#apparently people think that they/them is the ultimate pronoun set that no one could EVER be mad about and using they for someone

[jiggery-duggery]

I think if I get they/themmed one more time by someone who knows damn well what my pronouns are I’m just gonna go full chimpanzee mode and start tearing peoples faces off

[2c75ff]

GET TO KNOW YOUR ADMIN !!

NAME -- 'Miller' will do.

PRONOUNS -- he/him preferable; they/them acceptable.

PREFERRED COMMS -- Tumblr IMs to start, but I tend to prefer moving to Discord once it becomes apparent that we vibe nicely.

NAME OF MUSE -- Seventeen. (I may or may not have a short but running list of names that would feel fitting on him if indeed he ever arrives at a point of being willing to allow someone else to give him one, but that's a whole other thing for a whole other time.)

EXPERIENCE IN RP -- All the way back to the days of LJ, forums, and Yahoo Groups.

BEST EXPERIENCES -- I met somebody on here a handful of years ago who was a long-time fan of the character I was playing. At first they just sent questions to the inbox and tagged me in their art sometimes -- (which was supremely touching) -- but eventually they worked up the confidence in their English to try out an OC blog of their own, and we started doing IC interactions in addition to chatting OOC. It was nice to know that someone felt inspired enough by my silly little blog to go out of their way to befriend me specifically, and to know that they felt comfortable practicing things like art and English with me.

And that's the story of how I ultimately ended up drunk as hell at their wedding in Germany.

PET PEEVES / DEALBREAKERS -- Excessive passivity both IC and OOC. / Excessively lengthy RP replies in which very little of substance actually happens or is communicated. / People treating ships as mere smut/fluff wish fulfillment machines rather than as ongoing plots, or cooling off toward me the instant they realize that shipping with me is going to take actual time and work. / Constant mental health crises being essentially liveblogged OOC on a person's RP account.

MUSE PREFERENCE ( FLUFF, ANGST, SMUT ) -- Variety is good for you, and it's also good for your character. I'm up for just about any flavor as long as it's revealing or playing around with something interesting about our character(s), the dynamic between them, the setting, etc.

PLOT OR MEMES -- I like both. I do think, however, that it's incredibly useful to at least discuss a general, ballpark dynamic and get a vague feel for the overall, initial direction we both want. It's fine and natural if what we want flexes or changes with time, but I think even just a little bit of communication right up front eliminates a ton of guesswork. It also makes it easier to pick memes that could be interesting or useful in terms of advancing the goals/ideas we've already talked over with each other.

LONG OR SHORT REPLIES -- I tend to write somewhere in the ballpark of 2 to 3 developed paragraphs per reply, but overall I ascribe to the principle of worrying less about the word count itself and more about simply taking whatever space is needed in order to get the point across.

BEST TIME TO WRITE -- If I knew that, I would be unstoppable.

ARE YOU LIKE YOUR MUSE? -- In terms of a passing flavor, perhaps; sure. I've run from the popo, I've had a concealed carry license, the underside of my car's bumper is held together with Gorilla Glue and my own shoelaces, I did Driverless Car Shit for a living for like five and a half years, and I live almost exclusively in men's flannels and Levi's. Anything 'deeper' than that is for y'all to judge as we get to know each other.

tagged by -- no. tagging -- also no. steal it. do whatever.

[crystalcow]

𝑆𝑎𝑝𝑛𝑎𝑝𝑠 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑑//𝑆𝑎𝑝𝑛𝑎𝑝 𝑝𝑡 3

Masterlist // part one // part two

Sapnap x reader !p !child reader

Pronouns used: none specified!

Warnings: swearing, death, betrayal

•⊱✿•✿⊰•⊱✿•✿⊰•⊱✿•✿⊰•⊱✿•✿⊰•⊱✿•✿⊰

╔.▪️.═════════╗

Being sapnaps child will include..

╚═════════.▪️.╝

𝐏𝗼𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐥

Apparently the castle got attacked

George was killed by the one and only technoblade

You haven’t personally met the man but you respected him

After all he is a legend

But he killed George

So you were dragged with sapnap when he got pinged on his coms

Dream and George were arguing on the prime path

The sight somewhat terrified you

They were supposed to be best friends?

Dream is the strongest person on the server

George was supposed to be the most unproblematic and protected person

For some reason Quackity was also there

Hiding in the corner of Tommy’s house

“You don’t give a shit about us”

Those words brought some hurt to you as they left sapnaps mouth

“Of course I care about you! I just want to keep him safe.”

The three most important men in your life

The dream team, and ultimate trio the friendship that could never crack! The ones who raised you to be who you are

They were falling apart

“George is no longer king!”

Quackity was just eating all of the drama

Damn duck

“I’ve done so much for you, I hope you don’t forget.”

“Like what?” “I helped you raise a child Sap, a damn child.”

That pissed the both of you off

As if you didn’t just recently spend a whole day with him

None the less your whole life

Being drawn into wars, multiple actually

Practically being drawn to death

“Don’t you bring them into this Dream.”

“Eret is now king again, he can actually rule this place.”

“I was the best king this server ever had!”

So there it happened

The crown was snatched off of George’s head and you were dragged along with it

“Don’t worry, we can start our own place!”

“El rapids it is”

𝐄𝐥 𝐑𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐝𝐬

You were 100% skeptical about all of this

You didn’t trust that this would be good

I mean how could you

Everything that someone starts on the server

Dies, explodes, nukes, or straight up fails

So instead you went down to Lmanburg for the day!

You went to Nikkis bakery to get something to eat

She was glad to give you a couple snacks for the road

So while you were walking around the new area you spotted dream

“Where you heading off to?”

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

You both eyed each other weirdly

“Aren’t you supposed to hate me?”

You just laughed

Ofcourse you were upset

But you were also bored

“And?” “Come on let’s go see tommy”

So you agreed and carelessly followed the green man

You missed Tommy, after not having seen him for a bit

Fucking hell you needed friends

But when you got there

“Why the fuck is everything gone!”

You ran around the now blown up area

The tents were destroyed and signs were thrown around

Then you noticed the large pillar

You instantly ran to dream, begging him to give you a pearl

He was upset himself he lost his leech

So you threw the pearl up thankfully landing on the pillar

Looking around to see if there was any way he could’ve survived

But you accidentally tripped

And lost your first life

𝐘/𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝗼𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝗼𝗼 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 ♡︎♥︎♥︎

𝐏𝐫𝗼𝐩𝗼𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐬

You woke up screaming in your bed

The three lines on your wrist now faded into two

Sapnap came rushing in holding you lose to him

You tried not to but you cried a little

This was your first time loosing a life..

And you didn’t even mean too!

“Your never fucking leaving me again.”

Karl came in with Quackity following after

Karl just like snatched you away from sapnap and just held you

That man was ready to go back in time and reverse that from ever happening

Trust me he will if you ever loose another life

So after that everyone kept a close eye on you

That was until one day you were with your dad

You both were at your old house just chilling around

Before he handed you two velvet boxes

You were in awe of the two rings that sat in them

Who the fuck paid for these??

“I’m going to purpose.”

You almost dropped the boxes

“What?”

Sapnap just kept smiling

“You really like em huh” “Yeah flame, I love them.”

So you just hugged him

Internally freaking the fuck out

What would this mean???

Three dads? What if they wanted another child! Oh hell no

So you all stood in el rapids

Candles were spread around the top of the grassy hill

There were flowers blooming from every direction and lanterns set afloat

It looked mystical

You watched as sapnap got down on one knee

Karl was in shock, tears streaming down his eyes

Quackity looked love struck, looking into sapnaps eyes with total adoration

So when they said yes your dad called you and the other two just hugged you

“I’m guessing they said yes” you laughed

“Yeah they did!”

You couldn’t help but be happy

Your dad finally found some happiness

Even tho life was going to shit

If you won’t be there

He’ll have them

𝐋𝗺𝐚𝐧𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐠𝐬 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐞𝗺

Oh wait shit did someone spot tommy?

There was supposed to be a festival today

So you went to go check it out

Maybe throw a ball at the furry

“Go fetch!” You shouted at fundy

Yeah he was not happy and just threw you the finger

“Hey N/n is Dream coming?”

You were excited that Tubbo was actually talking to you again

“Huh? Oh yeah I think” “Great thanks”

And back to the disappointment

So you walked over to get a pretzel or some shit

And then heard everyone making a commotion

There he was, Dream walking in (angry) with full netherite armor

Damn dude respect some tradition

“Tommy blew up the fucking community house”

Did someone say tommy?

Oh you were ready to kill that bastard

Hell if Dream didn’t you most definitely will

So you followed everyone to the community house

Yeah you were ready to fucking cry

One of your homes, the place you’d always confide in since you were little

Where dream and George both helped raise you

Now blown to shreds

“What the fuck”

They were talking about Tubbo giving up the discs

Oh we are not going through that shit all over again

And this time the odds are most definitely not in your favor

Then tommy appeared half invisible

“YOU FUCKING DICKHEAD I THOUGHT YOU DIED YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT”

You litterly stabbed him, having to be held back by Quackity

“Alright hot shot, lets let them have their argument”

Tommy sent you an apologetic look already on the verge of tears

“Tubbo your not seriously considering this”

Then it hit everyone

“The discs were worth more then you ever were!”

Oh yeah we’re you already pissed off at tommy?

Yeah

And he just made it worse

“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU SAY TO TUBBO YOU SHIT HEAD”

Yeah you didn’t take pretending to be dead very lightly

Oh shit why was techno there

never mind, Lmanburg will be gone by tomorrow

No point killing tommy yet

Whos side were you on?

Neither. You litterly went into that battle feild and killed some shit

That was until multiple pieces of tnt landed ontop of your head

And that’s where you lost your second life

Shit

𝐘/𝐧 𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐰 𝐮𝐩 ♡︎♡︎♥︎ ⚠︎︎ᴏɴᴇ ʟɪғᴇ ʀᴇᴍᴀɪɴɪɴɢ

𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐬𝗼𝐧

This time when you won’t up it didn’t feel as bad

But you still screamed

A rush of a heartburn and scars employed on your body

The second line now faded into one

Shit

You were only 16-17 and on one life??

Die young the better

You waited out in your bed until the end of the fight

Death alerts and messages drowning out your communicator

But you had no energy what so ever

Until it all went quiet

You tried your damn best to get out of bed and walked to the damaged Lmanburg

There were people crying

Others were severely hurt

Then there were those who were perfectly fine

The whole place was a crater

Lmanburg.. the place of agony and depths of your pain

Now it’s finally gone

What the hell are you gonna do now?

Quackity spotted you calling out for Sapnap

You felt like you were gonna be crushed under their hold

“I’m gonna fucking kill dream.” You heard Quackity mutter

Sapnap felt like a bad father

Who lets their kids die twice?

(Cough cough Wilbur and dream)

Then suddenly things switched around

You were walking around with a bloodied nose and black eyed Tommy

Yeah you did a number on him

But it’s okay since he was your best friend

And there was a sign inside his house

“Wednesday you and Tubbo. Bring no one or anything, lets settle this once and for all”

The final disc war

“Tommy you can’t go” “I’m going N/n, he has my discs.”

So you like cried a little bit lined up on the prime path

Giving the two probably the last hugs they’ll ever get

Prime you really didn’t want to loose them

So you ran straight to church prime

Litterly begging Master Oolong that they won’t die

“Please please please spare them. Pogchamp.”

(Please this is all jokes and old references don’t cancel me)

You got a blast message from punz on your comms with cords

“Come here. bring your best armor”

So you did so running to the nearest ender chest

If walking means saving tommy and Tubbo, it’s somewhat worth it

Sapnap made sure you didn’t leave his side as you traveled around the nether

even tho you could literally swim in the lava

So just to piss him off

You jumped in

The sigh of relief this man

Yeah he’s gotten a little more paranoid for you

But it’s okay since it’s in love

You looked around the weird black stone room

There were two giant photos of the discs

And everything was made out of the same material

No design what so ever

Tommy and Tubbo ran to you like you were gonna protect them

“Dream why” you asked as he was incased in the blocks

Down on his last life

Just like you

‘I’m sorry’ he mouthed to you

Why was he apologizing to you?

Hasn’t he hurt everyone here

You looked around the different items

Tracing the outline of the item frames

Gasping in shock as you a cage with your name on it next to badboyhalo

“Tell em what you told me! How you blew up the community house!”

Your neck spun around faster then an owl doing that 360 thing

You picked up your ace seriously read to slash his head off

“Wait wait! Lets put him in the prison.”

So they took him off

And it pained you to see it

You trusted that man for a very long time

Nothing stays the same on the Dream Smp

•⊱✿•✿⊰•⊱✿•✿⊰•⊱✿•✿⊰•⊱✿•✿⊰•⊱✿•✿⊰

TUMBLR WOULDNT LET ME WRITE MORE KMS. So yes I’m sorry but there will have to be a part FOUR. I just wanted to finish this-

As always! Ask or request anything and ask if you want to be on a tag list :))

[3416]

Do you think that bisexual Buck could be confirmed on 9-1-1? Idc about buddie but am someone who believes that Buck is bi. There have been comments, Buck using gender neutral pronouns when talking to Maddie about her crush, Maddie saying that she wouldn't set up Josh with Buck because Josh deserves better and TK thinking that Buck was flirting with him. How do you think this would be written in the story? People forget that LGBT+ characters don't need romantic relationships to be good rep.

i think people forget that a lot too, lol. and there is a much better case for bi buck than any other sexuality headcanons in the og in my opinion, but i still don't know if the show will ever go out of their way to confirm it. like fandom truly can discuss rep until we're blue in the face but all the arguments about gay vs bi characters when the character on tv is actually portrayed as straight and will likely never be anything but is silly to me. i've seen a lot of that for eddie and i'm like...... fbdndjdjd all the infighting for smth that's not gonna happen is crazy imo. headcanon all you want.. you dont need "proof" just to have fun or stretch canon or write or think, but the arguments about viability are unhinged.

i personally think it might just stay a headcanon for buck still though.. if they continue to make him date women on screen until the shows over, but i still think it's much more reasonable to see potential in this being acknowledged when compared to a whole ship between two main characters becoming canon. i just feel like the best advice is don't get your hopes up?? like i know it's way too late for so many people, but i read some of the lines that people use as evidence like the stuff with tk or the joking about josh as more fanservice than narratively teeing anything up, so it's hard to say. knowing the writers see the fan talk online and discuss it amongst themselves but have never actually done anything concrete beyond some random lines feels like them saying: we see you, we appreciate you, here's something to have fun with, but that doesn't mean your interpretation is the end all be all or what we wrote/think about the characters or even what the majority of the demographic thinks so we're not gonna change the entire vision just for your hyperspecific ideas. and that's... how media works, and so many people forget it or never knew in the first place apparently. literally a lack of recognition that other people have different interpretations AND that you are part of One of those and not necessarily the majority just bc you're in your little online community. sorryfjdjf that morphed into more rant but ultimately! that seems more reasonable to think, but i still don't know that the show will ever go there tbh!

[comrade-meow]

This is a transcript of a speech by developmental biologist Dr Emma Hilton delivered on 29 November 2020 for the ‘Feminist Academics Talk Back!’ meeting. This talk was originally published by womentalkback.org

Sex denialists have captured existing journals We are dealing with a new religion

Thank you for the invitation to speak today, as a feminist academic fighting back.

As ever, let’s begin with a story. And, trust me, by the end of this talk, you’re going to know a lot more about creationism that you expected:

1. In the 1920s, in concert with many other American states, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed the Butler Act, making it illegal for state public schools to: “teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” In other words, banning schools from teaching the theory of evolution.

Three months later, Tennessee science teacher John Scopes was on trial, charged with teaching the theory of evolution, a crime he was ultimately found guilty of. He was fined £71 – about £1064 in today’s money – so it could have been an expensive affair for him, had he not got off on a really boring administrative technicality.

Yet, despite the evidence against him and his own confession, he was an innocent man. Scopes was not guilty of teaching the theory of evolution. He admitted to a crime he had not committed. He even coached his students in their testimonies against him. So why would he admit to this wrongdoing of which he was entirely innocent? Why would he contrive apparent guilt? In protest. In protest against a law he viewed as fundamentally incompatible with the pursuit of scientific truth.

2. The history of creationism and education laws in the US is turbulent and often opaquely legalese, especially for those of us unfamiliar with US law. Some of the methods of the wider creationist movement, however, will be immediately recognisable as they are employed by a new movement, one which seeks to erase another scientific truth, the fact of sex.

Method 1. The framing of human classifications, whether it’s species or sex, as “arbitrary”. This leads to the premise that such phenomena are “social constructs” that need not exist if we chose to reject them. That truth must be relative and consensual. Never mind that these “arbitrary” classifications appear to be surprisingly similar classifications across all cultures and civilisations.

It also necessarily spotlights tricky boundary cases – not really a personal problem for the long-dead evolutionary missing links, but a very real problem in the modern world for people whose sex is atypical and who are constantly invoked, even fetishized, as “not males” or “not females” to prove sex classification is somehow no more than human whimsy.

People with DSDs have complex and often traumatic medical histories, perhaps struggling to understand their bodies, and they deserve more respect than to be casually and thoughtlessly used as a postemodernist “gotcha” by the very people so horribly triggered by a pronoun.

Method 2. The distortion of science and the development of sciencey language to create a veneer of academic rigour. Creationists invented “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity” while Sex denialists try to beat people over the head with their dazzling arrays of “bimodal distributions arranged in n-dimensional space”.

Creationists, unable to publish in mainstream science journals because they weren’t producing, well, science, established their own journals. “Journals”. Sex denialists have captured existing journals – albeit limited to more newsy ones and to occasional editorials and blogs about gender (which is not sex), about how developmental biology is soooo complicated (which does not mean sex is complicated – I mean, the internal combustion engine is complicated but cars still fundamentally go forwards or backwards), about how discussing the biology of sex is mean (OK, good luck with that at your doctor’s surgery). Many such blogs and articles are written by scientists who simultaneously deny sex to their social media audience while writing academic papers about how female fruitflies make shells for their eggs (no matter how queer they are), about the development of ovaries or testes in fish and about how males make sperm.

The current editor-in-chief at Nature, the first female to hold this position, studied sex determination in worms for her PhD, and she now presides over a journal with an editorial policy to insert disclaimers about the binary nature of sex into spotlight features about research on, for example, different death rates in male and female cystic fibrosis patients.

The authors of the studies are not prevaricating or handwaving about sex, but the editorial team is “bending the knee”. I used to research a genetic disorder that was male-lethal – that is, male human babies died early in gestation. I’d love to know if this disclaimer would be applied there.

Method 3. Debate strategies like The Gish Gallop. This method is named for Duane Gish, who is a prominent creationist. What it boils down to is: throw any old argument, regardless of its validity, in quick succession at your opponent and then claim any dismissal or missed response or even hesitation in response as a score for your side. In Twitter parlance, we know this as “sealioning”, in political propaganda as the “firehose of falsehood”, although Wikipedia also suggests that it is covered by the term “bullshit”. So, what about intersex people? what about this article? what about an XY person with a uterus? what about the fa’afafine? what about that article? look at this pretty picture. what about what about whataboutery what about clownfish? The aim is not to discuss or debate, it is to force submission from frustration or exhaustion.

Method 4. The reification of humans as separate from not just monkeys but the rest of the living world. The special pleading for special descriptions that frame humans as the chosen ones, such that the same process of making new individuals, common to humans and asparagus, an observation I chose because it seems superficially silly – it could have been spinach – requires its own description, one that accounts for gender identity.

3. In the Scopes trial, which saw discussion of whether Eve was actually created from Adam’s rib and ruminations on where Cain got his wife, Scopes was defended by a legal group who had begun scouting for a test case subject as soon as the Tennessee ban was enacted. This legal group claimed to advocate for:

“Freedom of speech for ideas from the most extreme left such as anarchists and socialists, to the most extreme right including the Ku Klux Klan, Henry Ford, and others who would now be considered more toward the Fascist end of the spectrum.”

The legal group so keen to defend the right to speak the truth, in this case a fundamental, observable scientific truth? The American Civil Liberties Union, a group whose modern day social media presence promotes nonsense like:

“The notion of biological sex was developed for the exclusive purpose of being weaponized against people.”

and

“Sex and gender are different words for the same thing [that is] a set of politically and socially contingent notions of embodied and expressed identity.”

and shares articles asserting that biological sex is rooted in white supremacy.

Since the Scopes case, the ACLU have fought against many US laws preventing, or at least compromising, the teaching of evolution. I cannot process the irony of a group of people historically and consistently prepared to robustly defend the truth of evolution while now denying one of the most important biological foundations of evolution.

4. How do we fight this current craze of sex denialism? A major blow for creationism teaching was delivered in 1986 while the US Supreme Court were considering a Louisiana state law requiring creationism to be taught alongside evolution. The Louisiana law was struck down, in part influenced by the expert opinions, submitted to the court, of scientists who put aside their individual and, as one of them has since described “often violent” differences on Theory X and Experiment Y, to present a unified defence of scientific truth over religious belief. 76 Nobel laureates, 17 state academies of science and a handful of scientific organisations all got behind this single cause, and made a very real change.

Support for creationism has slowly ebbed away and the US is in a much more sensible position these days, although I still meet the occasional student from a Southern state who didn’t learn about evolution until college.

Sadly, one of the Nobel laureates has highlighted how unusual this collective response was and that he could not imagine any other issue that would receive the same groundswell of community support. Although he forged his career listening out for the Big Bang, so maybe I need to go through the list and find the biologists.

Part of the problem petitioning biologists to speak out is not necessarily fear of being cancelled or whatever, but simple lack of awareness of the issue, or incredulity that it is being taken remotely seriously. I’ve been working on a legal document and was discussing with a colleague about my efforts to find a citation for the statement, “there are two sexes, male and female”. He laughed at the idea that this would require a citation, told me to check a textbook, then realised that this statement is so simple that it would not even be included in a textbook.

And he’s right. I can find chapters in textbooks and hundreds of academic papers dedicated to how males and females are made, how they develop, how they differ, yet very few that feel the need to preface any of this with the statement “There are two sexes, male and female”. It is apparently something that biologists do not think needs to be said.

But of course, I think they are wrong, and that we live in a time where it does need to be said, where some aspects of society are being restructured around a scientific untruth, and where females will suffer.

Without recognition of and language to describe our anatomy, and the experiences that stem from that anatomy, mostly uninvited, we can neither detect nor measure things like rates of violence against women, the medical experiences, the social experiences of women and girls.

And, as for creationism, the reality of sex perhaps needs to be said by those with scientific authority, in unambiguous terms. Otherwise, we are living in a society that tolerates nonsense like there is no such thing as male or female, that differences evident to our own eyes are not real, that anatomies readily observable and existing in monkey and man alike do not actually exist. I’m sure this last assertion has the full support of the creationist community. And perhaps, as for creationism, a true tipping point will be tested when it is our children being taught these scientific untruths, or worse, when it is illegal to say different.

5. At the end of his trial, the only words Scopes uttered in court were these:

“Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom—that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom.”

I do not exaggerate when I say we are dealing with a new type of religion, a new form of creationism and a new assault on scientific truth. I also do not exaggerate when I say it may take a high profile court case to rebalance the public discourse around sex. There is only so far letters and opinion articles can go.

Two things I predict: 1. It will not be defended by the ACLU, and 2. With the recent proposals on hate speech law, it will probably involve a Scottish John Scopes, who finds themself in front of a judge for the seditious crime of discussing the sex life of asparagus at their dinner table.

Dr Emma Hilton is a developmental biologist studying aspects of human genetic diseases, and her current research focuses on a congenital motor neurone disease affecting the genitourinary tract, and on respiratory dysfunction in cystic fibrosis. She teaches reproduction, genes, inheritance and genetic disorders. Emma has a special interest in fairness in female sports. A strong advocate for women and girls, Emma tweets as @FondofBeetles.

[shera-dnd]

Love for a Dark Heart

Adding now to the list of things I can’t fucking believe I got paid to write: My FFXIV character falling in love with herself.

Honestly I could have kept writing this for another 5k words more, but I set the rules so I’m gonna stick to them

As usual you can follow this link right here to read it on AO3 if you’d prefer that. If you’d like to have a fic written by me you should feel free to donate to my ko-fi (rules for donations over here) and let’s get going with the fic

You are a rational woman.

You try to deal with the facts and not let emotion rule over your decisions. That doesn’t mean you’re cold hearted or any such thing, but when it comes to wielding aether you really cannot let your emotions get in the way, lest your magic escape your control entirely.

It’s why you joined the Arcanists Guild so long ago, their approach to spell craft was exactly what you needed, and after many long months of training you had even mastered the lost art of summoning. It had been your calculated and well crafted spells that had felled the Primals and even bested Gaius and his Ultima Weapon.

But what did that amount to?

You’ve been betrayed, the Sultana is dead, your friends are lost, and the nations you fought to defend probably have a price on your head by now. All your possessions now fit neatly into the tiny backpack you brought along in your journey to Ishgard, and the only people left to console you are Alphinaud and Tataru, but in all honesty you’re usually the one consoling them now.

But Ishgard still welcomes you and still needs you. House Fortemps has embraced you and the least you can do is fight to protect them as well. Just keep fighting and saving people until everything gets solved, it definitely worked just fine the first time you tried that, so why not try it again?

You don’t want to be bitter, you don’t want to be angry, you genuinely feel sorry whenever you snap at Alphinaud or Haurchefant, you know they’re having a hard time too. Still it is so hard not to just let that frustration fester in your heart.

One day you’re walking the streets of Ishgard, trying to work the anger out of your system, when you hear a man muttering something. It was a story about a man who fought like a beast, who wielded the Darkness like other men would wield a blade. Something about this story sparks your curiosity and next thing you know you’re pressing the man for details.

It seemed your mystery man had died in battle with the holy knights of Ishgard and his corpse had been dumped in the Brume. It was unfortunate, but mayhaps you could still find his corpse, maybe even his soulstone.

You weren’t thinking of wielding the darkness, were you? No, it was simply academic curiosity. You just couldn’t leave such a thing unstudied, right? Of course. Now to make your way to the Brume.

No pulse, no breathing, skin as cold as the snow around you, that man was a corpse. At least he was a corpse with a soulstone, maybe you could study that. You just have to take it and-

A voice calls for you in the dark.

You wake up confused, but still intact. Better yet, the man you thought dead was now alive and well in front of you. His name is Fray and he was a Dark Knight. Apparently so were you now.

Perhaps embracing the dark should have been difficult, it should have been the kind of decision you pondered over and considered all the pros and cons. It wasn’t supposed to be something you did on a whim, but in reality it was the easiest thing you’ve ever done.

You were stronger now. How else could you wield a weapon so massive? How else could those knights strike you with their blades and barely make you flinch? How else could you take all that anger, and frustration that you had repressed for so long, and give it such a beautiful shape as it cut down those hallowed bastards? 

It felt good.

It felt too good.

Perhaps the life of a Dark Knight was exactly what you needed.

In the weeks that passed no one questioned why you disappeared every night or where you went. You had gone through a lot, and they just wanted to give you space to heal. Besides, who would question what the Warrior of Light did with her spare time? It almost made you feel bad for what you were doing.

Almost.

It was hard feeling bad now that you have started studying the Darkness. No, studying would imply a lot more research and controlled tests. What you were doing was more like exercising it, working out a muscle you didn’t know you had until now. If that meant killing your fair share of monsters then so be it.

Especially when working that metaphorical muscle also seemed to improve your physical ones. Even your eye sight seemed to have improved somehow. With time your tunic had been replaced by plate armor, your glasses by a full helmet, your book of spells by the biggest sword you could carry.

There were still hiccups when adapting to this new life as a Dark Knight. No matter how many times you attuned yourself to the Darkness you could only ever hear whispers of that voice in the dark that had once called your name. It worried you, and frustrated Fray to no end.

Frustration seemed to be Fray’s default state. Always furious at the people around you who insist on asking you to fix all their problems, ready to throw threats and insults any time someone so much as  thought of interrupting you. You try to be nice, you try to de-escalate, to help those people anyway, but you know deep down that you agree with her.

Her? Wasn’t Fray a man?

Doesn’t matter, Fray can use whatever pronouns she wants. You just can’t remember her ever telling you she changed those. 

Wait did she just mention fighting Leviathan? Had she been there with you on that ship? Surely you’d remember that.

Why hadn’t she mentioned that before?

Maybe if you still saw the world through your old scholarly lens, maybe if you still distanced yourself, studied the situation, maybe then you would have realized what was happening. You really can’t help but feel a little stupid when the truth finally reveals itself.

When Fray takes off her helmet it is your face that you see, your eyes that stare into yours, your voice that challenges you. She was your Darkness, your repressed rage against those who used you again, and again to suit their needs; your frustrations with this world that would exhaust you to the bone before finding any solution that didn’t involve you, your need for someone to just step up and care for you even once.

If only she hadn’t hurt those people, if only her first answer wasn’t to just draw her sword on those she saw as a threat to you, maybe then you’d let her go.

Your swords clash and ultimately she’s the one to fall. Your Darkness, your heart, your…

...Esteem, lies defeated before you and you don’t know how to feel. She was a monster formed from the deepest abyss, yet when you hear her declare that she will always be there for you, if only you were to call her, you can’t help but feel hope.

It was only after you exposed yourself to just about every guard, and soldier at Dragon Head that you decided that it’s about time you came clean to your friends.

Alphinaud and Haurchefant didn’t understand why you had made the decisions you had, but they couldn’t think of anyone better to wield such a power. Tataru trusted you with her life and just a bit of Darkness wouldn’t get in the way of that. Estinien claimed that he understood, that he too struggled against the evil that granted him his powers. In the end it all felt too easy, too unearned.

Still, there was a nation to save and a war to stop. Your little existential crisis would have to wait. You could almost hear Esteem screaming at you for ever forming that thought. 

Soon it wouldn’t be just almost.

Weeks passed as you traversed Dravania, searching for a way to stop this war. For a moment you had hoped that by exposing the lies of Ishgardian nobility you would finally put an end to this, but of course that just led the holy men of Halone to do what they thought was right, which just happened to be capturing and torturing an innocent man.

You went in to try to save a man, to make those self appointed saints pay. You didn’t go there to lose a friend, yet that’s what you did.

You kept your composure long enough to reach your private chambers in the Fortemps manor, but as soon as the door closed behind you, you collapsed. You could have saved him, you could have prevented this, you could have jumped out of the way, or pushed him away, or just done anything.

But you didn’t, and now he paid the price for it.

What a pathetic excuse for a Warrior of Light you are.

“You’re no such thing!” A familiar voice calls. You don’t know when or how you summoned her back, but there she was.

Esteem lifted you from the ground and laid you in your bed. You noticed now that instead of the black armor she had favored in your fight, now she wore one of your old robes and your old glasses. It was almost funny thinking of a being of pure aether deigning to wear glasses for some reason.

With a gentleness you didn’t know either of you had, she caressed and soothed you as she repeated those same words over and over again, “it wasn’t your fault.”

It felt pathetic to only have a shadow of yourself to care for you, but for now it didn’t matter. All you could do in that moment was cling, cling to the kind words and the soft touch of the only person who cared enough to offer, and try as hard as you can to believe in what she’s saying.

“Rest now, you fool,” she asked, her voice just as gentle as before.

“Please stay,” you pleaded, unsure if she would disappear the moment you closed your eyes.

It was a selfish thing to ask, to force her to stay in the material world simply for your own comfort, but Esteem wanted nothing more than for you to be selfish, so there was never any doubt that she would oblige.

The next morning she was still there, asleep somehow, still holding you in her arms. It shamed you to admit that this was the closest you’ve ever been to another person. No one had held you this close, no one had ever let you fall asleep in their arms - or fallen asleep in yours for what that matters - had she been more than just a piece of your own heart, perhaps you would have found reason for embarrassment.

There was certainly some strangeness to it, of course. Waking up in your own arms and seeing your own face in the morning was as surreal an experience as you could imagine right now. Though it did allow you some interesting introspection. You shifted in bed a little, trying to get a good look at your own face, wondering if you had ever looked this peaceful before.

“If you even consider rising from this bed I promise you the Archbishop will be the least of your worries,” she grumbles without even opening her eyes.

“I did not know you could sleep,” you comment.

“Neither did I,” she replies. She pushes herself into a sitting position, having completely given up on the idea of returning to your shared slumber, “if I must be honest, I don’t even know how I was granted physical form once more.”

“Yet your first response to sudden corporealization was not to question it, but to attend to the sobbing mess on the floor,” you are by no means attempting to mock her, it simply sounds odd to you.

“What am I to say?” She jested, “I’m quite fond of that sobbing mess.”

At that you averted your gaze. It felt embarrassing somehow, to have someone declare their fondness so bluntly, even if that someone wasn’t an actual person.

“Have we truly grown so alienated from affection?” She sighs, her voice a mix of worry and disappointment.

You motion to protest, but a knock on the door interrupts you both. With a gesture, she requests you stay in bed while she handles this. That may be the worst idea you have ever heard, but you’re far too tired to protest.

“I’m glad to see you’re awake and well,” Alphinaud greets her cheerfully, “If you’re disposed, I’d like to ask-”

“I’m not,” She interrupts, “now, you may be on your way.”

The poor boy is too stunned to reply, and does nothing to stop her from slamming the door on his face. A smug smirk forms on her face as she strides back to you.

“Must you be so rude to all my friends?” You say as you glare at her.

“Must you put the needs of every last soul above your own well being?” She shot back, matching your stare.

You’re the one to break the stare first, “I’ll try not to.”

She nods and gives you a satisfied smile as she sits next to you, “now do try to rest. Wouldn’t want me to be rude to poor Alphinaud for naught.”

In the weeks that followed she had been ever by your side. Like your old summons she could effortlessly appear and disappear from thin air, combined with her nature as a being of pure aether it made you suspect you had somehow called upon an egi of Esteem’s former self. This was promptly disproven by the fact that her response to any direct commands was a simple and direct, “sod off!”

By all accounts she should simply be darkness aspected aether, given shape and purpose by your needs and desires, as unreal as Ysayle’s false Shiva. Yet here she was, talking when she wanted to, sleeping when she wanted to, eating when she wanted to--seven hells she even has different tastes than you. There was no other way around it, Esteem had become her own person somehow.

Part of you worried that you had somehow created a Primal of your own heart. That had now been buried under the far more substantial worry that you have been utterly mistreating an actual person with thoughts and feelings, who had done nothing but help you and care for you for weeks. This in turn had been buried under the mess of feelings that struck your heart at the fact that this woman had held you in your sleep for weeks now. Mayhaps you should just focus on hitting things with big swords for now.

On that angle things have been a lot simpler. Your preparations for the journey to Azys Lla were now almost concluded, and as you waited for Master Cid to finish his work you took your time to aid a fellow Dark Knight by the name of Sidurgu.

That man quite proudly embodied the mass of hate and anger you expected from a Dark Knight, a trait that seemed to invoke Esteem’s disdain and earn him quite a share of her unkindly remarks. Neither his emotional state nor her opinion of him were ever aided by the fact that you surpassed him with ease.

You may have stumbled onto this power like a blind fool, but it had somehow suited you with a natural ease that eluded your companion. It was in the pursuit of more power - under the guise of aiding a young girl that Sidurgu had taken under his wing - that you found yourself once more doing menial tasks for moogles. At least today you’d have the catharsis of beating them within an ilm of their lives for it.

What you did not expect was for them to burst into song and dance afterwards.

“‘Tis love! ‘Tis love!” They profess with their tiny voices, “all-powerful, shining love!”

Suffice to say that the both of you were completely befuddled by the performance - Esteem loudly laughing in the corner she carved for herself in your mind - had Rielle, your shared charge, not appeared in that moment you were sure you’d both sit like that for an hour.

It was only as you made your way back to Ishgard that Sidurgu took you aside to talk about what had unfolded. He mocked the idea that love could be the true power of Darkness, but you could see that sharp edge on his voice begin to dull ever so slightly.

A year ago you would have been just as dismissive of such an idea, to properly channel aether you require coldly calculated theorems, not something as nebulous as love. 

Yet here you are. You’ve wielded anger and frustration like weapons for months now, why can’t you wear love like an armor?

You loved your friends and that gave you strength.

You loved Eorzea and that gave you strength.

You loved yourself and that…

...Well, did you really love yourself that much? Not as much as you should if Esteem were to be believed, but she does. She loves you, and that gives you strength.

It’s with this context that you begin to notice the little things she does, even when she’s not around. The gentle touches, the kind words, the worry in her eyes after a rough fight. It had been her love that helped you strike down with your blade, it had been her love that held you up when an enemy would fell you. It made you oh so keenly aware of her heartbeat - surprisingly human and comforting - next to yours as she held you both together.

Had you loved her too this whole time?

Perhaps you should have questioned this before the worries of facing Garleans, Ascians, and the Archbishop, loomed this close in the horizon. Perhaps you should have questioned that Esteem’s love didn’t come just from some magically ordained purpose. Perhaps you should have questioned what it meant about you that you so willingly accepted and reciprocated that love.

By the time you arrive at the Fortemps manor that night, you have already made your decision and you find her in your room, reading a spicy romance novel from Emmanellain’s secret stash. Steeling yourself in a way you hadn’t done since facing Ultima, you approach her and bring your lips to hers. It was a fleeting touch, but it had the whole of you buzzing with nervous energy.

With the most detestably smug smile, she brings you close again so she may kiss you back and, as if she hadn’t just shaken your very soul with that act, returned to her reading.

You stare at her, utterly confounded by her lack of any real reaction. It takes her a moment to realize you are still staring and the words that escaped her mouth would infuriate and haunt you for the rest of your existence.

“Was I wrong to assume we’d been lovers for at least a month now?”

Perhaps you really should have just stuck to hitting people with big swords.

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - Painter’s Block

Once again, we have a decent episode that winds up falling apart in context of the wider story arc. 

Summary:  Traumatized after the previous events, Rapunzel is feeling out of sorts, even having trouble painting again, and starts taking a class with a mysterious new art instructor. The other members of the class disappear one by one to a mysterious location by the sea, apparently painting an old, withered tree. The instructor is revealed to actually be an old witch serving Zhan Tiri (the monster who released the blizzard), released after the use of the weather machine and wishing to release her master as well. It’s up to Eugene and Cassandra to rescue Rapunzel. 

Tonal Dissonance Is a Problem

We start this episode with a recap of Queen for a Day and then we jump straight into yet another festival. 

Ok, ignoring that clearly a lot of time has past and no one hasn’t done anything to help Varian nor even mentions helping him; it’s just aggravating to switch from a serious storyline back to a supposedly low stakes situation without resolving the first arc properly. Yes, levity is needed to break up tension, but not in a way that distracts entirely from the narrative. 

Rapunzel Doesn’t Even Bother To Think About Varian When She’s Having Her PTSD Flashback  

Its a minor thing, but throughout the episode Rapunzel keeps having dissociative moments as she constantly hears voices in her head as she remembers the storm. Now I actually do appreciate what the writers are trying to do here. As some who also struggles with Complex-PTSD and dissociation, it's nice to see it represented here in some way. However, the fact that they leave out the key part of her trauma, letting down Varian, undermines these moments. Especially when they had no problem using Varian’s voice clip of “You promised!” earlier in the recap. It’s one of those things you may not notice it at first, but once you do it winds up distracting from the scene. 

What an Odd Place to Make This Reference 

Sugarby is quoting Ursula here, but I honestly don't know why. Ursula’s actual VA, Pat Carroll, does appear in this episode but she plays Old Lady Crowley instead. Sugarby’s VA is Ellen Greene, of Little Shop of Horrors fame. (and Rock-A-Doodle) You’d think a quote from that movie would be more apt. Also Rapunzel was admiring everyone elses work right before this, not talking about tough choices. 

Yet Again Cassandra Gains What She Wants, But the Narrative Refuses To Remember It

Cassandra’s beef in seasons two and three is apparently no one notices her or gives her credit for what she does, yet in season one she gets tons of recognition. Like here for instance, when her dad gives her a detective assignment on a missing persons case. To her specifically. He doesn’t ask anybody else first and isn’t running low on troops. 

You can’t have one of the main characters achieve their goal on screen several times and then act like they had never achieved it in later seasons. The audience isn’t dumb. We’re going to remember what happened and it’s insulting to the viewers for the narrative to pretend like what we’ve seen just didn’t happen. 

Friedborg is Wasted Here

I’ve talked about it before, but Friedborg is an unnecessary addition to the cast. However I bring it up again because this episode could have been the perfect set up for making her plot relevant. There’s tons of unintentional moments within the episode that could have easily served as foreshadowing that could have connected her to Zan Tiri, more so than any of the other characters. 

Trauma is an Explanation, Not an Excuse

This episode presents the idea that Rapunzel is procrastinating helping Varian because she’s reluctant to face her trauma. Which isn’t excusable. It gives reasons for her actions but those reasons are still ultimately selfish. 

Now, had the show owned up to this mistake, I would have no problem with using it as a point of conflict, yet the show constantly excuses Rapunzel’s behavior here. In fact the show excuses the behavior of several characters with the idea that so long that they had a traumatic backstory, they’re justified in their horrible actions. All but Varian, which a big double standard. 

However, and I can’t stress this enough, trauma is never an excuse for harming others. Especially people who've never done you wrong. 

Rapunzel spends several episodes ignoring Varian’s problem, long past the point of acceptability. And if viewed in the intended production order, the amount of episodes doubles. Varian is left alone for months, given the timeline of the show, and yet Rapunzel, the supposed adult in this situation, is never held accountable for neglecting a child.  

Xavier isn’t Tied Into the Plot Properly 

Xavier just so happens to have a convenient spell book that also just so happens to have all the exposition on the big bad that’s needed. It’s never explained how he got this book, why he has it, nor is it ever used outside of the first season. 

Xavier is plot important as the exposition fairy but the show never explorers him further than that and doesn’t tie him into the narrative properly, even though there’s plenty of reasons to do so. In fact Xavier will become just as useless as Monty by the time season three rolls around, even though he previously had the most connection to the ultimate villain. 

The Disciples Plot Goes Nowhere 

Ok, first off we get no real explanation as who these guys are, nor why they follow Zan Tiri to begin with. Why do they want Zan Tiri freed? What’s in it for them precisely? 

Second, what meminal backstory we get on these guys, contradicts what we’re told about them here. Xavier calls them evil spirits, but later we find out that they were actual real people who onced lived. You could call them ghosts if you want to, but that begs the original question of why they followed Zhan Tiri in the first place and why they continue to do so even in the afterlife. Simply being ‘evil’ no longer cuts it because real people aren’t just purely ‘evil’. They have goals and motivations. 

Finally, they accomplish nothing. They never wind up freeing their master. That happens through other means. They never connect back to Zhan Tiri’s own goals and motivations. They don’t add backstory to any of the other characters nor expand the mythos of the series. They’re just there to be a baddie of the week, and it’s is such a let down given what other hints we got for them. 

Sugarby Misgenders Her Master

So it’s clear that the writers did not fully figure out Zhan Tiri’s plot before they started making episodes. Given how animation works and how much pre-production time you’re given before you ever even start animating (which is several years btw), that’s a sign of mismanagement right there. 

Zhan Tiri is revealed to be a girl, but is referred to using male pronouns until that reveal, even by people who very well should know better, like her disciples. 

Also all these tree metaphors and hints come to nothing either, as Zhan Tiri is ultimately both freed and imprisoned without them. So what was the point here? 

Rapunzel Doesn’t Learn Her Lesson

This episode is suppose to be about Rapunzel learning to accept responsibility and owning up to her decisions even if it's hard. This should, sensibly, end with her taking upon her responsibility for Varian and following up with him. But no, we get a painting party instead. 

This isn’t Proper Foreshadowing 

So everyone acts like this painting of Cassandra in front of the moon is foreshadowing for her taking the moonstone, but it’s not. Not good foreshadowing, anyways. 

For starters, it’s not focused upon. Everyone is also painting stuff and crowding out what she’s doing so your eye isn’t lead to her

Nothing anybody else paints is a hint to anything later on, so why should the viewer pick up on this? It’s just a thing anybody could paint. If anything, Freidborg painting the void over there could have been some real foreshadowing cause that’s different and stands out, but it isn’t. 

It’s not on screen long enough to register for the audience. If you’re only going to notice something after the fact then it’s not a meaningful clue. Real foreshadowing has to be detectable and the audience needs to be able to plausibly figure out a twist before it happens or you’ve got a bad twist that’s not integrated into the story.   

There’s no other evidence to backup the twist. All we get is one framing shot of a mirror and that brief talk with Eugene in in the cell in Cassandra vs. Eugene. That’s not enough. And no, Chris claiming her ‘dress is blue’ as a hint is utter bullshit, cause there’s Freidborg right there wearing the exact same dress. 

If MoonCass was always a thing that the writers intended to happen, which we do have evidence for given released production artwork and Chris’s own discussions about the show’s development, then they needed to put more effort into establishing the character and setting up her arc. 

The very fact that viewers can easily pick out supposedly non-existent ‘hints’ with other characters like Freidborg and Varian, but not pick up on the actual twist, means that the writers failed to communicate clearly with their audience. That is on them and not the viewers, no matter what Chris says. 

Conclusion

This episode is frustrating. Much like the pilot, it offers up good ideas but then never properly follows up on them. To make matters worse, it winds up distracting from the plot that viewers actually care about rather than furthering. 

[catalinaroleplay]

Gender & Pronouns: Cis man, he/him

Date of Birth: April 8th, 1990 (31)

Place of Birth: Catalina Island, California

Neighborhood: Avalon

Length of Residency: Native — Returned December 2020

Occupation: DJ and Former Reality TV Star

Face Claim: Alex Landi

BIOGRAPHY

TRIGGERS: Infidelity, Alcohol.

For Luca Choi, the price of love had always been conditional, too many ifs for one boy to count on both hands. If his biological father hadn’t had another family, if his mother had not cheated on her first husband, if she’d been more vigilant about her cycle — would Luca have been loved the same? 

It hadn’t been his choice. It is never the child’s choice to emerge into the world, though not much more responsibility could be ascribed onto his parents. Of course, it’d been his mother’s decision to abandon her first family to engage in an affair with another man, and his father’s to do the same, but Luca was an accidental product, the physical manifestation of their sins. A happy accident, his mother liked to repeat, but what of the burden of circumstance? 

Luca is six when he learns the association of accidents between colliding cars and burning planes. Spilt milk and shattered plates, dropped in the midst of a memory he cannot even remember, the memory of the day his father left their home. How disaster could be synonymous with the revelation that his father had led a life outside of them — and to a young Luca, the concept of a world outside of his own had been unfathomable. 

June becomes a sore spot, with Father’s Day and the anniversary of the loss of theirs rolled into one. He tries his best not to think about it, and his mother does hers to provide a nice, normal life for her two children, and one day, Luca cannot imagine anything else. The loss of a father is not so much a hole in the picture as much as it becomes an accessory to the norm. What use did he have for a father, when he had a doting mother and a darling little sister to spend every day? 

It’s why, ultimately, the merger of the two families was a shock to his senses. Yuna had been speaking to her ex-husband in secret, and had made the decision to reunite. In a blink of an eye, Luca had gained three family members. Three people with whom he’d shared genetic code and a mother, but little else. Perhaps he could see the curve of his eyes and the color of his hair in their appearances, but the warmth he’d felt with three had all but disappeared with six. 

It would have been easy to rebel. Luca knew how to do it; the last time he’d run away he’d only been six and only packed a toy truck and a bag of M&M’s for sustenance. Now, he was ten, almost eleven with a big kid backpack and an arsenal of books and TV shows rattling around in his head. He’d need clothes, for example. A flashlight in the dark. Food easy to eat on the go, and a water bottle to refill whenever he could. Luca thinks he can do it. When he was six, he’d only gone to the park three streets over, but there was one thing he was certain of: he would never look back. 

He plans. He fills countless spiral notebooks with his scheme, but he never seems to get around to it. And one day, six becomes the norm, and the notebooks are forgotten, replaced with a fixation for his mind. 

The rest, Luca knows, is unremarkable. His life is chock-full of the daily monotony of normal, pre-teen life, pockmarked by homework and soccer practice, piano lessons and birthday parties. Friends over his house, him over theirs; first dances, first kisses. By the time Luca is in high school, he is well-liked by his peers and on a track to success, much to his parents’ delight. He is a varsity athlete, a capable musician, and has a girlfriend to boot — what more could Luca want from his life? 

Still, he dreams about the freedom he’d felt at six, camping out underneath the slide, the sliver of stars lulling him to sleep. 

He breaks up with his girlfriend. He turns down an athletic scholarship at Stanford for NYU, desperate to trade in idyllic beaches and sickly-sweet creamsicle sunsets for the concrete jungle of New York. When the casting flyer for a new reality television show gets passed around at school, Luca laughs before dragging his best friend Nash along for the ride. What could be, he thought, the worst that could happen? 

Apparently, they cast him. Luca is almost in disbelief, even if he is secretly excited about the prospect. However, he quickly learns that Nash had not been cast — and selfish and desperate for a familiar face on set, he maneuvers his way into letting him onto the show. He expects it to be something fun for the summer before he leaves Catalina Island behind for good. He expects it to be a funny little anecdote — fun fact, I used to be on a reality TV show! — what he doesn’t expect it to be is what it becomes. 

Cleo Halliwell is an unexpected force of nature, an electric shock to his life that makes Luca believe in home. An anchor he’d never had, the storm he’d walk into every single time. They become friends first, but by the second season, they’d been inseparable and a bona fide item, no matter how much the viewers claimed it was a sham cooked up by MTV executives. 

After that, it’s just dominoes and gravity. 

At NYU, Luca had become increasingly jaded with his chosen path (no, it’d been his parents who’d handpicked doctorlawyerengineer for him, as if he’d cared about any of those things), preferring to spend most of his nights hanging out, drinking, and hitting up the clubs in New York. The DJing had been a simple extension of his interest in the music he was into. Much to his surprise, posting his music online had gotten him a decent amount of streams. Playing in apartments and rooftops of apartments quickly made way for legitimate venues and clubs. 

Meanwhile, the show only helped his budding fame, and Luca continued to date Cleo for the remainder of the series. The show received considerable media coverage, at least through tabloids, who seemed adamant on associating his penchant for clubs as signs of cheating, though he did nothing of the sort. And yet, like everything else, Luca had slowly begun to feel the cage enclose around him. The mild name recognition, the lies being printed online and elsewhere… where did his life and Saint Catalina’s Luca Choi begin and end? 

In the end, their breakup is mutual, marking the end of a large chapter in his life. He moves to New York full-time, occasionally traveling around to play at whatever venues and parties he could get. The island is a far-flung memory, forcibly forgotten if only because the memory of his relationship Cleo had soured. What if he had made the wrong decision? What if the island was truly home? 

For the first time in Luca’s life, he missed the small spaces, the semblance of home. 

But if there is one other person that reminded him of home, it is his sister. Growing up in their strangely disjointed home, they’d grown even closer over their twenties. All it takes is one call asking him to return home and he immediately buys a ticket to LAX before boarding the ever-familiar ferry back onto the island. 

PERSONALITY

Positive: Amiable | Easygoing | Creative

Negative: Avoidant | Insensitive | Irresponsible

Luca Choi is portrayed by Say.

[seancerpg-archived]

THE INVENTOR

Name: Kai Lei

Age: 29

Pronouns: He/Him

FC: Lewis Tan

BIOGRAPHY

tw - death

Growing up, he often thought it fortunate that he was a younger son. His temperament was never quite suited for business, nor the military, and brilliant as he undoubtedly was, he never excelled in academics, either. It was sheer luck that gifted him with elder brothers more than willing to take up roles within the family business, leaving him quite free to pursue the interests that actually excited him. And so, he retreated into a world of his own creation, the gentle whir of machinery became something akin to a lullaby, a comfort from the world he had isolated himself from. It became very apparent very early on that he had a particular knack for inventions, for building clockwork mechanisms out of nothing. It became a point of pride for his loving family, delighting in each and every one of his creations.

The creative child became an eccentric adult. Whilst his family were long used to, and accepting of, his peculiarities, it wasn't something that the world outside of his home was particularly understanding of. It would have been easy to become a recluse, to close himself off from those who would never see who he truly was, but that was never his way. He might have been an oddball, but he was far from a recluse. And so, with the backing of his family, he struck out on his own, setting up his own small shop. It was fortunate that he didn't need the money, for there was never much of a market for his particular brand of invention, but it drew the curious through his doors, and even if sales were rare, there was already something to talk to.

His happiness, however, was short lived. One by one, his brothers fell, each under circumstances more mysterious than the last, and all of a sudden, the weight of the world was on his shoulders. He was born into a world of wealth and titles, but it was never for him, not one that he understands, and he cannot help but feel out of his depth, more cut off than ever from his true passions. He was out of his depth, and the only people who he could turn to for advice, the brothers who had kept him protected from the complications of the family business, were all dead and buried in a neat row inside the family crypt. It was quite by accident that the idea to invent something that would allow communication with the nether realm sprung forth, spurred on by a chance encounter with a spiritualist at a dinner party. However, it's a plan he is beginning to regret, his tinkering seemingly disturbing something far darker than he intended - and far more dangerous.

THE GHOST

It was The Inventor who first made contact, dabbling with that which he did not understand in search of answers to his questions. If only he had let the dead rest, he would not have awakened anything at all, would have lived his life thinking spiritual happenings were utter nonsense, but he never did know when to leave something alone. Now, he is plagued by something that delights in his discomfort, and his workshop is the ultimate playground for such a creature. He's seen clockwork automatons come to life unbidden, things that should be still moving on their own, and what could previously be described as a mechanical malfunction is far too frequent to be a coincidence, unable to be ignored.

CONNECTIONS

THE POLITICIAN: He was close to your eldest brother, the two of them thick and thieves when they entered the realm of politics at the same time. The Inventor once considered him part of the family himself, and whilst he still considers the man to be a family friend, he cannot deny he has seen a change in him. He thought it was down to grief, the loss of his friend weighing on him as heavily as the the loss of a brother hangs over The Inventor, but if he's being honest with himself, the alteration in his behaviour started way before the deaths occurred. The Inventor wonders if The Politician knows more than he lets on.

THE ASSASSIN: They met a short while before the death of his eldest brother, and at the time, he thought he had found a true friend in her. However, since his life has been marred in tragedy, she has all but disappeared from his life. Far from being the shoulder to cry on that he thought she would be, she treats him frostily now, making it clear that she has little interest in spending time with him anymore. He's been left confused and upset by such treatment, wondering if he's done anything to upset her.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER: It was he who took the final photos of The Inventor's brothers, and since then, they've struck up a strange sort of friendship. He's even started working on a smaller, more compact camera for him, dedicating his time and energy to making The Photographer's life a little easier. The Inventor would be lying if he said he didn't have ulterior motives, though. As much as he enjoys The Photographer's company, The Inventor has been wondering if, together, they can create a contraption that can actually capture a spirit in print. He's yet to propose the idea, but it is one that he cannot quite push from his mind.

THE FRAUD: It was they who granted him his first brush with spiritualism, sparking his interest in creating something that could communicate with the dead. Since then, he's visited them more than once, regarding them as something of a spiritual advisor of sorts. They are more than happy to provide him with advice, for a price, and seem interested in what he is doing. As a man of science, he began his endeavours more than a little bit cynical of their cryptic predictions. However, recent events have him leaning on them more than ever, and their visits to their establishment are growing  more and more frequent.

THE INVENTOR IS PLAYED BY LIV

[ladyanatui]

Ultimate Daiken Playlist, Pt. 1

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

This is the abridged version of my Spotify playlist for all things Daiken, mostly in order from the start of 02 to...eventually. Even so, this is still a pretty damn long list. My original aim was for 30 songs, but...uh, yeah, I surpassed that pretty quickly. It’s around 75 now. Yikes. So I split it up.

I have problems with self-control. Especially when it comes to my babies.

Part 1 specifically covers from the start of 02 to just after the defeat of the Digimon Kaiser.

TRIGGER WARNING: This post discusses depression, suicide, emotional abuse, and PTSD quite a lot. Take care of yourself, folks!

Spotify Playlist

Click the song titles for YouTube links (apparently you can’t have more than five videos in a post), and otherwise, enjoy me rambling about Daiken...as I am wont to do.

One final note: Within the lyrics, I’ve emphasized meaningful words, such as night/nightmare, dark/darkness, miracle(s), kind/kindness, courage/bravery, friend/friendship, sun/star/light, fire/burn/ignite, angel(s), and words related to water/drowning.

“I’m Just a Kid” by Simple Plan

I think I got a lot of friends But I don't hear from them What's another night all alone When you're spending every day on your own

I envision this as Daisuke’s life before becoming one of the Chosen, before meeting Ken. It’s pretty well established that Taichi and Hikari are the only legitimate friends he has during that time, aside from (possibly) his soccer teammates, but he’s not close with any of them. And worse, his home life is obviously not great: His parents ignore him, and his sister irritates him just to irritate him. That may seem like a normal brother/sister relationship, but a 17-year-old slapping her 11-year-old isn’t normal or healthy.

The truth is, Daisuke has no legitimate example of healthy family interactions, and in some ways, his home life is as emotionally abusive as Ken’s was. His parents insult him (his father calls him his “stupid son” when Ken first visits) and ignore him (Daisuke repeatedly says his parents wouldn’t notice if he didn’t come home and lies to them to avoid spending time at home), so he has no idea how to respond to compliments.

This also means that he latches on to the people he cares about, much the same way Jun latches on to attractive boys. He idolizes Taichi (calling him senpai when speaking with him directly), and he constantly seeks attention from Hikari. Since we don’t know what Daisuke and Hikari’s relationship was like before Takeru shows up, it’s all speculation, but Daisuke was probably way less aggressive and possessive of her before someone came to try to take his one friend away.

So Daisuke has no idea how to show affection (whether familial, platonic, or romantic) in a normal, healthy way. He’s never had a close friend (or any real friends probably), and he’s never been close with any of his family. He’s actually lived an incredibly lonely life.

“Dark Blue” by Jack’s Mannequin

This flood This flood is slowly rising up Swallowing the ground Beneath my feet Tell me how anybody thinks Under this condition So I'll swim, I'll swim As the water rises up Sun is sinking down

Similarly, this functions as Ken’s theme song for events prior to the start of 02. There are a lot of references to water--“flood,” “swim,” and I believe there’s talk about drowning as well--which is very fitting because of the Dark World (Ocean), but also because Ken obviously suffers from depression and the idea of drowning is one of the most used and most accurate descriptions of what chronic depression feels like (trust me, I know!).

But my favorite part of this is the last two lines from the quote. Let’s be real, the sun is a huge symbol when it comes to our goggle boys--they are bright, cheerful, energetic, and so fucking bright they could rival the sun itself. When Ken is so incredibly surrounded by darkness, Daisuke is the sun. There are so many things that support this, but most importantly:

The Crest of Courage is shaped like the sun. It doesn’t get more overt than that.

When V-mon evolves to Magnamon, it’s described as: “It was a miraculous evolution. As beautiful as the rising sun shining brightly on the world.”

Daisuke is the sun. Ken is the world. And Ken needs his sun to help him out of the darkness.

“Send Me an Angel” by Highly Suspect

Open fire on my burning heart I've never been lucky in love My defenses are down A kiss or a frown I can't survive on my own

Send me an angel Send me an angel Right now, right now

Before they met, before 02 actually starts, both Ken and Daisuke are effectively alone. Yeah, they’re surrounded by people (Daisuke more than Ken), but never of them have any real friends or close relationships.

This song is something I see Daisuke feeling in his more introspective moments (rare, I know), as what he needs more than anything is true love and companionship. When I say love here, I don’t necessarily mean romantic. While, yes, Daisuke has poor luck in romance (Hikari, hello!), he has poor luck with platonic love as well.

And I’m all for anything that references Ken as being an angel. Obviously, Ken would never agree to that sentiment, but a lot of the time, it feels like that’s how Daisuke views him. To Daisuke, [post-Kaiser] Ken is this amazing, beautiful, even verging perfect person, and you can see he feels that way just from the way he looks at Ken.

I also chose this song because it’s a small reference to something I drew not too long ago, which itself is based on a Lilo & Stitch meme.

“Duality” by Set It Off

I can't quite contain or explain my evil ways Or explain why I'm not sane All I can say is this is your warning

It's a cloak or disguise unleashed, gonna get it off No, I'll never get away Cause if I try to stray It only holds me closer No, I'll never get away I'll have it any way

Okay, this is very obviously a Kaiser song. But it’s also a Ken song. The whole thing about this song is that Ken is trapped as the Kaiser and doesn’t have full control over himself. And can he actually explain why he does the crazy evil shit he does? His explanation is that he thought the Digital World was a video game, but that’s obviously not the full picture. He can’t fully explain because the Dark Seed is what makes him evil as opposed to simply sad and lonely and traumatized.

“Numb Without You” by The Maine

You are my last, you are my first You kill me for the better You are the rising tide You're every fucking thing inside me now

You are the violence in my veins You are the war inside my brain You are my glitter and my gloom I am so numb without you

This is another Kaiser/Ken song. To an extent, this song has a sort of sadistic romantic aspect to it, but I’m choosing to ignore those undertones in favor of just the creepy sadistic part. This is sort of Ken singing to his Kaiser persona and also to depression in general. Because the Kaiser is the “rising tide” (oh, look another reference to water!) and the manifestation of his grief and trauma and mental illness.

But as the title of the song suggests, the Kaiser persona is also what allows him to still feel something. Without it, he’s in the complete numbness of his depression (which sucks, trust me), and he would rather have the Kaiser, who is violent and angry and bitter, instead of the absolute numbness of his grief and depression.

“Deer in the Headlights” by Owl City

Tell me again was it love at first sight When I walked by and you caught my eye Didn't you know love could shine this bright? Well, smile because you're the deer in the headlights

Met a girl boy with a graceful charm But when beauty met the beast, he froze Got the sense I was not her his type By a black eye and bloody nose But I guess that's the way it goes

Note: I (obviously) changed a few pronouns in the quote. It should be apparent what I altered based on formatting.

Here, we see the first time Daisuke and Ken meet. And I’m talking Ken (although evil Ken), not the Kaiser. Yes, this is referencing the soccer match they play against each other in episode eight.

It’s pretty damn obvious that eleven-year-old Daisuke is completely enamored when he meets the famous Ichijouji Ken. He blushes and stumbles over his words, and he is so overwhelmed and happy that Ken remembered his name after the match was over. He admires him, and when Ken tells him that he’s the first person to ever stop that move in the match, Daisuke just looks so pleased to hear the compliment.

Also, bonus points for any song that references the sun or light: “Didn’t you know love could shine this bright?”

“Love the Way You Hate Me” by Like a Storm

You say I'm insane I say You're afraid I get stronger from the pain I love the way you hate me

I'd rather be a sinner than a slave I'd rather be an outcast than just bow down and obey When it's all done there's only one Name upon my grave I'd rather be a freak than be a fake

Another Kaiser song. While the previous song could be placed pretty much any time during the first fifteen episodes or so, this one is distinctly set after they find out the Kaiser is Ichijouji Ken. The focus here is on the way the Kaiser (emotionally) gets off from how much the Chosen Children, Daisuke especially, fight against him and hate him. He enjoys watching them try so hard and keep failing because, while he desperately wants to have an opponent, he loves to win more--he does think it’s a game, after all.

“Lock Me Up” by The Cab

Why don't you Lock me up with joy and kisses? Lock me up with love? Chain me to your heart's desire

I don't want you to stop Lock me in and hold this moment Never get enough Ain't no way I'm ever breaking free Lock me up

This song is mostly in reference to the serious foe yay aspect to Daisuke and Kaiser Ken’s relationship for the first half of the series. The homoerotic subtext in their relationship is ridiculous, especially since they’re two eleven-year-old boys, one of whom (theoretically) has a huge crush on a female friend for the first half(ish) of the season. But you can bet that, if the Chosen Children had a second enemy during the Kaiser’s days, the Kaiser would be pissed and pull the whole “No! Motomiya’s my enemy. Only I can defeat him!” bit like he’s Kaiba Seto or something.

“Fallen Angel” by Three Days Grace

How can I take the pain away? How can I save...

A fallen angel in the dark Never thought you'd fall so far Fallen angel, close your eyes I won't let you fall tonight Fallen angel

But then there’s comes the very important part where Daisuke has a revelation. When he and V-mon meet Wormmon on the Kaiser’s base, Wormmon is determined and takes them to the Digimental of Miracles in an attempt to help them defeat the Kaiser and bring back his kind-hearted best friend. The moment Daisuke touches the Golden Digimental, something changes: It’s connected to Ken because it’s borne from his Crest of Kindness, and Daisuke is able to see that there’s more to Ken than his Kaiser persona. He knows that there’s good in him before they’ve even defeated him, and he wants to help him.

And seriously, bonus points for a song from Daisuke’s POV that refers to Ken as an angel. I’ll fight anyone who says he doesn’t see Ken that way. Legit.

“Breaking Down” by I Prevail

Lies, every time they ask me I just tell 'em that I'm fine Try to hide my demons, but they only multiply Keep me running from the voices on repeat inside my mind Everybody fucking hates you

I guess I never noticed how it came creeping in My enemy emotion but I can't sink or swim I say I'm feeling hopeless but no one's listening But no one's listening, but no one's listening

This song is in reference to the way Kaiser Ken’s psyche is falling apart. He’s having doubts. Creepy voices are talking to him. He’s confused about how the Chosen Children are actually defeating him. Chimairamon is a freaking nightmare and totally uncontrollable. And Ken is about to have a goddamn breakdown.

“Goner” by Twenty One Pilots

Though I'm weak Beaten down I'll slip away Into the sound

I've got two faces Blurry's the one I'm not I need your help to Take him out

Look how far we’ve come! We’re almost to the Kaiser’s defeat! (Dear god, this is a long playlist...)

Ken isn’t aware of how much he needs Daisuke to help him at this point. He’s too busy being the Kaiser and, you know, having a mental breakdown. But it’s important that Daisuke is the one there to help bring everything down. V-mon evolves to Magnamon and defeats Chimairamon with some badass moves (he is a Royal Knight after all), and Daisuke and the rest of the Chosen Children are finally able to get through to Ken.

“Not Gonna Die” by Skillet

Break their hold Cause I won't be controlled They can't keep their chains on me When the truth has set me free

Only when he realizes that the Digital World isn’t a game is Ken able to break through the hold that the Dark Seed (and Oikawa and BelialVamdemon, etc.) have on him. He tears off his Kaiser clothes and goes back to being just Ken. Just sweet, kind-hearted, adorable Ken.

Parts of this song, though, would be from Daisuke’s perspective. He’s determined, even though they have defeated their enemy, to help Ken, even that simply means sending him home to his family instead of letting Ken just waste away, which is frankly what it looks like he’s about to do during this scene.

“Tell Me Why” by Three Days Grace

Tell me why Does everything that I love get taken away From me? Why does everything that I love get taken away?

How come nothing ever lasts? It goes from good to bad to worse so fast All it takes is one and I'm gone, and you can't erase the past How come nothing ever lasts?

Obviously, this is a Ken-centric song, the focus being on his past when he saw his brother’s death, though Osamu’s death is nowhere near his fault. Yet again, Ken goes through a traumatic experience (Wormmon’s death), and for the first time, this is (somewhat) his fault.

While I linked the subs version, the English dub of this scene actually has a line almost exactly like this song: “Not again. Wormmon’s gone. Just like my brother. I was helpless to save him, and now I can’t save Wormmon either. Why do I keep losing people?”

Sorry, were you not wanting to cry today? ...Oops.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

[adapted-batteries]

Out from the Facades

Fandom: The Librarians

Rating: General, sfw, some swearing

Relationship: Jazekiel

Word Count: 2236

Going off a previous post where I headcanoned Stone as a trans guy, this is a fic revolving around that, and the concept of found family for June 4th's prompt: Found Family.

Also posted on my Ao3.

-----

Jacob came home, hair cut short, with a button down shirt from the thrift store, trying to ignore the uncomfortableness of the too small sports bra he was using to bind. His father was usually home later, so he figured he’d have some time to think up what he was going to say, and where he could go if he ended up getting kicked out.

Unfortunately, Isaac Stone was standing at the kitchen counter, looking at some bill that had come in the mail that day. His father looked up, squinting at the open door from the bright Oklahoma afternoon. When Jacob unfroze and shut the door, Isaac sucked in a breath.

“So, you’re a boy now,” Isaac said, inspecting Jacob like he was a prize heifer at the county fair. While his feet could move, Jacob’s throat did not want to cooperate, so Isaac continued. “Since you couldn’t even be a decent girl, you better be a better man, you understand?”

Jacob nodded, mentally finishing the thought that came next: because I can’t have a queer for a kid.

So that’s what Jacob did. So long as he acted like a good ol’ boy, everyone went along with it. He was surprised how quickly people just decided that yeah, Rebecca Stone was actually Jacob Stone, star of the high school football team, more than capable of drinking with the actual linebackers, and making the same comments, though thankfully he never felt compelled to act on them like others did.

But the real shocker was how easily Isaac Stone swept the notion of Rebecca, the rough tomboy, under the rug like he had with his late wife's heritage. Surprising support wrapped in the ultimate thought that if things weren't right by themselves, he'd force it into a more acceptable image and move on. He’d drive Stone to Oklahoma City for hormone replacement therapy until he could drive himself, his father hid of all the pictures past baby stage that indicated a girl that wasn’t on board with being one, and somehow never misgendered him.

Of course, his father didn’t have to worry about misgendering if he wasn’t home, or was passed out drunk on the couch if he was.

By the time Jacob turned 18, no one made any mistakes. He’d been blessed by the transgender gods, spending most of his formative years on testosterone, and soon got top surgery in the city (thankfully paid for before his father completely ran the company into the dirt). To complete the perfect picture, he got himself a nice, manly job oil rigging. It was easy to forget he’d ever been Rebecca first.

But jacob couldn’t ignore how much of a fuckup he still was. No one knew that he’d went to college instead of “a stint up on the Keystone pipeline,” that he’d published dozens of scholarly essays on art and literature of all sorts while “apprenticing to be a surveyor,” that he still liked men even though he was a convincing fake womanizer. Despite briefly living more like who he really was, he was terrified of what would happen if the people back home found out. So, what better way to prevent that than to come back to Oklahoma and work long hours on a dead-end pipeline job, biding his time until Isaac decided he’d done enough to murder his company and let Jacob actually take over.

And then, when he was at the bar with some of his buddies, after dutifully hitting on the hot foreign chick with a Latin tattoo, ninjas showed up, and a NATO counter terrorism officer saved his ass.

The Library made it really hard to be Jacob Stone, manly oil rigger from Oklahoma, because he wasn’t any use to the Library for just that. No, Jacob Stone, brilliant scholar and expert in all things liberal arts, that was exactly who the Library needed to repeatedly save the world. And Jacob realized that, hey, it was pretty nice to actually be the real Jacob Stone, the one under all those facades.

The problem was old habits, ones that were decades in the making, were hard to break. It took him a few months to quit instinctively playing stupid before realizing, no, he didn’t have to do that. Only recently did he actually tell his colleagues what he was always busy working on in their off time, still publishing under Dr. Oliver Thompson, though the thought of abandoning the pseudonyms gave him the same fear that kept him hidden in Oklahoma.

At least the artificial interest in women was becoming not so artificial, but then there was Ezekiel Jones, doing his damn best to remind Jacob how not straight he was. And he still wasn’t totally truthful with the team; no one knew he was trans. Though he knew he didn’t owe them that bit of personal history, it felt like one more mask still hanging on his face.

And then the Library sent them to one of his father’s new sites in Wagner, and his past that he tried to shed came rearing its head all at once. Fortunately his father had hired local contractors who didn’t know Jacob, but he couldn’t do much about Isaac himself, or the fact they were dealing with some Choctaw mythology causing a ruckus, with protestors who seemingly could see through his white-passing visage and into his native blood.

It was as if the universe decided that he needed to actually confront the cultural past he’d carefully locked away years ago with his mother’s death, and the past he’d managed to lock away recently with becoming a Librarian. And maybe he actually would.

Isaac, of course, was off being useless in a bar, so naturally he got to introduce his colleagues to his father in his worst state.

“The hell you doin’ here?” Isaac was looking at him, just like he had that afternoon 25 years ago.

It took all of his willpower to not just turn around and leave. “...hey Pop.”

They managed to convince Isaac that he was just a surveyor assistant to Ezekiel, though part of him was on guard in case Cassandra decided to throw down with his father’s disgusting misogynistic behavior (he was convinced she gave Isaac a headache with all the jargon she threw around, so she got some revenge). It was easy knowing what to say to keep Isaac from suspecting anything, to get him to cooperate (especially considering he was oiled with alcohol), but after effectively being “out” intellectually for a year, it hurt to shove himself back into the good ol’ boy role, even if part of him was screaming it was the safe thing to do.

Being locked in the truth chamber was a thrilling experience, in that his anxiety about kept them from escaping. He thought he was going to have to come out right there to Ezekiel and Cassandra, but thankfully the door was happy enough with him talking about his father.

In the end, even after getting a practice run with Hokolonote, he realized it didn’t matter if Isaac had no clue who he really was. Isaac would never care, because Jacob still ended up being the family fuck up, just the “turnin’ your back on your family” one. He left Oklahoma with a different hurt, the low ache of realizing he never actually had genuine family to begin with.

And then he spent more time with the Librarians, and that ache began to fade. These people he worked with, saved, got saved by, knew him as he was, and loved him for it. And realized he felt the exact same way about them. He near spooked himself with how much he cared if Eve had died by Dulac’s sword, if Ezekiel got killed by anubis’s werewolves, if Cassandra didn’t make it through the surgery, if Flynn hadn’t been strong enough to take in evil while they scrambled for a solution to Apep, if Jenkins somehow died (thank god he was immortal). Family was only half of having people care about you; you had to care about them too.

He had family.

But he didn’t want any secrets with the family, and he still had one left tugging on his heart. And who better to tell than the other professional faker on the team.

He cornered Ezekiel in the main room while the others went about doing whatever they were doing. “Hey, Ezekiel, can we talk?”

Ezekiel looked at him, a mix of confusion and concern, since Jacob rarely pulled the first name card for him. “Sure, mate. Is something wrong?”

“No...uh, just, let’s go somewhere more private,” Jacob said, about-facing and walking deeper into the Library. Ezekiel followed him, and he knew the thief was suddenly hyper aware of everything because Jacob caught him off-guard.

The wandered for a bit, eventually far enough from the others and any main walkways where someone might come near. “Okay, what’s this about?” Ezekiel asked, folding his arms.

Jacob took a death breath. “I’ve not been completely truthful about my past-”

Ezekiel cut him off. “No one ever is, least of all me, so what of it?”

“No, just-” Jacob rubbed his face in frustration “-I know you and Cassandra found out I’d lied to my father about myself for decades, but that’s not the only thing about me you don’t know.”

“Okay?” Ezekiel just looked at him even more confused. “Are you like, coming out or something? Because that isn’t a big deal, I mean it is, but like, Cassandra has a girlfriend, mate, and you know I’m not the straightest bloke around.”

“You’re not?” Jacob shook his head, ignoring that bit of apparently obvious information for now. “I, uh, well, yeah, Jones, I’m coming out. I’m trans.”

There was an awkward silence as Ezekiel tried to figure out what Jacob meant by that. “Congrats?” He opened and closed his mouth a few times like he was trying out sentences in his head and deeming them not appropriate, and then a flood of words came out. “Um, so, do you have like prefered pronouns you want me to use? Are you thinking about a new name? Cuz that’s cool too. Are you still into women, or do you not want me to set you up anymore-”

Jacob felt like he’d been doing Atlas’s job for him, and Atlas had finally relieved him. “Ezekiel,” Jacob started to get the thief to quiet, “I’m a trans man.”

“Ooh, okay.” Ezekiel, despite his ability to don a quality poker face, had no control over the blush on his face right then.

Deciding he had nothing left to lose, Jacob decided to answer Ezekiel’s last question. “And you can stop with setting me up with women too...because I’m not straight either.” He let out a bark of a laugh at how surreal he felt, which made Ezekiel startle. Apparently Ezekiel realized how big this was for Jacob, because he was looking at him in amazement now. “I can’t believe I’ve not told anyone else that in two and a half decades.”

“You...it’s been that long?” Ezekiel blinked in disbelief. “How did you hide that?”

Jacob shrugged. “You’d be surprised how easily people will ignore things if you fit in somehow. And I wasn’t ever totally hidden...you met Slaten. He knew me, well, more than anyone else until the Library.” He knew what was coming next after he said that.

“Were you...together?”

A smile crept onto Jacob’s face, reminiscent. “It’s the worst when you fall for your straight best friend.”

“It really is,” Ezekiel replied, and then his expression changed to something more serious, his posture annoyingly more seductive with just a slight tilt of his head and angle of his hips. “Now I pride myself in reading people, a necessary skill for effective grifting, and, well, when I first met you, you gave off some repressed gay vibes for sure. Was there something more when you shoved me against that bookcase when ninjas were invading the Library for the crown?”

Jacob thought back to that moment. “Not exactly, I mean, I'm a fighter so my first thought was to immobilize you.” Ezekiel raised an eyebrow, but Jacob had more to say. He stepped closer to Ezekiel as he said, “then my second thought was you looked like you were enjoying it.” Now he was almost toe to toe with Ezekiel, and the thief had certainly picked up on where he was going. “And my third thought was that I enjoyed looking at you like that.”

Conveniently, they were near a bookcase, not the one from the memory, but close enough. With all other thoughts out the window, Jacob grabbed Ezekiel by the shirt and pushed him against the bookcase. Ezekiel let out a little gasp when his back hit the wood, making Jacob's heart flip in his chest. What he said was true; Jacob was enjoying pinning Ezekiel to the bookcase, and based on Ezekiel's turned on expression, he was too.

Ezekiel interrupted his observations. “Are you just going to look at me?”

“Hmm, I might with that attitude,” Jacob purred. Ezekiel scoffed, but he glanced down at Jacob's mouth, and then Jacob couldn't resist any longer. He relaxed his elbows and brought his face near inches away from Ezekiel's, but something making him hesitate.

Ezekiel read him like an open book. “You aren't second guessing, are you? There's nothing wrong with who you are, though your wardrobe could still use help-”

“Oh, shut it,” Jacob growled, but he didn't back away.

“Make me, cowboy,” Ezekiel retorted. That was enough to get Jacob to close the remaining distance and press his lips onto Ezekiel's.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration for him to say he felt fireworks when Ezekiel kissed back.

This was his family, this building, these people. Blood wasn't everything, despite what the folks back home thought. It only took him 40 years to find it, but he was very glad he did.

-----

Post Notes: So, this is some idyllic world where trans teens got HRT in the 80's, which as far as Google would tell me, wasn't a thing until more recently. Also, since I used “And What Lies Beneath the Stones” for reference on Jacob and Isaac interacting, I also noticed how the one protestor reacted when he looked at Stone, and my brain decided that was him recognizing Choctaw or another tribe in Stone because that's also a fun headcanon in my head from when people mentioned it way back.

I picture this happening after season four, so technically the LiTs don't remember the whole Jenkins dying bit (I feel like Flynn and Eve wouldn't say for time line stability, since Flynn does watch out for that already from “And the Final Curtain”).

[unexploredcast]

BEHIND THE SCREEN: GM Prep for Deliverance, OH (Mystery 1)

Thank you so much to everyone who left a review of our show in February! I’m so excited to be able to share my GM notes and a little bit about how I prep for our sessions with all of you, which are contained in quite a long post beow, and I’m more than happy to answer any questions that come up, so send them my way and I’ll get to them as soon as I can!

Fair warning: this post contains spoilers for... the entire first eight episodes of Deliverance, OH, quite literally, so if you haven’t finished listening to the first arc, it’d serve you best to listen to episodes 00-08 before reading my notes. I don’t think there will be any other spoilers for future episodes, but if there are I’ll be sure to mark them with plenty of space for you to stop or skip reading them.

Thanks again for your support, and enjoy this little walk through my brain on Monster of the Week! 

-Christine

ORGANIZATION

I do the majority of my GM prep for this game in one big google doc I call “Session Outlines” which I store in a folder that has all of my worldbuilding notes, monster ideas, intro scripts, alternate playbooks, etc. I like having everything in one place so I can cross-reference with old arc while I work and on the fly, and this is as close to organized as I get.

The “Session Outlines” document’s got a handy table of contents with links that I can follow to quickly get where I need -- the breakdown is based on the Mystery prep system that Monster of the Week gives, so each arc has it’s concept, hook, monster, minions, bystanders, locations, and countdown. I’m going to go through each of those, but this is what the outline/table of contents looks like on the first page of my doc:

As you can see, I give each arc a catchy, stupid name that no one else ever sees, just to entertain myself. 

Also in this doc, right at the end, I have the countdowns for various long-term arcs so that I can reference them when those intersect with things happening in smaller mysteries:

I’ll get a little deeper into countdowns further on in the post for anyone who hasn’t run Monster of the Week before, because they’re my absolute favorite part of prepping for this game. 

PRE-MYSTERY PREP

Now, the first mystery in Deliverance was the first time I’d ever run Monster of the Week, so there are some aspects of prep that I’ve altered a little as I’ve learned more, but let’s just go through each page of my original notes from that arc.

The first page of my notes is always where I put the high-level thematic stuff that I want going on. The Concept for the arc -- in this case, a complicated question of morality, responsibility, and control that comes up when you find out that the monster that’s killing people is just a kid that doesn’t really know any better. I knew that with this arc I wanted to immediately set up the season with the question of: can we say that a monster is intrinsically evil, and if they are not, how does that effect our moral responsibility in re: trying to stop/hunt them? 

Some of that came from my own agenda coming into the game, and some of that came from our episode 0, with Andrew flagging an interest in this strict anti-monster sect with rigid morals and absolute obedience, and also with Roman flagging an interesting in the nature and morality of monstrosity by choosing the Monstrous playbook. I figured a question like this would instantly give them both a strong agenda, and build an interesting tension between two of the four main characters if I could get them to butt heads about it.

The hook is pretty straightforward: what direct action or effect of the monster’s presence are they going to notice first, what’s our “opening shot” so to speak. I’ve been reading the essay collection Dead Girls by Alice Bolin lately and feeling guilty about having killed Delaney off before she was ever even on screen, but at the time I chose what felt like a trope-y establishing shot for the season so that it would become very quickly apparent where I was attempting to turn certain other tropes on their head. Anyway, someday we’ll be returning to Deliverance again and all I can say is that we may or may not have seen the last of Delaney Chapman... but that’s all stuff for later. 

I also always put Chase’s start of mystery move on the first page of each mystery’s notes for a few reasons -- mostly so I don’t forget to ask him to roll it, but also because his result will, in part, develop the tone that mystery’s going to have. If he rolls a 10, this is going to be a mystery where the Kindred is working closely to solve the same problem, but if he rolls a 9 or below, the group is going to be more splintered, he’ll have fewer resources on hand, and on a 6 or below, they’re going to be actively obstructing him in some way. In play, I bold the result he rolls on this page so that I don’t forget, weeks and weeks later when we’re recording the third session in the mystery, what it was that he rolled, and so I can look back later and remember the progression of his relationship with the sect. 

Anyway, after all of that’s set in place, I move on to firming up the details of the monster -- powers, attacks, weaknesses, all of that good stuff. Most important is the MONSTER TYPE, which is one of my favorite things about Monster of the Week.

For anyone who hasn’t taken a look at the Keeper preparation sheets for Monster of the Week ( HERE! ) I’ll put in a screenshot of what I’m talking about so that it makes sense.

The first thing I do in creating each monster is pick its type/motivation. Some of them are really obvious, but sometimes having the opportunity to pick an unexpected or non-traditional motivation for a traditional monsters is even better. I’ll elaborate more on that some day when I do one of these posts for a later mystery, because Clara is pretty straightforward in terms of monster type. Here are her full stats:

Now-- I’ll admit, at the end of the day Clara maybe wasn’t the monster in this arc. I went back and forth a lot on how to frame this arc in terms of monsters and minions, because the crew was never actually meant to fight or kill this kid. But, again, I was so interested in setting them up immediately against someone that made them question their internal concept of “monster” that I went with it. She was for me, ultimately, the central focus of the arc: the cause of the conflict, the motivation for the other involved characters, etc., even if she didn’t end up being the climactic conflict of the whole arc. 

Clara didn’t appear on screen nearly as much as I expected her to: I’m not sure I ever got as far as her physical description as written here. I picked her type as BEAST because, in her uncontrollable werewolf form, that was what she would do -- so if they hurt her, and she transformed in response to that injury, that was what she’d do.

I also write this neat custom move for werewolf bites, but then none of the PCs got bitten by anyone. Still, I stand by the possibility of time-pressure and tension inherent in that 7-9 option.

As for weaknesses, my understanding of the werewolf healing process changed a little bit in play as I started to describe it happening to Evelyn, so between sessions I crossed out the original idea. I honestly have no idea, in retrospect, where I was going with the second bullet point, but thus is the fun of digital ephemera, it still lives in this google doc even though I have clearly ignored it for the rest of forever.

That link about mercury, for the record, goes to an instructables page I found for “how to kill a werewolf” -- Andrew still gets mad at me that “quick silver” not being literal is the reason he has to clarify whether anything I say is a metaphor or literal, but I thought it was way more interesting than Chase’s already having the perfect weapon (his silver knife) on hand. 

Minions are up next:

As you can see, most of the heavy lifting here was in picking their Bystander Types since all three of them were werewolves with basically the same ability. I even copy and pasted from Clara to the point where I forgot to change the pronouns in Henry’s “supernatural powers” section. You can also see the little copy-and-paste checkboxes I use to represent harm on Henry’s stats -- there was so much happening at the end of that battle that I never fully caught up with filling those checkboxes in, and I think I also had them in my paper notes (which we’ll talk about later in this post). 

The big motivation here was to differentiate Evelyn and Henry as two sides of the coin: both doing “bad” things to protect their sister, but going about them in different ways, with Evelyn -- who has an investment in this town, a life here she needs to protect in addition to protecting her sister -- being subtle, less destructive, really focused on protecting more than on doing whatever it takes, where Henry -- who has just moved back, and has no attachment to Deliverance itself except his family -- was going to do anything it took to get people off Clara’s scent, killing anyone who got suspicious.

You can see that I’ve face-cast Evelyn, here -- I do this for maybe 25-30% of the NPCs I make for this show, either ones I think are going to be particularly important or ones where an image of them just immediately comes to mind. In addition to Evelyn, I think I have actors in mind for Damaris, Van, Larkin, Blanche... Maybe that’s it? I also originally had one for Remedy (blonde Zoe Kravitz) but some incredible fanart has swayed me to having at least 3 different mental images of Remedy. 

I should note that my actual writing process for these notes is not in the order they appear in the doc: at this point, I usually try to at least sketch out the countdown because I’m in the mindset of thinking about the monster and what they’re going to do -- and then I fill in the bystander and location details to suit the countdown, making any adjustments to the countdown that I need to to accommodate new ideas. 

But, in my notes Bystanders and Locations are next, so: 

First thing of note: somehow, Sheriff Commander-Jones’ wife, the medical examiner, never made an appearance. She is just chilling in the background of this show, waiting for someone to need to talk to a coroner at the morgue, happily married to a very overwhelmed Sheriff. There are a ton of details here that never came up, and one of the things I learned from this first mystery is that I’d over-prepped the hell out of it. My bystander notes these days are a lot simpler: name, pronouns, age, brief physical description, type/motivation, and a one-word trait usually is about it. 

(Melissa was going to be so good, I’m still so sad I’ve not found another way to bring her into things. Maybe someday...)

You can also see here the common symptom where I leave something (Yasumoto’s trait) blank to come back to and then instantly forget about it and it just stays blank forever. Also, I don’t know why the hell I wrote “charming” in Jason’s description. He was never truly meant to be charming. 

I keep the little Keeper list of bystander types/motivations in the doc below all of my pre-made Bystanders in case I need to come up with some on the fly, but more often or not I forget to write them into the notes. Evidence: Remedy is missing from this document after I made her up on the fly when Chase needed healing. 

Locations are notoriously my least favorite part of prepping. I’m not good at coming up with interesting locations so I struggle through outlining the important places. I spent a lot more time on it with this arc than I do later on in the show, but my go-to is a few keywords describing the feeling/appearance of the place, and what information they might come across there. 

After that, we get to my favorite part of designing a mystery: the Countdown. 

For those who haven’t read or run Monster of the Week, the Countdown basically represents the steps of what the monster would do if the hunters didn’t interfere, and it gives a sense of direction as to how things will progress. It’s broken up into 6 steps, and the story can move from step to step when the heroes take too long or fail rolls, etc. Here’s my countdown for the first mystery: 

This one was super concrete compared to some of the ones I’ve written. A recent countdown ended “And then the world ends” or something like that, so this one was a nice, concentrated countdown for a first foray into the game. 

I italicize countdown lines in my notes as they happen in play: when people stall for too long early on, or when they fail and I get to make an off-screen hard move. I think the shadows line here was activated when they took the time to take Chase back to the farmhouse to get healed, which meant they wouldn’t be able to find the information I had for them in the morgue. The rest of the countdown was altered by their decision to go after Evelyn -- because Evelyn couldn’t go after Damaris, Henry did, and thus didn’t go after the police.

I hang out on the Countdown page while we play, until I need to reference something else: it gives me a broad overview of where things are going to go, so switching back and forth between that and the list of Keeper moves on the Keeper reference sheet helps me improvise my responses to failed rolls and decide what’s going to happen as the characters go to specific place. I like keeping this focused outline of what the monster is trying to accomplish in the front of my brain at all times, because it makes it easier to decide what conflicts might arise and what threats are out and about. 

The last section I prepare before we start the first session for the mystery is a broad mystery information section, which isn’t necessarily in the outline of Keeper prep that Monster of the Week provides. For some mysteries I use this a lot, for others it’s just a line or to, but it’s my catch-all space for any information I can’t fit anywhere else but think I might need. 

In this case, it was both notes about werewolf transformations and also a sort of CSI-esque explanation of what had actually happened with Delaney and Jason the night before:

Again, most of this information didn’t get used -- and I’ve sense balanced out my over-prepping problem, but I almost always have something I want to remember that doesn’t fit in any of the other prep, so that’s what this section is for. 

I think the biggest thing to note here is that a lot of this information is in flux: I’m always playing with what things will work, what things won’t, what will make for interesting decisions based on what the PCs are doing, and adjusting my information and planning from there. Less kill your darlings and more let go of cool ideas when better ones come up, but it’s all about being able to adapt on my feet when things aren’t going to plan. I try really hard not to imagine the full arc of the story and how I think it might go, because when I do they inevitably go in the opposite direction. My focus is more cementing the ideas and themes and questions I���m interested in so that I can find ways for those to come up no matter what the players decide to do. 

Now, that’s all the prep that I do before the first session. But most of our mysteries for Deliverance take 3-4 recording sessions, so what do I do during and between?

DURING AND BETWEEN SESSIONS

During sessions, I tend to make notes on paper because it makes less noise while other people are talking than typing does (I am, as anyone will tell you, a notoriously loud typist), so write some brief notes from the session on a page for that session, and then another page of notes of whatever I’ve scrawled down immediately after we finish recording where I make note of where I want the next recording to begin -- what hooks there are for each character/group of characters, what needs to be addressed, what they’ve been in the middle of, etc. 

I dug through the pile of papers I brought back with me when I moved back to the US this summer to find my scratch page notes for the first mystery (recorded August-October 2017), which are below -- a few handwritten, and one pre-game section that I decided to type because, if I remember correctly, I was making these notes during a lecture because I had procrastinated until the last minute. Major apologies for my oft-indecipherable handwriting; I’d translate, but most of the time I, too, have no idea what it says. 

This one below was my post-session 1 notes, along with my general on-hand notes during the recording of the first mystery -- I’ve got harm checkboxes, Andrew’s description of the farmhouse for reference (which, admittedly, I have not looked at again until just now), and then some notes about where people are headed and what they’ve encountered and/or promised.

Looking back at those harm checkboxes, I think I nerfed Henry’s harm-count because I was pretty sure I was going to kill Chase if I didn’t. I was very much still getting the hang of how much harm monsters can do vs. how much harm hunters can do.

No, I don’t know what those numbers on the top are. I want to say that was Jason’s iPhone password?

This one above is pretty typical for what my pre-session notes look like in the middle of a mystery -- each character or character group and then a quick note about where they are/what they’re going to be doing. This looks the most like the notes I take these days, now that I’ve been playing the game for a lot longer. They’re fairly sparse! Basically enough to give me an opening introduction as we start recording and then ask “what do you do?” and go off of whatever their answer to that is. 

Another important note: much of this NEVER HAPPENS. “storm begins, takes them back to the station” who????? The quickest lesson I learned with this game is to not hold on to anything too tight because better things come up so quickly that you can’t afford to hesitate before abandoning ship and jumping to them.

As you can see, sometimes these notes are a “here’s what happened” or “here’s a thing you need to remember” note, sometimes they’re a “this is an interesting place to start” note, and sometimes they’re a “how the fuck am I going to get them back on track” note. Usually, I’d say, it’s that last one, with this particular group of characters. QUESTIONS are huge, in these notes -- “Where are you going now that Zeke’s kicked you out of the farmhouse?” is, I would say, the ideal kind of note for me to start off a session with. 

Anyway, all that to say: for me, the real work of Monster of the Week is asking the right questions. Having a monster is important and having some idea of setting and bystanders is important, but if I had ten minutes to prep a Monster of the Week mystery, I would have: monster, countdown, and a strong hook, and I could probably improvise it all from there. 

[rickktish]

Do you ever just...

look at the stuff you know you can never publish without somebody saying “kinky” and turning it into a fetish thing, even though it’s really not a fetish thing at all, and feel sad?

There’s stuff I know I will never be able to share with anyone because it reads as being super kinky. It’s not kinky. It’s world-buildy. But other people don’t think how I think, other people don’t look at things the way I look at them, and other people don’t have the opinions I have. 

I just... I yearn for a platform where I can share something without being afraid of accidentally making someone uncomfortable because of what they think is a sex thing when I don’t view it as a sex thing. I yearn for a society where I can share something creative without having to worry about social issues and opinions and pushing everyone’s triggers by describing the human body.

Today I was scrolling through one of my favorite tags and found someone crying for everyone to unfollow someone else because they supposedly drew child pornography and fetishized trans people. Except that nothing in their argument actually looked like there was any porn or fetishization occurring whatsoever, so I decided to explore the person being defamed myself. And you know what? I just read one of the most beautiful, heartwarming fan comics I’ve ever seen, with a masterfully organized story and wonderfully done EVERYTHING and I loved it to bits and it takes place in a fantasy world which the author of the original work outlined but (as far as I’m aware) never fully fleshed out. One of the characters is shirtless as originally drawn by the author of the original work. The (cisfem) fan artist headcanons this character as trans, and states in her explanation of the story that she spent a long time debating how to incorporate that into her work, and ultimately decided that the character shouldn’t be forced to have recieved top surgery in a medieval setting or to change his outfit in order to “qualify” to be trans. So she draws him throughout the entire comic series, which is at least a hundred posts long and totally worth reading through, as having his breasts exposed when he’s shirtless.

The person who was defaming that artist whose post I initially read was incensed that this cis artist had chosen to depict this character in this way. They held the belief that the artist was sexualizing an underage character and fetishizing his transness by using he/him pronouns for him while exposing his breasts. They argued that the artist clearly hadn’t asked the opinions of any trans people on this matter and ought to be degraded for it.

Except... as a trans man, reading about a trans man who is comfortable enough and free enough in his world to not have to get top surgery or cover up to be accepted was enormously freeing for me. It was incredible to me how accepting literally everyone in the comic was, even to the point of punting me out of my suspension of disbelief several times. Literally no one misgendered this character even once. The only time in-universe that the character’s sex was discussed was for a gag referring to a child he and his partner had accidentally adopted. And the artist’s style is wonderfully unique and simplistic and hardly graphic, to the point that while it was sometimes clear that the character had his breasts exposed, there was never anything uncomfortable or sexual about it. It was literally just another piece of character design, another facet of his apparel reflecting his personality and character. It was glorious, and I revelled in the absolute freedom that this character experienced, that I deeply envied and longed for. (which is not to say that I want to be able to walk around with my chest exposed, because I’m honestly usually not comfortable even in just short sleeves; I prefer to stay well-covered regardless, but the element of acceptance was astounding and deeply moving to me.)

But apparently several people have gone after this artist for “sexualizing” a character and “fetishizing” his transness by not requiring that he “pass.” Not only the person whose discourse initially led me to that artist and their comic, but others as well.

And it makes me sad. Because I write stories about trans men who accept their bodies. I don’t have the experience of a trans woman to feel comfortable writing about that without being afraid of incorrectly portraying that experience, though I’d like to someday try to do that as well in my storytelling. I write stories about trans men who hate their female shape when they’re referred to by female pronouns but can accept and love it when they use male ones-- because that is my experience. I have pages upon pages of journals examining my own perspective, exploring why “she” hates her body and “he” loves his when they are both me and I am both and I have been both but somehow they define my paradigm, my self-view, my world, and I have no answers but I can only write what I know and what I know is taking comfort in accepting my body as it is and my pronouns as they are. This artist, although she is cis and has not experienced what I have, managed to portray that perfectly, and it resonated so deeply with me that I read everything she’s created for that series in a single sitting.

I write about breasts. I write about men with breasts. I write about women with breasts. I write about uncomfortable things, about different perspectives from the norm, about possibilities I have never seen explored. 

I write about an A/B/O universe where it’s not about sex, it’s about a society shaped by a biology entirely different to the one which has shaped our own. I write about Dom/Sub/Switch worlds that don’t have a single drop of citrus in them but have a whole lot about what it means to be “safe” and why it matters how much control you hold over your every moment of breath upon this earth. I write about fetishes in a de-fetishized context, because when you get bored enough to read every single fic on a list for a fandom you learn things you never imagined were a thing, and personally when I learn things I start creating.

But I can never post stories I write about trans men who breastfeed their children, not without editing that part of it out. I can never publish stories about people in their earlyi  teens who are aware of and formulating opinions on this “sex” thing, because even though American kids are taught the mechanics of sex when they’re twelve and thirteen and fourteen the internet doesn’t want to know that they-- that WE-- think on it and consider what the things we learn mean in an actual, world context. I read an argument recently that boiled down to “don’t headcanon fourteen-year-olds as ace they shouldn’t even be thinking about sex what’s wrong with you” and all I could read was “sure, we TEACH them about sex at that age but they’re not supposed to actually THINK about it” and I don’t think I’ve ever read a more accurate description of the American education system and it burned me, down to my very core.

This got a lot longer than I intended, but I guess all I’m really trying to say is that it makes me sad how pervasive our expectation of sex as a perversion is in this culture. This online culture, this world culture-- we talk and talk and talk about sex and shame those who do or think anything outside the “norm”-- whatever that qualifies as for the two week period you happen to be writing during-- and I don’t think anyone on this fucking hellsite even really understands what sex even is on a fundamental level. I’m sure it sounds insane to anyone outside my own head, but the very first thing we fetishized as humans was sex itself and I kind of really wish we hadn’t done that, because it led to the setting of a billion other rules of what is “normal” in regard to procreative acts and what is “kinky” and what is liable to give the next everyday joe to happen upon the pose a boner. 

Sex is an act of procreation. It is an expression between people of an understanding deeper than words can depict, whether that is one of love or one of shared escapism or one of impulsiveness. As soon as it was turned into an act of pure recreation, it became a hot mess that you all can’t help poking at and making weird faces. I have a friend who can’t even stand to listen to a health class discussion of sex because it makes her so deeply uncomfortable and that makes me so fucking sad you have no idea. 

I just... I wish the societal view of sex and its relation to the body didn’t exist sometimes. I wish people didn’t think in terms of sex first and ideas after. I wish people could actually be mature for once in their lives and remember that it’s not all about who can get the biggest orgasm from the weirdest shit.

i know other people’s opinions are different from my own. I try really hard to respect them. really hard. But sometimes, when things don’t make sense in my mind, when I see what I’m 98% positive is a better way of looking at an issue, I just... my empathy function shuts down and I jsut want people to listen and think for once in their lives about why they think of sex the way they do. Why they think of anything the way they do, really. But sex especially. 

Maybe I just want everyone to be able to compartmentalize the way I can, and I know that’s not reasonable in any way shape or form but it’s 3 am and I’m tired of bullshit and i’m’ sad and i’m angry except I’m not really angry I’m actually just sad. Really, really sad. and kind of hopeless.

[decadentrpg-blog]

WELCOME EMILY, YOU’VE BEEN ACCEPTED FOR THE ROLE OF HELOISE DELACOUR

Admins Note: Heloise was certainly a difficult choice to make but after much assessment, I want to say that I absolutely adore what you’ve brought to the table! From build up of her background to every little historical reference that was placed within your application, it cohesively created this duality that Heloise has! I’ve enjoyed every interaction she has as well as the clarity and rationale behind her thinking! Your faceclaim request for Virginia Gardner has been approved. Congratulations on your acceptance again, please make sure to head your way to the checklist and submit your account within the next 24 hours!

Out of Character

Name / Alias: Emily

Pronouns: She/Her

Age: Twenty-two

Timezone: GMT.

In Character Application

Full Name: Heloise Delacour

Sexuality: Lesbian.

You like girls. No, that’s wrong. You love girls. You love the smoothness of their skin. You love their gentle curves, their bodies like oceans, refreshing and divine. You love stroking their hair as you lie between sweat-soaked sheets, curling it around your fingertips. You love sharing lipstick shades so it won’t get too messy when you kiss and the sound beaded dresses make when they hit the ground. Most of all, you love who you become around them. Bursting at the seams with euphoria, without a trace of shakiness in your footsteps, you unveil the creature you fought so hard to become - self-assured and valiant. You always slipped into her without thinking about it, knowing instinctively, that this was right. This was who you were supposed to be.

Gender/Pronouns: Cis-female, she/her

Hogwarts House:  Gryffindor.

The hat was adamant. They wanted you in Gryffindor. They wanted you to learn to harness your own roar, the find power in your sort of bravery - perhaps even to tame the brasher instincts of your peers, to calm the storm inside of them. Not every kind of bravery favours the bold, the defiant, the loud. There are different kinds of bravery. The courage to carry on when the chains around your neck drag you to the ground. The strength to try and try and try. The valour in turning yourself into an anchor, a steady weight for the rest of the world to ground themselves on. There are all sorts of bravery in this world, each as useful, each as needed, as the last. Children, yourself included, see so much, but so little at the same time.

You didn’t glimpse the potential in yourself. You wouldn’t for many years yet.

But the hat knew.

You pleaded for Hufflepuff, knowing you’d be able to carve a home out of the house. The world underestimated badgers, sneering at their perceived lack of intelligence, wit or ambition. You didn’t see that at all. You saw steadiness, a bedrock to build a person upon. It wasn’t a leap of faith. But society couldn’t be built around those who flew. Someone had to be waiting, down below, rooted to the earth, ready to catch falling angels.

The hat laughed.

“Better be…” Panic rose in your chest, a knot tightening inside of you. “GRYFFINDOR.”

They weren’t unkind to you. But you were the fawn in the pride of lions, the hovering figure in the background, the mute who never could make herself heard. Years later, with your personhood more fully attached, half of you wistfully wishes you could go back and do it better. Do it again. And yet, in your heart, you know there’s no value in looking backwards. You must journey on.

Head canons:

Trigger warnings for violence, war, alcoholism and mentions of abuse.

I. la petite fille

Your father - and you only have the confidence to say this now you’re a fledgling, grown to use her own voice - always cared far too much about what people thought. Cream of French society, darling of the elite, a career-hungry politician intent on climbing the ladder. Ironically, the sunshine in your soul can be traced directly back to him. And yet, where yours is woven into the very essence of your being, a warm touch to steady a storm, an easiness to still a monster, a brightness to diminish the darkness, his is a mask, a choking falseness. It was that, more than anything else, that scared you. He changed before your very eyes - shaking hands and kissing cheeks one second - to plotting behind their back the next. Nothing about him was real. He slipped between your fingers, never a solid thing to hang onto.

(The feeling, you know, is mutual. You were a grand disappointment. Too timid to follow in his footsteps and too honest to lie. You’re mostly strangers now, each unable to understand the other).

Your mother you know a little better. An English rose, she fell for your father’s charms one summer, a fling that never was supposed to turn into a marriage. You were the bump that interrupted those plans, the shame that would have befallen her good name. Both parties were hastily married and that was that. You’ve always wondered if she blamed you for it. Always been too afraid to ask. Your mother, you know, was miserable, far far away from home, shackled to a man she barely liked, forced to play the part of politicians wife. When she played it well, there was harmony in the household. But if she slipped up…all hell broke loose. And her, with her love of expensive wine and flirting with other people’s husbands, did mess up. You never witnessed the war inside of your father unfold, merely lived its after effects. Silently, you’d pull a blanket over your mother’s quivering frame and give your father his favourite cigar.

(As you grew, you became rather good at predicting the ticking time bombs. So before the storm ravaged, you nearly always scrambled to safety, grabbing your teddy bear and retreating to the back of the wardrobe. You never found a secret world in the back of there, but you did find safety - and that was a comfort in and of itself).

Peacemaker, your father would sometimes say with affection, your mother with scorn. You’d gulp and nod silently, opinions kept to yourself. Over time, a survival instinct became a pattern and from a pattern into a habit. Such things are hard to shake.

Ii. maison choisie

Your mother hailed from London’s big smoke and your father made Paris his home, so you’ve always been accustomed to cities - you could even say it’s in your blood. But nowhere ever felt like home more than your Grand-Mere’s home a stone’s throw from Amiens. Reluctantly, with great effort, your father would make the bi-annual privilege there, dragging your mother in tow. You never had to be forced, you galloped ahead, a country girl at heart. There was something so liberating about Amiens, especially in the summer, where the line between the fields and sky was impossible trace and wildflowers bloomed. Your grandmother was kinder than your parents, the only one who could pull you out of your shell - but even then, only when you were alone. More a hedgewitch than practiced individual, she used to set you upon a stool as she practiced her potions, entrusting you with the responsibility of stirring from time to time. She was the one who taught you that magic had more than rigid purpose, that it would be as beautiful as life itself.

She also taught you a second, valuable lesson.

You remember the very first muggle you met. You remember them because they waved joyfully as you stepped into the town square - and knew your father by reputation, your Grand-Mere by face. Your father, ever the diplomat, turned his face away, pretending not to have heard. You, bashfully, didn’t meet their eyes either. It was only later, when your parents had been placated by a bottle of wine or two, that your Grand-mere took you aside.

“Why didn’t you wave back?” Dumbstruck, you look for somewhere to scurry away and hide. Gently, she took your hand into her own. “I won’t hurt you chérie.”

“Maman et Papa didn’t.” And you never were awfully comfortable around strangers, bashfulness seizing control of you.

“They were wrong to.” Bopping your nose, your grand-mere drew giggles from you. “They didn’t wave because he was…” her voice strained over the English word. “A muggle. Have they told you not to talk to muggles?”

You shook your head.

“Don’t let them. There will be some, especially when you go to school, who tell you not to talk to witches who have muggle parents. You musn’t let them order you around. No one is any better or lesser because of the blood in our veins. Even muggles…they’re not witches. But they’re not the enemy. After all, if I never spoke to a muggle, I’d never speak to anyone! Never forget that.”

You promised you wouldn’t. You haven’t since.

Iii. armes de guerre Ultimately, it was war that drove you away from your beloved France and your cherished Grand-mere, who refused to stand down and flee when the German troops overran Amiens. You like to imagine she would not take a cowards way out, apparating whilst the others were rats in a barrel, trapped by the advance. You like to imagine she fought to defend her farm with every trick up her sleeve. You like to imagine she remained strong and valiant until the very end. But you’ll never know. The war snatched her from you, her story lost to the wind. All you had left was an owl from the French ministry and the personal condolences of the French Minister La Magie.

It took you a very long time to summon the courage to return. And even then, you couldn’t do it alone. Kenshin stepped in without being asked, the year after you left Hogwarts, stability at your side as you confronted the ruins of the happiest parts of your childhood. Violence had ravaged the landscape, scarring those who survived. Left with nothing, you saw the hallows of hunger in their sunken cheeks and poverty wrecked on their bones. Beauty had perished and been left to die. But in the ruins of her farm, you saw all was not lost. The Peach trees were still rooted, their bounty just as sweet. The goats, against the odds, made it out of the shelling alive. The old stool you had once assisted your grandmother had merely cracked, not splintered. Life went on - and through the cracks of darkness, light emerged.

You saw something of yourself in that light.

A hopeful creature, timidly taking her first steps into the world. A passionate believer in the strength of goodness, in victory and vanquish over evil. That progress, ultimately, would triumph. That even in the face of blasphemy, there is room for beauty, for brightness. The trick is in finding it and nourishing it, so that it may grow.

From seed to sapling to great oak.

The spark within yourself ignited that day. You felt your grandmother’s presence and smiled. You mourned, not in sadness, but in joy - for all the happiness that had been, for all that would yet come.

The world treads down on optimists, mocking their faith. But you’ve learnt there’s courage in that kind of relentless determination. That day, you felt its whispers in your soul. That day, you swore to let it go free.

Iv. soldat improbable The time that  followed ‘The Great War’ was supposed to be the long peace. If you look with hooded eyes, you’d find that in the cityscape of New York. Illicit drinking. Parties that last until dawn. Jazz bands. Woman’s emancipation. There is so much beauty, so much progress. But squint harder - and you’d find an underground war, a cold one, lurking just below the surface. It’s cause is more just than any muggle one ever fought. It isn’t a battle between great powers, princes and their cousins. It’s between right and wrong, progress and past, egalitarianism and inequality.

You know you’re not a likely candidate to fight in it. Most overlook you, sneering at your daintiness, soft smiles and open heart. They should understand that it’s what makes you strong, too. All you want is some small part in this larger battle, to be a part of the greater good. More than anything else, you’re a visionary, able to picture a world beyond this hatred. If you can see the brightness, you can be the brightness, a bedrock for those wearier than you, a guide for those who might come in your direction. You’re no warrior, not in the conventional sense, but not every battle should be fought with a weapon. Some need softer tools. You could be that person.

It is the sum of your duties with Dahlia. You see yourself in her, the girl you were but a few years ago, timid and unsure of the power in her own voice, but possessing a rosy heart. She deserves better. You long to show her that, to share your brightness and certainty in betterness, to pull her from the den of snakes and away from the Pride Society. You’re not asking her to fight, for the Coalition, for you…never. You simply want to help her. You would do anything - give her the means to runaway, a safe roof to shelter under, because you long to see her flourish. You’re just so afraid of failure…of failing her, your duty and yourself. The powers against you are overwhelming, those who wield the weapons lethal. The horrors she confesses terrify you. Light, as bright as it is, can be snuffed out. That is your greatest fear where Dahlia is concerned.

V. Coup de main As fun you’ll admit the parties Wren and Kenshin drag you out to are, you couldn’t carve a life out of them. Pleasure is for hedonists - and you do not count yourself among their ranks. When you found your own voice, the grit beneath porcelain skin, you were determined that it should count. You sought purpose in yourself, a way to matter. Almost as if you were trying to prove yourself…to yourself.

You found clarity in the most unlikely of places. A non-descriptive building in Queens - that would appear empty to an unsuspecting muggle. It’s purpose only became clear when you stepped inside, finding an overworked and overwhelmed refugee agency. In the aftermath of the great war, the creation of a dozen new states in Europe, thousands of wizards chose to emigrate instead, heading to the United States in search of a better life.

It’ll be tough work, the supervisor warned, staring you up and down, disdainfully. You bit your lip. Old habits die hard.

I’m tougher than I look. Promise. Your voice rang with clarity, in how true that statement had become.

You began volunteering on a trial basis. You distributed donations and held shaky people in your arms. You played with children and made puppets dance. After a fortnight, you began to offer your services as a translator, hoping to connect people into the interior of the US. A little while after that, you suggested you could be used by the organisation at large, rather than ad-hoc.

You felt a rush in your chest, advocating for yourself. You felt strong and brave and…right.

VI. bizarreries personnelles

Here are the little things that make you, you.

You never broke the habit of walking on your tiptoes, a legacy left from a childhood full of ballet dancing. Slender limbs, porcelain skin, your teacher used to sigh and wish you centre stage. Bashfully, you refused, your cheeks darkening. The spotlight was never yours to claim.

You cannot cook without making a mess. In your presence, the kitchen comes a bomb sight, ravaged by war. Nose flour-stained, fingers sticky, you chase Kenshin around the kitchen. You always catch him. He always allows himself to get caught.

Your pastries are infamous, light and puffy, the sort only the french know how to make. You refine your recipes with magic and tap your nose whenever anyone asks for their secrets. (Later, in fine ink, you pen them a letter, containing the details).

You despise British food. You ate dutifully at Hogwarts, too shy to even dream of asking for an alternative. Toad in the hole. Pies. Casseroles. Blegh.

You bit your fingernails until you were fifteen years old. Your mother enchanted them after that, exasperated at your lack of self-control. The spell has long worn off, but the manicure never lasts long. It’s a nervous tick.

You used to chew your hair. You threw off that habit by twelve.

Birthdays are your favourite times of the year. You take great pride in the gifts you give friends, a thoughtful gesture behind each one. You do, however, despise your own birthday. Being at the centre of attention makes you uncomfortable, you’d much rather spread and share the joy. Luckily, everyone’s learnt not to throw you surprise birthday parties. Instead, you have small, intimate gatherings.

(You and Kenshin have a ritual. A cupcake at midnight as eve becomes day.)

You’re hopeless at keeping plants alive. There isn’t a green bone - or thumb - in your body. You failed herbology miserably.

But you’re incredibly attentive when it comes to writing in your diary, daily and in french, to prevent eavesdropping eyes. A habit you haven’t shaken since your days in Gryffindor.

Your patronus is a lamb. An individual with a lamb patronus has a sort of natural innocence about them, and have a very serene disposition. They are kind to most, though they tend to have a difficult time reaching out and expressing themselves. They have a shy aspect of them that is not only social, but inner, which makes them hesitant to do many things. That said, they are very patient and calm creatures, which allow them to be workable with this nature.

You talk too much when you’re nervous. Far too much. About things that have nothing to do with anything. The weather. The latest show that opened on Broadway. The dance craze everyone’s talking about. Whether you should get a bob. You blabber, filling the space with…words. It’s endearing to most, but you despise it in yourself.

Your wand is 9 ½”, french-made and slim. Beech and Unicorn Hair. “The true match for a beech wand will be, if young, wise beyond his or her years, and if full-grown, rich in understanding and experience. Beech wands perform very weakly for the narrow-minded and intolerant. When properly matched, the beech wand is capable of a subtlety and artistry not seen in any other wood, hence its lustrous reputation.”

Languages are your forte. You have a knack for wrapping your tongue around them, inheriting a little of your father’s silver-tongued mantle. French is your mother tongue, but you’ve added English, Spanish, Italian and a pinch of Latin to the mix.

When you’re making a bold declaration or gesture, you rehearse the words in your mind the night before, like a politician preparing for a speech. You muse over the most effective way to get your point across, the comfort a person will be most receptive to, or whether it’s better just to hold someone and let them cry.

Connection expansion:

I. meilleur ami (Note: I’m happy to change all of this if the Kenshin player disagrees, this is merely my interpretation).

“Mon Frere…” Kenshin catches your grin. Deliberately, his mouth forms an ‘o’. “Ma sœur” You wince at the deliberately butchered pronunciation, but smile nonetheless. He’s always had a particular knack for that, drawing the happiness out of you. And you for him. The only label that fits your description is that of platonic soulmate. Or big brother. For truly, the lines between friendship and family have blurred, that you can’t tell them apart. Certainly, he feels more like family than your own blood ever did.

You met on your tenth day at Hogwarts, in the middle of Herbology class. Devil’s snare wrapped around your hand, you panicked, but were too shy to raise you concerns, suffering in silence. Where few did, Kenshin noticed you - and calmed you down with that bluntness of his. Before you knew it, you were smiling, then laughing and then free. You’ve been attached at the hip since - and shall be, until death do you part. The years did little to change the pair of you. Where some friends grow apart, you grew together, slotting like two jigsaw puzzle pieces. By third year, you were spending Christmas together, Kenshin sensing your unspoken reluctance to go back to France and face the holidays with your parents. After your first one together, you confessed the truth, honesty no one had even known. But most of all, he brought light into his life - different to yours, more brazen and bold. Like two twinned suns, strung across the sky. He is your confidante, secret keeper, joker, dance partner and now, roommate.

The latter made sense. When the two of you ended up in New York at the same time (it’s impossible to imagine the two of you oceans apart, impossible and terrible and dreadful), it made sense for the pair of you to find a two-bed apartment in Manhattan and make it your home. You are as compatible roommates as you are friends.

And, for the first time, he made a house a home.

II. le fruit interdit (Again, I’m happy to alter things dependent on plotting w/ Prosperina’s player) You shouldn’t want to kiss her. If you are the doe, she is the wolf - a huntress determined to strike clean.  In your heart, you know you should hate that dynamic, as you know you should despise her - resent the intimidation that rises through your bones, abhore the uncertainty she makes you feel.. You should be afraid. Very afraid.

And in so many ways, you are. You’re scared of what your attraction to her says about you, now that you are both girls grown, living with the choices you make as adults. You aren’t school children anymore, you aren’t praying to be noticed, doodling hearts with your names encased in it. You’re fearful of what might happen if you find yourselves alone, in a dark - or a light - room. But you’re more frightened, in a strange way, of nothing happening at all.

With Prosperina, there are so many unspoken anxieties, so many things you can’t possibly wrap your head around, that you can’t possibly know. Why she notices you now. When you began to crave the burn. If the risk is worth a moments ecstasy. How beauty could wear such thorns.

You know, now, how Eve felt, in the Garden of Eden. Just one bite, the snake hissed. Just one kiss, Prosperina whispers. You have no wish to shed your wings and toss yourself from Paradise’s gate. But she’s just as beautiful as any angel you’ve ever gazed upon.

In Character Paragraph:

Thursday night, 9pm sharp, the Yale Club. Dress elegantly. Heloise didn’t need to glance down at the invitation to know its contents, her heart having memorised them ten times over, skipping a beat each time it paused at a cursive. Even Prosperina’s writing was beautiful. She would have liked to say that the invitation was unexpected, out of the blue and had been firmly rejected. Yet, since she distastes lies, she could not.

Heloise had, however, made an attempt or two to excuse herself. Sending an owl in return, she had outlined her disapproval of the Pride Society and its galas in no uncertain terms. Prosperina had take an age to respond - deliberately, Heloise supposed, to make her nerves hop and jump. When she had, Heloise could almost taste her tone. It’s not one of those. It’s for charity. Don’t you support charity? She had caved. Heloise couldn’t be sure if that was strength or weakness, good or bad.

Three days later, another letter had arrived. Wear pink. It matches the blush on your face.

Stepping into the room, Heloise steeled herself, a picture of defiance in angel-white, beads reflecting the light back.

Not so long ago, she would have cowered, a ghostly slip of a thing, trembling in the corner. Glass of champagne stitched to her hand, she would have sipped until someone had taken pity on her - and even then, she might have fled. That worked under the assumption she plucked the courage to attend at all. Time sandpapered everyone, some for the better, others for the worse. Heloise liked to think she took after the former.

The first eye she caught was from across the room, her gaze instantly drawn to the slip of a girl shrouded by demons, unable to do anything but stare from her cage. Dahlia. It hurt to see her here, to see the shackles bound and to know she was powerless to help. To approach her, to take her hands into her own and wrap her arms around her shoulders was to betray her newfound friend, to expose her doubts to the world. There was cruelty in watching her suffer - but there was greater cruelty in taking a hammer to the foundations below her feet. That wasn’t Heloise’s job. Hers was to encourage Dahlia to flutter her own wings, to learn how to fly. All in good time. Smiling softly across the room, she let her face say what her tongue couldn’t. Stay strong, keep the faith.

The second pair were Prosperina’s - appearing from nowhere, sneaking up behind. Departing from conventions and norms, she didn’t bother with small-talk. “You look ravishing. But not as pretty as you would have had in pink.”

Tongue-tied, Heloise searched for a response. No one had the power to shrink her anymore, now that she had freed her voice from its restraints. And yet, that didn’t mean anymore wit had returned to it. In times like these, she prayed for Kenshin’s presence at her side, always ready with a sharp retort, the sort that drew him closer to someone. Or even Wren, brazen and bold, who spoke without thought. You don’t want to impress her! One voice screamed.Not like you imagined you might, a lifetime ago.

And yet, a little bit of her did.

Heloise spurned her interest. But a little bit of her didn’t want to do without it either.

“I - Thank you. You look…” Staring at Prosperina for the first time, Heloise felt the breath be stolen from her lungs. Divine. Enchanting. “Like a million bucks.” Slanting her voice into an American accent for comedic effect, she immediately regretted her choice no sooner had it been said. “And this…it’s certainly big. Very big. I suppose that’s good. The more people you can fit in, the more donations you can collect for charity.”

Prosperina laughed. Heloise was never sure if she was being laughed at or with. She preferred to think it was the latter.

“The committee had a few reservations. Something about…vermin control. The guest list is rather exclusive, you see.”

Confusion flashed across her face. It wasn’t as if New York was a stranger to rodents…but something about her tone, about the look on her face…made it clear that it wasn’t animals she was referring to. Without noticing, Heloise had become a player in the game. The smile froze on her face. “I sure hope that isn’t a reference to the architects who built the place. Or the perfectly nice people going about their business on the floor below. They’re not doing any harm.”

“Ah yes, the No-Maj’s, as our Yank friends love to say.”

Heloise tensed on the mention of that word. She despised it. No-Maj. So…derogatory. And rather rude. As if they didn’t count as people, or deserve respect, on the merit of something they didn’t have - and had no choice in having. “I hate that term. I hate - you shouldn’t talk about them like that. Nobody should. They’re hardly hurting anyone. And technically, this is their territory so really we should - be respectful.” Exhaling heavily, she steadied herself.

“Oh,” Prosperina leaned in, all smiles now, tucking a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “You’re such a doll. I was only playing. But I can be nice, if you ask nicely.” Her touch felt like electricity, the sort of chemistry that couldn’t be duplicated or faked. When it was real, it was real. “I’ll go fetch us expensive champagne to make amends.” Half-purr, she broke off and Heloise dropped her gaze. “Pink Champagne, I think.”

Cheeks deepening into rosy-red, Heloise watched her depart, wishing she could look away.

Extras:

Pinterest Board: X

[initiare]

BASICS:

Name: Manon, but I’ve gone by the alias of Sae on the internet since I was about 12 or 13. It’s really stuck and caught on so much over the years that it’s as commonly used as Manon is, if not more (both online and offline). Age: 29.  Pronouns: She/her.  Sexuality: Hetero. Zodiac sign: Cancer.  Taken or single: Single.

Four Things About This Blog:

1. Still unsure of how this worked exactly, but I’d decided to make a blog for Jace before I’d ever read (or seen) anything about him directly. A friend of mine had been in the fandom and I’d heard about him through her, enough that I’d peeked at a few basic bits on the wiki. And then one morning I woke up with this intense yet unexplainable urge to make him, this character that I knew next to nothing about. I read the first three books within a week and then I decided to launch him. I’ve never had a muse arise to the occasion quite in this manner, but then again, isn't this Jace we’re talking about? Nothing about him follows the status quo.

2. If I’d picked up the books without ever having heard anything about any character in specific prior to reading, I would’ve still likely found myself drawn to Jace’s character— but I would’ve made a blog for Valentine instead. They both appeal to me for different reasons, but ultimately, I’m very glad that I made Jace and I don’t regret not having made a blog for Valentine for a single instant.

3. I’m an exceedingly opinionated person with very set norms/values and they definitely make their appearance within my OOC posts, and they’re not always popular opinions ‘round these here Tumblr parts by any means. However, I don’t let them influence my perspective when it comes to writing for Jace (or any of my muses). Of course, I may recognize some or many aspects, but I make it an effort and personal challenge to look at everything from as many angles as I can as to obtain the widest picture of any character’s behavior or any situation.

4. Despite them not being in full view as they used to be, my tags have been described as being the ‘arteries’ of my blog(s) and I couldn't possibly agree more. If you don’t read them, you’re easily missing out on 80/90% of my meta’ing. My posts tend to have some coherency to them, some logic, but in my tags you find my incoherency and that’s my heart and my passion. That’s where I’m most alive.

Three Mun Facts:

1. I recognize that I’m incredibly headstrong and it’s both my gift and curse. While it’s gotten me in the occasional trouble because I realize that I’m being too stubborn a bit too late, there have been and are a lot of moments where I’ve used it to my advantage and I profit from it immensely in numerous ways. So while I could condemn it as a flaw, it very much hits the extremes on both ends of the spectrum.

2. I’ve got fire for a heart, I’m not scared of the dark; you’ve never seen it look so easy. Okay, so two days ago, I had a day of massive cleaning. This always goes hand in hand with music playing, I sing and dance (of which I can only successfully do the latter). Youtube went through related videos, it somehow got to One Direction. I used to unfairly hate them on principle because I heard them everywhere and everyone loved them; in the same light, Harry Styles was always the one I disliked the most because he was everyone’s favorite. Since that day, I’ve listened to their non-Zayn stuff a fair bit and it’s catchy, I guess I’m a very late fan. All good. Nobody can drag me doooowwwwn.

3. A lot of my thick skin stems from being able to properly put the right weight to people’s words. And I'm able to do that because I value’s people’s actions infinitely more than I do their words. It’s so very easy to say or type ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but if your actions don’t reflect your state of mind or your statements, then I lose respect. We’re all guilty of falling short of this every now and again, myself included; we’re all human after all, but once or twice doesn’t equal constantly.

EXPERIENCE:

How’d you start: Tumblr back in August of 2012 is when I started in the world of RP’ing. I made Tatia Petrova from TVD (I went by the url herbloodlacedtheirwine). I never really dabbled much into the world of writing before that, except little snippets in early high school as to practice and try to further my English. Platforms you’ve used: Tumblr. Best experience: While the TMI/TSC fandom definitely has its bad apples and I’ve been in fandoms where things were consistently calmer, I do find my best experience to have been here because of specific individuals I’ve met while here. However, my Tumblr experience has overall been really good since my Ezio blog. I had a field day writing him and people seemed to really appreciate my input on his character. Beyond that, his blog was also from which I released my themes and I’ll forever remember all the positive feedback I've gotten on them. Despite this site not easily showing it, there are a lot of people with a heart of gold out there. Worst experience: I’ve never exactly found myself in a really bad situation that I can refer to it as the ‘worst’, as I tend to nip things in the bud but I’m also someone who mentally catalogs things quickly, it’s how I deal with things. That and awarding stuff the weight it deserves and not a shred more— numerous things that I use to generally avoid things from getting very bad or affecting me more than I want them to.

MUSE PREFERENCES:

Original or canon: Canon every time. Favourite face: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jamie Campbell Bower, Toby Regbo. Least favorite face: Actors or actresses that play the main protagonists in usually a show, as they tend to become over-used FCs.  Note: I have zero problem with these actresses or actors themselves, I just get tired of seeing everyone use them even outside of canon characters played by them. —To name a few examples in past and present: Nina Dobrev, Ian Somerhalder, Emilia Clarke, Katherine McNamara and Dominic Sherwood.  Multi or single: Running a multi isn't something for me, but I don’t mind writing with them in whatsoever way. Kudos and respect to multi muse blogs for having the mind to be so organized, though. I couldn't do it.

WRITING PREFERENCES:

Plots or memes: Plots, although I enjoy responding to memes on Jace as crack and light type of threads so fit him quite well, they’re a nice change from the immense angst that can be done in threads. Best time to write: I used to think the night, but looking back at threads and timestamps; apparently some of my strongest writing was done in the afternoon or early evening. Problem is, I don’t always have time to write a lot during those times. An issue? Yes, yes it is. Do you like your muse(s):  I rarely make new muses, when I do, there’s a reason. So yes. How long (months/years?): For my current blogs? Jace’s blog was created in November 2017. Francis was made... July 2017 and Ezio in May of 2016. I’ve made no other muses since Ezio and any before him have been permanently archived. Fluff, angst or smut: Angst/fluff, I’ve no interest in smut as it’s written on Tumblr.

Tagged by; @takeseffort tagging; @deusidvult (come on Shae, please make me feel less bad for writing so much by outdoing me), @beastmade, @leuthros, @audacatrix, @edomson, @snakedhand. Who else do I usually tag, uhm, @cainmarked, @xncertainty. Anyone else? Say I tagged you. <3

[diveronarpg]

Congratulations, RICCI! You’ve been accepted for the role of MACBETH. Admin Rosey:  How is it possible that you had me laughing and crying in the same breath? You went from “... he’s a sad, kinda pathetic, almost self-sabotaging man who can’t enjoy the fruits of his own cruel ambition” to describing him as a Scottom (please read the app to figure out what that is). But you didn’t stop there, no, you added a whole layer to his backround that had me grinning from ear to ear. There is no other person I could possibly trust more to take up our beloved Mikael and do him justice. Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character Alias | Ricci

Age | Nineteen

Preferred Pronouns | she/ her

Activity Level | I don’t think I can be active everyday — I’m a super slow writer and am busy with college, but don’t doubt my ability to dedicate myself to a good RP. I won’t be on often, but I promise to be consistent, and I strive for quality whenever I do have the time to write. Overall, I’d say 6-7 out of 10 depending on my workload!

Timezone | GMT+8

Current/Past RP Accounts | wariest.tumblr.com & disquieters.tumblr.com

In Character Character

♚ Macbeth

What drew you to this character?

♚ Stage actors HATE him. Whenever I write men, one of my favourite aspects of their character is their relationship with masculinity, and I think I have Macbeth to blame for that, or at least partially. I’ve loved his story ever since I read it at fourteen, — and the questions that come with Macbeth’s tragic development are some I carry with when I write male characters, namely: what happens to men when you tie their worth to their masculinity, and what happens when society has tied masculinity to cruelty, violence, and power? I see Mikael as someone that could have been good, because at his core he knows what is right, but because of his insecurities, and because and the environment he grew up in, he ignores his conscience in favor of attaining power. I love morally grey characters. Macbeth isn’t a mustache twirling villain that revels in his own crimes, he’s a sad, kinda pathetic, almost self-sabotaging man who can’t enjoy the fruits of his own cruel ambition. He’s someone who is very aware of his own atrociousness and feels bad about it, but despite his guilt, never once strives toward self-improvement, and while that doesn’t make him wholly redeemable, self-awareness without change is an ugliness that’s jarringly recognizable, an ugliness that I want to explore further. His actions are so monstrous, but his motivations are so incredibly human.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character?

♚ SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES:  I want Mikael’s development to follow Macbeth’s and take him from mildness and reluctance to full-on ruthless ambition. I think part of the reason why Mikael has remained a soldier is because he has yet to prove he’s capable of real cruelty — his businesses make a lot of profit, but making money hasn’t quite tested his loyalty and how far he’s actually willing to go for the Capulets ( or for his own ambition ), and thus his morals have yet to be challenged. But his capacity for monstrosity is as immense as his capacity for greatness, and with unchecked ambition, he might abandon his conscience and soon become a more threatening player in the games. If an unhinged Macbeth can slaughter a man’s entire family, so can Mikael.

I think for now he’ll want to finally start doing more for the mob because with Alvise’s death, tensions are rising and soldiers like Mikael are expendable. Paranoia will drive him to want protection, for which Mikael will do horrifying acts to attain, and with every triumph, he’ll learn care less about loyalty and more about his own power and individual potential.

Mikael absolutely despises himself, and ambition he sets out to achieve exists because he thinks accomplishing goals would make him hate himself less. Except as his actions stain his conscience, the opposite happens, and with the extreme amounts of self-loathing he’ll soon possess, his mental health will deteriorate, making him increasingly erratic and unstable.

♚ SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING: Macbeth is a paradox — his constant attempts at chasing fulfillment only serve to make him feel emptier. In the same way, Mikael exists in a default state of hunger, so unused to being satisfied that he always finds something else to chase after once he attains what he originally wanted. Nothing he does can assuage the feeling of emptiness. After committing more and more atrocities he may come to the realization that he’s the problem — that perhaps nothing will ever make him happy. Once he gets everything he wants, I think he’ll resign to nihilism and come to terms with the meaninglessness of existence.

♚ THE INNOCENT FLOWER:  I want to see someone act as a sort of morality pet. Whether actively or by just being themselves, this character will remind Mikael of the existing good in him, and he will want to change for them. Of course, change, for Mikael, will be short-lived, because in the cutthroat world of mobster Verona, people might place less value on morality, and ultimately Mikael will keep choosing uglier paths to further his own ambitions. ♚ THE SERPENT UNDER’T: In the original text, Macbeth’s nihilistic outlook is finally revealed after Lady Macbeth dies, so perhaps, in this universe, Mikael truly sees no meaning in anything— except his wife. Though he won’t admit it, and maybe he doesn’t realize it, but he’s wholly dependent on her “love” to feel like life has value. Lucrezia is another one of Mikael’s attempts at chasing fulfillment; he thinks he’ll stop hating himself if he can get someone so unattainable to love him, which it why it maddens him that she doesn’t. He wants her with all the desperation of Arctic Monkeys song, but none of the dignity. He pours all of his devotion to her in hopes that he might get something in return, and though part of him understands that all his efforts are pathetic and fruitless, his desire for Lucrezia’s love and approval transcends all reason. Mikael constantly shaping himself into a man Lucrezia might like, or the man Lucrezia wants him to be.

At the same time, wanting Lucrezia is a testament to Mikael’s own masochism. Mikael is never satisfied, so in a twisted way, having someone who never gives in to what he wants is perfect for him, and it’s possibly why they’ve lasted so long. It’s apparent that he’s not enough for her, but he’ll never stop trying to be.

Their relationship is just so unhealthy and damaging on his end, and it’s mostly Mikael’s own  fault for putting her on a pedestal and placing so many expectations on her that he at least partially knows she’ll never fulfill. All I really want to explore is what lengths he’s willing to go to get her to stay, especially now that there’s a deeper wedge and newfound tensions between them with Lucrezia having been promoted to emissary. There are so many directions for their dysfunctional marriage to go and I’m willing to explore all the possibilities. He’s already ruined, but keep ruining him!

♚ MY BLACK AND DEEP DESIRES: The old-fashioned monogamist fool he is, Mikael has never considered cheating on his wife. Except things have changed now, and for as much as he denies it, his marriage is failing. He’s empty, and when he comes to terms with the fact that his wife may never really love him, he’ll find some other way to assuage his deep loneliness, stray to the path of infidelity and disrupt the dynamic the Falcos have, for years, maintained.

♚ THE WAY TO DUSTY DEATH ( trigger warnings: drug abuse ): Mikael’s fall is inevitable. It’s less question of if and more a question of how. Being as overworked as he is, and as desperate for fulfillment, and with his future actions potentially damaging his pysche,  Mikael is extremely susceptible to drug addiction. At the moment, he still carries much self-control, but in the future with his increasing nihilism and self-hatred he might just crumble — more so if someone finds that weakness and exploits it.

♚ BE BLOODY, BOLD, AND RESOLUTE: Being the absolute masochist he is, as a teenager and young adult, Mikael would frequent Measure for Measure for a taste of thrill and triumph. He frequents it less now that he’s older and married and working full time, but part of him still craves being in the ring. With all that stress and anger, who can blame him?

Are you comfortable with killing off your character?

♚ None of woman born shall harm Macbeth. ( Just kidding, yes, but it would be preferable to have someone born of C-section kill him just because it would be so FUNNY. )

In Depth

( trigger warnings: violence )

What is your favorite place in Verona?

Mikael knit his brows together. “What the hell is this for? Buzzfeed” Dark rings hung around tired eyes, which locked their gaze onto the journalist, betraying both exhaustion and annoyance. “When you told me this was for an article, I didn’t realize you were writing Top Ten Travel Destinations For the Overworked Italian,” he snapped, voice high and honeyed with derision. “Okay, edit that out. Try to make sure I don’t sound like a goddamn elementary student. I know I’m not Winston Churchill, but I can pay you good money to make me sound like I am. You’re a writer, you can do that, right?” A sigh escaped him. Mikael rested his elbows on the surface of his desk and hung his head low, thumbs massaging his temples. “I need coffee.”

What does your typical day look like?

“I get up,” he said, ripping open a sachet of Nescafe. “I jack myself stupid.” A surge of self-hatred shot through him as he poured hot water into the lid of his thermos. No sensible Italian would continue to respect Mikael if they discovered his liking to instant coffee, but single-handedly running a corporation left Mikael very little time for himself, much less time to brew himself his own cappuccino. Thus, begrudgingly, he took the sachet and dumped its content straight into the cup, but not before catching his own slip of tongue.

Mikael ran his hands through his hair, frustration simmering within. He sighed to himself. “Sorry, that was just the first thing that came into my head. I don’t know how to be alive before ten in the morning.” Dark eyes fell to the paperwork before him, and Mikael sighed, already resentful at the amount of work that needed to be done. Mikael set the thermos lid aside, barely noticing how it lay almost perilously close to the edge of his desk. “I go to the office, make some calls, keep track of the progress of my transactions, check Cawdor Industries’ stock market value, read some articles about bitcoin to try and understand what the in God’s name a blockchain is, make some more transactions, go home, jack myself stupid because satisfying primal human instincts is the only shriveled flower of joy remaining in life  — don’t put that in the article — and then I tell my wife I love her, and wait for her to not say it back.” For a second, his eyes gleamed with a silent sort of wistfulness, but as he locked his gaze onto the journalist’s, their usual deadness returned. “It’s our thing.”

What has been your biggest mistake thus far?

“Allowing myself to get ejected from the womb,” he deadpanned. “Everything’s gone a little downhill from there.”

Mistakes? Every day was a constant cycle of second-guessing and self-doubt. He’d couldn’t make a single decision without hindsight telling him he could have chosen a better path. Vacant eyes glanced over to the side of his desk, where Lucrezia’s photo sat, and Mikael’s heart rose to his throat. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful. I got to go to college. I made a name for myself. The business is booming, and I’m married. I have a wife, yes, she’s a real person, and yes, maybe it’s hard to believe but a human female woman took a look at me and agreed to live with my pathetic ass, and according to the law and what she said at the altar, she’s supposed to be in love with me. Sort of. So that’s going great. I’m grateful. I just don’t think I’m…” Happy.

Misfortune gripped the moment within a split second — as Mikael leaned over to reach for the photograph, his elbow struck the metal thermos and knocked it over, scalding water spilling from its mouth.  “SON OF A BITCH — ” Mikael rose from his seat, sending the swivel chair sliding outward, and as fury overtook him, his leg swung forward to kick the side of his desk, but as his foot collided with wood, the thermos lid toppled from the surface and spilt Mikael’s instant coffee onto his velvet office chair.

Almost all at once, his feature cycled through every existing expression, every existing emotion. Grief. Frustration. Resignation. Mikael palmed his forehead. “I’ll send you an email when my shit brain finds a better answer.”

What has been the most difficult task asked of you?

It was possible to believe that Mikael was as honest as he was crass. But his apparent tactlessness drew one’s attention away from much realer vulgarities: the truths Mikael kept within. Kneeling before his office chair, he took a wet rag and scrubbed at the stubborn coffee stain. Not meeting the journalist’s gaze, he mumbled, “Hell if I know.”

Everything was difficult. If anything worthwhile came easy, nothing would feel rewarding. The Falcos had clawed their way into the top, not resting for even a single second. And Cawdor Industries was born of their strife and struggle, but Mikael didn’t feel right merely inheriting it. No path felt valid if it hadn’t come with hardship; he moved mountains to turn the business what it was today. His parents gave him a kingdom. Mikael built an empire.

Except it had been thirty years and Mikael had yet to know what rewarding should have felt like. Every accomplishment only lent him a fleeting sense of triumph, and the satisfaction was quick to dissipate. What remained, instead, was poison. Cawdor Industries didn’t just design weapons — it sold them, less often legitimately than not, and most of the time, Mikael had turned a blind eye on all the casualties his business caused. Until he couldn’t.

Once, he could not recall how long ago, an anonymous sender delivered a video into Mikael’s inbox. It was apparent at first sight that it came from a protester, one that didn’t agree with Mikael’s line of work. At times, Mikael wished he had stopped himself from going further once that realization had been made, but curiosity was a hunger that begged to be sated.

“The most difficult task?” Mikael laughed, low and derisive. The video remained in his mind — the broken bodies of his weapons’ victims, lives destroyed for the business Mikael had worked to hard to build. He flung the rag, and it slammed hard against his desk. “Getting rid of this stain.”

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues? Mikael was a soldier. Just a soldier. That meant even for all the profit he produced the Capulet family, he was not entitled to their protection, nor could he rely on it. If Mikael had a choice, he would leave them be.

But there were stronger forces at bay. Was it unreasonable to question an outsider’s motives when Mikael himself was being interrogated and probed? If it were, it hardly mattered. Distrust was his birthright. The Falcos found wealth, but they never lost the beggars’ nature. What they passed down to their son was more than riches; Mikael inherited his mother’s relentless hunger, and his father’s habit of sleeping with one eye open.

Mikael leaned forward, dark gaze locking into the journalist’s, eyes leering with quiet hostility. “That’s none of your business,” he said, low and furious. “Get out of my fucking office.”

In character para sample:

Lights illuminated the waters, the gold of the street gleaming bright against the black of the river Danube. Perhaps, once, Mikael would have said Budapest at night was the captivating sight he’d ever witnessed, but that was before he met Lucrezia. Mikael hardly believed in magic, but in this moment, he thought it perhaps it existed, and it was this moment, an undeserving man standing by a river under the stars, blessed enough to witness the best of God’s creations. It was a type of awe that nearly brought him down on his knees. He knelt, one hand scrounging his pocket for the ultimate sign of his devotion, the promise of surrender. “Lucrezia.” The softness with which he spoke her name betrayed how unworthy he felt of it, like he doubted it could ever belong to him. “I’m not good with words. I’m not good with a lot of things, and sometimes that makes me scared to try anything new.” His heart skittered against his ribs. You’re rambling. Stop wasting her time.  “And I don’t know if I’ll be good at this, at,” the words his lips wished to form felt so foreign to his tongue. “At loving you.” Mikael took Lucrezia’s hand and pressed it gently between a palm and closed fist. Every selfish ache surged through his body. Guilt followed, for the hunger of his heart could barely be restrained, and nothing of him was worthy of this, nothing of him deserved the light Lucrezia radiated. “But for the first time, I don’t think I’m scared to try. I want —” Mikael paused. What did it matter what he wanted? What right did he have to ask anything of her? “I want to be good to you. Please,” Mikael’s voice remained soft, slow, but all deep longing and desperation was evident in the way his words cracked through his throat. He unfolded his palm, and the ring resting on it caught the light of the moon. “Let me be good to you.”

Eyes fluttered open. His phone buzzed against the bedside table, and the jarring sound of its vibrations sent a wave of annoyance surging through Mikael’s skin. As the real world reformed around him, the dream-memory shattered, leaving a bittersweet taste in its wake.

Nothing much had changed. Same life, same woman, same relentless emptiness. Legs slid off the bed, and Mikael sat upright, palms on either side of him. With one slow, lethargic motion, his hand reached for the buzzing phone on his bedside table, the faint glow of its screen bright against his tired, barely woken eyes. His face contorted into a scowl upon reading his alarm label: WAKE UP YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT. Mikael groaned. He shut it off, slammed the thing lightly against the table, but as he turned away, his eyes caught sight of his wife’s sleeping figure. He looked at her, and his anger quieted.

The sheets had shifted when he woke himself, so Mikael pulled them over her body, willfully gentle as not to wake her. “I love you,” he said under his breath, and a certain sort of sadness consumed him. His heart rose to his throat. It ached with a stupid, childish fantasy: that if he said and breathed and lived those three words enough, he would one day deserve to hear them returned.  

Mikael did not blame Lucrezia for not wanting him. How could she? When he looked at the mirror, there was no part of himself that he did not despise. Men like him and the monster blood they carried — they were hard to love, hardly worthy of love. This was the routine he deserved: to every day pray that their hearts’ hunger be sated, to every day have their prayers met with suffocating silence.

If emotions governed people, what a tyrant love must have been.

Extras:

♚ Mock Blog: regicidios.tumblr.com

♚ Cawdor Industries is a mix of several businesses, namely transportation, construction, and weapons manufacturing, which are all a legitimate front for Mikael’s Dirty Mobster businesses: smuggling, money laundering, and arms trafficking. Like the capitalist pigs they are, they’re primarily concerned with making money and use their close connections with the Capulets for networking and intimidation purposes.

♚ I read a lot on Riz Ahmed before writing this app, and out of love for him I just want to respect his background as a second-generation immigrant and write Mikael as a second generation immigrant as well. Falco isn’t a Pakistani surname, so I headcanon that his parents had their blatantly Muslim Pakistani surname changed in order to be recognized with more legitimacy in the Italian business ( and mobster ) world. Isn’t their background a little like the immigrant narrative anyway? People who came from nothing build themselves a better future with nothing but unbridled ambition and determination to forge a better life for their children. And of course, they’re typical Parents Of Colour, who constantly remind their child of how much they’d sacrificed as a way of saying: you owe us. That, and the generational gap between them, with Mikael no longer being familiar with Pakistani customs and traditions as a result of growing up in Diverse-But-Decidedly-Not-South-Asian Verona, drive a wedge between Mikael and his parents, and them not fully connecting is one of the many contributing factors to Mikael’s decision to send them away.

♚ This is me rambling but maybe a crass, clinically-depressed, overworked, caffeine-addicted hopeless ‘romantic’ nihilist-in-the-making is a little far off from how you originally envisioned Mikael but I’m going to stand by my portrayal because I firmly believe that the Thane of Cawdor Who Shall be King Hereafter is whatever the hell the polar opposite of Big Dick Energy is and m a n  he’s literature’s finest and funniest example of just how AWFUL toxic masculinity can get… I mean there’s an actual scene where Lady M tells her MacBitch he sucks at sex and then Macbeth proceeds to go on a murder-regicide rampage for four whole acts to redeem his manhood,  do you think someone that insecure will ever have the cool, self-assured swagger of ( the disgustingand horrible ) Michael Fassbender of Macbeth 2015 dir Justin Kurzel? No! Riz Ahmed is the love of my life but all his resources have him look like he’s either paranoid or dead inside or both, which is perfect, because that’s just quintessential Macbeth, everyone’s favourite Scottom ( Scottish Bottom ).

♚ That all aside, he’s an irredeemable bastard and I love him, please take us both.