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girlofmanyfandoms · 4 years

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Forbidden Spicy Gatorade Chronicles Chapter One

A/n: Ok, so the cult is getting stronger by the minute so if you haven’t been introduced yet, don’t be offended! I’ll try to go through everyone and introduce you in the next chapter. Erica (@the-never-ending-void) has asked not to be included in this fic.

Key:

Tater - @a-lonely-tatertot

Lynn - @lesbilynnette

Gray - @silver-snow

Lilah - @tribblemakingalicorn

Cadence - me

Ivy - @imaramennoodle

Molly - @molly-sencen

Farris - @everyonehasthoughts

Speens - @an-absolute-travesty

Holes - @holesinmyfalseconfidence

Connor - @linhammon-roll-bromance101

Panda - @worldwidepandamonium

Meg - @ultralazycreatorfan

Word count: 2,382

Warnings: If you’re reading this, you already know what’s about to pop off

Lilah poked Cadence’s shoulder who promptly rolled over. Lilah poked her several more times, a bit more aggressively. Grumbling Cadence sat up quickly and smacked her head on the top of the bunk bed. She sighed, rubbing her forehead. Her eyes slowly adjusted to her surroundings, taking in the strangely black, purple, and gold aesthetic room.

“Why’d you wake me up?”

“You got a notification,” Lilah said, eyes wide open, handing her the phone, slowly walking out of their shared room.

Cadence furrowed her brows, unlocking the phone before calling out to her roommate. “Wait, how long have you been up?”

“OREOS!” she called back. “Where are the keys?”

“On the kitchen counter,” Cadence replied, checking her emails. 1 unread message from Gray, the AI developer who she made small talk with during lunch breaks.

Dear Cadence,

Good evening! There’s a new play coming out on Mainstreet, called The Facade, and I was approached by the team to create a promotional piece. I was hoping you could help, and we would split the rewards 50/50. The play is about a murder crime, which is plotted out in a series of intricate riddles. The plot twist: the lead detective was the murderer, and had been delaying her trial while she was pretending to gather evidence, and stealing from a suspect to gain enough money to flee. And her second in command was funding the plots without knowing that her boss was the mastermind behind it all.

Ok, now that my boss has read above the cut we can talk freely. The offer is real, and I WOULD like to split it 50/50, I just can’t stand talking all formal, y’know? Anyway, since you said you do animations and stuff as a side gig, I thought maybe you could make the animations, and I’ll edit and do the social networking? Idk, I’m just spitballing here, let me know what you think.

Also, Lilah directed me towards this email, she’s really good at tracking people down.

Sorry if I made any spelling mistakes, I haven’t slept in weeks,

Gray

“Huh,” Cadence huffed, glancing at the clock. 3 AM. She had time. So, grabbing her IPad, she opened Procreate and got to work. The Facade. Sounds interesting enough. But what to draw? A lock perhaps? A silhouette of the main character? Before she could decide, her phone buzzed again, a voice recording this time, from Lilah.

“Hey, so I just ran into two of the actresses from The Facade and they said they want to talk to you about it so you can create a better promotional vid, meet me at the local library, k bye.”

Cadence wished on a shooting star that at least an hour had passed by so the buses would be running. But how wrong she was. It was 3 AM. It was raining. And the library was at least a mile away.

“This should be fun,” she mumbled, grabbing her set of keys, her IPad, and a raincoat before jogging the mile it took to get to the library.

_______

By the time Cadence arrived her hair was drenched and she was so out of breath and tired she thought she was going to pass out. She looked for any sign of her roommate, but she was nowhere to be found. Instead, she saw three people sitting at a table chatting freely and crying laughing. The librarian wasn’t fazed in the slightest. On the contrary, they seemed to be enjoying it, leaning over the library’s registry system, talking with them. Quickly Googling “The Facade,” Cadence confirmed that the two ladies were the actresses from the play. The other one offered occasional comments, mostly just watching the occurrences that went on. Social anxiety kicked in and told her to run in the other direction, but she really needed the money. She forced herself to approach them.

“Hey, I’m Cadence,” I introduce myself nervously. “Lilah said you wanted to speak to me about promoting your play?”

“Cadence! Lilah mentioned your animations, and we thought it’d be a new, eye-catching way to get our work out there,” the first one chirped. “I’m Molly, by the way. I play the detective’s second in command.”

“And I’m Ivy,” the other one greeted. “I play the lead.”

Cadence expected the third person to introduce themself next, but the librarian took the initiative. “Hello, fellow human, you may address me as SPEENS, I accept liver sacrifices.”

“They do that all the time,” the third person assured her. “Tater, by the way. I’m not in the play, I’m just working on a novel with Molly. We met up here to talk to good ‘ol Speens when these bit-”

“Language,” Molly warned.

“When these lovely individuals,” Tater corrected, “decided to make this a research sesh for the book. As if we needed more work. I’m free to fly wherever the wind takes me.”

“Amen to that, sibling,” Speens responded solemnly, pulling five wine glasses and vodka out from under the desk like a bartender. Cadence looked confused, but not against it. “Say, where’s the rest of the crew? Lynn, Gray, Farris, and the lot of them?”

“Farris doesn’t work on the set,” Ivy reminded her. “They’re an archaeologist. Holes makes the sets for us.”

Speens wrinkled their nose, seemingly in disgust. “And the others?”

“Well, if you can take a break, we can meet up with them at the theatre. Even Farris, since I heard their last trip was a bust,” Molly offered.

Without a second thought, Speens put up a sign that read “The Librarian is Out.”

“Do they-”

“All the time,” Ivy nodded. “It’s kinda their thing.”

“But, yeah, Farris and Connor tend to hang around the set,” Molly explained. “They don’t bother anyone, no one bothers them. They’re a bit older, kinda like the authority figures of the group.”

“If authority figures would let you make a dumba-”

“Tater,” Ivy nudged.

Tater changed their wording. “-unwise move in order to see what would happen.”

“They’re responsible for us without being responsible for us, if that makes sense,” Ivy commented. “Let’s get going though, before someone blows something up.” She shot a sideways glance at Speens, who put a hand up in surrender.

________

Ivy swung open the doors to the theatre and immediately had to duck for cover. “What the HELL, Connor?”

They were holding onto some theatre seats, zooming back and forth the row on rollerblades, occasionally losing balance and having to sit down. After a particularly messy turn-around, they decided to crawl over to the red carpeted steps and laid there for a moment. Farris was perched in a seat a row down, calming watching as Connor seemed to be having an existential crisis. Upon seeing Tater and Cadence, Farris got up, carefully stepping around Connor. “New kids?”

“Farris, this is Tater, and that’s Cadence,” Ivy helped. “They’re helping us promote the play.”

“Congratulations, you’re adopted,” they vowed, though Tater looked confused. “What? I don’t make the rules. Oh, wait, I’m supposed to be the responsible one…. Ok, so I make the rules, but they can be bent if the alternative’s interesting enough. Right, Connor?”

“Uh huh,” he called from the floor tiredly. If he hadn’t spoken, he would have been deemed dead.

“Lynn and the rest of the gang are in the back,” Farris informed them, pulling a skateboard from under their seat and helping Connor stand. Connor’s rollerblades flailed a bit as he struggled to get up, but his arm was slung around Farris’s shoulder, supporting him.

“DO A KICKFLIP,” Connor prompted, his words slurred.

“Are you kidding, I haven’t skateboarded since I was six, I need an actual skate park to practice that,” Farris recounted. “And how drunk are you?”

“Yes,” he responded, giggling in a hiccupy way. “Does anyone have more vodka?”

“I got you fam,” Speens said, pulling out a suitcase of alcohol from thin air.

“Anyways,” Ivy interjected, trying to get the conversation back on track. “I’ll go get the others, wait here.”

Ivy returned with Gray, Lynn, Holes, Panda, and Meg, and introduced them accordingly. “Gray works on the special effects, Lynn designed everyone’s costumes, Holes makes the set, Panda is a theatre critic, and Meg is our concept artist.”

“So, other than animation, is there anything else you bring to the table?” Molly asked.

“Well, I do glass art,” Cadence supplied. “It’s probably not relevant, but when it’s still really hot and glowy, which is when you can shape it, it looks like it would make a good snack. Hell, it almost looks like Gatorade. I can show a picture if you’d like.”

Cadence took her phone out and everyone crowded around to see.

“More like Powerade, Gatorade doesn’t come in that kind of blue,” Speens added.

“F O R B I D D E N S P I C Y G A T O R A D E,” Connor yelled, startling Farris.

“NO,” Holes countered, clearly distressed. “Do NOT drink molten glass. You’d die!”

“You call it death, I call it adventure,” Molly smirked. “I’m here for it. C’mon Holes, live a little.”

“Sis, how have you made it to adulthood thinking like that?” Lynn questioned, looking a bit scared.

“And I know how to live, I’m living right now!” Holes countered.

“Sure you are, nerd.” Molly rolled her eyes. “And how many near death experiences have you had, huh?”

“Near death- okay, first of all, I am not a nerd-”

“You kinda are,” Tater mumbled. Holes gasped, putting a hand over her heart as if they were betrayed. “What? You are. You make a living off of reading books.”

“Used to, friend,” Holes clarified. “I’m a freelance artist now. I picked up this gig because of these fools. And good thing too, because now you’re about to poison yourselves! Second of all, um, none?! How many have you had?”

Molly clicked her tongue in disappointment. “Five. Blended corn, acorns, eating soap, eating paper, and an intense game of dodgeball. I haven’t even peaked with these experiences yet.”

“Immortal until proven mortal,” Connor finished for her.

Meg stood next to Molly and held her shoulders. “This girl, she’s going places.”

“Meg, not you, too, I swear to god-”

“sLuRp,” Ivy joined in, grinning from ear to ear.

Holes was getting hysterical. “What the actual hell is going on? Lynn, help me out here.”

“The Gatorade is Forbidden for a reason, kids,” Lynn tried to reason.

Gray stood up with a mischievous glint in their eyes. “Where can we get it?”

“From the crunchy forbidden chocolate powder, of course,” Connor chimed in. Panda gave him a high-five while Holes became paler and paler from the cult forming in front of their eyes.

“This one speaks the truth,” Panda shrugged.

“Ok, what even is crunchy forbidden chocolate powder?”

“Sand, duh,” Connor said matter of factly. “Add some vodka, a martini, and some olives, and you got one heck of a slushie.”

“So that means there must be Forbidden Chewy Lettuce and Flavoured Forbidden Chewy Lettuce,” Tater went on. “Grass and flower petals. Cursed, but not wrong.”

“Ooh, and crackle air can be limestones and sodium carbonate, pies are dirt, bread is wood, and hard candy is metal,” Panda proclaimed.

“Fidget spinners are Forbidden Bagels, too,” Connor helped. “I should know, I tried the other day and cut my lip.”

Farris ignored the last part of Connor’s rant. “The variety pack, I like the sound of that.”

“Farris you’re supposed to look after us and you’re condoning this?!” Holes shouted.

Farris mounted his skateboard. “I’m not condoning anything. I’m enabling and hyping them up without joining in. That’s some big brain stuff.”

“This is why they control the brain cell,” Ivy nodded. “WAIT, ARE MY CHICKEN NUGGETS BURNING?!”

“Ives, you literally set a timer on the microwave backstage, you’re fine,” Tater reassured Ivy, holding her from running to check on her meal.

“Oh, like you know anything about microwaves,” Ivy argued. “You microwave ice cream.”

“It takes too long to soften, and I’m impatient,” Tater defended, turning to address Holes. “And it is eaten with a spoon.”

“Do not start this debate again- you know what, Panda, get ice cream from the mini-fridge, we’re settling this here and now,” Holes demanded.

“I think the real question is why is ice cream so hard,” Speens mentioned as Panda brought a tub of Haagen Daz ice cream. Holes used a fork to attempt to chisel out part of the snack. It wasn’t very successful.

“I think that’s just how Haagen Daz works,” Cadence observed.

Holes saw this as an opportunity to gain some momentum in the argument. “Not just this brand! All ice cream works like that!!!”

“No,” Panda objected. “Not Breyer’s. That stuff is always just right when you need it. Hashtag not sponsored.”

“Did you just break the fourth wall?” Lynn asked. “You know what, I don’t wanna know, just for the love of all that is good in this world please don’t drink the Forbidden Spicy Gatorade.”

“Too late,” Cadence said. “It’s easily accessible. Also, I’m calling E so we can recruit her.”

“Holes, I know you’re hiding it from us,” Molly speculated.

“What are you talking-”

“You’re keeping the Forbidden Spicy Gatorade all to yourself because you know of its power and you want it all to yourself.”

“I don’t HAVE the Gatorade, and I’m explicitly telling you it’s going to kill you if you drink it!”

As the bickering went on, Lynn slipped off to the vacant staff lounge to pull out her phone. There had to be a supplier somewhere who would give them this. She searched for a few minutes, and, after a few dead ends, she finally found an investor. “Cha-ching. Forbidden Incorporated is in business,” Lynn smiled to herself.

“Forbidden Incorporated, eh?” Farris asked from the doorway. Lynn froze and cursed herself for forgetting to lock the door. Now Farris knew of her plans. “Tell you what, I’ll keep your secret under one condition: We split the money 50/50, and get equal control over the decisions. So, deal?”

Lynn hesitated. She wasn’t sure she could trust Farris, but seeing as this was the only way to stop Holes from knowing just yet, she had no other choice. “Deal.”

_______

A/n: So that was fun and took entirely too long to write. I hope you enjoyed it and if you’re in the cult and I didn’t include you, reblog this and I’ll make a list. The next chapter might focus on a smaller group bc there are like thirteen characters here and I’m tired. Peace out!

#forbidden spicy gatorade

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flirting-with-psychology · 3 years

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[zombiebandido]

Can you recommend any Neil Gaiman to me, aside from Stardust or Good Omens? I cannot

What’s the best concert you’ve been to, if you’ve been? Idk, I think I’m just not huge on concerts

What’s the funniest screenname you’ve ever seen? i-run-with-scissors-to-feel-dangerous

Is there an animal you like that most people don’t? Don’t think so

Is there an animal that you think is overrated in terms of how it’s liked? Goats or cows, maybe

Is there a time period you think is underrated? Not really

What about music? Showtunes

Do you find yourself listening to music that’s a bit more esoteric? No

What are your three favorite books and why? Harry Potter because of the worldbuilding, Mistborn because of the worldbuilding and characters, A Confusion of Princes because it is a fun standalone book

What about authors? Idk, I mostly like specific books Do you have any likes you wouldn’t tell someone until you got to know them? Nah probably not

Do you have a favorite language? Not really

What about a place you’ve always wanted to visit? Ireland

What’s something someone does or says that just makes you laugh? Idk, it’s usually situational

Do goldfish crackers ever make you sick, or is that just me? No?

Do you have a favorite art style? Probably realistic

Do you have a favorite myth/fairy-tale? No, sorry I’m being boring with this quiz

Who is your favorite person aside from family? Probably my bff

Do any of your pets (if you have them) have weird quirks? My cat was just very emphatic

Do you listen to music from anywhere besides America? Not really

Have you ever “quit” a site and came back to it more than once? No

Do you have an “odd” fascination with anything? Dice

What is the thing you want most at this moment? An interesting job and a return to normal from the pandemic

What was the last book you read and what was it about? I’m currently reading The Martian about an astronaut stranded on mars

What was the worst book you’ve ever read & why? Walk Two Moons because the twist ending fucked me up

Do you have a favorite breed of dog or cat? Which? Golden retrievers

If you like any anime/manga, what are some titles you recommend? I don’t really like it

What do you think about school in general? I thought it was interesting and I wish I could go back

What’s the hardest thing you’ve been through, & what did you learn from it? Maybe the braces. Dk what I learned from it

What are three “unrealistic” things you want most? An interesting creative job with steady and high pay lol, the lottery, the good place experience from The Good Place

What are some of your favorite foods? Pasta, chocolate, cereal. I am a simple girl

Where do you like to buy your clothes? Kohl’s, Macy’s, and thrift shops

Do you take any daily vitamins? When I remember

Who are three of your favorite fictional characters of all time? Kelsier from Mistborn, Sirius Black from Harry Potter, Raydan Lykel from The Crown and the Flame

If you had to give the world a pre-existing mythological/fictional being, what would it be? Idfk

When buying Slurpees, if you do, do you get only one flavor or mix them? Mixing is fun

Do you have a favorite 7Eleven food? No

Do you have any desire to learn (a) foreign language(s)? Which? Not strongly

If you could have any career, “realistic”-ness aside, what would it be? Something in film maybe

What are three memorable movies from your childhood? The Little Mermaid, Harry Potter, Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper

Do you, personally, put a space after ellipses, or not? Let me check... do I? I guess I do

What do some of the things that inspire you have in common? Making things

Micky D’s sweet tea, y/n/other? No

What are three of your best (non-physical) qualities? Creativity, honesty, smarts

What are three of your worst (again; non-physical) qualities? Stubbornness, anxiety, lack of empathy

What is one of your firmest beliefs? I don’t really have firm beliefs

Do you ever question things until you’re unsure of even the silliest thing? Yes

Do you have anything that keeps you from doing something you’d truly enjoy? Anxiety and procrastination, and money

What are your three biggest pet peeves (personality-wise) in others? Holier-than-thou people, acting like you’re too cool for fun, being unsafe

Do you work to fix your faults? Or at least, admit to them? I admit to most of them but I’m not so great at working on them

What are three of your best physical qualities? (NOT EYES!) Why not eyes? Other than that, I guess hair color, boobs, singing voice (at least I’d like to think so)

What are some of your greatest aspirations? Do something fun, have a good social life, see what I would look like in my prime

How do you hope the world will change, if at all? Get done with the pandemic, stop having capitalism be so shitty

Who are three (fairly known) people you find very intriguing? Taylor Swift, Voldemort, F. Scott Fitzgerald

What are three things that make you the happiest? hanging out with friends, crafts, cuddling with my boyfriend

What is/are your view(s) on god, religion, spirituality, or relations to? I don’t believe in them

Are you arachnophobic or scared of spiders in the least? YES

Do you play WoW? What do you think of it either way? No, I am just not that into video games

What kind of computer do you have? Windows 7/Vista/XP/Other? Macbook Pro

What are you good at? Crafts and school

What career do you hope to have? Something creative

Are you taking any interesting classes in school/do you not attend? I’m finished with school but I wish I could go back

If you don’t attend, are you taking any “lessons” for anything? No

A book/piece that has had an exceptional impact on your life? Harry Potter

If you know of pandora.com, what is your favorite station? I haven’t listened to pandora in ages

Have you ever “lost” a friend in any way? How did you deal? Some just faded away but some actively ditched me and I tried to find out why

Any music recommendations? Showtunes

What are at least three of your biggest fears? Spiders, living a mundane life, covid right now

Most recently read book that you liked? A Confusion of Princes

Do you have a piece of jewelry you don’t like to take off? No, I have so many that I like to alternate them

Do you have a favorite quote? Why is it your favorite? Carpe Diem. Haven’t lived it much lately though Any odd pastimes you have? Making lists and charts

Are you quirky in any way? (Name them please). My fashion sense especially in high school, the nerdy things I do

Have any practices you aren’t opposed to but wouldn’t do yourself? Probably a lot, I’m generally of the live and let live mindset

Political standing?

Left

Do you have any piercings/what do you think about piercings? I just have my ears pierced

Do you have a favorite material? I’m a fan of soft materials like suede or velvet, also metals like copper and silver

What are three names you’d name a pet if you HAD to get a pet right now? It depends on the pet

Do you like to listen to dorky/amusing music? Idk

Coffee vs. Tea vs. Energy Drinks: Order from favorite to least favorite. Tea, energy drinks, coffee

Do you like more “fruity” sweets or “savory” sweets? Fruity unless it’s chocolate

What do you hate the most? Spiders

What genres of music are your favorite? Showtunes

Do you believe in true love? Idk

Do you believe in love at first sight? If yes, why? No

What are some of your favorite clothing accessories? Jewelry

If reincarnation exists, what sort of person would you want to be next?

One of those outgoing guys that always has adventures with his friends What are some things you believe strongly in? Idk

Where’s your favorite place you’ve been? London was pretty cool, also Italy

What sort of books and movies do you like? For books: sci-fi, fantasy, dystopia. For movies: rom-com, sci-fi, musical

What’s your favorite thing to do on a rainy Saturday? Idk, just stay in

Is there a book you’ve read that really touched you? The Great Gatsby just because I related to Gatsby a lot

Do you have a favorite artist? Taylor Swift

PC or MAC? Mac

What do you love doing? Crafts, shopping, board games

If you could create the perfect world for yourself, what would it be? Basically just the good place from The Good Place. Unlimited time and resources to learn and try things without pressure to make money off it

Do you think that fate plays a part in people’s lives? Not really

Are you religious, spiritual, atheist…? Atheist

What are your opinions on the media? The media is a very broad range of things

Do you think that people throw the words “love” and “hate” around too much? Idk

What is your favorite piece of technology that you own? My laptop

What’s a piece of technology you’d like to own? I have what I want at the moment.

Are you afraid of technology developing to where we’re too reliant on it? A little bit of getting to the point where a lot of jobs get replaced with AI, because instead of making lives easier like they could be, there will just be a huge unempolyment problem that our stupid capitalist society won’t solve

Does it bother you when people do things to fit in with a certain crowd? If it’s not what they want to do

Hot or cold? Cold Do you think that Bzoink should extent the character amount for questions? I don’t use Bzoink

Do you have a favorite combination of complimentary colors? Maybe green and pink

Do you know why all the young people who have nice cars always look grumpy? I don’t think I’ve noticed that

What’s your favorite odd ice cream flavor? Lemon Sorbet or Coffee Toffee Bar Crunch

Where do you like to get your ice cream? Haagen Dasz or Ben and Jerry’s

What’s your opinion on stereotypes/labels? Idk

Do you ever use random word generators for Bzoinkoids?

What?

Do you believe that history repeats itself? It sure seems like it is

Would you rather learn from your mistakes or just undo them? Learn from them

What was the most interesting class you had in school? My words and music class in college Do you write? If so, what? I used to write poetry, I sometimes come up with stories but I don’t really write them

Do you have a favorite website? Tumblr and Etsy

Do you think that the quality of TV shows is going down? No, there are usually good ones to discover

Do you have a favorite culture? Maybe Celtic. I just like the art patterns What was a story you heard as a child that really affected you? The Headless Horseman scared me a lot

Who was your favorite grade-school teacher and why? My third grade teacher and my 6th grade math teacher

Do you think that the world will end? How? Probably in a few billion years when the sun turns into a red giant

Do you believe in Global Warming? Have you researched it? Yes but I haven’t researched it

Do you prefer piercings or tattoos? Tattoos

Do you remember your dreams? Sometimes

#survey

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sage-nebula · 7 years

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YGO - In Plain Sight - Ch. 1 (incomplete)

Notes: Something like a year or two ago (probably two years, tbh) I outlined an entire longfic detailing how Yuugi and Jounouchi make their relationship romantic. I wrote that entire outline, and then---aside from the first ten pages of the first chapter, and other little bits here or there---I never wrote it. I’m thinking about sharing the outline, because it can work as headcanons if nothing else, and maybe if enough people want to see the actual fic based on the outline, that will inspire me to actually write it (although the outline is major #spoilers, but I don’t know if people would care about #spoilers for a fic). In any case, if I share the outline, I want to link to the bits already written, and that means sharing what I have of chapter one.

This fic takes place when Yuugi and Jounouchi are ~22/23 (at the start, anyway---birthdays will happen in later chapters), in the post-canon headcanon I have where they ended up getting an apartment together when they were ~18/19 that was close to Yuugi’s university. Shiori and Kisugi (and their respective romantic partners) are OCs, because I figure that Yuugi had to make some friends while in university. It’s too unrealistic for him not to.

As a final note, the Japanese school year runs from April to March, and I’m respecting that here.

Late April afternoons at Satoru University saw a mass of students draped over the quad. Some tossed Frisbees back and forth, others did battle with the wind as it tried to blow away their homework assignments and turn the pages in their books, and still others tried to enjoy quick catnaps on the sun-soaked grass, relishing in the twenty minutes of peace they had before they had to sprint off to their next class or work study jobs. Beneath their favorite tree in one corner of the quad, Yuugi, Shiori, and Kisugi were relaxing in much the same way, the three of them seated in a little circle with their lunches spread out before them as per their usual tradition. Kisugi nursed a can of peach tea, having already finished off his pork bun, and Yuugi chewed through a mouthful of instant noodles as Shiori relayed a conversation she’d had with her boyfriend the previous night, her cheeks flushed a bit pink as she talked.

“. . . so anyway, I brought it up to him last night and he said . . . okay,” Shiori said. She poked at the rice in her bento with her chopsticks, choosing to look at her lunch instead of at them. Yuugi and Kisugi stared at her with wide eyes, though as he swallowed his mouthful of noodles, Yuugi could feel himself beginning to beam on Shiori’s behalf.

Kisugi did not seem as pleased.

“Just like that?” he demanded. He leaned forward, the fingers of one splayed against the grass while his other hand squeezed his can of peach tea, his eyes intense. “He said he’d move with you after school, just like that?”

“Yep.” Shiori smiled, though she bit the inside of her cheek in a clear attempt to hide it. “It’s not like it’s that big of a stretch anyway, right? I mean, he’s an artist, and Shibuya’s just as on top of art as it is fashion . . .”

“It definitely is. I think it’s perfect for both of you,” Yuugi said, and when Shiori looked over at him her smile finally broke loose in the face of his broad grin. “That’s really great news—congratulations, Shiori!”

“Thanks,” Shiori said, and Kisugi heaved an exaggerated sigh as he flopped back on the grass.

“Fortune bestowed all her blessings on you and left none for me,” he said, and he reached one hand up toward the sky before he let his arm fall across his eyes. “I lost both of my loves the second I said I wanted to stay in Domino, and you get to keep yours even though you’re moving all the way to Shibuya! Why must you keep all of the luck and love for yourself, Shi-chan? It’s not fair!”

“Yes, well . . .” Shiori reached over to lightly pat Kisugi’s leg in consolation, but she only spared him a minute glance before she looked curiously at Yuugi, who had gone back to eating his instant noodles in anticipation of another one of Kisugi’s melodramatic monologues. “What about you, Yuugi? What do you have in mind for after graduation?”

Yuugi took a drink of his soda to help wash down his noodles, but not even the extra minute chewing afforded him could help come up with a suitable answer to Shiori’s question. By the time he swallowed down the last of his noodles, the only answer he had to give was the honest one.

“Nothing, really,” he said, and unsurprisingly, Shiori’s expression shifted to one caught between surprise and disappointment. Kisugi moved his arm from his eyes to his forehead to stare shrewdly at Yuugi. “I haven’t thought about it much.”

“You haven’t?” Shiori asked, and when Yuugi shook his head added, “But Yuugi, this is our final year! You have to start thinking about jobs, places to apply to, or graduate programs if you’re into that sort of thing—”

“Well, I’ve thought about some jobs—some companies,” Yuugi said, and as he tried to think of some companies to make his statement more of an honest one, he looked back down at his noodles and poked them with his chopsticks much in the same way Shiori had poked at her rice before. “You know, I thought about maybe applying for an indie board game company, or maybe something bigger like Nintendo—”

“You could always apply for KaibaCorp,” Kisugi suggested, and it was fortunate that Yuugi hadn’t been in the middle of eating when Kisugi suggested that, Yuugi thought, or else he might have ended up choking. “Don’t you and Kaiba have a history with that whole Duel Monsters thing?”

Yuugi forced a laugh, but even to his own ears it sounded awkward. “I . . . don’t think KaibaCorp is really a very viable option . . .” he said. Mostly because he was pretty sure that even if he did apply, Kaiba would refuse to interview him out of spite.

Well, no, Yuugi mused, and he smiled wryly as he looked down at his food. He’d refuse to interview Jounouchi-kun out of spite. He’d probably just make me the guy in charge of the mail room.

“Hm, that’s a shame. I hear KaibaCorp employees get very good benefits, though apparently it’s also a very high-stress environment,” Shiori said, but she shrugged before she looked back at Yuugi. “But hey—Nintendo, huh? That would be so cool! They’re based in Tokyo, right?”

“Kyoto, actually.”

“So you’d have to move,” Shiori said, and Kisugi threw both of his arms in the air again before he let them fall back onto the grass.

“Go!” he cried. “Leave me! Everyone does in the end! I’m doomed to spend the rest of my days alone, navigating the salty seas of isolation, adrift in a ship crafted by the driftwood of my loneliness—”

“Will you give it a rest? It’s not like any of us are leaving Japan!” Shiori said, and she rolled her eyes. Kisugi pouted at her, but she pointedly ignored him as she looked back at Yuugi. “But hey, if you have to move—what about Jounouchi? Will he be moving with you?”

“Huh?” Yuugi blinked, caught off guard by her question, which as far as he could tell came so far out of left field it wasn’t even on the baseball diamond anymore. “Oh, um—no? I don’t think so? I—we haven’t talked about it, but—”

“You haven’t?” Shiori frowned, her brow furrowed, and Kisugi pushed himself up on his arms. Yuugi was beginning to think there were a lot of things he hadn’t done that Shiori wouldn’t be pleased about. “But Yuugi, that’s a pretty big deal—it’s something you should talk about before the time comes. What does he plan on doing, job-wise? Does he know?”

“That talk is the kiss of death for any relationship, believe me,” Kisugi cut in, and Yuugi was grateful for the interruption, even if Shiori’s frown told Yuugi that she wasn’t. “The second I told Daisuke and Ai that I didn’t want to move to Osaka, they cut me loose! ‘It’s for the best,’ they said. ‘Long distance relationships never last,’ they said. ‘You’re going to get dehydrated if you keep crying,’ they said—”

“Yuugi, if you don’t talk about it with him now, it’s going to be that much worse when the time comes,” Shiori said seriously, and she raised her voice a little to be heard over Kisugi’s rant. Kisugi stopped midsentence and gave her an affronted look. “If you talk about it now, I’m sure you can work something out—”

“Ha!” Kisugi said.

“—but if you don’t then you really might have to break up when the time comes, because neither of you will have prepa—”

“Wait—break up?” Yuugi interrupted, and his entire body felt flushed with heat, as if he’d chosen to sit in the sun like Kisugi instead of beneath the shade of their tree. When Shiori nodded, Yuugi laughed, though it was more out of sudden nerves than actual amusement. “No, no, you’ve got it all—Jounouchi-kun’s not—we’re not . . . together. Like that. We’re just friends.”

“You’re not?” Shiori said, and she exchanged a quick glance with Kisugi before she looked back to Yuugi, her eyes widening. “O-Oh my gosh, I just assumed—Yuugi, I’m so sorry, I—!”

“It’s okay,” Yuugi said quickly. His cheeks were still burning, though he was able to keep his voice steady, much to his relief. There was no need to make the situation any more awkward than it already was. “It’s okay, you didn’t . . . know, I guess—”

“I just assumed—I mean, you live together, and you’ve always seemed so close, just like me and—well, I guess I thought you were just—that you weren’t just living together, that you were, um, together-together—”

“Probably we shouldn’t have discouraged Mina from asking him out, huh?” Kisugi asked, and Shiori pressed her lips together, wringing her hands in her lap, while Yuugi’s thoughts spun over which ‘him’ Kisugi was referring to. Kisugi gave Yuugi a shrewd look. “But really? You’re not? Really, really? You’re not fooling with us?”

“No,” Yuugi said. He set his chopsticks over the top of his noodles before he set the cup to the side. He didn’t feel much like eating them anymore. “Why would you think we were—?”

“It’s just, you know,” Shiori said, and she waved one hand through the air, as if trying to summon an explanation from the tree branches. When none came, she made an anxious sound in her throat before she looked down at her lap again. “The way you two are . . . you always seem so happy when you’re with him, and we just thought—”

“I am happy with him,” Yuugi said, and he pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “He’s my best friend.”

“Well, yes—I know, but—what I mean is, when you—when you were with, or when you looked at him, it really seemed like you were—” Shiori put her reddened face in her hands for a moment, as if to smother what she was trying to say, before she looked back up at Yuugi. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I really didn’t mean to imply, or—or assume—I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Yuugi said again, and as Shiori nodded and bit the inside of her cheek, her eyes on her lap, he squeezed his knees to his chest a little more tightly. Her explanation hadn’t really settled anything at all—hadn’t really answered why she (and Kisugi, for that matter) had thought that he and Jounouchi were together. It wasn’t a big deal, Yuugi supposed, because he and Jounouchi weren’t together and that was the end of that, but for some reason his throat still felt thick and his stomach still felt like it was twisted uncomfortably, and nothing Shiori had said helped him reason out why.

“So, out of curiosity . . .” Kisugi said slowly, after a moment of the three of them sitting in silence. “If you’re not dating Jounouchi . . . can I have a go?”

Yuugi and Shiori looked up as one in surprise, but Shiori was the only one of them who seemed struck by a sudden bout of indignation as she cried, “Kisugi!” and swatted his leg.

Kisugi gave her an indignant look in turn. “What? What have I done wrong this time? Why must you always treat me with such cruelty?!”

“I’m cruel? You’re the one trying to mack all over Yuugi’s—friend!” Shiori said, and Yuugi chewed the inside of his lip as it occurred to him what she’d probably been about to say.

“So?” Kisugi challenged.

“So?” Shiori repeated. “So you can’t—you can’t do that!”

“Why not? I’m single! Daisuke and Ai tossed me out into the depths of the abyss of misery, and it is perfectly natural for one in the same position as I to want to get out of the abyss with the help of a loving and beautiful rebound—”

“But you can’t use Jounouchi as that rebound!”

“Why not? He’s single! He’s—wait.” Kisugi looked back over at Yuugi, who started under the sudden intensity of Kisugi’s stare. “Jounouchi is single, right? He’s not dating anyone else, right?”

“Ah—no. He’s not. He’s single, I mean,” Yuugi said, and Kisugi turned back to Shiori with a triumphant grin.

“See?” Kisugi said. “He’s single, I’m single—this is the perfect set-up for a rebound romance!”

Shiori made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “You can’t do that!” she said again. “You can’t use your friend’s friend as a rebound, it isn’t right—it’s against the friend code!”

“It is not,” Kisugi said hotly. “The friend code only says that you can’t date a friend’s romantic interest, and you also can’t date a friend’s ex or a friend’s friend unless you ask your friend if it’s okay first, and that is exactly what I’ve done.” Shiori glared at Kisugi as Kisugi looked back over at Yuugi, his stare just as intense as before. “It is okay with you if I happen to ask Jounouchi out on a few dates, isn’t it? It’s what I was trying to ask before when I was so rudely,” he shot a petulant frown Shiori’s way, “interrupted.”

“Oh—um . . .” Yuugi swallowed and cleared his throat as he shook his head. Once again, his stomach felt like it was wrapped in uncomfortable knots, his heart beating in double-time to try and work through the tension. “No—I mean, yeah, that’s fine with me. I’m totally fine with it! You can do whatever you want.”

Shiori frowned, but Kisugi beamed, his expression almost blissful as he flopped backward onto the grass again. “Ahh, finally, my fortune seems to be changing!” he crowed. “Blessings from the lovely Yuu-kun himself. See, Shi-chan? This was meant to be. Even as the fissures in my heart left by Daisuke and Ai threaten to never heal, there may yet be another love story blooming on the horizon, one more beautiful and hopefully less tragic than the last—”

Shiori rolled her eyes again, but she was still frowning as she looked over at Yuugi. “So long as you’re okay with it,” she said, and Yuugi nodded quickly.

“Of course I am,” he said, perhaps a little too quickly if the look on Shiori’s face was anything to go by. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, I mean, he is your . . .” Shiori trailed off, but then she shrugged, looking just as uncomfortable as she had before Kisugi had interrupted the conversation before. Another couple seconds of silence passed before Shiori looked over at the rest of the quad, and it was with a frown that she suddenly dug into her bag to pull out her phone. Yuugi watched her curiously for a moment before her eyes widened, and she tossed her phone back into her bag with far more force than necessary. “Oh my gosh you guys, we’re late again—I was supposed to be at work five minutes ago!”

“Wait, what?” Yuugi checked his own watch, and his heart plummeted when he noticed that it was already five minutes past two. His video game production professor was adamant about starting class at two o’ clock on the dot, and while he didn’t have too strict of an attendance policy in that Yuugi was still allowed to walk in late, enough tardies would eventually start counting as unexcused absences regardless of whether Yuugi showed up or not, and this was already his third one. Yuugi yanked his book bag onto his shoulders before he reached over to grab his soda can and his cup of noodles, and Shiori likewise started shoving her books into her own bag with reckless abandon.

“Ah, you poor souls and your afternoon shifts and classes and things,” Kisugi said, still lounged back as casually as before while Yuugi and Shiori scrambled to clean up their lunch mess. “You should follow the Kisugi way of life and do everything early in the morning or at night instead. That way you don’t have to worry about being late after lunch!”

“Nights are the only time I have to spend with Naoya,” Shiori snapped.

“I’ll be sure to tell my professors they should host their classes at night to suit my schedule instead,” Yuugi said.

“Good man,” Kisugi said, but he frowned at Shiori. “But way to rub your love in my face, Shi-chan. It isn’t even the kind of love rubbing I—”

Shiori smacked her bag into Kisugi’s shoulder as she ran by him, under the pretense of slinging the strap around her shoulders. Kisugi let out a dramatized wounded cry at the impact, but Yuugi spared him only enough time for a pat on the other shoulder and a quick, “Bye!” before he sprinted past, tossing his empty soda can and half-finished instant noodles into the trash can on the edge of the quad as he ran.

That evening, Yuugi and Jounouchi lounged on the couch in their living room, Jounouchi watching a movie on TV while Yuugi played his 3DS. Their couch wasn’t the biggest in the world—it was best for seating only three people, really—and so while Jounouchi laid back against one armrest and kicked his feet onto the coffee table, Yuugi laid back against the other, his legs stretched across Jounouchi’s lap.

Video game production class had gone by relatively quickly. After weathering the heckling of his classmates for showing up late, Yuugi had done his best to focus on his professor’s lecture and their lab work, and in so doing had managed to push the conversation from lunch to the back of his mind. When he got home, Jounouchi had greeted him with a freshly made yakisoba dinner, and after having not finished his lunch, Yuugi was starved enough to wolf it down. That had led to the post-dinner lounging on the couch, and as Yuugi encountered a Young Couple trainer battle in Pokémon, the conversation with Shiori and Kisugi earlier pushed its way back to the forefront of his mind.

“Mm . . . hey, Jounouchi-kun?” Yuugi asked after a second. Jounouchi hummed a little to show that he’d heard. “Do you . . . um—”

“See, why do they do that?” Jounouchi asked suddenly, and he flailed one hand toward the television. Yuugi looked over to see that one of the actors in the movie Jounouchi had turned on was edging toward a door that had been left slightly ajar. “Sorry, Yuugi, I didn’t mean to cut you off—but seriously, look at this friggin’ idiot. He’s in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, he knows this, he knows there are zombies out there, but no, he’s gonna go investigate the strange noises outside, ‘cause that’s a good idea.” Jounouchi snorted. “Anyway, sorry—what were you saying?”

“Nothing,” Yuugi said, and he couldn’t help but grin a little as Jounouchi looked over, his dark eyes curious under his blond fringe. “I think a better question is why you of all people chose a zombie movie to watch. Doesn’t it freak you out?”

“Nah, not really. It’s too dumb to freak me out. Maybe if it was about, you know, something scarier—or if it had higher production values . . . and anyway, there was nothing else on.” Jounouchi looked back over at the television, and Yuugi followed suit just in time to see the actor from before be yanked from the house by decaying zombie hands. “Besides,” Jounouchi said, his voice a little more gruff than before, “it’s not like we’re watching in the dark, and you’re here. So it’s no big deal.”

“I don’t think I’d be much help in a zombie apocalypse,” Yuugi said, and Jounouchi looked over at him with a lopsided grin.

“You’re kidding, right? You’d be the best help. There’s no one I’d rather have backing me up.”

“Not even Honda-kun?”

“Honda’s good in a fight, but he’s not exactly the brightest crayon in the box, you know? All I’d be doing by teaming up with Honda is doubling up on brawn. That’s not gonna get us very far.” Jounouchi paused, and then shrugged a little as if to give a point. “Okay, so we’d smash up a lot of zombies. But something tells me getting covered in zombie juice is not exactly the best way to go about this.”

“Hmm . . . okay,” Yuugi said, as two actresses in the movie tried desperately to hold a door shut. “What about Bakura-kun, then? He’s pretty knowledgeable.”

Jounouchi gave him a flat look. “Seriously, Yuugi? Bakura?”

“What?”

“Bakura would probably join up with the zombies,” Jounouchi said, and as Yuugi laughed Jounouchi grinned and said, “He would! Or he’d end up being their king or leader or something. You know how he is. He loves all that creepy shit.”

“Yeah, but he’s our friend,” Yuugi said. “He wouldn’t feed us to the zombies.”

“No, but he’d want us to join his creepy ass zombie army,” Jounouchi said. “No thanks, I’ll take my chances away from his legions of the undead.”

“I don’t know that zombies are really Bakura-kun’s game,” Yuugi said. “I think he prefers ghosts and things.”

“Still.”

“Okay, so Bakura-kun’s out then,” Yuugi said. “How about Anzu? I bet she’d be good in a zombie fight.”

“Yeah . . . Anzu would probably kick some serious zombie ass,” Jounouchi admitted. “But she’s also all the way in New York. If the world went to Hell next week and everyone started turning into zombie chow, she’d have to fight her way over from America first.”

“True,” Yuugi said.

“And besides,” Jounouchi said, and he fumbled for the remote on the coffee table to lower the volume as the actresses in the film started screaming along with the background music, “Anzu’s cool and all, but that doesn’t change anything. You’d still be my first pick in a zombie fight.”

Yuugi closed the lid on his 3DS. He couldn’t exactly say why, but for some reason, the conversation had piqued his interest. “Why?”

“Why?” Jounouchi repeated. “Dude, isn’t it obvious?” He lifted up his hands to begin ticking off reasons on his fingers. “You’re smart, your entire life is spent either playing or making games and so you’d have a good idea of what to do to either avoid or take out the zombie assholes to avoid getting either of us turned or killed, you’ve already saved the world about three times over already, and as if all of that wasn’t enough, you’re my best friend.” Jounouchi moved his foot off the coffee table to lightly nudge Yuugi’s shoulder with it. “You and me ‘til the end, right? No matter what. I thought that was pretty obvious by now.”

“Well . . . yeah,” Yuugi said. “But I figured, you know . . . I don’t know, most people—”

“Who would you pick?” Jounouchi asked suddenly, and Yuugi cleared his throat a little, grateful for the interruption. “If, say, Kaiba somehow loosed a zombie virus on the world next week—who would you pick to team up with?”

“Why is Kaiba-kun the one infecting the world with a zombie virus?” Yuugi asked, and although some of his amusement had faded with what Jounouchi had said about the two of them together, ‘til the end, he felt it come back as Jounouchi threw Kaiba under the bus.

Jounouchi snorted. “Because that bastard’s heart is cold enough that it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out he’s one of the undead. But hey, seriously. Zombie apocalypse. Next week. Who’s your go-to guy?”

“You, obviously,” Yuugi said, and for some reason his cheeks felt a little warm as Jounouchi grinned. “If I had to pick anyone to help me save the world—or at least get through the end of it—it’d be you. You know that.”

“See? Then what are you acting so surprised when I pick you for, huh?” Jounouchi asked.

“Just because you’re my first pick doesn’t mean I have to be yours,” Yuugi pointed out, and Jounouchi scoffed. “Besides, there’s a lot of fighting when it comes to zombie apocalypses, and—”

“There’s really only fighting if you’re stupid enough to get cornered, I think,” Jounouchi said, and he pointed toward the TV again. “Like those assholes, look at them. Oh sure, run into the inventory room in the back, that’s smart. Seriously, it’s like they want to get eaten. Might as well come out covered in ketchup and barbeque sauce.” Jounouchi paused, and then shrugged. “Well, actually, that might be zombie repellant, since they don’t eat actual food. You never know.”

“Somehow I doubt that would work,” Yuugi said. Jounouchi opened his mouth to say something in reply, but before he could, his phone started vibrating on the coffee table. He reached over to swipe it off, and when he looked at the screen, he heaved a sigh before he hit a button to deactivate the alarm.

“Much as I’d love to see the end of the zombie fest, unfortunately, I have to go join their army,” he said. He lightly pushed Yuugi’s legs off his lap so he could stand up, and Yuugi frowned.

“Work?” Yuugi asked.

Jounouchi nodded. “Yeah. It’s an overnight.” He stuffed his phone in his pocket and stretched his arms above his head, yawning. “Man, I’m tired just thinking about it. Can’t wait until I get something better.”

“How are things going at the radio station?” Yuugi asked, and he sat up a bit straighter as he watched Jounouchi grab his work apron off the chair.

“Fine,” Jounouchi said. “It’s just an internship, you know. They say they’re thinking about hiring someone on, but . . .” Jounouchi shrugged, and slipped on his shoes. “Anyway, I better get going. God forbid I’m late for a ten hour shift, right?”

“You’re never late for anything,” Yuugi said, and Jounouchi laughed.

“Yeah, just about. Anyway, I’m off. See you later. Tomorrow, anyway.”

“Yeah,” Yuugi said. “See you.”

Jounouchi swiped his keys off the TV stand, waved, and was out the door in the next moment. Yuugi waited until Jounouchi locked the door behind him before turning off the TV, and—after a moment of deliberation between whether he wanted to make the effort to go to bed or whether he wanted to stay up a little bit later—flopped forward to lay on his stomach on the couch, flipping his 3DS back open in the process.

It was nice to have the whole couch to himself, he supposed, and as he stretched out completely and made his way through the trainer battle he’d initiated before, he noticed that—since he was laying facing Jounouchi’s side of the couch—the couch still smelled a little bit like Jounouchi---like his body wash and shampoo (ocean scented, Yuugi thought). Yuugi frowned a little as he knocked out the opposing trainers’ kirlia.

Was it weird to notice something like that?

#yugioh #mutou yuugi #jounouchi katsuya #yuujou #fic fix #kisugi #shiori #i feel like i've shared this before but i can't find it #maybe i just shared part of it #anyway tbc #someday anyway #hopefully #please god let me finish this at some point

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Towards more speculative sex • Eurogamer.net

Hello! All this week we’ll be celebrating Pride and the power of positive representations in games. Every day we’ll be bringing you stories and insights from different parts of the LGBT+ community. You can also help support Pride with Eurogamer’s newly redesigned t-shirt – all profits from which will be going to charity.

In 2015, the Wachowski sisters asked a very important question via their sic-fi TV show Sense8: If eight people were psychically connected to share each other’s senses, how would they have sex?

The answer – enthusiastically and at a distance – notwithstanding, the question itself proves important. By asking it, the Wachowskis applied a fundamental lens of speculative fiction-a view towards questioning what is, can be, or will be possible-to sex.

“Resistance and change often begin in art,” said speculative-fiction giant Ursula Le Guin in her 2014 National Book Award speech, with a pointed nod towards science fiction and fantasy. Especially now, with the rise of “geekdom” as a mainstream, socially acceptable hobby, the idea that speculative fiction helps reimagine and perhaps pave the way for new socio-technological realities is neither contentious nor particularly novel. Since people began telling stories, we’ve been imagining the impossible and subsequently using these stories to expand the boundaries of the possible. After all, long before Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov’s 1965 spacewalk in a nylon and metal spacesuit, Icarus soared to the sun on wax wings.

Which brings us back to sex. While sci-fi/fantasy authors spend a great deal of time conceptualizing various aspects of our humanity, reimagining how we have sex is often passed up for more “socially acceptable” topics. For queer folks, this is significant: who we have sex with, how often we have sex, and how frequently we choose to have sex is often the basis for discrimination against queer people around the world. There absolutely exists in culture an idealized, normative sexual praxis. And to seek out representation of anything else is to delve into the world of independent artists, of queer subcultures, and niche hobbies.

Consider, for instance, representations of the bodies we have sex with, especially the sentient but non-human kind. If we can conceive of intelligent aliens with whom we form emotional attachments, we can conceive of the desire to have sex with them. And while we can dream up scores of weird, unusual or monstrous bodies against which to wage war, our depictions of aliens to have sex with is sadly lacking in diversity. Mainstream film and television, at least, are mired in the heteromasculine gaze, where fuckable aliens tend to be lithe human women with brightly coloured skin. Hell, even Jabba the Hutt, a giant desert-slug, favours oddly Western-human ideals of beauty.

Star Trek (2009)’s take on alien sexuality.

In fact, we’d rather show no body than one that deviates from our beauty standards. While 2013’s Her is a deep, fascinating look at how humans might bond with and come to love artificial intelligences, that love is a rather chaste one. Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore is utterly content with the occasional bout of late-night dirty talk (with a hint of fade-to-black masturbation) with his disembodied, AI-girlfriend, the same activity he used to engage in with human sex-chatroom lurkers. He clearly has never heard of sex toys, nor the (rather ridiculously named, true) field of teledildonics. The movie does enter interesting territory when he tries to sleep with a human mimicking the AI-girlfriends moves according to instructions whispered into her earpiece, but this look into the sexual politics of human-OS threesomes fizzles out quickly and never resurfaces.

Contrast this with Naomi Clark’s Consentacle, a 2-player card game that embraces a monstrous, speculative beauty. You play a human astronaut and an alien attempting to maximize each other’s pleasure while in joyous flagrante delicto. The alien, Dup, is basically an enormous blue-purple head with extra eyes and multiple tentacles, complete with octopus-like suckers. The astronaut Kit is a human woman. And yet, despite the anatomical gulf, the game models their sex acts (represented via cards), as joyful an uninhibited. The two characters tease each other, bite, kiss, and caress each other, exchange soulful gazes, and insert arms into each other’s “hungry orifices”. There’s even a comic.

Naomi Clark’s Consentacle.

And why not? When we conceive of queer sex and queer bodies, we reject what is considered “normal” and embrace the unusual, the taboo, and yes, the inconceivable. Consentacle, for the most part, is a game about how partners can communicate healthily, but it’s also a game that encourages you to think about who your sex partner is and what their body could be. As a piece of speculative art, it emphasizes possibility; as a game, it invites players to make decisions and choices within these possibilities, picturing themselves, perhaps in a wholly new sexual light.

Consentacle is probably a more extreme depiction, but even when media try to depict “unusual” sexual proclivities here on earth, we’re served the same old 50 Shades of Grey: bland, sanitized representations of sexual practices that were once fiercely queer. Small wonder that “kink” has become synonymous with BDSM for many (straight cis) folks.

Games are not so shy. Alex Robert’s game POP!, which I had the pleasure of editing for an anthology of erotic games, focusses on the lives and loves of balloon fetishists. Far from mocking the practice, the game portrays its subject matter in a sensitive light. As a larp, where players create much of the story, it encourages players to be just as attentive: “keep love in your heart. Looners, as they often identify, are real people.” It tasks the players with sensitively exploring the community and society of those who have sex with balloons.

These social impacts of a more speculative sexual practice are often simplified by mainstream media. HBO’s Westworld might be attempting to question the nature of consciousness and intelligence, but when it comes to sex, the show’s message never really advances beyond, “have robot, will fuck.” Similarly, if we examine depictions of VR sex (I’m recalling Arnold Schwarzenegger’s little romp in Total Recall) the social consequence of being able to have constant idealized sex aren’t really discussed.

By contrast, Troels Ken Pederson’s larp My Girl’s Sparrow‘s zooms in on the physical aspects of sex in a futuristic world where VR is the only (acceptable) mode of sex. In Pederson’s game, the near-future world considers meatspace sex to be gauche and gross. The freeform game’s main focus is on a group of friends who rent a cabin for the sole purpose of taboo physical intimacy, and much of play consists of describing, in minute detail, the blow-by-blow of your sex acts. The game never feels pornographic, however. Rather, the detailed erotic descriptions serve to highlight the fact that these characters never get to do this in real life. “Sex isn’t an indeterminate mass – its details matter,” Pederson writes. “What we do together and how we react to each other says a lot about who we are.” How does it feel?, the game asks of you, and then constrains you further by forbidding you to ever discuss your feelings. How does sex feel when the norm is taken away from you? Or under another interpretive light, how does it feel to have queer sex?

Troels Ken Pederson’s My Girl’s Sparrow.

The concept of feeling and sensation is studied through a different lens by Kat Jones and Will Morningstar in You Inside Us-another title in the Honey & Hot Wax anthology of erotic art games I mentioned earlier. In this two-layer larp, one player takes on the role of a human colonist of a distant planet, while other plays an alien symbiont that comes to live inside the body of the former. The game asks us to examine the physical sensations we might often take for granted, and ask ourselves what physical pleasure and eroticism really mean. The two players, who maintain some form of physical contact throughout the game, describe mundane actions the human performs with their body in their day to day, and explore how it feels now that an alien is in residence. Has the nose become an erogenous zone? Does the act of eating soup now trigger tingles down one’s spine? “Be indulgent, intense, and weird,” the designers urge you, because the game is about, “making familiar sensations alien, [and] making alien sensations real and intimate.”

Jones and Morningstar position sex as something present within the banal, quotidian world. In the tiny, indie video game Stick Shift, Robert Yang does the same-only he focusses on the hyper specific act of, well, masturbating a car. Or perhaps you’re masturbating yourself via the car? Or is the car just your kink? Either way, Yang asks:

“What if sex in games was something we did, instead of something we obtained? One way to do sex is to see sex everywhere. Sex here, sex there, sex behind yonder tree!… and sex through the tender caresses that seduce gay cars everywhere.”

Robert Yang’s Stick Shift.

Yang, Jones, and Morningstar want us to normalize sexuality, want us to explore erotic possibility where society says there is none, want us to break out of the confines of “here and a this time are when you receive sex, as a result of this action.” By replacing “ordinary” with “sexual”, these games allow us to reject heteronormative dicta of what constitutes sex, give us permission to question what we ourselves desire, what we lust for, and what, for each of us, makes sex sex.

Finally, on the topic of queerness and sex, gender must inevitably come into play. Gender and the possible deviations from our binary norm are still relatively taboo topics in mainstream media. More than fifty years after Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, where the inhabitants of the planet Gethen have no gender as a default and shift gender once a month, most science fiction does little to speculate on our notions of gender. Now consider Avery Alder’s indie tabletop roleplaying game Dream Askew. You play members of an enclave of queers, attempting to “live, sleep, and hopefully heal” and maybe carve out a utopia in a post-apocalyptic world. At character creation you choose a gender. The game, however, eschews, “male” or “female”, and instead presents a variety of new options: “gargoyle”, “dagger daddy”, “ice femme”, “raven”. Alder writes:

“Creating a character in Dream Askew involves contending with gender, but it’s a gender exploded, extracted from the society intact and made mutant. What do some of these words even mean? […] When you encounter a gender word, imagine. Ask your fellow players. Flirt with a search engine. If nothing comes up, invent. No matter how you come to your initial understanding, it’s yours to continue to define through play.”

Avery Alder’s tabletop roleplaying game Dream Askew.

Not content with simply offering new ideas about gender, Alder encourages players to come up with their own, and in an unusually intersectional move, links these gendered markers to other dimensions of identity like ethnicity or social class.

If speculative fiction is to offer us a vision of a better, queerer future, we need to stop ignoring a facet of the human experience as significant as sex. Like Sense8 with its multi-gender psychic orgy, Black Mirror and its virtual-crossplay-coitus, or the legion of indie, underground games that explore the hornier side of life, sci-fi and fantasy media should strive to explore the future of fucking. We should be unafraid to poke at our conceptions of gender, prod our communities and reactions to intimacy, and probe at our kinks and desires. We need to play more with sex.

The Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity’s mission is to reduce sexual shame and normalise conversations around human sexuality by fostering sex-positive art and education. Two generous grant from them was what made “Honey & Hot Wax” possible. You can donate to The Effing Foundation here.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/towards-more-speculative-sex-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=towards-more-speculative-sex-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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kindabraveandlittlestupid · 6 years

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A Love/Hate Review of the movie Black Panther and my thoughts on feelings on this MCU addition. Please note these are just my feelings and thoughts on the film, its an opinion and I am simply one guy from the internet so if there is something you agree with (great) and something you disagree with (also great) just know I am not looking to have a fight over an opinion, which lets be frank have very little influence over the real world and your own like/dislikes.

After watching the trailer and months later stepping into the movie theater, I carried with me three concerns I hopped the movie would address. The first was noting Wakanda’s isolationism in the trailer wondering why a country so advanced would allow so much chaos to go on around them which was addressed and also a main plot point in the movie carrying some good political messages with it. A+. The second was a concern for the score of the movie worried they might go the way of Blade or Daredevil letting a bunch of artists put some random songs to the movie which would feel out of place but instead they opted for the orchestra with some heavy influences from proper African music. A++. The last prejudgment was the suit being bulletproof which I could get behind with Vibranium but somehow not being affected kinetic energy (momentum) from a projectile IE AK 47 being shot at him close range. Which he would have jerked back after being shot but instead shrugged the bullets and absorbed their energy. D -. Call me a stickler but I take the Neil deGrasse Tyson approach to movies and let science influence my opinion when watching while the kinetic energy could be absorbed he is still wearing a soft flexible suit which would have had him bruised and on his ass during that first convoy attack scene.

With those three concerns addressed going into the movie, I found there were some things I loved about the movie and somethings I hated as well. I know not everyone will agree with me on this but like I said its an opinion and we all have the right to be critical of art. It's once you go from being a critic to making personal attacks against other people or the actors/crew themselves that your opinion doesn't matter anymore... looking at you Star Wars Fanboys attacking The Last Jedi.

Shuri (Love) Getting past the immediate point that I think she is beautiful, she is easily my favorite character in the movie. She injected the humor, was a proper heroine and above all else the smart girl in the movie. I don’t know why it's so important to me personally being a white guy and all but I been wanting to see a female scientist role filled by Black Woman. Perhaps it was the fact Ghostbusters 3 had that chance but dropped the ball with Leslie Jones, The Martain had a bunch of white astronauts and only one of them was Latino, Marvel itself had been lacking a smarty character who wasn't Stark or Strange, or perhaps Geostorm (god knows why I watched that movie) had a black astronaut female but I can only remember her in one scene. I know lots of people got excited for Black Panther for its dominantly African American cast (no love for Luke Cage?) but to me personally seeing Shuri as the inventor of Wakanda was the major win in the movie and I hope to see more of her in the next Infinity War and BP2.

Heart-Shaped Herb/Vibranium (Love/Hate) I am used to many films using a MacGuffin and/or Applied Phlebotinum where something or some item seems to have a cure-all effect for the storyline that explains everything away without explaining anything. The Force, the Infinity Stones, Asgard Magic = Science, and so on most of the Marvel movies utilize something like this so I am no subtracting points completely for Black Panther doing the same but whenever I asked questions about how Black Panther never gets bruised I hear (it's because of the Herb) and no one seems too eager to break down the ‘How’ aspect behind the story. With Stark we could believe in the concept of the arc generator powering his suit and keeping shrapnel from his heart, it was explained during the movie. Black Panther, on the other hand, felt like the writers kinda mumbling “Something something something Vibranium allows them to do it” without investing to the audience's intelligence that might be able to follow along with the logic. Maybe I watched too much Star Trek and appreciate a universe that had explanations and limitations for its fantasy tech but there it is.

Killmonger (Hate) Perhaps spoiled again by good writing in other movies or years of reading comics in both the DC and Marvel Universe but Killmonger (to me) was an underdeveloped villain that quite honestly seemed kinda forced on the internet community as "the Best Marvel Villain" which I honestly feel he isn't deserving of. Here is a list of reason why I don't think he was the best.

CIA Colonizer - I realize Colonizer is supposed to be at a sting for early white exploration building colonies around Africa, Asia, India, etc but hard to feel empathy for Killmonger when served their interests so wholeheartedly. He felt justified for learning their tactics by going to Afghanistan and racking up kills of people who were not colonizers at all just Afganies.

Dead Girlfriend - He seemed to have a relationship with one girl who was going to come back with him to Wakanda before Killmonger shot her in order to get to Klaw. I am aware this is supposed to make him look like a cold-hearted killer but its just another victim under his rampage towards the throne.

Civil War - The attempted to play up that this was his plan all along as some sort of calculated long game but the underhanded approach of trying to shame T’Challa only fractured the Wakanda people and undermind his legitimate claim to the throne. Not to mention the resulting battle ended up leaving hundreds of Wakandans dead on a battlefield when the two factions clashed.

A Stupid Fucking Plan - So his plan, in the end, was to export weapons to communities to fight ‘colonizers’ all over the world. Sounds like a solid idea but is it? It was one of those plans that were less sound the more you think about it. Was he going to deliver arms to who? Northern African Terrorists (Boko Haram) the same who kidnapped hundreds of school girls? Was he going to deliver it to inner cities in the United States where there would be massive collateral damage in black neighborhoods and where there is a real chance that some might use their weapons against each other first? If the mission was to simply sow chaos into the world then yeah its a pretty good plan to start distributing Vibranium weapons but that was not his objective, he claimed liberation which would lead to lots of bloodshed that would likely leave African Communities decimated along with most major cities.

So that's why I wasn't a big fan of Killmonger. His story was yes tragic but he adopted the means/methods of the people he hated. He seemed to have killed more of his own people or people in Afghanistan then he did any white oppressor. And lastly, his plan to dishonor T’Challa and deliver weapons around the world wasn’t a strategy of someone playing the long game but rather someone who was acting out in anger and emotion. If that is what makes him a good villain fine but I think Black Mariah tapped into that tragic backstory better.

M'Baku (Love) I suppose I liked M’Baku because he was clearly an honorable leader. Sure he challenged T’Challa for the Throne as was his right but when the others arrived to provide him the flower so he might fight Killmonger himself he instead revealed he saved T’Challa and gave the man who beat him in fair combat. He could have easily taken the flower and attempt to take the throne a second time. He could have let T’Challa float down the river to wherever but he chooses not too. Gotta show him some love for not letting temptation sway him.

W’Kabi (Hate) Not much character development invested into W’Kabi but he was presented as a friend of T’Challa and lover (maybe husband) to Okoye. I suppose what bothered me was how quickly he shifted loyalty from T’Challa to Killmonger. Not the long-standing relationship presented in the movie and also one that shouldn't have happened considering a 30-second conversation with T’Challa would reveal that Eric was working with Klaw and that the only reason WHY Klaw escaped was that Eric blew a hole in the wall. I wonder if there will be redemption for W’Kabi in the next movie or not. I certainly hope so.

Nakia (Love/Hate...Ok Love) I loved her and I hate the fact her role was so little in the movie (doesn't hurt that she to was easy on the eyes). I always appreciate someone who represents the altruistic part of society and isn't willing to sit back and watch the world burn around her. I struggle to think of any male or female character of the MCU who believes in that sort of behavior as purely as she did. Maybe Danny Rand (if he wouldn't shut up about being Iron Fist and training in K'un-Lun) had his altruistic moments by wanting to sell medication at cost but that isn't quite on the level of activity that Nakia was. Either way, I want to see more of her and see her a greater influence on T’Challa. Also, why didn’t she fly to Oakland to help Shuri setup the Wakanda Outreach centers?

Wakanda AI (Love) I know its such a small thing but think Trevor Noah is a great guy. The kind of guy we need more of in the United States to tip the scales away from the more conservative extremists. I was completely unaware he was in the movie and when I found out he was the AI for Shuri’s lab I went back to watch the movie a second time just to hear his voice. As a political nerd and just general nerd, I love little details like that laced into the film as ‘easter’ eggs and putting forward one of South Africas (and now Americas) greatest progressive comedians into the film made me happy.

Attack on Museum (Hate) I understand the whole first act was basically to help establish Killmongers character but his approach of working with Klaw for some reason seemed well... pointless. He could have any point shot Klaw threw his ass on an airplane and flown all the way down to Wakanda and challenged Black Panther for the title of King without any underhanded approach and ALL the tribes would have been loyal to him. I am sure some people think it was a way to disgrace the Black Panther but there was no way he could predict if T’Challa would kill Klaw or put him directly on one of their private jets and flown all the way back to Wakanda after the Hong Kong chase scene. Its one of those things that seemed to rely on chance to much instead of planning it out properly. I am sure someone will say he (Killmonger) tipped off the CIA so they would bring him in first but I dont buy that.

Oakland (Love) Perhaps a little bit too much of community pride is the addition of Oakland to the movie and me being a Bay Area local I am always a bit prideful when one of the local cities makes it into a show or movie. I feel San Francisco has always been our go-to city for movie magic in Nor Cal and even San Jose/Silicon Valley has become popular with the tech community dominating the region but its good to see the 510 get some love as well. Well done Marvel.

Conclusion So all and all Black Panther was pretty good. I think they should explain more the Vibranium and Heart Shaped Herb some more in next movie and apply some limitations. I think this movie has provided a great cast of strong women for young girls to look up too. An I am excited to see a part two and/or part three to the series. Even more so the conclusion of Infinity War.

If I were to put it into my top ten marvel movies...

Iron Man

Thor: Ragnarok

Avengers: Infinity War

Guardians of the Galaxy Part 1

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Spiderman: Homecoming

Black Panther

Guardians of the Galaxy Part 2

Doctor Strange

Captain America: Winter Soldier

Hope no one is upset its not my personal top five but I am trying to be honest with myself in what brought me the most joy. Look on the bright side I didnt add Blade or Deadpool onto the list which might have pushed some movies (including Black Panther) lower on my list. ^_^

With Regards Michael California

#MovieReview #Black Panther

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