#because some words sound violently american

[saym0-0]

so the mechs totally speak a pidgin language of all their native languages right. we can agree on this right. their accents are a horrific mashup of all their original ones too, to the point where every single word they say sounds heavily accented to a native speaker of the language that word came from, even if its the mech that was originally a native speaker of that language. does this make sense at all?? they're just a linguistic mess i think they deserve it

[sereneres]

“ln yn forgetting she’s an idol f…” ⁰

le sserafim x lsfm 6th member!reader / 1.1k

summary. — “ln yn forgetting she’s an idol for five minutes and a few seconds (aka yn having no filter).”

warnings. — cursing / somewhat vulgar language / typical slurring from lsfm!yn / yn encouraging parasocial activities / video-format by @/jihyoruri

“unnie, stop touchin’ m’like that.”

chaewon blinks. yunjin freezes. kazuha promptly looks away from the camera, desperately trying–and failing–to hold back her laughter. eunchae was already snorting. sakura, in an attempt to do damage control, continued talking cheerfully to the camera, subtly shifting so that she could cover whatever was happening behind her with her head.

“practice has been pretty hard.” she says, sighing. “not because the dance is hard, though that’s a reason too, but because it ends pretty late into the night.”

“yah, ln yn!” chaewon’s voice is heard, followed by the sound of skin hitting skin–likely her hand slapping some part of your body–and a muffled yelp. “if you say things like that, people are going to misunderstand!”

“but unnie, you keep touchin’ me ‘n weird places.” the younger whines. “what else ‘m i s’pposed t’say?”

sakura, having given up, just slumped onto the floor, letting those watching the live see what was happening behind her.

chaewon was practically on top of you, shaking you back and forth by your shoulders. yunjin was snickering as she attempted to get the leader off of you with little to no success. eunchae was still laughing, her face red, and kazuha, at somepoint, had joined in on her laughter.

“ln yn!” chaewon screams, her cheeks reddening. “you’re an idol, for goodness sake, an idol! don’t say that kind of thing!”

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“‘where is yn?’”

“yn is currently preoccupied in the kitchen.” chaewon answered, eyeing something off screen. “both kazuha and eunchae are helping her which is why they aren’t here either.”

“they’re making cookies.” yunjin added, smiling. “erm, chocolate chip cookies, if i’m not–”

the sound of a door opening violently interrupts the american’s words, and the two girls on screen look to their left with surprised looks on their faces.

“chaewon’nie, the stove’s ‘n fire.” following your words is the high pitched beeping of what is undoubtedly the dorms fire alarms going off.

“what?!” chaewon stands up, with yunjin following suit. “what do you mean it’s on fire?!”

“‘s ‘n fire.”

yunjin, seemingly having remembered that the live was still going on, quickly ducked into view of the camera. “sorry, guys, we’ll be right back.”

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“ow, ow, fuck, ow–”

sakura, frowning, looked over to where you were presumably standing off screen. “ynnie, are you alright?”

she isn’t facing the camera, her head turned just enough so that those watching could tell she was worried by how tense her jaw was but not enough that they could see how her eyes had widened in alarm. you had cursed, after all, and in the middle of a live no less.

“m’fine, jus’ slammed the cabinet on m’finger.” you murmured, trudging into view with a hand wrapped tightly around your wounded finger. “it really hurt, ‘kura-unnie.”

oddly enough, you don’t seem all that worried about having potentially ruined your image as an idol by cursing. if anything, it seemed as though you hadn’t realized you had cursed aloud at all.

sakura, who is more than worried enough for the both of you, hums in response, absentmindedly checking your finger as she glanced at the live’s comment section. fortunately, it looked like no one was put out by your cursing, finding it more hilarious than upsetting.

“‘nnie, why’re they all laughin’? did somethin’ funny happen?”

“err… not exactly.”

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“unnie, wou’d you accept a kiss fro’me as a present?”

yunjin blinks, visibly stunned by your words. chaewon and sakura, both having realized just what you said, glance at the staff member standing behind the camera nervously. eunchae and kazuha, on the other hand, had quickly got over their shock and were giving you incredulous looks.

“oh my god-”

“…’s tha a yes or a no?”

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“ln yn, just what do you think you are doing?”

you freeze, giving sakura a panicked look–to which she responds with an amused smile–before slowly turning around to face your angry leader. “erm, h’llo, chaewon’nie.”

“hand.”

behind you, you could faintly hear yunjin and eunchae whispering about how chaewon sounded like she was speaking to a dog, ordering for it to give her a paw or something.

chaewon, unamused by your lack of response, both verbally and physically, raised a brow. “yn.”

you sigh, reluctantly doing as the older girl ordered and give her your hand, where a long cut glared an angry red on your skin.

“ooh~ unnie is in trouble~” eunchae murmured, smiling innocently at you when you turned to glare at her.

“yn, how did you get this?”

“…erm, i accident’lly stabbed m’self with scissors?…”

yunjin chortled, enjoying the scene before her all too much. “cut, more like.”

“not helping, unnie.”

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“‘kura-unnie’s basically m’ sugar m’mmy.” you mumbled to the camera, eagerly showing off the brand new pair of sneakers you had gotten–been gifted–earlier that day. “see? she bought m’ the shoes i was lookin’ at the other day.”

eunchae, who had been quiet until this moment leans into view of the camera, snorted. “unnie, you call anyone who’s ever bought you anything your sugar mommy.”

“sug-ar mom-my?” kazuha repeated slowly, tilting her head as she turned to look at chaewon, who sighed and shook her head with a look of disappointment on her face.

noticing how irritated the leader looked, the ballerina wisely decided to stay quiet and mind her own business.

“‘m not wrong though.” you point out to the unimpressed girl. “‘kura-unnie ‘s really m’sugar m’mmy. she buys me s’much stuff…” you giggle sleepily, turning back to the camera. “th’nk you, ‘kura-unnie~”

at that, chaewon, probably having realized just how… weird the conversation has gotten, clicked her tongue, drawing both your and eunchae’s attention.

“should i tell her to stop buying you things then?” she asked rhetorically, an eyebrow raised. “after all, we can’t have an idol, much less a girl group idol, being called ‘sugar mommy’ by one of her members…”

panicked, you sit up. “s’rry ‘nnie, i’ll ask ‘em to cut it out, ‘kay? don’t tell ‘kura-unnie anythin’!”

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“to those who’re sayin’ that they wanna marry me…” you start absentmindedly, staring at the screen of your phone before raising your head to look at the camera. “‘you bein’ serious? ‘cause if you are…”

[ lsfms#1fan: yes. desperatehoe: YES?!!! reasonableperson: uh no r u not a minor??? desperatehoe#2: PLEASE BE MY GIRFLRIEDNHSJQBWBS ]

reading the more or less desperate comments your fans were making, you smile lazily, though it looks more like a smirk than anything else.

“if tha’s the case, then,” you continued, clearing your throat as you kept your eyes on the camera. “please sign a prenup agreement.” from the corner of your eye, you could see a variety of confused comments. “then, and only then, will i consider being married to you.”

masterlist.

[marauderstars]

Ways J.K Rowling did poc dirty in canon:

Making the last name of one of her most powerful black characters “Shacklebolt” - a crude af reference to slavery and just in very poor taste.

Naming her only east Asian character “Cho Chang” - a Korean surname as a first name for a Chinese character - proving she did no research whatsoever into Chinese naming traditions.

Cho’s characterization also leans in to the trope of tragic Asian female characters being defined by their romantic connections to white men, as in “Miss Saigon” or “A Quiet American.” Cho’s storyline centers on her romantic involvement with Cedric, Harry and Roger Davies. She gets no meaningful arc of her own.

The sidekick-ification of Lee Jordan.

Michael Corner being referred to as “the dark one” which is bad enough, and then him being whitewashed in the films.

Pansy Parkinson’s comment about Angelina Johnson’s braided hair looking like “worms” goes completely unpunished. Rowling treats this as standard bullying instead of a racially-charged comment. Rowling clearly didn’t understand the serious implications of this comment and its rooting in deeply-ingrained discrimination against black hairstyles, or she would have written a similar reaction to this as she did to that of Hermione being called a “Mudblood.”

House Elves as a metaphor for slaves is highly problematic because they are depicted as “liking” their enslavement and being complicit in it, much like the black slaves in “Gone With The Wind.” Despite Dobby being a beloved character, he is also seen as an anomaly for desiring freedom, and many other House Elves are depicted as grotesque, fawning, ridiculous or sinister. Pretty garbage metaphor for black slaves.

In Goblet of Fire Rowling describes a group of “African” wizards wearing “long white robes” and “roasting what looked like a rabbit on a bright purple fire.” This is just… *sigh* The way this is worded is very clearly just token exoticism and includes no genuine detail about their clothing, cultural food or nationality. It’s just “wow those zany rabbit-eating Africans and their purple fire.” Once again black characters are being used as examples of otherness rather than shown as human beings.

Rowling has openly admitted that she created a detailed backstory for Dean Thomas, one of the series’ few black characters, but did not include it in the books and included the backstory of Neville Longbottom, a white character, instead.

Approving the casting of a white actress in the role of Lavender Brown in the films, a character the majority of readers assumed was black.

The portrayal of Blaise Zabini’s “famously beautiful” black mother who was known for offing her husbands and taking their money. Like. Come on. Tbh she sounds like a queen but violent woc gold digger is still a shit trope.

Just the entire treatment of the Patil twins at the Yule Ball, the way Harry and Ron treated them and Rowling’s garbage attempt at describing their traditional clothing.

Padma Patil’s portrayal in Cursed Child as the stereotypical controlling Indian wife. The idea of ending up with her instead of Hermione being positioned as some kind of horrible alternate reality for Ron had very xenophobic undertones, and while Hermione is portrayed as black in the play, I don’t believe that Rowling originally intended her to be a black character nor that casting directors deliberately set out to cast a black actress as Hermione in Cursed Child initially.

[archiveikemen]

'Villain Wants To Bother The Little Robin' Story Event: Chapter 1

Jude Jazza & Ellis Twilight Route

This is a fan-made translation solely for entertainment purposes with no guaranteed perfection. I do not own any of the original content. Please support CYBIRD by buying their stories and playing their games. Reblogs appreciated.

❥･• Warnings and FAQ

Victor: Kate… will you play the role of Her Majesty the Queen?

Kate: … It’s for a mission, right? Please tell me the details.

Victor: Ahh, what a quick response! You’ve grown so much as a fairytale writer, I… I…!

Victor: Emotional moment aside, you’re right, it’s for a mission.

Victor: An American ambassador is coming for a visit. According to our intel, there is word that he is planning an assassination attempt.

Kate: That’s a very serious issue… and therefore, I will be a stand-in for Her Majesty?

Victor: Yes. Jude and Ellis will be your bodyguards.

Kate: Why the two of them specifically…?

(Apart from Ellis, I don't think Jude would want to be “my bodyguard”.)

Victor: They’re experienced in handling violent situations. Should the ambassador carry out the assassination attempt, I believe they will be able to deal with it well!

(... They do seem capable of handling such situations smoothly…)

Kate: What exactly should I do as Her Majesty?

Victor: You will be receiving gifts, and have dinner at the evening banquet.

Victor: Basically, you only have to graciously accept the gifts presented to you.

Victor: The ministers will be present as well, so it’s OK for you to leave the complicated conversations to them.

Kate: Simply put, I just have to dress as Her Majesty and sit there… am I right to say that?

Victor: Yes! Her Majesty prefers to be quiet, so it’ll be alright if you remain silent.

Victor: Your voice sounds different from Her Majesty’s, which might raise suspicion. The two of them will follow up accordingly.

Victor: I understand that asking you to be a decoy is a difficult request… but you’re the only person who understands the situation enough to do so.

Victor: Will you accept the task?

(This proves that he trusts me as a fairytale writer. Moreover, Her Majesty's life is at stake here.)

Kate: Yes, I’ll do my best.

(Jude is a sadist who finds joy in tormenting others.)

(If I become indebted to him, there’s no knowing what he’ll demand for as payment. I can't afford any slip ups.)

(Ellis is kind and will do anything to make other people happy, but…)

(Because he will really do “anything”, I have to be careful so that he won't go overboard.)

(At any rate, in order to ensure that this mission will be successful without any troubles, I shall focus only on being a stand-in for Her Majesty.)

Kate: Victor, could you tell me more about Her Majesty's mannerisms? Such as her habits or anything that makes her unique.

Victor: …

Victor: Of course. I’ll tell you as much as I can.

After receiving some acting tips from Victor, I holed myself up in the library.

I wanted to learn a little bit about the royal family, the names and faces of the ministers, and the history of America and England…

…

(In the end, it feels like the more I study, the more overwhelmed I feel about my lack of knowledge. It made me feel more hopeless…)

I wore a crown, a veil that covered my face up to my chin, a pair of shoes to disguise my height, and an elegant gown.

I was already feeling defeated.

Jude: You fell asleep in the library, commoner.

Ellis: I’m glad you didn't catch a cold.

Kate: …!

Jude and Ellis stood on either side of me, laughing as if they had read my mind.

Kate: By any chance, was it… the two of you who covered me with a blanket?

Ellis: Yeah. Because you looked cold.

Kate: Thanks, Ellis.

Ellis: Jude pushed you back upright when you were about to slip off the table… with his knee.

Jude: That was because you were a hindrance.

Kate: Kicking a sleeping lady…

Jude: Calling some kid who played sleeping beauty in the library a “lady”? Don’t make me laugh.

Jude: You must’ve been working that little commoner brain of yours in your own way. How great.

Ellis: Mm-hmm. You’re studying hard to pull off pretending to be Her Majesty. You’re very great.

The former was entirely sarcasm, while the latter was a genuine and innocent compliment.

My facial muscles were confused about what facial expression to make.

(A- Anyway…)

Kate: I’ll be under your care for the next two days.

Jude: Decoy means someone who’s willing to die in another person’s place. Long story short, it’ll cost you your life.

Jude: … As long as the assassins are dealt with, it doesn't matter even if you die. Peace of cake.

Ellis: Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.

Ellis: I’m no good at politics and diplomacy… but I’m good at sensing when there are knives and bullets coming my way.

Ellis: I’ll do my best to support you so won’t have a hard time.

Kate: I… I’ll do my best too.

If Jude were something that’s tongue burning spicy, then Ellis would be sweet as sugar.

Being stuck in between time gave my heart no time to calm down.

(I wonder how Ellis is working for Jude.)

(Even though Jude isn’t the type of person to let people come close to him, he always has Ellis by his side.)

I remembered hearing that they worked together because of a contract.

(What on earth does that contract entail…?)

Jude: A commoner posing as the Queen will be easily exposed and gotten rid off.

Kate: Will Jude be able to do well as the Queen’s bodyguard with that sort of attitude and manner of speech?

Ellis: Jude is surprisingly capable of proper behaviour in public.

Jude: You might not know this, but this guy is crazy.

Kate: In what way…?

Ellis: Who knows? :)

Jude: You’ll find out soon enough.

(Are you saying that Ellis is no better at being a bodyguard than you? … Seems to me that it's the other way around.)

Ellis: … Hey, Jude, Kate.

Jude: Ah?

Kate: Yes?

Ellis: I have a suggestion—

Ellis: Let’s make a deal whereby if we succeed in this mission without having our identities exposed, we’ll fulfil one request from each other… what do you think?

(Fulfil each other's requests after completing the mission?)

Jude: What’s with that meaningless suggestion?

Ellis: I’m thinking of how to make this mission more enjoyable for Kate.

Ellis: What do you think…?

(So that’s what Ellis is thinking…)

I realised that since this morning, I had been unknowingly weighed down by the burden of wearing the crown.

(... Ellis is really good at telling how someone is feeling.)

Kate: Thank you, Ellis. We’ll do that!

Ellis: Fufu, then it’s decided.

(... Hm? But I heard him say “each other”...)

(I’ll have to grant requests from Jude and Ellis…)

Jude: … Just endure it as much as possible. I’ll be watching you make a fool of yourself while thinking of what “request” I’ll make you fulfil.

Ellis: Me too, I’ll be… thinking about what “request” will make you happy.

Seeing the two very different smiles, my facial muscles were once again unsure about what facial expression to make.

...

Chamberlain: The ambassador from America, Abel Edmund, has arrived.

The chamberlain loudly announced the ambassador's arrival, and the door to the audience hall opened slowly.

(... It’s happening.)

Jude and Ellis stood on guard behind me.

“Why did Her Majesty choose to be guarded by two unknown men, instead of the royal guards?” When I first entered the hall, I could hear the ministers whispering amongst themselves, however…

(Just one glare from Jude made their complaining cease immediately.)

(When Ellis smiled at them, the number of insolent stares decreased as well.)

(With the two of them around, my life will definitely not be in danger… it’ll be alright.)

I straightened my back and lifted my chin, fixing my posture according to what I learnt from Victor.

(I must focus on maintaining a regal attitude while acting as Her Majesty in front of the ambassador.)

Abel: I am greatly honoured to have been given the privilege of an audience with Your Majesty!

The ambassador was a man with teeth that glimmered in the light, and a smile as bright as the sun.

(Wow… he’s more frank than I thought.)

Maintaining my majesty, I nodded silently in response to his greeting.

Ellis: He looks lively.

Jude: Even if he keeps quiet, his face makes a heck lot of noise.

(P- Please don’t make me laugh!)

The point-blank commentary coming from the two of them standing behind me clearly stated their impressions of him.

Abel enthusiastically presented the various items he had brought with him as tribute.

(Even with a veil on, these items are dazzling…)

Once again, I felt overwhelmed by Her Majesty's power and influence as proven by the extravagance of the treasures gifted to her.

Abel: We have here an extremely rare avian species boasting feathers with vibrant colours. Its beauty is further enhanced by the magnificent sight of its outstretched wings.

Abel took a large bird resembling a parrot from its cage,

Abel: Please, have a look— ah!?

The parrot suddenly lifted its head and flew out of Abel’s hand.

(It’s coming this way!?)

Jude • Ellis: —!

[sugarakis-p2]

Hot Springs

As part of bonding Kurogiri has arranged for the group to visit a local mineral hot spring. the group splits up and it's just Shigaraki and Dabi, until two hero worshiping American girls wander into there web. To make things interesting, they make a bet on who can make there girl cum first.

[This is cannon divergence from My hero academia smash when they hike up into the mountains. It was hilarious and adorable....I also was in a mood to violently jizz all over it. A bit of the ultra violence]

Warning: Hard non/con, F/M multi, Dabi and Shigaraki are not nice, Original Character Death(s), Death Threats, Rough Sex, Deflowering, Loss of Virginity, Double Penetration, Fear of Death, My Hero Academia Smash!!, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Public Nudity

The men stared at each other with mutual disgust.

Shigaraki with that disgusting severed hand. Toga wondered how he was able to see out of one eye. How did he not end up with crossed eyes? Did he have depth perception? Toga looked to Dabi, who wore his permanent "I don't give a fuck” expression but openly called Shigaraki gross. To Toga, that was irony. Dabi's flesh was barely held together with staples. Staples in the age of healing. They are both mean and anti-social, in her opinion. Kurogiri was reading the guidebook out loud to the two.

"The skin benefits are equal to hydrotherapy. Hot spring water with varied hydro-pressure to combat hypertrophy, inflammatory reaction signs, abnormal pigmentation, and, more specifically, redness and scarring. This will be a perfect bonding experience for…oh. There is an age limit," Kurogiri said.

"Who cares! We will do what we want. It's so damn hot," Shigaraki huffed, scratching his neck. Toga considered all the dead skin floating in the hot spring and decided to opt-out.

"It's embarrassing being naked in front of people," Toga said meekly.

"I agree, and I'm starving. Let's goooooo! I'm hangry," Magne snapped. She was in a rare mood.

"We can go shopping together, Miss Himiko," Kurogiri offered, and Toga jumped on that. Leaving the two men staring at each other. Dabi turned and went in without a word. Shigaraki would have refused. But after that disgusting hike, Kurogiri forced them on. He was sticky and could use some Saki.

Their backs leaning on the outcrop of rocks, they drank and relaxed in opaque white water that reminded Shigaraki too much of jizz. He didn't hate it, though. The babbling of the spring was the only sound breaking the silence. Until the giggle and splash of two ladies broke the silence. They splashed, giggled, and played like children on the other side, thinking they were alone.

Shigaraki immediately pulled father off and folded him with care in his towel. He turns to see Dabi taking a peek at the cute nude girls playing in the spring. Shigaraki hmphed and poured himself more Saki.

"What is with that look?" Dabi asked, grabbing the Saki.

"What do you think you are doing?" Shigaraki hissed.

"I'm going to try to get laid. What does it look like, virgin?" Dabi smirked.

"What? Who told you I was a virgin? I met Midnight," Shigaraki snarked.

"Hey, did you see those two goth guys? What kind of crazy hikes up a mountain in all black? Kinda cute though," one of the girls giggled. Dabi grinned smugly. Two little Americans from the accents. 

"That could be either of us," Shigaraki rasped. Interrupting Dabi. He knows English, and he just proved it to the haughty burnt bastard.

"Want to bet?" Dabi teased.

"I think the guy in the jacket is burned. Do you think he's a firefighter? That would be so hot," the same girl giggled. Dabi grew smugger. Shigaraki scoffed and rolled his eyes.

"You act like it's impressive she's a star fucker. She's only interested in you because she thinks you're a hero," Shigaraki said, wiping the hand sweat off his face with spring water. That little act already soothed his skin, making him slightly more handsome.

"Then show me something, impressive fearless leader. I'm still getting virgin vibes," Dabi chuckled, loading up more Saki on the floating tray. It was starting to get dark. Those girls shouldn't be running around. They are asking for trouble. Whatever Dabi does to you seems fair game, in his opinion. The stupid hero-worshiping girls are about to get a hard lesson. Shigaraki was about to snap at Dabi for his snide little comment when he got curious and peeked.

"I wish I could have gotten a better look at the pale guy. I think he was wearing an oxygen mask. Maybe they are training. It looks like he had a nice body," You replied.  

He quickly changed his mind when he caught sight of you and heard that small comment. It's no longer Dabi who is going to teach you a lesson. Your slick wet chest got him instantly hard. How the water hid the bottom of your nipples made his mouth salivate. He also noticed something he didn't like.

Both of you have your phones in a waterproof bag, so you can still use them. He would have still fucked you even if he hadn't noticed them. But now he had more motivation to get involved, so whatever happens, it's not his fault. It's yours for being an easy trusting victim. You wanted a better look at him. He will give you one.

"Let's make it interesting. It will be good bonding, as Kurogiri says," Shigaraki said. A ghost of a smile at the corners.

You are about to look up those guys on the everyday hero web site to show Aimi when a shadowy figure appears around the corner.

"Thirsty ladies?" The figure said in English with a distinct Japanese lilt. It's the guy from earlier. Up close, you find him absolutely terrifying. His eyes are beautiful turquoise. He's young and has the features of a male model. The patchwork of molten skin was not as intimidating as his cock. He steps into the light to let you get an eye full. 

His cock is large, pierced, and not covered in any way. A row of bars on the underside and a hoop through the tip. He has staples everywhere. He looked more like a hellraiser than a hero. Not a hint of shame as he locks eyes with you, not looking away, which made your middle heat. But it also scared you when he came within an inch of your face with that thing. Aimi was gushing and practically drooling.

You yelp and flinch when you feel your phone being pulled from your fingers. When your phone was replaced with a cup of Saki, your hair changed color in surprise. The pale one is next to you. Oh god, did they hear you earlier? Your mind questions in utter embarrassment. He is pouring you some Saki as he touches your hair.

"Very pretty. Is this your quirk?" He asks in harsh deep gravel.

You jerked from that touch, but this man was so quick his arm was around your shoulder, pulling you close. You squealed when you felt something large and hard brushed against your thigh. You glance at Aimi. She is a pretty girl who thinks everyone is nice and nothing bad will ever happen to her. She is giggling and chatting with the burned guy like this is perfectly normal.  

"From America? What do you think of my English? My name is Dabi. What's yours, pretty girl? Tell me in Japanese," Dabi flirted.

"It's perfect English. Ummmm, let me try…" Aimi chuckled.

She does not see the danger signs at all. You want to get her attention, but the guy pouring Saki has roaming fingers. They moved from your shoulder to the side of your breast, his long nimble fingers working their way ever closer to your nipple.

"You are very pretty. Is it true what they say about American girls?" he whispered.

His hair was covering his face, but now that he is up close, you can see all of him. He is covered in scars. He is young under the welted skin. He is not classically handsome like the other one. This one has red eyes. They are rare and pretty. They are also hard and demanding, like a hungry wolf that wants to devour you. Normally you might find him sexy, but this guy has bullet holes. He runs his fingers through your hair and inhales deeply when you don't answer.

"Drink the Saki, pretty American girl," he encourages. His tone was more of and order than a suggestion. You whimper and down it. Your hair becomes darker by the second. Pouring more as he plays with the strands, eyes widening as your hair becomes so dark it's absorbing the light around them. You swallow hard and drink the foul liquid.

You don't like the flavor of alcohol at all. Everything about these two screams trouble. Even while the man was being entertained by your hair, you tried to slowly reach for your phone. Changing course for the Saki when his eyes dart to your cell. He is so quick it's terrifying. His hand darts out and grabs the craft with four fingers before you even get close. Why only four fingers? Do his fingers have to do with his quirk?  You wonder.

"Allow me," He insists as he pours you some more, a slight lilt of irritation.

"What's your name?" you ask, trying to sound friendly while not answering his questions.

"Tomura," he rasped, carefully setting the Saki back. If you could get Aimi to look at you for one moment, "You smell good too." Your flesh crawled as you felt his fingers move lower on your waist.  Didn't that mean "To mourn or mourning?"  It was not a pretty name.

"I like how fear looks like arousal," Tomura said creepily. Oh god, it was now or never. You feign seeing someone behind him while your hand reaches for your phone. Your heart is thundering in your ears. You hit the emergency button when Aimi makes your heart stop.

"HEY! What are you doing to my friend! Help! Hero!" She shouts with all the confidence of someone that has never known danger. Your mind screams  no  at her. Tomura whips around and yanks my phone away like a snake. Dabi yanked Aimi back by her hair. Tomura's grip tightens on your middle, pulling you flush to him. His massive hard cock pressed against your belly.

Dabi flashed a blue flame in Aimi's face before clapping a hot hand over her mouth. You could feel the cold heat from here. She screamed wide-eyed before registering how he would kill her if she did it again. Tomura held the phone away, checking who you dialed. You could feel his heart hammering too. You only caught bits and pieces of what they said, but you understood it enough.

"Are we expecting company?" Dabi asks. Shigaraki scoffs.

"No. Our silly little American girls didn't program the emergency number for Japan," He smirked, reverting to English. He wanted you to know how fucked you are. Your gut plummets in fear. How could you have forgotten to change it?

Tomura chuckles, closing his hand and turning it to dust. Dabi tosses Aimi's phone to him, and he catches it and also turns it to dust. You whimper. He looks down and grins ghoulishly as he grabs your ass and presses his cock harder against you with a rub.

"God damn it, Shiggy! You scared them! You probably said something creepy to get her spooked," he growled before clamping his mouth over Aimi's. She screamed down his throat. Tomura had started walking you back into the rock. It was slippery and still dug into your back. His knee started pressing to spread your legs.

"The bet was who made his slut cum first. You didn't say it had to be consensual," Shigaraki snickered as he roughly groped your chest. Tweaking your nipples and capturing one in his mouth. Sucking on your tender flesh too hard, they pebble hardening to peaks under his attention. His velvety tongue lathing over each one with greedy eagerness.

"You know it's difficult to do when they are scared. I should have known you'd be a creep and make this harder," Dabi snarled at Shigaraki.

Shoving Aimi face down on the rocks. You could almost reach out and touch her. She cried out, looking to me for help. You mouthed, 'use your quirk,' and pleaded with your eyes to not try to fight the deadly man. Aimi looked so confused and scared. It broke your heart. Where are the heroes? She mouthed back. You closed your eyes and looked away. They are not coming because you messed up.

"Don't make me lose my bet by forcing me to kill you. The only sounds that can slip from you are pretty ones. Damn. You also got the smart one of the two. Why are the pretty ones so dumb? There are no heroes, precious," Dabi growled, kicking her legs violently open.

You yelp and flinch in fear of those hands pressing your tits together. Tomura nips you so hard you bleed. The cruel look in his eyes says it all. Only pretty sounds out of you too. You shut up instantly letting any protest die on your tongue.

You braced yourself on his body so you don't slip on that cock. It feels like hot steel pressing on you. He pulls away from your tit. His lips were lightly stained red. He licks them, then runs his tongue over your nipple. The blood flow slowing.

"It may be hard for you. But for me, it will be easy. Mine is a good lil American girl. She'll cum for me. Look at those scared eyes. Like a scared bunny. Her hair is so dark my fingers disappear. You never answer my question. It is true that all American girls are sluts?" He asked, grinding his knee so hard on your thighs you finally parted them. Immediately his large cock pressed against your clit, the head of his cock bobbing up and down out of the water as he stroked himself over your sex. You moan a little and shake your head no.

"I'm a virgin," you squeaked. Dreading the thought of that thing sliding in you. It's sending delicious shudders through you, but it still scared the hell out of you. He presses harder and moans, leaning into you. Your nails dig into his shoulders, but he doesn't seem to care.

"Fuck. I've never had a virgin. But you will cum if you know what is good for you," He groaned.

"That's because you are one," Dabi laughs, about to penetrate poor Aimi, a virgin too.

"Shut the fuck up, Dabi," Tomura growled. He nuzzled and nipped at your neck and earlobe. Pulling away to finish the craft of Saki. He grabs the other and holds it up to your lips. He leans in a whisper, "I have never fucked a virgin. I heard it hurts. You will want this. Drink it all."

"The heroes will come," Aimi sobbed. You shook your head at her. Pleading for her not to say that. Not around these guys. What Dabi said and the evil glint in Shigaraki's was enough to tell you not to bring up heroes again. Dabi yanked her, and you could smell and hear the sizzle of flesh as Aimi whimpered. You drank deeply after that. By some miracle, you had the nicer of the two.

Tomura encouraged you to finish it. It made you lightheaded and heat pool in your center. It seemed like a kind act. But the look in his eyes and the evil grin told you otherwise. He wanted you flush and drunk. Aimi gave a pathetic shriek. Followed by a harsh smack on her ass and a yelp. You tried to block out your friends' pain. You are about to have your own.

"What sounds did I say can come from that yapping mouth. You really are the dumb one. I lost the flip. I thought I got lucky and got the easy slut. But you're so damn tight. I think you were a virgin too," Dabi said in his cool smokey tone, as if what he was doing to poor Aimi was normal and ok.

Tomura's pale body bared down on you as he grabbed your legs and forced you to wrap them around his waist.  

"You don't have to do this. Please let us go. We won't say anything to anyone," you begged quietly.

"I do what I want. What's your quirk called?" he asked, his wet digit getting tangled in your locks and brushing down your cheek. His eyes still held the hunger, but the rest of his face was steely resolve. He leaned in and ran his thumb along your lower lip. All five mean death. That was easy to figure out.

"My hair color changes to my moods. It's called mood crown," you answered quickly. His thumb pressed past your lips and touched your tongue. He bit his lip, and you could feel his cock twitch against your clit.

"What's her quirk?" He asked with a lilt. You did not want to answer this. His fingers dug into your cheeks like the rock on your back. You whimpered in fear. Aimi choked sobs, and the wet slaps of Dabi's thighs filled your ears. Hot tears spilled from your sad, lovely eyes. His cock twitched again.

"Please," you started, and he grits his teeth in warning. You feel so emotionally weak as you give into fear, "Lung control. She can hold her breath for ten minutes," you answer with a whine. Please pass out Aimi. Don't die. Knock yourself out. You pray. Shigaraki grimaces.

"That can have an autoerotic effect. We better get started. I'm not going to disrespect you by lying. I'm going to fuck and use you as I please. If you piss me off or don't listen. I'll kill you and move on to your friend. It would be one thing if you gotten ahold of some assholes in tights paid to save you with that nasty stunt with the phone. But you failed. Do you think I'm afraid of some civilians?  They will take one look at what's happening and walk away. Every single time. I think you know more than a few people who will think everything will turn out ok. That a hero will come to save the day. But the reality is you better listen and hope for mercy," he rasped, eyes darting to a simpering Aimi.

You believe every word he says. Shigaraki likes that. He likes that a lot about you. He plunged his tongue into your mouth. It twisted and entwined with yours. He tasted like Saki and had a hint of your blood.

You sucked in a sharp breath when he gripped the rod between your pussy and speared you. Pushing had past your resisting virgin pussy's barrier. Your hymen popped, seeping hot blood on his cock as it allowed him in deeper. You think you will pass out as your head swims and stars burst into your vision. He's huge, and it hurts.   

Your hair rippled colors as you endured the hot pain of being split in two. His eyes widened, and he forced himself deep enough to kiss your cervix. His entire body shuddered as his eyes rolled back in his head. He looked down to where you are connected, panting in excitement. A grip on your thigh and one kneading your breast. He ground against your sex. Simpering as you held back your tears, he began to thrust. This monster didn't even let you adjust to him. He kissed you again and groaned.

"That's a painfully tight pussy. I'm going to break it. I'm going to break you," he panted. It felt like a hot knife. You cried and then tried to relax.

"IT HURTS!" Aimi whined. You echoed her feelings with a loud sob.

Every thrust back in was excruciating, your face twisting into one long silent scream, your hair changing into a series of horrible colors. The water around you had a tinge of pink. Tomura slowed to longer thrusts. Savoring the sensations with pants and groans into your hair.

His hot breath fanning over your scalp. His weight forces you down and makes it hard to breathe. The rocks are digging into your back. You started to shove him away to gasp for air. He lifted enough to let you get a lung full. To your surprise, he adjusts you, clearing the pebbles and moving you more to the smoother surface.

"Better?" he asked, grinding his cock with more shallow thrusts.

"No, please stop this," you plead with a sniffle.

"Don't be stupid. It looks like your hair is going back to black. You're fine. Fuck, you're tight. You can beg and cry. But I'm going to destroy what I want, and right now," He grunted and empathized with a sharp, deep thrust.

"I want to destroy your purity and your will to fight me. Don't hold out hope someone will come to save you. Give in and cum on my cock. As much as I love a little resistive pussy. I'm not losing to that burnt asshole," he indicated to Dabi with his head.

He quickly licked his thumb, shoved his fist between you, and started rubbing. The sensation was like a shock wave going through your middle. You jerked and grabbed his wrist. You immediately move to yank your hand back, but he stops you.

For a moment, you thought you had died. You imagined all of his fingers had wrapped around your wrist, and at any moment, you will turn to dust. But Tomura hadn't. What he was doing was guiding your hand to your clit.

"If you don't like the way I do it, show me," he said kindly, which threw you off.

You violently shook your head and blubbered. His pinky threatened to lie down. The look of his of eager anticipation said it all. Do it, or he'll turn you to dust. He was still hard and firmly planted in you. This was just cruel. He was inconsistent with his mercy.

You start slowly and nervously. Tomura is staring at you, touching yourself as if he's studying every movement. You can't touch the sensitive bundle of nerves directly. It's too much for you. You rub circles over the hood. You shut your eyes and pretend he's the hottest guy you've seen. It's hard to do with a hot rod throbbing and stretching you at your core.

You have a hard time imagining someone else in you. You don't want to die, either. You do the unthinkable and really look at him. Touching yourself feels nice, but it will not get you to cum. The light blue dripped, and a few strands clung to his face. As you look at him, his eyes dart to yours. He holds them, pinning you with those scarlet orbs.

With a sharp intake of breath, his muscles ripple. He's not bulky, but he is toned with a softness that quickly disappears with each deep pant. Crimson eyes are blown with hunger and need. You moan sweetly as you grow wet. The pain fades into the background as your pleasure increases.     

"Fuck. That's a fine tight wet pussy. I don't hate it. Looks pretty around my cock. That expression is nice. Your hair is changing to pink, my lil American slut," He bites his lip.

You can feel the deep grind as his cock presses lightly on your cervix. Heightening the sensation of your ecstasy. You feel a moan rise from someplace primal. You clamp your hand over your mouth. His eyes catch the movement. He growls, clearly not liking how you are quieting your passion or distracting him from what you're doing with your sex. Quickly shooting out your hand, your fingers run through his hair. The Saki must be getting to your head. His strands are like silk-spun sky and clouds.  

He paused to let you get a good look and feel. Gasping for air, his chest heaves, and a shudder works down his body to where you two are attached. You cried out when he bucked his hips hard and fast. He licked two fingers and played with your clit the way you enjoyed. Shivers of pleasure run up your spine. His cock stroking along your slick walls.

He humped you hard and fast like an animal, but he was whimpering and pants like a puppy. You are velvet and bliss to him. Wrapping around his dick perfectly, squeezing and sucking him back in. You wish he would not whisper such filthy things. It kept you too present with what's he doing to you. The violent smacking of his boney hips against your tender flesh made your entire being quake under him. He was starting to feel amazing in you.

A tightening and tingle in your middle gather and build to new highs. You are no longer resisting Tomura. You are screwing him back. Bucking back into him. He's handsome enough, you tell yourself. He's making you feel good. If you ignore all else, you can forget your life depends on cumming on this nasty man's cock. You can convince yourself you wanted it. At this moment, as you feel yourself plunging into ecstasy, you do want it. You are moaning and whimpering sweet noises as you cling to him. You implode on impact. His cock fills you to the brim.

"Ah!" You scream sharply as you arch up to him. Every part of you tightens and then comes undone on him. He grunts as he grips your hips and shoves himself as deeply as possible. His lids are heavy with lust as drool forms at the corner of his mouth.

"Fuck!" He gasps a moment later. You have clamped down on him. Whimpering and writhing as his twitching cock spreads warmth deep inside you, "Oh yeah. There we go. That's a good little tight cock sleeve. Fuck. That pussy may be a virgin, but it can milk a dick. That's it. Suck up every drop."

"No way," Dabi hisses, suddenly next to you both. He has Aimi by the hair. She mercifully has her eyes closed as Dabi digs two of his fingers between you and Shigaraki. Shoving his fingers in deep to feel you pulsing on Tomura. You squeal and squirm as he stretches you more.

"Huh," Dabi says, surprised.

"What the hell is wrong with you? Look at her hair. You have no manners," Tomura hissed at Dabi.

"As if I know what pink and red mean. Damn, that red is bright. It almost glows. This wasn't a fair bet," Dabi says, pulling out his fingers at last. He licks the both of you off them as if that was no big deal. You shiver at the sight. Suddenly feeling cold and wanting to disappear in the warm spring water.

"What?" Shigaraki asks, scratching his neck. Dabi smirks and pulls up Aimi until she is standing.

"This one is a cold fish. You make this one cum while I try that one. You win the bet hands down," Dabi states.

"Why would you need to fuck this one?" Shigaraki asks suspiciously.

"You are going to leave me with a wet dick and not a chance to see if I get the same reaction? We need a control for the bet. If I make her cum then this bet is a push. We'll try some other girls. Unless you got attached like a little virgin simp to this one," Dabi mocks.

"You can't do anything but cause misery," Shigaraki growls as he rips himself away from paradise. Gripping Aimi by the arm and dragging her to a more comfortable spot.

"You might be right about that," Dabi smirks. You drop into the water, pushing off the rocks quickly. If you can run for help, maybe you both will live through this. You slip through Dabi's fingers. Finding the edge quickly and scrambling up.

"Well, go get her," you hear Shigaraki say as you pop up and run for the exit.

"Don't tell me what to do," Dabi shot back, right behind you.

Bursting through the exit, you attach to some random stranger. Screaming help in Japanese. The guy stared at you wide-eyed as Dabi grabbed your arm. Said something to the man while you begged for help. The heat on your arm made you whimper and flinch. Loosening your grip enough to be yanked away from the stranger. The guy smiled and walked off. You stood there with Dabi slack-jawed. This guy is actually doing exactly what Tomura said he would. He was going to leave you. A problem to be solved by someone else. A burst of blue flame, and that guy was flailing on the ground for a minute before he was a crackling campfire.

"He wasn't going to call the heroes, but it's better to side on caution. Are you happy you got a guy killed?" He asked you, leading you back to the hot spring.

"I didn't kill him. You did," you sniffle. You saw it. That random really wasn't going to bother to even call for help.  

"Tell that to his family. At least that made me hard again," Dabi chuckled, placing you back against the rock. Aimi is crying pathetically as Shigaraki humps her, your eyes connect with him, and the seething rage underneath makes your heart stop in terror. Dabi slicking himself on you. You whimper in fear. What will happen if you cum on Dabi? What will happen if you don't?

"Shouldn't I clean myself? We can go into the changing room. Lay on some towels," you tried to convince.

"Oh, I don't mind sloppy seconds. Makes good lube. Besides, I want to see him hot-blooded after I make his favorite fuck cum on this fat cock," he grinned. You cried and squirmed when he pushed his dick in you, "Oh fuck. That is a tight little pussy. I can feel why he didn't want to share. That's ok. He broke you in nicely. That is damn good."

You thought Tomura was hard as a rod. Dabi was real metal. You can feel the cold steel change its temperature as he sinks in deep. The different textures create new sensations. You cover your mouth as you moan. Dabi is slow and deep. Making sure you feel his piercings as they glide over your slick walls. Working all the sweet places, Tomura had to find the hard way. Dabi's warm hands are everywhere. He doesn't have to be careful like Tomura. It feels like Dabi is trying to devour you. He stops long enough to threaten you. 

"Don't try to get clever and pull at staples or stitches. Keep to the smooth skin, or I will set you on fire and keep fucking your corpse. I don't need the top half. You feel pretty warmed up. I want a good time," He panted, bucking harder and running a hand in your hair, pulling your head back and shoving his tongue in your grunting mouth. Another hand tweaking a nipple as he pounds harder and faster. The sore ache is resounding as you writhe under him. His lower lip has a different consistency. His flavor is one of horrible cooked flesh. He's too hot. His dick is more experienced in pleasing a woman. Tomura wanted to win. Dabi wants a good time. Both make you feel like their toy.

You dare to peek over and see a Tomura standing perfectly still, staring and scratching his neck so hard he's bleeding. His grimace is horrible. He looks murderous as he watches you tip over the edge. Free falling into a coaxed orgasm. You concentrated as hard as you could on your hair color. The best thing about having your heart on your sleeve is when you can lie, everyone believes it. He stiffened more as his eyes narrowed.  

"You won't get away with this limp dick," Aimi whimpered.

  NO!  Your mind screams. But it was too late. Tomura looked down. Set all five fingers flat on her back, and your best childhood friend disappears. Her face twisted into a shocked scream while you came. You squeezed your eyes shut and turned your head from them. Dabi growls as his hot cum feels like it is scorching your insides. You can feel his cum jetting into your eagerly sucking cunt. You heard her hands, and head tumble in the water as Shigaraki made his way to you.

"Did she cum?" Tomura asked worriedly. Dabi is still cumming and ignores him. You try to shove him away on his smooth flesh.

"How can I! Monsters. You killed Aimi. You killed her!" You wailed, trying to curl up on yourself. 

Dabi does not pull out. Dabi gives a light moan as his cock twists in you as you try to curl from him. Dabi looks at Shigaraki, who is scratching himself and having a fit. Then down at you, your pussy clamping down and trying to shove him out. Shiggy was right. Forced pussy was the best. This forced pussy was the best. That was the hardest cum in his life. He was physically stuck in you, and he loved it. He licked his upper lip and made a decision.

"Nah. You win," Dabi said to your shock. Tomura eased his scratching and smirked. Pulling you into an embrace and making comforting sounds, you cry too hard to hear these bastards' words. Dabi joins him, and you are so damn horrified and confused at the sudden dynamic change. That disappears when Dabi turns to Shigaraki.

"Ever done DP?" He asked a Shiggy who was busy kissing your shoulder. He looked bored at Dabi and then shook his head no, "Bitches love it. You sort of feel the other guys dick, but girls can't get enough after the first taste. They beg for it." Shigaraki considered this.

"Really?" He asked you.  How would I know?  Your brain shouts at him. He knows you were a virgin. Is he stupid! He just killed your best friend. You  loved  her! She got all the guys and was naive, but she was brave and stuck by you. You wanted to spit this in Tomura's face when you caught Dabi's expression. It was icy cold. You want to live to tell on these fuckers. Someone has to know what they did to Aimi and make them pay. 

"Yes," you whimpered. Dabi suggested a break before they started. Shigaraki went to check on father. Dabi leans in with burning eyes.

"I like your survival skills. You owe me. You better make fucking as good as this each time," Dabi instructed.

"I don't know how. I was a virgin. I just want to go home," you wept. Dabi grinned. 

"Keep that attitude. You want to live. You want to make us happy," He said coldly.  

You cried. They consoled in their creepy way. But kept going in every position and combination they could think of. For hours until you passed out and woke up in a new position, covered in cum and aching in every hole. You prayed through most of it. The longer they were not answered, the more you think these two are right about society. You got an earful of it when they were in a humping lull. When they had exhausted themselves using every hole in your body, they cuddled. You felt like a steak between two tigers. 

Shigaraki kept a firm grip on your neck. His face buried in your hair, mumbling sweet dirty nothings to the back of your head. Dabi's face is between your tits. 

"We have time for another go?" Dabi asked.

"I'm tired," you husked.

"You don't have to be awake," Dabi said flatly. You felt weary and hurt. Your heart becomes numb to their cruelty. A black swirl formed, and a psychotic chipper schoolgirl brat and a bitchy butch walked through. The smoky black guy was the dangerous one, though. There was a loud nasty argument in Japanese. Dabi got dressed and handed Tomura your passport while throwing towels and a robe at you.  

"As (Japanese) as she (Japanese) to us," Dabi hissed. 

"I was (Japanese) to share. (Japanese) is no us. I (Japanese) keep her," Tomura growled, pulling on his pants with a fucking severed hand somehow attached to his face. The argument between them ensued and got loud when you attempted to slowly head for the door. You are catching words like "kill," "hide," "body," "mine," and "keep."  

"Oh no, honey. You stay right there," The butch one said in perfect English.

 You freeze in terror as Tomura quickly comes over to wipe Dabi's come off you. Not his. He stands again, scratching himself, an air of seething as he gets in the smoky guy's face area. The smoky guy made some sympathetic noises, and Tomura stopped throwing a tantrum but was still clearly agitated. He stalks in front of you, kneeling down and shoving your passport in your face.

"We want to keep you, but Kurogiri says no. When things settle down, we will find you. You belong to the league of villains. You belong to me. Do not fuck anyone else. We will hunt them down and kill their entire family," he rasped, putting your passport in his back pocket.

They left. Dabi gave you a lingering look parting with a final warning.

"You're mine. You owe me, and there isn't a hero to stop me from collecting," he grinned, disappearing into the blackness.

They found you near morning, cradling Aimi's head and hands. You couldn't find her feet. The Japanese government locked you away for your "safety." Also, having no passport, they can just make you disappear. You took the morning-after pill. Not that it worked. They hid you in some hospital. This was hell.

When you saw Dabi on tv, you became disgusted. Endeavor created a monster. He said a half-sorry, and nothing came of it. He wasn't charged with child abuse or neglect. He could run around while you are incubating a product of this society's fucked up neglect. Whether it was Shigaraki's or Dabi's makes no difference. Not when you remember the look of that stranger. You hope it all comes crashing down.

When Spinner comes crashing through. You escape to find a news team. Yes, one of the  villains  will find you but not before the world knows what this place has done to you and Aimi.

[aloneinthehellfire]

OMG OMG OMG if we get the bathroom scene for RH3 can we pleaaaaaase also get the following mall scene in Steve's pov too!!! 🙏🙏🙏 It's so sad but I am invested in finding out what is going through Steve's mind when he hears the gunshot!!!

whew, i wrote this in one sitting and relived jack's fate. no... no i am not okay

RAINING HELLFIRE (READER'S VERSION)

Word Count: 1751

Warnings: death, guns, very sad things my friends

Set in RH3: Chapter 12: Uncle Jack

Find all Raining Hellfire works here <3

Summary: The Scoops Troop are backed into a corner and Steve doesn't think there could be anything worse... until you're facing danger he can't protect you from.

[A/N: I threw in a little flashback because I didn't feel like I gave enough in this pov, so I hope you all enjoy or, at least, are okay with it]

RH3: THE GUNSHOT

We’re all going to die.

Is all that runs through Steve’s mind as he slips behind the counter. Robin, Dustin, and Erica, are right beside him, all panting heavy breaths as they sense the Russians creeping closer and closer.

Steve squeezes his eyes shut, lips tight. They wouldn’t be in this mess if he had just listened to them and gotten out when they had the chance. But he wanted to find you, to make sure you were okay.

“No!”

Someone yells out behind them and they turn to eachother with wide eyes. They didn’t sound Russian.

Steve slowly turns on his sneakers, still crouched down behind their last-minute hiding place. It wasn’t very effective considering their attackers saw them jump behind it. He’s about to poke his head up when Erica shakes her head violently, a stern look on her face. She was holding a lot of attitude for a ten year old.

So he looks to Dustin and Robin, both of their faces distraught with fear. And he decides not to risk it.

“Found you, American.”

They all freeze, eyes wide. The voice was too far away to be talking to them. Which only meant…

Four heads poke up from behind the counter almost immediately, searching. It was too late for them anyway, the plastic barrier not providing much comfort in an escape.

Steve’s eyes sweep the floor of Russian soldiers before his breath hitches, finding a pair of eyes lock with his. The eyes that always made an array of butterflies swim around, his heart beat deliciously faster. Your eyes.

And in front of you, a man with a ponytail is pointing a gun directly at your chest.

No, no, no, no, no. His mind repeated the same word over and over. He was prepared to jump over the counter, run to you. Scream, yell, do anything that might distract the man’s attention. Take the bullet if he had to.

And then he’s suddenly being tugged back down, a grip on his shirt that brought him to the floor, Dustin’s wide eyes staring down at him.

“What are you doing?!” Steve hisses quietly, already trying to scramble to his feet. Not without the strain of fighting of his friend with freakish strength.

“They’re already coming for us!” Dustin hisses back, shaking his head. “You’re gonna get killed!”

“I need to get to her.” Steve pants, hands already gripping the edge of the counter, ready to run.

“Steve.” Robin insists, wide eyed.

“No, I need to-”

And then the gunshot rings out.

And his heart drops fifty feet below.

There was a rush of noises behind them, some loud crash that had their hands flying to cover their ears, a loud scraping noise like metal against concrete.

Once it stopped, they slowly lower their arms and sit in silent shock.

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.

The silent screaming inside his head was endless. Steve doesn’t think he can move. It’s like this plastic counter was the only thing keeping him from reality. Like that thing Dustin always rambled about, the cat in the box. If he didn’t look, if he didn’t remove that blockade of thick plastic, then you weren’t dead. But you weren’t alive either.

Dustin’s eyes were already filled with tears and he realises he has to break his shield.

“Stay with Erica.” Steve says, placing a hand on his shoulder and standing on shaky legs. He turns around.

The place you once stood was no longer visible to him. There was a wreckage, a car laying on its side while a rubble of shop memorabilia lay scattered around it. Any remains of Russian soldiers were lifeless or non-existent. But his last worry was figuring out how the car ended up there.

Steve heard someone screaming and a chill ran down his spine. They were your screams.

His sneakers squeak harshly against the once polished floors, taking off like he was running track at full speed towards the wreckage.

He doesn’t start breathing until he sees you, very much alive. His heart is jumping at the sight, a silent relief washing over him.

But you’re crouched on the floor, tears streaming down your face with an agonising expression he’s never seen before. And that’s when he sees the body laying at your feet. He can tell by your cries alone that it’s exactly who he thinks it is.

The squeak of Robin’s shoes join him merely a second later, a gasp leaving his friend’s mouth as she sees you, covering her mouth.

Steve wanted to revel in the relief that you weren’t dead. But Jack was.

He remembers the first time he met him, way back in freshman year. You had been nervous, trying to find an excuse to study at his house instead. But Steve wanted to know you better, and he figured the best place to start was your house. Jack hadn’t showed up until later, looking very confused at the sight of a boy stood in your kitchen. He didn’t say much to him, a simple hello, a snide comment on the ‘Harrington boys’ but ultimately grabbing a beer and slinking off to his armchair in the living room. Your face had said it all, and Steve didn’t ever pressure you like that again.

Then there was that night. The one you don’t remember. How could you? You didn’t even know it had happened.

Sophmore year, and Steve had lost himself. It had tore you both apart by the end, Tommy and Carol attacking you with words Steve hadn’t bothered listening to. He had done that a lot, ignoring what his new ‘friendship’ were doing to you because it wasn’t affecting him. But as soon as you stopped showing up at his table, as soon as he heard nothing from you for days, he knew he had to do something. And so he did.

One night, he went to your house and looked for your window, hoping and praying that you’d talk to him. But before he could even find a safe way to climb up, the front door had opened and out stepped Jack, looking surprised.

“Sir.” Steve greets quickly, suddenly forgetting how he usually stood. He hadn’t expected to be caught.

“I don’t think you should be here, son.” Jack warns, not with a menacing tone but with enough authority to have Steve feel intimidated.

“I just need to talk to Y/n-”

Jack’s sigh cuts him off. The man closes the door gently and makes his way off the porch to stand in front of him, hands shoved into his coat pockets. Maybe he was off to work? You had mentioned before that he was taking shifts at the factory.

“Have you been talking lately?” He asks and Steve blinks. He was expecting something a little different than a conversation.

“Uh…” He frowns, shaking his head. “No, not really.”

“Was that her decision?” Jack questions further and Steve isn’t sure how to respond. But he doesn’t have to. “You need to leave.”

Steve’s eyes widen. “But-”

“If she doesn’t want to talk to you, then she doesn’t want to talk to you.” He says so matter of factly, Steve scoffs.

“How would you know?” He mutters before his breath hitches, looking back up in a panic. “I didn’t mean-”

“Just because I’m not there doesn’t mean I don’t know stuff.” Jack squints his eyes. “She is capable of making her own decisions when it comes to her life. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you ain’t been coming around here lately.”

“I just need to know what I did wrong.” Steve pleads, changing his tactic. But Jack’s expression doesn’t budge.

He simply shakes his head, walking around him. “You know. But until you’ve accepted what you did or what you’re doing, she won’t talk to you. Trust me, son.”

And then he leaves him stood there just like that, climbing into his truck and turning on the engine. But he doesn’t drive away. Steve knows he’s watching.

And he can’t explain it, but Jack’s words didn’t feel like a warning but instead advice. So, Steve turns around and heads back down the street, trying not to glance back at your window.

Jack’s truck only passes him by when he’s already turning off Maple Street, content in knowing Steve hadn’t gone back and forced you into a conversation you clearly didn’t want to have.

Even when you had thought Jack didn’t care, Steve had seen it all along. And he had helped him. That talk lingered in the back of his mind for a while, even more so whenever you were around him.

He had felt so proud showing Jack the man he had become after that night. When you and he were starting to become the best friends you once were again, and he joined you for dinners at your house, and he watched Jack gift you your first car… all of that made him feel safe. Made him feel like maybe, just maybe, he had someone to look up to. And his heart was happy knowing that you had someone you could trust, that loved you.

And now you were crying on the floor, sobbing into the chest of a lifeless ghost that once used to be your father.

Once Steve snaps out of his shock, he’s running to you, wrapping his arms around your shoulders.

“Y/n...”

He tries to pull you away from Jack’s body, but you fight back, trying to push him away. But he won’t let go. He knows he never could.

Your shoves turn into measly fists against his chest, the fight leaving you as quickly as it came. You bury your face into his chest, sobbing in his arms, and he feels his heart shatter against your broken frame.

“I’ve got you.” He whispered, his arms never loosening their hold on you as you cried, stroking your hair.

As you cried, his eyes squeezed shut, the sound alone too much for his soul to bear. He never wanted to hear it again, but he would be there if need be.

Jack took a bullet for you, and he died saving someone he loved. Steve hated seeing you in so much pain, a vow to himself that he’d never make you feel that way again. But in the end, it was hopeless.

He would take a thousand bullets if it meant you could live. Because there wasn’t really a life for him if you weren’t in it.

[instantbreplay]

HELLO!

I HAVE A THEORY! And this is a theory regarding the newest character of Honkai: Star Rail, the rootin’ tootin’, flamboyant, brash, and trigger happy space cowboy of the Galaxy Rangers—Boothill! This will be posted on both Tumblr and AO3 for those who do not have either or for easier access! By the way, this theory contains mentions of leaks and in-game content, so if you don't want to get any spoilers, I advise not to read this theory at all.

For starters, I will admit that I haven’t played Honkai: Star Rail in a while due to…whatever reason I had, and one of those reasons was because of Twisted Wonderland! I was playing that for a while—still am—I was having a blast insulting Ace and having aneurysms over the students’ antics and methods of breaking people out (I’m lookin’ at you, Rook). It was great! Then, Star Rail showcases two new characters on their Twitter page for their newest planet known as Penacony, one of them being Boothill who a lot of people were upset with due to them wanting the characters, Sam and/or Firefly who unfortunately met her demise in the newest update, and…well, I fell head over heels for him and started saving for him (122 PULLS WITH 20 PITY BABY BUT HE’S MY FIRST FEATURED CHARACTER SO PRAY FOR ME). I kept up with leaks because I could care less about gameplay, stat kit, and character lore leaks since that’s the interesting part and helps me figure out if I want the newest character…like my Al-Haitham theory which did not age well, this theory about Boothill does stem from exhaustion from not sleeping, but I feel like this is a more coherent and sound theory than the last, and I have to say that I have to take this with a grain of salt—and I advise the same for you—because it’s merely a theory. I can be wrong on certain things, but without ado, I’ll start with what really feels like the backbone of this theory, and that is Boothill’s name: Boothill.

The Name

So, just to give a little context, prominently in Asian media—most notably Japanese and Chinese entertainment from what I’ve seen as I played HoYo games and watched a lot of anime—characters tend to have name pun which correspond with their personality, physical design, talents, etc., to give people a little laugh and be like, “Ooooh! I get what they mean!” For example, Zhongli, in HoYoverse’s most popular game, Genshin Impact, written as 钟离 in simplified Chinese, is a pun of his departure—his retirement—as Rex Lapis: 钟 Zhōng being a homophone for the word for “clock” as it’s spelled exactly the same, while 离 Lí is a common word for “leaving” or “away”. Putting it together, it can be taken as “time of departure/leaving” or “off the clock” which foreshadowed Zhongli stepping down as Archon of Liyue.

With that knowledge in mind, I looked at Boothill's name and decided to Google it because I knew it was a pun of some sort! My only thought was that his name could have been a reference to a western (cowboy) film I never heard of which, to me, made sense as Boothill is modeled after stereotypical cowboys, and HoYo loves pop culture references with the Genius Invokation TCG which is a reference to the ever-so-popular card game, Yu-Gi-Oh, and how March 7th and Caelus made a reference to the movie, Fight Club, when the Moles were talking about the first rule of Fight Club…never talk about Fight Club! So, I thought Boothill was a nod to an old movie!

…No! A lot of people have already Googled it, but for those who probably don’t know, Boothill’s name comes from a burial grounds for gunfighters—with headstones engraved with the gunfighter’s name or “unknown” if the identity of the person has not been found—in the Old American West called a Boot Hill, and that name derives from the phrase “those who died with their boots on”, meaning that the gunfighter died rather violently. I did see someone say that the phrase could also mean that they were hanged, and that part is correct as the context of the expression changed in the early 19th century. However, I don’t believe that Boothill was hanged—although it is a possibility that I will keep in mind! Again, I have to take this theory with a grain of salt so I don’t die on that hill again, but seeing Boothill’s situation that he’s metal and wires from the chin down, he most likely died in a very extreme battle in the past since the only thing human about him…is his head!

His body must have been blasted to oblivion to where it was beyond saving, beheading him from the impact of whatever and whoever killed him. Now, some people may think that they probably just beheaded him or he was shot multiple times in the chest: other possibilities I will keep in mind, but that would mean he could have resulted as some kind of Frankenstein instead because if the body was still there, the Interastral Peace Corporation or IPC (the people who rebuilt Boothill) would use that since he has things to salvage like a heart or liver, etc., yet if we look at another Star Rail character named Luka who hails from the Underworld, he is missing an arm which is replaced with a mechanical one. That is because Luka saved a child in a fire involving a monster possibly from the Fragmentum, and his arm was chopped off by the ax the monster wielded, giving him the prosthetic he has today. So, if we compare Luka to Boothill in terms of how bad the conflict in Boothill’s past was, Boothill lost too much of his body from the chin down for the IPC to even save, leaving him with a full body prosthetic.

The Light Cone

Now, the question that we have…why was Boothill killed? Who could’ve had such a grudge against him that they killed him off so violently? Well, that is where his Light Cone description comes in. Let’s focus on the middle of the description where it states:

“Some cruel memories resurfaced as the unforgettable hatred turned into a weak light in the darkness.”

The Light Cone entirely describes when Boothill was regaining consciousness and how he felt while briefly in a limbo before being greeted by a doctor in the IPC. What sticks out are these “cruel memories” and this “unforgettable hatred” that he has which calls back to what happened before he died. I’ll lead into this with another point I have to make this make sense a little bit: Boothill is a bounty hunter. Why do I think this? Well, we get a glimpse of this in-game in the newest update of Star Rail where Black Swan answers the phone to a mysterious Pathstrider of the Hunt who is part of the Galaxy Rangers (a gang who “swore to punish the wretched by any and all means”) who is tracking down Acheron, ready to kill her for reasons unknown as of right now: that was Boothill who has been confirmed to be a Pathstrider of the Hunt along with him being a Galaxy Ranger as he calls Acheron an “imposter” who is also a Galaxy Ranger, most likely hinting that Acheron is going undercover and infiltrating the group. We also know it is him from his line, “My bullets will find you”, since he is a gunslinger with a bullet motif on his hat and actual bullets around his waist and one hanging from his left ear.

Going back to the point I made, he’s obviously smart with pinpointing someone’s location such as Acheron’s and having at least some information on her like her being an Emanator. His Path, the Hunt, is said to “admire determination, ruthlessness, and tenacious behavior”, which fits Boothill’s Light Cone description as well as his possible reason for his alliance with the Galaxy Rangers and why his finger is ready to shoot Black Swan if she was an ally of Acheron stating to “get [her] forehead clean…and wait for [him]”. A bounty hunter would have to be ruthless with their target, showing little to no emotion as they are the person they are after, the person who wronged their client or the bounty hunter themselves, and it is obvious that Boothill is determined to gather any info from Black Swan to continue his hunt with Acheron.

Now, with that in mind…Boothill had to have been a bounty hunter in the past who was wronged as he had “cruel memories” returning to his mind, and he had anger in his heart that was weakening but helped him return to the living world. If I were to guess, he may have had a loved one who died at the hands of someone else and gained the skills to become a bounty hunter in his previous life to hunt that person down because he had “unforgettable hatred”, and that had to be at a level where he couldn’t let go especially if he had “cruel memories”, and those could probably be that he watched that same loved one get brutally tortured and/or murdered in front of him. As to who the loved one of Boothill could have been, it could have been anyone: his father, his mother, a sister, brother, a best friend—Unfortunately, we do not have the information to determine that for sure, but I truly believe that it could be someone he was very close to that was tortured and/or killed for, again, reasons unknown.

The IPC

From what we gathered in the leaks and what HoYo has already established, it was the IPC that brought Boothill back with unknown intentions, but to me for this theory, it’s because of his skills as a bounty hunter since he must have been the best hunter wherever he came from. However, Boothill has a new grudge against the IPC as the his reveal information stated that, “His flamboyant and brash actions were all to draw the attention of the Interastral Peace Corporation — the target of his revenge.” The man is very flamboyant as we can holler back to his Ultimate, his skill…the freaking JoJo poses—

—(somebody in HoYo is a JoJo fan—IT'S BECOME INCREDIBLY CLEAR NOW) so I can see him causing havoc and being flashy to purposely attract their attention so he can properly get his revenge on them due to them making him into a cyborg which he isn’t happy about.

However…if I go back to the Light Cone description…at the very end, it said that Boothill “would no longer live for himself.” Sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? Here he is greeted by the doctor that saved him, and he’s clenching his new iron fists (literally speaking) because he knows what the IPC’s intentions are. If he’s no longer living for himself, that doctor would most likely have a sadistic tone when he welcomed him back because they experimented on him, testing him and his new body and using him for unspeakable things against his will, and why do I believe this?

Think back to Boothill’s gameplay and the leak of his gun’s range. That could be a reason, and a way I can describe it is by using Bucky Barnes, a.k.a. the Winter Soldier, in the MARVEL franchise. In the movie, Captain America: The First Avenger, Bucky was believed to be killed during a fall off a hijacked train in WWII in an attack against HYDRA, a sub-Nazi group led by the Red Skull, Steve becoming devastated by his best friend’s death. However, in Captain America: Civil War, it was revealed that Bucky was actually brainwashed, gaining a prosthetic arm (like Luka), and became a Super Soldier under HYDRA as they experimented to revive Dr. Erskine’s research for the original Super Soldier serum. Plus, HYDRA knew of his friendship with Steven Rogers and that Steve was alive but was going to expose S.H.I.E.L.D. for their lies, making him a threat. So, they trained and used Bucky as their line of defense since he was the only successful experiment that remotely compares to Captain America in strength and combat.

Because of Boothill’s skills in gunslinging, the IPC possibly saw this as an opportunity to have an effective line of defense in case something were to happen in their facility or if there was someone they needed to eliminate; they would have Boothill who had those qualifications to be their guard dog, but hearing how Boothill talks in-game for the first time, you could hear a hint of insanity in him as he keeps insisting that he will kill Acheron and Black Swan with lines such as “My bullets will find you”, “you best find a casket store on Penacony, and ask the owner to reserve a good quality casket for you”, “I’ll leave a round for you, so get that forehead clean and wait for me”, and “Are you askin’ me to write your will?” He wants to kill anybody who hurts him, still having that anger. That must have been how he felt when he was trapped in the IPC facility, going through experiment after experiment that broke him to the point that he couldn’t take it anymore as he is still human; he still has emotions and a mind of his own despite being 90% iron and wires.

Boothill knew, from the sound of that doctor’s tone, that he would be seen as their Super Soldier, a little toy they could dispose of if he was deemed useless; he was nothing but a heartless, soulless object to them which most likely broke him. Boothill has calmed down since his possible escape from an IPC facility and killing people in order to have a successful breakout, but he still has that pain inside his heart because of the possible abuse he faced that he’s trying to protect himself from being betrayed or used again which is why he’s so expressive and flamboyant.

He wants to live for himself and show the IPC just how human he was. However, he’s still showing off how strong he is as a warning to others of what he can do to them if they ever crossed him.

Now, I cannot stress enough that this is just a theory (A GAAAAAME THEORY), and I have to take this with a grain of salt because there is still a lot we don't know about Boothill regarding his past or his relationship with the IPC. Heck, a friend of mine and I believe that Boothill may not actually be his real name, but there's no evidence of his real name to even prove that point. This is all speculation, and what I gathered and thought about using any resources I have at my disposal to produce this, so please—for the love of the QUEEN OF HEARTS HERSELF—do not take this as actual, confirmed, or leaked information on Boothill's backstory since there are many unanswered questions. For now, I'll stick to what I got until Boothill is finally released!

And hopefully not die on that hill like I did with Al-Haitham...

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jerry Coyne

Published: Jan 7, 2024

Oops! Scientific American did it again, this time with an op-ed that could have been ripped from the pages of The Onion.  As is so common these days, the piece proposes that we change the language of science (astronomy in this case), since some of its terms are bad in four ways:

a.  They are violent, sexist, and triggering b. They are not “beautiful and elegant” like astronomy is, but grating; and they are “not kind” c.  They are non-inclusive, presumably helping keep minorities out of astronomy. d. They are untruthful and distort astronomy

In my view, none of these claims holds up, for the article is all Pecksniffian assertion with not a shred of evidence. Author Juan Madrid assumes the role of a bomb-sniffing dog, snuffling the field of astronomy for linguistic mines.

Click the headline below to read and weep, or find the piece archived here.  The author is identified this way (my link):

Juan P. Madrid is an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

The piece begins by describing a collision that will take place, 4 to 7 billion years hence, between the Milky Way and its closest galaxy, Andromeda.  Immediately the word “collision” is seen as triggering. One of Madrid’s students described the future collision instead as “a giant galactic hug.” But the person who sent me this link added this comment:

My wife says that if Andromeda doesn’t want the Milky Way to hug her then it’s interstellar sexual assault.

Indeed! But Madrid hastens to instruct us why using “collision” is not only grating, but misleading:

The kindness, but also the accuracy, of the language my student used was in sharp contrast to the standard description we use in astronomy to explain the final destiny of Andromeda and the Milky Way: “a collision.” But as astronomers have predicted, when Andromeda and the Milky Way finally meet, their stars will entwine and create a larger cosmic structure, a process that is more creating than destroying, which is what we envision when we use the term collision. A galactic hug is scientifically truthful, and it’s led me to believe that astronomers should reconsider the language we use.

First of all “collision” doesn’t mean “destroying”, but simply two objects hitting each other. In this case, two galaxies “collide”, but their stars are spread so far apart that they’ll simply merge into one big galaxy and star will not hit star.  You could say “merge” instead of “collide”, but that also implies that perhaps the stars will absorb each other.  If you want to convey the idea that “nothing gets banged up,” then, Madrid suggests using “galactic hug”. He actually wants astronomers, their classes, and their textbooks, to adopt this new, kind, and romantic term. (There are, of course, more salacious terms that could be used.)  But they won’t be because they sound dumb, and in fact “galactic hug” is just as inaccurate as the other terms, for “hug” implies that there is some mutual enfolding, when in fact, the entities merge and do not remain separate, as humans do when they have a (temporary) hug.  When Fred and Sue hug each other, they don’t merge into one person. . .

And so Madrid, combing the literature for other terms that are jarring and, he says, misleading, finds more, as of course he would. (You can do this in any field of biology, chemistry. or physics; all you need is a sufficiently diligent Pecksniff). I’ve singled out Madrid’s instances of bad language below by adding my own links, and putting those words in bold.

For instance, in galaxy evolution we invoke imagery strikingly similar to what you would expect if you were eavesdropping on Hannibal Lecter: words like cannibalism, harassment [JAC: no instance found],  starvation, strangulation, stripping or suffocation. There is a rather long list of foul analogies that have entered, and are now entrenched, in the lexicon of professional astronomy. We have grown accustomed to this violent language and as a community, we seldom question or reflect on its use. Strangulation is a particularly cringeworthy term in astronomy, referring to the decline of the number of stars born in some types of galaxies. This is a vicious crime where most often the victim is a woman; the perpetrator, a man. Yet, we use this word mindlessly to describe a slow astronomical process that takes millions of years. Under certain conditions, some galaxies use up or lose the gas that is the primordial ingredient to form stars. When that happens, galaxies make new stars at a lower rate. But these galaxies do not die or suffer great harm. They will continue to shine and will live their natural evolution. This is but one of many examples of violent language in our field that actually describes something gradual, slow and perhaps even gentle.

Madrid was savvy enough to impute misogyny to one of these terms: “strangulation”, giving some woke heft to his thesis. But if you look at how the terms are used, only someone who wants to be offended would be.  Moreover, they are not inaccurate. “Starvation“, for example, refers to something that cuts off the flow of gas that galaxies need for new star formation. I don’t find it inaccurate at all. In fact, none of these terms are inaccurate—what Madrid really objects to is that they are “triggering” and “unwelcoming”. He tries to sell his campaign to deep-six these terms as being “untruthful”, because he doesn’t want to look like an ideologue, but I’m not buying it. Also he allows “explosion” for the creation of a supernova, in most cases he finds this language “needlessly vicious and [promoting] inaccurate connotations.”

In short, Madrid finds this language triggering, for that’s the only explanation for why we should avoid this kind of “vicious” language.  And, as he says below,

The use of hypercharged words in our field ignores the fact that this violent imagery can trigger distress in colleagues who might have been victims of violence.

But there are two points to be made here. First, as I noted in a recent post, giving the relevant studies, “Trigger warnings don’t work” and can even cause more trauma. There is no evidence that using this sort of language somehow harms the students. In fact, the remedy for those who are traumatized by certain words is not to avoid exposure to them, but to learn to not be upset when you are exposed. There is therapy for this.

Second, as is so often the case in these screeds, Madrid gives no examples of how the “bad language” upsets people. He should be able to produce at least a dozen cases on the spot, like “Jane got upset and left the class when she heard the word ‘strangulation'”, or “Bob reported Professor Basement Cat to the university for using the term  ‘cannibalism’ on the astronomy exam, which, he said, made him think of the Donner Party and prevented him from completing the exam.”  In nearly all of these language-policing articles, there is a surfeit of outrage and a dearth of examples or evidence of harm.

But Madrid circumvents the lack of evidence and simply suggests ways that we can censor this language, again pretending he’s interested mainly in scientific truth:

To shift toward more welcoming and truthful language in astronomy, scientific journals can push to change the currently accepted language. The referee, or the scientific editor, can ask the authors to consider more appropriate descriptions of the physical processes involved. Referees, editors and editorial boards can step up to enforce scientific accuracy and stop the use of violent, misogynistic language that is now pervasive. This is a call for scientific precision. The use of hypercharged words in our field ignores the fact that this violent imagery can trigger distress in colleagues who might have been victims of violence.

“Can”, “could have”, “might have”. Where are the examples of this? The sweating professor gives none. And isn’t it amazing that the more accurate language is always the kinder language?

And, as expected, Madrid manages to drag race, inclusion, and diversity into his discussion, even though none of the terms above have anything to do with race. And this belies his faux concern mainly for scientific accuracy:

As astronomers, we must strive to create a more inclusive and diverse community that reflects the composition of our society. Valuable efforts to provide opportunities for women and minorities to succeed in astronomy have been created. However, by many metrics, the progress made towards gender equality and true diversity has been painfully slow. We must listen to the new generation of astronomers. My student showed me that while some astronomical processes can be intense, the universe revealed through astronomy provides us with the most fascinating sights known to humankind. Like many other young scientists, she thinks that when we explain astronomical phenomena with wording and phrases that share our excitement and appreciation, it also encourages others to join in and wonder what else we can discover together. The universe is beautiful, elegant and ever-changing. Astronomy would be wise to follow its lead.

And so, in the end, we see that this kind of misguided effort, concentrating on words rather than science itself, is part of the corruption that has entered science via DEI and its ideology.  What we have is one more attempt to control thought by controlling language.

There is no evidence that minorities and women are being kept out of astronomy because they don’t find its language “inclusive,”, though that’s really the thesis of Madrid’s piece.  But the very idea that this thesis is true is laughable. Promoting the idea that galaxies hug each other is not going to bring people pouring into astronomy.

Once again Scientific American, trying to ride the woke bandwagon, has fallen off the train. Blame not only the author, but the editor, who actually approved this nonsense.

==

These people are fucking lunatics.

[calliedion-dungeon]

𖤐Hot Cherry Bomb

Third part of Dark Lipstick

Cardinal Copia/ Reader Fem/V

Word Count: 3.8k

Summary: Once you, and everyone at the ministry, realized what you have become, some proposals and concerns come to light, but your secret relationship with Copia is being threatened by your condition, because it means not being with him or death.

Warnings: +18 MDNI, Smut, with a demon, Design inspired in Callie Maggotbone (Ugly Americans, S1 E5 "Treegasm")

Picture @DjevelensWolfe

Weeks after Copia’s accidental summoning, you both have been more open about your desires for each other, at least in his case, he started to make you small gifts, being blatantly attentive to you, his eyes always fixated in your figure when you’re near, excited like a puppy, he follows you everywhere, never asking for anything in return for his attentions, only waiting for your eyes to meet his and if you smile at him, specially at something he said, that’s enough for the enamored Cardinal to feel light-headed, he’s addicted to the sound of your laugh which rings in his mind and keeps looking for opportunities to keep you interested on him.

You both have talked many times that there will be nothing that you won’t allow, he’s happy to have you around and let it be known that he adores you. But in these weeks, with the changes that have occurred to your body, things have complicated for you, you don't know how this new phase works, you fear that if you let your desires out as you would like, he could get hurt, in which way? You had heard horrible stories about how demons, or half demon in your case, can be too much for a human, even killing them in the heat of passion, added to the heat that burns you from time to time, especially if you think about him too much, sometimes you even feel sick, you need him in front of you, you want to be in his mind, make him squirm under you, the heat crashes you again making your skin look deep pink wishing that his freckled skin rubs against you…

“Y/N? Are you listening to me?” Sister Imperator questions you, standing arm-crossed and raising an eyebrow. She knows you haven’t heard her in a while now. You look to the people around you at the table, these meetings have been arranged to discuss how are your advances in your new state, to gather information about how to deal with it in the safest way possible.

“I’m sorry, ma’am” you can only fidget with the hem of your dress, looking down “Could you repeat that, please?”

“Ironically, you just answered what I asked you, I was asking you if you had trouble concentrating because of your change” she’s way more patient than you give her credit for when you first met her.

When the change occurred in your body, you were not sure who to turn to exactly, you did know that in the ministry they would know what to do, but who? The ghouls were the ones who ratted you out before you could seek help on your own, the Cardinal didn't think your change meant much so he didn’t tell anyone, but apparently it did, and that's what's been scaring you about yourself, Sister Imperator was worried that you were having sex with everyone, since creatures like you are famous for being insatiable and many times when they do not get what they want they become violent, since then they have had interviews with you and some ghouls present, more than anything to know if what you say is true, because although they are at ease with you being unproblematic, they’re not reassured that you repress yourself is the way to go either.

The curious eyes of the Ghouls from different eras are on you, you know they are talking about you, one or the other raises their nose to smell something in you, you squeeze your thighs thinking the worst, they say things in each other's ears and smile showing their fangs, when It was discovered that you were the descendant of a high-ranking demon, they hovered around you like bears and you were covered in honey, you even hear them grunt in their chests, they’re curious what could be like to be with someone like you, it just baffles them a little more that you haven't been with any of them yet, for satiate your appetite even if it is. But you don’t have appetite for them, you’re not sure if anyone there knows that the one you crave for it’s only one man, you may be horny 25/8, but you don’t have the desire to fuck everyone, that’s different and you don’t dare to say that, because it’s none of their business.

“Why do you hold yourself back, sister?” you can't tell which girly-voiced ghoul is talking to you, so you answer without looking up at first, swallowing hard.

“I’m not a sister, and… I” you look around you “I’m not holding back; I try to satisfy myself…” but it’s not enough, you know that, you can masturbate more than 10-15 times a day, which you have done, and the only thing you achieve is that you can only think things a little better for a short time, because the desire returns and rises like the tide, especially at night, when you expect Copia to summon you again.

“You’re repressing yourself; we can see it because your transformation it’s not done” one of the ghouls remarks in a very calm tone, the corpulent ghoul that sits beside you, he was one of the few who looked less interested in flirting with you than the newer ones.

“It’s not?” your defeated words resonate in the room; you ask yourself what else need to be done?

“I just want to point out that, there’s steam coming out of you, are you hot?” a young-looking ghoul points above your head, you notice the steam coming from your head and pulse points.

“No, well, yes but I can’t feel it” as if it was a concern that you could burn it all, you know you can, but hasn’t happened yet “I just need to cool down or I’ll burn my clothes again” you grab a folder nearby to fan your face.

“Well, hello fellow fire element” the ghoul to the right of the first ghoul who speaks to you tells you in a flirtatious and unashamed tone. A couple share the laugh, you can’t find what’s funny about it.

“I believe that’s another thing, we… fear that suppressing who you are might lead to dire consequences” Sister finally breaks her silence, you’ve never seen her so quiet about a thing, it’s obvious the ghouls would know more about your kind, you fear maybe she even might think about binding you or worse… vanishment.

“Like?” fearful of asking, your voice gets lower, remembering the time you almost rip Copia’s tongue out with your teeth because you get too excited while kissing or the several times you burnt your clothes or his because you want to hold him so much, at least you didn’t seriously hurt him and you won’t wait for it to happen.

“We don’t know, but hell fire is not something to play with” like you needed more reasons to be scared of being near your dear Copia, your eyes can’t even water properly as your tears evaporate as soon as they touch your skin and your pitch black eyes don’t let be seen that you want to cry.

“Please, I need to be excused, can we talk another day?” Seeing you all so down, they leave you for the moment, you stay outside the office for a few seconds until all the ghouls come out after you, some say goodbye to you, but you don't listen to them.

Hell fire. Nobody ever told you that was a possibility, only the sex drive part, of course everybody remembers that, yes, your libido has been the first sign of your change, but it doesn’t make you mad, it’s only when you think of Copia when it sky rockets your desire, it’s not anybody, and your priority it’s his safety, maybe you can do stuff from a distance, unable to touch, that’s the saddest thought.

“You know” someone says behind you near your ear “You might be able to control it if you let go just one time” a short ghoul appears in front of you, his grin shows off his fangs, you recognize he’s the one that said he’s a fire ghoul, maybe he’s interested in burning all with you.

“And if you want to… you know ‘let go’ you can’t hurt us, so it’ll be okay” a very slanky ghoul says as he makes air quotes, their offer comes from their natural curiosity, not many high rank demons can be in men realm because of how dangerous and vicious they can get, so compared to them you’re practically harmless.

“Unlike if you try with a human, just a thought, take it into consideration, gorgeous, if you don’t want to burn anybody alive, of course” your face must have given your disdain away, they can sense that not even for morbidity does it attract your attention, you only politely smile and walk away annoyed.

You rather be chained up with crucifixes than even think to be with somebody else, you have to look for all the options, walking along a stone path to get away from everyone, thousands of possibilities go through your overwhelmed mind, you just want a little silence, you have in mind to enter the gardens and beyond, before you can disappear from everyone's sight, a beautiful voice calls you, the one you can't resist.

“Y/N! I’ve been looking for you…” you hug him tightly, cutting his words, nuzzling on his neck taking his scent in, not his cologne, your nose can surpass that in his skin, his nerves, his sweet blood running through his veins, you open you pitch black eyes noting what are you doing to stop yourself once more.

“I’ve missed you” you say in a tone sexier than you expected, his face completely flustered and out of words, you’re not sure what you did, and yet, you have him whimper close to you “These meetings are such a drag” you change the subject, Copia blinks awaken from your spell.

“That I know about” he smiles sweetly to you “You haven’t told them?” He extends his hand indicating that you walk together, you lead the way through the bushes and trees that surround you, already making you feel more relaxed.

“About what exactly?” you ask feeling his gaze upon you, you try not to look at him so you don't get distracted by your desires again, even avoiding taking his hand just in case the glove it’s not enough to protect him.

“The summoning and that I did it, and what we are” both of you have avoided adding those details to whoever knows about your condition, just because you fear they will take him away from you or have more people from the clergy watching over both of you constantly.

“I don’t know why should I” you try to discard the thought and by your mannerisms he does too.

“Have you discovered something new?” his sheepish smile raises your spirit for a second, just before you remember the outcome of the meeting, he awaits your answer patiently as you hesitate.

“A few things…” when you say it you speed up the step towards an abandoned chapel.

“Bad things?” the Cardinal asks you following you around the stone brick building reclaimed by the forest decades ago.

“Definitely not good” accepting out loud feels worse than you imagined "Apparently the reason I'm always steaming and burning things is because my element is fire and I can only control it if... I let myself go. But if that happens, I can hurt whoever is near me" you swallow hard, battling the knot in your throat.

“Oh… that’s is indeed not good” He takes you by the arm when he sees you so distraught, turns you so that you can see him face to face and looks for your gaze, lifting your chin with a gloved hand.

“Unless” your voice comes out with more grace and charm than you would like.

“Yes?” he doesn’t let go of your chin holding you softly.

“Unless it’s a creature who can endure, like… a ghoul or any other type of demon, so…” you divert your eyes down, his face changes, you look to him to find just the thing you feared the most, hurting him and not in the physical way.

“So…? Do you want to be with…?” he mumbles, his voice barely audible.

“No!” You meet his lost stare, at least in that you’re sure as the sun is round “Our options are reduced to do things from a distance, I think… Or…”

“Thanks Lucifer…” he smiles relieved, expecting a favorable answer from you.

“We should accept this is too risky for you and just end this as it is” you drop your thought unsure and unwittingly.

“No, cara, I’ve waited for you my whole life, I can’t…. please don’t ask me this” it’s unbearable to see him like that, you’re even almost completely turned off for once. He takes your hands into his, kissing them as he whimpers miserably.

“I can’t either…” with your eyes constantly evaporating your tears he can only gaze at your swollen nose and the sound of your sobs to notice that you’re also sad “but this, I know this isn’t how we expected things to be, but I would not forgive myself is I accidentally summon hell fire and…”

“Hell fire? Like the fire the ghouls make?” he jolts when he hears what you said, somehow that captured his attention, his sadness receding.

“Maybe, maybe something stronger, I don’t know much about these things” you try to understand his reaction because he holds you in his arms and he seems happier, brushing his fingers on your cheeks tenderly.

“I do know…” he chuckles before closing the gap between you two, even when his lips are not a strange sensation over yours, you’re surprised by him kissing you eagerly. Against your wishes, you try to push him away slowly.

“My love, please we shouldn’t… remember last time? I burnt your cassock” you remind him what happened the first time you both tried to be together, when you burned his black cassock by swirling too much on his chest for pulling it to take it off and your blouse ended up totally scorched.

“It’s the black one anyway, it’s not noticeable” he grazes his lips over yours when he couldn’t reach you, he held you tightly by the waist, it was difficult, the heat was raising up again.

“Copia, please…” you whine not letting him go.

“Am I bothering you?” his tone shows concern, for a second he fears he’s been too persistent.

“No, that’s the problem, I can’t refuse you, so please, don’t ask me anything” Your words partly do reflect what you say, because you have him very well gripped by the neck and you had not noticed how close you are to each other, feeling your hearts gallop next to each other, your agitated breaths mixing, his is so sweet that it drives you crazy to eat him whole.

“Let go… Y/N” you widen your eyes, suddenly scared, but you know you don’t want anything else.

“I can’t…” you whisper to his face as you lower your hands down to keep them flat on his chest.

“You’re scorching hot” He brushes his nose against yours smiling, bringing your foreheads together.

“Did I hurt you?” you exclaim pushing him back you he doesn’t let you.

“No, but look…” in his red cassock you can see your hands marked on the cloth, as if he had left the iron on for too long, the shiny hands on his chest make you jump slightly.

“Shit! I’m so sorry…” your apologies fall into deaf ears, he laughs charmingly, he kisses you on both cheeks.

“Don’t be, please” he says happier than you expect him to be, he lets go of you and begins to unbutton his cassock quickly, just then you notice he’s not wearing the biretta.

“Don’t take it off, Copia it’s your only protection” shocked by what he is doing, you put your hands to try to stop him, but you do not exert much force because in a short time he is left only in pants and a shirt that he wears underneath, your concern increases, or rather the tide of heat that is approaching when you see he begins to unbutton his shirt.

“Look at me” says the sweet cardinal patiently “Y/N, look at me” You look carefully at his open shirt, his exposed chest lightly covered with hair, a mark stands out, something that at first seemed like a group of moles under his collar bone, they form a series of spiral numbers, it's not a tattoo, it's the mark, the real one, when you look at it you run your fingers over it unable to believe it, you knew that he was special, the only one for you, but this goes beyond what you could ever have guessed.

“Is this?” you’re so pleasantly surprised, your worries melt down, at least most of them.

“Yes. You can’t hurt me, amore” he excitedly says “I was made for this, just like you”

Without waiting for a single second, you pounce on him without fear of hurting him with your sharp fangs on his neck, you greedily lick the vein in his neck up to his lobe, he gasps in your ear, while you feel his fingers digging into your thighs, teasing the thin fabric of your underwear making an effort to pull them down, he then smiles at you tenderly, lost looking at your face, brushing his finger on your lower lip, thrilled that he doesn’t have to imagine how it feels like to be with you anymore, while you palm his chest looking once or twice at the mark, you slowly try to lick his finger but you feel something different, a little scared, you touch your own tongue, which feels forked in two, you look up at the Cardinal who looks at you fascinated, it means it's working already.

He closes the space between the two of you to give you a rough kiss, his teeth collide with yours and your tongue finds the most hidden corners of his mouth, you sigh through your nose and hot steam comes out along with a moan that rumbles in your throat.

He parts from you to finish taking off his clothes, you only half lower the top of your dress and half raise your skirt and kick your panties away, then he takes you by the waist to place you against a stone brick wall behind you, takes your thighs and he lifts you up without saying a word, you just feel his sweet breath on you, he growls when he feels you open and wet for him. You grab him by the neck tightly and force your heels into his butt cheeks to make him slide inside you, as he does you both roll your eyes in anticipation.

“Sei più delizioso di quanto potessi immaginare” he moans with his eyes closed pinning you against the wall with his desperate thrusts.

“Copia… you feel so good, please…”

Something interrupts you again, you feel that something has fallen to the ground, he follows your gaze and feels something dangling between his legs, he tries to capture it with one hand, but it escapes him, he doesn’t let go of you to look for it, you feel a pressure in your lower back and make a little effort, that is then when a pink hairless tail lifts up to your shoulder, feeling your own skin brushing against itself, you smile mischievously wrapping the tail around his neck, naturally having control over it.

“Don’t stop” you command him, needy as he is, he thrusts into you mercilessly.

You knew that the months of waiting would help you not need a foreplay to start strong, along with your condition, nuzzling on your neck he gives all his energy to make everything that he had been saving for you come true, as your moans get louder so does your heat that begins to burn around both of your bodies, as he said, he’s unharmed, he sees you so wild growling thanks to the perfect rolling of his hips hitting the right spot, you were also starving for his body which makes  your moans become a screech.

The tension inside you builds up, losing yourself each second you can’t help but scratch his shoulders cutting his skin and lapping up the blood that your claws have drawn, he doesn’t stop thrusting, on the contrary he does so faster.

“Mia bella serpente, mia bella tentazione” his voice broken by his effort makes you tremble within the little that you can still move “Ti voglio così tanto”

“Copia, no puedo más, no me sueltes! Me quemo!” your desperate screams echo for miles around, lost in your own pleasure, you don't quite know how you can speak, while the pressure in your head finally escapes in the form of screams and fire that consumes everything around you, and as Copia said, he is intact.

Violent bluish flames envelop you both, while he also has an orgasm and screams along with you like a possessed man, you bite his shoulder a little hard, marking your teeth on his tender skin now full of bruises, blood and freckles, a delicious spectacle in your opinion, you didn't know you had that in you.

The tree that was erected above you, catches fire like your blood and your skin that are boiling, you don't know how many minutes pass until your flames calm down and the screams were silenced by kisses, he joins your foreheads together, but something hits him, the pressure on your head and the infernal fire have ended up exposing the horns that you should always have, your crescent-shaped horns ignited the fire that consumed the tree and marked your body shape into the wall, burning the leaves and the ivy that once was behind you could see it when he helped you down and you both saw how the dark marks on the wall had the shape of your torso and your buttocks, you both laughed a little at that, but not so much at the tree, you quickly put on your clothes to go to ask for help to put out the fire, while you run together he takes you by the hand and smiles at you.

“I hope at least it was worth of your liking, cara” he stops for a second to kiss your hand, you let him do, but immediately you resume your running.

“Did I liked it you ask?” you laugh “My dearest Copia, this is just the beginning…” you smile at him showing your forked tongue.

[sharpteethdirtyclaws]

Musing about Sigma interactions and lore

I’m just going to make a few points about Sigma that can be seen via his interactions to actually give some evidence on how this dude is living his best neurodivergent life and he’s not actually helpless, brainwashed or incoherent.

“Sigma is brainwashed!! Talon is keeping him trapped!”

Counter: The Baptiste and Soldier 76 interactions

Baptiste: You’re strong enough to leave Talon. They can’t trap you.

Sigma: But I am not trapped! My colleagues give me everything I need.

The man can literally control gravity. Gravity is something that can genuinely crush a person very easily. If he really wanted to leave Talon, he could just do it. I know he just throws rocks at folks but your blood flow and bones work properly in normal gravity. If he really wanted to, he could just increase the gravity where you are standing to the equivalent of Jupiter’s and your bones would break as you got slammed to the ground.

You kind of see that Sigma is tired of explaining that he’s actually fine with Talon in the Soldier 76 interaction:

Soldier 76: Snap out of it, old man. Talon is using you.

Sigma: An ant on the ceiling! Where are you going, little friend?

Soldier 76: Hey, I’m talking to you!

Sigma: Oh there’s another one. What delightful creatures.

“Sigma doesn’t know what’s happening!! His brain is broken!! He doesn’t know what’s going on around him!!”

Counter: Origin story; Cassidy, Reaper, and Moira interactions

Sigma is made up of three states and thus it’s important to observe all of them. There is:

Brilliant scientist state

Confused and mostly catatonic state

Aggressive and violent state

In the gameplay, you see the scientist and aggressive state and he’s quite coherent. He talks to folks and responds in a manner that makes sense. However when people listen to him talk, their first reaction is that it’s nonsense babble. But when you actually understand what is occurring in his brain, his wording, descriptions, and such are actually quite logical. For this, I bring up the Cassidy interaction:

Sigma: An American cowhand? Has this dimension shifted timescales?

The key thing I want to point out that he says “this dimension” not “the dimension”. It’s specifically this dimension. 

Black holes have been theorized that, due to the immense amount of gravity, they could be punching a hole into space time. This means that they could potentially be ways into other parts of the universe but also other universes.

Sigma using that specific terminology of dimensions implies that he could perhaps be experiencing our universe and other universes at the same time. The greek symbol that he is named after is often used to say “sum”, meaning the addition of multiple things to make one thing. This name is likely for his multiple states but also could be that he’s experiencing multiple dimensions at once.

This is also stated in the Reaper interaction:

Reaper: This time, stay focused, old man.

Sigma: How can one focus when viewing the infinite universe?

This actually could be a reason as to why he hears a melody. Perhaps the universe or all the universes actually have a sound when you are observing it all at once.

And this is perhaps why he asks questions that sound like nothing to an outsider.

“Can a grain of sand differentiate between heap and not-heap?”

“Can one know that one knows nothing?”

“Can a fish that never sees the surface know it’s underwater?”

He’s the only person that can see the entire beach while also being a grain of sand. He not only knows the surface but also what is occurring above water. He says these things to try to explain how the listener doesn’t actually know what’s going on.

And to be quite honest, the fact that he’s quite coherent and responsive while experiencing this 24/7 is actually quite astounding. And it also makes that ant on the ceiling distraction even better because he was able to observe something that small while having all of that occur in his brain. Not only that, he goes into battle as well. That’s incredibly difficult to do. The man absolutely knows what’s going on most of the time.

And if he zones out on occasion, it’s incredibly understandable because human brains aren’t built for experiencing things like this. 

[mademoiselle-red]

This is a really fascinating article about how western translators and Vietnamese diaspora authors sometimes unwittingly fetishize the Vietnamese language due to their lack of education and exposure to it in contexts beyond their scope of knowledge and experience. It also speaks to a larger phenomenon of Asian languages being perceived as exotic by both non-Asians and the Asian diaspora in the west.

This article reminds me of a conversation I once had with a Chinese friend who said something along the lines of: “Chinese is a more poetic and subtle language, while English is more precise, structured, explicit.”

I was initially very confused because I’ve read a lot of poetic English prose and a lot of technical instruction manuals in Chinese.

And then I realized the problem: because Chinese is his native language, he is able to express himself more poetically and subtly should he chose to do so. Because he isn’t quite fluent in English, he tends to express himself in a precise and straightforward manner to efficiently get his point across, structuring his sentences as he’d been taught in his English-as-a-second-language classes.

Some people have a tendency to conflate the limits of their linguistic abilities in a language with the limits of the language itself. There are certainly untranslatable words and phrases, and no translation from one language to another can faithfully replicate the layers of meaning, sound, and nuance of the original. Every translation is an interpretation. But sometimes, translation eludes us because we suck at the language, and it’s okay to admit that! It’s ok to admit that we may sometimes have a naive approach to the language because of our limited exposure to it!

I have heard variations of the sentiment Ocean Vuong expresses in this interview with the New York Times, for example, from quite a few of my second-generation Chinese-American friends too:

“Cause in the Vietnamese context—and it might be similar to Chinese—words are like spells. If you talk about death, death visits you, so you don’t talk about death at the dinner table. There’s a lot of taboo around speech and how it brings forth the darkness. […] Chinese and Vietnamese culture is so much older than America. And I think, in this sense, America is still immature. I would argue that the way it renders and handles language is still quite primitive for a nation and a culture that has so much technological prowess. It’s actually quite archaic in how it imagines the capacity of language, and, and in this sense, Chinese and Vietnamese culture are way ahead, both in the time line, but also culturally, in their wisdom.”

For many of my second generation Chinese-American friends, Chinese is an elusive, and sometimes mysterious language seemingly full of ancient wisdom. It remains a “magical” language for them, probably because for them, it is not the language of legal disclosures, celebrity gossip, and dry philosophy texts in translation.

I had shared some of that belief in the “ancient wisdom” of Chinese too, until I started understanding the bawdy sexual innuendos in Tang Dynasty Chinese poetry, until I came across a sub-genre of Song Dynasty poems about cats (one poet wrote a series of poems about his white cat named “Snow”, who was apparently very fluffy and warm to cuddle with under the blankets in winter 😻), until I came across trashy Ming dynasty romances (mass produced and marketed towards bored & cloistered women).

As for cultural taboos around using violent metaphors, I don’t know anything about Vietnamese, but contemporary Chinese slang seems to have less regard for these old taboos. 我要死了 “I am dead” is often used on the internet to express an intense fannish emotional reaction to something. X会杀了我的 “X is going to kill me (if I did Y)” means exactly what it says on the tin. And finally, “开抢” in the sichuanese Chinese dialect means “to shoot with a gun” but actually means “to say something”. To begin a conversation in Sichuanese is to shoot at each other. How lovely.

Sometimes the curtain is just blue, and a cigar is just a cigar.

[swingleftnewsjunkie]

At CPAC over the weekend, right-wing columnist and podcaster Michael Knowles told the assembly, “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” The crowd erupted in applause. Like many crises today, this escalation of rhetoric by the right is both a five-alarm moment and entirely, terrifyingly predictable. 

News organizations and activists denounced the statement as genocidal in its language and intent, and there is no doubt that it was, even though Knowles now denies it. After all, you can’t have transgender people without transgenderism, and one need only substitute another “-ism” to see why: “Judaism must be eradicated from public life” also means exactly what it sounds like.

How should we interpret Knowles’s horrific pronouncements? And why is the right targeting trans people in particular and at this moment? 

It’s admittedly difficult to talk about “genocide” in America without being dismissed as having a Cassandra complex, so let’s turn to history as a useful and distressingly on-point guide in this case. Let’s also examine the recognized societal indicia that tip nations into violent and hellish “final solutions.” 

Upgrade to paid

Attacks on trans identity kicked off German extremism

Those warning of the dangers of genocidal language deployed openly against an entire community have some disturbing history on their side. When Hitler rose to power as German chancellor in 1933, he enacted policies to rid the country of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” His targets included Jews, Roma people, disabled people and communists—but also specifically homosexuals and transsexuals.

We hear echoes of “lives unworthy of living” in the rhetoric of the right today. Radical podcaster and columnist for the Daily Wire, Matt Walsh, who has amplified Knowles’s attacks, recently told his listeners that he would rather be dead than have a trans kid. Knowles himself has argued on his podcast (which until recently he co-hosted with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)) that words like “genocide” do not even apply in the first instance, because being trans “is not a legitimate category of being.”

While many are familiar with haunting images of the first book burnings in Germany, which took place in May of 1933, most aren’t fully aware of their origin story.From https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa4530

The books and texts that provided the fuel for that first bonfire came from the library of the Institute for Sexual Research, founded in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay, Jewish doctor. As Scientific American notes, the Institute was “full of life everywhere” and provided incredible and groundbreaking gender affirmation care to trans individuals. Its mission was to provide a center for “research, teaching, healing and refuge” that could “free the individual from physical ailments, psychological afflictions and social deprivation.”

In other words, the first book burning in Germany, which led to copycat bonfires around the country, was an attack on a trans care institution. There are echoes of this today: The far-right has specifically chosen to target trans care centers in America, including repeated bomb threats to Boston Children’s Hospital, for providing gender affirming medical care. 

Yes, a call to eradicate “transgenderism” is a call for genocide

When news organizations such as Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast ran headlines that Knowles had called for transgender people to be eradicated, Knowles called the headlines libelous and had his PR department at the Daily Wire threaten to sue for mischaracterizing his statement. Knowles insisted he wasn’t calling for the eradication of people, just an ideology. (Rolling Stone responded by changing its headline to an even better one: “CPAC Speaker Calls for Eradication of ‘Transgenderism’ — and Somehow Claims He’s Not Calling for Elimination of Transgender People.”)

Dangerous semantics aside, even if we were to look at Knowles’ statement as a call to eradicate an “ideology”—which of course logically would mean the eradication of the practice of transitioning and therefore the eradication of all trans people—we very quickly run into problematic history. As author Brandon Friedman notes, 

In fact, during the six years of Hitler’s dictatorship prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, as the Holocaust Encyclopedia cited by Friedman notes, Jews felt the effect of 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of their public and private lives. This is what it meant in real terms to “eradicate Judaism” from society. Similarly, in America the internment of Japanese Americans began with the freezing of bank accounts, a curfew past sunset and sharp restrictions on travel.

Today, that same dire historical pattern could not be clearer. So far this year alone, there have been over 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills proposed, some of which are now signed into law, with a particularly cruel emphasis upon trans identity and trans kids. As trans rights activist Erin Reed observes, such legislation is surfacing in a majority of states in the country: 

In sum, the push to eradicate “transgenderism” and erase trans people is in fact already fully underway in much of the country.

We are on the doorstep of something truly terrible. But we can turn back.

Genocide Watch lists the 10 stages that that historically lead to genocide. Importantly, the group writes, “At each of the earlier stages there is an opportunity for members of the community or the International Community to halt the stages and stop genocide before it happens.”Image from https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/what-is-genocide/the-ten-stages-of-genocide/

As LGBTQ+ activist Alyssa McKenzie notes in a powerful thread, we have already gotten to eight of these steps with respect to the trans community:

This is why it is so vital, at this moment, for us to understand where we are in historical terms and what we must do to protect vulnerable minorities like the LGBTQ+ community. We must do so not only for their sakes, but because we know that this kind of hatred and targeting is a test: If the far-right can drive a wedge and cause a majority of the population to turn away from one vulnerable community, either through indifference or pure fatigue, then it also knows the country is susceptible to other forms of autocracy, madness and violence. 

Our first obligation as citizens of a free and, yes, liberal democracy is to guarantee the full participation of every member, and not ever allow demagogues and hate-mongers to silence any part of it, whether they call any of us communists, “woke,” or queers. We are not without power in the face of these attacks. We can lift up trans voices, call out trans hate, oppose anti-trans legislation, offer trans sanctuaries and donate to organizations fighting on the front lines.

The same right wing groups have already come not only for LGBTQ+ people but for women’s reproductive rights, for minority voting rights, and for press and academic freedoms. So this isn’t a drill. We know from history where this could lead if we fail to take a stand now.

The main difference between pre-war Germany and America today is that we have the benefit of their painful, devastating history. Our duty is to demonstrate that we have learned those vital lessons. When we hear that “trans rights are human rights,” we must not only concur loudly and with all our voices, but actively identify and teach the terrible mistakes from the past so that we never repeat them.

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By Jay Kuo

The Status Kuo provides political and legal analysis in plain English, with no paywall! In crazy times, a little clarity goes a long way. Subscribe to get my email sent to your inbox. And if you’d like to be a voluntary paid supporter, I thank you!

[supernaturaltropecelebration]

Captain Oblivious and The Dense-as-Dirt Cowboy

Author: @howtumblrruinedmylife Artist: @solstheimart Pairing: Dean/Castiel Rating: Explicit Word Count: ~30500 Tropes: friends-to-lovers, AU, slow burn, no supernatural, first time, John Winchester’s A+ parenting, no internalized homophobia, just very oblivious boys in love, hurt/comfort, idiots in love Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Tags: side pairing: Sam/Eileen; addiction, alcoholism, descriptions of addictive behavior, description of the aftermath of a car accident, death of a family member (off screen, non-violent)

Summary:

A new neighbor moves into the house next to Dean’s and before he can say so much as ‘hello’, Cas has crashed right into his life, carved out a spot for himself and Dean can’t imagine it any other way. Cas is probably the best friend Dean has ever had, and since Dean’s life also includes Charlie, that means a lot. It doesn’t stop a lot of people from asking weird questions, though, and at some point, Dean has to face the simple fact: why does everyone assume they are gay?

Excerpt below the cut

“Don’t tell anyone,” Dean says, grinning conspiratorially, “But they all just want to scope you out.” Of course they all mean well and Castiel probably knows all of this, but. “Welcome to Wisteria Lane,” he adds, laughing.

“Is that what you’re doing, too?” Castiel— Cas asks, squinting at Dean, and his straightforwardness is kind of disarming and charming at the same time.

“Oh, always,” Dean admits with a wink, leaning into it. “I’m just brutally honest about it upfront.”

Slowly, Cas nods, accepts that the way he accepted Dean’s earlier sentence, word by word.

Charlie appears beside him again with an already opened bottle of soda for both of them. He thanks her with a nod and a smile and toasts to her, then extends the bottle towards Cas. “Thanks for the invitation.”

“You’re welcome. If I’m being honest, I’m still a bit overwhelmed but I also look forward to getting to know all my new neighbors.” Glass clinks against glass, a sound that Dean tries to ignore.

“Simple, just talk to them like regular, civilized Americans do — can’t run them all over,” he teases instead.

“Well, I wouldn’t have, if they’d looked left, right, left, before crossing the sidewalk,” Cas lobs right back without missing a beat, deadpan.

Dean snorts, taken by surprise, again. So that’s how this guy’s humor works. Dean digs it. “Good thing the police were already on-site to handle the incident, right?”

With a way too serious expression, which is all facade, Cas nods. “Thank you for your service, officer.”

Dean catches his bottom lip between his teeth in order to not smirk. He thinks he knows what’s up, and it’s time to test that theory. “It’s Dean.”

The expression falters, and eventually cracks. “...I knew that.”

Dean raises an eyebrow at Cas, bemused and more than a little smug.

Cas shrugs, averts his eyes. Busted. “I may have forgotten your name, yes. You got me there.”

“At least I don’t need to feel bad for missing half of yours, then.” Dean openly smirks now, can’t be helped. “Guess we’re even.”

For a moment, they just look at each other, then burst out laughing. Cas’ laugh is rough and warm, and it settles, somewhere deep in Dean’s insides. It makes him feel a little lightheaded, but that might be because he always forgets to hydrate properly when he’s on patrol.

Wheezing, Dean offers, “Okay, let’s start over, then? Hello, I’m Dean Winchester, I’m with the KCPD, I’m an aquarius. I like long walks on the beach. Nice to meet you.”

Cas collects himself enough to take Dean’s hand to shake it. His hands are big and dry, and the pressure around Dean’s knuckles is signaling confidence. “Nice to meet you, too. Castiel Novak, former FBI, virgo. I like doing yoga.”

Former FBI. Now there’s an interesting tidbit.

[trixiemolotova]

FARMINGTON, N.M. — It wasn’t until he was about 80 years old that Carlos Gallegos finally learned the word for what he is.

Genizaro.

Bobby Gallegos watched his hard-of-hearing father sounding out the word. Heh-NEE-sah-roh.

What it meant, Bobby explained, was that Carlos’s grandfather had been enslaved, along with thousands of other Native Americans in the Southwest in the years before and after the Civil War.

“Dad never talked about slavery,” Carlos said, though his own life has been shaped, in part, by that hidden history.

Carlos had always been told that his grandfather was Navajo, but had somehow lost his membership in the tribe. He knew his grandfather’s early life had been hard, violent even. He knew what his grandfather passed down to his father and then his father passed down to him: a heritage of hard work and profound disconnection.

It was Bobby, not Carlos, who yearned to know more. Bobby, now 60, peppered Carlos and Carlos’s late father, Preciliano, with one question after another.

“Sometimes you wonder where you come from. A lot of people tell you, ‘Oh, you look Indian,’” Bobby explained.

At last, Bobby and other relatives turned to a New Mexico genealogist, who showed them the handwritten documents that revealed who they are. An enslaver’s records, showing the 1864 baptism of a boy who was stolen from his tribe and held in captivity.

That boy was Carlos’s grandfather, Alejandro Gallegos.

And the men who enslaved that boy held great influence, far beyond the power they had over Alejandro’s childhood.

Younger relatives asked Carlos: Did you know your grandfather was enslaved by the family of a congressman? He tried to summon details from his memory without much success. His grandfather had died before he was born.

Carlos is 82 now. He’s still sounding out that Spanish word, genizaro, and understanding its double meaning. Because that term isn’t just a word for his grandfather and all the other Native Americans who were enslaved. It’s a word used to describe their descendants, like him, who are still marked by that slavery.

Enslaved after slavery’s end

Alejandro Gallegos was born in 1855 with a different, Navajo name that has been lost to history. He was about 9 years old when he was kidnapped from his family — probably by a rival tribe — and sold into slavery. In 1864, Alejandro was baptized, renamed, and taught to herd sheep, a task he labored at without pay well into adulthood.

As one of thousands of Indigenous people who were enslaved by Spanish colonizers in what is now New Mexico, Alejandro’s bondage placed him in a unique circumstance in history. He was enslaved even after the Civil War, when slavery became unconstitutional in the United States. And the family that owned the hacienda where Alejandro worked sent one of New Mexico’s first delegates to Congress.

Three of New Mexico’s earliest delegates to Congress were slaveholders. When New Mexico became a U.S. territory and these men went to Congress, they joined a body where many of their new colleagues were slaveholders, too.

As part of an investigation into Congress’s relationship with slavery, The Washington Post has documented more than 1,800 lawmakers who were enslavers at some point in their adult lives.

While almost all of these congressmen enslaved Black people, the New Mexican lawmakers enslaved American Indians. Native Americans were also enslaved in other parts of the United States, including by future lawmakers. The Northeast Slavery Records Index recorded that Joseph Stanton Jr., who would go on to represent Rhode Island in the House and Senate, listed an unnamed Indian in his household in a local census in 1774 who researchers believe was enslaved.

This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.

A growing community of New Mexicans now recognize that their ancestors were enslaved, a part of the story of American slavery that has rarely been told.

Enslavement of genizaros was a very different institution from the centuries-long chattel slavery that shaped the African American experience. Indigenous people who were enslaved were far more likely to obtain their freedom in adulthood and to bear children who were not enslaved, among other major differences.

Even so, the legacy of genizaro enslavement runs deep.

“I’m a firm believer in genetic memory — a lot of the things these grandmothers and grandfathers have gone through, it’s passed on to us in some form or fashion,” said Miguel Torrez, a genealogist who helps New Mexicans identify their ancestors and worked with the Gallegos family. “The reality is a lot of these descendants are very traumatized. ... They’re living with drug addictions, alcohol addictions.”

Other New Mexicans are focused on the persistent legal ramifications of Indigenous enslavement. Descendants are often unable to enroll in Native American tribes, meaning they cannot access medical care through the Indian Health Service or qualify for other government benefits. They have lost access to land that was once legally guaranteed to formerly enslaved genizaros and their descendants by the Spanish or Mexican government. Their claims were denied by the U.S. Senate when the land changed hands from Spanish to Mexican to American.

Those disadvantages, which genizaros in New Mexico are still fighting to rectify more than a century and a half after the end of slavery, are the product of a legal system in which the slaveholders wrote the rules.

A Spanish-speaking enslaver in Congress

The Rev. Jose Manuel Gallegos was a leading citizen in one country when it suddenly became another.

A Catholic priest, Jose Gallegos was born when New Mexico was part of Spain; became involved in Mexican politics when his home was part of an independent Mexico; and when the United States took over the territory in 1848 following the American victory in the Mexican-American War, dove into his new nation’s politics, too.

In 1853, Gallegos was sworn in as New Mexico’s second delegate to Congress, becoming the first person of Mexican descent in Congress. A White West Point alumnus (who was later killed fighting for the Confederacy) represented the new territory for one term.

Gallegos arrived in Washington unable to speak any English. When a fellow congressman requested that Gallegos be able to use an interpreter on the floor of the House, two-thirds of his new colleagues voted no. He persisted anyway in introducing legislation in a language he did not speak. Newspaper editorials poked fun of his lack of fluency.

When he ran for a second term in 1855, he narrowly won. But his opponent, Miguel Otero, challenged the results, claiming to the House Committee on Elections that Gallegos had won because Mexican citizens illegally voted in the election. Gallegos defended himself to the committee against the “sneers and jests” congressmen made about his language skills. But Otero, whose political faction was called the American Party, argued that if he were in Congress instead, he could speak “in the language of its laws and its constitution.” Members voted to seat Otero instead of Gallegos, and Gallegos went home to New Mexico in 1856.

While Gallegos was in Washington, his brother Pablo managed the family’s sprawling ranching compound near Abiquiú, according to Torrez. Upon his return, Gallegos stayed involved in politics, serving as speaker of the territorial legislature. At one point, he endured imprisonment for his support of the Union during the Civil War — despite listing 21 “servants” in his household in the 1860 census. A 2013 congressional report said that some or all of these Indigenous servants were, in fact, enslaved.

Meanwhile, Pablo enslaved three children sometime in or before 1864, baptismal records suggest. The children, including Alejandro, had likely been kidnapped from their tribes by another tribe that stole children to sell into temporary or long-lasting slavery. They were baptized as Christians and given new identities. Most took Spanish first names and the last names of their new enslavers, forgetting their given names in their native tongue.

Congress would approve the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, one year later. But the 13th Amendment didn’t end slavery for Alejandro. So many New Mexican slaveholders refused to comply that Congress passed an 1867 law specifically aimed at dismantling “peonage” in New Mexico.

Historians have found evidence of Indigenous people who were still enslaved in New Mexican homes into the 20th century, some until their deaths.

Alejandro was still herding sheep on the Gallegos hacienda in 1870, census records show.

At the time, Jose Gallegos was preparing to run for Congress once again. The 1871 election, which Gallegos won, was so contentious that a riot broke out after one of Gallegos’s campaign speeches, leaving nine dead and 40 injured.

Jose went back to Washington. Alejandro remained in Pablo’s household, likely in violation of federal law.

His descendants aren’t sure how he became free, but they know that he finally did. The 1900 census shows Alejandro living in Coyote, about 20 miles from Abiquiú. Those 20 miles marked the distance from slavery to freedom.

‘A good Navajo man’

In 1890, handwritten documents unearthed by a relative show Alejandro married. He had a daughter and then when he was nearly 50, a son, Preciliano, whose baptism was recorded by hand in 1903. Alejandro taught young Preciliano the shepherding trade that he learned in slavery before he died sometime after 1910.

Alejandro passed away long before Preciliano and his wife welcomed their fourth child, Carlos Gallegos – another generation to bear the name of the family that once enslaved them. Carlos grew up just down the road from the place his grandfather worked in bondage, and learned to tend the descendants of the same sheep.

A photo that Preciliano kept of Alejandro made an impression on Carlos as a child.

“You can tell he was a Navajo,” Carlos said. He remembered Alejandro sitting in what looked like a rocking chair. “I remember he got in his hand a whip or something in that photo.”

Rather than speak of Alejandro’s youth in slavery, his widow preferred to emphasize his dedication to providing for his family. “What I heard was, he was always working,” Carlos recalled.

His grandmother described Alejandro as “a good man, a good Navajo man.”

Alejandro was not, however, an enrolled member of the Navajo tribe. When genizaros were enslaved, they commonly lost their tribal communities — which means their descendants are often unable to prove their genealogy, in order to enroll in an American Indian tribe today.

“Slavery doesn’t stop when the slaves are free or they die. There’s these lingering effects,” said Bill Piatt, who discovered his family’s descent from enslaved Native Americans and now calls himself America’s only genizaro-identified law professor. He has written law review articles calling for tribal benefits for genizaro descendants. “They lost their tribal identity. They can’t point to a tribe, which means the federal government won’t recognize them, which means they aren’t eligible for benefits.”

Officials in the Navajo Nation did not respond to requests from The Washington Post to discuss what qualifications someone must show to enroll in the tribe and what the tribe’s relationship is today with descendants of people who were enslaved.

It is a question that still echoes in many Native American tribes across the country in various forms. In the Southeast United States, some Native Americans were the enslavers, not the enslaved. Descendants of Black Americans enslaved by Cherokees sought membership and were initially denied by the tribe; a federal judge ruled in 2017 that the Cherokees must allow the estimated 3,000 living descendants of those they enslaved to enroll.

Carlos has mixed feelings about the government benefits that would come with tribal enrollment. A proud American who wears a “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirt, he believes in the self-reliance that his father and grandfather exemplified.

A wiry octogenarian in torn blue jeans, he still bounds right over his fence to greet visitors when they arrive at his trailer on a dead-end street in Farmington, the town more than 100 miles west of Coyote where he moved decades ago for the promise of oil field jobs.

“From when I was young, maybe 15, until I was 76 years old, I worked all my life,” he tells his grandchildren. He only stopped laboring as a “swamper,” setting up and taking down oil rigs, when his boss told him he had to retire from the physically demanding job in his 70s.

He doesn’t like to stay still. Neighbors in his trailer park pay him to clean their yards. He’s installing a new engine in his 1959 Chevy Apache, a truck that he notes wryly was named after people like him.

But he went to the grocery earlier this year, and he’s been thinking about it since.

“A Navajo lady working in Safeway, she tells me, ‘Where are your food stamps?’ I say I don’t have food stamps. She says, ‘How come?’”

After he retired, he and his late wife applied, and were told they’d get $25 per month, he said. “Twenty-five dollars. What are you going to buy for $25? … Probably if you were Navajo, you get more.”

While tribal affiliation might not actually change food stamps determination, tribal members do qualify for health care and other forms of assistance meant to address poverty on Indian reservations. Billboards dot the Farmington area advertising assistance for tribal members with rent, therapy and health care, abutting a gas station that flashes “Let’s Go Brandon” in electronic lights and another that says, alongside Trump posters, “I miss the America I grew up in.”

Carlos went with his stepdaughter recently to a Navajo tribal office to ask what he would need to prove to join.

The tribe’s enrollment requirements are stricter than many, including a mandate that new members prove they are at least one-quarter Navajo by ancestry. Some would-be applicants struggle to find documentation, such as affidavits or church records that prove their parents’ and grandparents’ heritage, even without a history of enslavement. Still, enrollment has surged recently: The tribe grew by nearly one-third in 2020, from 306,268 members to 399,494, when many sought the pandemic relief checks of about $1,350 per adult that the tribe distributed to members from its federal coronavirus relief aid.

When Carlos asked about enrollment, he was given the address of a different tribal office.

As he watched the sun set from his trailer porch earlier this year, he mused about whether he would give it a try. He knows it’s a long shot for someone like him — an octogenarian genizaro — to become a tribal member.

“I want to do it,” he said. “If they want to help me, fine. If they don’t, that’s fine. I do wish I knew my grandfather, but I never did. I just saw him in the picture. He really looked like a Navajo.”

And now Carlos is certain: “He was a Navajo.”

Editing by Lynda Robinson, photo editing by Mark Miller, video editing by Amber Ferguson, copy editing by Thomas Heleba, design by Michael Domine.

Abby Raskin, a Post reader who lives in Brooklyn, contributed information about Jose Manuel Gallegos that added him to The Post’s database on congressional enslavers. Nick Arjomand, a reader in Los Angeles, contributed the information on Joseph Stanton Jr.

[ciegeinc]

Movie Review...Avatar The Way of the Water

(4.5/5) We got a lot to discuss with this here film right here.  So my official score is right below great but its low key 5/5. I had to dock some points because I can’t be out here supporting colonizer’s wet dreams...which we will get into soon.  Now to the Avatar franchise.

The first film came out in 2009, over 14 years ago.  It goes with out saying...out of sight out of mind.  The MCU had all but taken over cinemas in this time span, constant push back on release dates/delays and finally a non emotive trailer had me feeling less than enthused about this long awaited sequel to, at one point, the highest grossing film of all time.

I am going to be honest I don’t really remember the first film that much.  I do remember my experience at the movies and at one point literally swatting the air as a flaming ember was approaching.  One of the major marketing aspects of the film was the new/true 3D.  Which did live up to the hype but in the same instance masked a more problematic point about the film (something that we now have words for in our current social climate).

But before we get to this underlying rumbling in my gut about this franchise lets get to the positive first. Pun intended, my emotions were on a wave watching this movie, even shed a tear and wasn’t expecting that. You are getting this further exploration of this world and this culture and that is meet with excitement which is then contrasted by the sky people...invaders...colonizers.  Turning my mood sour.  The film balances these two narratives, perspectives perfectly and then they collide violently in a climatic concluding battle. 

Beautiful world, beautiful different skin colored natives...beautiful life, all upended when aliens invade.  Sound familiar huh.  But lets take it one step further.  Instead of just wanting resources and land, they invaders actually want to become a native, steal your body, steal your likeness (what in the Get Out is going on here).  Like i mentioned before, Avatar is the visual representation of a colonizer’s wet dream.  The first film felt like the plight of indigenous Americans and this one felt like that of pacific islanders.  This was the underlying rumbling, unease as I was watching the movie.  Am I reaching, am I being too “Woke”?

What are your thoughts about Avatar The Way of the Water?

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, "Avatar: The Way of Water" begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure (rottentomatoes.com).                

[reiverreturns]

top (5) gun(s). just kidding. top 5 favorite (or LEAST favorite) scottish stereotypes?

oh my beloved ac mutuals, how i love and adore you for putting up with my vroom vroom plane nonsense <3

okay onto business, this was a really hard one to pick how to answer! i don't like stereotypes in general (flattens my capacity for nuance) so i'm going to pick the five i think are most harmful/misunderstood.

that scottish people know/care what clans we come from. i think a lot of this stereotype comes from the north american view of scottishness and thinking that having scottish ancestry makes you scottish (which it doesn't). it's not generally front of mind in a modern scot's identity (unless you're landed gentry or something) and i find it a gross question to be asked because of that association to a very myopic/white view of scottishness.

scottish people are anti-english. this ties a lot into the independence movement and is heavily rooted in a uk-centric media narrative of scots having it "too good" as we are. a lot of scottish people WILL rib on english folk during sporting tournaments etc. (because its funny) but genuine xenophobia is rare and its quite reductive to assume a desire to self-determine the future of our country is based on an 'us vs them' mentality.

the scottish accent is impossible to understand. nope, we're often just not speaking english! scottish people often speak scots or scots-english which has different words, grammatical structures, and meanings for words vs their english counterparts. however, there are exceptions to this. some characteristics of a scottish accent (such as liberal use of glottal stops) make some english words really indistinct to foreigners. for example, a scottish person saying "can" and "can't" will often sound nearly identical unless they're stressing the 't' deliberately. that's why we say "can" and "cannae" in scots - it's much more distinct and you can't really mix them up. there are, of course, regional nuances i'm not touching on but to tdlr it - sometimes we're just speaking a different language; sometimes we accidentally make things more difficult by trying to make your life easier and speak proper english

scottish people are tight with money. this is such a weird one because idk where it comes from but its not true??? I WANT TO PAY FOR THINGS STOP MAKING JOKES THAT I WILL SKIP OUT ON MY TAB. TAKE MY MONEY.

scots are violent or unfriendly. especially if you are from/have lived in or around glasgow. scottish people tend to be quite direct and to the point but in my experience scots are generous with their time and want to help other people. it makes me sad to think people wouldn't want to visit the country because of that stereotype for violence.

and finally, a few things i agree with:

men in kilts are hot

women in kilts are hot

bagpipe music slaps (at an appropriate time of day)

Ask me my Top 5 of anything