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ineffable-romantics · 1 year

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Some thoughts on why and how I believe Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship would incorporate sex/why I do not read them as wholly asexual:

This is something I've seen the most discourse about in this fandom, and I've had a few thoughts of my own that I really wanted to expand upon in a full meta/character analysis post. I do understand that this can be a contentious topic, so first, let me clarify a few things:

First of all, this is going to be long. Tbh it probably won't be that organized either. I ramble and I'm not very good at editing, so just... you know. Be warned. (*Hi, it's me from 2 days after writing this; I'm really not kidding, it's LONG)

These are all my own thoughts. They might not be hot takes, because recently I've seen more than a few people come to the same conclusions on a lot of these points as I have. But I've also had these notes in my drafts for about a week and a half now, and have been continuously adding to it as things have occurred to me. This post is essentially just somewhere for me to collect the separate but related meta I've been kicking around in my head.

I fully respect anyone who does see and prefer an asexual reading of this relationship. These are my own thoughts and interpretations as someone who is not asexual. I am in the LGBT+ community, so while I do know a few things about the asexuality spectrum, I am by no means an expert.

This is NOT something I expect, need, or even necessarily want the show (or, God forbid, Neil's tumblr ask box) to address. Tonally, it's just not that kind of show. Newt and Anathema's sex scene was very much played for laughs, and it worked for that reason. If the show found a way to address it in a way that was both appropriate for the tone of the show and ultimately satisfying, then great! But there is so much more to this relationship than sex, and I didn't need a kiss to confirm their love, so I certainly don't need a sex scene. As immortal beings (as I assume they'll stay) there is so much of the rest of their lives we'll never get to see. You can headcanon them as asexual and potentially be right. I can headcanon them as not and be equally potentially right. Again, these are just a collection of my own thoughts, because I think the question of sexuality (or lack thereof) is just as interesting a facet of these characters as any other.

Note: Tbh I've been second-guessing this whole post and debated deleting the whole thing several times for being silly or unnecessary, bc I don't want anyone to think that this is the only thing I care about when it comes to this story/characters. But if nothing else, it's inspired me to write in a way that nothing has in a very long time, so I've decided it's worth continuing, if for no other reason than that.

This is going to be a mixed bag of textual reading, subtextual reading, and a full-on reach or two. It's been a while since I've been in an English class, but if my teachers expected me to find a deeper meaning behind blue curtains, you can expect me to read too deeply into the symbolism of a loaded rifle or an ox rib. (This is probably not what my professors had in mind when grading my literary analysis papers but oh well) My point is, if it feels like a reach, I'm as aware of it as you are. I am in no way saying that all (or even any) of my points made were deliberate on the part of Neil or the actors or the writers or the directors. I am no longer the delulu Apple Tree Yard child of my youth, I promise.

If anything said here is in any way offensive or hurtful to anyone in the asexual community, please do not hesitate to message me or comment and let me know exactly what it was. I promise you it is not my intention to do so, and am happy to clarify or outright edit anything that reads that way.

With all that being said, let's talk about why I think Crowley and Aziraphale would absolutely fuck nasty incorporate sex into their relationship.

Note: I am out of practice with essay writing, so I think I'll just go down the bullet points of notes I have been making, and expand on each as best I can

Food

Where better to start than with Aziraphale's introduction to Pleasures Of The Flesh? (Just a heads up, this entire post may feel very Aziraphale-heavy, and with good reason).

This might be the least hot take here. We've all seen the Job minisode. We've all seen That Scene.

Whether this was intentional or not, the symbolism here is off the charts. Eve was tempted by an apple. So why not go a similar route and tempt Aziraphale with another fruit, or cheese, or bread, or literally anything else for his first experience with food? Instead, we go with a huge, glistening slab of fresh meat that he proceeds to absolutely go feral upon, moaning and gasping into his meal while Crowley watches with what definitely doesn't look to be disgust or even satisfaction with a good temptation. There's surprise at the ferocity of Aziraphale's appetite, certainly. But ultimately he looks to be intensely fascinated by it, while the thunder crashes, the music crescendos, and the earth literally shakes around them.

(It's also interesting to note how very little it takes for Crowley to tempt him with the ox rib. One murmured suggestion, a bit of unwavering eye contact, and vavoom Aziraphale immediately meets him in the middle.)

Cut to Aziraphale devouring the rest of the meat with Crowley splayed back on a makeshift bed, drinking wine and continuing to watch him indulge through half-lidded eyes. Outside a thunderstorm rages while they're learning secrets about each other in warm flickering firelight. It's cosy, it's intimate, and if they'd thrown in a bearskin throw blanket, it might as well be a post-coital scene straight out of Game of Thrones.

The next time (chronologically) we see them discuss food is when Aziraphale "tempts" Crowley with oysters in Rome. So Crowley first tempts Aziraphale with meat and then Aziraphale tempts Crowley with what is widely regarded to be an aphrodisiac. Interesting.

And then chronologically after that, the Arrangement begins to form, which has always reeked of a friends with benefits situation. Just to throw that in there.

It's What Humans Do

In the very first episode, we're shown Gabriel's obvious disgust and bewilderment towards Aziraphale eating sushi, calling it "gross matter" and being proud of the fact that he does not sully his body with it. Aziraphale initially tries to defend his own enjoyment in it, before passing it off as something that humans do, as something he simply has to do in order to blend in (which we know very well is not the case).

He does this again in season 2, passing off Nina and Maggie being in love as "something humans do". But it isn't, is it? Angels are beings of love, and can sense it, and understand very well what it is... up to a point. Even romantic love is obviously within their wheelhouse, given what we now know happened between Gabriel and Beelzebub (we'll come back to them).

What the "humans do" that angels wouldn't understand is messy, physical forms of love.

But here's the thing: Aziraphale and Crowley love doing what the humans do. They love drinking, they (or at least Aziraphale) love eating. They love music. Crowley loves driving and sleeping and watching rom-coms and sitcoms. Aziraphale loves reading and doing magic and earning little licenses and certificates for achievement in his various hobbies. They love to playact at being human so much that they've stopped playacting and started building a genuinely human lifestyle for themselves and with each other.

Once together in an unambiguously romantic sense, why do we think they wouldn't also want to explore one of the most prominent, intimate, powerful human expressions of love and desire with each other?

Angels, Demons, & Asexuality

Here's where I really want to clarify that in no way do I mean that sex is necessary for a healthy, fulfilling, and loving romantic relationship, or that the lack of desire for sex makes you any less human. Asexuality is a sexuality as valid and human as any. What I would say is that it is definitely in the human minority compared to allosexuality.

Angels and demons, on the other hand, are predominately asexual. Sexless/genderless unless Making An Effort. (Which, btw, is a concept introduced as early as the original book; why even bring it up as a possibility? Why not keep angels/demons being sexless/asexual as a hard and fast rule, if not to open up the potential for later use? Chekhov's Effort, if you will. And isn't that something that Aziraphale in particular is shown to do time and time again? He makes an effort in French and driving and magic, doesn't he?)

And this is why I don't believe Aziraphale and Crowley necessarily need to be asexual, narratively. There is already a huge amount of ace rep within the angels and demons (and no, not just the horrible ones. Muriel also doesn't "drink the tea" and has no reason or desire thus far to Make An Effort, and there are certainly other angels and demons who aren't horrible like the archangels seem to be who likely wouldn't Make An Effort either).

The central conflict for Aziraphale and Crowley is that they are on their own side, the ones who went native, the ones who are so different in so many ways from their respective hives. It would make sense for them to also break away from traditional angel/demon asexuality.

I say "traditional angel/demon asexuality", because I would also like to note that I would absolutely not rule out demisexuality for either of them. This post is being written to as a response to people who specifically believe that they (like the rest of the angels/demons seem to be) would be sex-averse in a relationship, and that it wouldn't be a factor in their relationship. I could easily read them as demisexual, but I do think there would be no real way of verifying this, because they've never been able to form as close an emotional relationship with anyone else but each other. Certainly not in heaven, and I can't imagine they would be able to form that kind of attachment with any of the humans, who they love and emulate but ultimately regard as the separate species they are. So yes, they could either be allosexual or demisexual, in my opinion.

Then again, now that I think about it, Making An Effort itself could be a great metaphor for demisexuality, since they would be entirely sexless/asexual until they have enough of an emotional connection with someone to consciously manifest otherwise. Since the other angels and demons don't generally form those types of emotional connections with anyone, there hasn't been a precedent for it.

Except...

Brielzebub

We do have a precedent for it now, don't we? Gabriel and Beelzebub fell in love. They are a direct foil for Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship, speedrunning right through their courtship and finding their happily ever after on the other side of things.

For being such a 1 to 1 comparison, it feels deliberate that they did not kiss. They held hands, they were gooey with each other, but they did not kiss. That feels like such a deliberate thing to omit when you know what's to come at the end of the episode between Crowley and Aziraphale.

And going back to the food = sex metaphor for a moment, let's notice how even as they fell in love over the years, even when pints and crisps were there on the table in front of them, they never felt the desire to reach out for them. They didn't need to. It's a date (love story) even if you aren't eating dinner (sleeping together).

Yes, I know Jim liked hot chocolate. No, I am not counting it because I don't consider Jim and Gabriel to be the same person with the same proclivities, and Jim was highly suggestible at the time anyway.

Gabriel and Brielzebub's big happily ever after moment (as of now) was one between two asexual supernatural beings. They did not need to kiss to drive the point home. They showed what Crowley and Aziraphale could have, if they would only acknowledge it.

Crowley & Aziraphale's Dissatisfaction

But they do have that already, don't they? If you really think about it, what do Gabriel and Beelzebub do with each other that Crowley and Aziraphale don't already? They hold hands, they spend time together, they create little rituals, they give gifts, they're visibly and verbally affectionate with each other, etc. They are more or less already in a romantic asexual marriage relationship with each other, aren't they?

And it doesn't seem to be enough for either of them.

At the beginning of the season, Crowley is immediately shown to be unsatisfied with the way things are. Obviously part of it comes from living in his car, but it seems to be more than that (especially since Aziraphale makes it clear that the bookshop is just as much Crowley's as his, implying that he could have been living there the whole time and is choosing not to, for some reason?). You could argue he's feeling unmoored without Hell telling him what to do, but isn't that what he wanted? Isn't that what he still wants, by the end of the season? All season long, he's never indicated the desire for a new job, or a new project. He stopped the apocalypse because he wanted the freedom to openly spend time with Aziraphale, to spend his time on Earth however he sees fit. Until Gabriel arrives, he has exactly that (minus a flat).

So where does the dissatisfaction come from? And if it represents anything to do with his relationship, what does he want out of it that he isn't getting already?

I think Crowley only really comes to the realisation of what he's missing when Nina names it for him, not only putting them in the category of romantic, but physical (outright asking if they are sleeping together). These two posts [1], [2] go into more detail about what I mean, but I think it really pushes him into acknowledging that their relationship is more human than either of them have stopped to consider, and what that might mean as far as everything a human relationship can entail.

After all, Nina and Maggie only advised that he should talk to Aziraphale, make clear his feelings. The decision to kiss him, to tip them over the edge from nonphysical to physical, that was all him. And no, kissing isn't sex, but I wonder how taboo even that might be in the kind of all-encompassing asexuality most angels seem to identify with. (If they're disgusted by food and drink, I can only imagine what they think of snogging, much less sex.)

Aziraphale doesn't have this moment of someone observing their relationship from the outside. He loves Crowley, and as of 1941 probably even knows he's in love with him in a way that Crowley doesn't understand yet. Which makes sense, since love is technically his job, he'd be more likely to recognise it for what it is.

However, Aziraphale's reference for romance and relationships is Jane Austen. It's chaste. It's dancing and dinner and doing sweet things for each other and roses and candles and handholding. He contextualises his love for Crowley in that soft fantasy sort of way, where it's there, it's obviously there, but it's neat and easy and unspoken. Not to quote Glee in this, the year of our lord 2023, but it's all very "the touch of the fingertips is as sexy as it gets".

Someone should tell that to Aziraphale's face, then.

I'm not going to pretend I know what Michael Sheen's script notes were, but there were definitely some Choices™ made. Because yes, there were plenty of moments in both seasons with Aziraphale looking at Crowley in a sweet, loving, smitten way. And then there were moments that were yearning.

But yearning for what, exactly? All of those sappy Jane Austen tropes already apply to the two of them. So why are there moments where Aziraphale is looking Crowley up and down like the last eclair in the window and licking his lips and visibly exhaling like he's trying to get in control of himself (see: Bastille scene + Crowley telling Muriel to ask him if they have any other questions about love)? Why is Aziraphale not only unconcerned when Crowley shoves him bodily up against a wall in s1, but staring at his lips and a beat too late in noticing Sister Mary's arrival? Why are some of his lines so suggestive? I'm sorry, but the car ride after the church explosion might as well have been the beginning of a Pizza Man porn with a really weird Blitz theme. If even my mother picked up on that vibe, I can't imagine it wasn't intentional on part of both the dialogue and the delivery.

(This section may feel like more of a reach/joke, but I'm really only 20% joking. These are writers and actors who are EXTREMELY good at their jobs; they know what they were doing here.)

More importantly, I don't think Aziraphale is even aware that there is more to what he wants. He lives in the Jane Austen fantasy and it never even occurs to him that he might be interested in anything further. It never even occurs to him that, as an angel, there is anything further to be interested in in the first place. Until Crowley forces it to occur to him. Just like I believe Nina forced Crowley to confront the idea that romantic love is what he's been feeling all along, I believe Crowley forced Aziraphale to confront the idea that physical intimacy is something he's been wanting, without even realising.

Aziraphale's Hedonism

Expanding on Aziraphale for a moment. We talked about his relationship with food, but we all know that Aziraphale is defined by his love of things that Feel Good.

It isn't just that he and Crowley love human things. Aziraphale loves the best of the best, or at least his version of it. He doesn't just love food, he loves going to fancy restaurants. He doesn't just love clothes, he loves soft, cosy, warm, plush clothes, or shiny, flashy, bougie fashion. He loves the warmth of tea and cocoa, loves getting drunk, and sitting in a comfy chair in the sunlight. He doesn't just experience, he indulges.

Given the emphasis put on things that Aziraphale loves just because they Feel Good, it feels narratively strange to assume that he wouldn't enjoy the feeling of being touched, or that he wouldn't be willing to try it, at least once, with someone he cared very deeply for. And just like the ox rib, I think that once he gets the first taste of things, he would absolutely tip over into complete and utter self-indulgence.

Dancing

I also think that dancing could be construed as a huge metaphor here. After all, we're told flat-out that angels don't Dance. Except one.

I would argue that Aziraphale, in fact, Made An Effort to learn how to Dance. He threw himself into the gavotte with delight (at a Victorian gay club; noted) and worked hard to be good at it. He's chomping at the bit to Dance with Crowley, working up the nerve to ask him with undeniably romantic intent and eagerness. So, angels don't Dance... unless they Make An Effort to do so.

We are told that demons, on the other hand, do Dance, but not well. Makes sense, since they're the ones who would want to encourage a deadly sin like lust, but have as little understanding of human love and physical intimacy as the angels. Crowley, however, is shown to be an excellent dancer at the ball, especially in his compatibility with Aziraphale.

(But Aziraphale WandaVisioned the ball so everyone knew how to dance! Yes, he did. However, the rest of the brainwashing doesn't seem to affect Crowley in any way, and they did actually live through the time period where this sort of dancing was a social norm; I'd be surprised if he never needed to learn. After all, the demons can't spell either, and Crowley is at least functionally literate, as far as we know.)

As of today, it's also been confirmed that when Aziraphale asked Crowley to dance, Crowley replied with "you don't dance." Not "WE don't dance". So going along with the metaphor, Crowley is just now discovering that Dancing is something Aziraphale is interested in at all, much less with him, and not denying that he himself is interested in Dancing. In his defense, I believe he was asleep for a few years while Aziraphale was learning the gavotte, so he wasn't exactly aware of Aziraphale's hot girl summer.

Love Languages

I want to expand on that; Crowley and Aziraphale's compatibility. Specifically in regards to their individual love languages.

We all know Crowley's love language is Acts of Service. I don't think there's any debate there. He loves it, Aziraphale loves it, they're both aware of it, we're all aware of it, God and Satan are aware of it, no surprise there.

You may disagree with me, but I believe Aziraphale's love language is Physical Touch, for a number of reasons. One of which being his aforementioned hedonism. Aziraphale likes things that Feel Good, remember? He likes soft clothes, and well-worn books. Neil himself has said that they like holding hands. And any time he is taken by surprise (Brielzebub getting together, the wave of love in Tadfield, etc.) what is the first thing he does? Reaches out for Crowley. He stops him with a hand to the chest in the pub. He leads him by the hand to the dance floor. He guides him by the waist in the graveyard. He reaches out during the entire Brielzebub scene, whether he can reach Crowley or not. Despite his own turmoil, he grasps at Crowley's back during the kiss.

The one time Crowley reaches out for him (not counting the kiss yet; we'll get there), he is aggressively pushed against a wall (by someone he loves and trusts) with a complete and utter lack of concern (and perhaps some interest, depending on how you read it).

And when he isn't reaching out for anyone, or there isn't anyone to reach out to? Well, he's wringing his own hands together, squeezing his own fingers, as if to find that physical comfort in himself.

So. With that theory in mind, we have Aziraphale (Physical Touch) + Crowley (Acts of Service). Throw in 6000+ years of deep love, cherished companionship, and forcibly repressed longing, and there is a very real potential of this combination resulting in fierce sexual compatibility. Where Aziraphale would want to touch and be touched, to indulge in physical pleasure with someone he adores, in the same the way he indulges in every other fine thing in his life. And where Crowley would want to indulge him in return, to give him everything he wants, and to take pleasure in Aziraphale's pleasure, in the same way he enjoys watching him take joy in food everything else.

So Aziraphale is an angel who is insecure about his own less-than-holy desires, who would want to treat Crowley like a luxury to be touched and cherished and adored. And Crowley is a demon who has, over the millennia, been unhappy about how they've been forced to deny even their friendship with each other, who would want Aziraphale to feel comfortable and safe and encouraged to indulge in earthly delights. That sounds like a stunning recipe for sexual compatibility to me.

"You said 'trust me'" / "And you did"

Just like the Job minisode, the Blitz is RIFE with symbolism (intentional or otherwise). This one will be quick, but I did want to touch on it because I thought it was interesting. Maybe I'm reaching at this point, but I'm assuming you read the tin.

First of all, Crowley not wanting to admit to never firing a gun before; comes off as someone who very much does not want to admit to their crush that they're a virgin ("You must have done this lots of times!" / "Umm.... yyyyyeah.")

(You could make the argument that Aziraphale having a firearms license and a Derringer in a hollowed-out book is symbolic of him not being a virgin while Crowley is. I disagree, for reasons I'll go into later, but it's a valid reading. However, I see it more like keeping a condom in your wallet; it's there in case you need it, but the opportunity has not yet risen no pun intended.)

More importantly, the theme of this entire minisode is trust. We already know they trust each other with their lives against the rest of Heaven, Hell, and the world. But specifically, this is about the importance of having complete trust in your partner in a charged, physically vulnerable, intimate moment, where the only danger is between the two of you.

Aziraphale needs to believe Crowley would never hurt him if he can help it. Crowley needs to trust Aziraphale's unwavering blind faith in him. Frankly, it all feels very symbolic of two people deeply in love losing their respective virginities with each other.

The trick is a success, and they share an intimate candlelit dinner in which they reaffirm their faith in each other. Aziraphale also begins to voice his agreement with Crowley, that maybe Heaven's rules shouldn't have to be as black and white as they are, and that there are benefits to... blurring the lines, shades of grey, wink wink (at which point even my mom was like, whoa guys, this is a family show).

Btw also: Can we all agree how much it looked like Crowley was getting ready to get a lapdance in that one scene? You know the one.

Also also: "Aim for my mouth"? Come on.

The Birds & The Bees

Now that I think of it, there's also something to be said for the fact that Crowley and Aziraphale are both obviously familiar with where babies come from (how they're made and how they're born) while the other angels aren't.

Something something Aziraphale and Crowley fundamentally understand sex and reproduction in a way the other angels (and probably demons) very much do not, nor have any desire to.

Probably not important. Just thought it was worth mentioning.

The Kiss™ & Religious Trauma

The Kiss. Where to even begin?

This has definitely been the hardest one to start, because there is so much going on here that I definitely won't be able to cover it all, and will certainly miss a few things here and there.

Aziraphale's reaction to the kiss afterwards is the most interesting to me. And I don't mean directly after, I don't mean the "I forgive you" part. I mean the way he touches his lips when Crowley is no longer in the room and he no longer needs to save face, when he is completely alone. Had it been directly after the kiss, it would have been rightfully read as horror, or disgust, a shield to discourage further action.

It's not. It isn't just a touch, it's a press. As desperate and angry and unexpected and imperfect as the kiss had been, Aziraphale is pressing it into himself, recreating the feeling as best he can. Beneath all the poor timing and shock and hurt from their fight and fallout, I think it's fair to say that it was something he enjoyed. Something he doesn't think he should enjoy, something that Feels Good that he only allows himself to indulge in when completely alone.

Remember, Aziraphale's idea of love is Jane Austen and gentleness and courtship and fantasy. If he'd ever even considered kissing an option, it might have been gentle pecks, cheek kisses, forehead kiss, hand kisses. Soft, safe, chaste affection.

Crowley's kiss turns all of that on its head. He introduces physical intimacy in a very real, very messy, very human way that I don't think Aziraphale ever even considered could apply to them. Considering what other angels are like and what they look down on, even Aziraphale's Jane Austen fantasies probably would have been considered taboo.

So for their first kiss to be rough and desperate and passionate in the way it was, of course he was confused and in shock. It was deeply physical, and as overwhelming and awful as it was in the moment, it Felt Good. Enough that he grasped at Crowley and kissed back, if only just for a moment, before stopping himself. Enough that he actively pressed it into his lips afterwards, in private, to remember.

I adore how Neil has decided to evolve these characters past the first book/season. More so in this season, Aziraphale and Crowley have both become such interesting allegories for queer people on either side of the spectrum of toxic religion. Aziraphale in particular obviously, because he is the side that so desperately wants to believe, to make a difference, and to unlearn all of the propaganda he's been fed over such a long time. Just like so much of organised religion, there is so much that he is told, time and time again, that he should not want, that he is silly or stupid or outright wrong for wanting. It reminds me so much of the severe Catholic guilt one might feel for wanting/engaging in sex for the first time, and the stigma of being queer layered on top of that.

What is so critical to Aziraphale's character is that he goes on wanting, and more than that, actively pursues. He was convinced to go up against Heaven and Hell and stop all of Armageddon because he wanted to go on listening to music and eating lunch and reading books and enjoying the simple company of the person he cares most deeply for, even if that person is supposed to be the enemy.

All this to say that if angels are as generally asexual/sex-averse as I believe them to be, narratively speaking, it would make sense for Aziraphale to be singular in that regard as well. Mirroring his first experience with food, it would make sense for Crowley to be the one to first introduce this new messy, physical, human dynamic between them, for Aziraphale to hesitate (obviously we are at the Hesitation phase at the moment), and then (eventually) for him to dive in wholeheartedly, to absolutely glut himself on this new thing that Feels Good. It would make sense for his character development to show him overcoming his metaphorical Catholic guilt and pursuing the sexual intimacy most (if not all) of the other angels would scorn.

(I can't help but remember that plot idea Neil described from the unwritten sequel, with Aziraphale in a hotel room trying to watch a full porno by way of the free 2-minute teaser clips so he wasn't technically sinning by paying for it. I so hope this is used in season 3, because gosh, I wonder why Aziraphale would suddenly be so interested in observing human physical intimacy after 6,000 years. Lonely and doing a little surreptitious research there, angel?)

Crowley, on the other hand, is the queer person who has broken free from his toxic religion. He prides himself on being his own person, on their his own side. He doesn't have the hang-ups Aziraphale does. He doesn't worry that he's going to be judged or cast aside for wanting things he's not supposed to. So it only makes sense for him to be the first one to suggest/initiate physical intimacy. It makes sense for him to be the one who "goes too fast" (another fantastic example of this dynamic beginning as early as s1; what is that conversation in the car meant to represent, if not Aziraphale being overwhelmed by the intensity of their relationship, and his fear of succumbing to it when he believes he shouldn't? It's also interesting that this is the first conversation to take place in Soho, just after watching Aziraphale realise he's caught feelings for a demon, with the red glow of lust serving as the backdrop).

Do I think the kiss in and of itself was sexual? No. I think it was a passionate and devastating last-ditch effort on Crowley's part to convey the way he feels for Aziraphale. Not just that he loves him, but that he loves him in the most human way possible. But I do think that the kiss represents how they can move forward from here, and what they might want to explore with each other once they feel free enough to do so.

In Conclusion

I am sure, deep in my bones (unless we are explicitly told otherwise), that this was both of their first kisses no, I'm not counting the gavotte, and that neither of them have ever thought to do anything else physical with the humans while they have been on Earth. Like I said before, they adore the human race and lifestyle in general, but ultimately view them as a separate species altogether, and they seem mostly happy to keep to themselves and each other, unless otherwise necessary. I just can't see either of them being drawn enough to a human to pursue anything close to sex. If Crowley in particular has had anything to do with sex in the context of temptations, I'm positive he would be inciting lust amongst the humans themselves, not involving himself directly. At least not that directly.

So, like every other human experience they've had on Earth, sex is something new that they could explore together, just the two of them, on their own side. A deeply intimate, tangible declaration of their love and everything they've gone through to earn it. A visceral finger to give both Heaven and Hell. A renewed appreciation for their corporations and for each other's. A enjoyable method for immortal beings to simply pass the time in each other's company. A new and exciting way to Feel Good, and all the variations that come with it.

You might agree with this post, or you might not. Whether this is something that is ever addressed or not, it doesn't matter to me. This is a brilliant love story either way, and I genuinely feel so privileged to witness it.

But I just can't find it in myself to imagine, given everything we know about these two characters, that sex isn't an experience they would both consume with wholehearted enthusiasm, curiosity, and profound, ineffable adoration.

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Bonus feature: the very silly notes I made to myself that inspired this post

2K notes · View notes

fayes-fics · 4 months

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Vibe & Vexation

Pairing: Benedict Bridgerton x fem!reader, Modern AU w/ Regency roleplay

Summary: Watching Pride & Prejudice evokes playtime in Benedict.

Warnings: 18+ smut, minors DNI, established couple, Regency era sexual roleplay, teasing, remote vibrator, dirty talk, female orgasm, brief vaginal sex. Also features lake!Darcy!Benedict, anachronistic costumes (just like the real show this season tbh) and absolutely unacceptable use of Jane Austen.

Word count: 2.4k

Authors Note: Yes, the title is a terrible play on Pride & Prejudice. Listen, I don't know what this is either, and I'm posting before I lose my nerve after 3 weeks of writer's block. This is dedicated to @godofstory whose casual comment on one of my fics finally dislodged my brain block. This is modern Benedict roleplaying Regency. Also thanks to @colettebronte for reading through, being kind and saying I haven’t lost my mind. Well, not completely. Err, enjoy? <3

“Ben, don't be silly…”

“Are you suggesting that I wouldn't look dashing in a frilly shirt and snug trousers?” he teases, raising his head from your belly and twisting to look at you, his eyes twinkling with a mischievous glint as the credits roll on the Austen film you've been idly watching on a rainy Sunday.

“No, I'm not saying that,” you chuckle, your fingers touselling his hair. “You look good in everything and nothing…” you tease, enjoying the prideful swell of his chest at your compliment. “But I'm not in the mood to track down Regency outfits for a little sexy role play.”

“Leave the details to me, my love.” He waves a dismissive hand as he flips over and begins to crawl over you. “I will be your Mr Darcy….” he attests, lowering his voice to that rumble which always makes your belly flutter.

“But I don't have a lake in this flat,” you deadpan, perhaps not helpfully referencing a different adaptation, but too distracted to care, his crooked smile hovering right above you now.

“‘Tis a pity,” he agrees, quirking his lips, “but I shall think of something….” he winks before capturing your lips with his.

And, just like that, you forget all about the subject…

—

Two days later

“They didn't have any fusilli, so I got penne; I hope that's okay…” you call out as you enter your flat, dropping the heavy bag of shopping from your shoulder and flinging off your shoes, grateful to be out of them and home.

When there is no answer, you frown. When you texted on your way home, he sent back a list of supplies for dinner.

“Ben…?” you round the corner into the kitchen and realise it's empty, nothing cooking on the hob. “You're not even cooking….?” you raise your arms in a shrugging gesture, nonplussed, apparently talking to yourself in what appears to be an empty flat.

“Ms Bennet….”

His voice rings out resonant, a teasing lilt that has you spinning around. And almost toppling over.

There, in the doorway to your bathroom, is Benedict…. dressed up as a Regency gentleman.

Well, partially dressed. And what he is dressed in is damp and clinging to his skin in a way that gives away absolutely everything about why you cannot resist him. Broad shoulders and a tapered torso, completely visible through the most transparent white frilled shirt you could ever imagine. Snug blue trousers that, again, give everything away. He must have hopped into the shower to achieve this effect, his clothing virtually painted upon his skin.

You literally bite the edge of your tongue.

“Mr Darcy….” you stumble, incapable of any other words, mouth falling open as he saunters towards you with a confident gait, his trousers straining over his thighs as he does so.

“My eyes are up here, Ms Bennet…” he teases as yours ping guiltily to his face, knowing you are being entirely called out for your ogling.

“What if your eyes are the very last thing I am interested in, Mr Darcy?” you finally find your voice, stepping into the role of a feisty, historic heroine you enjoy so much.

“The eyes are the window to the soul…” he tilts his head challengingly, raising an eyebrow.

“That’s Shakespeare, not Austen,” you shoot back pointedly.

“All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes,” he corrects, indeed a quote from Pride and Prejudice. He has obviously been revising—something about that is as adorable as it is arousing.

“You don't fight fair…” you whisper as he closes in on you with a handsome smirk, but it hardly feels like defeat as his long fingers spider up your jacket buttons, the warm fug of his clothes amplifying the mouthwatering scent he wears under them.

“All is fair in love and war,” he counters, sliding nearer, his lips warm on your temple now as he flicks open your topmost button.

“Are you going to talk in literary quotes all night?”

Your ask is much breathier than you intend, very much not a protest about what is transpiring—a tingle down your sternum where his fingers trail over your skin down to the next button. You feel the curve of his cheek against your face from his responding smile.

“I might stop,” he proposes airily. ”But perhaps only to tease you until you pass out…”

“How?”

The question falls from you unbidden, curiosity seizing your lips.

“With the help of things poor Mr Darcy never had access to…” he offers enigmatically. “But for now, how about you go change into your outfit, Ms Bennet?”

“I have an outfit too?” your breath catching at the idea he has planned a whole scenario.

“Oh yes, ‘tis hanging in your room, fair lady,” he mutters, taking a half pace back. But before you go, he grabs your hand, raising it to his mouth and dropping a kiss that is anything but chaste—wet, plush lips with a slight edge of teeth dragging over your knuckles as his hot tongue lathes between your fingers lasciviously.

—

“I'm not sure this is quite Regency accurate…” you assert as you swan back into the living room a few minutes later, even as there is a frisson over your skin at the very sexy outfit he has chosen.

“Perhaps not,” he concedes, his eyes lingering on the pronounced swell of your breasts as you sashay closer. “But yet, I cannot fault my choice.”

“More Marquis de Sade than Jane Austen…” you opine, revelling in his stare, the time spent fastening each hook and eye down the front of the ivory corset worth it for that hungry look and the nascent swelling you see in his clinging trousers. The silk, frilled French knickers he picked out are new, which you are grateful for, but they match perfectly. There was an odd weight to them as you pulled them on, though, but you did not spend much time contemplating it, so keen to get back to the scene.

“Ms Bennet, how dare you turn up to my home so scandalously dressed when I am entertaining company?” he admonishes, his tone suddenly brusque, stepping fully into his roleplay, gesturing to the empty kitchen area as if it were filled with guests.

“Mr Darcy, I can only apologise. I thought you were away on business,” you improvise, clutching your hands over your body in a futile attempt to conceal your state of undress, acting horrified to be caught.

“Do you make a habit of trespassing in my home and flouncing around so slatternly?” he snaps tersely, his eyes flashing approvingly.

You know the question is rhetorical, so you just hang your head, biting your lip, playing at being ashamed and chastised for being so wanton in the home of the man you desire. This is nothing like anything in Pride and Prejudice, but you could not give less of a damn, a flutter low in your gut that this could go somewhere utterly delicious.

“I must insist you desist,” he continues imperiously. “This must never happen again! Now go to my private quarters and think upon what you have done!” he concludes, pointing to the sofa.

“Yes, Mr Darcy,” you nod and curtsy with faux demureness, which he seems to greatly enjoy based on the flash in his eyes, seemingly even more so when you break character and poke out your tongue insolently as you pass.

You take a seat on the sofa and watch, initially confused, as Benedict remains in the kitchen area, play-acting as if he is chatting to guests, supping from a wine glass and gesturing. Puzzled, you watch as he reaches for his phone casually and flicks something on the screen, his back still turned to you.

There is a sudden, sharp buzz in your underwear that steals your breath, your legs tensing, your feet kicking out reflexively, sliding your clit heavier against the vibration.

Oh fuck.

That’s why the underwear felt oddly weighted. He must have snuck a thin remote vibe pad into the lining.

He makes a half-turn and smirks over his shoulder as you pant and stare at the play of his back muscles under his translucent shirt, your fingers clawing into the sofa at the sudden not-at-all-gentle onslaught.

“Ms Bennet, are you quite well?” he calls out, a triumphant look claiming his face. “You appear somewhat flushed.”

“Mr Darcy, I find myself in a most perplexing dilemma,” you grit out between clenched teeth, impressed you can even form words. The vibe is a persistent thrum that you attempt to tilt yourself away from slightly but seem unable, always there, dragging against you in a way that makes you writhe, your back arching.

He spins around to face you entirely now, putting down his wine glass, phone casual in the other hand, thumb hovering portentously over the screen with a gleeful mien.

“What troubles you, Ms Bennet?”

His lilt is teasing and velvet, humming in your bones as much as the toy. The vibration suddenly ceases, and you collapse back into the sofa, panting mildly, the corset restricting your ability to take the gulps of air you need, your chest heaving, unable to do anything but stare slack-jawed at him.

“Have you quite forgotten your words, Ms Bennet? I thought you a creature of learning…” he needles, the painted-on regency garb he wears just more temptation, his cock straining against the wool now. He makes no move to draw closer, but he does flick open the buttons around his wrists and roll up his sleeves, his toned forearms flexing as he does so.

“I am a woman of learning,” you defend after a pause, “but I find myself rather disadvantaged tonight. I suspect deception…” You narrow your eyes at him.

He throws his head back and laughs, his Adam's apple bobbing prominently as he does so. It makes you want to pitch forward and bite it.

“Whoever would deceive such a fine woman as you?” he fires back as he tilts back down. You cry out as his thumb yet again swipes over his screen, and your underwear roars back to life—this time a softer pulsing wave, but no less titillating, an inflaming tease that staccatos against your engorged flesh.

“You might, Mr Darcy…” you accuse, but it's lighthearted at best, a toothless threat as all of your efforts are focussed on the fizzing pleasure radiating out into your pelvis.

“On the contrary, Ms Bennet. In vain have I struggled…” he begins.

That speech.

“It will not do….” he adds, shaking his head for good measure as he flicks open the buttons upon his soaked shirt, your eyes tracking the movement as each new slice of damp, heated skin is revealed in the soft, low lamplight.

“My feelings will not be repressed…”

He peels the sodden shirt from his form, and you moan as that honed body is revealed to you, glistening slightly. The vibe is a roiling wave against your clit that makes your pussy clench around nothing, wishing to be filled.

“You must allow me….” he pauses and lopsidedly grins as he roughly tugs upon the buttons of his trousers, a teasing striptease that has you spiralling fast, leaking copiously into your knickers now.

“Allow you what…?” you throw in, huffing against the restriction of the corset, something about its tight hold escalating your addled state, moaning as he drops the last vestige of his clothing, his cock springing free. His whole being glowing with pride in how much he can affect you.

“To tell you how ardently I admire and love you….” he concludes, his voice dark and smooth, settling over your skin like warm molasses as he finally prowls towards you.

You want to pitch forward and nuzzle your face into his cock. But he dips down as he approaches, pushing your legs far apart with his hands and falling to his knees, burying his face into your cleavage. He suckles vehemently on the swell of your chest, lathing his tongue over your flushed skin as you fight to gasp in enough air, the vibe and his lush mouth hurtling you fast towards oblivion, his hands a firm grip on your hips.

“I love you too, Mr Darcy,” you gulp in delayed response. “But, please release me from this torture…” you append weakly, needing reprieve from the prolonged hold.

“Is it not the sweetest torture, though?” he argues back as his nose trails up your clavicle to your neck, his mouth earnest upon a spot that always makes you pliant. “I want to see you struggle, my love, bound in my corset, sat upon my vibe, teased and vexed until you can take no more….” his words are a sinful soliloquy gusting almost wistfully into your ear, your lobe snagged under his teeth.

“Take pity upon me, please; I am distressed,” you appeal, feeling a slight wooziness as you circle a chasm of pleasure that licks teasingly at your edges.

“You are beautiful,” he counters, a firm hand cupping the back of your head and puppets you to stare into his blown pupils, his rigid cock trailing a sticky line over your thigh as he rumbles more debauched. “Now come for me, Ms Bennet, and then I shall have you…”

You screw your eyes shut just as he flicks to a higher setting on the vibe and can no longer fight or struggle, letting your body break, febrile, a dew on your back as it arches, you screaming to the ceiling as you are thrown into the stars and the earth at the same time, torn in a hundred directions by the intense pulse radiating out from your core and fanning across your whole body, every muscle tensing and releasing in a sudden wave.

Hazily, you hear his jubilant praises ringing in your ears, but it feels far away even as his hands and mouth are hot and heavy on your skin, ripping the corset and knickers from your body with a vehemence that would shock you were you in less of a euphoric, altered state. He pulled you bodily to the edge of the sofa, teasing his cock against your throbbing clit, making you groan and paw at him, the need rising again as you return to your surroundings.

“You have bewitched me body and soul,” he pants as he slides into your body, a surging insistence that has your fingernail curling into the sinew on his forearms, your toes curling around the fuzzy meat of his thighs. “I never wish to be parted from you for a second. I love you..,” his tone rough, broken, stuttering as he bottoms out inside you, quoting the film you watched together the other night before taking you urgently towards another blissful peak.

Benedict taglist pt1: @makaylan @longingintheuniverse @iboopedyournose @aintnuthinbutahounddog @severewobblerlightdragon @writergirl-2001 @heeyyyou @enichole445 @enchantedbytomandhenry @ambitionspassionscoffee @chaoticcalzoneranchsports @nikaprincessofkattegat @baebee35 @crowleysqueenofhell @fiction-is-life @lilacbeesworld @broooookiecrisp @queen-of-the-misfit-toys @eleanor-bradstreet @divaanya @musicismyoxygen84 @miindfucked @sorryallonsy @cayt0123 @hottytoddyhistory @fictionalmenloversblog @zinzysstuff @malpalgalz @kinokomoonshine @causeimissu @delehosies @m-rae23 @last-sheep @panhoeofmanyfandoms @kmc1989 @desert-fern @corpseoftrees-queen @magical-spit @bunnyweasley23 @how-many-stars-in-the-sky @sya-skies

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mswyrr · 2 months

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Qimir consistently aches to see the pain the dark side causes Osha and I believe this will lead him to resist Plagueis' plans in s2.

His first moment of regret and resistance is, in fact, at the very completion of his seduction! He gets Osha to put the helmet on - and it hurts her. It's causing her pain, so he fights to rescue her from that. Even though, presumably, this was (with Plagueis, whether knowingly or unknowingly) the goal.

Let's backtrack a second and reflect on the seduction itself. The show creator/lead writer, Leslye Headland, has said that it wasn't manipulation on Qimir's part, that he meant everything he said. Two relevant quotes from the same interview with her on this point:

"So, in my opinion, Osha is extremely in denial about her own anger at the Jedi and at her father, i.e. Sol. She's in extreme denial about that because she feels like she's not allowed to be angry, and she's in an enormous amount of pain over her sister and their history, and she also feels like she's not allowed to feel that. So, someone coming in and saying, “Actually, feeling all those things is not only okay but actually could restore your spiritual foundation,” is almost too much. I don't think that's manipulation. I think he's telling her the truth."

"[T]he relationship between Lo and Jen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was an influence in the writer's room. We referenced that relationship over and over again. The intentional parallel is that they are equals and their relationship is earned through mutual vulnerability, not intimidation or manipulation."

However, someone can be themselves misled and so mislead you too, from a place of sincerity! That is, perhaps, the most heartbreaking way of all to mislead someone. Qimir is lost - the Jedi path damaged him and he (like so many Jedi before him) snapped to the Sith path. It's not working for him, it's causing him pain likely, but he believes it and shares from that place. But the moment Qimir sees this path is causing Osha pain, he feels compelled to do something to help her.

Once he gets the helmet off Osha, Qimir seems relieved when he learns the vision Osha *thinks* she saw, of Mae "killing a Jedi without a weapon." (Which Qimir somehow knows is the goal here - to get Mae or Osha to fall - presumably because Plagueis either gave him the vision or told him directly to try to get that to happen?)

He's content with the idea that Mae will be the one to do it, fulfilling the vision/directive, and actively seeks to make it happen from this point on. He tries to talk her up into doing it at the pivotal moment, but that's not what she's about, her feelings about Sol are not so out of balance for her to "fall" as the Jedi and Sith understand it. She feels anger but also wants justice most, not revenge.

I read disappointment in how Manny plays his reaction to Mae's "No" - disappointment at "failing" sure but also I think it's related to the fact that he wanted it to be Mae, not Osha.

This was cemented for me by the way he played Qimir's reaction to Osha's fall. He's not celebratory, though he's just accomplished what he had been trying to since he began teaching Mae! He seems stricken, actually. There's no pleasure or satisfaction in his "success"! Witnessing Osha's pain only makes him feel compassion and bow his head in sorrow. This "success" is ashes in his mouth.

As a mutual on Twitter pointed out to me (♥️_LokiDokie!), Leslye's commentary in this interview supports this reading of Qimir as grief-stricken by what he's seen:

"Then it's like this passing through, stepping over the threshold, that actually will bring them closer together, which is so interesting. But the motivation I gave to Manny in that moment — in theater, we would call it dramaturgically — for, “Why is he stepping over to do that,” because it said it in the script, was, “You have been in this position. If you have a red lightsaber, you have felt this level of despair, rage, and dejection. So go over there and let her know that you have had that experience.” And he just did that beautiful thing. I was like, “Jesus Christ.”"

His reaction is a stark contrast to Mae, who never fell to the dark side, and doesn't understand what she's seeing - she mistakes this for Osha being liberated from Jedi mindwashing. THIS is what Qimir's face would look like if he thought this was a good thing and was happy about it:

The contrast is quite stark.

Qimir's sorrow for Osha continues as he attempts to comfort her and then sees she's bled the saber.

Intriguingly, Qimir has the helmet on and is "hiding" emotionally when he wipes Mae's memory. We don't get to see how that pain effects him. But the pattern throughout the episode is that when Osha hurts he aches too.

In the final scene, Qimir approaches Osha, again, without triumph at any of this. He's gotten everything he thought he wanted, but he looks at her and I read concern, sorrow, wariness.

He steps closer to her and takes her hand supportively, continuing his pattern (3 times in this episode!) of physically coming close to help/comfort her when she's hurting.

Then he raises his chin with resolve, but no happiness. They are facing the future, but they are "doomed" on the Sith path. Romantic love cannot live there anymore than it can thrive on the arid, repressed Jedi path. I think he suspects that - whether or not he's knowingly in league with Plagueis. Whatever is coming, the Sith path can only cause Osha more and more pain...

He cannot help but ache with her when he sees Osha in pain and want to help her. I cannot imagine an s2 where they continue down the Sith path without him breaking under the strain of watching the pain it causes her - he could endure it himself but seeing her do it? He'll snap. And that romantic love--something BOTH the Jedi and Sith reject and denigrate--that will help them escape imo. Here's a quote from Leslye I interpret as supportive of this reading. She references how the Sith path is inimical to romantic love and then alludes to the tantalizing possibility of escape:

HEADLAND: Oh, yeah! Again, they’re Sith. It's a different vibe. To me, it's gonna hit different because of their allegiance and who they are. So, yes, it is framed as romantic, but I do think, again, it's not gonna turn out great. I think if he's training her, “One to hold the power, one to crave it.” So they're starting off as equals, but what's gonna happen? Like in Romeo and Juliet, it's amazing because right at the beginning they're like, “Okay, these two die. Let's start the play.” As you're watching this incredible love story unfold, and it's one of the most beautifully iconic plays ever written, in the back of your mind, you're like, “This is not going to turn out well.” I want to clarify: They are not necessarily doomed or destined to fail as a team. But the Sith rule of two denotes a power imbalance. Which clearly, due to the final shot, is not their relationship. Also, Plagueis complicates their journey as Sith, because we know his apprentice is eventually Palpatine. They will not defeat him.

I feel pretty confident that the love he feels for her is pivotal to their journey away from the Sith path and what Plagueis wants for Osha - both because Leslye knows this is not a good path and because of the deep sense of care and connection Qimir already feels for Osha.

Combine this with Leslye's comments and imo it being unlikely that they'll repeat the same pattern with Qimir & Vernestra that they did with Sol & Osha and just the overall "sameness" that would come of hammering the endless cycle in more and I just don't buy that as the direction we're headed.

It is possible to tell it as a relentless tragedy and keep hammering the endless, inescapable cycles but, while tragedies are valid (I enjoy hotd!), even they have a narrative form more varied than that usually. And this IS a "coming of age" psychological/mythic Star Wars story at the end of the day. And one Leslye (happily gay married with a child!) drew on her own experiences (with religious trauma) to write... she didn't end up trapped in darkness why would a young protagonist like Osha have to?

Here's the full Leslye quote about religious trauma, since I believe it's vital to understanding where she and the writing team are going to take Osha, Mae, and Qimir:

You have a play, Cult of Love, coming to Broadway this fall. It’s about a Christian family gathering for the holidays. It’s inspired by your own experiences with your family. You were working on it at the same time as The Acolyte, from what I can tell. Did they influence each other? Our director, Trip Cullman, and I were talking about how it’s called Cult of Love because all cults have a dream, and the dream is really beautiful. Even Jim Jones started out trying to desegregate Indianapolis. This family in the play has this dream that they follow to the logical conclusion, which is that they never achieve it. I was raised Christian. Christianity is the ultimate dream. It’s a beautiful concept that God becomes human in order to love you more. Then you look at what Christianity has done to the world: colonization, genocide. It was a beautiful dream that doesn’t justify the human action that comes along. The Jedi also live in a dream, a dream they believe everybody has. In The Acolyte, the pilot ends with the line “An acolyte kills the dream.” The drama is to wake up to the fact that the dream doesn’t exist.

I think the point is for Osha and Qimir to wake up to the fact that both the Jedi and Sith "dreams" do not exist. They are toxic mirrors of each other - and Osha and Mae were born into a culture (the culture of the Coven and their mothers) that didn't see the force in the binary way the Jedi&Sith both do. Mae, who remembered and kept to the pov of the Coven, never fell to the dark side in a Sith way --she felt anger but balanced with a desire for justice, even when she killed-- it was only her sister, taught repression and self-denial by the Jedi, who did. Qimir and Osha have a conceptual/spiritual escape route open to them if they wish to use it.

Finally, Leslye has said that she's written Qimir as her "shadow" (in the Jungian sense) and that she feels close to him - and what does he want? "I want freedom." I don't think someone driven by that desire is going to just surrender himself AND the woman he loves to Plagueis the Creeper.

My wife was like, “What do you want to say?” I was like, “I wanna say that people don't want me to exist as a gay woman, as a woman in this particular space, working in this wild sandbox.” There was a whole crew of people who believed in me, but deep down, I felt like, “I am unaccepted for who I am because of what I believe in and wanting to wield my power the way I'd like without having to answer to the legion of people that just exist out there.” By the way, I think everybody feels this way. I think that's why it resonates when you're honest about yourself, and you get personal about it. When he says, “I want freedom,” that's what I want. I just want freedom. I want to be able to just be out there and be myself and be the type of artist I want to be without having to answer to anybody. That's why I feel so close to him.

#oshamir #the acolyte #the acolyte meta #qimir the acolyte #osha aniseya #my meta #long post

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livelaughpeg · 28 days

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I'm writing this from a throwaway account, because you know...Scientology.

I want to preface this post by saying I am not one of those "I knew it all along!" people. I can't stand that attitude. I was pretty ambivelant towards Neil Gaiman. Prior to the allegations, I didn't hate him but I wasn't that interested in him as a person either. I don't think you can always tell when someone is a bad or good person simply by the topics they write about. If that was the case we'd be arresting every horror writer on earth.

But one thing that did always rub me up the wrong way was the way he talked about getting work.

I borrowed and read "Make Good Art" (a small book based on a speech he gave to graduates at the University of the Arts) at a time in my life that I was really struggling to get by (I still am to some extent, but in a different way). I expected to see some practical advice. Instead it was a bunch of glib shit like:

I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and they paid for it, or they didn’t, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them. Looking back, I’ve had a remarkable ride. I’m not sure I can call it a career, because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan, and I never did. The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was 15 of everything I wanted to do: to write an adult novel, a children’s book, a comic, a movie, record an audiobook, write an episode of Doctor Who… and so on. I didn’t have a career. I just did the next thing on the list.

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.

Yeah, well, no shit. If you're a writer or artist you probably do anyway. Whether you get paid for it or not, whether you draw fan art or original art. But the point of Gaiman's speech was to give advice to people who wanted to be paid for their art. To make a career of it. Making art every day isn't always enough. You have to pay the damn rent, you have to eat, you have to network and do social media and promote yourself, and you have to do it while thousands of other people are doing the same thing in a massive crowd of people who want the same thing. Practical advice is much more valuable than platitudes and theory.

I am not a writer, I'm an illustrator, and let me tell you that for most people, 'getting your foot in the door' isn't a one time thing. Quite often you have to work at getting your foot in the door again and again until you become established, and it's very easy to be forgotten. I still feel like I'm in that stage now.

I watched my peers, and my friends, and the ones who were older than me and watch how miserable some of them were: I’d listen to them telling me that they couldn’t envisage a world where they did what they had always wanted to do any more, because now they had to earn a certain amount every month just to keep where they were. They couldn’t go and do the things that mattered, and that they had really wanted to do; and that seemed as a big a tragedy as any problem of failure.

The implication was that he was successful because he wrote every day and his friends weren't because they didn't, because you know, working a second job is tiring. He called this a tragedy, but there was something very glib about the way he narrated this.

I think someone had more financial cushion that he was letting on.

And yes, sometimes it does work that way, (some people are very lucky and make all the right connections) but Gaiman was getting Big Jobs right off the bat and something about that never smelt right to me after the way he talked about it.

And then I saw Jeff's tweets. Oh, that's why...

I suspect the truth is he was living off his family's money and connections, and while I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that if you're a struggling artist, his family are Scientologists, and I don't think he ever struggled.

I suspect it's all a lie.

#neil gaiman #jeff vandermeer #twitter

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dedalvs · 14 days

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When will humankind learn the lesson of its hubris and begin to heal itself? Also can you recommend any undergraduate or graduate level resources (textbooks etc.) for learning about fiction? I already read Writing Fiction by Burroway. Thanks in advance

January 14, 3182. Make a note of the date and return to this post when it comes.

To your second question, I've never read anything on writing fiction, only writing in general. I've found something valuable in every book on writing, even if there were things in the book I found less valuable. For example, I read Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg, and while there was much of it I didn't care for, there are some passags that have stuck with me 22 years later. When it comes to writing guides, I think the best thing to do is read what interests you while understand that what you are really doing is building your own writing guide inside you. You're absorbing what you find personally meaningful and using it to create your own personal styleguide that, like it or not, you'll be following for the rest of your life. Rather than rejecting that, and trying to decide which text will be the text that tells you how to write, embrace it, realize that you are going to do what you're going to do, and then try to work within that framework. That is, if that's what's happening, how will you approach a styleguide? What will it mean to you to read a very didactic text (i.e. "All serious writers must do x; no serious writer every does y") vs. a loosey-goosey one (e.g. "Dance naked in the garden of your creativity and allow your flowers to bloom!")? What are you looking for in these texts and what will you do with information or strategies that you find valuable?

Returning to Writing Down the Bones, I have to say I found the book to be mostly woo. It was more a kind of self-help/empowerment book than a book on writing, in my opinion. But there is something in there that I'm sure I'd heard before but which finally resonated with me. Specifically, it was the way she articulated that it really, truly doesn't matter what you put on the page when you're drafting. Drafting is not the time to reject. Even some idea comes to you that you find absurd, illogical, thematically inappropriate—whatever. It's not the time to push it away. Indeed, it's wasted effort. Editing and revising is the time to question. If you're writing, you shouldn't let anything stop you—even your own brain.

Why it took till then for this idea to take root, I don't know. It could be how she worded it. It could be that it came at the right time. Perhaps I was more open to new ideas when I was reading this book. It may also have something to do with a transition that had taken place for me in writing. After all, when I started high school, I was not regularly using a computer (we'd only just gotten a computer that stayed at home). When I started writing, I wrote by hand—on paper. It's a much, much different thing to edit and revise when you're writing on paper than it is on when you're working on a computer! I mean, digital real estate is cheap. When you're writing by hand, it can literally hurt to write seven or eight pages—and then to discard them in editing! Right now I'm working on a novel draft where I've decided an entire section needs to come out. If I'd written that by hand?! I can't even imagine.

I guess the tl;dr of it is I don't have a specific text to recommend. Rather, I encourage you to look around and grab anything that interests you. In doing so, though, I encourage you to approach it differently, focusing on what in it you find valuable, without either wholly rejecting it or feeling you have to follow it to the letter like an Ikea manual. I even found something valuable in C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, which I honestly can't believe I read.

If you'd like some fiction advice that may be generally useful no matter what you're writing, this is what I can offer:

A valuable skill to hone is being able to read your work as if you have no other knowledge of it. In other words, you need to be able to read your work like a reader. One of the most difficult things to do with fiction is to cut. You usually have a lot more characterization, a lot more plot points, a lot more detail, etc. than end up on the page. The important question is if you cut something, will the reader notice? Will it actually feel like something's miss it, or will a reader never notice? Mind, I'm not saying that as a writer you can't tell if something is superfluous, or that anything you cut will be superfluous. I'm saying sometimes even if you cut something important a reader will still get the impression that what they are reading is whole and unedited. That isn't a good thing or a bad thing: it's a neutral thing. The question you'll have to answer is what is this whole that the reader is getting, and is that whole something you're satisfied with?

Get multiple rounds of feedback from many different readers. I say this not because it's vital, because beta readers are important, because you have to have multiple perspectives on your work, etc. None of that. Getting feedback from many different readers is a form of self-care on the part of the writer. I was deathly afraid of feedback as a young writer. I welcomed praise, sure, but anything else felt too painful to bear. This changed when I took a short fiction class at Berkeley. Suddenly a short story of mine wasn't getting one round of feedback: it was getting fourteen. And not just from the professor, but from fellow students. This was a minor revolution for me in terms of accepting feedback. If I were to take, say, one round of feedback, certainly there would be some praise, but there would also be notes like "awkward phrasing", "why did x character do y?", "this is unclear", "too much description", etc. These things would burn me. I would seethe reading them, and it would hurt so deeply. But! Imagine that one of them circles a paragraph and writes "too much description" and then the other thirteen readers say absolutely nothing at all about that paragraph—maybe one even puts a smiley face next to it. THAT puts the criticism in its proper context. Maybe your writing isn't too bad! Maybe there isn't too much description. Maybe that particular reader just wasn't vibing with it, and maybe that's okay. And then let's look at it from the other perspective. Say thirteen out of fourteen papers have a sentence marked and all of them say things like "huh?", "what's this mean?", "confusing", etc. Guess what? The sentence is probably confusing. And for some reason if everyone's saying the same thing it hurts a lot less. It means, yeah, you probably made a little mistake, and that's okay. It's not one person singling you out, and it's not the case that they don't know what they're talking about. I can't emphasize enough how freeing it is to look at reviews of your work if you have a handful or more to draw from rather than just a single good friend.

It's okay to write the fun part first. You may have a plot device you're really excited about, but to get there, you have to introduce your characters, have them get together, have them go to a place, meet someone else, etc. And it may take time and energy to write all that. You may feel pressured to get through that before you get to the part you really want to write. You certainly can, but you do not have to. I don't know if younger writers can appreciate exactly what it means to have a computer. You can write a little bit now and literally copy and paste it into some other document later. Try doing that with a typewriter! You can write something like "Insert paragraphs later of characters traveling to x location". You can even drop a variable in there so it's easy to find with the search function later (e.g. "ZZZZZ insert scene description here"—now you just need to search for "ZZZZZ"). You can put it in a different color on the screen so it's easy to find when scrolling. You can paste a freaking photo into your document! It's extraordinary what you can do with a computer that you couldn't do in years past. You've got a ton of options. But most importanly, when your work is done, no one will know what order you wrote it in.

In fiction, nothing has to happen. Villains don't have to be punished; heroes don't have to win; characters don't have to have a specific arc that comes to some conclusion. Honestly, one of the tropes (if you can even call it a trope) that I find most frustrating in sequels for movie franchises is after the characters are introduced, they take a few character and assign to them the major story conflict, and then for the rest, they give them a mini arc. It's like, "Mondo 2: Exploding the Mondoverse sees our hero Larjo Biggins take on new villain the Krunge as the very core of the Mondoverse is threatened with destruction! Also, Siddles Nuli learns its okay to be left out sometimes and she shouldn't get her feelings hurt, and Old Mucko learns that even though technology is advancing, sometimes good old fashioned common sense is just what the doctor ordered!" If you get to the end of your story, and you feel it's done, you don't have to panic if you suddenly realize we don't know whether Hupsi ever made it to Bumbus 7. It's okay if Story A is resolved but Story B is not.

I don't care if you used Trope A in your new story even though you used Trope A in your past seven stories and neither should you. Seriously, you think anyone was complaining when Agatha Christie put out another mystery novel? "Oh. Mystery again, huh? Gee, we were all hoping you'd write a book about the struggles traditional fishing villages are facing in the wake of industrial modernization." No we fucking weren't!

I hope you find some of this useful. Whether you did or not, though, be sure you enjoy what you're doing. If you are, you're doing the right thing.

#writing #fiction #agatha christie #c s lewis #natalie goldberg #mcu #seriously #the end of hubris and the beginning of healing #mark your calendars

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writingwithcolor · 9 months

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My alternate universe fantasy colonial Hong Kong is more authoritarian and just as racist but less homophobic than in real life, should I change that?

@floatyhands asked:

I’m a Hongkonger working on a magical alternate universe dystopia set in what is basically British colonial Hong Kong in the late 1920s. My main character is a young upper middle-class Eurasian bisexual man. I plan to keep the colony’s historical racial hierarchy in this universe, but I also want the fantasy quirks to mean that unlike in real life history, homosexuality was either recently decriminalized, or that the laws are barely enforced, because my boy deserves a break. Still, the institutions are quite homophobic, and this relative tolerance might not last. Meanwhile, due to other divergences (e.g. eldritch horrors, also the government’s even worse mishandling of the 1922 Seamen's Strike and the 1925 Canton-Hong Kong Strike), the colonial administration is a lot more authoritarian than it was in real history. This growing authoritarianism is not exclusive to the colony, and is part of a larger global trend in this universe. I realize these worldbuilding decisions above may whitewash colonialism, or come off as choosing to ignore one colonial oppression in favor of exaggerating another. Is there any advice as to how I can address this issue? (Maybe I could have my character get away by bribing the cops, though institutional corruption is more associated with the 1960s?) Thank you!

Historical Precedent for Imperialistic Gay Rights

There is a recently-published book about this topic that might actually interest you: Racism And The Making of Gay Rights by Laurie Marhoefer (note: I have yet to read it, it’s on my list). It essentially describes how the modern gay rights movement was built from colonialism and imperialism.

The book covers Magnus Hirschfeld, a German sexologist in the early 1900s, and (one of) his lover(s), Li Shiu Tong, who he met in British Shanghai. Magnus is generally considered to have laid the groundwork for a lot of gay rights, and his research via the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was a target of Nazi book-burnings, but he was working with imperial governments in an era where the British Empire was still everywhere.

Considering they both ended up speaking to multiple world leaders about natural human sexual variation both in terms of intersex issues and sexual attraction, your time period really isn’t that far off for people beginning to be slightly more open-minded—while also being deeply imperialist in other ways.

The thing about this particular time period is homosexuality as we know it was recently coming into play, starting with the trial of Oscar Wilde and the rise of Nazism. But between those two is a pretty wildly fluctuating gap of attitudes.

Oscar Wilde’s trial is generally considered the period where gay people, specifically men who loved men, started becoming a group to be disliked for disrupting social order. It was very public, very scandalous, and his fall from grace is one of the things that drove so many gay and/or queer men underground. It also helped produce some of the extremely queercoded classical literature of the Victorian and Edwardian eras (ex: Dracula), because so many writers were exploring what it meant to be seen as such negative forces. A lot of people hated Oscar Wilde for bringing the concept to such a public discussion point, when being discreet had been so important.

But come the 1920s, people were beginning to wonder if being gay was that bad, and Mangus Hirschfeld managed to do a world tour of speaking come the 1930s, before all of that was derailed by wwii. He (and/or Li Shiu Tong) were writing papers that were getting published and sent to various health departments about how being gay wasn’t an illness, and more just an “alternative” way of loving others.

This was also the era of Boston Marriages where wealthy single women lived together as partners (I’m sure there’s an mlm-equivalent but I cannot remember or find it). People were a lot less likely to care if you kept things discreet, so there might be less day to day homophobia than one would expect. Romantic friendships were everywhere, and were considered the ideal—the amount of affection you could express to your same-sex best friend was far above what is socially tolerable now.

Kaz Rowe has a lot of videos with cited bibliographies about various queer disasters [affectionate] of the late 1800s/early 1900s, not to mention a lot of other cultural oddities of the Victorian era (and how many of those attitudes have carried into modern day) so you can start to get the proper terms to look it up for yourself.

I know there’s a certain… mistrust of specifically queer media analysts on YouTube in the current. Well. Plagiarism/fact-creation scandal (if you don’t know about the fact-creation, check out Todd in the Shadows). I recommend Kaz because they have citations on screen and in the description that aren’t whole-cloth ripped off from wikipedia’s citation list (they’ve also been published via Getty Publications, a museum press).

For audio-preferring people (hi), a video is more accessible than text, and sometimes the exposure to stuff that’s able to pull exact terms can finally get you the resources you need. If text is more accessible, just jump to the description box/transcript and have fun. Consider them and their work a starting place, not a professor.

There is always a vulnerability in learning things, because we can never outrun our own confirmation bias and we always have limited time to chase down facts and sources—we can only do our best and be open to finding facts that disprove what we researched prior.

Colonialism’s Popularity Problem

Something about colonialism that I’ve rarely discussed is how some colonial empires actually “allow” certain types of “deviance” if that deviance will temporarily serve its ends. Namely, when colonialism needs to expand its territory, either from landing in a new area or having recently messed up and needing to re-charm the population.

By that I mean: if a fascist group is struggling to maintain popularity, it will often conditionally open its doors to all walks of life in order to capture a greater market. It will also pay its spokespeople for the privilege of serving their ends, often very well. Authoritarians know the power of having the token supporter from a marginalized group on payroll: it both opens you up directly to that person’s identity, and sways the moderates towards going “well they allow [person/group] so they can’t be that bad, and I prefer them.”

Like it or not, any marginalized group can have its fascist members, sometimes even masquerading as the progressives. Being marginalized does not automatically equate to not wanting fascism, because people tend to want fascist leaders they agree with instead of democracy and coalition building. People can also think that certain people are exaggerating the horrors of colonialism, because it doesn’t happen to good people, and look, they accept their friends who are good people, so they’re fine.

A dominant fascist group can absolutely use this to their advantage in order to gain more foot soldiers, which then increases their raw numbers, which puts them in enough power they can stop caring about opening their ranks, and only then do they turn on their “deviant” members. By the time they turn, it’s usually too late, and there’s often a lot of feelings of betrayal because the spokesperson (and those who liked them) thought they were accepted, instead of just used.

You said it yourself that this colonial government is even stricter than the historical equivalent—which could mean it needs some sort of leverage to maintain its popularity. “Allowing” gay people to be some variation of themselves would be an ideal solution to this, but it would come with a bunch of conditions. What those conditions are I couldn’t tell you—that’s for your own imagination, based off what this group’s ideal is, but some suggestions are “follow the traditional dating/friendship norms”, “have their own gender identity slightly to the left of the cis ideal”, and/or “pretend to never actually be dating but everyone knows and pretends to not care so long as they don’t out themselves”—that would signal to the reader that this is deeply conditional and about to all come apart.

It would, however, mean your poor boy is less likely to get a break, because he would be policed to be the “acceptable kind of gay” that the colonial government is currently tolerating (not unlike the way the States claims to support white cis same-sex couples in the suburbs but not bipoc queer-trans people in polycules). It also provides a more salient angle for this colonial government to come crashing down, if that’s the way this narrative goes.

Colonial governments are often looking for scapegoats; if gay people aren’t the current one, then they’d be offered a lot more freedom just to improve the public image of those in power. You have the opportunity to have the strikers be the current scapegoats, which would take the heat off many other groups—including those hit by homophobia.

In Conclusion

Personally, I’d take a more “gays for Trump” attitude about the colonialism and their apparent “lack” of homophobia—they’re just trying to regain popularity after mishandling a major scandal, and the gay people will be on the outs soon enough.

You could also take the more nuanced approach and see how imperialism shaped modern gay rights and just fast-track that in your time period, to give it the right flavour of imperialism. A lot of BIPOC lgbtqa+ people will tell you the modern gay rights movement is assimilationalist, colonialist, and other flavours of ick, so that angle is viable.

You can also make something that looks more accepting to the modern eye by leaning heavily on romantic friendships that encouraged people waxing poetic for their “best friends”, keeping the “lovers” part deeply on the down low, but is still restrictive and people just don’t talk about it in public unless it’s in euphemisms or among other same-sex-attracted people because there’s nothing wrong with loving your best friend, you just can’t go off and claim you’re a couple like a heterosexual couple is.

Either way, you’re not sanitizing colonialism inherently by having there be less modern-recognized homophobia in this deeply authoritarian setting. You just need to add some guard rails on it so that, sure, your character might be fine if he behaves, but there are still “deviants” that the government will not accept.

Because that’s, in the end, one of the core tenants that makes a government colonial: its acceptance of groups is frequently based on how closely you follow the rules and police others for not following them, and anyone who isn’t their ideal person will be on the outs eventually. But that doesn’t mean they can’t have a facade of pretending those rules are totally going to include people who are to the left of those ideals, if those people fit in every other ideal, or you’re safe only if you keep it quiet.

~ Leigh

#colonialism #colonization #worldbuilding #alternate history #history #lgbt #china #hong kong #british empire #ask

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dduane · 3 months

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I just wrote a thousand words on my trek fanfic and I feel incredible. How do I maintain moment like this without burning out? any advice appreciated. Also I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how medicine is handled in the Star Trek Franchise. Part of my fan fic is an exploration on the operations of a big hospital vessel (some of my favorite background set pieces in Trek)

Let me take this in two parts.

First of all: don't worry about burning out any time soon. It sounds a bit like you're experiencing the flip side of performance anxiety—the "Having Performed" anxiety, where some nervous fragment of your writer-mind runs around tearing its hair and moaning "But what if it stops?!" ...This is way too familiar: I think we all get it from time to time.

The simplest thing to say about this is: Don't sweat it. You didn't get where you are as a writer overnight, and my guess would be that it takes at least as long to reach a genuinely non-writing state as it took to reach the writing one.

Also, and in particular, the kind of momentum most writers find themselves dealing with is not necessarily visible as words on the page. The Writer Brain has many forms of continuing creativity that don't show on the surface. Work, sometimes quite important work, is continually going on in the background without any exterior sign that even you can perceive. (Which is probably one of the things that drives a lot of writers furthest around the bend. We are all black boxes, full of processes we don't fully understand and routinely can't supervise or control. All we can do is learn to live with it, and keep on working.)

The thing to remember about your fanfic work (and indeed, of all writing work, but it's most obvious with fanfic) is that it should be for having fun. And yeah, you'll suffer and twitch and sweat your guts out over it as well! But regardless of facile simplistic bullshit "inspirational" mottoes about finding a job you love and thereby never working a day in your life, writing is usually work, and it's okay for it to be work... because some work is both worth doing, and worth doing well.

Meanwhile, especially at the fanfic end, you get to have the fun anyway! Fanfic, as we (mostly) make it and share it these days, is pure gift. It's grace made manifest. When you read it, you know that a stranger made this fabulous stuff for you, for nothing. Makers of fic inhabit a very special place. Be proud of your spot in it.

So for now just concentrate on sitting down as regularly as you can (the write-every-day thing isn't workable for some people, and maybe not for you: find your own rhythm) and let it slide out at its own speed. I'll be fine.

...Now. Re: medicine in Trek: what I do, mostly, is look at what's cutting edge right now, and then go further. Then I think a little about whatever I've created so far, and think about how to go further than that. And then write about it as if it's not merely casual, but a bit boring.

For example, as off this news story: McCoy shrugging and saying casually, “Well, we can handle this a couple of ways. We’ll either turn their pancreas back on, or print them a new one.” And then adding, “So what’ll we do after lunch?”

Just be bold in creating new approaches, because even now things are starting to look more wildly interesting than usual.

Hope this helps!

#writing #writing advice #medicine in the future #performance anxiety #process

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dystopyx-blog · 3 months

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as a Floyd enjoyer

I do read a LOT of octotrio posts.

Like a lot

so, as a yandere writer

time for yandere octotrio headcanons!

a lot of this will probably tie in for my ideas for my self insert and yandere posts I’ve written in the past!

it’s hard to say who was interested in you first. Either Azul was interested and sent the tweels on you, or the tweels were interested in you and then got azul interested and then azul sent the tweels on you, all I can say for certain is that at some point, someone is interested, and you get the tweels sent on you.

So you got the tweels following you around now. The two have different ways of studying. Floyd, of course, is more hands on. Jade typically stays back, taking EXTENSIVE mental notes. He mostly only gets involved when he can tell Floyd is getting a bit too… much for any one person to handle.

of course, then you have to deal with TWO tweels, and idc who you are, dealing with BOTH of them is way more to handle than just one of them. Like, one tweel is like 100%, but when those fuckers are working together it’s like at least 110%.

but… you seem to handle them really well somehow??

so whether it was Azul who was interested first, or they were interested from the very start, safe to say they are VERY interested in you now.

The tweels, despite being chaotic neutral at best (chaotic evil at worst) are still pretty goddamn loyal to Azul. So they eagerly report back to him (either to convince him or further convince him, again, doesn’t matter)

then this is where it gets really fun (for me)

I love the octotrio, and what I especially love is the mix of platonic and romantic. Like, ofc Floyd and Jade are purely familial. But when it comes to their relationship with Azul, it’s the kind of platonic that so fucking seamlessly shifts into romantic that no one is sure when it turned, and also no one cares. The octotrio blend so fucking seamlessly with each other, that they could even be purely platonic with each other, it could be less romance and more family, but an outsider would never fucking know or understand that. THE OCTOTRIO RELATIONSHIP/S ARE SO FUCKIN NOM NOM NOM I’M DEVOURING IT —

Ahem

anyway

point is, whether octotrio is a romantic poly or just three really fucking close friends, they all look at you and go “that one, we want that one.” And they don’t even have to vocally announce they want to share you, it is understood. There is no “all in favor say aye,” after a few times of the tweels reporting back to Azul they’re just all agreed “yes, this one is ours now, we are taking them for the seafood polycule.”

calamari, unagi, and shrimp, yum yum

ANYWAY

Expect the tweels on yo ass even more than before. Not only that, but they are FULLY embracing their statuses as fucking terrifying menaces to keep all your icky clingy friends away

Suddenly they’re paying extra close attention to your flaws. All of which they find endlessly endearing, what they’re really looking for is a chance to snap.

an insecurity, a life ending mistake, anything to get a chance to whisper in your ear that you need special help. Or maybe they’ll even use the fact they’re living up to their name and stick to you like leeches to convince you you need to talk to Azul

maybe you’re strong, maybe you can’t be fully convinced. Maybe once they do bring you to Azul (trust me, they will) you decide “nope, I’m out.” Thing is though, once they get you there, it’s already decided. Azul will know exactly how to trap you, exactly what to do to get you to come back, or even better, stay.

if you’re in Yuu’s shoes, I imagine he’d be willing to let you AND Grim live in the lounge. To make it less suspicious, he’ll probably say you have to work, or that he gets to use Ramshackle. Something to make sure you’re not suspicious why he’s suddenly so hospitable. But really, ramshackle or service are not what he’s after. Obviously. No, he needs you there, with them.

I don’t even really have to get into what these guys do as yanderes, since most students are already pretty frightened by the tweels. And now that they have someone to ‘protect’? HO BOI, do they REALLY give the student body to fear.

and if they get past Jade and Floyd, then there’s Azul, who will bribe or blackmail until they leave their darling alone.

yeah, sorry to say, once they have you in their sights, it’s pm over for you.

Doesn’t matter who saw you first, cuz you were doomed from the start either way.

GENERAL OCTOTRIO + READER HEADCANONS ❤️

Pleeeasassse I cannot get the image of octotrio dog pile outta my headdd. Azul, Jade, and Floyd are CUDDLY MOTHERFUCKERS, you cannot convince me otherwise. And once they have you, you’re joining. Typically Jade and Floyd both spoon Azul (you can’t convince me otherwise (or maybe you can, let’s talk)), and you’ll likely be sandwiched between Azul and whichever tweel called dibs that night. Or, it’s the true dog pile, where limbs are kind just all over the place. There’s typically a tweel at the bottom (cuz big bois), and that tweel is typically Jade because Floyd insists on being on top, despite his height and weight. And adding you just makes the dog pile feel so much fuller ❤️ (and if you’re one of those people like me who falls asleep better with like weight on top of you… yeah, you are not gonna be awake long enough to protest)

it may take a while for Azul to get comfortable enough to go full octomer on you, especially if you’re a darling who runs away, but once he does trust you enough, he will. And like… come on, I think we as a fandom agree that octo Azul is beautiful/adorable, so of course you do not react negatively to it, even if you’re a stubborn darling.

maybe you’re speechless, and Azul gets flustered and wants to ZOOM back to the surface, but the tweels hold him back, and thank god they do, because even if you aren’t screaming “omg you’re so cute/pretty!!” like I would, you probably mutter it under your breath, just loud enough that he definitely hears (did you know sound moves faster in water?) and he is a blushing cephaloboy. (Bet you didn’t think I’d bring SCIENCE into this, HA)

Suddenly now they’re also snuggling you in the water in med form, because yes these boys cuddle in med form, and you’re one of them now. Can’t breathe in water? Silly, they got magic for that. You are not getting out of this seafood pancake 🫵🫵

you are going to have so many limbs all over you omg. The tweels are trying their damndest to wrap their eel tails around the both of you, and Azul is keeping all of y’all together with his arms

(here’s another science fact, octopus do not have tentacles, those are arms)

AND DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE BREE—

#Yandere #yandere rambles #yandere headcanons #im really proud of this one ngl #Yandere twst #yandere twisted wonderland #yandere octotrio #yandere azul ashengrotto #yandere jade leech #yandere floyd leech #yandere octotrio x reader #yandere azul x reader #yandere jade x reader

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yuri-is-online · 3 days

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Bro floyd is so handsome-

And he's weirdly the only twst character that I can describe as handsome??? Like every other character I like is either cute or pretty. Trey and leona might have been handsome to me at one point but I'm just. Not attracted to them yk? Even Jade! Jade is very pretty! He's my evil little wife! But floyd is like. The only one that's actually handsome, like in the traditional sense. At least to me he is. Just like. His mannerisms I guess... idk man he's cool as hell and weirdly reminiscent of dark vintage americana. Weirdest fucking aesthetic I can connect him to but fuck you I'm connecting them (national anthem demo 1 by lana. I was reading the lyrics and also the overall vibe of that specific version of the song just kind of cemented for me)

Idk dude sometime I just go into you inbox and dump out my twst thoughts with no real purpose or structure and this is one of those times 🦵...also it's 2 am so that probably has something to do with it. Good night Yuri!

The prequel to this ask and also still goodnight because it is rather late here rn

Floyd is very much a mob boss, old Americana, guy you obviously should not be attracted to but still everyone kind of understands why type of guy. He's handsome in italics, in a way that you giggle about and exaggeratedly wag your eyes because hey you could be joking.

He's that sort of handsome where most interested parties would ditch him after a weekend. Handsome in a way that sparks but doesn't start a fire, like one of his bad moods that's strong, horrible, and will do so much damage but is gone as soon as it's come on. Like a man desperate for a real connection and can't quite get it, who is looking into your eyes while it rains outside not saying anything but really wanting you to know it's real. Handsome like the guy who doesn't get the girl but everyone knows if the writer was paying attention to their own characters would have been the better choice.

Handsome in a way that's stammered out without a technicality offered by someone small, vulnerable, and foreign to everything he knows in more ways than just the one obvious fact who ignores all of that stuff. Handsome enough for the spark to catch and the connection to wrap itself around your waist and drag you into the ocean without a single scream because the part those stories often ignore is that there are people who would look at an eel three times there size and still "would."

He laughs, dizzyingly loud and all the things he is at once because what he thinks of you is much simpler than all of that. He thinks you're cute~ so cute he could just eat you up.

#<3 asks #twisted wonderland x reader #twst x reader #floyd leech x reader #floyd leech x yuu

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jpitha · 19 days

Text

Allergies

This is a rewrite of one of my oldest shorts. As a writer - especially one who posts online - never worry about redoing some old work and posting the new one. Artists often will show their old work against their new right? No reason writers can't do the same either. Be proud of all your work, but feel free to show your improvement too!

The small station was in a popular shipping lane, so it had high amounts of traffic. Even though the humans had brought their wormhole generator drives, many people were still used to using the Gate system. Retrofitting every starship would be too costly, take too much time, and (some worried) would shift the power balance towards the humans too much. One didn't have to be human to be set in one's ways.

Because of the high amounts of traffic, most of the people on the station worked in the service industry. Providing meals, entertainment, refreshments, repairs and other such things, the population was quite diverse. In their off hours, they mingled and socialized.

Generi stood there awkwardly, still wearing the uniform of the trinket shop he worked in, his tail drooped and his ears low, trying to make sense of it. “Explain allergies to me one more time?”

Meg sniffed and wiped her eyes, but she smiled softly. She was sitting at a table in the resident's lounge. At her feet was a bouquet of flowers “Our bodies have this compound, called histamine. It's released in response to an attack - an internal attack - on our bodies. It's meant to help our bodies expel an invader. You know about itching? I've seen K'laxi do it. It's one of the regulators of our itching response. Mind, you, Histamine does way more than that, but we're talking about allergies right now."

"Wait, what do you mean by attack?" One of his ears perked up. This went from embarrassing to interesting very quckly.

"I know you have bacteria Generi, I also know your bodies digest food for energy. What happens when you get an infection?" Meg said, raising an eyebrow. Her sniffles and tears had subsided now that the bouquet was away from her face.

"Oh, I've never heard it called an 'attack.' Uh, our body temperature lowers, and we go into a kind of torpor. We lay down somewhere safe and stay still. Since the bacteria only can thrive in a narrow range of temperatures our bodies cool until our immune systems can take care of it." Generi puts his paw on the chair opposite Meg and looks at her, questioningly. She nods and he takes a seat.

"Really? Cools? But wouldn't that have put your ancestors at risk for predation- wait you didn't have predators, you were apex in your niche, weren't you?"

"I'm... not really sure. I'm not an anthropologist."

"Me neither, but I think I remember reading something like that. Our bodies are different. They raise their temperature to fight infections. It's more dangerous than your torpor because we can... well, die from it." Meg shrugs. "It doesn't happen too much anymore, but it used to be more of a thing."

"That sounds like a human, yes. In a race between killing your infection and killing yourself." Generi's tail flicks - a grin.

"We're getting off topic." Meg gestures towards the flowers, "in the case of an allergic reaction, our bodies call for histamine to be released when a harmless-" She glanced over and saw Generi's face "Fine, harmless - for us - substance enters our body, but we treat it like an invader."

"And this happens to everyone?" Generi was amazed at this impromptu biology lesson. It certainly seemed like humans were nearly constantly at war with something. Their own bodies, themselves, their neighbors, no wonder they were so good at it.

"No, not everyone, but a lot of people. It's fairly common. Anyway, in some people the body overreacts to the substance and produces histamine which causes the allergic reaction. Sneezing, runny nose, itchy eyes and body, congestion, things like that."

Generi flicked his ears and nodded, combing the two species gestures for assent. "Okay, I understand now. So the flowers...."

"Yes, I'm allergic to Roses." Meg blew her nose.

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" Generi was despondent. "I read about giving humans flowers as a sign of affection and I...I wanted..."

"Oh, I understand the intent Generi, I'm touched, really!" Meg reached over and patted his paw. She noticed his fur rise just a little bit. "I'm just allergic to Roses. Next time, try a different flower." She stood. "Wherever did you get them?"

"One of the humans over in Little Earth is growing them. He has a whole garden." He voice was filled with wonder.

"I had no idea. I can't believe the station authorities allowed it, some human plants are downright... prolific." Meg stared at Generi for a second. "How about you take me down to see them? I'll take an allergy pill first, and we can look at them together before it's shut down and it has to all go into the incinerator."

"You mean, like a date?" Generi's ears stood straight up, and his fur rippled once.

Meg started to laugh but held it back so as to not hurt his feelings. "Sure, just like a date. It'll be fun."

#humans are deathworlders #humans are space orcs #humans are space australians #humans are fun #sci fi writing #writing #jpitha #humans and aliens #humans are space capybaras

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aangelinakii · 3 months

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Hi I saw that your requests were open and I wanted to know if you would be interested in writing a headcanon where Jason's s/o is also a vigilante (they have powers maybe, like Violet Parr's with force field and invisibility); and strangely enough the villains quite like them (in a platonic way) they don't mind reader at all and actually have a type of frenemy thing going on? Wouldn't it be funny if while fighting the villains would just be like "I'll kill you Red hood! You too Batman and... oh hey reader!vigilante name :D how you doing? Have you thought about my invitation to the villains party?!"

If you accept my ask you can make as crack fic as you want, it is a funky prompt so 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️ but feel comfortable to decline also 💖

-🎃

TWO FRENEMIES WITH FRIES ON THE SIDE.

— you're alright. him, however...

summary : you're on patrol with your equally as vigilante boyfriend, when you come across some havoc in the night. the two of you need to work together to defeat them. but it's less easy for jason tonight.

before you read : this will be a superrr unserious fic, so if you aren't prepared for some silly stuff to happen, you just aren't on the level of this fic

note : thank you so so much for requesting pumpkin !! or is that a jack o lantern ??? either way, i love your anon emoji, and i thought this request was so funny !! i turned it into a fic instead of headcanons because i had a better idea for it, so i hope it's what you wanted !!! again, thank you for requesting ml <3

second note : sorry it took a few days to write up,, i went through a mini writer's block, but i hope it's enjoyable nonetheless 🫶🫶

when you and jason had left the apartment to go on patrol that evening, neither of you had really been expecting to find the condiment king breaking into a closed mcdonald's to steal their condiments. and of course it had to have been you two to find him.

no one ever wanted to come across the condiment king. you're probably sitting here assuming it's because of how indubitably evil he is, and how his plans always invoke terror into the streets of gotham; the reason no one wants to find him is because it will make the night a lot of work in terms of saving the city.

well, you're wrong. sure, he made the night far harder than it needed to, by squirting ketchup and mayo all over your patrol gear.

one, it made you stink for the rest of patrol – and when you're out looking after the city, you can't exactly go home and change. two, it's incredibly difficult to get out of clothes, for the condiment king had chemically altered his condiments of attack to thicken when oxidising; it's like trying to get sticky tapioca out of a metal sift.

he'd spotted jason first, who'd jumped down from the shadows to apprehend him. after all, the condiment king had only just bust the door open; he was quite a poor excuse for one of gotham's villains.

there was joker, penguin, two-face... for batman's case, he'd encountered space villains, which seem a lot scarier due to their near-invincible powers.

but you two had been stuck with the condiment king.

"AH!" he screamed, jumping back at the sight of the taller male, scrambling for his tubes and fire-guns. "you shouldn't be here!"

"me?" jason gravelled from beneath his red helmet, his head tilting and white eyes glowing menacingly. "i think we both have two very different ideas about that."

without warning, red and yellow squirted all over jason's front, causing him to step back in surprise, groaning at the growing stench.

before him, the condiment king yelped as his condiment guns were kicked from his grasp, as you sprung from the shadows.

"no can do, buddy," you breathed, watching his guns scatter to the ground, the tubes attached to their bottoms popping as they ripped from the bottles. "besides, haven't you heard about the boycott? why not use taco bell nacho cheese?"

the condiment king gasped, stepping back as you arrived, though his worry ceased quickly as he registered the sight of you. "oh, (name)! didn't realise you were out tonight."

"didn't realise you were, either, buddy."

you moved to stand behind him, taking his wrists and pinning them against his back, slapping a pair of cuffs against the skin. "but you understand why i have to do this, right?"

with a sigh, the condiment king nodded, his stature weakening. "yeah, i suppose so... hey, did you ever receive my invitation?"

"invitation?" the red hood repeated wearily, hands still avoiding his messy now-orange chest.

"uh.. i did, yeah," you chuckled as you tightened the handcuffs around his wrists. "i'll have to see if you can make it, yeah? find someone to bail you out if you can."

"invitation?" jason repeated once more. "what invitation?"

with a smile, the condiment king looked up at the red hood, completely disregarding the sauce he'd messed his clothes up with. "it's my birthday in a few weeks. i invited (name) and some other people, no big deal."

from behind his mask, jason looked over at you, and you could practically feel his quizzical glare on you. "you were invited to this nutter's birthday party?"

nonchalant as ever, you gave a nod, accompanying it with a half-shrug. "yeah, i'd ask to invite you, but something tells me you wouldn't be too wanted there."

#aangelinakii #dc #dc comics #dc reactions #dc imagines #dc headcanons #dc universe #jason todd #jason todd x reader #jason todd reactions #jason todd imagines #jason todd headcanons #crack!fic #ask and you shall receive !

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drdemonprince · 20 days

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i read in the comments to my last ask about "ordinary unhappiness" the idea of depression as a lack of agency and i feel like that is true? when i feel miserable and in pain, it's not because something is sad but because something is either unachievable or impossible (or at least there is the perception of it). and like i think that's what you were getting at too? this thing that drives you to keep going, this lack of satisfaction. i simply don't have anything i can give into such that i would ever even feel a lack of satisfaction. i've never had anything to give myself into and feel frustrated and perhaps sometimes successful in but instead i just envy the people who do have those things. nothing i've ever done has felt maintained a sense of emotional connectiveness in that way (positive or negative). i guess to wrap this back around to another potential talking point, i'm curious how you find that in your life? is it weird for me that nothing has ever felt worth putting myself whole ass into? idk, i find it envious you've got both writing and gay hypno fetish stuff you're able to just throw yourself into so wholly and utterly

Passion isn't inherent, it can be a choice too. I only look like I care a ton about writing and gay hypno stuff because I have deliberately chosen to pursue those passions, for many years, and cultivated a deep interest in them, anon.

When I was in my early twenties, I felt completely empty. I was a void. If you've read the first chapter of Unmasking Autism, this is the period I'm talking about in that book. I went away to graduate school (because I was good at academics, and I had some illusions about what a career in that field would do for me), but I had absolutely zero zest for the subject of psychology at that point. I had no research ideas. I read psychology books and publications purely out of obligation. I did what was required of me, but nothing additional beyond that, and I spent the rest of my time sitting at home, sometimes literally staring at the wall and crying. I had no friends or hobbies, aside from taking long, long depression walks listening to podcasts in order to fill the silence.

This was when I was at my most depressed, and my most suicidal. Just existing was a pain. I'd sob in bed at night and cry out begging for God to kill me, and I didn't even believe in God. The only thing that distracted me from my pain was a guy I was seeing, who was beautiful and very cruel and inconsistent, and I clung to him through all kinds of lies and abuse because it felt as though my happiness was located inside of him.

I had a friend that I wrote to about how miserable I was, and all the twists and turns that my horrible romance was taking. Her name was Heather. (Unlearning Shame is dedicated to her). She told me hey, you're a really good writer, did you know that? I really enjoy reading your emails, even when you're speaking about the most pitiful anguished shit, you really put it poetically and have a ton of insight. You should write more.

For a while, I ignored her. I didn't care about writing. I just wanted to get my pain out on the page because I had nobody to talk to, and oodles of time to waste. I had nothing otherwise that I felt I HAD to say. I had no PASSION. I did not feel like I was put on this earth to do anything. Other people seemed to have these drives, and I had nothing.

But then one day in a fit of depression I stopped by a bookstore right near my apartment, The Armadillo's Pillow, just to get outside of the house. I happened upon a book I had loved in high school, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. I took it home. I read it. It transported me for a few hours away from my pain. I went back to the book store and picked up some sci-fi. A John Varley collection, I think. I was also swept away from my suffering, even when the stories had flaws that I noticed. I was interested in the actual craft of storytelling: what worked and what didn't. And there was finally some beauty in my head instead of the usual dreariness and self-hatred and emptiness.

And so. I made the choice to write. I could have taken it or left it at that point. I didn't care about anything. Caring is a muscle that you have to flex. And when you're depressed, it can be very hard. I needed a lot of nudges from the external world and other people, to realize that I had some things I did gravitate toward, even if I didn't realize it.

All that time of course I WAS driven to write. I was churning out 5k word letters to Heather every day practically. I was reading stupid shit online. And when it was put in front of me, and I had no reason to feel guilt about not working hard enough on other things, I reached for books. But I didn't feel passion strongly under the heavy blankets of my depression. Or usually at all, really. I am a quite internally muted person whose emotions are suppressed. But they're there. Speaking to me softly. And to overcome my depression, I had to decide to listen to them instead of ignoring them all of the time, and give them kindling, and then fan them into a flame.

I started blogging regularly while I was in graduate school (right here, hello, you can check my archive dating back to 2011), and finding a reason to live. When I was writing, I felt like the world was interesting, and beautiful. It gave me new things to do. I attended literary readings and book launches all over town. I submitted work to magazines. I bought old copies of magazines and read them. I inhaled books. I listened to fiction podcasts. I joined writing groups. At first, it felt like a slog, like anything else. Doing these things, I was not "happy". But I was interested. I liked learning about the world of publishing, critiquing people's stories in my head, and commisserating with other Tumblr writers about the stuff that got featured on the Prose tag that sucked.

After YEARS of doing this, of choosing to fan my passions, it became a genuine motivation in my life. But even then? I lose track of it sometimes. I get busy, or there's no place comfy to sit and read in my apartment, and I forget that I like writing and reading for months at a time. And then I have to choose it again. It takes effort to care about something, every time.

It's the same way with hypno. I did have a fetish for this stuff all my life long. But it's a passion that people always thought was weird and gross, and that I thought was bad. I didn't tell anyone about it until my late 20's. I felt ashamed masturbating to it or looking up hypno content online. For years I snuffed out that flame of passion until I could barely feel it anymore. It wasn't until I was super depressed AGAIN in my later 20's that I took a bunch of weird off-label anti-depressant drugs under the table and had a weird dreamy headspace overtake me and make me insanely horny that I remembered how much I loved hypno, and because I was in search of an escape from my tormented brain, I sought hypnotists out.

And I had the time of my life. But I also had boring, awkward encounters, bad hook-ups, and had to do a ton of work.

My passions have drawn me out of depression because I needed them to. I had to find them, listen to them, and then give them lots of food. And it's one of the few things that a person does often have agency over, no matter how dispiriting their circumstances. You can make choices about where to put what attention you do have, in what free moments you do have. When you're on the bus or in line at the grocery store and you're thinking about how much you hate yourself, you can try to think about a story you read or a sexual fantasy you had, instead. It's a lot of work. But it's better work than the work of hating yourself, which takes a whole lot of energy and attention itself.

I hope you can find something like this for you. It doesn't really matter what it is. It can be some hobby you've always wanted to try, or something "childish" you've suppressed. Having a passion isn't like being chosen by the universe to care about something. It's not like love at first sight. Nothing fucking works like that in life. It's always work. It's always a choice you have to make, because no one else will give it to you. But there can be hints that you can follow, sometimes.

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