#even with starting to make the process less complicated over time I did really enjoy making all of portraits for my WoLs

[chibisatou]

Adventurer Portraits Two: Alts Edition

I have a Highlander, Lalafell, Viera, and a familar looking Miqo’te, with their adventurer plates and quick portraits under the cut! 

I have not updated any of the adventurer plates, leaving my pre-patch portraits as they are great and I don’t have to try to recreate them this way.

Satou Weard: my tall, hot, replay the MSQ alt on the same server as my main.

I have two gearsets for each of her DoW or DoM jobs.

Please ignore the Dragon being labeled as Lancer. Made sure that job crystal was properly equipped.

Without the battle stance or victory poses of my main my options were a bit more limited, and I found myself struggling finding images I liked with the Highlander emotes. I ended up deciding that DotL and DotH would be more of a series of standing with icons than it had been for my main, with some extra enthusiasm for culinarian, (bread!) and a little extra flair for weaver, for the beautiful suffering.

Sweete Popoto: my first ever alt, to play with a friend on the Crystal DC. She’s a cute ray of sunshine.

It was at this point that I figured out how to import the portrait from one gearset to another, and Sweete Popoto has the same portrait for all of her DotH

Helenus Vienna: made together with a friend, as black and white viera twins. My friend is the black rabbit and I am the white one. Sort of the tall, hot opposites to our usual lala antics.

I’m taking advantage of the copying portraits function liberally at this point, with Warrior and White Mage being unique, all DotH being the same, and the DotL having the same image but different backgrounds corresponding to the cities that the jobs start from.

Last but not least G’rahaute Tia!

That being said, I do not have much for his glamours yet, and he is the least played thus far, so I decided to focus on trying to capture the uncapturable movement of the ear wiggles, and used the same portrait for all jobs, and the same border, changing the background for each job.

[delzinrowe]

How do you explain a feeling? - Choso

WORD COUNT: ~2.2K WARNINGS: None. F!Reader SUMMARY: Choso's still learning to understand different human emotions, this time "love". A/N: I have no excuse for this, it's pretty much garbage, but enjoy

There was no word to describe the sheer absurdity of how Choso’s life had changed over the course of a few short weeks.

All he had known in the past was to fight for his brothers. Admittedly, his past did not hold a lot of memorable moments due to being stuck in a tiny tube and contained, sealed away from humanity.

Now that he stood on the good side of this fight, after most of the battles had been fought, he was almost displaying a childlike eagerness to learn about human traditions and customs. One subject that plagued his mind mostly were human emotions and feelings. How different people were. It showed in their vastly different reactions to certain situations, or even hardships.

Was it inappropriate to say that it fascinated him? Maybe. However, this was his home now, among humans. It was a strange feeling to be accepted, even if it was only by a handful of sorcerers who would most definitely be classified as abnormal humans either way. Accepted nonetheless.

Among all these new sensations, lessons, experiences, and situations he found himself confronted with, there was a particularly enchanting one; Y/N.

Whenever the female sorcerer was around there was a certain feeling of warmth in his chest. Something he could not quite describe, much less understand. It was odd, really. He didn’t feel it with anyone else, only her.

At times when he wasn’t attentive she would sneak up on him, and after successfully scaring the bejesus out of him she would let out this heartfelt laugh. Maybe it was only a chuckle, maybe it was a giggle. All he knew was that the sound of it was just about the most welcoming sound he had ever heard. Except for when his name would drop from her lips.

Sometimes Yuji would shoot him a gaze that Choso couldn’t read, with raised eyebrows, a slightly tilted head and a smirk on his lips while nodding towards her. But the half-human being was left puzzled whenever he received this particular gaze from his little brother. Couldn’t he just tell him with words what he wanted to say? Why did humans feel the need to make it all complicated by using body language which no rational thinking being would be capable of decoding?

Yuji’s non-verbal messages had him guessing more than the feeling in his chest whenever Y/N was near. And ultimately, Choso decided to confront his little brother about this strange thing he did. He loved his brother and he would fight for him to the death, but for fuck’s sake, he needed clear words to understand whatever the hell he wanted to tell him.

———

It only took the half-curse half-human being around half an hour to find Yuji and as he approached his little brother he was glad that no one else was around. However, before Choso even had the chance to say a single word Yuji already spoke up.

“Hey Choso, how are things going with Y/N?”, once again he had this confusing expression on his face. His eyebrows were raised but his lips curled into a smile. The tone he used made it all the more difficult for Choso to understand his little brother. “Just what do you mean?” Even without this choice of words Choso’s tone of voice made it quite clearjust how confused he seemed.

“Oh come on, I can see how you look at her and how you blush. You like her, it’s obvious.”, Yuji stated his reply, much to Choso’s horror.

It took the older one more than just a minute to process everything, his face mimicking a grimace now. Was that the strange feeling? Was it really possibly that it was of romantic nature? The thought never crossed his mind. It seemed way too absurd, after all he was a half-curse half-human being. He didn’t even know that he could feel anything like that.

Yuji must have seen on Choso’s face how the wheels started turning inside his head, causing the younger one to out a heartfelt laugh.

“I know I’m not the brightest, but even I noticed how whipped you seem for her.”

Choso could only guess the meaning of the word ‘whipped’, although that wasn’t his main focus at this point.

He barely had a chance to even think of his words when Yuji already spoke up again.

“Listen, you’re half-human, you’re capable of love. Right now I think that’s exactly what you are feeling. If you want my advice, go and tell her.” Wasn’t it ironic how the little brother gave such a mature commentary and even offered advice when it should have been the other way around? As the eldest of the death paintings Choso always felt responsible for taking the lead and offering advice. However, the topic of love was never brought up. For who would ever love a curse?

A pat on his shoulder pulled him out of his thoughts and his gaze lifted towards Yuji. He watched his little brother give him a thumbs up and eventually walking away.

No amount of thoughts could have prepared him for the conversation he just had. Love? It was a word he wasn’t familiar with, at least not the romantic kind. The only form of love he ever felt was the one towards his brothers. But that was nowhere near as intense as what he felt when Y/N was around. Maybe Yuji was right? Was he truly capable of this type of love? And even if he was… what did that mean? What was he supposed to do now?

‘Tell her.’ Yuji’s words rang in his ears, repeating in his mind like a command he wasn’t sure he could follow. Choso was prone to overthink certain scenarios, with this being a major cause for overthinking.

———

Even hours after his conversation with Yuji Choso couldn’t think about anything else than his little brother’s words. He needed to do something about all of this, right now. If that required him to talk to Y/N then he’d do that. Anything to finally clear up that foggy chaos in his mind.

It didn’t take him long to find Y/N. As usual she’d be around the training grounds, sitting somewhere at the side while observing the younger ones during their training. But this time there was no one fighting or trying out new weapons. Besides her, the training grounds were empty.

“What are you doing here alone?”, Choso’s sudden question almost made Y/N jump. What an embarrassing thought to admit that she was lost in thoughts and didn’t hear his heavy steps…

“Nothing really, just thinking.” She didn’t bother to look up at him as she responded, knowing fully well that he would eventually sit down next to her like he had done so many times before.

Although this time she seemed to wait in vain when Choso simply kept standing close to her. He didn’t even approach her. Was something wrong? Had she accidentally offended him in any way?

“What is love?” The question had caught her entirely off guard, even causing her eyes to widen before she furrowed them and looked at him puzzled. “What is *love*? Why that’s a damn random.”

“My apologies if I-”, Was it a bad question? Should he have waited for a better time? Either way, Choso’s apology was quickly interrupted.

“No, no. It’s alright.” Her gaze returned to a soft smile. With a tilted head she examined his features. “Are you asking for a specific reason or do you just want a general understanding of the human emotion called love?”

The way she looked at him, her voice almost gentle as she asked. How come she was so kind to him? The only good thing he ever did was side with Yuji. There was no reason for her to be so understanding and accepting of him, but there she was, trying to make sense of something other people would have just laughed at.

There it was again… this warm feeling in his chest. Something he just couldn’t quite describe. For a moment too long Choso got lost in his own thoughts before he remembered that he still had to answer her question. “A general understanding.”

A hum was all she responded with. His gaze lowered towards her as if he had tunnel vision. Everything around him was suddenly drown out. The rustling of the trees that surrounded the training grounds, the birds chirping away on some branches not too far away, the river nearby gurgling with fresh water. It all seemed muted, all he could focus on in this moment was Y/N.

“Well, I don’t speak for everyone but to me love is the warmest sensation I ever experienced. When you walk into a warm room after spending hours outside, and your fingers get those tingly feelings. Do you know what I mean? Iin the most positive way, it’s like that for me. Only a thousand times stronger.”

She wasn’t really sure what kind of answer to give him, or what exactly he wanted to know about love, all she knew was what she felt. Hopefully describing this would be helpful.

“Love can be everywhere, between family, friends and partners. But since you have brothers I guess you know the platonic kind of love anyways.” A warm smile was sent his way as she tilted her head once more. He still stood next to her, not having moved at all.

“But the romantic kind of love… That’s entirely different. For me personally, it’s when I can’t stop thinking of someone all day despite them being close by. Or when I catch myself missing them but it’s only been a minute since I saw them. It’s when the mere mention or thought of them makes me smile so brightly that I forget all my worries.”

Choso took in every single word she said. He figurtivaly hung on her lips like a dried leaf refusing to part from tree branch in late autumn. Did she always smile at him this way? Were her eyes always sparkling when the sun shone on it?

“Love is genuine happiness, it’s wanting to be with someone and being willing to do anything it takes to make that person happy. There are a lot more words and ways to describe it, but with the way you’re staring at me I think I’m failing pretty miserably.” Y/N couldn’t help but chuckle with the way he had been looking at her. She couldn’t read his gaze, all she knew was that the intensity of it was almost enough to cause her chest to tighten.

“You didn’t fail at all. I think I understand.” Choso’s remark was short but enough to intrigue her, eliciting another soft chuckle as she stood up to be closer to his eyes.

“Then what’s love to you?”, she asked with a quiet hum at the end of her words, her smile still evident but having dwindled by a bit.

Within a second his mind went completely blank. There was a peculiar sound in his ears, it sounded like drumming. Was that his heart? Did it actually beat as loud as it sounded to him? For a second he thought it would jump out of his ribcage.

“You.” There it was, his one word answer, dropping from his lips so casually, yet it left a burning sensation on his lips. But he felt the need to clarify as soon as he saw her widened eyes.

“I love you.”

Choso had seen some romance movies with Yuji before. He knew how these thoughts were supposed to happen on the screen. What he didn’t know was how to react when Y/N didn’t respond.

Seconds passed until she finally sucked in a deep breath, letting it go in a sigh only moments later. When the corners of her lips lifted into a smile he felt a weight fall off his chest. This had to be a good sign. She was smiling at him. The possibility of a heartbreak didn’t even cross his mind. When he focused on her smile nothing bad would ever come to his mind.

“I love you too.” Was it a bit early to say these words? Surely, but she knew that she had been crushing hard on Choso ever since he joined their side. He had always had such a gentle nature to him, despite being a half-curse. In some ways, she thought he was probably the most gentle soul she ever met. 

Y/N felt an overwhelming urge to be close to him, but even after confessing their feelings she felt somewhat too insecure to initiate anything. Or perhaps it was exactly because of it that she felt shy.

Choso on the other hand didn’t think twice about his actions. An overwhelming sense of happiness surged through him. He remembered the phrase “having butterflies in your stomach”, it felt fitting but he was still bewildered by the metaphor. Nonetheless, he wasted no time wrapping his arms around Y/N and engulfing her in what was definitely the tightest hug they had ever shared.

He remembered how he choose the life as curses with his brothers, when he convinced himself it was due to his brothers not being accepted by humans. But right now he was eternally thankful that he followed Yuji into a life among humans and sorcerers. This life that was filled with new friends, new sensations, new emotions.

A life he was determined to live to the fullest, with her by his side.

[the-modern-typewriter]

How do ik my writings good? It's my first story and so far it's been stressful cause I don't know if I'm doing anything right. I understand that writings a skill that'll build overtime but I have Noone that can give me critiques or tell what's ik doing right. All I get is it good which is nice but it's not beneficial 😅. So idk how to judge my self accurately

Part 1: How to ask for feedback

One way to get around just 'this is good' as feedback (especially when it comes from well-meaning places, like people who love you, so you don't know if you can trust it) is to ask some follow up questions.

This is partly because it helps you figure out what you're going for in a story/what's important, can be a way of checking if you conveyed what you wanted to convey etc. This is also partly because giving good feedback is as much of a learned skill as writing is. The questions can help anyone giving you feedback along because they don't necessarily know what you want or what would be helpful or where to start.

This can be questions that you submit alongside the piece or it can be questions you ask the person after. E.g. 'I was going for X, is this the impression you got?' This can be more or less complicated depending on who the reader is. So, if it is another writer, it might be more technical. If it's a kind friend, it might be 'did you see the ending coming?'

(The questions will depend on you/your story and what it is that you specifically want feedback about. There are many lists of 'questions to ask beta readers' floating around on the internet if you're not sure where to start.)

The questions can help bypass 'good', because no one wants to be mean, but if you ask the right questions it can help highlight if there are any issues in the story etc.

Leading to...

Part 2: It really does come with time/you as the writer/editing skill

Critique and feedback is fantastic and often validating. Most writers (myself included) adore feedback. Yay feedback!

However, the other skill you will developing alongside writing is editing and reflecting on your writing. This might include questions you ask yourself like:

E.g. Is this what I set out to achieve? On on a technical level, does this sentence flow nicely or am I catching on it? Is there a stronger word I could use here? Are there any boring bits?

Reading books you enjoy and figuring out what they're doing can help with this - and so can reading books and figuring out what you don't like about them and why. Both are part of the same skillset, it's just harder to do with your own work.

Final editing note: leave space between finishing a story and going back to it with an editing/'is this good' hat on. You will be blind to your own words straight after the writing process. Coming back in a week or two with fresh eyes can give you a much clearer perspective.

A first draft is often stressful and we are often not sure about it and honestly it often does need work or changes. That doesn't mean your writing is bad. It means it's a first draft and 75% of really brilliant writing is editing.

Part 3: Very important caveat

Good can mean 'I enjoyed writing this.'

You are on your first story! That's so exciting :D

While I've tried to give some practical advice in this post, honestly in the same way that someone who goes running for the first time probably isn't immediately training for a marathon, I'd also seriously argue you don't need to worry about technical ability on your first story. Or your second. Or your third!

Your first job is deciding if you actually like writing, same as with any hobby you might try. It's playing around with things and experimenting, because if you do like writing, that's what will make your writing your writing over any prescriptive guide you might read about writing craft. It's taking a stab at a story idea you had and seeing what happens.

My first pieces of writing were technically terrible. This is an example of my not even first piece of writing, but near the start of my journey:

I posted it back in 2018 with comments on how I would improve it with hindsight. I maintain it's an excellent example of the fact that writing is a skill you build over time. I know you know that. But I think there's a difference between intellectually knowing that and seeing it in action.

I hope this helps!

Good luck and try to have fun <3

[flymetosnarryland]

GTFO.

Did anyone miss Muggle London like I did? 🙃

This series as a part of "Infraction" has grown incredibly. It helped me understand a lot about things I want to write and made me think about "Infraction" as... well, my first real baby, lol. I wrote one Snarry, "Oblivion" already, but I take that story as testing the waters. I tried to know Harry and Severus, placing them in situation close to, eh, something that happened to me in a way. It means a lot to me and I'm proud of myself that I managed to write a fic from the start to the end.

"Infraction" on the other hand... this one is going to be really FAT piece of work and I'm excited over the moon about it. First chapter and the first part of second already landed on Ao3, but when am I going to finish the next part of it? (If anyone is interested at all, because I personally don't touch unfinished pieces, knowing how it works 🤣)

Well, to be honest, I decided to not rush it. Not because I don't know what to write. The main outline of the story has 40k+ words. It appeared that planning a series of murders is not so easy 😂 especially when the politics are part of it (I mean, Merlin... that's the last thing I thought I will EVER write, lol) and on top of that I have some complicated relationships (or, I suppose, a cherry on molten chocolate cake 🤤). Which makes me shiver and scream, that much I want to jump into writing it again. But the more I am thinking about the plot and fitting everything I need into it (of course writing it down), the more I'm surprised that I am able to figure out something that seems damn complex to me and my three brain cells 😂 I want to be proud of this story. I want it to be... maybe not perfect, but as good as I can see, it can be. And I enjoy the idea of growing as hobby writer. It makes me really happy. Also it's my first serious CRIME story. I know I said before that I always wanted to write crime. I always thought though it's out of my range, you know, I'm too dumb to bring something interesting that other people could possibly like as I do. But with this story I'm trying new things (like bringing Marauders to life), I'm thinking in advance, I'm on both sides: the detective and the serial killer and... GOSH. I really think it will have sense and be worth to waste some time on reading it, lol!

Also there is Snarry AUctoberfest on the way and, you know, I decided I'll try to write something for the fest for the first time! (It's my year of many first times and I really like it!) Funny thing, it appears that my fic for the fest will be a little test to what I want to do with "Infraction." When it occured to me (don't ask how it happen, but the idea I've had in mind turned 180 degree and I couldn't help it! Had to just go for it 😂) I was stunned. But in the same way it's a great opportunity to try new things, see how it will go and how it will work before I'll jump back to my baby.

If anyone checked "Infraction", please don't be mad or sad or... disappointed or angry (?), that I'm not updating it yet. This fic is absolutely my main focus and I'm tinkering and working on it. As for everything, I need time (and probably cut some other projects while I will write it; so less drawing going to be main part of the writing process 🙃 I suppose in the last quarter of the year; except if I'll have my holiday from work!)

Ah, dang. I wrote a lot here, I suppose? Less shite than messy personal stuff, but still something I guess, I wanted to share? Even if I think it's pointless and worthless, because who cares, lol. I'm learning, trying to share, I think. I should, as I wasn't doing it at all and it suppose to help me to... leave the shell of person that other people think I am. Because I grew to be someone irl that I'm really tired of being. Of pretending to be. How stupid it all sounds it's beyond me and I still deny to admit it.

[balaurbondoc316]

woooo Rain World Iterator OC, his name is Absence of Bitter Oranges and heeeeee's miserable. He was just supposed to be an entirely silly shitpost OC but uh he ended up with Lore, which I will put under the break. TW for abusive and unhealthy relationships, references to cannibalism, murder, emotional manipulation, and unhealthy coping mechanisms

I really hope Tumblr doesn't kill the formatting lol

- Had a fucked up series of “relationships” w/ a string of admins, nothing was ever explicitly nonconsensual but due to power imbalances and the culture surrounding how iterators were viewed in general always made him feel he wasn't “supposed” to say no, even if he wanted to (was never fully aware that’s why he kept saying yes)

- He’s not really aware that what happened to him was bad or abusive, as his only knowledge of abusive relationships comes from common knowledge/ media where whats shown is on the extreme ends of the spectrum where the victim always hates whats going on and where the abuser is really obvious about it, which wasn’t his situation at all

-there were times where he really did enjoy it and where he was the initiator, and also times where his admins where genuinely nice to him, so he figures he couldn’t have “actually” been abused- and comes up with excuses for when that wasn't the case as a coping mechanism

-very complicated emotions about this that he was never given the tools or knowledge to process, simply chooses to not think about it--- figures that since he wasn’t (in his mind) being abused, the reason he feels bad about what happened is just because he’s bad...

- the concept that the society and circumstances he was born into (and had no control over, and couldn’t have really done anything about) are actually at fault is too terrifying to think about (would be forced to contend w/ lack of autonomy and the fact the very nature of his existence in the first place is an act of violence against him, + The Futility Of It All) so it’s easier to just blame himself and then Just Not Think About It

Once tried to talk to his group senior about it when it was going on, but due to him not really understanding what was happening himself (and not having the words to describe it even if he did) his group senior didn’t realize what was really going on (got the wrong idea) and ended up getting both Oranges’ admin and Oranges in trouble for what was going on, making the whole situation (esp. the self blame) That Much Worse

This all resulted in a lot of self- loathing that would cause him to lash out, leading others to reject and block him, which would cause even more self loathing in a vicious cycle (+ resulting isolation making it worse)

Has a bad habit of sabotaging his own relationships from lashing out due to all of this

desperately seeks attention due to loneliness, whenever he finds a new group who don’t know who he is he’ll often start out with trying to talk about outrageous things (usually about Horizons Group nowadays, since talking about them allows him to be the sympathetic one in the situation) to get people to react and talk to him more.

Gets really snippy when he’s scared or overwhelmed as a coping mechanism, this happens incredibly often due to his general anxiety levels, resulting in him generally being seen as mean

Also has a tendency to overshare in order to get reactions or tries to talk over others in order to steal attention

Both of these things combined generally make him come off as really annoying to talk to, resulting in others generally disliking him

One reaction to this is to find members of the group with less power and kind of become their white knight in a sense, since this makes him feel both powerful and helpful and gets him a “friend” that is more likely to put up with his bullshit and defend him from others (and is dependent on him for validation)

He is also, unfortunately, terrified of being seen in a bad light (more so than usual, anyways), so the moment he thinks the general consensus is tipping from “yeah he’s the resident Mean Guy (gets people to argue with him, which is at least a form of interaction)” to “Yeah this guy sucks, we should ban him”, he will absolutely throw his “friends” under the bus to save himself (or at least as a distraction)

All of this combined usually results in him ending up driven out of or banned from group chats, with a lot of people that actively hate him

Incredibly isolated after Mass Ascension, even his local group won’t really talk to him, stewing in his own regrets and wishing he could be someone else without really understanding why he is the way he is or how to Stop Being That Way

In comes Horizons Group, who where the first to reach out to him instead of the other way around, which he hates since it means he’s not in control of the interaction

this is compounded by the fact that he literally can’t block them, giving him even less control (+similarity to his admins)

On the other hand, the fact that they simply refuse to stop talking to him means they are the only actually stable connections he has in his life, and will at least listen to him vent whenever another one of his social connections implodes (+ similarity to his admins)

Plus, how awful Horizons Group is makes him feel better about himself in comparison

Beyond Endless Horizons, in particular, likes to pester him

BEH tells him that the way he is isn’t his fault, that it’s his administrators fault, that they’re the bad ones (and what was done to him was wrong, and shouldn’t have happened)

And obviously that can’t be true, the ancients were the good ones, He’s the bad one, BEH is just trying to trick him into being Even Worse for his own amusement, obviously

(but the idea is so tantalizing, that his pain isn’t his fault…)

(but if that were true, what would that say about his existence, and the people who “loved” him? So it can’t be true… Right?)

BEH tells him that, if he just joined Horizons Group and let them remove his taboos- modify his can to be Better- let him be free- he could finally be happy, and that BEH would finally be the group senior that takes care of him, and stick up for him, no matter what, like he deserves.

And obviously BEH is lying when he says this, he really just wants to have access to his mostly- still- functional naval ports

(Oh, but what if he’s not? After all, they’ve stuck with him this long, even after he’s been so awful to them…)

(and even if it is true, would it really be so bad? Horizons Group seems so happy…)

(But then he’d become even worse, and he’s already so bad…)

BEH tells him, when he is at his lowest, and has been (rightfully) removed, run- out, banned, from yet another group of would-be friends, and has no-one else to turn to other than his tormentors (can he really even call them that, after everything?), that he will always be this way if he doesn’t let BEH help him. That he deserves this, if he refuses to let himself be helped.

And obviously that is true, even if (if?) BEH is lying about wanting to help.

(But would it really be so bad if he just… Gave in? After all, whats the point of trying to be better if he simply cant be? Sure he would become worse, but at least he might not hurt so bad, and Horizons Group seems to like him- at least, they haven't rejected him, despite having seen his worst…)

(But the part of him that Remembers the worst of his administrators, the part of him that does not know how to name or even think about itself, is terrified BEH- of being trapped again, even if he is not aware of it enough to name it)

and so he still rejects the offer, and tries to reach out to anyone, anyone else who’s still out there to abate the loneliness…

One day, Four Lines Horizontal asks for a favor.

He wants the access codes for his local groups gates- especially the ones for the cities.

They say they just want to scrounge the cities for any archives to plunder. His local group probably won’t even know he’s there! It’ll be perfectly fine.

Oranges knows he should say no. He knows what Horizons Group is like, that Lines is probably lying and wants something more nefarious…

But then, it is plausible. Lines is known to hoard knowledge- and after all, it’s only his puppet that can get across the oceanic tram line, and certainly no army (that’s why BEH wants access to his naval ports, after all).

And Horizons Group has been- well- not nice per se, but certainly nicer than his local group as been…

It should be fine, right?

Oranges gives Lines the codes.

A few cycles later, his group senior forces a group call- one of their group members has suddenly stopped responding to messages from her, and there is strange activity coming from her can. Has anyone gotten in contact? Or managed to send any overseers?

No one has. Oranges remains curt, and quiet.

Another few cycles later, and another of his group members has gone silent, and his group senior is beginning to panic.

Except this time, there is an overseer that manages to get into his seniors can- damaged, and forced to manually deliver the data.

A single image, of slightly lower quality than normal, but still legible: An absurdly large red centipede with a far- to- humanoid form at one end, and what appears to be some awful amalgamation of a spitter spider and a noodlefly, bent into the shape of a person.

Oh, Oranges thinks, Smoke is here too.

OHA: oh Void below, is that Horizons Group??? How did they even get over here???

GCFS: Isn’t Absence the one that controls the tram line to them???

GCFS: Absence, did you LET THEM IN??????

OMUE(GS): ABSENCE WHAT DID YOU DO

Oranges puts his can on communications lockdown.

Not that that stops his group senior from forcing her messages through:

OMUE(GS): Absence, as your group senior, I demand you tell me what hand you had in this. This is an order.

OMUE(GS): Absence. What. Did. You. Do.

AOBO: He said he was just going to be looking for pearls. How could I have known THIS would happen?!

OMUE(GS): AND YOU BELIEVED HIM????? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME????

OMUE(GS): Sunlight and Glass are probably already dead! You fucking idiot!

OMUE(GS): Oh stars above, you’ve always been a Karma-broken piece of shit haven’t you. Did you actually WANT this to happen???? Was all this ON PURPOSE????

OMUE(GS): ANSWER ME YOU BASTARD

Not that she can force him to actually read them.

(he curls into a corner of his chamber and Waits. He knows they will stop coming eventually)

(it seems to take a long time.)

About six months later, the last of his groups cans (sans his own) collapses, having been stripped of anything useful and their puppets spirited away across the ocean.

He forbids his overseers from the tram area. He couldn’t bare to see the most valuable- or nutritious- parts of their corpses loaded onto the tram, countless times over.

He couldn’t bare to see if their puppets where still aware- if they were still alive.

(although, he deeply suspects- with some of the comments Smoke has made- that they are.)

Not that that stops him from allowing the tram to run.

Later, he will refuse to talk about it.

He tells himself it’s due to the guilt.

He tells himself that the terror he feels is because he doesn’t want to face it.

He tells himself that he refuses to think about it because he would drown in the tidal wave of it, and no other reason.

(on his worse days, when BEHs offer seems the most tantalizing, he admits to himself he’s not scared of the guilt.)

(he’s scared of the fact he feels no guilt at all)

(he’s scared of the fact he’d do it again, with no remorse)

(he’s scared of the fact that this proves he’s already just as bad as Horizons Group, and can no longer use that as an excuse to refuse BEHs offer)

(at least then he’d be with fellow monsters. At least then he wouldn’t be so alone.)

(but still that part of him that Remembers kicks and screams and wails whenever he considers saying yes, still so terrified of having to go through it again.)

(and so he continues to reach, for anyone, anyone else…)

(but that part of him has become so tired, and being stuck with Beyond Endless Horizons is what he deserves)

Far away, across the ocean, The Graviton patiently sits in his chamber, a golden pearl and a set of administration keys close at hand.

He will have those ports, he just needs to be patient.

Oranges will become desperate enough, eventually.

It’s not like the little shit hasn’t dug his own grave.

It’s not like he doesn’t continue to dig it.

He doesn’t even have his local group to fall back on.

Not anymore, at least. Ha!

No, it’s only matter of time until Oranges gives in and allows himself to be saved.

Until he gives in allows himself to be fixed, allows himself to be surrounded by fellow gods who will actually love him, allows himself to not be controlled by the bugs beneath his feet, but properly worshiped by them, as he deserves.

Only a matter of time before he can save the world, and every god in it.

“And won’t that be a glorious day, Absence?”

[doomsdaydicecascader]

What would you say was the thing that really shifted your opinion on postcanon stuff? I remember reading your long form posts about it and finding them pretty eloquent and interesting given the information I had (and I admit they did nudge me to me to end up not reading the epilogues along with the sheer length and my own squeamishness, though of course you also gave them their due when you felt it was fair)

if i'm being real, it's primarily interaction with other homestuck fans - my social media spaces tend to be pretty heavily curated, i basically only follow people i trust to be intelligent, since like. there is a level of comfort and complacency with social media? i don't like following new people, i don't like unfollowing old people. so i just dont branch out that much.

but i joined the mspfa discord in........ may of last year? while i really enjoy playing the role of like, i compared myself to solaire of astora once. guy who is there to help. i enjoy doing that, there is fun in that. i have spent many hours over the past months explaining homestuck plot points in ways that basically only i would and it is largely, pearls before swine, because the fact is that people dont want to understand post-canon, they don't want to like, pick at it critically, to understand why the decisions were made, they want to hate post-canon. and this is a very critical difference between me not liking post-canon and the majority of people hating post-canon.

and there is something to be said about experiencing homestuck as it is perceived by other people, to really solidify what i liked about homestuck post-canon, because there was stuff i liked to begin with. and seeing people who hate it without good reason frustrate me! genuinely, if you had to see the same "i heard jade has a dog penis" discussions every 2 weeks from some sprout who showed up only to be mad, you would start to defend it too.

like, i actually delayed that second blog post at the time because hatred for the team was flaring up again, for whatever reason, i don't even remember. but i remember putting it off because i didn't want to contribute to people who were blindly angry about homestuck^2

there are reasons to not like post-canon, lord knows there are plenty. i actually stand by basically everything i said about it not actually working and the times where it goes too far. in the second blog post, not the first one. but like, there is a total and all-encompassing difference in what the conversation is, "yeah, the meat and candy thing doesnt really work and dirks graphic suicide is ill-considered at best" doesnt matter at all when the level people are operating on is "say a plot point as a joke, make people mad, have fun circlejerking over how bad it is"

part of it is also that in the process of writing my own comic, it kind of comes with the territory to be less precious about the characters. like, team slime, my home discord server, watches movies every saturday. for a while, our theme was musicals, and eventually, we watched hamilton. and i realized that lin manuel miranda writes alexander hamilton in the exact way i am always afraid i am writing jane and vriska, like. just. truly relentlessly protective of them. and so being less precious about these characters means recognizing the flaws therein, not being afraid to write them just being kind of disasters. i still am pretty precious about them, but its a work in progress. you gotta get your hands dirty with them, and that puts it in context of respecting when others do the same

like, there are still a lot of really glaring flaws in post-canon, dont get me wrong, but theyre not insurmountable, and it helps to have spaces like burning down the house for me to express directly like. what i wanted out of homestuck. post-canon is not what i want it to be, but when has homestuck ever given anyone what they wanted without any complications whatsoever

and i think it is genuinely capable of being extremely good - this recent update (yiffy overlooking the rosemary drama) is extremely choice! i genuinely love how everyone involved is characterized, the panels are flashy, it puts to bed really stupid shit, like. its unbelievably fucking good how the problem kanaya has isnt "rose had another kid with jade in secret, our marriage is in shambles" but "jane knows about this kid", like. the absence of infidelity conflict is refreshing and says so much about everyone involved. and i have been thinking nonstop about how rose and jades daughters takes after caliborn of all characters. like. "you hope they eat each other alive" with the perspective of like, a caliborn grin is such an INSANE direction to take yiffy! holy shit! its awesome!!!!!!!!

[oneangstymotherfucker]

tw csa mention / k!nk mention

Something that gets to me about the anti mindset is that it doesn't seem to be able to account for the fact that we might be reading age-gap stuff from the younger person's perspective. Why do they always assume otherwise? (Of course it's okay if you do, but for this post im talking about the other side).

The truth is, sexuality cannot be completely severed from childhood experiences. From what I've read, most kinks and interests develop alongside the rest of our personality(ies). This is very normal.

It is also very normal to engage in 'pleasure seeking' as a child. Something feels nice on your body, so you keep doing it. I started when I was about six, and every therapist I've talked to has said that is normal.

The age during which you start understanding your bonds and relationships to other people is also very important, and since it affects your development and the rest of your life, going back to those ideas and looking at them can be very healing.

So it makes sense why anyone would be interested in metaphorically 'going back' to those times in their lives and exploring what they didn't have words or capacity to understand back then. Real children do not have the capacity to understand or cope with sex. They are not ready, and it would cause them harm. Maybe it did cause you harm. Fictional children are not real children. Fictional children are an extension of our own inner child, a way for us to process what we couldn't then now that we are safe and have more control of our lives. It doesn't undo the harm, but it can help you sort it out and move on from it.

So yeah, all of this is even more important if you have been hurt. I write about the ages 6-12 a lot because that's around the time I was hurt. It's not that im 'stuck there' or 'fetishizing' it (you can't 'fetishize' your own trauma) - I am doing work there. I am reclaiming it there. I am making sure the needy little 12 year old in me is safe and happy.

But as for me and myself- I was still afraid. I might always be. For a long time I couldn't even approach sexuality. When I finally did it was talking to old men online, trying to get them to believe I was much younger than I was, playing with them and seeing what they would say. That was what felt safe. The only 'part' of me that felt safe being sexual was the part that was still a kid.

I don't cope like that anymore. I found a way that I like better, that is more under my control and is way less risky to myself and the potential people i was talking to. And that is writing fiction!!!!

Through fiction I can set up places where all of me feels safe (even if it might not look safe to you or would not be safe in the real world!). I can create scenarios where I can work through my fears, provide comfort and safety, and make a good place for my kid self to figure things out (and yes, get off).

And it has been helping! We've been feeling safer and more confident since we started writing, and we've learned so much about ourselves and how to feel safe.

I studied psychology for four years. There isn't really terminology for a 'bad coping mechanism'. There is the idea of maladaptive coping mechanisms, but here's the thing- what makes a coping mechanism maladaptive is wether it causes more harm than good in the person's life on a case by case basis.

The idea that a random stranger thinks they have the authority over your life and your unique psychology to tell you that you are hurting yourself with your coping mechanisms is ridiculous. No stranger online knows - or should know - the details of your trauma or life. They have no say in what is good for you. If you are worried something might be hurting you or holding you back, that is for you and maybe a trusted professional to figure out. It is certianly not for some squicked teenager or anyone else online to dictate.

Also, sexuality and brains are really complicated. You don't need trauma (or to remember it) in order to enjoy something. You're allowed to ship any ship for any reason. Bonus points if one of the reasons is because it makes you happy, because you deserve to be happy!

All ships are just roleplays. All fics are just scenes. When I write I put up tags to let people know what's in the scene. I hold on good faith that they are reading the tags, and they that I am not tagging incorrectly. I give them my scene, and if they at any point don't like what I'm doing, they stop reading. It is really very simple!!!

Finally, if you do have sexual trauma, you don't ever have to 'sterilize' it or be 'pure' about it. It's okay to have leftover feelings and kinks and interests that might seem backwards or not make sense to other people. You don't have to conform to a bullshit 'good survivor' image of some saintly person who put all that behind them and avoids avoids avoids like a pure little virgin mary.

You can look at it if you want to. You can pull it apart with your hands, you can reclaim it and get off to it if you want to, you can share it with consenting others and let them get off to it too. That is all okay and good. That is just being human. You are okay.

[blackbutler-readerinsertsandjunk]

(this seemed fun in my head) 'Enemies to lovers' trope (headcanons, reaction, whatever I'm not picky) with William and a fox!demon future!s/o?

aaaaaa definitely fun!! I did some headcanons~

but I love Will with a demon S/O so I'd enjoy getting to do more in the future!

Foul creature, no matter what form they decide to take. A demon is a demon is a demon, as far as he’s concerned, and any being who would eat his quota is an annoying pest to him at best, and a dangerous threat at worst. He has a very poor opinion of (Name) when things start out simply based on them being a demon. Although he doesn’t take physical action in the early days unless he has to, he makes it quite clear what he thinks of them.

They’re tricky, a clever fox living up to the stereotype, so he’s not surprised that he keeps running into them whilst collecting souls. Even if he doesn’t come face to face with them himself, it’s almost a guarantee that one of his underlings does. Is this demon stalking him? They act as if they have some personal vendetta against William in particular. He wouldn’t put it past someone like them, and the next time he sees them personally, he tells them in no uncertain terms that they should keep their distance from him if they know what’s good for them.

Of course, a demon doesn’t really know what’s good for them, do they? About the time he looks out his window while doing paperwork to find (Name) perched on the fence and peering curiously in is when he acknowledges that he’s not getting rid of them so easily. He goes out to talk to them during a break, asking what they want… and it turns out all they want is to get to know him. Hm. Unprecedented.

That doesn’t mean they get free reign over his life. They’re still a demon, so technically they are still in competition for souls. William needs to get those souls in order, where they need to go, and (Name) disrupts the natural process of things by stealing them to eat. Just like all demons do. He’s cautious around them, even though he might answer some questions about his personal life; favorite color, favorite food, etc., nothing too terribly deep.

His views begin to shift a bit when (Name) catches a soul in the midst of William trying to reap it… and then simply hands it over to him. No extortion for him to get it, no deals or contracts to get them to hand it over, not even that much taunting. A small smirk and some kind eyes as they hold it out. To him, the meaning is clear: they never intended to take a soul away from him. Perhaps from other Reapers, maybe in other branches, but they don’t want to jeopardize his job or deliberately make things hard for him. It’s a selfless act, with the result being that (Name) doesn’t get to eat that afternoon. After that, he starts to look at them differently. Less as an infernal creature who exists only to complicate his life, and more like a… person. Someone he wants to get to know. They wouldn’t do such a thing for anyone else, would they?

It’s strange, to make friends with and develop feelings for a being which preys upon the thing your job necessitates you to put in the universe’s filing cabinet. Other demons don’t get the courtesy that William affords to (Name) by allowing them to eat. While he doesn’t permit them to eat in or around London, it’s not a great feat for a demon to travel across the country and be back within some short hours. He isn’t going to go after them for… patronizing another restaurant, so to speak. As long as they’re several hundred kilometers away from where he works, that isn’t his jurisdiction, so he won’t chase them down.

He’s not sure what (Name) thinks of the whole thing. He swears he can taste the viscera of a soul when he kisses them, and it shocks him that he finds he isn’t as bothered by it as he thought he might be. It’s coming from them, and soon enough it becomes apparent that they care about him. They try for him, which is more than most people do. Despite their relationship not being perfect… for some reason, he’s glad the found their crafty little way into his life.

[withlovelunette]

Animal Arbiter writing update #1

You can find the WIP intro here!

I wanted to talk a little bit about the concept behind this wip and how I first conceptualised the idea, since I'm generally a pantser who develops ideas based off of vague vibes and vivid imagery, which can often make it difficult to figure out a proper plot. I figured maybe others might stumble upon similar hurdles, and I wanted to share my process for solving it while sprinkling in some excerpts here and there!

Content warning for talk about birth, pregnancy, and murderous intent.

So this project started off as a short story about a woman giving unassisted birth alone in a bathtub. The woman in question has a complicated relationship with her pregnancy and the "mother" role, and had partially hoped that the child would have been a stillborn so she could just... Not think about it.

I’d quit smoking far too late into the pregnancy, so part of me expected—hoped, even—that I’d killed the fetus inside me. I didn’t even go to the hospital. I thoroughly believed I had willed that thing dead and I’d be better off saving everyone the trouble by pushing the corpse out of my body all alone in a bathtub. I just wanted to get it over and done with and move on with my life.

Because of this, she'd been sabotaging her own pregnancy for a while, but when the child still manages to be a successful birth, the woman develops a sense of superiority over such an accomplishment, practically glorifying her own child as a miracle despite her initial (unpleasant) plans of how to get rid of it.

As strained cries pierced the silence and echoed off of the bathroom walls, I felt frozen in place. I gripped onto the walls of the bathtub to hoist myself up and lean forward. The tub was slippery from all the blood. The whole thing looked like a crime scene ripped out of a horror movie, a passage of death devoid of any sanctity. I loomed over the sobbing thing like a grim reaper, watching it helplessly thrash around in my own blood. If I’d truly wanted to, I probably could’ve killed it and gotten away with it. Accidents happen all the time during unassisted births, it was practically a statistical guarantee.

I think the excerpt above (which I've shared here before) was when I really figured out what kind of character I was dealing with, and I got kinda intrigued by it, I guess? ^^; A lot of my characters emerge from extreme characterisations like these, because I enjoy peeling back the layers to figure out exactly what kind of person would form thoughts like this in the first place. My drafts are usually just me trying to figure out my own characters, because I usually don't really know them when I write them for the first time.

One of those layers involved figuring out exactly why someone this determined to get rid of a child would decide to keep it. The rationalisation behind this decision ended up being a very vital part of the character I'd say.

When I picked up the delicate thing and held it in my arms, I hesitated to follow through with such a morbid plan. The successful birth of this child seemed like such an anomaly that it was practically a miracle, as if the thing had such a tight grip on the promise of a future that it defied death and willed itself back to life. (...) I didn’t love her immediately either, but I considered the birth of that child to be proof of some hidden strength in me that people refused to acknowledge. I created this defiant of death.

And that's more or less how I conceptualised Nora Gaarder, the narrator of the story! From here, I didn't really have a plan to add anything to the story, but I did find myself circling back to it pretty often because I had a constant urge to fill in the blanks of how she ended up in this position and what had shaped such a person, which is what led me to the decision of expanding upon it and making it a longer story.

I think what intrigued me the most with the story concept was the idea of birth, creation and motherhood juxtaposed with death, murder and detachment, but I didn't really have a plan or any sort of plot in mind for it. I then had the idea of adding a second character to the story who somewhat mirrors Nora's story, and this would become the basis for Anette, the 14 year old girl Nora has to look after over the summer. Without going too much into anything too spoilery, Anette's circumstances and Nora's circumstances kinda run parallel to one another, and as Nora uncovers more about the town she temporarily resides in, the more she realises the similarities between herself and Anette.

My brainstorming mostly consists of asking why? to just about anything and building off of that. Why is a woman giving birth alone? Why is she contemplating to kill it? Why did she decide to keep it? How did she end up here? etc. I can do this with more visual ideas as well by asking myself what the circumstances behind the imagery are, whose perspective depicts the imagery, and so on. The conflict in this particular story is very internal, which is common in short stories in general, so I've looked for ways to externalise the conflict as well, which, in this case, is Nora figuring out what the town is hiding from her.

Anyways, I won't make this post too long or rambly, but I hope it was somewhat enjoyable to read! I might be a bit spotty with posts for a while due to semester work, but I'll try to be responsive to any asks or messages if there are any! :,)

Tag list: @oliverferrie @jaydewritesfiction @coffeeandcalligraphy @annlillyjose @phantomnations

Let me know if anyone would like to be removed/added to the tag list for writing updates and additional content for this wip!

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

hi! if you've seen this post on another blog, i apologize. i promise it is not spam, i am just trying to find as much information about this as i can with limited resources (and i, quite honestly, do not feel like typing out this behemoth of a paragraph in new ways 50 different times /lh /nm). i'm looking for some advice regarding a relationship issue occurring with my and my partner, and even if you don't have any advice, just reading over it is greatly appreciated. :) so me and my boyfriend are both neurodivergent (i have autism & adhd, he just has adhd) and we both have different hyperfixations right now. i am someone who struggles to communicate when it comes to things i am not fixating on at the moment, that aren't special interests, or that i don't know much about, and currently we don't have the same hyperfixation right now. i'm also experiencing burnout and taking in new information is probably not a good idea right now, including much about their fixation.

mine is one that means a lot to me, and i actually associate a lot with them and happy times with them, but they are starting to associate it with bad times, and while they enjoy it, they don't fixate on it very much, and haven't for a while. they'll make sure that i know that while they aren't as into it anymore, they still love to hear me talk about it. my brain tends to hear that and see it as "i don't like it any more, and i never will again, and i really don't care to talk about it".

on the other end, my boyfriend is fine with enjoying their fixation on their own, but constantly feels as though if they talk about it, they're doing something wrong, and that there will always be a language barrier in between us due to it. they are down and determined to want to just "suck it up" and just throw out their interests all together and just try to make themselves enjoy mine again, but i asked them not to for their own mental health.

we both have trauma regarding people not taking our interests seriously, or not being able to share them in a healthy way, so we're struggling a lot with trying to find ways to communicate and talk with them in a healthy way. we both have the wish that we could just fixate on the same thing at the same time, like we did before with mine, and be happier that way and have less issues, but i'm not sure if that's going to happen for a while now.

i tried looking into resources about this, but as you could probably expect, there are none. so, i'm trying to go around tumblr and ask for advice from fellow neurodivergent people and see if they can help. neither of us want to hurt each other and are aiming to make it equally fair for both of us, but its just extremely hard for us to know how to do that without help. i would reach out to a therapist, or a counselor, and a. i am in the process of getting a temporary counselor, and b. because of my current home situation, therapy isn't a very feasible option at this moment.

i appreciate you taking the time to read this, and i apologize for the garishly long message. i know this probably sounds childish but its a lot of the only things we have right now due to my home situation, so we're trying to find ways to help it as best as we can.

i hope you have a great day, and both me and my boyfriend greatly appreciate you taking the time to read this.

Hi there,

This situation is very complicated for me to give some advice. I’ll post this anyway in case anyone has any advice.

I’m very sorry I can’t help. But I’m hoping someone can share some advice.

Thank you for the inbox. I hope you have a wonderful day/night. ♥️

[hornynofilter]

This happened to me about 3 weeks ago so I'm still processing the whole thing, but I thought you might appreciate this situation. I've been pretty sure I'm bisexual for awhile now and lately I've gotten way more curious about being with men. There's a bathhouse not too far from my place and I decided to visit one night. As soon as I stripped down in the locker room and started walking around the place in a towel, I began to feel very intimidated and out of my element. I was curious about being with another guy but I was also overwhelmed. I went into the sauna to sit down and clear my head. While I was in there, an older guy came in and sat down near me. He started to make small talk and I relaxed a little bit. He opened his towel and started playing with his cock. I've seen plenty of hard cocks in porn, both gay and straight, but this was the first time I'd ever seen another man get hard in real life. Honestly, it was mesmerizing to watch him stroke himself to full erection. He told me he wanted to see me get hard, too. The way he phrased it was less of a request and more of an order. I don't know why but I just kind of followed along. I was so nervous I had trouble getting hard, and that made him chuckle a little bit. He asked me if it was my first time and I said yes. He told me not to worry, that we didn't have to do anything I didn't want to do. But in the next breath, he told me to stand up and bend over a bench. Again, I knew I could have said no but it didn't really seem like it was request. He started rimming me, which felt amazing, and then before I knew it, he was inside me. He never asked me if it was okay, he just started fucking me. He wasn't super big, and I've played with dildos before, so I got used to it pretty quick but I was in shock that it all happened so fast. He stopped for a minute to spit on his cock, and then started fucking me again. This went on for a while. In truth, I lost track of time because my head was just spinning. I didn't even realize that somebody else had come into the sauna but before I knew it there was a cock in my face as a guy was standing in front of me jacking off. He said something to the guy fucking me about "Looks like you found a new toy to play with." The guy in my ass just laughed and said "Yeah, he's a newbie." After a few more minutes the guy standing in front of me grunted and shot his load all over my face. Around the same time the guy behind me pulled out and stroked himself until he came all over my back and ass. They both told me that I was really fucking hot and they hoped they would see me again sometime, then they left. I just sat down on the bench trying to get my head around what had just happened. I was covered in cum and my ass was sore and tingling. I was reeling because none of it was really consensual. I never said yes to any of it but I also never told anybody to stop. I just let it happen. I also realized that I was super horny and really frustrated because I didn't get off at all.

Every day since, I've gone back and forth between feeling like that was the hottest thing that ever happened to me and feeling like I should go file a police report. I can't figure out why I let that go down the way it did. Another thing that complicates the issue in my head was how good it felt. Once I loosened up a little bit, it was amazing. I've never experienced anything like that kind of pleasure. In the moment there was something so hot about being taken like that but like I said, I'm struggling with the fact that I never really said it was okay.

I guess what it really boils down to is yes, I was raped. And not only was I okay with it, it was hot. But it bothers me that I was okay with it. I don't know if that makes any sense. It's like I enjoyed it, but I'm really mad at myself for enjoying it. And at the same time, I kind of can't wait for it to happen again.

Hey, wow, thats a lot but still, thank you for submitting! Usually I try to take submissions as fantasy but ofc, that's not always the case and by the way you're talking towards the end I believe this actually happened. Therefore my brain is stuck between, encouraging you to give into that and go for it again and being real and hoping you're okay so bear through my rambling as I try to meld between the two(being neurospicy doesn't help lol).

I don't think you should be mad at yourself for enjoying it? but can completely understand why.. Being s/a'd isn't always how its depicted in media and such. Sometimes its being pressured by a loved one into giving in when you don't want to and then you think 'well i consented' when you were pressured. It leans into dubious consent. You did what he said but you didn't say yes or that you were okay with it. He should have asked.

Society and upbringing wants us to see sex or being sexual as negative. But I think you should accept what you want? Like I want to be a slut who gets fucked but I'm also not that LOL. I've wanted to go to glory holes and get used but I'm not that type of person due to those things and anxiety and the fact I'm demisexual (also definitely doesn't help)(like those things make you develope shame for enjoying it and if i didn't feel shame or anxiety, I'd whore out ngl).

If you enjoyed it and wanna do it again, then i'd say go back? just be safe and make sure you keep yourself on guard incase stuff gets too much and make sure to get tested every now and then. Keep yourself safe. OR - get a partner who you can consensually do noncon/be free use with. Cause that taken feeling can still happen like that if consent is giving way before hand. Putting safe words and such in place as well would stop it from crossing any lines and you'd be a hella lot more safe.

In the end, do not feel bad for liking it. If anyone shames you, they can fuck off. Bodies are weird. Brains are weird. All of it is weird lol. Do you, be safe, have fun~ and thank you so much for sharing! (Sorry if i did not give you a response you wanted and please keep me updated on what you might do/how you feel from this response?)

[tuxedo-rabbit]

Finished Ghillani’s playthrough of the main quest!

Her story was very interesting in a way that was different from Talia’s.

Keep reading if you want a deep dive of her story.

She didn’t want to join the Grey Wardens. She wanted to stay with her clan and search for Tamlen, even though she knew that meant dying. For most of the game Ghillani was resentful of having to not only be a warden, but also being tasked with defeating the Blight right from the get-go. On top of this she was grieving not only the death of her friend, but also the end of her relationship with her clan & whole way of life.

Ghilly hated Alistair in the beginning for pushing the responsibility of leadership on her, had trouble empathizing with his grief over the man that took her life away from her, and hated that he was filling the role Tamlen used to fill in her life without being anything like him. 

She was really just going through the motions of doing the work of being a Warden, without really wanting to be alive or engage with anything or anyone around her.

The first crack was Morrigan.

Ghillani was immediately drawn to Morrigan. They were both isolated from the greater human world and they bonded a lot over not understanding why the fuck human society does things the way they do. Also they’re both extremely pessimistic and pragmatic. Ghillani actively enjoyed her time with Morrigan.

Then there was Zevran. Zevran made her laugh, made her feel a bit like the person she was back in her clan. She started to feel less like a walking ghost and more like a person.

Once Ghillani killed Flemeth, her and Morrigan both realized how much they wanted to be happy with each other. That made Morrigan scared, and Ghillani started feeling guilty for being happy. It was obvious they were both in love with each other and Ghillani refused to break things off when Morrigan asked but..things became complicated between them.

The group traveled to the Temple of Sacred Ashes and Ghillani ran into Tamlen’s ghost. This was literally the worst time this could have happened. She took a huge backstep in trying to process her grief. The only one who seemed to realize how much she was affected was Alistair. After all that, they returned to camp only to be immediately attacked by shrieks and a ghoulified Tamlen. It was a lot! I still can’t believe the game set it up for maximum pain like that! And once again, Alistair was the one to come talk to her about it. Whatever remaining resentment she had towards him melted away.

Despite her feelings of guilt, Ghillani began to try to find purpose in her new life. Surprisingly, the catalyst for this was Wynne. At first Ghilly was extremely annoyed by Wynne, and also distrustful of the whole being possessed thing. After awhile though, all that talk about being trapped in the Circle and finding purpose in it started to resonate with her own feelings of being trapped in the Wardens. It made her consider what being in the Wardens would mean for her long term.

The Deep Roads were the turning point. Ghillani saw just what a Blight infested world would look like. The Blight became more than Tamlen and losing her clan. She was committed to defeating it.

I really, really  thought that Ghillani would harden Alistair, marry him off to Anora, and spare Loghain. After all, her whole thing was being pessimistic and pragmatic, and what worse punishment could there be then being conscripted into the Wardens? But....by the time they got to Denerim...Ghillani liked Alistair! And she’d developed so many friendships that I couldn’t buy that she would say everyone is only in it for themselves. Obviously some weren’t--her friends weren’t (despite what some of them might claim), she wasn’t anymore, and Alistair never was. And truly, I think she wanted to believe in how Alistair saw the world. All honor and goodness. It’s why she wanted to make him king. Pragmatic, strategic kings turned into Loghain. Alistair could never make the choices Loghain did. 

So she showed him kindness instead.

She still tried to make the arranged marriage thing happen...but Alistair killed Loghain and things went to shit. Ghillani trusted Alistair more than Anora, so Alistair became king.

And then he asked Ghillani to stay in Denerim and help him! He told her if exceptions could be made for him to not be in the Wardens, exceptions could be made for her! They weren’t even friends! And he sounded so angry when he told her. She was taken aback but told him she’d think about it. (after all, she really wanted to stay with Morrigan if she survived the whole Blight thing, and Morrigan probably wouldn’t want to live in the castle with Alistair).

At Redcliffe, Riordan explained how killing the archdemon works and Morrigan offered her Dark Ritual. God is that conversation heartbreaking. I think Ghillani was still fighting against the desire to just die at this point? She was reaching a point where she could imagine a future, but she didn’t feel like she really deserved it, or that it could actually happen. Morrigan brought up the subject of having a child together but with Ghillani not being allowed to be part of their family and, wow, that just hit so painfully. But strangely, I think it also made Ghillani realize just how much she wanted to live? To have even a sliver of a chance that she might get to live filled her with joy. I don’t even think Ghillani fully believed the ritual would work (she doesn’t have much trust in blood magic). She just did it in the blind hope that it would, and because it meant Morrigan would be at her side for just a little while longer.

I’m very much looking forward to Witch Hunt to see these two reunited :’(

She ended the game staying in Denerim with Alistair, helping him with the new Dalish alliance as she decides just what she wants her post-Blight life to be.

[wheelsup]

the taming of the shrew | two

if i be waspish, best beware my sting

after some setbacks, penelope is willing to do anything to get you back on board. but has spencer already ruined things?

A/N: hello! im so sorry that this posting schedule is super inconsistent. the more i thought about this chapter, the less i liked the more technical aspects of it. but! i hope you enjoy to plot aspect of it nonetheless <3 thanks for reading!

category: fluff, slow burn series, spencer reid x fem!reader

wc: 4.4k

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Since that phone call with Penelope, she’d been over nearly every night for a week with plates of treats and onslaughts of apologies. Each time she came knocking, you told her there was no amount of persuasion that could change your mind. And yet the following night, she’d be there, a new type of pastry in hand and a new set of reasons why Spencer was worth the trouble.

First, she brought blueberry muffins and reasoned that deep below that prickly exterior, he really was everything she promised –– sweet and caring. But that must be deep, deep down. Like, The Lost City of Atlantis, deep down, because you didn’t expect it to surface any time soon. 

Then, she brought fudge brownies and explained that his behavior wasn’t personal –– he was getting snippy with everyone lately. And while you maintained that anybody would have a hard time getting along with Spencer, you were absolutely positive that it was now impossible for you. 

Quite frankly, it wasn’t just Spencer who was unwilling to play nice. You hated him. More than you’ve ever hated a stranger. 

You wished him a lifetime riddled with minor inconveniences that would drive him to the edge of insanity. You wanted him to miss all his trains by just a quarter of a minute; close enough so that he could see it leave the platform, knowing he almost made it on. You wanted him to constantly feel like he was about to sneeze. You wanted his socks to be perpetually wet, and if he should happen to put on a dry pair? You hoped he stepped in a puddle.

That was all you could think about as you laid out on your couch, munching on one of Penelope’s lemon bars while she paced around your apartment. She kept going on and on advertising Spencer to you. As annoying as it was, she was also saving you a ton on groceries that week. 

For the most part, you filtered her out. Not a single word that came out of her mouth was believable anymore, especially not when she was talking about Spencer. Despite what Penelope thought of him, you saw in him what she refused to accept. 

As her speech came to a close, she looked at you like she expected a response to dignify her prattling. 

“Give it a rest, Penelope. He’s a lost cause,” you laughed dryly. “He doesn’t need –– nor does he want –– anyone in his life.” At the very least, he definitely didn’t want you. 

“Yes, that’s the problem!” If you’d been listening to her, you would’ve heard her saying the same thing. “He doesn’t want to date!” 

Your head just about exploded when she said that. 

There had been countless, fruitless conversations about this, and all along she saw the gaping hole in her supposedly airtight plan?

“If he doesn’t want to DATE, then WHAT was the point of this?!” Your fingers pressed the bridge of your nose; you suddenly felt a headache coming on. Funny how it always happened around the time of day that Penelope came to visit.

Penelope stopped pacing. She stalked over to your couch, picked your legs up by your ankle, and moved them to make space for herself. You begrudgingly sat upright as she took her place beside you. 

“Because he’s not himself anymore. He’s not open like he used to be. Not to the people who care about him the most, and certainly not to the world.”  

Penelope toyed with the hem of her dress, distracting herself from her quivering lip before pressing on, “Spencer Reid has always wanted love. And it’s not right that he no longer believes he can have it.” 

You hadn’t seen Penelope look so desperate until now. It was concerning. Because what could make her look so hopeless? What could make Spencer so hopeless? 

“Penelope, I don’t know what’s wrong with your little friend, but… there’s a lot more bubbling inside him than you’re letting on.” 

She chewed up the insides of her cheeks, wincing to herself at your incredibly accurate claim. 

“You are hiding something, aren’t you?” You narrowed your eyes on her. You were no detective, or whatever exactly her team did, but she was just awful at concealing her thoughts.

“It’s not my story to tell,” she murmured. 

She could already feel herself about to give it away and doubled down her mental defenses against it. Focusing extra hard on keeping Spencer’s privacy intact. If only you knew her track record with secrets, you’d be proud of her for staying quiet this long.

“What isn’t your story?” 

“That his girlfriend died last year.” 

She spilled it before she even realized what she was saying. You’d just asked so nonchalantly that she forgot she was talking aloud. Penelope turned purple, terrified now that the whole truth was out there. 

You couldn’t even take satisfaction in the fact that your trick worked. You were just as mortified as Penelope, and if you weren’t already sitting down, you knew you’d need to. You assumed there was something deeper going on with him, you didn’t think it was a dead girlfriend. That was some Nicholas Sparks shit. 

“He pretends like he’s fine but I know he’s not. And if he found a way to move on, maybe he’d start feeling as okay as he claims to be,” she sniffled before snot could run from her nose, tears lining the rims of her eyes. “I know I should’ve given you the full picture, but I didn’t think you’d go for it if you knew…” 

You were too floored to process it all right away. This added a whole new layer of complicated to an already uneasy arrangement.

“Well, I know you’re right about one thing. I would’ve said no.” 

She gave you a set of pleading eyes, praying you’d see where she was coming from. 

“I know,” she whispered defeatedly. “But maybe... now that you know, you can understand why he acts out the way he does.”

“Penelope, I can’t just… make someone move on, or –– or get them to believe in love! Especially when it’s fake.”

How on Earth did she expect you to pull that off? Did that guy from A Walk to Remember move on when Mandy Moore died? You hadn’t seen the ending of the movie, but you assumed not. 

“I’m sorry, this is just… a lot bigger than the favor I thought it was ––”

“What if I could return it?” she cut in. The gears in her head started to turn, figuring ways to patch up the holes she made. 

“There’s nothing I need from you.” 

That couldn’t be true. Penelope looked around the room and it didn’t take her long to think of it.

“I can help you sell your art,” she tempted, gesturing to the scattered canvases. “You make all your income from this, right?” 

You didn’t want to give any fuel to her fire, but you nodded. “What if… what if you didn’t have to settle for local buyers? What if I told you that you could make way more money selling them to the whole world?”

You chortled at her idea. 

You were a local artist, through and through. Your art got put in local galleries and sold to local buyers. Nothing more, and that was fine with you. You realized it a long time ago that it was just a pipe dream to think you’d be more. 

“I’m serious! You could get a separate painting studio, and stop living in one? Huh?” She wrapped her hand around your shoulder, waving the other in the air, urging you to picture it with her. “Imagine this: a kitchen that’s separate from your living room. A bed, inside it’s own four walls, and more than twelve feet from where you cook your meals.”

Pushing aside her so blatantly insulting your apartment, if that were a possibility, you’d want nothing more. But it already sounded foolish and you hadn’t even heard how she planned to pull it off. 

“Penelope, I’m fine where I am. I make the money I need, and that’s... it’s fine.”

She gave you a pointed look. “You know, I can hack all search engine results to make sure you are what comes up first anytime someone enters the word ‘painting’, right?

An airy chuckle left your lips. Of course she could. You patted her thigh twice and stood up, prompting her to follow you to your door –– hopefully, so she can show herself to the other side of it. “Still no, Pen.” 

“Just take some time to think about it!” Her voice carried through the wood as you shut it on her.

*

There was this one bench in Kenilworth Park – the one that overlooks the crystal clear pond – that you’d always been able to rely on to fix any problem.

There was hidden magic in the bushes that sprawled out from the edges of the water, surrounded by spiky green blades of overgrown grass. A simplicity you loved in baby ducklings paddling into the tiny body of water, swimming close together so they don’t get lost in, what seems to them, a whole ocean. And clarity provided by the freshest air in the world, under the shade of the big oak trees on a late summer afternoon.

But at the present, none of that came close to being enough.

The artist’s block started off as a minor inconvenience, but without your permission, had stretched into weeks of steadily declining motivation. Each new idea felt even worse than the last, and you were acutely aware that there would come a point where you’d officially hit maximum capacity for how awful they could get.

Still, that didn’t seem to light a fire under you. You happily coexisted with the blank pages of your sketchbook. Staring down at them, laying open on your lap in their stark-white glory, you felt like you were playing a waiting game. If you stared long and hard enough, maybe they’d flinch. 

Unfortunately, you never got to find out who won, because your phone rang inside your pocket. As if the caller had interrupted an incredible genius at work (which couldn’t be farther from the truth), you hastily raised the phone to your ear, slamming your sketchbook shut.

“Hello?” Your voice wasn’t as kind as it could be for someone with nothing better to be doing. Two seconds later, you learned who was calling and came to regret it.

“Hi, This is Rebecca from District Arts, calling with a message from Andre ––”

“Oh, hi!” you tried to walk back your previous tone, straightening up in your seat and pitching your voice higher, “Yeah, I’ve been waiting to hear from him!” 

While Rebecca intimidated you, Andre happened to be your closest friend at the gallery. He worked closely with the artists to curate their collection and help them make sales. 

“Does he want to sort out what to set the opening bid prices at for my new pieces?” A handful of days ago, you sent him pictures of your new work and were waiting to hear his thoughts. You’d always been able to trust his opinion, and a vote of confidence from him might be just the thing to inspire you.

“Uhm…” There was a criminally long pause on the other side of the line, ended by Rebecca’s weary inhale. “Unfortunately, we’re calling to inform you that your pieces will not be included in the next rotation.”

For a minute, you weren’t sure what to make of what she said. You’d never heard those words before.

“What – what do you mean?” you laughed nervously. She probably misspoke. Perks of friendship aside, Andre always included you in sets. 

“Ugh, let me just get him…” her voice faded away as she put the phone down. 

That wasn’t exactly the reassuring statement you were looking for. In the time it took for the call to switch hands, your confusion finally melted in. And then quickly boiled into anger.

The District Arts gallery changed their entire collection every two months. The pieces shown accepted rolling bids throughout the full eight weeks, finally selling at the end of term to their highest offer. After that, the pieces got taken down, sent to happy new owners, and the entire gallery reset with entirely new works. 

So if you missed one rotation, that meant waiting two months to get back in.

“Andre, how am I just cut from the gallery!” you barked before he could get a word in. If he didn’t like your work, he could’ve just said so. 

“No one said that ––”

“Okay, let me rephrase.” You pinched the bridge of your nose, something you found yourself doing quite frequently lately, and took a deep breath in and out. It was seemingly just for show because it did absolutely nothing to calm you down. “Why wouldn’t you put me in the next set? I’m in all of them!”

“I know you are!” He sounded just as upset. “It’s just that… we give you the biggest space we have, because you always manage to fill it up. But this time… I’m not so sure you can.”

“That’s ridiculous,” you scoffed. “What makes you say that?” You asked that, but you knew.

“You’ve only finished three pieces… I’m worried how you’ll deliver seven more before we set up.”

“But… it’s four weeks away, I could do ––”

“And it took you four weeks to make what you have... I’m sorry. We couldn’t take that gamble.” 

He took your silence as an opportunity to turn off the work talk and speak, just friend to friend. 

“You know that I trust you and I’d hold that spot if I could. But, I also know what you’re going through right now, and… I don’t know, maybe letting yourself rest would be a good thing?” 

Your heart paused. By, “knowing what you’re going through”, you assumed he didn’t mean the little artist’s block.

“If you’re implying that I can’t do my job because of what happened with Cyrus –”

“I’m not, I’m not....” he backtracked as quickly as he could. “But take another look at the paintings you showed me and tell me if they feel like you.”

Even if he was right, you wanted to fight him. You wanted to cry. You wanted to beg that you didn’t need that big space; you were willing to downsize and just turn in the three that you had. Even if they got shoved into the corner where hardly anybody bothered to look. You just couldn’t afford to go two months without the income. 

But even with tears beading up, you realized that the gallery couldn’t afford it either. They needed to bring in money and you couldn’t do that for them this time. So they were right to go to someone who can.

“Right,” you sniffled, recollecting yourself so he can’t hear the shakiness in your voice. “I understand. It’s a big risk, like you said… It’s for the better.”

Andre tried to thank you for being understanding and spewed some sort of encouragement. The words flew over your head. You managed to toss in a few ‘mhmm’s and ‘sure’s at the right places to coast you along until the call finally ended. 

As soon as it went dead, you dropped your phone to the side and brought your hands to your face, rubbing them furiously over your cheeks. Your fingertips pressed hard into your eyelids, trying to forcibly reabsorb the tears threatening to spill. 

It almost worked, until you tried to breathe. 

A full sob escaped in that one gulp of air and you succumbed to it. But the loud crunching noise of some pedestrian walking over the falling leaves destroyed your sense of privacy, and you quickly wiped away all signs of your breakdown. The crunching stopped just short of your bench and on instinct you flicked your eyes up to see who the intruder was.

You did a double take. It was him. That fucking asshole.

He was standing there, looking dumber than you could even remember, with his hands in his coat pockets and a curious look on his face as he watched you cry. Tucking your sketchbook under your arm in haste, you made it a point to stand up with as much aggression as possible, rolling your eyes at him.

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving,” you barked. “No need to yell at me this time.”

You bristled past him, barely refraining yourself from checking his shoulder as payback. You wanted to believe you were better than him, but it did sound incredibly tempting. He stood there for a moment before turning on his heel and following you.

“Wait,” he groaned.

You didn’t listen, neither stopping nor slowing down.

“I said wait,” he huffed as he caught up to you, popping up at your side and jogging along as you kept going.

“Yeah, because I need to listen to a guy who yells at strangers in bookstores.” 

Now that you’d brought up the elephant in the room, your feet started moving even faster, working double time to get you away from him.

Damn the fact that he had those long legs. He didn’t even break a sweat trying to keep up. He was inescapable.

“Well, if you waited like I asked, you would’ve gotten an apology for the ––”

“Gee, thanks!” you yelled, stopping for only a second to turn to him and give him a mocking bow of your head, hands clasped together like you were praising at his altar. “I was waiting with bated breath for that! Thank you, kind sir, for now my life can go on.”

“Look, I’m actually sorry,” he snapped. Then in realizing the irony, softened his voice, “I’m sorry for being rude. I was having a bad day… not that that’s an excuse.”

You stared at him blankly, just watching his mouth moving quickly and waiting until it finally stopped. 

“Did you need something?” 

“Did you… did you not hear what I just said?!” 

“No, sorry,” you smiled, voice sweet like sugar. “My ears filter bullshit. Wanna try again?”

He scoffed, looking away like he couldn’t believe you before stepping even closer. “What’s your problem?”

“Me!? The fuck –– what the fuck is your problem?” You turned and stormed off again, seething at his audacity. Spencer just couldn’t relent his annoying tendencies and followed yet again.

“My problem is that I’m trying to be nice, and you’re not letting me!”

You got a good, hard laugh out of that. “Okay, first of all, having to apologize for yelling at me and pushing me isn’t exactly the best starting point for the journey of becoming a nice person.”

“Like I said, I was having a bad day.” 

Under your breath, you muttered, “Well, I hope this one’s even worse.”

“Why are you such a ––” He stopped himself from finishing that thought. Even in his worst mood, he wouldn’t cross that line. 

But he didn’t need to finish it, you knew exactly where he wanted to take it. The soles of your shoes scraped against the loose gravel as you came to a grinding halt, ears ringing.

“A what?” You turned to face him, a sarcastic smile on your face growing wider as he started to shrink more and more. You got up close in his face, daring him to say what he really wanted to. So he could reinforce your belief in exactly the type of person he was. “A what?” 

Spencer pursed his lips and shook his head, refusing to say it no matter how much you challenged him. If he wasn’t going to have the balls to say it, you decided to take it upon yourself.

“Tell you what, you keep thinking about it and get back to me the next time you’re in a cunty mood.” 

The word he was thinking of was probably not as bad, but you had a habit of escalating things. Even if you took this one too far, you didn’t care. 

Before you tried to take off again, Spencer’s hand flew to your elbow. He tugged you back, forcing you to turn around and face him. He didn’t know his own strength; without any resistance, you came stumbling into his chest, at risk of falling over if it weren’t for his tight grip on your arm.

It took you a beat to push him away with both your hands on his chest, vocalizing your disgust for being so close to him. 

“Can you stop trying to disagree with me for a second? I’m trying to tell you that you’re right, I was being a… well, you know…” He avoided the word. Apparently ‘cunt’ was where he drew the line. “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve it.” 

Your nostrils were still flared and blood hot as ever, but he made you pause. He looked sincere, if not a little tinged with guilt as well. You were suspicious of it.

“You saw me crying and felt bad, didn’t you?”

He laughed darkly. “Well, I saw you, yes. Did I feel bad? No.” 

“Oh, my God,” you growled, berating yourself for getting close to believing he might be capable of decency. 

“I’m joking! I’m joking.” He squeezed your elbow twice in earnest. “I did feel bad, but that’s not why I wanted to say it.”

“Okay.” You weren’t ready to give him a real smile, so you flattened your lips into a thin line and nodded once slowly, and left it at that. 

You still weren’t a fan, but the apology did dampen some of the resentment. Maybe he wasn’t the worst person alive. You’d settle for saying top ten most annoying, instead.

Minutes later, you came to the startling realization that he was still on the path, just two paces behind you. You flinched when you saw him out of the corner of your eye, not expecting him to still be here. 

“Uhm. Where are you… why are you still following me?” 

“I’m not. My car’s that way,” he gestured to the parking lot at the end of the long walkway. “I forgot my loaf for the ducks.” He didn’t mean to offer that information up, it just slipped out. He could practically see your smug expression coming before it even got there.

“You’re not supposed to feed bread to the ducks. It’s bad for them.”

“I don’t.” He didn’t care to explain this to you, but he couldn’t have you thinking he was any less competent than he really was. “It’s a special bread made from water and seeds that were ground into flour. It’s duck-safe.” 

“They make duck-safe bread?” Now that was something you’d never heard before. 

“No… I make duck-safe bread,” he said softly under his breath. 

You didn’t know how else you were supposed to react to that besides laughing wildly. 

“You make it?” He nodded like you were the crazy one here. As if he wasn’t the one spending his spare time grinding up seeds and baking loaves of bread for ducks, donning a frilly pink apron and oven mitts as he did so. At least that’s how you imagined it. “Why not just feed them the seeds?”

“Because, loose seeds will sink in the water and can potentially clog waterbeds and cause foreign bacteria growth in the pond.” 

“So you… hand-make the seeds into a little loaf of bread so it doesn't do that?”

He confirmed. You pondered silently for a moment, then absolutely had to ask, “You ever eaten the duck bread before?”

Spencer was caught off guard by that question. His cheeks deepened to a rosy color.

“Yeah, well, it was the house so…” he laughed nervously and stared at his sneakers. “It’s actually not too bad.”

You weren’t entirely surprised by that. You remembered what his grocery basket looked like, and given those same options, you probably would’ve tried the duck bread too. Still, you cracked the smallest of grins at knowing he makes bread for ducks. The one, sole redeeming fact you’ve learned about Spencer. 

You reached your car first, and Spencer stopped in front of it with you. 

“I’m actually sorry, you know,” he whispered once more, hand resting at the top of your car door as you opened it. He wasn’t talking about the incident at the bookstore.

“Yeah…” For a while you were so busy being angry at Spencer that you forgot about your own problems. 

He noticed your nose was still red around the edges, eyes still a little bleary. “Are you okay, by the way?” His voice was too soft, too genuine.

You shook your head no.

“Is there anything I can do?” You shook your head again. And then you had an awful thought.

You knew he was just offering to help just to say it, because that’s how people react when you say you’re not okay even if they don’t care. But there actually was something he could do for you… Something that Penelope could do.

“Uh, no but…” you fixed your hair and tucked it behind your ear, seamlessly switching to a flirtier voice. “If you still feel bad about the other day, you’re welcome to make it up to me.”

Spencer cocked his head to the side, unsure of how he could do that. 

“Hang out with me sometime.”

“H-hang out?” You could tell that it flustered him, even if he tried to play it off. He swallowed thickly, nose twitching and brows scrunched together.

“Relax, I really do just mean hang out.” You were lying through your teeth. He didn’t need to know that. 

As if he didn’t want to think about it for a second longer and just get out of this conversation as quickly as possible, he agreed without thinking it through. He didn’t even ask why an almost complete stranger would want to hang out with him. 

You stuck your hand out, expecting him to hand over his cell so you could put your contact into it. He rocked on the balls of his feet, watching as you input your contact and sent yourself a text on his phone.

“Hi, this is…” you read out your message as you typed, pausing at just the right place. “What’s your name by the way?”

“Oh-uh, I’m Spencer.” 

A devilish grin took over your face, hidden from his view while you were looking down at the screen. He was going to be easy to fool.

-

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agh! im still not in love with how this chapter is turning out, but it came to a point where i just had to stop fiddling with it and just post it. any feedback or comments about this story is very much appreciated 💕

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[brawltogethernow]

How would you, personally, go about writing a plot where twenty-something Dick Grayson has to take care of suddenly-deaged-to-just-after-his-parents'-deaths Bruce, who doesn't remember anything of his adult life? (I mean, other than Necessary Alfred.)

Well, the part of this concept that can really sock you in the face is. Dick knows exactly what Bruce needed to hear right after Martha and Thomas died.

Bruce, though not lacking for people trying to take care of him, did not get what he needed after becoming an orphan. He grew up, and he made the best of things, and he thought about what he needed from the world and didn’t get, and he became that, and that’s Batman, and that’s Bruce Wayne. When he saw a kid go through trauma very similar to his own, he had an entire playbook written by his own suffering and fixer tendencies ready to go. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best thing in the world for Dick Grayson short of his family spontaneously coming back from the dead, and things were good for a long time.

And now Dick Grayson, age, I don’t know, maybe the same age Bruce was when they met to intensify the parallels, has this playbook memorized. So.

Brief, miscellaneous scenario that’s about to cause the de-aging, to establish adult Bruce’s voice. He is motivated and capable with a strong sense of deadpan humor, and there is a large mishealed wound at his core. He is aware of this. He is used to working around it. He isn’t even that bitter about it, most of the time. Basically any supporting cast members filling out the scene could be interesting, so lacking an established roster to pull from you can use anybody. I think I'd use heroes who aren’t in the Batfam - characters with their own concepts of Batman but who don’t all know Bruce’s entire life story from a personal or Gothamite perspective. Dick is not present.

So something goes zam or zap or “Go back to your beginning, hero!” —Actually yeah, I like someone using magic to try to turn Batman into a baby but the symbolism catching wrong and rewinding him to when Batman was “born” instead. Some heavy-handedness is good with DC.

Elementary age Bruce Wayne is deeply unsettling. He intuits most of the situation without assistance or effort. He also doesn’t care. You can’t expect a pile of shattered glass to care about some sci-fi nonsense suddenly happening. He is a million years old. He hates you. He should be dead, they shouldn’t be dead, nothing is right. Breathing hurts, or, doesn’t, but should. It’s unconscionable that it doesn’t hurt to breathe. This child's despair is actively uncomfortable to be around. The grit of a nascent Batman grants him immunity to being comforted by the surrounding gaggle of semiprofessional child comforters. —I’m of the opinion that Bruce Wayne was probably a weird child to match the weird adult he grew up into, just initially happy about it, which I’d gun to make clear in his reactions even with the bottomless agony.

You could also snug a very traumatizingly timed identity reveal moment in here if somebody was tagging along who can go, WHY do I recognize this face from old news... WAIT.

Now Dick can show up. To a JL workroom, or the batcave, or maybe the manor, because I would want to demonstrate that Alfred is well versed in this and is sent back to a not great mental place by it. The old coping methods rise easily to hand even after decades, but he feels he never properly figured out how to fix the problems Bruce had in this period instead of just working around them. Eventually Bruce started working around Alfred’s inability to help. —But anywhere you put that sequence seems like it would drag the pacing.

So Dick shows up, and he crouches down with his characteristic gymnast’s fluidity, and he puts his hands on this kid’s shoulders, and he says...something. It’s not going to be okay. How could this ever be okay? The people assuring you it will aren’t trying to lie to you, there just aren’t words for this. But you can stop this from happening to anyone else. Opening with a conscious deployment of Bruce’s own words from a decade and then some ago, because Dick has always understood this element of their dynamic.

Except then he’s touching this real child who is warm under his hands and small. The shoulders under Dick’s hands are bony, which is a brain-meltingly irreconcilable detail with adult Bruce Wayne the meat slab. When Dick says, “My parents were killed when I was your age, too,” it’s a completely unintentional verbatim quote that crawls up out of his throat like a toad in a fairy tale. He hates that; he has a whole snarled up capital-T Thing about unconsciously parroting Bruce. But also it’s not like he’s going to stop comforting the actual child who now has a complicated look in his eyes—like he was drowning and then Dick threw him a life preserver and told him to hang on until they get to land because it’s impossible to reel him back up to the boat.

So then we go to the manor, and finally get to do some domestic nonsense, but hideous. Ugly conversations about coping and grief in your socks in the kitchen—when your parents just died, the sentence “The weather looks bad” is about your dead parents—because Alfred is coping by airing out whatever rooms Bruce used when he was smol he doesn’t now so hard you’ll never know they were shut up, which leaves Dick free to feed the child a fortifying dinner of instant oatmeal. (Mourning and food have a complex relationship, and I don’t feel food you actively enjoy is always a good choice!) This process involves Dick walking on the counter unnecessarily, which entertains Bruce for a quarter second before he’s swamped by guilt at having the audacity to enjoy something.

It’s miserable, but there’s a distinct glimmer of something promising under the murk. There’s this building surety that this could lead to something good. Bruce gave Dick the tools he needed to heal once, and as an adult Dick could repay that to this version of Bruce with interest.

And then Bruce pops back to normal, because that’s not how time works, with all of the ways that his emotional wounds healed wrong and healed open intact. But also with this Escher-like doubled recollection of the most formatively terrible point of his life, a short new version layered over the original that was pointing distinctly in a direction that would have sucked less.

[sweetestlamb]

Try A Little Tenderness

Summary: Han Seo gets treated with kindness and affection and he doesn’t know how to process these foreign feelings. Also he gets a first eye contact of the mafia couple. 

Author's note: A few of you said you would like to read this so I popped it out real quick in between real life and all that mess, I did something like this for IOTNBO and really enjoyed that sometimes it’s fun to see a relationship from an outsider’s pov. I also saw a few people say that they ship our puppy with a certain someone so I threw in some crumbs because the visuals would be very pretty and good for my health. It has talks of past abuse (see psychopath brother) but I don’t think it’s any darker than the regular show. Happy reading! 

He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, for them to realize that he's nowhere near good or smart enough to keep alive such less work so closely to them and listen to their plans. They trust him, he can tell by the way that conversations don't taper off if he comes into the room with another question about how to use the copy machine- there are so many buttons and it's confusing figuring it out by myself.

This first time he sheepishly asks for help after reading articles online and coming no closer to understanding the massive machine, he expects more fanfare; a slap on the cheek, a rap on the forehead or just a simple sigh and "idiot" that he would smile in the face of but the word would stick to his heart for days on end. His eyes were glued to the ground after his inquiry so he missed whatever look they originally gave him but surprisingly enough Ms. Hong stepped forward, he almost flinched as the hand approached his view but instead of pain he just felt warmth on his shoulder.

Guiding him with the hand on his shoulder, she led him back over to the machine and patiently explained all the buttons to him, even smiling gently when he pulled out a little notepad to write down the many directions.

"You really only need these three buttons this is the power button, but this thing is ancient so sometimes it may need a good kick." He jumped marginally at the loud bang of her foot against the side, quickly writing that down as well.

Really old. Needs kick.

"Then you press this button to choose the amount of copies, choose double or single sided and choose with staple and that's it." His eyes darted rapidly trying to keep up with her directions while taking his notes. It sounded simple enough but his brother had taught him that if there was a way to fuck something up, he would find it, naturally. So his nerves skyrocketed when she turned to him with a grin and said, "Are you ready for another test? Make 20 copies of these." She handed him a small stack of papers. 

His heart jerked in his chest and suddenly he was fifteen years old again staring at a test sheet and knowing none of the answers. It was hard to study with the fear of Han Seok barging into his room at any moment to do another sick experiment on him, once he had sliced his finger just to watch it bleed. He'd told his father that he accidentally cut himself while cooking and let the shame wash over him as he got a look that screamed that he was incompetent and pathetic.

"Han Seo? Are you okay? You seem like you're a million miles away." The pretty lawyer's concerned voice brought him back to reality and he could feel the stares of the other men in the room on his skin, Vincenzo being the heaviest. He really didn't want to look stupid on front of the man for some unexplored reason. He swallowed hard before facing the machine, feeling like he was going off to war.

He pressed the big power button, shaken when nothing happened but suddenly remembered his notes and with an almost unnoticeable glance he found his answer, swiftly kicking the beast of a copier he watched it roar to life and almost on autopilot he mimicked the motions that Ms. Hong had just demonstrated and watched in terror as the paper was swallowed and the copies were spit out from the compartment in the bottom.

I did it.

Everything seemed to be in order and the machine hadn't exploded. Yet. 

"Oh."

The triumphant smile that had graced his face slide off like rain on a windowpane.

"I messed up. I'm sorry. Please let me try-"

He was bowing before he could stop himself, shame a familiar friend at this point in his life. There were very little moments that he didn't feel a tsunami of shame crashing over him in a thick heavy sheet.

"You just forget to select stapled. But that's minor, we can just staple them by hand." She responded nonchalantly picking up the copies and bringing them over to the table, "Good job though. Next time you'll probably get it perfect right?"

It was pathetic. He was pathetic. There was no reason for pride to grow in his chest like a mustard seed, he had only completed a basic task. Something that even a monkey could, actually monkeys could do even more complicated tasks.  It was nothing to be proud of. He shouldn't have been smiling as largely as he was, they would think he was insane and kick him out.

But.

She'd said he did a good job. That wasn't a phrase he was used to hearing, he wasn't someone who did anything worth praising. He shuffled away back to the shelves that needed to be organized in alphabetical order, moving a large file to the front of the row unaware that there was an equally huge smile on his face. It stayed there for the rest of the day.

Working there was different from working with his brother. Astronomically. Nobody hit him there, even when he made mistakes. Instead he just got three heads over his shoulder helping him fix said mistake or Mr. Nam pushing his chair out of the way and taking over with only a gentle chide of, "Be careful next time." And it's clear that they all care for and respect each other. It's evident in the way that there's no clear hierarchy at the law firm, when they have meetings they alternate on who makes the coffee for the team, take turns buying meals and they are all allowed to speak and share their ideas without waiting for approval. It's nothing like he's used to and it makes him wonder if this is normal and what he's used to is...not.

It's enough to overwhelm him.

Then something catches his attention in the peripheral of his eye, Ms. Hong impatiently goes to take a sip of her coffee ignoring Vincenzo's firm warning against doing so and she flinches at the heat of the beverage, sticking out her tongue instantly after the first sip, blowing and huffing theatrically- something he's grown used to seeing from her. This isn't what shocks him though, it's Vincenzo's reaction. Immediately he walks over to the water cooler, filling a little paper cup before bringing it back over to her and thrusting the cool liquid into her outstretched hands.

"I told you to be careful." He says voices filled with exasperation as she gulps down the water, shooting him puppy dog eyes.

"I thouf it mould be cool enouf." She replies around her extended tongue and he watches the interaction with wide eyes, that only grow larger when the murderous Mafia member picks up the lawyers mug of steaming liquid and starts to blow on her coffee, his lips puckered into a perfect o. Ms. Hong watches absently as if this is expected behavior and after a few minutes, Vincenzo takes a sip of her coffee deeming it cool enough before handing it back to her. She takes a sip dangerously close to the spot his mouth had just occupied and hums at the temperature, shooting him a brilliant smile. To his utter surprise the usually stoic Mafia member smiles back fondly, before walking off to make a call. Ms. Hong watches him walk away before realizing that he's watching their interaction and a delicate blush blossoms in her cheeks before she stutters walking off to her table.

He glances between the two with his head tilted. Feeling curious.

Once he starts looking it's almost indecent how often the two touch each other, Vincenzo's hand never too far from Ms. Hong's back or arm and she never reacts to the sudden touches, no flinching or tensing up when a foreign hand is suddenly on her person. That's a new concept for him, he doesn't like surprise touches.

Then there's the fact that Mr. Cassano never allows Ms. Hong to hold anything, when she comes bustling through the doors with bags in her hand the smell of pasta permeating the room the older man is already making his way across the room tugging the bags from her hands wordlessly. He places them carefully on the table before smoothly dragging out her chair and guiding her into it with a hand on her waist.

"I brought your favorite. Authentic Italian food." She smirks up at him, opening the containers and he feels his mouth water at the tantalizing aroma that fills the room even more than before.

"It smells amazing! Where did you find authentic Italian food?" He asks inserting himself into their conversation and for a minute, he second guesses himself gearing up for a blow. But it never comes and Ms. Hong waves him closer, pushing a container of thick noodles in his direction.

"Are you hungry? Here have some!" She shoves chopsticks into his hand and watches him eagerly and he can do nothing but follow her orders, stuffing the tomato sauce drenched noodles into his mouth. When he looks up he sees that they are both watched him avidly, awaiting his review and he smiles around his bulging cheeks putting up two thumbs.

"It's delicious! Best Italian food I've ever had!" He stares excitedly and he's unprepared for Vincenzo's sudden glare, it's the first time the man has thrown such a look his way he gulps nervously at the unnerving sight.

"What- did I say something wrong?" He warily asks watching the Italian man angrily stomp off whilst muttering something indecipherable to him but that makes Ms. Hong smile mischievously, grabbing the container and chasing after the fleeing man.

"Stop being a snob! Have some, say ahhhh!" He can't comprehend the sight that he's watching, dumbfounded as the petite lawyer hangs on Mr. Cassano's arm and tries to feed him the Italian food.

"No! I don't want it, stop! Why do you keep bringing that here?" The Italian Mafia boss whines pushing her away but he notes that he never pushes her too hard, his shoves are very soft barely rocking her slight body. When she starts to chase him around the room, Han Seo can only watch in shock the behavior too childish for him to reconcile that these are the same people who have been thwarting all his brother's plans. Not even Mr. Nam entering the office is enough to stop their shenanigans and in the end it's Vincenzo who admits defeat, backed into a wall. Han Seo waits for her to give him the food and for this moment to come to an end. But neither one of them make a move, frozen against the wall staring at each other looking a million miles away.

It's then that it clicks for him.

They are more than just partners. 

When one of the various plaza tenants burst through the doors only then is the tense moment severed, Ms. Hong jumps back flustered thrusting her hand at his face and Mr. Cassano has to open his mouth lest he get smashed in the jaw. He watches amused as a grimace crosses the older man's face as he swallows the food as if it's poison.

Ms. Hong flies across to help the cute pianist that he's seen around a plaza a few times. He stares at her from under his bangs, looking away when she catches his eyes. Coughing loudly he walks away to do something important that doesn't involve losing his wits because of a pretty girl. Maybe he can talk to Mr. Cassano later just to ask about her, there's nothing wrong with being curious about your neighbors after all.

He doesn't know where else to go so he comes to Jipuragi, letting out a sigh of relief when he sees all the lights off. He pulls the key that Mr. Nam gave him from his pocket, still in disbelief that they trusted him enough to give him a key to the establishment. He had blinked away tears when the older man pushed the small metal object into his hands, it felt like a huge responsibility. Almost like he was being accepted into their makeshift family. It was far more than he deserved. 

Sitting down on his chair, he lets the agony wash over him. His cheek is throbbing, sore and swollen from the open handed slaps against the skin. Their stocks had dropped again from all the accusations and bad publicity, and his brother had once again taken it out on him berating him like a dog before kicking me out. It's nothing new, nothing he's never experienced before but it feels worst. Now that he's been around people who don't treat him like he's dirt, it hurts even more to go back to the old ways. He's so lost in thought he doesn't notice the door opening or the person creeping inside.

"What are you doing here?"

He jumps at the unexpected voice, twisting in his seat panicked. His heart rate settles once he sees the cool eyes of the man he's grown to respect. Vincenzo Cassano. He slumps in his seat, no excuses coming to mind and then it's too late and the other man is crossing the room and taking a seat across from him.

Those cold eyes narrow as they search his face, "What happened to your face?"

Images of his brother looming over him and slapping him on the ground flood his mind, along with his screams of pain as he pleads for him to stop. Then visions of a much smaller version of himself pleading similarly as his brother pulled his hair and laughed at his cries. He's crying before he ever realizes that the tear has condensed. 

Vincenzo tenses across the table, looking lost and uncomfortable.

It only makes him cry harder. It's so much better than getting hit.

Without a word the Mafia boss stands up pushing his chair away, stomping powerfully to the door. He watches alarmed before finding his voice and calling out, "Where are you going?"

The man looks at him darkly answering, "To kill your brother."

He gapes at the statement said so matter of fact and a bubble of laughter rises to the surface, making him chuckle through his tears. He rears back further at the other man's blatant confusion following his outburst, feeling freer than he's ever felt because this is the first time someone has tried to defend him.

It feels nice. Better than nice, unbelievable.

His heart thumps as he looks at the other man that he has every reason to be scared of but instead he feels safer than ever in his presence, it almost feels like what a brother should. A real brother not the one that he has who would kill him tomorrow without batting an eyelash.

"He's not done suffering yet. But thank you." Vincenzo shifts awkwardly at his show of gratitude never accepting of thanks something he has noticed while observing the enigmatic man, he vaguely wonders what this man has been through to make the complicated person he sees in front of him. Maybe one day he'll ask.

"Well if you're going to stay here, there's a bed up there."

Impulsively he replies, "Have you ever used it before? Is it really okay for me to use?"

He's met with a puzzled look, which he returns with a calculating one and then he spares a quick glance over to Ms. Hong's table and the gears click and Vincenzo is tomato faced and yelling, "Watch your mouth you brat! Do you want a beating?"

It shouldn't be funny with his face still throbbing from a beating just hours earlier, but he laughs so much his stomach hurts and that pain dulls the ache in his face.

"Oh my goodness what happened to your face?" He's barely able to get out an answer before Ms. Hong is jogging across the room, ever so gently catching his face in her small warm hands. Immediately he's reminded of his mother and he has to look away before he embarrasses himself.

He mumbles a lie about tripping but she's already sending a ferocious knowing look over to her partner and he watches their silent conversation with large eyes, until her voice breaks the pregnant pause.

"I can't wait until we kill that punk. How dare he put a hand on you? I'll go get some medicine, you-" she points to Vincenzo, "get him some ice before it starts to swell." The man automatically follows her instructions, looking like a dutiful husband.

And that's how Mr. Nam finds them, Vincenzo pressing ice wrapped in towels against his cheek as Ms. Hong squeezes creamy ointment onto her finger and smears it across his cheek. He blames his glossy eyes on the pain in his cheek and not the one in his chest.

It's his first time walking around the plaza and he tries to ignore the suspicious eyes that trail him, he knows that they know him as their enemy's brother and underling so he doesn't blame them for not trusting him, he would do the same. The clang of piano keys catches his attention and leads him to the source of the noise like a siren luring lost men, he watches transfixed through the glass as delicate fingers fly across the keys in a frenzy. It’s mesmerizing. 

He was forced to get piano lessons when he was younger, he was surprisingly good at it even better than Han Seok thus his brother became enraged and smashed his fingers putting a permanent end to his lessons.

The music lulls him into a sense of comfort so much so he doesn't realize when it ends and the small pianist notices that she has an audience.

When he finally looks up and catches her eye, he freaks out expecting her to look at him like all the others have today so he's unprepared for the door to slide open and for her to beckon him in with a crooked finger. He walks in almost as if in a trance, she's so pretty it's almost unnatural a supernatural glow surrounding her in her white flowing dress.

"How does it feel working at Jipuragi?" She asks suddenly catching him off guard, he sputters before taking a deep breath and looking away before replying, "I feel useful. It's....new."

That's all he can disclose and honestly it's more than he intended on saying but a knowing smile stretches across her pale face.

"Vincenzo, he's someone special who can make others feel special too." He smarts at the clear adoration in her voice, of course. She liked Vincenzo too. Every woman at this plaza probably did, the Italian was much more appealing than he would ever be- naturally charismatic and handsome, every woman's dream.

He smiles defeated stepping further into the space, running his fingers longingly across the piano keys. Something else that just wasn't meant for him.

"You like him too. It makes sense, he's really cool." He whispers, self deprecation swaddling him like a blanket. 

It's obvious who else he's referring to only Vincenzo and Ms. Hong seem to be in denial at this point everyone else assuming that they're already dating.

She doesn't deny his accusation. It's his own fault for having hope but that knowledge does nothing to tamper the hurt that rumbles in his chest. 

She hums before walking closer to him, fingers trailing across the black and white keys.

"I did. But they're good together."

He stills in shock, lightly pressing down on the key beneath his finger the sound vibrating through his skin. Then she presses another key that rings harmoniously with his and he can't not look over at her and he jolts breath stuck in his throat when he finds her already staring at him with a serene smile, "There are a lot of interesting people here though, someone else has caught my eye."

He plays the final note to fulfil the chord they started and their eyes never leave the other, music floating on the air between them.

Full. He’s never known what that felt like before but now he feels full of everything and he can't go back, can't ever go back to the way things once were.

There’s no looking back, only forward. 

[wordsnstuff]

20 Mistakes To Avoid in Enemies To Lovers

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Weak Conflict

There should always be a strong, compelling source of tension between two people who are considered enemies. Even if their rivalry stems from external sources, such as bad blood between families or competing for a number one spot, there should always be a concrete reason why they hate each other.

Not Explaining Forgiveness

When one of these conflicts subsides, or a tense moment resolves, it should be justified. Tension and emotions shouldn’t disappear because you’re trying to stuff romantic moments in here and there. If one of your characters crosses a line and the other character chooses to forgive them, there needs to be a clear and understandable reason. It doesn’t always have to sit well with the reader. Your character can make a blatantly stupid decision, but it needs to serve the plot. 

No Tension To Be Found

If your characters have to verbally or physically assault each other to demonstrate the tension between them, you’re doing it wrong. If they have to kiss for the reader to see that they like each other, you’re doing it wrong. Tension is in the little things. It’s in the instances that most people would overlook, but your characters zero-in on because the subtext is too thick to gloss over. Tension is the most important plot device in enemies-to-lovers stories, so it requires a lot of time and attention to minute details. 

Conflict Solved Too Easily

If the rivalry between your characters is one misstep after another, with immediate forgiveness following, the tension won’t build correctly. You’re working your way up to a boiling over moment. A moment where everything comes out and then, once resolved, makes way for the romantic feelings to enter. If the conflicts don’t slowly build on each other, that boiling moment will come out of nowhere and be less satisfying to read. Don’t let your characters off that easily. Enemies aren’t constantly letting things slide. 

Characters Changing For One Another

People don’t need to be exactly the same to see attractive qualities in one another. It’s true that relationships shift your perspective and that it occasionally results in outward changes in behavior, but one or both characters shouldn’t mold their personality around their partner. 

Stupid Potion

If one of your characters has to become oblivious or avoid critical thought to maintain a relationship with that character, you haven’t made the two characters compatible enough. This is especially true when one or both of your character’s identity revolves around a higher intelligence. They should have enough in common that there doesn’t have to be a giant shift in one or both personalities to work as a couple. 

The Relationship Brings Them Down

The thing about enemies to lovers stories is that the happy endings are usually an indication of the author’s view of what is and is not forgivable in a potential partner. The acceptance of someone’s past mistakes, current flaws, and future struggles. When a love story ends with a couple that repeatedly lower each other or hurt each other, that sends a bad message, and that is your responsibility to avoid. It doesn’t need a happy ending, but it should never have a destructive one. 

Writing Abuse Instead of Rivalry

There is a big difference between writing two equals who have a rivalry slowly falling in love and putting aside their differences, and writing an abusive, predatory love interest who repeatedly hurts, manipulates, and gaslights the main character. Just because you can imagine the character forgiving them doesn’t mean they’re a good partner. Cheating, physical abuse, isolation, passive aggression, and manipulation are not character flaws. They’re not “mistakes” that the character needs to forgive in order to save their relationship. It’s abuse, and when you write a story between an abuser and a victim that has a happy ending, that has consequences. 

Revealing Feelings In A Cliché Way

This is very subjective, however, there are also a plethora of tropes to choose from and an infinite amount of alterations you can apply to make them your own. The objective, however, is to build up to it in a way that creates a satisfying payoff, and an interesting moment that serves all of the work you’ve done to build to it. There’s nothing worse than reading chapters and chapters of build up, anticipating a big moment where sparks fly, and then having all of that tension result in a sad sputter of mediocrity.

Instant Trust

Trust is difficult to build between two people, especially when they have a complicated past. Trust is earned, no matter who you are or what you’ve been through, it’s always a process. It’s never inherent. When two characters have a history of betrayal or hurt, trust is going to be even harder to develop between them, and that process is an opportunity for more tension, character development, conflict, and eventually a satisfying resolution. Trust development is a major plot device, and I recommend you take advantage of it. It’s also a huge opportunity for building romantic tension amongst the angst of trials and tribulations. 

Why Do They Hate Each Other, Though?

There’s a thin line between love and hate, and that line is infatuation; obsession. So, what put the two of them on the bad side of that line? This reason is the main conflict. The overarching plot begins with the point where that rivalry either begins or is challenged after a long while of stagnation, and it ends with the two characters crossing over that line into love. You need to make that beginning point very clear.

Rivalry Shouldn’t Just Dissolve

There needs to be a transitionary period that is tense and awkward with scattered moments that make the effort worth it to both of them. There should be a “Well, we hated each other last week and then they did some really sweet things and now I’m not so sure. Maybe we’re starting to become friends now? I feel really excited when I see them, so I must not hate them anymore, right?” period. 

Complete Opposites

Yes, opposites can attract. Yes, completely different people can fit together very well and have a happy relationship, but this is a cliché and is, in most cases, poorly thought out with little to no originality. 

Love With No Reason

Just like your characters need a reason to hate each other, they need a reason to love each other. There has to be something that makes them work. Not just a common hobby or characteristic or exterior aspect they share, but something that makes them fit together. If they love each other because... they can, your reader will feel like they’re watching two stupid, lonely people tolerate each other’s flaws in the interest of sex or companionship for 100 pages. 

No Actual Conflict Resolution

Relationships are built through conflict resolution. Communication, empathy, effort, and understanding between two people who work to make each other happy. Hollow forgiveness is not apart of that process, and if that’s all there is, you’re not developing a realistic relationship between compatible people, you’re depicting a toxic relationship that, in the case of these origins, can be abusive. 

Underusing Sexual Tension

Sexual tension is great. It’s easy to develop, it has a satisfying payoff, and it doesn’t take up a lot of space on the pages. It doesn’t have to result in x-rated material, especially if you’re writing for a young adult audience, but it’s simple and effective. 

No Awkward Transition Period

A large chunk of the plot should be awkward and uncomfortable to watch. The transition should be organic and make sense for your characters, but all organic movement contains struggle. Nobody goes from hating each other to loving each other overnight, and relationships are complicated and require hard work. Show this.

Catalogue Characters

There are enough stories out there with cardboard characters and self-insert protagonists, especially in romance. Make your protagonists unique and individual. Make your characters diverse and interesting to read about. Readers should have a bit of wiggle room for imagination, but that doesn’t mean they should be filling in the blanks like your characters are Mad Libs. Don’t close your eyes and point at character archetypes to form your cast. It’s obvious and lazy. 

Stagnant Tone

The tone of these stories often falls flat because in the interest of building tension, writers ignore purposeful tone shifting, scene-to-scene. Change it up, make it potent, and make a lasting impact during important moments. Suspense and anticipation shouldn’t just build during the climax and resolution. 

Bad Pacing

When your readers spend hours reading a story that promises a romantic payoff, they expect to see some of it. I think that a three act structure is really effective with this type of arc, with the first third being devoted to building rival tensions, the middle third being the shift from rivals to friends, and the last third building that romantic tension and ending with a happy resolution. 

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Masterlist | WIP Blog

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