#he also has a fair amount of bisexual panic

[stxrmstained-a]

// "Ah, that smile— It could light up a room. Hells, it could light up the entire Bay of Balduran" wyll you're absolutely RIGHT.

[oathofoaksart]

YOUNG JUSTICE OC: KITSUNE 

bio under the cut!

BASICS Name: Leiko Ara A.K.A: Kitsune; Lei, Kit, L.A [only by Charlie] Age: 16 [S1 Era], 21 [S2 Era] Gender: Cisgender Female Orientation: Grayromantic Bisexual

Skin: Fair Hair: Plum-Black Eyes: Black, fully golden and slit-pupiled as Kitsune Height: 5'6”, 6’1” in platforms Build: Lithe, built like a dancer Distinctions: Distinctly pretty. Sharpened canines and nails. A sharp dresser, obviously wealthy, rarely seen without some type of heel.

RELATIONS Parents: Ryuu Ara and Cho Miyamotou [estranged] Siblings: N/A Friends: Wally “Kid Flash” West, Zatanna Zatara, M’gann “Miss Martian” M’orzz, Raquel “Rocket” Irving, Kaldur’ahm “Aqualad”, Dick “Robin” Grayson, Conner “Superboy” Kent, Artemis Crock, Haley Overbea [OC] Partner/s: Wally “Kid Flash/Flash III” West (ev. post-S3) Misc.: Charles “Scribe” Jenson [OC], Penelope “Poppet” Caskett [@PoltergeistPrincessa] Affiliations: The Spiral, The Team

PERSONALITY Personality Type: ENTP-A [Assertive Debater] Temperament: Choleric-Sanguine Alignment: Chaotic Good Clever | Self-Assured | Driven | Arrogant | Spiteful

Aristocratic in both upbringing and nature, Leiko likes to carry herself with regality. Her confidence and well-honed charm makes her a popular figure among her school peers, even though she keeps everyone at a cool arm's length. Her social aloofness leaves her with little to no close friends, which she figures is just as well, since she finds friends to be a waste of time.

Around others in the heroic scene, Leiko allows herself to show off. She’s known for her theatrical and flamboyant attitude, topped with a haughtiness she cares little to subdue. She’s assertive, witty, and adores a challenge. She lets this completely unfurl as the vain and dramatic Kitsune, who views the world as her stage and anyone watching her audience.

Leiko struggles with unlearning a deep-seated cynicism against others and is often skeptical of actions claimed to be done out of good will, which clashes with the ethics of heroism. Her grasp on empathy leaves much to be desired as well; she can be condescending, sharp, and impatient when the situation calls for exactly the opposite.

Still, steadily Leiko finds herself learning humility, trust, and care from her teammates, along the way forming friendships no Swiss bank account could buy.

ABILITIES AND WEAKNESSES

Powers and Abilities:

Physiology:

Lei doesn’t possess a human soul, but of that of her namesake, a kitsune. Her “soul” is instead a Hoshi no Tama, usually referred to as her soul bead. It is a fist-sized pearl that resides within her body. This is the source of her magic as well as her heightened physical attributes.

Enhanced Senses: Lei demonstrates fox-like senses. She sees just as well at night as she does during the day, hears better than a normal human, and has a better sense of smell. This doubles in the supernatural side, she can see, hear, and smell beyond the mortal plane. 

Enhanced Physiology: Lei exhibits above-average speed, strength, endurance and rarely if ever comes down with diseases, viruses and the like.

Onmyodo: A traditional Japanese occultism

Illusion Magic: Lei’s strongest suit is her hold over illusion spells. Using a variety of paper charms, mirrors, physical cues, written and verbal spells, she's able to create confusion over her opponent. These illusions range from visual to audial, making it difficult to rely on one's own senses. Her illusions are often grandiose, jarringly colorful, with nods to the overall aesthetic influence of traditional Japanese art forms. In turn makes her relatively immune to similar tactics.  

Barriers: Can alternately use barriers as a sort of defense or a barring mechanism. Barriers set up by paper charms are stronger and more durable than barriers set by simple verbal spells, however combining both techniques grants the best results.

Pyrokinesis: Lei’s kitsunebi is a mystic fire she can conjure in the form of pillars and spheres. Notably different to “mortal” flame, as it burns exclusively supernatural/otherworldly beings, but brings the sensation of weakness and illness to the human body.

Weapons and Inventory:

Enchanted Parasol:

Kit’s go-to weapon. By reaching over her shoulder, the same way one would unsheath a sword, her oil paper parasol materializes into her hand in a burst of flame. It serves both as a defensive and offensive tool.

Closed: While in her hands it doesn’t appear to weigh any more than a regular parasol, in combat it carries an inexplicable weight, able to break concrete. She uses it as a melee weapon, much like a bat or a club. Kit also uses it as a makeshift wand/staff, for bigger and more complex spells. And a favorite stun tactic of hers is to mimic pumping the action to a shotgun, aiming her parasol and “firing” it. It creates a momentary illusion of being “shot” to whomever her target may have been. 

Open: Popping it open creates a quick-time personal shield, able to deflect various attacks and withstand a fair amount of explosive power. Ducking behind it obscures her from her opponent and she uses this window of time to work up a spell. Spinning the canopy of her parasol causes momentary dizziness. When jumping off of highland, the parasol allows Kit to glide for long distances (the amount of time and smoothness of the glide suffers when another person is in tow).

Ofuda: These paper charms can be used as delayed “bombs” affected by sticking them into walls, either simply timed or activated by touch. They also serve for warding spells. Gohei: A summoned short wand with a decorative paper trail, the length of the trail stretches during use. Lei uses it as a sort of weaponized gymnast ribbon, or a whip. Most effective against intaginable objects or enemies. Balance Charm: With Scribe's help and after many mishaps, Kit wears a beaded charm around her ankle which enables her limited enhanced movement. She appears to glide along, unweighted, making her movements seem feather light. It helps slow or cushion short distance falls and balance on unprobable surfaces. May also explain how she manages to fight in heels. Spellbook: Kit carries a small notebook with variant spells written herself for safe-keeping and for a quick reference check. Mirrors: Kit holds a small, two-faced mirror. The mirror serves to see through glamour illusions or create more intricate illusions of her own; more often than not, she uses it to admire a makeup job well done. Purification Salt: Ghosts in particular are vulnerable to salt, circles of it makes areas inaccessible to them. Calligraphy Set: A horse-hair brush, inkwell and a small stash of paper for written spells

Limitations and Weaknesses:

Water and Aquatic Environments: As host of a fire kitsune, Kitsune’s main and biggest weakness is water. Being around areas with large amounts of water dampens the potency of her magic, being doused in it cuts off completely until she dries off. While her parasol helps repel rain and small splashes, it can only do so much. The water effect includes any type, Lei incapacitaed by things such as baths and showers as well until she properly dries herself off.

Cynophobia: Lei’s “unprompted” fear of dogs, or really any sort of canine that aren’t foxes, can be traced back to Japanese folklore. Dogs were considered enemies of foxes, being used to hunt them down. People accused of being possessed by, or being kitsune, were sometimes forced to be licked head to toe by dogs in order to expel the demon to it’s true form. Dogs make Lei largely uncomfortable at best, aggressive dogs will either send her into a state of frozen terror or at worst, unabashed panic.

HISTORY [TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL HARASSMENT]

The only child of Ryuu Ara, a successful luxury hotel chain owner and president, Leiko grew up with the world served to her on a silver platter. She enrolled in the best schools, excelling in academics, popularity, and was starting to make headway as a teen model. Leiko formed into a pretty, precocious, if pretentious, girl.

At age 14, after wrapping up a student council meeting afterschool, the student body president forced her into a corner when she’d turned him down for a date. The boy grew increasingly aggressive, but was stopped from going beyond grasping at her blazer when a brilliant white flame unfurled from Leiko’s hands. She fled the second she found an opening, calling for help until she caught the attention of school security. The boy was found unconscious, but physically unharmed. (She would later find out, he complained of sudden illness and a downslide of rotten luck, with little to no memory on how he’d been knocked cold.)

Ryuu spared no expense on making sure justice was properly handed out, although that was simple when compared to the news Leiko gave him about her new ability to conjure flame. But he’d taken the revelation far easier than Leiko thought he would. Ryuu admitted it was something he’d been somewhat expecting, even dreading.

Leiko’s mother was something of a taboo subject. Outside of knowing her name was Cho (Ryuu never mentioned her maiden name) and that there had been an ugly divorce shortly after Leiko was born, she didn’t know much else. Even then, her father didn’t go into specifics beyond blaming Cho for Leiko’s newly discovered “peculiarity.” Ryuu ultimately decided it was best for Leiko to pretend she hadn’t discovered it. She had a bright future ahead of her as his heir and it wouldn’t be marred by her mother’s blood. Leiko obeyed despite her protests. They’d both come to realize, however, fire was just the beginning.

Over the following weeks, more abilities came to emerge, from heightened senses to supernatural awareness. She struggled under the pressure of maintaining the semblance of being normal. The weight of stress and desperation finally proved too much for Leiko, leading to a discussion gone sour, ending only when she noticed Ryuu backing away from the looming shadow of a four-tailed fox she cast on the wall. She would miss the following days of school when her eyes refused to revert back from their completely golden, slit-pupiled appearance.

Resigned, Ryuu took to looking into someone who could help Leiko with her magic troubles as this was beyond his reach.

That someone came to be a man by the name Scribe, a semi-public mystic who operated within New York. Scribe’s interest piqued at the mention of Leiko’s transformation and to the Ara’s slight relief, Scribe proved himself to be a sorcerer of true magic instead of a con-man looking for a quick buck. He’d confirmed their suspicions of Leiko being tied to the kitsune, fox spirits of Japanese lore, although he admitted he had little to no experience with said creatures.

Scribe refused to leave Leiko to sort things out on her own, however, and offered her a proposition. Scribe’s lifelong work dealt with a massive, mystical library he dubbed the Spiral, which housed knowledge from across space and time. Despite his years slaving away at discovering and archiving its secrets, progress was going at a crawl. He’d take Leiko under his wing, giving her access to whatever she could get her hands on and import what they couldn’t find from his various connections. In return, she’d take up being his personal assistant. Ryuu had been reluctant to let Leiko have a hands on approach and had made his dislike for Scribe apparent, but relented.

The world of magic was a far cry from the straight-laced, business-oriented life Leiko had grown in; it both terrified and fascinated her. Scribe, real name: Charles Mordichai Jenson (Charlie for short), proved to be an eccentric, but well-meaning guide where he could. As the two dove into research, Leiko let loose a sense of freedom and expression she stifled to fit her father’s expectations. Charlie was quick to help enable this. They were polar opposites in many ways, but Charlie saw a passion and potential in Leiko that mirrored his own at her age, and he fully intended to see it shine. It wasn’t long before Leiko wasn’t just checking inventory and jotting notes for both The Spiral and Jenson’s Comics (Charlie’s civilian pop culture store), but followed him out on relic retrievals and even the occasional “mystic field trip”. Charlie had been adamant on one thing when she stepped out of the safety of The Spiral however, much as he’d taken Scribe as his mantle, Leiko would have to make one of her own for the sake of her identity. It wasn’t a hard choice for her as it was practically staring her in the face, Kitsune took life. Over the next two years, Kitsune proved herself to be a capable magician despite being self-taught. Juggling her home, school and magic life was busy, but thrilling. Perhaps a little too thrilling. During an outing, Scribe and Kitsune were ambushed by a sorcerer named Felix Faust, who ultimately took Scribe prisoner. Well-aware of just how over her head she was, Kitsune went on a one-girl rescue mission to save her mentor anyway and was beyond relieved to find a young group of supers on the same trail.

The group, known simply as “The Team”, had been alerted of Scribe’s abduction through their resident mystic, Zatanna. Scribe had managed to send a distress signal before all communication cut off. Shoving down the twinge of jealousy that came with that revelation and of being out of the loop, Kitsune allied herself with the Team until Scribe was rescued. She was offered a permanent position on the Team, which she said she’d think over even though she had no interest in becoming a hero. She was more persuaded by the opposition placed by Scribe and the oddly genuine endearment shown by the Team’s speedster, Kid Flash.

Less than a few days later, an argument between Leiko and Charlie sparked by his confession of thinking she wasn’t right for the Team just yet sent her right to them out of spite.

Now taking a crash course in heroics, Kitsune tackles supercrime, training, self-reflection, team building and the frustrating, but integral importance of friendship.

NOTES

Kit has alternate versions of her Kitsune outfit and will switch between them mid-battle, either because she wasn’t feeling the one she was wearing, it got dirty, or a specific attack called for a wardrobe change

Because Lei’s brand of Onmyodo is largely “home-brew” given she’s self-taught, she incorporates other types of magic and styles to compensate 

Lei has the passive ability of being ridiculously lucky, she never loses games of chance such as coin flips and dice rolls

The nickname ‘Lei’ was originally coined by Wally West and it’s a nickname she only allows within the perimeter of the Cave

Lei is proud of her musical skill, it’s not uncommon to hear her singing to herself and will shred an electric guitar when given the chance

She has a pet Bearded Dragon named Prince. Prince was a at-Death’s-door rescue surrendered to Charlie, who gave him to her after she helped nurse Prince back to health and she wound up attached to him

Lei’s father is unaware she’s taken up heroism, as far as Ryuu knows, she’s studying under Charlie to get her curiosity of magic out of her system

[delilah-briarwood]

Omg they were roommates AU or like coffee shop/ books store AU?? For like any fandom but I saw you've posted magicians stuff so ayee love your posts

I haven’t watched the Magicians in a long time so bare with me a little. This is based on what I remember from the first two seasons 💙💜

So ‘Brakebills’ in this AU is actually just the name of the bookshop that Quentin runs with the help of his childhood best friend, Julia. Though, ‘bookshop’ is putting it a little lightly. It’s also a sort of hang out place for young people and they have a lot of literature themed nights going on. So there’s a fair amount of buzz for it.

Margo and Eliot are both well known Instagram influencers and they have a shared YouTube channel. They’re also absolute disasters. But they hear about Brakebills and are like ‘Hey, this would be a really good place to check out for a video etc’

So Margo and Eliot go to Brakebills. Once there Margo, Eliot, Julia, and Quentin have the exact same thought at the same time; ‘o fuck, im gay’.

Margo and Julia end up talking because they’ve both got the collective brain cell. Margo is very much endeared by this cute nerdy girl whilst the lesbian part of Julia’s brain is just going ‘hhhh p r e t t y’

Eliot tries to flirt with Quentin but Quentin.exe is not working; please try again later. He’s in anxious bisexual panic and has no idea how to respond. Eliot, however, finds this absolutely adorable.

Margo leaves with Julia’s phone number and Eliot leaves scheming on how to ask out the cute bookshop owner without Quentin going into disaster bi mode.

So Eliot keeps finding reasons to go back to Brakebills again and again and again. He always makes sure to talk to Quentin directly; ask about what books he’d recommend and what he’s interested in. Quentin is beyond flustered in response.

Eventually, Julia gets exasperated of all of it and just yells at the two of them to kiss.

TL; DR There’s a bookshop and nobody is straight.

[stfusilas]

~INTRODUCTION~

the jingle of dog tags under dirty tees, cigarettes lingering on clothes long after smoking has ceased, unshaven facial hair prickling against skin, a bic lighter always on hand, wind howling between barren trees on a cold winter night, locked doors with lost keys.

‹ JACK O’CONNELL , HE/HIM, CIS MALE, BISEXUAL. › SILAS HENRY is the TWENTY-SIX year old from LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. when a friend asked them what they thought of the manor they said,  ❝ IF YOU THINK THIS HOUSE IS SCARY, YOU SHOULD TAKE A LOOK INSIDE MY HEAD ❞ they claim SECONDS APART is their favorite scary movie, and if they were to die in a horror film they would SACRIFICE HIMSELF FOR SOMEONE HE LOVES. their fears include COMMITMENT, INTIMACY, AND LOUD NOISES, and they don’t know we know, but…HE DESERTED HIS SQUADRON IN THE ARMY AND WAS DISHONORABLY DISCHARGED. hope they enjoy their stay. ‹  muse b from walkman ›

Sup yall! I’m PJ, twenty years old (January 17th and I’ll finally be fuuckin legal!), and I use he/him pronouns. I’m in the EST timezone, New York babeyy! I was in this group awhile ago and I’m totally fuckin pumped for it to be back! I’m pretty boring honestly, especially compared to my son Silas. So enough about me and now onto him:)

Trigger Warnings: drugs, alcohol, gun violence, murder, mental illness

Silas was born on March 14th with fetal alcohol syndrome to a single mother who could never get her life straight. She was intoxicated when he was conceived, throughout the pregnancy, and stayed that way for most of his life. She did the best she could to provide him with food and shelter but they ended up at food banks and shelters more than once. 

He was a problem child which didn’t make it much easier on his mom. Fighting, not doing his school work, just causing a shit ton of mischief. He was ten the first time he got into his mom’s liquor cabinet (which was always full, despite their bare food cabinets) and eleven the first time he smoked weed. From there it turned into other drugs like acid and eventually cocaine. He wasn’t as bad as his mom but they were two fucked up peas in a pod. There are only a few drugs he can honestly say he’s never touched.

Besides getting constantly fucked up with substances, Silas had a habit for brawls and became infamous for being the kid who never seemed to lose even when he was against people larger than himself. He’d steal things, once the dumb fuck even took off with a car. Managed to get away by the skin of his teeth and never spoke about it again. 

All this landed him in trouble with the law but as a teenager he was let off easily every time. The judges felt sorry for him and cut him some slack, then he’d do good for a bit but would always eventually end up screwing himself over again. 

Despite being such an angry child, he managed to be decently funny. Made some friends because of his idiotic jokes and the pranks he used to pull. Stupid skits and other various things to show how stupid he is went on his Youtube channel and eventually his following grew a bit.  Think the Janoskians with all of their challenges like the cinnamon challenge, the milk jug challenge, etc.

Once he hit eighteen, he managed to screw up one more time and was given two options. He could either go to prison or he could enlist in the Army. Prison was’t something he wanted to experience so signing up it was. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to pass the psych exam but he did it, graduating from boot camp and eventually being sent overseas.

Silas saw and did a decent amount of shit while overseas. He killed his fair share of people and would deny it if someone asked, but he enjoyed his first few hits. At one point he had to kill a ten year old with a bomb and that really fucked with his head. 

Eventually he developed depression and PTSD but he did his best to hide it. One day his squadron was ambushed and most of his friends were killed. Seeing all of them lying around on the ground, gone, was enough to tip the scales and he just ran, deserting the military. He managed to survive for about a month on his own before making his way back. They dishonorably discharged him (secret alert!) and now he’s back in the States, doing his best to pretend like none of it ever happened.

Silas tries to act normal but those closest to him can tell that he’s not. He’s posted a vlog since returning but it’s evident that he isn’t the same kid as he was when he left. He has nightmares almost every night and the flashbacks are pretty bad too. Most nights he doesn’t even sleep, too afraid to go back to the war. 

Silas has a huge fear of commitment. Whether it be to another person, his squadron, or just placing a goddamn sticker somewhere, he’s afraid of it. He’s fairly nomadic and he knows it, besides his two besties. There’s something about being tied down that gets him on edge. He doesn’t like to feel trapped, and that’s exactly what the military did to him. 

He’s also terrified of intimacy. not as in sex, but as in getting extremely close to someone. He’s afraid of opening up to people and letting them see his real emotions. Not even his friends always know what he’s thinking, especially when it comes to his feelings about his tours. The only way people find out about his night terrors are if they witness him having them, but he tries to avoid that as much as he can by not sleeping around others.

As much as he hates to admit it, Silas does not like loud noises. Music is fine, but just the slamming of a door or someone else yelling is enough to send a chill down his spine. Fireworks and gunshots are the worst, and even thunderstorms can cause him to panic. When this happens, it’s easy to notice, if you actually pay attention to him. He completely stiffens up and his eyes widen, his hair stands on end and if it’s really bad, he gets cold sweats.

He’s there with his two best friends, Muse A and C from his subplot, Walkman. They booked them the stay as a celebration for his return since he’s been obsessed with the manor for years. He’s actually super excited to finally get to stay inside a room there, especially with the two people he trusts most on this Earth. 

Wanted Connections:

Maybe someone who also knew him in high school? The old, angry, stupid Silas. 

An ex? He’s never been one for commitment so he probably fucked that up somehow. 

An enemy! He’s probably got more enemies than most.

Someone who watches his Youtube videos? 

A crush or something? Mutual or one sided for either, but I’d like to fuck him up a bit

Okay that got mad long so I think that’s all for now folks! I’m very much down for ALL of the plots so feel free to hit me up or just give this a like and I’ll slide into your DMs;) If you’d rather talk on discord you can find me @ pjnfluff#3272

[matteredloyaltyaa]

really LONG CHARACTER SURVEY. RULES.

repost , don’t reblog ! tag 10 ! good luck !

TAGGED. I stole it. TAGGING. Go for it. lol

FULL NAME : Arthur M/organ NICKNAME : A handful. English, Cowboy/Cowpoke, Black Lung, etc. Common aliases are Tacitus Kilgore and Arthur Callahan. AGE : 36. BIRTHDAY : January 25th, 1836. ETHNIC GROUP : Caucasian. NATIONALITY : American. LANGUAGE / S : English, primarily. Knew a handful of Welsh thanks to his father, but it’s faded with disuse.  SEXUAL ORIENTATION : Bisexual, somewhat closeted.  ROMANTIC ORIENTATION : Biromantic, somewhat closeted. RELATIONSHIP STATUS : Verse dependent, single-ship with @notanoutlaw in most. CLASS : Lower/working HOME TOWN / AREA : Arthur just mentions he was born “up north”, I headcanon around the Oregon area, possibly California due to his mother’s favorite flower, but it’s uncertain. Though, the place he laments the most about is New Austin, or “out west”.   CURRENT HOME : Transitory, he moves with the gang.  PROFESSION : Outlaw, occasional bounty hunter.

PHYSICAL. HAIR : Light brown, dark blonde in some lights. EYES : Unique eye colour, blue-grey-sorta hazel.  NOSE : Average, dimpled. Scarred from fighting and getting it broken a couple times.  FACE : Somewhat sharp features in the brow and cheekbones, square jaw.  LIPS : Full, can be dry/chapped.  COMPLEXION : Somewhat clear? Hard to tell. Dry, dirt spattered sometimes.  BLEMISHES : Uncertain. SCARS : A handful. Most notable are the one he has on his chin that is most visible with shorter facial hair, one across his nose, and the one left on his shoulder by the O’Driscolls in chapter 3.  TATTOOS : N/A HEIGHT : 6′0, possibly 6′1 WEIGHT : Uncertain, fluctuates.  BUILD : Stocky, broad shouldered and he can be fairly intimidating, especially when his weight is about average or above.  FEATURES : Look above? ALLERGIES : N/A USUAL HAIR STYLE : Right parted, about 3-5 in length. Though, for people who don’t know the system--fairly short, tufts out around his ears and may reach the back of his neck before he cuts it again. USUAL FACE LOOK : Expression wise, his kind of got a resting irritated face, sometimes bored. Rarely clean shaven unless he has to be, usually keeps a fair amount of stubble.  USUAL CLOTHING : I change him too much to say. Tends to keep his heavy navy blue winter jacket, jeans/ranch pants, some sort of button up shirt, and sometimes his tan leather jacket. Tends to keep his hat, however, unless he needs to go without. 

PSYCHOLOGY. FEAR / S : Arthur has a mild one of change. He’s adaptable but he’s very sentimental and nostalgic, he will miss “old ways” and previous places. There’s also losing his usefulness, disappointing those who depend on him (much as he will get defensive when it happens). Post-Guarma, he does develop a fear of drowning. It won’t keep him from swimming, but getting swept or held underwater may cause some panic. Post-game au, he does fear about getting sick again and actively avoids doctors.  ASPIRATION / S : Uncertain, just wants to get out of the mess he’s in and eventually just wants a calm existence somewhere. However, once he’s diagnosed with TB, his main goal is getting those who want/will listen to him out of the gang as it starts to fall down. POSITIVE TRAITS : Caring, compassionate (to people he knows, might not be clear on first impression), intelligent (much as he may say the opposite and isn’t exactly book smart), observational, brave, humorous (in certain situations and may be a cover sometimes), friendly (somewhat, changes as he ages), artistic, creative, loyal, etc. NEGATIVE TRAITS : Violent, murderer (doesn’t do it without reason but he knows he’s killed more than he certainly should), defensive, (passive) aggressive, sarcastic, depressive, self-deprecating, selfish, rude (sometimes intentional, sometimes not), conflicted, stubborn, reckless (sometimes, has mellowed out with age but it’s still there), self destructive (sometimes), money-driven (not always a flaw but he’s easily swayed by money). MBTI : ISFJ-T - Turbulent Defender  ZODIAC : Aquarius  TEMPERAMENT : Phlegmatic-Melancholic ANIMALS : I’m not going to take the quiz because the game is very heavy handed with the whitetail buck motif for high honor Arthur. lol VICE HABIT / S : Smoking, drinking, etc. FAITH : Non-religious. GHOSTS ? : Generally, the existence of ghosts isn’t something he completely writes off after he’s witnessed the few in the game, but he’s also hard pressed to admit to believing in them outright. AFTERLIFE ? : Not in any sort of defined sense. He’ll often say he doesn’t believe in one or it won’t be a nice one for him if there is, but he finds himself nervous about the subject once he gets sick.  REINCARNATION ? : He doesn’t know enough about it. ALIENS ? : Not really? Doesn’t really know he’s looking at a UFO when he sees it. POLITICAL ALIGNMENT : Don’t start. ECONOMIC PREFERENCE : Uncertain. SOCIOPOLITICAL POSITION : Uncertain. EDUCATION LEVEL : Does not have a formal education on even the basic levels (primary, high school, etc), however Hosea and Dutch have taught him to read and write and he’s learned a handful of things when it comes to survival and his lifestyle. However, he’s not exactly book smart or the “book learnin’ type”. 

FAMILY. FATHER : Lyle M/organ, deceased. MOTHER : Beatrice M/organ, deceased. SIBLINGS : No blood related, but considers John as one along with a couple other members of camp. EXTENDED FAMILY : He has a few uncles, aunts, and cousins, but he’s not in touch. Issac, his son, and his mother, Eliza, who are both deceased. Mary L/inton/Gillis, ex-fiance. (Cain Kennedy, lover - @notanoutlaw) NAME MEANING / S : Arthur - English, “noble, courageous”, Morgan - (and I’m going against what’s been said in fandom) - Celtic/Welsh surname, comes from Old Welsh name Morcant - “mor” as “sea” and “cant” as “circle”.    HISTORICAL CONNECTION ? : Uncertain in the game, but it’s been pointed out about King Arthur and also Morgan le Fay, which highlights his struggle with good vs evil themes in his character. 

FAVOURITES. BOOK : Uncertain, mostly non-fiction. MOVIE : -- 5 SONGS : -- DEITY : Doesn’t know enough to give a favorite. HOLIDAY : Christmas, in a way. Not quite for the religious context, but he enjoys the hunting and cooking the gang does to celebrate, singing and talking over fires. He remembers it vividly when he was younger, so it’s stuck with him. MONTH : April-May. SEASON : late spring, early summer. PLACE : He likes most places in wilderness, give him something with a view and he’s good. WEATHER : Sunny, average weather. Not too hot, not too cold. SOUND : Rain, birds, etc. SCENT / S : Again, rain, campfires, etc. TASTE / S : Prefers savory over sweet.   FEEL / S : Weightlessness in his limbs once he’s able to sit/lay down after a long day, fingers in his hair, etc. ANIMAL / S : Horses, dogs, cats, animals. NUMBER : He hasn’t given it much thought. COLOUR : Blues, greens, deeper colours.

EXTRA. TALENTS : Sharpshooting, Arthur’s got impeccable aim and speed when using guns, there’s also his drawing, he’s getting fairly good at tracking, etc. BAD AT : Admitting to mistakes, expressing himself emotionally, adhering to rules, anything overly scientific, etc. TURN ONS : Sense of humor, confidence or self-assurance, kindness and/or compassion, dark hair, etc. TURN OFFS : Hypocrisy (much as he suffers from that himself), cockiness (has a limit before confidence becomes a turn off), excessive or needless cruelty, etc. HOBBIES : Drawing, writing in his journal, hunting, wandering around/sight seeing, etc. TROPES : Anti-Hero/Anti-Villain,The Atoner, The Big Guy, Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Obfuscating Stupidity, etc. AESTHETIC TAGS : Horses, old west, deserts, nature, gun slinging, writing, drawing, photography, etc. 

FC INFO. MAIN FC / S : R/oger Clark, mainly in game icons so I haven’t found a need for one. ALT FC / S : -- OLDER FC / S : -- YOUNGER FC / S : -- VOICE CLAIM / S : R/oger Clark GENDERBENT FC / S :

MUN QUESTIONS. Q1 : if you could write your character your way in their own movie , what would it be called , what style would it be filmed in , and what would it be about ? A1 : I actually REALLY enjoy the game’s story line, much as I feel the redemption through death is overplayed and not as deep as people make it out to be. I’d find a way to subvert that or some alternative, but idk. I like the game’s story. lol

Q2 : what would their soundtrack / score sound like ? A2 : Western-y. IDK? The game’s soundtrack is actually really good too so.  Q3 : why did you start writing this character ? A3 : I love his development and progression as a character, and even with the trailers where he seemed no more than an angry outlaw there was a part of me that was still “hmm” about writing him. Ultimately, he’s grown to mean a lot to me and I really enjoy writing for him on this blog.  Q4 : what first attracted you to this character ? A4: As mentioned above, Arthur probably has one of the best character progressions I’ve seen in a while imo. Even in the beginning, I went in under the impression that I’d be playing as this outlaw so the violence and gruffness wasn’t too much of a surprise, much as I wasn’t too attached until later chapters in the game because of this. However, as I spent more time playing as him and reading his journal, seeing how he interacts with strangers and people he loves, he has some depth to him and some deep rooted flaws and insecurities that are played very well in the game. He’s probably one of the few character deaths I’ve cried over. lol Q5 : describe the biggest thing you dislike about your muse. A5 : I have to be truthful, Arthur’s an asshole. lol I didn’t like and still don’t like him from Colter into Horseshoe in behavior and personality, much as it’s lessened from my first play of the game because I know what happens to him and how he grows. However, while he’s not blind to himself and how he acts, he doesn’t think for himself really. Even if he hates debt collecting, he does it for the gang and even tells Strauss he does it for pleasure at a point (sarcastic or not, considering they are talking about Thomas, a man trying to raise money for charity while suffering poverty himself on top of having TB), he does whatever Dutch tells him, among many other things. It’s not until later in the game that the theme of grasping redemption comes into play, and he starts to act and think for himself a little more once things start to spiral. As much as I love him with all my heart, Arthur’s got some deep flaws that are hard to ignore.   Q6 : what do you have in common with your muse ? A6 : HHHhh. I’d say we suffer from similar self-esteem issues, not just in body image but morality of character (much as his are way more complicated than mine jaksfha), we also have a similar sense of humor...Yeah, idk. I’m attached to him as a character and I can relate to him in certain ways, but it’s hard to pinpoint.  Q7 : how does your muse feel about you ? A7 : Idk, he’s pixels? Though, for the sake of a fun answer, I genuinely don’t know? We can be fairly similar in mannerisms and thought process (at points), but I have no idea if we’d actually get along if by some universe rip we were able to meet.  Q8 : what characters does your muse have interesting interactions with ? A8: I don’t want to get specific, I interact with a lot of interesting characters. Anybody who’s put me out of a comfort zone or forced me to look at Arthur in the different way has definitely stood out. Q9 : what gives you inspiration to write your muse ? A9 : The game itself is a good source, I enjoy putting up lets plays of it in the background sometimes if I’m struggling or just need something that isn’t music. I get more muse putting together blog playlists than playing them, but there’s that, too. Also generally plotting or talking about him can pull some to the forefront. Q10 : how long did this take you to complete ? A10 : An hour or so, I think?

[writinglionqueen]

Something I wanted to share since it was pride month; my coming out story.

For the record, you as an individual do not have to come out if you are not safe/comfortable coming out. It takes a lot to come out sometimes and, sometimes, staying in the closet is safer than coming out. Do so when you are safe. With that, this can be long and emotional for some so put your mental health first if you feel like coming out stories can be triggering for some so please don’t read if it might. There’s not a lot of bad in this story, but I don’t know how others may perceive my story. (Also, as a note, a lot of my language is kinda informal in terms of finding all this out...that’s kinda the point. I was learning who I was throughout the entirety of my life and this is kinda how I rationalized who I was and how I observed everything and how I came to terms with it)

If you didn’t read my header, I’m bi. I’ve been out since 2016. I will explain the process of me figuring it out and how I told everyone. 

So, I think I knew I was different from elementary school. I would call myself a tomboy and be “one of the guys.” I didn’t like the things the other girls liked; i.e. Hannah Montana, Jonas Brothers, and Justin Beiber. Instead, I always played with the boys (this could also be because I couldn’t find a girl who was into the same things as me). I would play kickball (even if I sucked). I would play Pokemon and pretend to be superheroes with the three boys I hung out with. Elementary school was also the first time I remembered WWE being a tiny portion of my life. I would pretend to be Kelly Kelly and pretend to beat up the boys (we obviously couldn’t wrestle on the blacktop so we pretended to fight bad guys as WWE people). But I was always that girl who didn’t like to be girly. Not by a long shot so I associated myself with boys and kinda had the thought process that overly girly-girls had cooties (yikes to little me). 

In elementary school, I was pretty sure my art teacher was “different.” What I mean by this, and my twin and I talked about it a little more recently in life than when we were in elementary school, because she had incredibly short hair, kinda like a boy style. My twin had recently told me that she doesn’t ever remember out art teacher ever referring to her SO other than partner. Looking back at her now, I am pretty sure she was/is a lesbian. I liked her though. She was creative and made me laugh during the scathes amount of art classes we had with her. (So she could technically be my first interaction with a lesbian. I can’t confirm or deny since I’ve been trying to find her on social media)

Moving into middle school, this was technically my first real experience around a lesbian. There was this girl who was the only one out. She was very much the “tom-boy” persona. As I knew of her in middle school, she had a girlfriend in the 8th grade who was super femme. During the 8th grade, one of my friends decided to have a sleepover and invite the two girls (even though she kinda grumbled about how she didn’t want the two alone.) So at the sleepover, all the girls were supposed to sleep in the large family sized tent they had set up for us. We hung out in it until the early morning, until then some girls wanted to sleep while others played truth and are. Let’s just say, they dared the lesbian couple to make out, they did and it ended with the tom-boy lesbian fingering her femme girlfriend. It didn’t confuse me, but it did make me really think about those kinds of things. This is when sexuality was technically first introduced to me because I think I remember being turned on by what happened. 

In late elementary school to middle school. I had a downstairs neighbor who became my friend since she was a year older than me. I think I developed a crush on her since I would become quite jealous if her time wasn’t spent with me. I also thought about holding her hand and liking her. (I didn’t recognize that I liked her until recently when I thought about how long I’ve been bi.)

In high school, I remember there was this dancer who I technically recognized as being my first actual girl crush. I say this because I remember telling my twin one time that I thought she was pretty and my twin kinda laughed at me. She was one of those popular chicks and she kinda treated me like...I had a mental/learning problem (a lot of people I think did but that was because I was quiet and I think I asked a lot of stupid questions). She was the first I technically and literally thought about in a romantic/sexual way. But I never dated girls (and I still haven’t. I’ve dated two guys but...I wasn’t attracted to either at all)

Within this time, I discovered Tumblr and the ease of finding 18+ content when I shouldn’t have. (Most of us been there). With this content, though, this was the only way I discovered and explored my sexuality. (But with the limitations that I only got the sexual lens of wlw and mlm and not the romantic side of things, but for those who don’t know, many LGBTQ+ individuals struggle explorations due to the lack of resources so most of us figured out things through porn and other 18+ content). It technically helped me figure out masturbation as a woman and what I was attracted to and what I wasn’t but I always felt ashamed by it because I knew if I was caught I’d probably be shamed by my mother (more so for the 18+ content and masturbating but not the sexuality part). I think my twin is the only person I’ve ever told that I had a crush on a girl at this time. A lot of my friend group in high school (mainly those a year older) were queer in a way or an ally. They made me feel loved as I learned new terms within my high school years of the LGBT. So, closer to the end of my senior year, I knew I liked girls and I liked guys. 

For me, I never was afraid to come out. My mom/family had never given me a reason to be afraid of having a different sexuality. I’ve heard my mom verbally praise LGBTQ+ people before I came out. 

So when I moved to college, grew a little on my own, I knew who I was. During national coming out day of 2016, I made a quick Facebook post saying that “I’m pretty sure I’m bi.” 

I didn't feel afraid, but I was nervous about the reactions of my family and friends that I tuned in on the comments and likes and loves my post got. No one was mean or upset or called me names. The reaction of my mom was not something I was thinking about. I wasn’t dreading it. I wasn’t terrified to hear what she had to say. She never had given me a reason to be afraid. 

Instead, she told me she was proud. That she wasn’t mad or upset that I was me. And that she still loved me no matter what. 

So it was out there that I was bi. 

When I went home for Thanksgiving break, closer to that time, we went out to eat sushi closer to the end of it. The topic of relationships and stuff came about. I think my parents were discussing with my younger sisters that they just wanted to make sure my little sisters were safe. I remember distinctly that my mom said she didn’t have to worry about me, but she also didn’t know if I had a boyfriend or girlfriend where I was staying for college. it made my heart full to hear my mom say that and acknowledge it out loud. 

During the summer between my sophomore and junior year, something went sour. I don’t know why it came up, why it needed to come up but my mom was talking to my sisters and me about the things she technically found annoying that we do. 

My fault in her eyes is that I’m very opinionated and I have the egotistical mindset that I’m always right. (I am opinionated, I’ll give her that, but I never ever said out loud that I think I’m always right. The air that I probably radiate this mindset I will admit to but) In lieu of this...she says out loud, that I am not bisexual. My heart shatters and I close myself off. 

Her reasoning for telling me this is to not think of my sexuality as being the only part of me. I didn’t think I ever gave the air that my sexuality is my only identifier but she wanted to talk to me that it isn’t my only identity. 

But, she also states that I can’t claim myself to be bisexual because I’ve never experienced sex with either gender (a surprise from your girl, I’m a virgin). She negates my sexuality because she feels as though she has more life experience to tell me that I am not bisexual, just bicurious. Wrong. Big wrong. (During my sophomore year, my mom and my stepdad cheated on each other, which lead to us finding out my mother is also bisexual but she could never be upfront about it because of our family friends) But, in her eyes, I can not claim my own sexuality because of my virginity to either sex and because she, as an older bi woman, says so because of her experience. 

Let me tell you, because of her telling me this, I had the worst breakdown I’ve ever experience in my life. We had the talk again with my stepdad (he wasn’t present for the first time) in which case he reiterates what my mom told me. I can’t be bisexual because I never had sex before. But both were trying to just tell me to not let my sexuality be my only part of my identity that I cling to. 

But as he was saying this, I got a panic attack and I didn’t want to listen to a word he had to say and I’m muttering I don’t want to hear it as I basically sob in my living room. Yeah...that’s the worst feeling I’ve ever felt in my life and I still think about it to this day. 

Because of my parents basically trying to negate my sexuality and not let me identify myself (I would rather not say that I know I like girls because I fantasize about them in various scenarios [pretty sure my mom or my stepdad asked what I’d do if I didn’t like girls as I thought...as if it’ll change]), I basically had shut down that part of myself and being a LGBTQ+ voice in front of them. 

On social media, however, I’m vocal about LGBTQ+ related things...but, sometimes, I feel like I’m being/claiming bisexual to spite them. And I don’t want to feel like I am. That’s not fair to me. 

Sometimes, I fear wearing my LGBTQ+ Balor shirt in public...sometimes, I still fear my mom will not revert back to the comment she made about me liking boys and girls. 

I never confronted her that these emotions are things I still face even though it’s been almost a year since my mom had said that to me. I feel like I overreacted on everything but I’m still stagnant on my sexuality since I get to decide who I am and what I identify as. As I feel that everyone should be able to do. 

I wrote this technically for myself, so I can understand that hey, maybe I knew I was bi all along and never really knew it (which….I felt like I figured it out). 

To those who are closeted, to those who are out and know the feeling, and to those who are not LGBTQ+ identifying: you never stop coming out. 

I still have to remind some people that I also like girls and that my framework isn’t only hung up on men. Sometimes, I have to remind people that f*g and f*ggot are words I will not tolerate being said (even though I’ve never been personally bullied with them). I still have to remind people that EVERYONE experiences their coming out differently and that they are still trying to figure themselves out daily. I have to remind people that there are those who are fluid about their identity and that there are those who are stagnant on how they identify themselves as. These are things I still have to remind people because the world doesn’t necessarily hand this info out to everyone. That needs to change. 

I wanted to share my story on the last day of pride months because....why not?

I’ve never shared it before and coming to terms with my sexuality and what it means to me has helped me processed a lot of how my past has shaped my future and who I am as a person today. 

By the way, I do love my mom. I really do. I feel like she messes up a lot when it comes to a lot of different things. 

Hopefully, I can tell her how much I still hurt when it comes to hearing her words in my head. Hopefully, I can do this soon, because that pain eats away at me sometimes. Her words haunt me and make me doubt myself and make me ask myself if I truly know who I really am or do other people know me better. (They don’t but those are the questions I may bring up to her if I ever want to talk about this)

I’m bisexual and that is not going to change or be vilified by someone else’s experiences on my identity to fit their means or their experiences. And if I’m wrong, hey I’m wrong (I’m not though. Not this time.)

So take my story as you will. Comment if you like if you can compare my story to yours of if you want to share your experiences and hardships, go for it. I just needed to get this off my chest. And, hey, I’m down to hear other people’s life experiences in terms of how they found out they were LGBTQ+ and how others received them. Or if anyone as kind words to me, I’d take that as well. 

Thanks to any who read this and have shown me support. 

I love you all. 

-Your friendly bisexual writer, Bri

[hencethebravery]

TITLE: First Family (1/1)

SUMMARY: It's not as if Killian Jones believes his husband to be incapable of winning the presidency (quite the opposite, actually)─he's just not entirely certain he wants him to. A CC 2020 Election AU. (Ao3)

NOTES: This particular story is meant to be entirely cute and in celebration of the prospect of having a “First Gentleman” (see recent Time magazine cover). It is not at all meant to be an endorsement of any one candidate, and if you come at me with anything other than love for these two boys and their dog, I will unhinge my jaw and swallow you whole. I developed Jasmine’s last name from a princess who appeared in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (on whom Jasmine is based, or so Wikipedia tells me). Oh, and another small disclaimer, this is the first time I’ve included Emma Swan in a Captain Charming fic. For whatever reason I used to struggle with including her, but I guess I’m over it because she’s here now. If you think that’ll bother you then give this one a miss!

If the chronically thin, awkward, and punk-ass 15 year old version of Killian Jones could have, somehow, opened a portal in time and space; a feat which might have allowed him to peer into the future in an attempt to witness what the future might hold, he would have likely imbibed several ill-advised shots of cheap bloody rum, and then quite dramatically flung himself atop the rumpled sheets of his perpetually unmade bed. If the younger Jones had even an inkling of the type of life he’d be living as a 35 year old man─with a full time job, a mortgage, a husband, one wildly photogenic dog─he would have done everything in his power to steer himself off such a disturbingly clean-cut, well-behaved course.

“Well and truly boring I’ve become, isn’t that right my love?”

Dave, the husband in question, sat comfortably in his usual corner of the couch, reading glasses perched at the end of his nose, putzing about on their shared iPad, paying less and less attention by the minute, “Oh, absolutely. Can’t stand you.”

The only reason he brings it up at all is because he has, somewhat unexpectedly, been rather unsettled by the prospect of a life change so massive, he has had no other choice but to reconcile with the fact that the quiet life he has managed to build for himself could, quite likely, be completely destroyed. Forever. Never to be found again. Relegated only to a memory that he’ll return to in his twilight years, a decrepit old thing. “Ah yes,” he would mumble, smacking his lips together in that way the elderly tend to do, “I remember when you could watch an entire 48 hours of television, totally unbothered!”

It’s not as if he legitimately wants to keep his husband, arguably the love his life, from doing what he’s meant to, and clearly, the man’s meant for greatness, but Killian has become accustomed to a certain standard of living. He likes (much to his younger self’s hypothetical horror) doing the same things everyday─up with the sun, cup of coffee, walk the dog, go to school, come home, make dinner, watch Netflix, go to bed. He likes weekend drives to the country; hikes in the morning, beers in the afternoon. He enjoys the calm, safe predictability of his life that he has so miraculously found in the wake of a rather tumultuous, traumatic youth.

“Killian,” David insisted gently, “you’re my husband. Obviously, if you don’t want me to do this, I won’t do it.”

The maddening part is that he knows with absolute certainty that he’s telling the truth. David Nolan wasn’t the resentful type─it was something he both simultaneously loved and hated about the man.

“I swear, darling, the last thing I want to do is hold you back,” Killian replied, frustrated with his own lack of enthusiasm, “I just…”

“...It’s a big change,” David finished, “I know. Honestly,” he continued, “I probably won’t even win.”

“Sure,” Killian scoffed, a smirk on his face, “that’s exactly what you said last time.”

5  Y E A R S  E A R L I E R

“I JUST THINK IT’S FUNNY!” Killian yells over the deafening cheers, one arm slung round Dave’s shoulders, the other waving wildly in the air.

“WHAT?” David shouts back, his mouth turned upwards in a somewhat manic, and what was fast becoming alarmingly permanent, grin.

“IT’S FUNNY!” he repeats, the volume of his voice doing little to bely the patience in his tone. He finds a few of their friends’ faces in the crowd and blows them a kiss, his cheeks starting to hurt with the force and breadth of his own smile.

“WHAT IS?”

Killian couldn’t help rolling his eyes at the absurdity of their attempting to hold a conversation at all at a time like this, but he’d never been one to keep from saying, “I told you so,” when the opportunity presented itself. That said, it was quite the ruckus, and he had simply shaken his head in surrender, silently promising to rub it in at a later date.

To be fair to David’s humility, a mayoral race and a presidential race are two vastly different undertakings, particularly when the mayoral position in question involved a municipality of around 100,000 people, which while a large enough amount, was quite small in comparison to the rest of the country. But at the same time, given what Killian knew about his husband, he had a hard time believing that the rest of the country wouldn’t be able to see what he saw─if they were able to get past the “First Gentleman” of it all, that is.

Killian would be lying if he said he didn’t have something of a pessimistic streak. Certainly, it had grown quieter over the years, especially since meeting David (and his subsequent election to political office in a small midwestern city), but the presidential election of about 3 years prior, coupled with the many national tragedies and constitutional crises, had “awoken the dragon,” so to speak.

“You’ve been watching way too much ‘Game of Thrones.’”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

David and Killian had agreed from the very start─whomever ran in 2020 would have to be and do more than the average candidate. The only way to remind the country and the world of who they really were as a nation was to commit a complete and total act of repudiation with a substantive majority vote.

“You know everyone and their mom is gonna run,” Emma Swan, David’s campaign manager, had joked in the weeks following the 2016 election, after all of their emotional wounds had felt somewhat soothed. Alcohol helped.

“Ah, yes,” Killian agreed, taking a sip of whiskey, “I can feel the splitting migraine already.”

Looking back, David’s silence in that moment had been suspicious, and if he and Emma hadn’t gotten absolutely wrecked in preparation for an upcoming election cycle that would inevitably last what would feel like a decade, he would have prodded a bit further. In fact, if he had prodded, maybe he wouldn’t be so woefully unprepared for the, “I’m thinking of running for President of the United States,” conversation.

Immediately before the panic had set in, what he had actually felt was pride. Regretfully however, panic will-out, and in the midst of his initial tittering he forgot to effectively relay that initial emotion, which was for David he was sure, far more preferable.

In the early stages of the mayoral race, Emma had been adamant on the point of storytelling. According to her, elections were won and lost on a candidate’s ability to tell a story─about themselves, their campaign, their vision for the community─and if David was going to run, an openly gay man (albeit white as they come) from a working class background with little name recognition, the story he told would have to be good. Thankfully there was the military record, that usually played well with an older, more conservative crowd, and it wasn’t as if he was a stranger to hard work─the necessity of family, community, the like. He’d lived there his whole life, people knew who he was, however… unfamiliar they were with his “lifestyle.”

Killian had been far more concerned about himself being one of the factors that could lose Dave the race. The two of them had yet to be married at the time, despite having lived together for several years, and while Killian had lived in America for much of his adulthood, he hadn’t been born there. He was also openly bisexual, had a mostly benign criminal record, and had gotten into his share of fairly public tiffs with some less... "progressive" members of their community. One of them had even been filmed─and gone viral.

“Aren’t you the least bit worried about dragging that all back up again?” Killian had asked during their first informal meeting with Emma. The kind of discussion that started with things like, "We're not having this conversation, but if we were," etc., etc.

“After this President?” Emma scoffed, a gleam in her eye, “It’ll only help.”

Killian should’ve guessed, after seeing David’s quick, knowing glance, that he’d been found out. That it wasn’t the loss of their current lives that he truly fretted over; his inability to walk down the street unmolested, but rather a deep-seated worry of his own value as a partner. He worried, as he had during Dave’s first campaign, that he would only weigh him down.

At some point in the near future, some invasive young journalist is going to ask Killian about the spousal sacrifices. They’re going to want to know, as the spouse of the first openly gay presidential candidate, what do you anticipate giving up? And how, if at all, has he made peace with their new reality? In point of fact, the first concession that Killian had made (up until the whole, “running for leader of the free world,” business that is) was his surrender of the coast.

Killian had never really had roots─there was never a physical home with four walls and a roof overhead to which he could depart and return, over and over again. It could never even be said that he had any people to which he might turn instead; he had a brother, Liam, but they’d never been particularly close, and their history was tense at best and outright antagonistic at worst. All this to say, it was part of the reason why he had given Her up (the sea). Because Dave, most curiously, would become his home in a way he had never thought possible. It was how he was able to make a compromise─to go without the sight of the waves lapping against the rocks in favor of a large, wraparound porch, with some admittedly stunning views of the trees and hills that surrounded their home.

It was where he happened to be sitting the morning after their first casual, "meeting but not a meeting," with Emma; a mug of cooling coffee in his hand, watching Sally sniffing to and fro in the damp grass. It was an otherwise normal morning aside from the impending dose of reality he had yet to fully face. He was in the midst of a perfectly somber and on brand bit of mindless staring when he heard the quiet rumbling of Dave’s early morning voice (a personal favorite of his).

“Hey,” he said, startling Killian out of his ironically stressful meditations. “Sorry,” he said with a laugh, taking a seat beside him on the porch swing, “I didn’t feel you get up this morning.”

“My apologies, love,” Killian answered with a brief kiss, “I didn’t want to wake you.”

There was no crying of gulls, and you couldn’t taste a hint of salt on your lips, but there was still the pleasant chirping of birds; the sight of the sun peeking over the tops of the trees, the heady smell of blooming flowers. Killian cleared his throat, both knowing and dreading the conversation he could no longer avoid.

“You have never,” David began, very astutely avoiding his husband’s nervous glances for the moment, “been something to be ashamed of.”

“For you to even think it,” he continued, giving a slight shake of his head, “I must be doing something wrong.”

“Dave, no─”

“Killian,” he interrupted, giving his hand a gentle squeeze, “you are the person I admire most in the world. You are the exact kind of person this country needs to see right now.”

A bit dramatic, Killian thought, desperately attempting to quell the violent beating of his own heart. Despite having known David for as long as he did, he was still somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer goodness of him. Having spent so long himself in a place of defensive cynicism, it was still a challenge to be so unabashedly confronted by such unrelenting hope. That’s what the country needs.

“I know it took us both a long time to make it…” He pauses, glancing up at the trees, the dog now slumbering at their feet, “here, but─”

“I couldn’t possibly adore you more than I already do,” Killian finished, abandoning his cold coffee in favor of framing David’s flushed face, “and I will be there every step of the way.”

“‘For better or for worse,’ blah, blah, blah?”

“Yes,” Killian laughed, pressing their lips together, “something like that.”

The secret? Say “yes,” to fucking everything. That seems to be the fundamental step when you have absolutely zero name recognition and you’re under the age of 75. It’s Emma’s first rule, and she fanatically demands that they abide by it unless she says otherwise. “Let’s let the paint dry on Fox for a hot second,” she suggests after Killian exclaims, “Surely not everything.”

But she damn well means enough. Everything from small, independent news blogs run by journalists, to “serious” news media, to BuzzFeed, and everything in between.

“One of these things is going to just,” she snaps her fingers. “And then it’s all over, boys.”

It’s during an interview with a fairly well known political podcast that really sets them on that, “nothing will be the same after this,” trajectory. He’d essentially been laughed out of the room until he sat down at a table with one of the unnecessarily handsome, affable hosts and dropped stat, after stat, after quip, after poignant observation─after some light hearted jokes that proved he wasn’t living in the dark ages.

“And I hate to ask this,” the host began, the hesitancy evident in his voice, “but what do you say to people who argue that you just don’t have enough experience for the job?”

After a brief pause, during which Killian could observe the wheels spinning from where he sat quietly in the corner of the room, David spoke. In that way he always had of speaking. That way that could convince anyone to listen to what he had to say.

“To that I think I would consider the importance of humility,” a chuckle, “I never want to be one of those people that believes they have nothing left to learn, but at the same time, to claim I have, ya know, ‘no experience,’ whether that’s because of my age, or the size of my city, is just… I don’t know, disingenuous?”

The host laughs a bit at that, “You mean to say, what precisely is their ‘concern?’”

“Yeah, I mean, we knew going into this we might create a few… waves─I don't know if you were aware, but, I am in fact very attracted to other men."

They left the sound of Killian’s obnoxious and embarrassing snort in the recording, which actually ended up being a good thing. Positive polling based on the sound of incredulity? It was strange, the small details that people seemed to cling to.

“But seriously, and this is what I believe, is that the individual experiences of every single person living in this country makes them… invaluable to understanding how it should,” he shakes his head, searching for the right word, “...exist, or be run. So, these people who are concerned about my experience, it’s not a lie for them to say that I haven’t worked at the federal level, or that I haven’t run a federal agency or served in Congress, but my experiences are valuable, my identity is valuable, and I think it’s something the people of this country deserve to see. Even if I’m not the one they choose.”

The tension at the back of Killian’s throat made swallowing a tad painful, but he had to do something to stop himself from crying, which would be… regrettable (although, once the polling had come out about the snort, maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing after all). Crying in front of all these cool, young politicos. But at that moment, at the close of his husband’s small speech, the hopeful grin on the face of the host, the other people in the room─hell, even Emma’s radiant expression, he locked eyes with David and he knew. Snap.

First Family

Mayor David Nolan and the Rebranding of Hope

May 2, 2019

by Jasmine Badur

“I’m not sure I truly believed in ‘hope’ before I met him,” Killian Jones, the potentially first, “First Gentleman,” had somewhat reluctantly revealed in one of our early conversations. “I don’t think I necessarily knew I didn’t at the time,” he paused, giving his ear a nervous tug, “but once I got to know him… I certainly seemed to understand what it was I’d been missing.”

I was invited out to the Jones-Nolan household by Mayor Nolan’s campaign manager, Ms. Emma Swan, a woman who has proven herself to be quite formidable in our current political landscape. “If you really want to know him, them,” she had insisted during one of our many phone calls, “you’ve gotta see them where they live.”

And so, here I am, on a warm, sunny day, greeted by the pleasant sight of a rather long, winding driveway lined with tall, leaf-laden trees. The house itself is also surrounded by quite a bit of lush greenery, which, as Killian explained, was purposeful. Apparently the two men value their privacy, which is pretty ironic, considering.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he answered, unprovoked, “pretty bloody funny.”

The couple’s dog, Sally, runs down the porch steps as I exit my car, and I can hear Mayor Nolan call her name from inside the house. Despite the somewhat grandiose nature of the extended driveway, the house itself is modest, with little in the way of fuss. Both men greet me at the door, and I’m immediately offered a drink or a snack by the Mayor himself.

“He’s worse than my grandmother,” Ms. Swan half shouts from another room, after which David (“Please, call me David”) huffs and playfully rolls his eyes. “We’re like a family here,” he explains, leading me into their warm, sun-drenched kitchen, “I don’t think I know any other way to do this, to be honest.”

“This,” of course, being the campaign. The reason I’ve shown up here at all, to share this historical candidacy with a country that has proven to be far more interested than David expected it to be.

“The truth is, no,” he admitted over our tea, “I didn’t really expect this.”

A turn about the house reveals a number of familiar sights─a mix of running shoes and formalwear lined up by the door, coats on their hooks, framed photos on the mantle or hanging on the fridge. I note a young Emma in a number of these photos, to which David confirms their personal history, that of being pseudo-siblings, which most people are tangentially aware of, but the way David explains, it has a lot more to do with his campaign than you might think.

Soon after Emma Swan had moved to town to live with her aforementioned grandmother, she had met David at school, and the two quickly became inseparable.

“My grandma was a sweet lady,” Emma had shared, albeit reluctantly, “but she was pretty old. Not really prepared to have a young kid. David and his mom became my family, more or less.” When I’ve spoken to others who knew the Nolans, the stories seem to follow a similar thread. It was nearly impossible to know them and not be treated as if they had known you your entire life.

“That was what my mother believed,” David says, a resolute smile on his face, “everyone deserves to have a family.”

It might seem an unusual tactic for the candidate to take, but having spoken with Emma Swan, and having spent time with David and Killian in their home, I’m not so sure the harsher criticisms are especially valid.

“He’s a bit inclined to picking up strays, isn’t he?” Killian starts, politely if not vaguely uncomfortable. The two of us are walking through the field behind their house, and truly, it is a beautiful piece of land. “And what are we all,” he finishes, somewhat distantly, “if not a country of wanderers?"

Most people have a general understanding of Killian’s background. Born in London to an absent single mother who passed when he was about 17, a brother serving in the Royal Navy; teaches literature, unreasonably handsome, perhaps inclined to appear in viral videos─“Surprised you lasted this long,” he says, laughing. “Haven’t you lot gotten sick of that story yet?”

Unfortunately for Killian, though somewhat fortuitously for the campaign, that now famous clip, of the man in question throwing an unequivocal fist into the cheekbone of a far-right activist, has earned him some degree of popularity in progressive circles, though he contends he had absolutely no plans for such an outcome.

“It was satisfying before the entire country knew about it,” he concludes, with a blend of both seriousness and charm that can be challenging for most people to pull off. “And I’d do it again in a bloody heartbeat.”

“God bless Killian Jones,” Emma had sighed when I’d first mentioned it to her, “that man’s righteous anger could be the thing that gets us elected.”

Killian himself isn’t quite ready to admit that, but he is glad to help his husband in anyway he can, even at the expense of his own anonymity. Which, he did admit, was a serious concern at first.

“We’d spent so many years searching for this,” he explained, glancing pointedly at our surroundings, the sight of their now smoking chimney peeking over the tops of the trees. “I wasn’t sure I was ready to give it up.”

But now, he says, the doubts seem to have all but faded.

“There’s always moments of insecurity, sure,” he admits, “but I think it’s worth it.”

The Nolan-Jones household is cluttered─but not in a way that might leave you feeling suspicious of their character. True, it’s cluttered in a way you might not presume a presidential candidate’s house to be. Maybe you would consider the “right candidate,” to be so obnoxiously Type A that their home be something akin to a serial killer’s lair. If that is what you were expecting, I am sorry to say that his house is very much not that. This house is cluttered in a way that our lives create clutter. Like their "family-oriented" campaign style, the ordinariness of their home and their lives prior to this event, reveals quite a bit more than you might think. We exist in a day and age seemingly obsessed with the idea of authenticity, and while I've grown to despise the word, it seems to have been given new life here, even though their kitchen did happen to smell of freshly baked cookies during my visit.

At the end of the day, no one knows how this campaign is going to shake out. Politics have never been predictable, no matter what many pundits and strategists claim, but if there’s one thing we might always learn to expect, it is that "electability" is a true falsehood. I don’t know if Mayor David Nolan will become the first openly gay President of the United States, and neither does he, but that doesn’t seem to be the point.

“It may seem trite to some, but it is about hope,” David said in the few moments before I left, hands resting in his pockets, his gaze tired yet contented, “I think our 44th president had that part right.”

In an era of such unrelenting cynicism, it can be difficult to find the silver lining of it all, but as I drove back down the long, winding driveway in the moonlight, the sight of Killian Jones and David Nolan waving in my rearview mirror, my heart felt a little less heavy.

Jasmine Badur is a freelance political correspondent with Time, BuzzFeed News, and others. She is currently on the road following a number of Democratic candidates running for President, including Mayor David Nolan. She can be found on Twitter @badurjofficial.

[elizabethrobertajones]

(part 1) this is random but something im curious about is do you think the next few years will see a radical shift in more lead lgbt couples in shows? i feel like when supernatural started it was all about subtext/queerbating between characters we would never see canon (maybe), the last few years have seen an update in more side lgbt characters/couples and while not a lot, more main lgbt characters then we had before. I don't know if tumblr/twitter fandom translates to general audience...

Yeah, I mean, the only way is up. I feel lucky that I managed to encounter a fair amount of queer content in my formative years, whether targeted programming on TV, or taking the route of not really differentiating the perceived cultural value of independent media like webcomics and webnovels etc from the mass media as I was young enough to naturally grow up on the internet as the internet itself was growing up and web 2.0 was pretty much taking off alongside my use of the internet. And that I had liberal parents who didn’t regulate our internet, and lived in a community where culturally I didn’t really fear being discovered casually accessing all this like in particularly this terrifying seeming evangelical christian community in America.

Which really makes me feel like A: everyone should feel that comfortable in themselves via the media as I did as a mass accessible thing or B: that the world at large should be soaked in as much representation and more that I encountered as a curious teen because at the very least it did me no harm and at best helped handhold me through an awful lot. 

And then brings us to the problem that the world isn’t actually like that and for a lot of people their media is restricted one way or another, from everything such as the era of social media weirdly making us much LESS broadly travelled on the internet as I was back in the day (SO many bookmarks - I had like 100 that I would check either daily or on their weekly update schedule, with enough habit that I had pretty much memorised it all without using an RSS feed or just following everyone’s twitter and waiting for update announcements, never mind the vast pit of things which I occasionally checked to see if their sporadic but very worth it updates had occurred somewhere in the last month/year) to the vastly overwhelming amount of media accessible to us. It seems almost to flood the market and creates this panic about watching the worthiest shows and campaigning for them and raising awareness and the FOMO and how things slip by and zomg you have to watch this that and the other, when even just making this list on Netflix now contains more hours of TV than a human lifetime and also one liable to disappear from the service at some point or another without warning. 

And then on top of that you have the absolute cultural monoliths that if you’re not going to have a cohesive culture - which now includes the entire population of the world because of our connectivity on the internet and mass-joining of services - based around smaller shows and stuff, then at the very least everyone is going to watch anything under the main Disney umbrella, other superhero flicks, animated things, and all the really big studio franchises and remakes, as well as a few TV monoliths which manage to get enough people talking to make it seem like “everyone” (again - these days it seems like that’s presumed to be the entire western world plus everywhere else these things air) are watching, like Game of Thrones or whatever… THESE properties are the inescapable ones and on that basis they’re the things we have to lean on the most for representation and then again barely get any, when it comes to gender and sexuality, due to them shooting for such worldwide markets that they can’t imply gay people exist to censors in places such as China. And it exposes the cultural awfulness inherent just in getting a white female character in the lead role of some things, or the absolute garbage fire lurking underneath that if you dare have a black stormtrooper or make one of your female ghostbusters black when you’re already ruining the childhoods of so many how dare… 

In those respects, having side characters who aren’t even major well-known superheroes or jedis or ghostbusters or whatever also be gay (because even well-known lesbian Kate McKinnon didn’t manage to get her ghostbuster to be canonically gay even if we All Knew) would be absolutely groundbreaking, even if it was, like, a role that could be snipped out for the Chinese market or something. And that’s probably exactly what would happen, and cue ensuing riot from whichever fandom, along with everyone rightly pointing out that even for us who got to watch it it was still a tiny side character… I mean Disney is still at the stage of what they did with Beauty and the Beast’s ~canonical gay character~ 

So yeah… that’s thrown back to TV and smaller movies to lead the way and because the generations showing most likely the real global percentages but actually just the young western world stats on queerness in any form (like… 25% instead of 1% or whatever and that’s STILL probably too low) are still teens to young adults. The previous gayest generation above them are still just arriving in power and settling in, and the excellent changes we already have from the generation before that is what we are seeing now... But given THEIR cultural context, even their best can still seem to younger eyes, moderate and not generally placing queer characters in lead roles except in niche or indie or otherwise “acceptable” places to take those risks. I think change is always coming and culturally each generation being more open and accepting that the last is really making changes and so on, hopefully things WILL change rapidly and what was the common state of affairs in the sort of indie media I consumed as a teen will be the mainstream soon because a lot of those creators 10 years later are kicking off… 

All that said, TV in the mainstream is still controlled by Mark Pedowitz types exercising their power over the Bobos who have their Wayward Sisters pitches with the clearly labelled main character for the main teen demographic being queer. The culture is very much that we’re now pretty open and can happily have queer characters, but the main characters are still largely held separate. A good example is Riverdale, which is on the CW, a newer show with writers such as Britta Lundin, who is young, queer, and wrote a novel blatantly based on being a Destiel shipper and fan interacting with the cast and crew in fandom spaces, and whose first solo episode of Riverdale featured a looooot of the gay stuff (yay). 

But while she’s a story editor and writer for the show and can use it as a platform for writing stories for its audience using a whole range of canonically queer characters, the show still keeps all 4 of its mains at a strict remove from this. Cheryl can come out as a lesbian in the second season after a lil ho yay in the first but no clearly marked storyline about her identity, but even though Betty and Veronica kissed in the first episode it was blatant fan service (for Cheryl in-story, lol) and mostly just set the tone that they are the sort of seemingly straight girls kissing for attention while having strong romantic or physical attraction to guys. In the second season the kiss comes up again in joking that Jughead and Archie are the only ones of the main 4 who haven’t kissed, Archie gets one planted on him by a dude as a “judas kiss” moment of betrayal in season 3 and he and Jug are teased that they were expected to get together because they were close but in the same sort of homophobic undercurrent tones as early Destiel snarking from side characters, seemingly less about their relationship and more to unsettle them with implications… I mean it was a complicated moment but in the long run it didn’t seem entirely pleasant to me, especially given the overall emotional state they were in and later plot etc etc. (My mum is 1000% invested in Riverdale now as a former Archie Comics reader as a kid so this is now my life too as I was in the room when my brother callously exposed her to it, hi :P) 

Anyway that’s just one case study but aside from SPN it’s probably the most mainstream teen demographic thing I watch… Other examples would be things like B99 which had Rosa come out as bi and that’s awesome, and made us all cry a lot, but Jake, the clear main character even in a very strong and well-treated ensemble, has a great deal of bi subtext, there’s no way given Andy Samberg’s apparent habit of ad-libbing MORE progressive jokes that he’d ever be intentionally harming people if that’s how his brain works (you know, like other people quick-fire offensive stuff from their mouth working faster than brain sense of humour :P). But at the same time for all Jake’s quipping about crushes and such and the fact the show clearly knows how to be sensitive to bisexuality with Stephanie Beatriz being a strong advocate, just because Jake’s the main character and adorably married to Amy. In NO WAY can that be threatened because they’re SO GOOD, so there’s STILL uncertainty that this will pay off in the same special episode “I love my wife but I am bi” kinda way that seems obvious that could just be said. We all carry on without it affecting anything because obviously Jake’s found his soulmate so we don’t mess with that but they should know it’s important to clarify it… Even with B99′s track record, I’m nervous solely because Jake’s the main character and main characters tend not to get self-exploratory arcs about latent queerness and ESPECIALLY not if they’re happily married. If ANY show was going to do it right and trailblaze in this exact era it would be them, but… gyah :P 

Anyway I guess the conclusion right now is that the more mainstream you are the more uncertain it feels, but we are right at that cliff edge, especially with shows putting in SOME of the work. If B99 doesn’t get us there (or the Good Place where they’ll happily confirm Eleanor is bi in interviews but I believe she hasn’t said it outright on the show despite clearly showing attraction to female characters, again, the denials we know so well in SPN fandom reflect a wider audience view of dismissing this stuff as jokes and not reflective of character feeling and identification without a Special Episode dedicated to confirming it >.>) then we’re very clearly on the cusp of SOME mainstream or massively well-known show doing it at least once in a meaningful way that has an Ellen-style cultural impact on TV writing. 

Let’s make it a goal for 2019 or 2020, and hope that a NEW show with a canonically queer main from the start is pitched and becomes a mainstream hit in the next 5… Still got a ways to go before Disney level mainstream but again there IS work going pushing the envelope, especially if we get a movie of a franchise such as idk Further Legends of Korra, or Steven Universe or something else that’s massively pushed the envelope with sexuality or gender for their main character on the small screen in the experimental petri dish they’ve had there for children’s TV. Something that would force Disney to blink about a lesbian princess or Star Wars to let Finn and Poe kiss or Marvel to let Steve and Bucky hold hands or something in order to remain relevant.

Once the Big Cultural Monoliths get in on it, I expect culture as a whole to first of all react quickly on the small screen, but honestly I’ve been waiting for them to snap pretty much my whole life since adolescence and they’re taking such wee tiny baby steps, and some factors are enormous geopolitical awfulness, that the story as a whole is unpredictable and we can only really hope that things don’t slow down. 

(Where this affects SPN is just impossible to say right now, given its almost unique position in this mess due to longevity vs fandom vs almost entirely new generation of writers’ room) 

[modernlcve]

*  —  stats —   gabriela melo !

* — basics !

full name:   gabriela beatriz melo. nickname(s):   prefers none.   her dad calls her gabby anyways. age:   twenty - four. date of birth:   april eleventh. place of birth:   rockville, maryland. gender:   female. pronouns:   she / her. sexual orientation:   bisexual. level of education:   high school graduate.

* — physical !

tattoos:  none. piercings:  ears pierced twice. notable features:   meticulously kept eyebrows. weakness(es):   none notable. scar(s):  none notable.

* — domestic !

occupation:   clerk at a gift shop,   waitress. residence:   lives in an apartment building in delphinus heights. social class:   working class. parents:  ricky melo, age 43, her primary parent growing up. she took care of him more than vice versa.   claudia aguilar, age 42,   left the family when gabriela was 12.   they don’t keep in touch. siblings:   none. extended family:   her father was an only child and his parents have passed over her lifetime,   so there isn’t much to speak of.

* — personality !

positive traits:   diligent,   steadfast,   resilient. negative traits:   spiteful,   jaded,   unforgiving. myers-briggs ( x ):   estj;   the executive. temperament:   choleric. moral alignment:   neutral good. horoscope:  aries,   the ram. hogwarts house:  slytherin.

* — favorites !

movie:   easy a. tv show:   broad city. book:   catcher in the rye. drink:   she likes a good mojito. food:   solid county fair funnel cake. animal:   hard call but she thinks jellyfish are cool and fun 2 talk about. color:   sky blue. song:   golden slumbers by the beatles. artist:   arcade fire. celebrity crush:   gary clark jr.

* — impressions !

first impression:  she’s a smartass.   she comes off as dry, a little holier-than-thou.   she’s got a hard shell,   but if you’ve got a similar sense of humor,   everything should work out. self impression:   she thinks of herself,   generally,   as someone who’s strong,   and doesn’t take people’s shit,   and is kind of Above the frilly things in life.   that’s taken a hit after all the matty stuff,   but she’s working on hyping herself back up. lover impression:   again,   she’s hard to get through too.   but i  feel like once you get through to her,   she really would die for you.   if she trusts you,   she trusts you hardcore.

* — et cetera !

turn ons:   humor,   intelligence,   confidence. turn offs:   arrogance,   people that can’t be direct. drink/drugs/smoke:   yes/no/no. dominant hand:   right. clean or messy:   messy. early bird or night owl:   night owl. hobbies or special talents:   surprisingly good at fast mental math.   extreme coupon-er in the making.

* — QUESTIONNAIRE !

01. where was your character born? what brought them to carina bay? what do they like most about the town?

gabriela was born in rockville, maryland.   if i’m remembering the plot right,  she moved to carina with matty before the break up.   she was pulled here by promise of stability,   a life that she’d never really thought she would get.   she stays now mostly out of spite:   she’s not gonna let matty win and run her out of town.   that,  and the hassle of moving and resettling is just too daunting right now.   she likes the small town camaraderie of it all,   and having friends she’s made since moving here as a support system.   she also likes not having her dad breathing down her neck all the time.

02. who are your character’s friends and family? who do they surround themselves with? who are the people your character is closest to?

gabriela’s only notable family is her father.   when she was twelve,   her mother left him,   and he fell off the wagon.   he instilled in her a kind of grit,   a proclivity for independence and sustaining herself from a young age.   she had to pick up his slack.   she surrounds herself now with people who support her:   a novel idea,   that she can trust other’s to do that,   and doesn’t have to constantly be the one supporting everyone else with nothing in return.

03. what is your character’s biggest fear? who have they told this to? who would they never tell this to? why?

i reblogged this the other day mostly as a joke but.   i thought about it and it’s probably true that she’s spent a lot of her life trying to not be a Bitch like her mom,   but since she’s become the dumpee instead of the dumper,   she’s seeing more of her dad in herself,   a fear she didn’t realize she needed to have.   she’s probably never told this to anyone because it’s just not her Style.   tough girl divulging her mommy and daddy issues just kinda ruins the vibe.

04. has your character ever been in love? had a broken heart?

she loved matty a lot.   i think she wasn’t used to someone who seemed to be so supportive and interested in her.   she clung to that hard.   while there was still an extent to which she was keeping some of her Mushier bits hidden from him,   she really felt a sort of Us Against The World thing with him.  and as much as i’ll Meme about subtweets and stuff gabriela really did take a blow from him leaving her.   she’s always been proud of her ability to detect bullshit.   she’s always thought she was really good at picking that out in people,   but this whole thing is just proof that if someone comes to her,   and appeals to that one part of her mind that fears ending up alone and pitiful like her dad,   she’ll so easily forget to be scanning for Bullshit.   matty truly had her fucking snowed and she’s reluctant to even think about getting back out there because of it.

05. your character is doing intense spring cleaning. what is easy for them to throw out? what is difficult for them to part with? why?

in general,   she has a good bit of clutter,   just because of how she grew up without much.   you never know when something could come in handy,   when you could need it and not be able to run out and grab it.   easy for her to throw out would be things that aren’t Clearly Functional,   but her standards of function may be different than the average.

06. it’s saturday at noon. what is your character doing? give details.

she’s working or sleeping.  either she’s on shift at one of her two jobs,   trying to scoop up as many hours as she possibly can,   or she’s getting sleep when she’s off the clock for once.   she usually tries to schedule time off during the week of instead of the weekend,  so typically she’d be working.

07. what is one strong memory that has stuck with your character since childhood?

literally anytime she could she’d try to convince someone in her family to go with her to the zoo in dc.   she just loves animals and Watching them so much.   it was only an hour’s drive from her home,   but it still felt special and fancy and like something to really Revel in.

09. what is something that upsets your character? where do they go when they’re upset? 

gabriela is upset when she doesn’t feel in control.   she’s used to having a certain amount of a hold on her life,   and when it gets out of hand is when she starts to panic.   when she’s upset,   she isolates.   she holes up in her apartment,   until she’s decided she’s moped a sufficient amount and forces herself to socialize again.   

10. when your character thinks of their childhood kitchen, what smell do they associate with it? why?

there wasn’t much cooking ever done in her childhood kitchen,   but both her parents were into trying to make instant oatmeal taste as good as they could.   the smell that stands out the most was her mother’s favorite,  oatmeal with way too much cinnamon and strawberries.

[vendettacanons]

Wilson’s Heart Headcanons

// I dug back through that old blog at 4am for these-

Given the time period, I don’t think it would be too far of a stretch to say that Wilson probably likes swing music. He rarely dances but I can see him being the kind to enjoy it and move his feet to it on occasion, and he’s not bad at it either! He might also low-key enjoy electroswing if he was in a modern au/lived long enough to see it become a thing

It wouldn’t be surprising if, after everything he’s been through and after all he’s seen, Wilson is uninterested in seeing anymore bodies. He went to war and watched his friends die beside him, he’s lost his wife, he saw people be maimed and slaughtered in the hospital. As far as Wilson is concerned, he’s seen enough bodies to last him a lifetime.

As time progresses, Wilson tries to keep up with trends and learn about new things like advancements in technologies. He’s fascinated by new machines and new breakthroughs that people discover and often enjoys taking a hands-on approach to said methods. He likes giving the newest music at least a listen before judging it and likes reading the latest books. He loves learning about newly proven theories and debunked myths. Overall, Wilson just enjoys expanding his knowledge and understanding of the world.

Wilson doesn’t really mind the weather. If it’s cold, he tends to generate a decent amount of body heat to keep himself warm. If it’s hot, it’s pretty easy for him to cool down. He doesn’t mind the rain and actually likes the feeling of it on his skin, or the sound of it pattering gently against a window. He has an issue with lightning and thunder due to his PTSD however (same goes for fireworks). Wilson’s favorite season is probably fall because by that point, everything is just the right temperature and the air always smells nice. Plus he thinks it’s an ideal time of the year to go on walks and he likes the way the environment looks during the autumn season.

Wilson adores physical contact and being held. He and Evelyn loved cuddling and dancing together and physical contact is very important to him. He’s not excessively touchy, but he does value touch and sees it as a sign of trust and deep compassion. After his wife passed away, he sort of drew into himself. Physically, he wanted to be comforted throughout the ordeal, but emotionally, he couldn’t handle the thought of being touched. He’s since recovered and is in a somewhat better place and while he does still very much appreciate and enjoy physical contact, he’s less inclined to make an attempt to engage in it anymore unless the situation prompts him to do so.

Wilson was always a good sport about the water growing up. He and his brother would often go swimming when the weather got really hot and he was a very strong swimmer that loved diving and doing cannonballs. The one issue he had with the water is that he always wanted to go in swimming pools, but never into the ocean. He eventually came to realize that the fear was because when he was very small, he feared the deep water. The one time he ventured in and stayed just a little past the shallow end, he accidentally stepped on a skate and almost drowned after losing his balance. Since then, he’s taken to avoiding the ocean for swimming and he’s disgusted by the idea of swimming with fish around. He’s also quite picky with what kind of fish he’ll eat as a result.

While Wilson never took to drinking heavily or smoked excessively, his use of cigarettes did pick up a fair amount following the death of his wife. Paired with the trauma he received during the war, Wilson became a serious recluse. He began retracting from the outside world. His brother was the most worried of all about this because he knew Wilson better than anyone and knew Wilson wasn’t handling the death of his wife well at all, but for a period of time, he didn’t know how to help. He didn’t know where Wilson was, Wilson was barely writing to him, and he was seriously concerned he was going to lose his brother along with his sister-in-law. Eventually, Wilson found a way to claw himself out of his pit of despair himself. He decided to just work more hours to help distract himself, picked up social contact again, and lightened up on the cigarettes. He’ll even go out on occasion to enjoy himself. Despite getting a bit better, things were never the same with him though. He still felt very disconnected from the world around him and he still felt a constant ache from where his wife used to be in his heart. He felt sad, tired, and lonely very frequently, and while he adored physical contact (and still really does), eventually that too became a rarity for him and he couldn’t feel the same pleasure now as he had from it before. He often pondered why he bothered going through life each day but he was still determined and sensible enough not to give up because he knew he still William and his sister-in-law and niece that loved him and needed him. Wilson has gotten better since reconnecting with his brother and talking about all this, but the death of his wife and the lingering effects of her passing still loom over him like a dark cloud some days.

Aside from the fact that one-third of Wilson’s vocabulary appears to be swears and snarky comments, Wilson’s way of speaking very clearly sets him apart from others. He’s often known for calling people bastards, both playfully and with derogatory intent. He calls people who are clearly younger than him kiddo, he refers to Elsa as “lady” when she grates on his nerves, and call Kurt a punk when he’s acting out of line. When Wilson’s nervous, he tends to stutter a lot. He babbles and the panic is evident from the fact that his voice raises an octave when he’s freaked out by something. When he’s startled, he curses and temeprorarily loses his nerve before he recovers it and shows anger to mask the shock.

Wilson is Bisexual, but he’s very much in the closet. Not just in the closet, but hiding behind the clothes and the shoe rack and the shoeboxes of old comic books and toys in the closet. And he’s only somewhat aware of it. Being that the game takes place during the mid-1900s, when homosexuality was generally seen as a massive no-no and could be met with threats, harassment, and even physical violence or death, Wilson is very much quiet about his preferences. During his teenage and early adult years, while he said he was never interested in dating and wanted to focus on finding a job and work before looking into a relationship, he did find himself looking more at men than women. Generally, he found men more appealing and it sometimes found his way into his and William’s conversations. William never really picked up on it though and figured that Wilson was just intimidated by competition. Eventually, when he met Evelyn, he realized that he did have an attraction to women. But after the draft, he began to feel confused and conflicted, because even though he was married (and even though he never felt compelled to cheat on her), he still found himself finding men attractive. For the longest time he told himself it was just because he missed Evelyn so much and he was surrounded by men, but a part of him knew that and he was in denial and he did find himself attracted to both sexes, not just one. After returning home to find her dead, Wilson’s heart (heh) sort of shut down entirely as he tried to cope with the circumstances. He still finds himself looking at both men and women, but he hasn’t really thought about getting into a relationship because he still feels like he’s grappling with the aftermath of Evelyn’s death, and because knows the risk he could be taking if he ends up with a man, or even coming. So far, no one knows yet. Not even William.

Despite that fact that it has been years, Wilson is still struggling to cope with his wife’s loss. He loved her with all his heart, even if at times his heart and his mind felt confusion. Evelyn was the world to him, the perfect wife, and it broke his heart when he was drafted and had to leave her and their unborn child. He was absolutely devastated when he heard she’d passed on and has never fully recovered or gotten closure. He still visits her grave frequently and writes letters to her, talking about what’s on his mind and what he’s going through. He still has all of these letters saved somewhere too, highlighting some of the best moments that he wished she was there for, and some of his worst. The reason he’s struggling so much to move on is because he hasn’t reached out to anyone to talk about it and hasn’t seeked any professional help either. As time has gone on, he’s been able to resist a lot of the darker thoughts that linger in his head as a result of being a widower; self-harm, suicidal thoughts or tendencies. He’s been strong and reminded himself that as much as he loved Evelyn, there are more people than just her that love him, care about him, and are depending on him. Similarly (and because he is essentially an extension of Wilson), Boris feels strongly about Evelyn in away. How he goes about expressing this often clashes with how he torments Wilson and varies based on his mood. If he’s trying to “empathize” with Wilson on s good day, he’ll often sit in silence with him and look through the paintings of them and the very old photos. He’s not in any of them but he feels the same despair and sadness that Wilson does to a degree and he understands many of the thoughts Wilson has. Though he doesn’t do anything to comfort him. If it’s a bad day, Boris will do what he was meant to do. Torment Wilson. And he can, will, and has used Evelyn’s death against him. He’ll threaten to mess with the photos, or mess with them outright, and say things like Wilson is to blame for her death, remind him that she died without him being able to say goodbye, and constantly hang the fact that he doesn’t know the truth about her and their unborn child’s death (that last one never fazes him because doesn’t know the truth, he was never told what really happened surrounding the circumstances around her death.) Boris mentally breaks him down and laughs about it. And he’s left some nasty permanent scars on Wilson as a result of his heinous words, both mental and physical.

Wilson has received a lot of nicknames, some of which he likes more than others. Bobbie happened to be what his brother called him growing up, and it was his wife’s favorite nickname for him. William still calls him Bobbie from time to time, not nearly as often anymore because Robert’s made it clear that he prefers to be called Wilson after hearing it for so long. He doesn’t like it when other people he doesn’t know/barely knows calls him Bobbie or give him nicknames at all.

Because Wilson lives by himself now, it’s safe to assume that he cooks his own meals from scratch and he’s damn good at it. His favorite thing to eat is biscuits with mashed potatoes and gravy (and maybe some beef or pork on the side) and apple pie with some ice cream for dessert. Evelyn used to invite him to come and cook with her, and he has his mother’s old cookbooks. After decades of it, he’s become an excellent chef. He can’t make up his own recipes, but he does add little twists to the ones he does read and they come out great.

Robert knows how to play piano. He took lessons when he was younger, along with guitar and the drums but he strongly preferred piano to either of the others. Guitar strings used to hurt his fingertips too much and he felt a little bored playing the drums, which William picked up instead. So he spent hours practicing on a piano his father bought for him and used to practice playing songs and singing with William. The two never enrolled in a class or choir, but after years and years of doing it, they built up their own skills over time.

The two brothers used to put on “neighborhood shows” with their parents being their biggest supporters. They both remember people encouraging them to pursue music, including their parents since they loved to sit around the radio all the time and listen to the songs that played. For a brief while in their teens, the two had worked with Thomas Baker (their neighbor) and another kid and formed a small band. They continued it throughout high school and into college before originally breaking up when their other member tried to get serious about it, while the three original members insisted they played just for fun. Wilson does occasionally play piano now and then and has the curious habit of humming or singing to himself, especially when he thinks no one is around. He can’t play often or for long on account of his developing arthritis (that he has yet to find out about).

None of Wilson’s clocks or watches has a six on them. Back then, the number six was considered an unlucky or cursed number, and therefore people would often leave it out of things like elevator floors, clocks, watches, and other numeric lists.

Wilson has a terrible tendency to feed animals. Stray dogs, raccoons, cats, opposums, squirrels, deer, bears, bunnies, birds. If he sees an animal and he has food, he will give the animals scraps to eat. This has led to things following him home on more than one occasion, much to his dismay. Currently, he has some resident cardinals, bunnies, a lizard, and a big possum taking residence in his backyard that he feeds fairly often. On the bright side, Wilson is rather knowledgeable on what animals can and cannot eat and will feed them accordingly. He’s not aiming to tame them, but he will admit that knowing that they’re there provides him some sense of company.

Wilson has a lot of phrases and a lot of ways he says things pretty often. Here’s a few the more notable ones.

“ I’m getting myself a creemee cone, you want one? ““ Can I get bowwow with extra red and sauerkraut ? ““ I could kiss you right now. ““ Another one bites the dust. ““ Pass me the clicker. ““ I’m at the rotary now. “ - referring to traffic circles“ Shit, I have to make a uey (pronounced you-we)/ take a jug handle “ - referring to making a U-turn“ Must be a full moon. ““ Looks like its leaf peeper season. ““ Just because a cat has her kittens in the oven don’t make them biscuits ““ Looks like the shoe is on the other foot ““ Shove that in your windpipe and smoke it ““ I’m done ““ I’m going on a packie run, you want anything? ““ The kid’s got moxie ““ This hits the spot! ““ I’m stuffed ““ I’m beat ““ Ain’t that the cat’s meow/ pajamas? ““ I’m zozzled. ““ This is the bee’s knees? ““ What a fucking loon. “

After leaving home with William, Wilson and his brother lived in New York. They owned a pretty big house and lived together with their wives in that house. After their parents death, William agreed to let Wilson be the sole heir of their parent’s house, their childhood home, and the land left behind. After Evelyn’s death, Wilson decided to move back into their parent’s home where he still lives all by himself. And he still knows every inch of their land like the back of his hand, including the grass fields behind their house, the woodlands beyond that, the creek where he and William used to play, and where their old treehouse is.

There’s a part of Wilson’s house on the bottom floor that’s completely clear of furniture. It’s between the living room and kitchen, and the floor is well worn and scuffed despite their being no furniture present in the space, and it makes the house feel larger than it actually is. The reason for it being so barren is because Wilson and his wife would often turn up the radio and spend time dancing together in the space. They made it for themselves, and Wilson can’t bring himself to try and move anything around to fill it up. Sometimes, he turns in the radio and tries to dance all by himself in the space but he’s never actually finished a song on his own.

Robert, for obvious reasons, is put off by loud noises. It’s the most clear cut result of his PTSD, but sounds like pots and pans suddenly being dropped, fireworks going off, thunder at close range, or other generally loud and very sudden noises spook him badly and can leave him with a nasty case of the shakes. On rare occasions, it can sometimes send him in a downward spiral and leave him hiding in the closet clutching his teddy bear.

Despite all his previous hopes and desires to build a family, Wilson’s age has all but prevented that from happening. Being old has essentially eliminated his chances of finding someone, and he’s hesitant about even trying because he likes to take his time developing a relationship with someone before becoming romantically involves. And of course, time is not on his side. That aside, he’s basically given up on having a child of his own. His chances of conceiving even if he did have a partner are incredibly low, and he’d rather not have a child that he might not be around to see grow up. Not to mention adoption isn’t exactly an option given the time period he’s set in. Though if an orphan showed up at his door Kurt, he’d take them in in a heartbeat.

One of Wilson’s childhood nicknames was Bobblehead. His father was the one who christened him with it. It kept in line with the theme of his nickname Bob, but it initially came from the fact that Wilson was born with a big head (as opposed to William who was born with a big body). The nickname only followed him as he got older and ended up becoming the brainiac child of his family.

Throughout his entire life, Wilson has taken on and fit the role of leader pretty nicely. He’s the man in charge, the boss, the one who leads the pack, the one who protects them all. But the position has had its drawbacks.When he was a young boy, being the oldest, it was natural that Wilson’s parents pushed him to try everything. They wanted to give him as many opportunities as possible and pushed him to work hard, which of course, led him to being one of the top students in his school. He was the genius kid, the creative kid, the innovator. Above all, his mother repeatedly reminded him that he, as the older child, was supposed to be more responsible and “set a good example for his younger brother William”. To his credit, Wilson was the best older brother and followed that advice to the letter. He convinced William to get into sports, which became his passion. He helped him whenever he struggled, kept him on the straight and narrow when he threatened to stray, and was a positive example in his brother’s life. He supported him, he loved him so much, that he would give his life for him. But that also meant he was held to exceedingly high expectations. Everything he did right raised the bar for him each time, and it would crush him when he couldn’t exceed the expectations he was given and prove himself to be the most successful child he could be. Disappointment and failure was physically painful for him, and he was always trying to prove he was a good example for William and for others. In the military, Wilson ended up working his way up to head of the 42nd infantry unit. He was admired for his logistical thinking, his coordination, his strategizing, and the way he could bring his squadron together to do what they had to do. He embraced the title wholeheartedly and grew into the mold of the leader and the protector. But again, that meant he was constantly under pressure. His every move was monitored and it made him an anxious perfectionist because he knew one wrong move could get him or his battalion killed, and he couldn’t bear the thought of his polished reputation being tarnished because of some small but critical oversight. With Evelyn, he was always worried about being the best protector. He lovingly embraced the title as the household defender and breadwinner, but he was also anxious that anything he did wrong might threaten that title and make him seem less like of a man or less like the strong, protective, good example that everyone recognized him as. Nowadays, Wilson is too old and too tired to be worried about other people’s judgements. He’s a grumpy old man that feels like he did all he needed to do to get the approval of others at the time, and lives with the pride of knowing he did a lot of things right. And even if he didn’t, even if he wasn’t perfect, he’s too old and sad to care anymore. His reasons for being a good example have moved on, and he stands by himself now. He’s a lonely, solitary man that doesn’t have anyone left to be a good role model for or protect. The anxiety is gone. But the regrets of letting the judgement of others stop him from doing things he thought might be fun still haunts him.

Robert knows how to write in cursive and his signature is simply R. Wilson. He picked up cursive early on in his life while learning how to write. He sometimes has the habit of taking shorthand notes in cursive or starting in print and fading into cursive as he write faster, which can be difficult for others just looking at it to read sometimes.

The Real Reason Wilson Was Hospitalized (TW for mentions of suicide and suicidal ideation)

Throughout the game, Wilson shows that he has a strong love for the horror genre. He enjoys the scary side of entertainment. The grotesque engrosses him, the intimidating intrigues his interest, the frightening fascinates him. He has a particular affinity for comic books given they’re what he grew up with, and he loves books about monsters and mystery, but given his time and the era of the game, he’s seen his fair share of movies. His favorites are definitely Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, and Wolf Man.// That being said, Wilson is less keen on romance. He’s willing to watch it to get romantic ideas of to please a friend/partner, but it’s not his cup of tea. He’s much less fond of the sci-fi genre and tries to stay away from it when possible. He loves superhero comic books as well and has a pretty big collection of them he has stashed away.

Whether it’s because he is linked to Wilson or because he simply spends so much time around him, Boris has picked up certain habits that Wilson has. For example, if Wilson is reading the newspaper, Boris will read the newspaper. If Wilson is sitting in a room listening to the radio/watching tv, expect Boris to be in the same room. If Wilson is working on puzzles, Boris is likely hanging off of his back watching him (and maybe eventrying to help). If Wilson is in the kitchen cooking for himself, Boris tends to sit on the countertop kicking his little legs and watching (and occasionally fucking with the food or helping prepare it, depending on what kind of mood he’s in). By technicality, Boris doesn’t need to eat. But he can, and he does, and is often a nuisance about it. He likes to steal snacks from Wilson, will often mess with the meals being prepared whenever Wilson is trying to cook, and will pick off of Wilson’s plate if it’s left unattended. Sometimes, he won’t even try to be subtle about it— he’ll jump up into Wilson’s face and snatch the food off of his plate/out of his mouth. Wilson has learned to appease him by making him a plate of his own from time to time. He shares a lot of Wilson’s favorites, including orange juice, grilled cheese sandwiches, strawberries, milk, and cookies.

Sweets are something Boris is a particular fan of. Ice cream is at the top of his list, cookies and cotton candy being a close second and thirds. Sometimes he’ll be up at 2 or 3 AM making himself a bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce and cookie bits sprinkled on it. Wilson himself has a bit of a sweet tooth, but it’s nothing compared to how much Boris enjoys sugar.

Boris has a habit of sticking his claws in his mouth or licking them excessively after he eats. He has no fingers so the claws double as both weapons and a means of staying dexterous. They’re a still very sharp though, so whatever he’s grabbing tends to get caught on the edges. He’ll spend a while licking things off of his claws until they’re completely clean, and that often means he’ll put his paws in his mouth and just start sucking on his claws until they’re completely clean. He’s careful never to cut his mouth but it still looks ridiculous. Similarly, Wilson has a tendency to chew on his nails. He never bites them and only very rarely breaks them, but he has a habit of chewing on his nails when he’s very very nervous. However, he also does it because, like Boris, he sometimes gets food on or under them and he nibbles on them to get the food out. He’s less about napkins and more into sucking the leftovers off his fingers then wiping.

At times, Boris can only be compared to a child. As intelligent and manipulative and dangerous and vindictive as he is, Boris displays attributes at times that one can only describe as being childish. He is easily motivated to act based on the idea of reward. He often enjoys being gently held and treated like a toy and is amicable with children given that they respect him. Boris has the habit of grabbing people’s legs, climbing onto their backs, and peeking over their shoulders in a way that is cute displays a sense of childlike curiosity. Case in point, when he’s not being a microbastard, Boris is tolerable and can be regarded as being akin to a small child. You can talk to him (not like a child, but as an adult), ask him to do things (which are more likely to get done if you offer him some sort of treat), you can hold him/his paw and guide him around, etc. The only issue is, if you’re going to regard him as a small child, don’t be open about towards him. He tends to get offended when he’s compared to a toddler and he may get aggressive/throw a tantrum.

Unlike his person, Boris has a distinct dislike for water. If he’s wet, his fabric essentially soaks up and holds water for long periods of time, making him heavier and slowing him down. It is not only difficult but painful to him to try and wring it out of his limbs, and sitting in the sun isn’t an option. If he tries to sun dry, his fabric will temporarily shrink— so much so that it will burst his seams which can lead to detached limbs or gaping “wounds” where his stuffing will pour from (or he’ll bleed) and he will start freaking out. (The shrinking does revert over time with normal stretching, but it still hurts). Being that he is a teddy bear and that he moves around often, he often picks up everything he’s around (dust, dirt, pollen, lint, etc). Smells also get trapped in his fabric, which means that naturally, if he gets wet, he’ll also be incredibly smelly and he does not like that. Despite his spite, Boris needs to be cleaned. And he and Wilson are both aware of this. Boris tries to put it off as much as possible because Wilson’s way of cleaning him is to throw him in the washer with a few Tidepods and let him ride the 90 mph spin cycle, then toss him in the dryer to tumble around for a bit without shrinking. As one can imagine, Boris is not fond of this treatment at all. He much prefers to be gently wiped down with a soapy wash cloth and rinsed by hand, blow dried, and lint rolled, all of which he usually does by himself (since Wilson sure as hell won’t). On very rare occasion, he will open himself up and try to wash his stuffing/give himself a scent pack of some sort to try and freshen himself up but he always loses his nerve. He can’t stomach the sight of his own stuffing. He also brushes his teeth very often and takes excellent care of his claws.

Being an extension of Wilson, whatever happens to Wilson will happen to Boris. If Wilson is injured, it will carry over to the bear. The only exception to this is when Boris harms Wilson himself. He has immunity from injuries he deals himself, but otherwise, anything that harms Wilson will reflect on him. Hence why in the game, since Wilson has a cut with a bandage over his left eye, Boris also has an open stitch wound with a bandage covering it. It is very rare for the pain to carry over unless it’s extreme. On the other hand, if Boris is harmed, it will not carry over to Wilson. He can be harmed in manners that cause him to bleed or require him to restuff and stitch up open injuries he receives, but said injuries will not carry over to Wilson. Meaning there is absolutely no risk in dealing damage to him, aside from the fact it’ll majorly piss him off and make him want revenge later on. Similarly, Boris can read Wilson’s thoughts at any given time, though this requires a lot of concentration and he usually doesn’t have the patience for it. While he can usually tell how Wilson is feeling and what he’s thinking, Wilson cannot do the same for him, making it that much harder for him to predict Boris’ behavior and protect himself from the little bastard.

Boris has exceptionally good vision. In darkness and low light, he can perceive things at a much greater distance and with much greater clarity than a human can. In extended periods of darkness, this ability seems even further enhanced. The main drawback is that Boris has a sensitivity to light. He can adapt to it over a short amount of time, but sudden exposure will temporarily blind him to the point of daze. Hence, when he moves around brightly lit areas, the lights around him tend to flicker and dull in his presence, a side effect he seems to have on his environment. Another drawback, perhaps more to the people around him than himself is the fact that his eyes tend to glow in the dark. If he’s completely shrouded in it, his eyes are still visible. When a light is shone directly into them at certain angles or under these conditions, his tapetums tend to glow greenish-blue as well.

Lucy’s teeth continuously grow to stay sharp for when she bites into people. Biting and chewing on things help keep them from getting excessively long. However, the longer she goes without a meal, the longer they grow in preparation for the next bite, until they are virtually unusable due to length. Thankfully, she comes equipped with a way of handling this. If her teeth are damaged (cracked, broken, have cavities, etc), they will simply fall and new ones will grow in to replace the old ones. By manually breaking off her overgrown tusks teeth, Lucy can trigger  the release of the old roots and the growth of new teeth to eat again. As one would imagine, this is extremely painful because all of her teeth have nerves (and if she waits too long to replace her teeth, she can develop quicks and nerve growth more towards the point of the tooth).

Evelyn’s spirit was disturbed by the hospital hauntings due to being buried nearby. She’s in no way malicious, but like Boris, she finds it difficult to return to where she came from now that she knows Wilson is still around. So she watches over him as he continues living on without her. She’s not exactly strong enough to send objects flying or cause illusions on the regular- again, she’s not an angry poltergeist, and she can’t always be around. But she can move small things around now and then and warm up a room by entering it for brief periods of time. Her spirit can be stronger but only in bursts, which she reserves exclusively for protecting him when the situation calls for it.

Evelyn can appear in people’s dreams. It requires relatively little effort on her part and it’s about the only time she can verbally communicate with people and actually talk to them. How vividly she is seen in the dream depends on how attached to person she is and if they’ve previously made contact with her before (Ouija boards, foggy mirror messages, warmth bursts, etc). Despite the temptation of it, she always refrains from entering Wilson’s dreams because she knows it wouldn’t impede his progress in recovering from her death.

Over the years, monsters have not been the only thing Vin has studied extensively. He’s learned that humans are sometimes the facilitators or “protectors” that like to shelter the beasts that he enjoys hunting. As such, he’s delved deep into the psychology of people, their words, and their actions. Paired with his intuition and unstoppable determination for his cause, Vin is as much a danger to some people as he is to the beings he primarily targets. He’s not ruthless, but he knows when someone’s trying to bullshit him, and he is not above threats, blackmail, or ransom when it comes to achieving his goals. 

[gwynne-fics]

Things to Avoid -- Rachel & Young-Do

little turtles

“I could do a drive by on my motorcycle before they even realize its you,” Young-Do suggested when the car stopped in front of the doctor’s office. He was stunned at the amount of reporters laying in wait for Rachel. “Have you investigated your secretary?”

“It isn’t her.” Rachel leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. “The only place this information is kept is on my phone. No one knows the pass code for that. It can’t be the doctor. He’s lost patients because of the press.”

Young-Do sighed and opened up the folder he got from Go Nam-Il yesterday. The private investigator was efficient in getting him what he wanted. His partner was also a very good attorney and had set up some paperwork for him. He hadn’t told Rachel his plans. He didn’t want to have a fight with her over this. “Ignore them and go inside. I have an idea that might get rid of them. Please tell the doctor I can come into your appointment.”

Rachel tilted her head and considered him before giving one of her rare smiles. “Alright. Try to mention your new drama.”

He resisted kissing her before getting out of the car and heading over to the group of reporters. Lights immediately flashed and questions were flung at him. “Like all the people you have seen come with President Yoo to her appointments, I am here to support her. I will admit to being horrified that this is even a story. Even if she was a celebrity, this harassment of her is uncalled for.”

“RS Talent International employs over a thousand people,” a familiar voice cut through. Young-Do searched the crowd and almost smiled. “Once she has an heir, this company will be accepted as a chaebol inheritance. Shareholders have a right to know the identity of the father.”

“Yoon Yoo-Rae. This is beneath you.”

She shrugged but still smiled. “My boss cares about it and I don’t have anything else on my radar. Give me a better story, Choi Young-Do. Any hints of a secret marriage for Lee Hyo-Shin and his former manager? Better yet, are you the father of President Yoo’s baby?”

Young-Do blinked. “I came out as gay five years ago. I’m pretty sure that takes me off the list.”

“Given the option, now that bisexuality is gaining awareness in our country these last few years, would you change your answer?” She pressed forward when he didn’t immediately answer. “Your chemistry with your female costars is too good. You were linked to several women after you debuted. They say you were too attentive to be truly uninterested in women.”

Why did so many people assume that being gay meant he couldn’t be nice to women? Being gay didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy their company or friendship. He didn’t know if he could believably make that argument. He was also sexually attracted to women but that wasn’t why he got on well with his costars.

“Given the option, I would prefer that it not matter who I sleep with. It obviously doesn’t affect my ability to do my job. Who is your source?”

“They wish to remain anonymous.”

Tan. Fuck. He wasn’t happy when Young-Do broke up with him.

Young-Do sighed and opened his folder. “You are still very good, Yoo-Rae. Unfortunately, you and your friends in the press are hounding an innocent woman who is pregnant. If she loses the baby, how will you take responsibility for it?” He ignored the murmurs and started handing out the legal documents Go Nam-Il put together for him. “I don’t expect you to actually respect these but it is just the start. No one is asking for this story, which means all of your bosses have been bribed to pursue it. That is not going to play well after the MBC scandal with Song Cha-Ok. That’s the story I’m giving you, Yoo-Rae. Are you brave enough to take it?”

“I want an exclusive with President Yoo if I do break something big.”

“I’ll talk to her.” Young-Do went back into the office. A nurse was waiting for him to take him into the exam room. Rachel had just started her appointment but she raised her eyebrows at him when he sat down beside her. “I think I know who it is now. This isn’t about you. It’s about me.”

“One of your exes?”

He just nodded but his attention was taken away from her when the doctor pressed the wand against Rachel’s stomach. “Is that...”

“This is President Yoo’s baby,” the doctor said professionally. “I think we can tell the sex if you want to know.”

“Yes,” Rachel said. “I would like to know.”

Young-Do watched in awe as the doctor moved the wand around. A few moments later he pointed at the screen. “We’ve got a little turtle. You will have a boy.”

“Oh.” Young-Do said and covered his mouth. Outside, his acting had been perfect but now...he lost all composure and started crying. “Oh.”

Rachel didn’t chide him for it. She took his hand and held onto him tightly as the doctor talked about several things that caused Young-Do to panic. Their son was too small, Rachel might not be getting the nutrients to their baby because she still had morning sickness, the heartbeat was a little irregular, and Rachel’s age continued to worry him.

“I don’t think you’re in danger of miscarrying anymore,” the doctor said and gave Young-Do a sidelong glance. “But I still want you to be careful. I am willing to write up a legal brief for a judge detailing the damage this constant harassment is causing you and your child.”

“Yes, please” Young-Do said before Rachel could refuse it. He looked down at her and ignored her glare. “What use is your pride if you lose him?”

“That isn’t fair.”

“I don’t think I can be fair anymore. Not after seeing this. He’s beautiful, Rachel.” He rose up from his seat so he could kiss her forehead. “We have to protect him.”

The doctor cleared his throat uncomfortably. “President Yoo, if Choi Young-Do is the father, I could do more tests to ensure the health of your baby. It could be that the two of you are genetically incompatible. I will keep it anonymous considering how delicate your situation is.”

Young-Do prepared to beg her but Rachel just nodded. “The nurse needs to take his blood in here. Every precaution must be taken.”

“I understand. Get dressed and I will send her in.” The doctor left and Young-Do helped Rachel back into her dress. He zipped her up and tried not to fret about what the doctor said.

He’d noticed her morning sickness since getting back. She hadn’t eaten anything yet. He texted her secretary to have something real on her desk by the time they got back to the office.

“How much damage control do I need to do?”

“Yoon Yoo-Rae’s source is Kim Tan. She thinks I’m the father because I’m very upfront with my boyfriends about you and he told her that. I put together a cease and desist package for the major networks.”

Rachel was quiet before she turned around and hugged him. “I’m not going to stop you from talking about your bisexuality. Getting outted was not your choice and you didn’t get to control the narrative. I will back you up on however you choose to talk about that. The reason I’m resistant to announcing you are the father is because you’re my employee and they will demand you marry me and leave Myung-Soo, not because you sometimes fuck men.”

“I’m never not going to be your employee. I won’t go to any other talent agency. You put that clause in our contracts to protect young girls from predatory managers. I was an adult, Rachel. I came on to you.”

She laid her cheek against his chest and tightened her grip around his waist. “I don’t regret it.”

“Neither do I.”

“I thought I wasn’t cut out for being a single mother. I thought I needed a man to be my husband. Myung-Soo has been amazing and I could never ask you to give him up. You’ve been...delightful these last few weeks. I think I can do it. I think I can be a single woman, with a child, and be happy with my boyfriend and his boyfriend.”

“Fuck. Rachel.” He held onto her and kissed her fiercely. A moment later the nurse knocked and came in to take his blood. Rachel waited with him and they left together. They went into the office and he made sure she got inside without too much trouble before heading to the next table read for his new drama.

On the way, Young-Do called Myung-Soo. “How did it go?”

“Rachel is having a boy.” He felt his eyes sting. “He’s so tiny, Myung-Soo.”

“There are still four months left,” he teased. “Babies grow. He’ll be big and strong like you in no time.”

Young-Do hoped so, with all his heart, that nothing went wrong.

[kimnamsjoon]

Hey bee! I saw your last post and was wondering why you don't like halsey?

heyo. 

I actually wasn’t planning on answering this just because like, I don’t really wanna play a game of your fav’s problematic tonight but, you know, I also don’t wanna ignore you so I’ll just give a quick summary below the cut ig. it’s kind of long bc we all know I love to ramble, just…. fair warning ig.

Let me start out by saying that I used to look up to Halsey a lot. Like… she’a bipolar bisexual girl…. I’m a bisexual, borderline, non-binary girl… like…. I felt represented and a lot of her music, as edgy as it is, helped me through some very unstable, not happy times in my life. And so I looked up to her and admired her. Let me also just stay up front that I’ve got no receipts for this shit. I’ll link to some screenshots of her deleted tweets, but the thing is is that when she’s called out…. she deletes the tweets, makes a fake ass “I didn’t mean it” tweet, and then deletes that when everything’s blown over, which makes it really hard to prove shit. But also let me say that a large part of what I’m about to summarize in my “reasons I no longer personally support Halsey” thing down below, I experienced first hand. I followed both her and the girl she ostracized on twitter, I saw the way she treated the girl, and it’s absolutely what drove me to stop supporting her.Which brings me to what exactly happened. This was, I don’t know, a year ago? My memory in general is really fuzzy (props to mental illness for that one) so I don’t have like a general time frame other than “idk a year ago, maybe two” so I apologize for that. I don’t have specific tweets and I don’t even remember the fans twitter account that suffered but like, it happened and I’m sure others out there witnessed it too. I feel like it was really big on twitter for a minute, but maybe that’s just ‘cause I followed the girl and Halsey so it felt big??? anyways, this was around the time that Halsey was (rightfully) being criticized for repeatedly making out with minors during her concerts. I don’t think I have to explain why that’s wrong, but just in case: minors cannot consent to adults, and even if they could, she didn’t ask if they consented prior to shoving her tongue down their throats; she didn’t even ask age, and if she asked anything at all, it was “are you single?” Furthermore, who’s going to say no to a kiss at a concert in front of hundreds, if not thousands of people? Could you imagine the pressure, and could you imagine the backlash from jealous fans? It’s just all around dubious, and it one-hundred percent made me uncomfortable, especially since I was still in high school myself at the time.  (and for other deeply personal reasons you can ask me about ((privately)) if u really wanna know but im not  tryna get into that here).But I still supported Halsey because I looked up to her, and the fans she had kissed has said they wanted it/would have consented. It made me uncomfortable, especially since she’s tweeted things like this [x] in the past, but I was in a very bad place mentally at the time, and her music  was a great help to me so I wasn’t ready to accept that the girl I looked up and thought so highly of was so… trashy.   Anyways, there was another (minor, as in, a minor) fan, the one I followed, that felt like me, which is to say she didn’t really know how to feel about it. She was uncomfortable, especially since she was a minor, but she really looked up to  Halsey. And she made a tweet about it, I don’t remember the specifics, and as far as I know the girl has since deleted her twitter from being bullied so badly by Halsey’s fans, but it was something along the lines of “this halsey thing makes me uncomfortable” but in a lot more words. She didn’t even mention Halsey, had the whole H.alsey thing goin’ and everything and was a huge Halsey fan. And Halsey got ahold of it, somehow despite the girl having a whopping 120-somethin’ followers, and retweeted it to her followers, complaining that the girl COULD have messaged her privately to discuss this. It was… really extra.Anyways, I think we all know what comes next, right? Fans, of any variety, are super fuckin’ protective of their favs, and they really know how to act like rabid dogs when they want to. They absolutely destroyed this poor girl, a minor, and she was begging Halsey to tell them to stop because she’s mentally ill, it’s giving her panic attacks, she’s not okay. It’s really messy and really awful, especially because the girl didn’t even say anything negative about Halsey in the first damn place. And Halsey’s response was, basically, “well i’m mentally ill too, and i dont control them”. The poor girl ended up shifting gears and just asking Halsey to delete the retweets, which still sat proudly on Halsey’s timeline, right up top, and Halsey downright refused. She played a whole ass victim card because a minor was uncomfortable with her making out with other minors, and then did absolutely nothing to stop her fans from attacking a minor. I ended up unfollowing the girl and Halsey that night because it was TOO much for me, a mentally ill myself, to handle. I’ve got BPD, and it was just… it was too much for me. I couldn’t stan her after that, and I definitely couldn’t listen to her music after that. After this incident died down (maybe a week later?) is around the time people started digging up her problematic tweets. I was starting to feel like maybe I wanted to like Halsey? You know, she was actually, truthfully going through some serious shit at the time, and she’s mentally ill herself, which mental illness is never an excuse to be a shitty fucking person, but I understand exactly what that’s like, so It was hard to fault her when I’ve been there myself??? Anyways, I mentioned earlier that I’m nonbinary. More specifically, I identify as genderfluid (she/they/he pronouns are all okay! I’m not pronoun specific), but I spend a very large amount of time on the male/masc side of the spectrum (which is why I go by Bee! It’s very androgynous, unlike Brenna, and so it doesn’t aggravate my dysphoria when im feeling masc). I’m not exactly out, and I definitely wasn’t back then, so I didn’t start presenting masc until literally right around the time all this drama cropped up. And… a lot of boys, and some girls that were into me, weren’t exactly into that, and I got called the tr*nny slur a lot, which didn’t help and…. can you guess what came out about Halsey? lmaoYeah, she was exposed for using the t-slur, and it really, really fucking hurt. There’s literally nothing worse than someone you look up to using slurs meant to hurt you. It’s literally the worse. And instead of apologizing and admitting she was wrong, she said “well, I was young” and used that as an excuse. and sure, being young can be a valid response… when you’re a kid. But she wasn’t a kid, and she was definitely old enough to know that fucking tr*nny was and is not an okay thing to say, so…. anyways, if she had just genuinely apologized and said she was wrong, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but she just deflected the whole thing and then deleted the tweet when no one was looking. Here’s a screen shot for anyone curious. [x]

Since this mess, a lot more has been exposed about her that has really cemented my disinterest for her, but listen, I’m not a detective and I’m not digging up sources for you. Just google Halsey + problematic, I’m sure someone’s done the work for you. I stopped paying attention to her after the tr*nny thing, so I don’t even know the specifics to tell you if I wanted lmao.  

So that’s like, that. It’s all very anecdotal, i know, but you asked why I, personally, disliked her and that’s why. yea,,,,

[southviridarium]

1. Mun information Preferred Name:  Robyn (Admin) Age: 25 Pronouns: She/Her Timezone: PST Activity Level(Scale 1-10): 7 Password: 

2. Muse Information Muse’s name: Clyde Donovan Appearance age:  21 Actual Age: 599, turning 600 soon Birthday: 5/10 Height: 5’10 in human form, 209 ft in dragon form Sexuality: Bisexual Gender/Pronouns: male/he/him

3. What type of creature is your muse? (if not human, if human, are they a hunter?)

Dragon

4. If a creature not mentioned on the list was chosen, tell us more about them in strong detail, strengths weaknesses, ect

N/A

5. Personality (two paragraph)

Has a pretty relaxed attitude about everything that happens, especially when it comes to the weird things that seem to occur as he considers them to be normal for the town. So he barely gives it a second thought. He can be very trusting of others, even going as far as to trust Cartman from time to time. He loves to do things that he considers to be fun, even when dangerous. Very short attention span as he can jump from topic to topic quickly or space out during a conversation. There are rare moments where he will get angry and even this will surprise himself. Though, he can also be overly sensitive, he can get stressed quickly in certain circumstances. Especially when arguments arise. He rather deal with things peacefully rather than violently. But on occasion, if the situation requires it, he will jump into a fight. Especially when he feels his friends need help. He’ll stand up for them regardless of how he feels about it. He can also be extremely gullible and fall for the smallest lies that someone tells him. Can also be a major cry baby when it comes to certain topics of things that happen and has the tenancy to just break down into tears.

6. Appearance (two paragraph)

Messy, thick chestnut brown hair that he rarely cuts. Usually it just lays on his head going in whatever direction it feels Because he lives in a cave,he rarely brushes the mop of hair on his head. His eyes are wide and colored with a shade of emerald green that glows when he’s in the dark, this allows him to see inside of the dark cave, where he resides. Just as well in human form, he’s athletic, yet still is on the chubby side to give him a kind of baby face. He’s about 5'10 in height.

Usually goes around with a big smile on his face, unless he’s crying.Head is more of an oval shape that gives the more baby face appearance to him. Has crooked teeth due to not taking good enough care of them. Except in dragon form, where tooth care doesn’t matter as much. They are large and sharp. Freckles litter his nose and cheeks, usually more obvious during the summer.

The odd thing about him is the scales that are on his skin, surrounding the area across his forehead and eyes as well as his arms. The coloring of these scales is a greenish color. He also has little horns that stick out of the top of his head. He can occasionally have a tail, however, when in human form, choses to not access it.

When in dragon form, he takes the form of a tall dragon that has green  scales and large wings.

7. Name at least 5 headcanons

-Can be pretty stupid on more than a few occasions -/LOVES/ Taco bell and actually hoards that in his cave since the town has a taco bell. Sometimes he doesn’t even buy it and just steals it. -He tends to be extremely gullible, believing things if he doesn’t know any better. Unless it involves the people he’s closest too, then he’ll most likely dismiss whatever was said as false. -His parents were killed by hunters before he reached the age where he could live on his own, so he’s been on his own in figuring things out and how to live. -He would /never/ hurt a human, and tries his hardest to not piss off the hunters. -He is very protective of his cave. No one is allowed in it without his say so. Any such attempt will be meant with violence. That is the only time he allows himself to get violent or even threatening towards a human.

8. Write two decent sized paragraphs that shows how you would portray your muse

Clyde was sitting on the outside of his cave, eyes watching the leaves of the nearby trees sway in the breeze. He enjoyed the peace that was in the air. Something about it was extremely relaxing to him. There was few things in this town he found peaceful.

“Today feels like the kind of day I should take another trip into town.” The young dragon hummed to himself, getting on up to his feet before walking in the direction of the town. It actually took him a fair amount of time to get there, choosing not to fly to avoid causing panic and alerting the hunters that he might pose a threat. He had a serious fear of them, and didn’t want to give any of them a single reason to be pissed off and try to kill him.

He walked towards the local taco bell and entered inside of it, taking in the scent of the Mexican food. God.. this felt more like home than his home. Sadly, just taking the building was out of the question. So he would settle for snatching food where he could and making off with it.

9. Any additional headcanons/weaknesses/ect you would like to add:

Nope

Accepted