#i can’t think of a pithy way to word this i just find it interesting

[restlesshush]

The context in which someone’s judgement is least to be trusted is if they’re calling an experience either unique or universal

[blorbocedes]

resharing riddle of rosberg by Will Buxton, because OP who originally posted it deactivated, and it's a very interesting read. since WB recently talked about how he didn't like Nico until they had a breakthrough moment and he realised that's his German sense of humour, this contextualises how people perceived Nico. Buxton wrote on Nico back in 2014, which covers his early GP2 career, the 2014 F1 season and provides a fascinating insight into Nico’s character. Highlights below:

I can’t recall the first time I met Nico Rosberg. All I remember is that I despised him, everything he was and all he represented: the cock-sure, entitled, bolshy son of a world champion. No grace, no humility. Wafting in, a blur of blonde hair and arrogance. A Formula BMW champion yes, but only a few F3 wins and just three years in single seaters gave what I held to be little foundation for such seeming conceit. I disliked him intensely. It got to the point where I held such disdain for him that I would actively seek for our paths to not cross… which was fairly hard given I was PRing the championship in which he was racing. I’d simply ask someone else to grab his quotes for me. They always seemed to be able to pull more out of him anyway.

Nico Rosberg had been quick from the outset, and watching his racecraft develop as the season went on became a growing point of emotional turmoil for me. He was so impressive; seemingly effortlessly rapid and blessed with a precision that was metronomic. But I just couldn’t like him. I wished he’d been a good guy, one I could get excited about. But instead I felt huge sadness that such a wonderful talent had been given to a guy who was apparently such a Class A prat.

I recall the low point only too well. He was breezing past on his way to dinner. His team-mate Alexandre Premat had topped qualifying, and I’d used the staggeringly unoriginal press release headline of “Premat Powers to Pole.”

“Why don’t I ever “power” to anything?” he pointedly sneered as he walked past.

I looked up, trying to figure out what he was talking about. Then it hit, and I wondered why he was being so petty. The headline was simple alliteration. I had probably or would probably use “Rosberg Reigns” at some point of the season on the back of one of his wins. It was just Nico being typical Nico.

“Dick!” I whispered under my breath, just loud enough for him to hear.

Later that night, I needed to talk to his then-PR guy Karsten Streng and hopped into the ART truck to find him.

“Karsten, can we have a chat?”

Out from behind his race overalls jumped Nico.

“Oh, so you don’t want to speak to me then? Huh? What’s that all about? You’d rather speak to Karsten than to me?”

I turned on my heels and walked out.

Karsten ran after me.

“Will, man, you can’t let that get to you. You know he’s only joking, right? Just fire it straight back at him. He’ll love it. He’s really a fun guy… honestly. But if you don’t give it back to him he’ll think he’s got the high ground. He loves a challenge.”

The next day Nico sent some pithy comment my way, so I turned around, flipped him the bird and winked. “Fuck you Rosberg.”

He looked taken aback. I broke out in a cold sweat. This was not behavior becoming of the championship’s press officer. Had I just managed to ruin any relationship I might have had with the man destined to be our first champion?

A smile broke across his face, and we never had a cross word again. Indeed, we started to get on really well. At the end of the season I received a package to my home, from Monaco. In it was an ART team shirt, signed by Nico, thanking me for my support. I had it framed, and it remains one of my most treasured pieces of memorabilia from my career in racing.

Nico was the most savvy driver I ever worked with. Stepping down from the podium after winning the GP2 title, he spoke to the awaiting press in turn, each in their own language. I’d only ever seen him in individual language press briefings, and to see him utilise such cool and calm intelligence so soon after the elation of what was at the time the most meaningful moment of his career left me astounded.

But therein lies the deepest issue with Nico Rosberg. He isn’t just smart. He’s the sort of smart that makes the rest of us question if we’re quite as clever as we thought we were. And at times it can be his undoing.

I’d seen his intelligence and need for the high ground cause him trouble time and time again in interviews, even in the GP2 days. The interviewer would sit down, all smiles, ready to start the conversation. But Nico, fearful of being on the back foot, would fire retorts and wrestle control of the interview back into his own hands. He would put the interviewer at ill ease in order to make himself feel more comfortable with the situation. What resulted was a terrible interview, and the prevailing opinion of Rosberg being precisely the one I’d drawn when first we met: that he was cocky and arrogant. When I came back to journalism in 2008 I had booked a sit down with him at Williams and for the first 2 minutes of the interview, that’s exactly how he was: back against the wall, stand-offish, arrogant, unlikable. I switched off the Dictaphone and asked him if he was going to carry on being a prick or if we could do this properly. He looked sheepish, apologised, and we picked back up with what ended up being a great interview.

All of which led to a question often asked: is Nico Rosberg too smart for his own good?

It’s a question that has come back again this year.

Many will point to Monaco as a stand-out point of the season. I always felt Rosberg was smart enough to pull off that stunt in qualifying, but I never believed he was that cynical or cold. To be a world champion takes more than intelligence and speed. As I argued over Multi-21 last year, while we may hate to admit it, what marks the champions out from the also-rans is the ability to be a complete bastard when the moment arrives. In Monaco, Nico was the bastard and turned that qualifying controversy into a race win that had the ability to completely shift the tide of the season.

That it didn’t, however, is his own doing.

Lewis Hamilton is widely regarded as one of the best qualifiers in modern Formula 1. And yet, with a dominantly fast car at his disposal, he has lost the Pole Trophy to Nico Rosberg, the German amassing 10 poles to Hamilton’s seven. That metronomic precision has played into the Rosberg’s hands on many occasions this season, and more often than not it has given him the upper hand going into the race. On Saturdays at least, Rosberg has proved beyond doubt that he has the pace. But he hasn’t turned that Saturday pace on regularly enough in Sunday’s race.

Mentally, what happened in Budapest was also a tremendous shock. Hungary should never have affected him as much as it did. Perhaps it all comes down to how much brain capacity we consider Nico Rosberg as having, but that August break should have been used to move on from what he perceived as injustice, and start the second half of the season fresh and with total clarity of mind. Rosberg used all of that mindfulness, however, to focus on the negatives and came back to Spa with it still playing on his mind.

That incident on lap 2 of the 2014 Belgian Grand Prix has been poured over to frankly ridiculous degrees. To me, it was a nothing moment. Rosberg could have backed out, Hamilton could have given more room. That both went into it so pathetically ultimately resulted in the damage it did. If Rosberg had truly wanted to teach Hamilton a lesson then he should have gone in hard. That he didn’t is the only reason that Hamilton’s tyre was sliced. Any intent, and Rosberg would have snapped his front wing, bouncing it off the side of the Briton’s tyre. Hamilton would have stormed off into the distance while Rosberg was forced to switch his wing.

I argued at the time that Rosberg needed to embrace one side or the other. He needed to be a hero or a villain, because if he was neither, he risked becoming nothing. And so it emerged after the race that he had told Hamiton he had allowed the impact to happen. A step towards becoming that villain? Perhaps, but it wasn’t enough. And that’s the big sadness of his season. He has been so fast and so consistent, but his inability to pick a side and his attempts at being all things to all people has led to him being left wide open to attack from all sides.

The way he interacts with broadcast crews is an incredible illustration of this. In Monza, in speaking with me on American television he spoke in confident and unashamed tones despite his apparent dressing down by the team over Spa. With the Germans he was the same… almost bullish. And then to the British TV and radio crews, his shoulders slumped forward, his head bowed down, his tone was full of contrition and regret. What he was saying was no different to what he had told the German or international crews, but the way it was said was at total odds with how he had been just 10 seconds before.

Just as in Bahrain at that GP2 finale 10 years ago, I stood in awe. So savvy, so intelligent to his audience… but perhaps, in this instance, a reflection of him trying to be just that little bit too smart.

The thing is, he can be so charming too. He has a dry and sarcastic wit, which can sometimes be played out with a deft finesse. In America and Brazil, he started to have a very subtle jab at his championship rival by adopting Lewis Hamilton’s apparent mot du jour. In almost every interview, Rosberg would drop in a little comment about how “blessed” he felt. Shrewd. Subtle. At times, however, he can be a total child. In Hungary this year I was running from my commentary position to the GP3 podium to conduct the post race interviews. Time is tight at the best of times, but when I arrived at the swipe gates I felt an arm around my waist pulling me back. At first I thought it was an over-zealous security guard. But no. It was Nico, giggling away with a huge grin plastered across his face.

Should he be crowned 2014 Formula 1 world champion, be it through double points or, let’s hope, a barn-storming wheel-to-wheel thriller, some will still argue that Nico Rosberg does not deserve to be world champion. With them, however, I would disagree. Lest we forget, this is the only man who, over the course of a full Formula 1 season, finished ahead of Michael Schumacher as a team-mate. As if to reinforce the point, Rosberg achieved this giant toppling feat not once, but thrice.

His out-and-out pace in qualifying this year has been insurmountable. That he has won the inaugural Pole Trophy is evidence of that. So we know he has the pace, we know he has the temperament to win races, and we know that on occasion he can embrace his inner bastard and drive with the ruthlessness that sets world champions apart.

Nico Rosberg has shown repeatedly in 2014 that he possesses the attributes shared by the best of the best. We should not deny him his glory should he be confirmed as such on Sunday.

[hyperesthesias]

Ramblin' Man and Other Sob Stories: The Tale of a Ghoul's Doomed Love Life.

RATING: MATURE words: 15,141. warnings: canon-typical violence, drug-use and addiction, language, mild sexual content, death of a partner, terminal illness, canon-compliant.

SUMMARY: A private conversation with Goodneighbor's Mayor John Hancock, in which he details how he found and lost the love of his life, and how he became a Ghoul.

author's notes: for the sake of this story, this piece utilizes the scrapped plot-point of Fahrenheit being Hancock's daughter.

song recommendations: Whiskey Sunrise by Chris Stapleton; Too Sweet by Hozier; Just Pretend by Bad Omens; Cleopatra by The Lumineers; Ramblin' Man by Allman Brothers Band.

AO3 LINK

I’m not known as a quiet kind of guy. I have the tendency to run my mouth. Ballsy, maybe. Impulsive, sure. I’d like to consider myself intuitive. People who know me – or who used to know me – wouldn’t exactly consider me smart, either. Hell, that’s what piqued my interest in Mentats in the first place. When I get an idea, I don’t easily let it go – something that can be a benefit, or a detriment, depending on how pessimistic you are. I consider myself a realist. Not something that’s often tied to intuition. Most realists I know are just pessimists in disguise. I prefer to see things the way they are: fucked, but not beyond recognition. Everything except for my face, maybe. But I only have myself to blame, there.

I wasn’t always this good looking. I was, actually, by all accounts, good looking at one point in time. At least, I liked to think so. Couldn’t seem to get many ladies to agree with me – they all seemed to focus on my brother. Never understood what they saw in the guy. But then again, we all have different faces we present to different people. Different people can bring out different aspects of ourselves, sometimes even things we didn’t know what we were capable of. That’s not always a good thing. But it’s not always a bad thing, either. Sometimes we can be pleasantly surprised with ourselves.

I know what you might be thinking – a guy like me, that’s not too hard, right? All jokes aside, sometimes it’s nice to know you’re still capable of something good. Especially when all else around you seems to be sinking into depravity and injustice by the minute. 

I felt good once. Not high – not ecstatic. Not altered. I felt good. The feeling was organic, it came from within me. Not manufactured. I felt…like a decent person. Which isn’t easy in a place like this. It’s a feeling I’ll never be able to replicate. Doesn’t matter how many chems I get my hands on, I would never even try to replicate it – it was a feeling unto itself. Something that could never come from a bottle of Jet. Trying to recreate it with drugs, feels like a sin of some kind. 

I’m not opposed to a bit of transgression, but even writing about it – about that woman…I can’t do it justice. Can’t do her any justice. Even though I’ve tried. It’s all I’ve wanted to do.

The only way I can describe it? The picture on a postcard. Something so idyllic, something so far out of reach – so idealized. It sounds kitschy, it feels kitschy. You know it’s a painting, you know it’s not really as pretty in real life, you know all that beauty only exists somewhere in an idealized past. But you can’t look away. You can’t look away. And you’re holding the stupid thing with as much care as you can – making sure the edges don’t fray, that the painting doesn’t fade. It represents something better, bigger than yourself: the way the sunset ought to be, the way it was all those hundreds of years ago. You don’t want to look away. And in the action of preservation, of preserving something beautiful, you find you’ve become a better person.

I know that doesn’t really make sense.

No one’s ever described me as pithy.

I tried to keep things good, I tried to preserve what I could. But nothing stays clean in this wasteland for long. 

Wren was a breath of fresh air in a town where chems were the cleanest thing to inhale. She owned a well in the furthest corner of Goodneighbor – it was the cleanest water you could get for miles. It was only advertised through word of mouth, and Wren didn’t run her mouth to many people. Anyone who knew about the well, knew about Wren – but not everyone who knew Wren knew about the well. She was there before Vic and his boys, she was there after. She didn’t age – not in the same way as a Ghoul, but like something else entirely. She was a Smooth-Skin, and by all accounts she looked human. As the years went by, I thought maybe she was a Synth, and I finally found the courage to ask her as much. She only laughed, and asked if I was implying she was stiff in bed. I never did find out what she was, exactly. Or if she knew of some drug that kept her looking fine – and if I could take a hit off her, as if maybe it would fix me. I figured it must’ve been something in the water. It was the sweetest water I’ve ever tasted.

People used to say water doesn’t have a taste – but, really, it’s the pollution that socks you right in the mouth. That metallic twinge, that thick feeling of oil and rust, the tingle of radiation. But after enough chem use, you start to lose your sense of taste. Really, I think it’s for the better. 

I met Wren before I became what I am now. She knew me since I was a wild and reckless youth – now I’m a wild and reckless wrong-side-of-forty. There were loads of roads into Goodneighbor, the home of good medicinals, if you knew where to look, and if you didn’t mind taking the back alleys. I wandered into a waterway system one night, that’s how I found the well. The passageway I entered was part of a water filtration system Wren came up with herself; I wound up wading runoff water, looking for the other end of the tunnel. Couldn’t find the light.

Instead, I found myself at the long end of a double barreled shotgun, staring at a bleak and brainless future if I didn’t come up with a good reason for trespassing, as she said. I fell head over heels for her the minute I laid eyes on her – both literally and figuratively. I was scrambling on the wet ground, pleading for my life. I must’ve looked as pathetic as I felt, because she had mercy on me. She put away the sawed-off and took me round to her cabin on her patch of land. Later, she told me she let me off the hook because she recognized me from her club – The Bird’s Nest; she said she knew me as the scrawny baby-faced kid trying to live his best life, one Mentat after the next. All I picked up from that later exchange was that she thought I was cute.

The Bird’s Nest club was on the outskirts of Goodneighbor. It was a classy joint, almost as exclusive as Wren’s well. The only way in was through private invitation. I got in in the first place by piggy backing off another acquaintance’s invitation, something that wasn’t exactly looked well upon. She told me she didn’t take kindly to intruders – at her well, or at her club, and as punishment for my intrusions, she said she’d find a use for me. She indentured me to servitude; I had more fun things in mind, but I worked off my crimes with janitorial service. I was instructed to clean the waste waterway, the very one she found me in; it took several days, but I scrubbed it top to bottom. After that, she had me clean The Bird’s Nest – ceiling to floor. I preferred the waterway. You don’t wanna know what kind of shit you can find on the floors of a nightclub.

Wren was as shrewd as she was beautiful. I eventually learned she distilled her own spirits with the water from her well. It made for a dedicated clientele, who couldn’t go back to any other sludge after tasting her whiskey – pure and crisp. Burned in all the right ways. Her competitors in the area all thought she was dealing something on the side; she was poaching customers left and right with the quality of her handiwork. They figured she had to be into something else to keep her retention numbers up so high. But it wasn’t drugs. Not at first, anyway. It was just…her. It wasn’t just her water that made people want to stay. It was her. She made you feel like you were the most important person on Earth, like you two had known each other since the beginning of Time. Like when you walked through her doors, you were coming home. Friendliness isn’t exactly common in the Commonwealth. Or anywhere around here, for that matter. I think people just wanted to feel…wanted. That’s how you felt with Wren.

I was there one day, mopping the floors, when three men came to her club, uninvited. Wren was behind the bar, with a shotgun under the counter. She greeted them as she would have anyone else: she was calm, quiet, she had this unassuming smile – could be used to disarm anyone, but it just as easily hid her own intentions. They demanded she pay them protection money. 

“Why?” she asked. “I can protect myself just fine.”

They all looked at each other like grinning idiots. They stood there laughing at her. But Wren didn’t budge. She was leaned on the bar, with a rag in one hand, glancing at each of them – just waiting for them to make the first move.

“You want to keep this place in operation,” they said, “you’ll keep the boss happy.”

“I don’t answer to your boss,” she said. “I’m an…independent contractor. I take care of myself.”

I stayed a healthy distance away from the impending conflict. The air was rife with that frenetic energy, that electric charge you can feel right before a fight. I wasn’t always so keen to shoot first and ask questions later. That was a skill I learned over time.

“We’ll take care of you and this shack of yours if you don’t hand over the money.” The three men all drew their weapons and started squaring their shoulders.

I can still remember the way her face looked as she stared them down: almost serene, unmoving. Like she wasn’t bothered by these brutes coming into her place, threatening to kill her and burn her place to the ground. She took the rifle out from underneath the bar and set it in front of her. “One of you will make it out of here alive. I’ll let you decide amongst yourselves who you would like it to be.”

I took that as my cue to duck behind something sturdy. 

All I remember after that is the sound of bullets flying and landing in soft flesh. Bodies hit the wood floors, and I could feel their weight reverberate through the planks from my hiding spot, behind a wall at the far corner of the club. Glass shattered, and I heard running footsteps – and for a minute I was worried Wren left me behind with those thugs; but, what did I matter to her anyway? She wouldn’t put her life on the line for me, a thief and a trespasser.

When the gunfire sounded like it died down, I risked looking over the wall and saw the last man standing giving Wren a beat down. Her rifle wound up across the room, it was closer to me than it was to her. He had one hand around her throat, and the other pulling on her hair. She had one arm trying to loosen his grip around her throat, and her other hand shoved into his face, digging her nails into his ugly mug. I panicked – didn’t know what to do. The worst thing I could do was get myself got in the process of trying to help. The smartest thing I could think of was tossing the shotgun back to her.

She kicked the butt of the rifle upwards with a flick of her foot, and caught it – whacking the guy over the head. It left a mark – he stumbled just enough for her to pry free from his grip. The minute she got her footing back, she shot the bastard square in the shoulder. Blood spattered onto her as he was blasted back at the force of the shotgun pellets. He scrambled as quick as he could, and flew out the door before she could fire off another shot.

The minute he was gone, Wren collapsed to the floor, shotgun at her side, her hand around her throat. I took the chance and came out of my hiding place, not sure if the woman was going to keel on the spot. She was covered in blood, could barely breathe. I offered to patch her up, but she told me, as best she could with a hoarse voice, that none of the blood was hers. All she asked me for was a cup of water. It was the least I could do, I figured.

I did as she said: grabbed a glass from behind the bar, and filled it with that crisp, clean water. I knelt beside her and helped her drink it, she had trouble moving her neck – but I noticed, there wasn’t a single bruise on it, where that thug’s hand would’ve been. 

After she finished every last drop in the glass, she turned to me, and told me my debt was paid.

“I spared your life,” she said, “and you saved mine. Consider us even.” Her voice still wasn’t quite what it was before the attack, but her breath was coming back to her, and she looked and sounded as though she’d only been involved in a minor scuffle. “Thank you,” she said, and she tried looking me in the eye, but I couldn’t hold it.

I looked around at the two remaining bodies of those attackers, and felt more of a coward than I did when I first landed in Goodneighbor for good, after Diamond City. The guilt was worse than the crash after a bottle of Jet. That was my first up-close and personal encounter with Vic’s boys. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t do jack shit,” I scoffed. “I coulda done more.”

“You have no loyalty to me,” she said. “The fact that you felt obligated to help, someone to whom you owed a debt, says more about your character than what you might or might not have done in the idealized version of yourself.” She swallowed, her hand massaging her neck, but still I couldn’t see even the trace of a bruise left behind.

I didn’t allow myself to feel the weight of her words – the guilt of Diamond City, of all those Ghouls, displaced, dead, or worse, was still too fresh in my mind. And at that time of day, I was still too sober to let myself feel anything at all. She stood, and I sat there, suddenly realizing I would have to mop the floor all over again.

She told me I didn’t have to stay there anymore, my debt was paid, I no longer had any obligation to her or to The Bird’s Nest. I told her I didn’t have anywhere else to go – which was the truth as a drifter, of course, but it was also my own way of sticking around as long as I could. The Bird’s Nest was the first place where I felt like I had a place. Wren bartered my services as a janitor for room and board. I slept in a repurposed broom closet in the back of the building, and even with living there, Wren was somehow always up and at ‘em earlier than me. 

There was a separate, locked room on the opposite side of the building where I stayed. I could hear her tinkering away in there from sun-up to the second the club doors opened. Whenever she left the room, even for a moment, she locked the door behind her. The only key was on her person at all times; she kept it inside her…unmentionables. What? A guy like me, I’m allowed a look at a rack like that. On occasion. 

I began to wonder if the rumors were true, if Wren was selling something other than spirits to keep her clients happy. Something harder, something that lasted longer than whiskey, and that was maybe purer than Jet. It was part of my own selfish reason I was interested in staying as long as I did. That, and, I…I started to feel things for Wren. Things I’d never felt with anyone else. She was everything I wasn’t: beautiful, smart, brave. Being close to her made me feel that maybe I could be those things, too, by osmosis. But I figured a woman like that, she’d never give me a second look. I was used to it – being passed over, mostly invisible. It was my brother who got most of the love, the attention, the good shit in life. Maybe that’s why I like talking so much: I’m an attention seeker at heart.

But I didn’t seek out her attention, I knew there wasn’t a shot between us. I knew what I was, besides a coward: a junkie. She knew it, too. But she never treated me any different. She knew the kind of shit that went down on the club floor – the chems that passed hands, the laced smokes, the patrons huddled in the corners, looking for something extra to take the edge off. Wren was never a fool. Which is exactly why I knew nothing could happen between us.

Vic visited her personally a week later. I wasn’t on the floor when he came by; I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to, around Wren’s secret backroom, when I heard the commotion. She was laughing at him. She had this beautiful laugh, elegant, like something out of an old film. But this laugh was different, it wasn’t something I’d heard from her before, it was sardonic, callous. Like she was making fun of him. Didn’t exactly seem like the smartest move from my vantage point – but who was I to point fingers? I didn’t have the stones enough to help her, either way.

I still remember the sound of his palm hitting her cheek. Her head whipped with the force of his slap. She held a hand to her face for only a second, before she brushed her hair away, and set her eyes on him again. She still had that laugh on her, though, even when he told her to wipe that smile off her face.

“Even if I was in the business of recreational remedies, I wouldn’t give you a dime, Vic. I wouldn’t let you anywhere near my operation.”

“Then you won’t be surprised when accidents start to happen,” he said. “But if I were to have the funding, I might be able to prevent these so-said accidents before they happen..”

“Don’t try to extort me, Vic. It’s not a language you speak well. You wanna know what I hear instead? Cowardice. I hear a man who gets off on watching others suffer. I hear a child’s tantrum – a child who has never felt in-control a day in his life. I’ve been here longer than you’ve been alive, Vic. I’ll be here long after you’re dead. I’ve seen men like you come and go. It’s never pretty. If I were you, I’d be more concerned about your own accidents.”

“You threatening me?”

“I don’t need to. I’ve seen enough to know men like you never last long.”

First time I heard her say that, I couldn’t help but wonder who’d be stupid enough to go up against a guy like Vic. Well, we all know how that turned out. Guess ‘stupid’ wasn’t far off.

She let him live. He walked out of The Bird’s Nest without a scratch. Same couldn’t be said for Wren, she was still rubbing the side of her face. From where I stood around the backroom, I couldn’t see a mark on her, though. But that being said, I was too preoccupied with the guilt of trying to catch a glimpse of what was behind that secret door of hers while she wasn’t looking. I went behind her back, literally, trying to see what I could see through the cracks of the door, trying to see if she was hiding anything interesting – interesting to me, anyway, in the way of chems. All I could make out were these silver pots and glass vials. Looked enough like a chem lab to me, though there wasn’t much to go on. Could have just as easily been part of her distillery.

I decided to get away from the backroom door before she found me, and I’d have to half-ass explain myself. I walked onto the floor, instead, and inquired about her encounter.

“He won’t give up,” she said. She was wringing her hands through her bar rag, she looked nervous. I’d never seen Wren nervous up ‘til then.

“What’re you gonna do?” It’s not like I had any heroic ideas at that point.

“Do what I’ve always done. Keep my head down. I won’t be picking any fights with Vic,” she said. “But I’ll finish them if he sends them my way.”

“Sounds like he isn’t giving you much of a choice.”

“That’s what he wants you to think.” She looked at me as she said it. Like she wanted me to really hear it. “That’s what he thrives on.” She threw the towel over her shoulder, and placed a finger along my jaw, guiding me to meet her eyes. “You always have a choice, John.”

That was part of the problem, really. I always had a choice. A choice for good, a choice for evil – evil’s a little dramatic, but no one would call a Jet addiction rational, either. My parents didn’t expect much out of me. Not that there was much to aspire to around here. My brother was always the rising star. The Golden Child. It was my choice to leave them. It was my choice to pick up a bottle of Jet for the first time. It was my choice to spy on Wren, even after all she’d done for me. 

It was my choice to shoot up one night at The Bird’s Nest. All I wanted was to forget – just for a minute, just for a second. Forget the guilt. Forget the fear. Forget the man I was, who I wanted to be – who I knew I could never be. Just forget it all. Just for a minute. 

It was a minute too long. I overdosed. Flat on the floor, fresh out of dignity. 

It’s ironic, really. I used to do anything and everything I could to forget. Now I’m a regular card holder at the Memory Den. Doing anything and everything I can to remember. To relive. Wren, and everything about her.

She found me on the floor, I guess. That’s what she told me. The next thing I remember is waking up in my bed, still unsure what planet I was on. I think I might’ve thrown up on her. But if I did, she never said anything about it.

I just remember the sound of her voice as she said my name: “John…” It was a sigh, it was familiar. It was disappointment. Or, at least, that’s what I thought. 

She was wiping my face with a wet towel, I pushed her hand away. “I don’t want your pity.”

“If I pitied you, you wouldn’t be here. Pity is passive. It does nothing.” She dipped the cloth into a basin of her water and passed it along my face again. “I’m worried, John. There is a difference.”

“I don’t need anyone else’s disappointment. I got enough of it back home.”

“I never said I was disappointed in you. In fact, I’m rather impressed by you.”

I scoffed, and almost pushed her away again, but my arms barely had any strength left in ‘em. “You got the wrong guy.”

“You’re John McDonough, aren’t you? Brother of the Diamond City mayor. I heard what you did for those who were displaced. The children among them. I don’t imagine it was easy to go against the word of your own brother. Although, I’m curious as to why it was he who pursued a career in politics, and not you. You graduated at the top of your class – beating out your brother’s own academic records.”

“If this is a polite way of asking what the hell happened to me, consider me still insulted.”

She only smiled and shook her head; she pressed the bowl of water to my mouth and helped me drink from it. “Not at all. I mean only to say I am impressed. Both by your compassion and discernment.”

“Yeah, well. No one’s ever accused me of being a genius. That’s what the Mentats are for.”

She thought it was funny. “Mentats enhance what’s already there. It doesn’t come from nothing.”

No one ever gave a fuck enough about me to listen, to appreciate, to just…let me be me. I swear, it was a better high than anything I could find in a bottle. “How’d you know who I am, anyhow?”

“It’s my job to know who I let into my establishment. With whom I work. It’s how I’ve survived this long. Knowing who’s who.”

“That why you’re so confident you can wait out Vic and his boys?”

“Partly,” she shrugged, and poured a tablespoon of something white and powdered into the rest of the water in the bowl. She had me drink it; it was bitter and fizzy, but it settled my stomach. “That, and I know men like him never operate long without making enemies. If it isn’t one of his own men who turns on him, it will be someone else he shouldn’t have crossed.”

“You have a lot of faith in other people.”

“I have faith in what I see.” She looked at me as she said it. Like she wanted to know I heard it.

That time I didn’t look away. That time I heard it. I felt it.

After that, she had me working more closely with her, like a personal assistant. She didn’t demand I get clean. She didn’t expect me to be anything other than what I was, who I was. She treated me with respect, like I was an intelligent creature, like I had a brain. It wasn’t something I was used to. But it was good exercise intellectually. A part of me felt like I was living up to whatever potential I might’ve left behind in Diamond City. The only two rules she laid down: don’t get shitfaced on the clock, and don’t go into the locked backroom. Easy enough.

But we always want things we can’t have, don’t we?

She trusted me. She didn’t have to say it. But she did anyway.

She was in her office, tired, more tired than a night’s sleep could fix. A hand on her head, her eyes fixed on nothing in particular; I came in through the door to tell her I’d finished restocking the bar, when I saw her. I didn’t say anything, I just stood there, wondering if she even noticed me. 

I called out to her, but she didn’t hear me, so I took the chance of walking in without permission. The towel over my shoulder, I came beside her, hoping she’d see me out of the corner of her eye. I wasn’t exactly keen on being on the wrong side of her sawed off again. 

“Wren?” I said again.

That time, she jumped, and lucky for me, she realized who was talking to her before she pulled the gun strapped to the underside of her desk. “John…” She exhaled and rubbed her face. “I didn’t hear you, forgive me.”

“It’s alright,” I tried not to sound as worried as I was. “Got something on your mind? You look preoccupied.”

She looked at me with this fatigued smile, and shook her head. “Trying not to think of my failures. Seems to be all I can think about when I close my eyes.”

“You’re talking to the expert of failure,” I said, hoping to see her laugh. “Though I don’t imagine you’d be partial to my preferred coping mechanisms.”

“Maybe you’d be surprised,” she raised a brow. 

I leaned my hip on her desk, arms crossed. “Oh yeah?”

“You’re not the first person in the Commonwealth to use a crutch – to deal with all the shit we see day to day.” She sat back in her chair as she looked at me. “You won’t be the last. All we can do is make sure people don’t suffer needlessly.”

The way she said it, it was like she knew something I didn’t. I got to thinking maybe it had something to do with that secret room of hers. Maybe she was cooking up a drug capable of keeping its user sane. A seemingly impossible feat, but by that point, I was convinced Wren was capable of anything – anything good especially. “You got an idea on how?”

She took a deep breath in and shook her head once. “Making sure people know they have somewhere they can go. That they have a friend. If they need it.” She paused, her eyes looking at nothing in particular again. She looked washed out, like something was eating her from the inside. Like the air passed right through her, leaving her a ghost. It was terrible. Then something crossed her face, like she thought of something that unsettled her, and she turned to me: “You know I’m your friend, don’t you, John?” She asked as though she were afraid I would say no.

I knelt down. “I know. I know that. Hell, you’re the only real friend I think I’ve ever had. You’ve never had an unkind word to say about me, and everyday I work to earn that.” She looked at me, and there was a sadness in her that I don’t think I’ve seen in anyone else – a grief that was too cruel for someone like her. “You know…You know that I’m a friend, too, right? Friends are hard to come by. I want to be your friend. Despite myself.”

She put her hand on my face, and ran it through my hair. There wasn’t an ounce of harm in her. She just smiled at me and nodded. “I know.”

I wanted to tell her then and there that there wasn’t a damn thing I wouldn’t do for her – but both of us would’ve known it was a lie. The best I could do was steal a kiss on her hand. Her skin was soft, and while mine wasn’t exactly as good-looking as it is now, at that time I only had a few scorch marks; I was still weathered from the harsh winds and Sun. Her skin felt as if it’d never been touched by the radiation. Like a feather – Like I could kiss it all over, and it would never leave a mark. I wanted to do all that and more, but I settled for a stolen kiss, instead. 

Wren was supposedly older than Vic, himself, which would’ve made her older than me, and any of my family and friends – save for the Ghouls who were around since before the War. I couldn’t make sense of it, she was beautiful, youthful, and not a day over gorgeous. But I learned a long time ago, the less you know, the less you’re liable for, so I didn’t ask questions that I thought were above my paygrade: my pay being room and board. I enjoyed not being homeless, and besides it’s impolite to ask a woman her age, you know.

She recruited my help on something important, she said, it was something no one else was supposed to know about. At first I thought I might finally get a look inside that secret room, but regardless of how curious I was about those vats and vials, nothing could have prepared me for what she showed me, instead. There was a room behind the The Bird’s Nest that was dug into the ground; it was covered in tarps and mud walls, with a crooked skylight window built into the dirt. Turns out it was a greenhouse. Wren had a garden of bright flowers – they were all kinds of pink, yellow, white, some all of those colors at once, with big green leaves, and long pollen-y things in the flowers. It was like something out of a picture book. I’d never seen anything like it, especially up close, in person.

She needed me to help prune and harvest some of the green shoots. I told her I didn’t want to fuck it up, that she shouldn’t have let me in her greenhouse, I was bad luck. All she said was that I wasn’t getting out of work that easy. She put a pair of scissors and gloves in my hand, told me where to snip, and to get to work.

Wren went around the greenhouse collecting what she could, picking the shoots she wanted, and putting them into her apron. The whole thing was surreal. I had to check to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. But sure enough, it was real – all of it. She had this white ribbon in her hair, it was pulled back, out of her face. The way the sunlight came in through the skylight, it made her look like some kind of saint. I was damn near ready to believe it, too.

We worked til my shirt was soaked from sweat. It was fucking hot in that greenhouse, the air was thick, and it felt like I was drowning in the humidity. I never thought I’d be ungrateful for water, in any form, but I guess too much of anything ought to kill you. She led me back inside The Bird’s Nest and told me to leave whatever I’d collected by her locked room.

I did as she said, and waited, out of sight, hoping to see into the room when she went in to work. When she dragged the baskets of plants inside, I could see a better set up of what looked to be a laboratory of some sort, and little empty vials waiting to be filled. I was sure that she was brewing something good – something better than anything you could find on the street. Between the plant crop, and her admitting to her own using habits, paired with the fresh needle marks on her arms, I was convinced she was going to flood the market with something sweet. Maybe even push Vic out of Goodneighbor with the profits. It seemed like a good plan, in my mind. But I knew better than to ask. I didn’t want to spook her, I didn’t want to ruin my chances of having first taste of whatever she was cooking. I decided to wait it out, see if she would offer me any as a reward for good behavior.

It wasn’t all selfish, though. And it wasn’t all one-sided. That’s what scared me the most. As the months went by, she would call me for errands that didn’t need doing, for advice she already thought of. She told me, really, it was just because she needed an excuse to talk to me. 

“You don’t need to make an excuse, baby. I know I’m easy to talk to.”

She just laughed. I liked making her laugh. It was the one thing I was good at.

(Farrah, skip to page thirteen.) When she first kissed me I thought I’d taken too much the night before, that I was still dealing with the hallucinogenic consequences. I thought maybe I’d imagined her – that the past eight months were actually a dream that’d gone by in the blink of an eye, that I’d wake up in the gutter of some back alley where I belonged. Then she kissed me again. And I knew my mind couldn’t make up anything that good. It had to be real.

I was worried I’d contaminate her. I was worried all my bad luck, all my failures, my past – all of it, would somehow change her for the worse. I didn’t want that. She deserved better than that. Than me.

Didn’t stop me from sleeping with her, though.

That’s how Farrah happened. Fahrenheit, she calls herself now. But her mother named her Farrah. 

Wren made the first move. I wouldn’t have dared. She was classy about it, she was always the romantic type. She didn’t use other people for her own advantage. When she asked something, she meant it – especially in private matters. She needed to know I wasn’t inebriated, that I wasn’t acting out of clouded judgment, that she wasn’t taking advantage of me. Hell, I wouldn’t have minded if she did, but she wasn’t that kind of person.

I did everything I could to show her just how grateful I was. How much she meant to me. Night and day, anytime she called, I was there when she needed me – for anything at all. I wasn’t her commodity, but I was just that eager. Didn’t matter who knew, wasn’t anything they could do about it. I was hers, and I wore it like a badge.

She was gentle with me. She didn’t need to be, but she was. It wasn’t just sex. It was something else entirely. A kind of high I can never chase down again. Vulnerable – my purest, realest self. That kind of elevation you can’t get anywhere else other than with the person you’re meant to be with. I think those months might’ve been the happiest I’ve ever been, and probably will ever be. 

Of course, I have a knack for ruining good things.

Wren got us something special one night – a little butterfly shaped pill, meant to be shared by two; you broke it in half down the middle, and held one wing under your tongue. It was meant to incite an erotic experience, capable of bringing people together in a way they’d never been before. 

Goddamn, did it work. Best sex of my life.

It was like a piece of myself fused with her. I could almost feel it, somewhere in my chest. The deeper I kissed her, the deeper I was inside her, the more I felt myself tethered to her. The world changed, and everything seemed brighter – it was pitch black, middle of the night, but the room felt as bright as day. Every scrape of her nails into my back felt hot, like sunlight. I couldn’t feel an ounce of pain if I wanted to.

She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, full of ecstasy. She glowed, bright colors – like the flowers in her greenhouse. She was all the colors of a sunset, as sweet as fruit, and made up of all the sounds a goddess would make. She had her legs wrapped around me all night long, barely let me breathe. I loved the way she looked when she enjoyed herself – especially when I was causin’ it.

(It’s safe now, Farrah. Mostly.) I woke up earlier than her, the Sun wasn’t even up yet. I laid there in her bed, still coming down from the night before. I could feel the heaviness of a crash coming on, and I wasn’t keen on being her downer in the morning. I had the mind to dip into my own supply of whatever was in my stash; I knew I had some MedX in my other room, and I figured I could slip away while she slept, and come back before she woke up for another few hours’ sleep. 

I managed to get out of bed without waking her, and I was almost out the door. I was almost out the door. I should have…just walked out the door. I should have just…

You ever have a memory, and remembering it is like watching it happen in slow motion all over again? And all you want to do is yell at yourself to do the opposite of whatever it was you did? 

Her clothes were on the floor. But the key to that room…it was just sitting there on her night stand. It was too easy. She was out, completely — I’d worn her out good. It was like I was watching myself from the third-person while I did it. I couldn’t stop myself. There wasn’t really any reason, other than morbid curiosity and the not-so-subtle hopefulness that I’d find something worth doping up on. I’d be in and out of there without her knowing, no harm, no foul.

The key fit perfectly, and the door opened with a shove. There were silver, pressurized vats, and some kind of glass distillation process set up. All of it was working, going, even though she wasn’t there to supervise it. I began to think maybe I had been wrong, that it wasn’t some new kind of chem, but that the plants were add-ins to her whiskey. But at the end of the distillery, the glass tubes were collecting droplets of something dark red – almost a rust color — into a vial. It wasn’t a quarter full.

There was a small refrigerator next to this whole set up, and I looked inside thinking maybe she had a bottle of something good I could nip. Turned out, it was only more vials – three of ‘em – and two bags with dates written on them, three months apart, the earliest one being only a couple weeks ago. I grabbed one of the vials and twisted it open; she already had three, and more were on the way, supposedly. It was worth at least a taste. The smell was…odd. Pungent – like iron and compost. Wasn’t exactly appetizing. But wasn’t exactly a deterrent, either. I’d had worse. 

The taste was just as bad – it almost had a soft grainy-ness to it, like soft silt. It left a tang in the mouth, and it went down harsh. Whatever it was supposed to do, just the act of drinking it was starting to kill my vibe. It was only then I started to realize maybe I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing. The shame was setting in, and I was starting to panic, realizing I didn’t know what to do with the empty vial. I didn’t know how to get rid of it without Wren finding out it was me who took it. 

I had to get back to the room. Return the key, lie back down, and hope that whatever I’d just swallowed wasn’t going to kill me in the next twenty minutes. 

But it was already too late.

I turned around, and Wren was standing there. 

I’ll never forget the look on her face. I knew, in that moment, everything everyone had ever said about me was true: worthless, stupid, selfish junkie.

“What have you done?” The sound of her voice, the betrayal in it, the horror – I can’t get it out of my head.

There was nothing I could say, there was nothing in my head other than regret. “Wren…”

She was starting to cry. I’d never seen her cry before. She grabbed the vial out of my hand, and checked the refrigerator. “It takes me a whole year to make just one – one of these vials! I give my life to make them! I give of my own body – my own blood!” She lifted the sleeve of her robe and showed me the needle marks. “Do you know what you’ve done?” she cried. “You’ve just drank my own blood!” She threw the vial at me and it shattered on a wall behind me. She grabbed the bags from the refrigerator and held them up to me. “My blood!” She sobbed, and checked the distillery, making sure I hadn’t fucked anything else up. 

I was starting to feel sick. I couldn’t tell if it was from whatever it was I’d just taken, or if it was because I couldn’t handle the idea that I’d vaporized the greatest relationship I’d ever had, and would ever have. I couldn’t hold it down, and I started to heave, my body wanted to spit it back out.

“Out! Get out!” she yelled at me, and pushed me out the door just as I threw it up. “It wasn’t meant for you anyway! All it will make you is sick and ill. A year of my life, in one bottle – to give to others who need it. Who need it more than me!” She pounded her fist on her chest, on her heart. “People who rely on me, John! Men, women. Children! The very ones you saved – they rely on me. On what you’ve just wasted,” she was practically shaking with anger as she looked at me and the vomit on the floor. “The only hope Ghouls might have for normalcy.”

I was trying to get back on my feet, still not sure if anything else was going to come back up – my head was spinning and my throat burned. At that point, I wasn’t completely comprehending what she was saying, and at first I thought she meant I was going to turn into a Ghoul. Turns out that didn’t happen until later. What she meant, instead, was something impossible: a cure for ghoulification. I didn’t understand at the time. 

I didn’t understand a lot of things.

“I’ll work it off,” I said, trying to keep my stomach from flipping. “I’ll work – A year, a year you said?” I spit something on the floor as I finally got to my knees. “I’ll work…–”

The way she looked at me…with anger and disgust. I deserved it. And more. But nothing hurt more than when she turned her face away from me. “There is nothing you can do to fix this.”

I begged her, on my knees, practically grasping the hem of her robe for her mercy. “Please – I’ll work – I’ll work it off. I’ll work the seasons. I’ll do anything. I’ll do…”

She still didn’t look at me. But I could tell her anger had turned into something else: heartbreak. “I don’t want you to.” She cried. “I want you to leave.”

I sat there, begging whatever higher power there was out in the universe for all of this to be a dream. A nightmare. That I would wake up next to her, in her bed; that it’d be morning, that I’d get to hold her, that it’d be us and nothing else. So many times before, I’d been the one to leave when things got rough. The one time I wanted to stay, the one time I wanted to make it right, instead…I couldn’t.

I didn’t know at the time that she was in the family way, otherwise there would have been nothing she could have said, nothing she could have done to get rid of me. I would have found a way to stay. At least, that’s what I like to tell myself. Who knows the reality of things. Promises we make to ourselves tend to be the flimsiest. But I like to think even I couldn’t stoop that low.

Again, I was a drifter. I began to wonder if that was all there was for me. I started to believe it. That there was nothing else – just alleyways and gutter beds. Vic’s boys were becoming bolder, terrorizing the population every chance they could get, trying to keep them in line: target practice in their own personal games of lethal darts. The only thing that kept me going was the hope of feeling okay again. The next high, the next score – those moments, ephemeral, transient, where I felt like a person again. I thought I was at my lowest. I didn’t think there was any way for me to feel any worse than I did. 

With every high, the lows got worse. The crashes, the lulls – they were mind numbing, and not in the fun way. I felt like a living, breathing sack of shit. Even the reflections of myself in the gutter puddles were too much to look at. The thought of myself made my skin crawl, and every waking moment was a struggle to get to the next waking moment. 

That’s when I came across a chem-maker at the border of Goodneighbor, he had a laboratory on the outskirts of a travel route towards Diamond City. He was a Ghoul, made shit for the hell of it, because he liked to. He used to be a chemist, apparently, but I was too strung out to listen to his life story. He offered me his cheap shit, but the usual orders of Jet and Mentats weren’t doing it for me anymore. I needed something else – something that would change…me. Who I was. If I could find that, then maybe things wouldn’t be so bad from there on out. Famous last words.

He offered me a bottle of Day Tripper, and my face must’ve done the talking on how annoyed I was because the old guy got offended.

“You don’t get it,” I said. “I don’t want to just see a different world. I want to be different. In the world.”

He looked at me, like he pitied me, and he shook his head. “I don’t got anything that can help you there, kid. Ain’t nothing that can change you, but you. But I got things that can make life a little more worthwhile in the meantime.” He tried to push the Day Tripper on me again.

He went on and on, and my mind started to wander. I noticed a bottle on a shelf behind him that looked similar to Wren’s stuff: it was a little glass vial, filled with a rust colored liquid. “What’s that?” I pointed.

He immediately shut me down. “No – you don’t want that. That’ll change you in all the wrong ways. Not the kind you’re looking for.”

“Where’d you get it?” I thought maybe Wren sold some of her stuff to dealers around Goodneighbor, hoping it would get to the right hands. Didn’t sound like her style, though.

He told me it was a relic from some old time religion that wasn’t around anymore. It was meant to turn people into Ghouls, on purpose. It was used as some kind of transformation ritual, rumored to have hallucinogenic properties. I looked at the guy talking to me, a Ghoul himself, and thought it didn’t sound so bad. He looked pretty much as bad as I felt. It was just more visible. He kept talking, but I was wondering what I would look like – what it would be like to look in a puddle and see someone else for a change. Someone with a different face. Someone who I deserved to see. 

“I’ll take it.”

“I’m not selling it to you, kid,” he scoffed.

I wasn’t exactly flush with caps, but there was one thing I had – it was the only thing that meant anything to me. I thought it might help the chemist, too. Inside my jacket’s inner pocket was a plastic bag, filled with a pressed flower. It was a flower from Wren’s garden, a closed blossom. I took it, before I shot everything to hell, half because I was fascinated with the thing, and half because I wanted a piece of her close to me. But looking at it, debating whether or not to barter it for the vial, I decided I wanted to put the past behind me. I wanted to let her go. For her sake, really. That maybe, on some level, if I was still holding onto her, I was still bringing her down – even from a distance. 

I gave him the flower, and he gave me the vial. I didn’t say anything else. 

The liquid had a similar texture – silty, left a residue on the tongue. The taste was way worse, though. I almost threw that up, too. But I managed to keep it down, managed to ride out the first few minutes of discomfort until the high kicked in. 

It was the weirdest, most incredible thing I’d ever experienced: It felt like dying in slow motion. Saying it that way sounds bad, but it was beautiful. I felt invincible – like I was transcendent of any plane of existence. Like nothing could hurt me – Like I had a purpose, a meaning. The world felt like it should, how I imagined it might’ve in its most perfect form: lush, green, sublime. Nothing could bring me down. It lasted longer than anything else I’d ever taken: three days. One hit. And on the third day, I woke up a different person.

The ghoulification didn’t happen overnight. It was subtle. It started with the color of my skin – marbley and patchy; then like spoiled Cram. Wounds opened, skin split, things sagged on me that I didn’t think could sag. By the first week, I was in a lot of pain. I managed to get my hands on some MedX and it helped keep me sane enough to get through to the second week. By that time, things on me were breaking down; my eyes were the first things to change. That was weird. I’d had blue eyes before. Seeing them turn black all over – that was a trip. 

Week three came around, and I was starting to have regrets. I got what I wanted: looking in the mirror was an experience in itself. I was a completely different person. But one wrong move and my nose dislodged. I had to rip the rest off, myself. You’d have thought I’d lost a fight to a leprotic armadillo. This was no longer the solution I thought it was.

It’d been six months since I’d left Wren, and I was praying to any and every god I could think of that she would have mercy on me again. Just one more time. That maybe this time I could take one of her vials for the right reason. The cosmic irony wasn’t lost on me that the very thing of hers I’d squandered, was what I needed. I didn’t care what I’d have to do to make things right with her. I set out to The Bird’s Nest, hoping to grovel. Hoping to ask for forgiveness. Hoping, maybe, she still loved me. The way I still loved her.

It was gone. All of it.

The only thing left of The Bird’s Nest was its still smoldering wood skeleton. I ran into the wreckage, terrified I’d find Wren’s body, or what might’ve been left of her. I didn’t find anyone, there were no remains of anyone in the debris, as far as I could tell. All that was left in her bedroom was a half-burnt photograph, it’d only survived from being tucked under her mattress. It was a photograph of us, taken by some hot-shot from her club; we were in the background, talking. It was a passing moment, made immortal. I’ve kept it ever since. The next thing I did was look for that locked room of hers, hoping to find a vial of Ghoul-cure that might’ve survived. I managed to find one, but it’d been broken, probably exploded in the fire. I licked whatever droplets I could from it, though. The rest of her equipment was totaled. Nothing survived. 

Her greenhouse was torched, too. Every plant razed to the ground, burnt to a crisp. 

I walked to the well, hoping to at least slake some thirst. But the drink I scooped into my mouth was bitter – sour. Tasted like chemical. The water’d been tainted.

It was Vic. I knew it in my bones. 

I’d never felt more powerless.

There was no way of finding where she went, where she escaped to. If she had another hide-out somewhere, I didn’t know about it. If Vic took her, there was no way I would’ve been able to get her back – at that point. The one thing in my life that I loved, and that loved me back…was gone. 

I was back on the street after that. There wasn’t much left for me. Other than survive. And watch my transformation progress.

It was a couple months after that when Vic’s boys went on a particularly bad tirade. People were getting sick of the bullshit Vic was letting loose on the streets. People were broke, and the broker they were, the fewer places they had to go – especially when Vic started to try his hand at buying real estate from already destitute homeowners. People were dying. They were getting tired of being hunted for sport. 

Vic’s boys liked the thrill of the hunt – The Most Dangerous Game, as it were. They were goons, sure, but they were sick. Twisted. With how many people were displaced, hiding places were getting scarce. I knew of a utility access point with room enough for two, maybe three people tops, if you all squeezed together.

A group of drifters were looking for a place to hide as Vic’s boys were approaching. I was already in the access point, about to close the door when I saw them frantically looking for a place to hide. They didn’t see me, but I was about to wave them over, when I saw the tyrants’ shadows around the corner. I froze. I debated what to do – I could call them over, and risk them exposing my hiding spot. Or I could just stay still. Close the door. 

There were three slits in the metal door that I could see out of when I closed it. That’s when I saw one of the drifters try and take a stand against Vic’s boys. He was done for the minute he opened his mouth. But he told it straight – that people were fed up with their terror tactics. He was dead the second they slammed his head into the ground, blood and brain matter everywhere. But they just kept going. They just kept going…

…And I just sat there, inside that little closet, praying they didn’t hear me crying, praying I wouldn’t be next, all until the beating stopped. His blood was on the access door when I finally opened it.

Everyone has their breaking point. That was mine. I went on a bender, trying to erase everything I’d witnessed from my memory – trying to get the stink of the catastrophic fire at The Bird’s Nest out of my nonexistent nose. Whatever it was, however much of whatever it was, it didn’t matter, it went down the hatch or up the vein. I just wanted the pain to stop. Tale as old as time.

I’m sure you’ve heard the legend from there. I’m a legendary kind of guy. I like to think I make a statement. Woke up in front of Hancock’s duds, and suddenly realized there was a way out – there was a way to be that different person. All it would take was a little bloodshed, and a whole lot of charisma. 

I might’ve still been high as hell, because I don’t know where I got the confidence, but I started organizing the revolution right away. The weapons, the people – it was all on the down-low, but it was getting done. I felt like a different person, especially with the clothes, especially not being able to recognize a shred of myself in the mirror. I think it helped. But the Ghoul-chemist was right, all that change had to come from within; it was just given a good drug-induced push.

Even when I wanted to back out, I realized I was in too deep already. I had the weapons, I had the people looking to me for guidance. I thought of Wren’s words: ‘Making sure people know they have somewhere they can go. That they have a friend. If they need it.’ Those people were relying on me, like people were relying on Wren. And I thought maybe, just maybe, by leading these people, by following through with them, I would be able right my wrongs with her on some cosmic level. 

And as I wrapped that rope around his neck, as I threw Vic off the balcony – as I listened to his neck snap, and the cheering of the people gathered there, I hoped maybe she could feel those amends made from wherever she was.

One of the first private matters I attended to as newly appointed mayor was trying to find Wren. I knew about Nick Valentine’s reputation from Diamond City, and I recruited his help. I told him it was a passive thing, not to dedicate loads of time and effort into it, though he’d still be compensated handsomely. I figured I was one of the last people she wanted to see – if she was still alive. I wanted to give her as much space as possible, but I was still hoping he’d come across her at some point.

Four years went by, and every update from Nick was the same: not a thing on the radar. Eventually, I asked him to consider expanding his search to possible grave sites. I didn’t want to be a pessimist, but like I said before – I’m a realist. And the reality was, Wren’s chances weren’t looking good. She had a talent for keeping her head down, but she also had a knack for making friends. If she was out there, if she was doing alright, she was still helping people. It’s who she was. The fact that Nick couldn’t come across a single person who owed her a favor was a singular sign pointing to the worst possible outcome.

Then, one day, Nick came to my office with news. He looked rattled – and that isn’t a pun. 

He said there was a girl who needed to see me. I didn’t think much of it at first. I’m the mayor, plenty of people say they need to see me on a daily basis. 

But he said this was different.

“She came to my office, looking to hire me,” he said. “She’s a kid, John. I don’t know a whole lot about human development, but she’s about yea high,” he motioned to just below his chest. “Didn’t have the caps to hire me if she wanted to, but I asked her what the job was, and if I agreed, it’d be on the house.”

I shrugged, legs up on my desk, most of my attention paid to the pen in my hand. “So you got a heart a’ gold, what’s this got to do with me?”

“She said she was looking for a McDonough. That’s why she was in Diamond City. She thought she was looking for the Mayor McDonough. Turns out she got the wrong mayor. She was looking for John McDonough.”

I was surprised to say the least, but still confused. “Did she say what she wanted?”

His face may be plastic, but you hang around him long enough you can tell when he’s nervous. “She said she had a message for you. It’s all she said for a while – she’s a real tight lipped kid. Was determined to only talk to you. But I told her without knowing what the message was about, and from whom, I wasn’t going to hand her over to my friend that easy.”

“Aw, that’s cute – You call me your friend to your clients.”

“She said the message is from Wren Huichol. She said she wants to see you.”

“What?” I sat up straight and stood, every other thought left my head. “Way to bury the lead, Nick.”

“I don’t think that could be considered the lead. Comparatively, at least. And there’s a reason I’m burying it.” 

“Spit it out, rust bucket – what’s the matter with you?”

“John, the girl is her daughter.”

My whole body went numb, my ears were deaf and ringing at the same time. I shook my head. “That’s not right. Wren didn’t have kids.” The height that Nick pointed to would’ve made her at least ten years old. “She didn’t have kids.”

“She told me to give you this, as proof.” He pulled something from his coat and handed it to me.

It was a flower. It was dried and pressed, all pretty – well taken care of. It was the kind Wren grew in her greenhouse. It felt like the heaviest thing in the world sitting in my hand. I didn’t know what to believe about the kid, but I knew that if Wren went out of her way to find me, to give me proof – then whatever was going on with her was serious. “Where’s the kid?”

“She’s outside.” 

Nick brought the girl into my office, then waited for me outside the Old State House.

The girl looked around ten years old. She had hair like her mother’s, and that same immovable and unreadable expression. Except the kid looked more stern than her mother. Whoever she was, and whatever she’d seen, it couldn’t have been easy, I thought. She looked like she’d been through hell, and she was still so young.

She didn’t waste any time, got right to the point: “Are you John McDonough?”

But there was something about her eyes, something about the way they looked. I knew them anywhere. I’d tried so hard to forget ‘em. They were mine. “Who’s asking?”

“I’m Farrah,” she said. “My mother sent me to find you.”

“She sent you…” It didn’t make sense. “Why? Why send a kid? Why not come herself?”

“She can’t. She’s sick. She sent me to find John McDonough, she said that I would be safe with him. With you. She says she trusted you. That she trusted you to do the right thing.”

The words hit like a rock, and I leaned my back on the edge of the desk to steady myself. “Did she…say anything else?” I knew this girl was my kid, I knew it in my bones. But none of it made sense. Wren and I met only five years ago; any child of mine should have been no older than that.

“She told me that John McDonough is my father. Is that you?”

I managed a nervous laugh, everything in me wanting to bolt. But I stayed put, even if my head was turned away from her. “I – I don’t know, kid, I think you got the wrong guy.”

“I don’t think so.” She kept looking at me, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. I wouldn’t be too calm if I found out my old man was a Ghoul. But she didn’t exactly seem fazed, either. If anything, she just looked tired. Exhausted. Poor kid seemed numb.

I took a deep breath, and got my head together before I crouched down to her level. Those eyes were mine, alright. I recognized the apathy. “How old are you?”

“Five.”

“You’re tall for your age. Well spoken. Why aren’t you like other five year olds? You go through a lot of growth spurts?”

“Mama says it’s because we’re different. That we’re special. But without the water she says she doesn’t know if I’ll be special anymore. She’s sick because she doesn’t have the water.”

“Are you sick, too?”

She shook her head.

“Alright,” my hands went down my face. I was barely keeping it together, but I didn’t want to flip out in front of the kid. “Alright, Farrah. Let’s get you cleaned up, let’s get you something to eat.”

That was the first time she looked her age. Her eyes got all big and watery, and she shook her head again. “I don’t want to leave Mama there by herself.”

I felt the same way she looked: devastated. “Me neither, kid. We’re not gonna leave her there. But I’m guessing you haven’t gotten a lot of food, or a lot of sleep, am I right? She’d want you to get all fuelled up before we go back for her. C’mon,” I stood up and gave her my hand. “You ain’t gonna be alone anymore.”

We headed out the next day – me, Farrah, and Nick. He didn’t have to come, but after I told him the rest of the story, he said he wanted to be moral support. The guy’s too soft for his own gears. It took us a few days to get to Wren’s place: a hideout somewhere between Goodneighbor and Diamond City, the kind of place that isn’t on a map. After Vic’s attack on The Bird’s Nest that’s where she must’ve gone, where she must’ve had Farrah, too. I was kicking myself for not trying harder to find her at the time. But at the very least, Vic was gone now. 

Then again, so was her well. 

Farrah led us inside the house, it was dug into the ground, like her greenhouse. It made the whole thing much cooler, which was a welcome relief from the Sun. I was half expecting to be met with the untimely smell of a body, or some other horror – and I was trying to get Farrah to let me scout the place first, but she’s always been as stubborn as her mother. 

It was only right then, right at that moment, when I stepped inside, when Farrah called out for her mother, that I panicked. I didn’t know what to say to her, I didn’t know how to face her – I looked different than the last time we saw each other. I thought maybe she’d take one look at me and say ‘Nope! Sorry. I’ll get Farrah to someone else who isn’t such a volatile freak.’

But I should’ve known Wren better than that.

I walked into her room just as Farrah told her she’d found me. They were hugging so tight, I thought they’d squeeze the life out of each other. 

“I missed you so much,” I heard Wren tell her, “but I didn’t mean for you to come back – you were supposed to stay there when you found him.”

“I’m a bad influence,” I said. Stupid way to introduce myself, especially after all those years. But it definitely wasn’t wrong.

She looked at me, and it was like all those years apart had just been minutes. She was just as beautiful as I remembered, but she looked sick. She looked like I had been right to be worried. She was thinner. Her cheeks were hollow, and she had dark circles around her eyes. She looked weak, which was never a word I’d used to describe Wren.

“John…” The way she said my name, it was the same. Like she knew me better than I knew myself. 

I took that as my cue to approach her, and she told Farrah to wait in the living room; Nick was there preoccupying himself, he volunteered himself to keep an eye on her while we talked. 

Wren tried to stand, but I told her not to. I sat on the edge of her bed, and kept to myself. I couldn’t look her in the eye. After everything, after all that time of thinking what I might say to her if I ever saw her again, dreaming of her, of holding her again. All I could do was sit there, waiting. Like a dog at her feet.

“You got a new look,” she said.

Took me a minute to realize she was teasing me. But eventually we both scoffed out a laugh. “You like it? I think it gives me a nice vintage feel.”

She laughed, and she sounded the same. Just tired. Made me worried.

“How are you holding up?” I asked. I reached for her without thinking. I gravitated towards her, my hand against her face.

And she didn’t pull away. She stayed there, in my hand. “I don’t think I’m gonna make it, John.”

I tried to brush it away, tried to pretend all those fears weren’t real. “You’re gonna be alright. We’re gonna get you back to the city. You’ll be alright there.”

She just shook her head. “I’m not gonna make it.” She looked up at me, and her eyes were wet, but her body was too tired to cry.

She told me without the water from her well, she was on a one-way track to the ultimate final destination. There was nothing that could stop it, nothing except for that well water. She’d had an emergency supply at her hide-out, about three years’ worth; she managed to stretch it as far as she possibly could between both her and Farrah. But she ran out last year, giving the last of it to the kid. She didn’t know why Farrah seemed fine, by all accounts her fate should’ve been the same. But she figured it was because of whatever wasteland genes I might’ve passed on. Gave her resistance to the radiation, or just made her more…normal. Wren was different, I didn’t fully understand how.

“Promise me you’ll take care of her,” she begged me, squeezing my hand. “Promise me you won’t let anything happen to her.”

“That was never a question.”

We sat there in silence for a while. Between life and death, there wasn’t much that felt significant enough to talk about. But I didn’t let her go. I kept holding her hand as long as she let me. 

“I tried…I tried to find you,” I said.

“I looked for you, too.” 

“If only I’d tried harder, sooner –”

She shook her head against the pillow behind her. “There was nothing you could’ve done, John. Vic came armed to the teeth. It was all I could do to get everyone out. To get myself out, with Farrah. She was just an infant then.”

Imagining Wren alone, with an infant – my infant – having to escape a warzone, it made me want to kill Vic all over again. This time, drawn and quartered through the city. “You don’t ever have to worry about Vic again. He’s gone.”

“I heard,” she smiled, weaker than before. “Took me a long time to figure out it was you.”

“Wasn’t exactly my usual M.O. of hiding my tail between my legs, I know. I just got so sick of it, Wren. So sick of it.”

“You’re a hero.”

“I wouldn’t say that. I’m barely a mayor. I like the hands-off technique of letting people do what they want.”

“After everything this town went through with Vic, I think that’s just what the people need.”

“You’ve always had faith in me.” The thought occurred to me of governing Goodneighbor without her. I’d been doing it for three years, there wasn’t any reason to think it’d be difficult otherwise. But it suddenly felt like too much. “You’ve gotta come back with me, Wren,” I said again. “I got a doctor there, I’ve got people there. I’ve got people now, Wren. They’ll fix you up. Hell, they can check Farrah – make sure she’s right.” She just shook her head, trying to let me down easy. “C’mon – don’t give up on me now.”

“I’m not giving up, John. I just know when I’ve lost.”

I felt powerless. As powerless as I did when thought I lost her before. “I just got you back.”

She touched my face. I looked different than when she touched me all those years ago. But it still felt just as good. Like home. “You’ll have me again. Someday.” She shook her head again, and tried to look better than she felt: “But I don’t want to think about ‘someday’ right now. I only want to think about right now. About you. About Farrah. Let me, John. Let me.”

I couldn’t tell her no. I asked her to tell me about the kid, instead. Tell me everything I needed to know – everything about her, about the memories that made them both laugh. About what I could do best for her as a father. She didn’t ask me to be anyone other than who I was. She never did. All she asked me was to think of Farrah first, before I did anything stupid. She was a smart kid, she said, she wouldn’t tolerate any of my bullshit. With her as her mother, I told her, I didn’t expect anything less.

She got tired, and I left the room to let her rest. Farrah was still in the living room with Nick, playing chess with him at the table. She was hustling people even then. I’ve always been proud of her. When I walked out of her mother’s room, she got up and took my place by her side. She never left her alone. I sat with Nick, feeling more vulnerable that I was willing to admit.

I told him mostly everything. I told him that Wren wasn’t coming back with us. I told him I didn’t know what I’d do without her. I told him if he wanted to leave, I wouldn’t blame him. 

He wasn’t going anywhere, he said. He was going to see this through with me. 

“Because I’m your client?” I scoffed.

“Because you’re my friend.”

I realized right then that people liked me. I went from being a nothing and a nobody – a radroach in the gutter — to someone people wanted to like. I was consciously aware of it, of course, but I don’t think it really hit me until then. I had friends, just like I told Wren. People who actually cared. It was weird.

Nick was going to offer me the couch to sleep on, but Wren said she wanted both me and Farrah next to her while she slept. I think a part of her was worried she’d go sometime during the night. No one wants to be alone when it happens. I didn’t blame her. I was just surprised she wanted me so close to her. I think a part of me came up with this whole story in my head about how she felt about what happened between us, that I forgot it might not have been completely accurate. I’d used it to self-flagellate for so long, I was learning on the fly how to accept that she still wanted me.

We stayed there for a little over a week. Farrah, her mother, and I got to talk. For once in my life, I felt something like normalcy. None of us talked about what was coming, we just enjoyed the ‘right now’, like Wren wanted. She and I enjoyed it together a whole hell of a lot more when we were alone, though. A couple times, in fact. Who was I to deny a dying woman’s request? 

A part of me thought that she was going to stand up one day and agree to come with me to Goodneighbor. That suddenly she wouldn’t be so sick anymore. That it was just a bad case of exhaustion, and that I was just what the doctor ordered. That me being there would somehow cure all her ails. She looked like she was getting better, anyway. She even made it to the living room, ate dinner with us at the table. 

Then the next morning, she could barely sit up, barely talk.

She asked me for some MedX. “I know you have some,” she said; I could barely hear her. “I saw it in your coat.”

“I have trouble sleeping.”

“John…please.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. Neither did she. There wasn’t anything left to say. She was ready. I had to be.

I made sure Farrah wasn’t around when I gave her the first hit. She started to look like she got some relief. I thought maybe that’s all she needed. Something to even her out. I thought maybe she’d sleep it off for a bit, and then be ready to get up and at ‘em in a few hours. Denial is always a double-edged sword. Gives you some relief for a while, but you always wind up paying for it later.

After a few minutes, she looked at me, and I knew it wasn’t enough. I never was.

“Just a little more…please.”

We both knew what would happen. I didn’t fight her on it.

I grabbed a second syringe, and ripped the cap off with my teeth, trying to keep my thoughts busy on finding a good vein. I tried not to think about what I was actually doing. I was doing what she asked. That’s all I ever wanted to do.

She trusted me. More than I deserved. I’ve always tried to live up to it. 

Wren started to get more relief after the second hit. Her face relaxed, and her breathing started to slow, it wasn’t anxious anymore.

I put a kiss on her forehead. “I love you, baby.”

She whispered to me she wanted Farrah with her, with me. I called in the kid, and she crawled into her mother’s arms. They both fell asleep. I was on the other side of her, watching them. I guess all things considered, I’ve gotten pretty lucky. I didn’t get a lot of time with Wren, but then again, some people never find someone to love in the first place. If there is some big, grand scheme of things, I’m glad it put us together. At least for a little while.

Nick dug the grave while I wasn’t looking. I actually don’t know what I would’ve done without him there. I’m used to being alone. As much as I’ve skipped out on everyone in my life, I’m just as used to people skipping out on me. But he was there. The whole time. I owe that guy a lot.

We stayed as long as Farrah needed to after we buried Wren. 

The trip back to Goodneighbor was a long one. I had never been more exhausted in my life when we finally got back to the State House. I didn’t have a place set up for Farrah yet, so I let her take my bed. I couldn’t sleep anyway. I spent the night looking out at the sky.

The following week, I tried to get back into the swing of things. Putting the past behind me – running. It wasn’t doing me much good, but I liked to pretend it did. I was in my office, trying to split my attention between balancing my ledger and consoling Farrah. I started to get frustrated, and the last thing I wanted to do was lash out at the kid. So I came up with a compromise: I taught her how to cook the books.

I pulled her onto my lap, and went over money math with her. Wren was right, she was a sharp kid – sharper than most at that age. But like all kids, she started to get bored. She was more interested in the way I looked. I started to think maybe she hadn’t seen many Ghouls while hiding out with her mom.

She touched my face, trying to make sense of it. “Why do you look different?” Kids have such a way with words.

“I’m a Ghoul,” I said. 

“How come I don’t look like you, too?”

“You do,” I said. “I didn’t always look like this, y’know. No one’s born a Ghoul. You gotta turn into one.”

“How?”

“Lots of radiation. That’s not gonna happen to you anytime soon, kid. Don’t worry.”

She was still touching my face. She had this stern, careful way of looking at things, like she was thinking. Always thinking. I guess she was trying to imagine what I used to look like.

“Here,” I said, and put her down. “I’m pretty sure I got a picture around here somewhere.” I rifled through my desk for a few minutes. There weren’t many personal effects, besides the occasional smoke box and bullet cartridge, but in the false bottom of the very last drawer, I’d put the old photograph of Wren and me for safe keeping. “Here,” I handed it to her, and pointed. “That’s your mom – and that’s me.”

She looked at the photo, then at me – real scpetical. Like I was pulling one over on her. All I could do was laugh. 

“That’s me, kid. A long time ago.” I pointed again. “See, you and I got the same color eyes. My eyes used to be blue.”

She stared at it for a long time, and sat down on the floor. 

“You can keep it.”

She looked up at me – she suddenly looked her age again: small, fragile.

I put a hand on her head, and let her lean on my leg. I kept working. Still running.

Despite everything – despite myself, really – I think Farrah, or Fahrenheit as she calls herself, turned out alright. No one could know who she was, how we were related, how she was different. It’d make her an easy target, and it would give me an exploitable weakness. I may not be the best politician, but I do know one thing about politics: no one is safe, and no one is off-limits. As far as anyone knew, she was just some orphan kid who was the mayor’s runner. It kept her out of trouble for the most part. But kids are curious critters, they get into things and places they shouldn’t. 

A few years after her mother’s death, Farrah got reckless. She got in with a dangerous crowd. She was the youngest among them, and they were always trying to get her to prove herself. I’m not saying I don’t understand the impulse – I, of all people, have no room to talk – but I made her mother a promise: that I’d look out for her.

Imagine my panic when I couldn’t find her all day, and into the night. I was sweating my head off, trying to figure out where she could’ve gone. I didn’t think she and I got along that terribly, that she’d wanna run away. But all I could imagine was the worst. I had half the mind to call up Nick and ask him to track her down, when I saw her so-called ‘friends’ wandering around the streets without her.

I don’t like to wield my diplomatic power, but when it comes to making sure my people are safe, my kid is safe, it’s personal. Whether they know she’s my blood, or not. I was open to the idea that maybe they weren’t involved at all, that maybe Farrah went off on her own. That is, until I talked with the head of this little crew, myself. I saw Vic in his eyes, and my hands itched to strangle the life out of him. I knew he was responsible for whatever happened to her, wherever she was. 

I dragged him into the Old State House, and laid down the law personally. Busted a kneecap, broke a few fingers, until he gave up their sick plan. These goons lured her out to a guarded junkyard and left her there. I threw him out of the State House and out of the city completely. Him and his whole crew. 

I got to the junkyard after sunset, and was held up by the owner, until he saw it was the mayor at the other end of his shotgun. I told him I was looking for a kid who’d come by earlier; she might’ve been with a group, she might’ve been alone. He knew who I was talking about. He pointed to the sign at the gate:

‘Trespassers will be shot.’

I bolted into the yard, barely thinking, looking for her. There was a clearing in the distance, and that’s where I found her: gaping hole straight through the chest. 

It was the worst moment of my life. There were no thoughts in my head, just…blinding white pain. I held her there for I don’t know how long. It was like the world had ended. Nothing else existed. I’d failed. I’d failed Farrah, I’d failed Wren, myself.

Then she gasped in my arms, and I nearly dropped her in shock – now I may be a user, but I’ve never used that much Jet, enough to bring back the dead. But it wasn’t a hallucination. Farrah was alive, the hole in her chest was mending itself somehow. I didn’t question it, all I did was get her home. By all accounts, she was fine. Got the wind knocked out of her, and felt sick for a few days while things healed up, but she was alright. She’s got the scars to prove she survived.

Kid’s got nine lives. Every damn day I’m worried she’s gonna lose ‘em all. She’s had a few close calls since then, but always comes back kickin’. I half wanted her to be my bodyguard so that I can keep an eye on her. But I know it’s the other way around, too. She looks out for me. Not all fathers can say that about their kids.

I don’t know how long Farrah’s gonna live. A century and a half, like her mother, or a few decades short of a hundred, like any other human. All I know is, I got a long life ahead of me. I don’t mind it. If I live half as long as Wren, I hope to do half as much good as she did. That’s all I want, really: to do good, and have a good time doing it. Sounds more simple than it is, but it’s worth the effort.

I’m still waiting for that ‘someday’ that Wren talked about. But I figure I oughtta fill the time before then, give her a good story when the day comes. Nothing beats a good story. I’m sure she’s got loads for me, too. I’m lookin’ forward to hearing ‘em.

For now, my time is filled with taking care of the people who need most: the misfits and underdogs of the Commonwealth. That, and making sure Fahrenheit doesn’t get herself killed too often — or losing my own head in the process. Not until I go feral, anyway. But that’s a story for another time. A long while from now. Hopefully.

I have a purpose again. It’s what everyone wants: to matter, to be seen, and to be important to people who give a shit. If I had to do it all over again, I would – I’d fix a few mistakes, I’d do a few things I should’ve done, avoid a few things I shouldn’t have done, and made more room for better things. But if I had to do it all again, if I could meet Wren all over again, if we could’ve had the time we did and more – hell yeah, I would. All of it. In a heartbeat.

[baeddel]

Please. Please can you tell me what a baeddel is and why people (terfs?) used it in a derogatory manner on this website for a hot minute but now no one ever uses it at all

you asked for it, fucker

[2k words; philology and drama]

baeddel is an Old English word. i have no idea where it actually occurs in the Old English written corpus, but it occurs in a few placenames. its diminuitive form, baedling, is much better documented. it appears in the (untranslated) Canons of Theodore, a penitential handbook, a sort of guidebook for priests offering advice on what penances should be recommended for which sins. in a passage devoted to sexual transgressions it gives the penances suggested for a man who sleeps with a woman, a man who sleeps with another man, and then a man who sleeps with a baedling. so you have this construction of a baedling as something other than a man or a woman. and then it gives the penance for a baedling who sleeps with another baedling (a ludicrous one-year fast). then, by way of an explaination, Theodore delivers us one of the most enigmatic phrases in the Old English corpus: "for she is soft, like an adulturess."

the -ling suffix in baedling is masculine. but Theodore uses feminine pronouns and suffixes to describe baedlings. as we said, it's also used separately from male and female. but it's also used separately from their words for intersex and it never appears in this context. all of this means that you have this word that denotes a subject who is, as Christopher Monk put it, "of problematic gender." interested historians have typically interpreted it as referring to some category of homosexual male, such as Wayne R. Dines in his two-volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality who discusses it in the context of an Old English glossary which works a bit like an Old English-Latin dictionary, giving Old English words and their Latin counterparts. the Latin words the Anglo-Saxon lexicographer chose to correspond with baedling were effeminatus and mollis, and Lang concludes that it refers to an "effeminate homosexual" (pg 60, Anglo Saxon). this same glossary gives as an Old English synonym the word waepenwifstere which literally means "woman with a penis," and which Dines gives the approximate translation (hold on tight) male wife.

R. D. Fulk, a philologist and medievalist, made a separate analysis of the term in his study on the Canons of Theodore 'Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore', collected in Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England, 2004. he analysed it as a 'sexual category' (sexual as in sexuality), owing to the context of sexual transgressions in the Canons. he decides that it refers to a man who bottoms in sexual relationships with another man. i don't have the article on hand so i'm not sure what his reasoning was, but this seems obviously inadequate given what we know from the glossary described by Dines. Latin has a word for bottom, pathica, and the lexicographer did not use this in their translation, preferring words that emphasized the baedling's femininity like effeminatus, and doesn't address the sexual context at all. Dines, however, only reading this glossary, seems to decide that it refers to a type of male homosexual too hastily, considering the Canons explicitly treat them separately. both Dines and Fulk immediately reduce the baedling to a subcategory of homosexual when neither of the sources to hand actually do so themselves.

by now it should be obvious why, seven or so years ago, we interpreted it as an equivalent to trans woman. I mean come on - a woman with a penis! these days I tend to add a bit of a caution to this understanding, which is that trans woman is the translation of baedling which seems most adequate to us, just as baedling was the translation of effeminatus that seemed most adequate to our lexicographer. but the term cannot translate perfectly; its sense was derived from some minimal context; a legal context, a doctrinal context, and so forth... the way Anglo-Saxons understood sex/gender is complicated but it has been argued that they had a 'one sex model' and didn't regard men and women as biologically separate types, which is obviously quite different from the sexual model accepted today; in any case they didn't have access to the karyotype and so on. the basic categories they used to understand gender and sexuality were different from ours. in particular, Hirschfield et al. should be understood as a particularly revolutionary moment in the genealogy of transsexuality; the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft essentially invented the concept of the 'sex change', the 'transition', conceived as a biological passage from one sex to the other. even in other contexts where (forgive me) #girlslikeus changed their bodies in some way, like the castration of the priestesses of Cybele, or those belonging to the various historical societies which we believe used premarin for feminization [disputed; see this post], there is no record that they were ever considered men at any stage or had some kind of male biology that preceded their 'gender identity.' the concept of the trans woman requires the minimal context of the coercive assignment at birth and its subsequent (civil and bio-technological) rejection. i have never encountered evidence that this has ever been true in any previous society. nonetheless, these societies still had gendered relations, and essentially wherever we find these gendered relations we also find some subject which is omitted or for whom it has been necessary to note exceptions. what is of chief interest to us is not so much that there was such a subject here or there in history (and whatever propagandistic uses this fact might have), but understanding why these regularities exist.

a very parsimonious explanation is that gender is a biological reality, and there is some particular biological subject which a whole host of words have been conjured to denote. if this were the case then we would expect that, no matter what gender/sexual system we encounter in a given society, it will inevitably find some linguistic expression. if, like me, you find this idea revolting, then you should busy yourself trying to come up with an alternative explanation which is not just plausible, but more plausible. my best guesses are outside the scope of this answer...

anyway, all of this must be very interesting to the five or six people invested in the confluence of philology and gender studies. but why on earth did it become so widely used, in so many strange and unusual contexts, in the 2010s? we're very sorry, but yes, it's our fault. you see apart from all of this, there is also a little piece of information which goes along with the word baeddel, which is that it's the root of the Modern English word bad. by way of, no less, the word baedan, 'to defile'. how this defiled historical subject came to bear responsibility for everything bad to English-speakers doesn't seem to be known from linguistic evidence. however, it makes for a very pithy little remark on transmisogyny. my dear friend [REDACTED] made a playful little post making this point and, good Lord, had we only known...

it went like this. its such a funny little idea that we all start changing our urls to include the word baeddel. in those days it was common to make puns with your url (we always did halloween and christmas ones); i was baeddelaire, a play on the French poet Baudelaire. while we all still had these urls a series of events which everyone would like to forget happened, and we became Enemies of Everyone in the Whole World. because of the url thing people started to call us "the baeddels." then there was "a cult" called "the baeddels" and so forth. this cult had various infamies attatched to it and a constellation of indefensible political positions. ultimately we faced a metric fucking shit ton of harassment, including, for some of my friends, really serious and bad irl harassment that had long-term bad awful consequences relating to stable housing and physical safety and i basically never want to talk about that part of my life ever again. and i never have to, because i've come to realize that for most people, when they use the word baeddel, they don't know about that stuff. it doesn't mean that anymore.

so what does it mean? you'll see it in a few contexts. TERFs do use it, as you guessed. i am not quite sure what they really mean by it and how it differs from other TERF barbs. i think being a baeddel invovles being politically active or at least having a political consciousness, but in a way thats distinct from just any 'TRA' or trans activist. so perhaps 'militant' trans women, but perhaps also just any trans woman with any opinions at all. how this was transmitted from tumblr/west coast tranny drama to TERF vocabulary i have no idea. but you will also find - or, could have found a few years ago - i would say 'copycat' groups who didn't know us or what we believed but heard the rumours, and established their own (generously) organizations (usually facebook groups) dedicated to putting those principles into practice. they considered themselves trans lesbian separatists and did things like doxx and harass trans women who dated cafabs. if you don't know about this, yes, there really were such groups. they mostly collapsed and disappeared because they were evildoers who based their ideology on a caricature. i knew a black trans woman who was treated very badly by one of these groups, for predictable reasons. so long-time readers: if you see people talking about their bad experiences with 'baeddels', you can't necessarily relate it to the 2014 context and assume they're carrying around old baggage. there are other dreams in the nightmare.

the most common way you'll see it today, in my experience, is in this form: people will say that it was a "slur" for trans women. they might bring up that it's the root of the word bad, and they might even think that you shouldn't use the word bad because of it, or that you shouldn't use the word baeddel because it's a slur. all of this is a silly game of internet telephone and not worth addressing. except to say that it's by no means clear that baeddel, or baedling, were slurs, or even insulting at all. while Theodore doesn't provide us with a description of how we can have sex with a baedling without sinning, and it may be the case that any sexual relations with a baedling was considered sinful, sexuality-based transgressions were not taken all that seriously in those days. there was a period where homosexuality within the Church was almost sanctioned, and it wasn't until much later that homosexuality became so harshly proscribed, to the extent that it was thought to represent a threat to society, etc. and as i mentioned, there are places in England named after baedlings. there is a little parish near Kent which is called Badlesmere, Baeddel's Lake, which was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Domesday Book (as having a lord, a handful of villagers and a few slaves; perhaps only one or two households). it's not unheard of, but i just don't know very many places called Faggot Town or some such. it's possible that baedlings had some role in Anglo-Saxon society which we are not aware of; it could even have been a prestigious one, as it was in other societies. there is just no evidence other than a couple of passing references in the literature and we'll probably never have a complete picture.

[tinyboxxtink]

“Sharky” *Part 9*

Okay it might end up only being 10 chapters, DEPENDING on what happens in the next chapter-- which guys, you’ll never see coming. Never in a million years. MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Also-- I don’t know if you care but the beginning scene/paragraph was written based on the scene in Grey’s Anatomy when Burke leaves Cristina at the altar and she has a panic attack/breakdown in her wedding dress. Just for reference, that’s what it’s supposed to look like. Don’t know who will understand that or not, but if you wanna YouTube it it’s very powerful. [To me.]

TAG LIST:

@wanniiieeee

@gibbs274

@word-scribbless

@dumauier

@chasingeverybreakingwave

@objection-argumentative

@aprildecker-blog​

Chapter List Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Part 10

-----

You made it halfway down the street before you felt your breathing increase, your body temperature rose by the second. In seconds you were hyperventilating, stuck in a damn leather trap of a dress. You were having a full on panic attack and you physically couldn’t breathe in the tight leather bodice. You had no idea what to do, you had literally never felt this panicked and scared and upset in your entire life. You tried desperately to rip off your sleeves at the very least, clawing at them while sobbing like a crazy person. But you were fighting a losing battle, and you felt yourself falling down to your feet. 

Your eyesight was blurry through tears but you managed to crawl into a nearby alley, still sobbing loudly and trying to breathe. You really thought you were going to pass out, and some creep would probably come and find your unconscious body in the alley and do sick stuff to it, and you’d be on the news at 11. 

You kept gasping for breath, now wrestling with the zipper on the back of your dress. You needed this OFF, and you needed it off NOW. You felt yourself losing consciousness, when a pair of hands caught you from behind. 

“What do you need?” The voice asked. You were certain this was a rapist, but why was he asking what you needed? 

“I...can’t….I can’t….” You sobbed, flailing your arms towards your back. You felt the hands unzip your dress just far enough that you could pull it off to rip your arms out of the sleeves and just hold it up over your breasts so you weren’t standing there half naked. Finally able to breathe you finally just sobbed while this person held you from behind, their head was pressed into your back and you could hear their words muffled but clear:

“I’m so sorry...I'm so sorry…” 

You finally looked down and realized the pair of hands that were holding you, and your panic went straight back to rage. You broke free from their grasp and spun around to see Rafael hunched over, clearly surprised by your sudden turnaround.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!” You screamed at him, causing people walking by to look in concern.

“You were having a panic attack! You nearly collapsed in the street! What was I supposed to do just walk back into the party and leave you to die?” He said loudly so people would know he had been trying to help you, not rape you.

“YES!!!”

“Oh come on Y/N---” He tried to help you steady yourself on your heels, but you ripped them off and tossed them at him.

“No!!!” You screamed. “I told you to leave me alone, Rafael for fuck’s sake! Just go back and be with your girlfriend--” You started to walk away.

“I don’t want her, I want you!!!” He yelled, making you stop in your tracks.

“Well you sure have a hell of a way of showing it!” You turned back around and yelled angrily. 

“Look, Y/N...God, I don’t know how this got so fucked up…” He shook his head as he paced the alleyway. 

“Right because nothing is ever your fault,”  You scoffed with a roll of your eyes.

“I’m not saying that! I--” He sighed and stopped pacing to look at you. “Look, I was really low, and upset about you, and Liv and I were drinking, and--”

“So your solution to getting over me was to bond with the person who sabotaged us in the first place? Real sound logic there, counselor,” You said in a mocking tone.

“Look I get what she did was wrong, but she’s also been my best friend for a very long time, and I just-- I don’t know, I focused on that part,” He looked down. 

“How? How can you just sit there and make excuses for her--”

“I’m not making excuses for her, I fucked up okay? I was drunk, and sad, and I ignored my angry feelings at Liv and one thing led to another…” 

“Oh for Christ’s sake Barba really? One thing led to another? You PURPOSEFULLY slept with the ONE person you knew I’d never forgive you for!”

“That’s not true!!!” Rafael argued. “I’m not dismissing my behavior, but I swear to you it was NOT my intention to hurt you--” 

“Really? So what did you just think I’d never find out about you and her?”

“No I just-- look the next morning she was just so happy, and I was too much of a coward to tell her that I was just missing you and--”

“For fuck’s sake Barba are we in 10th grade? You ‘accidentally’ sleep with your best friend and then just date her because you can’t tell her the truth? And I’m just supposed to believe that?”

“It’s the truth!” He yelled. “I’m not proud of it, but it is the truth. I will go right back into that party and I will end it with her right now Y/N I swear it--”

“It doesn’t matter!” You cut him off. “I don’t care what you do, or don’t do with Olivia, Barba, I really don’t. Date her, fuck her, break her heart. Because you and I are off the table, permanently” You started to walk away again, but he grabbed your hand.

“No, come on Y/N there has to be a way we get past this, there has to be. I mean, look how upset you are. I know you still care about me--”

“OF COURSE I STILL CARE ABOUT YOU, IDIOT!!!” You screeched. “Yes, I’m having a fucking nervous breakdown over you because yes I do still lo--like you, but it’s irrelevant!” 

“But why…?” He asked in a soft voice.

“Do you really think that I can EVER look at you without seeing you and that bitch with her legs in the air?” You asked. “I mean, even right this second that’s ALL I can think about!” You started to cry again as you once again  tried walking away from him.

“Y/N, Please...please I am begging you…” He grabbed both of your hands this time and got down on his knees.

“This isn’t a negotiation, counselor. There’s nothing you can do, no penance you can give,” You sniffled. “It’s just...it is what it is,” 

“Please, Y/N....,” He clung to your waist like a child as he whimpered into your stomach.

You placed your hands over his back and looked to the sky, pleading to whoever was up there to make this stop. It was absolutely true, everything you said. Even though you could see that this whole situation was just a fucked up series of events and misunderstandings, you really couldn’t look at him without seeing her. You wanted to forgive him, you wanted to pick him up off his knees right now and just kiss him until the pain went away, but you couldn’t. 

“No,” You did your best to keep a stern tone as you pried him from your body. “I’m sorry,” You whispered as you put a hand to his cheek; you noticed he had started crying as well. 

It took everything you had to pick up your heels and walk out of that alleyway with your sleeves tied around your neck so it kept your dress over your breasts. 

------

After several minutes of trying to compose himself, Rafael finally walked back down the street and into the bar where his friends were waiting. 

 Rafa! Where the hell did you go?” Oliva cried.

“I went after Y/N,”  Rafael simply stated.

 “A-Are you serious? Why?” Olivia asked in disbelief. 

“You know why, Olivia” Rafael replied with a straight face.

“I cannot believe you--”

“Look, Liv. You are my absolute best friend in this entire world, I hope you know that,” He sighed. “But this has gone too far,” 

“Excuse me?” 

“Why did you do everything you did to Y/N, Liv?” Rafael crossed his arms. “ Is it because you’ve known how I’ve felt about her from the start?”

“I...Maybe…” Olivia looked at the ground as Rafael sighed deeply.

“Olivia I have tried so hard, SO hard to be there for you. To care about you, to love you. I have chosen you over and over again, but I won’t do it anymore. What you did was wrong, and you really hurt me,” He said sternly.

“How did I--”

“By hurting Y/N, Liv! By hurting us! Now, it’s so fucked up that I will NEVER be with her, and yeah that’s my fault and I have to deal with it now but--” He took a breath. “I need space, okay? I need to face what I’ve done to someone I cared about very much, and I need to do it on my own, and not with the person who helped me do it. I’m sorry,” 

He gave her a kiss on the cheek and walked out of the party, alone.

------

The next Monday you walked into work with your head held high, despite all the whispers and snickers as you passed by each desk. 

“Hey there, Cobra,” Your colleague Stacy waved. 

“Cobra?” You raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, you know like a spitting cobra?” She smirked. 

“Oh lovely, is that my new nickname then?”

“Could be worse,” Stacy shrugged. “We could just call you ‘chum bucket’,” she added with a laugh.

“Pithy,” You chuckled mockingly. 

“Y/L/N,” Buchanan suddenly walked up to your conversation. “May I see you in my office?” 

“Um, Yeah sure…” You muttered uneasily as you followed him back to the office. You could hear Parker humming “The Death March” behind you. Vultures. You finally reached Buchanan’s office, he let you in first as he closed the door behind you.

“Sit, please,” He gestured to a chair. You obeyed as he went around and sat at his desk chair.

“So, I heard you had an interesting Halloween night…” He raised an eyebrow.

“Listen, sir I am so sorry--” You started to beg for forgiveness.

“Y/N, you are one of the best lawyers I have here,” He cut you off. “You’re a Great White among those Tiger Sharks,”

“Thank you…?” You scrunched your face.

“But you’ve been spiraling,” He sighed. “I mean, spitting on a sergeant in the middle of a bar full of NYPD, that’s…” He shook his head with a laugh of disbelief. “That’s ballsy. Do you know how many cops have called here today asking for your head on a stick?”

“I know sir and I--” You started to apologize but he put his hand up.

“But do you know what I love most about being a lawyer?” 

“What’s that?”

“I don’t work for the NYPD,” He smirked. 

“I’m sorry sir...what are you--”

“That took guts, Y/N. Putting ‘Saint’ Olivia Benson in her place like that,” He went on. “You know those schmucks at the NYPD think they are so high on the moral ground, but just look at what Barba did to you,” He came around and put a hand on your shoulder. “Lying and manipulating you like that, just for that self righteous Siren,” 

“Yeah…” You shifted uncomfortably in your chair. 

“And I would like to reward you for your courage,”  He smiled.

“Sir?” You were sure you heard him wrong.

“I know that those three idiots tried setting you up at that party to tank your career, but unfortunately for them-- it did the very opposite,” He gave you an evil smile. “I’d like to offer you the position of partner,” 

“R-Really?” You blinked in disbelief. 

“Yes really,” He chuckled. “Is that a yes?”

“Absolutely, John! Thank you!” You went to hug him but he put his hands up.

“Ah...just the thank you is fine, Y/N,”

“Right. Sorry,” You put your arms at your sides. You knew better than to show emotions at work. 

“Well then, let me show you to your new office... partner,” He smiled as he led you out of his office. You walked proudly behind him as you raised a high middle finger to the glaring looks of your co-workers.

 Maybe things were turning around….

 . 

[miniherodesktales]

Mulch: This is fun, isn’t it, guys? The whole gang back together enjoying its yearly being-hunted-down-by-a-maniac- while-saving-the-world-crazy-over-the-top misadventure. 

I know I say this everytime, but for the sake of tradition: what would you, guys, do without me?

Trouble: We wouldn’t have earaches for a start. Mulch, will you please just shut up and concentrate on leading the way to wherever it is you’re leading us?

Mulch: Ahh, I forgot we had a new addition to the group. You come close, Trubs, but you’re no Julius Root. He really knew how to bite my head off, you know? When you tell me off and use the word “please” it’s just not the same. When Root used to scream convict it was like his head and heart was about to explode and you wouldn’t know which one was gonna blow first. I miss him; you just don’t fill the void.

Trouble: Void?! How dare you -

Mulch: This is where Arty usually jumps in with a pithy remark to get us back on track - though usually it’s within my favour. Just a little heads up for you. Right, Arty? What you got for us?

Artemis: I need to tie my shoelace. Can I borrow a light?

Mulch: See? Always witty, never mundane.

Artemis: Hold on, there’s something interesting on this rock....

Holly: We don’t have time for a geology lesson, Artemis.

Artemis: Shine the light a little closer, Captain....Oh. Oh, fascinating.

Holly: All I can see is a badly carved face of a man with a long mustache. 

Artemis: Yes, but look at those etched lines above it. Now, those are Ogham markings, an ancient Irish alphabet, over a thousand years old. I take it that your gift of tongues is unable to translate something so primitive, so allow me. It’s warning us to beware the man with the mustache.

Trouble: Yeah, Mom always warned me to never trust men with beards -

Mulch: Hey!

Trouble: But she never mentioned mustaches. Let’s move on. 

Artemis: Butler, you take a look. Does it not mean anything to you? Look at the little lines across its lips. Look at the chains. 

Butler: Sorry, Artemis, but as always you see more than we do.

Artemis: How can I be the only one not comprehending this - Look! There is a Mjolnir carved just above it!

Trouble: What are you talking about?

Artemis: It’s a Loki stone! And Mjolnir is the sign of Thor.

Holly: Thor and Loki? They’re just old elf stories. How did you know about them?

Artemis: We have our own stories about them. And as you’ve already pointed out, we’re on tight schedule so I’d rather not bump into them. Let’s prove their existence another day.

Trouble: Heh, you actually believe in this stuff?! Grow up, Fowl! Uh, no offence meant, Butler.

Artemis: It’s been a pattern throughout my life that I’ve believed in things that others said I was too old to believe in. And yet I’ve always been right to do so. Let’s go another way.

Trouble: Fine. I wouldn’t want to see you upset. Teenagers! Mulch, find us another path. Mulch? CONVICT?

Artemis: Oh, how surprising. While we were chatting he’s tunneled his way into that secret chamber behind all those warning signs. It’s starting. You know, maybe I should have my mouth stitched closed because it’s always in moments like this that people suddenly stop listening to me and, frankly, it’s a waste of time and oxygen.

Butler: Please be quiet, Artemis.

Fairy Thor: WHO DISTURBS THE PEACE OF THE MIGHTY THUNDERER? DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?

Artemis: Yes, yes I do because I read and pay attention to the warning signs.

AN: This was just a bit of fun based on a half-baked notion that maybe Loki is an Irish creation from the times the Vikings were in Ireland. I’ve done no research for this, so I can’t back it up in any way. Plus, I like to think that in Artemis’ world, Thor and Loki were ancient Fairies. 

[thequibblah]

directors cut for WTRF? 🥺👉👈 not biased at all obviously just objective third party asking for a directors cut hmmm hmmmmm

literally how could u do this every other word in that fic is an easter egg i can't shut up about..... bestie u are about to have regrets

one thing u should know is that 90% of things in this fic have real-world equivalents and its not even like....... hidden equivalents. serie primo = serie a, for instance. this trend is going to continue and i won't apologise <3

fun fact i named the bar the Bar and the drinks after shapes because i was too lazy to come up with something actually clever

this bit

I’m grinning to myself by the time she approaches my table.

was a very intentional fakeout and if you read this and thought "she" would be lily, feel free to sue me for emotional damages

the biggest conundrum of this AU was, how are jily not going to have met in school when magic exists? the solution was, of course, having multiple magic schools. but i couldn't let one of them have hogwarts, that didn't seem fair. i know i did sort of let lily have it..... but i felt more comfortable making hogwarts a university so there was a legit reason why james wasn't there and in gryffindor (if he'd gone he absolutely would have been)

once solved, i did the fun thing of naming them! ottaline gambol's was easy, i just scrolled through the list of ministers for magic and picked a progressive one. peverell hall was a whim, made all the funnier when lily's reaction is:

Much was made at Otty’s — one of the more progressive magical schools, named for one of the more progressive Ministers of Magic — of schools like Peverell Hall and St. George’s. The latter, I know, is chock-full of pureblooded elite. Peverell Hall is supposed to be slightly better, but still.

dang, it's gonna be funny if she ever finds out james is a descendant of the guy it's named after

fun fact, i included this because peter's question was a real thought i had when reading bond and free, your inspiring writing knows no limits:

The first thing you conjure in Walking Wombat is a yellow quill... “Why yellow?” Peter asked. Eddie gave him a strange look. “Why not?”

i realised i'd put jily in the same conundrum they had in tis the fucking season here:

It’s only then that I remember she’s just bought us drinks. I turn back to my triangle. “Oh, shit.” I suppose I can pawn it off on one of the others.

...but of course the resolution is rather different, and i do so enjoy a james with no filter (aka default james)

I briefly lose control of my brain and my tongue. “Is it too soon to say I’m in love with you?”

by the way, no-filter james will be a theme. wild things sure do run fast but not as fast as this boy runs his mouth!

also, another interesting challenge here was making sure james has a reason to be the way he is in AU. i love playing around with james's childhood/background and seeing how that affects his character while (hopefully!) staying true to who he is. i did that in ttfs by having him move around a lot and not meet the marauders until after the flashback timeline, which is why he's less of a git — he doesn't have the level of comfort in a social setting that canon james has with hogwarts, which is basically his playground from day 2 of first year lol

here, james was probably a fkn nightmare all through school, but of course he gets a big ego check when his quidditch career is derailed. i imagine his years in italy as a continuation of that humility lesson.

I will fully admit I used to be a cocky prick. This is what comes of being a kid who grew up with everything. But one useful thing that the whole fiasco four years ago taught me is humility. I’ve learned how to ask nicely for another chance.

and so much of writing him in wtrf is juggling that typical confidence with the insecurity/fear of losing something he's invested so much in (and has seen slip away before). it's really new to me, because typically i give lily uncertain life circumstances, but i suppose it's both of them in this AU.

the car thing was... i swear didn't start out as smutty, it was purely because i wanted a way to establish lily as muggleborn in a world where the connotations of not having magical parents is very different. more to come on that!

also, come to think of it, by this metric...

I’m now in dangerous territory, since that adds another impressive action to her running tally.

...i think james is already in love with her LOL

this bit:

The street is considered indecent and the downstairs hallway would have our landlady come running at once, so if it pleases Your Honour, we would recommend the sitting room sofa.

...was actually because in draft one lily was a lawyer, but then it was funny enough that i didn't want to take it out, but NOW i realise it makes it sound a little like she's addressing james as your honour, which.... hm. but anyway, we move on

Marc Bolan begs us to get it on through the stereo, vocalising my thoughts exactly.

the song here was initially "you shook me" (h/t @keepingupwithpotters) but i chickened out because zeppelin is SO horny dfjkhgkjs

also, it gave me so much joy to read everyone reacting to lily thinking about her ex (the general vibe was "who the fuck is this guy!!! ew!!!!") — rest assured (or, unassured??) that he has a part to play in all this. anyway, this is one of my fave lines:

He’s just a person, and there’s such a relief in sleeping with James and not the myth of a guy.

because as any come together reader knows....

Just James. Just James. It was never just James.

wtrf lily will learn!

literally the whole world knows i'm obsessed with needle drops that have no subtlety at all, but this one...

We just laugh, tangled together in a sweaty heap, as “Heaven Is in the Back Seat of My Cadillac” plays through the car’s speakers. “On the nose, isn’t it?” James says, sitting up.

...was pure luck, because i was looking up the top hits on the uk singles chart for the week(ish) this scene takes place in so that i could find a song that would realistically play on the radio, saw this, and was like omg the stars really do align

i feel like the thing i enjoy most about writing romance is the importance i get to place in noticing/looking/observing (and sometimes, not noticing!). it's just such a powerful but simple writerly tool, and god knows i am obsessed with pithy descriptions anyway, so this bit i am especially happy with:

James is already waiting, leaning against the car with his hands in his pockets. I feel as though I’m seeing him for the first time, the faint light of the flickering streetlamp catching him in profile: the strong slope of his nose, the hard line of his jaw, the curve of his smile. He studies the facade of our building with open curiosity, and I wonder what he’s looking for.

(one can only imagine james's train of thought in this moment. perhaps "ah. here lives the future love of my life"?)

“Thanks,” she tacks on at the end. I tip my head to one side in confusion. “For what?” “For, I don’t know. Being nice.” She laughs awkwardly. “I don’t do this very much.”

it wouldn't be a quibblah original tee em without some discourse to come about the nature of romantic/sexual relationships, would it? one thing i enjoy about this AU ("one thing" i say as if this isn't the billionth thing in a list) is that i get to write a romantic lily who's squaring that romanticism with what she perceives as the culture of the times. (this is a bit of a staple in all my characterisations of lily, but it is not often paired with casual sex, the complication of all complications!)

oh this bit literally wrote itself like i didn't even pause to think just vomited it out:

In the morning — and it must be early still — the sun streams through Lily’s sorry excuses for curtains with aggression that cannot be ignored. I crack open an eye to find myself sprawled out across her bed, quite literally spread-eagled. She’s attached to my side like a barnacle. Or a very pretty barnacle, anyway.

i'm especially proud of james's voice in this story. i don't often write first-person fic and i was worried how it'd turn out, but i think james as a character/narrator typically colours his own 3rd-person narration so strongly that it ended up a smoother transition than i'd feared!

also i just. i can't resist throwing in comic relief and i hope that this whole segment was a gentle enough preparation for the awkwardness that followed LOL

All of a sudden, the balcony door bursts open. I nearly drop the mug. “What the—” Mary pokes her head around the corner, sporting a righteous smile. “Morning, handsome.” Over her shoulder she shouts, “He’s on the balcony!” I blink. There’s a sound from inside the flat, as if something very large has just been dropped. Then a swear. “Oh, shit,” I say, realisation dawning, “you weren’t looking for me, were you? It’s so loud out here—” Mary cups a hand around her mouth and stage-whispers, “Lily was frantic.” She’s quite violently yanked back, and Lily herself appears in the doorway, slightly out of breath. “Should’ve checked the balcony first,” she says, and closes the door before Mary can insert herself into the space again. “Hi,” I say, which is agreed-upon best practice for greeting a woman you’ve just had fantastic sex with and ideally would like to have sex with again.

to this day i don't know what lily dropped. let's hope it wasn't expensive!

Captained the under-17 English squad at the World Cup some years back, Serie Primo’s lead goal-scorer of last year… Only an injury in what should’ve been his first season at Puddlemere mars his record. I wince reading about it and comparing it to a heap of press clippings. James Potter was hurt, and Puddlemere didn’t fancy paying for him not to play, so they shipped him off to Milan.

(you cannot imagine how much pointed interrogation of my brother it took to gather this intel.) i constantly worry that i've got dates or timelines wrong somehow — you might notice i tweaked under-17, which used to be under-19 until i realised that made no sense (even though in terms of its career importance i would much preferred it to have been u-19.... anyway). i also found out that u-17 football squads don't actually have captains but i said fuck it on that count.

but obviously i started writing this AU for the sports possibilities, only to discover i'm going to have to interfere a great deal with the Timeline (you shall see in future instalments).

god i really went through the whole fic. like i reread the whole thing to do this. here u go clare jfbghjfd

[ghostmartyr]

So if you, like me, have nothing to do but wonder about the state of my inbox, you might rightfully be wondering how I plan to deal with the obscene backlog I have spent so many years failing to deal with.

If you have never wondered that, fear not, that doesn’t exclude you from finding out.

Today we’re just going to go through my entire slew of unanswered asks, and instead of answering them, I am going to provide excuses for why I didn’t do anything with them.

For added fun, several of the asks were in my Drafts.

I will not be cutting out the comments I started to make.

I will no doubt regret this.

Let’s have a time, shall we?

I don’t even know what year this is from. If I remember correctly, I didn’t get back to you because I thought about trying to reason out who would legitimately win, and there were too many points for both sides. I kept intending to come up with a proper answer, then time went by and this got buried.

Though the actual answer is probably “it depends on who gets the main character sticker at the time.”

...

..

.

Well.

I can tell you this is multiple years old.

We, as humans, aren’t equipped for time travel.

I didn’t answer this one because I didn’t feel like it was asking for one, and I’m only reproducing it here because it is really, really funny now.

Two years old. Plus change.

I think the entire reason I never replied to this one is that it cheered me up whenever I scrolled down enough to see it, so thank you.

You know, I entered the link at the time. Really, I did. But then came trying to come up with a comment and what can you really follow that with?

(Click the link.)

Okay then.

I still feel no need to respond to this, so that’s probably why I didn’t to start with.

Historia and literally anyone.

I don’t remember why I didn’t answer this, which usually means some combination of feeling tired and not being in the mood to scroll down to where it was.

Oops.

The thing is, this crosses dangerously close to being a fic idea. Fic ideas take time and effort. You can imagine the absolute dread I felt at having to engage with either concept.

It would have been a lot of fun to do, though. Hats off.

See, again. This is a very interesting concept that requires thought. I can tell you when I received it I was in no mood for anything that required anything of the sort.

I wrote a fic that is possibly never going to see the light of day now where they hang out in a kitchen with hot chocolate together and bond through unstated trauma and Frieda attempting to make things better.

That probably contributed to interfering with imagining how they would actually get along.

Anyway, I ship them slightly in that fic AU. Don’t @ me.

Oh dang. I remember this.

I actually really wanted to answer it, but the problem is that I wanted to come up with a good answer. Every character, tiered by their chances. A full Hunger Games edition of what went down and who killed who.

Then I didn’t.

Anyway, turns out the answer is that no one feels the need to chop of rocking chairs in a hurry, so she’d last a long time!

I didn’t answer this because I try to avoid responding with, “I don’t know.” My secondary answer would probably have been, “By being killed.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with those answers, but unless there’s been a tonal trend in asks, I assume that pithy answers that don’t actually have any meat behind them would not be appreciated.

I would stick to him probably being killed, though. But some signs do point to him being relatively immortal.

Hm.

Hmm.

I don’t know why I didn’t answer this, but I would guess it had something to do with me caring very little about Ymir’s thoughts on anything outside of her little clutch of people. And ongoing trauma of repeated dead/alive Ymir commentary killing off my desire to come up with a good answer.

Sorry?

I... have no idea why I didn’t answer this? Maybe I didn’t see it?

Anyway, yes.

There’s a longer version behind that yes, and I’m sure that might have contributed to never getting around to answering this. ...Assuming a past where I did actually see this one.

I have a confession.

I don’t really like crossovers.

There’s a sliding scale of degree, but that’s basically why this didn’t get a response.

Ah, we’ve landed on a recurring theme.

Sometimes, answers involve me thinking about the entire cast.

The usual consequence of that is I don’t have the energy for that, so nothing ever happens with these.

Oh, this one’s easy.

I had no fucking clue.

No ideas, head empty.

That didn’t seem like a good answer, so here we are, probably around a year later. I still have no clue. If I were forced to write a singing duo AU, I would probably just put some adjectives and nouns into a blender and flip a coin.

Names are hard.

I think I didn’t answer this one because I felt like I’d answered similar asks before. And I’m not really sure when this is from, but it’s possible canon complicated coming up with an answer that wasn’t distressed screeching.

Something something give Connie and Mikasa hugs, not partial about where they get them from.

Apparently not. Oops.

I can’t remember why I didn’t respond to this one. It’s possible the oodles of bad parenting proved too distracting to formulate such a post.

Sometimes I get an ask, and my immediate, gut reaction is, how the fuck should I know?

If I can move past that, the ask is answered.

If I can’t, the ask continues its descent through scroll hell.

I am sorry. There are no answers here.

Yeah, this is just the same as the above, just with I have no idea.

It’d probably be a Madoka Magic deal.

Huh. I don’t remember passing this one over. If I were to guess a timeline, I was probably too bitter over potential post-timeskip looks that I never got to be interested in focusing on the characters lucky enough to get good ones.

Go Connie for being less short, I suppose.

This clearly belonged to something that I was doing, but time has eroded the context, so I am simply left with failure and disappointment on all sides. Sorry.

Aw, we’re getting into the boring part of the inbox now, I think. Not because of the questions; you guys are always great. But I can’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t have answered this, which leads me to think that the reason was I was too tired to put words together.

That’s a boring reason, so maybe I should go into Drafts for the next few...

Yeah, still unfairly prejudiced against crossovers. I am no fun, etc. etc.

I have no memory of it, but I feel like I didn’t answer this because there was no way I could match this kindly anon’s enthusiasm.

You go, random internet person.

You have good ideas.

Oh no.

Uh.

See.

I know exactly why I didn’t answer this one.

I am so sorry, Anon.

I really didn’t care.

I am filled with affection for you because you clearly do, but uh.

...I basically put this on Read.

This has a very simple, ie boring, explanation. Any time someone asks about the cast as a whole, I want to think about the cast as a whole, and that takes a lot more thought than most of the asks I get. Cue putting it off. Cue it getting lost in scroll hell. On and on we go until we end up here.

Anything that opens with kilometers is something that requires more brain power than I have had in the past year.

Also I think I got this during a spoiler week, so I saw it, but I was trying not to look at it, and then it got lost in the post-chapter asks.

That happens a lot.

We might see it more soon.

If I can’t come up with words more than “-shrug-” I try not to answer.

...Good news, though!

The manga did my job for me!

I feel like I answered some variation of this. That might be why I didn’t answer this specific one.

The wiki does a better job keeping track of the timeline than I ever have. I probably didn’t answer this because it would involve trying to remember which volume actually name-dropped a number of weeks or months. Searching for lines I know a character said is pretty easy, but searching out lines I have a vague feeling of someone providing? That tends to hit the frustration button with the force of a truck.

But yeah, if you ever want to know how long something took, the wiki is absolutely your friend. They do good work.

Consider: “What if” questions are hard, and I am lazy.

This is actually one I really did mean to get to, sorry. It’s an interesting thought, and I miss Sasha.

...I clearly did a magnificent job answering your asks, friend.

Prediction asks are hard for me; I feel like I’m throwing darts randomly into the air and the dartboard is still deciding if it’s going to show up. So uh. I guess I just kept putting this off until it didn’t get answered.

This post is going to have so many apologies. Implied and otherwise.

I continue to be the No Fun Police who accidentally-on-purpose avoids crossover commentary.

I feel like I didn’t answer this one entirely because seeing it in my inbox gave me far too much joy to have it lost in a sea of posts.

This is what my inbox was made for.

I have no idea when this was from, but I see your emotions and appreciate them, Anon.

...Did I not see this one?

Hey, Anon who probably doesn’t remember sending this: This is a good ask and deserved some good attention, and I’m sorry I missed my shot at it. Good thoughts.

I didn’t answer this one entirely because I knew I couldn’t match the energy of it, and responding with anything less felt heretical.

That is one hell of a mood, Anon.

This is definitely from the era of, “Can’t think, brain empty.” Sorry about not getting back to you, I just really couldn’t organize my thoughts well enough to come up with an answer.

I feel like I didn’t know what this was continuing from and was too exhausted to ask.

LOOK YOU CAN SEE I WANTED TO ANSWER THIS BECAUSE IT’S A DRAFT.

Too many things, Anon.

I liked so many things about all of that. Trying to turn that enthusiasm into words wasn’t agreeing with me, so I put it in Drafts and told myself one day I’d do the most awesome post detailing everything.

Intentions, huh?

Every time I tried to take a normal screenshot with formatting Tumblr just laughed at me, so that might have been a contributing factor.

Dang, I’m really sorry. This is another one of those cases where I wanted to take my time with a response, and I took too long.

I, uh.

Am guilty of not being too interested in pondering Ymir’s thoughts on Levi or Erwin.

That’s it, that’s the explanation.

Yeah, I just couldn’t come up with an answer here? Or someone else asked? Or several of my friends decided to be annoying about lists on Discord? I don’t even know.

Presumably there could be a list.

There is not.

Honestly, I just couldn’t figure out how to follow that starting sentence up. A thought exercise on Armin, Historia, gender, and themes sounded really interesting, and I put it in Drafts so as not to forget it being interesting.

Then, you know. This post sort of paints the picture.

Ah.

Man, I really was looking forward to putting some proper thought into this. That’s the problem with having so many things I love in one place, I guess. Symbolism? Historia and Ymir? Mikasa? So many good things! Where do I start!

With paralyzing indecision that results in not a lot. Sorry, Anon. This really did light up my day when I got it.

Here’s the thing about me and writing:

I often fail to.

(I love both these ideas, though.)

Yes.

Do I know why I didn’t get around to answering this?

Absolutely not.

But yes, I’d agree with that.

GOOD NEWS!

The manga actually gave us some of them together in the future.

I occasionally giggled over their shared distaste.

It was a good time.

And this is another one I just do not know why I didn’t answer, whoops.

This never got answered because I couldn’t come up with an answer.

Broad questions are scary because they can go just about anywhere and I didn’t know how to handle that level of commitment.

I think I didn’t answer this one, A), because words are hard, and B), because mostly I just wanted to listen to more of your wondering and less of mine.

I probably could have answered this by saying I don’t have any, but that seemed rude, so I didn’t respond to it at all.

Yep.

Frieda is worthy of my time and effort.

Landing this in Drafts instead of my inbox.

Where the lighting makes it more obvious that hope has gone there to die.

I think about it so much too.

I find the answers fundamentally upsetting.

That is probably why I did not provide an answer here.

That is a lot of kids to make up headcanons for.

So I didn’t.

She’s eaten by dogs before she develops a personality.

Since that seemed like the wrong thing to say, I said nothing, and into Drafts this went.

‘I have no earthly clue’ seemed similarly unhelpful.

At this point, we understand that there is no mystery to my backlog.

This one hurts.

-sees the 112 reference-

Wow does it hurt.

As I hope is obvious, I really, really loved this question, and kept meaning to carve out time to work on it specifically. What went sideways was trying to put words to how EMA functions. I knew the feel of what I wanted to express, but every time I tried to write it, it came out wonky.

I’m very sorry I couldn’t do anything for this, because I was thrilled to spend time with it.

I didn’t answer this because Fuck Marley.

It’s nothing against you. At the time, I simply wasn’t in any mood to consider any version of Marley. Even the canon version was too much for me, so giving it my time in a roleswap AU had me hissing.

Roleswaps in general are amazing, and I love them a lot. A dedicated person could make a fantastic one based around Marley and Paradis. I think it would probably be cool af.

But I was so tired of Marley when I got this, I just couldn’t make myself think about it. Sorry. It’s a fun idea.

I didn’t answer this one because I kept trying to extend my response past, “I think he just really likes baseball.”

I think he just really likes baseball.

My feelings on that as a quality answer are derogatory.

Mm. The ones where I actually tried to get something started hurts.

Ultimately, this ask was a larger demand than I could make my brain work through at the time. I made sure to write down the tl;dr version of Sasha’s, because I found that desperately important, and not something that people talk about much, but the additional weight of trying to think of themes for multiple characters made it hard to progress.

Me, looking at the prompts: Hi my brain left me.

Sorry, Anon. Too many gears were moving for me to get a proper feel for what I wanted to do with this one, so I ended up ditching it. ...I was planning to finish it, though. Eventually. See, I even put the quote in the Draft version as a reminder of what I was doing, so I could get back to it right away.

Yeeeeah, this is just one more to the “I will give this wonderful thing all the time it deserves!” pile.

The pile is stored in the Failure Corner.

Perfectionism is the enemy of progress.

You guys really like crossovers.

I love that for you.

-spends two years ignoring you-

I mean, I just didn’t know what to do with the rainbows.

They sure are there.

They sure are pretty.

I sure couldn’t come up with a comment to add.

...I don’t know why I didn’t answer this. Possibly because I think it’s fine? I’m not too attached to it, and spent the whole manga period wanting to watch an anime version instead, then we got an anime version.

I’d guess that my general “meh” feelings interfered with responding here.

No idea why I didn’t answer this.

Yes, and good for you.

I support all thoughts on giving the Reiss kiddos personalities.

I think I didn’t get back to you on this because I wasn’t sure how to encourage you to keep going so I just sat awkwardly on my hands and felt weird about not saying anything.

...Thanks for sharing!

I love how it’s the little things that date these.

Unfortunately, we’re now at the point where 90% of the reason I didn’t answer was because I was too sick to muster up anything approaching enthusiasm.

Or because I’d just finished answering a bunch of chapter-specific things and was burnt out.

This felt pretty self-explanatory to me, so I felt like that gave me permission to ignore it.

Also, it mentions Marley.

I might be slightly petty.

Really though, I think what stopped me from giving a proper answer is that the question of what an author is trying to say throws me off a little. I work better thinking of it in terms of what the story is saying, with the author just happening to be the hands that wrote it all down.

I don’t know. This was probably another case of feeling like I should give this more of my time than I was able.

I couldn’t decide.

That’s it.

That’s the reason.

Everyone needs to give Mikasa a hug.

My blog title for a hug.

-the crossover snake hisses and consumes another-

I am so sorry.

This is fun.

I probably should have just gone with posting and saying so, because I am genuinely charmed by this. I tend to feel like I have to add something to asks to justify the post. That policy maybe didn’t need to be a thing.

I love my anons.

I want that to be clear.

Really, I do.

I especially love their willingness to embrace my crackpot logic.

Still.

Sometimes, the only response one can have to Schrodinger’s Ymir is to ignore its existence, find a pillow, and scream into it for the rest of time.

This replaces typing.

-looks at Armin-

-looks at Eren-

Yeah, don’t know why I didn’t answer this one, either. I blame tiredness? Sorry about that.

I feel like I didn’t answer this one because it felt like work.

This is where I start considering that making this post was a mistake.

I could have just agreed with you and gone about my day.

Probably should have.

Did not.

Another one for that, “had nothing to add so I just left it in a corner, abandoned and unloved,” pile.

There is an apology section at the end, but we’re not there yet.

This one I don’t think I noticed.

Alternatively, I did notice, and wasn’t sure “Yes,” would pass as a good enough answer.

--------------------------------------

Okay, time to really just get into it: I think for the remainder of my inbox, I didn’t answer because physically, I was just too damn exhausted, and I kept waiting for a point in time where I’d feel better. Sorry to put a limit on the personalization, but in the end, that’s all there was to it, and rephrasing it a dozen times will make me crazy.

And here we are.

Well.

Good grief, do you guys even have any clue how much I like all of you?

Obviously there’s a lot of guilt in the above, because I can’t tell you how much I wanted, each time, to give a great answer that would make you thrilled you messaged me. I am so sorry to all of these I didn’t get to. There were days when the alerts in my inbox were the best thing to happen to me, and I never wanted to let any of them go without acknowledgment.

I try to say thank you as often as I can in my responses, because that’s as close as I can get to reminding you all, constantly, that I am grateful for your participation. The only times I don’t say it is when I worry that it’ll look like it’s being done out of habit, not genuine gratitude. Or when I think you might take it the wrong way if I say thanks for a basic conversation. Because you provide me content and make me interested in things I might not normally look twice at.

There are so many instances of people saying hi, and thank you, and wishing everyone well here.

I haven’t been active in the larger fandom in two years, but I have always been so happy that you guys kept dropping by my space anyway.

You are a pleasure and light in my life, no matter how much snark I might throw about.

Thank you all.

[desdemonafictional]

2020 Fanfic Year End Summary

Hey ho let’s go

Nev does these every year and I think they’re interesting, so for the first time I’m gonna give it a go too. I feel like this has been the longest fucking year--the Zine feels like it was two years ago and last January feels like it was ten years ago.

I’m gonna answer some questions and do a little reflection on the year 

This year I technically finished Icarus with 2k words of a 36k story, and after that I went on to produce 197k words not even COUNTING the stuff from GPAU which I do not know how to divide up for 2020. 

That’s 23 fics in one year, 8 of which were cowriting projects. This year has been, objectively, insane. By comparison, in 2019 I produced 17 fics and at the time I thought THAT was doing pretty impressive work. Now it’s not my best year by sheer number of titles--2018 was an oil boom while I was into JTHM and I actually put out 25 fics that year, some of which were short oneshots and some of which were two- or three-shots. But in terms of words? 2020 knocked them all out of the park. Which is absolutely something I owe to my amazing friends who let me ride around in their brains like the parasite I am.

In 2018 I started cowriting with Chokopopo, in 2019 I started cowriting with Neveralarch, and in 2020 I just did a fucking ton more of that with no looking back. It’s so incredibly motivating to have someone to show your progress to! And to have someone to hand the project over to when you’re stuck. If I hadn’t had Nev to bounce off of, most of this fic wouldn’t have been thought up at all, let alone finished. And don’t even get me started on GPAU! Choko and Zephyr and me have done such amazing things with “Welcome! Everything is fine”, and I can’t wait to be able to wrap that up and leave it for posterity.

I switched job positions around July of this year, and it’s changed the way I produce fic. Not sure if it’s good yet or not. I was never actually under a stay at home order this year because I work for a state agency, so to a degree I’ve missed out on the ways that quarantine affected other writers. I think I was fortunate?

Best Title 

Ahhh this is tough, I put a lot of effort into my titles this year--I promised myself in 2019 I was going to stop using song lyrics for fic titles because they make songs loop in my brain and it’s self inflicted torment, which is a promise I... mostly kept. “Dress Your Idol in Gold and Ashes” is the one I put most effort into probably, because I kept toying around with it trying to find something that was evocative of the right pagan imagery, and also the idea that got me started on the fic was a passage in a text book about the daily dressing of an idol statue in ancient Egypt.

“Broke My Last Glass Jaw” gets special mention because I named it after an essay that I wrote in undergrad for my African American Lit course, in which I broke down themes of the spoiled american dream via the lens of 90′s rap.

Worst Title

“Take one for the Team” is definitely my laziest title. It’s just super self indulgent kink fic, no character arc or anything, so I couldn’t find a good image or phrase to bring in for the title. Also I remember I really wanted to post it quickly, since it was a response to some art I was looking at, and I wanted the artist to see. I’m sure I could have done better with the title.

I did end up titling “Fear and Delight” after a song but I forgive myself because I literally only wrote the fic because the song existed first.

Best Summary

Some of these summaries I wrote and a some I did not, but of the ones that I wrote I think.... “ I'm All Full Up on Yesterdays, Don't Sing Me No More Blues” is the best one. It launches you directly into the action, while preserving the surprise reveal at the end of chapter 1. I actually wrote chapter one with this summary in mind, so it was baked in there from the start.

Jazz turned in his seat, cube at his lips, just in time to spot the white pursuit vehicle steaming and panting in the doorway. “Jazz of Staniz,” the enforcer shouted, “surrender the matrix and come quietly!”

Jazz knocked back his drink. “Well!” he said to the open-mouthed bartender, “time to split!”

Worst Summary

I mean, summaries are hard for everyone, right? That’s the thing we all universally struggle with, I think? I usually end up liking mine, and this year I was less afraid to just let a section of the story speak for itself. Anyway the worst one is “ Broke My Last Glass Jaw” by virtue of the fact that I had to come back months later and add another line because I wasn’t satisfied with how it was reaching audiences.

After the war, Impactor is at loose ends.

(They were friends once, weren't they? After all this time, Impactor wonders if Megatron hasn't managed to forget.)

I really wanted that one line to say it all, but honestly it requires a lot of trust in me as the author and most of the people who pass by the fic in the archive aren’t gonna know me from adam. The second line clarifies what kind of story it’s going to be in terms of tone and theme.

Best First Line

I’m pretty ambivalent about most of my first lines. Since Nev already pointed out the first line in “ Apotheosis”, I have to admit, it is pretty good. It gets off to a real jaunty start.

“Excuse me,” Starscream said, striding down the steps of the senate chambers with his cape flaring out behind him, “get your cowcatcher out of his face, you tin-plated amateur despot, he’s with me.”

I also like the audacity of a run on sentence that is the opening to “ Desecrate You”

Ratchet clicks the video because it was auto-recommended, and because First Aid is always dropping hopeful hints that he wants her to watch his show when he’s supposed to be grading papers, and because something about the title (“This is Definitely a Hoax! None of this is Real! Short Cut Footage Episode”) makes her wonder why the hell someone who runs a Ghost Hunting youtube channel would bill their own hard work as a hoax right out of the bag.

Worst First Line

Definitely the least interesting is from “Tantric Sex, and Other Mysteries of the Divine”. I guess it’s another fic where I was really eager to get to the meat of the fic, and so I just went back after I was done with the fic and wrote a paragraph of bare bones setting context so we could move on already.

It’s game night at Swerve’s, and Nightbeat is out in the thick of the crew for once, getting the lay of the land.

I have the same problem in a few fics, which probably arises from the fact that when I read a fic, I often skim the first paragraph or so to see if I really want to commit to the read. So I sometimes write like I’m expecting the audience to do that too. I probably need to work on that. Man, I even did it in Sexy Staycation.

Best Last Line

I like endings! I usually have a good gut instinct for where stories should end, and how to pace that, and what image I want to close the fic on. Often times I’ll be writing a story and feeling really lukewarm about it, and then the ending will come to me, and I’ll feel totally won over by it. That happened with my Suicide Squad fic years ago. So this is for the most part me picking the best of the things I already like. “Broke My Last Glass Jaw” has a good pithy one; I like how it isolates this moment as a moment of choice, and how it’s also ambiguous whether he will change because of this or whether he’s doomed to go back to his predetermined pattern.

And despite the unguarded door and the empty inviting streets beyond, where no one wants or expects anything of him but his feterless bitter trog onward into the next waiting prison cell, Impactor lays down, and Impactor does.

Special mention goes to “ The Sky Dark in its Eclipse : Orange Light Remix”, because the ending section is one of the big changes I brought to the remix, and I’m really happy with how it alters the shape of the narrative and also how it changes the focus of Rung’s arc. Most of the actual words in this fic were written by Choko in 2018, so this is like a collab in slow motion--I changed loadstone moments mostly, some of the framing, all of the backstory, and updated the setting for Cybertron. But the ending is all me.

On the morning of Intro to Psych finals, while Hot Rod hums and taps and scrolls back and forth through his test on the front row of the testing hall, Rung will sit behind his desk and brush the dust from the rotors of his fateful archetype, and start the long process of putting the pieces together once and for all.

Worst Last Line

Again, I like my endings, so this is really the worst of the best. The original ending line I wrote for “ All Our Urgent Restless Sighing” was:

Deadlock’s finials twitched. “...I am a reasonable amount of interested,” he said, “in this topic.”

And in the beta process, Nev came back in and added the line about Ratchet and cuddling, which was a big hit with the readers it seems like. So clearly I benefitted from some help there haha!

Looking back, did you write more or less than you thought you would this year?

you know what, I definitely wrote more than I thought I would. I didn’t see “Don’t Sing Me No More Blues” coming at all, and that was once a month for most of the year. I was hoping that I would be able to write a few things outside of Transformers, because I always worry that my long spans of hyperfixation are driving away my longtime readers... and I did manage to get one hxh thing written that was good, and one hxh thing started that is mediocre so far. So I guess I’ll call that good enough.

 What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, just your favorite.

hmm I’m really proud of the Pharma chapter me and Choko put together for GPAU--the body horror, the tragedy, the lotus eater machine plot. But even though that felt like a whole ass story of its own, I guess it’s only a chapter at the end of the day. So my favorite story would be “Apotheosis”. It’s just SO much, and we had SO many things we wanted to do, and somehow we managed to do them ALL. Corpses! Children! God! It’s got everything! The only thing it doesn’t have is the idea that literally started us plotting out the fic. And that was “ritual public sex with Starscream and Rung”. Oh well. Maybe someday. Probably not.

Okay, Now your most popular story

Ha! I tend to view the success of a fic more based on its bookmark ratio than its hit count, but by the numbers, unsurprisingly, “ Don't Sing Me No More Blues” is my most popular fic of the year at a whopping 3k hits and 113 bookmarks. Well, it is jazz/prowl which means it has a built in audience of considerable size, and it also updated seven times this year which increases its net range, so no surprise. But I think people also just really vibed with it--it’s very much a product of the times we are living in, and I don’t think it could have been written in any year except for 2020. 

“Dress Your Idol” has 58 bookmarks, by the way. I’m extremely proud of that fic for having such a high bookmark to view ratio. I guess the people who did read it liked it a lot.

Story most underappreciated in its Time.

Okay nothing is as under-exposed as the stuff I produced in JTHM, so I’m definitely not complaining. It’s hard to think about leaving TF because TF is such an enthusiastic community. That said, “ Neggnog Cozy” did not get eyeballs. I’m not surprised, it’s short and it’s gen, and Thundercracker doesn’t have the built in audience of say Starscream. Still, I thought it was really funny and cute and I would have liked it if more people would have given it a chance.

Story that could have been better

Oh, “ Melusine Among the Tombs” for sure. I went into that with only the first chapter planned and immediately after realized that I had no idea where the fic was going and also I had lost my grip on canon characterization after a couple years going rusty in other fandoms. I plan to finish it eventually, but I need a better plan than “wing it???” first.

Sexiest Story

I wrote SO much weird kink this year. Like. Shout out to past me for writing some pretty spicy JTHM fic, but this year I really leaned into how weird you can plausibly get with an all robot all alien cast. 

“ The Sensual Machine” is the most unabashedly horny because it was written specifically for a weird kink themed zine that I was an editor on. “Desecrate You” is also quite horny but I almost exclusively wrote the frame device for that, so I don’t get sexy credit lmao. “Fear and Delight” was a big hit with all the hxh readers and I think it has an element of sexiness more so than pure horniness--its has a kind of glamour and style to it.

Most fun story

“Starscream's Sexy Staycation” is by far the most unabashedly comic and sexy and silly and low stakes. It has one of my favorite kinks, a beautiful stupid moment of Ratchet suffering, and Rung calling safeword which is something new and fresh and I want a lot more of it in the world.

Did any stories shift your perceptions of the characters?

“ Lacunae” was given to me as a yule gift prompt with the express intention of explaining who the fuck Carmilla’s mother was, and what the deal is with Carmilla as well. This would have forced me to reevaluate my understanding of the novel except for the TEENSY insignificant fact that I realized I had never finished reading Carmilla, somehow, and ended up reading it for the first time in December in preparation for yule. So uh. Hmm.

I think “ Don't Sing Me No More Blues” made me think about Prowl in a different way. I wasn’t really expecting him to be this hard-edged idealist when I started out on the fic. He was originally going to be much more like the autistic coded Prowl of “The Cop and the Cryptid,” one of my favorite fics ever. Also, I started writing the fic about a month before the riots and police protest kicked off in America this year, and it really caused me to zero in on how Prowl being part of a system like that affects his relationship to the world and other characters.

Hardest Story to Write

“ Elegy for Actaeon of the Hounds” took me a total of six months to write from start to finish. I don’t know why. Well, It’s partly because there are three involved sex scenes and sex scenes are actually very difficult and time consuming for me to write. It’s also partly because I kept wanting it to have a character arc, and I kept getting stumped on how to handle that. Beauty and the Beast plot lift? Have Rodimus be a rabbit? Eventually I settled on the version that kept the cast tightly cinched down around Megatron and Rung, and I’m happy with the result.

Easiest Story to Write

When we were writing “Apotheosis” it felt like we were on FIRE, we were so productive and we started three other projects between us while it was in motion. But “Take One For the Team” was absolutely the most fun to write, it basically wrote itself

Most Overdue Story

“Champagne in the Final Days of Rome” was based off a conversation I had with Nev pretty early on in our friendship--Discord says it was June 2019, so that’s uhhh ten months between discussion to actual writing? And it still didn’t turn out to be the fic we were originally outlining, haha.

Oh god you know what was really the most overdue? The last chapter of “Icarus; or, Look Who's Digging His Own Grave”. It was literally a year, January to January, between chapter 12 and 13. For a while I thought maybe I was just going to have to leave it there, without resolving the time loop problem at all.

Did you take writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Writing for the zine was a big risk. I remember Nev had to reassure me at least twice that what I was writing wasn’t too weird or off-topic or embarrassing to be part of the project. Now, of course, I’m very happy with it. But my god I was nervous to post something that was like.... straight up actually bimboification applied to one of the most popular toy characters of all time.

What I learned from this is that people love horny shit, are READY to take a chance on a weird fic when its in the right wrapping paper, and when in doubt you CAN sell people on a kink they’re not really into by making the kink actually a reflection of a character arc. Are you writing this down?

Do you have any goals for writing in the new year?

Finish GPAU!!!!!!

I’d like to FINALLY sit down and do some hard work on my original fiction. I’ve been kind of waiting for the tf hyperfixation to wane so I could move forward, and I think that process is in motion now. But who knows. If Rung shows up in the new comics I might get nerfed again.

Other than that I’d like to write at least one fanfic that isn’t TF, and I would like to get this really crunchy Rung/Pharma fic off the ground so I can make some people CRY

[sinceyouaskedme]

Thoughts on episode 4 of The College Tapes 

(also containing some commentary+spoilers for The A.M. Archives)

(also also, fair warning that this is somehow almost 1,000 words long? Whoops! Guess I have some opinions!!) 

Wanna preface this by saying it’s gonna sound like I’m really bitter and upset, but honestly I’ve recently achieved complete emotional detachment and now I feel absolutely nothing about any of this. It’s quite nice.

The evolution of: seeing the episode summary > “oh god, it’s the dreaded Oliver episode, guess I better get this over with” > realizing there’s no reason to believe Oliver would be in only one episode and my brain just made that up optimistically > actually listening to the episode and realizing with dawning horror that it’s actually structured as The Only Mark Episode, Featuring Oliver Who Will Continue On To Be A Major Plot Piece For The Rest Of The Series > 💀💀💀 

Anyways, I tried to be nice about Briggon being not a great writer because it was his first time but Meghan doesn’t have that excuse so I get to be mean and straight out say this episode sucked lol

IDK who this character she wrote is, but it’s not Mark Bryant

Ha ha ha ha ha I’m joking, I know exactly who she was writing and it’s Dean Winchester, beat for beat and line for line. I haven’t watched that show in probably five years and good god I did not miss him.

I get that spin-offs are hard. It’s difficult to quickly introduce a character in a way that won’t bore people who have seen the original show while still making sure your new audience gets a good grasp on the necessary backstory, so it’s a common writing trick to just pick one or two traits to really hammer in on for each character. I understand the logic. But I DEEPLY disagree with the decision to present Mark’s primary traits as “recovered alcoholic” and “nonconsensual lab rat”.

Alcohol culture is always so boring lmfao idk why non-sober people find it so difficult to comprehend that not drinking alcohol =/= not having any sort of social life as an adult. But, whatever, this is a standard complaint I have about a lot of media. The particular thing here on which I want to remark is that it’s so interesting to hear Mark identify Boston as a city known for beer when, to me, Boston has always been a city known for lesbianism. Truly we are from different worlds.

Feeling some type of way about Joan just giving the ability suppression serum out to anyone who wants it. I mean, obviously probably it’s more complicated than that and Mark was puffing it up to make a point about Joan/The A.M. doing “good”, but even that is :T 

It's like! They still don’t get that Helen had a point! Even with Oliver devastated by losing his ability (...lol) they still haven’t taken ten seconds to stop and think “Hey, maybe someone having the indiscriminate power to take away any Atypical’s ability at any time could be…………...bad?” 

Also lol @ this shady professor guy showing up from nowhere to spookily say the Order can’t be trusted. Yeah, no shit. Bro, name an ancient global shadow organization that CAN be trusted

One of the things I wrote (but did not publish, to be fair) when TCT spoilers started coming out is that I was really, really worried that there wouldn’t be any significant female characters, and WOWZERS did this episode make some choices that did not put those fears to rest. Four episodes in, Caitlin and Miriam are still the only women at the main plot location and neither of them know about Atypicality so! I remain worried, thank you!

They want so badly for me to care about the queerybaity bullshit that is Mark/Oliver and I’m just 😴😴😴

Did you know it’s possible to take a canonically bi character and use him to make boring queerbaity bullshit! I didn’t! But here we are! Here Mark is, somehow! (#freehim) 

"Sam left for her own around the world journey" genuinely what is that supposed to mean, where did she go???

Subpoint: LOVE how they also casually dropped in that Mags is still in Boston. Just to make sure no one gets any crazy ideas about her being with Sam, wherever Sam is. Just to take the possibility that we could have the queerbaity couple from the last series on-screen together and nip that right in the bud.

“Mark and Caleb are like brothers” 1) 😴😴😴😴😴😴😴😴😴😴😴😴😴 2) Where the fuck did this relationship come from??? When and why did they start hanging out????? What interests or hobbies do they have in common????? 

(^I’m mostly asking rhetorically, but if you’re reading this and want to take that bullet point as an excuse to write a ship primer, please be my guest, I would be so intrigued)

I screamed “what the fuck is THAT supposed to mean” at the Damien name-drop line, but like. It doesn’t mean anything, they didn’t mean anything by it, and they’ll never follow it up. This is what I mean by queerbaity bullshit - the way they took what was one of the biggest, complicated, fleshed-out, intriguing interpersonal relationships in the original run, which served as a really interesting investigation on what it means to love and be loved and be in love…….and they just smashed it all down to a pithy one-liner that they’re going to pretend never happened.

“Oh no, Oliver is sad because he lost his ability and he hurt Mark by blatantly disregarding his boundaries :(“ I do not care! I do not care about this man! And if you like Damien’s beats and tropes and ships so badly then why don’t you go and actually write Damien! Jesus. 

Artifacts are still such a mind-boggling stupid piece of lore. I can’t believe we’re stuck with this plot for another 16 episodes.

[overthinkingkdrama]

Jona’s Top 10 Dramas of 2019

A couple words about how I do these lists. Firstly, I only count as “2019 dramas” shows that finished airing in 2019, therefore dramas that started airing in 2018 but finished in the early months of 2019 have been included in my process, but dramas that are currently airing and will finish in 2020 have not been included. Secondly, this list is more based on my subjective experience with each of these dramas than my objective assessment on things like acting, writing and production values, though naturally I take the latter into account when forming my opinions.

Also: Yay! This year I managed to write a full review on every drama that wound up in my top ten, so feel free to click the link on each title and check those out if you want to read my detailed thoughts.

10. Hotel Del Luna

I have a somewhat Stockholm Syndrome-y relationship with Hong Sisters dramas. Though a lot of them are not excellent, or stumble a bit in the execution, I can’t seem to stop watching them. And yes, I’ve seen them all. Something about their particular blend of fantasy, romance and camp just works for me. I do think Hotel Del Luna plays to their strengths. Somewhat like if they got to take a second run at Master’s Sun but with their dream budget, and it’s just fun. This drama is gorgeous to look at. However, it is Lee Ji Eun, aka IU, who carries the entire drama on her lovely shoulders with her mesmerizing presence as Jang Man Wol.

Bottom Line: It shouldn’t be this way, but it’s so rare to get a mainstream drama where the female lead is allowed to be truly dark and flawed, or for a drama to fully focus on its heroine’s journey through the whole run.

9. Encounter

I was somewhat disappointed by the ending of this drama, and I think that might have made me unduly harsh when I looked back at it earlier in the year. However, I got the chance to rewatch episodes with a friend and was reminded of the soft, romantic escapism of this drama. Ultimately that’s the reason this ended up in the list. I like that it plays the rich woman/poor man, noona-romance tropes entirely straight and I liked the quixotic fairy tale it was unapologetically trying to sell me. Park Bo Gum and Song Hye Gyo are a noona-romance dream team up that I’m glad I got to see at least once in my lifetime.

Bottom Line: If you don’t like your dramas slow-paced and highly sentimental then this might not be the show for you, but I can appreciate a drama that knows exactly what kind of show it is and tries to do one thing well.

8. The Light in Your Eyes

If there’s any common theme to these favorites lists in previous years, it’s that they usually include dramas that took me by surprise and did something I haven’t seen before. The Light In Your Eyes fits that description so well, not just because of oddly dark tone or the quirky premise it presents in the first episodes, but because it’s a drama dedicated to showcasing the talents of the veteran actress, Kim Hye Ja, with whom the lead character shares a name. Of the dramas on the list this one made me cry the hardest.

Bottom Line: The Light In Your Eyes is a drama that has a greater emotional coherence than it does logical sense. In fact, if you think about the plot too hard it falls apart entirely. But it feels true, and that’s why it hit me so hard.

7. Search WWW

In my review I called Search a “female power fantasy” and I still think that’s a good description. It’s also sexy romantic fantasy, twice a noona romance, and a corporate drama focused on the very contemporary issues of powerful search engine companies and how they affect the information we see and the way we view the world. I think any of those is an interesting enough angle to make a drama about, maybe several dramas. If this show has one major flaw, it might be trying to wear too many hats at once. But I salute the creators for trying to make us something different than the typical pretty boy chaebol story, and giving us not one but three female characters filling those typically male roles.

Bottom Line: I do believe this drama deserves more love and respect than it got from a fandom that at least in theory cares about women’s stories. But I also understand why a lot of people didn’t connect with the lead character or the business stuff. But for me there was something about the lead couple that rang true and resonated with me.

6. WATCHER

Every time I watch a thriller, I’m hoping for something like WATCHER. Something with deep, complex, gray characters and a story full of twists and turns that keeps me engaged and guessing from episode one until the finale. Add on top of that a powerful cast who can really do justice to these substantial characters, you’ve got a winning recipe. OCN produces a lot of dramas in this genre, and they seem to be more prone to produce sequels than most other networks. Unfortunately, that also means a lot of the dramas they make feel paint-by-numbers and empty on the inside. WATCHER is one of those shows that reminds me why I keep coming back to this network and this kind of story time and again.

Bottom Line: This is one of those dramas that has you second guessing yourself even when they come right out and give you the answer, keeping you in a perpetual state of distrust along with the characters. But it’s built on the strong backbone of complicated and dynamic character relationships, which is why it is one of this year’s best.

5. Be Melodramatic

The higher I get up this list the harder time I have boiling down my thoughts on these dramas to one pithy paragraph. Often even I don’t know what kind of dramas are going to steal my heart. I have a particular weakness for dramas that can make me both laugh and cry, and then laugh through the tears. Dramas like Go Back Couple and Matrimonial Chaos that have deep heartache folded into the shenanigans. I love a funny drama. I like to laugh, but that doesn’t count for much unless I really care about the characters and their lives at the end of the day. That’s what makes me go from liking a drama to loving it, and that’s ultimately what I’m going to remember about a drama when it’s over. Be Melodramatic is special for the way it deals with heavy subjects in a gentle and lighthearted way, and somehow without losing the emotional impact.

Bottom Line: Be Melodramatic is a drama with tongue firmly planted in cheek, lots of laughs, lots of clever dialogue as well as a meta look at the drama industry from the inside, but the reason it works so well is the vein of heart, love and loss that runs all through the story.

4. One Spring Night

It’s so gratifying when a drama delivers exactly the experience you hoped it would. One Spring Night was a drama that ended up on my radar on the strength of the previews and posters, which promised me understated, romantic slice-of-life. I’d really enjoyed Han Ji Min in The Light in Your Eyes and have been fond of Jung Hae In since While You Were Sleeping. The pairing immediately seemed to have potential, but because the drama was picked up by Netflix, in the US I had to wait until it finished airing before I could give it a shot. A lot of the time when that happens, I see enough of the drama through gifs and screencaps that my interest fades. In this case I was only more intrigued. I’ve still never watched Something In The Rain but watching this drama has made me consider that might have been an oversight on my part. And yet I worry that if I watched it now I wouldn’t be able to help unfavorably comparing it to One Spring Night. This drama is truly something special.

Bottom Line: Because of the restrained, faithful realism of this drama and the two leads who seamlessly embody their characters, this drama has the almost voyeuristic quality of peeking into something intimate and private. It’s a palpable and thoroughly involving love story.

3. Nokdu Flower

I can hardly recommend this underrated gem of a show enough. I know nearly every historical gets compared either favorably or otherwise to Six Flying Dragons, which is kind of the recent high-water mark of sageuks, and I’m going to do that again here because Nokdu Flower is really the first historical drama I’ve watched since SFD that is at the same level of quality. One thing that sticks out about my experience watching both dramas is getting actual shivers watching these charismatic leaders rally their followers around them, and understanding at least in some small part why someone would leave behind everything they knew, pick up arms, and risk their lives for an ideal. Nokdu Flower captures the fearful power of revolutionary ideas in the hands of common people, but doesn’t descend into mere jingoism or sand off the rough edges or try to white wash the dark parts of human nature while it’s at it.

Bottom Line: At its most basic level Nokdu Flower is a story of revolution, and one of flawed characters either finding their humanity or having it burned out of them in the crucible of war. As that description would suggest it’s not an easy watch, but it’s a good and worthwhile one and definitely one any sageuk fan should check out.

2. My Country: The New Age

Compared to the far more traditional and grounded Nokdu Flower, My Country is almost fantastical in tone and at times eschews logic and realism for set pieces, sword fights and close range shotgun blasts of pathos. That’s probably why I love it. The larger-than-life sensationalism of this drama is what pushes it higher on this list than the carefully crafted Nokdu Flower, because this drama appealed to me on a more primal way. It’s so unrestrained and epic in everything from the set design, the soundtrack, the cinematography to the characters themselves and the performances of the actors playing them. Lurid, melodramatic, passionate, intense, suspenseful, romantic, raw, angsty, dark...I’ve basically run out of new adjectives to use while describing this drama elsewhere on this site. Basically, My Country is my id on a plate. Bon appetit.

Bottom Line: While there are definitely misguided and flawed elements to the writing and execution in this drama, somehow all of that is swept away in the sheer pleasure of watching it. If it had been specifically designed to appeal to every narrative kink I have, they couldn’t have made a more perfect drama for my tastes.

1. Children of Nobody

I finished my favorite drama of 2019 back in January, and then got to wait around 11 and a half months to see if anything else I watched last year would knock Children of Nobody from the top spot. It’s a mixed blessing to peak that early in the year. On the one hand, there was nowhere to go but down from here. On the other, I’ve had a lot of time to digest this very heavy show, which is something I definitely needed. I mentioned in my original review of this drama that each of the characters is an iceberg, so much more going on beneath the surface than what we can see. And what I’ve realized over the course of the past year is that the whole drama is like that, in a way. It’s an iceberg of a story, and I was able to pour a lot of myself into it, to try to understand it, and that’s part of the reason it was such an emotional watch for me. I don’t know when or if I’m going to be able to rewatch Children of Nobody, but I hope I can do it some day because I feel certain I would appreciate it even more upon a second viewing.  The fact that this is a murder mystery and a thriller is almost incidental to the emotional core of the story, which is deeper and more lingering than that. The secrets, once revealed, do not diminish the story but only turn it slightly so that you can see it from a different angle.

Bottom Line: This drama is certainly not going to be for everyone. I don’t know if I would say it was underrated so much as it’s niche. The difficult subject matter is naturally going to narrow its appeal. But I do think that dramas that require the most from me, mentally and emotionally, are often the ones that stick with me the longest and make me bend and grow as a person.

I sure hope you’ve enjoyed my top 10 list this year and I wish you joy, success and profound wellbeing in 2020. Thank you again--and thank you always--for following me. I’ve got great things planned for us this year.

Jona

[typewriterghcst]

Title: A Very Small Wish Fandom: The Cat Returns Characters: Baron, Muta, Toto, Haru, plus some OCs Rating: PGish maybe??  Words: 2797 Summary: A pleading request from a parent whose daughter has been cursed by a resentful witch is nothing truly out of the ordinary for the Cat Bureau— in fact, it might be so common so as to be routine— so why does something feel inherently off about this particular one?  Notes: Second chapter of six of a Secret Santa gift for @deedee-sunflowers. I had the realization that it actually takes a Bit for the witch part of this to show up, and I apologize for that orz That said, I'm so glad you liked it! Especially that they're all in character and that Vanya is interesting, aha. I worry a lot that he might be too grating, bc I definitely get a lot of enjoyment out of writing those kinds of characters, but I don't want them to also be irritating to sit through rip Anywho, a chapter in which Haru has a chat with a beloved monster i’m sorry that was a very vague shrek reference

                                      Ch. 2: Virtuous Siree

She might be hesitant to admit it, but Haru is almost disappointed to meet the cursed daughter, having halfway convinced herself in her unshakable unnerved skepticism that the Vanya creature had crafted her existence wholesale from lies and nothingness. Yet here she is, standing before them with her hands (hands? it’s hard to tell) folded in a mannerly fashion in front of her. Her long, golden veil is in much better shape than her father’s handkerchief, though the odd snag and rip is perhaps inevitable when one is in possession of what appears to be a pair of curly horns.

She is otherwise far from inconspicuous, as well; the gauzy shroud masking her person still reveals the aforementioned horns, and a pointed snout, and little hands adorned with inch-long claws. A long, hairless tail snakes out from behind her, curling at her feet like a sleeping dog.

Perhaps the most pressing thing, however, is that the same uneasy chill runs through Haru within this strange, half-concealed child’s presence as it does when her father is around. For the first time, she wonders if it’s not, in fact, her blunted human instincts furiously trying to warn her of Vanya’s true nature and simply a facet of his kind’s existence.

Vanya wanders into her line of sight again, standing beside his daughter with a laughably manic, skittish energy and reaching for her clawed hand. Haru notes the two are very nearly the same height. Yet, to hers (and probably the Bureau’s surprise, as well), he appears to have little trouble lifting her off the ground and holding her out to them, as if he’d worried they wouldn’t understand just how truly monstrous she’d become should he not bring her closer to their eyelines.

“This is my daughter, Virtuous Siree.” He seems to take a certain, special glee in saying so. “She is exquisitely cute! Like a baby. I’ve had her for years now.”

Virtuous Siree, though her face is obscured by the veil, seems unbothered by this treatment, inclining her head politely to their guests.

“Pleased to meet you.” Her voice echoes much like a lonely call in an empty stairwell, resulting in the definitively disorienting effect of two separate people speaking in unison.

“...And you, as well.” Baron is the first to recover from the oddness of the situation, removing his hat and bowing, and the rest of them follow suit shortly after (sans Muta, anyway, who gives a more characteristically terse greeting).

“Thank you, by the way,” Virtuous Siree then continues, as casually blithe as her father. “For taking the case. We are beyond aromatized to have obtained your assistance!”

Behind her, Vanya utters a noise somewhere between a squeal and a sob, and then hugs her close to him. “Cute! She’s too cute! Virtuous Siree, did you have a good day today?”

“Yes, Papa, I worked in the garden. The cherries are ripening on the vine! And I started a new painting when I was done.”

“Your funny prickly face horns are sticking me through my fur!” Yet, he appears to make no motions to pull away. (Haru sneaks an amused look at Muta; sure enough, the mystified frown on his own face makes it clear he’s as lost about how to feel about this interaction as she’d expected him to be.)

“How far of a journey is the Sown Forest from here, Vanya?”

The fox glances at Toto only from the very corners of his eyes at first, but the expression lacks even the most minuscule hint of suspicion. He pulls his face away from Virtuous Siree’s veiled one, placing her back on the ground with a happy coo.

“I can’t tell you how far, but it will take….” Here he counts futilely on his tiny paws again. “...eighteen-twenty minutes!”

“...You mean, eighteen to twenty minutes?”

Vanya hesitates, and here, now, it becomes obvious he’s beginning to pick up on Toto’s skepticism. When he answers this time, he’s back to his by now expected plaintive offense.

“Time works differently in Oostal! I’m only a little creature from Oostal, and I don’t know your Earthical time measurements!” He cries.

“Papa’s trying his best,” Virtuous Siree interjects with the modest passion one might expect from a shy girl her age, patting her father on the paw.

“To focus on the pretty Vanya Creature’s tenuous grasp of a time he’s never used before when his cute daughter is at risk of being cursed forever!”

“Yeah, birdbrain, that’s real heartless of ya,” Muta can’t help but add (a marked testament to how much he enjoys antagonizing the crow, if even his antipathy for the Vanya creature doesn’t see him pass up the opportunity.)

“But if time works differently, how are we meant to keep track of how long we have?” Toto asks, side-eyeing Muta with no small degree of smug amusement. (For his part, Muta seems uncertain whether to take this abrupt subject change as a surrender or a snub.)

“Use a pocket watch,” is Vanya’s dismissive reply.

Baron finds himself rather suddenly the object of vested interest for three pairs of eyes; Muta, Haru, and Toto all three almost instantly turn to him. He looks from each one to the other in moderate bemusement for mere seconds before his shoulders relax in a subtle show of resignation.

“Yes, I have one with me.”

“Wouldn’t have been you if you didn’t,” Toto teases with a smile.

“Of course,” Baron deigns to play along with a faintly put-upon tone.

“Where’s that witchy paper you said you got, anyway?” Muta asks Vanya. “The one that says it’s okay for you to get help from strangers. Don’t think I forgot about it,” he ends with crabbily.

“I left it on the table!” Vanya replies with a matching huff, less than humored by Muta’s skepticism.

Here Virtuous Siree jumps to contribute, expression molded into a contrite, abashed frown, “Oh, no— Papa, those papers got blown away earlier today! I-I opened the door to go out into the garden, and a bigly strong gust blew in!”

“Seriously—?”

“They blew up into the surrounding trees,” Virtuous Siree continues, more chastened than before in the face of Muta’s apparent exasperation, a reaction which seems to give the cat some considerable pause. “I couldn’t reach them.”

Vanya pats her head.

“It’s no significant loss that they did! We can search for them when I go to pick up the leg up in our sleeves.”

The perplexed silence which settles after Vanya’s words lingers heavily, but at least only briefly.

“Oh,” Toto first responds with a dawning amusement and the slightest of laughs. “You have something in mind to help make these tasks less of a struggle.”

Vanya nods enthusiastically, giving no indication of having discerned their earlier confusion, nor why Toto then felt the need to clarify. His tail, also, curls into an excitable question mark shape before relaxing again.

“It will take just a moment— I hid it in the root cellar with the other cates.”

“And the root cellar is—?”

“At the edge of the property, by the fence.”

“Very well. It shouldn’t take us long, I think, but we ought to depart right away. Please lead the way, Mr. Vanya.”

“I’ll stay here,” Haru speaks up. “I’d feel a little bad leaving Virtuous Siree all alone again, even if it is just a few minutes— I don’t mind keeping her company. I mean—” Here she turns to the girl herself with a sheepish expression, hands folded bashfully behind her back. “ —if she doesn’t mind my company, of course.”

“I don’t mind!” Virtuous Siree responds with a resolute shake of her head.

“Good, goods!” Vanya agrees in delight. There’s yet another almost cat-like expression of affection from him, rubbing his cheek against Siree’s as he swings their joined hands. “Play nice, Cute Siree. We’ll be back before you know it!”

                                                          &&&

The little house in which Vanya and Virtuous Siree have made their home is in all honesty not all that strange to Haru. At least, in the sense that it has walls and doors and windows, and furniture with purposes that are easy enough to grasp upon laying eyes on them. Yet two things still stand out to her as unusual. 

The first is that the walls, if not the house entirely, give the rather distinct impression that the entire thing had been carved from an enormous gourd or another hardy vegetable of sorts. When Haru furtively lays a hand on one of the few unoccupied walls, she finds she can’t discern the material by sight or touch.

The outside of the house hadn’t struck her as so outlandish. It certainly hadn’t appeared to be a massive vegetable.

The second, as previously alluded to, is that almost every available surface is buried beneath an arbitrary variety of countless objects— threadbare coats, rusted silverware, broken trinkets.

Distantly, Haru recalls Vanya’s pithy words regarding his shattered teacup— waste not. Seems he kept that particular aphorism close to his heart.

Vanya’s daughter has claimed a spot at the round table in the middle of the room, perched precariously on a wobbly stool with a set of messy watercolor paints and a well-worn brush.

Her face is still hidden, but Haru can still tell her companion (Virtuous Siree, as her father has stubbornly referred to her, and it’s still a terribly odd name to Haru) is shyly stealing glances at her, one after the other, before quickly looking away again, back to her painting.

“Can I draw something, too?” Haru eventually asks to divert the tension.

Virtuous Siree jumps on the distraction. “Oh, yes! You can! Papa always keeps plenty of paper and paints around for me!”

The girl jumps off her stool and scurries to a cabinet across the room, behind a pile of ostensible scarves and socks (the cabinet itself also piled high with an unimaginably diverse array of items— hairbrushes, hats, and tattered books, just to name a few.) In a snap, Virtuous Siree has an identical spot to her own set up at the table beside her for Haru.

“Here you are! Would you like a flat or a round brush..?”

Haru, having never been much a painter, finds herself somewhat stumped at the question, glancing back and forth between the two brushes for a half-minute before sheepishly speaking up. “Actually, this is silly, but do you have anything more fit for an amateur? I don’t do much drawing, and I’d hate to waste some of your good materials.”

Virtuous Siree laughs, a short, girlish noise that quite comically clashes with her unnatural-sounding voice, and waves her hand. “Don’t be silly, I have plenty of materials. You can’t waste them if you used them to do something fun.”

“O-Oh… Well, I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“If you want to start slow, though, hmm…” Virtuous Siree scampers across the room again, stooping to look in her cabinet; Haru hears her shuffle various objects around as she searches for something specific. “Oh! I have some wax crayons. They’re a little used, though.”

“Oh, that’s okay. They’ll be perfect.”

It’s when Haru is settled again, this time staring down at a sheaf of brown, grainy papers— thick, heavy, with a distinct weave to the tiny fibers that must make up the sheets— that she finds herself beset by another stumbling block. She hasn’t drawn anything since she was a child, and those childish scribbles had consisted mostly of attempts at whatever animals had caught her eye.

Absently, she wonders if her skills have managed to budge past their old level. Probably not. But, there’s no time like the present to find out, she supposes. She’ll try drawing Baron.

“What does the name Virtuous Siree mean?”

Virtuous Siree gives a pensive noise. “You don’t have to call me Virtuous Siree. Just Siree is fine. Only Papa calls me Virtuous Siree-- he added the first part a little while ago.”

“Okay, Siree, then. If you like, you can call me just Haru.”

“I’ll do that!” Then, remembering what Haru’s original question was, she adds diffidently, “‘Siree’ is just a filler word in Oostal’s language, but it has a-- umm, an implication of emphasis. It’s what you use to boost the feelings in what you’re trying to get across when you can’t remember a word.”

Haru pauses in her attempt to color in one of Baron’s eyes. “Does that mean your name with the addition of ‘Virtuous’ is kind of like saying ‘really virtuous?’”

“It is!” Siree admits with an almost embarrassed laugh. “Papa’s very silly sometimes.”

To herself, Haru thinks that sounds like yet another vast understatement.

“...Have you ever dealt with witch’s magic before?” Virtuous Siree asks.

“Not…. witch’s magic, no. At least, I don’t think so. But I was transformed into a cat once,” Haru says, carefully drawing a spiral on her paper with a yellow crayon (her interpretation of the sun. It won’t do to put crayon scribble Baron into a rainy, sad environment, after all).

“What’s a cat?” Siree asks.

“Oh— um. It’s an… an animal from my world. They look a little like your father, but a little bigger. Oh! Actually, Muta and Baron-- well, Muta is a cat, but Baron just looks like one.” Then, abruptly remembering Siree has been cursed and must therefore look quite similar to her father under normal circumstances, Haru hastily adds, “I-I guess they’d look like you, too, wouldn’t they?”

Siree nods slightly, even though she hasn’t looked away from her own painting. When she speaks, her voice is soft, shy again.

“They're cute. I wish I could be cute, too, like Papa. Or, um, like I was.”

Somewhere, that gentle, beseeching string of words tugs at an old fear, one that had been allayed rather completely with the return to her normal form but not altogether forgotten— that of losing her familiar reflection. What was on the inside ultimately wouldn’t have changed, and there had always been little flaws in her human appearance she could have spent hours complaining about, but… in the end, her face, her humanness, had been held more dear by her than she could ever have realized without being transformed against her will.

“Don’t worry,” Haru finds herself saying. “Baron and the Bureau managed to rescue me from becoming a cat. They’ll do the same for you, no problem. You just wait. You’ll be your old self in no time.”

Siree’s brushstrokes slow and then stop altogether. She moves so that Haru knows she must be studying her thoughtfully, and the very knowledge of Siree’s no doubt unblinking, pensive gaze trained intently on her is enough to give her goosebumps again.

“...You’re very kind,” the girl eventually remarks. Then, finally looking away (Haru’s pretty sure, at least), she adds, “I like that. I hope you make it out safe.”

“I have the Bureau,” Haru says surely. “I’ll be fine.”

“Well, I hope they stay safe, too,” Siree adds.

As if wise to the fact they’d been the subject of the past few moments of conversation, the Bureau (accompanied, of course, by Vanya) arrive just seconds after with the familiar sound of the beginnings of an altercation between Muta and Toto. Vanya again wastes little time in hugging Siree.

“You’re back,” Haru says in the meantime. “Are we good to go now, then?”

“Yeah,” Muta breaks off his disagreement with Toto to answer with a shrug. “Whatever the pipsqueak picked up, it didn’t take long.”

“It’s a surprise!” Vanya protests, turning a haughty gaze upon Muta. Then, thoughtfully, he amends, “...A good surprise.”

Haru, thinking of Vanya’s original haste in returning to his daughter, and seeing perhaps the same veiled concern in Baron’s and Toto’s faces, nudges the avian Creation beside her, and… well, bless him, Toto takes very little time to speak up for them all.

“Will Virtuous Siree be alright here all by herself?”

Vanya rocks back and forth a few times, dragging poor Siree with him (though she seems unbothered, at least). “Yes, yes, Virtuous Siree is safe here. There are neighbors! ...In fact, if she feels scared, she should go next door to Mr. Gleb.” This spoken directly to Siree, despite the odd choice in phrasing.

“I will, Papa,” Siree answers without hesitation.

It’s here that Vanya lets her go with one last delighted chirrup, bounding over to the door and the Bureau and darting outside. Before following suit (...somewhat), Haru turns back to the girl and flashes her a reassuring smile.

“Bye, Siree! Stay safe, and don’t worry— we’ll get you all fixed up.”

“I know you will!”

As far as Haru can tell, Siree continues waving until they can’t see each other, and something about the dedication instills a certain amount of similar sentiments in Haru.

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 47 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about adjectives. First, we now have masks to match your scarves, mugs, and notebooks in Lingthusiasm IPA, syntax, and esoteric symbol designs.

Gretchen: If you want a bit more Lingthusiasm as you go about your everyday life, that is a thing you can do. They’re available in many colours. You can go to lingthusiasm.com/merch.

Lauren: I’m interested to see whether prefer to colour coordinate their facemasks with their scarves or if contrasting colours is the way to go.

Gretchen: Stay tuned! We will report back on the Lingthusiasm fashion statement. Also, this month’s Patreon bonus episode is about doing linguistics communication on a shoestring –Bonus 42 – which means there’re 41 additional bonus episodes if you’ve run out of Lingthusiasm to listen to. There’s way more where that came from at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. It’s got a bit of bonus Lingthusiasm origin story because, spoiler, we started our ling comm projects on a shoestring as well.

Lauren: Absolutely. The ling comm on a shoestring episode came together because we’ve been talking to our wonderful linguistics communication project, LingComm, grantees. We realised that it’s the kind of information that’s useful whatever project you’re starting or if you wanna know how we got started doing linguistics communication.

Gretchen: It can probably be cross applied for communicating about other types of topics as well but, hey, we’re linguists, so we’ll call it “ling comm.”

Lauren: Talk about what we know.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, I have a game for you.

Lauren: I love games.

Gretchen: I’m gonna give you a word and then you say whatever word you think of quickly after that.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Let’s start with “red.”

Lauren: Blue.

Gretchen: Big.

Lauren: Small.

Gretchen: Fast.

Lauren: Slow.

Gretchen: Loud.

Lauren: Quiet.

Gretchen: Online.

Lauren: Offline?

Gretchen: Afloat.

Lauren: “Asink”? What is the opposite of – I don’t know what the opposite of “afloat” is.

Gretchen: “On shore,” “on board,” I dunno.

Lauren: Sure.

Gretchen: I didn’t think through that one very deeply.

Lauren: I’ve been doing so many of these in children’s picture books at the moment. It’s always a great delight.

Gretchen: These words are – or at least mostly, with the exception of “asink,” perhaps – these words are mostly adjectives, which is the kind of word that you may have learned if you played Mad Libs as a hobby like I did growing up – is a word that describes things.

Lauren: I feel like that’s a good start for what an adjective is in terms of you just need a pithy definition. But I feel like these words all have more things in common than just that.

Gretchen: The thing that I find really interesting about adjectives as a category is that they’re one of those categories that seems like it gets passed down to us from the descriptive grammatical tradition. When you start looking at it more closely, it breaks apart really quickly. There are more differences and more similarities in other types of categories. It really starts to make you question the notion of parts of speech. When linguists talk about diagnostics for adjectives, in English, sometimes we diagnose adjectives by saying, okay, you can add endings like “-er” or “-est” on them or use words like “more” and “most” with them to make comparatives and superlatives. You can have something be “redder” or “bluest” or “bigger” or “smallest,” “louder,” or “quieter.” It doesn’t always work though.

Lauren: “More online,” “most online.”

Gretchen: Fair enough. “More afloat,” “less afloat,” “afloater.” Adjectives are words that they have this descriptive property, but they also have this morphosyntactic property that they can be compared to degrees like other adjectives.

Lauren: Once you start realising this is something that adjectives do consistently in English, but other word classes don’t, these “-er” and “-est” suffixes can be used to figure out what isn’t an adjective as well.

Gretchen: If we have a word like “dog,” and I don’t think there is “This dog is ‘dogger’ than this other dog.” “This is the ‘doggest’ dog.”

Lauren: Definitely not in standard English. I think it’s a great example of how we can be playful, but I don’t think it would come off as a very standard form. Or we wouldn’t have like, “You are more ‘danciest.’”

Gretchen: “The ‘dancest.’”

Lauren: “You are the most ‘dance’” doesn’t work because –

Gretchen: I mean, you can be a “dancer,” but that doesn’t make you more “dance” than the other person if you’re a dancer. That’s a different kind of “-er.”

Lauren: You’re a dancer, but I’m the “dancest.”

Gretchen: That sounds like an invitation to a dance off! Yes, I mean, you can do these, but they very clearly have this playful quality that “fast/faster” is just like, yep, you can do that. Whereas, “dancer” or “dancest” has this playful quality that you can do it if you wanna have a bit of fun, but it’s not something that’s already part of the canon of things that people typically say in English.

Lauren: This is why we refer to them as diagnostics in the way that we take a temperature on a person to see if they have a fever, we can use these morphemes to test whether a word is an adjective in English or not.

Gretchen: Or to have the weird fun of making something into a different lexical category than it had previously belonged to. If I wanna say, “Oh, this thing is ‘funner,’” like, hey, that’s a bit of fun you can have with lexical conversion.

Lauren: Are lexical conversations the “funnest” thing you can do? I think so.

Gretchen: They are the “funnest.” There are other ways of doing this. That’s a test you can do with putting endings on the word, and you can also do tests by what kinds of sentences you can put it in. If you have something like, “the red car” or “the big car,” then if you wanna test, oh, does “dance” work in there – “the dance car.” Kind of? Again, it sounds like maybe you’re having a bit of fun with the language. Or “the dog car” – it’s an interesting example because if you take a word like “the doghouse,” right, “dog” is clearly describing “house” there. I think that’s one of the issues that confuses people when you’re talking about adjectives because you can use other kinds of words to describe something or to modify something like “doghouse” or “dance” – I feel like a “dance car” – I dunno, there’s a “party bus.”

Lauren: The dance car is the budget version for when you only have a couple of friends.

Gretchen: Or maybe it’s a car that can dance itself. You can be a “partier,” but you don’t have a “partiest,” like, “This is the ‘partiest’ bus,” “This is the ‘dancest’ car.” It can let us do these diagnostics language-internally and figure out here’s what’s going on in English, here’s what’s going on with this particular word. Where, if we wanna try to force it into the mould of being really adjective-y, then we can do it, but it’s very clearly playful. Whereas, if we make this one into a very adjective-y mould, it’s like, yep, okay, lots of people are already doing that.

Lauren: We’ve been using the “-er” comparative and the “-est” superlative suffixes to tell if something is an adjective, but we can also use a negative diagnostic to check if something is definitely not one of the other word categories.

Gretchen: Right. If you have a word like “party” or “cake,” which we know is a noun, one of the things that nouns can do is nouns can become plural. You have “cakes,” you have “parties” – this sounds like a great afternoon. I’m having the party cake.

Lauren: But you can’t have “bigs.” You can’t use the plural on an adjective.

Gretchen: Right. “Bigs” and “smalls” and “reds.” If you do, it’s kind of because you’re actually treating this adjective as a noun. Sometimes that means – so if I’m doing laundry, I can be like, “Oh, I’m gonna put the reds in this pile and the blues in that pile.” Now, I’ve taken these words that are traditionally adjectives and I’ve converted them into nouns, which is something that people do pretty regularly. This isn’t as playful because people have already done it. And, oh, now I’m actually using this adjective as a noun. English is a language that’s very prone to bringing words to cross over into other lexical categories. Many other languages also do this. It’s something that we miss when we talk about, “Oh, ‘red.’ It’s an adjective,” because you can sometimes use it as a noun. If you talk about like, “I’m gonna wash all the reds together,” you’re using it as a noun there. It’s not that “red” is always an adjective, it’s most canonical form is an adjective in the same way that you can make “This is the ‘partiest’ bus I’ve ever seen.” If you wanna make that into an adjective, you can.

Lauren: I used to get very anxious about this because I liked just being like “These words are adjectives and these words are nouns.” Once I got comfortable with the diagnostic approach of just looking what a word is doing in the particular context it’s being said, it’s actually a lot more liberating and relaxing to be like, “I will just accept this word on the terms that it arrives at me.” I can look at where it is in the word order because that’s important for English. I can also look at what suffixes it has because that’s also useful for English. I can use these criteria every time. I don’t have to remember a list of what’s an adjective and what’s a noun and what’s a verb. I can just use these criteria that I know when I come across an example.

Gretchen: I think it’s one of the things that distinguishes a linguistic approach to grammar from a “I’m taking this high school English class” approach to grammar because I definitely remember being taught, okay, if you wanna know if something’s an adjective, you can look it up in the dictionary, and the dictionary will tell you. This, of course, raises the very obvious question of, “Well, how did the dictionary makers know that this was an adjective? Who decided that?” Dictionaries are great. I’m not anti-dictionary. But if you’re always looking for external authorities for something that you can actually logic out for its principles, it’s unsatisfying. Whereas, being able to actually deduce, “Oh, I know this is an adjective because I’ve run it through these tests,” let’s you feel like you’re figuring something out about that world. It’s the appeal of doing a logic puzzle as opposed to being told like, “Here’s what the sudoku looks like. If you wanna know what the correct answer is to the Sudoku, you just look it up.” It’s like, well, you could actually just do the sudoku and then you could figure it out. That’s more fun than looking up the answer to the sudoku.

Lauren: Yeah. I enjoy being a part of speech detective and figuring out what a word is doing in a sentence using the linguistic evidence that I have.

Gretchen: Similarly, we have existing diagnostics around verbs. Verbs in English, when they’re in the third person singular, often have this other S ending that’s not plural. If I say something like, “She bigs” or “She reds” or “She blues,” this is very clearly being jocular with language almost to the point of incoherence because I’m not quite sure what any of those mean.

Lauren: I guess you could say, “She bigs herself up” and in that complex structure it’s the “big” that takes the plural?

Gretchen: Totally. I mean, I don’t know if that’s an idiom that I have but, when you say, I’m like, “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

Lauren: I’ll accept that. It’s these edge cases – every time you’re like, “I figured out what this category is,” and then you find these edge cases, and then you find the edge cases to the edge cases, and then someone will have written their whole PhD dissertation on an edge case of the edge case, but that is what makes language so fun to play with.

Gretchen: Absolutely. I think if I wanted to make these colour terms into verbs, I’d really wanna add a suffix at that point. “I’m gonna ‘redden’ my shirts by washing them in with the reds.” Sometimes, we just make something into a different part of speech by treating it as if it is, and then it is that way. Then, sometimes we add a suffix, or we add something else to it that makes that conversion happen. Maybe it’s because “redden” exists that it’s difficult to say like, “I ‘red’ the shirt by washing it with the reds.”

Lauren: Once you realise how effective this adding suffix morphemes to words to create new words and new word categories is, you’re like, “Ah, this is how English has 100,000 or 200,000 words,” or whatever people say. Because any noun, if you are a creative enough English speaker, can be adjectivised with the right amount of creative use of the resources that you already have.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, I just said the “really adjective-y adjectives,” which makes “adjective,” which is itself a noun, into an adjective. Or it can be “adjectivised,” which then makes it into a verb.

Lauren: Then we can talk about the “adjectivisation” of nouns.

Gretchen: Right. We could talk about “adjectival,” which is the adjective of “adjective.”

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Or the adjectival form of “adjective” if you will. I think we’re really rapidly approaching the place where “adjective” doesn’t actually feel like it means anything anymore, just in the sense of we’ve been saying the sounds /æ/ /d͡ʒ/ /dɪk/ /tɪv/ too many times in a row.

Lauren: I’m really grateful that we have the diagnostic criteria to know that it does actually mean something in English as a category. This is where your native speaker intuitions or finding a speaker of a language to consult their intuitions is really important because, as we’ve already said, there’s a difference between forms that we recognise as people regularly using and ones that we’re just making up for creativity sake for this episode. There are lots of other intuitions that people have about categories like adjectives that they may not have consciously ever reflected on. I think the order of adjectives is definitely one of those things.

Gretchen: Ooo! Is this the “big red car” versus “red big car” thing?

Lauren: Yes. I think of it as the “iced tea” phenomenon, personally.

Gretchen: I could go for some iced tea right now.

Lauren: Sure. If you would like a flavour of iced tea, what type of iced tea would you like?

Gretchen: I dunno. Maybe I’ll take a lemon iced tea.

Lauren: I always used to order lemon iced tea in Singapore. It took quite a while, while I was living there, is realise that I was in this weird negotiation with people because I would order a lemon iced tea and they would say, “Yes, one iced lemon tea for you.” “Lemon iced tea” is the phrase that I am used to. It took a long time for me to actually remember to order an “iced lemon tea.” I figured out it was because, for me, “iced tea” was the genre. That’s the minimal unit. Then, I would add “lemon” as a second adjective to modify that because I could have lemon iced tea or peach iced tea or any other delicious flavour of iced tea.

Gretchen: Mango iced tea or something.

Lauren: Whereas, for Singaporeans, it was the fact that it was lemon tea or milk tea or black tea –

Gretchen: Yeah, okay, and then you could have hot milk tea or cold milk tea, hot lemon tea or iced lemon tea.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. In this case, the adjective order was dependent on what we thought we were modifying to begin with.

Gretchen: That’s really neat. There’s this meme that circulates the internet every so often pointing out that people say “the big red balloon” or the “the four big red balloons” or “the four big old round red rubber toy balloons,” and this sounds like a lot of description to go to when I’m talking about balloons, but it sounds unremarkable to you. Whereas, if you put it in another order like, “the toy rubber red round big four old balloons” –

Lauren: I can actually feel you pause and mentally process that.

Gretchen: The ironic thing is, is I’m reading it out loud and yet it’s still so difficult to say out loud from a page. Because there’re certain conventions about orders that people put adjectives in, and you don’t even think about this because you just do it instinctively. It seems to often work fairly similarly across languages, which is kind of interesting.

Lauren: Even now that we’ve just figured out what adjectives are, there’re actually sub-categories within adjectives. Are they describing different properties of something? Is that where they come from?

Gretchen: Yeah. For example, people tend to put size before colour – that’s your “big red” thing. Or objective or subjective opinion can sometimes go – it can go in a couple different places. You have “big bad wolf,” not “bad big wolf.”

Lauren: But maybe there’s a bad small wolf, just to go back to the lemon iced tea situation.

Gretchen: Well, and that’s the thing. There is some sense in which there’s a bit of a default order, but there’s also a sense in which “the bad big wolf” and “the good big wolf” – you could use that order if you wanted to have a direct contrast there. So, in addition to the fact that, hey, the order you put adjectives in is actually more regular and more complicated than you thought about it – there’s revelation Number 1 – revelation Number 2 is, you can break it still. You can do other things with it than this pattern you didn’t realise you were following. You can follow this second pattern you also didn’t realise you were following.

Lauren: It’s adjective awareness all the way down.

Gretchen: Yes. One version of this order that people have described is: quantity; objective/subjective opinion; size; age; shape; colour; quote-unquote “real” adjectives or adjectives not otherwise specified; and purpose. That’s something like “rubber” for the adjective not otherwise specified – material, maybe – purpose, something like a toy. That is one order you could come up with. It words fairly well if you’re just substituting “red” and “blue” with each other, or “old” and “young” with each other, in respect to these kinds of things. You can keep stacking adjectives and see which orders break. Of course, sometimes, if you put “good” in there, it’s not necessarily gonna work the same way as “high-quality,” even though those are both opinions. You can start creating a really elaborate taxonomy of adjective orders, and you can kind of get somewhere, but you’re also like, “Where am I even going?”

Lauren: Obviously, intuition is part of this because we found it easier to process one order than the other, but linguists also draw on corpora. People will look at how adjectives have been ordered in speech to look at which ones people prefer to go before or after. It’s actually incredibly rare to get seven adjectives. It’s really rare for people to describe a balloon in that much detail.

Gretchen: Well, and it’s interesting that we have intuitions about how these seven adjectives can be ordered even though it’s very rare that we actually say seven adjectives in a row like that. That’s kind of neat. In languages, languages like French, which often puts the adjectives after the noun, you may get the same order but in the inverse. The order is based on what’s closest to the noun not the linear left to right order or first to last order. It can be based on what’s closest to the noun and build outwards in the other direction. Although, French has this interesting complication which is that some of its adjectives, “big” and “small” – “grande,” “petite” – tend to go before the nouns, whereas most of its adjectives go after. You have this interesting intersection there.

Lauren: Our English diagnostic criteria for adjectives going before a noun is not gonna work as neatly for French.

Gretchen: Right. One of the things that you learn in French class is like, “Oh, there’re these two classes of adjectives. There’s the class that goes before the noun and the class that goes after.”

Lauren: Cool.

Gretchen: Or, for some of them, if you put this adjective that conventionally goes before the noun and sometimes it goes after, it means something slightly different when it goes after. Maybe it means something a little bit more literal or something. The question of which part of speech categories are the categories that we actually should use and which ones are just spurious differences that don’t really matter because it’s not part of the real categories – it turns into this giant can of worms when you start opening it. Because, in French, we could say, “Oh, well, we have adjectives. Adjectives are adjectives. Surely there are adjectives, right?” But then why not, in French, have two different categories of these modifiers that go before the noun versus these modifiers that go after the noun? Why unify them both under “adjectives”? They don’t behave the same way.

Lauren: Do they behave the same way in other ways?

Gretchen: They do behave the same way in other contexts. You can describe them with comparatives and superlatives kind of like you can in English. It’s not a suffix. It’s a different word like “more.” But one of the key things is that they agree in gender and number with the nouns that they modify. If you talk about “a blue car” versus “blue cars,” you’re gonna put that extra S silently – in the writing, but not necessarily in speech – on the word “blue” as well as the word “car.”

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: This is much easier to see in a language like Latin, which actually pronounces these differences, versus French where it’s kind of fossilised and maybe fake – I dunno, it depends on who you ask – because it’s mostly there in the writing at this point. In Latin, it’s definitely very actively there in the actual speech. It’s actually still pronounced. In Latin, any sort of ending change that you do on the nouns – if you make it plural, if you make it possessive, if you make it the subject or the object of the sentence – all of these types of changes that you could do to the noun you have to do with whatever adjectives it goes with. The big way that you can tell that something is an adjective is because it’s doing all this stuff to match its noun. If you read Latin poetry, you can see the noun and the adjective can be split apart on different lines, and you can tell that they go with each other because they have matching endings.

Lauren: It’s really cool that adjectives have a noun-y property in French because there’s a language in Nepal called Manange where some of the adjectives have a verb-y vibe rather than a noun-y vibe. I know about this because in a grammatical description by my colleague and collaborator Kristine Hildebrandt, she talks about – they have this really small set of adjectives that behave more like adjectives as we think of them in English, but then they also have this set that they come from verbs. You can see how they’re related.

Gretchen: An English version of that might be if I say like, “The cat is running,” I could also talk about “the running cat” or “the walking cat,” where “run” and “walk” are canonically verbs, but you can also use them in an adjective-y sort of way. You don’t get to talk about “the ‘runningest’ cat” or “the ‘walkinger’ cat.” You kind of could.

Lauren: You can talk about the “more cooked cake” – “Mine turned under baked, but yours is more cooked.” But, anyway, you absolutely couldn’t use the “Look at if the adjective is doing noun-y things” criteria that’s very important for French. You can’t use that for Manange. You have to look at how they relate to the verbs instead.

Gretchen: Well, and it’s interesting because, doing the research for this episode and looking at Latin in a bit more detail, it turns out that Latin grammarians actually didn’t distinguish in the same way between nouns and adjectives at all. They talked about this broader category of “nomin” or “names” of which both nouns and adjectives were sub-categories. You had your substantive nouns and your adjectival nouns. These are both sub-categories of the general categories of nouns. Then verbs was its whole other thing. In some respects, I like to think of them as “adje-verbs” and “adje-nouns.” You have your adjectives that work like verbs do and your adjectives that work like nouns do. This is true of Algonquian languages as well is you have in these languages “to be red” or “to be big” is a verb. Instead of saying, “This house is big,” you say, essentially, “The house bigs” or “The house reds,” and that means, “It is big” or “It is red.” It’s all one word.

Lauren: Cool. That’s very verb, as opposed to the Manange which are kind of verb-y.

Gretchen: Yeah. They conjugate like verbs. The verbs get different types of endings and so on. They really act like verbs. Whereas, the nouns do a different thing. They have the endings like verbs do. It’s interesting to see – okay, the idea that adjectives exist. You can find evidence in English that they’re distinct from both verbs and nouns. They can do different types of things. But depending on the language, something that means essentially the same thing – like “red” or “big” or something which seems very descriptive-y – can, in some languages, have formal properties that makes it more like a verb, and then other languages have formal properties that makes it look like a noun, or neither of the above. I went and looked at the book Describing Morphosyntax, which is a book that tries to do a –

Lauren: Here’s all the possibilities.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s a book that tries to catalogue the possibilities for what languages can do, which of course is biased towards which languages have been previously described, but it does give you a bit of a picture of what some languages do at least. They actually break down five different types of ways you could treat adjectives.

Lauren: Okay. Here are five common ways, if we look across the world’s languages, adjectives tend to exist.

Gretchen: Right. They call them “property concepts” because it’s not clear that all of them are actually adjectives.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: We’ve talked about three of them already. One is property concepts could be verbs. The second is property concepts could be nouns. The fifth is there’s a distinct class of adjectives for property concepts.

Lauren: I love that’s the fifth. The thing that we think of as the most obvious is like, “Oh, and also this thing.”

Gretchen: The other two are – sometimes property concepts are treated as nouns and sometimes they’re treated as verbs depending on the demands of discourse. The example that this book has is in Dutch, but I’m more familiar with the German case which works in the same way, I think. This was one of those weird facts you have to learn about German adjectives if you learn German adjectives in school. Thy way that they articulate it in this book was not the way that I had learned this. It was just like, “Here’s this class of adjectives and it does several different weird things.” It’s very cool when you think about it in this way, which is that when the adjective goes before the noun – if you have something like “a red cat,” “a red car,” which is “eine rote Katze,” “ein rotes Auto.” “A red balloon” – “ein roter Ballon.” In that case, the adjective, “red,” has a different form depending on which noun it goes with. It acts like a noun because it gets all these noun endings depending on the gender. But if you say, “The cat is red,” “The car is red,” “The balloon is red” – “Das Auto ist rot.” You don’t put the ending there. You just have the bare form of the adjective. In that sense, it’s acting more verb-like because it doesn’t do the same gender agreement that it does when it’s before the noun. This was taught to me as like, “Here’s this thing you have to memorise,” but to think about it in terms of a typological perspective of maybe adjectives are fake and these words are sometimes acting as nouns and sometimes acting as verbs depending on other things in the discourse, it’s just a really interesting proposal. German speakers probably think that they have adjectives, but it’s an interesting formal proposal.

Lauren: I like it as a way to re-think something you take for granted.

Gretchen: Because it is true that sometimes they really seem to be very noun-y and they get these endings that the nouns get. Sometimes, they don’t get these endings. There’s also an extent to which they don’t really act like verbs because verbs get endings depending on what – if they were being really verb-y, you should have like, “You ‘red,’” “Du ‘rotest,’” which that doesn’t – “Du ‘rotst’” – that doesn’t exist. They don’t act fully like verbs, but they could act in the same way that you can say, “This is open,” “This is closed,” “This is opened,” “It is closed.” It could be some sort of verbal participle thingy. I dunno. It’s an interesting way of pointing out that even the diagnostics that say, “It takes on morphosyntactic properties of one type of part of speech, therefore it must belong to the same category as that part of speech.” If you have a case where sometimes it has the same endings and sometimes it doesn’t, then there are two things going on.

Lauren: Hmm. You’ve talked about four out of five possibilities for how things we think of as adjectives occur across the world’s languages. What is the fifth?

Gretchen: The fifth one is also a part-time thing which is that some property concepts get treated as nouns and other ones get treated as verbs.

Lauren: Right. So, kind of the opposite.

Gretchen: Right.

Lauren: Okay. This is our Manange example where you have that very small set that act as adjectives in a particular way and you have a set that act as more verb-y adjectives.

Gretchen: Yeah. For example – and I don’t know if this is true of a particular language – you could say, maybe, colours and numbers in this language get treated as verbs but sizes and qualities get treated as nouns or vice versa or some sort of distinction like that. The example in this book is with Yoruba, and I don’t know enough Yoruba to have a concrete example of how that works.

Lauren: It does exist in real languages. That’s good enough evidence for me.

Gretchen: It kind of takes us to this question which, you know, is also a question, if we look back at the Latin based or Greek based – because Greek did the same thing as Latin where it lumped nouns and adjectives together for, again, really good language internal reasons that they had the same sets of endings – of, is the class of adjectives even valid? Is it even really a thing when you start looking at the different types of evidence for a distinct class of words, in this case, across different languages?

Lauren: This brings us back to that question of those diagnostic criteria and the ways of testing if something is an adjective or maybe a noun or a verb that we talked about in more detail for English and a little bit of detail for other languages which is that you need to figure out the criteria that you’re using for diagnosis in each language. You can’t just come in with the English criteria and try and apply them to Yoruba or Manange or French because it won’t work.

Gretchen: It begs the question – in English, there’s an established grammatical tradition of saying, “Here are the diagnostic criteria for adjectives” and if you’re gonna work in English, it’s useful to know what the rest of the literature says for what adjectives are. If you’re working in a language where there hasn’t been this descriptive grammatical tradition, you’re coming in and saying, “Okay, so, first thing I need to figure out – are there any diagnoses that could prove that this is a different thing? What would it mean to be different? What are the language-internal things that could prove that some set of unknown words is different from some other set of other unknown words? I don’t know what the words are in each of these categories yet.”

Lauren: Yes. I remember doing this for Yolmo. There’s a bit of flexibility about whether an adjective can go before a noun or after a noun. They seem to mostly go before, I think, but I never actually – with the data that I had – managed to tease apart if it was a thing that was completely free or if it was because people were focusing on a particular bit of information and they wanted that at the start or the end. Going back to that thing about corpora, one of the examples that I have in the descriptive grammar of Lamjung Yolmo that I wrote is in there because I was just so excited to have a spontaneous example of someone saying a sentence that had three adjectives in it.

Gretchen: Because it’s so rare!

Lauren: Getting people to say something off the cuff with seven adjectives in it is so rare – impossibly rare. Even just having three adjectives I was like, “It’s so pretty. I have no reason to put it in the grammar except that there’re three adjectives here.” I had to start from scratch with this language – well, start with the existing literature because why make life hard for yourself – and figure out my own criteria for whether the category of adjectives existed at all to write about them in grammar and how to explain them.

Gretchen: But the existing literature doesn’t look something like the 1,000-plus page Cambridge Grammar of the English language that has everything described in exhaustive detail plus the hundreds of other books that are written about it. It’s like, “Oh, there are two books. Okay, that’s fine.”

Lauren: There’re a few things around, yes. It’s these edge cases on edge cases that we’ve been talking about, which is why something like the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language doesn’t just have, “Adjectives describe and modify nouns.”

Gretchen: That’s it. The one-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. That’s all that’s there. There’s 1,000 pages of, I dunno, probably 50 or 100 pages about adjectives in CGL. I haven’t checked.

Lauren: Looking at the variation across languages in how what we think of as adjectives behave and how you have to use language specific criteria for deciding if there are adjectives and what they look like brings us to a bigger philosophical question as to whether adjectives exist in Language as a thing at all – once we start looking at all the variation across the world’s languages.

Gretchen: And even more broadly, whether it’s legitimate to look at multiple languages and try to apply the same sets of categories. Is it legitimate to try to say that languages have nouns and languages have verbs? Even if we can establish maybe noun-hood and verb-hood – because those are, I dunno, fairly basic – does that mean that the more edge case-y categories like adjectives or adverbs or prepositions or something like that, which can sometimes be done with other types of grammatical features, do those exist? Is it even legitimate to try to cross apply these categories in languages? It’s an ontological question that doesn’t have an easy answer.

Lauren: This is actually an ongoing question in linguistics. It doesn’t have an easy answer. People are still grappling with this idea of language internal categories versus language general categories.

Gretchen: There’s a large extent to which the categories that we think of as basic, primary categories – nouns, verbs, adjectives – are inherited from a particular type of intellectual tradition of looking at languages. I mean, kind of the Greek and Latin one except not entirely because they didn’t actually necessarily think adjectives were entirely their own thing.

Lauren: What a revelation.

Gretchen: It comes from a particular grammatical descriptive tradition. Perhaps, if we’d started with a different language, we might’ve said, ah, well, a really important distinction is – let’s say you’re gonna be French – whether it goes before the noun or after the noun. Actually, this is a fundamental distinction and we need to go looking for this distinction in a whole bunch of other languages because we have this easy diagnostic for it in French. Surely, there’s some sort of fundamental ontological distinction between this set. So, where do you make your fundamental ontological distinctions and where do you say, “Oh, actually, these are just two sub-types of adjectives” or “These are two sub-types of verbs. Some of them just tend to be adje-verbs.”

Lauren: This ongoing debate about word categories and their existence across language is so long-standing in linguistics that the two different sides of this argument as affectionately known as “lumpers” and “splitters.”

Gretchen: Great names.

Lauren: Great names. Whether you lump words together that may have been across what people have more lately decided as separate categories. Those original Latin grammarians lumping what we think of as nouns and adjectives together – great lumpers. We’re much more splitter-y in our approach these days.

Gretchen: By comparison, we’re much splitter-y. Whereas, if we were to say, oh, it turns out that the kinds of things that can go before a noun and after the noun are something different, we could become even more splitter-y if we wanted to. You can find people who’ll argue for a lumpier approach or a splittier approach within the same language, sometimes using the same data to say, “Oh, well, there are some similarities or there are some differences and it depends on whether you think the similarities are more important or the differences are more important for whether you’re gonna argue for one or the other.” I love how it destabilises this – we think of, again, as this fairly intuitive notion of an adjective to say, “Well, maybe adjectives aren’t a thing” or “They’re not a thing in all languages” or “The evidence for them is different depending on what language you’re looking at.”

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, masks, and ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: It’s now available as a paperback.

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Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our comms producer is Eleanor Bally. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[malachi-walker]

What character(s) from other fandoms that you're a part of remind you the most of Catra? Personally, I don't think I've seen too many, aside from maybe Vegeta from DBZ and maybe Jason Todd from DC comics but that's about it for me

Ok, anon, thanks for your patience. Let's go.

Firstly, I have two ladies that do give me a similar vibe to Catra (though they aren't 100% matches as you'll see.) And I want you to take particular note of that: it's very telling that the characters you mentioned are both dudes. This is something I have been thinking about for literally decades because it is a deeply entrenched stereotype in our culture: male abuse victims are angry, frustrated loners who lash out until they find that one (girl) person that gets through their facade, female abuse victims are portrayed as either anxious messes (more common in recent years) or as just... These smiling caricatures who continue to pretend to be happy because that's what our societies expect women to be. And this is something I took note of at a very early age, because as someone growing up with an abusive birth father I looked to the MALE characters as a guide book on how to act, because getting angry and lashing out was what made sense to me at the time and I resented the hell out of that unspoken implication that I was supposed to just suck it up and plaster on a smile when I wanted to rage against the injustice of what I was dealing with. In hindsight it wasn't great behavior, but it was what I needed to keep myself sane at the time. I'm not even exaggerating when I say I have waited my whole life for a character like Catra: someone who is reflective of my experiences as an ex-abuse victim, someone who is angry and wrathful and still allowed to be sympathetic. Now on to our two ladies.

First up: Vriska Serket from Homestuck. (I know, Homestuck is a huge fandom with a lot of assholes, but I do still enjoy the original comic. I just don't interact with the fandom.) Vriska and Catra both have similar vibes in the way they project their outward personas of being the badass bitch who takes no shit and is on top of things, but we all know that's a lie. And they both come from abusive backgrounds: Vriska was forced to become a killer at a very young age because her parental guardian (a literal giant spider) would eat her if Vriska didn't feed her other kids. Doesn't excuse her jerkass tendencies or her terrible actions, but that was how she started out. And Catra's deal with SW needs no explanation.

They both have developed very similar gadfly tendencies in order to maintain a sense of control around other people (though Vriska is a lot more mean spirited about it) and both have moments when the facade cracks and they show actual sincerity and frustration at themselves and other people. The main difference between them is that Vriska's actions are driven by a sense of grandiose self-importance that she has cultivated and fed into as a way to avoid looking at her own actions (because she's the best, so everything she does is awesome, right?) whereas Catra's primary driving motivation is pain: either making sure she doesn't have to hurt anymore or hurting those who hurt her. Plus Catra grapples with her sense of guilt a lot throughout Spop and maintains those sympathetic undertones while Vriska's moments of clarity are so rare that you basically have to keep a chart to locate them. But you could totally picture them both teaming up to make fun of their respective frenemies, assuming they didn't kill each other first for reminding themselves of their deep underlying self-loathing.

Second candidate: Anthy Himemiya from Revolutionary Girl Utena. And boy howdy, if anyone is interested in this show and wants to avoid spoilers, skip to the end now, because we're going on a deep and dark journey here.

At first glance, she and Catra don't have much in common. In fact, she seems to fit the stereotype I described above: the placid smiling doll who takes the abuse and keeps going. Key word: seems to. Anyone who actually watches the show knows exactly where I'm going here.

We're introduced to Anthy as the "Rose Bride": the prize in a series of sword fights between students at a very strange school, with the ultimate promise being that whoever owns the Rose Bride at the end of the duels will gain some nebulous ultimate power. And yeah, I said "own" for a reason: whoever possesses the Rose Bride effectively owns her and some of the most uncomfortable scenes in the show reinforce the fact that Anthy tailors her thoughts and actions to whoever currently controls her. And as you can expect, this leads to BUCKETS of abuse. Literally everyone in this show is culpable in some manner for this, no matter how well intentioned.

But remember that "seems to?" Because that's only one side of Anthy; the outward persona if you will. On the other side of the coin you have Anthy the Witch, and that's where the parallels with Catra come into play and why Anthy was my go-to abuse representation before Spop rocked my world. Because the big twist we find out at the end of the series is that Anthy and her older brother Akio (formerly Dios) are the former literal personifications of the fairytale damsel in distress princess and the noble prince on a white horse, respectively.

But the balance was upset: having to constantly go around saving people was literally killing Dios, because one of the major points of RGU is that you can assist people in saving themselves but doing it yourself strips them of agency and traps them in a cycle of needing to be saved again and again. The more people the noble prince saved, the more people needed saving. When it became clear that he couldn't keep going, Anthy took a stand and prevented the people coming for Dios (angry that he wasn't saving them anymore) from getting to him, and thus incurred the wrath of everyone and got skewered alive by an angry mob in the process. This isn't hyperbole: the role of the Rose Bride is to instinctively bring out the disdain and hatred of everyone on the planet. It's a punishment for stepping out of line, for not being the placid princess who needs to be rescued anymore.

Because we're operating on fairy tale logic, no longer being a princess means that Anthy became a witch, and no longer being the prince made Dios into satanic archetype Akio. So behind the scenes of the entire show, Anthy is the witch assisting her brother in orchestrating the duels, and their ultimate goal is to find someone pure of heart enough to embody those princely virtues Dios once possessed and to steal that power so Akio can return to being who he once was. All of the psychological torments and head games are designed to weed out the potential candidates to find that special someone... Except it's an impossible goal because no human being can live up to that standard. And with each atrocity they commit it becomes even more impossible to return to being that person.

Ok, tangent done, here's where it gets interesting: Anthy is a character with two sides to her, the suffering Rose Bride fated to endure the hatred of the entire world and the Wicked Witch who manipulates and orchestrates the torment of those around her. But here's the deal: she's a victim too. She's a victim of a system that won't let her be anything other than these two binaries; she's a victim of her brother who has all the power over her and has trapped her in a codependent incestuous relationship, and I don't care how awful the things she's done are: nobody deserves to go through the shit she does. So with all of that in mind, the actions that she goes through as the witch make perfect sense. Why shouldn't she torment these people who do nothing but abuse her and deny her of agency? Even the best hearted of the duellists (aka the ones who don't hit her or abuse her sexually) nonetheless fall into the trap of projecting their own biases and expectations onto her, biases that her role dictates she carry out. Her actions as the witch aren't right, but nothing about this situation is. That's the entire point.

And that's where she ties into being like Catra. Catra does some truly fucked up things, but it doesn't cancel out the fact that she's an abuse victim that has been literally tortured for most of her life for no good reason and has received zero acknowledgement of that abuse in universe. And much like Anthy, she can't begin to heal until the situation is acknowledged, because that's literally step one of breaking the cycle: confirming that this is not okay and that no one deserves the shit she's been through. Just knowing that herself isn't enough: it's acknowledgement from others that enables that process to begin, because no one can recover from abuse in a vacuum. You need outside people to be touchstones, because so much of recovering from abuse is confronting the way it warps your perception and thought processes. You need at the minimum one normal perspective to give you that, preferably more, but one minimum.

Hurting the people who care about her is definitely not okay and I'm not excusing her actions in that category, but it doesn't change the fact that she is justified in wanting to rage and lash out, because she is still trapped in that cycle. She can't heal or let go because the process hasn't even been started. She's not off the hook for the things she's done, but neither should she be automatically condemned without taking those factors into account (which is the entire reason why the distinction between an excuse and a justification exists.)

And if I can be a little pithy... The other similarity between Catra and Anthy is I can guarantee that in twenty years people will STILL be arguing over whether or not Catra "deserved" to be freed from her abusive situation.

Good God this turned into an essay. Hope this makes up for how long it took, anon. And anyone else who makes it this far, treat yourself. You earned it.

[kpopfanfictrash]

Cupcake Wars (M)

Author: kpopfanfictrash

Pairing: You / Kungsoo (D.O.)

Genre: Smut / Humor

Prompt: “Frost the damn cupcakes.”

Rating: 18+ (explicit sex)

Word Count: 2,901 [ THIS IS A REPOST ]

Every year, your company holds its annual bake sale. The event is a big deal, not in small part because Accounting always wins. The remaining three hundred and sixty four days of the year are then spent pointedly lording this fact over everyone else in the building.

Each meeting you attend holds a simper, that look of fake concern over the top of wire-rimmed glasses (a fashion staple, in Accounting). “Such a shame,” Rosetta tends to sigh at your weekly check-ins, tutting gently between her teeth. “Especially after what happened to Y/N last year. A real pity. I hope the same thing doesn’t happen again.”

This is when you tend to grit your teeth and smile, pinching your leg beneath the table and biting back your retort. You don’t need pithy comebacks against Rosetta, because you have the best brownies in the world.

She is right about one thing, though – last year was a catastrophe. It was a disaster of monumental proportions, ruined by a freak accident you could have done nothing to avoid. Not that this keeps Rosetta from implying otherwise, of course. It was in the middle of baking, when your apartment held that emergency fire drill. Your roommate practically dragged you from the kitchen, leaving so fast, you didn’t have time to properly turn off the oven – ironic, come to think of it – and ending in your caramel pretzel brownies being burnt into crisps.

When you arrived and saw their ruined state, you sank to your knees, cursing gods of both baking and fire.

While you did this, your roommate, Jongin, stood by and stared. “Uh,” he responded, growing more and more nervous as time passed. “Are you going to be okay?”

“No, Jongin,” you exhaled, lowering your chin to your chest. Gently, you placed one hand on the oven door. “My children have given their lives and I must mourn them appropriately.”

“Ri-ight.” Slowly Jongin backed from the room. “This has been… weird, Y/N.” Without breaking eye contact, he shut the door to his bedroom.

You sat there for several more minutes before grumbling to your feet, deciding nothing could be done to salvage the situation. You were out of baking supplies and it was 10:30 pm on a Sunday night – there was no way you could bake something by tomorrow morning. Instead, you were forced to bear the shame of arriving with store-bought goods – a fact which has honestly haunted you ever since.

Not this year. 

Gritting your teeth, you stir harder. This year, things will be different; except that this year, you have a new problem. Glaring over the top of your mixing bowl, you stare pointedly at Do Kyungsoo. “Why are you here again?” you demand, continuing to stir.

He raises his eyebrows over the top of his glasses. “My oven broke,” he explains, for at least the fourth time today. “Jongin said I could come over and use his.”

Again, you glare at Jongin’s bedroom door. “Yeah, well Jongin isn’t here,” you huff, incensed. Jongin is off visiting his girlfriend this weekend. “It’s just me.”

“Right.” Kyungsoo seems unbothered, continuing to crack eggs. “But half of the oven is Jongin’s, and it is this half I will be using.”

“Oh, no,” you mutter, wagging the spatula in his direction. “Don’t you try and accountant your way out of this one.”

It looks as though Kyungsoo is struggling hard not to laugh. “Okay, first of all – accountant is not a verb.” He places a shell in the trash. “Second, you don’t have to worry about me because I’ll be done soon and out of your hair. Things can’t possibly go worse for you than last year, can they?”

Rather than giving Kyungsoo the satisfaction of answering him, you resume stirring. The batter soon becomes smooth from your ministrations, closer to where you need and while you work, you sneak a peek at Do Kyungsoo.

Truth be told, you don’t actually hate him. Despite him being a part of Accounting and kind of stuffy and continually at your apartment hanging out with Jongin – you don’t hate him. Kyungsoo has these deep, dark brown eyes. He has this funny, square smile when he laughs. His humor is deadpan, the kind which usually flies over the rest of Accounting’s heads during meetings.

Okay, so maybe you like him.

Kyungsoo is Jongin’s best friend, though. He is over here all the time and he has never once expressed interest in you, so it’s clear where he stands on the matter. Take right now, for instance. Kyungsoo continues to stare studiously at his cookbook, squinting down at the page and acting as though you don’t exist.

You stir harder – too hard, actually – and some of the flour from the bowl explodes over the rim. “Crap,” you mutter, blinking through the haze. When you try to wipe it, this only makes things worse, leaving a giant smear of chocolate down the side of your cheek.

Glancing up, you see that Kyungsoo is staring. He bites down on his lips to keep himself from laughing. “You – uh,” he pauses, lips pressed into a thin line. “Need help?”

“Nope,” you snap, turning away. Wiping your face, you rub it further into your cheekbones. “Just ignore me and frost the damn cupcakes.”

Kyungsoo glances down at the bowl, then back up, puzzled. “I haven’t even baked the cupcakes yet.”

Ignoring him, you turn on the sink, wetting your hands to wipe at your face. “Right. Never mind,” you exhale, blinking back tears. How embarrassing, to do that in front of him. It surprises you, when you turn back around and find Kyungsoo before you. “What are you doing?” you blurt, ass hitting the counter as you take a step backwards.

Kyungsoo’s eyes narrow, lifting a hand. Gently, he wipes a smudge from your cheek. “You missed a spot,” he exhales.

The moment seems to last longer than it actually does. Time slows while his thumb brushes over your skin. The motion is purposeful, matter-of-fact, but his eyes remain warm. You find yourself at a loss for words, gaze locked on his. Then Kyungsoo pulls away, returning to his abandoned bowls on top of your counter.

“Thanks,” you manage, staring after him.

Kyungsoo shrugs, resuming stirring.

Walking back to the counter, you feel aware that something has shifted. For some reason, you keep glancing at Kyungsoo, sure that he is doing the same. Your gazes never meet though, so you quickly stop. That is, until you are pouring batter into your tray and happen to look up, before he looks away.  

Kyungsoo blinks, breaking the moment but the damage has been done. His cheeks flush red and hastily, Kyungsoo removes his glasses in the guise of cleaning them. Smiling, you smooth your batter with a spatula, realizing he is not immune to this tension.

“Soo?” you murmur, innocently looking at him.

Kyungsoo seems surprised that you know his nickname. Occasionally Jongin calls him this, but never you. He has left his glasses on the edge of the counter and his eyes, meeting yours, are wide. You notice his hair is mussed, from when his hands ran through it earlier. 

“Yes?” he asks.

“Could you pass me that spoon?”

Kyungsoo looks down and nods, picking it up. When he hands it to you, your fingertips graze his to send electricity down your spine. “Thanks,” you murmur, voice lower than you meant it to be.

Sneaking another glance, you notice him biting his lip, concentrating hard on adding flour and sugar. Returning to your brownies, you try to shake the visual from your mind. Kyungsoo would have said something to you if he liked you, you remind yourself. This is just your imagination, reading into his movements.

Eventually, it is time to place your tray in the oven. As you slide in the sweets and set the timer, you turn towards the kitchen and nearly run into Kyungsoo. “Oh!” you blurt, right before he kisses you.

His lips are warm, soft, his nose brushing yours as he pulls gently away. The kitchen around you is silent, but for the tick of your timer. Slowly, you open your eyes in confusion.

“What was... that for?” you exhale, struggling to catch your breath.

Kyungsoo stares back at you, looking nervous for the first time that you’ve known him. “I just,” he swallows, shaking his head. “I’ve wanted to do that for such a long time.”

The memory of his kiss still burns on your lips, as you look on in shock. You had no idea that he liked you – Kyungsoo is always so cool, always so composed. He never seems to think much of anything, let alone you but now he doesn’t seem cool, doesn’t seem composed at all. His glance continues to dart from your lips to your eyes; searching for a response, an answer, anything to put him out of his misery.

“You only wanted to kiss me?” you manage to ask.

The corner of his mouth lifts, as Kyungsoo ducks his head to boldly kiss you again. Softly, his hands slide into your hair, pulling you close. His lips mold to yours, body hard as you melt up against him. His hands slide over your torso, pulling you backwards; away from the oven, to be pressed against the refrigerator, flush to the metal while his hands slide behind you.

He quickly undoes your apron, yanking it free to throw onto the floor. He laughs at your clothes, still sprinkled with flour. “What was the point,” he murmurs, kissing your neck. “Of wearing an apron, if your clothes got dirty anyways?”

“The apron was cute,” you respond to him, shrugging. “I wanted to look cute.”

“Mm.” Raising his head, Kyungsoo locks eyes. “But you always look cute.” Leaning in, he presses his entire body to yours, dark hair falling into his gaze.

It is hard to think straight, when he looks at you like that. Smoothing your hands under his shirt, you slide up his back and over his skin. Kyungsoo kisses you gently, teasing and sweet until you achingly groan. Right hand sliding into your hair, he opens your mouth and rolls his hips against yours.

His length is clear, outlined through the press of his jeans and sending your heart racing. You want him, god do you want him. “My room,” you gasp, breaking away.

Kyungsoo’s eyes widen, but he nods, gripping your hand tightly in his. He lets you pull him down the length of your hall, into your bedroom. When he steps inside, you almost smile, because it is such a strange sight. You don’t normally bring guys back on the first date but, come to think of it, Kyungsoo has already been in your home before. Just not in your room.

He seems to be realizing this as well, as he walks the edge of the room. He stares, silently observing your books heaped in piles, the colorful pictures hung on your walls.

“I guess you’ve never seen my room before,” you say to him, soft.

Shaking his head, Kyungsoo picks up and replaces a figurine. He looks over at you. “No. But I thought about it.”

Breath catching, you watch him walk forward. “What did you think about?” you murmur, unnerved when he stops before you to slide his hands around your waist. Gently, he tugs your shirt upwards.

“You,” he responds simply, removing your shirt entirely. “In your bed. I was there as well,” he adds, almost an afterthought.

You laugh, tugging his shirt free from his belt. “Was I? What was I doing?”

Kyungsoo’s chest is toned, rising and falling as he stares back at you. Without answering, he kisses you, walking you backwards to sit on the edge of your bed. Quietly, he pulls you to sit on top of him. 

“I could show you,” he offers, soft.

Not daring to speak, you nod. As you slide closer, Kyungsoo’s eyes darken when you roll your hips over him. He groans, low in his throat and kisses you, this time with a deeper edge. Flipping you over on the bed, his hands trail your sides as he watches your expression. He bends, only his dark hair visible while he unlatches your bra, removing entirely to toss onto the floor. 

You gasp, arching when his lips close over your nipple. His other hand moves to your center, palming you fast over your leggings. You weren’t expecting this and your legs close tight around his hand, while his mouth continues to tease you.

Kyungsoo’s thumb continues to stroke, making small circles over the outside of your pants. Soon, a whimper falls from your lips. “Kyungsoo,” you groan, distressed when he lifts his head; only to move to your other breast. “Soo.”

“Yes?” His fingers slide under the hem of your pants, rolling the material and tugging it down to your ankles.

Strangely, you are not embarrassed by being naked before him. Normally, you would be. Sex with someone for the first time is inevitably awkward but the way Kyungsoo is looking at you now, makes you never want to wear clothes again. He stares at you in awe, transfixed by the sight.

“Yours, too,” you murmur, hands fumbling with the strap of his belt.

Kyungsoo tears his gaze away long enough to replace your hands with his, shoving his pants down and off to the side. He pulls you forward, kissing you eagerly while you shiver into his body.

Somehow, your leg wraps around the edge of his waist, curving closer. His hands twine in your hair, hands hot on your body. He follows your spine to your ass, pulling you closer. Hand drifting in between your legs, Kyungsoo briefly swears when he discovers your wetness.

“Fuck,” he groans, pulling back just to see you. “Can I taste you?”

Nodding, you tremble when he lowers you onto your back. Kyungsoo lowers himself between your legs, fingers sliding over your thighs. When his mouth brushes skin, tongue deliberately tracing everywhere but where you want him, you tug at his hair.

“Soo,” you groan, legs framing his head.

He smiles, finally giving into what you want. You groan when he starts to suck on your sex, one finger sliding into your body at the same time. He continues until you’re soaking and needy, begging for him to please be inside you. Then, Kyungsoo raises himself on his elbows, kissing you messily while you explain where the condoms are.

Before he can roll it onto himself, you bend and take his cock in your mouth. Kyungsoo is already hard from pleasing you; he hisses, when your lips cover his shaft. When you take him all the way, deep-throating, he runs a hand through his hair.

“No,” he groans, eyes fluttering shut. “I don’t want to come like this.”

Sliding your lips off, you sit back on your heels. Kyungsoo rolls the condom onto himself, stroking his member in slow, slow motions. When he is fully covered, Kyungsoo grabs your body. He holds you above him, waiting for your nod before sinking you onto his lap.

You stay there for a moment, forehead pressed to his, slowly breathing. Then, his hands dig into your back, pulling you closer while he slowly thrusts upwards.

The sensation is deep and you whimper his name, especially once Kyungsoo begins to move faster. He thrusts into you over and over, rolling his hips at just the right angle. Lowering his head to your neck, he bites down as his finger skims down your torso.

When he reaches your sex, he pauses, continuing to thrust while rubbing circles against you. Entire body tightening, you clench down around him, certain you can’t hold on for much longer. Each thrust hits your g-spot and you can’t quite think, due to the building pleasure within you.

“Soo,” you moan, pressing closer. Arching your back, you deepen the angle. “I’m so close.”

He nods, thrusting harder, kissing you deeply while his finger continues to tease. Soon, you’re gasping, slamming yourself down on his dick and feeling yourself coming undone. Your orgasm is shattering, entire body releasing while he continues to move. At his own release, Kyungsoo stills, sliding hands up the length of your body. You stay like that for awhile, fingers curled tight into the hair at the base of his neck.

“Wow,” he exhales at last, eyes finding yours. “I mean, just – wow.”

You laugh at his expression, leaning back while he presses his lips gently to yours. “I can’t say I disagree with that,” you murmur.

Kyungsoo pulls you closer, wrapping his arms tightly around you. “I’ve liked you this whole time,” he admits, voice quiet. “Each time I came over, every day at the office, I would try and work up the courage to say something.”

“Why didn’t you?” you ask, pulling back.

“Are you kidding me?” Kyungsoo smiles wryly. “Look at you. Look at me. I’m boring, dull, I’m everything you couldn’t possibly want.”

“Boring? Dull?” Arching an eyebrow, you stare. “I don’t have time to tell you how wrong you are but, suffice to say, now that I have you – you’re not getting away.”

Kyungsoo chuckles, kissing you again. “Deal.” As he pulls away, his eyes widen at something over your shoulder. “Oh, fuck,” he groans, biting down on his lip to keep him from laughing.

“What?” you blurt, turning as much as you can. “What is it?” From your spot in Kyungsoo’s lap, you notice the tendril of smoke rising out of the oven. “Oh, no,” you groan, lowering your head to his shoulder. “No!”

Kyungsoo laughs, his body shaking with yours. “It’s okay,” he grins, removing himself from your body. “It’s fine, we still have my batter.” Wrapping your blanket around his torso, Kyungsoo shuffles into the kitchen. At the door he stops, peering at you through the frame. “Unless you want to use the batter for… other things?”

A tiny smile grows on your face, as you shrug. “Why not?” you groan, falling back on your bed. “Work already thinks I’m a horrible baker anyways.”

[3,000 Followers Drabble Game Master List]

[eldritchsurveys]

534.

Are you the type of person who gets straight to the point?: >> I generally prefer getting straight to the point about simple matters, but sometimes “the point” isn’t really a thing that can be laid down in one short sentence or whatever. I’m always more interested in the nuance and complexity of things than in just being pithy.

What was the last thing you said in complete caps?: >> I don’t remember, I usually avoid typing in all caps.

Do you enjoy playing board games?: >> Not usually. I get bored of them easily.

Are there any movies you are wanting to see?: >> Yeah, Spider-Man: Far From Home (still) and Jojo Rabbit (next weekend, hopefully) and maybe that one movie about the snake church (snurch)... Them That Follow, I think it’s called? Also, The Rite, because someone I was talking to earlier reminded me that that existed and I still haven’t seen it. Me. With the priest thing. Still hasn’t seen that. SMH

Do you live closer to the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific Ocean?: >> Atlantic.

Who was the last contact you stored into your cell phone, if you have one?: >> Katie, Sparrow’s best friend.

Did you wear anything new today?: >> The Endless Nights Vampire Ball shirt is kind of new, and I bought the Hellraiser necklace yesterday.

Would you ever have a calendar in your car?: >> ---

What was the last song you sang along to?: >> Beautiful by Sevendust, probably, because that’s the last song I listen to and I do know the lyrics.

Are you a fan of the band Taking Back Sunday?: >> I’m a fan of two of their songs.

Do you ever eavesdrop on people’s conversations?: >> Sometimes. Usually unintentionally, because people are loud and my sensory processing makes it difficult for me to tune them out even if I want to.

Aside from waking up, what was the first thing you did this morning?: >> Went to the bathroom.

Are you good at playing Hide and Go Seek?: >> I don’t know, I don’t have any memories of playing it (probably because I never got to play it at all).

Do you live in an apartment or a house?: >> Apartment.

Is there a music artist that never seizes to amaze you?: >> Every time I think about My Chemical Romance I’m just. Amazed. They’ve amazed me since the first time I saw the Helena video and I’ve never lost that sense of wonder.

At what time do you normally go to bed?: >> Sometime between 10p and 1a.

What is the last magazine you read?: >> Uh... GameInformer, I think. That reminds me, I still have two Time issues to flip through.

How many words do you type per minute?: >> I don’t know, I haven’t tested myself in years. At least 60wpm, I’m sure.

What is your favorite term of endearment?: >> ---

Do you like Twizzlers?: >> No.

Who or what made you smile last?: >> I don’t remember.

Have you ever seen the movie The Wicker Man?: >> No, but I very much would like to.

How many states are between the state you live in and Florida?: >> I don’t know, go look at a map.

Do you sneak in candy/soda when you go to the movies?: >> I usually sneak in booze, if anything, especially if I’m going to the cinema closest to the apartment, because that specific one doesn’t sell booze like most of the others do. Also because store-bought booze is cheaper. But one time when Sparrow and I went to see some movie or another we sneaked in burgers from Wendy’s, lmao.

What was the last song you had on repeat?: >> I don’t remember.

Do you often have that song on repeat?: >> I don’t often put songs on repeat, period.

What brand of lotion do you use?: >> Aveeno. I also have a body butter kind of thing from a vendor in New Orleans who makes it herself. It feels and smells so fucking luxurious, I love it.

Where are your favorite pair of jeans from?: >> Old Navy.

Silly string or confetti?: >> No thanks.

What month is your best friend’s birthday in?: >> ---

One a scale of 1 to 10, how tired are you right now?: >> Like a 3? I’m not that tired right now, but I’m sure I will be within the next couple of hours.

How long is your favorite song?: >> ---

Nachos or tacos?: >> Tacos.

Whose wedding did you last attend?: >> My own.

Are you a rebel?: >> Yeah, it’s kind of just part of my personality. “Incorrigible” is the word I like to use, because I got it used against me a lot as a child. ~reclamation~

Does it take you more or less than an hour to get ready for the day?: >> It takes me less than 10 minutes, lol.

What was the highlight of your day today?: >> Lauren came to the weekly meetup and that’s always great because we like the same kind of shit and it’s fun.

Do you tap your foot when you listen to music?: >> Sometimes.

Would you rather use tape or glue?: >> Depends.

Homemade or store bought cards?: >> I have no preference. I don’t really have a use for cards at all and I find them to be kind of wasteful. Kind of like wrapping paper, but at least with wrapping paper there’s the experience of unwrapping a gift, which is kind of fun. Cards aren’t really that fun to me.

When did you last eat popcorn?: >> The only time I ever eat popcorn is when we go to Horrock’s because I always try one of their weird popcorn flavours that they have free samples of. I don’t like popcorn but I always try theirs for some reason.

Have you ever done community service?: >> No.

Will you get your hair cut anytime soon?: >> I should probably buzz my hair sometime next week.

Are you uncoordinated?: >> Not usually.

Michael or Janet Jackson?: >> ---

Do you listen to any hip hop?: >> Sure.

What will you be doing at this time tomorrow?: >> I have no idea. Probably something like this.

Have you ever listened to Jane’s Addiction?: >> Yep. I like Mountain Song.

Orange or purple?: >> Purple in most cases.

& - the typical ending to my surveys - how about some lyrics?: There I am on the road again, there I am up on the stage, there I go playing star again, there I go turn the page <-- Just gonna keep Lane’s because 1) I can’t think of any off the top of my head and 2) I love this song. Well, the Metallica version, anyway. The original never got to me in quite the same way.