#i tend to get pretty literal about the phrase “fuck or die”

[yeyinde]

stalker!Ghost who gets tired of these little games you keep playing with him (blocking his number, changing your locks), and decides to take matters into his own hands. after all, it says something that you went out of your way to get a restraining order against him—accompanied by a scathing, bratty little message about leaving you alone. boundaries. him being a creep. as if everything he does to protect you was an inconvenience. was for nothing. maybe his old man was right. maybe some brats need a good, hard lesson in respect.

one he feels obligated to give.  

so. he comes for you. presses the muzzle of his gun against your trembling lip, and tells you to stick that pretty tongue out for him, birdy. 

(since you want to be so lippy, he'll give you something to mouth off on.)

[iamthunderhearmehowl]

Halsin's Daughter Headcannons PT5: ✨️Names/Personality/Druid Subclass / Theme Songs ✨️

Oh wow. We're on prt 5???? Am I obsessed? Or am I basically making a new DND character to play in my next campaign 🤫🫣

Either way, I want you guys to enjoy this as much as I am.

ANWAYS

So I have 4 names lined up and a poll going on. The poll and all other posts related to Halsin's Daughter can be found here.

And may I just say that ya'll are going to make this hella hard for me bc everytime I look all the names are tied lmao.

The names:

Armelle - Means Bear

Faeryl - I think this one is super cute

Haelra - Similar to Halsin

Khalees - Not gonna lie, I got this one from a name randomizer

I'll make another post in 7 days letting yall know the winner. Could I have easily just flipped a coin and name her? Yeah but that's no fun!

Personality:

I'm still working on this one so bear with me (hahaha i hate myself lmao)

I think she would be really quiet. Hiding in the background, she normally wouldn't speak unless she is spoken to. She tends to keep to herself

Although she is a natural flirt and naturally charming; part of her knows that it's a defense mechanism. She's like this because she HAD TO be. She had to survive her life in the underdark and that meant winning her mother political favors via seducing people. It was survival for her.

She's actually really klutzy. She always knocks something over. IDK man she's like either super unlucky or just a bull in a china shop.

Dead ass would just be walking and minding her own buisness and her shirt would get caught on a door and she would fall backwards and accidently set the place on fire

She's also kind of a day dreamer. Most people would see her and think about how elegant she looks sitting at the tavern table with her legs crossed nicely, thoughfully staring into her cup

In reality - she's thinking about eating chocolate in her wildshape as a wolf. Would she die or would she just have really bad diarrhea????

Her thoughts are literally your google search bar at 3 am.

When she finally gets comfortable around people, she is a gem to be around: She's pretty funny + a mess.

Walking chaos honestly

Favorite phrases: "Why the fuck are you the way that you are?" "For what reason???" "It was an accident I swear" "You have 2 braincells"

She's not as serious as her father; but she did spend most of her time with Mol and Arabella who are both pretty mischevious and witty

Now once she has a mission or job to do it's a whole different story: Home girl goes 0 to 100 real quick

She uses wild shape to her full advantage

If she's getting chased on rooftop she'll just jump off and change into a crow in mid air

She'll also wildshape into a wolf and run at you at full speed only to change her self back right as she stabs you

Druid Subclass:

I'm still looking into this, but I think I would make her either Circle of Dreams or Circle of Wildfire.

I can see circle of dreams because she would be good aligned. And it's easy to see her playing with Pixies in the underdark as a child.

HOWEVER

Circle of Wildfire would make more sense because again this girl is just walking chaos. Like I said in previous posts she sees natures balance as chaos itself. What is normal to the spider is chaos to the fly. So Circle of Wildfire would make so much sense for her.

Again I am working on it but let me know what you think ❤️

Theme Songs:

This is honestly just for funsies.

HD's Theme Song: ⤵️⤵️

Dammon + HD:

lol can you tell that I'm a Sleep Token fan? Anways that's all I have for tonight! I'll be back for part 6 as soon as I can!

[magmacannon]

🚬, 🌫️, 🦪, 🛡️ & 🪓 for Grey and Yarrow!

ohooeheehee here we go, time to finish these up. G for Grey and Y for Yarrow ofc

🚬 smoking/drinking habits? signature brand or drink?

G - Occasional smoker, probably a one drink a day-type guy! Very stereotypically I think he likes liquor on the rocks (though I think he'd be a little crazy abt coffee liquors and mixed drinks including them). I think Grey would only smoke if he had an opera cigarette holder at hand though, both for the aesthetics and for not getting the smell on his suits.

Y - I think Yarrow probably smokes less than most people at this point in his life, though he was regularly rolling joints when he was younger. His drink of choice is wine that he dramatically swirls while lounging (or fruity mixed drinks) and he definitely drinks pretty often.

I rolled a dice for this and only Grey knows how to use a bong though! yay <3

🌫️ how does this character feel about lying?

G - Grey lies a lot!! He figures that the truth is only necessary for business transactions and personal conversations, and can have fun with adjusting the truth sometimes. He has an incredible poker face, too. That being said, most of his lies are those of omission and in the name of good customer service.

Y - Yarrow is totally comfortable with inconsequential lies and/or lying about literally anything to people he dislikes, but generally tries to be very truthful and straightforward with everyone else. The most he'll do is fib something to fuck with someone he likes and will usually explain it as a joke immediately afterward. He also gets mad if you accuse him of lying when he hasn't (and will fake this anger if he actually did lie) - he does keep the phrase "I'm being entirely truthful" for situations where he is in fact being truthful, though.

🦪 how would this character describe their gender, if asked?

G - Again with the grain of salt that is "gender presentation/masculinity and femininity are different in Dorna", I think Grey hadn't put all that much thought into gender, met his ex and started wondering about it via their own approach to gender presentation as a 'fun game,' and then settled on "I'm alright as-is" and not really worrying himself about it.

Y - He's got the type of gender you unlock after transitioning in both directions multiple times. He's dressing dramatically enough for it to be drag most days more than anything else!

🛡️how does this character protect themself and others?

G - Grey tends to protect himself and others by being very private! He has a very small number of people he cares about and is willing to protect, and keeps it that way very purposefully to maintain a low level of risk. He's pretty keen on using enchantments and things that can defend him/his family/his shop even when he's not around, though. He has redundancies in security.

Y - Yarrow's first line of defense is to only get involved momentarily in the lives of others, which helps him protect himself emotionally and means that he doesn't feel trapped in responsibility for anyone else (so he hopes). Second line of defense for himself and people he cares about is One Million Powerful Spells (and/or money or connections) - when push comes to shove Yarrow uses every option he has to protect himself and those he cares about.

🪓 would they make it to the end in a horror movie?

G - I really don't know... if he was one of the main cast then absolutely not, he'd likely die shortly after discovering a macguffin or some Secret. If he was a mysterious vendor then he'd be alright, but that would only happen if he was there for like one scene total.

Y - I feel like he's too slay and would be doomed. 90% chance he dies bc he's having sex and fails the horror movie cliche test, 10% chance he can go final girl or just BE The Killer. Regardless he's giving a stellar performance!

[keingleichgewicht]

WERE YOU KIDDING ABOUT THE ASK GAME if not i dont have any specific lyrics in mind but i always thought the lyrics to the mill were so cool and maybe you could get some thoughts out of them? :0

YEAH GOD OKAY LET’S TALK ABOUT THE MILL. LET’S TALK ABOUT UHHHHHHHHH [THROWS DARTBOARD]

this line. this MIGHT go on for a while so i will............  readmore

so the mill feels kind of notably different to the rest of the pafl songs, which tend to be unusually literal for lyric, either straightforward retellings of events (punch it, punk!) or character piece monologues set to plot visuals (strike 3) or both (all of them, but for instance particularly comfort zone, which is just dmitry’s horrible manifesto until it gets hijacked by a death sentence in the second verse.) the mill is a lot more like what we expect from poetry these days, which is to say it’s heavy on imagery, low on clarity, and fucking confusing!

I’ll draw a circle in the sand, drive myself around the bend in a desperate attempt to hold on to your battered hand Rocked to sleep beneath the snow, she is bathed in youthful glow ‘Strong enough to let it go,’ he says, but darling, I don’t know

a lot of the mill is about circles. this is in the name: a mill is something which turns. a waterwheel is a circle, a grindstone is a circle. it’s even in the melody: the chorus is a cyclic, pentatonic four-note riff that keeps going up and down and up its own ladder, chasing its own tail, not really reaching resolution. and then it’s also in, you know, the story:

the meat grinder!!!! everyone’s favorite fucking hellhole!!!! it is only semi-explicitly identified in the song but that’s because it’s a concept from the source material - both tarkovsky’s stalker and roadside picnic feature the meat-grinder, as a location nicknamed thus by stalkers because it is even more fucking deadly than the rest of the zone, all of which is already ridiculously fucking deadly, and if you’ve seen the movie:

it is more or less instantly recognizable in the mill as well. so here we have a circle! here we have a mill (the title has about seventy double meanings but this is certainly one of them,) and as it turns out, this mill at least will absolutely kill you. and horribly too. interestingly though, in roadside picnic (the book) the meat-grinder is not a tunnel, and it’s not round - it’s just a nondescript patch of ground which will wring you out like a dishcloth and kill you extremely dead if you walk into it. on the other hand what we have in the book in terms of circles is the golden ball, which is the equivalent of the movie’s the room, which is, well,

in short both stories ultimately hinge upon the idea that there is a something in the zone which can give you your heart’s desire. anything you want. everything you want. whatever you want. it is infinitely powerful; it is infinitely capable. the catch is that it will only give you what you want. the catch is that giving you what you want is not the same as giving you what you are asking for. the other catch is that in both cases you have to get through the meat-grinder first.

(so, by the way, what the fuck, right? does pafl’s zone have a wish-granting factory? is it also behind the grinder? where were the original trio going when they got themselves fucked up? and did they get there?)

but the point is: the golden ball, the wish-granting factory, is also a circle. it’s just sort of a sphere. it’s a big round fuckin yellow thing. you know, sorta like:

which is THE ONLY TIME yellow is used in occam’s razor not counting the full-colour shots, and it drives me CRAZY, but it is also me going full conspiracy board so let’s not even worry about it. THE POINT IS.

the circle is the death-machine and the wish-machine. neither of these things are really.... very good. the circle, or at least the arc, is also very closely associated with death:

(розовая дуга предрассветного, ‘rose arc of pre-dawn’. if i’ve fucked up that nominative please feel free to stone me to death!) 

in the gdoc notes to message lost ferry briefly refers to the dawn as if it were a good thing, the dawn of hope, which is a usage that sort of agrees with the desolate and deathless hope of strike 3′s ‘everything will pass / a day will come,’ but on the other hand it really is very closely associated with dying. nikolai bites it; nikita bites it; sergei and olga left significant chunks of themselves behind. and the thing about ‘this too shall pass’ is that it’s always true, as is ‘everything ends’, but of course that’s ‘cause the thing that ends might be you. and as we know

dawn is an ending. so that seems concerning!

i think the circle, the arc, the bolt falling back to the ground, is not a good thing. i am getting a little conspiracy board here in general but forgive me, i cannot make you a wholesome answer, my wit’s diseased. i think the circle is an enclosed space. it’s an unbroken cycle. it’s the grindstone. it’s the mill. it’s about what pafl’s always been about: about being trapped, about having no chances, about being bordered upon. the circle’s the geometric figure of equidistance from a given point, and you can walk on it forever, and nothing will ever change; you will never get closer, you will never get further away, you will never get out! the sun rises, the sun sets, and you are no closer to anything you wanted. it’s worth noting that anya’s borderline city, the zone-edge port town she complains is trying to crush all her dreams, her mill

is a circle. (a cog in a machine! a grind-wheel! a cage!)

and yura, whose dreams have already been burned out of him, who starts the series already resigned to never getting out of here, calls it ‘this dire deja-vu’, i am specifically resisting putting the accent marks back onto that, which is to say, it’s a repetition that haunts him. it’s going round and round and getting nowhere.

so if we bring it back around: drawing a line in the sand, as the phrase is generally used, means setting a border, means saying this far and no further. often it’s yourself you’re setting the border for. you hit some divide you can’t abide crossing so you say this stops here, it may be too early or too late, but i say it stops here. so logically: drawing a circle in the sand means you’ve locked yourself in completely.

I’ll draw a circle in the sand, drive myself around the bend in a desperate attempt to hold your battered hand

the whole first half of this song, i think, is olga promising to grind herself down in a hundred ways if it means she won’t be left alone. how hard can it be to never let it overflow? she may feel lower than the low, she may wish she could just disappear out here, into the postindustrial rust, but though it gets harder all the time she will keep pretending. she isn’t going to burden sergei, or indeed anyone, with her problems, her fears, her scars. she is hurt, but she’s used to it, she’s gotten used to being haunted long ago. she keeps her bad eye covered. she stays within her circle she has drawn. she keeps going round and round. she will take the smallest sliver of human connection and be happy, she promises she will be happy, she promises she won’t ask for more, she will take just the ‘hello.’

but you knooooow it’s not true. you know it’s grinding her down, that she’ll be milled to nothing pretty soon, and really she knows it too.

i am perhaps seventy percent sure that this line is a reference to the windmills of your mind by michel legrande, which features such lines as

Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind

which on one hand seems sort of obscure to be a purposeful reference but on the other hand would be a hell of a coincidence if it wasn’t, wouldn’t it. either way it characterizes circles ambiguously, but definitely unsettlingly. going around in circles is chasing infinity, but what in god’s name would you do with it if you caught it? what are you even hoping to accomplish? and: 

the second half of this song is bitterer, sharper - staring down the mouth of the meat-grinder she’s a little more willing to admit to herself that this is going nowhere. she is running out of cages to keep herself in. she is very tired. it’s easy to say why don’t you leave it all behind, it’s easy to say, she’s strong enough to let it go, it’s easy to say, too strong to die. it is a lot harder to actually live.

this is also where the flashbacks admit to us how badly hurt they really were - sergei with his whole side in shreds, she still hides her eye but at least we get to see it’s bleeding. this moral compass is forever misaligned, she says, so there is damage, and it is lasting. and she can’t settle for hello, she can’t live like this, she needs someone by her side. the trouble is whether she can believe she has any hope of getting that

as for who ‘her’ is, or the ‘she’ of ‘she is bathed in youthful glow’, i figure there’s two possibilities: either it’s nadya, who haunts olga too, because nikita’s abandonment of nadya represents exactly what she most fears for herself, or it’s olga’s younger, unbroken, binocular self - both of whom were so young, and so easily hurt, and are now unfindable.

and then there’s this conclusion: ‘the sun will rise, until then / i’ll be waiting for you on the other side.’ which maybe is a sort of hope after all? she’s reached no real conclusions in the zone - she knows there must be hope but she can only barely believe in it - she thinks she is destined to self-destruct. but on the other hand she still has that, a version of sergei’s own ‘a day will come’

you may be hurt, but if you can hold yourself together, you can hope for a dawn someday. an ending. a change. but the trouble’s that there’s more than one kind of ending. and there’s more than one meaning for other side. there are cages, and then there are cages. and you know what else looks like a tunnel, a circle?

staring down the barrel of the gun.

[therealtsk]

tsk i’m DYING to hear your play-by-play on which worm characters have dumb fanon interpretations

UH OH YOU JUST OPENED THE FLOODGATES so the short answer is pretty much every major character but I am a high-effort bitch so let's do this: Taylor Hebert: jfc, I could probably hit a word count limit talking about Taylor alone. First you have the dumb as shit TINO (Taylor In Name Only) phenomenon where people just straight up SI as Taylor but pretend it's her and she's basically a different person wearing Taylor's skin like an ill-fitting suit. Then there's the Memetic Escalator Taylor interpretation where Taylor's Warlord era characterization is flanderized so hard that she turns into her world's version of Doomguy where her response to literally everything is ultra violence, mutilation and torture and she can totally beat up anyone you guys hahah coin sock goes brrrrr you go brutalize those totally deserving victims queen. And then there's shy, stuttering, soft spoken "useless lesbian" Taylor which is not as common but still, fuckin straight men and the way they infantize gay women. Taylor is perhaps the most consistently inconsistent characterization I've seen in fandom, it's fucking wild Lisa Wilbourn: Has two fanon settings. Taylor's best friend who exists solely to give exposition and get the "Stop Coil" subplot rolling (occasional gay subtext will be added in a way that feels fetishy) Or, the evil bitchy blonde who is first target of the SI. I constantly wonder if the people who write the frankly masturbatory SI's are aware that we can tell they're still bitter about girls not dating them in highschool. Brian: basically does not exist in fic aside from the occasional joke cause racism and also because of how popular wlw ships are in Worm fandom. you deserve better dude Alec: has a few token appearances in wormfic fandom that usually have him as the comic relief alongside Aisha, which might actually be for the best considering he's a rapist and the Worm fandom's uhhhh tendencies. Moving on- Aisha: prankster girl that alt!Taylor will adopt as a younger sibling. hopefully is not part of the totally-not-a-harem considering she's even younger then the rest of these teens Bitch: Another girl to fall into alt!Taylor's definitely-not-a-harem, but with more butch tendencies. Basically has no personality in fanon outside of her dogs Parian: SHE DOESN'T HAVE A SHOP FFS also another member of Taylor's totally-not-a-harem Flechette: yeah it's a harem Sophia: holy shit you think Brian's bad? The racism in pretty much every fanon depiction of Sophia is off the charts. Hyper-violent, super edgy, "predator/prey" speech inbound, will get humilated/killed in some new, supposedly satisfying but actually just deeply uncomfortable way, probably throw in some E88 shit too just because Emma: again, do the writers know we can tell they're still malding over the fact that the pretty girls in highschool didn't date them? fanon emma is pretty much a cardboard cut out of whoever was mean to the author. something something bitches three Madison: in fanon has a C53 fetish, occasionally is also Browbeat. don't ask why Victoria: gets hit with the blonde stereotypes even harder then Lisa, "Collateral Damage Barbie" is one of the phrases that activates my flight or fight responses. she basically is an entirely different character in fanon. bubbly dumb blonde girl with a massive temper and well other sexist bullshiit Amy: I hate even touching this character with a ten foot pole but basically is hit with the "soft useless lesbian" trope hard enough to make her into a completely separate person from her canon self. whether or not this is a good thing is still up for debate Carol: in fanon, an evil bitch who exists solely to bully Amy Mark: who? The rest of New Wave: cannon fodder for Leviathan Danny Hebert: literally stale milk instead of a personality, will probably die before the fic is over but we won't care because the author did not care either Armsmaster: hahaha robotman go brrrr or is an arrogant self-aggrandizing shit, can't interact with people without Dragon helping him 24/7 Miss Militia: fanon bat'd into team mom,

idk where this came from considering her first instinct upon seeing children is to pull out a gun holy shit wait is she actually Taylor's true mom- Velocity: canon fodder for levi Battery & Assault: sitcom wife, sitcom husband! please ignore how fucked up this relationship is if you look at it for more than two seconds Dauntless: haha armsy is JEALOUS also cannon fodder for levi Triumph: who? The BB wards in general tend to be incredibly bland, the only ones who have fanon personalities of note are Clockblocker and Vista. The former being such a huge prankster that every other line is a joke- or him complaining about how BULLSHIT Alt!Taylor's powers are. Vista is an angry kiddo who says that Shadow Stalker doesn't count as being a girl on the team The E88: no personality for any of them except that Kaiser is noble and really isn't that bad and also Purity did nothing wrong totally she's just a hot mom trying to do her best, please ignore how she exclusively targets characters of color and literally calls white criminals more civilized than miniorities- the worm fandom has something of a nazi problem i hate it here The ABB: racism and honorable samurai lung even though that has no canon basis so again, racist stereotypes The Slaughterhouse 9: This one makes me just as sad as the Lisa shit because dear god this is such a good cast of villains that fanon completely flattens to bowling pins for the Alt!Taylor of the week to mow down, why does this fandom suck so much. Anyway Jack is just the Joker, Crawler is masochistic, etc i'm moving on now The PRT/Protectorate as a whole: They are an evil paramilitary organization that pressgangs kids into signing up to become child soldiers, and somehow at the same time, they are a bunch of idiots who listen to the PR department and have stupid things like RULES that prevent capes from COMMITTING VIOLENCE. Being called "the biggest gang of all" is common and some shit like "at least the criminals are honest" is a likely statement. Cauldron: whoo boy this one really boils my blood but fanon Cauldron are just a bunch of evil idiots who can't even tie their shoelaces. basically a bunch of dudebros are upset that women run the world and that two of them essentially have "I win" powers so they have to make them lose to their SI- er, Taylor in fics so they can assuage their masculinity, which totally isn't pathetic Scion: Is at once the end all be all of worm you can't write a wormfic without scion or else it's TOTALLY MEANINGLESS because what is the point of a story if all the characters are going to DIE in a few years anyway, and at the same time is incredibly easy to defeat- this ties into how Cauldron is stupid. Scion Truthers pls shut up and go read something else okay I think that's everyone I would apologize but the only thing I'm sorry for is how messy this is

[ag3ntl3vi]

Hoodie X GN! Reader X Masky | “Rock Paper Sisscors” |☁️

This struck me at like, 3AM while listening to Devil in Diguise. I’ll probably write more parts to this tonight if im being honest. 

!Gender-Neutral reader!

Trigger Warnings: Sexual mentions. 

Word Count: 2,317

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

"Can you go any slower?" You laughed, stopping to allow your friend to catch up. Sweat dotted her chocolatey forehead as she panted. 

"Yes! I can." She wheezed. "You're just too fast!" Taylor whined loudly, bending herself in half to try and catch her breath. You rolled your eyes and pulled her up, raising her arms over her head. 

"You'll breathe better this way," You told her, taking a step back and taking a long sip of your icy water. Taylor nodded her thanks and slowed her breathing gradually. 

        "Wanna keep going?" You asked as you wiped your mouth on your wrist. Taylor feriously shook her head. "I'll pass, (Y/n)." She whimpered. You put yout arms behind your head as you began to walk down the worn dirt bath. 

"That sucks," You murmered. "We were only 1/4th of the way done."

Taylor gaped at your cocky smirk. "And you do this everyday?"

You nodded. "Twice a day if I'm feelin' lucky," You winked and giggled. Taylor shook her head in disbelief. 

"You're a machine," She grumbled, jogging to your side. You could tell she was tired, but she was the one who asked to join you in your near-night run. She said she needed the exercise to get the perfect "summer body", even though it was fall. 

You hummed. "I didn't know they made sexy machines now." Taylor pushed away the urge to roll her eyes, though she desperately wanted to. She chose not to answer your stupid comment. You both started to walk back to your dorm and planned a junk food movie night. You had the feeling she wouldn't last, but you couldn't say no to her puppy face. You had to admit, you were a sucker for your best friend.          Taylor ended up chugging the rest of her and your water bottles greedily, but you didn't blame her. She was pretty out of shape. The darker skinned girl took a large gasp of fresh oxygen after finishing off your beverage. 

"Learn to breathe, my God," You snorted. She glared.

"I just ran a mile, you can shut your mouth, you fucking monster," She hissed playfully. 

School campus soon came into view after your bickering. Taylor grumbled about how badly her feet ached and how she was never running ever again. You parted ways at the dorm. Taylor wanted to get the living room set up for the movie and sent you out for snacks and drinks. You easily migrated to the everything store. That wasn't its actual name, you couldn't care to remember what it was, but the everything store seemed to suit the run down shop better. 

        You pushed thr glass double doors open, a cute bell ringing to announce your presence to the cashire, Michael. 

"(Y/n)!" He greeted with a smile. You returned the facial gester with a small wave of your own.          "What're you here for this time?" He leaned his head on his open palm, his eyes trained on your figure. You had your back turned to him as you read the movie names on the rack. 

"What does it look like?" You chuckles, plucking a familar title from the shelf. 'Kiki's Delivery Service', a childhood favorite of yours. Michael didn't verbally answer, he was too busy allowing his eyes to roam your every curve. 

His eyes snapped to the side when you turned around to wonder down the candy isle. You shoved a KitKat , snickers, and (f/c) into your arm (allowing an extra of your favored one into your pocket, shh) before you turned the corner, finding the energy drinks. With a childish grin you grabbed a few of the better Monster flavors. You knew you had popcorn at the dorm so you didn't bother trying to find a box here. 

        You decided to check out as quickly as possible, avoiding as much conversation with Michael as you could. He gave you the creeps. He always tended to make sexual remarks regarding your running outfit, like how your shorts made your ass look plump or how cute you looked with a flushed, tired expression. In general, he didn't seem like a good guy or influence, though Taylor took an odd interest in him. She always had shitty tastes in men. 

It was getting late, you noticed. The sun started to darken as students scrambled to their respected dorms or apartments off campus. You made your way to your room. The illuminated cobblestone path gave you the worst horror movie vibes, so to say you booked it was an understatement. As soon as you were inside the safe confindments of your dorms living area, you released a loud sigh of relief. You thought about taking the elevator up, but decided on the stairs to the third story. You were very grateful you were on a higher floor, to you it served as a lesser chance of being robbed or murdered. 

"I brought a movie, candy and monsters, come on, you filthy goblin." you called into the freakishly neat room. Taylor was a very, very messy person so you tended to pick up after her more than you'd happily admit. It didn't take long for you to set positions for certain objects in specific places. Example, your shoes stayed in a small, plastic, blue bin by the door. They didn't ever make it to the carpeted floor of the living room. You had a key rack by the door so your keys were never lost or misplaced and Taylor had insisted you needed a coat rack, so your bookbags and Taylor's purses hung there. Any extra blankets, pillows, and sheets were placed neatly in the spare closet. 

        "Monsters..?" Her brown head popped out from around the corner. 

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

Taylor had passed out halfway through the movie, not that you were surprised. You pouted. You were very well use to it, but it wasn't any less disappointing when it happened. You carefully laid her on the couch, not bothering to wake her. She was a literal demon when she was woken up. You covered her body in a large, fluffy blanket before standing, pacing for a moment. 

You wondered back to your organized room and grabbed your large spray bottle you kept on your dresser. You stared down your mass of plants in your window seal and the few on your night stand and hanging from the ceiling before watering the ones that needed it, leaving your Rainbow Bush succulent alone. Satisfied, you grabbed your school jacket and your earbuds and phone before slipping your shoes on at the door. 

It was almost 1 before Taylor and you had finally settled enough to sit and watch the movie, so it was fairly late now. But, regretfully, your body was still pumped from the sugary drinks you consumed not long ago. You made a quick choice to go on a short run to tire yourself out a bit before retiring for the night. Sure, wasn't the best idea to go out at night, alone and defenceless, but you prided yourself in your speed if needed. Besides, you've done it before and you were obviously still alive!

You made your way to the dirt path you ran earlier in the day, struggling to remember a stupid songs name. You grinned when you figured it out and hurriedly played it. The opening played through your earbuds as you gently bobbed your head to the beat.

"There are boulders on my shoulders, collar bones begin to crack, there is very little left of me and it's never coming back," You sung softly along with 'Be nice to me'. An old, but greatly loved song from your middle school years. You began to run.

Your lips parted in a content smile as a phrase slipped past your teeth.

"You're a killer, and i'm your best friend. I think it's unfair, your situation," 

You began to bounce on the balls of your feet excitedly. "You say i'm changing! I'm sorry I didn't know I had to stay the same!" You jumped as your legs moved, your voice growing louder and bolder with every word thoughtlessly spilling out your mouth. You became unaware of the eyes watching your movements, head tilted in confusion. 

"Your voice is driving me insane!" You shouted, hopping more as you swished your head side to side, getting louder everytime the phrase was repeated. The last note rang through your ears and you let out a joyful that was quickly cut off. The overbearing feeling of being watched dawned on you. 

You jerked around and scanned the treeline, your eyes falling on a tall male facing you with a tilted head. You stared at him, confused before your gaze fell on the bloodied pipe dangling by his side. You fearfully and turned around, bolting in the direction the path led you to. You didn't have much time to understand why he was watching you, but you could hear his heavy footsteps crushing dead leaves as he raced after you. 

'Molly' blasted into your ears loudly, making you jerk in surprise. If you were going to die tonight, you were glad this was the song you'd die to. 

You could hear him distantly still chasing after you. Not to brag, but you could run a mile amd keep going onto the next without breaking too much of a sweat, though you'd be fairly tired.          Speaking of tired, you could feel the drousiness spreading to your head and deep down you knew that you couldn't keep the pace up for much longer. 

Sucking in a deep breath, you turned into the woods, lifting your feet high so you wouldn't be the stupid one to trip on a root and be killed first. That would be an embarrassing way to die and not even Molly could make it better, you concluded. 

So you did the most logical thing your sleepy brain could think of.

You climbed a fucking tree.

The man was a far enough distance for you to get a good amount of height between the two of you. You panted, your palms itching with needle-like pain from the rough and merciless bark, but pulled yourself up another branch and looked down. The man was panting heavily, bent over as he struggled to force air into his most likely burning lungs.  He stood up after a quick second, glaring up the tree at you.

Childishly, but overcome with a sense of acomplishment, you stuck your tongue out at him. 

Bad idea, you concluded when the guy's gloved fists clenched by his sides and he started to climb. 

You squealed. "No! Fuck off!" You shouted. "Pick another goddamn tree, you humanoid orange!" A growl ripped through your teeth as you glared fearfully at him.          To your surprise, he got down. He moved his head to stare at you before sitting indian style, his face pointed to you.

For the first time you had a proper look at him, and you weren't surprised. He looked like he came from a shitty horror movie. He wore an orange hoodie with a ski mask hiding his facial features, a red frowny face sitched into it. He had dark blue, wore out jeans and black boots that looked to be kept as clean as Taylor would keep her living space. 

'Best friend' Began to play quietly through your (f/c) earbuds and you forced down a snort at the timing. You were hoddled up in a tree while a guy who most likely wanted you dead watched from below. You shook your head and glanced at the dark sky.

'The stars are out' You thought as you spotted the little dipper, the big one wasn't far away from it's child. 

It only took about ten minutes for your easily distracted mind to get bored. You stared down at the hooded man as he drew in the dirt with his pipe. An idea struck you, a bad one, but an idea nevertheless. And it wasn't going to kill you, with a lot of hope, it may allow you to live another day. 

"Yo, tangerine!" He flinched at your loud voice, moving his head to stare at you. 

You held up a fist with your dominate hand, your opposite going under it, palm up and open.

"Wanna play rock, paper, sisscors before I die?" 

The man stilled before very, and I mean very slowly nodded. You allowed yourself to snort. Now you were going to play a childs game with a murderer. 

"Do you know how to play?" You called down. He nodded again and held up his hands. "Cool," You said.

The orange-clad killer was absolute shit at rock, paper, sisscors. He was even worse than your nephew, who was six and had the attention span of a squirell. Sometime in your game playing, you had moved yourself a few branches down to see him better in the dark woods. You now sat a branch above his head.          He didn't move much, but his shoulders seemed to slump.

You threw rock, again, and he threw sisscors. You gave an evil victory crackle whiele he glared gloomily at his open fingers.          "That was fun," You stretched your arms over your head, yawning. "Can I go now?" You calmly asked. 

He didn't move for a long while, looking between you and his gloved hands, the, back to you. Finally, he nodded. You hopped down, smiling widely. 

"Thanks," You said nervously. He was trying to kill you earlier, so you wouldn't be completely off guard around him. You started to shuffle around him cautiously. His arm shot out, grabbing your upper arm roughly. You flinched hard, looking up at him with wide eyes. 

This is it, You thought He changed his mind and wants to eat me!

Instead, you heard a deep voice whisper.

"You can leave if we can play again soon."

[not-poignant]

Do you think many things have changed about you being a writer online since the beginning of the Fae Tales Universe compared to now? Not only writing style, but including how you are online, or how you think about fandom?

Oooooo

*thinks*

Actually yeah, I mean writing style yes, but in terms of how I think about fandom and how I am online, that has changed a lot. (Adding a Read More because oh god this got LONG).

I used to like, try and be 100% kind all the time, since firstly that comes very naturally to me, and secondly because I was so like...happy and thrilled that folks were communicating with me in the beginning.

But then I was taken advantage of, and one person in particular was abusive, and at the time I didn’t see it for what it was. I’ve also been stalked. I’ve had someone turn up on my doorstep uninvited. And over time I think I’ve become no less grateful (if anything I’m more grateful for the amazing readers), but also more wary? Like, I’m more likely to delete troll messages, than I used to. And sometimes I think it will be more obvious if I’m impatient or if I’m asserting a boundary in an ask response.

Radiotherapy to the head/neck for the cancer I have also really altered things there. I realised I could die at any moment, life is really short, my tumours could metastasise at any time (I actually have one that’s growing at the moment, which is alarming) and that I don’t really have the...patience I guess, to spend time constantly saying ‘this isn’t a music rec blog’ or ‘please don’t recommend books to me because most of the time I don’t like them and people tend to resent me for it’ (as an example) year after year after year. Or to deal with bad faith anons, or anons who just enjoy the novelty of getting me to answer incessant questions about space or something else that has nothing to really do with me. I can’t tell you how many asks I’ve gotten about ‘will you ever make Augus and Gwyn dads, could they adopt a baby’ but it’s a lot and I’ve deleted most of them.

So I actually think I’m more realistically human than I used to be, online. Which is a weird thing to say, right? And maybe that pisses people off. I’ve always been very opinionated, probably to my detriment, that’s never really changed. I’m still going to tell antis to go fuck themselves.

I try and stick to a policy now with messages that piss me off, which is ‘take time before you reply to this.’ I don’t always succeed, but I usually like to wait 12-24 hours before I reply to those messages (or delete them), so I can at least give a fair and moderate response. I really hate feeling like I just got angry at someone who’s possibly only 18 years old and doesn’t really know how to articulate themselves well on the internet, and it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between ‘troll’ and ‘someone who really just is nervous and shy and doesn’t know how to phrase their question.’

In terms of fandom, I love replying to comments more than ever, actually. Like I love it. I love kudos even more than I used to. I really am grateful for all reader  engagement. But I don’t have as much time and energy as I used to respond to every ask, so I respond to asks less, and I respond to them in a less timely manner. I really hate that, but sometimes it’s like ‘I can’t spend all of today replying to asks, I literally have to write the chapters that people want to read.’ I also get social anxiety around asks, and people can be impatient - like no one sends a second comment on AO3 going ‘heyyyy you haven’t replied to my comment yet’ - but you’d be surprised how much people put pressure on you on Tumblr sometimes, as though I also don’t have social anxiety and things might be really stressing me out. :(

In terms of my priority, it’s always 1. Writing content, 2. Replying to comments / being active on the Discord, 3. Replying on Patreon when necessary, 4. Replying to asks. If I’m behind on writing, everything else gets hit. I think when I first started out, I actually put comments and asks ahead of writing content sometimes, but now I know I will literally spend all my time responding to folks and that’s a me problem, and I’ve worked on that since lmao.

I’ve realised over the years that instead of just writing for myself, like I always used to, I also just want to deliver so many of you wonderful people good stories. This has come to matter to me more. The best way, I think, to repay some of the amazing faith and love you’ve all showed me, is to try and give you the best possible writing I can until like, my cancer makes that impossible. And so I’ve become a lot more focused as a writer, and a lot more like ‘this is where I want to be.’

I’ve also realised I care a lot less about traditional publishing, I really love serials! Er, that was a big one, I thought one day I’d transition from writing serials online to publishing books, but now I would like to always be writing serials, and publish books on the side. In a perfect world, I could also publish the serials as books too, so people could own them if they wanted to.

I’ve also seen over the years the rise of antis, and puritanical censorship, and more, and that’s made me angrier, and also much, much stronger re: feeling centred in what I write and what I have written. So I feel like I am much more like...genuinely not bothered by what antis have to say to me, and ironically I get less bothered by antis than ever before, probably because they know that I’m Teflon with claws whenever it comes to any of their rhetoric. I have a media degree that says they have no idea what they’re talking about, and I’m angry on behalf of all the readers who feel ashamed for reading certain content, and who deserve not to feel that way. So that’s like...a thing that’s changed over the years - my anger, and my anger on behalf of readers who might feel guilty or ashamed for liking noncon or incest or underage in fiction. It’s fiction. They’re allowed to engage in that without being afraid of being bullied for it. But that’s not the world we live in.

To be honest, a lot of the changes have been positive! I’ve become more sure and focused, I’ve actually become happier as a writer and a person, and I enjoy the fandom experience more, as well as writing fanfiction and stuff. I wish I had more time to like... chat about AUs and stuff and write Tumblr posts like I used to, but radiotherapy hit me pretty hard with some permanent energy loss and side effects, and so where things have changed in a bad way, it’s almost always because of health and not because I love fandom any less. And where I’ve changed in terms of sometimes being a bit more cynical about anon asks I try and remind myself to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and to just remind myself that I have my boundaries, and I’m safe/okay. I hate that I have to do that nowadays, but it was kind of stupid that I didn’t do it before.

I can’t believe how like... how lucky I am to be here. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to write for you all. Lucky to write stories I love. Lucky to reply to comments and asks like this one. I don’t ever want to lose sight of that or the gratitude.

I think the day I stop being grateful, is the day I need to walk away. It’s humbling, honestly, and I feel that more and more over time, and not less. Even when I’m an opinionated dumbass who writes too much most of the time, lmao.

(I didn’t even get to talking about how my writing style changed I’m sorry anon THIS GOT SO LONG FUCK)

[tweetracer]

Hello, I love your work and writing style. I was wondering, since none of the Lost boys is what you could call a boyfriend material - how would they deal with being in a long-term relationship? What would be the biggest challenge for each of them? And maybe for you as their partner? I would love to hear your thoughts.

LOST BOYS + RELATIONSHIP STRUGGLES

DAVID

As an immortal, David lives his life fast-paced and reckless. The people he brings into his world (save for his boys of course) are there for kicks until he grows tired. It’s not the best model for a relationship of course but he never had to worry about anything being truly long-term.

That was until he met you, of course.

The moment he realized he wanted you to be in his life forever he panicked. He’d never wanted anything to be in his life forever- at least nothing he didn’t already have.

But you? You were special- and he wanted you to be with him.

You knew what he was- it was one of the things he loved about you. You knew and you still loved him, you still cared for him even though he was... a monster.

The second he realized he loved you he asked to turn you. He wanted you in his life forever and since he wanted it obviously you did too.

When you turned him down he was crushed. Why? Was it him?

Well.... no... but also yes...?

He was rough and tumble- and while you definitely dug the ‘bad boy’ aesthetic- you also wanted someone who wasn’t scared to be soft with you. David struggled to show his gentleness even when the two of you were alone and...

....while that was fine for a fling....

You expected the moping- hell, you expected him to dump you on the spot.... but he didn’t. He fucked off to the cave for a few days, sitting in his chair- unmoving and so deep in thought you’d think he was a statue.

When you finally spotted him at the boardwalk again, he made a bee-line towards you. Confused, you watched him stomp right up to you, grab your wrist, and pull you into a telenovela-style dip and kissed you right then and there.

He....He could be a bad boy and still love on his kitten..

While PDA and emotional communication still weren’t exactly.. his strong suit he was working harder to be more open about his feelings.

DWAYNE

At first glance Dwayne is everything you could want out of a long-term relationship.

He’s kind, courteous, considerate. He’s like a (sort of) living security blanket. His constant calmness is enough to calm even the worst of your moods..

The only issue is he’s always calm.

You have literally never seen this guy get angry- he always handles you like you’re made of glass. You know comparably you are considerably more fragile but god.

He keeps his feelings and opinions under such tight wraps you might as well be dating a fucking bedside table.

You kept most of your frustrations to yourself, not wanting to really shake the boat but all of these small annoyances built up slowly till it felt like you were going to explode.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was so small in hindsight it was surprising that it was the catalyst. You asked him what he wanted for dinner.

“Whatever you want to eat”

“Dwayne, what do you want for dinner”

His responding shrug and assurance that he’ll like whatever you pick made you fucking explode.

He stood there, wide-eyed as you chewed him out. ‘For god’s sake can’t you ever have an opinion on something?’ ‘You’re being a doormat- you’re a literal vampire have some fucking spine’

When you stormed off he still stood there, blinking and shocked as he tried to really process what you said.

You didn’t see him for the rest of the night and when you went home the cave was empty. Content to fume for a while longer you didn’t see him again until you were out on the boardwalk the next night.

The two of you discussed the previous night’s events, speaking in hushed tones in a quiet corner booth of Stoker’s Diner. You explained that him always agreeing with you put a lot of pressure on you to make all the decisions and how it wasn’t healthy for him to not voice how he was feeling.

He needed to know that you wanted to listen to him too. Both voices are important in a relationship- especially when you hope to be as.... long term as the two of you.

While he’s still more reserved than most people- Dwayne begun to actively communicate a bit more, giving you his opinion a bit more freely and always ready to preen anytime you comment on it.

PAUL

You loved Paul.

You really did.

But where Dwayne was a doormat- Paul was a bulldozer.

His brain moved at a million miles a minutes, constantly pulling him in different directions and making social cues hard for him to notice.

You knew this but good god it was frustrating- sometimes holding a conversation with him was like trying to talk to a moving train. Occasionally you’d have to actually grab him to get him to look at you and get an answer to the question you’ve been asking him for the past five minutes.

Finally, you’d had enough- you had already told him twice that you wanted to go home. That you were tired and your feet hurt and he hadn’t seemed to notice. Every time the two of you would start heading back to the bike he’d get distracted.

You yanked your wrist away from where he had been dragging you towards another carnival game- storming off in the direction of the bikes.

He followed after you like a lost puppy- “Doll? Doll what’s wrong?”

You said nothing until you were at his motorcycle, arms crossed and scowling.

You’d been asking for an hour to go home and he’d ignored you- and as you told him his eyes went wide.

The two of you managed a (rough but productive) discussion, eventually settling on some code phrases to communicate when you felt like you were being ignored or not listened to.

While there are still rough patches, Paul actively attempted to listen better- blue eyes focusing hard as he clung to your words. You could tell sometimes he was trying to fit a square peg in a triangle hole- attempting to force his brain to understand what you were saying.

During those moments you’d calmly repeat the question again, smiling and giving his hand an encouraging squeeze while the words took purchase in his brain.

Every once and a while he’d miss an ‘I want to go home’ but you knew he was trying and, more often than not, all it took was a flirty pick-up line and a far too chaste kiss to have him dragging you back to the cave anyways.

MARKO

Marko’s Napoleon complex was pretty obvious when you first met him. He paraded around with a puffed out chest and a willingness to beat the shit out of anyone who looked at him wrong.

While his edges were a little rough he was always gentle towards you- a little overly cautious, sure, but you knew he just meant well. After all, you didn’t really know how long he’d been a vamp and for all you knew life as a human might have only felt like a dream at this point.

It was sweet how carefully he tended to you.

At first.

After the fifteenth time in one night of being fawned and coddled you felt frustration begin to bud in your chest. You were a human not a baby bird, tripping isn’t going to kill you and you’re ninety percent sure you don’t need to be wearing sunscreen at night.

You tried to discuss it with him gently, you knew he only did this because he cared for you but you explained that it was getting a bit excessive. You were fully capable of doing things on your own and his constant hovering was getting overbearing.

What was supposed to be a civilized conversation ended in a knock down drag out screaming match, the two of you yelling at the top of your lungs and scaring off anyone in a thirty foot radius.

He was trying to protect you! Humans aren’t like vamps! They can get hurt, they can fall and break bones- they can die. And he doesn’t... he doesn’t even want to think about-

....... never mind... he doesn’t even want to go there...

Marko puffed up, furious, and got on his bike; leaving you on the boardwalk alone with a sore throat and red face from yelling.

The two of you fumed for almost a week before his resolve cracked. He poked his head in to the window of your apartment, waiting with a soft-browed scowl before you let him inside.

Your conversation was tense as you tried to explain your individual perspectives, eventually conceding to meet in the middle.

He would cut back on his helicopter-esque hovering anytime you weren’t doing anything but sitting and you would try your best not to get hurt..

...But you still weren’t allowed to ride the bikes with anyone but him. He just doesn’t trust the other vamps with such precious cargo.

[flyingupward]

critical role - vox machina chapter 4 - attack of the conclave

all sentences taken from episodes 39-56 of the first campaign of critical role. feel free to change pronouns, phrasing etc. to fit your needs!

“All this time, you’ve been trying to kick my teeth in and your true enemy was right over there.”

“That’s good. Moving is not my forte.”

“We’re in a hentai. Make it go away.”

“Not all short people look alike.”

“God, I wish I was not made of farts.”

“We live in a cold, cold world. No one deserves anything.”

“You chose so poorly. It is truly impressive how poorly you chose.”

“Stay away from all men. Forever.”

“I’m glad I came in handy for that field trip.”

“I hate your friends!”

“Little do they know I shop for everything at Home Goods so joke’s on them.”

“It’s just radioactive material in the basement. It’s fine.”

“Somehow the coffee has not been poured on your head. That’s the greatest magic trick I’ve seen all morning.”

“Everything else was dragons. Why wouldn’t it be dragons?”

“Sorry, I was so caught up in the fact that I’m literally going up against death incarnate.”

“You’re a magnificent handsome bastard. Don’t die.”

“Do not go far from me.”

“He’s just a sociopath, that’s all.”

“There are dragons outside and we’re playing rugby with a fucking skull!”

“A simple mind is looking for a simple solution to a complex problem.”

“I’m a firm believer that there’s always a way to victory if we’re smart about it and we’re quick about it.”

“We either stand now or we might as well be dead.”

“We try, we mostly fail, but occasionally we get it right.”

“It was such a bad deal I said no. Can you imagine how bad of a deal it must have been?”

“No offense darling, but you look like shit.”

“If we’re going to be roaming about the streets, I’d like you to not fall open like a can of baked beans if you don’t mind.”

“Let’s not get overexcited about the sudden realization that some of us can be a bit iffy.”

“Thank you for that smattering of applause.”

“I have one of those terrible ideas I get on occasion.”

“This is politics. You’re not supposed to like them.”

“You can talk my fucking ear off in a moment. Shut up for a second.”

“If the parasite hasn’t a host to feed on, the parasite dies.”

“I never forget that when I rule, I rule these people as well.”

“One day, you’re going to stop being afraid of me and I hope that day comes soon.”

“There’s no swinging by, that’s a caper.”

“It will be built back better than before. That’s what we do.”

“We have a lot of Pop Tarts, but not very many gold pieces.”

“This is where I live. What are you doing here?”

“I’m cold and I still haven’t been paid.”

“We’re not trying to score points. We are trying to do right.”

“This is fucking happy fun bunch over here. They bring death with them everywhere they go.”

“And to think I might have briefly missed you.”

“You have to find the no name guy who’s going to help you find the stuff that’s hidden that nobody knows where it is or what it is.”

“What do you want to do? Do you want to stay here while the world burns?”

“World’s always ending, baby.”

“It would be wondrous, after we complete this transaction, that we never meet again.”

“Oh my God, I just buy healing to save my life, what a waste.”

“I’m going to stand over here and fail to stay in character, okay?”

“Let’s all have a toast to the inevitability of the universe.”

“My God, I love other people’s problems.”

“Are we sober yet?”

“I think her foolish impulses are exactly what we’re looking for.”

“Better to die a fool for something than live in regret for doing nothing.”

“I think we want her to do her stupidest.”

“You’re… brooding.”

“I tend to glaze over when he’s talking.”

“Lead the way, shitkicker.”

“A lot of your friends are very weird.”

“I would just like to point out that I’m mostly sober.”

“That’s okay because remember, I’m me.”

“I’d like to stand up, please.”

“I’m scared to death which is why the math is so bad.”

“I’ve met few as unremarkable as you in my travels.”

“Well then, we’re in trouble. I have an attitude about everything.”

“Yeah, there’s like 37 things we have to do before tomorrow so… ”

“She’s not really gonna care about court so much as ripping the bones from your back.”

“I thought you were gonna tell me a dirty joke or something. When you say, ‘Come here,’ that’s usually what that means.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s going to be daylight if we’re underground.”

“I’m really hoping that it’s the worst decision we make because then everything’s uphill.”

“I like who we are together and I think that that’s important.”

“Dying in slow motion over here.”

“Oh good, more darkness.”

“Oh my God, you’re going into a special section of your book. That’s never good.”

“I’m very aware that my greed killed me.”

“Oh, I must have missed it because I was dead. That’s right.”

“Do you have feelings and did that hurt them?”

“I’m pretty tired after dying.”

“I think I love you too. I’m just terrified to allow myself to.”

“We are a city of seasonal affective disorder.”

“So I heard a rumor that you sort of saved my life in a really creepy sort of way.”

“By the power vested in me, I now pronounce you my Pokemon.”

“Your secret is safe with my indifference.”

“I always fucking hear you in my mind. It’s very quiet in there these days.”

“If it becomes a problem, just raise your hand and scream.”

“Our lives are so bizarre now.”

“Why is my brain tingling? Is someone noodling around up there?”

“You know what? It’s just fire. I will be on fire.”

“Did someone lose an orb?”

“Are we really about to pretend to do CrossFit?”

“Not enough spit takes in the world for this moment in time.”

“Beyond it being an engineering issue, it might be a greed issue first.”

"She's an adult. Deep levels of arrested development, but an adult nonetheless."

“Retroactively, you’ve never been seen in your entire lives.”

“You take everything good away from all of us.”

“It’s not one problem, it’s a very large problem and a massive problem.”

“Those that give a fuck, speak up.”

“We’ve lived half our life in the shadows. You’ve made them your home.”

“I love my reckless brother as much as he hurts my heart.”

“Duck hunt’s a bitch.”

“This is so dumb. Why am I doing this?”

“Congratulations, you’re creepy as fuck.”

“Give me this you fucking hoarder. What’s the matter with you?”

“I will smite you.”

“I was born to shove things in holes.”

“Knowledge is power, for reals!”

“Are we time bandits now? Is that what’s happening?”

“I hate time travel. I hate time travel so much.”

“No worries. I didn’t need to live anyway.”

“Perhaps it’s time to be a better badass.”

“It’s been a traumatic five minutes.”

“Like any good plan, everything will go wrong.”

“Oh well, I’m fucked then.”

“Oh, tiny dancer, you are fucked.”

“He died as he lived: Deeply unimpressed.”

“Don’t you dare die happy.”

“I like that we managed to make solving problems with violence into an ABC afternoon special.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say, ‘At dawn, we plan.’”

“I genuinely don’t understand the place you come from.”

“That is the weirdest coping mechanism I’ve ever heard of.”

“Maybe we should just sleep together and see what happens.”

“Thank you for telling me the truth after you sort of lied to me.”

“Yeah keep twitching, twitchy.”

“We totally planned at dawn!”

“Everything is terrible. Our lives are terrible. They are way worse than they were six months ago.”

“You are a fucking madman, but I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m fucked. I understand I’m fucked. It’s fine.”

“This was all part of the plan, the hastily smushed together plan.”

“He’s a liar and a bringer of death and he’s smiling at you while he does it.”

“Bravery means nothing. Survival and victory mean everything.”

“Oh shut up, you flying suitcase.”

“You don’t need inspiration, you’re fine!”

“If I move, he’ll kill me. So I won’t.”

“Cursed Lizard! We’re going to give all your gold to the poor!”

“Don’t be so glum you old fool! This is a day of glory!”

“We will all die. It just depends on cost.”

“Oh, wow. You just said a lot of things in a very short amount of time.”

“You are the worst of us.”

“If there’s a dare involved, that’s completely different.”

“I don’t like wanting things.”

“Is it the people or is it the fact that you have finally realized how pointless it all is?”

“I feel like I’ve been lied to my entire goddam life and it’s all crashing down upon me right now.”

“The thing is you’re not wrong and you’re not crazy, but it’s not hopeless either.”

“Even surrounded by friends, I often feel so alone.”

“Thank you for being a friend even though we just met.”

“The terrible woman may have a point.”

“Woo! Good leadership!”

“The awkward woman makes a fine point.”

“It is not about idolizing ourselves, it is about a very long story which we are a very small part of.”

“I’m doing something very stupid now with my friends. We’re going to try to save the world.”

“I admire everyone in our band of misfit toys, but you most of all.”

“You are all kinds of fucked up all the time and that’s why we love you.”

“We’re all all kinds of fucked up and that’s why we all are together.”

“That’s all we can be is ish.”

[tsaritsa]

tagged by the beautiful and sexy and successful @fullmetalscullyy + @megthemighty. ty babes ur both fergalicious mwah how many works do you have on ao3? 40

what’s your total ao3 word count?  275,381 words

what are your top five fics by kudos?

may i feel, said he

for the serpent has died and i’m leaning by your side

enthrallment

against the run of play

a strange fate with wandering limbs

i’m really proud of each of these pieces for different reasons. mifsh is a love letter to mar and to the fandom generally; ftshdailbys (what a fucking acronym lmao) was one of the first pieces i did with the intention of hitting a specific word count; enthrallment is a reminder to myself that pain does eventually pass (and that riza/bradley is sexy af); atrop definitely helped develop my love for multimedia fics and playing around with how we show information to the reader; and asfwwl was as much a study of riza as the people around her

do you reply to comments, why or why not? absolutely — although i tend to wait for updates to reply to the previous chapters if it’s an ongoing piece. i’m always stunned by the comments i get and i treasure each and every one of them. ty for giving me a little joy in my daily life

what’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending? i guess it depends on ur perspective. a strange fate is essentially dead dove on arrival — and bellyache deals with some unsavoury themes as well

what’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending? prolly that v saccharine valentines day fic. personally it makes me cringe a little now, but if that’s what floats ur boat, then go for it

do you write crossovers? if so, what’s the craziest one you’ve ever written? specific aus are as close as i’ve gotten - the crown!au would be the best fit. the concept of doing a marvel-esque endgame showdown has never really vibed with me; especially for the fma universe, which is incredibly niche and unique in a variety of ways

have you ever received hate on a fic? hahahahahah remember the time when ppl were bitching about mifsh on here bc it was ‘everywhere’ and we were ‘no better than rcyeddies’ with the power imbalance and it was a ‘glorified self-insert fic’ and we were deviants for sharing it and had made the royai fandom ‘cheap’ and ‘an awful place to be’ bc they were so much more than fucking?

yeah me neither lol. i’d also like to state that i’m not bitter about this anymore — but it really did feel awful to read those things, and for ppl to judge us and the substance of the story without ever bothering to talk to us before doing so. i’d like to think the fandom is a kinder space now, where we can just. move on if we don’t enjoy something, instead of sniping about it publicly and deliberately trying to make ppl feel bad

and if u were one of those ppl who were mean: either die mad and jealous lmao OR write something better and more engaging if u want ppl to shut up about may i feel. that’s literally all u have to do 🤷

do you write smut? if so, what kind? i write sexy smut. sometimes it’s an au where they’re in a ballet company. sometimes they’re at university. sometimes i forget to finish them in a timely fashion

have you ever had a fic stolen? not lifted verbatim. but there have been a few times where — and it’s not just my gut feeling, others have brought it to my attention — ideas and phrases align a little too neatly for me to brush it off as mere coincidence. at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter

have you ever had a fic translated? i’ve been very lucky to have a few translated: a few in spanish, russian, and mandarin as well, if memory serves me right

have you ever co-written a fic before? y’all know i have. may i feel and starstruck are the published ones, but maybe more will surface. we’ll see

what’s your all-time favourite ship? royai for sure. they just tickle a very specific part of my brain

what’s a wip that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will? won’t say i can’t finish any of them bc there’s always the chance i will — just a matter of sitting down and figuring out what needs to happen

what are your writing strengths? this made me pause for a bit bc in truth i’m not terribly sure. i’d like to think my dialogue is strong — not only in terms of characterisation, but in the ability to move the plot forward without having to simply tell the reader what is going on. y’all know i love making things sound pretty as well — assonance my beloved

what are your writing weaknesses? it’s a double-edged sword. as much as i love writing to a particular aesthetic, that definitely hinders me too when i get too involved with the details rather than examining my writing from a birds-eye perspective. i also know i struggle with keeping things simple — from explaining something as just. as it is as well as bigger issues like “let me just tell y’all about the history of the economy of resembool from the years 1872-1911 even though this was meant to be a throwaway sentence″

what are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic? i think it can add a ton of depth to a scene — it’s more a case of ensuring that the context around the dialogue can help the reader infer meanings without feeling so unsure they want to go search the translation. for the most part in may i feel, i think readers have been able to understand without too much hassle when a character uses spanish (but also we all know enough rudimentary spanish that it’s not utterly foreign). using a non-latin written language like mandarin or thai would definitely take me out of the fic more — but again, it’s all in how u apply it 

what was the first fandom you wrote for? fruits basket! i never published it tho

what’s your favourite fic you’ve written? currently it’s my piece that will be published for this years fma big bang. i’m really excited to share more about it next month (and publish it on october 3rd!!)

tagging @firewoodfigs, @royai, and @bringingglory if y’all haven’t already gotten around to it

[ramblinganthropologist]

MER Week 5 - We are Family

Summary: Visiting family can be tough sometimes, especially when your job involves being the only fucking hope for humanity. Alistair’s never sure what to tell his sister when he sees her, but at least he’s got Bo to remind him he’s an idiot when he gets back. Don’t you just love family?

(ME 2 setting)

---

“So… uh… how are things going?”

Ah, the question he had been dreading for the last hour had finally shown itself. Maybe this was a bad idea after all. Worst of all, his exit was cut off. No way out but through it…

Fuck.

Normally, Alistair Shepard didn’t mind going to see his sister Anora. After all, they had a lot of catching up to do what with 11 years of separation and all between them. However, they usually had his niece as a buffer. Kelly was great for that sort of thing, especially if she wanted to hear parent-approved stories. Unfortunately, her father had custody that weekend. So, it was just the two of them, sitting on the couch and making awkward small talk.

Did he mention it was awkward? Because it was so fucking awkward. Fuck, maybe he should’ve taken a preventative anxiety dose…

The Spectre took a tentative sip of his tea just to have something to do – gross. His sister liked this variety of tea bag that he just couldn’t stand, but she was trying. That was enough to make a good try of things as she watched him over her own cup. What she was thinking, he had no clue.

It was hard to read his sister. Maybe it was because he was so used to military types?

“I mean… it’s going?” He put the cup down. “We were on Illium before we got back to the Citadel.”

Yeah, he had been hunting down an assassin and a justiciar to add to his crew in order to survive killing a shit ton of Collectors. Thane was great – he lived in Life Support so he didn’t die before the Collectors killed them. He hadn’t even mentioned Samara and her centuries of baggage, that was the best part. Reflecting on that, he knew it wasn’t exactly something you told your older sister over really shitty tea. So, he kept mum on the details.

Most of his stories wound up like that. Was that bad?

“Illium… well, at least you’d be easy to spot among the asari with your hair and all.” Anora took a cautious sip. “Did you… need armor for that one?”

Need armor – that was their codeword they’d come up when he hadn’t been sure what to call what he did. Anora had a weak stomach, and he didn’t exactly want to drag up the gory details of his job. Though, was it technically a job at that point? They had literally brought him back from the dead for it – that was nearly a calling. More than that, he wasn’t really getting paid. Cerberus was in a weird gray area…

Either way, it was a useful code.

“Yeah. It got heated at points, but nobody died.” Well… nobody on his side anyway. There were plenty of dead mercs thanks to both his crew and his own two hands. This was something else he wouldn’t tell Anora, mostly to keep her mind at ease. Apparently, hearing your younger brother was really good at killing people tended to put people off.

Civilians, couldn’t live with them…  kind of turned into a war crime if you accidentally shot them.

“Oh… that’s good. I know it…” she paused, frowning. “I know you’ve had it rough lately.  I saw you on the news with your friend Garrus and it looked like half of his face was missing.”

Alistair took another sip of his nasty tea to give him time to think of how to best phrase his possible boyfriend taking a rocket to the fucking face after a goddamn siege. It wasn’t exactly polite dinner conversation as he made the mental edits.

“Yeah… kind of. The implants are healing, though. At least the mandible is still attached and all.”

Judging by the look his sister gave, that probably wasn’t the right answer.

“Omega is not a fun place.” Was his only justification as he took another sip. “I definitely don’t recommend the Terminus system for Kelly’s spring break.”

Another wince – he was just knocking it out of the park with today’s visit. Maybe he should just close his stupid mouth and drink his tea before he gave her a coronary…

Anora at least didn’t drop her cup. Concern was written all over her face though as she rolled it between her palms. There were probably a thousand thoughts running through her mind, and he just had to wait on the final decision. Lucky for him, he was good at waiting.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” A judicious answer. She sipped from her mug, face unreadable. “So… where are you going next?”

To hell in a fucking hand basket, or a least close enough when they managed to get through Omega-4. However, it wasn’t exactly something you shared over tea, especially with your older sister.

When he glanced away, Anora sighed. “Right… top secret Spectre business, then?”

“Something like that.” He frowned. What little good feeling between them was starting to wear down. Soon there would be nothing left but awkward questions and long pauses full of questions neither of them could answer. No doubt it would be time for him to go soon.

Lucky for him, his omni-tool started to beep. Someone was trying to communicate with him. Without thinking, he hit the button and his sister’s living room was soon filled with the sound of the Normandy’s cockpit. If he strained, he could hear EDI softly beeping in the background.

“Commander, you there? Sorry to break up the family visit, but we’re getting a message from Admiral Hackett. I think you’re going to want to hear this.”

Alistair could already feel his forehead throbbing at the thought. “I swear, he just bothered us…”

“Yeah, tried to mute him but you know how he does that thing to get it through anyway.” Joker was priming the Normandy for takeoff in the background. “You should probably get back to the Normandy in case we need to head out.”

Sweet relief.

“Yeah, I’ll be there in twenty. Knowing the admiral, we’re going to be in the ass end of nowhere, so start checking the relays.” He paused, sighing. “Thanks, Joker. See you soon.”

The call ended not long after. He finished his tea in one long swallow. Anora was watching him, impossible to read. She had long since abandoned her tea – it was growing cool on the table. Talk about a bad sign.

“Admiral Hackett contacts you directly?”

Alistair sighed a ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I’m kind of his go-to for confidential stuff he doesn’t want to do. Call it first human Spectre privilege I guess.”

Anora didn’t exactly look impressed. “I’m guessing armor is going to be needed then.”

“Probably.” He sighed again. “I should go. They can’t exactly leave the Citadel without a CO on deck, can they?”

His cup clinked softly as he placed it back down on the table and stood. Anora stood as well and walked him to the front door. There they hovered, neither really saying anything, eyes not really meeting.

It always ended like that. It was why he preferred Kelly there to help soften things between them.

Her hand reached out – maybe to squeeze his shoulder – but it didn’t make contact. Instead, it fell back to her side, limp. It was hard to read the emotion in her face then, but then again it always was. When it came down to it, Anora was a bit of a brick wall he wound up hitting his head against.

“Well… be safe. I’ll see you when you’re back on the Citadel?”

He nodded, already planning his route back to the ship. “Yeah. Thanks for the tea. Tell Kelly I said hi.”

She nodded, and that was it. No hug goodbye, nothing more than an awkward wave as he walked down the path. Then the door shut, and it was back to work. Maybe he felt bad about the relief that he felt as he turned to leave, like a weight had just been lifted off his shoulders. The more he walked, the easier it was to forget.

He had to anyway – he had work to do.

“Wonder what the fuck Hackett wants this time…” Alistair grumbled to himself as he aimed for the port that would get him back to the docking bay he had left earlier that day. By the time he got there, the Normandy would be ready to leave. Within the hour, he’d be shooting towards the relay. Then – who knew. With Hackett, anything was possible.

“Seriously? He wants something AGAIN? Didn’t we risk our collective asses for him last week?”

Probably because he’d be lost in his thoughts, but Alistair realized he was standing in shadow. He glanced up, unsurprised to find red eyes and a bored expression. Without much thought, he shifted his pace. He needed to – otherwise he couldn’t keep up.

Bo had a bag of snacks in her arms that jingled as she walked. From the looks of things, Joker had paged her during a grocery run. Hopefully she had managed to get the citric acid he had asked for – he was starting to run low, and without it he’d just be eating sugar. That was a line even he wouldn’t cross.

It wasn’t a big line, but every man needed one.

“Yeah, I have no idea what. Joker couldn’t tell me; I was still with Anora.”

His adopted sister winced. “So, which one would you rather have faced: her or first contact?”

“I’d say I’d rather see a turian’s face pointing a gun at me.” He winced at his own bluntness. “Sorry… have to watch my tongue around her. You know she worries.”

Bo rolled her eyes at this as she handed him a smaller bag to carry. From the looks of things, there was a massive container of citric acid inside, buried next to a candy bar he was definitely going to destroy within a few hours of achieving FTL flight. It was nice to have someone who thought of him.

“You’re a fucking N7 level marine, I think she can figure out you’re winding up in some pretty fucked up shit.”

That was another wince on his part. “Yeah, but… I don’t exactly have to tell her how I stood in the line of sight for Garrus’ rifle, now do I?”

His answer got him quite the shove forward – it was a miracle he didn’t hit the ground face first as Bo continued on ahead, bag still jingling. “I’m pretty sure she knows you’re a dumbass with a martyr complex, don’t worry.”

Ah, someone was still sore about that. Well, excuse him for using his head…

Still, attempted face plant aside, Alistair had to admit he felt a lot more at ease as he and Bo continued their walk back towards the Normandy and their continuing fight against Admiral Hackett’s to-do list. Maybe he should have felt bad about that, but he had enough actual bad things to worry about. Something like this, he’d be happy to let slide for the moment. It could get him later, when he was in bed and couldn’t sleep.

“Gee, thanks. Love you too.”

Bo flipped him the bird as he caught up to her. “Can’t help I have a dumbass for a commanding officer brother, now can I?”

“He didn’t shoot…”

“You still got in the fucking way of a sniper rifle, you moron. The ghost of Alec Ryder is going to chew your ass out when you go to bed tonight, and I’m pretty sure that bastard’s still alive.”

The last thing he wanted was Alec Ryder, corporal or otherwise, near his ass. No thanks. That was enough to give him a lifetime of nightmares…

His adopted sister nudged him again as they got closer. “Next time just… don’t be a fucking hero. I don’t even know why I’m saying it, I know you will, and it’ll piss me off and then we start all over again.”

Despite the lecture, he chuckled. “I’ll do my best.”

“No, you won’t. You’re a fucking boy scout and it’s the worst.”

At least they had at last reached the Normandy. The yellow still needed painting over, but it was a sight for sore eyes nonetheless. Alistair was happy to hop aboard as decontamination hissed around him. It was humming to life beneath his feet, almost as if it was welcoming him back.

He loved this part.

“Commander Shepard and Commander Shepard have returned. Agent Miranda stands relieved.”

EDI’s robotic voice echoed as they stepped out of decontamination. Off to the side, Joker swiveled around in his chair to greet them. His grin only got wider as he spotted the bag hanging from Bo’s arm, almost reminding Alistair of a kid in a candy store.

“Did you get it?”

Bo snorted as he pulled out a smaller bag and handed it over. “You’re worse than Saren when it comes to snacks.”

“Hey, leave my hamster out of it. Saren is a gentleman.” Alistair still chuckled as he looked out at the Citadel dock from the Normandy’s front window. Soon, it would all be the blackness of space rushing out to meet them.

“Well, can’t be too bad if I’m getting compared to that.” Joker swiveled back around, already starting the procedure for takeoff. “Hackett’s message is ready when you are, Commander.”

Right… ugh. Just thinking about it gave Alistair a headache as he watched Bo head off to distribute her snacks. Still, it was a headache he could tolerate as he felt his mind shifting back to mission mode. At least here, he was in his element.

“Go ahead and play it. Might as well find out what ass end of nowhere we’re heading to…”

And just like that, it was business as usual. Admiral Hackett needed help, and the Normandy was the only ship he could get to do it. Soon, Alistair would be back in armor and ready to face whatever hell awaited them.

In a weird way, it was good to be home. But how fucked up is it that home was a fucking bootleg Alliance frigate hotwired by Cerberus?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

One of the very last events I attended before the lockdown was a thing in Silicon Valley attended by many old friends, but the best moment of all was the chance to hang out with Kim Stanley Robinson, a friend and inspiration.

That's when Stan told me he had just finished a book that might be his last-ever novel, The Ministry For the Future, and that his future work would be nonfiction, starting with his long-planned book about the Sierras.

I was stricken. Robinson's novels are a lifeline for me.

The first Robinson novel I read may just be my favorite: Pacific Edge, a green utopian novel about a successful transition to a post-climate-emergency, just and stable world. Re-reading it is a vacation from all my anxieties, still.

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/15/pacific-edge-the-most-uplifting-novel-in-my-library/

My first novel, DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM, wouldn't exist without Pacific Edge. That was the book that taught me that small disputes over beloved local treasures could be as dramatic as (and microcosms for) global conflicts.

I have been both dreading and anticipating MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE, not wanting to read my last KSR novel but also wanting so badly to read this one, because it's the book in which he imagines the end of capitalism.

You've heard the phrase, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," variously attributed to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. As the author of a couple of postcapitalist novels, I have a real appreciation for the details of that truism.

It's actually not all that hard to imagine a postcapitalist society - but imagining the actual END of capitalism, the euthanasia of the rentier, the reversal of the doctrine of virtuous selfishness, the abandonment of the idea that some are born to rule, that is damned hard.

And while PACIFIC EDGE is my favorite KSR novel, my favorite KSR series is the string of books that starts with 2012's 2312 - a string of books that really leans hard into imagining the actual end of capitalism.

xhttps://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/15/pacific-edge-the-most-uplifting-novel-in-my-library/

2312 is set 300 years into postcapitalism. It's a novel of solar-system-scale civilization, riven by its own problems and contradictions, filled with tech marvels, a tale of natural wonders that showcase Robinson's incredible, John-Muir-grade genius for pastoral writing.

2312 was followed up by Aurora, one of the best space-exploration novels ever written, about the arrival of the first-ever generation ship at its destination world, and the hasty retreat it is required to stage.

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/02/kim-stanley-robinsons-aurora-space-is-bigger-than-you-think/

The book provoked a vitriolic reaction from science fiction's great reactionaries! I love a book that enrages the right people, and I was delighted to publish Robinson's rebuttal to their peevish complaints.

https://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html

From there, we move on to New York 2140, a novel of a pivotal moment in the transformation of capitalism and its relationship to the climate emergency.

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/03/18/new-york-2140-kim-stanley-robinson-dreams-vivid-about-weathering-climate-crisis/

These are like an artilleryman rangfinding a mortar, first overshooting his target and then walking his fire back, drawing closer to his bullseye. For Robinson, bullseye is the moment at which our society is transformed into one that can survive the coming emergencies.

It's telling that the 2312 books never got there. It is so fucking hard to imagine the end of capitalism.

But that is what The Ministry For the Future Does.

Sort of.

It's a novel about a specialized UN agency, chartered through the Paris Climate Agreement to represent unborn generations and the natural world in legal proceedings related to climate devastation.

Talking about this book, Robinson has described it as a kind of futuristic documentary, told in many voices, as a way of describing a phenomenon as vast as this global transformation.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#ksr

Like many docs, it follows a couple of main characters, but weaves in dozens of other voices, some of whom we hear from only once or twice, recounting pivotal moments in which a moment calves away from our reality as we know it - moments of shear, giddy and terrifying.

Robinson is so good at this stuff. This is the book that he has been practicing for all his life. The vignettes are superb little jewels, mostly illuminating flashbulb moments in the lives of strangers met fleetingly.

But some of the most powerful moments don't even have characters: there's a transcript of the openng a fictional congress of global climate remediation groups after the crisis that is just an alphabetical list of countries and their associated projects.

This literally made me burst into tears of joy, bursting with hope at the thought that we could, as a species, spawn so many evocative and hopeful projects to save our world, our species, and our nonhuman cohabitants.

Robinson's versatility is on glorious display here: from long lists of hypothetical ecological projects, he veers into closely told moments of human endeavor in the natural world, showcasing his pastoralism with scenes so vivid you could reach out and touch them.

But all that said, the most interesting thing about this book is the stuff that Robinson couldn't or wouldn't put on the page. Robinson's hypothetical scenario for the end of capitalism is a baroque scheme of global cryptocurrency money-creation tied to carbon drawdown.

His technocrats trick capitalism into spending itself out of existence in a plan that is by turns brainy and daffy (as all blockchainism tends to be), with some pretty epic handwaving (especially when it comes to the breakup of tech monopolies).

But all of that would fail were it not for acts of absolutely brutal, ruthless terrorism. Robinson's transformation isn't merely about the carrots of double-bluff get-rich-quick schemes, it's heavily dependent on the stick of terror.

The aviation industry isn't (just) replaced by airships and rail because it's better and cleaner - but also because parties unknown use drones to bring down every private jet in the sky, and then commercial liners, until the aviation industry seizes up and dies.

And the world doesn't abandon beef because vegans win the moral argument or because greenies win the practical one - the decisive factor is drones that dart an unknowable plurality of the world's cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

There's more - pitiless, remorseless, anonymous. And while Robinson gets up close and personal with one traumatized individual who engages in an ecologically motivated, short-lived (and nonlethal) kidnapping, we never meet any of the terrorists or their victims.

The terror that begets the transition is recounted in the dry language of an encyclopedia entry, not dramatized like the pivotal moments of so many other characters.

It's a very telling omission.

My 2019 novella "Radicalized" is about an online community of men who, after watching their most treasured family members die slow, painful, preventable deaths because of insurance company fuckery, become suicide bombers who murder health execs.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/who-says-violence-doesnt-solve-anything-a-review-of-radicalized-four-tales-of-our-present-moment-by-cory-doctorow.html

Writing that story was an intensely uncomfortable experience (and, judging from reader comments, it can be uncomfortable to read, too).

It's one thing to recognize that a systemic problem might not be solved without grotesque, mass violence, and another to put yourself in the shoes of either the perpetrators or the victims.

Robinson's end of capitalism is, superficially, a story of a transition, not a spasm, not a capital-T Terror. The lives we inhabit in this novel are people who are engaged in struggle, but not mass-murder.

But right there on the page is Robinson's uncomfortable and only partially elided conviction that we're not in for a transition, but rather a bloodletting, a reckoning commensurate with the ecocidal crimes that led up to this moment.

MINISTRY is a book that, on first consideration, feels like a utopia - not merely for the beautiful descriptions of people, animals and environments finding a way through the emergencies, but for the emergencies resolution.

But on closer examination, MINISTRY represents the dark fears of one of our brightest, most hopeful writers, that the world can only be saved by means that are literally too terrible to contemplate up close.

It's an uncomfortable read. It's a brilliant book. If it indeed turns out to be Stan's last novel (oh please don't let it be Stan's last novel), it will be a fitting capstone. But the subtext of this book is that we are past the point of no return.

Not only will rescuing our planet entail sacrifices of species, habitats, and coastlines - it will also entail sacrifices of the moral convictions that make vast spectacles of bloodletting unthinkable.

[cannibalisticapple]

Okay, so I have some thoughts on Kurikuri’s decision to delete a large number of her fan fics, and on fan fiction as a whole.

For those who don’t know, Kurikuri (@letaizawarest) is a popular fan fiction author with numerous popular Erasermic fics, along with other fandoms. Around the end of May/start of June she deleted a large number of her stories, specifically those that featured either police, or those set in the My Hero Academia universe where they work as Pro Heroes.

To quote her post:

as you may have noticed, roughly half of the fics on my ao3 have been deleted.

i’ve deleted all my fics about police officers. also, after some thought, i also deleted my non-AU bnha fics, because although they might not be “cops” in name, they are law enforcement. i do not want to be a part of the system that glorifies the police. 


at the moment i haven’t deleted other profession AUs and high school era fics, but i will continue to reflect on their relation to the source material. even if you enjoyed the deleted fics, please do not circulate them in other formats (PDFs, EPUBs, etc). 


i also encourage other writers to think about cop fic they’ve written. while it may be fun and escapist for you, it still encourages the idea that antiblack and killer cops are just “bad apples” and that good cops exist. let’s dismantle that system of thought.

I have some very, very mixed feelings on this.

To start: I respect her reasoning, but I don’t agree with it. I fully agree that it’s not just a bunch of “bad apples”, there’s a serious issue with the system and how the police operate in the United States. I’ve always been bothered by how the police let other officers get away with horrible BS, even as a kid, and that rage has only grown as I’ve grown older and found out more about how screwed up it is on every single level.

But the way that last paragraph is written rubs me the wrong way because you can’t paint every single person in an entire career field as unequivocally corrupt, bigoted and all around callous murderers. Good cops DO exist. Plenty of people go into the career hoping to fix things, or just genuinely want to help their community in whatever way they can. But the thing is, they’re fighting a losing battle because the system is working against them. When they DO speak up against the corruption, bigotry, violence and other issues, they tend to get fired and blacklisted from the field. Or sometimes, they get outright murdered and it’s treated as a “suicide.”

A shitty fact of life: sometimes, the people who are more willing to resort to underhanded tactics and willing to turn a blind eye to corruption are the ones who climb up the career ladder furthest. And in the case of the police, it’s deep-rooted enough that it can’t be fixed internally anymore. But that doesn’t make literally every police officer corrupt.

I’m not posting this to make some political point or argument though. I obviously disagree with Kurikuri’s opinion, but I respect it. I can even respect her decision to remove the stories featuring the police, or even the ones heavily focusing on the characters’ jobs as pro heroes. I can see how heroes are just another version of law enforcement, because honestly, they are.

As a writer and a reader, I fully respect that it’s ultimately her choice to delete her stories. It’s not my place to make demands. She’s the one who created it, and as a writer I know the hard work and time that goes into crafting stories, so I believe she has a right in how it’s used and shared. The fact she shared it in the first place was something she didn’t have to do.

But the thing is, she DID share it, which is why I have this conflict.

As a writer, I’ve always believed that fiction can be more powerful than fact.

Fiction can give readers a window into mindsets you’d never imagine before, because you can connect more easily with fictional characters than real people on the news. That’s why Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so critical in the battle against slavery: it didn’t just gave a face to slavery, it let readers experience the characters’ lives directly. People got to see the struggles and suffering firsthand, feel the rising crescendo of hope each time freedom is in reach, and the soul-crushing despair every time that hope gets dashed by outside forces.

Fiction may not always be “true” or even “accurate,” but it can help us understand other people, see them as fellow humans, in ways that nonfiction just can’t. It can evoke emotions, empathy and familiarity in a reader that a news story or biography can’t capture because it draws you directly into their world.

And it’s that part—the part where readers enter this fictional world to connect to characters they’ll never meet—that leads to the other power of fiction that many people overlook:

Fiction has the ability to help readers persevere.

How many people reading this have used books to get away from trouble in their lives? To take a breather from all their anxieties and stress, and dive head-first into this other world for just a moment, where nothing else matters? How many people reading this had their whole lives changed by reading a story where a character’s words resonated with them? Where it helped them come to an epiphany about how to do better, how to be better.

Sometimes, the world is too overwhelming and we need to escape it. That’s the beauty of fiction. It lets us go to a world where our problems just don’t matter. Even if the world in question is worse than our own, it can still be a relief and give us hope because hey, at least we’re not living in 1984 or the Hunger Games, right? Stories are what keeps many people going through the hardest time, what gives them hope that life isn’t utterly hopeless.

And even after a story is finished, whether it’s fan fiction, a book, a show, or any other medium, that story will have a special place in people’s hearts. Many people will go back to those stories years later when they’re faced with immense stress and need a break from the real world, so that they can dive into the world that helped them persevere the last time they felt so bad. Just having a copy of it on hand can be a source of comfort even if you never read it again.

I want to highlight one phrase Kurikuri used in her post to describe how people feel writing stories about police and heroes: "fun and escapist”. That’s honestly so accurate, those stories are escapist, and that is why I’m so conflicted.

Stories about superheroes, while technically revolving around themes of law enforcement, are a form of escapism FROM police corruption.

There’s a reason that superhero comics are so popular in America. Superheroes appeal to a natural desire for justice because as so aptly pointed out, the real world doesn’t always HAVE that justice. It gives an ideal for people to aspire to, a glimpse of what could be, what should be. (Come to think of it, that’s probably why I hate the DC cinematic universe so much, it’s skewed way too much to favor the villains/antagonists and maximize suffering for the good guys.)

Right now, the world is full of more injustice than ever before. I can’t turn on the news without feeling my rage and stress boil over. Every day it gets worse and worse somehow, and I (and many others) genuinely fear that the United States may be heading towards a civil war this November. Donald Trump’s voice alone is enough to make my blood boil at this point.

I, and many others, turn to fan fiction so I can break away from reality because that amount of rage and fear just isn’t healthy.

I don’t have depression, or anxiety, or an abusive family, or a chronic illness. I’m not at risk of being made homeless anytime soon, nor do I need to worry about bills right now or going hungry. I’m a privileged white girl who has barely anything to worry about. What I’m saying is I’m fucking lucky and I know it, but I STILL can’t stand thinking about the state of the world and need to get the fuck away from it to take a breather for my own mental health.

And I also know that many people don’t have that option because their situation is so bad, they NEED to be aware of it at all times.

In the past when writing for other fandoms, I’ve had people tell me my fan fiction was the reason they did not commit suicide.

In my early college years I fell into the creepypasta community and was pretty active in it, especially on deviantArt. I don’t know if that particular fandom’s subject and focus makes it more appealing to teenagers going through rough times or what, but I swear, more than half the people I spoke to suffered from some form of mental illness, abusive or broken family and home situations, bullying, and every other way the world can screw someone over through means beyond their control.

During that time, a few readers left comments that waiting for my stories to update were what kept them going. They didn’t explicitly say that it was the only reason they didn’t kill themselves. It was more just remarks like, “Your writing is the only thing keeping me going.”

I’m not vain enough to believe my stories are so good, it made people decide to continue living JUST to see what happens next. Suicidal thoughts and urges are much more complex than that. But it’s still not something you expect to hear on something you write for fun.

I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t because my stories were "just that good.” I think it was because they needed something to cling to in bleak times. That sometimes at the lowest point where all seems lost, people need just one little thought, just the smallest thing to push away those dark urges before they could fully overwhelm them. Something like, “If I die now, I won’t get to see how that story ends.” It’s such a small thing, but having something to look forward to can be so powerful in fighting off impulsive decisions.

It’s made me hyper-aware of just how powerful writing is.

To me, I see writing as a way of helping others. I give people that option for escape. It’s a large part of why I update on a regular, weekly schedule, and why I published extra chapters when the pandemic got announced and when the riots started. People need that comfort, that little break from reality to just sit and breathe so they can get through the rest of the day. I can’t do much to fix the world, but I can at least give people that.

Right now, people need that escape more than ever.

And deleting the stories is taking that escape away and causing MORE stress.

In times like this, people often turn to the stories they know will help most, and plenty of people in fandoms will first search up their favorite ships. They look for fluff, smut, angst... It helps people feel better to focus on these two people who are obviously in love as they work through their troubles.

Many times, readers will be more drawn to stories in the canon universe than radical AUs set in other universes. That’s how they were introduced to those characters. I myself can enjoy no-power and fantasy AUs sometimes, but what I really crave are how they interact in the canon world because that’s the world and versions of them I want to see the most. By deleting EVERY SINGLE STORY IN THE CANON UNIVERSE, that option was removed.

In many of the stories that were deleted, the characters’ careers were honestly a minor facet of the story. Some used it to establish the setting, such as treating injuries after a patrol. Some just simply used it to explain they work at UA, a school for teaching kids with superpowers. Some just had them work as heroes because it’s set in the canon universe, and never directly show ANTTHING about the work.

I’m not always looking for a story about how being a hero shapes and impacts their lives, and most of those stories that got deleted AREN’T about being a hero. That’s just one piece of their character, it’s far from the focal point. It could honestly be removed from several of them without changing the rest of the story.

I can get wanting to make a political point and I respect that, but by deleting those stories, you’ve taken away a key source of comfort from hundreds, thousands of people. By deleting the stories, you’re making the stress worse.

On Saturday night, I realized several of my favorite stories are suddenly gone. I knew Kurikuri had deleted a bunch of her stories, but I hadn’t realized just how many of them I liked. Some of them I’ve specifically sought out to reread multiple times in the past, never really paying attention to the author. Realizing they’re just gone caused me heavy stress because it made me paranoid about all these other stories I like to reread. I don’t expect those stories to be around forever, but I still didn’t expect them to vanish so suddenly. I never thought I’d need to download them to make sure I’d still be able to read them while the site is still up.

I spent hours searching out specific stories to see if they were written by her, and make sure they’re not gone forever. I have no way of knowing which ones she’d written and deleted because there’s not exactly a list out there anymore. My desperate search for those stories and one in particular (which I still haven’t found) contributed to the lack of sleep I got that night.

And I need to reiterate: I am mentally healthy and have no major stresses in my immediate life. And that’s why I’m hyper-aware of how this stress will affect people who AREN’T as lucky as I am.

If an author decides to delete their stories because they feel the stories themselves push harmful values or themes, fine. If they’re getting harassed, or it reminds them of a bad time in the lives, or they just don’t like that story anymore, okay. I can respect that and accept it.

But these stories were deleted for the EXACT reasons that people will be looking for them now more than ever, and that’s where I draw the line.

This applies to ALL fandoms.

If you as a fan fiction writer have more than, say, 100 kudos on a completed story or one-shot, there’s a good chance people will read and reread your story in stressful times. If you have a reasonably popular story that updates on a regular or even semi-regular basis, there is a chance that someone is using it as a lifeline to have something to look forward to while the rest of their lives go to hell. Maybe not because they specifically love it, but because it gives them something routine.

I want to make it clear that it’s not our job to care for other people’s mental health. Fan fiction writers don’t have an obligation to people, we’re doing it for fun first and foremost. We’re not some sort of saviors, and we shouldn’t think of ourselves that way or we can honestly screw people up worse. We’re not obligated to write these stories JUST for our fans.

At most, our stories are sources of support and comfort for readers. A little break from reality. If writing a story is causing you more stress than enjoyment, stop. Fan fiction, and all other fan media and stories in general, is ultimately created for the creator’s enjoyment more than anything.

Your own mental health comes first. Don’t set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.

But with how utterly fucked and unfair the world is right now, people need those stories now more than ever. So if you’ve got a story out there that’s fairly popular, please, please, PLEASE be mindful of your readers before deciding to delete it. Now is the absolute last time people need more stress trying to find a single story. And if you’re going to delete it, maybe give readers a heads up so that those who need it or have some powerful attachment to it for all the reasons I’ve discussed here can download a copy for their own personal use.

Don’t hurt your readers to make a point.

[koishua]

𝙂𝙀𝙏 𝙏𝙊 𝙆𝙉𝙊𝙒 𝙈𝙀 𝙏𝘼𝙂 !

tagged by: @luvvseong @yangyangify @spookybias @iuwon @floraljae (thank you, my loves <3)

tagging: @zhongwrld @moonbeamsung @rutosruru @lyjikyu @armysantiny @kopikokun @mochiable @envirae @channoticedmeuwu @radiorenjun @lebrookestore @whiteprincessofnohr + anyone who would like to do it!!

notes from vie: oml what the hell was this. honestly, this was so long, but i think it allowed me to reflect upon myself for a moment lmao.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙙𝙖𝙮 𝙞𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙗𝙞𝙧𝙩𝙝𝙙𝙖𝙮

october twenty eighth! on winwin day, nonetheless!

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩❜𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙧

i adore every single one smh. if it were palettes we were speaking about, then it would probably be greyish blue tones and beige to yellow ones!

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩❜𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙡𝙪𝙘𝙠𝙮 𝙣𝙪𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧

my lucky number does not work, because my misfortune overpowers it way too much. i like the number eight, though!

𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙥𝙚𝙩𝙨

i used to have pet baby cobras, fishes, yellow and blue budgies, and aquatic turtles!

𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙩𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪

i am aspiring to reach 170 cm, but i am currently 159-160 cm! that would be 5'2"?? i think.

𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙥𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙚𝙨 𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚

a pair of combat boots, white canvas shoes, and one sneakers for sports class... not many lmao i am not a shoe gal.

𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙜

changes everyday. as i am typing, however, it would be lose it by oh wonder, rush hour by gaho and run by one republic!

𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙢𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙚

i have three: rise of the guardians, room (2015), and... any studio ghibli movie tbh. whoops.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙬𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙖𝙡 𝙥𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙣𝙚𝙧 𝙗𝙚 𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚

i say that i do not have a type all of the time, but all of the people i have been attracted to and had a crush on were the wild, fun, and cute guys in my class. they also tend to be very kind and understanding as well. i am a sucker for people who smile often.

they would have to be accepting of all of my flaws and love me regardless, just like the way i would do the same for them if i love them as well. i am also extremely touch deprived haha, so i would honestly be over the moon if they don't mind hugs and physical affection.

𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙧𝙚𝙣

only after i have a stable income and have things sorted out, because i don't want to struggle raising them because of financial and mental issues. no kid deserves parents that can't take care of them ig.

𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙜𝙤𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙣 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙡𝙖𝙬

the law from where i come from are terrible and something pretty bad has happened, but i'd rather that's kept in private haha. i swear i didn't commit any crimes lmao police are just incredible blind and unfair there.

𝙗𝙖𝙩𝙝 𝙤𝙧 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙬𝙚𝙧

shower. i am way too impatient for baths. also, i feel weird sitting in a tub filled water while naked lmfao it's so weird for me.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙧 𝙨𝙤𝙘𝙠𝙨 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜

grey.

𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙩𝙮𝙥𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙢𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙘

k-r&b, indie, pop-rock hybrid ig, lo-fi.

𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙥𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙤𝙬𝙨 𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙨𝙡𝙚𝙚𝙥 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝

only one below my head.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙥𝙤𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙨𝙡𝙚𝙚𝙥 𝙞𝙣

it varies. i sleep like a rock even though i can’t sleep for long, so i wake up in the exact position i initially fall asleep in. either on my back or my right side, since my left side isn’t too good lmao.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙙𝙤𝙣❜𝙩 𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙮𝙤𝙪❜𝙧𝙚 𝙨𝙡𝙚𝙚𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜

buzzing mosquitos and damp, hot air (which is very rare, so i guess we are okay). i also hate being cold, so i sleep with two blankets even during summer haha. my limbs are ice-cold all the time smh

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙗𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙠𝙛𝙖𝙨𝙩

oats mixed with chocolate chunks.

𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙙 𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙮

i never went to a club or took lessons, but we had a backyard where my dad allowed me to shoot at stuff with a bow and the few arrows he made. i was pretty good at aiming, but my eyesight has deteriorated, so i left it at that lmao

𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙛𝙧𝙪𝙞𝙩

watermelons and mangoes... also rambutan and mangis, but we don’t have them in germany ;-; i missed them.

𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙨𝙬𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙙

fuck. and i am sorry to say that i use it here quite a lot.

𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙨𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙨

tons.

𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙖 𝙜𝙤𝙤𝙙 𝙡𝙞𝙖𝙧

some have called me a psychopath before, but they just don’t understand that i was raised by very strict parents and learned how to lie lmao. i am pretty ashamed to say yes.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩❜𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙩𝙮𝙥𝙚

i have tested twice. once when i was fourteen, which showed that i was an infj-t, but then i took it again last year and it showed that i was an infp-t. i heard that 16Personalities was trash, though, so take it with a grain of salt.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩❜𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙩𝙮𝙥𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙜𝙞𝙧𝙡

my best friend. she is a wild character, ngl, but she and i communicate extremely well. she is outgoing, courageous, hilarious, and has no qualms with being the odd one. she isn’t overly obnoxious, but she has a nice kind of self-confidence going on.

𝙞𝙣𝙣𝙞𝙚 𝙤𝙧 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙩𝙞𝙚

i love yang jeongIN. definitely an innie, because i don’t even remember what the front of my house looks like haha. i don’t go out unless someone literally grabs my arms and physically drags me out and i am not even joking with this one. 

𝙡𝙚𝙛𝙩 𝙤𝙧 𝙧𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙙

i was originally right-handed, but then i got paranoid of breaking my right arm and having to study with my left arm all of a sudden and get bad grades, so i learned how to do stuff and write with my left hand as a kid.

𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙛𝙤𝙤𝙙

don’t have one. call me when we’re talking about dessert.

𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙚𝙞𝙜𝙣 𝙛𝙤𝙤𝙙

don’t have one.

𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙤𝙧 𝙢𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙮

my entire aesthetic is chaotic academia irl, so you tell me.

𝙢𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝙪𝙨𝙚𝙙 𝙥𝙝𝙧𝙖𝙨𝙚

oml, how tf, bahaha, bestie, no because-, hehe, lmao, i’m sobbing, i guess, toodles, etc etc.

𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜 𝙙𝙤𝙚𝙨 𝙞𝙩 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙩𝙤 𝙜𝙚𝙩 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙮

i can techincally be ready in five, but procrastination is the sole thing i excel at, so yeah, definitely half an hour.

𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙩𝙖𝙡𝙠 𝙩𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙛

cnversations happen in my head, my the office-esque reactions happen out loud. i talk a lot and imitate phrases i hear from someone to myself and reenact scenes from my daydreams bahaha

𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙛

i don’t shut up. someone save the people that live with me.

𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙖 𝙜𝙤𝙤𝙙 𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙧

definitely not the most technically sound vocalist, but i can hold a tune or two. i was a soloist in my choir for a few years and was the vocalist for a band, but we disbanded smh i am still very sad about that :/ i loved them so much.

𝙗𝙞𝙜𝙜𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙛𝙚𝙖𝙧

seeing my loved ones die before me.

𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙖 𝙜𝙤𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙥

i don’t feel comfortable talking bad about people :/ just ignore and move on.

𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚 𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙧 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙧𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙞𝙧

i have hair that reaches my knees, but dear god do i want to chop it all off in one motion and get a yeeun-style bob cut.

𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙨𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙤𝙡 𝙨𝙪𝙗𝙟𝙚𝙘𝙩

sports and art. to hell with everything else. i’m not bad at them at all, but oh gosh i want to burn them all.

𝙞𝙣𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙩 𝙤𝙧 𝙚𝙭𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙩

... idk. i hate speaking to strangers and feel so awkward during one on one conversations with friends. i don’t go out a lot and social events tire me out, but i also crave noise happening around me. so,,, ambivert? i do tend to be the life of the party often during the few times i go out, but then i just lug myself back home and crash for the week lmao

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙢𝙖𝙠𝙚𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙤𝙪𝙨

anything related to school. i have regular panic attacks /gen. also, i have thalassaphobia and megalophobia, so things larger than life and the vast, empty ocean terrifies me and movies like that just make me nauseous. 

𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙡 𝙘𝙧𝙪𝙨𝙝

my first real crush this one guy in my band. he was the other vocalist and was so pretty and fun. he always used to tease me smh. at least, that was something. but then we had to disband last year, because the older guys were moving away to study and us high schoolers were also moving to different cities ;-;

𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙛𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙧𝙪𝙣

i was in my middle school track team and used to compete a lot since i was pretty agile, but then i started to hate running, stopped, and now i am just a little above average bahaha.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙧 𝙞𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙝𝙖𝙞𝙧

black. i want to dye it with cotton candy colored highlights, tho!

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙢𝙖𝙠𝙚𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙧𝙮

unnecessary comments, rude and obnoxious, self-entitled kids and people in general, people who tell you how to do your own job, hate comments, the basic dni criterias as well 

𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙤𝙬𝙣 𝙣𝙖𝙢𝙚

kind of?

𝙙𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙖 𝙗𝙤𝙮 𝙤𝙧 𝙖 𝙜𝙞𝙧𝙡 𝙖𝙨 𝙖 𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙙

i would want a girl.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙜𝙩𝙝𝙨

i have cold hands if you want to cool down. i can adapt to any kind of environment instantly, since i have moved twelve different times to fifferent schools and countries. bless my parents. i have gained the ability to conquer shifts in social environments at the cost of my mental health :’) i also consider myself to be nice and can get things down quickly, so i am a fast learner.

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙬𝙚𝙖𝙠𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙨

kanemoto yoshinori, yoshi, eye smiles, and brownies. i am also very impatient, a perfectionist, a procrastinator, and have absolutely zero self-control over aggression against my own body. i have trouble reacting to other people's emotional outbursts, be it crying or anger and don't know what to do and how to comfort them. i also have trouble opening up and am never authentic around people, so i don't have... friends, if that makes sense? i don't feel comfortable being myself and feel like i have to be the person that they want me to be? idek.

i get bored extremely easily and nothing interests me that much ig

𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩❜𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙧 𝙤𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙗𝙚𝙙𝙨𝙥𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙

blue.

𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙧 𝙤𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙧𝙤𝙤𝙢

white and hints of blue.

[briapia95]

An analysis, many interpretations, and comments on the interactions between WWX and LWJ in Chapter 25: Malice —Part 3

I feel like this chapter [and the last couple of paragraphs from the previous chapter] is gold and all that happens between those two is so interesting and bittersweet to read. And it also gives me so many feelings because you can feel the yearning in-between the lines.

By this point, they’ve have reunited after LWJ went after the person running away from the man-eating castle and WWX has managed to run away from JC and transfers JL curse mark.

Just by the end of the previous chapter we are given this small piece: [consider that WWX is coming late to the meeting point]

[...] the white-robed figure stood at the end of the street, standing motionless with his head hung low.

Before Wei Wuxian made any sound, Lan Wangji looked up and saw him. After some hesitation, he walked over with a darkened expresion.

Wei Wuxian didn’t know why, but he involuntarily took a step backward.

He could almost see scarlet streaks of blood by the corners of Lan Wangji’s eyes. He had to admit... Lan Wangji’s face really did look quite scary.

So, it’s quite clear to me that LWJ was not angry but instead scared, and deeply scared as that. The novel has stated several times that WWX used to teased him so much and in such a high degree in the past because it was difficult to get a reaction out of LWJ. But now? Now it only took for WWX to take longer than it was expected to get such a reaction from LWJ.

And of course, the man is scared out of his life. The last time he left WWX behind in a hostile situation was also the last time he ever saw him alive, if it was any other character they would not have risked doing so again. But despite all of that, he chose to trust WWX’s judgment and go after NHS so as to not lose track of him while WWX took JL so safety, even when LWJ knew there was a high possibility that JC was around. [which turned out to be correct]

So now he sees WWX coming back to him and it’s such a relief that even in his stoicism WWX is able to gather that something was happening with LWJ [pity he misunderstood what emotions were going through LWJ at that moment]

Now to the actual chapter I was supposed to be talking about:

WWX, having being attacked with zidian and bearing the curse mark, staggers and almost fall if not for LWJ

[...] thightly gripped his wrist like what he did last time, back in Dafan Mountain.

Wangxian.mp3 playing in the distance.

So now we have two things that really made me laugh:

WWX being flustered because LWJ knelt in front of him to look at his wounds.

I love how even as WWX proclaims to have such a thick face, yet he still gets easily flustered by such small things.

And the famous “... I only left for a few [fucking] hours” phrase from LWJ.

I mean I’m pretty sure inside his head LWJ was screaming so many curses because yes. By this point, WWX has been with him for days and nothing has happened to the other man. Not even with the failed evocation at the Mingshi with NMJ arm. And now he has left WWX out of his sight for |this| short amount of time and look at what happened to him. LWJ is screaming and suffering internally. And WWX is downplaying the seriousness of his injuries. Please give the man a break WWX.

And just when WWX starts to walk towards the shop where NHS is located, we get this:

Lan Wangji stood behind him. He suddenly called out, “Wei Ying.”

Wei Wuxian’s figure paused. A second later, he pretended as if he didn’t hear the name, and answered, “What?”

Idk about you guys but if this is not a heavily charged moment idk what it would be. Because this is the first time LWJ directly calls WWX on his bluff. He’s literally offering him a hand. Tentatively he’s saying “I’m here, you don’t need to hide, you can rely on me”, but at the same time If WWX had chosen to ignore the call he could have easily done so because LWJ is not imposing. Yet WWX chose to tentatively reach back. And IDK, this part causes so many emotions in me, because, for all of what they both remember, their last interactions pre-WWX’s reviving were terrible hostile.

LWJ then states the obvious, 1) you transferred JL’s curse mark to yourself, and 2) you met JC.

And WWX delivers this harsh truth

[...] “As long as both of us are alive in this world, we’d meet for sure, sooner or later.”

Here WWX furthermore confirms his true identity but also I think he implies something quite sad. If he and JC are both alive they’ll keep meeting, they’ll keep hurting each other, and sooner or later one of them will end up dead. And LWJ is not stupid, he catches on quite fast, so he replies:

[...] “Do not go...”

And this little sentence is so many things in such a few little words at the same time. ‘Don’t go meet him, don’t leave me behind, let me protect you, you don’t need to die and leave again.’

And of course, WWX being who he is by this point of the novel, deflects. Because if he’s good at something it's to change the subject and joke around when he’s placed on a tight spot that involves opening-up to face harsh feelings.

[...] If I don’t go, how am I supposed to leave? Are you gonna carry me on you back or something?”

WWX said this because he knew it worked in the past, that LWJ has shot down similar requests in his first life. But, at LWJ’s lack of response, he knew his deflection didn’t really work as he planned to, maybe LWJ would leave the subject to rest but WWX would not be able to tease him into forgetting the conversation.

And LWJ totally does just that, he goes and tries to carry WWX, just like WWX did when they were teenagers, and now is WWX turn to be flustered again.

There’s a little part that stood out for me in this whole scene.

[...] Lan Wangji walked in front of him, as if he really was going to bend down, kneel, and carry Wei Wuxian on his back, despite his honorable status.

And is such a small throwaway line that almost goes unnoticed but it reflects one of the main obstacles WWX has to overcome. WWX does not think of him as an equal to LWJ. And how could he? First, he was the son of a servant, no matter how talented he was in contrast to the second Jade of gusu. Then he was reviled as the Yilling Patriarch, the scum of the cultivation world, in contrast to Hanguang-Jun, the light bringer. He was persecuted and killed and while LWJ was revered. It’s a sad life the one that WWX lived on his first life if you think about it. And WWX is totally aware of these differences in social status and the comparisons other people drew. He might be able to boast that in skill they're equals, but that's it. Outside that he was always regarded as the inferior, that's something I think plays a heavy hand in his belief that the only reason LWJ wanted to bring him back to gusu was to punish him.

As for LWJ’s part, we have this moment after WWX denies being carried

After a moment of silence, Lan Wangji responded, “But you have also carried me on your back before.”

Wei Wuxian, “Did such a thing ever happen? Why don’t I remember?”

Lan Wangji answered in an indifferent tone, “You never remember such things.”

First, we have a vulnerable moment when LWJ tries to reminisce a treasured memory and then goes to quietly exasperated with a dash of disappointment. Because as I stated before, I truly believe WWX did remember the time he offered to carry LWJ in his back, the phrasing is too deliberate to be a coincidence, and LWJ knows it too but also knows that indeed WWX tends to forget many things -read Wangxian.mp3 [the entire reason he figured who you were WWX omg]- so he also can't be sure if WWX is playing into the oblivious character he tries to pull or if he truly doesn't remember. So he doesn't press the matter further but also is not going to let WWX tease him into forgetting he's been hurt.

LWJ has evolved, he now actually can take WWX teasing and keep up with it too, that’s why he ends up carrying him bridal-stile. (To WWX further embarrassment). But being the tease we know WWX, he escalates his antics, starting to play with the front of LWJ clothes as he’s been carried -aka flirting, you are not fooling anyone here WWX- and LWJ just goes along with it. And, of course, he will! He waited 13 years for you WWX with no hope of ever seeing you again, he’s not gonna let this chance go to waste.

Then WWX decides to ask what’s been on his mind since Dafan Mountain, “how the [dolphin noises] did you know it was me? And even since the begging too!” And LWJ here chooses to answer him with a non-reply, the kind of when he's saying the truth but he knows the other person will not understand what's he's saying (his favorite form of communication).

[...] “You told me yourself”

I feel like mostly this is a way of defense LWJ uses when he's also avoiding telling people what he really wants to say, either because he does not care what the other interprets and/or is subtly insulting them -see his treatment of JC and JGY- but he will still be courteous when doing so or because he's afraid of the reaction the other person could have if he's being completely honest -WWX rejecting him if he links together that wangxian.mp3 = you've had feeling for me ever since then = I remembered I rejected you so I’ll reject you again. But also is a way of subtly letting WWX in, as if to say, ‘I know you rejected me but my feelings are the same’. And the moment WWX is unable to figure it out this happens:

It seemed as if something had sent ripples through Lan Wangji’s eyes. Yet, the slight waves faded immediately, and his eyes were a still pool of water again.

Oh LWJ you poor suffering fool, I don’t blame him since for all that he knows WWX rejected his feelings already. But also, this is why communication is important guys, non-replies are cool and everything but if LWJ had said something else, anything else that hinted at the reason he was able to recognize WWX, so much pining would have been spared. But alas.

This is getting longer than I expected but there are two more points I want to touch.

When they arrived in front of the door of the room where NHS is staying at and WWX ask LWJ to let him down so that he can open the door. It goes like this

Before he finished his words, Lan Wangji did something that was extremely impolite. It was possibly the first time in his whole life that he had ever done such a rude act.

Carrying Wei Wuxian, he kicked the door open.

And I really love this part.

I remember reading a while back a meta that said that in WWX’s first life LWJ had tried to be the bridge that connected WWX with the “righteous” path, that he was trying to bring him back to the “right and accepted” side, but in WWX’s second life LWJ pretty much says, ‘I’ll walk alongside you in any path you chose’.

And this paragraph is LWJ's character evolution in a nutshell. It was shown in little glimpses before like with the scene of WWX finding the secret stash of emperor’s smile at the Jingshi or the whip scars on LJW’s back. But nothing is so blatantly stated regarding this change in LWJ’s character previous this moment. The “I will stay with you and help you forge a path where we can both walk freely” is this small moment when LWJ prefers to keep WWX in his arms and just slam the door open than letting him on his feet to open the door because it's the proper thing to do that we know LWJ will always choose WWX and not try to find compromises as he did on WWX’s first life. Something that goes against everything he was taught about property probably. And he’s doing it without a single hesitation. If that’s not love and devotion I don’t know what it is.

And now, the last part I wanted to bring into attention; right after LWJ startles NHS when kicking the door open and walking with WWX on his arms:

Acting as if he didn’t see anything, Lan Wangji carried Wei Wuxian inside and put him in the bamboo mat.

LWJ just showing so much care for his beloved Yilling Patriarch. He will make sure that WWX is safe and comfy before continuing with this very serious investigation. All because on WWX’s last life, LWJ was not able to provide him this sort of affection and care he always wished for. But now he’ll make sure as hell that he’ll be able to bring comfort to his beloved, no matter the situation because he actually can do it and he sure is not going to be wasting this second chance.

And that’s it, I feel like this chapter is Wangxian in a nutshell. The chapter underlays the feelings, characterization, interactions, and arcs that will be explored through the rest of the book. And it’s why it gives me so many emotions while reading it.

Omg, this turned out so much longer than I thought. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk I guess xD

[more rambles]

[yourdeepestfathoms]

Hi! I know a lot about the queens but not so much about the ladies in waiting. I love your content and I’m wondering if you could give a sort of run down on the ladies (like their history and their personalities within the fandom)? Or if you have a post that already explains this or could point me to where I could find more information about them because they seem really interesting.

Hello! You came to the right place because I am the goddess of lady in waiting content. I’ll give you a basic rundown of the gals’ history and then some personal headcanons I have for them. I hope it helps!

(Note: I’ll just be covering the West End version of these girls. Also not everyone’s interpretation of them are the same, mine are just more out there in the community and the ones people tend to go off of.)

Maria

Maria de Salinas was the lady in waiting and best friend of Catherine of Aragon. She entered the court when she was 19 and stayed there until Aragon was divorced. During Aragon’s illness later on, Maria literally broke into the castle where she was kept, deliberately disobeying her orders not to, and stayed with Aragon until she passed. The queen died in her arms.

In SIX, Maria is played by Alice Angliss

Headcanons

Secretly guilty of Bessie’s exile. Believes she could have done something to help her.

Has an acid reflux and cannot eat hot foods because of it

Awful bedhead in the morning

Really warm. Like a literally space heater

Everyone loves her hair

Really good at cooking

Very protective over Bessie

Scared of moths

Maggie

Margaret “Maggie” Lee was the lady in waiting and best friend to Anne Boleyn. She entered the court when she was 27 and stayed until Anne’s execution. Now she and Anne were very close, as their family’s properties were close together, so they were probably childhood friends and grew up together. Anne even had a lady in waiting she saw as a little sister and that most likely was Maggie.

Interestingly enough, one of the men Anne allegedly had an affair with was Thomas Wyatt, Maggie’s older brother. They were both imprisoned, so I imagine that must have been hard on Maggie, however Thomas was spared from being hanged. Maggie was the one to tell Elizabeth what was happening to her mother and was also up on the scaffolding with Anne when she died. She was given a special prayer book from Anne just before the execution.

In SIX, Maggie is played by Amy Shaw

Headcanons

Badly traumatized by Anne’s execution, moreso than Anne is. She constantly has nightmares about it

Will sometimes hallucinate Anne without a head, that’s how bad her trauma is

Lowkey a kleptomaniac

Has a pet snake

Will speak French when she’s distressed or scared

Joan

Joan Meutas was the maid in waiting to Anne Boleyn and lady in waiting to Jane Seymour and, from what I’ve been told, Katherine Howard. She is the youngest of the four ladies in waiting. She was 16 when she worked under Anne and 19 for Jane- so literally Baby.

Unfortunately, there is little to no information about her, so a lot of it can be left to interpretation and theories. She had a brother named John, though. However, I cannot for the life of me find the website that said that.

In SIX, she is played by Katy Richardson

Headcanons

Had a terrible caffeine addiction. Like, if she doesn’t drink at least two cups of coffee a day she WILL get a headache

Believes her work is the most important thing in her life. As the MD, she has a lot to do, so she always seems to be working

Insomniac. Literally never fucking sleeps

Picks her skin

Doesn’t have much memory from her past life. It’s almost like her brain was wiped completely

VERY CLINGY. If you befriend her, she will because codependent and attached

Extremely jealous of Jane and Kat’s mother-daughter relation. She’s infuriated by it, even. She hates how Jane cares more about some queen she never knew than her

Literally watched all three of her mistress’ die, two of them being bloody executions, so she’s actually pretty scarred by that

Bessie

Elizabeth “Bessie” Blount was the maid in waiting to Catherine of Aragon and the lady in waiting to Jane Seymour and Anna of Cleves. She was 11 when she first joined the court and when she was 13 she became Henry’s mistress. And, allegedly, they had A LOT of sex. Like, every week. For eight years.

When she was 15, Bessie got pregnant. She ended up being very premature and miscarried a baby boy. When she got pregnant again at 21, she was taken away to a country house to spend her terms at and was not allowed to leave. Her only company was a male housekeeper to watch over her. Allegedly, she would write letters to Aragon, but they never got any replies. She ended up giving birth to Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy. When wenr back to the kingdom, she was promptly exiled from court and didn’t come back until Jane’s rule.

So, basically, her entire life in the affair was a mess of pedophilia, as she was a child through most of it. Also, the phrase “Bless’ee Bessie Blount” was created because of her.

In SIX, she is played by Terri DeMarco

Headcanons

Has trauma similar to Kitty’s, but has a lot more guilt

Depressed and has self destructive tendencies

Will take care of her girls (the other liw) instead of herself

Takes three hour long showers and basically scrubs all her skin off while doing so

Hates when people see or touch her stomach

Has phantom pain of Henry’s touch and treatment

Claustrophobic