#i think I’ve lost the plot again with. the metaphor | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

4unnyr0se · 3 months

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❥ apple cider | tobio kageyama

warnings: timeskip! university! tobio, f! reader, she/her pronouns, virgin! tobio, cunnilingus, tit-sucking, hickeys, sub! tobio, cowgirl position, praise, needy! tobio, unprotected sex, hinata mentioned

MDNI | 18+ content

word count -> 6.2k

a/n: okay yeah lowkey i lost the plot a little bit but its tobio soo... also sorry if he's ooc i tried so hard

❥ song: apple cider - beebadoobee

Biology class was a pain in the ass, no matter what your major was. Whether it was an elective course or required for a biology major, it was god-awful. At least, it was god-awful for Tobio. He needed it for a science credit, and that class was the only one that wasn’t open. And it was a 6 PM-9 PM lecture, which was the greater of the two evils. So basically, he got the worst time slot for the worst possible class. And all because he slept in once class registration started for college sophomores. It's totally unfair.

But it wasn’t the stupidly long and late classes that pissed him all the way off, no. It was his annoying, stuck-up, sickeningly smart classmate who was the textbook definition of a know-it-all. Literal and metaphorical; you even dressed like one. Neck-length black turtlenecks with round nerd-like glasses and ankle-length skirts in tones that complement your skin so well. He hated you. He hated how you were better than him. And you were so smug about it. Your stupid little smirk would grace your features every time the professor praised you for getting another correct answer. Or when your professor praised you for “Breaking the curve yet again, spectacular! You’re going places.” God, that pissed him off—little miss brilliant, perfect you.

So one could imagine the rage he felt in his stomach when your professor made the both of you stay after class, well after the other students left, chattering about how lame the homework was and what parties were happening on Friday.

“Tobio, I asked you to stay after because your grades are…less than satisfactory,” your professor pushed up her glasses, gesturing to the piles of papers with his name scrawled out in chicken scratch. “I’m worried about your performance. If you continue on the path you’re on now, you’ll probably have to retake the class. That means you’ll fail three credits short and might have to graduate later than the others.”

Tobio shrugged, shoving his hands in his loose jeans pockets. “I can always take a class in the summer, can’t I?”

Your professor shook her head. “Unfortunately, no. I don’t work during the summer, and I’m the only professor that teaches this biology level. Besides, I know you have volleyball to attend to when you aren’t in class. It must be stressful, dealing with sports and academia.”

Tobio didn’t know what academia meant, but it sounded like school. “So, what? Are you going to tutor me after class or something?”

“Oh, no. As a professor, I cannot help students past my office hours. That’s why I’ve appointed my best student to tutor you until your grades are satisfactory,” she gestured to yourself. “She’s maintained a high ninety throughout the semester, so she should have no problem tutoring you.”

You waved at Tobio, smiling softly.

Tobio sighed and rolled his eyes. “No offense, professor, but is there any way that I can get somebody else to tutor me?”

“Do you two not get along well?”

“We just don’t know each other, that’s all. I think Tobio is just shy,” you stood beside him. “I promise I’ll do my best to help you improve your grades, honestly.” you flashed him another soft smile.

He thought the show you were putting on for your professor was impressive. “Fine, whatever.”

“Great!” your professor happily clapped her hands together. “In that case, why not start tutoring him tonight? I’m assigning an online quiz tomorrow that isn’t open note, so I hope you’ll score better than 60% this time, Tobio.”

You covered your chuckle with a false cough. His highest grade was a 60%. Oh, that’s pathetic. Adorably pathetic. “Yeah, we can walk to the library. Unless you have something else that you need from us, professor.”

Your professor shook her head and bid you two off, closing the classroom doors behind you. You and Tobio walked awkwardly to the library, his blue eyes glued to the ground below you.

“So, you play volleyball?” you tried to break the silence. He didn’t respond. “Did you hear me? I asked if you play volleyball.”

“Just shut up and walk. You hate this as much as I do. Stop pretending to like me. Our professor can’t hear you. No need to suck up anymore.” he brushed his black bangs out of his face.

You were taken aback by his words. “Okay, that’s fucking rude. Sorry for wanting to get to know you better, jackass.” you played with the necklace dangling from your neck, your eyes darting to look over at Tobio occasionally. He was tall, taller than you were. Built, too. You heard that he played volleyball in high school and won nationals a couple of times, and he was only a college sophomore. You thought he must work out regularly to keep his shoulders broad. He definitely had abs, too, rippling just under the compression shirt he wore-

“Oi, we’re here. Did your brain leave your head or something?” he grabbed your wrist, stopping you from slamming face-first into the library doors. “Watch where you’re going. Next time, I’ll just let you break your nose.”

“Gee, thanks. I feel so protected,” you sighed, walking to an empty study corner. Tobio took the beanbag, and you took the couch, taking out your flashcards and highlighters. “So, we’re currently on the human anatomy unit. This is one of the more complicated units, so I can’t blame you for struggling. One of the reasons I’m doing so well is that my high school offered human anatomy during my third year. I was good at it.” you praised yourself.

“Wow, really? Karasuno didn’t offer that.” Tobio leaned back in the bean bag, resting his arms behind his head.

“You went to Karasuno? I didn’t know you were from Miyagi.”

“I thought it would be obvious to you since you’re so smart or whatever.” he rolled his eyes, leaning forward. “Let's just get this over with. I have other shit to do besides getting babied by the class know-it-all.”

You slammed your flashcards down on the table, shooting him a glare. “Look, it’s not my fault you’re bad at biology. But I’ve been appointed as your tutor and won’t give up on you just because you’re mean to me. I’ve been called worse things. So suck it up and let me help you, you asshole.” you tossed your textbook at him. “Read this passage, and then I’ll show you the flashcards. Is that okay with you, or do you need further instruction, moron?”

Damn, he liked when you talked to him like that. He knew you were faking that kindness act just so your professor wouldn’t get upset with you. He was right. Tobio knew you had an attitude under all that nerd attire that made you look so fucking sexy. Wait, did he think you were sexy? No…right? You were his tutor. You were a total loser who dressed like that basketcase from The Breakfast Club. So why did he suddenly have the overwhelming urge to slam his lips against yours when you told him off? He shook his head, trying to erase the sinful thoughts from his mind as he read the passage in the textbook that lectured about menstruation. Ew, gross. Well, he guessed it wasn’t gross. It was natural. Besides, you would probably punch his lights out if he said it was gross. For once in his life, it was better to keep his mouth shut.

“Have you finished the paragraph?” your words snapped him out of his thoughts—a twinge of pink dusted his cheeks.

“Yeah,” he responded, closing the textbook. “I can’t believe you have to go through that every month.”

You shrugged your shoulders. “You get used to it eventually. At least I don’t have endometriosis,” you shuffled your flashcards, taking one out of the deck. “Okay, can you tell me the average amount of days that a person with a uterus gets their period?”

Tobio thought for a moment. “Uh…five?”

You slowly nodded. “Well, it’s closer to a week, but everyone is different, so I guess you’re technically right,” you pulled out another card. “Why do people with uteruses get cramps when menstruating?”

“Um…because the muscles in the vagina contract to…”

“To what?”

“To get rid of the lining…”

You clapped your hands together. “Very good! Did you already know some of this stuff?”

Tobio nodded. “I have an older sister. She gets really bad cramps, and the whole house turns into chaos whenever she gets her period. Chocolate usually helps…I would always make her chocolate milk.” He smiled to himself.

“Aw, that’s really nice of you. Your older sister is lucky to have a nice little brother, even if he’s a jackass to his biology tutor.” you snickered, putting away the flashcards. “Well, it’s been an hour already. I think we should wrap up. I’m hungry.”

“I’m not a jackass, shut up!” Tobio grew defensive, crossing his arms over his muscular chest. “I have to get to practice anyway. Hinata will start spamming my phone any minute if I’m late. He’s so annoying.”

You put your items in your bag. “Hinata? Like, Shoyo Hinata?” you pushed your glasses up to your face. “I know him. We eat lunch together sometimes. He’s hilarious.” you smile, and Tobio felt a jealous wave wash over him. You were the cutest girl he had talked to in a long time. Why did Hinata get to talk to you, too? Was he about to try something? Fucking Hinata.

“He’s actually really fucking annoying. He makes weird noises when he receives the ball like a toddler.” Tobio smirked, brushing the dust off his jeans. “But if you think he’s funny, you must be right. After all, you’re the smart one.” he teased.

You scoffed and rolled your eyes. “Don’t get pissy with me because you have a shitty grade in biology. So, what if you know how the menstrual cycle works? I bet you’re awful at the reproductive part of human anatomy.” you placed a hand on your hip. “We’ll meet here tomorrow at the same time. You get to learn about the vagina, which should be fun for you since you’re obviously a fucking virgin.”

“I am not!” Tobio huffed, staring daggers as you walked away. He wasn’t technically lying to you, but it also wasn’t the truth. Sure, he had done things with his mouth and hands, but he never went all the way. And Tobio was almost positive that you would bully him relentlessly if you knew that he was a virgin. And he also knew, way deep in his gut, that he wanted you. For whatever reason, he had to have you. You were so full of yourself and painfully smart, smarter than he would ever be. Tobio needed to fuck you so good that you would not doubt in your mind that he wasn’t a virgin.

The library was relatively empty, but it was a Saturday afternoon. Students who lived off campus were at their parent's house, and those who lived on campus were probably asleep in their dorms or doing other activities. It was a lovely atmosphere, especially without all the annoying frat guys using the library as a place to make out with girls in the nonfiction section. You and Tobio sat in the usual spot, except you both sat on the couch this time. Even though you didn’t particularly care for him, he was getting better at human anatomy, which you felt proud of.

“So, are you ready to learn about how we reproduce?” you opened your textbook to the bookmarked page. “I know we already learned this in high school, but it’s still an important part of the unit to review, just in case there’s a question on the exam next week that’s a curveball.”

Tobio sighed and took out a highlighter he bought exclusively for your tutoring sessions. “I can’t believe we have to go over this. We’re in college. We know how to fuck.” he blushed, tapping the uncapped highlighter on the thin paper of the textbook.

You cleared your throat. “Just because we know how the process is done doesn’t mean we understand the risks that come along with it. There are sexually transmitted diseases and ectopic pregnancies…there’s a whole list of things that can go wrong during sex. Luckily,” you pushed your glasses up the bridge of your nose. “Those things are relatively rare. Well, except for the STD portion. That’s why condoms are important, even when your partner is on the birth control pill.”

Tobio smiled slightly. “You seem to know a lot about this. Is there something I should know?”

Wow, he was never this smooth when it came to flirting. Usually, he was an awkward mess who stammered over his words and made a fool of himself.

You rolled your eyes and looked at him. “My high school just thought that being properly educated when it came to sex was important, that’s all. I’m not some sexual deviant if that’s what you were wondering. Would a sexual deviant dress like a librarian?” you gestured to your outfit.

Tobio’s eyes wandered to your tight-fitting sweater that fit snugly around your breasts and waist. The skirt you wore was thigh-length and oh-so-snug, and the stockings you wore underneath made you look like the prettiest librarian he had ever seen. “Do you want me to be honest, or is this one of those questions where I’ll be wrong no matter what I say?”

You closed your textbook. “No, be honest. Let me know what you’re thinking.”

Tobio took a deep breath, refusing to make eye contact. You were pretty, but damn, were you terrifying. “I…I think you look really fucking sexy when you dress like a librarian.” he squeezed his knuckles on his lap, looking down at his feet with a furious blush on his face.

You chuckled. “So you have a thing for librarians or something?” you moved closer toward the bumbling setter. “That’s not a bad thing, you know. Even though you’re incredibly stupid, you are…kind of cute.” you placed your hand on his trembling thigh.

“Don’t touch me there. It’s sensitive,” he whispered.

“Aw, you really are a virgin,” you softly purred, finding this whole ordeal amusing.

“I told you I’m not,” Tobio continued to lie. “I’ve…I’ve had sex.”

You sighed, pulling your hand away from his thigh. “You know, it’s okay if you are a virgin. I know I tease you about it, but it’s really nothing to be ashamed about.”

Tobio crossed his arms and grumbled. “My teammates say otherwise, especially the upperclassmen.”

You rolled your eyes yet again. “Tobio, they just say those things because of toxic masculine culture. You have to ask yourself if you honestly think you’re ready to lose your virginity if you’re emotionally ready for it.”

Tobio raised an eyebrow. “Why would I have to be emotionally ready? Don’t people fuck because they’re horny?”

“Well, yes, but it’s a very intimate act. You have to be mature enough to be vulnerable with your partner. This is why sex education is so important.”

Tobio racked his brain, thinking of what to say next. “Do you…want to come over tonight? T-to study, obviously. I have to get my grades up, or it’s my ass.”

You smiled, packing up your things. “We can just study in my dorm. I live alone, so it’ll be nice and cozy. Maybe we can do a practice quiz on female anatomy? I’m guessing you already know a lot about male anatomy.” you give him a suggestive smirk.

Tobio frowned. “Did you just say that I jerk off a lot?”

“You’re a nineteen-year-old in college. Of course, you jerk off a lot.”

“Shut up! God, you’re so pretentious.” Tobio shoved his hands in his pockets, leaning back against the couch.

“At least I’m not failing biology,” you stuck your tongue out playfully. “Come by my dorm building around nine. It’s the one by the dining hall, you can’t miss it. I’ll be waiting to buzz you in.” With that, you left, humming to yourself as if you didn’t give Tobio a million ideas on how to spend his time in your dorm. What if you brushed against his shoulder when going over terms, and his hand just happened to slide around your waist? Oh, it would be absolutely terrible if you got on top of him, caging him under your body as your lips trailed down further and further until they landed on his needy cock. Fuck, Tobio was hard just thinking about it. He grabbed a nearby throw pillow and whistled to himself, waiting for his erection to go down so he could walk to his dorm and prepare for tonight. In reality, nothing would probably happen…right?

It was 9:02 in the evening. The crickets played a tune outside your dorm hall as you sat down on one of the many chairs they had scattered on the lawn that were usually used during the springtime. The moon shone brightly in the sky, and the fireflies danced with the stars. Truely it was a perfect evening.

Except Tobio was fucking late. Sure, it was only two minutes, but what if he forgot? You didn’t have his contact information; emailing him was out of the question because that would be outdated. And so, you waited patiently outside for him to arrive. You couldn’t wait to lecture him.

“Yo,” Tobio waved. His backpack hung over his shoulders, and his cell phone practically dangled from his grey sweatpants. “Sorry, I’m late. My roommate was being an asshole, and we were yelling so much that I lost track of time.”

“You’re two and a half minutes late, dick,” you brushed the dirt off your knees, stretching. “I was considering going back inside and leaving you to fend for yourself.”

Tobio scoffed. “It’s only two and half minutes, damn. You really need to learn how to relax.”

You opened up the dorm building with your keycard. “If I relaxed, I wouldn’t be at the top of my class. Now, would I?”

“Whatever. Can we just get this over with? I hate studying.” he said defensively. It wasn’t technically lying; Tobio didn’t like studying, but he liked studying with you. He would never admit it, but you made the material easier to remember, and you actually cared about him getting decent grades for whatever reason.

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, princess. I live on the third floor, and the elevator is broken, so we’re taking the stairs.” you took off your hoodie and wrapped it around your waist, revealing your low-cut tank top. “C’mon. I don’t want to waste more time than we already have.”

“It was barely three minutes…” Tobio muttered under his breath as he followed you up the stairs, trying his best not to trip over the steps as his eyes constantly darted to your exposed cleavage. Fuck, you looked so fucking good. Did you even know what you were doing to him? Probably, you loved teasing him. Maybe if he got enough answers correct, you would let him bury his face in your breasts and suck little hickeys onto them.

“Okay, we’re here,” your dorm room was just at the end of the hall, nice and secluded. You jiggled the key in the doorknob and let him inside, the dorm walls decorated with posters ranging from your favorite TV shows to stupid ones you found while thrifting. “Make yourself at home. I’ll get my laptop to do online flashcards. If you get them right, you get to feed your little monster pet. Isn’t that fun?”

Tobio chuckled. “You have to rely on a game to study? And there I thought you were just books and, uh, other things.”

“Wow, so smooth.”

“Shut the hell up.”

You giggled and sat on your bed, patting the spot next to you. “Make yourself comfortable. This could be a while.”

“As long as it’s less than an hour, I don’t care.” he sat beside you, mindful of the space between. If he was any closer, he might be unable to help himself.

“Oh, honey, did you think you would be in and out of here in a tight thirty minutes? You could not be more wrong,” you mocked him, opening the flashcard application on your computer. “This will take maybe two hours so that you can learn all there is to know about the female body. Unless, of course,” you leaned in closer. “You don’t think you can handle it.”

Fuck, this is where Tobio dies. He’s going to die, and it’s because this sexy fucking nerd won’t give his virgin ass a break.

“I-I can handle it! I can totally handle it!” Tobio sounded so sure of himself, but the crimson blush decorating his cheeks gave it all way.

“If you say so,” you clicked on a flashcard. “Alright, what is the labia?”

Tobio thought for a moment. “Uh, it’s the folds of skin around the vaginal opening…right?”

You smiled. “Very good! You get to give the little monster a treat now.” You handed him the laptop. “You can click on what food you want to give him. I personally like giving him the rice cakes.”

Tobio chuckled at the tiny digital creature chewing on the snack. “This is kind of cute. I can see why you like studying now.”

You shrugged your shoulders. “Studies show that making learning fun actually helps the material stick in your brain for longer periods of time. Who knew?”

You clicked on another flash card once Tobio had finished feeding the virtual monster. “Oh, this is a fun one. How rare is the female orgasm without clitoral stimulation?”

“...why do I have to know this?” Tobio looked flustered.

“Just answer the damn question.” he looked cute when he was embarrassed.

“Uh, common…I think. I don’t know, I’m not a girl.”

You sighed and adjusted your glasses. “Wrong, sorry. It’s actually incredibly rare for a female to orgasm without proper clitoral stimulation. We often time have to fake it to please our current partner.”

He looked down at his socks. “That doesn’t sound very fun. Why do guys cum more easily than girls?”

“Because the sperm fertilizes the egg, and women don’t need to orgasm to produce the egg, obviously.”

“And how was I supposed to know that?”

You rubbed your temple. “Because the textbook is right in front of you, dummy. Anyways,” you looked at Tobio. “Don’t feel bad. We have sex toys and stuff so we can get proper orgasms.”

Tobio scratched the back of his neck. “Has…has anyone ever made you cum?”

You were silent for a moment. “No, not even once. I had a boyfriend who was convinced he knew where the clit was…he always got it wrong.”

“Sorry to hear that,” why did Tobio feel bad? He wasn’t your boyfriend…did he want to be?

“S’not your fault, don’t apologize.” you pat him on the back, the faintest shade of ballerina pink on your cheeks. “Well, we should probably get back to studying now.”

Tobio closed the laptop. “We could study a different way…o-only if you want to.”

“What do you mean? Like, without flashcards?” you were faking your innocence. You knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Are you seriously going to make me say it?” Tobio forced himself to look at you, drinking in your natural beauty. Holy fuck, you were so gorgeous.

“Yeah, I really am,” you leaned forward, licking your lips. “Go on, tell me how we can study a different way. I’m so eager.”

Tobio groaned to himself at the sight of your pink tongue licking your bottom lip, making you seem even more tempting. “We could, dammit, we could have sex a-and you could show me how to…y’know, make you feel good. O-only if you want to, I would never force you to. It’s not like I’m desperate for sex or anything. Who said that? Not me-” You cut him off by placing a manicured finger on his chapped lips.

“If you want to fuck, then let’s just fuck. I’ll teach you along the way, alright Tobio?” you placed your laptop on the dresser beside you, climbing into his trembling lap. Your soft hands cupped his flushed face, the scent of your vanilla hand cream filling his nostrils with a pleasant aroma. “Do you want me to fuck you, Tobio?”

“God, yes,”

With his approval, you gently pressed your lips against his. He quickly melted into the kiss, wrapping his muscular arms around your waist so your chest was flush against his. His lips moved slowly against yours as if he was terrified to do something that would upset you. You giggled into the kiss, shifting in Tobio’s lap to get more comfortable.

He groaned into the kiss, his hands squeezing your hips with feather-light force as your tongue bore into his mouth, dancing with his own before pulling away. Your arms secured themselves around his neck, fingers tugging on the loose strands of midnight black hair. “Did you like kissing me, Tobio?” you purred, your petal-like lips trailing kisses down his thick neck.

“Y-yeah, I really fucking liked that,” God, his whimpers would be the death of you.

“Do you know what a hickey is, Tobio?”

“Not really…” he felt ashamed of how little he knew.

You frowned at his downtrodden tone, rubbing his cheekbone with your thumb. “Hey, don’t say it like that. It’s okay if you don’t know what a hickey is. I’m your tutor, don’t you want to learn?” he nodded.

“So why don’t you let me show you then, hm? I’ll be gentle, I promise.” you kissed up and down his neck until you found a spot that made Tobio gasp. “Is this where it feels good?”

His sweatpants strained. “Yeah..really good,”

Your teeth nipped at the skin. “This might hurt, so tell me if it’s too much. Can you be a good boy and do as you’re told?”

Another whine escaped his puffy lips. “Yeah, I’ll be good for you.”

Your lips descended onto the previously marked spot, taking his skin between your teeth and sucking ever so slightly. His once light grip on your hips strengthened as you bit down on the sensitive flesh, sucking the tiniest purple bruise that would surely blossom into a beautiful hickey. You pulled away, catching your breath and brushing your hair out of your field of vision. “How did that feel, pretty boy?”

Tobio’s cock was painfully hard in his boxers. The grey sweatpants were not doing him any favors in terms of concealing his throbbing erection. “Shit, that felt so fucking good,” his hands traveled down to the bottom of your shorts, fidgeting with the cotton fabric. “Can I have another one, please?”

You pecked his nose. “Only because you asked so nicely.”

His head craned to the side to give you better access as you bit at the other side of his neck, suckling on the same place opposite the first hickey. Whimper after shallow whimper fled his lips, his calloused hands from years of volleyball sliding under your shorts to toy with the fat of your ass.

You gasped at the sensation, pulling away prematurely. “Somebody’s certainly handsy tonight.”

“S’not my fault,” Tobio looked away. “Just wanted to feel more of you, that’s all. Not my fault that you’re pretty.”

“You’re cute,” you pecked his lips, your glasses pushing up against the bridge of your nose. “Tobio, do you wanna continue being a good boy for me?”

“So fucking badly, please. I’ll do whatever you want. Just make me feel good.” Holy fuck, he was sure he had never been more embarrassed in his whole life. He would never say something like that. The power you held over him was unmatched.

You rolled yourself off his lap, propping yourself on the bed by your elbows. Teasingly, your hands reached under your shirt and pulled it off, your bra following after. The cold and arousing air of your dorm room grazed your tits, your nipples perking up at the temperature change. “Why don’t you take that shirt off too, hm? Don’t be shy now.”

Tobio didn’t need to be told twice. He practically ripped his shirt from his body. You didn’t even get a chance to admire his toned form before his lips were on yours again, his muscular body caging yours as his rough hands left trails of molten lava on your breasts.

“Fuck, Tobio,” you moaned into the kiss, wrapping your legs around his slender waist. “D’ya like what you see, pretty boy?”

He didn’t answer. His lips wrapped around your nipple, eagerly sucking at the sensitive mound while his other hand toyed with the supple flesh. You let out a content sigh as his mouth alternated between breasts, not leaving one abandoned for a moment.

“Fucking love these tits,” his voice rumbled against your cleavage, covering your scorching body with sloppy open-mouth kisses. “You’re so fucking pretty.”

Your hand danced between his messy hair. “Good boy. You’re being so good, Tobio.”

His hips rutted against yours, his clothed erection desperate for any kind of friction. “Wanna make you feel good,” he groaned as he tore his mouth away from your breast. “Please, teach me how to make you feel good.” he didn’t even care how desperate and pathetic he sounded. All he knew was that he needed you.

“Take my shorts and panties off,” you lifted your hips off the mattress. Tobio didn’t need to be told twice. He pulled your soft shorts off and tossed them on the ground beneath you, your panties soon dangling over your ankle. “That’s it. You’re such a good student, Tobio.”

Fuck, your body was to fucking die for. Your glistening heat was so incredibly tempting. He wondered what you would taste like…if you would permit him to taste you.

“Do you know what oral sex is?”

“Y-yeah, of course I know. I’m not an idiot.”

You nodded in satisfaction. “Now, do you want me to show you how to make a girl cum on your tongue?”

His nod was a bit too quick.

You chuckled. “Alright then,” your delicate hand spread over your pussy, circling your clit. “This is the clitoris. When you apply enough pressure to the clitoris, that’s when your partner will probably orgasm. Fingers sometimes do the trick,” you looked deep into his gunmetal eyes. “But the best thing to do is to suck on it with your mouth. Can you be a good boy and do that for me, Tobio?”

“Mhm, I-I can do that. I’ll make you feel so fucking good, I promise.” he lifted your hips so they rested on his thighs for support. The hot breath from his tongue sent electric shocks throughout your body, complimented only by his whimpers as he flattered his tongue against your soaking heat.

“Fuck,” you sighed, tossing your head back against your plush pillows as Tobio slowly dragged his tongue up and down, occasionally stopping to suck on your clit. Your hands flew to his unkempt hair as he grew greedy, quicking his pace. The calloused tips of his fingers squeezed the supple skin of your thighs as his nose brushed against your most sensitive bud, lapping at your sobbing cunt like a man starved.

“T-Tobio, fuck!” you cried out, arching your back further into the mattress as his pace quickened like a man on a mission. His tongue and lips worked against your core in a fierce heat, not being able to think of anything else except pushing you over the edge, just like you asked him to. Your thighs clenched around his head as his thumb found your clit, swirling electric circles. “I’m so fucking close, don’t stop!” his name fell like a mantra from your lips as he continued his brutal pace, groaning as you tasted too incredibly sweet on his tongue.

He lifted his head from between your thighs, his mouth covered in your slick. “Am I doing a good job? Do you feel good?”

You shoved his head back down. “Yes, just keep going. I’m so fucking close, Tobio, please.”

The sound of you begging was all he needed to drive you over the edge. He buried himself in your heat, his thumb being replaced by his middle and ring finger as he drew rough circles against your clit, his tongue darting up and down like a madman. With one final cry of ecstasy, you came crashing down as your orgasm sent shockwaves of pleasure throughout your molten figure. His tongue worked you through your orgasm, lapping up every last bit of your release.

You pulled him up by his hair, your face flushed with the deepest shade of pink he had ever seen. “Fuck…that was so fucking good. You’re such a good boy. Do you want your reward now?” Before he could answer, you flipped over so he was under you, your body still shaking from the aftershocks of your orgasm. His sweatpants were discarded, and boxers hung on his ankle.

“What are you doing?” Tobio whined as your thumb teased his throbbing cock, gathering precum on it as you tasted him. “Fuck, it feels so fucking good.”

You hovered above his length, aligning it with your entrance. “Shh, just think about how good I’m about to make you feel, okay?” you lowered yourself down onto his cock, hissing as your greedy pussy swallowed his length.

“What about, oh fuck, what about condoms?” Tobio whimpered, his hands finding your hips as you sat on his pelvis, the walls of your cunt squeezing around his cock.

“Well, you’re a virgin, and I’m on the pill. It’s safe to assume that you’re clean.” you groaned as you lifted yourself, the head of his throbbing cock sitting snug in your walls before you slammed yourself back down.

“Holy shit,” Tobio rasped, squeezing his eyes shut as you began to slowly bounce on his cock. “Y-you’re so fucking tight, oh my fucking god.”

You leaned down to kiss him, whispering sweet nothings against his lips as you raised and lowered your hips, creating a steady pace that filled you up so nicely. “Yeah, you like me fucking you?”

His grip on your hips tightened as you set a relentless pace, your dorm room filling with the echoes of skin smacking against skin as his cock disappeared in and out of your cunt. “Shit, I’m not gonna last if y’keep that up. Fuck!” he shouted as his cock brushed against your cervix. The sight of your bruised breasts bouncing in his face only drove him further to the edge of euphoria, taking your nipple in his mouth as you continued to ride him.

“Yeah? You want me to fuck you harder, Tobio? So fucking greedy.” you were met with a wanton cry as you slammed down even harder, his cock twitching inside of you. Your pace grew sloppy as he continued to suck on your breast, his calloused hands roaming up and down your backside, desperate for purchase.

“M’not greedy!” Tobio whined, practically sobbing into your harsh kiss as your walls clenched around him, milking him for all he was worth. “Gonna fucking cum, fuck! Can I cum inside? Can I please cum inside your pussy?” his pride has long since been thrown out the window, his release the only thing in his head. Tobio didn’t even wait for you to respond before his climax crested, shooting white hot ropes of cum into your pussy, his hips bucking up into yours as he rode out his incredible high.

The warmth in your core enveloped you as your bouncing ceased, letting him recover from the aftershocks of euphoria. His mouth was agape, and his gorgeous blue eyes could barely be kept open.

“You’re so cute,” your hands cupped his cheeks, kissing his nose as you got off of his ruined cock. His body was scooped into your arms, fingers drawing random shapes and patterns on his chest as he recovered. “Did that feel good, pretty boy?”

Tobio could only grumble in response. “So good, so fucking good. Love that pussy,” he whispered, curling up deeper into your arms as you tended to him.

“Do you need anything? A glass of water, a snack?”

“I’m not five years old…” he sighed, peeking up from your arms. “Can we just cuddle or something? I don’t wanna leave just now.”

You raised a brow. “No one said you had to leave right away. Where that stereotype came from, I will never know.”

Tobio shrugged. “I dunno either. It’s stupid, anyway. You’re so warm.”

“Are you sure this isn’t the same guy who was being such a hard-ass a couple of days ago?” you chuckled, fluffing his hair.

“No! Shut up,” he frowned at you, pecking your cheek. “Let’s watch a movie so I don’t have to keep looking at your stupid, pretty face.”

“Hey, Tobio,” you whispered in his ear. “If you get a good grade on that quiz next week, I can show you what my mouth can do.”

#haikyuu smut #haikyuu #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu!!#kageyama tobio #kageyama smut #kageyama x reader #kageyama x reader smut #karasuno #tobio kageyama

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friautyalltheway · 1 year

Text

Up for a call?

⪩⪨ • Yunho x Reader Smut

⟢🎱

Warnings: Dom! Yunho, Sub! Reader, Phone sex, first time phone sex, fingering, mentions of hair pulling, porn without plot, starts soft but gets naughty, shy reader and Yunho

18+ below the cut!

Yunho being on tour with the band killed you. Yes- sure he would be coming back home in a few weeks again, but you needed him here with you. Of course, to cuddle and to just spend time together - but what you needed most right now was something entirely different. Everytime he went on tour, you became so fucking touch starved and simply needy. Seeing a single video of him performing and growling on stage made you go feral. But no amount of touching yourself could satisfy you enough. Nothing and no one was able to put up with Yunhos skills, which you were craving for right now.

After two hours of doom-scrolling through the latest tiktok-edits and twitter posts of your boyfriend, he finally texted you.

Done with the show for today! Up for a phone call? :)

His message read.

Of course Yuyu!! Just call me when ur ready - i ´ll answer!

You replied. You were looking forward to what he had to tell you about today´s show, and also you were looking forward to hearing his voice again.

A few minutes later your phone rang. Excitedly, you picked up. „Hi Yunho! How was the show today?“, you asked him.

„It went well. But i can ´t wait to come home again, to be honest. I miss you, and i miss peaceful, stress-free sleep…“

His deep, raspy voice went straight to your core. You were ashamed of how embarassingly horny you were for this man. He just wanted to talk, and here you were, thinking about him fucking you, whispering sweet nothings into your ear that would eventually make you come undone.

„Sweetheart?“, he asked. You realised you had been lost in thoughts for quite a while.

„Yes Yunho, sorry, I was just - uhm, distracted.“, you mumbled.

„Distracted? What distracted you, sweetheart?”

You took a deep breath, before you confessed what you had been thinking about for the past hours. „Yunho. It is that i miss you just- not in that way. I don’t know, it is kind of embarrassing to talk about that on the phone but- yes well, of course i want to cuddle up with you and stuff, but, oh god- i really need you in another… another way.“ you stuttered. You felt stupid. Hearing those thoughts from you was probably the last thing he needed right now, exhausted from an extremely long, exhausting show and-

„Y/N, so do I. I wanted to hear your voice. And do not get e wrong, of course I would love to be all cuddly with you right now, but what I really need is something that goes way further than just cuddling. It has been months since I’ve last been with you, touched you, and even on stage i could think of nothing else than just, shit- fucking you.”

You silently gasped at his confession. You felt like a horny teenager, sexting over snapchat- not like the girlfriend of an international Idol talking about how horny the both of you were on the telephone.

“God. I ´m so pissed off that you ´re two continents away from me. Wish you were here instead of your hotel room…”, you sighed.

You heard him draw in a sharp breath, and nothing could have prepared you for the things he was about to say.

“I know that I ´m not here, but we can make the best out of our current situation, right? We ´re both horny and touch starved - so how about you get all comfortable, loose those clothes and imagine i was next to you, hm?”, he suggested.

Shit, what had gotten into him? Yunho usually was not this brave, sometimes not even being able to ask you for sex when you were together because he did not want to make you uncomfortable. But not that you ´d complain - you’ve been literally hoping for something like that to happen. Yunho just shamelessly asking you to have phone sex was all you needed today. It wouldn’t fill up the hole entirely, literally and metaphorically, but it would do enough to satisfy the both of you.

“Sounds very good, yes.”, you told him, your fingers already unclasping your bra, freeing your breasts. Your nipples were already heard, blame the AC blasting cold air in your room.

“Can you… tell me what you’re doing right now?”, Yunho asked with a breathy voice.

“Playing with my- with my breasts, i guess. Feels good, Yuyu.”, you told him.

“Oh, fuck, just imagining your hands playing around with those nipples, shit, we’ve barely even started and I’m already so fucking hard sweetheart”

Hearing him say this made you press your thighs together, the heat in your stomach intensifying.

You let out a breathy moan. “Shit, i’d like to see that right now… Feel it…”

“Oh yes, so do I. I can only imagine how wet you are already. Tell me, do you feel good?”, Yunho asked.

“Mhm. So, so wet for you.”

“Come on princess, finger yourself. Let me hear how good you can make yourself feel while thinking of my cock.” You slowly started fingering yourself, focusing on Yunhos instructions while you applied pressure to your clit with your thum, while your index finger went in and out of your wet pussy. You let out a string of quiet whimpers, loud enough for Yunho to hear.

“Yes, that´s right. Imagine it was my cock pleasuring you right now. Shit. Want to pull your hair and make you my little slut… Want you to fall apart…”

Hearing those filthy, filthy words coming out of the mouth of your usually sweet, innocent boyfriend made your walls contract around your fingers.

“Stroking myself for you right now, princess. Feels so fucking good…”

You added another finger.

“Tell me what you ´re doing right now, will you?”, he demanded.

“G-got two fingers inside right now. Fuck, it´s not enough. I wish it was you, baby.”, you explained to him. “Go on, add another finger. I know you can take it.”

“I don ´t know if I can, ´m close already, so, so close…”, you whined. The image of Yunho lying in his bed, hand on his erect member was playing in your head non-stop, bringing you close to the edge faster than ever before. “I ´m sure you can, come on. Hold on a little while longer for me.”

His words of encouragement reached you, and you did as he told you. Using three fingers now nearly made you fall apart, the pleasure becoming overwhelming, your orgasm approaching fast.

“Sweetheart i ´m sorry, but I am so close. Wanted to keep on going but imagining my pretty, little pathetic whore with three fingers in her pussy is just way too much for me, shit…”

“Yuyu, fuck… I ´m-“

“Come for me, princess. Let me hear those moans, hm?”

That was what sent you over the edge. With one last, loud moan you came, Yunho following close with a satisfied groan.

“God. What a way to end the day.”, he murmured. “You did so good for me. Love you, sweetheart.”

#ateez #ateez fanfic #ateez imagine #ateez smut #yunho smut #jeong yunho #yunho x you #yunho x reader #ateez yunho #ateez yunho smut

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itsnothingofinterest · 9 months

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Hey, Hope you're having good Holidays? 👋

Do you think there's going to be a big twist coming up in bnha?

Or maybe a twist big villain or something?

Because all the other villains have been taken out of commission and there's still doesn't seem to be any way for deku to save/defeat shigaraki. (Nothing that we've been shown so far.)

Because shigaraki does seem to be more powerful than deku and even if they do FINALLY start talking, deku seems to be in the same place 'ideal wise' as he was several arcs ago.

Like what could deku say that could prove his point (not that he really has much of a point, as he still hasn't really even thought about trying to fix hero society's giant flaws) to shigaraki now?

Even more, what could deku do, since he's still focusing on the crying child inside shigaraki and not what made the crying child?

Well my answers about the same as it's been for a long while now; I agree Deku's not in the right headspace to save Tomura and probably can't cram the character development to get into that headspace in at the last second before/during his metaphorical final exam here. He still needs to further develop his own views on things if he wants to challenge & change Tomura's views. Maybe Deku could convince him the entire country's not a lost cause and he shouldn't destroy it within a few chapters, but there's a massive gap between that and actually saving him the way we usually mean. The fact the other villains have not really been saved either so far doesn't really help my opinion of Deku's chances.

So yes I do expect a big twist and, same as ever, I expect that twist to be that this is not the final arc and we'll get a My Hero part 2 after Hori takes a long break. It's basically the only real meaningful twist I can think of at this point that'd resolve this time conflict without rushing resolutions that should not be rushed. Especially with Kurogiri (& maybe Machia if he’s alive) still left as dangling plot threads that could potentially recover the villains.

(Though I would not hate it, half just because I think it'd be funny, if the HC president came out of nowhere to reveal she survived clone-stro and is taking over as big bad so that Deku...idk, reevaluates the system he's protecting or something.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Although while we're discussing where Deku is, ideal-wise, I have been meaning to go over my current criticisms with him for a bit; which to discuss below a cut:

Is mainly that he’s kind of just All Might again. He's like All Might in nearly every way that counts and his only aspiration is to be All Might 2 and save everyone he can like All Might did. I mean I’ve seen people sometimes say "no Deku’s totally different and better than All Might in this or that way" but those ways often seem to assume All Might was a lot worse, less kind, and more independent than he really was.

(And also that Deku is less independent than he really is; just compare this arc to Kamino, where they both work alongside their hero peers...until they feel the need to take on the final boss 1v1.)

Like, as someone critical of the hero society All Might built, I’ll bet I often come off as thinking All Might wasn’t a good hero. But that’s not so, I think All Might did the best he could have done, and moreover the best anyone could’ve done trying to fix things the way he did. I doubt anyone could've hero'd much better than him. If Deku were sent back in time to replace All Might, the best he could’ve done is about what All Might did. And if All Might faced all the hurdles Deku has, at the same power level for each, I believe he’d have managed at least as happy an ending to every arc.

So the great hurdle of this all is: All Might was the greatest hero he could possibly have been...but he also wasn't enough. The various ways the League were driven to villainy to form the group at all is proof of that. And that's why a rehash sequel to him won't be enough either. I understand why Deku and everyone else admires All Might, but he can't be doing the same things expecting much better results. If he does, then even if he does save Tomura here in the same way the rest of the League has been "saved" so far (a tall order already when Tomura's made clear he doesn't want another All Might), I fear he'll just face another League led by another Tomura in the future; another Tenko who was failed by Deku this time.

#Hope you're having nice holidays too btw.#bnha #shigaraki tomura #gigantomachia #kurogiri #toga himiko #dabi #spinner #redestro #paranormal liberation front #PLF #midoriya izuku #class 1a #all might #hero society #hero public safety commission #my stupid long term predictions

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prairiedust · 11 months

Text

one thousand days of destiel, or cas: fuckerupper of endings

Idk why I’m crawling out from under my woodpile to write this, except that it occurred to me that in three years I’ve not rewatched a single episode of Supernatural and have at least two dozen tags yet blacklisted on tumblr, and that I am still not okay about this stupid show.

I never tried to tie up the folklore/author themes I’d been geeking out about through the last seasons, neither as the show was ending nor afterwards. I’ve been simmering now for over a thousand days. I could not even write a complete sentence about spn for all this time, and so I just left that pot on the back burner and did other things. Finished my Master’s degree. Started a new job. Saw my oldest child graduate from high school and move off to college, and helped my younger child move on to sixth grade. Watched some other shows, got a new blorbo, saw some movies, started painting again, picked up a couple of new hobbies as I am wont to do.

Today is the 5th of November, 2023. (ETA i sat on this for a bit.)

November 5th, 2020, was exactly one thousand and ninety-five days ago.

I see gifs from the show from time to time and I think to myself, wow, that scene/episode/series is completely irrelevant to my life now. I am fine and normal about everything. But if it really was, if I really was, it would not hurt so much to see the gifs and the lyric posts and the amvs when they aren’t caught in my tag filters. So maybe it’s time to get some things out of my head and onto paper.

I genuinely, nearsightedly, naively thought that since Dabb et al had been the ones writing the whole folk v author themes, and thus posing as someone we could count as being on “our side,” the folk-side of the postmodern audience, they’d honor that conceit, even to the very last shot.

They did not.

And yet… they absolutely did.

Which hurts and is fucked up, but also it’s fine. It’s fine.

In the end, the only “folk hero” (by which I mean the only force in the spn universe capable of warping the threads of the story with any permanence) was Castiel. When Castiel left the story (of his own volition, if you can find a comfortable layer of this meta pie for that concept to rest in,) the writers reverted to God Mode. Because Castiel had been their freedom, their mouthpiece, their avenue for improvisation, and so at the end of the series…

well, we got You changed me/I love you

•

and then we got “Cas helped.”

So much has been written about that pivot point, but genuinely I don’t give a rat’s ass about rewrites, producers, the cutting room floor, or COVID. It exhausts me, and I’m not beholden to writing about spn for grades or notes or any kind of other bullshit that would oblige me to do research.

I feel like… we got what we got.

So let’s criticize some media.

The Paradox:

Cas imploded— went from flexing the narrative from within to being narrated by a force from without. And I couldn’t bear to wrap my head around that for a long time. It seemed that this “twist” was beyond cruel. That’s what he got. Vanished and nerfed. For saying ily. That was what happened when he was finally in focus, fully revealed. He lost. He was relegated, along with Jack, to become heaven’s Two Men and a Truck.

It was a trick, the whole “Chuck is a writer” plotline. The Author regained control of the character that had previously been acting independently. Very Pirandellesque, very frustrating, ultimately even tragic.

So, yes, thematically and critically, having Castiel give up his Agency for Characterhood– giving up his ability to create plot for a role as a character in a plot— was ‘literary’ brilliance. It cemented his status as a grand fucker-upper of the show in a way that any show writer “authoring” a requited destiel ending would not and could not have done. Even Jack, I believe, had been “manipulated” into god-hood from within the narrative. Jack was Dabb’s grand metaphor, he was a product of Author. Castiel was… well, he was a chaos engine from the moment he walked through those barn doors.

To seal the metaphor, the writers ended up living that truth.

I really don’t know if I’m being cogent about this. I’ve been struggling to turn this idea into words for, like, ONE THOUSAND DAYS.

The folk-vs-Author themes becoming A Thing in The Supernatural Show was like a chemical reaction: once the ions had bonded, the resultant compound could not be separated back into the different materials. What on that screen was Author, what was “author,” ie show writer, and what was text-experiencer-as-author? Where did the Sam-as-magician arc go, what were we supposed to do with the semi-metatextual moments that Mary had, having been brought back into the narrative by Amara, not Chuck? Everything got so out of control. Add in a smidgen of secret-sauce-TPTB possibly superseding the author/Author, and what you get is that ridiculous mess of a final two episodes.

It’s not about the rusty trombone or the butt hole pleasures. It’s about love. And kids.

Thank you, hon. It really is. (The above line was left in this doc by my spouse. It is a quote from The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I’ll allow it.)

Anyway. It was hard to see past the sound and the fury of it all.

*****

I was feeling nostalgic several months ago and took a swim in my old meta tags; I found a gem from season…10? Idk and idc, but it was from “The Things We Left Behind.”

I compared Claire to Sleeping Beauty (a tale that got a lot of use in later seasons) and wrote: “I tend to think that Castiel’s entire arc is about desperate and unintentionally misguided attempts to Change The Ending of whatever story he’s shown up in” and reading that again really kind of sucker-punched me.

‘We’re making it up as we go’ was the crux of Cas’ existence. Remember that half-related story in Baby wherein Cas got himself hitched to the Djinn queen? Remember when Jack died and the Empty came to claim him in Heaven and Cas made that terrible bargain? The last-minute attempt to gank Lucifer that actually got him killed and sent to The Empty?

Time and time again, Castiel’s go-to for “changing the narrative,” for advancing his plot, is self-sacrifice. In Chuck’s house against the archangel. The Leviathan disaster. Saying ‘yes’ to Lucifer. The Bargain for Jack in Heaven. And those times it worked out. Not without great pain for both the other characters and for the viewers, but he always came back.

And with each return, his motivation became clearer. (Picture your favorite screencap of Dean here.)

Cas’ love grew, crystalized, and then disappeared, like frost on the windowpane of a house on fire.

If they had continued the CasDean storyline, it would have ultimately been The Author IRL writing/creating/manifesting/materializing ‘destiel.’ And so by putting a torch to all of that architecture, they essentially gave everything to us. Unspoilt. Fingerprints wiped. Serial numbers scratched away. Jailbroken. Whatever floats your boat.

The confession was both affirmation and abnegation. Symbolically, The AuthorTM had washed his hands of it, but with destiel out of the picture, The Author also got his ending.

This is why “Cas helped” felt like a ‘fuck you.’ If Cas was out of the narrative, why did he come back as one of Heaven’s real estate developers? It did not fit.

And yet. It did. Because Chuck won. Chuck, or everything that an Author represents in television land– TPTB, showrunner legacies, multiple producers, a chaotic and treacherous and politically messy writer’s room, multiple incompatible or unresolvable MOs and visions— all that ends up being packaged and presented as a single unerring vision.

So I have to admit, although I don’t have to do it with any ion of grace, that in the end it was pretty fucking smart.

Destiel is ours. Destiel is the folk ending. The Author never got to touch it, never so much as breathed on it, was so far divorced from the concept that the absence thereof going forward hit us like a truck full of bricks.

Yes, it hurts that Dean was just left on the floor until the credits rolled, that there were no final words, no ensuing acknowledgement.

I’ll go so far outside the Text as to address the ‘Dean can’t reciprocate’ direction from one of the scripts:

If Dean had made a single move onscreen. Uttered a word. In Despair or either of the other two episodes.

Destiel would have been claimed by The Author.

Anyway. I’ve been collecting posts now and again under the tag ‘the endless folklore of supernatural.’ For three years, the fandom has continued to loot, to ransack, to graffiti, to create and re-create, to burn, to mix, and to distill.

There’s all kinds of things in that tag, it’s sort of a kitchen sink of everything that I thought was even tangentially relevant to folk-Destiel and the postmodern experience of creating text as a reader/viewer etc.

We turned a literary story based on an urban folktale back into folklore.

And so it goes.

I doubt I will do much more analysis of this show, even if it comes back, and I unfortunately can’t touch The Winchesters. But I can’t say I never will. I just thought three years, one thousand days, was a pretty good place to leave a marker on the trail.

—

Epilogue: About The Winchesters:

I did not finish watching The Winchesters because of something wildly, randomly, but highly personally triggering that was built into one of the episodes; however I am very sorry that it was canceled or possibly ironically lost to the WGA-SAGAFTRA strike of 2023.

“What is the maddest thing a man can do? Let himself die.” That’s the clue that leads Castiel to his hidden grace in a copy of The Man of LaMancha in 10.18 ‘The Book of the Damned,’ written by one Robbie Thompson.

I noticed from the get-go that Thompson gave Carlos the last name Cervantez. He was nodding to the self-immolation of the last cadre of writers of Supernatural and stating clearly that he was holding a pen, not a match.

Want some very fun and amusing and wildly pertinent facts about the Don Quixote books?

The narrative conceit of Don Quixote IN THE FIRST PLACE LOL is that Cervantes claims to have found a manuscript by a historian named Cide Hamete Benegeli and Cervantes thought the story was pretty neat, if a little rough; Cervantes retells the story for us from what he’d read by that author, distilling the “original” into the book we experience as Don Quixote the Man of La Mancha.

The final words of Cervantes’ Part One are “perhaps another will sing with a better pick.”

Later, someone publishing under the pseudonym Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda wrote their own part two, feeling that the original author was taking too long to get their ass in gear (or judging by their own preface they felt that Cervantes had not even done the original story justice in the first place. Which is A Mood.)

So when someone actually did have the audacity to run off with his characters and commit word crimes with them, Cervantes absolutely obliterated the dude in his own Part Two.

Thompson left Spn after season eleven. But, lest someone think this is a commentary about fan fic, he also wrote the episode Fan Fiction. So anyway all the Cervantez-Cervantes business was certainly something.

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mumms-the-word · 3 months

Text

In Fathoms Below - Ch. 8

Ch. 8 - Cloakers

Characters: Gale, Karlach, Wyll, Lae'zel, Shadowheart, Astarion, Halsin, Minthara, Gortash + other OCs; pairing is Gale x fem!Tav Plot: The island city of Nautera disappeared over 4500 years ago, if it ever existed at all. Now not a single, legitimate record of Nautera exists, save for one. The Nauterran Account. Long thought lost, it has recently been retrieved from the depths of Candlekeep’s archives and placed into the capable hands of one Gale Dekarios. With the Nauterran Account in hand and an eclectic team of Baldurians and other allies mounting an official expedition, Gale journeys to find the ruins of Nautera…but hopes to find so much more. A/N: You guys voted and now we're here! Time for a cheeky Underdark encounter with a few beasties. Hopefully everyone makes it out alive. But you'll have to read on to find out!

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | BG3 Masterlist | Read on AO3

Gale gave a small bow in deference to Minthara—she was the general after all—before he left to go find Karlach. Thus far on the trip, Karlach had been the one person he could honestly call friend, even after so short a time together. The others were warming up to him slowly too, he supposed, or perhaps he was warming to them. He wasn’t certain. But Karlach had been a constant warm presence down here in the Underdark, both literally and metaphorically.

He found her lounging against a rock with Wyll, both of them chatting and taking swigs of water from their canteens. Since arriving in the Underdark, both Karlach and Wyll had taken to wearing a weapon at nearly all times, except when bedding down for the night. Karlach had a large, lethal-looking battleaxe strapped to her back now, while Wyll had taken to sheathing a rapier at his side. Neither of them had used their weapons yet, aside from Wyll practicing his parries and ripostes or what-have-you before bedtime, but both seemed to think it was only a matter of time.

Karlach smiled and waved Gale over as he approached. “Just in time, Gale. You always miss the best stories from Wyll here. He was about to tell me about a fight he had against a wyvern or something.”

“A wyvern?” Gale asked, raising his eyebrows. “Was this some sort of…nobleman’s sport or…?”

Karlach laughed, while Wyll merely looked a touch sheepish and proud at the same time. “Well, actually, it happened during my time as the Blade of Frontiers,” he admitted. “That’s what I’ve been doing the last few years. Hunting monsters, fighting brigands, that sort of thing.”

“A hero of the Sword Coast, the Blade of Frontiers is,” Karlach said, nudging Wyll with her elbow. He merely chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck, though Gale could tell he took pride in the name.

“I had no idea,” Gale said. Then again, glancing at Wyll’s scars, he ought to have known. The scars he bore were from battles and monster fights, not noblemen’s duels and slumming adventures. They were scars from his time as the Blade, not as the son of Duke Ulder Ravengard. “Your, ah…reputation hadn’t yet reached Waterdeep, I’m afraid.”

“One day it will,” Wyll said breezily. “Anyway, what did you need?”

“Minthara wants Karlach to accompany me to scout ahead and find a new path for us,” Gale said. “Shadowheart, too.”

“Sounds like a party. Mind if I tag along?”

“Ooh, say yes, Gale,” Karlach said, brightening. “You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Wyll here fight.”

“And you have?” Wyll asked, grinning at her.

“Well, no, but your stories are amazing. I bet you could go toe-to-toe with a dragon and come out just fine.”

Wyll laughed and even Gale had to smile at their banter. Karlach made fast friends with everyone, it seemed.

“And if there’s nothing to fight?” Gale asked.

“Then we can find something to fight,” Karlach said, like this was the only obvious answer. “Besides, I hear Astarion’s been lurking around. Maybe we’ll run into him.”

Gale tilted his head. “How did you know that?”

“I told her,” Wyll said. “All the signs are there. The dead creatures, mainly, each of them completely bloodless. I think he’s sticking close to us. Though whether that’s for protection or to eventually make us his prey…” He trailed off with a shrug.

“Hmm…well if we’re about to encounter a vampire, perhaps having a monster hunter on our side wouldn’t hurt,” Gale said. “That just leaves Shadowheart, then.”

“I’ll get her,” Karlach said. “Meet you up front!”

She waved to them both and jogged away, heading toward the back of the convoy. Wyll shook his head fondly, watching her go. “Ah Karlach. I doubt even the darkest depths of the Lower Dark could dim her spark.”

Gale glanced sidelong at Wyll, noting the fondness in the younger man’s eyes as he watched Karlach’s flame-flickering form disappear down the convoy, toward the medic carts. Gale smiled faintly to himself and kept his opinions quiet.

“We’d best head toward the front, then,” he said instead. “We’ll meet our drow scout there. I really ought to learn his name…”

Moments later, Gale, Karlach, Wyll, and Shadowheart fell in step behind the drow scout, whose name was Nevrin, though he had parted with that name tersely and quietly when Gale asked. Together, they left the convoy behind and ventured deeper into the awaiting tunnels. As the darkness enveloped them, Gale cast dancing lights around them to help illuminate their way forward.

Nevrin scoffed. “Humans,” he muttered under his breath. “Now everything down here will spot us.”

“Oh, let it come,” Karlach said. “We can take whatever it is. Besides, they would have seen me anyway.” She gestured vaguely to herself, indicating the softly-glowing vents in her shoulder and the pulsing glow of her engine beneath her skin.

Nevrin merely made a soft hmph and continued on.

Gale cast a slow look around them as they walked through the passage. These tunnels appeared rough-hewn by tools, not naturally forming, so clearly they were on the right path. Though he couldn’t help but wonder when they were made, and whether they were made by the githyanki explorers or the author of the Account, who had journeyed down here to try and find Nautera’s ruins. He supposed in the end it didn’t matter, so long as there was a road to follow.

But sure enough, after several moments of walking, they reached a cave-in blocking the majority of their path. Rocks and boulders of varying sizes lay in a heap from floor to ceiling, the source of the cave-in lost behind them. There appeared to be a thin route along the right-hand side, spaces where they could see the possibility of the path continuing beyond, but on the left, a crude, burrowed passage disappeared into the darkness, leading off to some unknown space.

“Too bad we didn’t bring Halsin,” Shadowheart said, eyeing the gaps in the rocks on the right. “He could have turned into a mouse or something and scurried on ahead to see if the path continues on the other side.”

“Perhaps you can illuminate the space beyond?” Gale asked. “Then we could see what we may be working with.”

Shadowheart pursed her lips, as if she didn’t want to respond to Gale directly, but then shrugged. “I suppose. One moment.”

She climbed up onto the rocks and stuck her arm down one of the larger spaces, whispering a light spell. Light shone out through the gaps between the rocks, but when Shadowheart squinted through them to the other side, now illuminated, she retreated with a shake of her head.

“No use. Everything just keeps getting blocked the farther you go. We’d spend days trying to dig out this path.”

“We do have a lot of smokepowder,” Karlach suggested. “Plus the gnomes’ constructs are rothé. Aren’t they supposed to be good at clearing rubble or something?”

“Wouldn’t they just get damaged trying to unblock the path?” Gale asked. But Karlach merely shrugged, unsure.

“Let’s investigate out other option first, before we make any decisions,” Wyll suggested, gesturing to the left. “Shall we?”

“Smart thinking. Lead the way, Mr. Blade,” Karlach said. Wyll chuckled.

“Just Wyll is fine.”

They were mostly quiet as they ventured farther down the passageway, though the air between them was generally comfortable...Nevrin's serious demeanor aside. The walls here were rougher, with signs, even to Gale’s untrained eyes, to suggest that claws and other bestial markings had created this tunnel, rather than ancient tools. Gale wasn’t sure he wanted to meet whatever it was that was capable of carving through rock like this. Hopefully it was long gone and not lying in wait at the end of this tunnel.

The passageway eventually widened out into another cavern, this one made up of a series of rocky platforms that seemed to have shifted and broken over time, their rubble lying along the cavern floor in the gaps between platforms. Gigantic flat mushrooms grew along the cavern walls and on the sides of these platforms, glowing softly in blues and reds. Wyll and Nevrin split off from the rest of them, with Nevrin deftly climbing onto a series of wide mushrooms while Wyll clambered up the rocks onto a platform. They both peered into the darkness toward the other end of the small cavern.

“No luck,” Wyll said. “Unless Nevrin sees something I don’t, I think this place is a dead end.”

“There is a small cave on the far side,” Nevrin said. “But I do not think our wagons can fit through it.”

“Not without magic, in any case,” Gale said, already thinking of solutions. Levitation spells to get the carts across the platforms and mushrooms, spells to make everything smaller for a short time…

“Will it lead us back to the original path, though?” Shadowheart asked.

“Only one way to find out,” Karlach said, flashing her a smile. She climbed up to join Wyll and then pointed to a nearby mushroom that spanned the distance between her current rocky platform and the next. “These are safe to walk on, right, Nev?”

“It’s Nevrin,” the drow said, scowling. “But yes. Usually.”

Karlach had already hopped onto the mushroom when she froze and looked over at him. “Wait, usually?”

He simply shrugged and didn't elaborate. Karlach half-rolled her eyes, though she didn’t seem particularly annoyed, and jumped to the next platform.

“Come on, then,” she said, turning and beckoning to the others as she walked backward along the platform. “Last one to the cave is a rotten—”

Her voice cut off as she stumbled back over something and fell backward. She let out a surprised yelp as the ground below her hissed and moved—only for a giant stringray-like creature to raise its wings out from underneath her.

“Karlach!” Wyll yelled.

She rolled quickly to one side, off of the creature and over the edge of the platform. She fell a short way down and landed hard, her knees buckling briefly, but kept on her feet. On the platform, the creature flew upward and spread its wide, leathery wings with a sharp hiss. Though its face was mostly obscured by the semi-darkness, even Gale recognized the creature from old bestiaries he’d glanced through during his studies at Blackstaff.

“A cloaker,” Wyll said, drawing his sword. “Careful, it can—”

“Less talking, Wyll, more fighting,” Shadowheart snapped, summoning a ball of glowing, golden light to her hands. Taking quick aim, she lobbed it at the cloaker. It shattered against its leathery hide with a shower of golden light, causing it to hiss and recoil.

Karlach unlatched the battleaxe from her back and got into a fighting stance. “Come on, then, bring the fight down here ya fucker!”

Instead, the cloaker flew upward near the stone ceiling and let out an ear-piercing screech. In the darkness of the cavern, only partly illuminated by Gale’s dim dancing lights and the glowing mushrooms, they could hear other creatures stirring and taking flight.

“Watch out!” Wyll warned, but it was too late.

A large, dark shadow swooped down from one of the upper platforms toward Karlach, wrapping around her from behind. Her battleaxe clattered to the ground with a metallic ring as the cloaker pinned her arms to her body and wrapped its tail three times around her legs. They both fell in a struggling mass, Karlach wrapped up in the cloaker like a black cocoon. When Wyll tried to run to the edge of his platform to help, another cloaker flew upward at him, blocking his path. He swore loudly and flung out a hand with a sharp dolor! Sickly green energy blasted outward from his hands, slamming into the cloaker and sending it reeling backward.

Gale didn’t have time to be surprised at Wyll’s sudden use of magic. His allies were in danger. He summoned a fireball to his hand, ready to cast at the cloaker, only to hesitate—what if he hurt Karlach? Or Wyll, if he tried to help Wyll? What if he couldn’t remember how to sculpt his spells to protect his companions? It had been well over a year since he'd been in battle; the last time had been before he'd acquired the orb and all its cursed side effects. He suddenly felt about as skilled as a young apprentice.

He clenched his teeth as the doubt drowned out rational thought. He stopped the spell and switched to a simple firebolt, aiming for the cloaker smothering Karlach as she struggled to escape the suffocating grip of the beast’s wings. He just needed an opening—

But he waited a fraction of a second too long. Another cloaker appeared near Nevrin, swiping his feet out from under him with its tail, and then screeched, summoning three more around Gale. Gale stumbled back, throwing his firebolt at the nearest one to him, but it dodged easily. The next one flew at his legs, knocking him off his feet. The third loomed over him, ready to smother him, but he conjured a chromatic orb of lightning and threw it right into its face. The lightning hit and skittered over the creature, causing it to screech and then disappear.

A phantom. A copy of the cloaker, easily defeated by just one hit, but just as capable of dealing damage and just as deadly as a normal cloaker. If the other cloakers had the same idea—

But of course, they did. Screeches rang out around the cavern as other cloakers called phantoms into being, surrounding all five of them.

“Karlach!” Wyll yelled again, dispatching a phantom with another eldritch blast. “I’m coming!” But as soon as a second phantom fell to his blade, a third phantom, along with another cloaker, swooped in for another attack. Shadowheart was soon at his side, blocking one of them with her shield, but soon the two of them were surrounded, trapped on their platform.

Still on the ground, Gale fired off four magic missiles to take care of the two phantoms nearest him, and then rolled over and scrambled to his hands and knees, just in time to see another figure leap down from a platform near Karlach. White-haired and pale, the figure landed on both cloaker and Karlach with two daggers in each hand, stabbing downward into the cloaker’s hide. The cloaker writhed and shrieked, unfolding its wings to try and shake off its attacker, but the figure held on, wrenching one dagger free before stabbing it back down.

Karlach rolled away and snatched up her battleaxe. As soon as she was on her feet, she lifted the axe high and shouted, “Watch your head, fangs!”

The figure—Astarion—wrenched his daggers free and leaped away, just as Karlach brought her axe down over the head of the cloaker, chopping its head clean off its body. The head bounced away with a dull thud as the body collapsed, jolting once before going still.

But the battle wasn’t over. Nevrin struggled to duck and dodge the attacks of another cloaker and its two remaining phantoms, while Shadowheart and Wyll battled two more. A cry in the distance told them more were coming, sweeping through the darkness. Gale scrambled to his feet as Karlach hauled Astarion up. They barely glanced at one another before separating to rejoin the fight.

Gale couldn’t get the upper hand of any creature down on the cavern floor, so he misty stepped up onto a platform well above the fight. From there, he gathered more lightning in his hands and aimed it at one of the cloakers attempting to bite and attack Wyll and Shadowheart.

“Perure!”

Blue lightning illuminated the cavern with brilliant light as it blasted forth from his hands, heading straight for the cloaker. The air suddenly smelled of ozone and tasted of metal, but Gale focused on shaping the spell so that its only target—its only victim—would be the cloaker. It shuddered and shrieked as the lightning struck it and caused it to seize up, tiny crackles of lightning flitting around its body before it hit the ground in a smoking, lifeless heap. Two of its phantoms instantly disappeared.

Both Wyll and Shadowheart cast surprised looks up in Gale’s direction. He spared them a half-hearted wave before pointing behind them. “Watch out!”

They both were back in the fight in an instant, blocking the next creature that flew down to bite or capture them.

Down below Gale, Astarion and Nevrin worked in tandem, with Astarion feinting and dodging its attacks while Nevrin went in with his blades. One phantom fell to their strategy, and soon the cloaker itself was dead, too. Wyll and Shadowheart made quick work of their last cloaker, using a combination of Wyll’s sword, Shadowheart’s mace, and both of their magics, while Gale misty-stepped closer near Karlach, who was going solo against a cloaker and one of its phantoms. A well-aimed chromatic orb of fire dispatched the phantom while another guiding bolt from Shadowheart and a wide-arcing hit from Karlach’s axe silenced the final cloaker forever.

Then all was still. The cavern seemed oddly quiet, the noises of their battle fading in distant echoes around them, leaving naught but the six of them panting and looking at each other.

“Is everyone all right?” Gale asked.

Karlach, just a few feet away, nodded and turned her axe blade-side down, planting the head of it into the ground and leaning against the handle. “Phew…nothing like a quick turn with a few beasties to get your heart going, right? Just me?”

“Careful,” Shadowheart said, moving to the edge of where she stood on a platform with Wyll. Her eyes were on a wide mushroom across the way. “We might not be done with all the beasties just yet.”

Gale turned to look up at the mushroom, only to find Nevrin standing with his sword at Astarion’s throat. The vampire stood with his hands up, near his chest, his daggers on the ground at his feet.

Astarion had the good grace to try and alter his grimace into a charming smile. “Is all this really necessary?” he asked. “After all, we were working as a team just now.”

“You were a convenient distraction for the creature, nothing more, spawn,” Nevrin said. “That does not mean I owe you my life, nor have any cause to trust you.”

“Hang on, you can’t hurt him,” Karlach protested, straightening up. “He just helped us out.”

“But why?” Nevrin asked, his red-eyed gaze never leaving Astarion. “He must want something from us.”

“Perhaps if you let me speak, we can come to an arrangement?” Astarion suggested, lifting a finger to edge the sword just a tiny bit away from his neck. Nevrin sneered and pressed the blade even closer. A thin line of blood ran down the column of Astarion’s throat. He swallowed, growing still, and flicked his eyes toward Karlach and Gale. The silent question, or perhaps plea, in his eyes was clear.

“Nevrin, wait,” Gale said, stepping forward. “Let us handle the vampire. You go scout the cave ahead and see if it connects back to the main path. While you scout ahead, we’ll determine what should be done about him.”

The drow flicked his gaze briefly to Gale and then back to Astarion. “And why should I take orders from you, iblith?”

Gale frowned. He had a point, but it didn’t make his remark, or his insult, any less irritating. “Perhaps because Minthara gave me leave to decide what to do with him if we encountered him. Or did she not impart that specific detail to you before we left? If you doubt me, ask her yourself upon our return.”

It was a bit of a bluff and a bit of a lie, but Gale was hoping that the drow would weigh the risks of asking Minthara to explain her orders and decide against angering her. He held his breath, waiting to see if his words had any effect. After a moment, the drow relented, slowly lowering his blade and glaring at Astarion.

“Fine,” he said, sheathing his blade. “But if I return and find one or most of you dead, I will report to the Nightwarden that it was due to your own foolish mistakes.”

He turned on his heel and retreated toward the back of a cave, to an inky black spot that was darker than the rest of the surrounding darkness. The cave, Gale assumed. Soon he was entirely out of sight.

Astarion rubbed his throat with a wince before bending to retrieve his daggers. Tucking them into his belt, he hopped down from the mushroom to the cavern floor below and walked over to Karlach and Gale looking, if anything, a little sheepish.

“I suppose a thank you is in order,” he said, glancing between them.

“A thank you?” Karlach asked. “I should be thanking you. You saved my life out there. I’d probably be dead, or closer to dead, if you hadn’t swooped in when you did.”

“Yes, well, don't expect heroics like that all the time. Consider it…” He trailed off, looking conflicted a moment before lowering his gaze with a slight clearing of his throat. “Consider it repayment for…well, saving my life on the submersible. You could have easily left me to drown or be blasted to pieces aboard that wretched thing, but you…took me with you, instead.”

He frowned, as if he couldn’t quite puzzle out why Karlach had done such a thing. After a moment he shook his head slightly, as if clearing his thoughts, and looked up at them again. “Honestly, I think you're probably a little mad for doing that. And I know you're all mad for whatever the hells it is you're trying to do down here. But I’m grateful for not dying in a horrible underwater explosion nonetheless.”

“Aww…consider us even, then, fangs,” Karlach said, smacking him affectionately on the shoulder. Astarion flinched at the blow and then rubbed his arm with a kind of pained smile. “Oops. Sorry, Astarion. Don’t know my own strength sometimes.”

“Clearly,” he said, glancing down at the dead cloaker nearest them.

“Is that why you’ve been following us?” Wyll asked, as he and Shadowheart joined them on the cavern floor. “So you could say thank you to Karlach?”

Astarion gave an awkward chuckle. “Well…actually I’ve been following you because I don’t know where else to go. You seem to be heading toward some specific location, so I figured, why not tag along? In the shadows, of course, and only until I find somewhere better to be. I know when I’m not welcome.”

“Well you’re welcome now, if you want to join us,” Karlach said.

“Hold on, we can’t just adopt a vampire in the middle of an expedition like this,” Shadowheart said. “What would Gortash say? Or Minthara? And aren’t those blades from the weapons supply?” She pointed at the daggers he had tucked into his belt.

Karlach waved this off. “We have plenty more blades. As for Gortash and Minthara, we’ll talk them into it. Astarion’s on our side now, isn’t that right, fangs?”

“Er…in a manner of speaking,” Astarion said reluctantly.

“And who is going to volunteer to feed him?” Shadowheart asked, crossing her arms. “I don’t exactly relish the thought of any of us having to become this vampire’s bloodbag.”

The question gave them all pause. Karlach scratched the side of her cheek, looking apologetic.

“Well I can’t do it,” she said. “I’d burn you to a crisp, Astarion. Sorry.”

All eyes turned to Gale next. He felt a chill at their expectant gazes and couldn’t help but rub the mark on his chest out of habit. It seemed to ache at the very thought, as though reminding him of its presence.

“I, er…have a blood disease, I’m afraid,” he said. “I doubt he’d find my blood very nourishing. Or tasty, for that matter.”

He tried to ignore the way their looks turned to curiosity or doubt. But he was speaking the truth…mostly. Since the orb sat so close to his heart, it had slowly tainted his blood over time. He’d known that for well over a year, now. He could taste the bitter acidity himself, when he mindlessly gnawed a hole in the inside of his cheek while studying, or when he cut his finger while cooking and licked the blood away out of habit. He bled as red as any other man, but internally, he was altered. Poisoned.

Blighted.

He met Astarion’s gaze, trying to look sincere. Though the pale elf looked a little doubtful, something in Gale’s expression must have convinced him. He turned his crimson gaze toward Wyll and Shadowheart instead.

“I suppose that leaves me, then,” Wyll said thoughtfully. “Assuming we can’t find anyone else.”

“Not to sound ungrateful,” Astarion said, holding up his hands. “I appreciate the sweet offer, but I’d rather not make more enemies out of the lot of you than I already have. And if I recall, they say you’re the son of one of Baldur’s Gate’s grand dukes. I’d hate to anger anyone’s daddy back home.”

“‘Daddy’ has already toss me out in my ear,” Wyll said, crossing his arms. “I don’t think it’s possible to disappoint him more than I already have.”

“This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with your being a warlock, would it?” Gale asked, curious despite himself.

Wyll just shrugged. “It’s a long story, and not an important one. The point is, Astarion, I don’t mind giving you some of my blood every now and again. Really. So long as Shadowheart or Halsin can give me a pick-me-up on the days you need to feed, that is.” He glanced over at Shadowheart as he said this.

She sighed through her nose. “Oh...fine. Since you’re all so determined to keep him. Just as long as he keeps those fangs well away from me.”

“Noted, darling,” Astarion said, a hint of a smirk on his lips. “I won't bite where I'm not wanted. Promise.”

“Well, now that that's settled,” Gale said, eager to move on. “We should get back to the task at hand, shall we?”

“Which was…?” Astarion glanced around at the rest of them.

“Finding a way through or around that blockage in the main passageway. Ideally we'd like to say on the ancient paths down here.”

“Ah, well you're in luck, actually.” Astarion pointed toward the cave that Nevrin had disappeared down. “Follow that through to the end and you'll find it comes back out on your ancient road. I didn't venture too far ahead and I have no idea what other creatures might try to bite your head off, but I did notice that much before I heard all the screeching and came back to save the lot of you.”

“Astarion, you're a godsend,” Karlach said, grinning. “Come on, let's catch up to Nev. We'll see this new path for ourselves, report back to Minthara, tell her all about how you found the path, and bam—you're part of the expedition.”

“That simple, huh?” Astarion chuckled and shrugged. “If you say so. Let’s—”

His next words were cut short as a distant, echoing shriek traveled down from the cave ahead. The five of them glanced at each other in surprise. Then Karlach hefted her battleaxe onto her shoulder with another grin.

“Come on, then,” she said. “Let's go save Nevrin's hide and smash some more beasties!”

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #gale #gale dekarios #gale of waterdeep #my fic #in fathoms below #bg3 fic #bg3 fanfic #bg3 fanfiction #you guys wanted cloakers so I give you cloakers #hope you like it!!#and YAY astarion is finally part of the team!#took him long enough...

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autistichanseo · 1 year

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What If Gaus Electronics was a daydream Jang Hanseo made up to deal with the abuse he was going through? Hear me out:

Okay to start off: I don’t actually think the show was made with the intention of well, being an escapism Jang Hanseo made to deal with everything so I won’t call it a theory or anything.

But head canon that maybe, maybe Hanseo made up a world where he was the main character just, living a normal office job. Living a boring, normal ordinary life far away from his current position as puppet CEO.

The structure of Gaus Electronics is similar to a cartoon. When Sangsik gets hurt (e.g. when he lost a tooth in the first episode) he magically regains it later on. It’s all silly and lighthearted and nothing truly devastating happens in the show, the only injuries that stay longer then a few scenes are needed to progress the plot (e.g Narae’s arms being in casts so Sangsik and Aziz have to look after her.)

Sangsik makes a potentially catastrophic mistake in the first episode for the company he works at, but this mistakes ends up helping the company. It means Marketing Team 3 gain a lot more respect than they had before.

He makes a mistake and it doesn’t hurt him or lead to awful consequences, which we know for a fact isn’t the case for Hanseo. Even the smallest mistake leads Hanseok to hurt Hanseo or could be fatal for the company. He has to deal with the weight of always having to please his brother (whose impulsive, erratic and mood can switch drastically at the drop of a pen) while also making sure he doesn’t mess up anything as the fake CEO of babel.

Thats a lot of pressure, constantly on his shoulders.

But in this universe he doesn’t have either of those things.

Why not make a world where he could imagine what it’s like to just make mistakes like every other human being and not get hurt for it? To be allowed to grow from them and learn rather than live in fear of what would happen to him for doing so?

Moreover, it wasn’t even Sangsik who uploaded the video in the first place publicly!! It was Mr. Cho the invisible dude (I think that’s his name) which is a great metaphor of how Hanseo has to take the fall for all of Hanseok’s mistakes publicly.

Things that weren’t even his fault he had to apologise for! To the public! He had to endure the hate and backlash for all of it!

Maybe Hanseo in his head makes up this entire universe. He’s the main character, he works for some random office in this world in the lowest Marketing Team. He was never allowed to suggest ideas to Hanseok, but now its his job! It’s his job to come up with ways to market the company he works at!

Hanseo has lived in riches his whole life and it’s all he knows (e.g. how he reacted to the Jipuragi office) so maybe what Matan thought living a normal life was like is what Hanseo thought it was like.

Maybe Hanseo projected onto Matan, and that’s why Sangsik wanted to become Matan’s older brother so badly.

He wanted to be the older brother to him he never got.

And maybe if he also plays the older brother, he could make sure he wouldn’t be hurt again.

Anyone who “hates” Sangsik in the show comes to love him (Narae) or secretly do love him even if they pretend they don’t (Mr. Baek). He has people who care for him and love him even if he’s “stupid” and messes up. Something Hanseo desperately wanted.

He wanted a family. And that’s exactly what Marketing Team 3 could be for him. Even if they were fake. Even if they were made up.

He could at least imagine what it felt like to be happy if he wasn’t allowed to be so.

(@seerya @dongyeonsimp since I’ve converted you guys to this hc 🫶🏼)

#theres probably more I could add and I will when I remember #poor hanseo man #tvn vincenzo #jang hanseo #빈센조 #gaus electronics #kdrama #i might make a fic about this hc #or art who knows #he makes a full blown map of everything and hanseok catches him #and straight up rips it up #and hanseo cries because its the one thing he had for himself #jang han seo #mypost #gaus hanseo daydream hc

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ladditt · 2 years

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V9 Ep1

okay! Chores are one so its RWBY time lessgo

1) okay right off the bat the first person perspective, music and editing are top fucking notch for this opening. The rising panic is palpable and it gets across how it must have felt to be trapped in a situation that’s getting worse by the second without having time to process the last horrific life changing event before a new one happens. I haven't seen something that well made from this show in a WHILE full props to the creative team for this one.

However, I do really want to see a behind- the-scenes clip of how this was animated from a third person perspective. Hysterically, shots like this are either animated by having two disembodied arm models fixed just behind the camera, or by using the actual character model but either distorting the neck or removing the head entirely so you don’t get any clipping. Either way it’ll be fucking hilarious.

2) that water is fucking beautiful, we sure have come a ways from the flat blue plane of V1

3) two suns? Is that a metaphor?

4) I’m not gonna point out every well crafted shot because from what I’ve seen so far I might be here a while, this episode in particular seems to be going out of it’s way to have varied, intentional shot composition but this shot?

Rubes tiny and isolated in a strange world? Physically surrounded by a dark unknown forest? That some good shit right there.

5) oh god the plant models. They’re excellent and the set design for this forest is perfect but I really hope that the staff were given adequate time to design and model them all….

6) aye, rubes. I don’t think that “keep moving forward” is the best way to deal with this one.

7) I will withhold my judgement until they’ve had more screen-time but, yeah little is really annoying.

8) “what happened after we fell?” nothing good blake, nothing good.

9) again, top notch animation, and the gang is back together way sooner that I was expecting. I’m gonna say that’s a good thing. Following four different plot-lines probably wouldn’t have worked.

10) don’t dodge the question weiss. I know you’re trying to be kind but you’re not gonna be able to put this off forever, and the longer you wait the worse it’s gonna be.

11) is that the jabberwocky? It’s… fine. The muscle texture looks cool but beyond that I’m not getting the “nightmare fuel”. according to the op it looks like it’s going to be more of a consistent antagonist though so there's still time for it to grow on me.

12) “if you thought we wouldn’t come for you, you must have forgotten who raised me” my HEART

13) also shout out to barbra for the line delivery on that “damn it” that was excellent.

14) if it were 2015 and I were still a 14 year old bee shipper I would have lost my mind at that hug. So for now I’ll just be happy for the people who ARE losing their minds.

15) “it must have gone pretty bad, huh?” Oh they’re addressing this NOW? I was expecting at least another episode of weiss tiptoeing around the topic before we got the reveal

16) oh shit ruby just went out like a lightswitch. Yeah that’s a pretty realistic reaction to hearing something like that, on top of the fact that volume 8 took place over like, what, four hours? No one here has had a chance to stop since salem showed up, they're all exhausted.

Considering this place is mindfuck central and we’re got a murderous shapeshifter milling around down here as well it’s really not going to take much for people to start losing their minds. And I mean, If this is wonderland “everyone’s mad down here” might end up being relevant.

17) blake stepping up as leader while ruby is out of action? Love to see it

18) ruby passing out from stress and then instantly pretending that nothing happened and refusing to let herself feel a human emotion? that’s my girl.

19) oh good fucking god. Yeah I understand completely why this took an extra year to make. I though the new assets for the forest were going to be it, but no it looks like we have five or six completely unique zones to this place. again, i REALLY hope that this wasn’t as hard on the animators as we’re all assuming it was.

20) i’m not gonna analyze the op because as a rule, i’m not a fan of them. but yeah, it looks like this is the beginning of the “ruby has a nervous breakdown” arc

aye, consider my thoroughly impressed. the filmaking for this episode was above an beyond what i was expecting. i can’t say i’m completely sold on the talking mice but i’m also not sure how literally we’re supposed to be taking what we’re seeing. from a lore perspective wonderland is... interesting to day the least. is this a separate world or a lower layer of reminant? was this created by the brothers or does this world have a different set of creators? humans and grimm don’t seem to exist here but the emotions of the characters do seem to have a physical affect on the environment, on top of that, the relics were explicitly created by the brothers to help humanity and atlas is the one that created those portals that brought us here in the first place. and atlas at least seemed to have some knowledge that wonderland was here considering he mentioned that falling would be bad. so, does this place have a connection to the power of the relics or was taking a detour through an alternate dimension just the quickest way to connect two portals?

my current theory as of episode one is that wonderland is the brother’s “WIP folder” so to speak, weird ideas and not quite finished creations that the brothers are keeping stored for a rainy day. like, the jabberwocky looks a lot like a first draft of what the grimm ended up being.

#RWBY #RWBY9 #RWBY Spoilers #Ladd watches V9

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sidecharactersdomatter · 10 months

Text

Thoughts I had during TGCF S1 Ep 11

-Previously on TGCF…

-AAaaaugh there’s so many falling cobras!

-Oooh firebending through blood, not like how it’s done in Atla that’s for sure

-Aaaaugh they’re still here

-Oh yeah, that’s probably it.

-It’s official, Fu Yao is a huge mood

-Too late he already is trusting them

-Oooh a good metaphor to tie in with the cobras

-No he has not lost himself, just wait till we get halfway through the series… oboy that’s spoilers isn’t it

-Yeah the side without snakes really is a valid reason

-Aw San Lang like his joke

-No there goes the flame barrier

-Aiaigasa! It’s Aiaigasa again folks AAAAAHHH!!!!

-No they will not at all San Lang

-Scorpion tailed cobras why’d they have to be Scorpion tailed Cobras?!?!?!?!?

-This whole episode will trigger everybody’s ophidiophobia…and arachnophobia

-Oooh! Good palm strikes!

-I know it isn’t San Lang who’s controlling the snakes and blocking the mana

-Where did Ban Yue go???

-Aiaigasa is the stuff people

-Oooh who was that?

-San Lang gets to fight again!!!

-The animation for that hidden fight

-Oooh Ruoye tensed up for a sec

-We’ve seen how she fought in Ep 9

-Oh Xuan Ji got name dropped!

-Oh! Plot twist again!!!!

-It is all coming together again…

-Oh foreshadowing from Ep 3 again

-At Ban Yue pass!

-Yes he did

-It is all coming together people

-He was keeping up his selfless act

-Man that was a really long cold opening folks

-Pei Xiu protected Ban Yue

-The Yong’An boy

-Aw Ban Yue

-Ban Yue has the answer

-Aw no Ban Yue she’s worn out

-Aw he helped tend to her wounds

-Hi Xie Lia- I mean General Hua

-Oh that was traumatic

-No Ban Yue…

-I think it’ll lead to more war

-They both remembered Xie Lian

-She didn’t want her kingdom to kill themself with dynamite

-Aw San Lang helped supported her when she fainted (It’s official he is also father material)

-That explains the fall of the desert kingdom

-Woah it’s going back and forth between Kemo and Pei Xiu

-“Violence works for me” Never change San Lang, valid

-Ooooh who could that be on top of the pit?

-A cyclone

-He saved Ban Yue!

-Hi Nan Feng

-*Sees Nan Feng’s beat up face* Ahahahahahahaha I’m sorry XD

-Never change Fu Yao and Nan Feng, never change

-Hi Windmaster

-Oh San Lang knows the dark haired woman

-You’ll find about that later

-The truth has come out

-Yep that sums it up

-That explains the sandstorm

-Yeah well he ended up getting involved when Heaven didn’t give him an answer about the ban Yue pass

-Aw he’s protecting Ban Yue again

-Oh good Tian Sheng and the merchants are safe

-Yes heaven is confirmed to be corrupt

-Does anybody know who female!Ming Yi’s English voice actor is? (I’ve tried looking her up but please do answer in the comment section!)

-We’ll see Windmaster again too

-No General Hua!!!!

-Ooooh Pei Xiu army backstory

-He didn’t get assigned

-Ooooh Classism!

-That one scared soldier

-He never got promoted

-Ugh classism really did get explained in this ep

-Hi Ban Yue

-They won a fight with Pei’s strategy

-Ugh Classist general

-No Ban Yue!!!! She was so young!!! T - T

-Really good instrumental of Bu San people, the first ending song of season 1, whoa it is really moving even without words! This Donghua by far has the best emotionally stirring music!

-Yeah where will Xie Lian go from here? (Well we’ll have to find that out next season)

-You know he’ll get involved with reporting to the Emperor too

-Oooh Yizhen got name dropped too!

-I think Pei Ming will verbally harm Xie Lian (yeah I’ve seen the first ep of Season 2 sry)

-I think I have a good reason why Fu Yao left early

-And it spanned about 3 episodes Nan Feng!

-Ban Yue is out cold

-Magic sleeves of holding count: 5 (These are gonna get hard to track folks)

-Uncle Jiang is cured!

-There go the merchants

-Yeah you go make that temple Tian Sheng, do it for Xie Lian best dream ever!!!

-Oooh San Lang has connections

-Oooh Nan Feng’s face turned blue when Xie Lian offered to cook!

-Good excuse Nan Feng valid

-And the way he’s running away from the duo XDXDXD!

-Here’s why Fu Yao left early, as they healed Uncle Jiang he contacted Nan Feng through the telepathic array and Fu Yao’s reason is: Come on, you know how horrifying his highness’ cooking can be. This is just my theory, and I’d love to hear your possible ones in the comments!

-He called him by his real name ‘Hua Cheng’!!!!

-And the way Hua Cheng moved in closer and just preferred to be called ‘San Lang’ my freaking heart!!!

-Oooh Hong Jue again! I guess it plays during the second half of Season 1

Only one episode left to react to!!!

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lunannex · 2 years

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What do you hope the writers do with Allison's arc next season? Ngl s4 broke my heart because it really felt like she was separate from her siblings. She was at such a low point and just feeling so much anger and grief. It was hard to watch even though Emmy was phenomenal.

I love this question! See, the thing with my views on Allison is that they tend to be sort of separated from the general plot of the show. By this I mean that what I’ve always been the most interested by are the parts of her life that we’ve never gotten to see…her life pre-canon, her time in the 60’s, and now – what happens after she reunites the with Claire and Ray.

I hope they explore the topic of emotional dependency and bodily autonomy with her. You know, have her question her own morality and what it means to be good and bad – if those are even concepts that exist. It’s different with her siblings because of how all of them were raised, but when paired with someone like Ray – who is such a beacon of justice and a believer in doing what’s right, I feel like that could be something she struggles with. I want them to explore her relationship with Claire. Has been away from her for so long made her view parenting through rose-colored glasses? She hasn’t parented Claire in YEARS and even when she was married to Patrick, what she did wasn’t really parenting either.

Mostly, I just want her arc in S4 to be about self-growth. Does she owe some of her siblings apologies? Yeah. Mainly to Viktor for the whole Harlan thing and Luther for violating his autonomy. The Hargreeves have all done TERRIBLE things to each other, Allison isn’t an outlier here. At least in the first episodes of the season, I want her to be sort of in her own little world with Ray and Claire. A picture perfect family (tho you can still see the fractures in that illusion in some instances). But I want the main focus to be on her relationship with her siblings. Maybe she goes to find them after hitting a low point with Ray and Claire (possibly after using her powers on Claire again and Ray catching her? So she feels like she’s stuck repeating the same mistakes all her life)

From what I can gather, Reginald and Abigail are gonna be key players, so have her join forces with her siblings. Have them learn how to PROPERLY be a team. Have Allison try to fix those bridges she burned. Even in S3, she still has kindness left in her, she’s just….really struggling. Have her express that. Give her a scene with Five where they discuss the deal she made with Reginald where it ISN’T just him pointing fingers and her getting defensive. Remember, Five made a deal too (the difference came down to the way they were portrayed but no I’m not bitter why do you ask). Everything he’s done is for his family. He UNDERSTANDS the lengths people will go to for the ones they love. Have them FINALLY team up and reach some sort of understanding

On another note: her powers! I don’t think she’s still figured out which lines are okay to cross and which aren’t – so have her explore that. Through Claire and Luther, have her evaluate WHY it’s wrong to use them on the people she loves. The Hargreeves aren’t saints and they’ll always make mistakes, but deep down I DO think they want to do good – they just get a little lost along the way. And it’s important to remember that Allison didn’t get Ray and Claire back by being “good”. If she does make the decision to better herself, I want her to do it for HER. Yes, she absolutely wants to be an amazing mother to Claire, but she needs to realize that this isn’t something she should only do for the sake of other people

And this is totally self-indulgent but I want the show to end with her getting her purple hair from the comics! Idk! Let it be a metaphor for how she’s working on moving forward after spending so much time stuck in the past. At the very least let her have a hopeful ending, she deserves that much

Anyway, if it wasn’t already obvious, I care so much more about the characters than the plot so sorry that barely any of this includes actual… y’know. plot things lol. Hope you liked it tho!! I love one (1) woman

#luna answers #she is everything to me your honor #tua

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theundertalenebulartheory · 2 years

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The Nebular Theory (AO3) Plot Semi-But-Not-Really Spoilers Below the Cut - Clarifying Points for the First Two Chapters

I have been having a blast reading some of the super neat comments people have been leaving on the fic I’ve been writing over on AO3

But I have seen some people commenting about their confusion and I’m worried that in my attempt not to give away too much, I may have said too little. Ideally more about this should be given in small snippets at the beginning of the upcoming chapters (like in the Chapter Summary section that I am definitely using incorrectly) but in the meantime… here’s a couple of semi-spoilerish clarifying points pertinent to the first two chapters:

The Star is a separate entity from “Gaster”

Both The Star and “Gaster” were in the Void together

The Connecting Thread that Sans and Papyrus used to summon The Star WAS actually and legitimately connected to The Star

The moment where it talks about something tugging (I think the word I used in Ch2 was “twang” like a guitar string being plucked and buzzing on the frets) right after The Star was summoned from the Void is the moment where The Star transfers their line of connection to “Gaster,” which sacrifices their own ability to be easily pulled out of The Void. Like having one of those Coast Guard Floaty Save-Yo-Dumbass Donuts tossed to you and then you giving it to someone else instead, which forces you to let go of whatever it was you were holding onto originally.

Part of the reason I really liked the idea of teasing the reader with this information up front was twofold:

A major plot point is The Star getting Yote into The Void, which makes everyone forget them. I could have waited until we’d spent some time in the story, building up the character development, and Then dropped that Veil of Forgetfulness over the characters left behind so only the readers remember and can see the gaping hole left behind in their wake. But why not have the reader discover alongside the story character who it was that they forgot? Discover, as they realize Exactly who was lost and Exactly what it means to have them metaphorically sink below the waves, what it means for them to have given their only Line of Connection away to “Gaster” so that the soggy lump could finally escape the Void where he’d been trapped.

While I mostly want to tell a fun story… like… Memento Mori and all that. Right? I … hate getting the rug pulled out from under me. I hate “and then they died” shock value. But showing the funeral pyre up front let’s the reader know that, when this Moment arrives, that it was planned from the start. That all the sweet and beautiful moments that happened to them happened with death on the horizon. (I say death very loosely and mostly poetically but not very literally. I DID promise a happy ending. There IS a reason MC spent so long working with Pap to help inspire him to build The Machine. Consider it Chekhov’s Blueprint if you will lol) And I hope that, in some ways, it makes all the sweet moments sweeter and the hard moments less bitter. Less bitter because… they made it, right? Death still waits on the horizon, but wait he must. And while he waits, we triumph. We feast. We laugh and we love and those moments matter. Death (again, used very loosely) will Sit, damnit, and he will WAIT and we will Have our moments while he does.

Author has shown you Chekhov’s Gun, but author has also shown you Chekhov’s Defibrillator. Shit’s going to go down. But we have the med kit on standby. Death can reap, but we never gave him permission to harvest. And while we’re at it, we’re taking this sad, soggy old man with us. That’s right. We’re taking him right out of your basket and putting him in ours. Just because we can.

Neener Neener.

#fic update #the nebular theory fic #fic spoilers

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hedgehog-moss · 2 years

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what are your favorite books in terms of prose? curious after you wrote about how many modern writers lack a sense for good writing, which i’ve also felt for years. so who do you think writes especially beautifully :-)

(Warning: long post ahead pondering what is perceived as beautiful prose in English vs French!)

The first books that came to my mind are the ones listed below, and it got me wondering why they were all by French authors, when I read a lot in other languages. I think even if you can read foreign literature fluently, it’s easier to detect & appreciate beautiful prose in your mother tongue, not just because you know it so intimately (so you know how many different ways there are to convey an idea and why this particular way was a great choice in this context), but also because languages develop their own criteria of what constitutes good writing, and we aren’t really taught about this—we're taught about our own language's criteria for good prose as if they were universal and objective, and it can be hard to move beyond that, especially when you're happily lost in a book and not actively trying to analyse the subtleties of the writing.

At the risk of giving the least hipster answer ever I really like Victor Hugo's writing because there are whole passages that sound so good I need to go back and re-read them to figure out what's happening in terms of plot (usually nothing, so it's ok), because I was too busy enjoying the flow of language the first time around (my favourite of his is The Man Who Laughs)

I read Pierre Assouline's 500-page book about the Book of Job even though I have little interest in biblical analysis or religious history, because there were sentences that were so pleasantly paced and balanced I just got carried by the momentum...

I love Annie Ernaux's writing in Les Années even though I'm not a fan of her other books, because the sentence construction and rhythm are so perfectly suited to the theme of the book.

I find Anatole France's books rather dull but the language is hypnotising (I talked a bit in this post about how his grammar is graceful as a dance...)

^ looking at this I realise I always come back to movement—grace, balance, flow, rhythm (not the pace of the story but of each sentence), and I know these are the criteria that French deems Terribly Important. I mentioned at the end of this post how (and why) English tends to be less interested in the motion of language and more in the imagery; in Goodreads reviews by native English speakers, beautiful writing is more likely to be described as ‘vivid’ than melodious. That's not to say English speakers can't appreciate (or prefer!) other kinds of prose, obviously, it's just, in broad strokes, what each language likes to focus on (at the present time.) There's a lot of appreciation in English for the kind of prose that you could easily make a moodboard out of—evoking sensations, colours, atmosphere—while French highly values the kind of prose that you can easily trace out in the air, with your hand rising and falling, tapping the beat, following grammatical twists and turns.

That's just my understanding, but it's something I notice a lot because I like to read French books along with their English translation (and conversely), to see how translators handle a tricky turn of phrase, or what I would have done differently. And it happens time and time again that the English translation lovingly preserves the imagery of a French sentence (even when a metaphor is difficult to translate) while coldly abandoning the rhythm and sound (even when there are easy English equivalents). Meanwhile French translators often completely ignore (or miss out on) subtle sources of mood and imagery because they are too busy picking the words and sentence structure that sound or flow best. It's really quite funny when you start to notice it.

I would have dozens of examples if I actually took the time to note them as I read, but just two recent ones off the top of my head—

French -> English

I'm currently reading Sylvain Tesson's La Panthère des neiges (The Art of Patience: Seeking the Snow Leopard in Tibet in English) (I needed a 'cold’ book during the heatwave...) At one point the author draws a comparison between religious worship and observing wild animals. For an example of what I was saying re: "tracing out sentences in the air", there's the sentence "La prière s'élève, adressée à Dieu." The two halves are 5 syllables - 5 syllables (6-6 if you read it formally.) The last word of the first half is "s'élève" — "rises". The last word of the second half goes down, since it's the end of the sentence. There's a clear rising and falling motion to it, which is also perfectly balanced in terms of syllables / rhythm; it makes a nice symmetric pattern in the air.

Now, the translation aspect—you've got the sentence "A genoux, on espère sans preuve." Then, shortly afterwards: "A l'affût, on connaît ce que l'on attend." The author is comparing the acts of kneeling (to pray) and lying in wait (to watch animals); so he chose phrasings and sentence structures that create a clear symmetry ("A genoux" / "A l'affût", 3 syllables, starting with the same sound, followed by a comma, then “on” + verb + clause.) The English translation? "To kneel is to wait in expectation without proof" [...] "Lying in a hide, the object of the wait is known."

This is bad!

Now the two sentences have different grammatical structures, they don't contain the same pronoun and don’t start with the same sound or phrasing even though the translator could have chosen to write "Kneeling" and "Lying" to preserve a tiny bit of the original intent. The translation obliterates the similarities of sound & rhythm in the grammar and word choice, which were here for a literary purpose—to link and compare two concepts.

On the other hand, every sentence in the book that's ripe with vivid imagery of wild animals is very conscientiously translated. In the next page, Tesson describes yaks as "taches de jais saupoudrant—", the English translator: "[the yaks] appeared as jade smudges scattered—" It's word for word ! The translator clearly thought visually striking phrases are essential and must be preserved as faithfully as possible, but phrases that are striking on an auditory / rhythmical level are less important (or less likely to be appreciated by an English-speaking reader.)

English -> French

I was reading The Bear and the Nightingale last year and I remember a contrast so blatant it made me laugh—the sentence "The ground was thick with snowdrops" in the original, was translated in French as "Le sol était parsemé d'une nuée de perce-neige." (The ground was scattered with a mist of snowdrops.)

In terms of French prose, this is good! In terms of faithful translation of English prose, this is bad! The translator went for the complete opposite when it comes to imagery—"thick" which evokes weight, vs. the weightlessness of "scattered" and “mist.”

But you know what? "Parsemé" and "perce-neige" have the same syllable count and nearly identical consonant sounds— [p]-[sə]-[m] / [p]-[sə]-[n]. It's pleasing to the ear and symmetrical. The “mist” bit might seem unnecessary (you could say “scattered with snowdrops”) but it was added because it contributes to this—rather than having two similar words right next to one another, they are now the last word in the first and second half of the sentence, making each half end on a similar sound, like poetry. The two halves "le sol était parsemé" and "d'une nuée de perce-neige" have 7 syllables each (with a mute e, the way most people would read it.) So the sentence sounds nice and is well-balanced, and what could be more important than musicality and balance?? Surely not imagery.

It's good writing in terms of what French deems important. It's terrible at preserving what the original English deemed important—"thick" associated with snowdrops as if the flowers were an actual blanket of snow—this evokes weight and quiet—the next sentence then opens with the trill of a bird, and the light, airy sound feels all the more vivid thanks to this clear contrast.

Which is obliterated by the French translation. But the French sentence flows nicely, and it really highlights what each language finds beautiful and essential, in terms of prose. I mentioned in this post that one of the reasons French takes up more room as a language is that it loves grammatical redundancy while English hates it—and I think it's because expanding or repeating a grammatical structure can add symmetry and balance, while it dilutes / drowns out the imagery. I don't think translators make an active choice all the time to overlook one aspect of the prose and pay more attention to another—I think as they mentally chew on the original text and try to come up with the best equivalent, they instinctively tend to fall into this pattern of favouring their language’s Good Writing criteria (probably because it’s assumed readers favour them as well.)

I should write these kinds of examples down in some Word doc, because they’re everywhere, and while there are so many writing styles and translation styles in both languages, there really is a pattern here—French being obsessed with balance and assonance, i.e. the beauty of motion & sound (which are twin concepts when it comes to language), how to make the flow of a sentence linger in your mind; English being obsessed with the beauty of imagery, the ways to make it 'pop', how to make an atmosphere linger in your mind.

Sorry for this very long answer that only briefly touched on your question, but I really love to observe the ways people use their languages so similarly yet differently!

#ask #language tag #i already made this disclaimer in one of the posts linked here but obviously there is good imagery in french writing and #musicality and rhythm in english prose #this is just a general pattern / preference that's noticeable

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thylionheart · 4 years

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5x16 JESUS????

#spn #00 #yoshua? right?#«Gardener to Gardener» ie. creator to creator... Right??#he’s the only one who god talks so... RIGHT?#«I just trim the hedges around here» what is this metaphor??#like he’s to one who maintains Creation while god’s away?#is that even Jesus job? I think I’ve lost the plot again lads #Bc there isn’t an angel named Joshua??#a la biblical canon or apocrypha

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yesimwriting · 3 years

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Bloodroots in the Suburbs - Chapter One: The Babysitter

prologue

a/n soooo happy with how this story has been received!! here’s chapter one :)

series summary: Bloodroots are such a strange flower--white and innocent looking yet undeniably poisonous. It has no place in the safest neighborhood in CA. Then again, neither do you. The suburbs are killing you, and no one understands that...at least you think no one does. I see that in the way you roll your eyes when your sister presses the issue of when you’re going to get back on your feet. I see that restlessness when you’re in the small plot of land that you’ve actually managed to turn into some type of garden. I see you; I understand you. And if it wasn’t for the confines I bear to protect my son, I’d let you know that. But for now, I settle for knowing that the two of us are equally trapped, and I take some solace in that. I feel bad about it, I do, considering that from what I’ve gathered you spent most of your life being considered the perfect, ideal golden girl that was nothing but potential. And now you’re no longer the gifted child, the one that’s first to raise their tiny hand in class, the one that knows everything. But that’s okay--because I’ll make my selfishness up to you.

chapter summary: In a town full of au pairs and staffed houses, nanny cams are just standard practice. It’s not Joe’s fault that the new babysitter keeps getting phone calls.

Joe’s POV.

You’re a natural caregiver. That much is clear from how much time you spend outside, watching and pruning the pitiful green square you’re desperate to turn into a garden. I’m sure you will, something about the way your eyebrows draw together when assessing the tiny, green sprouts tells me that you’re a force to be reconned with when you’re determined. And you definitely are.

You take such care with your plants, how could I ever need a reference to trust you with my son? Trust. That’s the perfect word for us, y/n. You don’t belong here, you’re not one of these fake, cookie cutter emblems--you’re real. I can trust you. Not with everything I’ve done, no, or with feelings that are still unfortunately brewing. Feelings I promise I will keep in check. I swear I’ll do everything I can to keep them on a leash.

You’re young and you’re meant for more than this place, I refuse to give you strings, especially when getting tangled in my web could cost you your life in both a metaphorical and literal sense. I know your career feels shot right now, and I really feel for you. I mean one New York agent gets caught trying to take advantage of you, and you’re the one getting punished? How is that fair? I thought this generation believed women...but that’s just what the media wants us to think. A point you brought up in the first and last interview you did after the scandal. That interviewer kept asking sexist questions and no one in the world was willing to defend you, that’s why you lost your patience. If I had been there, I could have protected you. I’m here now, though, and I promise I’ll make up for my absence.

“Joe? Can you watch Henry today? I know I said I’d take him, but Sherry called me about an event she wants me to cater. It sounded like the mommy blogging convention of the year, which means I have to pick up groceries and try recipes for about a thousand different dietary restrictions.”

I have to look away from you. I have to pretend that there was never anything intriguing about the window that looks out over the front lawn even though you’re standing there, only a road dividing us. Still, I’m not too disappointed, because Love has given me the perfect opportunity to introduce the idea of you.

This feels like playing with fire. If Love ever senses the way I feel about you, you’ll never get to leave here. You’ll never get to do anything again. But I know how to be smart, I know how to be attentive enough to keep her doubts away. And if you’re the girl across the street, the babysitter, you’ll blend into her background. It’s not like I can keep you completely away from her, I would if I could...but you’re across the street from me. I know the monster that lives in me can’t shut you out when you’re right there, so in need of my help, even when it comes to opening a gate.

So I know I can’t put you away, somewhere safe...which means I need to hide you in plain sight. Which is exactly what I’m doing. “I can’t, shift at the library.”

“The usual sitter’s out of town, so I guess I should tell Sherry I can’t do it.”

“Or...” This needs to seem like an idea I’m coming up with right now. “You know the family across the street?”

“Sarah and Tom?” She nods once, adjusting Henry on her hip. “Yeah--they’re great, but I don’t think either of them are up to babysitting. They want a baby too much to be around one that isn’t theres.”

“No, no, of course not. There’s actually someone else living with them--Sarah’s sister, I met her while taking my walk with Henry yesterday. She mentioned wanting something part time and she has babysitting experience, and a strong list of references.” That’s completely true--you texted me your resume about half an hour after we met. You added a smiley face at the end of your text. Does that mean you’re already thinking of me as more than just the random dad from across the street?

“Sarah’s sister?” Love pauses, she’s thinking about it, trying to put a face to the label. “Oh--I’ve met her. She’s been by the bakery, she’s a good tipper, seems nice.” This is working, but I can’t seem eager. “Isn’t she a party girl? Sherry said something about her needing to flee New York City.”

Indifference. Indifference. You make it so hard not to defend you. My hero. You said it politely, a partial joke, but I intend to make it a reality. “Sherry likes gossip. Party girls don’t move to the suburbs if they want to keep being party girls.”

She pauses, desperation is making her a little more open to the possibility of a stranger watching Henry. “You want to let her watch him?”

Love doesn’t sound suspicious. There’s the slightest bit of tiredness in her voice, she’s just discussing the prospect of hiring a new babysitter. This is going to be the most important reaction. I need to play you as sympathetic, someone who I could feel protective of, sure, but not in a romantic way. Right now, I’m thankful that you’re younger than us. “She probably came here because she wanted to abandon her past. I see us in her.” Love’s eyes round slightly, good, she’s sympathetic. Time to seal the way that she sees you, and y/n, I want you to know that this next part makes me feel terrible, but it needs to be said. A nail in the coffin for your safety. “She seems like a good kid.”

Ugh, saying that left a terrible taste in my mouth. You’re not a child. Considering the ways I’ve thought of you, the ways I’ve pictured you, it’d make me a fucking monster to think of you as a child. Which is why Love needs to think I see you as that.

Henry spits up onto a blanket on Love’s shoulder; I feel you, buddy. Love wipes his mouth with the fabric. “Okay--that’s a good point.”

“And if it makes you feel better, I can try to duck out of work a little early, surprise her a little. See how she is with Henry.”

She bounces Henry comfortingly. “Yeah--could you?”

“Definitely.”

“Okay, then can you see if she’s available? Because I need to be at the grocery store like now, because the deadline is super soon and--”

“I’ve got it.” I step towards her, moving until I’m close enough to take Henry into my arms. She lets the way our hands touch linger before leaning upwards. She kisses me and I kiss her back. It’s a quick peck, nothing really, but it’s enough to make me wonder what It’d be like for us to kiss. For our lips to touch. “Go. Go make keto, vegan, paleo, fast ending pastries so that all the mommy bloggers can tell everyone you’re the best.”

She grins. “Thank you.”

I adjust the way I’m holding Henry. Now, I have an excuse to talk to you. To bring you here and allow you to slip into our lives like you’ve always been here. “It’s what I do.”

Love leaves, purse in hand. I wait until her car is out of the driveway before looking for you out the window. You’re no longer in the garden. You must have gone back inside. I hate to think that you might have plans. Neither I nor Love would hold it against you, considering that this is extremely last minute...but things have just worked out too perfectly.

I cross the street, Henry in my arms as I knock on the front door. You open it--not your sister or brother-in-law. You. Did you see me from the window? Were you hoping that I’d come back to you so soon?

“Joe! Hi.” You’re happy to see me, it’s more than politeness, I can see a warmth in your eyes. Maybe you want to entertain the idea of me but you can’t bring yourself to. You don’t want to be the person that destroys a marriage. I understand, but you’ve destroyed nothing. If anything, you’ve cultivated me into something new. Something with purpose.

“Hi,” I could get lost on this front porch with you. “I know this is insanely last minute, but Love just got this catering job and I’m scheduled to work, so given yesterday’s conversation, I was wondering if you could come over and watch Henry.”

You smile, eyes moving from me to Henry and then back to me. The warmth of your expression tells me that I’ve done the right thing.

“She’s available!” A voice interrupts us.

You turn your head, throwing a slightly irritated glance behind you. “Sarah!” You turn back to me, eyes softening as a form of apology. We were interrupted, and you feel bad about that. “Sorry about her.”

Your sister appears in the doorway. I see the family resemblance--same hair color, same eyes. “Hi, I’m Sarah Burrell, I’ve seen you around the neighborhood. Tom and I keep meaning to invite you and your wife over for dinner, but he’s been so busy with work lately.”

Right, your brother-in-law’s ‘work’. He’s a Burrell, as in Burrell Pharmaceuticals. Also known as the company that supposedly created the first, secret COVID vaccine that only the ridiculously rich could afford. Buzzfeed thinks the Burrell vaccine--which was never confirmed--was administered to the Queen of England and the entire royal family. But then again....that’s Buzzfeed.

Still, the point is your brother-in-law might be the richest guy in Madre Linda. He’s also the youngest of three, meaning that he’ll never have to look at the business side of Burrell Pharmaceuticals. It also means that Tom’s side business of creating healthy, sophisticated energy drinks’ is completely unnecessary and overly pretentious. Does the world really need an energy drink with 0 trans fats that’s white truffle flavored? We both know the answer to that.

"Hi, Sarah.” Your sister reaches out her hand. I take it. “Don’t worry about it, Love and I have been busy with the bakery and...him.” I bounce Henry once, letting all the attention move off of me. Sarah smiles, but there’s a tiny bit of stiffness there. A stiffness so subtle I don’t think she’s aware of it. You weren’t kidding when you made that joke about how badly she wants a baby. “Which is why I’m so thankful to your sister, who’s offered to help us.”

Sarah nods, ready to let you go.

“Babe--is someone at the door?” Great--the man behind escargot flavored energy drinks himself. He appears in the foyer, in a Ralph Lauren collared shirt, dirty blonde hair shagging over his eyebrows. “Oh--hey, you live across the street, right?”

“Yes, I’m Joe and this is Henry.”

“Oh--what a cute little man.” He coos at Henry, who is his father’s son, because he really doesn’t seem impressed. “We’ve been meaning to have you over for dinner, but I’ve been slammed in the office.” Fighting several FDA lawsuits. “I own a company that makes high end energy drinks.” I nod, pretending that I’ve never heard about it. “Oh, speaking of, there’s a new flavor I’ve been developing and I brought home a sample, and I’ve been looking for someone to try it.”

I’d literally rather put anything else into my body. “That sounds great, but I really need to get to work.”

“It’ll take a second, I’ll go get us two glasses.” My digestive system will never forgive me if I don’t get out of this.

“Tom, he’s busy.” Thank you, y/n, you’re trying to save me. “I don’t--”

He comes back, holding out a glass of dark liquid. “Told you it’d only be a second.”

You’re giving me a look that says sorry. A look that tells me that I don’t need to do this. But I’d do anything for you, even drink the tar being handed to me. I take the glass, forcing myself to swallow the liquid in it. And--it’s so much worse than I thought. It’s bitter, and...and fishy.

Tom is watching my reaction. I turn my grimace into a smile. “It’s um...I’ve never tasted an energy drink like this.”

“Good, right?!” I nod, fighting the way the energy drink seems to want to come back up. “It’s caviar flavored.”

The things I do for you, y/n. “Y-yeah, I got that.” He grins. “I’d love to drink the rest of this, but I need to get to work.”

“Of course,” he takes the glass back. “Well, good to finally meet you, and thanks for the feedback.” I almost say ‘anytime’ but realize that he might take that literally. “Oh, um--I have these tasting parties with other guys from the neighborhood, I’ll be sure to send you an invite.”

I’drather lose another finger. “I’ll keep an eye out, man.”

He smiles again, nodding before disappearing. Your sister squeezes your shoulder once before saying goodbye to me and disappearing into the house. As soon as they’re gone, you laugh. The sound is so warm it makes the lingering taste of acidic, liquid caviar worth it.

“I can’t believe you actually drank it.”

Look at you, making me smile after one of the weirdest, unneeded interactions I’ve experiencing all week. And that’s saying something in Madre Linda. “Hasn’t he gotten you to drink anything?”

“No,” you shake your head, attempting to dismiss a smile. “He thinks I’m allergic to like twenty different things.” You laugh again. “I’m so sorry I didn’t get you out of here in time.”

You’re still holding in a partial laugh, we’re still joking, and yet I know that there’s something genuine about the reaction. Something behind your eyes tells me that you do feel a little bad, a little guilty. You’ve been told to apologize too many times and some of that’s sunken into you.

“I have a feeling he would have caught me at some point.” We stand there again, quiet. It’d be too easy to lose time with you.

But you don’t like the quiet. Or at least, you’re not used to it. Because the quiet means you’re being seen and you’re used to people interpreting you incorrectly. I can see it in the way you stand, the correction of your posture, the way you angle your head. You want to be seen as perfect, flawless. You don’t have to be perfect around me. And it’s scary, y/n, I know--but I won’t run from you, and then you’ll understand that you’re safe with me.

“Probably.”

I nod. “We should get going.”

You take a step forward, one hand reaching for the door handle. “Yeah, we should, I’d hate to make you late for work.”

There isn’t a shift for me to be late to, but you don’t need to know that. “Right.”

We walk together, a polite distance between us, and yet, when I turn to open the door, the back of our palms brush. The contact is more surprising to you than you realize, you take a partial step back as I open the front door.

I want to show you around. I’m not particularly attached to this property, it’s a nice house, Quinn blood money made sure of that, but it doesn’t mean much to me beyond a way to assure that Henry gets into a good school. But I want you to be comfortable in my house, I want you to be comfortable around me. It’s the least I could do, considering the way you’ve helped me. Without your assuring presence, I think the suburbs would have driven me crazy. But you’ve been here, outside in your garden, letting me know that I’m not the only one drowning in the mundane.

But you’ll get suspicious about why I’m not in a bigger hurry to get to work. So this will have to be a rushed interaction. “He had a bottle a little over an hour ago, which means he doesn’t need to eat for a couple hours, but if he gets fussy there’s another bottle in the fridge. If that doesn’t work, try putting him down in the nursery, it’s the first door upstairs. He might whine at first, try reading to him, there’s a stack of books in there--Fitzgerald is his favorite.” You raise an eyebrow, amused at what you’re probably assuming is a joke. “There are diapers and changing supplies under the diaper table in the nursery, uh...” What else should I tell you? “I wish I had more time to show you, but--”

“Oh, no,” you dismiss, always polite, always ready to help, “you’ve told me enough, I’m sure Henry and I can figure out the rest.”

You extend your arms, ready to take Henry. I squeeze him once before handing him to you. Our hands touch as you adjust the way you hold him. I don’t want to move back. Carefully, I let my fingers move past the back of your palm and onto your forearm. You let me move your arm so that you can better support Henry’s head.

I know I’ve agreed to keep my feelings in check, but seeing how naturally you hold my son. You’d be good for Henry. We’d be stable, a perfect family. But even thinking of this is putting you in danger. Love would kill you just because I cared about you, if I ever tried to do anything...

I can’t. I’m taking enough risks as it is, doing what I can to satiate the monster in me. “I think he likes you, and that’s a real compliment because sometimes I’m not even sure he likes me.”

You rock slightly to keep him calm. “That has to be in your head.” You say it with no judgement, a slight hum in your voice as you tilt your head. “You seem really great with him.”

Is there something in the way you say that? Something in the way your eyes soften? Or is that just what I want to be seeing? Women are drawn to babies and the men that are responsible for them. Let it go, let it go, let it go. I’m not going to get as attached to you as I’ve gotten to other people. Everything about you is temporary.

“Please, if I could get him to stay as calm as you are, I’d get hours of my day back.” You laugh slightly, cradling Henry’s head. It’s just me, you, and Henry, and I can’t remember the last time things felt like this. Complete. Like the family I had always pictured. You feel it too, that’s why you haven’t looked away yet. You may not have a name for the feeling, but that’s okay.

Henry starts to mumble, interrupting our moment. You look down, rocking him a little more. “Not to kick you out of you out of your own house, but speaking of hours that you can’t get back, aren’t you running late for work?”

It’s too easy to get distracted with you. I need to focus. “Right,” I step back, towards the front door. “I’ll see you soon.”

You rub Henry’s back patiently. “We’ll be here.”

I walk out the front door, grabbing my keys from a table at the house’s entrance. I get in my car, driving away for your sake. I leave the neighborhood, driving towards town. I end up parking in an alleyway between two stores that Love won’t need to go to for baking supplies. There’s nothing illegal or particularly sketchy about what I’m doing, but I put on a dark baseball cap and slump into the driver’s seat of my car anyways. Better safe than be recognized by a neighbor and forced into a conversation about baby food allergies or preschool introduction letters. I pull out my phone, clicking on an app that takes two seconds to load. The screen shows me the camera feeds.

I’m not the biggest fan of technology, or Sherry’s blog, or...Sherry, but I do need to thank her for her blog post on the best nanny cam on the market. You’re still in the living room with Henry. I click on the camera you’re closest to, letting it become full screen.

You’re good with him. You’d make a good mother, something I wish I hadn’t noticed but can’t stop thinking about. You’re attentive, focused, even though your phone rings often. You don’t take the calls, of course, your full attention is on Henry.

Who’s calling you so much? Unfinished work in New York? A concerned friend? Maybe your mother? Or is someone waiting for you? They seem obsessive, y/n. You’re uncomfortable.

When Henry falls asleep, the phone rings again. This time you finally answer, I unmute the feed.

“...Stop calling me. I changed my number and didn’t give you my new address for a reason.” You hang up before shoving your phone angrily into the pocket of your jeans. You let out a frustrated sigh before wiping your face with your hands. Are you crying?

Whoever has been calling you has hurt you. Really hurt you. If I could get your phone, just look at your call history, I’d know who they are. And then--no, the person is far from you now. They don’t have your address, they don’t have to be taken care of right now. Those are the kind of impulsive thoughts that make Love unstable.

Henry starts crying, you wipe your check with the back of your palm one last time before going back into the nursery.

You recover like nothing happened, and you do it so well I have no choice but to wonder how long you’ve been dealing with the way the person on the phone makes you feel.

The time passes more slowly after the interruption. I can’t stop seeing the way your phone rang, again and again. The way you let it go on and on until you finally exploded. Is no one looking out for you? You’re twenty, you were in school until your career took off. Do you have an old roommate you talk to? Is that who the problem is? You’re one of the youngest people to ever be given their own New York Times column, so being able to relate to your coworkers is off the table. Your life fell apart, and you came here...to your sister, who’s caught up trying to have a baby. What about your parents?

And who is calling you so much? You’re never on your phone in the garden. I’ve seen you on the phone at the window before, and you seemed fine. Is the stranger always calling? Why? Who are they?

This isn’t about me or about my urges. I want to know you, to figure you out, but I said I wouldn’t do that. I’d barely started with Natalie and look what Love did. I’m only going to help you...but can I do that without knowing you?

The phone rings again. You ignore it, leaving it on the kitchen counter before reaching into the fridge to find a bottle for Henry, who’s hungry crying. Who is that? They won’t leave you alone, you need someone to make them. You...you need me.

Stop it. Care less. I don’t think I can leave you alone. You need someone that cares about you, and I’m trying to be that without getting attached. I need to--are they calling you again? Damn it, I need to know whose calls you’re ignoring.

I lock my phone, dropping it onto the passenger seat before taking my car off park. It’s a reasonable time to come back.

Parking the car in the driveway of the house, I’m relieved to see that Love’s not back yet. Never thought I’d say this, but thank god for Sherry and her entire army of mommy blogging monsters.

I open the front door, and it takes me no time to find you. You’re with Henry, sitting with him on the couch. And your phone is still on the kitchen counter.

“Hi.”

“Hey,” I walk over to you, taking Henry back, “I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.”

“Oh, he was great.” You were great, don’t sell yourself short. “And you were right about FItzgerald, half a chapter of The Great Gatsby, and he was out cold.” So you like the book with her, huh. Henry’s rejection aside, I think today was successful. Or at least it will be when I think of a way to get that phone number.

“Told you, he’s his father’s son.”

“Fitzgerald’s great, it’s hard not to like him...though I do think Zelda deserves more credit.”

“You got me there.” I adjust my grip on Henry. “Sometimes in a marriage, things end up like that.” Why did I say that? I have no idea. It’s way too early to test the waters on how much you care about the fact that I’m married...I shouldn’t be doing it at all.

You nod once but your expression reveals nothing. “It’s a big decision.” Sometimes it’s the wrong decision. “I’m sorry, do you mind if I use your restroom?”

“Of course--second door on your left down the hall behind you.”

You walk away, not even glancing in the direction of your phone. The moment you’re gone, I walk to the kitchen counter. Your phone is password protected, but the missed call number is on your notification screen. I pull my phone out of my pocket, taking a picture of yours. Your phone starts buzzing again, this time it’s a call from your sister. When you don’t answer, she texts you immediately.

Ashton called the house phone asking about you. Maybe you shouldn’t come back for awhile, he’s crazy enough to have been calling from the airport.

Who the fuck is Ashton?

Chapter Two - Kill Habits, Not People

Taglist: @maggiecc

#you x reader #you netflix #you tv show #joe goldberg #joe goldberg you #joe goldberg x reader #joe goldberg imagine #joe goldberg x you #love quinn #love quinn x reader #you season three #you season 3

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tinyhistory · 4 years

Note

Hey! Love your stories so much I just had to ask! Do you have any favorite drarry authors/stories? I sometimes compare the quality of other stories to ROA (oops!) because ROA is just that good. My personal favorites are ROA (of course!), the Foundations Series (saras_girl), the ordeal of being known (louisfake), denouement (the_never_was), Good to Me (And I'd Be So Good to You) (AWickedMemory), and To Hurt and Heal (cassisluna). Have you read these? Have a wonderful day! :)

Thank you, so glad you’ve enjoyed my stories! And thank you for so patiently waiting for a reply. I haven’t been online much in the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately I haven’t read any of your recs, but I’m always happy to add another fic to my to-read list.

I did a rec post a few months ago, but I’ll post an updated version now. The Skyhawke Archives appear to be down, which is crushing news. I’ve had to update a lot of the links.

So here are my favourite Drarry fanfics:

And We Are At Our Apogee (PG-13) by angelgazing

Summary: Draco wanted revenge, but it didn't work out that way.

My notes: Californian beaches, supermarkets, road trips, and a bittersweet ending.

A Reckless State of Mind (T) by Lomonaaeren

Summary: Draco is a Psyche-Diver, and his newest patient is Auror Potter, who’s been a pathological liar for over a year—and has just tried to violently end his own life.

Notes: The plot alone guarantees inclusion on this list. Probably the most creative fic I’ve ever read, and the twists and turns will keep you guessing.

Berlin, In the Year of Our Lord (PG) by Are

Summary: Harry is a green-tea addict. Draco stalks him.

Notes: Probably my all-time favourite fic, along with Blue Vase. It’s sparse and minimal and I love that writing style.

Blue Vase (M) by ivyblossom

Summary: Let’s pretend.

Notes: Draco finds an amnesiac Harry and befriends him, pretending they were once lovers. It’s pensive, short, and bittersweet.

The Boy Who Only Lived Twice (E) by lettered

Summary: Harry Potter is an Unspeakable. Draco Malfoy is the wizard who shagged him. Adventure! Intrigue! Secret identities, celebrities, spies! It's all right here, folks.

Notes: Action-heavy fics are damn hard to write, but lettered nails it. The action scenes are breakneck speed, the conversations are threaded with double meaning, and even the silences are tense.

Draco in Darkness (T) by Plumeria47.

Summary: Following an accident in his seventh year, Draco loses his eyesight.

Notes: This is one of the first fics I ever read (when it was over on FF in 2003) so it’s probably here just for nostalgia points alone. I read it when I was a kid and just thought it was a lovely golden fairytale, the best romance I’d ever read in my (very short, thus far) life. I love reading it again, even years later as an adult when I can see the tarnish on it; the things my childhood eyes didn’t notice. I don’t care. It’s my soft and fuzzy comfort fic.

The Flesh is Frail (NC-17) by wildestranger

Summary: None

Notes: Draco has injuries from curses and spells, and Harry keeps him company. Draco is angry; Harry is stubborn. They argue their way into a grudging relationship. It’s a short read and well worth your ten minutes.

Good-bye to Yesterday (NC-17) by furiosity

Summary: Draco felt ready to face even a million years in Azkaban as long as it meant that at the end of it all, he would make Potter pay.

Notes: It’s not a dark fic, but it certainly dips in and out of the shadows. If you like your romance to be sharp as a razor and bitter as black coffee, give it a read.

Hymn to Color (PG) by Lomonaaeren

Summary: Months after Draco cast a curse that took Harry’s eyesight, Harry is still trying to come to terms with it. Draco still wanted forgiveness, which was probably the problem.

Notes: Probably my very inadequate idea of “fluff”. It’s a quiet, introspective fic. Draco and Harry are well-written.

Kings among runaways (PG) by enderxenocide.

Summary: Later, the toast will be slightly overcooked, Draco will burn the eggs, and there will be another fist fight in-between the living room and the front door, but they’ll eat breakfast with second-hand plates and Draco’s great-grandmother’s silverware.

Notes: Dreamy descriptions, abstract scenes, and the characters are lovingly delineated. Beautiful writing.

On Broken Glass (PG-13) by coffeejunkii

Summary: After the final battle, Draco is holding the shards that are left of his and Harry’s life.

Notes: Established relationship. Harry’s forgetful and seems to suffer both short-term and long-term memory loss; Draco stays by his side through six years of post-war amnesia. Very short, just a tiny ficlet. There’s sequels (in bite-size pieces) but I prefer to read the first ficlet and leave it there.

Paper Dolls (M) by cupiscent

Summary: In the final year of the War, Draco gets a letter, makes a choice and pays the price.

Notes: Short, succinct, and packs a punch. No character deaths, in case the summary has you feeling nervous.

Portrait (PG-13) by Silent Blast

Summary: None.

Notes: Dorian Grey, but Drarry. Of course it’s going to be good.

Shattered (NC-17) by femmequixotic

Summary: One damned accident involving one too-lucky curse, and suddenly you'd think he was five again, with their Harry, be carefuls and their quick Levitating charms ready the instant the potion gives way and his rebelling hands lose hold of whatever's in their grasp.

Notes: Draco’s an artist. Harry’s intrigued by his sculptures and paintings.

Snatch (PG-13) by didntyoupotter

Summary: Harry is comatose, Hermione and Ron aren’t much help, and Draco isn’t sure about anything anymore.

Notes: The opening scene fools you into thinking this will be a light read with a streak of good humour. Don’t fall for it. By the third act, you’ll be hanging onto every word and feeling a lot of emotions. Also, back in the day, this was one of the Draco/Harry fics. Everyone knew of it. Pay your respects to your fandom history and read this beloved classic.

The Stages of Acceptance (T) by Lomonaaeren.

Summary: Harry, already happily married to Ginny, receives the news that he's Draco's mate. Law and custom don't give him the option of ignoring the news. The stages of his reaction, one by one.

Notes: This is not a romance, and I love that the author just casually chucks all the Veela tropes in the bin and says “nope”. In Lomonaaeren’s own words, this fic is more practical than romantic. Harry is unfamiliar with the Veela concepts and hates the very idea of being “shackled” to someone; he rejects Draco at once. Draco is miserable and lonely. They do eventually come to understand each other better, but it’s a huge struggle with lots of setbacks. The general air of pessimism and misery does make the small glimpses of compassion and empathy feel so well-earned. I love a fic that rations out its happiness.

The Stately Homes of Wiltshire (E) by waspabi

Summary: Malfoy Manor has mould, dry rot and an infestation of unusually historical poltergeists. Harry Potter is on the case.

Notes: This one needs no introduction. The writing is polished, the characterisation perfect, and the dialogue is fun. I love the humour woven throughout it.

Then Comes a Mist and a Weeping Rain (E) by faithwood.

Summary: It always rains for Draco Malfoy. Metaphorically. And literally. Ever since he had accidentally Conjured a cloud. A cloud that's ever so cross.

Notes: Another one that most of us know. It’s a lighthearted and fun read.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (M) by novembersnow

Summary: In the war-torn years after Hogwarts, one man has no knowledge of his yesterdays.

Notes: Another classic back in the feverish heyday of the Harry Potter fandom, when books were still being released and everyone had worked themselves up into a shipping frenzy. And no wonder this fic was an instant hit. Draco has lost all his memories and Harry’s investigating as an Auror, but the longer you read, the more you start questioning everything. Good twists and turns that lead to a tender ending.

Turn by Saras_Girl

Summary: One good turn always deserves another. Apparently.

Notes: An inevitable inclusion on any favourites list. I think my favourite thing about it is the characterisation. Everyone is so well-rounded; the characters are brought to life and feel like old friends. All their habits, styles, mannerisms, even the way they walk or talk. While I love everyone in this fic, I have to admit that Blaise is just amazing. Of all the thousands of Blaises imagined by fanfic writers, I love this one the best. “Old bean” indeed.

Under the Ivy (PG-13) by coffeejunkii

Summary: It is impressive how much you can learn about someone by simply sharing a few rooms. They don’t spend time together, not really, but Harry still knows that Malfoy prefers raspberry jam over strawberry, that he hums along to the Wireless when he thinks no one is around, and that his leg is bothering him more than usual when the temperatures drop below freezing.

Notes: Another old, old favourite of mine. It’s like snuggling into a soft blanket. Remus owns a cottage and Harry moves in after the war. Later, Remus lets a room to Draco, who is an outcast after the war and has limited housing options. Harry isn’t happy at first with the new lodger, but he eventually warms up to Draco. A slow and gentle romance.

Vale Sanare (M) by rurounihime

Summary: Draco’s world gains a new component, just when he thought he’d sorted everything out.

Notes: London nightclubs, one-night-stands, loud music and lonely nights. Draco has seizures due to a curse from the war, and the seizures have led to a fear of intimacy. Short and sweet.

The Way Down (T) by lettered

Summary: Malfoy’s all, “Come out of there,” the way you say to a cat who is badly behaved. And Harry’s all like, “No, what, I’m a hermit! And I have a chest-monster! And I am crazy magically powerful!” and Malfoy’s all, “We all have problems, bub.” (thoughtfully) “You are crazy though. I’ll give you that.”

Notes: I just adore this fic. The fic starts well-grounded, giving you a solid backstory and matter-of-fact context, but as it goes on, it slowly unravels into dreamy scenes, lush settings, and repeated motifs. It’s just such a beautiful story.

When Love beckons to you, follow him (PG-13) by megyal

Summary: Draco wakes up, lost, somewhere in a forest. He has no idea where he is or how he got there. As he is blundering around trying to find his way home, he hears Harry's voice in his head, telling him what to do.

Notes: I generally like my fics to be bittersweet or with a bit of heartache — but this fic is just a little cloud of softness. If you need something light and lovely without being syrupy-sweet, this is a good choice!

The World of the Living (M) by fourth_rose

Summary: A traumatised war hero and a convicted criminal under the roof of an eccentric journalist make for a rather odd ensemble, but Luna has never had a problem with oddities as long as they make sense.

Notes: The story is told from Luna’s perspective, which gives everything a lovely dreamy quality. She takes in a couple of strays after the war — first Harry, who is avoiding his other friends and has quit his Auror job — and then she offers a room to Draco right after his trial. Draco is rude, angry, and ungrateful; Harry is churlish, withdrawn, and moody. Luna doesn’t seem to mind in the slightest, and over the course of the next few months, her house guests slowly warm up to each other.

Voices From the Fog (E) by noeon

Summary: After years of running away, Harry crosses paths with an all-too familiar face and follows him to Amsterdam.

Notes: Harry drifts across Europe, trying to forget the war. He ends up in a woodworking shop in Amsterdam, alongside a moody Draco. Atmospheric settings and solid characterisation.

#draco/harry fanfic #drarry #drarry fic recs #drarry fic #answered asks

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impalementation · 3 years

Text

spike, angel, buffy & romanticism: interlude [1/2]

part 1: “When you kiss me I want to die”: Angel and the high school seasons

part 2: “Love isn’t brains, children”: Enter Spike as the id

part 3: “Something effulgent”: Season five and the construction of Spike the romantic

part 4: “But I can’t fool myself. Or Spike, for some reason.”: Buffy and Spike as a blended self

part 5: “Everything used to be so clear”: Season six and the agony of the real

“This is real, here”: On the word “real”

Consider two of the show’s most recurring motifs: the word “real”, and the dual imagery of fire and water. I see these motifs mentioned most often in the context of the Spike and Buffy arc, and they are indeed crucial to it, and I’ll eventually get to the how’s and why’s of that. But that said, they are not motifs exclusive to that arc. In fact, in order to explain what fire, water and “real” mean in the context of Buffy and Spike’s characters and relationship--and by extension, how they connect to romanticism--it’s also necessary to explore the show’s whole symbolic infrastructure around them. So that’s what we’re going to do.

I call this section an interlude because it’s more of a clipshow than a standard argument. I’m hoping that these examples will provide context for the analysis in the final section, but while I think this section is worth reading, it’s also possible to skip to the next one (when it ends up getting posted). Some of these examples have already been discussed, some haven’t. Some I’ve almost definitely forgotten. But I’ve done my best to be as comprehensive as possible.

First, “real.”

In the first four seasons, I don’t know that the exact word “real” is used in a directed enough way that it could quite yet be called a motif. But several patterns in how the concept of realness is used do emerge, and will inform the last three seasons, when “real” becomes an unambiguous motif.

First there’s the idea of a person’s “real” self. In “Angel” Darla talks about Angel suppressing his “real” nature, or in “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” Cordelia talks about people not “really” knowing her, in a parallel of the way that people don’t “really” know Buffy. In “Dead Man’s Party” Buffy confronts her mother for throwing her out, saying: “You found out who I really was, and you couldn't deal.” Multiple times in season three, Faith claims that the “reality” of people is selfishness and deception. In “Beauty and the Beasts” she says: “It's not cynical. I mean, it's realistic. Every guy from...Manimal down to Mr. I-Love-The-English-Patient has a beast in him. And I don't care how sensitive they act.” And in “Consequences” she says: “It doesn't matter what kind of vibe you get off a person. 'Cause nine times out of ten, the face they're showing you is not the real one.” It cannot be emphasized enough that one of the big Buffy-specific pieces of vampire lore is that vampires have grotesque hidden faces. It’s clearly an important metaphor to the show, one that’s echoed in its many two-faced characters, whether that’s Malcolm, Ms. French and Angel in season one, or Giles, Oz, Ford, Jenny, Ted, and Angelus in season two. Or the demons who get their faces pulled off in “Anne” and “Living Conditions.” Or the abusive boyfriend in “Beauty and the Beasts.” Or Faith, who goes bad. Or the Mayor, who acts normal in public but has an agenda underneath. Each time, there’s a question of which face is someone’s “real” one, or how an alternate face fits in with who the character “really” is.

In addition, the first four seasons feature many plots in which a character has their perceptions altered or becomes some false version of themself. First there’s the (again) Buffy-specific vampire lore that when someone becomes a vampire, something about their self is lost, nebulously called the “soul.” In “Witch” a mom steals her daughter’s identity, in “The Pack” Xander becomes a hyena, in “Nightmares” Buffy becomes a vampire, and in “Halloween” the characters become their costumes. In “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” all the women think they’re in love with Xander. In “I Only Have Eyes For You” ghosts hijack people’s bodies. In season three, we get alter-egos like Buffy as Anne in “Anne”, Faith as a doppelgänger figure, the parents as kids in “Band Candy” or vampire Willow and the other Wishverse characters. Season four in particular is brimming with identity confusion, alteration, and theft. Buffy feels like she isn’t herself in “The Freshmen”, gets her soul sucked in “Living Conditions”, and becomes a cave person in “Beer Bad.” In “Wild at Heart” Oz’s werewolf side overcomes his human side. In “The Initiative” we find out that Riley has a secret identity just like Buffy, and that Spike has had a chunk of his identity stolen by being chipped. In “Something Blue” a spell makes Buffy and Spike think they’re in love. In “Hush” the villains steal everyone’s voices. In “Doomed” Spike is forced to abandon his bad-guy costume and wear Xander’s clothes instead. He also attempts to hide his identity from Riley just like Buffy did. In “A New Man” Giles gets turned into a monster, and tries to tell himself that his monstrous instincts aren’t who he really is. In the Faith two-parter, Faith literally steals Buffy’s body and life.* In “Superstar” it’s Jonathan’s turn to steal Buffy’s identity, in addition to magicking everyone’s minds into seeing him differently. In “Where the Wild Things Are” characters are once again possessed. In “New Moon Rising” Willow acknowledges her feelings for Tara, no longer suppressing that part of her identity. Finally, the Initiative arc as a whole features villains that want to scientifically alter people and demons without their consent, reprogramming personalities and grafting pieces of identity together. Also in general, the characters find themselves at a loss throughout the season identity-wise, unsure of who they want to be. The fact that season four finishes on a character-piece episode highlights the centrality of identity to the season’s themes. It ends with the First Slayer informing Buffy that her identity remains not fully known: “You think you know what’s to come...what you are. You haven’t even begun.”

*(As an aside, I find it interesting that in “A New Man” Buffy and Spike are the only ones who are able to recognize Giles despite his transformation. Also that in “Who Are You?” Tara can recognize Buffy being wrong and that in that episode and “New Moon Rising” Faith and Spike can recognize Willow’s sexuality. Buffy and Spike navigate humanity and monstrousness in such a way that it fits that they’d be able to recognize Giles through his monstrous exterior. While Faith and Spike’s connections to repressed desire makes it understandable that they’d recognize Willow’s. Tara’s connection to Willow’s “true” self also makes it understandable that she’d recognize Buffy’s. In any case, these examples reflect ideas around recognition being an important element of navigating split identity.)

Second, there’s the idea of being a “real” person, often contrasted with the idea of being a “thing.” “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” features a character that is so ignored she becomes invisible, and emphasizes Angel’s lack of reflection, and the way that this makes him less real (“Looking in the mirror every day and seeing nothing there...it’s an overrated pleasure.”). In “Prophecy Girl”, when Xander is trying to get Angel to help him, he tells him that Buffy thinks that he’s a “real person”--in contrast to the nothingness of vampirism and Angel’s personal disengagement from the world. In “Halloween” Buffy thinks she needs to be a fake version of herself to appeal to Angel, and says that she “just wanted to be a real girl for once.” On the other hand, when Kendra shows up, Buffy tries to claim that she and not Kendra is the “real” Slayer. In “Lie to Me”, Drusilla describes herself as “not a person”, while by contrast in “The Dark Age” Buffy tells Giles: “I'm so used to you being a grownup, and then I find out that you're a person.” In “Ted”, Ted mocks Buffy by saying that she can’t slay him because he’s “real”, and Buffy is devastated when she thinks she’s killed him, saying: “He was a person, and I killed him.” In “Phases” she’s disgusted by the werewolf hunter: “It doesn't bother you that a werewolf is a person twenty-eight days out of the month?” She’ll express similar disgust towards Riley’s dismissal of Oz’s personhood in “New Moon Rising” and general “bigotry” towards the supernatural. In “Killed By Death” Buffy describes herself as a “real hero” who fights “real monsters.” In “Becoming, Part 1”, Drusilla cries that she does not want to be an “evil thing”, while Whistler tries to persuade Angel to join the cause by telling him: “You can become an even more useless rodent than you already are, or you can become someone. A person. Someone to be counted.” But he also warns Angel that the more he lives in the world, the more apart from it he’ll realize he “really” is. In “Anne” the hell dimension demons try to break down people’s selfhood until they think they’re “no one.” In “Homecoming”, like in “Halloween”, Buffy is anxious about how disconnected she is from being a real girl. She misses her yearbook picture, the record of her personhood. When her teacher doesn’t remember her, she says: “I’m like a non-person. Am I invisible?” She wants to be Homecoming queen so that she can say: “I was there. I went to high school, I had friends, and...for one moment, I got to live in the world.” In “Lovers Walk”, Spike describes himself as “nothing” without Dru. In “Amends”, Angels asks if he’s “a thing worth saving.” In the classroom discussion of Othello in “Earshot”, Buffy describes Iago as “not really a person. He's uh, the dark half of Othello himself,” describing Faith by proxy. This aspect of Faith will climax in “Who Are You?” when she describes herself as “nothing” as she pummels Buffy in lieu of herself.

Next, there’s the idea of “real” love. In “Reptile Boy”, Angel warns Buffy that their attraction “isn't some fairy tale.” In “Innocence” Angel mocks Buffy by claiming that he had to pretend to love her. In the same episode, Oz turns down Willow’s advance because he thinks she just wants to make Xander jealous. In “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” women try to insist that what they feel for Xander is real (“What we have is real”), and that they finally “really see” him. Meanwhile Xander turns Buffy down, saying “this isn’t real to you.” (Also: Drusilla tells Angel she’s “finally found a real man” in Xander.) In “Homecoming” Cordelia hopes to find out “if it’s real” between her and Xander. When Angel breaks up with Buffy in “The Prom” he says that Buffy needs a “real relationship, instead of this-this freak show.” In “The Harsh Light of Day” the debate about whether the Gem is “real” is arguably also about whether people’s romantic intentions are real. In “Something Blue” Buffy muses that “part of [her] believes that real love and passion have to go hand in hand with pain and fighting.” Xander says that “Angel's an okay guy” unless “you give him even one second of pure, real pleasure.” The many instances of sexual and romantic deception and coercion are also relevant to this subject. You have things like the predatory Ms. French in “Teacher’s Pet”, the boys building a girlfriend in “Some Assembly Required”, Parker hiding his intentions in “The Harsh Light of Day”, Faith sleeping with Riley in Buffy’s body, or the various attempted love spells. For all the show’s flaws when it came to acknowledging how nonconsensual some of these moments were, it’s also clear that they were not meant to be seen positively. Rather, they all seem to have been treated as unreal perversions of love.

Finally, there’s the idea of the “real world.” The show alters reality multiple times in the first four seasons: “Nightmares”, “The Wish”, “Fear, Itself”, “Superstar.” It also sets up a contrast between the supernatural world and the people aware of it, and the “regular” world that lives in ignorance (“Everything you've ever dreaded was under your bed, but told yourself couldn't be by the light of day. They're all real!”). Both worlds are treated as more real in different ways. The supernatural world is “real” in the sense of being the unacknowledged unknown, while the regular world is “real” in the sense of the everyday. If you went a bit more meta, you might say that the supernatural is the realm of metaphor, while the regular world is the things the metaphors refer to. Symbol versus referent. Or to make things Jungian, the unconscious versus the conscious. There’s also the idea of the “real world” as the world after high school (“I mean, when in the real world am I ever gonna need chemistry or history or math or the English language?”). In “Prophecy Girl” Giles tries to go fight the Master on Buffy’s behalf, saying: “I-I've waded around in these old books for so long, I've forgotten what the real world is like. I-it's time I found out.” Similarly in season four, a colonel disparages the Scoobies as a “band of freaks” and warns Riley: “They're anarchists, Finn. Too backwards for the real world.”

All of these usages of realness are ultimately intertwined. In “Halloween”, for example, Drusilla asks Spike “Do you love my insides? The parts you can’t see?”--a question that connects the episode’s ideas around inner and outer identity to the realness of love. In order to love, both people need to know who they are, and who they’re loving, and part of knowing who one is is also knowing the world and having a relationship to it. In order to grow up, one must be able to navigate reality in all its forms: literal and metaphorical, conscious and unconscious, personal and societal.

Now let’s get into “real” as it manifests in the last three seasons.

“Buffy vs Dracula” opens the season with Dracula using the same lines the First Slayer used in “Restless”: “You think you know...what you are. What's to come. You haven't even begun.” In both cases, it’s a figure of Buffy’s violent, isolationist side saying that it knows Buffy’s identity. Dracula adds a sexual overtone to it too. In other words, the season opens with the idea of Buffy reckoning with the shadow side of her Self, and connects her shadow to a sexualized vampire figure, as well as to romantic myth. “Real Me” starts the “real” motif, though. Dawn says that nobody knows the “real” her, which takes on significance when you think of Dawn as Buffy’s girl or human side. She’s dismissive of Buffy’s ability to do “backflips and stuff” since it’s not “a crucial job skill in the real world.” Meanwhile Harmony, who in the context of the episode one could read as a figure of Buffy’s vampire or shadow side, tries to tell Spike that “I’ve found the real me...and I like her.” In other words, both Buffy’s human and vampiric halves express a desire for realness. Moreover, Buffy has to rescue her girl half from her vampire half--but who notably, “sucks” at being bad. “The Replacement” reinforces these ideas around identity, reality and duality. Xander gets split in two by a device intended to split Buffy into her human and Slayer halves, and to kill her by killing her weak, human half. When Riley asks which Xander is “the real one” though, Giles replies that: “They're both real. They're both Xander. Neither one of them is evil. There's nothing in either of them that our Xander doesn't already possess.” The implication being that the same ultimately goes for Buffy. (Tellingly in “Intervention”, when Xander tries to say that Buffy and the bot are “both Buffy”, Buffy instantly disagrees. Buffy’s human and Slayer halves may both be Buffy, but the robot is not. The robot is the fakeness that Buffy, Spike and others are tempted by.). Keep all this context in mind for Spike’s arc, and how it ultimately connects to Buffy’s. In the season that Spike becomes both a love interest and the more ongoing avatar of Buffy’s shadow side, the show paints him--like Harmony in “Real Me”--as a vampire who is fairly incompetent at badness, and who increasingly expresses a desire for realness. Point being: season five establishes the idea of Buffy not only “reckoning” with her shadow, but reckoning with it in the aim of integrating it into her total (“real”) sense of herself. Bridging her human and Slayer, or “real” and romantic duality.

Meanwhile, Dawn’s (and the other characters’) ongoing anxiety over her realness can be read as Buffy’s anxiety over how human she really is. The word “real” shows up over and over in the context of Dawn. In “Blood Ties” Dawn despairs “Am I real? Am I anything?” Buffy says “[Dawn] probably feels like she can say or do anything right now. She's not real. We're not her family, we don't even know what she is.” Tara wonders “How can [Dawn] not be real?” to which Willow replies: “She’s real. She’s just, kinda...new.” Look at this conversation from “Listening to Fear”, and the usages of “thing”, “wrong”, and “real” in the context of both season six and the person/thing dichotomy established in earlier seasons:

DAWN: [Mom] called me a thing. 

BUFFY: She loves you. Okay? She's not herself. I told you what the doctor said about the tumor. 

DAWN: No, not just Mom. People. They keep saying weird stuff about me. 

BUFFY: Are you talking about the man in the hospital?

 DAWN: He called me a thing too. And there was another one. Weird guy outside the magic shop. He said I didn't belong. He said I wasn't real. Why does everybody keep doing that? What's wrong with me? 

BUFFY: Nothing. It's not you. I think there's something that happens in people's brains when there's something wrong. It's- it's like a short-circuit...and it makes them feel like nothing's real except for them. That's all it is.

Also look at this conversation between Dawn and Ben in the context of other characters calling themselves “nothing.”

BEN: Is there anybody I can call? Your sister? 

DAWN: I don't have a sister.

 BEN: Oh. You two have a fight? It's okay, I know how that goes. I got a sister too. They can be a real pain sometimes. I tell you, there've been a lot of nights I wish she didn't exist either. 

DAWN: It's not Buffy. It's me. I'm the one that doesn't exist. (sighs) 

BEN: Look, I know it can feel that way sometimes, but when you're older- 

DAWN: No, you don't understand. It's not real. None of this. (indicating her body) They made it.

 BEN: Dawn-

 DAWN: I'm nothing! I'm just a thing the monks made so Glory couldn't find me. I'm not real.

In other words, in a season in which Buffy is repeatedly afraid that being the Slayer is “turning [her] into stone”, her metaphorical humanity (or girlhood, or innocence) becomes afraid that it does not exist.

It’s also notable that Dawn is introduced in the season in which “real” life things like cancer and death become a driving force of the emotional plot. Buffy becomes vulnerable via Dawn--ie, her humanity. In “Shadow”, the episode that reveals that Joyce has cancer, Glory attacks Buffy and mocks her by saying: “There! That feels more real, don’t you think?” It’s a line that at once echoes Buffy feeling like she’s been attacked by realness, as well as a line that treats Buffy’s fighting like a performance she’s failing to pull off (ie, she is failing at both real life and at romantic performance, shades of season six). After Joyce’s death, Buffy says that her “Mom was the strong one in real life.” When Buffy has to drop out of school, Xander tells her “welcome to the real world”--which Ben will echo when he tries to cripple Glory with his humanity: “Welcome to the world.” And when Dawn stops keeping up with her schoolwork, Buffy tries to make her understand that “this is for real.” The crisis of the season involves the threat of “the walls separating realities” crumbling and bleeding together, echoing the way that the line between real, non-metaphorical life, and Buffy’s supernatural life--or put another way, between adulthood and childhood (or to connect to the Jungian reading, between the conscious and unconscious)--has begun to collapse.

“Real” of course, also shows up repeatedly in the context of love. When Riley confesses that he’s been seeing vampire prostitutes, he says that he knows what they offered “wasn’t real”, but that their hunger for him was. And the Initiative offers him his job back, saying it’s “the real deal”--in contrast to how Riley perceives Buffy’s feelings for him. Ie, not the real deal. Riley also threatens Spike with the language of realness, attacking him with a fake stake (“Looks real, doesn’t it?”), but promising to “do this for real” and “kill you for real” if he makes a move on Buffy*. “I Was Made to Love You” centers on a fake girlfriend. Anya wonders “Why would anyone do that if they could have a real live person?” to which Willow replies, “Maybe he couldn't. Find a real person.”  Outside of romantic love, the season also addresses the idea of real familial love and bonds. In “Intervention” Buffy tries to tell Dawn she loves her: “I love you. I really love you.” Giles calls Buffy Dawn’s “real family” while Glory tries to tell Dawn that her hell dimension is Dawn’s “real home.” There’s a repeated question of whether Dawn is “really” Buffy’s sister, because how could Buffy love someone who isn’t?

*(An interesting interaction if you read Riley as Buffy’s normativity and Spike as Buffy’s shadow. Buffy’s normativity is suspicious of her shadow and suggests that realness would destroy it. But it’s actually Buffy’s normativity--Riley--that falls apart under the pressures of both realism--Joyce’s illness--and shadowy romanticism--Riley going to vampires. Buffy might want a “stable” love, but her still-unresolved inner conflict between realism and romanticism makes this impossible. Or at least, that’s one way one could interpret things.)

And then there’s Spike. In “Crush”, Spike parallels Buffy’s behavior in “Halloween” when he dresses up like Riley--ie a real or normal man--to appeal to Buffy. Just like Buffy dressed up as a cliche hyperfeminine woman to appeal to Angel. Spike insists that what he and Buffy have is “not pretty but it’s real” and that “this is real, here”, while Xander says that Spike isn’t to be taken seriously because what he feels is “not real”. The climax of the episode involves Spike attempting to prove the reality of his feelings in the face of Buffy’s claims that what he feels is “not love.” Then in “Intervention” Spike of course orders up a fake Buffy. At first he says that “some say [a bot] is better than the real thing”, but at the end Buffy says, disappointed, that the bot “wasn’t even real.” However, his sacrifice for Dawn “was real.” In general, it’s notable how often fakeouts are a feature of the Spike and Buffy arc, whether that’s the bespelled love in “Something Blue”, Faith teasing Spike in “Who Are You?”, the dream in “Out of My Mind”, Buffy pretending to be the bot in “Intervention” or all of the many cases in which a character asks if Spike is Buffy’s boyfriend. The idea of them having feelings for each other (and in particular, Buffy having feelings for Spike) is treated as a joke, a tease, and then eventually a genuine question. Buffy and Spike could never happen in the real world...or could it?

Notice how over and over in season five, it’s Spike and Dawn that have their realness questioned in different ways. In Dawn’s case, her “realness” is precarious in the sense that it’s unclear whether she should be treated (loved) like a real person, given her mystical origins. But also in the sense that she is physically vulnerable and could easily die. Meanwhile Spike’s realness is uncertain in the sense that it’s unclear whether or not he can feel or behave like a “real” person, given his soulless status. In other words, just like Buffy with her Slayerness, the idea that either Spike or Dawn might not be “real” is connected to the fact that they are supernatural. Moreover, Dawn and Spike are both repeatedly portrayed as outsiders because of their precarious realness. Dawn is excluded from information, and is unsure whether Buffy and Joyce will accept her. Spike too is excluded from information, and unsure whether Buffy will accept him into her life. Multiple times, Spike and Dawn have conversations alone together outside of Buffy’s house (“Blood Ties”, “Crush”, “Forever”, “Tough Love”, etc), aligning them as companions in outsiderness. Taken together, Spike and Dawn reflect the two sides of Buffy’s dual nature, and her struggle to see them both as truly part of her. In turn, it’s significant that Buffy ends up inviting both into her life. Dawn earlier in the season, and Spike in “The Gift.” Both sides of Buffy’s nature prove themselves willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.*

*(An arc, incidentally, that is foreshadowed early on by Tara’s story in “Family”. Tara is torn between her--apparent--human and demonic halves and considers herself an outsider, despite her desire to help. But she is eventually welcomed into Buffy’s circle, in a scene that Dawn and Spike are both present for and actively participate in.)

In general, the world “real” just infuses season five, with more examples than I can even address. Things like Tara inventing constellations because “the real ones never made sense to [her]”, or Anya wanting to play the game of Life with “real money”, or Buffy saying that going to a “real hospital” in “Fool For Love” would get her “real mom, real freaked out.” It’s a word that’s always popping up like a low-level anxiety. Realness is coming, and the characters cannot stop it.

In a fulfillment of that prophecy, in season six Buffy’s (and other characters’) anxiety over her realness is no longer metaphorically externalized in characters like Angel, Dawn or Faith, but becomes intensely located within herself, and mirrored in Spike. Gone are the scenes in which Buffy easily reassures Dawn that she is real and not a thing. Instead, she begins to apply words like “thing”, “nothing”, and “real” directly to herself, or to Spike as thinly-veiled projection. The realness of Buffy becomes a genuinely pressing question, compared to previous seasons when it was never really in doubt. So the season opens with the Buffybot playing Buffy’s role. The characters lament that “the only really real Buffy is really Buffy,” which the Buffybot chirpily parrots as a knock-knock joke (a type of joke, notably, about identity), devoid of the solemnity of the original sentiment: “'If we want her to be exactly she'll never be exactly I know the only really real Buffy is really Buffy and she's gone' who?” When Buffy does come back, Dawn and other characters repeatedly ask if it’s “really” her and if she’s “really” there. In “Life Serial”, Buffy attends a seminar about the “Social Construction of Reality” (the word “Reality” is written on the blackboard), that introduces the question of whether identity is something externally defined or individually created. She spends the episode having her perceptions messed with by the Trio, and trying to figure out who she is and wants to be. The Trio gloats that they’re “really supervillains now” because they got one up on Buffy. In “All the Way” there’s various talk of the costumes not actually being accurate to reality (“You’re not a real pirate!”, “If I see one more idiot that thinks witches are all hairy moles and rotted teeth”), a reminder of the idea of identity performance. Dawn is hurt because she thought the vampire “really liked [her].” He says that he does, and moves to bite her--a dynamic that foreshadows the simultaneous sincerity and violence of the Spike and Buffy dynamic. In “Once More, With Feeling” Buffy sings that “nothing here is real, nothing here is right” and that she “can’t even see / if this is really me.” Sweet sings to Dawn that he’ll “make it real, girl.” Spike observes that Buffy talks to him because “whisper in a dead man’s ear / it doesn’t make it real”, and says about one of Sweet’s puppets: “Someday he’ll be a real boy.” Repeatedly, Buffy describes her identity as a role she is trying to fulfill, rather than something she connects with. And of course before she and Spike kiss, Buffy sings that “this isn’t real / but I just wanna feel.”

In “Tabula Rasa”, Spike tries to tell Buffy that “I know what kind of girl you really are” but fades out with a “...don’t I?” Anya wonders if Giles is leaving “for real this time?” After the characters lose their memories, Tara gets excited because “this is a magic shop, a real magic shop.” Similarly Buffy says: “Monsters are real. Did we know that?” (Remember Buffy telling the boy in “Killed By Death” about her being a “real hero” who fights “real monsters”). In “Wrecked” a stoned Willow dismisses Dawn’s fear of the demon chasing them: “Oh it’s okay, he’s not real.” To which Dawn says, scared: “Seems real! Very! Real!” In “Doublemeat Palace”, Anya says that Xander lectures her about “how a real human would behave.” In “Dead Things” Dawn says that Janice’s mom is going to “teach me how to make real tortillas”, in contrast to the lack of nourishment Buffy provides. Spike asks what Buffy’s friends would think of her if they knew who she “really” was. Dawn snaps that Buffy isn’t “really here.” Eventually, Buffy despairs that she “can’t feel anything real” while attacking Spike as a proxy for attacking herself. In “Older and Far Away”, Buffy tries to promise Dawn that they’ll “sit down and have a real dinner” (shades of those “real tortillas”). In “As You Were”, Sam is excited about “patrolling with the real, live Slayer”--a pointed phrase to apply to a Buffy who has repeatedly asserted that she is neither real nor alive. In “Hell’s Bells” Anya tries to stop Xander from being persuaded by the vision of their future: “But it wa - it wasn't real. What he showed you, it wasn't real.” To which Xander replies: “I know it wasn't real. But it could be.” In “Normal Again”, the characters of the two competing realities each claim that the other world isn’t real (“No, none of that’s real, none of it. You’re in a mental institution.”). Dawn and Joyce, both figures of Buffy’s family, make the most appeals to Buffy, asserting their realness and the fakeness of the other world. Spike remarks: “So, she's having the wiggins, is she? Thinks none of us are real. Bloody self-centered, if you ask me.”

In “Entropy”, Anya gets annoyed that Xander readily agrees to the curses she can’t inflict on him: “Those are metaphor intestines! You're not in any real pain! What's wrong with me?” Spike insists that what he feels for Buffy is “real” to which she replies “I think it is. For you.” Spike muses that despite their unnatural existence, he and Anya are the “only ones who are really alive.” Multiple times, Buffy is accused of not knowing who Spike “really is.” In “Seeing Red”, Dawn asks if Spike “really” loves Buffy, and Spike admits to Clem that he and Buffy were “never together. Not really. She’d never lower herself that far.” Andrew explains that the Trio “can't Siegfried and Roy” the barrier protecting the orbs they’re after, “It's gotta be the real deal.” During their fight, Warren mocks Buffy: “What's the matter baby? You never fight a real man before? ” In “Villains”, Andrew cries that Warren was “just using” him and “never really loved--” (him), a farcical echo of Spike and Buffy. Jonathan chastises Andrew that “this is real life.” Warren postures that he needs “a real gang, you know, not a--not a couple of wannabes. ” Just before she kills him, Willow taunts Warren with one of his bullets: “Wanna know what a bullet feels like, Warren? A real one? It's not like in the comics. ” Anya warns a security guard regarding the danger Willow poses: “These things are real. They're dangerous. And they're coming.” In “Two to Go”, Buffy and Willow debate about what a Slayer “really” is. Finally in “Grave” Buffy tells Giles that for a long time after her resurrection she felt like she wasn’t “really here”, but that that feeling has gone away.

In other words, season six realizes the full threat of realness that season five began. It threatens the idea of Buffy being overwhelmed by her shadow, i.e. the mystical, violent half of her that seems antithetical to realness. The part of her that, like a vampire, she thinks cannot grow or change or feel. That cannot have real emotions or live in the real world. But as discussed in the previous post on season six, Buffy--and Spike, as a mirror of her--eventually accepts that realness, despite the pain of it. Buffy no longer wants to protect Dawn, her humanity, from the real world, she wants to show it to her. Meanwhile Spike, her shadow, proves itself capable of change after all, committing to reality by getting a soul.

While it might seem that the way Spike and Dawn are used in the resolution of season six is an unnecessary rehash of the resolution of season five, in fact I think the way the two seasons deal with the idea of accepting the “real world” and “real identity” are quite different. Season five, to me, involves a passive kind of acceptance of reality. Repeatedly, we see characters helpless in the face of things they can’t control--love, death, pain, selfhood. It challenges characters to behave gracefully in the face of difficult, even impossible choices. If season five is a conclusion of something, it is perhaps a conclusion of the idea of “You have a choice. You don’t have a good choice, but you have a choice” that has defined the show from the beginning. Buffy finishes season five having accepted both her own nature and the unfair nature of the world, and this is what allows her to sacrifice herself and move on to the adult world. By contrast, season six demands that the characters take an active role in the creation of their reality and identity. And it is this demand that frightens them all so much, and tempts them to stagnate, regress, give up. Buffy no longer has authorities either to guide her or to struggle against, nor supernatural battles passively thrust upon her. She is alone with her own power, and must overcome her fear of using that power in the course of creating her own life.

Season seven will then take this idea of having an active relationship to reality to another level, by introducing the idea not just of creating identity, but altering the world itself.

Season seven opens with Buffy teaching Dawn to fight, lecturing her with the lesson from the last season: “It's real. It's the only lesson, Dawn. It's always real.” Dawn will repeat the sentiment later in the episode to a disbelieving friend: “Lesson one: it’s always real.” When Spike appears in the basement Buffy asks “Are you real?” and he begins to laugh hysterically. In “Beneath You”, a girl vents to Anya: “God, my boyfriend's spineless, and he should just—you know, he should just be spineless for real.” To which Anya replies: “No spine. Got it. I can do that.” Trying to perform his soulless persona, Spike says to Buffy “You've had your turn, love. Leave the real violence to the demons, yeah?” In “Selfless” Anya asks Xander sadly: “What if I’m really nobody?” In “Him”, Buffy and Dawn fight about how “real” Dawn’s feelings for RJ really are:

DAWN:  It isn't a crush. It's love. I love R.J.

BUFFY : Again, since yesterday. Dawn, it's awfully fast.

DAWN: What? You're telling me I don't feel what I feel?

BUFFY:  No, of course not. I believe that you think it's real. It seems real...to you.

DAWN : You know what? Maybe I don't want advice from the Dysfunction Queen. You have no idea how I feel. You have no idea what real love is. Maybe if you did, you wouldn't make fun of me this way.

BUFFY:  Dawn, I'm not making fun of you.

DAWN:  Just go. Leave me alone.

Buffy uses the same language with Dawn that she used with Spike in “Entropy” (“I think it is. For you.”), but in a situation that echoes her quick feelings for Angel in season one. In “Conversations With Dead People” Holden realizes his and Buffy’s camaraderie will have to end in a fight to the death: “Wow, reality just shows up sometimes, doesn't it?” Later, Buffy muses to him about Spike: “And the joke is...he loved me. I mean, in his own sick, soulless way, he really did care for me. But I-I didn't want to be loved.” She tries to be real about herself, and Spike. In general, having accepted the necessity of realness by the end of season six, Buffy spends season seven trying to hold on to it, and integrate it with her life. Instead of trying to accept that she is real, Buffy knows in season seven that “it’s always real,” but struggles to know what the “real” thing is. She struggles to see through illusions and preconceptions, and tries to assert her understanding of reality. Notice how unlike in “Bewitched, etc” in season two, when Buffy is caught up in Xander’s love spell, Buffy in “Him” is able to tell Dawn that “No guy is worth your life--not ever” even without the spell being broken. She is no longer consumed by passions and illusions the way she was as a teenager, but can see through a spell.

To that end, throughout season seven, the First becomes a not-real version of various dead people. Moreover, the fact that the First cannot be touched suggests the idea of the search for the real in the face of the illusory. What is the tangible thing? In “Sleeper” Willow and Buffy talk about these aspects of the First, using the language of deception, illusion, and reality:

WILLOW: Buffy, this thing knows us. It made us think that we were talking to people we knew. Mine said it came with a message from Tara. But Dawn actually saw your Mother. This thing, it had me for a while. I mean, before it started letting loose with the pulse-pounding terror. But before that, the lies were very convincing. It just seems real.

BUFFY : Lies...

WILLOW:  I mean maybe, maybe to confuse us, to mess us up. Or maybe just to be cool.

BUFFY : Vampire I killed last night told me Spike sired him. Two nights ago.

WILLOW:  Well, that's impossible, right? So maybe it was another one. A fake-out. You got one too. It wasn't a real vamp.

BUFFY:  It dusted real enough.

But most significantly, the only “living” characters the First becomes are Spike and Buffy. So Buffy’s struggle to see through preconceptions also arguably goes for her perceptions of herself--and Spike, as usual, as a mirror of her. In “Sleeper” the First appears to Spike as both Spike and Buffy at different points, and forces Spike to behave as a false version of himself. In “Never Leave Me” Spike says that Buffy has never met “the real me.” Just before raising an ubervamp the First asks him: “Now, Spike, wanna see what a real vampire looks like?” As Buffy, the First tells Spike to “be realistic” about Buffy’s belief in him: “I don’t even believe in myself.” (The First’s insistence that Spike needs to move on also echoes Buffy’s response to Spike in “Entropy” when he told her his feelings were real.). When Buffy comes to rescue Spike, he at first insists that she is “just a figment”, but realizes it’s the real Buffy when he touches her. His realization parallels his realization in “Intervention” that the Buffy kissing him is Buffy, and his realization that the Buffy descending the stairs in “After Life” is not the bot either.

To continue the clip show: In “Showtime”, Buffy tries to tell the First appearing as her mother: “You’re not real.” She asks Giles if he’ll “ever show up for a real visit.” In the guise of one of the Potentials, the First tries to make the others feel unprepared by saying it’s “never even seen a real vampire, much less slayed one.” The girls wonder how Buffy can protect them when she couldn’t defeat an ubervamp, “and you’re the real slayer.” In “Potential”, Amanda asks Dawn about the vampire that attacked them, “Is it real? Was it really a vampire? I bet you think I’m crazy,” but Dawn believes her. After the other Potentials successfully fight off a group of vampires, Rona is excited: “It was like we knew what we were doing. For real.” When Willow transforms into Warren in “The Killer In Me”, Andrew touches her face in awe. “It’s so real,” he says, to which she replies: “I’m all too aware.” In “First Date” Buffy describes Wood as “too charming to be real.” In “Get it Done”, just before finding Chloe’s body, Buffy jokes with Dawn about whether she has any “real homework.” When transported to the Shadowmen world, Buffy tries to tell herself “I'm not really here at all. None of this is actually happening. This is like a play. Like some shadow-play. Some non-reality re-enactment hologramy--” whereupon one of the men knocks her over (Lesson one: it’s always real). In “Storyteller” Buffy notes that “here, in this school, over the hellmouth”, the way things feel “kind of starts being that way for real.” She tries to get Andrew to get real and “stop telling stories.”

In “Dirty Girls” Caleb defines Buffy by her “Strength. And the loneliness that comes with real strength.” In “Empty Places” Spike is skeptical of the mission that Giles wants to send him on, but Giles assures him that it is “bonafide, with real ramifications.” During the climactic confrontation between Buffy and the others, Faith expresses skepticism about Buffy’s plan. “ Listen, we're fighters, all of us, but you gotta give me something to fight, something real, not—” she says, to which Giles adds, “Windmills.” In “Touched”, in the aftermath of the First appearing as the Mayor to Faith, Wood says to her: “Listen, nobody wants to be alone, Faith. We all want someone who cares, to be touched that way. I mean, the First deals in figments, but that wanting is real.” Spike confirms the reality that Buffy couldn’t confirm in “Empty Places”, that something is at the vineyard. And more importantly, confirms the reality of how he sees her, and the reality of his love by extension: “I’ve seen the best and the worst of you, and I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are.” In “End of Days” the Guardian says she’s “as real as” Buffy is. In “Chosen” the First wears Buffy’s face. It taunts her by saying that none of the Potentials (“those girlies”) “will ever know real power unless” Buffy is dead. Which of course, Buffy ends up proving wrong. And finally, as the amulet begins to work its magic, Spike says, with awe: “My soul...it’s really there.”

Over and over season seven uses phrases like “real vampire” and “real strength.” Over and over, it asks if people are real. It asks if stories and propositions and feelings are real. To change the world, one must be able to see the world for what it is, to see what needs changing. One must be able to see power as something that can be creative, not just destructive. In total, Buffy finishes the season having rejected the false image of the First (“I want you to get out of my face”), having accepted the reality of her shadow and found strength in trusting it (Spike, Faith), having discovered that “real” power is about connection and generosity rather than isolation, having experienced romantic love that is based on real--both positive and negative--understanding, and smiling at the prospect of facing the real world.

The next half of this post will discuss the parallel evolution of the show’s symbolic use of fire. If “real” is about the “real” half of the realism/romanticism duality, then fire is about the romantic half.

#romanticism series #gen #s1 #s2 #s3 #s4 #s5 #s6 #s7 #buffy #spike #once again this is long #about 7400 words #hence splitting it up #have to say i don't exactly think this is my best writing #i kind crap out on proving things compared to other posts #but it was already so long and i'd only meant to post a bunch of unadorned examples in the first place #that i'm just gonna go ahead and post it #and mark it off as an interlude

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