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ursaminortarot · 3 years

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Pick-a-card Reading

I did another pick-a-card reading, this time focusing on love and romance. Also, if this is relevant to you or resonated with you at all, can you leave a comment with your astrological sign and which pile you picked? If you know your moon, rising, and venus, could you leave those as well? I have a theory I want to test.

The piles you can pick from are:

Pile 1: Hyena

Pile 2: Swan

Pile 3: Frog

Pile 4: Lion

Pile 5: Fire Ant

Pile 6: Black Egg

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Pile 1: Hyena

Wheel of Fortune, 5 of Wands, 3 of Swords reversed, Soulmates reversed, Wisdom Ace of Swords, 8 of Pentacles reversed, Father of Swords reversed, Co-create, Vision 10 of swords, 10 of Wands reversed, The Moon reversed, Go the Distance, Bond Knight of Wands reversed, 9 of Swords, The Sun reversed, Regenerate, Message Knight of Cups, 8 of Wands reversed, 6 of Swords reversed, Yin reversed, Achievement Bonus Cards: 3 of Pentacles reversed, 3 of Wands reversed, Death, 5 of Cups reversed, 6 of Swords

You haven’t had the best of luck with your past relationships. You’ve dealt with heartbreak and disappointment and that’s made you skeptical of love; and if you ever believed in soulmates, you don’t anymore. The positive to all this pain is that you’ve learned a lot about yourself and how to assert your boundaries. You’re the type of person to throw yourself into work as a distraction. Keeping yourself busy to avoid processing your emotions is something that can only work for so long. You need to focus less on work, it’s preventing you from doing the work you need to do in order to move on. You may even begin having dreams about your most recent relationship until this is done. Ending negative cycles can be a difficult and daunting task, but in this case it’s necessary. Otherwise you won’t find your peace. You are healing, it may not be progressing at the speed you want, but these things take time. You were meant to find this message: “there’s light at the end of the tunnel”. Healing isn’t linear, so don’t feel defeated after a hard day, week, month, or even a hard year. At this moment, you should focus on finding harmony within yourself.

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Pile 2: Swan

The Chariot, The Tower, Ace of Wands reversed, A leg Up, Poised, Death, Reflect 3 of Cups, Temperance reversed, The Chariot reversed, Co-create, Regeneration, Deceit 5 of Pentacles reversed, Page of Wands, Temperance reversed, Time to go, Protect Page of Wands, Two of Swords reversed, 9 of Pentacles, Why? reversed, Tick-tock reversed, Luck 4 of Cups reversed, Queen of Wands, 6 of Wands reversed, Breath, Come to the Edge, Terra, Vision

I get the feeling that you don’t have a type, or if you do it’s always changing. Sometimes you can be a little rash with love and this can get you in trouble. You’re the kind of person who will turn someone’s world upside down - and then you ghost them. You haven't always been this way. At one point you were in a serious relationship, and for some of you, possibly engaged or planning a family. This relationship didn’t end well, it was a very messy break up. I get the impression that you were likely cheated on. You end relationships so quickly, and sometimes harshly, because you would rather hurt the other person than risk being hurt again. You haven’t felt safe with a partner in a long time, but the problem here is that you don’t stick around long enough to develop the level of trust that you want to have within a relationship. What you need to do right now is spend time alone, dig deep, and really think about what it is that you want. Do you even want a relationship right now, or are you just looking to have fun? You’re not very grounded at the moment, this is a contributing factor to your restlessness. If you can, take some time to enjoy nature and find your center. If you’re the kind of person who likes to party, you’re being asked to slow down and pace yourself.

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Pile 3: Frog

[Before getting into the reading, I’m getting a distinct feeling from this pile. Either, you’ve never been in a relationship or you don’t have a lot of experience with them.]

The Moon reversed, Knight of Pentacles, The Hanged Man reversed, Building Blocks reversed, Balance The Empress, Queen of Swords reversed, Ace of Cups reversed, To Be Fair, Achievement 5 of Cups reversed, King of Wands reversed, 10 of Wands reversed, Milk and Honey, Simplicity 3 of Cups, 4 of Pentacles, The Tower reversed, Higher Power, Sol 2 of Cups, 6 of Pentacles, Daughter of Cups reversed, Never-ending story, Transformation Bonus Cards: 8 of Wands reversed, 7 of Wands reversed, Clean it up reversed

You’re very cautious or picky when it comes to relationships. There are a lot of fears present here, but we’ll handle them one at a time. There’s a fear of not finding stability or being trapped. You want everything to be fair and equal in a relationship, but this can make it difficult to ask for what you want or need. You don’t want to be too much, but you also don’t want to be giving more than you’re receiving. You hold yourself and other people to high standards, some might say that they’re impossible to meet. You know exactly what you want in a partner, and that makes you afraid of disappointment. It’s not that you need to lower your standards, but you need to realize that it’ll be difficult to find someone who meets all of your expectations. If you don’t want to wait until that person crosses your path, or if you don’t even believe that they’re real, then you’re going to need to discern what standards are a necessity and which one’s are preferences that you can go without. People like being around you, because you have the ability to put them at ease. You built up this skill and put a lot of work into it. You have this need to make sure others feel safe when they're with you. You don’t want others to feel like they can’t be themselves around you, because you know how awful that can feel. You can connect with people on a deep level very easily. This is what’s frustrating for you, because if you can bond with people so easily then why haven’t you found your person? You are an extremely lonely person, but you need to accept that things will progress at their own pace and you need to get comfortable being alone.

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Pile 4: Lion

Queen of Swords, Queen of Pentacles reversed, 2 of Pentacles reversed, Soulmates reversed, Deceit The Fool, The Page of Cups, The Fool reversed, Poised, Breath, Sleep 10 of Cups, Six of Wands reversed, The Magician reversed, Here and Now, Cycle 3 of Pentacles, High Priestess, The Chariot reversed, Not for you, Exchanging Gifts, Bond The Hermit, Justice, Daughter of Wands reversed, Go the Distance, Wisdom Bonus Cards: Ace of Swords, Ace of Swords reversed

You’re a very strong and intelligent person, but you can be cold and calculating. You’re at odds with yourself because you want to be softer. You are a hopeless romantic at heart, but you can’t bring yourself to express it. You restrain that softer, more romantic side of yourself to save face. You don’t want to look stupid, but you also want to do all the sappy, silly lovey-dovey shit. You have a very creative side to you and you could use that as a way to explore your softer side. You don’t have to share your art with anyone, but it could help shift the way people perceive you. It could make it easier to express to people that there’s more to you than the cold front you’ve been putting up. Finding balance is key. You are analytical & calculating, but you’re also romantic & nurturing, and you need to find a way to exist as both, or you’re never going to get anywhere.

You should focus less on the future. You’re so worried about having this perfect fairytale ending, that you’re just getting in your own way.

You see the world in a very unique way and you don’t think you’ll meet someone who understands how you process and think about the world around you. You have a lot of conflicting feelings right now, and that’s okay, it’s human. You can’t be perfect all of the time.

Also, you need to chill, you’re taking this way too seriously. Love, romance, and relationships are supposed to be fun. Go meditate in a forest or something, run away to the mountains, just find a way to relax. I can’t fully describe with words the extent of the uptight/tightly-wound energy I’m getting from you.

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Pile 5: Fire Ant

7 of Cups reversed, 3 of Wands, Daughter of Swords, Truth be Told reversed, Simplicity The Empress, 10 of Wands reversed, 5 of Pentacles reversed, Observer reversed, Go the Distance, Deceit 2 of Wands, Queen of Swords, The Hanged Man, 9 of Swords reversed, Soulmates reversed, Fork in the Road, Healing Queen of Cups, King of Wands reversed, Ace of Swords reversed, Building Blocks reversed, Exchanging Gifts reversed, Balance 3 of Pentacles reversed, Queen of Wands reversed, Death, 8 of Pentacles, Poised reversed, Sol

You’re juggling a lot emotionally and I feel like you cope with these feelings through art. You are highly perceptive and you have a piercing gaze that can see through everybody’s bullshit. You value truth above anything else in relationships. You see so much that it makes it difficult for you to feel. It’s not that you don’t have feelings, it’s that you break everything down to the smallest detail and your feelings stop being feelings and become observations and data. You’ve become overly analytical and it’s getting in the way of potential relationships. I feel like you are this way because you saw something in someone once and you ignored it, and then you really wish you hadn’t. You thought that you had a future with someone who thought of themself as kind of a sacrificial lamb, so to speak. This person could not take accountability, everything was someone else's fault, and most of the time, they blamed you. Even though most of it was self-inflicted because they didn’t know how to say no and just went along with everyone and everything. Your view on relationships and love has been changed by this experience. The good news is that you’re starting to heal, but you’ll likely never see love the same way and you won’t be able to trust people as readily as you once did. You still believe in love and romance, for other people, but not for yourself. You don’t believe that you’ll ever be able to share that much of yourself with another person again. You have this ‘once was enough’ energy to you. If you want romance in the future, which I’m assuming you do because you’re reading this, you need to work on rebuilding the parts of yourself that got damaged by that relationship. Put yourself and your healing first and maybe, one day, you’ll be able to open yourself up to the prospect of romance again. Nothing’s impossible. This lack of confidence you have in yourself is starting to impact your professional life. You need to find yourself again, and that’s not going to be easy.

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Pile 6: Black Egg

[This reading is all over the place. I can’t tell if that’s because I was tired after doing the other 5 readings or if it’s because you, the person who picked pile 6, are someone who has energy that bounces from one thing to another very quickly.]

Wheel Of Fortune, Ace of Pentacles, 4 of Wands reversed, 6 of Pentacles, Treasure Island reversed, Sol King of Wands reversed, 6 of Swords, Justice, Mother of Swords reversed, Chop Wood, Achievement 5 of Pentacles, The Hierophant reversed, 6 of pentacles reversed, Father of swords reversed, All that Glitters, Bond 3 of Swords reversed, 10 of Wands, Son of Wands reversed, Daughter of Swords, A Leg Up, Arcana The World reversed, Death reversed, Ace of Wands reversed, 2 of Wands reversed, Blessed reversed, Air

You’ve had a rocky love life up until this point. All you want is stability because that’s something that has been lacking in your life, you need a balance between the domestic side of a relationship and having the freedom to be able to go off and do whatever you want. You don’t want to be pinned down, and yet, you want to pin someone else down. You need to allow potential partners the freedom you’re asking for.

You’ve gotten some bad relationship advice in the past. Someone told you that you need to be something you're not, or at least pretend to be something you’re not. The problem with this kind of thinking is that once your partner discovers that you haven’t been entirely truthful with them, they're not gonna want to stick around. Because, you know, people don’t like being lied to.

You’ve had your heart broken in past relationships because you felt like you couldn’t turn to your partner for help. They were someone that asked a lot of you, but wouldn’t reciprocate.

You’re an intelligent, and perceptive person, but you’re also incredibly passionate and a little head-strong. So, sometimes you don’t think before you act and that’s been a point of tension in past relationships. You want to rush everything, but there are no shortcuts in love. You need to slow down or find someone who can match your energy.

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I know that readings with 30ish cards take me about an hour to do, so why was I surprised that this took me 6 hours?

I don’t know how much of my personality to let show throughout these kinds of readings. I don’t want them to be dry or too detached, but at the same time people probably just want to know what their piles have to say.

[The decks I used were the Modern Witch Tarot, the Wild Unknown tarot, the Earthbound Oracle, the Wisdom of the Oracle and the Wild Unknown Animal Spirit oracle.]

I feel like these were too specific to apply to a lot of people, but also not specific enough. So, if you want a more personalized reading check out my Etsy shop.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/UrsaMinorTarot

#tarot reading #tarot #tarot reader #tarot pick a card #tarot cards #tarot decks #oracle cards #oracle decks

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madhyanas · 4 years

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a place at the table

Pairing: Din Djarin x gender-neutral!Reader

Rating: T/PG-13 [mild]

Word Count: 3k

Warnings: Spoilers for s2ep3, Chapter 11! Reader uses they/them pronouns. References to drowning, not explicit. Descriptions of freezing/extreme cold. One reference to Chapter 9 (s2ep1). Din being as self-sacrificing as always. Din’s particular brand of Mandalorian family values. Pining, yearning, affection - just think soft.

A/N: well then. first time posting for din! this has been cooking since ep3 came out, i’m just slow. it’s soft!! and worried!! and din severely procrastinating his own identity crisis!! they’re really fuckin married, guys. lovely stuff. also, if you can’t tell, i adore frog lady. and bo-katan. mwah.

BIG thank you to @justrunamok, @pettyprocrastination and @generaldamneron for beta-reading <33

gif credit: @captrex - from the post here. thanks!

masterlist

You thought you knew cold.

Days and nights in the Crest have acquainted you with it. A hollow metal hull in the depths of the galaxy, surrounded on all sides by a vast expanse of nothing. Keeping the heater on burns fuel that you can’t afford, not with three mouths to feed. Space is cold, as cold as it could get.

And then you nearly drowned.

The briny depths of Trask are frigid, you’ve come to realise. Logically, you know it’s nowhere near the freezing vacuum of space. That’s real cold; true, absolute zero. But the thing about water is that it gets everywhere. The searing, ferocious chill of it had slammed all mental processes to a halt, petrifying your rationality before all else. It drenched your clothes, your hair. Snaked into your nose and seeped into your lungs. Rushed you as a swarm; no other sensation was relevant.

At the time — scrabbling at a grate hanging overhead, right there but always just out of reach — it’s what you imagined carbonite to feel like. Conscious but consumed.

Space is cold from a distance. Water freezes from the inside, cracked and jagged and burning.

So you should be grateful for your saviours. Mandalorians, unlike any you’ve ever seen before.

Which is to say, unlike Din.

There’s a lot to think about. So many things have happened in the span of a day that you can barely keep track. And beyond all else, you want to ask how Din’s coping—

“Trask is a black market port. They’re staging weapons that have been bought and sold with the plunders of our planet. We’re seizing those weapons and using them to retake our homeworld.”

—but there are more important things to deal with at the moment.

“Once we’ve done that, we’ll seat a new Mandalore on the throne,” the red-headed woman explains.

Bo-Katan. She speaks regally, like she’s been on that very throne before. More importantly — like she’d earned it. In truth, she scares you. All three of them do, these new Mandalorians who show their faces — they scare you in the way Din did back when he was just a gruff, faceless employer. A tinge of instinct; a shiver down your spine that has nothing to do with the cold.

What she’s saying is important, you know that, and you can’t place the onus on Din to handle it after the day he’s had. But you can’t bring yourself to focus either. You’re barely holding it together as it is, taking mild, balmy comfort in his and the baby’s presence on either side.

The three of you, together. Right now, at this table, that’s the only thing keeping you from splintering right down the middle.

Even with a steaming bowl of broth in your hands, your fingers ache with the chill. It hurts, regaining body heat. Hurts as feeling returns to your toes. Hurts to clench your jaw, to stop it from chattering. Hurts the delicate skin of your face, thousands of icy needles jabbing into the nerves. There’s a pounding between your ears and behind your eyes. You’re tired, and you suspect Din is, too.

You really do want to ask how he’s dealing with…this. The Way has been part of his life — and part of yours, in as much of a lifetime as you’ve known him — for many, many years. An oak tree, offering security and strength to the garden. How must he feel, stoic at your side, to see these three fell theirs so easily?

An identity crisis is the last thing Din needs.

What he needs is a break. You need him to want a break.

A coo at your elbow catches your attention. The baby — safe and warm, thank the Maker — seems fascinated with the water dripping from your hair, patting his hands into the small puddles forming on his high chair and giggling at the splashes. It’s as if he was never swallowed whole in the first place; that’s another thing you’re going to recall decidedly later. Nonetheless, he bounces back fast, your child.

You smile, hearing your teeth click, and pet the sensitive spot between his ears. He blinks at you sweetly.

Someone clears their throat.

You look up, startled, to find three pairs of eyes on you. Expecting. None of them saying… anything.

The other woman, the one with braids on her forehead, slurps her slithering noodles without blinking. Unnerving, to say the least.

“Sorry,” you blurt, more on reflex than anything else. “Did I… miss something?” The uncertainty in your voice doesn’t escape anyone’s notice.

Beneath the table, a broad thighs shifts to press against yours. Comforting. You glance at its owner.

“It’s… Mandalorian business.” Bo-Katan tilts her head. Her gaze flits between you and Din, polite and clear. “I’m sure you understand.”

You blink, bemused. “Oh?”

And then you realise.

She’s asking you to leave.

“Oh!” Your brows shoot up. One of her partners smiles ruefully in your periphery, and you are struck with the distinct feeling of being other. “Of course.”

That’s… well. It’s justified, is what it is. She’s right. You aren’t Mandalorian.

You stand quickly, and the chair grates against the floor unpleasantly. You manage not to cringe, somehow.

There’s a free table on the other side of the cantina, you think you saw it as you entered. Should you take the baby? No, Din’s never liked being away from him, even if you’re there. But they’re armed, all three of them, and you don’t know them, even if they did save your life, saved the baby’s, saved Din’s—

There’s a hand at your elbow.

“They stay.”

Din’s voice is unyielding. He hasn’t moved at all besides his grip on your arm, keeping his visor trained on Bo-Katan, who raises a brow.

No one says anything for a long, tense beat. Until—

“They’re not Mandalorian,” Bo-Katan says bluntly. It’s something you don’t have the nerve to state aloud. Something Din is apparently ignoring, however much you’d never believe it.

He stays silent.

“It’s okay,” your murmur, and the silver helmet you know turns to you fractionally. Barely anything, and you know you’re heard. You don’t need to see his face to know he’s still staring Bo-Katan down. “I don’t mind.”

There are three sharp, foreign gazes on you, and your newly-rejuvenated toes curl in your boots. After so many days bundled up in the Crest, you’d forgotten what it felt like to be watched and unwanted. The company inside had never made you feel that way.

“They stay,” he insists, making you jolt. “As is their right.”

Bo-Katan’s half-smile is faintly amused. “And which right is that?” she asks, like she already knows the answer. It seems like they all do, daring Din to state this mysterious ‘right’ that you’re in the dark about.

“It is their right as a member of my clan.”

The gloved fingers on your elbow tighten, leather creaking ever so slightly but just enough to remind you to breathe.

You blink at the silver helm dumbly, forgetting your onlookers for the time being.

He’s— He means that. Din doesn’t say what he doesn’t mean. Every word is measured, deliberate. He chooses his words like he chooses his weapons; they’re specific, well-cared for. Only to be used when necessary. Which suggests that—

Well. Maybe you should sit down.

As you do so, the woman opposite Din releases a slow, steady breath — Maker, you’d almost forgotten she was here — and squares her shoulders.

“Very well,” she says coolly. Her eyes flit to you, appraising, searching, before returning to Din. “As I was saying…”

And then you tune out again, ever so slightly. The information is going in, but you’re not truly registering its significance. Stupid, really, considering Din’s quite literally just fought for your place at the table. But you do.

You stare at the chipped, stained wood as if it holds the answers to questions you don’t know how to phrase. The baby babbles something incoherent, trying to get your attention, so unjustly denied to him, and you offer a finger for him to hold.

Clan. As in, part of. It’s new.

It feels like a small, three-fingered hand, gravelly warmth next to your thigh, and a hand pulling you back to the table.

———

Tracking down the Frog Woman and her husband isn’t too tedious. Trask’s daylight hours are long, for a moon, so even after Din’s aside with Bo-Katan and her people, it’s barely dark as you make your way to the inn.

“It won’t be long,” Din had assured you. “I go with them, assist with their mission, and come back within a day. Routine transport raid.”

Them. Their. It didn’t bode well that his so-called brethren are this… dissimilar.

“Last time you helped someone out, you got swallowed by a desert dragon.”

“That wasn’t last time.”

“Still counts.”

Childish, perhaps. Petulant. But correct.

The problem was, so was he. There was no choice.

Now, Din leads your party of three briskly down the street.

Since his father had manually adjusted the drift range on the crib beforehand, the child has no issue being carted along express-style, making curious noises at the various fishing apparatus he sees scattered around the port.

You don’t have such luxuries as the little womp rat, so you’re left to frantically try and match your Mandalorian’s pace. The lingering shivers wracking your frame are shoved aside for the wheezing burn beginning to creep up your sides.

“Hey, uh, Mando?” you ask, somewhat out of breath. “You think you could slow down? You’re going a little fast—”

Your shoulder clips a passing Quarren roughly, spinning you round with the force of the collision. The point of impact throbs unpleasantly, painful but superficial. Stunned, you can only blink as the tentacled man snaps something unintelligible in your face. An apology sits ready on your tongue and you open your mouth to speak, before a solid wall appears between you.

A breathing, unyielding wall of leather and beskar, glowering at the Quarren silently as you’re turned away, closer into the gentle bend of his hold. Quietly surrounding, protecting. Something else you’re not used to, from when it was just the three of you in the ship. But this feels… good. It feels like it’s yours.

The other man balks, and leaves with a grumble under his breath.

Din glances around above your head, ever aware, ever cautious. “Stay close,” he murmurs and—

You could probably pinpoint the exact moment your body temperature spikes, as a large, gloved hand comes to rest on your lower back. “Oh. Okay.”

The rest of the walk passes you by.

“I wasn’t trying to rush you,” he says tersely, having slowed his pace considerably. There’s an apology in there somewhere; you can hear it. “But you’re soaked, and you’re cold. You need to get warmed up.”

You smile. It’s really not the time, but— “Are you offering?”

A huff from the modulator, and he shakes his head silently. Less rejection, rather than fond exasperation.

“You must be cold, too.” The realisation dawns on you in an instant. Oh, Maker. He’s been freezing for just as long as you, now. If not more, since he hasn’t eaten anything warm.

The next shake of the helmet is more insistent, purposeful. “No. I wear more layers than you do.”

“You dived into the ocean, Din.” His name is hushed, spoken after a quick look to confirm that no one can hear you.

“So did you.”

“I was pushed, that’s not the same thing.”

Din doesn’t respond, and your smile dims. He seems to hesitate for a moment, before pressing a button on his vambrace, and the baby’s crib floats a little closer.

Oh.

He doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the walk. You regret bringing it up.

But his hand doesn’t stray from your back.

——

The building is small, cozy. Barely a couple of stories tall. And, to your delight, it’s warm.

“Thank you for having us,” you tell the Frog Woman gratefully. One of their towels is wrapped around your shoulders; a placeholder until you can find a clean, dry change of clothes. You feel better already. “We’re sorry to impose like this.”

She croaks something vaguely welcoming and you smile, keeping a shrewd, wary eye on the baby — now staring at the egg canister with wondrous intent, reaching his stubby little hands out from his place clutched to your chest. Now there’s something to keep you occupied for the evening.

A hand on your shoulder, warm and light, and you turn around. Din tilts his head towards the door. “I’ll be going,” he says, barely a whisper past the lip of the helmet.

“What? Uh, Mando, hold on!” Halfway out of the chair already, you stare at him incredulously, before turning back to the expecting parents. “Just— Just a second, please. Could you take the baby?”

However disinclined she may be to your carnivorous terror, the Frog Woman takes him into her hands gently. She’s sweet, kind. You hope she understands the depths of your appreciation.

A polite nod from Din to the couple. “I’ll be back for them soon.”

He follows you into the narrow corridor. The door slides shut behind you both.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

You stare at him for a moment, tugging the edge of the towel at your shoulders. Your mouth opens and closes, faltering around words that don’t have the courage to form.

“I…” You deflate. “I just— I wanted to ask you that. Before you left.” It’s a foolish question. What’s wrong, like his entire way of life hasn’t been upended in a heartbeat by a careless show of face. Like the Way hasn’t just crumbled at his feet like wet sand, trodden on by three strange pairs of boots, scorched by familiar jetpack fuel.

He doesn’t say anything. No tilt of the helmet, no sinking shoulders. Nothing. Just keeps looking at you, visor tilted down to your face.

There’s a reasonable distance between you. Not professional by any stretch of the imagination, but enough for him to be comfortable in semi-public. The corridor is empty, and you can’t hear any footsteps.

Except Din’s, when he steps forward.

You feel your features soften in time with the pounding of your heart. “Din, love, please—”

He pulls you into his chest, plucking the wind from your lungs in a surprised, candied puff into the worn fabric of his cowl. His arms snake around you, securing you to his sturdy frame, and by reflex, yours mirror the movement on him. The helm’s hard, flat surface presses against the side of your head tightly; an anchor tugging on the seabed.

You feel him inhale, a ragged, rattling thing that has your stomach sinking. You only hear that sound when he’s injured, stumbling back to you with a bounty and a nasty, jagged stab wound or two. Only when he’s injured but oh, isn’t he?

It’s hard to tell how long you remain like that. Wrapped around and in between each other. Feeling each other breathe in and out, like the push and pull of the tides. It’s worth it, for the fading of tension in Din’s shoulders. Not removal. But an ebb for the flow. You’ll take it.

“There is a lot,” he rasps, modulated into your hairline. “You know that. And I can’t focus on what needs to be done if I think about it.” You feel him sigh, draping into your arms even further. “I can’t afford that.”

You try to keep your voice calm, soothing. To avoid the hot press of tears threatening to clog your throat. “Okay. That’s, that’s— Okay.”

You sound like a fool, parroting your own words. But he doesn’t seem to mind.

“Okay,” Din agrees. There is something shaky in his voice, and you would give anything to wrench it from his chest and throw it into that Maker-forsaken ocean. Let it drown for all you care.

For now, though, this is enough.

You move to step back, just a palm’s breadth away, and his arms unlock to let you do so immediately. His gloved hands slide down to nestle in the dip of your waist.

You look at Din consideringly, wondering if you could push for later. Later, to discuss the revelations he’s been bombarded with. Later, to talk about what you’re doing to do. Later, to finally get him to rest his weary bones.

Urgent, but. You decide to let him be. For now.

There’s something else you’ve been meaning to ask about anyway.

“So.” You smile wanly, treasuring the jewelled glint of beskar through the thinnest film of tears. “As a member of your clan, huh?”

Din sighs. Bracing, grounding. Returning to the present, where you’re just here to see him off. Where you have a baby waiting inside to keep from snacking on your hosts, and he has a hijacking to initiate. His fingers press tighter into your skin.

He appreciates the subject change.

“You already know my name,” he says quietly. Shrugs. “I’d say you know more about me than anyone else.”

You take a second to mull that over. Enjoy the taste of it in your mouth, the weight of it in your heart. He is such a precious thing to know.

Without thinking, the word leaves your lips in a bright gust of affection. “Same.” The helm tilts. “You know more about me than anyone else, too.”

He nods, a small, barely-there movement. More to himself than to you, you suspect.

“Good.”

Elastically, achingly slow, Din leans his head down. You lift yours up. When your warmed forehead meets beskar, a kiss from which you feel deprived, yet glutted, you’re inclined to agree.

“Stay safe,” you whisper. Your heart fogs and clouds on the metal, right above where his lips would be.

His thumb strokes across your waist. And you know he will.

——

#din djarin #din djarin x reader #the mandalorian #the mandalorian x reader #star wars #star wars fic #reader-insert #gn!reader #the mandalorian fic #the mandalorian season 2 #the mandalorian chapter 11 #gender neutral #gender neutral reader #the heiress #my writing #sw #bit nervous about this one #we'll see how it goes huh

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ghostburs-blue · 4 years

Note

Haha sorry ! 🙈 for Peter Parker pls 💕

I hope I did your ask justice!!

Request: 1 an 19 from the prompt list pls ? ✌🏼🤍 > “God, you are fucking adorable” and “Have you ever kissed anyone before?”

Summary: Peter is dumb and y/n pines for someone she can’t have

Warnings: a moderately intense crying scene, angst, light swearing and tooth-rotting fluff

Word count: 2.1k

A/n - I didn’t really introduce Betty and Ned b/c they’re not super relevant here, but when I refer to “the group” it’s Peter, y/n, MJ, Betty, and Ned!

All Yours

Pure adoration filled your gaze as you practically ogled at the boy sitting across the lunch table from you. You skimmed every part of his body, absorbing the glowing image of him like he would disappear when you blinked. His eyes, deep brown and mysterious, looking at you… Wait, looking at you?

You blinked, focusing on Peter’s face. He was wearing a small smirk.

“Y/n? I’ve been calling your name for the last minute,” he smiled. You glanced at your friend MJ who sat on the other side of you after you felt a small nudge on your ribs. You mouthed a quite shut up to her, causing her to let out a knowing laugh.

For the rest of the school day, you were careful to make sure no one caught you staring again.

After the last bell of the day rang, you made your way to your locker and grabbed some materials that you would need for homework that day. A voice close to you made you jump.

“Hey y/n!” Peter exclaimed. He noticed your reaction, reaching out to grab your shoulder. “Are you okay? You’ve been pretty… on edge today,” he said.

You gave him a brief nod and a curt, “Yeah, I’m fine.” Before he could push you any further on the topic, you started walking away, forcing him to match your pace in order to keep up.

You quickly changed the focus of the conversation. “So, how’s Liz?” You wondered aloud. Glancing at him, the familiar feeling of your heart slowly breaking entered your chest at the sight of his dreamy smile.

He sighed adoringly. “Everything’s going great between us, you know? I think,” he paused, sucking in a breath. “I think I’m going to ask her to Homecoming,” he finished almost proudly.

You felt your stomach drop and attempted to paint on a smile that didn’t look like a grimace. “Aww Petey, that’s great! I hope she says yes,” you answer, not quite meeting his eyes. Peter didn’t seem to notice.

The entire walk back to your apartments was filled with Peter rambling on and on about how amazing and kind of a person Liz was. For once, you regretted the fact that the two of you were neighbors.

He finally stepped as you two reached your respective doors. Peter turned to say bye, only to be met with the sound of your door softly clicking shut. He stood alone in the hallway, slowly lowering the hand that he was about to wave with. Something panged in his chest. Sadness? No, it couldn’t be. She just didn’t want to say bye, he reasoned with himself, nodding and pushing his way into his own apartment.

The next few days continued like this; you would be fine until he mentioned Liz. Then, you would shut down and close him out, your answers and replies becoming short and cold. The rest of the group had figured it out ages ago, yet the constantly oblivious Peter ignored the answer that was just under his nose. You liked Peter.

But of course, Liz was everything to him. Why would he go for someone like you when he had someone like Liz? Gorgeous, smart, funny, practically everything you felt you weren’t.

Alas, the dreaded day arrived, much too soon for your liking. Peter bounded into the cafeteria with a seemingly boundless amount of energy. Just one glance told you what had happened.

“I asked Liz to homecoming and she said yes,” Peter blurted out, seemingly blind to you attempting to hide your tear-filled eyes. Everyone else gave him hugs and congratulations. However, when he turned to the person whose opinion he trusted the most, you couldn’t even look at him.

“I- I’m happy for you Peter. You two deserve each other,” you forced out. You stood up suddenly, grabbing MJ’s hand and dragging her with you. You two practically ran to the girls’ bathroom, trying to stop the tears rolling down your flushed cheeks.

When both of you were safely away from the rest of the school, you broke down crying. MJ held you comfortingly, rubbing small circles on your back and murmured soothing words into your ear.

When the tears finally ceased, you looked up at her through red-rimmed eyes. Glancing at your reflection in the mirror, a terrifying thought hit you like a freight train.

You were in love with Peter.

Sure, you knew you liked him, but you never realized how deep those feelings truly ran. You slapped your hand across your mouth in an attempt to stifle another sob threatening to burst through. After another few minutes, you tried to fix the mess that was your face with the paper towels from the bathroom.

Taking a deep breath, you stepped outside with MJ. Almost immediately, you ran into a firm chest. Two hands reached out and grabbed your shoulders, pulling back and steadying your shaking body.

Looking up, your gaze met Peter’s warm brown eyes. They softened immediately, pulling you into a close hug. If he noticed your arms staying limp at your sides, he didn’t say anything.

Stepping back slightly, he coughed a little. “Are- are you okay?” He stuttered.

You offered a weak smile. “Yeah. Uh, cramps really suck, you know?” You tried to laugh but it just sounded like a frog was stuck in your throat.

Peter nodded and smiled back, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. You knew he didn’t buy it.

MJ cleared her throat behind you two. “We only have, like, 5 minutes until our last class of the day so… do with that as you will,” she finished awkwardly, walking away.

You coughed slightly as you two wandered aimlessly around the hallways. “So, what kind of dress is Liz wearing to the dance?” You asked, trying to change the subject. And of course, Peter went on another tangent on how amazing she was and how understanding she was with Peter’s limited knowledge of fashion.

What you didn’t notice this time, however, was how his voice lacked emotion and passion, and how he looked at you like he had never seen something so perfect before.

The cursed night was fast approaching, though you dreaded every second of it. One or two people had asked you, but you didn’t want to lead them on so you politely turned them down.

It seemed like it got there all too quickly. MJ sat on your bed, leaning back on her hands, as she watched you pace back and forth and complain loudly about “society’s unfair standards for women” and how “I should be able to wear sweatpants and a hoodie to a high school dance!”.

MJ rolled her eyes, heading to your bathroom to finish applying her makeup while she left you alone to pick a dress (you were seriously considering going in pajamas, though). Eventually, you decided on a light blue floor-length dress. The bodice was a pale baby blue with pink fabric flowers sewn on. The rest was a slim tulle skirt, lightly skimming the floor. You wore a pair of white strappy heels to add a few inches, then headed to the bathroom to show MJ.

As soon as she got a good look at you, she whistled and made a spinning motion with her finger. You complied, slowly twirling around to show off all of it. Turning back to your friend, she grinned and clapped her hands together.

“Peter will fall in LOVE girl!” She exclaimed excitedly, making you blush, then scold her.

“Peter’s with Liz now. It’s only a matter of time until they start dating,” you state, though it seemed like you were just trying to convince yourself.

At 7:00 pm, you both found yourself by the steps of the makeshift venue, which was actually just the school gym. Taking a deep breath, you grabbed MJ’s hand and pulled both of you inside.

Instantly, you spotted Ned and Betty and pointed them out to MJ. You guys carefully made your way over, hugging them both and planting kisses on their cheeks. While you all were exchanging compliments, you couldn’t help but scan the room for Peter. It was a bad habit that you just couldn’t seem to shake. Trying to clear your head, you announced to the others that you were going to get a drink.

Little did you know, Peter was looking for you as well. He was dancing with Liz, yet his attention wasn’t focused on her. He faintly heard someone calling his name, snapping his head back to Liz when he realized it was her.

Liz’s gaze softened, and she gently pulled him to the side of the dance floor. “It’s y/n, isn’t it?” She asked, only warmth apparent in her voice.

Peter tried shaking his head, then nodded regretfully. “Yeah,” he whispered, heart sinking. “How are you not mad?” He asked, tilting his head slightly.

She smiled at him, giving a little laugh. “I’ve always known. Hell, everyone knows.” She gestured around to the crowd surrounding them. “I just hoped the feelings would go away if we were happy enough together,” she murmured.

Peter searched her eyes, looking for any hints of anger or fury. He was met with only admiration and guilt. Without a second thought, he pulled her into a tight hug, resting their foreheads together.

“Thank you,” he whispered, stepping back. Liz blinked, and he was swept away by the throng of people. She was left gazed longingly at where he once stood.

Peter called out your name as he pushed his way through groups of people dancing. He started to grow desperate, thinking you may have left the dance early. Turning, he called out again as a last resort.

This time, he saw you. Your head lifted at the sound of your name being called, eyes scanning the room.

When your eyes met, everything else in Peter’s sight vanished. It sounded cliché, he knew. But it looked like she was illuminated in a column of light, bouncing off her features and making her look like she was glowing. As if in a trance, he made his way over to the refreshments table, where you were nursing a glass of punch.

“Hey,” he said simply.

“Hey,” you responded. Looking up at him, you didn’t question why he wasn’t with Liz. You leaned closer, whispering, “Let’s get out of here, yeah?” into his ear.

Without checking if he was following, you turned and made your way to the exit, stepping out of the door.

You took a deep breath as the cool air hit your skin, a welcome change from the sweaty and hot mess that lay inside.

A hand reached out and grabbed your waist, spinning you to face the man himself, Peter.

Suddenly realizing how close you were to him, you stepped back, breathing heavily. “I- uh…” you were at a loss of words as you tried to make sense of the cacophony that was your thoughts at that moment.

“Y/n, why didn’t you ever tell me?” Peter asked, his voice sounding broken. Your eyes instantly softened, your heart yearning for the boy standing in front of you.

“You liked Liz so much. I couldn’t ruin that for you,” you said, hoping he could hear the admiration in your voice.

“Yeah, I liked Liz. But I love you,” Peter stepped closer once again, and this time, you let him. As you were both leaning forward, he stepped back and let go of you, causing you to stumble a little bit.

“What the hell Peter?” You asked, confused. Then, you realized something. “Peter… please answer truthfully,” you say carefully. He gives an embarrassed nod.

“Have you ever kissed anyone before?” You ask, studying his reaction. After a second, he shakes his head, almost bashfully.

You giggled, enjoying the moment. “Well then, let me show you how it’s done,” you whisper. A millisecond later, your lips are crashing onto his. He responded well, mouths moving in sync against each other.

You two pulled apart much too quickly for your liking. Your foreheads rested on each other, panting heavily.

Pulling back, you admired his flushed face, tinged pink.

“God, you are so fucking cute,” you exclaim, not waiting to see his reaction before you pull him into a deep kiss once again.

After a few more minutes of giddy smiles and teeth clashing, both of you decided to head back inside in case anyone got suspicious.

For the rest of the night, your stomach was filled with butterflies, your eyes with laughter. So, when you eventually reached your respective homes and looked at each other with so much love in your gaze, it was no surprise that Peter would pull you closer once again. This time, however, he simply held you close, cradling your body so carefully one would think your bones were made of porcelain.

After a long silence, he looked down at you with loving eyes. “You’re finally my girl,” he whispered, almost unbelieving.

You smiled. “I’m all yours.”

#peter parker #peter parker fanfic #peter parker angst #peter parker fluff #peter parker x reader #peter parker x y/n #liz allen #mj #marvel #spiderman #spider-man #y/n #roo’s fics

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buckyownsmyheart · 5 years

Text

Duty [1/12]

CHAPTER 1: Reaching an Understanding

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x reader

Word Count: 3.2k

Warnings: None! Maybe baby swear words

Series Summary: Ex-army doctor, and now on-mission-for-the-Avengers doctor, Major (Y/n) (Y/l/n), had prepared herself for anything. That was, of course, until she met a devastatingly charming Sergeant from Brooklyn with a quick wit and a kind smile. I wonder what will happen.

Series Masterlist

Prologue

The next day, things in the briefing room were a little tense. A feeling of unease spread through you as you walked into the room, trying to ignore the subdued murmurs and eyes tracking your movements from agents, healthcare professionals and Avengers alike. You steeled yourself against their gazes, daring anyone to question your integrity before Nick Fury quietened the chatter from beside you.

“Some of you have already met your new on-mission doctor, Major (Y/n) (Y/l/n), and those who haven’t will have heard about her. She will be helping us keep healthy from now on. There will still be the same team here in the medical bay, but she’s the needed add-on. Any questions?”

Before anyone had the chance to form a thought that might lead to a question, he continued. “Alright, dismissed. Avengers I need you to remain behind for further briefing and report clarification.” There is a jostling and scraping of chairs as the agents leave the room. 17 gives you a wink on their way out before the room becomes quiet once more.

Fury eyed the room. “Your recent infiltration into the HYDRA camp was successful in giving us insight into their new project, but that’s as far as the success goes. I don’t want a fuck up like this again.” He distributed updated files around the table, and you took the closest seat, next to Black Widow. Looking down at the classified file, you weren’t sure you were meant to be reading this but opened it anyway, your curiosity beating your wish to abide by any rules. And you read.

********

S.H.I.E.L.D CLASSIFIED

PROJECT: MOONSHINE, (accessory to HYDRA), 05 SEPT 2019

Named after the technically legal, but often lethal, home-brewed alcohol, HYDRA have created a facility now known to be located within the EUREKA RESEARCH FACILITY in ELLESMERE ISLAND, 79°59′20″N 085°56′27″W. The base, previously owned by the Canadians before HYDRA took over, is secluded and only reachable by jet, with food, fuel and other supplies brought every 6 months.

Recent information has shown their proceedings, including images [see page 3 through 5] of their testing on human subjects, in an attempt to produce the same effect as the serum, successfully trialled on Steven G. Rogers, but by forms of mutilation and pain endurance, as recreating the serum, as shown on James B. Barnes, was deemed unsuccessful in producing the desired effect.

The methods include electrotherapy, fire exposure, exhaustion and debilitation techniques. These hope to push the cells within the body to mutate themselves to survive the conditions.

TOP SECRET SPECIAL HANDLING ONLY

********

You looked up to Fury, reeling a little from the information. You shifted in your seat as it felt too hard and your feet placed uncomfortably on the floor. You hadn’t reached the pictures yet but had a good enough guess as to what they contained.

“We’re working with the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI-6, on this.” Fury reported and looked to you as he said it, “They’re working with our team to find out more. Until then we can only wait. Major, you’re dismissed.”

You stood up, maybe a little too quickly, and walked out the door before you were given any more files. You walked to your quarters and flopped onto the bed. Rubbing the heels of your palms into your eyes to try to try and rid them of tiredness, and make your brain deal with the new information. There had always been people capable of causing such pain, but the thought of people intentionally inflicting that sort of torture on many people was enough to make your stomach turn, and you considered yourself to have a pretty strong stomach. In an attempt to distract yourself, you decided to head down to the medical bay, trying to familiarise yourself with your new surroundings and try and lessen the stares people had given you being the new girl. You rolled out of bed, not daring to look in the mirror and walked back out of your room.

Two flights of stairs and several corridors filled with loud colourful art later, you found the bay. The set up was much like a normal hospital ER, with a bleak looking desk at the front. Someone was scribbling frantically behind it, the bags under her eyes indicating their understaffing and overworking, a permanent feature of any healthcare professional, apparently even if they worked for billionaires. She looked up as you approached and gently returned the smile you gave her.

“Hi Major, what can I help you with?” Her voice carried a slight roughness to it, but not in an unpleasant way. It was an oddly comforting husk that made you feel like she would have perfect control of any situation that arose.

“Hi Angie,” you smiled, reading her name badge. “I wanted to get acquainted with everything, see what’s what and how you guys run things. I’d love to help out as much as possible.”

“Would you meet the people who run the show?” she drummed her fingers on top of the now closed folder, “Dr Cho is currently with someone, but I can find some of the team?"

Before you could answer, her eyes flickered to something behind you, causing you to turn and see what she was looking at. Your eyes met with piercing blue ones and you couldn’t help but give a sigh.

“Hey Doc,” Bucky Barnes grinned sheepishly, “Been given orders to have my arm re-looked at, would you be able to help?”

Narrowing your eyes at him you turned back to Angie to ask for her opinion, but she was already holding out a file that had a printed ‘James B. Barnes’ on the top.

“Room 4 is empty,” Angie gesturing to a room with the same unbothered air as she busied herself with other tasks, but you thought you could see the trace of a smile. You realised you weren’t going to get any more help on this one, and so opened his file, pretending it had something to do with his current injury. In reality it was a record of his previous injuries, and had zero relevance at the moment, but it kept your hands busy and felt it made you look important and not like you would rather be anywhere else but stuck in a room with him. You made the short walk into room 4, not looking to see if he had followed you, and sat in the chair in front of the computer. When you had fortified your composure, you turned to him. He was sitting on the bed, idly playing with sheet covering it, and now seeing his open face and off-guard composure, there was no ignoring how good-looking he was. He had changed from his tactical gear into a plain red Henley that stretched over his chest, and you could see the strain of the trousers he wore, their blue bringing out his eyes in a way that should be illegal. You averted your eyes and coughed a little, trying to rid the frog that had managed to wind its way into your throat.

He interrupted your train of thoughts, “I’m sorry for yesterday.” You looked back at him with surprise, not expecting an apology. “I was rude to you and I didn’t give you a chance before immediately dismissing you.” He didn’t break eye contact, and in an attempt to distract yourself from the unusual things your stomach was doing, you tried to drop your rigid glare into something you hoped was more comforting and busied yourself washing your hands.

“It’s alright. I’ve been underestimated my whole life; I’ve now learnt not to take it personally.” You looked up and met his gaze. “C’mon Sergeant, let me see how much I hashed up that arm,” you saw his shoulders drop a few inches. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all, you knew you had a tendency to be a little defensive at times. After peeling the bandage back, you couldn’t help but murmur a few exclamations as all you saw was faint pink section of skin. A small yellowing scab and peeling of the skin around the edges were the only indicators of any injury.

“Perhaps you’re a better doctor than you think,” Bucky said, giving a small laugh. A small smile wormed its way onto your face.

“Mind if I poke around it a bit?” You glanced up at Bucky, “Why did they even send you down here? It’s healed perfectly.”

“Not at all, all yours.”

You worked your fingers around the edges of the wound, massaging the skin and seeing it whiten and then pink, showing signs of healthy tissue and vessels. You felt Bucky’s eyes on you, but had to resist the temptation to look up, otherwise you might fall right into them.

“It’s amazing,” you confessed to him, “I can still feel the dissolvable stitches I put in there but everything else has healed completely. You would expect this sort of recovery within 12 weeks, not 14 hours.”

“I’ve never seen it heal as fast as this," He motioned to his arm. "Steve and I would have been a little less uptight at the whole situation if we knew.”

He nodded to the desk, where you had placed his file.

“All the information on my healing and other enhancements,” he said, his tone had hardened slightly, “Are all in there,”

“Oh, the doctors here have already tested you for this sort of thing?”

“Not the doctors here.”

You looked up at him and your face fell with realisation, of course HYDRA had kept records on him. Sympathy and pity gripped your heart, and you felt your cheeks heat up.

He snapped at you suddenly, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m not broken, and I don’t need your pity.” You knew he wasn’t pissed off at you, he was pissed at the situation, but doesn’t mean his words didn’t sting you a little bit. Bucky yanked down his sleeve and stood up quickly.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.” You reached over and gathered the bandage from the bed next to where he had been sitting, “I don’t think you’re broken. You’re healing, there’s a difference.” You looked into his eyes, trying to convey the sincerity you felt with those words. When he didn’t move, you offered a truce, “Let me take out a few of those stitches on top. It might be a bit more comfortable for you.” He nodded and silently took one of the spare chairs. He did have the grace to look a little ashamed at his outburst, but you figured asking for a second apology in 10 minutes would be a bit too much.

You were quiet as you cut the offending sutures, and when you were done, Bucky pulled down his sleeve and spoke, his voice soft, “Umm, you uh-, you figured out how to use Stark’s coffee machines yet?”

“Not yet,” you laughed, “Haven’t been brave enough if I’m honest. Never seen so many damn buttons on a machine in my life!”

He gave you a small chuckle, “How about I show you? To make up for being an ass. Today and yesterday. I know all doctors and soldiers have a sweet spot for coffee.”

You smiled, he was trying to make amends and you appreciated that. “Lead the way, Sarge.”

“You press this button, and then the water should come through this part, and you get your regular filter coffee. Tastes exactly like it did in the 40s, better even,” Bucky said as he pressed the button. Steaming hot air jetted out of one of the pipes on the side, singeing a hole in Bucky’s shirt and exposing the glint of his metal arm as he swore profusely at the machine, and then at his shirt for good measure. It had become apparent in the past 30 minutes that as much as Bucky claimed to be able to work the coffee machine, he actually had as much of an idea as you, potentially even less.

“Looks like it’s going really well for you Terminator,” Sam Wilson entered the kitchen, and as he caught sight of you, he smiled and extended out a hand. “Hi, we sort of met in the quinjet, but I’m Sam.”

You took it, “(Y/n), nice to meet you. You don’t by any chance know how to work this machine? Half-robot over here is about to blow something up.”

Sam laughed and wandered over to where you were stood, pressed a few buttons on the side, and coffee started dripping into the jug. He turned to you and quipped, “You’re really trusting old-man over here with showing you something technological? For someone quite intelligent, you don’t seem very smart.”

You leaned back and laughed at his comment, Bucky however, looked put-out.

He glared over at him, “What do you want, Wilson?”

“Steve is looking for you down in the boxing ring, says he’s ready to kick your ass again.”

You looked at Bucky, “Steve beats you in a fight?” Then grinned over at Sam as annoyance crossed Bucky’s face.

“Not today he won’t,” Bucky grumbled as he trudged away from the coffee machine, muttering incoherently except for a few words that I’m not sure Steve would appreciate hearing.

As you enjoyed the bitter and warm smell of fresh coffee, Dr Bruce Banner walked into the kitchen and gave you a warming smile. He too pressed a few buttons on the machine, and a green froth fell into his mug.

“It’s so good to have an actual medical doctor on the team, they all kept coming to me on the battlefield,” he gestured around him, as if the Avengers were all there, “With life-threatening injuries! Expecting me to patch them up and send them on their way! I only dealt with tropical diseases in India! It was an entirely different thing!”

Sam turned to him, “You’re meant to be a genius Banner, what’s the use of your 7 PhDs if you can’t do anything useful with them?”

You laughed at the interaction, “It’s a pleasure to be on the team, happy to help in any way I can.” You paused, contemplating your next words carefully. “This might be a bit invasive, but what’s the deal with Sergeant Barnes? Is he normally this grumpy?”

Sam looked up at you, but it was Bruce who answered. “He’s still getting used to being able to be the good guy. I think he feels he doesn’t deserve it and so lashes out before anyone else can push him away first. He doesn’t like letting people in. Took Sam a bit of time to figure that out too.”

Sam laughed softly, “He’s the biggest damn grump I’ve ever met, but underneath he’s also a softie and an idiot. Give him time, he’ll be more bearable.”

You just nodded, pondering what they had both said. It made sense, he was still decompressing and figuring things out, maybe you could let him off the hook for being such an ass. You stayed in the kitchen for an hour or so with Sam and Bruce, getting the inside knowledge on the Avengers, the ins-and-outs of the compound and where to find the best bagels nearby. If you were wondering, it’s the deli on the right as you exit the compound.

“Right,” You turned to the two men, “I've been avoiding my unpacking, so I should probably get going, but it was lovely meeting you both properly, and thanks for all the information, I reckon I’ve got enough to blackmail the whole team now.” You said with a wink before walking out the door, waving over your shoulder.

In your room, your bags stared at you, lying on the floor, daring you to open them. You stared right back at them. You had been caught in this gridlock for the past 10 minutes and couldn’t quite find it in yourself to begin the task. You reprimanded your lack of motivation, and you had just managed to open your bag and sat on the floor, trying to organise some of your junk. You looked at the photos you had brought along, and they made your insides smile. There were some of you and your brother, the rest of your family, and some of your old army section and other friends. You felt a twist of guilt as you realised you hadn’t rung them yet to let them know you had arrived. Your brother, being a hacker, probably could find out that information if he was really concerned, but you felt bad if it got to that.

After a quick text letting them know you were safe and happy and that you would ring them later, you found yourself being drawn to your gym clothes. Maybe you should be checking out all the facilities that the compound had to offer. It would seem rude not to. Not because a certain someone who had captured your attention was probably still down there, sweating a little and most likely looking quite good. Not at all. You would never. Trying to move your thoughts away before they became slightly perverted, you pulled on some kit, letting your dog tags hang out in the open, clattering on your chest as you made your way down.

The gym was pretty standard, with weights and machines in one corner, cardio down the far wall, and free space with various mats and equipment dotted around. What drew you was the small boxing ring and punching bags dangling from the ceiling in the opposite corner. Unfortunately, no sign of Bucky. Not that he was the sole reason you were down here. You began to wrap your hands and after a quick warm-up you started jabbing at the bag, getting a feel for it again, before tightening your muscles and pushing yourself a bit harder.

“Not sure the bag is good enough for you Major,” Bucky spoke from behind you, appearing out of nowhere and making you jump, “think you might need a more challenging opponent.”

You let up on the bag, steadying it with one hand, “You offering yourself up, Sergeant? Is Steve that much better than you that you’re going to sink to my level?”

“Not sure the bag would agree with that statement, you were giving it a harder time than Steve and I put together,” He provoked, patting the bag with a pretend sympathetic gesture. “I would like to think I could put up a better fight than the bag though.”

Steve rounded the corner, from what you assumed was the changing rooms, and addressed Bucky. “I’ve seen her file Buck, let’s just say she would have had you nose-deep in mud in the 40s. And I’m not going to be putting my money on you today.” You grinned at Steve.

“Alright, it’s on.” You paused, straightening up and chucking him a pair of gloves from a nearby bench, “Don’t think I’m going to go easy on you just because you’ve got a pretty face.” And with that, you parted the ropes and jumped into the ring.

Chapter 2

tags:

@broco8 @nerd-without-a-cause @sebbbystaaan @mcubuckyandsteve @cutepiemimi13 @velvetwonderbucky

(strikethrough means I couldn’t tag you!)

#duty #bucky x reader #bucky x y/n #bucky x you #bucky barnes fanfiction #b.b fanfic #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes fic

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echobearclasspectingblog · 5 years

Note

Sorry to bother you, you can ignore this if you want! But i was wondering what a session with a Witch of Space (D), Seer of Time (P), Knight of Light (D), and a Maid of Blood (P). Thank you in advance and it's ok if you don't wanna do this lol

Hey it’s alright, not sure why you’re so apologetic and stuff over this session request but I’m glad to work on it. Also, pretty excited since this’ll be the first time I work on something with specific Derse and Prospit definitions. The lunar sway is something that’ll effect personality, and probably how a player will wield their classpect, as well as certain strategic situations due to dream self placement. Future session requesters, you don’t have to include lunar sways, but if you have them in mind go ahead and include them!

Witch of Space (D) - One who makes changes to Space or changes things through Space

Seer of Time (P) - One who knows Time or knows through Time through research

Knight of Light (D) - One who serves Light or serves using Light

Maid of Blood (P) - One who encourages creation of Blood or encourages creation using Blood

You’ve got a space player, required to breed the genesis frog. You’ve got a time player, required to scratch the session. Light and blood are useful aspects for the other players, even if my initial reaction doesn’t find them particularly synergistic. Nice balance of classes too. Ok, I’ve gotta say it, intentional or not this feels like a fun twist on the beta kid’s session. You’ve got a derse version of Jade’s classpect, Dave and Rose’s classes switched…. and then John’s nowhere to be seen and we got some blood making person instead. Maybe this wasn’t your intention and I’ll try to let this not color my analysis, but I figured I’d mention that fun little comparison.

Looking good so far, but let’s put this session to the test! First we’ll figure out pros and cons to each player on their own then look at how well or poorly they match up.

A witch of space changes creativity, planets, and beginnings. Changing the size of things, or the distance between them makes this a very powerful player. They’ll also help the others switch to new creative perspectives, or using their own to create massive changes to the session, so they’ll be a huge help with alchemizing. Being a derse dreamer means their belief in changing things is more likely a rebellion originated line of thought, and their creativity is based in more practical things. They’ll understand the space of your session as it objectively is and their planet wide alterations will be very calculated.

A seer of time learns about pacing, history, and the future. Their tools for learning and seeing will be types of view ports into different points in the past, and points in the future. If there’s anyone who can discover how flexible alpha timeline manipulation is and how best to use it, it’s a seer of time. As a prospit dreamer they’ll study time more in concepts, meaning they might ignore specific details in favor of learning more general mechanics of time travel. With this lunar sway, they’ll be more inclined to tell their fellow players what version of the future is best to aim for long before telling them which future is actually more likely to occur.

A knight of light serves fortune, relevance, and knowledge. Your players will be important with this knight serving them, any cross-session shenanigans will result in your interactions being very important to their session as well. Being a derse dreamer means the knight will be more familiar with the metaphorical side of ‘light’ instead of literal, but the little that does show up around their dream moon they’ll know how to use to great effect. Having their dreamselves on derse also means horrorterror influence, and their relevance means the knight may end up serving them and going grim dark.

A maid of blood encourages creation of bonds, relationships, and violence. Helps forge bonds between the players and important people in the session. Also figures out the best combinations for blood based weapons so that’s cool. Dreaming on prospit means a lot of your connections will be with prospitians, meaning you’ll be more familiar with the army and generals of the fight than typical sessions. They might also end up encouraging someone to use the ecto-biology lab to create way more ecto-siblings and ecto-children than the session should originally have, and making a larger family in sburb than intended by paradox space could mean dire consequences.

Knight of light is the obvious match up to the witch of space for genesis frog breeding duties, and being derse buddies means they’ll probably see both of each other on the space player’s planet and the dream self side. This does have the bad side effect of meaning if they’re both awake on one side they’re both vulnerable on the other, and if their dream selves are sleeping that means the seer or maid need to figure out how to get to derse to prevent a sleep stabbing. The knight will serve the witch well though, helping them find the most important and necessary frogs and always having at least 5 sources of light on them at all times like a sensible person. Meanwhile the seer would help with frog catching as well, being able to peer into the future of which frogs need tampering with. They could also be decent backup, viewing what times would be safe for the witch and knight to take a break, and what times they would need to worry about assassination attempts. The maid of blood will encourage the witch to make friends, consort friends that’ll help hunt down more frogs for their quest, and dersite friends that’ll help keep their dream selves safe. Even without coming to derse themselves, the seer and maid seem like they’ll do a good job covering the weakness of double exposed players.

The witch of space will change how the seer learns about/with time, probably directly alchemizing new types of view ports themselves with different features. The knight of light will relay important information (weapons, people, places, planned events) to the seer to focus the research so they don’t end up lost viewing every part of the future or past. Being prospit buddies, the maid of blood will help the seer create a network of information on their dream moon, and many hands make light work.

Witch of space is a good support for the knight of light, being able to command stars and suns for the knight to use as instruments to serve with. Some powerful solar based weapon alchemizing. The seer of time telling the knight what the future holds will help them figure out what things are more important to others. Both of them seem to create a feedback loop for each other, which will build up slowly over time as they learn how to better command their classpects. Finally the maid of blood will help the knight learn to rely on others and not try to do everything by themselves.

I sense the witch of space’s relation to the maid of blood could be mixed as the nature of such a strong change based class might rub someone who’s all about building solid foundations and bonds the wrong way, but there’s potential for synergy with changing the ‘space’ between people to be less. The maid combined with the seer would probably end up making viewing equipment very similar to ecto-biology view ports, seeing points of time of specific people and those related to them by blood. The knight would help ground the maid’s initial desire to create as many friendships as possible, instilling the idea of quality of relationships over quantity.

A good stable sburb session if I’ve ever seen one. There are a few potential bad mix ups but none that seem wholly negative. It’ll depend on how the players use their classpects together, the lunar sway of each of them seem to suggest to me that they’ll be pretty likely to make it work.

Honestly genesis frog breeding for this group is about as fool proof as you can make it based on classpects alone. The space player has several levels of safety as well as several levels of help in terms of breeding the right frogs. While not as high of chances as the frog quest, overall success in the session is also decently high. There is always possibility of failure, and horrible mistakes could be made, but as long as the players give it a good attempt and learn how to play the game properly there should be little to worry about.

#sburb session #Session ask #witch of space #seer of time #knight of light #maid of blood #derse #prospit

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bettydraperlookingpissed · 7 years

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Matthew Weiner, The Art of Screenwriting No. 4

Born in 1965, Matthew Weiner is barely old enough to remember the period with which his television series Mad Men has now become almost synonymous. His office is exactly what one might hope for the creator of Don Draper: a stylish mixture of midcentury modern furniture, with a cabinet full of top-shelf liquor. But it turns out that the furniture came with the building, which was designed in 1955, and the liquor, mostly gifts, is wasted on Weiner, who hardly drinks at all.

(Copy and pasted cuz TPR charges and I got your back, man. Or maybe you’re made of money and can afford that kind of thing. It’s long in case ya wanna save it. Good Sunday night reading.)

Weiner’s sensibility reveals itself on closer inspection. A framed still from the set is shot from behind the actors’ heads, showing the crew. There’s a black-and-white photograph of Groucho Marx, Alice Cooper, and Marvin Hamlisch in conversation. There’s a homemade Father’s Day card by one of Weiner’s four sons, reading “Dad Men” in red and black crayon. There’s a picture of Stedman (Oprah’s boyfriend), because when Vanity Fair photographed Weiner’s desk soon after Oprah’s, he asked what she’d had on hers. His bookshelf overflows with fiction, essays, and poetry—from Diaries of Old Manhattan to Billy Collins to Moby-Dick.

A former Jeopardy! champion who once, rather than give notes, jumped up and danced to “Zou Bisou Bisou” for Jessica PareÌ (Megan Draper on the show), Weiner seems never to sleep. Our interview took place in four sessions that spanned almost eighteen months—real months, that is. More time than that passed on the show during the same period, but to say exactly how much would be, in Weiner’s universe, a spoiler. We spoke late into the night after he had spent full days in preproduction meetings, in editing, in sound-mixing sessions, on set, and in the writers’ room—and we could only sit down to talk on the rare nights when he didn’t have to write. Even with this schedule, he comes in every morning inspired by a movie he’s seen, an article he’s read, or a poem he’s remembered. (I’m lucky to be a writer on the show.) Weiner begins every season by rereading John Cheever’s preface to his Collected Stories: “A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He appears much alone and determined to instruct himself.” The life of a showrunner leaves him almost no time to be alone, but Weiner seems always to be instructing himself.

WEINER

You know, I got a subscription to The Paris Review when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I read those interviews all the time. They were really helpful.

INTERVIEWER

How did they help you?

WEINER

There were people talking about writing like it was a job, first of all. And then saying “I don’t know” a lot. It’s helpful, when you’re a kid, to hear someone saying “I don’t know.” Also, they were asking questions that I would’ve asked, only I’d have been embarrassed to ask them. Like, What time of day do you write?

INTERVIEWER

What time of day do you write?

WEINER

I write at night on this job because I have to, except Sundays when I write all day and all night. Left to my own devices I will always end up writing late at night, because I’m a procrastinator. But if there’s a deadline, I will write round the clock.

INTERVIEWER

Did you know when you were a kid that writing was the job you wanted?

WEINER

I wanted to be a writer, but the way my family thought of writers, that would have been like saying, I want to be quarterback of the football team or president of the United States. My parents had the books every Jewish family had—My Name Is Asher Lev, QB VII, O Jerusalem!—but they were also really into Joseph Heller, and my dad took Swann’s Way on every vacation. I always thought I would be a novelist, like the people whose books I saw lying around the house.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read those books?

WEINER

Not really. I read very slowly. I’m a good listener. If they’d had books on tape back then, I would be the best-read person in the world. When I had to do a report on Measure for Measure, I went and got the records, and I listened to John Gielgud do it. My dad read Mark Twain to us at night. I loved “The Stolen White Elephant” and “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” And The Prince and the Pauper, oh my God, did I love that. I read Mad magazine and stuff, but my parents were always yelling at me, You need to read more! Crack a book already! I was not really a reader until I left college. My favorite form of writing is still the short story. Winesburg, Ohio was the first book that I read where I recognized the people in it. I knew the teacher who was sort of gay and couldn’t control his hands. I recognized everybody in there. And then, with John Cheever, I recognized myself in the voice of the narrator. His voice sounds like the voice in my head—or what I wish it sounded like.

INTERVIEWER

Who are your favorite writers?

WEINER

I don’t make lists or rank writers. I can only say which ones are relevant to me. Salinger holds my attention, Yates holds my attention. John O’Hara doesn’t, I don’t know why—it’s the same environment, but he doesn’t. Cheever holds my attention more than any other writer. He is in every aspect of Mad Men, starting with the fact that Don lives in Ossining on Bullet Park Road—the children are ignored, people have talents they can’t capitalize on, everyone is selfish to some degree or in some kind of delusion. I have to say, Cheever’s stories work like TV episodes, where you don’t get to repeat information about the characters. He grabs you from the beginning.

Poems have always held my attention, but they’re denser and smaller. It’s funny because poetry is considered harder to read. It wasn’t harder for me. Close reading, that is. Milton, Chaucer, Dante—I could handle those for some reason, but not fiction. From ninth grade on, I wrote poetry compulsively, and pushed myself to do iambic pentameter and rhymes because free verse was cheating—anybody could do that. But I was such a terrible student. I couldn’t sustain anything.

INTERVIEWER

What pointed you toward drama?

WEINER

Actually, I think it has something to do with my not being a great reader. When a play’s put up, it’s all there in front of you. When you’re a little kid who has trouble with long books, it’s a very literary experience to go see Eugene O’Neill. During high school, I wrote skits, I did improv, I was a performer. My senior year in high school I was elected by my class to give a speech at graduation. It was seven or eight minutes of stand-up comedy, including a salute to the bottom fifth of the class, of which I was part. The dad of a classmate of mine, a guy named Allan Burns, who created The Mary Tyler Moore Show, came up to me afterward. He said, Have you ever thought about writing for TV? You could do that.

INTERVIEWER

Had you thought about it?

WEINER

I had been raised more or less without TV. I loved it, my parents loved it—but we weren’t allowed to watch it. And yet what was on TV during those years? M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Carol Burnett and Bob Newhart. TV was very bad before that, and got very bad after that, but at the time it was really very good. The thing is, I took what Allan Burns said seriously just because it was the first time someone said I might be able to do anything. But my parents hated show business. It’s part of living in Los Angeles.

There was one other formative experience. One of our English teachers, Ms. Moser, had a poet come to visit our school—W.S. Merwin. The honor society got to have dinner with him. Even though I made bad grades, I edited the literary magazine, and the teacher made sure I was allowed to go, too. She had even told him about me, because when we met he said, Tell me your name again, I want to remember it. In my yearbook, Ms. Moser wrote to me, Keep doing what you’re doing, and stick to poetry and starve.

INTERVIEWER

Which you did not do.

WEINER

I tried. At Wesleyan I could not get into any writing classes. I applied to everything and got rejected. You’re laughing now, you should have heard my parents. Six hundred students, all that money, and you can’t get into class!? An older student, who was studying with the famous professor Frank Reeve, told me I should go and ask, personally, to take a tutorial with him. Franklin D’Olier Reeve. This Vermont Yankee, log-splitting son of a bitch. He had gone with Robert Frost to Russia. Incredibly handsome and charismatic—in fact, he was Christopher Reeve’s father. I imagined he was in the CIA. So I went to his office and brought my poems with me. He shredded them. I had some line that was like, “Where does it hide?”—this is sophomore poetry, right?—“Where does it hide to gently squeeze the pitch of morning into orange whispers of dusk, squeeze the pitch of dusk into orange whispers of morning,” and he said, Lose the split infinitive and juice squeezer. It was brutal. Then he said, When do we start?

I spent three semesters studying with Professor Reeve, writing poems and delivering one or two of them to him every week. I also took a lot of poetry classes. There were a couple years there where The Waste Land was the most interesting thing in the world to me. I loved that it was so personal and grimy and gross and epic at the same time. Two women talking about getting an abortion in a bar at closing time right next to a story about Greek gods and the Fisher King. The high and the low together. It is so important to my life as a writer, there’s so much dialogue, so much rhythm that I have tried to emulate. That’s still my idea of what a poetic sentence sounds like. My senior thesis was in creative writing, was poetry.

INTERVIEWER

What were your poems like?

WEINER

Pretty funny, a lot of them, in an ironic way. And very confessional. A lot like what I do on Mad Men, actually—I don’t think people always realize the show is super personal, even though it’s set in the past. It was as if the admission of uncomfortable thoughts had already become my business on some level. I love awkwardness. Reeve compared my poems to cartoons. He had me read “Mac Flecknoe,” Dryden’s satire on the poet Thomas Shadwell, because he knew I had a sense of humor and was interested in celebrities. He also told me that I had to be as interesting as my work, which terrified me. I was like, Forget it, dude. I’m a very conventional person. I’m middle-class. My father’s a physician. I had no personality to speak of. I kept wishing I had grown up interesting so I could be a great writer.

INTERVIEWER

Maybe Reeve turned you into a TV writer by giving you a weekly deadline.

WEINER

I’ve always said TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing. Even then I needed to talk about what I was doing. Once I knew that my writing would be read right away, even if it was judged—and once I knew that it would be shot right away—that was all I cared about.

INTERVIEWER

Did you figure this out in film school?

WEINER

No. I didn’t go to film school for writing, but I realized that if you could write, you could have complete control. All these people I admired—Woody Allen, Jim Brooks, Preston Sturges—directed and wrote. When directors would come to the school and talk about their movies, eventually they’d have to talk about the fact that someone else had written it. To me that was like the dirty secret.

Then I graduated from film school and was stuck in a hole by myself for three years, writing. Linda, my wife, was supporting us, but that was awful. I was not made for that. I am not the writer who wants to live in the woods. Plus, half my time was spent trying to get into show business, which is demoralizing and somehow futile without finished work, but easier than writing.

INTERVIEWER

What were you writing during that time?

WEINER

Screenplays. I finished a screenplay that I’d started at USC. Then I wrote another screenplay about paparazzi. Then I started working on a Big Movie. After film school, I read everything that had been assigned to me in college. I mean, everything. I read Mein Kampf. I read all the time instead of writing. And I read a lot of biographies and became interested in this kind of American picaresque character. By picaresque I don’t mean like Candide. I don’t mean a guy who shit’s happening to. I mean a guy who is making his own future because he has no other options. I mean Tom Jones. So I was writing this movie following a guy’s life from 1930 to the millennium. And I got to page 80 of the thing, and I abandoned it.

Then I decided I was going to make a movie, an improvised movie that I was going to be in. Kind of a comedy Cassavetes movie—people improvising, but in a story. This was around the time of Clerks. I saw Clerks and felt the way many people did. It wasn’t like hearing the Beatles for the first time. It was a ten-thousand-dollar amateur black-and-white movie. It was inspiring in the way only something crude and peculiar can be inspiring.

And because I had gone to film school, I knew what commercial filmmaking was and knew I didn’t like it. In the nineties there was a stranglehold of formula on the movies. People would point to great movies like Chinatown as examples of how structure generates great works. But I always felt that these structures were derived from great works. The individual stories are organic, they come out of people’s heads. To say that the story of Jesus and the story of Moses are the same story is a horrible mistake. Are they both heroic? Yes. Do they both have inauspicious beginnings and unmarked graves? Yes. That does not make them the same story. But the studios were trying to consolidate films into a bulletproof system, they were trying to reverse engineer a hit—which, of course, is insane. In entertainment you’re a fool to try that.

One of the big things was, everybody hated “episodic structure,” as they used to call it.

INTERVIEWER

Meaning what?

WEINER

They were uncomfortable with a movie like The Godfather or a story like the Odyssey, where the only thing holding the events together is the characters. Now, there’s this monster, this obstacle, but there’s no real progression—the hero just keeps trying to get home. Sure, Michael Corleone starts off as a young war hero and ends up as the godfather, but the wedding takes up the first half hour of the movie. People liked to talk about “act breaks” and “rising action” leading to a climax, but what about Apocalypse Now? Someone’s on a journey, and sure, we’re heading toward a climax, but there are so many digressions. To me, those digressions are the story.

People would say to me, What’s holding this together? Or, How is this moment related to the opening scene, or the problem you set up on page 15? I don’t know. That’s where the character went. That’s the story. So many movies in the seventies are told this way, episodically, and they feel more like real life because you don’t see the story clicking. Movies like Days of Heaven—big movies that take time out to show the locusts. Do you need the crop duster in North by Northwest? No, but it is the most memorable part of the movie. It has no essential function in the story. Cary Grant has already been pursued. They’ve already tried to kill him. They’ve drugged him. They’ve poured booze down his throat. Remember how Cary Grant goes back to the house where the bad guys got him at the beginning of the movie and poured booze down his throat? He comes back the next day and says, This is where I was, they poured booze down my throat. Remember how he goes into the room where they poured the booze into him and they’ve changed the couch?

INTERVIEWER

Even now the hair on my neck is standing up.

WEINER

They’re so evil. They changed the couch! It’s preposterous, but delightful. Of course, anything that is epic is episodic in structure, whether it’s Lawrence of Arabia or The Godfather, which was already being treated like an art movie—the most successful commercial movie in the world treated like an art-house movie.

I liked episodic structure and I thought it worked. I still think it works. At the time I was especially interested in Billy Wilder and Fellini. I liked their grasp of tone, the way the movies are both funny and dark. You’re always scared and laughing and on the verge of tears somewhere in the middle of these movies. I could watch Sunset Boulevard and 8 1⁄2 over and over again. Everything you need to know about writing is in those two movies. How to tell a story, where to start the story, whose point of view it’s from, at what point you leave their point of view, when you should see a character in a scene by himself or herself—all this shit that drives you nuts when you’re trying to structure something. And then, the fact that there are no rules. That’s what both movies are saying—there are no rules, the audience is not as rigid as you think, and certainly not as rigid as the people paying for the movies to get made.

Anyway, once I got out of film school I said, They will not let me fly the plane. So I’m going to build my own airport. I shot my first movie, What Do You Do All Day?, in twelve days, in 1995. It cost twelve thousand dollars. Anybody can raise twelve thousand dollars—now it would probably be even cheaper, because there was no digital then.

Around that time, my friend Daisy von Scherler Mayer called me up and said, I sold this sitcom. Come in and sit at the table. We’re going to run through the script and you’ll just pitch jokes. The show was called Party Girl. And I drove onto the Warner Brothers lot and sat down at the table with all these professional writers and had no trouble talking and telling jokes. Not just because I’m an extrovert, but because I’d just made this movie and I knew it was funny. You’ve never heard of What Do You Do All Day? and it never went anywhere, but I still say it changed my life. Making that movie took me from being a frustrated, bitter person with no control over his life to a delusional, grandiose person with no control over his life. I was so high on the idea of having a job and writing jokes and going down to the stage and seeing the actors saying them and getting laughs. I couldn’t believe it.

INTERVIEWER

So none of the screenplays you’d been writing before that period were made?

WEINER

Well, remember the eighty-page picaresque thing I threw away? That turned out to be the basis for Mad Men.

INTERVIEWER

Really?

WEINER

Four years after I’d started working in TV, I wrote the pilot for Mad Men. Three years after that, AMC wanted to make it. They asked me, What’s the next episode about? So I went looking through my notes. Now, imagine this. At this point it’s 2004—I’m writing for The Sopranos—and I go back to look at my notes from 1999 ... but then I find this unfinished screenplay from 1995, and on the last page it says “Ossining, 1960.” Five years after I’d abandoned that other screenplay, I’d started writing it again without even knowing it. Don Draper was the adult version of the hero in the movie. And there were all of these things in the movie that became part of the show—Don’s past, his rural poverty, the story I was telling about the United States, about who these people were. And when I say “these people,” I mean people like Lee Iacocca and Sam Walton, even Bill Clinton to some degree. I realized that these people who ran the country were all from these very dark backgrounds, which they had hidden, and that the self-transforming American hero, the Jay Gatsby or the talented Mr. Ripley, still existed. I once worked at a job where there was a guy who said he went to Harvard. Someone finally said, You did not go to Harvard—that guy didn’t go to Harvard! And everyone was like, Who cares? That went into the show.

How could it not matter, when everyone was fighting so hard to get into Harvard and it was supposed to change your life? And you could just lie about it? Guess what—in America, we say, Good for him! Good for him, for figuring it out.

INTERVIEWER

I’m struck by the irony that Don Draper has become an icon of the 1960s Establishment when the character himself feels like such an outsider.

WEINER

Everyone loves the Horatio Alger version of life. What they don’t realize is that these transformations begin in shame, because poverty feels shameful. It shouldn’t, but everyone who’s experienced it confirms this. Sometimes people say, I didn’t know we were poor—Don Draper knows he’s poor, very much in the model of Iacocca or Walton, who came out of the Great Depression, out of really humble beginnings. Or like Conrad Hilton, on the show. These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power. I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP. A WASP male.

The driving question for the series is, Who are we? When we talk about “we,” who is that? In the pilot, Pete Campbell has this line, “Adding money and education doesn’t take the rude edge out of people.” Sophisticated anti-Semitism. I overheard that line when I was a schoolteacher. The person, of course, didn’t know they were in the presence of a Jew. I was a ghost. Certain male artists like to show that they’re feminists as a way to get girls. That’s always seemed pimpy to me. I sympathize with feminism the same way I identify with gay people and with people of color, because I know what it’s like to look over the side of the fence and then to climb over the fence and to feel like you don’t belong, or be reminded at the worst moment that you don’t belong.

Take Rachel Menken, the department-store heiress in the first season of Mad Men. She’s part of what I call the nose-job generation. She’s assimilated. She probably doesn’t observe the Sabbath or any of these other things that her parents did. That generation had a hard time because they were trying desperately to be buttoned-down and preppy and—this is my parent’s generation—white as could be. They were embarrassed by their parents. This is the story of America, this assimilation. Because guess what, this guy Don has the same problems. He’s hiding his identity, too. That’s why Rachel Menken understands Don, because they’re both trying desperately to be white American males.

Of all of them, Peggy is my favorite. I identify with her struggle. She is so earnest and self-righteous and talented and smart, but dumb about personal things. She thinks she’s living the life of “we.” But she’s not. And every time she turns a corner, someone says, “You’re not part of ‘we.’ ” “But you all said ‘we’ the other day.” “Yes, we meant, ‘we white men.’ ”

INTERVIEWER

It’s strange that you wrote the hour-long drama Mad Men just when you were succeeding as a half-hour sitcom writer.

WEINER

I didn’t see a future in situation comedy. There wasn’t room anymore for something like M*A*S*H*, where they would have sentimental moments and episodes that could sneak up on you and make you cry.

When I started out, there were few dramas on TV. They were out of style. There were four news magazines a week, and there was Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, or whatever, and the procedurals and the game shows. Reality TV hadn’t happened yet. Then, while I was doing it, situation comedy went from being the most lucrative and exciting place to be in television to disappearing. All the things that people hate about network TV were starting to fail economically, and still the networks were asking, How do we re-create Friends? By the time I wrote the Mad Menpilot, the syndication market had dried up. Survivor happened when I was writing on the sitcom Becker. Survivor, The Sopranos, and Lost all happened within a few years of each other. By then, drama had become really big. And then David Chase hired me for The Sopranos based on my script for Mad Men.

INTERVIEWER

You worked on three seasons of The Sopranos before you went back to your Mad Men pilot. Did that change your conception of your show?

WEINER

Mad Men would have been some sort of crisp, soapy version of The West Wing if not for The Sopranos. Peggy would have been a climber. All the things that people thought were going to happen would have happened. Even though the pilot itself has a dark, strange quality, I didn’t know that that was what was good about it. I just wanted an excuse to exorcise my demons, to write a story about somebody who’s thirty-five years old, who has everything, and who is miserable.

The important thing, for me, was hearing the way David Chase indulged the subconscious. I learned not to question its communicative power. When you see somebody walking down a dark hallway, you know that they’re scared. We don’t have to explain that it’s scary. Why is this person walking down a dark hallway when he’s on his way to his kids’ school? Because he’s scared about someone telling him something bad about his kids. He’s worried about hearing something that will reflect badly on the way he’s raised his kids, which goes back to his own childhood. All that explanatory stuff, we never even talked about it. And I try not to talk about it here. Why did that happen? Why do you think? You can’t cheat and tell people what’s going on, because then they won’t enjoy it, even if they say they want it that way.

You know how sometimes I give you a note that says, Why don’t you do X? and you say, That’s the thing I wanted to do? That’s what I learned at The Sopranos. That’s the note I try to give to everyone who writes here. Take the risk of doing the extreme thing, the embarrassing thing, the thing that’s in your subconscious. Before The Sopranos, when someone said, Make it deeper, I didn’t know what they meant. Or really, I knew in my gut—but I also knew that it was the one thing that crossed my mind that I wasn’t going to do. To have Peggy come into Don’s office after he’s had the baby and ask for a raise and be rejected, and look at the baby presents, so we know she’s thinking about her own baby that she gave away, and then to have her tell Don, “You have everything and so much of it.” There is something embarrassing about that. A scene that was really just about her getting turned down for a raise became a scene about her whole life. That was the sort of thing I learned from working with David Chase.

Another thing that happened when I began writing on The Sopranos was I noticed that people were always telling me anecdotes. They would throw out a line of dialogue they’d heard somebody say or that someone had said to them—and that was the story. I did not know how important that shit was. There’s an episode where Beansie and Paulie are reminiscing and Tony dismissively says, “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.” And it’s devastating. David Chase had witnessed that actual statement. Now I have a ton of stuff like that I’ve saved, things people have said to me that are concise and devastating and sum up some moment in their lives. When I’m talking to some woman on an airplane, and she says, I like being bad and going home and being good, that is very useful.

INTERVIEWER

Did you cultivate your memory for those moments?

WEINER

I always had that kind of memory, I just didn’t know there was any value in it. One time we were doing a research call at The Sopranos. It was a two-hour conference call with a guy talking about emergency medicine. At the end of it, the writer’s assistant, who was taking notes, had a bunch of medical facts, but all of us writers had written down the same two ideas. All of us. Just those same two ideas in two hours.

INTERVIEWER

What were they?

WEINER

He said that everyone with insurance is a VIP. And he used the expression “wallet biopsy.” I think they’re self-explanatory. But that’s what being a writer is. I don’t know what makes something a story, but I know one when I hear it. Mad Men was a show I wanted to see. I really wanted to tell a story about that period. I thought it was sexy. I wanted to live in it a little bit, and I wanted to remind people that they have a misconception about the past, any past.

INTERVIEWER

What sort of misconception?

WEINER

You know in Reds, when they’re interviewing the witnesses, and Henry Miller says, People today think they invented fucking? That kind of thing. The old people you’re looking at, they may have been more carnal than we are—drunker, less responsible, more violent. So many of those film noirs are about how soldiers reintegrate themselves into society. The private detective is haunted by the shadow of having killed people in the war. Don’t even get me started on The Best Years of Our Lives. The move to the suburbs, the privacy, the conservatism of the fifties—that’s all being driven by guys who, for two years, had not gone to the bathroom in privacy. I’m not the first TV person to be puzzled and fascinated by the fifties. The two biggest shows of the seventies are M*A*S*H* and Happy Days. Obviously that moment is some sort of touchstone for culture. Is Hawkeye not related to Don Draper? He’s an alcoholic Boy Scout who behaves badly all the time. I just wanted to go back and look again.

So I spent a lot of money buying videotapes to watch movies from the period. I hired somebody to do research for me. Then, because I was working all day, I stumbled on the idea of dictating. I found that I was constantly thinking of dialogue and couldn’t write it down fast enough. I heard that Billy Wilder did it, too. He walked around with a riding crop while his writing partners would type. Joseph Conrad did it. So did Henry James. I’ve since kept track because some of my writer friends think it’s cheating. And it’s hard to believe you can be as eloquent as your characters, but you can be if you have the topic and you’re channeling them. Then you get to fix it afterward. It’s way better than sitting there and procrastinating while you write a new piece of description and try to perfect the sentence.

INTERVIEWER

Will you describe how you write the show now?

WEINER

At the beginning of the season I dictate a lot of notes about the stories I’m interested in. Then for each episode, we start with a group-written story, an outline. When I read the outline, I rarely get a sense of what the story is. It has to be told to me. Then I go into a room with an assistant and I dictate the scenes, the entire script, page by page.

INTERVIEWER

I’ve seen you do whole scenes without pausing.

WEINER

I can see it in my head. And I don’t look at the dictation. I try and keep it in my head. That’s why the fatigue gets so bad. And why it’s crucial to have the right assistant. It requires the chemistry, it requires them reading my mind a little bit so they know when I’m moving back to an earlier person who’s talking or which person is saying it—because sometimes I stop identifying the speakers. After a while I’ll talk in different voices. I don’t even know what I’m doing when I walk around making up those scenes. But I wrote my play the same way, and my second movie, You Are Here. If you compose that way, it means the dialogue can all be said. John Slattery and I had an argument about something in the second episode, where there was a bit of a tongue twister. He was supposed to say, “Coop is going to want a carbon with your hand-picked team for Nixon on it. And I warn you right now, it includes Pete Campbell.” He said it was impossible to say, but I knew it could be said because I’d said it. I rattled it right off to him. Then he smiled and performed it and everything else I wrote for him. I started writing more tongue twisters for John. My favorite was, “He knows what that nut means to Utz and what Utz means to us.”

INTERVIEWER

What’s the main difference between writing for someone else’s show and writing for your own?

WEINER

It’s one thing to hear Tony Soprano say your dialogue. That is ridiculous. That’s a totally surreal experience. It’s another thing to create an entire environment and walk onto the set of this fake office from a different era and see Peggy in her ponytail and bangs and Joan looking like Joan. It was better than I could have imagined. I am a controlling person. I’m at odds with the world, and like most people I don’t have any control over what’s going to happen—I only have wishes and dreams. But to be in this environment where you actually control how things are going to work out, and who’s going to win, and what they’re going to learn, and who kisses who...

INTERVIEWER

And then you have the challenge of doing episode after episode, season after season. You once said to me, “I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of scenes with two people in them. You have to know what kind of scene it is.” What did you mean?

WEINER

When I was just starting out, a writer explained to me the meat and potatoes of situation comedy. For instance, a scene where one guy thinks he’s talking about one thing and the other guy thinks they’re talking about something else sounds like a big clicheÌ. But guess what? That’s comedy. The question is, Can you do it well? I’ve personally written some of the most clicheÌd comedy scenes on Mad Men.

INTERVIEWER

Like what?

WEINER

Like the first season, when Pete goes to return that chip-and-dip at the store. He tries to hit on the officious clerk and she rejects him, then that other guy comes in and hits on her, and she loves it. That could be a scene on any situation comedy in the world, right down to waiting in line. To me, waiting in line is one of the funniest things in the world.

Or think of the premiere of season 3 of Mad Men, where Ken and Pete both get promoted to head of accounts. I put them in the elevator so that each of them can magnanimously congratulate the loser. I wanted to see how long we could sustain the dramatic irony. When I got to The Sopranos, I realized that I hated it when one character would just help another character through the scene. “I got something to tell you.” “Well, uh, what have you got to tell me?” “It’s kind of hard to say, Ron.” “Well, I’m listening.” I don’t know about everybody else, but I find that whenever I really want to say something, there’s a huge obstacle. Except in this interview.

INTERVIEWER

What about all the scenes you do with four or five or six people? Or more? You have all those status meetings, all those partners’ meetings.

WEINER

Those are tough, and the hardest part of my job is dealing with exposition. So populating those meetings with a lot of characters gives you a chance to bury it. But I find that giving each of the characters their own goal in the scene helps them talk in my head. And that’s usually the place for the most drama. Characters go in the story from having a private problem to having a public problem, even if they just lie about it. Which I guess is some convoluted definition of dramatic irony. Take the meeting in the episode “Hands and Knees.” Don has almost been caught by the government. Pete has to turn down North American Aviation and lie for Don or Don will go to jail. Pete also knows that Don is sleeping with Dr. Faye. Lane has been beaten by his father with a cane. Roger has lost their biggest account and sent Joan alone to get an abortion. Joan has not gotten an abortion. And Cooper is just there—he doesn’t know anything. So there are six secrets in the room, and when I was writing that scene, the hardest part was forcing the characters to talk about anything. Luckily we had the structure of another dumb meeting. The audience has so much information, and the characters don’t have any.

In addition to writing, I happen to go to a lot of meetings, and I find them hilarious—the rules of order, old business, new business, it’s not just from the Marx Brothers. But you know, every scene is comic to me.

INTERVIEWER

The first time I walked onto the set, I saw a stack of mail sitting on a secretary’s desk. Every single letter was addressed to a character on the show, from a client they have in the show, stamped and postmarked 1965. How do you make it so real, so detailed?

WEINER

Well, I have a bunch of people who delight in re-creating that physical reality. But as for the writing, I don’t make any special effort to write “period.” I try to be realistic, but the characters are smarter and more eloquent than regular people. It’s part of why I have them talk so slowly—or, really, listen so much—because I didn’t want the dialogue to be repetitive and snappy and sound phony. I wanted there to be real things like people saying, What? when they didn’t understand something, and coughing—things like that. The director of the pilot wanted it to look “1950s.” He actually wanted to do it in black and white. Then he wanted it to be spoken faster. But if you speak that fast, you’ll have to keep repeating the information. I did not want to do that. I didn’t even have the characters address each other by name because it felt phony. And after two seasons of the show, Roger Sterling was known as “the white-haired guy.”

One thing we did agree on was that we were looking for a commercial cinematographic style. We were very interested in the ceilings, in the low angles. The cinematographer, director, production designer, and I all shared a point of reference in North by Northwest, which is a story about an advertising man. Even though it’s very stylized and it’s a thriller and it’s Cary Grant, it was made in 1958, a couple years before the pilot took place, and we were influenced photographically by that.

A lot of these things were decided, like so many good decisions, by financial necessity. In the pilot, I wrote an overhead shot of men coming into the Sterling Cooper building, because I knew that was the cheapest angle to make period. Looking straight down, you have the side of the building—and the buildings hadn’t aged much—and you have the tops of people’s hats, which might not require full costumes, and some cars, and you get the sensation of period. When we did the flashbacks, our first glimpse of Dick Whitman’s childhood, I remembered how, in Death of a Salesman, they had staged the flashbacks in the regular sets, and I thought, Why don’t we just put this in Don’s dining room? We’ll stage it in a sort of theatrical limbo.

INTERVIEWER

Often you’ll say, That just doesn’t sound period. And someone will go research it and discover that you’re right. How are you so connected to a period that you experienced only as a small child?

WEINER

I cut out any slang that I didn’t know organically. Even as a kid, you hear certain expressions and then you stop hearing them. I had heard people say, “Make a hash of it.” They don’t say it anymore. Also, I intuitively cast actors who had a certain formality to them. It turned out they were almost all from the Midwest. They have old-fashioned manners.

But you know, these questions of verisimilitude have a lot to do with the framing and the editing. The original director, Alan Taylor, is a huge fan of Wong Kar-wai, and so am I. What Wong Kar-wai does is let scenes develop in front of your eyes. In a conversation, the point-of-view shots will include parts of people’s shoulders and heads. He has a shot design that appreciates the space, puts the people in the space, puts the audience in the space. Music and mise-en-sceÌ€ne are part of it, but the editorial style was most important of all. We don’t use overlapping dialogue. Usually, when you cut a scene between two people talking, you keep cutting to the person who’s listening. It allows you to use material from different performances. It’s also supposed to keep the audience in the scene. But I felt that, since these actors were so good and they pulled off these transitions in front of our eyes, why cut away? So I’d stay with their performance. They would do the entire speech, and then there would be a pause on one side or the other for the other character to respond. That, to me, magically creates a first-person experience, though none of this was intellectual. That’s kind of the way I experience the world. It feels normal to me.

INTERVIEWER

Once you had directed the show, did it change the way you wrote for it?

WEINER

I try now to write every script as if I would have to direct it. I do not leave vagaries of position or gesture. I do not have vagaries about the set. I try to specify who the characters are. It’s a blueprint. I will always give visual clues. I’m not talking about the props only, but a visual motif. People sitting or standing. I will write those things in. Where they are in the room, I write that in the script. You don’t have to do that, and I used to not write that. Betty has a seat in the kitchen. That’s one of my things. Your mom has a place where she sits, if she sits. Directing has made me not write impossible crap like somebody “plops into a chair” or “turns beet red” or “rolls their eyes.” That means that there’s no cheating in the stage directions—“He’s never felt this way before.” “He reminds her of her father.” You can’t write how someone feels, you have to show it in the scene.

The miracle of writing Jon Hamm sitting on the steps at the end of the first season and, as the camera pulled away, seeing his face physically change in a way that . . . It was exhilarating. So much emotion. I’m too embarrassed a person to ever do that job. I don’t know how actors do it.

INTERVIEWER

On the level of the scene, you’re always searching for a surprising way into a moment, or a way that a moment can turn into something you don’t expect.

WEINER

You know that scene in Rebecca when Joan Fontaine is exploring the room where everything is monogrammed “Rebecca,” and George Sanders just appears in the window? It’s a ground-floor room, and he’s sitting in the window. He just slides his leg over the sash and walks into the room. You’re like, That guy could’ve come in through the front door, but I know so much about him because he came in the window. We all love moments like that.

How many people say at the beginning of a story that the character is bored, and they start telling all these things about how he’s bored—he does this, and he goes to his mom’s house, and she’s talking, and he’s staring off, and then you go to his job and it’s the same every day. But actually, it only takes one shot to explain to the audience that the character is bored, and I mean bored with everything in their whole life. They did it on The Sopranos. When Tony was supposed to be laying low, they had a shot of him on the escalator in the mall.

The story is not, We built this great bridge, let’s watch people go across the bridge. The story is, The bridge is out, the bridge is broken, I’m going to try to build one. And then it gets blown up right before I finish it.

INTERVIEWER

Do you read any of the commentary on Mad Men?

WEINER

I stay off the Internet.

INTERVIEWER

Now you do.

WEINER

Yeah, I couldn’t take it. It’s like being on trial for a crime you didn’t commit and having to listen to the testimony with a gag in your mouth. I did learn, though, that what I intended something to mean is not always what it means. That’s okay. It’s actually kind of amazing.

INTERVIEWER

You directed a movie last year. You write plays and poetry. How do you feel about being labeled a “TV writer”?

WEINER

I don’t even understand what that is. That’s going to be a big joke to everyone in ten years because everyone’s going to watch things on the same screen. The movie industry is clinging to its perceived role as the dominant form in the culture, but you know, I was just reading an interview with Stanley Kubrick from the late fifties where he talks about how movies, if they want to have any impact, have to start being more like television, or better. He was talking about the artists in TV at that time—among them, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose—and the directors who went with them—John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Delbert Mann. In the next ten years, they all went into the movies. The movies took that business away. But really, the fifties was the golden age of television.

INTERVIEWER

What made the fifties a golden age?

WEINER

Social consciousness and a respect for the audience. This was the same moment as the blacklist, so there was so much subversion. There’s poetry, there’s great speeches, there’s incredible eloquence in those early made-for-TV dramas, but they are derived from real life. There are actors in them who are unattractive. There are recognizable milieus, like automats. Before the 1950s, something like 12 Angry Men wouldn’t have seemed like a promising subject for a Hollywood movie. It had to be a ninety-minute TV show first. But that’s how it goes. Americans are subversive and they depend on their entertainment to express it. So thankfully, all subversive entertainment eventually succeeds.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever worry about losing your touch?

WEINER

In show business, careers are always seen in terms of hot or cold. Hot and cold doesn’t interest me. That’s dependent on the world. Are you in style or are you not in style? My kids have no Faulkner on their reading list. Thomas Wolfe—completely gone. You never know what’s going to go and what will stay. But on the creative side, you’re either wet or dry. That’s what a writer asks himself. Am I going to dry up? The repetition is the hardest part. You know—you deal with it every day. You witness me trying not to get caught with my pants down doing something I’ve already done. Remember Allan Burns, from my high school graduation? Well, I had lunch with him after my freshman year of college. I asked him, How do you write? He said, My rule is quit when I’m hot. When I’m in the middle of something and it’s good and I know where it’s going to go, that’s where I stop, so when I get back tomorrow I can get back on it. Underneath this was obviously the fear that he could wake up tomorrow and not be able to write. That terrifies me, too.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have other superstitions about your work?

WEINER

I have a pen I use to check off numbers on the outline. I’ve been using that pen since Becker. I will borrow other people’s superstitions. But I’m most superstitious about hubris. I am terrified about having things taken away from me because I finally relax. When I wrote the pilot of Mad Men, I was saying, I’m already successful, why am I not happy? Now it’s become, You didn’t even know what success was. What if your dreams came true?

#Don Draper #Jon Hamm #Matthew Weiner #Mad Men #this is loooooong #hopefully some of you are into this #also if some of you versed in law tell me if this is legal? i give credit so i should be good right #right??

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utopianparadoxist · 7 years

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Love, Faith, and Fantasy - Just what (and who) does Jake English want?

UPDATE: Sorry about the dissapointing news on 4/13 today. I imagine many fans won’t be in the mood to read this right now, but I thought it’d be a better way to spend the day than being dissapointed. So maybe you will. Either way, I put a lot of love into this. I hope it helps.

I want to begin this post with a mea culpa.

In the wake of the last post covering Jake’s awareness of events unfolding around him, I was lucky enough to receive feedback from a number of really great people. Among that feedback was the idea that I was kind of overstating things with regards to Jake’s intelligence to the opposite extreme. I feel that this is true! Not because I don’t think Jake is aware or that he was an actively getting Jane to lean one way in her answer--I still think that’s correct, and in fact I have more evidence to present in favor of it under the cut. But I worry in my zeal, I presented a skewed image of how I think about Jake--essentially, I was trying to correct what I perceive as the fandom problem of invalidating Jake’s intelligence completely and painting him as a moron. I think it is a fair criticism to say I overcorrected in that endeavor.

I’m hoping that admitting that my choosing to tone down certain claims is a direct result of valid and insightful criticism will allow you to give me the benefit of the doubt, and make it easier for you believe I am being genuine in approaching this subject and interested in and willing to incorporate feedback where I find it logically consistent. This is important to me for reasons that will soon become obvious. That disclaimer out of the way, please click on the cut to see what I have to say.

If you do, by the way: Thank you. It means a lot to me.

There was originally an author’s introduction here. In the interest of brevity I reposted it to it’s own post, so click here to understand my motivations for writing and my desire for the fandom. Otherwise, please enjoy.

Knights and Pages - Servitude and Ownage

In my last post, I advanced the idea that Pages are an Active class and Knights are Passive. In so doing, I made the mistake of implying Pages are all secretely hyperintelligent supergeniuses who use everyone knowingly. That wasn’t exactly my intent, but that’s fine--sloppy execution on my part. My bad. What I didn’t do is discuss the potential key verbs Knights and Pages might operate under--because I honestly didn’t have one I felt confident in. In the wake of discussing the piece with @theworstpersonintheworld (misleadingly named), he made a suggestion that struck me deeply, and once I started thinking about the story in those terms everything truly fell into place.

I think it will be useful in explaining the dynamic between Jake and Dirk as I see it, so I’d like to make the case for it here before we move forward.

The key verb for both Knights and Pages is ‘Serve’. This puts them in direct thematic opposition to Rogues and Thieves, who ‘Steal’, which lines up with those dual systems Sburb loves so much--after all, if Princes and Bards are ‘Destroy’ classes, it’s reasonable to assume there is also a ‘Create’ set, right?

Knights Serve their Aspect to others. Pages use their Aspect to Serve themselves. To establish this and contrast against Jake’s actions later, let’s take a look at some of Dave’s actions in this context to establish what this verb can mean.

From the outset, Dave has a reputation for providing his friends with his Time, serving them long rambling diatribes to consume and enjoy--often far exceeding the time they’re willing to spend on the conversation.

His primary contribution to the Beta’s game is to run loops around the session, constantly gathering all relevant resources possible so that his friends don’t need to worry at all about limitations like money or access to weapons and can do whatever they feel like. Essentially, Dave takes care of the minutiae.

This predisposition to serving others is also likely why Knights seem to end up helping out with Frog Breeding duties so often. This is essentially the most important game objective, and so serving the Space player in completing it is also Serving every other player in step.

And then there’s this. Serve is a word with double connotations. It can indeed imply servitude or service, and Dave definitely does that. But there’s a colloquial definition of Serve that derives it’s use from the term “Get Served”, which Urban Dictionary defines as: To be completely owned or shown up by someone. Kinda like Dave does to us here--which Karkat also does, by the way.

This is also something Dave does repeatedly--he overwhelms Tavros with a time-consuming and epically sassy document, and makes Time-based power plays against Karkat gestures of antagonism. To serve someone in this sense essentially means to defeat them in rhetorical or literal battle, explaining why Aradia describes Knights as a Warrior class.

I’d like to posit a corollary attribute that I believe holds true for all Classes, as well. This one is not explicitly advanced textually, but I believe I can back it up. It takes place along a different axis. I posit that just as the classes affect their Aspect, so too they are affected BY their Aspect.

So in addition to the Active/Passive distinction, we could read both Knights and Pages as ones who are Served by their Aspect.

This is true of Dave, as he gets owned by his Bro in an explicitly time-consuming fight. And the trend continues as he then gets saved by his future selves over and over again throughout the session--being served in both senses:

If this reading of Knight happens to bother you because it means that the Beta session has an uneven distribution of Active/Passive classes, consider the dynamics of both sessions:

In the beta session, Rose essentially takes and follows orders from the Horrorterrors and Doc Scratch, whilst also distributing orders to Dave and John (who each take further orders from Terezi and Jade and Vriska, respectively). All of this is ultimately in support of the plan Jade commits to herself, plans herself, and executes herself--taking Active control of the entire session in one fell swoop at the last instant.

In the Alpha session, all three Active players flounder and stifle themselves and each other with nothing meaningful to do and no way to receive substantial benefit. Ultimately, it is the Passive player--Roxy--who rises above the constraints of her session and achieves more or less competence at understanding her role and powerset by the end of the session.

In the session that requires constant action and change, there’s Three passives to one Active. In the session that requires patience, introspection, and connecting with each other, the inverse is true. The incentives and natural skills of the players are set at odds in both cases, stacking the cards against them.

That’s enough on Knights for now. To save on length, I’ll explain how the other Classes are affected by their Aspects elsewhere. I think we’ve established this framework well enough, so let’s pick up where we left off with Jake.

Faith and Fear

So basically, I was never exactly trying to argue Jake was some kind of secret supergenius manipulator. What I tried to say, rather, is that he’s pretty much about as aware and capable as his friends are. Whatever mental hiccups he has that can be attributed to mental shortcomings on our part are a red herring--Jake’s problem is actually similar to Jane’s:

Willful ignorance coupled with an intense aversion to confrontation. Before I start talking about those, here’s some extra evidence in favor of my view that Jake manipulating Jane into denying her feelings was intentional.

Last we talked about Jake, I mentioned how soon after Roxy messaged him and let slip about Jane’s crush, Jake messaged Jane in order to talk to her about it. What I missed was that that conversation with Roxy happens much earlier, and Jake and Roxy actually have a SECOND conversation on the subject...immediately preceding Jane and Jake’s conversation.

Note here that Jake slips up and describes Jane’s pinings as “unrequited”. Jake broaches the subject, and then rambles a bit about how he wonders if people really do feel that way. Then Roxy is interrupted by something and has to go, which results in...

I’m not really vouching for the idea that this “Hmm.” is definitely Jake being given a line of quiet contemplation before he decides to do what he does next--talk to Jane--but I will advance it as a possibility. At the very least, the line is ambiguous. This kind of understated response is a little bit odd in the context of Jake being worried about Roxy’s danger, and he seemed lost in his own thoughts right before she left.

Regardless, moving on to the next page. Nothing I said with Jane was fundamentally inaccurate, so I won’t cover that subject matter again. What I do want to answer is: Why?

If Jake knew how Jane felt, why not just answer her? And why does he seem to forget Jane ever liked him in the first place once she says No--to the point that even with Brain Ghost Dirk, his literal own brain, telling him better, he still claims ignorance?

And the answer is that Jake conflates believing in someone with believing the things they say, and Jake very much wants to be a good friend to his loved ones. And what Jake fears more than anything is that he may have to confront or disappoint anyone. That he be forced to find out he accidentally hurt his friends’ feelings--or be forced to choose to do something that would do so himself.

This is why his big solution when he becomes a Trickster is to become a doormat and date everybody, explicitly so that he can make everyone happy--not because he wants to date everyone himself. (though he makes it a point to include Dirk when the girls exclude him) And he admits his reasoning himself once the session falls apart:

So it’s more convenient for him if it turns out he really was wrong about Jane liking him--despite literal evidence to the contrary--and once he has it, he serves himself through Hope and believes it wholeheartedly.

He then puts Jane in a situation where she ends up Serving him by acting as a confidant for months, all the while talking her up as such a great and understanding friend and thanking her. (This is an approach Jake constantly uses, by the way--think of his “standup gent” gratitude spiel in his first log with Hal. Why does Jake give it? He wants uranium--ie, Dirk’s service.)

And implicitly uses the head trauma he received during session entry as a plausible excuse for his lack of foresight, just as he uses his Hotheaded Adventurer persona to ignore possibilities he finds inconvenient. He does all this because on some level he’s genuinely convinced it’s all true, so this isn’t exactly active manipulation. But he convinced himself it was true in the first place because it was conducive to his preferred fantasies.

This reluctance to confront his friends when he thinks there’s a chance he messed up also explains a question barely anyone seems to have asked: If Jake was having so much trouble with Dirk, why did he always go to Jane or Erisol? Why never Roxy, over the course of six months? The answer is because Roxy knows a secret (hidden information-Void stuff), a fact that Jake cannot square with his constructed identity: That he knew Jane liked him all along. Because she told him about it. (Roxy has her own reasons for not advancing this information, which we’ll get to someday.)

But because of all this behavior, Jake’s friends find it extremely difficult to approach him about subjects he doesn’t want to be approached with, which coupled with their own issues ends with everyone bottling up their feelings until they burst, always ending in Jake getting breathtakingly....

Devastatingly...

Served.

But I don’t want to harsh on Jake here. It’s not that he doesn’t love his friends--it’s just that he’s kind of selfish about it. But that isn’t always a bad thing, as we’ll soon see. For now, do you know what Jake is more comfortable doing for Jane than letting her down gently over her unrequited feelings?

Literally dying for her. After she threatened him with sexual slavery. And she’s not the one he chose to be with romantically--we’ll get to Dirk later. This is not a boy who cares only about himself--it’s a boy who is so scared of disappointing the people he cares about he would rather lie to them and himself forever rather than face the possibility. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt them, obviously.

In the words of so many people who have told me about their perceptions of Dirk: “Intent does not invalidate abuse.”

And there’s no one this habit of Jake’s hurts worse than it hurts Dirk Strider.

Fearful Heart

We get exactly one pesterlog with Dirk and Jake, and in my opinion, it is the single best pesterlog in the entire story of Homestuck. For those who forgot: The log I will be quoting from is a memory from Jake’s 13th birthday, the day Dirk sent him the Brobot and confessed to being from the future.

It is indicative of the nature of their relationship, since it is immediately after Jake remembers he’s dreaming that Brain Ghost Dirk adopts the sassier approach-- likely a reflection of Hal’s effect on Jake’s perception of Dirk, brought to the forefront once Jake remembers his situation in the real world.

The first thing worth pointing out is that Dirk doesn’t buy Jake’s Hothead Adventurer persona at all. Don’t get me wrong--Dirk takes Jake at his word when Jake talks about liking adventure and fighting and all of his interests, but when Jake tries to talk himself down intelligence-wise, Dirk flips his rhetoric to compliment him.

And when he brings up Rose’s book series, Dirk opens by asking if Jake’s read it. When Jake dodges and tries to lean on not being able to understand it (and asks Dirk to help him keep the secret--more of his hiding stuff to spare people’s feelings), Dirk ignores the comment and launches into a diatribe on the book’s underlying themes--knowing Jake will follow every word of it.

This perception into Jake’s true nature links into Dirk’s role as a Heart player--Nepeta similarly saw right through Karkat’s angry bluster and unpleasantness into the deeply emotional and gooey Heart underneath.

And when Jake leans on his dumb (and coded straight) adventurer’s persona to deliberately avoid letting his conversation with Dirk skirt too close to gay territory...

Dirk actually snaps at him, coming off pretty critical. It’s important to note this conversation takes place while Dirk is in the process of sending Jake the Brobot, a project he’s worked on for months and which we learn was meant to be a romantic gesture on Dirk’s part, judging by the ‘tender’ comments. So it’s safe to assume the dude’s got romantic thoughts on his mind right now.

And fairly intense ones, too: The Hal describes his memories about feeling for Jake as ‘heavily arresting’ periods of remembering ‘conflicted, incipient preteen episodes’ on the subject. This tells us that the episodes were getting started before Dirk was 13, that they involved conflicting emotions, and that they were intense enough that Hal is still essentially paralyzed by them--even removed from their original biological context.

Especially because he brings up sexuality again soon after, only to once more be shut down--and with Jake taking ‘gay’ as a mean-spirited pejorative, no less.

Soon after that, Jake says something that could be read as flirty and Dirk immediately jumps on it, escalating things to thinking about actual physical proximity. When Jake points it out, Dirk gets flustered and quickly changes the subject. He then starts talking DOWN how capable he is--a sharp contrast from later Dirk talking himself up in front of Jane. They talk some more, the conversation turning to Dirk doubting his own ability to make the AR, and...

There’s two things to note here: The first is that Dirk is clearly and transparently moved. The second is that Jake explicitly notes that he appreciates Dirk being helpful--being of service. This exchange is linked to Jake’s faith, and arguably leads directly to the creation of the AR. It also leads to this:

In this way, the boys nearly exchanging their true feelings for each other is linked to the creation of new life--a concept (reductively) considered the domain of heterosexual couples. Alas, it veers off into the future talk, where we learn something else important:

This moment is important to Dirk. Jake’s faith in him is important to Dirk. So much so that the moment reverberates three years later, as Jake dreams about it, through Brain Ghost Dirk delivering a line that is actually unique enough to jar Jake out of the memory--essentially, Dirk’s feelings slipping through the Ghost to wake Jake up to his reality.

Brain Ghost Dirk implies Dirk thinks Jake’s faith is impressive, further undercutting the fake reasons Dirk gives Jane for letting Hal hassle him. This moment means a lot to Dirk, and it comes at a time when his emotions are likely already running high. Which makes it a real shame what happens next.

Jake reacts horribly to the Brobot’s design, which Dirk responds to with a question. Jake spends most of his life up until now talking up his love of fights, challenges and adventure, so Dirk asks for clarification. He then asks Jake to trust him, trying to sell the idea--but Jake makes it pretty clear he dislikes the idea.

Which is why I really can’t parse him changing the subject as some cold-blooded act of manipulation. This conversation has been a rollercoaster for Dirk--he’s been built up, torn down, and sent a ton of mixed messages. The big romantic overture he had planned blew up in his face, and I think there’s an argument he can no longer do anything to fix it without knowingly exposing Jake to danger. Dirk wants to be done by this point, I think, and I would be too.

And the tragedy is? I don’t even buy that this was Dirk imposing some Training Program on Jake out of his personal perspective that Jake needs to improve. At this point, I’d need a strong argument to convince me of the reading. It leaves too big a plot hole, and there’s a more obvious canonical explanation for it anyway.

Because if Dirk was willing to unilaterally impose training on Jake because he needed to be stronger, then it begs the question: Why not the same functionality for Jane? Are we putting it down to some completely canonically unaddressed misogyny? Jane is in as much danger as any of them, and far more unprepared. If he felt that strongly and was that willing to control, does it really make sense to think he’d stop short of training her personally to ensure their success?

It’s much more reasonable to assume the obvious: That when trying to romance his best friend, Dirk approached the situation logically. Jake talks about loving adventure all the goddamn time. Dirk knows he doesn’t actually do any adventures. But he believes Jake that he wants to. The answer? Simple.

Set up an elaborate scenario in which Jake can experience all the adventure he wants--while also keeping him safe from monsters. Essentially, Dirk is trying to enable Jake to actually start living out his fantasy in a safe environment, and Jake inspires in Dirk the desire to help him in this way through Hope for romantic reciprocation.

Dirk isn’t interested in controlling Jake English at all. He’s trying to Serve him.

Which he succeeds at! Over the long run, Jake does indeed grow to view the chase as an adventure, and admits to finding the whole experience of the Brobot kind of exciting in confidence with Jane. I’d have to hear explanations if someone wanted to square this with Jake perceiving it as abusive, personally.

Hence why Jake levels up when he’s trounced. Which makes these lines Dirk delivers three years later, directly to the audience:

Straight up lies. It’s Dirk hiding from his hurt and confusion by destroying his own perceived fuckups with his fabricated Stoic Coolguy Warrior persona--the same way Jake hides from his own by burying them under his beliefs.

In reality, all Dirk wants is to try to make what Jake wants possible. Which is very fitting, because there’s only one thing Dirk wants more than Jake himself. What Dirk wants is to be believed in. To be valued and wanted. To be of service, to be necessary, to be good. And specifically...

To be like Dave Strider.

As you Wish

I’ve already laid my case for why Dirk definitely did not set up the events of [S] Unite Synchronize, but with this context it’s worth noting the note Dirk was trying to play while setting up the session--essentially, he was trying to live up to Dave’s legacy and mythological role, acting to Serve all his friends complete session entry.

He fails at this. Miserably. But Hal, who is also a Dirk trying to emulate Dave, succeeds--by the end, it literally take’s over as EVERYONE’S server player, even Dirk’s. He even takes Dave’s text color during the process AND literally takes charge of--his words--metatemporal mechanics.

That established, let’s refocus a bit and note the nature of Dirk’s relationship with all of his friends by the time they start playing.

We just took stock of how badly Dirk’s last attempt at approaching Jake romantically went, and soon after this the AR is created and begins attempting to intercept, manipulate and solicit Jake on Dirk’s behalf--I already went over how Dirk had no control over this, didn’t want it, and grew to hate Hal for it. Several times over.

To make matters worse, we learn Jake essentially toyed with Dirk’s heart with jokes he--again-- never confronted Dirk to correct, although he correctly deduces it left lasting damage on Dirk’s feelings.

Partly as a result, he views Jane as a competitor with an unfair advantage. Her complete ignorance about his sexuality doesn’t help matters, so he can’t talk to her.

All the while, Roxy is actively and willingly pressuring him into romantic interest in her and directly comparing him unfavorably to Hal for his lack of romantic reciprocation. And Hal not only harasses Jake and positions himself as a better friend to Jane (this particular act I do not view as malicious), but uses Dirk’s very insecurity about failing Roxy against him.

And while Hal claims to be on Dirk’s side in the Jakestakes, Dirk is pretty much right to be suspicious of his intentions:

So essentially, Dirk has no one to talk to about his sexuality and gets ignorance or cruelty on all sides with regards to it. Is it really reasonable to demand of a teenager to come forward to his best friend--who he last heard voice rejection of the very CONCEPT of gayness--not only to admit his sexuality and explain how it factors into his alternate self’s abusive behavior, but also to confess or try to talk around his soul-searing, cosmic romantic love for the guy?

And that is what it is, make no mistake about it. The AR is either getting carried away with the feelings it says are distant and diluted for it, or confessing those feelings on Dirk’s behalf.

Heart is the aspect not just of love, but of any intense attraction between two or more people, and thus shipping. At first, these elements may seem disparate, but they’re more connected than they seem.

After all, what do you do if you ship two characters? If you think they’re in love? Typically they’re shown as close together as possible, trading attention and feelings. Placing their two souls in proximity to one another’s and implying a give and take between them.

Which is why it’s no surprise that Dirk expresses love by trying to close physical distance, or that when he and Jake hook up in the session, Dirk tries to compensate for his fears that Jake is straight and acting out of obligation by trying to stay as close as possible--thus being clingy and needy but with no real exchange of emotions taking place.

And in [S] Unite, we get shown the degree of Dirk’s feelings. When Jake revives him with the only romantically coded corpsesmooch in the comic, Dirk’s Heart symbol lights up and takes over the screen before he pulls off amazing feats while racing to Jake’s side. And in the panel just before, the lamp representing Dirk’s literal life lights up and overflows so brightly that it literally breaks, unable to contain the force of his passion.

Dirk’s Prince of Heart role does reflect how he destroys his relationships, but not the way most people think. It’s not that Dirk is willing to erode the selves of his friends to fit into his molds, but rather that Hal positioning his Self between Dirk and his friends undercuts Dirk’s ability to reach out and trust their perceptions, or even tell where he begins and Hal ends.

At the same time, Dirk’s intense fear of rejection keeps him away from broaching his problems with Jake the same way Jake’s fear of disappointing others stops him from broaching his--his Love getting in the way of honesty as much as his constructed Persona.

Save for the trickster log--which he recants--Dirk never once even thinks to consider his friends as aggressors towards him. His instinct is to assume he’s somehow failing them instead. Just like with Jake, Dirk sees into the core of all of his friends, and what he really sees at the end of the day is this:

Dirk thinks Roxy is noble. He sees her as she really is--as one of the Nobles of the session, as they ALL are, seeing right past their flaws and mistakes and straight to the shining hearts of their intentions. Again, Roxy’s not even the one he wants to be with romantically, and we saw the intensity of how he feels about Jake. He wrote Jane entire books and sent her personal bodyguards crafted out of heirlooms taken from the Bro Dirk essentially wants to become. What would he have to say about them, if asked?

Dirk’s problem is his perception of his friends’ nobility leads him to erasing all their hurtful behavior, and his own perceived hurtful behavior stops him from seeing any nobility within himself. Dirk’s response to all of the complicated ways he’s been hurt in trying to manage the Hal and Jake situation as ethically as possible by all of his friends is to internalize responsibility for absolutely all of it. It never even crosses his mind to hold Jane or Jake or even Roxy accountable. Only his own identity.

When things finally explode on him, he turns all his pain inwards and projects it both onto Hal and onto himself. Dirk’s Prince of Heart role nearly culminates in his most literal destruction of himself--Dirk being nearly Destroyed by Heart.

Jake’s love is no less complicated, but thankfully less drawn out. And Jake does love Dirk, again--I feel this is canonical. But I want to qualify this final section with a disclaimer, because I really don’t want to invalidate anyone.

So to be clear: I think reading Jake as aromantic is copacetic with the canon. Obviously I don’t share this reading--I see him as Bi--but all I’m going to argue here is that Jake deeply, truly, profoundly loves Dirk back. I’m going to describe the angle of that love, too. But whether that love is romantic or platonic is irrelevant to me. You can read them as lovers or best friends or whatever shade of grey between is most pleasing to you, in my humble opinion.

That said, I don’t feel the need to deconstruct Jake’s every line to determine why he didn’t mean each and every one that could suggest a lack of romantic interest. You can pretty much put almost all of them down in one of four categories:

His worries about other people’s perceptions and early discomfort with queerness, his later discomfort with feeling unsafe and sexually threatened/objectified, his (willfully ignorant) lack of surety regarding the nature of Dirk’s feelings for him....

And the one I actually want to talk about.

This is in response to Roxy talking about feeling like it hurts to let Dirk down. The thing is, Roxy--like Dave--is a Passive player, who predominantly feels inclined to help others. Of course failing someone she cares about is going to sting for her more than it would for Jake.

That has nothing to do with Jake’s capacity for love, it has to do with the fact that Jake is selfish. It has to do with him regretting his self-absorption. Jake does love, and he loves intensely--he loves enough to die for it, which is pretty much as intense as it gets. He’s just deeply, deeply selfish about it.

And I love that selfishness about Jake. Because it turns all doubts about whether Jake loves Dirk back to ash in one fell swoop, in one single, brilliant, shining moment. In this moment all of Jake’s plot threads come together--his sexual abuse and lack of agency, his growing fear, his certainty none of his friends wants him anymore, his selfishness and fantasy indulgence AND Dirk’s desire to live up to Dave’s image are all build up to one single, spectacular moment.

A cinematic moment. A moment with deep philosophical implications.

Everything about Jake and Dirk’s narratives builds up to this. Dirk’s desire to live up to Dave and Jake’s inherent selfishness are complementary, symbiotic forces. I mentioned earlier that when Dirk’s lamp lights up and overflows he performs incredible, unbelievable acts whilst rushing to Jake’s side.

And when Jake is lit up by Aranea, removing his agency as a person COMPLETELY while also making him the brightest object in the sky, Jake manages to find a way to turn his power against her. And what he chooses to create reveals everything about his character. Because what he chooses to do is call Dirk to his side, to protect him and keep him safe from his perceived threat.

Both of the boys literally LIGHT UP with their feelings for each other, in a comic where the concept of Light is explicitly linked to relevance, importance, understanding, and the concept of reaching Enlightenment or Nirvana. (Stay tuned, I’ll flesh this out more in my next three videos.)

I’ve gone over the inherent romance in Jake choosing to create Dirk over literally any other option imaginable. But with the new context of Jake explicitly looking to serve himself through Hope, it takes on an added edge. What Jake wants more than anything else in the world is Dirk, but not at all to make Dirk happy or because it’s what Dirk would want. No.

Jake wants Dirk because he’s selfish. Because he wants life to be happy and easy and adventurous but carefree, and he believes he can always rely on Dirk to take care of things or bail him out when things get too intense for him to handle. Jake wants Dirk as a best friend, a bodyguard, a partner, a rival and a servant all rolled into one.

Jake’s feelings for all of his friends have nothing to do with them and everything to do with himself. He’d rather die than live in a word without Jane, and that’s why he saves her--not because he thinks he owes it to her for past slights.

All of this is textual by implication. Dirk’s line:

”I am Brain Ghost Dirk. You kissed my boyfriend. Prepare to Die.”

Is indicative of the Dirk Jake wants and believes in in his head. This line is a movie reference to The Princess Bride, a romantic fantasy adventure comedy with a very curious dynamic between the romantic leads. No shortage of people have pointed out how Jake seems to see himself as or end up in the positions of sexualized and marginalized female protagonists, but I think there’s a cause to be made Jake’s “arc” draws from this specific one--Buttercup--above all others.

Buttercup’s dynamic with Westley is simple. She issues requests to him, and he responds “As you Wish.” This As you Wish is an explicit I love you, and the power of love is put forth as the source of Westley’s power and endless competence and ability throughout the entire story. It doesn’t matter what needs to happen, Westley finds a way to do it. And he does it because he believes in their love.

Buttercup, however, struggles to hold on to her faith that love can overcome all things possible and wavers in her commitment to living for it, ending up nearly trapped in an unwanted marriage. Buttercups’ arc is resolved when she chooses to believe in love even at risk of love, promising never again to hide what she truly desires--Westley.

This is the essence of Jake’s fantasy, and we know that’s what it is because when Caliborn threatens to kill Dirk in the Masterpiece (which the Credits suggest we’ll soon see once again), Jake responds by shifting his and Dirk’s fundamental power dynamic--once again Lighting Up with love to save him by delivering Caliborn his destined serving.

Jake’s victory ends up giving Hope to all those opposing Lord English, but Jake himself doesn’t give a shit about that. Jake’s stated motivation for trouncing Caliborn is one thing and one thing only: Saving Dirk. Serving his own desire to see Dirk safe. Caliborn is hurting his friend, and Jake is mad about it. His motivation is essentially identical to his desire to save Jane, though--he doesn’t want to live without Dirk.

And on Dirk’s side, this dynamic ultimately validates the idea that he became everything he wanted to become by emulating Dave through a bit of understated environmental storytelling. I already argued in favor of Grandpa being able to on some level remember his relationship to the Alphas, so click here to read that argument or accept my premise here and move on.

This dynamic answers a question that didn’t even need asking--why the Knight sitting on the Derse side of Grandpa’s house wears a suit suspiciously similar to one of Dave’s most well-known ones.

It suggests an explicit linkage of the idea of Knighthood and the idea of Dave, and suggests that this is the imagery that comes to Grandpa’s mind when thinking of Dirk. In one way, you could view this as Dirk managing to destroy his own thematic legacy in Bro and choosing to live up to something different--a sort of ultimate manifestation of his Prince of Heart role.

And just for the record, this is a connection that has held true across not only the entirety of the Homestuck, but through Hiveswap as well, with a Knight standing right in front of a smuppet.

Which suggests to me that WP has approached Grandpa’s memories and the Alpha’s arcs with the same attention to detail the comic itself gave them, and makes me extremely confident in what’s to come. Hopefully now you are too. Hiveswap’s attention to detail speaks to the quality of the story they’ve crafted, and we should all be excited beyond reasonable belief, in my humble opinion.

Conclude.

So that’s it. That’s pretty much all my evidence for this reading of Dirk, Jake, Dave, and the wider story surrounding them. I look forward to hearing your responses. Personally, putting this together was revelatory for me. I hope it was for you, too. If it wasn’t quite, I hope you want to talk about it and keep track of the ongoing conversation I hope takes place here as a result.

This series has been a passion project, but also essentially a side project to my youtube series aimed at welcoming and explaining Homestuck to new, incoming Hiveswap fans. If you find yourself trying to make it easier for a Hiveswap fan to understand what Homestuck is about and how it connects to the game, I hope you think of me.

If you like my writing and have a buck to spare, you could also really help me out by enabling me to focus on putting more of this content out there through pledging on Patreon. Doing so will also give you access to my private community of enthusiasts trying to advance new and interesting readings of this wonderful property.

That’s really all there is to say on the matter. My next essay, if my current whim sticks, will be on Jade and Davepeta--and why Jade’s character arc isn’t as badly handled as many seem to think. If not, I’ll certainly get to it later.

If you read this far, then all I want to say is thank you. Thank you for being interested and open-minded enough to grant me the opportunity to share these ideas. I love you for it more than you could believe. I think people like you are what will save humanity from itself.

See you again soon, everyone. Until then,

Keep rising.

#Homestuck #Classpects #Dirkjake #Jake English #Dirk Strider #Dave Strider #Knights #Pages #My MSPA Analysis

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dreamteamspace · 3 years

Note

Random and perhaps specific question, if there were to be, hypothetically an acc made specifically to reblog mcyt fanart to the point it can balance the like:reblog ratio, do you think this is a good idea? I'd like to know your thoughts and maybe suggestions

In general, making a sideblog to reblog mcyt things, especially fanart, is a great idea! It allows you to seperate things from your main blog and reblog as much as you want without worrying about spamming people, and hey, some people might even follow for exactly that!

As for the like/reblog ratio: Obviously when you reblog something, you improve the ratio a little bit (the more notes, the tinier the improvement, given you also leave a like. If you don't leave a like out of principle, I guess you theoretically move the ratio a little more (mathematically speaking), but not because it 'actually' moved or because more people 'actually' saw it, it just gets one note less.)

It's obviously still a good thing to do! It helps spread the post, and hey, one of your followers might reblog the post and get it going even further!

I'm not sure what you mean with "to the point it can balance the like/reblog ratio". One single blog simply cannot do that. Even if you spam reblog, the ratio might LOOK better, but same with reblogging without leaving a like: The ratio looking a little better doesn't always mean more people saw it. In fact, theoretically, a blog that spams reblogs until there's as many as there are likes (if that were even manually possible, although that would probably need a bot or something) probably wouldn't have almost any people following that blog because of the spam they'd have to scroll through.

One reblog is all that one sideblog can *usefully* do, other than maybe reblog once every few days perhaps over different timezones. Although this, again, wouldn't be enough to "fully" balance the ratio.

And since I've started writing this marvelous essay already and you've got my going, dear anon, I have something else to say that's on my mind that I feel like a lot of people miss (although isn't directed at you specifically, I just feel like this is a good post to talk about it):

A lot of people on tumblr yell for reblogs, and they're right for the most part! This site lives on reblogs. I recently learned how to quick reblog on desktop (Hold down "e" and hover over the rb button of a post), and I reblog as much as I can. Reblogging things you like is crucial to this site.

That being said...

given each user that reblogs the post also leaves a like (as I said before, not doing that *technically* improves the ratio, but doesn't *actually* show it to more people, making the like/reblog ratio statistically inaccurate),

given every user that normally would've simply left a like and moved on,

-because it doesn't fit their blog theme, -because they've already reblogged dozens of posts that day, -because while they agree with a controversial post don't want to shove it at their followers just trying to vibe, -because it's a theme more adult-leaning than their typical content and the content they're comfortable showing their followers,

reblogs the post instead,

is a situation in which the like/reblog ratio would be "balanced", but is not realistic.

Because the above reasons exist. We can't ignore them. It could destroy specific, trigger-free spaces, spaces for minors, blogs with themes entirely and blogs that insist on a positive atmosphere meant to relax rather than start things.

A blog that posts and reblogs exclusively pictures of frogs reblogging a fanart of a minecraft youtuber would maybe lose a couple followers and the people following that blog would only be very marginally interested in it. Which is, again, where sideblogs come in: If the person running the frog blog likes mcyt that much, they'd probably consider making a sideblog. But we can't force people to make sideblogs, so assuming we do NOT ignore the reasons stated above for not reblogging, let's present a more realistic situation:

given every user that likes the post in some capacity but does not plan or personally does not want to reblog it instead ignores the like function and does not give a like,

then the same post would have... less notes. Yep. That's it. That's all that would change, really. The like/reblog ratio would be "perfect", but like... the post would have less notes.

The only time where the "reblog things!" is relevant is when people who WANT and are WILLING to reblog a post do not do so for a reason that is AVOIDABLE, such as:

"Im scared people will think Im cringe/this isnt the content my blog is made for/I dont want to show this to my followers for whatever reason, but i still want to support this interest of mine" (make a sideblog),

"reblogging takes too long" (learn to quick reblog. Side note, though: as someone with high depression times, yes, even reblogging can sometimes feel mentally exhausting. Obviously your mental health always comes first, and quick-reblogging does not allow you to add trigger or content warning tags, should you use those for your blog.),

"reblogging isnt that important, it won't matter" (YES, IT IS. YES, IT WILL),

or anything else within reason.

And like, I GET it. People want to boil down the message as simple as possible so that people understand it while scrolling by at 80 mph, which is "REBLOG THINGS", in hopes to reach the people that don't reblog for one of the reasons stated above.

But like, if people that can't/won't reblog a post anyway for one reason or another, and never plan to, just stop using the like function alltogether- we'd have a perfect like/reblog ratio, but just like... less notes on posts.

What people need to understand is that *only reblogs truly help in spreading a post and likes don't do anything other than add a note*, which is valuable and important information, especially people who come here from other sites where the like works differently. I put "likes" on a lot of posts that dive very heavily into drama or criticize ccs (even if I half agree, although most times I just don't know enough to know whether that's even a good take or not). I reblog them only when I think that *my followers would in some way benefit from seeing that post*.

Even if we're on the topic of fanart: Some fanart needs a hell ton of trigger tags, some I vaguely think looks okay but is from a cc or character that I literally know nothing about nor have ever seen and that nobody follows me for, but I still want to add a note.

Where I'm going with this is that, like, we're never gonna have a "perfect" 1:1 like/reblog ratio? It's literally impossible, unless people want to get less notes on their posts alltogether, and I don't see the point in that, personally. Likes may not do much, they really only do a little compared to reblogs, but sometimes people just... want to do a little.

TLDR: We just have to tell people likes work differently here than on other sites, and that reblogs are important and have a much greater effect on the post, and that likes work differently.

This system isn't designed to have its ideal state be a 1:1 ratio: It's designed to have an option of giving only a little and much more covert support to a post if you happen to not want to reblog it for some reason.

#Anonymous ask #ask #dreamteamspace speaks #mcyt #mcytblr #dsmp #Anon just in case i want to clarify that there's nothing wrong in wanting to improve things #ur doing great I just rarely get asks and I am very bored sdlkfjs #i just went off on a really long rant there #making a sideblog to reblog fanart sounds like a great idea like genuinely #i myself am sitting on a sideblog right now #so i can unashamedly quick reblog every dream fanart ive ever come across #hope this helps tho #long post

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kalachand97-blog · 7 years

Text

New Post has been published on Globeinfrom

New Post has been published on https://globeinform.com/technical-seo-suggestions-and-advice-on-your-a-higher-blog/

Technical Seo Suggestions And Advice On your a Higher Blog

Test That Your Most Vital Assets Are Crawlable

Photograph result for Technical SEOSimply searching into your robots.Txt file won’t be enough for checking whether or not your website is crawlable. Robots.Txt does an awesome process with regards to preventing robots from crawling and indexing certain pages, however, there can be other reasons why a number of your pages get blocked. This is why you have to use a Search engine optimization crawler, so as to ensure search engines like google and yahoo can get entry to all pages of your internet site.

Keep in mind that Google has now the capability to render pages the way cutting-edge browsers do it. This is why in 2017, it’s no longer enough to make sure crawlers can get entry to your pages, as they also want to study your CSS and JavaScript files. If your CSS files can’t be listed, Google might not see your pages nicely, and their styleless version goes to be illegible. Further, if you need Google to index your dynamic content material, you need to give them get right of entry to for your JS documents.

If you have to check a website depending closely on JavaScript or built with AJAX, you can discover a crawler which could render JavaScript such as internet site Auditor and Screaming Frog.

Cast off your “shallow content material” or prevent it from getting indexed.

If your internet site is antique, you can already have loads of low-quality content material published and indexed. A few years ago, the common trend was to submit 500 phrases articles, so only a few human beings with writing longer posts. Nowadays, This is not anything else than a large footprint for ‘skinny content’, so I’d do my first-rate to Get rid of these pages as quickly as viable.

Check out the Engines like google, and take a look at the blogs that rank nicely Nowadays. They all have very long articles, with lots of useful records.

This indicates you need to search for all of your thin content material and delete it without delay. in case you don’t want to bodily delete most of these posts and pages, you can assign them the “no index” tag, so as to prevent search engines like google from indexing them within the Search engines like google.

I would personally delete these pages in preference to “index” them, due to the fact de-indexing can take a totally long time, and that I simply don’t need them on my sites.

If those short pages include content, you shouldn’t delete them. Despite the fact that, you must recollect including more information, as a way to lead them to extra regular. After you are carried out including statistics, you could ship the URL via Google Webmaster Equipment to have it indexed once more.

Use Internal Linking to your Benefit

Do you conflict to get hyperlinks from high authority websites? You have to leverage your Internal linking above different matters. in case you’re beginning a Blog, do that from the beginning because it will shop time inside a long time.

Take a better observe your sitemap.

You recognize that sitemaps are extremely Essential when it comes to Seo. They’re the ones that tell search engines like google and yahoo on the shape of your internet site, thus rushing up the invention of your pages. Right here’s what you ought to be seeking out:

– Freshness: ensure that your XML sitemap receives updated whenever you upload new content.

– Cleanness: Eliminate all garbage from your sitemaps by using doing away with all 4XX pages, all non-canonical and redirected URLs, and all pages marked with the “no index” tag. In case your sitemap is choked complete of such pages, search engines might also determine to ignore it completely. you could Test your sitemap for errors on your Google search Console, underneath Crawl > Sitemaps.

– Length: Google crawls up to 50,000 URLs, so having a bigger sitemap is pointless. As a rely on truth, your sitemap must be a good deal smaller than this. Many Seo specialists say that reducing the number of URLs in your sitemap may additionally result in having it crawled extra frequently and greater efficaciously.

Always Consist of Relevant Key phrases inside the Alt Tag Of Your Photographs

Google can’t recognize Pictures, so it has to rely on metadata to understand and rank Pictures. This is why your alt textual content should Constantly Consist of the Maximum Applicable Keywords. Use it to describe your Image.

9 Guidelines For a Higher Weblog Blogging is a high-quality manner to share statistics, thoughts, thoughts, reviews and evaluations but with the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there it is easy to wander off in the crowd. It takes time to get human beings to discover the Weblog after which to end up dependable readers. Every blogger with a large amount of readers/subscribers will tell you that they began off the identical way as anybody else with 0 readers and built it up. Blogging no question is a long time commitment that can’t be a chore. There has to be passion that comes thru your posts that readers can relate to. At the same time as a few ought to argue that how can a reader sense your passion for your a way to Weblog post, it is there because you are there every day or whichever your very own posting schedule is. you’re there to greet them and proportion what you’ve got to say and this is wherein the ardour starts of evolved to come back via. The day you lose the ardour, the day your posts begin to go through and poof the readers flow on. now not even the seasoned vets will write a put up ever day that ever reader holds onto their ever phrase and loves it. it’s miles the fact of Running a blog – you simply can not please anyone each day. This is not to deter however to inspire to preserve on writing. Writing a amazing Weblog is an ongoing gaining knowledge of enjoy. Suppose back on your first Weblog and how much Higher the following ones have become simply by means of turning into greater comfortable and additionally getting some traffic. want to have a Better Weblog? Right here are some things I have learned and placed to the test.

9 Guidelines for a Better Weblog

1. Discover your niche. That is the first step to having a top notch Weblog. See in which you may fit in within that niche. if you are a social media marketing Blog, then realize all matters social and notice what is out there and where you may upload cost to readers.

2. know your topic inside & out. With all the blogs available you have in order to be a face within the crowd. Understanding the whole lot about your subject matter location may be the difference in putting you aside and getting examine. if you are talking approximately a brand new iPhone app. You Better be the use of it to peer the way you have interaction with it and not the other Weblog submit you simply read.

3. examine, read and study different blogs. read as many enterprise blogs and you may in addition to hobby blogs. Do now not just study the actual popular ones, locate ones that might not be so popular but have extremely good stuff. Such a lot of thoughts and thoughts for new articles come from reading other blogs. This allows to preserve you abreast of what is going on and additionally helps with differentiating yourself. in case you simply examine 5 blogs that have almost the equal precise Suggestions, locate ways to exchange yours up.

four. Embrace remarks. Properly or awful Embody Each Weblog remark you get as usually a complaint/critique is a present. remark lower back for your remarks in your Weblog. Have a ordinary commenter, send them an electronic mail thanking them for their contributions.

5. comment often on blogs. This was once touch upon blogs and people ran to as many blogs as feasible and were a 1 or 2x commenter. Of route there are instances wherein there is a Weblog or 2 that writes some thing of interest to you and you remark and they in no way write something similar once more. Adequate now not those however the blogs that you want to study, remark frequently so human beings get to recognise you after which come and read your Weblog.

6. Write exciting stuff. Take a read over earlier than you submit and ask your self will they study some thing from this? Have I given them some thing to walk away with?

7. Prevent writing for the numbers. Sure the numbers are Vital but to write a post with the only aim in thoughts being to get 10 new subscribers is a by no means finishing chase. Stop chasing and write to who’s analyzing. The numbers will come with extremely good stuff.

8. Be unique. Getting mind and ideas from different posts or even the use of them as a part of your submit to emphasize a point is incredible however taking a publish and claiming it your personal isn’t best going to get you referred to as out however flip off readers. once more, Stop chasing the numbers.

nine. Be proud however humble. A publish this is referenced in some other Blog that drives visitors is so worthwhile and is so inviting to tell everybody resist the urge. Do cartwheels, excessive fives and dance around however flaunting in a Weblog put up is just not the location. Publication is probably a Better location.

Blogging is some thing that you have to revel in and can’t be a something you have to do to hold up the numbers. As generation changes what you are doing Nowadays to sell your Weblog may additionally alternate however what is going to in no way exchange is the readers. Write exquisite content material that people walk away from being inspired, having found out, proportion or disagree together with your opinion is what a in reality Excellent Weblog is all approximately.

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hairterminator · 8 years

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How To Overcome Self-Doubt | 5 Remedies For Self Doubt | Stay Grounded And Self-Confident

#http://blog.hair-terminator.com Am I a fraud? Do I deserve this? Is this all a waste of time? What if I fail… AGAIN? Those tend to be ’s thoughts when striving for something. If you’ve been asking such questions… …you’re experiencing self-doubt. Causes? People putting you down Lack of

#http://blog.hair-terminator.com Am I a fraud?

Do I deserve this? Is this all a waste of time? What if I fail… AGAIN? Those tend to be ’s thoughts when striving for something. If you’ve been asking such questions… …you’re experiencing self-doubt. Causes? People putting you down Lack of achievements Past failures Effects? No drive No success No sense of fulfillment It’s a serious issue… so how do you overcome it? Here are 5 effective remedies you can try. Click here to watch the video – How To CRUSH Self Doubt Click here to watch the video – 5 Ways To Overcome Self-Doubt

What Is Self-Doubt?

The dictionary defines self-doubt as “a feeling of doubt about one’s own abilities or actions.” But self-doubt has a power that goes beyond what you feel at the moment. It correlates with the past. And if your past hasn’t been filled with achievements – that tends to be a burden going forward. I was never great at it before, so why bother trying now? Mixed with fear (particularly fear of failure), self-doubt has that same crippling effect which some get before their first time skydiving, public speaking, or even going on a date. The difference is those events come and go quickly. The nerves kick in beforehand but subside as you start getting a rhythm. But self-doubt is another ball game. It’s no longer nerves – they have mutated into mental “watchdogs” that bark when you approach unfamiliar territory. Their job is to keep you in the neutral zone between success and failure. They don’t want you to take risks. The 2 main sources of self-doubt: Unaccomplished goals (either because they were too daunting or you failed too often) People who have given up on you or said you’re not good enough However, there are a number of ways to cure self-doubt. They’re good habits which train you to always see the big picture – that YOU are in control of your life.

Self-Doubt Remedy #1 – Know You Are Capable Of Greatness

You’re not meant to play it safe and settle for “okay” every time! We all learn from an early age to recognize rules and limitations to whatever we do – eating, watching TV, talking to , wearing clothes, etc. We’re trained to follow the norm, to think realistically. But that kind of discipline can also be used to discourage us from taking on new challenges. It can make the words “impossible” and “difficult” ring in our head constantly. That’s why self-doubt is a learned emotion. If you read success stories, most of them come from everyday like you and me. They grew up in similar environments (or more modest ones) and experienced similar things. But they realized they were capable of something big (bigger than what they had) – and their dreams were modeled after it. That was my case in the world of online business. I started off with a small clothing service years back – and now I’m running RMRS plus a few other companies. I know how far I’ve come, and it does feel good to have acknowledge my success. One of them is my friend Mark Schaefer, who has me featured in his newly released book Known. I’m actually one of the main stories among fellow entrepreneurs – who successfully established a personal brand to gain an edge over competitors. It’s a fantastic book that offers a step-by-step guide to becoming “known” in the digital age. It covers more than 50 case studies where worked to build their reputation, authority and audience in their respective fields. Get a copy of Known and discover the gameplan for earning everybody’s attention and trust – and for realizing your greatness. The book includes the research of top professionals in fashion, real estate, construction, banking, marketing, and many others.

Self-Doubt Remedy #2 – Ignore Those Negative Voices

Have you heard the story about the frogs who tried climbing to the top of a tower? It was like a sporting event – complete with a crowd of frogs that cheered them on once the contest began… except the cheering didn’t last long. At some point, a frog in the crowd shouted that no one had a chance to win. The tower looked too high. Other spectators would yell the same thing. And soon enough, the competing frogs grew tired and began to collapse… until one little frog remained. This frog wasn’t fazed at all. It just climbed higher and higher… and BAM! It reached the top. And what did all the other frogs learn at the end? The winner was deaf. The moral here isn’t that being deaf equals success. It’s to NOT listen to the wrong . Always remind yourself that haters or bad critics in life are worthless. They gain nothing when you ignore what they say – even if they see you stumble. They only become relevant if your self-doubt heightens and your motivation goes down. They only win if you throw in the towel. And when you do succeed – they find ways to downplay your success. So those aren’t worth your time or concern. But it’s not just about an individual or group. Society can try swaying you to do or not do certain things. It can tell you to quit. Or tell you the only option is to “sell your soul” and go against your principles. Let those ideas fall on deaf ears. Stand up for what you know and believe is right. Stand by your goals and passions. Trust me – you’ll be glad you did when you’re lying on your deathbed.

Self-Doubt Remedy #3 – Have Your Own Cheerleading Squad

If there’s someone today who’s done the biggest 180 on self-doubt, it’s Nick Vujicic. This is a guy who was born with no arms and legs – and has proven he can do just about anything the average human being can. He’s now a motivational speaker and runs his organization Life Without Limbs. He’s been quite the cheerleader – for anyone who was born different or suffers from bullying or depression. But Nick himself had cheerleaders throughout his relatively rough childhood – his family. His parents had fully come to terms with his condition the year he was born, and said they’d never give up on him. As he entered teenage life, they told him he’d never know what he could achieve until he tried. He went on to learn how to fish, swim, snowboard, brush his teeth and be independent. Nick also has a wonderful wife named Kanae. Early in their dating relationship, he struggled with failed businesses and felt depression once again. His fear of being a burden resurfaced. But once Kanae told him “I’m not going anywhere” – that’s when he knew she was the one. The two are now happy parents. So likewise, you need your own cheerleading squad to lift up your spirit at the end of each day. Who are the who care about you? Who will make you feel better you when you hit rock bottom? Whose advice and opinions matter? Who will do favors before you even ask – and won’t expect anything in return? You know who those are. So don’t take them for granted.

Self-Doubt Remedy #4 – Be Humble & Eager To Learn

This is for anyone regardless of what they’ve achieved – keep your ego in check. Why? Let’s take it from Newton’s third law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. An inflated ego might seem okay at first. You’ll have fun showing off or bragging about your stories. But when you experience failure… it hits you harder than it ever has. You go crashing down with a bigger head – which means a longer recovery period. That’s why you need humility. I consider this a distant cousin of self-doubt (both concepts share a family tree but have contrasting genetic makeup). Humility isn’t just a likable personality trait. It’s part of staying grounded during your highest highs and lowest lows. As Ryan Holiday wrote in his book Ego Is The Enemy – many have made an impact on history by putting their ultimate goals “above their desire for recognition.” It’s a great book that analyzes Eleanor Roosevelt, George Marshall, and other amazing but humble . Along with being humble – you need a thirst for learning. You might taste success a couple of times, which helps you grow in self-confidence. But every successful moment should also be a reminder that there’s more to learn. There’s more to improve. People call me an “expert” often, but I consider myself an eternal student. I see things through the eyes of a child – with lots of curiosities and much fewer assumptions. That’s exactly the way Aristotle, Socrates and Plato lived.

Self-Doubt Remedy #5 – Compete Against Your Former Self

Aim to outdo the previous version of yourself, and no one else. If you think about it – it’s unfair to compare yourself to others. Everybody has their own age, different starting points in life, different goals and perspectives. Some get luckier than others, and yet we tend to underestimate how big of a factor luck is. Many star athletes and musicians thank specific for their success since Day 1. We all go through twists and turns, meet the right and wrong , and fail in our own way. We just can’t copy and paste someone’s path to success. It makes more sense to compare your own self to last week or last year – in terms of mindset, body, relationships, etc. That’s how you can make your future goals realistic and crystal clear. If you insist on becoming as huge as Mark Zuckerberg, I’m afraid that only serves as a breeding ground for self-doubt. It’s too much pressure and disappointment at stake.

The Best Prevention Method – Hard Work

Strong work ethic > Talent Not all of us have a natural talent or ability to excel in a certain field. That’s the reality. But once you’ve accepted that, you can rely on patience and perseverance to help you succeed. And those are values anyone can develop. If you put in enough effort daily, you’ll be able to stay focused. The end goal is constantly in your head. You’ll be protecting yourself from self-doubt 24/7 – even during those times of failure. Because you’ll always have the urge to try again. Keep in mind what these men had to say about failure and success: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” –Thomas Edison “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” –Winston Churchill If those guys had succumbed to self-doubt and stopped pushing themselves, would we be living in a world with lightbulbs? Could World War II have ended the way it did – exactly when it did? Remember – there have probably been more failures than successes in human history. But successful have the confidence and willpower to move past each failure. That’s why they work the hardest. There is no room for self-doubt in their minds. Only 100% determination. They can climb to the top without letting others bring them down. They’re the true winners in life – so follow their lead!

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utopianparadoxist · 7 years

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Knights and Pages - Serving, Service and Ownage

[Author’s Note: This is a repost of Love, Faith and Fantasy--my piece on Jake and Dirk’s character arcs and the relevance of Knights and Pages in understanding them. I thought breaking it up into chunks would make the content more accessible, and give me room to flesh out each argument. Thus there will be some updates to the content. Hopefully this will mean more people can easily approach it!] [Pt. 2 - Faith and Fear] [Pt. 3 - Fearful Heart] [Pt. 4 - Noble] [Pt. 5 - As You Wish]

What I didn’t do is discuss the potential key verbs Knights and Pages might operate under--because I honestly didn’t have one I felt confident in. In the wake of discussing the piece with @theworstpersonintheworld (misleadingly named), he made a suggestion that struck me deeply, and once I started thinking about the story in those terms everything truly fell into place.

I think it will be useful in explaining the dynamic between Jake and Dirk as I see it, so I’d like to make the case for it here before we move forward.

Knights Serve their Aspect to others. Pages use their Aspect to Serve themselves. To establish this and contrast against Jake’s actions later, let’s see how this model applies to Dave, Karkat and Tavros. First, the Knights, and an outline of the different executions the Serve verb can take.

Serve can mean:

1. To provide, or give (a counterpoint to Take)

2. To provide service for

3. To own or defeat, in literal or rhetorical battle (in the colloquial ‘You Got Served’ sense).

From the outset, Dave has a reputation for providing his friends with his Time, serving them long rambling diatribes to consume and enjoy.--often far exceeding the time they’re willing to spend on the conversation.

Karkat does the same thing--often offering Pacts and Bonds to friends that he likes while simultaneously offering his services in helping them figure out relationship problems.

Davesprite comes back from the future and literally empowers not just Dave, but John by providing him Time in the form of a Hammer with Time powers.

Dave’s primary contribution to the Beta session is to run loops around the session, constantly gathering all relevant resources possible so that his friends don’t need to worry at all about limitations like money or access to weapons and can do whatever they feel like.

Essentially, Dave takes care of the minutiae. He provides a service to his friends--putting them in the best position possible to act out their own wills.

Karkat’s ultimate contribution to his session is similar--ultimately, Karkat’s main role was to maintain the bonds between all his friends. LIke Dave’s, Karkat’s nature affects every single other player, keeping them bound towards a common goal and thus bettering their odds of winning the game. (it’s worth noting I think Vriska’s view of Sburb is wrong here.)

This predisposition to giving service to others is also likely why Knights seem to end up helping out with Frog Breeding duties so often. This is essentially the most important game objective, and so helping the Space player in completing it is also helping every other player in step.

And then there’s this. There’s a colloquial definition of Serve that derives it’s use from the term “Get Served”, which Urban Dictionary defines as: To be completely owned or shown up by someone. Kinda like Dave does to us here--which Karkat also does, by the way, before going on a rant outlined by his ambitions and silhouetted with Blood colors.

When Karkat wants to make something bite, he ends a relationship. Refuses to continue offering his Aspect, basically. This is also something Dave does repeatedly--he overwhelms Tavros with a time-consuming and epically sassy document, and makes Time-based power plays against Karkat as a gesture of antagonism.

To serve someone in this sense essentially means to defeat them in rhetorical or literal battle, explaining why Aradia describes Knights as a powerful Warrior class--one of the definitions this wordplay allows for is a class that uses its Aspect to deal devastating, embarrassing defeats.

Dave obviously uses Time powers to fight, thus enabling him to Own/Serve his enemies in this sense, but Karkat is much more interesting here. Karkat also seems to fill the second stipulation Calliope puts onto Passive classes--that is, that they tend to function with less awareness of their Aspect, their Aspect working through them rather than under their direct control, as if through “The Will of the Aspect”.

Every time Karkat wins a confrontation in Homestuck, he does so by establishing a connection. You can argue Karkat’s aware he does this with Gamzee, but he doesn’t really parse it as doing a Knight of Blood thing. But with Clover he doesn’t realize what he’s doing at all! He thinks he just beat this green elf dude, but what actually happens is Clover wanted to enter a relationship with him.

What goes ignored is how unlikely a win this is--because Clover is so lucky, he straight up could not be defeated normally. Clover loses this fight not because he’s overpowered, but because he benefits even more than Karkat does. Clover is a horndog, and in his view there’s no better outcome to this fight than Getting Lucky. Karkat wins unawares, as if through the Will of Blood.

Contrast this with Jake’s win. Jake beats the felt, shocking Crowbar--but Crowbar doesn’t benefit from this at all. Jake does. Jake is the one who wants to be seen as an impressive adventuring hero, and by exposing Crowbar to an unforeseen possibility, he achieves that.

So in addition to the Active/Passive distinction, we could read both Knights and Pages as ones who are Served by their Aspect.

In this sense, Dave also operates “As if through the Will of the Aspect”, even as he’s in control of his actual powers. He’s presented with stable time loops that he has to obey, and it’s kind of a loaded question whether any given Present Dave would have taken the same path had he not already been given the path to follow from his future selves.

Now, to contrast before we move on to the rest of this series, a few notes on Tavros:

Tavros’ main psychic abilities correspond to his Classpect--he’s able to move animals to serve his will, providing them direction. The reading that Pages inspire their Aspect in others isn’t totally off, in my view. What it misses is that Pages seem to inspire in others a desire to serve or help them. To benefit themselves somehow.

Vriska clearly perceives her actions towards Tavros a kind of twisted service, and while I don’t want to put the picture here, Tavros certainly ends up getting Served through Flight--a Breath concept. Tavros also gets the ability to fly early on, like John does--and Tavros gets it directly through Vriska’s service, one of the few times her efforts are actually helpful.

This doesn’t extend to just Vriska, though. Tavros inspires Kanaya and even Equius--who ordinarily wouldn’t help on account of the Hemospectrum--to provide him with robot legs, extending his freedom of motion, again a concept linked to Breath. This again benefits no one except Tavros.

Perhaps more telling is this visual language, which suggests Tavros was about to actually Do the Windy Thing--when he was acting under his own will and directing it for a goal he had in mind. Possibly healing? Who knows, we never find out, because this is Vriska. Needless to say, when asked to do things HER way and the way she would most benefit from....Tavros can’t do it. It’s not what comes naturally to him.

And of course, this reading puts a whole new spin on Tavros’ final act in the story. If we’re reading Pages as intrinsically kind of selfish and self-motivated, then Tavros’ motivation here isn’t to provide a useful service to Vriska. It’s to do something so useful she can’t possibly deny it, so he can have the pleasure of owning her.

This is Vriska getting Served. This is an immutable fact that is being stated for the record. That it is genuinely helpful does not mean that Vriska getting fucking wrecked isn’t what is taking place here. Notably, Tavros immediately gives power over the army to Meenah, because he doesn’t give a shit about responsibility. Tavros had a goal, and the ghosts helped him achieve it.

A final note:

If this reading of Knights and Pages happens to bother you because it means that the Beta session has an uneven distribution of Active/Passive classes, consider the dynamics of both sessions:

All of this is ultimately in support of the plan Jade commits to herself, plans herself, and executes herself--taking Active control of the entire session in one fell swoop at the last instant.

In the Alpha session, all three Active players flounder and stifle themselves and each other with nothing meaningful to do and no way to receive substantial benefit.

Ultimately, it is the Passive player--Roxy--who rises above the constraints of her session and achieves more or less competence at understanding her role and powerset by the end of the session.

In fact, @arrghus makes an insightful point about these unbalanced sessions:

Namely, that this puts the kids in the exact same position as the Trolls’ Red and Blue teams--which ALSO have an uneven distribution of Passive/Active classes under this reading, only reaching equilibrium when added together.

This segment covered, we can move on to Jake, and how this reading of Pages reflects on him.

This series has been a passion project, but also a side project to my youtube series aimed at welcoming and explaining Homestuck to new, incoming Hiveswap fans. If you find yourself trying to make it easier for a Hiveswap fan to understand what Homestuck is about and how it connects to the game, I hope you think of me.

See you again soon, everyone. Until then,

Keep rising.

#Homestuck #Dave Strider #Classpects #Tavros Nitram #Karkat Vantas #Knight/Page #My MSPA Analysis

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