#it happens in extreme circumstances and under a lot of pressure

[fruitageoforanges]

not reblogging because i don’t want to drag one specific person, but re: my last post, no, the blacks don’t have the same conquerors parallels. more specifically, daemon isn’t a visenya.

now, don’t get me wrong, he has his own fucked-up psychosexual relationship with his brother (which i think is the most compelling part of him), but if anything he’s an anti-visenya. just because he wields dark sister and is a skilled warrior doesn’t mean he’s like her. visenya wasn’t a tantrum-thrower. visenya didn’t run away across the sea. i don’t think aegon i could’ve sent visenya away if he tried, and he never had cause to in the first place.

the difference between daemon and aemond is much more stark in my mind than a lot of people think, and it can be summed up by what alicent says to rhaenyra in ep 7: ‘where is duty? where is sacrifice?’. aemond is governed by duty and loyalty, daemon is governed by his own wants.

[crookedkryptonitebeliever]

Yves has an impossibly high tolerance for mind influencing drugs. But it doesn't mean that he's completely immune to it.

It's almost impossible to know if he was drugged as he knows how to function normally despite being spiked with dosages that can kill a horse. Everything is still under his unyielding control and to outsiders, nothing is out of the ordinary. He's lucid, still extremely smart and poised.

Yves has to be. Because living in his body would be an absolute overwhelming hell for an average person; a lot of his bodily functions aren't done automatically. He has to consciously and manually maintain these processes. Examples of which are: blinking, breathing, swallowing excess spit, producing spit, lowering or increasing his blood pressure and modulating his heart rate. Even digestion.

This was a result of decades of experimentation and mutation inflicted on himself. Yves decided that it's much better for him to be aware and controlling of these processes.

However, if you pay attention enough, a dead giveaway that he's under the influence of something is the size of his pupils. Most of the drugs that can actually affect him lower inhibitions and forces Yves to revert back to automatic contractions.

He loves you so much that when his resolve is weakened, his pupils will dilate more than twice as large whenever he sees you- or anything relating to you. Almost making the irises of his eyes appear black. Under normal circumstances, he's able to choose the degree of pupil constriction to appear "normal".

However, when presented with something he isn't interested in or even disgusted at, drugged Yves's pupils will shrink to a point where it's almost invisible. It doesn't help that his eye colour is green, making his true feelings very obvious despite his behavior being aloof and he's putting his poker face on.

He would be wearing his sunglasses a lot until his body clears up all the unwanted chemicals, because he has lost reign over the contractions in his eyes, that he couldn't constrict it fast enough when faced with blindingly bright lights- causing him a great deal of pain when stepping outside.

And, if you're with him, his eyes are in a constant state of dilation out of adoration for you, allowing too much light to enter and inflicting a headache.

Yves doesn't like being drugged. He despises losing control over himself, so he would do anything and everything to prevent that from happening. Although rare, but possible, he would allow himself to consume such substances in order to test his bodily limits, or to even run experiments on behalf of you.

So pay attention, you would never know when you'll get to witness Yves's power and control faltering again.

[dkmbookworm]

Fizz Character Analysis (Spoiler Warning)

So when I was watching the newest episode of Helluva Boss, I will admit that I was slightly confused by Fizz’s explanation for why he felt he couldn’t quit working for Mammon. After all we saw that Asmodeus was trying to get him to quit working for him already and had spoken of how much he despised the man. So why does Fizz think that Ozzie will leave him or he’ll lose everything if he quits

However, when you look at the circumstances of Fizz’s life leading up to know and the influences he has around them, this actually does make a lot of sense for his character.

Chronologically speaking, we can see that at the beginning of his life in childhood, Fizz was already a child star in the circus, and was well loved and admired for his talents. He completely outperforms and overshadows Blitzo, and garners the attention of his father, Cash Buckzo. It’s been a running joke that Cash far prefers Fizz as a son because he is better than him and rakes in a lot more of a profit. But, we can understand this isn’t real affection, Cash assigns worth to being a good performer and being able to provide something to someone else in order to be loved. Fizz is overworked and under a lot of pressure in this kind of environment

This pops up again, when we see Fizz as a teenager. The pressure of being perfect is starting to get to him and he struggles to establish firm boundaries with others as we see with that rabid fan. Blitzo was the one who had to step in when he got aggressive, and even though everything that fan said was bullshit, his words still deeply affected Fizz.

Jumping forward again in the timeline, we see that Fizz has been picked up my Mammon as a performer. And again, all boundaries are gone as he makes robotic versions of Fizz to be sold all over hell for all manner of uses, and most commonly in the form of sex dolls. This very obviously makes Fizz incredibly uncomfortable but because he feels he owes his success to Mammon it is harder to turn him down without the backup that Blitzo provided to him when they were young.

And based on his treatment in the present day, Mammon Regularly

Scrutinizes his weight and appearance

Touches and manhandles him

Puts him through dangerous stunts

Forces him to talk to crowds of people when he’s already tired or stressed

Makes him deal with sexual harassment

Putting him into costumes that feel restrictive

And most likely he was already dealing with this kind of thing long before he even met Asmodeus and began to date him. The mindset he grew up with in childhood is being reinforced in this time frame. He is worthless if he isn’t performing, he always has to be striving to be better, he needs Mammon.

Another factor to keep in mind, is that while we don’t know this exactly, fizz has just come out of being severely disabled and traumatized by what happened in the fire with him losing his limbs and horns. And with the theory that Mammon was the one who initially provided him with his new robotic attachments, he would have to be feeling a lot of gratitude towards him for this. His image of himself coming out of this is fragile with this new version of his body to come to turns with, on top of losing his best friend. Making him extremely vulnerable and easy to take advantage of.

Then jumping forward again, we see that fizz has started a relationship with Asmodeus, one of the deadly sins, ranked only under Lucifer and his family. Both of them care very deeply for each other and have established very strong mutual trust and boundaries. Albeit, they do have to keep this secret (even tho they are very bad at doing this). Ozzie is protective of Fizz’s safety considering he is ranked much lower than him in hell’s hierarchy and that much more vulnerable to being hurt. This is one of the first positive relationships that fizz has been able to enjoy in a long time, and you can see that Ozzie has sort of filled the hole that blitz left (no pun intended). He acts as that barrier/voice that keeps him from people who cross his boundaries.

And while we can see that Ozzie is an amazing, loving partner to him, this isn’t going to fix the years upon years of problems he’s faced. His childhood, teen years, and a portion of his adulthood have been in the spotlight with managers exploiting him for profit. It is all he knows and they’re going to make sure he can’t leave.

Think about how Mammon knew that Fizz and Ozzie were an item. Think of how he would be talking to him in private telling him that Ozzie could leave him at any point because he’s just some imp. That without his fame and talents that he is nothing. The bottom of hell’s hierarchy.

One of the strongest elements to Helluva Boss’s storytelling is the way they lay out hints and background details that allow audiences to put together the story without it having to be exactly spelled out to us. And I think that is what they have done here, even if the pacing of the show can be a bit off at times. When we go back and rewatch the episodes that feature fizz we can see begin to see how he got to this point in his life and what it took for him to break out of it.

[itshype]

Please don’t pet me! I am working! (DC x DP)

The Service Animal Cujo notfic that I, personally requested but just like my extremely cringe Batman x Witcher fic, I have to do everything myself. I wrote this but held off during DC x DP week because I’m not participating in that. If I keep writing these, I’ll have to make a masterpost or probably whack them up on Ao3 for archive purposes at some point but for now: Here is the Space Obsessed Danny story and Here is the Kingmaker Danny story! CW for mention of panic attacks in this one!

So! Let’s get going. Danny died. He can’t stop thinking it. He was dead. He’s walking and talking now but he knows deep in his soul that everything’s different now. He was dead and somehow nothing has changed? He feels like something of his journey to hell itself should be visible in his skin – something more than the small exit scar on his left foot. Another dimension was opened through his body and his hairstyle didn’t even shift?

Sam and Tucker are just as freaked out as he is, but they aren’t nearly as frightened. The ghost powers and Halfa stigma won’t come until later, but right now Danny is having difficulty even considering the possibility of leaving the house. With Danny in such bad condition emotionally, there’s no way to cover up what happened, and Jazz takes them all to the hospital.

Now, I know in a lot of fanfics Danny has weird physiology even in human form (lower body temp, slower pulse etc) but I don’t remember any of that being canon so I’m ignoring it. And if it is canon then I am exercising my right to debone the original show like a small chicken and use it to make a flavourful stock.

So, Danny checks out with the doctors except for a weirdly tiny burn but he is having like 5 concurrent panic attacks about everything from “there’s nothing after we die”, “The electricity cooked me”, “Life has no meaning”, maybe even throw in a fun “I came back wrong”.

Hell, maybe he does have weirdly low vitals, but the rapid pulse is countering his slow heartbeat and decreased blood pressure etc. Up to you!

Danny probably ends up being sedated if he can’t calm down but by then there is a different issue. The doctors Fenton have arrived. Now, I think it’s no stretch of the imagination to say that under the wrong circumstances they would dissect Phantom if they got their hands on him but also I know they somewhat care for their children and canon has shown more than once that under good circumstances that they could accept Danny.

When his ghost sense goes off for the first time it’s pretty obvious. He’s in a hospital and instead of a tiny little whisp of silver breath; it’s like a fogbank creeping along a moor, its sea mist rolling in from the horizon of his mouth and whiting out his private hospital room. No one can see two meters in front of their own face, and it takes over a minute to fade. Sam screams out for Danny and tries to grab his hand where she knows it was but can no longer see. Tucker starts at the sound and drops his device, screeching gratingly at the clattering plastic of his PDA hitting linoleum, hard.

When the mist finally evaporates, the Fentons want to take him home immediately and run tests. They think the ghostly influence is ‘obvious’ but the 68-year-old nurse, Beatrice stands like a 5-foot-nothing wall of solid rock and won’t let them touch him. Jazz also angles herself between her parents and the door so if they did somehow manage to get their hands on Danny, they wouldn’t be able to leave without steamrolling her. Then the heartrate monitor goes wild as Danny panics about being a guinea pig for his parents’ less-than-lukewarm lab safety practices and they back off without further interruptions.

That’s the point when it hits them that everything that has happened to Danny is their fault. His accident was because of them, he’s melting down because of them, both of their children genuinely believe that they will hurt Danny just because he’s having weird ghostly side effects to almost dying in a ghost portal. One they built.

It’s a few hours later when they breach the subject of going home, of at the very least making a decision about school even if that decision is to formally take a leave of absence. Sam and Tucker’s parents had made them go home and he’s a lot calmer now but at this stage, his weird ghost powers are causing problems. It seems to the orderlies and nurses that his anxiety is getting worse because he’s turning intangible through cups and cutlery – making it look like he’s shaking so hard he can’t even hold a single cup, and is flat out refusing to eat.  

Even though it’s been less than a day it looks like Danny’s shock is just getting worse. He phases through his bed right as Beatrice and his parents walk through and they think he’s hiding under there out of fear. He tries to explain, confused, and disoriented and deep in denial. Jazz shuts him up. She doesn’t know completely what’s going on, but she knows enough, and she isn’t letting 12 hours of changed behaviour force her to blindly trust her parents.

Beatrice is most concerned. It hasn’t been very long but there’s no reasonable cause for his steep and steady decline. No reason outside of something-something-ghosts.  

That’s when the first few pamphlets come out about therapy animals. They require some time to be trained and the middle of nowhere Amity Park doesn’t exactly have a pool to choose from, but it’s okay to adopt a younger animal and train it themselves.

Danny looks at the pictures of the fluffy bunnies and alert-eared dogs with big, glistening eyes. Then puts them down. There’s no way an animal would be safe in his house.

That’s when the ghosts attack. Danny isn’t the only spectre with a ghost sense and these ghosts are less human due to a lack of ectoplasm. Obviously, the silver fog reappears, and, in his terror, Danny drops to the next floor of the hospital, glitching through his bed and the floor underneath it. He crashes painfully in the middle of the gift shop.

His parents reach the conclusion that due to his extreme ectoplasm contamination; he’s developed a serious allergy to ectoplasmic weaponry, including things like ectoblasts that ghosts have naturally. They’re not…the wrongest that they could be. Unfortunately, they decide that Evil Ghosts TM can sense this weakness and are trying to kill their poor baby boy. Everyone else is freaking out about ghosts being visibly proven but the Fentons knew ghosts were real with zero doubts so they’re rolling with it.

Now, due to the knowledge that he died, Danny is having difficulty worrying about other things like catching up with schoolwork, his weird new allergies/powers or even Dash.

BTW KUDOS to anyone still reading, I know this part was really long, but I really felt like I couldn’t just flim flam over the details of why Danny would need an emotional support/service animal even if it’s fictional.

First day back at school, the Lunch Lady attacks. Danny barely eeks out a win just like in canon.

His parents decide that this is because of the allergies and the ghosts being able to sense Danny’s weakness as I said above. And they take it upon themselves to root out the problem at its source, to find all the ghosts who could hurt their son and imprison them, partly for Danny’s safety and partly for study. Not even they are sure where the divide is between their two loyalties.

So, they look to their now-functioning portal.

Unfortunately, they were massively underprepared, and they don’t come back.

 Jazz sees the locked lab door and leaves them to it, making dinner and making sure Danny knows she wants him to be at school.

He doesn’t go, she lets him not go.

Two days later the boredom is worse than his fear. He goes to school. Danny, Sam and Tucker enter like a single unit. Dash tries some shit and either:

Jazz emerges and smacks his head hard enough he loses vision for several seconds – long enough for her to knee him hard enough to put the continuance of the Baxter lineage into question.

Danny starts panicking again. The teachers always want to side with Dash but him openly attacking a kid who was just in the hospital who doesn’t even lift a finger in defence of himself is beyond the limits of any sane adult’s “boys will be boys”.

Doesn’t really matter, the point is that he’s not looking to fuck around any time soon now that he’s already found out. But he did in fact attack Danny.

Danny goes home. His first attempt at school following his death has failed.

Tucker, separately, goes to a garage sale to buy old electronics to use in his PDA upgrades. He buys a boxful of weird lab equipment that definitely has a microchip or two. When he opens it at Danny’s house as an effort to distract him, a small pink teddy falls out. No one notices it bounce beneath the sofa. Sam or Jazz brings up the support animal idea again but is reminded of the whole “our house is a toxic waste site” thing and backs off.

Weeks pass, Danny develops his ghost powers and Jazz realises their parents are actually missing. She submits a missing person report mentioning the switched-on portal – the lab door was locked from the inside.

So, when Danny wakes up one day and there’s a glowing green dog already with a collar and a toy he thinks “ah yes, a dog that my sibling has procured for me as we discussed many times to help me cope with my own mortality, the near-constant ghost attacks and my parents who vanished.”

So, he puts a leash on Cujo who is happily chewing on his little pink teddy and takes him off to school while Jazz is using her first free period to go bother the local cops about their parents. (Why haven’t they been taken in by child protective services? Either:

Because I said so

Jazz is 18

Jazz used her improbable psychology powers to bamboozle the social worker into leaving)

Everyone at school loves Cujo. He gets all the love and does a very good job of dragging Danny away from ghost attacks (so he can fight them!!)

Jazz doesn’t find out about Cujo until the afternoon but probably lets the whole thing lie because it’s a great solution.

This could go on for some time. Both Danny and Phantom have Cujo but as Phantom Cujo stays in his big form so there’s no connection made. Canon mostly proceeds as normal except the parents aren’t there and there’s no huge issue with Valerie.

Realistically, a fair few high schoolers are probably also on the hunt for a pet ghost dog because if Danny and Danny both have one there must be heaps going around. Danny is also worried about his parents and periodically looks for them but that isn’t the focus of this story so I won’t go into a lot of detail – just clarifying that he’s not a sociopath who finds out his parents are missing and goes “oh ok”.

This could be its own story but let’s get to the DC part now!!

Eventually the Justice League connects the two calls, one about the ghost dog and one about the parents disappearing through a portal. Maybe Valerie complains, or even fanon favourite Wes contacts the authorities about the ghost dog with no official training or certification. Either way the JLA algorithm picks up these two very strange claims from one town and send someone to investigate.

But I mean, parents vanishing from a locked room and a green dog aren’t exactly world ending stuff, so instead of sending an actual busy superhero they send one of the kid heroes.

Now a lot of people will go ahead and put Damian into this. But I don’t really care for him in a dynamic with Danny. But I have another vigilante in mind, one who is less animal crazy, but more dog focused and also has issues with being seen as an actual person.

That's right, it's Conner Kent. And his faithful alien dog Krypto. I've seen a few fics where Danny adopts him, but you know what other family member should think you're an actual person? Your significant other. This could totally be a friendship thing no problem, but I do feel like some versions of canon Connor Kent would get on great with Danny.

Without the looming, repeated threat of vivisection, I think Danny would be a lot more chill about his secret identity and would probably disclose Cujo’s origins to Superboy. Once Connor knows about Cujo (Phantom’s dog) being able to shrink, he can see Danny with the dog once and connect all the necessary dots. Because I stand by the fact that the main reason Danny’s secret ID isn’t discovered more is because there’s no reason for a dead person to have a secret identity but once the concept is introduced then it’s pretty simple. Connor can hang out with Phantom while Phantom does ghost fights because the Kryptonian can’t really contribute but he’s there for moral support.

Eventually, Danny reveals to Connor that he himself was cloned before and talks excitedly about his clone who he considers a cousin. I definitely think without the parents there that Dani would visit more even if she has an obsession with travel, wanderlust or freedom that prevents her from permanently moving in.

This knowledge makes him very upset about how he was treated by his genetic donors, and Connor decides to move in with the Fenton siblings (without really asking the Fenton siblings) and decides that he’ll commute to the watchtower/titans tower/mount justice (depending on which version of canon he’s in sorry I can’t be bothered to figure it out).

Unfortunately, on top of not asking the Fentons, he doesn’t notify or ask anyone in the caped community. So as far as any of them are concerned, Connor went on a minor mission to investigate some missing people and is now himself missing.

Just as a caveat because I don’t feel like getting into an argument today, I used the terms both “service animal” and “emotional support animal” even though in most countries these are not interchangeable legal definitions. I use it in a non-legal way here because emotionally helping Danny – especially when that emotional stress causes physical damage is a service, and also there is the potential for Cujo to help Danny in other physical ways.

Also, there is definitely room here for Dani being buds with Match. I think that'd be neat.

If I could draw, I would make art of Cujo and Krypto being besties but I cannot so just picture it for two seconds. Done? Great, thanks!

[tieronecrush]

꒰ა ONLY ANGEL ໒꒱

javier peña x f!reader

chapter one: sweet temptations

series masterlist

rating: E (18+ only, MDNI)

summary: After his return to the US, Javier is trying to settle back into a normal life without the pressures of Colombia and the DEA, but he finds himself feeling isolated with no one to spend his nights with. Now a newly appointed criminology professor at Texas A&M, he is drawn to you, a post-grad student in one of his classes. You’re intelligent and witty, sweet and kind, and he can’t get you out of his mind. To cope with his growing loneliness and to rid himself of thoughts of you, he signs up for an “arrangement service” to connect him with somebody—a sugar baby—he can care for. After he is matched up with Angel, he finds himself developing feelings quicker than he ever expected, but what happens when he finds out Angel is really you?

series warnings: power imbalance (prof and student), sugar daddy/sugar baby relationship, discussion of money, criminal activity, judicial systems, graduate school, smut, daddy/papí kink, praise kink, degradation, self deprecation, discussion of self worth, multiple sexual or romantic partners, sex work, cursing, use of spanish, likely more warning so read at your own risk!

word count: 3.8k

a/n: first chapter AHHHH!!! hope you all love, i am not sure if i am doing a taglist yet cause it’s a lot of work tbh so will keep y’all posted <3 and a special thanks to bestie @northernbluess for helping me with this brainchild and always screaming about javi with me. love ya sister wife <3

“Professor Peña! Welcome back, sir. So glad we have you on for another year,” the voice of the Dean of Faculty, Jim Banks, booms in the empty hallway of the Sociology department, a cramped space on the top floor of one of the, luckily, newer buildings on campus. With a large donation made to the university last year, specifically directed to the Sociology department for their ‘advancements in the field and hiring top talent’, the department was moved out of the basement and into a space that actually saw the sunlight. And had a decent view of the quad, too.

Javier stops in his tracks in the middle of the hall, turning over his shoulder and giving the man approaching behind him a strained, polite smile. He hikes the strap of his chestnut leather messenger bag further onto his shoulder, the itch of his brand new button-down scratching against his skin.

“Dean Banks, good to see you,” he sounds clipped, but Javier has always had a hard time hiding his impatience and annoyance.

“Please, Peña, like I’ve said, call me Jimmy! No need for formalities, buddy.” The dean slaps Javi’s shoulder when he reaches him, and Javier clenches his fist at his side. The whole buddy-buddy Southern thing never roped him in, and certainly not after he was made privy to what a boys’ club the academic world was.

Javier has been a professor for 6 months at Texas A&M University, based at their San Antonio campus, and has taught primarily undergraduate classes for the first semester and summer session that he was on the faculty roster. Hired into the Sociology Department after job-hunting for something to fill his time after retiring. Well, he technically resigned after the nightmare that was Cali, but he negotiated to keep his extremely cushy government pension. Never needed to work another day in his life, but damn he was getting bored. Even his Pop nearly kicked him out to get him to do something other than roaming the field of the ranch and camping out to watch the boats.

Those damn boats.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Dean Ba—Jimmy?” He takes one step back, out from under the man’s hand on his shoulder, and straightens up, grip tightening on the strap of his bag.

“Well, I do gotta favor to ask you, Peña. See, Professor Harrison has had some…extraneous circumstances that have kept him from coming back to the department this semester, and likely next semester. So, I was coming down here to ask if you would be willing to take on his graduate-level course for the semester, and possibly his next semester too. It’s Sociology of Deviance, and by god, you were the first person I thought of to fill in, ya deviant!” Banks gets a good laugh out of his own joke, the effort falling flat for Javier. He waits out the man’s reaction to his own humor, clearing his throat to attempt to egg him on and end the conversation earlier.

“So, what d’ya say, Peña? Think you can manage instructing that course? Syllabus and everything is already planned, just have to have someone actually teach the material and grade everything.”

“Uh, yeah, that would be fine. I’ll check in with Beth at the department’s front desk to get access to Professor Harrison’s material for the course,” he nods to the dean and starts to turn away, ready to retreat to the peace of his private office when Banks’ voice catches his attention again.

“Can’t thank ya enough, Peña. And, uh, try not to get yourself into any of those extraneous circumstances that will be on the class roster, yeah? Don’t want to have to replace you too. We can’t have A&M losing the Big Man on Campus, hey?”

His brows furrow as nods in response, calling out a ‘yes, sir’ as he finally starts toward his office again, stopping at the front desk of the department and requesting the materials for the graduate course, complimenting Beth’s nails with a playful wink.

At the click of his office door, he sighs and sets his bag down on the desk, turning around to face the large window overlooking the campus quad with his hands on his hips.

What the hell kind of extraneous circumstances was Dean Banks getting at? Javier’s a professional, his days of bending the rules in his career are over.

The morning goes by quickly and suddenly it’s two o’clock, fifteen minutes until the new lecture he’s been assigned to instruct. He gathers the syllabi that Beth had dropped off an hour earlier, taking his bag with him as he weaves through students in the halls and slips into the lecture hall, descending the wide stairs at the side of the rows of seats. At the start of every class, he prefers to spend the minutes before gathering his thoughts and laying out everything he needs to get covered. Today’s an easy day, the only goals are to hand out and review the syllabus, and to have the students introduce themselves.

At the prompt time of 2:15 pm, Javier clears his throat and quiets the chit-chatting down, looking up for the first time and meeting a set of eyes that dry his throat immediately. Soft, supple lips are quirked up into a smile, tendrils of short bangs framing her face. Her skin looks like velvet, with baby pink rouge on her cheeks, and a swipe of gloss across her bottom lip. His eyes combed down to her open chest, the scoop-neck baby tee emblemed with some band’s name that he didn’t know. When you smile at him, he feels his heart pound and his cock jump, suddenly grateful for the pretentious podium that he is standing behind.

So those are the extraneous circumstances Dean Banks was getting at.

It was the second semester of your two-year Master's program, and you were honestly excited for the first day of classes. Over the summer session, you had taken a couple of courses to get ahead and worked as a Teaching Assistant for one of your old undergraduate professors. It was about four years ago that you graduated, working in Corporate America before deciding to go back to school and pursue your found passion in Criminal Psychology. The Teaching Assistant job paid pitifully, as you should have expected, so you had turned to an external opportunity that quickly, and easily, became profitable for you and allowed for you to quit TA-ing and focus on your studies for this semester.

The first class of the first day is Sociology of Deviance, a class that is scheduled for Monday and Wednesday afternoons. When you registered for the course, the instructor was listed as “To Be Determined” but as a required credit for your degree, you signed up for this semester anyway.

And holy shit, you’re glad you did.

A few minutes after two o’clock, the lecture hall door opened and slowly shut, the man in a baby blue button-up and tailored slacks stalks down the stairs to your right, headed for the desk in front of the green chalkboards. Underneath the tiny laminate surface that swings out from your chair, you cross your legs and sit up, eyes trained on your professor. His dark hair is clean cut, but not too cropped, swept to the side and up away from his face. A strong, full mustache adorns his upper lip, perfectly groomed along with his clean-shaven, sharp jaw. Wide, expansive shoulders strain under the material of his shirt, the top button near the collar undone and his tie slightly tugged down. The silver belt buckle sitting at his waist glistens in the fluorescent lights, one glance given down his legs and then to his muscular arms when he turns around to write his name on the board.

Professor Peña.

No fucking way, you think to yourself, immediately more engaged than his looks had you. The Javier Peña was teaching one of your courses, a name buzzing around campus over the summer, one that you had read about over and over for the last few years while focusing on the World News section of the paper. The DEA agent not only had a part in taking down Pablo Escobar, but he was also the agent who found and arrested Gilberto Rodriguez, a godfather of the Cali Cartel, and eventually took down the rest of the whole organized crime family.

Finally, someone who actually had some experience with crime outside of a courtroom. 

Uncapping the ballpoint pen laid in front of you, you tap it against your chin as you listen to Professor Peña recount his philosophies in teaching. According to him, he prioritizes ethical and principled practices in the field, noting personal experiences he had with the opposite. You vaguely remember a story from the Miami Herald about his involvement with Los Pepes during Escobar, and you could never forget reading about the corruption of not only the Colombian government but the US government during the Cali days. That case — that scandal that he exposed was a big reason you dove back into criminology. You wanted to be a person who would better it for the people under the jurisdictions of the judicial system, as naive as it may sound.

A thick, stapled stack of packets gets dropped onto your desk, eyesight zoning back in to look to your side and face your professor standing next to your chair. He gives a tight smile, nodding his head to your left.

“Please pass these down that way after you take one for yourself.”

Even from that simple statement, his deep, raspy voice has you sucking your teeth, shaking your head to yourself as you pass on the stack of syllabi, and turning your attention to the outline of the semester. As you study the required readings, Professor Peña returns to the front. Another clearing of his throat turns your eyes up, sitting up straight again as you watch him lean back against his desk, crossing his arms over his chest.

“At the beginning of each semester, I like to have everyone go around and introduce themselves. Now, I know you’re all adults and probably don’t want to do this, but it helps me to remember you when I’m grading all your shit,” he gives a closed smile to the room as a rumble of gentle laughter erupts and quickly fades.

“Anyone want to volunteer to go first?” Professor Peña scans the room, interrupted by a brunette guy that looks to be around your age, an eager smile on his face.

“I’ll go first, Professor. My name’s Alex, I’m in the first semester of my first year of law school. Planning to focus on Criminal Law. I went to UT Austin for undergrad. Go Longhorns!” The exclamation gets some applause, you note the lack of reaction from Professor Peña and smiling to yourself.

Thank god he isn’t one of those insufferable college sports obsessed men.

A handful more of your classmates take their turns, and you politely pay attention to each of them, but unable to shake the feeling of eyes on you. One glance toward the front and you catch Professor Peña’s eyes, darting away toward the student speaking and his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows hard.

If you could read his mind right now, you surely would be dropping the class. Javier can’t seem to keep his eyes off of you, entranced by every angle of your face that he’s given, your head turning to face each of your classmates as they speak. It’s endearing how engaged you seem in learning about your peers, and it snaps him out of the daze for a moment when he realizes that he is really the one that needs to be paying attention to the names being spoken.

The only reprieve he seems to get is when you take your turn to introduce yourself, giving your name to the room and each detail you offer, he automatically categorizes into his brain to remember. In those thirty seconds that you are solely speaking, his gaze is trained on you, watching the pout of your glossy lips as they move together and apart, your tongue hitting behind your teeth and the softly shadowed eyelids that crinkle at the sides when you smile. Something you’ve said makes you laugh a bit, the sound ringing in his ears and pumping his heart faster.

The focus moves from you to the next student to volunteer, but Javier can’t help the lingering of his eyes across your collarbone, sloped shoulder and pen bouncing in between your fingers.

Enamored. Infatuated. Bewitched, even.

God, he shouldn’t be thinking about his student this way. 

But you are so fucking gorgeous. And clearly kind, with the way you focus on everyone speaking, gentle smiles given to everyone. You have to be intelligent, pursuing a Master’s degree. And you seem so delicate, so sweet.

What do you taste like?

Nope, not going there Javier. Sure, he’s lonely, but with a student? After another professor just got caught with one, allegedly?

Before he knows it, every student has given their name and random facts about themselves, and he can finally turn his back to the room to begin writing out the required, upcoming assignments and go over the material that will be covered over the next few months. In the blink of an eye, class is wrapping up and he lets out a long exhale, longing for about two fingers of the whiskey that is sitting in the bottom drawer of his desk.

He leans over the table in front of him, shuffling the extra syllabi together and organizing them into his briefcase while the students funnel out of the lecture hall. Brows furrowed, he sighs when he hears footsteps approaching, glancing up to see that little band t-shirt he noticed before, now the view of a dark evergreen, black, and hints of yellow plaid and pleated skirt with legs extending from the mid-thigh hem, and suddenly he’s standing up a bit too quickly to acknowledge your approach.

“Excuse me, Professor Peña?” you ask, saccharine and well-mannered.

“How can I help you?” he responds, not managing to hold back the grin that ticks up one side of his mouth.

“I wanted to properly introduce myself to you,” you give him your name with your hand stretched out, “I know it sounds kiss-ass, but I am really excited to be able to take a course from you. It’s cool to have a non-lawyer professor in criminology courses.”

“I appreciate that,” he slips his palm against your outstretched hand, shaking it and noting your firm handshake, “Hopefully, I live up to your expectations as a professor. Not sure if I will have as good of a grip on the material as Professor Harrison would’ve, this is my first time teaching this class.”

You drop his hand and wave off his concern, a smile still plastered on your face. It’s not forced, by any means, he can see it’s a genuine expression which has his insides stirring again.

“I’m sure you will exceed expectations, especially if the reviews from my graduate cohort have told me anything.” The statement is punctuated with a faint laugh, echoed by Javi as he tilts his head in questioning.

“Glad to hear that I am… well-liked?”

“You could say that, Professor Peña,” you raise your eyebrows with a curl of your lips, nodding slowly, “Well, I should let you get back to your office. Looking forward to the semester.”

“Nice to meet you,” he repeats your name, “And be sure to read your syllabus.”

You turn around as you climb up the stairs of the lecture hall, wide smile, “Oh, I always do my homework, Professor Peña. You don’t have to worry about me.”

Luckily during syllabus week, Javier’s workload is light enough to stay on top of his emails and be able to plan ahead for the next few weeks when things will start to ramp up and assignments will be due.

In his office the next morning, he’s in the midst of slowly working through his short to-do list before his class at one o’clock. With a familiar chime from the clunky machinery on his desk, he turns to the screen and clicks open the tab with his university email address. A new message is in his inbox, one from a student. He starts to skim the message to look for questions asked, thinking to himself as he shakes his head with a disbelieving scoff.

A student already emailing? It’s the first fucking week, c’mon kid, let up and have a little fun during syllabus w—

Oh, wait, it’s you. From his graduate course yesterday afternoon. The student off to the left, with the sweet smile and doe eyes, tight t-shirt and juicy lips.

What would they look like around him?

Jesus Christ, Javier. Get your shit together. A student. That is what you are, and all that you can be.

At least until you graduate.

Shut up, Peña!

He argues back and forth with himself, the angel and devil on his shoulders both making convincing arguments. Physically shaking himself out of the thoughts, he focuses back on your actual message, fully reading it now and chuckling to himself when it’s simply a message about a mistake in the syllabus.

One of the readings is listed with the wrong author, but of course, with how amiable and courteous you are, it’s phrased as a question rather than flat out telling him it’s wrong. Something along the lines of “Sorry Professor, but did I get this wrong…”

He’s not offended, he didn’t write the syllabus, and even if he did, he still would feel no qualms about being corrected where it was due.

There’s a flash of something in his chest, the smallest bit of anger when he thinks about you drafting this email to him, likely nervous you’d get a shitty response back. He knows the type of shit his colleagues say to their female students, and it grates on him every time. Typing up a reply to you, he answers the question concisely. The cursor blinks for a minute on the screen, deciding whether or not to finish off the message with some words of encouragement or not.

Quickly, he adds ‘And please, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. Clearly you know your stuff, and I could use some help with navigating this new course.’ Adding his signature, he hits send before he can give it another thought.

Exiting out of the window, an ad pops up onto his desktop. Javier moves his mouse to hover over the ‘X’ button, the baby pink banner catching his attention.

Sweet Temptations.

Curiosity gets the best of him and he clicks through to the website, licking his lips when he’s greeted with a logo design that features the silhouette of a woman as the ‘T’.

Javier is lonely.

He moved away from Laredo, where his father resides on the family ranch, the only familiar piece of the US that he was eager to return to. That excitement for the slow life burned out quickly, angst settling in and keeping him on edge — those damn boats.

Chucho encouraged the move, the job, the lifestyle change. Something busier to keep his mind and body occupied, left active enough to forget about the news from over the border, the runs happening right behind his family’s land.

Sure, Laredo is a short drive away, but the distance from family and the few friends he has at home, plus no informants to spend his evenings with, Javier has become decidedly lonely. And these days, he is open to any means of companionship.

For a few minutes, Javi pokes around the site, reading about the matching process for men “seeking arrangements” that “avoid the complications of traditional dating”.

From what he can gather, it’s a place to find a sugar baby. And as a man who was — honestly is supportive of sex work (if this even counts as sex work?), he isn’t above paying for an arrangement that will work for him. Traditional dating hasn’t given him much luck, too many expectations put on him upfront, and too big of a jump to be made that he isn’t quite adjusted for. 

All of this logic is leading him to the sign up tab, filling out his information. He creates a new email address for this purpose, choosing a simple ‘javip@hotmail.com’. The rest of the form is a simple questionnaire, looking to get the gist of what he’s looking for out of this arrangement and what kind of woman he typically goes for.

He hovers over one question: ‘Are you looking for a relationship that will be sexually active?’. It’s a check of ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and suddenly the back of his neck is burning with a hint of shame as he selects ‘yes’.

After the rest of it is answered, he submits it.

If this goes nowhere, hey, at least he tried.

In the exact same spot a week later, Javier is slumped in his chair at his large desk, the sleeves of his button up rolled up to expose his forearms as he does the reading for his own class, preparation for Sociology of Deviance tomorrow afternoon.

Last week, at the second meeting of the cohort, he was impressed by your analysis of the first reading assignment, joking with you after you hit all the key points that ‘you could come up here and teach and give him a break’. That same jolt of energy from last Monday passed through him when you smiled bashfully at him, actively listening for the rest of the lecture. Before he could pull you to compliment you again, you were up the stairs and out the door, a tiny piece of notebook paper left behind. He stalks up to the desk you were at, picking up the scrap and grinning to himself when he sees a doodle of yours. It’s him, it has to be with the prominent ‘stache and eyebrows, his characteristically accurate head floating on the page. He tucks the drawing into his pocket and leaves for the day, stowing the art piece in the top drawer of his desk.

Today, he flicks the paper around in between his fingers, studying the fluid line work when his computer sings again with an incoming email. With nothing in his work inbox, he checks his new personal one, greeted with an excitable subject line:

YOU’VE GOT A MATCH!

JaviP & TheOnlyAngel

tagging some peeps that requested it but not sure if i will have a taglist for this series lol: @northernbluess @swiftispunk @joelsversion @mrsquill @yazsos @cartoon-garbage04 @sugadolly @ilovepedro @lovers-liability @deathwife @walkingintheheartbreaksatellite @undrthelights @atticrissfinch @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin

[oddlittlestories]

Okay so I can’t find it but I saw a post about wishing at least one other character would acknowledge there’s a reason House doesn’t want to go to his dad’s funeral. And I wanted to say that I agree with this. And I think it’s the point. And that House as a show was also subverting expectations, so I wanted to talk a little about this.

So first off, I think it does really interesting things when you take a non-diegetic / non-in-universe approach to the show.

One, this was Supernatural era. You know, the show that sometimes categorized the dad (who would leave his child sons alone for weeks at a time, was sometimes implied to hit them, and openly shamed them especially Dean) as the only true hero. And also iirc a lot of shows and movies at that time centered around the theme of forgiving your abusive parent.

Two, in the previous season, we get an episode that canonically parallels the severe traumas of rape and physical child abuse.

Three, House never apologizes or forgives his dad. Yeah, he’s a misanthrope, so there’s a narrative excuse there, but he’s also allowed to do it. And he’s right about his dad not being his bio dad.

Four, for the above reasons, it is reasonable to view the narrative as being on House’s side. He goes because of extreme social pressures (which exist in the real world!) and, possibly, because his mom wants him there. But the narrative essentially says that his dad was a bad person and House shouldn’t have had to go. (With the possibly caveat of ‘[even shitty] funerals are sometimes a place to reconnect with living people you actually care about.’)

Part Two: Diegetic / In-Universe

House’s mom. This is really interesting, right? House’s mom is brought up over and over again. And the narrative thread is—she was abused, too. Should House connect with her? And if so, why and under what circumstances?

And what’s really interesting is, House doesn’t want to under the given circumstances. Because it means submitting to social mores he doesn’t agree with, including the circumspect of implying, “My dad was a good guy.”

But his mom doesn’t seem to see it quite the same way. “He’s not going to care [that we started late], Greg. He’s dead.” Essentially saying, this really isn’t about him. He’s dead.

So it’s this moral ambiguity again. Can and should House align with his also-abused mother? What would it cost him to do so? (And implied: childhood abuse can have lingering impacts forever, especially when people dismiss it because - the war is not over.)

To me, this episode is one of the examples where many characters take on roles as foils to expose a narrative theme. In this case: social pressure around “respecting your parents.” And I think it’s brilliantly done. I think when you have the overwhelming suffocating feeling of WHY ISN’T ANYONE LISTENING TO HIM

I think that’s EXACTLY the point

These motives are, to a degree, being placed on the characters. It’s extremely well-written, so it feels authentic, but to me it’s just as likely Chase would say “he shouldn’t have to go” and Cuddy with her mom would be more sympathetic. But the writers chose to unearth all the reasons each of them would put social pressures on House. And this happens to people in real life.

And of course, Wilson. It’s not inauthentic for Wilson. He’s doing two things at once. One, he’s playing out his own issues around social obligation. Two, he’s grabbing onto “I am socially obligated to be around House” like a lifeline.

Which leads us to the second theme of the episode, which is inherently true to the characters and deeply humanizing.

Complicated grief.

House’s grief is complicated because of social pressure. And he’s not sad his dad is dead—he’s sad that it changes nothing. Like he says to the kid with the facial deformity: “you can change your face, but you can’t change who your face made you.” House can change his circumstances. But he can’t change who they made him.

And Wilson’s grief is complicated because his girlfriend died suddenly, violently, unreasonably. And his best friend was deeply involved—in trying to save her and in her ultimate loss. He’s terrified of losing people and he almost lost them both. And because it’s Wilson, he represses, justifies, and misunderstands his own motives which makes everything harder. And it’s also deeply real. People compartmentalize. They misunderstand their own feelings.

So yeah! This episode is a twofer. One is meant to make you scream internally about the social pressures around funerals and abusive parents. The other is about complicated grief and mourning, and reconnecting despite and sometimes because of death.

The complexity gives me brain worms. I love this episode.

[threwedaway]

TW: SA, ABUSE

Someone said some victim blamer shit in my reblogs and that's an automatic no, but I needed to share... Because what the hell, man?

I got this reblog and I'm trying to keep my composure. This is probably going to be a rambling mess. I was just trying to make a fun little post about HuskerDust, but here we go!

I crossed out the name, because I don't know how old this person is and I don't know what their experiences are.

This will kind of go back and forth between Angel's situation and general information/experience. I think from what I've seen it won't resonate with everyone, but it is definitely within the realm of possibility and makes sense given his circumstances.

I also use the terms victim and survivor interchangeably as a fair warning.

I know there's been a lot of talk around victim blaming and this is blatant.

I'm aware this is a fictional character. I have, however, worked at multiple non-profits that focus on helping survivors of abuse and SA as well as being a victim myself. So, I am pissed beyond belief.

No one lets themselves be abused. Even in situations where someone resigns themselves to abuse, it is for their survival and safety. It is under duress and it is not someone letting themselves be abused. This person says Angel is doing an awful job saving himself, but in all reality he is attempting to keep himself as safe as he can in the environment he's in.

Husk isn't doing everything right and a relationship with the foundation of it being we both suck and we're both stuck in shitty situations isn't going to be stable, but as I said in my original post, he's telling Angel he's not alone. He's not doing that perfectly, but he's saying even if we can't fix everything I'll be here. He says we're in this together, respects that Angel doesn't want to be saved, and he takes the pressure off. He makes himself a safe place for Angel to vent and makes it clear that he enjoys being around him no matter what.

Trying to force someone can push them towards their abuser and isolate them further or put you and the victim in a lot of danger if you're untrained. Which is what happens in the episode when Charlie comes to the studio. Someone tried to help when he didn't ask for it and it ended badly, which just reaffirms that he cannot accept or ask for help without repercussion.

If you have someone close to you who is in an abusive situation and they don't want to leave for whatever reason, applying too much pressure can be counterproductive. If it is safe to do so (mentally and physically), be there for them. Try and keep the line of communication open so they have a life line if or when they're ready.

Angel is under contract, there has been a pattern of abuse for at least a decade, his self worth is extremely low, there are threats of violence against him and people he cares about and Valentino seemingly provided everything before Charlie and is still providing for his drug habits. That's not even getting into the intricacies of the fact he was trafficked, which makes things more complicated.

Aside from the magic piece of paper, these are real reasons people stay in abusive relationships.

My point is, this is uninformed and victim blaming. The amount of times I've heard from survivors all the reasons they didn't ask for help even though it was awful is too many to count. So many people come out of these situations after years and years and blame themselves for not getting help. It is never the fault of the person being hurt, it is always the fault of the person hurting them.

Angel is trying to save himself and is making steps forward. He's going to the hotel, distancing himself from Valentino and he's also trying to 'break himself' or make himself less appealing to his abuser. While that last one isn't good, he's not doing nothing. He is trying to use the resources he knows to stop the abuse.

Autonomy is very important in situations like this. Of course someone in this situation should ask for help, but if someone isn't ready it's not our place to decide that for them.

This struck a nerve obviously!

No one is a bad victim. We do not judge victims choices to ask for help or not ask for help. We do not imply any survivor of abuse lets it happen somehow.

Keep anything close to victim blaming off my blog. All and all, don't put these words in that order! Ever!

[shitty-fallout-art]

only a single portrait because you don't need to see more right now :)

-Currently residing within the bowels of the Slop Shop hideout, Cait is an unwilling captive acting as Jared's current prophet.

-Not much could initially be said about Cait, given that she had nobody with which to share her story with. Once she was sold to the Combat Arena, she figured she would spend the rest of her life within its walls without a hope of ever being freed from them; and technically, she was correct.

-For years her routine had been a murky cycle of violence, the days blending together so that she lived perpetually within the chaotic fights of the arena. Between the chems that both gave her spirit and dulled her mind, and Tommy not being one to keep her updated with matters that, frankly, didn't interest her, the world seemed to pas by her with little trouble, until its troubles grew too great for her to be ignorant of.

-The numbers always fluctuated, raiders coming and going at all intervals depending on circumstance alone. Raider nests often got liberated or stolen, their proximity to Diamond City was often a liability risk, and prime targets in the southern regions were often too good to pass up. No matter what the combat arena promised in terms of excitement or caps, the unpredictable world of the commonwealth outside meant that business could go from busy to slow, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

-It wasn't until the numbers drastically went up that she figured something must have been driving everyone up north.

-At first it was a great boom for business, and despite the increase in her performances, she was also allotted time for herself to make room for other, fresher acts. Though unable to leave and very restricted in what she was allowed to do, Cait was able to make the most of her time with chem usage and general distractions, and second-hand she learned of pretty strange things happening outside the Combat Arena.

-The arrival of the Brotherhood got quite a laugh out of a lot of people, as did the rise of the minutemen, though such opinions were tinged with embitterment and anger towards their rapid success and rock-hard defenses. Nothing had squashed their spirits yet, but it was obvious that most raiders saw both groups as a challenge, and held mixed feelings of excitement and worry at a confrontation. Any further politics surrounding them had slipped her mind. Her addiction had grown heavier, and her actions while under usage became extreme and frightening.

-For months the Combat Arena flourished, then came a steady decline in profits, yet the number of patrons never went down. People were still showing up, and weirdly enough, staying there for long periods of time, though it appeared as though there just wasn't enough to indulge in freely. Chems were still easy to get hold of, but food started to become a bit harder to come by, and it wasn't for lack of effort on the raiders part. Cait's position kept her well fed, but fights often broke out amongst the freeloaders.

-Tommy was gradually loosing control of his business. It was hard to throw out the people who couldn't pay, but as they grew in number they overwhelmed him and eventually made themselves at home. Everything was running dry but they had no means with which to replace it. The Brotherhood was putting pressure on nearby areas and if they caught wind of the place then the Combat Arena was doomed.

-He grew desperate, and though he had promised to take Cait with him, he tried to sell her contract in the end for a little extra cash.

-The man who bought it, a Raider named Rust, was a strange one. He often talked about the failings of Ortega and bought large quantities of chems whenever he could, though rarely seemed to take them himself. When the Brotherhood came knocking down their down, he took Cait and fled towards the northeast. Cait hated him, but he supplied her with chems and kept her ignorant of the fallout outside, so she didn't complain much.

-She spent most of her days traveling and most of her nights swimming underneath intoxication, and it was one of these nights that the pair had met Jared.

-At a raider's den in Green Trailer Estates, Cait scourged for any chems they had available, becoming wild and uncontrollable with its influence. This had often brought her negative attention, but for Jared it was a sign of something great.

-She thought his questions were weird, most didn't make sense, but he seemed to like the nonsensical answer she gave, and when he promised her more chems for more answers she simply couldn't refuse.

-She didn't find out until after Rust and Jared formed a partnership that she had dug herself into her own grave.

-Her chem usage had increased substantially, but even when she tried to take a break they kept giving them to her. In moments of coherency she started to realize that the answers she was expected to give Jared were wholly unbelievable and impossible for her to know, but he insisted that she had some kind of ability to answer them.

-Cait grew confused and worried, but also weaker and sicker as time went on. Jared acted accordingly, giving her time off the chems and trying to keep her as healthy as possible, but it was during these sick episodes that she came to learn just how crazy he really was and how shitty she felt all the time.

-In was simply out of question for her to quit, they wouldn't allow her, and the feelings she so once enjoyed as a means of escape became painful and impossible to tolerate.

-Over the course of many years she hung on the brink of death, only to be kept alive for the sole purpose of acting as a seer. Even when malnourishment ruined all of them, even when her urine grew black and painful, even when her heart could not beat on its own and she could not even lift her own head; Jared simply refused to part with his ticket to greatness.

-But he still realized the toll this was taking on her, and that was when the experiential abductions began. From her bed she watched many chem users come and go, unable to provide the proof Jared sought and often dying from the effects of whatever cocktail Jared's boy's had concocted.

-It's a hard and painful life that she's grown sick of, having abandoned all hope of ever getting better, though she asks for a swift, painful death instead of slowly rotting away. It seems inevitable that she will eventually meet her end, no matter how hard Doctor Carrington tries to keep her alive, but those chems they keep administering are starting to have strange effects on her body, and she isn't sure what to make of that.

[el-moscorrofio-y-el-mercachifle]

Hellooooo ❤️

I love your blog a lot, you're so insightful and it's like an oasis in the desert of media literacy in the YSBLF fandom, lol.

Wanted to ask, what do you think would've happened if Don Hermes found out about the Sinister Plan? I think that regardless of the point in the story he would probably be unable to forgive Armando for it and might be the biggest deterrent for Betty to be with/accept Armando back, but I wanted to know what you think and what possibilities you see!

Hiiii! Thank youuuu!🥰🥰🥰🥰

Oh, I love this question!!! It has multiple answers depending on when he finds out and how. that would have definitely been a big stone! Big enough to have been the plot of a sequel or of a whole other part of ysblf (that ik couldn't be, but it had the potential), or, simply, ending it all on tragedy.

I'll go for him finding out after Cartagena and through Armando. My first idea was him finding during Cartagena and through her diary, becaus I think the novela mainly nodded to that (given how he eyed the diary when Betty was leaving and how foña Julia mentioned he might try to read it), but after thinking it through, I think that if don Hermes had read through Betty's perspective how it all went down, how it shattered her, how it's not the first time a man manipulated her like this, and how she thinks her life is nothing but a "cycle of tragedy", he wouldn't have let her go back to Ecomoda at all. His protection style is avoiding the thing that can hurt her, like how he isolated her from the kids who mistreated her as a kid and how he didn't want to let her go to that "date" with Roman's friend. And it all would have ended right there, with Ecomoda back in th Mendozas/Valencias' hands for a microsecond before being eaten alive by the debts, lenders, and banks.

So instead I think the only way it could have worked and the relationship between A&B would have still happened would have been if he had known it all after the relationship started. Otherwise, he wouldn't have let Armando get anywhere near Betty. Probably Betty wouldn't even be allowed to go back to Ecomoda! The novela made a big point of Don Hermes not finding out under any circumstance.

I'm sure no one would tell him the truth, so I think he would have needed to find out on his own. Maybe he heard a rumor, or maybe he found something like the diary or a copy of the letter

Point is, he learns the truth, ans immediately his half-hearted tolerance of the relationship becomes full on disapproval

He already knows a few things that I'm honestly baffled about him just forgetting and approving of so quickly: that Betty was Armando's mistress and that they did semi ilegal business together

Add on top of that that Armando used Betty like that, and don Hermes definitely would have absolutely disapproved

He'd likely ban Armando from his house, and would make it extremely clear to Betty that he disapproves of Armando and doesn't want to see them together

Doña Julia would try to talk him out of that, but it wouldn't work.

Knowing don Hermes, he probably wouldn't even tell her why he hates Armando

Honestly, I think Nicolás would have been on his side

Personally, I think everyone by the end of the novela accepted the relationship simply because there was no more time, but if there had been, a whole new part of the novela could have been handling these types of issues

I definitely think Nicolás, don Hermes, and doña Margarita wouldn't have approved. Roberto would have likely continued nof being too present.

So I think the pressure of having almost no support from the people that they cared the most would have hurt a lot

Doña Julia may approve, tho

Nicolás would disapprove but be like "do whatever you want but I think this is wrong" ans would treat Armando coldly whenever they saw each other at Ecomoda

In the novela Armando basically implies that his dates with Betty were mainly at her house, so I'm guessing in this case they'd likely be mainly sneaking around in the office

Not that the relationship is a secret, but rather they would just keep it pretty lowkey

It would bring them down a lot, because for them it's important to have their parents' support

But by the time the engagement comes, Armando is sort of okay with knowing his dad is basically out of his life and his mom is very reluctantly in it

Margarita is not only angry about what happened with Marcela, but she's also angry about how quickly he went to Betty. ((With her too I think her quick acceptance of her was mainly due to lack of time))

Eventually don Hermes would have to tolerate Armando, but they would never form a good relationship

In general, as long as don Hermes finds out AFTER they are together, I don't think much bad would happen! I think Armando and Betty were ready and willing to fight for the other by that point. But if it were to happen during Cartagena or immediately after??? Or if he finds out through her diary??? Hell no, all hell would break loose! Don Hermes would get his gun and threaten Armando at gunpoint to never get near Betty again. He would forbid Betty from going back to Ecomoda. If Armando tried to go again to the house he'd be kicked out.

It's a lot of different possibilities depending on when he finds out!

Thank you for the ask🥰🥰 i'm glad you are enjoying my blog🥰🥰

[royboyfanpage]

I’m starting to wonder if Roy would’ve been angry at Uncle Sam over what happened to Grant

Hi!! Sorry this took me so long to answer, I wanted to get some panels for this.

My immediate thought was "he'd absolutely be angry", but I wanted to elaborate a little more than that. I haven't been able to find many comics with Grant in the Freedom Fighters, and none that go into his run with them in-depth, so I'm mostly gonna be referencing the comic your ask's referring to, Infinite Crisis #1 and, as a comparison, The New Titans #116.

Before I get on to Uncle Sam, I'm gonna go on a tangent about Roy's leadership because, despite all his self-doubt, Roy was a genuinely good leader when he led the Titans, particularly in #116. He knew when to have his team fight-

-issuing understandable and consice commands as to what to do and when to do it. He assigned people specific orders based on their skillset, and was able to manoeuvre them into a singular fighting unit once it was time. At the same time, he knew when to recall them-

-and expressed concern whenever they attempted to overexert themselves or do something above their skillset (albeit in a very Roy way)

Roy actually understands his team, he knows what their strengths and weaknesses are, and he knows what they should and shouldn't be doing at any moment. And his team genuinely respects him for it!

(Plus, Bart respecting Roy more than Wally is one of the best things to come from this era)

Now, as for Uncle Sam in Infinite Crisis. As mentioned, I don't have much of a broader scope as to what his leadership pre-Crisis was like, ie when Grant was on the team. Additionally, the circumstances they were under were definitely a lot more extreme than New Titans #116. Whereas Roy and co were only up against Gar and Kyle, the Freedom Fighters were up against-

-significantly more, to say the least. However, a key factor in efficiently leading a superhero team is the ability to work well under pressure, so Mr. American Patriotism won't be entirely excused. In the issue, I could only find two instances where Sam actually issues commands, one-

-where all he's doing is telling them what the mission is, and two-

-where he's telling them to keep fighting no matter what. This is piss poor leadership. Not only does Sam give the absolute bare minimum of commands, but they're so incredibly vague and non-specific it's embarrassing. Sure, you could chalk it up to the surprise, the number of enemies, etc etc, but that is absolutely not an excuse. In a situation like that, he should be losing his voice by the end of it because of how many commands he should be issuing. Instead, he more or less treated it like a free-for-all. Additionally, his team had been awake for 48 hours prior to this. That is absolutely not prime condition, especially since before the ambush they had no idea it was a serious threat. Intel that a group had held a meeting somewhere two days ago is not at all justification for dragging your team around when they're all exhausted. Even if the Justice League were unavailable at that time, there are countless other teams who could've taken that! And when the ambush did happen, instead of calling for a retreat like the smart thing would've been when faced with that many enemies, he ordered them all to keep fighting a battle that was impossible to win.

So yeah, Roy would be pissed at Uncle Sam for what happened to Grant. You could argue that even if they were in prime condition, even if they'd tried to retreat, even if Sam had given orders, the team still would've been beaten. But Uncle Sam absolutely did not help. Grant's injuries were, at the very least partially, a result of poor central command and awful leadership. Roy did absolutely everything he could to lead his team, giving member-specific orders and doing all he could to ensure their safety. Uncle Sam basically said "I don't care what you do, just don't give up" which, while being a good sentiment for every day life, is absolutely shit when it comes to a life or death situation. And Roy would be pissed that the kid he worked so hard to train and protect sustained lifelong injuries because of some human American flag.

Anyway I think Roy should get to kick the shit out of the old man for funsies <3

[saintsenara]

How does your adhd help or make more difficult your job as a doctor?

thank you very much for the ask, pal!

obviously, this answer needs to start with a little acknowledgement of my relative privilege when it comes to my adhd.

like many women, i was diagnosed as an adult, but i was lucky enough that this happened when i was still a student [six year degree coming in clutch - the fact that i had to pay for the diagnosis, not so much], which meant that when i qualified and started actually working, i'd had several years of taking medication and coming up with techniques to manage my life. i can very well imagine [particularly because i know so many people it's happened to] how much more difficult i would find doing my job if i had only recently acquired - or was still waiting for - a diagnosis.

as i've said, the reasons for my late diagnosis were primarily gender-related - i'm a cisgender woman, and so even though i have the more "classic", "male" version of adhd [by which i mean that i'm hyperactive, rather than the inattentive-type manifestation of the condition which is presumed - although not, in my view, entirely accurately - to be more common in women] i wasn't screened as a child because adhd was seen as a thing which boys had.

but they're also because the circumstances of my early life - above all, that my family wasn't housing- or food-insecure, and that my parents were able to have a work-life balance because of this - allowed me to cope well enough with the bad parts of being a child with an undiagnosed neurological disability to be extremely high-achieving while at school. i was in trouble all the time - as most of us were - but this was usually because i spent my time in the classroom messing around, safe in the knowledge that i could race through any work last minute and be completely fine. i was my teachers' nightmare, but it was for the extremely chic reason that all the consequences they threatened me with never came to pass. i was told for fourteen years of schooling that the rug was about to pulled out from under me if i didn't buck up my ideas. instead, i got top marks in every exam, i got into an excellent university to study a competitive subject, i got a first in that subject, i have also - as well as my medical training - got a phd, i'm in an interesting and unusual speciality. i have a lot of letters after my name.

this is because i'm astonishingly clever - and i won't apologise for stating that as fact - but it's also due to good fortune. adhd [especially adhd which is undiagnosed until adulthood] is enormously overrepresented in the prison population, among addicts, among those who have no qualifications, among the long-term unemployed. i think it's important to simultaneously recognise that - while i do think of myself as disabled, and i'm right to - i am very, very lucky in the treatment plan and support system i have. i could be in a very different position had even minor things about my childhood changed.

but with this context taken into account... my view is genuinely that medicine is the number one job for the dopamine-challenged.

i'm not going to go into details about my specialism on the public timeline, but it has several aspects which work really well for my brain.

it's usually very fast-paced and unpredictable. like many people with adhd, i am excellent at working under pressure [and i'm great in a crisis] and very much not excellent without it.

but even when we have slower days it still always feels like i'm progressing towards a tangible goal. like many people with adhd, i'm not great at visualising long-term things - i think in the now and the not-now - but my work relates to cases where the long-term goals and outcome are easy to visualise, and i like that.

it's an area of medicine which is, essentially, puzzle-solving, often in creative and novel ways. like many people with adhd, i struggle to maintain focus on tasks which are too repetitive - but i'm also, as we often are, very good at spotting patterns and details, i have excellent intuition, and i'm a very good lateral thinker.

it lets me be on my feet a lot, to be moving around, and to be doing things physically. my fidgeting has really been cut down by the ol' lisdexamfetamine, but the twitchy impulses which remain are channelled very nicely into being able to do things with my hands and have it count towards my workload.

it's very sociable. i get to spend a lot of time just having a natter with the nurses - and i always have someone around to body double with - but i also get to work with lots of other departments and other non-medical professionals, i teach medical students, i present at conferences, and so on. it's very busy, there's always something new going on, and something which interests me is guaranteed to pop up just when i'm starting to get a bit fed up with a sitting-at-my-desk task...

and the "this interests me" point is the key one, i think.

like many people with adhd, my issue isn't a deficit of attention, it's an inability to easily control the focus of that attention. i have a typically low tolerance for boredom, and i find it extremely difficult both to start and to concentrate on enough to complete tasks which don't interest me.

but i like what i do - i find it fascinating - and that means that i have a lot of attention to devote to it. i can't remember what day my bins go out or what my mam asked me to pick up for her from the supermarket, but i can remember endless information pertaining to the human body, no matter how grim the situation that body finds itself in.

it's taken a bit of trial-and-error to get to where i am - i found the surgical rotations of my training really tough, for example, because surgery is a discipline which is very repetitive, and which lacks that mystery-solving element which so appeals to me - but i'm in a place now where i genuinely think that having adhd makes me a better doctor.

and even the night shifts are worth it to not have to work in an office.

[no disrespect to the spreadsheet girlies...]

[thedreadvampy]

this is my new gripe forget talking about "die" vs "unalive" if I have to see one more person talking about "sexual assault" or "SA" when they specifically and exclusively mean "rape" I'm gonna fucking lose it.

apart from anything else idk about other legislatures but while in general/casual use I do personally think rape is a subcategory of sexual assault, in both Scottish and English law I'm pretty sure that rape and sexual assault are two distinct things. attempted rape falls under sexual assault but rape is its own crime?

and I'm not wanting to lean on that tbh because the legal definition of rape is Bad Actually - extremely heterocisnormative (UK law is particularly bad on this bc rape legally can only happen with a penis, any other penetration is Assault By Penetration), extremely restrictive, and, due to being a discrete legal construct, draws extremely arbitrary boundaries between which things which in my experience are pretty much on the same level are and are not rape.

and I also don't. think that legal constructs of sexual assault from within a carceral system are the most useful even if they were broader and more reflective of the human experiences of rape and sexual assault.

hooooooowever. they don't need to be separate things for my point to stand. let's ignore the law (because it is. deeply flawed.) and just talk about what sexual assault entails.

Sexual assault includes (depending on your definition):

Unwanted sexual touching (with hands or objects)

Unwanted kissing

Attempted rape

Cumming, pissing or spitting on someone sexually without consent

Violating someone's bodily autonomy for sexual purposes (eg secretly feeding them things, looking up their skirt)

Groping/feeling up without consent

If we're going to get technical, generally speaking in a legal/professional context, sexual assault means specifically unwanted sexual touching. however I don't think it's unreasonable in an online context to bundle in other forms of sexual violence including:

Masturbating in front of someone

Trying to coerce/threaten/trick someone into any sexual act (whether with yourself, with another person or by themselves)

Flashing someone or sending sexual images without consent

Pressuring people into sexual conversations/situations

Watching/recording people in sexual situations without consent

Creating or obtaining nudes of someone without consent

and loads of other stuff that's traumatic and miserable as well - I don't want to get too granular

rape is an aspect of sexual violence, but not all sexual assault or sexual violence is rape.

rape includes:

someone having sex with you against your will or without you being able to give full consent

that's it that's specifically what it is

the only flex in this definition is what you count as sex and how you define the bounds of consent for the purposes of the conversation

but like

do you see the problem?

do you see how. wherever we place rape in relation to sexual assault. attempted rape is also a form of sexual assault.

do you see how it's important that "rape" isn't synonymous with a term that also includes "attempted rape"?

in some - many! - circumstances it's useful to group together all these experiences of sexual violence. the edges are not clearcut and they all deserve to be understood as significant and traumatic.

but if we're taking about rape we're taking about rape. We're talking about a specific thing and it requires specific language. If we unilaterally consider rape and sexual assault to be 1:1 synonyms, there's absolutely no room to acknowledge the difference between "attempted rape" and "rape" (other than by removing anything that isn't a full on successful rape from the definition of sexual assault, in which case we're just removing the language to talk about that type of traumatic experience)

they're not the same thing and the use of SA as a euphemistic way to talk about specifically rape is convincing a lot of people that they are the same thing. and that does immediate measurable harm to our ability to actually talk about our experiences.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Hi! Do you happen to still have your headcanons about death? It was one of my favorite posts of yours. Thank you!

I don't have the post but this is a headcanon I think about a lot. I have two versions. The hard reset reboot and the soft reboot. The hard reboot is where the fantasy parts of my universe kick in and the soft reboot is something very much based in reality and biology.

Hard reboot:

This is only possible with the complete destruction of a body. Think getting ground to paste by the force of a glacier or going so far down in a ship wreck the pressure atomizes the body or getting turned into pink mist by artillery. Either the body is completely destroyed or otherwise the damage is unsurvivable. A beheading or certain kinds of spinal injuries for example are impossible to survive under any circumstances. This results in a whole molecular reset. Whatever was now ceases to exist entirely. No remains in the ground, no spare parts. Nothing left but the blood spatters and the echoing scream They are completely remade in a very mysterious process no one quite understands. And the results can be extremely dramatic when they reappear. They may be lacking scars they've had forever or they may reappear later on. Limbs may or may not regrow. Arthur may have lost the Danelaw scar for awhile and it may have popped up again later. Matt might lose some of the scars from the WW1 shrapnel eventually. While I do think that nation's have some built in abilities to cope just being what they are and a lot of trauma fades over time, trauma reactions can be variable and uneven. So while they may reboot and reset, it's still very circumstantial. They might feel better or different afterwards but it's still incredibly disconcerting.

Soft reboot:

The other type I call the 'soft reboot' or the biologically possible one, auto-resuscitation also sometimes called Lazarus syndrome. About half of doctors report seeing a case with their own eyes but data is still quite hard to come by. For most people that it happens too it shows up in their medical records vaguely and the difference between reversed clinical death and auto-resuscitation is not entirely clear to physicians, nurses or patients. But one possible theory is that it is the heart being restarted by pressure of some sort exerted onto the cavities in the chest. This doesn't have a reset. I am not dying today. It's fucking painful. I am not dying today. Coming back is terrifying. One moment the world is dark and cool and the terror of he medical environment is fading and any thoughts echo limply. Life and person hood trickles away but scrambling for a grip, something rolling into a void desperate for traction. No life flashing before the eyes. But Death is there. A sun bleached skeleton, the dried and decaying flowers of a funeral crowning an eyeless skull. Death offer's a hand and the falling is over. I am not dying today.

And then it does go black for a long time but then... life. The bones are a different temperature from the flesh. Every muscle has been strained every fucking direction. Half the ribs are broken because doctor's might have called it. The eyeballs aren't quite in the head right. A death has been declared, paperwork half filled out but the sun is rising, death kisses a bruised, warming cheek and asks, wryly.

"𝑨𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆, 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒏?"

There's no magic reboot. The guts are bit rotted from sitting in a corpse for a night. There's a little brain damage but not as nearly as much as there should be. The joints are swollen, every vein in the face and neck and legs are pulling through muscle and flesh like cords through clay, held only inside by skin. Everything that was wrong is still wrong, and a little worse. But the sun is up. The sun is up and the heart still beats and the rest will heal. It has no choice but to heal. Because there is a heartbeat and breathe and the rest can wait.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

so i've been writing up a lot of sdmi meta lately, sometimes pretty scathingly and sometimes with a lot of praise, and man it is a real whiplash to go from 'sdmi did a fantastic job showing how a marginalized person--a villain, even--being body-shamed even one time is Fucked, and a major signal that the person who does it is abusive and about to do him serious harm,' to

'so people in the show constantly make unnecessary, derogatory, degrading comments about the abuser's body. he is an extremely marginalized person who has been dehumanized from birth for having that body, up to and including being considered legal property; he has been tortured in a pressure cooker of abuse targeted at his minority status for a quarter of his life. this is Quirky and Witty and Whimsical, no one has a problem with it, and we are going to just skate right on by that without ever even acknowledging that he's oppressed. moving along now'

like, in pericky's case it's interesting to explore how ricky does say some genuinely extremely shitty, bigoted things to pericles that are presumably part of why he snaps and hits him, but he's doing that in the context of being abused, and pericles is reacting to it in the context of abusing him. ricky's not a great person and does not spend his time around great people, but he's trying to stand up for himself with the verbal and emotional vocabulary he has available. the person he's trying to draw on for the strength and the beliefs to do that with--the language to do that with--is his only real example of someone in pericles' life who has never, ever bowed to him.

......aaaaaaaand she's super fucking racist. and is the one who makes the bulk of the body-shaming comments about pericles in the show. so no wonder ricky turned around and incorporated that into trying to imitate her.

but see, she also has a reason to be racist/ableist to pericles: he preyed on and traumatized her and the people she loved, and ruined all their lives (and tbh, my personal read is that he was probably pretty emotionally abusive to her when she was a teenager). like, sure, that's a lot less of an immediate reason not to take someone to task over being shitty about their abuser than Currently Being Abused the way ricky is. cassidy's a grown adult who's had two decades of distance from him to heal, and has had plenty of opportunity in the meantime to unpack that hey! your abuser was one (1) shitty person from this extremely vulnerable demographic of people who have otherwise never done jack shit to you! maybe don't do things like call them 'it' and threaten to put them down because you're mad at that one guy! just a thought.

but still, she had a reason, right? right.

and when marcie uses the fact that he's much smaller and weaker than her to grab him and threaten to break his neck; tortures him in a way that can only be done to him because of the kind of body that he has; and intentionally calls him the wrong species to compare him to a nonsapient animal, with the connotation of preparing him to be cooked and eaten ('one wrong move and i pluck this ugly little chicken').... well shit, dude, you can't exactly hold that against her under the circumstances, can you? just, like, gestures at EVERYTHING that's happened, including the fact that he'd just spent god knows how long torturing her by keeping her trapped in a box, and she's a teenage girl who's doing this to hold the line with the knowledge that she's about to die violently. which she does. at pericles' orders. like, jesus, that's not exactly a situation to lecture someone about Problematic Language.

after all: she had a reason. right?

right.

this is something i see over and over, especially in sci-fi/fantasy settings where it's easy for the writers to make up their own social contexts, exaggerate Bad Things to the extreme, or both.

on the one side of this equation you have the hatebait: a minority character who's written to be Super Evil and Monstrous and Hateable, who says slurs and kicks babies into traffic and often as not is a sexual predator--the worst of the worst, and you'd never defend someone like that, would you? they deserve any bad thing that happens to them, don't they? anything they say they don't like about their situation (god forbid want to change) must just be an excuse, a sob story, maybe outright hypocritical given how they treat other people, right?

awesome, glad we've got that out of the way. now we can move on to the part where you cheer for brutal violence targeted at that minority, or at least go 'well, that's rough i guess, but they're a Really Bad Guy, so....'

(one of my least favorite examples of this ever is the trope where the villain in their True Form(tm) is physically small, weak, disabled, and/or Really Really Old, and when they're defeated they're stripped down to that state to hurt/humiliate/imprison/kill them. and/or watch horrific things happen to their body as a direct result of being removed from the source of their size/youth/power/basic fucking life support. it is DEEPLY distressing and i hate it so much.)

it is really fucking upsetting how well this works. i tend to get really invested in characters like this.

so we have our object of 'justified' bigotry, hatred, and violence. but then you have the other half of the equation:

the person who Always Has a Reason.

there's been a lot said about the appeal of bodice-ripper fantasies: they're popular in large part because in a sex-negative society women are shamed for their sexuality and for wanting sex, and there's catharsis for some people in stories about being Allowed to cut loose and enjoy it because you had no choice in the matter. nobody can blame you for that, right?

(in real life they can and will, because society is shit about survivors and hates us. but that's real life; this is the safety of your own fantasy to work things through, with no voices spouting bullshit at you except the ones you're allowing to talk for the express purpose of telling them to shut up.)

so there's that. and somewhere there is an excellent post about SPN, and similarly full-of-whump shows marketed to the same demographic of men, being maybe the same thing for those men in a different way: if Every Possible Terrible Gutwrenching Devastating Loss and Trauma and Torture happens to you, then surely it won't make you any less of a man if you cry and break down, show weakness and pain. nobody can blame you for that, right?

(i don't know where that post went. if anyone has the link to pass on i'll add it here, because it is a Really Good Post and worth reading.)

all well and good so far. understandable.

and then you get to the person who Always Has a Reason. and what they Always Have a Reason for is bigotry, hatred, and violence toward minorities. or representations of real-life minorities with a hasty oppression-swap fantasy AU slapped on.

they oppressed the character's people. they tortured them. they murdered their family. they genocided their planet. they're abusing them. they raped them. they ruined their life. maybe the character is a kid who's young and in over their head and going through enough shit already, and can't really be held up to the standards of an adult who's not currently experiencing War Crimes.

you wouldn't begrudge them defending themself, right? you wouldn't begrudge them hating their tormentors and lashing out at them when they get the chance, and savoring it when they land a blow (no matter how low)? you wouldn't expect them to be a hundred percent progressive and politically correct and careful of their language in the face of that?

nobody could blame them for that, right? right.

right.

(funnily enough: it doesn't go the other way. the minority hatebait is always a hundred percent responsible for any shitty thing they do in retaliation for what they're subjected to, or attempt they make to stop it. often as not, their actions mean that whatever injustice they were yammering about should be dismissed for everyone suffering under it, because this guy used it as an Excuse and that's why you can't have nice things (basic rights).)

anyway, yeah, this is. a Thing and i see it a Lot. and it does really chap me how extreme and totally unaddressed it is in sdmi, because if you don't let the framing get away with hatebait and Always Having a Reason, then pericles makes for a really really complex and compelling exploration of someone who's been dealt a shit hand and suffered terribly also happening to be the miserable, hateful old cunt who wrecked generations of your family because they desperately needed help and didn't get it.

[fenharael]

Today I bring  you more more Varré headcanons for fic development based on these prompts by @wisteria-lodge

What is the character’s go-to drink order? 

Red wine. Preferably a type of the Negroamaro variety, as it is the type of grape that grew on his family's vineyard. He likes the dark color and rich flavor, so he will also order a Rosé blend of this variety. For a cocktail, he would order a Café Brûlot.

1. Because it is fancy and showy, and he would want to show off a bit at a nice place.

2. Because it has coffee in it and it will help keep him awake and also show his guests he is a man that needs coffee to stay awake. (he works hard and needs people to know this)

3. Because it’s got the same strong, sweet flavors he enjoys.

What is their grooming routine? 

Varré has never been one to take care of his physical appearance overmuch. He was pressured a lot as a young man by his family and father to always look presentable and he developed a bit  of opposition to that growing up. He never goes out of his way to look bad or dirty mind you - he just doesn’t put in a lot of effort to take care of his personal appearance or himself. He cares more about his work and his passions than his well-being and will frequently run himself ragged or crash. He will pull his hair back so it's out of his eyes, and shave so he isn’t irritated by a beard. He will bathe when he smells bad enough, and fix up his clothes when they are too torn or dirty, so it might be best to say his approach is practical. 

He will take utmost care of his mask, though. To him, the mask symbolizes his role in Mohg’s dynasty. Before the dynasty, the mask still mattered a lot to him and was a symbol of the role he played in the war and how he was trying to do what he felt was good work. His image is more important than him.

More specifically in terms of how he grooms himself:

He wakes up in the morning and dresses if he hasn’t slept in his clothes. He will splash water on his face and tie back his hair. Then he will carefully put on his mask and arrange his veil. He doesn’t often brush or wash his hair, it really only happens when he also needs to shave. He smells pretty bad up close, but he does keep a rose-scented perfume he makes himself and wears it liberally to cover the stench of blood.

What was their most expensive purchase/where does their disposable income go?

The time he paid an exorbitant price for an "exotic" prostitute at the highest-class brothel in the capital, while drunk, to prove a point.

The Perfumer’s tools and blood rose seeds to start his garden and make his perfumes.

The outfit he wore to the gala at his father’s estate to celebrate his nephew’s birthday.

His disposable income went to alcohol and books, mostly, sometimes  gambling, and food. In the dynasty he doesn’t get paid, so he doesn’t have much disposable income, what he  does have, he uses for books.

Do they have any scars or tattoos?

He has scars on his hands, wrists, and arms from cutting himself with surgical tools and on rose thorns, mostly from his time in Leyndell and as a war surgeon. He has the Mohgwyn spear symbol carved into his back from Mohg’s claws, and the symbol on his forehead that he carved himself when he was fully initiated into the dynasty.

What was the last time they cried, and under what circumstances?

Varré cries infrequently, usually it’s from an overwhelming frustration combined with a lack of sleep. If his stress is extremely high, he will first try to deal with it directly, and with violence or threats. If that doesn’t help, he will drink or kill about it. His last resort is to cry. The last time he cried was likely over his state of emotional distress regarding his apparent abandonment by Mohg while he was bleeding out (combined with his loss of favor), his crisis of faith, and his conflicting emotions (regarding Envy).

Are they the oldest, middle, youngest, or only child?

Middle child. He has an elder brother named Artan and a younger sister named Emina

Describe the shoes they’re wearing.

Sturdy, leather boots. He keeps them partially folded down to allow for more freedom of movement, but they are always laced tight. They are worn and dirty, but well-made. He had them made while living in Leyndell in the style of the cobblers from his town. They are of unusually high quality for someone who worked as a surgeon. He really only has this one pair of boots so he does take care of them as needed.

Describe the place where they sleep.

In the dynasty, his room is fairly bare, as he shares sleeping quarters with the other war surgeons. He has his own space quartered off with a folding screen and a velvet curtain draped from a ceiling beam for some privacy. His bed has the standard linen sheets given to all surgeons, and a small side table with some candles. He has spent the extra money to buy himself more candles and has stacked them so they’ve formed a solid section of wax- he just continues to add candles. He also has a candelabra in the corner for some extra light. He keeps his clothing and personal belongings in an iron banded wooden chest- this is the chest he’s had since boyhood and it bears his family crest (that has been sanded off). He keeps a stack of books on his side table and near the foot of his bed and has a threadbare carpet on the floor. His walls have no adornment, as their rooms are in the abandoned dynasty complex and already have ancient carvings on them.

What is their favorite holiday?

Varré was never religious and disliked the holidays imposed by the Golden Order. The dynasty has no holidays, and won’t have any until the day Miquella arises to godhood. That being said, he always enjoyed the spring festival dedicated to the saint of love which was a local tradition in his town. He loved the flowers and the romance of it all as a boy, and as a man, he has sort of co-opted it and folded it into his belief system from the dynasty.

What objects do they always carry around with them?

He always carries his weapons: the rose bouquet, miséricorde, sacred seal, and throwing knives. He has a satchel with his surgeon's tools, a silver dagger, and a pouch with herbs and medicines. Varré tends to travel light and doesn’t keep anything but the necessities on him. If he needs food, he will generally return to the dynasty, or he will have some pre-prepared things to tide him over. He dislikes hunting and will only do it if absolutely necessary.

[utterlyazriel]

Okay so first of all,,,

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHRRGHRHRGRHNNNGRHRRRGHHHARGHAHHDHFHHRHRHSNARLOOOUUUURRRGHHAHRGRRNRNNGG

—AHEM ANYWAYS

One I am EXTREMELY AND IMMENSELY SATISFIED WITH THE ANGST WE HAVE BEEN DELIVERED THANK YOU MOTHER

Me seeing Azriel bend over at the waist and nearly hurl thinking of how much faith was put in him by reader:

The fact that she's likely going to have slight discoloration over her wings now from where she received the lashes 🥲 and Azriel is gonna think about what happened every time he hits a particularly self loathing moment and sees them

RHYS AND READER ARE GONNA MEET!!!!! CASSIAN AND READER ARE GONNA MEET!!!!!!

I am definitely down bad to see big Rottweiler batboy get super fucking attached to her, esp at the way she doesn't get pissy and throw fits no matter how many times she's knocked down. Like from the moment I read Azriel take note of her resolve I knew Cassian was gonna have a field day with how much better she accepts not being The Shit in every circumstance compared to... Just about every male Illyrian he's had to train

And since you asked: might I posit for however far down the line,,, guess who has an EXTREMELY similar history to reader? Feyre who had to go hunting in frozen forests as a mortal for half a decade. Bonding over that shared experience, Rhys and Az watching them bond over that shared experience

(Also to further the themes that are already present throughout earlier chapters, it's fun to consider the boys talking about all the harrowing shit they went through because they brute forced it— and reader just being like "You know you could have done it way easier by (x)?" because she couldn't afford to throw herself at things until they worked her way. She had to find clever solutions around her survival.)

Not cracking under the pressure of Amren or Nesta's Signature Gazes bc she's had a little over two and a half decades of learning stoicism in the face of opponents much stronger than herself.

I WILL REFRAIN FROM GOING FURTHER BUT KNOW I AM HOLDING THE NEWEST CHAPTER LIKE

THAT IS ALL

HAHAHAHAHAH I LOVE THIS REACTION

angst angsted!!!! i'm so pleased to have satisfied you 🫶 and HAHA YES RIGHT THE MEME WAS ACCIDENTALLY PERFECT that wasn't planned believe it or not! it was after i wrote that i was like wait a damn minute....

mmmmhm isn't that the tastiest part with hurt/comfort scenarios? the scars to remind you of them forever? if they're mates they have to be equal in each way... scars on the both of them that tie them to the illyrian mountains...

rhys and cass are gonna meet her!!! i do know all three batboys have their specific gripes around illyrian females and them not being able to train and i do agree that cassian, probably more than anyone, takes it more personally considering his mother's past </3 expect some training between them for sure

and feyre!! i'm such a feyre fan lol there's no way she's going back to velaris and not becoming besties with the high lady <3 feyre will have a lot to teach her about healing i think, which parts to loosen and leave in the past and which parts served her well and she should be so proud of 🥺

comparisons of time in illyria... that's very good i like i like and well yes ofc, not blanching in the face of scary women (i think instead u will be like oh my GOD that's who i'm tryna be like)

thank you so so so much for this detailed review!!!! i know it takes time and effort to write them and it means sooooo much to me for you to share it with me 😭😭😭 MWAH!