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yoiisa · 3 days ago

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HEEELLAURRR

can I request headcanon bllk boys anyone of your choice including sae 🙏🏻 with wifey reader during post pantrum depression since no one writes about it 😔 and it’s the boys just helping her out here and there??

ofc!!, I’ll do sae, bachira, isagi, and kunigami

all characters aged up (20+)! Tags: TW for depression, anxiety, self-loathing language, and feelings of inadequacy. Reader is struggling w depression in this fic, so proceed with caution for sure! major angst (argument between couple in Isagi's) with tiny doses of fluff throughout, hurt with only a tiny bit of comfort (except for kuni and maybe isagi)

if you ever find yourself struggling with ppd please call 1-800-944-4773 or visit postpartum.net i have so much respect for mothers out there, but please remember that the best mothers take care of themselves as well as their babies!! you got this babe, and with that let's get on to the fic

➜ at first, having a baby with sae itoshi was fine. everything was going smoothly- well, as smoothly as having a newborn could ➜ still, there was always that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that festered in you. it was dark and cold and rose like bile in your throat that you had to swallow down ➜ the monotony of every day settling in on you was only feeding the dread inside of you. waking at the ass crack of dawn for a diaper change or to feed, and then running around all day caring for your daughter's every whim and desire ➜ sae helped where he could, but obviously there were some tasks only you could accomplish, and it was driving you to a brink ➜ eventually, he had to leave to go to Spain for some work, and you swore up and down that you could handle him being gone for a couple weeks. he was reluctant to leave you alone, but duty called after all, so he left ➜ and suddenly, that darkness consumed all of you and it was too much. you just . . . snapped

Sae knew leaving you alone was a bad idea. He'd seen the ways you'd been tiring yourself out, running after Yuki, and without him around, he worried seriously for your health. Nonetheless, you'd insisted that he go to Spain for his work, instead of just trying to handle it all from Japan itself. "I'll be fine, you don't need to worry," you insist, you're head on his chest. "She's been at home for 4 months now, I've gotten our routine down to a science by now." Sae played with your hair, twirling the locks around his fingers as he hummed, "Okay. I'll go then." As he was leaving, he made sure you promised him that if anything happened, anything at all, that you would immediately call him and tell him. You'd just waved him off, which did absolutely nothing to quell the dread in his stomach about leaving. He knows you don't notice how attentive he really is to you, but he notices everything about you. He worships the smallest details that make you who you are, that make you his wife. With that in mind, it's so incredibly frustrating when you think he doesn't notice how your smile doesn't reach your eyes anymore, or how your skin has become dry because you haven't been drinking enough water. It's 2:41 A.M. when he gets the call. It's been a week since he'd left for Spain. He peels his mask off and blinks blearily at his phone, which vibrates along his hotel's night stand. It should be around 9 where you are right now, which is pretty early for you to be calling him . . . unless something happened. Sae instantly sits up alert, his heart racing as he answers and puts his phone to his ear, "Hello? Y/N, what's wrong?" You're silent for a moment, which allows him to hear Yuki screaming her lungs out in the background of the call. Finally, you croak, "Help. Please, she won't stop crying. She's been up since 1 in the morning, and I . . . I don't know what to do." Sae's breath hitches. "I'm coming home." He can tell the guilt is eating you alive as you whisper his name, but he doesn't care. He cuts off any protests you might have with a, "My girls need me. I'm coming home. I'll get on the next available flight. I'll see you soon. I love you." His heart shatters as you don't return the affection, instead just sobbing into the microphone, "I'm sorry."

➜ part of the reason bachira meguru fell for you was because of your smile ➜ you exuded happiness and joy with every step you took and he was drawn to that aura like a moth to a flame ➜ but after having your baby, bachira noticed that the glow you had once was drained from you like a sponge. you traded in your glowing eyes for dark circles and your frown seemed perpetual ➜ worse yet, he noticed how rarely you smiled at your son ➜ at the beginning, when things weren't as bad, you would offer up the occasionally tiny smile, but you'd become so distant from the boy as of late. you'd become distant from him as well ➜ and he hates it. he did what he could to try and pull you back to his side, to get him to tell him what's wrong, but nothing was working, and it was starting to make him feel in over his head as well ➜ he cracks eventually and calls his mom, completely lost on how to help you navigate your depression

It all happens in a blur. One minute, Bachira is walking into your son's nursery to put some laundry away and the next minute, his entire world tilts as you whisper, "I don't love him." You're standing over Kaede's crib, just staring down at the little swaddled thing. Your husband is at your side in an instant, his hands squeezing your arms as he's begging for an explanation. You practically fall into his chest, your legs weak as you fall to the floor. You're not crying or anything, it's like your body's too weak for even that. All you can manage is the quietest, "I don't . . . feel how I'm supposed to when I look at him. I don't know what's happening." Bachira and you stay curled up together on the floor for a while, until Kaede starts crying. You tense in his arms as the shrill sound pierces your ears. Bachira shoots up from the floor and tends to your son, leaving you lying there as helplessness washes over him. Once you've gone to bed later that night, he instantly is on the phone with his mom. "I don't know, is something wrong with her? Should I be scared for Kaede? I don't want him to get hurt," Bachira sighs, rubbing his forehead. "I don't think Y/N will hurt him," Yu sighs on the other end of the line. "She's probably just overwhelmed right now. A lot of women go through this when they first have their kids. We get told a lot that motherhood is this wonderful thing, but a lot of times, the amount of work it takes is exhausting and is completely glossed over. The stress of it all can cause new moms to get really bad depression. It can make you want to give up on everything sometimes." Bachira bites at the skin around his nails before asking meekly, "Did you want to give up on me?" "No," Yu replies fondly, recalling the days of Bachira's infancy. "Believe it or not, you weren't a fussy baby at all. It made being a single mother easier at first, but when you got older, well, you know." Bachira nods as Yu continues, "Why don't I come over for the next week or so? I can help Y/N take care of Kaede, and the two of you can also get some alone time, if I take Kaede off your hands for a while." "Seriously? You don't mind?" Yu shakes her head, her smile widening. "It'd be my pleasure. I'll also talk with Y/N as well. Hopefully she'll feel a bit better. I knew someone who had post partum depression . . . I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy."

➜ isagi yoichi hates feeling powerless more than anything in the world ➜ it's part of the reason he was able to adapt so well in the world of soccer after all. he encounters all kinds of players on the field, and he needs to be flexible with himself in order to make sure he doesn't sink underneath all the talent ➜ but babies are different. they don't operate on logic or patterns or anything like that. they feel everything in excruciating levels and the same can be said for depression ➜ when isagi notices that something's up with you too, in addition to the learning curve of having a newborn son around, he also gets thrown in way in over his head ➜ the two of you begin to have arguments a lot as a result. he is upset because the entire pregnancy, you'd been raving about how you couldn't wait to have a kid, and now? now all of that was gone ➜ after a particularly explosive fight, he finally sees the pain you're going through as well, best believe he'll do whatever he can to make sure you get the help you need ➜ after all, he can't do this by himself

"Yoichi please-" "I just don't understand," Isagi groans, kneeling in front of you. His hands are on your knees and his face is bowed. "I . . . I thought we agreed that this is what we wanted? Why are you backing out now that Ryuji's already here?!" "Who said I was backing out?" you ask incredulously. "Haven't I been doing everything I can? I've been feeding him, changing him, comforting him when he cries. I haven't showered in a week for fucks sake!" "And you look a million miles away throughout it all! You have this face- this horrible distant expression! I just don't understand, didn't you want this?" You slip up and shout, "Who would want this?!" and Isagi flinches back. The two of you stare at one another in horror, before your husband's face contorts to something between grief and anger. "The hell does that mean?" he growls and you lose it. You start bawling and screaming, "Who wants a life confined to just this?! To sore breasts and shit stains and hair pulling and the crying- he won't stop fucking crying! I can't make him stop, you can't make him stop! I don't know what to do!" You fall onto the floor, your hands stabilizing yourself on Isagi's shoulders as you continue to wail. "I want to be there with him! I want to hold my son and be happy to be a mother, but I just can't. Everything feels so big when I hold him, and I feel so small. I hate myself for it! I see other mother's and feel horrible, like why can't I just be them?! It . . . I hate myself so much. I'm horrible. I'm so horrible." Isagi's heart shatters as you cry and he instantly wraps his arms around you, pulling you into his lap. You tuck your face into his neck and inhale, breathing him in in a way you haven't done since long before Ryuji was born. You stay like that for a while before you croak, "You need to leave me." "What?" Isagi blanches. "I'm not cut out for this whole motherhood thing. I'm so scared one day, I'll do something terrible to Ryu. Something that'll hurt him. I'm not safe to be around. You need to leave me." Isagi stills, his heart pounding a mile a minute. Finally he manages, "I'm taking you to a doctor tomorrow. A psychiatrist at the hospital hopefully. Ryuji will go to my parent's house for a while until we can figure out what to do next." Before you can protest anything, he kisses your forehead. "And that step will not be to leave you. Not in a million years, so you can just forget about that."

➜ kunigami rensuke would quite frankly be the best person at helping you deal with your depression ➜ he knows the intensity of depression, and what it can do to people, especially when they are feeling isolated and alone. he did go through the wild card program after all ➜ he thinks back to how he was during his wild card training and the nel, and to know you're experiencing that kinda intense depression right now pains him beyond the telling ➜ ultimately, he just stays by your side no matter what. if you need space from your daughter, he's quick to help you get some quiet. if you need a shoulder to cry on, he'll hold you for as long as he can, letting your tears soak his shirt without a word of complaint ➜ after all, you've given him the gift of your daughter, so the least he can do is take care of her mother, and his wife, as well

You're sitting up in bed, your eyes closed and a cup of tea in your hands. It's only half drunk and starting to cool, but the cup is still warm enough to keep your hands from freezing, so you hold tight. Eventually, Kunigami steps into the bedroom, a soft smile on his face as he sees you. He walks up to you and sits beside you, his head resting on your lap. "Is Sakura asleep?" You ask, petting his orange hair. He hums in confirmation and peeks up at you through his lashes. You take note of the dark circles under his eyes and you look away, guilt eating at you. "I'm sorry," you whisper, and he tilts his head. "For what?" You purse your lips before sighing. You set the tea off to the side and close your eyes. "For making you do all the work. I wish I . . . I was a better mom and wife." He shoots up, immediately his hands going to your cheeks, brushing away imaginary tears. "Hey, hey none of that. You're an excellent mother, and a wonderful wife. Why on earth would you think otherwise?" "Because you've taken all the hard jobs like putting her to sleep and changing her-" "Because you've already done more than enough for her and for me. You keep her alive- hell you gave her life- and you continue to do other things around the house, like cooking amazing food for me. I couldn't ask for anything more, truly." You lean into his hands. A tear leaks from your eyes as you ask, "Really, Ren?" Kunigami nods and presses his forehead against yours. "Just keep doing what you're doing. If I need help, I'll ask, and if you need help, ask. I don't ever want you to feel like you're not doing enough or that you're alone. You're not, you never will be, not while I'm here." You sob, and he kisses you through it, his lips soft against yours. For the first time in months, you feel like you can properly relax.

a/n: this is prob gonna get a tad bit personal, but i just wanna reiterate how much love and respect I hold for mothers out there. all of the women in my fam have problems with their reproductive health, and it's likely that I will too when I'm older. Despite this, they've never been anything but incredibly mothers and role models and I love my mom, my aunts, and my grandma dearly

i also want to be a mom when I'm older and I encourage everyone who also wants this to do some serious research into what pregnancy/motherhood entails. it's rough out here for us girls and no one is gonna support us the way we will ourselves, and part of that means being educated on our bodies, despite the lack of proper research done with them a lot of times

anyways, rant over. love y'all and stay safe to all the mamas out there!

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the-conversation-pod · 2 days ago

Text

The Untamed Episodes: The First Life

AND WE'RE BACK

It's been a hot minute since we dropped an episode, so we're back to talk about a project that has stuck in fandom for years. We finally got NiNi to watch The Untamed, so grab your snacks and come listen to her talk about everyone's hair along with our friends @lurkingshan and @neuroticbookworm. We'll be discussing censorship in media as we try to run through the big overview of Wei Wuxian's first life.

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:00:55 - Introduction 00:03:55 - Censorship in Media: A Global View 00:12:37 - The MoDaoZuShi Phenomenon 00:24:33 - The Big Picture 00:33:36 - The First Life 00:40:07 - The First Life: Thoughts and Impressions 00:46:21 - The First Life: WangXian and Other Fucked Up Love Stories 01:01:17 - The First Life: Various Random Musings 01:11:02 - Outro: Notes From the Future

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation, the Queer Media And Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

I'm Ben, the media critic.

NiNi

I’m NiNi, the VIIBs queen.

Ben

And we are your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

We’re here to talk queer film and dramas, with a special focus on Asian QL.

Ben

So if you like to dive deep into queer stories…

NiNi

If you like cracked out takes on art and commerce in queer media…

Ben

If you just enjoy simping for attractive people…

NiNi

We believe in simping!

Ben

Tune in!

00:00:55 - Introduction

Ben

And we're back. This week we're doing a little bit of a retrospective. We're gonna be covering The Untamed. Friend of the pod, pod team member, and troll of the pod, Shan—who is of course here.

NiNi

Say hi, Shan.

Shan

Hi, people!

Ben

Shan mentioned during our Diamond League episode that this was a huge oversight in the pod's discussion history and so we successfully bullied NiNi into finally watching it. And she managed to watch the whole thing.

Shan

I'm so impressed.

NiNi

It was a struggle. It was a lot. There were some episodes in the middle where I was just like, ooh, okay, I'm just gonna have to push through. But I made it.

Shan

You sure did.

Ben

Because The Untamed is such a large project to discuss, we brought an additional clown along with us. Everyone welcome back Bookworm.

Say hi, Bookworm.

Bookworm

Hi people!

Ben

Bookworm, despite how busy she is, has been following Shan's [laughs] recommended BLs list for like two years now. And then for about, like, a one month period, we completely lost Bookworm to reading all five of these books. And then during Christmas of ‘24, I think, you guys watched all of The Untamed in like a week.

Bookworm

We did it in two weeks, I think. Six episodes a day.

NiNi

That is commitment.

Shan

Bookworm has very short windows where she actually has a lot of free time. So we took advantage of the holiday season.

Bookworm

She trapped me between Christmas and New Year's.

Shan

I just strapped her to a chair, and said [Bookworm laughs] we're watching the episodes, let's go.

NiNi

She's good at doing that.

Bookworm

Sure is.

NiNi

That's how she got Ben to watch Goblin.

Bookworm

Wow, that was a moment. That was so good.

[NiNi laughs]

Shan

I'm feeling really proud of my accomplishments.

[NiNi laughs]

Ben

Goblin was at least better than Coffee Prince, ‘cause there was a moment when I was watching Coffee Prince, around like episode 10, where I'm like, I'm over this show!

[Ben and Shan laugh]

Shan

He was so mad because he was waiting for the turn and it hadn't come yet and he was getting so frustrated.

NiNi

Episode 10 of a kdrama? That's not when it happens. Come on!

Shan

He just didn't understand the rhythms yet. He pushed through, and then he came around and ended up loving the show.

Ben

Goblin did a much better job of not losing me during the episode 10 phenomenon because they had great Bonds Between Men content. Every time I'm like, “ooh, I'm getting a little tired of this modern angst shit,” they're like, “here's a scene from the past with that one guy you love.” There he is. There's my boy.

NiNi

I think that's a good segue into what we're gonna talk about here, Bonds Between Men, because this is a show that works on multiple levels deliberately because of details that we're gonna talk about. So let's dive into talking about The Untamed.

00:04:14 - Censorship in Media: A Global View

Ben

Normally on this show, as you all know, we would do like a “Ben, what the fuck is the show about?” and I'd give some kind of snarky blurb about it, and then we get into it. Because we're talking about the biggest Chinese BL that exists, we're gonna unpack a ton of the context around our understanding of Chinese censorship.

Shan, you've done a bunch of the background on this one. Take us in.

Shan

So first, just an acknowledgement up top that censorship exists in all media. That there are standards in every country that have to be met for anything that is aired, on public television in particular, in movies. This is not a thing that is unique to China. And most Asian dramas are censored to some extent according to whatever the social norms of their home country are.

That said, Chinese censorship is especially strict. It's considered one of the worst state censorship models in the world. The Chinese Communist Party monitors everything that comes out. They're very often concerned with curtailing political opposition and promoting Chinese nationalism—if you include more of it, you can get away with doing stuff they don't like. They want to prevent negative depictions of Chinese history. They're also very often just doing basic morality policing around sex, in particular. So, even in heterosexual romance media, this applies. You see very little sex in cdramas, even when they're het. Angle kisses, stuff like that still exist even in het media. Of course this is even more severe for queer media. Typically, you're not even gonna see things like onscreen kisses in queer media out of China.

They also put limits on things like magic, which is very relevant for the story we're gonna talk about today. It has to be depicted so as to avoid seeming more powerful than the state or promoting superstition. This is very often why characters who use magic are not really allowed to have happy endings. You can't show a character thriving because of their use of magic in Chinese media. So sometimes magic is changed out completely in these stories for quasi-scientific explanations, or magic is used and then the characters have ambiguous or sad endings in order to counterbalance that.

On top of those censorship norms, there's also law around pornography. Pornography is completely illegal in China. Technically, since the mid 2010s, homosexuality is not criminalized legally anymore in China, but there are a lot of really vague laws that still exist around abnormal sexual behavior, quote unquote, and obscenity, quote unquote, that allow for queer media to be targeted by censors.

In terms of Chinese BL shows, there were a handful of them prior to The Untamed that did make it to air. Most of them adapted from novels—we'll get a little bit more into that in a minute. In 2017, in the middle of the airing of Addicted, is when the censorship crackdown on BL really took shape. That show was very popular and was actually depicting things like kisses between men and it immediately got terminated, yanked off the air, and then the censorship laws got much stricter.

Y'all probably remember that, NiNi and Ben. I think you were around in fandom when that went down.

Ben

I sure was.

NiNi

I wasn't quite there yet, I watched Addicted after the fact and I didn't have the context.

Shan

You were confused, right? [laughs] You're like, why is this show such a big deal?

Ben

Both of those guys kind of disappeared from acting for years afterwards.

Shan

They got blacklisted.

Ben

They're only just now starting to work again.

Shan

Yeah. So that show got yanked off mid-airing right after the first kiss aired on TV. And then after that, you never saw anything like that. Even the few Chinese BLs that managed to get released after that, you don't see things like on air kisses or acknowledgement of sex at all.

It's hard for a lot of these shows to get made in the first place. Even after they get made, a lot of them don't end up going to air or they start airing and then get yanked off TV very quickly. There are many, many danmei adaptations sitting on the shelf in China. There are shows that have been made and will never get released. It's a really rough environment for creators who are trying to make this queer content and get it out in the world.

Ben

Let's add some additional context, if we can, about censorship outside of China. Since we have two Americans and two non-Americans here.

Bookworm or NiNi, do you have any specific cultural memories of censorship in media from your home countries? ‘Cause I have a few American ones I will of course bitch about.

NiNi

I'm gonna let Bookworm go first because India and censorship? This is a big one.

Bookworm

I know, right. So in India, the most prominent kind of censorship that I've noticed in media is almost a self-censorship by the creators themselves around things that deal with caste or religion, and we very rarely get homosexual depictions, but whatever we do get, it's almost always a tragedy. I've never seen a gay character have a happy ending in Indian media yet. When we have inter-caste romance depiction, for example, the story will struggle between the realities of how caste can affect these relationships and how it will be received and how difficult their lives will be made, and giving them a happy ending. In India, even though openly we say that it's bad and we shouldn't be clinging to the caste systems now in the 21st century, it's still there. And even though it's not said out loud, most of the powerful media producers and people who can fund this, they tend to be people who are from upper caste. So, if you make something that is openly against their caste, it's just never gonna come out.

So, when I watched The Untamed, it was very relatable to watch something where they wanted to do more, but you can see that they just can't.

NiNi

In Trinidad, we don't have a very big recorded media tradition. A lot of our art is theatre-based. And you can find pretty much most things in the theatre, but it's mostly for comedy sake so there's a lot of sex farce, that kind of thing. In terms of recorded media there isn't that much, but what there is, you don't really see, like, actors kiss that much. But that’s not a censorship thing because t's not like they would not be able to air that. It's just a question of the traditions being different. There's no standards boards or things like that, but we don't put very much on the air anyway.

Ben

In America they would just lie.

NiNi

All men do is lie. [laughs]

Ben

They pretend that the advertisers or the nebulous white midwesterner won't want to watch things like Pose, or if a gay actor says something out of line they hurriedly cancel their show despite the show being really fucking good. Having to pick up the scraps that the establishment here is willing to make each year is incredibly frustrating. There's a lot to be said about top-down state level censorship, but I don't think it's inherently worse or better than this.

Shan

Well yeah, there's state censorship and then there's censorship due to trying to attract sponsors and advertising dollars. But it ends up in the same kind of results of not having honest depictions in media. And I think American media is very susceptible to the latter.

NiNi

There's also some interesting things there between how sex is censored and how violence is censored in Western media. I wouldn't say that it's not censored, but you can get away with a lot more violence than you can with sex.

Ben

I have a lot of feelings about the MPAA, so we're not gonna get into that, but let's just point out that you can have somebody run through a building shooting up everybody and get a PG-13 rating as long as there's no blood. But if two gay people even look at each other too long, that's an R rating immediately.

Shan

Rated R, mmhmm. This stuff is not new, it is not unique to any one country, it exists everywhere. But currently, in 2025, China has one of the strictest state censorship models. And so that's the context under which Chinese BL is made. And, the context under which The Untamed was released.

00:14:54 - The Mo Dao Zu Shi Phenomenon

Ben

All right, now let's get into Mo Dao Zu Shi properly. This has been around for awhile.

Shan

So, danmei is the term that is meant to describe Chinese literature that features male/male romance within a whole bunch of different genres. It's a very broad term, danmei. It just means male/male romance. These typically are published as web novels, usually serialized, written mostly by and targeted mostly to a female audience.

Danmei exists in a kind of a gray space legally in China. It's both queer and pornographic, so it's technically not allowed, but there's not really an enforcement mechanism. The authors stay anonymous because of course, if they're caught publishing this stuff, there could be serious repercussions.

A lot of danmei novels have become available in recent years to an international audience. First, via fan translations that were done just purely out of love. And then those translations got passed around via the online whisper network of international folks who were interested in these stories. And this genre became so popular that there are now official English translations of some of these books being made. There's a publishing company called Seven Seas that has acquired the rights for many of the most popular danmeis and are publishing them over time. And so that is how this book, Mo Dao Zu Shi, aka Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, became much more widely available to an English speaking audience.

This book originally started in 2015 and the writer is Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. It was so popular that it has been, over the years, translated into over a dozen languages. It was first passed around the international audience via a very popular fan translation, and then became officially published in English starting in 2021. Made the New York Times bestseller list, expanded the audience for this story even further. This is a story that is set in a genre called xianxia which is a popular Chinese media genre about humans in historical China who are called cultivators, which basically means that they do martial arts enhanced by magic. They have paranormal, spiritual, physical powers that help them achieve immortality.

This story was so popular that it's had a bunch of adaptations. It's had a webcomic, an audio drama, an animated series and a spinoff to that, an audio book, a mobile game, and of course, The Untamed, the live action show, which we are gonna be discussing today. And there are additional adaptations still being announced. We just found out that there's gonna be a Japanese stage adaptation in the theater, which I'm very curious to see what that's gonna be like.

So this is an extremely popular story that has really gone global through fan word of mouth. It's a huge deal in terms of its reach and its enduring popularity with fans.

Ben

You have no idea how much time Shan and Bookworm spent trying to get all of these notes in order.

Shan

It's a lot to cover!

Ben

[laughs] We had a whole side thing with Twig about, like, a canceled international tour that was gonna happen before COVID.

Shan

I didn't even know about that.

Ben

Let’s establish when everybody came to this. So, I came to The Untamed through normal Tumblr BL sphere around episode 25ish of the drama, I believe?

Ben

Shan, when did you come to The Untamed?

Shan

It's hard for me to remember now. I've been so up in this story’s business for years now that it's really hard for me to actually untangle in my brain when I got to certain versions of it and how. But I didn't watch it live. I definitely binged it after the whole thing was out. So I think I probably first watched the series in 2020 or 2021, read the novel and then watched the series again. I was watching a lot of Asian dramas. I had started getting into BL and Netflix just told me to watch this. They put it right on top and I was like, “oh this is interesting, I haven't seen anything quite like this before.” It's kind of remarkable that I'm just sitting over here in the United States and Netflix is telling me to watch this Chinese BL web series.

This aired in China on Tencent Video. But it was so, so popular. It became one of the highest earning dramas of 2019. Over time, it passed 10 billion views. Netflix picked it up in late 2019, brought it to a much broader international audience. And that's how people like me saw it. This is a story that in both novel and show form spread fiercely by word of mouth. People just loved it so much that it kept getting picked up and brought to new audiences.

When did you first hear about this show, Bookworm?

Bookworm

I think I was just vaguely aware of a very long Chinese drama that was on Netflix. I possibly could have seen it on my recommendations before getting into watching BL at all. I started watching BL only in 2022. So I definitely was not in the fandom when this released live.

So how I was introduced to this, the time was December 2023. And I just went to Shan’s DMs to talk about how my BTS bias was going to the military. And she was like, here you go.

Shan

Something to distract you. [laughs]

Bookworm

“Here's a picture of this man who's so beautiful and always wears white for some reason. You can think about this man.” And it was like, “what do I do to know more about this man?” And she was like, “I know exactly where I should send you.” And she just directed me to all the books. So yeah, that's how I spent my 2023 holidays, just locked in my room like a gremlin inhaling all the books.

[Ben laughs]

Shan

I did not remember that I showed you Wangji because V was going to the military. [laughs]

Bookworm

That's exactly what happened. You trapped a freshly grieving army wife!

NiNi

it just amazes me how Shan is so good at tempting people. She knows exactly how to get people to do things. It's a little bit scary.

Bookworm

The whole thing was done in 10 days. I genuinely don't think I slept for more than maybe four to five hours. [laughs]

Ben

[laughs] You did not. You were talking to us in a haze. You screaming about sections.

Shan

The thing about Bookworm is she also likes to live blog her book reading. So we were along for the ride. [laughs]

Bookworm

That's right. Every time something happened, I bothered them. It's kind of their fault. Shan put me through it. Like, she has to suffer.

Shan

I had to be there for emotional support after doing that to you.

Bookworm

Exactly.

NiNi

That's the thing, Shan's gonna, like, be the temptress that is seducing you with the apple, but then she'll be right there with you when you fall apart. [laughs]

Bookworm

Exactly.

Shan

It's my duty.

Ben

NiNi, what did you know about this whole experience from just sort of seeing it in the background noise of BL constantly for the last five years before you sat down and engaged with it?

NiNi

So I don't think it's any surprise to anybody who listens to this show that I don't watch cdrama, but this show is sort of inescapable. I have friends who are not BL fans, who are not Asian drama fans, who watch this and rave about it and talk about it all the time. This thing is a fucking monster and completely inescapable. And I was just like, “eh yes, I know everybody says it's good. It probably is really good. I don't know how I feel about censorship like this. I don't know if this is something I wanna watch, if it's gonna frustrate me.” I was aware of it out there in the world and aware of how big it was. But, “eh, not sure it's for me.” And then after the Diamond League, I was basically Shan’d into watching it. [laughs]

We're gonna use Shan’d from now on, like to Shan somebody.

Bookworm

That is a good verb. We are gonna use that.

NiNi

We're gonna coin a new term, to Shan somebody.

Shan

I'm just here to enrich your lives with this amazing media that you need to see. And NiNi ended up enjoying this way more than I thought she would. So I was very pleased.

Ben

We're gonna jump ahead slightly and tell on NiNi. NiNi is now watching Word of Honor.

[all laugh]

Shan

She sure is!

Bookworm

She is!

NiNi

I am. [laughs]

Shan

The evil plan is proceeding very nicely.

NiNi

I will say though, Word of Honor is like the Passions to the Days of Our Lives that is The Untamed.

Shan

Yes!

NiNi

And anybody who does not understand what that means, I'm so sorry for you.

Shan

It's exactly right.

Bookworm

It's me. I'm the one who doesn't understand what that means, but it's fine.

Shan

These are American soap operas that NiNi is referencing.

Ben

American soaps that have been on forever.

[Ben and Shan laugh]

NiNi

Basically, Days of Our Lives is wild, Passions is lower quality and wilder.

Shan

This show, this story, the book, all of it. It's ubiquitous if you hang out in fandom spaces online. You cannot avoid it if you are in those spaces. It is one of the biggest fandoms. It's certainly the biggest BL fandom on the internet.

Ben

When we watched this in 2019, I was minding my own business, watchin’ shit like Until We Meet Again and Trapped. And then they started posting all these gif sets of all these Chinese boys with really long wigs and very clean outfits. There was a lot of screaming. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? Why is every goddamn lesbian on tumblr howling about this show?

Shan

Why are the girls freaking out?

NiNi

And we all know from listening to this show that Ben listens when lesbians talk.

Shan

That's right.

Ben

I was like, I don't know what is happening, but every goddamn girl in BL is losing their minds over a censored Chinese BL in 2019. Have we not learned? [laughs] And they wouldn't shut the fuck up about it. And I'm like, all right, that's enough. Around episode 20 to 25.

I got intrigued by the Bonds Between Men stuff. There are some gif sets at the time. Like, this looks like Man Angst. Hold on, I'm intrigued now. Let me go check this out.

I remember going through The Untamed loop. Being kind of overwhelmed with details in the first few episodes. And then we went, “okay, we're in a flashback sequence. Guess we'll be here for like an episode or two.” We weren't. And then I ended up catching up with where the show was around episode 38, which was great timing for me. Like, I ended up catching up to the show right around the time we got into the present. And I was like, “I have context’ and then watched the rest of the show [laughs] live with everybody else and had a pretty good time. And then like a week after it finished, I ended up watching the show again. Because I feel like I needed to reprocess it.

I don't think I was prepared for how sticky the show has been for fandom itself. I guess I shouldn't have been because fandom really loves to fill in the blanks on stuff. That's their favorite thing. I grew up watching a lot of Chinese action and a lot of wuxia films, so I had a good time, but I was not expecting this to be the show for everyone. I like the show a fair amount, but I was very surprised by this becoming one of the biggest BLs of all time.

Shan

It's not only the fill in the blank stuff, but it's also that there's just so many characters, so many relationships, so many dynamics that are just great fodder for meta and fanfic and just, thinking. There's just so much here and I think that's why it has endured for so long.

00:28:42 - The Big Picture

Ben

Okay, we are going to now attempt to talk about the show.

NiNi

I'm glad you said attempt, bestie, because there's just so much here.

Shan

Please don't get mad at us for whatever we inevitably leave out.

Ben

Let's just get that out of the way. We will not be able to discuss everything that happens in a 50 episode drama adapted from a five book complex novel series. We will be covering some highlights of things that are interesting to us and doing some comparisons along the way.

This is a pretty big story and at its core, it's a mystery. So, if you've been holding off on watching this and you feel some kind of way about spoiler culture—I personally don't subscribe to it—but we will be talking about the details of this show for the rest of the episode. So, if you'd like to resume this later, go ahead and pause, grab a shit ton of snacks, go watch The Untamed, [laughs] and then come back.

[all laugh]

Bookworm

Be prepared to not sleep for a long time.

NiNi

Two weeks is the bare minimum.

Ben

You have been warned. All right. So, The Untamed is primarily a story about a talented young cultivator named Wei Wuxian who was kind of in a high ranking role within one of these major clans that organize themselves around cultivation. They have a role in their society where they help manage supernatural phenomena and protect regular people from supernatural and ghost related bullshit.

There is an expected way that you're supposed to practice and study cultivation. The most powerful clan who wears a lot of red is like, “that's it, we're taking over everything,” and then begins murdering everyone. A lot of things happen. Wei Wuxian ends up developing demonic cultivation in the book, rediscovers it in the show—we'll talk about that later—and helps the not-red clan defeat them, after which we end up in the complex politics that follow after a major power shift.

Eventually Wei Wuxian dies in a major confrontation after he kills thousands of people, and then 16 years later in the show, he is brought back, reuniting with some of his close friends and allies—because this is a BL romance/not romance—as they go on an investigation to figure out why this cursed hand is trying to kill everybody.

That is the simplest overview I can give of a very complicated show.

Shan

You did good, bestie. That's about the best you could do.

NiNi

I did not look at the timer when you started talking, so I do not know exactly how long that took.

Ben

It was about three minutes. I was trying to do it under three. There are a shit ton of characters in this. Wei Wuxian is a very likable protagonist with very clear relationship dynamics with every character. So there's a lot to really dig into.

Shan

I think you should reiterate for folks what the experience of watching The Untamed is like. There's this very famous tweet that I think we should give some credit to that described it perfectly.

Ben

We'll post the screenshot and a link to it in the transcript. Gavia Baker Whitelaw, is a film critic who runs her own podcast, she has her own Tumblr blog, I'll link to hers on here, she goes by @hellotailor. I'm a big fan of Gavia's writing, I really like the way she engages with media. Gavia went through the same experience as the rest of us in early 2020 of like, “what is this show?!” [laughs]

So Gavia starts watching The Untamed and is live blogging on Twitter. “What is this nonsense that I'm watching? What is happening?” And the user who went by Dr. Kate Wild at the time writes, “There's three stages to watching The Untamed. Stage one, this is nonsense. This is very bad.”

That's like episodes one and two.

“Stage two, this is quite watchable nonsense.” That's around episodes four to eight.

And then “Stage three, I have never cared about anything more in my life.” [NiNi laughs] That happens for different people at different times.

Shan

NiNi, it was taking her a while to get to stage three. And I said, “Don't worry, NiNi. Stage three comes for all of us at different times. You will get there.” And she did. [laughs]

Ben

When was stage three for you, Shan?

Shan

Okay, so first of all, I am a Lan Wangji devotee. I love that man. He owns my heart. So from episode one, as soon as he appeared, I was like, “okay, hell yeah, that's my guy. I'm here, I'm seated.” But in terms of when the story kinda took over my brain, I think that really happened for me during the arc where Wei Wuxian is liberating the Wen prisoners of war and he meets Lan Wangji on the Qiongqi Path in the rain and they have a very sad and tense conversation before Wangji decides to let him leave with the prisoners, but does not leave with him.

That scene—which by the way is unique to the show—just drilled itself into my brain so deep and I was never normal again, ever, and I never will be. That was the point when stage three took root for me and I became obsessed with this media, and that obsession will last for my whole life.

Ben

I think it was during the cave arc when Wei Wuxian made Lan Wangji vomit blood. I'm like, “that's way too fucking gay. I have to watch this little man for the rest of the show.” [laughs]

Shan

I feel like most people are super in by that sequence, too.

Ben

That whole section is pretty good though, between the handling of the hostage arc, the blow up in the cave, and then the sacking of Lotus Pier. That's a really strong section for people who really like historical political dramas. There's a really strong sense of inevitability at the point at which Wei Wuxian in particular is thrust into the situation, because he's not a passive person. But you can feel the next 15 episodes about to unfold.

Shan

What about you, Bookworm?

Bookworm

For me I think it's different because I read the books first and the books are structured quite differently from how the show is structured. So the show does it very linear. Once you jump into the flashbacks you just keep going for 33 episodes and then you emerge, as Ben said, with context. But in the books it interweaves between the present and the flashbacks and the structure kind of gives way to the author releasing information in like very small amounts to keep the tension and intrigue going.

I'm just the kind of person who starts screaming from the very first moment a question appears on my book or on my show. Like if there is something that needs to be revealed, I need to have it. Just tell me. I don't care if it's a 50 episode show, I don't care if it's a 10 book series. I just start vibrating from the moment I see the puzzle that needs to be solved.

So in the books, Wei Wuxian, when he's in Mo Xuanyu’s body, people are not gonna recognize him as Wei Wuxian. So he was just like coasting on that and he was doing all sorts of shenanigans with Lan Zhan. But we get to a point where Lan Zhan calls him Wei Ying and he just freezes and he's like, how did you know that it was me? And Lan Zhan just tells him, “You're gonna have to think for yourself.” And that's it. That was stage three.

Shan

Classic. And that dynamic keeps coming up over and over again through the whole story.

Bookworm

I was like, “oh my god, how did he know? Just tell me, just tell me!” So that was my stage three.

What about you, NiNi?

Shan

NiNi’s came later, right?

NiNi

Mine came very late. Stage three for me came when Wei Wuxian is hanging off the cliff and Lan Zhan is trying to save him. And this implacable man just breaks and his face just completely changes. And I'm just like, “okay, I'm in.”

Shan

Yeah, it was definitely Lan Zhan’s emotional break for you, right?

NiNi

Oh, most definitely. From the outside, he appears controlled, even though it's very clear to anybody who's watching this show that this man is losing his mind at all times. And in this case, he just cracks. Because he's about to lose this man and he knows it. And that's when I was just like, “okay, I'm in.”

00:39:30 - The First Life

Ben

We gotta get into the overall set of arcs that we went through in the show. Wei Wuxian is our viewpoint character and we've gotten really caught up in the romance between him and Wangji. But at the core, this is a political power drama where there's a lot of different players vying for control. Wei Wuxian is the wild card because he actually doesn't value political power that much. We at least need to establish, like, what does everybody else give a shit about.

Shan

We're gonna divide this because there's two different time periods. So let's start with the first life of Wei Wuxian, the first time period.

When the show starts, we are dropped into the story in a very confusing manner. Wei Wuxian is resurrected. He's in a new body 16 years after he died. He doesn't know why the fuck he's back or what's going on. He runs into lots of friends and allies and enemies and frenemies and he is running around like a chicken with his head cut off. He's confused. We're confused. You're not really supposed to understand what's going on in those first couple episodes, but there's actually a ton of information packed into them. As Ben said, once you have context, if you go back and watch them, there's so much information in those first couple episodes.

NiNi

This is the “this is nonsense” stage.

Shan

Exactly. This is the stage one. Where you're like, “What the fuck is going on? Why are all these people running around like this? I don't understand anything.” [laughs] It's intended to be kind of disorienting.

Then you jump into this long flashback, which is about 30 episodes long. So you get the political power struggle between the great clans. There are five of them: the Jiang which Wei Wuxian is part of, the Lan, which Lan Wangji is part of, the Nie, the Jin, the Wen. That main political power struggle is driven by the Wens trying to do a hostile takeover of the other clans. They burn the Cloud Recesses, they storm the Unclean Realm, they sack Lotus Pier, and then the war—the Sunshot Campaign—is a response to that, the other clans joining hands to try to stop the Wens from trying to take over the cultivation world. Lots of complex dynamics between the clans going on there that we will not get into that culminates in this Battle of Nightless City.

Alongside that political power struggle, we have Wei Wuxian's rise to power and his fall from grace. He is incredibly smart. He's a cultivation prodigy. He is also not as reverent about the traditional ways of doing things. He's very interested in unorthodox cultivation methods, including demonic cultivation, which is very much looked down on. As the war played out and as the Wens take control, he was part of fighting them alongside his struggles with controlling his own power. He took great exception to the aftermath of the war, the treatment of the Wen prisoners of war, the more innocent Wen clan members who were not part of this, who are just regular folks or weak cultivators, medical cultivators who didn't actually hurt anyone but were treated badly because they were Wens by the other clans. So he intervened to protect those folks. That is what led to him retreating from the cultivation world to the Burial Mounds to live with the Wens, resurrecting Wen Ning and ultimately setting himself up to be a scapegoat and get ambushed by the other clans, because they were very unhappy with him.

Alongside that, we have a couple very personal storylines going on. One to do with Wei Wuxian's family relationships and the implosion of his clan family, the Jiang family. They are his adopted family, the heir, who is Jiang Cheng, and sister Jiang Yanli, these are his adoptive siblings. It's a very fraught family relationship. His adoptive mother resents him partly because of who his mother is and partly because he outshines her son, the sect heir. When Lotus Pier—their family home—is attacked, both of the Jiang parents die. The clan is basically decimated, Jiang Cheng loses his core, and Wei Wuxian decides to pull a real big noble idiocy. Sacrifice his own life, basically, for his brother, give him his core, tell nobody he did this, and then start cultivating on the demonic path to try to come up with another source of power as part of his survival. His relationship with his brother is, in particular, one of the most interesting and dynamic and complicated relationships of the show. And he has a very, very deep love for his adoptive sister, which of course ends up coming back to bite him when, as a result of him losing control of his powers and starting this battle at Nightless City, his sister is killed in the chaos. Huge traumatic event, causes him to go off the deep end and destroys his relationship with his brother.

Alongside all that, one more big storyline, of course, is the unfulfilled romance between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. We get alongside all this political power struggle stuff, some actually really lovely moments of them. First, meeting each other as teens, Wei Wuxian very infatuated with Lan Zhan right from the beginning, but didn't really understand what his feelings meant. Lan Wangji, of course, did understand what the feelings meant [laughs] and was not happy about it.

NiNi

Oh he was so mad, friend. He was so pissed. He's like, “Why do I like this wastrel?”

[NiNi and Shan laugh]

Shan

“Goddamn it! Why is it you?”

So yeah, big gay panic on poor Wangji's side and big oblivious nonsense on Wuxian’s side. But then we see them over time bond over their shared values. They actually believe in a lot of the same core ideas. They end up doing adventures together. They defeat bad guys together. They survive together and support each other. They kind of develop, like, a deep friendship that on Wangji's side is always very consciously also romantic love and on Wuxian's side is a little bit more oblivious.

When Wuxian loses his core and starts doing demonic cultivation, there is a divide that comes between them. Wangji does not understand these decisions. Wuxian will not tell him why he's doing any of this stuff. So they end up in this very tense dynamic where they're fighting all the time, but they don't wanna be fighting because they really care about each other. They spend some time together and attempt to reconnect, but of course everything ends in despair when Wei Wuxian basically jumps off the cliff after his sister dies at Nightless City and gives up on his life. And that is how the first life arc completes.

00:46:32 - The First Life: Thoughts and Impressions

Ben

What I think works well with the drama, I personally like dropping us in and just being like, there's a lot of shit going on. You guys are gonna have to figure out a lot of shit over time. And I actually, in retrospect, like the very long 30-something episode flashback sequence. I think if they had tried to maintain the back and forth nature of the source material, the audience who maybe missed an episode or two here or there would be confused as hell.

I also think it's a pretty clever choice because you start in the present and there's way too much shit going on. And then they flash back like, “so anyway, they're in school.” And everybody's like, “okay, I understand school. Let's meet some kids.” I think that's a really smart adaptation choice. Everybody may not understand what's going on in the world of cultivation, but everybody knows what it's like to be bored in a classroom with a stuffy old man telling you to write a bunch of rules down.

NiNi

I kinda had the opposite reaction. I understand why they structured the story the way that they did, but for me, if they had started at Cloud Recesses, I would have been fine. And I feel like I would have had less of a who's on first kind of thing going. It took me a really long time to clue into what the story was even doing, because I was so confused. I didn't even understand that the Cloud Recesses stuff was a flashback at first. To me, if they had done the story more linearly, I would have gotten it. I understand why they did it the way that they did to set up a hook and to do this reverberation throughout the story of showing that these things happen over and over again. But for me, I would have been fine with a more linear narrative.

Shan

Part of that is also just your unfamiliarity with cdrama tropes and, like, the signifiers of things like age and timeline shifts and class stuff. One thing I think is really funny, NiNi, is that you cued in so quickly to what the hair was telling you, which I thought was just so funny. [laughs]

NiNi

This is the only reason I survived. I was reading the show and all the characters through the hairstyles. So I saw Wei Wuxian and his wild little tendrils and I was like, “okay, this guy's a rebel.” And then Lan Wangji with his very structured beehive. I was like, “okay, I know who you are, sir.” And then all the different characters, depending on how their hair was styled, I could get a sense of who they were as a character. If this person is mischievous, if they're playful, if they're, like, rules focused, I could get all of that through the hair. So that was actually really good. [laughs]

I could not remember anybody's names for the longest time. So I was in, like, the chat saying, “what is Beehive doing?” Or “Tendrils is acting a fool today.” And they would know exactly what I was talking about. [laughs]

Shan

It really worked for you.

NiNi

It really did work.

Shan

NiNi was tracking as Wangji's beehive was getting bigger and bigger.

NiNi

It was massive at one point. I was like, “oh, you are really trying to intimidate people now with this.” Like, that's what's happening here.

Shan

It's true. Like, their hair changes with their status and with their age, right? So as Wangji attains higher status in the cultivation world, his hair pieces get more elaborate and huge. It's actually a very effective visual language.

NiNi

It's like the Texas rule: the higher the hair, the closer to God.

Ben

I mean, you're genuinely not wrong.

Shan

No, it's real. I'm something that cued for you.

NiNi

It really paid off for me at the end when Wangji comes to Wei Wuxian and his hair is all down and soft. I'm like, “oh my God, he's so in love.”

Shan

That's when NiNi just started melting.

NiNi

I did, I absolutely did. He had no beehive. He was entirely defenseless, basically, in front of this man. It's a great visual language for when you have this censorship that you can't say certain things and show certain things. Showing what was happening between the characters through the hair was very effective. For me, anyway.

Bookworm

One of the key moments when NiNi really queued into the beehive and the tendrils thing was when, after Wei Wuxian was thrown into the Burial Mounds and Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji was searching for him, he just walked up to the Wen headquarters and the reveal was just slowly, you see his hair and then he just keeps walking with his sword out and NiNi just was like, “Oh, he has the biggest hive I've ever seen. You guys are done for.” [laughs]

NiNi

Like, these motherfuckers are dead!

Bookworm

Dead.

NiNi

His beehive is up there, okay—

Shan

Beehive is up. The sword is out.

NiNi

He came to kill somebody, that's what's happening right now. [laughs]

Ben

I think what works so well for me with the show and especially on, like, secondary or tertiary watches, is because you start off being told this is a tragedy. It, I think, puts you in the right mood when you're watching the past stuff. The show opens with people literally fighting each other for a plot token. We're watching cultivators in the midst of a crisis literally stab each other to grasp what they hope will make them stronger than other people. So we're ready for everything that's gonna go wrong because of the opening sequence. It's very well structured and why I think the show got away with so much. We know Wei Wuxian’s gonna die. We know that his brother is gonna be furious with him at his death and we know that this guy who's wearing all these white clothes is gonna be very upset about it when that happens. This set me up very well to anticipate a lot of what was coming.

You end up meeting all these characters in the past and then some of these people are just straight up dead 16 years later. And it's like, well, how did these people die? I thought the war was over. And this leads to the next phase of power play stuff that's happening.

00:53:00 - The First Life: WangXian and Other Fucked Up Love Stories

Ben

While this drama is censored, there is all sorts of really fucked up gay energy all over this story.

Shan

Let's talk about how impressively they managed to communicate the romance without being able to show anything explicit.

NiNi

The romances, because I clocked about four romances in this thing and I was told that I was correct, so I'm so proud of myself. [Nandy and Shan laugh] There's two het romances and two queer romances. The het romances are between Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan—

Ben

I love that they low-key hated their brother-in-law. [NiNi laughs] Like, that's such an appropriate brother experience.

NiNi

There was nothing low-key about it, bestie. High-key hated.

Shan

Zixuan is very immature. He likes Yanli, but he's embarrassed that he likes her. And so he's kind of mean to her. And she, for some fucking reason that I never understood, just really likes him anyway. Which is why her brothers hate him. They do eventually get married and for their extremely brief marriage seem to be happy together.

NiNi

So brief, so sad. We'll get into that a little bit later.

Ben

Their marriage is arranged originally by their parents because their families have been allies for at least a generation or two and this is an attempt to strengthen that, and so the parents want these two kids to like each other. It's actually beneficial for the political goals of the families that in the end the kids actually do like each other. But there's complications. People never understand Wei Wuxian's relationship with Yanli, people constantly misread his relationship with her. And then there's the genuine issue of of Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian fucking despising Zixuan for being such a dick to their sister all the time.

NiNi

I keep thinking about the whole inn thing where he takes over the entire inn and they can't even get a room. It's so fucking dumb. And he's such an asshole about it. [laughs]

Bookworm

This is the storyline where I was glad that this was here because amongst all the fighting and the flying and the magical shit happening, like fighting a giant tortoise and being generals in war and all of that, this is where you're like, “oh, they're teenagers. Oh, they're so stupid.” [laughs]

NiNi

That's so true!

Shan

It's a good reminder that they’re all teenagers.

Bookworm

Every time Jiang Yanli gives a pass to that man, I'm like, “oh my god. What?”

Ben

I'm like, “girl, him, really?”

NiNi

You're like, Yanli, stand up! Stand up, girl.

Shan

It gets even wilder in the context of the political power struggle going on and the scapegoating of Wei Wuxian because that's her fucking brother and the Jins are going after him! So it's very wild to me that Yanli decides to marry into the family that is actively hunting her brother. Like, girl.

Ben

I get the sense that she never understood how serious that was and I think she felt like her one big tantrum solved the problem.

Shan

I do think that they set this character up well for that to be believable. She is not a strong cultivator. She is not very involved in sect politics. She is a very caring person who just loves who she loves and doesn't really want to deal with the idea that they won't get along. So she just doesn't allow it to be true in her head. And Wei Wuxian loves her. So, he was never going to say to her, “I don't want you to marry that man who's trying [laughs] to hunt me.” Because he wants her to be happy.

I think her character makes sense. But she's a character that I can never personally get on board with, because I'm just like, “girl, your choices are so bad.”

Ben

I feel for her the same way I feel about the messy hets in Coffee Prince. Like, we needed, like, another like pat but tragic het story to make sure that we could get away with this very queer story.

Shan

That's a good segue to talk about the other very subtle mini romance between Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing. Not in the books, by the way, this was added only for the show. And I think Ben, when we were watching, you commented that you thought it was really there to add an additional layer of heterosexual plausibility and plausible deniability for the show.

NiNi

I feel like that was part of it, yes, but that is also a romance that doesn't happen. Jiang Cheng is definitely in love with Wen Qing. Wen Qing feels sort of the same, but Wen Qing is also an incredibly practical woman and Jiang Cheng is not saying anything that is going to help her. Like at one point, after everything's gone down with the Wen clan he was just like, “You should leave your clan.” Which is basically him asking her to marry him, and she's like “Dude, really? How do you think this is gonna go? My clan killed your parents, you are the heir and then you're going to bring me there as your wife? That's not gonna work.”

Shan

I thought it was a really good way to illustrate the rock and hard place that Jiang Cheng was between for all of this show.

NiNi

Oh my god, I love this character.

Shan

Right? He did care about the Wens. He did wanna help. But politically, there was only so much he could do and what he could do was not enough. He knew that. She knew that. They had to accept that. Given the circumstances he was in with a mostly decimated clan, very young and suddenly thrust into having to lead and rebuild the Jiangs, he just didn't have the power and the resources to do something like offer protection to the Wens. He couldn't do it. And he was not willing to risk the total decimation of his clan in order to try.

That's why he and Wei Wuxian ultimately broke, right? Wei Wuxian knew that. Which is why he left the clan to do it on his own. It's really good conflict because you can see that people care and they wanna try, but they just can't do what they think they should or what they want to. Wuxian did do those things and he paid for it, big time.

Ben

See, and this is why I like it so much. If we're gonna have to do gay tragedy in a story, I need hets to suffer too. [laughs] Nobody's happy! The Jiang family relationship sucks. The leader of the Jin clan is a womanizer and an abuser who doesn't give a shit about all of his bastards he leaves all over the place. He's a gross, nasty man. The only happy heterosexuals we had died within a year of having their baby.

Ope, nope that's not fair. Mianmian’s doing okay. Good for her.

Bookworm

Mianmian’s doing great. How dare you! [Ben laughs]

Shan

She's the one happy het person in this show. [NiNi laughs] She's the one.

Bookworm

The only sensible one.

NiNi

Because—

Ben

She supported the gays.

NiNi

Mianmian stood up for the gays, exactly.

Ben

That's right!

Bookworm

Yes!

Shan

And because she left the clan. She said, “Fuck this shit, I'm goin’ rogue” and did her own thing.

Ben

One of the reasons why I think some of the other censored stuff fails is they just don't have enough hetero plausible deniability in them. You have to give the straight audience a bone if you're trying to get stuff past the powers that be.

Shan

Let's talk about the third love story that is technically never explicitly confirmed in book canon, but that's in my opinion only because the book is from Wuxian's point of view and he doesn't have the visibility to see it. That is, of course, Meng Yao and Lan Xichen.

NiNi

My God.

NiNi

The most tragic of all the tragedies.

Bookworm

Oh no! No no no!

Shan

Go off, Bookworm.

Bookworm

I just don't agree with the tragic part of it because for somebody in Lan Xichen’s position, he is so oblivious. He was played like a fiddle by this man. This is, like, dialed to a hundred in the show because the way Meng Yao was played in the show, you see him on screen just smirking around. And I'm like, “This man, he doesn't have good intentions. You can't trust him!”

NiNi

For me, that's the tragedy. The visual language and everything, like the acting is telling me this is a villain. But I trust Lan Xichen so much that when Lan Xichen trusts Meng Yeo, at first I'm just like, okay, well, there must be a reason. If he trusts him, maybe I'm reading this all wrong or maybe this is a plot because he trusts him so completely. And he is destroyed for that in the end. Like, absolutely destroyed.

Shan

I actually love that reflection, NiNi. I think that's a really fair way to read it.

Bookworm

I just want to quickly add that NiNi basically got Nie Mingjue’d into this. Like she basically did the same thing that Nie Mingjue did.

Shan

[laughs] That's really true. Nie Mingjue, their other sworn brother, who goes along with trusting Meng Yao—even though he clearly doesn't—only because Xichen asks him to.

Bookworm

And then he got his head chopped off for it!

NiNi

He got got. [laughs]

Ben

It's so fun watching people watch this show. NiNi's like, “ooh, I love this Dimples of Doom boy.” And I'm like, okay, she's falling for the dimples. And then he stabs the battalion commander in the middle of a battle. And NiNi's like, “oh, I guess I can't like this boy anymore.” [laughs]

NiNi

Then he had a really good explanation for it. And I was just like, “okay, maybe I can.” This is the thing!

Shan

He's good at what he does.

Bookworm

She saw that man stab the commander and then Mingjue called him into the room to throw him out of the sect, and do you remember what NiNi said? She said, “Can you at least treat this man for the stab wound before you throw him out of the sect?”

[all laugh]

NiNi

By the end, I was like, no, you should have killed him. Banishment was too good. You would have saved a lot of people if you had just killed this man in that moment.

Ben

I do not feel sorry for Xichen, because there were so many signs and he actively ignored all of them.

Bookworm

Yes.

Shan

We'll get into the second life arc, but like it took until the very, very end for him to accept, despite all the evidence he saw, despite everything he witnessed over two decades of being friends with this man.

To be clear, Meng Yao, who becomes Jin Guangyao when he moves up in the world, he's married to a woman. But Xichen is basically in this hopeless love with him. They're both clan leaders. They cannot become a couple in a real way, because of their position in society. And because of that love, he is so susceptible to manipulation. He just believes whatever Meng Yao tells him, even if it doesn't make sense. He will believe Meng Yao's words over his own lyin’ eyes.

Ben

Wangji and Wei Wuxian: “We have evidence that this man is the most evil.” Xichen: “Okay, but have you considered that I love him? Jot that down.”

[all laugh]

Bookworm

Oh, I hate him!

Shan

That is exactly what it is! It’s so wild.

Bookworm

Oh, my god.

NiNi

That is not even an exaggeration, that is almost exactly how it goes down.

Bookworm

I think it's a good connective theme between all three of these romances, that people have their own ways to separate the politics of the person that they like. And when they want to protect them, do they wanna choose diplomacy, do they wanna choose brute force, do they wanna choose compromise, what route do they take? You can see that Jiang Cheng, when he came to the proposal, he must know that that's not gonna happen. But you can see that there is this need to protect this woman who he knows is innocent. He also knows that he has this huge weight of clan politics, that he's now the clan leader and his clan is severely wounded and he has to make responsible choices to weigh between whether I choose my clan or whether I choose to do everything I could to protect this person, which is what I want to do in my heart.

My problem with Xichen is he doesn't really separate what the politics or the clan is going through and what Meng Yao is basically feeding him. You shouldn't be this gullible to a person who is basically another important figure in another clan that you know is doing just shady shit. You know they're having prisoners of war. You saw them use them for target practice. You saw them abuse the prisoners of war, beat them and kill them and all of that and this man is a part of that clan. Not just a part, he is pretty high up in the ladder.

Ben

He's also a known spy.

Shan

Yes!

NiNi

Exactly! Precisely!

Bookworm

I know! Exactly!

Shan

You're right, Xichen does not have an excuse. He witnessed this stuff with his own eyes.

Ben

I don't care how prettily he blinks in frustration. He's stupid. [laughs]

NiNi

Bookworm, I found what you just said really entirely fascinating because I think that one of the reasons, then, that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji works is that neither of them are directly in line to take over the clans. Wei Wuxian is an adoptee. He's not ever gonna take over the Jiang clan. So he does in some ways have to make his own way. And Lan Wangji is the second son. He also has to go his own way. So the politics for them, they're still the politics of clan loyalty and all of that, but they don't have the leadership responsibilities that all these other romances are involved with.

So what they can do and particularly what Lan Wangji can do to protect Wei Wuxian is far beyond what any of the other romances can do to compromise, protect, whatever. Lan Wangji just basically decides, that's my man, and nobody's gonna touch him. Even when I am mad at him, even when I don't understand what he's doing, nobody is touchin’ that man, ‘cause that's my man.

01:10:06 - The First Life: Various Random Musings

Ben

Before we leave the first life stuff, let's do a couple of quick hits. Favorite moments from the first life, starting with the school shit through the Battle of Nightless City.

Shan

My favorite moments tend to be tied to Wangji, of course, and his emotional landscape. So, the standout moments that feel really crucial to his character arc are where he reaches this emotional cliff that he falls over, and that happens for him several times. It happens when he is sitting with Wei Ying making a lantern—

Ben

I knew she was gonna fuckin' say that.

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

Shan

—and he draws him a rabbit on the lantern, which makes him smile. But the more important moment there is that he listens as Wuxian makes a vow for how he wants to live his life. And Wangji turns to him and looks at him like, “oh shit, I see you. I understand you now.” He agrees with the morality of the values that he holds. And that's a huge moment for him. They were in this stage where Wuxian was being a pest and Wangji was having his little gay panic and they were kind of adversarial with each other. And that moment really shifted things for him emotionally where he was like, “I understand him. We are actually on the same page about the things that matter. And I cannot go back to not knowing that.”

And then, as they have their adventures together and they get to know each other better, moments like in the cave with the tortoise, where Wangji kind of explicitly acknowledges his romantic feelings—not in a way that Wuxian can understand and receive, but he definitely does. And then the rain scene on Qiongqi Path, when he makes a choice to not stop Wuxian from leaving with the Wen prisoners of war, but also not join him. I think that was a huge moment for him where he came up against his own limitations about what he felt he could do for Wuxian. He was not actually willing to break from his clan and help him, but he didn't stand in his way.

And then of course that all culminates in his attempts to bring Wuxian back into the cultivation world that ultimately go sideways because of the machinations of the Jins, and the moment where he is forced to let him go when he is falling off the cliff. That is the moment where his heart just shatters. And then, we'll pick up with him 16 years later and all his regrets.

Ben

Alright, Shan, no crying yet.

Shan

I'm doing great.

Bookworm

Bookworm!

Bookworm

I will fight Shan for Lan Wangji if I have to.

NiNi

I think we all will.

Shan

Don't even try it.

Bookworm

Most of my favorite moments will also be tied to Wangji. Shan already mentioned a lot of them, but we still have a couple. After we see Wei Wuxian lose his core, get thrown in the Burial Mounds and learn demonic cultivation, when he shows up in that Yiling supervisory office wearing red eyeliner and a black robe on—

Shan

It just naturally goes on, the evil spirits put the eyeliner on.

[NiNi laughs]

Ben

It’s one of the many ghosts in the sword.

[all laugh]

Bookworm

Just full emo get up and gets his revenge on Wen Chao while Lan Zhan and Jiang Cheng is watching. That scene was very well depicted, it was very well shot, was very well acted. I really liked the tension of Lan Wangji realizing that something is different and you can see his heartbreak, you can see him calculating what's going on. You can see him just being so happy to finally see Wei Wuxian. He was gone for months and he just showed up in the middle of a war. And my man wanted to just, I don't know, grab him and kiss, but no, this guy wanted to murder. That was his first priority and it broke him. That is one of my favorite moments. I mean, obviously, I'm very normal. It's fine.

[NiNi and Shan laugh]

There was the moment after the archery competition. Phoenix Mountain Hunt. We see Wei Wuxian just lounging in a tree and Lan Zhan shows up and they finally, finally have this conversation where they try to ease some of the tension that they've been holding because of Wei Ying’s, like, reticence to engage with Lan Zhan, when he asks what is wrong and Lan Zhan going insane basically trying to figure out what is happening with Wei Wuxian, why he's not following the sword path, why he has turned to demonic cultivation. I think that that is one of the iconic moments in the show and of course it has a whole discourse about the “soulmates” translation.

Shan

I think the actual word is zhiji and it doesn't have a direct literal English translation. So, no translation is really capturing it correctly.

Bookworm

But it was translated as, I think, soulmate for the show.

Shan

Lifelong bosom companion!

NiNi

And they were roommates!

Ben

He's my boon companion.

Bookworm

I really liked that conversation and how it diffused a little bit of that tension that they were holding, and then of course everything goes to shit. But at least they were happy for a brief moment.

NiNi

I think for me, there's three things that tie together into a line. The two caves and then when Lan Wangji meets Wei Wuxian in Yiling Town and he invites him to come back to the Burial Mounds for dinner.

Ben

There were two caves! [laughs] Oh my god!

Shan

There were, that's legit.

Ben

Goddamn, there are a lot of caves in this fucking story.

Bookworm

The caves belong to the gays. It is what it is.

NiNi

I think those three points in the story form a very interesting line because the first cave is the Cold Pond Cave and they meet up with Lan Wangji's ancestor who developed the Lan clan's signature martial arts magic style and she basically explains to them their mission, what they have to do, this thing about the plot MacGuffin, the Yin Iron. But it's so interesting to me, when they came out of the cave, it's like Wei Wuxian instinctively understood that they don't tell anybody about what happened in the cave. I found that was an interesting change and dynamic to their relationship and also very gay.

And then when they're trapped in the cave with the Tortoise of Slaughter—

Ben

She really could not get over that fucking name.

NiNi

I could not. [Ben and Shan laugh] The Tortoise of Slaughter, okay. Yeah, so they're fighting this thing and Wei Wuxian basically goes into its shell and finds this sword which is the first step on the path to his demonic cultivation. Everything that happens from the moment he touches that sword took him directly to his break with all the clans and ending up in the Burial Mounds in the first place so that when they see each other after such a long time apart, after everything, and he's just like, “Hey friend, how are you? Come to dinner at my house. You're gonna go fight a monster? Fuck that. Come over.” It's, like, basically like the “Hey big head” text of all time. And I was completely into it.

Ben

Hold on, I just got triggered.

[Ben and NiNi laugh]

NiNi

It was such a romantic moment for me. You feel Lan Zhan's feelings the entire time, but it's really the first time that you feel Wei Wuxian's feelings for Lan Zhan and how they confuse him. He knows that he has these strong feelings and he wants Lan Zhan to be around him and in his life. But it's almost like, he doesn't know what to call it or at least he can't face what to call it.

Ben

I like moments in the past where people's personal ethics and loyalty to people who have helped them directly makes them ignore the responsibilities they may have to their clan. So, the first one for me is when Wen Ning poisons his own clan to help Wei Wuxian rescue Jiang Cheng.

Shan

I knew it was going to be about Wen Ning. Ben loves Wen Ning.

Ben

I really do. You mentioned him twice earlier and I held it in.

Shan

She did so good.

Ben

That moment's earned. Because Wei Wuxian showed him regard and kindness earlier and he returned it in kind.

The next big moment I like is Yanli's tantrum when she's like, you better keep my brother's name out your fucking mouth. Because that was really fun for a character who's been very reserved, who doesn't really challenge a lot of people. We have not really seen how all of the trauma they've survived directly impacted her. I really liked her in that moment, putting her foot down, like, “fuck you, I don't care.” You can see Wei Wuxian barely holding onto his control, and the only two things holding him back are his sister and his not-boyfriend. And then, like, within five episodes, neither of them will be present, and everything's gonna go to shit.

NiNi

Yep, pretty much.

01:20:53 - Outro: Notes From the Future

Ben

It's Ben and NiNi from the future!

NiNi

All the way in the future. So far in the future.

Ben

This episode is too fucking long. We're sorry, guys. We had a lot to say and we got Bookworm in the booth. It's also The Untamed. It's a very fucking long drama. So we're gonna take a pause here after the end of our discussion of Wei Wuxian's first life, and we'll pick up in the next episode with his second life. We appreciate you all for joining us.

NiNi

Yeah, we talk too much and so, there's gonna be two episodes. So see you guys in the next one!

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

#ben and nini's conversations #the conversation #mo dao zu shi #the untamed #podcast #lgbtq #bl series #chinese bl

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visualtaehyun · 2 days ago

Text

TNP EP.4 language annotations & novel extras ✨

I'm finally back to posting from desktop!! As always, all pronouns are presented in an "I/you" format. Words and expressions that I've previously explained in my EP.1, EP.2 and EP.3 annotations won't be explained again so please refer to those posts if need be 🙂‍↕️

Disclaimer: not a native Thai speaker, I am very much still learning 🙏

Calvin & Nin

Nin: [omitted]/เจ้าชายคาลวิน /#, jao-chaai Calvin/ + พ่ะย่ะค่ะ /pha-ya-kha/

Calvin: เรา/ท่านชายคณินทร์ /rao, than-chaai Khanin/

- เราเจ้าชายคาลวิน /rao jao-chaai Calvin/ - ยินดีที่ได้รู้จักเจ้าชายคาลวินเช่นกันพ่ะย่ะค่ะ /yin-dee thee dai ruu-jak jaao-chaai Calvin chen gan pha-ya-kha/

Short explanation: Calvin is higher in status than Nin. We even see Nin giving a hint of a bow, actually.

Long explanation: Calvin is a Prince, เจ้าชาย /jao-chaai/, on the same level as Emmaly's four Princes but higher than Nin who is also a Prince, yes, but his title is ท่านชาย /than-chaai/. Some of the promo material actually tried to translate this distinction by adding "His/Her Royal Highness" in front of Nin, Ramil, and Ava's Prince and Princess titles. You can't really compare fictional Emmaly's royal titles with British or Thai or any real life ones, of course, but neither can you divorce the existing terms from their original context. In Thai, they aren't even technically royal titles, they're what you'd call styles - for example, ท่านชาย /than-chaai/ and ท่านหญิง /than-ying/ are styles of address for princes and princesses, respectively, of the หม่อมเจ้า /maawm-jao/ rank which isn't a thing in fictional Emmaly. Ignoring the complexities of real life Thai royal titles and styles, TNP uses the following ones so far (from highest to lower):

เจ้ามหาชีวิต /jao ma-haa chee-wit/ -> King Thipokbowon

เจ้าชาย /jao-chaai/ ♂ / เจ้าหญิง /jao-ying/ ♀ -> Prince Tharin, Prince Rachata, Prince Chana, Prince Wasin, Princess Khunita

ท่านชาย /than-chaai/ ♂ / ท่านหญิง /than-ying/ ♀ -> Prince Khanin, Prince Ramil, Princess Ava

...hence Nin in the trailer saying he intends to become the next เจ้าชาย /jao-chaai/:

เพื่อจะได้เป็นเจ้าชายค��ต่อไป /pheuua ja dai bpen jao-chaai khohn dtaaw bpai/

Ava & Nin

Nin: พี่/น้องหญิง /phi, nong ying/

Ava: [omitted]/ท่านพี่ /#, than phi/ + เ��คะ /phe-kha/

Last week, I wrongly assumed that these two are the same age, based on how Nin and Ramil speak to each other and also based on how casual Ava's one line directly addressing Nin sounded:

วันนี้ thank you นะ /wan nee thank you na/

I need to rescind that statement though. Nin may be younger than Ramil but Ava is younger than Nin still!

- ท่านพี่คณินทร์ งานใหญ่มากเลยเพคะ /than phi Khanin, ngaan yai maak loei pheh-kha/ - มาน้องหญิง เต้นรำกับพี่น่ะ /maa, nong ying. dten ram gap phi na/

Thipokbowon & Nin

Nin: หลาน/เสด็จปู่ /laan, sa-deht bpuu/ + พ่ะย่ะค่ะ /pha-ya-kha/

For most of EP.3, Nin was struggling with how to speak to everyone in the palace and using a default ผม /pom/ for himself regardless of who he spoke to. Now though?

เสด็จปู�� หลานกับคุณชรัณเพียงแค่สนิทกันเท่านั้นพ่ะย่ะค่ะ /sa-deht bpuu, laan gap khun Charan phiiang khaae sa-nit gan thao nan pha-ya-kha/ = Grandfather, I and Khun Charan are merely close [to each other].

Ava & Chana

Ava: หญิง/[?] /ying, #/ + เพคะ /pheh-kha/

Chana: พ่อ/ลูก /por, luuk/

หญิงขอตัวก่อนนะเพคะ /ying khaaw dtuua gaawn na phe-kha/

I was surprised to hear that while her dad addresses her quite affectionately and normally, Ava herself speaks pretty distantly to him here. She isn't calling herself ลูก /luuk/ as we've heard in the trailer and which would sound more familiar. Maybe it's because they clearly don't see eye to eye...

Paytai & Charan

Paytai: [?]/อาจารย์ or คุณชรัณ /#, aa-jaan or khun Charan/ + ครับ /khrap/

Charan: [omitted]/[?] + no particles 🤡 this man, I swear to god 🤌 I'll get back to him later though!

Surprise~ Paytai knows Ran via Morpheus School of Art! I can't wait to see what they kept and what changes they made with these two.

While we're talking about Paytai though: there's this one line where a Bhuchongpisut palace staff addresses Paytai with a choice of particle that had me go Huh?

พ่ะย่ะค่ะ /pha-ya-kha/

-> In the novels, Paytai is 'just' the son of the Minister of Defense. But being Ramil's chosen companion affords him a higher status, akin to royalty - I guess it makes him some kind of nobility? That still doesn't explain why he's being addressed with พ่ะย่ะค่ะ /pha-ya-kha/ here though. Hmm.

Ramil & Nin

There's one addendum or change compared to last week. Nin largely omits any 1st pers. pronouns when talking to Ramil but in front of Rachata? Nin once curiously calls himself Nin นิน:

นินต้องขอรบกวนท่านพี่รามิลด้วย /Nin dtawng khaaw rohp-guaan than phi Ramil duay/

Rachata & Nin and Rachata & Ramil

Nin: หลาน/เสด็จลุง /laan, sa-deht loong/ + พ่ะย่ะค่ะ /pha-ya-kha/

Rachata: ลุง/หลาน /loong, laan/

-> In the novels, Rachata is the youngest among the 4 Princes. Here though, he's clearly older than Tharin at least, considering both Nin and himself refer to him as ลุง /loong/.

Rachata when talking about Nin while he's present:

ขอโทษน้องหรือยัง /khaaw thoht nong reuu yang/

Rachata when talking about Nin while he isn't present:

แกอย่าทำอะไรโง่ ๆ แบบนั้นกับไอ้คณินทร์อีก /gae yaa tham a-rai ngoh ngoh baaep nan gap ai'Khanin eek/ = Don't you do anything dumb like that with/to that damn Khanin again!

Ramil: [?]/เสด็จพ่อ /#, sa-deht por/ + พ่ะย่ะค่ะ /pha-ya-kha/

Rachata: ฉัน/รามิล /chan, Ramil/ but as he's chastising Ramil and Paytai, we hear that it's actually ฉัน/แก /chan, gae/ (as in the last screenshot ↑)

-> ฉัน /chan/ is an informal 1st pers. pronoun which, in this case, is used by a senior or superior when speaking to a junior or inferior.

-> I've mentioned before that แก /gae/ is the lowest in terms of impolite pronouns that the royals go in the novels. Yes, Thipokbowon also calls his son แก /gae/ but for himself he uses พ่อ /por/ which gives it a familiar vibe. Rachata however? The combination of ฉัน/แก /chan, gae/ is giving authoritarian parent 🥴 (not that we couldn't tell by the blatant abuse...)

-> ฉัน/แก /chan, gae/ is exactly how novel!Rachata speaks to both Ramil and Paytai.

Ran & Nin

Nin's default: ผม/คุณ /pom, khun/

Nin, in public or when Chakri seems to be in hearing distance (?): เรา/คุณ /rao, khun/

Ran's default: กระหม่อม/ฝ่าบาท or ท่านชาย /gra-maawm, faa-baat or than-chaai/ + พ่ะย่ะค่ะ /pha-ya-kha/

Ran, when dropping formalities with Nin: ผม/คุณ /pom, khun/ + ครับ /khrap/

The way Ran kept going back and forth between speech levels drove me crazy while watching. It's really indicative of his internal struggle though - his duty vs. his heart. So instead of this section being endlessly long, I decided to compile (most of it) into a video for a change!

Explanation of my color-coding: - gold = ราชาศัพท์ /raa-chaa-sap/ - red = recurring or important - orange = Nin - blue = Ran

Let's talk about how incredibly high Ran's emotional walls are, shall we? Just last week, New was still getting mad at how cold Ran was while confronted with Nin breaking down--

--and now look at how Ran has to touch Nin to confirm that he's safe and to comfort both him and himself:

He's really come to care (เป็นห่วง /bpen huuang/) so much about Nin! This boy is relentlessly breaking those walls down one brick at a time and I cannot wait to see Ran's true feelings and desires come to light!!

He indulged himself once, admitting to Nin that he cares/worries about him, and that immediately ended in trouble and got them both admonished by the King. And yet he keeps on defying the King: looking into what became of Thatdanai behind the King's back, sharing his findings with Nin before anyone else, trying to keep secrets from the King, allowing himself to be affected by Nin, and his remarks in the gemini painting scene!

The face of a man who's realizing that his favorite dog's leash is slipping his control...

Misc. notes

The gemini painting and how the King and Ran talk about the myth of Pollux and Castor are show originals that I find quite fitting with 1) how they chose to focus on the perceived familial relationship between RanNin since Ran has been raised by the King, and 2) how it evokes the title and this episode's recurring themes:

ถึงแม้จะอยู่เคียงคู่ในฐานะกลุ่มดาว /theung maae ja yuu khiiang khuu nai thaa-na gloom daao/ = Even though [they're] side by side as a constellation of stars, [...]

-> เคียงคู่ /khiiang khuu/ = paired next to/beside [each other] -> TNP's native title: ข้ามฟ้าเคียงเธอ /khaam faa khiiang ter/ = Across the Sky, Beside You or Crossing the Sky [to be] by Your Side

-> ฐานะ /thaa-na/ = status, situation, or position in relation to someone or something -> ในฐานะ /nai thaa-na/ = as [...], in the position/capacity of [...]

In the novels, there is a scene in chapter 22 where Ran delivers a new painting to the palace that the King had commissioned him for. Ran first runs into Paytai who's waiting for Ramil so the scene establishes these two being acquainted with each other as they talk about the painting. It depicts the Garden of Eden so they mention human greed vs. human desire, suffering, love. Upon handing the painting over to Thipokbowon, he doesn't show any reaction beyond appreciating Ran's art:

"Tell me, what were you thinking when you painted this?" "I was just reading a book and came across an article about the Garden of Eden, Your Majesty." It was a truth mixed with a bit of a lie. Charan knew that the kind was just making casual conversation as usual, but because his heart wasn't as untouched as it used to be, he felt more awkward than ever. "It's beautiful. Thank you very much. It really brings this room to life." Fortunately, the elderly man didn't seem to question anything. Thipokbowon appeared satisfied with admiring the art in front of him. And that was the best outcome... in Charan's mind. "If it pleases Your Majesty, I'm happy to serve." The king's conversation continued, and Charan responded, keeping everything as normal as possible. But inside, his mind was drifting, much like someone else.

I previously answered an ask (spoilers ahead!!) about in how far the show's gonna deliver on RanNin's service top x power bottom dynamic. At the time, I was like I dunno man, that's not how I perceived novel!RanNin to begin with. But with this adaptation? 👀 I guess we'll see if it'll play out similarly to the novel after all but in this early stage of their relationship it certainly feels a lot more like service top!Ran and power bottom!Nin than the novels ever did to me (but maybe it's just because their later dynamic is far more present in my mind?).

We got three more cameos this episode:

- influencer, CEO and socialite Aon Somrutai as Lady Aon (หญิงออน /ying Aon/) - songwriter Amp Achariya as a singer - influencer Kati Katiya as a youtuber

And two (!) new OSTs, with the ballroom dance one being sung by P'Amp �� I was overjoyed to see her sing another beautiful song for a ZNN series! While we're on the topic of OSTs: here's Daou and New singing "I trust you" together :>

Expectations for EP.5:

introduction to Jay and Calvin, introduction to Mira

Nin confronting Ran about distancing himself and not doing his duty of protecting and looking after Khanin (which was already part of my expectations last week)

no clue otherwise! I'm not entirely sure where we're at plot-wise so I'm mostly expecting the side couples to get more focus or to possibly get more of a Charan-centric episode, considering we'll get to see him as a professor at Morpheus~

⇒ emblems, territories and royal houses of Emmaly ⇒ royal family of Emmaly + other character bios ⇒ relationship chart ⇒ characters and cast of TNP ⇒ all my TNP posts

#the next prince #charankhanin #zeenunew #nunew chawarin #zee pruk #domundi #local woman harps on about tnp #local woman harps on about linguistics #local woman harps on about znn #ข้ามฟ้าเคียงเธอ #the next prince novel #khanin assavadevathin #charan phithakthewa #ava davichmetha #paytai ronnavi #ramil bhuchongpisut #calvin lee #i'm not even sure if they kept his surname for the show??#also apologies to everyone and everything i ignored to work on this post instead but this did take me forever to put together 🙃

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mortalscience · 3 days ago

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criminal minds 18x04 thoughts behind cut (SPOILERS)

GARVEZ CRUMBS: Luke lovingly chiding Penelope for spending too long staring into JJ's eyes and then chuckling at her when he ushered her back. I'LL TAKE THE CRUMBS I'LL TAKE THEM EVERY TIME.

the bits between Penelope and JJ are probably my faaaaavorite parts of this episode!! Penelope hugging her and not wanting to leave her side and having a heart to heart and more hugging and JJ calling Penelope her best friend and Penelope being all "I know" I'M SOBBINGGGGGGGGGG!! I love them so much!!

and to go along with that, a classic JJ and Penelope working together in Pen's lair scene <3 love when they do that!

we got some explanations for stuff in this episode. BAU-gate was shut down, and the reason JJ is back at work is because she found that video and now she's obsessively going after Voit. Which, I'm loving this for JJ's arc. She's angry and grieving and now she will (unhealthily) channel that into taking Voit down. GET HIM, QUEEN. "You're stuck with me you piece of shit." JJ!! I wish for peace for JJ but she is not the type of person to opt for peace.. lbr, none of the BAU are, hahaha.

the unsub of the week had some classic elements that should hopefully appease everyone who wanted the OG CM episode style back? Penelope presenting the case and wheels up and jet scenes and the most CLASSIC element, a standoff with the unsub while they threaten a victim hahaha.

Voit's finally remembering who he is. And it's not going well for him. I think we will see him struggling with accepting his serial killer history and the guilt he will be feeling about it. I am one of the few who likes Voit and his whole storyline so I am enjoying this. I loved the creepy dreams he was having as his brain tried to make sense of the surfacing memories. He knows he has a connection with Rossi, and first it was familiar and fatherly and now it's taken on a sinister tone because he is starting to remember they are Bitter Enemies.

I really like how Voit was acting a little more Voit-like this episode, as his memories start to sleep back in. The childlike attitude is fading away and his smarminess is coming back.

me, a Phoenician, who hates Tucson: yeah I'm not surprised there's a serial killer there. lmaooo.

yet another page taken from the Luke Alvez Playbook when Tyler moved the phone closer to his mouth to say 'please' while talking to Penelope. It's GOTTA be on purpose.. cause damn. Luke did it better tho. lol.

I was amused at the subtle way they showed how weird it was for Tyler to be out in the field when Penelope was surprised by him calling for info, hahaha.

welcome to the team Tyler, here's your first person to die in your arms that you couldn't save. that's ✨ BAU trauma 101 ✨, more advanced courses to come

loooooved the Emily & Tyler bits, I'm so excited because I wanted more scenes between them. she's taken him under her winggggg, teach him to fly, Emily! I have always felt they had a particular connection. "I've been where you are. Wondering if I'd earned my spot on this team." Oh Emily. <3 And her speech about loss, and being able to live with what you've lost.. crying. ;_; Everyone on the team has lost so much. The cruel sacrifice that they all must make.

Ohhh I loved this episode! Can't wait to see how JJ unravels further in her quest to destroy Voit and the internal battle that Voit goes through over remembering what he is.

#criminal minds #criminal minds evolution

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aesthetictarlos · 1 hour ago

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Congrats Allie!!! 🧡🧡🧡

I chose the prompt: 9 ⧽. tripping, but being caught in the arms of the other

Thank you darling 💖 I hope you enjoy, I'm sorry for any mistakes! @dark-alice-lilith requested the same prompt so this is for you as well 😘

TW: mention of canonical character death

Moving is great but also stressful and tiring. Buck's delighted to move in with Tommy, thrilled to start another chapter of their life together, but he's also exhausted.

For the second time in the span of eight months his belongings are packed in cardboard boxes. All his clothes, books, kitchen utensils ready to be moved from one place to another, ready to join Tommy’s and find a new, hopefully permanent, home.

When he moved out of the loft, things were different. He was helping a friend, trying to leave behind a place that had never really felt his. A lot was going on at that time and changing sounded good, like a new beginning; then everything went downhill and his new place felt suffocating, haunted by Eddie’s ghost and the remnants of a friendship that didn’t feel good anymore. Bobby died and Buck was the shell of the man he used to be, tearing apart at the seams, struggling to find his footing in a life without his Captain and father figure.

Tommy has been his anchor in the storm, slowly but steadily guiding him back to the shore, back under the sunlight. They drifted close again and after they got back together, Buck's place felt more homey, less intimidating. Tommy's presence made it feel a home, not just a house.

Deciding to move in together in Tommy's house felt natural and neither of them were scared anymore.

Tommy helped Buck packing, blessing him with the sight of straining, bulging muscles and sweaty skin and playful smirks. It took them a while but they're done now and in a few hours they'll officially be living together.

Buck closes the last of his boxes with packing tape, uses a sharpie to scribble kitchen on the side and takes in the final result, glancing around the house, his eyes dancing over the boxes and duffel bags they spent a week packing.

“Hey, babe,” Tommy calls from the living room, dragging him back to the present. “It looks like everything’s ready.”

“Hi, honey,” he says softly, mesmerised by the glint in Tommy's eyes. He's pretty sure the same lovestruck, excited expression is reflected on his own face. “Yeah, I'm done. Everything’s– fuck.” His left foot catches onto one of the boxes and he trips, like the distracted, idiot in love he is, already bracing himself for the fall.

A fall that never comes because Tommy's right there, catching him into his arms, like a prince charming or a knight in shining armour. It's a silly thought but it's pretty accurate, he can always trust Tommy to be there for him.

“Easy, Evan,” Tommy teases affectionately, holding him up and tugging him close. “We need to christen our new place, we don't want you hurt.”

Buck laughs, blushing. “Babe, we already christened your place a lot of times in the past months.”

“Yeah but it's not mine anymore now, it's ours.”

Buck smiles softly and brushes their noses together. “Our home.”

“Our home, baby.”

#bucktommy #tommy kinard #evan buckley #tevan #kinley #buck and tommy #my fic #my writing #allie writes #bucktommy ficlet

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chromecore · 22 hours ago

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hello friends! i’ve been tagged in a couple things the past few weeks so i wanted to finally get to them uwu

i was first tagged by by @elmknight and @clockworkvenus a little while ago to share the origins of my username. to be honest it’s not the most exciting story but i started yapping and i definitely did a lot more than answer the question but here we are! and then @glassrunner tagged me to fill out this get to know me tag so that will be under the cut as well!

thank you guys for tagging me i love doing these tag games hehe <3

get to know your mutuals and tag 6!

Favorite color: oh i love them all but pink and blue

Last song: i’m gonna assume this means listened to? plan b by megan the stallion u_u

Currently reading: piñata by leopoldo gout. it’s a great read i just have horrible time management skills and am trying to repair my tiktok attention span so it’s taking a while to finish

Currently watching: ted lasso with my partner and pen15 by my lonesome

Currently craving: “whatever life feels like when I'm not burned out lol” <- prev answer honestly a mood but i could also go for some tofu stew

Coffee or tea: matcha when i can afford it but rn coffee because i can’t afford matcha u_u

Last song I sang out loud: mmmm naked in manhattan by chappel roan???

Favorite chip flavor: …takis but don’t judge me i get the trader joe’s ver with no red dye and a mild amount of spice because i’m at the age where my stomach fucking gives out whenever i eat actual takis

Last book I opened: same as my currently reading

Earbuds vs. headphones vs. nothing: i do enjoy headphones a bit more than earbuds but my curly hair can get flattened weird by them sometimes so i guess i use headphones when i’m home and my earbuds when i’m out lol

Last place I went to other than home: my partner’s house

A color that looks good on me: i’ve been struggling a bit with my body image lately so i’ve only really been wearing black lol but i feel like darker colors in general look best on me regardless

Last trailer I saw: mmm i honestly don’t have a clue i want to say the last trailer i watched that kept my full attention was final destination bloodlines lol i know it’s been out for a week or so but i’m not seeing it until this saturday with my siblings *-* honestly pumped

origins of chromecore

i had played cyberpunk for the first time honestly maybe a year or two ago. it was gifted to me by my sibling on the ps4 (I KNOW…) and then on the ps5 after i bought my partner one. first time i played on my pc was march or april i think. i believe i was about halfway through a playthrough with the v that i would later develop into vivienne <333 and i realized in the back of my mind randomly that in all this time i’ve been playing and falling in love with these characters i’d never once checked ao3 for fic. this was my first mistake /j time getting exposed to other people’s ocs and the community and but i was just instantly reminded of my time on deviantart as a kid making silly ocs for the anime i watched with my friends… it made me so nostalgic! not to be dramatic but like tangent time maybe it’s the abusive relationship i was in a while ago but i got all the life and joy and whimsy sucked out of me by this leach of a manchild and i felt like all my interests were childish and stupid. i didn’t do anything but work and take care of an apt for almost two years. i know now that he’s a narcissistic prick that couldn’t handle that i was better than him at everything but he did a lot of damage to my mental health regardless so. it took me a while to unlearn those things. anyways back to the point i was hit in the nostalgia reminiscing but here were all these people still doing what they loved regardless of where they were in their life and i was just like in awe. like wow… i wanna be apart of this…

so ANYWAYS skip forward a little i keep playing my game, but i spent most of my time dicking around in photomode and debating whether or not i wanted to try and return to fandom life. eventually i came across @luvwich and her wonderful novel of a fic (read. it. even if you don’t know anything about cyberpunk she has such a way with words i genuinely am so in love with this fic that i don’t want it to end and have yet to read the last few chapters. i’m insane) and i also came across mike in game for the first time around the same time and it was a wrap. he was kind of the final piece of the puzzle. the final nail on the coffin of my free time if you will. i don’t know i’d managed to go however many playthroughs without meeting mike but i suppose i never realized how many gigs reggie offers you lol but anyways i was in love with his loser ass

i made an ao3 account just to let luvwich know her fic changed my life and after doing some brainstorming and studying of other people’s cyberpunk usns i managed to snag chrome_hearts on ao3 which i thought was such a cool usn. i tried every variation i could on tumblr but apparently it’s a clothing brand or something lol so i eventually settled for chromecore. i do think it has a better ring to it though. the alliteration rolls off the tongue a bit nicer. i was hesitant to start posting but i’m so glad i did because i’ve met sooo many wonderful people and made so many new friends and here we are! my old tv fandom/kpop blog turned video game/personal blog owo

i’ll tag (no pressure of course) @soju-poppi @me-ns @angelsofcode @sixthmagic @weisshapt to do both or just one if you’ve already been tagged or have a preference!! love to get to know some of my newer moots!! annnd @luvwich @elmknight and @clockworkvenus to do the get to know ur mutuals game since i know you guys already did the other one <3 if you waaaant have fun

#tag games #serena.txt #yap city over here

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fortes-fortuna-iogurtum · 1 month ago

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turns out poetry and fiction aren't that great when you can't feel any connection with them 90% of the time

#pray for me please #it's finals week and i'm really struggling #I'm so tired and I don't know how to deal with all the things running around in my head that are bent on distracting me from the work I #*need* to do #and my friends are lovely and supportive but they have their own work and trials too #and I'm struggling at the moment #I don't need any more bible verses I think I actually just need to be angry enough to finish this stupid assignment #and then every other stupid assignment that has to be done before the end of the week #but i've been struggling to feel anything much less anger for a while #just too tired and overwhelmed and too used to hiding my emotions from everyone. it's exhausting but I'm fairly good at it.#so again -- prayer please. that i'll be able to get through all of this and not give up #and then I'll deal with all the things I need to deal with later on when there is time and space to do so #(goodness knows there won't be much time and space at home but there will at least not be any class work so that will be nice)#(i'm so tired of feeling angry!! but it turns out that underneath everything else there's a whole lotta anger still!!! and smothering it #down doesn't seem to be helping anything!! aaahggrgrgghshdghdgs)#(and unfortunately all the work I've been doing to give up my propensity towards control seems to have just left me feeling #apathetic and pointless. there has to be a line between obsessively controlling every aspect of your life you can manage #and just giving up and not being able to see the point in anything anymore. right????)

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lynnetendo · 2 months ago

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TRIED DRAWING SIFFRIN FOR THE FIRST TIME!!! FINDING MY STYLE FOR FUTURE ISAT FANART BLAH BLAH!!! NEED TO PRACTISE DRAWING SIF. SIF IS INEVITABLE

#isat #in stars and time #siffrin #artsy lynne things #BRUH this is a binary/pixel-y artwork but it just smoothes out when viewed from afar... Sad #i really wanted to include one where sif is crying... sorry sif...#70% of the time i was like “hmm this sif looks wrong” and the fix was to make their hat bigger unironically #i still dont think ive made the hats big enough tbh #it's so hard to fuse my artstyle with insertdisc5's artstyle... but i know i'm not the only one...#i'm glad ISAT is monochrome. i really struggle with color comprehension so this just means i can pump out more ISAT fanart theoretically...#...without it sticking out too much #or the opposite #without my hypothetical future fanart getting drowned out by mere color competition #i finally started ISAT after playing SASASA;AP 3 years ago... and promptly bingeplayed it within like a week #Not surprising. Just like it's not surprising that I can't stop thinking about ISAT... and Sif...#i wanna do an ISAT animation... ...big words for someone who has little animation experience and like. 0 proper programs for it either #WE BALL!!!!!!!!!!#congratulations ISAT for being the first fanart i draw and finish and post in. months? a year?#ISAT gives you 3 traumas and heals 5 #PS: i have no idea why but i one-layer'd this whole thing? which seems unspectacular but #it was really bothersome when doing the shading bits or details #but at that point i was too committed to WE BALL so i just kept it this way throughout

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advluv4life · 3 months ago

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I don't want to brag but I've gone from 10 words to 416 and after the past year of a drought I want to express that I am proud of myself. I will get these last two chapters out. I will do it.

#Lily #fanfiction #bsd #bungou stray dogs #atsushi nakajima #bsd atsushi #bsd dazai #dazai osamu #I just reread it because I wanted to figure out what my holdup was #and I think I figured it out #and as I was reading it I was thinking about the transitions I was struggling with #so I'm hoping to finish this story #within the next 2 months #that is a tentative timeline #it's currently spring break #but I have a Japanese essay to write #and preparation for my final product in my other class #I should be working on my Japanese essay right now #but I was desperate to get some words down for Lily #so maybe one chapter could get posted by the end of the week and then I might have to wait a few more months until classes are out #to get the last one written #but nothing is changed of what I want to do in the last two chapters of the story #it's still the same #it's just getting it down I'm struggling with #I think it was the transitions and the point of views and how I wanted to describe it #as I was rereading I was making a plan of action on how to approach it #I have to say though I do like the story #I'm surprised I wrote that I actually really like it

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deoidesign · 1 year ago

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#ok finally making a post about meds #I've not ever tried taking medication before. I was sorta raised with that classic 'dont rely on meds you have to learn to manage without'#I mean I was also raised with the idea that therapy is stupid unless you have 'real' trauma. and also like idk.#can't stay home from school unless your temp is over 100 or you're throwing up. etc. very suck it up mindset #so I was just really nervous to start. also of course worried about losing myself or whatever I know that's a silly fear but #it's also a common fear for a reason!!! anyways #so I finally was like 'I need to do something' when I realized I was so anxious I couldnt even get myself to go outside alone #like I just don't want to do ANYTHING alone to a detrimental effect. and it was butting into my ability to do my work...#for various reasons. but then ALSO adhd has been a constant issue with my work as well!#it is SO hard to write and draw on a weekly pace like I am without being able to focus #my whole life I've had these terrible nightmares constantly and I've always woken up constantly in the night #sleep has always been terrible so I've always dreaded going to bed.. ESPECIALLy because it didnt even make me less tired #it was more something that I just did because I had to.#but going to bed was always terrible. there have been times I was too scared to go to sleep for weeks on end...#I've been mitigating this for years of course. and recently I've been taking melatonin which has been helping too.#but I've also always struggled to get up. because I've always been EXTREMELY exhausted #but also anxious of what the day might bring... idk.#anyways it has all hit a point that I was like okay. I am doing as many coping mechanisms as I can. the psych said they were good too #but... it just has never been enough. it's never been enough to make me not tired it's never been enough to make me not scared #so I finally talked to the doc about it. and she was like youve def got smth wrong basically. which yah I know.. but yknow #anyways so I started taking wellbutrin. and I am so frustrated now. because it's WORKING #that constant looming sense of dread is gone. I'm excited to get up. I'm excited to go to bed BECAUSE I'm excited to get up #I feel like for years I've been holding on to the idea that I have to get up because I have to put something good out into the world #and I've been clinging to knowing that if nothing else. I am able to help other people feel better.#but now for the first time in my life I'm like. free of it. I didnt even know it was possible... and I'm so sad how much I've lost out on #and so frustrated how my whole life I've been told to put up with it and push through it. and treated like a failure for it being too much.#and just. It has only been 2 weeks. but the lack of anxiety is SO noticeable I'm so...#I'll never miss it. the adhd is still pretty present but like whatever. I can manage that better.#and I'm just crying because of all this combined.#I just. I hope I get to finally be the best I can be now. for myself but also for you guys!

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blessedcactus · 12 days ago

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Me remembering I also have to do a character animation assignment oh jeezuz...

#nimo's sheeko sheeko time #Maybe I can work on that now tho since my partner finally got back to me #she's a fellow disabled person and we have been STRUGGLING JDNJDNFD #we do have a 3 day extension for accoms so it's whatever I say laughing nervously #animation will be done this week tho!!! LAST MODULE NEXT MONDAY WOOOOO #finally I will understand storyboardng #kind of nuts I'm doing this for digital marketing tho #like....they really be doing that #I remember asking in class during animation and my mentor seemed a little confused #like girl you doing that???#like I dunno let me google their salary #sorry 60K feels too low for all of that huh #anyway it's fine I wanna do UX/UI #PRAYING I GET A GOOD ONE SINCE YOU CAN MAKE 90K #I have big dreams on my frail shoulders

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prismatoxic · 2 months ago

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a food i haven't been able to have in forever is now available to me again, and i ate it, and it's so good. it's so fucking good. oh my god i'm going to be able to actually eat food. this is awesome

#i've had like 0 comfort foods to fall back on for weeks/months and have been really struggling #finally... something i'm eager to eat...#tox.txt

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biillys · 3 months ago

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was rereading a doc i had (titled christmas!!!!!!!!!) of neil inviting billy back home for christmas after not speaking with him for years cos billy told him he was fucking a dude in a going steady kinda way, but then neil had some health scares (cancer) and susan missed the kids, so next thing u know, neil's begrudgingly on the phone, gritting out a 'we're having christmas day here. if u care. sure. ur fag boyfriend can come too.' and then was like. well what happens BEFORE all that.

and for some reason my brain decided it was gonna be billysteeve but make it shitty. anyway.

steve cheating on billy becos i can. and i love to give billy attention in the form of everyone else.

anyway. warning for cheating and steve//nancy ??? is that a warning?

billy hears them before he sees them, but still can’t stop himself from walking up the stairs and pushing their bedroom door open anyway.

meets the sight of nancy fucking wheeler’s bare back sitting upright on his bed, steve's voice carrying from somewhere underneath her, and turns around and walks straight back out, slamming every single door he touches behind him.

loses himself at the bar two blocks over before somehow carol’s manhandling him into an uber, her getting in after him, then loses the rest of the night to hers and tommy’s couch, only vaguely aware of where he is.

he wakes up to a kick to the thigh, then a jab to the ribs.

grabbing the pillow from under his head, he shoves it on top and groans.

“wake up, asshole. it’s 2pm.”

“fuck you,” he mumbles, gripping the pillow tight when carol tries to pull it away.

“fuck you too for waking me up at 1:36am and making me get out of bed. you know how much work your drunk ass is?” carol bitches, resorting to sitting in him and tugging at his hair, before turning gentle, running her fingers through it instead.

billy relaxes into her touch for a moment before her words catch up with him and he remembers what happened the night before, and after his mind flashes him an image of nancy wheeler riding his fiancé’s dick, he shoves himself up and stumbles to the bathroom.

finds himself on his knees and spewing into the toilet bowl, fighting for his fucking life just to get a breath.

“you wanna talk about it?” carol asks from the doorway, leaning against the frame.

billy spits in the toilet bowl. “not fucking really.”

“steve called,” she says airily, smirking at him when he snaps his head up, only to groan from the way it makes his stomach spin.

billy glares at her, his insides slowly settling.

out of everyone, carol’s probably the one who doesn’t care for steve’s shit the most. billy wishes she could teach him how to do it.

wishes he could tell her.

“yeah?” he croaks, pushing himself up to standing so he can brush his teeth. “what’d he want?”

“just wanted to see where you were,” she replies casually, all the power in her fucking hands.

billy brushes his teeth, spits, gargles some fresh water, then spits again, before turning around to face her, his breath squeaky clean. “and what’d you tell him?”

carol shrugs. “said i hadn’t heard from you.”

billy feels his inner growing panic start to recede. at least steve won’t look for him here.

“tommy texted though, said steve turned up at eddie’s place looking for you.”

she’s watching him closely, looking for any give. any weakness. she’s smart like that.

billy usually loves it about her. right now, though, she can fuck right off.

“yeah, well,” he sighs, done with this entire mess, “he can keep looking.”

she smirks at him again before reaching a hand out and tugging him over, pulling him out of the bathroom. “c’mon, i stocked up on alcohol on sunday. whatever happened, let’s get wasted.”

billy stays at carol’s and tommy’s for two more nights.

tommy comes home the second day, looking at them both on the couch, completely faded and fucked up; billy three sheets to the wind, carol at least slightly steadier than him on her feet; with worry written all over his face, but he’s a good sport about it and instead of asking questions, he picks up a joint and joins in, lacing his fingers with carol’s when he comes over to sit beside her.

by the time billy makes it home three days later, he’s mostly got his shit in check.

he makes it through the front door, having spotted steve's car in the driveway, and prepares himself for whatever’s about to happen.

gets through the kitchen next, then past the living room, walks up the stairs again, and braces himself.

he finds steve sitting on their bed, the sheets and pillows all done up and neat, like he went to the effort to wash it and make it, but billy’s not actually that stupid or naive, and steve’s never been able to work their stupid fucking washing machine, no matter how many times billy’s told him which dials to turn and what buttons to press. guesses he’s just covering up the evidence.

billy doesn’t say anything.

steve seems speechless.

billy waits. wants to see where he takes this.

if he’s even gonna apologise or beg for forgiveness.

if he’s gonna end it.

“listen…” steve starts, and just that one word alone has reality hitting billy like a fist to the face.

whatever he hoped would come of this, if it ever came to a head–whatever fucking unrealistic dreams he had of steve tripping over himself to patch things up, running back to him–disappear before his eyes, and he realises steve’s never gonna give a shit about him enough to care.

billy’s never gonna be worth it.

he looks at him sitting on the bed, looking like he’s barely slept, except he knows it’s not guilt that’s kept him awake but instead his fucking decade long insomnia, childhood and teenagehood trauma that billy has no hope of fixing taking it's toll, and he can see clearly how this is gonna play out.

there’s gonna be no i’m sorry’s, no i’ll do better’s; nothing’s gonna fucking change.

steve’s just gonna excuse his shit life choices, like he always does, and billy’s either gonna accept it and live with it, or he’s gonna be alone, and everyone in the entire goddamn world is gonna know he can’t keep someone interested. that he’s not worth loving.

“it was just…a one time thing,” steve bullshits, looking at him the same way he always looks at him. like he’s a million miles away. “and i promise, it won’t happen again.”

billy swallows. feels like he’s just swallowed acid and his insides are swimming with it.

“so this only happened the once?” billy checks, his voice flat. he already knows the answer. he’s seen the text messages. has read the business trip itineraries.

“yeah,” steve promises–lies–eyes so fucking big and brown.

billy used to love them.

“yeah, it was only one time, billy. i swear.”

billy lets the few feelings he had left go numb. finds it in his muscle memory to nod his head then turns around and walks straight back out.

“i need to sort my head out. gonna crash somewhere for a few days.”

steve catches up to him quickly, grabbing him by the arm.

billy flinches.

steve barely notices.

“you’re coming back, right?” he asks, and this is the most emotion billy’s seen from him in months. since that first year they dated, back in high school, probably. he’s spent just over three years of his life with him and can’t remember the last time steve actually looked at him. “i have a business trip on friday, so you’re gonna like, come back and feed the cat, right?”

billy’s gonna choke. “you have a business trip on friday?”

steve looks cagey. “well, yeah? i still have to work, billy.”

billy’s pretty sure he’s gonna punch something. he clenches his hands into fists instead, letting his nails dig in until he fucking bleeds.

“yeah, steve,” he says, voice as even as he can get it. ”i’m coming back. how about–you leave friday 2pm, and i’ll come back friday 2:05pm, and i’ll feed your damn cat.”

steve nods at him, looking relieved, like the cat he convinced billy into letting him get was his biggest concern about today, and not their entire fucking relationship.

steve comes back on a tuesday.

“how was your trip?” billy asks, leaning against the kitchen counter, watching steve’s every move.

steve shrugs, leaning down to stroke his cat’s back. “fine.”

billy clenches his jaw. nods to himself and pushes himself off the counter, making his way out the back to lounge on one of the backyard chairs, cracking open a beer.

thinks about walking out.

stays.

maybe his dad was right, all those times he blamed him for everything in their life going wrong. for his mom leaving. for fucking everything up.

billy knows, now.

he takes a sip of his beer and thinks, this is as good as it’s ever gonna get.

they’ve been together for 3 years and 4 months when eddie and tommy corner him in an alleyway before a show, looking at him with guilt written all over their faces.

“we need to talk to you, man,” tommy says quietly, looking around and making sure they’re alone.

eddie’s face looks serious. billy feels his stomach drop.

whatever they’ve got to say, billy doesn’t want to hear it. he’s hanging on by a fucking thread these days as it is.

“listen, man,” eddie steps in close, resting a hand on his shoulder, and billy can’t handle that right now.

he shrugs him off.

eddie takes it in his stride and lets his hand drop back to his side, but still stays standing where he is, bowing his head in close.

billy doesn't know what they've got to say, but can feel it like a lead weight in his stomach already. whatever it is, it’s gonna be fucked, and billy straight up can't handle that right now.

he thinks about pushing past them and walking away but knows it won’t work. knows he’s not getting out of this little heart-to-heart, no matter what move he pulls.

raises his stare to meet them both head on and straightens out his shoulders.

waits for them to spit out whatever it is that they’ve got to say and get it over with.

“it’s about steve,” tommy steps in, looking between them both, hesitating when he looks at him.

shakily pulling out a lighter and a cigarette, billy lights up, shoving the stick in his mouth and taking a deep inhale. “what about steve?” he says, cigarette dangling from his lips.

doesn't think about the million and one different things it could be from that sentence alone, ‘cause if he does, he knows whatever grip he’s got on his life right now will shatter.

eddie takes a deep breath, and billy clocks the way his face is full of regret.

“he’s cheating on you, man,” he says quietly.

billy’s ears start ringing. feels his fingertips and toes go numb, his blood run cold.

no one was meant to know.

he was meant to live in denial and settle for whatever steve could be bothered to give him, and no one was meant to fucking know that he wasn’t enough.

“what?” he says back numbly, his voice flat.

can’t show emotion, ‘cause if he does, he’ll break.

“he’s seeing nancy,” tommy says, looking like he regrets every word. “we don’t know how long for, but we caught them together when we played that show in new york last week.”

“seriously, man, we just found out, and we fucking flipped on him, but he’s like, trying to fucking deny it, which–how. we literally caught them fucking–” eddie word vomits, looking at him like he’s waiting for him to fly off the handle.

billy can’t react. can feel the fragile hold he’s had on every single part of his life slowly start to unravel, like someone's pulled the string and let the ball of yarn roll along the floor, and knows he’s got minutes at best to pull himself together. to save face.

doesn’t know how to live in denial, though, when the people closest to him are trying to shove the truth in his face.

his mind races in a million different directions as he tries to figure out how to play this. how to make it out the other side unscathed, without ripping out his heart and leaving himself a bloody open mess.

can’t find a single path that doesn’t lead in that direction, or a variation of.

he takes another inhale of nicotine then exhales it out, preparing himself for what comes next.

they’re gonna know.

everyone’s gonna know.

billy’s nothing worth staying for. there’ll always be someone better, someone worth risking it all for, even if for just a weekend, and it’ll never be him.

“you okay, man?” tommy checks, taking a step forward, seeming to realise he’s seconds away from falling apart.

billy sniffs and swipes at his nose, gathering every last bit of strength he can muster and pulls himself together. “fine,” he clips back, voice tight.

“you’re uh–you’re taking this surprisingly well,” eddie points out, and when billy looks at him, he sees the wheels turning in his head, then watches it click into place.

eddie stares at him, his mouth dropped open slightly. “you knew.��

“it’s fine,” he says back automatically, ‘cause that’s what he’s been telling himself for months. for over a year. for almost two.

it’s fucking fine.

“it’s not fucking fine, it’s fucking bullshit,” tommy cuts in, and he sounds pissed.

billy doesn’t know what to make of it. tommy and steve have been best friends since diapers, long before he came on the scene, and if you don’t count their little high school fallout, they’ve been going strong for almost twenty years.

billy can’t compete with that.

“how in the world is it fine?” eddie adds as he gives him an disbelieving look, searching his face like he’s waiting for the punchline.

billy closes his eyes. knows in their own twisted way, they're doing this because they care, but it doesn't feel like fucking care right now. it feels like a fucking knife.

opening his eyes again and blinking away the tears, he thinks about how steve and eddie were friends first. how, technically, steve was the one who introduced them, both the guys having teamed up for some random shit billy doesn’t even remember just before he rolled into town, and when he sucked up his pride and went to make peace with steve after the shitshow that was his first week in hawkins, then asked where the best place to get green was around here, steve offered to lead the way, and less than 15 minutes later they were pulling up in front of munson’s trailer, and billy’s never really looked back.

realises only now how fucked it is that the only friends he’s made were actually steve’s first, and at the end of the day, he’s gonna lose them in the break up.

billy’s been a part of their lives for barely 5 years. he’s got nothing on a lifetime of memories. definitely hasn’t earnt their loyalty.

his chest squeezes painfully and he struggles to take in a breath as he looks out in front of him and forces himself to face facts.

this might be one of the last times he sees them.

the bands probably over, billy’s definitely kicked out, and they're never gonna stay up for 34 hours straight because they want to finish recording just one more song again.

when he thinks about it, he probably won’t even miss steve that much when he leaves, but he doesn’t know how he’s gonna cope when he loses the guys.

the band.

the girls.

shudders out a breath and tries not to fucking break down.

chrissy; who runs her hands through his hair whenever he lays his head on her lap, always just as drunk as he is and so goddamn happy to see him, and carol; who stays up ‘til 7am drinking with him and watching real housewives and fucking love island, and is the first person to call whenever billy sends out an sos.

shit, he’s gonna fucking cry.

he clenches his jaw and refuses to make eye contact. “show’s gonna start soon, we should get inside.”

“billy, steve’s fucking his ex,” eddie spells out, sounding pissed.

billy wishes he didn’t flinch.

tommy pushes himself front and center then, standing in front of eddie and getting right up in billy’s space.

resting his hands on billy’s shoulders, he forces eye contact.

“how long?” he asks quietly.

billy tries to look anywhere but straight ahead. feels his eyes watering, the tears he blinked away earlier coming back to the surface. can feel the weight of tommy’s hands on his shoulders grounding him, keeping him tethered.

“bill’s, man. how long?” eddie repeats, and billy’s gotta give him credit. he sounds calmer. gentler.

he sucks in a deep breath before throwing his cigarette on the ground, wishing he didn’t need to be handled gently right now as he stomps it out.

this is exactly why he wasn’t enough for steve.

“how long with nancy?” billy pushes past the lump in his throat, his voice catching and wishing the ground would swallow him whole, “or how long with all the other girls?”

“how many girls was he fucking?” eddie yells, giving up on being calm.

tommy elbows him but says nothing, giving billy space to talk.

billy can’t, so he shrugs. doesn’t know what’s more embarrassing now that he’s been interrogated about it.

steve cheating, or him letting it happen.

“dude, what the fuck?” tommy asks after a moment, looking at him in disbelief.

the judgement gets too heavy to bear and he feels himself cracking. he looks at their faces, the way they’re waiting patiently for some sort of explanation, like this is all billy’s life dream and he’s completely on track for his 10 year plan, and not stuck on a ride spinning out of control, no one in the driver's seat to guide the way, and feels whatever grip he’s got just–slip.

he can’t take it anymore. can feel his anxiety and humiliation turning to anger, ‘cause it’s the safest place to hide.

“what?” he growls, wiping at his eyes and stepping forward, making himself tall–big–just like neil taught him. “you think i can do better? you think i can fucking ask for more?”

“better than steve–” ”–yes!” they yell simultaneously, eddie sounding just as mad, tommy sounding exasperated.

“jesus, then you’re stupider than me!” billy yells back, throwing his arms out wide. he hopes to god no one comes out anytime soon and witnesses this, ‘cause this is already too much to handle. “yeah, steve cheating fucking sucks, but hey! at least he comes home to me! at least he puts up with my shit. at least he still agreed to marry me!”

“dude, that’s like–” tommy tries, but he doesn’t want to hear it.

“and i know i’m a lot, okay? i know i’m hard to fucking deal with,” he lists, counting off in his fingers, “so, if the best i’m ever gonna get is every other weekend and the occasional christmas, then so be it!”

he steps back, suddenly exhausted. hears the way his voice cracks and hates himself.

jesus, he’d fucking leave him, too.

“what–you want me to ask someone to love me for fucking life? you think there’s a single person in the entire goddamn world who could commit to me, and only me, and never stray?” he’s begs, aiming for mean, but he hears how he misses the mark by a mile and just sounds desperate. looks at the guys he’s called his best friends for years now and pathetically wishes they'd answer him, that they’d tell him. that they’d be honest and give him what he needs to hear.

needs somebody, just one person, to tell him he’s worth something.

he pushes that need down deep and lets his voice give out, feeling fucking ruined. “don’t be delusional.”

they stare at him silently for a beat, then another, before eddie breaks the peace.

“jesus, man. what the fuck’s steve done to you?” he asks quietly, and when billy meets his eyes, he’s not mad anymore, instead is just looking at him like he cares.

uhhh and then heather comes back in the picture after drifting away, living her best college life, except it wasn't really her best college life, and that dick boyfriend that billy and carol told her to dump actually turned out to be a real dick, but his brother was worse, and suddenly she's picking up the phone and calling billy, asking if she can hide out at his for the night, and if he can pick her up from hospital, and he's barely been in georgia for a month when he gets the call, so he makes the drive back to california then drives them both back, and they send a selfie to the group chat like 'hoes in georiga do it better' and suddenly carol and chrissy are turning up on his door step like what the fuck? heathers back? after not returning our calls for months? years? let me the fuck in?

and then theyre getting spectacularly drunk and recounting their worst hits, and billy's fessing up his Feelings about everything that went down with steve, trying to be Nice about it cos he's aware who he's in a room with, and carol's like 'you know we chose you, right? like you know you won us in the divorce?' and billy's like. too drunk to process that elequantly, and is like. well obviously you're saying that to make me feel better but i Know steve's always gonna be more important to you. and carol and chrissy are like. we may have known him longer, but we love you better.

carol: who offered to be designated driver to my planned parenthood appointment when we were seventeen and me and tommy were scared shitless of what was gonna happen if we didn't make it. who shoved four weeks worth of pay in my hand as they pushed me out the car door. not fucking steve.

chrissy: you squared up with my dad the day i got kicked out of home while eddie helped me pack and carol caused bodily harm to my mom. you sat with me for every meal i ever ate all through my last year of school, no matter how long i took to eat it.

heather: i never fucking liked him. thank fuck he's out of your life. me and max gonna be poppin the biggest bottles when we see each other next.

tommy and eddie when they find out: bro you literally made this band. if it weren't for you, we'd still hate each other. you changed our lives, bro.

and lots of other stuff but. billy having FRIENDS that love him dearly and he loves dearly back and living his best life.

then like. 4 years later:

billy pulls the phone away from his ear to stare at it in shock before lifting it back up. “i’m sorry–what?”

neil clears his throat, and billy’s pretty sure there’s a gun pointed at his head. there's no fuckin' way his dad just invited him and daryl home for christmas.

“i said–he can come, too,” neil says after another minute of silence. he sounds like he’s talking through clenched teeth.

holy fuck.

so he didn't hear him wrong. he’s officially invited back home, after three years of radio silence. neil didn't even reply to the birthday text he sent him that first year, and now he’s being invited to christmas? daryl, too? something’s fucked.

“you dying?” he blurts out, ‘cause that's probably the only realistic option.

his dad sighs, sounding burdened. tired. billy feels his heart start to race.

“no, son,” neil responds, letting the silence hang.

“okay, then. what?” he presses, ‘cause shit’s not making sense. why now? why’s he been a homophobic piece of shit his entire life only to suddenly now decide to not care?

“me and susie just want our kids home for christmas,” neil explains.

billy’s not buying it.

billy eventually tells his dad he’ll get back to him, he’s just gotta discuss holiday plans with his partner first, and neil replies that him and sue would really like them to join them.

billy feels like he’s talking to a stranger.

says he’ll text when he knows what the plan is.

texts max to see if she's got any similar phone calls recently, then tries to forget about it.

gets home from work that afternoon and he attempts to start dinner, but doesn't take long to get distracted and burn it, deciding to give up halfway through.

daryl comes home just as he's throwing the towel in, lydia in tow, and finds him sitting on the kitchen counter eating chocolate from the packet, food burnt on the stove.

“my turn to cook,” billy states, offering lydia some chocolate, eyes focused on daryl. “so, takeaway?”

daryl eyes the mess on the stove and sink and sighs, grabbing the pamphlets from the top drawer.

“don’t care, you’s pick,” he hands them over to lydia, lydia jumping on the counter beside billy. billy looks at their choices over her shoulder before his eyes catch on daryl starting to walk away. “ring and order, i’mma go shower.”

billy nods, focusing back on the task at hand, pushing all thoughts of his dad and christmas out of mind.

lydia holds up the thai food pamphlet.

“fuck yeah,” billy says, picking his phone up from the bench.

while he calls and orders, lydia and daryl switch. her in the shower, and daryl coming out to lean against the kitchen bench.

“you good?” he asks, watching billy try and scrub the pan he burnt.

“what are we doing this christmas?” billy replies, dropping the pan back in the sink and turning to him, completely changing the subject.

daryl shrugs. it’s november, he’s barely thought about christmas beyond trying to figure out what to get lydia.

“usual, i guess,” he answers, picking up a tea towel and wiping the few dishes billy washed before he got stuck on the pan. “might go to rick’s for lunch, might go there boxing day instead, or the greenes. might just hang out here.”

“so, nothing’s planned,” billy summarises, picking the pan back up. he scrubs a bit before giving up again, putting more hot water in the sink before turning to him. “my dad called.”

daryl snorts. him and billy haven't sat down and painted detailed pictures of their childhoods, but they've shared the broad strokes, and he’s not stupid, or an idiot. has enough experience in the shitty childhood department to fill in the blanks.

neil wasn't good people.

will wasn't a saint either, but something about the way billy talked about neil, especially about the years after he moved out, and the way neil treated him that one time daryl met him, made him more slimy–more manipulative–in his opinion.

at least will never pretended with him. he always had his own principles and morals, and he stuck with them. daryl always knew where he stood.

neil, on the other hand, seemed like all his principles and morals depended on public perception, and could change at the drop of the hat. was a wishy-washy bastard, always too busy caring about everyone else's opinion rather than his own, which meant if billy was never good enough to get every single person's approval, he never got neil's.

daryl hates him.

“yeah?” he says, throwing the tea towel down on the bench. “what’d he want?”

billy chews his cheek.

“invited me home for christmas,” he admits, then corrects, “us. he invited us home for christmas.”

daryl raises an eyebrow at him.

“he invited us to fuckin’ hawkins?”

billy shrugs this time, testing out the pan again before giving up and letting it soak. “yep.”

daryl stays silent, letting billy get his head straight. the only reason he would be bringing it up is if he had something to say about it.

“asked him if he was dying, he said him and susan just wanted to see their kids for christmas,” he explains, looking at him out of the corner of his eye like he’s too scared to turn to face him properly, but still wants to see his face. daryl gets it.

“what’chu wanna do?” he asks after another few minutes of silence.

billy shrugs.

“going there would be stupid,” he finally says, turning to him properly. “it’d be awkward and rough and it’d be a shit christmas. he’d probably hate you, he definitely hates me, fuck knows lydia doesn't need to be subjected to him, and max probably won't even be there.”

“so we don’t go,” daryl says, then waits.

billy cracks less than a minute later. “but why did he call? why’d he invite us? why now, when for the past few years, i’ve been as good as dead to him?”

daryl let's him talk it out. knows he’s not asking him anyway.

“surely he must be dying, right? like, cancer or some shit? there's no way he woke up this morning like hey, let’s reach out to my greatest failure and make amends–”

“you ain’t a failure,” he cuts him off.

“no, i’m just his failure,” billy rolls his eyes before rubbing a hand down his face.

daryl knocks his arm into his, nudging him with his shoulder. billy grips the counter behind him tighter.

“i don't even know why i care so fucking much,” he whispers, so fucking confused his head hurts. “if he’s dying, then, like. so what. who gives a shit, right?”

“ain’t that simple,” daryl says back, and billy slides his hand over until their pinkies overlap. daryl knocks his elbow into his again. “it’s fucked up, what parents do to their kids. even more fucked up how we still treat them like parents. expect them to love us, ‘cause we fuckin’ blindly love them.”

billy blinks at him and daryl realises his eyes are wet.

“ain’t blindly,” billy states, voice firm.

daryl nods. “that's why it’s fucked up.”

and then the idea of them going home for christmas and introducing his boyfriend and kid to neil, finding out about the cancer, and neil being like. it's physically killing me to pretend to be okay with this. and billy being like. cancer's a bitch, huh. bet you never saw this side effect coming, did u, dad? who knew liver cancer said bi rights.

#m #fic thoughts i start in decemeber and have a like 800 words doc for #that now are 15k ........................... billytommyeddie band au my beloved....................#anwyay the idea of steve knocking nancy up #and steve like. struggling with the responsibilty of a whole ass kid #and commitment of being with nancy For Realz #and nancy hating being tied down like that.#like she had Plans. she was gonna go places.#but then everything kind of fell apart #and she was slipping into bed with steve instead of jonathan cos it felt easier #it felt freeing. like she could be herself again. without the weight that jonathan put on her #which wasn't really weight. was more just. he knows her. knows what she likes. what she wants.#but she doesn't love being Known like that. feels it like expectations instead.#so going back to steve. who Doesn't know her like that?#where she can make different decisions and steve won't question them?? Freeing.#but then it keeps happening and then its been months. almost a year.#and then they're getting found out. and then nancys finding out she's knocked up. and she can't get rid of it.#she lost a 5 year long relationship for this. can't just abort it #so she has the kid. but then thats a whole new weight in a whole new way. and the baby doesn't even make it to 6 months #before nancys leaving her with her mum. a note saying Sorry but I Can't. and Neither Can Steve.#so then karens like. raising this kid.#and billy. who been gossiping and catching up with karen like weekly since his first week in hawkins is like.#damn grandma. anyone ever tell you you's could be sisters.#and karens like. i'll kill you.#the idea of jonathan and billy being a bigger part of the kids life than nancy or steve.#maybe steve coming around when the kids like 2 or 3 like. hey. maybe i can be a dad now. maybe i'm ready #maybe nancy coming back too like. okay i think i'm finally ready.#and them both realising their ex's who they left for dust are like. their kids fav uncles. that billy and jonathan are genuine friends now.#and being like. what the fuck.#anyway!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! who CARES!!!!!!! we love to have fun!!!!!! sorry to anyone who loves these characters!!!!!

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