#it's honestly grating at this point

[thewritingpossum]

Why is this Catherine in litterally all of her scenes with Potemkin? 😭

[benevolenterrancy]

Swords pining for each other's cultivator is my new favorite type of pining. Love your NieYao content! <3

I don't suppose we could get Baxia or Hensheng throwing a tantrum while Jin Guangyao / Nie Mingjue are away, leaving their owners to deal with the embarrassing aftermath?

Also, do you have any recs you'd recommend with these two?

this is the exact moment Nie Huaisang realised he was going to have to start meddling in his big brother's love life (con't: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Hensheng, on the other hand, doesn't throw tantrums but WILL sulk...

[superscourge]

i love when im minding my own business and then im hit with the extreme intense love for drawing sonic with the force of a train

[die-with-me-dazai]

Everyone out here "omg the anime cut this omg the anime cut that how COULD they omg I hope they don't adapt this LN or I hope they do adapt this LN....." etc etc and I'm just here like "damn I'm so glad bungou stray dogs has an anime and we're getting new seasons"

I'm just genuinely happy to have anything at all

Is the anime adaptation perfect? No of course not

Am I just happy the anime is still ongoing? Absofuckinglutely

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

Sick again/the same time but longer

[lolliputian]

Had a weekend where I pushed myself hard creatively and got a lot of amazing feedback from it. My brain is melted, but my heart is happy. 💙

[saturnskyline]

#maybe even with the inherent homoeroticism in there depending on who you ask

me, me, me, ask me!

~*~*~

Kim is sixteen when he wants to move out. His father doesn't say no, but he might as well. He tells Kim that nowhere is as safe as their house and that Kim can move out when he can defend himself properly, and by properly, he means Kim has to win whatever fight his father organizes. Kim is a good fighter, a natural one, he gets praise from Chan, and nobody except Pete gets praise from Chan. But his father is a cunning man, and when Kim gets attacked by Big, Chan and some burly dude he has never seen before, it only takes them a few minutes to win.

"Who was that?" he asks later when Pete ices his sore jaw and tells Kim what mistakes he made during the fight and what he needs to work on next. 

"Game," Pete says because Pete knows everything. "I've seen him with Khun Vegas."

Ah.

~*~*~

"What do I get out of it?" Vegas asks because Vegas doesn't do favours, not even for his family. 

"You can pretend I am Kinn and beat the shit out of me?"

Vegas snorts and ends the call.

~*~*~

Kim trains harder than ever and still loses. Fucking Game pulls a knife on him, slaps him, and fights like he has no honour. This time Pete is silent as he holds an ice pack to Kim's bloody nose.

~*~*~

"No," Vegas says instead of hello. 

"What would it take?" Kim asks because he hates the house he lives in, hates the chain on his neck, and hates not following his dream.

There is a long silence. 

"Why?" Vegas asks in English.

"I want to get out, and he won't let me leave otherwise." 

Vegas laughs, but it sounds hollow. "Sucks to be you."

He ends the call but messages Kim two days later. The message contains nothing but a time, date and address. Kim has three days to figure out how he can sneak away; he has a feeling Vegas does not want witnesses. 

~*~*~

Vegas is two years older, taller and stronger. He fights to win, and he fights dirty. He enters the abandoned apartment with a scowl and wastes no time with pleasantries, dropping a bag and going after Kim like his life depends on it. He pushes Kim into the broken coffee table with a kick in his stomach, and it's on. Twenty minutes later, Kim is on his back, bleeding from at least ten different places, and he isn't sure that a few of his ribs are not broken. His head hurts, and his wrists are firmly pinned above his head. Vegas grins with bloody teeth, and something in his eyes makes Kim realize that maybe it was not a good idea to show up alone, with nobody to protect him.

"See you in two weeks," Vegas finally says, disappearing before Kim gets enough strength to sit up. He stays like that for a while, wrists still above his head, and if he closes his eyes, he can still feel Vegas's hands around them.

~*~*~

It takes a while to unlearn some of the things Big and Pete have taught him, but Kim is a quick learner. Where Vegas might be stronger, Kim is faster, and where Vegas is more aggressive, Kim can use that momentum against him. That and he learns to use anything and everything around him to fight Vegas. The first time he throws an old vase, Vegas actually stops and laughs, looking at the broken pieces around him. Kim punches him in the jaw to shut him up. Later he yields to Vegas when they roll, and the ceramic pieces cut up Kim's back badly enough that he needs stitches.

~*~*~

Five months in Vegas shows up with a bruise on his face, his lip swollen and bloody. 

"Cheating on me?" Kim asks, pushing Vegas against the wall with a strength he didn't have months ago. Vegas growls like an actual animal and swaps them around so viciously that Kim almost loses his balance. His head hits the wall with a loud thud. Kim's so used to the pain, he ignores it. Vegas goes for his stomach, and Kim risks leaving it unprotected. He punches Vegas in the mouth, splits the lip open again, and Vegas stumbles backwards. 

Kim wastes no time, aims for legs and kicks hard enough that Vegas falls, and the adrenaline rush from knowing that this might be the first time he wins is so heady that Kim almost falls himself. He knows he is not strong enough to make Vegas yield just by pinning down his arms, so he uses his body to pin Vegas down, punches Vegas in the mouth once and then twice and then the third time, enough to make Vegas dizzy, to make him forget who is stronger. 

"Yield," he orders, looking down at the blood smeared all over Vegas's mouth. 

Vegas looks at him. It's a strange look, like he's calculating something, and Kim pushes his knee deeper into Vegas's stomach. "Yield."

Vegas surges up and bites Kim's lips with such strength that the blood that Kim tastes is his own. He yelps in pain and surprise, and the next thing he knows, Vegas flips them around, grinning like he always does when he knows he's won.

"What the fuck," Kim turns his head, breathless still, and spits blood on the floor. He should have aimed for Vegas's face.

Vegas, the crazy motherfucker, leans down and licks Kim's jaw like Kim is some prey to be eaten. 

"See you in two weeks," he says, leaving Kim on the floor, covered in their blood.

~*~*~

Kim disarms Chan, Game and Big four months later and gets his apartment keys. If Vegas is surprised to see him a week after, he doesn't let it show. He pushes Kim against the kitchen counter, and Kim breaks a dish against Vegas's cheek. It's on.

first of all, before i go any further, this is in reference to my tags on a previous post about kim and vegas bonding through violence:

second of all.... TUMSA????? TUMSA. YOU'RE LITERALLY INSANE FOR DUMPING THIS MASTERPIECE IN MY INBOX 😭😭😭

well idk what i'm even supposed to say gdhfsdjfhsdf. i'm glad you volunteered for the sake of "inherent homoeroticism" bc you are going to be the reason i put the vegaskim? kimvegas? (probably both. they're fighting for dominance after all) tag on my blog for the first time 🥲 thank you for your service bestie <3333

[chillwerewolf]

hot take: the rise in straight ppl using the word 'twink' as a funny descriptor for people is just a socially-acceptable way for them to call someone a faggot

[dappercritter]

The older I get the more my ideal Godzilla story becomes less about Warriors with kaiju and more about the human characters as well as what kind of effect living with or studying these monsters has on them.

Or "Pokemon if it was a seinen" as my sick mind likes to think of it.

[bisolationist]

This is the part that makes me go. Oh. Hmm.

The response seemed more along the lines of "well OBVIOUSLY it's true that men being sexually assaulted is an immeasurably lesser crime on the spectrum but we should be nice because maybe individually they're really hurt by it uwu"

This is what I mean by how I'm tired of subjectivity-of-experience being a vaguery by which people concede that our trauma (subjective response) might be great while the harm (objective crime) is vastly lesser. I already wrote a very off-hand post about this and I can't believe we even got another assault comparison. Now this response wasn't nearly so bad as what I was referencing to there, but it's still the same pattern of buying into that rhetoric.

The OP's response is seemingly compassionate (and I think there's genuine compassion behind it!), but imo is a rhetorical dead-end and hollow of meaningful criticism.

Saying that someone's trauma-response to something might merit compassion is good of course, but it does nothing to combat the implication that it should be a far lesser crime in terms of punishment, and seems to implicitly concede the anon's rhetoric on it being a different magnitude of harm. People already know different people react to events differently. But if they see you reacting strongly to something they seem mild, they see you as weak, manipulative, or both. So to people like anon, I think this response doesn't refute any of the beliefs they are espousing, it just reinforces the idea that male SA victims that exhibit trauma responses are reacting strongly to something mild and should be treated accordingly.

All of this to say... uhm, like sorry but sometimes the correct response is to say "being sexually assaulted is not like breaking a fucking ankle being sexually assaulted is not like breaking a fucking ankle being sexually assaulted is not like breaking a fucking ankle", not to plead the case that broken-ankle victims might FEEL as bad as someone who was violently hatecrimed, because that implicitly concedes the premise.

Note on that: not lost on me that the example chosen, a broken ankle, is something more associated with accidents. I've also written before on how people are determined to view victimization they think is unimportant as accidents/collateral and go out of their way to examine it as such (I talk about biphobia being talked about this way too, but I think it carries over to a lot of experiences).

[vaugarde]

back when this series first dropped i remembered it really bothered me that people called satogou "firstfriendshipping" cause it ignored chloe's presence in the group as goh's actual first friend, and yknow it sorta had "ignore the girl so only the boys matter" vibes, but see now i can't even be too annoyed about that cause in retrospect it's not like the show itself gives a fuck about chloe or considers her goh's friend

[yukikorogashi]

.

[dandyshucks]

also I got rly scared abt this last night or the night before because I suddenly realized sometimes people interpret it this way,,

so i just wanted to say that the reason i dont interact w people very much is NOT bc i think im better than ppl or anything - i am just very genuinely Petrified of messing up in social situations, to the point that I end up isolating and avoiding rather than risk making mistakes ^^;; WHICH ISN'T HEALTHY but . i havent figured out how to work through this yet dhdjdkl

BUT YEAH i just wanted to try to make sure nobody is thinking I'm some hoity-toity goober, I am literally just Extremely Terrified fjdjdkdl

[binders-and-beanies]

Doin bad again folx

[the-eclectic-wonderer]

Hey hey, how about 27, 31 & 39 for weird questions for writers 😊

Hello! Sorry for taking some time to answer -- I was really tired and needed to get some rest :) oh, and thanks for the questions, of course!

27. Who is the most stressful character you’ve ever written? Why?

Oh, so far it's got to be Rose from Golden Girls. I feel like there's a very delicate balance to writing her POV, and it's easy to get it wrong. Like, I don't know -- take St Olaf stories. They're a part of Rose, so you really can't avoid them when writing her POV for long enough, and they've got to be ridiculous, but not mind-numbingly stupid, because at some point they stop being funny and become frustrating. You know?

I will say it's worth it, though. I love Rose to bits, and as stressful as it can be to get her thought process just right, it's also a lot of fun!

31. Write a short love letter to your readers.

A love letter? What could I write in a love letter that I haven't written in my works? :)

You know I write for myself, but I'd be lying if I said I don't think of you all when I'm writing something. I anticipate your reactions to certain scenes, I get curious about your general thoughts, I wonder if someone will notice something that flew under my radar and surprise me with it... it's lovely! I had no idea that writing could be such a cooperative effort before, and it warms my heart.

I don't know much about love. I'm on the aromantic spectrum, and I've only ever fallen in love once -- but, in my very humble opinion, a big part of love is consideration, it's paying attention, it's building up a conversation. If that's true, then any of my works is a love letter to anyone that reads it. <3

Oh, and of course: thank you, so much, if you've read any of my works. I'm still shocked at the idea that there are people out there who are actually interested in what I write. It's an incredible feeling.

39. What keeps you writing when you feel like giving up?

Mostly, I try not to get to the point where I feel like giving up! If I notice I'm getting frustrated with a work, I put it down and go do something else, maybe leave it be for a while. Sometimes you just need to give your brain a break! I just try not to be too hard on myself about writing in general -- this is a hobby for me, it's supposed to be fun. If it's not, that means I probably need to focus on some other hobby for some time, and I'll come back to it when I'm ready.

[kittlyns]

A hard pill for me to swallow lately has been that, despite everything, I'm probably the best version of myself that could've existed. And that's not really a comforting thought.