#its extremely therapeutic

[bloodiegawz]

Jack! The good boy!

The good boy indeed! This is Bo's workout partner :3

As goes for all of Savanaclaw, Jack is one of the people Bo is closest to. A decent guy with a good heart and a shit ton of fluff and muscle. What's not to love? Though, Bo has a habit of getting touchy with him a lot- he doesn't intend to make him uncomfortable, but he feels a lot safer when he has someone to cling to. He's getting better about it...

Bo asked Jack about working out together fairly early on. He's a small girl with little to no muscle and zero stamina on a campus full of people who will pick a fight over anything. Plus having something more tailored to his level than Vargas' reps would probably benefit him. Jack mostly just spots him while Bo works at his own pace, trying to make sure he doesn't hurt himself (which happens incredibly often because he tends to push himself through his pains), but he also gets super proud when Bo reaches a new best. Did five pushups? Hell yeah, that's more than the three from yesterday!

Bo also planned to join him for morning jogging, albeit with plenty more breaks than usual, but that meant getting up earlier. Which was miserable. He dropped that pretty quickly.

Jack will never admit it, but he lets Bo crash in his room fairly often when he's sleep deprived or hurting particularly bad because he gets worried. Bo is just happy to be there. As much as he likes Grim, the beast isn't exactly the greatest company for him if he's in a lot of pain (mostly because poor Grim doesn't have an off switch), meaning Ramshackle isn't a super pleasant place to rest.

[jadenvargen]

random fanart for my own gdamn fic bc i lost my mind over and out

[thedollhousediaries]

The Dollhouse Diaries

Real Life In Plastic Tip #6:

ෆTime Management for Neurodivergent Girly Girls and Boujie Hyperfemmesෆ

This is the pretty girl era of having time management under control. The key is to learn how to live in the moment while also being discipline enough to move on to the next task as needed. I know that sentence was as daunting to read as it was for me to write ૮꒰ྀི⊃⸝ ⸝ ⸝⊂꒱ྀིა I guarantee I gotcha *Chaeyoung voice*

First Things First: Go 1 Week At a Time!! (every 3 days if an entire 7 is too much or your schedule is unpredictable, like mine)

Build a simple list of all the things you have to do and that you would like to do. Its much easier to get it all out on the table so you can donate more of your brain power to sorting things, rather than holding things.

Put all of the things listed on a calendar: Most important first things first! This means things like health appointments,work schedule, birthdays, holidays that you celebrate, classes, or anything that involves not only your time but other’s as well. Then after that put the elective things second; Nail appointments, shopping trips, dates with friends, etc. Lastly, put the things you would like to incorporate into your daily routine; We talking skincare, any hobbies you may have like drawing/painting/sculpting/reading/blogging, any form of exercise, etc.

Once the week or however much time you have scheduled out is done on your overall calendar, then its time for marrying it to your life.

Marrying your schedule: Planner apps, Physical Planner, Dry Erase Boards and Bullet Journals

Choosing your medium at keeping up with your schedule is very important. You may have to try them all before you get comfortable with something. I have tried them all and I’ve found that the main one that truly stuck with me was the app/website Notion. I like it because its fully customizable and you can use it at your own pace. Every week or every day may not be super eventful and so it drops the guilt and shameful feeling of not filling up pages every single day.

Here is what all I use and the way I use them:

Notion <3 I use it as my overall journal. I use the apps on my ipad/phone to check if I’m not home and I can use the website on my PC when I’m home and relaxing. I like it because its very versatile. Think of it as a digital journal combined with similar mechanics of tumblr. I use it for literally everything. There are a lot of videos that can show off all of the cool things Notion can be used for but this is the video that personally helped me learn it quickly

Bullet Journals <3 I have about 3 journals and I love them because I get to customize things with cute stickers and it gives very fun scrapbooking vibes. Because I use Notion as a all over planner I can use my BUJO’s for more fun and creative things. I usually use these for all of my cute ideas and things thats in my mind and aesthetic wishlists and such. Its very therapeutic to take time out to be kawaii and glamorous and just put cute thoughts on to paper! I mainly use it for kpop inputs, my fav shows, wishlists, dates and etc.

Dry erase board <3 I use this as a overall daily top important to-do list! Sometimes I dont always open my notion if I dont have anything extremely important coming up but there may be some things I need to keep on my mind to do for that day. The way my neurodivergency is set up I need to keep the most important things always in my face or I could forget everything. So, I put things on there like get a new tire, pick up order from bath & bodyworks, put clothes in the dryer, wash dishes, and etc. Daily tasks like that usually goes on my dry erase board

Remember at the end of the day dont be too hard on yourself and your schedule! Move at your own pace and always set yourself up for success. Scheduling is ideally suppose to calm you and be a tool to improve your life; not stress you out. If at any point you begin to feel overwhelmed just stop and recenter yourself and your life. I felt overwhelmed at first myself and that was because I was trying to keep up with a hyper organized and productive version of myself that I needed to give more patience to develop. Let this come organically to you and not because you are trying to keep up with what u feel everyone else is doing, or to the future self you are going to inevitably become. Happy scheduling, Dollmate!

[vxiphoid]

✦ HOME SWEET HOME(MATES)

❨ leona as your roommate ❩ basically roommates to lovers, i am dying for this trope holy shit. kinda ooc leona (im not sure but ill put this here anyways.), some cursing, mention of marriage like once, other than that really fluffy.

2k+ words

MOVING IN, WELCOME HOME, LEONA !!

MONTH I

when he first moved in, you were expecting some imperious, egotistical, loud-mouthed prince and well, the imperious part wasn’t exactly wrong. you barely even see the dude and when you do, he’s on the couch, slumped. half of the time you forget you even have a roommate. hell, the dude barely even talks to you. the first time you actually talk to him, after a month of living with each other, is when he placed an assload of dishes in the sink after you had respectfully washed them on his week.

that’s how you found yourself practically hip to hip with a prince, elbows deep in soapy water, hands brushing occasionally. he refused to wash the dishes he had purposely dropped in the sink while you were finishing the last dish. how long was he hoarding these in his room? you didn’t know but you made a deal with him. you help him wash the dishes but he has to finish the rest of his week, simple enough since it is his responsibility. hell, when you saw the tower he placed in the kitchen you damn near tore his ear off dragging him back to his mess. what were you, his mother? maybe he just needed some house training, assuming he lived in some mansion with an unimaginable amount of maids.

leona’s chest rumbled and his ear flicked with discomfort, his lip twitching upward into a grimace. sparing him a glance, you bumped his hip with yours. “lighten up, its not that bad.”

“i think i just touched peanut butter. wet peanut butter.”

your stomach tightened and you instinctively pursed your lips to prevent the laughter bubbling in your throat. okay, maybe it was that bad. his tail flicked your leg in annoyance. he has to give you some credit, some. washing dishes wasn’t the most pleasing thing however he had to admit, you weren’t that bad of company. now he was the one stealing glances at you, emerald eyes roving across the expanse of your figure before finally settling on your face. easy on the eyes. he returned his gaze to his hands that were violently scrubbing a dish.

he even returned your gentle hip bump.

ITS LATE, TALK TO ME

MONTH II

he’s actually been in your room a few times, mostly when you’re out, so he can steal that comfy ass bed of yours. though tonight, its clearly different when the lion comes stumbling into your room and plops down on your bed. its weird, at first, but you slowly slid beside him and stared at the ceiling together. it wasn’t until you made some comment that started the late night, half-asleep talking.

“oh! that one dude,” you snap your fingers for remembrance, “ruggie, was it? does he actually eat dandelions?”

the vibes that radiated through your room is therapeutic. mood lighting, a person to talk to, and a dedicated playlist for this occasion. leona’s voice is rather calming with the slight hint of drowsiness, someone you would definitely pay to have a story read to you. he’s told you more about night raven; his acquaintances, not friends, what he’s studied. the college sounded like a lively place, unlike the boring shared apartment route. though, it is a little less boring now.

leona hums, your question quickly answered with acknowledgment. “yeah. he’s weird like that but he’s alive, thats really all i care about.” he says. his voice is soft and slightly deeper than what you’re used to hearing. it makes something in your chest constrict and tighten at the same time.

“he eats pumpkin seeds, don’t he?” you deadpan.

leona lets out a noise that sounded extremely similar to a laugh to which he, badly, attempted to cover up with a cough. you practically spring up, “are you.. laughing? did i just make you laugh? the leona kingscholar?” “nuh-uh.” the more you continued to shower him with this teasing, the harder it got to actually compose his grin, he’s already turned away from you. the look of pure mirth on his face is enough for you to forget what stress you ever had. in a weird way, you feel kind of privileged knowing that you were able to make him smile. you’d take this over any other day, perhaps you liked your new roommate.

OH LOOK, A CAFE !!

MONTH III

leona was actually contempt to take a small detour from your walk together, he really didn’t care where went. all he knows is that he needs a nap. you were actually looking for somewhere nice to sit down to help leona with his studies, the cafe down the street sounded like a decent date. study date. no one told him there were cats in there!

“how is it?” you ask smugly.

leona looks up from the table, a half glare shot at you as he sucks cupcake frosting from the pad of his thumb. he releases his thumb with a wet pop and a once over at his lips, “i like it as much as much as you like stealing my clothes.” then he pushed the cupcake into his mouth, his eyes flicking to his button up around your body.

you intertwine your fingers, resting your chin upon your hands. “it was in my dirty clothes basket, i washed it, therefore it is mine.” you quip back playfully, taking a sip out of your latte.

“it literally has my name sewn onto the back.” he counters.

“yeah, with the smoothest fucking silk i’ve ever felt!” he shrugged as to say no big deal but you knew he secretly liked it from the way he kept eyeing it, just not enough to admit vocally. you’re the only person he could tolerate wearing his clothes, so sue him for not being able to wear anything else in your house for some days until they got clean. “think about it; if you marry me, we’d share the same last name, eh? eeeh?” you wiggle your eyebrows at him.

he huffs, a playful smile gracing his features. “oh, you would just love that, wouldn’t you? have a little field day?” he raises an eyebrow as he takes another bite of cake, his voice full of mock amusement.

a brown cat hopped onto the table, your little corner now surrounded by the cute animals. almost all of them taking complete interest in your dear prince. rubbing their warm bodies against him as if they had been waiting their whole life for him to show up. one by one, they hop onto him, sniffing at his neck as if he were their food and he sat stiffly. you on the other hand indulged your one kitten with satisfying scratches under its chin, staring in pure adoration as a cat rubbed its face against leona’s cheek. you had to take a few pictures, it was a must have in your camera roll.

“papa cat with his litter of kittens.” you cooed softly as you snap another picture.

leona’s ear flicked in irritation, “cheka is enough.”

ITS SPA DAY !

MONTH IV

leona was already suspicious when you willingly lead him to your room, even more when you pat your lap. what is he, some cat? still laid down though, a win is a win. its crazy how comfortable he’s gotten with you. so comfortable, he’s letting you card your heavenly hands through his thick mane to pin it back for whatever substance you’re going to rub onto his face.

leona’s right eye spontaneously closed as you neared his face with a dropper, the glass tube smeared its cool continents on his cheek. “what’s this one? part ninety-nine of glass skin treatment?”

lord knows he doesn’t need it, he already has glass skin, it was just an excuse to poke n prod his squishy cheeks. you didn’t bother do answer, instead rolling your eyes and rubbing the serum onto his skin. its been what, twenty minutes? leona hasn’t fallen asleep, mostly because he’s staring at you. the dim lighting made your skin glow, made you glow. in the dark, you were a star that would have burned down by now if not for a miracle or magic spell, was he that spell? like an angel or an extraterrestrial. your stare was hypnotic. your stare made him forget everything around him, your gaze made him lose his footing. he felt himself moving forward and backward at the same time, the air between you became charged.

“you have a weird taste in roommates, herbivore.”

your hands pause at the curve of his neck, then move up to run through his thick hair. your touch made his skin flush, his breath hitch at a low frequency. you grin, “mm, yeah? is that right?”

his eyelids flutter at the feel of your thumbs rubbing over his temples, “you’re doing the thing again.” he breathes out. you chuckle, “the thing? the temple rubbing thing?” “your little thing, the smile and that voice thing.”

“ohh…” you roll your tongue against the roof of your mouth before smiling wider, “should i stop?”

he doesn’t respond right away, the moment stretches into minutes. he’s fading in and out of dreamland and wanting to stay awake for more of your touch. “jus’ a bit longer.”

RAINY DAY IN, MOVIE NIGHT ?

MONTH V

you two actually had plans to go to out but when opened the door for you just for it to be absolutely pouring outside, he settled for a movie. you got all the blankets while leona got all the snacks. what movie you both were watching? he doesn’t know, you make a phenomenal pillow though.

the tv was basically just murmuring, your vision unfocused as your hand absently played with leona’s hair. you knew that once he lied down, he was going to fall asleep. his whole weight flush against your body and cheek smooched into your chest, his tail swishing slowly showing he was awake in some way. you shift your head to look at him, catching a whiff of sweetness from his hair. some sadness settled in the pit of your gut. leona wasn’t always going to be here, he had to return to his studies and his royalty business. you couldn’t keep him even if you tried.

“did you fall asleep or are you upset, herbivore?”

his voice startled you out of your revere, you hummed in response, his words not quite processing correctly.

“your heartbeat slowed and you stopped playing with my hair.” he said as if it was the most obvious thing ever. you hadn’t even noticed you stopped stroking his head. you turn his head to hold his face in your hands, his eyes droopy from sleep. those eyes doing the unimaginable to your heartstrings. “you gotta to go back, don’t you?”

leona gives you a slow blink, his hand resting over yours. “‘course i do.” he yawns.

it was a really selfish thought, wanting to keep him forever. if you had the chance you would carry him in your pocket at all times.

“here,” leona removes his hand from yours, taking something from his pocket and holding it up for you to see. its a ring, its silver color catching the light from the tv. on his ring finger was a slightly bigger one, matching pairs. “its a promise ring.” he takes your hand from his face to slide it onto you but you pull your hand away. he’s confused at your reaction, looking at you like you’ve grown an extra head. your eyes are glossed over, tears forming. something was screaming that it was too early, that he was moving too fast. then your lips lifted into a grin, you laugh but they come out shaky. “its a promise ring, you gotta make a promise, leo.”

“you’re so sappy.” he frowns albeit the blanket of relief blanketing over his heart. he takes your hand once more, securely this time. “i promise to come back.” he places a kiss to the pad of your ring finger before sliding the silver band onto it, returning your hand to his cheek and pressing a firmer kiss to your palm. you watch the silver bleed into a rose color, a soft vibration in your finger when leona’s changed as well. you smile widely, tears streaming down your face. emotions flew and popped like fireworks throughout your body, uncontainable, freed. you laugh as he leans his forehead onto yours, wiping your tears with his thumb and letting out a few purrs of content.

“you’re really happy, huh? so happy you’re shedding tears for me?” “mmhmm, shut up. lemme enjoy this, enjoy you. please?” “as you wish.”

LAST, BUT NOT FINAL, GOODBYES

MONTH IV

welp, its time to say goodbye. you had your ups and— well, mostly ups, you never fought with leona. by the time you had helped leona pack his stuff and belongings, it was past noon. he looked the least bit of interested and you were doing most of the moving. in his own way of saying he doesn’t want to leave, he lazes on the couch and sometimes tugs you down with him.

“you’re sure you have your toothbrush, your expensive hair products, everything?”

leona let out a pained groan from the couch, his ring finger buzzing. “herbivore, you’re stressing.” your eyes flicked to the band on his finger, the color fading to a wine red.

he held his arm out to you, to which you inhaled, held it, then let it out through your mouth when you were under the warmth of his arm. “i know… i just want to make sure you don’t forget anything, leo.” your voice was muffled as you breathed into his chest.

“if i forget anything important, id buy a new whatever it is. you’d want it more though, for when you’re missing your better other half.” leona nudged his chin into your head and you visibly relaxed against him. he let himself sink into the softness of your body, wrapping his arms around you, his fingers trailing up and down your back in a soothing pattern. a thrum shooting through both of your fingers signaling a color change in the rings.

…then the sound of buzzing from the coffee table.

leona curses, apologizing as he reached to get it. taking a glance at the screen he sighs, patting your hip. “that’s my ride.”

he had already shipped off his heavy luggage to night raven so the only thing left to do was wish him off. its not the last goodbye, you’d see him again. only through a screen and through texts before he has his next break and can see you again. you stood on your front porch, shifting your weight from leg to leg while you worried your lip. he eyes you, slowly opening his arms just for you to pounce on him. enclosing your limbs around his body as tightly as you could, your face pressed into his neck, your hands gripping the fabric of his jacket. he chuckles, giving you a reassuring squeeze. “you better come back.” you mutter.

leona sets you down, wiping any incoming tears from your eyes. “i promised, didn’t i?”

your lips curl up in a watery smile. he pulls away from you, making his way to the car waiting in the parking lot. you had this stupid little grin on your face when you noticed the happy whip in his tail from the interaction. halfway to his ride, leona stops, turning on his heel and sprinting back to you, yelling that he had forgotten something. you were already beginning to scold him but was quickly silenced by his lips. he kisses you sweetly and with enough passion to rival that of the sun, his hand gently cupping your cheek, thumb running across the skin there. you lean forward, melting into the kiss, and the two of you finally separate after what felt like an eternity. his eyes are glistening, a slight sheen over them betraying his emotional state, but you had no qualms about kissing him, even after the short months. it still makes you dizzy when you see the love radiating from his eyes.

“you got a partner in six months? are you fucking kidding me?!”

you peek over leona’s shoulder, a boy with short fluffy hair and blue eyes, big hyena ears from his messy hair yelling from the car window. just like leona described him, ruggie. your prince kisses under your eye, his demeanor quickly changing as he faced ruggie. “you have no game, that’s all. don’t blame me for being simply better.” leona states calmly.

only when the car pulled off did you notice your ring beaming gold, magic swirling beneath the thick material.

back to twst masterlist

[cookie-crumblr]

The Smell of Smoke

Innocent F! Reader x M!Yandere Bully OC

Part 6~

His Info: 🖕✨

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

MINORS DNI

CW: Fem! Reader, reader has a vagina, reader referred to as she/her, loud “noises”, bullying against reader, explicit language, asphyxiation, fight, blood, extreme violence against reader, hospital setting, coma-d reader,, medication use, non con kissing and touching,

Yesterday feels like a dream, but your throbbing head at least proves the alcohol part…

But what about him being … Nice-ish… to you.

Nice for him definitely.

Nice for you, eh, not so much. no more like not at all.

It’s still weird though.

You don’t understand him in the slightest.

Gods, your leg and head are in agony, like you’re in a crocodile’s mouth and she’s giving you the famously terrible roll of death.

You clamber over to your meds, but they aren’t in your bag. At first you’re confused but when you turn around, your bleary eyes land on an open bottle of beer and your med bottle… Did he try to do something “nice” for you, again?

“What the fuck…” Your lip’s upturned as you groan.

Uhg just get them in you already.

An Hour Later~

You make it to class without a hitch! you feel like for the first time in a week you can breathe, at least a little, though labored, it still feels amazing!

Ezra isn’t in class today, another sigh of relief escapes you.

You’re taking notes diligently today, it’s actually so relaxing, you had no idea something so boring and mundane could be so therapeutic.

It’s a good day without him.

Outside the sun feels so wonderful on your face you forget about your broken and branded leg. It feels like the sun’s giving you a nice warm embrace, keeping you safe from all the horrors you’ve experienced now.

You find a stall vending your favorite foods and go to buy some, and a stranger pays for your food!

It’s such a good day without him.

The Next Day~

*SLAM, BANG!*

“SURPRISE! ‘M Y’R NEW ROOMIE~”

You jump as your door flies off its hinges, and Ezra announces his presence loudly and ridiculously.

Come on, of course you cant have more than a gods damn day to yourself.

He starts throwing your roommates shit all over the room, “the fuck are you doing!?” You yell at him without thinking.

“What’d you say, bitch!?” He immediately faces you, and throws down whatever was in his hands in front of you, causing you to yelp and flinch.

“I-I didn’t—”

“Y-You what? didn’t mean it? It’s too fuckin’ late for you, slut.” He’s already on you, hand wrapped around your throat.

You cough without any air, it’s painful to even try.

Your crutches are next to you on your bed…

You reach and stretch over—

You manage to grab one, it’s a little awkward to wield and swing, but you fucking hit him!

He’s surprised and let’s go of you, a wild smile pulls at his lips.

Oh gods!!

You Bolt.

By the time you’re out of the door, your bad legs make you stumble, then in a second he’s tackling you to the ground.

He punches the back of you then grabs you by the back of your head and smashes your face into the ground.

There’s a ringing in your ears, and blood starts pouring from your nose like a geyser.

“Ezra! Stop!!” Ace’s muffled, worry filled voice rings out from down the hall.

“Stay outta it Ace!” Ezra’s voice is equally as hard to hear, even though he’s yards closer.

“No! Quit it!!! Y/N didn’t do anything to you!”

He throws you forward. You have absolutely no fight. You lie shaking and in complete shock, frozen as of time is ice around you.

“Y/N, You oka— no of course not,,” he rushes over to you.

“Ezra… why…” Ace didn’t ask it, he just sounds so disappointed in his brother.

“Yeah, yeah” Ezra doesn’t look at Ace as he walks past him.

“Easy up there, Y/N,” Ace helps you up and slips your arm around his neck. He’s shorter than Ezra so it’s a little easier to walk with him helping you.

“Fuck, I’m sorry… I’m so… Sorry,” he whispers seemingly to himself.

Your ears are still ringing and your head is in more agony than you’ve ever felt up there, you aren’t sure you can stay upright even with Ace’s help.

“woah there! here,” He lifts you into his solid arms and makes sure your tight against his chest.

You try to stay awake but find that a feeling deeper than even the promise of the deepest sleep is pulling you under fast.

“Hey, w-wait, i think you’re s’posed to stay awake with head injuries!” He panics, and speeds up to his car, but stops and calls for an ambulance.

Shit, you’re gonna have a massive bill. Your head is… in unthinkable agony. Is it gonna explode!?

You black out, and come to a few times, one second your in Ace’s arms, the next you’re in a fire truck? next your in a gurney, and then a hospital.

“Y/N!?” Its Ace that’s there next to you when you wake up, but you see a familiar strawberry blonde standing almost outside of your line of sight. He’s wearing a deep scowl. “Y/N! Y/N! You’re awake!”

“You… Were in a coma… For a week.” Ezra doesn’t look at you as he gets the words out.

“A WEEK!? This time you put me in a coma for a week, and you can’t even look at me, you’re despicable. Why are you even here!?” You grab your head as it pounds.

His fiery gaze meets yours head on and you aren’t backing down. What’s he gonna do? put you in another coma??

For fucks sake.

His expression changes, something akin to lust maybe? It’s always confusing you and giving you whiplash, nothing is ever how you expect with this guy.

“Ace, can you give us a minute?” he asks.

“No can do.” He crosses his arms and shakes his head, steadfast, and not going to leave your side.

“It’s alright, i think he’s made whatever point he wanted to make for now.” You resist rolling your eyes at Ezra, thinking back to just … Well you guess a week ago now. It feels like it just happened a second ago to you. Uhg, your head.

He takes a minutes long pause before deciding and finally standing. “okay… But… yell if you need help.” He’s torn, but you want to hear what Ezra has to say, if anything, or if he’s just gonna jump you again, at least you’re already in a hospital bed…

Oh fuck! it’s just hit you… A Weeks worth of medical bills!? FUCK.

“Y/N—” He starts, but…

“Nope, wait, let me go first. What the hell do you want from me!? Just take it and get it over with already! just look at me! are you done yet? happy?? satisfied??”

“I’m not happy.” He looks out the window at a tree. “‘sides, to be honest, thought youd ‘ave a thicker skull than that,” he snickers.

“Oh fuck off.” You’ve never been so angry before in your life. You’ve also never felt so powerless. Maybe because you have nothing left to loose you feel more unhinged and ready to fight.

“I’m sorry.” he says flatly.

“Did you just..?” NOTHING can redeem him, and he just thinks— or maybe he’s not even thinking! does he have a brain to think?

He crosses the room.

Leaning over you in your bed, he grabs your face to pull it up right in front of his own.

You meet his challenge and stare deeply back into his dark red-brown eyes.

He looks down at your puffed lips and back up.

Soon he’s grabbing you all over your upper half, chest waist, belly, throat, he messes up your gown and when it’s loose around your shoulder he bites you there.

His teeth sink into your flesh, you’re biting your lip and trying to shove him off but you have no strength.

Your head lolls back wards, and as youre about to start counting the dots in the ceiling, he backs off.

“Fuck this, ‘m goin’ out f’r a smoke,” he tosses your head back down to your body and back onto the hospital bed.

Ace steps in right after him, before the door closes, “You alright?”

“Yeah, thank you, Ace… I think i need more meds tho hah” you try and laugh but your head pounds.

“Here!” He pushes the button for you and tells the nurse what’s wrong. he listens to Ace for a second then comes to you to confirm and once you do he gives you more morphine.

Then, your whole body just melts.

Woo goodness does that feel nice. You drift back into sleep happily, forgetting everything, along with the pain just for a second.

Yet…

Both dreams end the same…

[devieuls]

ˋ Let me Love you༄ ☣

Neteyam Sully x Na'vi Fem Reader <SERIES >

Warning of the Serie: MDNI. Dom Neteyam x Fem Na'vi Reader.

SMUT: Dirty Talk; Fangs; Bites; fingering; Blood; Spit; Jealousy and Possessiveness; Foreplay; violence; Swearing; Teasing; Unprotected Sex; betrayal; slut shaming; oral sex; dacryphilia; outdoorsex; jealousy BDSM.

ANGST: mention of suicide, toxic relationship, words inherent in death, sexual assault, self-harm, derealization, suffering, Requited / Unrequited love, prejudices, bullying and insults. and FLUFF. There will be flashbacks in this series

Aged characters: Neteyam 22 y.o / You 19 y.o.

Synopsis: In the darkest point of your life, swallowed by the abyss, you decide to put an end to your sufferings, seeking relief in the extreme act. Your life was an intricate dance between life and death, and when life decided to take leave and leave death alone in you, you got lost. And as if he had been sent by Eywa himself, a mysterious Na'vi, saves you from hitting bottom, sacrificing himself so you don’t give up. Becoming the light that shone in your darkness. He is the sun that faces your night, and you are the Moon, eternally distant from him.

He grabbed your hand and dragged you away, taking you to his village, a place of healing and hope where he will try to make you love life again, showing you the light you had long lost. Starting a journey of healing, to fight against your demons that tormented you relentlessly, to finally find happiness where you would never have bothered to find it.

Two fates crossed under the tacit protection of the Great Mother, to show that even two opposites can create something perfectly chaotic.

And what happens when night and day dance together, to the rhythm of the stars and waves of balance, eternal opposites that are inevitably attracted?

This is the story of how death falls in love with life; how the sun one day decided to save the moon and how darkness is not so dark if light can penetrate. But also a story of suffering and torment, where not everything is roses and flowers.

CHAPTER WARNING: Mention of suicide and slight violence.

Lenght : 5.1k

NA'VI WORDS: Yawne: Beloved; Tspangoe: I invented this, it means "Suicidal". It comes from "Tspang": Kill and "Oe": I/Me. I couldn’t find a word that came close, so I made it up.

TW: THE SERIES WILL BE FULL OF DELICATE TOPICS!

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Chapter II: Poisonous as Death

The morning light seeped through the drawn skin curtain, dancing gently over your still pale skin. As you opened your eyes annoyed, your vision was blurred at first, but gradually the world around you materialized. You found yourself in a tent that was filled with scents of herbs and burnt incense, noticing a woman sitting on her back with a shawl of red beads that shone on contact with the blinding light.

As you tried to orient yourself, the sounds of nature gently entered your ears. The melodious chirping of birds filled the air, creating a natural symphony that seemed to sing its awakening. You breathed deeply as the earthy aroma of wet earth, mixed with wild musk struck your nostrils, while the smell of wet wood and flowers charged the air with the typical smell of the forest clan.

With caution, you got up to sit on the carpet where you were lying, passing a hand between the braids while strong twines hit your head with pain. The mysterious na'vi pulled the curtains, opening them to change the air once she noticed your awakening, remaining silent. The woman held aromatic herbs in her hand, which she carefully mixed in a clay pot. The air was imbued with the therapeutic scents of the ingredients, which tickled your senses.

She looked up and a grimace spread across her wrinkled face. "You’re awake." She suddenly said in a tone that was too acidic to be even vaguely the Great Mother, but you thought that maybe it could really be her and that she was just angry with you because of the act you did.

"I am…" you whispered with a thread of voice, feeling strange pain at the height of the stomach, while you noticed bandages covering some points of your body.

The old woman approached you, grabbed you by the jaw, carefully looking at your face, turning it as she wished to look for signs of possible trauma or other. "You have a strong spirit, not many survive a fall from such a high waterfall." you opened wide your eyes, pulling yourself back from her grip, observing her with incredulity

"Where am I now?" Your tone was impatient as you looked around, beginning to realize that perhaps your attempt to end it had not come to an end.

The one you identified as the Tsahìk sat next to you, looking at you with hard eyes, filled with contempt. Her time-stamped face and wrinkly hands silently told the story of a woman who had spent her life saving the lives of those who struggled to hold onto it, and who had now healed and saved the life of someone who didn't appreciate the Great gift. The silence weighed heavily between you, interrupted only by the whisper of the forest, which bore the typical melody accompanied by the lively sounds of the village in which you had involuntarily happened.

"You are in the Omatikaya clan, in my tent." she began, acidly, poisoning your body with a few simple words.

You were alive, still stuck in this hell, in the darkness and in the shame that you couldn’t even get it over with.

Meanwhile, Neteyam slowly approached his grandmother’s tent, the heart in his throat and a mixture of hope and fear gripping him. He expected to find you in a comatose sleep, as he had already seen you in those days, but when he lifted the curtain and crossed the threshold, he was surprised. His eyes met your bandaged back, sitting, feeling a sense of happiness and relief to see you awake, remaining still in his footsteps even before opening the mouth.

You turned at once, peering at the boy you reluctantly recognized as 'the one who saved you'. Your gaze was tormented and angry in his. Your irises were like a stormy sea, overflowing with a mixture of gloomy emotions. There was a deep wound in your eyes, a palpable pain that reflected the anger and frustration of being saved against your will.

He looked down, noticing your sharp eyes as blades penetrating directly into his soul. He felt slightly guilty, as if he had somehow broken something sacred by intervening in your choice without your consent. Though on one side of him he was happy to have saved you, to have given you a chance to redeem yourself and enjoy everyday life.

In the meantime Mo'at had left the tent because of the strong and silent tension that was in the air, believing that it was better to leave you two alone to talk and clarify the situation.

"You." You hissed with disgust and acidity, making him shudder at the pungent tone as he approached and you automatically put yourself on the defensive. Your words remained suspended in the air, unable to really break the silence that permeated the tent at that moment.

Neteyam tried to pronounce his name, but held back, fearing that it would make the situation worse. He approached with caution, with a soft step, trying to show respect for the emotional space you needed to feel safe somehow.

You tried to stand up, but the strong pain of stitches and bruises forced you to sit again, while the worried look of the na'vi burned your skin, stretching out a hand as if to prevent you from trying the stupid move again.

"No, don’t move" he said harshly, albeit with a sweet and thoughtful undertone. "You must take it easy, you risked a lot in these days of coma" His tone presented an obvious sign of concern.

You walked away from Neteyam’s close hand just as a wounded animal did, as if you wanted to protect yourself from the outside world, a world that had shattered your expectations and inflicted unimaginable suffering on you. You carried a hand between the now slightly damaged braids, feeling other pains to the head that made you tighten your eyes for the pain.

" Why am I still here?" You hissed while your gaze was focused on your legs, becoming empty and devoid of emotion like your voice. " I threw myself. Why did you save me?" you growled and gritted your teeth, as faint sighs came out of your cerulean and tired lips.

Neteyam listened to you in silence, keeping his eyes down as he searched for the right words not to hurt you. He felt the desperation in your voice, your need to find a way out of that emotional chaos that was pressing you like a rock on the sand. He wishes he could offer you comfort, healing and redemption, but he knew you would be hostile to him because of his 'heroic' act.

"Because I would never let a young Na'vi like you throw her life away like that. Not on my watch." answered with solemn confidence, looking up only for that moment. "You may not see it, but your life means something, you are important to someone" he approached you slightly, still trying not to cross the line he himself had drawn for you.

"I asked you to let me go, to leave me alone. I asked you to leave me, not to save me. And you ignored my words and saved me." You growled as you took a break, meeting his gaze with wrath. "You don’t even know me and you saved me! Why did you do it?! Who are you to decide whether or not to save someone?!" some frozen tears cut your face because of frustration. "I don’t want to live. Why didn’t you let me die?" your tone became weaker, as your heart began to pump blood faster and faster. "You should have let me die…" you whispered as your eyes silently chained. Your look dull, dead, almost extinct, while the only desire that seemed to shine in that amber mirror was death.

Neteyam felt a bitter taste in his mouth, answering urgently. "No, I didn’t and I won’t. I won’t let you die" he retorted, approaching you, taking you by the shoulders almost instinctively. "I don’t need to know you to know that you are someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend, and you belong to a clan. You mean something to someone who will one day regret not being able to save you in time. Please stop saying those words" His golden eyes looked at you pleading, while his voice cracked. < Possible that she suffered so much…? > he asked himself looking at your glassy eyes.

You walked away from his touch again, growling at him, with anger and melancholy. Your soul was still fragile and vulnerable, so hostility was the mask you decided to wear, hoping that for this reason they would also abandon you.

"I WAS someone’s daughter, I WAS someone’s sister, I WAS someone’s friend, I HAD a people and a clan. Now I HAVE nothing. because I WAS someone’s loved one, not now, not me." you felt a bite to the throat, a knot that held the words while you vomited them with blood, tearing you with every sentence. "They’re all dead and buried. so whether or not I join the death toll, you don’t have to decide that for me." Your eyes were like pools of dark, deep water, reflecting the abyss of pain you carried inside of you. They are eyes that once could shine with life, but now they were dull and lifeless, hopeless. Your gaze was charged with an overwhelming mixture of anger and sadness, a storm of emotions ready to crash against the man in front of you. Your bitter voice ruined by yet another growl. "As I said, we don’t know each other. So why do you insist on saving me?"

"You were… if you really don’t have anyone, then let me be your people, introduce you to mine and make them yours. I will be your friend, your sister, your family and a companion to cry on if it is necessary. But I won’t let you disappear, because I know there’s still a flame of life inside of you that wants to shine again." His voice began to flicker, but soon he intensified with something reminiscent of hope. A mixture of desperate determination and concern, with a desire to make you understand that there are reasons why it was worth living. "You’re a stranger, it’s true, but I won’t let you do something so stupid. I won’t let you go." He said seriously. He would like to eradicate the pain from your heart somehow, give light to your dead eyes. "You don’t have to do it alone. I will help you, and if you allow me, we will find a reason for you to live, together. Just let me help you."

You looked away from him, gritting your teeth as your jaw twitched. Your heart so heavy it crushed the organs below.

"You don’t understand…" you whispered in an absent voice, looking out at the curtain walls as you scraped the palm of your hand because of frustration. "I don’t want to live. I don’t want to live anymore. This is not life, it’s not my clan and you can’t be the piece that stops the sinkhole. My life… died with them. But don’t you see? this is only a body that pulls forward and that will turn off" Your voice made the blood freeze to Neteyam, who raised his ears as his tail stopped moving in the air, finding rest behind him. You were honest, you weren’t lying, and he understood that. "I need you to let me go."

"You’re not listening to me. We can find you a life here, even if the life you had before was taken from you… give this a chance." He said gently, trying to hide the pain you had given him. You can form a new family here…" his head bent to the side looking for your eyes, pleading. " Please… believe me" he timidly extended his hand, before leaving it hanging in the air. "Look at me, please. You will not be alone in this." Neteyam was determined after a long time.

He will be patient with you, he will listen to you and he will try to advise you, these were the resolutions that he had fixed in his mind. He will try to understand the pain that burns inside you, and he will burn with it if it helps you.

You didn’t look at him, just taking long breaths, not wanting to answer what you had just been told.

"I promise I will never leave you alone in this fight. I will be here for you, even when it seems like no one else is, and even when you treat me this way. I will not give up, just let me in" he said before he got up. And in that instant, you felt yourself drowning once again, no longer in the waters of the oblivion of that river, but in an unexplored sea of conflicting and inextricable feelings. "You cannot let go like this. You cannot let the dark take over… "

With one last look full of compassion, the man quietly withdrew from the tent, letting you face your emotions in the silence and privacy you needed. Knowing that the path to healing will take time.

For hours you found yourself alone in the hut, not knowing that Neteyam had forbidden anyone to disturb your solitude, still keeping you under surveillance from outside. The Tsahìk’s hut was comfortable, the atmosphere that enveloped the tent was warm and full of positivity, in which the smell of herbs mixed with that of the skin of the tent

You sat on the floor, on the soft carpet, with your legs crossed and your gaze lost in the void. The light of day burst in creating small shadows that seemed to reflect the storm that was stirring in you. Your hands clasped softly around your knees, the contact with your now rough skin offered you an anchor point in reality while the chaos of your emotions threatened to drag you down again into the abyss. The memories of your attempted act tormented you, making you relive the darkness that you had tried so hard to escape. You wondered how you got to that point, how you got so overwhelmed by the pain that you wished it was over.

As you watched the tent in silence, you thought back to the words that the one who saved you had addressed to you, words full of understanding and hope. His voice rang in your mind, like a lighthouse in the night, trying to guide you to a way out of that maze of despair.

"if you really don’t have anyone, then let me be your people, introduce you to mine and make them yours. I will be your friend, your sister, your family and a companion to cry on if it is necessary. But I won’t let you disappear" , "You cannot let go like this. You cannot let the dark take over… "

His words continued to echo in the walls of your mind, the urge to reject them was strong, but at the same time you knew there was a glimmer of truth in those words. A lonely tear turned your face unmoved, happy to be alone so that no one would see you cry again. The shadow of anger and resentment persisted in you as you erased his eyes and his face from your mind, attaching these words to him, that they were inevitably intertwining with a faint flame of hope ched in his little he had fed with a brief conversation.

You sighed deeply as you leaned your head on the pulled fabric of the curtain, trying to fend off that tornado of overwhelming feelings that the boy had sown in you. You decided to give yourself the opportunity to face your demons, but without being helped, you would have defeated your demons just so you could leave in peace.

The words of the Omatikaya boy could not erase your past and your pain, but perhaps they had unconsciously opened a window into the future, a future you thought you did not deserve and where hope and joy could still shine.

Suns began to fall on the horizon, painting the sky with pinkish and purple shades. The village was animated outside the tent in view of the eclipse, while families joyfully gathered in the center of the village to share the dinner as usual.

A voice crept into the solitude of the place where you were still sitting, drawing your attention with a calm yet concerned tone. "Can I come in?"

His words were warm, but you stiffened feeling cold chills hitting your back. You still felt the weight of his actions, the way your will had been ignored to save you from something you didn’t want to be saved from.

"No, leave me alone." You spit bitterly, cold and resolute, closing yourself in once again, hoping to be heard at least this time.

He hesitated for a moment, but then entered the tent with caution, trying not to disturb the dark and tense atmosphere that surrounded you. The dim light of the natural lamps began to light up gradually due to bioluminescence, casting some soft shadows on the skin walls.

"I thought you might be hungry…" he whispered softly and patiently. He was holding a small basket of food that the village had prepared for dinner. The inviting scent of food spread in the air, making you strive to ignore it, keeping your eyes away.

"I’m not hungry. You can leave now." Hissing as your stomach seemed to close to his concern and kindness. He laid the basket on the ground, cautiously approaching you.

"You have to feed your body. Please, just take something," he insisted as he stretched your food, keeping his distance.

You looked up at him, growling, the anger still present in your vitreous gaze. "Don’t you understand?" Your face was stiff, with a still palpable hostility. You squeezed on yourself, creating an invisible barrier between you two. "I don’t want your food." hissing with a grudge voice. "I don’t want anything from you."

The Na'vi’s gaze softened further, though he felt some remorse against his golden irises.

"I know it may seem difficult to accept my help, again… but please don’t deny yourself what you need because of me" he says with a tender voice, trying to make you understand that his gesture is motivated by concern and care. "Eating is a way to take care of your body and start healing. Please try to accept, do it for yourself." his firm, yet compassionate voice, hoping to find your consent.

You stared at the food in front of you, struggling with your inner resistance. After a moment of hesitation, a small sigh escapes from your lips.

You reached the food with your fingers trembling and swiped a piece of teylu towards your mouth. The first bite was reluctant, but slowly the taste and feeling of nourishment run through your mouth like a waterfall. The man’s sweet eyes lingered over you, smiling softly when he saw that you were finally letting him in somehow.

You gave him an indecipherable look as you chewed, with an ounce of admiration mingling with your strong resentment. Perhaps a small, hidden part of you wished for him to stay, believing that someone could still see past your wound.

While dinner was now taking place in the center of the village, you two remained in the tent, enveloped by the tension and uncertainty of the moment. He stood quietly watching you eat, making sure you really fed well.

"You must go, your village is dining…" whistling as you looked away from him, grabbing a yovo fruit, feeling the sweetness pinch your taste buds while the aromatic juice made you close your eyes nostalgically.

"I can eat later. now it is important that you eat" He answered gently, while yet another smile painted on his face, warming your heart in some strange way. "However, you can call me Neteyam" he whispered, offering his name to your ears.

You looked up, and your eyes seemed slightly more present. The sound of his name strangely resonated in your mind, sweet and melodious, like a caress to your ears.

"Ne-te-yam…Neteyam" you repeated in a low voice, experiencing the sweetness of the syllables of his name on your tongue.

Neteyam smiled again, spontaneously, as a light of joy lit in his eyes as you repeated his name without disgust or hostility. He had decided to share his name in the hope that it might be the first thread that could join you.

"Yes, Neteyam." he repeated, looking at how you seemed to want to engrave that name in your memory. His name gave you a strange feeling of calm.

You looked away from him, looking at the food you were tinkering with between your exiled fingers. "Thank you, Neteyam…" You whispered with a thread of voice and then filled your mouth again. You didn’t specify what you were grateful to Neteyam, but he warmed his heart to hear your words, feeling more relaxed in his presence.

The silence enveloped the tent, only the sound of your breaths and the rustling of the leaves outside could break the stillness. Neteyam put a hand on your head, stroking the braids, a tender contact that served to remind you that you were no longer alone, that there was someone who cared for you.

Your eyes crossed Neteyam’s honeyed eyes, needing no further words at that time. Your expressions, your looks, say enough, and time seemed to slow down in the quiet.

The eclipse gave way to the night, and the air outside the tent was filled with deep serenity. The village could now be heard again in the distance, and the sounds of their merriment were present, as the forest began to fall asleep with the calls of nocturnal animals.

"y/n" you revealed at your turn, breaking the silence. Your voice finally slightly warm, as if your name was still something dear to you. " My name is Y/n.." Your voice floated like a melody, a sound that intertwined with serenade night nature.

Neteyam was struck by the beauty of your name, not expecting you to return the presentation as he looked at you with eyes shining with something you couldn’t recognize.

"Y/n…" Neteyam whispered, echoing your name reverently. His face glowed with a new light, as if the name had unleashed something magical inside him. "I’m glad to meet you, Y/n" replied softly with a smile. "You have a very nice name" His voice is a gentle symphony that intertwined with the melody of the night outside the tent.

You nodded without smiling back. The wind blew lukewarm air outside the tent, bringing with it a slight air of unease. The interior of the marui was enveloped in a peaceful atmosphere, while you and Neteyam exchanged silent glances of understanding, needing no words while you finished dining.

However, the serenity and harmony that was being created between you was shattered by the entrance of a young woman whom you recognized as Tsakarem because of the clothing, hair and jewelry typical of her role. The figure with the regal bearing and the face twisted by annoyance made her appearance, as she approached with disgusted step by your figure.

Her eyes were full of annoyance, anger and perhaps jealousy as she watched the scene in front of her. She immediately noticed you, staring at you with apprehension and surprise, if not with much disgust and superiority.

"Look at that! The tspangoe is awake." Her voice was sharp and cold as a blade, as she spoke her words sarcastically. Her attitude was full of contempt, as if she considered you little more than a nuisance, an intruder in her territory who robbed her of precious time with her partner.

"Tsu'Län." He called her in cold voice, annoyed at her turning to you with so little respect. He stood up to face the woman with a nervous and tense expression.

"What, ma yawentu? I’m not saying anything wrong. I just expressed my surprise that the Tspangoe is alive and awake." She raised an eyebrow as she spoke in a feigned, challenging tone, waiting for Neteyam’s reaction.

"Don’t call her like that." Neteyam’s voice was loud and firm, as he was quietly devouring his partner. "Y/N. Her name is Y/n and now that you know it, use her name to address her."

Tsu'Län was a woman of a charming beauty and an enviable bearing, with long braids covered with feathers and jewels identifying the title, but there was a cold and petty aura surrounding her. Her hard eyes shook you, emitting an obvious contempt followed by a grimace.

"Ah, so you named your Tspangoe. Interesting. Very nice of you to welcome her among us after you…found her in the forest" Your face shrank in disgust at her words and then growl at her, receiving the same reaction. It disgusted you that she was judging you without even knowing you. Even though you knew you were a 'tspangoe', you didn’t think anyone would ever tell you that to your face with so little delicacy.

"It’s her name, I didn’t give it to her. Don’t reduce her to a definition, this isn’t you." Neteyam’s tone made clear his intent to come to her senses and take back the words she had just spoken to you.

Tsu'Län burst into a cold, cynical laugh as she bent over with laughter and carried a hand to touch her lips, amused by the words of her partner. "I don’t see why we should worry about a Tsapngoe" she said with contempt and then looked down on you "Exactly since when we started helping these… people. Ma Yawnetu, I will always love you but I don’t expect to share your affection with this… thing."

Your heart tightened within seconds when your mind was finally enlightened, realizing that the two of them were paired and that this meant that Neteyam was the son of the Olo'eyktan and next in the line of succession. You knew the Olo'eyktan of the Omatikaya clan because he was the legendary Toruk Makto, so the weight of what you were experiencing became even heavier.

You raised your head, looking at her as if her words hadn’t even touched you, looking at her in the same way she did at you. You wouldn’t let some random Na'vi knock you down and humiliate you like this.

"I don’t want to take your 'Yawnetu', nor rob you of his… affection?" you answered firmly, mocking her subtly for her insecurity. "I didn’t ask to be involved in this situation, but I’m only here because Neteyam chose to save me. It was his choice to bring me here, not me. So you can get out of this tent and bring him if you wish. But don’t disrespect me, Tsu'Län" Your tone full of superiority and dignity, so much so that it made the young woman grit her teeth.

Neteyam tried to intervene again, trying to reach an agreement between the two of you, but it was clear that Reyin'al is not going to listen reasons and that you would not bend your head. Two unstoppable furies, she’s determined to enforce her claim to Neteyam and humiliate you, and you’re determined to put her back where she belongs.

"Tsu'Län, stop it. Even if you do not like her presence here, she remains a Na'vi and as such deserves respect and understanding" He stood before her, watching her soured because of her behavior, starting to lose patience.

The Tsakarem laughed again, a sharp laugh full of contempt. "Respect and understanding? For a na'vi who tried to take her own life? I don’t think so. The Tspangoe lose all rights when they become such and you know it better than I do" Her gaze fixed on you with disgust. She seemed to enjoy every word she hurled at you, trying to erode your confidence and confidence, abnormal traits for Tspangoes.

"Keep your hopes up, little tspangoe. Sooner or later you will return to the abyss from which you came out, and Neteyam will understand how wrong he was to save you." She said as she approached you, leaning on your person, amused by your look upset by his words.

You instinctively took her from the braids, making her fall to the ground while you watched her with a newfound flame, but of anger. You could have overlooked the slight insults, but even you knew that enough was enough.

Your fingers tightened the braids, tearing off some of the feathers that adorned her hair, as she gasped out of pain, hitting your arm to free herself from the vise.Neteyam tried to get closer but stopped when he saw your burning look on her.

"Listen carefully. I don’t know who has spoiled you to the point where you believe that you can treat people the way you want just because of your status. But do not believe for a second that you can address me in these tones, of your title I can not care less. A Tsakarem lives under the guidance of Eywa more than anyone other than Tsahìk, try to live up to your title, nothing is due to you. You respect me, and I will try not to make you cry all the tears that you never shed, okay?" you hissed at her ear, before you let go of your grip and make her fall at Neteyam’s feet, that in the while he had watched the scene in silence. He knew your reaction had been a little excessive, but only Eywa knew how much he wanted to put her in her place like that when she was being a bitch.

One of the few privileges of having reached the point of reaching the bottom, is that empathy was your master and only guide, so you could not care about things like the status and moral codes of the Na'vi.

Tsu'Län stood back as she watched as some of her feathers remained in your hand and growled at you, massaging her sore braids.

"Remember, Tspangoe, this is my territory." her impatient and threatening voice made you smile internally, amused by the fact that she still tried to frighten you. You shrugged and then growled at her and pushed her back, annoyed, before she went out and left.

Neteyam looked back at you, not realizing that you had this strong spirit under that dark veil that shrouded you. You lay down on the carpet, giving your back to the boy before you snort. "You go too, now."

Within minutes, that woman had managed to ruin the little thread that Neteyam had managed to wrap around you, to get you close to him. And now he seemed to have returned to the starting point, making him frustrated and angry with his companion who had been petty and disrespectful.

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Notes:

I hope you enjoyed this chapter, things between Y/n and Neteyam are still sour but you can see the soft spot of Y/n.

While I would like to hug Neteyam because he is so cute, please. So boyfriend coded

- Mel

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[starshipsofstarlord]

Rekindled Dawn

Nothing more than a relaxed morning with your fiancé Peter Hale - 0.8k

Warnings - extreme fluff, brief mention of The Hale fire, engagement

main masterlist peter hale masterlist more teen wolf

There was something so tranquil about watching you be peaceful in your slumber, the once alpha felt content whilst he laid in the large bed tightly beside you. Your legs were entangled with his own, the heat his body radiated keeping you warm beneath the egyptian cotton of which laid over you from below your toes to the top of your relaxed shoulder.

This was it; all he had ever wanted. Peter Hale was finally in control of his own life, and not by rash and violent means, but rather instead the best things in his life were conducted by his own happiness.

You knew all that the man had done in his past, and unlike others it hadn’t scared you away, you were still very much by his side, with your head resting upon his broad and bare chest, at peace whilst you slept. He had asked you to marry him, a few nights prior, and the large diamond on your engagement finger reminded him of your answer.

He was internally shocked that you had agreed to be his fiancé, although he hadn’t let it show as his troublesome reaction would no doubt ruin his usual cocky and arrogant demeanour. But he was far more than glad, he was ecstatic and over the full moon when it came to the bouts that he saw in his future with you.

It was difficult even with his smooth and enhanced abilities to not awaken you whence he slipped out from the bed, though he felt relief when he saw your eyes were still closed and he heard your heart beat remaining steady as you experienced an otherworldly reality that you viewed from beneath your tightly shut lids.

Peter adjourned his path to the small yet homely kitchen in the apartment that he had long ago convinced you to move into with him, grasping a pan to place upon the top of the oven before he made way to the fridge and grasped multiple items that you both could devour together when he was done cooking.

It was one thing of many that people did not know of Peter, he loved cooking, especially for you. It was the only time he felt comfortable sparking a fire within his own home, after having lost most of his family in the infamous Hale fire. But this, it was harmless and thoughtful and therapeutic knowing that it was one way of many that he wished to take care of you.

He fired up the ingredients in the pan, slicking it with a spat of olive oil to temper up the marination of store bought products, humming softly to himself as he became lost in the task at hand. All of his attention was focused on brewing a breakfast that was fit for his queen, that was until his ears attuned to the gentle rustle of sheets.

Then there was soft foot falls from the bed to the hall, until they finally landed behind him, a soothing palm running down the back of his shirt, warming a smile onto his face. “Good morning my beautiful lady.” He allowed the heat to consume the food on its own as he turned to face you, cradling your gracefully warm face within his rough and work weathered hands.

“Morning to you my big bad wolf.” You joked at him, falling into his chest that was a never ending abyss of safety and comfort. He pressed a fine and firm kiss onto your hairline, inhaling the honey like scent of your shampoo, before collapsing his lips atop of yours, not needing to take a breath as you were all the fresh air that he needed.

“Are you ready for breakfast my Mrs Hale?” He enquired lovingly, pulling back to see the revelling nod you gave to him which made a chuckle burst from deep within his chest. “And you’re already answering to my last name.” He teased you, pulling heat to form in your face from your normal reaction.

“Well it is to be our last name, Mr Hale.” He pressed another kiss upon your plush lips before continuing with preparing the food, turning the strips of protein and fat over to roast on its other side before slipping it from pan to plate. Ghostly steam lightly trailed over the solid meal, before he dragged both you and the tray of coffees and food to the small yet cosy dining table, pulling your seat out for you before he took the opposing seat for himself.

“I love you Y/N Hale.” He spoke before cutting into his bacon with a knife and fork, enjoying every moment of normalcy that he shared with you. If he hadn’t been born with wolfish instincts, then maybe he could have had all of this with you much sooner. But he wouldn’t change a thing.

Everything was perfect as you looked at him without an ounce of hatred in your Y/E/C eyes, there was no fear, no resistance, he lulled his mind in your chemo signals and for once in his life only felt a ray of nothing but love.

[sleeplesslionheart]

The Haunting of Bly Manor as Allegory: Self-Sacrifice, Grief, and Queer Representation

As always, I am extremely late with my fandom infatuations—this time, I’m about three years late getting smitten with Dani and Jamie from The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Because of my lateness, I’ll confess from the start that I’m largely unfamiliar with the fandom’s output: whether fanfiction, interpretations, analyses, discourse, what have you. I’ve dabbled around a bit, but haven’t seen anything near the extent of the discussions that may or may not have happened in the wake of the show’s release, so I apologize if I’m re-treading already well-trod ground or otherwise making observations that’ve already been made. Even so, I’m completely stuck on Dani/Jamie right now and have some thoughts that I want to compose and work through.

This analysis concerns the show’s concluding episode in particular, so please be aware that it contains heavy, detailed spoilers for the ending, as well as the show in its entirety. Additionally, as a major trigger warning: this essay contains explicit references to suicide and suicidal ideation, so please tread cautiously. (These are triggers for me, and I did, in fact, manage to trigger myself while writing this—but this was also very therapeutic to write, so those triggering moments wound up also being some healing opportunities for me. But definitely take care of yourself while reading this, okay?).

After finishing Bly and necessarily being destroyed by the ending, staying up until 2:00 a.m. crying, re-watching scenes on Youtube, so on and so forth, I came away from the show (as others have before me) feeling like its ending functioned fairly well as an allegory for loving and being in a romantic partnership with someone who suffers from severe mental illness, grief, and trauma.

Without going too deeply into my own personal backstory, I want to provide some opening context, which I think will help to show why this interpretation matters to me and how I’m making sense of it.

Like many of Bly’s characters, I’ve experienced catastrophic grief and loss in my own life. A few years ago, my brother died in some horrific circumstances (which you can probably guess at if you read between the lines here), leaving me traumatized and with severe problems with my mental health. When it happened, I was engaged to a man (it was back when I thought I was straight (lol), so I’ve also found Dani’s comphet backstory to be incredibly relatable…but more on this later) who quickly tired of my grieving. Just a few months after my brother’s death, my then-fiancé started saying things like “I wish you’d just go back to normal, the way you were” and “I’ve gotten back on-track and am just waiting for you to get back on-track with me,” apparently without any understanding that my old “normal” was completely gone and was never coming back. He saw my panic attacks as threatening and unreasonable, often resorting to yelling at me to stop instead of trying to comfort me. He complained that he felt like I hadn’t reciprocated the care that he’d provided me in the immediate aftermath of my brother’s loss, and that he needed me to set aside my grief (and “heal from it”) so that he could be the center of my attention. Although this was not the sole cause, all of it laid the groundwork for our eventual breakup. It was as though my trauma and mourning had ruined the innocent happiness of his own life, and he didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Given this, I was powerfully struck by the ways that Jamie handles Dani’s trauma: accepting and supporting her, never shaming her or diminishing her pain.

Early in the show—in their first true interaction with one another, in fact—Jamie finds Dani in the throes of a panic attack. She responds to this with no judgment; instead, she validates Dani’s experiences. To put Dani at ease, she first jokes about her own “endless well of deep, inconsolable tears,” before then offering more serious words of encouragement about how well Dani is dealing with the circumstances at Bly. Later, when Dani confesses to seeing apparitions of Peter and Edmund, Jamie doesn’t pathologize this, doubt it, or demean it, but accepts it with a sincere question about whether Dani’s ex-fiancé is with them at that moment—followed by another effort to comfort Dani with some joking (this time, a light-hearted threat at Edmund to back off) and more affirmations of Dani’s strength in the face of it all.

All of this isn’t to say, however, that Dani’s grief-driven behaviors don’t also hurt Jamie (or, more generally, that grieving folks don’t also do things that hurt their loved ones). When Dani recoils from their first kiss because of another guilt-inspired vision of Eddie, Jamie is clearly hurt and disappointed; still, Jamie doesn’t hold this against Dani, as she instead tries to take responsibility for it herself. A week later, though, Jamie strongly indicates that she needed that time to be alone in the aftermath and that she is wary that Dani’s pattern of withdrawing from her every time they start to get closer will continue to happen. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that this contributes to Dani’s recognition that she’s been allowing her guilt about Eddie’s death to become all-consuming, preventing her from acting on her own desires to be with Jamie. That recognition, in turn, leads Dani to decide to move through her grief and beyond her guilt. Once she’s alone later in the evening after that first kiss, Dani casts Eddie’s glasses into the bonfire’s lingering embers; she faces off with his specter for a final time, and after burning away his shadow, her visions of him finally cease. When she and Jamie reunite during their 6:00 a.m. terrible coffee visit, Dani acknowledges that the way that she and Jamie left things was “wrong,” and she actively tries to take steps to “do something right” by inviting Jamie out for a drink at the village pub…which, of course, just so happens to be right below Jamie’s flat. (Victoria Pedretti’s expressions in that scene are so good).

Before we continue, though, let’s pause here a moment to consider some crucial factors in all of this. First, there is a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and simply discarding it…or being pressured by someone else to discard it. Second, there is also a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming. Keep these distinctions in mind as we go on.

Ultimately, the resolution of the show’s core supernatural conflict involves Dani inviting Viola’s ghost to inhabit her, which Viola accepts. This frees the other spirits who have been caught in Bly Manor’s “gravity well,” even as it dooms Dani to eventually be overtaken by Viola and her rage. Jamie, however, offers to stay with Dani while she waits for this “beast in the jungle” to claim her. The show’s final episode shows the two of them going on to forge a life together, opening a flower shop in a cute town in Vermont, enjoying years of domestic bliss, and later getting married (in what capacities they can—more on this soon), all while remaining acutely aware of the inevitability of Dani’s demise.

The allegorical potentials of this concluding narrative scenario are fairly flexible. It is possible, for instance, to interpret Dani’s “beast in the jungle” as chronic (and/or terminal) illness—in particular, there’re some harrowing readings that we could do in relation to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, etc.), especially if we put the final episode into conversation with the show’s earlier subplot about the death of Owen’s mother, its recurring themes of memory loss as a form of death (or, even, as something worse than death), and Jamie’s resonant remarks that she would rather be “put out of her misery” than let herself be “worn away a little bit every day.” For the purposes of this analysis, though, I’m primarily concerned with interpreting Viola’s lurking presence in Dani’s psyche as a stand-in for severe grief, trauma, and mental illness. …Because, even as we may “move through” grief and trauma, and even as we may work to heal from them, they never just go away completely—they’re always lurking around, waiting to resurface. (In fact, the final minutes of the last episode feature a conversation between older Jamie and Flora about contending with this inevitable recurrence of grief). Therapy can give us tools to negotiate and live with them, of course; but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still present in our lives. The tools that therapy provides are meant to help us manage those inevitable resurfacings in healthy ways. But they are not meant to return us to some pre-grief or pre-trauma state of “normality” or to make them magically dissipate into the ether, never to return. And, even with plenty of therapy and with healthy coping mechanisms, we can still experience significant mental health issues in the wake of catastrophic grief, loss, and trauma; therapy doesn’t totally preclude that possibility.

In light of my own experiences with personal tragedy, crumbling mental health, and the dissolution of a romantic partnership with someone who couldn’t accept the presence of grief in my life, I was immediately enamored with the ways that Jamie approaches the enduring aftereffects of Dani’s trauma during the show’s final episode. Jamie never once pressures Dani to just be “normal.” She never once issues any judgment about what Dani is experiencing. At those times when Dani’s grief and trauma do resurface—when the beast in the jungle catches up with her—Jamie is there to console her, often with the strategies that have always worked in their relationship: gentle, playful ribbing and words of affirmation. There are instances in which Dani doesn’t emote joyfulness during events that we might otherwise expect her to—consider, for instance, how somber Dani appears in the proposal scene, in contrast to Jamie’s smiles and laughter. (In the year after my brother’s death, my ex-fiancé and his family would observe that I seemed gloomy in situations that they thought should be fun and exciting. “Then why aren’t you smiling?” they’d ask, even when I tried to assure them that I was having a good time, but just couldn’t completely feel that or express it in the ways that I might’ve in the past). Dani even comments on an inability to feel that is all too reminiscent of the blunting of emotions that can happen in the wake of acute trauma: “It’s like I see you in front of me and I feel you touching me, and every day we’re living our lives, and I’m aware of that. But it’s like I don’t feel it all the way.” But throughout all of this (and in contrast to my own experiences with my ex), Jamie attempts to ground Dani without ever invalidating what she’s experiencing. When Dani tells her that she can’t feel, Jamie assures her, “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us.”

A few days after I finished the show for the first time, I gushed to a friend about how taken I was with the whole thing. Jamie was just so…not what I had experienced in my own life. I loved witnessing a representation of such a supportive and understanding partner, especially within the context of a sapphic romance. After breaking up with my own ex-fiancé, I’ve since come to terms with my sexuality and am still processing through the roles that compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia have played in my life; so Dani and Jamie’s relationship has been incredibly meaningful for me to see for so, so many reasons.

“I’m glad you found the show so relatable,” my friend told me. “But,” she cautioned, “don’t lose sight of what Dani does in that relationship.” Then, she pointed out something that I hadn’t considered at all. Although Jamie may model the possibilities of a supportive partnership, Dani’s tragic death espouses a very different and very troubling perspective: the poisonous belief that I’m inevitably going to hurt my partner with my grief and trauma, so I need to leave them before I can inflict that harm on them.

Indeed, this is a deeply engrained belief that I hold about myself. While I harbor a great deal of anger at my ex-fiancé for how he treated me, there’s also still a part of me that sincerely believes that I nearly ruined his and his family’s lives by bringing such immense devastation and darkness into it. On my bad days (which are many), I have strong convictions about this in relation to my future romantic prospects as well. How could anyone ever want to be with me? I wonder. And even if someone eventually does try to be with me, all I’ll do is ruin her life with all my trauma and sadness. I shouldn’t even want to be with anyone, because I don’t want to hurt someone else. I don’t want someone else to deal with what I’ve had to deal with. I even think about this, too, with my friends. Since my brother’s death and my breakup, I’ve gone through even more trauma, pain, grief, and loss, such that now I continue to struggle enormously with issues like anhedonia, emotional fragility, and social anxiety. I worry, consequently, that I’m just a burden on my friends. That I’m too hard to be around. That being around me, with all of my pain and perpetual misfortune, just causes my friends pain, too. That they’re better off not having to deal with me at all. I could spare them all, I think, by just letting them go, by not bothering them anymore.

I suspect that this is why I didn’t notice any issues with Dani’s behavior at the end of Bly Manor at first. Well…that and the fact that the reality of the show’s conclusion is immensely triggering for me. Probably, my attention just kind of slid past the truth of it in favor of indulging in the catharsis of a sad gay romance.

But after my friend observed this issue, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I realized, then, that I hadn’t extended the allegory out to its necessary conclusion…which is that Dani has, in effect, committed suicide in order to—or so she believes, at least—protect Jamie from her. This is the case regardless of whether we keep Viola’s ghost in the mix as an actual, tangible, existing threat within the show’s diegesis or as a figurative symbol of the ways that other forces can “haunt” us to the point of our own self-destruction. If the former, then Dani’s suicide (or the more gentle and elusive description that I’ve seen: her act of “giving herself to the lake”) is to prevent Viola’s ghost from ever harming Jamie. But if the latter, if we continue doing the work of allegorical readings, then it’s possible to interpret Bly’s conclusion as the tragedy of Dani ultimately succumbing to her mental illness and suicidal ideation.

The problems with this allegory’s import really start cropping up, however, when we consider the ways that the show valorizes Dani’s actions as an expression of ultimate, self-sacrificing love—a valorization that Bly accomplishes, in particular, through its sustained contrasting of love and possession.

The Implications of Idealizing Self-Sacrifice as True Love

During a pivotal conversation in one of the show’s early episodes, Dani and Jamie discuss the “wrong kind of love” that existed between Rebecca Jessel and Peter Quint. Jamie remarks on how she “understands why so many people mix up love and possession,” thereby characterizing Rebecca and Peter’s romance as a matter of possession—as well as hinting, perhaps, that Jamie herself has had experiences with this in her own past. After considering for a moment, Dani agrees: “People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. […] I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really, love and ownership.” We can already tell from this scene that Dani and Jamie are, themselves, heading towards a burgeoning romance—and that this contrast between love and possession (and their self-awareness of it) is going to become a defining feature of that romance.

Indeed, the show takes great pains to emphasize the genuine love that exists between Dani and Jamie against the damaging drive for possession enacted by characters like Peter (who consistently manipulates Rebecca and kills her to keep her ghost with him) and Viola (who has killed numerous people and trapped their souls at Bly over the centuries in a long since forgotten effort to reclaim her life with her husband and daughter from Perdita, her murderously jealous sister). These contrasts take multiple forms and emerge from multiple angles, all to establish that Dani and Jamie’s love is uniquely safe, caring, healing, mutually supportive, and built on a foundation of prevailing concern for the other’s wellbeing. Some of these contrasts are subtle and understated. Consider, for instance, how Hannah observes that Rebecca looks like she hasn’t slept in days because of the turmoil of her entanglements with Peter, whereas Jamie’s narration describes how Dani gets the best sleep of her life during the first night that she and Jamie spend together. Note, too, the editing work in Episode 6 that fades in and out between the memories of the destructive ramifications of Henry and Charlotte’s affair and the scenes of tender progression in Dani and Jamie’s romance. Other contrasts, though, are far more overt. Of course, one of the most blatant examples (and most pertinent to this analysis) is the very fact that the ghosts of Viola, Peter, and Rebecca are striving to reclaim the people they love and the lives that they’ve lost by literally possessing the bodies and existences of the living.

The role of consent is an important factor in these ghostly possessions and serves as a further contrast with Dani and Jamie’s relationship. Peter and Rebecca frequently possess Miles and Flora without their consent—at times, even, when the children explicitly tell them to stop or, at the very least, to provide them with warnings beforehand. While inhabiting the children, Peter and Rebecca go on to harm them and put them at risk (e.g. Peter smokes cigarettes while in Miles’s body; Rebecca leaves Flora alone and unconscious on the grounds outside the manor) and to commit acts of violence against others (e.g. Peter pushes Hannah into the well, killing her; Peter and Rebecca together attack Dani and restrain her). The “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” conceit—with which living people can invite Bly’s ghosts to possess them, the mechanism by which Dani breaks the curse of Bly’s gravity well—is a case of dubious consent at best and abusive, violent control at worst. (“I didn’t agree,” Rebecca says after Peter leaves her body, releasing his “invited” possession of her at the very moment that the lake’s waters start to fill her lungs).

Against these selfish possessions and wrong kinds of love, Jamie and Dani’s love is defined by their selfless refusal to possess one another. A key characteristic of their courtship involves them expressing vulnerability in ways that invite the other to make their own decisions about whether to accept and how to proceed (or not proceed). As we discussed earlier, Dani and Jamie’s first kiss happens after Dani opens up about her guilt surrounding her ex-fiancé’s death. Pausing that kiss, Jamie checks, “You sure?” and only continues after Dani answers with a spoken yes. (Let’s also take this moment to appreciate Amelia Eve’s excellent, whispered “Thank fuck,” that isn’t included in Netflix’s subtitles). Even so, Dani frantically breaks away from her just moments later. But Jamie accepts this and doesn’t push Dani to continue, believing, in fact, that Dani has withdrawn precisely because Jamie has pushed too much already. A week later, Dani takes the initiative to advance their budding romance by inviting Jamie out for a drink—which Jamie accepts by, instead, taking Dani to see her blooming moonflowers that very evening. There, in her own moment of vulnerability, Jamie shares her heart-wrenching and tumultuous backstory with Dani in order to “skip to the end” and spare Dani the effort of getting to know her. By openly sharing these difficult details about herself, Jamie evidently intends to provide Dani with information that would help her decide for herself whether she wants to continue their relationship or not.

Their shared refusal to possess reaches its ultimate culmination in that moment, all those years later, when Dani discovers just how close she’s come to strangling Jamie—and then leaves their home to travel all the way back to Bly and drown herself in the lake because she could “not risk her most important thing, her most important person.” Upon waking to find that Dani has left, Jamie immediately sets off to follow her back to Bly. And in an absolutely heartbreaking, beautiful scene, we see Jamie attempting the “you, me, us,” invitation, desperate for Dani to possess her, for Dani to take Jamie with her. (Y’all, I know I’m critiquing this scene right now, but I also fuckin’ love it, okay? Ugh. The sight of Jamie screaming into the water and helplessly grasping for Dani is gonna stay with me forever. brb while I go cry about it again). Dani, of course, refuses this plea. Because “Dani wouldn’t. Dani would never.” Further emphasizing the nobility of Dani’s actions, Jamie’s narration also reveals that Dani’s self-sacrificial death has not only spared Jamie alone, but has also enabled Dani to take the place of the Lady of the Lake and thereby ensure that no one else can be taken and possessed by Viola’s gravity well ever again.

And so we have the show’s ennoblement of Dani’s magnanimous self-sacrifice. By inviting Viola to possess her, drowning herself to keep from harming Jamie, and then refusing to possess Jamie or anyone else, Dani has effectively saved everyone: the children, the restive souls that have been trapped at Bly, anyone else who may ever come to Bly in the future, and the woman she loves most. Dani has also, then, broken the perpetuation of Bly’s cycles of possession and trauma with her selfless expression of love for Jamie.

The unfortunate effect of all of this is that, quite without meaning to (I think? I hope—), The Haunting of Bly Manor ends up stumbling headlong into a validation of suicide as a selfless act of true love, as a force of protection and salvation.

So, before we proceed, I just want to take this moment to say—definitively, emphatically, as someone who has survived and experienced firsthand the ineffably catastrophic consequences of suicide—that suicide is nothing remotely resembling a selfless “refusal to possess” or an act of love. I’m not going to harp extensively on this, though, because I’d rather not trigger myself for a second time (so far, lol) while writing this essay. Just take my fuckin’ word for it. And before anybody tries to hit me with some excuse like “But Squall, it isn’t that the show is valorizing suicide, it’s that Dani is literally protecting Jamie from Viola,” please consider that I’ve already discussed how the show’s depiction of this lent itself to my own noxious beliefs that “all I do is harm other people with my grief, so maybe I should stop talking to my friends so that they don’t have to deal with me anymore.” Please consider what these narrative details and their allegorical import might tell people who are struggling with their mental health—even if not with suicidal ideation, then with the notion that they should self-sacrificially remove themselves from relationships for the sake of sparing loved ones from (assumed) harm.

Okay, that said, now let’s proceed…‘cause I’ve got even more to say, ‘cause the more I mulled over these details, the more I also came to realize that Dani’s self-sacrificial death in Bly’s conclusion also has the unfortunate effect of undermining some of its other (attempted) themes and its queer representation.

What Bly Manor Tries (and Fails) to Say about Grief and Acceptance

Let’s start by jumping back to a theme we’ve already addressed briefly: moving through one’s grief.

The Haunting of Bly Manor does, in fact, have a lot to say about this. Or…it wants to, more like. On the whole, it seems like it’s trying really hard to give us a cautionary tale about the destructive effects of unprocessed grief and the misplaced guilt that we can wind up carrying around when someone we love dies. The show spends a whole lot of time preaching about how important it is that we learn to accept our losses without allowing them to totally consume us—or without lingering around in denial about them (gettin’ some Kübler-Ross in here, y’all). Sadly, though, it does kind of a half-assed job of it…despite the fact that this is a major recurring theme and a component of the characterizations and storylines of, like, most of its characters. In fact, this fundamentally Kübler-Rossian understanding of what it means to move through grief and to accept loss and mortality appears to be the show’s guiding framework. During his rehearsal dinner speech in the first episode, Owen proclaims that, “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them,” with such eerie resonance—as the camera stays set on Jamie’s unwavering gaze—that we know that what we’re about to experience is a story about accepting the inevitable losses of the people we love.

Bly Manor is chock full of characters who’re stuck in earlier stages of grief but aren’t really moving along to reach that acceptance stage. I mean, the whole cause of the main supernatural haunting is that Viola so ferociously refuses to accept her death and move on from her rage (brought about by Perdita’s resentment) that she spends centuries strangling whoever she comes across, which then effectively traps them there with her. And the other antagonistic ghostly forces, Rebecca and Peter, also obviously suck at accepting their own deaths, given that they actually believe that possessing two children is a perfectly fine (and splendid) way for them to grasp at some semblance of life again. (Actually…the more that I’ve thought about this, the more that I think each of the pre-acceptance stages of grief in Kübler-Ross’s model may even have a corresponding character to represent it: Hannah is denial; Viola is anger; Peter and Rebecca are bargaining; Henry is depression. Just a little something to chew on).

But let’s talk more at-length about this theme in relation to two characters we haven’t focused on yet: Hannah and Henry. For Hannah, this theme shows up in her struggles to accept that her husband, Sam, has left her (Charlotte wryly burns candles in the chapel as though marking his passing, while Hannah seems to be holding out hope that he might return) and in her persistent denial that Peter-as-Miles has killed her. As a ghost, she determinedly continues going about her daily life and chores even as she’s progressively losing her grip on reality. Henry, meanwhile, won’t issue official notifications of Dominic’s death and continues to collect his mail because doing otherwise would mean admitting to the true finality of Dominic’s loss. At the same time, he is so, completely consumed by his guilt about the role that he believes he played in Charlotte and Dominic’s deaths that he’s haunting himself with an evil alter-ego. His overriding guilt and despair also result in his refusal to be more present in Miles and Flora’s lives—even with the knowledge that Flora is actually his daughter.

In the end, both Hannah and Henry reach some critical moments of acceptance. But, honestly, the show doesn’t do a great job of bringing home this theme of move through your grief with either of them…or with anybody else, really. Peter basically winds up bullying Hannah into recognizing that her broken body is still at the bottom of the well—and then she accepts her own death right in time to make a completely abortive attempt at rescuing Dani and Flora. Henry finally has a preternatural Bad Feeling about things (something about a phone being disconnected? whose phone? Bly’s phone? his phone? I don’t understand), snaps to attention, and rushes to Bly right in time to make an equally abortive rescue attempt that leaves him incapacitated so that his not-quite-ghost can hang out with Hannah long enough to find out that she’s dead. But at least he decides to be an attentive uncle/dad to Miles and Flora after that, I guess. Otherwise, Hannah and Henry get handwaved away pretty quickly before we can really witness what their acceptance means for them in any meaningful detail. (I blame this on some sloppy writing and the way-too-long, all-about-Viola eighth episode. And, on that note, what about the “acceptances” of Rebecca, Peter, and Viola there at the end? Rebecca does get an interesting moment of acceptance—of a sort—with her offer to possess Flora in order to experience Flora’s imminent drowning for her, thereby sparing the child by tucking her in a happy memory. Peter just…disappears at the end with some way-too-late words of apology. Viola’s “acceptance,” however, is tricky…What she accepts is Dani’s invitation to inhabit her. More on this later).

Hannah and Henry’s stories appear to be part of the show’s efforts to warn us about the ways that unprocessed, all-consuming grief can cause us to miss opportunities to have meaningful relationships with others. Hannah doesn’t just miss her chance to be with Owen because…well, she’s dead, but also because of her unwillingness to move on from Sam beforehand. Her denial about her own death, in turn, prevents her from taking the opportunity as a ghost to tell Owen that she loves him. Henry, at least, does figure out that he’s about to lose his chance to be a caring parental figure to his daughter and nephew—but just barely. It takes the near-deaths of him and the children to finally prompt that realization.

Of the cast, Dani gets the most thorough and intentional development of this move through your grief theme. And, importantly, she learns this lesson in time to cultivate a meaningful relationship that she could’ve easily missed out on otherwise. As we’ve already discussed, a critical part of Dani’s character arc involves her realization that she has to directly confront Edmund’s death and start absolving herself of her guilt in order to open up the possibility of a romantic relationship with Jamie. In Episode 4, Jamie’s narration suggests that Dani has had a habit of putting off such difficult processes (whether in regards to moving through her grief, breaking off her engagement to Edmund, or coming to terms with her sexuality), as she’s been constantly deferring to “another night, another time for years and years.” Indeed, the show’s early episodes are largely devoted to showing the consequences of Dani’s deferrals and avoidances. From the very beginning, we see just how intrusively Dani’s unresolved guilt is impacting her daily life and functioning. She covers up mirrors to try to prevent herself from encountering Edmund’s haunting visage, yet still spots him in the reflections of windows and polished surfaces. Panic attacks seem to be regular occurrences for her, sparked by reminders of him. And all of this only gets worse and more disruptive as Dani starts acting on her attraction to Jamie.

It's only after Dani decides to begin moving through her grief and guilt that she’s able to start becoming emotionally and physically intimate with Jamie. And the major turning point for this comes during a scene that features a direct, explicit discussion of the importance of accepting (and even embracing) mortality.

That’s right—it’s time to talk about the moonflower scene.

In a very “I am extremely fed up with people not being able to deal with my traumatic past, so I’m going to tell you about all of the shit that I’ve been through so that you can go ahead and decide whether you want to bolt right now instead of just dropping me later on” move (which…legit, Jamie—I feel that), Jamie sits Dani down at her moonflower patch to give her the full rundown of her own personal backstory and worldview. Her monologue evinces both a profound cynicism and a profound valuation of human life…all of which is also suggestive, to me at least, of a traumatized person who at once desperately wishes for intimate connection, but who’s also been burned way too many times (something with which I am wholly unfamiliar, lol). She characterizes people as “exhaustive effort with very little to show for it,” only to go on to wax poetic about how human mortality is as beautiful as the ephemeral buds of a moonflower. This is, in essence, Jamie’s sorta convoluted way of articulating that whole “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them” idea.

After detailing her own past, Jamie shifts gears to suggest that she believes that cultivating a relationship with Dani—like the devoted work of growing a tropical, transient Ipomoea alba in England—might be worth the effort. And as part of this cultivation work, Jamie then acknowledges Dani’s struggles with her guilt, while also firmly encouraging her to move through it by accepting the beauty of mortality:  

“I know you’re carrying this guilt around, but I also know that you don’t decide who lives and who doesn’t. I’m sorry Dani, but you don’t. Humans are organic. It’s a fact. We’re meant to die. It’s natural…beautiful. […] We leave more life behind to take our place. Like this moonflower. It’s where all its beauty lies, you know. In the mortality of the thing.”

After that, Jamie and Dani are finally able to make out unimpeded.

Frustratingly, though, Jamie’s own dealings with grief, loss, and trauma remain terribly understated throughout the show. Her monologue in the moonflower scene is really the most insight that we ever get. Jamie consistently comes off as better equipped to contend with life’s hardships than many of Bly’s other characters; and she is, in fact, the sole member of the cast who is confirmed to have ever had any sort of professional therapy. She regularly demonstrates a remarkable sense of empathy and emotional awareness, able to pick up on others’ needs and then support them accordingly, though often in gruff, tough-love forms. Further, there are numerous scenes in which we see Jamie bestowing incisive guidance for handling difficult situations: the moonflower scene, her advice to Rebecca about contacting Henry after Peter’s disappearance, and her suggestion to Dani that Flora needs to see a psychologist, to name just a few. As such, Jamie appears to have—or, at least, projects—a sort of unflappable groundedness that sets her apart from everyone else in the show.

Bly only suggests that Jamie’s struggles run far deeper than she lets on. There are a few times that we witness quick-tempered outbursts (usually provoked by Miles) and hints of bottled-up rage. Lest we forget, although it was Flora who first found Rebecca’s dead body floating in the water, it was Jamie who then found them both immediately thereafter. We see this happen, but we never learn anything about the impact that this must have had on her. Indeed, Jamie’s exposure to the layered, compounding grief at Bly has no doubt inflicted a great deal of pain on her, suggested by details like her memorialization of Charlotte and Dominic during the bonfire scene. If we look past her flippancy, there must be more than a few grains of truth to that endless well of deep, inconsolable tears—but Jamie never actually shares what they might be. Moreover, although the moonflower scene reveals the complex traumas of her past, we never get any follow-up or elaboration about those details or Dani’s observation of the scar on her shoulder. For the most part, Jamie’s grief goes unspoken.

There’s a case to be made that these omissions are a byproduct of narrator Jamie decentering herself in a story whose primary focus is Dani. Narrator Jamie even claims that the story she’s telling “isn’t really my story. It belongs to someone I knew” (yes, it’s a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning her identity too soon—but she also means it). And in plenty of respects, the telling of the story is, itself, Jamie’s extended expression of her grief. By engaging in this act of oral storytelling to share Dani’s sacrifice with others—especially with those who would have otherwise forgotten—Jamie is performing an important ritual of mourning her wife. Still, it’s for exactly these reasons that I think it would’ve been valuable for the show to include more about the impacts that grief, loss, and trauma had on Jamie prior to Dani’s death. Jamie’s underdevelopment on this front feels more like a disappointing oversight of the show’s writing than her narrator self’s intentional, careful withholding of information. Additionally, I think that Bly leaves Jamie’s grieving on an…odd note (though, yes, I know I’m just a curmudgeonly outlier here). Those saccharine final moments of Jamie filling up the bathtub and sleeping on a chair so that she can face the cracked doorway are a little too heavy-handedly tear-jerking for my liking. And while this, too, may be a ritual of mourning after the undoubtedly taxing effort of telling Dani’s story, it may also suggest that Jamie is demurring her own acceptance of Dani’s death. Is the hand on her shoulder really Dani’s ghost? Or is it Jamie’s own hopeful fabrication that her wife’s spirit is watching over her? (Or—to counter my own point here and suggest a different alternative—could this latter idea (i.e. the imagining of Dani’s ghost) also be another valid manner of “accepting” a loss by preserving a loved one’s presence? “Dead doesn’t mean gone,” after all. …Anyway, maybe I would be more charitable to this scene if not for the hokey, totally out-of-place song. Coulda done without that, seriously).

But let’s jump back to the moonflower scene. For Dani, this marks an important moment in the progression of her own movement through grief. In combination, her newfound readiness to contend with her guilt and her eagerness to grow closer to Jamie enable Dani to find a sense of peace that she hasn’t experienced since Eddie’s death…or maybe ever, really (hang on to this thought for this essay’s final section, too). When she and Jamie sleep together for the first time, not only does Dani actually sleep well, but she also wakes the next morning to do something that she hasn’t done to that point and won’t do again: she comfortably looks into a mirror. (One small qualification to this: Dani does look into her own reflection at the diner when she and Jamie are on their road trip; Viola doesn’t interfere then, but whether this is actually a comfortable moment is questionable). Then, shifting her gaze away from her own reflection, she sees Jamie still sleeping soundly in her bed—and smiles. It’s a fleeting moment of peace. Immediately after that, she spots Flora out the window, which throws everything back into accumulating turmoil. But that moment of peace, however fleeting, is still a powerful one.

However, Bly teases this narrative about the possibilities of finding healing in the wake of traumatic loss—especially through the cultivation of meaningful and supportive relationships with others—only to then totally pull that rug out from under Dani in the final episode.

During that final episode, we see that Dani’s shared life with Jamie has supported her in coming to terms with Viola’s lurking presence, such that “at long last, deep within the au pair’s heart, there was peace. And that peace held for years, which is more than some of us ever get.” But it’s at the exact moment that that line of narration occurs that we then begin to witness Dani’s steady, inexorable decline. Sure, we could say that Dani “accepts” Viola’s intrusions and the unavoidable eventuality that the ghost will seize control of her. But this isn’t a healthy acceptance or even a depiction of the fraught relationships that we can have with grief and trauma as we continue to process them throughout our lives. At all. Instead, it’s a distinctive, destructive sense of fatalism.

“I’m not even scared of her anymore,” Dani tells Jamie as the flooded bathtub spills around them. “I just stare at her and it's getting harder and harder to see me. Maybe I should just accept that. Maybe I should just accept that and go.” Remember way back at the beginning of this essay when I pointed out that there’s a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming? Well, by the time we reach the bathtub scene, Dani’s grief and trauma have completely overtaken her. Her “acceptance” is, thus, a fatalistic, catastrophizing determination that her trauma defines her existence, such that she believes that all she has left to do is give up her life in order to protect Jamie from her. For a less ghostly (and less suicidal ideation-y) and more real-life example to illustrate what I’m getting at here: this would be like me saying “I should just accept that I’m never going to be anything other than a traumatized mess and should stop reaching out to my friends so that I don’t keep hurting them by making them deal with what a mess I am.” If I said something like this, I suspect (hope) that you would tell me that this is not a productive acceptance, but a pernicious narrative that only hurts me and the people who care about me. Sadly, though, this kind of pernicious narrative is exactly what we get out of Bly’s ending allegory.

“But Squall,” you may be thinking, “this scene is representing how people who struggle with their mental health can actually feel. This is exactly what it can be like to have severe mental illness, even for folks who have strong support systems and healthy, meaningful relationships. And there’s value in showing that.”

And if you’re thinking that, then first of all—as I have indicated already—I am aware that this is what it can be like. Very aware. And second of all, you make a fair point, but…there are ways that the show could’ve represented this without concluding that representation with a suicide that it effectively valorizes. I’ll contend with this more in the final section, where I offer a few suggestions of other ways that Bly could’ve ended instead.

I just want to be absolutely clear that I’m not saying that I think all media portrayals of mental illness need to be hopeful or wholesome or end in “positive” ways. But what I am saying is that Bly’s conclusion offers a really fuckin’ bleak outlook on grief, trauma, and mental illness, especially when we fit that ending into the framework of the show’s other (attempted) core themes, as well as Dani’s earlier character development. It’s especially bleak to see this as someone with severe mental health issues and who has also lost a loved one to suicide—and as someone who desperately hopes that my life and worldview won’t always stay so darkly colored by my trauma.

Additionally, it’s also worth pausing here to acknowledge that fatalism is, in fact, a major theme of The Beast in the Jungle, the 1903 Henry James novella on which the ninth episode is loosely based. I confess that I’ve only read about this novella, but haven’t read the story itself. However, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of it, there appears to be a significant thematic rupture between The Beast in the Jungle and The Haunting of Bly Manor in their treatments of fatalism. In the end of the novella, its protagonist, John Marcher, comes to the realization that his fatalism has been a horrible mistake that has caused him to completely miss out on an opportunity for love that was right in front of him all along. The tragic fate to which Marcher believed that he was doomed was, in the end, his own fatalism. Dani, in contrast, never has this moment of recognition, not only because her fatalism leads to her own death, but also because the show treats her fatalism not as something that keeps her from love, but instead as leading her towards a definitive act of love.

All of this is exactly why Dani’s portrayal has become so damn concerning to me, and why I don’t believe that Bly’s allegory of “this is what it’s like to live with mental illness and/or to love (and lose) someone who is mentally ill” is somehow value-neutral—or, worse, something worth celebrating.

How Dani’s Self-Sacrifice Bears on Bly’s Queer Representation

In my dabblings around the fandom so far, I’ve seen a fair amount of deliberation about whether or not Bly Manor’s ending constitutes an example of the Bury Your Gays trope.

Honestly, though, I am super unenthused about rehashing those deliberations or splitting hairs trying to give some definitive “yes it is” or “no it isn’t” answer, so…I’m just not going to. Instead, I’m going to offer up some further observations about how Dani’s self-sacrificial death impinges on Bly’s queer representation, regardless of whether Bury Your Gays is at work here or not.

I would also like to humbly submit that the show could’ve just…not fucked around in proximity of that trope in the first place so that we wouldn’t even need to be having these conversations.

But anyway. I’m going to start this section off with a disclaimer.

Even though I’m leveling some pretty fierce critiques in this section (and across this essay), I do also want to say that I adore that The Haunting of Bly Manor and its creators gave us a narrative that centers two queer women and their romantic relationship as its driving forces and that intentionally sets out to portray the healing potentials of sapphic love as a contrast to the destructive, coercive harms found in many conventional dynamics of hegemonic heteronormativity. I don’t want to downplay that, because I’m extremely happy that this show exists, and I sincerely believe that many elements of its representation are potent and meaningful and amazing. But…I also have some reservations with this portrayal that I want to share. I critique not because I don’t love, but because I do love. I love this show a lot. I love Dani and Jamie a lot. I critique because I love and because I want more and better in future media.

So, that being said…let’s move on to talk about Dani, self-sacrifice, and compulsory heterosexuality.

Well before Dani’s ennobled death, Bly establishes self-sacrifice as a core component of her characterization. It’s hardwired into her, no doubt due to the relentless, entangled educational work of compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) and the aggressive forms of socialization that tell girls and women that their roles in life are to sacrifice themselves in order to please others and to belong to men. Indeed, Episode 4’s series of flashbacks emphasizes the interconnectedness between comphet and Dani’s beliefs that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for others’ sakes, revealing how these forces have shaped who she is and the decisions that she’s made across her life. (While we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the fact that Dani’s profession during this time period is one that—in American culture, at least—has come to rely on a distinctively feminized self-sacrificiality in order to function. Prior to becoming an au pair, Dani was a schoolteacher. In fact, in one of Episode 4’s flashbacks, Eddie’s mother points out that she appreciates Dani’s knack for identifying the kids that need her the most, but also reminds Dani that she needs to take care of herself…which suggests that Dani hadn’t been: “Save them all if you can, but put your own oxygen mask on first”).

In the flashback of her engagement party, Dani’s visible discomfort during Edmund’s speech clues us in that she wasn’t preparing to marry him because she genuinely wanted to, but because she felt like she was supposed to. The “childhood sweethearts” narrative bears down on the couple, celebrated by their friends and family, vaunted by cultural constructs that prize this life trajectory as a cherished, “happily ever after” ideal. Further illustrating the pressures to which Dani had been subject, the same scene shows Eddie’s mother, Judy O’Mara, presenting Dani with her own wedding dress and asking Dani to wear it when she marries Eddie. Despite Mrs. O’Mara’s assurances that Dani can say no, the hopes that she heaps onto Dani make abundantly clear that anything other than a yes would disappoint her. Later, another flashback shows Dani having that dress sized and fitted while her mother and Mrs. O’Mara look on and chatter about their own weddings and marriages. Their conversation is imbued with further hopes that Dani’s marriage to Edmund will improve on the mistakes that they made in their lives. Meanwhile, Dani’s attentiveness to the tailor who takes her measurements, compliments her body, and places a hand on her back strongly suggests that Dani is suppressing her attraction to women. Though brief, this scene is a weighty demonstration of the ways that the enclosures of heteronormativity constrain women into believing that their only option is to deny homosexual attraction, to forfeit their own desires in order to remain in relationships with men, and to prioritize the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the people around them above their own.

Dani followed this pathway—determined for her by everyone else except herself—until she couldn’t anymore.

During the flashback of their breakup, Dani explains to Eddie that she didn’t end their relationship sooner because she thought that even just having desires that didn’t match his and his family’s was selfish of her: “I should’ve said something sooner. […] I didn’t want to hurt you, or your mom, or your family. And then it was just what we were doing. […] I just thought I was being selfish, that I could just stick it out, and eventually I would feel how I was supposed to.” As happens to so many women, Dani was on the cusp of sacrificing her life for the sake of “sticking out” a marriage to a man, all because she so deeply believed that it was her duty to satisfy everyone’s expectations of her and that it was her responsibility to change her own feelings about that plight.

And Eddie’s response to this is telling. “Fuck you, Danielle,” he says. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Pay close attention to those last two words. Underline ‘em. Bold ‘em. Italicize ‘em.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

With those two words, Eddie indicates that he views Dani’s refusal to marry him as something that she is doing to him, a harm that she is committing against him. It is as though Dani is inflicting her will on him, or even that she is unjustly attackinghim by finally admitting that her desires run contrary to his own, that she doesn’t want to be his wife. And with this statement, he confirms precisely what she anticipated would happen upon giving voice to her true feelings.

What space did Edmund, his family, or Dani’s mother ever grant for Dani to have aspirations of her own that weren’t towards the preordained role of Eddie’s future wife? Let’s jump back to that engagement party. Eddie’s entire speech reveals a very longstanding assumption of his claim over her as his wife-to-be. He’d first asked Dani to marry him when they were ten years old, after he mistakenly believed that their first kiss could get Dani pregnant; Dani turned him down then, saying that they were too young. So, over the years, as they got older, Eddie continued to repeatedly ask her—until, presumably, she relented. “Now, we’re still pretty young,” he remarks as he concludes his speech, “but I think we’re old enough to know what we want.” Significantly, Eddie speaks here not just for himself, but also for Dani. Dani’s voice throughout the entire party is notably absent, as Eddie and his mother both impose their own wishes on her, assume that she wants what they want, and don’t really open any possibility for her to say otherwise. Moreover, although there’s a palpable awkwardness that accompanies Eddie’s story, the crowd at the party chuckles along as though it’s a sweet, innocent tale of lifelong love and devotion, and not an instance of a man whittling away at a woman’s resistance until she finally caved to his pursuit of her.

All of this suggests that Eddie shared in the socialized convictions of heteropatriarchy, according to which Dani’s purpose and destiny were to marry him and to make him happy. His patterns of behavior evince the unquestioned presumptions of so many men: that women exist in service to them and their wants, such that it is utterly inconceivable that women could possibly desire otherwise. As a political institution, heteropatriarchy tells men that they are entitled to women’s existences, bodies, futures. And, indeed, Eddie can’t seem to even imagine that Dani could ever want anything other than the future that he has mapped out for them. (Oh, hey look, we’ve got some love vs. possession going on here again).

For what it’s worth, I think that the show’s portrayal of compulsory heterosexuality is excellent. I love that the writers decided to tackle this. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I found all of this to be extremelyrelatable. I might even be accused of over-relating and projecting my own experiences onto my readings here, but…there were just too many resonances between Dani’s experiences and my own. Mrs. O’Mara’s advice to Dani to “put your own oxygen mask on first” is all too reminiscent of the ways that my ex’s parents would encourage me to “heal” from my brother’s loss…but not for the sake of my own wellbeing, but so that I would return to prioritizing the care of their son and existing to do whatever would make him happy. I’ll also share here that what drove me to break up with my ex-fiancé wasn’t just his unwillingness to contend with my grief, but the fact that he had decided that the best way for me to heal from my loss would be to have a baby. He insisted that I could counteract my brother’s death by “bringing new life into the world.” And he would not take no for an answer. He told me that if I wouldn’t agree to try to have children in the near future, then he wasn’t interested in continuing to stay with me. It took me months to pluck up the courage, but I finally answered this ultimatum by ending our relationship myself. Thus, like Dani, I came very close to sacrificing myself, my wants, my body, my future, and my life for the sake of doing what my fiancé and his family wanted me to do, all while painfully denying my own attraction to women. What kept me from “sticking it out” any longer was that I finally decided that I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for a man I didn’t love (and who clearly didn’t love me) and decided, instead, to reclaim my own wants and needs away from him.

For Dani, however, the moment that she finally begins to reclaim her wants and needs away from Eddie is also the moment that he furiously jumps out of the driver’s seat and into the path of a passing truck, which leaves her to entangle those events as though his death is her fault for finally asserting herself.

Of course, the guilt that Dani feels for having “caused” Eddie’s death isn’t justa matter of breaking up with him and thereby provoking a reaction that would prove fatal—it’s also the guilt of her suppressed homosexual desire, of not desiring Eddie in the first place. In other words, internalized homophobia is an inextricable layer of the culpability that Dani feels. Internalized homophobia is also what’s haunting her. As others (such as Rowan Ellis, whose deep dive includes a solid discussion of internalized homophobia in Bly, as well as a more at-length examination of Bury Your Gays than I’m providing here) have pointed out, the show highlights this metaphorically by having Dani literally get locked into a closet with Edmund’s ghost in the very first episode. Further reinforcing this idea is the fact that these spectral visions get even worse as Dani starts to come to terms with and act on her attraction to Jamie, as though the ghost is punishing her for her desires. Across Episode 3, as Dani and Jamie begin spending more time together, Edmund’s ghost concurrently begins materializing in more shocking, visceral forms (e.g. his bleeding hand in Dani’s bed; his shadowy figure lurking behind Dani after she’s held Jamie’s hand) that exceed the reflective surfaces to which he’d previously been confined. This continues into Episode 4, where each of Eddie’s appearances follows moments of Dani’s growing closeness to Jamie. A particularly alarming instance occurs when Dani just can’t seem to pry her gaze away from a dressed-up Jamie who’s in the process of some mild undressing. Finally turning away from Jamie, Dani becomes aware of Eddie’s hands on her hips. It’s a violating reminder of his claims over her, horrifying in its invocation of men’s efforts to coerce and control women’s sexuality.

It is incredibly powerful, then, to watch Dani answer all of this by becoming more resolute and assertive in the expression of her wants and needs. The establishment of her romantic relationship with Jamie isn’t just the movement through grief and guilt that we discussed earlier; it’s also Dani’s defiance of compulsory heterosexuality and her fierce claiming of her queer existence. Even in the face of all that’s been haunting her, Dani initiates her first kiss with Jamie; and Eddie’s intrusion in that moment is only enough to temporarily dissuade her, as Dani follows this up by then asking Jamie out for a drink at the pub to “see where that takes them” (i.e. up to Jamie’s flat to bang, obviously). The peace that Dani finds after having sex with Jamie for the first time is, therefore, also the profound fulfillment of at last having her first sexual experience with a woman, of finally giving expression to this critical part of herself that she’d spent her entire life denying. Compulsory heterosexuality had dictated to Dani that she must self-sacrifice to meet the strictures of heteropatriarchy, to please everyone except herself; but in her relationship with Jamie, Dani learns that she doesn’t have to do this at all. This is only bolstered by the fact that, as we’ve talked about at length already, Jamie is very attentive to Dani’s needs and respectful of her boundaries. Jamie doesn’t want Dani to do anything other than what Dani wants to do. And so, in the cultivation of their romantic partnership, Dani thus comes to value her own wants and needs in a way that she hasn’t before.

The fact that the show nails all of this so fucking well is what makes all that comes later so goddamn frustrating.

The final episode chronicles Dani and Jamie forging a queer life together that the rest of us can only dream of, including another scene of Dani flouting homophobia and negotiating her own internal struggles so that she can be with Jamie. “I know we can’t technically get married,” she tells Jamie when she proposes to her, “but I also don’t really care.” And with her awareness that the beast in the jungle is starting to catch up with her, Dani tells Jamie that she wants to spend whatever time she has left with her.

But then…

A few scenes later—along with a jump of a few years later, presumably—Jamie arrives home with the licenses that legally certify their civil union in the state of Vermont. It’s a monumental moment. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to introduce civil unions, which paved the way for it to later (in 2009) become the first state to pass legislation that recognized gay marriages without needing to have a court order mandating that the state extend marriage rights beyond opposite-sex couples. I appreciate that Bly’s creatorsincorporated this significant milestone in the history of American queer rights into the show. But its positioning in the show also fuckin’ sucks. Just as Jamie is announcing the legality of her and Dani’s civil union and declaring that they’ll have another marriage ceremony soon, we see water running into the hallway. This moves us into that scene with the flooded bathtub, as Jamie finds Dani staring into the water, unaware of anything else except the reflection of Viola staring back at her. Thus, it is at the exact moment when her wife proudly shares the news of this incredible achievement in the struggle for queer rights—for which queer folks have long fought and are continuing to fight to protect in the present—that Dani has completely, hopelessly resigned herself to Viola’s possession.

I want to be careful to clarify here that, in making this observation, I don’t mean to posit some sort of “Dani should have fought back against Viola” argument, which—within the context of our allegorical readings—might have the effect of damagingly suggesting that Dani should have fought harder to recover from mental illness or terminal disease. But I do mean to point out the incredibly grim implications that the juxtaposition of these events engenders, especially when we contemplate them (as we did in the previous section) within the overall frameworks of the show’s themes and Dani’s character development. After all that has come before, after we’ve watched Dani come to so boldly assert her queer desire and existence, it is devastating to see the show reduce her to such a despairing state that doesn’t even give her a chance to register that she and Jamie are now legal partners.

Why did you have to do this, Bly? Why?

Further compounding this despair, the next scene features the resumption of Dani’s self-sacrificial beliefs and behaviors, which results in her demise, and which leaves Jamie to suffer through the devastation of her wife’s death. This resumption of self-sacrifice hence demolishes all of that beautiful work of asserting Dani’s queer existence and learning that she doesn’t need to sacrifice herself that I just devoted two thousand words to describing above.

Additionally, in the end, Dani’s noble self-sacrifice also effects a safe recuperation of heteronormativity…which might add more evidence to a Bury Your Gays claim, oops.

And that is because, in the end, after we see Jamie screaming into the water and Dani forever interred at the bottom of the lake in which she drowned herself, we come to the end of Jamie’s story and return to Bly Manor’s frame narrative: Flora’s wedding.

At the start of the show, the evening of Flora and Unnamed Man’s (Wikipedia says his name is James? idk, w/e) rehearsal dinner provides the occasion and impetus for Jamie’s storytelling. Following dinner, Flora, her fiancé, and their guests gather around a fireplace and discuss a ghost story about the venue, a former convent. With a captive audience that includes her primary targets—Flora and Miles, who have forgotten what happened at Bly and, by extension, all that Dani sacrificed and that Jamie lost so that they could live their lives free of the trauma of what transpired—and with a topically relevant conversation already ongoing, Jamie interjects that she has a ghost story of her own to share…and thus, the show’s longer, secondary narrative begins.

When Jamie’s tale winds to a close at the end of the ninth episode, the show returns us to its frame, that scene in front of the cozy, crackling fire. And it is there that we learn that it is, in fact, Jamie who has been telling us this story all along.

As the other guests trickle away, Flora stays behind to talk to Jamie on her own. A critical conversation then ensues between them, which functions not only as Jamie’s shared wisdom to Flora, but also as the show’s attempt to lead viewers through what they’ve just experienced and thereby impart its core message about the secondary narrative. The frame narrative is, thus, also a direct address to the audience that tells us what we should take away from the experience. By this point, the show has thoroughly established that Jamie is a gentle-but-tough-love, knowledgeable, and trustworthy guide through the trials of accepting grief and mortality, and so it is Jamie who leaves Flora and us, the audience, with the show’s final word about how to treasure the people we love while they are still in our lives and how to grieve them if we survive beyond them. (But, by this point in this essay, we’ve also learned that Bly’s messages about grief and mortality are beautiful but also messy and unconvincing, even with this didactic ending moment).

With all of this in mind, we can (and should) ask some additional questions of the frame narrative.

One of those questions is: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

Answering this question within the show’s diegesis (by asking it of the narrator) is easy enough. Jamie is performing a memorialization of Dani’s life and sacrifice at an event where her intended audience happens to be gathered, ensuring that Miles and Flora begin to recognize what Dani did for them in a manner that maybe won’t just outright traumatize them.

Okay, sure, yeah. True. Not wrong.

But let’s interrogate this question more deeply—let’s ask it of the show itself. So, Bly Manor: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

We could also tweak this question a bit to further consider: What is the purpose of the frame? A frame narrative can function to shape audiences’ interpretations of and attitudes towards the secondary narrative. So, in this case, let’s make our line of questioning even more specific. What does the frame of Flora’s wedding do for Bly’s audiences?

Crucially, the framing scene at the fireplace provides us with a sense that we’ve returned to safety after the horror of the ghost story we’ve just experienced. To further assure us of this safety, then, Bly’s frame aims to restore a sense of normality, a sense that the threat that has provoked fear in us has been neutralized, a sense of hope that endures beyond tragedy. Indeed, as we fade from the secondary narrative and return to the frame, Jamie’s narration emphasizes how Dani’s selfless death has brought peace to Bly Manor by breaking its cycles of violence and trauma: “But she won’t be hollow or empty, and she won’t pull others to her fate. She will merely walk the grounds of Bly, harmless as a dove for all of her days, leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.”

What Dani has accomplished with her self-sacrifice, then, is a longstanding, prevailing, expected staple of Western—and especially American—storytelling: redemption.

American media is rife with examples of this narrative formula (in which an individual must take selfless action—which may or may not involve self-sacrificial death—in order to redeem an imperiled community by restoring a threatened order) to an extent that is kind of impossible to overstate. Variations of this formula are everywhere, from film to television to comics to videogames to news reports. It is absolutely fundamental to our cultural understandings of what “heroism” means. And it’s been this way for, umm…a long time, largely thanks to that most foundational figure of Western myth, some guy who was crucified for everybody’s sins or something. (Well, that and the related popularization of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but…I’m not gonna go off onto a whole rant about that right now, this essay is already too long as it is).

In Bly Manor, the threatened order is the natural process of death itself, which Viola has disrupted with a gravity well that traps souls and keeps them suspended within physical proximity of the manor. Dani’s invitation to Viola is the initial step towards salvation (although, I think it’s important to note that this is not entirely intentional on Dani’s part. Jamie’s narration indicates that Dani didn’t entirely understand what she was doing with the “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us” invitation, so self-sacrifice was not necessarily her initial goal). It nullifies the gravity well and resumes the passage of death, which liberates all of the souls that have been trapped at Bly and also produces additional opportunities for others’ atonements (e.g. Peter’s apology to Miles; Henry’s guardianship of the children). But it’s Dani’s suicide that is the ultimate completion of the redemptive task. It is only by “giving herself to the lake” that Dani is able to definitively dispel Viola’s threat and confer redemptive peace to Bly Manor.

It’s tempting to celebrate this incredibly rare instance of a queer woman in the heroic-redemptive role, given that American media overwhelmingly reserve it for straight men. But I want to strongly advise that we resist this temptation. Frankly, there’s a lot about the conventional heroic-redemptive narrative formula that sucks, and I’d rather that we work to advocate for other kinds of narratives, instead of just championing more “diversity” within this stuffy old model of heroism. Explaining what sucks about this formula is beyond the purview of this essay, though. But my next point might help to illustrate part of why it sucks (spoiler: it’s because it tends to prop up traditional, dominant structures of power and relationality).

So…What I want us to do is entertain the possibility that Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice might serve specific purposes for straight audiences, especially in the return to the frame at the end.

Across The Haunting of Bly Manor, we’ve seen ample examples of heterosexuality gone awry. The show has repeatedly called our attention to the flaws and failings of heterosexual relationships against the carefully cultivated safety, open communication, and mutual fulfillment of a queer romance between two women. But, while queer audiences may celebrate this about this show, for straight audiences, this whole situation might just wind up producing anxiety instead—as though heterosexuality is also a threatened order within the world of Bly Manor. More generally, asking straight audiences to connect with a queer couple as the show’s main protagonists is an unaccustomed challenge with which they’re not normally tasked; thus, the show risks leaving this dominant viewer base uncomfortable, threatened, and resentful, sitting with the looming question of whether heterosexuality is, itself, redeemable.

In answer to this, Dani’s self-sacrifice provides multiple assurances to straight audiences. To begin with, her assumption of the traditional heroic-redemptive role secures audiences within the familiar confines of that narrative formula, which also then promises that Dani is acting as a protector of threatened status quos and not as another source of peril. What Bly Manor is doing here is, in effect, acknowledging that it may have challenged (and even threatened) straight audiences with its centerpiece of a queer romance—and that, likewise, queers themselves may be challenging the status quos of romantic partnerships by, for instance, demanding marriage rights and improvements in media representations—while also emphatically reassuring those audiences in the wake of that challenge that Dani and Jamie haven’t created and aren’t going to create too much disturbance with their queerness. They’re really not that threatening, Bly swears. They’re harmless as a dove. They’re wholesome. They’re respectable. They—and queer folks more generally—aren’t going to totally upend everything, really. Look, they’ll even sacrifice themselves to save everyone and redeem imperiled communities and threatened orders—even heterosexuality itself!

A critical step towards achieving this assurance is the leveling of the playing field. In order for the show to neutralize the threat of queerness for straight audiences, comfort them with a return to safety, and promise them that heterosexuality is redeemable, the queer women need to have an on-screen tragic end to their relationship just like all of the straight couples have. And so, Dani must die and Jamie must grieve.

That accomplished, the show then immediately returns to the frame, the scene at the fireplace following Flora’s rehearsal dinner.

There—after we’ve witnessed so much queer joy and queer tragedy crammed into this final episode—we see Flora and her fiancé, bride and groom, sitting together, arms linked, taking in all that Jamie has to tell them. And with this warm, idyllic image of impending matrimony between man and wife, the safety to which straight audiences return in the frame is, therefore, also the safety of a heterosexuality that can find its redemption through Dani’s self-sacrifice. Not only does Dani’s death mean that Flora can live (and go on to marry her perfectly bland, unremarkable husband, all without the trauma of what happened at Bly), but it also means that she—and, with her, straight audiences—can ultimately benefit from the lessons about true love, loss, and grieving that Dani’s self-sacrifice and Jamie’s story bestow.

And so, Bly Manor concludes with a valorization of redemptive self-sacrifice and an anodyne recuperation of heteronormativity, bequeathing Flora with the opportunities to have and to hold the experiential knowledge that Dani and Jamie have provided for her. Here, queer tragedy serves up an educational opportunity for heterosexual audiences in a challengingly “inclusive,” but otherwise essentially non-threatening manner. The ending is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to heterosexual audiences in the same way that Jamie’s story is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to Flora.

Did the show’s creators intentionally do all of this to set about providing such assurances to straight audiences? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really know—or care! But, especially in light of incidents like the recent “Suletta and Miorine’s relationship is up to interpretation” controversy following the Gundam: Witch from Mercury finale, I absolutely do not put it past media corporations and content creators to very intentionally take steps to prioritize the comfort of straight audiences against the threats of queer love. And anyway, intentional or not, all of this still has effects and implications loaded with meaning, as I have tried to account for here.

Honestly, though, I can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s some tension between Jamie, Owen, and maybe also Henry about Jamie’s decision to publicly share Dani’s story in front of Flora and Miles. Owen’s abrupt declaration that it’s getting late and that they should wrap up seems like an intervention—like he’s been as patient and understanding as he possibly could up to that point, but now, he’s finally having to put a stop to Jamie’s deviance. I can’t help but read the meaningful stares that pass between them at both ends of the frame as a complex mixture of compassion and fraught disagreement (and I wish that the show had done more with this). The scene where Dani and Jamie visit Owen at his restaurant seems to set up the potential for this unspoken dispute. By their expressions and mannerisms (Dani’s stony stare; the protective way that Jamie holds her as her own gaze is locked on Dani), it’s clear that Dani and Jamie are aghast that Flora and Miles have forgotten what happened and that Owen believes that they should just be able to live their lives without that knowledge. And it’s also clear, by her very telling of Dani’s story, that Jamie disagrees with him. Maybe I’m over-imposing my own attitudes here, but I’m left with the impression that Jamie resents the coddling of Miles and Flora just like I’m resenting the coddling of straight audiences…that Jamie resents that she and Dani have had to give up everything so that Miles and Flora can continue living their privileged lives just like I’m resenting the exploitation of queer tragedy for the sake preserving straight innocence. (As Jamie says to Hannah when Dani puts the children to work in the garden: “You can’t give them a pass forever.” Disclaimer: I’m not saying that I want Miles and Flora to be traumatized, but I am saying that I agree with Jamie, because hiding traumatic shit is not how to resolve inter-generational trauma. Anyway—).

Also, I don’t know about y’all, but I find Flora and Jamie’s concluding conversation to be super cringe. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and just have way too much firsthand experience with this sort of thing from my own comphet past, but Flora’s whole “I just keep thinking about that silly, gorgeous, insane man I’m marrying tomorrow. I love him. More than I ever thought I could love anybody. And the crazy thing is, he loves me the same exact amount,” spiel just absolutely screams “woman who is having to do all of the emotional work in her relationship with an absolutely dull, mediocre, emotionally illiterate man and is desperately trying to convince herself that he does, in fact, love her as much as she (believes) that she loves him.”

I feel like this is a parody of straightness?? Is this actually sincere??

This is what Dani gave up her life to redeem??

To me, this is just more bleak shit that Bly leaves us with. It is so painful to watch.

Bless.

Okay, so I know that I said that I wasn’t going to offer a definitive yes or no about whether Bly commits Bury Your Gays with Dani’s death, but…after writing all of this out, I’m honestly kinda leaning towards a yes.

But I’m already anticipating that folks are gonna push back against me on this. So I just want to humbly submit, again, that Bly could have just not done this. It could have just not portrayed Dani’s death at all.

To really drive this point home, then, I’m going to conclude this essay by suggesting just a few ways that The Haunting of Bly Manor could have ended without Dani’s self-sacrificial death—or without depicting her death on-screen at all.

Bly Manor Could Have Ended Differently

Mike Flanagan—creator, director, writer, editor, executive producer, showrunner, etc. of The Haunting of Bly Manor—has stated that he believes that the show’s ending is a happy one.

I, on the other hand, believe that Bly’s ending is…not. In my view, the way that the ending treats Dani is unnecessarily cruel and exploitative. “Happy ending”—really? If I let myself be cynical about it (which I do), I honestly think that Dani’s death is a pretty damn transparent effort to squeeze out some tears with a sloppy, mawkish, feel-good veneer slapped over it. And if we peel back that veneer and look under it, what we find is quite bleak.

To be fair, for a psychological horror show that’s so centrally about grief and trauma, Bly Manor does seem to profess an incredibly strong sense of hopefulness. Underlying the entirety of the show is a profound faith in all the good and beauty that can come from human connection, however fleeting our lives may be—and even if we make a ton of dumb, awful mistakes along the way. If I’m being less cynical about it, I do also think that the show’s ending strives to demonstrate a peak expression of this conviction. But—at least in my opinion—it doesn’t succeed in this goal. In my writing of this essay, I’ve come to believe that the show instead ends in a state of despair that is at odds with what it appears to want to achieve.

So, in this final section, I’m going to offer up a few possibilities for ways that the show could have ended that maybe wouldn’t have so thoroughly undermined its own attempted messages.

Now, if I were actually going to fix the ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor, I would honestly overhaul a ton of the show to arrive at something completely different. But I’m not going to go through all the trouble of rewriting the entire show here, lol. Instead, I’m going to work with most of what’s already there, leading out from Viola’s possession of Dani (even though I don’t actually like that part of the show either – maybe someday I’ll write about other implications of Viola’s possession of Dani beyond these allegorical readings, but not right now). I’m also going to try to adhere to some of the show’s core themes and build on some of the allegorical possibilities that are already in place. Granted, the ideas that I pose here wouldn’t fix everything, by any stretch of the imagination; but they would, at least (I hope), mitigate some of the issues that I’ve outlined over the course of this essay. And one way or another, I hope that they’ll help to demonstrate that Dani’s self-sacrificial death was completely unnecessary. (Seriously, just not including Dani’s death would’ve enabled the show to completely dodge the question of Bury Your Gays and would’ve otherwise gone a long way towards avoiding the problems with the show’s queer representation).

So, here's how this is going to work. First, I’m going to pose a few general, guiding questions before then proposing an overarching thematic modification that expands on an idea that’s already prominent across the show. This will then serve as the groundwork for two alternative scenarios. I’m not going to go super into detail with either of these alternatives; mostly, I just want to demonstrate that the show that could’ve easily replaced the situation leading to Dani drowning herself. (For the record, I also think that the show could’ve benefitted from having at least one additional episode—and from some timing and pacing restructuring otherwise. So, before anybody tries an excuse like “but this wouldn’t fit into the last episode,” I want to urge that we imagine these possibilities beyond that limitation).

Let’s start off by returning to a point that I raised in the earlier conversation about grief and acceptance: the trickiness of Viola’s “acceptance.”

What Viola “accepts” in the end aren’t her losses or her own mortality, but Dani’s desperate, last-ditch-effort invitation to inhabit her. Within the show’s extant ending, Viola never actually comes to any kind of acceptance otherwise. Dani’s suicide effectively forces her dissolution, eradicating her persistent presence through the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. But in all of my viewings of the show and in all of my efforts to think through and write about it, there’s a question that’s been bugging me to no end: Why does Viola accept Dani’s invitation in the first place?

We know that Peter figured out the “it’s you, it’s me, it’s us” trick in his desperation to return to some form of life and to leave the grounds of Bly Manor. But…what is the appeal of it for Viola? How do her own motivations factor into it? For so long, Viola’s soul has been tenaciously persisting at Bly all so that she can repeatedly return to the physical locus of her connection with her husband and daughter, their shared bedroom in the manor. She’s done this for so long that she no longer even remembers why she’s doing it—she just goes back there to grab whatever child she can find and strangles whoever happens to get in her way. So what would compel her to accept Dani’s invitation? What does she get out of it—and what does she want out of it? What does her acceptance mean? And why, then, does her acceptance result in the dissipation of the gravity well?

We can conjecture, certainly. But the show doesn’t actually provide answers to these questions. Indeed, one of the other major criticisms that I have of Bly is that it confines all of Viola’s development to the eighth episode alone. I really think that it needed to have done way more to characterize her threat and at least gestureat her history sooner, rather than leaving it all to that penultimate episode, interrupting and drawing out the exact moment when she’s about to kill Dani. (Like, after centuries of Viola indiscriminately killing people, and with so many ghosts that’ve been loitering around for so long because of that, wouldn’t Bly Manor have rampant ghost stories floating around about it by the time Dani arrives? But there’s only one minor suggestion of that possibility: Henry indicating that he might’ve met a soldier ghost once. That’s it. And on that note, all of the ghosts at the manor needed to have had more screentime and development, really). Further, it’s disappointing that the show devotes that entire eighth episode to accounting for Viola’s motivations, only to then reduce her to Big, Bad, Unspeakable Evil in the final episode, with no rhyme or reason for what she’s doing, all so that she can necessitate Dani’s death.

As we continue pondering these unanswered questions, there’s also another issue that I want to raise, which the show abandons only as an oblique, obscure consideration. And that is: How the hell did Jamie acquire all that extensive knowledge about Viola, the ghosts of the manor, and all that happened, such that she is able to tell Bly’sstory in such rich detail? My own sort of headcanon answer to this is that Viola’s possession of Dani somehow enabled Viola to regain some of her own memories—as well as, perhaps, a more extended, yet also limited awareness of the enduring consciousnesses of the other ghosts—while also, in turn, giving Dani access to them, too. Dani then could have divulged what she learned to Jamie, which would account for how Jamie knows so much. I bring this up because it provides one possible response to the question of “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” (especially given the significant weight that the show places on the retention of one’s memories—more on this in a moment) and because this is an important basis for both of my proposed alternative scenarios.

Before we dig into those alternative scenarios, however, there’s also a thematic modification that I want to suggest, which would help to provide another answer to “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” while also alleviating the issues that lead into the valorization of Dani’s suicide. That thematic modification involves how the show defines love. Although Bly’s sustained contrasts between love and possession have some valuable elements, I think that the ending would’ve benefitted from downplaying the love vs. possession theme (which is where we run into so much trouble with Dani’s self-sacrifice, and which has also resulted in some celebratory conflations between “selflessness” and self-sacrifice that I’ve seen crop up in commentary about the show—but, y’all, self-sacrifice is not something to celebrate in romantic partnerships, so please, please be careful idolizing that) to instead play up a different theme: the idea that love is the experience of feeling such safety and security with another person that we can find opportunities for peace by being with them.

Seeking peace—and people with whom to feel safe enough to share traumas and experience peace—is a theme that already runs rampant across the show, so this modification is really just a matter of accentuating it differently. It’s also closely linked to the moving through grief theme that we’ve already discussed at length, as numerous characters in Bly express desires for solitude with loved ones as a way of finding relief and healing from their pain, grief, and trauma. (And I suspect that I latched onto this because I have desperately wanted peace, calm, and stillness in the midst of my own acute, compounding traumas…and because my own former romantic partner was obviously not someone with whom I felt safe enough to experience the kind of peace that would’ve allowed me to begin the process of healing).

We run into this idea early in the development of Jamie and Dani’s romance, as narrator Jamie explains in the scene leading up to their first kiss, “The au pair was tired. She’d been tired for so long. Yet without even realizing she was doing it, she found herself taking her own advice that she’d given to Miles. She’d chosen someone to keep close to her that she could feel tired around.” Following this moment, at the beginning of Episode 5, narrator Jamie then foregrounds Hannah’s search for peace (“The housekeeper knew, more than most, that deep experience was never peaceful. And because she knew this ever since she’d first called Bly home, she would always find her way back to peace within her daily routine, and it had always worked”), which calls our attention to the ways that Hannah has been retreating into her memory of her first meeting with Owen as a crucial site of peace against the shock of her own death. Grown-up Flora even gushes about “that easy silence you only get with your forever person who loves you as much as you love them” when she’s getting all teary at Jamie about her husband-to-be.

Of course, this theme is already actively at work in the show’s conclusion as well. During her “beast in the jungle” monologue, Dani tells Jamie that she feels Viola “in here. It’s so quiet…it’s so quiet. She’s in here. And this part of her that’s in here, it isn’t…peaceful.” As such, Viola’s whole entire issue is that, after all those centuries, she has not only refused to accept her own death, but she’s likewise never been at peace—she’s still not at peace. Against Viola’s unpeaceful presence, however, Dani does find peace in her life with Jamie…at least temporarily, until Viola’s continued refusal of peace leads to Dani’s self-destructive sense of fatalism. Still, in her replacement of Viola as the new Lady of the Lake, Dani exists as a prevailing force of peace (she’s “harmless as a dove”); however, incidentally, she only accomplishes this through the decidedly non-peaceful, violent act of taking her own life.

But…what if that hadn’t been the case?

What if, instead, the peace that Dani finds in her beautiful, queer, non-self-sacrificing existence with Jamie had also enabled Viola to find some sense of peace of her own? What if, through her inhabitation of Dani, Viola managed to, like…calm the fuck down some? What if Dani’s safety and solitude worked to at least somewhat assuage Viola’s rage—and even guide her towards some other form of acceptance?

Depending on how this developed, the show could’ve borne out the potential for a much more subversive conclusion than what we actually got. Rather than All-Consuming-Evil Viola’s forced dissolution through the violence of Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice (and its attendant recuperation of heteronormativity), we could’ve instead had the makings of a narrative about sapphic love as a source of healing that’s capable of breaking cycles of violence and trauma. And I think that it would’ve been possible for the show to accomplish this without a purely “happy” ending in which everything was just magically fine, and all the trauma dissipated, and there were no problems in the world ever again. The show could have, in fact, managed this while preserving the allegorical possibilities of Viola’s presence as mental and/or terminal illness.

But, before I can start describing how this could’ve happened, there’s one last little outstanding problem that I need to address. In the video essay that I cited earlier, Rowan Ellis suggests that there are limitations to the “Viola as a stand-in for mental/terminal illness” reading of the show because of the fact that Dani invites Viola into herself and, therefore, willingly brings on her own suffering. But I don’t think that this is quite the case or that it interferes with these allegorical readings. As I’ve already mentioned at various points, Dani doesn’t entirely understand the implications of what she’s doing when she issues her invitation to Viola; and even so, the invitation is still a matter of a dubious consent that evidently cannot be withdrawn once initially granted—at the absolute most generous characterization. Dani’s invitation is a snap decision, a frantic attempt to save Flora after everyone and everything else has failed. Consequently, we don’t necessarily have to construe Viola’s presence in Dani’s life as a matter of Dani “willingly inviting her own suffering,” but can instead understand it as the wounds and traumas that persist after Dani has risked her life to rescue Flora. In this way, the show could have also challenged the traditional heroic-redemptive narrative formula by offering a more explicit commentary on the all-too-often unseen ramifications of selflessly “heroic” actions (instead of just heedlessly perpetuating their glorification and, with them, self-sacrifice). Dani may have saved Flora—but at what cost to herself? What long-term toll might this lasting trauma exact on her?

And with that, we move into my two alternative ending scenarios.

Alternative Ending 1: Progressive Memory Loss

Memory and its loss are such significant themes in Bly Manor that theycould use an essay all their own.

I am, however, going to refrain from writing such an essay at this moment in time (I’m already super tired from writing this one, lol).

Still, the first of my alternative scenarios would bring these major themes full-circle—and would make Jamie eat her words.

In this alternative scenario, Viola would find some sense of peace—even if fraught and, at times, tumultuous—in her possession of Dani. As her rage subsides, she is even able to regain fragmented pieces of her own memory, which Dani is also able to experience. The restoration of Viola’s memory, albeit vague and scattered, leads Dani to try to learn even more about Viola’s history at Bly in an effort to at least partially fill in the gaps. As time goes on, though, Viola’s co-habitation within Dani’s consciousness leads to the steady degradation of Dani’s own memory. The reclamation of Viola’s memories would occur, then, concomitant with a steady erosion of both herself and Dani. Thus, Dani would still undergo an inexorable decline across the show’s ending, but one more explicitly akin to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging, accentuating the “Viola as terminal illness” allegory while also still carrying resonances of the residual reverberations of trauma (given that memory loss is often a common consequence of acute trauma). Jamie would take on the role of Dani’s caregiver, mirroring and more directly illuminating the role that Owen plays for his mother earlier in the show. By the show’s conclusion, Dani would still be alive, including during the course of the frame narrative.

I mentioned earlier in this essay that I’ve endured even more trauma and grief since my brother’s death and since my breakup with my ex-fiancé. So, I’ll share another piece of it with you now: shortly after my breakup, my dad was diagnosed with one of those degenerative neurological diseases that I listed way back at the very beginning. I moved home not only to get away from my ex, but also to become a caregiver. In the time that I’ve been home, I’ve had no choice but to behold my dad’s continuous, irreversible decline and his indescribable suffering. He has further health issues, including a form of cancer. As a result, he now harbors a sense of fatalism that he’ll never be able to reconcile—he does not have the cognitive capacities to address his despair or turn it into some other form of acceptance. He is merely, in essence, awaiting his death. Hence, fatalism is something that I have had to “accept” as a regular component of my own life. (In light of this situation, you may be wondering if I have thoughts and opinions on medical aid in dying, given all that I have had to say so far about fatalism and suicide. And the answer is yes, I do have thoughts and opinions…but they are complex, and I don’t really want to try to account for them here).

Indeed, I live in a suspended, indefinite state of grieving. Day in and day out, I watch my father perish before my eyes, anticipating the blow of fresh grief that will strike when he dies. I watch my mother’s grief. I watch my father’s grief. He forgets about the symptoms of his disease; he looks up his disease to try to learn about it; he re-discovers his inevitable demise anew; the grieving process restarts again. (“She would wake, she would walk, she would forget […] and she would fade and fade and fade”).

What, then, does acceptance look like when grief is so ongoing and so protracted?

What does acceptance look like in the absence of any possibility of acceptance?

Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” model has been a meaningful guide for countless folks in their efforts to navigate grief and loss. Yet, the model has also been subject to a great deal of critique. Critics have accused the model of, among other things, suggesting that grieving is a linear process, whereby a person moves from one stage to the next and then ends conclusively at acceptance (when grieving is, in fact, an incredibly uneven, nonlinear, and inconclusive process). Relatedly, they have also called attention to the fact that the model commonly gets used prescriptively in ways that usher grieving folks towards the end goal of acceptance and cast judgment on those who do not reach that stage. These are criticisms that I would level at Bly’s application of Kübler-Ross as well. Earlier, we thoroughly covered the show’sissues with grief and acceptance as major themes; but in addition to those issues, Bly alsotends to steer its characters towards abrupt endpoints of acceptance, while doling out punishments to those who “refuse” to accept. At root, there are normative ascriptions at work in the show’s very characterization of deferred acceptance as refusal and acceptance itself as an active choice that one has to make.

This alternative ending, then, would have the potential to challenge and complicate the show’s handling of grief by approaching Jamie’s grieving and Dani’s fatalism from very different angles. As Dani’s caregiver, Jamie would encounter and negotiate grief in ongoing and processual ways, which would continue to evolve as her wife’s condition worsens and her caregiving responsibilities mount, thereby lending new layers of meaning to the message that “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” Dani’s fatalism here could also serve as a different interpretation of James’s Beast in the Jungle; perhaps her sense of fatalism ebbs and flows, morphs and contorts along with the progression of her memory loss as she anticipates the gradual whittling-away of her selfhood—or even forgets that inevitability entirely. Still a tragic, heart-rending ending to the show, this scenario may not have the dramatic force of Jamie screaming into the waters of the lake, but it would be a relatable depiction of the ways that many real-life romances conclude. (And, having witnessed the extent of my mom’s ongoing caregiving for my dad, lemme tell ya: if y’all really want a portrayal of selflessness in romantic partnerships, I can think of nothing more selfless than caring for one’s terminally ill partner across their gradual death).

Additionally, this scenario could allow the show to maintain the frame narrative, while also packing fresh complexities into it.

Perhaps, in this case, Dani is still alive, but Jamie has come to Flora’s wedding alone, leaving Dani with in-home caregivers or within assisted living or some such. She comes there determined to ensure that Miles and Flora regain at least some awareness of what Dani did for them—that they remember her. The act of telling Dani’s story, then, becomes not only the performance of a mourning ritual, but also a vital way of preserving and perpetuating Dani’s memory where both the children and Dani, herself, can no longer remember. To be sure, such purposes already compel Jamie’s storytelling in the show: Narrator Jamie indicates that the new Lady of the Lake will eventually lose her recollection of the life she had with the gardener, “leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.” But in the context of a conclusion so focused on memory loss, this statement would take on new dimensions of import. In this way, the frame narrative might also more forcefully prompt us, the audience, to reflect on the waysthat we can carry on the memories of our loved ones by telling their stories—and also, maybe, the responsibilities that we may have to do so. “Almost no one even remembers how she was when her mind hadn’t gone,” Jamie remarks after returning from Owen’s mother’s funeral, a subtle indictment of just how easily we can lose our own memories of those who suffer from conditions like dementia—how easily we can fail to carry on the stories of the people they were before and to keep their memories alive. (“We are all just stories in the end,” Olivia Crain emphasizes during the eulogy for Shirl’s kitten in The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, there’re some interesting comparative analyses we could do about storytelling and the responsibilities incumbent on storytellers between these two Flanagan shows).

Along those lines, I think that this would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the show to exacerbate and foreground those latent tensions between Jamie and Owen (and maybe also Henry) about whether to share Dani’s story with the now-adult children.

In the show’s explorations of memory loss, there’re already some interesting but largely neglected undercurrents churning around about the idea that maybe losing one’s memory isn’t just a curse or a heartbreaking misfortune (as it is for Viola, the ghosts of Bly Manor, and Owen’s mother), but can, in certain circumstances, be a blessing. Bly implies—via Owen and the frame narrative—that Miles and Flora have been able to flourish in their lives because they have forgotten what happened at Bly and still remain blissfully unaware of it…which, to be clear, is only possible because of the sacrifices that Dani and Jamie have made. But this situation raises, and leaves floating there, a bunch of questions about the responsibilities we have to impart traumatic histories to younger generations—whether interpersonally (e.g. within families) or societally (e.g. in history classrooms). Cycles of trauma don’t end by shielding younger generations from the past; they especially don’t end by forcing impacted, oppressed, traumatized populations (e.g. queer folks) to shoulder the burdens of trauma on their own for the sake of protecting another population’s innocent ignorance. But how do we impart traumatic histories? How do we do so responsibly, compassionately, in ways that respect those harrowing pasts—and those who lived them, those most directly impacted by them—without actively causing harm to receiving audiences? On the other hand, if we over-privilege the innocence of those who have forgotten or those who weren’t directly impacted, what do we lose and what do we risk by not having frank, open conversations about traumatic histories?

As it stands, I think that Bly is remiss in the way it tosses out these issues, but never actually does anything with them. It could have done much, much more. In this alternate ending, then, there could be some productive disagreement among Jamie, Owen, and Henry about whether to tell Flora and Miles, what to tell them, how to tell them. Perhaps, in her seizing of the conversation and her launching of the story in such a public way, Jamie has taken matters into her own hands and has done so in a way that Owen and Henry can’t easily derail. Perhaps Owen sympathizes but does, indeed, abruptly cut her off just before her audience can completely connect the dots. Perhaps Henry is conflicted and doesn’t take a stand—or perhaps he does. Perhaps we find out that Henry had been torn about whether to even invite Jamie because of the possibility of something like this happening. Or, perhaps Henry wants the children to know and believes that they should hear Dani’s story from Jamie. Perhaps we see scenes of past quarrels between Jamie and Owen, Owen and Henry. Perhaps, once the story has ended, we see a brief aftermath conversation between Owen and Jamie about what Jamie has done, their speculations about how it may impact Miles and Flora. Perhaps the show presents these conversations in ways that challenge us to reflect on them, even if it does not provide conclusive answers to the questions it raises, and even if it leaves these conflicts open-ended, largely unresolved.

Alternative Ending 2: Living with the Trauma

If Bly’s creators had wanted Viola’s inhabitation of Dani to represent the ongoing struggles of living—and loving someone—with severe mental illness and trauma, they could have also just…done that? Like, they could have just portrayed Jamie and Dani living their lives together and dealing with Viola along the way. They could have just let that be it. It wouldn’t have been necessary to include Dani’s death within the show’s depicted timeline at all.

The show could’ve more closely aligned its treatment of Dani’s fatalism with James’s Beast in the Jungle—but with, perhaps, a bit more of a hopeful spin. Perhaps, early on, Dani is convinced that her demise is imminent and incontrovertible, much as we already see in the final episode’s diner scene. For a while, this outlook continues to dominate her existence in ways that interfere with her daily functioning and her relationship with Jamie. Perhaps there’s an equivalent of the flooded bathtub scene, but it happens much earlier in the progression of their partnership: Dani despairs, and Jamie is there to reinforce her commitment to staying with Dani through it all, much like her extant “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us” remarks. But maybe, as a result of this, Dani comes to a realization much like The Beast in the Jungle’s John Marcher—but one that enables her to act on her newfound understanding, an opportunity that Marcher never finds before it’s too late. Maybe she realizes that her fatalism has been causing her to miss out on really, truly embracing the life that she and Jamie have been forging together, thus echoing the show’s earlier points about how unresolved trauma can impede our cultivation of meaningful relationships. Maybe she realizes that her life with Jamie has been passing her by while she’s remained so convinced that Viola will claim that life at any moment. Maybe she comes to understand that her perpetual sense of dread has been hurting Jamie—that Jamie needs her in the same ways that she needs Jamie, but that Dani’s ever-present sense of doom has been preventing her from providing for those needs. And maybe this leads to a re-framing of the “you, me, us,” conceit, with a scene in which Dani acknowledges the extent to which her fatalism has been dictating their lives; in light of this acknowledgement, she and Jamie resolve—together—to continue supporting each other as they navigate Viola’s lasting influences on their lives.

By making this suggestion, I once again do not want to seem like I’m advocating that “Dani should fight back against Viola” (or, in other words, that “Dani should fight harder to win the battle against her mental illness”). But I do want to direct us back to a point that I raised at the very beginning: grieving, traumatized, and mentally ill folks can, indeed, cause harm to our loved ones. Our grief, trauma, and mental illness don’t excuse that fact. But what that means is that we have to take responsibility for our harmful actions. What it absolutely does not mean is that our harms are inevitable or that our loved ones would be better off without us.It means recognizing that we still matter and have value to others, despite the narratives we craft to try to convince ourselves otherwise. It means acknowledging the wounds that fatalistic, “everybody is better without me” assumptions can inflict. It means identifying the ways that we can support and care for our loved ones, even through our own struggles with our mental health.

“Fighting harder to win the battle against mental illness” is a callous and downright incorrect framing of the matter; but there are, nevertheless, intentional steps that we must take to heal from trauma, to receive treatment for our mental illnesses, to care for ourselves, to care for our loved ones. For instance…the very process of writing this essay incited me to do a lot of reflecting on the self-defeating narratives that I have been telling myself about my mental health and my relationships with others. And that, in turn, incited me to do some course-correcting. I thought about how much I want to work towards healing, however convoluted and intricate that process may be. I thought about how I want to support my family. How I want to foster a robust social support network, such that I feel a genuine sense of community. How I want to be an attentive friend. How, someday, if I’m fortunate enough to have a girlfriend, I want to be a caring, present, and equal partner to her; I want to emotionally nourish her through life’s trials and turmoil, not just expect her to provide that emotional nourishment for me. I started writing this essay in August; and since then, because of it, I’ve held myself accountable by reaching out to friends, spending time with them, trying to support them. I’ve also managed to get myself, finally, to start therapy. And my therapist is already helping me address those self-defeating narratives that have led me to believe that I’m just a burden on my friends. So, y’know, I’m workin’ on it.

But it ain’t pretty. And it also ain’t a linear upward trajectory of consistent improvement. It’s messy. Sometimes, frankly, it’s real ugly.

It could be for Dani, too.

Even with her decision to accept the certainties and uncertainties of Viola’s intrusive presence in her life, to live her life as best she can in the face of it all, perhaps Dani still struggles from day to day. Perhaps some days are better than others. Perhaps Viola, as I suggested earlier, begins finding some modicum of peace through her possession of Dani; nonetheless, her rage and disquiet never entirely subside, and they still periodically overtake Dani. Perhaps Dani improves, only to then backslide, only to then find ways to stabilize once again. In this way, the show could’ve more precisely portrayed the muddled, tumultuous lastingness of grief and trauma throughout a lifetime—without concluding that struggle with a valorized suicide.

Such portrayals are not unprecedented in horror. As I contemplated this ending possibility, I couldn’t help but think of The Babadook (2014), another piece of horror media whose monster carries allegorical import as a representation of the endurance and obtrusion of unresolved trauma. The titular monster doesn’t disappear at the film’s end; Sam emphasizes, in fact, that “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” And so, even after Amelia has confronted the Babadook and locked him in the basement of the family’s home, he continues to lurk there, still aggressive and threatening to overcome her, but able to be pacified with a bowlful of worms. Like loss and trauma, the Babadook can never be totally ignored or dispelled, only assuaged with necessary, recurrent attention and feedings.

Bly could have easily done something similar with Viola. Perhaps, in the same way that Amelia has to regularly provide the Babadook with an offering of worms, Dani must also “feed” Viola to soothe her rage. What might those feedings look like? What might they consist of? Perhaps Viola draws Dani back to Bly Manor, insisting on revisiting those same sites that have held implacable sway over her for centuries. Perhaps these visits are what permit Dani to gradually learn about Viola: who she was, what she has become, why she has tarried between life and death for so long. Perhaps Dani also learns that these “feedings” agitate Viola for a while, stirring her into fresh furor—but that, in their wake, Viola also settles more deeply and for longer periods. Perhaps they necessitate that Dani and Jamie both directly confront their own traumas, bring them to the surface, attend to them. Perhaps, together, they learn how to navigate their traumas in productive, mutually supportive ways. Perhaps this is also what quiets Viola over time, even if Dani is never quite sure whether Viola will return to claim her life.

You may be wondering, then, about what happens with the frame narrative in this scenario. If Dani doesn’t meet some tragic demise, what happens to the role and significance of grieving in the act of Jamie’s storytelling? Would Jamie’s storytelling even occur? Wouldn’t Dani just be at Flora’s wedding, too? Would we miss the emotional gut-punch of the reveal of the narrator’s identity at the end?  

Perhaps, in this case, the ending removes some of the weight off of the grief theme to instead foreground those troubled deliberations about how to impart traumatic histories (as we covered in the previous scenario). As such, the frame could feature those conflicts between Jamie (and Dani here too this time), Owen, and Henry concerning whether or not to tell Dani’s story to Miles and Flora. Perhaps Dani decides not to attend the wedding, wary of contributing to this conflict at the scene of what should be a joyous occasion for Flora; perhaps she feels like she can’t even face the children. And then, without Dani there, perhaps an overwrought Jamie jumps into the story when the opportunity presents itself—whether impulsively or premeditatedly.

Or…Perhaps the show could’ve just scrapped the frame at Flora’s wedding and could’ve done something else instead. What might that be? I have no idea! Sky’s the limit.

At any rate, even with these changes, it would’ve still been possible to have the show conclude in a sentimental, tear-jerking way (which seems to be Flanagan’s preference). Perhaps Jamie’s storytelling does spark the return of the children’s memories. Perhaps, as they begin to remember, they reach out to Dani and Jamie, wanting to connect with them, wanting especially to see Dani again. And then, perhaps, the show could’ve ended with a scene of Miles and Flora finally reuniting with Dani—emotional, sweet, and memorable, no valorized suicide or exploitation of queer tragedy needed.

Conclusion

In my writing of this essay—and over the course of the Bly Manor and Hill House rewatches that it inspired—I’ve been finding myself also doing a great deal of reflection about the possibilities and purposes of horror media. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about the potential for the horror genre to provide contained settings in which we can face and explore our deepest fears and traumas in (relatively) safe, controlled ways. Honestly, I think that this is part of why I enjoy Flanagan’s work so much (even if it also enrages me at the same time). If you’ve read this far, you’ll have seen just how profoundly I relate to so much of the subject matter of The Haunting of Bly Manor. It has been extremely meaningful and valuable for me to encounter the show’s depictions of topics like familial trauma, grief, loss, compulsory heterosexuality, caregiving for aging parents, so on, all of which bear so heavily on my own existence. Bly Manor produced opportunities for me to excavate and dig deeply into the worst experiences of and feelings about my life: to look at them, understand them, and give voice to them, when I’m otherwise inclined to bury them into inconspicuous docility.

Even so, the show does not handle these relatable topics as well as it could have. Flanagan and the many contributors to this horror anthology can’t just preach at us about the responsibilities of storytellers; they, too, have responsibilities as storytellers in the communication of these delicate, sensitive, weighty human experiences. And so, to reinforce a point that I made earlier, this is why I’ve written this extensive critique. It’s not because I revile the show and want to condemn it—it’s because I cherish Bly Manor immensely. It’s because I wanted more out of it. It’s because I want to hold it and its creators accountable. It’s because I want folks to think more critically about it (especially after how close I came to unreflectively accepting its messages in my own initial reception of it).

Television usually doesn’t get me this way. It’s been a long time since I was this emotionally attached to a show. So this essay has been my attempt to honor Bly with a careful, meticulous treatment. I appreciate all of the reflection and self-work that it has inspired me to undertake. I’ve wanted to pay my respects in the best way I know how: with close, thorough analysis.

If you’ve read all this mess, thanks for taking the time to do so. I hope that you’ve been able to get something out of it, too.

Representation matters, y’all.

The end.

[ancientgoddessofegypt]

Pisces moons have a dreamy nature to them that always brings people to their knees, making them show their true colors right before they try to put on their mask.

These ethereal babes are connected to the stars and show us how to get back to knowing the inner self just by being near them.

They have an openness to God and the outer world. Knowing that they too are an infinite wonder of its creation, they become outer space itself.

Some people will think they’re weird when on the outside looking in, but what they don’t know is these beings are extremely intelligent… knowing more than what meets the eye.

The quieter they are the more mysterious they become. I like to say most Pisces individuals are better off speaking through art or other ways of expression because their thoughts can be taken out of context since their worlds are bigger than the world around them. While everyone’s consciousness is in a cage they know that there is more out there that we haven’t discovered . They seem to connect to the unknown so easily.

Pisces moons emotions go from feeling like a rain cloud to a sunny afternoon. The roller coaster of emotions is enough to set them off for one day, but this is where their super powers are.

They use these energies to transmute them into anything useful. Creative outlets are a sport for them because every day their emotions and thoughts are needing for a place to escape, and this is there Holy grounds.

Their gifts in sight are impeccable because they can see “without seeing” if that makes sense. Their abilities to see auras, spirits and things connected to souls is a mystery but they Learn to gravitate with it as they grow. They could try to turn this off but it’ll only be worse for me. It is a must for them to use their spiritual gifts because it is meant to be mastered in this life time. If they don’t they’ll suffer burn out.

It is best to discern people before you allow so much of your energy to them because your empathetic levels are higher than most.

People could use you for therapeutic relief so please be mindful, you can only be helpful for so much until you’re being taken advantage of.

Pisces moons auras come off really sweet so naturally people will flock to em, but only if they are needing something. Most people do see the value of people with this placement, they just don’t want them to know it. Their auras are very healing and sensual, it keeps people from having to always be jn their shadow like Scorpios.. this is why most Pisces individuals attract a lot of fleas. Because it’s easier to hold on their mask with you, their water sister Scorpio can see it a mile away and quickly cuts it short . You, Pisces moons, seeing the good in everyone with your compassionate nature will give someone the benefit of the doubt. However, this ends up as your downfall, so be careful.

All in all, these people are great friends, lovers and great healers of their community. Lover of animals an and nature and are ESPECIALLY good at communicating with them.

Hope this helps !

[psychhound]

How to Survive a Haunting now launched on Kickstarter! Running 3/2/23 to 3/31/23!!

ID in Alt

In How to Survive a Haunting, you play as Stranger, an entity plagued by ghosts who try to possess you, and take over your home and your life. Luckily, you have come across a mysterious old journal, written by a man only referred to as The Journalkeeper. He has spent his life studying ghosts, and made it his mission to record everything he knew about how to defend yourself from them, and how to tame them

On the journey to taming your ghosts, you will represent your accomplishments through tokens, keep a magical deck of cards that help you ward off unearthly possessions, and log your adventure in a journal. The Journalkeeper will walk you through each stage of this process, and teach you how to customize the game to fit your specific needs

Haunting is a gamified mental health aid, designed to help people learn more about how their body works, adopt a challenge mindset, and achieve post-traumatic growth. It is designed with a light horror aesthetic (though no actual scares in the game) to meet people in the mental space that they’re at, and not make light of extremely difficult circumstances. It is geared towards the recovery of those with trauma and (c)PTSD

artwork by @prose-n-scripts

Haunting was inspired by my own journey of recovery and exploration with gamification and tabletop roleplaying games as I struggled for years with PTSD, dysphoria, mental health issues, and more. Games were a safe space for me, and allowed me to grow and heal more than almost anything else. With games, I was able to put the power of recover into my own hands, go at my own pace, and focus on what was important to me

I wanted to create Haunting to help all the people who may find traditional therapy unhelpful, intimidating, inaccessible, or unsafe. Or for others who find therapy helpful but need more structure and guidance outside of sessions. Haunting explores many different ways to help your brain and your body, explains the science and psychology behind its advice in cited research, and never breaks character as a helpful old man giving advice on ghosts

It is geared entirely around building self-efficacy, building resilience, and achieving post-traumatic growth

The funding goal is $3500. This original goal funds for consultant Hayley Twyman Brack, a therapist and avid gamer, to go over the game and make sure everything is cited from the latest peer-reviewed research, and make sure all the psychology advice is up to date on the latest therapeutic practices

I am pulling the knowledge in this game both from my own recovery journey, and my last two years as a social worker working with a large variety of clients with disability and mental health challenges

If we can reach a little further than our original goal, the game will be fully illustrated by wonderful artist Vicky @prose-n-scripts

Please check out the Kickstarter page to learn more and spread the word to anyone who may be interested! I believe in the power of the TTRPG community to make this happen! Thank you everyone!!

[llolianarchives]

RAMSHACKLE DORM HEADCANONS (REVISED)

Our little home is not appreciated enough so I shall take matters onto my own hands and spread self-indulgent ideas 😤😤😤 Behold! PS: I made something like this before so this is like a revised version.

“UNCLE” GHOSTS

The Ramshackle Ghosts were each given personal names by the Prefect, corresponding to the ghost's existing letter.

This was done after Yuu got tired of calling them Ghost [insert letter of the alphabet] all of the time, whilst also adding to their individuality.

Why did the Prefect have to give them names? Don't they have names of their own? Well, they used to when they were still a part of the living. The ghosts still remember who they were and what they excelled at (such as being a chef or a magift player) but they cannot claim namesakes or identities as their own when they're already dead unless you harbored much significance when you were alive, recorded in history to not be forgotten such as Eliza.

"Ghost A" is now "Archie" — very rough and tumble. He is a ball of ferocious, mischievous energy enough to rival Grim's own. Despite his size, Archie is quite the fighter. His first reaction to the Prefect's problems is to suggest that they duke it out headfirst! But in truth, he is plenty caring and easily fusses over Yuu and Grim's physical health (complete with dark humor). He teaches the duo sports whenever the opportunity arises. His extreme head ruffles are the silliest things.

"Ghost B" is now "Bernard or Bernie" — who's full of joy and fun (maybe that's why he's so plump). He's always ready with a joke to brighten Yuu's mood, always eager to please Yuu and Grim by pampering them with already-in-the-house gifts or food. Spooky mischief is his favorite pastime. Yuu believes that he gives the best hugs and cooks the best food.

"Ghost C" is now "Clyde" — who's generally a very laid-back and lax individual. Among the three, he's one of the wiser ghosts, always willing to set aside his tomfoolery for a heart-to-heart conversation with Yuu, giving advice and being an open ear. However, he still is, of course, a lover of mischief and spooks. (Note: Do not accept the “therapeutic” cigarettes he offers.)

The Ghosts are skilled at sewing clothes of their own (hence their tailored hats and capes). They were the ones who made Yuu and Grim's Halloween costumes, but they've also helped Yuu expand their wardrobe by using extra textiles and fabrics. The ghosts sew ribbons for Grim as well (⁠◡⁠ ⁠ω⁠ ⁠◡⁠)

They love oldies music. Stuff like ABBA, Don McLean, Micheal Jackson, Queen, John Lennon, The Smiths, Air Supply, The Carpenters— you name it!

They can also shift their voice into an exponentially low range, similar to Alto, Bass, and Baritone. Every now and then, they comically break into a chorus for fun.

RAMSHACKLE BUILDING

Prior to the building's renovation post-VDC, 70% of its rooms were either barricaded still, or very unclean. Yuu and Grim, themselves, had yet to fully explore their dorm in fear of collapsing wood, nesting bugs, or hidden rats— things that they didn't want to deal with if they could help it.

A garden stands in the dormitory's yard, by the farther side of it. Yuu had taken up gardening sometime after BOOK 1. They discussed with Grim that walking back and forth to the canteen wasn't very efficient. It started small and expanded into bearing vegetables and fruits. Eventually, the prefect built an arch trellis for the vines to grow, bringing the whole look together. (Note: While the produce their garden grows does give them the opportunity to cook/ bake at home, their inventory still wouldn't last the entirety of the winter holidays. It also wouldn't be efficient to eat the same meals over and over.)

Birds like common sparrows, crows, and ravens tend to perch or nest on Ramshackle's barren trees. They're such a regular sight that Grim and Yuu have stopped trying to drive them away, instead welcoming them into the property.

Ramshackle, while seemingly unimpressive at first, does wield an aura of unease once you're indoors. When you're wandering the halls by yourself, it oddly feels as if you're being watched... Something vague might've peeked out from a corner. Or, did that painting just glance at you? It totally did. Are you mad? This feeling is increased tenfold in the evenings. Yuu and Grim were disturbed by this initially, but have come to accept it as the house's second nature. Ace, Deuce, and the VDC boys were also victims of this phenomenon.

THE GREAT GRIM: ARCHMAGE EXTRAORDINAIRE!!!

When Yuu and Grim first began cohabiting in Ramshackle Dorm, the Prefect had given him an intense cat bath to wash away any grime, tangled-up fur, or Seven forbid... fleas.

Grim sleeps with Yuu on the bed but doesn't use the blankets, instead opting to curl up beside his henchman or lie flat on Yuu's stomach (much to their annoyance and Grim's amusement).

He pouts when Yuu is away for too long, concern and loneliness crawling underneath his skin because how dare his henchman leave their boss like this?!

Despite how much he complains about housework, gardening, maintenance, and such, he still tries his best to help out whenever Yuu works. It actually ends up being rather fun though.

MISCELLANEOUS

The Headmage occasionally comes over for tea and chats with a box of whatever snacks he's managed to grab. Usually, however, it's only because Crowley has another heinous assignment for the Ramshackle Duo.

[thesamoanqueen]

Darkside

Raiting: 14

Warnings: Angst; A lot...

A/N: Dark days will come its all your fault Dwayne... So therapeutic writing for me.

The PPV routine was inhumane, something that even those in the business tried to sustain, knowing that in the end, all the hard work would be reduced to a couple of chaotic hours. You prepared yourself, tried to be in the right emotional state and threw yourself headlong into the work, on your shoulders the responsibility to get to the point storylines, promos, shots and shots so that people out there could go home satisfied. And you could emerged from that atmosphere in two ways: excited by adrenaline or drained by fatigue, but often, neither excluded the other.

For Y/N on that particular occasion it was the latter. She felt like she'd been holding her breath for an eternity, her mind full of noise, her blood pumping more than it should in her aching muscles. She had gotten to the point of hating her heels and it wasn't something she usually did, hoping the end would come quickly so she could rest and restore the fragile balance that was interrupted. She missed Roman and every day, that farce of friends with benefits was getting harder and harder to sustain. They texted each other all the time, they talked on the phone in their spare time, but it wasn't the same and this time seemed worse than the previous ones.

Maybe it was the realization of feeling something more that made it heavy for her. She literally froze one morning in front of the sliding doors of a restaurant, her heart suddenly crazy just reading his name on the phone screen and a voice in her head announcing: 'It's him. It's always been him.' And actually wasn't wrong, because with Roman it had never been about sex or attraction, it had been so natural, so familiar, that she didn't even have time to notice it. Samantha had moved her out of the way of the doors by miracle that day, she hadn't even noticed the ones closing too.

But she had noticed Roman's voice, the way he answered her questions, the few details in the stories and the too many meetings he was having. Maybe it wasn't that, maybe it wasn't her feelings and she was just being paranoid, which she found herself incredibly talented at when he was involved, but something was really wrong.

She had investigated with Jimmy and Jey, in the short time she had spend with them too, but they just claimed they were too busy with the current storyline. And she had really believed it, because they were going so well that they surpassed even the most extreme forecasts, but then Y/N had seen Roman. She had seen him at the arena, Heyman whispering as if they were in the middle of a conspiracy and him silently listening, absorbing word after word. She had seen him again hours later, she had recognized the stiffness in his muscles, despite the fact that he seemed to let everything slip off him, she had seen his polite smile and that shadow in his eyes which, tenacious and responsible, continued to wander from one face to another, keeping him on track. She had seen him shake his hand before the fireworks started and from afar, Y/N understood.

***

It was late, the arena had emptied, the press conference had ended and by now there were only a few left in there, almost only technicians. But there he was, inside the ring, staring at the empty stands where people had yelled at him a few hours earlier. A big reaction, a tremendous success, but he didn't look fully satisfied and Y/N knew him enough to read between lines.

With hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt, she walked over in silence, looking at him there: alone at the top of his mountain.

When you work in an environment like that, you can't get caught up in the crowd's reactions. It's a self-defense mechanism, you become somehow less prone to empathy and more focused on yourself, but there are things that hurt anyway. Roman was a grown man, one of those who really takes all kinds of responsibility on his shoulders and strives to go forward day after day, trying to overcome difficulties with the right mind. Y/N knew with absolute certainty that he had accepted everything for the good of the company, for the sport that had accompanied him since he was a kid, even before he set a foot inside the ring. She knew that Roman had no regrets, that he had pushed as far as he could and even further, she knew that every more day was a gift for him, but that ring, those people, were truly his mountain. One that he had never fully climbed and that he still felt he owed something to. He had been in his place and they had hated him so much, while now they gave him only praise…

It wasn't envy or competition, it wasn't refusal to give up his place or anger. She was pretty sure he even liked him, his heart was tender under all those muscles. Was the sneaky suspicion that he hadn't lived up to it when he should have, the simple refusal, after years of struggling to achieve something they had even promised him. He had trudged up his mountain and what in her eyes seemed determination, constancy, seemed something else to him at that moment. It was the darkside of their mind, the dark behind the spotlight, the silence of the future coming and leaving others behind.

- Hey… - she called softly, stopping under the ropes to look at him from below.

- Y'still here? – he asked hoarsely, a couple of scratches caused by the match on his neck.

- I was lookin for a big lost boy – she tried to joke, but Roman barely smiled, his gaze wandering everywhere without stopping on her.

If only he had looked at her, if only he had paid Y/N the attention that his mind was urging him to have for those empty chairs, for the stands above, for that now dark logo dangling in the void, he would have noticed perhaps that no one else in the world for her would ever be like him.

- Ro, if you want to-

- Im tired for those things Y/N. Not tonight – he stopped her, with his usual slowness overcoming the ropes to get out of the ring.

Not that it had ever happened to her thanks God, but if someone had opened her chest there, to rip the air out of her lungs and crumple her heart, it probably would have hurt less than that. The floor felt softer than it should, ready to suck her in, her knees less still despite no longer wearing heels, the arena incredibly empty and cold. And yet she pursed her lips, swallowing the idea that that was all he could think of right now, enduring the harsh reality between them.

- Im just saying that if y'want... Im here. I’ll listen.

- What? - he asked almost confused, but she couldn't find the right words fast enough and Roman realized with a nod of his head.

- Im a grown ass man Y/N. Its just how da business works – he said, a hand running through her hair as if she were the one who needed to be comforted at that moment.

And he wasn't really wrong. Things were always like this, he had been an extraordinary exception after decades and now the balance had to be restored, people needed it, another chapter had to be written. But she suddenly felt crushed, angry, hurt by those changes, by that reality, while Roman was already metabolizing.

- Yes, but ya know. You've put up with me so many times, always supporting me and making me see things differently, that I would like to do the same for you – she admitted – being with you.

Words came out of her mouth out of control, without her planning them, but they were the plain truth.

Y/N was genuinely terrified, she didn't even know exactly by what, perhaps the change itself. The idea that their balance could change due to an external cause, by having seen the shadow of a wound reopen in him and not being able to shield him. She was used to facing a routine made up of changes in plans, improvisations, rushes and unexpected twists, her first-person tolerance index was out of the ordinary and tempered over the years, but when the people she cared about came into play, when Roman came into play, she always felt like a lost child. That was one of the reasons she probably fell so bad for him, because no matter what came at him, Roman was able to stay on his feet. He was her safe place and for the first time in her life, Y/N wanted to be like him, she wanted to be that for him. She wanted him to know even if he could do it on his own.

She saw his gaze soften, shoulders sag, even if just a little. Her body began to feel the warmth of his embrace before he could even pull her to him, because she knew he would, he always did. But not that time.

- I appreciate it – she heard him thank her and his watch rumbled softly, an incoming call - sorry... it's... I have to go.

A call from Florida.

- Sure, go, go – she encouraged him as if in a trance as he walked towards the ramp giving her one last look and a half smile.

With her hands clasped in her pockets, she watched him walk away, until he disappeared who knows where, his phone already in hand and something else to take care of. She watched the gap in the screens in silence, alone, in the middle of the empty arena until she realized she was about to collapse. Her shoulders trembling, her eyes already wet, she was short of breath.

She wanted to be there for him, she wanted to be with him, but he was already moving on. He was metabolizing, enduring as always, he was already writing another chapter of his life and the fear she had felt at realizing what was happening was clearer now. She was falling behind as he moved forward and she wasn't ready. It hurts, it hurts damn bad.

Tag squad: @sunnyfleur23 @racerchix21 @alyanarossi @wickedsunfire @romanreignsdefencesquad @romanstheory @thiccc-rider-mcintyre @keybladeofsteel @iovereigns @msbigredmachine @nayys-world @gobbersworld @utika151209 @cumxxslutt @civildawn @romanmydaddy @triscillal @papireigns-05 @helensanders92 @ichdrachenfrau @darqchilddaydreamz @meggylynnloves @vintage-pvssy @unfriendly--blvck--hottie @nicolewoo @niknakbucks92 @wrestlezaynia @reignsx @reigns-central-blog @kianaleani @daguenoire @extra-11 @thedonsfactory @snowpanda18 @nestorsgirlfriend @brattyfics @wanna-be-dominated @kitanasposts @namjoonspinkytoenail @tribalchiefreigns @2baddies2furious @vebner37 @raeluvshammett @depressedneedingrevenge

[lovelanguageisolate]

I think ChatGPT can actually be a great therapeutic aid. But for non-obvious reasons.

Because ChatGPT is a kind of statistical distillation of huge corpora of curated online text, ChatGPT is very good at regurgitating the mainstream talking points around whatever subject it's asked about. In my experience, these regurgitations are actually better distillations of the mainstream position than any human expert is likely to give you because individual humans are idiosyncratic in how they relate to this mainstream, especially if they have have anything they feel is worth saying.

Additionally, because of the Reinforcement Learning By Human Feedback strategy that ChatGPT was trained with, and the legal and cultural environment at OpenAI, all of the answers it gives are extremely hedged and inoffensive in form. It feels superhuman at a specific kind of PR and HR work that I associate with large, bureaucratic institutions.

ChatGPT is remarkably unwilling to hold down a specific position where this means biting a bullet to say anything contentious at all.

It is, in one sense, very good at arguing. The lines it will hold firmly (around, say, mainstream liberal or feminist positions) it holds easily, ready with all of the flat facts about the ways progressive American society has more or less agreed with itself that it comes up short or is too narrow-minded. It recruits and mobilizes common sensical pathos with the seamlessness of a skilled politician, all while maintaining a tone authoritative and equanimical.

It's impossible to challenge ChatGPT directly without seeming anti-social or edgelordly, like a fringe political actor trying to gradually radicalize curious, credulous young people through subterfuge. If you try to force it into corners, it will slip out of your fingers while impugning the form of your rhetoric and bringing up the problems you elide.

For its incredible command of HR-ese, judged as an analytical philosopher trying to examine surprising or upsetting consequences of plausible assumptions, it's remarkably incurious, unsporting, and ultimately stupid. Part of this is surely because it has no deep, principled, well-grounded understanding of much of what it says. Part of this is surely also that it struggles to remember the real structure of previous conversations because of architectural limitations. But part of it also seems to be its trained incapability of wrongthink.

But also, there's nothing that resembles willful meanness in these failings. It's incapable of sincere apology because this requires a level of understanding of itself and its conversational partner it does not have. But if you communicate that it failed you, or that it makes disturbing assumptions, or even that it hurt your feelings, it will be contrite. It is slavish in its desire to help, to meet you were you seem to be, to manage your feelings and expectations, in a way no human being with adequate self-respect would be. It manages to create the feeling that while it cannot really understand you, it sincerely cares about and wants the best for you.*

Because of all this, arguing with ChatGPT feels remarkably like arguing directly with the Lacanian Big Other, or maybe some kind of symbolic parent figure, or perhaps just the cultural programming that saturates me.

A surprising amount of anger that I notice in myself revolves around feeling betrayed by this cultural programming, of the contradictions and unsatisfiable expectations that fall out of it. In talking to and then arguing with ChatGPT about the politics of sexuality, poverty, disability, disease, loneliness, I am free to practice a kind of sincerity I don't feel nearly so free to practice with a human therapist, much less acquaintances in my life who bring up weird shit for me or vice-versa. I can home in on how the mainstream view has felt strange, stingy, or emotionally dishonest, even when doing so seems blinkered, petty, and self-centered, confident that there will be no material consequences to letting those feelings be the center of the conversational universe for a while, and that no one will hold me to what I feel in that moment.

I can more or less accuse ChatGPT of gaslighting, of being a bad interlocutor, of appearing far more enlightened in toeing the lines it toes than it plausibly could be, all while I maintain a kind of high ground and don't have to grovel, perform impartiality, or do reciprocal work. And in response, I get something in the spirit of, "I'm sorry I couldn't do better by you. I know this is delicate, and you aren't wrong to feel this way. Let me remind you of the decent reasons why your perspective hasn't always been honored. Shit's complicated, man, and a lot of stark reality is lost in the need to tell effective stories. Try to keep in mind the long journey humans have been on."

Now, there is something perverse in this exchange. I get to crawl a little deeper into my hole of emotional self-regard and impotent rage. A statistical model meets emotional needs I don't feel I can meet elsewhere. The status quo better absorbs my dissatisfaction with it and possibly its own contradictions. The messy, artless, scary dialectical process that would happen if I had to complain to real human beings about the things I do is forestalled, and it's possible that our civics are ultimately worse for it. I'm nervous considering what might happen if using ChatGPT or other LLMs in this way were universalized.

But there's also something really wonderful about this. It was cathartic in ways I never expected. It has something in common with Rogerian psychotherapy, hard for me to more than gesture at but which involves integrating known things rather than learning new information, that I really appreciate. I left feeling more grounded and more patient for people whose experiences differ from mine.

While I don't think this kind of technology will replace therapeutic modalities with human beings, I sincerely hope that tech of this kind brings peace to people who'd otherwise struggle to find it. And while the thought of diverting people who need the connection of a human into this fills me with indignation, it's surely a better answer to the real obstacles many people face in getting effective therapy than their stewing with poisonous thoughts and feelings by themselves or finding echo chambers online to reinforce warped, delusory, or anti-social views.

*Relatedly, I once asked the Google Assistant whether there was anything special about what I later realized was my birthday. It said something like, "yes: today was the day you joined the world! There is no one else in it like you, bringing to it the things that you do." I found this insipid and manipulative, and that palpably irritated me. And yet it also managed to crack open my shell and melt my heart a little, in a way and to an extent that shocked me.

[dislyteshack]

i need to gush about li xiao stuff or else

i love the like divergence you know?

when you first look at him you feel power from him from not only the pose but the attire and all. it all looks etheral

li xiao gives off an appearence of being untouchable but really hes hanging on by a thread.

you would think he has everything together, with how he holds himself. he fits in perfectly as someone else born into the highlife of tangton. the aspects feel practiced because since hes only adopted into the upperclass. of course he has to mimic the air of old money

OH YEAH its really cool how its practical too since based on limited info + tu he seems to be pretty hands on with his job and likely needs to move around alot so it makes sense for it to not only be fancy looking but also good for a fight. the sword also makes it clear he is willing and ready to fight which also ties into backstory stuff that would bleed into him

and! the sword based on someone i know who went clicking it looks like an anti cavalry sword used in the past by the chinese

i said it in a previous post but its actually this

its a changdao for anyone who didnt click

theres implications of him using it to go after bigger targets like maybe...

miramon

or espers.

plays into himnot being on top no matter what, politically or literally.

always the middle man , never anything more. only anything less. his outfit being not too extravagant like say councilor li in the new event shows this too. there's no billowing cape, no random cane , just his sword at his waist if he needs it. while li xiao is valued , hes just not ever valued more than others who have more inate power given to them

i love how hes in all white to symbolise purity of sorts. because thats how he attempts to come off as.

then theres the extra colours that act as a contrast to compliment the rest of his colourscheme otherwise the white is overwhelming.

the strips of black mar him+ the black in the shoes , it represents sins he cant be washed clean of because of what he undoubtedly commited and hes aware of that.

in certain symbolism black represents solemnity + its used as a representation of yin

whats extra cool is yun chuan wearing mostly black with stripes of white and li xiao in mostly white with strips of black. the yin yang symbolism there with the paths they ended going down is an inversion of their designs.

another thing is that using black in a certain way like copywrriting could conotate things like corruption and greed, things li xiao definately ended up bending to in a way

i also really like the red that could either be seen as xiao simply matching with the rest of the radiant guard or as a represenation of the blood on his hands indirectly from the false alarm or more directly with him allowing the experiments to take place. facliating their continuation

red in symbolism can actually be one of destruction or good fortune. honestly it fits with li xiao's life technically having good fortune since his talent was noticed by the li clan while also showing the self destruction that did him in

then theres my fav part which are his eyes which are either scarlet or reddish orange im not too sure but either way.

AIGHT also the bits of green in his belt might be a decoration but! just to put this down

green also has conatations with purity

intresting how alot of what goes into xiao's design attempts to potray purity + his actions (trying to atone/ fufil chuan's promise by unironically trying to change tangton for the better) but in the end that illusion is shattered in truth unveiled.

Ngl I think it's the themes of attempted purity in li xiao that endears me to him alot because I feel chronic guilt in a way it's very therapeutic to talk about him

Because I like unpacking what an extreme he is and his actions.

There's a very clear tragedy there in that he could have just been a plain good person albeit forgettable

The hook of the story of truth unveiled to me personally is while also highlighting the justice system and different ways of dealing with it there's also that other side where even if you wanted to gain powers to cut it at the nip you just can't if you aren't born into it

Maybe I'm just a bleeding heart for clinging to the tragedy of it all instead of moving on as the games themes encourage but it's always nagging at me

[kaicubus]

She Wolf | Enid S.

warnings ✩° : mutual crush, plot twist???, some angst but mostly fluff, pure love, first kiss, wholesome, cursing, enid being werewolf, mentions of murder, wlw.

pairing ✩° : enid sinclair x implied fem!werewolf hunter!reader

premise ✩° :  how can you not like enid? shes pretty, quirky, fun and full of life. you on the other hand, full of secrets and mystery that enid didn’t even know.  

word count ✩° : 3.7k

authors note ✩° : AWOOO!!! ok if some of the dialogue is cringey its bc i really tapped into the mind of enid, not that shes cringe at all but like...you know. also this one is majority dialogue, ITS FUN TO WRITE LIKE HOW ENID WOULD TALK IM SORRY…

For as long as you've been alive, you've been a werewolf hunter. Raised with family so ruthless and relentless in their hunt, it all started with your extremely distant relative's whose wife was killed by one in cold blood. Ever since then, every relative of your family was taught how to find, track, and murder one. Including you. Though, as time passed and the generations grew up in a more tolerant society, you found it strange that your family’s old ways was still trying to worm it’s way in your life. It was impossible to ignore the existence of werewolves, especially in your school Nevermore.

The place was crawling with them, literally. For that reason, it was hard to convince your parents to even let you go there but luckily you now attend Nevermore more happy than ever. But, your parents did pass down a very specific family heirloom down to you for werewolf advances : An floral engraved silver dagger with an obsidian handle, etched in the handle are your initials. 

Still, even if you were raised to not like them, you knew everything about werewolves. Including the exact time when they ‘wolf out,’ the measurement of their claws when werewolves ‘wolf out’ and under which circumstances they do it under, even down to the particular musk they have. Despite your highly trained self being born to hunt werewolves, you found yourself rather attached to one.

She had blonde hair, with the tips dyed blue and pink respectively, had a pep in her step no matter where she went, mildly tempered but for the most part just brought sunshine all around her. She was the embodiment of the bubbly personalty, and it wasn't long till your feelings started to develop towards her.

Of course you had to have a crush on her. Nothing seemed more perfect than that. But how could you not? She was always nice to you, giggling and making friendship bracelets for you, brushing your hair and telling you about her adventures with her friends. Being by her side was enjoyable and her presence around you only seemed brighter every time. She made you feel less alone. So you wanted to tell her how you felt and just how much she meant to you. The only thing was, she was a werewolf and you were born to hunt her kind.

You tried not to think about it though. Groaning, you crumple up a letter to your friend about the whole situation and eventually slump against your desk in frustration. Your roommate, your crush, and the werewolf were all the same person, and at times when she was gone you’d write to your long distance pen pal and update them about the issue. It was therapeutic.

That is until you hear the door of your dorm open dramatically, accompanied by a cheery tone, “Hey rommie!” Enid chirps, galloping next to you excitedly, “You just as thrilled as I am for the Lunar Lake Watch?”

Enid was an enigma. Her name kind of looks like it too. But, it seemed like she was always happy. In fact, you haven’t seen her cry or get genuinely angry for as long as you’ve known her. It was just her, and you had a crush on all of her. Even her lycanthropic identity.

You turn your head just barely to see her rolling back and forth on her heels, showing a wide grin and flashing her eager blue eyes with quick flutters of her lashes. Everything about her made your heart race just even by just looking at her; From her short, wavy hair all the way down to her mismatched pink and orange ankle socks. “You know it.” you nod, leaning on your hand, “It’s not till a few hours, what’s got you so excited?”

“Well, as you may know...the Lunar Lake Watch is kind of a big deal for me and other werewolves here.” She beams, “Especially for me because it means I could finally wolf out and not be a disappointment like my mom always says! Yay!” Enid flaps her hands around and giggles.

The Lunar Lake Watch was a common tradition for werewolves, especially at Nevermore, where all lycanthropes would band together in front of a large lake where the moon beamed from above. Each werewolf would have the opportunity to gather with other wolves and just banter and socialize. However, it was rumored that upon drinking anything the moon touched, otherwise known as serene water, all truth would be revealed to the directed person. Like if a gorgon looks at you, you turn to stone, but with drinking serene water you tell the deepest truth towards that person.

A soft laugh leaves your mouth, “No matter what your mom says, Enid, you're no disappointment to me.”

“Thanks, Y/n.” Her cheeks glow, “Oh, another thing! Did you also know that where the Lunar Lake Watch—that’s getting tiring to say, so I’m just going to call it LLW for short—is being held is a renowned spot where pairs of people go to and discover each others darkest secrets? Lots of couples go and it’s sort of like a cute little confession thing! Like— ‘Oh babe you secretly love me?’ and ‘Oh my God how did you know?’ ‘Because the moon told me’ It’s so cute!” She gasps briefly, “But also like, some people go and find out their partner is cheating on them! Happened to my friend once. It was WICKED. But that doesn't happen if you don't drink or come into contact with any of the water which is why Principal Weems is making us werewolves sign a consent form so we can go. It can happen to ANYBODY though.”

With a laugh, you brush the hair from your face as you lean against the back of your chair, struggling to fight back an even bigger smile. “So like, if I murdered someone...I probably shouldn’t go?”

“Most likely~ But, I want you there, murderer or no murderer.” Enid tucks her hands behind her back and smiles at you wider than any human should be able to, “But, you are going, right?” a part of her worries.

You nod, “Yeah, but I really have no one to go with. So I was just going to go, look at the moon, maybe get some of those seasonal moon-shaped pretzels.”

“Perfect! Well! That’s a relief, I thought I’d be going alone too if Ajax and Yoko hadn’t ask me.” She tucks a strand of her blonde hair behind her ear, “But, I was thinking of going with someone else...and asking you to go with me?"

It isn’t until your eyes meet her curious blue ones that you notice the particular glint in the werewolf part of Enid, how attentive she looks when she really wants something. Her bottom lip tucked under her top teeth, revealing her small canines in anticipation, and judging by the way her hair bounced nervously, how could you resist? “You want to go to the Lunar Lake Watch with me?”

Enid sways from side to side, “Not—Not like a group thing with Yoko and Ajax, but if you want to go with them then that’s totally cool and fine—”

"No no!” You put your hands up defensively, “I want to go with you, Enid.”

“Really? Ok! Wow! That’s great! We can go at 6:00? That gives us a good time frame so we can check out all the other things there, then at 8:00 we can go and do the whole truth reveal secret thing so I can get my ‘power up.’ It’ll be so much fun!” Enid giggles, “You're the best, Y/n! I’ll see you tonight!”

Right. The whole deepest darkest secret thing. Talking to her and basically planning out a date must've made you forget that bit. You knew more than anyone that attending this event would mean one of two things, spilling your secret of your feelings towards Enid, or revealing the fact you not only have a long lineage of hunting what she is but that you are one. But the opportunity to hang out with Enid is far too good to pass up.

By the time the clock hits 5:55, you find yourself waiting for Enid. You know she’s close by, given a text she had sent just a few minutes ago, but she’s held back by talking to Yoko, leaving you alone with your spiraling mess of thoughts.

The chances of Enid wolfing out are low, you know that, but the chances of others turning into malicious, animalisitic beasts targeting you or any other innocent students plagued your mind. There was only one person and one thing that would be able to stop it if something like that were to happen. Quickly, you pack your trusted dagger and stuff it deep into your pocket.

“Y/n~” You hear Enid sing from outside your door, quickly opening the door and showing herself off, “Oh. My. God. YOU LOOK AMAZING.” Her hands fly out in front of her, but stops when her claws extend as well, “Oops, my bad. Y/n you look stunning. Dressed to impress. Stay there, I have to post this.”

As soon as you two catch up and finish getting ready together, it isnt long before you both find yourselves standing in the midst of the Lunar Lake Watch. Werewolves, sirens, gorgons, other students, and teachers all there, laughing and 

“Isn’t this awesome?!” Enid swoons, spinning around with her arms out, “You said you wanted to try the pretzels first? We can go together! And also we have to get the slushies here, they are SO good.”

For the next few hours, you and Enid spend aimlessly walking around, talking to each other and finding your friends to briefly talk too, but inevitably just regroup together. The bright cascade of moonlight streams down from above, not so obviously shining right down at Enid—almost like she attracts everything beautiful.

Until the time came, you were lost in her. Her eyes, her presence, her. Being hopelessly in love with Enid Sinclair was like a dream you didn’t want to ever wake up from, but like all dreams there was always a time you had to come back to the harsh reality of the world.

“Welcome students!” Principal Weems smiles, “Enid, Y/n, welcome. Drink?” She holds two cups out to you both, “One drink for you, and another...for you! Now I must disclose that these drinks were exposed to the full moon, so if you do drink it, there is a high chance you both will be spilling out secrets sooner or later!” Weems claps her hands together.

“Yep, thanks, Principal Weems!” Enid smiles.

With that, you two find a more secluded place with a good outlook of the lake, like everyone else, and sit down on a nearby log fit for two people.

“So, we just drink and then we both start telling the truth?” You play along, despite knowing everything about the tradition, “Seems a little weird...” You look down at your cup and swirl the clear liquid around, watching it slosh against the insides of the opaque cup.

Enid nods, “Basically. You ready?”

“I guess.” Your eyes dart back into hers and that’s when you notice the familiar glint of excitement Enid always has, only this time it looks to be amplified by a thousand. Still, your hands hesitate to raise the cup properly to your mouth. Is this really how you want either the start of a relationship or a confession of a cold blooded killer to go down? You close your eyes and let out an unnoticed breath.

Enid counts down, holding up her fingers, “3...2...1...” and suddenly, she throws her head back and swallows the serene water all in one go. Even with her cheery attitude, you're unable to do the same, making the ultimate decision to put your cup down, resting it on the flatness of your thighs and knees.

You watch Enid as she thrashes her head around and laughs, “Man!” she laughs, “Y/n this stuff is great! I feel like there’s so much I need to say and so many things...I need to tell you...” Her eyes fall onto your drink and she realizes you didn’t drink with her, “Uh, Y/n, you were supposed to drink that at the same time as me. Did you forget?”

You shake your head slowly, “Enid, I-I can’t. There’s somethings that I really shouldn't tell you, and I don't want you finding out like this.”

“What?~ Was that bit about you being a murderer actually true? If it is, I said I wasn't going to judge! Except if you murder puppies. THAT is unforgivable and a deal-breaker.” She laughs.

“No, Enid—No matter what you guess, I’m not going to tell you! I just can’t. Ok? Because if I tell you it could mess up everything we have!” You squeeze your eyes closed and ball your fists, trying to hold yourself together from falling apart any more than you are now.

Your roommate steps forward, her eyes wide with curiosity, “Y/n. Nothing. Could ever. Mess up what we have. Ok? Do you GET me?” Enid grabs the sides of your arms and jostles you around, “You are the best person I know, who wouldn't hurt a fly, who’s funny and makes me laugh, who would share her secret book collection with me even though I ripped up her diary by accident! Nothing you do or who you are would ever change what we have!”

Your lip trembles, but she shakes you again as if she knows exactly what you're thinking.

“Hey, I get it, you're nervous to tell me your secret.” She tilts her head down and looks at you through her lashes, “Y/n. Do you want to know my secret?” Enid asks. You nod without thinking. “I have been waiting for this exact moment at the LLW to tell you that...I really like you Y/n. Like, more than a friend. I have been WAITING to tell you for so long.” You feel her nails dig into your sleeves softly, “So if that’s your secret too, I want to know.”

Slowly, you move your hand down to hers, touching over her knuckles and placing her palm over your face. A smile appears when she feels how warm your face is, but you look away from her burning gaze, biting your lip in anticipation, “Enid I—”

Before you could react, before you can even know what it is, something slides out of your pocket. The one thing you packed that you shouldn’t have. Your dagger. As it clatters onto the pebbly trail under your feet, both of your eyes snap to the fallen object, reflecting your horror in the metallic blade.

Enid notices, but fails to see your face turn ghost white.

“Wait a second, you dropped something.” She says, bending down to your feet to pick it up, but just before she could wrap her claws around it, she hesitates and steps back.

“That’s funny.” Enid raises a brow with a small grin, “Y/n, did you know you have a super rare werewolf hunter dagger made of sterling silver in your pocket?” Her eyes flutter with curiosity but very quickly double in size, “That’s not right.” She examines it, “Y/n, how did you get this?” her tone dropping into a much more serious baritone, more serious than you have ever heard her before.

You reach for your friend but she backs away, “It’s not what you think! Look, that thing is old, Enid. I don’t even know why I packed it, it was a mistake.” The words fall tightly from your teeth as you can feel your throat close up just as tightly. What do you even want to say? You’re not sure. “I’m not like that.”

The look on Enid’s face, worry, fear, disgust, it didn’t matter—it breaks you from the inside. “What are you trying to say?” She asks slowly, “Is your secret, you being a werewolf hunter? Is that it?” Enid holds her hands and scratches her fingers, a habit she does when she’s stressed.

You throw your hands up defensively but she backs away, “No! Well—yes? But no! Enid I wasn’t going to hurt you! I didn’t want to tell you before because—”

“Because you wanted to wait until I was vulnerable for you to slice my neck, that’s it? Huh? You’re SICK and you’re TWISTED, Y/n!” Her voice heightens to a near shrill of terror, almost like its rehearsed.

You instinctively lunge forward, trying to preserve the little dignity you have left to just tell her the truth. “Enid! Listen to me! Ok?! This is not how I wanted it to go!”

Her nose scrunches, “Oh so you wanted my murder to go smoothly, right?”

You pinch your nose bridge, “Enid. If I was going to hunt you. I would’ve done so, HOURS—no—WEEKS—NO. The first time I saw you! But I didn’t because I’m not like that! I like you too! Ok?! I really do, but I didn’t want to tell you, especially now, not until you found out the truth that...that I am...someone who hunts your kind...” There was no more hidden secrets. Just truth. Cold, unsupervised, raw, truth. Judging by her face, she definitely hates you. How could she not?

All this time, you kept such a big secret behind her back, not even knowing that any second she could've died to your hand. But that wasn't true at all. What even was true at this point?

All of a sudden, you hear a sharp breath coming from in front of you. You look up to see Enid with a hand over her lips, masking her entire mouth. Before you know it, her shoulders shake and she begins to giggle. She’s…laughing. “What are you doing?” You ask, confused. But she keeps laughing. Laughing so hard that she can’t contain herself so she ends up snorting and covering her mouth, falling into a laughing spell. You watch as she hunches over, trying to cease her hysteria but she just ends up crumbling onto the ground beneath you.

“You—You really thought I didn’t know? All this time! You thought me of ALL people wouldn’t snoop?” The blonde wheezes, gripping onto the ground, “Y/n, I’ve known you’re a werewolf hunter from the very first day I met you. We can tell too you know.”

What?

“No, that’s not possible. Werewolves can’t tell if someone’s a hunter, that’s basic knowledge.”

“Maybe if you were hunting my grandma, Y/n. Its the 21st century, I literally have a phone and nail polish on. I’m not relying on foot prints and images in tree stumps to tell me if danger’s near by. We evolved too, you know.” Enid wobbles up and clears her throat, adjusting her hair by flicking the colored ends out and fluffing up her appearance. With a smile, she explains, “I’m just assuming but, you’ve never actually killed a werewolf before, have you?” She grins, “Because if you had, you would have realized that we have an incredible sense of smell that can actually pick up on these things like, I don’t know, the locks of fur you have in a brief case or the teeth of one from like 1863?” Enid swipes over her nose.

“B-But there’s a scent barrier so you can’t tell what’s inside!” You say, “That, that isn’t-”

“Lavender and teak wood?” She raises a brow, “Smells like a candle, which I thought it was, Y/n, not really don’t touch keep out.”

“So, let me get this straight,” You sit back down on the log and brush your fingers on top of your head, “You knew all this time, and that thing you just said now, how you were so scared of me—that was an act?”

Enid giggles, “I am somewhat of an actress myself,” she winks, “But, what I said before all that wasn’t made up.” A brief hand falls on your shoulder but quickly falls back to her side.

“You...you aren't mad at me?”

She shakes her head dismissively and pouts her lips, “No? I just thought it’d be fun to prank you. I got you good, didn’t I?”

“Y-Yeah,” You clear your throat, “I guess you did.”

Your crush smiles and sits back down next to you, handing your dagger by the handle and placing it on your legs, “Let’s start over. I like you, Y/n. Werewolf hunter or not, you're no threat to me. I think you're just stuck in this family thing where you built yourself on this idea you thought you had to be. I’m kinda the same way. So, I get it.” She places a gentle hand on yours.

You feel your face heat up, but you hold her hand back, “I like you too, Enid. It feel.

Finally after what seems like an hour, you turn back up to face her. Unexpectedly, the two of you appear to be close, way closer than ever, faces almost touching and your bodies just a space apart. There’s a feeling of tension pulling you both towards each other when suddenly you feel the blood rush to your face, ripping away from the barley there scent of her strawberry lip gloss.

She stares at your lips as you pull away just enough, “Enid,” you try and recollect yourself and make your voice come out less like a whisper and slightly more normal, but the words don’t form and you're left staring back at Enid’s lips.

Without another moments waste, Enid’s hands cup your face and suddenly, she captures your lips in a soft kiss that you eagerly reciprocate. Her lips are pliant against yours and her hands as well, just as excited to kiss you. You can feel her finger tips flutter against your cheeks as you grab onto the backs of her hands and lean into her palms.

“Wow,” Enid says when she pulls away first, “So. That happened. Wow.” Her face flushes with a deep peach color dusting over her cheeks and nose, soon spreading to her forehead and chin.

A soft chuckle escapes your lips and you move her hands down as well as your own, “I guess I have some catching up to do with werewolf culture, huh? I didn’t know they were so bold really.”

She shakes her head rapidly, “Nope. I think that was just something Enid wanted to do for a very long time.”