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not-goldy · 3 months

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But isn’t JK sort of "queer cleansing" in Ch 2?

All those women in his MV’s who he had zero chemistry with but not a single reference to being into men (not that I expect that of course, being from a homophobic country. More like being in the closet, unfortunately.. but still).

I think his side of Ch 2 is interesting, based on the past ten years up until the military announcement— which is when this sudden "flipped switch" from disliking/being indifferent about dating women, refusing to sing "girl" in a Jason Derulo cover and being the object of other men’s affection, to singing about boinking women seemed to happen.

If the blurry video wasn’t true, I wonder if BH didn’t rush to clean it up because it kind of worked out to help with JK’s new "ladies man" image 💀💀 His face isn’t even decipherable but at least half the fandom ate that up!

To some extent I guess.

Heteronormativity and queer cleansing are two related but distinct concepts so I hope you are not confusing the two as one and the same in this case.

Heteronormativity in this sense is promoting hetersexuality and images of it as the standard or mainstream idea of something. For instance, what is the purpose of choosing a female lead to play the role of love interest besides the fact that that is just how things are done in the industry??

At this point it doesn't even matter at all the female you cast, it just has to be A female to play the role. It's not political, it doesn't speak to the sexual orientation of the individual, it's just what sells and what is considered the norm or standard way of doing things. You could replace the female subject with an inanimate object and the message of love and affection will not be lost.

Over using female as love interests without allowing for much diversity in music visuals has led to a situation where the woman has become a neutral marker in art. Much like words such as Man or other masculine forms gained neutrality and universality such that where you see man or dude or guy in a text you don't necessarily think they are referring strictly to a man, it's the same for women. They are there because they are expected to be there.

We are not wired to see their presence in MVs as contributing any unique or significant meaning to the story telling.

However seeing two men or two women portrayed as leads and love interests adds a political dimension to the message of the song or story of the MV.

It's why visuals such as Blood Sweat and Tears and the whole visual album of HYYH era speaks to many of us. Other wise they are all men, they can just sit and shout into a mic cos no one wants to see them grope each other- it's gay.

It's also why a producer will tell Tae to find a female to sing a part he wrote for Jimin on his personal song- it wasn't because a female voice was required for the song but simply unconventional for two men to sing a duet of that kind.

That's heteronormativity not queer cleansing.

A cleanse is an intentional act meant to please an audience, to calm their wrath and to portray conformity to the desires of the masses.

Heteronormativity is unconscious biases and decisions that are meaningless in themselves and are done not just to please but for the sheer reason that that is what we know and have come to accept as the norm.

I guess the difference is, did Jungkook have a choice other than choosing a female character for the role? No. To choose a male character for such a role would be so political and revolutionary because it would be going outside the norm.

Having a female lead is just a trend. For straight people, if they want to be "political" they often cast the real object of their affections and discard the paid models and artists. JB did that with his wife and uhm- what's the name of the dude who said his lungs under water but was breathing fire?

Queer cleansing is not just about heteronormativity. Promoting and using women as leads is not necessarily a cleanse.

It's heteronormative because whether he is in Korea or not, whether his country is conservative or not, whether he is gay or not, he would have casted a female as lead because it is expected and normalized.

I mean, why else would they have casted female leads for their mv way back when they were starting out, as young as they were, as young as he was?

Why else would he date a girl when he had no feelings whatsoever for her.

Why else were they made to pick up girls and demonstrate how they would ask a girl out or kiss a girl as entertainment disregarding the fact not all of them might have been into girls.

Let me leave you with this imagery:

Heteronormativity, like right handedness, or able bodiedness is the default setting of society. Manufacturers create products build cars, roads on the assumption that every one is right handed able-bodied straight individual and every thing in society is made to cater to this group bu default.

So sometimes when people create products to cater to the audience we can't say they are making revolutionary statements or even deliberately being discriminatory- they doing so simply because it's how things are done.

Jungkook might simply film an MV that way because that's how things are done in the industry.

I hope in the future he realizes this challenge and goes out of his way to challenge it not because he is queer but because he desires to bring change and uniqueness into the world.

And you are right. There are so many instances of hybe cleaning up his image or putting him through queer cleansing- I just don't think the MV is one of those.

Like I said, even his own fans try to queer cleanse his image by cooking up straight rumors and attacking people to try to suppress and disassociate him from any queer narrative.

And it's a cleanse because they do this with the understanding that portraying him as queer is harmful to his image or reputation or even a threat to his commercial success such as them tearing down his banners and even banning BTS in certain places because they seem "gay" smh

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corvuscorona · 4 months

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"You Never Forget Your First Love."

The other day, a mutual (hi! you know who you are I think probably hello hi! thank you for the Posting Impetus!) said something that made me curious (for, like, the 80th time, actually; lol. I Have Thoughts) about something: what's the split on people who subscribe to the "Stranger of Paradise probably intended for us to believe that Jack & Sarah were in love" mindset, vs. not? In general, but ESPECIALLY around these parts.

I genuinely didn't read it that way myself (& I do NOT normally give media (general) this much credit, but the writing in this game is sublime; I had no choice but to fully engage Scholar Mode on it), + I think it's interesting that SPECIFICALLY any of my fellow tumblr people / AO3-heads / Gay People Online / etc. seem to have. (I expect nothing from people who haven't been basting themselves in the same online sub-subcultures as me for over a decade. They're allowed to write wrong things on wikis, and have done so already; it's whatever.)

I wanna metapost badly again, so let's go. Join me. No poll. If you have an opinion on this, I'm looking directly into your eyes and beckoning you towards your own keyboard + also the reblog button / comment section, like a weird ghost. What did you think when you first played the game?? What do you think right now? What are you about to think after you have read a bunch of my words. Tell Me. I Need To Know This.

Spoilers for, idk, everything? Today we will use everything we've got to talk about Princess Sarah.

1. As a Narrative Element

This game makes a point of referring to Sarah as things like "a symbol of hope and peace" as often as possible, & when it isn't doing that she's usually in the role of An Object Or Device Of Some Kind, anyway. She's important because she's capable of holding light and dark in balance & SOMEONE'S gotta hold onto this dark crystal for safekeeping, and also we're gonna need to upset that balance on purpose later. There's that conversation in the Wicked Arbor about whether the Strangers would "choose" her (as opposed to "treasure") as the "reward" for succeeding in their mission[1], & there's the one in the Sunken Shrine where Jed asks Jack what he thinks of her and Jack says that he doesn't care about her as a person[2] BUT that protecting her is mission-critical (lol), too.

Sarah's death is metaphorically charged. It's the point of no return: the dark crystal breaks, the balance of light & dark gets extremely ruined, & Literally All The Darkness In Cornelia converges in one place (Fool's Missive XXVII). That's the payoff for the "symbol of hope and peace" motif, and communicating this idea that "the metaphorical light of hope just For Real Died, Like Catastrophically Imploded, No Take-Backs" feels to me like it was the highest priority here. Second-highest goes to "Jack had way more humanity before, but he set it aside on purpose and is actively in the middle of losing the rest of it." "Sort of." "I'm not getting into what counts as humanity or doesn't because if I did we would be here forever."

Basically, I'm saying that the tidiest read on the situation is "Jack despairs because Sarah dying means in a very literary and final way that everything is ruined forever, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with, like, Love (romantic)." I don't think the text of the game is particularly signaling that Love (romantic) is involved, and I think that if it meant to, it would be more obvious about it. You could bundle "an romance" into the "humanity" thing if you wanted to, but I'm not inclined to, based on some additional list items that you can read below this one.

[1] The fact that Neon ALSO says she feels bad for her for being thought of in this way only reinforces my conviction that the game is pointing at Sarah & yelling "REMEMBER THAT SHE IS MOSTLY A SYMBOL!", tbh. Who wants to go point out how freaky the mechanics of Being An Royalty are w/ me and the boys??

[2] I will give the Wiki WrongPosters this: I can totally see this as some kind of irony thing, given that he's still missing like a fucktillion of his memories when he says it. However! As mentioned above, I have other reasons not to read it as evidence that he was ever, like, romantically interested in her.

2. As a Sheltered Youth™

We don't have a TON of information to work with RE: Sarah as, like, a person, but here are a couple of hard facts to start with: she's 19 (per the data book, but she'd have to be somewhere in the 18-to-early-20's age range regardless or her whole deal wouldn't really make much sense, imo. She's a baby...!), and she's royalty. I think this ties into her utility as a walking metaphor, among other things; she's archetypically young, fresh, & idealistic. I'd call her naïve but the game obviously isn't interested in portraying it as a weakness, so positive words only; why not.

You could argue that people look to her as a symbol of hope because she hasn't directly experienced enough strife to exhibit hopelessness or fear in response to bad news in the abstract. I find it interesting that before Jack, like, knocks the wind out of her & tells Sophia to take her outside so she can see for herself how bad things have gotten at the end of the game, she says that her duty is to die with her people if she has to, & it doesn't even seem to occur to her that she could lead at least some of them away to safety...? When she changes her mind, she still talks about herself as a symbol before she ever uses the word "leader". She sees HERSELF in terms of symbols and metaphors, and takes action based on her designated role As One Of Those. Not very practical.

There's also the dialogue you can have with the queen the first time you're allowed to run around in the throne room at the beginning of the game, where she asks Jack to smile in front of her daughters (NOT just Mia; daughters, plural). Even if she only means "dude can you be polite please," the fact that this is The thing she has to say to Jack is telling. Is it going to upset your 19-year-old daughter to see that the Guy Whose Job It Is To Kill Monsters looks serious? Why do you think this? Does your 19-year-old daughter understand how serious the situation is, generally speaking? Do you not WANT her to for some reason? Boats don't work anymore unless a weird elf messes with them first. Not thinking very hard about the implications of this is something a sheltered person does.

Residual time loop un-memories aside, a young woman in this situation is so obviously going to have a huge crush on Jack Garland no matter what. He Is So Cool, first of all, & he's also Different from the adult men she gets to see on an everyday basis (family, guards, rando townspeople[3]...). It's not like the political social scene could POSSIBLY be thriving in this world, either; it all seems to be one kingdom we're dealing with and they're kind of busy with the external threat of being Under Fucking Attack By Monsters. Does she even get fun treats like "handsome visiting dignitaries" & what-have-you? The game doesn't present us with any potential options, here. Jack is mysterious, he has special-boy Warrior of Light status, his one job & apparent life's purpose is protecting the kingdom she loves, he's pretty nice to her (even in later cycles he at least goes out of his way to be polite!), & additionally, he's shredded. THIS makes sense to me.

There's a Q&A in the data book that has something to say about JACK as a symbol & what that has to do with this whole thing but we'll get there. We'll get there.

[3] Tangent: what's up with how Cornelia's entire adult male population appears to consist of aging queens. Why did they only make models that look Like That for the NPCs? It's awesome but I have 1 quastion

3. JACK JUMPSCARE !

I'm not about to say that he's just humoring her, or anything, but please humor ME for one second & put yourself in Jack's shoes. Not the default shoes; we can have more fun than that. Maybe the Banded Boots. Blurple ones? Shaped like a cartoon would wear them? Big spikes on the back for no reason? I love those things. Anyway, you're Jack. You're working for literally the king, & the work means Everything to you for reasons you can't even necessarily explain except to say that it JUST does. The king's eldest daughter (very young adult; Never Been Outdoors; a little overly-sociable but nice enough & what do you expect from a princess, anyway) has imprinted on you like a duckling for whatever reason. You would be nice to this person, yes? You'd be patient with her while you're in town. You have Brutal Murders to be doing, but not until, like, 2 days from now, or whatever; you're sharing space with her in some capacity in the meantime & it's in your best interests to keep her happy. (You probably even enjoy doing this, if you're Jack of a Way Earlier Cycle; I'm in no way ruling that out. Sharing your music collection with an enthusiastic Baby Adult? That's fun. I think he was probably having fun. Okay, you can step out of the fun purple shoes if you want; the Humoring Me Minute has concluded; thanks.)

Also, @2000sanimeop and I think that if Jack felt that way about her Astos would have been a little More Something about how much it was gonna suck for him when she died. In Fool's Missive XXVII he uses the word "painful," but that's about it. He doesn't even bring it up in XXV, which is the one where he says he's curious about whether she'd survive being turned into a fiend (side note: Astos fucking rocks. Why did he write that down?? I love him). & Hey SPEAKING OF ASTOS,

4. I wouldn't put Jackstos on a wiki, either.

The writing in Stranger of Paradise, SERIOUSLY, WITHOUT EXAGGERATION, is some of the best I've seen in literally anything ever. It suits not just its medium but also its sort of Place in History Relative to Other Video Games & the things it chose to DO with that medium & that niche INSANELY well. It is CUSTOMIZED. It's SO INTENTIONAL. I can't get too far into this or we'll be here all day, but the essence of what I want to say here is: there are relatively few facts presented to us by this game, compared to the implications we can go about drawing from those facts & other, external sources of context.

Sarah calls Jack her first love; that's a fact. No facts are presented to us that REALLY say much one way or the other[4] about what Jack thinks of this, himself; "fucktillion memories missing" Jack says he doesn't care, but he's missing a fucktillion of his memories, and DLC2 Jack has a set of dialogue options (hi Anne the Malboro I love you Anne the Malboro) that can point either way depending on what the player chooses, which is kind of nothing, on balance. As the audience, we can (should!) draw whatever conclusion we want about it, but none of those conclusions are text.

[4] I WILL GET TO THE DATA BOOK IN ONE SECOND. HOLD ON.

And, okay, please let me level with you. Let's be on the same page. Jack & Astos had some kind of thing going on, imo, OBVIOUSLY, but I want to be CLEAR and I want to get CREDIT for the things I'M bringing to the table to help generate this conviction. I drew that conclusion & I read that reading based on subtext, context, personal history, personal preference, & sheer gay zest for life. It is also, emphatically, NOT TEXT.

Astos refers to Jack with the ol' "...friend" in Fool's Missive XXI. He calls him "my Jack" in Fool's Missive XXXI. Canonically, textually, he has some big fucking COMPLICATED fucking feelings about this man. These are facts. If you're playing this game as Some Guy, I can see how you could potentially absorb these facts & still pay them much less regard[5] than I did & continue to. My argument here is that god I wish I lived in a world where Some Guy could extend the same courtesy to me and not treat Sarah's textual affection for Jack as something that necessarily indicates Some Kind Of Reciprocal Romantic Whatever, Definitely, Obviously, Of Course.

[5] Longer Tangent: I have been informed that the Some Guys of the world are currently pretty good at Recognizing a character that behaves in a way that's Pretty Gay, but tend to stop there, possibly for the combined reasons that A. they're not very familiar with a lot of the the ways gay relationships often work (you know, soul resonance. mutual recognition. sharing a brain etc.) and B. the Object Of Affection is usually the player character and they subconsciously shy away from thinking of a Guy They're Supposed To Identify With as gay. This is practically a lead-in to an entire separate post I could make, so I'll leave it at that, lol.

The writing is too good for that kind of assumption! I'M SERIOUS!! It's mind-blowingly subtle & endlessly fascinating to hold up to the light & view from every possible angle, and "Jack & Sarah were in love" + "Jack & Astos were in love" are BOTH ANGLES. I'm personally very very interested in giving the text credit for that. I think it's impressive. I think it's really, really cool, and I think it was on purpose. Speaking of which,

5. Word of God agrees with me, btw

This is from the Q&A section on page 156 of the Confidential File. The translations below are my own (I think they're straightforward enough, but lmk if you know more than me & I'm actually being stupid in there somewhere. Alt text has the JPN, if you want to copypaste it or something). Someone asked:

Why is it that you established Garland as someone Sarah has a romantic interest in?

The answer is from Daisuke Inoue (director, one of 3; the other 2 are from Team Ninja; he's from Square Enix):

That was because, from a narrative standpoint, we wanted Sarah to be the kind of person who holds onto hope. You can imagine that she saw the "hope" to save the world in Jack, a potential Warrior of Light. Sarah is seen by her people as a symbol of a bright future, but if there were nobody to give her hope, that might destabilize her emotionally. As for whether she felt genuine love for Jack, or just mistook her feelings of admiration towards him for "first love," we'll leave that to your interpretation.

The first time I read this, I thought the question was implying the aforementioned Reciprocal Something, but on closer inspection that doesn't even seem to be true! "思い人" seems to indicate a directional relationship; as in, the question assumes that Jack is an object of affection to Sarah, but assumes nothing about what Jack thinks.

Also, the answer uses the word "初恋" (hatsukoi), which is a very established Concept as far as "first love" goes, but in that one cutscene, Sarah says "初めての恋" (hajimete no koi), which is. Different, but I couldn't tell you how, lol. It's Not The Exact Same Phrase, but I'm not sure whether it's meaningfully different in this context. If I had to guess, I'd say that IF ANYTHING it could be a way of saying "first love" without invoking the cultural CONSTRUCT of First Love (as much)? But it's whatever. The localization holds up. All sources show that Sarah had Feelings about Jack, and all sources CONSPICUOUSLY neglect to mention Jack's feelings about her.

It was on purpose. This is my license to be as annoying as I want for one second here. I am right. All the other writing in this game is notably subtle, efficient, intentional, and skilled, AND ALSO, WHEN do you ever see anyone write such a richly beautiful, mostly-subtextual relationship between two men, which can easily be read as a romantic thing, and NOT explicitly canonize a very possible romantic relationship between at least one of those men and a woman, like not even in an interview or anything. What the fuck, man.

I'm putting away the Respectable Scholar Hat now. This is so funny. The person asking this question didn't EVEN go as far as assuming Jack & Sarah had any kind of Actual Romance going on, & the answer STILL dials it back to "she might have been conflating her feelings about Jack AS A SYMBOL with actual affection, also. We'll let you decide : ) ". This game is everything ever.

#stranger of paradise #that's it that's the only tag. there's enough words under that readmore for anyone&everyone. happy weekend!!!

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seraphsfire · 8 months

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Life situation & kitty update! Help me stay in Seattle instead of being forced to go to wyoming

Hello! I was able to make rent this month, but so far I cannot make rent for next month.

Ko-fi has been holding donations since paypal has been flagging them as "income" so that no longer works.

If you would like to help me out using paypal, the link is HERE. I will look into other venmo and cashapp. you can also reach out for a commission! If you donated via paypal and would like me to draw you a little something in thanks, please let me know!

I also put together an AMAZON WISH LIST , most is things for the kitties or food and some non-essentials / self care things for the hell of it that are things i haven't been able to buy myself for a while. Other than rent, kitty supplies and food are what I spend most $ on.

More on what I'm facing and what my kitties need:

about the kitties:

My sweet kitty Jade, needs a steroidal shot for her dermatitis. She should have gotten another one on the 25th, but I had no money to take her to the vet and she started ripping her fur out and made big, golf-ball sized spots completely bald on her armpit and chest :'( We put her on benadryl, moisturized her, and gave her a little jacket thing to help but I can tell she's really uncomfortable and really needs a vet visit to get that. it's $80 just to visit my vet and i'm sure the shot could be anywhere from 10-40 dollars, I really don't know. She's not in danger of pulling huge chunks of fur out thanks to the little jacket but she's really not happy and it makes me so sad.

About my situation (kind of long, sorry):

My Parents (mostly my mom; it's very hard to get responses from my dad) gave me rent money for September, but then made it clear that she will no longer help me financially under any circumstance if I want to "choose" to live in Seattle, then I'm essentially on my own. She doesn't want to give me money because she doesn't want ours to be a "transactional-based relationship" (after spending my entire childhood having them pressure me to move out on my own)

My dad is convinced that since Seattle is a city, it is very unsafe (and too full of Democrats) and that we would be safer living in their small town of Pavilion, Wyoming--which is literally just like, a few very spaced out neighborhoods. The nearest actual town is a 30 minute drive, and it's not very big either, and I don't drive. I would be snowed in *with them* for 4+ MONTHS every year, and every summer unable to leave the house for weeks because of the heat.

My dad has told my sister and I that if we choose to live right next to them, where they could have complete control over our lives, they would even buy us a house--but because we're not doing that, they refuse to support us in the life we've chosen for ourselves. They do not see the cruelty in this and think we are being nonsensical staying somewhere like Seattle which is "dangerous" and they do not like that it is full of non-republicans. I came out as queer in 2016, something which they have never spoken about since. I would likely be the only (out) queer person for MILES, and I don't feel like being the guinea pig for whether the anti-gay people there are the kind who ignore you or the kind who will hatecrime/kill you (:

Since I'd be at zero in my bank account in wyoming, they would have complete control over what I eat (not fun since I have a messed up digestion), clothes I buy, where I go, and how I behave just like they did when I was a child, or they'll start taking things away hoping that "tough love" will work. (it just made me mentally ill lol)

If I start a job in a week and a half I might be okay, but if I can't start until after that I won't have enough for October rent. I have one interview coming up but the future is still very up in the air.

#people in need #signal boost #haha im scared #thank u

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homocrafting · 11 months

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turns out whatever instinct in me makes me want to make tma aus is unstoppable and all consuming. so here's qsmp tma au focused on the brazillians:

cellbit- he HAS to be the archivist ok this man is so eye aligned it's not even funny. HOWEVER because qcellbit and fcell are the same person, Events happened to him before he became the Archivist, ala from the archives grian. local paranormal enthusiast finds dead half eaten bodies, gets arrested for it (he SWEARS he didn't eat those people), goes to prison for 10 years, goes nuts (becomes F!Cell), kills himself in the island, wakes up in his room and Felps tells him "bro you disappeared for 10 days are you ok" and he's just like. What.

Worth mentioning that he fucking speedruns the archives. also known as the qsmp. Cucurucho, who is kind of like elias but a bit less (I inagine the Host would be elias, wjoever they are), thinks "wooo new archivist I wonder how long it'll take them to find out abt the horrors" and then cellbit shows up 3 days later running on 2 hours of sleep and 20 mugs of coffee with a consipracy board connecting a bunch of statements and theorizing about entities

ALSO the web is around him like all the time. if you pay attention there's at least 2 spiders near him at all times, usually hidden because he squishes them when he sees them. he's tangled in the web of lies that is the plot I'm making for this au and his ass is NOT beating it

Felps- Stranger type of guy who doesn't even know and takes like. a year to realise something's up with him. don't worry abt it ok I don't know why he's stranger-y to me either. it's the vibes just trust me

Mike- ok so. I am Very unsure for pac and mike, PLUS I've not seen herobrine a lenda, which means I don't know all their backstory, BUT I'm thinking Lonely for Mike, so far? he kind of distances himself from everyone after richas dies with him, so far is the only person I've not seen much gay happenings happen to, tends to disappear to fuckall nowhere apparently, as one does. also the fact that, back in prison, he seemed to have the most difficulty connecting with others.

also, the Desolation hates him personally. he doesn't know why. his house has burnt down thrice. he gets burnt by the littlest things for no reason. he's banned from the kitchen. an avatar of the desolation tried to kill him once. he watched his own son die in front of him. this is based on nothing from qsmp or anything I've seen Mike do I just think it's funny

Pac- I can only think of Vast and Spiral for him tee bee eich. Leaning heavily towards the Vast because, you know. gestures to the giant hide and seek maps, and also O RAIO, even though I have 0 context for that. he just... he explores the world and made giant hole (yeah yeah holes are the buried but consider: it's big.). it's his "I can show you the world" vibes. again dude just trust me

note abt tazercraft: both of them are very, very touched by the Spiral. reason? Chume Labs

Forever- I'm thinking either the Buried (mostly the digging aspect- he's destroyed a whole mountain and dug up and entire desert), or the Hunt (his intense hunt for Phil's love, the insane grinding that could be seen as hunting for resources, the werewolf hc my beloved). Leaning more towards the Hunt bc dogboyyyyy

The plot I have in mind is very different from the tma plot, but I'm not sure of everything yet, so for now you get this little bpnus :)

[CLICK]

[Cellbit]

We've been back from the Adoption Center for about a day now. Not a timely update, but things happened, and, well.

We found... we found a weird... creature. It- he? Acts human, although he can't talk. He communicates with us through a little notebook, and overall acts incredibly childish. He sure looks like a child. One with- with some material akin to... to egg shells as skin. He has hair, despite apparently being all... eggy. It's black and curly, covers his face. He doesn't like it when we try to move it away from there, but we're working on a safe way to see what's under there.

He seems not to know where he came from, but I know he's lying. It's- there's no way he doesn't, not with what he said, I don't care if Pac and Mike or, hell, Felps believes him, He called us fucking- he called us dads! That's the first fucking thing he said! It has to be some kind of trap, some kind of spy, I don't know yet but when I find out I'm going to fucking-

Shit. That wasn't too professional. Alright, where were we.

We brought him to the Institute. Forever and I weren't thrilled about the idea, but it was 3 against 2. I can't believe Felps would- I get Pac and Mike, there's something wrong with them I'm sure of it, but Felps? I underestimated his braincells. What am I talking about, he doesn't have any.

(Soft chuckle)

We, we named him Richarlyson, he seemed to like it. We asked his name first, but all he did was draw a- (Snort) a stick figure shrugging.

The only clothes he has are a singular oversized Brazil shirt. The moços and Felps want to go buy him clothes.

I don't know how they'll justify the kid having, I don't know, pure white hard skin, but they said not to worry about it, so I guess I won't! I won't. I fucking won't.

... I'm gonna follow them tomorrow. Just to be safe.

That's all for today, I'm gonna go- I'm going to check some statements, see if there's anything even remotely related to this.

This is Cellbit, Head Archivist of the QSMP, which I still don't known what stands for by the way, signing off.

[CLICK]

#cellbit #forever player #forever #richarlyson #felps #tazercraft #pactw #mikethelink #brazil world domination #qsmp #hmmm I need a tag for this au #the quesadilla archives #<- idk if that's gonna be permanent but that's it for now #favela five

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shinmelodia · 8 months

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Love & Process: blue (2002)

Hello to everyone reading, and welcome to a highly belated attempt to squeeze some of my thoughts and emotions through some semblance of a creative process and onto a page. Today, I want to introduce this blog by talking about a lovely film, blue (2002), directed by Hiroshi Ando and based on a manga by Kiriko Nananan.

Since I'm still somewhat new at diving into live action film, especially, like, uh, Japanese indie film, its helping to start with the yuri genre. Because like practically any other woman on this site, I quite enjoy lesbians. blue's manga original offers something of an alternative to the yuri norm, though, and the film follows suit. Both are definitely examples of the Japanese filmmaking trend I've heard of called "mumblecore," (or maybe mumble-komi for the manga equivalent) that most people know through the likes of Inio Asano's early work. Like Solanin or Girl on the Shore, blue is shoegazey, quiet, and contemplative, adorned with moments of subtle physical intimacy, layered emotion, and stunningly beautiful compositions of daily life.

My metric for these kinds of slow mood pieces, which I've previously tended to watch at random whenever the mood struck me, is that if my barely-medicated ADHD brain can even finish them, there's clearly something special going on. blue passed with flying colors; yeah, ok, it took two sittings, but I spent all of both enraptured, immersed, and invested in the mono no aware of silent, fragile love and messy asymmetry that formed this movie's emotional palette. blue is about love, of course, but its also about process and expression, both emotional and creative, and how processing things, artistically, verbally, non-verbally--is often required of real, human love.

In being about this, I think it did things for me that a lot of yuri often doesn't and gently hit me in a place that I really needed to be hit. So, let me get into it. This is going to be...very personal, and also obviously spoil the details of the film, if you care about that, although I'm sure there will be plenty of depth left in the text that I leave untouched. Whether you read it or not, I'll be happy I made it. Oh, and sorry if I come off as really New for being so struck by themes and aesthetics that are probably sort of standard for this type of film. I can't help what I feel like writing about, though.

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Kirishima Kayako lives in a small town by the sea, one much like dozens of other anonymous, disaster-prone exurban towns in Japan at the turn of the millennium. She rides the bus to her girls' high school every day, where she eats lunch with her friends and tries her best to learn something in class. Really, though, she's aimless, quiet, lonely, and introspective. She's trying, but its rare for others to be able to tell. She's also in love with her classmate, Endou Masami. When she confesses at the end of the first act, on a windy beach against the vastness of the ocean, Endou responds that she's glad, and the two become our lesbians for the movie. Kayako falls to her knees and cries in relief. Masami is different from the others--she sees how hard Kayako tried. Does that mean she loves her back, though?

Endou Masami has cool passions and interests; she collects American CDs, which she expertly critiques and describes while lending to friends. The mere view of her vibing to her American alt-rock while smoking a cigarette in front of her apartment window is album-cover worthy in itself. Kayako feels the same way: one of the most intimately gay scenes of the pre-confession portion of the film is when Masami lights a cigarette and asks if Kayako is shocked. The quiet girl declares without hesitation, "No, I'm admiring the way you lit the match."

The whole early film is such a delectable, lonely vibe. The slowly intertwining couple's solidifying dynamic is the kind that forms between an emotionally complex introvert and the perhaps even more unknowable yet somehow more confident object of their affection. The two are classmates, (there's no classic yuri kouhais and senpais here) but for the early part of the film we are seeing things from Kayako's perspective and Masami seems unmistakably older in spirit. There's something about the dense emotions conveyed in her gazes at her new girlfriend, the almost world-weary tinge of recklessness in her distant grins. She talks about music Kayako's never heard of and lends out books with Romantic-era paintings that she has well-formed thoughts on. Kayako even openly admits that if she could, she would want to be Masami.

I think we've all loved a girl like that.

It's a pretty typical experience in middle school or high school, for really anyone lonely who loves women, to be drawn to these sorts of sad, beautiful, oh-so-seemingly-complex femmes. I guess straight men have a similar thing going on with the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, but for us women (or, women-to-be, at the time, I guess), the phenomenon of these people to us often involves a sort of existential jealousy. I'm not sure what is so alluring to other people about the sense that the object of their love has Something Going On that they are working through, or a vast and complicated life beyond the scope of one's understanding, but it me it always felt like something I was missing out on for myself. Obviously, a lot of their experiences and interests must be interesting and fun and super cool, you think, but even what pain you think they convey must be somehow more edifying than yours.

For me, the edifying aspect was the mere fact of femininity itself. The idea of a girl who has deep and Real emotions, who feels Real love and Real sadness and can actually express that in how she looks, beautiful and imperfect, always threw into stark contrast my own inability to express myself comparably. I was depressed, I was growing up, and I felt things, too, but, as someone who everyone thought was a straight boy and who was too scared to admit to being otherwise, I lacked that sort of beauty, that means of expressing what was inside me through fashion, makeup, book or music knowledge or taste. Or at least I thought I did. Thus, my own emotions must have also meant less. So, I ignored them and belittled them, and entire years passed before I processed a thing correctly. I always wanted to be some other girl. That was the only thing that would fix me.

I assume that the teen (and, uh, sometimes beyond) existential pining experienced by some other people in real life usually lacks the fun bonus that mine had of a screaming void where my femininity should have been, but I'm not sure how much this actually matters to the crux of the kind of experience I'm talking about. That some kind of void is there is all that matters, really, and its there for Kayako in her relationship with Masami at the beginning of the film. She has nothing, Masami is everything, and just being close to her is enough, for now. Just being noticed, just sharing something with her, is all Kayako feels like she can ask for.

Of course, this incomplete way of seeing love can't last, which brings us to the next part of the film, which starts when the two are hanging out and Masami reveals through a guarded, distant grin that she had an abortion a while ago. This isn't something that shocks Kayako or is really meant to shock the audience, and it isn't the big moment where she forced to reconsider her feelings. Rather, she asks how it went, and Masami responds honestly. She mentions she felt horrible the next day and had to be picked up by ambulance from the nurse's office, prompting Kayako to recall silently what to us was the film's first scene, a view from her window during class of an anonymous ambulance, sirens turned off, discreetly rescuing a student.

That she had this ambiguously traumatic, and at least unpleasant and potentially taboo experience is something that could have made Masami feel even older to Kayako, her pain even more distant and obscure. It certainly already is a way that Masami herself feels distant from others. Yet, by considering her own special, observant view of the ambulance back when it happened, it becomes one that Kayako can in some small way assertively share with her. Rather than continuing to put her lover's experiences on a pedestal, Kayako in this scene makes a silent decision to turn a blossoming mutual acceptance simply that they happened into a moment of true intimacy between the two, a sleepover punctuated by smirking kisses and satisfied cuddles initiated by each of them for the other. Despite her remarks that Kayako is weird for unhesitatingly wanting to stay with her, its an intimacy that Masami is happy to accept. This is all an important turning point in Kayako's development because she begins to choose insight, closeness, and assertion over the distant admiration that trapped her earlier.

As we go on, we'll start seeing how blue's gentle impact comes from the way it doesn't glorify or sugarcoat that earlier kind of unhealthy and immature dynamic. Instead it subverts it by giving Masami depth and Kayako agency, before reaching an endpoint that reflects on how the dehumanization of that kind of depressed, pining relationship can be overcome. In that sense, blue is a yuri romance mostly about the couple coming to accept their own and each other's humanity and capacity for expression. Like any good mumble movie, its full of long silences and almost unrealistically hesitant dialog, and doesn't give any explicit internal monologues like a lot of manga do. The world of this movie is one where expression is an uphill battle, something that has to be worked towards and struggled through. It's the world that Kayako and Masami share, in their own separate ways. And that's why its such a triumph to watch Kayako finally find her voice, her passion, and her process, which all starts in this scene.

First, though, it's time to learn about the Something that Masami has Going On.

Things begin when Kayako is still sleeping. Masami gets a call on her house phone that she doesn't answer, but that sends her into a silent spiral of emotional dread. She spends the next day at school in the nurse's office, refusing to tell Kayako what's going on and confiding only in her friend Nakano. Then, when summer break comes along, she disappears, leaving Kayako alone at home, pouring silently over the book of still life oil paintings that Masami lent her.

It ends up being Nakano who tells Kayako why she left. It's the story Masami didn't tell about the source of her abortion: an adult, married man whom she had a relationship with and eventually a pregnancy from. She got things taken care of without telling him, alerted her parents and tried never to see the rotten salaryman again. That is, until he called. He wasn't getting along with his wife anymore, apparently, and she had some sort of attachment to him that made her come running back. Her taste in music originally came from him, after all. It seems that, for the time being, her devotion to this mysterious, abusive man is going to perpetuate a brutal cycle: she'll keep hurting both Kayako and herself all at once.

What really destroys Kayako and her relationship, though, is that she lies about it. When she comes home after some predictably rough interactions with this guy, she tells her supposed girlfriend that she was enjoying a vacation with friends, and even gives her some grapes, supposedly grown in the prefecture she was hanging out in, as a twisted souvenir. The more assertive Kayako enforces her boundaries without hesitation, though, in equally as blunt a tone as she complimented her love, as when she told her she wanted to stay with her, all those nights ago. "Why are you lying to me?" Its with that same grin, now tinged with emotionally oblivious deception, that Masami dares to at first first feign ignorance.

"Eh?" Her smile is shallower than its ever been.

So Kayako walks away.

Their dynamic has now become worse than just immature; it's entirely toxic. From an outside perspective, Kayako is working on her shortcomings, while Masami refuses to reconcile her past. This kind of toxicity, though, is sadly just as common in high school (and even sometimes middle school) as is the kind of misunderstanding, lonely pining I talked about earlier, just usually among different sorts of people. Appropriately, its often even that exact kind of beautiful, hurting, mature femme (in the eyes of disastrous, moody lesbians like Kayako) who is going through that sort of pain. Its that mysterious and tragic byproduct of compulsory heterosexuality that causes a lot of girls to seek validation in the love of an older man, and that I imagine becomes a sort of addiction to that validation that only masquerades as love. Hell, Masami attributes much of what made her seem so interesting on the surface, her love of music, to this guy. She feels like she'd be nothing without him, and the way Kayako praised her, at least in the way she interpreted it, did nothing to dispel this fear. Which I think is really why she decided to go back, even though it would mean betraying the very girl whose love provided her an escape from it all.

Its an ugly truth, and its one that yuri media usually shies away from portraying, but it is explored with refreshing frankness and resolved with astounding maturity by the end of blue. And I think its the source material's status as "alternative" (I guess in Japanese parlance, Garo-inspired) manga, not to mention the movie's simply as an independent film, that allows it to break with genre limitations in this way. There's been tons of writing done on how yuri definitely presents a fantasy of the sapphic experience. Mainstream yuri's origins in Class-S still to this day often cause it to portray romances between women as fundamentally different, and inherently more pure, than those involving men, trapping them in a bubble of unassailable innocence. While that kind of makes sense and seems extremely cool to those of us who celebrate having little interest in moids or whatever, it also has the effect of sugarcoating and sometimes even outright obscuring what real women, even (and sometimes especially) sapphic ones, go through.

There's already a decent amount of yuri, especially among those aimed at older demographics and those where its more of a secondary genre, that do deal with compulsory heterosexuality and the experiences that come with it. What are much rarer are yuri series where one of the lover's flaws more resemble Masami's than Kayako's. Not enough that I've read at least is willing to make its relationships messy, or have one of its leads just do straight up bad things like self-destructive cheating and lying.

Because, really, its the same as what Kayako went through, isn't it? The lonely longing for something more that feels like it can only be cleansed by denying oneself all one has and betting it all on being close to someone else. The only difference between the two's actions is temperament and perhaps socialization--one sought it from a cooler woman, the other from an older man. And somewhere out of sight, that sad, irresponsible, fucked-up adult was probably hopelessly lonely, too, just like Kayako had to accept Masami was. Maybe disaster lesbians, disaster bisexuals(?), and yes, disaster straights aren't so different after all.

Well, other than that Kayako has worked to process her feelings, while Masami went and ruined her relationship over them. That's an important difference. Still, though, even Kayako has some work to do about how she feels about all of this. Masami's pedestal has been smashed, whether she likes it or not, and now she's lonelier than ever. So where does this vampiric cycle of taking from others end? What substance can replace loneliness in this ouroboros of etropic emotional alchemy?

Kayako doesn't touch the grapes. Instead, she silently processes things, lies on the floor listening to the cicadas scream in the garden. The grapes go rotten, and her brother throws them out. She sulks for a while.

Then, she starts painting. A still life of grapes, inspired by the books that Masami lent her. At first, her drawing is lousy, as the school fine arts instructor later tells her, but the colors are gorgeous. The deep purples of the fruits are expertly layered to capture light and tell a story, one deeper than the instructor could possibly imagine. It's the story not only of the transformation of a relationship, but of the growth of one of its participants. As the hot, still air of the coastal Japanese summer cloys around her lonesome final vacation of high school, Kayako finally salvages a passion to call her own out of a floundering relationship. When school starts again and she picks up art classes, going to Tokyo for uni, a dream that was previously held only by Masami, starts to be within her reach. She has a future, an interest, and a way to process all has happened to her.

And then comes the time for Masami to try and return. She proves unwilling to address all that happened before, instead trying to kiss Kayako after school in the art room. Her undeserved attempt at intimacy is rejected with a shove, but so too is her self-pity that causes her to instantly run away. There's more that needs to be said that simply "I'm a terrible person." Kayako pursues her into the town's small shopping district as night begins to fall and neon crackles to life against a cool late summer night. Now the emotional climax of the movie begins.

First, Kayako starts talking. She tells Masami about the painting, about her summer, about how lonely she was without her, about all the places she wanted to go with her. She talks about how happy she was at the same time that she found something she wanted to do without her. This approach is new for her. She's never so far relied on words so heavily to express her emotions. When Masami points this out, Kayako says:

This is how she's choosing to process things for the time being. At first, it was being silent to carefully consider her emotions. Now, its speaking up to keep them focused on what she really wants.

Then, its Masami's turn, for the first time, to tell the truth. By now they're away from the small cluster of lights, staring out at the blackness of the beach where they first got together. Masami broke up with the guy, she says. But she also asserts that she came to his emotional aid to begin with because she felt his need for help was more important than anything else to her. She couldn't tell her girlfriend this before, because doing so would mean telling a truth she didn't think Kayako could bear to hear: that he meant more to Masami than she did.

Kayako already knows this, of course. And by speaking up to quell her justified anger, by weaving words like the deft strokes of honest color on the tip of a paintbrush, she's gotten herself to a point where she can accept it, too.

I mean, think about it. Masami is broke now; Kayako needed to buy her a sandwich so she wouldn't be hungry on their impromptu date. Her sabotaging drive to be validated and her inability to accept love from the girl willing to give it has, by all accounts, ruined her life for the time being and harmed those around her. Even though she broke up with the guy out of necessity, or out of some fleeting impulse to run back to Kayako, she still feels like nothing without him. As she says to Kayako later, now the envy runs in reverse--Kayako is passionate about painting now, while Masami will still amount to nothing. Despite it all, though, Kayako is willing to love her. She's called Masami out on what she needs to be, then decided to stay nonetheless.

"I always come second. You broke up with him, so the number one spot is vacant. When someone else comes, you'll put him there...

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For most of my life, I believed that artistic expression was primarily the product of unrestrained, innate, and self-indulgent passion. I thought it was just something people either have or don't have, and that when they do, its something that can drive them to great heights of accomplishment and happiness otherwise impossible for humans to reach. It was mostly Japanese otaku media that instilled this into me, I think. I grew up exposed to a dizzying array of diverse and often miraculous artistic products that captured my imagination in ways the safe output of my own boring, monolithic home empire never did, and most of them were made by people who literally poured their lives into working on them. From Eiichro Oda's future-destroying, decades-long devotion to making One Piece to Kentaro Miura giving his life to practically paint the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel in pen on page after double-page spread in Berserk, to all of the hyper-passionate, universe-shattering early works of Hideaki Anno and his animator cohorts, I thought that I lived in a world of weird and wonderful treats whose cooks had the work ethic of demigods and the talent to match.

And even on the lower levels of the medium, among fan artists, cosplayers, writers, posters, historians, I felt surrounded by people who lived and breathed impossible passion, whose lives must have been defined by a kind of information processing my brain simply wasn't capable of. They had some ability to inhale the miraculous vapors of an abundant artistic landscape and spew out works of their own that further decorated the texture of a fleeting age of impossible marvels. And all that time, there I was, left on the sidelines, interested in many things but passionate about none, and lacking the motivation to really work to pursue anything at all. It was (and, honestly, still is) a state of existential discomfort similar to that sort of lonely-girl-pining, but doubtlessly far larger in scale. Some people had passion, while I had nothing to show for all my years of being alive. For fuck's sake, there was so much stuff out there, and I barely could muster the motivation to even read any of it most of the time.

After a while, I started to feel like I was simply broken, like I was an empty person that didn't belong in the very world I loved living in. And while I think this might be a niche outlook and insecurity (although one represented, to my profound gratitude, in Masami), I think it's also how a lot of people think about love. Love is often portrayed as a feeling sparked entirely of instinct, one that, when a person truly feels it, will never cause them to make any mistakes or do anything fucked up to those they care about. Something that will drive those bolstered by it to impossible heights, improve lives beyond the sorrow and loneliness to which they are otherwise condemned. But, as Kayako learned and as Masami and I are having to find out, that isn't really the whole story.

Expression is love. Love is process. Therefore, expression is also the labor of putting love through a process, of rigorously trying to get your ass in a seat and put in the steps of putting your feelings into form. As this is required of art, so is it required of relationships. And so the two are a cycle. Creation requires emotions to process; relationships require emotions to be processed. And the love that creation inspires feeds itself into the love for others that inspires the emotion to fuel more creation. A Labor of Love. Again, I know I'm New.

But this is what Kayako has been working up to all movie long, first with her silence, then with some words, then with the labor of painting, the iteration of getting better, then with more words again. She has found a slow cycle that is elevating her above her loneliness, a cycle that Masami helped create, and is welcome within, but that can, if need be, exist without her.

Love, labor, process. Expression, creation, process. Creating, processing, choosing...in the end, to do it all again. To stay with what--and who--you have labored to love. And that is the choice Kayako has made.

I have not yet answered what, after thinking and writing about this movie for days on end, might be the substance that can replace loneliness as fuel for the alchemical cycle of emotional taking and giving. By the end of the lovers' reunion, sitting by the road under the slowly-illuminating blue of a haphazardly-clouded dawn sky, Masami doesn't feel like she has an answer, either. She feels small and hollow, manipulative and weak. She's jealous of the coping strategy her own girlfriend has developed to deal with the effects of her bad behavior. So, in the end, what is she? What is there even left for Kayako to love?

I'll be honest, this feeling is so fucking real I get perilously teary every time I think about it. Because, for as much as I mused about Kayako's feelings resonating with me as a former and sometimes girl-piner, when it comes to my current relationship at age 22, it's Masami in whom I see myself most clearly and brutally. It's hard not to when she is the only representation in romance, let alone in yuri, I have seen so far who is as much of a fucking brat as I am at times. Whose tendency to sabotage her own relationship makes it so asymmetric that what her girlfriend feels appears almost one-sided, but whose love is real all the same. If she lacks process, talent, maturity, mystique, if no one is ever going to be good enough for her, then what at all does she have left?

The answer to all of this is the thing that lies at the core of her being, that makes her who she is. The source of her potential to express herself, the starting point of a process yet to fully begin. It's hard to see, but it's there. Its what makes her Endou Masami. And its what Kirishima Kayako loves the most.

It's color. It's the thing at the core of creation that can't be described with words, that forms the motivation for any process. Its the vivid purple of a painted grape whose intentional creation transcends deception and nurtures discovery. It's the blue of a dawning sky whose light guides two girls in messy, lopsided love back into each other's arms. It's Kirishima Kayako. It's Endou Masami. It's what everyone has, and it's all anyone has.

It's the source of love, its process, and its object.

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Eventually, Kayako has to leave for Tokyo. That's the decision that's best for her, and its a decision that, for the time being, will leave Masami behind in the countryside, hard at work on the process of learning to love herself. At the end of the film, she sends Kayako one final piece of proof of who she is. It's a painting of sorts, recorded on VHS, composed not of oil but of compressed light and sound. Stylistically, as the camera zooms in, it begins to resemble less Renoir and more Rothko: at first, its the beach, then, simply the point of the horizon, the area where the sea and sky meet. Its raw, not quite processed, pure color, vibrant blue, filtered and compressed into chunky, washed-out 800x600.

By way of description, "this is all I can do."

For years, I've struggled to believe that my emotions, hindered by depression and self-sabotage, have any value at all. As someone for whom love, passion, and expression have always felt difficult, even putting my thoughts down on a page, let alone drawing, painting, composing, or directing, has always seemed impossible. Recently, though, I've grown a lot. I've found the beginnings of a process learned to accept its existence. Both this process, and all the loves that go along with it, are often uncomfortable. They are painful and brutal and blissful things into which to pour the labors of communication and the torments of understanding. I've learned to process discomfort for the sake of creation, to create for the sake of love. It sounds cheesy, but again, I can't help what I wanted to write about.

I hope you'll join me as I find more new things and tough feelings I love to process on this account. There's so much more I'd love to say about blue, just for starters. I could talk about my undying appreciation for the work of Mikako Ishikawa, or how the shots in this movie are so gorgeous and evocative that I'd seen many of them before in "Japan in the 00s" vibes compilations.

But, until then, this is all I can do.

#japanese film #japanese cinema #yuri #yuri manga #lgbtq films #teen romance #pining #film analysis #personal essay #blue (2002)#kiriko nananan #mumblecore #long reads

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theresattrpgforthat · 8 months

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May I request some recs for games where you play as a dragon? ::D Thank you for your time!!

THEME: Dragon Games

@foggedover and @vanderlyon both of you asked this question so I am killing two birds with one stone this time around! These games were so much more cute and wholesome than I expected Dragon games to be.

Hot Gay Bro Dragons, by Riverhouse Games.

Bro, he’s your whole world. He makes you feel fabulous. His body is smoking hot, and when you look into his eyes they sparkle like gold.

He’s a dragon. So are you. You’re in love.

This is HOT GAY BRO DRAGONS, a gay game about telling your boyfriend you love him.

This is a silly goofy game about dragons in love, that can work for 2 players but can also play with more! What I really love about this game is when you choose how big of a dragon you are, you also tell your dragon boyfriend about how you feel about him based on his size relevant to yours. The game also encourages you to use phrases like “oh my god bro” and “bro you’re so smoking” and “that’s bro-lliant my dude”. If you’re just looking for a fun goofy time with someone you love, this game can do that for you.

Dragonhearts, by FractalDragon.

You get to be a dragon

You get to kiss dragons

Need I say more?

This Tabletop RPG is about about the clash of over-sized personalities between shapeshifters who can assume human or dragon form, or anything in between. It's GMless—meaning everyone has equal narrative authority—and plays best over one or two 3-4 hour sessions, with 3-4 players.

As a Firebrands hack, Dragonhearts is rather poetic in its character creation and plays through a series of mini games. These mini games include fights, rituals, moments of intimacy, competitions and more - and most of them can be played in whatever order makes sense for your story. This game also comes with a solo game, which each player will play as they set up their characters but might be interesting to play if you want to explore this game by yourself. If you are interested in short, segmented forms of play that can be mixed and matched as your dragons wrestle with emotions and learn about who they are, I definitely recommend Dragonhearts.

Epyllion, by Marissa Kelly (at Magpie Games).

Dragonia faces a threat we dragons have all but forgotten. Inside each of us are seeds of Darkness waiting to take root in doubt, anger, and sorrow. You and your fellow dragons— although small now—must protect Dragonia from the growing Darkness…and learn what it means to be a true friend. -- Tass the Gigantic, Councilmember

Epyllion is a tabletop role playing game about young drakes who investigate rumors, solve problems, and discover the truth of a growing evil in Dragonia. While you play, you and your friends tell awesome stories, explore what it means to be a drake of Dragonia, and discover the value of friendship through magical, whimsical, and heartfelt adventures.

This is an adorable game about young dragons, perfect for all ages. You are young dragons trying to save their home from evil. It gives me the same vibes as Land Before Time, although others have described it to have the same tone as Spyro, or My Little Pony. Epyllion has received many accolades in the gaming community, and its author, Marissa Kelly, is also one of the brains behind the gorgeously haunting game of Bluebeard’s Bride. If the kind of dragon you want to play is cute and trying very hard to be a hero, then this is the game for you.

Hearth Dragons, by M. Davis.

With powerful magic, someone has created you, a dragon. Not a true dragon, no, but one crafted with care and love and given a purpose: to protect your home. With a special ability you were crafted with and a dragon's flame within, many adventures await you and your fellow hearth dragons as you strive to be the best caretakers one can be. And you don't even need to leave the house!

Hearth Dragons is a Lasers & Feelings hack inspired by The Last Dragon Chronicles by author Chris d'Lacey and the Pennykettle Dragons who made the stories as magical as they were. With friends and a game master, you'll make your own clay, paper, or other kind of handcrafted dragon and work together to solve problems and tell stories using your own imagination or the random adventure generation table within.

This is a quick little game with easy-to-generate characters and goals. You’ll create a house together and then do your best to protect it from forces such as an ominous neighbour or a a dangerous creature, from doing things such as ruining brunch or capturing the family pet. This is a great little game, perfect for one-shots and pick-up games.

If you like this creator's work I also recommend their solo journaling game, called An Afternoon As A Dragon, a game about someone who's become a dragon because of a curse.

Baby Dragons, by Litza Bronwyn.

In this game, you are a fierce baby dragon, hatched amongst a variety of other dragon eggs and left to discover the wonders and dangers of the world with your draconic siblings. You must choose if you are better at mental or physical, and go out in search of food, loot, more minions, and/or a better lair.

A simple one-page game that is easy to pick up and play with little to no prep! This is also inspired by Lasers and Feelings, but rather than manufactured dragons, you’re just babies, and you’re more likely to cause trouble than prevent it. If you’re interested in Epyllion but you want something that requires less commitment, you might want to check out Baby Dragons.

#tabletop games #indie ttrpgs #dnd #game recommendations #asks #dragons

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tamelee · 3 months

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Hi… what do you think about people hating on naruto and saying that sasuke deserves better than naruto and that he doesn't love sasuke as deeply as sasuke does. And the way he talks in ch 698 like he doesn't want to come out. And he marries the first girl who chases after him to hide his sexuality like a closet gay behavior and live up to society's expectations (following according to his mother's word). Sasuke looked soo sad in Gaiden because Naruto had rejected his love for him. Some SNS shippers say that's why they hate Naruto.

I highly doubt you’re talking about SNS shippers/fans though. I have a feeling I know exactly what kind of stans these are because they’ll take every opportunity to hate on Naruto (and other characters as well). And if such people do claim they are then I’m pretty sure that the ‘🍥’ joining the ‘🍅’ is just in the bio for show. As if to say, ‘I ship SNS, therefore my unsolicited and biased criticism against Naruto is extra valid :)’ when it’s really not, (and vice versa) but I‘ll spare you the rant.

Using secondary source material (anything ’Boruto’) in order to invalidate main source material (’Naruto’ Manga) to then try and rationalize secondary source material-outcomes (the sequel) with assumptions to fill the gap in between these two (blank period) when it’s completely void of all previous logic in the first place, makes a well grounded argument in what way exactly?

In other words; why the hell would you look at the sequel and willing let that change your perspective as if it holds any merit to what we’ve already come to learn?

There is nothing wrong with a good hypothesizing session. I know from experience it can be somewhat soothing to rationalize a way towards something unwanted. In this case, it’s the sequel. ‘Gaiden’ is interesting for its own reasons. It’s sort of like, trying to come up with an explanation that makes an outcome seem a little less… bad. Which becomes easier because Naruto and Sasuke’s misery is fully on display. In the case of these haters though, they make it worse and just blame a character for a company’s money-grabbing decision. To let that be the deciding factor for them that fuels these unhinged claims about him being a bootlicker that acts through hatred or whatever strange mumbo-jumbo they also come up with. But anytime someone tries to make an argument about ‘Naruto’ and uses “because in ‘Boruto’…” you can already cast it aside as invalid.

Connecting two unrelated idea’s doesn’t say nor prove anything. You can’t even disprove it either because the argument doesn’t make any sense.

So it’s also ironic to hate on Naruto using Ch. 698 as an excuse to say he ‘doesn’t love Sasuke as deeply as Sasuke does’, when it’s primarily Naruto trying to explain how deeply he loves Sasuke as best as he can lol. I’m not sure if I’m impressed by the creativity or just dumbfounded that someone can read Ch. 698 and then come to such an irrelevant conclusion as if it has anything to do with ‘coming out’. It’s like having a conversation with someone about a very specific type of bird when another person barges in to ask why they’re discussing how to create your own carrousel. And besides, Naruto may exaggerate his denial profusely when someone brings it up (which is by itself very telling), but he never was good at hiding how he felt about Sasuke or how far he’d go (literally the entire story), even threatening war on behalf of Sasuke, dragging Konoha in it, indicating revenge for Sasuke if he’s harmed when really it was just a matter of his own personal feelings. As… obviously Konoha couldn’t care less and in fact would most likely side against Naruto anyway. He’s already boldly shared his intimate thoughts with the entire world during the war though, didn’t he. He literally connected his Chakra with everyone and spilled his brainrot about him freely.

You can create your very own narrative towards the outcome that is ‘Boruto’ and make it as crazy as you want, but it will still be based on assumptions. In fact, go ahead and write that story if you must, they tried and failed with Hinata’s movie for a reason. I'm sure an SNS-fan can do a better job, in fact, they have.

The idea that Naruto would probably struggle to accept how he feels and what it means, could very well be true. It would definitely be conflicting with the role he is expected to play as Hokage and it’s also something I’m exploring in the story I’m writing. But, so would it be possible that Sasuke will struggle, because we haven’t forgotten that love caused him to experience the most horrible pain through betrayal, yes? Naruto does care about how he’s perceived and he is a people-pleaser that was on a journey to realize that there is a difference between the conditions he must meet in order to soothe his sense of feeling unworthy of love and the unconditional love Sasuke proved to hold for him, regardless of anything else. “Because I feel relieved just looking at you as it reminds me of the love I’ve lost”.

Acknowledging is one thing, accepting is a whole other and then taking the action-steps to pursue it freely would imo require another story which would’ve been a fitting follow-up after Ch. 699 if that was even possible in the first place for Kishimoto to do. But it’s not.

Stop for one second and think about the amount of value you put onto the money-grabbing shit-stain on the franchise that is ‘Boruto’ and whether you want that bullshit, no matter the label, to invalidate everything you’ve loved about it in the first place. Rationalizing something when the bridge toward it is missing completely and where the outcome isn’t followed by logic is just people inventing an explanation to justify their own unhappiness with something. Aka; their hatred for Naruto.

#asktamelee #naruto talk #anti naruto ending #cw boruto

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spicybylerpolls · 1 month

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Well, unknown hero agent man / pen symbolism anon, i hope you're reading this, cos you hit the nail on the head! this kind of symbolic storytelling is not only a fine art of cinema (being lost these days a little sadly, what with the whole netflix speedy turnover etc), but exactly what (good) films of the horror genre aim to do.

horror has long been a way to creatively tell 'normal' dramatic stories through subtext and symbolism. not sure if this is still a way around traditional censorship but im sure it began that way. films like the exorcist, the shining, rosemary's baby... all classics that are filled with subtext. its also an exciting way to talk about things that might seem trite or too bleak when portrayed as a 'straight' drama (this is the term meaning 'non-genre based' or 'non-musical' lmao). So you could say that ST is NOT straight, in more ways than one 😉

but much of this will go over casual viewers heads, so its finding the balance between making a story believable on the surface (another dimension exists! scary government men trying to kill us!) and subtextually (the UD as a metaphor for trauma/AIDS/closeted homosexuality/abuse etc) if viewers are clever enough to see/feel it. i say feel because much of storyviewing is instinctive instead of analytical.

so ST incorporates both - not just metaphorical, vague storytelling, but also real issues too. but it goes one step further, and actually has characters talk explicitly about reading deeper into stuff (murray's behind the curtain speech). it's a very meta show, even for a genre piece, which is why it astounds me that some people think it's not that deep lol. and some people think that only literature can be deep, but never tv or movies - which is an insult to anyone who has ever been passionate about cinema tbh. It's a statement that would probably rip the heart out of the duffers' chests and stomp on it. these guys are super nerds who have dedicated their adult lives to this passion project. as finn said, 'most people make it then just cash in - im so glad they still care'.

I'm sorry you don't feel comfortable talking about the beauty of this storytelling on your main. it really does surprise me that the fandom is so censorship obsessed because sexual metaphors have long existed in visual media, and especially in horror films. there used to be a long post about byler and a potential sex scene at lover's lake on here, but the user disappeared and the post went missing. it was about all the sexual imagery in ST, with a focus on byler in s4. i especially loved how they mentioned mike's introduction, where he was just in underwear: it is both appropriate for the setting, but also gets the audience used to him as a growing lad with a body and draws attention to those uncomfortable, potentially sexual aspects of being a teen. i mean, he was in tiny pants for god's sake. did we need to see that? why did we see it? etc etc

hilariously, they also referenced the always sunny in philadelphia scene where a character is in a therapist office talking about a pen being a dick. he then puts it in his mouth and chews the pen lmoao

i think you'd enjoy @therainscene's rod symbolism post too. I'm personally hoping for some explicit sex scenes with byler, because the show so far has arguably been telling that story metaphorically already for 4 seasons, and bringing it out of the subtext could be a storytelling device in itself. bringing byler's secrets into the light. after all, this is a period piece that aims to shed light on a bygone era. its not a propaganda piece that needs to remain coded; the reasons for staying secretive still exist for mike and will in the 80s, but times have changed since then for us as a global audience, and more importantly, the aspirational message has changed. what message would the duffs want to send to viewers that are still bigoted? clearly one of the beauty of homosexuality, seeing as will, our fav gay boy, has been the darling sympathetic victim of the show since s1e1. the show needs to remain true to both the 80s while also having a strong message for this decade in order for modern audiences to be able to gain something from watching this story; in order for there to be a reason the show exists at all.

so to answer your question, i had never picked up on the pen symbolism until now, but i immediately agree, not least because 1) it must have a meaning that connects to byler's conversation otherwise why does it just interrupt them with no reason? (from a storytelling pov), and 2) because of the always sunny scene lolllll

thanks for the discourse! if you stick around into s5, im sure we will be able to start discussing this on our mains. it'll be a new era and there might even be gifs/pics of byler to accompany our 'spicy' discourse haha!

Amazing/fascinating points! Thanks for adding to the discussion!

#byler #spicy byler #will byers #mike wheeler #no poll

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hamliet · 9 months

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It's A Boys' Love Story, Your Honor: Be Gay, Do Crimes

This review is often satirical and sometimes facetious. Or is it?

Anyways I got dragged into watching HIGH&LOW, a Japanese action show full of pretty boys punching each other. Aside from me wondering how all of them don't have CTE and screaming CHEST COMPRESSIONS when one character codes and the nurse like... walks away (he's ok the power of friendship is stronger than any defibrillator), it turned out to be a surprisingly excellent, enjoyable, and even poignant watch.

The plot is vibes at best and the narrative ideas are less formed than, say, those of Kinnporsche. But, what it does have down pat is characters. Pretty much every character is compelling from their introductory scene (except for the Mighty Warriors who exist purely to suck). The characters may not necessarily be the most complex or psychologically challenging, but they come across as intriguing enough, flawed enough, to carry series on their own. Like, I would honestly watch a full series based on any one of them.

To be honest, this show does more to establish who a character is, what they want, and make them interesting within a character's first 30 seconds than some high-brow directors do with three hours of film. I would honestly recommend it to anyone trying to understand how to characterize.

Also, it's basically a yaoi but with fighting instead of f*cking. It's just dripping in homoeroticism that they infuse with just enough plausible deniability that insecure straight guys can watch it too!

Although, being straight in this 'verse is pretty much a misery sentence for everyone except Kizzy and Kaito. I haven't seen such flagrant use of bury/break up your straights since Togashi.

But:

It's not a yaoi! you say.

To which I shall respond with numerous examples of what the f*ck is this then? The power of (b)romance?

Doubt. (Heh ifkyk.)

Cobra + Murayama

The same episode we get a girl having a crush on Murayama he's shown as completely disinterested because he's too hung up on Cobra. This leads to him seeking Cobra out. And also to him having realizations about himself. He's then kind to the girl, but not romantically interested. The framing of this Cobra-Murayama realization about himself with the episodes opening with a girl pining and ending with his kindness to her is clearly to get the audience thinking about romance and the other interactions in light of that.

Murayama embarrassingly asks to join Cobra in front of all the other gangs.

Murayama calls him Cobra-chan and sides with Cobra when all the other leaders of SWORD refuse. All three others have left but Murayama still tells Cobra he has his vote, even though it's not going to do anything, just so Cobra knows Murayama's on his side.

In End of Sky Murayama literally going behind Cobra's back to get Hyuga to agree to join Cobra's alliance to protect him, at personal risk to Murayama, even though Cobra will never know what he did for him, when even those most loyal to Cobra have abandoned him, is literally a romance trope as old as time. And it's literally set to inspirational music.

At the end of the movies, Murayama gets a motorcycle and is implied to join Sannoh eventually with clever color symbolism as @eatprayworm points out.

As if we didn't get it, The Worst literally shows us Murayama calling Cobra-chan on his phone and tells us that he frequently drunk calls Cobra by having him say that he's not calling about bikes... this time. This phone call shows 0 narrative purpose besides reminding us that Murayama's endgame is with Cobra.

Chiharu + Yamato

Yamato saves his life and then is told he has to "take responsibility for" Chiharu, which is totally not a reference to the common idea of a guy taking responsibility for knocking a girl up--

except it is explicitly because even Yamato's mom directly asks if he knocked someone up when she hears that he has to "take responsibility" for someone.

When they finally reconcile after Chiharu confesses to drugs Tetsu tells them "you look good together."

Chiharu then takes a bullet for Yamato. I mean, not actually, because it was a blank, but no one, not even the person firing the gun, knew it was a blank.

Tetsu + Dan

Whenever Dan expresses interest in a girl Tetsu gets mad at him and when Tetsu cuts off his dreads to be more appealing to girls Dan gets mad at him. They're in love your honor.

They'll leave a gang for one another.

They exist only in proximity with each other.

Tatsuya/Kohaku/Tsukumo

These old men are so gay. They started the fall. And by old I mean they're supposed to be like 26 but they are clearly played by actors in their mid-40s and so I'll just pack off and head to the Villages then.

Smok(e)y + Hiroto

Ah yes when you're wandering around Nameless Street looking for your older brother and he's not there so you and your other brother decide to leave but then! then! a sickly man wasting away everywhere but his hair (which remains luscious) walks in front of you, barely glances at you, and you instantaneously walk away from your brother and your life to go follow the twink. Much straight.

Rocky + Koo

Here.

They also use "anata" for one another. Which means "you," but also is frequently translated as "dear" because it's what married couples often refer to each other as.

The manga also implies they live together.

Yasushi + Kiyoshi

Everyone in canon refers to them as "Yasukiyo." They exist in a state of symbiosis with weird hair and insanity.

If anyone implies Yasushi was involved with drugs Kiyoshi will fight to defend his honor.

"He sacrificed himself for me!" ?????? That's a love trope, Your Honor. Don't worry, though. They're gay, so Kiyoshi survives his sacrifice.

Odajima + Todoroki

Fellas is it gay to spot a man across a battlefield and be so in awe you run over to him right away?

Is it gay if you then ask said man "you're different from the others. Want to play with me?"

Tsukasa + Fujio

Tsukasa mopes around like Bella after Edward left after Fujio moves away for like a week.

Tsukasa takes a bus ride across the country for the chance to fight his BFF again in the rain (wet, what is symbolism) and then tells him "I'll be waiting for you." And also "I should move here because it's boring without you."

Tsukasa might be held as a hostage but he knows Fujio will come for him. In fact his relationship with Fujio is explicitly paralleled with Amagai and Suzaki's.

Amagai + Suzaki

The redemptive power of love, as beautifully written by @eatprayworm here.

I mean Suzaki literally can barely stand and limps over to protect Amagai when Amagai is experiencing the consequences of his actions and then saves Amagai from himself.

At the end of the day all he wants is to be boyfriends with Amagai.

Probably my favorite ship because it's everything I love, meaning one of them is too good for this world and one is a bastard.

Nakagoshi + Nakaoka

Nakagoshi sacrifices himself for Nakaoka even in a parallel to Yasushi and Kiyoshi (don't worry, they're gay, so they live too).

Tsuji + Shibaaan

Do I even need to comment here?

And I didn't even get into Sachio's sunset conversation with Fujio, in which you visibly see the twink fall and then they, not knowing who the other is, subsequently meet and recognized each other on the battlefield like Mr and Mrs Smith.

Themes Too!

High&Low isn't exactly an uber-deep thematic exploration of what it means to be gay and do crimes, but the themes it does do it does pretty well.

One of those is indeed the redemptive power of love, which involves being seen and known. Y'know, that mortifying ordeal. Because love itself leads to freedom. It's true for Chiharu, it's true for Noboru, it's true for Arata.

Rocky and Kizzy/Kaito's story is kind of one of the best examples of the redeeming power of (platonic) love leading to freedom, and it takes like... 3 minutes? of the story. And it's not left unexplored; it's just succinct. Kizzy and Kaito are trafficking women and Rocky comes to stop them, and when fighting, notices that Kizzy is actually a transwoman. He stops the fight and says that he doesn't fight women. That's enough for Kizzy and Kaito to follow Rocky, giving up their life of cruel crime and atoning--truly atoning--by spending the rest of their lives doing exactly the opposite of their crimes: fighting to free women from traffickers and protect them.

The significance of that moment is that by seeing Kizzy as she really was, Rocky pointed out to Kizzy that she was engaging in self-harm, keeping herself trapped (symbolically) and never able to live as she could. But for Kizzy, to be truly free to be herself means helping other women also be free. It's also, even if unintentional, a good twist on the transphobic trope and conservative talking point of a transwoman trying to harm women (cough, she who shall not be named).

Kizzy also never styles herself super feminine even after gender confirmation surgery (as implied by Rocky that she received), but she still is a woman, and her being herself leads to redemption and freedom for everyone around her. We stan Kizzy and her loyal boyfriend (husband?) Kaito in this house.

Another theme, and connected to the idea of self-discovery and freedom and love and all that, is how to handle the past, a question everyone is always asking because as long as we're alive, we're evolving. Obviously we see that with the Amamiya brothers and the Mugen backstory, and we also see that in the present with Murayama and Todoroki. But we also see this most sharply highlighted in the conflict between Cain and Smokey.

Cain is not subtly named after the first murderer in the Bible, who kills his brother. Cain, of course, kills Smokey in cold blood, with Smokey asking him "did you come here to kill me?" and Cain affirming that he did indeed because if he doesn't, he won't be able to completely erase his past.

But the thing is, you can't kill your past without killing yourself. You have to embrace it and let it live. And something as precious as a life won't be so easily destroyed. To live, you have to live with all of yourself, the past and the present and the hope of a future. It's a struggle, it's a fight--but with people beside you, it's worth it. Almost like the fights in the series are a metaphor for struggling through life or something.

And then we have gentrification. Let's just say the horrors of it are not exaggerated. Smokey's death--and life--offer poignant social commentary on what happens when people treat others like they don't deserve to live, like they are forgotten, like they don't exist. Because they do exist, because they love.

When Cain kills Smokey, Smokey tells him--in all sincerity, despite being abandoned by his parents, living in a homeless slum, and being terminally ill his entire life because the rich poisoned the people in the slum--that he lived "the best life." Why? Because the scenes flash back to him meeting his adopted sister Lala, caring for Eri, meeting his gang. He had a family, and he loved them, and they loved him. When he dies, he's buried in that same slum and Takeshi comments that "to Smokey, this [place] is heaven." And it is, because heaven is love.

(Also, the "rich poisoning people by being careless because these people don't matter" is hardly unrealistic. Bhopal would like a word with you, Dow Inc, you sh*theads.)

In Conclusion

Things you'll have to endure: multiple Mighty Warrior music videos.

Things you get to enjoy: Hyuga being a Barbie girl in a Barbie world who shows up to fights with all the Durama Ikka and planned choreography and bespoke songs.

Things you get to enjoy: multiple twinks needing rescue from being dragged into the drug trade to save their loved ones only to get whumped in true hurt/comfort fanfic fashion before sobbing in the arms of their friends who welcome them home.

Things you have to endure: Noboru trying to convince Cobra et al to join the Mojo Dojo Casa House Kuryu Group.

Things you get to enjoy: The power of friendship saving Noboru from himself, Rocky from dying alone, Smokey from having no meaning to his life, Amagai from himself, Murayama from himself, Todoroki from himself, Arata from himself, setting captives free, and rich bastards who trod all over the poor getting what they deserve.

Things you have to just not think too hard about: gangs seeing drugs as the biggest taboo which I'm pretty sure is not usually the case but hey, hoodlums have standards, and also the evil guys keeping their secrets in a folder literally stamped with the label TOP SECRET.

Things you have to endure: Smokey dying. I'm not over it. Someone fight me to bring him back. But also it's one of the most beautiful death scenes in fiction.

Things you get to enjoy: Generally no one, unless you're Smokey, straight (Takeru), or yakuza (no one cares).

Things you have to ignore: why no one ever studies at these high schools and why they all look like they're in their 30s-40s.

Things you get to enjoy: pretty great rep of a trans woman that directly counters some of the most harmful tropes.

Things you have to endure: Noboru being resurrected by the power of True Love's Handholding, because the nurse literally RAN AWAY from a coding patient to "get the doctor" but it's okay, his friends beg him to live and he does.

Things you get to enjoy: a series that founds its premise in action and violence that offers a surprisingly wholesome, kind message on relationships, humanity, redemption, and love... whether that love is platonic or romantic.

But, I mean, Final Mission literally ends with the gangs defeating the evil corporation with a rainbow-colored smoke that takes over the sky of the city. So it's gay.

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sirensskai · 2 months

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My Ripp Grunt headcanons

It was about time I put them all in one place because as you can tell I’m obsessed with him and have a lot😭 Some of them might make no sense whatsoever or sound weird or are probably me just projecting but who cares lol. If I forget any or think of more I’ll add them later. Also it’s going to be really long…

Anyway… “So Kai, how much do you like Ripp???”

Me:

Birthday

I have come up with a birthday for Ripp. December 13, 1988. (Yes I know December 13 is the same date as Taylor Swift lol.) He is a Sagittarius (that’s canon but that’s why I picked that birthday). I see sims 2 Strangetown as starting in 2005 and he was age 16-17 back then. He’s a year and several months younger than Tank and 4 years older than Buck.

Height

Kind of short for a guy, about 5.5. Tank and Johnny are significantly taller and he hates it.

Identity

He is bisexual and transmasculine. Maybe non binary too, specifically a non binary man (like a demiboy or something.)

Ripp has always been attracted to all genders. He doesn’t really care about that (can fit pansexual too.) He is open to seeing multiple people at once so is polyamorous too. Which can be one way of explaining the romance aspiration. And yes, he has a crush on both Ophelia and Johnny.

He is transgender and knew something was up from an early age. Like a lot of transmasc people he went down the “tomboy” to trans pipeline. He didn’t fully realise what being trans meant and that that was what he was until he was about 14 though. Ripp chose his name himself, idc. He thought it was cool.

Johnny and Ophelia were very supportive of him being trans. He had them at school when the bullies found something new to pick on. As was his mum Lyla who he is very close to. Buck didn’t fully understand at first because of being really young but is still very supportive. (Also Buck ended up becoming Rebecca and is transfem herself but that’s another character headcanon lol) Lyla helped him start HRT.

General Buzz though… I don’t see General Buzz as entirely transphobic. I think he’s the kind of person to prefer having sons, but is still weird about Ripp being trans. He is kind of against it at first but gets used to it. He would also want Ripp to be a man in the “right” way (based on a Tumblr post I saw.) He messes up pronouns sometimes but at least tries. He still thinks Ripp is a fucking lazy ass disappointment overall though 😭 “yeah you are trans or bi, whatever, but you are still my worst son ever.” I think he would be more concerned if any guy Ripp dated was an alien over the fact they were a guy (oops, he already has a crush on Johnny Smith.) General Buzz’s conflicting views about Ripp with Lyla also contributed to those two’s strained relationship. He sees a lot of Lyla in Ripp, in both appearance and personality and he hates being reminded of her.

Tank was in a similar position of getting used to it over time. Didn’t mean he stopped wanting to beat his ass all the time though. He had some internalised stuff he had to deal with himself though (being his own person with his own wishes and also, gay.)

Ripp took Lyla disappearing very hard, especially since she was the one helping with his transition. He was on his own. Things got complicated because General Buzz was still kind of unsupportive. Ripp snuck out for several days to get top surgery by himself and General Buzz was very angry about that.

Personality

He’s a very sweet person overall. He’s friendly with almost everyone and hates conflict, but if he is confronted he loves taking the piss out of them. He’s very positive most of the time despite his terrible life. Very talkative and can go on and on. Tries to make a joke and lighten the mood with just about everything, including himself, even if he does go too far sometimes (which he instantly feels bad about if he makes someone sad.) Definitely swears a lot which his father hates, but he loves annoying his father.

Relationships

I don’t think he has a bad relationship with his father and Tank forever. They make up at one point and maybe they don’t become really close but they at least get along somewhat again (no horrible PSP ending in my sims game.)

He was very close with Lyla, probably the most out of all three of Lyla’s sons so he was devastated when she left, and even more so when he found out she died. One of the few supportive people in his life and she was gone.

Him and Buck (or Rebecca later) are very close due to them both having a strained relationship with General Buzz. Rebecca looks up to Ripp a lot. Also they end up both being transgender which they make a joke out of later. “I can’t believe we’re both Grunts and trans.)

He’s been friends with Ophelia and Johnny since middle school. He hangs out with them a lot and prefers being with them to being at home. He loves being an idiot with Johnny but is sweet with Ophelia. He fell in love with Ophelia first then Johnny.

He met Lilith after she also ran away from home. The two became close because of that. They love poking fun at each other. He’s afraid Lilith will make fun of him if he tells her he likes her (but Lilith likes him too.)

Self insert time, he’s really sweet around Lana. Ripp talks a lot and Lana barely talks at all due to their extreme shyness but he doesn’t mind. He cares for them a lot. He is the most calm and gentle to them and loves listening to them ramble about their interests. He might want to marry her.

Music Career

Ripp was always interested in music, mostly rock music but he is open to other genres as well. I see him as being very into Nirvana. He started playing guitar at school with Johnny Smith, covering their favourite songs. Lyla got him own guitar, and he also started writing his own songs, uploading them to MySpace or something.

At one point he runs away from home and gets a trailer for himself. Away from his father, he has a lot more freedom to do what he wants with his life. He’s still working at the gas station and going to a lot of music labels and he eventually gets signed to one. He has his first major song released through them.

Ripp is the lead singer and guitarist in a band as well as a soloist, with Johnny Smith, Lilith Pleasant and Mercutio Monty, the last two he meets and befriends at one point. (Idk what to name this band yet lol.) Johnny also plays guitar, Lilith is the bassist and Mercutio plays the drums.

His music style is very diverse. And I’m also going to base them off Lana Del Rey albums and songs because why not. His very early work is very acoustic. The first ep and debut album he releases has influences of grunge, surf rock and psychedelic rock. A lot of guitar sounds. And whatever sounds come out of AKA Lizzy Grant.

He goes through some tough things in life which is why he takes a break between his debut and his second album. The sound of this album is quite different. Still guitar heavy but also very slowed, dark and psychedelic. Probably some of his most depressing songs ever. Definitely has a song calling out General Buzz. His Ultraviolence era. It’s a little bit of a concept album too, there’s some sort of storyline throughout. He wears black eyeliner on stage.

The next album is experimental, a little bit of the style of his first album back with the guitar but also some trap beats in there. If I could describe it in a Lana Del Rey song it would be Freak Like Me Demo. Also the most horny album. Bisexual anthem in there though.

The latest album I’ve imagined for Ripp (idk why I’ve imagined all these albums for a sims 2 premade, please help) he explores pop. Lust for Life era (I’m still drawing that, I have a vision.) It’s a lot more uplifting than his previous work and it changes the world. Also somewhat of a horny album too. He dies the ends of his hair purple.

Ripp moves to Del Sol Valley at one point when he becomes a celebrity and gets a house in the pinnacles.

He is definitely very popular in terms of being attractive. There are people making thirst TikToks of him and writing self insert fanfiction and everything. (Couldn’t be me. /s) Some fans are really obsessed with him. To the point they would leak his unreleased music and post it everywhere which is unfortunate but some of them are so good (I’m writing a fic based on this.)

He also does campaigns and advertisements and things as part of being a celebrity, there’s a billboard or magazine cover somewhere where he’s modelling underwear 🙏 And he also hopes it annoys his dad if he sees it and recognises his face lol

His social medias would be hilarious and he would also own terrible people.

Other random hcs

I think Ripp was an unplanned child. Lyla was happy to have him but General Buzz not so much, he kind of hated Ripp from day 1.

He was a “problem child” at least in General Buzz’s eyes and also the schools he went to where he had behaviour issues and struggled to focus. His dad made him see a psychologist. He’s autistic (or aspergers back in the late 90s-early 2000s, also I don’t think General Buzz is the most up to date) and has ADHD. I don’t think this helped with General Buzz already seeing him as a disappointment. Ripp gets really fixated on music (both certain artists and creating it) or certain tv shows or very unconventional things that are kind of uncomfortable for some people. Like literally just the subject of woohoo interests him and he wants to know everything about it lol. I think he fixates on philosophical stuff too like death and the purpose of life (another thing that can lead to some uncomfortable conversations.) Very unlike the stereotype of autism because he’s really outgoing and social too, but it is a spectrum.

I think he shows a lot of affection through touch.

Really dark hc but… 😭 Although he pretends it doesn’t, I think the terrible relationship he has with General Buzz and Tank, as well as Lyla disappearing and dying did really affect him. Has depression and some self esteem and emotional issues and fears abandonment. He has considered *unaliving* before. Also a weird relationship with food. Although he has max interest in food, and he eats a lot of food (but mostly junk food) he grew up with the pressure to remain thin. The dark period of his life between his first two albums involved that and he may have abused substances too. I’m a terrible person, I’m sorry 😭. The romance sim part of him might have spawned from craving the love he didn’t get at home. He feels undeserving of a real relationship but deep down that’s what he actually wants.

I am sorry to him for giving him all these traumatising hcs but I can’t help myself. He was bullied in his school years 🥲 The psp secret of him being afraid of toilets from “one too many swirlies as a child” is to do with this. Tank was involved too maybe, but I don’t believe it was all down to him and he’s a terrible person. With the trans headcanon, I think he was picked on by both boys and girls. Girls didn’t like him for being “weird” and boys would go out of their way to hurt him for trying to fit in with them.

Due to General Buzz being in the millitary, he travelled to a lot of places and moved around a lot prior to going back to middle school in Strangetown. I think he would become interested in different cultures and pick up some words of different languages. He lived in Tomerang at one point.

Ripp is kind of feminine. He isn’t afraid to like “feminine” things and he loves jewellery and painting his nails.

He has a brow piercing and a septum.

He gets a sleeve tattoo.

Has rarely ever cut his hair in his life, he lets it grow really long and he doesn’t care. He would hate for all of his hair to just be chopped off (and that’s also what his father wants)

Smokes, both cigarettes and weed. Tries to stop smoking the cigarettes later on though. Him, Johnny and Ophelia get stoned together and sometimes Lana if she’s willing.

He’s quite arty (his canonical one true hobby is set to arts and crafts.) Spends a lot of his time drawing anything from animals to horny “anatomy” pictures because why not. He takes art when he attends college.

Ripp is a great father. Idc about that romance aspiration, just because he has that doesn’t mean he’s a deadbeat father 😭 Like I’ve said before, that sounds like Don Lothario but not Ripp. His nice points are too high for that. Also being like his own dad would be the last thing he wants to be. He really cares for any kids he has, and the people pregnant with the kids. He would be a really fun dad, maybe a little permissive. Basically the opposite of General Buzz (and also how I think Lyla was.) He also cares for people in general instead of just wanting woohoo out of them.

Ripp is left handed. Sims 4 actually set him up as left handed for me lol. Left handed guitars are unavailable to him to start with so he’s forced to learn right handed 😰 But later on he gets a left handed guitar and plays amazing.

He has a tooth gap.

Cat person. General Buzz, Tank and Rebecca are all drawn to dogs but Ripp is the only cat lover 😭 He gets a havana or a maine coon (or both.)

I think Ripp fits the pleasure aspiration more than the romance aspiration to be honest. An aspiration that involves some romance but also not being a total sleaze and wanting to relax and have fun sounds more like him. It fits Lyla too (another reason why they were so close is that they had very similar personalities.) Another aspiration that fits is popularity, he’s just a very friendly person who loves making friends.

Songs that remind me of Ripp:

#sims 2 #ts2 #Ripp grunt #I hope you enjoy this entire essays worth of headcanons #I’m literally insane about him #my headcanons #Ripp Grunt autism at it again #SoundCloud

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nuvoloso · 1 year

Text

I'll be there.

Oikawa x masc reader (he/they)

Support is something I just know that silly little volleyball captain craves from a s/o. This is about somebody who tries their hardest to give him that, even if sometimes it's a swing and a miss.

This one's in first person, y/n is the soccer captain at seijoh, dating Oikawa, yeah yeah you get it. the little ~~ means change in view or time, it'll make sense as you read.

[Side note: I play soccer, so if I write in another sport, it's always gonna be that until somebody tells me to do something else so yeah slay]

Word Count: 4233

Spring was always a busy time for me, but especially so this year. The captain of the volleyball team, Oikawa Tōru, and I had (to the dismay of his many fans) started dating. Not only were they devastated because surprise! He's gay, but now he was also taken. I loved it though, they'd swarm him and I'd infiltrate their ranks, my lovely Tōru only embracing me, not giving those girls a second glance. Sometimes I'd play with them and flirt with him loudly, just to see how long before they got so jealous they had to leave. Honestly such a fun game to play.

Anyway, spring was crazy this year because Tōru had a ton of volleyball shit going on, and I had soccer tournaments too. We'd made each other promise when we got serious that we'd make it to each other's games whenever we had the chance. Of course we both understood the importance of keeping grades and appearances up since we both wanted to go into the athletic field post-grad. However, we also understood the importance of supporting each other, so we really did try our best.

Sometimes for me that meant if I knew I had a game the same day or I wouldn't be able to be there for whatever reason, I came to practices leading up to it or took him out to dinner afterwards.

When I could make it, despite not totally understanding everything, I cheered louder than anybody else when Tōru was up for serve or if he did something especially dazzling.

Today, he would be playing against Karasuno, which he was especially excited about. He had been telling me all about it yesterday, I guess there was this Kageyama kid that he went to junior high with that he'd be playing against for the first time. He said that during a practice match they'd had not long ago, Kageyama and some other kid had done some kind of super fast move that had upset a lot of players on the team. He was really looking forward to cracking down on them, it was almost scary.

"You'll be there today right?" He asked me, shutting the door to his locker. I was leaning up against the others next to his, thinking about my schedule today.

"I should be, unless something comes out of the blue. I'm not anticipating anything getting in the way though." He grinned at me, his smile infectiously making its way onto my face. "You better not be lame." I threatened, but he brushed it off and grabbed my hand, pulling me towards the cafeteria so we could get lunch.

"I'm never lame, and this game is gonna be fast paced so even you will find it entertaining, I can almost promise it." His hand gripped mine tightly, like he always did when he was excited or determined.

I smiled at him as we made our way down the stairs, "Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it later."

As we got our food and looked around for a place to sit, a few others from the volleyball team were furiously waving us over to them. Tōru dragged me over to them, despite my wanting to sit with guys from my team.

"Y/n! Are you coming to the game tonight? Gonna watch us kick Karasuno's ass?" Iwaizumi asked, I guess Tōru wasn't the only one hyped for this game.

"I should be, I've got nothing on my schedule for later. Is everybody so excited for this thing? I thought Karasuno wasn't any good at volleyball anymore." The team all shook their heads, everyone started talking at once about different people on the team and what they could do, a lot of the conversation based around the freak duo.

The team continued to chatter away about the game and everything they were looking forward to, I just quietly listened, catching every third word. Tōru's games were always in the evening which was nice because it meant they were usually just after when I finished up at practice. But, it also meant I had to either shower and change in a massive hurry and bolt to the gym, or I had to just go in my soccer stuff, I did a healthy balance of both.

My mind had drifted to thinking about what drills we'd be doing today, hoping that it wasn't going to be a push day since I wanted to get cleaned up before the game later. I felt a hand on my shoulder, lightly shaking me which brought me back to the present.

"You in there somewhere, y/n?" Tōru asked, I cracked a smile and briefly apologized for spacing out. "Do you really find my favorite sport in the world so boring?" I couldn't immediately tell if he was joking or not, so I decided to play it safe and assume he was serious.

"Of course not, I was just thinking about the plan for practice today, I might try to convince coach to let us have a rest day so I can have time to clean up before I come watch. I'd never think volleyball was boring, you play it after all." He seemed to like that answer.

Soon enough, the bell had rang and we parted ways with the rest of his team and went back up to our classrooms. I walked with Tōru to his and lingered with him until I really needed to get to my own. He pouted as I left him, but I just laughed at the stupid look on his face and made my way out.

When I got to my own class I found a few of my teammates talking to each other, greeting me as I entered.

"Hey captain! Excited for later today?" One of them asked, I naturally nodded, assuming he was talking about the volleyball game later. It looked like he was going to say something else, but our teacher entered and they quickly dispersed getting back into their seats.

The later half of the day went by slowly, but eventually we were released. Alongside my few teammates that were in my class, we headed down to the school's main gym so we could get changed before getting out to the field. My team had an interesting energy today, it seemed like they were all pretty pumped for practice even though it was a regular day.

I didn't say anything though, and focused on getting changed and making sure all my stuff was good to go in case I needed to get out quickly to catch Tōru's game. Needless to say, I was very determined to make it to this one. I hadn't been able to make it to one of Tōru's real games in a while since they nearly always lined up with my own, or I had practice matches with other teams during them.

I knew Tōru was always a bit let down that I couldn't watch him play as often as he wanted me to, and I honestly couldn't blame him. I, of course, loved it when he came to my games to support me but never really affected me when he wasn't there, at least not as much as it did him. Since I couldn't honestly remember the last game I had made it to, I was absolutely going to make it to this one. Plus, Tōru was beyond excited for this match and I wanted him to enjoy it as much as he could.

When I made it out onto the field, the coach greeted me and I helped him finish setting up cones and getting the practice jerseys and water stations set up. Soon enough practice had started and things were pretty normal for the first half, it was when we were taking our larger break that I noticed something different.

The managers were handing out our official away uniforms, as if we were going to be playing a game. It was odd enough that we were getting our uniforms, but to be getting the away ones was even stranger. Generally, if we hosted a match or practice match, we got to wear our home jerseys, and the other team would compensate for that and wear whichever of theirs differed from ours the most.

It's not as if I didn't like our away jerseys, I liked them better than the normal teal and white ones for sure. The away's had to be decently different from the home's so they were mainly black with white and turquoise details.

As our manager handed me mine, I thought to ask her what we needed them for.

"I thought we weren't having any practice games today, why are you handing out the uniforms?" She gave me a weird look.

"You don't remember? Coach said that Date Tech would be coming over for a practice match today because it was the only day that worked for them. He sent out a mass email about it a few days ago, don't you check your emails?" God why? Of all the days they had to surprise me with a practice match it had to be today?

I sighed, "I guess I must've missed it, thank you though." She looked puzzled at my lack of excitement towards the match, but didn't ask about it. "Hey coach?" I called, getting up to meet him before I got changed.

"Yeah, what's up--is something wrong? You look a little distressed." I nervously wrung my jersey as if it wasn't already bone dry.

"I just, didn't realize we had a practice match today. How long do you think it'll go for?" Coach was surprised at my question, usually I wanted these matches to go on forever but asking when it was over was new.

"Well, it all depends on you guys. We'll start as soon as they get here, but we're going to do a full match. It's what? 16hr right now?" I checked my watch, nodding. "Ok so we'll probably be done right around 18hr, maybe earlier but it depends."

I pursed my lips, sighing quickly but thanking him for humoring my questions. Tōru's game starts at 17hr 30m, and he said they usually last about an hour. I might be able to catch the last half or so if I hurry.

I watched the Date Tech bus pull in, and silently begged them to just go faster. I had no time to waste, I needed this game to start as soon as possible.

Luckily with everyone's excitement surrounding the match, they wanted to get going too, and things started shortly after the visitors offloaded their bus. We greeted each other, and play began shortly after.

When half time rolled around it was just turning 17hr, which meant after our ten minute break, we really would be finishing right at 18hr. I pulled out my phone to shoot Tōru a text, though I was sure he wouldn't read it since he was likely getting ready for his match.

Y/n [hey I'm not going to be on time to the match, I got blindsided by a practice game. I might be able to see the later half or so of the match]

I was going to just put my phone away after I sent it, but I saw that he had read the message, and the dots that meant he was typing.

Tōru [hope you can make it <3]

That was all I got. And I could practically feel the tribulation on his end through the simple message. I threw my phone back into my bag and put my palms into my eyes for a few moments, until I could tell I was being watched.

"You ok y/n?" Someone asked, I moved my hands from my eyes and looked up towards the voice. It was our goalie, and he was offering me a hand up.

I groaned, "I was supposed to go to Tōru's match that starts in thirty minutes, but now I don't know if I'll make it. I promised him I'd be there too, but I had no clue we had a match today." He gave me a very knowing look.

"Ah, yeah I get it. My girl's on the tennis team and our schedules never line up. Maybe these clouds will start doing something interesting and we'll get released early." I looked up at the sky and noticed that he may be right. The clouds were dark and looked about ready to dump some rain on us, I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed it earlier.

I loved playing in the rain, I thought it was fun and challenging but the coaches definitely didn't feel the same way, they saw it more as a danger since it made everything so slick. We had a tent set up so our stuff was never at risk of getting drenched, but soccer was an outdoor game and the weather was unpredictable.

Play resumed again, and as we went on I could feel droplets of water setting on my skin. Just a little downpour, please. Just enough to let me get outta here soon. As if the sky was listening to me, the droplets doubled in size and quantity and soon rain was coating the field and everyone on it.

"Alright everybody, we're gonna stop here for today and we'll pick this up again another day! Get your things and get inside to dry off!" The coaches were yelling, everybody running to the sidelines to get their shit and leave. I was probably the fastest, checking my watch it was 17hr 50m which meant Tōru had been playing for at least twenty minutes, and I was gonna make it before it ended.

I grabbed my things and about as quickly as I could, changed out of my cleats and into an old pair of sneakers I only ever wore outside because I didn't care how dirty they got. I threw on my jacket and ran to the street in front of Seijoh to try to get a taxi so I didn't have to try to run to the Sendai City Gym.

That, was where my luck ran out. The streets were empty, not a taxi in sight which meant I had to call for one and wait for it to show up. Thankfully there was one nearby and it didn't take too long to show up but I was losing time. The driver handed me a towel she had on hand and told me to dry myself off as well as I could because she didn't want water all over her cab. I apologized profusely as I did my best to dry myself off.

We arrived at the gym a handful of minutes later, the kind taxi driver giving me a disposable umbrella she had, telling me to not get drenched again. I thanked her over and over while I gave her some cash for the ride, and ran as fast as I could to the gym's entrance. When I got there I quickly changed out of my disgusting shoes, shoving them into my bag and pulling out a cleaner pair of hightops to wear. I ran into the bathroom to take a look at myself, running my hands through my hair a few times and dabbing off some residual rain and sweat that I'd missed while in the taxi.

When I deemed myself mostly presentable I jogged through the building until I heard the sounds of volleyball. There were a few different sections that had teams going, and to my luck Tōru's was the last one I checked. I ran up the stairs leading to the bleachers, but didn't bother to find a seat, I just got as close as I could to where Tōru was on the court.

I looked at the score, it was the third set, and about in the middle from what I knew about the volleyball score system. I looked around the court, recognizing a few players on the other team from what I had heard, and noting the positions of everyone on Tōru's team.

To my joy, he was going in to serve next. I tried calling out to him, but the crowd of Seijoh supporters drowned me out. Luckily I caught Iwaizumi's eye, a grin appearing on his face when he realized that I'd made it. I couldn't hear anything he was saying, but as the team was quickly transitioning he got Tōru's attention and pointed up at me.

When his eyes met mine, I could immediately see a change in his demeanor, his eyes lighting up with a vigor unlike anyone else. He made a small heart with his hands as he walked back behind the court line, I returned the gesture, and Tōru started his serving routine.

The rest of the game flew by, it really was one of the most captivating volleyball games I'd seen. Both teams fought viciously; any bystander could feel the hunger between the two teams, but our team's skill was just higher than the other's. The match ended with Seijoh on top, 33-31, and upon their win I ran down to the entrance to the gym so I could meet Tōru.

I had been beyond crestfallen when I'd gotten the text from y/n saying that they had a practice match. It had been ages since they'd come to one of my games, so I was really looking forward to having him here, but I should've known that something would come up.

Iwa thinks that's why we lost the second set, because I thought y/n would have arrived by then, but ultimately didn't show. If I'm being honest, I had given up on them showing up, I knew he wouldn't abandon his team or a practice match just to watch my game.

To say I was shocked when Iwa yelled at me to look in the stands, is a major understatement. When I saw them there, waving and smiling at me from the stands, nearly falling into the court from leaning so hard against the rail, I knew my heart skipped a beat or two. He looked a bit crazy, if I had to guess it was raining and he just sped from his game to here without changing. They looked fantastic in their soccer uniform, the jersey being a bit snug helped show off some of his great features, plus his skin glistened from the rain and probably sweat that coated his skin. That is, not to mention, the look on his face as they watched me, pride and love just emanating from his eyes and smile.

I felt a new energy run through me after I saw them, and we battled the shit out of Karasuno, but they held their ground. I was almost happy for Tobio, he played...better than he used to. I wouldn't say well or great, but he was improving if ever slowly.

When the match ended and we thanked the fans, I didn't see y/n up there anymore, but I wasn't worried. I knew where they'd be.

As we wrapped things up, I half-ran to the entrance of the gym and saw my lovely partner waiting for me. They nearly tackled me in a hug, telling me how proud they were and how incredible the game was. It felt amazing to hear that, and to know that they actually had seen me play rather than had just heard me tell him about it.

I kissed him when he had paused, and I could feel him smiling beneath my lips. He laced his fingers together and rested them on my lower back, keeping me closer to them while my hands were on his face. We stayed like that for a few minutes, trading kisses and just enjoying the moment we had together that came so rarely.

Eventually, y/n pulled their face away from mine and watched my eyes for a handful of seconds before he decided to say anything.

"I told you I'd be here." They said, a slight smirk emerging on their face.

I rolled my eyes, "You said that you'd be able to watch the whole thing! You only got to see the last half of the final set!" He pulled his hands off of my back and put them up in front of him defensively.

"Hey it's not my fault! I checked my email again and I didn't see anything from anybody about a match today! I really did think I had the day off from practice matches!" I sighed as dramatically as I could, and let the topic drop.

Though suddenly remembering what he'd looked like when they'd got here I asked, "Why did you look soaked when you got here? And you're still in your uniform and your hair is..." My eyes widened a bit, and y/n laughed, coming his hands through their wet hair a few times, catching a snag or two from whatever had gotten it so wet and frazzled.

"We were still playing our match when it started just dumping rain, and the coaches canceled the rest of it. Since it was just Date Tech and they're not too far away, they didn't feel bad about canceling the match rather than trying to move it inside." I hummed, that made enough sense. "I had to call a taxi to get here though, and that poor driver was so mad at me for getting in her car soaked through, so she tossed me a towel and a disposable umbrella and I tried to dry off before I got here." They gestured to the somewhat dryer parts of their uniform, but shook their head chuckling in defeat. "I guess I didn't do a great job."

"Yeah you're gross, and in desperate need of a shower and dry clothing." Y/n only aggressively nodded, but claimed that all of their stuff was either still in his locker at the school or super dirty and in his bag.

I was trying to think of something to do when Iwa joined us, laughing at y/n's state. They joked back and forth about how gross the other looked, when Iwa tossed me my duffle bag. "You left this in the gym, I thought maybe you'd forgotten it. And dude," He said shaking his head at y/n, "You seriously gotta do something, you smell like shit."

"Thank you so much Iwa I had no idea, your input is so appreciated and valued and will be thought about heavily throughout the rest of my life." Y/n loudly and sarcastically proclaimed.

"Damn right!" Iwa sneered back, their bickering finally coming to an end. Iwa excused himself to help pack up the team's things, and it was just me and y/n again.

Looking down at the bag Iwa had thrown to me, I had an idea. "Y/n," I said, gathering his attention from his previous interaction, "I've got a spare club t-shirt and a pair of sweats in here that you can wear after you rinse off. I'll just put my jacket on and wear my uniform on the way back."

He tried to protest, insisting that I get changed since I just finished a game, but I wouldn't have it. Y/n was almost shivering and I could tell he was trying to hide it, they were barely dry from the rain, and they'd worked hard during the practice match not that long ago. When he'd conceded, I showed them where the showers were and left my bag with him, deciding to just sit outside the room and wait for him.

I pulled out my phone, and found that there were a handful of notifications from different social apps and my messages. I checked my messages first, seeing that they were nearly all from y/n, he'd texted me what they thought of a play every time it happened. I smiled, that was one of their more adorable habits. The other notifications were mentions from pictures that y/n had added to their stories or had just posted of me and the team.

I loved having y/n here to watch my games, I loved having their support and their love during these important times of my life. It meant the world to me that they supported me through all of this, even if they couldn't watch the game live. I could only hope to return the favor the next game they had.

Y/n emerged from the washroom, now looking much more put together, and also looking quite well in my clothes. They were a bit small on them in a few places, but I knew they wouldn't mind, and I certainly didn't care either.

"I saw your messages, and the stuff you posted, all very cute!" I grinned, him smiling back at me and taking my free hand, helping me stand up.

"I've gotta let the world know how proud and lucky I am to be with you." I felt my face flush, and he took the opportunity to land a quick kiss on my lips before pulling me towards the exit of the building. "Come on sunshine, we can't keep everybody waiting, they'll start making up stories."

I knew he was right, and together we went back out to meet everyone else.

#haikyuu #haikyu imagines #Oikawa tōru #Oikawa x reader #Oikawa x m!reader #Oikawa x male reader #aoba johsai #seijoh #volleyball #imagine #fluff #oneshot #haikyuu x male reader

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