#quotation marks on the word rival

[heartofthescales]

The thought of Al Haitham snapping and having his Akasha turn his eyes red and his thoughts unrestrained because Azar was blatantly deeming Cyno as an “untrustworthy” individual and keeping him on a metaphorical leash drives me insane

[angelkhi]

love me, hate me - s.r

summary: steve rogers pisses you off, and you piss him off. but is it really ever that simple?

warnings: SMUT 18+ (MINORS DNI), p in v, switch steve & reader, face sitting, unprotected sex, talks of bodily fluids, enemies to lovers a little bit, slight hate fucking but also not?? feelings at the end sort of.

word count: 2.8.k

a little note: Happy New Year to you all! finished this at 4 am so not beta’d any mistakes are my own (seriously i just spelled mistakes as ‘mestayks’ so like sorry lol) half based on this request but also something i already had in the works that seemed to mesh xx

"Let's not forget who's doing who a favour." You chide, already irritated by presence.

"Please sweetheart, I'm doing you more of a favour than you realise."

"And how's that Mr Rogers?" You fix his crooked tie. Always picking up after him.

"You walk in there with me? There's no way you're going home alone tonight." He smooths out the collar on his shirt, checking himself over in the mirror. "Your little problem gets solved."

"My little problem?"

"Don't get me wrong, Yels, it's great doing it yourself but it would be nice for someone give me an orgasm every now and then."

"You fuckin pig! You were listening to my conversation?" You're embarrassed. Beyond embarrassed. If there's one person that doesn't need to know about your dwindling sex life it's Steve Rogers.

"It's kinda hard not to overhear yours and Yelena's screeching on girls night." Once again those fingers fly up into quotation marks and you have to blink yourself free from the daze you're slipping into.

Maybe Steve does have a point, you're significantly louder after a bottle or two of rose, but it doesn't give him the right to use your own words against you.

"You're a dick, Rogers. It's none of your fucking business how many orgasms I have." He's smirking down at you now, something in his eyes you've never seen before. "Let's just get this over with. I don't want to have to see your face any longer than necessary."

The two of you enter the ballroom together as planned, and heads turn almost instantly. The quiet gasps and turning heads boost his scolded ego more than nicely. But that's all it is. A soothing bandage over a painful wound.

Stark's infamous shindigs that rivalled even the most grand of galas, yet you are the only thing that matters to him in a room filled with expensive champagne and extravagant sculptures. He watches you from across the room, Bucky's latest debrief on Sam's irritating behaviour blending into the mindless background chatter.

You're done up to the nines, pretty hair twisted in some intricate up-do, and that dress. That fucking dress. He wonders if things would be easier if you knew how he really felt about you, that the trading of insults between the two of you is the only way he can resist pinning you against every available surface and fucking the attitude out of you.

You work your charm with everyone that comes up to you, offering you drinks and boring conversation. You know you're in charge, so do they, and so does he.

He spots you talking to a pretty redhead he soon recognises as Wanda, she's changed since he last saw her. But he much more notices the lingering stares and flirtatious touches, the way you lean into each other and laugh a little too loud. Jealousy is no longer a green eyed monster, but a blonde haired, blue eyed super soldier.

You happen to glance over at him in that moment, taking in his tensed jaw and white-knuckle grip on his champagne flute, expecting it to shatter under any more force. He watches as you smirk in his direction, and the go back to the conversation like he wasn't even there. Sam and Bucky pull him away to a conversation that is meant to be important and he loses sight of you for the rest of the evening.

The party starts to get a little too lively towards 11pm, the rowdy crowd excited about the looming new year. You find yourself at the bar, sick of your uncomfortable shoes, ready to get more than drunk, kiss a bottle at midnight and fall into bed with your vibrator once again. Someone slides into the empty seat next to you, speaking to the bar tender. You catch the 'and whatever she's having' and roll your eyes just wanting to be left alone at this point.

Your double vodka and cranberry is slid in front of you and you take a single sip before turning to the man next to you. He's attractive, with his full beard and long brown hair. There's something in his eyes but you don't care enough to find out that much about him. He shakes your hand firmly, introducing himself as Quentin Beck. You smile and thank him when he compliments you, you hum and nod when he tells you about his latest technological venture that sounds weirdly similar to Tony's, you smile coyly when he rests a hand on your thigh and offers to take you somewhere a little less private.

You're silently disappointed that this is the best you could do on a night like tonight but you're not one to look a fort horse in the mouth. He guides you through the crowd with a hand around your waist until the function room doors come into view and your excitement dims even further. Steve stands in the doorway, arms crossed and biceps bulging as he stares at Quentin and then his hand on your waste.

"Hey honey." He wraps his fingers around your wrist lightly, stopping you in your tracks. He stares down at you for a second too long, then diverts his gaze to Beck.

"Fuck off." Two words. Two are all it takes for Quentin to crumble.

His hand moves from your waist faster than you can blink and he's already being swallowed up by the crowd when you turn away from glaring at Steve. His fingers linger around your wrist but you shrug him off, and leave the grand ballroom stomping down to the elevator.

He follows you of course, right up to your door, pushing inside when you try and slam it in his face.

"Honey that guy was a creep."

"Don't 'honey' me you just ruined my one good chance of getting laid tonight." You kick off your shoes.

"Well I wouldn't call it a good chance..."

"What was that?!" You're about to fiddle with the zip of your dress but instead steve has your attention and an insane amount of audacity.

"M'just saying he wouldn't have been worth it." He pauses, sitting on your bed uninvited. "Doesn't look like he can find his car keys let alone please a woman."

"I guess I'll never know now." You scoff.

"Use me instead."

What in the sweet baby jesus?!

"How much have you had to drink?" You chuckle, and go back to working your zip.

"You know I can't get drunk. How much have you had to drink?" He retorts, reaching up to undo the zipper for you.

"Not enough for this to be a hallucination. What's in it for you?"

"An orgasm." Fair enough.

"Why are you doing this? Are you trying to humiliate me?"

"What? No! I'm just trying to apologise for ruining your New Years hook up." He looks sincere, but then Steve never lies. You on the other hand, would be lying if you said you didn't want to jump his bones at least twenty three and a half of the twenty four hours in the day. And he's offering himself to you on a golden platter. Why turn. it down?

"Strip."

It's a simple word, but it holds so much power. Starting something that may just fucking ruin you. But you want it. He wants it. The easy route be damned. Steve is quick to discard his clothing, looking up at you expectantly waiting for your next request. You simply just let your dress drop, carefully stepping over the expensive fabric and slotting yourself between Steve's legs. His eyes widen when he realises you'd neglected to put on any underwear that evening. She reaches out to touch you, rest a hand on your hip but you slap it away.

"Lay back." You kneel over his hips, excitement fizzling on your skin as he rests on his elbows, taking up an insane amount of space with his broad shoulders and wide thighs. He doesn't move any further, a sly smirk on his lips and wonder in his eyes.

"I said I don't want to see your face, lie the fuck back." You have him under your thumb, and your pussy, when he lays back against the cotton sheets you crawl across his body and rest above his face. His hands grip onto the backs of your thighs, usually light eyes dark with lust. 

"No touching." You thread his arms above him, resting forward and pinning them against the pillows. His response is muffled when you lower yourself onto his face. His tongue works wonders when he's not using it to talk and you definitely prefer it when he's not talking.

You grind yourself down against his pliant tongue, clit bumping his stupidly perfect nose with each thrust. You're taking what you deserve from him, what he owes you and you fucking love it. You love the fact that he could easily slip you underneath him, pin you beneath him and pull you apart but instead he's letting you use him, letting you grind yourself to an orgasm on his face.

"You're not so useless after all Rogers, fucking hell." His lips purse around your exposed clit and your thighs shake a little. You press yourself further against him, chasing your well deserved orgasm until you're panting above him half spent.

Lifting yourself off of him, you take in his flushed cheeks and blown out eyes. God he's pretty. Your hand strokes through his hair and he leans into your touch. Putty in your hands.

You reach back, your hands almost dwarfed by the impressive size of his pretty cock. You struggle to wrap your hands around him fully, but when you start stroking him slow but firm it doesn't matter. His face twists into one of pure bliss and his hips fuck up into your fist desperately. Deciding enough is enough you manoeuvre down his body, hovering over his painfully hard weeping cock. You drag him through your folds, almost slipping him in before bumping his engorged head against your clit until you're right on the edge of desperation and finally sink down on him.

You take him slowly at first, unable to stay quiet as he stretches you open. There's a slight sting but my god does it sting so good. Once he's fully sheathed you take a moment to accommodate, grinding down on him, twin moans coming from the two of you. You raise yourself up again, right to the tip and back down, slowly building the rhythm until you're bouncing on his cock, hitting spots you didn't even know existed panting for breath. 

"You feel so fucking good." You whimper chasing your own pleasure, fuelled by Steve's. He fists the bedsheets, so obedient trying not to touch you, but you look so pretty and broken and you're touching yourself whilst you ride him, clenching down on his dick so fucking perfectly. He's more vocal than. you expected, grunting and moaning and whining.

"Fuck I'm gonna come. Steve." Your fingers roll your taught nipples between your fingers, pinching and pulling. Steve's hips stutter for a moment, but then he's right there with you, fucking up into your perfect cunt until you're shaking on his dick, grinding your clit against his pubic bone and falling over the edge.

He doesn't give you a second to breath, wrapping his strong arms around you and placing you flat on your back. You're breathless, your vision is still fuzzy but then he's pounding into you. Lifting your leg above his shoulder opening you up up to him even more. You're well and truly fucked. Not a single word or thought or even sound registering. You're just wide eyed and open mouthed and taking what he gives you.

"Not so cocky now are we, hmm sweetheart." His thumb flicks your clit once and you're coming all over again, a loud scream echoing off of the walls.

"There she is. So fucking perfect, taking what you need. Did I do well, did I satisfy your greedy pussy or do you still want more?"

"St-Steve. More." You sound so broken, so unalike yourself but you never want to go back to her when you can be this.

"Course you fuckin do. Play with your tits for me, that's a good girl." He thrusts slow but deep, your weak legs held in position by his huge hands. He relishes in your flushed face and smudged makeup. Your hair has foregone the confines of bobby pins and it's splayed out on the cushion behind you. You're fucking perfect.

"Who's cunt is this?" Your eyes lull into the back of your head when he delivers a quick sharp tap to your clit. "Tell me who's cunt it is and I'll let you cum."

"Y-Yours. Yours Steve."

"Good. And who's fuckin dick is this tearing you apart?" It's all too much, you're on the verge of crying from the overstimulation. "Who's is it?"

"Mine."

"Good fucking girl." He punctuates his words with his thrusts, picking up speed once more and rubbing small quick circles against your clit. Your tears do spill then, dark mascara running down your cheeks when you explode all over him.

He fucks you through the orgasm, pulling out of you when you begin to claw at his chest, leaving pretty marks all over him. He kneels over you, furiously stroking himself to completion until he cums in long white ropes all over your breasts, chest heaving and panting. He collapses next to you, silent as you try to catch your breaths and wrap your head around what just happened.

It shouldn't surprise you when Steve gets up to the bathroom and comes back with a washcloth, but it does. It leaves you stunned. You try not to show it though, nor do you give him a glimpse at how disappointed you are about leaving.

"Damn Rogers, you really know how to hate fuck." Steve's gaze is frantic, but mostly confused.

"Hate? I don't hate you." His eyebrows are pulled together so tightly you're scared they might just fuse into one another.

"Could've fooled me." You pull up your underwear and pull on his shirt foregoing the tight dress.

"Look. I don't. Hate. You. Do you get on my nerves? Sometimes. But I could never hate you."

"So what? You wanna call the way you've treated me since I got here a proclamation of your undying love." He's silent. "You can't be fucking serious Rogers."

"Don't be like that, you gave just as good as you got." You scoff, but it's the truth. "Every time I look at you I want to fuck you, every time I see someone even look at you I wanna fuckin... I don't know!"

"Steve..."

"You terrify me. I have all these feelings for you, but you're so... you. You're so gorgeous, you're potty mouth and you're strong and you don't take shit from no one, not even me. I'm an idiot, I know that and I don't expect a sorry to fix anything, but I need you to know that that wasn't a one time thing, I want you."

"Well fuck. You have feelings for me?" He nods, simple, effective and oh so Steve Rogers. "I thought. I don't know what I though. I walked in here and you just stared at me and left, and I guess I though you took one look at me and decided I wasn't enough. So I decided I was gonna prove you wrong."

"I think you're everything. You've certainly proved me right." He looks angry, at himself at and the situation, but mostly at the fact that you'd ever thought those things about yourself.

"Right pair of idiots we are." You mutter, trying to lighten the you're-not-sure-what mood. He pulls you into his lap, rough hand resting around your waist.

"Aren't we just." He whispers against your lips.

"How many people did you tell to fuck off tonight? Just out of interest."

"Bout 15." He mumbles and then laughs, "don't regret a single one of them though."

You surge forward and press against him. His lips are softer than expected and his movements are so slow, so tentative. You arch into him, greed driving your need to make up for the last few wasted months.

A loud bang erupts from outside of the glass windows, popping into a concoction of golds and reds and pinks, until the New York skyline is littered with individual fireworks displays.

"Happy New Year Rogers." You whisper against his lips, though it turns into a breathless whimper when he pulls your panties to the side. "You get on my nerves too by the way. Like a whole lot."

"Yeah yeah. Happy New Year."

[multistoty]

The darker the sky, the brighter the stars. The auburn haired princess believed the stars align so souls can find one another. Whether they are meant to be souls in love or souls in life remains to be seen. They were to be married by the end of the night. It was because they were two parts of a whole. He did not belong to her. And she did not belong to him. It was never about belonging to someone. It was about belonging together. Every person has the power to change their fate if they are brave enough to fight for what they desire more than anything. Hope is a powerful thing. Some say it’s a different breed of magic altogether. Elusive, difficult to hold on to. But not much is needed. She remembered thinking falling for him would be like falling in love with darkness, but now she imagined he was more like a starry night: the constellations were always there, constant, magnificent guides against the ever-present black. The air was full of salt and secrets. The beauty of his smile was like that to rival the sun. Hope Mikealson was the child of a fairly influental king of a smaller kingdom famed for the piles of blood and sinew of those who caught his ire. Her six uncles and seven aunts were just as fiercely protective over family though her Uncle Elijah was the one who truly kept their country running. While Hope was raised utterly loved, she was determined to not fully follow in the bloodlust that formed her legacy in these kingdoms. It was the night of her wedding with the handsome stranger that Klaus had betrothed her too in Aegon who seemed like a gentleman even as he was also out of his element. A true plague of a girl. And yet a queen in every sense of the word. Be as swift as the wind. As silent as the forest. As fierce as the fire. As unshakable as the mountain. And you can do anything. It does not take courage to kill. It takes courage to live. Though Hope could easily do it with a flashing glint of a dagger or sword. The only power any man has over you is the power you give him. Two stubborn lovers, protecting each other from the very same threat. Destiny was for fools. The pair would not wait for their life to happen. They would make it happen. It's inevitable. When you meet the one who makes you smile as you've never smiled before, cry as you've never cried before... there is nothing to do but fall. Waiting. Not waiting. One lover. A hundred lovers. There should be no judgement either way. A woman is not defined by what she does or doesn‘t do in the bedroom. They've never found the body of the first and only boy who broke my heart. And they never will. Time goes on even when we do not. And the couple are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives they did not choose. Things were all still new. But she liked the way she felt about herself when she was  with him. The blonde seemed to think that she was strong and smart and capable and he actually values her opinion. He makes his soon to be wife feel like his equal--like she can accomplish just as much as he can, and more. And if she did something incredible, he's not even surprised. He expects it. He doesn't treat her like some fragile little girl who needs to be protected all the time.Even as she knew he would always be at her side. Maybe they could grow to love one another.  People seldom realize that they tell lies with their lips and truths with their eyes all the time. The butterflies of the world migrating to her stomach felt more delicious than all nerves before.  She’s come to believe that the most dangerous man in the world is the one who feels no remorse. The one who never apologizes and therefore seeks no forgiveness. Because in the end it is our emotions that make us week, not our actions. She promised herself then, in that moment, that she will hold him forever, just like this, until all the pain and torture and suffering is gone, until he's given a chance to live the kind of life where no one can wound him deeply ever again. He's looking so deeply into Hope’s vivid blue eyes that she was surprised she hadn't buckled under the intensity everything about him is intense. Nothing about him is manageable or easy to compartmentalize. He's too much. Everything about him is too much. His emotions, his actions, his anger, his aggression. His love. And she wanted to drown in it. Her eyes professional pickpockets traveling over the man who was to be her husband and the minutes they comfort. They had been doing a sort of practice. Now, alone in eachothers arms with bellies filled with mulled wine and voices far off. “What a pair we will be. My mother a woman of scandal same as yours. But I am lucky to be betrothed to such a handsome man with a sexy affinity for sharp objects. Charming even when he continues to brood.”

@the-jester-x​

[fluffypotatey]

Silly/Dumb Things that Make Me Irrationally Angry

disclaimer: the key words here are “silly” & “dumb”

The “Narnia Kids are the Founders of Hogwarts” theory

The “it was all a dream” theory

Thinking protagonist = hero

When fandom villainizes a character simply because they’re “in the way of a ship”

Character in relationship starts pursuing a different character (typically the MC) but doesn’t break up with the character they’re currently dating?????

Speed running enemies to lovers trope (that’s a trope for slow burns wtf are you doing put it down!)

Calling Disney’s Beauty & The Beast a story about Stockholm Syndrome 

Calling any diverse media “woke” to undermine it

Misunderstanding how tags work on ao3 (particularly the / and & for pairings)

Misunderstanding the purpose of tags on ao3

Calling Lucy Heartfilia weak 

Forgetting that Dick Grayson was a mathlete

Basing all of Jason Todd’s personality on his anger and ruthlessness 

Misunderstanding Jason Todd’s anger

The DCEU butchering my boy Batsy

The “I was accidentally eavesdropping and left believing they were talking shit about me but turns out I missed the most important bits” trope

Being a military historian who loves the Civil War (I don’t trust you)

Using the word “females” to sound smarter (you just sound dumb also “women” is right there)

Spring Break being colder than usual (IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF MARCH IN TEXAS WHY WAS I SHIVERING)

Calling me by a nickname that I already refused to (you gotta earn that shit)

Ep 2.08 is never really touched on again after it’s “resolved”

vld’s lost potential (while i have made my peace, i will still bare my scars)

text blocks in fics

dialogue with no quotation marks 

“Oh lookie, we got this wonderful fantastical world (that takes some inspiration from history) with it’s own politics and world building BUT we keep the sexism and racial prejudice bc the inspiration we pulled was medieval times :)” <- i will fight you for sport

mistaking rivals to lovers for enemies to lovers (similar flavor just R to L is slightly tamer. can they blend? yes, but they are not the same thing)

the blatant disregard for internet safety on tiktok (why tf would you announce your age, show your face, and air out your dirty laundry to everyone??? where is your caution? this is not vine, lil beans, y’all are stressing me out. did you miss the pbs episode about the dino agents and stranger danger??? or the fever dream computer game our 1st grade class had to play at school???)

if you have the sniffles, for the love of all things holy, please stand up and get a tissue. no one cares if you get up. i honestly prefer hearing you blow out your nose than hearing you suck up snot every 5 minutes.

taking the backstories told by Macaque and Azure about the Monkey King in lmk at face value (biased narratives are a thing! unreliable narrators are a thing! i will give the biggest sigh if Sun Wukong is placed as the sole character at fault in another fic i read with this)

“redemption” arcs

“sympathetic” villains

missing the fucking point about why Batman chooses mercy and rehabilitation over baseless violence (this also coincides with my issue with how some people view Jason as the Punisher 2.0 bc it suffers through the same fucking glorification of justifying apathy of human life and rejection of 2nd chances)

missing the fucking point about what makes Superman super (here’s a hint: it’s not his fucking power)

the fact that i missed most of Vine’s peak bc i wasn’t allowed a phone until middle school

i lost my post canon script of Cinderella in the prince’s POV that i wrote in 6th grade (rip, i should have created a personal gmail so much sooner, i could have saved you T^T)

understanding a motive does not equal justifying or excusing said motive. you just now understand why a person did what they did. maybe you find justification in it, maybe not, but it’s not absolute!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Games Workshop declares war on its customers (again)

There’s a difference between a con-artist and a grifter. A con-artist is just a gabby mugger, and when they vanish with your money, you know you’ve been robbed.

A grifter, on the other hand, is someone who can work the law to declare your stuff to be their stuff, which makes you a lawless cur because your pockets are stuffed full of their money and merely handing it over is the least you can do to make up for your sin.

IP trolls are grifters, not con artists, and that’s by design, a feature of the construction of copyright and trademark law.

Progressives may rail at the term “IP” for its imprecision, but truly, it has a very precise meaning: “‘IP’ is any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers, competitors and critics, such that they must arrange their affairs to my benefit.”

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

In that regard, it is a perfect grifter’s tool — a way to put you on the wrong side of the line for simply living your life in the way that works best for you, not the grifter.

Now, copyright and trademark’s framers were alive to the possibility that they might become this kind of weapon, and they wrote limitations and exceptions into each doctrine that were meant to safeguard the public’s right to free speech and free action.

But those limitations and exceptions are weirdly self-eviscerating. Both trademark and copyright’s limitations assume that they aren’t being weaponized by immoral sociopaths. Both collapse if they are.

Take copyright. Copyright has a suite of limitations and exceptions under various global legal systems, including US law. US law also contains a specific set of exceptions colloquially called “fair use,” a subject of much mystification for lay people.

Under fair use, someone accused of copyright infringement can ask a judge to find that their use of someone else’s copyrighted work is permissible because to deny it would be socially harmful.

The fair use law sets out four factors that judges MAY consider when considering such a claim. Note that these four factors are neither comprehensive (judges can weigh other factors), nor dispositive (failing to satisfy a factor doesn’t disqualify your use from being fair).

If that sounds confusing to you, don’t worry. It is confusing. As the lawyers say, “fair use is fact-intensive.”

The specifics of a use really matter: who’s making the use, what they’re using, why they’re using it, how they use it, and how much they use.

That’s why anyone who claims that “X is never fair use” (for example, commercial fanfic) are full of shit — as are people who say “X is always fair use”).

Commercial fanfic absolutely can be fair use. No less a body than the Supreme Court says so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone

Despite all this ambiguity and nuance, IP grifters who want to force other people to arrange their affairs to their own benefit are laser focused on the four factors, reasoning correctly that if they show a judge that the factors favor them, they’re more likely to prevail.

Half of the four factors are out of the grifter’s reach. As a rightsholder, you can’t control “the purpose and character of the use,” or “the amount and substantiality of the portion used.”

But the other two factors are more readily within the IP wielder’s remit. As someone seeking control a work, you can frame “to the nature of the copyrighted work” by talking up how much creativity and originality went into it, which judges will weigh in your favor.

More importantly — and disturbingly — is the way that an IP holder can influence the fourth factor: “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

Think about that fourth factor for a moment here: if my use of your work doesn’t cost you any money, then it’s more likely that my use is fair.

The corollary: if you can bully some people into paying for something they’ve always gotten for free, then you can claim that the people who refuse to pay are ripping you off — that there is a “market” for the use, and that their failure to pay weakens that market.

This is effectively what’s happened to music sampling. Seminal albums like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” were produced with thousands of uncleared samples — but at the time, no one was clearing samples.

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/

Had the rightsholders to those samples dragged Public Enemy into court, they wouldn’t have had the fourth factor on their side. No one was paying for samples, so a failure to pay for samples had no “effect on the potential market for the copyrighted work.”

However, in the 33 years since Nation of Millions dropped, paying to license samples has become common practice — and the mere existence of paid samples makes not paying for samples more legally risky.

So say a rightsholder decided to aggressively license simple quotations — as the Associated Press did in 2008, when it offered to sell you a license to a 5-word quotation for a mere $12.50.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010341.html

All other things being equal, a short quotation from a news article is likely to be fair use. But if the AP managed to terrorize enough bloggers into coughing up $12.50 for a 5-word quote, it could create a market for 5-word quotations.

That market would change the fair use argument for people who don’t pay — yes, they’re making a transformative, critical use, but they’re also undermining the market for the copyright, and a judge might find this change tips the scales away from fair use.

Even more importantly, the additional uncertainty might stampede more people into paying $12.50 for a 5-word quote rather than risk a $250,000 statutory damages award for copyright infringement.

The more people who pay for 5-word quotes, the sturdier the market becomes and the riskier it is to rely upon fair use.

The fourth factor looks like an escape valve for uses that harm no one.

But it actually rewards to bullies who intimidate others out of money they don’t actually owe — until they do.

Trademark has a similar gotcha. Trademark is very different from copyright. Fundamentally, trademark is about protecting buyers, not sellers. Trademark meant to help buyers avoid being tricked into buying an inferior product because it was deceptively named or styled.

If you buy a can of Coke, you want the true Black Water of American Imperialism, not an inferior brand of dilute battery-acid.

But if your Coke turns out to be a fake, you might shrug off the harm or balk at the expense of punishing the fast operator who mis-sold you.

So trademark empowers Coke — and other vendors — to punish third parties who trick their customers, acting as their customers’ champions. Trademark doesn’t exist to prevent Coke from losing money to a rival — it exists to help Coke drinkers get what they pay for.

Trademarks can be registered with the USPTO, who nominally weigh trademark applications to ensure that they’re distinctive and original. Practically, examiners are busy, sometimes careless, and ideologically inclined to grant, not deny, claims.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/14/son-of-cocky-a-writer-is-trying-to-trademark-dragon-slayer-for-fantasy-novels/

But you don’t have to register a trademark to assert it. You can threaten or pursue legal action on the grounds that someone has violated an unregistered trademark, which is any distinctive graphic or phrase that is associated with your product.

Registered or unregistered, trademark enforcement primarily comes down to whether a “naive consumer” would be mislead by someone else’s use of a mark. That is, when you bought a Coke-branded sack of chicken feet, did you think it was blessed by the Coca-Cola company?

If there’s no likelihood of confusion, trademark holders struggle to enforce their trademarks.

This standard seems reasonable, but, like the fourth factor in fair use, it has a sting in its tail.

One of the ways you can induce confusion in the public is to gain a reputation for being a litigious bully. Say Coke is known far and wide for clobbering anyone that uses its trademarks, no matter how trivial the use and no matter how bad it made them look.

If Coke is truly notorious for its zero-tolerance policy, that will lead to a widespread public understanding that every time you see Coke’s marks, the use was blessed by a Coke lawyer — meaning a use that might not otherwise be found to be confusing can be made confusing.

“If that was any other company’s trademark, I’d assume that they had nothing to do with it — but since I know Coke has an army of baby-eating attack lawyers who destroy anyone who uses a mark without permission, that must be an authorized use.”

Like fair use’s fourth factor, trademark’s confusion standard rewards the most vicious and uncaring businesspeople with new rights that their more reasonable competitors do not enjoy. IP selects for sociopathy.

Now, IP — in the most sinister sense of the phrase — has pervaded every industry, but the contradictions of IP are felt most keenly in its spawning grounds: the culture industry.

Culture is in tension with the control of ideas, because culture is the spread of ideas.

Creators (and execs) are vulnerable to the pirate/admiral fallacy: “When I take from my forebears, that’s legitimate artistic progress. When my successors do it to me, it’s theft.”

This pathology, combined with ready-to-hand IP weapons, incentivizes all manner of wickedness. Remember when Marvel and DC teamed up in a bid to trademark the word “super-hero” so that no one else would be allowed to use it?

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/

These perverse incentives are made tragic by the inherently participatory nature of culture.

It’s not merely that Marvel and DC wanted to steal the word “super-hero” right out of our mouths.

It’s that super-heroes are culturally important because of how we take and remix them in our lives. Marvel went on to use the law to stop us from pretending to be superheroes online, something Casey Fiesler called “Pretending Without a License.”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277598023_Pretending_Without_a_License_Intellectual_Property_and_Gender_Implications_in_Online_Games

Which brings me, at last, to Games Workshop, a company that has consistently led the IP bully pack, indiscriminately terrorizing the Warhammer 40k fans who made it a massive commercial success.

Warhammer is a strategy/roleplaying game that is played with miniature creatures that players buy, modify and paint. If you’re not familiar with all this, maybe this sounds a bit like toy soldiers.

It’s a lot more interesting — not just because of the game rules or lore, but because of the incredibly, unbelievable, jaw-dropping virtuosity of Warhammer players when they paint and style those miniatures.

There’s a reason I look forward to Saturday morning’s weekly linkdump from Jonathan Struan of the week’s best Warhammer and other RPG miniatures:

https://www.superpunch.net/search?q=warhammer&max-results=20&by-date=true

and why I follow incredible painters like Aurelie Schick:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/110246635@N06

Warhammer is intrinsically participatory, co-creative and active — it’s not media you consume, it’s media you produce.

Games Workshop has become fantastically rich off of this…and they hate it, and they always have.

For years they’ve pursued fans for producing their own fan-made supplements and additions to the game:

https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/99301

The more Warhammer players complained about the indiscriminate censorship of their fan media, the harder GW cracked down on them, wiping out whole genres of creative work:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/48933/games-workshop-files-purge-09

GW claimed it was only defending its rights, the grifter’s signature move, making you a crook for having the audacity not to put their shareholders’ interests ahead of your own.

Then Games Workshop claimed a trademark on “space marine,” a generic term that had been widely used in science fiction for decades, including, notably, in Heinlein’s classic “Starship Troopers” (1959).

https://web.archive.org/web/20130207002144/http://mcahogarth.org/?p=10593

They didn’t just go after RPGs that used the phrase — they used trademark claims to remove novels from Amazon for having the phrase in their titles.

“Space marine” is a generic phrase, but GW was betting if they were sufficiently, spectacularly brutal in their enforcement, they could create a proprietary interest: “Now, I know GW destroys anyone who uses ‘space marine,’ so this ‘space marine’ must be endorsed by GW.”

GW just launched a new set of terms of service, including: “individuals must not create fan films or animations based on our settings and characters. These are only to be created under licence from Games Workshop.”

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-WW/Intellectual-Property-Guidelines

Now, this isn’t how copyright works. There are many ways in which a fan film or animation could be fair use, no matter whether GW forbids or permits their production. But this isn’t mere overreach: it’s a direct play against the fourth factor in fair use.

If GW can establish that all animations and vids are produced under paid license, then any fanvid that doesn’t pay for a license has a weaker fair use case, because the fourth factor protects existing licensing markets.

Indeed, as Rob Beschizza points out on Boing Boing, GW timed the terms of service change to coincide with the announcement that they’re launching a subscription service including “cartoons, in-house hobby videos, access to a vault of ebooks and mags.”

https://www.pcgamer.com/now-even-warhammer-has-a-subscription-service/

This is bullying with a business-model, in other words. Fans have figured out how to have fun with each other for free, and GW wants them to stop and pay the company for its in-house version of that fun.

Warhammer creators are demoralized and disheartened. The creator of the hugely successful Oculus Imperia Youtube series posted a heart-rending message of surrender.

https://twitter.com/OculusImperia/status/1421136444437970949

Oculus Imperia also edits “If The Emperor Had A Text To Speech Device,” (TTS) another beloved Warhammer fan series. Alfabusa from TTS posted his own absolutely demoralized goodbye to his work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXljeaktnDA

Ironically, both channels would have a stronger fair use case if they mocked and criticized Warhammer, rather than celebrating it, as fair use tips favorably towards critical uses.

The fact is, they love their hobby and its community and they want to improve it, not tear it down.

Neither wants to get dragged into a brutal copyright case against a deep-pocketed corporation. Even people with great fair use cases balk at that:

https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

Now, some people might be thinking, what’s the big deal? Why don’t these creators just make up their own stories instead of remixing the ones that come from Games Workshop?

Those people are assholes.

*All* stories are fanfic of some kind or another. Every mystery novel is a remix of Poe’s Murders In the Rue Morgue. Games Workshop’s stories are the thrice-brewed teabags of many sf writers (remember “space marines?”).

Tolkien straight up ripped off his characters from the 1000-year-old Norse poem “Elder Edda,” which features dwarves named “Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Nori, Dori, Ori, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur.”

https://musingsofatolkienist.blogspot.com/2015/07/hobbit-origins-catalog-of-dwarves.html

Culture is made of other culture.

GW made something wonderful with Warhammer — by plundering the stories that preceded it.

The sin isn’t in the taking, it’s in the pretense that it never happened, and the vicious grifting that punishes anyone who does unto GW as they did unto everyone else.

[strawberriesnscreams]

Elriel Fic

Can I just preface this by saying that outside of k-12 and college, I have NEVER written anything EVER. I just typed this out today because it was on my mind. It is the first piece of writing I will have ever ‘published’ so please go easy on me if I made a mistake with quotation marks or something. Dialogue is harder than I thought it would be. If you guys like it I will definitely continue the scene! (p.s. peep the quote at the end iykyk)

Anyway, this is the first time Az and Elain find themselves alone since that night through his pov... no smut... yet;)

word count: 500ish

I heard her before I saw her. Of course I did, I heard everything all the damn time. Often aided by my shadows, but not this time. No, this time they weren’t necessary. If any one else had been home they too would have heard that noise - that keening. Every bone in my body willed me to turn away but how could I? Keeping my distance had been ordered of me by my brother and high lord. But as another sob rang into the air I knew I couldn’t. 

“Elain, it’s-” I’m grateful to get cut short before I make a fool of myself.

“I know it’s you Azriel.” She sniffles in between her words. “I’ve heard you standing there breathing for several moments now..” she pauses. “Did you need anything?”

“Did you need anything?” I’ve spent the last 500 years telling myself I didn’t need anything. Anything more than what I already had anyway. I had brothers, and a family, and a purpose to my life by serving my court. I shouldn’t have needed anything more. But by Mother I did. I needed her. I needed her in every waking moment. Even in my dreams she consumed me. Her smile, her eyes, her laugh, her everything. My everything. 

I realized only then that I had let an unnatural amount of time pass by without a response. “I’m just worried about you. I heard you crying and had to make sure you were alright,” Mother, I'm a fool. “Well not alright of course, but…” A brief moment passes and I wonder if it’s too late to slip into my shadows and obliviate myself. I settle on “Is there anything I can do?”

“No Azriel there isn’t.” There’s a sharp finality to her words. I had not heard her take such a tone to anyone but Luci- I need to stop myself before my thoughts lead me down a dark and murderous path. Her heavenly voice floats up again. “I wouldn’t want you to make any more mistakes.” Anger and sarcasm hang heavy between them.

I can feel the world caving in on me. Even if I had been thrown into the cauldron itself, it might not have rivaled this feeling. The sky was bending, cracking, and breaking. And so was my heart. So was hers, I realized, thanks to me. 

“Elain I- I misspoke… I’m sorry. You’re not a mistake, the farthest from it, I swear.” I can see the struggle behind her eyes. To believe me, but to not allow herself the vulnerability to be hurt again, by me.

“Explain then. Tell me why you fled. Why do we dance these silly dances around one another just for you to leave me!” She takes a steadying breath and soldiers on, “Why do you make me feel safe with you if this isn’t what you want?” 

How can I tell her the truth, without directly disobeying my high lord. She takes my hesitation as an answer and I feel as though I’m being ripped in two.

The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. 

[hollyoakhill]

do you have any tips on how to write a good oc? I just read your Intruder fic (it was absolutely amazing!!!!! thank u for blessing us all with that masterpiece) and one thing that really stood out to me was how 3-dimensional and well developed the characters were- their different personalities, the way they interacted with eachother, their behavior in relaxed vs stressful situations, all felt so real and genuine. I know it might be a complicated question, but how do you make your ocs feel real?

Aaa thank you, that is such high praise!

I'm not an expert, but I can go into a little detail of how I approach the creation of my characters. At the risk of this becoming lengthy, I'll put it all under the cut. None of these things will be one way of creating a character, so feel free to pick and choose these tips as you see fit!

1. Tropes are your friend!

It might be disheartening to realize that your character may fall into certain archetypes - the Mentor, the Cheerful Protagonist, the Angry Rival, the Silent Hunter, etc, but this is far from a bad thing. By being aware of what sort of archetype your character falls into, you can use it as a starting point to create some truly fun and memorable characters.

2. Consider what your character does

Do they have a job or some kind of duty? What kind of person do they need to be in order to do their job? Are they unemployed, and if they are, how do they choose to spend their time?

I like to think about this a lot because it helps inform a lot of their other interactions. A character who is used to being in action might get antsy in longer periods of quiet, or maybe they might relax entirely.

3. Your OC's Neighbor

Creating a character all by themselves can be rough. Sometimes all they need is a friend. I can confidently tell you that pretty much all of my characters exist because I started with one Main OC who just needed a friend (or enemy). Sometimes, creating one character means you have to create a whole family of them. This is where tropes will be super helpful again because it will save you the time and energy to work on the characters that matter to your narrative.

And hey, sometimes by creating a Neighbor to your Main OC, you open the door to create some of the most fun and memorable characters in your narrative. (Kitfox would not exist without Sunshine, and Frostbite would not exist without Kitfox.)

4. Play dollhouse with them

Just plop 'em in a scene! Any scene will do. Have one character ask a question and force your fresh baby OC to answer it. What do they say? Do they say nothing at all? Force them into a house with an exit guarded by fifty dogs and a shark. Now, toss a meteor in there. How do they respond to this new threat? Do they run for cover or do they perhaps have a loved one to rescue?

Honestly, anything goes. This is by far the most effective way to foster and nurture a new OC's personality. I've written countless scenes of a character in scenes that will never be 'canon' because it's all just a playground for them to grow.

I really can't overstate how useful this method is to me. To get you started out, here are some fun questions I like to start a scene with:

- "How the hell did you get in here?!"

- "Are you... bleeding, sir?"

- "I thought she was with you?"

- "Why would you let him into the restricted zone?"

- "When will the reinforcements arrive?"

- "Did you eat the last donut?"

5. Find your character's voice

This might be the trickiest thing when making a new character. It's something that might emerge as your write them more and get a feel for their personality. It kind of goes back into the point of playing dollhouse with your OC's a bit, to experiment and have some fun with the different ways your character sounds. Do they have a distinct accent, do they speak with clipped tones, are they quite short and stoic or are they loud and brash? How you write their dialogue will affect your character's personality a lot. Perhaps they don't speak at all? How do they communicate with others? This leads into my next point:

6. Find your character's mannerisms

Body language is probably one of the biggest factors in characterization. It's not just what a character says, but it's what they do as they say it. Do they gesticulate wildly, or are they sheepishly fiddling with the hem of their shirt?

"Where is the book?" he commanded, stepping briskly toward his men. His voice resounded in the massive chamber, the vibrations felt under the soles of their boots.

"Where is the book?" she smiled, gently brushing a blond lock from her face. She leaned against the counter with mild disinterest, but with shifty eyes that said that she was looking for something else.

A LOT of writing can be done outside of the quotation marks. Have fun with the things you add in there! Really, there's nobody stopping you.

Non-verbal characters are fun to write because it really makes you consider the way they move and behave around different people. Are they perhaps proficient in sign language or do they use different tools to communicate? Dialogue can sometimes be far more than just two characters speaking, and sometimes an interaction done without a single word uttered can be more powerful than a lengthy sonnet.

7. Pretend they're real

This might be a little silly, and this is definitely where you can choose to ignore it entirely. I like to keep things within the realm of naturalism. It means that these characters I create all have a hint of human, real-world flavor in them, no matter how whimsical or ridiculous they are.

What I mean in this case, are just simple, ordinary quirks that may or may not have any bearing on the narrative at all. Like, I'm talking just human, ordinary, flawed things, like bad habits, illnesses, mistakes, making stupid decisions... anything really. Sometimes this means having your superhero OC ordering pizza takeout because they're always too tired to do the dishes, your honorable paladin having a toy collection habit, or your witty, wisecracking Captain having depression (cough, cough, Kitfox). Does your character need to take meds? Do they have issues focusing on a subject for a long time? Do they have a gambling habit? These are all things that can affect how they interact with others, or how they behave themselves.

A lot of writing tips mention giving your characters a Flaw (hubris, arrogance, overprotectiveness, narcissism, etc.) It's a great writing principle, but it doesn't always work for me, because I feel like they can be too floaty when I still don't fully know how the OC works. That's why I like to work with this particular Human principle. Keep in mind, I'm not saying these things are Bad Things, but rather ordinary, human quirks that we have to deal with on a daily, and so does your OC.

///

Aaaaand I've been going on for a long time hahah. It seems I got a little carried away! Anyway, these are all things I like to think about when writing, and it's in no way peer-reviewed by other authors, so pick and choose these subjects as you see fit! Hope this helps and have fun OC-making!!

[dragonbugsuperior]

My Problem With Kagami And Why I Can't Sympathize With Her

While I believe Kagami deserves better fanbase wise and I don't hate her, that doesn't blind me from the fact that she's done some pretty messed up shit.

I hate how the show exemplifies her friendship with Marinette as one that only centers around the fact that it was because of Adrien (Ikari Gozen) that they actually formed a friendship in the first place. While enforcing the moral that a guy is more valuable than a friend. It really makes me feel some type of way that they made Kagami choose Adrien over Marinette while being aware that Marinette also liked Adrien. Making her out to be someone who has little to zero social experience while doing nothing to contribute to gaining friends.

Umm?

Don't the writers claim to showcase "girl empowerment"

What message are they trying to send to their audience? (Mostly young girls) That a guy is worth sacrificing a friendship? Even when that guy clearly treats you as an option, is indecisive about you, and has feelings for someone else?

In contrast to, someone you can form a close bond with, a sweet girl who helps you get away from a packed schedule and a strict uncompromising mother, and someone who sacrifices their feelings in order for you to be happy.

Miracle Queen was quite the trip and really got me. Kagami made it super clear that she's ready to throw her only friend under the bus if it means she can have a chance with Adrien which is really fucked up since Marinette sacrificed her feelings for Adrien so they could be happy. WHICH. Mind you, she really didn't have to do that, she could have told Adrien about her feelings but for the sake of Kagami and Adrien's happiness she leaves them be. This is a sore spot for me, because it's what ended my friendship with my high school best friend, with whom I had an agreement that if we both liked the same guy, we wouldn't go for it because our friendship was worth more. They may not have had that same agreement, but Kagami made it clear that Marinette is worth nothing to her as a friend. Considering the fact that Adrien treats her as an option while still having feelings for someone else. I cannot emphasize how little time I have for girls who do that, fictional or real. It's shitty and backstabbing and not worth it.

Adding Kagami's consideration of Marinette in Miracle Queen was only to give the writers brownie points, because ultimately she still choose Adrien over her one first actual friend. So was the consideration even genuine or worth it?

Kagami knows that Adrien likes someone else, but she continues to pursue him, and tries to convince him to go out with her, instead of actually giving him actual advice about his romantic "woes".

Kagami also knows her one only true friend aside from Adrien likes him and still continues to pursue him disregarding marinette despite knowing that piece of information.

In Frozer, Adrien makes it clear that he has feelings for someone and she assumes it's Marinette without asking questions and gives Marinette "advice". I'm putting advice in quotation marks because it's questionable if it was really advice.

"The only reason you can't stay on your feet is your hesitation. I never hesitate"

That. That wasn't really advice she was giving. Adding the fact that she said "I never hesitate" that has nothing to do with Marinette's hesitation. She only said that because she was given that Adrien had feelings for someone else the same episode and she assumed that, that person was Marinette which is also completely messed up. Literally all Marinette did was fall, everyone falls, it's a basic mistake and how ironic! it is Kagami that gave her "words of encouragement" (Clear Sarcasm)

Marinette gave Kagami no reason to say anything to her except that she fell. She went with Luka, She gave Adrien advice about the entire situation, and Marinette didn't say anything to her while on the double date.

Oh, and what was her point in saying she never hesitates? Like I said. "Marinette's hesitation has nothing to do with, her not hesitating which is why it was illogical for her to bring that up"

What point was she trying to make bringing that up?

Kagami is finally given the opportunity to have friends and be more social and her first encounter with a girl her age (Marinette) she assumes Marinette's the one Adrien has feelings for without asking him gives her "advice" which really wasn't advice at all. It was actually a snarky comment she made all because she assumed Marinette is the one Adrien has feelings for. (Technically, just that she's Ladybug)

She doesn't even help herself gain social experience. She gains it from other people without actually helping herself.

Kagami: meets Adrien and doesn’t like him, randomly has feelings for him several episodes later with no development or explanation, knows right off the bat he’s interested in someone else but pushes for him to date herself instead. Meets Marinette, assumes she’s the rival without asking, is rude to her, and throws a tantrum when Adrien tells her he’s not interested. Sure, she improved since then, but her first three episodes (Riposte, Miracle Queen, The NYC Special, Frozer, Oni-Chan) didn’t flatter her.

Kagami sees Marinette as competition than an actual friend. An obstacle that gets in the way. And her judgement of her is based off that fact that she assumed Marinette is the person Adrien has feelings for without asking any questions.

I find that really messed up especially in a show that claims to be preaching "girl power" but what do you expect when the show is written by racist misogynistic 45 y/o men.

[loyally-unfaithful]

—; it’s beginning to look a lot like christmas.

word count: 3.6k

pairing: razor/gn!reader; razor/traveler

genre: fluff

summary: « i remember… purple mentor say ‘mistletoe’ a big part of weihnachten. »

you looked at the plant in slight bewilderment, not quite sure what to make of this offering. it was cute.

« oh. »

razor stares expectantly at you as you watch him make no further attempt to move. you can’t help the laugh that escapes you, the banality of everything setting into your mind. or maybe you’re getting sleepy. you wonder: « do you know why, razor? »

a/n: secret santa secret santa secret santa anyway, this is my side of the secret santa gift for @absolutely-rational​—i chose to write a thing for razor, but i barely play the game and i haven’t met him or own him* or anything so i apologise if it’s a little ooc ,,,, merry christmas and happy holidays ^^

p.s. as the man who’s good at saying very little in way too many words, the length of this fic just exploded and it’s alot longer than what i wanted it to be dskljfsldkja

heads-up

i write dialogues in what i will call the french/european system? anyway, i see that it's not the dialogue formatting that most english readers are accustomed to so i modified it slightly to be easier to understand basically dialogues will be within guillemets (« »), and words that are within the quotation marks but are italicised are actions and/or dialogue verbs.

hope that clears things out a bit and i hope you give me and my fic a chance :)

« weih… nachten…? »

he tilts his head slightly, not unlike a dog. what’s that? razor repeats your words slowly, tentatively, enunciating the foreign word with care. he wonders if the words sound strained coming from him. words are hard.

« that’s right! it’s a large festival in teyvat, and even more so in the city! you elaborated, sensing his confusion. here in mondstadt it’s called weihnachten and it’s supposed to be about, you know, spending time with friends and family, passing around gifts and presents to those you care about. »

you soon felt at ease as you continued: this world had its differences, but it had its similarities. it had its own equivalent of christmas. something that you know about. sure, maybe the origin is different, maybe it had different customs and traditions, but it was a comforting familiarity in the midst of everything that’s so staggeringly foreign. then again, you suppose that’s what drew you closer to the silver-haired boy: neither of you truly fit in, nor fully understood the strange world you happen to be in.

though at the very least, razor had his lupical. as bittersweet as it was, it warmed your heart to know that at least he had family to be around with during christmas, and well, around… in general.

« weihnachten. he says, this time with more conviction. how to celebrate? – well for starters, (where do you even begin?) we’d decorate our homes with all sorts of festive trinkets and we’d fill the streets with all sorts of sparkly things. garlands, lights, flowers, ribbons; decorations that’ll spruce up the place and make the city light up. it always made people cheer up and get in the holiday mood, especially at night when the fairy lights twinkle about! »

razor’s mouth moved in a silent gasp. then does that mean that those bright stars he liked so much were not stars, but rather lights? is that why they seemed to be brighter near the end of the year? the people from the city decorated, he considered. is that why the stars’ reflection, bouncing around in the lake, were an array of dazzling colours, from glittering red and shimmering green to captivating shade’s who’s name he doesn’t know?

« is why… sometimes stars explode? he wondered. – yup! though we don’t usually light up fireworks until new year’s. you wondered for a moment. do you like fireworks, razor? the silver-haired boy frowned, lost in thought, before shaking his head. – loud. scary. me and my lupical, we go hide. we don’t like… firework. »

you hummed in understanding. dogs have never been fond of fireworks and firecrackers either.

« fire is bad. why light firework? isn’t it big hassle? »

it reminded razor of the red, burny girl. fun person, friend! but the toys she uses are loud and dangerous, they create explosions and fire, just like fireworks.

« hmm, i guess… you pursed your lips in thought. good question. i guess that at this point we all just do it out of tradition. new year’s brings a lot of excitement, and people let it out by lighting them up. it’s also really pretty. »

the more he thought about it, and the more he learned about it, the less he understood the celebration. why? it’s loud and distracting. bright colours hurt eyes, doesn’t it? it’s time spent with your family, but razor is with his lupical everyday. do humans… not spend time with their lupical regularly? why is this specific day so special from the rest of the year? he doesn’t get all the funny dates and celebrations humans have to keep track of. seems like a big hassle. sounds complicated.

« no such thing as weihnachten in wolvendom, huh? »

he shook his head.

you tucked your finger under your chin, pondering, in slight puzzlement. back in your world, you would’ve been able to take pictures—maybe that would’ve helped him visualise it better—but you couldn’t here in teyvat. a sigh. anyway, it’s not like you had your camera on your person anymore, so you do your best to describe your happiest sensations, experiences, memories of christmas: the smell of hot cocoa on a cool winter morning, the crackle of firewood from the hearth, and the feeling of soft wool on your skin, hugging you from the biting cold. the merry and jovial carols sung by the star singers, the gleeful chattering between friends out on the street, and the boisterous cheering and partying coming from the many bars and restaurants in mondstadt. the comforting arias and prayers echoing from within the cathedral, the mouth-watering aroma and fragrance of treats from the christmas market, and the grand christmas tree placed at the heart of the city decorated with even more opulent and lavish garlands and baubles, the vivid glimmering lights reflected from your eyes.

describe the different little things that made christmas different and more special from the rest of the year.

somehow this time that you took to pay the wolf boy a visit was consumed by you rambling about the merry holiday, drivel that he listened to attentively and with a pure and honest kind of curiosity (even if he doesn’t always understand you) that you found endearing and made your heart flutter, until the sun dipped below the horizon and the stars adorning the city shined out, rivalling those peppering the night sky. until the howls from his family called him away from you, and until you motivated yourself to begin your trek back to mondstadt after sitting in the woods alone.

being with him was always a welcome distraction, you thought.

december 25th.

paimon was dozing off after stuffing her face full of the dishes from the christmas banquet (good for her!), the cup of tea you had between your hands had gotten cold, and your breath was fogging the frosted window in front of your desk. you mindlessly traced a smiley face on condensation. you can see the ever changing colourful lights blinking through the glass pane. you take another gulp of the unpleasant liquid, unsatisfying as you feel it slowly go down your throat. the calming and comforting scent it brought (it was chamomile) having long dissipated.

sighing, you pulled your fingers off the cold china, deciding it wasn’t worth finishing, and quietly slipped out of your room (which was graciously granted to you by the knights of favonius), taking care to slot the chair back under the desk and gently close the door behind you. you wondered if taking a walk would help you feel better. you tightened your shawl around you and buried your freezing hands into your pockets. head down, you quickened your pace to… wherever your legs were taking you.

another sigh.

you smiled almost bitterly to how much of a grinch you were being. you liked christmas, or rather, you liked what it stood for, and you liked the idea of spending the winter months with your closed ones.

a few hours ago, the knights of favonius had organised a small christmas party at angel’s share, and though they had thoroughly reassured you that you belonged and were included in this celebration, you couldn’t help but keep to yourself and stick to a corner of the bar. you couldn’t bring yourself to join in on the fun, or talk to others. you didn’t feel like it was your place to force yourself into their conversation, into their lives. you were grateful that they thought about you, and you didn’t want to question their kindness, but… you nursed your glass of virgin cocktail, peeling your eyes away from your wonky reflection on the liquid.

you weren’t exactly at home: you looked at jean and barbara, happily exchanging jokes and teases. a relaxed sort of conversation, banter which flowed, almost as if it were rehearsed, in a way that was only possible between sisters. that night, the deaconess wasn’t smiling as if she was holding back tears. the carefree girl was speaking with jean (rather than the acting grand master) who allowed herself some respite from the demanding position.

you look at the uncharacteristic smile on the bartender’s (who happened to be none other than diluc that evening) face, and you doubted that kaeya, sharp-eyed as ever, missed it either. it was subtle. but it was there. you don’t miss the way the cavalry captain held back on his sarcastic remarks or the way diluc wasn’t being “deliberately uncivil” (as kaeya would put it) either; the way the red-head indulges kaeya’s seemingly insatiable thirst for alcohol while the latter makes an effort to maintain a friendly, if curt, chatter.

a particularly loud giggle drew your gaze back at the two sisters: lisa seemed to have joined them. you sipped your beverage, half-hearted. the three seemed to have started a rather animate discussion. you hear them laugh again. it makes you frown, but you shake your head, pushing those angry thoughts out of your mind. just because you’re miserable (even though you shouldn’t be—your friends are with you) doesn’t mean they have to feel down with you.

setting your glass down on the table, you wondered if you would've felt better if you were with someone closer to your age, but amber had gone home early: she dropped by and hung out for a bit before going home to spend time with her family. your glass is empty now. you feel… envious. you wished you could spend this christmas season with your family. it’s not fair. it’s not fair.

your favonian family, and yet you were out of place.

you excused yourself early from the gathering, the other members politely bidding you farewell and a merry christmas (« frohe weichnachten! »), and quickly went up the path leading to the order’s headquarters, wanting to hide away in your room as soon as possible.

now, you stop before the lavish tree: it’s as grand and brilliant as it’s always been. but now it seems much too bright. the colours an eyesore. singing sounds more like knives being dug into your eardrums.

your head hurts.

a humourless chuckle escaped you. you used to take turns with your sibling on who got to slot in the christmas topper.

this year was their turn.

back then, your sibling made a point to hang gingerbread treats on the tree, and you made a point to eat them behind their back come christmas morning.

normally, you’d be sharing gifts with your sibling during this time of the year.

your entire life they’ve always been there by your side, and you by theirs. for better or for worse, you kept each other company. you’ve always spent christmas with them.

this was your first christmas without.

the rest of your thoughts are jumbled, incoherent. something your long term memory didn’t deem worthy of keeping, so they simply fizzled away. everything was a blur as your feet carried you outside the city, away from… it doesn't matter. just away. carried you away. happiest time of the year. but you’re here alone, with no one you know and to call home in a world you don’t recognise. far away from the land you once knew.

panting, you stopped in your tracks when you realised you’ve started sprinting. what were you doing, you chastised yourself. can’t you act a little more mature? finally lifting your gaze, you took in your surroundings; instinctively your feet must’ve taken you to wolvendom. you kicked a stray pebble under your boot. not like that afterthought was going to help much. it’s not like anyone was waiting for you here either, razor was probably with his lupical. hunting or snoozing away.

with little care, you let out an exasperated sigh as you let yourself plop ungracefully to the ground, listless.

you sit there in silence, nothing to accompany you except for the cacophonous ringing of crickets in the forest. you drew your knees closer to you. what were you doing here? it’s cold. you hear thistle crack, and so you defensively draw your sword as you rose to your feet, only to be met with a familiar mop of fluffy silver hair.

« it’s night. dangerous here. »

was his curt greeting. you lowered your sword, shoulders relaxing.

you opened your mouth, ready to apologise, make up some sort of excuse, let him know you’re leaving, when something else caught your eye: « you kept the scarf? »

he blinked. once, twice: « you gave it to me. he said, very matter-of-factly. you are my lupical. it is… treasure… razor paused, correcting himself. treasured, possession. »

having realised that the intruder was not dangerous, the wolf boy came closer and gently pressed his forehead against yours and nuzzled your face. a small laugh escaped you as you returned the affectionate gesture, something you’ve learned was his customary greeting. it was cold out, but his touch was enough to bring feeling back to your cold self and make you warm and fuzzy inside.

still resting your head on his, you asked, timidly: « is it ok if i stay here for a bit? » it came out as a whisper, unsure if you’re any better staying here rather than back in the city. but as he nodded in agreement, your shoulders loosened as you let go of tension you weren’t aware you were building up again. you slumped into him, burying your face into him and held him in a loose hug. razor, as for him, let himself be snuggled to your heart’s content, happy to receive such fondness.

« today is special day, isn’t it? » his blood-red eyes peered inquisitively back at you, arms wrapping around you as he tries to remain as close to you as physically possible.

« mhm. » you mumbled non-commitally into his shoulder, opting to pull yourself closer to him and nuzzle into the crook of his neck.

« not go celebrate in city? » razor asked, perplexed. he thought that you said this was a big celebration to be had around other people? despite his bemusement, he rested his chin on the top of your head. it makes him all warm and soft inside, the thought of you choosing to spend this special day with him of all people. it makes him happy. he hopes you’re happy too. the wold boy gives you a once-over and his brows creased in slight worry: you’re really quiet today. why?

« uh-uh. » you grunted, shaking your head against his shoulder, your hair brushing against his clothes. the chunky scarf you gave him, the one you were convinced he was going to throw out due to its garish colours, tickled your exposed skin. he kept it. you smiled, touched. he kept it. it still smelled faintly of fabric softener, but marked by the smell of pine trees and something sweet, something you associated with brewing thunderstorms. you’ve always found rain and thunder to be comforting.

being with razor comforts you.

he wasn’t much of a talker. you both knew this. silence is ok though. he’s happy to be with you. but razor wonders why you’re so quiet today. concern flashes through his mind and he turns your gaze upwards, making you face him. you can’t possibly imagine what pathetic expression you were pulling and you quickly try to cover your despondence—but it was a fruitless venture.

« you smell sad. he watched you, a worried look on his face. »

you scrambled for some explanation, reassuring him that it’s nothing. that you’re not being a downer. that you’re happy. but he’s decided: « wait here. »

knowing that there was no restraining him once he’s made up his mind, especially when it’s something to do with the ones he considered close to him, you reluctantly let razor peel you off of him. as you watch him scurry away, you find yourself dearly missing his warmth, the comfort and safety of his arms. was staying here a good idea? you wrapped your arms around yourself. maybe you should leave. you’re ruining the mood. you’re disturbing wolvendom’s peace. before you could finish that line of thought, the wolf boy returned, this time carrying a handful of… something with him.

they threatened to tumble out of his grasp, but ultimately stayed put as he returned to his original position and held them out into your general direction, showcasing whatever he had procured. in his hands were multiple plants which bore small scarlet berries and oval, evergreen leaves. a plant you immediately recognised.

« i remember… purple mentor say ‘mistletoe’ a big part of weihnachten. »

you looked at the plant in slight bewilderment, not quite sure what to make of this offering. it was cute.

« oh. »

razor stares expectantly at you as you watch him make no further attempt to move. you can’t help the laugh that escapes you, the banality of everything setting into your mind. or maybe you’re getting sleepy. you wonder: « do you know why, razor? »

he blinked, clueless, before looking at the mistletoes in his hand with confusion, coming to the realisation that no, he didn’t actually know why it’s so important. it’s not edible. maybe because it’s pretty? the city has many red lights and white lights. some mistletoes are red and others are white?

he continues to stare at the berry, as if it would cave in and reveal its secrets to him if he sustained his efforts. taking his prolonged silence as his answer (though you had expected for him to not actually know—knowing lisa, she would’ve just offhandedly mentioned them. and when razor would’ve asked her about what they meant, she’d just smile without answering him), you filled him in, your voice filled with mirth: « people usually kiss underneath mistletoes. »

he turned his gaze back to you before voicing the conclusion he had come to: « this mean, i have to kiss you? »

you chuckled. « only if you want to. »

he looks at the plant, giving it a long hard look, then back at you.

it wasn’t much, it wasn’t spectacular. hell, it was more of a ghost of a kiss than anything. but you still smiled as his lips brushed on yours. a peck, which lasted too long yet not long enough. awkward, but endearing. your textbook first kiss, including the warm fluttery feeling of butterflies that so often preached about, if only a little more clumsy.

it’s cute.

he’s so genuine, earnest, in his endeavours. it makes your heart soar. he’s sweet. you don’t deserve this kindness but he gives them away without a second thought.

you don’t deserve to be happy during christmas, especially not when your sibling was still out there, alone and potentially afraid. maybe, no, it definitely is selfish for you to enjoy this day. pretend like everything is alright just for this one moment. that you’re not some traveler stuck in a strange and unknown world, that you’re not desperately trying to find your sibling and a way out. act carefree, and get to be you. but goddammit does he make you so so happy that your heart clenches and that you can’t help but smile from ear to ear. you deserve to be miserable today; you feel like shit, really. but you’re also really happy, and glad, and relieved, and maybe a little tired.

it’s all too much, and you feel so much at once that you just don’t know how to handle this anymore. overwhelmed. you smiled and laughed giddily as the waterworks started (despite your best efforts), and you’re a mess, and definitely a bit sleepy, but you’re stupidly happy today. stupidly happy because of him.

this alarmed the boy, watching you laugh between hiccups, sobbing despite wearing a large smile. for humans, tears are sad. smiles are happy. were you ok? he’s confused. did he do something wrong?

« why crying? » he fretted, slightly panicked. he jumped to fuss over you, wipe away your tears, gently cradling your face with a gentleness that you would’ve never thought he was capable of when you first met.

you laughed as you wiped your face. « these are happy tears. » you try to explain.

he’s your home. your lupical. someone you’re at rest with, and safe with. you love him.

your words get caught in your throat, unable to express everything you want to tell him. so instead, you engulf him in a hug. something he was caught off guard from, stiffening, but quickly relaxed and embraced you back. still a little unsure, he comforts and reassures you the only way he knows how: patting your head. when he’s down head pats makes him feel better. he hopes you’ll feel better.

« thank you. » you said softly, shakily, sniffling. thank you for being here. thank you for being you.

you’re not as alone as you thought, you never really were. together, in your own small corner of the world. your home: razor.

as you cuddled together, passing the time by naming and pointing at the celestial canvas above you, you realised: maybe this year, as unfortunate as it had been, didn’t have to end on a bad note. at some point, razor had shared his ridiculously large scarf with you, wrapping it around the both of you. and slowly, your words slowed, your breaths evened out. you pressed more of your weight against him as you felt your eyes droop. you’re safe. you’re with razor. you’ll fall asleep, and when you wake up he’ll be there. as drowsiness takes you over, you think to yourself ‘yeah, i’m happy.’

you’re happy here. in this one time, one place, with razor, you’re happy.

and you hope that wherever they are, your sibling is happy too. and that they’ll forgive you for being selfish, for being happy despite everything.

you hoped that your mirror image had someone to spend christmas with.

somewhere—someone they felt at rest with.

LIKE MY WORK? CONSIDER BUYING ME A COFFEE // CHECKING OUT MY MASTERLIST | LINKS CAN BE FOUND ON MY DESC

[samedmunds]

My litany thoughts on 1999 cult classic strategy video game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Alpha Centauri is a game of the early Civilization variety from the EA golden age and ranks very highly in my top ten. While you probably heard of it if you were playing video games around the turn of the century, I've found members of my age cohort to be tragically unfamiliar with this masterpiece.

Alpha Centauri is an unofficial sequel to Civilization II, a game where the only way to way to win is either completely eliminate all competitors to the last city or, rather more easily, send a spaceship loaded with colonists to the title star system. Shortly after leaving home, the ship loses contact with Earth, which would make sense to a player of Civilization II where the bonuses to science and trade from democracies evaporate when technology ends, upon which point all the AIs revolt and become militant fundamentalist theocracies and climate change rapidly destroys the planet, leaving the player with an endgame that is literally 1984. Either way, when the already strained ship arrives at the Alpha Centauri system an unknown partisan assassinates the captain of the UNS Unity and the population fractures into seven opposing factions before firing the colony pods and exploring an inconveniently hostile planet.

The player starts here, in typical Civ fashion: a scout, settler, and absolutely no technology to speak of. That isn't to say you are a bunch of primitives, all your units start out with some approximation to modern guns and judging by the amazing quotes and wonder videos your society is well beyond the 21st century--more on the story later. The gameplay is incredibly well-balanced in spite of its age and quirks (with the exception of the freight-train progression of Yang). Rapid early expansion as the bountiful Peacekeepers may leave you at serious risk to the relentlessly martial Spartans, who are in turn threatened by the uber-specialized technocratic University--but be careful to underestimate the backwards Lord's Believers, their probe teams will just as quickly rob you of your gains. The Morganites can afford to sparsely defend their home if they're willing to pay off their aggressors, but they'll struggle expand over great swaths of territory without irking civil unrest drone riots from corruption. Meanwhile the Gaian Acolytes can harness the permanently-dangerous mindworms to great effect from the beginning of the game. Yang just... builds. And keeps building, and next thing you know he's conquered the Peacekeepers and turned Miriam into nothing more than a puppet and where are all these cruise missiles are coming from?

In short, the strategic design of this game is nothing less than a work of art, but that isn't to say it doesn't have its anachronisms. The User Interface has taken its inspiration from early versions of Microsoft Word and it rapidly pays off to know the hotkeys. The wonder videos are resolution locked and can sometimes cause problems depending on your display configuration. The unit creation system is simultaneously wonderful and horrendous. It allows me to create special long-range nerve gas bombers that eradicate cities shortly before orbitally-dropping specially-trained garrisons to quash all resistance. On the other hand, if you do not accept the cumbersome slew of computer-generated options, keeping your new weapons systems up to date with your latest technology (especially when playing as Zakharov) rapidly becomes a chore.

That said, there are a variety of features in the game that I think deserve to make a reappearance in the Civ Games. The pick-your-government system is incredibly balanced and fun to roleplay. You can't get away with crimes against humanity when solar storms hit in Civilization VI, nor can you weaponise climate change to flood your rivals cities, or strategically terraform to alter weather patterns and deny your neighbors arable land. At the bare minimum, we should be given the option to nerve staple rebelling cities when our control runs out!

All that said, there is also the story to contend with. One is at first tempted to think that a 4x strategy game with a marked emphasis on replayability would necessarily have a tacked-on story, if one at all. After all, the point is for the player to create it through their actions, not have it spoonfed to them. The majority of what you learn about your world that isn't printed in numbers and small pictures on the mapscreen is through blurbs that accompany each discovered technology or new building. The aforementioned wonders even have their adorable early-CG renderings, sometimes mixed in with some experimental film footage. There are occasional interludes that describe the mindworms and machinations of Planet, but the bulk of the wordage comes from epigrams of the faction leaders and the occasional bit of Nietzsche or Plato. It's so good that I can't help but stop and listen to CEO Nbwadibuke Morgan ramble on about supply chain economics or Sister Miriam's apocalyptic warnings every single time. Take some examples.

Proper care and education for our children remains a cornerstone of our entire colonization effort. Children not only shape our future; they determine in many ways our present. Men and women work harder knowing their children are safe and close at hand, and never forget that, with children present, parents will defend their home to the death!

--Col. Corazon Santiago, "Planet: A Survivalist's Guide"

Or perhaps, a more on the nose one:

"The Academician's private residences shall remain off-limits to the Genetic Inspectors. We possess no retroviral capability, we are not researching retroviral engineering, and we shall not allow this Council to violate faction privileges in the name of this ridiculous witch hunt!

--Fedor Petrov, Vice Provost for University Affairs Accompanies the Retroviral Engineering technology

The game often doesn't directly tell you what Retroviral engineering is, nor does it labor to explain just what having someone nerve stapled means, or the precise function of the Recycling Tanks, but through its quotation it beautifully circumlocutes the world you are shaping--and being shaped by. It really never pulls any of its punches, even if its just on Organic Superlube--great stuff--and I still catch muself quoting it regularly.

Ursula LeGuin once wrote

"Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. 'If this goes on, this is what will happen.' [...] This may explain why many people who read science fiction describe it as 'escapist,' but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because 'it's so depressing.'"

Alpha Centauri is absolutely extrapolative fiction and very firmly rooted in the 1990s and I love it. It was released in the Aaron Sorkin TV, pre-9/11 days where the word Internet was more often than not followed by the words, "is like an information superhighway" and it absolutely no efforts are made to cover it up. The main factions are a cross-section of the New Millenium's hopes and anxieties. A New Russia that went a very different path before Putin took over, a cheerful clan of ruthless Western capitalists hellbent on putting Morganvision on every network set, a group of vaguely Scottish free-love peaceniks hellbent on defending the most-of-the-time incredibly hostile environment. There's the Second-Amendment preaching Spartans or the optimistically-influential UN which, judging by its naming scheme for its bases, seems to dedicate entire cities to bureaucratic agencies. The All-American Christian fundamentalists don't entirely butt heads with the frighteningly powerful Human-Hive (if your country calls their cities names like "Huddling of the People" and "Paradise Swarming" you might not be the good guys). The expansion also brings in more dynamic characters like the Information Wants to be Free! data angels Brian Reynolds very clearly came up with after watching Swordfish and Hackers back to back or the Nautilus Pirates who have no right to be as fun as they are.

The visions of the future are at once both anachronistic and prophetic; while elements may come off as cheese, I see it as a sort of window to the past, a way to examine what was once (and sometimes still is) on our mind. All in all, I give Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri 4 out of 5 stars and a definite all-time favorite, warts and all. You can pick it and its expansion up for $6 on Gog.com and play it through a built-in emulator that works for most systems. If you're willing to brave a dated interface and an older-fashioned gameplay style, I would definitely recommend it.

[hanawrites404]

Wynne's Diary - Murder with Julian

"Have you heard of Mr. Isadami?" Nadia asked me as we both talked in the salon.

"Oh yes I do know him. He is a merchant who sells fish meat and other seafood. He is one of the most richest merchants of Vesuvia" I stated.

"Well, unfortunately he is dead"

"What??!" My eyes widened and I got tensed up a bit.

"Yes. He was found dead in his own house. His neck was slitted open and so were his wrists. He lived alone and at an isolated area so no one was there to witness the murder. He also didn't have any family" she explained.

"I see.......wait. How do you know that this was a murder?" I asked her.

"Through this" she then shows me a pink card which had a polka-dotted matching bow on it.

"What the fuck is this?" I cringed at the cutesy design.

"A business card.....of a serial killer, that is" Nadia answered.

"A serial killer?? Nadia, don't joke with me" I scoffed.

"I'm serious Wynne. I'm not in the mood of joking at all" She huffed.

"Neither am I, Milady" I crossed my arms and legs.

"You may not know this but she already has killed many important people of Vesuvia without leaving any clues at all except this peculiar card"

"Oh goodness. This killer is surely threatening the peace and safety of Vesuvia" I remarked.

"Exactly. She is degrading our economic development by killing the rich merchants and traders, not to mention that the people of Vesuvia are in danger with a such a person on loose. For rectifying this situation, I would need your help Wynne.

You know every corner of the city. So I want you to find her and capture her as soon as you can" Nadia requested me.

"Of course Madam. I'll do my best to capture this wretch and end this tyranny as soon as possible. You have my word" I stood up and bowed to her.

"Very good. I'm sure that you will be able to do it in one day. You will have to forgive me for rushing you on this"

"Don't worry about it Nadia. I totally understand. You care about the safety of people and we would have to capture this son of a bitch quickly before she ruins anything else. I'll make sure to give her the right punishment for what she has done" I cracked my knuckles.

"I believe in you Wynne. All the best. You may start your hunt right away" Nadia granted me permission.

I nodded and was about to take my leave.........

But then he came.......

"Hello ladies! May I ask what you both were gossiping about?" The red-haired hooligan came barging through the doors like a overly-hyperactive person on too much drugs.

"ここにクソ馬鹿が来る" I rolled my eyes.

"Nothing much, Doctor Devorak. I have assigned Wynne with the arrest of the murderer of Mr. Isadami and she was on her way" Nadia told him and I facepalmed.

Ugh, did she really had to tell him??

"Oh how exciting! May I have the permission to join the lovely blue lady in order to assist her appraisal, Countess?" He takes my hand to kiss it but I pulled away and crossed my arms, looking away from him.

"Of course. I grant you permission"

My eyes torn wide as soon as she completed her sentence. I then quickly turned to her, arguing.

"Nadia how could you?? This man will come inbetween my way!!" I angrily pointed at him.

"The arrest does need a person's assistance who knows about the underworld. If Doctor Devorak is offering you help then you should accept it" Nadia defended.

"Why are you taking his side?!! You already know that he is chaotic and disastrous and would mess things up!!" I snarled.

"Go easy on him, will you? He must have changed a bit after the last masquerade"

"Changed a bit?! You gotta be kidding me. He is still, the fucking, same!! Why don't you understand??" I placed my hands on my hips.

"Oh come on Ocean Head, I am not that ba--"

"YOU BETTER SHUT YOUR MOUTH!!!" I roared at him, and he whimpered back like a sad puppy.

"It's an order Wynne. You like it or not, Doctor Devorak is coming with you and you will not deny his contribution to the investigation" she commanded.

From the corner of my eye, I see Julian smirking at me cockily. This irritated me even more.

"I....This is just......Goodness I will........UGH fine!! But don't expect me to tolerate him all the time" I finally gave up.

"Of course. Just don't be at his throat all the time" she replied dismissively.

"I will try my best" I glared at the smirking idiot.

"Good. You both are free to leave. Do share the information I gave you with Doctor Devorak so that he too could work on it" Nadia added.

"Yes madam" I bowed to her one last time and then took hold of Julian's hand to drag him out of the salon.

"So what's your plan Ocean Head??" Julian asked me.

"The guards have investigated the crime scene already. And according to them, the murder was conducted by a serial killer. And it was done so perfectly that the killer left no flaws for us as clues, which makes her a professional" I told him.

"Wait, a professional female killer?! Now that's hot. Very very hot" he smirked and I glared at him.

"This is why I really wanted to refuse Nadia from letting you 'help' me" I told him, putting the word inside quotation marks with my hands.

"Oh my, I am so sorry Honey. I didn't know that you would get jealous so easily" he then wrapped his arm around my waist but I pushed it off me.

"Don't touch me, and I am not jealous" I replied harshly.

But why were my cheeks heating?? It's not that I was really jealous or anything.......

"Alright Sweetheart. But do remember that you are the best one in my eyes" he nudged me with his elbow.

"Whatever" I rolled my eyes and sighed, shaking my head.

"So shall we make some haste, Detective Wynne? The countess sure is desperate to get rid of such a dangerous killer and it's better to not make her wait any more longer" He held my hand, but this time I didn't push him off.

I squeezed his gloved hand gently as I gave him a slight smile, which somehow was enough to turn his cheeks red and look away. He truly was adorable sometimes.

"Yes Sir" I replied to him. He then hesitantly kissed my hand, afraid that I might attack him. But I didn't and blushed pink instead.

It looked like he was really satisfied with my reaction as he smirked at me again, brushing his finger along my cheek.

"You are so beautiful. No one can ever rival your beauty" he complimented me.

"Shut up already. There are many prettier girls than myself. Now let's not waste our time" I started to walk, my hand still holding onto his.

"Whatever you say, My Dear. But you still are the prettiest" he kissed my head.

"Shut up before I push you into the thorny bushes"

"Oh my my. Sorry Ms. Detective"

"Whatever"

................................🍋...................................

"Are you really sure about this idea, Julian?" I asked him.

"Do have faith in me, Ocean Head. We both will kill this!" He winked at me enthusiastically.

"Oh Gods, please tell me that you are overexaggerating and not going to actually murder" I eyed him.

"Oh of course not Sweet. I was referring to it as a locution. I won't cause you any trouble at all" he brushed one of the strands of my hair behind my ear.

"I-I......Fine......yes....alright then" I nodded, and Julian smiled at me.

If you don't know what is going on, then allow me to tell you.

We both were at the Rowdy Raven. The place where many people from the underworld spend their leisure at. Well, that's what Julian says.

We got to know that the serial killer whom we were looking for loves to spend her free time at the Rowdy Raven (Julian literally had to sell his underwear at the red market to get this information), so there was a high chance she was going to come her to have a drink. And so we were waiting for her.

"So what you are proposing is that you will approach the girl, flirt with her and then take her to an isolated place while I follow both of you without getting spotted. And as you keep her distracted, I will finally come out of my hiding place and sabotage her. Correct?"

"Absolutely" he nodded.

"Hmmmm....sounds good. Hopefully this plan of yours work well".

"Of course it will work. I have a lot of experience in distracting people. You just have to distractingly attractive for it" he smirked sexily.

"Sure" I shrugged, not being really interested in getting an advice on how to seduce.

Suddenly I feel someone entering the Raven and there was a girl with long and bright blonde hair wearing a pink dress which would hurt your eyes as it had too much of the colour.

But then I noticed something eye-catching. It was the enormous bow on her head, and I shook Julian's shoulder as soon as I realised something very important.

"Julian.....that's her. She is the one we are looking for. The bow on the card and on her head match. She has to be the one who killed Mr. Isadami" I told him while pointing at the girl.

"Oh I see. She is cute, not going to lie. Too cute for a killer" Julian rubbed his chin.

"True. I bet her attire is just for fooling the people in thinking that she is a harmless girl" I commented.

"True" Julian nodded.

I then sighed and turned to him, patting his shoulder.

"Let's get this over with. Do be careful alright? We don't know how dangerous she can really be" I warned him.

Julian nods at me and goes to the girl, while I kept watch of every single thing they were doing.

Honestly speaking, Julian was giving the her the time of her life. I could see her smiling and laughing with him and also having drinks. She wasn't suspicious of how Julian came out of nowhere to befriend her.

And fortunately, soon came the time that Julian led her outside to the isolated backside of the Raven and I followed them.

I stayed under the shadowed area and looked at the two. Julian had her pinned against the wall and the girl's face was flushed pink and was smirking like an idiot because of too much alcohol.

I was comparatively closer to both of them so I could hear what the girl was talking about. She said :

"Those innocent faces covered in blood, they make me so happy. Their eyes gauged out and their tongues cut off, truly bewitching. And their wails are like music to my ears. They are a true work of art.

Killing children is what I enjoy the most........."

This made thick adrenaline rush through every inch of my body and fill me with boiling rage. My hands shook violently and my mind was almost in the verge of losing sanity.

'Kill.......Kill......Kill.......' was all that my mind could say, and I obeyed it with full diligence as the next thing I did was form an ice dagger which was sharpened already due to fury flowing through my veins and threw straight at the killer's forehead with full force.

Blood splattered all over the wall behind her.

"СВЯТОЙ ЕБАТЬ !!!" Julian stumbled back, cursing from fear and astonishment.

I ignored him and walked straight at her, another dagger ready in my hand. I held her now limp body against the wall and kept stabbing her wherever I could plunge my knife through, ensuring to exert as much force and anger as I could on her.

There was blood everywhere on me and I was enjoying it making it spash on myself.

"Oh god...... Wynne...."

As soon as I heard his shaky voice, I stopped. I let the body fall on the floor and I turned to look at Julian, my face expressionless.

He was dumbfounded and got as pale as a ghost. There was terror, shock and disbelief in his eyes.

"Wynne....I......" He approached me slowly, reaching out to me.

My breathing got quicker and I threw my knife away. I backed away from him as soon as I realised what I had done.

I was turning into a monster again.........

"No.....stay away from me" I backed up against the wall.

"Wynne it's alright. I am not going to hurt you" he still moved towards me.

"I-It's not about hurting me Julian. It's about me hurting you. I have become a monster yet again. My anger is getting out of control, and I'm afraid that you too might get killed because of me and I.......I.......I cannot afford to lose you"

Julian said nothing but wrapped his arms around me, embracing me tight.

I was surprised a bit, but then I too hugged him back.

"You are not a monster Wynne. Don't ever say that. You are a hero. You protected Vesuvia when the people needed you and you did it again by ending a killer's life.

Honestly saying, I would never be as brave as you have ever been Ocean Head. And I love you for that. So don't ever call yourself a monster alright??" He locked his eyes with mine.

"B-But--"

"No buts. You are perfect as you are and don't you dare ever change yourself because you see, I have fallen for a Wynne who is grumpy and serious, and I only want her" he grinned.

This put a smile on my face too as I chuckled while shaking my head.

"You too idiot. Never ever stop being a total moron" I pinched his cheek.

He giggled and pecked my lips, making me blush the reddest.

"I love you Winnie" he leaned his forehead with mine.

"I love you too Jules" I confessed.

He then smirked and started to take off my dress.

"W-What the??"

"You do owe me for scaring me with that sudden attack. And I'm going to be harsh on you" he told me as he removed my corset.

"Of course. I do have to compensate" I smirked back and started to remove his shirt.

"You are on, Wynne Toprak" he then lifted me up against the wall and started kissing me roughly, squeezing my thighs.

The dead body lying near us improved the ambience even more for us to make love in the out shamelessly, because that's how we were and I loved it.

The end.......

[skeeloo]

At Least Stay

Kinda sounds like a angsty title but I can assure you it’s not lmao

Pairing: Yushi, aka Shiori (my oc) x Yuno

Rating: PG ofc! Just some self indulgent oc x cc fluff to get back into the swing of writing cause I love these two

Notes: This is longer than I intended for it to be, but nonetheless we are finished

Word count: 2.6k

Night had acended upon the clover kingdom putting an end to the day and welcoming a cool, crisp night, the hours only continuing to tick by as Yuno and his partner occupied themselves in the Golden Dawn’s library with assorted interesting books. Getting so into the stories about the history of things and books about certian magics and such that it seemed as though the two had lost their sense of time, which they did.

Shiori managed to put her book down for the first time in a good few minutes , her eyes averting from the pages to a clock on the wall ticking as each second went by. She blew it off before doing a double take and checking the clock again, this time reading the time displayed, having the nerve to act shocked as she got up to put the book back on the shelf it was on before she had borrowed it to read, uttering “shit” under her breath, Catching the attention of the boy with her as Yuno took his eyes from his book to look at her, slightly raising a brow.

“What’s up with you.. are you ok?”

Shiori nodded before turning back around from the book shelf to look at him. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just didn’t realize how late it got.” She began walking back to the library table they had been sitting at. “I have to go.” She went to reach for another book that was sitting on the table to put away, Yuno gently grabbing her wrist as those words made him react.

“Go? Why?” His expression shifted ever so slightly from stoic to a little concerned as he didn’t want her to go, at least not yet.

“Cause I have to go home, Yu. I don’t wanna worry my mom, let alone my father-“ Shiori looked a little filled with worry as the last thing she wanted to do was worry them.

Yuno let go of her wrist. He silenced himself looking for words and excuses to get Shiori to stay a little longer, staying the night would be a small stretch but if he could somehow convince her to stay for at least a hour longer he’d be happy.

“You’d be crazy if you think I would let you go out at this hour.”

“Crazy?” Shiori chuckled. “Don’t be ridiculous, It’s only night time-nothing different from if I went home in the daytime.”

“It’s dangerous.” Yuno stated blankly

“Dangerous?” Shiori couldn’t help but hold in a laugh. “That’s the last thing I could hear from the likes of you. Don’t you like to jump into danger yourself?”

Yuno scoffed. “I’m not Asta.” He stated, throwing some light shade to his rival.

Shiori looked at him all skeptical at that moment. “Riiight-“

Yuno only rolled his eyes. “Creeps and creatures can be lurking in the dark and you wouldn’t know. I can’t and won’t risk you getting attacked and hurt.”

Shiori gave him a ‘are you serious’ look. “You know your sounding kinda like Klaus right now” She pouted as she leaned her upper body on the table.

The comment took Yuno slightly aback and made him cringe, his reaction making the girl laugh as gave his own rendition of a ‘are you serious’ look, mixed with a little shock.

‘Klaus? You’ve got to be kidding...’ he thought to himself as he let out a audible sigh.

“My point still stands. It’s better if you stay here.”

Shiori raised a brow. “Like spend the night? Yu, you know my parents wouldn’t appreciate me saying nothing before jumping into sudden plans-“

“I’ll take the blame.”

“Well you had a quick answer for that.” Shiori thought about a few more issues and concerns that came to mind. “What about captain Vangeance, your squad mates?”

“I’ve brought you here more than once havent I? It’s not like they don’t know who you are”

“And what about Bell? that sassy wind spirit of yours doesn’t seem to like me all too much. She’d complain her little head off all night.”

“I was able to pry her off of me for the day, don’t worry about her.”

Shiori thought for another moment. “I don’t have any pajamas either way.”

“You can wear one of my uniform shirts to bed.”

For every concern, the boy had a answer. Shiori had to admit she was impressed, yet unaware of the true intention on why he wanted her to stay so badly but with the way he had been talking and giving quick answers, it became increasingly obvious. “Do you really not want me to go cause it’s as you put it ‘dangerous’ or is it that you just don’t want me to leave. Stay with you for a bit longer? Give you affection?”she made the quotation mark finger movements with her hands when she spoke, giving him a smile that seemed to be a light smirk.

Yuno once again was taken aback, she was directly on the target with her assumption, yet he being the stoic boy who found it difficult to express his emotions properly he was, denied it.

“No, that’s not...” he looked away from her. “It’s more the first..” Safe to say he did a bad job of hiding the fact that he just wanted her company for longer and didn’t want her to go so soon. He remained silent for a moment before speaking up again.

“I just want you to stay with me for a while longer... I have squad duties in the morning and I want to spend the rest of what we have of today with you.” Yuno did his best to find proper words to express himself. It was already difficult in itself but even more so in a new relationship where everything is just so foreign to him. “Also it is dangerous out but.. at least stay?”

Shiori gave him a soft smile, sighing softly while maintaining it. “Well, the chance of getting scolded isn’t as important to me as precious time with my Yu-Yu is. So I’ll stay.” Shiori suddenly burst into a little flutter of panic. “You don’t mind if I call you that right?” She chuckled. “It suddenly came out..”

Yuno almost let out a chuckle at her sudden franticness. He wasn’t quite accustomed to the nickname as “Yu” sufficed her just enough but hearing it repeated twice over was quite cute of her he had to admit.

“You worry your head off so much about the little things-“he spoke nonchalantly meanwhile deep down hearing that she would stay with him made him quite giddy although it wasn’t displayed as most emotions of his werent.

Shiori chuckled. “I know, I know- it’s dumb but I guess even now I’m still a anxious mess around you when it comes to some things... I need to work on that.” She looked as she was pondering for a moment before she felt a slight gust of wind. Seeing as Yuno used his magic to put the books they had taken to read back onto their spaces on the shelves. He then promptly got up from where he was seated.

Shiori would never not be marveled in how much control he had in his magic, looking at Yuno after the books retuned to their proper shelves.

“I would like to think we’re done here. Maybe we could..make the rest of the time tonight worthwhile.” He attempted to grab her hand but hesitated and opted out last second in his decision. Meanwhile Shiori had a grin on her face.

“That sounds just great. What did you have in mi-“

Once again Yuno attempted to reach for her hand, Shiori took a pause in her words as she felt his pinky slightly brush against her hand. Looking down at their hands she went ahead and gently grabbed his, the two standing still and becoming slight messes over a simple gesture of affection.

Shiori broke the awkawardness, bringing his hand up to her face and snuggling her cheek into it, smiling as she did so, Yuno could have swore his heart skipped a few beats. It was crazy how some simple actions could almost make him feel so strongly and such a way. It seemed to be something only she could do to him, show all sorts of affection and share loving words that can make such a stoic boy absolutely melt in her hands. And with Shiori, the same could be said on her end.

It was quite crazy. A stoic and seemingly cold boy ending up with a slightly shy and kind girl. Their personalities being polar opposites, yet here they were now.

“Your hands are nice and warm-“ She chuckled, bringing his hand back down from her face to hold it. Meanwhile Yuno looked at her completely fascinated and enamored. He was able to crack a small smile. He didn’t speak but the expression he held spoke enough words.

“You alright Yu?” Shiori tilted her head a little as she asked the question.

“Peachy.” He looked down to the floor to avoid Shiori from pointing out the small tinge of rose forming on his cheeks, covering his face with his other, free hand while he was at it. “Let’s just go-“ he uttered, walking along with Shiori who couldnt help but be confused with his behavior.

“Are you flustered?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? You seem it.”

“Nuh-Uh”

“I think you are-“

“Nope.”

“You can admit it. It’s ok, Yu.”

“Not a chance.”

There went his famous catchphrase. Shiori couldn’t help but let out a small laugh and a sarcastic eye roll with Yuno denying the matter as they walked.

The two innocently went back and forth, Shiori continuing to pester the boy about being a little flustered to where Yuno would only continue to deny the obvious.

At least until they reached his room.

The two settled a little bit, Yuno pulling out one of his uniform shirts. Feeling a little mischievous he used his magic to launch it at a unsuspecting Shiori. He intended for it to hit her chest to be playful but it ended up hitting her face.

“Ack!”

Yuno had to catch his own laugh while Shiori took the shirt into her hands, glaring at him.

“Sorry-“ he quickly spoke up.

Shiori let out a chuckle accompanied with a sigh. “Using your wind magic for mischief I see.”

“It’s just tempting. I like messing around with you.” Yuno turned around so she could change into the shirt he had given her, hearing rustling of some clothing.

“This is way bigger than I thought it would be-“ Shiori spoke, giggling as since the sleeves were just a little long for her arms she flapped them

“Are you done?” Yuno asked casually, not wanting to turn too suddenly when she wasn’t ready for him to do so.

“Yeah” Shiori smiled as Yuno turned around, adjusting the sleeves with pulling them back so her hands saw the light of day from inside the fabric.

Of course the shirt was bound to be big on her short frame but with how small she was and the way she was smiling while enjoying wearing it, it was adorable. Yuno couldn’t help but let a soft smile make way into his face, looking at her all enamored. The sight just tugged at his heartstrings, all the right ones.

“I... wow..” He commented, not knowing what to say. walking forward he placed his head on her shoulder, wrapping his arms around her, Shiori standing there for a second before wrapping her arms around him as well, one of her hands snaking to the back of his head and running her fingers through his hair, the action making the boy absolutely melt in her arms. It was soothing and comforting for him.

Shiori felt him shift his weight more, it seems as though he was so calm he just gave up with holding his own weight and leaned on her completely, her struggling slightly.

“Yu-Yu, your getting heavy-“

“But I’m so comfy...” he nuzzled himself further into her shoulder and held her tighter, acting more clingy and affectionate in the moment as her hugs cuddles were something he especially loved since he could hold her close.

“Your all on me.. not that it’s a bad thing but I’m not trying to fall and bust not just mine but both of our asses.”

Yuno let out a groan, pouting slightly as he had to let go of her. It was like getting comfortable in bed but realizing you need to get up to get something or turn the light off, granted it was minor as he would snuggle back up with her after they moved to the bed but still, when it came to cuddles, he dreaded waiting.

However Shiori wasnt long in laying down on the bed and opening her arms for him, Yuno wasting no time in getting in with her and holding her close to him, resting his head and nuzzling his face into the crook of her neck. Shiori beginning to play with his hair once again as he wrapped his arms around her, not intending on letting go anytime soon.

“Be aware your not getting away from me.”

Shiori chuckled at his remark. “Your such a baby for cuddles..” she spoke softly as her fingers ran through his soft hair, easing the boy of any stress he may have carried at the moment. She then felt a gentle kiss on her neck, looking down at Yuno who was looking up at her

“Baby? You can’t be serious.”

Shiori smiled at him, gently grabbing his face. “Yeah, but your my baby. Makes a difference.” Shiori caressed his face with her fingers, Yuno getting a little blushy and hiding his face in her neck again.

“S-stop..” He softly contested his treatment.

“Stop what?” Shiori grinned.

“Stop.. whatever sourcery this is...”

Shiori let out a chuckle, gently grabbing his face once again and making him look at her

“Well it’s not sourcery, nor magic.” She closed the distance and left a soft peck on his lips. “Just love.” She giggled, Yuno bringing her closer to him and laying her head on his chest. She heard his heart beat, it was a little rapid from the action she had just laid upon him, but nonetheless still nice to listen to.

Shiori wrapped her arms around him, making herself more comfortable and snuggling into him, Yuno holding her a little tighter.

“You keep tightening your grip on me... Yu-Yu, I’m right here. Not going nowhere.”

“Stil.. I want to keep you close.” He took a pause. “Your warm and I like feeling you next to me.” One of his hands wandered into her hair, gently twirling some of her curls, placing gentle kisses on the top of her head. He loved these moments. The moments where he could hold her close to him and let his feelings for her out without too much thought or worry, both in a soft daze with light touches and lots of verbal and physical affection, enjoying eachothers company and warmth. A perfect way to end the day.

“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else at this very moment either.” She smiled, feeling his hand gently grab her face, raising her chin up to him slightly, softly smiling before planting a kiss on her lips, lingering for definitely a while longer than just a quick peck before pulling back, Shiori laying there in a small daze, Yuno letting out a small, quiet chuckle.

“Look, you didn’t push me away that time.”

“Hush, you just didn’t catch me off guard like you usually do.” Shiori snuggled herself in his chest, clinging onto him. She wouldn’t be so needy for being held close, however in his arms she felt safe and loved, something she adored to feel.

The two remained quiet for a while, enjoying eachother before Yuno suddenly spoke up.

“Shiori?”

“Hm?” She perked up, her closed eyes fluttering open.

“ I love you.”

Shiori smiled, snuggling herself in further. “I love you too, Yuno.”

Once again a small period of silence arose, Shiori almost knocking right out with her hair being played with.

“Didn’t you say you have squad duties in the morning? Shouldn’t you be properly getting ready to sleep instead of falling asleep like this?

“That’s tomorrow’s problem.” He stated, closing his eyes. “If we fall asleep now it won’t matter any.”

“I hope your sure about that”

-

[multistoty]

@realmofthedragon​

The darker the sky, the brighter the stars. The auburn haired princess believed the stars align so souls can find one another. Whether they are meant to be souls in love or souls in life remains to be seen. They were to be married by the end of the night. It was because they were two parts of a whole. He did not belong to her. And she did not belong to him. It was never about belonging to someone. It was about belonging together. Every person has the power to change their fate if they are brave enough to fight for what they desire more than anything. Hope is a powerful thing. Some say it’s a different breed of magic altogether. Elusive, difficult to hold on to. But not much is needed. She remembered thinking falling for him would be like falling in love with darkness, but now she imagined he was more like a starry night: the constellations were always there, constant, magnificent guides against the ever-present black. The air was full of salt and secrets. The beauty of his smile was like that to rival the sun. Hope Mikealson was the child of a fairly influental king of a smaller kingdom famed for the piles of blood and sinew of those who caught his ire. Her six uncles and seven aunts were just as fiercely protective over family though her Uncle Elijah was the one who truly kept their country running. While Hope was raised utterly loved, she was determined to not fully follow in the bloodlust that formed her legacy in these kingdoms. It was the night of her wedding with the handsome stranger that Klaus had betrothed her too in Baelon who seemed like a gentleman even as he was also out of his element. A true plague of a girl. And yet a queen in every sense of the word. Be as swift as the wind. As silent as the forest. As fierce as the fire. As unshakable as the mountain. And you can do anything. It does not take courage to kill. It takes courage to live. Though Hope could easily do it with a flashing glint of a dagger or sword. The only power any man has over you is the power you give him. Two stubborn lovers, protecting each other from the very same threat. Destiny was for fools. The pair would not wait for their life to happen. They would make it happen. It's inevitable. When you meet the one who makes you smile as you've never smiled before, cry as you've never cried before... there is nothing to do but fall. Waiting. Not waiting. One lover. A hundred lovers. There should be no judgement either way. A woman is not defined by what she does or doesn‘t do in the bedroom. They've never found the body of the first and only boy who broke my heart. And they never will. Time goes on even when we do not. And the couple are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives they did not choose. Things were all still new. But she liked the way she felt about herself when she was  with him. The blonde seemed to think that she was strong and smart and capable and he actually values her opinion. He makes his soon to be wife feel like his equal--like she can accomplish just as much as he can, and more. And if she did something incredible, he's not even surprised. He expects it. He doesn't treat her like some fragile little girl who needs to be protected all the time.Even as she knew he would always be at her side. Maybe they could grow to love one another.  People seldom realize that they tell lies with their lips and truths with their eyes all the time. The butterflies of the world migrating to her stomach felt more delicious than all nerves before.  She’s come to believe that the most dangerous man in the world is the one who feels no remorse. The one who never apologizes and therefore seeks no forgiveness. Because in the end it is our emotions that make us week, not our actions. She promised herself then, in that moment, that she will hold him forever, just like this, until all the pain and torture and suffering is gone, until he's given a chance to live the kind of life where no one can wound him deeply ever again. He's looking so deeply into Hope’s vivid blue eyes that she was surprised she hadn't buckled under the intensity everything about him is intense. Nothing about him is manageable or easy to compartmentalize. He's too much. Everything about him is too much. His emotions, his actions, his anger, his aggression. His love. And she wanted to drown in it. Her eyes professional pickpockets traveling over the man who was to be her husband and the minutes they comfort. They had been doing a sort of practice. Now, alone in eachothers arms with bellies filled with mulled wine and voices far off. “What a pair we will be. My mother a woman of scandal same as yours. But I am lucky to be betrothed to such a handsome man with a sexy affinity for sharp objects. Charming even when he continues to brood.”

[lazuliblade]

Sports Nippon (Sponichi) January 1st, 2020 issue [the phrase I put in quotation marks is from Yuzuru; the accompanying article text is from writer/editor(?) Ryosuke Sugimoto] 冬の頂点を知る男が夏のアスリートへメッセージ

「心からの闘いを。」

ライバルの背を追い 進化を遂げて 日本男子初となる黄金の輝きを手に入れた。

ライバルに追われ、 負傷を乗り越えて、 66ぶりに連覇を達成した。

’14ソチ、’18平昌。 冬の頂を知る フィギュアスケート・羽生結弦(25 = ANA)から 東京五輪・パラリンピックに臨むアスリートへ。

「心からの闘いを。」

鍛えた体、 磨いた技術、 そして熱い心で舞え、 夏の勇者たち。 A message from the man who knows the pinnacle of Winter, to the athletes of Summer

“Battle from the heart”

Chasing after a rival’s back, evolution comes about, he became the first Japanese man to grasp the brilliance of gold.

Chased after by rivals, he overcomes injury, a consecutive champion was realized after 66 years. Sochi ‘14, Pyeongchang ‘18. From the figure skater who knows the pinnacle of Winter - Yuzuru Hanyu (25, ANA) - To the athletes facing the Tokyo Olympic & Paralympic Games.

“Battle from the heart” With bodies forged, skills polished, and hearts ablaze, dance, Heroes of Summer. -----------------------------

*technically it’s more like “passionate hearts/spirits” but in keeping with the rhythm of the sentence, I used “ablaze” instead. Like being fired up. Think: anime protagonists drawn with figurative fire because they’re rearing to go. Yuzu’s message “Battle from the heart” is deceptively simple. It’s vague enough that trying to capture that in English means playing with verb-noun and synonym usage. I typed up my process below for anyone that cares to read. If it helps my friends, maybe it can help other people too. I have pages debating with myself on how to capture the straightforward but poetic way the article is written (if you couldn’t tell, I’m kind of a nerd), but I’ll spare you that conflict. One quote is enough, I think.

He says “kokoro kara no tatakai wo.” Which needs some unpacking, because even though it’s like three words long, it’s a bit vague. Rather, precisely because it’s three words long, it’s vague. “kokoro kara no” = “a thing that’s from the heart” i.e. 心からの願い kokoro kara no negai = a wish (that’s) from the heart 心からの力 kokoro kara no chikara = a strength (that’s) from the heart “tatakai” = a fight (noun) BUT he doesn’t just say “fight” here. He doesn’t use the general kanji for “fight” 戦い which you would understand as protagonists fighting against their circumstances or against a rival (or delinquents fighting in the street). He uses the more advanced kanji 闘い which implies fighting a real hardship. He’s not just saying “a fight from the heart” – he’s saying “a challenge/ battle from the heart.” He’s implying that the Olympic grounds are a battlefield. (which we actually know from previous interviews) and so we get to the vague part…

“wo” “Wo,” alone, is meaningless. You attach it after a noun to show that the following verb is acting on said noun. i.e. “ドアを閉めます doa wo shimemasu” (close the door) “朝ご飯を食べます asagohan wo tabemasu” (eat breakfast) “お茶を買います ocha wo kaimasu” (buy tea) Since it’s New Year’s and this is incredibly fitting timing: よいお年を “yoi otoshi wo” = “[may you have/let’s greet/may you welcome] a good year.” Notice there’s no verb following the “wo” there. You can finish the sentence with “ お迎えください omukae kudasai” (politely requesting that the person welcomes/greets), but you don’t have to, since it’s implied. Which brings us back to Yuzuru’s sentence… His sentence isn’t a complete sentence, because he doesn’t have a verb in there. It’s left open-ended in classic proverb rumination style. So you can interpret it as him saying “do ___” or “aspire to ___” or “aim for ___” and you wouldn’t be wrong. Basically, as the athlete receiving this message, you can decide to employ the “tatakai” in whatever way best suits you. How you do the “tatakai”(fight) is up to you, as long as it’s from the heart. So finally, how I chose to capture this: “Battle from the heart” -“Battle” being a noun and verb so you can take it as “a battle from the heart” or “do battle from the heart” or “aspire to battle from the heart” or “aim for a battle from the heart.” -It sounds less clunky than “war from the heart,” -it doesn’t carry extra implications like adding a verb “wage war from the heart” (because he doesn’t actually tell you to wage an all-out war) -and “battle from the heart” feels heavier than “fight from the heart” It’s rallying against a hardship. You’re not just struggling or fighting, you are battling. Or to put it a bit less straightforward and a bit more appropriately poetic... he’s not just saying “fight,” he’s saying “battle with your heart on the line.”

---------------------------------------- Also, as an aside, giving short phrase messages like this may not be very common in some places, but choosing a saying for the year/season is a pretty big thing in Japan. You can see it with the JSF asking skaters to give a phrase for the skating season, and their responses looking something like: “overcome the wall” “challenge myself” “skate with a smile” etc. Not something limited to public figures, I’ve even seen it in elementary school with teachers collecting phrases to include in a newsletter for students at the start of a new trimester. If you had to choose one word, phrase, or sentence to represent the year and encourage your students for the final push, what would you choose? There are those who jot down the first thing to come to mind, and those who put a lot of thought into what to say.

[grandhotelabyss]

Where the corporations fail literature, little magazines and small presses will emerge to fill in the gaps. Things may start to look a bit like they did one hundred years ago, and the time will be ripe for another aesthetic revolution.

Christian Lorentzen, “Literature”

(Is this true? My impression is that modernism’s small presses and little magazines were founded by eccentric independently wealthy people who had an actual interest in the arts for their own sake. I am not a sociologist of literature, though, so my cursory scan of Margaret Anderson’s and James Laughlin’s Wikipedia pages could be inadequate to the task. The “little” magazines and “small” presses that came later—see Juliana Spahr’s Du Bois’s Telegram for details—were and are funded by universities and/or by foundations that are often little better than intelligence cutouts. So the level of true independence is not going to be the same as it was in the days of Joyce and Stein.

Which leads me to a question: what are eccentric rich people doing with their money these days that they can’t throw me a few crumbs? Not that I am experimental in the requisite sense—this is the other problem with the dream of the modernist revival. Lorentzen rightly complains about Netflix-ready corporate-monopoly realist novels, but all the most strenuous gestures for resisting the realist novel—most of them born with the realist novel in the 18th century or even before—have hardened into a body of convention as rigid as such realism itself. Oh, your novel set inside the unraveling consciousness of a man without a memory wandering a nameless country that vaguely resembles Franco’s Spain doesn’t have paragraph breaks? How utterly utter. I prefer in my own fiction to present a surface you could almost think at first was conventional realism—not only do I use paragraph breaks, but I even notate dialogue with quotation marks—and then slowly unveil to you that you are in a dream or a nightmare, as fiction indeed should be, but not in a literal-minded way. Dreams and nightmares work because no matter how strange they get they feel real. 

Two stray comments on the rest of the piece, for which please click.

First—pedantry alert!—but Lorentzen oddly doesn’t mention the most famous early-20th-century novel to have been touched by the 1918-19 flu pandemic, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, in which eponymous Clarissa’s heart was “affected, they said, by influenza,” presumably four to five years before the narrative proper, which mirrors her cross-gender, cross-class day-double Septimus Warren Smith’s traumatic time in the trenches.

Second, I enjoyed the suggestive remarks about how much of “online” to incorporate into fiction. [What’s the point? To repeat my thesis, “online” will probably be gone in some number of centuries or even decades, so we had better get onto paper whatever we want to remember. I still have a comic book I drew on loose-leaf paper when I was seven; I don’t have my college essays, which are on some floppy disk somewhere, maybe in a dump, that no machine in my possession could access even if I had them, and only about half of my 2002-2006 livejournal still lives on archive.org., not that these are items of any value.] I don’t recommend imitation—Tweeted novels and the like. We can’t reproduce the suspense of doomscrolling in fiction, because the lure of the feed is precisely that it refers to reality. Direct competition with new media never works—Updike writing “cinematically” in the present tense now seems forced and silly and generally at odds with what was valuable in his sensibility—though neither does paranoia about not being influenced by new media, as if fiction had to be punitively interior or linguistically self-involved to avoid being too flashy or fun. As long as we’re doing something interesting with language or structure, our books will probably not be wholly reducible to TV or Twitter. And if our fiction is at least realist-adjacent, as in set in the present, it’s enough to write directly about characters’ interactions with the online world and how it affects their lives offline. This changes the content, but a change in content is a change in form: now we have a different kind of narrative interest. 

For example, if you’ll indulge me, in my Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, the nameless narrator meets one of his neighbors for the first time, and she alludes by way of consolation to the relatively recent death of his mother, which she’d learned about by googling him before she knocked on his door. Later, another neighbor discloses that whatever she’d found out about the mother’s death on a local newspaper’s website was a planted official cover story concealing a much more nightmarish set of facts. This second neighbor discovered these facts almost by accident through chatter on 4chan about a secret video, intolerable to watch, that surfaces briefly from time to time on various sites before being quickly removed. In other words, what used to be a fictional character’s interior secrets are now exteriorized and discoverable by a dogged enough sleuth. Characters are built not on the old model of social facades concealing hidden depths; now they are—and experience one another as—layers upon layers of searchable data that less conceal than embody some mysterious, unreachable inner core paradoxically distributed over the network. The online world has pulled us inside out like a glove. In showing us this, fiction remains itself—usually at its best when investigating character, which it does better than rival art forms older and younger—but changed from what it was by new technology, alive to its time.)

[project-ohagi]

Tetsuro Kuroo x Reader {Haikyuu!!}

Trigger Warnings: Self-Harm, Depression/Anxiety, Bullying and Suicide.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The sands of change trickled gradually down the hourglass, casting a abhorrent self-reflection. Yours was certainly not an appearance to be desired - of this you had been warned. The voice of rationality and perseverance thundered away, claiming that such false, trivial nonsense should progress unheeded. However, the years of abusive conditioning pierced these thoughts with a million scorching needles. What if everything was true, and it had been all along? The words which drowned out your confidence: fat, ugly, worthless, hopeless, pig, freak...what if a deeper meaning aligned them to your soul?

A single, fleeting observation was all he required, to understand the very thrust of your agony. It didn't cease there, though; he couldn't allow it. Being in a college preparation class, competition was rife, and you always managed to rival his grades. But...recently, you had been slipping, falling between the cracks, into a fathomless void. He noticed, and for many days, he brooded. This was a complete character-shift, and his peers worried. They actually cared for him, unlike you. That was when it clicked in his mind, and those gorgeous ambers, shimmering with concern, began to latch on to your movements (significantly slowed, he realised), your speech (lowered, nervous, as if you were deliberately attempting to avoid something), and even the dark bags which had manifested underneath your eyes. Life once shone so radiantly within, but now they seemed lifeless and cold. It was obvious how little time you reserved for sleep, and an unease started to contort his stomach.

The occasion on which he had first approached you was nothing short of awkward. Standing opposite you, a few sheets of paper in hand, he endeavoured to explain his intentions. The previous day, heavy sighing and innumerable yawns had alerted him to your loss of concentration. It seemed like you desperately wanted to cling to every word rolling off the teacher's tongue, but a barrier had been erected, preventing any information from filtering in. He couldn't bear imagining all the trouble you could attract, so he had prepared a set of notes for you. It was a simple gesture, yet it meant everything to you. How could someone, especially the most handsome, most intelligent boy in the entire school, waste their precious time on a lowlife such as yourself?

The revelation that someone was watching, someone did care, punched you square in the face. This was Kuroo Tetsuro, for gods' sake! The light, crimson hue plastering his cheeks served to further highlight his beauty, and remind you of your unmistakable contrast. Such manliness, such sex appeal...such kindness. No - you couldn't get attached! Your fingers brushed ever-so-slightly, as you retrieved the papers, and your eyes widened. No - you couldn't overthink this! It was just a friendly gesture...there wasn't a hope in Hel of him ever returning your romantic interest. Still, the feline grin playing at his lips forced your heart to beat twice as fast.

When the pace at which you walked decreased, he noticed. When the weight grappled your stomach, trying to expand, expand, he noticed. There was nothing wrong with your body - he assumed you to be ideal, in fact. However, something about your eating habits had definitely changed, for a difference to be so conspicuous. It wormed into his mind, eating away like a parasite. Would an interrogation be appropriate, or would he seem to be prying too deeply? After all, so much of you was still shrouded in mystery. If he could corner a mutual friend, maybe? But...who? Surely you must have followed someone around! Although, after gliding like a stalker just a few paces behind, he realised that you didn't occupy a group; you walked alone, sat alone, ate alone.

In the solitude, you sobbed for bygone days, begged for a new beginning. Something, anything, just so you didn't have to feel so alone, so worthless! But...this never unveiled before those dulling ambers. Some days, rising from bed was a painful nightmare, and you simply couldn't face the world. Kuroo wasn't privy to the true extent of your emotions, your anguish, but he knew that you couldn't afford to miss classes. He created notes for you, writing as neatly, and with as much affection as he could possibly muster. His love was ink, bleeding on to the page, yet you could never absorb it.

And often, he would doodle, absentmindedly, in the corners of the pages. Hearts and squiggly-lines were abundant, but sometimes, more profound markings would accompany them. He hadn't intended to preach - he just wanted to understand your pain, your suffering...all that you embodied. You discovered a quotation, crafted with the most genuine compassion, which your tears threatened to sully.

Please let me take you out of the darkness and into the light. 'Cause I have faith in you, that you're gonna make it through another night. Stop thinkin' about the easy way out, there's no need to go and blow the candle out.

That night, while the song resonated in your ears, you wondered if the boy was psychic. Indeed, thoughts of self-slaughter were a constant in your mind, although they were typically subtext. Lately, due to the jeers of your bullies, coupled with the stress of school and your mounting anxieties, you were dancing a dangerous border. Straddled by mental illness, with which you fought a waning battle, you desired nothing more than the sweet, searing kiss of a blade. His heartfelt message hadn't bestowed the strength to ward off the demons consumed by malice, but it was a sure step forwards. Somebody was wishing your pain away - somebody strong, somebody capable. If your fractured mind would permit another day, another week, another month...maybe then you could sing his praises.

Except...it wouldn't.

This depressive reality chipped away at your already-fragile mentality, etching your final words on to a single page. Soon, the embers of life would be extinguished, and an elusive serenity could penetrate your heart. It was nothing to cry over, nothing to fear. But then...why were you crying? Why were you fearful? As Kuroo's blindingly-handsome face entered your mind, the tears began to cascade. He wouldn't miss you, would he? You barely ever talked...he had never called your name...you had even failed to disclose your deepest affections.

All this, however, was during a fleeting lifetime. On this page, your love-riddled words would be immortalised. He would finally realise the truth, and the extent, of your feelings. Nothing could tear you from this; something should be left behind...some last trace of you. He deserved it. He deserved a detailed explanation, a tender goodbye, a sorrowful apology. You couldn't shake the guilt welling up inside, as the bottle drew closer, closer, closer.

One pill, three pills, six pills...

Messy, ebony hair and glowing, amber eyes. Eternal slumber encased you within its soft cocoon. Peace had absolved you, at long last. You would dwell no more on things as trivial as life.

Pictures of a once-grotesque girl were passed around online the following day, but Kuroo hadn't noticed. The view of your empty seat impressed a heavy feeling on his heart, and yet he couldn't comprehend why. It wasn't until a classmate, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, skipped by, presenting him with an envelope, that the frightening contortions gained clarity. Apparently, she had found it nestled in the crack of your locker, and had only read the name engraved upon it, before hurtling towards the classroom. Her spirits were sky-high, which served to alleviate a fraction of his tension. This girl had a slight connection to you, after all, so surely her cheerfulness must have been a positive sign?

The sick-inducing twists of his stomach did not cease, however. Droplets of both blood and tears littered the paper - how had he never recognised those lashes on your arms? They were less prominent in revealing places, so they merely resembled cat scratches. And...despite everything, he thought they were, up until the very end. Or perhaps, he simply wanted to believe that. As his eyes ghosted over your tear-blotted words, something inside his core snapped. He broke. He hurt. He cried. He prayed and he wished, for your happiness, and for the sweet nothings he could have whispered in your ears. There had been so many words dying to leap from his tongue. There was so little time in life. But...if you could have stayed, just for one more day...

...I guess those wishes were useless now.