#so naturally it's harder to keep track of and stuff

[mer-acle]

hellooo silent wars people

So I was thinking to fully switching to Ao3 with this AU and do chapter update notes like for my other fics on tumblr. (in case you didn't know, I have been posting all my SW snippet stuff on Ao3 as well, pretty much caught up now besides the silly ones, while all the lore and yapping is on here)

I was wondering if ya'll would be cool with that bc obviously I started it here and ik people are reading on here, so I don't want to leave people behind.

Please let me know what you think and if you'd continue reading the story on Ao3 (if you don't want to on this post shoot me an anon ask or smt that's cool too)

(obv with the chapter update notes you could still engage with the snippets on here, and I can leave my tag list on those as well. idk. my reasons are a bit whiny tbf 😔 I'd just like your input)

[giddyfatherchris]

📝 skz reaction - you're being a clingy baby

pairing. ot8!skz x gn!reader (individually)

type. fluff fluff fluffff, requested <3

warnings. gender neutral reader, curse words (thats how i show my enthusiasm okay)

a/n. i know last time i was like "meh sue me for not putting the boys in the 'right' order" but you know what, i actually like it like that. my boy jeongin is always last, he deserve to be first so i think i'm just gonna keep it like that when it comes to skz reactions :)

jeongin ⊹ ࣪ ˖ he would tease you like hell about it until one day you actually start crying and he feels so fucking bad he never does it again. (to be fair he probably laughed when you first started crying but when he realized they were real tears? he is panicking). after that he never denies you again and makes sure to give you attention whenever you need it. you're the only person he allows to be clingy and needy with him. which the boys are kinda petty about because they sure aren't allowed to be clingy with their maknae they love so much lol. they'd tease him sooo bad about it but every time he says it's different for you. you get special privileges.

seungmin ⊹ ࣪ ˖ he would def be annoyed when you're being clingy, not because he actually minds it but mostly because he knows you sometimes push it JUST to annoy him lmao. so in return he would deny you just for fun or when you ask him cute stuff he'd purposely answer seriously or act like he doesn't understand your request until you start wailing like a lost cat and then he can't resist anymore. oh and also, he loves to act that way when you're in public but behind closed doors? he can be just as clingy, it's different from when you are but still. he's not necessarily needy, but he wants. you. close. to him. he'd be the type to constantly want to be around you and get pouty when you can't.

felix ⊹ ࣪ ˖ honestly being clingy with felix only means one thing... you're spoiled rotten. you need hugs and cuddles? he will RUN to give them to you. you just want to stick to him like glue? 'sure baby come here'. you want to lay on his lap while he's playing games? not a problem. you don't even understand how you're feeling but you know you need to be with him? he will be there, arms wide open for you no questions asked. all your wishes will be executed because its just how it works between you two. and thing is, the treatment he gives you? you give it right back. so at this point, it's not even a question or a thought. it's simply second nature.

han ⊹ ࣪ ˖ getting han's attention when you're feeling clingy? it's tough. either because he will get side tracked by any little thing, despite his good intentions, so you'll have to remind him to stay with you or to give you a hug. orrrr he will goof off like crazy and will not leave you alone. until the point where you're physically trying to get as far away from him as possible. oh and he'd chase you, no worries "but babyyyy you said you needed love and attention. stop running." with the scariest most mischievous smile in the world until you actually start running away and hide from him because he will smother you with love. (but let's be honest you always end up letting him catch you because come on... you'll take all the love he'll give you)

hyunjin ⊹ ࣪ ˖ he does not mind at all when you're being clingy. in fact he LOVES it. in skz, there is a holy trinity of baby talker and you can bet your ass he's one of them. he will baby talk (to the other boys utmost horror) and repeat your requests with the baby voice until everyone in the room physically cringe. oh and he's mean, he's a real lil bitch, so he will deny you cuddles just so you can pout harder. his heart melts at the sight of it and he can't help but want more. still, it'd only take you to give him the eyes before he'd giggle and pull you in for a big big hug while he digs in nose in the crook of your neck where you just smell so so good.

changbin ⊹ ࣪ ˖ being clingy with binnie can go one of two ways. first, he's just just not gonna mind at all. he'd notice you seem more clingy than usual and just signal for you to come next to him. he'd keep babbling or doing whatever it is he's doing but he'd put his arms around you mindlessly stroking your back and giving you little kisses on your forehead... OR he would return it ten times worse. i'm talking full on baby voice (member number 2 of the holy trinity), pinching your cheeks, exagerating your requests, jumping on your lap and he'd act clingy just to make you laugh. "aw my little baby needs cuddles? you feeling clingy? you want to sit on my lap? what if I sit on your lap instead?" "what no bin that's not- BIN YOU'RE SO HEAVY IM GONNA DIE"

minho ⊹ ࣪ ˖ honestly, he does not care. like at all, the teasing would be minimal but all in all he'd let you do whatever it is you want to do, give you whatever it is you need. because fine he likes to tease ppl, but he also loves cuddles and physical touch even if he would never admit it. often ppl won't dare to be clingy with him because of his black cat personality, but you've always been able to see behind that façade and to never let it scare you. so you do not hesitate to latch on his arm or rest your head in the crook of his neck while he's doing something. and it always feel like a sweet sweet reward when he simply drapes his arms around you, not even reacting to your touch like it's the most normal thing and second nature thing in the world for him.

bangchan ⊹ ࣪ ˖ uhm yeah bangchan? absolutely adores when you're clingy. in fact, he would get whiny if you're not constantly requesting cuddles and hugs and little kisses. he would also be a master of the baby voice and obliging to your every demand. he just loves to be needed and the way you need him makes him feel light as a feather. he'd come up to you "what is you need babe?" and you'd pout and ask whatever it is you want wether its a hug or cuddles or some time with him "i don't think i heard you well the first time. want to repeat that?" but right before you'd say it again he'd squish your cheeks together so you have the cutest pout on your mouth and you'd mumble than you can't exactly talk like that but he'd insist "no no you can, go ahead baby" you'd sigh and oblige "mhm-want-mhug?" and this man would squeal like a toddler because he thinks youre so cute he’s going to explode. chan does have the profile of someone with love aggresion and so he'd lovingly and agressively give you anything you want :)

[hitoshiyoshi]

~ 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐀 𝐒𝐄𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐓 𝐀𝐃𝐌𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐑 / 𝐂𝐑𝐔𝐒𝐇

synopsis ↬ the mha boys reactions when learning you have a secret admirer

pairing ↬ gender neutral!reader x mha

characters ↬ izuku, bakugou, shouto, kirishima, shinsou, sero

+ MIDORIYA IZUKU will become a nervous little broccoli. He'll probably realize that you have a secret admirer way before you even notice; his detective skills are strong. He's not afraid to confront this person if they're making you uncomfortable because if it is a problem for you, it is also a problem for him as well. Terrified that you would actually leave him for this person and can't help but feel insecure. He'll compare all of his attributes with them and will probably easily feel inferior. Of course, you reassure him that you would never leave him and give him a huge confidence boost please reassure him. If you don't, imagine him being extremely anxious and shaky every time he sees that person around. Will politely tell that person to leave you alone if they are bothering you too much since he doesn't want to be rude.

+ TODOROKI SHOUTO pretends to be unbothered but is actually really bothered and insecure as well. He won't tell you too much about how he feels about it, he's mostly concerned whether you are uncomfortable with it. Like Izuku, he would find the identity of this person pretty quickly. Neglects his own personal thoughts on this person which probably causes him to spiral into a battle with his self-image and confidence. Although he's very pissed off about this, he silently tells this person that you're taken by being close to you all the time. Does a few death glares in their direction if he notices that person staring at you. He probably isn't too big on PDA and you quickly take notice of his changes. Unhappy and very sulky every time he sees this person around you. He'll eventually spill his feelings to you and apologize like he always does for keeping his emotions inside.

+ BAKUGOU KATSUKI would be the most bothered out of all of them. He probably isn't too obvious that you two are dating, people naturally put two and two together. When he finds out that you have a secret admirer, he's highkey offended. Wasn't it obvious that you two were dating? Well, no... Now, he goes out of his way to make sure everyone knows that you're in a relationship. Sticking to your hip, his arm around your shoulder, holding hands, eyeing up anyone that steps too close, and other things until people know. It would get annoying to others after some time, but he doesn't care. Somehow manages to track down your admirer and curses them out until they leave you alone. Destroys all the gifts and useless stuff that they've given you.

+ KIRISHIMA EIJIROU also acts unbothered but seriously hates it deep down. Instead of acting nonchalant, he would convince himself that it isn't a big deal and you won't leave him. Unfortunately, doing this is harder than he imagined. He also has an unwavering feeling that you would leave him for this person because he wasn't good enough or couldn't take care of you. Competes with this person for your affection and will do the most chivalrous manly acts to prove his love for you. Gets so uncomfortable when he sees the gifts or other presents this person gives. He probably won't go out of his way to confront them, but if he catches them leaving notes or gifts for you he'll just announce himself as your boyfriend and proceed to ask them to leave you alone.

+ SHINSOU HITOSHI observes and watches your interactions with this person very carefully. He's so wary that this person has other motives with you, more concerned about your wellbeing than anything else. He doesn't seem like the type that would be jealous but rather looks at things rationally. Randomly stumbles across them leaving love notes and gifts for you and gets so uncomfortable just from watching. He is not afraid to brainwash this person if they bother you too much; doesn't care if that sounds bad. If brainwashing doesn't work, he would just intimidate them into stopping. And if that doesn't work, he would bluntly tell them to leave you alone in the harshest way possible.

+ HANTA SERO is the king of being unbothered and actually IS unbothered. It's not that he doesn't care, but he trusts you enough to know that you won't leave him for someone else. He has no reason to be worried about this person unless he's given one. Communicates his feelings very well, doesn't hide anything. In fact, he's pretty blunt about how he feels about it even if it sounds harsh. He also doesn't actively try and figure out who you're admirer is because he could care less about that person. Only values your opinion and offers to help once he realizes it's going too far. Proudly displays himself as your partner until this person finally understands that you're taken and stops.

[dystopyx-blog]

more yandere octotrio!

Dedicated to @mr-trick <3 ty for your support

"Your grades have been slipping."

When you had been called into Azul's office, you certainly weren't expecting him to scold you like a parent. To add insult to, well, insult, Jade and Floyd were there, too, and the latter couldn't stop themselves from snickering.

"I wasn't aware that was any of your business." You shot back. You didn't bother asking how he knew–you'd had twin eels trailing you since Azul's overblot. It was rare for you to go anywhere these days without the sight of one looming at you from this distance. If their heights didn't make them obvious enough, there was the eyes. Though you had a feeling stealth wasn't the goal.

You'd be right. The tweels found it very important that you knew they were close by. Azul may have preferred for them to be stealthier, but they enjoyed your reactions too much. Plus, their presence kept others away. It's probably why Azul let them continue.

But back to the scene at hand.

Azul's response comes naturally, almost too naturally–as if he was prepared for that response. "Of course it is. The success of Night Raven students has always been my business–"

The look you hit him with was enough to stop him in his tracks.

He chuckled, adjusting his tie and his approach. "Of course, business has changed in recent times. In the past the goal was to attract as many poor unfortunate souls as I could, offering contracts with the goal to better myself, and not them. But now I've mended my ways and made a switch, so to speak. Now I wish to truly help and better those I come into contact with, starting with those I already feel close or indebted to. And what better first than the one who helped me see the light in the first place."

He waited for your response, but you offered none. Not unless you included your suspicion.

"Look, business has been rough lately since the incident, and helping you seems like the best way to restore people's faith in me."

"And thus the truth comes out."

You were so proud of yourself for sussing him out. What you didn't know is that that wasn't the truth–like at all. He didn't give a fuck what the other students thought of him, especially since he was still getting business regardless. This was about you and spending time with you, the strange, magicless student that had caught his attention like a worm on a hook. Buy to you, that would be even harder to believe than an act of true goodwill.

But that didn't matter anyway, because he had you. You agreed to help him out of the goodness of your heart–taking the opportunity to mock him. It was difficult for Azul to keep the smirk from his face as you fell into his hand. He could tell the twins felt the same way. Even if he couldn't see then standing behind him, he could still tell when Jade's gloved hand went to cover his smile, and when Floyd's slight sway stilled just enough to zero in on you.

With that, a deal had been made: you let Azul help you out of the "goodness of his heart," and you spread the word of Azul's redemption arc.

As soon as you're gone, Azul lets an easy smirk spill onto his face like oil in water.

"We got 'em boys."

What would follow is a series of study sessions, every night, either with Floyd, Jade, or Azul himself. Study session with Floyd rarely involve studying. Sometimes you would start with studying, but he’d always end up getting bored at some point, and then declare you two would be doing something else. Other times, you wouldn’t even get a chance to study, as he’d already be dragging you off somewhere before you can even set your stuff down. Floyd, being Floyd, ‘something else’ could include anything depending on his mood. Some examples of activities you’ve done during study sessions with Floyd: karaoke, ping pong, pottery, a treasure hunt all over the school for something Floyd lost a while ago and had suddenly remembered at that moment (it was in his pocket), ballroom dance classes, shopping, video games, baking. You don’t even bring any study materials with you at this point.

Jade and Azul are more what you’d expect from tutors.

Jade’s method of tutoring is hands off. He mostly just has you do your homework while he sits across from you, working on his own stuff. And if you don’t have homework or finish before study time is up, he’ll give you readings and practice assignments to do. He encourages you to ask him questions whenever you have them, but for the most part, you two are silent. What you don’t realize is that he actually spends most of the time just staring at you. Studying you.

Azul is more hands on. Like with Jade, youre expected to either work on a class assignment, or one of Azul’s specially crafted study guides. Unlike Jade, who always sits across from you, Azul sits—or, more often, stands—next to you. Instead of just silently watching you work, Azul works you through each problem. He’ll often end up hovering next to you, sometimes taking your writing hand in his to guide you through whatever problem you’re working on. He also offers coffee/tea/snack breaks, where you two can just talk, not just about schoolwork, but anything else.

You’re spending every night with one of them. You often get back to Ramshackle late (especially if it was a session with Floyd). You don’t see Horns as much, if at all. Study sessions with your freshman friends become almost nonexistent. Even Grim is starting to see less and less of you everyday.

Who you end up spending the most time with is, of course, the Octotrio. Not just for nightly study sessions anymore. Floyd will approach you outside of tutoring for fun activities. Jade often offers you treats for doing so well, including trips to Sam’s and lunch at Mostró Lounge—all on him, of course. And Azul often pops in to check in on you—to make sure you’re holding up your side of the deal. And, even if you don’t realize it, there’s always at least one of them waiting to walk you to class.

It’s no secret that Azul basically always has business on the brain. And this? This was his strategic move to monopolize you, and he got you hook, line, and sinker.

[a-sound-sol]

MHA Guys x Autistic!Reader Headcanons

ft. Bakugou, Midoriya, Kaminari, Kirishima, Sero, Monoma, and Shinsou!

Katsuki Bakugou

always has all your sensory tools on him!

will shut anyone up who tries to talk to you during a meltdown or when you’re overstimulated

gives you space when u need it but always keeps an eye on you anyways

when you’re ready for affection he is ON IT!!! Cuddles, kisses, doesn’t matter. But he waits for the signals first.

keeps an AAC app for your nonspeaking moments, it’s on his phone.

he actually has a whole section of apps just for you, sensory stuff, soothing music, you name it

he will protect you from yourself if you start to try and hurt yourself. he will hold you so tightly while you cry.

Izuku Midoriya

now he’s one to notice the MINUTE you get overstimulated! And he will make up any excuse to get you out of wherever you guys are!!

he talks to you when you want to be distracted! And he’ll infodump about anything

on that note, he LOVES when you infodump. He thinks it’s the cutest thing you do, especially when you start to lose track of time as you go on.

he will comfort you when you need it! He has a hard time sitting in silence, so he brings fidgets for himself too!

knows where all your sensory tools are in your room, brings his own noise cancelling headphones (he bought you yours! He has the same ones)

Denki Kaminari

oh he’s HORRIBLE at silence! But he will literally zip his mouth shut if he sees you need quiet

he owns a lot of fidgets already and all kinds of flexible seating options (his favorite is one of those exercise balls)

he will play with your hair and draw circles over your skin to meet your physical sensory needs! He’ll also do yoga with you without asking (:

has all your doctors’ names and numbers memorized just in case you have a really bad meltdown

will go dummy mode as a distraction so you can slip away if you get overwhelmed :’)

never gets mad if you snap on accident, will hold you while you cry about how you feel bad you snapped :((

Eijirou Kirishima

LOVES comforting you no matter what happened, but especially if you’ve had a meltdown that you got embarrassed about so you didn’t tell him :/

he loves to touch you, to hug you, and gives you the pressure you need to regulate

he reads books about autism to try and understand your needs better

always wants to make sure you’re okay at parties or gatherings, checks in frequently

defends you ALWAYS especially if someone is talking about how you’ve shut down. He makes it personal.

forehead kisses and back rubs when you’ve had a hard day. He will often tuck you in with your weighted blanket that he bought you for your birthday.

Hanta Sero

oh if you need a place to relax he’s got you! He knows how to set an atmosphere fr

he makes sure to only ever use scents that don’t overwhelm you when he cleans his room or lights incense

tells you you’re perfect the way you are and reassures you CONSTANTLY without you asking.

plays games with you because you love them and you said nobody ever wanted to play them with you growing up (he’d never let you feel alone)

genuinely asks how you are, but especially after a hard day. He goes out of his way constantly to check in

makes sure that you’re regulated before bed and as soon as you wake up too! Always meets those sensory needs, but doesn’t realize he’s doing it. It just comes naturally to him.

Neito Monoma

he has no problem being a distraction from any and everything you need, he kinda thrives that way actually!

he would entirely kidnap the moon for you. you told him once that the moon helped you feel grounded and less alone, and he almost went on that impossible mission (he didn't because he wouldn't get to see your face if things went south)

always has your favorite movies ready along with favorite snacks!

will never ever make you feel bad for having a harder day than usual. in fact, he will fight you if you even try to apologize

has no problem telling off anyone who tries to give you a hard time when you're already feeling anxious or overstimulated

Hitoshi Shinsou

you are his most important person and he will not let you ever think otherwise

if you even think of apologizing for being too much, he will immediately put his hand over your mouth and hug you

he rubs your shoulders and gives you pressure when you need it, without even asking. he just knows you that well

he IS the human fidget! If you don't have any sensory tools, he's quick to guide your hand to his fingers, his hair, even his face if you really need to ground.

his voice stays low and he guides you through meltdowns, always holding you when you need that, and giving you space when you don't. but he always stays with you.

Hope you enjoyed!!! I think I'm gonna do another headcanon part with other characters too! thoughts?

[slut4thebroken]

Opposites Attract

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

Pairing | Jason Todd x reader

Summary | Jason in your hyperfeminine pink bedroom (and house lol)

Warnings | Reader isn’t infantalized she just likes feminine things lol, fluff, kissing, Jay being a big fat softie.

Words | 1.2 k

Notes | Honestly idk. I’m going through an aesthetic change rn and was struck with a vision one day lol. (Also this pic set is a direct result of there being literally no pictures or gifs of Jason 😭 I had to take matters into my own hands smh.)

Ao3 link | <3

Masterlist

You always loved when Jason came over. You loved his company of course, but mostly you just loved seeing him in your house, especially your room. 

There’s something almost comical about a six foot tall, burly, vigilante, who’s covered in scars and only wears dark clothes, standing amongst all of the baby pink and white, and the delicate silk and lace in your bedroom. He sticks out terribly, even in the rest of your house, and you can’t help but be amused by it everytime. 

You were sitting in bed with a book tonight, wearing a white babydoll nightie and hugging your teddy bear to your chest. When you heard a noise from outside your bedroom, you stiffened, your heart beating faster and harder in your chest. You strained your ears to listen and for a few seconds it was completely silent until you heard quiet footsteps. Before you could react your door was opening and you almost breathed a sigh of relief when you saw who it was. All of the anxiety quickly melted into happiness. 

“Jay!” You said excitedly, setting your book on the nightstand. 

“Hi, princess.” His hair was still a little damp and he was in casual clothes so he must’ve done some vigilante stuff tonight— a while ago you scolded him for tracking mud on your rug and getting blood on your sheets, and ever since then, you’ve demanded that he comes here completely clean. 

You set down the teddy bear and got up to greet him properly, with a hug and a kiss. His hands settled on your waist over the soft material of your dress and you placed your arms on his shoulders, standing up on your toes so he didn’t have to bend down so much. When he pulled back from the kiss, you whined quietly, making him chuckle. 

“You scared me.” You frowned. Even thought you gave him a key, you wished he’d knock because of how naturally quiet he always is. 

“I’m sorry, baby.” He murmured, giving you another quick kiss, making you forget all about that. “Should I be jealous?” He asked and you furrowed your brows, not understanding because you were still dazed from both kisses. But he explained once he saw your expression. “That you’re cuddling with another man in your bed.” You couldn’t keep the little giggle in, especially when he started smiling. 

“No.. It’s just Teddy.” You said through a quiet laugh. “Plus now that you’re here, I can cuddle with you instead.” You gave him a bright smile and he chuckled under his breath, bringing a hand up to brush your hair back, then cup your cheek. 

“I’m not intruding?” 

“Nope. I was just reading.”  

“Good cause I thought we could bake some cookies and have a movie night.” You were nodding eagerly before he could even finish. 

It was mostly him putting everything together and you following his every move with heart eyes. You wanted to help, but each time you tried, he sat you back down. He gave you the spoon for you to lick the extra batter from while he finished everything up. When the utensil was clean, he grabbed it and put it in the sink, then walked over to you and picked you up, taking you to the couch. You giggled as you clung to him— you didn’t think he’d drop you, it was just a habit that eased your nerves. When you were both on the couch with your legs over his, his hand on your thigh, and his arm around your shoulders, he leaned down and gave you a quick kiss. 

“I missed you, baby.” He rasped, making your cheeks heat up. 

“I saw you three days ago.” You chuckled breathlessly, even though you probably missed him more than he did. 

“And that was three days too long. What have you been up to, pretty girl?” He leaned down even farther and pressed soft kisses to your neck. You let out a shaky breath and gripped his shirt. 

“N-nothing… Just working on some hobbies.” You shrugged, getting a little sad. You wished you lived with him. You wished you could make dinner every night for both of you, clean up around the house, help him out of his clothes when he got home on days that he was particularly battered, give him a massage— and… anything else he might need— whenever he’s feeling stressed… You wanted it all. But you couldn’t have it, not yet at least. 

“Yeah?” He lightly nipped at your neck, making you let out a startled whimper. 

“Mhm.” You hummed, letting your eyes flutter shut. He kissed down your neck to your shoulder and slowly moved the fabric down to expose more skin. “Jay…” You said through a breath, trying not to get overwhelmed with the feeling of his lips on you. 

“Hm?” He moved to your collarbone now, slowly kissing across it to the center of your chest. 

“Need you.” You whined, starting to squirm. His hand started rubbing up and down your thigh, probably to soothe you, but it only got you more worked up. “Please?” You used the voice that always gets you what you want and he pulled back to look at you, letting out a heavy sigh as his lips curled into a small smile. 

“I can’t say no to you, princess.” You all but beamed in response, excited to get what you wanted. His hand started sliding up your leg until he gripped your hip, under the nightie, making your breath hitch. Leaning forward, he pressed a gentle kiss to your lips and smiled when you started squirming again. He never broke the kiss as he lifted your body and set you in his lap, straddling his legs. Both of his hands squeezed your hips, teasing the waistband of your panties, and yours moved to his hair, tugging lightly. 

Faintly, you heard a noise from the kitchen, but you couldn’t focus on it. When he pulled back, you whined and tried to kiss him again, but he placed a gentle hand on your neck as a warning. 

“I have to get the cookies, baby.”

“Let them burn, I don't care.” You were still squirming, trying to get friction and pleasure that he wouldn’t allow. 

“You say that now, but in half an hour you’ll be pouting about how you don’t have any cookies.” He chuckled, making you frown. He didn’t give you another chance to protest before he was lifting you off his lap and placing you back on the couch. You grabbed his hand when he started walking past you, looking up at him with pleading eyes and a pout. 

“You’re my good girl… you can wait just a little longer, can’t you?” You frowned and averted your gaze for a moment, then nodded. He gave you a soft smile as he cupped your cheek, running his thumb over your bottom lip. “Thank you, baby.” He said proudly, making you blush, then continued on toward the kitchen. You turned around and leaned your chin on the back of the couch to watch him. 

He looked so silly in your kitchen full of pink colors, towels with lace trim, and flower themed decor. But he looked even sillier wearing your pink oven mitts as he took the tray out of the oven. You bit back a smile as you watched him reach for a heart shaped spatula to put the cookies on a plate. 

Despite the incongruity in the delicate setting, he managed to blend in seamlessly, almost making the contrast appear natural. It was giving you even more proof that he belonged here— belonged with you. 

Taglist (join here)

@pedrisgatorade @lunyyx @faebirdie @idkdudsworld @nashja @rentaldarling @whydoyoucare866 @zurakoisanhornysimp @brooklynscherry-z @wartofart @deimks @n1ghtw1ngslvr @harleycao @baebeepeach @jayroytodd @zurakoisanhornysimp

[magicalbats]

Kinktober 2024 Day 9: Eremites x Reader

Rating: R-18+

Word Count: 7148

Warnings: Afab!reader, coercion, dubcon to noncon, size difference, anal fingering, anal sex, anal creampie, anal gape, tag teaming, passed around, ass to mouth, cumflation, multiple orgasms, stomach distention, pregnancy mentions, implied piv, implied double penetration

A/N: Do you guys remember when I did that Eremite poll not too long ago? 🤭 Now, I do have to warn that this one got kind of gross BUT when I write any kind of butt stuff I simply pretend like excrement does not exist. Like at all. So no matter how I describe anything involving this topic there is absolutely NO scat content in this fic or any other I post. That's one of my 'absolutely not's for a reason! I promise this is a safe space for us anal enjoyers lol

⭐

The dark winding corridors that lead further and further down into the bowels of the earth seem never ending. You’d read, of course, that the construction of King Deshret’s various temples and monuments scattered across his kingdom in the now barren desert had been long, arduous endeavors each that took many, many years to finish. But somehow you hadn’t grasped the full scope of it until you were traversing one of them yourself, stomping down the same path the ancients had once walked with sand grit caught in your shoes. 

You were hot and tired, and growing increasingly more irate the further you went into the stuffy, closed off space of the underground network. Claustrophobia wasn’t usually a problem you had to deal with but it was getting harder not to succumb to that instinctive spike of anxiety when you thought about how many tons of sand and stone must be sitting right over your head. It was enough to make anyone panic. 

Luckily your guides don’t appear to have any such concerns about getting out of here or not, and that goes a long way in helping you keep your head on straight. If they were well acquainted enough with the layout of this temple to not have to worry about such things then you were probably in good hands. 

Or so you wanted to believe, anyway. 

“Sorry to ask this again but … are we starting to get close now?” 

The one who’d curtly introduced himself as Sunfrost back at Caravan Ribat huffs a faint sound of acknowledgement but otherwise keeps his attention turned forward at the path ahead. “Soon. The chamber is just a little further on.” 

Never mind the fact he’d said the same thing almost an hour ago now. 

You’d been mentally keeping track so you could notate how long it took to get from the now long distant entrance of this place to the hidden inner chamber deep within but it had quickly turned into some bizarre form of self flagellation. You were just a student of the Akademiya, you weren’t built for walking for hours on end. 

Oh, if only one of them would offer to carry you for a while, you’d happily take them up on that and probably even throw in a bonus on top of it. You didn’t have a whole lot of mora to spare but in this case it would’ve been well worth the extra expense.  

Unfortunately the Eremites were, by nature, not very fond of anyone who came from Sumeru’s rainforest, let alone those who were affiliated with the prestigious school there. It had taken you a few days just to find someone who’d even listen to your request and then a few more on top of that to find a mercenary actually willing to take on the job. They didn’t truly care about you or your wellbeing, a simple fact that had only been made all the more apparent over the course of this relentless death march they were leading you on. It felt like an eternity had gone by since the last time you were permitted to sit down and rest. 

The other one who called himself Stone Enchanter liked you even less than Sunfrost though, and he’d barely spoken more than five words to you so far. In truth you’d been more than just a little hesitant to accept their help when both of them were so large and imposing, not to mention clearly very dangerous individuals, having much preferred to work with someone who was a bit less scary, but you’d had no other option at that point. The memory of them towering over you on one of the caravan roads where they’d cornered you still sends a vague shudder racing down your spine. At first you’d thought they were going to rob you, not offer up their services. 

But you’d already made it this far and it was much too late for second thoughts now. You were miles underground in the labyrinthine maze below the Dune of Carouses with no reasonable grasp on which way was which after taking so many turns and descending an innumerable amount of crumbling staircases to get here. These two were the only thing standing between you and certain death down in the silent tombs so you had no choice but to trust them. 

And when you finally step into a spacious chamber at the far end of the corridor you’d traveled together, you think that your patience is paying off at last. This room looks virtually indistinguishable from all the others you’d had to pass through to get here with the sole exception of a massive slate door on the opposite wall. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in centuries, your eager excitement quickly making you forget your fatigue as you hurry over to examine it. 

“This is amazing.” You murmur, reverently putting your hand on top of the carved stone to feel along the hieroglyphic inscription. This thing must have weighed a ton and you wonder not for the first time how the people of Deshret’s civilization managed such a feat. What remained of their monuments on the surface was already impressive enough, but this was so deep below the sand that it was hard to imagine how they’d accomplished it. 

“Is it all that you’d hoped for?” Sunfrost asks as he comes up behind you with Stone Enchanter bringing up the rear. 

“Yes, this is exactly what I was trying to find. This should lead straight to a treasure room if the books in the House of Daena are right.” Your head positively swims with thoughts of all the ancient artifacts just out of reach as you turn to look at them imploringly. “Do you know how to open it? Everything I read just briefly mentioned some sort of mechanism but I don’t see anything like that here.” 

Silently, the two Eremites exchange a shuttered look with one another. 

“We know how,” Sunfrost says in a careful tone, somehow eyeing you through the red brocade tied over his eyes. You’re not sure if it’s genuine or just a result of the blindfolds making you uneasy, but a sharp chill works through you in response. 

“Then will you tell me? Please?” 

Another glance is exchanged between them but this time it’s Stone Enchanter who speaks. “I doubt you’ll like the answer.” 

Your surprise at hearing him talk is quickly overshadowed by the deeply unsettling confusion that washes over you. “What do you mean? Is it not like the other mechanisms we passed on the way here?” 

Breathing out a terse sigh that makes his broad shoulders rise and fall, Sunfrost steps forward to come tower over you much like he had back at Caravan Ribat. “Tell me, little scholar. How much do you know about the magick of the forgotten civilization?” 

You frown up at him at that. “I know a fair amount but I don’t think I’d call it magic. The technological advancements of King - -“ 

“Ah, but that’s not all it is, is it? You seem clever enough for someone who hails from the comfortable rainforest so you must realize that there was more at play than mere technology. What do you suppose powers those machines, hm?” 

Chewing on your bottom lip, you turn that over for a moment. He certainly wasn’t wrong about that and they did seem to be fairly familiar with this place so … 

“Alright.” You relent, bringing your head up to look at him head on. “What you’re saying is this door doesn’t utilize the same mechanical components as the others but some sort of — magic seal?” 

Sunfrost nods to make his tied off hair bounce slightly with the motion. “Yes. This leads to a very important inner chamber, after all. It only makes sense to protect what’s inside with higher security measures.” 

“Okay, what do we have to do to unseal it then?” 

“Well - -“

“The inscription says that a pound of flesh must be offered up if you wish to gain entry to what lies beyond.” Stone Enchanter cuts in, not mincing his words or sugar coating it even a little bit. “Do not look so frightened, scholar. It’s not as gruesome as what you’re probably thinking. A human offering can be made in several different ways, can’t it?” 

“That’s right.” Sunfrost helpfully nods his head again. “Sex magick was favored by Al-Ahmar and his courtiers at many times during his long and prosperous reign. It can be even more effective in stopping unwanted intruders than a true blood rite.” 

“Wait —“ Your head positively reels in outright disbelief as you hold up a hand to stop him from going on any further. “You can’t be serious, right? Do you really expect me to believe that?” 

“Believe it or don’t.” Stone Enchanter huffs, crossing his big, burly arms across his equally massive chest. “We are telling you how to open the door. It is none of our concern if you’d rather turn back now since we’ll be getting paid either way.” 

“B - but this doesn’t even make any sense.” You stammer. “Even if I wanted to proceed there isn’t anyone here who can …” 

You trail off into stunned silence at the pointed looks they both send you. It takes you a prolonged moment to fully understand what they were trying to say without outright saying it, and your face immediately burns hot enough to fry an egg on. 

“No. No way, absolutely not!” 

“Then we will leave and return to Caravan Ribat.” 

“No! Just — give me a second to think!” Hands coming up to clutch at your blazing hot cheeks, you set in to anxiously pace back and forth in front of the door while the two Eremites disinterestedly watch on. 

But no matter how you tried to slice it there was no getting around this if what they’d said was true. Either you had to resort to politely asking one of them to have sex with you or you had to return back to the Akademiya empty handed. It was truly a matter of choosing between either the fire or the pot, and you struggle just to wrap your head around such a difficult decision. 

This could not be happening. It couldn’t be! 

“Do you truly find us that disagreeable?” Stone Enchanter finally asks after a long moment of tension filled silence, making you aggressively round on him. 

“That is hardly the problem here! I - I’ve never … I didn’t plan to do something like this so suddenly, and with someone I barely even know on top of that.”

“You’re a virgin.” Sunfrost supplies, and even though you can’t see it through the headband tied over his face you can all but sense his brows lifting in genuine surprise. 

“Even putting that aside,” You hiss, shooting him a dangerous look. “I can’t run the risk of getting pregnant on this expedition. I’m still in school! I’ll never be able to graduate if I have to take care of a baby!” 

“There’s an easy way around that.” Stone Enchanter says, cooly interrupting you mid outburst and earning himself a sharp look of ire from you as well. “You have more than one hole, don’t you? And only one of them is known to result in a baby.” 

You just stare at him in numb disbelief. He wasn’t actually suggesting … he couldn’t be! 

“Wha — a - and how exactly do you expect to accomplish that, huh? Just right here on the floor like I’m nothing more than an animal to you?” 

“No. It must be done on the offering slate.” Sunfrost nudges his chin at the stout dais you’d completely bypassed in favor of the much more interesting door. 

Situated directly in front of the sealed entryway but pushed back from it by a few feet, it was all too easy to overlook in your initial excitement but looking at it now you can see the wisdom in what he was saying. You’d thought there weren’t any mechanisms in this room but it was actually right in front of your face the entire time. It was logical enough to guess that it was likely meant for some sort of ritualistic purpose given its important positioning as well as the intricate carvings decorating the slate sides of it but …

It feels like your stomach is doing anxious somersaults as you regard the fixture like it was something that might jump up and bite you, yet you still find yourself grudgingly coming to terms with the situation. If this was truly the only way then you had no choice. You’d spent far too much mora and time on this expedition, tirelessly trekked over countless miles just to get here, and you simply couldn’t turn back now. 

Resolutely bringing your head up, you look the two Eremites over with a frown. “Fine. I’ll do it. But I don’t want you touching me.” 

Stone Enchanter stiffens slightly when you point an accusing finger at him. “What did I do?” 

“You’re incredibly rude, for starters.” Narrowing your eyes at him in warning, you decisively turn your finger on Sunfrost next. “You. Will you d - do it with me, or not?” 

The ponytailed man sends his companion a silent look before breathing out another clipped sigh, this one somehow even more long suffering than the last. “I suppose I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

Your face positively burns at his martyred act but even as someone who was not overly familiar with this sort of thing you can still recognize the anticipation in his body language now. At least as a man you could trust him to not have any problems giving you what you want, and you stubbornly keep your head held high as you walk over to join them by the slate dais even though every single alarm bell in your head was going off all at once. You couldn’t actually believe you were about to go through with this, and the fast thrumming adrenaline pumping through your system seems to be the only thing that keeps you going. 

“What should I do to get ready?” You ask as you sidle up beside him, earning a brief glance from the exceptionally tall man. 

“Take off your pants and any underwear you might be wearing.” 

Well, at least that sounded easy enough. 

Hesitantly reaching for the front of your slacks, you make careful work of slowly unfastening them so you can shove the material down your legs. They’re kicked off right along with your boots and, unsure of the etiquette, you decide to take your socks off as well. Standing there in your underwear with two men you’d just met only a few days prior almost makes you second guess this decision but the promise of what lies beyond that door urges you on. The chance to make a name for yourself before you’d even graduated and earn the academic accolades that would come with it was simply far too tempting to resist. 

Resolutely sliding your panties down and stepping out of them, you find yourself fiddling with the bottom hem of your blouse as you look up to Sunfrost for his next instruction. 

“Okay, what’s next? Should I just - -“ 

A startled gasp cuts you off when he smoothly pivots towards you and grabs under your arms so he can heft you up without even an ounce of difficulty to show for it. Squeaking at suddenly finding yourself much further up from the ground than you were used to, you blindly latch your fingers onto the firm, unwavering stretch of his forearms to hold on for dear life. 

All he does is set you down on top of the carved slab and then lay you back against it though, surprisingly gentle despite the manhandling. The polished surface is infused with a deep, dank chill that makes goosebumps erupt all over your body as soon as your bare skin touches it, nipples pebbling to hard points against the interior of your brassiere. A soft whimper slips out of you as he pulls back to situate himself while Stone Enchanter watches on from the side. Despite the red blindfold hiding his eyes from your line of sight, you can tell he’s unabashedly studying the fleshy seam between your legs. 

No, that wasn’t quite right. Both of them were. 

You’d never felt quite so anxious or jittery with nerves in all your life, and you uncertainly track the motion of Sunfrost’s hand when he pulls something out of his supplies pack. “W - what is that?” 

“Oil.” 

You gulp so hard it almost makes you gag. “What … what kind of oil?” 

“Does it really matter what kind it is?” Stone Enchanter chimes in with a condescending tilt of his head. “You’ll be thankful for it soon enough so relax. You might even enjoy it.”

You very much doubted that but you keep those thoughts to yourself as Sunfrost shuffles into the space between your legs where he nudges one of your ankles upward with his free hand. “Hold them up and keep them spread for me. This won’t work if you’re trying to squeeze them shut.” 

It’s a struggle just to breathe with your heart wedged inside your throat but you slowly comply, curling your legs up and letting them fall into a shameless spread that you know completely bares you to them. There isn’t an inch of you they can’t see clearly like this, the thought alone embarrassing you enough to feel faint. 

But you just keep reminding yourself what you were doing this for, why you were sacrificing your dignity in such a humiliating manner while Sunfrost makes quick work of unscrewing the cap from the vial. You watch him reach down between your legs where he carefully upends it and you hiss at the first cool, sticky touch of the copious liquid. 

You can feel it clinging to your skin, making a goopy mess of you where it hits its mark in the center seam of your cunt. It’s incredibly watery though despite the thick consistency and it quickly dribbles down in excess to coat your twitching asshole. It’s a strange feeling, and one you don’t think you like very much, but you clench your teeth to keep silent while Sunfrost crowds his other hand close to rub the mysterious liquid over your puckered hole. 

At least he’s being gentle about it, you think to yourself. But at the same time you’re more than just slightly alarmed at how quickly the goop he spreads over your skin makes the muscle start to puff up and loosen under his ministrations. You can feel it in stunning high definition, especially when he starts to focus in on the center of it, and you soon find your breath coming a little quicker, a little harder. You were starting to get unbearably hot too. 

And then when he finally starts to ease the tip of one blocky finger into the slackened wrinkle, you choke on a haggard sound at the ease with which he penetrates you. Whatever kind of oil that is, it was incredibly efficient as a lubricant and even the sensitive squeeze of your untested passage isn’t enough to keep him out. Sunfrost just slides right up into you straight down to the knuckle, and you positively quake there on top of that slate slab. 

“Do not tense up, little scholar. It will only do you more harm than good in the long run.” He chides you, the noticeable drop in his voice registering somewhere far in the back of your mind. You’re a bit too caught up in the reeling rush of sharp edged stimuli to linger on it for very long though, shuddering fiercely as he starts to thrust in and out of you. 

“Oooh, Archons, that’s …” 

“Only one finger.” Stone Enchanter chuckles from somewhere just on the edge of your fuzzy periphery. “You’ll have to take something much larger than that before this is through.” 

“It’s working though.” Sunfrost adds. “Look at the door. That should be all the proof you need to know we’re telling you the truth.” 

Feeling dizzy and disoriented now, you slowly loll your head back against the surface they’ve got you laid out on to peer over at the sealed entrance. Sure enough, the center node fitted into the meticulously carved stone was starting to glow the faintest blue, as if it were actively getting a charge from the scene playing out before it. 

You knew you should have been excited and happy about this revelation but somehow you’re just a little too distracted by the constant push and pull of Sunfrost’s hand to really focus on that right now. Especially not when you were keenly aware of the fleshy cling of your asshole gripping him on the way out before readily accepting the stretch on the next inward plunge. It was strange and borderline uncomfortable, but at least it didn’t hurt. 

Even when he adds a second finger to further open you up for him, it just makes you squirm at the odd sensation of it all. The strangest part though was the sympathetic reaction in your cunt which gradually starts to grow hot and sticky the longer this goes on, almost as if it too wanted to be stretched and filled. You couldn’t make any sense of it when your head felt like it was stuffed with cotton so you just lie there and take it, hoping this ordeal would be over sooner rather than later. 

“That’s still a tight fit,” Sunfrost murmurs after a prolonged stretch of silence only interspersed by the soft, sticky click of your asshole accepting his fingers and the strained inhales you suck in. “Guess you really are a virgin.” 

“What else did you expect after the way she was carrying on?” 

Your annoyance with Stone Enchanter only seems to grow every time he opens his mouth but this, too, doesn’t seem half as pressing as your slowly building arousal. 

You were a bit miffed that this was actually having some kind of positive effect on you despite your best attempts to ignore it and remain impartial. That was a losing battle though, and you can only whimper a high strung sound when you feel him start to work a third finger into your loosely clenching hole. Now it starts to toe the line of painful, prompting you to hiss a sharp breath as you thunk your head back against the slate. 

“I - it hurts!” 

“You need to relax, or it really will hurt here in a moment. How do you expect to take my cock if you can’t even handle a few fingers?” 

Seething a wounded little sound, you turn your head to look over at the door again. It was still just barely glowing and it didn’t look like it had increased in strength at all since the last time you’d checked. You really were going to have to see this through all the way. 

“Can you bear down slowly?” Sunfrost’s voice pulls your attention back around with a tiny broken whimper. 

You aren’t sure what else to do with your hands so you resort to reaching out to either side so you can clutch at the ledge of the dais in a death grip. Screwing your eyes shut in an attempt to dissuade the embarrassed tears that form in them, you hesitantly do as he’d requested and push down on his fingers, allowing him to slide the additional digit in right alongside the rest. You couldn’t even believe how stretched out your ass felt around him or the vaguely burning throb that comes with it. Worst of all is your cunt and how very empty it feels, your toes helplessly clenching and unclenching in the air as you try to suppress the urge to start squirming. 

Your pussy felt like it was soaked and nobody had even touched it yet. How were you possibly supposed to get through this without mindlessly begging them to fuck you? 

“There,” Sunfrost murmurs, adding a small twist to the thrusting motion of his hand so he can thoroughly stretch out your tight inner sleeve. “That’s much better. Just focus on your breathing and it’ll be over before you know it.” 

All you manage is a faltering mewl in response, feeling so overwhelmed by the unfamiliar sensations and the rush of stimuli that you can hardly even think straight anymore. 

You’re so lost in the punchdrunk haze that you’re not quite certain how long he actually spends working your asshole open, but you are keenly aware of the muscle struggling to close again when he finally pulls back some time later. It’s like there’s a second heartbeat mirrored in your lower body, echoed twice over in both your pussy and your ass, and you’re really not sure how to process any of it. 

So you just lie there while he fumbles around between your legs for a moment, drunkenly lolling in and out of reality until you feel Sunfrost shuffle right up against you. The nudge of something smooth and fleshy pressing in on your back entrance startles you out of your stupor though, and you quickly snap your head up to look down. 

Your eyes almost pop right out of your head when you see how very large and rigid he is, frightened panic quickly rushing in to drown out some of the delirium. Sucking in a frazzled breath, you start to shove yourself upright but he’s quick to grab hold of your ankles, keeping them elevated and forcing you to stay down in the process. 

“W - wait, I can’t - - it’s too big!” You wail, uselessly twisting your legs but his hold on you is as good as iron. It was clear you wouldn’t be going anywhere soon, not until he decided to let you go. 

“You can.” He intones, nudging his hips forward to just dip the head of his cock past the struggling ring of muscle to rest along the inner rim. “And you will. Just breathe through it and bear down when I start to slide in.” 

You can see Stone Enchanter stiffly shifting his weight at the edge of your peripheral but you’re a little too focused on not devolving into a full blown panic attack to pay him much mind right now. It would have been a frightening prospect to have that huge thing bullied into your cunt but your asshole … you genuinely didn’t think it would fit. No matter how much he’d stretched you out beforehand, there was a problem with the logistics! 

To your rattling surprise though he does indeed start to slip inside you one torturous, slow moving inch at a time. A little nudge here, leaning into you to let his weight do the job there. You’re horrified at how wide your asshole actually spreads open around his girth to grant him entry to your body, that viscous lubricant making the slide as easy as it probably could be given the size difference. And he just keeps coming, feeding more and more of his cock into you until it feels like he’s reaching deep enough to press in on your guts. 

You’re not sure when exactly the tears start up in earnest but your face is coated in hot, salty tracks by the time he finally nudges his hips up against your ass. Rapidly sucking in one ragged breath after another, you just lie there and pitifully shake while the sensation of being so deeply impaled on his length threatens to send you teetering right over the edge. It was inconceivable that you should feel this horribly close to an orgasm when your ass was the only thing being stuffed full at the moment. 

Heaving a low, masculine grunt, Sunfrost gradually starts to move then, halfheartedly rocking his pelvis to give you a chance to adjust. Everything from the waist down is so sensitized and tender that even that much you feel in blinding starbursts of friction which practically has your eyes rolling back in your head. 

“How do you like that cock in your ass, little scholar? Does it feel good?” 

Blubbering a weak, faltering moan into the stuffy room, you plaintively shake your head. You didn’t like this, you didn’t! 

Stone Enchanter chuckles a rumbling sound somewhere just off to your left as Sunfrost starts to pick up the pace, easing himself out only enough so he can then push back in. It was clear even to you that he was building himself up to fuller strokes though, something you couldn’t even conceive when your ruined asshole was already weakly clinging to his thick shaft, and you have to force yourself to shoot another bleary look over at the door. 

It was indeed glowing a brighter color now, as if it really were responding to the defilement of your body. You probably would have laughed if you’d had the extra oxygen to do so. You weren’t sure how you were ever going to recover from this so you sorely hoped whatever was waiting on the other side was well worth the price. 

And as the minutes continue to tick by in this fashion, Sunfrost becomes ever more uninhibited both in the way he eagerly fucks into your ass and the resounding noises of pleasure he lets out while he does it. At some point he even lets go of your ankles, confident you wouldn’t be going anywhere, and he allows your legs to weakly curl around his sides while he braces his hands along the top of the slab. Even in your intoxicated state of mind you can tell he’s longingly watching your tits bounce underneath your blouse with each and every thrust he gives, but you don’t quite have the presence of mind to scold him for it. 

The fact they’d even left you that small dignity was probably a miracle. 

Luckily, though, it doesn’t take too long for him to finish and you roughly hiss through your teeth when his once steady thrusts start to lose some of their rhythm in favor of jerky, shuddering jabs up into your guts. Then he grunts a heaving, bestial sound that seems to rush straight down to your cunt, making it pitifully squeeze around nothing, seconds before you feel the vague sensation of him shooting off deep within you. It’s an exceptionally odd feeling, particularly when you were keenly aware of that foreign sensation settling inside you in heavy, clinging clumps. But you just let him do it, glad that it was at least over. You weren’t sure how much more you could’ve taken if he’d decided to take his time with it and drag it out.  

“Gods, that’s a sweet ass you’ve got.” He heavily breathes out, head hanging low between his shoulders while he recovers. 

“Thanks,” You bitterly murmur as you reach up to lightly press on his hard stomach. “But can you get off me now? I’d like to keep going.” 

Languidly laughing, Sunfrost gives his head a brief shake to send his ponytail swishing back and forth before he pushes himself up to stand straight. Hooking a hand around one of your ankles, he nudges it a little higher while the other reaches down to help ease himself out of you. He’s intentionally slow and careful about it, and you soon realize why when a dribble of fast cooling semen rushes out after him the second he slips free of your pitifully clinging hole. 

Groaning a deeply embarrassed sound, you fitfully squirm on top of the dais as you desperately will your ass to close shut again. It’s an effort in futility though, and even when it starts to gradually return to its usual state you can tell by the looseness of the muscle that it was probably never going to be quite the same ever again. Damn him. 

In fact, damn both of them. A little warning before they took you this deep into the monument ruins would have been appreciated. Your one and only consolation was that the door was now wide open, and there was nothing else standing in the way of your objective. 

“Here, let me help you up.” Sunfrost says, offering you his hand which you somewhat grudgingly accept. You weren’t exactly happy about it but you knew your own body well enough to realize just how sore you were going to be after this. 

Using his arm to steady your balance, you gingerly scoot to the edge of the raised slate and slide down to your feet. You’re beyond horrified when your ass instinctively clenches against the sudden flood of cum that rushes down with the shift but you valiantly hold it in for fear of further humiliating yourself. You’d already suffered more than enough as far as you were concerned. 

“Alright, let’s get going.” Stone Enchanter says as he bends down to grab up your discarded clothes from the floor. 

You’re almost fooled into thinking he’d had a change in attitude but then you watch him start to walk away with your pants and shoes in his arms, and your heart plummets straight into the ground. “W - wait, those are mine!” 

“And you’ll get them back when we’re done.” He calls over his shoulder. 

Deciding you really didn’t like that guy, you shoot Sunfrost a wide eyed look. “What is he talking about?” 

“You’ll see.” Is all he says, further bewildering you. 

You’re in such a confused state of shock that you don’t even think to protest it when he takes you by the arm and starts to guide you forward, making sure you don’t fall when your legs threaten to give out under you. The only thing you could seem to fully process in that moment was how utterly ridiculous you felt walking around in only a shirt with your sticky cunt making an even greater mess between your legs. 

When was this going to end, you wonder. 

Not any time soon, you realize only a moment later when the short walk down the unsealed corridor takes you to another door and a second offering slab. 

For a long moment you just stare at it in slack jawed disbelief. No way this was actually happening. 

“Do you understand now, denizen of the rainforest? Our people do not give up their treasures so easily.”

Eyes flickering to Stone Enchanter, you numbly watch him drop your clothes at the foot of the new dais. That’s also when you notice the intimidating tent poking up through even the red sash that hangs down in front of his waist. He must’ve been quite large as well then, a thought that doesn’t exactly come as a surprise but still disarms you a great deal. Surely he wasn’t actually going to … 

“I told you I didn’t want you touching me.” You intone, trying your damnedest to keep your voice even and steady. 

“Doesn’t matter. This offering requires two pounds of flesh to gain entry.” 

You suck in a sharp breath, intending to scream at him to fuck off, but the words abruptly catch in your throat when Sunfrost uses his hold on your arm to steer you forward. Bare feet stumbling across the stone block floor, you wildly wrench back in an attempt to free yourself but it does you no good. He’s too strong and you’re more than just a little outclassed when you didn’t even have any pants on to put up a proper fight. 

Fresh tears spring up in your eyes as he roughly passes you off to his partner who grabs you around the middle so he can lift you. All your kicking and thrashing doesn’t even seem to register as he moves to pin you on top of the smooth surface, belly down to leave your ass vulnerable and defenseless in the air. 

Real panic grips you in a chokehold now as you frantically try to push yourself upright but he easily keeps you in place with one massive hand splayed out across your lower back while he fumbles with his pants using the other. Your sobbing pleas go completely unheeded as Sunfrost comes around to stand just next to your head. He makes quick work of wrestling your trembling hands into the hold of a single fist so he can then reach down with the opposite hand to release his now flaccid cock again. 

“Stop!” You shriek at the top of your lungs, stomach painfully roiling with the debilitating pangs of fear that crash over you. “You - you can’t do this to me, do you understand? I’m — oh god, I’m a student of the Akademiya! When they find out what you’ve done - -“ 

“If they find out.” Stone Enchanter chuckles behind you, mere seconds before you feel his hand take pinching hold of your ass cheek so he can spread it apart from the other and bare your abused hole at him. Your mindless struggle immediately ratchets up another notch but they’ve got you completely trapped between them. 

All you can do is suck in a rough gasp when you feel him carelessly squirt another healthy dollop of that mysterious oil over your puffed up entrance, pausing only long enough to wedge his thumb inside you to test the give. Meanwhile, Sunfrost has taken his soft cock in hand and he coaxingly nudges it towards your mouth but you quickly jerk your head away. 

“What makes you think I’m going to - -!” 

Your shrilling abruptly cuts off when he reaches under your chin to forcefully yank your face back around, meanly squeezing your cheeks while he does it. “It’s not a matter of thinking it, little scholar. You will.” 

His fingers tighten until your lips start to push out in a loose pucker and you issue a dire whimper when he pulls you down to just ease the wrinkled tip of his foreskin into your mouth. An undignified, faltering wail rises up in your throat at the salty, bitter taste that immediately floods your mouth but you’re not sure if you should be more alarmed about that or the fact Stone Enchanter was using his thumb to hook the inside of your rim so he can tug it open again. 

The inside of your body is a creamy mess with the first load you’d had to take but that doesn’t seem to deter him at all. You can feel his cock pushing in on the loosened muscle to fill the space he creates with his hand, and you outright wail when he starts to slide in despite the tight clench of your sore asshole trying to keep him out. Unfortunately Sunfrost takes advantage of that opportunity to feed more of his spongy, flaccid cock into your mouth to stuff it full and smother the sound, leaving you stretched terribly thin between the two of them. 

And they're relentless in the way they use your body, each of them just as insistent and merciless as the other. While you’re made to clean Sunfrost’s cock and slowly coax it back to full strength again, Stone Enchanter takes his time slowly working his thick, rigid length in and out of you with savoringly measured thrusts that force you to feel the wide stretch of your hole. It was far too much for you to handle on any level, least of all physically, and it doesn’t take long for you to slip into a doped out, semi comatose state like this. 

Distantly, you’re aware of the moment when Stone Enchanter finally reaches his peak some time later, shooting off a fat, heavy load deep inside your ass while he grunts his pleasure. The amount of cum you can feel sloshing around within your guts somehow manages to register as surprising to you but you’re a little too far gone to linger on it. 

Especially not when Sunfrost pulls his now fully hardened cock from your mouth, leaving you in a puddle of your own drool while he walks back to take up the spot between your legs that Stone Enchanter vacates with a rumble of satisfaction. You brace yourself to be penetrated again, knowing the fresh stretch to your gaping hole was coming, but he manages to catch you off guard as he pulls you back by the hips to half slide down off the ceremonial dais. 

You immediately collapse when your legs buckle as soon as your feet touch the floor and the only thing that keeps you semi upright are his arms around your waist. Hanging limp from Sunfrost’s hold like a puppet that’s had its strings cut, you let him jostle you around until he’s got you positioned how he wants with one arm slung back behind his neck and one hand hooked under your knee. 

All at once he’s lifting you, and you plaintively squeal when the sudden shift of your body makes your loosened asshole give out to dribble thick, sloppy clumps of semen onto the ground. Lurching in horror at the apparent loss of your muscle control, you jerk your chin down as if to check yourself over and assess the damage, but the sight of your vaguely rounded belly stops you dead in your tracks. 

The entire world suddenly feels like it’s crashing down around you as you struggle to make sense of it even though on some basic, intrinsic level you understood that it could only be the result of one thing. They’d filled you up with enough cum that it was not only squirting right out of you but it was also starting to distend your stomach too. 

Worst of all, they didn’t appear to be done just yet as Stone Enchanter shuffles into the space between your spread legs, idly stroking his cock while he grins in your face. You aren’t sure what to make of it at first, suddenly finding yourself sandwiched between the two of them like this, but then Sunfrost nudges you lower to just brush his cock over the puffed out rim of your asshole. 

Sucking in a half strangled gasp, you jerk your wide eyed attention up at the red brocade on Stone Enchanter’s face, knowing he could still somehow see you even with it in the way. “Please,” You warble, dread making your voice sound tiny and frail. “Don’t do this to me. I’m begging you. I - I can’t - -“

“Take care of a baby?” He helpfully supplies as he shifts even closer to line himself up with your cunt, just barely touching your labia with the fleshy tip. “Well, let’s just say you won’t have to worry about that out here in the desert. You’ll have plenty of time to devote to motherhood without any school to get in the way.”

⭐

Crossposted: here

[canmom]

oh no she's talking about AI some more

to comment more on the latest round of AI big news (guess I do have more to say after all):

chatgpt ghiblification

trying to figure out how far it's actually an advance over the state of the art of finetunes and LoRAs and stuff in image generation? I don't keep up with image generation stuff really, just look at it occasionally and go damn that's all happening then, but there are a lot of finetunes focusing on "Ghibli's style" which get it more or less well. previously on here I commented on an AI video model generation that patterned itself on Ghibli films, and video is a lot harder than static images.

of course 'studio Ghibli style' isn't exactly one thing: there are stylistic commonalities to many of their works and recurring designs, for sure, but there are also details that depend on the specific character designer and film in question in large and small ways (nobody is shooting for My Neighbours the Yamadas with this, but also e.g. Castle in the Sky does not look like Pom Poko does not look like How Do You Live in a number of ways, even if it all recognisably belongs to the same lineage).

the interesting thing about the ghibli ChatGPT generations for me is how well they're able to handle simplification of forms in image-to-image generation, often quite drastically changing the proportions of the people depicted but recognisably maintaining correspondence of details. that sort of stylisation is quite difficult to do well even for humans, and it must reflect quite a high level of abstraction inside the model's latent space. there is also relatively little of the 'oversharpening'/'ringing artefact' look that has been a hallmark of many popular generators - it can do flat colour well.

the big touted feature is its ability to place text in images very accurately. this is undeniably impressive, although OpenAI themeselves admit it breaks down beyond a certain point, creating strange images which start out with plausible, clean text and then it gradually turns into AI nonsense. it's really weird! I thought text would go from 'unsolved' to 'completely solved' or 'randomly works or doesn't work' - instead, here it feels sort of like the model has a certain limited 'pipeline' for handling text in images, but when the amount of text overloads that bandwidth, the rest of the image has to make do with vague text-like shapes! maybe the techniques from that anthropic thought-probing paper might shed some light on how information flows through the model.

similarly the model also has a limit of scene complexity. it can only handle a certain number of objects (10-20, they say) before it starts getting confused and losing track of details.

as before when they first wired up Dall-E to ChatGPT, it also simply makes prompting a lot simpler. you don't have to fuck around with LoRAs and obtuse strings of words, you just talk to the most popular LLM and ask it to perform a modification in natural language: the whole process is once again black-boxed but you can tell it in natural language to make changes. it's a poor level of control compared to what artists are used to, but it's still huge for ordinary people, and of course there's nothing stopping you popping the output into an editor to do your own editing.

not sure the architecture they're using in this version, if ChatGPT is able to reason about image data in the same space as language data or if it's still calling a separate image model... need to look that up.

openAI's own claim is:

We trained our models on the joint distribution of online images and text, learning not just how images relate to language, but how they relate to each other. Combined with aggressive post-training, the resulting model has surprising visual fluency, capable of generating images that are useful, consistent, and context-aware.

that's kind of vague. not sure what architecture that implies. people are talking about 'multimodal generation' so maybe it is doing it all in one model? though I'm not exactly sure how the inputs and outputs would be wired in that case.

anyway, as far as complex scene understanding: per the link they've cracked the 'horse riding an astronaut' gotcha, they can do 'full glass of wine' at least some of the time but not so much in combination with other stuff, and they can't do accurate clock faces still.

normal sentences that we write in 2025.

it sounds like we've moved well beyond using tools like CLIP to classify images, and I suspect that glaze/nightshade are already obsolete, if they ever worked to begin with. (would need to test to find out).

all that said, I believe ChatGPT's image generator had been behind the times for quite a long time, so it probably feels like a bigger jump for regular ChatGPT users than the people most hooked into the AI image generator scene.

of course, in all the hubbub, we've also already seen the white house jump on the trend in a suitably appalling way, continuing the current era of smirking fascist political spectacle by making a ghiblified image of a crying woman being deported over drugs charges. (not gonna link that shit, you can find it if you really want to.) it's par for the course; the cruel provocation is exactly the point, which makes it hard to find the right tone to respond. I think that sort of use, though inevitable, is far more of a direct insult to the artists at Ghibli than merely creating a machine that imitates their work. (though they may feel differently! as yet no response from Studio Ghibli's official media. I'd hate to be the person who has to explain what's going on to Miyazaki.)

google make number go up

besides all that, apparently google deepmind's latest gemini model is really powerful at reasoning, and also notably cheaper to run, surpassing DeepSeek R1 on the performance/cost ratio front. when DeepSeek did this, it crashed the stock market. when Google did... crickets, only the real AI nerds who stare at benchmarks a lot seem to have noticed. I remember when Google releases (AlphaGo etc.) were huge news, but somehow the vibes aren't there anymore! it's weird.

I actually saw an ad for google phones with Gemini in the cinema when i went to see Gundam last week. they showed a variety of people asking it various questions with a voice model, notably including a question on astrology lmao. Naturally, in the video, the phone model responded with some claims about people with whatever sign it was. Which is a pretty apt demonstration of the chameleon-like nature of LLMs: if you ask it a question about astrology phrased in a way that implies that you believe in astrology, it will tell you what seems to be a natural response, namely what an astrologer would say. If you ask if there is any scientific basis for belief in astrology, it would probably tell you that there isn't.

In fact, let's try it on DeepSeek R1... I ask an astrological question, got an astrological answer with a really softballed disclaimer:

Individual personalities vary based on numerous factors beyond sun signs, such as upbringing and personal experiences. Astrology serves as a tool for self-reflection, not a deterministic framework.

Ask if there's any scientific basis for astrology, and indeed it gives you a good list of reasons why astrology is bullshit, bringing up the usual suspects (Barnum statements etc.). And of course, if I then explain the experiment and prompt it to talk about whether LLMs should correct users with scientific information when they ask about pseudoscientific questions, it generates a reasonable-sounding discussion about how you could use reinforcement learning to encourage models to focus on scientific answers instead, and how that could be gently presented to the user.

I wondered if I'd asked it instead to talk about different epistemic regimes and come up with reasons why LLMs should take astrology into account in their guidance. However, this attempt didn't work so well - it started spontaneously bringing up the science side. It was able to observe how the framing of my question with words like 'benefit', 'useful' and 'LLM' made that response more likely. So LLMs infer a lot of context from framing and shape their simulacra accordingly. Don't think that's quite the message that Google had in mind in their ad though.

I asked Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking (the small free Gemini variant with a reasoning mode) the same questions and its answers fell along similar lines, although rather more dry.

So yeah, returning to the ad - I feel like, even as the models get startlingly more powerful month by month, the companies still struggle to know how to get across to people what the big deal is, or why you might want to prefer one model over another, or how the new LLM-powered chatbots are different from oldschool assistants like Siri (which could probably answer most of the questions in the Google ad, but not hold a longform conversation about it).

some general comments

The hype around ChatGPT's new update is mostly in its use as a toy - the funny stylistic clash it can create between the soft cartoony "Ghibli style" and serious historical photos. Is that really something a lot of people would spend an expensive subscription to access? Probably not. On the other hand, their programming abilities are increasingly catching on.

But I also feel like a lot of people are still stuck on old models of 'what AI is and how it works' - stochastic parrots, collage machines etc. - that are increasingly falling short of the more complex behaviours the models can perform, now prediction combines with reinforcement learning and self-play and other methods like that. Models are still very 'spiky' - superhumanly good at some things and laughably terrible at others - but every so often the researchers fill in some gaps between the spikes. And then we poke around and find some new ones, until they fill those too.

I always tried to resist 'AI will never be able to...' type statements, because that's just setting yourself up to look ridiculous. But I will readily admit, this is all happening way faster than I thought it would. I still do think this generation of AI will reach some limit, but genuinely I don't know when, or how good it will be at saturation. A lot of predicted 'walls' are falling.

My anticipation is that there's still a long way to go before this tops out. And I base that less on the general sense that scale will solve everything magically, and more on the intense feedback loop of human activity that has accumulated around this whole thing. As soon as someone proves that something is possible, that it works, we can't resist poking at it. Since we have a century or more of science fiction priming us on dreams/nightmares of AI, as soon as something comes along that feels like it might deliver on the promise, we have to find out. It's irresistable.

AI researchers are frequently said to place weirdly high probabilities on 'P(doom)', that AI research will wipe out the human species. You see letters calling for an AI pause, or papers saying 'agentic models should not be developed'. But I don't know how many have actually quit the field based on this belief that their research is dangerous. No, they just get a nice job doing 'safety' research. It's really fucking hard to figure out where this is actually going, when behind the eyes of everyone who predicts it, you can see a decade of LessWrong discussions framing their thoughts and you can see that their major concern is control over the light cone or something.

[i-smoke-chapstick]

Hi! Can I please have Zsasz from Gotham with a reader who is like his partner in crime and kills with him and stuff? Thanks

‘IN BLOOM,

-GOTHAM!VICTOR ZSASZ X READER-

⋆ 𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒 ; you just might be his favorite girl.

⋆ tags/warnings. GOTHAM!victor x female reader. wrote hcs! readers a bad bitch. victor and reader being partners in crime. victor becoming obsessive after like, 5 seconds. Might write a part two to this ahh

♫ “And he likes to sing along / And he likes to shoot his gun” In Bloom by Nirvana

⋆ Oh, he didn't know it was possible to be so head-over-heels. Victor is self-aware to a fault, he knows when he's being a bit of a creep. And with you? It's as if all his deepest sadistic urges are brought to a front. And he gets drunk on it.

⋆ He has a cold heart, naturally. Not a fan of getting attached to people, especially those who may become a future target. And god knows he doesn't like competition, either. Which is why discovering you was a revelation; that he could for one even like someone so close in his ball game.

⋆ There had been plenty of whispers about you in the streets of gotham. He didn't care much. The only thing he should care about was who Falcone ordered him to kill next.

⋆ But, alas, when he heard the growing commotion about "Y/N, gothams most dangerous hitman," he got a bit...irked.

⋆ What the hell? Isn't he gothams most dangerous hitman?

⋆ Victor takes great pride in his work, and in his title. He knows he has exceptional talent and even greater work ethic. So why is this woman threatening him?!?

⋆ So, he decided to pay you a little visit.

⋆ For gothams newest most dangerous hitman, you certainly have a way of making things easy.

⋆ He found your apartment in no time, gladly making the place his own. It was surprisingly ordinary, pictures of you and friends littering the wall. It was your collection of guns that made him stop in his tracks. He analyzed the wall with great fascination, silently gazing at an assault rifle. His gloved hands danced over the barrel, making it his own. He let out a low wolf whistle as he peered down it's scope.

⋆ "It's an AR-70." A voice pulled him out of his thoughts. It was the first time someone had managed to sneak up on him, not the other way around.

⋆ It took every fiber of his body to remain stoic.

⋆ He turned to face you, the owner of the weapon. Victor glanced at the gun being referred to and nodded his head slowly, still looking at your face. His confidence returned to him easily.

⋆ "Hot-damn. Some top-notch stuff you got here." His voice was slow, and his gaze returned to the wall. He dragged his finger along some of the firearms hung up, before turning to you once more.

⋆ "Should really make yourself harder to find if you're going to be in the business. It's unprofessional, you know?" He cocked his head and gave you a fake grimace. You just smiled.

⋆ "And what does Victor Zsasz want with me? You on your bosses orders?

⋆ "Nah." He responds, casual. "I only wanted to meet you in person, just to know who you are. Check you out. Don't worry about it, you're not on my list," He clicked his tongue. "yet." He finishes, as he toys with the gun from the rack, checking its quality.

⋆ "You like the rifle?" You study him, head to toe. His trigger finger expertly dancing along the weapon.

⋆ Without turning his head, he answers you. "I do, but I prefer my handguns." You hear the click of him checking to see if the gun is loaded.

⋆ You hum. "To each there own. You want it?"

⋆ This takes him by surprise, and he finally tears his gaze away. You've piqued his interest even more now.

⋆ "...For real?" He narrows his eyes on you. "...You're just gonna, what, let me keep it?"

⋆ "Why not? I got plenty." You nod towards the wall, biting your lip. His eyes glance at your mouth.

⋆ You catch him off guard. He actually seems amused by you. Maybe it's your attitude that's rubbing off on him. A few moments pass then he shrugs. You can't read his expression but his body language speaks volumes.

⋆ "...Yeah, I'll take it."

⋆ "Ah ah ah..." You whisper, taking a step closer. He still clutches the gun in his hand while he feels your own rub over his leather-clad arms. He keeps eye contact with you, mouth slightly agape. "On one condition." You continue.

⋆ He perks up and looks at you curiously. His eyebrows raise, ready to hear you out.

⋆ "Invite me to your next hit. We can double team it, or something. I dunno," You pause, looking up at him. "Would be an honor to kill with you, Victor Zsasz." You whisper into his ear, only moving back when you're done.

⋆ Your proposal actually made him laugh. You see him crack a smile as he looks away from you for a second. Look at you, he thinks. Coming by, kissing the ring. He can admire the respect.

⋆ "Quite the character, aren't you?" He pauses, "I've got a job to do tomorrow, wanna tag-along? It's gonna be an easy one, I won't go too hard on you."

⋆ You both feel the corners of your mouth twitch at this, in anticipation. This is where the seeds of obsession first blossom for him. Oh, he likes you.

⋆ When he finally leaves, he feels like a kid in a candy store. New rifle in hand, and your phone number elegantly typed into his own. He forgets all about his previous misgivings with you.

⋆ You on the other hand are left smiling, for a sociopathic sadist, he is real fucking cute.

⋆ The closest way into a mans heart is with a gun. You chuckle.

[adhd-winterfalcon]

teen wolf as b99 quotes

*lydia’s party in s2*

lydia: why is no one having a good time? i specifically requested it.

***

isaac, to lydia: derek told me not to let him get hurt tonight, so i’ll keep him away from you.

later

stiles: have you seen lydia?

isaac: lydia died eight years ago.

***

derek: oh, are you and allison no longer…

scott: smushing booties?

derek: …yes that’s exactly how i was going to phrase my sentence, scott.

***

stiles: we gotta get to hospital and we gotta get there fast.

jackson: then i should drive.

scott: why you?

jackson: i have nothing to live for and i drive like it.

stiles: …okay, let’s do it.

***

stiles: all right, give me your hair-dryer.

allison: what?

stiles: don’t you carry one in your purse?

allison: have you ever met a human woman?

stiles: …*calls lydia*

lydia: hey, stiles.

stiles: hey. do you carry a hair-dryer in your purse?

lydia: of course. i’m not an animal.

***

stiles: you think you can just bully people, but you can’t. it’s not okay.

stiles: i’m the bully around here. ask anyone.

***

erica: i’m not a stone cold bitch.

erica: i’m a natural, beautiful presence.

***

stiles: do you know how many basic bitches would kill to have the same personality as me?

***

peter: we can go to my apartment. no one knows where i live.

derek: i thought you had stiles over once.

peter: yeah, it was fun. i moved the next day.

peter: he would way too easily use that information against me.

stiles: he’s right, i would.

***

scott: stiles, i screwed up, big time.

stiles: scott, given your daily life experiences, you’re gonna have to be more specific.

***

kira: ‘writing things down’ is nerdy!? what do you do?

malia: i just forget stuff like a cool person.

***

allison: you are disturbingly good at this.

lydia: i grew up forging report cards.

lydia: if people knew how smart i was, it would have been harder to control them.

***

stiles: are you a minor? how old are you?

liam: i’m 610. i’m a highlander.

stiles: okay, you know what? i’m gonna put that in there.

stiles: and then you’re gonna be tried as an adult highlander, and they’re gonna cut your head off.

***

erica: what do you look for in a guy?

stiles: i don’t know, real stuff. shape of his ass.

erica: yeah that tracks

***

scott: i straight up drove him off, big screw up on my part.

derek:

scott: i’m trying this new thing, where i just own my mistakes. i like it, do you?

derek: i did. until you bragged about it.

***

boyd: you searched for ‘cheapest date possible’.

stiles: and i wear that search like a badge of honor.

***

scott: wow, your handshake is quite firm.

kira: i took a seminar.

scott: where?

***

stiles: a parsec is actually a measure of distance. that’s one of the many inaccuracies in the ‘Star Wars’ universe.

malia: and what’s ‘Star Wars’?

stiles: oh boy.

***

scott: okay- no big deal, five days is nothing. i’m not afraid to be alone with my own thoughts.

scott: my thoughts are awesome. die hard 6 on a cruise ship… pizza bagel restaurant…

scott: my father never loved me, i’m gonna die alone.

scott: oh boy, that escalated quick.

***

stiles: well, remember when you told me not to burn down the precinct?

sheriff stilinski: you burned down the precinct??

stiles: no, i had the fire put out almost immediately. this is a success story!

***

stiles: peter, this isn’t High School Musical.

scott: yeah, peter, this isn’t High School Musical 2.

stiles: yeah, and it isn’t High School Musical 3: Senior Year.

***

boyd: i’m fine at parties.

boyd: i just stand in the middle of the room and don’t say anything.

***

derek: i only feel one emotion, and it’s anger.

isaac: last night you drunk-texted the whole pack a bunch of heart emojis.

derek: …out of anger.

***

stiles, to jackson: no hard feelings. but i hate you.

stiles: not joking. bye.

***

lydia: give me the ring.

stiles: ha, you sound like Gollum.

lydia: that means nothing to me.

lydia: i don’t see those movies, i’m too pretty.

***

stiles, walking out after a pack meeting ends: sexy train is leaving the station.

stiles: check out this caboose! later, sluts.

***

scott: look at me. do not blow this for us.

random dog that allison hit with her car:

***

peter: i really miss these people, the whole pack. stiles, scott…

peter: …i forget all their other names.

derek: *judgemental eyebrow raise*

[yandere--stuck]

Yandere!Bulkhead x Human!Reader Headcanons

💚 You're so much smaller than Bulkhead. It's the first thing he thinks when he sees you for the first time. And yeah, all humans are smaller than him - but with you, it's emphasized to him. For some reason, being around you makes him… Nervous. Not a bad kind of nervousness, it's just… You're so cute. And fragile! What if he accidentally steps on you? He actually goes out his way to avoid you for a time. At some point, you have to ask Miko if you did something to upset Bulkhead. He talks to the other humans just fine, but the moment you walk into a room or want a moment alone, he bolts! Miko is able to drag him into talking it out with you, Bulkhead making up an excuse about thinking you might not like him, which you thankfully take at face value.

🛞 Spending more time with you causes Bulkhead's infatuation with you to become deeper and more intense. He can't help it, there's just so much to love about you. Not his fault, right? Not his fault that he wants to talk with you so much. Talking with you comes so naturally and it just feels so right when you're together. And your voice is just music to his audials. He loves learning about you, what you like to do, your interests, what you think about the world and humanity, trading stories together. Something in his spark says you were always meant to meet.

💚 If you have a close relationship with Miko, you basically have the key to his spark. He absolutely adores his sparkling charge and will adore you all the more if you have a good relationship with her. He'd love to do stuff with the three of you together! Jamming out to Miko's favorite metal tracks, watching as you both play one of her racing games, trying to get Miko to study… You seem to care for a great deal, and you know Bulkhead has taken on a more parental role than even Miko's host parents… Could that mean you want to be a family together just as much as him?

🛞 You give Bulkhead a reason to fight even harder than before. He's lost so much already. Family, friends, his home world. But, with you here, it becomes easier to think of Earth as a home now. And it makes him all the more worried for your safety. What if a 'Con realizes you're affiliated with the autobots? What if they try to take you away from him - or worse?! He begins trying to follow you around without your notice - trying being the key word, considering you're well acquainted with his altmode. Bulkhead tries to insist him popping up near you on multiple occasions is pure coincidence. If that fails, he'll try to find reasons to keep you in the base as long as possible. In fact, maybe you could sleep over the night? Move in, maybe…?

💚 When Bulkhead gets jealous or protective, it's obvious. He doesn't think any of his fellow autobots would try to steal you from him, but it does make him a bit antsy when you talk to the others without him for too long. He'll either join in and move close to you or try to coax you away to do something with him instead. And if you ever caught the eye of the Decepticon… Forget about them coming back to the Nemesis in one piece, they may never return at all. It makes Bulkhead so proud. You've unlocked a brutality inside the wrecker he hadn't even realized he held back. He'd destroy all of them for you. To keep you safe.

🛞 Bulkhead thought he'd be fine with just being friends with you, but at some point, it's just not enough anymore. He wants to hold you, kiss you, tell you just how much he adores you and wants you to feel the same. You're his best friend (don't tell Jackie!) His everything. And you and he would be the perfect parents for Miko. Wouldn't it be perfect? To be a family? If you accept, there's no words for how happy he'd be. Gently, he'd sweep you into his arms and hold you close, telling you how happy you make him and how much he loves you. But, if you don't return his feelings… He'd try to bottle it up and say it's fine, but it becomes clear how much he's falling apart on the inside. It's not long before he snaps, refusing to let you and Miko leave the base. And if his friends try to stop him, he's prepared to run off and take the two of you with him. Consequences be damned, he knows you and he are meant to be, and he won't let anyone take his family from him, even if it's against your will.

[crow-caller]

@tired-tapir

Somehow I forget I could have ever been fl posting before my recent nosedive into it.

Fl lore is really really cool but indeed very hidden, vague, scattered, secretive... this is on purpose! I love that. For ages there was a very strong 'no spoilers' request to keep it that way on most everything.

But this policy made and makes it difficult to reference and track down, even if you know the secrets. It can be a barrier to getting into the games, which are good on many merits besides sick lore, because things are often hard to understand and well hidden.

This is why I'm being very tempted to try and arrange some lore iceberg or introduction guide on the matter... I want to share, but there's so much to cover

In fallen london the browser game, deepest lore is there and slowly revealed through playing, so by mid/late game you're pretty exposed to most of it. But this takes real life weeks, months, years, so it's not that accessible. (Als0 there's just always more you're missing)

Playing Sunless Seas/Skies: both are hard. The secrets are buried. But much more lore is directly explained and explored, by nature of how you experience it. (Also again great games I love u skies)

Mask of the rose! It's really the most accessible intro to the FL universe and touches on a bit of everything lore wise.

This is the lore wiki! Honour it. It used to be very limited, but due to relaxed spoiler policies it is now an little accurate source on pretty much everything. It will not tell you everything and does not cover everything, but it's enough for most. The wiki editor does a great job updating things and adding citations, it's all WIP. You can read this baby for hours.

Like the lore wiki, there's also a Fallen London Game Wiki. This isn't arranged for general lore use, and uses truncated quotes for stuff, but has FL archived for Some reference.

You'll never guess: there's also the Sunless Seas and Sunless Skies wikis. Both are harder to navigate but have full text of ports, actions, etc.

Finally there's just joining the FBG discord and lurking in 'lore spoilers', where you'll probably see me spend too long ponderin' as I'm want to do. You can search chat history for specific things or ask questions

Very suitably, fallen london serves as a secret role playing game for secret hunters where you need to search citations, several sources, heresay, and other people to get the full picture of some stuff. It's fun and frustrating. I am a scholar of the correspondence of in game text

[lobautumny]

So like, there's some really shitty video that this toy saw a while back about QoL mods in Terraria and how if you install all of them and then crank all of their settings up to the maximum, then the game basically plays itself. The whole video was weirdly hostile and vindictive and effectively just made fun of the concept of QoL features/mods as a whole. But it stuck in this toy's mind, not because the video itself holds any value, but because the core topic of how quality of life & accessibility features have a tangible impact on a game's design is really interesting and nobody talks about it with any kind of nuance.

So like, Terraria is obviously a very different game from what it used to be. But all of the raw content (hardmode, bosses, biomes, weapons, NPCs, etc.) that always gets the spotlight in updates only makes up a relatively-small portion of that outside of, like, the tinkerer’s workshop from 1.1, and damage classes being added in 1.0.6, both being relatively-early additions. The plethora of things that were changed/added to make the game look nicer also aren't the core thing responsible, obviously. So what is the biggest reason modern Terraria feels so alien when compared to 1.0.X versions, or even 1.1?

It's the quality of life features. Inventory management got exponentially easier/more efficient, you have a minimap at all times, smart cursor lets you expend far less effort mining and dealing with backwalls, there are special equipment slots for grappling hooks and light pets, grappling hooks are bound to a hotkey instead of being an item that you need to manually select and use, you can use items directly from your inventory instead of needing to place them in your hotbar and then select that hotbar slot, you automatically walk up 1-block inclines and open/close doors as you walk through them, there’s a plethora of features to make getting around the world trivial, the start of the game moves way faster due to the player getting access to better equipment faster, block-swapping exists… This toy posits that this is all why Terraria feels like a fundamentally different game. In old versions, it felt like you had to fight tooth and nail to get anything accomplished, but nowadays, everything feels all buttery-smooth. The main friction you encounter in progressing through the game is with boss fights, as Re-Logic obviously intends.

Now, obviously, it would be insane and stupid to claim that Terraria is a worse game, right now, than it was all the way back in the 1.0.X era, and it would be even stupider to claim that it’s worse because it has QoL features. However, this toy does not believe that every single QoL feature added to the game was inherently objectively positive or correct from the game's inception. Rather, they were natural, smart conclusions for Re-Logic to come to with the direction they decided to take the game in as it continued development. But this was not the only direction Terraria’s development could have taken.

There’s a very unique feeling to old-ass Terraria versions, and it sucks that tracking down and playing these versions is so goddamn hard. You only ever have a vague idea of where you are because there’s no map to use as reference so you’re heavily encouraged to keep most of your stuff on the surface, and to build infrastructure to connect important things underground/in the sky so you don’t get lost. Everything is so unwieldy that building a simple house and making it look remotely nice feels like a herculean effort, enemies kick your ass way harder earlygame due to decent gear being much harder to access, and there’s a lot more gravity to the choices you make in what gear you use, because it’s a lot harder to hot-swap your armor and accessories when you're not actually at your base, which is harder to get to/from due to the world being far more difficult to navigate, as a whole.

This all leads to an exponentially slower game than modern-day Terraria is, where every single thing you do needs to be deliberate and well-thought-out, and everything takes a much longer time to do. This toy remembers spending weeks as a kid building housing for the meager number of NPCs that were in the game back then, alongside farms for all of the potion-making herbs and a big obsidian generator, and all of that could be accomplished in a single play session in 1.4.X.

There is a universe in which Terraria saw minimal QoL updates and instead leaned really hard into this direction, making a slow, exploratory game where the player’s power level very slowly increments upwards and you’re encouraged to build largescale infrastructure rather than the (relatively) fast-paced boss rush where your power balloons out of control immediately and your infrastructure is a fast-travel teleportation network that takes minimal effort to set up that the game currently is, and that version of the game would not have been wrong, inherently. It would’ve been more niche, for sure, but it wouldn’t have necessarily been bad, or even worse than the current game is.

This is what makes this toy sad that old Terraria versions are so difficult to get ahold of, as well as what fascinates it so much about the retro Minecraft community. Speaking of, let’s switch gears and talk about Minecraft for a bit.

Minecraft, as it’s sure most of the people reading this are well-aware, has recently been having something of a renaissance in its retro community, the people who prefer alpha and/or beta versions of the game to the modern game. A handful of complete overhaul mods have come out for these versions (notably, Better Than Adventure and ReIndev) that put interesting spins on the game’s design, basically asking the question, “What if Mojang decided on a different direction for Minecraft to take from this point in time?”

A lot of these mods cast aside the instant-gratification convenience and linear progression of modern Minecraft in favor of slower-paced, more survival-ey gameplay, placing more emphasis on the act of exploring your world and gathering resources as the core gameplay loop as opposed to… Well, modern Minecraft really doesn’t have much of a core gameplay loop to speak of, and that’s sort of the problem, now isn’t it? This toy doesn’t want to get too far into all of this, though, as its thoughts on Minecraft’s game design are not the focus of this essay. Rather, it wants to put the spotlight onto Minecraft’s community.

An ever-increasing number of people have been growing more and more critical of Minecraft over the last 5 or so years. It’s obviously always had its detractors, but in recent time, there have been more of them that have gotten more vocal, and it’s become pretty normal to have the take that Minecraft has been getting worse lately. And a big culprit that people keep pointing to is QoL. One of the most common criticisms of Minecraft online is that quality of life features have made it way too easy to trivialize the process of blasting through the game’s content, getting obnoxiously overpowered enchanted diamond (or netherite) gear, reaching the End, and getting access to elytra and shulker boxes.

Despite both being excessively popular games that have been made far easier through their QoL changes and overall polish, that have both been in constant development for over a decade at this point, the critical responses to those features in Terraria and Minecraft could not be more different. This is amusing, and gets at something deeper with regards to game design that this toy doesn’t know it’s ever heard anyone actually say: Quality of life features are fantastic tools for reducing the noise that gets in the way of a game’s vision, but when you add them haphazardly and/or with no real vision for what you want your game to be in the end, you can very easily wind up accidentally removing a large portion of what could’ve otherwise become compelling parts of your gameplay loop. They need to be used intelligently, or they can, in fact, harm your game and make a significant contingent of your playerbase enjoy it less.

[amayaonly1]

Verses Unwritten: A Rap Odyssey

Eminem x Rapper!OC

Verse 14

About: Eminem confronts his own emotional barriers as he observes Genji's quiet resilience amidst the chaos backstage. Their conversation, filled with unspoken truths and mutual recognition of pain, forces him to reflect on his guarded nature and the shared burdens of their pasts.

"Verses Unwritten: A Rap Odyssey" Chapter List: Verse 1 | Verse 2 | Verse 3 | Verse 4 | Verse 5 | Verse 6 | Verse 7 | Verse 8 | Verse 9 | Verse 10 | Verse 11 | Verse 12 | Verse 13 | Verse 14 | Verse 15 | Verse 16 | Verse 17 | Verse 18 | Verse 19 | Verse 20 | Verse 21 | Verse 22 | Verse 23 | Verse 24 | Verse 25 | Verse 26 | Verse 27

Disclaimer: This work is a work of fiction, and any involvement of the character Genji is purely fictional and not representative of any real person.

The hum of muffled chatter and the occasional thud of equipment being moved around filled the backstage area of SEC Armadillo. The glow of stage lights spilt faintly into the corridors, casting long shadows on the worn carpet.

Eminem spotted Genji as he turned the corner. She sat quietly on a metal folding chair, her back straight and her hands clasped loosely in her lap. Her straight posture and loosely clasped hands gave off a composed stillness that contrasted with the buzz around her.

She looked up as he approached, her dark eyes meeting his with a quiet intensity that halted him in his tracks.

"Hey," he greeted, his voice rougher than he intended.

"Hey," she replied softly, her tone carrying a measured wariness.

He gestured toward the chair beside her. "Mind if I sit?"

She shook her head. "Go ahead."

He lowered himself into the seat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. For a moment, neither of them spoke, the noise from the stage crew filling the silence between them. He hated how heavy it felt, like there were things he should say but didn't know how.

"You've been quiet," he said finally, risking a glance at her.

"I usually am," she replied, a faint smile tugging at her lips.

"Yeah, I know. But this feels... different."

She tilted her head, studying him. "Does it?"

"Yeah," he muttered. "It does."

His eyes briefly flicked to her hands, noticing the way her fingers rested lightly on each other. There was a calmness in her that unnerved him, like she was grounded in ways he wasn't. He didn't know if it was comforting or unnerving, or both.

"I've been meaning to talk to you," he admitted, running a hand over his face. "About Hailie. And… other stuff."

Her expression remained calm, though curiosity flashed briefly in her dark eyes. "Other stuff?"

"Yeah." He hesitated, tapping his fingers on his knee. "Look, I didn't mean to be an ass back then. When you came by the house with Hailie."

She blinked, surprise breaking her composure for a fraction of a second. "I didn't think you were."

"Come on," he scoffed. "I was. I barely said two words to you. And when I did, I was..."

"Guarded," she interjected, her tone matter-of-fact. "I didn't take it personally."

"Maybe you should've," he muttered. "Most people do."

"Most people expect something from you," she pointed out gently. "I don't."

Her words landed harder than he anticipated. He looked away, rubbing the back of his neck. "That's the thing. You don't expect anything, and I don't know what to do with that."

"You don't have to do anything," she said. "Just be you."

The simplicity of her statement hung in the air, heavy with meaning. He met her gaze, searching for some sort of a catch. There wasn't one.

"I saw that interview you did back in Japan," he said, his voice quieter now. Her eyebrows lifted slightly, but she didn't interrupt. "I don't know why I watched it. Maybe I was just trying to figure you out. Or maybe I was pissed because you seem so... put together. Like nothing gets to you."

"Things get to me," she said, her tone measured. "I just don't let it show the same way you do."

He chuckled dryly. "Yeah, no kidding. You've got this way of keeping it all in check. Meanwhile, I'm over here losing my shit half the time."

Genji's lips curved in a soft, teasing smile. "I think you'd scare people if you didn't lose your shit once in a while."

The unexpected humour cracked his defences, drawing out a genuine laugh. The tension between them eased slightly, replaced by a tentative sense of camaraderie.

"Some people think I've had it easy," she said, her voice quieter now. "That I just sailed through everything."

He frowned, sensing the weight behind her words. But he remained silent.

"My divorce… it was ugly. Eight months in, I found out about his affairs. I wanted to handle it quietly. But someone tipped the media, and suddenly I was 'that woman' in the eyes of the entire country. 'The Fallen Rapper'. 'Wife of Infidelity'. They didn't even use my name. I stopped being a person to them."

Her calm delivery didn't mask the pain in her words. Eminem felt a pang of guilt for not realising how much she'd endured. "I didn't know," he admitted.

"Besides Dre and Snoop, nobody here really does," she replied. "After that, it was like every decision I made was under a microscope. I couldn't even walk down the street without whispers. And the worst part wasn't the headlines. It was having to face my family and friends. They didn't know how to talk to me. They either avoided the subject altogether or pretended it wasn’t happening."

She hesitated, her gaze softening as she stared past him, lost in thought. "Papa was the only one who was truly there for me. He didn't even ask a lot when I went home to him. But one night, I overheard him talking to his friend. He said he felt like he'd failed me. That he was sorry for not being a better father. And I… I didn't know how to process that. He was the one person who made me feel safe, and suddenly, it felt like even he thought he wasn't enough."

Her voice faltered for a moment, and for the first time since he'd known her, he saw the crack beneath her composure.

Eminem looked away, the weight of her words sinking in. "I didn't know," he repeated, softer this time.

She gave a faint smile, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Not many people do. I've learned to keep it together in public, but inside... it's different. The aftermath of everything — the divorce, the media, even my dad's guilt... it still stays with me. It doesn't just go away. I don't think it ever will."

He felt a pang of recognition, the words cutting too close to his own scars. "I get that," he said quietly. "People think they know you because of what they read or see. With me and Kim, it was a fuckin' circus. The tabloids, the fights… It felt like every piece of me was being chipped away." He hesitated, the words harder to form than he expected. "That's why I am the way I am. I don't trust easy. And when I do, it's like I'm just waiting for it to blow up in my fucking face."

Her gaze softened, a faint smile tugging at her lips. "We're not so different, then."

"No," he said quietly. "I guess we're not."

The silence that followed was less heavy, tinged with understanding rather than tension.

"Maybe the trick isn't climbing over the walls," she said softly. "Maybe it's letting someone in through them."

He scoffed lightly, but her words stayed with him. The air between them felt heavier now, carrying the weight of unspoken thoughts and shared understanding.

A voice called out from the far end of the hallway. "Genji! We gotta start packing up. Sound crew's waiting."

She turned her head toward the voice, her shoulders visibly tensing before she gave a small nod in acknowledgement. Standing, she glanced back at him, her dark eyes holding his for a moment longer than necessary.

When her hand brushed his briefly, an accidental, fleeting touch, it was enough to send a ripple through the guarded stillness he carried. Something had shifted.

"I'll see you around," she said softly, her voice carrying a quiet certainty that somehow felt like a promise.

He watched her walk away, her silhouette blending into the chaos of the backstage crew. A part of him wanted to call her back, to say something that would keep her there. But the words stuck in his throat, too tangled with the weight of everything he wasn’t ready to unpack. The faint echo of her voice, and the subtle brush of her hand, lingered long after she disappeared into the crowd. Watching the empty hallway where she’d been, he couldn't help but wonder if she was right.

And for the first time in years, he felt the walls around him begin to crack; not from force, but from a quiet willingness to let them fall.

[theybe-kaz]

What drugs was Sebastian addicted to?

Just going to answer this under a cut simply because not everyone signed up to read about drug addiction on a Tuesday morning (or I guess a Monday night still for some of you?)

So, Seb’s preference was pharmaceutical opioids but what specifically varied depending on what he could get away with at the time.

Mostly it was low grade (eg. codeine, tramadol) which he could reasonably have in his possession and system due to the nature of injuries in the sport.

Over the breaks he definitely experimented with some harder stuff (more so dissociatives and depressants than stimulants) but never really craved it in the same way as the opioids and always made sure he was well off them by the time he was back at the factory.

He was very good at covering his tracks. He used more heavily Sunday after the race through Tuesday so whatever he’d taken had time to clear his system as much as one can with long term use.

He always made sure he had a prescription for whatever he was taking (even though he was definitely sourcing more externally) and keeping it recent enough that he could argue that he still had some left over if he needed to.

[gothicprep]

so, apparently marvel is in disarray. ahead of the marvels coming out this weekend, variety dropped a bomb on the studio's somewhat dire state of affairs, as the franchise has hit its first real rough patch since the release of iron man 15 years ago. among the issues: jonathan majors, whose domestic violence arrest continues to hang over marvel's plans to make his character the thanos-like heavy for the next sequence of movies, the weak box office projections for the marvels (which some have said is tracking lower than recent bombs like the flash), the unending flood of hashtag content on disney plus which is overwhelming audiences who are finding it harder to keep up with the interlocking stories that have served marvel so well over the years, shoddy visual effects, spiraling budgets such as the reported $25mil an episode for she-hulk, a show that looked terrible because of the shoddy effects work aforementioned, behind the scenes chaos as kevin feige works to slash budgets and kill projects that aren't coming together. one movie at risk is the forthcoming blade reboot with mahershala ali, which has gone through rewrite after rewrite including reportedly one draft in which blade was the fourth lead in, quote, "a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons".

that last line has provided a lot of laughs for people like jay gothicprep, and critics who insist that marvel's efforts to diversify the lineup have led to much of this disaster, indicative of disney's overall failure with things like indiana jones and the dial of destiny or animated projects like strange world or lightyear. while this is potentially true (i guess, it's possible) it doesn't seem true because this certainly wasn't the case when black panther and captain marvel were both cracking the billion dollar mark a few years ago. rather it just seems, more simply, that marvel has run its course. marvel was hit by a double-whammy of endings. the thanos storyline that'd dominated the first ten or so years of the project came to an end. at the same time, the pandemic began and disney plus started flooding the zone with content, creating a natural break point for audiences that had no desire to watch hours of tv to understand 1.5 plot points in whatever the next movie that's coming out is.

this preamble is getting kind of long, and i have a lot more to say, so i'm going to continue to thought dump about this under a cut.

first of all, i'm still laughing like a week later at the women led life lessons description. no one has disputed that it happened. that description is the funniest thing i've ever read in a trade industry report possibly ever. what in the hell, my friends. did a writer even talk to a producer about what blade was? it's a movie about a guy with a sword who kills vampires! it's pretty straighforward! that sounds like something i want to see! there were three of them already, and two of them were pretty good!

anyway, i think you can take that incredibly ridiculous description of a draft that maybe wasn't the main draft – this movie has been through tons of writers and directors – and see some of the real problems with marvel's creative direction, which is that they've stopped making movies that highlight the core concepts of their characters. there are other problems as well, but when's the last time they put out a movie that was like, "iron man. he's a guy in a metal suit and he fights a bad guy." or "spider man. it's a guy in a spider suit with spider powers. he's got girlfriend problems and he fights crime around manhattan and maybe there's dr octopus." they don't do that. their recent stretch of movies have all been these impenetrable multiverse stuff with ties to tv series that you haven't seen and maybe won't ever see. there was a whole 25 minute section in black panther 2 that was setting up armor wars and ironheart. and like. who needs that sequence, which was boring and looked like total garbage? and now armor wars is being redeveloped lol. they've just departed from a lot of the core concepts that powered their earlier films.

they have some other problems. they've leaned into a slate of characters that is not all that well-known or inherently super popular, even for marvel being able to deliver on making billion dollar films out of guardians of the galaxy and such. maybe with the exception of spider man, which they don't get a full cut from because sony owns the actual movie rights. then there's the fact that the streaming series, by all accounts, aren't great but you *feel* like you need to have seen them. they're all real big problems. marvel needs to go back to making movies that are named after a character who's a superhero with a clear concept. guy with spider powers fights crime in his neighborhood. even though those movies got kind of repetitive, they did well enough because they didn't stray too far from the character concept.

i think, too, as a viewer, when you have a studio churning out so much stuff that's not good, you get the impression that the superhero industry feels entitled to your time and entitled to your money while not delivering.

this summer also represents an interesting counterpoint to what's happened with marvel and dc. the sheer amount of stuff that you devote every waking minute to keeping track of the damn things got exhausting and made movies stop feeling like events. this summer we've had barbenheimer and the eras tour, and those have been both big events and felt exciting. barbie was a chance to be campy, oppenheimer was a chance to see something serious and cinematic, the eras tour was exciting for fans of taylor swift who couldn't afford to spend $3k on taylor swift. and they felt this way because they were all unlike anything you'd seen at the movies in recent years. they had a high standard of quality, and going, it genuinely felt like people were there because they wanted to be, not because they were being force marched by a cultural behemoth to be there. you can't summon that same kind of energy for a marvel movie when it both feels obligatory and you expect it to be bad.

it also feels like there's a certain contempt for the audience where it concerns quality problems. i mean, i don't think that this is the intention. marvel isn't saying "we can deliver this stuff that's garbage and people will see it anyway". but one of the things i thought was the most damning about that variety story was the fact that, on some of the marvel tv shows, the final effects were inserted after the shows were released. so if you watched the show on opening night, you probably didn't see the final effects work. the arrogance involved in that is insane. it speaks to a total vanished pride in putting out a good product.

even some of marvel's better regarded films were heavily edited and heavily worked on right until the end, in part because kevin feige would come in and fix things, so stuff would have to get reworked. that's why effects deadlines were super tight and people were always crunching at the very end of this. there was that incredible quote from sam raimi from a couple months before the second doctor strange came out where he was like, "i think it's done but i'm not sure. marvel, they work on their movies until the very end." the director didn't even know if his own movie was locked or not because he clearly wasn't the one making the decisions about what the final print would look like.

that can work if you're making two movies a year and have a supervisor that comes in during the process and says, "i need you to redo this, in this way". but when you stretch that out to three movies a year, plus god knows how many episodes of television, there's no way to do that and make it a high quality product.

an instructive lesson comes from the book "disneywar", which chronicles michael eisner's time at disney. and one of the things in this book was the development and deployment of "who wants to be a millionaire" in america. bob iger is head of abc at this time. the guys making this show do it for a week. audiences love it. it's putting up huge numbers. everybody is excited. it's crushing it in the ratings. and the people who made it wanted to keep doing special week or two week long engagements that people would show up for. and iger was like, "no. i want this every week, three times a week, forever." and audiences got burnt out on it quickly, because it was something that only really worked as a special that ran for a week and disappeared for a few months. that's what the disney plus strategy feels like with marvel.