#so the mood is still Vampires therefore the post still stands

[albatris]

*clears throat* *leans into microphone*

vampires

[highdio]

I got an ask about the model boat that DIO's building as he and Pucci hang out and talk about the stand ‘Survivor’ in Part 6. The scene deserves its own post because it's the basis for one of my least-favorite wrong takes: that Dio is re-living a trauma by re-creating a "shipwreck" scene. Also no dw anon I don't think you implied this. This take's been repeated so often and without reflection that it's wound up being treated as something canon, check out this TV tropes entry to see how reflexively it gets parroted:

Dio's building a model ship in the middle of a wreck??? Fanon takes can take on a life of their own and, in Dio's case, so many people know his character through the caricature constructed around and outside of the canon instead of through how Araki actually wrote and drew him. So I'm going to break down the actual Part 6 scene to examine how we wound up so far from the truth of what's actually going on in it.

1. The first thing we need to get clear is whether Dio's model even resembles the ship he killed Jonathan on in Part 1, and the short answer is no, it doesn't. For reference here's the model:

and here's the ship from Part 1:

Both are hybrid sail/steam (implied on the model by the paddle wheels even though there's no smokestacks) but the ill-fated ocean liner that took Jonathan and Erina 1/2 way across the Atlantic is a lot bigger and grander. The OVA adaptation's helpful because it’s spot-on faithful to the manga:

It's gigantic, you can see three full decks and two large smokestacks, along with elaborate baroque-looking detailing all over the stern end. Dio's model ship looks entirely different. It's simple by comparison and, were it scaled up to full size, it'd still be a lot smaller (check out the model rowboats and their oars around it for size reference).

So it's not clear that the model Dio's building is even a callback to Part 1 or some sort of easter egg on Araki's part (after looking at the two ships side-by-side my gut tells me it’s not). Keep that in mind as we step through how much the scene's gotten mangled in fanon.

Like I said, the model-building panels form the basis for an oft-repeated bad take you see a lot online, where people say it's a "shipwreck" scene (I guess because there's rowboats around it?) and, therefore, a re-enactment of trauma. Ofc that's bogus. The ship's fine, and rowboats are how crew come ashore whenever a tall ship drops anchor. There's even a lighthouse and the ship is resting in a tranquil harbor. The anime version of the scene shows these details clearly:

Hopefully it's easy to see the scene for what it is: Dio engaged in the most mundane hobby you can think of, while having a leisurely conversation with his BFF. As Pucci explains it, they're talking like children ranking their favorite action heroes by how strong they are. It's a very chill little scene, remarkable for how unremarkable it would be if this wasn't DIO and Pucci.

It's worth including the official digital color version here too because, apparently, they forgot DIO was a vampire and gave the scene a cheery sunlit mood by making the sky outside the windows as blue as day:

It's a mistake ofc but it also underscores the relaxed feel to the scene: out of context, the day-lit color choice feels natural because the scene's got such a comfy vibe.

So how do we get from a chill guy chilling (canon) to a guy re-living a trauma (fanon)? Answer is, ofc, projection.

It's a fandom thing to need a villain's evilness to be justified - explained (excused?) in a way - through past trauma, say, or a series of unavoidable circumstances (or maybe some valid ideology they hold). A villain's villainy is only legitimized, validated, or complex enough *if* they've earned it by having a "good enough" reason to act bad. In Dio's case, where 'bad' is a wild understatement, some fans simply need him to be hurt, traumatized, or otherwise sufficiently suffering in ways that Araki just never intended. And this need is so strong it can override what's in front of their own eyes, even where the author and the text suggest the exact opposite.

In this way the Survivor scene acts as a Rorschach test where some people see the traces of trauma where there are none - in fact, it's the one scene where DIO seems most at ease, relaxed and unguarded (and ofc without his "shadow"). As such the scene and its misreading encompasses a lot of that's wrong about how fanon can sometimes view Dio and a lot of what's right about how Araki wrote him.

_____________________________________________________

Thanks to the anime there's an additional coda to all this. The Survivor scene in the Stone Ocean anime is faithful to the manga, but there's a twist: DavidPro gives us a sort of 'easter egg in reverse.' Remember the grand multi-deck ship Jonathan and Erina left for their honeymoon on? Here's the anime version, from all the way back in Season 1:

It looks a lot like Dio's model.

So here we have something from the manga that's likely not originally a callback getting turned into part of a callback, but in reverse order since the callback gets shown four seasons prior.

Of course, none of that negates the fact that the Stone Ocean anime scene is remains one of safety and comfort. The model ship isn't wrecked and DIO and Pucci are at their most relaxed and conversational. The scene hasn't been reshaped into any indice of trauma. What you have then is a fun little callback for the observant, and with it a wicked re-contextualization of this panel:

Now it’s become Dio towering over a model of the ship he killed everyone on. And somehow this feels appropriate: Dio's got a gift for casually being a jackass when referring back to some of the worst things that he's done. Aside from the obvious comparing human lives to slices of bread, a good example is this panel where he refers to Zeppeli's horrific death in the most deliberately offhand way:

So, anime Dio leisurely building a model resembling the ship he accidently destroyed while killing and then desecrating the body of the only man to ever defeat him? It feels right in character: a subtle nod to one of the many calamities he's caused. Assuming the viewer's more Joestar-sympathetic than me, I feel like what Dio's doing here and, on a meta level, what DavidPro either intentionally or unintentionally is doing is having some fun at the viewer's expense.

[noethicalconsumptionunderdisney]

Just saw your delightful post about Laex’s houses and I wondered how you would sort the rest of the family ? Also , @wisteria-lodge wrote a post about Gryffindor / Slytherin that would probably interest you .

Holy shit, I am so sorry this is getting back to you so late, anon!  This got lost in my Drafts and I totally forgot about it until I was recently trying to dig some stuff back up and got slapped in the face with this.  So even though this is months and months (and two Sorting essays lol) later, let me try to answer this the best I can:

(Links to Alex, Justin, and Max and their respective essays, so I don’t have to repeat myself)

Everyone else (...that I bothered to sort at least) below the cut:

All of the other Big Characters:

* Jerry Russo: Slytherin/Ravenclaw.  

Slytherin Primary- He broke off from the wizard world and chose a normal life because he met The One, and figured that being mortal was worth it if it meant being with her, going against what was expected of him from his community, and everything he’d believed about himself in order to do it.  

I also do believe he’s ambitious to an extent about his sub shop-- he certainly seems to care the most about whether it does well, and we know he cares a lot about his family legacy from how upset he was when it seemed that legacy would end (the times the kids might all lose their powers, that time they almost lost their lair).  Beyond that, he doesn’t seem to give much thought to the world outside his family, or even to his long-lost sister, who’s likely been kicked out of his inner circle, so I don’t think saving the world has ever really been a huge priority for him like it is for the kids.

Ravenclaw Secondary- One reason he makes a really good teacher is that he knows and remembers most of the spells the kids need to learn.  What he doesn’t remember, he can always look up in a spellbook, which he has a ton of.  He also has a lot of various magical trinkets that he’s collected over the years.  Plenty of them have value in terms of teaching, but I really do think most of their collection is because he thinks they’re neat.  This is also probably why they have a subway car as part of their sub shop, so that he would have a reason to use it, and therefore have a reason to have it.  

(You could argue Hufflepuff Secondary in regards to how he invests in his business, but even there, he likes to cut a lot of corners and doesn’t seem to feel particularly bad about doing so, as long as he doesn’t get in trouble for it.)

* Theresa Russo: Hufflepuff/Gryffindor.  

Hufflepuff Primary- She could be Slytherin too but I keep circling back to how much she cares about the traditions and cultures she left behind, and how, while she is happy in the life she has with Jerry and her kids, she’s still genuinely sad about losing that connection.  I also think about it in terms of her difficult relationship with Alex, how she calls her mija, how she pushed so hard to give Alex a quinceañera (that she didn’t want), how she was upset that Alex was failing Spanish, and how out of her depth she is with the wizard world.  

It has to sting a bit that her husband’s world, which she has no real connection to outside of him and the kids, has such an impact on everyone’s daily lives, while her world kind of gets left behind, either because the kids aren’t as interested, aren’t as exposed, or because she has to keep her extended family away from her immediate family so that magic doesn’t get exposed, how she has to follow the rules of a world she doesn’t even like that much.  Or perhaps she doesn’t like it because she’s lost so much to it.

Gryffindor Secondary- The Movie in particular solidified this one for me, just the way she gets curious about magic and Jerry and Max’s journey even though she thinks they’re strangers, dives headfirst into it despite Jerry worrying about letting a mortal be part of the adventure, and how she sees a parrot turn into a human, who is clearly Bad News, walks right up to her, and tells her all the shit she’s been put through and why she needs that stone.  

There are great moments from the show, too-- the ones that stick out to me are her talking back to the van Heusens when she knows damn well they’re vampires, and her getting Alex to teleport her to Megan’s so she can stand up for her kids’ right to have their powers, powers she doesn’t even like most of the time.  She definitely has a temper, and it’s usually played for laughs, but I also think it fits because she’s an incredibly brave person, and while there are definitely times when she runs away scared, more often than not she’ll stand her ground even in times of danger (and probably a few times where she maybe should’ve been more careful...).

* Harper Finkle: Slytherin/Hufflepuff

(Note: I like to think of this one as the Best Friend sorting, because it’s used a lot with Main Character’s Best Friend (and the Girl Friday, but this is Disney Channel so that’s not as common here), and because that combination tends to make for some pretty damn good ones.)

Slytherin Primary- I think it’s very possible Harper has a Hufflepuff Primary Model here, because it took me some thinking and rewatching to decide this, but nah, Harper’s best friends with Alex for a reason, and it’s not out of, like, the goodness of her heart or whatever.  Harper does like being part of things -- she enjoys being part of the Russo family, she enjoys being in clubs in a way Alex doesn’t get, she was excited to be invited to Gigi’s tea party because she thought she was being included in their “high society lady” rituals -- and she likes doing the nice, kind, good thing, but on the occasions where she does act purely in her own self-interest, she doesn’t feel the least bit guilty about it.  

We see this side of her more in seasons 3 and 4, but as early as season 2, we see her taking advantage of Cupid’s arrow making Justin fall for her even after Alex informs her of the situation (and only starting to hate it when she gets tired of his clinging, not for ethical or compassionate reasons), happily accepting the ribbons that make Alex’s Gryffindor squirm, because “it’s about time she got some appreciation,” and deciding she’ll continue to work for the vampires that just tried to eat her and her best friend because she “kinda needs the job” (honestly, mood tho).

Hufflepuff Secondary- More often than not, it seems Harper is taken advantage of rather than the one taking advantage, though, and I think this is why.  Working hard makes her feel good!  Being dependable makes her feel good!  She’s upset when it’s revealed that Alex used magic to help her win at everything she tried when she was little, and that she’s actually bad at those things.  She cares about earning her accomplishments, not just getting them.  She has a perfect attendance record and she cares about it a lot.  And that’s the core of what a Hufflepuff Secondary is: show up every day, and try as hard as you can.

She also prides herself on her moral support.  She’s generally willing to drop everything to help Alex and the thing she got the most furious with Alex for saying was that she was a bad friend.  This ties back to the Slytherin Primary thing, but I think it has a lot to do with how much work she puts into everything, and how much work she does for Alex, when Alex won’t do her own, and she doesn’t even mind doing it, maybe even likes doing it, as long as she gets credit for her dedication.  Luckily, Alex does appreciate her as a friend, even if she doesn’t show it as often as she probably should, and has her moments where she’ll come through for Harper too.

* Juliet van Heusen: Ravenclaw/Gryffindor.

Ravenclaw Primary- She goes against her natural instincts to hunt humans and instead sticks to animals as the more “ethical” path.  Granted, she was given a soul by her parents, which both helps her blend in better and might be what leads to her more ethical behavior, but I do think her Ideals are something she chose to live by, rather than something that was given to her, and I think part of why she likes Justin is that she connects with him intellectually, so I lean Ravenclaw for her Primary.  

Gryffindor Secondary- She tends to be pretty forthright and brutally honest a lot of the time.  She tells her parents she’s dating Justin by just... shouting that she likes him and then running back to tell him, she answers Zeke’s question about a horse-drawn carriage by implying that she killed them (for context, he’s a mortal), and she motivates Justin to win by bluntly telling him she’ll have to break up with him if he loses his powers.  She’s restrained enough to keep her vampire secret, but... not very restrained outside of that.

* Mason Greyback: Slytherin/Gryffindor.  

Slytherin Primary- His main motivation seems to be Alex, and he’s very singlemindedly dedicated to her most of the time.  The only times I can think of where he isn’t focused on her is in that first episode, when he wants to paint dogs, and only gets focused on her when she casts a spell on him, and in that moment where he sees Juliet again and confesses his undying love (oops).  He says afterwards that werewolves are “very loyal,” and I think based on the episode where we meet Mason’s parents, we can infer that that means “loyal to their own,” as they don’t like him dating a non-werewolf.  They might not include Alex in their definition of “their own,” but Mason clearly does, and puts her above everything, even citing her as his main motivation to “stay good” against Gorog’s influence.

Gryffindor Secondary-  For his impulsivity and temper, yes, but also for his dedication to Big Romantic Gestures, which I think are the ultimate Gryffindor Secondary love language.  Not that other Secondaries can’t perform them, but I think with Gryffindors it’s more likely to be a regular thing.  He tries to be more subtle in the apartment arc and it comes out more passive-aggressive, and then he ends up Doing The Big Thing anyway, like breaking the elevator in desperation or running to Bermuda to save Alex.  Even the big sculpture he makes Alex for their anniversary earlier that season, while it does take a lot of time and effort, there’s still this element of just throwing yourself wholeheartedly into something and focusing exclusively on the thing until the thing gets done (to the point of neglecting everything else) that feels more to me like Gryffindor Secondary’s battering ram than Hufflepuff Secondary’s slow and steady tortoise.

...+ a few others I thought were relevant:

* Zeke Beakerman: Ravenclaw/Ravenclaw.  To his own detriment, even: when he runs for president against Justin, he ends up voting... for Justin, because he really thought it through and Decided that Justin would probably be the better leader.  (And then retracts it because he’s morally opposed to Justin not voting.)  It’s played for laughs, but I think that does show he puts ethics before himself (and... possibly before reason.  Such are Idealists, lol).  He also likes to gather a lot of obscure knowledge and hobbies such as clogging, collecting skills because he finds learning them fun.  Ravenclaw, through and through.

* Stevie Nichols: Gryffindor/Slytherin.  Perhaps a much more stark example than Alex on both sides: more unscrupulous and more mischievous on the Slytherin side, more committed to her Cause and her Ideals on the Gryffindor side.  They bond over their shared Slytherin-ness, naturally meeting in detention because where else, and I actually think their shared Gryffindor is what ultimately comes between them- Stevie wants to convert Alex to her Cause, Alex freezes her and lets her die (maybe?) because she believes her Cause is evil.  Because unfortunately, sharing the same emphasis on Ideals and method for determining them, doesn’t always mean you’ll have the same ones.

* Rosie: Slytherin/Slytherin.  She lies to Justin when she meets him, saying she’s a wizard, when she’s actually an angel, and it doesn’t get much better from there.  She turns her wings white around Justin and acts good right up until she has him, then she starts influencing him to turn bad, so when it’s revealed she’s an Angel of Darkness, he’s too far gone to be upset.  But that Slytherin loyalty works both ways -- while his Slytherin loyalty to her made him do bad things and join the Angels of Darkness, her Slytherin loyalty to him made her convince Alex to save him, because she’d fallen in love with him for real and wasn’t okay with Gorog disposing of him once he’d outlived his usefulness, and that caused her to turn on Gorog for good, and then For Good, when she rejoined the Good Angels.  Just as she was the one who turned Justin to the dark side, she’s the one who turned him back to the light, and I think they were able to have this influence on each other because of that shared understanding of Slytherin loyalty.

... And I think that’s more than enough for now!  It’s been fun to think about all this, and even better to finally share it.  Again, sorry it took so long, but hope you enjoyed!

(P.S.: Btw, totally agree on that Gryffindor/Slytherin post-- it fits Alex so well (though definitely more the Jack Sparrow/Lovable Rogue variety).  I’m glad you see it, too!)

[queermediastudies]

Feminist Vampires: Don’t Invite Mainstream Audiences Inside! (Madi Mackey)

Bit, written and directed by Brad Michael Elmore, is the story of a young trans woman named Laurel who moves to Los Angeles and finds herself mixed up in a friend group of female vampires. She is quickly turned into a vampire herself and thrust into their world. Duke, the leader of the girl gang, implements some very strict rules for the group. The most important rule is to never turn a man into a vampire, stating that they can’t handle the power. The film follows the five young women as they navigate their lives as both vampires and members of a bustling Los Angeles night life. The drama comes to a peak when Laurel accidentally bites her brother and has to decide between saving his life and following Duke’s rules.

The film is an excellent example of modern day intersectional feminism. The core group of women is very diverse, representing African American, latina, butch, and transgender identities. They are all women-loving women in some sense, though their specific sexualities are never detailed. They are unflinchingly focused on retaining their power and their sisterhood by refusing to let a man into their groups and forbidding any usage of their mind-influencing powers on each other. However, the film is not perfect, and does not hold up to much scrutiny from a queer perspective. Duke, the previously mentioned leader, is also the only white girl in the group. Their hatred toward men could push the idea that all feminists hate men, further isolating the movement. Finally, the film does not mention class or any struggles associated with the marginalized communities the characters belong to, reducing the film to a post-gender, post-sexuality world. For these shortcomings, I argue that Bit is a great stride in the queer movie industry, but it misses the mark in many categories, and could therefore cause more damage to the trans, lesbian, and feminist communities than the positive impacts of such representation could outweigh, if it were to leave the arthouse and break into the mainstream.

One major theme in Bit is intersectional feminism. As mentioned before, the group of vampires is quite diverse, but this inclusion is only skin-deep. Their dynamic still enforces white, middle-class homonormativity. The girl with the most power is white and cisgender, and all of the girls are able-bodied and middle- to upper-class. Joyrich explains that television industries must continually portray homonormativity to maintain profits, and the same can be said for the film industry (2013, p. 5). Although this is a low-budget film that premiered at an independent film festival, the director, Elmore, stated in an interview that one of his main goals was for the movie to reach a larger audience of at-home viewers (Dunagan, 2019). His yearning for mass reception might have caused him to reproduce homonormativity for the film to be more palatable and, therefore, more profitable.

This is not the only flaw within the production practices for this film. Similar to criticisms regarding Pose and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, Elmore is a cis white man who took it upon himself to tell a queer story. By doing so, he took production resources and material benefits from its popularity away from the trans, lesbian, and POC communities who live the stories that he is telling (Tourmaline, 2017). Elmore explains that he read multiple theoretical texts and memoirs regarding gender while writing the script, and then had a close, gender non-conforming friend of his approve it before he, “felt more comfortable to show it to people in and around that conversation and community that I wasn’t close to” (Dunagan, 2019). While he did a fair bit of research into the community before creating the film, this isn’t the same as being a member of the community. Cavalcante explains this difference as a split between identifying with and identifying as a character, with identifying as a character always hitting closer to home and being more personal (2017, p. 14). Although Cavalcante makes this distinction in regards to audience reception, I believe it can be applied to production as well, and how Elmore wrote characters he could identify with, whereas a trans or POC writer could have written more personal characters that they identify as. Because Elmore is not trans or a POC, he needed to enforce homonormativity in his film in order to create characters that he identified with, as he has never lived as someone on the margins.

(Brad Michael Elmore, writer and producer of Bit)

Still, the production methods and content of the movie themselves could absolutely be described as queer. Benshoff & Griffin describe new queer cinema as films that have low-budgets, usually remain in the arthouse, and show the inadequacy of labels, instead focusing on the social discourses surrounding gender, race, and class (2004, pp. 11-12). Bit checks all of these boxes, even offering some helpful insights into social discourses. When Laurel, the transgender protagonist, is turned into a vampire, Duke tells her that their number one rule is to absolutely never turn a man. Laurel looks worried and asks, “What about me?” to which Duke responds, “Never even crossed my mind” (Elmore, 2019). Her immediate acceptance of Laurel’s identity expresses a consistent mood throughout the entire movie. Laurel’s transition and identity are never remarked in more explicit terms, and the sexuality and ethnicity of the other women are all treated with the same unspoken acceptance. The only identities that are ever mentioned are class and sex; Laurel asks one of the girls how they afford to live in L.A., and anyone who identifies as a man is immediately treated with contempt.

(watch video until 42:50)

While these approaches to intersectional identity may function well within the underground audience of new queer cinema, they could cause problems if Bit were to hit the mainstream. As Tongson explains, media representations help to produce our material realities; we rely on media to understand identities that we don’t know in the real world (2017, p. 158)). By ignoring the struggles of marginalized communities in the film, Bit raises more questions than it answers for viewers who are unfamiliar with these communities. Their confusion could cause these people on the margins to become cultural interpreters and explain their communities to those who don’t understand. Some see this as an opportunity to share their life experiences and cross cultural bridges; for others, it can become a burden of representation and they may lose a feeling of privacy (Cavalcante, 2017, p. 11). Bit could be seen as a welcome break from tragic representations for people within the trans community. Conversely,  Elmore’s silence on these issues could also lead mainstream audiences to believing that marginalized communities do not face any struggles in modern America, and therefore lose some empathy. 

This mediated understanding of reality could also be greatly detrimental to the feminist movement if it were to hit the mainstream. While I loved the explicitly feminist tone of the film, other audiences could find it off-putting and apply Bit’s ideology to all real-life feminists. The group of women in this film are quite outspoken around their distrust and distaste toward men. This could be applied to feminists, who are already called “man haters” in the real world as an attempt to invalidate their arguments. Elmore could be adding fuel to this fire by depicting feminists as exactly what the mainstream fears them to be.

Simultaneously, this bold approach to intersectional feminism is exactly why I, and many other queer viewers, love this film. My own subject positionality influences my understanding of Bit, just as those of mainstream audiences would make them feel differently about the film. I am a college-educated, middle-class, white, bisexual woman. I am also an outspoken feminist and socialist. All of my converging identities influence my view on this film and the opinions I have on its themes. As a young person who spends a lot of time in feminist spaces online, I felt such a rush while watching this film and hearing them directly saying things like, “Men can’t handle power. They have it already, and look at what they have done with it” (Elmore, 2019). A lot of people online say things about hating men, and I know from my own personal experience that the argument is so nuanced that it is simply easier to say “kill all men” than it is to explain what feminism really stands for and how it is, in fact, not simply man-hating. I love that this film expects the viewer to have this same knowledge, and can therefore say things like this without needing to defend itself and explain all of the nuance behind such a statement.

My status as middle-class and a socialist also have a great impact on my subject positionality and interpretation of Bit. Coming from a middle-class family and city, everything in the movie seemed normal to me. I was able to identify with the characters’ struggles, as they didn’t have anything to do with money or family issues. However, I could see this posing an issue for people who are struggling financially or with their family dynamic. To make up for this, the film has a lot of discourse regarding the redistribution of power and resources. Downward redistribution is a key tenant of leftism, so this movie displays clear leftist ideologies from a socio-political perspective (Duggan, 2002, p.XVI). We can see this in lines like, “How would you like to hold the keys to the kingdom for a change?” when Duke is talking to Laurel about turning, and at the very end of the movie, when Laurel’s brother asks her what they should do next and she responds, “Maybe what everyone with power should do and never does: share it” (Elmore, 2019).

(watch video until 1:30:00)

Finally, watching this film from the subject positionality of a woman greatly influenced my interpretation and reaction. At first, I was appalled by the group of girls and how nonchalantly they killed people, especially men. Laurel was written to have the same feelings of shock and disgust. So, when Duke said, “Our role is secondary. Our bodies are suspect, alien, other. We’re made to be monstrous, so let’s be monsters,” (Elmore, 2019) that was enough of an explanation for Laurel, and for myself, to become sympathetic to their cause. I have been personally affected by the feelings of otherness and being secondary that Duke lists, so this was a perfect line to change my opinion on their actions. However, if a man were to watch this film, especially if he were not to be a feminist, he might not be so sympathetic because he does not have the same experiences and understanding of what it is like to live in this world.

(watch until 41:12)

Bit is a film that crosses many boundaries, while still upholding some homonormativity for the sake of profit and consumption. It was written with the expectation of an audience that is knowledgeable of marginalized communities and social issues, making it thoroughly enjoyable to watch from a queer perspective. However, if the film were to break into the mainstream spotlight, its lack of nuance could cause harmful backlash toward trans communities, people of color, woman-loving women, and feminist movements. 

References

Benshoff, H. M. & Griffin, S. (2004). Queer cinema: The film reader. Psychology Press.

Cavalcante, A. (2017). Breaking into transgender life: Transgender audiences’ experiences with ‘first of its kind’ visibility in popular media. Communication, Culture & Critique, 10(3), 538-555. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12165

Duggan, L. (2002). Introduction. In The twilight of equality? Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy (pp. X-XXII). Beacon Press. 

Dunagan, R. (2019, August 2). Interview: A talk with Brad Michael Elmore, Director of OUTFEST’s ‘Bit’. Flipscreen. https://flipscreened.com/2019/08/02/interview-a-talk-with-brad-michael-elmore-director-of-outfests-bit/

Elmore, B. M. (Director). (2019). Bit [Film]. Vertical Entertainment.

Joyrich, L. (2013). Queer television studies: Currents, flows, and (main)streams. Cinema Journal, 53(2), 133-139. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2014.0015 

Tongson, K. (2017). Queer. In L. Ouellette & J. Gray (Eds.), Keywords for media studies (pp. 157-160). NYU Press. 

Tourmaline. (2017, October 11). Tourmaline on transgender storytelling, David France, and the Netflix Marsha P. Johnson Documentary. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/reina-gossett-marsha-p-johnson-op-ed 

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 5x19 Tough Love

aka you are not immune to… internalized bi erasure?

Welcome to this dailyish (weekly? bi-weekly?) text post series where I will rewatch an episode of Buffy and go on an impromptu rant about it for an hour. Is it about one hyperspecific thing or twenty observations? 10 or 3k words? You don’t know! I don’t know!!! In this house we don’t know things.

And in today’s episode Tara’s not perfect and gets her mind sucked out for it, we kick off the season’s multi-episode finale arc by revealing Dawn to Glory, and we draw some weird parallels between two of our dynamics. Perhaps mostly though, I’ll just talk about Willow’s sexuality, because at some point, we need to properly address that elephant in the room.

Okay, so, let’s just kick this off. If you’ve been in this fandom long enough, you’ve been inevitably exposed to the discourse of Willow’s sexuality. And you might be asking now… what’s the big deal anyway? Isn’t art up to interpretation? Wasn’t that one of my main motivations for this rewatch? Why does it matter that parts of the audience ascribe different labels to Willow?

And well… that’s valid, but it also misses a crucial element of our media, one that I alluded to in my rant about Whedon character deaths. Art doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And the significance of that is only amplified for folks and groups whose experiences aren’t recognized or seen by society in the first place.

To them it will matter whether or not someone recognizes a character by a certain label. Because a refusal to do so feels like an erasure of their own identities. That’s what makes this whole discussion complicated in the first place.

Now, am I the best person to do a deep dive on this? No. Especially not in one of these barely proof-read long rant posts. I’m sure you can find much better sources, so please do that. But it’d feel disingenuous to ignore it too, so I’m just gonna address it to the best of my abilities as well as provide my own in-universe interpretation of what it could mean for the characters.

Great. Now for that pesky discourse.

Personally my go-to analogy to describe it is the classic Shrek onion one.

You see, you peel away a layer of the Willow’s sexuality onion… and it’s still an onion. You peel away all the layers, you chop it up, and sure, it remains an onion, but now everything’s a mess and you’re crying.

The issue is that you kind of need to peel those layers away anyway if you want to truly divorce yourself from the binary thinking that the show itself often engages with. Which is what’s arguably gotten us into this mess in the first place.

Because however you view Willow’s sexuality, you can’t deny that the show is doing a lousy job defining it. Willow does identify as gay/lesbian as of 5x11 and through the end of the series, but the language the show uses makes it impossible to just leave it at that.

In Doppelgangland, when Willow meets her vampire self, she describes her as “kinda gay”. Not gay, but kinda gay. We also see Vampire!Willow making out with Vampire!Xander in The Wish beforehand, so if Vamp!Willow is supposed to tell us something about Willow’s own sexuality, then it’d stand to reason that she’s bi. Right?

Well, apparently not. But then we run into her actual line in 5x11 where she first uses a label, saying “Hello, gay now!”. Notice, it’s gay now. As in Willow just woke up one day and turned gay. The same joke(?) is repeated in Intervention, where one of the characteristics that was programmed into Buffybot about Willow was saying Gay(1999 - ).

Now, that’s not to say that Willow can’t just have a fluid sexuality and identify anyway she fucking wants to, and she doesn’t need to justify her label to anyone. She fell in love with Tara, and that made her reconsider her own identity. Season 7 almost ends up addressing this too in a scene I think, so that’ll be nice to get to.

The issue mostly comes from the show skipping to engage even with the possibility that Willow (or anyone for that matter) might be attracted to more than one gender at the same time. The closest we get to this is with the love triangle setup in New Moon Rising, except I guess in this love triangle Willow also chose a sexual orientation?

It’s like that episode was the quantum superposition of Willow’s Schrödinger’s sexuality, and upon observation, it locked into either one of its two states. That’s why Tara’s been talking about getting a cat in that episode! Guys, we solved it!

Notice also that I’ve yet to really talk about Willow’s sexual history before Tara in regards to this… because for me that’s sort of less part of the point? If Willow was a real person, and you knew that she had this adorable boyfriend before she identified as a lesbian, you wouldn’t go up to her and question how she defines her own sexuality. I mean… I hope so? Don’t be a fucking asshole.

But that’s both the fallacy of the argument and the reason why you should still respect the label Willow identifies with. Because Willow is not real, she’s a fictional character, and therefore arguments can and should be made about how the show portrays her sexuality… And yet, the people who identify with Willow are very much real, and so are their own experiences of people dismissing their own chosen identities.

So, there you go folks. These are my two cents. Willow’s gay, but we need to acknowledge how the show appears to be either completely unaware, or actively dismissive of the existence of bisexuality. This even comes up in the S8 comics, where Buffy’s sexuality after having a relationship with a woman is continuously referred to as essentially “not-gay”. Because I guess in the Buffyverse canon these are your only two options.

Now that we got all that out of the way, we can briefly talk about this episode, I guess.

To keep it on track, I guess we should dissect the argument between Willow and Tara that sort of caused me to whip this whole discussion out here.

Now, this is a fascinating scene, because it pivots a lot, and reveals a lot about the characters and their insecurities. It also appears to be fueled by Willow’s own lack of self-reflection and Tara’s non-confrontational nature.

It starts with Willow complaining to Tara about how Buffy appears to be trying to be more strict with Dawn. Willow is obviously identifying with Dawn in the situation. But Tara says she completely understands Buffy.

This then probably reminds Willow of Buffy earlier telling her that she wouldn’t understand when she was talking to her about Dawn, which causes a mood shift in Willow. It also reminded me of season 3 of Buffy telling Willow the same thing regarding her connection with Faith, so as a Buffy/Tara shipper that association kind of delights me, ngl.

But as Tara pushes further, seeing that something is bothering Willow, she reveals the insecurity behind it. Willow isn’t just responding to Tara having this wisdom through this major, tragic life experience that she can relate to Buffy with; it’s that Tara’s done all of this so much longer than she has. She’s been a witch all her life. She’s been out much longer.

That however then triggers Tara’s own insecurities about Willow rapidly surpassing her in her own magical abilities, and says that that “frightens” her. She tries walking back on her choice of word later, but it’s too late, and Willow locks into that.

Now, this is some riveting stuff. Because with foreknowledge, the easiest interpretation here is that this will relate back to Willow’s abuse of magic in season 6. That deep down Tara already sees what having this much power will do to her girlfriend.

This is arguably even reinforced in the episode with Willow going after Glory. It’s once again foreshadowing, Willow attempting to take revenge for something that’s been done to Tara; but it also betrays a certain arrogance in Willow. She actually believes that she can take on Glory, a supposed God. (Which, honestly? She probably could by season 7.) That’s the kind of power that she wields and how she chooses to use it.

Still, in the argument itself Tara pushes this fear of hers in a slightly different direction, saying that she’s afraid that she wouldn’t be able to fit into Willow’s life, after all these changes. And that’s where the previous discussion fits in.

Perhaps to understand Willow’s response, we should remember how magic has been used as our lesbian metaphor for almost a whole season. Because she almost immediately jumps to the conclusion, that Tara’s afraid that she would… go back to boys? Which is of course a classic, toxic stereotype used against bisexuals, despite the fact that no one here canonically identifies as bi, so add that to the discourse.

More importantly, it’s said by Willow. Now, Tara totally drops the ball here, asking her “Should I be?”, which reinforces the validity of Willow’s assumption that it’s actually something that Tara is thinking. Even someone as perfect and precious as Tara is not immune to propaganda.

In Tara’s defense, she once again tries dancing back on it, and talking it out before Willow storms out, but yeah. While I’d like to think that Tara’s question came more from a place of general insecurity, regardless of the gender of Willow’s next possible love interest, she sure fucked up in that moment.

Still, the fact that it’s Willow jumping to this debate, might just tell us more about Willow herself and how she sees herself.

Let’s go back to Restless for a bit. In that episode, Willow’s fear was ended up being about how she was scared that deep down she was still the same girl that she was in high school. That all these things she developed through college that made her stand out were just a facade, and that she was merely hiding her true identity as the same lonely loser she believed herself to have been back then.

So… and bear with me here… if we take that fear as a core motivation for Willow’s character, we can interpret the way she identifies her sexuality as a means to distance herself from her old identity. From this perspective, it’d perhaps even make sense for her to feel insecure about a supposed attraction to men, because she sees that as a regression to her old identity.

I can not stress it enough that this is merely a possible interpretation though. And one that would really only become satisfying if season 7 - which was already largely about reconciling with these different aspects of her identity for Willow aside the obvious theme of power - ended up tying it all together with Willow re-defining her own sexuality. It didn’t though, so I’m still left with the same conclusions, and this thought experiment of a character analysis.

Anywho, this is getting so very long, and there are still a few things that I wanted to touch upon this episode. Mainly the parallel we’re drawing between Willow / Tara and Buffy & Dawn throughout.

Normally, I love a good parallel storytelling. It’s efficient and makes the whole thing more cohesive. Here however, they manage to drive the parallel home so hard, that it just becomes weird at some point.

Like the fact that we have these two conflicts in the two relationships, arguably anchoring the episode? That’s good stuff. I also like the fact that Willow and Tara’s argument grows out of their discussion about Buffy and Dawn’s situation.

There’s actually a lot of great interaction in the entire episode. I love Dawn opening up to Spike about how she feels responsible for what would happen to Tara, and how she feels like she can’t be good because of all the terrible things happening around her. That’s a brilliant scene. Spike’s “Well, I’m not good and I’m okay”? I actually love him in that moment, not even gonna lie.

Buffy thinking that she actually convinced Willow to not go after Glory reminded me of a scene in Angel the series, where the gang thinks they managed to curve Fred’s impulses to axe murder her old professor. Do you all even know these people you call friends??? But again, I liked that exchange.

And okay, Buffy needed to be reminded what she would do if something happened to Dawn to realize what Willow was planning. Fine.

But then you’ve got the doctor asking Willow if Tara was her “sister” (to which she of course replied “She’s my everything”, and it’s fine, I’m fine), and then in the last scene, Buffy explicitly equating Willow’s need to take care of Tara with her own feelings regarding Dawn.

Again, I understand parallel storytelling. I love it. But when you’re equating a romantic and a familial relationship there’s a point where it becomes weird, and for me, these two moments put it just over that edge. This is of course a deeply subjective perspective, and I recognize that.

And then you also get Buffy trying to take on these new adult responsibilities in the episode. She’s dropping out of college to try and care for Dawn, and is faced with the challenge to become a parental authority figure in her sister’s life. The scene where she explains to Dawn that the reason she’s being tough with her, is because otherwise she could be seen unfit to be her guardian just gutted me.

This episode is just way too much, guys. And we’re only just at the beginning of the big finish of this season.

[fanficparker]

My Home (Part 17)

Peter Parker x Reader

Part 17… Peter Parker

Word count: 1.88 k words

Warnings: Angst, Some action, big fantasy words, swearing

A/n: Tell me if you want to get added to the TAGLIST of My Home! For more parts see ‘MASTERLIST’ in my profile description! Taglist in the reblogged post. Tell me if you wanna get added :) PS: IF YOU COULD REBLOG IT, THE FIC ISN’T GETTING MUST ATTENTION ON TUMBLR….

Peter’s POV:

"What do you mean by was still alive? Does she --- is she dead?!" I was hunted by my own words.

"Well yeah! I tried my best not to kill her. But she didn't tell me where the ring was. Stubborn wasn't she?" that evil Dorothea spoke up with a pout.

I clenched my fists tight, so tight that if I had longer nails they must have pierced through my suit and skin. My eyes felt like they were burning as tears rushed down my face, hidden under my mask.

The word 'was' associated with Y/n was too much for me to bear!

First Uncle Ben! And now Y/n!

It's my mistake every time, Uncle Ben was trying to make me understand things and I ran off, leaving him alone to deal with the danger following him. And Y/n! She wasn't telling me, rather she was begging me that she has changed, she wanted to protect our planet, but I let her go. I handed her to death itself!

"And most importantly, Liz doesn't deserve Peter."

And Peter doesn't deserve Y/n. Because I deserve to be alone.

"Where are you lost Spider, Spider-Man? That's what people call you right?" she asked in her nonchalant voice.

I can't let her know that I'm broken. I have to be strong. Come on Spider-Man, you gotta save the world, that's what Y/n wanted before dying right?!

"Don't waste my time. Just tell me where the ring is?" she questioned again, dramatically blowing air over her long black nails.

I don't think her nail polish is wet.

Her thin, long arms with those disgusting long black nails made her look like a 70s vampire.

"The ring? Do you mean a wedding ring? Well I'm in no mood of marrying you."

"Uff..." she groaned tilting her head back in frustration. "And I'm in no mood of spreading pedophilia, kid. Just give me that ring."

"What's your actual plan? Let's get a straight deal- if you tell me what's your plan, I'll tell you where the ring is! " I raised my eyebrows. I literally have no interest in talking to her but I'm trying to buy some time to think of a valid plan, but in reality, I have zero idea what am I gonna do with her.

"I like deals. Okay, you little humans should know what Queen Thea has planned for you. Believe me, it is for your own benefits."

"That's what all bad guys say. I'm used to it. Just tell me what's your plan. Ruling over the world sounds cliché to me. I hope you got something new."

"Cliché. I don't do cliché. I do real..."

"Shit?"

"Business!"

"You're doing it for money. Dollars work on your planet too?!"

She groaned again at my comment.

She tries to remain calm, but gets irritated really soon - weakness noted!

She took a deep sigh before continuing her words.

"Business in the sense that both the communities will be benefited. Humans and... better humans, that's me and my people. With the power of all 3 rings, I could manipulate every element on Earth. With that, I will get the whole Earth under-water as you did with our pretty Atlantis."

"What?! How's it beneficial? Aren't all living creatures gonna die? "

"Think far! Future consequences! You must have read it in school- 'Life originated from the sea', therefore, with so much quantity of biomass underwater, new organisms will evolve, better people, better humans, a new Earth, no more pollution, greenhouse effect. No more crimes! A whole new start. A better start! A better life!"

"That's rubbish! Senseless! You call it science! Are you insane?!" I blurted out, my eyes squinted, nose scrounged. "And what benefit is it gonna give to your people?" I questioned.

"It will take about a billion years for the advance species to take over, by that time we Chromicoms can make use of the vacant area, you know. Chromicom isn't a really big planet like your Earth, and we deserve to stretch our arms. Relax!" she yawned waving her hand on her mouth.

"How the fuck you can feel sleepy at this time?" I exclaimed in surprise.

"Because I don't need to work," she said and I could hear some banging noise behind my back plus my tingling spidey senses. And in a split second, the debris of the exploded museum building felt like moving. I looked back at Dorothea in utter confusion, her hands were waving in the air, the two rings she was wearing looked exactly the same like the one Y/n used, but they were shining.

Whenever Y/n used the ring it never glowed, but her rings were glowing.

I looked back at the flinting sound, amplified. The small stones were floating in the air, joining with each other. For a minute I was just seeing how the rocks and stones got lifted and got attached with each other, and finally when I could understand, 3 dog like creatures made of stones were running towards me!

What the fuck! She can manipulate objects? Antikeímenokinesis! Are you kidding me? Can anyone fucking provide me with the list of all possible supernatural powers? At least I could come prepared!

Upon realizing those stone creatures were trying to knock me out, I webbed the top of the nearby tower swinging, but one of the 3 stone creatures threw its hand on me, by hand I mean a big piece of rock cutting my web, making me fall on the ground. I groaned as my bones dug into my skin pressed against the concrete pavement. I couldn't even get up when all 3 of them got on me.

I would have really pet them if they weren't made of stone. They are freakin' crushing me under their weight, their hard stone body felt like jabbing through my skin. It's so painful, feels like giant rocks were rolling all over my body. They were sniffing on me, trying to smell. Can stones even smell?!

One of the dogs stopped just at my suit pocket, the exact place I kept Y/n's ring in. My heart skipped an uncomfortable number of beats. I have to get up and face this. I pushed off those stone creatures webbing them up.

"You got the ring, right! Just give it to me, and you'll be able to meet Y/n... after death," she said walking towards me.

"Well... That's not gonna happen." I announced swinging again to the tower.

At least she can't fly.

"You don't want these innocent citizens to die, right?!" she said in a dramatic sad tone, making my swinging come to a halt. I twisted my neck only to see a small coffee shop packed with people afraid of this bombarding of the museum, surrounded by a ring of flames. Dorothea's rings were glowing again, she was directing the fire from the exploded museum towards the coffee shop

Pyrokinesis...

Why do villains enjoy blackmailing us? Can't they just fight us instead of involving any innocent life in between? They do the exact opposite cause they are the bad guys. And now I'm the good guy, so I gotta do my job.

"Leave them alone, and fight me!"

And she directed the fire nearer to the coffee shop. The screaming of the people amplified, some people were even tapping the transparent windows violently with a frightning face.

"Just give me that ring, and I won't hurt them." She was affirmed.

I didn't respond, looking for ways to stop her, but how? Can't I just web her up? With that inanimate object controlling power, it won't stand a chance.

The screams became ear-splitting. The Gas Station just next to the coffee shop was making things worse.

"Okay, I give up." I couldn't let her take over those innocent citizens in cold blood. She smirked, the fire became still like someone has pressed the pause button. She stretched her arm, a stone flew towards me. She shook her head, indicating me to put that ring on it. Even though I hated doing this, but I can't let them die like that, maybe I could figure out something afterwards. My shaky hands put down the ring on the stone and it swiftly flew back to her. She instantly lifted the ring, sliding it on one of her fingers.

"Now leave them." I repeated. She only replied me with a smile, but not just a smile, the evil smile.

"Nooooo... " I screamed and abruptly some metal rods came flying to me, pinning my arms and feet tightly to the tower I was leaning on. I couldn't make any move, the metal rods were too much for my strength, why am I not Captain America?!!!! My freakin' super strength isn't enough to rip off these thick metal rods.

My eyes widened as the flames rose up again, travelling towards the coffee shop, the screaming voices hit my ears again, my vision getting blurry.

"Why are you doing this? I gave you the ring!" my throat felt like choking. "You guys should get yourself ready to see the mass deaths, it's just the start... Like an inauguration." she gloated, utter satisfaction and pleasure in her voice.

"Please" I begged, my voice fainter than before. She looked away enjoying the painful screams. I flutter shut my eyes tight, seeing myself losing, seeing innocent people dying, begging for mercy.

But in the other minute, I fell on the concrete floor again, my back hitting the floor, accompanied by a loud noise of splashing water. I opened my eyes immediately, only to see the whole place drenched in water. The fire was extinguished. Dorothea was too drenched in water. She was pulling back her now wet hairs in disbelief, appearing surprised as 'what just happened?', just like me.

Before I could think further I could hear the loud whooshing sound of the wind, the small pebbles and leaves that were lying on the ground previously got pushed farther due to the rising air currents, so were the bits of paper and Dorothea's long wet hairs.

And with a swift movement, the wind speed multiplied about a hundred times, knocking out Dorothea, making her fall on the ground.

"Sorry for kicking your candy ass." Another voice, that voice I was dying to hear caught my ears. I turned my lying body, only to see a tornado of dark winds. It was all I could see at the first sight, but it soon started diminishing as a small figure started to appear. And at that moment, she was standing right in front of me.

"Y/n." my lips automatically formed the words.

"Seems like you missed me already." she grinned, walking towards me helping me stand.

"So, you-you are alive?" No matter I felt extremely happy, but hell surprised at the same time.

"It's a long story." she reckoned.

"You tricked me into thinking you were dead. Of course I have time."

TBC) Taglist in the reblogged post. Tell me if you wanna get added :)

PS: IF YOU COULD REBLOG IT, THE FIC ISN’T GETTING MUST ATTENTION ON TUMBLR….

[elysiantouch]

world building &&. werewolves

the two werewolves found on this blog - davin & eli - are slightly different from one another, as davin is a turned ‘wolf and eli is a born ‘wolf.

detailed beneath the cut is a more extensive overview of the origin of werewolves as well as each type of werewolf ( turned versus born ), as they share key similarities & differences between them.

in a direct comparison to vampires, there are various detailed histories discussing the nature and origin of werewolves, who are considered a younger species of nonhuman yet not the youngest by far. all werewolves share a history, yet certain family lines detail differences, as discussed in the post for eli.

near the beginning of current time, seven families had founded a village in a country that no longer exists, in a time that was wrought with tension and uncertainty and savagery. it was a modest farming village, everyone close with one another, with very few newcomers arriving simply because it was so new, so small, so isolated. isolation served as a barrier and a downfall, as the seven families were unaware that war was wreaking havoc through their country, a plague riding on its tails with intent to demolish. when the war reached its peak was when it reached the small village, the peace and comfort of it ripped by marching soldiers coughing ash and poison.

the seven families were proud folk, unwilling to bend to the weaponry and anger and hatred, but they were farmers, and simple, and peaceful. the matriarch of each family was taken from her bed and slaughtered in the village center, as warning, as promise. the patriarchs of the family are said to have made a pact on the rise of a full moon, with a prince of hell, in order to save their village from the ravages of war and pestilence, in exchange for the humanity within their soul and within their progeny’s souls. it was an easy decision but with a twist - the youngest son and daughter of each family was taken, replaced with a beast who tore through the soldiers as the soldiers tore through their mothers.

from then on, the histories become more detailed, more muddled, more crystal clear and murky, as those two children of each family left after learning what they had done, discovering their once horrific gifts through trial, error, and bloodshed. it’s said that there is perhaps one surviving werewolf from each of the original seven, but there is no proof.

BASIC INFO:

STRENGTHS: superior speed, strength, agility, and senses ; enhanced sense of sight, smell, and hearing ; moderate healing factor ; semi-immortality/prolonged lifespan ; lupine shifting ( partial even without the moon’s influence, but only if of a born line ; complete with the moon’s influence, both not of and of a born line )

WEAKNESSES: feral mind after shifting ( temporary if of a born line ; often permanent if not of a born line ) ; weakened physical and mental state after shifting back to human ( amplified in turned wolves, and often a direct link to feralness ) ; wolfsbane ; silver ; extreme mutilation ; other powerful supernatural beings ( ie. other werewolves, vampires, demons, angels )

when in their human state, werewolves retain muted strengths and heightened weaknesses ( ie. they can hear better than the average human yet not as well when in their wolf state ; they are way more susceptible to poison by wolfsbane in their human state than wolf state )

werewolves are humans before they are wolves ; due to the nature of their origin, they retain more human physiology as a whole, and do not adopt wolf physiology in human state, only in wolf state

all werewolves have the capacity to go completely feral, as often depicted in werewolf mythology, both in human and in wolf forms

werewolves are pack creatures by nature of both human and animal physiology, as that innate desire to be with those of similar standing is multiplied thricefold - they thrive better when in a pack, be it of family or friends or both

though it is highly dependent upon the person, werewolves are often much less reserved when in wolf form, as their mind is more animalistic than not

this means that emotions such as affection, anger, and fear are obvious as a wolf than a human

pack rankings do not exist within werewolf packs, as werewolves are born human with the ability to turn into a wolf, as opposed to born wolves with the ability to turn into a human

despite this, some werewolves do exhibit traits associated with rankings, yet will never identify as such

unlike vampires, who have a distinct method of turning, werewolf turning is not a biological/physical experience, despite the scar of a bite mark left behind

THE ‘BITE’:

turning a human into a werewolf is not done through the modern horror method of biting or scratching, as there is no method of transferring dna in such a way

simply put, to turn a human into a werewolf, a ritual must be performed

the details of this ritual vary from werewolf to werewolf, pack to pack, but the basics are the same

the ritual is a mimic of the original pact performed by the original families, though it is modernized and, therefore, not as effective, resulting in an inability to pass on traits that born werewolves possess

because of the nature of the ritual, very few werewolves know of it and even fewer can properly perform it, resulting in botched results and traumatized humans left to deal with the effects on their own

the original pact left the two youngest children of the seven families with bite marks on their appendages, on their legs and wrists and calves and upper arms

in a mirroring of that pact, turned wolves possess canine bite marks, as a mark that their turning was a success

TURNED VERSUS BORN WOLF:

alluded to throughout, turned wolves do not possess some minor abilities that born wolves do

in the hours following a full moon transformation, turned wolves and born wolves both possess a feral mindstate, as they are pure animal than they are human

born wolves, because they are often born within a pack and are taught by the pack members, have learned how to pull their human mind into the forefront and, therefore, can reclaim their mindstate

it is possible for a turned wolf to be taught how to reclaim their mindstate, but it is often a difficult feat to accomplish, and not as effective or guaranteed

born wolves possess the ability for partial transformation, which often takes place during the nights without a full moon

this ability is extremely draining and rarely used, especially in modern times when it is much more difficult to hide the true nature

turned wolves can only transform during full moon nights, and only into their wolf forms as opposed to a partial state

born wolves are considered born if at least one parent is a born wolf and one is a turned or born wolf, as that ensures passing of the proper dna

turned wolves are much more susceptible to weakened physical and mental states the morning after a full moon transformation, often resulting in extreme mood drops and fatigue

born wolves are also susceptible to this but have more experience in dealing with it

as such, newly turned wolves suffer greatly, whereas older turned wolves have learned to manage, yet are still prone to suffering

[tricksters-captain]

Klaus Mikaelson/Mikael imagine - Monsters Of Men

AN: Well, I may have started watching the originals again and I’m almost on season 3 and I had a little idea of an imagine... So...here it is. I mean I don’t really know what this is, since I just let myself write this at 1am and  so I’m posting it. 

Summary: Klaus loves you, therefore you are a weakness, a weakness that Mikael can use but what happens when you turn into Mikael’s weakness too?

Pairing: Klaus x reader, Mikael x reader (somewhat)

Word count: 2,040

Warnings: None really, mentions of blood, some strong language

Two men. Two monsters. Two creatures of darkness.

Both cruel and cold and murderous beings. Both so far stuck in their own minds that you weren’t aware that they could even feel what they did for you.

You. A simple human, longing for the immortal life but it never being granted to you.

When you literally stumbled upon the world of the supernatural you didn’t realise that you would draw such attention to yourself, let alone the attention of an original. In fact, you were a beckon of attraction as all the Mikaelson’s took a very strong liking to you. 

Niklaus Mikaelson tried to fight it at first but he eventually caved in to what his instincts were telling him and approached you.

He admired how you tried to fight your feelings for him and he enjoyed toying with you. You soon grew close to the hybrid and his siblings. But as your bond grew with the originals, so did you desire to turn into an undead soul.

You had been through thick and thin with the Mikaelson family since their return to New Orleans and despite Klaus’s protests to keep you away from danger, you had somehow managed to stick around. Your stubbornness and will to fight was something Klaus despised and admired about you. He always had a thing for the ones with fight in them.

When you pretty much signed up to becoming apart of the Mikaelsson family, you knew what it meant. You knew that you would now be used as a target, a weak point, something that people could break in order to break Klaus and Elijah. And that’s exactly what happened.

When Mikael came back from the dead, he discovered his bastard’s infatuation with you and sought you out. He captured you and used you to try and get Klaus to him but in the couple of days that it took Klaus to track you down, Mikael found himself bewitched by you, just like the other men in the family. He never understood why Klaus would take a liking to a mortal but when he met you, he suddenly realised why.

You were special and to see you slowly turn Mikael back into the man he once was before his daughter was taken away was an extraordinary thing. You hadn’t fully flipped a switch and Mikael was suddenly an angel but there were glimpses of the soft man that came through in the 36+ hours he spent with you.

When Klaus collected you, he hadn’t managed to put his father down and therefore you and Mikael met again. 

Mikael didn’t know what it was that had him in this way. He hadn’t felt such a strong feeling since the early stages of his wife’s and his relationship. However, what he did know was that he didn’t want any harm to come to you ever. 

You stood in-between the two men, blood soaked your shirt as you had taken a hit just above your hip but your hand held the pressure to stop you bleeding out. 

Boy, what a day it had been. 

So much was going on with all the supernatural creatures and now you had managed to get injured whilst on your way to stop Klaus and Mikael from ripping each other apart. 

Klaus’s eyes widened as you stumbled between him and Mikael; there were a fair few metre in-between you and the men and both of the men’s eyes fell to your wound. 

“(Y/n), what happened?” Mikael asked, his voice full of concern which surprised Klaus. How could the cold, cruel monster of a man that he dared to call father suddenly melt at the sight of you?

“I’m fine.” You swayed on your feet, clearly showing that you were not fine. You noticed the men had already been fighting as they were both covered in fast healing wounds and blood of their own. 

You locked eyes with Mikael and suddenly remembered the days you spent together and how you had managed to crack a smile from the man once you realised that he wasn’t just the soulless man that Klaus had once described and now, seeing his face full of concern and his lips wear a frown, you couldn't help but want to see that smile again. 

“You are not fine, (Y/n)––” Klaus went to step forward but you stopped him, 

“Don’t. Please, I came here to stop you from you fighting, don’t worry about this.” Your eyes fell to your blood soaked shirt. 

“This is madness, you are bleeding out, you are going to die if you just stand there.” Mikael also went to approach you. 

“No, what’s madness is the fact that you are involved in this at all!” Klaus was furious at the sight of worry in Mikael’s eyes for you.

Klaus was the one to catch you when you fell.

He bit down on his wrist and pressed it against your lips.

“Please, (Y/n), drink.” Klaus begged, his eyes glassy as you struggled to keep your own eyes open. 

You opened your mouth and let the salty thick liquid run into your mouth. 

“What do you think you’re doing?! If anything happens to her, if she somehow dies in the next twenty four hours then she will turn into one of you!” Mikael was angry with himself because half of him wanted you to drink Klaus’s blood and half of him would rather die than see his sweet pure human turn into something corrupt and venomous like a vampire. 

“Don’t you think I know that!” Klaus snapped at his un-biological father. “Anyway what do you care?! You’ve never cared for anyone your whole miserable existence!” 

“That is not true and you know that, Boy.” Mikael bared his teeth back at Niklaus. 

You opened your eyes and Klaus helped you to your feet as you started to feel better. 

You reached up and wrapped your arms around Klaus’s shoulders, embracing him tightly. 

Klaus let out a shaky breath, relieved that you would be okay and Mikael felt his chest ache with jealousy and spite. 

“That’s enough of the sappy stuff, Boy.” Mikael ripped Klaus away from you and pinned him against a wall of the courtyard by his neck. 

“No! Stop! Mikael!” You pleaded, rushing forward but still not fully healed so too weak to do anything to stop the immortal. 

Mikael hesitated killing Klaus at the sound of your voice, the plea. 

Klaus took this as a chance to switch the roles. 

Klaus squeezed his hand around Mikael’s neck. 

“All this time I believe you would never have a weakness and now I see you do.” Klaus almost laughed at his fathers pathetic behaviour. 

Never had he seen Mikael falter in a fight due to a girl. 

You managed to worm your way in-between the men before any more violence could commence by fucking under Klaus’s arm and shoving your hands on Klaus’s chest, forcing him back slightly. 

“Stop!” You cried out, Klaus seemed taken back by your actions. 

You turned and faced Mikael, reaching up and touching his face. His bitter expression softened against your hand. 

“All this fighting, it’s completely pointless. Stop trying to bloody kill each other.” You begged, your eyes flickering back to Klaus as you dropped your hand. 

“So, what’s this then? You spend a couple of days with my dear old dad and suddenly you no longer want him dead?” Klaus looked looked betrayed by your actions. 

“I know what he did to you, Klaus. I know he deserves to be six feet under but...” You didn’t get a chance to finish as Mikael had fled, cutting you off and getting away from Klaus’s wrath once again. 

It’s hard having two men of such power fight for you. Two originals desperate for your affection. 

You honestly felt stronger feelings for Klaus but there was something there with Mikael, you saw it; something good. A small spark of light in a man full of darkness. You saw the same thing in Klaus yet on a larger scale. 

Klaus had been livid with you since the night you fought for Mikael but his bond to you was too strong to completely hate you for it. And the fact that you got yourself killed only a few hours after Klaus fed you his blood by pissing off a witch. 

Over the past few days, Klaus had been training you and teaching you the ways of vampirism. It was more difficult than you originally thought it would be but being you, you soon learned and quicker than most. 

You rested your forehead against Klaus’s as you stood in his bedroom. He clenched his jaw and closed his eyes. 

“I love you, Niklaus Mikaelson.” You whispered, running your thumb over his lips. It was the first time you admitted it and instead of waiting around to hear the response you fled with your new vampire speed to the other side of town. 

The new enhanced emotions made you feel the need to be melodramatic in times of high emotion and admitting something like ‘I love you’, something you once told Klaus you would never say, really hit the list high on high emotion events. 

 “Looks like my little human is no longer human.” Mikael’s voice rang through your head as he snuck up on you. 

You span around and stared at the man. He had been missing the past few days, the Mikaelson’s had started to wonder whether Finn had got to him. 

You saw the disappointment on his face. 

“Mikael.” You breathed out his name, he closed his eyes momentarily and then neared you. 

“(Y/n).” He mimicked you. 

“Finally stopped your ridiculous plots to kill Niklaus yet?” You tried your best to lighten the painfully obvious dreary mood. 

“The only reason I haven't daggered that insolent boy yet is because of you.” Mikael admitted. 

“What?” You were confused by his confession. 

“I fear my bastard son may have your heart and if I dare dagger his then I would be daggering yours also.” Mikael admitted, more truthful than he had been in a small while.

You opened your mouth but didn’t know how to respond. You sensed the man had a soft spot for you but you had no idea you were the reason he was putting off killing Klaus. 

“I also fear that if I did kill the bastard than you would never feel for me the way that I somehow feel for you.” Mikael wasn’t one to confess his undying love so you knew that this meant a hell of a lot. 

He held your face in his hands. 

“As long as you care for that... monster, I cannot strike him through.” He muttered quietly, his eyes searching your own. 

“Mikael––” You went to speak,

“No, don’t bother. I have never felt for anyone but my wife and now that I finally do, I cannot have her.” Mikael looked at you with such longing that it was hard to suppress any emotion.

There was a silence as Mikael observed you. 

You took this moment to press your lips against the monsters forehead. You didn’t know why but you believe the was some reason you had some feelings for the man, the same reason that drew you to the Mikaelson family in the first place and therefore you felt an attachment to the creature even after everything he’s done. 

“When I met Klaus, I didn’t think I would know anyone else with such a darkness inside them and then when he opened up about you, I knew there was.” You admitted, you saw Mikael’s face furrow as he waited for you to get to the point. “But... one thing that I learned from Klaus was that everyone has some light inside them. You just need to find a way to bring it out.” 

“All lights can be extinguished, (Y/n), even a light as pure as yours. Becoming a monster like my children only proves that yours will not last as long as I thought.” Mikael then left. 

Leaving you standing there, alone. 

“(Y/n)...” Klaus startled you as he found you.  “...why did you run?”  

[wonderwonderhowido]

fic roundup

Another year-end meme, this one looking back on my fic output in 2016.

Wordcount: 126,116 words according to ao3

Stories: 10

Fandoms: 7

January: None

February:

Goodbye Highway (first chapter posted in January, finished in February) - The Raven Cycle, Ronan/Adam, 69k words. The big amnesia fic.

Did I Say Too Much? I’m So In My Head - Haikyuu!!, kuroken, 3k words. Kenma pines and then is brave. This was the one I wrote during the one all-nighter I pulled in 2016, while I was in a semi-euphoric state after the Carly Rae Jepsen concert. Memorably, this was also the night I tripped and read all the ushioi and found myself with a new otp, but the fic I wrote that night was actually kuroken.

March:

Better Make Sure That You Get Yours - Haikyuu!!, ushioi, 6k words, written for Auto’s birthday. The rimming fic.

April:

Last Year’s Wishes Are This Year’s Apologies -  Haikyuu!!, ushioi, 13k words. The one where Oikawa saves Ushijima from a dude hitting on him, drunken hookup ensues.

I Am One Of Your People - Haikyuu!! x Attack on Titan, Armin/Kenma, 5k words and written for ouroboros for smutswap.

Stand Brave Life-Liver - The Raven Cycle, Ronan and Noah gen, 1,802 words. A missing scene from TRK.

May - August: None

September:

Change of Heart -  Haikyuu!!, ushioi, 12k words. The one where they get lost in the woods together and have to work shit out.

November:

Warm Blood - Mystic Messenger, Jumin/Zen, 7k words and the first chapter of a WiP that will probably never be finished. Zen’s a vampire in this one.

December:

Teach Me Just What Fast Is - Yuri!!! On Ice, Yuri/Otabek, 3k words. Basically just my manifesto of headcanons about Yuri P being a sub.

Tiny Islands Where We Didn’t Always Have To Be Afraid - Jessica Jones, Jessica/Trish, 4k words. Backstory of them hooking up while they were teenagers.

Leitmotif of the year:

I am not sure that there is a single leitmotif that runs through all or most of these, but all my ushioi plus Goodbye Highway have to do with struggles of reconciling the past with the present, and the general concept of, and importance of, the baggage you can have with someone. So I guess that.

Other themes I’ve noticed: healing from trauma; pining; jealousy, resentment, anger and the complications ensuing from these uglier emotions getting entangled with romantic yearning; gaining understanding and knowledge of another person and/or yourself through sex; sex and control, specifically the sexiness of surrendering control to someone else.

What’s the story that makes you happiest?

Goodbye Highway. I feel like a broken record for how much I’ve already talked about my positive feelings for this story, but, well. It made me happy to write and it makes me happy to think about.

My favorite stories this year:

Goodbye Highway; Better Make Sure That You Get Yours; Change of Heart

Most popular story:

Goodbye Highway, and I’m a little stunned by the popularity of Teach Me Just What Fast Is, considering I wrote it on an airplane. 

Story most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:

Hm. I mean, both Tiny Islands and I Am One Of Your People were barely read by anyone, but I didn’t really expect them to be? I wrote the Armin/Kenma for ouroboros in smut swap, and they loved it, so I consider it successful by that metric, and Tiny Islands I wrote primarily for myself and I’m satisfied with it, so.

I guess I feel like Change of Heart and Last Year’s Wishes are underappreciated, partly because they got less kudos than the ushioi rimming and were harder to write/more plotty than that, and partly because I always think that ushioi is underappreciated by the universe in general.

Most fun story:

Change of Heart. Dramatic locker room arguments, a hike in the woods gone horribly wrong, forced intimacy, and all of Oikawa’s issues and hangups. The dialogue I wrote for this is some of the most fun I’ve ever had writing dialogue, and I loved pulling so liberally from my own internal monologues for Oikawa’s.

Sexiest story:

Better Make Sure That You Get Yours. Hard to argue with rimming and frenemies to lovers.

Story with single sexiest moment:

Adam sucking on Ronan’s fingers and then his dick before fucking him, in the middle of the longest sex scene I have ever written, at the end of Goodbye Highway. Oh also Oikawa coming on Ushijima’s face in Last Year’s Wishes.

Story with single sweetest moment:

Probably Goodbye Highway again, Ronan and Adam eating chocolate cake and watching porn together. I’m also awfully fond of Blue and Ronan’s first conversation together in GH, when she gives him the light, which maybe doesn’t strike other people as sweet, but it is for me. Also, Oikawa coaching Ushijima on how to make friends is very sweet to me.

Hardest story to write:

Warm Blood. It became hard enough to write that I’ve pretty much given up on continuing it, which is too bad; I kind of feel like I shouldn’t have posted it at all, oh well.

Easiest story to write:

Teach Me Just What Fast Is, or Did I Say Too Much? Both of them were written in p much one sitting, while I was sleep-deprived and in a good mood, and they just flowed.

Truest story of the year:

I still struggle with deciding on a definition of ‘truest.’ Tiny Islands is the story truest to its canon; Goodbye Highway and Change of Heart are the two truest to myself, I guess.

Story that made you cry/saddest story:

I don’t think Goodbye Highway is ultimately a sad story, although some might disagree, but it was the closest anything came to making me cry.

“Holy crap, that’s wrong even for you” story:

I don’t think I wrote anything that would fit this even remotely. All the porn I wrote was extremely right.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

I don’t know if this counts as shifting my own perceptions of the characters, but I wound up writing Jumin and Zen as kinder to each other than I’d originally intended in Warm Blood, and I’m still sort of mad that I wasn’t able to make their dynamic nastier.

Biggest disappointment:

Not writing the Blue and Ronan gen story where they become roommates after Gansey’s death.  

Biggest surprise:

I cannot fucking believe that HQ is the fandom I wrote the most for this year.

Most telling story:

Goodbye Highway, which is basically just 69k words of me processing my own brain shit. Change of Heart, wherein I wrote Oikawa a lot like myself.

Favorite opening line:

From Better Make Sure That You Get Yours: “Oikawa had a list of things that frustrated him about sex with Ushijima Wakatoshi.”

(Honorable mention, from Last Year’s Wishes: “Go suck a dick, Ushiwaka.” Listen, I love writing Oikawa more than I love most other things on this earth.)

Favorite closing line:

"Ronan sat on the forest floor, ignoring the occasional buzz in his pocket that indicated a text from Gansey, until it started to get dark. The temperature dropped, though not by much. Stiffness grew in his legs from sitting in one position too long. Distantly, he could hear the roar of an engine on a highway, so far away that it seemed quiet and kind. And around him, fireflies.” From Goodbye Highway. I just need to point out that I wrote this before TRK came out, and therefore m*ggie owes me for the concept of Ronan and symbolic firefly imagery.

And I can’t choose, I also love this one so much:

“As Noah crouched over Gansey’s body and said the words Gansey needed to hear, energy lines and time circles and knots in threads flitted through him like bird wings flapping. He was relieved to find that letting go did not feel like being murdered at all.” From Stand Brave Life-Liver

Favorite line from anywhere:

I’m very fond of this line from Tiny Islands, because it’s very simple and forgettable out of context but, at least to me and within the context of the show, it has a super bleak impact: “Jessica’s hangover the next morning was terrible, and she swore to herself she’d never drink again.”

But also like, the real favorite has to be this one from Goodbye Highway: “The holes in his mind scared him. But they were just holes. They couldn’t hurt him in the present.”

Favorite title:

Tiny Islands Where We Didn’t Always Have To Be Afraid, which is my favorite lyric from Run Fast by The Julie Ruin, a song that makes my heart hurt whenever I think about it. Honorable mention for Last Year’s Wishes Are This Year’s Apologies, because Fall Out Boy.

Looking back, did you write more stories than you thought you would this year, fewer than you thought, or about what you predicted?

I don’t remember having any real predictions about how many fics I would write, but hm, probably fewer? I wrote fewer than last year, but more of my stories were longer and/or more substantial.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2016?

Ushioi took me by surprise and I’m so glad and I’ve never looked back.

Story that could have been better?

Idk, I’m pretty pleased with the quality of most of them. Stand Brave Life-Liver probably could have been better, but I’m not sure how I could have improved it except by being an entirely different kind of writer than I am. I Am One Of Your People could have been more ambitious, but I think it works as a hot sex scene and a snippet of an established relationship. Warm Blood could have been finished, but oh well.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Goodbye Highway was risky, I guess, but it didn’t feel like it at the time because it mostly flowed easily. Same with most of what I wrote, tbh. I started working on a novel pretty early on last year, and the work on that was for the most part not something that flowed, so fanfic was more of an escapist thing for me, something I thought of doing purely for my own enjoyment and often something I spent time on when I knew I should be doing other things. This meant that most of the fic I wrote was id-driven and a blast to create. I guess what I learned is that it’s worth it to try and find that sweet spot where your writing is simultaneously you shooting from the hip, and striving to pull off an ambitious concept.  

What story do you want to have written?

I want to have finished the otayuri spy AU, I’m so impatient with this one, it’s all I’ve been thinking about. And I want to have written ushioi where Oikawa tops. And I want to have written some kind of otayuri fic that involves them having some kind of fight or misunderstanding and angsting about it and then resolving the conflict. And I want to have written the otayuri idea I have that I described as “orgasm denial but for kissing.” Look I just want to write otayuri all day, every day.

Story I want remembered:

Goodbye Highway.

What’s next for 2017:

I don’t really have any fic goals right now beyond finishing my current otayuri WiPs. Predicting next year’s fandoms is always fun to look at later, in a ‘wow I was hilariously wrong’ way, but I have no idea what’s coming up that could prompt me to write fic. Maybe I’ll write some stuff for Attack on Titan s2, if that starts showing up on my dash again. Maybe I will continue to tend my humble ushioi garden and write the bottom!Ushijima of my dreams; I keep thinking that I’m done with HQ but that hasn’t happened yet and I should probably learn to stop predicting it. I would like to write some victuuri, but I’m waiting for the right idea and it might never come.

You know what WOULD be nice, but I have no idea if this is actually on the horizon, is getting into a big western TV slash fandom again. I’m so ready for another Teen Wolf. I mean, I think a lot of us are and have been for a while, and YOI kind of turned out to be way more of a juggernaut fandom than I would have predicted, which of course I’m thrilled about. But it seems like all of the big non-anime fandom waves in recent years have been movie fandoms, which I can never seem to sustain an interest in, and I want another huge ridiculous TV fandom. I have no idea if this will be in store or not, though, beyond YOI hopefully continuing to gain momentum.

[talabib]

How To Build And Lead The Perfect Team.

Great teams are far more than a collection of talented people. You can bring together some of the brightest minds and still have a highly dysfunctional team. As you’ll find out in this post, what makes a truly effective team is a mixture of different qualities, chief among them the commitment to making or achieving something that can’t be done alone.

We know that great things can happen when people come together and put their minds to it. In a way, modern civilization is a testament to what human cooperation is capable of.

Creating a positive team benefits both the team and the person who leads it.

The business world is filled with challenges, starting with trying to get new ideas, organizations and products off the ground. Of course, having a great team at your service can be a huge asset, and yet keeping that team running smoothly presents its own challenges.

For starters, it’s important to keep your team motivated when times are tough or when your goal looks more like a fantasy than a real possibility. This is just one example of when staying positive is crucial to staying afloat.

One of the big benefits of establishing an optimistic, positive outlook within your team is that everyone benefits, with the group as a whole, as well as each individual, experiencing an increased likelihood of success.

According to a report from Duke University, optimistic individuals have a greater likelihood of succeeding in politics, business and sports.

The benefits of positive thinking extend beyond the workplace as well: the pioneering psychologist John Gottman found that married couples who engaged in five positive interactions for every one negative interaction were much likelier to stay together than the couples who were closer to a one-to-one ratio.

And what about team leaders? Well, they also benefit from the positive workplace environment they help create – and it starts with having devoted team members.

According to the research of organizational expert Wayne Baker, leaders who exude positive energy naturally attract other people. So, if you’re a leader with a vision and you project an aura of optimism and unity, people in your workplace will naturally want to be around you.

As Baker explains, positive-thinking leaders will inevitably attract talented colleagues, rather than other leaders, and these people will likely devote their time willingly to your projects. It’s also likely that they’ll share new information, opportunities and ideas with you before they share them with anyone else.

To put it simply: when the team is thinking positively, everyone wins.

A great team culture is essential, and every team member is important in maintaining it.

If you want a healthy and high-functioning team, you need to have a healthy and positive team culture.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but “culture” is one of those slippery concepts that can be easier to recognize than it is to define.

The fact is, culture is the sum of many parts as it includes both the written and unwritten rules that dictate how a team works, communicates and acts. Therefore, you can think of culture as the team’s beating heart – the force behind everything your team stands for and does.

It makes sense, then, that all of the world’s most successful organizations pay careful attention to cultivating a healthy culture.

Apple, one of the most successful companies in the world, has a strong culture that can be recognized in everything they do. From day one, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were consciously creating a culture that would not only set them apart but would also inform everything Apple did and how they did it – whether it was hiring, product design or ad campaigns.

Decades later, the culture that the two Steves created has proved so strong that this influential heart is still beating fiercely within the company. Nowadays, Apple’s motto is legendary: “Culture beats strategy.”

While this is a catchy phrase, it doesn’t mean you can neglect strategy. On the contrary, a smart strategy is important. But it’s your culture that will ultimately determine whether your strategy is successful or not.

Now, your team will be looking to its leader to create a positive team culture, but when it comes to making that culture a reality, everyone in a team has a significant role to play.

In a study by the Heart Math Institute, researchers found that people can sense another person’s feelings from as far away as ten feet. So, even when you’re not directly in front of someone, it doesn’t let you off the hook in terms of how you’re projecting your energy.

There’s another study by Harvard University that suggests that everyone’s emotions are “contagious” since they affect those around them. This means that your cheerful mood – or your grumpy vibe – can spread throughout the team. Everyone and anyone in the team can create a positive or negative ripple-effect depending on their mood.

Positive teams confront negativity and actively eliminate it from their ranks.

In their attempts to establish a positive team culture, many organizations make a simple but critical mistake: they reward positivity and yet ignore the hints of negativity lurking just below the surface. This may sound relatively harmless, but unaddressed negativity is guaranteed to fester and grow until it eventually infects the whole team.

Fortunately, there are reliable cures that can disinfect any team of its lurking negativity. For starters, every team will benefit from making a vow not to be brought down by negativity. For this decision to become a reality, bold action may need to be taken.

In 2011, the University of Georgia’s team was on a multi-season slump, and the coach was adamant about keeping any subsequent negative feelings away from the team.

So, after the next season got off to a rocky start, the coach took the dramatic step of having a vampire painted onto the wall of the team meeting room. This wasn’t just any old vampire, either – it was a “negative energy vampire,” and if any player or coach did anything negative, their photo was placed on the vampire wall.

This sent a strong message about just how adamant the coach was about the team staying positive – no matter what. It was also a huge success, as once the vampire emerged, the team broke their losing streak and won their next ten games!

Another tactic with proven results is to implement a “no complaining” rule. As the name suggests, this rule forbids any team members from complaining, unless they’re presenting a solution to their complaint. This is terrifically effective at eliminating much of the mindless yet toxic complaining while also promoting and generating solutions.

The rule was invented by Dwight Cooper, the CEO of the talent management company PPR, which has been voted one of America’s best workplaces.

Poor communication can breed negativity, so teams must maintain regular face-to-face meetings.

These days, we have a vast number of ways to communicate: through email, texting and a variety of messaging apps and social media platforms. But the irony is, one of the most common reasons for a dysfunctional team is poor communication.

It begs the question: Why are so many teams feeling disconnected when there are so many tools for reaching out to one another? The answer is, with so many different ways of communicating, our messages have become less meaningful. This can lead to disastrous results.

Communication voids are formed within teams when members and leaders consistently choose to neglect face-to-face communication in favor of smartphones, email and social media. It’s especially damaging when leaders never communicate with team members one-on-one.

When this happens, negativity can easily fill the communication void as rumors, gossip and complaints replace trust and cooperation. When faced with the void, it’s only a matter of time before team members begin to assume the worst and adopt a mind-set of fear and survival. There’s only one thing that can restore the balance and keep negativity at bay: clear communication.

Therefore, a powerful and positive team must combat negativity by prioritizing regular, meaningful communication.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to promote healthy communication methods within your team. For example, experts have seen success with sales teams that schedule daily conference calls where learning opportunities, achievements and obstacles are discussed.

You may think that working remotely means you have to forego normal, beneficial communication, but that’s not the case. Even if you’re not in the office, you can establish daily or weekly video conferences.

Mealtimes are also great opportunities to connect team members. Leaders especially can benefit from regularly eating lunch with a different colleague each week, to strengthen bonds.

Care and commitment are the keys to astounding collective and individual achievement.

It takes more than one superstar to create a winning team. Extraordinary teams require the collaboration of extraordinary members who are committed to achieving greatness.

You may think Oscar-winning actors do it all by themselves, but in reality, each one has a whole crew of dedicated individuals who made their performance possible, from the writer, director and cinematographer to the set designer. Just because we don’t see them on the movie screen doesn’t mean they’re not an invaluable part of the process. For greatness to happen, it takes the care and commitment of every individual working together.

Committing to a team means that me turns into we, and one of the special things that happens when a team like this comes together is that it can now achieve things that people on their own cannot.

Business coach and former Navy SEAL, Nick Hays, will never forget “Hell Week,” the most brutal and dreaded part of the SEAL selection process. Part of the week involves a 200-mile run while soaking wet and on the verge of hypothermia, with each night providing less than four hours’ sleep.

The recruits who were first to quit before the week was up were the ones who focused primarily on themselves. They couldn’t see beyond their own pain and discomfort. By not committing to the team, they didn’t draw strength from the other members and therefore didn’t have what was needed to complete the grueling week.

The recruits who did become SEALS were more committed to their team than to themselves. They bonded, motivated each other and wouldn’t dare quit for fear of letting the team down.

It takes a desire and a genuine consideration and caring to connect with and commit to your team. Once you do, great things can happen.

One day, when Steve Jobs was a kid, his dad was building a fence, and young Steve asked him why he was putting so much care into painting the back of the fence, which no one would ever see. His father replied, “But you will know.”

Steve Jobs’s father taught him to genuinely care about every project he took on, and he internalized that wisdom and put it to work in the products he made later. With Apple, he took so much care that those early products still inspire awe and passion among the company’s team and their millions of loyal customers.

Positive teams make small, determined steps toward greatness for the sake of fellow team members.

If you’ve ever been fortunate enough be part of a powerful, positive team, you’ll know that it’s not just fun and games. With a commitment to achieving greatness, there also comes a striving – a desire to improve yourself for the betterment of the team.

This means that an exceptional team isn’t just a collection of individuals committed to one another, they’re also committed to self-improvement as part of the overall pursuit of excellence.

Every member of a great and positive team is endlessly restless and always looking for new ways to improve, grow and learn. Knowing this can help you spot a truly exceptional team.

Just look for the ones with people who are both hungry and humble. Seek out the team of people who are not afraid to be uncomfortable if it means they’ll grow and learn. The individuals in the best teams are the kind who are unwilling to settle for mediocrity. Instead, they challenge the status quo while keeping their eyes firmly locked on the prize of greatness.

Another powerful tip that you can introduce for self-improvement and achieving greatness is the one percent rule. When this rule is in place, each team member agrees to show up to work and give one percent more energy, effort, focus and time than they gave yesterday.

Of course, a one-percent daily improvement is practically impossible to quantify, but nevertheless, the rule gets results.

This was put into effective use in a women’s college lacrosse team. Each of the team’s 35 players agreed to the rule, and in the spirit of positive thinking and teamwork, they believed that the combined improvement should amount to a 35 percent increase across the whole team each day. Naturally, this is a significant amount of growth, and by being committed to seeing it happen the team did indeed experience an incredible improvement.

This team of 35 lacrosse players is a perfect example of the power that can be created when positivity, commitment and selflessness come together in the pursuit of greatness.

Great teamwork is built on fostering positivity and optimism by promoting a culture that values commitment, care and clear communication between all team members. It leaves no room for negativity to seep in. A positive team is built up of individuals who are devoted to one another and to constant self-improvement, with the knowledge that their efforts can make amazing things happen.

 Action plan: Care comes before criticism. A functioning team requires its members to give one another constructive criticism from time to time since this is part of the process for improvement. You should be aware that people are more receptive to criticism when they believe the person providing it has their best interests at heart. No one appreciates criticism from someone who doesn’t seem to care about them. So it’s wise to learn and care about each team member while being sure to express that caring attitude on a daily basis. This will help create a workplace where people aren’t afraid to give and receive honest feedback.

[m0ckingjay]

Zoey Shikoba

Member

Tribe: Makah Age: 24 Birthday: 31 Dec 1992 Gender: Female Location: Neah Bay High School: Graduate

Zoey is currently Online Zoey's other character(s): Jezebel Arlin,

Postcount: 1811 RP Posts: 128 Last Logged In: 07:36 7 Aug 2017 Started playing: 27 Jan 2009

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:: Bio ::

Talent(s):

None

Appearance:

Since young, Zoey had always appeared as a buck-toothed, brace-wearing, short girl with frizzy chestnut coloured hair. She was often looked down upon by friends and relatives ever since her kindergarten days for her less than average looks, back when Zoey and her family still resided in Illinois. Going to elementary school changed her a little. She dropped her glasses plus the braces, but still, her classmates snubbed and ignored her, thus planting a shy seed in Zoey herself. Her less than pleasant history made her the shy person she was now, and there weren�t many comforting memories at her old hometown, either. Puberty brought about a huge transformation in her appearance, when she first moved to Forks. Her hard complexion features softened to reveal a sweet, angelic face with large hazel eyes, mixed with a slight indigo tint inherited from her grandmother, and was the only thing that seemed to stand out in her features. Her frizzy hair soothed out into a long mane of coffee coloured hair that reached her waist, and her skin has a similar but slightly lighter brownish hue, giving her a sun burnt kind of look. Her short and stout bodice shot up a few good inches, and her waist eventually shrank. Zoey may seem small and petite at first glance, her body a fragile and tiny frame supporting her heart-shaped face, but since joining the Spartan cheerleaders, she'd gotten herself plenty of exercise and is fit as a fiddle. Zoey as a Thunderbird shifter has dark brown feathers and a bright yellow beak. Like all Thunderbirds, she is huge in size and it was the enormity of her size that had scared herself when she first shifted. Post-shifting Zoey as a human has also experienced a change in which she lost a lot of weight and looked more haggard than her bubbly cheerleading days. She had permanent dark circles under her eyes and constantly looked as pale as a parchment. However, after her brief move to Finland, she managed to make herself look better, though not as good as her pre-shifting days but good enough. Hence, that was one of the reasons she was most reluctant to move back to Forks after three years.

Personality

Zoey was ostracized from society ever since she was young, and things didn�t exactly turn well for her for the next few years. People often gave her disdainful glances that indicate that she was not worthy of their appraisal. Therefore, being the only child in her family, Zoey grew into a shy person, avoiding attention and crowds if she could. Although many people thought being the only child was a privilege, Zoey saw it as a tormenting experience, as there often was no one she could confide in. Her secrets, her thoughts, her opinions� She had to keep them to herself, and more often than not, she wished herself a sibling to be her guardian, as her workaholic parents were playing the negligent game on her. Many people think that introverts are, in actual fact, proud and ignorant brats, but Zoey was anything but one. She merely had an introspective personality and preferred to muse over her thoughts alone, undisturbed. In her opinion, she hadn�t done anything impressive, what was there to brag about? Nevertheless, she was one of the �losers� and outcasts in Fallbrooke High of Illinois, and once again found herself alone and isolated with no one to keep her company. Despite her shyness, Zoey�s brittle temper can be quite a flare once she was triggered, and her rebukes were often less than polite. It was as if the loneliness she had felt since young had piled up inside her, and resulted in a more than sulky attitude whenever she was infuriated. However, it doesn�t take much to relief her of her anger. Say, books and music were her best remedies. More often than not, her mood swings would take over her feelings, and people were often taken aback by her volatile personality. Meeting her new stepfamily brought out a change in Zoey. Perhaps it was the bubbly aura of the Baileys that had infected her system and caused the upward curving of her lips every time she meets people. Indeed, her step-sister, Linden, was a caring sibling, and Zoey�s childhood wish was finally fulfilled, and at the same time, she got herself a new best friend and was not lonely ever since. Unfortunately, great things do not last long, and Linden�s sudden death made Zoey replay her old past life again. Her loneliness and helplessness returned with a force so tremendous, it was exhausting. Once again, she shunned herself away from everybody, meaning to mend her broken heart all by herself, but was later guided back to her route of happiness by her newfound best friend, Chelsie Overton. Things went downhill again after Chelsie was bitten by a vampire and Zoey started shifting into a Thunderbird. Her old snarkiness and moodiness returned and she was her bitter self once again. The move to Finland however, opened her eyes a little and she matured greatly over the years. She was not prepared to be forgiving during her return to Forks, but Zoey knew better than to completely sink into the deep pits of her old bitter self once again.

History:

The Shikobas can be regarded as an ancient American native family of the Makah tribe that dated back to the �30s. Born in the 1960s, Troy Krueger Shikoba was a lucky son, as he didn�t have to go through the poverty condition the Shikoba ancestors had to endure. It was the most fortunate year for the Shikobas. Therefore, it can be said Troy Shikoba was the luckiest of the young Shikoba generation. Troy Shikoba met Nathalya Sparrow in university, which he went to after graduating. And, of course, they fell in love with each other and there were no objections between the two families towards their marriage, although the affluent Sparrows weren�t exactly appeased by Thalya�s choice of a bridegroom. The arrival of Zoey Ishka Shikoba on the 31st of December 1992 to couple Nathalya and Troy Shikoba was greatly anticipated, as they were childless for a decade since their marriage. Relatives and friends often marvelled at the cherubic child, and her parents couldn�t have been prouder. Years �specifically fourteen years- after Zoey�s birth, Troy was ordered to Forks, due to working reasons, and after several weeks of exhausting trips to and fro the two towns, Troy Shikoba announced an official move to Forks, a tiny town located somewhere in the Olympic Peninsula. Of course, Zoey was both sad and elated, but excitement soon triumphed over solemn as Zoey was utterly glad to leave her traumatic past behind in Illinois. Despite the move to a smaller town, the Shikoba couple remained busy as ever, hardly paying attention and regard to that little child of theirs. Although she was the only child, Zoey was never spoilt by her parents, but was brought up strictly and primly instead, even when they still lived at Illinois. Her past time were spent juggling several curriculum at once; academic tutoring, piano and violin lessons, swimming and netball lessons. Although Zoey kept on comforting herself that her parents was doing this for her own good, she found herself in despair every time she saw other kids enjoying themselves in the snow, or running around in meadows near to her house. Despite people�s incessant comments about her being �the perfect child�, Zoey felt anything but whole, anything but perfect, for all she ever felt deep inside was a huge, yawning void, waiting to be filled by someone who loved her dearly. Zoey only found comfort in the stories her grandma often told her about the Makah tribe, a tribe both her parents were part of. Due to the amount of time Troy and Thalya Shikoba spend on work, Zoey�s own dear parents never had the chance to tell those tales themselves. So when Grandma Shikoba eventually contracted schizophrenia and had to be in a ward on a long term basis, Zoey felt left out of the world and often retreated to her own thoughts, which had now became her own personal sanctuary. Zoey started school at Forks High and was usually classified as one of the �freshman freaks�. Her so-called friends weren�t even enough to fill a raft, and she was frequently snubbed and ignored by her student body for one, being an outcast, and two, scoring the highest grades on every test. To everyone, she was the haughty Zoey Shikoba from the rich Shikoba residence; the spoilt princess of her parents. Even though Zoey was hurt by those remarks, she tried to hide her feelings with an imposing fa�ade, determined to be oblivious in this school of hell as she reckoned that she couldn�t have felt lonelier than she already was. The excuse of �work� eventually became the reason of the divorce between Thalya and Troy Shikoba, as they brought up the subject casually during dinner, as if it was merely an idea to repaint the kitchen walls. Surprisingly, the divorce wasn�t quite a surprise for Zoey after all the time she was neglected by her parents, and the only feeling felt during the separation was nonchalance, and perhaps a wee tinge of regret as she watched her father leave the threshold. Her mother had put on a stony expression that was unreadable, and even though Zoey knew she was the one who had suggested the divorce, she knew Thalya Shikoba was still filled with an influx of regret towards her first love she met 20 years ago. Zoey had stayed with her mother in a secluded suburb in Forks ever since. Thalya Shikoba �who didn�t bother to change her surname-, was a single mother for two years, until she met Dirk Bailey, and surprised Zoey by announcing the news of her remarriage over the dining table. A wave of jumbled emotions swept over Zoey and she realised that they were mainly made up of fear and nerves. She already couldn�t cope with her classmates at school, much less a new family. Under that layer of fear and apprehension, there was also a tinge of agitation and irritation towards her mother, possibly triggered by her quick and rash decision to remarry and build a whole new family with a complete stranger in the said stranger�s house. When the time had arrived, sensitive Zoey was afraid to meet her new family in the magnificent and majestic Bailey house in Seattle. She was afraid of their reactions and judgments towards her, the shy and sulky Zoey Shikoba. Worse, she was afraid she wouldn�t be able to accept what was in store for her, as she was never a fan of new changes and surprises. However, surprisingly, she found herself comfortable with her newfound father and stepsister, Linden Bailey. It thrilled her more that they were in the same clan, the Makah tribe, and truly believed that things would start to get better after all. And she got her wish, as Linden was the best sister and friend she had ever had in her sixteen years of life. Stories about evil step-families were now considered taboo in Zoey�s mind, and she couldn�t believe she could ever fear the Baileys. Zoey�s blissful dream was destroyed on a rainy day in the month of May, when she found her step-father and mother crying in the living room. She herself was shell-shocked when her mother blurted out that Linden was dead. Zoey could feel her world crashing down around her and refused to accept reality. No one and nothing could confirm the real cause of Linden Bailey�s death, except that she was covered with lots of brutal and severe lacerations that were fatal and was believed that she was killed by a wild animal when tracking through the woods at an ungodly hour in the morning. Zoey didn�t believe any of it, and was sure something was behind her sister�s demise, and vowed to find out the real truth by herself even though she was reprimanded constantly by her mother for her paranoia. Linden�s death brought out the old Zoey; the isolated and grumpy and lonely girl she was at her previous hometown. Suddenly, school turned out to be a great bore, and the few friends she made at her first few days at Forks High School realized her change in behavior too and started to avoid her. Zoey couldn�t help herself, but thought it was probably best for her to avoid people, and for people to avoid her. However, a few weeks later, she met a new girl, Chelsie Overton, apparently hailed from San Francisco and a small class-skipping act brought the two teenage girls together, and they were best friends ever since. Zoey still couldn�t forget about what happened to Linden, but in the end, she promised to not ever fall into the sunken pit of her life again, and returned to her bubbly and cheerful self, which earned her even more friends than before, including her newfound boyfriend, Blake Matthews. Thanks to Chelsie's encouragement as well, Zoey decided to join the Forks High Spartan Cheerleaders in her junior year and that was what Zoey liked to call her "golden era". She had everything she could ask for: a best friend and close friends from the cheerleading team. However, Blake and Zoey drifted apart gradually and both agreed it was for the best. Since then, Zoey had never been in a serious committed relationship, and she preferred for it to be that way until she found someone she might, well, imprint on. Her golden era collapsed the day Chelsie and her went to the Olympic Forest for an innocent jog, which ended up with Chelsie being bitten by a vampire and vanishing thereafter, leaving Zoey to phase into a Thunderbird for the first time. Fortunately, she was discovered by the Makah Alpha at the time, Roswyn Sands who had stopped her from going after the vampire that had turned Chelsie. Chelsie's "accident" had a huge impact on Zoey's life. She was her old self again until a few weeks after the incident, when her mom and her stepfather decided a move would be appropriate, and the whole family packed up and left for Finland without telling a soul. At the time, Zoey hardly cared but in retrospect, she probably should have told the Flock about her move instead of leaving them hanging. The three years Zoey spent in Finland helped her to mature greatly. She knew she could never become the same bubbly cheerleader she was again but she was determined not to sink into the deep pits either. There, she had the privilege of leaving her past behind and learned the brand new cultural ways of the Finnish. She didn't mind staying at the Scandinavian country forever. However, the world isn't a wish granting factory and three years later, Dirk announced that they would have to move back to Forks because he was needed there by his company. Plus, both her parents thought it was finally time to return to reality. Zoey was less than pleased, but she knew her parents were right, and that she would have to face her problems eventually. Her first sights of Forks were painful, and the sight of Forks High was even worse. Memories of her and her girls practising on the field every afternoon, her hangouts with Chelsie at the cafeteria...she was relieved she had already finished high school. She was also surprised to find that almost everyone in Forks was a stranger to her, and the same could be said for the Makah Flock. Despite the fact that she crave for familiarity, she decided she could work with a whole new environment too, just as long as it didn't give her headaches as her old environment had.

[krissysbookshelf]

Enjoy An Exclusive Sneek Peek of: #famous by Jilly Gagnon!

Rachel likes Kyle. Rachel snaps a photo of Kyle and posts it online. Kyle becomes insta-famous. And what starts out as an innocent photo turns into a whirlwind adventure that forces them both to question whether fame—and love—are worth the price…and changes both of their lives forever.  

LEARN MORE

Chapter One

RACHEL

TUESDAY, 4:15 P.M.

Loving your mom can lead to some seriously bad decisions.

I’d agreed to tag along on her quest for face creams mainly out of boredom. But the mall with my mother on a Tuesday afternoon—as though I suddenly believed in the calming effects of retail therapy? We’d been here maybe ten minutes and already I was regretting it.

We were almost at the makeup counter that was our raison de mall when she grabbed a black, fluttery top with laces winding up and down the front.

“Ooh, Rachel, isn’t this nice?” She held it out to me. It looked like batwings in a corset.

“Not my style.” I pushed the shirt away, turning to a rack of oversized sweatshirts in neon-bright colors. Where had she even found that thing?

“No, not for you, for me. I think it’s cool. Edgy. Don’t you?” She held the shirt at arm’s length. One chunk of frizzy hair fell from behind her ear onto her cheek. She always cut it too short; at that length, hair as electrical-socket nutso as ours would not be contained behind mere ears.

“Sure, Mom.” I’d be pretty shocked to see my mom commit to a shirt she had to lace herself into. Usually her style tended toward neutral-colored sacks, but if she really wanted to dress like a vampire, I wasn’t going to tell her no. Besides, it’s kind of awesome when parents try to be cool, like watching a baby sloth play the piano or something. Terrible on the execution, and therefore adorable.

“Hey, do you care if I go get something at the food court? I went straight to ceramics club after sixth period, so I didn’t have a chance to get a snack.” Things would move a lot faster if she didn’t have me to bounce awful fashion ideas off of.

She glanced at her watch. “Meet me back here in fifteen minutes. I don’t want to spend the whole evening at the mall.”

“Sure,” I said over my shoulder.

“And don’t be drinking one of those gallon-sized sodas,” she said. “They’re poison.”

Mom was always finding some new threat to my precious development. Too late: I’d topped out at five foot three years ago.

I felt my phone buzz against my hip bone as I passed by Banana Republic, its faceless, elongated mannequins watching disdainfully as I rounded the Wet Seal, following the faint scent of tasty greases.

(From MO-MO): Do you have a new draft of Twice Removed ready yet? I don’t think I’ll be able to look at it until the weekend, but we need to be on top of this.

(To MO-MO): No, I had ceramics today. I’ll work on it soon—we still have what, three months until the deadline?

(From MO-MO): There’s no point in putting it off.

Mo must be stressed about something; trying to micromanage someone else was always her go-to when she had too much on her plate. We were applying together to a summer playwriting program with Twice Removed, but the due date for applications was forever away, and I was doing more of the writing regardless—Mo was more into performing, which meant I usually just let her help with edits. There was no point in calling Mo on it though, unless you wanted to intensify her stress-crazies. The best thing was to divert her to whatever she really wanted to talk about, so you wouldn’t start arguing about not-really-the-point.

(To MO-MO): Don’t worry. I’ll send you something by the time you’re able to look at it. Why so busy?

(From MO-MO): Did I ever mention how much I hate Europeans?

(To MO-MO): That’s racist.

(From MO-MO): You can’t be racist against a continent.

(From MO-MO): Trying to absorb the entirety of their pointless history—which is all just wars and oppressing women, BTW—is making my head hurt. I am SO going to fail this test.

Doubtful. Monique never failed anything. We’d been best friends since we were in diapers, and I couldn’t remember her ever even getting a B. In third grade, she made two entire projects for the science fair in case one was better than the other.

(To MO-MO): That’s what you get for taking smart-kid classes EVEN FOR ELECTIVES.

(To MO-MO): Guess how hard my Art II test will be? Oh wait, we don’t have one.

(From MO-MO): I hate you.

(From MO-MO): I take it back. Distract me. If my head explodes I at least want to die laughing.

I looked around for something I could send to Monique. We had this ongoing game where we’d send each other funny pictures on Flit (basically anything that got an out-loud reaction—from snort to guffaw—scored a point, honors system) and the mall was the perfect spot to play. Monique loved unintentional double entendres or grammar mistakes on store signs. I usually sent funny graffiti or dogs in clothes. There’s something about a dog wearing pants that never gets old.

I glanced around as I made my way across the mall to the food court, but nothing jumped out at me. And now that I was getting close enough to really smell all the different kinds of grease in the air, there was no way I’d be able to focus on the game. I was too hungry to hunt down a costumed Pomeranian. Food would have to come first. I spun around slowly, trying to figure out what I was in the mood for.

There was the depressingly beige buffet of breaded meat bits at China House (pass), sushi that was probably fresh off the boat a week ago at Japan EXPRESS (side of food poisoning, please?), Mrs. Butterbun’s Cookie Shoppe (even thinking about putting an inch of frosting on a cookie made my teeth hurt) . . .

That’s when I saw him.

Kyle Bonham.

Instinctively, I ducked my head over my phone and half turned away, so he wouldn’t think I was staring.

I was, obviously—you couldn’t help but stare at Kyle. He was about a thousand miles away from my type—so clean-cut he could be in an ad for drinking enough milk—and still I went fricking googly-eyed whenever I saw him. Extra embarrassing since I had fifth period with him every single day—it was only a matter of time until he caught me drooling.

He was standing behind the register at the Burger Barn, solemnly counting out change for a little girl who couldn’t be more than seven or eight. She had this dreamy, beaming look on her face, like she was so proud to be getting treated like a grown-up, or maybe like she was half in love with him.

You and me both, babe.

He placed a final coin in her palm and straightened up, his shaggy brown hair flopping over his forehead in perfect just-barely-curls. Somehow he looked even hotter here than he did at school. The burnt-orange Burger Barn T-shirt he was wearing made his eyes—a little too far apart on his face, which made them even more beautiful—look greener. He somehow managed to make his pointed paper uniform cap seem jaunty and alluring.

I looked down at myself. I was wearing a shapeless old oxford I’d stolen from my dad’s Goodwill pile. It was so long it made me look like a little kid playing dress-up, and it had clay all over the hem from where my apron hadn’t covered it up. Then of course there were the faded leggings, starting to go baggy at the knees, the Chuck Taylors that had gotten so scuffed over the summer I wasn’t even sure anymore what color they’d started as, and the sloppy side braid that did approximately nothing to contain the bursts of dark-brown frizz I call my hair.

Great look, Rach. No wonder Monique was always asking to give me makeovers. I was a fricking disaster.

Not that it mattered; I was not the kind of girl guys like Kyle Bonham—or really, any guy—paid much attention to. I’d managed to stay pretty much invisible for my entire high school career by hiding out in the art room. Especially to the painfully adorable lacrosse-star seniors who go out of their way to make even eight-year-olds feel special.

An older couple shuffled up to the register, staring perplexedly at the dozen or so variations on meat and cheese the Burger Barn packaged as “specials.” Kyle watched them blankly, looking like someone out of one of those catalogs where everyone is leaning against rustic wooden furniture just “being themselves.”

I should totally send a picture of him to Mo. After all, what could be a better distraction than a perfect-looking boy? Bonus: if I snapped a picture of Kyle I could look at it on my phone whenever. Yes, borderline pathetic, but it’s not like anyone would know but me.

I walked up behind the old woman, trying to look casual by keeping my phone down by my waist.

I tilted the phone up so Kyle’s face was in the frame. He was staring out over the rest of the food court while the older couple worked out their order. I couldn’t believe I was doing this; he was only a few feet away. Even with my flash and sound off, it would be so easy for him to realize what was going on.

But it would be worth it. In fact, this might be my best entry yet. Not like it was hard to find something better than a misplaced apostrophe, but this was gold-star emoji material.

As soon as he turned his head back toward the couple, I could take the picture quick and head over to the Pretzel Hut, like I’d realized I didn’t want anything Burger Barn had on the menu. At least, not on the food menu.

“Well I don’t know, Fred, I don’t think I want triple cheese. Can’t we get regular cheese?”

“Ma’am, if you like, I can substitute the cheese,” Kyle said, smiling easily at the older woman. She seemed startled that he was talking to her. Enough so that she shifted over into my frame right as I was clicking to take the picture.

Well, crap-sandwich. Great photo of old-lady shoulder, Rach.

I shifted my weight onto my left foot, easing over as imperceptibly as I could. Just move your arm, Grandma…

That’s when I saw her, sulking in the line for the Caribou kiosk about twenty feet past the entrance to the food court: Jessie Florenzano.

. . . and her mom, waving cheerily at me like I wasn’t the last person Jessie wanted to see, especially with her mom in tow. Jessie had been embarrassed by her even before our friendship imploded.

Jessie raised an eyebrow as though she could smell what I was doing. I dropped the phone down to my side and waved back. Jessie rolled her eyes and turned her back on me. I could see her whispering sharply to her mom, who smiled apologetically, then turned to Jessie, frowning. There were very few people I’d rather see less than Jessie, anywhere, ever, but I kind of loved that her mom still automatically acted friendly, four years after Jessie had sliced me out of her life.

I turned back. Grandma was laughing and nudging her husband’s arm.

“You know how I love pickles!”

Ew. Not the mental image I needed before eating.

Kyle smiled and tapped at the register. If I moved my arm a couple more inches… but not too far. He couldn’t know what was happening, and Jessie couldn’t guess; it would be way too mortifying. He tapped his fingers on the counter in a rat-a-tat rhythm as the old lady dug through her wallet.

He was perfectly lined up in the frame, the last traces of a smile lingering on his smooth cheeks.

I glanced over at Jessie. She was resolutely pretending I didn’t exist. There was never going to be a better time.

Click.

He looked toward me for a second. Crap, I was totally caught. I could feel my cheeks burning, betraying me. My breath caught somewhere around my sternum and stopped there, trapped.

  But then he smiled and turned back to the customer, taking her pile of ones and quarters.

I exhaled, trying not to grin. I cropped the photo, typing in Mo’s Flit handle so she’d see it. This was even better than a German shepherd with a tie.

“It’s Rachel, right?”

I looked up, startled. The old couple had moved away to wait for their order, and Kyle was staring at me expectantly. I checked over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t talking to someone else. Like the Burger Barn only served Rachels or something? But I was the only person in line.

“Um, yeah.” I felt my face going hot again. “Rachel. That’s me.” Oh god, I sounded like the worst kind of stupid. Quickly, I clicked to make my screen go dark.

He pointed at himself.

“Kyle.”

I just stared, totally incapable of forming words.

“We’re in Creative Writing together? Fifth period?”

As though I hadn’t spent every day of the three weeks since school started thanking all the gods for that fact.

“Right,” I said, trying to sound like a girl who didn’t eye assault him daily. “You sit in the back, right?”

“Yeah! So Jenkins won’t call on me too much. I’m not as good as you are at that stuff.”

“I’m not that good,” I said automatically, looking down at the counter. Someone had made a ketchupy fingerprint to the right of the register. Like a cheeseburger crime scene. I couldn’t believe he knew who I was. The semester had barely started, and I wasn’t even his year. Not only that, he had an opinion about me. A nice one.

“No, you are. That story of yours that Jenkins read yesterday was… well it was really weird, but, like, in a cool way,” he said.

“Oh. Um, thanks.” All my words were melting, puddling around my feet in a big sloppy jumble, too liquid-slippery for me to get a grip on. The story had been about a computer that got a weird virus that convinced the machine it was actually the ghost of Queen Elizabeth I. He’d already summed it up: It was weird. I was weird. I could feel my armpits stinging with sweat.

“Anyway, what can I get you, Rachel from writing class?” he said.

You, shirtless, on a stallion?

“Um… what do you mean?”

“To eat?” He frowned. It made his nose wrinkle upward, like it was tethered to his forehead. I was so flustered about him knowing my name that I’d forgotten where we were—in line, at his job. He was being nice because he worked service. For god’s sake, he flirted with the elderly. Even more blood rushed into my cheeks. If you poked them with a pin they’d probably burst everywhere. Like that scene in The Shining all over the Apple Prairie Mall food court.

“Oh, duh. Sorry, my blood sugar must be really low,” I said. That’s always Monique’s excuse when she gets ditzy or snippy. “I was thinking, um, french fries?”

“Small?”

“No, large,” I said quickly. I was starving. He grinned a little, which reminded me that the girls Kyle Bonham hung out with did not eat large fries. They’d probably cumulatively eaten half an order of fries in the last ten years, which was why they looked like miniature supermodels and I looked like the funny friend. “I like how the large container makes my hands look extra tiny and stunted. It helps me get perspective on life,” I added.

Oh dear god, someone take this shovel away from me so I can stop digging my own fricking grave.

He laughed though, shaking his head slightly. “You’re funny. Okay. One large fry is gonna be four thirty-six.”

I dug in my purse for the money. He counted out my change and went to grab the fries. I could feel my heart rate slowing back to “not having a coronary” speeds.

“There you go,” he said. “I think this is the right size for your hands,” he added, grabbing one of my tiny fingers and playfully lifting the whole arm up in the air.

His touch was like an electric shock tingling up my entire arm. I almost snatched it back; guys don’t usually go around grabbing my hands. Only guys like Kyle—guys who win state sports titles and homecoming king crowns—have the balls to do stuff like that in the first place. I hoped I hadn’t nervous sweated enough to pit out my shirt.

But somehow I managed to keep it together long enough for him to squint back and forth between my hand and the fry box, measuring the two against each other before finally nodding as though I’d passed muster.

“Yup, looks like a fit,” he said.

He dropped my hand. I tried to breathe again.

“HA.” I forced a laugh. Poorly. “I should go. I have to meet up with my mom.” Awesome, Rachel, add to your intrigue by reminding him you hang out with your mother.

“Enjoy the fries, Rachel from writing,” he said, grinning. “See you tomorrow.”

“Sure.” I gulped, nodding too many times, too fast. “See you around.”

I walked away as slowly as I could force myself to, which was just this side of a sprint.

Breathing hard, I plopped onto a bench near the fountain. That had been disastrous.

But at least I’d gotten my picture. That had been the point, right? To flit something goofy to Monique? I finished typing her handle, then—because of course I’m oh-so-witty the minute actual guys have disappeared—I typed in a hashtag.

Send.

Immediately, I felt a little twinge. What if he saw it? He’d know it was me.

But that wouldn’t happen. Kyle didn’t follow me—maybe ten people did. I flitted all the pictures in the game to Monique, I’d been doing it for months; no one had ever noticed them before. I think the most attention any of the pictures ever got was a single non-Mo luv, and that squirrel vest had been AWESOME. Why would anyone suddenly care about this one?

My phone pinged with the sound that meant I had a reflit.

I opened my feed to see what Mo had said.

@attackoftherach_face tonight’s brain food.

The picture I’d flitted was below. That sweet, goofy half grin lingering around his lips was too adorable. So much so that it had made me feel sassy enough to flit:

@Mo_than_you_know I’m digging what they’re serving up at Burger Barn today. #idlikefrieswithTHAT

God, I am such an idiot.

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