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scary-grace · 1 month

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Opposites Attract (Chapter 2) - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

Your quirk lets you capture almost anyone with ease, and you can't believe you let Shigaraki Tomura escape. Shigaraki can't believe it, either, and according to the League, there's only one possible explanation -- you let him go because you've fallen in love with him. He decides to find out if it's true. You decide you won't fail to capture him again. You both get a lot more than you bargained for. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapters: 1 2

Chapter 2

It’s been two weeks since the League of Villains vs Kamino Ward: Round 2, and there hasn’t been a single day that somebody hasn’t read you the riot act. It wasn’t enough that Miruko did it on-scene, well within microphone range of every single news crew who swarmed the park – every senior hero in Yokohama got in on it, too. And as if it wasn’t already your worst week ever, the HPSC called you in for a formal review of your pro hero license. You didn’t sleep at all the night before, and when you got to the hearing half an hour early with sweat stains already oozing through your one nice blouse, you found out that they’d done the review already, and the hearing was just to present the findings. One of the members of the committee mentioned that you looked a little pale. In hindsight, you’re amazed you didn’t have a heart attack.

You found out that the review of your license was a PR thing more than anything else – although your choices weren’t popular or flashy, nothing about how you handled the incident fell outside the hero code. Not that it matters to the general public. If you had an agency, they’d be booking you on podcasts and talk shows so you could explain yourself, but you’re underground, so you’re stuck listening to TV presenters who’ve never met a villain and podcasters who’d piss themselves if they came face to face with even the pettiest of criminals, all talking about how badly you blew it. There was even a petition circling demanding that you make a public apology for what happened to the All Might statue – one apology to the sculptor who made the statue, and one to All Might himself. When that one started making the rounds, you set your social media accounts to private and hid from your phone for the next three days.

Things are starting to die down, you think, but you’ve still got one stop left on your humiliation tour, and it’s the one you’re dreading the most. Your alma mater is always looking for learning experiences to offer their students, so you’re spending this afternoon at UA, listening while the first-year hero students pick apart every action you took in Kamino Park.

It’s an open forum, so everyone who wants to run their mouth gets a chance to do it, and you sit stonefaced in your chair, praying for your composure to hold. Eraserhead said he’d give you chances to respond, and he does, every time a student sits down. But you don’t want to get into a back-and-forth with a bunch of kids. You did what you did. You can’t go back. Maybe they can learn from what you did wrong.

What did you do wrong, actually? The HPSC cleared you. You’re so unpopular right now that they’d seize any chance they got to strip your licenses, but they cleared you – and you’re still here, listening to a bunch of teenagers take shots at you. The unfairness boils up inside you all at once, and when the next kid sits down, you stand up before Eraser invites you to.

“You all think you could have done better than me out there,” you start. “Maybe you’re right. There are always things that could be done better. What did I do wrong?”

It’s quiet for a second. “Are you stupid or something?” Bakugou asks you. “They got away! That’s what you did wrong!”

“Is it? Kurogiri and Shigaraki got away at USJ, and again at Kamino the first time. I don’t see you lighting All Might’s ass up,” you shoot back. Bakugou makes an affronted sound. “Answer me for real this time. What was my actual, quantifiable mistake?”

It’s quiet for another beat. Eraser opens his mouth, but Class B’s teacher speaks up first. “That’s the more interesting question,” he says. “We’ve talked about how Skynet could have done better. What actual mistake did Skynet make that led to the final outcome of the incident?”

You know what it was, deep in your heart, and you also know that the only person who could call you on it is somebody you hope you never see again. A hand creeps up, and Vlad calls on the student – one of Eraser’s. “Yes, Midoriya?”

“I don’t know if I would call it a mistake,” Midoriya says, “but I was wondering – why didn’t you use more of your quirk?”

That’s a new one. You wait quietly, and Midoriya elaborates. “I mean, Magnetism has dozens of applications. You’re sort of known for being creative with how you use it. And r/herojapan did a power ranking of every active hero and you ranked the highest out of all non-charted heroes.”

That’s news to you. “So I guess that’s what I want to know,” Midoriya concludes. “If you have a quirk with a lot of applications and a lot of power to work with, how could the League of Villains escape?”

“Uh –” You glance at Vlad King, then at Eraserhead. They both gesture for you to go on. “What you said about my quirk – you’re right. I can go big with it. But the bigger I go with it, the less control I have, and I’m not creating magnetic fields out of thin air. I’m enhancing and altering what already exists. Every magnetic field I alter is touching another one, and my alterations affect those fields, too. If I want to use my quirk safely on a large scale, I have to alter some magnetic fields while stabilizing others simultaneously, and I have to do that while protecting civilians and assisting my fellow heroes and trying not to get killed. Using my quirk on the scale I would have needed at Kamino just isn’t possible.”

You can tell Midoriya doesn’t get it. Nobody else does, either. “Maybe you should demonstrate,” the girl from Class B who can make her hands enormous says. “Show us what would have happened if you used your quirk the way Midoriya is talking about at Kamino.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Vlad says. “Ground Beta should be open right now. Let’s go.”

Vlad was your homeroom teacher in your first year at UA. You’ve been struggling not to call him sensei since you set foot on campus, and you know he knows how much you’ve struggled with your quirk. You also knew he was going to support you, but you’re not sure you like how he’s doing it – proving that you’re right, sure, but proving it by proving that you can’t handle your quirk at even partial strength, when the way you were using your quirk wasn’t even the real problem. If you had reacted faster, gotten a solid grip on Shigaraki through other means instead of getting distracted by how not-okay he is, you’d have held all the cards by the time the warp villain came to play. You’d like to see the warp villain try to back you into a corner when you’ve got a piece of rebar wrapped around Shigaraki’s throat.

But you didn’t have your shit together, because you were too stuck on just how shocked Shigaraki looked when you asked if he was okay. Not fake-shocked, not mocking-shocked, not look-at-the-hypocritical-hero-pretending-to-care shocked – truly, honestly shocked, like you’re the first person who’s asked him that question in a while. You flatly refuse to entertain the thought that you’re the first person who’s ever asked him that, because that would be too goddamn sad and you’re not into woobifying villains. You know more than a few heroes who have those romance novels about getting captured and ravished by a not-bad-just-misunderstood villain hanging out on their e-readers, and that’s not your style at all. So why did it bother you, seeing that look on Shigaraki’s face? Why are you still thinking about it two weeks later?

You shake it off as you, Eraser, Vlad, and the students reach Ground Beta. If you don’t want anybody to guess how you actually messed up, you need to do a good job proving that their idea of your mistake is the right one.

Vlad sets up a target a quarter of a mile down Ground Beta’s main street – the distance from one end of Kamino Park to the other – then makes his way back to you and the others. Eraserhead ushers everybody away from you. “Okay,” you say, projecting your voice, “I’m going to show you what it would have looked like for me to use my quirk to drag the League of Villains to me from across Kamino Park.”

Part of you is tempted to just blow it. Use your quirk recklessly, without worrying about consequences or property damage or anything but how it feels to finally let loose. But you’re a hero. You need to set a good example, not give the students even more reasons to question why you still have your license, and even here, there’s a chance that using your quirk at full strength isn’t safe. You get set, feeling the stabilizers in your boots anchor you to the ground. You tap into your metal sense, identifying the target a quarter mile away. Then you extend your hand, activate your quirk as precisely as you can manage, and pull.

The practice target starts moving. Unfortunately, so does everything else. No matter how hard you try to keep your focus on the target and only the target, metal fragments in the concrete lurch upwards, responding to your shift in the magnetic fields, pulling the street apart. The buildings on either side crumple inwards as their steel frameworks tear free. Lightposts bend into impossible shapes. Manhole covers lift from the street and fly towards you, forcing you to employ your other hand to stop them from striking the students behind you. The air vibrates. And sure, the practice target is flying towards you at high speed – but the destruction you’re wreaking on everything in between you and it is worse than what anyone but Shigaraki could have done to Kamino Memorial Park.

You let your grip on the magnetic fields fall when the target’s within thirty feet or so, and let momentum do the rest. Then you turn back towards the students. “This looks bad, right? If I’d done this at Kamino, it would be even worse. Anybody want to guess why?”

“Water mains,” the girl from 1-A with the Creation quirk says at once. You nod. “Cities are full of underground infrastructure, and most of that is made of metal. If your quirk is hard to focus narrowly at a distance from the target, you could do billions of yen worth of property damage.”

“What about people?” the electricity kid from 1-A says – the electricity kid who, if you remember right, also has a wide-range quirk. “Do they get caught when you do that?”

“No,” you say. “I have to be at close range to manipulate the iron in someone’s body. And they have to have enough iron in their bloodstream to make it possible.”

You say that, cringe, and brace yourself for what must be coming – one of the students, probably Midoriya, realizing that Shigaraki’s weapons-grade anemia is what kept him out of your reach at first. Followed by one of the students, probably Midoriya, asking why you didn’t use any of the other means at your disposal to capture him. “Oh,” the electricity kid says instead. “I get it now.”

“I have a question, Skynet,” Bakugou says loudly. “Couldn’t you do all that without destroying everything if you trained your quirk harder?”

You asked yourself that question a lot when you were a student at UA. The theoretical answer was always yes. “No,” you say, without getting into all the reasons why. “Does anyone else have a question?”

A Class B student named Honenuki has a question about what types of property you should avoid damaging if possible, and a Class B student named Monoma wants to know whether you were in Class A or Class B when you were at UA. He looks pretty happy when you say Class B, which is weird. You’re persona non grata among heroes right now. It doesn’t make a ton of sense that he’s excited that you were in the same class as he is. Vlad doesn’t ask you how things have been going; he just pats your shoulder and walks off. You try to escape before Eraserhead can talk to you, and make it exactly five steps before he calls out. “Skynet.”

You grit your teeth. “Do you want me to apologize, too?”

“For what?” Eraser looks irritated. “I asked you to look after my students. You looked after them. I’d be asking you to apologize if you’d let them fight.”

“Oh.” You weren’t looking forward to making that apology. “Then, um – what did you want to talk to me about?”

“My students are used to having their quirks temporarily canceled, but my quirk is unique. They’re much more likely to run into villains whose powers serve to restrain them,” Eraser says. You get where he’s going with this and try to interrupt, but he talks right over you. “I want you to come back for at least one of our basic training sessions. It’s rational to give them a chance to practice against a power set like yours, and it’ll also allow you the chance to work on fine-tuning your quirk.”

You knew there was a backhand somewhere in there. “My quirk’s as fine-tuned as it’s going to get.”

“We’ll see,” Eraser says. “The next basic training where all my students will be present is next Thursday. Come in.”

You recall making a promise to yourself, one which included telling Eraser to go to hell if he asked any more favors. But you still need to rehab your image. A lot. “Yeah. Sounds good.”

You change out of your costume before you leave campus – everything except your boots, which you wear almost all the time – and while you’re waiting for the train, you get a text from the group chat you have with the three other female pros who debuted in the same year as you. That’s about the only thing the four of you have in common, but that’s not stopping Yue from messaging in all caps. I MISSED MY ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY! WE NEED TO CELEBRATE <3 <3 <3

Yue was the last one of the four of you to debut. Her agency held her back for maximum press impact, whereas you just picked a day at random to quit working as a sidekick and strike out for yourself. Kagura, another member of the debut class, texts back before you can. Spa night?

That sounds good to you, but it’s not Yue’s speed at all. GOING OUT! I CAN GET US INTO CLUB 100 IN TOKYO!

Right – Yue’s number 25, as of the most recent billboard chart update. Mayuko, the member of the class you get along with best, texts next. It might be nice to see what it’s like?

Kagura gives a thumbs-up, and Yue sets the celebration date for tonight – and orders you all to come to her apartment to get ready. She has a special message for you. NO BOOTS, SKY. THEY’RE TOO CLUNKY FOR DANCING.

You send back a frowny face, and Mayuko chimes in. You can borrow my shoes. It’s been so long since we got together! I can’t wait!

That’s true, and you’ve missed them – but right now you’re a liability. Are you sure you want to be seen in public with me? I’m sort of radioactive right now.

Nobody will recognize you out of costume, Yue says, instead of what you were hoping she’d say, which is that it doesn’t matter and she has your back. Be at my place at 6!

There goes your quiet night. You board your train and lean back in your seat. If you have to go dancing tonight, you’d better catch some rest now.

Shigaraki refreshes the page, frowning. Then he refreshes it again, getting the same message. What the hell does ‘set to private’ mean? He googles it, learns that only approved followers can see an Instagram account that’s set to private, and feels a surge of annoyance. It figures. He spent two weeks debating whether or not to look you up, and by the time he’s finally decided it’s not creepy to look up the weird hero who has a crush on him, you locked all of your stupid social media accounts.

Part of Shigaraki still thinks everybody’s messing with him – everybody except Toga, who’s delusional, and Twice, who’s probably never touched a girl who wasn’t in the process of arresting him. But something about it keeps bothering Shigaraki. Something about you keeps bothering him. Thinking about it makes him itch, and not thinking about it isn’t working. After two weeks of trying both, Shigaraki decided to look you up and find out what you’ve said about him and the League of Villains, so he can finally delete the mental save file with you in it.

But you haven’t said much about the League of Villains. Shigaraki can’t tell if that’s because no one’s asked you or because you don’t have anything to say – or at least not anything you’d say publicly, which is why he went looking for your personal social media accounts and found them all locked. Shigaraki scratches with one hand and looks you up on Reddit with the other. He has to be pretty specific in his search query. Just looking up “Skynet” brings up a lot of stuff about movies.

The Reddit threads about you are a mix of obsessive hero fans and people who think you’re hot. The latter group spends a lot of time bitching about the fact that you don’t post enough thirst traps. It doesn’t seem like you go for fanservice. Good. Shigaraki hates heroes on principle, but he hates the ones who don’t showboat ever so slightly less.

You used to work with Eraserhead, which is probably why he let you supervise his class. You went to UA. There are links to all your Sports Festival performances, and Shigaraki bookmarks them for later, in case you’ve got skills you didn’t show in the fight at Kamino. You’re not very well-known, and none of your arrests have been of big-time villains. And as far as Shigaraki can find, you’ve never said a word about the League.

It’s not like Shigaraki was expecting to find a whole essay about why you don’t hate the League and why you have a crush on him. He wouldn’t have liked that. But he also doesn’t like the fact that you apparently didn’t think about the League at all before you fought him at Kamino. Maybe you did and you were just keeping quiet about it. Or maybe you didn’t care at all until you met Shigaraki in person, and then you – what? Worried about him? Cared about him? Wanted him to live? Do people actually fall in love at first sight?

Toga would say yes, but Toga’s seventeen, and also insane. Shigaraki can’t take anything Toga says at face value.

There’s one other spot on Reddit where Shigaraki finds you – in a thread on the weirdest hero names. He remembers the movies that kept popping up in his earlier search results and finds one of them on his favorite pirating site. He’s bored. There’s nothing to do right now. He’s decided not to do anything else until the dust has settled. He has time for a movie.

The hideout is quiet right now. Dabi’s been gone all day. Toga and Twice left this afternoon, either to scout things out or to steal more supplies, and Spinner, Compress, and Magne are all napping in the next room. This afternoon, Shigaraki sent Kurogiri to ask the doctor for help. He didn’t want to do that, but with Sensei gone – gone, and it’s Shigaraki’s fault, because it was his stupid plan – the League is out of Nomus and running out of money. They need backup, and Kurogiri’s better at convincing the doctor to do things than Shigaraki is. A scarecrow with a paper bag over its head is better at convincing people to do things than Shigaraki is. If Shigaraki was convincing at all, he would have won Bakugou over, and none of this would have happened.

The movie is sci-fi, or maybe horror. It’s also really old, from some time period where all the movies were set in a world where quirks don’t exist. If quirks existed, this movie would be over before it even started. Probably. Shigaraki wonders if you’ve seen this movie. If you liked it. What other things do you like, in addition to him?

A few minutes later, he gets an answer to at least one of his questions. You’ve definitely seen this movie, and you must have liked it, or you wouldn’t have named yourself after the evil supercomputer that nuked humanity and started building killer robots to take out anybody who survived. Now Shigaraki gets why you were on the list of heroes with weird names, and he’s pretty sure you should be at the top of it. You must have at least a couple screws loose. That’s probably why you took one look at Shigaraki and decided to fall in love with him. If you have fallen in love with him. Have you?

Shigaraki needs to stop thinking about this. He presses play on the movie again. Now that he’s got at least an answer or two, maybe he can focus on something else. Something other than the fact that he’s tired and hungry and has a headache and will probably get dizzy if he stands up too fast, just like he always has. And the fact that none of those things were a problem until you asked if he was okay.

He must fall asleep or something, because the next thing he knows, the screen of his phone’s gone dark, and someone is hollering at him from the other room. “What?” Shigaraki shouts back.

“Get in here,” Dabi says. Dabi’s back. “Your girlfriend’s on the news.”

“All over the news,” Toga adds gleefully, before Shigaraki can argue back that a) you’re not his girlfriend because b) he doesn’t even like you. “She’s even cuter when she’s covered in blood!”

What? Shigaraki stands up too fast, comes close to blacking out, and scrambles unsteadily into the other room. Magne has the TV on, and Shigaraki elbows his way past Compress and Dabi for a look at the screen. It’s the national news, a special report. Something about speed brakes failing on a Shinkansen headed through Tokyo and a catastrophic derailment. Or what would have been a catastrophic derailment, if it wasn’t for you. Before Shigaraki can tell somebody to look up what happened on their phone – his is dead – the news broadcast plays a video of the incident. All Shigaraki and the others can do is stare.

“Damn,” Spinner says into the silence that falls afterwards. “If she’d done that at Kamino, you all would have been toast.”

No kidding. Shigaraki didn’t go to school past kindergarten, but every idiot knows that trains are heavy, and knows that the faster something is going, the harder it is to stop. In the video, you’re on the tracks behind the speeding train, hand outstretched. Shigaraki sees the train shudder when your quirk catches it. It yanks you off your feet about three seconds later, and you get dragged out of the frame facedown, one hand still extended, still hanging on. Whoever’s holding the camera pans left, following the train, and it’s pretty obvious that the train is slowing down. Shigaraki thought your quirk was good for paralyzing people and pulling wires out of the ground. He’d never have guessed you were capable of this.

“Why didn’t she do that at Kamino?” Dabi asks, baffled. “She could have made it big as the hero who took down the League of Villains instead of getting dragged by the press for letting us go.”

“Which do you think dragged her harder, the press or the train?” Magne cackles, and Dabi snorts. “She looks like roadkill –”

“Don’t be dumb,” Toga says to Magne. “She’s got blood all over her. It’s cute! And she let us go at Kamino because she loves Tomura-kun.”

“Oh, right.” Magne nods. Dabi’s still snickering. “The train isn’t half as cute as the boss is!”

Dabi’s snickering gets worse, and Twice is guffawing in the background. Shigaraki yanks the remote out of Magne’s hand and turns up the volume on the TV to drown them out. “ – pleased to report a lack of severe injuries to the passengers, courtesy of the gradual stop achieved by what was first believed to be a civilian acting without authorization,” the newscaster is saying. They’re on the scene. There’s an ambulance in the background. “We’ve since confirmed that the individual responsible for the save is an off-duty hero by the name of Skynet. We have her right here –”

The camera zooms in on you, just in time for you to spit a mouthful of blood into the gutter. Magne was right – you look like shit – and Toga was right – you’re covered in blood. You’re not wearing your costume, and your clothes are pretty shredded. You wipe your mouth on the back of your hand and stand up straight, grimacing. Shigaraki’s taken his share of hits in battle before. He’s impressed against his will.

The interviewer is asking you a bunch of questions, and Shigaraki listens carefully. Now that he knows how powerful your quirk actually is, he needs as many clues as possible about how it works. He picks up things here and there, but he keeps getting distracted by you. By the blood dripping from the corner of your mouth. By the big, bloody scrapes across your torso. By the way one of your shoulders is pretty obviously dislocated, and the fact that you’re standing there doing an interview when you should be getting help. Shigaraki doesn’t need to ask a stupid question about whether or not you’re okay. He knows you’re not. Why does he care?

Because you were off-duty. Because this wasn’t your job. Because you got in trouble for letting Shigaraki go at Kamino and still jumped onto the tracks to get dragged four hundred yards behind an out-of-control train. The heroic system is bullshit, and there’s nothing defensible about it, but that train probably had hundreds of people on it, and they’d be dead if it wasn’t for you. Being a hero is idiotic at best. But if it’s possible to do an idiotic thing the right way, you’re doing it.

The interviewer is asking you why you stepped in when you weren’t on duty, and you’re getting pretty visibly annoyed. Spinner is the only person other than Shigaraki who’s still watching. “She’s underground, right?” he asks. Shigaraki nods without looking away from the screen. “She acts like a true hero. Stain would approve.”

Shigaraki doesn’t give a shit what the Hero Killer thinks about anything. But he has a really bad feeling that he’s starting to give a shit about you. What the hell is he supposed to do about it?

Turn you, obviously. The League could use a quirk like yours, and it would be a serious blow to hero society for an established hero to join forces with Shigaraki. You probably weren’t trying to get Shigaraki’s attention by stopping a speeding train, but you’ve got his attention now, for a good reason instead of a stupid one. The thought of your feelings for him is a lot less uncomfortable now that they’re something he can use.

Kurogiri gets back from the doctor with bad news – the doctor can’t help them right now, because they’re taking too much heat. It sounds like bullshit to Shigaraki, but he has something else on his mind. He talks to Kurogiri away from the others. “Find out where Skynet lives.”

Kurogiri looks surprised. “Why?”

“She’s stronger than I thought. We can use her.”

“I see,” Kurogiri says, but he’s giving Shigaraki a weird look. “Why do you need to know where she lives?”

“So I can let her know I’m interested,” Shigaraki says. Kurogiri’s expression doesn’t shift. “I don’t have to tell her what I’m interested in.”

Kurogiri’s still making a weird face. As much as Kurogiri can make any kind of face. “Right?” Shigaraki prompts, and Kurogiri nods. “Right. Once we know where she is, what should I do?”

“Something subtle,” Kurogiri suggests. “Consider it while I seek the information you requested.”

Something subtle. Easy enough. Shigaraki feels better about the whole thing than he has since he ran into you for the first time. You’re in love with him? That’s fine. If you love him so much, you can help him destroy the world.

#shigaraki tomura x reader #tomura shigaraki x reader #shigaraki x reader #shigaraki x you #x reader #reader insert #opposites attract au #man door hand hook car door #a bisquared production

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sitp-recs · 11 months

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hello lovely liv!

i have to admit push and pull you down by mostlyvoid has me on a chokehold like no other, i'm obsessed with the dynamic between h&d and now am wondering if you know any other fics with a harry thats not content with his life meeting a draco who is showing him a different (like morally ambiguous) side of life? or do you have any rec lists already? i'm not even sure what bullet points to look for i'd appreciate your help :)

*elmo fire gif* love love love that fic! It’s short but super intense and the dynamics, dialogue and characterization are perfectly executed by @bonesliketambourines 🤌🏼 I don’t know any similar fics with those specific vibes but I think you might enjoy these. They play with jaded!Harry and morally ambiguous!Draco in different ways, some are darker than others but the Drarry dynamics are equally delicious. Enjoy!

Second Chance by @shealwaysreads (G, 2k)

Harry and Draco spent one long, perfect year together after the war, then the Ministry came calling. Three years later Harry finds his way to Draco’s door.

A Cold Spot in Hell by @drarrytrash (E, 8k)

When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire. If you wanted 8k of sexy arson, emotionally difficult arson, general arson, handkerchiefs, dread, and poetry curation, now is really your moment.

Clear As Mud by scoradh (M, 10k)

Set post-war and post-Harry's-conscience...

Two Zinnias and the Scent of Lemon by @the-starryknight (M, 16k)

The Ministry didn’t turn bad overnight. Harry didn’t suddenly turn rogue either. Between covert Legilimency links and Polyjuice disguises and running and running and running, Draco has forgotten what it is like to have a safe harbor that isn’t a person. If there’s an art to fighting back, then they’ll find it hand in hand.

Unfinished Business by cupiscent (E, 20k)

Ten years after the War ends, Harry and Draco still haven't got their act together. But maybe it's not too late.

Sun Thief by @floydig, BlackRose532 (E, 28k)

It’s 2005, and Draco Malfoy says, “Fuck the Ministry,” Harry works as a handyman in muggle London, and Draco should really stop pissing off the Squib gangs. Or: Harry beats up a pimp and isn’t sorry about it, Draco deals black market potions, and they’re shagging. Again.

The Laws of Gravity by @lettersbyelise (E, 31k)

When he runs into Draco Malfoy picking pockets at a charity gala, Harry Potter is forced to face the desires he’s avoided for years — at the risk of shattering the public image he’s so carefully curated since the war.

Dreaming Darkly by @quicksilvermaid (E, 40k)

It's five years after the war, and Harry is not okay. He hates his job. He hates Robards. He hates Ron's promotions and Hermione's concern. He chases oblivion in booze and weed and quick dirty fucks, but it's never enough. Then Draco Malfoy's face comes up on the case board as a murder suspect and Harry is thrown into an investigation that will take him to dark and dangerous places.

The Beauty of Thestrals and Other Unseen Things by @writcraft (E, 63k) - Draco’s not morally ambiguous here, just unapologetically queer 🌈

Harry has terrific friends, an amazing girlfriend and his job as Head Auror enables him to work on challenging cases and Ministry reform. He just wishes he could work out why he’s been so out of sorts.

A Pocket Full of Stones by waterwings (E, 68k)

A curse is spreading through the wizarding world, erasing memories of the war. Harry Potter is on the case! Where Draco is the DMLE’s most wanted dark wizard and Harry is the private investigator tasked with bringing him in. It goes as well as one might expect.

Criminal by @the-sinking-ship (E, 83k)

Things were going just fine for Draco Malfoy. He successfully conned and counted cards across Europe and America, amassing a small fortune, along with a lengthy rap sheet. That was until he made the grave mistake of returning to England for a high stakes card game and got himself caught – by Harry Potter no less.

#asks #Drarry reclist #jaded Harry #morally ambiguous Draco

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wildpeachfarm · 2 months

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Hi Moku!

It’s been a while. Hope you’ve been well!

I only want to say something once (and then move on) about the events that transpired yesterday on the bird app (still glad it’s deleted off of my phone though).

Dream continues to prove time and time again why he’s a better person than me, and probably 99% of CCs. I would not have forgiven this man for attempting to ruin my career and slander my name. I wouldn’t have even approached him directly; my legal team would have done it, if I were in dreams shoes.

If you were to ask me why I am a fan of Dream, I’d say it’s because he’s produces good content and it brought me closer to my brother. If you were to ask me on a deeper level, it’s because this man is kindness and empathy personified. I thought I possessed empathy, but this man has enough for the whole world. Seeing a person continue to get beat down as hard as he has by not only fellow ccs, but other fandoms, and haters of himself- watching that- makes me indescribably upset on his behalf. But seeing him continue to rise above makes me realize just how much growth I still have to do as a human. (And he’s doing all his maturing publicly; I’m just a mere fan who does all of my maturing in private.).

If you asked me on a deeper level why I’m a fan, it’s because in all the time I’ve been on the internet, I’ve never seen someone so unapologetically themselves. I’ve never met the man, but from what I’ve heard, he’s even sweeter in person. Online culture can be cringe and when your career is based off performing well online, sometimes you can get caught up in it. Dreams never strayed from who he is. He’s always been empathetic but now he’s incredibly more so because he just wants us all to be loved. And it’s more than admirable, and if I found a word that means more than that, I’d insert it.

Anyway. Enough Dream love posting, even though I could go on for all of ever.

I rarely reply on Reddit, more of a lurker on most social forum apps now. But I replied yesterday. Cause as a victim of grooming, abuse, and SA I am so exhausted from seeing all this “I know something about Person A that you don’t know but I’m not going to reveal it cause the ‘victims’ aren’t ready” bullshit. It does nothing except for piss off actual victims. Parading around potential victims and would-be abusers but never actually releasing anything makes you just as bad as the person you’re claiming is despicable. You’re showing victims you don’t care about them and would instead protect their abuser in favor of some interaction on your account. And that’s exactly the reason why some people don’t speak up.

Never in my life have I seen people go “I’m going to publicly allude to there being victims of Person A (without releasing proof) to see how the public responds” until I joined this fandom . Motherfucker, you got clowned on by everyone including one of dreams biggest ops. All you did was show victims that should they come forward, they can expect that same response. This takes away from the legitimacy of true victims and helps actual abusers (or whatever the nature of the crime is) keep getting away with being horrible people.

That is if there are any victims, and this time there weren’t. And haven’t been. And as this man quickly found out, people are still trying to spread false information to take Dream down cause they can’t handle that he’s not a despicable human who’s done criminally offensive shit. Why those people would want there to be victims explains everything about who they are as people.

To his latest statement, I’m glad this turned out positive. But again, I would not have been so kind if I was in Dreams position. This man claiming he had nothing to gain from this when his entire career is commentary makes me laugh. He absolutely had something to gain from this. Dream is still a giant creator (Twitter isn’t where his fandom is, contrary to other CCs and antis beliefs). Taking him down would make you the hero of Twitter (I’m saying Twitter cause on YT Dre keeps thriving), and riding off the George/Caiti situation, it would have been monumental (again, all true if this man wasn’t talking out of his ass). He absolutely had a million things to gain from saying what he did. You can’t convince me otherwise.

And his shock at dreams empathy is incredible.“Yeah sorry I tried to ruin your career bro. This is probably where I get sued, right?” ‘No, dude, it’s all good. I’m here to clear up any misinformation. Just want us all to get along.’ Is how I imagine that went. Incredible that not everyone possesses the same kind of malice those bad faith actors sending him that shit did. Or even himself for trying to ruin someone’s career over baseless shit sent by people who clearly have a bias against Dream.

I am once again begging people to talk to each other. I feel like everyone forgets the DM button exists on every app. And with how few people use it, it’s probably all dusty and covered in spider webs. This situation was resolved cause Dream reached out and they talked it out like the adults that they are. Amazingly, this whole situation could have been avoided if Slander or Zander or whatever the fuck his name is just talked directly to Dream first. We wouldn’t have even known more people were trying to spread shit, cause it would have already been resolved (though I’m not dumb and know people are still trying to do so. Brighton Bastards, looking at you).

I understand Dream wanting us to leave this man alone, and I will. I want no part in whatever he’s doing. He could completely change his whole approach around and suddenly be a better person, and I literally would not care. Cause I am not Dream, so I have nothing personally invested in being respectful to this man. But I’ll leave him because for my own victim hood, I couldn’t trust this man with my food never mind supporting me when I needed it.

I will not be praising him for “doing the right thing”, though I am glad he apologized both publicly and hopefully privately. Had he done the right thing before boldly making those claims, we wouldn’t be here. You don’t get to try to ruin someone’s career off of baseless shit and then backtrack when you’re corrected and expect people to praise you. Congratulations, you chose to be a decent human this one time. Now continue to do so.

To wrap this up, I am glad he apologized. I am glad he said he’d be taking a better approach to future situations should there be any (not just with Dream but with other CCs too). I am still saddened that Dream has to continuously reach out to these bad faith actors cause they don’t care to fact check things (when it’s literally their job to do so).

Dream, never change. I know the fandom says they want Nightmare to return, but your kindness is why we love you.

Zander, thanks for apologizing. Hopefully you mature from this and I don’t have to do this again-coming from the empathic part of me. From the victim side, fuck you for adding on to why it’s hard for victims to come forward.

I didn’t mean for this to get so long, but I greatly appreciate you reading it. I will be moving on now. Maybe back to Dream love posting. I like that, that makes me happy.

Hope your Sunday goes well!

-L :)

L omg hi it's been ages! Hope you're doing well ^^

and yeah this is all very true and well-said; Dream is a whole new standard for empathy and understanding in the face of harassment and misinformation and slander. I am slowly learning to understand him and I also feel like I am maturing more alongside him because I really thought I was empathetic to people before, but Dream knocks it out of the park every single time and leaves me speechless.

I agree that Zander should not be applauded for doing the normal thing and privately communicating and publicly apologizing after constantly creating issues. But I am glad it happened nonetheless because maybe this will inspire more people to chat with dream before coming out with vague shit that ALWAYS turns out to be untrue.

Another good turning point for the fandom that I hope wakes people up to just how ridiculous and convoluted things become when private communication amongst people is not promoted in the face of potential drama/controversy

#ask #anon #anti drummyache tag

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joyce-stick · 10 months

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Lost Judgment's Lost Plot | joyce-stick

Didn't like the "detective boys punch school bullying revenge janitor" plot.

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Essay transcript:

All right, before we get started, here's the plot of Lost Judgment without all the twists. Oops, all spoilers! Oh, and also, quick note that this story deals with… or rather, invokes, the topics of bullying, suicide, bereavement, sexual assault, and of course, murder. We're gonna talk about some tropes, some themes, some ethics, and of course some casual sexism, too. Fun stuff! So. Here we go.

It’s 2008, and a student, Mitsuru Kusumoto, is being bullied at Kurokawa Academy, a Japanese private high school. His bullying is reported to his homeroom teacher, Yu Kitakata, by a classmate, Yoko Sawa. Kitakata, in order to collect evidence of the bullying, places a hidden camera in the classroom, and from this, obtains footage of several of his students bullying Mitsuru. The same day as this footage is recorded, Mitsuru attempts suicide. The suicide attempt fails and he falls into a coma which goes on to last thirteen years. Kitakata is fired as a result of this incident and later goes off the grid, changing his name and identity to “Jin Kuwana,” and branding himself as a local Yokohama handyman. Feeling guilty about having neglected to intervene in time, Kuwana subsequently plots to go about exacting his idea of justice on all the bullies who pushed their classmates to suicide. He approaches the parents asking if they’d like to get some real justice for their children, and then goes and kidnaps the former bully, and encourages the parent of the bullied child to murder them. The first such murder victim is Shinya Kawai, the one who bullied Mitsuru, and the first such murderer is Reiko Kusumoto, his mother and the Vice Minister of Health in Japan. He continues doing this for five years, amassing seven victims. To do this, Kuwana enlists the criminal accompliceship of Mitsuru’s other former bullies using the video that he recorded as blackmail material, and preserves Kawai’s body on ice to use as further leverage over them. In 2018, Akihiro Ehara sues Seiryo High School over the suicide of his son, Toshiro, who was bullied by Hiro Mikoshiba, a classmate of his. No substantive evidence turns up on account of tampering and obfuscation by the school board, and the perjurious testimony of Yoko Sawa, now a teacher at Seiryo, who is pressured into keeping quiet about the truth. As such, the case is dismissed. In 2021, Kuwana helps Ehara exact revenge on Mikoshiba. Ehara and Kuwana hatch a plot to make a public mockery of the Japanese justice system’s failures, which involves Kuwana posing as Ehara and staging a sexual harassment incident with the help of Yui Mamiya, one of Kuwana’s blackmailed ex-students, in order to furnish Ehara with an alibi for the murder of Mikoshiba. Ehara’s sexual assault case is taken on by defense attorney Saori Shirosaki, and two months later, the court declares Ehara guilty and gives him a six month sentence. As he receives his sentence, Ehara cryptically reveals the identity and location of Mikoshiba’s corpse. Shirosaki finds this suspicious, and contacts Takayuki Yagami, the protagonist of the Judgment games, asking him to sus out what in the heck is going on. Yagami and his colleagues deduce and uncover all this, with their detective skills. There is a conspiracy with a gang, Reiko Kusumoto’s political rivals, and a bunch of other people who they confront, indict, and/or beat up.

Ultimately, Yagami brings the truth about these murders to light, confronts Kuwana and beats him in a fight, and the story ends.

*cough cough cough*

Okay, um, now I don’t have to play along with this fucking Like an Ace Dragon Attorney twisty ass bullshit. I can now talk about the game without recapping the important stuff. That’s great. I think.

So, if you couldn’t tell, Lost Judgment’s plot is a tad unhinged.

Okay so one minor note before we start: Lost Judgment has a little story DLC, called The Kaito Files, which could be very quite good, but it doesn’t look worth fifty (actually thirty) dollars. This video is not about that DLC. If I ever play the DLC, maybe I’ll make a follow-up video. If you think you might want that, back the Patreon, and maybe I’ll do it. Now then…

The first Judgment, developed by Yakuza series creators Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and released in Japan in 2018 and elsewhere in the world in 2019, is a game that I quite enjoyed. It’s a Yakuza game, meaning it has the various trappings of Yakuza games that you might’ve heard about, from the distinctive free roam town slash real time action combat random battle gameplay to the wealth of activities and diversions you can do speckled all about, and also the plot, which is still at its core the sort of wildly implausible thrilling criminal conspiracy that you’ll be used to if you’ve seen any of these games to the credits.

But it’s also a detective-themed game and a sendup of the mystery genre, meaning that its story is structured as a murder mystery, and there’s also some more detective-like flourishes in the gameplay loop, like interrogating witnesses or snooping around for clues. The story is fun, the detective stuff is fun, the game is fun. It’s also, quite notably for our purposes today, reasonably thematically cohesive.

If you’ve played any Ace Attorney game, you’ve seen this game’s basic thematic thrust: the justice system turns out skewed and often unjust results by imperfect people who make mistakes despite the best of intentions, as well as those in power trying to protect their good name, and it’s up to the law-dealing, truth-seeking protagonists to apply the law fairly and bring the truth to light. It’s Ace Attorney through a Yakuza lens, and that’s just a hell of a lot of fun. While there are some clumsily executed minor story beats, and some fumbled talking points, those don’t drag the game down significantly, and it is, nonetheless, a good time.

While I would overall recommend Lost Judgment to RGG veterans and anyone who really liked the first Judgment, I’d say that recommendation comes with reservations, because, oh gosh, that plot. It is much clumsier than the first game’s, much more thematically complicated, and rhetorically baffling. It’s also probably the most messed up scenario I’ve ever encountered in an RGG game, and that’s unfortunately not to its benefit, because the game really isn’t interested in engaging fully with the implications of this plot, and I think that’s pretty disappointing.

But before this story gets into the weeds, we do a cold open on a run-of-the-mill case for Yagami and his colleagues where you do a regular old Yakuza games tutorial, get to meet the characters, the parkour and stealth mechanics that this game introduces, and of course, the cats. This game is full of cats. Then we’re whisked away by the plot to do a first chapter case, where Yagami and Kaito are enlisted to help by their buds up in Yokohama who’ve been contracted to deal with a case of alleged bullying. Obviously the bullying is real, they help stop it, they all pat themselves on the back— and then the chapter ends with Yagami getting that call from friendly lawyer girl Shirosaki.

Before I continue, it’s important to note that the bullying of which this game’s story speaks is very much a real problem that plagues real life Japanese schools, and also that I don’t know shit about it. I am not Japanese, I have never been a student in a Japanese school, and I have no connections to anyone who ever has been. I’m a 24 year old transgender plural lesbian otaku failwoman from the US of A. I wasn’t even a student in any American schools, bar a few specific limited circumstances, as I was homeschooled. As such I’m pretty far removed from the cultural context and life experiences that might make this game’s story ring very differently to a Japanese player, or to anyone who’s been a victim of school bullying. So, I can only authoritatively comment on the topic of school bullying insofar as how much its invocation affected my enjoyment of this video game. In short, do your own research! Or, if you don’t, then just, assume that everything I say is true and don’t fact check any of it.

School bullying in Japan is infamously traumatizing, and often has tragically violent outcomes, the most well-known and oft-discussed of which is suicide. This is often chalked up to a few specific factors, namely the stifling routine and workload of school life, the cultural pressure to achieve harmony and not rock the boat, and school boards who have a vested interest in sweeping potential scandals under the rug.

sources: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

It’s a pretty serious social issue, to put it mildly, and one that, like all social issues, has naturally come to attract satire. My favorite examples of such satire are the erotic horror visual novel Wonderful Everyday, or Subahibi, and the manga/anime series Sangatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion in English, but let’s just call it Sangatsu), each of which have a bullying arc.

Subahibi’s bullying arc is oriented as a revenge fantasy where the victims fight back against the bullies, presenting this violent resistance as a necessary and natural outcome of the cruelty of the antagonists and the impotency of the teachers (although, to avoid misrepresenting Subahibi, I should clarify that this subplot is a relatively short section of the game, and there is a lot more going on in it that is far beyond the scope of this video).

Meanwhile, Sangatsu takes a more down-to-earth approach that frankly discusses the nuances of the issue and has everyone involved more peacefully (and probably more realistically) confront the social causes at play. Both these works each focus effectively on one of these two angles, and do them well in their own ways, but Lost Judgment sort of awkwardly marries the realistic social commentary and the revenge plot, to the murder mystery, legal drama, to what I feel results in the detriment of both. Sangatsu and Subahibi, along with numerous other examples, are in my opinion far better at discussing this topic than Lost Judgment- though, once again, it bears reminding that I am saying this as a media critic, and not a sociologist. Do not believe me!

So, anyway, the first chapter of this game is a pretty straightforward case of solving bullying, and I have to say, I don’t really like it. If I had to put it in about a sentence, this opening chapter plot feels like all the parts of Persona 5 that people claimed to like, albeit forced into the framework of a Yakuza game.

If you’re wondering why I think this, well, RGG Studio and Atlus are both divisions of the game development branch of our beloved SEGA, itself a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings, their friendly megacorp pachinko-churning parent company that they merged with in 2003, shortly after discontinuing the Dreamcast and leaving the console market, a thing no one mentions because it obviously didn’t affect anything because everyone still likes the video games! Mostly.

I’d hazard a guess that the different people making these games probably talk to each other. (I’m very certain that there was, at some point, an interview with an RGG developer that said this, but I cannot find this interview anymore (gosh damn, did I try), because advertising has gone on to make search engines worse. Or maybe I dreamed that interview up.) And given how Sega frequently boasts at the end of each fiscal period that their sales figures have been bolstered by both Yakuza and Persona, whose audiences definitely overlap (at least internationally), it only stands to reason that they would think that Yakuza can make some more of that Persona money by borrowing elements from the latter.

Whatever the case may be, this first chapter doesn’t work very well for me.

Firstly, it just makes me feel really uncomfortable, what with how Yagami and company go about placing hidden cameras and listening devices to spy on teenagers, something I find ethically suspect. The story never stops to consider if this is the most correct or appropriate thing to do, because we’re supposed to be on Yagami’s side since we know he’s got a good reason for it! There’s a girl who confronts him about it, Kyoko Amasawa the schoolgirl detective— literally the best character in the game, voiced by Xanthe Huynh, literally the best dub actress, in English. Amasawa is great, it's wonderful to hear Xanthe say such lines as

"This is your Reichenbach Falls Moment!"

But this conversation is just, she thinks Yagami is doing something malicious or perverted, she's wrong, he proves she's wrong, and the game never asks the question of, "okay, but, is it really fine to spy on teenagers even if one does truly have good and pure intentions in doing so?" I don't think it is, so, yeah, this whole plot point just makes me really uneasy. Like, I would not trust any adult with technology designed to invade the private lives of the children under their charge in the name of ensuring their safety. More often than not, that sort of practice is used to rob children of their personal freedoms, a thing that we as a society really like doing to children in the name of protecting them! In general! But that’s a whole other video.

Anyway, that’s ultimately only a minor issue I have with the story, it doesn’t matter that much, and it’s done and over with quickly, so we can ignore it. Mostly. The bigger and more enduring issue is how the story goes about talking about bullying.

There’s two things that this game attributes bullying to, and those two things are hormone fluctuations and the bystander effect. Early on in chapter one, we get this dialogue about the hormones thing:

Tsukumo: Research shows that boys at that age experience a sudden spike in testosterone. This leads to outbursts to assert dominance, compounded by the irrationality of an immature brain. Scientifically, this potent mix of impulses often manifests as bullying. Kaito: Yeah, I call that puberty. Yagami: But that would apply specifically to boys, right? You're getting cases with girls involved too, aren't you? Tsukumo: Ah. With girls it's more likely rooted in oxytocin, a brain hormone that also has links to bullying.

So, I don’t know if this is true, and if so, to what extent. I did try to do some cursory research, but didn’t find any definitive answers. However, I am fairly suspicious of how this dialogue uses the scientific argument of the impact of oxytocin and testosterone on social behaviors to suggest that bullying is basically human nature, and especially in how it genders the two. “Oxytocin and testosterone make girls and boys, respectively, be mean” sounds like a rationale that is at best very reductive and at worst outright pseudo-scientific.

But, let’s just assume for the sake of argument, that it’s true. Alright, well, what about all the other reasons why bullying happens? Like, I don’t know, social and cultural pressures? For example, one character who appears in this game is Akane, y’know, the girl, who is in on the bullying for…

I don’t know why, actually. I don’t really know why any of these kids are bullying Koda. I mean, I do know why, they do tell Yagami what started the bullying, but I feel that that's a thing that's explained to further the plot, rather than a part of the story that is told. I don't have a great sense of what their social dynamic is, or why they all decided to bully Koda together, or, that they have any individuality really, beyond just... "Mean Kids 1 through 4."

But, given that Akane is like, the one girl in this group, I feel like there must be an interesting reason for that. Maybe she’s the leader of this clique who rallied all these guys to her cause, or maybe she joined them because she used to be Koda’s friend but felt like if she didn’t bully Koda with them, she might become a potential target. Maybe there’s some other reason! Maybe there’s other external reasons for all these kids to be bullying this girl. Maybe they just want her money, maybe they have a petty grudge against her, maybe they have an abusive home life, or maybe they’re just stressed and lookin' for someone to take it out on. Maybe it's all of these things between all of these kids. There could be all sorts of issues at play here, and I think it’s a huge missed opportunity that basically all the game has to say about it is:

Kaito: Hormones are f**ked up, huh?

This isn’t a strict requirement for me to enjoy this plot, or find its perspective worthwhile. Like, you don’t need to empathize with antagonists. Sometimes you just want people to be mean so that you can feel good about them getting kicked in the face. That is basically the point of Subahibi’s bullying subplot, particularly the branch where Zakuro and Kimika fight back against Megu and Satoko and their, um, bullying friends—

Kimika: Looking at it from afar, I had to think... why should the person who's suffering die while they get to go on with their lives like nothing happened? I couldn't stand it. If it's so bad that I would kill myself, I might as well kill them instead... that's the conclusion I came to.

(they do A LOT WORSE than bullying in the other branch. I can’t show you, it’s YouTube illegal and kinda disgusting)

I think that plot works precisely because it doesn’t justify the actions of their bullies. It doesn’t say that they’ve got the bullying hormones, it doesn’t try to make them sympathetic in any way, they’re just a bunch of mean bitches and we’re supposed to be happy when Kimika fights back against them. Similarly, in Lost Judgment, if they wanted to make these characters just mean, they could’ve just not said anything about the hormones! They could’ve just said these people are bullies, and left it at that! I mean, the Yakuza games up till this point have been doing just fine letting you kick random gangbangers in the face without telling you they’ve got the criminal hormones, and that was fun and we all had a good time!

But, because this game doesn’t go into any further detail about why bullies are bullies, it comes off pretty much like that. These kids have the bullying hormone. Is that their fault? I don’t know, but they’re pulling a knife on Yagami, so it’s fine to beat them up, I guess. The story does come back around to make the bullies sympathetic, when they decide to stop being bullies, apologize to Koda, and help Yagami, and that’s nice and cool and everything, and something that can also work without the hormones thing— like, for example, how it works in Sangatsu! Hinata’s bullies apologize, there’s a mutually amicable and peaceful resolution, and the story discusses and sympathizes with the broader social circumstances that pushed them to bullying, without condoning or excusing their actions. Like, maybe teenagers are just dumbasses who don’t always foresee their actions having consequences, or are afraid to change even if they do, and most people are just trying to do good at heart and will come around when they realize that their bad actions have negative consequences. I don’t know. It’s just a thought that there is!

Anyway, the story hasn’t got anything to say about the social conditions that might have led these kids to start bullying. It does, however, have a bit to say about the conditions that lead others to allow bullying to continue, and in this, the bystander syndrome is cited.

And this isn’t wrong! Although, I feel they don’t adequately address the potential social causes of this phenomenon. Like, for example, the cultural pressures to not do anything when you, y’know, have a life, and standing up to bullies might get you in actual trouble beyond just being embarrassed. Everyone we’ve talked to who’s either stood up to bullies in their time, or known someone who has, has spoken of being met with discipline or even expulsion even though they were the ones being aggressed. And in other contexts, standing up and speaking when you see a wrong being done could be met with violence or losing employment or legal repercussions or what have you.

So, it goes beyond simple embarrassment, to say the least. We could probably, as a society, I imagine, be doing more to encourage people to not ignore injustices beyond just appealing to their moral sense. But that’s, also, a different video. Overall, I feel like this entire plot ignores the bulk of the actual systemic problems at play in favor of armchair psychology, which, hey, I guess I’m doing armchair sociology about a social issue that, while obviously not unheard of in my country, is very different from how it is in Japan. So it’s not as if I’m not guilty of talking shit about something I know nothing about.

Ultimately, this first chapter is just, like. Fine. It has a weird bit with spying on teenagers. It has a cheesy feel-good Hallmark Channel drama ending. There’s not much of a message to take from it, besides “well, it sure is good to stand up for others” which is very true, but also a rather shallow moral. With regards to how much it seems to borrow from Persona 5, I’d say that Persona 5 was at least very specific in explaining the social ills at play, how it affected the teachers, the students, the parents, the concrete reasons why it's easier for all these groups to stand by and do nothing, and was by no means above naming and shaming the individuals in power responsible for allowing the crimes to proceed. Sure, it goes about it in a very straightforward and teenage manner, without offering much more meaningful systemic analysis to speak of, but it does do it!

Conversely, Lost Judgment acknowledges the systemic issues: the students and their clique behaviors, the teachers who turn a blind eye at best and actively contribute to the bullying at worst, the school boards who try to hush up potential scandals, and makes someone stop in the middle of grieving to say DID YOU KNOW THAT IN OUR COUNTRY THIS HAPPENS THIS OFTEN,

Sawa: In Japan, 300 children commit suicide every year, across all grades. Less than three percent are proven to be linked to bullying.

But while it points all of this out, it doesn’t analyze any of it beyond the most superficial of observations, and it certainly doesn’t take anyone to task. The tone it takes with all of that is more like, “well, who can blame them? Folks gotta keep their jobs.” It feels like it just doesn’t have the guts to blame anyone in specific, besides just “the system” and “human nature”, both things that are hard to get mad at, because, those things are the way they are! It doesn’t really have much of anything to say about why they are the way they are, or suggest those things could be changed, and thus no coherent solution is presented, besides encouraging individuals to lean into their better senses and just sorta going, “well, hopefully good people will make the system good.” …Which I suppose is, the same, thing that Persona 5 does… but… anyway… um, Sangatsu also does this part better

added interlude

Hi, editing Audrey here, and um. There’s one other probably sorta really significant critical difference I forgot to mention, and it’s that Lost Judgment’s plot focuses on the perspectives of adults.

Subahibi, Sangatsu, and Persona, in all their various plots about bullying and harassment, focus on the perspectives of victims. That is to say, the kids who are affected.

And, in what I originally wrote for this video, I spent a lot of time discussing how Lost Judgment is missing the perspective of the bullies, which it is, but I overlooked the perhaps even greater and more damning sidelining of the perspectives of the bullying victims. Like, we have Koda, who does get to say a small piece about how she just sorta put up with the bullying and then Yagami and company helped her realize how bad she had it, but then just talks about how she wants to play basketball, which is not something we care about, and then... is never really ever relevant, ever, again. Then we have Toshiro... who is already dead, and Mitsuru... who is also already dead (in a coma). And then we have seven other unknown bullying victims... five? Right. Yeah, five other unknown bullying victims... who Kuwana at some point took revenge for.

They're already dead!

And their voices are just not relevant, to the story, at all. Instead the story chooses to prioritize the voices of the people who, let’s not mince words, weren’t there for the kids when they should have been.

Not to say that the feelings of the teachers and parents aren’t worthwhile perspectives to include, but it does kind of brush aside their part of the fault for ignoring the bullying in the first place, and also doesn’t deign to inquire how the victims would feel, about an ex-teacher inciting their parents to Murderous Violent on their behalf. Unlike in Subahibi, where, the revenge is exacted by the actual victims of the bullying in direct self-defense against their immediate aggressors and then they stop once the bullies back off, in Lost Judgment it’s done long after the fact, by people who weren’t even the primary victims, and who really bear a lot more fault for not helping when they should have, and… really, that line of thinking puts this story in a really, really dark light.

Anyway I’m gonna just, stop now

end interlude

I appreciate the earnestness of this arc, the hopeful note that this concludes on. I think that the confidence and strength of this writing elevates this ending scene to the point where I at least don’t find it outwardly cringe. But overall, I genuinely just do not think that the Yakuza formula is equipped to deal with this kind of nuanced social issue where there’s specific problems and sides. We’ve seen this kind of fumbling before, in Yakuza 7 with illegal immigrants and sex work, in Yakuza 5 with idols, and now here, with bullying. The writers of these games seem to like gesturing at these sorts of things, and making a few genuinely salient statements, but ultimately their attempts to comment on these issues don’t work when they have to be crowbarred into the fantastic conspiracy plot in this manner. They just don’t have the sensitivity or sense or interest to write this sensibly with an eye towards actually acknowledging what the real issues and their causes are.

The events of the first chapter are relatively segregated from the main story, almost making it so that we’ve now had to play two prologues, and I’d imagine that it’s almost representative of this game trying to tell two completely different stories; the bullying drama, and the conspiracy drama, and the former doesn’t really get a chance to play out to its fullest and best, because it’s forcibly truncated by the game’s need to move onto the latter. Which I guess we may as well start doing ourselves, because gosh I’ve said entirely too much about this game’s first few hours. I hope y’all are prepared for me to list off everything that I do not like about this game that I do not like! Or, don’t like as much as I want to, at least. Maybe we’ll talk about that.

I think the role of Yoko Sawa, the teacher, in this game’s plot, is casually sexist to an exhausting degree. Big surprise, right? This is an RGG game, after all. Well, yeah, but more so than usual.

Sawa first meets Yagami when he's investigating Koda's bullying, and then gets to see a lot more of him when he keeps showing up at the school to investigate the main case. All throughout, she’s constantly telling Yagami to please stop talking to her.

I get that Yagami is a private detective and all, and he cares a fair bit more about solving this case and finding the truth than people liking him. He’s not a stalker or a criminal, he is a lawyer and he does to a point care about the law, but he’s also not the most straight-laced of characters, either, and he is willing to and does break a little law to achieve his goals, sometimes. To a certain point with him, the end justifies the means, so it makes logical sense that he would keep trying to get to Sawa-sensei, despite being told to fuck off, because Sawa-sensei is so frequently a lynchpin of the case. And, y’know, he does this with everyone! Yagami sure does do a lot of pressuring people into letting him interrogate them! So it’s not, like, out of character or anything.

With all that said— it really gets to me that Sawa is the person who Yagami ends up interrogating the most frequently, and thus the one who tells him to fuck off the most. At first, because she really doesn’t want to talk to him, and later because even though she’d maybe like to talk to him, she fears for her safety. And I’m just kind of like… okay… plot… why must Yagami go bother this poor woman again. She’s been through enough. Gosh.

It super doesn’t help that one of the first things said about Sawa is that she’s hot? Like, Kaito says that she's hot, makes a pass at her, and Yagami’s like, “bro shut up” but, oh boy, they really wanted you to know she’s hot. And unlike Kiryu, who is a remarkably sexless protagonist throughout most of the series, Yagami fucks. Or seems to anyway. So that first impression of being told that this woman is hot, gives an entirely different texture to these later meetings with Yagami, where he, y’know, a guy, is repeatedly showing up like “hey please talk to me” and she, a woman, is like, “uh, no.” Oh boy, I love gender~

Yagami: I think you have the key to that answer, even if you don't know that you're the one holding it. It's like a lock. And until I figure out how to get through it, I'm going to keep picking at it. Sawa: I told you. I'm late for a meeting. Yagami: I'll be here when you get back. Have a good meeting.

And then Sawa dies!

It’s a pointless, cruel, and meaningless death committed by a gang boss to send a message. And that’s the point of it, yeah. It’s a death of an innocent to raise the stakes and show the villains mean business and all. I get it. I also fucking hate it. Like, it’s obviously fridging, yeah, but y’know, I’ve seen fridging. What I’ve also seen is a pretty recurring trope in the Yakuza formula, where RGG Studio just needs to kill off a woman to advance their plot. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if not for the fact that women aren’t allowed to do anything cool or interesting in these games! I could make a video talking about that. I did make a video talking about that, and I got rid of it because it was bad.

Anyway. This worked better in Yakuza 4, 5, and 6, because at least there, the dead women had, y’know, relationships with the relevant playable characters that I found believable and credible and were built up enough to make it hit hard when they get killed off. And 6 gets points for revealing that the woman being killed off was a fakeout, and she's fine, because the goon that was supposed to kill her had a conscience, that's funny~

But like, Yasuko, in 4, for example! Or Lily. Whatever. Yasuko gets killed off in a similar way for a similar purpose, but it kinda worked there because they at least gave us reasons to care. Yasuko gets to move the plot and have some interactions with Akiyama, Saejima, Kiryu, and Tanimura. It feels justified when they all pray together at her wake. And, like, Akiyama has a thing for Yasuko, but it fits his character and he’s not weird about it, and it seems like Yasuko might reciprocate if not for the criminal underworld at her back, so, yeah. It’s still not great, and it’s kind of egregiously uncomfortable that Yasuko isn’t actually physically shown doing any of the interesting things she’s said to have done that got the yakuza after her, before she dies. Still, it makes sense. It’s, y’know, good, so long as you accept the fridge and its chilly embrace.

Sawa and Yagami in Lost Judgment don’t have this factor for me. When Yagami later continuously brings her up, saying that the killing of bullies needs to stop lest more innocents come into the crossfire, I can’t help but think “bro. you didn’t know her. she kept telling you to go away. why are you being weird about this woman you didn’t have a relationship with. she wasn’t going to fuck you!”

*laughs* yeah. Yeah, okay, I realize this isn’t funny. But like, that’s all I can really think! I know that’s not textually why he was talking to her, but it really does feel like that! I don’t know, it just feels like that! I do not like it!

So, yeah, that’s that thing. Another thing that’s stupid about this game! Y’know how earlier I mentioned that the antagonists stage a groping to fabricate a murder alibi? Yeah, that’s a twist. We go through a huge chunk of this game thinking that Ehara, an ex-cop, harassed some poor woman on a train. Then it turns out that the sexual harassment was fake. That the woman who was supposedly victimized was in fact in on it. I don't have another word for it. That's just stupid!

They could’ve salvaged that if, perhaps, they’d wanted to explore how Yui Mamiya was victimized in the course of being forced to play a part in a murder alibi. Then maybe they could’ve swung it, made the throughline about her being victimized, like, cohesive, somehow. But they don’t do that, and in fact, Mamiya just kinda, does nothing, for most of the rest of the game, after the fakeness of her sexual harassment is exposed. She tells them about the conspiracy and its motive, and how they staged the incident, and that’s kind of it. It’s kinda made way worse by that before they find out, Saori and Yagami go to interrogate Mamiya about the supposed harassment, and Saori mostly says a bunch of platitudes about how good it is that she came forward.

Saori: No, what you did was both brave and inspirational. Many victims are afraid to come forward for any number of reasons. Your voice might give them courage to find their own.

“You’re such an inspiration! -oh, you were faking it, to cover up a murder.” This just feels deeply ill-advised, and, I imagine, like this particular game really wanted to work sexual assault into its plot to feel like it’s tuned into the zeitgeist, to make that Persona money, again. But Lost Judgment has nothing to say about the topic of sexual assault. It’s simply a prop in the murder mystery. This plot twist could’ve worked just as well with anything; Ehara and Kuwana could’ve faked any number of petty crimes to furnish him with an alibi, like, mugging, or shoplifting, or vandalism, or pulling a knife, or whatever else, and the writers chose this one.

And, adding to the absurdity of this plot twist is that Ehara is said to have been a cop, which, is never really relevant besides explaining away why he got such a slap on the wrist for the sexual harassment charge. But that's just hilarious, also, that the story exchanged "cop sexually assaults woman on train," a curiously specific and highly plausible chain of events, for "woman faked sexual assault to help cover up a murder," which is, of course, far less likely.

I’ve got a funny anecdote about this one, actually. In the mystery solving dialogue where Yagami draws this conclusion, you’re asked to select it from a dialogue wheel, and I looked at that and was like, “no. no. no. fuck noooo” and selected every other option. A friend of ours, who watched us play most of this game, commented that the various dialogues about the wrong answers made it feel like Yagami really didn’t want that to be the answer, to which I said, “yeah, I don’t want that to be the answer either!”

Another thing that bothers me about this part is that, when Yagami and company deduce that Mamiya is an accomplice, they also deduce the thing with Kuwana using the bullying footage to blackmail her. When they learn of this particular means by which Mamiya was victimized, they… use the bullying footage to blackmail her. This in itself wouldn’t be a bad thing, if it didn’t feel like the game twisting the knife on that they really don’t care how she’s been victimized.

I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Yui Mamiya, overall. This reads like an absolute nightmare scenario to me. You were mean to some other kids in high school, like a lot of kids are. Maybe you were pressured into the bullying, maybe you had a difficult life, maybe your parents abused or neglected you, maybe whatever. Your actions have some unforeseen negative consequences, but you get on with your life because you can’t let that guilt destroy you, and then almost a decade later, long after you’ve moved on, your old teacher shows up at your doorstep and blackmails you into becoming an accessory to murder.

There’s a lot of people in the past who we were mean to as a kid, as a teen, even, once or a time another, when we didn’t yet know any better, and like, the thought of something from that long ago, coming back to bite us? Someone showing up at our door to say they hate us for that, let alone trying to blackmail us over it? That’s fucking terrifying.

And the fact that the game doesn’t consider this entire plot development through the lens of Mamiya being a victim, and being retraumatized by Yagami making her go through this all over again, it’s… it feels like a pretty big narrative oversight.

The same can be said for her other classmates, as well, who are also being blackmailed by Kuwana in the same way, and similarly thrown under the bus by the story, albeit without the sexual assault thing. But, they have much less screen time than Mamiya— and they're all guys, so I naturally have less to say about them.

It just bugs me, in general, that like, the story never questions the notion that these people deserve some kind of comeuppance for bullying a child to suicide over a decade ago. Is encouraging a suicide tantamount to murder? Especially when the ones doing it are a bunch of teenage dumbasses? I don’t have any definitive answer to that question. Your own opinion will depends on your sense of ethics and perspective on the issues of bullying and suicide, and those could be radically different from mine. Legally, it’s a very muddled question that would be answered very differently in different courts at different times with different case contexts.

source: [7]

But personally, if I had to draw a line, I would say, no, bullying someone to suicide isn’t tantamount to murder. And the reason why is because, I think, if we were to say that that was the case, then where does that stop? How do we measure what actions caused someone’s suicide, and whomst of the actors are more guilty than others? Is the teacher responsible for their death, not having noticed or taken action on the bullying? Are the students who stood by and did nothing responsible? Does being a bit mean to someone who later kills themselves mean that you might’ve pushed them over the edge and could therefore be culpable? Or are we to say, no, none of that makes you guilty, and take the other extreme position, being that no one can be guilty of causing their suicide unless they physically coerced the victim to jump off of the roof? But even in that case, how do we decide that they really meant it?

I genuinely do not know, but I would say at some point after enough time has passed, it’s really not worth punishing anyone. I don’t know if y’all’ve noticed, but I consider myself pretty left-wing, and as a necessary result of that, I don’t particularly believe in punitive justice. I don’t think people should be sentenced to death, and I don’t think people should go to prison. This isn’t to say that I think that someone who bullied a child to suicide is blameless, or that they should face no consequences, but unfortunately our society isn’t particularly equipped to deal with this kind of thing in a healthy way, that would actually be meaningfully reparative. All that the system, and thus most people, can conceive of, is punishing individual wrongdoers.

Sugiura: “well, all you kids tormenting mitsuru looked pretty psychopathic to me” Mamiya: “oh, and YOU’RE so perfect? an angel who never once acted out of line? Never lashed out at someone weaker than you? Or sided with the group to shut someone out? Everyone does it! We were just ‘lucky’ enough to have some creep tape us picking on some kid who couldn’t take it! Why did this have to happen to me…?” Yagami: “I’d say it’s because bad things happen to bad people.”

At this point during my initial playthrough, I paused the cutscene, and let out a beleaguered and tired sigh.

Mamiya is obviously being a little hysterical and all, but like… she has a point. She isn’t wrong. As much as she and her friends did to hurt Mitsuru as teenagers, the chain of events she describes sounds horribly traumatic in itself. Her teacher, lying in wait with the evidence of bullying for nearly a decade, so that he could come around and hold that over her head. That’s legitimately fucked up. Did she deserve this? Does this fix anything? Sure, it doesn’t seem like she or any of the others particularly regret their actions, but even still— Is it worthwhile to punish her for the rest of her life for this, especially so long after the fact?

But the story just dismisses all of those questions with that line. Of course she deserves to get punished. She’s a bad person. And that’s it. The issue that the story ultimately takes is with Kuwana’s methods of blackmail and serial murder, and even then, it doesn’t say that it’s because it’s not effective, but rather because it’s outside of the justice system.

And that’s, y’know, kind of expected, given that this video game is, in part, a murder mystery pastiche, particularly of Ace Attorney. A game series that I like, despite the fact that every episode of that series necessarily ends with the true murderer being exposed in court, arrested, and sent to prison. Things that I necessarily do not agree with, because I disagree with the existence and function of the institutions of the courts, the police, and the prisons, but hey, you get what you sign up for when you wanna have a good time with the detective-lawyer game about exposing the real murderer and sending them to prison.

[https://twitter.com/headfallsoff/status/1051484419251425280]

That Lost Judgment goes so far as to say, whether deliberately or by oversight, that someone is still guilty of something they did thirteen years ago as a dumbass teen who wasn’t mature enough to foresee the consequences of their actions… it bugs me. So.

Anyway, the other thing I have to criticize, is just, Kuwana, or more specifically, the plan he has.

I just think it’s stupid. Both in the sense that obviously it doesn’t actually do anything to stop bullying, and also I don’t think I see what it actually illustrates about, y’know, the thing the game purports to be about. It’s not really bad exactly, I mean, obviously this game was going to revolve around catching a murderer, and Kuwana, sure is a murderer, or murder instigator if you wanna be technical, and he sure is a villain in this pulpy murder mystery conspiracy story.

I just don’t get why that story needed to be about bullying. I don’t get why it needed to be about sexual assault. It isn’t really about bullying or sexual assault, it just uses those topics as props in the murder mystery. By the time we find out what Kuwana’s motive is, the game has stopped being about bullying since about, like, between 15 and 30 hours ago, and it just feels, meh. For all the reasons I’ve kind of already said. I do kind of like how Kuwana is sort of positioned by the story as something of an anti-hero, and got hella charisma, I wanna like him. Given that I think both sides are wrong here, it’s. Y’know.

From then on the stuff that happens is just, yeah, conspiracy, fights, and then exposing the truth in court, and all of that’s entertaining and everything. All the normal things that I come to Yakuza games for. I mean, I also come to them for the thematically rich narrative wrapped around this hokey action crime plot, and that feels pretty thin in this game.

Again and again over the course of its 40 odd hour runtime, Lost Judgment loses the plot. Or rather, gives ultimate precedence to its plot, at great expense to its themes. All of the remotely worthwhile or interesting ideas that it hits on aren’t developed, all just kinda fall by the wayside in favor of these three rather trite, formulaic talking points: That the law isn’t perfect but people need to try their best to do the best they can with the system anyway, that vengeance is hollow, and that you should stand up for others. And, that’s what there was to take away from the first Judgment. And in that game, it was fine, because that story was mostly just a fun time and didn’t exhibit any significant aspirations to say anything else. It might have been fine in Lost Judgment, too, if not for that this story’s subject matter felt like it wanted something else. Something more specific and nuanced. But instead, its purported themes are left feeling like interchangeable plot devices, the fun core of this murder mystery muddled by the question of

“why? and what was the point?”

I mean obviously the point was for people to buy the game, but, other than that… who knows. who can say.

So, all the stuff I said is, genuinely, what I figure I probably believe. Probably. But, it bears clarifying, I still like this game. It wasn’t trying, necessarily, to be super deep or thought provoking or politically accurate. I’m sure the creators see it as a nice bonus if it’s seen as such, but its ultimate goal is to, y’know, be a game that’s fun to play with a story that’s fun. And I think it is! I think there’s a lot of things in it that are fun and good. There’s honestly too much that’s interesting and good about the optional content of this game, which, is the case with every Yakuza game, but that’d require a whole entire separate video, and, maybe we’ll make that video. I don’t know.

I don’t think borrowing from Persona is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think there’s a hell of a lot of potential for good in doing that! Like, Persona’s appeal, to a lot of people, is the exaggerated school life mystery thing, but it’s somewhat stymied by its need to be an SMT game, because it is. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they really don’t like how Persona 5 ends with them fighting the huge anime god, because that’s just such an absurd and nonsensical escalation of a plot that starts really serious and realistic.

The Yakuza games are very similar in structure to a JRPG like SMT or Persona, but their “huge anime god” is just “a regular guy who’s in charge of the conspiracy,” and that’s also an absurd power fantasy and all, but it’s a more realistic one that makes more sense with that kind of story. Y’know, if they want to focus on a high school setting again, maybe have a teenage delinquent as a protagonist— which, I guess they already sorta did in Kurohyou, but, y’know, if they wanna do that again. That could be cool.

So! Yeah! Lost Judgment's not totally wasted time just cause its main story is kinda weird and bad. It's at least hella interesting. And, with that, I want to talk about another way we could possibly look at the main story.

About two thirds or so of the way through the story, Yagami gets an audience with Reiko Kusumoto, the mother of Mitsuru, the bullied child whose suicide attempt started Kuwana’s murder instigation spree. She tells Yagami about the events that led up to her murder of Shinya Kawai, how he didn’t even recognize her or seem to regret anything he’d done, and that pushed her to kill him, a thing she states that she doesn’t regret in the slightest. And I wondered,

… shouldn’t she regret that?

I mean, basically, all the stuff I’ve already said. I’m not sure if this situation warrants murder, or furthermore, if it’s really realistic or interesting to depict the parent of a victim as desiring revenge like this. There’s a significant contingent of friends and families of murder victims whose murderers have been placed on death row who advocate against the death penalty, so I don’t figure it’s unthinkable to suppose maybe some parents of children who died to suicide don’t actually want revenge on the people who pushed them there. And maybe the story could’ve acknowledged that possibility, and that might’ve been something, but also, maybe that wouldn’t have gelled with what it was trying to do.

If someone is placed on death row for murder, the feelings of the victim’s families don’t matter. They can say they would rather not see the murderer killed, and the state will still execute them anyway. So, aren’t they, kind of, in the same position? Where they don’t get to have any meaningful hand in deciding what justice would be, and the state holds a legal monopoly on exacting violence, and choosing when and where it’s appropriate to do so?

I mean, I, as some sort of dumbass anarchist, would say the state is pretty definitionally illegitimate, and that the monopoly on violence they hold over the populace is unjust. As a general rule, I don’t like violence, but I’m also not a pacifist, and I’d say sometimes that violence is maybe necessary… although in a case such as what’s depicted in the game, I’d say that death is a pretty unjustified response, but.

Is that something that matters to the families of the bullying victims? I don’t really know what it’s like to lose someone close to you to suicide. I especially don’t know what it’s like to lose a family member to suicide as a result of bullying this cruel. So, maybe some people who have experienced that would feel that that is justified, or at least fantasize about this sort of revenge. I mean, even despite my stated politics (you can correctly guess I oppose the death penalty), I can’t claim like I’ve never had thoughts like this. Statistically speaking, most people do!

I may not know people who’ve endured bullying specifically in Japan, but I do know people who’ve been bullied. Some of those people know, or knew, others who attempted suicide as a result of bullying and negligence by the school they went to. Some of those people, actually, a lot of those people, scratch that, all of those people, are queer. (Almost everyone in our social circle is queer.) If they’re angry at, and feel vengeful towards, those who’ve bullied them, or their friends, or just people who bully others to the point of suicide in general, then I don’t think I’ve got any right to criticize them for that. I believe their anger is justified, and I don’t think I’d be able to fairly criticize them for acting on that, or, thinking about acting on that.

And if nothing else, this story definitely does focus a lot of attention on the grief and anger that these game’s antagonists feel, and it cares a lot about portraying that effectively. It might be that this game is actually a really emotionally potent picture of that anger that resonates really well with people who’ve been in that situation and felt that way, and I’m just not one of those people.

So maybe in that sense, Lost Judgment is in its own way an emotionally honest depiction of how bullying in Japanese schools affects people that couldn't come from something more considered and careful in how it discusses these issues. And maybe that’s good. And I just don’t see it.

But my eyes aren’t the only ones.

Thanks for watching this, this was really hard to write, but, I guess I did it, so, yeah. I’d appreciate getting thrown a few dollars on patreon or ko-fi. And also subscribe or like or whatever, share the video to whatever social media platform you use. Anyway, the important names are:

Patreon credits: Ada. Just Ada - Anime Omelette - ASabitsukiFlow - Azu - ColorfulCast - dameDiadora - deeso - Duskpixie - Elvenoob - Emma R - Femboy Bebop - Good Civilization - Gwen Starlight - hev - Kaylee Smerbeck - Korin - L Tantivy - LaLaLacuna - Lilly - M - Mira Yeuden - Nik Gothic - Pigeon - Roger C Walker - RukaCollie - Sally - Saoirse Russell - Scimitar - SimplyAero - SleepySlug - Spiderrebelnews - Thijs - Trucy - Vile Lasagna

Aaaand bye.

#lost judgment #judgment #video essay #going to make this 'public' tomorrow morning #but in the meantime #it is unlisted #and I will just reblog it later #yakuza #ryu ga gotoku

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jasontoddiefor · 2 years

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“Bruce can’t kill! He’s not a cop. He will just beat the shit out of you, arrest you, and hand you over to the cops who he doesn’t even trust. Also he believes in redemption, which is why he utilizes the Gotham prison system despite it never being focused on redemption or rehabilitation and also he continues to utilize Arkham despite it canonically making everyone worse!”

The issue isn’t just that Bruce doesnt kill the mass murderers of Gotham, it’s that his moral stance has no nuance. He doesn’t believe in self defense or defense of others. If bane was killing Damian and Damian killed bane to save himself, Bruce would blame Damian. There’s no room in his ideology, it’s just as extreme and skewed as other characters. AND! He can’t just let it be his own ideology. He has to force it on other people as well

I‘m assuming the second one is from the same anon! If not I’ll still answer in one since they work together

You‘re bringing up multiple interesting points here so I‘m gonna break those down briefly!

Batman‘s (Legal) Authority

He’s a vigilante. He has been enemy of the force for a time. The fact that he’s allowed to operate at all hinges p much only on the fact that he’s going after criminals and Gordon like him. And the moment he goes after criminals that are on the “legal” side of things, he’s public enemy #1. He’s never had any kind of binding legal authority.

Violence used in arrests

Batman is violent. Sometimes it’s on purpose, to show him losing control and going to far, sometimes it’s just “Haha Batman go punch” comic book narration style. But we also see panels of Batman talking people down, not using violence as a first, middle, last and only resort. And my original point about that was that “beaten up” is still better than “dead”.

Reliability of the system

I mean, yeah we know the cops and Arkham suck but what else is he supposed to do besides what he’s already doing, weeding out corrupt cops and funding Arkham? He could start his own private prison but we’ve seen in other comics how much that Does Not Work. I think ultimately, Batman sees himself as an emergency service trying to pick up what the system itself can’t do while trying to fix it himself. Meanwhile, people still have to go somewhere.

Humanity/Morality of Batman

Bruce Wayne is a dick. Very my way or the high way, arrogant, and a man of extremes. He cares about people, about love, but Christ he‘s not a good communicator. He‘s got flaws, his inability to see nuance at times is certainly one of them. But what struck me - especially in Batman: The Knight, which was why I added that panel and cannot stop recommending that comic - was that Bruce defines himself by acting out of love, the want to protect, and the realization that if his mission is to save human life, he cannot take it. No matter how much he might resent a person or think they’d deserve it, if he became the kind of person that would kill for his mission, he’d become someone unrecognizable.

Batman‘s ideology as a frame

This is going to sound very dismissive and I promise I do not mean it that way. Batman is a character that says “we don’t kill, period. If you can’t do that, don’t do the job”. Like, that sounds incredibly offensive, but those are the standards to which he holds himself. I’m the best, I can do it without resorting to taking a life, so if you do the same job I’m doing, you should be just as able. Bruce didn’t really make any of his Robins his side kick, they more or less did that themselves, kicking and screaming, whether. Batman wanted them to be Robin or not. If they wanted to, they could drop out (ofc they don’t actually can bc we’d be left without any comics) but they don’t. So we’re back to Batman saying, “if you wanna do the job, you have to be able to do it this way”. Thus one of the Robins taking a life in self defense doesn’t fly because they’re supposed to be better. Is that particularly rational? Well, no, not necessarily, but that’s what it boils down to. If they had to resort to taking a life to save themselves, they shouldn’t have been in the position I’m the first place, but somewhere away from the fight. He trained himself until he could fight without taking a life and thus everyone else who wants to do the same should learn it as well.

All of these are associated with the whole discussion surrounding Batman killing, and you raise interesting points regarding how Batman operates and the hypocrisies involved. The last two are difficult to discuss particularly because we’re still reading comic book heroes and not actual legal irl batvigilante. I think this is still a step sideways from my original point that Batman’s refusal to kill on principle is a valid stance the character should be allowed to keep, but all of this is interconnected.

#dc #ask #anon #I should make a tag for this discussion #Batman #bruce wayne

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chiffonperiwinkle · 3 months

Text

This is it Fucking Asshole, I'm done

Ok this is going to be a long rant. I'm leaving the place I currently am in and so it won't matter that I finally blocked him now. It took me a long time to finally cut him off because I was afraid of him. Sorry in advance for heavy topics.

tw for unhealthy relationships, violence

I can't believe I considered him my partner for two years. It was one-sided (I did not like him back but I didn't want to leave and hurt him) and I suppose it was also reinforced by my own emotional problems when I was badly depressed. Back then he wasn't so much of an asshole, and he always said he loved me, he was attracted to me, stuff like that. Back then I didn't really explore labels so I didn't really think of myself as aromantic. It was fine until he crossed my hard boundary: he talked down my special interest when I specifically told him to not to. And initially, he was happy that I was enjoying what to do. How fucking ridiculous of him to suddenly thought it was okay to treat me like that afterwards.

I guess I forgot to tell him to keep it private, so he immediately told the situation to others, including stuff about my sp/in. Then I couldn't help but try to expose him on social media for being rude and someone who crosses hard boundaries. I didn't want to talk to him for a while, and I certainly didn't know that he was trying to get his "friends" (involved in borderline illegal stuff) to doxx me and beat me up. Since he has his own medical struggles and stuff he would use that to guilt trip me and say that he would do unspeakable things to himself if I left him. So of course my cowardly ass stayed for him and started talking to him again.

During that few months in which we were trying to "work it out", he was basically saying this all the time

"you should devote all of your time to me, i don't like how I need to always text you first, do you even care about me? you don't put in any effort"

and of course I wanted us to not be enemies, but I couldn't deal with someone this volatile. I told him that I needed my own space and preferred alone time a lot. So I guess that continued in peace. Until somehow he found out about my efforts in trying to build a platonic connection with another person. I don't remember how he knew, if I told him (hell why did i trust him to not hurt me again) or if he was spying on us, but he knew that I was putting more effort into befriending someone else. And so, he slandered us. He compared my friend to a convicted criminal and called me immoral. He said something along the lines of "omg you're so gross" and "you guys will never be real friends lol" But I was simply trying to befriend someone whom I really felt grateful for, and a kindred spirit similar to myself? Then he would gaslight me and say weird things like "the person you're trying to befriend hates you/is disappointed in you etc"

Anyway, I ghosted him for three months after this. and during that, he would mock, provoke, and talk shit about me in public just to get a response. And I guess he succeeded: because first, I couldn't put up with him anymore, second I was also dealing with a stalker then and he offered to help me. I feel so fucking stupid for going back to him again, if I could slap my past self I would do that 100x times. I guess then we were in peace again. He still didn't like me nor my friend-to-be, either (he got mad at me whenever I mentioned that person lol) and so i tried to let him meet my friend and my friend also disliked the asshole (buddy if you see this lol i think you said he talks too much or smth? but yea he def does don't let him in) and i guess after a while i stopped talking to the Asshole. He's in a position of power in the organization where I am, so no one could really do anything about him. I didn't block him for a long time because i was afraid he would slander/defame me and oomfs and/or retaliate with violence (when I first met him, he responded by throwing something at me and when we were together he would sometimes hit me and sometimes snatch my phone and then say it was a joke) but now since I'm leaving that organization, I no longer belong there and I can hopefully safely cut all ties with him. And now I've built a genuine connection with the aforementioned friend. I'm glad it all worked out buddy, and thanks for your unwavering support.

Asshole, if you ever dare to come across my page and stalk my social media, I have many things that I want to say to you: How are you a part of the queer community and still assume my identity and my personal relationships? How dare you attempt to tarnish a genuine connection between two kindhearted people? How dare you cross my boundaries, when I told you not to? How dare you retaliate, provoke, frame and never apologize for what you've done but instead ask me to apologize to YOU? I hope you have a horrible life, I hope you forget your meds, I hope you rot. You are so full of yourself while disregarding the feelings of everyone else, that no matter how accomplished you are, others will know you by your aggressive nature alone. The heavens are watching. May karma find you.

To my two irl moots who will probably see this, thank you both for the help. Without you, I don't think I would've survived this year's tribulations. May true companionship, kindness, and love always prevail.

#tw unhealthy relationship #tw violence #tw threats #vent #personal stuff #rant #unhealthy relationships

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youtwitinmyface · 1 year

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Superior Spider-Man #6

Written by Dan Slott Drawn by Humberto Ramos Published by Marvel Comics

Here's a retro review of a comic book that was published by in 2013. The premise of this series is that Doctor Octopus had managed to take over Spider-Man's body.

That's right, through some sort of supervillain shenanigans (I wasn't reading that storyline, so I still don't know the exact details, but for the purposes of this review it's irrelevant), he was now in Spider-Man's brain and had all of his memories. And the plot twist is that once this happened, Doc Ock's massive ego made him decide that he was going to prove that he could live Spider-Man's life, both as a superhero and a civilian, better than Spider-Man ever could. And thus this new series was launched as Doc Ock set out to be a superior Spider-Man, get it?

This is #6 of the new ongoing series and part of a longer overall story arc but, thankfully, Dan Slott writes it as a self-contained story that any reader can follow even if they hadn't read the previous issues, which I hadn't done. I don't recall exactly how I found out about this issue in the first place but I picked it up because I'd somehow heard of the villains who appear in it, and I thought they sounded intriguing. The characters you see on the cover are the duo of Screwball and Jester, a couple of costumed criminals armed with various joke-related weapons like paintball balloons, slingshots, and squirt guns Their modus operandi is that they go around filming themselves "pranking" people in public and uploading the videos online to get hits. But with their software they're able to secretly phish the accounts of everyone who subscribes to their website, and hack all of their credit card and bank info.

I thought that was a clever idea for modern supervillains, as technology advances you'd think more supervillains would be engaging in cybercrime instead of just robbing banks or whatever. In this issue, J. Jonah James, who was the Mayor of New York at the time, is Screwball and Jester's latest victim as they throw a pie in his face and pull his pants down in the middle of a press conference. Jameson is outraged and contacts Spider-Man to track down and apprehend the criminals. So that's the main plot of the issue. There are a couple of subplots. We see that the real Spider-Man is still "alive" sort of. His mind and personality is trapped inside his body, he's unable to control anything, but he can see everything Doc Ock is doing, and can also access Ock's memories, including one flashback of Ock being picked on by a bully when he was a young boy, which is something we see motivates Ock's hatred of people like Screwball and Jester who like to humiliate other people.

Also at this time, Spider-Man was still serving as a member of the Avengers, and in several scenes we see his teammates, Captain America, Wolverine, Spider-Woman, Thor, Black Widow, and Spider-Woman, having a private meeting at Avengers HQ as they discuss Spider-Man's behavior. In recent weeks he's gotten more violent in his treatment of villains, even killing one of them. They don't know about Doc Ock, so they just think Spider-Man is getting out of control. Only Wolverine, no stranger to violence and killing himself, ever speaks to Spider-Man's defense. But they vow to keep a close eye on him.

In his private life, we see that as Peter Parker, Ock has re-enrolled in college to get his PhD. He's also struck up a close friendship, possibly more, with a woman named Anna Maria Marconi, a fellow college student. I can't tell if she's meant to be a Little Person, or just is just really short. But we see her getting made fun of by some other students because of her size, which enrages Ock but Anna Maria takes it in stride. Doc Ock manages to track Screwball and Jester, but when they get the upper hand and mock Spider-Man (all while broadcasting the encounter on their website), Ock snaps and proceeds to brutally beat the crap of both of them, to the horror of the real Spider-Man who can do nothing but watch. I really enjoyed this issue, the characterizations were all spot-on, J. Jonah Jameson is as insufferable as ever, and through captions of Doc Ock's private thoughts, we can see that even as he's trying to be a hero he's still an arrogant egomaniac. And I've also been a fan of Huberto Ramos' artwork and think that Spider-Man is a character that's perfect for his style. Re-reading this issue again after these years makes me think I should probably track down the rest of this series to see what happened next... SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN #6

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ashtxeman · 2 years

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For the headcanon thing- how about the man of the hour glass joe?

You have opened a can of worms, and it smells like croissants and coffee.

First off, Joe and Kaiser are 100% boyfriends, and they've been dating for about 4 years! Their first date was at a fancy Italian restaurant, but none of them could read the menu so they just awkwardly ate pasta and left.

His actual name is Joseph Rousseau, and he's an only child meaning his childhood was pretty lonely. Luckily he doesn't mind too much.

Joe's birthday is August 15th, the day the Arc de Triumph was built!

Joe would love to have a cat, but he doesn't have any animals in his house because he's allergic. If he were to cave and get one anyway, he would get a birman cat and call it Fève.

When it comes to his love life, you'd think Joe would have a good lineup, but he actually hasn't dated that many people. When he was a teenager he dated a friend named Annette who was part of the same friend group as him. They were happy for a while, even if Annette didn't really have Joe's best interests in mind (convincing him to smoke and drink and such), that was until Annette's brother Jules started to shun Joe away. Eventually Annette took Jules side in a big argument and that escalated into something worse, which resulted in them never speaking again. He didn't date anybody after that, until Kaiser of course.

Since he and Kaiser officially got together, Joe's been holding back on pretty much everything. Knowing that Kaiser was, to him, a perfect man Joe wanted everybody to know they were a thing.. but Kaiser isn't the same, and prefers to keep things private. So Kaiser often finds himself telling Joe to stop taking pictures or to turn his voice down when he starts to lament in public. He's French though.. romance is in his blood.

For speaking, Joe's English is practically fluent, but for some reason he just can't perfect reading. He panics whenever you put an English menu in front of him, often misreads signs and puts accents where they don't need to be in his texts.

Joe was a petty criminal as a teen, back in France he used to shoplift with some questionable friends. As well as that he'd take part in underaged drinking and smoking.. what a rascal he was.

He gets vertigo a lot, so has paracetamol on him at any given moment. Helpful to himself and to literally everyone else.

He also has tinnitus.. Ear ringing go BRRRR. Or, EEEEE, more like.

Joe has a long scar down his leg because he tried to participate in the Tour de France before he started boxing and ended up falling down a hill with the bike. He also has some smaller scars in other spots from y'know, 100 big fat losses.

The WVBA is very careful putting Joe in matches, since betting on them is so easy. Going in, you know who's going to win and you know you'll get your moneys worth. This trend has been changed before, however. The first time it was when Joe beat Nick Bruiser, since everybody bet on Nick winning.. yeah, that didn't happen. The second time was when Little Mac was thrown into the mix, as some people sincerely believed Mac was weak enough to be beaten by Joe. Everybody put their money on Joe for once, and then he went and lost again.. safe to say the crowd was not happy that day.

Joe has a bit of an apathy issue. At times he won't react to things as much as he should, but other times he'll really exaggerate his feelings and end up looking stupid.

Joe was a choir boy growing up! His Mother, Colette, was a religious woman who ran a bakery and had him be in the choir so he wouldn't be running around the business all day.

His favourite colour is blue.

He legally can't drive because of his medical issues, so anytime you see him he's usually in a taxi. Many taxi drivers know him by name.

He absolutely despises Gabby Jay for some reason. They were great friends at one point, and then that changed to complete hatrid from Joe. Even the mention of Jay can ruin his mood.

The only alcohol Joe drinks is wine, and even then it takes a lot of it to get him anywhere near drunk. It's mostly a mix of a built up tolerance plus medicine keeping it toned down, but there's been a lot of times he's been down on his luck and got a bit carried away with it. You could say there might be a stash of cabernet sauvignon somewhere in his kitchen labelled 'emergency only', because there is.

Joe's way too forgiving for his own good.. most of the time. He likes Aran even if he's a complete nuisance 90% of the time, simply because he likes to give people the benefit of the doubt. Though, push him enough and you will get a very stern side of him that feels almost uncanny. You've seen the way he stares.. right into the soul..

Joe is a fantastic cook and tends to cook for the other boxers at gatherings. He's willing to cook anything, but is of course best at making pastries!

He also cooks when he's stressed. If he's having a bad day he'll make croissants, immediate mood lifter.

If he wasn't a boxer, he'd love to run a bakery.

A lot of the time he develops a liking for a particular hobby, but quickly gives up on it because of low self-esteem. For example he once took art classes, but gave up because he didn't think he had the talent for it.

As a joke he was given a baguette pillow for his birthday, but he genuinely loves it and keeps it right next to him in bed.

Joe has been completely afraid of the Bruiser twins ever since the incident with Nick. He won't speak to them or go near them, and gets uncomfortable when they're brought up.

Joe's eyes are a lovely burgandy colour, but some people swear they've turned a strange pinkish-turquoise at times.

He has naturally dark undereyes, but they're way darker than they would be usually since he is perpetually tired.

He may not be the best in the ring, but sit him down at the TV and boot up a game? Consider yourself beat, he's unnaturally good at video games.

90% of the time his nails are painted black.

He tried to grow his hair out once, but it kept getting caught in his headgear so he gave up and cut it.

He absolutely did have a terrible phase when his hair was short and blonde. Don't speak to him about it unless you want him to get majorly embarassed LMAO.

In the A-Bracket, Joe gets along best with Kaiser, Disco, Hugger and Sandman.

In the B-Bracket, Joe doesn't really get along with anybody. He's either scared of them, or never talks to them.

Don't ask him about Quick.

#punch out #glass joe #you dont understand how much i needed this MUHAHA #i love him so much but you probably cant tell yk yk

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watching-pictures-move · 2 years

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Movie Review | Desperate Hours (Cimino, 1990)

The movie opens with a courtroom scene. Super smart violent criminal Mickey Rourke is on trial for being a violent piece of shit (that's the exact chart) and being represented not by some dumbass public defender who will defend him all the way to death row, but by hotshot lawyer Kelly Lynch doing pro bono work. He angrily demands to represent himself, gets yelled at by the judge and then when he talks in private to with Lynch, uses a gun she smuggles in for him to break out. But it's not just the gun he uses in his escape attempt. He also tears open Lynch's blouse. Now, you're probably thinking that he'll have her flash her boobs and distract everybody while he sneaks away. And you'd be wrong to think that. No, he just drags her along draped in a fur coat, and then when's noticed, leaves her and runs to the getaway car driven by his associates. Lynch's fur coat falls off and we see her boobs, but there was no strategic importance to this gesture the way it plays out. There's no boob-assisted stealth. No boob-induced shock and awe. All we get out of this scene is that Rourke's violent streak extends to women's blouses. A later scene where we barge in on Lynch putting on a wire while topless feels positively naturalistic in comparison. People complain about shower scenes in horror movies, but those are at least situations where it's natural to have nudity. Listen, I'm not trying to be skeevy here, I'm genuinely baffled by this scene. (I will say that based on a shot of Lynch in sunglasses and a coat later in the movie, she's certainly nails the noir heroine look.)

Rourke and the boys later take up with Anthony Hopkins, Mimi Rogers and their family, and the movie turns into a hostage thriller while Lindsay Crouse and Dean Norris try to track them down. None of this is remotely effective on that level, but it is fascinating to observe how little it works. This is Michael Cimino's remake of the Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name, or if you want to be technical, another adaptation of the source novel, smartypants. I imagine there's a version of this that runs much longer, that better fleshes out the love between Rourke and Lynch, the tense relationship between Rourke and his associates, the fraught marital bond between Hopkins and Rogers, and the unconventional tactics used by Crouse compared to the more conservative Norris. Now, such a version would likely run at least three hours given Cimino's track record, but the film at under two hours does justice to none of those relationships and instead jerks back and forth between their lowlights, basking in their general sentiment without the dramatic legwork to sell any of them. I suspect the movie is intended to play hysterically, based on the aggressively directed car chase, the excessively shooty climax, and the score that's pathologically unable to underplay a single beat. A three-plus-hour version might have proved exhausting if pitched at that level, but it likely would have cohered better than the fits and starts the existing version moves in.

Now, putting aside the fact that the movie doesn't work at all, I do think it's worth watching purely for Rourke's performance. Rourke has always been an actor of immense magnetism and forcefulness. (Look at his role in Body Heat for a masterclass in stealing a movie with only a few minutes of runtime.) He's substantially more mannered here than I've seen him elsewhere, which apparently earned him a Razzie nomination, but Cimino understands that Rourke, like in Year of the Dragon, can be a great destabilizing presence, a quality which serves him well here even if the character comes off as underdeveloped. It is interesting the extent to which Rourke inserts himself into Hopkins' and Rogers' relationship, and his strangely protective attitude towards their children, and I think there's a version of this that plays like a more malevolent Down and Out in Beverly Hills, where a stranger addresses the problems of an upper class family in unorthodox ways. Certainly there's a bit of aspiration when Rourke asks for a change of clothes and puts on Hopkins' tuxedo, which is a bit of a dick move given that you can't throw it in the wash. If you're gonna break into a man's house and hold his family hostage, the least you could do is not add to his dry cleaning bill.

#film #movie review #michael cimino #desperate hours

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returntosaturn271995 · 1 year

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Excerpts From Kasher In The Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16

“As you go back through the creaky secret rooms of your memory, you find places damaged by time and neglect.”

“t gave me a private thrill to know that I wasn’t the only piece of damaged machinery out there.”

“My mom told me stories of how scared she was, of how he threw her around, but to be honest, I never believed her. It wasn’t until years later, when I started throwing her around myself, that I thought there might be something to the story”

“I found a wall calendar in a pile of his stuff as my family and I did that sick divvying of the loot that happens when someone dies”

“My mother is a third-generation divorcée”

“addicted to being right” (What makes people need it?)

“To this day I cannot think of psychoanalysis without picturing turtlenecks.”

“What bullshit. I wasn’t too angry. I should have killed him for saying so.”

“This was my chance to ruin everything. I loved doing that.”

“I was angry, of course I was. I also worshiped him a bit, of course I did.”

“I slowly started sharpening my tongue on the whetstone of Oakland Public Schools. If I couldn’t win all the fights, I’d certainly win all the rounds of verbal sparring. People fucked with me so I learned how to fuck right back. I started to hone the questionable skill set of the class clown. In short, I became an asshole.”

“ I transitioned smoothly between angry out-of-control kid into frightened out-of-control kid”

“I could tell questions were out of the question.”

“People called me the Gandhi of the playground. Wait, no they didn’t, they called me white bitch”

“The world looked like my underdeveloped oyster.”

“The victim of frequent, severe, man-sized beatings at the hands of his father, eventually his personality fractured into so many pieces that he just picked them up and shaped them into whatever fit the situation best”

“I fucking remember that—believe me, you would, too.”

“ They tell you that you feel loopy and disoriented, but no one tells you that it crawls through your skin, filling in every place of deficit, every gaping crack where your humanity didn’t fuse.”

“You know how parties are supposed to be fun? Now imagine the opposite of that.”

“My father took himself so seriously because no one else did.”

“St. Ides, the patron saint of cirrhosis”

“Our circle of normalcy included four of the seven layers of Hell”

“DJ always became somewhat more articulate when he was finding a way to call me fat. The Lakota Sioux called me “Swims with T-Shirt”.

“DJ, perhaps too dumb to be afraid, broke the silence, turning to me and saying, “Fats, you at the end of the line. You’ll slow us down.” Fats complied”

“I firmly believe that everyone should get punched in the face at least once in their life. It builds character. Getting your ass kicked teaches you that your body isn’t a glass menagerie figurine that could shatter at any trauma. You gotta get lumped up sometimes. Then heal and know you are all right.”

“He laughed like the universe.”

Urban psychedelia

“Her eyebrow twitched and I could feel her set her clinical phasers to kill mode and gear up”

“She grinned and I wanted to rip her face off with my mind.”

“a first-class sociopath.” First-class. I guess if you’re going to be evil, best to do it in style.”

“the topical anesthetic I’d been dabbing at my life was starting to wear off.”

“There was something I found so phenomenally satisfying about the process of cracking a therapist’s professional armor.”

“I’d knock “shave and a haircut,” and he’d answer back, “two bits.” I guess we did that just to let each other know that someone else was there who understood. One night I knocked and no one answered. Nate was gone. He’d been released. That night, I cried myself to sleep, hyperventilating, terrified, and I really didn’t know why.”

“My grandfather, Dick the Dick, had been an English professor at a local community college. Lecturing on such topics as “Spousal Abuse: How to Do It!”

“The Seneca Center for the Severely Emotionally Disturbed Youngster”

“I’ll tell you, there is nothing quite so distracting to a lecture on the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria as the low, deep thudding of a severely emotionally disturbed youngster’s head repeatedly slamming against an inadequately padded cell door.”

“Fuck it is the great battle cry of the drug addict.”

“I stole like an animal. Oh wait, animals don’t steal”

“My mom starts screaming at me, “You’re high! What are you on?!? What are you on?!?” Which is like the worst thing ever to scream at a dude who’s freaking out because he’s high.”

“The moment you sink to a new low is the same moment that your conscience becomes compromised to the point that it won’t rebel against the indignity you are putting it through.”

“Life was the wound. Life seared and stung. The world stung. I was born a mess of paper cuts, the world was a pool of lemon juice I’d been shot into. So I found drugs, I found a painkiller that made me able to ignore the wound. I could walk upright. I could go forward. I could navigate the acidic reality. Of course, if you are wounded, and you find a medicine that makes you numb, you don’t correct for the wound.”

“There came a point where I was all wound. I couldn’t see where I stopped and where the wound began”

“The great irony of the addict is that the thing he takes, which is the only thing that has ever made life feel good, stops working long before he considers the possibility of life without it. That first day I’d gotten high, I’d promised myself a life where I’d never stop. I never wanted to not feel that way again. The fact that I hadn’t felt that good in years hardly registered with me.”

“I was going to save him. I never considered he wouldn’t let me. Or that it wasn’t my business to.”

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dwestfieldblog · 2 years

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TEARS OF A HOSPITAL CLOWN

The method of science, the aim of religion…this written on the Solstice but not feeling too pagan in this one, too exhausted for magick.

62 days of hospital stories while visiting a very ill and close member of my family. Screams, pleas, insanity and a death beside her. Enraging and utterly heart breaking. ‘Medically fit for discharge’. According to a government (which has spent 12 years decimating the service, and spunking billions of pounds on non arriving ppe equipment and backhanders to mates) the NHS nurses are making ‘unreasonable’ demands. A government backed survey found that 13,000 full time nurses could be hired for the cost of a one percent rise. Yes, perhaps, but they would also be earning the same rubbish money for the same endless hard work. Every day I have watched what the nurses do, the burden of caring between several wards, eight patients in each with extreme needs of pain, hallucination, fear, toilet, bleeding, dementia, strokes, cancer, rotting feet, the endless checks of medication, blood tests and blood pressure…

Unreasonable? All those politicians and the good citizens with enough money for private health care should spend a week in an NHS ward seeing the work done before they rush to lofty judgement. Many nurses are now working the equivalent of one day for free. And still have to pay for the honour of parking their car if they can afford one.

The Tory party (or is it a ‘work event’) appear to be on the verge of splitting into a new group, spearheaded by the abysmal shyster Farage. Lucifer save us. Boris said he would run for PM and then realised the mess he had helped create would be better dealt with by the next couple of schmucks in order for him to return triumphant. The ridiculous Home Secretary resigned under the laughably useless Liz Truss, saying she took ‘full responsibility’ for her leaking of official information via her private email address and then returned to her job under the thin gurning Sunak. So, not quite taking FULL responsibility then.

What a surprise. A look of terminal shock in your eyes, etc. Shame about Penny Mordaunt ‘In the past 12 years we’ve made this country infinitely better’. Really? REALLY? Any plans to recoup those billions paid out for non-functioning and/or non appearing PPE etc? No. Sunak wrote that off as a tax loss. Another great British leader, who in spite of 1 trillion pounds recently being wiped off the value of crypto, wants to turn the UK into a digital currency superpower. The con in Conservative.

The Holy Land (copyright) of Israel voted for the clearly corrupt Netanyahu so he can get himself and wife off the hook from criminal charges. He, like many dubious politicians did a deal with the far right for power and is now legalising illegal outposts to appease them. But to criticise their government is to be antisemitic. Is it? So, if one says bin Salman al Saud is a very dodgy guy who clearly knows much more about murder than he should, therefore one condemns all Arabs? If I show rude disapproval at the Communist government, I despise all Chinese? No, not in the slightest. On the other hand, if I ridicule Trump, I AM most certainly laughing at all his gullible dumber than ectoplasm supporters. And De Santis is an utter scuzzball too, anybody who uses the phrase ‘family values’ as a vote catcher needs watching.

The one finger up to the Mullahs, non head scarf wearing protests bravely continue in Iran and damn right too. The ‘Morality’ Police beating and vanishing young demonstrators daily as they knock the turbans off clerics’ heads. Almost 100 unarmed protestors shot dead by religious cops. Public executions on the rise. Don’t blame outsiders too much for the rage in country rising against your heartless theocracy you bearded, backward misogynists. Try being decent instead of holy.

And of course, the new improved modern Taliban have just barred all females from receiving education from primary to further. And banned them from working at anything other than cooks, cleaners and baby machines, as Allah the allmerciful (blessings be upon him) demands. God I hate what neophobes do with religion. Over fifty percent of the population discarded to slave status.

President Winnie the Poo aka Xi the Ruler for Life had his predecessor Huge in Towel very publicly removed at China’s national Congress to shame and disgrace the former moderate tyrant. Emperor Jinping, what goes around, comes around. The spirit of 8964 will never be snuffed out. The one man protest on a Beijing bridge was a heroism the pointless Just Stop Oil cretins could never match. ‘No to cultural revolution, yes to reform, no to great leader, yes to vote, Don’t be a slave, be a citizen, remove the dictator….’

Peng Lifa is either dead or being threatened with his entire families’ deaths unless he goes live and says how wrong he was to speak truth to power. Love how the very restrained diplomat and underlings (now sent home) at the Chinese consulate in Manchester dragged a protestor into their grounds to beat him with impunity. Chinese protestors in Beijing rebelling against the too stringent lockdown measures, chanting ‘Down with the Communist Party!’ Many holding blank sheets of paper in a sarcastic comment on the utter dearth of freedom of speech. Genuine bravery. How many of them are on the way to the death penalty or ‘re-education’ camps?

China bought the old site of the Royal Mail opposite the Tower of London in 2018 for255 million and planned to turn it into their largest European embassy. Good or bad for Britain? Hmm. As of December 2nd, the local council had turned them down. Stick your Dongfen up yer jacksie Xi. An East wind is coming indeed, no manure Sherlock.

Meanwhile in Tibet, ‘Chinese police have been collecting biometric data on all Tibetan males over the age of five – DNA, iris scans and fingerprints in the ‘Great One by One Inspection’. Harvesting the information for a Minority Report style future. What a charming bunch the communists are. Scum.

Trump runs for President again, a man who couldn’t run a bath is running because ‘I believe the world has not yet seen the true glory of what this nation can be’. ARF. Fat petulant playground no friends bully stamping his little feet at very weak recent election results. At least Cartman was funny. Speaking of horrible fat stupid lying manipulating swine, overjoyed to see Alex Jones being dealt a hefty total of a billion dollars (count them) fine for his evil Sandy Hook inventions. And millions still believe in these guys, doubling and trebling down on ignorance. Which is why ‘true patriots’ and the religious are so easy to fool by any bull manure magic beans merchant…and so very lucrative too. You love your country and worship an invisible sky wizard? Step right this way sir…

‘Perhaps you have contracted one of those diseases…the kind which could only be transmitted by word of mouth…’

And as for the orange filth head meeting with the deeply mentally ill Kayne West and Nick ‘Jews have too much power in our society. Christians should have all the power, everyone else very little’. Fuente, uf, if ‘God’ has any decency, a stinking circle of Hell waits for that unholy trio…

Anton Krasovsky of the Russian state’s RT channel was finally suspended after saying Ukrainian children should be drowned or burned alive and their grandmothers were using their funeral funds to pay Russian soldiers to rape them. This is what it takes for a pro government man to be suspended. Sure, Trump could use the guy as a straight-talking press officer. Dimitry Kiselov is of course still allowed to call for the complete annihilation of Britain with his master’s penis substitute Satan 2 in a radioactive tsunami. Bring it on prick.

Transgender issues…puberty blockers... Most, if not all of us will remember confused thinking about their identity or experimenting when younger and it indeed WAS just a phase as hormones shifted about. Little boys in girls’ clothes, girls being tomboys, both sexes having same sex crushes for a while. Yes, including me. Left brain/right brain…Parents claiming their child was transgender because they wanted them to be a different sex. ‘Aww, we wanted a boy and we got a girl, please make him right doc, we’re not just transhausen by proxy’. Ok, I self-identify as an alien from Sirius and demand respect for the deluded minded. Aliens are people too.

Cosmetic surgeons making big bucks by encouraging girls with body shame issues to have mastectomies when it is likely what they need more is help and support with self-image. It just seems as if males who think they are female want to transition without the actual hassle of periods and giving birth etc. Easier these days to claim one identifies as female, rather than as a bloke who enjoys wearing female clothing express his feelings.

Devon Partnership NHS trust gave a two-hour session about ‘gender unicorns’. Non binary, agender, neutrois, demigender, polygender, androgyne, femme butch, fondue set, cuddly toy… Mental health has taken a real beating in the West in the last two decades and desperately needs to be addressed, not dressed up. And if the righteous middle class woke want to ban blackface as being offensive, then they should ban all the ugly transvestites in drag for being deeply offensive caricatures of women.

Super sweet to see Kim wrong un taking his daughter to see his masterful phallic intercontinental ballistic missile, it is important to spend quality time with your children. One day darling you could inherit a nuclear wasteland…

Elon Musk getting ever more deranged with his plans for Ukraine and Twitter etc. I am genuinely disappointed (as if he cares) as I had actually held some hope for him being a useful human instead of yet another rich dingbat fruitcake idiot. And as for bloody Zuckerberg and his Meta self…ARF. The virtual avatar of himself looks far more human than he does.

Being the full-time carer for my mother for the last seven months is annihilating me, atom by atom. She very rarely knows who I am or that she is in her home of 33 years and is hearing and seeing dead relatives. Hallucinations of memory. Daily and nightly falls, dangerous walkabouts, a mini stroke, endometrial cancer for three years, blood, excrement, refusing to drink or eat. I never would have returned to England if not for her but only regret that she won’t let me help enough. More tests for an operation I know will not happen. Sometimes I am too tired to even be a friend. Guilt. I do not ‘believe’ in death as THE end but I am watching her vanish in front of me day by day. Me taking refuge in rational order and she by withdrawing into deepening lunacy, step by faltering step. ‘When can I go home?’ I heard this in the hospital from others, now I hear it at home. When a peaceful death is the only possible happy end. I am running on fumes trying to do all the right things, knowing I am failing.

‘Madness may only be the expression of ordinary emotional confusion. Fear of madness can cause, I believe, a retreat into the very madness one fears. This is only superficially a paradox. Madness may be said to be a tendency to simplify, into easily grasped metaphors, the nature of the world. …you have plainly been confounded by unexpected complexities; therefore, you are inclined to retreat into simplification…to create a world whose values are unambivalent, unequivocal.’

And back to Israel this festival season for Yanuka and the ‘abomination of desolation’ which would be the permanently coming end times . Darling YouTube is ablaze with apocalyptic anti-Christ ravings. Again. Because the guy has a good memory and is apparently charismatic. And for those who profess themselves to be (don’t laugh) ‘Christians’, it is a SIGN of the coming Armageddon. Again. And the little darlings welcome it…

‘Such is the character of one prone to morbid anxiety, that he would rather experience the worst of things than hope for the best. Why have such conclusions been drawn? Because that type of mentality would prefer to bring on catastrophe rather than live forever in fear of its possibility. Suicide rather than uncertainty’.

All quotes in this blog (apart from the last one below) have been taken from Moorcock’s trilogy, The Dancers at the End of Time.

‘When a critical mass is achieved within a species, the behaviour is instantly transferred to, and exhibited by all members of the species. A phase transition…’ Let’s hope so. Hurry up species, it doesn’t need all of us, we just need enough. Let’s go...

Happy imaginary Christmas and New Year to you, stay well…Love.

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rinzis · 3 years

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very real and very cool toman hcs

part 2 to the bonten hcs . perhaps these will also be atrociously unfunny …. also thanks to minty @venti-loving-hours for helping me think of some of these :}

+ ok to start with let’s talk about michael. mikey collects the most random shit and leaves it lying around EVERYWHERE. he was one of those kids that took his bandaids off and stuck them on the wall :/

+ chifuyu broke his ankle one time and had one of them big ass casts on it . he allowed baji to sign it thinking he would write a nice message but instead he just drew a massive cock and balls

+ speaking of baji he refers to himself as an alpha male at least twice a day

+ kazutora has criminal butter fingers. mans cannot hold shit to save his life so they never trust him w holding anything because it’ll be on the floor within 30 seconds

+ also baji parrots whatever he hears even though he has no idea what half of it means . he heard mitsuya say “jarring” one time and assumed it meant cute so he called a girl he found cute jarring and got his ass beat

+ the toman captains played mini golf one time and nahoya took a massive drivers swing and let go of the club which then concussed draken

+ mikey also finds it hilarious to do the card swipe down draken’s ass crack with any remotely thin object . draken has to practice a LETHAL ass clench to make sure mikey can’t do it in public

+ baji rips cheeks so fucking loudly during toman meetings and tries to blame it on chifuyu but one time baji actually followed through and shit himself so he stopped doing that

+ takemichi made a draken x emma playlist but then mikey found it and it had nightcore on it so it became ‘their little secret’ . mikey also forced takemichi to make it collaborative but mikey ended up adding fat bottom girls to it so takemichi made it private again because it ruined the vibe

+ hakkai thinks his vintage bowling shoes are the shit so he wore them out one time but nahoya nicknamed them the prehistoric archeological stompers 6000s so he only wears them for bowling now

+ mitsuya genuienly cannot swim for shit like this guy . if he dares step foot outside the shallow end he just silently sinks like a fridge ….. also kazutora shouted ‘let’s get a toaster in here’ in the pool one time and mitsuya clobbered him

+ souya let nahoya pick a tattoo for him once . as they’re brothers souya thought he’d pick something quite meaningful but he looked at it once it was done and it was a love heart with anal written in it so he had to get it lasered off

+ baji once said that mucho’s hair looked like a yellow turd so he tore a chunk out of baji’s .. also mucho’s favorite comeback is ‘your mom’ and he thinks it’s hilarious but whenever someone uses it on him he just freezes and doesn’t know how to react . also he said that to baji one time who replied with ‘talk shit about my mom and i’ll bang yours’ ….. was not well received

+ mikey thought you snorted weed for a good while so when he found out you’re supposed to smoke it he cried

+ pah-chin tried to learn spanish to impress a girl but the only thing he ended up learning was hijo de puta and he still says it all the time

+ chifuyu cuts his pizza with scissors. mikey picked up a pizza and bitch slapped mucho with it one time

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therenlover · 3 years

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One Last Night In Madripoor (An 18+ Helmut Zemo/Reader Oneshot)

Synopsis: Baron Helmut Zemo is a lonely, wanted man looking for some fun, you’re a piss-poor bounty hunter in search of a connection before leaving your life of crime behind, and fate has brought you together at a party the likes of which has never been seen before. You only have one night left in Madripoor, so why not take a chance?

Tags: Smut, SoftDom!Zemo, Hook Up, Semi-Public Sex, Drinking, Safe Sex, Explicit Consent, First Meeting, Wall Sex, Blow Jobs, Cunnilingus

Rating: 18+

Warnings: Swearing, Explicit Sexual Content

Word Count: 4200~

This fic has been crossposted under the same title to my AO3!

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Madripoor was a place like nothing you had ever seen.

It wasn’t that the sights were anything special. You could find seedy criminal underbellies lined with neon where the streets ran red with blood anywhere if you looked hard enough. Even the ocean view didn’t do much to set it apart from any other place visually. No, Madripoor’s scenery and architecture weren’t what kept your eyes wide with wonder whenever you found yourself wandering through the winding back-alleys without a purpose. It was the people that kept you around.

Thieves, pirates, and miscreants had been taking shelter at the docks since before anyone there could remember. It was a city borne of the underbelly of society, the people nobody sees, but you saw them. You saw them every day when you stood in the main market waiting for an easy bounty. There were faces everywhere; big and small, tall and short, scarred and flawless. No two people in the streets of Madripoor were ever exactly alike. If you needed to remember someone, their unique face was right there waiting in your mind.

After living on the island for almost 6 months, most people were already cataloged neatly in your mind as friend or foe. This man, though, he was new. He was different.

The night was still young. There was some trouble at the Princess Bar that ended with Selby dead and a few murderers loose in the streets with a price on their heads, but you steered clear. Going after the killers meant going up against hundreds if not thousands of trained bounty hunters and assassins and no amount of money was worth dying over now, not while you were so close to freedom. Instead of chasing your doom, you decided to head to your room, get dressed up, and head out to wherever the music was loudest in search of a place to forget about your problems for the night. The thudding sounds of poorly DJ-ed club remixes led you to Leonardo’s Place. That’s where you found him.

You were two drinks in and sticking close to the wall when he stumbled into your line of sight. What initially caught your eye was his dancing. He couldn’t move for shit. What kept your attention, though, was his face.

There was transience to him, like at any moment someone could bump into him and he would disappear without a trace at their touch. Despite that he was gaudy. Everything about his clothing screamed wealth and fine taste from the thread count of his obnoxious purple turtleneck to the shine on his boots. He was strange, a walking contradiction, and one who had never had the pleasure of gracing your presence or screwing you over in the past. In the simplest of terms, he intrigued you. With nothing left to lose you downed the last of your cocktail and made your way to the gap in the crowd where the stranger had staked his claim. It was game time.

“You come here alone?” You asked. Your voice was barely a whisper above the heavy thrumming of the music.

He gave you a long look up and down before answering as if he were trying to size you up. Something about having his gaze linger on your body made your heartbeat soar. “I’m not looking for company,” His accented tone was gruff but left a sliver of room for reconsideration. You took the chance. What could go wrong?

With as much tact and grace as you could muster you let yourself slip a little closer to him. “What, do I look too expensive for you?” you teased, before backing off with a grin, “Thanks for the compliment, but I’m not here for that. My job is a little more… dangerous.” As you danced, the hem of your dress rode up your thigh just enough to reveal the knife holster in your garter belt. It pleased you greatly to see this handsome stranger do a double-take; that meant he was looking at your upper thigh in the first place. “I just liked what I saw in you… do you like what you see in me?”

Somehow, your little joke had endeared him to you, however minutely. Instead of brushing you off the man paused his jerky dancing for a moment to really take you in. Then, he caved. “Would you like a drink?” He asked.

You smirked. “Who would I be if I turned down a free drink from a handsome stranger,”

He met you in the middle as he offered you his hand. “I never promised it would be free,”

So, the two of you found yourselves at the bar, bodies leaned into each other and away from the rest of the sweltering crowd as the bartender slid you your order. The stranger was drinking a brandy straight while you opted for a sidecar. It was enough alcohol that you were starting to feel pretty buzzed, but you still felt in full control of yourself. You took a long sip before speaking. “So, what should I call you?”

It took him a moment to respond but once he did, he seemed sure of himself. “You can call me Helmut, but Baron is fine as well,”

You cocked up an eyebrow. “Is that a nickname?”

“More of a title,”

He took a drink as you gawked. “Like royalty?”

“Not like. I am,”

Your cheeks flushed. The rational part of your mind was so stunned by the ease with which Helmut lied that it seemed to short circuit completely, leaving you very puzzled and more than a little intrigued. “Well, pardon me, Mr. Baron. What’s royalty like you doing in a place like this?”

“There are plenty of reasons a man like me would have business here. A woman as beautiful as you, though… not so much,” he waved his hand in loose gestures as he spoke, “Why risk your life and beauty for this? A life living in the underground where you cannot so much as dream of seeing the stars?”

You finished your drink in one large swig. It burned down your throat but you relished in the pain. “Not all of us are lucky enough to be born in a place where we can see the stars. Funny enough, though, I’m just about to get out,”

“Is that right?”

“I finally saved up enough money from small jobs to buy my way out from under the Power Broker’s thumb,” Something about the way Helmut smiled at you made you feel safe. It was like you could tell him your worst, darkest secrets and not feel an ounce of fear or guilt. “I’m nothing special here, a small-time bounty hunter, and I kept it that way for a reason. I’m not valuable and I don’t know much. If I just pay my dues and keep the money coming until I can get their claws out of my back, I should be free to leave with a freighter tomorrow morning,”

Helmut was quick to respond. “Ah, travel by freighter. It’s terribly dangerous to be a stowaway, you know? Impossible to predict quite what the seas will be like,”

“Well, that’s just a risk I’ll have to take to get out of here and stop… what was it that you said I was doing? Risking my life and beauty?”

The two of you chuckled as Helmut took one last drink to empty his glass. Then, the conversation stilled. Around you people were alive, gyrating to the music as their pulses thumped to the beat, but it was like they weren’t even there. Instead, your whole being was focused on the strange man in front of you who had stolen away your sensibilities with his cool tone and thick accent. He made you feel alive. No, more than alive. Every color was brighter, every sound was sharper, every sip of your drink was crisper. He was a once-in-a-lifetime man, and this was a once-in-a-lifetime night. Oh, to hell with it!

“I like you, Baron,” you purred, pressing yourself close to him. His breath hitched the moment you touched him. He acted as if it had been a very long time since he was last touched like that. “And I think you like me too. In fact, I think you like me enough that we should take this conversation somewhere a little more private. What do you say?”

He didn’t respond. Instead, his gloved hand made its way around your wrist, and in a moment’s time, he was pulling you across the crowded dance floor towards a small, secluded hallway. You assumed that meant yes.

The instant you made it to the shelter of the shadows Helmut was on you like a man starved. One of his hands was quick to explore the skin just above the hem of your dress as the other pressed against the wall, caging you in and holding you as a more than willing hostage to his affections. He didn’t kiss your face, and you weren’t complaining about that, but he did put his mouth to good use sucking a dark bruise into your collarbone. His ministrations only stopped when a high, keening sound escaped your lips.

“You like that, don’t you, meine kleine schlampe?” he growled through gritted teeth. Something about his tone turned your already weak legs to jelly. The second you went limp in his grip, though, he pulled back. Straightening himself out, he offered you a steadying arm. You took it without hesitation. “I’m terribly sorry to be so rude. I assure you that I am not usually the type of man to hook up with someone on a whim, I’ve simply been… indisposed for many years and haven’t had many opportunities for pleasure, especially not with a woman as beautiful as you,”

His compliment was enough to have you blushing like a schoolgirl. You had killed more people than you could reasonably count, and probably fucked even more, but something about the way Helmut looked and sounded and acted made you feel almost innocent to his advances. He was a drug and you needed to get your fix before he disappeared forever.

“Does that mean you think I’m special?” You asked, all doe eyes with an innocent smile. Helmut ate it right up.

“Yes, schatzi. Very special,”

You hitched a leg up, letting your heel dig into his expensive dress pants and drag him closer to you once again. “First your little slut and now your little treasure? Which one is it, Helmut?”

“And so smart,”

“Move, Baron!”

At your insistence, Helmut was on you once again, leaving a trail of hot, wet kisses down your neck as he fiddled with his gloves, yanking them off and shoving them in his back pocket before he continued. “So demanding,” he chided, and yet he continued to lavish you with affection, his hand climbing higher and higher up your thigh. Your back was pressed flush to the wall now, and you were painfully aware of just how warm Helmut was. He smelled like a rich man’s cologne and yet his skin tasted of cheap soap when you leaned in to give him a bruise of his own.

“You love it,” you replied. He let out a husky laugh.

“I suppose I do,” he chuckled, and then his fingers brushed over your core. Your knees buckled. Helmut kept you upright with his body as he continued to taunt you through your underwear, but he seemed more confident now, almost cocky. “My needy schatzi, have you no patience?”

Your response was breathless; a confession.

“Not with you,”

Something about your words lit a fire in Helmut’s eyes. In an instant he had your leg hiked up while he ground his hardened length against your clothed wetness. Your mind went blank. He felt big. A mindless whimper fell from your lips.

“How do you want me?” Helmut asked. As he spoke he ran a light finger down your elevated thigh. You offered up another whimper. “I’ll need you to use your words and tell me what you want or I can’t give it to you,” His tone had you wet enough that you worried you were dripping.

With a gulp, you managed to fumble out the words. “I’ll blow you first if you promise to fuck me,”

That had him grinning like a wolf. “Perhaps you are my little schlampe, so eager to get down on your knees for me…” And you were. Even on shaky legs, you found yourself happily falling to your knees as the Baron fumbled with his fly. It was only then that you found yourself gazing down the hall towards the cacophony of lights and sounds and people maybe 20 feet away from your hiding place in the shadows. As if he could sense your discomfort, Helmut paused. “Are you alright?”

You nodded quickly. “I just forgot we were out in the open for a second,”

“Do you want to stop? If the location is the problem, I would gladly pause so we can find a new hideaway,” he stopped short, looking down and meeting your heavily lidded gaze, “or perhaps the idea of putting on a show excites you?” Your heart jumped out of your chest. Helmut noticed. “Well, if my little schlampe is so keen on putting on a show, she should get a move on,”

That was your cue to get to work. In a swift motion, you finished unzipping his fly and shifted his boxers, letting his lovely cock spring free. It was a pleasant penis and far as they went, average in length but thick with a leaking purple tip at half-mast. Just looking at it made you clamp your legs together.

Slowly, you gave a tentative lick up the underside of his length. He felt heavy on your tongue in the best of ways. Helmut jerked upward, a man possessed. You couldn’t help but laugh. “It’s been a long time, huh?”

“Less talking, more working little schlam-” you cut Helmut off quickly by taking most of his length into his mouth. That seemed to shut him up. His wolf-like grin had dissolved into a slack-jawed mess the second you started to suck him off. Oh, this was going to be fun.

For the most part, the Baron let you set the pace, bobbing your head and taking as much of his length as you comfortably could, but after a short while his hands were buried in your hair as he fought the urge to buck into your throat, hard. With a particularly rough snap of his hips, Helmut pulled away.

“You are an angel from heaven, schatzi,” he groaned, pulling himself slowly from your mouth as you got your first good deep breath in a while, “but a deal is a deal, and it wouldn’t be quite fair if I got to have all the fun, now would it?” Your breath hitched in your throat. Finally time for the main event.

Helmut was surprisingly gentle with you as he offered you a hand and helped you back up, only pausing to wipe a line of dribble off your chin with his thumb. With anyone else, it would have felt wholly humiliating but with Helmut… well, it did things to you you would rather not admit. You quirked up an eyebrow, though, when he got on his knees in turn, mirroring your past position. “What are you doing, Baron?”

“I simply assumed my sweet schatzi would enjoy a reward for taking my cock so well,” his words had you biting your lip as your cheeks flushed, “now be a good girl and take what I give you. I want to hear those pretty noises you made earlier,” With that, his face disappeared under your skirt. He pulled down your panties and… snickered?

“What now?” you groaned, squirming as his hot breath hit your exposed nub.

“You’re sopping wet,” he replied. Out of habit, you moved to shut your legs but found Helmut’s large hand was holding them open. “I do enjoy being sandwiched between your thighs, but you shouldn’t hide yourself from me. Take your pleasure. You’ve earned it,” That was when he began his assault on your folds.

You had been with plenty of partners over the years, all with varying proficiencies when it came to giving pleasure, but no one had ever made you feel quite as good as Helmut did while you gripped his hair and rode his face with reckless abandon. He always hit just the right spot, alternating between sucking on your sensitive clit and running his rough tongue in sloppy circles against it. In no time flat your pleasure was building toward’s its peak as your knees trembled.

“Helmut,” you squeaked, “Helmut I’m gonna cuuuUUOH!”

You were suddenly thrown over the edge of pleasure as the Baron worked you open with his fingers, pressing that spot inside of you just right. It was a revelation. Nothing would ever compare to him and you hadn’t even fucked yet. Once you had regained some semblance of stability he emerged from his place between your thighs, face slick with your juices, wearing the expression of a cat that got the cream.

“You make such lovely sounds for me, schatzi,” Helmut groaned, rising from his place at your feet and reaching into his pocket. While he fumbled for a condom you took the time to actually remove your panties, lifting one shaky leg at a time before balling them up and tossing them on the ground. You could grab them later. Or not! In all honesty, your ruined undies were the last thing on your mind as your watched Helmut roll the condom onto his proud cock, pumping himself a few times. “Now, are you sure you want this?”

You had never felt more sober in your whole life despite the drinks you’d downed earlier.

“God, yes,”

“Wonderful,”

He caged you into his body once again, lining himself up on your slick folds, and then with a pronounced bite against your collarbone, he was entering you. It wasn’t painful or uncomfortable, you just felt full, like a missing piece of your body had been completed. For the first few thrusts, you were too blissed out to really take note of anything around you, but once you tuned back into the world of the living you realized Helmut was talking. Well, babbling was more like it. He seemed to simply be speaking his stream of consciousness into your ear as he pistoned in and out of you like a madman. There was a jilted rhythm to it, but the abnormality kept you on your toes.

“I won’t be letting you go any time soon, schatzi, and definitely not on some dank freighter like a rat from the gutters. No, you will travel with me. Once I help my friends and slip away from the front lines I can take you anywhere your little heart desires. Paris, Vienna, Australia… Mein Gott, what a sweet cunt,”

Any sane woman, after hearing his sex-drunken musings, would have run. They would have heard the wild ramblings of a madman and left after their little fling was done to never see him again. It was only rational. He didn’t even know your real name. Sane women didn’t run away with strangers claiming to be barons they hooked up with in a seedy club selling stolen Van Goghs in a hub of the criminal underworld.

The only thing was, though, that you weren’t a sane woman.

You were a killer, a child left in the streets to live or die who had scraped themselves together and dragged themselves towards life. So what if the idea of some rich mysterious benefactor with a good dick coming in to save the day sounded fantastic? It was fantastic. Like your own personal version of Pretty Woman. Even if he wasn’t as rich as he claimed to be, being poor and getting dicked down by him was better than being poor and alone.

For just a moment, and with no regrets, you let yourself get lost in the fantasy and just let go.

It was as if Helmut could sense a difference.

“Are you close, little schlampe?” He gasped, letting his thrusts take on a faster staccato rhythm.

You could do little more than moan and nod as he pounded you into the wall. That seemed to be enough for him to get the message, though.

“What a good girl,” he purred. His mouth was so close to your ear, his hot breath tickling the sensitive flesh with each heaving breath he took. As he chased his own climax, he brought a hand between your bodies and rubbed tight, wet circles around your clit. It was already sensitive, your body was only barely recovering from your first orgasm, and yet something about the overstimulation was thrilling, like racing towards an impossible dream. With a shout, you came for the second time, melting into Baron Helmut’s arms as he quickly followed.

The two of you stayed there, slumped against the cool wall and still connected by your dripping sexes, for a few moments, breathing heavy. Surprisingly, you were the first to speak.

“Wow,” you breathed, letting a soft laugh escape your lips.

Helmut returned the sentiment. “You were wonderful,” In a strange moment of intimacy, he pressed a gentle kiss to your forehead, but then he pulled out, tying off the full condom and tossing it to the ground as he tucked himself back into his boxers and zipped up his fly.

“Are you just gonna leave that there?” you made a gesture towards his litter.

“They have janitors,”

A burbling laugh escaped from your lips. “That they do,”

Back in the main room of the party, the crowd had only grown larger as the night progressed. Nobody had seen you, nor had they noticed your cries as they danced and drank and made merry under the neon lights. You were, for all intents and purposes, invisible at Helmut’s side. Within and without. There was something exhilarating about knowing he was the only one that truly saw you in a room packed with hundreds. It was like something out of a twisted fairytale.

“So…” you broached the subject gently while you pulled down your dress to protect your modesty, “Did you mean what you said back there about Paris and Vienna, or…”

“Oh, you heard that?”

You snickered. “It was pretty hard not to with you breathing in my ear,”

“I apologize,” he leaned against the wall beside you, shoulder to shoulder in the darkness, “but yes, I meant what I said. I-”

Suddenly, from down the hall, a booming voice interrupted your moment.

“There you are!”

“Goddamnit, Zemo, I thought we told you to stay low not hire an escort,”

There, at the mouth of the hallway, stood two massive men. They were obviously displeased, and though their faces were obscured by the lights you could tell you weren’t the one they were after.

They called him Zemo… where had you heard that name before?

Helmut stepped away from the wall with a shrug. “At least I didn’t cause a scene by forgetting to put my phone on silent,”

The larger of the two men stayed where he was, while the other walked to meet the Baron in the middle.

“I swear to God, man, you’ve gotten ten times more insufferable since I learned you were rich.

The Baron shrugged. “It comes with the territory,”

“But you don’t have to be such a jackass about it,”

You felt it was a good time to chime in.

“Thank you so much for that, Helmut, but I think I should give you guys some privacy,” you said, straightening out your dress and walking deeper into the hallway. There had to be an exit somewhere…

“Wait!” When you turned, you found Helmut rushing to meet you. The men in the background looked shocked and almost smug. “Save your money. Meet me out at the airstrip tomorrow afternoon if you feel like seeing me again. If not, know that the Power Broker doesn’t let go of assets cheap, and you just slept with a man with a million dollar bounty, so buying your freedom isn’t an option. If you want to go without me, you’ll have to hitch a ride on a cargo ship but not as a stowaway. Working for your keep is the best way to stay under the radar. Nobody can touch you once you’r-”

You cut him off by pressing a finger to his lips. “I’ll see you at your private jet, Baron,”

He smirked. “So you will,” With as much gusto as a man could muster, he returned to his companions but not before offering one last goodbye. “Farewell, schatzi, until tomorrow,”

As you leaned up against the wall once more, you watched them go with a twinkle in your eye.

“Who was that?”

“None of your business, James,”

“Guys, what the hell did I just step on?”

“I believe that was my used rubber,”

“ZEMO!”

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a/n: I hope you enjoyed the filth! I haven’t written for Zemo before, even though I’ve loved him for years, but he’s definitely going into my main rotation now. If you have any ideas, send them my way! I’d love to fill the void, because there just aren’t very many Zemo x reader fics out there. If you enjoyed this, maybe reblog or leave a comment! I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks again!

Please do not post my works to any other sites, thanks! <3

#oh my god this is filth #Would you believe I wrote my first smut like a week ago?#zemo #baron zemo #helmut zemo #zemo x reader #helmut zemo x reader #baron zemo x reader #marvel #falcon and winter solider series #fatws #bucky barnes #sam wilson #smut #marvel fanfiction

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