#that's really resonated with a lot of people in the years since the novel was published and spawned so many different takes on the story

[finalgirlminamurray]

my tag for my gender-swapped tcm au on here is (will be) "the sawyer sisters", because it's simple and easy to put on everything related to it, and my name for the collection of fics related to it on ao3 is "don't question the virtue names" because i felt the need to address my odd choice of naming theme for them in a way that probably draws more attention to it than anything

but if i really wanted to be clever and slightly esoteric while expressing my vision for this 'verse, my tag for it would be something like "cannibal Little Women"

[britneyshakespeare]

you know i mentioned last night that i realized only *after* i started rereading david copperfield that since i recently became an aunt, i was gonna see the story from a whole new angle and start relating more to betsey trotwood. i didn't even think about how at salem house i was gonna be poor mr. mell...

[monkebearness]

Our Story, Like a Romance Novel [Chapter 1: Before the Rise]

Chapter 0, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4

Tags: fluff, coming-of-age, friendship

Word count: 6.5k

a/n: hellooooo!! I'm still working on my more "mature" one-shot fics, so just bear with me, if that's what you're waiting for. but, if you are interested, here's the next chapter to my current series.

It was the summer of 2023 when he first entered the so-called big leagues of Seoul State University. Perhaps it was the best time for a lot of young folks to express their freedom and discover their identities during this point in their lives, if they weren’t being nagged by their parents back in high school. However, for some youngsters who aren’t as lucky and fortunate with their privilege, working part-time has been the usual case in his life since high school, but juggling it with important college matters has proven to be quite the challenge for them. For some, they can only work one shift a day or night per week.

For one particular sophomore, however, he found himself in an unforgettable position. When everything felt more overwhelming for him during the first year of his college life, he caught the attention and earned the eventual trust of an upperclassman…

“Join our club, Junghoon-ssi,” Park Sohyun holds him on his shoulder with this plea.

“But I’m planning to join an organization,” he informs her. “It’s in line with my major.”

“Then you can still join that organization,” she notes. “This club of ours, it’s not really an academic one nor is it recognized by the university. But get this—you’ll get paid.” Such a phrase gets him. “Think of it as an internship—or an extracurricular. It’s not a big deal.”

Like Daewon, Geum Junghoon was not the same confident, talented, and successful chef that he ended up becoming nor did he have the model-like physique that some folks are looking up to imitate and achieve in their lifetime. Like a lotta people in their late teens to early twenties, he too had to go to college while also getting a taste of the real world outside of those hours.

“I appreciate the offer, but it’s fine, sunbae,” he asserts his choice. “I already have a few shifts on my plate too… And well, if things do get more difficult, I can just file a leave of absence for the semester so I can focus on working more.”

Yet such a sincere and considerate senior of his wanted to lessen some of his burdens.

“No, don’t…” Sohyun insists. “I know you’ve been having a harder time, juggling your part-time jobs and classes. I’ll just say it to you now. Quit those jobs while you’re at it. When you’re in our club, you won’t need to keep working more just to earn a lot less.”

His mouth almost opens, but he doesn’t know what else to say. “Who told you..?”

“Myungsoo-ssi. Kotone-ssi. Your close friends,” she mutters names dearest to him. “They’re worried about you, too. And I wish I can do something about it, too.”

“You asked my friends?” he’s confunded. “Wouldn’t that be a power trip on your part?”

“Not if I’m just genuinely concerned,” she sighs. “They told me you weren’t in the best state to study and work at the same time. But I’m serious… We’re not gonna give you a hard time or anything. In fact, I think it’ll be more productive than most of your shifts. Take it from someone who’s also been in your shoes…”

The offer has been made. And realizing his personal situation, it sounds more tempting. The fact that Sohyun used to live a similar lifestyle makes him resonate with her more. “I’ll have to think about it.” He doesn’t want to let such a chance slip. “If that’s okay.”

“Of course!” she reassures him. “Take your time, Junghoon-ssi… The offer stands.”

He never expected to have gotten such an offer from his sunbae. At times, he would think that he was lucky that he was paired up with Sohyun during their first project. Maybe if it was someone else, he would’ve still kept on giving himself a harder time.

= = =

“Welcome to the Club, Junghoon-ssi. Make yourself at home, okay?”

He chose not to join another organization.

Geum Junghoon was brought into the campus meeting room of the Mad Money Club for the first time. His senior by almost two years—Park Sohyun—asked him if he could join them in a way that she first described as a “more productive part-time side gig.” Due to personal reasons, the young man accepted her invitation a couple of days after hearing her compelling offer at the cafe.

The room looked cozier than any classroom he has gone to in his almost one year as a student. Maybe it’s the decorations and furniture. It felt like he was home, at least like his boarding house. It felt weird but also welcoming as he saw new and familiar faces, whose heads now turn to him with various glances. Most are positive, to say the least.

“Ne. Kamsahamnida, Sohyun-sunbaenim,” he bows to her with gratitude.

“Please drop the honorifics,” she snickers at his gesture. “Just call me Sohyun-ssi.”

He hesitates to even mouth those words. “I can’t, sunbaenim. That just feels…”

She chuckles. “Alright, alright. Will noona be more comfortable for you then?”

“Ne!” he exclaims. “That sounds better… Kamsahamnida, Sohyun-noona.”

“I know that we have rules, but don’t be too uncomfortable around us, arachi?”

“And we still have three other members,” another student adds. Junghoon immediately recognizes her as his upperclassman Seo Dahyun. “But don’t be nervous around them.”

“Babe, you think recruiting another one this year is a good idea?” a worried voice asks. She’s a tall woman who’s laid back on the couch. Sohyun walks to her and joins her seat.

“Come on, now, Xinyu-ah,” she fixes her scruffy hair. “Just trust me on this one, okay? Junghoon’s only a part-timer. Think of him like our scout or assistant. And besides, I really wanna help him out and he’s been such a great help to me in ways I don’t even know how I can repay him… Isn’t that why we founded our club in the first place?”

“Not to meddle with you lovebirds, but Sohyun-unnie has a point…” Dahyun adds in her insight to the matter with a hopeful tone. “I still remember joining this club because you girls helped me out when I got here in Seoul. And look where I am now!”

Holding each other in an embrace, Xinyu knows and feels she can trust Sohyun dearly… From a distance, Junghoon is relieved that another member of the club accepted him. At least, she voiced her trust in her girlfriend. That was enough for Junghoon to feel a little less like some outcast, unlike most of his classes and group projects where folks would just come and go after a limited span of interactions about academics and interests.

“Well…” Xinyu looks at Sohyun. “You and Dahyun are right about our oath... I trust you, Sohyun-ah.”

“Thank you, babe,” Sohyun kisses her girlfriend’s cheek. “I mean, I also trust you accepting Yubin-ssi. Let’s call it even.”

“Fair enough,” Xinyu giggles.

“Yah, Sohyun-unnie!” Yubin herself whines to her sunbaes, already defensive in her tone. “What did I do? I already told you gals before, I haven’t been spending our money on anything stupid! That's why I wanted to join this club so badly.”

Sohyun, Xinyu, and Dahyun can’t help but laugh at her reaction. “I was kidding, Yubin-ah…” Sohyun calms her down. “You’re just as welcome here as everyone!”

The couple chuckle before their lips lovingly touch each other with no sign of worries. Junghoon looks at them in contemplation, touched by this new sight of love and comfort.

Dahyun shakes her head with a smile. “Aigoo… Get a room, you two.”

“But we are in a room,” Xinyu casually retorts, continuing her embrace with Sohyun.

Dahyun swallows a humph at the remark. “You get what I mean, unnie!”

“Okay, okay…” Xinyu stands up with Sohyun. “We’ll be heading outside for a bit, if that makes y’all singles any less uncomfortable.”

“That’s so uncalled for, unnie…” Yubin places a palm on her chest in disbelief.

“I’m joking!” Xinyu chuckles alongside Sohyun, as they tidy themselves up. “But we are gonna be heading out. For real this time... See you later, girls!”

“And Junghoon-ah!” Sohyun adds on their way out, waving at her hoobae.

The lovers bid their fellow members goodbye, leaving the three members in the room. Thankfully, there’s no awkwardness felt between them due to their comical interaction, though Junghoon still feels a “bit formal” and anxious when his eyes meet Dahyun’s, as much as he is curious about her based on what he has heard from the talk minutes ago.

“If I may ask, Dahyun-sunbaenim… You’re not from around here?”

“Nah, my hometown’s in Busan, Junghoon-ssi. How about you?” she asks back.

“I was born in Gyeonggi-do… At least that’s where my dad was.”

“And your eomoni?”

He stops for a second, recalling an integral moment from his past. “She was from Daegu, but I haven't gone there in a long time.”

“That’s nice to know! Some of my friends are from there.”

“Oh!” Yubin joins their conversation with excitement, with her eyes now lighting up with curiosity about him. “Your dad’s from Gyeonggi-do, too, sunbae? We live there, too!”

“That’s nice to know, Yubin-ssi. It’s kind of interesting that we all have some hometowns in common. At least, for a while.”

“It really is! Hope we get along, Geum Junghoon-sunbaenim.”

“I hope so too, Yubin-ssi,” Junghoon bows. “It’s nice meeting you everyone.”

= = =

In the following couple of weeks. Junghoon and his close friends outside the club were sitting in campus gardens, as they would usually hang out during breaks or this time, after classes. Kim Myungsoo and Lee Yeonghwan are juniors. Lim Honggi, fellow sophomore. Another sophomore, Kamimoto Kotone, is the only woman in their group—but she and Junghoon go all the way back since high school. They were his friends and brother-like figures since freshman year.

While Junghoon is no stranger to being quiet, they witness their youngest friend scratching his hair—not even the gust of wind can suppress the questions swirling within his confused mind. Myungsoo taps on Junghoon’s shoulder, stopping his hand from scratching his scalp.

“Dude, that’s like the loudest you’ve ever been today,” Yeonghwan shares his concern. “You got dandruff on your hair or something?”

“Yeah… Are you okay, man? What’s on your mind?” Myungsoo reciprocates his worry. 

“Umm, well…” Junghoon hesitates for a second. “If you don’t mind me asking, hyung… What exactly does the Mad Money Club do? I know you’ve known some of the members since last year, so…”

“Sohyun didn’t tell you?” Myungsoo wonders. “None of the members briefed you? Wow. I wonder what she said that made you agree to come working for her club, man... Those women are a mystery to us!”

“I just got into them two weeks ago, so I’m just getting used to the club.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about those rich kids, Junghoon... I do know some things about the founders, but they’re mostly just rumors or basic stuff you and everyone else on campus might already be familiar with.”

“But didn’t we already warn you not to join any sketchy organizations?” Yeonghwan raises an eyebrow.

Junghoon shakes his head. “It’s not sketchy, Yeonghwan-ah. They’re surprisingly nice when I entered their club.”

“Are you sure they're not a cult or some kind of laundering scheme?” Kotone joins in.

Junghoon turns to her in confusion. “Where did you hear those rumors?”

“I mean, these two aren’t entirely wrong,” Myungsoo plays devil’s advocate due to their concern for him. “There’s an actual rumor about them praying to statues while holding Korean bills, but just based on your experience with them, are they that strange?”

“Nah, they’re not that weird…” he chuckles. “That was just a goof that they made for a project in Xinyu-sunbae’s economics class. Was it something about the historical and sociocultural critique of Western capitalism? Something like that? But, I got to know them for a bit, so…”

Junghoon started to share what he exactly does with the Mad Money Club in those past few weeks.

For a start, I would sometimes tutor some of the members. At first, I thought it was just it. I would become a private campus tutor. But, I wasn’t complaining about it. It was productive and my work was paying off, and getting paid.

“So that’s basically what the Diamond-Water Paradox is,” I tell Yubin. “Even if water is more essential to us as humans, it’s still interesting to realize the fact that the market’s value of diamonds is always more expensive. And so, you can solve it by using this formula. The change in total utility divided…”

If that wasn’t enough, I help them with mapmaking and illustrations. Considering they have tablets or pens and papers… It wasn’t too hard for me to help them out whenever they needed a hand for an assignment or project.

“Oh…” Yubin rejoices at her realization. “I understand it a little better now. Thanks for the assist, sunbae!”

Most of the time, it’s Yubin who I've been helping since she’s the youngest. “You’re welcome, Yubin-ssi.”

Gong Yubin is a freshman, being the youngest recruit in the club this semester, but she easily got along with the older members. Even with me. Apparently, she has been friends with a few of her seniors here (my juniors) since they were in high school, so that must have been a little bit easier for her to adjust into living in college. She may be a little bit frisky and playful most of the time, but she’s a resourceful student and is kind to everyone whenever she gets serious. Even if she gets teased about being a babo because she failed some of her earlier quizzes, she’s quite the quick learner, too, and her passing her exams compensates for that.

But there was more than tutoring for me by the second week, even though that was one of the first things Sohyun-noona expected me to do as their assistant. In the weeks that followed since I first joined Mad Money Club, I became involved in some of these girls’ extracurricular clubs and organizations. One can say that I was being outsourced.

“Alright! You’re doing a good job, Junghoon-ssi,” Dahyun cheers me on from the table.

“It’s nothing, sunbae. As long as I’m able to do something to help you all out, I’m glad.”

“Don’t hesitate to ask us for help, too, okay? As your sunbae, we know a lot of things and we can do a lot of stuff, too.”  She raises her clenched fists while pouting with a momentary fierce gaze.

Seo Dahyun-sunbae is a junior from Behavioral Science, but interestingly enough, one of her main hobbies are going to the campus gym not just to work out on most evenings, but she also loves to spar in boxing and sometimes martial arts, which is cool. Though she doesn’t play in actual matches, she apparently packs a powerful punch, so I definitely don’t wanna get on her bad side.

She’s usually nice, on the bright side. Especially with an extremely angelic voice, she’s also a well-respected member of the Seoul State Singers since she joined last semester. In person, she can get along with everyone within the span of one or two conversations. At least that’s what happened to our first meeting. Because of her bubbly attitude, she usually approaches people first, but she never forgets to be respectful of them which makes me admire her.

Eventually, I met the two other members of the club, starting with their leader, who I thought was Sohyun, but happened to be someone else. She’s actually the same age as Dahyun-sunbaenim, despite all of them, save for Yubin, being in the same class year.

“It’s nice meeting you, Junghoon-ssi… Just treat this room as home when you’re here. You’ve already done a lot of help for the club and it’s only your first week,” she tells me.

“It’s my pleasure, Seoyeon-sunbaenim,” I bow to her during our first introduction.

“I know why Sohyun recruited you into the club and I welcome your reasoning behind it. But I hope you understand why we founded this group. It is more than just a gig.”

“I understand, sunbae. I choose to stay here for a while. For as long as you need my service, I will be here.” I bow to her again; not only is she older, she’s also another sunbae.

Yoon Seoyeon-sunbae was the first member I’ve met after classes and contrary to what I did believe, she’s actually the club’s main founder and leader. She applied and got into SSU through a special scholarship, which was impressive. I could’ve entered here the same way until I realized that I already qualified for passing the entrance exams. She’s a student of Media and Communication and just like Sohyun-noona, she was probably just as busy as her when I first met her, which is why she rarely shows up in the room when it’s my “shift” in the morning and early afternoon.

She and everyone else there might’ve been somewhat suspicious of me for being the only guy in the club, but I get why she herself has yet to earn my full trust. There’s a lot of pervs and douches lurking everywhere, even and especially on such a prestigious and privileged campus like this. I never plan to have relationships in college, anyways, but befriending them feels great. Besides, I won’t always hang out with them, unless they need my help for something. It feels much, much more different from high school.

“Nice to meet you, Junghoon-ssi,” another member shakes hands with me. “I don’t get why Sohyun-unnie is hiring an assistant here, but I hope that you joined us because you’re willing and not you know… The opposite,” she giggles.

“It’s umm… My pleasure meeting you, Nien-sunbaenim,” I feel hypnotized in her gaze.

Hsü Nien-tz'u is another junior from Marketing, but everyone simply calls her Nien. She was a Vietnam-born Taiwanese and she’s also a year younger than Sohyun-noona and the same age as Seoyeon, although they went to university in the same year. Last year, I think I’ve seen her before on campus a couple of times, but now that I’ve met her in person and know she’s a member of this club, she’s pretty funny when she jokes around and well, she’s pretty.

She has beautiful eyes, too. I don’t know what else to say about Nien yet, other than the fact that she just lights up the room with her stunning sense of humor, confidence, and lively charm whenever she’s there. It'd be nice to know her better, but that’s just wishful thinking, even if I get to see her in the room more often during lunch breaks and free times. And why am I calling her comfortably?

“Yah, Nien-ah!” Sohyun calls her out. What kind of question is that?”

“The one no one else dared to ask, unnie,” she snaps back. “What else?”

“You little–”

“It’s okay, noona,” I came to her defense, even though it seems like these girls have always bickered at each other like this before. “And Nien-ssi, Sohyun-noona didn’t pressure me. I just like to offer what I have to help with y’all, and I’d be more than happy to help.”

“Well, if any of the girls are giving you a hard time, don’t be afraid to ask ‘me’ for help, arachi? I can make it easier for you if you want.” She just winked at me. Seolma.

I was a bit taken aback by what she said, but I could not help but chuckle at her as my only reaction. I can’t tell if her statements are “genuine,” but at least Nien’s humorous gestures and words just somehow tickles the heck out of my funny bone or something.

“Omo, Nien-ah… I don’t believe this. Are you flirting with my hoobae?”

Nien raises her hands up. “I’m just saying! He may need some ‘assistance’ too, you know? He’s only human.”

“You’re not denying it, Nien-ah,” teases Dahyun.

There's a hint of taunting and enticement to Nien's mischievous smile. “I have no intention to. And he's my hoobae too, you know.”

“Whatever you say…” Sohyun scoffs, shaking her head. “Either way, he’s off-limits.”

“Am I though?”

My sudden bold response impressed the entire room with a wave of “oooooh” towards him. While it made Sohyun put her palm on her face while letting out a light laughter, it even took Nien aback for a second. But the fact that she smiled at me was one reaction I didn’t expect. I take her response as a sign of respect and friendliness for a person she's met. Oh, how clueless was I truly during those years.

“How about that,” she smirks. “You see, he can definitely answer for himself, unnie.”

“Woah, I did not expect that side of you, Junghoon-ah!” Sohyun turns her head to me.

“I’m just kidding, noona… Trying to lighten up the mood and all,” I explain. “But I don’t mind Nien-sunbae’s assistance, it might come in handy someday, you know?”

Park Sohyun-sunbae recruited me into the club in the first place. We were in the same student organization that I joined as a freshman, but she was also in a couple of my classes. She’s in a good number of organizations when she was still a freshman, but she stopped when she co-founded Mad Money with Seoyeon and Dahyun-sunbae.

We first worked on a paired assignment, which turned out well because she was approachable and took the initiative during our meetings. But after that, we kept staying as partners whenever she got busier on her organization projects and I chose to finish on our class assignments. She insisted that I stop including her names on the finished works.

Now, I can say that she’s a good friend of mine. She seems to treat me like that as well. I might even say she’s like an older sister to me, but maybe I’m just being sentimental, because I never had one. Point is, meeting her has made my college life more fun and refreshing.

Xinyu smiles at us. “Well, whatever happens to these two, I can still vouch for everyone. Junghoon has been nothing but helpful to the whole club, so far.”

Zhou Xinyu is another junior alongside Sohyun and Nien. She’s from Beijing, but she’s not an exchange student, as some students believe. Aside from dating Sohyun-noona since they were freshmen, I don’t know anything else about her to be honest. However, I did learn that she’s a major in Media and Communication too. She’s also a member of the SSU Thespians’ Society, though I haven't seen her acting (on the stage) yet. In terms of her visuals and physique, she’s like a model.

She makes a lot of jokes with Nien-ssi and at times, she even flirts with almost everyone she’s with, which Sohyun seems to be fine with. I’m assuming that’s just Xinyu being very playful. I mean, what do I know about relationships? But I’m pretty sure she’s only like that to people she’s comfortable enough with, but as a new associate of these women, it’s fun to see her be all self-loving and teasing with the rest of the Mad Money Club.

All in all, I hope we all get close, even if I’m not a "core member" of their club. If not, then at least respectful enough to each other. I don’t know how long I’ll be working with and for them, but all I can hope for is that things work out well while I’m getting to know them. Just like one of their 10 rules, I just gotta be(you)tiful... Be myself, ‘cause why not?

“Now I’m thinking that you should’ve just joined our group, instead,” Kotone tells Junghoon, snapping him out of his vivid recollections with the Mad Money Club.

“Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know. I thought it’d convince you to stop overthinking like this sometimes. Besides, my clubmates will treat you well, if you end up changing your mind later.”

“I’m already close enough to not be comfortable with my own clubmates. I think I’m good, but thanks for the concern, Tone-yah.”

“You’re welcome. But I’m just gonna put it out there again: our doors will always be open... That is unless you already have someone making you stay there for a reason, haven’t you?”

Junghoon smiling in silence says it all. Knowing what his face means, they cheer their friend on. He hasn’t felt what most people would call butterflies, at least not in a while. 

From her eyes to her beautiful face. Her effortless yet flawless sense of humor. And that wink of hers and soft smile still gets him. How can he not be allured by this girl’s charm?

Yeonghwan notices Junghoon’s sudden smile. “Is there really someone you like?”

“I guess..?” Junghoon chuckles, not minding the feeling of his cheeks now warming up. “But it’s not that big of a deal.”

“I think your face says otherwise,” Myungsoo teases him. “You think you have a shot with someone there?”

“Do you like Sohyun-sunbae or something? You got a thing with lesbians?” Honggi adds.

“Nah… I don’t like her that way. Sohyun-noona’s kind of like a mentor to me. A tough, brave, and wise one. And I’m grateful to always learn from her.”

“Fair enough. Maybe it’s that freshman then? Gong Yubin? That girl looks so—”

Kotone darts him with a stare. “Honggi-yah, are you sure you’re not just saying your crushes out loud?”

Honggi raises his hands in the air. “I’m just guessing! Just guessing, alright? I’ll stop.”

“Wait, is it Nien-ssi then?” Myungsoo is right on the money. “I mean, based on your encounter with her earlier, it seems you got a thing going!”

“Nah, I doubt it,” Junghoon shakes it off, despite Myungsoo getting the correct answer. “I mean, look at me… I’m pretty big and she’s in a diff—”

“Dude!” Yeonghwan exclaims in disdain. “We’re just guessing and you’re already being like that to yourself.”

“Like what? I’m just being truthful, you know?”

“We’re in 2023, for crying out loud,” Kotone whines, knowing what Yeonghwan means. “Junghoon-ah, we are not living in some kind of freaking stereotypical rom-com drama from the last decade. This isn’t True Beauty or Lookism!”

“I know, but regardless, I accepted to join since I took Sohyun-noona’s offer, not because I wanna flirt with girls,” Junghoon looks down after a sigh. “I couldn’t say no to her offer. Not after how much she’s helped me since last year.”

“So that’s why you joined, huh…” Myungsoo realizes it’s more serious than they thought.

“I’m pretty sure you helped her a lot more, based on what she told us,” adds Yeonghwan.

“Yup…” Myungsoo begins to explain to Junghoon. “Sohyun told us when you two first partnered up for Social Sciences. You took care of things when she couldn’t respond to your texts, but you still managed to use all the resources she provided. She even told us about your project last semester. Like if you did that to a straight woman, she would’ve probably gone out with you!”

“That’s ridiculous, hyung…” Junghoon laughs at his last remark.

“He is,” Kotone laughs with him. “But oppa’s main point is, Junghoon-ah, you’ve helped Sohyun-sunbae big time. Without anything in return… You didn’t have to, but you did.”

= = = = = =

Months ago. Sohyun and Junghoon were standing in front of the open classroom door.

“You didn’t have to do it…” Sohyun reminded him. “That was our project for finals too!”

“I thought you were having a hard time, sunbae. Juggling all your gazette articles to meet the deadline on your org. You told me you were dealing with other courses, too. I feel like I had to do something.”

“You didn’t have to,” she objected. “At least not what you did. You could’ve just talked it out with the professor. I’m not even pissed that you’ve done the paper without me. I’m pissed because you did it, and still included my name… When all I did was send you a bunch of links for you to read alone, and I feel like shit because I didn’t even bother reading them in time.”

“And every single link you’ve sent me still helped me with finishing our project, sunbae… If I’m being honest, working together with you through the semester has been and still is one of the best experiences I’ve had with a randomly selected partner so far.”

Such an answer amuses her, strangely enough, she can’t even come up with anything. “Why’s that? What about the other partners you paired up with from other classes?”

“Most of them were also randomly selected, and the rest of them were just me working with my close friends, but we rarely have classes together for this semester... I can’t let people down, you know?”

“You know, you should really go out of your shell every once in a while,” she rebuked. “But for once, don’t do every single group task by yourself!”

“Yeah, but sometimes they would have emergencies, so I’d just cover for their parts,” he remained stubborn. Even his tone was consistently nonchalant to her. “Everyone wins.”

“Well, those things can happen for sure. But let me ask you something: can you tell the difference between a groupmate who can’t help you out because of an ‘emergency’ or a freeloader who’s just lying their ass off to get out of making an effort?”

This time, Junghoon runs out of words and excuses to defend his own misfortunes. He knows she’s right. The strongest point any concerned person can make in this scenario.

“See…” she softens her tone. “You do realize now that you’re being a pushover. Any sane or reasonable student would do anything to help out their partner—no matter how busy they may be. And if they can’t do anything to help or have anything to contribute, then you negotiate with them. Leave their names out, if you have to… You’re a smart kid.”

“Leaving my shell does sound nice, Sohyun-sunbaenim. But I doubt I have time for gatherings and all that, so it’s fine… (optimistic) For now, I have a lot on my plate… Maybe someday.”

“Look, umm… I always respect people’s privacy… But by any chance, are you off to study again or something? I feel like you’ve studied enough by yourself and if you keep this up, you may even end up teaching the whole class for the rest of the semester.”

He chuckles. “Even I don’t wanna do that. But no, I actually have to take my shift for the evening, before my coworker leaves the store empty again without notice.”

“You’re working part-time? Where?”

“Ne. I work at a convenience store and—” He notices the time on his wrist watch. “Crap. Sorry, but I really have to go.” He bows to Sohyun at a quick pace, much to her surprise. “Thank you, sunbae. Annyeonghi gasipsio!”

Sohyun only bows in uncertainty at the sight of Junghoon’s quick pace as tightens his backpack around his shoulders and leaves the hallway in a rush, leaving a trail of wind. She slowly runs her fingers through her hair and slightly scratches her head, processing the situation she was in. A student exits the room next to Sohyun, instantly noticing her.

“Sohyun-ssi!” she turns to see her classmate, Junhee, approaching her with enthusiasm. “Congrats on getting the highest paper with Junghoon-ssi.”

“Oh, Joonie. Thanks! You and Chaerin did great too.”

“Thank you! We certainly did. But we’re not the champions of the semester, so…” she smiles with anticipation. “Does that mean you’re treating the class this time?”

“If you guys don’t immediately leave the classroom next class, I’ll think about it. But only those who’ll stay can come,” she teases.

“You know my friends and I definitely can’t say no to that offer, so you bet that we’ll be staying and chillin’ there until you tell us the plan… But I gotta head back to the dorm. See ya!” she waves her farewell, before leaving the hallway.

Sohyun waves back at Junhee. However, guilt has yet to let go of her mind and heart.

“That’s mostly Junghoon’s effort, to say the least,” she whispers to herself. “Heck, all the credit should be given to him. Aigoo…” she sighs.

She thinks to herself, tilting her head in confusion. I never expected that I'd become a freeloader for once. Great job, Park Sohyun. I can’t accept this. Kid’s too generous. I really gotta make up to him and help in some way. I have to.

= = = = = =

It was the end of his fourth week as an assistant of the Mad Money Club when Sohyun personally talked to Junghoon right after their club meeting outside their room. After feeling a buzz in his pocket, Junghoon takes a look at his phone. ₩300,000 has been wired to his account. His eyes widened at the screen and blinked seven times before looking back to his sunbae, who cackled. To some, it may not be enough, to Junghoon, it's more than something. Six digits. How in the hell is poss—

“This is—this is too much, noona. I can’t accept this. I should wire back at least—”

“Don’t return a single won,” she interjects. “You do and you earn it, Junghoon-ah.”

“I owe you a lot. Kamsahamnida. Kamsa—” he keeps bowing to her over and over, overwhelmed by the reward he’s received from his warmhearted upperclassman.

“Yah. That’s enough bowing, Junghoon! We’re supposed to support each other’s backs, not break ‘em,” she stops him while having a good chortle. “And I thought we’re friends helping each other, not just sunbae and hoobae... And if you’re wondering how you can pay me back, don’t. You’ve done it already. Instead, you can promise me you’ll be more confident and respectful to yourself, alright?” She raises an eyebrow.

“Ne, Sohyun-noona! I’ll keep doing my best.”

“You already are… Now, have the girls been treating you well?”

“Of course. I really enjoyed meeting them during breaks. For once, it’s nice meeting new folks who aren’t just there to be one-time partners or group mates who you only meet in class projects or reviews.”

“That’s great… I even heard that you’ve got a little crush on Nien, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t!” he exclaims in panic. “I think Nien-ssi’s just a little cute and funny.”

Sohyun cackles at his sudden burst. “Come on, now. I don’t see why that’s a bad thing… Do you want me to give you her number?”

He clasps his hands, lacing his fingers together. “I don’t think it’s appropriate, noona. Not without her permission or her choice, it’s not right.”

“Bummer,” she pouts. “I think she would’ve loved to get to know you more outside the club. But you still get a pass in my book!”

She hits him lightly on the right shoulder, leaving him confused. “Umm, how so?”

“You're being respectful. Not to go all boomer on you, but nowadays, folks just get into hook-ups more than actual committed relationships, which is fine but, some of those people just give us gals the heebie jeebies and asshats who don't give any shit about creating connections! Especially men… But not you, Junghoon-ah… You're a classic gentleman.” she snaps her finger, which makes a thumbs up in front of him.

“I don't really know how to make of that, but thank you, noona. Based on your principles about relationships, you must be a pretty great girlfriend to Xinyu-ssi.”

“Thanks, Junghoon-ah…” she daydreams beside him. “She is, too. Maybe even a better girlfriend than me. More than I could’ve possibly imagined. She’s amazing.”

“I don’t know much about her yet, but from what I’ve seen from you guys, she’s pretty nice. You two look great together.”

“That’s too sweet of you. And I’m sure you’ll get along with Xinyu just fine… By the way, you should watch her plays sometime. I’ll pay for your ticket if you want.”

“That would be neat, but I’m sure I can afford it thanks to my gigs. Including the club.”

“Well, She’s actually gonna star in a new original romance play that's coming up by the end of the month, so you better check your calendar… It’s my queen we’re supporting.”

He’s intrigued. “I’ll see if I’m free that day, but I’m sure she’s a phenomenal actress.”

“She definitely is…” she sighs in awe. “Sometimes I can’t tell when she’s joking or being serious, like there are times when she does aegyos out of nowhere for no reason. That’s how I know she’s such a pro at these things.”

Junghoon laughs. “Maybe that’s just her charm. She knows that it gets you.”

“I guess so, and it keeps working every time…” she then faces him, retaining her smile. “But now, back to our last subject, do you want me to ask Nien for her number?”

“As much as I would like that, sunbae… We’ve only known each other for a whole month, just like with the rest of the club. It’s a bit too soon.”

“That's why you're getting to know each other through SNS. Don't you want that chance? It’s not even a chance anymore!” she whines at his impressive but irritable persistence.

“I do…” the hesitation in his voice starts to sound apparent. “Just not now… I want to give it time, if you understand what I mean. I do appreciate your consideration, though.”

Someone walks to them. A woman with a tall stature and long hair, slightly towering over Junghoon. Both of them recognize her. Speak of the goddess herself.

Xinyu rushes to Sohyun with an embrace. “Babe! Have you handled everyone’s payments yet?” For a moment, she turns to Junghoon with a cheerful smile. “Hey, Junghoon-ssi.”

Junghoon quietly bows to her, just as the loving couple embrace and passionately kiss in front of him. They’re a match made in heaven, Junghoon thinks to himself. And it’s also a bit awkward to be here. Why am I not leaving?

“I just did babe,” Sohyun nuzzles her nose. “Should I wire your payment as well?”

“That can wait, jagiya.” Her lover’s cheerful tone slowly shifts into a more seductive one. “You can pay me with something else, though.”

“As much as I would love that, I don’t think now’s the right time, Xinyu-yah...” Despite her words, Sohyun's actions can't help but rebel against her own restraints, allowing herself to lean closer towards Xinyu's hot, red lips.

“Then when’s the right time?”

“I should head out, noonas,” he mumbles and bows to them, hiding his agonizing embarrassment while the couple slowly embrace beside him. “Thank you for today.”

Right as he gets on the bus, he receives a text from Sohyun. Understandably, he expects another errand or follow-up from an upcoming group assignment in one of their classes. Maybe even an error in the total amount of her payment, which weirdly enough, he was partly hoping for.

[Sohyun: Here’s Nien’s number.] [Don’t you dare mess it up. Hwaiting!]

He begins typing his reply on his keypad, but he immediately notices a second message pop up before he can complete his text.

[Sohyun: If you’re typing that question, yes, I asked her!] [Do you need any other proof?]

She’s already read his thoughts. Junghoon takes a heavy breath and exhales with a smile. Is this really happening?

{Junghoon: I don’t know what to say, noona.}

[Sohyun: Don’t say anything, Junghoon.] [Just do well and go with the flow (>ᴗ•) b!]

{Junghoon: Kamsahaeyo.}

He proceeds to switch to his more familiar group chat in a fit of panic.

{JungJung: Guys, guys! You got a minute? I have an emergency.}

[Myungi: What happened, Jung?] [Everything alright?]

= = =

just another note, if you've reached this point. since I'm still stumped writing newer fics (I'll release one soon), I'll most likely start posting more of this series, though I'm gonna sort out how I'm gonna divide them each chapter. again, I know this fic ain't everyone's cup of tea, but I'm still thankful for y'all who's read it. hope you have a nice day!

[etirabys]

meandering post about reading Orson Scott Card again

I've been offline starting at 9pm every day (except once. I was drunk at karaoke and asked for anons at 8:30pm) for six weeks, with the result that in befuddled boredom two nights ago I picked up Orson Scott Card's Songmaster from the house bookshelf.

I read Ender's Game and three sequels when I was a teen thought the books were mid. Since those are OSC's best works I assumed he had nothing more interesting to offer me and didn't try more of him for fifteen years, but Songmaster was compelling enough that I immediately afterwards picked up The Memory of Earth, the first book of a pentalogy.

TMoE is extremely my jam: after humanity blows itself up on Earth, AIs monitor thriving human civilizations in the planets that survivors managed to escape to, and suppress any tech that enables large scale violence by exerting low key mind control via satellites. But forty million years pass, many of the satellites break down, and the AI needs help from humans to restore capabilities. Because as its control wanes, people are starting to e.g. conceive of airplanes or bombs again, and override the injunctions against entering military alliances more than two edges of connection away.

The AI is worshipped as a god all over the planet, but the fourteen year old protagonist that becomes one of the AI's agents tells the AI from the beginning that he'll break with it if its morality seems wrong to him. I like the fourteen year old – unlike Ender or Songmaster's protagonist (adult minds piloting ten year old bodies), he's a normal gifted kid who's unpopular 50% due to his ego and big mouth and 50% because he's socially inept and offends people even when he's trying to be nice.

Songmaster is also partly about a permanent solution to large-scale violence, albeit through one guy who establishes a monopoly on violence and sweeps in pax galactica. Both it and TMoE are preoccupied with the eradication of suffering from evil / human violence, which is closer to my resonant frequency than narratives about defeating particular people or ideologies. At the moment I can't think of any other book with such an insistent focus on the matter than T.H. White's The Once and Future King. It's hard to make a compelling story out of, and I don't think Songmaster really succeeds, but TMoE's premise is well suited to explore that. (I'm also enjoying the matriarchal culture where everyone is expected to have multiple serial-monogamous marriages.) After reading 70% of TMoE last night I wrote:

Usually when I read fiction there's a small part of me going, how can I use this as fodder for my own growth, how can I remix or improve or react against this, how do the author and I measure against each other? (If the quality and content are at an anti-sweet spot, the small part becomes quite large and I feel all teeth towards the author.) But on occasion I read something so close that the absence of that measuring-feeling is its own sensation – ego departs, or at least is split across two bodies. There's just amity and recognition

And it's pretty interesting to feel this way about Card for, well, the reasons.

(If you're familiar with Card drama none of the following will be new to you; I'm coming to it fresh so the rest of this post is me going "uh... wow")

I vaguely knew he was a homophobic Mormon who'd gotten into fights about gay stuff, but I couldn't tell from the Ender books I read. But in Songmaster his issues spring off the page in such a weird way. Every fifth Goodreads review of this book is "Card, u gay?" because, well,

(One review, possibly from a fellow Mormon, that went "Card, it's so sinful of you to be this gay in your novel". Why did he write this book that would predictably make everyone mad...)

it's full of gay male desire. The protagonist (Ansset) is approximately a castrato and characters notice him sexually a lot. The first and only time Ansset has sex it's with a Kinsey 4-5 male character he loves, who's married to a woman but has fallen in love with Ansset. It turns out the drugs Ansset took to prolong his singing career painfully and only-kinda-figuratively explode your balls when you have your first orgasm and you'll never feel sexual desire again. (You'd think his loving teachers would have warned him of that, but, whatever, they didn't.) The other guy is literally castrated in punishment for inadvertently torturing a highly valuable castrato. It's pretty bald: GAY SEX IS ALMOST IRRESISTIBLY TEMPTING BUT YOU SHOULDN'T DO IT.

(Sidenote: both Ansset and the guy's wife are very close and have a "there's enough love to go around" attitude about the gay sex initially, before they go "wait Josif is a SERIAL MONOGAMIST... he can only love one person at a time... the moment he had the gay sex his marriage was destroyed". It's funny in a mildly stupid way that Card would set up this parable of homosexuality destroying lives and a marriage but almost everyone involved is peacefully ready to sail into an open marriage. I guess it makes sense if you want to say very clearly that THE GAY PART IS THE BAD PART)

which is fascinating to me, because... why would you tell on yourself like that

(81k also told me secondhand of an essay? interview? where Card openly says "we have to stand against legalizing gay marriage because everyone will get gay married and society will collapse", so that's informing my read of Songmaster as well)

I am pretty dang open about my personal life online but if I had a lot of feelings I thought were disgusting and immoral I would not write a novel dripping with those feelings before pointedly castrating the leads for them. Especially if it wasn't relevant to the actually highbrow themes of (checks notes) winning over your adversaries with kindness and never relinquishing your monopoly on violence. I would be so so so so embarrassed to let this go to print, it's so psychologically transparent, what was he thinking

(Well, I assume he's a very different person with different social incentives. For all I know, people in his church went "hey Orson we read your book and it's clear that you're gay but signaling strongly that you won't give into the gay feelings, we're here for you, it was really brave of you to publish this".)

[rad-roche]

The way you write intimate scenes with Gloria and Nick are so hot and special and unique I hope we get more one shots of their life together

Sincerely me, a robot sex enjoyer

aw, thank you!! i'm very glad to hear that. i remember way, way at the start, when i was deciding to do a pastiche of 30s detective novels, i was laying out exactly what i had to do. well, it has to have this sort of tone, and use approximately this sort of language, and the character i'm making (who would become gloria) has to do this sort of thing... and i remember reading over the list and lingering on just how sexually charged a lot of those books are and thinking ah, fun to write, but it's not like i could actually follow them into the bedr... and being like. wait. why can't i? i like writing sex! and that was that decided. ditto gloria's truly, truly gigantic amount of swearing. that wouldn't fly in the time period, but if i took it out, she wouldn't feel like gloria, would she?

the written series is concluded, but as far as comics and pictures go, i'm always down to do more. if you didn't know, i host the nsfw stuff offsite. just as an aside, a thing that really vexes me in books, tv, not so much movies since their runtime is limited but you get the gist, is when the getting together/will they won't they is sooo charged and tantalising and makes you want to chew through your arm, but the minute they actually sleep together it goes out the window! it's like oh, relationship resolved. sex has been had. it is time to move on. character chemistry is a weird, tricky mistress, that's about as hard to pin down as the real thing, but i tried my damndest to make my audience go oh alright it's been two years and they're gnawing on each other like starving animals i see it, even if they're doing something totally unrelated and not sexy at all. thanks again, anon! it's not an aspect i've seen people bring up much, so i'm really glad it's resonated

edit: oh i almost forgot! keep your peepers peeled for this year's valentine's picture

[chdarling]

Hi CH Darling!

I just wanted to take a moment to tell you how much your books have meant to me. Over the years since you started publishing TLE1 and TLE2, I’ve gone through some really difficult times, losing both my parents after a long illness. It might sound silly, but reading about James’s grief over his father’s illness and Lily’s loss after the accident resonated with me deeply. I felt seen in a way I didn’t expect, and your books made the grieving process so much more bearable.

I want you to know that I’m doing really well now, but I have to admit—I cried and cried when you dropped that TLE3 spoiler about James and Lily talking about death. That one hit hard!

I absolutely adore you, and I’m beyond excited for the third book. I just know it’s going to be spectacular. I also wanted you to know that I don’t think you realize just how much happiness you’ve brought to so many people—including me.

Sending you all my love ❤️

I had to sit with this ask for a little while before responding because it elicited such a strong emotional response in me (in a nice way!). The first time I read it, I sat down on my couch and just sobbed (again, in a nice way!). I am still in a mental place these days where I feel like I struggle to effectively wrangle my words around the thoughts I want to convey, but please bear with me as I try.

First of all, I am so, so sorry about your parents. That is such a heavy loss to bear. It doesn’t sound silly to me at all to turn to stories in times of suffering (this is why TLE exists in the first place, to be honest), and I am so profoundly honored to have been able in a small way to sit with you through this grief.

I have been feeling very useless and alone lately in the face of everything happening in my country and the world. I won’t go deeply into that, but I’ve spent a lot of time unhealthily and somewhat brutally interrogating myself over what can I even do to combat all of this, when the only thing I know HOW to do is write my stupid little stories? And what good does that do anyone, really? In the face of a fascist takeover, a burning planet, a lingering (and looming) pandemic, an intolerable onslaught of grief and loss, what is the point or value of my fuckin’ Harry Potter fanfiction? Of art at all? Of me?

This message — and all the messages people have been sending me lately — really helped to remind me what the point is. It’s connection. It’s communion.

Grief is an uneven road — it bends and forks and often loops back upon itself — but it is a road that all of us will one day walk. The point of art, I think — be it poetry or novels or a fuckin’ HP fanfiction — is to make sure that we do not have to walk it alone. Thank you for letting me walk with you, and thank you for telling me about it. It made me feel less useless and alone.

I cannot thank you enough for that. ❤️

Annnnnd I’m crying again. (In a nice way!!!!!!)

[akweia]

Nintendo Switch Games That Changed My Brain Chemistry

(A Love Letter to Some Special Video Games)

I call myself a cozy gamer. And while I still think that's true, I have played several games, where my playthrough experience was less than cozy and nothing short of a tear filled and/or emotional experience.

Which may seem a bit of a silly thing to say about a game. But, at essence, video games can be art that really touches people and teaches them something they didn't know before. Or resonate with parts of our hearts that even the jadedness of the internet can't wear away.

Or something that make us laugh, have fun when times are truly hard.

I always wondered what the best medium would be to express how I felt about games like that! (And I think a small Tumblr is just the place.)

So without further ado, in no particular order Nintendo Switch/ Video Games that changed my brain chemistry (I love all of these dearly)

and some light spoilers. None of these are new releases though, and I know most of these are pretty well known, so that should be ok.

Night In The Woods; Developed by Infinite Fall and Secret Lab, published By Finjii

Meet Mae, a black cat (aka trash mammal) moving back home after a mysteriously and intentionally vaguely described negative experience at college. But Like a lot of folks moving back home after a long while, nothing seems to be the same and yet so much is (like trying to fit into an old sweater), and Mae is haunted by mysterious forces both internal and external. Anyway. Is that a cult in the woods or is just your imagination? Why would you worry about that when you can build a trash animatronic with your old buddy Greg! ?

I love this game so much. It definitely plays kind of like a visual novel, but with aspects of a mystery adventure game with some platforming! The main cast is extremely sympathetic and this game somehow manages the Olympian task of balancing humor, small town darkness, and a compelling murky mystery.

Favorite quote: "I'm a total trash mammal!"

2. Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood; Deconstructeam and Devolver Digital!

None of this is your fault. But all of it is your responsibility.

Fortuna can see into the future. And like almost every oracle of lore, that has gotten her into trouble. Banished by her coven for her dangerous predictions, and trapped within her immortality and solitude, Fortuna does the unthinkable. She solicits the help of a powerful demon to change her fate.

But what's fate, destiny, and the future in the hands of powerful immortal witches? Make your own decision. Pay the price.

God I loved this one. Also made me cry. Sisterhood, responsibility, fate and our own play into it, power. All the good stuff. I know its been out for years, but telling any more of the story even on this small blog STILL feels like a crime. That's how good it is. I stayed up all night to finish my first playthrough!

Favorite quote(s): already up there :D.

3. Cozy Grove!!! Spry Fox!

A game that probably doesn't need any introduction. I've seen this one all over social media and gaming articles. I love my ghost bears! A little lost spirit scout stumbles onto an island full of ghost bears that need a helping hand. It's so cozy and I love that there's DLC. There's so many takeaways to be had, since there's so many unique stories with each bear. I love how peaceful it is to play through each story. It's the perfect mix of busy work and emotion to me.

My favorite bear: Charlotte Pine (I don't care if its basic! I love her! )

4. Citizen Sleeper Jump Over the Age and Fellow Traveller

Hello cyberpunk, space age dystopia facing the perils of incredibly late stage capitalism.

I wish I could erase this from my brain and play it over again.

A sleeper is essentially and unfortunately a mechanical being forced into servitude from creation. People who want to work off a debt can have their simulated mind grafted into a robot "sleeper" body without their memories or emotions. You play one such being that is trying to break the hold of their corporate captors as you try to outpace your own programmed obsolescence.

What do we owe to each other? And how will you choose to live and be free? And if you aren't human.. what are you? And who gets to decide? How do you decide.

Its cyberpunk! It's high stakes! I love it. Not very actiony action for some, but for me I was glued to my screen. I think there's a lot of takeaways from this one, but it left me wondering what do we owe to each other? The sleeper meets so many people they can help, and truly what do they owe to a world that has quite literally enslaved them from birth? I also think it's interesting and compelling how one person can mean so much to a system. There's pretty much always someone out there who needs you, no matter how small you feel.

Favorite Quote: "Wake up Sleeper"

5. Naiad, Hi Warp!

"Hello little tear!"

You play as Naiad, a newly formed being made to flow through rivers. Taking care of creatures of all kinds. It is so beautifully animated and written. And a poignant piece on anthropogenic impact to the environment. Its somehow lighthearted and a little heart breaking. Do our small impacts and acts of good matter when the odds are against us? You gotta flow to find out. If nothing else I could love this for how pretty it is, but I loved it for how it made me feel too!

See you later little tear!

Favorite quote above!

It was so nice being able to write about all these wonderful games! I think I'll keep posting things like this.

[spaicy-project]

A Reflection on My Creative Journey

🔹Spaicy Project:

A Reflection on My Creative Journey

It’s been 13 years since I began the Spaicy Project in 2012. What started as a personal passion—something I created just for myself—has grown into a universe that has resonated with many of you. I’m deeply grateful for the support and love you’ve shown me along the way. However, I want to share how this project has evolved, alongside my own priorities and vision as a creator.

When I started, I dreamed of turning Spaicy into a major franchise, something like a professional manga. Over time, I realized that a project of that scale requires a team and resources that, for now, don’t align with my current reality. I’ve learned that it’s not about doing everything alone, but about finding a sustainable balance that allows me to keep creating without sacrificing my well-being.

My life has changed a lot since those days when I spent hours drawing at 22. Today, I deeply value my world beyond the internet—my partner, my friends, my family, and the peaceful moments that recharge me. I’ve learned that my creativity flourishes when I embrace projects that excite me without draining me, and that has led me to rethink the direction of Spaicy.

This process has come with challenges too. Like any long-term project, there were moments of doubt and valuable lessons. One of those lessons was realizing that by accepting too many outside opinions on the narrative, the story stopped feeling entirely mine. That’s why I decided to reboot the project: to recapture the essence of what I always wanted to tell. Now, with more experience and a clearer vision, I’m ready to bring this story to a close in a way that respects both my personal life and creative passion.

────────────────

🔹A new possible format for Spaicy Comic

My new approach is to transform Spaicy into a hybrid story—part light novel, part illustrated comic. This will allow me to draw the key scenes I’m passionate about, while denser parts—such as training arcs, long dialogues, or worldbuilding—will be told through text, supported by colored comic pages and even animations if the future allows. This format is not only viable, but it also gives me the freedom to tell the full story without leaving it unfinished, all while keeping Spaicy’s spirit alive.

I know this change may come as a surprise to some, but I truly believe it’s the best way to honor both the story and my well-being. I’ve also discovered that I really enjoy creating lighter, self-contained content like illustrations and short animations that I can share with you without the pressure of a massive project. In this fast-paced content era, I’ve noticed that what resonates most with people isn’t always the most complex—and that has inspired me to explore new ways to create.

────────────────

🔹In Summary

Spaicy Project is still a vital part of who I am, but I’m no longer the same person who started it. Today, with a more mature perspective, I’m excited to bring this story to its conclusion on my own terms—balancing my passion with my well-being. If you’re starting your own creative project, my advice is this: start with something small, manageable, and joyful. Don’t put your entire identity into one single work—your worth as a creator goes far beyond that.

Thank you for joining me on this journey, for reading, and for being part of this world I love. I hope you’ll join me in this new chapter of Spaicy. I’m truly grateful for your support! 💜

Posted using PostyBirb

[typingwithmyhandstied]

January/February 2025 Reads

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote--- I read this for school. I did not like it. I could give many reasons, but I've decided to keep this positive/not bad reviews.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone--- This book surprised me, in a good way. Was I confused for the majority of it? Yes. Was it worth it in the end? Also yes.

Emma by Jane Austen--- Easily my favorite Jane Austen novel yet. I was reading this for like three months, but I am including it here becaue it's when I finished it. Emma Woodhouse is such a complex character, and I love her. (Side note: Only two books left and then I've read all of them...)

I Am Not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang--- What can I say? Ann Liang never misses. A masterpiece. I love how visceral all of her books always are. I felt like I could feel everything Jenna was feeling. Even if I didn't relate to everything, it still resonated, and I think that is the mark of true genius.

Sounds Fake But Okay by Sarah Costello and Kayla Kasyca--- I really loved how this was informative, but it was mostly about their own experience. I feel like I need to read more about ace people talking about their own story instead of the sexuality in general, and I really liked it for that reason. Plus, they are hilarious.

Morning In The Burning House: Poems by Margaret Atwood--- The first poetry book of the year. I'm going to be reading a lot of poetry books coming up I think. (My friend thinks I'm just trying to cushion my reading goal. I am NOT.) I did not expect to like this that much, but it hit so hard. I need to read more of her poems. She might be one of my new favorite poets.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood--- I also read this for school, but I liked it one hundred times, hell more than In Cold Blood.

She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo--- Another poetry book, another masterpiece. I did not understand every poem in this book, and that just made all the ones I did understand even better. Hell, the ones I didn't understand were still amazing.

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio--- NEW FAVORITE BOOK ALERT. (Every book I read is a favorite at this point but really.) I am so obsessed. I finished it over a week ago, and I haven't been able to start a new novel since. It made me insane. I feel insane. This book was insane. It was the perfect case of the perfect book at the perfect time for me I think. It also made me want to read more Shakespeare... I already want to read this book again. I could talk about it for HOURS.

NOTE since this is my first one of these: I am going to probably do these every month, but I want a few DISCLAIMERS.

As you might have noticed, I am not rating these books on any scale. I have them in the order I read them. I am not giving them stars. That for me is for Goodreads/Storygraph, and it's pretty meaningless half of the time anyway. I will not be doing that on here.

I am also not doing this to be all like LOOK HOW MANY BOOKS I'VE READ. I am not reading to meet a goal. I read because I want to, and I am doing this because I want to share about what books I've read because I like talking a little too much. So yeah.

IF ANYONE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT ANY OF THESE BOOKS OR HEAR ABOUT ANY OF THEM, HIT ME UP

[hanasnx]

can you share some of thosr anakin-related-content-you-consumed on ur anakin fixation era cz im fixating on anakin aswell rn and i want to study him!! please, idk where to start 🙇🏻‍♀️

supercut of star wars I - III reddit link with instructions to receive them via google docs

i've seen both tpm and aotc supercuts but i have yet to finish the rots supercut because of it being so long. there are also deleted scenes on youtube that were not included in the supercuts linked here:

star wars episodes I and II extended edition - unused deleted scenes youtube video

revenge of the sith 4 hour supercut - unused deleted scenes youtube video

if you cannot get a hold of the supercuts for some reason, no sweat. the same channel listed in the above links has a bunch of videos on their channel of all "restored deleted scenes" that you can watch individually. of course, that is without the "siege of mandalore" that's included in the rots supercut. but that's just the bits you would see from season 7 of the clone wars spliced in, so you wouldn't be missing anything.

star wars: episode I - the phantom menace

if you cannot get a hold of the supercuts for whatever reason, start here. one of my favorite star wars movies. features young anakin, about nine years old, and how comes to live with the jedi, how he meets padme, and where he comes from.

star wars: episode II - attack of the clones

we follow older anakin, about nineteen years old, where he reunites with padme and they fall in love. the cracks of the dark side's influences are beginning to show.

star wars: clone wars

this is the mini-series released in 2003-2005 to depict anakin's journey throughout the beginning of the clone wars to prepare audiences for star wars: revenge of the sith coming out in 2005. it has since been de-canonized and replaced with the clone series that comes out in 2008. it is still worth the watch. anakin's voice actor is supremely talented and sounds a lot like hayden christensen. albeit he is dramatic, as it is a kid's show, i still very much enjoy his characterization. it's actually pretty funny too, it did get me to laugh a couple times. chapter 24-25 i believe is where anakin undergoes a sort of spiritual awakening, and the ending always makes me cry.

star wars: the clone wars movie

it was honestly boring to me, but i still watched it for much needed context on the show.

star wars: the clone wars

as i’ve said before, i don’t really care for tcw!anakin, but this was still a fun and enjoyable watch. it wasn’t completely worthless to me, i did learn some more things about anakin that applied to hayden’s rendition.

unreleased star wars: the clone wars arc - crystal crisis on utapau (full) youtube video

i didn’t finish it but from what i’ve seen so far it’s pretty funny.

anakin & obi-wan | let my people go youtube video edit

one of my favorite edits to one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite movies. i think about it a lot, especially during the “this was my home.” lyric. hammering in the betrayal of brothers that grew up alongside one another, and if you resonate with that song and movie it provides another layer of context. it’s deliciously painful. when anakin’s side of “you who i called brother,” cuts through and interrupts the melody, impatient to speak about his perspective using ramses�� narrative to do it, it’s acutely accurate to anakin’s character in my eyes.

clone wars: battle of the heroes - a star wars fan animation youtube video

i haven’t seen this yet but i’ve been waiting to enjoy it to its fullest. the creator worked very hard on it for a long time, so it’s worth the link.

star wars episode III: revenge of the sith novel by matthew stover

i have not read this, but i’ve seen hundreds of excerpts over the course of this hyperfixation on tumblr. it’s widely accepted even though it’s decanonized, and offers insight into anakin’s head that you can’t access with just watching the movie. i thoroughly enjoy and reblog the excerpts i come across, but since i’m not a reader i haven’t picked it up to complete it myself.

star wars: episode III - revenge of the sith

the third installment in the prequel series, and where shit goes down. twenty-three year old anakin grapples with his desires overcoming his sense of obligations, warping his own ideals to fit into selfish purposes. you see how he betrays the republic, his wife, his brother, and himself, all for power.

star wars episode III revenge of the sith (xbox) no commentary walkthrough full game [1080p60fps] youtube video

i haven’t gotten to watch this yet but i’d like to soon, i’ve seen bits and pieces and i believe there are alternate endings that prove interesting. if you like gameplay movies i think you should give it a shot, but if not, go ahead and skip this one.

star wars: episode III - revenge of the sith - making the game youtube video

it’s short and sweet. about hayden’s view of the character anakin and how he acts in combat.

star wars: tales of the jedi

s1e5 where we receive insight as to how anakin trains his padawan.

vader: complete canon comic series 1-25 in chronological order youtube video

i loved this so much. so many good moments that i ate the fuck up. we follow vader in his first year of becoming the sith lord, grappling with identity, past, and recognition. we also get insight into the very sensitive time of jedi eradication, i learned a lot. my favorite parts are when vader has to fight without a saber against clones, make his own red saber by retrieving one from a surviving jedi, and the arc that includes jocasta nu.

star wars the force unleashed- full game walkthrough gameplay no commentary youtube video

star wars the force unleashed 2 - full game walkthrough gameplay no commentary youtube video

both of these i've been meaning to watch, but i haven't been in the mood. i figured i'd link them in case you were interested in more gameplay movies.

star wars rebels

i didn't finish this, but i did watch a lot of the vader content and the scarce anakin content. i'll watch anything that mentions him tbh.

star wars jedi: fallen order - full game - no commentary youtube video

i played this game and loved it. the ending is the money shot tbh.

star wars: obi-wan kenobi

this was probably the first sw show i watched after i got back into darth vader in august 2022. reawakened a lot for me, i really enjoyed vader's part in this story. reva is also one of my favorites, and i thought her being a mirror image to anakin in this situation was clever, i thought her backstory was unique and refreshing. but what really shines for me is vader's contribution as both an extension of the emperor and a vessel for his own selfish desires. there are parts where i can see he's more machine than man. there are also some anakin parts as well! which i didn't enjoy as much, funnily enough.

rogue one: a star wars story

i haven't seen this one in years, but i do remember darth vader's appearances being both funny and badass.

star wars: episode IV - a new hope

star wars: episode V - the empire strikes back

it took me a long time to come around on this one. now it's one of my favorites. especially because we start to get the first glimpses within the original trilogy of vader's humanity, and his ability to demonstrate faint loyalty to his blood.

star wars: episode VI - return of the jedi

fave sw movie tbh since childhood. you can't get better than the ending. vader's sacrifice is everything to me.

lego star wars: the skywalker saga

i had played this game back in may 2022 when i visited my sister. she and i used to play lego games together when we were kids, and one of my first video games ever was lego star wars: the video game from 2005 which she introduced me to. it holds a special place in my heart, and i really liked playing skywalker saga even though at this point i hadn't cared about star wars in years. when i got back home i couldn't stop thinking about the saga game so i bought it myself, and then played it so obsessively i didn't do anything else. it got me back in the mood for darth vader so i watched obi-wan kenobi, and one thing leads to another now here i am with a smut blog about anakin skywalker's entire life and his every iteration. i loved the game, i think you should play it even though it's just lego versions of everything, it's still really fun.

star wars: ahsoka

you see him in this and the cinematography is breathtaking at times, but i didn't care for it. i only cared about the glimpses of anakin/vader's appearances even if they didn't contribute anything to the story for me.

anakin skywalker vs palpatine full fight scene (hd) - star wars episode IX [alternative ending] youtube video

this is a fan edit! i think about it a lot even though i haven't seen the sequels.

the life of anakin skywalker: darth vader (star wars) youtube video

i haven't finished this, but from what i've seen it's taught me things even i didn't know. i really appreciated the facts that aren't even on wookiepedia.

any books on it i've only seen the excerpts here on tumblr, i haven't read any because i'm not a big reader but i've seen some great posts that i reblog. so don't sleep on the books/comics

great ask

[hyperpotamianarch]

So, today I want to talk about Maladar: one of the early books of Israeli Fantasy. Which might make it sound older than it is, since it was written in the 2000s, but I think I can stand behind what I say. If you have an interesting contradictory example - don't hesitate to point it out!

Now, admittedly, I did not reread the book in preparation for this post. My criticism of it is mostly based on memory. I did not hate the book, and neither did I love it - it was a decent book, but not a great one.

I did watch a video by the author (Liat Rotner) about her thought process in writing the book (in Hebrew), though. This post is based off of this video, in which she looks at three thigs in non-Israeli Fantasy literature she seems to consider significant: references to myths, connection to war and inventing a language. And thus, I intend to touch each of those in turn.

To start with mythology references: there barely are any. There's a general build that's supposed to be based on Kabbalah - how human deeds and thoughts affect other dimensions or worlds, tilting the scales for good or bad - but that's mostly an oversimplification. There are a couple of things that are taken directly from the Tanach, but they're distorted and don't create a coherent image. There are a couple of Midrashim I think Rotner could've incorporated, but she didn't. And the most major offense is how the book seems to imply Israel doesn't have folktales - ignoring centuries of culture in exile, without showing any reaction to it from the folkloric representation of countries Jews lived in. It seems to detach the history of diaspora from the history and existence of Israel, which may not have been intentional but is the implication I see. I have tried to articulate this point a couple of times already and failed, so pardon me if it seems a little dense.

As to the war connection, well, it is an interesting angle. LotR really was inspired by Tolkien's experience from WWI, to a degree, and with the current situation in Israel - a hostage crisis with an ongoing war - this could probably resonate very well with people. Except for the relative smaller scale, but I really can't blame Rotner for not predicting that in 15 years, Gil'ad Shalit will seem like a small problem. She did got criticized for presenting a political opinion in a middle grade book, but I don't think that should be that much of a problem. If anything, I think she overestimated the significance of that detail, as many Fantasy books weren't written under the shadow of war. However, of everything in the book... she very likely presented it pretty well, all things considered. Though it might be that I'm too close to her political opinion to notice the problem.

And now, we get to languages. Which... [deep sigh] Look. Lots of people think that they have to invent a cool new language for their Fantasy novel because that's what Tolkien did. But Tolkien was a freaking linguist. He was, very specifically, and expert on that topic. There's a common claim that he invented the language before he made up the story that went with it. I'm pretty sure Rotner's BA is in literature, not linguistics.

The concept of Maladan, as she presents it, is interesting: she says she mixed some Yiddish she learned with some Aramaic she knew from home (she grew in a religious family) and with ancient Hebrew to create it. But... how shall I put it...

We have exactly one sample of Maladan in the text of the book, and it's when our main protagonist sees the ancient prophecy that's related to the magic amulet he has. And I remember quite clearly that this prophecy was written pretty much wholesale in Aramaic, outside of one weird word that I'm going to have to assume was taken from Yiddish. Now, to be fair, it's no better or worse than the Ancient Language of the Inheritance Cycle, which is a pack of random Latin and Germanic words (to my understanding). In that case, the only criticism I have that is particularly on Maladan and not the Ancient Language is that it's either under-developed or under-presented.

To conclude, I would like to note that all those point, on paper, are good ones: the outside references, lived experience and invented languages of Tolkien did contribute to the overall experience of reading his book. I simply think that Rotner didn't do that all that good. Perhaps the mere fact she attempted to copy a success destoyed her chances, or perhaps she didn't do enough research. I don't know. If you enjoy the book - great! All the more power to you! I simply think there needs to be a book that does this better. (Please don't point me towards Charashta, I've already read it.)

[vengeancedemon]

TIMING: immediately after part 1. LOCATION: emilio's apartment PARTIES: @highoctanegem & @vengeancedemon. SUMMARY: with the truth undeniable, jade and emilio talk about what happened and what comes next. CONTENT WARNINGS: none!

Jade wished she could’ve been pissed at him longer. Cause like, let’s be real… It hadn’t been nice, watching him chat with literally anyone but her online. It hadn’t been nice refereeing all those petty arguments between him and Regan, or watching him start a rotten meat business (?), or trying to get a better read on his situation via those convos while her texts went unanswered. It was super rude of him to pull out the death card now, actually. And okay, mad wasn’t really her style. She was more likely to get back at him in sneaky ways, find a different outlet for all those negative feelings she hated having stuck in her chest. But she probably could’ve made a good case as to why it was totally fair for her to be a little bit miffed about the whole thing. Obviously, the circumstances changed as soon as she entered the apartment and her spidey sense went off. Some pieces were now connected, some puzzles were solved. If she felt any sort of way other than hurt, she could put a pin in it. For now. (The death card kinda was the most powerful card in the deck).

She wasn’t prepared to learn that Emilio had died, obviously. And even less prepared to realize he didn’t stay dead (what were the chances, really?), but something about his admission, something about the emotion he kept restraining in his voice resonated with Jade. It pulled her back right to the couch they were sitting on. As opposed to where her mind had been wandering throughout this, of course. Which was… jumping on the walls, cartwheeling across the floor, trying other athletic feats on the table or something. Being dead then coming back to (un)life was factual, unequivocally true, given the fact that she had eyes and the special hunter sauce. Concrete. But it was his fear that felt the realest thing in the room to Jade. It was his fear that sucked out all of the adrenaline that had been cursing through her body since she set foot in his apartment. His fear was just as real, and that was what made everything even weirder. 

Maybe it was cause she rarely felt scared. For someone who believed herself to be so attuned to her emotions. (Anger wasn’t one, those were just bad vibes that people should just ignore), fear was… novel. For years she’d bypassed it, or maybe she’d simply been unable to identify it. Almost like if one of her siblings had unplugged the wire that was supposed to make that feeling kick in. Like if they’d forgotten to check yes on the trait when they were customizing her personality. Not Ruby, that was totally not her doing, she would’ve said a healthy dose of fear kept hunters sharp, alive for longer. But maybe Jasper. (Mhm, being a daredevil had his seal of approval written all over it). No joke, she could probably count the things she had been scared of in her life with one hand. Her father’s voice. A wasp nest in their tool shed. Going back to Roseville after college. Van getting hurt. Losing Regan. Fear required some kinda perceived danger, didn’t it? Maybe her baseline had been so high growing up, so inhuane, that everything else was… (actual, real) child’s play. Maybe this kinda thing went into the ‘you’ll understand when you’re older’ category, cause… well, she had been worrying about a lot more things recently. And she figured from worrying to fear there was like, a hopscotch of distance. 

Jade looked at him in slight wonder. Emilio was scared, and it took everything in her not to ask, of what? Had he realized, as he bled out (cause given their nightly activities, it was the most likely cause of death, who were they kidding?) that he was actually not up for it? Did he realize he’d wanted an extension on the deadline at the last moment? Was the fact that he’d risen, his own doing in a way? And actually, she had to ask, whether he knew it or not. Whether he could untangle the mess that were his words and feelings to supply an answer or not. If he was scared, then she wouldn’t be. That was one of those simple choices so rarely presented to her, so she made it. “What part is the scariest?” Cause obviously, there was always an easy target to stab, a closer mark to throw a punch at. He wasn’t the big, outward feelings kinda guy, but he was action. He was able to spot the issue even if he couldn’t verbalize how it made him feel. (And they’d already established fear was a big one there, anyway).

Not many things were simple these days, she had to agree with Emilio there. Quietly, not cause she didn’t wanna give him the reason, just cause he was talking and she wanted to be respectful, obviously. (But also, maybe). Jade tried her best not to conflate his negative to let her help, with how she felt about his decision to keep her in the dark about his death. He didn’t imply it was about her qualifications, and she wanted to believe he was being truthful. (But okay, it still did sting a bit) (Based on past experiences or whatever). She looked down at the dagger in her hand, swallowing a knot in her throat. At least she was able to keep some tears at bay for now. Tears she pushed further down when he clarified she would get hurt too, should she honor her intentions of sending him to the farm upstate. She froze in confusion for a beat. She was almost positive he wasn’t talking about her feelings being hurt. (Cause well, that ship had kinda sailed with him as captain). Nuh uh, scratch that, she was positive. He was being literal, wasn’t he? He was expecting her to pick up what he was putting down. 

(She buffered a little).

The what in the puzzle was revealed unexpectedly, as sometimes things were, and it was mostly done by discarding. Mares and zombies…they could hurt, (she sure had a bullet wound scar thanks to that gay cowboy), they had abilities they could use to inflict damage, but she was more or less equipped to deal with them. Their disposal wouldn’t inherently harm her, if she took the right measurements. But Emilio made it sound inevitable. And she could almost see the dim walls in the living room being replaced by pale blue ones from the room she shared with Amber. She remembered as they went over her sister’s flashcards (cause she was a nerd like that) (in hindsight, Jade was always gonna have to carry the mantle of being the cool Bloodworth), learning key facts for each undead species. She was never the one who retained all of it, but of course, the knowledge remained. 

About three things she was absolutely positive: First, he was confirmed not a vampire. Second, he made his final demise sound like an event. And third of course, the common thread of revenge and unfinished business during his lifetime. Yeah, no. That piece of the puzzle was impossible to fit anywhere else. “Oh,” she said dumbly, even though, it was the smartest she’d felt since she figured out which of her plants she was overwatering. (All of them) (And okay, she shouldn’t feel smart simply cause she was actually displaying deductive skills any decent slayer would. But the dubs were so rare these days, let her have this) (And also, her plants were doing a lot better now, by the way, after some trial and error). She winced, realizing just a minute ago she’d been thinking about how it was kind of a silver lining that Emilio got to keep immortality as his skincare? Okay, maybe not. He was… he’d eventually…

Jade held her breath as he contemplated her offering, the revelation of his nature pressing new tears against her throat. They could figure out something, they just needed more time. An unwanted sensation of déjà vu swooping in her belly. She’d been in this position before. This… helpless. She didn’t like thinking about it too much. To the point that they (her earliest memories) had become one of those [redacted] chapters. One of those… episodes banned in 50 countries. She’d pleaded silently and not so silently before, for Onyx to let her off the hook, for him not to hand her a knife, for him to skip this one lesson and this other hunt, for him not to capture vampires for her to stake on “special days”. And he’d listened, he’d delayed her training, he’d assigned her easier tasks (like holding a crossbow far away from the action). His love had made him ‘soft’, his words, not hers. (His biggest mistake, he’d called it recently too, after all those years reassuring her it wasn’t the case). 

But maybe he was right. Maybe if he hadn’t loved her, if he hadn’t hesitated to subject her to the same training all slayers went through, then she wouldn’t be here, questioning how many more times she was gonna keep failing. Questioning if she should make exceptions for undead best friends. Why did he even listen to a kid? He should’ve known better, and then no one would be in this mess. He couldn’t be the hands that cradled her and also the ones handing her the knife, it didn’t make sense. He’d set her up for failure and now had the gall to hate the consequences of his actions. (It was whatever, she was not going on a tangent about him) (anymore).

She’d pleaded for Emilio to stay a little longer, to give it time to figure things out, to give them time to catch up, despite her duty hanging above them, despite her willingness to hurt them both. And so, he loved her enough to let her off the hook, too. Loved her to the point of taking that blade away from her, to the point of enabling her failure, too. Which, based on the scorecard, it seemed like the only way people around her could love her. It used to bother her, how no one seemed to root for her glow up. But now it bothered her that she wasn’t nearly as bothered by it. (Like, maybe people not wanting her to be a murderer wasn’t so offensive, whatever) (She should still care a little, though, right?). What Jade wanted to focus on, was Emilio agreeing to stay a little longer. Agreeing to sit with her on this couch, letting her pour one out for him. Metaphorically. Except, not really. She’d just pour it out of her mouth, too. She set the dagger on the couch first, but then decided to place it on his thigh. And when she let go of it, she looked ahead, at the wall (that was definitely lacking in the nude photography department), before leaning her head on his shoulder. She sighed, blinking a few remnant tears. “I bought it for you. The sheath’s inside the bag,” along with the banana magnet, that sorta didn’t sound nearly as funny now. But well, this was the first time she’d come back from a so-called family vacay only to find her friend had turned into a… fury. She had some experience for the next time that happened.    

She wanted to walk on eggshells, respect his time, but also, was she even the Jade he knew if she didn’t push a little bit? If he didn’t earn at least one eye roll from him? Emilio might have been scared to touch those subjects, but she wasn’t. Couldn’t be. Wouldn’t be. (And somehow, she had allowed Onyx and Ruby to question the kinda person she was with very minimal pushback) (Why?) (She knew why. Hated the why). “Have you fed?” Did he already know… what, um… specific brand of… meal he needed? (Did she want to know? If he was gonna be committing… Actually, she did wanna know. He wasn’t Metzli, he was Emilio. She’d always want to know). 

Emilio, who was dead, and he’d come back as a fury. In case the audience at home hadn’t caught up, by the way. Sorry, Jade was there with the rest of them now. Her heart was still doing laps around the room, threatening to jump out of the window every now and then, her body still seemed to be leaking grief despite her best efforts, but her mind had already created a nice little compartment, added a few cute stickers to the folder with the information, and closed it for later assessment. The show could get back on the road, even at 30 percent capacity. (Her half speed was many people’s full speed, anyway). 

She poked the hole in her black jeans, trying to get her thoughts in order. There was an avalanche of questions she still hadn’t asked. Was he keeping himself away from everybody who loved him, or just the ones who could sense him? Where was Teddy? Did they know? Was Emilio planning on pursuing revenge on the person who killed him? How and when did it happen? And she knew he might want to push the spotlight away from him, ignore all the uncomfortable conversations, just the way he’d ignored her messages. She’d definitely wanted to discuss her California adventures with him, but that was before she showed up to him chilling on the couch, reeking of death. That kinda stuff had a way of rearranging priorities, shockingly. 

Cause there was no way to get back to any normal friends catching up moment, nope, but Jade could offer him her consistency, she could resume her position as the comedic relief. Wrestle him away from the storm in his head, peel a couple layers of severity out of the situation. Had to, cause Emilio was scared. But she wasn’t. (Not yet). “I kinda hate that and I can’t be mad at you for ghosting me, cause… well, that joke is ripe for the picking, isn’t it?” He really did almost ghost her for realsies. “Plus, you beat me at the who had the worst April competition.” And actually, it was the second April in a row where they both seemed to be going through it. Maybe next year, they should invest in some bubble wrap in advance. She was gonna add a note on her phone. “You just…had to go and one up me,” she clicked her tongue, tempted to steal the bottle back from him, but nope… she was gonna have to rinse her mouth later if she did. She wished Emilio liked sugary drinks better. (More importantly, she wished her friend hadn’t died while she was on the other side of the country. She wished she hadn’t left for two weeks, cause then maybe she would’ve been hanging out with him when it happened. She wished he hadn’t returned as a revenge-thirsty creature. She wished he could’ve seen his daughter again. She wished she could offer him relief in a way that didn’t eliminate him from her life) (Alas, only one of those problems had any room for fixing, so… time to start introducing him to cocktails). 

“I missed you,” she said softly, aware of how extraneous to anything they were talking about her words were, but… for the three weeks she’d been unable to talk to him, the three weeks she hadn’t known what was going on, that had been the most frequent thought in her head. She’d missed her friend, and that didn’t change just cause there were more pressing issues to tackle. At least, she was actually able to say it. (A relief that should’ve felt viscerally wrong, but didn’t). Then she bristled, tasting the salt of the tears rolling to the corner of her mouth. “If you didn’t wanna pay me my 70 bucks you could’ve just said so, you know?” Cause that had definitely worked so well for him before. Honestly, the more she thought about how he was sure he was getting rid of her so easily, the funnier it got.

—

What part is the scariest? It was a fair question and, really, was that any surprise? Jade confused him, sometimes. Jade spoke in ways he didn’t understand, made him wonder if he came from a different planet than she had instead of just a different country, made him question just about every aspect of his life because how could they be made of the same history and be so different? How could they both claim the title of slayer and wield it in ways that were nothing alike? Jade was an enigma, was a riddle, was a case he’d never quite been able to solve. She wore her mask in a way that felt different from Eve, different from Teddy, different from Emilio himself, and he didn’t know where the edges of it were. He didn’t know how much of the strangeness was a disguise and how much of it was Jade. He knew her the way you knew a book written in a foreign language. You could turn the pages, you could even translate the words written on them, but they’d never sound quite as they should.

But even when Jade was confusing, even when she made no sense at all and made him want to yank his hair out and roll his eyes and ask questions whose answers wouldn’t make any more sense to him than the questions themselves, she had never treated him in a way that was unfair. She had never asked him to do anything that he’d felt she had no right to ask for, never expected things that weren’t right for her to expect. He didn’t always like the things she asked him — namely, they’d disagreed on their duty and what it entailed more than once — but he’d never been able to deny that she had a right to ask, anyway. This was no different. It was fair to wonder which part of his experience had been the most terrifying. 

The problem, of course, was that Emilio was still wondering the same himself.

He didn’t like to think about his death. He wondered, sometimes, if it would get easier as time went on. A hundred years from now, would it be a dimple instead of a canyon? Would he be able to laugh about the ridiculousness of it all, roll his eyes at how foolish he’d been? It seemed impossible. Right now, thinking of it at all ached. 

He could tell her how he’d felt when that knife went into his chest. He could tell her about the fear, about how unexpected it had been. He could tell her about the way he’d thought, up until the moment the blade twisted, that he was going to find some way out of it. He could recount the cool metal of the dumpster as his limbs were folded inside of it, could recall how the light was the first thing to fade and the sound was the last. 

Or maybe he could tell her about his thoughts instead, about the foolish way he’d thought there might be something waiting for him when it was all over. He could tell her about the moment he registered death as inevitable, when he’d imagined himself forgiven for every wrong he’d ever done, because wasn’t that how it always went? Living people were complicated, messy things. They made mistakes, they faltered and they fell and they let down everyone they cared about and everyone who cared about them. But the dead were simple. The dead were like clay; you could shape them into whatever you’d needed them to be. In life, Emilio and Juliana fought so much and so often that he remembered her voice best in angry tones and screaming insults. But in death, he imagined her softer. In life, his sister had betrayed him, had told his mother things he’d never wanted her to know and signed his death warrant in the process. But in death, he always thought of her as she’d been at sixteen, when Victor’s death united them in their grief. In life, his mother was someone he’d wanted to get away from. In death, she was right. 

There was a reason, he thought, why only the dead were sainted; none of them could object to the title.

He could tell Jade about all of this, but it wouldn’t answer her question. Because hadn’t waking up been just as terrifying? Hadn’t he fought against the bodybag Eve had zipped him into? Hadn’t his chest heaved with breaths he didn’t need to take, hadn’t the world closed in around him when the realization struck? Hadn’t he felt Eve’s blade against his throat and thought, for a moment, that he ought to encourage her to saw through his neck even knowing how afraid he’d been with a knife in his chest, even knowing that forgiveness was a thing he’d imagined and could never truly earn? 

Or maybe, he thought, Jade would want to hear about the darkness. What would she think if he told her that, for the first time, his eyes didn’t automatically adjust to the dark and grant him the ability to see through it as easily as they did daylight? How would she react if he recounted how he’d felt in that bodybag, unable to see anything at all? Children were afraid of the dark. Would Jade think less of him if he admitted that he might be, too? If he listed out every part of the experience that haunted him, what would she say?

Dying was harrowing, but so was coming back after. Feeling his heartbeat fade had been just as scary as feeling its absence now. He’d been afraid in the dumpster, with his blood soaking the metal; he’d been afraid in the bodybag, with the darkness all around him. He couldn’t tell Jade which part was the scariest. He couldn’t even answer the question to himself. 

Fair questions, he thought, were often the hardest ones to form an honest response to.

“I don’t know,” he admitted quietly. It felt like the kind of confession he should have been making to a priest, but he wasn’t sure he’d be welcome in a church anymore. 

(The religion his mother had clung to was about a man who died and got up after, a man who was killed and shook it off because he still had more left to do. Was it hypocritical, then, that she’d also dedicated her life to killing others who did the same? What was the difference between a messiah and a monster? When did one become the other? Emilio knew which he was, knew his mother would have agreed, but he still wished there was a clear line in the sand to distinguish the two.)

He wasn’t looking at her, but he didn’t really need to be. He could feel it, the moment she understood the thing he wasn’t saying. Jade wasn’t Eve, who knew more about fae than she did the undead. A fury was rare enough for most wardens to be in the dark about what they were, but a slayer would know of them intimately. Perhaps only through stories — most slayers Emilio knew never met one at all, and for obvious reasons, few people knew a living slayer who’d successfully dispatched a fury — but it was something they all learned about anyway. There were whole hosts of undead things to worry about, but the best slayers had at least some working knowledge of all of them. 

So Jade knew, now, what he was. She was the second person to have that distinction — the fact that Owen found it out before she had made his skin crawl just a little, even if it was no one’s fault but his own — and the second to know exactly what it meant. Owen wouldn’t kill him because Owen was selfish (or so he claimed), because he wasn’t willing to give his own life for such a cause or because he wanted to watch Emilio suffer through his afterlife firsthand. And Jade wouldn’t kill him because Emilio was selfish, because he wouldn’t let the last act in his life be taking hers. And so there were two slayers who knew what he was, and two slayers who would do nothing about it. Emilio would continue to exist in this miserable, in-between state, and they would continue to let him. 

Part of him wondered, then, if that meant he wasn’t alone in his monstrosity. It was a terrible thing to wonder, but couldn’t that be said of all his thoughts these days? He was a monster, with awful thoughts and unfair questions, but he didn’t know how to stop any of them from swirling around in his head. He would hurt people. It was an inevitable thing, something that could not be avoided. He would hurt people, and Jade and Owen knew it, too. They’d spent years learning about it, having it carved into them the same way it had been carved into him once. He would hurt people, and Jade and Owen knew it, and neither of them was going to do a goddamn thing about it. Did that mean the blame was shared, then? Did that mean Emilio got to slice up that guilt, to cut it into parts and hand pieces to each of them? To Eve, too? To anyone who knew a monster when they saw one, but let it go on with its monstrous life all the same? 

Jade said oh, and all he could do was nod. She knew what she was, and she held the knife in her hand but did not use it. She sat beside him on the couch, and her heart was still beating. And he loved her, and she loved him, and he tried, again, to answer her question: which part was the scariest? Bleeding out in the dumpster, or sitting on a sofa with his best friend after and telling her about it? He weighed the two on invisible scales, put the bloody teeth and the crumpled limbs on one side and the soft cushions and still chest on the other, and he still didn’t know which weighed more. He was dying, and then he was dead. He didn’t know which of those things was worse. Maybe the scales were perpetually even. Maybe both things weighed the same. Maybe the only difference between the fear of the dying man in the dumpster and that of the corpse on the couch was the fact that the latter’s heart was incapable of pounding to show it off.

She shifted beside him, the hand holding the dagger moving, and if she were anyone else, maybe he would have flinched. But this was Jade, and the dagger was not bound for his throat. She placed it on the cushion before thinking better of it and placing it on his thigh instead, and he marveled at the decision for a moment. She was sitting on the couch beside a monster, and she was handing him a blade. He was sitting on the couch beside someone designed to end his life, and he rubbed the handle absently and made no move to grip it. She’d said once that they were both shitty slayers, and she’d been right. And now, they were still bad at the things they were designed to do, even if they were no longer designed for the same purpose. There was a knife between them, but no violence climbing up the blade. There was a knife between them, and it might as well have been a bouquet of flowers. It was love; it wasn’t violence. Emilio wasn’t even sure when the two had stopped sounding synonymous. 

“It’s nice,” he told her, because it was. It was clear she’d taken time picking it out, clear she’d been thinking of him while she did it. “I like it. I would have liked it.” He should do that, shouldn’t he? Talk about himself in the past tense. That was what you did with the dead. That was how you differentiated them from the living. Emilio would have liked the knife Jade had gotten him, but Emilio bled out in a dumpster before she made it home to present him with the gift. Emilio would have laughed at it, would have made a joke, would have tested the weight of it in his hands and nodded in quiet appreciation. Emilio would have done a lot of different things, but the corpse on the sofa could only stare at the blade and absently run its finger across the handle. 

Jade asked him to stay a little longer and he would, even if only for her, but that didn’t change the facts. She wanted him here, but he was still dead. A corpse was still a corpse, even when you loved it. It would still decay, even when you kept it propped up on the sofa and sat beside it. Jade loved him, and he loved her back, but it wouldn’t start his heart back up. They both knew that.

He’d always liked that Jade was to the point, even if he flinched at the bluntness of her question now. It was still fair, and he was still honest, because that was how they were to each other. It didn’t matter if the question she asked him was one he didn’t like — he would answer it. He would tell her the truth, even when they both wished the truth was something different than it was. “Once,” he replied, thinking of the way his blade slid into Siobhan’s gut. His eyes flickered briefly over to the wall she’d stumbled against, to the dark stain he hadn’t bothered to scrub off the floor. “But… only a little.” I didn’t kill anyone, he could say, but what would it matter? They both knew that would change soon. They both knew his track record was going to get bloody sooner rather than later. “I’m still… figuring things out.” Still trying to determine the best way to feed, the right way. He didn’t know if stabbing Siobhan hadn’t satiated his appetite because she’d survived the experience or if she just wasn’t the perfect target for his rage, and he wasn’t sure how to figure it out without getting more blood on the floor.

He let out a hollow laugh at her statement. This probably did bring a whole new definition to ghosting, even if he only barely understood the existing one. “I guess… at least I’m committed.” The joke fell flat, mostly because it was clear his heart wasn’t in it. Everything felt empty in a way it shouldn’t have, because he should have felt relieved. He was sitting next to his best friend on the sofa, and she hadn’t put a knife to his throat. He was sitting next to his best friend on the sofa, and she’d asked him to stay even knowing what it meant. He was sitting next to his best friend on the sofa, and he loved her and she loved him and he felt empty, anyway. The world was still heavy, and his knees were still buckling under the weight of it. Loving and being loved didn’t make anything any less crushing. Somehow, with the most awful parts of him, he thought it almost made it worse instead. “You know me,” he said quietly, still staring blankly at the knife on his thigh, “I like to win.” They both knew that this wasn’t any kind of victory. They both knew that everyone on this couch had lost something they were never going to get back.

The lump in his throat made it hard to swallow, but he took another long swig from the bottle and he swallowed it, anyway. He pretended the way his eyes burned was because of the taste of the whiskey and not the weight of her words, pretended the way they watered was the alcohol burning in his chest. “I missed you, too,” he admitted. He wanted to be angry with her, even if he had no right to be. He wanted to scream at her for not knowing, somehow, that he was in an alley in need of backup, wanted to berate her for leaving town and letting him die in a dumpster with a hole in his chest. But his limbs were heavy and the world was on fire and he thought maybe, for one night, he could be empty instead of angry. Maybe, this one time, it was the better option to be. “I’m sorry. For… all of it.” For dying on her, for coming back when he shouldn’t have, for avoiding her for as long as he had, for the fact that tomorrow, he’d probably go back to being angry. He was sorry that she loved him, and he was sorry that he loved her back. He was sorry that neither of them was very good at loving. He was sorry for everything. He’d never learned how to be much else.

—

‘I don’t know’ had the same ring to it as ‘all of it’, which only sank her heart deeper. And honestly, Jade should’ve seen it coming from a mile away. The guy had died, he’d lost everything for a second time, and then well, how many times could she keep repeating the tiny little detail of him coming back as the thing they were nurtured to hate? Or pity, in her case. (But… some could argue that it was just a nicer way of framing it, wasn’t it? And would they be wrong?) (That remained TBD, the thought sure kept nagging her.) So fine, maybe it was naive of her to hope that it wasn’t all bad. Naive to hope there was any kind of silver lining in death and unlife. Like, even Rose had that door when the Titanic sank! 

Someone back home would’ve said she was too grown for that kinda mentality. (But, she said she wasn’t tangeting about him anymore, so). 

Emilio had never been a man who displayed his fear the way he did his anger. Actually, anger was just the placeholder for the entire wheel of emotions with him. It didn’t fool her, obviously, cause Jade got it, hunters and fear had a weird relationship. (Kinda like hunters and happiness) (Or hunters and non-repressed feelings). So the fact that he was willing to show it now, own up to it under these circumstances, in front of her, broke her a little bit. She couldn’t picture it, couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t feel it. Being terrified of so many things. She didn’t want to either, experiencing crippling fear wasn’t in her bucket list. But she wished there was a way to split the bill, so to speak. That he could Venmo her two or three of his fears, and she could waste them all away. Sadly, there was nothing transactional about this, he could not work out how to do it. He kept footing all of the suck.

Jade watched him gauge the knife, while the notion that he was scared of so many things remained at the forefront of her mind. Had he really feared that she’d put the knife to his throat? That she’d found out about him and she’d stormed into his apartment not to see him, but to finish him? Did he fear other slayers now, in that case? Did he fear his own kind? (Did they still count as his kind?) (But also, would he be wrong? To now walk around with more paranoia drizzled on top of his paranoia that someone might tail him to end him just cause… He was…) (Nope. She kept running into tricky questions she swore not to touch yet. Better swerve on that). 

After a silence, he thanked her for the gift, but the smile about to bloom on her face didn’t prosper. He was speaking in the past tense, like he wasn’t literally sitting right next to her. She frowned at it, felt her lips tremble, but didn’t say anything about it. Was that what he wanted? To be referred to as a dead man? Was he testing things out? She like, kinda understood it. Not in such a dramatic way as being dead and coming back to life, but as in… life had taken her on a little journey too, since she decided to go solo. And whether she liked it or not, she could feel it. He probably felt it too, tenfold: The disconnect. Between who he was before he died and who he’d become after. 

Could a person really change that much? The simple act of flipping a switch, and fully glowing up was actually not simple at all. All those life coaches on Instagram had lied to her. Cause so far, every time she’d tried to go against herself, what she’d been taught, what she’d believed so fervently, she ended up finding out she was being rudely weighed down by several monkeys that didn’t even belong to her circus. She most definitely didn’t remember picking them up on her own. The closest thing she could imagine to Emilio’s predicament was humans going through near-death experiences. Some did come out to completely do a 180 on their life, didn’t they? Maybe they had gotten a little highlight reel of all their greatest hits and realized it was kind of a flop, and it was super embarrassing. So they had no other choice but to actually redo it all with a little more zest. 

She’d normally chime in, get her motivational speaker on, but this was as close to an original experience as one could get. Though maybe…not? There had to be records of previous hunters who’d come back for an encore. She’d never met one. But maybe her siblings had. Maybe Eve had. Maybe she could ask. Keeping it all hush hush, obviously. (Asking for a friend and all) (It wouldn’t even be a lie). What were they talking about? Oh, “you can still like it,” she said gently. Wasn’t that a choice in itself? She’d been learning a lot about choices recently. Like wall paint and tiles, and bedsheets. “Or you can hate it, that’s okay too,” Cause Jade didn’t care if Emilio decided he no longer liked knives, or if he decided he loved knives even more now (that sure would be a feat), or if he decided to pursue his newfound passion of sailing boats, or skydiving, or whatever. (She drew the line at MLMs, though.) She just wanted him to share that with her. And expect appropriate clowning, should his choices be silly. That’s what friends were for, after all. 

In a sense, he had an unmatched opportunity to flip things around. Enter a different era. Jade vibrated with the possibilities for about three seconds before she was brought back to the very painful reality that he was now a creature who needed a new sustenance, who needed to inflict some sort of revenge upon somebody else to keep walking this earth. (Hard to enter a new era with the odds so stacked against, right?) Sustenance he already got a taste of, apparently. Cool, cool, cool. Super chill. It was her own question, there was nothing vague about it (nor did she want to be, considering everything at stake) (sorry, poor wording). And she’d braced for the answer, but still… he had gone and done what was now in his nature. She tried not to have any dramatic reaction to it (and sure that was hard with an expressive face), but she was pretty proud of her clenched jaw and slow breathing. “Uh huh,” good, she could’ve added, would’ve added (except) (except… those monkeys). Good that he’d already taken precautions. That, in a sense, was also a dutiful thing to do. The slayer thing to do. Preventing a more violent outburst. Her brain was still a little scrambled, putting all those thoughts on the table at the same time, though. She nodded, “okay, that’s… You gotta keep figuring things out”.

And he’d hopefully tell her how that went next time. And Jade would… cope with the knowledge that she’s allowing it to happen (it was such a small act, in comparison to the storm he was weathering). Cause… Love made you stupid sometimes. Or all times, really. Sometimes it meant letting the love of your life drag home all the stinky dead things she saw, sometimes it was pleading to the sister who raised you to stop being so freaking narrow-minded, sometimes it meant letting your best friend commit violent acts in order to stay ‘alive’. What an inconsequential little feeling. She loved it. She hated it. She got high on it. Right now, she was a little mad at it. But most of all, she did not want some made up higher calling or anyone who believed in it to dictate and restrict who she could give it to. Not anymore. (But again, just declaring you were turning over a new leaf only made it easier for people to point out when you actually weren’t doing that at all) (But boy did she want to).

His laugh, defeated and miserable as it was, did make her chuckle in turn, though. She wasn’t about to go full Grey’s Anatomy gang laughing at George’s funeral (not that he’d understand the reference) (and you know, with eternity on the horizon… what were 22 seasons of a medical drama?), but it did feel nice. The pressure in her chest loosened a bit. “Committed to the bit, yup,” she tacked on, for old times' sake. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever fully managed to get him to understand what the bit meant but… it didn’t matter. She just wanted things not to be so heavy for him right now. “Sure,” she dragged her vowels in a skeptical tone. He claimed he liked winning the worst April competition, that might be the funniest joke uttered yet. Jade would’ve liked to swap places, maybe. Or, preferably, she would’ve liked both of them to enter the best April competition. If that was a thing that existed. Then again, they probably wouldn’t have met the qualifications or something. She figured that kinda contest had strict zero body count requirements.  

Jade kept her temple against his shoulder, letting another quiet moment pass, (and maybe it wasn’t an unnecessary, dreadful thing) (silence belonged in music sheets too, after all), until she heard his apology. It stirred her back into a sitting position. It was still odd to hear those words. Cause back home, people just did things. A whole lot of wrong things, apparently, she was starting to realize. And when they wronged you and decided they couldn’t stand your pouting anymore, they’d bring you a plate of fruit, or they’d invite you to the movies or… There was never like, acknowledgment of hurt feelings. The train kept moving, and you just had to hop right back in without paying attention to the wreck it’d left behind. (And she did get pretty proficient at both doing the wrecking and jumping into wagons so… the system couldn’t be that bad, right?). If anything, apologies had only become a more normal thing in her life recently. Regan had coaxed words out of her that had felt foreign her entire life. Had created a kinder, gentler space for her to mess up, for her to admit when she felt hurt, too. And as it turned out, she didn’t hate it one bit. Even if, being unapologetic still had its perks from time to time. 

Something about the upbringing of a hunter had Jade wondering if the Cortezes had followed similar strategies. “Yeah, well…” She sighed, and she could feel her tear ducts activate again (a sentence she wasn’t sure she would’ve ever thought about if she hadn’t met Regan). It was nice that Emilio was sorry. Some of what he had done had been pretty dumb, obviously. But there were choices influenced by fear. Fear that Jade couldn’t begin to understand. She was totally out of her depth here. And even if the hurt didn’t vanish with one apology, even if she couldn’t get back all those weeks in the dark, even if she couldn’t unfeel the loneliness and the confusion, she also didn’t plan on holding it over him (not in a mean way, at least). Jade was willing to let the death card stand a little longer. 

“I’m sorry too… sorrier, even.” Sorry for your loss, people liked to say. It was super strange to offer condolences to the person who’d died. But Jade was sorry. Sorry that he’d died scared and alone, that he now existed as a monstrous being, that he had seen himself as monster even before all of this anyway, that she’d asked for him to spend more time as said abomination, that she took too long to come out here and figure out what was wrong, that it wasn’t as simple as mourning a friend for her either, that she dared to think mourning a friend’s death would ever be the simpler scenario, that still despite everything, she thought they could work out a solution. Yeah, Jade was immensely sorry. And she wasn’t sure hope was what Emilio needed from her right now. She wasn’t even sure she needed the Whiskey, or a blade, or a banana magnet. Maybe he just needed someone to sit by his side, and prove to him, despite his inclination to cover his ears and eyes to what was in front of him, that his life had had more impact as a human being than it ever did as the weapon he was brutalized into becoming. 

“I’m gonna assume you’ve done a whole lot of silent contemplation lately, so…” Momentary truce with the concept of silence aside, Jade still believed it was a little bit like torture, and she figured, nay… she knew Emilio could do without it right now. She knew he would get back to it eventually, and his thoughts would be louder than any word he could speak, so for now, Jade would rather keep him right on this couch, with her. “I guess I need to ask for the story,” she tested the waters, for both of them. She felt more drained, but also less on edge. She could take it, she could hear about the man who’d decided to hurt them both, about the blade that sank into him, about the organs it pierced, the life it drained, about the ground he bled on, about what came after. And maybe it was selfish to ask, but Emilio of all people knew what it meant not to have answers.    

—

There was nothing more terrifying than the concept of being understood. It wasn’t something Emilio had realized until later in life because, in the beginning, he had wanted someone to understand him. His siblings never quite had, and none of them had ever really tried to, either. Neither had his mother. Even his uncle, who had perhaps come closest to at least housing the desire of comprehending the youngest Cortez, had fallen short in actual practice. Emilio had been so hungry for that understanding, had chased it so adamantly into adulthood without expecting he’d ever catch it. 

He’d chased it until he was 26 years old and Edgar’s friend from camp needed a place to stay. He’d chased it until his brother volunteered Emilio’s couch, “because it’s not like you use it, anyway.” He chased it until Juliana took one look at him, smiled with sharp teeth, and introduced herself in a way that carved her initials into his heart for the rest of his goddamn life. People said, sometimes, that you ought to be careful what you wished for, lest you might someday get it. Emilio had learned that when a woman with dark, curly hair and sharp brown eyes understood him better than anyone else ever had.

It was terrifying, the way she knew him. It was harrowing. She could trace his silhouette in the shadows, could explain him more thoroughly than he’d ever been able to explain himself. Juliana knew the nooks and crannies that Emilio hadn’t recognized himself, knew him in ways he hadn’t thought possible. There was no hiding from her, no pretending to be anything he wasn’t. Juliana knew him. Sometimes, it felt like she’d known him from the very start, from the first day she’d told him her name.

And then she’d died, and it had felt like all the parts of him she’d touched had died right alongside her. 

She’d died, and no one knew him anymore. She’d died, and Emilio hadn’t even known himself. He’d been as much a ghost as she was, haunting a world where he was unknown and unimportant. He’d come to Wicked’s Rest as a restless spirit, ready to turn to a poltergeist and destroy whatever was left in his path. But this town was one full of ghosts and sometimes, they found each other. This town was full of people who, like Juliana, cared enough to try to understand him. 

He didn’t think anyone did a better job at it than Jade. It wasn’t for lack of trying, of course — Teddy and Wynne and Nora and Xóchitl and so many others put all they had into comprehending him, but Emilio was a puzzle who had so many pieces still missing. No one could understand him without understanding where he’d come from — or, more accurately, what he’d come from. Other people looked at his background, at his family, and they couldn’t make sense of it. They couldn’t comprehend why he’d been raised the way he had. Even those who grew up in the world of monsters didn’t always see why some needed to fight them.

Jade was different, though. Like him, Jade was a slayer. Like him, she’d lived her entire life knowing exactly what went bump in the night. Other people talked about second chances, or third, or fourth. But Jade knew exactly how dangerous that kind of thing could be. A monster on its fifth chance usually meant a pile of bodies who’d had every chance taken away. Other people thought that mentality cruel, he knew. Jade thought it reasonable. 

She wasn’t the only one in this town who understood it, of course. Owen knew Emilio better than either of them would care to admit, comprehended him more thoroughly than some of his closest friends to both of their detriment. Eve, too, had a level of understanding that neither of them could deny, had strengthened it in the back of her van with a knife against his throat. Hunterst understood other hunters, even when the style with which they hunted differed. Jade was here, was on his couch, and he wasn’t kicking her out for the same reason he’d let Eve leave whiskey outside his door, for the same reason Owen hadn’t killed him in that barn: because there was understanding here, and he was afraid of it. Because there was understanding here, and he needed it, too.

You can still like it, she said, and he kept staring at the knife. He remembered Eve’s blade against his throat, remembered Owen’s in his gut. Understanding was messy, sometimes. Especially among people like them. You can still like it. Could he? He would have before, but nothing was the same now. He wasn’t the same now. And he wondered, with a glance in her direction, if Jade understood him still. He wondered if his death had killed that understanding at last, if the knife to his chest had finally succeeded in carving out the pieces of him that could only be comprehended by other hunters. (Hunters. Just hunters. Not other hunters, not anymore. The word no longer applied to him; the title no longer fit. Emilio Cortez was not a hunter. Emilio Cortez was something to be hunted, now.)

“It’s nice,” he said, in lieu of answering the question neither of them was asking aloud. Was he still him? The man she’d bought this knife for was dead. The man whose couch they sat on bled out alone, with only his murderers to hear his final words. There was a body in front of her, and it was moving. It was sentient. But it was not alive, and Emilio didn’t know if it was him. He didn’t know what parts of him made it out of that alley; he wasn’t sure any really had. 

Was Jade? Did she really look at him and see the same man she’d known before, despite the twinge in her gut that reminded her, on a constant basis, that he wasn’t? Was her certainty that he was not the kind of monster she’d been raised to despise built only out of love, constructed from the ruins of the understanding they’d once shared? 

If their roles were reversed, would he think the same of her?

None of these were questions he knew how to answer. He wasn’t sure either of them wanted the answers, wasn’t sure they would have been able to cope with them. Some things, he thought, you were better off not knowing. 

For example, Jade would be better off not knowing when he began feeding in earnest. When he did more than nonfatally stab someone who had wronged him (and Regan, for that matter, which might make Jade approve of the choice just a little), when his hunger sunk its teeth into strangers, into humans, would Jade sit beside him on the couch as she was now? Or would she bring a knife that was meant as something other than a gift instead? She told him to keep figuring things out, but how much of that was the naive hope of holding onto a friend? How much of it would remain when the man gave way to the monster completely? 

He’d never heard her as quiet as she was now. Even when Regan was gone and they’d believed she wouldn’t return, even when she was doubting everything she’d been raised to believe was the truth, Jade was loud. She chattered endlessly, her voice becoming white noise that made the things lurking beneath it a little more bearable. But there was no softening this blow; there was no making this bearable. This was the kind of thing you just had to sit with. And right now, in this moment, Emilio was a little too selfish to sit alone.

She was sorry, and what more was there to say? What more to be? She was sorry, and so was he. They were both sorry, and it didn’t change anything. They were both sorry, and everything was as it was, anyway. 

She asked for the story, and he swallowed. He thought of the Wormhole, of the alley outside of it. He thought of the knife, of the way it twisted in his chest. He thought of the black spots dancing at the edges of his vision and the way they eventually took over entirely. He thought of the bodybag in Eve’s van, the fear that still had him by the throat, the hunger pangs that he couldn’t shake, the rage that was all consuming. “I don’t know if I’m ready to tell it,” he admitted quietly, his fingers twitching around the handle of the knife. “But… I can try to answer your questions.”

In the end, wasn’t that all she’d asked of him? Not to succeed, because there was no success small enough to fit in his hand here. Not to claim victory, because that had died when he had. Jade had only ever asked him to try. 

And how could he say no to the only person left who really understood him?

[theygotbitchesinmedia]

Ask Box Dump

Some of these are literally 8 months old whoooops. Sorry!!!!! but we get there!!

whatasmoothgardener asked:

Also reccing trying out Girls Last Tour, a manga/anime by the mangaka of Shimeji Simulation that follows two girls as they explore the deserted post-apocalyptic megacity they live in. Mainly focuses on the two girls and them contemplating the world, both in a literal sense and a more abstract sense. The anime adaptation is pretty good but for some reason didn't adapt the ending so if you go with the anime I very much rec reading where it left off.

whatasmoothgardener asked:

Reccing another underrated manga for this blog called Hakumei and Mikochi about the daily lives of two women roommates in a world where people are only a few inches tall and coexist with talking animals. A rather laidback manga but I think the art and the worldbuilding really shine through. There is an anime and while its an okay adaptation I rec the manga since you really miss out on the WHA-level art of the comic if you watch only the anime.

whatasmoothgardener asked:

Suggesting more anime. Humanity has Declined is an fantasy-comedy post apocalypse anime focusing on the mediator between humankind and fairies and the strange things that happen to her due to the local fairies. The episodes are in Anachronic Order. I can only speak for the anime here as I haven't read the light novels nor the manga.

whatasmoothgardener asked:

Reccing another anime. Pani Poni Dash is a Gag Anime about Japanese highschoolers and their new teacher Rebecca, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who happens to only be 10 years old. Most of the cast is female. I don't remember there being a lot of fanservice in this but it's been a while since I've watched it. Has a manga I've yet to read.

@whatasmoothgardener

Girls last tour I've heard of before and it's already on the list! I don't know a ton about it but I think it's one I definitely want to get to at some point. hakumei and mikochi is 100% new to me and I'm not really into this character art style but these backgrounds are gorgeous. I always love some interesting worldbuilding and that + nice art are definitely enough to be worth my time. Humanity has declined has some nice looking colors there which is tasty to me. added to the list! Pani Poni dash I think i'll skip on because gag franchises in general are lower priority and with a list that is getting close to 200 titles long i gotta pick where to put my time.

astracetus asked:

Misericorde! It's a visual novel in which a nun is murdered in a secluded abbey. If you like murder mysteries and women, you will like it I hope. The cast is almost all female, and the quality of the characters is through the roof.

@astracetus

this one is a big name in the flower that bloomed nowhere server, which is a great place for Bizarre Women Media recs so I added it to my list after seeing it there! this is one im sure im going to play at some point and im really looking forward to it

Anonymous asked:

popping in to drop a rec for dykette by jenny fran davis which was an indescribable reading experience. almost definitely the most insane lesbian drama i have ever read about…it’s contemporary litfic (?) but is also just. extremely absurd. the worst person you know CAN be a lesbian

I have yet to come across a piece of contemporary litfic I like, but to be honest that's not a huge point against it... the less i'm into any particular genre the more i feel kind of compelled to look for the exception that proves the rule. however i will say that reading about rich new yorkers is not my idea of a good time nor do i really get a lot of enjoyment out of stuff that talks about "queer nonconformity". in general, the more times the word queer is used to describe something the less likely it is to resonate with me lol. the 2.9 goodreads rating compels me a little bit... goodreads reviewers are insane so a complete mixed bag/middle of the road set of reviews means this could really land anywhere for me. i will put it on the list but probably wont be getting to this one any time in the near future

Anonymous asked:

I’d like to recommend ShootAround by suspu on webtoon! It’s about a highschool girls basketball team trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. It’s mostly a comedy, but does have more serious moments.

"high school" "zombie apocalypse" and "webtoon" are three keywords for a piece of media to have that, on their own are pretty offputting to me, but in conjunction with each other i think are dealbreakers. going to skip on this one sorry!

dilsdoes asked:

i dont know if youre still looking for recommendations but i have 2 podcasts, if thats a medium youre interested in

>girl in space: a girl is alone on a space station orbiting a star when something approaches. i think the protagonist is pretty well written. a second season is in the works, but its been in the works for a while now.

>we fix space junk: a smuggler and an ex heiress work as repairwomen for a conglomerate that basically owns them. theres also a mini series focusing on another female character from the series, but going into that would be a spoiler. i dont know what the status of this one is.

@dilsdoes

we fix space junk is on the list! narrative podcasts i tend to fall off of pretty hard for reasons i'm not entirely sure of, but that said i am open to them. added girl in space

Anonymous asked:

Don't know if you still take recs and this is a bit out of left field but I'm three books into the Blackwater series by Michael McDowell and I think you would apreciate the female characters. The blur: with a flood that devastated the village of Perdido, Alabama, appears a misterious woman, who intricates herself into the very wealthy Caskey family. And the pitch is that Elinor Dammert is a flesh eating monster, evil and manipulative and I can't help but root for her 🤍

Looking for stuff that's a bit out of left field is half of the point of looking for recs! I hope her being a flesh eating monster is part of the premise rather than a big spoiler because i would really really prefer people don't send spoilers in their recommendations. but it sounds interesting! added to the list.

Anonymous asked:

I want to recommend the manga series "JK Haru is a Sex Worker in Another World," about a girl who gets isekaied into an extremely misogynistic fantasy world and becomes a sex worker for survival. I think the series has a lot to say about the role of women in that genre and irl. It is also genuinely quite funny, if dark and featuring explicit sex scenes - if this is something youre willing to check out I'd be really interested in hearing what you think about it.

explicit sexual content is completely fine by me. i'm less sure if im interested in Commentary on isekai as a genre because it's not a genre i have a ton of interest in or experience with so deconstructing the misogyny therein just might not really hold much appeal for me. will put it on the list nonetheless!

anon704580 asked:

you gotta read shimeji simulation and girls last tour. peak yuris

@anon704580

both on the list already! im sure ill get to one or the other at the very least

taisorato asked:

Is Orphan Black on your radar? I'm not sure if I'm really recommending it because it has a lot of racist pitfalls that f/f media (especially Canadian media) of that era just do but it is certainly A Show that can entertain.

@taisorato

I watched orphan black when it was airing! im not sure if i ever finished it, and that was like ten years ago at this point so i dont really remember most of it or have complicated feelings on it. but regardless of anything else you could say about this show tatiana maslany's performance was fucking increeeeedible. there were so many times in this show when i forgot these were all the same woman doing this. i would need to rewatch this one in order to meaningfully recommend it or not so i think ill just stick it in the graveyard as unfinished for now

Anonymous asked:

i'd like to rec Nevermore (webtoon). two women (brash goth & conniving prep) awake on the shores of a misty island with no memories except a feeling that they're important to each other. they find themselves whisked into an ""academy"" (thinly veiled setting for death games) for the recently deceased, and the last one standing gets a second chance at life. they're both immediately embroiled in the interpersonal politics of Fake High School on opposing "sides" but are def in yuri anyways

already on the list!

notarealcarrot asked:

Hello this ask is here to add Tactical Breach Wizards to the pile of media you should check out.

@notarealcarrot

Looks cool. Added to the list!

Anonymous asked:

idk if it's your speed, but have you read claymore?

@snarp has been telling me to read claymore for awhile now so its already on the list and legally i do have to read it

Anonymous asked:

Has anyone recommended the Children of Time trilogy to you yet? Doctor Avrana Kern is inarguably a woman of all time

They have not! added to the list.

lattedecoffee asked:

While the games I am about to talk about have male protagonists, their female characters are some of my favorites in media. They are also all written by Kotaro Uchikoshi, which is why I’m putting these in the same ask.

The whole Zero Escape Trilogy is a great time, but I’m going to focus on the first game, 9 Person 9 Hours 9 Doors here. There are 9 people and you have 9 hours to get out of here through the door with a 9 on it. Behind every numbered door is a point and click escape room the player must solve, but depending on the doors you pick the story will change. There are only 2 required endings to get the full experience but all 5 are worthwhile.

As for female characters, we have 3 in our main cast: Clover, June, and Lotus. Each appears to be a very specific archetype of character (Clover is the young naïve one, June is the childhood best friend, Lotus is the hot sassy one), and the male characters also seem simplistic at first glance. Yet as the story progresses you learn more about these characters and find some of amazing writing. Most of the details would be spoilers but I will say I expected June to be my least favorite member of the cast and she quickly became one of my favorite characters in anything. Clover isn’t as naïve as she first appears, and Lotus’ character went places I didn’t expect but make me love her more.

AI: The Somnium Files (it has a sequel but I’ll focus on just the first) is a much more recent Uchikoshi game. Many elements of Zero Escape feel like prototypes for elements of AITSF (eg. AITSF’s protagonist Date and VLR’s protagonist Sigma have similar personalities but Date ends up being much more likable whereas Sigma has his annoying side and his “oh shit plot is happening” side), but that’s a ramble for somewhere else.

As for female characters, oh my god where would I even start. Mizuki Okiura is a 12yo girl, but she’s also going through some incredibly traumatic stuff. She’s easily one of my favorite child characters alongside original trilogy Pearl Fey. Boss is a character who seems to be, like Lotus, just hot and sassy, but why is she hiding so much?

And the mothers in AITSF, oh my god the mothers. Hitomi Sagan and Mayumi Matsushira make me love each of their children more because of how much they care about them. And yet they aren’t reduced to “mother of X,” they have their own things going on that most parent characters would never get.

I could keep going but damn this is getting long. If you want me to elaborate on something specific I can :)

@lattedcoffee

I've already been through all of the zero escape and somnium file games! i really love aitsf and 999 but ultimately i don't think they're the right fit to recommend for this blog. mizuki and akane in particular i do think are fantastic but ultimately i dont think either game is a right fit to recommend for this blog. kotaro uchikoshi has a complicated relationship with misogyny to say the least. it's a very nebulous line to draw but ultimately the question i ask for whether or not something belongs here is not 'would i recommend this thing that has good female characters' but 'would i recommend this thing specifically because of how the female characters are handled' and i think 999/aitsf are firmly in the former category rather than the latter.

OKAY i think thats all the ask answering i have in me for today. whew. still more than 70 messages in my inbox but it was over 90 when i started so ill consider that a win for now. ty all for the recs!

[caldella]

6 and 23 for either Blitz or Stolas? :)

Ohhhh boy! Buckle up, I guess, because this is going to be LONG and gonna get more personal as we go. I sure hope you like reading.

6. What's something you have in common with this character?

Link to the original post in case anyone else wants me to infodump lol.

I might have more in common with Blitzø than I can think of at first glance, but I mostly look at him as a character I love and less one that reminds me of me.

Blitzø

Horse girl/Hyperfixation/Special Interest I've always been a horse girl. I was into the old 80s/90s MLP when I was little. I had horse posters, and toys, and stickers, and novels, books on different horse breeds and their history. From my teens on, I actually co-owned a horse with one of my parents for 19 years and was around them learning to ride earlier than that. I used to do horse roleplays on forums back in the day. I've started and stopped a historical novel over the last few years that revolves around working horses. know Brandon Rogers is actually terrified of horses, but watching the show lean into Blitzø's Horse Girl status and make all his OC's brings me joy.

Avoidant tendencies I'm really, really bad at letting people in on my feelings IRL. And I'm not accustomed to meeting up with friends etc. just to "hang out," so I can empathize with his need to feel useful for people to be around them.

Creative Specifically when it comes to his drawing. I have loved art since I was a kid and obviously still make it today! I am a graphic designer by trade as well. I still doodle on sticky notes and on the corners or work notebooks. I love his doodles.

Sentimental attachment I have some necklaces and other pieces that were given to me by a grandparent as heirloom pieces, and some hats/other clothing from one of my parents who has passed. So Blitzø having his mother's skull pin resonates with me.

That might be about it for Blitzø. I can think of sort-of similarities but they feel like a stretch.

Stolas

There's a lot to put here. A lot a lot.

Privileged background childhood (to an extent) Technically, I've never been more than middle class, so definitely not the same level as Stolas. But as a young kid esp., I was technically well off. We lived in good neighborhoods. Education was prioritized. I got my first job because I was someone's kid (internship at their work). I never had a mansion/palace or housekeeping staff or anything approaching leisure lifestyle wealth. But I had access to stuff that kids from struggling families wouldn't.

Educated/'nerdy' & hyperfixations/info dumps Did I mention I had entire books on horse breeds? Yeah, that nerdy part of me has never changed. I love delving into details when it comes to information, as is probably evident by this blog. One of my parents was a teacher - we grew up going to zoos and museums and symphonies more than amusement parks. I'm prone to spouting off more info than necessary about the topics that interest me, too. I'm not good at half-investing in something or engaging casually. And like Stolas and his plants etc., a lot of my special interests are a little niche and not things that easily involve other people. I love that Stolas is just a straight up nerd, and it's an integral part of his character. Take a look at how long this post is and try to tell me I don't hyperfixate or info dump!

Passive/follower I can be stubborn as hell, but I do not like being a person in charge. I find it a lot less stressful for someone else to invite me into their plans than to come up with them myself. I also stress out easily with personal conflict and will avoid it when possible.

Stars/planets/space It's a motif I've always loved. The first thing I learned to sew in middle school was a pillow with a sun/moon/stars pattern. I know the stars were kind of... put onto him by his job, but he sure makes it work, and I relate to it, if you can say that.

Escape through fantasy Stolas engages in either fact-driven books about his special interests or escapist romance fantasies: and honestly, mood. I've always preferred stories set in a non-modern reality. Real life gives me anxiety, and like Stolas I seem to prefer stories through the lens of a non-grounded fantasy. Probably why I'm sitting here relating to an owl demon more than any character played in a live action show. And like Stolas, some 'normal' relationship dynamics were ones I didn't experience until adulthood outside of that fiction.

Anxiety issues/crying meltdowns Oooh yes, indeed! I have major anxiety issues and had my first anxiety attack in 3rd grade. Mine usually involve painfully strong sobbing and hyperventilating. I got my first stress-induced ulcer at 16-17. This sad boy and his crying meltdowns and mood swings and only ever managing to mess up socially - I relate to him so much.

Masking I don't even know if I have to say anything. Anyone who's masked up during a meltdown understands this, I think. Especially if you're used to being the 'weird kid' that people don't always want around anyway.

Weird/unwanted kid Here's where things get start to get complicated! I have a sibling, and we were pretty close as kids, so my experience wasn't as bad as Stolas'. But I was often the 'left out' kid in my class/neighborhood. I've been the only kid in a group excluded form games, I've been the unwanted 3rd wheel in a trio, I've alienated friends when I was into one of my hyperfixations and weirding them out, and for a good year or two I had no friends at school at all. I was made fun of by my schoolmates in front of their friends for a while - it was basically a group activity for the 'popular kids' in early middle school. So I relate to Stolas being his social group's easy target, being made fun of to his face, and having no one among his peers who seems to have his back.

The 'responsible kid' who grew up too fast/existentialism Thankfully I was never pressured to marry/have kids! But I was definitely that "pleasure to have in class" goody-two-shoes student a lot. Going to college was an expectation for me: graduating high school was not considered a big deal by my immediate family (it was to my grandma though <3). Our financial situation was not as great in my teens as it was when I was little, either. A parental split, a drop in income, plus we'd moved homes 5 times in like 6-7 years. I didn't feel there were options out there for me to mess around. We couldn't afford it. I felt like I had to go to college, and I had to find a career as there weren't really backup plans. So I started early in mid-summer to save tuition and skipped the following summer break, too. I might not have been married with a kid at 19, but I already had a 2-year degree and a full-time job. I like my career, but I never had a lot of dreams as a teenager of what I wanted to do or really looked forward to adulthood. The ones I did have didn't really happen and aren't really what I'd have now. I relate to Stolas never really having a 'fun' part of his early adult life. I relate to the existential part of him that never got to make his own purpose and now struggles to see that he could ever have goals.

Traumatic responses/isolating I still don't handle raised voices well. I have likely traumatic responses to conflict and arguments, even ones at a distance that don't involve me. When my anxiety gets bad, I tend to shut people out and isolate to try and escape. Boy, do I relate to how Stolas perpetually fucks up and closes himself off the same way.

Daddy issues(?) We're starting to get real personal now! My dad was not completely absent like Stolas'. But his job required him to be out of town a lot. Weeks at a time sometimes. And for as poor at communicating as I am, he was worse. Now, he did love us, which I can't say about Paimon, and my mother was always present and loving/supportive. But I didn't realize as a kid that my dad's lack of involvement wasn't normal. We moved a lot, which also caused issues because it prevented me from keeping friends for long or seeing a lot of other family dynamics. Until my teens, I thought immediate families sitting down to dinner together was sort of a fictional TV/movie thing, except big holiday get-togethers (which even then my dad would take his plate to a different room). Things got more complicated after my parents divorced. I basically never saw him face-to-face as an adult, and he rarely contacted me unless I did it first. I relate to Stolas' father being both an ever-present factor over his life yet physically/behaviorally absent.

Problems under the privilege Just gonna CW: abuse. Now, my dad wasn't fully a Stella. He loved us. He was my sports coach in middle school. He took us to movies & other activities. He was also verbally and emotionally abusive. He was sometimes physically abusive (I never experienced this personally, but I witnessed it). Nothing was ever good enough to make him proud. We could never tell if he was going to have a positive or negative reaction to something, and his negative reactions were frightening. He'd change/renovate parts of the house without telling anyone. He lost/took out of state jobs multiple times and expected all of us to uproot and go along with it. The divorce obviously made his behavior worse. He eventually locked us out of the house with a bunch of our belongings still in it (goodbye horse books) and even threatened to take our horse (which he had no involvement in) as one of the assets he got in the split. One of his siblings helped support him through it and also became abusive. I cannot express how visceral that divorce argument felt in The Circus and Stella/Andrealphus' actions since. I'm sorry for whatever writer had the personal experience to write the dialogue for that scene so well, because holy shit. As an adult, my technical degree wasn't a 'real' college degree to him. He went to my HS graduation but not my college one, because just going to dinner afterward wasn't "impressive enough" for him to travel for. So again, I relate to Paimon's absence and Stolas never being good enough for his peers. I should relate more to Octavia in theory - abusive parent + good parent, divorce dynamics, etc.. But instead I heavily relate to Stolas. Until my late teens, our family from the outside looked like a well-off middle class family with an ideal situation. In reality, we functioned on the decisions of the increasingly abusive parent, while people around us expressed how lucky we were to have our comfortable life. I relate to Stolas being on edge in his own home, of how the verbal/emotional abuse escalated over time. On how his experience created issues keeping other healthy relationships. How he felt his life was so controlled. How he looked like he had a perfect life from an outside perspective but was fucked over until things unraveled publicly. For wanting to, but being unable to make an abusive person happy, no matter what he did. For the abusive person taking a ton of his possessions when the marriage broke apart, and them using their sibling as leverage. For growing up in an isolating dynamic that affected his ability to function as an adult. For not having a good grasp on making decisions, because he feels they've been frequently ripped from him beforehand. I relate to how he can be an anxiety-riddled mess as an adult with a lot of emotional issues. How he's prone to despondency and hopelessness and feels he can't/shouldn't make choices. How people expect him to behave without fault and don't believe that he's falling apart from the inside. How he messes up with other characters out of lack of experience/poor influence rather than malicious intent.

Conclusion:

Gawd this was long as predicted! It's safe to say that I love Stolas and all the many aspects they've represented with him. Yes, he's deeply flawed, but that's the point of most of the HB characters. I guess it's pretty obvious by this why I get so huffy when people see Stolas' privilege and complain that about his behavioral issues, without seeing how many problems can develop under that veneer.

As for the other option, it's impossible to pick one image as a fave for either, but I do love the style/how happy they look in this one:

~Caldella signing off!

(and apologizing for the length lol)

[ectoodle]

Okay, hi, I know you have gotten a bunch of asks and stuff saying how much your animatics (both two time and ikanaide) meant to people but god I had to put my two cents into this so please bare with me and my rambling since i cannot emphasise how much this means to me.

I got into TGCF back in 2020-2019 but never really had many people to talk about it with. Last year in April, I managed to convince a few friends of mine to watch the TGCF Donghua and after watching a few episodes most of my friends had to go but one stayed with me. Neither of us wanted to leave fully so we watched a few animatics and it was then we came across your Ikanaide animatic.

Initally, we weren't going to watch it as neither of us had read SVSSS yet and if we were honest, hadn't even thought about it. But for some reason we clicked the video.

God the video is so beautiful and the way you expressed emotions in it and despite neither of us knowing the plot of SVSSS, we were crying (near bawling)

I then fell down the rabbit hole and honestly, it has been the best thing to happen to me. The fandom is great and has helped me rid myself of a lot of guilt and shame I had built up over the years in my past fandoms. The novel itself has reinvigorated my long time love of writing and literary analysis, and lastly, Binghe.

He means so much to me, the others mean a lot to me also (esp Shen Jiu and Shang Qinghua) but Luo Binghe? He means the world to me.

I recently had a harsh fall out with one of my special interests. I knew it was a long time coming but it hurt a lot how it happened. In these time, Binghe is my emotional strength and I just. Thank you. Thank you for introducing me to SVSSS. Thank you for helping me heal my broken relationship with media I enjoyed.

Thank you for sharing your talent with the world. Both with the Ikanaide animatic that changed my world and now with the Two Time animatic.

SORRY THAT THIS IS SO LONG HOPE YOU HAVE A NICE DAY FOREVER AND EVER

Wow, thank you so much for sharing such a heartfelt message with me! I know it takes a lot of courage to share your thoughts, so I'm really honored to hear you guys share how much that mv means to you all; as an artist, it's the kindest and most encouraging thing for us. I never would have imagined a passion project made on an unhinged whim that was basically an advertisement for my favorite book would have an impact on so many people; it's a solid reminder that the art you make are worthwhile after all, if it can touch at least one person's heart.

The nature of the book tends to attract fans that are just in it for the fun and silliness of it all, and that's what I can see as something refreshing and healing in a fandom. Yet it's also very emotionally resonant that has lots of layers and nuance to peel from. And also whatever you may have thought was weird in the book, turns out to be even weirder in the most absurd way. SV really does have that certain charm that sticks with you in the long run!

I'm so glad that mv made such a positive impact on you anon! Wishing you the best and that the most handsome wife, peerless demonic overlord beauty of the three realms, Luo Binghe continues to be your solid rock for a long future! ❤️

[odyssean-flower]

i think what i love so much about your fic is how you made reader a normal person. just a normal person. she is the most relatable y/n I’ve ever come across in all my years of reading fanfiction. she’s not beautiful, she’s not special, she doesn’t have your average cliché tragic backstory, she tends to come off as abrasive to her peers more often than not—it’s brilliant. she’s just your average woman who really means no harm, doesn’t have any big aspirations and knows her place in life. she knows she’s better off than most but she’s still riddled with insecurities. i think that’s what resonates with me most about your mc. im not beautiful, im not special, i also tend to come off wrong to people during first impressions—and then you connect that person with someone like neuvillette? kind, thoughtful, unbiased, untainted, tender, empathetic neuvillette? gosh you’re an actual genius. you and your writing, author, is exactly what fiction, as a whole, needs more of. more characters that are just people. normal people. normalcy. it’s a beautiful thing, really. something painfully underappreciated. it’s getting tiring seeing every female lead be this gorgeous woman who’s “the chosen one” or something and can do everything and everyone falls at her feet, particularly the men. it’s so unrealistic and tedious and, most of all, impossible to relate with for most people. your mc is the exact opposite of a that and it’s such a breath of fresh air. im sorry for rambling but 😭 i could go on for days why your mc is literal perfection, but i’ll leave it at this!! i love you and your work very much <3 never stop writing and i hope every blessing in the world comes your way 🫶

omg im so happy that you like my mc! sometimes i worry that she's a bit too developed to be a y/n haha

yeah i always intended to write a fic where neuvillette gets with an ordinary person, partly because i didn't really feel like making up an elaborate backstory or powers, and partly because i thought it'd be an interesting thing to write about. now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with overpowered mcs who are the center of the universe--far from it. fanfiction is inherently self-indulgent after all and i think everyone should write what they want. but maybe it's because i grew up on YA novels featuring chosen ones that I'm starting to prefer more ordinary protagonists as i get older haha. i said this before but a lot of my fic is inspired by jane eyre, one of my favorite books.

anyways there's still a lot of obstacles that come with writing an ordinary mc with no powers or mysterious backstory as you can see haha, like coming up with stuff to further the plot and romance, since there's no real reason she would get involved in dangerous shenanigans lol