#the other being that his hair would like. noclip. like if he put on a hat or something.

[skeletalheartattack]

Boe always reminds me of the skeleton from The Exploited's album covers

OUGH FUCK, you're so right. what sharp teeth, fucked up and scary...

[the-s1lly-corner]

Caine, Ragatha, and Kinger x plush!reader

not much in the inbox so i think imma rattle off some ideas ive had in the brain for a while but didnt have the time or energy to get out!! i know im posting earlier than i have been the past few days but!! idk i just cant sleep. ill probably hop back on later and get to writing again, maybe

CAINE:

thinks youre really cute. definitely ramps up on calling you names like "Doll", he thinks hes so clever for the petname. I like to think that he gives you a whole wardrobe of cute outfits and accessories. sure you might not be a doll... well... do plushies fall under the same category? as far as caine knows, you do! probably offers to give you other stuff, like alternative eyes (IE. buttons) or hair, probably unaware of how morbid that sounds since he cant relate to the whole "having a body/sense of self" thing that the circus members have. theres no malicious intent, i promise! loves snuggling into you, bonus if youre scented

RAGATHA:

on the off chance one or both of you get torn during the day/IHA, you guys patch each other up. of course this is assuming you guys can get torn up in the first place.. honestly im on the fence about it but the image of the idea of you guys caring for one anothers injuries has me feeling things. you guys have matching outfits, its nice, i think. both very soft, emotionally and physically. really i mostly put ragatha here so i could write down that first idea! maybe you guys sew in patches of fabric into one another, like you have ragathas favorite color and she has yours.. think of it as your versions of matching couples tattoos!

KINGER:

imagine being weight and/or scented. that man would be all over you, holding onto you. i mean even if you werent, he would still be clinging onto you since it brings him comfort. but the added smell and weight gives him that bonus level of comfort! probably immediately calms down when you lean in to hug him, wrap your arms around him and his body is already calming down from its shaking and noclipping. if youre an animal plushie, he probably runs his fingers through your fur and plays with it. very gently grabs a handful of it and ever so lightly tugs. in a way its how he determines youre actually. there. and in the present moment

[awogga]

I completely LOVE your AU!! I love the idea of Gordon being in denial on his obvious crush on Benrey. I also like to think that their students try to help him come to terms with his crush for Benrey. And who do you think it's the one that confesses his feelings first? How does it happens?

for some reason i recently lost the ability to articulate my thoughts in any way other than notes app bullet point format, so have some half-baked fluff below the cut:

there’s one night toward the end of a particularly rough semester when gordon just can’t seem to relax

he’s been up and down all evening, pacing around his apartment, rearranging things that don’t need to be rearranged, absently picking up objects and immediately putting them down again

he doesn’t realize what he wants until he walks into the living room and sees benrey curled up on the couch alone with a controller in hand

he’s playing something on the xbox

he’s also wearing one of gordon’s red MIT sweatshirts

gordon doesn’t remember lending it to him, but there’s something about the way he looks in it that makes his knees feel like they’re going to give out

his mouth goes dry

before he can think better of it, he’s sinking down beside him a respectful distance away, arms resting casually over the back of the couch, then at his sides, then crossed

he’s determined to sit still

he’s never been very good at sitting still

benrey must notice how agitated he is, because he eventually pauses his game and lowers the controller he’s holding, expression unreadable

“yo”

for the first time in about as long as he can remember, gordon can’t get a word out to save his life

benrey is staring at him

“you need somethin bro? a lil sweet voice?”

a beat passes. then another. gordon wrings his hands and prays that his face doesn’t look quite as hot as it feels

“can you just. come here?”

benrey is still staring at him

the hum of the air conditioner is suddenly very loud

gordon is in the process of contemplating the physics behind noclipping between planes of existence—more specifically, whether or not it would be possible for him to do so in the next five seconds—when benrey sets his controller to the side and wordlessly climbs into his arms

this isn’t the first time gordon’s held him like this

he wakes up nearly every morning holding him like this

he’s never had to ask for it before, though, and that’s where the difference lies

almost immediately, it’s as though a heavy weight has been lifted from his shoulders, and gordon finally feels himself start to relax as several days’ worth of pent-up stress drains out of him

he closes his eyes and cards his fingers through benrey’s hair

benrey’s face is tucked into the crook of his neck

they end up laying like that, legs tangled together, chests rising and falling in tandem, and gordon doesn’t even realize that time is passing until he wakes up hours later to a darkened apartment

the clock on the sideboard reads well past midnight

benrey stirs when he stretches

“jus needed some quality no homo time huh? top ten epic cuddle moments? gotta renew your monthly subscription?”

gordon feels lighter than air

when he doesn’t respond, benrey raises himself up to look at him

and then, because gordon is still only half-awake and has absolutely no impulse control, he pulls him down again and kisses him

and kisses him

and benrey seems to have lost the ability to keep his sweet voice in check, because everything is suddenly pink and his mouth tastes like bubblegum and it’s exceedingly clear that this was not what he was expecting

gordon has to remember to ask tommy about that one later

when he pulls away, benrey is flushed and gaping at him; meanwhile, he himself still has yet to fully process any of it

he isn’t certain that he ever actually woke up

“bro.. why’d you. you’re not suppos’ta....”

gordon feels like his heart is going to burst

benrey’s flush deepens

“do it again please?”

and so he does

[goatbi]

What Happened? Chapter Two

Benrey drifted for awhile, his strange half-sleep the best he could actually accomplish with his whole just left of being human thing going on. He was distantly aware of everything going on, but it almost felt like a third party watching in rather than him being in the scene himself. 

Sure, when Gordon woke up, he could feel him shift slightly, his hand moving through Benrey’s hair again, but it was just as distant, though it did make him smile. Sleeping against Gordon’s chest, Benrey didn’t actually move much, barely breathing, just enough to show he was alive. 

Gordon had been woken up by Coomer and Bubby’s failed attempts at being quiet, trying to get into the kitchen to start breakfast. Gordon just smiled over at them, which gave Bubby the incentive to raise his voice back up to normal levels. Coomer tried to shush him, seeing as Benrey was still apparently asleep, and Tommy had yet to emerge from his room either, but Bubby just kept talking about pancakes as he walked into the kitchen. 

Benrey didn’t pay too much attention to the argument about pancakes and waffles that followed. He felt Gordon’s hand moving in his hair, but he didn’t really pay much attention to what was going on, closing his eyes and floating, separated from everything. 

He opened them again when he heard barking, and realized that Sunkist was attempting to jump up on the couch next to them. Upon failing that, Sunkist just pressed his head against Benrey’s back and sat next to the couch. Tommy was awake then, though Benrey still didn’t see him up. He might need to wake up soon, but... then he’d have to talk about everything. He didn’t know if he wanted to do that, and he frowned, wrapping his arms tightly around himself, causing him to hold tighter onto Gordon. 

Gordon frowned down at him a moment, hooking his other around around him to hold him tighter in return, and Sunkist almost whimpered, pressing against his back again. God, he really didn’t want to have to explain everything. He was just... how could he have fucked up this badly? It was so simple, he pretended to be human all the time, he had friends but... 

What if he had fucked it up with all of them? Every person he thought was a friend he had successfully made in his efforts to look and sound more human all hated him? 

Without his consent, sweet voice began to tumble from his mouth, where he was pressed against Gordon’s chest, fear and worry floating up around the ceiling as more and more began to slip free the more Benrey worked himself up. Gordon noticed, sitting up a bit, gently trying to wake him, and Benrey... let him. 

His eyes opened, just having one form again, and he closed them again quickly, just to hide his face in Gordon’s chest and force all the emotions in the sweet voice back down, tears streaking down his face. 

“Tommy what do they mean?” He hears Gordon ask, but he doesn’t hear Tommy’s response. He knows Tommy had to have responded, as Gordon holds him all the tighter, and Benrey shrinks himself just a bit to fit better into Gordon’s arms, safer there than he had ever had been. “I’ve got you, you’re okay Benrey...” 

He feel Sunkist leave as he calms down, apparently trusting Gordon to calm him down the rest of the way. Benrey slowly opens his eyes, the shapes behind his eyes dissipating as the pressure goes away. The room is still lit up by his sweet voice, but as the emotions calm down, the sweet voice disappears, and the only light becomes the sun filtering into the room from between the half drawn curtains. Benrey focuses on them. They look handmade. 

“Benrey?” He looks up at the sound of his name, and Gordon gives a small smile, as if trying to hide the worry floating in his eyes. Benrey can almost see the color of it behind Gordon’s brown, and he cracks a smile himself. “Wanna get up so we can eat?” 

Benrey doesn’t move, just watching as the sweet voice hidden in everyone floats around behind Gordon’s eyes. For a moment, he expects to see annoyance brighten everything up, but no, Gordon’s sweet voice stays that consistent worry-tone, and Benrey nods slowly, lowering his head onto Gordon’s chest slowly. Gordon doesn’t prod him, and, after a moment, he finds his legs again and pushes himself up, standing shorter than normal, arms around his chest. 

They shuffle into the kitchen, and Coomer greets them with his normal, bright “Hello Gordon!” and Benrey smiles, teeth tinged with held back sweet voice, light shining from his mouth, so he ducks his head again and hides it. Tommy is the only one who can translate it, but even then, Benrey doesn’t want them all to know his emotions when even he doesn’t understand them all. 

“Benrey?” He looks up at his name again. Gordon is watching him, sweet voice slightly amused now, but mostly worried. He should have payed attention to that color more often in Black Mesa. Maybe this would have all been avoided if he had just looked. 

Color bubbled out of his lips, and he covered his mouth with one hand looking away quickly. 

“Hey, it’s alright! Coomer just wanted to know what you wanted.” 

“Pancakes are the right choice here, Benrey!” Coomer says from the side, voice still just as loud, but soft in his own way.

“Don’t listen to him, waffles are better.” Bubby grumbles, and Benrey finds himself despite himself. 

“Uh, same... same thing, just different shapes. One of each.” Benrey grins at the outraged look on Bubby’s face, but he hears Gordon laugh besides him, so he counts it as a win, letting himself be herded over to the table to sit. Tommy is on one side of him, and Gordon the other. Sunkist lays at their feet, Benrey assumes for Tommy, but when Benrey sits, Sunkist sits up and puts her big head on his lap. Benrey stares down at him ignoring the sweet voice bubbling out of the corner of his mouth. 

Slowly, Benrey puts a hand on Sunkist’s head, and she looks up at him, tongue lolling out of her mouth, and she turns her head to lick his hand. Benrey smiles down at her, slowly petting down her head, letting his hand be covered in doggy slobber as he did. The colors floating about the ceiling changed, slowly, though there still was the occasional fear bubble floating around the colors of love and contentment. 

A plate is set down in front of him, and he looks up, watching as Coomer’s extendo-arm retracts back to a normal size, and when he looks at the plate, there’s a waffle stacked on top of a pancake sitting there, and a bottle of syrup is set down soon after. Gordon and Tommy’s plates are set down soon after-apparently agreeing with Bubby and Coomer respectively on which is better-and Coomer balances his and Bubby’s plates, along with Bubby, as he walks over to the table. 

Benrey doesn’t do anything at first, but slowly, he sits up, drying his hand on his pants, where Sunkist doesn’t lick his hand again because she’s the perfect dog, and he drenches his food in syrup, just covers it, taking the time to fill each cell on his waffle with syrup, watching as it pools on the plate and soaks through the batter. 

“Jeez...” Gordon laughs slightly, struggling a bit with his fork in his left hand, though Coomer seemed to have taken this into account and precut his waffles for him, so he could just stab. Benrey didn’t want to watch him struggle, so he found another reason to look forwards to when Gordon’s right arm grew back. He didn’t like watching his friends struggle with anything major... if they were his friends still... 

He looked away, smiling down at his syrupy mess of a plate, and passed the syrup to Tommy, who grinned at him pouring the same, if not more, syrup over his pancakes. 

“Okay, am I the only person here who likes a normal amount of syrup?” Gordon asked, as Bubby started eating his without a single drop of syrup, and Coomer began the same charade as Benrey and Tommy did, soaking his in syrup. 

“This is... the uh, the normal amount, Cringeman.” Benrey mumbled at him, stabbing at his food to cut it into smaller bites, watching the syrup drip down the sides of his stack, pooling on the plate. He glanced over at Gordon, catching his eyes carefully, staring past them to the sweet voice. 

Gordon shook his head slightly before Benrey could get a good look at it, though he didn’t notice anything angry hidden there. “You guys are insane, though, really, I’ve known that this entire time.” 

Benrey watched quietly as the syrup was passed to Bubby, who just pushed it along to Gordon. Gordon stared at it for a moment, glancing down at his right arm, and Benrey frowned, color bubbling behind his lips, spilling out when he spoke. “Does uh, Does Gordon Feetman need help?” Gordon glanced over, looking up at the color for a split second before back to Benrey. 

“Uh... yeah, that’d be uh... appreciated, Benrey.” Benrey grabbed the syrup, drizzling it across the bits of waffle on Gordon’s plate, and took the chance once more to find Gordon’s sweet voice. There was embarrassment, yes, and Benrey understood that, needing help was never fun, but there was a bit of relief hidden in there too, for what Benrey assumed was not having to make an ass of himself in front of Bubby or himself, the two that usually jumped on him about things. 

Benrey set it aside before Gordon said anything. It was far less syrup than Coomer, Tommy, or himself used, which had taken easily half the brand new bottle, but Benrey didn’t want to, even jokingly, upset Gordon right now. He had fucked up enough before. 

Gordon stared at him for a moment, as he stabbed as his food carefully, before turning to his own food. 

They ate in relative silence, all of them ignoring the sweet voice that Benrey couldn’t seem to get under control the entire meal, though Tommy would shoot worried glances out of the corner of his eye towards him, watching the fear and worry and pain float out of his mouth each time he took a bite of food. 

They sat in silence as they finished, and Benrey wanted to sink off, noclip through the floor and disappear into the void. He stared down at Sunkist, and reached down to pet her head again. She licked the syrup off his fingers before he could pet her, but that was okay. This gave him a reason to stay. 

“Alright... we need to talk.” Gordon looked over and Benrey, who nodded, not letting himself shrink any further. He had to explain himself. 

[ranting-red-mage-blog]

01. The Public Image

The main reason I turn to Tumblr to blog is because I find it rather disheartening and flat out aggravating that our only source of reference is either the official community forums or reddit.

Needless to say, neither of these places are appropriate for posting honest opinion, least you be subjected to the hivemind that jeers and boos at you while giving -666 thumbs down because you simply stated, “I disagree.”

Alright, maybe I’m exaggerating; it’s never just ‘I disagree’, but you get my point. It’s a bunch of emotionally insecure hyper defensive wall flowers that just want Andy Warhol’s long promised 5 minutes of fame. Every waking moment I spend on reddit trying to accept it’s otherworldly culture for the sake of being involved, the more I realize: fuck this shit.

The FFXIV reddit community is the equivalent of when someone refuses to shower for 2 weeks and then decides to bathe in french vanilla fragrance mist. It doesn’t work. Not only are people completely aware of the shit beneath the surface, but the sweet appeal you’ve thrown on is nauseating.

Reddit universally is disgusting, and normally I’d never even have reason to venture that close to it’s ilk — but the fact that it’s the only community outside the official forums almost forces it on you with each google search. Not only that, but so much of the information and the “theorycrafting” on there is flat out incorrect.

They’re infatuated with the idea of theorycraft (they probably think the word just sounds cool) and have the god-awful tendency of confusing opinion with fact. Perhaps the biggest ringer for me is that roughly 2 - 3 days out of the week if you look at the top upvoted discussions, you’ll find a thread dedicated to what a lovely, beautiful, and welcoming community we have.

Or people reminding everyone to be polite because that’s who we are. It’s our brand. Let’s quote:

We're a community praised for our generosity and overall welcoming feel. Let's not ruin it. If you suspect someone used a Jump Potion and you're not on board with playing with them, then kindly leave the party, don't bring it to the subreddit in hopes of farming up karma and inflating you're own ego because you think it's okay to do so. It's not. We're better than this guys. C'mon.

Piss off.

I could make a huge comment on XI’s well renowned community and how ridiculous it is that people want to control everyone on a video game that’s not even theirs to moderate, but I could summarize this perfectly by just saying: reddit.

It really grinds my gears to see so many people trying to take over this game, like they own company shares because they pay a subscription fee; so they’re entitled to tell everyone how the game should be, or how the community should behave. Even so far as to tell the developers themselves! The balls on some people! Let’s quote off reddit again:

Give 20% back with aetherflow - Any heavy healing and mana goes poof. 1/3 for energy drain is typically enough, but it would help.

Have bio again just for an extra button to press No really, the dungeons are still not that heavy on healing and I picked ACN for dots to start with even SMN feels like I don't have enough dots. Spamming broil just isn't fun :/

An extra stack of aetherflow. Since we have so many abilities locked behind stacks but this might be OP.

Any one of these and I'd be happy.

Okay, so school is in session everyone. Yoshi-P is considered one of the most highly receptive developers when it comes to personal feedback regarding MMORPG and player satisfaction.

Does anyone know why?

At the start of FFXIV 1.0 alpha & beta, the moderators/administrators were completely unresponsive to the opinions and feedback of the testers. People grew furious as their feedback went into the dark abyss and bugs/known issues persistently appeared while SE promised everything was working as intended.

I’m 99.9% certain everyone has watched the coverage on A Realm Reborn, posted on youtube by NoClip titled “Rewriting History”. This is the first time, after 7 years, that SE has opened up and explained what was actually going on behind the scenes. It also explains why Naoki Yoshida was placed in the position he’s currently in. 

In 2.0 beta, Yoshida and his team (although met with much doubt and criticism that they would just do the same as the previous alpha/beta), made it their utmost top priority to take player feedback and apply it to the game. This is why Yoshida asks for feedback.

The community, who most likely have no idea about the history behind this since Legacy members left playing this game are few and far between, have completely taken advantage of it and ran out the door screaming.

Now, every time a change happens people are instantly flocking to the forums & reddit to complain about how the idiot dev team has ruined their entire life and they will never return to that job so long as they live because blahblahblah.

Holy shit, get over it. This isn’t WoW, where the changes made inflict a notable 50% negative DPS impact on the meters. At most you’re looking at a whopping 1% - 5% difference. You could even go as far to compare damage dealt by job on FF Logs to see that almost every class is a toe hairs length away from each other in DPS (except Samurai because it’s clearly broken, hence the patch coming up to fix it.. I’ll look forward to reading the whining demands all over).

I nearly didn’t return to the game for Stormblood, truth be told, because of how utterly put off I’ve become with everything. I know I’ve ranted about reddit this entire post, but it’s not just them. It’s on personal domains, tumblr, and fan blogs. Websites across the board with patreon pages dedicated to support their unique careers on XIV. Careers.

We try to keep our monthly operating expenses low to begin with, but we also want to gain enough to set aside for expanding what we do. At this point, we'll be able to cover all operating costs and set aside savings to be used for expanding what we do, prize pools and more! Thank you for bringing us life!

The above is quoted from the official A Stage Reborn patreon page. Let me clarify this perfectly here: these people are trying to profit off a Square Enix video game. They’re using the FFXIV models (character & object), and even the original screenplay of “I want to be your Canary” from Final Fantasy IX to bring in-game entertainment and have the gall to link a patreon for funding. 

The terms of agreement and privacy policy attached to this is enough to make my head spin. This game is not for you to profit off. This game isn’t a career. It’s a game. In all my years on XI, and even the rogue few I bounced to a few other MMO’s, I’ve never seen this shit.

When did people start trying to profit off being part of a fanbase instead of enjoying it? How did we get here? It seems like everyone is clawing at the gate trying to rip off a small piece of XIV for themselves