#this is a fairly regular interaction for them

[tacosaysroar]

Ok, there’s a guy on my team who very obviously intensely dislikes another guy on my team and it is occasionally weirdly dramatic. Case in point:

gChat group conversation

Guy A: *several sentences where he says what his work tasks are for the day (instead of putting them in the online standup spreadsheet) and then thanks people for covering for him while he was out for a few days*

Guy B: This is online standup day, so please make your updates there. Thanks.

Guy A: *sort of apologizes while also explaining/defending his choice*

Guy B: This is a gChat group, please don’t assume messaging is only meant for you. Welcome back.

[yonpote]

ok heres how i split up the dnp eras (loosely based on dan's timeline in his interview w anthony)

2009-2011: the Sillies era :3 dan refered to it as being a dumb teen just posting cuz he was bored, which is like, thats what all of youtube culture was at this time. they met and like fell in love or whatever you know the lore dont you. phil moved from his parents home to his first apartment in manchester, and dan technically moved to uni but really he moved into phil's apartment to take advantage of his washing machine and ps1 and. yknow. other stuff. they officially moved in together in 2011 yippee hooray, the phanchester apartment holds a special place in my heart

2012-2013: THE SHIFT. they started getting Serious about youtube as a career, doing more stuff w the radio, superamazingproject started in 2011 but THE SHIFT is very easy to observe when you compare the first season of sap to the last season. ALSO. they were NOT A DOUBLE ACT AND NOT GAY 🙄. it could also be called the No Homo era lmao idk this is when a lot of shitty things were happening wrt leaked information, harassment of their families, and just generally becoming more in the spotlight especially while still in the closet being a horrible experience. but also, they moved to london and got cool opportunities with radio stuff and were starting to actually make a living on this shit.

2014-2016: Peak Dan And Phil™ Era. at the height of their popularity. they realized oh shit, we ARE a double act and not only does everyone enjoy us best as a double act, WE enjoy working together. tabinof, tatinof, dapgo, still doing the radio every month up until they start touring, 7 second challenge app, gamingmas, what the hell DIDNT they do during this time period (what they didnt do was uhh take care of themselves and not overwork and not blur their work and personal lives so much to the point where they felt like the whole apartment was a film set.)

2017-2018: Gay Softlaunch Era (aka post-baking aka glass closet) the baby steps toward authenticity, moved to the double apartment to separate work and life, ii's whole theme, dan talking abt depression, phil getting the quiff, both of them being gay as hell in every way other than saying it explicitly. important things of note: TRUTH BOMBS dropped, Interactive Introverts happened, still uploading gaming vids and honestly by the end you could feel their fatigue. and then they hiatused dapg.

2019-2022: ok these four years each feel like whole eras in themselves, but also theres an overarching theme. THE GAY ERA.

2019: im gonna futher split this year in half. first half- dad left to buy milk so other dad is taking care of us. rough six months for dannies im sure. important phil thing of note- he changed his film set from his "bedroom" to a fairly basic but cute shelf backdrop. honestly prob didnt wanna keep pretending that was his bedroom considering.... second half- DAN AND PHIL GAY. dan uploads his magnum opus. phil comes out via tweet. they go to japan and its really gay and it's The Trip to japan for them like yes they first went in 2015 and again in 2023, but Japhan 2.0 Was The One. what does this mean? proposal? anniversary? idk exactly but it was gay as hell dude and theyve talked about that trip with such love in their hearts.

2020: Phandemic (sorry that was bad) but also where tf is dan again? even with the big C-word happening, it was business as usual for phil, regular vids but make em gayer, caught a pigeon nbd, and end of the year introduces the Stereo app show Phil and Phriends where he's had chats with pj, louise, his brother, seth everman?????, and finally. dan reappears. they reveal that they bought and FULLY PLANNED a house together and are ready to move!

2021: they don't move house for another like six months! basically their house was (and is??) still being worked on AND they were in lockdown AND turns out at the end of last year, they were kicked from their Life apartment and were now living in the Work apartment so you can imagine what all of this can do to their psyche and lowkey they were getting sick of each other like it wasnt just bordering on phivorce it was nearly Phurder. Phidow. but to fill the time so that DOESNT happen, my favorite fucking thing ever happens: Lockdown Lads (and all the other names). the first taste of what a dnp podcast would sound like, with the added bonus of chaotic listener interaction. oh yeah also dan wrote a mental health guide book whatever (IM KIDDING I REALLY LIKE YWGTTN I WROTE LIKE TWO REVIEWS ON IT NOW) and they finally become Homosexual Homeowners. theres quite a bit more dnp content this year, dan being on phils channel a bit more, the phodcasts, dan's gay and not proud special.... oh yeah and hometown showdown i guess AND TEXT VIDEO 2!!! my favorite and my namesake!!!!!!!

2022: Prophecy Year..... but they didnt get married. dan returns with another longass video to say: hey i hate being a youtuber and also youtube majorly fucked me over. but also fuck that im gonna do a weird talk show and ALSO GO ON TOUR WITH THIS APOCALYPSE THEME! phil actually... slows down this year. more dan uploads than phil somehow??? but also Dan Is Leaving me is posted and i go completely insane and become the deranged individual you see today. WHICH FINALLY LEADS US TOOOOOO

2023-present: The Unhinged Era. dan's tour was a huge Emotional success for him but uh not without its hiccups due to management and all that and i think he and phil finally realize. Fuck It Who Cares. dan flies back to england FROM AUSTRALIA to make sure he can be with his future ex-husband on his birthday. CAKE HEART EMOJI. YELLOW PLAID SHACKET. they go on a gamer date and post a picture of playing footsies in a cab. THE PHUDE HAPPENS. they go to japan again and while this one will never be The One it was still a well earned holiday this time with bryony! and they took a bunch of very cute film camera pictures.... THIS IS ALL JUST THE FIRST HALF OF 2023 BTW. in phil news, he talks about going to therapy and figuring out how to manage his anxiety!!!! he changes his hair again!! he hires an editor, phan is his otp, he teases about the gaming channel a couple of times but so many of us already dropped any hope of that returning- OH WAIT WHAT THE FUCK?!!!? HUH!??!? they returned, and more chaotic than ever before. the gayness upped to the max, the Weirdness on full speed, the Horniness at Very Scary Levels Oh God Stop Talking About Dogging, phil can swear uncensored now???? and this energy has continued into today...

[mozzaremi]

got too silly, made omori magic au, that i'm calling MAGIKOMORI indodump in read more! (it's long)

Magikomori (Infodump)

The whole premise of the au is that the world of omori takes place in an alternate universe where magic is real

Magic and witchery have only recently become a viable career choice in this world, with magic academies popping up to help other witches to properly hone their craft in their efforts to make a living profit from doing what they love and are passionate about.

Both Sunny and Mari come from a bloodline of witches, making them generally talented in magic and spellcasting. Their mother isa witch, while their dad is just a regular guy who doesn't have the best outlook on magic users. 

Mari develop a people-pleaser side of herself that oftentimes is directed at her father, always trying her best to receive validation from him, resulting in Mari dropping all thoughts of becoming a professional witch in the future to instead focus more on her regular school studies and perfecting her skills on the piano.

Sunny, being the opposite, fully embraces the magic side of himself. The specific type of witch ability he's good at being illusions. He can summon lifelike recreations of entities from his dreams without much trouble. His summons are able to interact with the real world around them while also having a mind of their own. Although with Sunny being a less-experienced illusionist, he cannot control them or summon many at a time (he works around this problem by being able to conjure chibi versions of his dream entities into the real world).

While Mewo is still the pet of the family and she is recognised as Mrs. Suzuki's familiar. At the time of Sunny and Mari being toddlers, they would happens to accidentally cast spells and it was Mewo's job to reverse them and babysit the children when the parents were busy.

Other noteworthy magic users from the friend group is Aubrey. While she’s not from a family that's magically inclined, after seeing all the cool stuff Mari and Sunny are able to do with their witch heritage, saying that she became inspired to dabble in magic would be an understatement! 

The particular magic Aubrey specializes in is alchemy! She’s able to use spells to conjure, combine and transform items. One of her first successful alchemy attempts was being able to transform a simple wooden broomstick into a wooden bat 

The other magic user of the group is Basil. 

His family is part of an ancient bloodline of seers, and are able to see visions of the future. On top of that, Basil's lineage are bearers of a curse of being subjected to frequent nightmares, taking away any semblance of peace in their day to day life, leaving them with restless nights of poor sleep, night terrors, and insomnia. This curse also affects Basil's abilities to see visions, as it's hard to separate possible future events from a bad dream.

With the help of his grandma, Basil combats the curse by creating magical potions to suppress the nightmares and give himself a better night's sleep. 

Potion making becoming his speciality, he contemplates joining a magic academy to get a permit to sell his very own potions to the public! His brews range from tea- like elixirs that help with staying calm, helping with concentration, and clearing up general sickness (so basically like the stuff you can find at a regular pharmacy but make it magical)

Both Hero and Kel staying fairly faithful to their canon counterparts, both not having that many ties to magic, but still appreciating the craft! The brothers often contemplate on learning spells for their daily use, whether it's to help with chores or to enhance the taste of a special valentine's treat for a special someone! 

Now here's the deal breaker question... does Mari die in the au?

Well... yes and no. The accident does occur, but after Sunny pushes Mari, instead of freezing up, he attempts to cast a spell to save her from the fall, but instead he fumbles the spell so bad, that Mari phases between the world of the living and the dead, Sunny and basil being the only ones who can see her.

Their dad was already showing slight agitation from the witchery mischief that that family takes part in and the accident is the last straw for him. He leaves the family right after, convinced that the spell cannot be reversed and that mari was basically murdered by Sunny's hands and magic. 

Their mom tries her hardest to reverse the spell that might as well have been a curse. But without being able to detect mari, and with Sunny and Basil being the only ones to see her, it's their responsibility to attempt to undo the spell.

Instead of framing it as a suicide, Sunny's mom filed it as a missing person's case just so nothing bad happens to the two boys. Since magic has only been recently integrated into daily life, there weren't any good sources to turn to for help, so all trust was put into basil and Sunny to fix this.

Attempts to find a way to reverse their mistake were made with the two worried boys collecting countless books on spells and curses in effort to find a solution to their problem. After months of research, things were looking hopeless. Sunny, not being able to deal with the pressure, falls into a depressive state, barely leaving his own headspace while sleeping all day and night.

After the incident, he develops the headspace that we know, though with more magical elements sprinkled in, alongside Omori and his headspace friends. Omori is almost a stand-in for Sunny's own familiar, being able to effortlessly enter the real world and also disguise himself as his cat form. Omori would cause the young witch to procrastinate on finding the right spell to bring Mari back, ensuring that Sunny doesn't become too stressed or depressed when his attempts lead him nowhere. While not doing it out of any evil reasons to keep mari stuck between planes of existence, he just wants to protect Sunny and make sure that he gets some semblance of rest and peace in his life.

Basil's mental state also worsens alongside his best friend. With his best friend shutting him out and not having that much spare time to brew potions for his nightmares, all his time is devotedto finding a way to bring back Mari even without Sunny's help.

After the disappearance of Mari, instead of Hero becoming a chef or a doctor in the future, he chooses the career path of a detective, even purchasing a very expensive crystal ball to try to contact Mari if she were to be dead. Coincidentally he has no luck with being able to contact her, leaving Hero with some hope that he might find her someday. 

Aubrey still ends up becoming a delinquent, while also using her alchemy abilities for mischief. She forms a friend group of other delinquent magic users, causing occasional acts of misbehavior in faraway town.

She still owns Bun-Bun as her pet bunny, and while not having any magical abilities, Aubrey still refers to him as her familiar companion.

Kel is still... same-old Kel, still into basketball and a personification of a ball of sunshine. He still attempts knocking at Sunny's door to see him again, with things not going well until Sunny has to move. Kel also pitched in to get Hero the crystal ball for some closure, even being surprised as well when nothing came up. 

Being stuck between being dead and alive, after the four years Mari loses any resentment she might have had for Sunny and instead feels bad for her dear little brother. While Sunny can still see Mari, it's almost as if after Omori came into the picture Sunny started ignoring Mari's presence. Noticing this, Mari would attempt invading the boy's dreams to talk to him, causing all the headspace reset shenanigans.

When it comes to magic being used to cause other people harm, it all follows the "rule of three". Whatever energy a person puts out into the world, be it positive or negative, will be returned to that person three times. Being aware of this magical law does help with preventing any possible person using magic for evil. 

In Sunny's case, while it was accidental, he did cause his sister and his friends a lot of grief, so it all returned back at him, the negative energy being a lot of emotional turmoil. This feeling of physical and mental unwellness is what helped develop Omori as his supposed familiar to help him cope. 

The plot of omori would still play out as it normally would withthe main difference being that people think that mari went missing instead of her committing suicide. 

Bad and neutral omori endings are still plausible options for the plot. But in the good ending, once the friend group forgives Sunny and Basil for keeping up the lie of Mari's disappearance, they attempt to work together to undo the spell keeping Mari in limbo.

[sillysillygoofygoose]

A beach day with Nanami Kento

Includes: babysitter/nanny! Fem reader x Single Dilf! Nanami

Age difference (reader is 22, Kento is in his mid 30s, Yuji is 4!!) +Secret Pining

MDNI! (Slightly) EXPLICIT CONTENT AHEAD!

Cw: small small mention of breeding kink lol

Part two now up!!

"Thank you for inviting me. You really didn't have to." You smiled up at the older man, lugging a huge bag filled with beach toys, towels, and sunscreen.

"No need to thank me, Y/N. You're like family to us. You're always so good with Yuji, I really appreciate all your help." Nanami responded, casually hauling a tremendous beach umbrella, two seafoam green foldable chairs, and a cooler.

"Anyways, we wouldn't want you to miss his first time at the beach." His voice monotonous yet slightly more affable than usual.

You felt your face heat up slightly, flushing at his simple, kind praise. The toddler in question hurriedly waddled up to you, slipping slightly on the hot microscopic grains under his itty-bitty toes.

"Y/N, up up, please. Uppies, please and tank you. Ouch!" He angrily huffs out, switching his weight from one foot to the other, trying to combat the burning sensation on the soles of his feet. Yuji starts grabbing at your swimsuit cover-up, trying to hoist himself up.

You hush him slightly, slinging the awkwardly large bag over your left shoulder quickly before bending down to pick up the whining boy.

Nanami's gaze becomes glued to you as he watches Yuji grip onto the slouching neckline of your cover-up, innocently revealing your cleavage.

Holy shit.

You continued walking, slightly readjusting your top, moving Yuji's strong death-grip to your shoulder.

"I told you you should've kept your shoes on until we found a good spot." Your tone was gentle but stern, with a teasing undertone, tickling the boy's neck slightly, making him squirm and giggle in your arms. Nanami couldn't help but admire you.

He remembers the first time you babysat Yuji. A coworker recommended you, after he voiced his difficulties finding someone he trusted with the then two year old Yuji. He constantly struggled balancing extra meetings or overtime with being a single father. However, as soon as he met you, he knew you'd be a perfect fit. You were gentle, sweet, nurturing, responsible, and very... instinctively maternal. Especially for a college girl, looking for a side hustle. Not to mention you were drop dead gorgeous, but that was more of a selfish reason on Nanami's behalf to hire you.

You were nervous at first. You've never taken care of a child (well, baby) so young. His limited vocabulary put you on edge, worried that you wouldn't be able to tend to specific needs if he couldn't fully verbalize them. But, you quickly managed to make a strong connection with the tiny boy. By the end of the night, he had fallen asleep, snuggled into your shoulder.

After that, you became a regular sitter for the small Nanami family. Ever since you graduated a couple months ago, you became his nanny, Nanami having to work more often after a big promotion, eager to hire you full time.

He was thankful for how well the arrangement worked. Yuji absolutely loves you, maybe even more than him. Nanami doesn't mind though. He is absolutely infatuated with you. He enjoys watching the regular interactions between you and his son. He can't help but think about how beautiful of a mother you'd be. Or how beautiful you'd look pregnant with his baby.

Nanami didn't think twice before asking you to join them on a trip to the beach on his day off. He'd honestly be lost without you.

After what felt like eternity for little Yuji, you finally found a fairly secluded spot right in front of the ocean. You placed Yuji down, immediately turning to help Nanami with the shit load of things stacked in his strong arms. Together, you two unpack.

"Y/N, Dada!!!! Look!" Yuji tugs at both yours and Nanami's hand, pulling you toward each other until your arms are touching. The tot points at the ocean, pure exhilaration coursing through his busy brain.

"C'mon let's go! Go go!!" He squeals jumping up and down.

"Yuji, we have to apply sun lotion." Nanami reminds Yuji to which he slumps his shoulders, pouting.

You grab the face lotion, pulling Yuji towards you by his tiny torso. Smearing it over his face, you make sure not to miss any skin, rubbing the lotion in generously. His bright rashguard protected his upper body, almost glowing in the sunlight. You applied lotion to the limited skin exposed by his long swim trunks. Plopping a bucket hat on his head, you patted his hip.

"There you go!" You beam, watching him light up before sprinting towards the water. Once he arrived right at the shore, he turned his upper half, waving big at you and Nanami. You both wave back like proud parents, smiling at your pride and joy. His short attention span was consumed by the crashing of the waves, turning back around to stare at the ocean in awe.

You keep your eye on him, ensuring he doesn't get swept up, before shimmying your cover-up off your warm body. Nanami stared at you in the same manner his son stared at the ocean. Amazed.

"Mr. Nanami, can you please help me get my back?" You shifted your attention towards him, holding out the sun lotion. He gulped before nodding, accepting the lotion from your hands.

"You can call me Kento." He mumbled, placing your hair over your shoulder.

"Are you sure that's alright?" You asked, smiling to yourself. He hummed in response. You gasped as he began applying the cool lotion to your hot skin.

"Is that okay?" He asked holding you in place by the arm after you instinctively lurched away from the source of the cold.

"Yeah, it's good." You breathed out. He intently studied your back, watching in satisfaction as the harsh white began blending into your dewy skin. He finished applying the lotion, hands lingering for just a bit longer than what would be considered appropriate for an employer... but you weren't just an employee, you were family, right? He pulled himself out of his trance, removing his hands from your back.

"Thank you, I'll do you now." You took the lotion from his hands.

"Huh?" He asked densely.

"Your back. I'll help you with your back. So you don't get burned." You clarify, laughing away the awkward feeling in your stomach.

"Oh, right." He sighed, pulling his shirt over his head.

Oh.

Oh.

He's jacked. Buff beyond belief. Where does he find the time to maintain such a god-like physique? You blink, tearing your eyes away from his shredded torso, feeling your cheeks become inflamed.

He turns around in front of you, pretending he didn't seeing you staring. Pretending it didn't affect him. Pretending he wasn't staring too.

You watch your hands tremble as you begin rubbing the lotion into his broad shoulders. You applied more pressure than when you were helping Yuji. Kento let's out a fairly strong groan as you feel him tense under your small hands.

"So sorry, did that hurt?" You panic, removing yourself from him.

"No, not at all. That just felt... good." He relaxed his shoulders allowing you to quickly finish your task, heart fluttering against your chest.

"Okay all set... let's go check on Yuji." You smile, jogging towards the little boy who's now bending down, trying to drink the salty ocean water.

He chuckles, amused at you pulling Yuji's mouth away from the sandy terrain. Kento joins the two of you, whipping up Yuji in his arms, trudging into the shallow waves.

"Y/N, come come! Dada's bringing me in water!!" Yuji smiles over his dad's shoulder making grabby hands at you. Joining them in the ocean, the three of you play around, splashing each other, and dipping the crown of Yuji's head in the chilly water making him laugh. You all stood together, taking in the sunny scenery as the small waves lap at your abdomen. Kento pulls you into him by the waist while Yuji was babbling to the two of you about a huge fish he swears he saw.

This was new. You decide to take it a step further, seeing how much you can push. Placing your head on his chest, you wrapped your arm around his waist, keeping him close. You swear you see him glance at you, the side of his mouth quirking up.

Once the water starts to get a little too chilly and Yuji gets a little too bored, the three of you return to your small setup. You stood with Yuji as he continued rambling, occasionally tripping over his words. Kento approachs the two of you, wrapping the boy up in a towel ten times his size before lovingly placing one over your shoulders. You thank him, picking up Yuji and placing him on your lap, sitting on one of the plastic beach chairs.

His father sits close next to you and the three of you sit in comfortable silence, warming up. Comfortable silence until...

"Y/N?" Yuji starts, the side of his face squished against you chest. His small hands fiddle with a strand of your wet hair.

"Yes, bud?" You look down at the boy coddled against your body.

"When are you gonna be my mama? I want you to be my mama." He asks, genuine tone in his small voice.

Your eyes widened, head immediately whipping towards Kento. He was smiling. Full on, teeth saying 'hello', smiling. You can't help but return the gesture.

Not knowing how to respond, you laugh it off.

"Aw, you're so sweet!" You attempt to look down at the little boy, who's holding onto your neck, shoving his small features into your skin, embarrassed.

"You'd be a good mama. I wove you." He says softly, you melt, touched by how appreciative he is.

Kento let's out an audible 'aw'.

"Love you too Jiji." You respond, rubbing his back soothingly.

Kento was fighting his tongue not to repeat Yuji's words to you.

...

I will be coming out with a part two (with smut!) veryyyy soon!!! Hope you enjoyed! xoxo

[project-sekai-facts]

idk if this has its own comprehensive post on here or not but can you explain in depth how rui is gay coded

yeah okay

i think what you'll see people bring up most often is the fact that he has his right ear pierced (see above). incredibly brief queer history lesson for anyone who is unaware: back in the 70s & 80s when it was still illegal or otherwise heavily looked down on to be gay, wearing a single earring in your right ear became a non-verbal identifier amongst gay men in America. As far as I'm aware, identifiers did actually vary between areas, but it became far more publicly known that the right ear was the gay ear and the left ear was the straight ear. Even today when the stigma has worn away a decent amount, you still hear people bring up the term "gay ear" and the fact that the right ear is the gay ear is fairly common knowledge. This is also a known thing outside america, i'm not sure how far the spread is outside america and other english-speaking countries but it is definitely known in a fair amount of places, including Japan (also it should be noted that a right ear piercing can have different meanings in different cultures that predate this meaning, and nowadays people are more likely to get whatever ear pierced they want regardless of sexuality).

obviously anyone can have any ear pierced that they want but things work a bit differently with character design. the only other MCs who regularly wear earrings are An (left ear) and Akito (both). For both of them, this is definitely done to make them seem more cool, which makes sense given they're in the street music scene and following the fashions. As for NPCs there's Nagi (left), Arata, Ken, Tatsuya, Iori, Saku, and Yuuka (all both), which again is probably just to fit the fashion of those characters. Okay, Yuuka just has regular old earrings but as for the others you've got street and punk rock styles which both incorporate piercings as a big part of the style (especially with Saku's punk look).

so all that considered, Rui's earring just sticks out, I guess? it's not really a fashion thing, it's pretty plain and just kinda there, and very conveniently happens to exactly match up with an old way of signaling in the gay community instead of being in his left ear which is the far more common ear for guys to get pierced if they only have one earring. also he almost always only has the one piercing in his right ear in trained cards, the only exceptions being his cheer squad (earrings in both ears) and his canary card (three piercings but still in his right ear).

like i said though, it doesn't have to mean anything but talking from the perspective of character design, sometimes if you want to communicate something about a character then you put it in there.

building off of that, very stereotype-y but his choreo is notably quite.. flamboyant, should I say, compared to the other characters, even shizuku and haruka's more elegant styles. honestly just watch the clip this is so hard to explain. anyway in the process of writing this i found out that his mocap artist lists in his professional profile that one of his specialities is dancing for both masculine and feminine roles, so I get the feeling that there was a reason they cast this person specifically instead of one of the other male artists at the company, and then there was the decision to even have him dance like that in the first place. this doesn't have to mean anything at all and as i said leans very far on stereotypes which is something that i'm not a huge fan of but you do still have to consider things like this even when talking about modern media since it’s still a common way to imply characters as queer.

this one again is more of a matter of perspective. Rui has a few interactions with Tsukasa that could very definitely be read as flirting. it's kinda ambiguous though, which does make sense given the type of game this is; idol-adjacent games like this very rarely make anything concrete so that people who are fans of a pairing can enjoy the teasing and people who don't like it can simply move on. first thing that comes to mind would be the part where he invites Tsukasa to his house in wonder halloween (above), mainly because his L2D uses his smile expression that has a blush with it and that was a choice that someone on the L2D team had to make but didn't have to - they could've easily just kept his usual teasing expression he had at the start of the interaction there was no need to change it.

There's a couple other interactions but this is probably the most obvious outside of the incredibly shameless shiptease of Rui volunteering himself to play Juliet so Tsukasa could rehearse the proposal scene of his R&J adaptation despite the fact that Nene was in the room in Kamikou Festival!. Also, these scenes I mentioned would have been written long before the pairing between the two characters gained popularity in the fandom, so they were written just because the writers wanted to rather than because they were intentionally targeting a certain group.

(TL by pjsekai eng)

there's also that 1koma that I posted about a while ago. you know, the one where he asks for people to call him the "modern day Hiraga Gennai"? Hiraga Gennai as in the 18th century Japanese inventor who was also gay and wrote multiple works about it. The whole joke of the 1koma is that Rui wants to be known as the modern equivalent of a gay scientist and Tsukasa questions if he really wants to be called that.

The 1komas are played for jokes though, and especially the original ones are quite hard to call canon due to some of the scenarios and character interactions not making sense. But then again, someone on the writing team decided to write a gay joke around Rui for whatever reason that may be and it got passed by higher ups and put in the game (or, 3 versions of the game. the joke didn't make it to EN due to Gennai not being very known amongst the audience).

the only other thing i can think of (and arguably like, the biggest bit of evidence for this theory (? Idk if I should call it that)) is that he doesn't really show any interest in women.

First off, the Valentine's Day 2021 vlive. Quick note that in Japan, Valentine's is traditionally a holiday for girls to give chocolates to boys (while white day is the reverse). You can give platonic valentines too, which is what happens in-game... for the most part.

Those chocolates Rui got could easily just be platonic chocolates from other students, but then you have a few factors to filter in. 1) this is very early into the game, back when his only friends were WxS and Mizuki and 2) Those chocolates aren't from WxS, since Emu and Nene give the boys sweets offscreen after the vlive, and Tsukasa is on the receiving end for this holiday. Of course, one box could be friend chocolates from Mizuki, but that leaves more chocolate boxes than friends to give him chocolates.

Immediately after this, Tsukasa gets jealous that Rui got chocolates and tries to brag that he got some too, before saying too much and revealing he got friendzoned by multiple girls, basically confirming that Rui's chocolates were given with romantic intent. I guess you could say that these were chocolates given out to everyone in 2-B, but then why would they leave it anonymously in his locker? Tsukasa's classmates just gave them out to everyone in-person. The only reason I could think of is that people don't want to associate with him, which is canon, but if that's the case then why even bother. I dunno. This is almost word-for-word from that post I made about the in-universe attractiveness of every character so sorry I made you sit through that again.

Getting back on track, Rui seems very neutral about the fact he got given multiple boxes of what was likely confession chocolate. He just briefly mentions that he forgot the holiday was even happening until he found chocolates and then never brings this up again. I think it's worth comparing his reactions to Tsukasa, who seems to care very much about his abilities (or, lack thereof) to attract women. Obviously Tsukasa is the big reactions/brag about a lot of things guy, but Rui does not really seem to care about the fact that multiple women find him attractive, or just the holiday where he’s supposed to get chocolate from girls in general. But this whole interaction is just for jokes anyway so you don’t have to think too much of it if you don’t want to.

Second sub-point: Shizuku. Shizuku can be considered as the most attractive character in-universe given the sheer amount of characters that have been shown to be attracted to her or at least comment on her looks (currently at least 8 MCs if not more and a few named side characters). Admittedly none of those MCs are male, but it isn't like it's impossible for people to be attracted to the opposite gender in this game, like we just established that Tsukasa says he's interested in women, so the point still stands.

(TL from Tsukasa's #3 fan on YT)

Specifically I would like to point out a scene in A Once-In-A-Lifetime Pandemonium, when the 2-B trio first meet the Miyajo 2nd years. The three of them immediately recognise Shizuku and Airi and then Ibuki describes Mafuyu as "a beauty". Shizuku gives them her idol smile which in their POV has the same sparkles that often (not always, but definitely in this context) show up when characters are attracted to another character (like how Haruka has this effect on Minori and Kohane, and An has this effect on Kohane). Like it's very, very obvious that Rui's friends are attracted to Shizuku and the other girls and they're pretty surprised that he's hanging around with them.

But Rui never acts like this around Shizuku at all, nor does he ever even address the fact that she's good looking. He doesn't even bring it up in their earlier interactions back in the Picnic event or any events after, when a lot of other characters (e.g: Emu, Ena, and Mizuki) commented on her looks almost immediately after meeting her (they did first meet in a pretty stressful situation if you want to argue that, but it still stands that he's never been attracted to her). Similarly in The Tomorrow we Hope for, he does not have any reaction to meeting Haruka for the first time, unlike how we see other characters who are attracted to women (Kohane/Minori/debatably Nene it’s up to interpretation) act around her at first.

at the end of the day i think you could definitely make a case for it. like it's harder to make a solid argument in comparison to say, Kohane, An, or Minori who are outright attracted to other girls and say as such on-screen, but there's definitely some more subtle hints and stuff to work with still and it was actually quite fun to compile them (i took the in-depth part to heart as always sorry anon).

[canmom]

Hypothetical Decentralised Social Media Protocol Stack

if we were to dream up the Next Social Media from first principles we face three problems. one is scaling hosting, the second is discovery/aggregation, the third is moderation.

hosting

hosting for millions of users is very very expensive. you have to have a network of datacentres around the world and mechanisms to sync the data between them. you probably use something like AWS, and they will charge you an eye-watering amount of money for it. since it's so expensive, there's no way to break even except by either charging users to access your service (which people generally hate to do) or selling ads, the ability to intrude on their attention to the highest bidder (which people also hate, and go out of their way to filter out). unless you have a lot of money to burn, this is a major barrier.

the traditional internet hosts everything on different servers, and you use addresses that point you to that server. the problem with this is that it responds poorly to sudden spikes in attention. if you self-host your blog, you can get DDOSed entirely by accident. you can use a service like cloudflare to protect you but that's $$$. you can host a blog on a service like wordpress, or a static site on a service like Github Pages or Neocities, often for free, but that broadly limits interaction to people leaving comments on your blog and doesn't have the off-the-cuff passing-thought sort of interaction that social media does.

the middle ground is forums, which used to be the primary form of social interaction before social media eclipsed them, typically running on one or a few servers with a database + frontend. these are viable enough, often they can be run with fairly minimal ads or by user subscriptions (the SomethingAwful model), but they can't scale indefinitely, and each one is a separate bubble. mastodon is a semi-return to this model, with the addition of a means to use your account on one bubble to interact with another ('federation').

the issue with everything so far is that it's an all-eggs-in-one-basket approach. you depend on the forum, instance, or service paying its bills to stay up. if it goes down, it's just gone. and database-backend models often interact poorly with the internet archive's scraping, so huge chunks won't be preserved.

scaling hosting could theoretically be solved by a model like torrents or IPFS, in which every user becomes a 'server' for all the posts they download, and you look up files using hashes of the content. if a post gets popular, it also gets better seeded! an issue with that design is archival: there is no guarantee that stuff will stay on the network, so if nobody is downloading a post, it is likely to get flushed out by newer stuff. it's like link rot, but it happens automatically.

IPFS solves this by 'pinning': you order an IPFS node (e.g. your server) not to flush a certain file so it will always be available from at least one source. they've sadly mixed this up in cryptocurrency, with 'pinning services' which will take payment in crypto to pin your data. my distaste for a technology designed around red queen races aside, I don't know how pinning costs compare to regular hosting costs.

theoretically you could build a social network on a backbone of content-based addressing. it would come with some drawbacks (posts would be immutable, unless you use some indirection to a traditional address-based hosting) but i think you could make it work (a mix of location-based addressing for low-bandwidth stuff like text, and content-based addressing for inline media). in fact, IPFS has the ability to mix in a bit of address-based lookup into its content-based approach, used for hosting blogs and the like.

as for videos - well, BitTorrent is great for distributing video files. though I don't know how well that scales to something like Youtube. you'd need a lot of hard drive space to handle the amount of Youtube that people typically watch and continue seeding it.

aggregation/discovery

the next problem is aggregation/discovery. social media sites approach this problem in various ways. early social media sites like LiveJournal had a somewhat newsgroup-like approach, you'd join a 'community' and people would post stuff to that community. this got replaced by the subscription model of sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where every user is simultaneously an author and a curator, and you subscribe to someone to see what posts they want to share.

this in turn got replaced by neural network-driven algorithms which attempt to guess what you'll want to see and show you stuff that's popular with whatever it thinks your demographic is. that's gotta go, or at least not be an intrinsic part of the social network anymore.

it would be easy enough to replicate the 'subscribe to see someone's recommended stuff' model, you just need a protocol for pointing people at stuff. (getting analytics such as like/reblog counts would be more difficult!) it would probably look similar to RSS feeds: you upload a list of suitably formatted data, and programs which speak that protocol can download it.

the problem of discovery - ways to find strangers who are interested in the same stuff you are - is more tricky. if we're trying to design this as a fully decentralised, censorship-resistant network, we face the spam problem. any means you use to broadcast 'hi, i exist and i like to talk about this thing, come interact with me' can be subverted by spammers. either you restrict yourself entirely to spreading across a network of curated recommendations, or you have to have moderation.

moderation

moderation is one of the hardest problems of social networks as they currently exist. it's both a problem of spam (the posts that users want to see getting swamped by porn bots or whatever) and legality (they're obliged to remove child porn, beheading videos and the like). the usual solution is a combination of AI shit - does the robot think this looks like a naked person - and outsourcing it to poorly paid workers in (typically) African countries, whose job is to look at reports of the most traumatic shit humans can come up with all day and confirm whether it's bad or not.

for our purposes, the hypothetical decentralised network is a protocol to help computers find stuff, not a platform. we can't control how people use it, and if we're not hosting any of the bad shit, it's not on us. but spam moderation is a problem any time that people can insert content you did not request into your feed.

possibly this is where you could have something like Mastodon instances, with their own moderation rules, but crucially, which don't host the content they aggregate. so instead of having 'an account on an instance', you have a stable address on the network, and you submit it to various directories so people can find you. by keeping each one limited in scale, it makes moderation more feasible. this is basically Reddit's model: you have topic-based hubs which people can subscribe to, and submit stuff to.

the other moderation issue is that there is no mechanism in this design to protect from mass harassment. if someone put you on the K*w*f*rms List of Degenerate Trannies To Suicidebait, there'd be fuck all you can do except refuse to receive contact from strangers. though... that's kind of already true of the internet as it stands. nobody has solved this problem.

to sum up

primarily static sites 'hosted' partly or fully on IPFS and BitTorrent

a protocol for sharing content you want to promote, similar to RSS, that you can aggregate into a 'feed'

directories you can submit posts to which handle their own moderation

no ads, nobody makes money off this

honestly, the biggest problem with all this is mostly just... getting it going in the first place. because let's be real, who but tech nerds is going to use a system that requires you to understand fuckin IPFS? until it's already up and running, this idea's got about as much hope as getting people to sign each others' GPG keys. it would have to have the sharp edges sanded down, so it's as easy to get on the Hypothetical Decentralised Social Network Protocol Stack as it is to register an account on tumblr.

but running over it like this... I don't think it's actually impossible in principle. a lot of the technical hurdles have already been solved. and that's what I want the Next Place to look like.

[parad-ice-lostandfound]

Prompt: The Prefect's Obsession.

Pairing: Yandere!Prefect/ Yuu and Reader/ Player (can be read as platonic or romantic)

Genre: Yandere

TW: Obsessive behaviour...? Let me know if anything else should be added ^^ (Reader and Yuu are two different individuals.)

AN: I initially had the prompt 'obsession', but reading @roseapov 's Player and Overseer thing gave me this idea; what if Yuu was more than just a puppet, and equally as obsessed with the player as the rest of the twst cast? I'm trying to explore how to write more unsettling kind of stuff, since I'm pretty good at writing regular ol' angst and fluff if I do say so myself ^^ somehow twst brings out this side of me lol. Anyways, as always, I hope you enjoy!

The Prefect was made aware of your presence in their life during the first ever battle they fought, against the blot monster in the Dwarves' Mines.

They remember the rush of energy that filled them, the authority with which they barked out orders for their friends to fight. The intensity of the battle had had little effect on them (even though a small part in the back of their brain said that they should have been freaking out) as they instructed their friends, while their own strings were pulled by another.

Till then, the Prefect had only felt someone's intent gaze, even when no one was there. At times a little rhythm would be thrumming under their skin, sometimes soft and slow, other times fast-paced and exhilarating. But the way you had possessed their body, taken over their actions to lead them and their friends to victory, was what astonished and scared them the most.

They hated it at first. After all, who would like to have no control over their actions in a life-or-death situation? But as time went by, and you led them to victory and safety so many more times, the Prefect grew fonder of you.

The many hours you spent, watching them repair Ramshackle or handle Grim and the rest of the first years endeared you to them. You were so patient, so kind-hearted to be helping this magicless human navigate the challenges of being transported to a magical world. Their desire to know you, to thank you grew day by day, minute by minute. After all, without your help they would not have gotten this far. Somewhere, the lines between genuine gratefulness and blinded devotion blurred, and the Prefect had no intention of redrawing those lines, ever again.

They could tell when you weren't with them. The lightness they felt when under your watchful (and loving, hopefully) eyes would go away sometimes, leaving them to mindlessly wander, waiting for you to come back. Of course, they wouldn't hold your occasional absences against you. They couldn't even bring themself to think something so blasphemous as to hold a grudge against you. But they also couldn't suppress the fear and anxiety that ate away at them each time you left, wondering whether you would come back, when you would come back, and how long you would stay with them the next time.

You, who they had never seen, had more of an impact and importance in their life than the boys of the seven dorms they had become fast friends with.

A conversation with Riddle after one of their lessons together revealed that the boys were also aware of a greater entity watching over them. They called you by a special name, one initially used by Idia and then adopted by everyone else.

Player.

Prefect tested the word, satisfied by the way it rolled off their tongue. Because they control us, just like a player would their game characters.

The Prefect became the subject of more attention fairly quickly after it became known that they were aware of the player and not just a oblivious puppet as Azul had theorized earlier. Considering that you used the Prefect exclusively to interact with everyone, the boys would try to spend as much time as they could in their presence, in hopes of feeling the your 'grace' and monopolizing it. It was just a feeling, one that they could all experience but none could explain. Your presence through the Prefect calmed them. Even when they thought themselves to be alright, the feeling of your presence would help soothe parts of themself they weren't aware needed soothing.

But the Prefect...They hated it.

The way they all milled around them, hungry for any indication of your presence, your validation. The way they stuck close to them, waiting to bask in the familiar warmth and calm that surrounded the Prefect when you visited them. To the Prefect, they were quickly turning from friends to insistent, irritating flies buzzing around.

Nobody deserved to be in your presence. Nobody but them. Because you chose the Prefect as your vessel, a blank slate for you to use to mercifully interfere in the lives of those who didn't deserve you.

The Prefect felt a sense of pride at the thought of being your puppet, at your mercy and for you to do what you wish with them. No greater honour could have been conferred to them and their existence than to create miracles in your name, under your guidance.

Of course, this... devotion meant that the Prefect often wondered about you. While you watched over them as they attended their lessons, the Prefect wondered if you liked to learn History; perhaps you were more into sports and fitness. Or perhaps alchemy was more your pace?

The Prefect also liked to imagine that their features somewhat mirrored yours. Perhaps your eyes were similar, or the curve of your nose, or perhaps your skin tone. After all, there must be something common between an entity and their vessel, to show that they are bound to each other, right?

As they looked down at your fallen form, however, they could not see any similarity. Not even a passing resemblance.

You were different, breathtakingly so.

Having spent the most amount of time in your presence, there was no way the Prefect could have made a mistake. The light sheen of grace that clung to your skin was enough of an indicator of your identity. The Prefect watched, mesmerized by your (e/c) eyes that held a mix of awe and curiosity, your apologies for bumping into them ignored in favour of staring at your face, searing each and every feature into their brain.

The Player.

The player was in Twisted Wonderland.

The player was in Twisted Wonderland?

But how?

Briefly, as Yuu extended a hand to help you up, they wondered if you had been unceremoniously dumped into this twisted world of magic and monsters, the same way they had. Their blood began boiling under their skin at the thought that some being (could this mean there were beings greater than you?) would treat you so carelessly, as if you did not hold power over some of the most important figures in Twisted Wonderland.

Prefect watched you stand with their help, a soft and grateful "Thank you," slipping through your lips and setting their every nerve on fire. The timbre of your voice, the slight awe in your words and the grateful light in your eyes as you looked at them, it was all so much. Too much, and yet still not nearly enough.

And then, a small voice spoke up from deep within them. 'The Player is here. And nobody knows.'

For if they had, if they had the slightest of an inkling that their beloved deity was amongst them, the housewardens would do their best to have you for themselves. Each dorm would declare an outright war on the others if it meant having you by their side.

But if you could be persuaded to join one before the others even found out...

They gave you a big smile, reverently noting the slight blush you sported. How cute. "No need to apologize. I wasn't looking where I was going either. But.. I haven't seen you around here before. I'm Yuu, what's your name?" They asked, hoping to not scare you off by seeming over eager.

"Ah, I'm (Name)," you answered, a bashful smile on your face. They cooed over your warm smile and sparkling eyes internally. So naive, so trusting; no wonder you cared about everyone, even those that had hurt your vessel, and by extension, you.

"I'm in the process of transferring from Aravae Arcane Academy," you continued, and their smile almost slipped from their face. You were in the process of transferring into Night Raven College? That too, from an obscure academy situated Sevens knows where? How long had it been since you had decided to grace Twisted Wonderland with your actual presence? How long had they been unaware of their beloved deity being so close? How long had they been unable to serve you as they should have?

The Prefect pushed the thoughts down, deep down, where it would never see the light of day ever again. You were here. Through some miracle, you were right in front of them, where they could touch you if you permitted (for they would never lay a hand on you without your permission).

And you would stay. The Prefect would go through it all again, fight the Great Seven even, if only to ensure that you would stay close to them. Where they could bask in your glory and serve you as they are meant to. A loyal follower devoting their heart, soul and mind to their beloved deity.

Your expression changed into one of slight embarassment and awkwardness, and that is when the Prefect realized they might have been just a little too intent with their staring. Nervously chuckling, they said, "Ah, okay. That explains it, I guess."

You chuckled as well, and the Prefect felt as though fate was smiling down upon them. This, this was their reward for going through all that they had. This was what they were meant for. "Yeah... I am kinda lost though. I was supposed to meet the Headmage, but..." You trailed off, and they nodded understandingly.

"Yeah, the grounds can be real hard to navigate. But don't worry! I'll help you get to the Headmage's office. He should be there, if he's not doing any surprise class supervisions today," they chirped.

"That would be nice. Oh, but, I don't want to trouble you. I mean, you must be busy..."

"It's no problem, really! I'm always happy to help!"

"Oh, well... If its not much trouble, please lead the way."

"Sure! Oh, by the way, do you have any dorm you'd like to be in? I know the Dark Mirror sorts students into dorms, but people do change their dorms sometimes if they want to..."

[itsagrimm]

Niche König headcanons

SFW

He hates going shopping but he loves a good bargain for groceries. You will find him planning a weeks meals, cutting out coupons and doing serious research by flickering through advertisements & flyers at the kitchen table. He is also a hardcore Aldi and Lidl fan.

The only time König has cursed outside a battle situation was when Soap tried to convince him toast is bread in the mess hall.

König knows the rules for Fußball but does not particularly care much about it. However, he does care about how it's called. (It's Fußball so football, Not Soccer!)

At home his go to anti-anxiety-measures are going on hikes and visiting the climbing gym. Also, he owns one of those colourful outdoor raincoats because he got those for the hikes but definitely wears them for any other too many occasions. It tends to look slight off so he looks like a lost tourist with it.

As a kid he went to the library a lot to get new fantasy books. As an adult he does not have the time for that anymore but he still likes fantasy stories. So he listens to audiobooks bc the gear for that fits better into his duffle bag than a bunch of books.

Has opinions about Vienna. If you ask him about it, it will trigger a surprising tirade about the austrian capital and some numbered quartiers. However if someone says something negative about Vienna he will firmly defend Vienna as the bestest of best cities ever.

Contrary to popular believe he does not think too much about his height. He grew up in Austria and surrounded by fairly tall people. Also while he is exceptionally tall, he is not much taller than most people he interacts with on a regular. But he does struggle with his strength and is insecure about the space he takes up in a social sense.

Massiv metal fan. Yes, he had longer hair as a teen for head banging purposes in his bedroom, plastered with posters from his fav bands.

NSFW

König kind of does not know how to use his body outside of the familiar battle movements. It's awkward at the beginning. He is like a deer caught in headlights. And he needs instructions, explanations and feedback for what he does, otherwise he feels kind of lost.

Is not very experienced. Obviously.

Once he does learn how you like it, he draws immense joy and pride from seeing you squirming and moaning. It fills his heart with a calm he rarely experiences. He did this. He made you cum. And he has a hard time enjoying himself and cuming before he took care of you at least once. He also might evolve into a pleasure dom one day.

That man is curious but also shy. Get ready for online shopping a bunch of sex toys to try out.

Speaking of online orders. He needs the extra large condoms without latex, which he orders as well bc he would have a hard time dealing with the cashier at the check out. The poor man does not only have anxiety but also a latex allergy and a huge dick.

The hood stays on.

König gives off bi vibes but is confused by it. It will take him a long time to figure that out.

He is kinky but does not know how to phrase a lot of it or ask for certain things. Watching porn together to show what he likes is one of the ways he tries to articulate his desires without actually saying it.

Absolutely into getting pegged. Absolutely not into giving someone anal. He does not want to hurt his partner.

Likes his partner on top of him. That way he can touch them better and caress their skin. Also really into holding onto their hips. He likes how his hands look like there.

Into getting scratched, bitten and having his hair pulled. After overcoming that surprising realisation he might discover that he very much likes doing that to his partner as well.

Not down for one nightstands. The whole sex and emotions situation is hard for him. So, having one set partner gives him a feeling of stability. And while from the outside that might come off as a bit traditional he is not opposed to opening up the relationship once he worked through his own bisexuality.

[youthguk]

bibliothèque | jjk (m)

“No better place for a good sex than library”

pairing: jungkook x reader

genre: smut.

words: 2.9k

author’s note: happy valentines day ♡ feedback is very welcomed

There was some hazy electrical tension wreathing the atmosphere in the library. It first occurred to you when one particular person started attending your regular study group sessions at the university’s library. It was unknown to you why exactly Jeon Jungkook joined your group but everyone was more than welcome to any new members striving to gnaw at the granite of science. 

And you’d be lying if you’d said that Jungkook joining the study group wasn’t the best thing that happened to you this semester, making your once-a-week meet-ups the highlight of your week. To your surprise, it was fun and easy with Jungkook. You were accustomed to gaping at him in the hallways, all by himself, sure that he was a loner or something. You barely ever caught him in conversation with someone, so you just assumed that he was grim and grumpy all the time. Boy oh boy were you wrong. 

The moment Jungkook stepped into the library and got paired with you to quiz each other was just a blessing from above, turning your Saturday morning meet-ups into something to look forward to the whole week. He was charming and funny without even trying, never skimping on witty comments. You were getting used to his presence and the power that it held over you, feeling tingles in your stomach every time he’d lean closer to you to see if your answers matched with his or every time that his fingers would leave imperceptible touches on your shoulder while he sits sideways in the chair, deep in thoughts to solve the equation. 

“Seems like you two get along pretty well,” randomly said Ruri, nudging you teasingly as your study session ends and Jungkook is quick to leave. You notice how the rest of your study group snickers at Ruri’s words, nodding confirmingly. 

You shrug, gazing at his receding silhouette.“Yeah, just like with everyone else.”

“Come on, you know damn well that guy is the biggest introvert on campus.” 

Trying not to let that idea get to your head, you brush those thoughts off. It's too dangerous and gullible to believe that Jungkook was paying any special attention to you. Surely, he was evidently attentive whenever you spoke during meetings or presented something, but you like to view it just as an act of generosity that he failed to show to others. Besides you two never interacted outside of the library; yes, you would greet each other in hallways but it never went further than just nods of acknowledgment. Which fairly did make you mad, leaving you to crave for more. A little bit. 

But still, the thought of Jungkook actually being into you was too enthralling to let go, so today you decided to shoot your shot. What's a better place for unraveling a guy’s true emotions than a place filled with rows upon rows of written human confessions? 

You enter the reading room where everyone is already seated, including Jungkook. You never liked being late but for today you needed all chances of catching his attention that were possible. As you approach your study group, everyone’s attention is on you. 

“Hey, _____, we thought you were skipping today’s session,” Ruri greets you and you notice Jungkook’s gaze on you. 

“How could I skip this?” A mischievous grin plasters your face as you take your seat, tracing with your fingers the back of Jungkook’s chair, knowing pretty well that his dark eyes are riveted on you. 

Libraries were always so quiet, unveiling and emphasizing every little motion, every breath taken. Though you were oblivious to the usual annoying sounds of students flipping pages or the creak of chairs as the librarian travels past them, organizing the books. What you were certainly attuned to is Jungkook’s body sitting next to you, reacting to your every single move. 

At first, you think to yourself that it’s just a coincidence when you wistfully place a pencil on your lower lip and hear Jungkook clearing his throat. Just a coincidence, no need to overthink it, you reassure yourself. 

But it’s still worth trying out one more time, right? You cross your leg over another, the pleated miniskirt of yours exposing more bare skin of your thigh. You register Jungkook’s sudden ruffling through the pages of his book. Well, now you’re intrigued and can’t contain the impish smirk flourishing on your lips. 

“Hey, Jungkook, what do you think about this passage?” You lean in closer to him, tossing your notebook to him. You definitely caught him off guard as he nervously gulps trying to compose himself.

You blink at him innocently, as your black leather loafer’s toe fleetly brushes his leg under the table. His body tenses under that brief touch, leaving your mind open to lingering thoughts. Jungkook himself was such a blessing to an eye, with silky black hair coating his doe eyes that always made him appear so innocent and genuine while the rest of his body reeked of masculinity. And seeing him now so agitated because of your slight closeness makes your heart rise to your throat, welcoming dirty thoughts into your head. Damn it, what were you doing? Where would this all lead today? 

“I think it’s fine, you did good,” he says, pointing back at your notebook when met with your smitten expression. “You look different today.”

You raise your eyebrow at his statement. “Really? What’s different?” You lean in closer, tilting your head curiously. 

“I don’t know…just different,” he clears his throat, eyeing you up and down, gaze slowing at the sight of your bare thighs, but he quickly looks back into your eyes. 

“Well, I hope in a good way?” 

“Yeah, totally my type,” he chuckles and the sudden change in his demeanor makes you giddy. What was that? 

His unexpected confession leaves you frozen as you search for more in his hooded eyes that are dangerously tempting now. Losing control of whatever you started, you feel something unleash in Jungkook as he rests his chin on his right elbow that is propped negligently on the table while his left-hand travels under the table. You feel a firm grip of his left palm on your thigh and your stomach somersaults. You heavily sigh, eyes widely staring at him. 

Jungkook just narrows his eyes, looking pensively at your notebook as if you two couldn’t care less about the damn essay right now. You toss a look on the other side, making sure that all of this is inconspicuous to the rest of your study group. 

Jungkook arches an eyebrow at you. “Is something wrong?” He casually says, tilting his head closer to you while his hand glides higher up your thigh, sending shivers down your spine. His magnetic face was so close to you now, that you would have felt his lips brushing yours if you decided to come closer to him. “You didn’t answer, _____,” he whispers now, his hot breath lacing your mouth. You swallow, feeling a low throb in your core. 

When you feel his strong grip on your thigh moves higher, under the fabric of your skirt, you indulge in your first instinct, pressing your legs together. He squeezes your thigh again, a gasp trapping in your throat as his own tension is now clear to you. What were you doing, this is insane. 

“You know…” you clear your throat, not expecting that it’d be so hard to collect yourself, “I still need to look for some references.” 

You stand up from your seat, sleeking your skirt with your shaky hand. This was ridiculous, what was your plan again? To find out if Jungkook liked you? Well, apparently he does have some slightest interest in you and isn’t that shy to show it as well. But what were you going to do about it? Whatever those options were, you are not insane enough to discover them at the library, full of people. 

You hurry through the stairs, making sure to get away from Jungkook as far as possible. The second floor was surprisingly empty, and you stop at the section farthest away. You lean at the bookshelf with your back, catching a breath. 

But you weren’t destined to be left in solitude today as you hear the sound of approaching footsteps. You turn around, grabbing the first book that caught your attention. Crime and punishment. You roll your eyes, reading the title of the book. Of course, what else you’d need right now when writing an essay for English literature class? 

Jungkook’s figure appears right next to you, catching you unawares. “Sure you needed this for reference?” 

He’s leaning his shoulder on the bookshelf, studying you closely. “This? Oh, no, of course, no,” you let out a nervous laugh as if caught at a crime scene. “You know, just love this so much, wanted to freshen up the story in my head. For my own enjoyment,” you grant him a strained smile.  

“Something tells me I can bring you more pleasure than some prose-less classics author,” devilish smirk plasters across his face. It’s surely hard to argue with that. 

“Where did you get that courage from?” You snap at him, closing the book in your hand with a clap.

Jungkook scoffs, taking the Crime and punishment from your grip and placing it back on the shelf. “Is that what bothers you?” He takes a step closer to you, startling you with the dangerous proximity of his body to yours. You step back, until your back hits the stack of books behind you, trapping yourself between Jungkook’s hot body and the bookshelf. “Is that why you dressed like this today? To get my attention?” He catches your chin between his fingers, forcing you to face him. 

“Don’t flatter yourself, it’s not for you,” you let out an obvious lie to both of you. 

He just chuckles at you amusingly. And when you finally meet his eyes, your stomach tingles at the sight of his glossed-over glare. “Not for me?” He scowls, jaw clenched as his fingers release your chin, trailing down to your neck, briefly caressing your clavicle before traveling lower to your breasts. 

Your heart pounds hard inside your chest, sending blood to your head. You felt his every touch so deeply, wishing to get rid of the clothes preventing you from the skin on skin contact. He cups your breast in one hand, fondling it, while the one snakes up your thigh. As Jungkook reaches up your core, you feel the fabric of your underwear clings to your wet folds.

“Is this not for me, hm?” He hisses, the raspiness of his voice cutting through the overwhelming silence of the library. You would like to answer and stand your ground but you just stand there, panting in anticipation, chest heaving under his touches. 

“Jungkook, we are in a fucking library,” you attempt to argue, one last chance to stop something that both you needed right now and craved even longer. 

He shrugged, palming your heat, the throbbing between your legs growing stronger and stronger. “What can be a great place for a good sex, if not library, love?”

Jungkook will be the death of you, that you can tell already, when his mere words were able to make you squeeze his forearm, your body arching towards him. 

You didn’t need to ask Jungkook more, seeing you like this was a miracle to him alone, your half-lidded eyes peering at him in pure neediness. 

Before you knew it, his lips were crashing yours, hungrily devouring you. His tongue felt perfect against yours, making you tremble as he grunted into your mouth. You whimper, feeling his hand on your jaw while the other one pushes aside your panties, thumb brushing over your wetness smeared all over your folds. You exhale heavily, list clogging your mind, the worry of having sex in the public library long-forgotten now. 

Jungkook’s wet lips travel down your jawline, burying himself in the crook of your neck. You throw your head back, parting your lips to let out a quiet moan. 

He growls before coming back to your parted lips, ghosting them with his before you feel him pumping his finger inside of you. You wince, biting on your lower lip in hopes to suppress the moan. 

He pumps you in and out, his finger dipping in your arousal. Your hold on his forearm becomes more desperate and there’s nothing more that Jungkook wants to do than give you everything that you yearn for. 

Jungkook adds another finger, now pressing the spot that had you drooling on his hand. 

“Fuck, Jungkook, I—, please,” you try to collect your thoughts through the panting. 

But he only shushes you, stretching you out more for him. “We don’t wanna get caught, right, baby?” 

And you just nod, taking him, grinding along with the pace of his fingers that were hitting your spot so deliciously. Jungkook doesn’t slow down for a bit, driven by the blissful state of yours that he created. 

You clench around his fingers, growing tighter. Jungkook was attentive to your every move, so once you start clenching around his fingers, growing tighter, he speeds up even more, pushing you over the edge. 

Jungkook grunts seeing you whimpering, brows knotted while your body is convulsing around his fingers as the pleasure washes over you. “Good girl,” he brushes through your hair as you tiredly throw your head forward, on his shoulder, ragged breathing escaping your mouth. 

You search for his mouth, while hands desperately trace down his chiseled chest to his belt, determined to unbuckle him. 

“I appreciate this, princess,” his hand hovers over yours as you meet his darkening gaze. “But I prefer this more,” he swirls you, pressing your back to his front, and you whine at the closeness of your bodies. “Hope you don’t mind this?” 

You briskly shake your head, turning to the side, striving to catch a glimpse of Jungkook, as you hear him unzipping his jeans. “No-no, it’s perfect, Jungkook, please,” you throw your head back in anticipation of finally feeling him, taking him fully. 

“That’s my girl,” he murmurs against your earlobe from behind as his hand wraps around his length, pumping himself off. You bite your lower lip, wishing to get a proper look at that lewd sight. 

Jungkook pushes up your skirt, squeezing your ass cheek. You sigh heavily, pussy throbbing rapidly as he tapped his tip against your core. 

“Jungkook, f-fuck me, please,” you plead, not able to wait for more as he glided his big cock between your ass cheeks making you hold your breath in anticipation. You were so wet, so eagerly ready to take him here, not a single worry about being in the library, regretting only that you two couldn’t moan loudly. 

He places his tip inside your pussy, and you find yourself desperately pressing back against him. Jungkook slides his hand under your shirt, cupping your breast under the bra, setting your stomach on fire. You palm your hand over his and squeeze it tighter as he finally pushes his cock inside you, making you both moan at the feeling. 

Your walls hug him, clenching on his full length, feeling his own arousal. At first, he moves excruciatingly slow, thrusting in and out of you at his full length as he stretches you out. 

When he starts speeding up, thrusting deep, you grab his arm, pulling him closer, your back perfectly pinned to his chest, feeling his own heart hammering at a soaring rate. 

Jungkook slides his free arm to your front, resting two fingers on your clit, rubbing it with the same pace he was thrusting you from behind with his cock. 

You feel another wave of pleasure approaching you as you’re tightly wrapped by Jungkook’s hands from behind, and nothing except for the sound of his hips slapping against you roughly and your muffled whimpers surrounding you now. 

You knew Jungkook had some insanely special power over you, but you could have never imagined that it would allow him to fuck you senselessly in your university’s library. Well, now that was the last thing on your mind, especially as you feel him fastening his pace violently, making your grip on the poor bookshelf that you used to support yourself. 

And as the sound of his moan reaches you, your pussy clenches around his cock, throbbing through your orgasm taking over you. You tremble in his embrace and Jungkook only groans at this sight, gripping tightly on you, speeding up even more, chasing his own high. 

You feel his body shuddering behind, filling you in warmly. He now rests his chin on your shoulder, leaving wet kisses on your nape. 

“Fuck, Jungkook, that was so good,” you mumble, pulling your skirt down, as he buckles up his jeans, tugging his shirt in. 

You turn around to face him, now that you both look somewhat decent and he latches on your lips again, hands wrapping around you. “Do we really have to go back to that study session now?” He pouts at you, his doe eyes back to being innocent as if he didn’t hungrily devour you with them just moments ago. 

“You have better plans?” 

“With you? Plenty.”

____________ 

i hope you enjoyed this oneshot, let me know your thoughts <;3 

[penaltyboxboxbox]

adding to my fandom annoyingness thoughts- i think f1/sports fandoms generally are less annoying because there is a part of them that is socially acceptable and able to be performed in public as well as with people who may not full "get it". a super online f1 fan who ships yaoi and whathaveyou can often times, still go to a real life gp and have a fairly normal conversation with like, a regular degular f1 fan who checks instagram- because if they say, both like ferrari, they are watching the same races/supplementary content, theyre at this real life event with hundreds upon thousands of others, with that one shared thing in common, youre all rooting for that team to win. even if you disagree about the minutia, you all want your team to win.

in more niche fandom spaces, like kids cartoons or specific anime or years old tv series, theres not mass real life gatherings. theres cons, but unless your fandom is huge you might not have a meet up, and again, even if you like the same things, youre not necessarily all there with the same hope/mindset... and i think with there just being a lot less socially acceptable ways to display and interact with those types of fandom in the general public, it leads to the online spaces becoming very fraught because it is the only space people have to defend. Without specifically outlined pockets of who is "safe" or "right" you start to get those who overreach into trying to expel ppl from fandom they dont think should be there, you get more arguing about how to be a fan the right way or splintering something that was never meant to be consumed in a divided way........but its done in an effort to fit in/feel like you have a space to be a nerd properly...idk im rambling now i just things its so fascinating having been in so many fandoms in my life

[earthstellar]

I finally realised why this panel sticks out to me. 

For context: Everyone just arrived in the nightmare Functionist Universe, they’ve ended up somewhere they aren’t supposed to be, and the little drone is basically a cop who wants to search everyone. 

And this scene sticks out to me, this panel in particular, because Ratchet is the only one who challenges the cop-drone. 

Which is pretty significant, actually. 

How to Deal With Space Cops: Fucking Don’t! Unless You Can Get Away With It. 

Rodimus, Drift, Megatron, and Terminus all come from backgrounds where they were all harassed by authority figures on at least a fairly regular basis; They’re far more familiar with being pushed around by cops than Ratchet would be. 

Granted, Ratchet worked in the Dead End and undoubtedly got some degree of shit for it, but he still had the social class/caste status to dodge the more severe questioning, and had friends who were active duty cops himself. He got bothered by some authority figures, but for the most part, he could talk back without fear of suffering any of the more severe repercussions that most of the others here would be facing if they did anything similar. 

Authorities Aren’t That Scared of Authorities 

Chromedome, Rewind, Roller, and Minimus have all worked for or alongside bodies of authority themselves, and therefore likely aren’t as immediately resistant; They want to get through this without incident if they can, and in their minds, that means hearing out the cop-bot before they do anything. Their reactions are on hold. They’re listening, not talking-- Because most of them have been the person questioning others before. 

Gutter Mechs Know The Unspoken Reality of Things 

But check out the looks on Rodimus and Terminus’ faces. They’re just like, alright, this shit again. They’re not letting their faces show anything that a cop-drone might interpret as resistance or aggression, or they know they’re fucked. 

Drift and Megatron actively look put off, because they’re taking more of a defensive approach. They’ve both been treated severely and with suspicion by authority figures before, especially representatives of law enforcement, so they’re not saying anything--But their expressions show that they’re already calling bullshit on whatever this little cop-drone wants with them. “What does this thing want with us, now?” And rightfully, they don’t say shit. They know better. 

It’s a brilliant little bit of visual storytelling. Their reactions--or lack thereof--in their faces is a nice touch. The group of bots present consists of a mix of people with very different experiences of dealing with (or working with) oppressive authorities in their pasts, and Ratchet is the only bot here who wasn’t either a gutter mech or low class/caste, and also wasn’t an authority figure himself (his authority is entirely within the role of CMO, which is still a position of authority within a medical context, but not beyond that). 

Ratchet Had a Cop Friend, So Now His Ingrained Perspective on Authority is Somewhat Fucked

So of course, Ratchet, who has been relatively protected from the worst outcomes of dealing with cops in the past, is the only one to speak up here and risk challenging the cop-drone with a question-- Because why wouldn’t he push back? He’s never suffered at the hands of cops and was never a cop himself. He had cop friends. Surely the cop-drone has to provide a reason for a stop and search? And surely he knows that isn’t necessarily the case in reality, but he still asks, like he’s surprised or caught off guard to at least some degree. (Oh, Ratchet. I like to think that Drift talked to him about this shit afterwards...) 

Ratchet never worked for or alongside a police department before. He doesn’t grasp how fucked he is, if that little cop-drone decides he’s a non-person on a whim. He might understand that there’s risk in this interaction on an intellectual level, but on a personal risk level, he’s never really been at that much risk of being trashed by the cops. 

Even when working in the Dead End, his cop friend(s) clearly knew about it and never arrested him for it. Shit, we know at least one of his cop friends actively helped him out by dropping off potential patients at his clinic. 

So everyone else present has some level of experience, good or bad, with dealing with actual cop bullshit. But the majority of Ratchet’s personal experience with cops has been entirely through the lens of being a respected mid or high class/caste bot with a profession that benefits pretty much everyone, including the cops. He’s largely been “safe”, even when doing unsafe/illegal shit like running his Dead End clinic.  

So of course, his immediate reaction to being stopped and searched is essentially total bewilderment. 

Privilege: Legacy of Cybertron’s Past  

It’s entirely possible that Ratchet, even when working in the Dead End, has never really been all that bothered by cops/authorities before, despite the risks involved in running his clinic there. 

This might be the first time that he’s being stopped and searched like this. He’s never really been profiled or viewed by authorities in this way before, at least not so directly. He’s now dealing with a cop-drone that is treating him the way they treat most people, not the way they treat Ratchet the Medic and Trusted Friend of a Police Captain Equivalent, because the authorities in this universe are ones that he has no personal connection or familiarity with. 

His profile isn’t automatically popping up with all his credentials next to his name. He’s just some bot, with a bunch of other bots, and he’s now suspect. And that seems to have caught him off guard, a little bit. 

Nobody else is saying shit, because they understand this situation more personally. They’ve either been treated like shit by cops before, or they’ve BEEN cops before. 

But Ratchet is the odd one out, and he’s the only one with the particular social status of being a medical doctor, and so he pushes back, because what, exactly, did this little cop-drone say to him? And he feels secure enough to actually ask the drone for clarification. The authority figure bots know to stay quiet and let the cop-drone lead, and the gutter mechs/low class bots know that whatever they say, they’re about to get arrested anyway. 

Nobody but Ratchet is surprised, and it really feels like Ratchet is showing some of his pre-war social privilege here, totally by accident. It’s not his fault, it’s just how he experienced pre-war life compared to the others. Cybertron was a shitty place, and Ratchet was only aware of how shitty it was because of his personal drive to engage with those of lower classes/castes in order to try to assist them; If he hadn’t actively desired to open his own clinic in the Dead End, he would have stayed in Iacon, surrounded by other mid or high class bots. The same people he had spent most of his time interacting with, up until that point. 

We see how he handles Drift in the flashback to when they had first met; His advice comes from good intentions and genuine desire to help Drift, but the advice is ultimately hollow and impossible for Drift to commit to. Ratchet is shown as not really grasping how dire things are, that it’s not possible for Drift or other bots like him to simply walk into a job centre and pick up a paying gig. It took some time for Ratchet to understand this, because it wasn’t his lived experience; As a medic top of his class, he’s always been in high demand. But that isn’t the reality for Drift. 

It’s a realistic approach to exploring class/caste differences, and I really appreciate it. 

This panel is a genius quick and subtle way to emphasise the class/caste differences between all of the characters here, and highlight how vastly differently these bots would all be treated-- Both in their actual past, and in this alternate Functionist universe. 

Anyway it’s 3 AM so I’m going to bed now, just wanted to write this out before I forgot about it LMAO <3 

I can’t recall the exact issue this panel is from at the moment, but when I remember or get the time to look it up again, I’ll edit this to let y’all know! :) 

[centaurisolarflare]

König Headcannons – Part II:

If I wasn’t clear in my last set of sfw headcannons, I interpret König as having ADHD and Social Anxiety Disorder. I’m going to get into some diagnostic criteria and give some of my headcannons for how they appear for König specifically, and some blurbs throughout because I never learned how to stop talking. 

Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia):

Anxiety surrounding social situations in which there is the potential for scrutinization. I think König’s anxiety would be particularly focused around interactions (conversations, meeting new people, etc) and being observed. 

- He isn’t comfortable with crowds, the dislike of being surrounded by people is intensified by the tinge of constant situational worry that comes with being a soldier. 

         -- If you take busy public transport, where there’s people packed into a bus or a subway car, he’ll sit bouncing his leg and playing with your hands. If you’re standing, he’ll be right behind you with one arm around your waist keeping you close against his chest; if it’s a particularly bad day he’ll hunch himself over to bury his face in the crook of your neck, breathing in the smell of you and trying to ignore everyone else. 

- Even in more regular social situations he’s got this habit of coming up behind you and resting his chin or cheek on your head. You’re used to it, often grabbing his hand and putting it on your waist, but the reactions from whoever you’re talking with range from befuddlement to discomfort, to outright terror at this massive dude just lingering directly behind you. 

- He does not like having his picture taken, especially when he isn’t aware that the picture taking is happening. He will get upset if anyone refuses to delete photos they took without his knowledge and permission. 

         -- He does, however, usually let you take polaroid with him – they develop soft enough that his worries about the photo being horrible are eased, plus he finds he’s fond of the way you’ve got them tucked around the house. Once you took a polaroid of him that he clearly didn’t like, he wasn’t really saying anything about it but you could tell, and you fucking lit it on fire – you went and got a zippo and burnt the fucking thing. He was oddly touched by your wiliness to commit a small act of arson purely for his comfort. 

- I also think he’d not particularly like eating in front of others – as a result of his anxiety he thinks people watch and judge him more than they do, and there’s too many opportunities for something to go wrong, so the threat of that embarrassment causes him to take most of his meals alone. 

         -- The knock at his door is soft and measured, three knocks just loud enough to catch his attention but not startle him. He knows, really, before even opening the door, that it’s you. He wants to see you, he really does, but the thought of it kicks his heart rate up and he feels the urge to fidget with his hands or the edge of his shirt as he takes the few steps needed to reach the door. You’re standing there, holding two full meal trays, flashing a bright smile up at him as you explain that you noticed he’d left the mess hall without eating. You ask to come in and he wordlessly steps to the side, hesitating just slightly as he contemplates if he should ask you to leave – he reasons with himself that he’s confident if he did ask you to go, you would, and that’s reassurance enough to have you stay – before shutting the door behind you and praying he won’t do anything humiliating. You chatter about how you weren’t entirely sure what to grab him, setting his tray on his desk, and sitting cross-legged on the floor with yours balanced across your knees. It twists something unfamiliar in his guts when he looks at his tray and realizes it’s a fairly accurate representation of what he would have gotten himself. He thanks you, the murmur of his voice barely audible. Then, the battered slice of cake catches his eye. The sweets they serve on base aren’t ever particularly good, but it’s chocolate and, fuck, he loves chocolate. Usually these slices, provided to the base kitchens already in a small plastic container, are hard to get and it’s even rarer for someone to make it out of the mess hall without being forced to give it up on some grounds of hoarding. The way there’s frosting smeared on the inside of the container suggests you underwent that trial. You must notice him looking at it for longer than anything else and you immediately grin, devious and triumphant, and regale him with the tale of how you managed to sneak the cake out, all because you offhandedly remembered he’d mentioned once about liking chocolate. You even apologize for the dubious quality of it, and he thinks he could cry. The story gives him time to settle across from you with his own tray largely free of intensive notice. By the time you’ve shifted to discussing a different topic with him – giving his responses a genuine attentive regard that makes it difficult for his anxiety to think you’re secretly judging him – he swears if you ripped out his heart right at that moment, you’d find your name written all over it. It just… becomes a Thing™ to meet up like this for meals, in his room or yours. You always seem to know when to talk, when to turn your head away from him, when to let him think you don’t notice his fretting, and when to either coax him into conversation or sit in easy silence. He panics less about it. He finds himself becoming more and more comfortable with you – fond of the peculiar way you habitually gesture with your fork, how you’re always willing to split things in half to share, how you inexplicably manage to scrounge up hot drinks during the cold months – and he's surprisingly glad to have your company. 

- An individual with social anxiety can be fearful of acting in a way that shows anxiety symptoms that will be seen negatively. 

         -- I think König would be worried most about being the reason people reject his company or take offense to his presence. He, at his core, wants people to like him, no matter how much he buries it. He has a hard time knowing whether or not you’re joking if you ever pretend to be disapproving or mad – his fear of driving you away, of you viewing him negatively, totally wipes away his ability to detect when you’re being sarcastic or playful. I think once you two are close he’d look to you in public settings for indications on when other people are kidding around or not – he trusts your evaluation of tone and social context far more than his own. 

         -- I also headcannon that one of the rare times he isn’t worried like this is when he’s really, really tired. When he’s exhausted, he’ll flop next to you, lean his weight on you, and laugh when you struggle to hold him up. This is when he’ll be the most blatantly transparent. You often feel like you should excuse yourself as soon as possible when this happens, but sometimes it’s on missions when he’s falling asleep while you keep watch and you can’t go anywhere; or at base when he’ll grab your wrist and ask you to stay, and how could you say no to him? All you can do is try to mitigate whatever comes out of his mouth, so he doesn’t reveal too much when he’s barely lucid. When he’s out of his mind tired is when he’ll look at you, starry-eyed and with no attempt to school his expressions into something less embarrassing, and whisper how beautiful and kind and perfect you are. He rarely ever remembers doing it – in his memories the comfort of your presence slots in seamlessly with the relief of collapsing on his bed for the first time in two days. 

                   ---- I think the same thing would happen if he’s ever on hella painkillers. He’s awake but definitely not all the way in his own brain so he’s just babbling about how wonderful you are. He’s just… narrating his thoughts. You’re the medic with him throughout the helicopter evac when he’s covered in more injuries than God should allow? You’re getting more of an honest confession of his feelings than the situation calls for. You’re the doctor moderating his recovery from a nasty concussion? Holy shit you’re going to hear about how you personally make the stars shine. Your whole medical team will know how he feels about you before he ever knowingly confesses. 

- Avoidance of anxiety inducing situations.

         -- I love him, but König has a frustrating habit of avoiding or retreating from you when his anxiety spikes. He needs a lot of reassurance that you don’t think of him the way his anxiety tells him you do. 

- I also think, as a comorbid symptom, he suffers from a bit of body dysmorphic disorder regarding his height/size and his accumulated scars – he perceives these things, respectively, as defects and flaws due to the way they’ve only ever drawn attention to him in situations where he’d rather everyone not even notice his existence. 

         -- His heart is going to explode. It’s going to explode and shred through his lungs. Is that medically possible? He feels like it is. It has to be. Because this is the first time you’ve seen him in a short sleeve shirt and you’ve got your hands on his arms and you’re currently looking at the jagged silvery scar that curls across his bicep and- and fuck, he needs to remember to breathe. He offers the stories behind each scar you ask about nearly entirely on autopilot. Can you feel his pulse? He’s scared of what you think, even as you hum and trace your fingertips carefully over each flaw on his skin. He’s marred, he knows it, and he makes a desperate attempt at casualness with some quiet self-deprecating joke about how the scars are ugly, but they couldn’t really make the rest of him worse than it already was. He misses the mark by a fucking mile, apparently, because your hands go tight around as much of his forearm as you can manage to wrap your fingers around and you're staring directly into his eyes with the intensity of the goddamned sun. He wishes he could throw himself into the sun right about now. But he’s listening, mostly, when you tell him that he’s handsome and well-built and nothing even has the possibility of changing that, not to you. That you like his scars, the proof that he’s endured, and you wouldn’t change a single thing about him. He’s listening, mostly, he swears, but he’s also super fucking concerned about how his heart has definitely just exploded and every other organ in its vicinity is splattered across the inside his ribcage. He can’t function like this, for god’s sake, can’t do much more than offer a jerky nod and let you resume your exploration of his arms, littered with grumbling comments about how you can’t believe he doesn’t think he’s good-looking, has he looked in a mirror recently, is he fucking blind.

                   ---- Bonus points if this somehow takes place before you’ve ever seen him without the sniper’s hood on; so he counters that you can’t possibly know if he isn’t hideous and you cut him off telling him he’s beautiful, and he’s like you’ve never even seen my face, and you tell him you know it’s pretty because it’s him and because it’s him it’s pretty, it has to be, regardless of anything, because he’s inherently pretty, and he just… has to blush about it for several business days.

ADHD

We all know about how our boy couldn’t be a sniper because he was 1.) too fucking big and, more to my point, 2.) couldn’t stay still. König has ADHD, argue with the wall. 

- The inattentive criteria I think he specifically meets are difficulty organizing tasks, avoiding activities that require sustained mental focus, often losing things necessary for tasks, easily distracted by extraneous stimuli and that his mind seems to be elsewhere even in the absence of any obvious distraction, and he tends to be forgetful regarding daily activities. 

         -- I think for work stuff he’s got a whole mess of systems to help keep himself on task and completing everything he’s supposed to be doing – sticky notes in improbable places, a seemingly nonsensical ways of going about starting things, using things like the amount of time it takes someone else in the barracks common room to reload their clips as a timer for how long he has to do something of his own, etc etc. He'll drag his desk three feet to the left just so he'll notice it in the morning and remember something. I think he very often writes things on his actual self with permanent marker, usually on his hand or forearm, if he’s really got to remember to do something. He might even have a more regular system for that, like a dot on his index finger means he has one important task to remember. 

         -- He fucking hates paperwork. It’s boring as hell and his brain never wants to do it. Very much “but I know who’s saying I have to get this done; it’s me, and I know I’m full of shit” vibes. Deadlines aren’t real until they’re tomorrow. He bribes himself with sweets or something he actually enjoys for every few pages he gets through – if you see him buying a pack of multitudinous candy from the vending machine, he’s likely got a stack of reports to do. 

         -- It seems like he’s got a staring problem, and most people are super intimidated by it, but he’s usually just spaced the fuck out. You’ve got this odd habit of crossing your eyes at him whenever you catch his gaze and he sort of refocuses; he doesn’t quite know why you do it, maybe just to communicate to him that you notice, but he finds it endearing. 

- Hyperactivity and impulsivity – fidgeting, uncomfortable with being still for extended periods of time, excessive talking, an inability to wait for his “turn” in conversations or blurts out answers before the question is fully asked, difficulty remaining seated, and general restlessness. 

         -- Fidgeting. Don’t… don’t ask me to explain this, and it might not be everyone’s cup of tea… but… I think maybe, maybe, he’s got a lip ring or tongue piercing that he fiddles with. It’s a secret from his superiors, obviously, because that’s definitely not military protocol compliant, but I think with how often he’s got his hood on it wouldn’t be awfully hard to hide. I’m fixated on imagining him with one silver lip ring or a tongue stud, someone please explain to me why. Anyhow, I’ve mentioned before that he will fidget with your hands, but I also think he’s prone to messing with whatever’s near – whether that be a pen or a weapon or some part of his gear or clothes; he has a habit, of dubious safeness, of spinning a butterfly knife around and has more than a few small scars from where he’s accidentally nicked himself. 

         -- He’s prone to squirming if he has to sit somewhere for a while, especially if there’s not much for him to pay attention to. He ends up sitting super crooked most of the time. 

         -- I think he uses running or otherwise working out to burn off some of his energy, especially when he’s particularly restless and when he’s on base. He hates feeling stuck in the small room he’s assigned to sleep in, and there’s something satisfying and grounding about the ache in his muscles and the way he has to concentrate on his breathing. 

         -- When he’s comfortable with you, which absolutely took an ungodly long time, he will go on tangents and simply not shut up until he starts worrying that he’s annoying you. If you ask him about whatever his recent fixation is, he’ll be over the moon about it. Good luck getting anyone else to believe he can talk that much though, the most they’ve heard him talk is over comms in the field and that’s nothing compared to what you’re privy to. He always apologizes when he interrupts you, no matter how often you tell him you understand and that it’s alright. 

Other prattling unrelated to me thinking way too much about psychology: 

- Loves that you make the effort to learn how to pronounce his name correctly. When he’d first told you his name you said it back to him, asking if you had it right. He usually would just tell people they had it fine to avoid the awkward back and forth of trying to get them to say it right, but something about the way you looked at him made him actually give you the slight correction you needed. Then – and this is one of his endless fond memories of you – you sort of looked off into the middle distance, staring unfocused at his chest, and said his name softly over and over again with entirely correct pronunciation before giving a short nod to yourself, looked back up at him and continuing the introduction. 

         -- He’s watched you correct other people on their pronunciations, casually but like it was absolutely necessary that everyone else say it properly, and it never fails to warm his heart. 

- Very rarely gets drunk but when he does, he’s the type of drunk to call you and tell you how amazing you are. Shit, he’ll tell anyone about you. Much like how he’s quietly honest when tired, but his drunk honest is louder and more social. Tells his teammates or friends how beautiful and clever you are, tells the bartended how much he loves you, tells the people next to him how smart and lovely you are, tells the closest table how you make him so happy. Someone tries to flirt with him, they tell him it doesn’t matter that he has a partner, and said person is now trapped in a lecture about exactly how much you matter to him, complete with photos. 

         -- If you end up coming to get him, nearly the entire place will say hello to you because he hasn’t shut up about you for the past hour. He lights up when he sees you, holding your arms and swaying slightly as he stares down at you with the biggest smile on his face, mumbling about “See? Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you how wonderful they are? See? Look. Look at you, so perfect. I love you; you know that? So much.” 

- Loves when you steal his clothes. Cannot get enough of how you look wearing his shirts. 

- I will accept criticism and differing opinions on nearly anything, but I am adamant that König has the sluttiest little waist. I think he was lanky before he started gaining serious muscle in the military, and now he’s a little more bulky but still has that litheness about him so his proportions just give him a slutty little waist. I don’t make the rules, he’s just built like that. 

- I think, to an extent, he knows how to sew. Nothing fancy, and his stitches aren’t even or perfect by any means, but he knows how to mend worn patches and tears well enough. Hates threading needles. But if he notices you’ve got a tear in your coat or something of the sort, you’ll just find it fixed the next day. Left exactly where it was but mended. Like a house brownie. The only way you’ll figure out it’s him is if you catch him doing it. 

- I know this lovely couple, both from a country outside where they currently live, and every time the husband travels back to their home country he’ll pack all his clothes and whatnot in a suitcase and then pack that suitcase within another suitcase. He does this so he can fill the extra suitcase with all the food and things his wife wants from their home country and take her back essentially a giant package of all the stuff she misses and can’t get in the country they live in. Long story short, if you’re not yet going home with him, König absolutely would bring you anything you wanted from Austria, even if he has to bring a whole extra bag. 

- I don’t think he’d carry any sort of photograph of you with him during work or on missions. If there’s a chance of anyone getting their hands on the photo, of learning that you’re important to him, of hurting you or using you to gain leverage over him, he will not have anything on his person to even indicates that you exist. I think he’d love the idea of it, the romantic sentiment of having a polaroid of you tucked in a pocket over his heart, but he just isn’t willing to take that chance. On leave though, at home, he treasures every little sign that you’re around and involved in his life – from photos to the notes left on the kitchen counter, the way you kick off your shoes by the door, the hickeys and scratches that make it look like he got mauled by a fucking tiger, how you always text and ask if he wants anything while you’re out, and even just the fact that he knows at the end of the day he gets to crawl into bed and fall asleep with you next to him. 

- Piggyback rides. You can jump up on this man whenever and he will go on about whatever he was doing as if nothing’s happening. 

- If he’s drinking anything hot – it might be in a coffee cup, but don’t be fooled – it’s hot chocolate. He makes the real kind at home, with real chocolate and cream on the stove. 

[a-twistedheartslonging]

About your non human au

Got a bit of a ramble plus a question but it's a bit long

How open to cuddling are the Nrc folks? Or more like, how willing and upfront/obvious about wanting scritches and pets is everyone in Nonhuman au. I was wondering where on the sliding scale of "unabashedly unashamedly asking for cuddles" vs "i totally do not want cuddles but if you don't give attention to me i will be upset for completely unrelated reasons that have nothing to do with not being petted and cuddled"

(also due to my garbo memory, i can't remember if basically the majority of all of NRC is now nonhuman in this au but i do recall that humans are rare so I'm gonna put in the other NRC folks too in case also cause it's fun)

I feel like the most upfront and unabashed about demanding or asking for scritches would be Lilia of course. Followed by Ace (i feel like he's desperately trying to act smug and jokey about it but he will be genuinely upset if you turn him down or worse get annoyed and actually go to someone else). Deuce i feel like wouldn't necessarily be super upfront (he's uber embarrassed and doesn't know how to go about communicating that) but he will do what he thinks will get what he wants without being too pushy. Lots of Deuce being fairly clingy and lots of casual leaning on reader/yuu but Deuce would get flustered easily i believe and he doesn't have the word weaving skills like Ace to try to bluff his way out. Also Floyd will give Lilia a run for his money with how vocal and willing to go get his damn cuddles. Kalim as well but he's not as likely to gun for Reader/Yuu like Lilia or Floyd. More of an impromptu decision based on encounters.

Cater, Trey, Jack, maybe even Ruggie and Jade are less openly vocal and pushy about their scritches and cuddles. They are more likely to be casual i believe and also try to sneak in their wants. However they probably won't deny nor completely avoid the want for pets or grooming. Rook can technically be placed here too cause i feel like he wants to have attention on him but also he wants his little mischievous chase games in the mix (he's being chased and the reward is pets) but he doesn't want to miss out on that relaxation time just in case the lil human can't keep up. Some good old Rook complexity in there involving wanting to be accepted to be seen and to see beauty but also an odd sense of trepidation and almost shyness, he might even half joke about how you're trying to tame him and that you should be responsible for those you tame

The last group definitely feels like the type to never outright demand or ask for cuddles scritches or pets but they will be soo petty and irritated if they think they're not getting their due attention. Jealous tsunderes to me lol. Leona, Vil, Riddle, Idia and Malleus go in this category but for different reasons. Leona and Vil just have a lot of pride and an image they're trying to uphold. Riddle and Idia are soo touch starved and socially awkward that they both don't know how to go about communicating what they want but also they don't know how to handle it when they're actually interacting. (riddle is so socially awkward but he at least has a plethora of rules to work off of unlike idia). Malleus is awkward and out of his depth so i think he just wouldn't know how to express what he wants but he's very jealous of the others for getting their own cuddles so easily in comparison

Loving the ideas you got!

I do love a good ramble.

Ok, so

“How open to cuddling are the Nrc folks?” 

With the guys at that school in general It's sort of a case-by-case type thing and depends on the person in particular. Kind of like how some people are cool with physical affection or hugs but some aren't, and with others, you gotta build up a bond for them to be cool with it. Some of the beasties aren't gonna want some random person touching them, just like a regular person wouldn't be cool with it.

A thing to remember though that changes the circumstance is, that this is a school full of a bunch of hormonal dudes and you happen to be a cute exotic little thing. So some are gonna be cooler with that curious touching just for that…though you should be wary of their intentions.

But that’s just an in general thing for the students, it's gonna be dif with the main guys since they know you and you went through all that stuff with them. You guys are homies.

Looking at what you wrote I say you're pretty spot on with how open those certain main guys would be to it. Adding on to the Lilia bit, not only in his regular form is he perfect for petting but in this au, he has two other forms he can switch into: A big scary sexy bat monster and…adorable little actual bat that you can keep in your pocket. Being in the latter form lets him conserve energy and magic so he likes to chill in it, another benefit is how freaking ADORABLE he is in it, and he uses it to his advantage with no shame.

Pet him, brush him, tell him how cute he is, and kiss his little face. The funest thing to do is feed him little cherry tomatoes and watch him go ham on them. Have you seen those cute vids of fruit bats eating stuff? Well, you should.

Ace and Deuce are clingy little things but in different ways. Deuce wants you to touch him so badly but he’s anxious about making you uncomfortable or you thinking he’s weird. Being a girl would add more to that. Also you call him a good boy while showing him affection he will die. P.S. When he goes home for the break and his mom smells you on him she is going to ask him so many questions and tease him. Please help him.

Ace is…regardless of what creature he is in the au he has asshole cat energy. Like, he's clingy and demands attention at the worst time but when you're in the mood he's like “Meh” but then gets pissy when you go to or smell like someone else. Passive aggressively scents all your stuff.

Floyd and Kalim have no shame in asking. Though with Kalim it's asking and although he’ll get sad when you're busy or not in the mood for it he’ll respect it. Floyd does not. He is like one of those big ass dogs that will straight up lay on you and won't move. Kalim keeps offering to hire you as his personal cuddle giver/groomer and his parents encourage it since having a human serve under you shows status, not that he cares about that.

My god, Cater would use you for so many videos.

So true for the “won't be vocal about it” thing. Cater is gonna “Haha…unless?” about it. Trey, Ruggie, and Jade would definitely manipulate situations so that you WILL pet them. Ruggie is gonna act like he's doing you a favor so you end up cuddling AND feeding him. Jack is still very much a tsundere about it, will probably take a while to get him to let you and he wants to do it in private.

Rook…another with no shame in accepting it. He’s so used to being the one doing the chasing. It's nice having someone so interested in him and giving him praise. He’s still gotta keep some of his mystery so he won't tell you things but he's gonna ask you all kinds of questions and want to take…terns with touching. He’s as interested in your unique body as you are with his. Take that however you want. 

Leona will straight up tell Ruggie to go get you and bring you to his room for Touching Time. With certain affection, he doesn't want others to see but with other kinds, he wants to show off. Especially if your mates.

Vil is pretty particular about what he allows you to do and how you touch him. Do not mess up his hair or feathers. 

Riddle and Idia. Even if he likes you it will take time for him to be cool it. Both want the affection given to be privet. Riddle actually puts together a Snuggle Scedual and gets pretty pissed if someone or someone interrupts or makes it run late. God forbid it gets canceled. Tbh for both of them it's kind of…cuddle therapy? For Riddle it helps with his anger and feelings of loneliness and the lack of affection he's had to deal with since…well forever.

For Idia…tbh I can't help but picture him as one of those anxiety-riddled dogs that's always shaking. You kind of end up his Emotional Support Human and if he absolutely has to leave his room he's keeping you close and hiding behind you, even if you're smol.

Is Mal awkward? Heck yes, but he is also touch-starved and greedy. You'll be lucky if his dragon instincts don't kick in have him keep you in his nest forever. Once he figures out “Oh…these touches are pretty nice.” He won't be shy about physical affection, even with the others around. Might get territorial and you should prob talk to him about it, so he doesn’t end up…going all dragon about it.

[theminecraftbee]

second’s slightly arbitrary guide to vault hunters knowledge unlocks

so, one of the main questions I see new vault hunters players have is “which mods should I unlock in what order?” unlike skills or even, if expensively, expertises, mod unlocks in vault hunters are completely irreversible, which means they can be kind of intimidating for new players. so here’s my (somewhat arbitrary) guide to what to unlock! keep in mind I’m not a “top player” or anything, so these might not be the PERFECT meta picks, just a guide for new guys.

also if your question is “but I have one knowledge star and am like level 5 what do I unlock NOW”, the answer is probably vault compasses if you’re getting lost, either stack upgrades or double pouches if you’re having inventory management issues (depending on whether “numerous stacks of common items” or “many types of items” is currently your larger problem), or storage drawers if overworld storage is giving you nightmares.

additionally, my biggest unlocking mods advice is to check how much the thing you want to do costs in materials before unlocking it. nothing sucks more than unlocking a cool mod and only realizing you need an echo pog to interact with it and you’re only level 15 afterwards, after all!

anyway let’s go, general guide beneath the cut.

STORAGE MODS

these mods give you the first three without price increases before they start getting more expensive, which is useful, since people almost always combine more than one solution. even after they start getting more expensive, it’s only +1, so this is a category you should get the thing you want or need in when you want it without worrying about it locking you out of other options later.

Storage Drawers are the backbone to basically everyone’s storage system. they work fairly simply: each drawer can store a certain number of stacks of a single item. add upgrades to increase the number of stacks or make the drawers automatically void excess. if they are connected by other drawers or trim to a drawer controller, you can double-click the controller to move everything in your inventory that goes into a drawer to one of them, and that controller acts as a port for other storage interacting with it. because they can store an absurd quantity of items, are way cheaper than basically every other storage option, and are useful right up to the late game, these are by far and away the most common first storage option. I can’t recommend them enough. even early game before you can afford a controller they clean up your inventory SIGNIFICANTLY with the number of stacks they can hold.

Colossal Chests are a trap earlygame. unlike regular chests, you can’t use quark’s sorting or searching functions, which means they’re effectively the “hiding it under the bed” solution to chest monsters. however, mid-game once you actually have another storage mod, these become fantastic, since they’re much cheaper and use much more common materials than storage disks and capable of storing large amounts of items. the largest one you can make in vault hunters is 5x5 for the record. a lot of people like using this with ssn to help reduce lag.

Simple Storage Network is… controversial. it’s the cheapest early way to make a searchable storage network, but it gets very laggy the more chests you attach to it, and many of a storage system’s most useful functions are no longer possible to craft in vault hunters because of it. also, it eats items with NBT data, so never store crystals, jewels, gear, or similar things in it. my general recommendation is to do whatever you want in singleplayer (although if you want a crafting interface you’ll need to upgrade out of this eventually), but in multiplayer only use it if you’re using colossal chests or something else that prevents you from having to make massive silos of chests, and save your server the headache. it’s only one knowledge point, though, and it’s much cheaper generally than the digital options, so I totally understand why people go for it, and it can super be worth it early game when you just need to be able to search your inventory! just be aware of the caveats.

Applied Energistics 2 is one of your two main digital storage options. digital storage should be your end goal with a storage system! it is the more complex of the two. my understanding is that it’s cheaper if you know what you’re doing, as well as more powerful, but that it’s notoriously a beast for people who don’t know it to try to understand. if you don’t have good spacial reasoning skills maybe stay clear, but if you do and you like a more involved storage approach, go with this. also, be aware you’ll need something that can produce power in order to use this mod. (ae2 comes with power generation on its own, but I don’t remember if you can craft that in vault hunters or not.)

Refined Storage is the other of your two main digital storage options. digital storage should be your end goal with a storage system! compared to ae2, refined storage is fairly straightforward, but it’s slightly more expensive and a bit less powerful at its highest levels. it is the one I recommend to most people, though, just because “straightforward” is really valuable if you don’t want everything to be a puzzle. also, be aware that you’ll need a mod that can produce power to use this mod.

Mekanism QIO is a third digital storage option you can only use with Mekanism unlocked. my understanding is that it’s quite powerful, although it does not work with altar automation. most people won’t use this on account of mekanism being a pre-requisite and mekanism being fairly late-game, but if you want to use it, it’s almost certainly just as good of an option as the rest!

LOOTING MODS

the majority of these are pouch upgrades, but this also contains bulk soul dust recycling and the vault junk controller. these mods get more expensive by two points for every one you get, so the order does matter somewhat; remember for each mod in this category you get that is not “a bigger pouch”, the slightly further away bigger pouches get, and for each bigger pouch you get, the further away other inventory management gets. so it’s a balance for when you get what! that said, most players end up unlocking basically everything in this category eventually, because it’s all quite useful, and even at maximum price it doesn’t get as expensive as the production mods or big mods or big toys get. unlock things as you need them in this category. I tend to unlock things in this category whenever I have the knowledge stars to unlock it and nothing else I want to save up for at that exact moment!

Bigger Pouches are the vast majority of the unlocks here (being double pouches, belts, small backpacks, and large backpacks). they’re prerequisites for each other, so you have to unlock them one by one. normally, I unlock them when the pouches I have aren’t cutting it. that said you could just as easily get by with a small army of smaller pouches, you just won’t be able to fit as many upgrades! so this is a mileage may vary thing.

Stack Upgrades are the most useful pouch upgrades, and should be the first ones you buy. these are multiplicative by each other—two tier 2 stack upgrades in the same pouch don’t add 8x the number of stacks a single slot can hold, but 16x! these also mean pouches with a lot of stack upgrades can be a poor man’s storage drawers in a pinch. you will need these, get them before you upgrade past double pouches.

Refill Upgrades are one of the two QOL pouch upgrades. you can save this until late, but the ability to automatically always have a stack of an item (or, well, up to nine items!) in your hotbar is extremely handy for things like marking blocks, kiwis, and food, and helps save hotbar space and time managing inventory. I personally find this more useful than the feeder upgrade but that’s a preference thing.

Feeder Upgrades do one thing only: automatically have you eat a food (which can be controlled with a whitelist/blacklist) from the pouch it’s installed in when your hunger goes down. this seems sort of arbitrary in vaults since hunger doesn’t heal your health but it’s actually really nice and once you get used to it you’ll be so sad whenever you don’t have it. set the food it feeds you to vault sweets and literally never have to worry about your hunger bar again. this is normally either the last pouch upgrade I get or second-to-last (before big backpacks) but I could totally justify getting it way sooner.

Junk Controller is… interesting. it sometimes doesn’t play nice with pickup upgrades and pouches, although I think that’s fixes at this point. it automatically voids items you pick up in the vault that are on its list of controlled items. it’s capable of handling WAY more than a void upgrade can, but honestly I find the advanced void upgrade can do everything I need it to when it comes to voiding vault items, and the junk controller is pretty expensive. however, if you’d prefer not to have to use void upgrades and to never have to deal with vault junk again, I could see this being the thing for you!

Soul Harvester is pure QOL. it is so much faster than and so much more efficient than the soul diffuser that I recommend everyone get it at SOME POINT, if only to make processing things into soul dust more efficient, but if you don’t do much recycling it’s probably not very useful for you.

POWER MODS

this is the first category on the list that makes other mods in the category enough more expensive that the order you unlock in, and whether you unlock at all, matters, at +6 per mod. you will also almost inevitably need at least one of these no matter what you do. as such, this category can be overwhelming for people. luckily it has an answer! the answer is powah. you should get powah. yes I know it’s the most expensive one and means you’ll have to wait longer but you’ll thank me later.

Iron Generators are sort of a trap. they’re cheap at low levels and good for early game, but the cost for higher-level power generation is very high compared to how much power they make, they burn fuel whether something is currently drawing power or not, they don’t come with any kind of cables so you’ll need a handling mod to move the power or to place them directly next to the things they need to power, they can’t charge items like the mining gadget or the building gadget, and they make everything else in the category more expensive. however with all of that said: if all you’re doing is powering an RS system, then yeah, you’re probably fine to just use these forever and buying these as the cheap option is probably fine.

Powah is the most versatile of the options here and comes with literally everything you need to make a decent self-sustaining power grid. the best generators for most people are the solar panels, which only require direct sunlight, and thermo generators, which provide power as long as they’re above a heat source and provided water. a supplementaries sink (which doesn’t require a mod unlock) or a thermal expansion aqueous accumulator (which does) can do that job easily. additionally, batteries are really useful for various gadgets, the ender network lets you move power remotely, and it can charge items inside its energy cells. the main downside to this mod is that it’s a royal pain in the ass to actually CRAFT any of this; while most of the individual ingredients aren’t that expensive, there are normally many steps to any higher level craft and the base ingredients add up. luckily, mod boxes are really good with this mod, and you can normally get a decent system running from almost only those.

Flux Networks are vault hunters’s best option for storing and moving power around. this mod doesn’t come with power generation options on its own, but it’s the most powerful for transferring power around by far. a good purchase in tandem with another mod.

Botania Flux Fields allows you to turn botania mana into power. it doesn’t come with any cables, so you’ll need a handling mod to move the power around, but as several botania mana flowers can be made self-sustaining, this is probably an interesting option if you already have botania before you need any power.

Thermal Dynamos are like if iron generators were actually good. they require constant fuel like an iron generator, but they have a much wider variety of things they can burn and actually produce meaningful power. they require thermal expansion to unlock, though, so I’ve never used them by virtue of the fact that by the time I have thermal expansion, I almost always also have powah. they also don’t come with cables.

Mekanism Generators are the best solution for producing very large amounts of power. the mekanism reactor is more than the vast majority of players will ever need, but if you’re getting deep enough into mekanism that you need a nuclear reactor’s level of power generation, you should accept no substitute. once again though for most people a large powah setup will normally cover your needs, this is, quite literally, the nuclear option.

HANDLING MODS

these mods don’t do much on their own, but they make handling output from other mods much easier. they make each other somewhat significantly more expensive, but tend to be overall cheaper than power mods, so even with that +5 knowledge points required for each new mod in the category, it’s not normally hard to get more than one. these are a very “get them as you need and/or want them” category, but you’ll almost always find yourself wanting at least one, if not more, to get things done.

Modular Routers are probably the best mod in this category. they do just about everything, able to wirelessly transfer items, fluids, or power, sure, but also able to activate things like a player, automatically kill mobs, vacuum items (or experience!) from the ground, and probably more. a common sight in many vault hunters bases are the signature laser beams of routers shooting things around. they can be a little complicated to understand at first and I highly recommend watching someone like iskall use them when you’re starting out, but once you understand them you will soon learn to love them. they work by creating a router, then placing “modules” in that router that tell it what to do. you can also add upgrades to the routers! this is my biggest recommended handling mod; if you only get one, this is the one that can do most everything anything else in this category can.

Pipez are simple: they’re fairly cheap pipes that move items, fluids, power, or gasses from one place to another. this is the quick and cheap option for handling, and are often the most intuitive. the downside is that you physically need to lay the pipes between places, so they take up a lot of space. fun bonus fact: at a certain level of power draw, a power pipe with an advanced pipe upgrade will be MUCH cheaper for rate of power transfer than using powah cables. I learned this the hard way. in general these are fast, minimally laggy, and surprisingly useful, especially for fluids (or gasses if you’re using mekanism).

XNet is presumably powerful but I don’t know anyone who uses it on account of it also being kind of complicated. my understanding is that if you have any kind of item/energy/etc transfer that you want to apply interesting logic to, this is your solution, so it’s probably nice as the “brain” of your base. I can’t say much else because I don’t use it though.

Dark Utilities is a small but handy mod. its biggest draw are its plates, which are items that can be placed like a carpet that do things to entities that step on them. most notable are the vector plates, which push a mob in the direction they point and the various damage plates, including a non-lethal damage plate that’s great for exp farms or the player damage plate, which makes mob drops fully AFK-able. also not to be discounted are a few redstone odds and ends (including a randomizer) and special blocks that only certain types of entities can pass through (great for filtering in farms). this mod is almost always recommended in tandem with ispawners, but can be useful in all kinds of farms outside of that too.

Iron Furnaces are basically a fancy QOL mod: they let you make really absurdly fast furnaces, including ones that are powered by power instead of fuel. they’re almost surprisingly useful though; a fast furnace can save you a whole lot of time!

Automatic Genius is—well, if you’re at the point of unlocking automatic genius, you probably already know, to be honest. it’s auto-crafting, it’s useful, it practically has the entire game as prerequisites so. there’s that.

BIG MODS

this category is one of the ones that gets to people, because it’s one of the +12 categories. whenever you pick a mod in this category, make sure it’s one you want, because the next one will be very expensive! chances are if you’re a modded player, you already have an opinion about which of these four is the most useful to you, but if you aren’t, I’ll attempt to give some tips.

Thermal Expansion is probably the easiest of the four for a new player to understand. it requires power generation, but most of this mod works by simply building a machine, which then does that machine’s one thing. (for example, the redstone furnace, which cooks things using redstone, or the pulverizer, which crushes things.) I personally really like thermal; it’s extremely straightforward and compact and decently powerful as an earlygame option. it also sort of has ore doubling; you can pulverize raw chromatic iron to make two raw chromatic iron dust, which can then be smelted to two ingots, but for other ores the ratios are a bit messier and often comes out to “just use fortune and a normal furnace unless you need the secondary products”. still, very useful as a mod!

Create is a mod you probably already know; it’s taken the world by storm, after all. building create contraptions is fun and more intuitive than redstone and routing power to a lot of people, and it has a number of very useful tools, such as the crushing wheel and its ability to ore double, the various ways you can convert items using fans, and one of the very few ways to automatically farm trees in vault hunters. the main downside of create is that it’s deceptively expensive in larimar and chromatic iron and that it can’t produce power. also, in my experience, create is the laggiest of the big mods, although your mileage may vary on that front.

Botania is a magic mod that’s secretly actually a tech mod. it doesn’t require power, instead using its own power called mana, and can be used to do a large number of useful things, including farming trees, making cobwebs and other rare and hard to make altar ingredients, and making some very pretty decorative blocks. personally, I always had trouble wrapping my head around botania for some reason, which is silly since I’ve somewhat figured out mekanism, an objectively more complicated mod. of the four big mods, botania definitely helps you get the most hard-to-get and unique blocks, but it’s the only one that doesn’t have any kind of ore doubling.

Mekanism can get you as much as quintupling your ores, has a number of fairly high-powered machines, but is also really complicated in a lot of places and requires an entire power grid to use effectively. also, the mek suit isn’t in vault hunters, if you wanted that. I love mekanism I think it’s very fun also you should NOT get this as your first big mod unless you have so many resources to spare. make this your second one at the very least, it’s VERY late-game, but enjoy it when you do.

UTILITY MODS

unlike the last several categories, these don’t make each other more expensive ever! instead, these are all mostly small but useful mods that don’t fit in another category. whenever you want one of these go ahead and buy it, there’s no reason not to and it won’t make anything else more expensive!

Vault Compasses is one of the most useful mods in the game. all it adds is a vault compass, which is a compass that always points back to the entrance of the vault. you can also hold down shift+right click to set it to point to a new point in the vault, such as a loadstone in an elixir vault or the last monolith in a defeat the guardians vault. it costs four netherite ingots, which is a lot in the early game when most people get this, but it’s VERY WORTH IT. you’ll never be lost again!

Elevators create a special block that, when above or below each other, let you jump to teleport up to an elevator above you or crouch to an elevator below you. they’re very useful in bases with verticality; I like to use them to hide a lot of my storage and mechanisms in a basement that’s invisible from the main build, lol, but they’re handy for any kind of similar thing. pro tip: you can disguise them as any block by right-clicking them with that block!

Trash Cans are what they sound like: a special block that permanently destroys what you put in them. they can have a whitelist/blacklist, and you can pipe or hopper items into them. they’re handy for things like getting rid of unwanted armor from mob farms or other junk items that would otherwise clog up your handling.

Waystones allow you to teleport to pre-determined locations; a waystone lets you interact with it to teleport to any other waystone you’ve found, if you have the mod unlocked, and the teleport pads teleport you to a specific other pad. they’re just extremely handy for getting around a server, and on my friends’ server we just give everyone a knowledge star to unlock these on day one so we can get to each other’s bases easier.

Torch Master gives you several tools for preventing mob spawning. there are ways to prevent both passive and hostile mobs from spawning, and to place large amounts of light. the mega torch has a pretty wide radius too, so it’s fairly easy to cover your whole base.

Altar Automation is the only prohibitively expensive utility mod; this is meant for use lategame. it can be bound to either an ae2 or rs controller, and then will automatically take items from that storage system to complete the altar for you, leaving your only job to hit the button and get the crystal. it’s very handy, but also deliberately meant for buying after you’ve mostly already got all the other mods you want.

BIG TOYS

all of these mods are fancy QOL mods. they all require power, so don’t get one before you have a power source! additionally, only building gadgets come with a way to charge, so make sure you either have batteries or a way to charge before getting these. at +12, this is once again a category where order matters. however, since they’re all QOL, it’s a less massively consequential choice than your choice of production or big mods. go with the one that vibes with you most.

Building Gadgets are tools to help you place blocks, copy/paste structures, swap blocks, and delete blocks. they’re held in your inventory but require power, which means they either need to be charged or you need to have a battery. luckily, they come with the enercell for charging. I can’t express enough HOW MUCH EASIER these make building large structures; the base building gadget alone speeds up building massively. I highly recommend these on any skyblock world just for sheer ease of building platforms, but also anyone who likes Big Buildings should probably consider them.

Weirding Gadgets are chunk loaders. they require power. not much else to explain other than the obvious “be careful on servers when you are leaving your farms loaded please”, I think.

Mining Gadgets is a mod that gives you a cool laser to mine blocks with. I love my mining gadget, it’s very fun, but fully upgrading a mining gadget is very expensive in chromatic steel (and in echo for the magnet and void upgrades) and a very, very solid argument can be made that the only advantage this thing has over a hammer is that it has a long range, the ability to automatically place lights, and the ability to stop liquids in their track. meanwhile, it has the very large disadvantage of requiring being charged with power, costing a lot to get upgraded, and not being able to mine more than a 3x3. it’s up to you if any of those benefits sound like they beat a hammer to you and you decide to get it.

Digital Miner is a mekanism device that automatically mines out everything in an area for you (rather like an old-school quarry). just place it in a location, give it power, and let it run! like most mekanism devices, this thing requires a lot of power, and it is, once again, arguably slower and more expensive than a hammer. however, it’s also fully automatic and requires no effort on your part to get a LOT of resources, so it can be very worth it for those who do not enjoy mining themselves!

PRODUCTION MODS

arguably even more consequential than the big mods you choose are the production mods. which production mod you go with will decide on a multiplayer server what is your “thing” and what requires trading; on singleplayer it will decide which altars will be easy for you and which will be hard. there’s also no right choice here (although I’d argue there are two wrong ones). at +12, it’ll be a bit until you unlock your second one, so choose wisely!

SNAD is a trap. it vastly speeds up the growth of things that can grow on sand but it’s just not worth the +12 to everything else for that alone—and that really is all you get. don’t get it.

Easy Piglins are less of a trap but still a trap. they allow you to put piglins in special boxes for trading, as well as make automatic traders. however they don’t really do anything that picking up a piglin, putting it in a hole near your portal, and throwing gold at it manually doesn’t do, so for the +12 to everything else, for my money, this one isn’t worth it.

Easy Villagers by contrast is worth it. while the ability to pick up villagers and easily re-roll trades doesn’t require unlocking this, the various villager blocks this mod unlocks are very handy for doing trades much easier. it also comes with one-block breeders, iron farms, and crop farms, and the ability to automate any of them, including the villager trades. personally I tend to find villager trades aren’t my main alter bottleneck, so I go for this last, but someone else may disagree with me on it, and honestly I don’t blame them. a solid choice.

Cagerium is one of the two mob farming options. cagerium works by creating terrariums for passive mobs, mob cages for hostile mobs, or a binding plate for boss mobs, and then putting spawn eggs you get from the vault in them. it then outputs that mob’s drops into a chest below, passively. you can put up to four eggs in a cage to make it faster, but you need a skeleton key to swap out what’s in a cage. also, it’s slow compared to ispanwers. however, it’s cheaper early game, doesn’t require building a farm, and is better at a few edge-case mobs (namely, boss mobs like the wither or ender dragon if you get one of those eggs and shulkers, because shulkers are a nightmare).

iSpawners is the other mob farming option. this lets you create an expensive item called a survival spawner that works like a regular vanilla mob spawner, only you can pick it up and move it, it’s much faster, you can swap what egg is in it whenever, and it is active in a much larger radius of the player. ispawners are more reusable and much faster at producing drops than cagerium, but they require infrastructure like a farm to be built around the survival spawner to be effective, and while the survival spawner is a one-time craft it’s a VERY VERY expensive one. which of the two you prefer is a matter of preference.

Botony Pots are one of the two plant-growing options. this mod lets you make pots that automatically grow plants over time, including plenty that can’t be farmed normally, such as spore blossoms or small dripleaf. the hopper botony pot has been made more expensive than it used to be, so it’s at parity or more expensive than swapping things out of a phytogenic insulator to have a lot of them, but for passively farming plants, botony pots are still king. the one plant it can’t do is any of the trees, however, so you will still need a solution for that.

Phytogenic Insulators require thermal expansion and power, and are your other plant farming option. they’re rather expensive, but they can be freely swapped through, can produce things like trees that botony pots can’t, and are much faster than botony pots (especially when maximally upgraded). like with ispawners and cagerium, this is a matter of preference for which you pick, but you’ll probably only need one of the two.

ALCHEMY MODS

these, thankfully, don’t require any strategy or explanation; you can only go one at a time, and each unlocked mod is a new upgrade to your existing vault potion (or vial to start with). each upgrade heals more health and has a stronger chosen effect. that said, no matter how high you upgrade, you always have the same number of charges. take these when you start needing that extra health!

and that’s everything! hopefully this is helpful for new players playing along with the hermits! happy vaulting!

[canisalbus]

Ohh the scent thing is such a fascinating facet of your story! When Machete does his violent work, can Vasco smell it on him? Does Vasco's scent linger on him after they spend a night together? Can passerby smell sex or arousal? What kinds of smells do Machete's co-workers give off? That would make the forbidden things very difficult to hide.

Does any of their peers suspect them at any point?

I think Machete is too much of a neat freak to let any unpleasant odors stick to him for too long. Even though I have this habit of drawing him sprayed with blood and such, in reality it's fairly uncommon for him to get his hands properly dirty, even towards the end, at his worst. He has employees specifically for that business. I think the only affair that is exceedingly hard to avoid or scrub off would be executions by burning, which he has to supervise on occasion. Smoke is just one of those things that spreads far and wide and permeates everything. The persisting aroma of charred flesh and burnt dog hair makes him nauseous for days.

If there's enough close contact it's only reasonable that their personal smells would start to blend together. I can see this being a significant bonding thing under most circumstances. Machete always gets a little blue whenever he has his sheets changed after Vasco has gone back to Florence.

Depending on the situation recent sex might be noticeable, arousal would probably be only detectable on very close proximity. This kind of stuff starts to cross to pheromone territory and that's just a little too nebulous and instinctual for me to unpack in a logical and meaningful way, I think.

His co-workers smell of various things just like everyone else. If there's something seriously wrong with their health you might be able to tell, or not. You might be able to guess where they live, what they do for living and what kind of pastimes they enjoy if they smell familiar in a certain way. Some people are easier to read and some don't give you much of anything to work with.

But we're talking about very subtle things, I'd imagine in order to notice any of the above you'd have to stand at least withing a touching distance to a person, preferably be somewhat familiar with their usual scent profile and have the intent and awareness to decipher what you're sensing. It's not something you can catch from the other side of the room or a thing that dictates social interactions to an overwhelmingly great degree. So if you manage to maintain a sufficient distance to anyone who might suspect something, you're probably fine. Regular bathing helps, and using perfumes and other additional scents to divert people's attention away is very common.

[deliciousdefendorinternet]

Really Hope JD and Bruce's Horrible Treatment of Branch in this scene gets brought up again in the future.

like they were legit Cruel to him During the Argument scene and it never gets brought up again afterwards Hell JD and Bruce don't even apologise.

they legit abandoned him his whole life then acted as tho they wanted to be around each other again thus getting Branch to open up to the idea of having them back in his life.

only to then turn around and Casually say they were going to Ditch him again and then cruelly mocked him for being upset by this.

given he legit spent most of his life an orphan having no one after their Grandma died JD and especially Bruce were colossal jerks in this scene.

I say especially Bruce because at least with JD its in character he's a idiot loner who says insensitive things because he never thinks before he says or does anything.

but Bruce is a fairly normal Husband and Father to multiple young children who seems to have pretty decent social skills to say the least given he works in a Job that requires Regular social interaction.

and again he's a friggin Dad so clearly family does mean something to him so for him him to act like Branch was immature for being upset by his only family Ditching him yet again after being absent his whole life just comes across as worse in my opinion.

what do you think? do you think it will get brought up again in the future?

I really Hope so because this Bothered me TBT felt like most of its Drama was unresolved because they just Rushed to the family making up with each other after saving Floyd Despite most of the family issues not actually being talked about properly.