#this is largely a personal post this time I'll make posts later engaging with the actual content of the show

[cookinguptales]

So a few days ago I finished listening to the last of (the public episodes of) Old Gods of Appalachia. It was... honestly kind of a weird and personal listening experience, and I had to go slowly because I'd be lying if I said it didn't pull up some stuff from my childhood that I didn't enjoy.

I loved writing of the show and most of the voice acting! Most of the storylines were so, so, so good. I wish I could write like that. But the best writing in the world is still a very strange experience when it has ties to a life you left behind a very long time ago.

(cut for length! don't want to spam the poor tag)

Mama's side of the family is from that part of the country, and I have never had a good relationship with any of them. Same old story. Pentecostal/Baptist/Church of God. Enough said, right? lmao. I'm a queer disabled woman with a strong interest in magic and folklore so you can probably guess how well all that went. I'm NC with most of them now, very LC with what's left, and most of what I hear about them is through Mama, who still tries to talk to them as much as they abuse her. Last I heard, they were mostly Q.

Old Gods is an incredibly accurate show when it comes to depicting that part of the world, to the point where I had to stop even just that first episode several times to just kind of. Sit there with my thoughts and then let them go. Even just hearing Mamaw and Papaw made me thing about my gramma and my paw-paw and the uh. Very complicated relationship we "enjoyed". I feel like memories cropped up at the strangest things, like when he talked about copperheads out in the woods and I remembered that Easter when the egg hunt was canceled because one of the parents went to put an egg in a hole in the ground and found a whole nest of baby copperheads. I remembered the woods out there on the Tennessee side of Bristol twenty-five years ago when Mama would still let me visit my grandparents.

He'd say "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" and I'd be right back there at Gramma's kitchen table, seven years old and reading through every verse the Bible had on witches as punishment after Gramma found a Harry Potter book in my suitcase.

But listening to the podcast was also a deeply surreal experience because so much of it was familiar that shouldn't have been. My family never would have taught me magic or local folklore. Not ever. Well -- they had their own folklore, as we all do. Laying hands and the like. But the stories that were there before them. Oh no. Not ever.

When I was finally turned loose on the world when I was 18, I was frustratingly liberal for my own family, but annoyingly conservative on a college campus. I had a lot to learn very, very quickly. Thankfully, I did -- and I learned it through taking classes that I never, ever would have been allowed at home. I went from being unwilling to be in the same room as a tarot deck to collecting them myself. (And I have a very lovely collection now, too.) I went from being sort of fascinated if afraid of concepts of magic to taking classes on it.

I've always had a particular interest in cunning magic. It came up in my first class on the history of witchcraft, and something about it... I don't know. The combination of folk magic and mainstream religion and the elevation and degradation of them both. I ended up learning a lot about British cunning folk, but particularly quite a bit about those up in Scotland. (Just ask my Sleep No More friends. They'll vouch, probably with a laugh and a shake of the head.)

I never learned much about Appalachia, though. Not about folk magic. So imagine my confusion when I understood all the references made to folk magic in this show. Some of it, sure, was from my childhood. Haints and the lord, etc. But other things, witch bottles and charms and running water, none of this was stuff my family would have taught me. This was the stuff I'd learned in school. On my own, once I graduated. This was the Scottish folk magic which had always called to me in my classes.

And then, y'know, they mentioned it explicitly in the show. That whole Scotch-Irish thing that Appalachia's got going on. And I thought... oh, I've heard Mama talk about that. But I never felt like any of that had much to do with me; I don't have strong familial connections with either side of our family, Mama or Dad's both, and so why would I feel connected to their family history? I feel like an orphan and a mutt most days.

But oh. Of course they did. Of course they brought Scottish and Irish traditions with them when they came, and of course they weren't too dissimilar from the things Scotland had before and after they'd left.

God. Imagine how I felt when I realized that I'd spent over a decade studying the exact subject that my grandmother had always tried to keep from me. I'd come to it a roundabout way after that day sitting at Gramma's table, feet too small to reach the ground and puzzling through verses of the Bible that I've learned since were about necromancy, but I'd done it by accident all the same. I studied the traditions that my family would have had before they picked up the snakes, so to speak, and I'd done it by going right back to the source.

How perfectly fucking bizarre.

And that, all that took some getting used to. But I got used to it. I kept listening, glad that at least that part of my childhood was something I'd managed to put to bed. I could listen to the rest of the show without being hurled back to my infancy.

Oh, I'm sorry. Did I mention that Dad's side is Pennsylvania Dutch? :')

Who the fuck has characters who are Pennsylvania Dutch?

So then all that's happening in the show, and I'm thinking about when I went to Alsace just before the pandemic hit, when I spent Christmastime there and I was inundated with traditions that had been passed down to me from my father. How strange it was to finally light candles for an advent wreath and know exactly from whence that tradition had come. When I was in Strasbourg, our tour guide was genuinely psyched to meet someone whose family was Pennsylvania Dutch because, well, he knew exactly where my family was from. It was such a very weird experience.

And now! Fuck! Here it is again! And I'm thinking about advent wreaths and baked butter beans and Braucherei and hex signs... all things that, again, I'd had to piece together myself in absentia. All traditions that I had received piecemeal, and ones that I'd had to confront when I myself moved up here to Philadelphia for school.

It's... like going to a family reunion, I guess, where they all recognize you but you don't speak the language. It's the strangest feeling.

But, I mean. I didn't grow up with all this. Mama and Dad went up north, much to the disappointment of her family. (They got upset when she married a Yankee, but then they moved and oof.) So okay, listening to this podcast is a weird trip for me, but it's not that reminiscent of my actual childhood. It's not like there's a character who left her family in Appalachia to go have a baby in Cincinnati, Ohio and what the fuck is going on here? lmao

(Though thankfully, my mama didn't die in childbirth with me. It was just awful close and I was one blue baby.)

When I tell you I had to turn the podcast off and go for a fucking walk!

Like... look. Old Gods of Appalachia is a good podcast. Not every arc and character landed for me, but there are certain episodes that I still marvel at. (The Boy oh The Boy.) Ways of weaving together threads that I really wish I could do as an author. The storytelling is fantastic and the production design nearly impeccable. There are transcripts, which as a woman where we passed down both haints and sign language I very thoroughly appreciate. It's perfectly creepy and the worldbuilding is fantastic.

Those vibes hit is what I'm telling you.

But it's also a podcast that felt in some ways like a history of my family that I had never learned on my own terms. I actually ended up going to my parents and talking about our ethnicity and history and traditions a few times while listening to this show, and I actually ended up learning a lot about my own background. Which... I still feel isn't totally my own to claim, but perhaps I came around to it my own way. It was honestly one of the strangest listening experiences that I have ever experienced.

I'm going back and forth on being a Patreon backer so I can listen to those episodes, too. It's not that I've never backed Patreons before. It's not even that I've never backed podcasts! (I backed TMA back in the day, at least before it changed course a bit and I lost interest.) But, and you are not allowed to judge me for this, damn. Did they have to call it tithing? I just. I know it's just a bit, I know it's not real, but I apparently still have just enough religious damage that I can't make myself do it. It's so dumb. But man. I don't fucking tithe.

We'll see if I make it over that particular hurdle. I'll probably be able to design some mental gymnastics to get me through it. Maybe.

They'll be in Brooklyn the day before my birthday and. idk. Maybe I'll go, if the venue is accessible. Book a trip to Sleep No More as well, make a fun little trip of it.

But... hell. I can't help but notice that the first stop is in Columbus, Ohio, where I once wore a little tiger mask at the zoo, and the last stop is in goddamn Bristol, Tennessee.

[anarchywoofwoof]

Hello, Thank You For Being Here (Pt. 3)

other links: twitter | twitch | bluesky | neocities

side blogs: @toocoolforghoul & @in-the-woods

old pinned post

hello. my name is biddy. my pronouns are whatever, but you can use he/him if that makes it easier. i am a degenerate Anarchist dog from the Midwestern United States. i am 33 years old and taken (@thatcrazywitch). i am AuDHD, i suffer from severe anxiety, cptsd, depression, contamination OCD, and dyspraxia.

this blog serves as the primary source for my thoughts, feelings, ramblings, shitposts, life happenings, art, and whatever else crosses my mind. the topics will vary wildly, but you can expect a lot of the following:

anarchist and leftist agitprop

general us political news and opinions

world news

climate change/environmental news

poetry, prose, and other writing

random personal diatribes

animals

memes

silly text posts

photos of my dog

i find DNIs pointless, but i would ask if you are a TERF, transphobe, zionist, hardline religious zealot, or otherwise a fascist, for you to unkindly go fuck yourself. this blog is an unyielding ally to all marginalized and/or oppressed peoples, including but not limited to trans folks or any other queer-identifying individuals, Black and Indigenous peoples, and many others. you get a block immediately when interacting with my posts. i will not engage, so please do not waste anyone's time.

here are some tags that i frequently use. i am terrible at keeping up with them and i largely reblog without tags and then go back and add them later when i have time.

Text Posts: #text, #bork bork thoughts

Ask Responses: #borking back

Tumblr-Related: #meta

My Dog: #sweet princess peregrine

Other Dogs: #anarchodogism

Cats: #cats on the bork blog

Anarchoposting: #anarchy, #anarchism, #anarchist

OC Graphics: #oc, #learning photoshop through play

OC Poetry: #oc, #poetry

Non-OC Memes: #memes, #not oc

Wholesome Posts: #happy borks

please be advised: if i fail to tag something appropriately or reblog from someone detestable, please message me or send me an anonymous ask and let me know. DO NOT REBLOG MY POSTS WITH PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE COMMENTS. i treat people with respect when they treat me with respect. but i will publicly dress you down if you break this rule and then block you. this is the only warning i will give. no exceptions.

otherwise, please feel free to like or reblog anything i post. if it was too personal to be reblogged, i wouldn't share it. so don't worry about breaking tumblr protocol. i'm too old and tired to care about that.

my sense of humor is also very deadpan/sarcastic, so please keep this in mind when interacting. if something seems out of character, ask me for clarification and i'll provide it. there's a good chance that i'm probably just being silly. i love you, enjoy your stay.

[ditchdwellersupreme]

The Religion Of The Spirits

One thing that I think very few people talk about is the actual Religion of the spirits we engage with. Sure, we talk about pagan gods, Christian saints, etc. but I'm not sure if we realize the extent of this. I honestly hadn't given it much thought until very recently, but there are certainly instances in which spirits I've engaged with have a clear and defined religious identity.

I was talking with one of my Islamic friends, and he was talking about how djinn have religions. For example, there are Christian jinn, Muslim jinn, etc. They have religious affiliations just like we do. This got me to thinking about some of my past experiences with spirits.

I've found that various "lower" spirits (i.e.: Elementals, local spirits, spirits of the air and local weather, etc.) have religious affiliations, and beliefs. I also noticed that this seemed to change depending on my locale. In Virginia, most of the terrestrial, nature, and local spirits were "pagan" or at least non-Christian. In fact some of them had their own gods they worshiped. I recall a classmate of mine actually discovered one of the goddesses he venerated found a river near us to be sacred to her. Revealed through dreams etc. Yet the weather/storm spirits responded really really well to Abrahamic, specifically Christian, invocations and prayers. They always calmed down when I would call on the Lunar Archangel (Gabriel) and certain other angels, and working with the lore of Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee. (I think I'll make a post later about using mythology, folklore, etc. to craft spells and rituals). Contrast that with when I moved to Georgia, and the local spirits (at least in Savannah) are largely Christian and/or Hermetic in some aspects, while the spirits of the weather respond so much better to pre-Christian deities and invocations. Zeus and Helios especially. Though I also have a feeling that they prefer other spirits, and other methods than just invocations and petitioning higher powers.

I think it's important to consider the religion of the spirits we call. I saw a post by Hoodoo Moses on instagram a while back where he linked an article about a certain charm. It was a Crucifix with Jesus on it, however it is common in Muslim dominated communities. The reason being that it was a charm used again Christian Jinn who may be harming or possessing a person. Even though the person may not believe in Christianity, they know that spirit does and to rid it, you need to go through the avenue that would best appeal to it. It's a unique and genius way of thinking and working. Yet so simple at the same time.

Just something to ponder on, perhaps I'll go more in-depth as I explore it further, maybe make a video on it. I just think it's neat!

It also makes me wonder if there's New Age and Starseed jinn/local spirits. I think that concept alone is supremely entertaining

[ozara13]

Pinned post!

Alright i don't really know how to make one of these but I'm seeing more and more people with them lately and as i want to be more active here i probably should have one as well. So here goes nothing.

Hello, I'm Ozara. A lot of my discord friends call me Oz, but if you're a mutual you can call me by my prefered name of Lila. I have been on this hellsite since 2014, long enough to be intimately familiar with the ancient texts/deep magic but not long enough to have been there when they were written. Despite coming up on 10 years here i have been largely silent for most of that time, just rebloging and liking the things that i enjoyed without tagging them at all. Recently though I've been wanting to change that and actually be social, however scary that is.

I was born in 1998 so as of writing this i am 26 years old. I specify the year because i probably won't be attentive enough to update that every year.

I am a trans woman, my egg cracked in the 2020 lockdown and i started hrt in October of 2022. My transition timeline post is currently my most popular so you'll probably see that at the top but here it is in case it gets lost

Now for the important part. I am one of those horny kinky subby tgirl lesbians you hear all about and i am pretty much always horny on main. You will see kinky nsft stuff on here and i will not feel shame for it.

Getting into my kinky side, i identify mainly as a puppydoll. So all of the things you expect from a puppy girl but add a ball jointed doll personality in there as well. Despite that being my Main Thing, i am not tied down to it. I also wanna experience being a myriad of other kinky personalities such as but not limited to, hucow, pony, maid, rope bunny, bimbo, fuckdoll, hypnoslut, latex drone, slave, toy, you name it, i want it. Long story short, I don't wanna be in control and i want a nice yet commanding (T4T) Mistress to take care of me and do all of the thinking while I simply obey.

Consent is important to me and I typically like to get to know someone as a person before engaging in the kinky stuff. My DMs are always open for mutuals but if i don't know you, don't come in expecting my submission from the get go.

One thing I have to mention is that I am broke and kink can be expensive so here is my Lovense Wishlist if anyone wants to be generous

https://www.lovense.com/wish-list/oav1?_utm_pro=2112141049

(ill probably make a venmo and throw that in here later for if someone wants to just give me money)

Umm, i think that's it? I'll update this if i can think of anything i missed.

[captainvulcant]

ATLA Live Action Review

I will preface this by saying that largely I enjoyed watching ATLA and I would watch a season 2, would even look forward to a season 2.

However, I did have a lot of issues with this series, issues which I don't feel can be solved by saying "well it's a different series it shouldn't be an exact copy paste of the original". If their changes are worse than the original then that is a failing, and there was a lot which was objectively worse. I'll begin with:

Dialogue Are these things written by AI now or something? The dialogue was giving me "I forced an AI to watch x hours of halmark movies and write one for me" but for your standard adventure series. Listen, we have had this already in 100s of other series and films. ATLA is so unique, could we not have kept the dialogue to that style instead of the expositiony "It's my responsibility" style basic adventure hero stuff? At best it was dull, at worst it was actively cringy. I felt that Zuko and Iroh's dialogue was better and most engaging, no real issues there, but only on a couple of occasions did I experience the Gaang's characteristics and dynamic that I was hoping for from the dialogue.

Music Would have very much liked to have heard some East-Asian instruments and music style. The bog-standard western orchestra did the same as mentioned above: it's dull, it's predictable, it didn't bring me into the world it took me out of it. I was metaphorically taking a shot every time the orchestra swelled at a dramatic or poignant moment. The exception was the little Leaves from the Vine motif they dotted in around Iroh, that was wonderful. Could have done with more of that for Aang's emotional moments.

Exposition So much exposition. Imo they shouldn't have shown the air nomads being attacked. We should have seen Aang fly off and then seen the fire nation making its way up the mountain ominously (on foot!! why do the firebenders have bending jet packs now??? this defeats the later plot??? why can everyone fly now????) before cutting to black. If they really wanted to show it it could have been in quick flashbacks as Aang makes his way through the air temple, which I think would have made it feel more personal to Aang and more devastating. As it was I was just reminded of Star Wars through the whole thing (so many Star Wars vibes at the air temple it really threw me off). Dialogue exposition also awful. If they had spent less time explaining every single plot point to the audience like we're stupid and more on the relationship between the characters and character development we might have actually felt like we progressed from episode 1 to 8. Which leads me to:

Characterisation I'm considering making an entirely different post for this honestly, but here it is in brief. I think we really lost something in this series, and for that I blame the 8 episode thing Netflix is obsessed with. The actors did a good job I felt, particularly with a script that was more rote phrases and platitudes than wise words and attitudes. We didn't really get to see friendships developing, they were just there. We didn't see the characters grow, and the issues which they faced and overcame in the series (which worked perfectly well!!!) have been changed for no reason. Sokka's dad was disappointed in him?? Why???? We already have Zuko whose dad is disappointed in him. I love Sokka's original character, I love seeing him getting over his mysogyny. You know what might have been helpful, in 2024 where all studies show that young men who spend time online become more conservative and sexism is rife?? Maybe showing that it's ok to change your views, that it's ok to work with and respect women, that people will still love you, and that it's not always your fault when you're taught stupid shit. That would have been useful. Taking away that aspect of his character meant changing Katara's and Sukis, and not for the better!!!! Like jesus Suki, my poor Suki. She's such a cool character in the animation. She has responsibility, she is competent and cool and knows her place in the world, but is also open to the idea of change. Why did they make her so awkward (original Suki is fun and funny as well) and unsure? And more parent drama?? Again??? Do they only have one plot?

I also felt that by missing key episodes like the Northern Air Temple we really missed out on Aang's character from the animation, and the emotional weight those scenes could have brought. This Aang doesn't goof off, he's already learned his lesson. This Aang doesn't struggle to balance his beliefs as an airbender (the last airbender, the only one who can continue them) with his job as the avatar, he's just 100% up for the fighting with no conflict. This is a huge part of his character's original internal struggle (and a massive plot point later on) and it feels like we lost something by taking it out.

Final Thoughts Once again, I did enjoy the series. I got super emotional at some parts, I particularly enjoyed the first 4 episodes. Overall I liked the casting and I think the actors did a pretty good job and I'm excited to see where this will go in season 2.

But, I do think that we are allowed to criticise and compare things. I'm seeing a lot of people on here being like stop over-analysing things!! No, lol. Firstly, this is tumblr, the over-analysing website. If you want a superficial review go to tiktok. Secondly, if I had one thing to place the blame on for my issues with this series it's that it is more generic and dumbed down than a cartoon made for kids almost 20 years ago. I am not alone in thinking that media is becoming very basic and sanitised (while at the same time becoming more explicit and violent? It's like no we can't have nuance or complex issues but we will show you explicit sex scenes and awful violence) and also it all feels the same. And I do think we should be wary of the homogenisation of media.

[aroaceacacia]

could you do a tldr after redacted do their thing? i dont follow many people from this fandom on twitter and im too scared to try and dive into it rn when shit is happening.

as of right now the situation is this:

- yesterday a twitter user made a series of tweets complaining about the "scitties" trend. redacted finds it a ridiculous thread and picks it apart in the discourse channel, but doesnt engage

- i make a tumblr post saying scar would think scitties is funny (another user adds tags that are good explaining how fandom content doesnt need to be filtered for cc consumption)

- today, a member of hermittwt dmed multiple people telling them to stop following mojo chojo

- this person cited the following claims: mojo being a hermitshipper, drawing nsfw, and reblogging art from a dsmp shipper who has drawn NSFW of c!tubbo

- the fact is that mojo has stated (back in November here on tumblr) that they dont like drawing nsfw and at most their art will be suggestive. also, OP (the one trying to call ppl out) said the thing about c!tubbo in a dm and then couldnt find evidence of it so that really goes to show how

- at least one member of redacted challenges the dm they get. they make a small amount of progress but the damage has already been done

- redacted is sick and tired of hermittwt being so weird about shipping

- multiple members of redacted are relatively large artists in the fandom and we think it would be funny to just start going "surprise! you're weird for being so concerned about this"

- members of hermittwt who are not in redacted start to see our tweets and find they agree, that theyve been sick and tired of the discourse/negativity for a long time

- the mod of the 3rd life quote bot has revealed herself as emma @strifesolution who some of you may recognize as being a longtime yogs fan (fandom is normal abt shipping and does not harass people) and as being the guy to coin the treebark ship name

- live update i think we just ratioed ori???

tl;dr we think hermittwt needs to touch grass and we're tired of being nice. maybe later or tomorrow I'll be able to put together a more coherent timeline of events, or maybe my friend will just make a dont stop the party edit and that will explain everything

[johannestevans]

New media recs, new works, a new podcast!

Good evening!

A return to work after my time off for my birthday - I had a really good time resting over the birthday week, and I've been brewing a few new things in the meantime!

First and foremost, if you've been hoping for some of my fiction to be available in an audio format, you're in luck. The Story is a simple, no-frills podcast where it's just me reading short stories aloud - for the time being, I'll be doing a bunch of romance, fantasy, and horror pieces from my back catalogue, but later on I hope to make some of my erotica pieces available too!

I've set up a podcast that for now is available on Spotify and YouTube, but over the next few weeks will hopefully become available on other podcast platforms such as Google and Apple Podcasts. The first episode is already released and is an audio reading of Two Plates, with the plan from here to release weekly episodes on Thursday mornings.

Alongside Ashleigh Wilder, I was a guest on Trauma Talks with Jeremy Sachs and Katherine Cox a little while ago, and our episode, which is about our experiences of trauma alongside autism, is coming out on June 14th. I'll of course share the link next week when it's been released, but in the meantime, I absolutely recommend going back through some of their other episodes and giving them a listen, it's a really valuable podcast and so well-done.

If you're in or around California, my friend Rene Gannon-O'Gara's 2023 feature, Donut, is going to be screened at the Sherman Oaks Film Festival later this month, and I totally recommend it! I'll post my own review a little closer to the release, but in the meantime, general admission tickets are $15, and of course there are a bunch of other great flicks also being screened for the festival.

Some other media recs for this week:

The Boogeyman (2023, dir. Rob Savage) - This latest from Rob Savage was a real trip, and a friend and I had a great time seeing it in the cinema together - Rob Savage also did Host (2020), which I really enjoyed, but this piece was just impeccably constructed, so rich with layered meaning, such a cohesive concept and so well-executed. I want to rewatch this film in a little while and make some notes so that I can write about it at-length, but suffice it to say I absolutely recommend seeing it in a cinema if you can and it's safe for you - just some fucking A+ monster design, some great acting from Yellowjackets' Sophie Thatcher, a really excellent script.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick) - Lewis and I watched this last week and I fell asleep an hour in, and just finished it this week - it's a good flick, and this is another one I might write a bit more about later in the week, as I had a lot of feelings about the presentation of HAL and reading him as a gay man! I am personally not in the camp that this is one of the all-time greats, as I honestly only cared about the centre section of the film, not the beginning or the end, but it's still good even with those parts included.

The Terror by Dan Simmons, 2007 - I believe I've recommended AMC's The Terror (2018) before, which is a limited series I've got a lot of affection for, but this is my first time reading the book the series was based on, and I'm really enjoying it! Based on the once-lost expeditions of HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, two British explorer vessels which sought to find the Northwest Passage, written in a period style, this is a story effectively about a British colonial party who are punished by nature around them for their hubris and entitlement in desiring to be "explorers" - I would warn upfront that there's a lot of racism in this largely because it's written from the perspective of these 1800s white dudes in the past interacting with different Native Americans and other indigenous peoples, and in the course of the story engaging with different Inuit people. While the TV series is still good and I do plan to rewatch it after finishing this, the book is obviously much more rich, and it actually has more gay dudes than were included in the TV adaptation, as some of them were cut for time.

New Works Published

Narration: Two Plates

3k, rated M. Originally published Nov 20, 2022. A crotchety bookshop owner receives regular visits from the sex shop-owner across the way. Age gap, kissing, lots of banter and sharp back and forth. Note some mentions of past sexual abuse.

Listen on YouTube / / Listen on Spotify / / Read on Medium. / / Read on Patreon. 

Magazine Publication: Sheathed

This was originally published back in January, but has been republished this month by Bare Back Magazine!

A young man uses his coach’s mouth.

1.2k, cis M/M, rated E. Featuring blowjobs with throat-fucking, size difference, gagging, mild objectification, rough sex, coming in pants, and age difference.

Read from Bare Back Magazine / / On Medium / / On Patreon.

Blog Post: Advice for pre-transition trans men hooking up?

Anonymous asked:

possibly weird question but would you have any advice for trans men who are pre-any kind of medical transition who are looking to try dating apps and such?? I'm wanting to start living my best slut life but it's also a little intimidating when I don't always pass. Apologies because I do know this is probably a kind of broad question 😅 but thank you!

On Tumblr

Short Story: Two of A Kind

A boy washes up on shore and meets a pirate swordmaster. 

1.2k, rated M. Warnings for implied sexual abuse and reference to past sexual assault throughout, with a focus on survivors' solidarity. 

On Medium / / On Patreon

Short Story: The Secretary

A young woman goes to collect her inheritance.

4.1k, rated M. Content warnings for loss of a loved one and non-graphic references to sexual assault.

On Medium in The New North / / On Patreon

Short Story: The Butler

The captain's steward used to be a butler. About 1.3k, rated T.

On Medium in Prism & Pen / / On Patreon

[swordfright]

please write that essay

I assume based on your timing that this ask is in reference to this post, in which case I'm sorry it took me a couple days to get around to answering! This is not gonna be super well-organized but here are my thoughts:

The lore tidbit about c!Quackity actually having WON the bet with Glatt is literally the best possible way that whole situation could have gone. It’s such a solid storytelling move and I respect cc!Q to the moon and back for confirming it, both because I think c!Q's actions after having won the bet are very in-character for him and also because this option is, simply put, more narratively satisfying than the alternative. I'll explain why I think that.

c!Quackity's whole character arc is about belonging and agency and, importantly, how the pursuit of those things can go wrong. When he first joins the server he struggles to find somewhere to belong and gets used by others. His later attempts to exercise agency in order to foster his idea of a safe and stable community (yes, I'm including Butcher Army here) largely end in disaster. So eventually, Q establishes his own country, his own place where he can control every potential element and risk factor, but arguably he does so at the cost of love and friendship and community, the things he wanted to foster and maintain and protect in the first place. His defining fears about community safety eventually become reduced to fears about personal safety. To me, it’s a very clear negative character arc. When Q makes the bet with Schlatt’s ghost and ends up torturing c!Dream for the revival book, the audience are led to assume it’s because he lost the bet and is still beholden to Glatt in this one final way.

The exact nature of his and Schlatt's relationship prior to Schlatt's death carries some degree of ambiguity, but it's pretty widely interpreted as an abusive romantic relationship, and I'd argue that canon supports this interpretation. They were engaged following the Manberg coalition, and we know their relationship was increasingly rocky during this period. If you subscribe to this particular interpretation of their relationship (which I do because again, I believe canon supports it), then this adds a certain weight and gravity to Q's bet with Schlatt's ghost. The bet becomes a horrible postmortem extension of this toxic relationship that has deeply left its mark on c!Quackity, and Q losing the bet puts him in a vulnerable position both psychologically and literally. He is still beholden to his shitty ex, despite having put him in the fucking ground. That's a powerful motivation to get the book and be done with Glatt forever --- so it makes sense that when Q started torturing Dream for the book, many viewers automatically assumed it was because Q lost that bet.

Personally, I never really liked that assumption, because I feel it lets Q off too easy. It's too convenient an excuse. It dismisses the horror and cruelty of Q's deal with Sam by allowing Q the plausible deniability of desperation, characterizing the torture as his final desperate attempt to escape Schlatt's legacy, i.e. “My abuser made me do it, I’m still being threatened and coerced, I’m not culpable for my own actions!” (Which isn't even a justification that c!Quackity himself would ever use, so it's frustrating to see viewers fall back on it. The c!Quackity woobification in this fandom is much worse than the c!Dream woobification but let's leave that discussion for another day.)

But then (BUT THEN!!!) we find out that no, c!Quackity didn't lose the bet, he actually WON. He didn't want that book for Glatt, he wanted it for himself. He tortured Dream for this reason and because he enjoyed torturing Dream, and it’s an amazing anti-reveal because it pulls the rug out from under you but it also makes perfect sense given the sort of person we’ve watched Q becoming over the course of the past year’s worth of lore content. It’s about cycles of violence! In a story that has been about cyclical violence from the beginning, this is a natural conclusion for Q's character arc. DSMP is a story about building as an escape, and escaping what you've built. And ironically, this reveal makes c!Quackity a perfect foil to c!Tommy because Tommy is an abuse victim who, in a lot of ways, strives to be better than his abuser (hello I realize this is a controversial opinion but whatever this is my post) and Quackity is an abuse victim who intentionally strives to out-do his abuser.

Finally, Q winning the bet with Glatt is like, the only option that carries any kind of narrative catharsis. Because if he’d lost the bet, it means that despite Q's tireless efforts to gain agency, he never truly succeeded and is still being used as a pawn. Which is boring imo! It’s literally “area man ends up exactly where he started," which can be a compelling arc but it's not the most compelling possible arc for this particular character in my incredibly biased opinion. Whereas Quackity having won the bet gives his character arc direction. The arc then becomes “area man strives against all odds to achieve agency, succeeds, forfeits humanity in the process.” Area man escapes cycle of abuse only to perpetuate it. Which I personally like because I think it's interesting!

It may not be an uplifting arc, but it’s an arc! It starts in one place and ends up somewhere else. It has momentum! Even though this reveal technically reflects “poorly” on Quackity’s character (idc lol he will be my forever babygirl no matter how many times he violates the Geneva Convention), it’s a plot twist that respects his character so much more than the alternative. There's only so far you can take a story about a guy being powerless. It's much more fun to tell a story where the powerless guy finally attains the agency he always wanted, but at a great personal cost.

(Coincidentally, this is also the reason I wish c!Wilbur's finale stream had ended not with him leaving c!Tommy but with him asking Tommy to accompany him to Utah and Tommy rejecting his offer. But I digress lmfao I'll be bitter about that storytelling decision on my own time)

Anyway, I think @elmhat phrased it really well when they said "We care about Quackity because of his choices." Not just what happens to him, but how he decides to react.

[deviantartdramahub]

Hello, I'm Jasper Rolls, the subject of previous posts on this blog submitted by monstermaster13 (hereafter referred to as Nathan because I don't want to write that username 400 fucking times). I would like to make it clear that I would rather be doing literally anything other than this right now, but since Nathan has apparently made it his mission in life to try and mess with mine in any way he can, I'd like to clear things up where I can. I'll be going over the events of the story chronologically, in a sort of abridged cliff notes version, and then picking up on specific points that Nathan submitted in his telling that I feel are worth addressing. Apologies for the length, this whole stupid affair is just...like that. Believe me, I'm trying to be as concise as possible. A lot of the stuff described has since been deleted since Nathan frequently removes stuff he later realizes is potentially embarrassing or makes him looks bad, but we have evidence of a number of things in here which I can try and provide if necessary.

Doing this chronologically means addressing the grooming stuff first, which is largely irrelevant to the "current" drama, but since it's been brought up I have to mention it. Put simply friend of mine, Bernnyx (hereafter referred to as Bernie), befriended Nathan in 2012, when she was around 13 or 14, and they engaged in roleplays focusing around themselves transforming into characters from Tim Burton movies. How does this function as grooming? Well...

Nathan has in the past described transformation, and specifically transformation into Tim Burton movie characters, as a fetish he has, and one that he greatly enjoys. "Fetish" and "love this particular fetish a lot" are the exact terms he has previously used to describe this interest, which indicates that he considers content of that ilk sexually gratifying, since that's what a fetish means.

Bernie had their age listed on their profile, which indicated they were a minor. In addition, Nathan once publicly posted a screencap of his DeviantArt settings on Twitter, which indicated that his year of birth was 1973. Unlike Nathan, I'm not here to criticize what a person finds sexually appealing - if there's a trait Nathan and I share, it's an interest in transformation, so being critical of that would be throwing stones in glass houses. However, given the information that Nathan has chosen to provide himself, it seems to indicate that he was nearly 40 years old when he was engaging in roleplay involving a topic he considers sexually gratifying, with someone he was fully aware was a minor. Unless he was just specifically blind when reading the age part of a DeviantArt profile, I don't know.

There's every chance that the year of birth that he put into DeviantArt is one he made up for whatever reason. I don't know for certain. If Nathan ever wants to clarify his actual age and clear this part up, he is more than welcome to, but the fact that he hasn't after all this time is curious. Surely, it would be so easy to disprove.

For the rest of this story we have to skip forward to 2020. While Bernie and Nathan still mutually followed each other on DeviantArt, they had drifted apart and not directly spoken for some time. For various reasons, Bernie chose to deactivate their DeviantArt account, and prior to doing so, politely requested that Nathan remove them from a "DeviantArt Family" list he'd made. Nathan claimed her reasoning was "dumb", but complied. Later the same day, checking in on Nathan's account to confirm that he had done what Bernie requested, Bernie discovered that they had been blocked. Shortly after, Nathan uploaded a short story synopsis very clearly based on the prior events, with the names changed, as well as a short rant written in character as one of his OCs, in which they directly name Bernie as the wrongdoer, and transform Bernie into a Pokemon as punishment for the crime of not wanting to talk to Nathan anymore.

This is where I get involved. I had been mildly aware of Nathan for some years as he had frequently commented on and favourited my work on various art galleries, and was a fan of what I did. Prior to this point I had considered him strange but largely harmless. However, the vindictiveness of Nathan's actions in this instance struck me as highly unsettling, and I chose to block him as I did not want someone who acted in this way towards a friend of mine to interact with me any further. I did not directly speak with him during any of this. I was, in retrospect, rather naively hoping that the block would speak for itself.

Nathan reacted extremely negatively to the block, posting a rant in which he assumed that I had blocked him for being fatphobic. I have never accused him of of this, and if it was a trait he had, I wasn't aware of it and it played no part in my decision to block him. Judging by his comments in the time since, however, he has since chosen to wear this particular boot with aplomb, considering the venom with which he criticizes my After Dark Twitter account, which is his prerogative, I suppose.

From here, Nathan repeatedly tried to get into contact with me any way he could, begging for my forgiveness and asking me to unblock him. He repeatedly attempted to add me on Discord, sent unwarranted messages to any account I hadn't already blocked him on, and when he ran out of those, he started sending messages to my romantic partners, as well as any previous romantic partners he knew I'd been involved with and any friends he thought would have my ear. This resulted in no shortage of embarrassment for me as I had to repeatedly explain to the people in my life who Nathan was and why he was contacting them. The entire time this was happening, Nathan was also uploading various journals along the same line of asking forgiveness, as well as at least one original character bio (since deleted), very obviously based on his experience with me. At the same time, he obsessed about Bernie leaving him like he was a heartbroken former lover (despite the complete lack of personal interaction for years), and ranted angrily and offensively about another friend of ours who he highly disliked, and who he blamed for "stealing" Bernie away from him.

We all tried our best to ignore Nathan's actions, even as he actively attempted to get us punished through moderation channels for the crime of upsetting him by establishing boundaries against him (including once attempting to report Bernie to the Discord subreddit). Really, there's so much shit he did that this story would get even more disgustingly long than it already is in this truncated version if I tried to describe all of it. I cannot impress upon you how much he would not fucking stop trying to get into my view as much as he could to harass me, demanding that I unblock him because he considered himself completely innocent of any crimes.

Eventually, I responded to him via an ask here on Tumblr, which is I believe the sole time I have ever directly interacted with him, making clear exactly what my grievances with him were, and that I wished for him to no longer contact me. Nathan ignored this and still kept trying, although his tone shifted from apologetic to self-hating instead, where he admitted that everything I had stated was true, although at various points he attempted to pass the blame for these actions to various alter egos or characters he has invented.

After this, I and my friends elected to once again go back to the policy of ignoring him as much as humanly possible, an act which Nathan was seemingly determined to test. For a solid year afterwards, he continued to harass us in ways that are largely similar to the above and would belabor the point to describe in any detail - the only point of note is that he eventually shifted his tone from self-hating and apologetic to venomous and hateful towards me. Clearly he decided at some point that actually he'd never done anything wrong, and we were all just meaninglessly hating him in all his perfect innocence. This eventually lead to a sequence of events in which, mere hours after one of my partners suffered the loss of an extremely close family member, Nathan chose to send a hateful message to a side blog I had neglected to block him on, adding to my already considerable emotional stress at the time.

This, combined with a number of other things that I don't have the time to go into detail about (but considering you've had multiple submissions from Nathan where he describes getting into fights with literally anyone and everyone, I imagine you have some idea), led to us deciding that we needed to make a document detailing what exactly had happened, because we considered Nathan to be an active danger to the community we were in. Additionally, we were sick of him lying about what happened between us. We had said extremely little on the matter publicly prior to then, while he had been posting every day about his rewritten version of events where he was completely innocent of any wrongdoing. The document in question was posted in July 2022. While most people in my circle online are now aware of Nathan and what's happened with him, Nathan leveraged various moderation tools to get the document taken down, and it can't be read publicly anymore. We still have copies of it and all the evidence of what I've been talking about contained therein, so if you would like more direct proof of any of this fucking nonsense, then it can be provided, but I won't be posting it publicly as Nathan will probably do the same thing again given the opportunity.

Since then, we have, of course, tried to go back to the policy of ignoring him, which for the most part I've succeeded at doing, and would really, really, REALLY rather continue doing, since every time I see hide or hair of Nathan I feel sick, and I'd rather not feel that way. However, every 4-5 months or so, he's ended up floating into my vision since he is intent on stalking me across the internet, harassing me wherever he can, and talking shit about me and my friends, telling a highly biased and skewed version of the events to anyone who will listen. Most recently, I believe he is responsible for trying to sign one of my e-mail accounts up to various random forums and websites with usernames intended to embarrass me. I would very much like him to stop harassing me, and if he must spew his bile, I would rather he kept it to his own blogs and accounts, rather than trying to slander me publicly or directly try to harass me like this. Unlike Nathan, who seems to have all of time to yell incoherently at me online, I have a life, and a job, and friends I would much prefer to engage with rather than having to deal with his continued persistent harassment.

That's a rough overview of the events. As mentioned, I have pretty direct evidence of most of the stuff I've discussed here so if you need that then I can provide. Now to discuss some of the more specific points that Nathan has discussed.

"And it gets worse, Jasper very much did this too. He dedicated more than a few posts to me for the past couple of years, oh yeah sure dude…i'm the obsessed one, says the person who is still mad about something that didn't even concern him until he got involved himself."

I post about Nathan maybe once or twice a year, if that, when his repeated continued harassment gets so out of hand that I have no other outlet than to vent frustration about it publicly because I am sick to fucking death of him continuing to force himself into my life. When I do so, I tend to mention him in broad terms that do not directly name him. I can't exactly prove a negative, but the only accounts I know Nathan actively uses are his DeviantArt and FurAffinity accounts, and I have absolutely no interest in seeking out any of his other accounts because I would rather be witness to Nathan's existence as little as humanly possible. Nathan, in comparison, whenever I've had reason to check, seems to post about me and what I do daily, covertly following every account I use online and ranting on his own accounts about how much he hates everything I say and do, no matter how benign. I believe this should be somewhat self-evident from the posts he has submitted to your blog, in which he has described actively stalking any account I happen to post on with regular activity, including my Bluesky, Letterboxd, and Storygraph accounts. He posts about me plenty on his own accounts too, and with comparative venom - and when he stops doing that, he makes AI generated knockoffs of mine and others work, because he is apparently completely void of creativity.

"In the document that was made about me one of the writers behind it either Jasper, Bernnyx, Baeksangeo or Gavin said they used the Anonymousdevi account to accuse me of being transphobic…"

This is an incredibly bizarre point Nathan has repeated several times over the time since the document was posted. This incident involved another person entirely, who directly stated who they were in said document and described the events in first person. Nathan seems to have gotten incredibly confused by this and believes it was actually me, Bernie, or one of our other friends using a pseudonym. I don't know why. His belief that they deserve a callout is just plain strange considering they had this one exact interaction with him and nothing else.

"I am sorry dude but you don't have the right to speak for all gay men or the LGBT community at all."

Actually I do, sorry. Cry about it. [THIS IS A HYPERBOLIC JOKE]

"I rarely talk about what happened regarding him and me on my posts or even in my deviantart page (despite the accusations), so i very much just try to ignore the guy."

This is an absolute lie. As I have described, Nathan stalks my accounts and posts angrily about what I do in specific detail with extreme, nigh on daily frequency, from what I've seen whenever I've come across him in the wild and checked in on how he's doing. His claim that he "rarely talks about me" and "tries to ignore me" could not be more of an outright fabrication. The only way I can figure him seriously believing this is that he considers the daily rants and harassment as being not him, because he posts them in character as one of his OCs - therefore, it's not him stalking and harassing and ranting about me, it's one of his characters. I'm sure you can agree the difference is negligible.

That's everything I have to say. I have no interest in discussing this further with Nathan. I and my friends merely want to live in peace and enjoy our time online, something Nathan has seemingly dedicated his life to attempting to ruin. I ask that he please do literally anything else with his time other than spend it harassing and stalking me and my friends for years on end. Thank you.

All noted. A classic chain of two sides bringing things up the scale after one's mistake. There is no shame in two sides in a conflict where nobody is perfect to consider/acknowledge such.

Having seen everything, if Nathan is reading this, if he may ceasefire in return for the other side wrapping up their own open-fire, as well as look down on how he may have challenged TOS (unspoken norms are unspoken norms but TOS is TOS when it regards that, and maybe the other side went against TOS), I would prescribe the conflict be considered having ended. What say he?

[memorymessage]

re: leaving instagram

i've noticed the subtleties in the transactional interactions on instagram.

if i'm not actively posting bodychecks, people start to forget my existence. even people i thought were genuinely reaching out to me to become friends—they seem to only want to talk to me if i've been posting photos of my body. they only like the stories that are of my body.

(not everybody. you know who you guys are, and i appreciate you endlessly.)

i'm not naïve or foolish—this is what i signed up for. this is what i get for: A: engaging with an app that is personal-photo-based in the first place, and B: fostering a mutual community of people with eating disorders.

i made my bed, now lie in it; i reap what i sow; i dug my own grave, etc, etc.

when i first made the account, i was rabid about posting photos every day. i had been private online for so long that i felt like i was breaking open a dam. i grew up on myspace. i had a camera in my own face every single day. but, after i transitioned as masc years later, i became ashamed of my feminine features. i only posted photos where i passed as masc well enough, which took great effort, make up, and some costume tricks (yes...i may have cut up hair extensions and made myself a beard). and, even then, i would get nervous about posting any photos at all—deathly afraid of my femininity.

there were a few instances where i would create fake social media accounts, give myself a fake name, and post pictures of myself dolled up as femme to the nines. an outlet to release the feminine side of myself without fear, but keeping the entity as far away from the "real" me as possible. but, even that was fake and untrue to myself—wearing makeup i never wore. wearing extensions that were shoved away, tangled, in a box.

i haven't been honestly myself in online spaces in many, many years.

this instagram account was the first time i truly let myself be... me.

but the novelty of posting pictures every day wore on me. i do still have an ed and bdd, after all.

especially when i reached my lowest weight of all time spring of last year. i felt like every picture i posted should be "perfect". the smaller i became, the more i scrutinized myself. looking even the slightest bit too large in any given angle was unacceptable.

the attention i got during that time was also at its peak.

and my mentality from that time regarding photos of myself never recovered.

my weight went up. it became harder and harder for me to want to take pictures. even when i would force myself to take pictures, it became harder to pick one i even wanted to post. not to mention, chronic illness has absolutely debilitated me the past year. most days, i am in bed, in pajamas, in no state (mind and body) to take photos.

and people started talking to me less and less, liking my posts less and less, viewing my stories less and less. the only time people would remember i existed is when i posted an acceptable bodycheck. then i would get a short-lived spike in people liking me again. only to die down until i posted my next check.

people weren't interested in my text posts, or the videos i would share. to put it plainly—people are not interested in me as a person.

why does this matter?

two reasons: it reinforces my bdd-based belief that i am only worth anything if i am thin and pretty. and... i was on myspace trying to be the next audrey kitching scene queen at age 10, meaning attention from others validating my very existence was interwoven into my young, developing brain. and there it yet remains.

and it's not just about other people. taking a good photo of myself gives me sense of pride and rejuvenation so immense that i'll never be able to explain. i assume that feeling also took root from the myspace scene queen days. a new pfp was everything back then, after all. i guess my brain still thinks it is.

my instagram account did not start like this. it used to be a small, casual little place where i would upload daily snaps. and it's sad this is where it has ended.

my insecure little delusions raveled up in themselves, tangling my body and leaving me motionless in fear of judgment. paralyzed.

in short: we're not having fun anymore, and i need to do myself a service and take responsibility for that.

i need to leave.

(for now.)

[acesknights]

° × Warlock Background info post ° ×

CW: Small warning for the post as there will be gore art near the end of this post 🫶

I wanted to make a small(ish) post about warlocks backstory/info because I've been practically only relying on what i find in my notes app and what i remember in my head about him

I'll update this as i go / more info is added into this oc

Info under cut <3

// General information //

Name: Adrian Jan Gruszczyński

Aliases: Warlock

Rank: lieutenant

Affiliations: Shadow Company, GROM [formally]

D. O. B: [09/09/1988] September 9th 1988

Age: 37 Years

Gender: Male - Cisgender

Nationality: Polish

Ethnicity: (West) Slavic

Laterality: Right side dominant

Blood type: O+

Languages: Polish, English, Russian

Personality Type: ISTJ

Specialises in: Long-range-marksmanship, CQC, covert infiltration

Weapon of choice: Barrett MRAD Bolt-Action Sniper Rifle + SIG MCX-SPEAR LT Assault Rifle

// Appearence //

Eye colour: Light Blue

Hair colour: Dark Auburn

Height: 187CM

Weight: 75KG

Body type: athletic

Any markings and/or scars: smaller scars on his arms and legs from small accidents while on the field ie - barbed wire, knife/sharp abrasions.

Deep knife lacerations on his back that required stitches [now healed leaving deep visable scarring]

Chemical burn across the right side of his face, going down to his collar bone - his hair, ear, and neck being affected by the said burn - his right eye sustained little to no damage yet that is subject to change but currently the burn had only eaten away at a large amount of his face, exposing/ripping apart part of his lips - leaving half his mouth always shown.

That severity of a burn had led to him requiring a skin graph from his thigh, more surgeries would be needed in the future to better fix this injury.

The same chemical burn scarring also being on his right forearm, the scarring there hadn't caused major damage as it was partially burned from splashback from the chemicals being thrown onto him but still required the same attention and overlook incase it were to damage his ability to use said arm

// Mannerisms //

Best traits: Tactical Acumen , Loyalty , adaptability to situations

Worst traits: Neuroticism, abrasive nature, known to have workaholic tendencies

Mannerisms: He has a tendency to respond in a brutally honest manner - a trait he had picked up from how he was brought up. He's highly observant, frequently assessing his surroundings and the people around him, which contributes to his tactical acumen. Despite his stoic exterior, he shows support for his team through subtle gestures, like a reassuring nod or a brief, reassuring touch on ones shoulder. Adrian may engage in tactile behaviors like adjusting his gear, checking his weapons over when in deep thought or contemplation before deployment.

// Family //

Relatives: [N/A]

Relationship status: Divorced - 'Katarzyna Gruszczyńska' [estranged]

Children: 'Anya Gruszczyńska' [deceased]

Extra: carries romantic feelings towards his Commander 'Phillip Graves'

// Background //

- Adrian had began his career in the Polish Army when he had enlisted at aged 19, specializing in covert operations and unconventional warfare. He excelled in reconnaissance and stealth missions.

- Special Forces Training: Adrian's exceptional skills caught the attention of the top brass, leading to his selection for specialized training within Poland's elite GROM unit. He honed his skills in marksmanship, infiltration, and hand-to-hand combat.

- While Adrian was still serving in the GROM unit, a mission involving counter-terrorism took an unexpected and horrific turn as Adrian was part of an operation to neutralize a dangerous extremist group responsible for multiple attacks across the time-span of three years. During a high-risk raid on a remote compound that was found inside of a large town, a hostage situation had occurred. This tragically claimed the life of their young daughter, Anya - who had been staying with Katarzyna's parents at the time. Adrian had to witness first-hand the death of his only daughter in front of him. The only view he had was from the scope of his Sniper Rifle

- The loss of their child was an unbearable burden on Adrian and Katarzyna as grief and guilt overwhelmed them both - knowing that this turn of events could've been stopped much earlier than before, yet the two of them had tried to overcome this grief in two vastly different and unhealthy ways. Adrian's relentless commitment to his military career as a coping mechanism drove a wedge between them both - he threw himself into his work seeking solace in the missions to distract himself from the loss of Anya. While Katarzyna could not bear the pain and distanced herself emotionally from him, thus straining and ruining their relationship with one another.

- Overtime, It eventually led to their estrangement, with both of them unable to find a way to heal and reconnect amid the painful memories of their once beloved child. The two agreed to their own separate ways and eventually divorced.

- Shadow Company Recruitment: Adrian's skills and experience eventually caught the attention of the private military organization, Impressed by his service history, they offered him a position that aligned with his talents.

- Injury: During one of his mission within Shadow Company, a mission that Adrian was tasked on had gone south all of a sudden - leading to a gunfight with the enemy rather quickly. Said gunfight leading to Adrian getting hit with a nasty chemical burn across his face and upper left arm. This injury left him unable to serve fully for multiple months, leading him to need multiple different facial reconstruction / skin graphs surgeries to help aid in the healing and lessening the look of this injury he had sustained.

// Images below that show his injury: // + coloured in varient

[mizukagami-takamagahara]

About your tags on the Ignis post, I didn't know Aspec!Terumi headcanon was controversial? (Like, he's not human, I can't see gender or sexuality coming naturally to him.) What do people usually headcanon him as? Straight?

I'll admit I'm largely just assuming it's controversial. I think a lot of people equate "talking about sex" to "wanting to have sex," so with Terumi's constant dirty mouth and euphemisms it can make sense to read him as sexually motivated. Like, 'he talks like a pervert, why wouldn't he be one???' I guess I just think that Terumi doesn't fit the fandom stereotype of "asexual."

I'm really not involved in shipping and that side of fandom, so to be fair this is the opinion of an outsider looking in. But I think a lot of people headcanon him as gay or bi. He's paired with Relius, his hosts, or Trinity most often.

A lot of people are also inclined to interpret their faves as similar to themselves, so that bias may color my interpretations and those of others. I myself am an asexual Terumi fan, so that may be influencing me!

As for my personal hcs/interpretation...

It's been a while since I went through BlazBlue, and I've started doing these deep-dive character studies, so I might want to come back to these points at a later date- when I've really dug into his character and have sources to analyze, and see if my opinions change. For now, these thoughts are kind of 'off the cuff.' They've had a lot of time to stew in my brain and soak up the broth.

((I mean, I am aware that headcanons don't need to be canon-compliant, but I'm the type of person who specifically gets their enjoyment of this sort of thing by treating the source material as a mystery to solve or a puzzle to put together, so cross-referencing with canon and shooting for accuracy/believability is a large part of the fun for me.))

He talks dirty a lot, but it seems to be intended to either 1.) infuriate others and make them uncomfortable or 2.) hurt others directly by humiliating, defiling, or dominating them. I see his sexual commentary as a weapon- it's a power play, one more way he can harm, Hatefarm [tm], and make himself feel powerful.

He's implied to be somewhat averse to touch and connection. He's strict about interaction being on his terms and freaks out when it isn't. [As a separate but related point, connection itself is something he really doesn't seek. It likely isn't in his nature, considering what he is/was. He's much more inclined to use 'connection-seeking-behavior' as a tool to prompt vulnerability he can then take advantage of, or as a tool to annoy/aggravate people he knows won't be receptive to it.]

[Though there may be something to say about the intended relationship between the Susano'o and the Amaterasu- or the 'role' of the Susano'o- and how that could influence Terumi's 'natural' or innate perception of relationships as a whole. But like. The last thing I need is another tangent to go on.]

I have a lot of thoughts about Terumi becoming sort of 'humanized' over the However Many Years since leaving the Susano'o Unit (kind of like how when you live in an area long enough, you start becoming more similar to the locals.) He simultaneously talks about himself as separate from and above 'disgusting, pathetic, powerless' humanity... while quite clearly acting very human (selfish, impulsive, fun-seeking) and engaging in man-made pleasures (guitar, live music, accessories) that he's just as likely to insult others for engaging with. He even seemingly identifies most with his 'human' form; when he Self-Observes we get that Yellow Jacket Terumi rather than his spirit form or anything resembling the Susano'o. To me, this suggests that that is the form Terumi most identifies with/sees as himself.

Because of the above point, I think Terumi isn't inclined to human connection, touch, sex, etc- they aren't instinctual/intuitive to him, considering his origin, they aren't a need the way they are for a social species- but he does enjoy and relate to more parts of the human experience than he's willing to admit. So, like, I don't think Terumi is necessarily sex-averse, but I don't think he's at all internally sexually motivated. Like, I can see him enjoying feeling sexy and possibly even pursuing sex under extremely specific circumstances, but that would absolutely have to be on his terms and it could be hard to predict when/where/how the stars needed to align for it to happen. 97% of the time it's much more likely that if he is making a pass at anyone, he wants them to hate it. If they reciprocated, he'd likely get upset fast.

[theophagie-remade]

(Warning: this is going to be a long long post)

[To make my life easier, I'm going to use "fanbase" to mean fans as a collective, and "fandom" to indicate those who are involved in shipping. Yes, I know that shipping isn't the only thing that makes up a fandom, but I need a quick way to differentiate between the two things, hence that "to make my life easier". Love and peace]

I've been spending a little more time on twitter these days just to witness the state of bnha discourse there (am I using it though? Ah! You'll never have me, hellsite [derogatory]), and man. It's genuinely... puzzling? Somewhat impressive, in a bad way? That such big portion of the fanbase appears to be completely unwilling to engage with anything that isn't surface level conflict, and completely disregards thematic elements, parallelisms, patterns...

Not that it's inherently wrong to be more interested in the fights, to want more action-based scenes or anything like that, and obviously it's not like bnha is the damned Divine Comedy, but the thing is, these are people who actively antagonize anyone who does talk about the [previously mentioned things] that it does have, and who do so in a scornful manner? What. Hello. I mean, shounen fans in general don't have the best reputation within manga/anime communities as it is, but to think that it has gotten this bad in there...

From my understanding things have turned especially sour in the past few months, but I do know that it has always been a thing. It was an eternity ago, but just to say one I still remember how a lot of people were genuinely convinced that Bakugou would indeed join the villains back when he had been kidnapped because... he has a bad attitude and is aggressive... When during the exam with Midoriya and All Might not long before that the audience was explicitly told what his objectives were, why he acted the way that he did, etc. Again, the problem isn't strictly that these people misunderstand things, but that they act like they know better and are so smart when canon (and theories by fandom swamp dwellers, but I'll get to this later*) has contradicted them again and again.

I'm going to half-recycle another post I made real quick. I know that to an external person it may look like I'm making up a Guy Type so that I can be mad at him, but well. It is a fact that the portion of the fanbase that I'm referring to is largely made up of young, straight men who invalidate the opinions of anyone who isn't like them, and that these guys are also very quick to turn to all sorts of bigotry whenever they have the chance, which... isn't a new thing obviously, but the thing with these guys is that oftentimes they're youtubers with a following, which can result in very nasty things. And after having had the displeasure of reading certain things, I do wonder why these men are even reading bnha anymore, what they're expecting out of it. It was obviously never going to be the dark manga that they wanted it to become. Midoriya was never going to be an ambiguous, emotionally distant protagonist. Bakugou was never going to remain a big, bad bully.

Recycling another post of mine again, but 💀 it literally is like this. Sorry for the bad screenshot but I don't want to worsen the length of this post too much lol

And speaking of Bakugou, something that at first really threw me off when I first exposed myself to this side of the fanbase (to the Dudebros™) is how vehemently they hate him. It's funny, because on paper he is most things that they've always wanted Midoriya to be. He's sure of himself, stronger than most since the beginning, has drive, is cool, isn't wHiNy. And then I began reading things like "all the teen girls and women in their 20s in this community care about is their stupid anime boy and their baseless gay ship" and I was like "Ah. It's one of those cases". And I don't like playing armchair psychologist, but from the way they're obsessed with bringing up his past bullying, and from how they talk about him in general, I do also think that they project hard onto Midoriya, whom they perceive as "the victim", "the underdog", hence why they wish he hated Bakugou, why they play down how important they are for each other, maybe why they refuse to accept the emotional weight of certain scenes and narrative choices.

And to tie back into *what I said earlier, this attitude that they have towards Bakugou, the way they act like he isn't a pivotal character (he's the damn co-star on set ffs), how they constantly and purposefully misunderstand him has had very funny outcomes, in which: they say A; the fandom (among which are the aforementioned brainless girls and women) says B; in the time that it takes for a chapter to come out, the dudebros revel in their perceived superiority; Horikoshi ends up delivering B, or as close to B as it could have been; ✨️the dudebros have a meltdown✨️, mayhaps they even have the bright idea of sending some death threats to Horikoshi himself here and there; repeat. And obviously the fandom has its own unlikely theories too, but in the case of these guys we're talking consistent levels of flopping, of completely misreading the manga and the characters. But no, it's the teen girls and the women who are stupid and ruin the fanbase with their disgusting gay🤢🤮 shipping (and any queer fan too, obviously 🙄, do any of you not know that shounen manga is supposed to be for us manly straight men who like pussy and want to see blood and guts 🙄) (why are you even still reading bnha if you're looking for that???)

The unfortunate coincidence that has made all of this worse was that, just as most people in the fandom like Bakugou and most dudebros dislike him, most dudebros like Uraraka and most people in the fandom... dislike her? Nope, not even that! (Un)surprisingly, there aren't many people around who express negative things about Uraraka herself. What I did read? Criticism (very understandable criticism, criticism that I fully agree with) of Horikoshi's writing, wishes that she had been given more agency, that she had been treated like the prominent supporting character that she is in a dignified way and not just as the mc's token future wife... Mhhh. Funny that. Funny also that most of this criticism indeed comes from women, who in turn are told that they should just shut up and stop complaining. :)

And wouldn't it be even funnier if the two characters that the fanbase is split over were both shipped with the mc, creating an even more polarised environment. :). And it's frustrating that it all circles back to that, izuocha isn't fandom-popular because people generally bring up its one-sidedness and the fact that Uraraka's feelings for Midoriya did have a negative impact on her growth, bakudeku isn't dudebro-popular because, and I'm listing things that I have literally read: it's gay and Midoriya and Bakugou aren't gay (a classic, an evergreen. Fresh); Bakugou abused Midoriya; Midoriya and Bakugou think of each other like brothers (note the paradox here); it's "sexualising children" (but shipping izuocha isn't?).

So Fun. Not one thing to not love in here 👍

Going back to Bakugou a second, but at this point it isn't even funny to read certain comments anymore for just how stupid they are. Bakugou dudebros pov encouraging him to win, keeping his secrets, wanting him to look at me, helping him train, constantly worrying for him, saving his life by risking mine, knowing him better than anyone else, apologising to him, being the closest person to him, acting like and thinking about him before possibly dying because I hate him 💢😠👊

And I mean, like I said lots of guys say things like these because 1) of projection and refusal to move on from the bully version of him from the earliest part of the story; 2) he's largely liked by female fans and Women Bad; 3) it's an extension of the bakudeku/izuocha ship war (🙄), but this pettiness and desire to be contrary for no good reason at all do leave me ??? Like, just how incapable of reading are you willing to make yourself look just because of how immature you are (if you are indeed faking it instead of the worse scenario, which is you not even misreading things on purpose but being that bad at it...)

[st-eve-barnes]

Hi friend, uh so im currently trying my hand at a slow burn ettore x oc fic, im 1.5k words in and i have no idea how to approach posting it, like i think im going to do a couple of large parts instead of 1 monster post. im also terrified of posting it in the first place as i dont have a beta reader or anything. Do you have any tips? i adore your writing <3

Hi! Thank you so much! I feel honored you're reaching out to me for tips, I'm not sure how helpful I'll be but I'll give it a go.

I've personally never worked with a beta reader either, it probably would be better for my writing but I just like to do it on my own and once I finish a chapter I have this need to post it ASAP lol

What I can advise is just do a really good final edit and then leave it for a while and then reread the whole thing fresh. Often that's when I find certain things that don't flow very well or don't sound right and make some last minute adjustments.

I also prefer posting in chapters instead of one long post, it's probably personal but I often don't have time to read a whole fic so those often get archived to "read later" while shorter chapters get read quickly so for a slow burn I would definitely recommend that.

Posting multiple chapters spread over time also gives people who may have missed the first chapter a chance to discover the fic later on and catch up, so more engagement for your story.

If you're writing a longer fic make a masterpost about it, it gives you another chance to get your story in the tag and in the spotlight.

When you write Ettore just be aware that he is a sensitive subject and difficult character not everyone is going to read so take that into account in your expectations when posting your fic. (it's not you, it's him lol) If posting on Tumblr I think OC is a little harder to sell than Reader fics as well, though this is probably different on other platforms.

Reblog your own stuff, be shameless about this and reblog it for every time zone and people who may have missed it.

That fear of posting never really goes away unfortunately, I never know what to expect when I post a fic and writing for new characters is always a bit scary.

I've written for the MCU for so long so when I started writing Eddie Munson and now Aemond in a whole new fandom was definitely scary. You just have to do it and hope for the best, and don't feel too discouraged when it doesn't do well. If you had fun writing it and only a few other people liked it as well that's enough. (I have fics who get to 1000 notes and some who barely get over 100, it happens and it will continue to happen even after years of writing.)

I'm not sure if this was helpful to you at all but good luck posting your fic, I hope it goes well!

[thelastonewastaken]

Unsocial Media

The first social media platform I joined was hi5. It was a cute little platform where you could change the skins of your profile page to any colour or template. Most of my friends from high secondary school also joined at the same time (I guess that's why I signed up, peer pressure being what it is) and it was good to view people's profiles and leave funny, little comments.

A year or so later, everyone moved over to Facebook. It was pretty much the same idea, but since I went to university soon after I also started connecting with people that saw in class or in school. The fundamental idea of these platforms was that you could connect with anyone and build a network of people with shared interests. I posted a lot on Facebook then, posts that I see now when I get memory notifications. I even wrote a few poems on Facebook Notes.

Mid-way through university, in late 2010 or early 2011, I joined Twitter. Twitter was really fun. It used to be that you tweeted into the ether and sometimes you got a sign that the ether heard you. I met a lot of people on Twitter, made friends and blocked a lot more. At some point though, I think Twitter became a little mean. People formed cliques and every tweet became some kind of argument. You could say "X makes me feel good" and someone would reply "So you're saying Y is trash?" No sir, those are different points. I started tweeting less and less until Meta released Threads and I mostly moved there.

Instagram is peak social media. If I could give up social media, I think I'll quit Instagram last. Originally, I used it to post photos I thought were funny or photos from trips I went on, but then I started to explore amateur photography more. With Stories, I started to engage with more people and actually gained a lot of friends on the platform (of course, I've blocked people too).

My problem with the current state of social media (and this includes LinkedIn) is that it is now a marketplace. On one side, you have creators of content, who work quite hard at generating (and 'adapting') photo, video, and/or text content for the enjoyment of the other side, the consumers of content. These platforms have developed complex algorithms to make the distinction between both sides appear latent, while encouraging creators to post more content and consumers to scroll more.

As I write this, I realize that I will probably post this online so I'm obviously consumed by this system too.

This system has benefited a lot of people. Creating content now provides sufficient income for many people, and brands employ creators in selling their goods to more people. Consumers now know of brands and influencers that address their needs more directly than they would know using other media platforms. The main negative of this system is that creators have to post engaging content very frequently, which tend to be incendiary and typically post about subjects within their niche.

This might sound weird, but when I follow people on social media I expect to see different sides of them. Like, you talked about a book you read yesterday but you're talking about car exhaust pipes today. That's range, human beings are supposed to have range. Don't talk about personal finance everyday, dawg.

For people who simply want to connect with others, it's become quite hard to do so. I would not have met my wife without social media or the last friend I hung out with in Toronto. And that's quite sad. Now when I follow new people, I take their follower count into consideration because if they have a large following they're less likely to engage with new people.

Where does that leave me? I don't know. I'm just a guy who likes to meet new people without leaving my house.

[productsreviewings]

The continuing fiasco that has been Elon Musk taking cost of Twitter continues, together with his newest jaunt being the creation of a ballot to let customers determine if he ought to step down from being CEO of the corporate.It started over the weekend, the place in keeping with The Verge (opens in new tab) a brand new coverage was instantly implement which threatened customers with account suspension in the event that they have been discovered to be sharing hyperlinks to different social networks on Twitter, equivalent to Mastodon and Instagram.Just a few hours later this was reversed, with the posts and tweets deleted and Musk apologizing.Nonetheless, this led to a weird plot twist the place he created a ballot as as to if he ought to keep or step down as Twitter CEO, alongside Twitter Assist creating its personal ballot (opens in new tab) relating to whether or not customers ought to be capable of share hyperlinks to different social platforms.I have been following this saga since Musk first determined to purchase the platform in April, adopted by placing it on maintain in Might, and it is akin to a foul film from the 90s.His survey says..Ought to I step down as head of Twitter? I'll abide by the outcomes of this ballot.December 18, 2023See extraThe ballot closed at 6:20 PT / 11:20 GMT on December 19, with 57.9% voting that he ought to step down, with 17,502,391 votes being made on this ballot.Whereas his causes for doing it this manner nearly make sense, all of it feels as if he is toying with customers for engagement. Drama is one thing most of us have doubtless seen or skilled on social networks equivalent to Fb and Musk isn't any stranger to this, which is why incidents like these have been flooding the information streams ever since he took over in November.From replying to infamous customers and unbanning others equivalent to Donald Trump, it makes headlines and retains Twitter related. Granted, the platform has sorely wanted large adjustments for some time now, but it surely should not must stoop so low to the purpose the place customers are voting as to whether or not they can share hyperlinks to different social networks.I've already been utilizing Twitter much less and Mastodon extra (opens in new tab) - I discover it enjoyable and fascinating, and a far cry from how I have been studying my Twitter feed, even earlier than Musk took over. In the event you're considering of transferring to an alternate social media platform, we have some nice selections so that you can think about.The results of the ballot will almost definitely do nothing - silence could make extra of an influence than a tweet thread, and Musk is aware of it.As an alternative, we advocate you stay up for the vacation break and spend it with household and pals, watching dangerous motion pictures and consuming every kind of chocolate; not poring over this billionaire's newest social media antics. #Twitter #customers #vote #Elon #Musk #step #weird #twist