#this is mostly for my own reference and not intended to be definitive

[dilf-docs]

It Always Leads To You

dbf!joel miller x younger fem!reader

summary: it's been a year; now you're back. how can joel be so sure of those old summer feelings in your eyes when there's a new hand holding yours?

warnings: 18+ (minors dni), age gap, toxic relationship, cheating and infidelity themes, mutual pinning, kinda dark!joel, smut, p. in v., pussy pronouns, oral (f. receiving), fingering, manhandling, lowkey forced creampie, ANGST, the taylor swift evermore (2020) references go wild, happy ending cause y'all weak asses voted for it and i love to keep my citizens happy!

word count: 5,199 words

side note: my joel miller era is alive and breathing after this tlou re-watch i'm doing my brother swears it's for him but it's mostly me and my fic/womanly reasons, yes we love gaslight girlkeep girlbossing in here gotta say, finding inspiration for this amidst my wattpad duties and christmas movie marathon was harder than i thought lol. was it worth the wait? please like, comment and reblog to let me know! it's based on this request (they're still open btw!)

part: I / II

Holidays linger like bad perfume.

Your eyes wander through the streets: the roads you've got to call home, the ones where you grew up. They're familiar, but so foreign, it's hard to believe they're the same ones where you scrapped your knees at ten and kissed Joel just last winter. It's as if both timelines, your life, feels more like two separate lives, miles apart.

"Hey, you okay?" tender, from the driver's seat; you're still getting used to the soft.

There's a reassuring smile your way, his hand finding yours to give it a squeeze. You notice his palm is the same size as yours. It fits perfectly, but there's a ghost of what it feels like to have it all wrapped up, looming over your itchy palm like all the yearning's a joke.

You nod. "Just tired. That's all"

He sighs. "If I wanted you to lie to me, I would've just asked"

"I'm not lying" you defend yourself as his pickup truck parks on the sidewalk.

He makes a funny face, and you laugh.

"I'm serious, Nick" your lips purse, a thing you do when you lie, yet he still hadn't noticed, like Joel. "Don't worry"

He doesn't look that convinced, so you take off your seat belt and grab his hand.

"C'mon. Mom and dad must be waiting for us"

"Hey" Nick calls you out.

"Yeah?"

"Who lives there?" and he's pointing behind you.

It's his. Joel's house.

"A friend of my dad's" you answer, dryly.

It was last december when you stood there in his porch, begging. It feels like time has stopped ever since, and you're still right where he left you.

"So will he be here?" Nick asks. "You know, since he knows your dad"

"Don't think so" you shrug, "he's got better things to do anyway. Bitter old man" comes out, with more venom than intended.

"Oh! Alright, sorry for asking"

You come back to your senses, realizing you've shared more than you should.

"No, I'm sorry. It's not that important; let's just go inside"

Your mom and dad greet you as soon as you cross the door. Last year, you'd basically fled away before New Year's, with a poor excuse and a broken heart. They both greet you as if nothing happened, although you're sure they remember your tear streamed face coming back from Joel's house, where it all ended.

As your mom corners Nick with kisses and embarrassing questions, your dad whispers to you:

"Joel asked what happened" you quirk and eyebrow, "wanted to know why you left"

"Eh, it's not important" you try to dismiss. "Definitely not as important for a guy like Joel to know"

"What is that supposed to mean?" your dad inquires. You often wonder if they knew.

"Nothing" you laugh nervously. "Listen, why don't you go and meet Nick, yeah? Did you know he likes fishing too?"

The distraction works with your dad; the same can't be said about you.

There's conversation flowing, but through the snow covered window, your eyes keep glancing back to his own. The view is dark, and you ponder if he's fled as well, the town plagued with memories too painful to reminisce.

You can still feel his hands roaming your body, the lust filled gaze that hid warmth. Every time he touches you, you have to remind you he isn't there: that the lips that kiss you, don't taste like his, that the hands that hold you, aren't big as his, and that the face that looks at you like they'll never choose another, is one you haven't learned to love yet.

Joel's memory cuts like thorns: they sink their teeth into your heart, that bleeds with that blood-colored sadness you're all too familiar with. He's poisoned you. But-- isn't it his love also the antidote for this disease he's gave you?

You abruptly stand up, plate half eaten.

"I-I need some air"

It's cold outside, but you don't care. All you want to do is sit on the porch, and drop some tears, something you can do inside too, but the fear of your muffled cries being able to be heard stops you.

You walk towards the stairs, to sit there like you do on summer days, yet there's now a difference: the snow. So you end up slipping, falling with your butt on the floor.

You yelp, embarrased although no one can see you.

"Need help?"

That you're wrong, apparently.

You don't even need to raise your view to know who that voice belongs to: you know it like a record, spinning in circles on your head.

He offers his strong hand your way, and although the cold wind hits your face, you're back to spring on the cabin: wet feet, bright sun and beating heart.

"I can get up myself" you reject his help, pushing the hand out. You keep avoiding his gaze, so you don't see how he's reacted, yet you hope he feels bad about it.

You walk up to the front door, and it takes you a while to realize he hasn't left yet. On top of that, it seems like he's following you. Just what you needed.

"What are you doing here?" you question, but your tone sounds like you're offended.

"Your folks invited me over" Joel answers, "Says they got a special guest"

"Yeah" this time, you do look back, finding him to be much closer than you thought he'd be. Yet you stand tall, defiant even. "It's my boyfriend"

You savour the way his expression falters, before the stoic façade takes over again.

"Boyfriend?" Joel scoffs, as if you just told the funniest joke ever.

"Is that supposed to be funny?" you bite back. "What? Think a pretty girl can't get a new man?"

"Never said I'd doubt'it" he clicks his tongue. "Y'a could get any man you'd want, sugar"

Ironically, the only man you want stands before you.

"Right" you chuckle dryly, "I think it's kind of funny of you to say that"

Joel's eyes bore into yours, a clash of emotions circling in his chocolate orbs.

"Y/n-"

"Don't" you stop him. Then sigh, defeated. "Let's just go inside"

As soon as you both arrive on the dinning room, your parents both greet Joel. Then, they introduce him to their guest, just as promised.

"Joel, this is Nick, y/n's boyfriend" your father speaks. "Nick, this is Joel, a dear old friend of mine"

Nick, as the gentleman he is, offers his hand. Joel accepts, but you can see the barely desguised displease behind his eyes.

"Wow, strong grip" Nick comments before joking, "you can let go now, I'm not going anywhere"

The hidden meaning of his words, whether intentional or not, hit Joel in the face. It's obvious by the way he backtracks, letting go of Nick's hand.

As you sit again, Nick leans to your side and whispers.

"Is this the guy who lives in the house across the street?" you nod. "Thought you'd said he had better plans. But, see? I told you: no plan's more important than coming to your house"

He's always making jokes, trying to make you smile, but it's done the opposite now. The food has gone cold long ago, yet you cut through the meat with a violence so palpable, even your mom tells you to slow down.

The nerve of Joel, showing up to your house like it's nothing, talking to you like he's unaware of his spell on you, acting like Nick is some sort of competition when he pulled out of the race himself a winter ago.

"So, Nick. How did you two meet?" your mom adresses him, eager to know details.

"It was at a party, actually, through mutual friends. Not a very spectacular story, that I know. What's funny is, she asked me what hour it was. And what did I say?"

"He didn't answer my question. Instead, he said: For you, I'm available any hour" you answer.

Your parents laugh, but Joel remains quiet. You wonder what he's thinking.

"You know" looking at Nick while cutting the steamed vegetables a little too agressive, "y/n actually hates parties"

"Joel" you warn through gritted teeth.

"Really? I didn't know that!" Nick seems so genuine, Joel can't help but hate him. He looks at you, concerned "You didn't tell me"

You can't believe he would rat you out like that. The appropiate word isn't hate, and you don't know how to describe it, but parties aren't really your environment; if you can, you'd choose to be anywhere else.

He'll pay for that.

"Joel" you seethe, an ugly smile painted in your features, "did you know Nick knows how to fish?"

It's a direct jab at him. He feels stupid for letting you get to him. The inferiority complex towards some random guy he just met, years younger, is actually laughable.

"I like-" Nick wants to add on that.

"Well" Joel interrupts, looking at you. "You never taught me like ya' were s'pposed to"

"You never cared to learn" you reply, acidic.

He sips his drink, trying to hide the smirk that's formed on his lips. You can't shut up, and he loves you've stayed the same.

"That means I've got some classes to take" Joel leans back on his chair, relaxed like he's won this round. "Just tell me when"

The tension cuts like the storm that's just formed outside.

"You should stay over, Joel" your dad offers when he takes a peak at the climate, "it's too dangerous outside"

Joel seems indestructible, like not even a snow blizzard could pierce through the rough old man. But he agrees, much to your dismay.

It's probably midnight already, and all you've done is toss around the bed. Nick peacefully snores next to you, and you envy how easily he falls asleep. You've always find it hard to sleep, the nighttime plagued with too many loud thoughts that fill the silence.

You get up carefully, heading downstairs for some water. You sip with tranquility when a noise jolts you from your sit.

The wooden floor creaks, making you aware you're not alone anymore.

"Can't sleep?"

You don't answer, seeing his sturdy figure emerge from the shadows until the dim moonlight shines over his aging features. Silence settles in. Outside, the wind howls, bumping against the windows with violence, like your heart does now against your chest.

"Not much of a talker, are you?"

"There's nothing to talk" cuts your response through the thick tension, the air suddenly suffocating.

You take another sip, but the tremble of your hand doesn't go unnoticed by Miller.

"Right" Joel sits next to you, on the kitchen island. "Won't even look at me, sugar? You've got eyes" his voice drops, "use 'em"

"What are you doing, Joel?" you ask looking at him, tears threatening to spill, making your bright eyes shimmer with pain.

He gets up abruptly, like he's woken up from a trance. He's seen his own pain on your eyes, and he hates it.

"Joel?" you ask again, demanding but softly.

He can't answer. Instead, he leaves.

"Goodnight, y/n" voice raw, many emotions boiling, hidden on the inside. It hurts.

If you hadn't changed, Joel too stayed the same.

A goddamn coward.

Two days have passed since, and now it's Christmas Eve.

You kneel, putting the presents under the tree. Normally, your parents would have much more people around for the holidays, but thanks to the storm, it's just them, Nick, Joel and you.

"I'm gonna miss Mrs. Stone's cookies" you pout, "I wish she could be here"

"It's a big loss for tonight" your dad sighs. "Next time, yeah? Christmas will come again faster than you think"

You nod, still absent as he walks away.

"Hey" Joel pops up behind, seemingly from nowhere.

"Hey" you reply, voice laced with tiredness just at the sight of him. How will you manage to survive until New Year's? You have no idea, the task harder if he's staying in the same house as you are.

"Put this in there, will ya'?"

He hands you a box, neatly wrapped up. What stands out the most is the silver bow on top. Your stomach drops: it's your favorite color.

"Y-yeah" you stammer. When the present falls in your hands, you notice it looks like Joel did it himself.

"Didn't know you were capable of nice things" you whisper. There's no anger in your voice, only loss.

"I'm trying" is what he says, before leaving you alone. Until then, you realize he had been touching you, the skin where his hand was on your shoulder burning.

Dinner goes by swiftly, conversation flowing easily courtesy of Nick and your father, who both have in common the love for talking. It may be your brain messing with you, but his eyes never leave you, fixated on your every move, savoring when your lips open and take a bite; when you lick them afterwards, salt in your mouth he'd love to take off in a movement of his tongue. The ghost of your lips haunts him, cruelly playing with his yearning now that he's got you across the table. It's a few centimeters, really, but it feels like you're miles away: and it's his fault. You're no longer his, and he's reminded of it every time your boyfriend kisses what he once had.

Now it's time to open the presents, and you excitedly raise your hand to go first.

"Alright, sweetheart. You know I can't deny you anything" your father beams, "go ahead. Choose any present you'd like to open first"

Joel's eyes are on you, and you know he's desperately waiting for you to open his first. Maybe partly in courage, maybe partly in fear, but you choose Nick's first: something safe to start with.

"That's mine!" he chirps, and Joel mockingly imitates his kid-like joy under his breath.

You unwrap the present, finding a small box inside.

"Please, don't be another box" you joke, and he laughs.

"You think that low of me? Please"

You keep unwrapping and find a bag. The bag has a small tag that reads: Gotcha.

"Nick! God, you're so corny" you tease as you open the bag. Inside, there's a velvet box, and by the looks of it, you can tell it's jewelry. You gasp, pulling out a silver charm tied to a silver thin chain: it's a marlin fish. "Nick..."

"I know. Marlin isn't your favorite fish, but that's all I could find" you get up, wrapping him on a tight hug. Aware you've got an audience, he leans and whispers "I knew fishing was special to you, because of your dad and childhood. Maybe now" he takes it from your hands, carefully putting it around your neck, "it can also be our special thing"

Joel sees the scene unfold in front of him, his grip tight on the cloth of his jeans until it's white. His jaw clenches at the affection display; all he sees is red.

"What about that one?" your mom points out Joel's present. A pit of nerves forms in your stomach. "I don't remember seeing it there"

Before you can grab it, your dad moves faster, examining the box on his hands.

"It's Joel's" he makes a pause, "for y/n"

You pretend to be shocked, and you can tell Nick tenses at your side.

"You didn't tell me you were close"

"Used to" you correct quickly, despite the knot on your throat. "Not anymore"

"He still got you a present, though"

You don't get to answer because your dad leaves the box on your lap.

"Open it" it's soft but feels threathing for some reason, "I'm curious"

Joel's resting hands tremble as much as yours while you open the present. You reveal the simple white box under the wrap, opening it up.

Your voice comes out shaky as you call his name. And he can see it: the muffled laughters on the shed, the warmth of the cabin's fire, the fogged up windows of his car, the bruises on your tits and that voice, so vulnerable, he can see you on his porch, saying those three words that terrified him so much, his solution was breaking your heart.

"What is it?" your dad asks.

"It's a scarf" the fabric tickles your fingers that wander through the loose strands.

You remember it all too well.

"Oh, it's vintage!" your mom comments when she sees the worn-out aspect.

But just as your affair with Joel, you keep the secret of it's real owner.

"It's perfect" you mutter, remembering better times: ones where he'd wrap the scarf colored as the leaves on the ground around your neck, covering bruises he'd just made while you joked you'd steal it, and Joel would say he'd just let you, that it looked better on you anyway.

You've forgotten the good, so used to thinking of Joel at your worst, like a punishment to endure and sink your shipwreck even deeper. You felt lost, replaying memories that seemed stuck on a loop. Since last december, all you've known is pain; creeping up through the cracks in your fleeting happiness, one you've tried to find to no avail. One day, past the curses and cries, maybe there'll be happiness. But as for now, that day seems terribly far.

As he sees your teary gaze, Joel often wonders were it went wrong. When did hurt was all you had for him in that gaze of yours he can't bare to look that long, not before he's reliving all those seasons by your side, replaying his footsteps on the snow, grass, water and fallen leaves, trying to find the one where it all went wrong. The torture he now wears like a second skin, his agony painted words addressed to the fire of a house that feels so empty and alone.

"We should continue" your dad speaks over the silence, "there are still many presents left"

The night moves slowly, and the scarf you've chosen to wear is now suffocating around your neck. But you can't take it off. This is the closest you've been to Joel on a year; it still smells like him. As the presents run out, you excuse yourself early to bed, only to wake up again in the middle of the night. You want to pee, so you exit your room and walk to the bathroom, your bare feet against the cold wood sending shivers down your spine that only seem to augment when you walk past his door, next to the bathroom. After being done, you splash some water on your face, as if that would make some sense get to you.

"What are you doing?" you ask yourself in the mirror. Your tired reflection stares back at you, in silence.

You open the door, ready to go back to bed when a hand covers your mouth and shoves you inside.

"Don't scream" your cries go muffled against his hand, the calloused digits pressing against your soft skin, "wanna wake 'em up?"

You shake your head, so he lets your mouth free.

"Joel" you call out, but he's facing the door, his back all you see. No sound can be heard, aside from his uneven breaths.

"I'm sorry" he says, and then you hear the small click of the door's lock.

"What the hell?"

This time, he faces you, but his movements are so quick you don't register his lips on yours until it's too late. He kisses you like a starved man who hasn't had a meal in years, eating you out while your body acts up on it's own, the urgency embarrasing even.

"No" you pull back. Your mind screams in guilt at how much you want this, and that's all you can hear aside from his ragged breaths.

"No?"

"It isn't fair"

"To lover boy out there?" he teases, "I know he ain't treating you right, or ya' wouldn't look me the way ya' do"

"Don't, Joel" your tone is icy, "Nick treats me better than you ever could"

He laughs, darkly. "You know I ain't meant that" he corners you against the sink, the material cold against your bare legs; you don't sleep with nothing but an oversized t-shirt, despite the weather.

"Riddle me this, sugar: if he treats you so well, why are you so fucking wet?"

Your heart beats so fast you fear you'll die. He gets closer, his hot breathe prickling against your ear.

"It takes a man to please a woman" he tucks a loose strand behind your ear, "and I ain't leaving my baby displeased"

His fingers pull down the panties until your clit is exposed.

"Look at 'er" he traces a teasing finger over the puffy skin, coated on your slick "missed me, didn't she? Gonna treat 'er so good, she won't ever feel lonely again"

He softly kisses your neck, the trepidation and regret tying your stomach in knots.

Joel teases your needy core with his finger.

"Tell you somethin', sugar" Joel finds it hard to hide his adoration, "I missed 'er too"

He stares into your eyes while pushing two rough fingers inside your cunt. You bite your lip, holding back your moans.

"Need summ help?" he kisses you roughly, smirking when he feels your shaky breath against his lips. He pushes them in and out faster, making your walls squeeze tightly around his fingers.

"Did he ever have you comin' this fast? I'ont think so" he whispers against your neck. You whisper his name through labored breaths, making a smug smile adorn his features. "Good girl"

He proceeds to kneel down, despite the creak of his bones. You see him leave a trail of kisses down your thighs, your legs opening wider in response. His tongue gives rapid flickers against your sensitive bud, aware of the lack of time. He slurps the pulsing cunt, his head moving back and forth while he sucks, coating his moustache on your juices. Joel goes back to the quick movements, tongue knowing your spots and twisting fingers as aid, causing your back to arch.

"Fuck" you curse as you come, gripping the sink a bit too tight.

Joel then pulls away and places his fingers coated in your arousal in his mouth and licks them. He sees the obscene display in the fogged mirror, satisfied.

"Goodnight, sugar" Joel bids goodbye like it's nothing, kissing your lips that taste like you. "Still as sweet as ever"

It's New Year's Eve.

"You're leaving?" you sound so sad, Joel can't help but scoff. In the end, he'd stayed long after the storm had passed, your father arguing holidays weren't meant to be spent alone. So he stayed.

And now, Nick is leaving.

"I'm sorry" he apologizes for the millionth time, "but granny is sick. I don't know if she'll make it another year, so say the doctors. I would love to stay, really, but I have to be with her"

You understand, having lost your grandad years ago. But that doesn't mean you're okay with it: Nick leaving means a clear path for Joel, who didn't stop with him sleeping next room, and certainly won't now, despite not having interacted with you since he ate you out on the bathroom.

He pulls you into a long hug and a kiss that doesn't feel the same anymore. "Will you be okay?"

"Yeah" you nod, "I'll miss you though"

"Well, I'll be all yours when you get back"

You smile but it doesn't reach your eyes.

"See you, y/n. I love you"

Your lips purse after you utter those three words back.

Later at night, the house is filled with guests. The lively environment is restored, and you feel less confined to Joel's claws, so many faces to speak and distract yourself with, compared to Christmas and the past couple of days. You clutch the marlin charm tightly, mind busy wandering to places it shouldn't. Joel stares at you from across the room, eyes trained on you as he sips his drink calmly, like he's won; you don't know why he's keeping score if he already knows it. You wander off to the kitchen, and Joel follows you.

"You have to stop" you speak as soon as he enters, aware he would follow you.

"I ain't do shit"

You turn around, facing him. "Bullshit, Joel"

"Tell me, what'd I do?" he comes closer, and despite your erratic heart and fear, you stay still; challenging.

"You did this, Joel" his expression falters for a second, the weight of last december's crimes dawning on him. "Don't try to make me feel guilty"

"I ain't. That wasn't your fault" he sighs, breath dragging long like a cigarrette. "But this" he motions with his hands the reduced distance, "this it is"

Your breath hitches.

"We can't keep doing this, Joel. Nick doesn't deserve it"

He pins you against the counter with force, gripping the skin of your wrists until you're sure you'll get a bruise. Joel's eyes darken at the thought of your frail and soft body under his rough figure and belly, his strength and your weakness making the job of putting you under his will, so much easier.

"Don't say his name" he whispers, his breath laced with alcohol, "he ain't here anymore. Ain't nothing to stop me now, right, sugar?" Joel purrs as he steps towards you, taking your face in his hands before starting a heated kiss, making you stumble.

This was so wrong, but it felt so right, the missing pieces falling like dominoes.

He was your pain divine: you needed his hurt to bleed and feel alive again. Maybe the red of the blood and the blue of your sadness could paint your darkest grey skies with a happiness you've craved since you lost him.

"Tell me to stop" Joel whispers, tempting like a devil as he kisses down your neck, littering it with hickeys.

"Don't"

Next thing you know, you're excusing yourself upstairs and then Joel goes missing too, both inside of your bedroom.

Your dress was the first thing to go.

"Wear it for me?" you're about to answer, lips pursing, but he cuts you off, "and don't lie, sugar. Don't get too used to the bad girl schtick"

"I only wore this dress so you could take it off"

He kisses you desperately, legs wrapped around his waist while he carries you to bed, and the memories of your first flood you as he drops you down to your back, watching the way you bounce. He has you just like he wanted: moaning his name while he leaves tender kisses on the soft bare flesh.

"Joel-" you gasp. Despite the chatter downstairs and music, you try to remain low as he wraps his lips around your nipples. He then moves to your breasts, covering them with his kisses and hickeys. He hadn't touched a woman ever since you left, the feeling of the rosy innocent skin on his rough teeth making him loose all common sense, the real thing even better than what he would try to conjure when he fucked himself in the bathroom at the memory of you.

He groans when he feels your hands roaming over his back, nails digging on the scarred skin.

"Someone's eager" he teases, seeing your damp underwear. "Is this 'cause of me?" you don't answer, too busy removing the cloth, only for his strong fingers to grab you and stop you. "Don't be shy, answer baby. We got a whole new year, yeah?"

"I need you Joel" you whine, not laughing at the joke "cut the crap"

He pushes you gently back down to the bed. "So needy sugar, want me to help ya'?"

You eagerly nod, making him laugh. But there's no mock, only love behind the sound.

"Will you let this old man take care of ya', pretty baby? Just use your words, and I'll be all y'rs"

"Do it, Joel. Just do it"

You gasp as your folds begin to be prodded open by the fat head of Joel's cock. You curse, feeling him push in just the tip, the sweet burn of your walls welcoming his size making you grab his arms that stand at the sides of your body, caging you in.

His tummy pushes against your stomach as he adjusts himself, his weight sinking your body on the creaking matress.

"'S just the tip, ready for the whole thing?"

You needed him, all of him.

"Yes, Joel. I want you" You say and he pushes in slowly, feeling his cock fill up every empty space that craved for him.

You squeeze your eyes shut as his hips roll back pulling out about halfway before rocking back in. His sloppy thrusts pick up a familiar pace that makes you moan and beg for more, head falling against the sheets as his pace speds up until he's fucking you senseless.

Joel's brain goes blank at the sight of you creaming on his dick and the obscene sounds leaving your pretty mouth. Did he really give this up? He'd definitely go back in time and slap the fuck out of his past self, because there is simply nothing better than having you under him, screaming his name like that's all you can ever say.

"Does he fuck you like this, huh?" Joel angles his hips, resuming his brutal pace. Your body jolts with each snap. "Is he enough for you?"

"Yes" his stomach drops, dark eyes now hesitant, "but he isn't you"

He pushes himself back in, your eyes fluttering shut almost immediately.

"Tell me you'll leave him, y/n. Look me in the eyes and tell me who ya' really belong to"

Your eyes snap open at the possesiveness clashed with jealousy that drips from his sweat-soaked lips.

The confession falls easily, as meant to be. "Yours, Joel. Always was and will be"

He could cum just at the sight of your loving doe eyes.

Downstairs, the countdown begins, but in your room, all you can hear are his soft groans and your pathetic whimpers, and if the people would stop shouting, you could probably hear the squelch of your dripping cunt sucking in his girth with each thrust.

After a few more erratic thrusts, you feel his warm cum fill you up. Joel was always obsessed with how his cum seeped out of you and around his cock. Without thinking, his rough fingers push deep in you, making you yelp as he makes sure he isn't wasting a drop behind.

The countdown ends, and fireworks erupt outside as your head rests on the crook of his sweat covered neck.

"I love ya', sugar" those words you thought you imagined that one time, now real, so goddamn real his voice quivers and eyes get tearful with grief, "'S okay if ya' don't say it. I just wanted you to hear 'em. 'M just tired of wastin' my time"

He wraps your lips with his with tenderness you had only dreamed of. There is still a lot to talk and heal, but this time, his arms hold you like a promise. And you let yourself believe it.

Y/n's New Years' purposes: 1. Break up with Nick 2. Try to explain this seasonal mess to mom and dad 3. At last, try to be happy

cr: divider by @kodaswrld / gif @tomshiddles

[k4is4rion]

Bob dating hcs :O?

Robert “Bob” Reynolds x GN! Reader HCs

Thank you so much for your request! I’d be happy to give you some of my hcs for dating this gorgeous, gorgeous man

⚠️TWs: Bob typical triggers (references to domestic abuse, drug abuse)

NOTE: a lot of this is speculative based on the post credit scene of Thunderbolts*!

wc: 1550

⚠️‼️SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT ‼️⚠️

Bob’s has two favorite love languages, with a very close second place, mostly because he can’t make up his mind about which he enjoys doing for you more. The first one being acts of service, doing small tasks for you whenever he can. On top of doing the dishes for the team, he enjoys folding your laundry, making you snacks (he would make more food but he sincerely doubts his ability to cook well), and making you a warm beverage of your choice. He’s memorized which mug is your favorite, how much milk and sugar you prefer, and he always puts in requests for whoever does the grocery shopping to get the brands you prefer. As soon as you mention needing something or needing something done, he’s on it to the best of his ability unless you tell him specifically not to. He likes feeling useful, especially since he struggles with feeling like he’s not doing enough among the group, but you always reassure him that he is.

His second most favorite love language once your relationship has progressed enough definitely has to be physical touch. He is an inherently very anxious person and he’s found that having physical contact with you can be very grounding for him, especially in moments where he’s feeling particularly down. He’s a huge cuddle bug, enjoying it as frequently as possible without overdoing it- even if he doesn’t believe it’s entirely possible to cuddle too much. As much as he enjoys cuddling, his most favorite form of physical contact comes from laying his head in your lap as you play with his hair. He could lay like that for hours if you let him.

You guessed it, quality time is his third favorite! Although, being cooped up together so frequently, it just sort of comes naturally. Quality time together takes many forms, being with the whole team or just one on one. While with the team, you two often sit together while enjoying a meal, watching a movie, traveling, or whatever else you all find yourselves doing. Sometimes you’ll both just enjoy each other’s presence while doing your own things. The whole team is a bunch of insomniacs (John claims he isn’t and is actually very responsible about his sleeping habits. John is lying.) so you’d expect them all to remain for the duration of the movie night, but they don’t, even if they’re the ones selecting the movie. You two often end up cuddled on the couch watching movies for a long time, having even been discovered curled with each other on the couch the next morning. Also, if you for any reason haven’t seen one of his childhood favorite movies due to whatever given reason, he takes immense joy into introducing them to you. Sometimes he gets embarrassed once he realizes that maybe the movie wasn’t as good as he remembered, but you reassure him you enjoyed yourself anyway.

Your fellow team members tease you both about how you seem to be attached at each other’s hip because of your inseparability, but even with their jokes, they’re very happy for you both. They’re glad to see you both happy. Sometimes you’ll have a small moment of affection within the group that’ll be met with a snide comment from Ava, but you know by now it’s not serious or intended to be hurtful.

Unfortunately because of Bob’s early history with addiction, a lot of his relationships have been less than healthy. He’d do anything to make sure he does right by you. With this, he often seeks romantic advice from the New Avengers, but very rarely does anyone besides Bucky have consistently good advice. Ava asked if he was being serious by asking her of all people, then said he if was, their relationship was doomed. John sometimes gives good advice on surface level things like dates, but after Oliva, he doesn’t quite trust himself to say beyond that. Yelena isn’t really into the whole dating thing, making a similar point to Ava. Though, she does have some small moments or general wisdom she can bestow upon Bob. Alexei is well loved by the whole team but, advice from him is not the most sound. When what he’s saying isn’t complete obscurity it’s likely just bad advice. Oddly enough he’s actually had a couple moments of genuinely fantastic advice, not only for their relationship, but just life in general. He was a very mixed bag. Last but not least, Bucky had fantastic advice. He was a bit of a player back in his day, and even if what he said was old fashioned romance, it still held true. His weak spot was when things were specific to the modern sphere of dating, he’d tap out, saying how he’s got no idea how those things go nowadays- this is when a lot of the “Back in my day” moments happen.

Unfortunately actual dates aren’t very common in the time following his “Void” incident. It was incredibly hard to go out since the New Avengers were made public figures, but to make up for this, he improvises. He sets up nice little dates within the confines of the tower. Some of his personal favorites include personal movie nights with all sorts of snacks, a dinner date on the roof, or two person game nights. (Game nights with the team never go well, someone always ends up in tears [its bob])

When the two of you finally can leave the tower together, frequent ice cream trips are a MUST. He always orders a vanilla milkshake with whipped cream, his favorite- even if it’s a little basic. He’d defend his choice in flavoring by saying it was the default for a reason, and even if it was basic, the way the vanilla would linger on his lips certainly wasn’t a negative.

He hardly ever talks about his past. With his father in childhood and later his addiction to morphine and other various drugs, it’s very rare you get something out of him. Occasionally he’ll casually bring up something from his childhood, acting like it was no big deal when in reality in was sort of disturbing. One day he’d say something like “This is like the time I got into a car accident and almost died” at a very mundane thing, leaving everyone very confused. He would be confused why no one would laugh, then remember what his therapist said; time and place. He has deep rooted shame because of both what he’s done and what he’s been through, and shockingly? This is a source of bonding between you two. He regrets a lot he’s done, you regret what you’ve done, but you both know that those things were able to get you to where you are today, and you couldn’t be more thankful.

Because Bob is associated with the avengers, it’s unanimous that he needs to be able to defend himself without the use of his powers, as it poses too much risk as at the moment. He trains differently with the various members, but training with you is his favorite even before you become a thing. Sometimes his enhancements become obvious when he forgets to hold himself back, but you remind him that what he may be up against won’t be so keen on pulling their punches. On the rare chance you spar you go easy on him, knowing he was inexperienced, but he does shockingly well! You even break a sweat, only realizing this when you’ve successfully pinned him down to the mat. He looks up at you with his big blue eyes and blurts out how pretty you look right now, causing you both to be immensely embarrassing.

Make no mistake, even if he is incredibly sweet and often times nervous, he is still a young man. A traumatized, incredibly handsome young man. He hates being infantilized by any means. He says it reminds him of his times in rehab where the nurses would treat him like a child. As he becomes more conscious of his mental illness, he makes a serious effort to help himself. Infantilizing him makes his effort feel devalued.

After the void incident, he feels incredibly anxious that something like that would happen again, even with the assistance of mandated therapy. Your comfort and words of affirmation are helpful in keeping him grounded and very much appreciated, but they only do so much. You try to compensate but it just ends up wearing you out and when he finds this out, he’s consumed with guilt. He reassures you that while he will always appreciate what you do, but at the end of the day, you aren’t responsible for him. You can only do so much and sometimes a person needs more than that, and that’s never your fault.

On a lighter note, he worships the ground you walk on. Insecure? Not if he can help it. He adores you and makes this very clear as often as he can, even if it’s done while avoiding eye contact. Sometimes when you’re just laying together he’ll pepper you with kisses, quietly murmuring how much he loves you and everything he likes about you. He feels like he’s finally understanding what it means to experience genuine love.

[magiturge]

unfinished ref for pasquale, don't have a desire to finish it but i will talk about some details, some of it can eventually be outdated as i learn / understand more.

one of the biggest things is t he writing of "heaven is .." accompanied by the bunnies on the inside of his coat running. i've mentioned it before somewhere that pasquale is in particular a bunnyfolk, a big bunnyfolk due to his greed in vulcanic heights.

these two details are in relation to the text that shows up when a big bunny in dream game jumps and lands

the text as transcribed from the wiki discusses perenniality.

it's hard to describe, though it's important to me.. so bear with me... mafia have a dialogue saying "we are soldiers, and soldiers don't go to hell". in infinite silver, there's a paper discussing fissure and it's barbarities. while it definitely is referring to fissure and the brutality of their leader wegottman ..

i feel like it can lightly apply to mafia, in the sense that they invade other areas, sick big psycharpaxes on targets with significant debth ( of which the mastery of big psycharpaxes is illegal ), leave bombs that leave long lasting fire in its wake while chiding the person on the other end. its brutal, as they say they have no room for empathy.

move from one target to the next, invade another area in the dreamsphere and leave again, over and over, the same game but slightly different everytime.

their is destruction in their wake even if their presentation can be so goofy.

the "heaven is.." of his belt is finished with the cyclical movement of the bunnies on the innerside of his coat, running and running in a circle, in a cycle around the inside.

( gesturing my hands wildly because i don't know how to explain it ) ..pasquale is a little strange sometimes, in the head at least. he recognizes the remorseless and very greedy behavior he and the rest of mafia exhibit across the dreamsphere with the denial that they could ever go to hell.

he'll believe in a god when it benefits him. even with josafa's influence and silent presence across the dreamsphere, he'll only believe and pray for them in death.

if soldiers don't go to hell, where do they go. hell is empty. heaven is perennial.

-

more straight and direct details are the gradients of his coat and his hair going from dark to lighter from top to bottom. it's intended to reference the bunny pattern he's based on, which are silver marten rabbits!

his fur is mostly a dark color, to a slight blue / teal coloration to reference feral bunnies in game.

pasquale has eyes but they are hidden in the thick crest of fur in his face. it is rare to actually see them since he is usually looking straight ahead or has his fedora tipped at an angle where you may only see the lower half of them.

-

the bunnies of his coat's collar are semi-alive, semi-extensions of his will. they're sort of like pets at the same time, they are in all terms, his.

the bunnies are generally sleeping and are all individually named by pasquale. they can wake up and jump off or exist as their individual named self. they are not bunnyfolk.

in a more feral state that mafioso can be in ( usually in pursuit of a target or just being angered ), the bunnies are no longer visually domesticated bunnies but become wild hares that join in the pursuit of a target. they become noticeably less friendly, losing the round softness they had in their sleep.

-

pasquale owned a big psycharpax as a pet that he lost ownership of in the events of the meat market arrest.

[cheriqube]

Fishsticks

My take on Rafayel's and MC first meeting as kids. Content: Mostly fluffy(?) Kind of angsty if you squint. Not canon compliant! Reader is AFAB, is referred to as 'girl'. No use of Y/N. 5.2K words

-------------------------<º))))><¸.·´¯·.¸¸.·´¯·.¸><((((º>---------------------------

It wouldn’t be long before Rafayel turned into a glorified fish stick. Two, maybe three hours tops? Then the ocean’s last great deity would be nothing more than a shriveled husk, stranded helplessly upon dry land like a dumb, oversized, tragically misplaced whale. No disrespect intended to whales, of course, he mused with a faint smirk, even now unable to resist a sardonic thought.

The young Lemurian’s mind churned as swiftly and chaotically as the muttered curses slipping through his parched lips. Every grain of sand felt viciously sharp, tiny shards of fiberglass embedding themselves deeper into his scales the drier they became, scraping mercilessly into his gills and fins. Definitely not his preferred exit from existence, but admittedly, there was a grim sort of poetry in it.

Pure, twisted artistry. The Last Sea God Abandoned. Rafayel could already picture it vividly: his tragedy immortalized on canvas, paraded shamelessly in some grubby human gallery, patrons sipping champagne while greedily devouring his suffering.

After what felt like two grueling hours of stubborn defiance—twenty minutes in actual, painful reality—he finally allowed himself to collapse in exhausted resignation. But hey, give him some credit; he'd made at least some pathetic inch-by-inch progress toward salvation, hadn't he? This whole melodramatic spectacle was turning into a rather embarrassing performance.

Still, despite the hopeless theatrics, there remained an irritatingly persistent spark inside him. It was a reckless whisper confidently promising he'd make it back to the sea—because he had to. At least, that's the story he desperately clung to, repeating it like a mantra even as doubt stubbornly clawed at his thoughts.

Trapped somewhere between complete despair and detached indifference, Rafayel let his head sink back into the gritty warmth of the sand, his gaze reluctantly drifting upwards toward the glaring sun. It burned like an overexposed photograph, harsh and brutal against his vision. How did humans tolerate such relentless brightness? Beneath the waves, sunlight danced softly, fractured into glittering patterns, gently cascading through the currents in a mesmerizing ballet.

It painted everything in hues of liquid gold and shifting sapphire; a sight infinitely more enchanting than this merciless blaze. He much preferred that tranquil beauty to this cruel, blazing spotlight. Especially now, as he lay helpless beneath it, slowly roasting alive.

For the first time, Rafayel actually paused to take in his surroundings. Up until now, he’d been too consumed with the singular, burning need to get back to the ocean to bother looking around. But now, stranded and marinating in his own bad decisions, the reality set in—this beach was far too close to Linkon, a sprawling human city that hummed with noise and metal and artificial light.

His guardian had warned him, of course. Don’t get too close to the surface. Stay clear of the cities. They’ll ruin you. But did he listen? Naturally not. He was a god, after all. Listening to others felt… beneath him. Why take orders from subordinates when you’re supposed to be the one giving them?

Still, as he lay half-buried in the sand, salty skin cracking under the sun, he couldn’t help but admit, just this once, maybe his judgment hadn’t been so divine after all.

Rubble and discarded remnants of human life choked the shoreline, a grim demonstration of the tsunami’s wrath. Shattered wood, twisted metal, and forgotten plastic clung to the coast like scars, making each step a gamble. The sea churned a venomous gray, seething with fury, and the sand had turned the color of ash. Dark, heavy, solemn.

Rafayel could still feel the weight of the tsunami’s rage, echoing in the waves and soaked into the earth itself. Its sorrow hadn’t just passed through; it had seeped in, stained everything it touched. In a way, he understood it. Sometimes, he felt like that too. Wild and wounded, desperate to be heard.

Jagged rocks jutted from the water like ancient blades, defiant and raw, while scattered boulders created a fractured path that led nowhere but the deep, open sea. It was tragic, chaotic… and yet, there was beauty in its ruin. A haunting kind of beauty. The kind that made you stop and stare, even if it hurt.

With a deep breath, Rafayel finally let his eyes flutter shut, arms stretched wide across the sand like he was offering himself to the sun. Maybe, for the first and last time, he’d get a tan. Or maybe he’d just combust into ash like an overcooked scallop. Honestly? He had no clue. But now seemed like the perfect time to find out.

Just as the edges of sleep began to blur his thoughts, the oppressive heat of the sun suddenly faded. A reprieve? A benevolent cloud, perhaps, drifting in with divine timing, moved by the tragic sight of a young, too-beautiful-to-die sea god wilting under its gaze?

Curious, he cracked open one eye, half-expecting to see a majestic puff of white mercy above him. Instead, he was greeted by a small, wide-eyed human child peering down at him like he was some exotic beachside cryptid. He gasped—you gasped—then thunk!

In a flurry of startled motion, he sat bolt upright and slammed his forehead directly into yours. Both of you recoiled, groaning and clutching your heads in synchronized agony, as if the universe had decided you needed to suffer together.

You let out a dramatic “owwwww” as you stumbled back a few clumsy steps, clutching your forehead like it had been personally betrayed.

Rafayel snickered, wincing as he rubbed the sore spot between his eyes. “What was that for?!”

You blinked at him, still dazed, and jabbed a finger in his direction like a tiny, furious judge. “W–what? You hit me!”

The two of you stood there, frozen in mutual indignation and confusion, both flustered and vaguely starstruck. Rafayel had never seen a human child up close, his only references were the blurry surface images drifting through currents and warnings from his guardians.

And you? You’d certainly never come face-to-face with a mermaid—or, well, whatever he was. A mermaid boy? Mer-kid? Mer–child? You weren’t exactly sure what to call him. Up until about fifteen seconds ago, they were nothing more than bedtime stories and glittery cartoon nonsense.

But here he was. Breathing. Blinking. Possibly sunburnt. And very, very real.

You were the first to break the silence. “Are you… really a mermaid? Or is that, like… a costume or something?” Your gaze drifted down, wide-eyed, to the tail sprawled out behind him—an iridescent masterpiece of blues, greens, and glimmers of violet that shifted with the light like living stained glass.

Rafayel’s expression soured instantly. Offended. Deeply. The kind of offended only a divine being could muster. Being gawked at by a human was bad enough, but to be questioned like some beachside street performer in glitter and spandex? Unforgivable.

“I’m a mer-MAN, actually,” he snapped, his voice sharp with wounded pride. He crossed his arms in an exaggerated huff, the pout on his face somehow both regal and childish. “And no, it’s not a costume. What kind of ridiculous question is that?”

Then, with a theatrical flick of his tail that sent a spray of sand in your direction, he added, “Not that it matters. You need to get out of here. Before I make you leave.” It was a bluff, of course. An empty threat dressed in bravado, tossed out in hopes you’d take the hint and scurry off without getting curious. He wasn’t exactly in the best shape to be intimidating… but he could still pretend.

Not that Rafayel expected much from a human child. Especially not one that had the nerve to poke at him like some beached curiosity. His voice remained cold, edged with disdain. He didn’t trust humans. Didn’t like them. Didn’t want anything to do with their noisy, stinky, chaos-loving ways—

“I think your scales are beautiful.”

The words tumbled from your lips before you could stop them, completely bypassing his scowl and the thinly-veiled threat. You weren’t listening to his attitude… you were looking.

His scales had caught you in a spell. No, he had. You’d never seen anything like him before. He shimmered like the ocean trapped in a prism, a living tidepool of blues and greens, glinting purples and silvers, every movement catching the sun like a whispered secret. He reminded you of the fish you’d stared at through thick aquarium glass, or seen flicker across TV screens and glossy textbook pages.

He was a storm In starlight. A rainbow with teeth. A myth dragged straight out of the sea and dropped into your world.

The sudden shift left you uneasy, a quiet tension blooming in the spaces between heartbeats. Had you said something wrong? Surely, it was just a compliment. Nothing more, nothing less.

Rafayel was utterly disarmed, the bravado he'd worn like armor crumbling in an instant, replaced swiftly by a charmingly flustered vulnerability. Heat surged to his cheeks, blooming into a deep scarlet that stood out vividly against his normally composed demeanor. His mouth fell open slightly, poised to retort with some witty comeback or playful threat, but nothing came forth except a choked silence.

Anxiously, you shifted your weight from one bare foot to the other, relishing the comforting scratch of the warm sand beneath your toes. It was something to ground you amidst the awkwardness of the moment.

“You-you don’t even realize what you're saying,” Rafayel stammered, each word tumbling clumsily over the next as embarrassment overtook him completely. “Where I come from, if someone says they like your scales, it-it means something entirely different. It means that you genuinely... like them!” His voice trailed off into an awkward murmur, thick with confusion yet woven through with threads of cautious curiosity. His eyebrows knitted tightly, reflecting the storm of intrigue and bewilderment swirling within.

“Okay, so maybe I do like you,” you admitted casually, watching carefully for his reaction. “What d’ya have to say about that?”

A mischievous hum escaped your lips as you brought the sleeve of Caleb's oversized sweatshirt thoughtfully up to your chin, the soft fabric comforting and familiar. With exaggerated deliberation, you pretended to consider Rafayel's words, eyes sparkling with playful amusement at his evident discomfort.

The words achieved exactly what you'd intended. Rafayel froze completely, eyes widening in startled disbelief. Truthfully, there was sincerity beneath your playful facade; why shouldn't you like him? Rafayel was charming in an unconventional way, a bit sassy perhaps, but fascinatingly mysterious. Plus, he was literally a mermaid! That alone elevated him beyond ordinary.

Rafayel opened his mouth, then closed it again quickly, abandoning any attempt at speech as if words had suddenly vanished from his reach. His pulse thundered wildly in his chest, each heartbeat resonating loudly enough to drown out the quiet crash of the waves. It felt as if every nerve within him buzzed simultaneously, shaken and uncertain. He couldn't grasp why he was so deeply affected by you… your voice, your laughter, even your playful teasing. Why, despite your obvious humanity, did you feel so strangely familiar?

“You look like you could use some help,” you pointed out brightly, gesturing once again toward his glittering tail, partially submerged in the sandy shore, surrounded by disturbed grains that marked his fruitless attempts at escape. Pointing, it seemed, was rapidly becoming your new favorite pastime.

“No, no, no! Absolutely not—I don’t need your help—” Rafayel protested emphatically, his voice edging on frantic despite the stubborn set of his jaw.

Confidently, you stepped closer, moving gently but determinedly over the sand. Rafayel immediately released a startled, almost desperate yelp, freezing you mid-step. You paused, eyes flicking upward to his face, cautious curiosity mixing with genuine concern at his apparent distress.

“Yes, you do!” you chirped back defiantly, inching toward him without hesitation.

“No!” he insisted, backing away as much as he could in his stranded state. Yet despite the melodrama, Rafayel made no real attempt to repel you. “If you so much as lay a finger on me, I swear I’ll curse you—I know how! I'll cast curses that—”

But whatever wild threat he'd intended evaporated abruptly into the evening air as your warm, determined fingers clasped tightly around his trembling hands. Rafayel instantly fell silent, his eyes glassy and distant, lost somewhere far beyond the moment. It was as though your touch triggered a spell of its own, placing him in a delicate trance.

“I can’t carry you,” you sighed dramatically, bracing your feet against the soft, shifting sand. You tugged at the stubborn mermaid with every ounce of strength your small limbs could muster, gritting your teeth against the effort. “Ugh, you’re so heavy!”

The accusation snapped Rafayel instantly from his reverie, and a scowl replaced the bewildered expression that had softened his features only moments ago.

“Heavy?” he spluttered indignantly, his voice pitched with scandalized outrage. “Did you really just call me heavy? First, I never asked for your help, and now you’re implying I'm big—”

“Well…” you mused mischievously, dropping him suddenly and stepping back to dust off your hands in exaggerated indifference. The mer-child toppled onto the sand with an unceremonious thud, limbs sprawled and hair wild as he landed gracelessly like a sack of potatoes. “You're right, I don’t have to help you. Maybe I'll just say bye.”

“Wait-wait a minute! You're seriously going to abandon me here?!” Rafayel called after you, disbelief crackling sharply in his voice as you purposefully trudged away, your back facing him. Each step was slow, exaggerated, crafted purely for dramatic impact.

Rafayel’s eyes widened comically, panic surging through him as he scrambled upright. The water was so tantalizingly close—just a few agonizing feet away—he could practically feel the gentle lap of the waves beckoning him home.

“Yep,” you drawled lightly, enjoying the theatrics of your exit, until a quiet sniffle reached your ears, stopping you in your tracks. A small pang of guilt squeezed your heart, compelling you to whirl around anxiously.

Your eyes widened in instant remorse as you caught sight of Rafayel, now dramatically collapsed onto the sand, his face buried deep within his hands. His body shook gently, as though he were some tragic royal mourning a lost love on a theater stage. The effect was immediate—you fell entirely into his trap, your resolve shattered.

“Oh—no, no! I-I'm sorry! I was just joking!” You rushed back over, sliding onto your knees beside the crestfallen mer-child, placing a gentle, reassuring hand on his trembling back. Your heart twisted uneasily at the spectacle you'd inadvertently caused.

“You… you really would've left me here to die,” Rafayel whimpered softly, voice dramatically thick, muffled behind his crossed arms. “How cruel can one human be? I'm the last of my kind, you know!”

“I’m really, really sorry, okay? Let’s just… start over.” Your voice softened as you crouched beside him, offering the olive branch with a small, sheepish smile. You told him your name, letting it hang in the air between you like a peace offering.

The sorrowful quiver in his voice stabbed sharply at your chest, twisting into a deep ache. A hot flush rose to your cheeks as guilt churned anxiously in your stomach. You dropped your gaze to your restless hands, twisting nervously against each other in your lap. It was only supposed to be a playful joke, yet somehow, you’d managed to upset him anyway, and that realization was unbearably uncomfortable.

Rafayel stayed quiet for a moment. Then, as if sampling something foreign and sweet, he whispered your name back to you. Slowly, deliberately, rolling it around his mouth like it meant something sacred. The way he said it sent a strange warmth skittering up your neck and into your cheeks, leaving you flustered for reasons you couldn’t quite pin down.

After a pause, he finally lifted his head. His face was suspiciously dry, not a single tear in sight.

“My name is Rafayel,” he declared, trying for regal but landing somewhere between smug and bashful. “From Lemuria.”

He stopped there, deliberately omitting The Last Sea God. No need to add that complication. Humans had a habit of getting grabby when divine titles were involved.

“Rafayel,” you repeated, grinning. “What a pretty name!”

That did it. With an audible groan, he buried his face in his arms again, but not before you caught the flash of crimson coloring his cheeks. Compliments weren’t rare for him—he was objectively, irritatingly beautiful—but when they came from you, they somehow bypassed all his practiced indifference. And he hated that.

“Yeah, thanks,” he muttered into the crook of his elbow. “So… are you gonna help me now?”

With a laugh bubbling from your lips, you reached out and gently took hold of one of his arms, then the other, tugging him carefully toward the waterline. He didn’t resist, just grumbled theatrically under his breath as you resumed the awkward task of dragging a slippery sea god across the sand like a misbehaving seal.

The foamy edge of the tide met your feet with a sharp, icy kiss, and you inhaled through your teeth. The contrast between the sun-warmed sand and the cold embrace of the ocean made you shiver, but you pressed forward, wading deeper until the water licked at your thighs, your legs stinging with each step.

“A little further, please,” Rafayel requested softly, his voice unusually gentle, and since he asked so sweetly, how could you refuse?

“Okay,” you said, glancing down at him with a mixture of triumph and exhaustion. “You should be able to swim from here, right?”

Moving him grew easier as the ocean buoyed his weight, gently lifting him from your aching grasp. Soon, the cool seawater rose to your collarbones, forcing you to balance precariously on the tips of your toes. Caleb was definitely going to murder you for returning his favorite sweatshirt soaked with salt and smelling like seaweed, but you knew his anger would melt into fond annoyance within minutes. It always did.

Finally, Rafayel managed to gracefully slip from your hold, freeing himself effortlessly. He turned to face you, his silvery tail shimmering beneath the gentle afternoon sunlight, the ocean rippling around him like satin.

“Thank you,” he murmured quietly, avoiding your eyes with sudden shyness, his gaze cast downward toward the glittering reflection dancing atop the waves. He reminded you of someone who longed to stare into the sun—captivated yet unable to bear the brilliance.

His voice softened to something vulnerable, almost pleading. “You can’t tell anyone you saw me, okay? Promise?”

Shivering slightly, your teeth chattering uncontrollably, you nodded vigorously. You wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone—not a single soul. Your heart held the secret safely tucked away.

“You…you really should get out of the water,” Rafayel noted with gentle concern, noticing your trembling. “It doesn’t look like it’s good for you.”

“N-no, I’m okay,” you protested, stubbornness coloring your tone. “I want to stay in… just a little longer.” The truth was simpler, quieter: you didn’t want to leave him yet. You craved the strange warmth of his presence, curious about his story, his home, most importantly, about him. You secretly wished you could see him every day, even knowing how impossible such a dream was. Still, you clung tightly to that tiny speck of hope, refusing to let it slip through your fingers. “I… I like swimming. Really.”

The Lemurian giggled at your insistence, the sound light and silvery like wind dancing over water. Then, with surprising tenderness, he lifted his hands and placed them gently on your shoulders. “This might help,” he murmured, almost bashfully.

The ocean around you had stilled, waves brushing gently past your body like silk ribbons, serene and infinitely tender. The waters felt alive, quietly rejoicing at Rafayel’s safe return home. And somewhere deep within, hidden beneath layers of conscious thought, you understood their gratitude, their happiness. It was a quiet celebration whispered in currents and tides.

From his palms radiated a soft, pulsing warmth that seeped deep into your skin, chasing away the tremble in your bones. The cold retreated like a shadow at sunrise, leaving behind a glowing calm that settled in your chest. For a heartbeat, you questioned everything. Was this real? Were you actually in the ocean, being magically warmed by a mythical sea boy with glowy hands? If it wasn’t real, you didn’t want to wake up.

He didn’t move his hands, and part of you was certain that if he let go, the chill would come crashing back in full force—icy, bitter, and deeply unwelcome.

You floated together in silence, not speaking, not quite looking at each other, but acutely aware. The kind of silence that felt full instead of empty. Like something important was being said without words.

Then Rafayel finally broke the stillness, his voice barely louder than the whisper of the sea. “Did you mean it?”

You glanced up, surprised by the tremble in his tone. His eyes met yours—vibrant violet-blues that shimmered with something distant, almost ancient. There was a strange familiarity in them, like he was seeing something in you that even you hadn’t yet discovered. His expression was gentle, searching. A softness poured from him that felt vital, but strange, like a melody you didn’t know the lyrics to.

“Mean what?” you asked, your voice quieter now too, respectful of the moment.

“That you liked me,” he said again, more deliberately this time, and his face flushed pink, rosy with nervous hope. He looked like he needed the answer—not just wanted it, but needed it. Even if your version of liking wasn’t quite the fairytale romance he might’ve been imagining.

“Of course I did,” you replied, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Rafayel’s breath caught in his throat. He nearly pulled away, hands twitching upward as if he might bury them in his hair in disbelief, but stopped himself just in time. His face suddenly shifted, a serious look overtaking his features—well, as serious as a sea child with a flushed face and sparkly eyes could manage.

Your eyes went cartoonishly wide the moment the words left his mouth, like someone had just proposed marriage in the middle of a math test. Then came the laughter: bright, genuine, and unstoppable. You laughed so hard your sides ached, until you caught the way Rafayel’s expression shifted from confident to confused, and then to downright devastated.

“We should get married,” he said matter-of-factly, as if it were the natural next step.

“Wait—wait, you’re for real?” you gasped, stifling your giggles as guilt crept in. “I’m only nine! And you don’t look much older than me either!”

He blinked, long and slow, as though your words were puzzling and distant, as though the concept of age was a tiny detail he'd forgotten to care about. “Well... you could just come back with me to Lemuria,” he said earnestly, like he was solving a simple puzzle. “We’ll get married in fifty years. Is that better?”

Clearly, Rafayel had no idea how human lifespans worked, or how short they were in comparison to… whatever he was.

You giggled again, but this time it was softer, laced with warmth, and you offered an immediate apology, sensing how tightly wound he’d suddenly become. “I can’t just leave, Rafayel. I’ve got someone really important to me here. I can’t abandon him. Caleb needs me.”

You saw it then—the way his face faltered, the way his grip on your shoulders tightened ever so slightly. Maybe wasn’t the word he wanted to hear.

“But maybe…” you added gently, “maybe one day I’ll run away with you.”

Maybe?

Maybe?

The word echoed in Rafayel’s mind like a crack through crystal. His lips formed a pout, but there was a storm behind his eyes. Who was this mysterious someone you couldn't leave behind? What kind of human could possibly be more important than the thread of fate Rafayel felt between the two of you? The thought gnawed at him—uninvited, irrational, and too loud to ignore.

“Next year,” Rafayel said, his voice steady with conviction, “let’s meet on this same day, at the same time. And every year after that… until you’re ready to marry me. I’ll chase you until I find you again if you don’t return to me.”

It wasn’t fair, he told himself. You were just a human girl, someone he’d only just met. And yet, deep in the marrow of his being, in the secret place where memory blurs into myth, Rafayel was certain he knew you. Not in this life, perhaps, but in another. A thousand tides ago. A thousand names ago. He knew you, and he had already chosen you. And you him.

He said it like a vow, carved into the ocean air, a promise wrapped in tides and time. Beneath his calm exterior, though, was an ache too vast for his small frame to carry. So much hurt pressed against his heart, fractured and layered like coral reef. But none of that mattered. Not now. Not when he looked at you and saw something he couldn’t explain—something that felt right. Even if it wasn’t today, or tomorrow, or ten years from now… he would wait. As long as it took.

And now it was your turn to blush. Your face lit up like the sun had turned its gaze directly on you. How could someone you’d only known for thirty minutes speak with such unwavering devotion? It was terrifying. And beautiful. And weirdly… comforting.

Without thinking, your hands floated up to his cheeks, cupping them with the gentlest reverence, like he was something fragile and rare. The gesture felt achingly familiar, like you’d done it a thousand times in a hundred forgotten lifetimes. Rafayel didn’t flinch. He didn’t move. He simply leaned into your touch, eyes flickering with quiet awe.

“I promise,” you whispered. “But—”

Your voice faltered the moment your name rang out over the waves, sharp and urgent. You whipped your head toward the sound, panic rising like a wave inside you. Caleb.

You weren’t supposed to be out here. Not this far. Not alone.

The sun was beginning to sink below the horizon, its final light spilling across the sea in ribbons of gold and rose. It caught in Rafayel’s eyes, turning them into twin galaxies—deep, endless, impossible to look away from.

He was glowing. Or maybe the sea was. Or maybe it was something else entirely.

Your name came again, closer this time, slicing through the magic like a knife.

You had to go.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stay longer.” Your voice trembled with regret, fragile as seafoam. It wasn’t your fault—none of this was your fault—and yet the apology hung heavy in the air, like a promise you wished you didn’t have to make.

Now.

“Next year, okay?” you added softly. “Same day. Same time. And every year after that.”

You tried to smile, but it barely reached your eyes. It was a ghost of joy, hollowed out by the ache in your chest. You didn’t want to leave any more than Rafayel wanted to let you go. His hands stayed firmly planted on your shoulders, as if by sheer will alone, he could keep you anchored there forever. The sea murmured around you, reluctant to give you up.

Only when you quietly whispered his name did his grip falter. His fingers slid from your shoulders like seaweed slipping through the tide, falling back to his sides with quiet defeat.

“I’ll see you again,” you muttered, the words catching in your throat like sand in the wind.

You both lifted a hand in parting. Then, with one last look, you turned and began waddling out of the water, the hem of your soaked clothes heavy and dragging. Rafayel stayed where he was, motionless, then ducked behind a jagged rock, the coral-slick surface cool against his skin. He needed to see it. Needed to see who was taking you from him this time?

A boy. Slightly older than Rafayel, but not by much. Dark hair, sharp gaze, and wearing a thin white patient’s gown and matching sweats that fluttered in the salty breeze.

Then he noticed you were wearing the same thing—only yours was half-hidden beneath a dark cotton sweatshirt. Your feet were bare, and bandages wrapped your right hand and neck like the sea had tried to take pieces of you with it. A pang of unease twisted in Rafayel’s chest.

Is this… what all humans wear? he wondered. Are you sick? Hurt? Trapped?

He didn’t know. And that frightened him more than anything.

“You’re lucky I found you before they did,” the boy said abruptly, grabbing your soaked arm and pulling you against him protectively. “What were you thinking, coming all the way out here?”

Caleb. Rafayel heard the name in your voice earlier, soaked in affection.

“I’m sorry… I just wanted to swim…” you murmured, voice barely more than a ripple in the wind. You looked down at your feet as you walked, salt still clinging to your skin, hair dripping a steady rhythm onto the ground. You truly sounded ashamed, like a child who’d broken something delicate. But you hadn’t said a word about Rafayel. You’d kept your promise.

Wherever it was you stayed, wherever you were being taken back to, it needed you to return. Urgently.

The older boy sighed, not with irritation, but with weariness softened by care. “Don’t apologize,” he said gently. “You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? I just need to make sure you’re safe.”

His voice trailed off as the two of you disappeared down the beach, toward the dock bathed in the last golden blush of sunset. Maybe back to the city. Maybe to somewhere secret, tucked away from the world.

For a long time, Rafayel didn’t move. The sea lapped at his tail, beckoning him home, but he stayed crouched behind the stone, eyes fixed on the path you’d vanished down. Only when the beach was swallowed by dusk did he finally slip beneath the waves and return to the deep blue—where a very angry guardian awaited.

He didn’t care.

He didn’t know who that boy was. He didn’t know where they were keeping you, or why you wore such strange clothing. But he would find out. He had to. Because you were living in his head now, like a melody half-remembered, a face from a dream. He couldn’t stop thinking about you—about the bizarre certainty that he’d known you before, long before this life.

He would tell you next time. He would tell you everything.

About Lemuria, about the sea that sings his name. About how he’s a god—the last sea god. About all the lifetimes you’d met before. About how, century after century, you always found each other, and always fell in love.

But that’s how a child thinks. That stories are spells. That if he tells you, really tells you, you’ll remember too. That your eyes will light up and your arms will open, and you’ll come back to him forever.

Because you promised.

Next year.

Same day. Same time.

And every year after that.

[the-lovely-lady-luck]

okay i finally did it, i caved and i wrote 3k words about a character with less than 60 lines of dialog in a ~30 hour game. if you haven't played clair obscur: expedition 33 yet i lightly suggest that you do bc the game is absolutely an all-timer. also don't read this because it spoils just about every major plot point in the entire game. if you've played feel free to read on.

Fuck. Clea Dessendre. I don't even know where to start to be honest. What a wildly compelling character. Eldest daughter syndrome. Needs to be doing something productive-ass cunt. This is sort of just my insane ramblings about her (mostly off the cuff while at work or packing for my trip), so if there are any inconsistencies it’s likely due to that but I fully intend to do a deep dive looking into all the mentions of Clea sometime soon.

I guess the central thing that compels me is the thing that most people get wrong about her in the first place: her grief. admittedly we have very little to work on from her directly, but I would argue that it's intentional. We have a couple of core things about her introduced through our first and only real interaction with her.

- She's a painter (obviously)

- She is mean to Maelle, and it's highly insinuated to be related to blaming her for Verso's death. She “both loves and hates him for that”, hating that he sacrificed himself for a sibling she doesn’t love like she loves him and yet loving him for it because it's why she loved him in the first place — that he was the kind of person who would sacrifice himself like that.

- She is off waging war against the Writers. She is outwardly dismissive of the rest of the family and the way they are handling their grief, but at the same time says she will wage this war on her own if need be.

I’ve seen a lot of jokes about how she's the only one in the family not caught up in grief, how she's off fighting in the plot of an entirely different game where she is the protagonist, etc. And while that's funny (and I want to play the clea game please please please) I think putting her off in a corner where she gets to lore dump and then not matter is a missed opportunity to think about her place in all of this. 

The stages of grief tend to be overused and often misunderstood (people putting too much significance in, say, the order of them or the insistence on everyone existing in every stage in the process), but I like the framework of different manifestations of grief and the names are easy to understand so I am going to use them as points of reference here (though notably i am reaching different definitions and conclusions for these terms than the “stages of grief”). My original thoughts on the topic were long and rambly so I'm paraphrasing my thoughts.

Denial and Bargaining are predominantly shown through the parents of the family, Aline and Renoir. Denial is Aline’s territory, with many characters remarking about her desire to escape into the fantasy of the canvas to avoid the harsh reality. She builds upon Verso’s established world and creates a fake version of her family so that she can play out what “should” have been. Bargaining, in a less traditional sense, is Renoir’s domain. He insists on his method of grieving over all others. And while he has a perspective many see as more healthy than Aline’s, his desire to force his family all under one roof to heal together is violent and ends up dooming an entire world just to satisfy his belief. His bargain is that if we just all stopped what we were doing and stood together for a moment and process in the *right way* then it won’t hurt.

Depression and Acceptance are the axis on which Alicia and Painted Verso reside. We don’t see much of Alicia in-game (I am counting Alicia, Maelle, and Maell-icia as different people in this context, since they largely have different experiences and feelings) but during her flashback we see she isn’t doing much in the mansion, and she takes Clea’s insults and believes them to be true. She blames herself for Verso’s death, as well as the conflict her parents are locked into. We don’t know enough about the situation with the fire to make any kind of commentary on how true that is but it clearly weighs on her as she worries over her family and repeatedly seeks some way to help. She initially talks about her injuries and claims her desire to go into the canvas is more to help her family, but later on, as Maell-icia, she comments to Renoir of “how little of [her] life remains” outside the canvas, revealing a darker insight to her interiority. 

Painted Verso is one of the few characters to strongly reside in multiple modes as a character of both Depression and Acceptance. Painted Verso is someone I think I could go on another rant about but my abbreviated take is that Painted Verso is a character who is being denied the stage of acceptance by everyone around him. By the time we reach him he has known the truth and wanted out of his immortality for some time. His life has gone too long, he has watched his loved ones die or be killed off, only to learn to love again and then see them die and killed off again in a never ending cycle. While the family of his dead namesake fights over his memory in their attempt to reckon with grief, Painted Verso is forced to live through cycles of grief over and over and over again (while these people can’t even get through a single one). His acceptance goes beyond accepting grief and it has basically broken him. He wants an end to the pain for him and for everyone in the canvas that dies because of his family (on his behalf), even if that means wiping it all away. With Verso’s memories and feelings and characteristics he is the most in-tune to what Verso would want for his canvas (rivaled only by the sliver of Verso’s soul that still resides within the painting).

Which leaves one major stage remaining, something that this game as a whole, in fact, seems to lack: Anger. Sure there are flashes of it here and there (this is not a game without anger), but it is rare that we see anger ignited by grief in the main story. Gustave has flashes of it, and then after his death Maelle possesses a great anger towards Painted Renoir for his part in it. But otherwise we see the other stages spread far and wide across the game while anger is relegated to the background.

Clea is anger. And her absence haunts the narrative like the absence of anger haunts the game. Her simmering anger echoes throughout the background of the game, from abducting Painted Clea to killing an Axon to pushing Alicia into the painting, her choices compound. And while I'm fully prepared to admit I might be going wild with all the red strings on the pinboard it feels like its simmering just under the surface in anything directly related to her, like a motif. With Renoir, with Alicia, with Simon, with *herself* she is trying to inspire rage at one thing or another.

Now anyone who knows me likely knows I love themes of anger and mess so it's no surprise I love Clea so much. Clea is *angry* at the writers, and while the other family members likely share the sentiment, she is the only one seen to be stewing in that anger, who has stayed in it as long as everyone else has been mourning or bargaining or denying. As shown and stated by both herself and Renoir she is waging war alone and at the same time lashing out at anyone nearby. She blames Alicia  for Verso's death in his sacrifice for her and she shows outright disdain for Aline and her attempts to escape to a world where the tragedy didn't happen. Renoir, who is ostensibly on her side, is not immune as Clea repeatedly states he is wasting his time trying to force Aline out of the canvas. Even verso, whose death the family so greatly mourns, gets the word hate spoken towards him for his willing sacrifice for Alicia. But each of these are, in a fucked up way, some combination of care, grief, and love for each character.

Clea is not kind to Alicia, generally speaking. It is difficult to gauge what their relationship was like before Verso's death, but it was certainly worsened by the event. she belittles her and her abilities, and even a couple of instances flagrantly comments about her inability to speak from her scarring. I certainly wouldn't call it a warm dynamic but there's a repeating theme of treating Alicia like a child, *which she is* at her (likely) age of 16. In several instances Clea mentions that Alicia being in the painting would actually help (as she is unlikely to be helpful in fighting a war given her proficiency before going into the painting) and she says she won't have to worry about Alicia while she is spending time growing up in the painting as maelle. Clea even enters the painting again, something she has repeatedly said is a waste of time, to specifically ask Painted Verso to watch over her since it is safer for her in the Canvas. It's not a particularly kind love, but I think it is a love all the same. The Clea in the endless tower speaks to Maell-icia asking if she wants to have fun, get away from the stress of fighting for a moment. She is still antagonistic but her distance and Maell-icia’s safety in the canvas allow her to let down her walls enough to speak more kindly.

Clea and her mother have a rocky relationship, which we can see pretty clearly with her attitude towards her mother in the flashback and how Renoir's plan wouldn't even function without Clea's direct involvement in weakening her mother. There is an twinkle of admiration in her words, as Clea talks about how Aline used to be the head of the Painters Council, how Aline is far better at painting than Renoir is and how Clea had to help him to even have a chance, how Aline *would have* agreed with her before she became this different person in her mourning. She is also the only Dessendre child to consistently refer to her mother as “Aline” rather than “Maman”. She even paints over her mother's depiction of her, one of the most pointedly spiteful things in the game. While it is all antagonistic, I think it hides a resentment that Aline isn't with the rest of the family. The person Clea respected, who was head of the Painter’s Council, would not abandon her family — would not abandon *Clea* — like Aline has. And with her gone and unwilling to listen to anyone else on the subject, Clea has cut her out, abandoning her to the painting and only contributing to her expulsion because it will hasten Renoir to her cause.

Renoir and Clea are close, him being one of the only people she shows respect for. She doesn't speak very highly of his painting skill, and she is firm in her belief that his attempts to expel Aline are a waste of time, but he wants to live with his family in the real world, which is the closest that Clea has to someone to grieve with. And so she creates the nevrons to stop chroma from returning to Aline, and letter sends Alicia to go help him too. She really wants him out of the painting, thinking he will be of major assistance in the war she is fighting (despite her comment that he's not as strong as his wife). And the admiration is mutual. While there is some debate in the game if it is Clea or Alicia who is Renoir's favorite, we can see with Hauler, the Axon slain by Simon in Old Lumiere, that Renoir saw her as carrying a part of the world on her shoulders. Alone. Clea’s ostensible lack of care towards the events of the canvas is repeatedly betrayed by her actual actions that add up to Renoir’s eventual success. 

We don’t know much about the war going on, but we know that Clea is the only one in her family fighting in it, potentially the only person fighting in it *at all* if the throwaway lines about the state of the Painters is indicative of anything. Upon Verso’s death she starts fighting. And then Aline withdraws from the world leaving her family to grieve without her around, a betrayal from a woman and paintress Clea seems to respect. Renoir, the only one who seems to want everyone together, goes into the canvas to bring his wife out. Clea is left to sort things out on her own, using anger and fighting a war single handed to process her feelings. And all of this on top of having to care for her newly scarred younger sister (who Clea is already having a hard time not blaming for Verso's death) because her parents have abandoned them both. 

But Clea is a grown woman. She can handle this. And then time wears on. and on. So she creates Nevrons to speed the process up, to get her parents back. She goes in herself only to discover a painted version of her likeness, some kind woman helping this man she loves on an expedition to explore this newly shattered world. It's such an insult to Clea that she steals this fake version of her and *paints over her* — both a mark of skill as well as a pointed aggression towards Aline, painting over another artist's work. It’s easy to assume that she is simply offended by Aline painting a bad or unflattering depiction of her, but I think it’s actually the opposite. We know Aline is an amazing painter, Renoir remarks that Painted Verso is one of her finest creations and Maelle/Maell-icia both have an affinity towards Painted Alicia and seem to understand each other on an intrinsic level. Renoir and Painted Renoir interact very little but despite Maell-icia’s comment to the contrary, both are quite willing to commit mass murder to protect their respective families in the way they think is correct. I don’t think Aline got Clea wrong, I think she got Clea *deeply* and *uncomfortably* right. 

Clea, in her anger and her already growing disdain for her mother, sees this woman who loves and cares for her family, for her brother and for Simon, and loses it. It is too painful to see a version of herself happy and in love; and in anger and jealousy she steals her away and “forces” this Clea into someone endlessly producing Nevrons — alone and fighting her own war against the expeditions without her family. Clea disguises herself as her Painted counterpart and grants Simon the power to kill the Axon painted in her likeness — Hauler, She Who Carries the World (that’s not an official title but god I just *really* want to know what it was). In one fell swoop she has erased herself from the canvas and from both parents; leaving one corpse as a monument in the center of the world among crumbling ruins and one corpse an animated puppet painted over her likeness and trapped in a sky prison.

The final piece of the puzzle is verso, who we learn Clea was very very close to. The only canonical age we have is verso, who is 26, so it is difficult to draw hard lines around childhood, but given that Clea is the eldest and Alicia seems to be quite a bit younger than Verso, it makes sense that Clea would be closer to him than her. She would have spent 10ish years with him (which we get some small glimpses into throughout the game) before Alicia came along. We get a lot of stories about the two of them through fading souls and talking to Esquie and Francois. Verso is scared of the dark and Clea makes him the Lampmaster (scary as fuck nightlight), the two of them go on adventures with their respective imaginary friends/creations. In the extended scene where Esquie gets Urrie we learn that Francois enjoys dancing and singing, and that he used to do so with Clea all the time. While initially unclear if this is just Esquie's optimistic perspective on the situation, the ending in which Francois asks to keep the little stone (with him and clea carved together) shows us francois “crying dramatically” over the rock (and Verso commenting about how much he must miss her). If you go back to him later Francois actually *thanks* the player for giving him the rock, saying it is nice to have a carving of Clea. These memories and her parent’s depictions of her paint a very different image than the one we see in her few real appearances.

The personal nail in the coffin for me is Re-Painted Clea seeing Painted Verso in the flying manor. When you make your way up there Verso is surprised she is even alive, a testament to how well Clea pulled off her deception. After the fight the party determines that they can’t really kill her, but something causes one of Re-Painted Clea’s eyes to return to normal, accompanied by the sound of panting effort. Painted Clea regains control, if only briefly, and tries to reach out to Painted Verso, her brother. Her body cracks and strains at the movement, like she is fighting off Clea’s Re-painting just to hold his hand again. The effort isn't enough and Re-Painted Clea takes control again, backing away and shaking her head. She takes control of her Nevrons and bids them to attack her relentlessly until she dies in an explosion of paint and energy. Painted Verso only gets a moment to say goodbye to the energy left over before it dissipates. Painted Clea seeing the fight with Painted Verso is enough to give her the will to fight back against the weakened control, and Re-Painted Clea sees Painted Verso as enough of a threat to her control that she kills herself rather than risk it again (yet another cruel bit of programming from Clea in her Re-Painting process).

Honestly I could probably keep going and getting less and less coherent given that we have so little to work with but YOU SEE MY VISION. I KNOW YOU DO. Clea baby I love you and your anger. Your belief that anger will defeat the grief and that you can outrun it you just have to become meaner and more spiteful and don’t stop running and running and running or it will catch you in the dead of night. And then your grief will make you useless just like your family is. And what good are you if you don’t have use.

Fuck. Clea Dessendre.

[beefycupcakes]

I watched the Cars trilogy recently and with that came a wave of nostalgia and a strange desire to make my own designs for the cars as humans. Aka taking all the charm out of Cars but scratching the brain itch.

So, no need to drag out the intro any longer, I have some notes written out about em for those who might be interested or just bored.

Lightning McQueen:

I tried to make his suit look as professional as possible, with references pulled straight from McQueen's paint job/stickers, while also keeping in mind that I do intend to draw him more so I didn't want to go too crazy with the design. In a perfect world I would've let my maximalist cravings win, but alas let's keep it digestible for my sanity.

I feel like everyone's kinda on this unspoken agreement that McQueen as a human would pretty much look just like Owen Wilson, and that's the big picture here. I used Wilson as inspiration while tweaking and exaggerating a few things to my preference. (Okay, well not everyone, lmao.)

The chevron markings on the front cut off at the side seams not wrapping around the entire suit as to not clash with the sponsor logo on the back.

Also, he's wearing special gloves to help him grip & have control over the steering wheel. I think sometimes that looks a little weird when his sleeves are down & cuffed, but I just feel like he needs to have the gloves there— especially when he comes out of the top half of the suit. (It's also lowkey supposed to mirror his 4 tires when you consider his shoes are also black.)

So yeah, that's basically all I have to to say regarding Lightning McQueen's page. I feel like a lot of my design choices are self explanatory and, honestly probably shared universally... I mean, he's really cut & dry. (But I love him ⚡︎)

▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄

Mater:

I'm not gonna lie, Mater was a bit challenging for me. I definitely had to step out of my comfort zone but I wanted to stay true to the character and not butcher anything.

My first thought was to give him a fishing pole to substitute for the tow hook— but then the more I was thinking about it, the more that felt so... out of place? Radiator Springs is in Arizona, which is (not entirely, but mostly depicted in the movie as) a desert. And even though there are beautiful bodies of water in Arizona, in the movie I don't recall seeing any prominent ones, at least in relation to Mater. So, scratch that, instead I gave him a lasso, which isn't supposed to entirely substitute for the tow truck— no, he still drives a tow truck, but the lasso is so he can grab people/things similarly to Tow Truck Mater (very cartoony). My explanation for this is the cattle ranch. Yeah, Mater is a tow truck driver but perhaps he has a side hustle, or hobby, if you will.

Also, I didn't want to make him... dirty(??) Like, yeah, of course, Mater would obviously get a bit filthy from time to time, it's just in his nature, but that is NOT going to be the core of my design. In regards to the rust happening on him, I felt like instead I would substitute this with being very tan. Again, Arizona is a desert. Because of this, he would take off his shirt often, and this would substitute for the missing hood like on Tow Truck Mater. The removal of the shirt also reveals just how tan Mater actually is.

It's his uniformed overalls that have his original aqua color, but from years of wear & tear they've been patched up with brown patches, this would also reference the rusting. The one strap is supposed to mimic the one headlight being broken, and I know that's a stretch, believe me, I wanted to do something with his eyes but eyes are not the headlights in the Cars universe..... think about this. Think about it really hard... if you know what the headlights are in the Cars universe then this actually makes perfect sense.

He is taller and wider than McQueen, which is a reference to the literal frame of their vehicle counterparts. (A little hard to picture with these images, but eventually I'll draw them together!)

▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄

That's all I have to say really, but do let me know what you guys think! Gas it up and it might encourage me to make a part 2 with some of the other characters! Who would you like to see next? ♡ Thank you so much for reading & have a great day, Kachow!!

[bananasofthorns]

America, Thankk You for the Mental Health Crises, but I Need You to Stop: An Analysis of Will Wood's "Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics, but I Need You to Stop"

I wrote this for my midterm in my Rhythm and Revolutions: Music and Social Change class, which examines the relationship between music/musicians and social change or social movements. It's a really fun class and this was a very fun essay to write. Please enjoy!

America is in a mental health crisis. Although there is no one thing to point at as the direct cause, there are two polarized viewpoints on mental illness that have exacerbated the issue into the ongoing crisis it is today. On one side of the divide are those who ignore mental illness and see it as a shameful weakness; on the other side are those obsessed with pop psychology and the pathologization of all aspects of human existence. In his song “Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics, but I Need You to Leave” from The Normal Album, Will Wood confronts both viewpoints in a parody of dialectical behavioral therapy.

The title of the song refers to psychologist Marsha Linehan, the creator of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). She hoped to treat patients struggling with therapy that focused on changing their thoughts and behaviors by instead teaching them to recognize how their different systems of thought influence each other and how to balance these reactions. At its core, DBT aims to synthesize contrasting views (Swales, 2009). Additionally, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) dictionary of psychology defines “dialectic[s]” as “any investigation of the truth of ideas through juxtaposition of opposing or contradictory opinions” (APA, 2018a). These concepts serve as the framework for “Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics, but I Need You to Leave.”

In an interview with New Jersey Stage, Wood explains why he based his song around dialectic theory: “I think the major directions people come from in the mental health discourse are both deeply flawed but mostly well-intended.” The two directions he focuses on in “Marsha, Thankk You” are of those who dismiss mental illness and those who define themselves by it. He also says, “The level of vitriol with which people identify with their often-extreme perspectives on the subject prevent the conversation from making serious progress.” In this song, he expresses his frustrations with the current conversations surrounding mental health, but he also hopes that the song will bring comfort to those struggling with their own uncertainty about mental illness, as well as push them to examine the ways they feel and speak about the topic (“Will Wood Releases,” 2020). He does so by contrasting the two above perspectives in a way that satirizes them both, highlighting how absurd he thinks both extreme sides of the conversation around mental illness are.

Throughout most of “Marsha, Thankk You,” Wood speaks to the listener as if they are someone who defines themself by their mental illness, whether or not that diagnosis is true or self-assigned. In doing so, he addresses issues that plague modern psychology and society, such as over-medicating and the increasing prevalence of pop psychology which pathologizes all aspects of being alive.

One problem with how mental illness is currently treated is the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs. In an interview with psychologist Lawrence Rubin, psychiatrist Allen Frances explains that the expanded diagnosis criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), has led to over-diagnosis and over-prescribing. “Drug companies have become experts in selling the ill to peddle the pill,” he tells Rubin, meaning that these companies take advantage of the too-broad definitions in the DSM-5 to profit off of people who do not actually need medication but believe they do, based on an unnecessary diagnosis. (Rubin & Frances, 2018) “How many milligrams of you are still left in there?” Wood asks the listener in the song’s chorus (Wood, 2020), implying that their true self is being replaced by who they are when taking drugs that they rely on but don’t need.

He expands on his implied criticism of this attitude in an interview with Kill the Music. This perspective, he says, is pushing the belief that mental illness is inherently unfixable and is telling those who are mentally ill that, “[their] only hope is spending the rest of your inherently sick existence worshiping the chemical technology the heavens sent down to us through AstraZeneca,” a global pharmaceutical company. Wood finds this hopeless, over-reliant perspective to be unproductive. (Mohler, 2020)

He adds that these people also find it necessary to “fanatically identify with pop psychology platitudes,” (Mohler, 2020), which is the main issue he speaks against in “Marsha, Thankk You.” The APA dictionary of psychology defines “popular psychology” as “psychological knowledge as understood by members of the general public, which may be oversimplified, misinterpreted, and out of date” (APA, 2018b). Pop psychology has always existed, but it gained traction in modern times through self-help books and magazines. Recent years have seen the rise of mental health influencers–people who spread mental health knowledge and advice on social media platforms–which has led to even more pop psychology “facts” becoming general knowledge. As Wood pointed out in the interview above, people begin to rely on or obsess over the tips and tricks in pop psychology videos and self-help books. This leads to them defining their lives by a mental illness or psychological condition they may not even have.

Throughout the song, Wood’s lyrics point out how absurd this way of living is; he criticizes the lifestyle in the hope that people will realize the ridiculousness of what they’re doing and reassess how they think about themselves. “You could sing a pretty malady like a black canary, but a crow don’t know the smell of carbon monoxide,” he tells the listener in the first verse (Wood, 2020). “A canary in a coal mine” is an expression that indicates an early warning of danger, based on how coal miners used canaries to detect carbon monoxide. Wood likens the listener to a crow mimicking the real thing: it can make the noise, but it cannot actually do the job, and the listener can fake the symptoms of a mental illness but that doesn’t mean they actually have it.

The bridge of “Marsha, Thankk You” especially draws attention to pop psychology’s tendency to pathologize normal aspects of life. In this part of the song, Wood takes the stance he has been criticizing, singing as if he is the one obsessing over a perceived symptom or unnecessary diagnosis. “Doctor, what’s my prognosis if the studies show that / Disease is in the eye of the beholder?” he asks in the first two lines of the bridge (Wood, 2020). “Disease is in the eye of the beholder” is a play on the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” which means that everyone has their own standard of what is beautiful; in these lines, Wood says that pop psychologists redefine mental illness to be whatever they think fits them best, whether that is true or not. 

Throughout the rest of the bridge, he satirizes this attitude, ending the section by saying, “We’ll all sing when the bell curve rings in lyrics symptomatic of the way we think / If our harmonies don’t sync, we can change our voices / A chorus on condition of our diagnosis” (Wood, 2020). The bell curve refers to the visualization of statistical average, also known as “normal distribution” in statistics; this line ties the song into the themes of normality and conformity that Wood explores in The Normal Album. He is saying that all these people who buy into pop psychology beliefs do so because they want to feel “normal,” and pop psychology gives them ways to treat symptoms or actions that they see as “abnormal” (whether they are or not). When he adds, “If our harmonies don’t sync, we can change our voices / A chorus on condition of our diagnosis” (Wood, 2020), he means that these people change how they act or see themselves based on what the most recent pop psychologist (a self-help blogger, a mental health influencer, etc.) says their “symptoms” (pathologized human behavior) mean. They will do anything to fit into an acceptable box, even if that label doesn’t truly apply to them or doesn’t actually mean what they’ve been told it means.

All of “Marsha, Thankk You,” but especially the bridge, forces the listeners to examine how they think about their own mental health and whether or not they are susceptible to over-relying on pop psychology. However, the song is meant to be a critical comparison between two perspectives, so over-pathologizing is not the only attitude Wood discusses; he also comments on the opposite side of the spectrum, in which people dismiss mental illness entirely.

Attitudes towards mental health have changed drastically over time. The pop psychology trend is mainly prevalent in younger generations; in contrast, older generations are more likely to ignore or deride mental illness. According to Arielle Kanitz, director of dialectical behavioral therapy at FHE Health, the Silent Generation, Baby Boomer generation, and Generation X all carry a heavy stigma against mental health. For the former two generations, it was assumed that anyone being treated for mental illness was insane, and treatment for those outside that label was unheard of; for the latter generation, they “suck[ed] it up and deal[t] with it” (Robb-Dover, 2023). Even today, when conversations regarding mental health are much more normalized and acceptable, those attitudes and beliefs remain. 

Wood uses the choruses of “Marsha, Thankk You” to mock that perspective of mental illness. In the first chorus, he puts himself in the older generations’ shoes and sings, “Back in my day we didn’t need no feel-good pills and no psychiatrists / No, we just drank ourselves to death / And god damn it, we liked it” (Wood, 2020). The phrase “back in my day” is associated with reminiscing on the past, especially in a fond way, but oftentimes the past was not as good as it is remembered. Wood, speaking as the older generation, derides therapy and pharmaceutical drugs and in the same phrase lauds self-medication through alcohol. This contrast emphasizes the absurdity of dismissing valid treatments for mental illness in favor of ignorance and harmful coping mechanisms.

In the next two choruses of the song, Wood reiterates this criticism by increasing the disparity between the speaker’s judgement of modern mental health treatment and their acceptance of harmful ways to deal with the issue. In the second chorus, he replaces the second line of the quoted lyrics above with “No, we just bled out in our baths.” By following that statement with “And god damn it, we liked it,” (Wood, 2020), he points out how foolish it is to dismiss mental health treatment, because back in the “good old days” when that treatment wasn’t normalized, people killed themselves when they were unable to receive help. 

Finally, in the third and last chorus, he sings, “I said, back in the days of lobotomies and shock therapy and mad scientists,” (Wood, 2020) in reference to some of the common ways to treat mental illness that were prevalent in the late 1800s and early-mid 1900s. Not only were these methods later decided to be harmful and unethical, they were also mainly used on patients with more stigmatized mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; if a patient was receiving these treatments, it was because they needed to be “fixed.” As a result, people who grew up when these treatments were more common still hold the attitude that mental illness is something bad or shameful, even when modern treatments (the “feel-good pills” and therapy that Wood mentions) are proven to be beneficial. This attitude means that these people refuse to reassess their own mental wellbeing, even when they are hurting because of it. Wood finds this attitude equally as unproductive and harmful as over-relying on pop psychology.

“Marsha, Thankk You” is meant to parody a dialectical behavioral therapy session in how it seeks to juxtapose two contrasting perspectives on mental illness. This becomes especially evident in the song’s outro, where Wood speaks as the listener’s therapist, forcing them to face harsh truths about themself. Regarding their identity, in relation to mental illness, he tells them, “It’s not the way that you were raised, or what the advertisements say / Not what you pay for, what you pray for, what you want, or what you say” (Wood, 2020). These statements address both perspectives that he has criticized throughout the song: the listener’s beliefs about mental illness should not solely be formed by the stigma they grew up with, nor by the self-help “guides” trying to sell them something. Their personal mental state, and any diagnoses they may need, are not reliant on what they buy into, what they hope for, or what they tell others (or themself) that they have. These lyrics summarize Wood’s goal with this song, which was–as he told New Jersey Stage–to get people to examine their attitudes towards mental illness and, hopefully, get them to become more comfortable with themselves.

He continues with the lyrics, “And I see your tendency to redefine disease by what you need / And I’m afraid I can’t prescribe the diagnosis that you seek” (Wood, 2020). This once again frames the listener as someone on the pop psychology side of the conversation, over-reliant on a diagnosis to tell them who they are. Wood, in the position of the listener’s therapist, calls out this behavior and refuses to enable it. He tells the listener, “and something tells me / You prefer to be sitting there flipping through those old issues of People,” (Wood, 2020), implying that the listener cares more about the pop psychology anecdotes in the magazine than the real help their therapist is trying to give them. This final observation drives home Wood’s criticism of this type of person.

The last line of the song is spoken; Wood states, “Well that’s our time, see you next week” (Wood, 2020), effectively ending the dialectical behavioral therapy session and the conversation between the two perspectives he contrasted in the song.

Actual DBT aims to find a balance between conflicting thought processes or ideas. However, in this case, Wood thinks it would be more beneficial to get rid of these attitudes entirely. The conversation between pop psychologists and mental illness deniers is “getting us nowhere,” he says in an interview with Kill the Music. “It’s a game of tug of war with the teams a mile apart and no objective judge. We don’t need to meet in the middle, we need to give up the game” (Mohler, 2020). Although he used dialectic theory as the framework for “Marsha, Thankk You,” he does not actually believe that there is any way for these perspectives to reconcile. Neither are helping America’s mental health crisis, and in fact it may be more beneficial to society if both sides did not exist at all in the extremes that they do.

[salixsociety]

Yes, I Hate Wicca.

A hopefully comprehensive guide to all my strifes.

More often than I care to admit I find myself quarrelling with people over my seemingly baseless hate for all things popular and simple. I'm accused of being a pretentious traditionalist, of being a snob, even of being a white supremacist on grounds of talking about European culture as a replacement for conventional witchcraft. I will not deny that I am a touch snobby and pretentious - such is my biggest flaw - but I am not a white supremacist, and my loathing for many seemingly innocuous witchcraft practices is not for nothing. It is because I hate Wicca, and everything related to and derived from it, and I have good reason to. Today I would like to introduce you to every single reason I have to loathe Wicca passionately, so that I can hopefully defer future debate partners to this post instead of retyping the same arduous messages.

What is Wicca?

Per the r/Wicca subreddit:

Wicca is a neopagan religion based on ancient pagan beliefs. It's an earth-based religion that believes in a God and Goddess as representative of a greater pantheistic godhead. Wicca includes a system of ethics and teaches that we all are ultimately responsible for our own actions. We believe in gods. We believe in magic. We believe in multiple realities. We practice alone, or in groups. We practice witchcraft.

I chose the r/Wicca subreddit for my first primer because it's easy to accuse people of misrepresenting a faith if you do not allow the community to speak for itself on what their faith constitutes. As much as I hate Wicca, and do not think it is redeemable, I have no desire to be accused of letting my hate set the tone of my arguments against it. I don't want to give militant Wiccans leeway to claim that I speak on their behalf and therefore my points are wrong. The Wicca subreddit is a large community and often referred to by Wiccans, and it features this brief description of 'The Craft'. In any case, though Wicca nowadays is divided and will be described slightly differently by everybody you ask about it, the description provided by the subreddit is a pretty good example of common ground between all Wiccans. That description mostly matches up with how the average Wiccan would describe their faith. My personal description of what Wicca is would look slightly different. I would take care to note, for one, that Wicca is a form of Western Esotericism, more specifically Western Occultism. [1] I also find it important to note that whether or not Wicca is an earth religion, or nature religion, is of some debate, and not all consider it such. What is also subject of some variation across traditions and individuals is whether or not The Craft is pantheistic: some people accept the two gods of Wicca as figureheads for every pagan god in existence, others simply worship them as one single masculine god and one single feminine god. 'Witchcraft' is also a term that has no set definition - I can only assume that the mention of it on r/Wicca intends to broadly refer to most or all forms of magic accepted within Wicca.

Worth noting is that Wicca has spread very far beyond the confines of British Traditional Wicca (BTW), which are streams of Wicca that still adhere strongly to their roots. What is and is not Wicca is something that is of some debate among Wiccans themselves. That's why I think it is highly important to establish a few definitions that we'll be using for the rest of this post:

WICCA: I'll admit to using this term loosely. When I say 'Wicca' in this post I'll mainly be referring to the community of people who consider themselves Wiccans, i.e. the Wiccan religion. I may also use it to describe the broader influence of Wicca, however.

WICCA-DERIVED: I'll mostly use this term when I don't want to paint something as being inherently Wiccan, just related to or derived from it. Wiccan practices often escape the bounds of their respective culture and then grow into staples of various traditions that aren't meant to be Wiccan at all. When referring to such things I'll refer to them as derived from Wicca, or similar.

Wicca's Origins

To understand the history of Wicca we have to travel back a bit further than its founding: to the 16th and 17th century Witch Hunts in Europe. I have another post on this same blog detailing the relationship between Wicca and the Witch Trials, which I highly recommend reading to get a better understanding of the accusations of antisemitism I will be making shortly. At any rate: the witch trials happened across Europe and its colonies throughout the early modern period, after a time of much disaster. As I state in my other article:

Before the early Church turned its hateful eye to the concept of 'witches,' it was firmly on jews. Jews, alongside other heretics and oppressed minorities like the Rroma, were considered utterly worthy of damnation. They were seen as antagonistic to the Church, going against everything the Church stood for, and furthermore as misanthropic, greedy, unreliable enemies. They were the scapegoats for many disasters and indeed frequently accused of practicing magic or poisoncrafting to invoke these disasters on the 'Good Christian Folk'. Furthermore, and this may sound familiar to you, jews were accused of 'consorting with the devil' and murdering children in order to consume their blood to mock the Eucharist, often referred to as blood libel. It was often claimed that this (nonexistent!) practice was done on the Shabbat, alongside other practices twisting and mocking those done in Church on Sunday. The persecution of Jews in Medieval Europe was horrific and seemingly endless, having origins in antiquity and reaching a peak during the Crusades, and another when the Plague ran rampant. Jews were banished, forced to convert to Christianity or brutally murdered, not infrequently by burning or strangulation.

It is fairly easy to see, with some research and critical thought, that it wouldn't logically be real witches being murdered during the witch hunts. For starters, it's hard to believe that there were really people out there flying through the sky on brooms, to mythical locations, to dance naked under the full moon, have sex with the devil, and cannibalize children. There were of course those people who confessed to having done such things, but they were under threat of torture. Indeed, this archetype of the 'witch' has its origins in the Church's loathing for non-Christians and heretics. As Lily Climenhaga states [2]:

"Magic" acted as a description for individuals or groups who did not subscribe to the perceived societal norms of the medieval Christian community. Jews and heretics, the principle Others within Medieval Europe, existed outside of the societal norms and played an important role in the formation of the Christian perception of witches and witchcraft. Common elements existed between stories surrounding Jews, heretics, and witches. These beliefs created the preliminary conditions necessary for the mass persecution and intolerance toward witches and became inherent to the idea of the witch as the diabolical Other within Medieval Christian thought.

Furthermore, the stereotypical image of the witch is directly derived from hateful depictions of the marginalized. The conical, wide brimmed hat that we often see a cartoon witch depicted with actually comes from the conical hat known as a judenhut (jew hat), which was compulsory for many jews to wear in the Middle Ages. [3] Then there is of course the typical red or black hair, short and stocky figure, buckled shoes, large hooked nose, green skin, et cetera. All of this to say: It was not witches being hunted during the witchcraze. There is no such thing as a human person able to fly on broomsticks, cause storms at will, magically steal money from a distance, and curse someone to death with one glance. The medieval and early modern 'witch' is a mythical figure used to justify the persecution and eradication of the already marginalized. This idea is fairly commonly accepted now, as it should be, but it wasn't always.

In 1828, German lawyer and professor Karl Ernst Jarcke proposed the witch-cult hypothesis: a now discredited theory that the people persecuted and murdered during the witch trials were not marginalized innocents, but rather members of a pan-European pagan religion. He posited that this pagan witch-cult was older than Christianity, but had been driven underground by it, and only came to light when the accused of the witch trials confessed to witchcraft. This hypothesis was affirmed and adapted by other scholars throughout the 19th century but remained of moderate popularity at best, until 20th century Egyptologist Margaret Murray became one of its most avid proponents, incorporating it into many of her works. Most notably, she featured it in 1921's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and 1933's The God of the Witches. [1] Murray's writing is the origin of many Wiccan motifs, such as the thirteen member coven, the Horned God (based on the works of James Frazer) and the cross-quarterly gathering. Furthermore, as a radical skeptic and rationalist, Murray wished to strip the witch-cult hypothesis of all supernatural notions. [4] She claimed that the secret society of witches were not Satanists but nature-worshippers, and that the gatherings were actually orgies, where a priest dressed in ritual skins and horns fornicated with all the gathered women. She also proposed that these rituals were actually benevolent fertility rituals for the good of the witches' communities, and there was little to no malevolent magic involved. She was also the one to introduce the idea that the people who confessed to curses and other malevolent magic were actually witches who had forgotten their own original intent, or had been misinterpreted by the court. [5] Murray herself [5]:

For centuries both before and after the Christian era, the witch was both honoured and loved. Whether man or woman, the witch was consulted by all, for relief in sickness, for counsel in trouble, or for foreknowledge of forthcoming events. They were at home in the courts of Kings [...] their mystical powers gave them the authority for discovering culprits, who then received the appropriate punishment.

These writings were a turning point for the associations of the word 'witch'. Prior to these hypotheses, 'witch' was a bad word, an insult even, reserved only for people - especially women - believed to have evil intentions and use spiritual methods not sanctioned by the Church for their own benefit. The use of the word 'witch' nowadays, as a self-imposed title for anybody using any magical means, can be traced back to this pivotal moment in time. While Murray did great PR for the nonexistent witch archetype, erasing the idea that their practices were Satanic and supernatural, she unfortunately did much harm to marginalized peoples by propagating the idea that it was not them being persecuted, but some mythical clan. Therein lies my first problem: Wicca minimizes the impact of what it calls the 'Burning Times' on marginalized peoples and instead adopts all this suffering for itself, painting the 'witch' as a marginalized, oppressed, and beloathed historical figure, when it's the very people who would've been doing the burning who founded, shaped, and maintain Wicca. In doing so, it also adopts various words, like Sabbat(h), which is a word unique to Judaism and has been weaponized against Judaism since the Middle Ages. Despite much criticism, even from Murray's contemporaries, she was invited to write a highly influential piece for the Encyclopaedia Brittanica in 1929. She used the opportunity to promote her hypothesis as fact, and it quickly grew so influential that according to Jacqueline Simpson, the ideas got to be "so entrenched in popular culture that they will probably never be uprooted." [4] But we haven't even gotten into when Wicca was actually founded, so let's get to that.

One of, if not the only contemporary fan of Margaret Murray's hypothesis, was Folklore Society fellow Gerald Gardner. He was an interesting and well-travelled man, having come from a wealthy family, growing up with nursemaids and a family firm. As a result of his illnesses (namely asthma) and constant travels abroad during childhood, he never received a formal education, nor did he attend school. Instead, through his travels and family acquaintances, he developed quite the interest in spirituality. At first he developed an interest in the Buddhist beliefs of the Singhalese natives on his tea plantation, later in British and Celtic folklore from his relatives the Surgenesons. In his biography, it is revealed that it is from these relatives that he learns that his grandfather, Joseph, was rumored to be a practicing witch. [6] Different accounts of Gardner's life had it that it was also rumored within his family that a Scottish ancestor of his had been burned as a witch in 1610. [7] A few years after this time with the Surgenesons, Gardner was initiated as an Apprentice Freemason in Ceylon. He quickly rose in the ranks, but eventually lost interest in the Masonic activities and resigned in 1911, presumably because he wanted to leave Ceylon. [6] After this he moved around Asia a fair bit more, taking a great interest in Indigenous beliefs there, and even participating in some of their tattoo and ritual traditions. During this time of travel, Gardner also decided to take the Shahada, the Muslim confession of faith and, technically, final step in the process of becoming Muslim; but Gardner never became a practicing Muslim, mostly using the Shahada as a means to gain trust from the locals in Malaya. [7] In 1927, Gardner's father's health deteriorated, and he went back to Britain to visit him. During this time in Britain he researched various spiritual and religious movements, namely Spiritualism and Mediumship, and he reported many spiritual encounters with whom he interpreted as deceased family members. [6] [7] He attended many Spiritualist churches and seances, and had a number of spiritual experiences that, according to his biographer, changed his interest from a purely amateur anthropological one to one of genuine personal belief. [6] He became re-involved with Freemasonry, and started taking a serious interest in magic. When he, after his retirement, officially moved back to Britain, he started pursuing magic there with some seriousness. He became involved in such things as nudism, and, in September 1937, he requested a Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph. D) from the Meta Collegiate Extension of the National Electronic Institute, an organization based in Nevada. This organization was widely known for providing illegitimate degrees and diplomas through mail order, for a fee. After this he began to introduce and style himself as 'Dr. Gardner' despite having no academically recognized qualifications. [7]

He started allowing spirituality to shape his life, such as when he bought land on his beloved Cyprus because he came to believe that he had actually lived on the island before, in a past life. He wrote a book referencing this as well, influenced by his dreams: his first novel, A Goddess Arrives, followed a British man in the 1930s who had, in a past life, been a bronze age Cypriot. [7] When World War II became an imminent threat, Gardner and his wife moved to Highcliffe, just south of the New Forest, to escape potential bombings. [7] He becomes involved with the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, a magico-religious tradition in Western Esotericism. The Fellowship had been founded in 1920 by George Alexander Sullivan, based upon a blend of Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Freemasonry and his own personal innovations. [7] It requires mentioning that Western Esotericism and all of its more modern traditions (Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Freemasonry, Occultism, et cetera) are inseparable from white supremacy. This is something fairly well-recorded, if shrouded, and so complex I am hesitant to delve into it in great amounts of detail. It is, however, pivotal for the reader to understand that many of Western Esotericism's greatest thinkers from the Middle Ages onward were antisemites, racists, misogynists, colonialists, and even nazis. Western Esotericism also had a gigantic impact on 20th century race studies, and the idea that there was such a thing as a superior or aryan race. Defenders and fans of Western Esotericism are quick to point out that there are also many non-white thinkers in Western Esotericism that were pivotal to its formation, and I would never deny that. I am, however, denying that what Western Esotericism has turned into is productive. Having been founded upon the backs of indigenous and marginalized peoples, by appropriating their practices and denying their suffering, such as the appropriation of Kabbalah and the denial of the persecution of jews, shaped by men who were famously evil, such as Aleister Crowley, and used as pseudoscientific justification for some of mankind's greatest atrocities, I cannot stand with modern Western Esotericism. Ever. It is true that Western Esotericism has been the victim of white supremacy as well: Freemasons being persecuted and incarcerated as part of the 'jewish conspiracy' in Nazi Germany for example, but at the same time the connections between Esotericism and the nazi, half-Nordic, half-Hindu German Faith Movement cannot be denied. Folkish and Odinist 'traditions' find their roots in nazi occultism as well, as they sprang from the desire for a Pan-Germanic ethnic identity. These faiths persist to this day, attracting many different types of people and turning them into white supremacists or even neo-nazis.

Back to Gardner. During his time with the Rosicrucian Order he had also joined the Folklore society, where he published some works and became member of the governing council, where he was a distrusted man. He had also joined the Historical Association. [7] He ran into some quarrels and troubles with the Rosicrucian Order and found himself increasingly cynical of their practices, especially when Sullivan claimed that World War II would not come the very day before Britain declared war on Germany. [6] There was, however, a select group of people within the Order with whom he got along quite well. [7] Biographer Philip Heselton theorized upon who this group could be and claims they may have been Edith Woodford-Grimes, Susie Mason, her brother Ernie Mason, and their sister Rosetta Fudge, all of whom had originally come from Southampton before joining the Order in Highcliffe. Per Gardner himself: "unlike many of the others [in the Order], [they] had to earn their livings, were cheerful and optimistic and had a real interest in the occult". He was "really very fond of them", claiming he "would have gone through hell and high water even then for any of them." [6] It was these very people who took him to the house of a woman Gardner calls 'Old Dorothy' Clutterbuck, a wealthy local to the New Forest area. They, according to him, made him strip naked and take part in an initiation ritual, wherein he caught the words 'Wicca' and 'Wicce', which he recognized as the Old English words for witch. Though research by the likes of Hutton and Heselton shows that the New Forest Coven, as Gardner calls them, were likely only formed in the 1930s, Gardner took this experience as proof of the witch-cult hypotheses which he had learned about from Margaret Murray's writings. [7] Gardner spent a significant amount of time with them but only ever described one of their rituals in detail, one intended to ward off the Germans from coming to Britain. It is attested in both Bracelin's and Heselton's biographies. Gardner went on, after these events, to also become involved with druidry and be ordained as priest in the Ancient British Church, and he conducted some rituals according to the Lesser Key of Solomon with his nudist and occultist friends. [7] In 1947 Gardner was introduced to Aleister Crowley, a man of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the founding father of Thelema, a Western Occultist new religious movement. Crowley is one of those ubiquitous, evil figureheads in Western Esotericism that people prefer not to give too many words to. His history with occultism, racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and sexual abuse is too vast to summarize in one paragraph. Still, Thelema persists to this day, as do Crowley apologists. Crowley elevated Gardner to the IV° of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) and issued a charter decreeing that Gardner could admit people into its Minerval degree. The charter was written in Gardner's handwriting and only signed by Crowley. [6] [7] [8] When Crowley passed away, Gardner appointed himself the leader of the O.T.O.. He would, however, lose interest in leading the O.T.O. within a few years. [7] During this time Gardner also travelled through America, especially in hopes of learning about Voodoo and Hoodoo. [7]

Gardner wished to spread his newly founded Wiccan religion, and wrote another work of fiction in order to do so. He described various Wiccan rituals in this book as 'High Magic' and based it heavily on the Solomonic Keys. He was also working on a scrapbook which he did not intend to publish, which he called 'Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical'. Therein he wrote down various Wiccan rituals and ceremonies, and this book would later form as the prototype for the Wiccan Book of Shadows, a term he himself coined. He claimed the book to be of ancient origins to his followers. During this time he also gained his first initiates, and the first covens were formed. [7] During this initial time of true organized religion, Gardner ran into several problems. People important to him left his faith due to his actions with the press, and he had quarrels with some members who recognized that many of his rituals and such had been adapted straight from Thelema. [4] In 1954, Gardner wrote arguably the most influential work on Wicca: Witchcraft Today. It was his first non-fiction work, and contained a preface by Margaret Murray, the woman who had popularized the witch-cult hypothesis on which Wicca was built. In this book, Gardner praised Murray's theories, and added some of his own: namely that the European belief in faeries was actually because of a hidden pygmy race living alongside mankind, and that the Knights Templar were actually initiates into The Craft. [7] After this, Gardner started cultivating larger scale attention for Wicca. He invited the press to write about his religion, and most of the tabloid articles produced painted him and his cult in a negative light. They were made out to be devil worshippers, cultists, et cetera. Nevertheless, Gardner persisted, and encouraged the press to write more. He thought the publicity, even if negative, would help prevent the 'Old Religion', as he called it, from dying out. [7] [8]

In 1960, Gardner's official biography, Gerald Gardner: Witch, was published. It was penned in its entirety by Gardner's friend Idries Shah, a Sufi mystic, but Shah used the name of one of Gardner's High Priests, Jack L. Bracelin, because he was wary of being associated with witchcraft. In 1963, Gardner visited Lebanon. On his way home, he had a heart attack on ship, en route to Tunisia. He was buried there, the funeral only attended by the ship's captain. [9] Many authors have speculated on Gardner's life since his passing. Though he was devoted to his only wife, Donna, it was claimed that Gardner spent many evenings 'cuddling up' to a young High Priestess named Dayonis. Biographer Philip Heselton claims that Gardner had a longterm affair with Edith Woodford-Grimes, nicknamed Dafo by Gardner. This theory was affirmed by Adrian Bott. [10] Gardner was one of, or possibly the first person to use what Wiccans know as a 'Craft name', a magical name used for magico-religious purposes in Wicca. Gardner was known as Scire by his followers. Reportedly, Wicca was not known as Wicca at the time of its initial development. Gardner often referred to his adherents as 'the Wica', but the religion was only ever referred to as 'Witchcraft', capital W.

In Wicca's founding lies my second problem with it. Wicca was founded by a white man, based on a combination of Western Esoteric notions and experiences, Spiritualism, Mediumship, appropriation of indigenous European, Asian and even American spirituality. It was built on a hypothesis that denies the suffering of marginalized peoples and claims it for nonmarginalized, white, privileged Europeans instead. It poses itself as something with roots in academics, while the founder had never enjoyed any form of education and possessed a fake PhD. It was influenced heavily by cults, occultists who are generally acknowledged to be terrible people, and pseudoscience. It claims to be ancient, but was founded in the 1900s. And, importantly, it contributes heavily to white supremacy through the idea of a pan-European cultural identity and pan-European pagan religion.

Wicca Today: Innocuous Propagation of White Supremacy

Wicca has grown exponentially since its founding, now being by far the largest pagan religion actively being practiced in the modern era. It has both organized covens and solitary adherents across the world, and most people who have access to the internet will have heard of Wicca once or twice. Wicca is, truly and undeniably, inescapable in pagan and magical spaces. It's easy, and common, for adherents to claim that Wicca is not what it once was. 'Yeah, the origins are bad, but that doesn't make the whole Craft bad,' is a favored argument against the idea that Wicca's origins make it inherently irredeemable. I disagree strongly with this, and always will; something that was built with bricks made of appropriation and lies can't be separated from those evils. If you took the appropriation out of Wicca, it would cease to be Wicca. Deconstructing Wicca would leave you with a blend of Freemasonry, Thelema, folk magic, Christianity, various Indigenous beliefs, Kabbalah, Occultism, and some misrepresented paganism. If you take the appropriation and harm out of Wicca, it simply ceases to exist. Nevertheless, many people think Wicca can be separated from its evil origins. That's why in this section of the article, I'd like to delve into why that is not true, and how Wicca continues to do harm in this day and age.

For starters, of course, Wicca has not ceased to be appropriative simply because time has passed. Rather, the appropriation gets increasingly less attention, until it becomes so integral to the Craft that people don't even notice or stop to think that it may have come from somewhere that never wanted it to be taken in the first place. A prime example, which I've already touched on very briefly, is the use of the word 'sabbat', in reference to 'Wiccan' holidays. As I wrote in my other post about this topic:

The very root of this word is the Hebrew ש־ב־ת (sh-b-t). It is the root word for many words pertaining to rest and not working (or more broadly: 'cessation'). This word evolved into שַׁבָּת (shabát), which translates to Saturday or weekly rest-day, normally. This word, also often spelled Shabbos from Ashkenazi Hebrew, travelled through various antique languages (Ancient Greek -> Latin -> Old French) directly to Middle English, where it became 'Sabat', and later Sabbath. While this word, in its travel through Europe, has influenced some words, you'll notice that it has also stayed one unique word, with a unique meaning: the Jewish Rest Day. The Sabbath, Shabbos, Sabbat, Shabat, et cetera, will always and has for most of its history been the word uniquely reserved for Saturday in Judaism. To those not very well read on Judaism, it may be helpful to know that Judaism is what is considered a closed practice. It is only permissible to practice Jewish religious tradition, and to a large extent, Jewish culture, if you are a Jewish convert. By extension, that should clue you in on the nature of the word and holiday of Shabbat.

This word, which should have stayed what it was meant to be, a word for the Jewish rest day, first became associated with the archetypal witch during the late Medieval period, when jews, and later witches, were accused of going to Sabbaths or Synagogues to perform evil rituals. Though there were attempts by the likes of Margaret Murray to claim that the word 'sabbat(h)' as used by 'witches' was not in any way related to Judaism, those claims have been strongly disputed. Murray claimed in her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe that 'sabbat' actually came from Old French s'esbattre, meaning to frolic and amuse oneself. This theory has no proof, nor is it readily academically received or accepted. The word in conjunction with witchcraft is deeply hurtful to Judaism and jewish people across the globe, as it reminds them of the persecution they faced when their faith and culture was considered evil and worth being killed over. I highly recommend reading Why I Don't Call Them Sabbats, Why You Should Stop, and Other Thoughts on Problematic Aspects of Western Witchcraft by Nile Sorena for more thoughts on this topic, as well as Jews and the Witchcraze by Jewitches.

The Wheel of the Year, the cycle of yearly Wiccan holidays (the very ones referred to as 'sabbats', which I refuse to do and will not start doing), is just as appropriative as the use of the word sabbat, but, hilariously, it is also quite magically and religiously dysfunctional. The Wheel of the Year is a Wiccan invention, initially based on the works of James Frazer, Robert Graves and Margaret Murray, the latter of whom was a big proponent of the theory that 'witches' gathered on cross-quarterly days, something that is still a big motif in Wicca. These theories were adopted by neopaganism by Gardner's Bricket Wood Coven and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, a neo-Druidic group founded by Ross Nichols. Supposedly, these people harmonized the eight primarily holidays described by the former academics to create an easy-to-use calendar for neopagans in Britain. [11] In the 1970s, prolific Wiccan Aidan Kelly gave names to some of the previously unnamed Wiccan equinoxes (Mabon and Ostara) and the Wiccan summer solstice (Litha). [12] This leaves us with the contemporary wheel of the year, which looks like this:

There are many reasons I find the Wheel of the Year appropriative and dysfunctional. For starters, Wiccan lore claims that the spokes-on-a-wheel structure is borrowed from Celtic mythology, but there is no evidence that Celtic myth ever depicted the passing of time as a wheel. Nevertheless, there is no inherent problem with viewing the passing of time as a wheel; cycles are very important in paganism across Europe. More cumbersome than the supposedly ancient wheel structure, is the combination of pagan holidays from various only passively related cultures. Beltane (Bealtaine), Lughnasadh, Samhain, and Imbolc are Celtic; specifically Gaelic. They all work well in conjunction, and were historically celebrated by the same people(s) throughout their years. Yule is Germanic, being celebrated by the Norse, continental Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon peoples. It was not in any way historically related to the four primary Celtic festivals, and doesn't work in conjunction with them very well, as many things that made Yule significant to the Germanic peoples, were celebrated during Samhain by the Gaels. Mabon is a contrived festival, filling an autumnal gap. The Germanic peoples did not have a specialized holiday for the autumn equinox, nor did the Celts, so Wiccans filled this gap with a 'lesser Sabbat' in the 1960s, named 'Mabon' by Aidan Kelly in the 1970s. [12] It was named for Mabon ap Modron, a figure in Brythonic mythology. As Wicca is wont to do, it paints itself and its traditions as incredibly ancient and cultural, and Mabon is no exception to this rule. Wiccans generally paint Mabon as a 'Celtic harvest festival' filled with rich traditions of sacrifice and preparation for winter, but factually, nothing is less true. Mabon (ap Modron) as a deity has nothing whatsoever to do with the autumn equinox, and there is no solid record of consistent autumn equinox festivities as celebrated by the Celts (nor by the Germanic peoples, for that matter). Noteworthy also is that on top of this usage of the name of Mabon for an unrelated festival often being deemed appropriation by Welsh and other Gaelic people, additional offense is often taken to the likening of the 'Mabon' celebrations to Thanksgiving, as many leftist people involved in Celtic culture have no respect for, nor wish to be associated with, colonialism. Ostara is an almost equally contrived festival, based on a single attestation by a Christian in England, Bede, who claimed in his work The Reckoning of Time that there was an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Ēostre, to whom a spring feasts were dedicated during the month of Ēosturmōnaþ (modern April). Litha, too, finds its origins in Bede's The Reckoning of Time. Per Aidan Kelly himself:

Summer was also rather easy. The Saxon calendar described by Bede was lunisolar. It usually had twelve months, but in the third, fifth, and last month of an 8-year cycle, a 13th month was added to keep it (more or less) in sync with the solar years. The last and first months in the calendar were named Foreyule and Afteryule, respectively, and obviously framed the holiday of Yule. The sixth and seventh month were named Forelitha and Afterlitha; furthermore, when the thirteenth month was added, it went in between them, and the year was then called a Threelitha. Obviously, by analogy with Yule, the summer solstice must have been called Litha. (I later discovered that Tolkien had figured this out also.)

Now, there is nothing wrong with being inspired by various open, European cultures and using that inspiration to create something new. Traditions don't have to be centuries old to be valid. What makes this thing that Wicca does appropriation, is that it refuses to acknowledge its traditions as modern, and its inspirations as cultural. This started way back in its origins, when Murray popularized the witch-cult hypothesis and Gardner espoused it, and it survives into the modern day with Wiccans either refusing to admit or pointedly ignoring the fact that their traditions are modern and were established in the modern period.

Wicca also breeds tolerance for cultural (mis)appropriation. When one is not taught to feel any animosity toward appropriation like the use of the word 'sabbat(h)' outside of its original context, even when the usage of the word is of active detriment to the people to whom the word originally belonged, one will feel confident doing other, similar appropriation elsewhere as well. This is why you'll often notice that it is Wiccans, and people who practice Wiccan-derived practices, who end up appropriating such things as white sage, dreamcatchers, sound bowls, reiki, et cetera. Some of those things should never be used by people who are not native to the culture those things come from, such as white sage, which is not only strictly closed but also a severely endangered plant; others are open to foreigners, but should be treated with respect and acknowledged as belonging to a certain culture. Wiccans who readily appropriate such things are often unable or unwilling to provide substantial information on where those practices or items come from and why they should be within their rights to have them, except through arguments which minimize the cultural value of something. A great example of this is this famed argument: "white sage can't be closed, it's a plant. Plants belong to the earth, and the earth belongs to everyone. I should be allowed to use white sage." Ignoring the fact that white sage is endangered and white sage in stores is generally poached, which entirely negates the 'respecting the earth' aspect of that argument, this argument also diminishes the cultural importance of white sage to Native Americans.

A different reason that appropriation runs rampant in Wiccan communities is, actually, white supremacy. The goal of white supremacy is to homogenize the white race into a single white cultural and ethnic identity, so that all white people may band together and rule over the inferior races, as it were. People think that white supremacy has to be quite drastic, only recognizing it in such things as fascism and neo-nazism, but in actuality, white supremacy is propagated in many far more innocuous ways. The wish to eradicate minority languages, various conspiracy theories about aliens, many commonly accepted forms of pseudoscience, and many forms of cultural appropriation that are popular to this day are huge cultivators of white supremacy. Something does not need to explicitly state, or even have the intent or desire to create a homogenous white ethnic identity to further white supremacy. This topic is so vast and complex it is impossible to summarize in any effective way in this post, which is why I encourage all magical practitioners and pagans to see witchcraft as highly intersectional an do their research about white supremacy and other harmful ideologies that survive in western spirituality to this day. Folkism and Odinism are great examples of not explicitly, but undeniably white supremacist spiritual organizations that further white supremacy by attempting to create a universal Germanic (and then European) cultural and ethnic identity. Wicca also engages a lot with the idea of various pan-European identities. This is particularly visible in two ways: one, the idea that there is a pan-European witch-cult that has survived from prehistory into the modern age. Magic, throughout Europe, as well as paganism throughout Europe, is highly variable and culturally dependent. Though it follows many of the same themes, as it does mostly have its roots in Proto-Indo-European common origins, it is distinctly different. If Europe had one, shared, culture, our world would look very different. Indeed, Europe is just as culturally diverse as any other place, even if nowadays (thanks to white supremacy) that is harder to see. There is not and never has been one singular secret society of witches in Europe. Instead, folk magic, which is culturally and linguistically dependent, and extremely variable across Europe, has survived under the radar of the church into the modern era, and it is one of Europe's most beautiful assets when it comes to illustrating our cultural richness. The second way that Wicca propagates pan-European identities is through their dual divinity system. Wicca's divinities, the Great Horned God and the Triple Goddess, who both are also, in turn, appropriated from Gaulish and Celtic lore respectively, are often said to be a sort of figurehead for all pagan divinities and serve as a sort of shorthand way to worship them all, in a soft pantheist way. The Horned God or Lord, the divine masculine, represents all male pagan gods, and his counterpart represents all female pagan gods as the Divine Feminine. Now, pantheism is not inherently problematic, but when one tries to reduce every pagan divinity in existence, gods which all have wildly different cultural and historic backgrounds, to two deities, without even being so courteous as to make those deities liminal and featureless, I fear that does turn into a problem. No, it is not possible to worship every single pagan god in existence by paying respects to just two deities who are mostly modern inventions. Every deity and every religion, every culture, has distinct needs, requirements, and ways of paying respect, and attempting to reduce all of that to the idea that two gods can serve as a prism and replacement for all the gods which have ever existed is a major flaw to this religion as well as a serious indicator of a strong tie to white supremacy.

But there is another problem to the dual divinity system of Wicca, which is gender essentialism. On top of cultural variability being completely forsaken by this prism-pantheistic idea, it also completely fails to acknowledge that there are many deities across Europe and across the globe which do not conform to the gender binary. The abrahamic God Himself is a great example, but so is Loki, a deity who is oddly well-beloved by Wiccans despite the religion's bioessentialist nature. So are Hermaphroditus from Hellenic myth, various South American divinities, even deities in Tagalog lore. As a matter of fact, gender-neutral depictions of divinity have been found on Celtic gold. [13] Divinity itself, as a concept, has no gender. Rejecting the gender binary has also been crucial to magic and witchcraft across Europe, see for example crossdressing being a prerequisite to successful Seidhr practices, and the associations of men practicing seidhr with unmanliness and even homosexuality. [14] Rejecting the gender binary was a powerful act when it came to magical skill, as it furthered ones journey into the liminal and undefined, the strange and 'other', which is where all manner of magical creatures resided. In fact, the residents of the Otherworld, the Faeries themselves, are not too keen on gender binary. The Divine Male archetype of aggressor, protector, avenger and ruler is one that, in Faery Courts, is generally represented by the Queen, not the King. If there even is a King. I find this ironic, considering Wicca's desire to be closely associated with Celtic mythology and antiquity. The concept of Divine Femininity and Divine Masculinity is also directly contradictory to feminism. To attempt to reduce a woman to nothing but the soft, sensual, sagely, nurturing caretaker is undeniably misogynistic. The idea of a Divine Masculine, too, is antifeminist, though only in the sense that it is entirely patriarchal. Men are leaders, providers, and warriors, according to the gender essentialist archetypes that the Divine Feminine and Masculine reference. This is harmful to men, as well, because it places them in the position of needing to be manly and invulnerable at all times, much to the complaint of both men and women in the modern age. It is simply unproductive and anti-feminist, in a way that is hard to ignore. The bioessentialism of Wicca goes beyond just the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine archetypes of their deities, however. There is a strong emphasis within Wicca on depictions of genitalia, and many Wiccan authors and figureheads draw comparisons between really any long object and a phallus, believing that everything in magic has to eventually circle back to fertility. Wands are phallic, athames are phallic. The average Wiccan supply store will have penis shaped candles, penis carvings of various crystals. Wicca propagates bioessentialism the likes of which are not seen in any other form of paganism, not even historic paganism. This attitude towards the nonconforming and emphasis on the gender and sex binary make many people feel excluded from Wicca. Trans people, nonbinary people, really any queer or gay person, of any sort, can experience Wicca as a hostile environment. Wiccans may argue that it isn't transphobic by saying that they are including both sexes and never intentionally exclude trans, gay and nonconforming individuals, but what they fail to realize is that the binary, any binary, is outdated. There are more than two gender identities, and there are more than two sexes. Intersex people can never feel included when the religion so heavily affirms that there is, or should be, only penis and vulva.

Furthermore, Gardner himself was a flagrant homophobe, and well-known for it. Lois Bourne, a High Priestess of the Bricket Wood Coven, Gardner's own coven, wrote this about him: [15]

Gerald was homophobic. He had a deep hatred and detestation of homosexuality, which he regarded as a disgusting perversion and a flagrant transgression of natural law ... "There are no homosexual witches, and it is not possible to be a homosexual and a witch" Gerald almost shouted. No one argued with him.

Wicca Tomorrow: Cultural Erasure and Loss

Admittedly, none of what I've said so far has truly captured my biggest, and primary, reason for hating Wicca as much as I do. Other than the fact that I myself am indigenous, and have felt the effects of white supremacy, cultural erasure, and homogenization of white peoples all my life, other than the fact that I am queer and in a gay relationship, other than the fact that I have family who were victims of the holocaust, other than the fact that I am, at my core, an intersectional, radical leftist - the thing I hate the most about Wicca is its potential. Not potential for greatness, mind. I hate Wicca's potential for destruction. I already get to witness it in action every day, and it strikes fear into my heart like nothing else.

I, personally, have always believed that the first antidote to white supremacy, in an ironic but poetic spin, is love for one's own culture. White supremacy, in an attempt to make the white man feel at home in his whiteness and like he has one thing (superiority) in common with all other white men, strips him from his local culture. He is forced to view himself as part of something great, something that spans all of Europe, or all of Germania, or what have you, and he is made to turn a blind eye to what he already has. Local culture. His language, more specifically even, his dialect. His mother's lilt, and his father's flowery cadence. His neighbors. Their celebrations, their cooking traditions. His city. Its architecture, its communal sites, its judicial system. His land. Its medicines, its foods, its magics. The animals upon it. His companions, his livestock, rarely even his foes. Everything a person truly needs is within walking distance when in nature. Every ecosystem is equipped with everything we could possibly need, from a varied diet, to our medicines, to our shelters, to our hygiene products, all the way to the very things that keep us in check. That is not coincidence: we were grown, woven fiber by fiber by that land, that soil, over thousands, millions, billions of years. We do not need the whole world, there is no reason to try to conquer it. But we want to colonize, and so we must make larger and larger teams, clans, armies, races. The man from Truthan must become Cornish, then Celtic, then English, then British, then European, then white, then better. He would have been better off, happier, had he stayed Cornish.

In the worldwide community of people who take an amateur and personal interest in magic and paganism, Wicca is white supremacy's most effective tool in stripping people of their local culture. Wicca did not become this by design; shoddy and evil though its origins may be, I do not think Wicca was created with the intention of homogenizing and radicalizing the white race. However, in the 1950s, when all cultural magic in Europe were flying low under the radar of the church, hiding in families, in villages, in cookbooks and journals, in visits to the local keening woman to cure the evil eye the neighbor gave your cow, Wicca was the first community, first organized religion, to wave a flag and loudly and proudly proclaim to be pagan, to be witches. To do magic. It was the first to associate itself with those labels and voluntarily take them on, to be known by them. Through this singular association with those terms, it became the first thing people thought of when they thought about magic. Because the magic of the common people, the folk magic, is never termed magic by the ones doing it. "This rowan stick in my windowsill against lightning? Magic? You mean that stuff those witches in London do?" Nowadays, as the first form of magic and paganism to go mainstream in Europe since Christianity's taking over, Wicca is ubiquitous when the amateur goes to research magic and paganism. When the internet came along, this became a bigger problem than it may already have been before the digital age. Now, when people are introduced to the concept of modern magic and paganism, when they go to research it, they will only find Wicca. Not for utter lack of sources on (other) cultural magic, on the contrary: there are plenty, but one needs to use specific key words to find them. More scientific, more academic, more secular. When one wants to research cultural and specific magic, one must assume the author does not believe himself, nor does he believe you do. Wicca, however, has resources that do assume the researcher is interested in practicing, which is yet another reason that people go to Wicca rather than something else. They won't find the folk magic, and if they do, it won't be as comprehensive, accessible, entertaining, and personable as Wicca. Wicca will always win, because it was never challenged in the first place. This has led to a huge disparity in the amount of people who know about and/or practice Wicca, and the amount of people who know about and/or practice folk magic and/or cultural paganism. And as Wicca gains more and more popularity, both because it was always set up for success by chance, and because it subtly purveys white supremacy in a way that most people do not even recognize, it will continue to smother cultural, traditional, and folk magic.

Wicca's Reach: Contemporary Magic

Many people who would not consider themselves, or do not identify as Wiccan, still get called that by me in an intentionally derivative way. Not usually to their faces, but when I am discussing reasons why I do not like Wicca, I find it hard to draw a substantial, or even relevant, line between people who identify as Wiccans, and people who do not identify as such but still, functionally, are. Due to Wicca's chokehold on the first several pages of Google when you look up most things pertaining to magic, most practitioners of magic are essentially Wiccan without the label. They do not associate with Wicca intentionally, but they have no idea how to access, or any awareness of the existence of folk magic resources, and so end up practicing the magic Wicca teaches. In witching communities, well-known Wiccan authors are considered staples to read, such as Scott Cunningham. Authors that do not call themselves Wiccan (anymore) but do promote the magic are just as popular, such as Arin Murphy-Hiscock and Nathan M. Hall. These authors all have the same fatal flaw, which makes them Wiccans and automatically unreliable in my eyes: they promote the very idea which Wicca all but created, that there is one, single, universal way to do magic. That you, a Hawai'i Native living on the Islands, will do the best magic you've ever done with this set of European herbs that do not grow on your own soil. With this set of half-baked, appropriative Laws and methods, contrived out of a mishmash of appropriated indigenous practices and European traditions; like the Threefold Law, which is nothing but a cheap and terrible misinterpretation of the Dharmic concept of Karma. Except Wicca doesn't call them that. It calls the herbs staples, essentials. It calls the half-baked rules Ardanes and Magical Theory. Nothing is more ironic to me than a supposed nature religion telling people to forsake the nature around them in favor of the 'universal subsitute' Rosemary (salvia rosmarinus), a plant they've never even seen in real life save for in the jar in their spice cabinet.

Nowadays, thanks to the omnipresence of Wicca, there is a whole new magical tradition, yet unnamed. It consists of all those secular practitioners of magic who do all of their research via resources actually pandering to practitioners, all those people who claim 'we are the daughters of the witches you couldn't burn', all those people who have never heard of or hardly ever think about magic that isn't 'witchcraft'. I like to refer to it as 'contemporary magic', or sometimes 'modern magic', in a context where the label contemporary could be cause for confusion. This 'modern magic' is that more-or-less universal, monotone, Wiccan derived, secular magic that most people would term 'witchcraft'. The magic you see on TikTok. The spell jar magic. The cord-cutting magic. The lemon hex magic. The 'spiritual but not religious' magic. The sound bowl and smoke cleanse magic. The light and love magic. The 'white' magic. Magick. This magic is not culture-less, not at all. It is its own culture, as it were, and not only that, most of the spells, rituals and rules it has have their origins in European culture. But this magic is, in a way, anti-culture. Colonial. It smothers and endangers local magic, more relevant magic, and spreads like wildfire because it is so easy to never have to research beyond Wicca. What makes this modern magic inherently harmful is that it, too, is appropriative. The resources that provide you with this magic, which like the religion that sprouted it, is a huge, sometimes dysfunctional and clashing mosaic of culture, do not actually inform you of the origins of any of the practices that they teach you. They teach you what to do, how to do it, what materials to use, et cetera, but they don't teach you where these rituals came from, why these plants had those associations, what culture sprang this curse. And contrary to popular belief, those things are crucial to magic. The cultures at hand deserve to be honored for what they've given, and every culture has the right to be preserved. Culture is important elsewhere, but it is fundamental to magic. Magic cannot exist without culture. Gods are nothing but a lens to view the world through, magic is nothing but a response to struggle in a language that every human shares: the language of wonder and learning. Magic, at its core, is nothing but humanity's ability to feel amazed, and learn from the elegant language the earth speaks to us. And it is propagated by our ability to speak, to share, to teach to one another. Mother to daughter, brother to sister, chieftain to peasant, wife to warrior. Carry this, eat that. Don't do this, don't go there. Wicca does not acknowledge this importance of culture, nor does it make any efforts to teach the practitioners of it and its derivatives what cultures it was built on and off of. That is the crux and definition of cultural appropriation.

Wicca will continue to spread. I think one of my toxic traits is that I resigned myself to this idea a long time ago, much like how many people resign themselves to the idea of white supremacy or climate change. I can't help but see Wicca and the damage it does as irreversible. Wicca occupies the first pages of any google search about magic, the first thought anyone has when you self-identify as a pagan or practitioner of magic. 'Witch' as a word is completely different than it once was, as is the word sabbat. It feels inescapable, and this weighs heavily on me as somebody whose culture, too, is growing lost in part due to the priority of Wicca over cultural magic. I started writing this post in hopes of getting out all my grievances with this tradition. Ten thousand words and a great many sources later, the wound Wicca carved into me when I realized people would choose it over the valuable cultural knowledge I have and want to preserve no longer throbs, it just aches emptily. If this post manages to change one person's mind on Wicca, it has done its job, and I can die happily. If this post motivates one person to look beyond Wicca and glance at the rich and wild world of cultural magic, especially their own culture, I'll spend eternity in the afterlife gloating.

If there was one thing I wanted the reader to take away from this post, it is not that they should hate Wicca and actively fight to eradicate it. It is that culture is beautiful. All cultures are beautiful. There is no such thing as 'white culture' and we should strive to dismantle that, but the way to do that is to acknowledge the real culture. British culture, English culture, Cornish culture. Low Saxon culture. Silesian culture. Yakutian culture. Tibetan culture. Qazaq culture. Yup'ik culture. Irish culture. Amazigh culture. Cree culture. Sámi culture. Maori culture. Aymaran culture. Muscogee culture. Zulu culture. Find what is rightfully yours, because no matter who or where you are, there is culture in your ancestry, and there is culture in your neighborhood. You are entitled to it like you are entitled to air and water. Learn about the plants that are native to your area. Learn about the medicines your peoples used when conventional medicine was not available to them. Learn about their faith before Christianity, learn about the way they thought the universe came to be and what made humans human. Eat cultural foods, both yours and not. Talk to your elders, and really listen to what they say. Try to remember the weird superstitions and turns of phrase you grew up with. I promise it's there, and I promise it's beautiful. I promise it will make you feel at home.

In the following weeks I will try my best to dedicate some posts to the beginnings of folk magic. How to get involved, where to look for resources, what makes a good resource, what keywords to use when searching, what to do when it feels like there's nothing out there for you, how to find which culture you are a part of. Until then, I will leave you with my sincerest gratitude for reading this ridiculously long complaint.

----------------------------

Doyle White, Ethan (2016). Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. 

Climenhaga, L. (2012). Imagining the Witch: A Comparison between Fifteenth-Century Witches within Medieval Christian Thought and the Persecution of Jews and Heretics in the Middle Ages. Constellations, 3(2). 

“The Dehumanization and Demonization of the Medieval Jews.” Medieval Antisemitism?, by François Soyer, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, 2019, pp. 45–66.

Simpson, Jacqueline (1994). Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why? Folklore, 105:1-2: 89-96.

Murray, Margaret Alice (1933). The God of the Witches. S. Low, Marston & Company, Limited.

Bracelin, Jack (1960). Gerald Gardner: Witch. Octagon.

Heselton, Philip (2012a). Witchfather: A Life of Gerald Gardner. Loughborough, Leicestershire: Thoth.

Valiente, Doreen (2007) [1989]. The Rebirth of Witchcraft. London: Robert Hale.

"Britain's chief witch dies at sea". News of the World. 23 February 1964. Archived from the original on 8 September 2018.

Heselton, Philip (2003). Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration: An Investigation Into the Sources of Gardnerian Witchcraft. Capall Bann.

Lamond, Frederic (2004), Fifty Years of Wicca, Sutton Mallet, England: Green Magic, pp. 16–17.

Kelly, Aidan. About Naming Ostara, Litha, and Mabon. Including Paganism. Patheos.

Ambiguous Deities on Celtic Gold, Numismatic News. February 27, 2023.

Price, Neil (2002). The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Uppsala: Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University.

Bourne, Lois (2006). Dancing with Witches. London: Robert Hale. p. 38.

---- If you enjoy my work, please consider purchasing or commissioning some of my written resarch, ordering a reading, or commissioning my art. Click here to see the options. Thank you!

[baixue-temple]

I know I've only poked around the fandom for like.. A MINUTE but I have a thought as I go through meta and fanfic stuff, I keep bumping into interpretations bouncing between "Shen Yuan is a nasty little gremlin of a man just like the original Shen Qingqiu" to "he's a very nice person deep down unlike the original goods" but for me I'm kinda feeling like...

They're not the same person on a literal level. But they are also kinda the same guy, in a way in which they are running much more parallel than I think is given credit, in ways that makes SY much more fleshed out than The Nice One and SQQ flattened down to The Mean One.

Mostly I'm thinking of someone's video essay that touched briefly on Nature Vs Nurture themes in the show, and while they were talking about in reference to Binghe's arc, it made me sit back and think instead about how SQQ and SY could arguably fall under the same debate despite being more definitively separate entities than PIDW Binghe and SVSSS Binghe are.

Just off the top of my head:

They're both are very academic in their interests/skillsets, but SQQ's issues have twisted his perception so that his interests are instead standards of measurement against his worthiness as a peak lord (or just a person in general) vs SY's interests seem to come more calmly, given that he could binge read novels and more-or-less seamlessly fit into the scholar peak. Both display tendencies to defend their skills/interests from perceived or even imagined criticism...

...But both are ironically also pretty damn critical of others around them! The key difference that Shen Yuan is typically more internal about it once he transmigrates because now he doesn't have a keyboard between him and his targets unless SQH is around vs Shen Qingqiu is has truly just lost his ability to give a fuck, using his words as much as a shield as a weapon against perceived threats aka everyone and everything.

The level of self-deception that these two engage in re: their self-worth and how much they mean to others needs to be studied in a petri dish.

Both have a Specific Person that is critically important to their place in the world that come with complicated feelings of love, anger, self-worth, trust issues, etc. This really clicked for me when SY is taken to the fake bamboo house after being caught by Binghe. Whether or not Binghe's intentions are good, all SY is feeling is anger and tells him to leave him alone. He trusted this person! And what did he get? Captivity. So he lashes out verbally to keep him at arm's length because that trust has been damaged. Wait why does this sound familiar--

Furthermore, they are both pretty good examples of personalities where protectiveness of that Person can bleed into being domineering. SY doesn't realize he's done this to Binghe until nearly the end of the novel, where SQQ learns it early to survive and never unlearns it especially in regards to YQY. Both of them have big ol trust issues, have learned that they have little control over the world around them, enough so that they feel the need to control even their closest allies around them -- because they feel that if they don't, they cannot be safe.

Both tend to get misinterpreted -- and then react to it almost as polar opposites. Shen Qingqiu's more minor misdeeds or even attempted good deeds get taken negatively because of his personality, and he realizes this but gives up. Where Shen Yuan's actions often get received more positively than he originally intends or even wants, especially at the start of the story when he's primarily only thinking about his own hide, and there's lots of times where this goes completely over his head.

All in all, I think I'm finding more that I appreciate things that take this into consideration. That SY and SQQ are very much mirrors of each other's flaws and strengths. It's also just a sort of sad irony that SY starts the story hating SQQ so much but gradually becomes more forgiving of him as he learns more about the man and himself -- especially when you take into the factor that Shen Qingqiu... also hated Shen Qingqiu.

[anonymouscheeses]

Im sorry i have to say it..: Get Your Hands Dirty sounds like a love song.

HEAR. ME. OUTT!! (No i dont mean a love song between Chloe n Ella omg 😭)

What I'm implying here is that it sounds like one of those niche high school love stories when one of the lovers(most likely a goodie two-shoes) goes to their mentor/parent/even the person their loving/etc to ask for advice on relationships. Or more specifically, if this person is worth it or even a good person. From the top of my head: I Won't Say (I'm In Love) and the goodie and the wildchild dynamic is pretty similar to Gabriella and Troy from hs musical, which iws(iil) kinda inspired this post tbh but also ive been thinking about this ever since i first watched the movie. (You plop in ur own songs, i js KNOW this trope exists)

Now that we've established the well used niche trope existing in this niche song made by the niche king that is Disney.... why do i think that Get Your Hands Dirty is a love song, i hear?

Lets analyze THE LYRIICS 😈😈

"Right and wrong, cruel and kind, who's to say?" "There's a code that I believe in."

"Robin Hood" "yeah?" "Awesome guy" "yeah!"

"Every choice, you're gonna find there's shades of grey." "There are rules for a reason!"

"So you could then cross that line, theoretically."

"You'd agree?" "But he stole for the poor."

"The decision's always up to you. When there's only one thing left to do"

"I don't know you anymore.."

Okay, so i shortened and made it tiny for obvious reasons, that bein its too long 😭 so! AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS A FEEELIN?? a feelin that this is SCREAMING denial?! Its giving...

Chloe: Ellaaaa.... this girl im talkn to is SOOO HHHOOOOTT and PRETTY and cool and stuff but ugh.... SHE EEEVILLL!!

Ella: oh my gosh.. STFU. Shes prolly not even that evil ill prove it smh..

*get ur hands dirty starts playing. No exaggeration. No cap.*

"Okay, but there's some universal truths you must recognize." "Like?"

"Valiant knights, pure and good, guaranteed" "That depends on what they're fighting for"

"Creepy witches selling potions for evil deeds" "She could have kids she's providing for"

"If your good-good things will come to you"

MORE denial, Chloe wants to be friends with Red SO bad she looks stupid, but she brings herself back by trying to prove to herself that she's evil and they SHOULDN'T be that close. Which also is a big sign of comphet and heteronormativity, i would know 🧍 (which is a post for another day i might make. Prolly 2 prove that Chloe is a lesbian in deep comphet)

"But just how far do you go? How much do you compromise? Oh, tell me, how do you know. Where do you draw the line?"

"There's nothing I wouldn't do. If my heart tells me it's right. If it's for someone I love. If it's to save a life."

"To save your life."

Further deepening the trope i mentioned. The first line could be interpreted as a double meaning since the song is kind of mostly about Chloe coming to terms with the fact Red isn't really evil or as bad as she thought, plus the argument of where the line between evil and good is. It could refer to Red or Ella, maybe both, but Ella changes the meaning with her own experiences so it drifts off the focus from Red because we cant have ANYTHING 🤧 but i still believe Chloe intended it to be for Red since the entire song is really just for the progress of their relationship n stuff.

Now this could definitely all be in my head, yes, Disney would most likely NEVER canonize or even imply heavily a queer relationship or anything lgbtq on a pre established franchise (cowards.). But there is always a chance.... deep inside the dark heart of the mouse..

Plus, with the subtle hints here and there of Red and Chloe's relationship growing, romantically or not, they are still super close and love eachother alot. Chloe is js (kinda) canonically a girl kisser who cant help but find a girl kissable (same)

And don't get me started on this movie and its obsession with love and proving how it is not "ain't it". Hello...? They set the tone of love, but i see NO person close enough to Red established for this message (other than Chloe) and if they introduce some random guy in the next movies, NO ONE would care nor would they want it unless somehow its 100x better than redcharming, but thats impossible cz wlw 4 life.

So, this entire thingy is me basically finding scraps and wanting to provr that charminghearts IS canon and WILL be established soon! (Im delulu)

[quartervirus]

🦇👻🎃 HAPPY HALLOWEEEEEEEENNNN 🎃👻🦇

Halloween really snuck up on me this year. I intended to upload old, vaguely-thematic art throughout the month, then Life Happened and suddenly it was October 31st.

Here's my last-minute fit thrown together from what I had lying around for the company party I didn't know was happening until I walked into the studio on the day to find it done up like a Haunted House!

It's a lot of straps and chains and I definitely have a terrible allergic reaction now, but it was worth it.

I can also finally show off my NEW, TOTALLY PERMANENT VAMPIRE VENEERS!!!

I was 12 when I watched Interview With A Vampire for the first time and I've wanted fangs of my own ever since.

I am now 33.

I'd say 20 years is long enough to safely say it is no longer "just a phase", mom.

Of course, now that I have them and have gotten used to them, I'm already thinking about getting them longer ... and mORe ...

For anyone interested in details or are considering permanent fangs of their own:

These are ceramic veneers capping my existing teeth. There was no filing, extracting, or damage done to the original teeth. If I change my mind and want them removed at some point, it will be possible to remove them without issue using the old scans and X-rays as reference.

Most dentists may not agree to the procedure for personal or legal reasons. I had to really shop around to find these, which is largely why it took me so long to get them done. I finally found a dental practice specialising in cosmetics and prosthetics.

From there it was a simple matter of consulting with a dentist, taking a 3D scan of my teeth (upper, lower, biting), and sending them to the lab. The specialists mocked up a design which I tweaked until we got it looking just right, and barely two weeks later they were ready to pop in. It was so fast!

My dentist was so sweet and lovely and so excited to have such an unusual request. It turns out I'm not even the first person to ask for vampire fangs ... He and the lab made sure to brief me on the pros and cons and potential side effects, but were ultimately very happy to accommodate me.

I've had them for almost three weeks now. Talking was no issue, but I wore pop-ins throughout high school so I had some practice with more cumbersome teeth. It took a little longer to get used to how the fangs felt in my mouth, and I definitely startled myself a few times in the mirror.

Eating, however ... It didn't even occur to me until I was staring down a plate of food that it's not exactly a thing vampires are known for.

We're mostly fine now.

Spoons are sometimes an issue.

I am psyched and very happy with the veneers and 11/10 would get them again. Of course, now that I've gotten used to this bite, I'm already suffering "teeth envy" and considering future alterations ...

💀⚰️🦇 Happy Halloween, little batlings 🦇⚰️💀

[helenofblackthorns]

okay top 5 least favorite shadowhunters characters 🎤🎤

since you've already got your favorites sorted out

see. this is actually so hard because where do you even start with least favourite?? like do you go by how much you hate them or how indifferent you are about characters — those are totally different things! I despise Valentine but he is a least favourite? he's a villian doing is job within the story well & I think about him all the time because of that! feels a bit wrong to say he's a least favourite yknow? there's also characters who suck but are funny or their misfortune brings me enjoy (like Benedict <3)

anyway, after much internal debate I'm going to be choosing characters whose presence mostly just pisses me off idk

5. Axel Mortmain — he's here because he's such a non character for no reason & it annoys me. I literally had to look up how to spell his name because he's so deeply irrelevant, even in the very series he's the main antagonist of. should be a crime to be this boring honestly like you forget he exists the moment he's not on the page (something CC has also fallen victim to when she forgot to include him in Clockwork Prince despite the fact the title literally refers to him 💀)

4. Jordan Kyle — booooooooo tomato tomato 🍅🍅🍅 something Simon or Maia will think about him & it will get to me & for a moment i like him until i remember who he is and that he sucks! I'm pretty sure Maia's age got changed at some point but whatever it's still weird

3. Hodge Starkweather — he's so pathetic it's painful to read 😭 honestly the more I reread the series over time the less sympathy I have for him because yes his situation was unfair and sucked but Jesus Christ the way he's always the victim in his head. he never actually owns up to anything he did & this is most obvious when looking at how he treats Jace & is in denial about his identity (you know damn well which baby that is, you did murder his mother after all)

2. Andrew Blackthorn — I'm his number one hater but I'm never actually sure if CC intended for him to be hated. like is he supposed to be complicated but an ultimately positive figure? lots of people definitely like him/think favourly about him and I know this because they always disagree with my hater posts where I'm interpreting his actions in the way that makes him look the worst. idc I will be continuing because I know in my heart he abandoned Helen & Mark in Faerie on purpose & is therefore on this list

1. Belial — and in first place we have the one & only King of London! world's most nonsensical villian who's character seems to be trying to be many things at once (funny, for example) but fails at all of them <3 also he creates so many plot holes & I'm not entirely confident they'll be fixed in twp (although I really hope that is the case)

[tozettastone]

Bro why were people being so weird about you in the HP fandom?? I'm gonna take that as a sign that you probably won't write any further continuation for Hinata at Hogwarts, which is totally fair enough! But also, honestly that fic is probably my favorite characterization of Hinata maybe ever, and also the KakuHidan lore was FASCINATING like, I want a 500 page coffee table guidebook about Hidan's Elder God cult and their backstories and how they met, etc. Would you ever consider dropping some of the lore here on Tumblr?

Oooh.

Well, my HP fandom experiences far predate that fic anyway. But you're right that I probably won't end up writing more of that fic series! However, I'm glad you liked it.

I can drop some lore regarding Hidan's elder god cult in that fic at least. It's just his Jashinism combined with relentless HP Lovecraft allusion. I think it's tagged with "lovecraftian" or something, but it's definitely not a crossover. I just thought Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos had good vibes for a Hidan religion in that setting. So here're some examples:

In Launch Your Assault, there's a part where it reads:

[Hinata] crawled into bed and dreamed unquiet dreams of soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps on the roof of her tower dorm. You must sign the book of Azathoth in your own blood, whispered something, rising like steam from the sweltering sewers in her mind.

That's a reference to The Dreams in the Witch House, a short story in which the guy having the titular dreams is taken via dream to a city of Elder Things (not to be mistaken for outer gods — the elder things are basically advanced scary space aliens with crazy abilities) where he's made to do this. A lot of deaths follow. It's, like, a whole thing.

In A Strange Land opens with:

Hidan dreamed of water in his lungs and whirling stars and strange equations. He could still taste the rank salt water from a distant ocean on his cracked lips when he woke.

This stuff is kind of a melange of vague Lovecraft vibes. References to water and distant oceans are always intended to be allusions to the Deep Ones, a marauding species of humanoid fish-people from Massachusetts who worship their Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. "Strange equations" reference works like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dreams in the Witch House, texts which really lean into the convention of the delicate intellectual discovering some terrible mind-wrecking truth of reality through sheer force of mental instability. You know the kind.

Fun fact: when contemplating where some of Lovecraft's clearly pre-existing ideas about this stuff came from, you can also cf. earlier texts like Arthur Machen's The Inmost Light or The Great God Pan or also (much better known) Robert W Chambers' The King In Yellow.

There are also occasional references in all of the fics to, for example, "outer gods," which is a category that Lovecraft (and his later fans) uses to describe fantastical deities like Nyalarthotep and Yog-Sothoth. They're presided over by Azathoth, who is the greatest of them, but who also is kind of a drooling thoughtless non-being at the centre of the universe, who just kind of hangs out being serenaded by flutes that will drive you mad. Azathoth's somehow locked away from the regular universe of our daily perception, so we mostly don't worry about him. Until we do. LOL. (Since Lovecraft's work is by far at its most effective when he explains as little as possible, the deities tend to be guys of tremendous, but vague, significance.)

--

Re: Hinata's characterisation in that fic series.

I think it's more fun to write her in that spot because she doesn't actually have to be proactive about very much? One of the reasons I like sticking her in a setting with Hidan and/or Kakuzu is because they're both such assertive characters with such reliable motives that she doesn't have to exhibit any desire other than "please let everything be okay!" which we all just kind of accept as IC for anyone under the regular cohort of Hidan-and-Kakuzu circumstances. I find her canon character a bit wishy-washy as regards her internal motives, so this is my way of getting around it.

--

As for Hidan and Kakuzu backstory... I know they don't have any other family and they spend the holidays with each other, but I genuinely can't remember if I had ever thought more deeply about their relationship.

[darlingofdots]

What is a romance novel, really?

So far, the response to this post has mostly shown me that a lot of people don't actually know what a romance novel is, and that's okay! I don't expect everyone to know! However, for my own peace of mind, I am going to do my best to explain what we mean when we talk about romance novels, where the genre comes from, and why you should not dismiss the pastel cartoon covers that are taking over the display tables at your nearest chain bookshop. Two disclaimers up front: I've been reading romance novels since I was a teenager, and have dedicated the majority of my academic career to them. I'm currently working on my PhD and have presented/published several papers about the genre; I know what I'm talking about! Secondly, all genres are fake. They're made up. But we use these terms and definitions in order to describe what we see and that's a very important part of science, including literary studies!

The most widely used definition of "romance novel" to this day is from Pamela Regis' 2003 A Natural History of the Romance Novel, in which she states that "A romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more [protagonists]."* People also refer to the Romance Writers of America's "a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending" and another term you will see a lot is "Happily Ever After/Happy For Now," which posits that the protagonists must be in a committed and happy relationship at the end of the novel in order to count as a romance novel. That's it. That's what a romance novel is.

Of course it's a bit more complex than that; Regis also posited the Eight Essential Elements which describe the progression of the love plot over the course of the book, and there's a similar breakdown from Gwen Hayes in Romancing the Beat that is intended more as writing advice, but both of these are really useful for breaking down how this narrative structure works. My personal favourite part of the Eight Elements is that the romance opens with a definition of the society in which the protagonists exist, which is flawed in a way that oppresses them, and then the protagonists either overcome or fix it in a way that enables them to achieve their HEA. A lot of social commentary can happen this way!

It can also be a bit difficult to pin down what exactly counts as a "central love story" because who decides? A lot of stories have romance arcs in them, including dudebro action movies and noir mystery novels, but you would never argue that the romance is the central plot. A lot of romance novels have external plots like solving a mystery or saving the bakery. A useful question to ask in this case is whether the external plot exists for its own sake or to facilitate the romance: when Lydia runs off with Wickham in Pride & Prejudice, it's so that Lizzie can find out how much Darcy contributed to saving her family from scandal and realise her own feelings for him. The alien abduction in Ice Planet Barbarians happens specifically so the abducted human women can meet and fall in love with the hunky aliens. There are definitely grey areas here! Romance scholars argue about this all the time!

I have a suspicion that a lot of people who responded to the post I linked above are not actually romance readers, which is fine, but it really shows the lack of understanding of what a romance novel is. I have a secondary suspicion that the way we have been talking about books has contributed to this miscategorisation in a lot of people's minds, because especially with queer books we will often specifically point out that this fantasy book is f/f! This dystopian novel has a gay love story! This puts an emphasis on the romance elements that are present in a book when a lot of the time, the romance arc is just flavouring for the adventure/uprising/heist and we are pointing it out only because its queerness makes it stand out against other non-queer titles. It makes sense why we do this, but there is SUCH a difference between "a sci-fi book with an f/f romance arc" and "an f/f sci-fi romance." I could talk for hours about how the romance genre has evolved alongside and often in the same way as fanfiction and how there are codes and tropes that come up again and again that are immediately recognisable to romance readers, even down to phrases and cover design, and how romance is an incredibly versatile and diverse genre that functions in a very specific way because of that evolutionary process. The same way that dedicated fantasy readers can trace the genealogy of a given text's influences ("this writer definitely plays a lot of DnD which has its roots in the popularity of Tolkien, but they're deliberately subverting these tropes to critique the gender essentialism"), romance readers are often very aware of the building blocks and components of their books. These building blocks (that's what tropes are, lego pieces you put together to create a story!) often show up in other genres as well, especially as part of romantic arcs, but that doesn't make every book that features Only One Bed a romance novel, you know?

Romance is an incredibly versatile and diverse genre and I really highly recommend exploring it for yourself if you haven't. I personally read mostly Regency/Victorian historicals and I've been branching out into specifically f/f contemporaries, and there are so many authors who are using the romance framework to tell beautiful, hard-hitting stories about love and family while grappling with issues of discrimination, disability, mental health, capitalism, you name it. The genre has a very specific image in a lot of people's minds which makes them resistant to it and it's not entirely unjustified, but there is so much more to it than Bridgerton and repackaged Star Wars fanfiction!**

*the original text said "heroines" but Regis later revised this. There is a very good reason for the focus on the heroine in the first couple waves of romance scholarship, but that's a different post!

**neither of these are a bad thing and part of that genealogy that I mentioned earlier.

[kaumedii]

Introduction.

Welcome to Kaumedii!

(Pronounced: /ˈkaʊməɾi/ or /ˈkɑməɾi/)

I am KK, another B-grade artist meandering this digital hellscape equipped with nothing more than a dream and a pocket full of not-so-niche fascinations. My official platforms are on Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok all of which have the same handle.

Personal and Event Features

#kxxoc — Original Characters

Project Features — Art

#hitidehavoc — Personal Project

#ENAJustDeserts — ENA AU

Project Features — Writing

#ENAJDLore — ENA AU

(Attached below are a few notes and disclaimers regarding this account.)

From the Artist.

On Engagement

Before you decide to engage with my platform, I would like for you to first consider the following:

Spontaneity — I am not one to devote my entire life and being to a few interests, though I do not deny the possibility of spontaneous fixation and otherwise.

Communication — I am not a full-time artist nor an internet personality. I am mostly offline, and that unfortunately lends me little time for genuine interactions. That is not to say that I am completely distant. I just cannot promise my complete presence nor attention since my time is mostly occupied with work and other personal whatnots.

Audience — I am aware of my art’s ’charms’. In other words, there are inevitably some aspects of my style or current fascinations that draw in specific audiences. I myself cannot predict this from happening since I mostly draw for my own enjoyment and just care to share, but I would be naive to not at least expect it. That being said, I am not an outright NSFW artist nor am I one that is carefully tailored for a ‘family-friendly’ audience. I am not for kids… nor for any morally fossilized or even morally bankrupt adults.

On Content

As mentioned, my alignment as an artist is painfully grey, so I cannot easily tell you if you should draw near or fend off. Given this, I will provide you with a gist of what I will be offering:

Suggestive Themes — Whether that be characters in revealing attire or them parroting my impulsive (not evil) thoughts, Tumblr and I will morally get our freak on.

Disturbing Themes — I am an avid fan of the macabre, and that will occasionally bleed into my work, though that is admittedly less than I often hope for since I draw rather... cutely.

Interpretation — More often than not, I will take some liberties when it comes to making fan art of established titles. These are definitely done with respect to the original. This includes design tweaks, ships, dynamics, and alternative universes.

As for what I will not offer:

Children — I am incapable of producing them artistically and physically, and in the rare chance that I do, they will likely be ugly (cause they are).

NSFW — While I do acknowledge my capabilities, I have withheld such power for the betterment of humanity… behind a paywall of a bajillion dollars (tax exempt).

On Use

I do not allow reposts — Like everyone else, I am unsettled by the unauthorized use of my art, especially if it is for a profit, for artificial image generation, and or for personal gain (impersonation). I ask that you consult me directly if you do intend to use my art and that you to respect whatever decision is made during that conversation. Aside from blatant theft, I am not overly possessive of my work, so you are free to reference and take inspiration as you please!

On You

If you actually read through all that and fit the bill, congratulations! I have absolutely nothing to reward you with, but I will praise you for your integrity! Thank you!

Sincerely and certainly not yours,

Kaumedii.

[cadaverousdecay]

i have to be able to compare things to other things to understand them. if i am faced with something, i have to conceptualise it in terms i can understand.

sometimes it’s as mundane as thinking of desire as a form of hunger. taking a hard to pin down concept that mostly takes place in the mind and turning it into something concrete and physical.

but it often goes further. i like to analyze things and i’m really into literary theory and criticism, so i often view things through those modes.

ex:

there are differences between desire and hunger. the biggest being desire often won’t kill you while hunger will. but the metaphor gets across a basic idea, you want you need you long for your crave you yearn.

once you’ve set up the metaphor, it’s easy to come up with theories about the concept in question.

-hunger is caused by a lack of; it is a vacuum. you need, because you are empty. does desire come from a similar place?

-hunger is a thing that can be satiated. can desire be satiated as well? and if you need to eat to cure hunger, what kind of consumption is required for which kinds of desire?

-hunger evolved as a way to alert animals that they had to eat so that they could keep themselves alive. do desires come from a similar place?

etc

not to say any of these theories are correct, but they could be. honestly, it’s less a matter of truth and more a matter of perspective.

i feel like where a lot of psychoanalysis tends to fail is that they are searching for universal truths about the mind while often not realizing how much their own perspective is tinting their understanding of the mind.

i think trying to understand life is similar to analyzing literature. there are basic concepts you can use as a guide, you can attempt to explain it through existing theories and motifs and comparing one thing to another and all that. but however you end up understanding it will say more about you than it will about life itself.

i don’t personally know if life in general has innate meaning, and honestly i like the existentialist view that we give ourselves meaning. “existence precedes essence” we create ourselves, all that.

but i do think a lot of things have meanings. and it can be difficult when faced with something that has a definite meaning to figure out what the intended meaning is, and what part is my analysis brain looking for connections that aren’t there

it can cause miscommunications, especially when the references and connections between two people can vary so drastically. things can mean completely different things from one person vs the other, and there aren’t even any footnotes. they don’t even give you footnotes.

but for the most part it’s fun. i like to analyze and have theories and compare things. it’s fun extending that past literature and movies and other forms of media and into my life and psyche. but watch out… trying to analyze your mind can lead to analyzing your analysis and it becomes a whole thing.

a big appeal of literature is the connection aspect. and especially connecting paired with understanding. to compare two books to understand the themes better. to compare yourself with a book to understand yourself better. to feel understood by an author. to attempt to make yourself understood by becoming one.

i like things to make sense to me i guess is the biggest thing. and then i want to be able to make sense when trying to share my ideas and thoughts. i’m an analyser i analyse things