#this is not a static post; i will be coming back and editing it when i realize i forgot things

[smellrain]

𝐧𝐡𝟏𝟑 - 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭

in which: nico and you had met years ago in a cold rink in canada but then lost touch for several reasons. It's hard, growing and correcting mistakes of your past but you try anyway.

tags: written, angst, hopeful ending, mentions of: depression, injuries, hospitals, doctors, etc. (masterlist)

notes: [5.1k] I have no idea what this is? I woke up, wrote the entire thing and passed out again for 2 hours. Tried polishing it through editing? Yeah. It turned out a lot different than the rest of my stuff so far, so it's scary posting this. Come & tell me if you liked it.

The ice was as harsh as it was unforgiving. 

The cold air of the rink has seeped into your bones years ago and the reddend tips of your fingers went numb a while ago, but you were used to it by now. Nothing really mattered when you got like this, too caught up in your head for anyone to reach. 

Not even yourself. 

You had been home and then suddenly not, your body already knowing what you needed before your mind caught up to it. 

The rink wasn’t open, not yet, but you had gotten a key years ago. The owner, David, had been the only one that had looked at you the same back then. There had been a knowing sort of look in his eyes when he had seen you waiting for him at the front door stepps, eyes red. 

He had given you a key, because he had seen you for who you were: a girl whose entire life had collapsed around her. 

Bronze at fifteen, silver at sixteen, gold forever out of reach. 

You could still remember the red pen tucked into your doctor’s coat. The ‘my condolences, but’, the white light, the letter in your hand, the sinking realisation that this was it. 

That you were going to be one of the several girls that had pushed their body too far.

The same way you had done everything back then you had followed the instructions of your therapist to the letter. Stretching, compressions, different exercises. Still, there was no full recovery, no chance of ever skating professionally again. 

That might be the worst part, still being able to skate but knowing that you will never be able to feel it anymore. That you were cursed to be in this limbo, never letting go of it but never being able to live for it anymore. 

The harsh sound of your blade cutting over the fresh ice was as pleasant as it was torture. You wanted more, but you had to settle for this. You had to learn that this was all you were ever going to get. 

These select few hours in the early morning, just before your classes started, before you had to start living your life. 

You could feel yourself drawing harsh breaths, but it didn’t matter. You had pushed through worse, hunger, hurt and feelings just to stand here for a bit longer. The ringing in your ear accumulated when you thought about all that you had lost, that you could never regain.

Suddenly the heavy door of the entrance fell closed. You slowed down, curious who it might be. The clock in the corner of your vision reflected a red 05:57 back at you. It was too early for it to be anyone aside from David or another person with a key, someone like you.

It was a guy, a bag in his hand and another slung over his shoulder. 

You would recognize the equipment anywhere, familiar with it in a distant way. It must be a hockey player that David had picked out out of the hundreds that frequented this place. 

For some reason you already didn’t like him. Maybe because unlike you, he had the chance of actually archiving his dreams. Bitterness was an annoying but frecent emotion that stained the back of your mouth. 

You wanted. You wanted more than this. You wanted the early morning practices, the ones after school, the rigidous schedule, the heavy monitoring. What were you without all that?

The static in your mind had been interrupted by his arrival but you hardly noticed, more focused on the way he walked down the stairs, casually like he had done so hundreds of times already.

It was almost six, which meant it was time to get off the ice anyways, so you circled a few laps, rotating your wrists and shoulders to feel if anything was off, and then made your way towards the outside of the rink. 

“You look pretty,” said the boy from where he was tying his shoelaces up on the benches. “Out on the ice, I mean.”

Something in you hurt at that, as if your heart started pulling at its own strings. It’s been a while since anyone has watched you skate,, since you let someone else watch you. There was a sharp kind of anger rising up in you that it had been him watching you which dissipated as soon as you looked back at him.

It wasn’t his fault. There really was something wrong with you.

You knew your parents didn’t approve of you being here, but they couldn’t look at you anymore when you skated, disappointed that this was how it had ended. Disappointed in you.

“Thanks,” you said, your voice completely scraped raw. You hoped he didn’t notice it. 

“I’m Nico,” he said, approaching you. He held out his hand. He wasn’t wearing gloves yet but his dark shirt had thumbholes that his thumb peeked through which was weirdly endearing on him. 

You looked back up to his face. There was a tired but polite smile plastered on it but you didn’t have the energy to give him one. Instead you simply told him your name and took his hand. Even through his layer of fabric it was warm beneath your icy fingers.

He didn’t flinch at the cold of your hand and instead started genuinely smiling which took you by surprise. People didn’t react to meeting you like this, not anymore. 

Then, without saying anything else, he took off his guards and stepped on the ice, skating around to warm up. You watched him for a bit while scraping off the excess ice and putting your skates away. 

His skating was differentthan yours; not as delicate. The beauty of it had been hammered into you from an early age on which didn’t seem to be the case form him. It was weird, not being on the ice, being the one to watch instead. 

You changed back into your shoes and walked up the steps. 

From the top, which wasn’t all that high because this rink wasn’t that big, he seemed small. You wondered if you looked like that too, if anyone had thought that when you fell down, when they had seen you sprawled on the ice at fifteen, not being able to get up again. 

A sick shudder passed through you. You wondered if you had ever gotten up from that ice.

Then you turned around, your back to him and left without saying goodbye. 

~*~

The next time you saw him again, was two days later, just after six. 

You knew you were going to be late for class but didn’t really care. Today you weren’t as cooped up in your own head, but it was still hard to let go of these stolen few hours of freedom and face reality. 

“Hey,” Nico said, “it’s you again.”

“Hello,” you said in return. He stepped on the ice and you fought off the urge to leave immediately. That would be impolite, a voice reminded you in your head, even if you didn’t want him to be here right now.

“Are you here every morning?” he asked you, falling into step beside you and therefore joining you on your cooldown laps. 

Your eyebrows furrowed in annoyance. Couldn’t he just do his own thing? Did he have to come talk to you? “Yes.” 

"Dedicated. I only come every second day,” he said as if it mattered to you. You might have to leave early every second day now to avoid talking to him, which made your scowl even worse. 

“Okay.” You said instead. 

He hummed in reason but dropped the conversation after. When you took a look at him from the corner of your eye he didn’t seem deterred at your attitude, seemingly just satisfied that he got a response.

After another lap in, you hated to admit it but companionable silence, you left, without saying anything but this time he waved back at you from below. You didn’t return his gesture. 

~*~

Despite your early judgement, the two of you formed some kind of routine over the next few weeks. You came early, and sometimes you left a protein bar for him in the stands and sometimes he brought  you a hot tea for when you got off the ice. 

Still, always without fail, he joined you for a few laps. He talked about his life and sometimes asked you a few questions. Sometimes you answered him, other times you didn’t. He never pressed for answers. 

Nico told you that he was from Switzerland, which explained the heavy accent. He just joined Halifax, and he came early to work on his technique, preferring to do so in silence without his teammates chirping at him. You, in turn, told him that you had skated, professionally, before your injury. He didn’t ask for details about either of these things and you didn’t share of your own accord. 

Slowly, so slowly that you didn’t even notice, you realised that he had become your friend. 

It was strange. You hadn’t made friends in a long time. Before, you had had school friends, but because you never hung out outside of it, always training, it never deepend. 

A weird sort warmth seeped in under your skin at the thought of the two of you being friends like a steady fire that kept you warm at night.

The friends you had made while skating splintered along with your knee. 

It was hard, you knew that, to see their worst fear reflected back at them, but it was still hard for you to reach out, so you simply stopped talking to each other. 

On your bad days you thought that it was all their fault, on your good you knew that it was a mutual mistake. 

The thing about Nico was that he was hard to pin down. He was hardworking, thrived under pressure and loved hockey. He was also afraid of falling and failing, he loved sitting under the sun in the summers, feeling his skin heat up and his favorite colour was green, but he admitted that it changed every few weeks. 

You knew that this friendship wouldn’t last, not really. Neither of you had any way of reaching out to the other, and neither expressed the desire to do so but it was still nice, this tentative kinship.

~*~

“Have you ever played hockey?” he asked you, once. 

It must have been a Saturday or Sunday because you were in no hurry to get off the ice, instead basking in his company. 

“No,” you answered, simply.

He grinned, “you are missing out.”

“Really now?” you asked, teasingly, when you turned around to skate with your front to him.

“Really. I wanna teach you,” he said, leaving the choice up to you without outright asking. If you wanted to you could just brush it off and the conversation would continue. 

Instead you said, “yeah, sure, why not.”

His smile was blinding, the adoration for his sport bleeding from every inch of his skin. It was a good look on him, happiness. Distantly you wondered if anyone had ever thought that about you.

It was different, skating with a stick in your hands but it was fun. He taught you how to shoot and aim at a certain spot which you weren’t half bad at if you stood still.

Hours later when the two of you stepped off the ice your tea was cold but you hardly noticed it.

~*~

Another day you asked him what he was reaching for. 

“Olympics,” he had answered immediately but after a beat of silence he looked up as if the lights in the ceiling were stars he could wish upon. “I think I want someone to look at me and think ‘I want to do that. I want to start playing hockey.’”

You looked at him and the only thought that crossed your mind was that he was the reason you could step off the ice again, that you knew you would always be able to come back, just one more time. 

“I like that,” you said because it was true. 

He tilted his head back to you, and the way his eyes glimmered with a rare vulnerability made your breath catch. Or maybe that was just the effect he had on you, standing still, alive and just in reach.

Oh. 

That was that feeling in your chest. 

~*~

Yet another day he joined you on the ice and you immediately kicked him off again. 

“What did I say about injuries?” you asked, frustrated in a way only he could make you. 

“That they were not to be ignored,” he parroted back, his gaze between his feet as if staring at his ankle would magically heal it. 

“Exactly,” you said. Then, gentler than before, “you need to give yourself time to heal, otherwise you will never get better.”

He looked back up to where you were hovering above him. “Okay.”

You didn’t want him to have the last word. “Okay,” you said firmly and sat down next to him. 

The two migrated up to the changing rooms  where he sat on a bench with his ankle elevated while you worked through your stretches, your knewww aching in phantom pain.

~*~

Today your mind was quiet.

It was your last time and you had wanted to take it all in again, one last time. You were moving, your father had gotten a new job somewhere in New Jersey. You knew it was good, a new start away from everything, a chance to start over. 

But still, you were going to miss this. The rink, the quiet, the place you had grown up in. The place that was your prison as much as it was your salvation. 

As you looked up towards the ceiling, the lights shining down on you, the dark gary that seemed black in contrast, you thought you should cry. This was the perfect moment to, and you hadn’t yet. 

Then, the door opened. 

You were surprised because he wasn’t supposed to be here today. Nico had been here yesterday and the two of you had argued about your favorite brand of cereal, and you selfishly had wanted to leave it at that. 

To leave your friendship without having to say goodbye, without having to ever really let go of him. 

“Nico,” you breathed, before you could stop yourself. 

“Hey you,” he said, as he came up to you. You didn’t even realise that you had stopped moving. 

“It’s late,” he stated. You looked up to the clock and sure enough, it was almost twenty past. 

“Ah,” you said, uncaring. It’s not like you had school today. You wondered when he went to school, if his just started later than yours had. In all your talks you had never actually talked about it. 

And you never were going to anymore, you had to remind yourself. Suddenly it was a lot harder to breathe through the ache in your chest. 

“Are you okay?” he asked, and you knew he meant it, “you look, I don’t know, sad?”

“I’m moving,” before he could ask anything more, “like tomorrow. This is the last time I’m going to see you in a while.”

“Oh.” The expression on his face was hurt, because he must have realised that you had intended to leave without saying anything. 

“I’m sorry,” you said. “for everything.” You weren’t really sure for what, but it seemed like the right thing to say. For your intentions, the way you acted, maybe.

“It’s okay,” he said, but it wasn’t, not really. You knew that and he knew that you knew.

“I’m moving to New Jersey.”

He was quiet for a bit.”America,” he started. Then, “do you want to exchange numbers?”

You ignored the sting behind your eyes. “I’m probably going to have to get a new simcard, but you can give me yours.”

The two of you skated back to the door, from where you had stood still in the middle of the open space. He got a piece of paper and a pen from his bag and then somewhat messily tore off the corner of a worksheet and scribbled down his number in blue ink and signed it with his name.

He looked up at you but neither of you said anything for a while. What was there to say, anymore? 

“Don’t forget about me,” he ended up telling you and you reached out to hug him. He was warm under your hands, steady and you were going to miss this, him.

“Don’t forget me either,” you murmured into the crook of his neck. 

Still, in the back of your mind, you knew that you were never going to use his number. You were going to cut off your old life before it could follow you to your new one. But for once you had told him the truth, you weren’t going to forget about him, probably ever. 

And that was that. You said goodbye, waved and you left him there. He returned the gesture, face unreadable and you were sad that the last time he looked at you he wasn’t smiling.

From the top you looked down at him one last time. He seemed bigger now, compared to that first time you had looked down at him, still filled with bitterness.

Maybe that was just your imagination, or maybe it was his confidence after playing with his current team, after seeing his results pay off. 

You turned and let the door fall closed behind you. 

Then, and only then tears started to well up in your eyes. You ignored them and moved on. Always looking ahead, never back. 

Still, you kept the number tucked away safely hidden in a small corner of your wallet. A piece of him that you would always carry with you. 

~*~

You made new friends, graduated and decided to attend college. Got diagnosed with chronic depression and mild anxiety, got a boyfriend and broke it off again after three months, cried, laughed and finally lived. 

But there was part of you hidden in the corner of your wallet, too.

~*~

If you were being honest, Nico didn’t really cross your mind when your friend asked you to go to a hockey game with you. 

In a way he did, because he had been one of your few friends that played hockey, but it was more of an oh yeah, the sport Nico loved and not oh yeah I’m going to a hockey game and I wonder if Nico is still playing, I wonder if he made it to the big leagues. 

Okay, maybe that was a bit of a lie, but still. You hadn’t expected this. 

The two of you went to the Prudential Center and you were excited despite your earlier apprehension. Your phone with the blocked tags of icehockey and nhl seemed to burn a hole in your pants but it’s not like anyone would know. 

Your friend had told you a bit about the team, but if you were being honest, you could not remember any of their names, much less which position and line they played. 

When the players got announced, the home team first, you froze. Suddenly the noise of the cheers around you were completely quiet until they flooded back to you, a harsh reminder of reality.

Because it was him. That was Nico. Your Nico. Or like your past Nico.

There, with a red thirteen and a small C over his chest, was Nico. He was all grown up now, and instead of thinking wow, he is kind of attractive when he smiled at the camera, you thought, holy shit, he is really, really handsome. 

Your friend picked up on your strange behaviour. “What's wrong?”

I know him, you wanted to scream. I think he saved my life without meaning to, and I think I loved him but I never told him. What came out instead was, “I think I'm going to be sick.”

“What?” she asked, suddenly even more worried, “do you need fresh air? Or do you just want to leave?”

You wanted to stay. You wanted to shoot a puck at his head and tell him to look up at you, the way he had done back then. 

“No, don’t worry about it,” you said and when didn’t change at your reply, you added, “I’m just going to get some water. I think it might be the crowd or something.”

“Are you sure? Do you want me to come with?”

You knew how much she had been looking forward to it, and besides there was nothing she could help you with anyhow. “No, really, it’s all good. Just need to breathe for a second.”

She gave you a look, and you smiled despite wanting to curl up in a corner and cry, “if you are sure. But if anything,” she took your hand in hers, “if anything is wrong call me. I’m gonna have my phone in my hand the entire time.”

You squeezed her hand the same way your heart did at her words. “Thank you, really, but it’s okay. I'll be right back.”

Then you fled up the stands and you couldn’t help but think about the first time you had seen him, how you had left without saying anything. You looked down, just once, and spotted him immediately, as if he was the north pole to your south, your eyes drawn to him. 

He seemed even bigger now, as if he had finally grown into the steady confidence he had had, even back then. 

You smiled. He deserved it, genuinely. You were glad that he did end up making it to the big leagues, even if some part of you hurt at that. You still missed ice skating, your rink from back then, David, but most of all you missed what could have been if you hadn’t been scared. 

What could have been if you had just texted him. 

Regret was a useless emotion to feel, but all of a sudden you felt yourself drown in and you coughed once, just to ease that feeling in your throat.

Then you turned your back to the ice and walked up the rest of the stairs to the stands to get yourself some water. 

It was useless trying to think about any of it now, so you pushed the thoughts aside for later. 

~*~

A week later you were drunk. It was a Friday evening and you had finally finished the gruelling lab you had worked on for the entire day. 

You were hanging out in your friend’s room, the same friend that had taken you to the game a week before. Two of your other friends were sat ob the floor, leaning gainst the opposite bed and a warm, content feeling spread through your chest. 

You had friends now. 

“What’s wrong?” she suddenly asked from where she was sat next to you on her bed, her back against the headboard, yours against the wall adjacent to it.

“Nothing,” you answered because nothing was. 

“Don’t ‘nothing’ me, tell me,” she said, “you've been quiet ever since we came back from the game a week ago and I’ve waited long enough for you to say something, so now I’m going to.”

Had you been that obvious? Or did she just know you that well? Either way, she deserved the truth, the full truth.

“I just,” you began and stopped again, starting to peel off the sticker on your beer with the blunt edge of your nail. 

“When I was younger, I skated.” You started. You knew that she had never expressed any kind of interest in skating so you elaborated further, “really well.” Wow, you were really eloquent tonight.

“Okay,” she said, no doubt wondering where you were going with this. 

Your mind was fuzzy around the edges because of the drinks which made harder than usual to focus on your words, but it made it easier to talk about it, too. These people didn’t know about anything that had been, only what was. “I was good enough to win. Olympics, I mean.”

Suddenly one of the other two friends from the other side of the room joined in. “The Olympics?”

“Yeah,” you said, staring firmly at the bottle in your hands, not looking at any of them. “I won bronze and silver, fifteen and sixteen.”

“Holy shit,” she said, as did your other friend, but one of them remained quiet, so you looked at her. 

From the look in her eyes you knew that she knew. “And then I fell, badly. Tried to get up again but couldn’t. Went to the doctor and you know,” you trailed off, “retired. Started physiotherapy, got a lot better but…”

“Not enough to ever compete again,” she finished for you. 

“Yeah,” you said, voice hoarse. “But I couldn’t let go of it, you know? So sometimes, before school, I snuck out to the local rink and skated around just because I didn’t know anything else.”

Your friend that was next to you on the bed made an encouraging noise, and laid a hand on your knee, so you continued. 

“Then I met a guy. I was in a bad mental place, not really talking to anyone unless I had to, but we somehow became friends.”

Then you looked at them, “I don’t know, it was a weird friendship because we only ever saw each other at the rink every few days, but I felt something for him anyway. It wasn’t quite love but could have been, maybe.”

The others were still listening, and the words rushed out before you could stop yourself. “Then I moved. Wanted to leave before saying goodbye because that would hurt too much. On the day I was leaving I saw him anyway. He gave me his number but I never used it.”

“You wanted to make a clean cut?” your friend asked. 

“Yeah. It was sefish, because it wasn’t just about me, you know? I should have told him how I felt, but I didn’t.” You shook your head, “but that’s not even the point. I saw him again at the game.”

“Oh,” your friend that had dragged you to it, said. 

“Yeah,” you answered, and your other friend asked, “why didn’t you talk to him?”

The other friend, the one that had never asked you about your skating, even though she had known, even though she had every opportunity to, said, “because he was playing, right?”

“Yeah,” you said and you wanted to cry. You could still hear his name announced by the speakers. “Funny, all the time we spent together and I never knew his last name.”

“Who is it?” she asked, gentle, and you knew you could just not answer. You could bury it deep down, once and for all. But that’s not what you wanted to do, not anymore. 

“Nico Hischier.” And your friend laughed. 

“Of course it’s the captain,” she said and you couldn’t help but join in, the effects of the alcohol cursig through your veins. What were the chances, really? That he ended up in the state you had moved to all those years ago.

The others joined it. “He changed his number by now, I’m sure.”

“Oh yeah, definitely,” one of them said. 

All of you were quiet for a second. “Wait, I have an idea,” she said and moved her hand from your leg and grabbed your phone. 

She gave it to you and made a motion for you to unlock it. You did and gave it back to her. From where you were sat you weren’t able to see your screen, much less what she typed on it. 

After a few seconds she gave it back to you. 

It was Nico’s instagram profile. You hesitated before clicking on his most recent post. Your other friends that had been sitting on the floor climbed up to join you. 

“Follow him,” one of them said. You could feel your heart thumping in your chest. This was not the account you had used to document your wins and training back then, but it still had your first and last name in the username, but it was on private. 

Underneath your thumb the button changed colour. “Fuck,” you said.

The other three laughed at your exclamation. “Wait, do I text him?” you asked, turning to the others. 

They all looked back at you, and one of them asked, “do you want to?”

You did. You really fucking did, but you had no idea what to say. “But what do I say? Hey, sorry for being a dick to you when we were like seventeen, I was half in love with you and didn’t know how to tell you, so I just cut you out before anything could possibly hurt me.”

One of them leaned her head on your shoulder. “If you leave out the half in love part, it’s not too bad.”

“You should also ask if he wants to meet and talk in person,” the other said. 

You opened your notes app and the four of you composed a message to him. 

Your hands were shaking and your heart was beating too fast. This was it, this was your chance and you weren’t going to let go again without a fight. This time you would stay and he could make the choice: to stay or to leave. 

Then, you hit the small blue icon and sent it and let out a quiet scream. You wouldn’t be able to take it back, not anymore. 

You threw your phone away from you onto a small patch where the blanket you were sitting on was still visible. 

Over an hour passed and you still hadn’t heard back from him. Soon after you pased out, but a quiet acceptance had settled in your stomach. He forgot. Or maybe he didn’t see the message or maybe he didn't want to talk to you again, which you couldn’t blame him for. 

But when you woke up the next morning, you had a single notification from him. 

For a second you debated not clicking on it, but that would mean standing still. It would be different this time. You would be different this time. There was an unfamiliar, new kind of determination that flickered up your spine and it reminded you of the steady ice under your skates, of the final hug the two of you had shared. Harsh, unforgiving, certain. 

You clicked on it and there was no going back now.

Nico Hischier Hello, it’s been a while.  Of course I remember you, didn’t I tell you?  For sure, I'd love to meet up and talk. Does next weekend work for you? I have a home game which makes it easier for both of us. 

notes: So. How are we feeling? Thoughts? Part 2? Please talk to me about this one because this lives in my mind rent free.

[chaos0pikachu]

Cinematography?? In MY BL??? Not as likely as you think.

TLDR: it's a joke!!! but also legit sometimes I see "cinematography in bl" and it's just some basic pictures with mid-tone lighting and blue t-shirts. Let's talk film terms like: aperture, panning, tilting, and movement in film so we can see what goes into cinematography (with sources!). Also if I name a show you like as "boring cinematography" don't send me hate mail I'll laugh

(examples used: Our Skyy2 vs kinnporsche, 2gether vs semantic error, 1000 Stars vs The Sign)

If I name a show you like in this post as "bad cinematography" be chill about it, like, I ain't saying you can't like it, I'm just talking about techniques here not personal likability or overall show quality. I like badly filmed shit too say hello to my collection of Friday the 13th Blue Rays we're just here to talk techniques and like, educational stuff okay?

So the straight (heh) textbook definition of "cinematography" is: the art of making motion pictures. Which, frankly, tells you nothing. Like it's not wrong~~ but it's not informative either. Cinematography covers a lot of what we, the audience, visually see on screen:

"Cinematography is the art of photography and visual storytelling in a motion picture or television show. Cinematography comprises all on-screen visual elements, including lighting, framing, composition, camera motion, camera angles, film selection, lens choices, depth of field, zoom, focus, color, exposure, and filtration." (source)

So let's talk movement in film.

So when I talk about movement, what do I mean? I mean the way the camera, the characters, and the environment moves within a frame.

This video on Akira Kurosawa's usage of movement in a scene is brilliant:

Something as simple as having rain or fire in the background of a shot can enhance the emotions of a scene vastly. it gives the scene depth - literal depth, not narrative depth - that would otherwise be missing.

The way the camera moves and transitions leading the viewers eye back and forth makes what you're watching more engaging. You aren't consuming these scenes, you are engaging with them. They are apart of the story itself, giving the environment life and texture so the characters within them matter more.

And, look, I get busting out Thee Akira Kurosawa might be unfair, but if we're gonna talk cinematography we can't not talk the importance of movement on film.

To understand good cinematography you have to understand what makes it good and as such what makes bad or mediocre cinematography.

In connection with movement we gotta talk about camera techniques like panning and tilting:

"Camera movements are a fundamental part of video production. They can be a powerful storytelling device, heightening tension, evoking emotions, and bringing the viewer into the action. Without saying a word, camera movements can transform a scene’s entire narrative, and direct audiences’ attention where you want it." (source)

So we have movement of environment, of characters, and we also have movement of the camera itself.

Ok so like, where does the BL come in Pikachu??

I'm getting to that, I'm going to start with a more general example: Our Skyy 2 (Bad Buddy meets 1000 Stars edition) vs Kinnporsche.

Starting at 5:17 we have Pran stranded or whatever, and this shot is like, it's fine. It's boring as hell, but fine. Why is it boring as hell? Well it's flat, it lacks movement, it lacks depth.

When the driver drove off the camera could have panned to follow his movement and then panned back to Pran at a different angle to showcase his isolation. Honestly since the scene starts with a mid close up of Pran, I would have had the camera behind Pran as the driver drove away, and had the camera pan around Pran 360 so we get shots of his environment, and him, while also emphasizing holy shit he's like, fucking stuck in the wilderness. 

In general, there's a big lack of movement in the scene. The camera remains almost entirely static, there's no attempt at zooming in or out, following Pran's movement, or showcasing his environment in any meaningful way. Even when Pran begins walking towards the camera the angle of the framing is still centered, rather than tilted downward or upwards to give us more dimension (non-BL comparison, the Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington does the "walking towards the camera" shots really well).

We get a cut of a medium close up of Pran, with a deeper focus so his environment is blurred out.

I understand the thought process of this shot, we want the audience to focus on Pran, but if the point of the scene is to emphasize he's alone, confused, maybe even a bit anxious at his new circumstances it could've been done better. Take a wider shot from this angle, open up the lens to allow for that background environment to come through and show him isolated. Maybe do a pan above him or tilt the camera up going from his feet up as he nervously ruffles his hair. There's options here.

This just adds more walking to the scene, which we already had. It doesn't enhance or emphasize anything about Pran's emotions as a character.

Anyway the camera continues to follow him and then we get another cut. And it's from the same angle as before, only this time we see a truck coming. The camera remains static, it completely stops moving, and we just wait for the truck to drive into the frame.

This whole sequence of events ends at 5:57 and while not a long sequence I find it frustrating because it's boring. The only way the audience knows that Pran is anxious is via Nanon’s acting, there’s nothing in the filmmaking that enhances or contributes to that feeling.

He’s alone, until he’s not, and that’s all the scene tells us. It leaves the scene lacking any tension as well, because we’re not getting a sense of isolation - how large is this space? How alone is Pran right now? What is the entirety of the environment? 

Contrast this with a similar scene in kinnporsche ep06 where Kinn and Porsche are alone in the mountains. I don't have a video of this specific scene so I have to link the trailer, starting at 1:48 to 1:52, but see how we start mid-close up of Kinn and Porsche, then pan out from above them? This is a better showcasing of just how vast the environment around Kinn and Porsche are.

They're still center frame throughout all of this, the depth of the scene is in mid-focus so nothing is blurred out and you can see the sharpness of the environment.

It also places the audience in the same space as Kinn, who is looking up at the sky while the audience looks down at him. It makes the audience a more active participant in the shot, emphasizes the state of the characters, gives the audience a sense of space & environment, and relies a sense of emotion.

The additional fast zoom out also adds to the scene by adding movement and making it more dynamic.

(my man pran looking like this 🧍)

Both these scenes are pretty short, but they're relaying similar information and one is way more dynamic and effective than the other. Both Pran and Kinn/Porsche are alone in the wildness, but in the latter there's a lack of space, a lack of movement, and a lack dimension. This is mainly a framing issue, so let's talk more about camera movement (panning, & tilting).

Here's a scene from 2gether vs a scene from Semantic Error.

(saw someone say 2gether had a high production value and chepie where??)

This entire scene with Sarawat and Tine is flatly shot. There is nothing in their background so no outward movement is happening, the lighting is even as are the colors, everything is at the same depth, and there's little to no motion in the camera.

The scene with Sarawat pushing Tine into frame. Why doesn't the camera follow Tine's motion of movement so the scene has more momentum? It just stops and the char falls out of frame before walking back into it. Then we get a series of cuts back and forth of close ups on Sarawat and Tine's faces. Back and forth, back and forth.

The editing leaves a ton to be deserved because if the back and forth did a quick pan back and forth with each beat we could build up tension, give the scene some texture, heighten the intensity of the argument. If we're going for something softer we could place them in on better set, or make the characters move themselves - have Sarawat walk away from the argument up those stairs, have the camera follow his movement as Tine chases him continuing the argument - or play with the lighting a bit, pan the camera down or tilt it something!

When Tine kisses Sarawat why doesn't the camera move with him in a more notable way? Why did we have a cut to a close up? And then we're back in a mid close up and more cuts and this editor is killing me!

This scene is 4mins long and the only engaging bit of filmmaking here is when the camera follows Tine when he steps closer to Sarawat putting the latter in the frame at 3:15, the entire scene is 4 minutes long.

I want to compare this scene to this scene in Semantic Error which is also all dialogue and also obviously filmed on a shoestring budget.

So right away the camera work here is smart, it starts off in an establishing shot, evenly lit, of Sang Woo and Jae Young both in the frame. Then we get a mid close up of JY looking down, then a tight close up of JY looking up.

The change in camera angle emphasizes his surprise at seeing SW here as he looks up at SW. The lighting has also changed, it's much brighter now. The camera also begins to move, where it was static before it begins to tilt and shift.

We get a cut to SW, the first one of this scene. JY is seeing SW in a new light for the first time, and as such so is the audience. By starting the scene off in an outward shot with both chars in the frame, they are placed on the same level and the audience doesn't see their expressions up close. So when we're hit with JY's close up of surprise and then SW's close up of his wet hair it holds way more impact. It enhances the feelings of JY's character for the audience.

The lighting behind SW has also changed, it's much brighter, and warmer compared to the cooler tones of light behind JY. The camera also slows, and continues to to tilt and shift. JY's world has literally been shifted on his axis.

We get another cut, this time medium on SW and notice, the camera stops moving for that moment and the light around him dims. It's not as saturated. We're moved out of JY's pov here and back into "regular" framing.

SW tries to make JY leave, we get a close up cut of the cut on JY's arm - hey editing used to display important and new information! - then the camera cuts to SW getting medicine and here's a small but important thing, when he tosses at JY the camera follows his movement. And instead of cutting away, when JY gets up thinking SW is hurt, the camera follows JY's movement back towards SW.

It would have been easy to make a cut there back and forth - like in the 2gether scene did over and over - but following the movement of the characters makes the scene way more interesting visually to watch.

Changing the angles of the camera from a lower angle (where JY is looking up) to a downward angle (where SW is looking down) makes the scene more interesting visually as well and enhances the storybeat of JY looking up at SW in a new light memorized. This contributes to the story as well, as it's JY who catches feelings for SW first so their are literally, on uneven ground until they're not later in the story. The camera is panning, tilting, moving with the characters even given the limited space. The lighting adds to the effectiveness, as do the minimal cuts.

On a technical level, the scene in Semantic Error is just better filmed. In my own opinion, the scene is far more engaging b/c the filmmaking is better, where in 2gether the reliance is almost completely on the actors to sell the scene with little help. And I'm not saying nothing about Bright and Win cause their stans wildin'.

Next, I wanna talk about aperture.

I saw a post that used this word and I didn't understand the context in which they were using it because aperture isn't a style of filmmaking its a camera setting or lens adjustment - it's the rate at which the camera opens and closes letting in light and focus.

"Aperture is the opening of the lens through which light passes. When you hit the shutter release button to take the picture, the camera aperture opens to the predetermined width, letting a specific amount of light through. A large aperture lets more light in, and vice versa. Aperture is calibrated in f/stops, written in numbers like 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11 and 16. The larger the number, the narrower the aperture." (source) <- really recommend this article if you want to learn about aperture in film.

A great non-BL example of aperture used for style is One Piece Live Action where cinematographers Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, and Michael Wood love using deep focus aperture in a lot of scenes.

But let's compare The Sign vs 1000 Stars.

So when the scene starts, we're in mid-focus/aperture, everything is of similar sharpness and depth. Nothing is especially blurred out we're getting the full spectrum of Phaya and Tharn's environment.

When the camera switches to close ups of Phaya and Tharn however, we get a deep focus aperture. That's why everything behind them is so blurred out. In a close up of Phaya, even Tharn's face is blurred. The director wants the audience to focus specifically on these characters individually, so we can understand the weight of their dialogue. But when the camera wants us to see the characters as a unit, it cuts, pulls back out of that deep focus and everything is back in mid-focus again.

Here's another thing, it's subtle but it's important.

This scene also combines what we already discussed about movement. At :08 of the scene, in that first mid-shot the camera is actually zooming in closer on Phaya and Tharn. Not dramatically, subtly, but it is there. This is important, because at 3:23 we get another mid-shot of them, pulled out of that deep focus, and the camera begins to zoom out.

The camera also follows the movement of Phaya grabbing Tharn's hands, then pans back up to Phaya's face once again before panning higher into the frame and panning back to their faces and zooming in.

When we move back out of that deep focus, into a mid-shot the camera continues to zoom out on the two characters as they kiss.

I saw someone say that this scene wasn't "filmed like BL kisses" and, eh? Like it isn't filmed in that static style of filmmaking which has dominated BL filmmaking probably due to budgetary reasons. But

The Sign follows a similar filmmaking style as Kinnporsche and Domundi shows do. But also just like, basic filmmaking techniques you'd see in shows of the non-CW/soap variety.

The thing fans are seeing here is film technique (probably partially due to a larger budget). Movement, lens adjustment, panning and titling, lighting and color are all playing a role in this specific scene.

Cinematography baby.

(sidenote the VFX of The Sign is dope as fuck too)

Okay so let's talk Our Skyy 1000 Stars

So this opening scene follows a similar structure to the scene in The Sign: mid focus shot of the two chars, into separate deep focus close ups. It's also a dialogue heavy scene like the one with Phaya and Tharn.

So why does their scene work better on a technical level than this one in Our Skyy 2?

The scene in The Sign combines techniques of aperture, movement, lighting, color and framing to give everything more impact.

In this scene with Phupha and Tian we get a similar editing style as the scene in 2gether: lots of back and forth cuts, very tight close ups, static camera movement. Where as the camera zooms in and out during mid-shots, the camera doesn't move in Our Skyy 2. It remains motionless even though a zoom in as the two characters lay in bed would add a lot to the scene itself.

In the close ups the camera continues to remain static, only changing angles when there's a cut. At 1:22 Phupha moves his arm to wrap around Tian, the camera could have taken a closer shot at his arm, and then followed his movement as he wraps it around Tian. Like how the camera followed Phaya's movement when he holds Tharn's hand.

Instead it's just a flat shot, we see his arm wrap around in a mid-focus above shot. The camera does move to follow Tian a couple times - at 1:50 for example. But overall, the scene is stiff - who sleeps like this frfr - in framing, in movement, in depth.

I want to say that I don't think this scene is bad - like I do the 2gether scene or the earlier scene with Pran - I think it's just, okay~~

And no, for none of these examples did I pick "the worst" shots or whatever. I'm not out to get any specific show, but tried to find comparable scenes and compare and contrast the filmmaking techniques used in both and how effectively they were used.

I want to leave off with this.

There's a lot that goes into cinematography, yes this singular shot of Furiosa is amazing, but what makes the scene amazing?

Pay attention to how the camera moves (panning and tilting), when the camera moves (zooms in and out), the movement of the scene (the hair and sand moving), the lighting (Furiosa from behind is in darkness, her side profile more lit), the depth of the scene itself changing (as she walks away from the group the focus/aperture gets deeper on her, then when she walks out of the frame it grows larger to focus on the characters left behind).

All these little things make up what is "cinematography". The more you learn about the techniques used the more you can notice about film and what makes a scene powerful.

As BL gets more budget we're seeing shows expand their filmmaking catalogue more and more. Which is exciting! If fandom is gonna talk cinematography I think it's helpful to have the vocab to do so, and it's cool to watch a scene and be like "oh I see what they're doing here and why and how".

I mentioned other things that go into cinematography like framing, lighting, color, and there's also editing (which is separate). Idk if I'll make a post about those things cause I'm lazy and this shit takes forever to research and write but who knows~~

Check out other posts in the series:

Film Making? In My BL? - The Sign ep01 Edition | Aspect Ratio in Love for Love's Sake | Cinematography in My BL - Our Skyy2 vs kinnporsche, 2gether vs semantic error, 1000 Stars vs The Sign | How The Sign Uses CGI | Is BL Being Overly Influenced by Modern Western Romance Tropes?

[like these posts? drop me a couple pennies on ko-fi]

[blindmanbaldwin]

Perhaps it was seeing it on a premium large format screen, perhaps it was my mood that day, or perhaps it is because I'm always drawn to the stories of people trapped inside of their contradictions — but I was impressed with "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" last year, especially with its cinematography and editing. I thought bits of the film, particularly the climax, had shots/rhythm evocative of the great Terrence Malick only to find the film's editor Mark Yoshikawa is a frequent collaborator of Malick.

Now I could talk at length about those comparisons, or the sense of gaze of the film (Tom Blyth's eyes are fascinating to track when he's in close-up/medium shot), or the relationship the wider series has with the medium of television. But I'd rather talk about the beginning of one scene near the beginning of the third-act as an example of effective pacing building dramatic tension and establishing character.

Start on this wide shot at a low-angle. "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" uses low-angle shots frequently, which makes sense in a story about insecurity about power/class gaps. Low or high angles means we see something at an unnatural eye-line — which creates a visual power imbalance.

In the background we have a man just barely peaking over the horizon. This is Coriolanus Snow, our boy from the Capitol who comes from a noble family that lost everything in the war. In the first chunks of the film, we learn that Snow wants to restore his family's former glory. He wants to get that power back. The power gap that we see.

But this isn't the Capitol. This is District 12. This is place he was sent because of his failure. He cheated at the titular Hunger Games to win them for his tribute. So what could he be looking for out here to help him with his desire?

POV shot now. Cutting from that low-angle wide to seeing through Snow's eyes. While it isn't the subject of this post, the POV shot is the most direct expression of gaze. Think about cinema's greatest voyeurist Alfred Hitchcock and all his iconic POV shots ("Vertigo"). Nothing gets inside of a character's head like literally showing what they see.

Snow moves toward something — a something we now know was the (relative) perspective of the first shot.

Or, rather, not a something. But a someone:

Now back on Snow. Only this time he isn't obscured in the background but near the center of the frame. The camera pushing in before to emulate his movement seen now in his movement. Going toward the someone seen in the previous shot. Someone we couldn't really see before — but now are getting closer to finding.

Close enough to see her guitar.

Of course, if we were listening we would already know that this is Lucy Gray Baird. For her voice echoes through the forest and calls to Snow. But we're sticking to the visual — where we see him pushing toward someone. Pushing toward her.

Baird was his tribute in the Hunger Games. Living (but not hailing from) District 12, she had the lowest odds to win the Games. But through her own determination and a little bit of a push from Snow, she succeeded in winning the Games.

More importantly — she succeeded in winning his heart, as he did to her.

Go back to earlier: the beginning of "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" establishes Snow's desire as reclaiming his family's lost power. Story is conflict, conflict is character, and character is desire. Think mathematically for a moment: Character is action that is a function of desire. But desire cannot remain static. Pull any book or movie off of a shelf at a library. What a character wants at a start will not be the same thing/only thing they want at the end.

Snow began wanting to reclaim his family's lost power. But through this desire — him cheating the games and getting exiled to District 12, the lowest and poorest district in all the land, runs contrary to this desire. He cannot get more power being among the powerless. Why would he act in such a contradictory manner?

Because once he laid his eyes on Lucy Gray, young Coryo had a new desire in his heart. He didn't want to just reclaim what belonged to him, but he also wanted to protect her.

Like all functional drama, this creates a problem — he wants two things that are mutually exclusive. To protect her requires working against the Capitol which means pushing his family further down the social ladder. But to work on restoring his family means throwing her to the odds, and he can't stand thinking of her brown eyes dying out there.

Speaking of brown eyes...

Now we're on Lucy Gray's face. Focus on her and her playing (notice her eyes looking down and not hyperaware of her surroundings), but with another element in the background. Snow coming on the horizon.

Adapting a work from one medium to another always creates new restraints, but also new modes of expression. Condensing a 450-page novel into a ~2.5 hour film requires conveying the emotional arguments of the work in different ways. As such, "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" focuses more on Snow's desires/contradictions than Baird's (even more than the novel) but we still have to some sense of her internal desire to create a compelling character that isn't just an object for Snow's character journey.

Of course, there is the real basic desire of surviving the Games, but that is lackluster and doesn't create real emotional bite. No, her central desire (at least in the film) comes through that one point mentioned earlier — she lived in District 12, but she did not come from District 12. Baird is a wanderer, or at least before the war was part of a wandering culture. Now she is trapped. Her desire is to get back what she lost; she wants to fly as a bird once again.

Look at the above shot. There is no distress on her face. While Snow got exiled for his actions in the prior chunk of the film, Baird got no punishment. She went back to District 12 and could play her music again. Not free to fly high but freer than she was at the start when she got called to fight in the Games.

This natural landscape Baird and Snow find themselves in during this scene is (metaphorical) paradise. It is the closest place to Baird's desire of freedom. The latter bits of the film's third-act use this idea to great dramatic effect.

Baird and Snow's desires both overlap and conflict. Both want to get something that they lost from the war — Snow his status, and Baird her freedom. But their desires operate in opposite direction. Baird wants to go up (free) while Snow is concerned with what's happening down on the ground among the social community. What Snow wants at the start can only be found in having people beneath him, while Baird's is found in having some space to be in.

But recall — Snow also wants to protect her, and this desire comes through a genuine feeling toward her. At the start it may be boyish attraction to her brown eyes and voice, but what his gaze perceived turned into something more. They both want the same thing of undoing loss.

And it's that sameness that pulls Coryo to Lucy Gray. That sameness that pulls him down the social ladder (he has a famous last name, she has no name) and down the society's hierarchy (he is Capitol, she is District) to risk his future for her. That sameness that pulls him to throw his own life and his chance of getting his past back away. That sameness that keeps him walking.

That sameness that makes her bring this strange man into her world. That sameness that makes her trust him with her everything.

Her personal space out here, far from the suffering in District 12 and the tyrannical bloodshed in the Capitol, now has the presence of that strange man she let inside.

Viewing this natural space as her paradise, she had won this peace but found that her ghost still lingers. A ghost that she doesn't really want to let go of — as evident by her attention going to him, and the unconscious act of her voice calling him here. Remember: nothing in conventional narrative is coincidence or happens spontaneously. Every action a character does is an expression of desire.

Why does she sing? Becuase that's her life. She is a performer. She performed on stage in District 12's bars. She performed when got selected for the Games, which is what first caught Coryo's eyes. She performed for the whole nation to survive in the games. And she performs for Coryo — because she wants to perform for him.

And through this her desire reveals its contradiction. She wants to be free and untethered; to fly like a bird. But she has the same feeling for him that he has for her, and this feeling creates an attachment — a tether. The wanderer found a home.

She could tell him to go away. She could tell him to leave. She could tell him to do whatever. Her words don't matter.

Film is a language of image. Sound (music and dialogue) matter, but ultimately is it a moving picture. A film establishes a character through visual actions. Lucy Gray identifies Coryo, and she stops playing so she can talk to him. So she can go to him. He is pulled into her world — but she is pulled toward him.

Think about the sequence of shots, specifically the POV shots. It is basic movement: start far from the object, and move toward the object. As the character whose POV the camera emulates gets closer to the object, the film cuts back to the opposite side to establish the geography of the scene. But it also creates a little bit of tension — these two forces are coming together and one of them doesn't know it, so what will be the reaction when they come together?

A few frames of static. Coryo stands in anticipation. Waiting to see what she will do.

Go back through these ten shots. Notice they all are of the same vantage point. We see Snow approaching from the horizon, and we see Baird playing her guitar on a rock with Snow coming behind her. While the scene progresses by composing more of the frame around the subject as they get closer together, the core angle remains the same: one shot from him walking and one shot of her point in space. We don't change this basic idea.

Until the scene begins with them coming together to have their first conversation since the Games — which also ends the scene as it shows the distance that remains between them.

They are pulled together, except Coryo stands above her. They both want to be together but they both occupy different places in the social hierarchy that they can never escape. The contradictions of their desires expressed in the blocking of one shot.

[cuckoo-on-a-string]

Civilian Asset 3.

Polyamorous/femme/female reader x multiple

Summary: Things go from bad to worse.

Master List / Prev chapter

Warnings: 18+, Mild/brief self harm (over-washing), language, peril, first aid/wound care, discussion of terrorism, emotional break downs

Tagging: A couple folks have asked about tagging. Unfortunately tagging breaks my posts, so I don't keep lists. But I DO reply to each comment on each chapter when I post something new. So it's like a hand-written invitation delivered by butler to your inbox.

A/N: Thank you for your continued support! I hope you enjoy this chapter. Barely edited, but made with love. Keeping chapters short for quicker updates, so that Soap teaser I dropped will actually be in 4. My bad.

3.

You can’t think beyond my face hurts and I thought I died.

The men to either side have you packed in tight, shoulders pressing against yours, knees bumping with every sway and turn. All four of the soldiers keep their eyes on the passing landscape and the road leading through it. The men only speak to make note of potential tails, to confirm or deny the presence of new threats.

You left London a while back, and you’re in the patchwork of expanding towns spilling out beyond the green belt by the time you regain enough sense to notice.

You see very little. Fewer houses. More fields.

None of it really sinks in. The inside of the car smells like gun oil, sweat, and a coppery stink you know rises from your own clothes. Your own skin and hair and empty nail beds.

You let yourself disappear for a while. For maybe an hour, you let the static blanket your mind like snow. It’s like floating on the top of the lake, and if you break that surface tension, you’ll drown, so you let it blind your senses instead. So long as no one notices you, you don’t have to exist. You tell yourself it’s just for a minute, just for a bit, just until something else goes wrong and you have to remember pain, and fear, and whatever else makes up your life in the moment. The protective blur stretches on forever, and you lose track of time.

An itch pulls you back into your body. Eyes on you. Someone watching.

You glance up, and you meet death’s gaze in the rearview. There are eyes, but no face. Only a skull. For a brief instant you think of trying to jerk awake, like you would in a falling dream, because maybe the reaper isn’t real, unlike every other horror of the day. But then you notice the cloth beneath the bone and the military headgear.

It’s just a man in a mask, the one in the front passenger seat with the rifle you noticed as you piled in behind the Scotsman.

Skull-face blinks slowly, twice, confident you won’t look away while his eyes are closed, patiently enigmatic as a cat.

The SUV turns sharply onto a gravel track, and Skull-face turns back to the window, like he didn’t just stare you down through the mirror.

The uneven jolts as the tires dip into grooves and potholes drives away the last of the static. And you blink, eyes still on the mirror, trying to come to grips with reality.

What the actual fuck?

Around the bend, a farmhouse creeps into view. It sits low over the green turf, unassuming apart from old leaded windows that make it look too much like something out of a cottage core mood board for the situation. This isn’t a space for men with guns and tac vests.

But the man in the bucket hat taps on the brakes, nods, and says, “Ghost, Gaz: clear the house.” He doesn’t change gear. Doesn’t park. Even now, he’s ready for an ambush.

You don’t think the men who grabbed you were capable of thinking that far ahead. They did find the original safehouse, though, so maybe you should be a good civilian and keep those thoughts to yourself.

The Brit who clipped the zip ties off your wrists and helped you out of the warehouse pops out with a “Yes, sir.” So does the grim reaper up front. The doors slam shut again, and the two move in concert, guns raised, sights fixed on the windows and door as they approach. The man in the mask takes point, rushing through the door the instant his colleague turns the knob, and they disappear inside.

You’re uncomfortably aware of… everything. Your breath. The ants roving under your skin. The two men still in the car with you. It’s impossible to sit still, and you peer around your enclosure like a gerbil in a hamster ball – technically safe but in no control. The wind stirs the bushes at the edge of the driveway, and you imagine people behind them who move like your escorts. Cold. Efficient. And they’re already too close.

Your neck strains as you try to see through all the windows at once, struggling to catch a glimpse of doom before it drags you under.

“You broken?”

The leader, the man behind the wheel, must be addressing the Scot. It only registers he’s talking to you when you find said Scot watching you, too. There’s more room in the back now, but you still feel crowded and exposed in a horrible, nonsensical mess.

And – oh, right, the man is talking to you.

“Hey.” He doesn’t look through the mirror. He physically turns, arm over the back of the seat, so he can look you in the eye as he asks again, and his words come slow to your adrenaline-scoured brain. “Are you broken?”

You flounder. Puzzled. That… means what? You’re missing context. Is what broken? No bones. They didn’t – technically – hurt you that badly. Everything will fix itself in time. It could’ve been worse. You know that, even if in the moment all you want to do is sprint to the ends of the earth, find a blanket, and curl up in the darkest corner at the edge of the map.

Is he asking if you’re functional? If you can make it through debriefing?

That must be it.

And, fuck, you’d physically fight all four of them at this point if they tried to stop you from passing on the intelligence you’ve literally bled for.

“No.” You’re surprised by your own conviction (and how little your voice shakes). “Not broken.”

There’s an actual twinkle in his eye – and really, how dare he? – but his approval and the uptick of those bushy, bearded cheeks is the right kind of ridiculous in the moment. The Scot huffs beside you, but you don’t have the bandwidth for any more smirks, twinkles, or other bullshittery, so you keep your eyes forward and hope to fuck someone will tell you what to do. You can only hop between so many distractions before you miss a step and fall into a heaving mess on the floor.

“Good,” says Captain Fishing Hat. He turns back to the wheel just as Skull Face comes back.

The burly man signals, and as the boss finally turns off the engine, he opens the door and reports, “House is clear. Gaz is setting up for debrief.”

Gaz, then, must be the youngest Englishman. The Scot shifts, subtly ushering you out, and you scoot along as instructed, letting the men more or less herd you across the yard, through the door, into the kitchen. They keep their heads on a swivel, and that doesn’t help your nerves. Not at all. But they don’t give you time to stop and angst over it, either.

You find yourself in the kitchen, guided to one of four wooden chairs around a square table. It’s covered in tech. A black case sits open on one of the other seats, and the empty foam imprints inside match the boxes, cables, and laptop before you.

“Ready, Kyle?” Fishing Hat asks.

“Nearly, Captain,” Gaz replies. “Working on the connection now.”

So, Captain Fishing Hat is an actual captain. You aren’t shocked. Maybe in shock, but not surprised.

But as you sit where you’re told and watch the screen illuminate, a realization dawns on you. You won’t be debriefing to these men. Someone else at the other end of this connection is waiting for the whole story, and fear flutters to life in your gut like a startled pigeon. Loud, awkward, probably diseased.

What if you’ve misjudged all this? What if it’s a ploy? The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend, and the proper authorities aren’t the only ones hungry for the information you carry. Stiffening in your seat, you prepare for another fight, lifting the prickly guard you let drop as you knelt in the back of the SUV, clinging to the Scotsman’s tac vest.

Just as you’re glancing at the window over the kitchen sink and wondering if you jump high enough to break through the glass before any of the men grab you, a face appears on the screen, and the woman says your name.

You recognize her. Or at least her voice.

It’s the woman from the phone.

You physically droop against the back of the chair, gasping in relief.

Fuck. Fuck.

You’re going to be okay.

“Glad to see you in one piece,” she says.

“Me, too.” A rasp taints your voice, and you feel the phantom pressure of an arm crushing your trachea.

“Kate Laswell,” she introduces herself. “This is a secure line. Go ahead and tell me what you know.”

It’s easier than you expect. You’ve been thinking so much about everything you need to say, turning over pieces in your head, putting it into clearer words, ordering it by importance, that now it just flows. You lean forward, desperately ready to spill. But just because you’ve gathered everything into a coherent thread doesn’t make it any less painful to acknowledge. It’s like tugging up a string of barbed wire from your gut, pulling it out of your mouth inch by inch. You worry if you have to stop, the blades will lodge in your throat.

The woman is clearly a pro, though, and she saves her questions.

You list names first: people in American alphabet agencies with ties to a particularly violent white supremacist group. If there’s any chance they could be listening, she could end the call and try again in a secure location. But she must’ve guessed something was off when the official safehouse she sent you to was compromised. This time she’s prepared, and she lets you continue.

There’s a bomb, a new alliance with ultranationalists, someone named Makarov. It’s a test. To see if the American terrorists are as good as they say, if they’re worth Makarov’s investment. There’s a promise of more if they get the body count Makarov’s set (thousands).

The man whose blood you’ll always feel, slick between your fingers as you confused the thump of the nightclub’s base with your own pulse, kept his cover long enough to get the details of the attack. Date, location, time, target. He didn’t live long enough to give you more. He gave you what he thought was most important. You hope it’s enough. You hope it’s worth it.

Laswell thinks for a minute, then asks, “Did the men who kidnapped you indicate they knew how much of this information you possessed?”

“No. They, uh – that was the whole point, I think.” You lift you hand, so she can see the missing nails. “They wanted to know how compromised they were before they shot me.”

You say it so quickly it only clicks after it leaves your mouth. They were going to shoot you. You knew that, but away from the rough hands and zip ties it feels surreal. People like you don’t get shot. People like you have car accidents and a few too many fast food dinners for your general wellbeing. But the gun against your head was real. It’s a true thing that just happened, and that means people like you do get shot. Every safe, calm moment in your life looks like a lie, a skewed carnival mirror in retrospect.

People like you get shot.

People want to kill you.

You may still get shot. That’s why you’re in this safehouse with four heavily armed men.

Time isn’t the endless resource you imaged yesterday morning. It isn’t a solid path with clear, expected landmarks with which to gauge your progress. It’s ice, and the patch under your feet spiderwebs with ominous cracks.

You realize Laswell is speaking again.

“- handle the situation Stateside. Your current location is one of my private safehouses. Not on any list. Totally secure. I think it’s best to stay there and treat it as your base of operations for now, Captain.”

The captain, leaning over your shoulder to get in frame, nods. He’s too close without touching you, but no one’s indicated your part in this is finished. So you stay put.

“Rog,” he says.

“The attack is our chief priority, but closing the active cell in England and following their trail back to Makarov is a close second. I already have taps being set on a few of the names on that list.” Laswell says your name, and she clearly tries to soften her war face, but she’s all business right now. “I’m leaving you in the custody of the 141, under Captain Price.”

He gently claps you on the shoulder, like he’s assuming command. “Understood. Keep us in the loop, Kate.”

“Roger that. Keep your heads down. Stay safe. Over and out.”

The feed cuts out, Gaz – Kyle? – closes the laptop, moving the chaos out of the way as the Scotsman appears with a first aid kit. None of the soldiers leave space for an awkward pause. They all have a mission. Somewhere to be. Something to do.

The captain pulls a second chair up beside yours, meeting your gaze with another of his disarmingly charming smiles that crinkles at his eyes. As he and the Scot begin sorting through the kit, he says, “We’re overdue for introductions. Captain John Price.”

He holds out his hand, and you tentatively accept it in a piss poor handshake, but his smile doesn’t break, and he gestures at the Scotsman. “That’s Sergeant Johnny MacTavish, or Soap.”

The sergeant waves with a handful of cotton pads and disinfectant. He points into the corner, where Skull Face lurks. “Grumpy bastard in the corner’s Ghost. He’s a lieutenant. If you were curious.”

No one offers his real name, and you swallow down every question with a vengeance. The names make them seem real, concrete, and you seize the lifeline they’ve thrown.

You make eye contact with the last man, trying to prove you aren’t a sack of potatoes in human skin and have an actual, working brain between your ears. “And you’re Gaz?”

He smiles, reaching over the table to shake your hand in a way that makes you double down on your bet that he’s the youngest. Certainly the least jaded, even if he’s every bit the soldier the others are. “Sergeant Kyle Garrick, yeah.”

Ghost pushes off from the wall and heads back towards the front door. “I’ll take first watch.”

Whether he’ll be watching the road from a sniper’s perch or chilling by a window, you can only guess, but his captain gives him another nod, and off he goes. Sociable as an alley cat.

“Let’s see about that hand, then.” Calloused fingers rasp along the underside of your wrist as the captain lifts your hand into the light. He arranges it carefully on the table, keeping his touch gentle so you don’t feel the raw bands of irritated skin where the zip ties bruised you.

It isn’t like you’re resisting. The bloody nail beds don’t look right, and you’re struggling to believe they belong to you at all. There’s an experiment where people develop an artificial connection to and fear for an artificial hand. You feel like you’re in an opposite test. Your eyes say the hand on the table belongs to you, but it doesn’t feel that way. If the captain sawed it off instead of gingerly spraying antiseptic ointment over the exposed nerves, you might just shrug it off.

The bandages hurt, though.

The pain tugs at your gut, and you rejoin your whole body with a shudder. That hurts, too. You take a deep breath, and your stomach aches. Your free hand squeezes into a fist, and the scabs on your knuckles crack open. When tears flood your eyes, you can only imagine what new agonies they’d summon if you let them fall, so you blink furiously and pretend your eyelashes aren’t so wet they stick together.

As his captain finishes treating your hand, the Scot – MacTavish, Johnny, Soap, whatever the fuck you’re supposed to call him – takes a seat on the table, pinches your chin, and puts one of those little cleansing pads he’d been fussing with to work. It stings like a bitch, and you flinch despite your best efforts.

Still holding your chin, he angles your face up and blows over a series of cleaned scrapes on your cheek. The tiny breeze might as well be a hurricane. It knocks the soul from your body, and you go entirely still, befuddled.

“The fuck, Soap?” Gaz asks.

The Scot huffs, getting back to work with a fresh gauze pad, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “You’re supposed to blow on cuts,” he grumbles, like he’s trying to sound gruff to make up for the accidental sentiment. “So they don’t sting.”

It makes you want to smile. You can’t remember how right now, but maybe you’ll think back to this moment and smile about it later.

“Thanks,” you say instead.

Soap has not forgotten how to smile. “You’re welcome, bonnie. Let me put a butterfly plaster on this, and you’ll be fit as a fiddle again.”

A nice thought, and maybe true for a soldier like him, but every screaming inch of your body informs you this is a lie.

The captain taps your knee, pulling your attention back to the fading crinkles at the corners of his eyes. He lifts a finger and leads your gaze from side to side, leaning in close to see if your pupils are the same size. “Doesn’t look like you have a concussion. Are you hurt anywhere else? Any risk of internal bleeding? Cracked ribs?”

Gaz, seeing your confusion (because how the fuck would you KNOW if you were bleeding internally?) offers some helpful context. “Did they kick you in the stomach? Any sharp pains in your chest when you breathe?”

Did they kick you? You can’t really remember. Probably. It’s all a furious blur of motion and panic.

“I’m not sure.”

It’s the truth, but it’s a bad one. The captain nods as a wintery flash passes over Gaz’s face. “That’s all right. Let us know if you notice any unusual swelling or new pains, yeah?”

“Okay.”

One more big smile – a bit forced, definitely for show – lifts his whiskers, and he climbs out of his chair, pulling it out of your way.

Gaz steps up to lead you out of the kitchen. You feel like a football – always under someone’s control, being run by one teammate to the next. But what else is there to do to, really? You follow him up a narrow flight of stairs to a pokey hall on the second level. There are three doors, and the first you pass has three twin beds crammed inside. The second is smaller but only holds two beds. And the last door leads to a bathroom. Gaz, clearly used to safehouse etiquette, fishes a washcloth, towel, and little bar of soap out of the deep, dark depths of a cupboard too high for you to reach.

He sets them on the counter in a tidy pile and says, “You really shouldn’t get your bandages wet for forty-eight hours, but I bet you feel like hell. Washing up a little with just the sink might help.”

His big brown eyes fix on you, too soft and looking for some kind of confirmation you’re okay without getting in your face.

Are you broken?

Fuck. They’re all trying to make this normal. What happened isn’t their fault, and they’ve surely seen worse. They probably don’t have to babysit damaged goods after the fact very often, though. The least you can do is try to make this normal for them, too.

“Like a bus ran over me, backed up, and ran over me again.” You think for a minute and add: “Might’ve been some Nazgul, or cave trolls, or some other shit, too.”

The soldier snorts. A grin catches him by surprise and turns his whole face bright. The effort was definitely worth it.

“Tolkien? I like it.” As he moves out of the bathroom, he points at the smaller bedroom. “Take whatever bed in there you want. Since one of us will be on watch, we probably won’t need the other one. Give you a bit of privacy. Try to get some rest, yeah?”

You can’t imagine how you’ll fall asleep, but you act like his suggestion is as reasonable as it sounds.

“Of course.”

He leaves you alone.

You soak the washcloth in tepid water and peel off your shirt. There’s a countdown of little tasks in your head, ways to delay the inevitable. How long can you linger over the soap and cheap terrycloth? What if you just lock the door and keep wake sitting on the cold floor?

Then you notice your reflection.

You haven’t thought about what you look like. It’s less your face staring back and more a collection of hurts, and you struggle to find yourself through the bruises and bandages.

Everything aches, throbs, or stings. You’re so scared you want to smash your head into the counter just in case it’s like in the movies, and time rewinds, letting you wake up in bed at the hostel with a clear head and free day to play tourist. You know how to do that. Always going, doing, seeing. Always a task, a plan, an idea.

Now your hands are empty – apart from that one fucking piece of glitter you can’t get off between your thumb and forefinger. It winks in the light, and you scrub at it in a frenzy. You clean everything in a rush, too rough with your bruises, but you’re on the verge of a breakdown, and you don’t want to fall apart in anything resembling a public space.

It’s all been too much for too long.

You open the door carefully, peek up and down the hall, wary of minding eyes. Then you nearly trip over your own feet getting into the smaller bedroom.

Door shut.

Shoes off.

Everything else stays on, every layer between you and the world outside a blessing as you bury yourself alive under a stiff, scratchy blanket that probably came from a secondhand shop two decades ago. Your breath catches when you breathe in, like you’re choking on the stuff you need to live. The air bubbles out in gasps. Painful. On the verge of sobs. But that would be too loud. You must be quiet and still or something awful will find you again.

It's a good thing tears are silent. You soak the flat pillow with them, hiding in the dark under the covers.

Impossibly, you do sleep. It takes a while, but your body screams for rest, and it pulls you deep as you cry yourself out into nightmares of voices arguing just behind your head, and eyes that send beams of light around shadowed walls.

[cultivating-saplings]

In honour of 4/13x15 I'm posting (a very slightly edited version of) the paper I wrote on the Unofficial Homestuck Collection for one of my classes last term. The language/tone is a bit more academic than what I would usually put up on here, but it's exam season so... 

Don’t Turn Your Back on the Body:

The Resurrection of Homestuck After the Death of Flash

Digital media is, broadly speaking, very difficult to preserve. The rapid pace of technological development means that obsolescence and decay present a consistent threat to the availability of natively digital works. Most computers produced in 2023 no longer have built in CD drives, and I feel fairly confident in asserting that none are being produced with floppy disk readers outside of hobbyist spaces. Issues with the accessibility of physically stored digital media can be mitigated (at least for now) by the use of external readers, but the preservation of fully digital media, born and hosted in its entirety on the Internet, is a different beast entirely.

This is, in part, an issue of pure volume; no one organization could ever hope to archive the vast amounts of stuff that the Internet is constantly producing, let alone organize it into a resource that could be used effectively. Like Borges’ cartographers who created “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,” to fully archive the Internet would be to replicate it in its entirety. Thus scope becomes a central question of fully digital archiving. 

The Internet Archive, which also operates the Wayback Machine, answers that question with a resounding and all-encompassing ‘yes’ — their stated goal is to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,” but even this comes with caveats. The organization freely permits members of the public to upload files to the archive and save pages on the Wayback Machine, but the work carried out by its official volunteers is more curated, and prioritizes webpages which have been identified as particularly important.

The Internet Archive is very effective within its own space, yes, but it has its limits. When the piece of work you are trying to archive is composed of not just static text and images, but longform animations and complex browser-based games, where do you put it? What do you do when the software necessary to access these elements of the work has been taken offline? And what happens if the people who were supposed to safeguard it fail to do so?

These were the issues that the fans of Homestuck faced in 2020 as the impending deactivation of Flash loomed on the horizon.

But first, before I properly explain what the Unofficial Homestuck Collection really is and why it is so effective as a digital archive, let me tell you about Homestuck. 

Frustrated with the poorly implemented official preservation of the comic, and with a lot of free time on his hands, one fan began the Unofficial Homestuck Collection as a personal project during lockdown, during the “depths of 2020.” As the project changed hands and more fans became involved over the following years, its true scope came into focus: the Collection would preserve not only Homestuck itself, in its entirety and with its Flash-dependent pages intact, but also as much of its contextual material as possible, thus making it a prime example of the effectiveness of fan-driven digital archiving and preservation. Because the people who created the Collection are long standing fans of Homestuck, they know which pieces of peripheral material will provide the context the comic demands. The Collection preserves Homestuck as a text in a way that would be impossible in an analogue format, creating an archive both of the work and of the experience of reading it in a serialized format.

Andrew Hussie began* Homestuck on April 13th of 2009, and published it serially on mspaintadventures.com, his personal website at the time, until its conclusion on April 13th, 2016. Prior to beginning Homestuck, Hussie had been publishing short webcomics and pieces of fiction for several years on his older website, Team Special Olympics, since 2004, which had gained him a small but very loyal following. This following was centered mostly around the forum attached to the TSO website, which hosted the first of Hussie’s ‘MS Paint Adventures,’ Jailbreak, in September of 2006. Jailbreak was a short comic which Hussie produced as a collaborative writing game on these forums, in the style of early text adventures.

Beginning with the prompt, “You wake up locked in a deserted jail cell, completely alone. There is nothing at all in your cell, useful or otherwise,” Hussie then wrote the rest of the comic according to the first comment posted after every page. This, perhaps predictably, resulted in a barely coherent mess of a story.

Following the conclusion of Jailbreak after a short 134 pages, Hussie would produce two more comics prior to beginning Homestuck: the unfinished Bard Quest (June-July 2007) and Problem Sleuth (March 2008-April 2009), which was his longest work so far at the time of its conclusion. Problem Sleuth in particular represented a substantial increase in production quality and general coherency over Jailbreak, as Hussie gained experience using the MSPA forums as tools for collaborative storytelling, reigning in the meandering narrative by allowing himself to be more selective about which forum responses he followed.

Hussie would continue this more controlled style of forum collaboration throughout the first three Acts of Homestuck, which followed a much more focused story than any of his prior work, thanks to his decision to use reader input only in specific parts of the comic. In the introduction to the print edition of the first Act, Hussie described his own role during the production of these first Acts as “dungeon master, a game engine responding to input, and an improv comic all in one.” During the process of writing Act 4, Hussie stopped taking prompts from readers entirely, and would construct the rest of the comic ostensibly as its sole author.

‘Okay,’ you might now be thinking, ‘you’ve given me the context, but what the hell is Homestuck? And what’s it about?’ Well, to wildly oversimplify a very complex piece of media, Homestuck is a webcomic about four young online friends who play a video game that causes the end of their universe and grants them the power to create a new one as they see fit. It is a story about growing up and realizing you’ve been forever changed by your experiences, a story about leaving behind the life you knew and constructing a new one. It is also a story about time travel and paradoxes, genetics and cloning, a large number of aliens, a possibly larger number of puppets (at least one of which is sentient), and an unfortunate amount of clowns. 

This story slowly unfolds over the course of 8126 pages, 817,929 words, and 166 animated panels, 95 of which contained some degree of interactivity and all of which total over four hours in length. Most of the comic’s pages consist of a main image, usually a short looping gif, accompanied by a text description or dialogue, which is almost always written in the format and style of online chat-logs between characters. As mentioned previously, however, these simpler gif-and-description pages are interspersed with longer videos, animated in Flash and soundtracked by one of Hussie’s several collaborators.

The first of these animated panels was uploaded a few weeks into Homestuck’s publication — an animated opening title-card for the comic, scored ominously with sounds of howling wind and windchimes. This first Flash panel was relatively simple, but the next would introduce a bespoke soundtrack (“Harlequin” by Mark Hadley), and the third would include simple interactivity. These soundtracked animations and interactive segments increased in scope and complexity over the course of the comic’s run; the final animated page in the comic, “[S] Collide,” comes in at nearly twenty minutes in length, and some of the larger interactive segments can take upwards of two hours to fully explore. 

While some of the later interactive pages were developed in an engine based on HTML5, most of Homestuck would be built using Adobe Flash, and would depend on the program for basic functionality. This would prove disastrous for the comic’s long term preservation. Flash was very popular, and had become ubiquitous by the early 2010s, but it had security issues which were easy to exploit, its range was fairly limited in terms of what kinds of animations it could produce, and, as its most fatal flaw, it couldn’t run on mobile. Thus with the expanding use of smartphones and tablets, Flash became less and less practical as a tool for web developers, and Adobe began slowly preparing to kill it. On December 31st, 2020, Adobe sent Flash off to the farm where it could frolic and play in the digital sunshine, leaving many online communities facing a crisis. How do you preserve a text when its foundations have crumbled?

With Homestuck using Flash in such an integral way, the issue of preservation was an important one. After the finale, Hussie would post some short post-credits stories to Snapchat from October 2016 to August 2017, as well as a longer epilogue in April 2019, before stepping away from any formal involvement with the comic in 2020. In 2018, Hussie had given the distribution rights for Homestuck to VIZ Media, which primarily handled the English-language publication of several manga series, and had left the rights to the IP and the freedom to produce new work to former collaborators. Thus it was VIZ who took on the task of officially preserving Homestuck against the death of Flash.

To say their efforts were unsatisfactory would, I think, be paying them too great a compliment. The complex and highly detailed Flash animations were replaced with embedded YouTube links to low-quality screen-captures of the originals. The hours-long walkaround games were not translated at all, replaced with ‘choose your own adventure’ style pages of text and links. The official version of Homestuck as it currently exists fails to capture a lot of what made the comic work, because it removes a lot of the gamified elements of the comic that are so integral to its storytelling.

There are many snapshots of the website from before the walkaround games were taken down on the Wayback Machine, but the Flash emulator that archive.org uses is very inconsistent, frequently becoming stuck on looping loading screens or failing to process assets correctly. While the dubious preservation of the long Flash animations is a real issue on its own, the lack of any attempt to replicate the format of these longform games represents the loss of something essential to the comic. Homestuck is, throughout the whole of its story, intertwined with the visual and cultural language of video games. The loss of the complex interactivity of these panels fundamentally changes how the reader is permitted to engage with them and, by extension, with Homestuck’s narrative as a whole. The official version of Homestuck that exists online is no longer complete. 

This incredibly poor preservation was the impetus behind the creation of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. In its most basic form, the Collection is simply a preserved and restored version of Homestuck, intact and in high quality, accessible through a downloadable client, rather than online — reducing the Collection down to this basic description does it a disservice. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection includes not just Homestuck, but all of Hussie’s prior work: Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth are in there, but so are the full contents of his first website, Team Special Olympics, alongside archived versions of his now-deleted accounts on various social media platforms, and copies of threads from the MSPA forums that he would later reference in the main comic. The Collection also includes material that Hussie released alongside Homestuck, like the in-fiction blog of one of the main characters, various short comics written by guest authors, and a full episode of an in-universe childrens’ cartoon.

These peripheral materials are interesting and provide context for some of the more obscure references throughout Homestuck, but many of them were not produced until well into the comic’s run, and assume an audience that is caught up with the most recent update, making them dangerously full of spoilers for the unaware new reader. This issue is solved by the appropriately named ‘new reader mode.’ One of a variety of useful accessibility tools included in the Collection, the new reader mode tracks which page a user has reached, and implements a universal spoiler cloak over the whole program, hiding all materials that were released after their most recent page’s publication. This tool is what transforms the Unofficial Homestuck Collection from an archive of a text, into an archive of an experience.

De Kosnik argues that fan-driven archiving serves as a way for fans to mediate their own temporal experience of a text, describing websites hosting fanworks as mechanisms which “maintain the possibility of individuals joining fandoms… long after a media text has ceased to air.” While De Kosnik’s focus is on archives of fanworks and their function in ongoing fan spaces, I would argue that this framework, which centers the impact of serialization on the dynamics of fan communities, fits extremely well when applied to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. Homestuck was published serially over the course of seven years, accompanied by blog posts, side comics, music, and other pieces of peripheral media that were released in tandem with the comic itself.

Updates were highly anticipated events, and fan communities were structured around them — one user on Tumblr found an unlisted part of the MSPA forums where Hussie posted new pages before they were published, and this “MSPA Prophet” became a fixture of the fandom for their ability to predict when the next update would come. The event that was an update (or upd8, after the typing style of a popular character) was a central aspect of the experience of reading Homestuck during its publication, and it is one that is very difficult to recover now that the comic exists as a static, completed work. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, through its new reader mode, functions as a solution to that absence. It does more than safeguard the reader against unwanted spoilers: it temporarily transforms Homestuck back into an incomplete text. 

Homestuck makes use of the assumed preexisting knowledge of the reader, and their “intuitive familiarity” with various types of digital media and culture, especially ones which are inherently participatory. The story’s use of narrative motifs and referential easter-eggs allows Homestuck to function, in Hussie’s own words, as “both a story and a puzzle,” but that “There [are] a range of ways to interface with it[…] Failing to grasp everything shouldn’t preclude basic enjoyment, nor is it a symptom of failure by either the reader or the story.” In the most frequent example of repeated symbology in Homestuck, Hussie peppers the text with references to the number ‘413,’ simplified from April 13th, the day the comic began.

The story follows four friends who are all thirteen years old, many of the songs on the comic’s soundtrack are exactly four minutes and thirteen seconds long, and the timestamps on chat-logs show that characters frequently begin important conversations at precisely 4:13, to name just a few of the number’s appearances. The combination of puzzle and story in Homestuck extends beyond these kinds of motifs, however, and into the way Hussie employs referential humour.

Some of these references are fairly easy to catch; in Act 4, one of the main characters is gifted the Warhammer of Zillyhoo — a brightly coloured weapon which originally appeared in Problem Sleuth. Others, however, are much more obscure. The older brother of another main character runs a business creating bizarre, semi-ironic puppet pornography. Most of the audience read this as an absurdist joke about the internet’s love for offputting porn; the subset of fans who had been following Hussie for several years, or those who looked into Hussie’s early activity on the MSPA forums, however, would find themselves with new understanding of a long-running joke. This element of the experience of reading Homestuck is something that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection not only preserves, but makes readily accessible to the comic’s readers in a way that would not have been possible during the comic’s publication.

On a purely theoretical basis, I would argue that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection is valuable not just in the context of contemporary fan activity, but as a potentially valuable resource for future research. Homestuck is a foundational piece of the current cultural landscape, its influences permeating both digital and analog media in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways.

Undertale, titan of online culture that it is, was created by Toby Fox, who was the composer behind a large amount of the music in Homestuck and was, during the game’s production, living in Andrew Hussie’s basement. Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb tetralogy, began her writing career as a prominent figure in the Homestuck fandom on Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. Although the reach of her original work has thoroughly outgrown her fandom roots, Muir includes sly references to Homestuck in several places in her books. Hell, one of the animators working on Bluey, a cartoon aimed at very young children, included references to Homestuck in the backgrounds of episodes they worked on, as easter-eggs for the benefit of parents in the know. All of this is to say that Homestuck has its hooks deep within the culture of the Internet, and its impacts will, I think, be felt for a long time yet.

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is certainly not immune to digital decay or link rot, but it is resistant to them, since it is hosted on a large and well established website (GitHub), and, once downloaded, can be accessed without an internet connection, and shared freely. For the hypothetical future researcher, the Collection contains resources to mitigate the frustration of trying to hunt down pieces of contextual or peripheral material by packaging them with the text itself — it functions like a sourcebook. 

Bibliography

Bamboshu, and GiovanH. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection. 2020. https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/ 

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10248.001.0001.

Glaser, Tim. “Homestuck as a Game: A Webcomic between Playful Participation, Digital Technostalgia, and Irritating Inventory Systems.” In Comics and Videogames. Edited by Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noel Thon. 96–112. Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003035466-8.

Hussie, Andrew. Homestuck. MS Paint Adventures, 2009-2016. https://homestuck.com. 

Nakhaie, FS. “Reproduce and Adapt: Homestuck in Print and Digital (Re)Incarnations.” Convergence, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221141961.

Read MS Paint Adventures. “Statistics.” Last modified April 7, 2018. http://readmspa.org/stats/.

Veale, Kevin. “‘Friendship Isn’t an Emotion Fucknuts’: Manipulating Affective Materiality to Shape the Experience of Homestuck’s Story.” Convergence 25, no. 5-6 (2019): 1027–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517714954. 

[spidey-bie]

I read a Hobie analysis which inspired this post even though this post and that analysis have nothing in common. Anyways enjoy my rambles.

We don't talk enough about how most of Hobie's influences are either subtle or behind the scenes. He doesn't force his opinion or his thoughts onto anyone. Like when he's trying to guide Miles away from the Spider Society he doesn't just outrightly tell Miles. He tries to subtly persuade him, (this is broken down into detail in this post that's not mine).

So knowing that I retract my previous statement about Hobie going on a rant towards Gwen's father. He definitely said something though but it was most likely in a more roundabout way so that Gwen's father could come to his own conclusion.

I truly love how the spider-verse series likes to subvert expectations. When I was first introduced to Hobie Brown I originally thought that he was just going to be a static character that we don't learn much about. And yet in those 10 minutes we were introduced to so much about his character. We learn what his ideals are, what his motivations are, and how far he's willing to go to protect those that he cares about.

When I first think of anarchy I assumed that it's something chaotic and uncontrolled. Which isn't true once you look more into anarchism. And it's funny because when we first meet Hobie he seems rowdy and spontaneous. He literally bursts into the scene while shredding on his guitar. Yet when the mask comes off his actions and mannerisms have changed. He still holds the same principles and ideals but he seems more toned down if that makes sense. (Somebody wrote a post about how everyone's alter ego seems like over exaggerated versions of themselves and if I can find it I'll reference it. Edit: FOUND IT. ALSO THIS POST TOO. )

Now I wonder how long has Hobie been plotting to overthrow this organization. I refuse to believe that he could just sit back and let it all be. Especially after learning about canon events. It's true that he has enough going on in his own world. But I'm sure that he was attempting at the very least to recruit people for the destruction of this organization. Was Miles just the last straw?

This is completely unrelated but I think there's something to be said about how the spiders chose to be willfully ignorant in this society while knowing that it was an organization based off of someone else's flawed reasonings. Was it because of the camaraderie and the fellowship that they felt within it that they couldn't bring themselves to see that it was wrong?

These are just some thoughts. But I would love to hear what someone else thought about this.

[autumnslance]

Another thing for new Tumblr users: Read Mores

We don't use excess spaces or ROT13 or anything to avoid spoilers here! We use a Read More cut. This is also handy for shortening long posts.

As of July 2 2023 (it can and does change over time, but mostly in where to find things) on desktop when making a hard return space in your post it pulls up the formatting menu for selecting images, gifs, links, etc. The last icon on the list--the straight line, squiggly line, straight line--is your Read More cut

On my iOS tablet app, the menu's found at the bottom of the post editor.

This lets you hide spoiler content and/or trim down longer posts, like long lists or longer fanfiction or character info or lore or whatever.

Now, this is also where your blog's customization comes in; someone clicking on a Read More cut will be taken from the dashboard to your blog post, to read it with your font and color choices. Please make sure they're actually readable and accessible. Even with only a minor astigmatism correctable by glasses, I've run into a LOT of unreadable blogs.

For readers, a way around this on Desktop is the XKIT REWRITTEN browser extension. Handy for a lot of ways to tweak your Tumblr browser experience in general, one of the options also lets you open Read More cuts directly on the Dashboard, which can be a lifesaver if avoiding badly formatted or inaccessible blogs.

Another strong word of warning: Read Mores link back to the original post. Handy if you want to Edit what came under the cut. But also--if you delete the post, or change your blog name/URL, it may break the Read More link on reblogs. The information is either gone or unable to be found, due to how Tumblr structures posting and reblogs, especially in the older text editors. This is often why you'll see people advocate not putting image or video descriptions under a Read More, even if they get long. Other vital information on a post can be lost this way as well.

So go forth without stretching your mutuals' dashboards or worrying about spoiling folks who haven't filtered their tags/words properly!

(Speaking of: please use filtered words and tags for things you don't want to see or interact with!)

If you want to make static Tumblr pages (like all the ones I have on my blog), or have questions about how and why to Customize your blog (don't be mistaken for a spambot and also gain access to your full blog features!), I have other tutorials for that!

[philliamwrites]

indulgence

pairing: eren x fem! reder

warnings: ‼️18+, minors dni‼️, eren jaeger, consensual hook-up, unprotected sex, rough sex, vaginal fingering, riding, biting, dirty talk, penetrative vaginal sex, oral sex (fem. Receiving), swearing, use of names (baby, slut, whore, bitch), doggy style, mentions of an exhibitionism kink, phone sex (jean’s being pulled into something he didn’t ask for lol that poor man), spitting, choking, missionary position, overstimulation, crying, multiple orgasm, creampie, aftercare

wc: 7.7k

a/n: sorry for the reupload! i edited one thing and tumblr kicked the post out of the tag searches; likes and reblogs are hugely appreciated!!

the 2nd part of a previous post (temptation) as a thank you for reaching 200 followers a couple of weeks back!!

i wanna fuck this man so bad it makes me look stupid.

At this point, Eren is just fucking with you. You know it, he knows it, and you both know it isn’t the type of fucking that you want.

You slam your thumb into the bell, hear the electric buzz and hope the whole student dorm goes up in flames because someone misplaced an electric wire. It doesn’t, and you’re left to wait in the freezing cold, the cutting wind that picks up and whips your hair left and right.

Thirty seconds, and then you’re gone. Big dick or not, if Eren thinks he can leave you blue-balled and freezing, he can call for another bimbo and let her jerk him off. Even though you were really looking forward to it, and the picture he sent you was a nice reminder of a good friend you’re missing. Just thinking about it ignites a fire between your legs, makes your mouth water.

You hope you’ll leave his place on shaking legs tomorrow.

After another painful, long minute out in the cold, the intercom finally comes to life. Eren’s voice, even through the static, is deep and raspy.

“Who goes there?”

“Open the door, Jaeger.” Your patience is needle-thin. There’s a moment of silence, one dreadful, short moment in which you know Eren is thinking about every way possible that he can be an ass.

He doesn’t disappoint.

“State your business, and I might think about it.” The audible grin in his voice drives you mad. You know what he wants, and you didn’t wake up this morning for Eren to play you like a fiddle. Looking left and right, finding the entrance to the dormitory empty, with a voice drier than autumn leaves swept to the ground, you say, “I’m here to fuck you, Eren Jaeger.”

“Don’t sound too excited about it.” You imagine him standing there, bare-footed probably because he’s an animal like that, and rolling his eyes. But the door buzzes a second later. You shoulder it open, engulfed by the warmth, and find Eren’s apartment number on the mailbox lined up opposite from the elevator.

420.

The joke is blaring so loud it isn’t even funny.

Feeding him a taste of his own medicine, you choose the slow ascent of the staircase, and every floor you pass sends your heart beating higher and higher until your anticipation beats in your throat. Last time, after Eren was done with you, you had looked like you got mauled by someone which isn’t that far from the truth considering Eren fucks like he plays his overrated sports games. Like he’s got everything to lose.

He’s waiting for you, leaning against the door frame, hands in his pocket and barefooted—almost the definition of casual indifference. When you stand before him, he doesn’t move, just like earlier this day where he’s been an inconvenience in your own apartment.. He smiles slowly, a cat’s smile as it faces the mouse and contemplates how best to slay it.

Eren leans forward, his green eyes gleaming. His face is predatory, but his voice is gentle. “Didn’t take you long at all to get here. Needy, are we?”

You take another step closer, your chest almost touching his. Almost, because you’re a good head smaller than him. “I wasn’t the one fucking into my own hand all by myself,” you say, voice silky and calm like a lake’s surface on a windless day.

Amusement flickers in his eyes, brightens them before a shadow falls again. “But you couldn’t wait until tomorrow. You had to come as soon as I sent you a picture of my cock.”

It’s cute that he thinks he’s the sly fox, when every animal living in the forest knows that the most fearsome creature is the huntress wearing her prey’s fur coat. “And if we stopped talking,” you say, your fingers grazing where his shirt covers his solid, taut abdomen, “I might actually cum tonight.”

Eren smiles slowly, like the moon slipping slowly behind dark, heavy clouds. He steps aside, allowing you to enter the lion’s den.

You have barely time to take off your coat before Eren’s hands are all over you. He spins you around, hands cupping your face to tilt it back, granting him full access to your hot mouth, his own bruisingly hard. Restraint has never been a concept known to him, even though it looks so good on him—he’s tense in all the right places.

Without any preamble, his tongue explores your mouth, his teeth holding your bottom lip. One hand slides to your neck, his big, rough fingers cupping your throat gently—deceptively so, as he presses his hard, tall body against yours as if he’s trying to mould you into him.

Your fingers claw at his shirt tucked in his sweatpants, eager and impatient as you chase his mouth. He lifts his arms, letting you take his shirt off. You’re in no hurry to turn away your appreciative gaze from the hard dips and valleys of his body, the sharp v-line on his narrow hips. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, arms the size of your thighs and you remember clearly how they flexed when he held you in place in Connie’s bathroom weeks ago—all taut cord and strong muscles.

Eren looks glorious, like a mortal that Gods would sacrifice their own immortality for—if he wasn’t a Greek God himself. Impulsive and horrible, but pouring his everything into the one thing bringing him joy. Like playing with you.

It has your knees weak in anticipation and want. Your breath catches in your throat when Eren lowers his face to your neck, brushes where your pulse pounds with hungry teeth and hot lips curved into a sharp, wicked smile.

Out of the corner of your eyes you spot the couch in the adjacent living room. With your mouth still on his, you push him towards it, tip-toeing after him. Clearly amused, Eren lets you handle him whichever way you want. For now. His back hits the couch’s cushion as he falls into it, automatically spreading his legs for you to step between them, curling one hand around the loose, soft hair at the back of his neck.

Now Eren is the one tilting his head back to look up at you, the sight far from unpleasant as his eyes dip down to the low cut of your cleavage. Funny, how he looks at you as if you are the Goddess and he’d sacrifice anything for just a minute between your legs, in your arms.

“Eager, are we?” he says, his broad hands splayed wide on your hips as you crawl atop him, leaning down to pepper hasty, open-mouthed kisses on his sharp jawline, to lick and suck at the pulse point where you can feel the beating of his heart.

“Do me a favour,” you say into the crook of his neck, “and shut up. Just let me have my fill, okay?”

Eren thinks about that for a moment. His hands roam from your hips to your ass, squeeze once, twice. And then they fall away, back to his sides, and you hate how much you already hate the loss of them. “Sure. But you have to give me a good show, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” you say. “Whatever.”

You’re too eager, too hungry for a good fuck to notice. If you had taken one moment to look into his eyes, to see what is lurking behind those sharp, marble green eyes, you would have realised that you were about to get into far more than you bargained for.

You would have known asking Eren for anything is like summoning up the devil. The devil might grant your wish, but afterwards, you’re out of a soul.

But you don’t spend a second questioning his laid back, easy willingness (nothing about Eren Jaeger is easy), not with the constant throbbing between your legs; certainly not with the visible outline of his hard dick that jolts when your fingertips graze him.

Shuffling closer, your knees hitting the back of the couch, closing around Eren’s waist, you lower your hot, still-clothed pussy onto his bulge straining through his pants. Just that contact makes Eren groan, makes drool collect at the corners of your mouth. You slide against his clothed crotch, dry-humping his dick in slow, hard rolls, one hand splayed flat against his lower abdomen so you can feel every time it flexes and hardens when he rocks up into you.

His fingers hook under the hem of your sweater. With a swift motion, he pulls it off, hands immediately drawing to your tits like magnets pulled in, fitting perfectly. He squeezes them, pinches your hardened nipples through the fabric of your lace bra as you speed up rolling your hips against his.

Eren pinches the fabric of your flared skirt between his fingers and lifts it, watching you move against his hard dick, a lazy, content smile spreading on his face like a cat that’s found a comfortable spot in the warm sun and is in no hurry to leave.

That placid light in his eyes quickly turns into a wicked gleam though when he sinks his fingers into your tights, right at your crotch, and yanks the fabric apart. The ripping sound is like a gunshot, breaking your rhythm as your hips stutter. More heat pools into your belly—a delicious mixture between arousal and anger.

“You owe me a new one, asshole,” you grunt, digging your fingers into his arms. Eren just grins, one hand getting a firm hold of your waist to keep you moving.

Soon, the friction isn’t enough. You prop yourself up on his arms, one hand sliding down between your legs where you slide the fabric of your underwear to the side. You don’t miss how Eren’s eyes are glued to the thin thread connecting your drooling cunt with your slip. He’s raising his hips to shuffle out of his own pants just enough for his cock to spring free, hitting his lower stomach. He’s holding your half-lidded gaze, curling his fingers around his hard, long dick. Oh, how much you’ve missed him, and you can’t help but stare at his girth, the thick vein running along the underside—

“Don’t start drooling now,” Eren says, laughing quietly to himself.

“You wish,” you mumble, and very discreetly try to swallow the spit that’s pooling in your mouth.”

You collect the slick of your arousal and spread it on your warm, soft pussy, pads of your fingers circling your clit slowly as you watch Eren pumping his cock just as slow—lazy strokes from where his balls rest, up to the angry flushed tip of his cock. Your thighs clench as you hold yourself up, immediately stuffing two fingers inside your throbbing hole. The stretching burns, but you can’t help and sigh at finally filling yourself.

Eren still holds onto your waist. His throat flexes when he swallows, eyes riveted on your drooling cunt.

“Want me to do it?” he asks, noticing the uncomfortable angle of your wrist as you fuck your fingers inside you.

You sink your teeth into your lower lip. “Sure.”

Eren grins. “Say please.”

“Fuck you.”

“Preferable within the next hour, yeah.”

Your voice is dry, devoid of any emotion. “Oh, my darling Jaeger. Please.”

He squeezes your thigh, hard. “Good girl.”

Eren chuckles when your thighs jolt slightly at the praise, and you make it a point to hold his gaze when he challenges you to say something about it. When you don’t relent, he raises his fingers to your mouth, tapping the rough pads against your lips. “Open up.”

You roll your eyes but part your lips, sticking your tongue out slightly. Eren drags his fingers over your warm, wet tongue until his knuckles press against the corners of your mouth. His fingers are so deep in your mouth, too close to your throat, and you can feel tears well in your eyes.

Deeming his fingers sufficiently wet, he pulls his hand back and drops it between your legs where he slides his fingers between your wet folds, collecting your slick, and enters your weeping hole with one thick finger. Again, the stretch has your mouth open, your eyes half-closed. He sinks his finger knuckle-deep inside you, runs them along your hot, gummy walls. And then stills. You wiggle your hips, trying to encourage him to move, but Eren is immovable like a marble statue, watching you with hawkish eyes.

“Do you mind?” you ask, grabbing onto his wrist and sinking his finger deeper inside you.

Eren’s little laugh is dark. Condescending, even. “I’m just here for the show. If you wanna get off, you have to put in some work.”

The answer to that gets stuck in your throat when he curls his finger inside you. You glare at him, but fine. You don’t need him. You’ll just use him until you’ve had your fill and then go, see that he can hump his pillow or something.

“Oh, don’t make that face,” Eren coos, dragging a thumb over your jutted lower lip. “You look so cute pouting like that, it makes me want to be even meaner to you.”

He seals your mouth shut with his before you can throw an insult at him—or even worse, challenge him to actually be mean as the gnawing pit of hunger in your belly demands.

Now holding his wrist steady, you lift your hips agonisingly slow and sink back down, up, down. Up, and this time Eren sneakily bullies his second finger inside you, still not giving you any more friction than the one you create as you fuck yourself open on his fingers. Sometimes, when he’s feeling generous, he brushes your clit with his thumb—either in a slow, hard brush, or just a quick tap. It’s enough to drive you insane.

“You’re such … an asshole,” you hiss between gritted teeth, angling your hips this and that way to make his fingers brush against the bundle of nerves inside you that make you see stars.

“You like it,” Eren says a little breathless, dragging his thumb over your clit in a harsh swipe. His lips move along your cheekbone to your throat and you swallow a moan. “I like that you like it.”

“Shut up.” You smash your mouth on his, hungrily, just all teeth and tongue and whatever drool escapes the corners of his lips, your tongue travels that path until you nibble on his jawline, his chin, trying to bounce on his fingers until it isn’t enough and you feel that abysmal yearning for more, more, more eat you up from inside.

You yank his fingers out and take his cock, hard and hot, leaking at the tip, to align it with your sloppy cunt. Eren watches with glittering, wide eyes as you continue to roll your hips against his cock, slicking it up with your own arousal until it glistens in the dim light, thin threads of your slick connecting to his rock-hard shaft, clinging to the protruding vein at the underside.

He’s digging his fingers into your clothed thighs, holding your legs open. His breath grows laboured, drowned by the slick sound of you rubbing yourself on him, and you could swear there are hearts in his eyes as his mind drowns in the sight of your wet folds.

You aren’t doing any better. You can’t stop staring at his dark tip catching at your clit, pushing against it, and when you sink down to his balls, his shaft resting against your pubic mound, he stands hard and proud, almost all the way up to your navel.

You forgot how big he really is. But does that stop you? Of course not. Your mother raised no quitter, go big or go home, and if you can’t go home at all because you can’t walk after you’re done with Eren, nobody cares. Certainly not you.

Steadying your feet on the couch, you squat to align your hole with his cock, his fat tip kissing your entrance. Eren, the gentleman that he is, helps you by splaying his hands over your ass, sinking his fingers into the plump flesh. You both watch as you lower yourself slowly, your cunt swallowing his tip first—the breach has your mouth wide open, a silent cry and Eren grunting—then the rest of him, still moving so slowly that you can accommodate to the girth, the heavy feeling of him sliding inside you inch by inch, hot and heavy and thick.

“Wait, wait.” Eren holds you still, pausing your excruciatingly slow descent. He ignores the positively lethal glare you bend on him. “What about a condom?”

“Just pull out in time.” If he’s thinking he can hold you back from getting dicked down any longer, he’s so, so wrong. You wiggle your hips, gently bouncing in place on the upper half of his shaft, working yourself open. Eren throws his head back, his fingers digging into your ass at the friction, breathless laughter escaping his parted lips. You can see a dark line where he has bitten his bottom lip, or maybe you have bitten it.

“Because that worked out so well last time,” he says. Pictures flood the back of your half-closed eyes. The sink Eren had bent you over at Connie’s party, ploughing into you like an animal. And when he’d cum, his thighs shaking, his grip on your elbows pulling them back bruising, he’d filled you up to the brim, until it leaked down your legs, onto the floor. It had felt so warm, so good.

You grin. “Didn’t knock me up, did you?”

“Would you like that?” His voice is rough, scratchy. “For me to knock you up?”

You hate how your body betrays you, how you clench and he isn’t even all the way in. Eren chokes on a moan as your legs begin to shake at his sides. He pats your legs, encouraging you to continue your journey down on his cock. “What a beautiful answer,” he croons.

Your heart pounds in your ears. It is so, so hot; hot as if you’re burning up from the inside. Your face contorts slightly, the moan catching in your throat as his cock splits you open, forces your tight, clenching walls to part and take him in, accept him. Accept all that he’s giving you.

A warm hand gently slides up to the back of your neck. Your eyes flutter open—when did you close them?—shaking the tears loose that have collected at your lashes like morning dew clinging to curved leaves.

“Breathe,” Eren says, almost softly. Something warm skitters in your chest at the nearly caressing expression on his face. “You’ve done this before. You can do it again. You can take it.”

That warm feeling evaporates, quickly replaced by stinging annoyance. “Great advice, coach.”

When Eren grins at that, a little crookedly, the tight knot in your stomach eases a little. Maybe you aren’t the only one struggling right now. You try to relax, take one deep, shuddering breath. Allow yourself to sink down a little more, feeling the drag of his fat tip against your walls. When he’s finally, finally balls deep inside you, you take a moment to get used to his girth, gently rocking your hips back and forth.

Eren’s hands find their way back home around your thighs, nails digging into your flesh and leaving angry, crescent marks on your skin even through the fabric of your tights. His back against the cushion, head leaning slightly against the rest. Chest falling and rising with every deep breath, one hand steals between your spread legs and his thumb drags one of your lower lips to the side to allow him a spectacular few of where you’re pierced and drooling on his dick.

“Look at that,” he drawls, his voice gravely low. He’s smiling like he’s just won the lottery, a warmth in his eyes that has a prickly, pleasant feeling pooling in the pit of your stomach. The closest word you can think of how he looks at you is adoration. “See how much she missed me?”

“You’re so disgusting,” you mumble, but that doesn’t stop you from lifting your hips, up and further up until his leaking tip catches at your clenching hole. It doesn’t want to let him go. You don’t want to let him go.

You sink your fingers into his muscular arms to steady yourself and begin to bounce on his dick. Eren’s face, contorted with pleasure, deserves its own painting to commemorate it. His brows furrow, his jaw tenses. You watch the beads of sweat collect at his temples as you immediately take on a spine-breaking pace that has your eyes rolling to the back of your head.

“Good fucking cunt, treating me so well.” Eren’s smile has vanished, and the warm spark in his eyes is suddenly ablaze—a roaring fire, threatening to consume you. “Wish I could film this … put a camera right behind you and see your cunt swallowing my dick. Would you like that?”

No, you want to say. Instead, you moan, your body twitches for a second, and that is answer enough. Eren smiles placidly. “Of course you do.”

He frees your tits by yanking your lace bra down and stares at them bouncing whenever you sink down on him hard enough that you feel his dick in your throat. It feels like a fire is licking up from your knees up to your thighs. You have to put your knees down, get into a more comfortable position that won’t have you end up in the ER at the end of this night—

“Oh, no, no,” Eren coos when your knees sink into the cushion. He grabs onto them, lifting them again, slightly changing the angle at which you sink onto his cock. “Come on, be a good girl. Keep ‘em up. That’s right, just like that,” he adds when you dutifully return to bounce on his lap in a squatting position. “Just like that.”

You hate noticing how much your body reacts to his voice. You can hear him struggling too, his little grunts whenever you sink down completely, stuff your cunt with his monster of a cock. It all accumulates to the tight knot in your abdomen to tighten further, the pleasure a hard-clenched fist around your fuzzy mind.

“Oh God—God, I’m—I’m close,” you whimper, wrapping your arms around his shoulders for leverage, feeling his muscles strain.

“Are you?” Eren places a warm hand at the back of your neck, pulling your forehead against his shoulder. “You’re doing such a good job, fucking yourself on my cock, such a good job,” he growls in your ear. “Come on, you can let go. You can cum.”

He tries and fails to sound as if he’s got it all under control, feeling you tipping closer and closer to the edge of becoming completely untethered—your walls tighten vice-like around his cock. He grits his teeth and grabs your ass harshly, moving you up and down, up and down, using you like a ragdoll and helping you bounce on his cock—he’s not even fucking you himself, just moving you like one of those pocket pussies, like you weight nothing and manhandling you all the way he pleases is nothing but child’s play.

His hot mouth maps out your temples, your cheekbones, your jaw. He kisses your cheek deceptively soft, and with a harsh, sharp whisper against your mouth he grunts, “You can cum like the good little slut that you are for me.”

Something inside you just snaps, something you’ve been trying to hold onto so desperately and finally, you’re free.

Eren slams you down on his cock when you cum so hard your whole body shakes, the tears clinging to your lashes finally rolling free, and he keeps you pierced on his cock, feeling every twitch and convulsion of your hot walls as your mouth falls open in a loud cry. His groan vibrates through his whole body as he continues to move your hips in shaky, desperate rolls, starving for more friction, more of your spasming walls.

When your sweaty body finally stills and you slump against him, Eren already begins to pull you off his dick and your battered pussy retaliates by clutching tightly around him as if saying Don’t go yet. I still need you inside me.

You’re hiding your face in the crook of his neck, patting weakly at his shoulder. “St-stop, wait … wait a second, please.” You’re still so sensitive, the slow drag of his cock is too much friction on your overstimulated, swollen cunt.

Eren mouths at your neck, his tongue running in lazy swipes over your skin. “Did you enjoy using me as your personal dildo?”

You whimper when his fingers dig in your thighs again. He yanks you off his dick, and you both stare at the thread of slick between your legs still connecting you two before Eren wipes his dick off on the inside of your thigh.

With a swift movement—with way too much control than you want to give him credit for, he rises to his feet, you still clinging to him with all your might. “’Cause now it’s my turn to use you as my cute, little cocksleeve.”

His words make you shake, your legs locking tight around his narrow waist. Eren carries you to this dark bedroom, and in true Eren fashion, he almost trips over a heap of dirty clothes lying by his bed and nearly breaks both your necks.

“Oops.” You can feel his boyish grin against your skin as he reaches over to the night stand where a lamp flickers to life, and before you can tell him to pick up his dirty, stinky clothes, his mouth is already back on yours. He spreads you on his sheets, pulls off your skirt, tights and underwear. You don’t notice your phone falling out of your pocket on the bed as he throws your clothes to the ground without any care, quickly followed by his own pants after he shakes them off.

And then Eren just looks at you for a moment. Takes all of you in with eyes starved and gleaming with something that might be unadulterated awe—as if you are an exhibit usually sealed away behind highly secured iron doors and finally, he has you all to himself.

It all takes less than a minute, but Eren’s hands fly back to your body as if you two have been apart for years. He lets them roam over every stretch and fold, his fingers tracing the curves of you, the dips and hollows of your body, his rough lips following closely after. Not an inch is spared by his hungry mouth—he sucks nasty bruises on your shoulders and collarbones, digs his fingers into wherever your soft skin yields as if he tries to leave imprints there, as though you are a thing fashioned from a potter’s hands and Eren is the artist.

Your tits fill out his warm, rough palm completely, a perfect match as he holds them and pinches your nipples, with his fingers first, then his teeth. He settles between your spread legs and kisses a trail down to your stomach, to your swollen cunt, where he presses his hot tongue flat against it.

“Wait, gimme just … five—five minutes,” you slur, digging your heels into his shoulders and trying to push him off, but Eren just grabs your ankle and holds your leg, spreading your further open.

“You gotta keep up, pretty girl,” Eren mouths against your wet folds. His tongue dips into your hole, followed by his fingers. “You had your fun, now it’s my turn. I’m gonna fuck you so hard you’ll forget your own name.”

A thrill of anticipation shoots up your spine, arching your back into a beautiful curve that has your eyes rolling to the back of your head—and looking right at the line of big-breasted figurines in skimpy outfits that don’t deserve to be called clothes.

“Oh my god,” you say, slumping back into the mattress. “I’m not going to fuck you with all your fake girlfriends watching us.”

Eren follows your gaze, lapping at your cunt, fingers plunging in and out of your hole in lazy movements, and if your hips slightly jerk against his face to create friction, you’ll deny any such thing ever happened.

He narrows his eyes. “Don’t you dare say that about Rei Ayanami.”

“What? That she’s not real?” Sometimes, with the way he acts like he’s a walking sex God, it’s easy to forget what a huge fucking nerd he is.

Eren pinches your thigh. “No need to be jealous. I’m paying attention to you now, aren’t I, baby?”

“It’s not about that.” As if Eren needed his ego more fed. “And anyway, isn’t Asuka way better?”

His eyes nearly sparkle. “Where have you been all my life?” He sighs and dives back between your legs. You didn’t think such simple words would have any impact on you, but here you are, heat scalding your ears.

“Oh, you are so pretty when you’re all embarrassed,” Eren croons. He kneads at your thighs, grabbing them hard as if they’re his personal anti-stress toy. “I can’t wait to see how you’ll look when I fuck you stupid.”

“I forgot,” you say dryly, “you can be such a romantic.”

“Any time.” Eren gives your clit tiny, sharp kitten licks with the tip of his tongue that have your legs twitching shut. A harsh slap from him on your thigh makes you jump. “Keep ‘em open for me.”

Your hand travels down to where he’s holding painfully hard onto your thigh, your fingers brushing and holding onto each other for a moment. If anyone else saw you, they might confuse you for lovers. That is until Eren leans back and spits on your cunt, spreading it with so much fondness as if he were putting paint on a gilded canvas.

“I hope you’re ready, baby girl,” Eren says to your cunt. “I’m gonna mess you up real good.” He places a last parting kiss on your clit, then flips you around, arranging you however he wants: on your knees, legs spread painfully wide, ass up, your face in his pillow.

You hug it closely to your chest, not daring to turn around. Your reward is a harsh slap to your ass that has you shuddering so hard your teeth rattle before Eren, pressing his thighs against yours, slides right back in, grunting low and content.

“Home, sweet home, baby,” he sighs, sliding in and in and in, and finally he’s fully back inside you, balls resting against your slick folds. You can’t help yourself—you giggle. At his joke, at him stretching you out blissfully. Who the fuck even cares anymore?

Finally, he moves, aaaall the way out, then aaall the way back in, and because patience isn’t a word in his dictionary, he begins to snap his hips against yours at a brutal pace. The stretch still feels impossibly good, every inch dragging over your sensitive walls and unravelling thought after thought until your mind is empty and only filled with Eren’s cock, Eren’s cock, Eren’s cock.

Eren laughs, driving you forward with every harsh thrust. You have to catch your body against his headboard before he smacks your head right against it with how rough he fucks you.

“What? Am I fucking you stupid? You feeling so good you can’t talk like a normal person?” he says, and to your horror you realise you must have said that out loud; must have worshipped his cock out loud.

You press your face into his pillow, and if you suffocate like this, you don’t care. It beats having to deal with the embarrassment of admitting how fucking good it feels, each relentless thrust that Eren puts so much force behind that you can’t stop mewling into his pillow. He fucks you good—so good, you want to forget your name.

Vrrrr. Vrrrr. It takes a long moment for your fucked out mind to understand what is happening. Eren, with his head still too clear for your liking, pauses for a moment. Still connected to you, rocking his hips gently into you, he digs around the blanket he’s half kicked off his bed. You’re still unable to comprehend. That is until you hear Eren’s snort behind you, and then he throws something right next to your head.

An incoming call on your phone set on vibration.

Calling ID: my little pony 🐎

“Oh no,” you blurt, hand springing forward to decline the call.

“Oh yes.” Eren is faster. He seizes your wrist, unfairly easy with just one hand, and with his thumb, he swipes right to accept the phone call.

Your mouth goes dry as a desert.

“Ey, where the hell did you go? Sasha and Connie are coming over and I need pop tarts,” Jean says.

You need to die. Right now. Eren pulls your arm back by your wrist, settling it on your lower back. You don’t trust yourself to speak and tell him you’re going to kick his ass to Narnia. With a chair.

“Heeellooooo? Can you go and get them or what?”

“I don’t think,” Eren says, driving his cock all the way back only to drill it inside you with enough force to punch an obscene moan out of your lungs, “that’s possible, horse face.”

You slap your free hand on your mouth, feeling your heart beat in your throat. If Eren’s pillow combusts it’s from all the heat radiating off your face.

“Jesus,” Jean says, “Christ.”

Eren laughs, and you hate how the sound, so clear like an early summer’s day, makes you feel, makes something flutter in your chest. He ruts shallowly into you, making sure the fat tip of his cock presses right against the bundle of nerves deep inside you. You feel your eyes rolling back, your hips bucking into him on their own accord as you try to fuck yourself back onto him. You almost miss Jean’s next words. Almost. Because the screeching tilt to his voice is barely something you can blank out.

“I thought you two didn’t get along?!”

“We get along splendidly when I’m inside her,” Eren says.

“Oh God, I’m gonna throw up.”

“Don’t be shy now.” Eren is on a roll, it seems. “You can wipe out your tiny dick and jerk off to it, I don’t mind.”

“I. Mind,” you grit out over the sound of Eren abusing your cunt while Jean squeals, “My dick isn’t tiny, you asshole!”

It sounds a little as if Jean is having an existential crisis on the other line. You’re very close to having one yourself at the feeling of more and more slick pooling between your legs, gushing onto the mattress. It doesn’t go unnoticed by Eren, the slick and easy slide. His speed increases. He’s nearly pounding into you again.

“Bitch, didn’t you say you’d rather open Only Fans than fuck him again?” Jean asks you, appalled. You never in your whole life wanted him to shut up so bad like right now.

“Oh?” Eren presses his damp, bare chest into your back, pushing you into the mattress. He leans over your shoulder, to your ear on the other side from the phone and hisses darkly and quietly, “Would have loved to see that. Watch you stuff your cute little cunt with big, big toys. Would have donated money to you so you could buy them. Not that toys will ever satisfy you again after I’m done with you.”

You whine, spreading your legs even wider to grant him better access.

Jean makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like gagging. “Why is this happening? You’re the last two people I wanna hear going at it like rabbits.”

Content with his work, Eren leans back, changes his angle so that he’s fucking up into you. He groans when your walls grip him so tight that he has to bully his dick back inside you. “You’re—you’re still here, horse face.”

“Fuck.” The tone of Jean’s voice changes. “Yeah, this shit is like a car crash.”

“Next time,” Eren says, “come over and watch. I’m sure she’ll like that.”

“I—I’m gonna … gonna kill you,” you drawl, and yet your body betrays you and reacts to his words, not because it’s Jean but because apparently, you’re a slut for exhibitionism and Eren knows.

“Okay, that’s my cue to go and bleach my ears. You better be using protection, you psychopaths.”

Your phone lights up when the call disconnects. Finally. Eren leans over you again, marking up your neck with sharp, hungry teeth, biting into the heated skin. “’M sure he’s jealous.”

So that’s what this is about. He just wanted to prove a point, that you and him aren’t a thing, that you two are nothing, but if Eren possesses something, no matter how brief or the context of the relationship, he has to let other people know, and he pretty much smacked a neon-sign in Jean’s face that right now you are Eren’s. That you belong to him.

“You’re a freak,” you mumble, rolling your hips against his. Wanton and desperate. He can claim you all he wants; you don’t even care anymore.

Eren grins against your sweaty, hot skin. “Good thing, right? Or else you wouldn’t be here.”

He shifts his position, keeps one knee pressed into the mattress, and lifts his other to put his foot down to put more weight behind his thrusts. You thought it impossible, but like that, he hits you even deeper—you wish someone would take a picture right now as he mounts you, draping his broad chest over your back and circles his strong arms your shoulder to cage you; pushes one of his arms against your throat to choke you.

This is how animals fuck: unabashed, filthy. With one aim only. To breed.

With your hand now free, you grab onto his hair, pulling it loose from its low bun. Eren turns his head, running his mouth along your open palm, your wrist as he gets lost in the merciless rhythm of fucking you, aiming to destroy you. Your throat becomes hoarse from the screams and moans he punches out of you.

When he pushes you over the edge a second time, your knees buckle, unable to hold you up any longer as shockwaves grip your body, your walls fluttering around Eren’s cock.

This time, he doesn’t relish in the spasm and contract of your tight walls. He pulls out and flips you over on your back, laying the weight of his whole massive body on top of you as he slides back in. Only his hips snap with a ferocity as if he’s trying to break your spine; he is all desperation as his body cages yours.

His warm hands hold your head, cupping your cheeks. He looks at you with his eyes blown black from desire, half-closed, mouth hanging open. His thumbs press into your forehead as he eats up the sight of your fucked-out, blissful expression: eyes puffy from crying, nose running, drool sticking to the corners of your mouth and chin. Your heart-eyes on him.

“Gorgeous, so gorgeous,” he mumbles, and a jolt of unadulterated desire strikes your body at the sight of him becoming untethered because he feels so good fucking you. You are the one making him absolutely drunk on your pussy. “Lemme ruin that pussy for any other dick, will you? Can’t get off on any other dick except mine. Can’t fuck anyone else except me.”

You nod and nod and nod, licking your lips, swallowing. Eren smashes his mouth on yours, biting at your lips. “I’m gonna make this pussy a slut for my dick. No one can ever fuck you like I do. Ever.”

It’s so much, too much; you haven’t even recovered from your second orgasm and now Eren’s giving it to you like there is no tomorrow. Like today is your last day on earth and his whole purpose is to drill the shape of his cock inside you.

Something inside you snaps. You can’t keep up with this, can’t hold Eren’s searing gaze any longer. You shake your head, trying to break free from his hold. Somewhere you snatch a pillow and try to hide behind it, but Eren is having none of it.

“Oh, no, no, no, you can’t hide from me.” He cups your cheeks, thumbs wiping off tears as he licks into your mouth, lets you suck on his tongue. “Look at me.” He shakes you slightly until you do. “Look at me.”

You do. You look right into his unfathomable, green eyes and it’s nearly enough to make you come undone.

“Look at this.” He tilts your head, cupping the back of your neck gently, until you can look down your bodies, see how Eren’s massive cock disappears into your body as he hammers at your cunt. The outline of him inside you.

You laugh and cry, tears running hot paths down your temples.

“Look at how I’m fucking you,” he continues, his voice thick with the need to devour you. “You love it, don’t you, baby? Love, love, love how I fuck you like a whore.”

Nodding yet again, your nails dig bloody crescent marks into his arms as you hold onto him as if your life depends on it.

“Say it.” Eren’s thrusts lose his momentum as his hips stutter. He’s getting close, chasing his own climax without any care for you. More tension coils in your lower abdomen at that thought, driving you crazy. “Use your words, baby. Say how much you love it.”

“Y-your cock,” you whimper. You don’t recognise your own voice, it sounds so gone, so completely out of it. “Your cock sh-should live in there … that’s how mu-much I love … love it.”

Eren groans. His thrusts become so powerful he’s making you both bounce on the mattress and you have to lock your legs around his waist. “Such a filthy mouth.” He hooks his thumb around your teeth and yanks your mouth open. Spits in it. “I love it. I love it.”

When you swallow his spit like a good girl, he looks at you as if you are sculpture, something shaped a thousand years ago in the likeness of a pagan deity, as if you are absolutely divine—but his words are utter filth, delicious music to your ears: “Love this pussy so much, taking me so well. Treating my dick so good. C’mon, say it. Who’s fucking your brains out? Who’s messing up this fucking cunt?”

This time, you aren’t even hesitating as you shake with the force of his thrusts. “Y-you, you, you.” Your arms circle around his shoulders as you hold onto him. “E-Eren, Eren, Eren!”

“F-fuuuck!” His voice rings in your ear as he stuffs your cunt with one final, hard thrust and stays as he empties his balls inside you, stuffing you full with load after load of hot, thick cum. He groans your name as if it is the only word that holds any meaning in his entire existence; as if you are the only thing that keeps him from getting unwoven. Your walls milk him hard as he pushes you, no kicks you over the edge a third time this evening.

You cry against his thick neck, little hiccups and wet moans as Eren slides out fully, only to snap back inside, once, twice, and a last time. And finally, he slumps against you, exhausted and with his heart beating so hard against his ribcage you can feel it knock against your own chest.

The silence is like balm to a wound as you take the time to catch your breaths. Eren is hiding his face in the crook of your neck, inhaling audibly as his nose brushes along your throat.

“That was—” he begins, his voice throaty. You can feel his fingers gliding through your hair, smoothing it back.

“Yeah … yeah, that was something,” you agree, and proceed to lie flat like a pancake under him, not moving as his mouth plants lazy kisses on your shoulder. That is until you feel Eren’s warm cum leak out of you, slowly sliding between your ass crack and down his balls. You can feel him pull a grimace against your neck.

“Lemme go clean up.” You pat his shoulder until he pushes himself off you, his mouth curled downward. His frown only lasts until he, holding your legs open, slowly pulls out and watches your cunt push out another load of his cum.

“Pretty,” he says, thumbing at your hole.

You throw your arm over your eyes. “Your pull-out game is on top, as always.”

“Well, it didn’t seem like you wanted me to pull out.”

He’s right, but you don’t have to tell him that. All you want right now is to curl up and sleep for the next three days.

But Eren, who has the cock and stamina of a horse, picks you up easily in his arms, and the only reason he stumbles is because on the way to the bathroom, he trips over his dirty clothes a second time. “Oops.”

You’re too tired to comment on it. Too tired to answer anything when he goes full nerd and chats you up about the final instalment of the Evangelion movies as he sits you on the toilet lid while searching for a clean washcloth in one of his cupboards. When he soaks it in warm water and carefully wipes it between your legs, having to lean down slightly, you reach out and squish his cheeks, finally silencing him.

“What do I have to do to make you shut up?” you say.

Eren’s eyes dip to your mouth for a moment. “Sit on my face next time.”

His answer surprises you enough you lose your hold on him and he dives forward to smack a wet kiss on your mouth.

You blink at him, a little dazzled. “Next time?”

He grins. “Why not? I think we’re a pretty good match.”

That’s a persuading point. It’s a persuasive enough for you to lean forward and gently lick at the curve of his v-line, to slide your hands up his waist, over his hard packs. Eren’s eyes immediately darken. You’ll have to see if he can hold out another round first, because he has yet to learn how insatiable you are. Insatiable and over-indulgent. But this indulgence, him, is like playing with fire, and you have no problem becoming the match to set it off.

a/n: part 3 threesome w/ jean, let’s go

i’m joking.

am i?

***

shamless self-ad, please go check out my canon (with divergence) eren/fem!reader series! 🥺👉👈 the mutual pining is going hard right now and they’re both kinda dumb about it.

will have explicit sexual content later which will be marked for minors to not interact with those chapters

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[dduane]

Dai!

I'm currently reading chapter 4 of The Wizard's Dilemma - where Kit and Nita are fighting, and sending messages via their manuals - and I was wondering:

The manual translates their spoken words into the Speech. And the Speech is much more precise for describing things as they are, including a lot of context. Wouldn't it transcribe, here, context such as tone of voice, speaker's intention, etc. etc., so that Nita's "fine." might come across differently than if she texted just the English version?

(I find the idea SO intriguing, since written language often lacks exactly these context clues, and to imagine a language that doesn't? Is fascinating.)

Have a good start of your week!

...I'm going to get myself off the hook here by suggesting that there are a lot of ways you can have a Manual (or similar instrumentality) set up to either send or receive data: some ways a whole lot more granular than others... if you have the patience to put up with them. Sometimes you might just opt for the milk-tongue/casual native language option if you thought it was sufficient for current needs (and then forgot to reset when it wasn't).

Some of the granularity options were suggested in one of the YW 30-Day OTP Challenge posts: I'll just paste the contents in here. Inserting the cut below...

(Manual transcription, JD REDACTED XXXXXXXX.xxx - XXXXXXXX.xxx inclusive)

recording state: static | DYNAMIC editing: locked | UNLOCKED live context: off | ON location: Sol IIIa Illumination: 26% Phase from primary: waning crescent Coordinates: IAU: LQ11: 22.5° N / 18° W regional designation: IAU: Montes Carpatus (old style: Lunar Carpathians) microregion: no formal designation, no colloquial designation, reference coordinates; bookmark “Kit’s Rock” Playback: flat text | CONTEXTUAL POV TEXT | audio | audio + view | audio + view + interior cognitive [more] POV selection: static | dynamic | CONTEXT-DRIVEN | [more] POV style: omnicient (total) | omniscient (need to know) | BLIND ITEM NARRATIVE | normal narrative | stream of consciousness [more] POV narration: 3P | 2P | 1P | P-NEUTRAL [more] POV depth: EXTERIOR | int. conscious | int. subconscious | int. preconscious [more]

Participants: Callahan, J.L., Rodriguez, C.K.

(record begins)

CKR: You keep fiddling with that.

JLC: Yeah… the record settings are way more involved than I thought. Way more involved than they used to be, anyway. I messed something up the other day.

CKR: Anything serious?

JLC: Not really… got lucky that time.

CKR: …Up here again.

JLC: Yeah, seems smartest. We’ll have some warning in case Certain People start looking for us.

CKR: Like we have the slightest chance of escaping notice—

JLC: Didn’t say that. Some warning, though.

CKR: Fair enough.

(break in record) (record resumes)

JLC: It wasn’t, though.

CKR: It kinda was.

JLC: Uh, not really.

CKR: Look, it’s not like you were trying to hide anything about it. You told me you two were kissing. It’s okay.

JLC: But it wasn’t making out.

CKR: I don’t mind if it was. You were under pressure.

JLC: Pressure didn’t have anything to do with it! And it really wasn’t making out.

CKR: Neets, honestly, it’s not a problem.

JLC: It is if you think making out means that we were intending for something else to happen. Because it wasn’t. And you think that’s what it means. I can tell.

CKR: Listen, really, it’s okay! It was a weird situation, bizarre stuff was going on, you weren’t—

JLC: Stop right there! I know what was happening!

CKR: Look. Sorry. I’m sorry, I just…

JLC: I just need a way to show you.

CKR: …don’t think it’s that important, but if you—

JLC: Wait. Wait.

(pause)

JLC: You know… this could work. Absolutely it could.

CKR: What?

JLC: (laughter) We can run it back and take a look at it.

CKR: (pause) Run what back?

JLC: When he and I kissed.

(pause)

CKR: You lost me. Exactly what are you saying?

JLC: Well, you possibly won’t have heard. I do have an in with a privileged source. But lately there are some new ways to get at information using the Manual…

CKR: Whoa, whoa, wait a moment! How would that ever be in the Manual?!

JLC: It’s always been there… or the raw data has. But there are new ways to get at it.

CKR: (pause) This is kinda bizarre. The Powers are usually so gung-ho about privacy issues.

JLC: Oh, They still are. Everything’s locked down so that you can’t get at it if you don’t have all the necessary permissions.

CKR: How did you find out about this? Bobo?

JLC: Actually, no. Closer to home.

CKR: Oh…my…God. No.

JLC: Yes.

CKR: Dairine. How did she ever—

JLC: Not her. The Mobiles. They’ve got this insane archival project going on…

CKR: What, to preserve for all time the immortal details of you two necking?!

JLC: (laughter)

CKR: I can’t believe I’m getting on board with this. So fine. What do we need to do?

JLC: Get Ronan up here.

CKR: …For what exactly?

JLC: Consent.

CKR: …What??

(break in record) (record resumes)

JLC: See, that’s what you get. You okay?

CKR: Yeah, fine. Go on, make the call, no point in falling halfway down a mountain for nothing!

JLC: Not anything like halfway. Couldn’t have been more than—

CKR: Will you make the damn call already?

(break in record) (record resumes)

CKR: There he comes.

JLC: That was quick. Where?

CKR: Down the ridge.

JLC: Yeah. The usual offset.

CKR: Is it me or is he putting on weight?

JLC: Looks like muscle. Did he say last time that he’d started doing weights?

CKR: Yeah. Something to do with the rugby.

JLC: He didn’t give up his thing with the weird club, did he?

CKR: The hurley? No chance. Hey Ro!

(adding participant: Nolan III, R.H.)

RHN: Hey yourself. I see you two are busy with your usual pastime of watching the rest of us live out our little antlike lives far below.

CKR: Yeah. Pull up a rock. …Weren’t busy, were you?

RHN: Just finished a job. Nothing exciting.

JLC: This from the man who said Taking In The Sea was no big deal. Don’t think I didn’t just see your precis update.

CKR: What’s he done now?

JLC: Here, check this out.

CKR: (pause) Did you just cause an earthquake?

RHN: Just a wee titchy one. Maybe some plates fell down off shelves in Howth… no worse than that. CalTech and the USGS’ll have it for their records if anyone gets suspicious.

CKR: …Nice. What did the people on the ferry think?

RHN: Mostly ‘Feck are we glad that this very localized tsunami came up and pushed us ashore at Ringsend without destroying our ship much.’

CKR: Jeez. What the hell are your power levels doing?

RHN: Still having some peak swings secondary to my roomer, that’s all. Suits me fine. At least I get something useful out of having him in my head moving the furniture around all that while.

CKR: Well, wow, you did good.

RHN: I guess. Ta much.

JLC: I’m just wondering how they’re going to explain it the rest of the way. That quake won’t have been enough.

RHN: Don’t be daft. It’s Ireland. We’ll blame it on the weather.

JLC, CKR: (laughter)

RHN: So what was this big thing you needed to talk to me about?

JLC: Not that big. Need some input, though.

RHN: About?

JLC: A discussion we were having.

RHN: Oh?

JLC: We were talking about making out.

(pause)

RHN: …Uh.

(break in record) (record resumes)

RHN: Yeah, so you were telling me why you need me for this.

CKR: Well. It was a question of semantics, first.

RHN: Let me get this straight. You asked me to come up from Dublin… to the Moon… to discuss semantics. Of kissing.

JLC: Not just semantics. I want to review some material, and I was hoping you’d sanction it.

RHN: Sanction what?

JLC: Instant replay. …Well, not instant.

RHN: You lost me.

JLC: Remember when we kissed?

RHN: (pause) Which answer won’t make one of you clock me upside the head with a moon rock?

JLC, CKR: (laughter)

RHN: What the feck brought this on?

JLC: A difference of opinion.

CKR: Nosiness.

RHN: Uh, not feeling safe about this whole line of enquiry now, but moving on regardless…

JLC: It’s okay. See, there’s a recording…

RHN: Of us kissing? Not possible.

JLC: Not a recording as such. Except insofar as the universe passively records everything that happens inside it…

RHN: …You’re telling me we’re living inside the One’s Sky Plus box.

JLC: (pause) What?

CKR: TiVo.

JLC: Oh.

RHN: Seriously, you’re telling me you can play it back somehow?

JLC: Not playback exactly but—

RHN: Hey science queen, telling me what it’s not like is wasted effort. The direct approach, please.

JLC: Well, going by Dairine’s explanation, it’s got something to do with hyperstring structure and the Theory of Everything.

RHN: Oh please.

JLC: No, that’s what I thought at first. It’s a real term, though. This technology, it’s something the Mobiles have been implementing: this big project they started. She got all bogged down in technical stuff I didn’t understand, but it sounded like she—

RHN: Whoa whoa whoa, wait just a moment, did we hear history being made right here before us on this dusty rock? Did Miss Juanita Louise Callahan—

JLC: Dead, Ronan, you are about to be discorporated before your time.

RHN: —actually admit to not understanding some kind of technical stuff?

JLC: I really will kill you, you do understand that? You want to make history, fine. First human being to be killed on the Moon. You mentioned rocks? Let’s try this one, it looks good—

CKR: Oh God.

RHN: (laughter) It’s pumice. Who the feck do you think you’re gonna kill with pumice?

JLC: Oh it is not pumice, please, are you blind?—some kind of basalt, probably got kicked up here out of one of the maria by an impact, and maybe it’s about to have another of those! Dairine never told you about the L word, she knows her life would be too short. It was Carmela, wasn’t it, how can she, oh God why can she not just keep her—

RHN: Not Carmela. Someone else. Too bad, your secret’s out for all the world to hear….

(SFX: rock being pounded against larger rock)

JLC: Aaaaaggghhh!

RHN: Feel better now?

JLC: No. And when I recover my composure—

RHN: Always an entertaining exercise, there are nuclear weapons with shorter fuses—

CKR: Will you two shut yourselves up for two seconds?

(pause)

CKR: Thank you. Jeez. … ‘It sounded like she’ what??

JLC: (pause) Uh. Like what the Mobiles were talking about was making this sort of gigantic backup.

RHN: What of?

JLC: Everything wizardly apparently.

RHN: So how is the two of us kissing wizardly?

JLC: Well, we’re both wizards!

RHN: Oh, give me a break! There had to be, I don’t know, thousands of wizards kissing right then!

JLC: But probably only one who had the One’s Champion living in his mental basement at the time. Which makes it really of historical interest, I think.

RHN: Not ‘historical’ as in banging me in the head with a rock, I take it.

JLC: Don’t assume you’re safe yet. Anyway, parts of the explanation were way beyond me. In fact I think they were kind of beyond Dairine, or she hadn’t really spent much time getting her head around them. Because sometimes she made it sound like the Mobiles were trying not just to back up everything wizardly, but just… everything.

RHN: Everything?

JLC: In the universe.

RHN: What…? All the information?

CKR: Or all the thought?

RHN: All the matter?

JLC: I think maybe all those.

(pause)

CKR: …How in the One’s name do you back up everything?

JLC: I have no idea. I keep meaning to ask her about it, but she’s not home a lot right now, and other stuff keeps happening…

CKR: You’d have to make a whole new universe…

RHN: So anyway! This recording…

CKR: Wow.

JLC: Seems like wherever there’s a manual, it makes a kind of imprint or marker on local space, and this kind of record can be made.

RHN: But no one can see it.

JLC: Only the participants, if they give consent. And anybody else they consent to allow to see it.

RHN: Seriously.

JLC: Yeah.

(pause)

JLC: Well?

(pause)

RHN: How are you about this?

CKR: She told me about it.

RHN: Not the kissing itself. I know she told you about that. And anyway, you know I already knew you knew.

CKR: Oh God, stop, too complicated already. So?

RHN: If she’s okay with it, I’m okay with it.

CKR: Okay.

RHN: You sure?

CKR: Look, why do you keep asking me? I didn’t kiss you.

RHN: Maybe that’s a shame. Maybe you don’t know what you’re missing.

CKR (to JLC): Maybe you want to hand me that rock.

JLC: (laughter)

RHN: So what do we have to do?

JLC: Nothing. It’s here, in the manual. It heard you: the permission’s in. It’s cued up. Now we just roll it. Ready?

RHN: Yeah.

CKR: Yeah.

[ERROR: Permissions failure. Secondary playback is embargoed in this format due to insufficient permissions level or number. Please check your permissions module and try again.]

CKR: Would you pause this a minute? …You know, this is kinda weird.

RHN: What, you mean sitting on the bloody Moon watching yourself in a porno?

JLC, CKR: (laughter)

CKR: This is not porn! These are just two people staring at each other in the dark!

RHN: After one of them slags me off with a flamethrower, yeah. God you were brutal.

JLC: Oh, come on, it wasn’t that bad.

RHN: Maybe for you. I was kinda raw at that point.

CKR: You? Admitting to raw?

RHN: I don’t mind it now. It got better.

CKR: Anyway, how is it porn when all you’ve got here is two people just sort of looking at each other longingly with their tongues hanging out?

JLC: Cut it out! There were no tongues.

RHN: But I think I see what you mean about the weirdness.

CKR: (laughter) What, besides you thinking it’s porn?

RHN: No it is not porn, shut up, I concede the fecking point already. It’s what bothers me in bad TV shows. Where’s the camera?

JLC: I told you. There were manuals on site. No, I know, don’t start. Manuals or equivalent instrumentalities… your Knowledge thing. Where there’s a manual, or equivalent, there’s sort of a node that can make a record of what’s going on in local reality. It’s some kind of string structure business: pluck the string in one place, it vibrates somewhere else.

CKR: Oh God. Quantum mechanics again.

JLC: Yeah. Maybe the cats might be better to ask for the details: they work with strings on the gates all the time. They’d know.

RHN: Given a choice between asking Rhiow and asking your sister? Rhiow every time. Where were we again?

JLC: Watching us kiss.

[ERROR: Permissions failure. Secondary playback is embargoed in this format due to insufficient permissions level or number. Please check your permissions module and try again.]

CKR: So this doesn’t constitute making out?

RHN: Nope.

CKR: Meaning you weren’t thinking about doing anything more? Anything after?

RHN: (pause) Hadn’t crossed my mind. I was just kind of amazed that it was happening right then.

JLC: And not necking.

RHN: What?

CKR: Necking.

RHN: Haven’t heard the term.

JLC: Kissing for a long time.

CKR: Like in a car, when you’re parking. Or on the couch when nobody’s home.

RHN: Done much of that?

CKR: Oh please. I have two older sisters. You have no idea how glad I was when Helena finally went to college. Half the time when the parents were out, the living room sounded like, oh, God never mind. I’d nearly forgotten.

RHN: Parking?

JLC: Going somewhere scenic to neck.

CKR: Or make out.

RHN: The definitions are getting dangerously circular now. Better roll it again.

[ERROR: Permissions failure. Secondary playback is embargoed in this format due to insufficient permissions level or number. Please check your permissions module and try again.]

CKR: But there. See, you grabbed hold of him—

JLC: He started it.

RHN: I was falling off the fence.

JLC: Oh, and that’s my fault somehow.

RHN: Yes, yes it was. What? Would you rather I said, ‘No, she kissed me and it had no effect whatsoever, thanks for playing’? Look, here, here’s the rock! Talk among yourselves and sort it out. I’ll just sit here, don’t mind me.

(pause)

JLC: Let’s call it mutual.

RHN: Thank you very much. Continue.

[ERROR: Permissions failure. Secondary playback is embargoed in this format due to insufficient permissions level or number. Please check your permissions module and try again.]

RHN: Okay, it’s clear. Definitely not making out. It might be snogging. Timing’s pretty iffy, though.

CKR: What?

RHN: You saw the timer running. That didn’t even last thirty seconds.

JLC: Felt like longer.

RHN: Relativity. Ever heard of Einstein’s Stove? A snog is, like, three minutes minimum.

JLC: I’m not so sure.

RHN: How are you defining terms all of a sudden? Had you even heard that word before I used it just now?

JLC: Excuse me, I watch Dr. Who. He said he’d just snogged Madame Pompadour. That was even shorter than this. Ten seconds maybe.

RHN: Let’s keep the fictional characters out of this, shall we?

CKR: Um.

RHN: Besides, the other thing with a snog is that it’s more for pleasure. This was just both of us being freaked out, I think.

JLC: Well, yeah. You were so vulnerable. And kinda cute that way.

RHN: And you were all fierce even though you were unnerved. And kinda cute that way.

CKR: So…

RHN: Reassurance.

JLC: And experimentation.

RHN: Yeah. Comfort smooch, undifferentiated type.

JLC: With added One’s Champion. God was I shocked. Any comfort, boy, it went right out the window when I found out who else was in there.

RHN: Yeah, roll that. Kind of funny in retrospect.

[ERROR: Permissions failure. Secondary playback is embargoed in this format due to insufficient permissions level or number. Please check your permissions module and try again.]

RHN: (laughter) Janey mack, look at me go.

JLC: I’m so sorry… I really didn’t mean for that to happen.

RHN: Wasn’t you I was reacting to. The damn Spear: it was like having it stuck in your arse.

CKR: There’s an image I won’t soon forget.

RHN: I’ll be remembering it a lot longer, believe me.

(pause)

RHN: So what’s the verdict? Have we got consensus?

JLC: Comfort kissing.

RHN: Borderline snog at best.

CKR: But okay, not making out.

RHN: Great, he concurs. Are we done now? Can I go back to my humdrum life?

CKR: Oh, yeah, Mister 'I Made The Earth Move'!

RHN: The sea floor anyway. And don’t you forget it.

JLC: Can’t wait to see the write-up on that.

CKR: And the environmental impact justification they’re gonna make you file.

RHN: Which I am already late for, due to being called up to Lunar orbit for the absolute weirdest consult of my life. Thanks a million.

CKR, JLC: (laughter)

RHN: Always pushing the boundaries, you two.

JLC: You say that as if it’s a bad thing.

RHN: No. Not at all. Kind of what we do, isn’t it? But some of us excel.

CKR: That almost sounded like a compliment.

RHN: Don’t get cocky. I’ve got the rock. (pause) Anyway, I’m outa here. Had people to see before the damn ferry started taking water. They really have to find better technology for those doors.

JLC: Anybody I know?

RHN: Some of the chicken-shop crew.

JLC: Give them my best.

RHN: Will do. Dai stihó, you two. Stay out of trouble.

CKR: What are the odds?

RHN: Please. I know you too well. Oh Kit, don’t forget, schedule change on the Big Game next week.

CKR: I saw the calendar change. No problem.

RHN: Right. Later!

(pause)

CKR: That it?

JLC: Yeah. Save out.

Participants: Callahan, J.L., Rodriguez, C.K., Nolan III, R.H.

(formal signoff) (record complete) (end of line) (end of file)

“…So.”

“Yeah.”

“We were talking about making out…”

“Yeah, we were, weren’t we?”

“We could always try defining when a snog stops being borderline.”

“Defining terms. So romantic.”

“Yeah, well this time make sure that thing’s off.”

[mhbcaps]

pinned post

hi I'm mhb and this is jackass my cyberpunk 2077 blog! you will find virtually nothing else here and I don't tag my reblogs except to occasionally hoot and holler about the content.

about me

I'm over the age of 25 and I live in the USA where I work in a school and play d&d a lot. I also draw, and once in a blue moon I write. my vp tag is mhbcaps

my ask box and DMs are open if you want to hit me up 😄

my ocs

David “V” Lozano: (he/him) my canon V, a born-and-bred Heywood brawler who never really cared about being famous but god Jackie made it sound so good. He doesn’t think he can make a difference and he doesn’t really try to. It’s all about survival, and corps can wipe you out in the blink of an eye. He would’ve minded his damn business after the heist if it hadn’t been for Johnny.

He used to date Kerry but they broke up and now he's with Angel.

Sanctuary Zelenko: (they/them) Medtech washout, ex-Scav, currently a ripperdoc in Northside. They’re eccentric, they’re enigmatic, they’re downright creepy sometimes. Their friends tell people they’re harmless, but no one knows for sure. Best not to find out.

Joey Armas: (he/him) Scav who grew up homeless in Pacifica. His brother was killed in front of him by some trust fund kid testing out their new combat-grade implants--that’s probably what set him down the path that led to the cyberware and organ black market.

They're dating each other.

Viggo “Gogo” Day: (they/them) a Static of the Kessler nomad clan along with their three brothers and a sister. They’re David’s best friend, a bright and cheerful foil to his taciturn toughness. The city hasn’t beaten the optimism out of them yet, and they have a lot of friends in surprising places who’d like to keep it that way.

Brother "Bea" Calloway: (she/her) a statuesque netrunner that’s earned herself a spot in the Afterlife’s back booths. She’s highly focused and more than a little intimidating when she’s working, but in her personal life she tends to be quite demure in contrast.

Brother is dating Gogo's older brother Augie, and Gogo is dating River Ward.

NPVs

There are NPVs available for David and Gogo (Sanctuary is coming soon) - you can message me here or on Discord if you'd like me to send them to you! they come with one-page guides to their character and shooting tips.

technical information (& transparency)

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660S (I use a prebuilt that I bought from Costco in 2020, don't come at me)

I use AMM and the game's photomode to take my screenshots, along with this effect replacer mod and a modified version of this reshade preset. Facial expressions are mods by pinkydude or xbaebsae. Except for some tattoos and Sanctuary's eyes, I only use publicly available mods - anything you see in my screenshots, you can also grab for yourself. If you need help finding it, don't be afraid to ask!

I occasionally will edit screenshots after the fact, usually to add text or reduce clipping but not much else. If I really fucked up the lights on one shot in a story, I'll fiddle with the color levels to match it to the others as best I can. Most of the screenshots I post are dragged straight from the folder to tumblr.

I think sometimes VP seems intimidating or impossible because it can be hard to figure out how some people get their shots looking like custom Blender setups or near-photorealistic. The answer is usually hotsampling, high-end GPUs, Otiscam, 4k texture mods, and photo editing software - sometimes all together, sometimes not. Not to say that these things are cheats or somehow invalidate the artistry behind the VP, but it IS to say that anyone can do it if they learn the tools, and those tools aren't even required. I don't use any of them. That's why I'm including this section - hopefully I can demystify VP a little. An artist's tools are only part of how they make art: having the same tools as someone else doesn't mean you'll magically make art just like them, and not having the same tools as someone else doesn't mean you'll automatically be worse at making art. At the end of the day the only thing that matters is that you love your blorbos and you think they look good.

anyway

thanks for reading

happy [day of the week]!

[ace-trainguys]

What if I posted the draft of the prologue to a fic of an au I haven't talked about on Tumblr. For a Halloween treat.

It's not edited up to where I want it. That and because this is only the first part of this au and it will be a long while before I write the rest is why I'm not posting it on ao3 yet. But if you would like a little something spooky, here is:

Heart of the Subway, part 1: Descent

Ingo sweeps his flashlight out in front of him. Even though Chandelure floats beside him, it is the proper safety procedure to illuminate the path ahead. The sensor that went offline is rather deep in the maintenance tunnels, but it shouldn't be too far now. Ingo hums to himself and Chandelure whistles along.

He reaches the next intersection and pauses. Instead of the two branching paths he was expecting, there are three. Ingo consults his mental map- he had been certain he was going the right way, but he must have made a wrong turn. A rare occurrence - one that hasn't happened since Ingo and Emmet became Subway Bosses, in fact. But that's the only explanation for the discrepancy. Each tunnel has the even shape of a man-made structure - no chance of a subterranean pokemon causing mischief.

All three paths slope downwards.

"Chandelure," Ingo murmurs. "Have I made a wrong turn?" She, too, knows these tunnels well. Chandelure chimes in confusion, confirming that she is also in the dark. Ingo had presumed as much - if she had noticed something wrong, she would have stopped him earlier. But he had to ask. "Very well. Let us retrace our steps."

Ingo turns around and heads back the way he came. He could have sworn that this tunnel had a slight downward slant when he had originally gone through, but he must have been mistaken. It's certainly sloping lower now.

Sooner than he expected, he reaches another intersection. It's wrong. There should be an opening to his left, and an opening forward, but there are four tunnels splitting off. This is not the way he came, but how could he have ended up somewhere else?

"Chandelure, do you sense anything?" Ingo asks. If it is a trick by a ghost, she will certainly be able to tell. When he doesn't receive a response, he turns and finds the space beside him empty. "Chandelure?!" He calls, but only his own voice echoes back to him. His loyal partner would not wander off and abandon him, but her purple tinted light is gone. Where is she? Ingo whips around to the direction he came from and-- it goes down.

No, no, he definitely descended coming this way. Did he get turned around? Which way did he come from? He shines his flashlight into the other tunnels, but all four slant deeper into the earth.

That's not possible. It-- the direction he came from, he went down. He didn't hear anything. Nothing could change the tunnels so silently.

It feels like a dream, but Ingo bites the inside of his cheek and feels pain. He's awake.

Ingo pulls out his radio and gets blasted by static. No matter how he tries to tune it, the results are the same.

Ingo... does not know the protocols for a situation like this. But he cannot simply stand around. He picks a tunnel and descends.

After several yards, Ingo turns and shines his flashlight back. The tunnel does not appear to be going back up like it should. He shudders and turns around again. What a horrible optical illusion, he tells himself, and desperately tries to believe it.

As he walks further and goes deeper, he begins to see cables run along the walls. He shines his flashlight on them, and though they are in line with the electrical wiring used in the subway, their placements and directions do not make logical sense. Ingo is intimately aware of how messy the wiring of the subway system was when he and Emmet began their careers. It was one of their highest priorities to repair when they became the bosses. It would make sense that there could have been wires they missed when doing the power system overhaul, so deep in the maintenance tunnels, but... these cables dip in and out of the walls in a way he's never seen before.

As he continues going deeper, he encounters cables drooping down in loops from the ceiling. An egregious safety hazard in five ways he can count off the top of his head. No one must have been in these tunnels in decades.

The wires grow thicker on the walls, running in all directions. Yet it is quiet - no hum of running electricity, despite the forest of cables. The only sounds Ingo can hear are his own careful breaths, and his rapid heartbeat.

It is not long before the cables have grown so thick that the walls are no longer visible. Ingo nearly trips before he realizes there are wires reaching out of the floor as well. He trains his flashlight and eyes at the ground, stepping carefully around the growths.

The tenuous beam of light hits a slab of solid metal. Ingo raises it to view an ancient door, wires twisting around every inch. Thick cables have entirely replaced the walls and floor - and a quick look upwards confirms the ceiling is covered as well. He swallows his dread and turns the doorknob with a shaking hand.

Immediately after stepping through, the door closes behind him with a sense of finality. The chamber he has entered is much wider than the tunnel he was in previously. Cables twirl and flow all around, congregating in a massive pillar in the center. Ingo realizes with a start that he can see outside his flashlight’s meager view - the whole room is filled with a dim sourceless light.

When he returns his eyes to the central pillar once more, he feels–

welcome happiness home

What…?

Ingo finds himself relaxing despite the incongruous nature of the emotions. It doesn’t make sense to feel this at home in such a strange, alien location, and yet. It’s as if he’s sitting on the couch, one arm around his brother, surrounded by their pokemon. Comfortable, safe, warm.

He can’t hear anything, but he can almost feel a noiseless sound. A pulse. Gazing upon the monolith of intertwined lines, he gets the sense that these wires, despite the lack of electricity flowing through them, are not lifeless.

He is suddenly, indisputably sure that this is the heart of the Unovan subway system. There is no logical evidence, nothing that could have led him to this conclusion, but he is certain.

Ingo is awestruck. Nothing could have prepared him for the power and life that the core of the subway emits. After all these years, all the effort Ingo and Emmet put into restoring a run down transit system - seeing that it has blossomed into something like this makes him want to laugh and cry. It was worth it.

The corners of his eyes pinch, his version of a wide smile. He wonders if he should feel reverence, in the core of the place he and his brother dedicated themselves to, but instead he’s filled with love, love, love that is not his own. Ingo realizes that it’s the subway itself, communicating with him in pure emotions, and he laughs. His own joy is reflected back at him. He loves and adores the subway, and it seems it loves him back.

With a noise like leaves rustling in the wind, cables shift in the pillar, opening a small entrance. Ingo feels a gentle pull forward, an invitation to enter the heart. happy closer appeal. Ingo notices he’s taken a step closer without realizing it.

He steps back and plants his feet firmly to the ground. Come come come. No, Ingo will not do anything blindly. Love safety stay happy, the subway croons wordlessly, yet he feels himself start to sweat.

Suddenly he’s sure that if he enters the heart, he will never be able to come back out.

Comfort love safety. It’s not bad, down here. Pleasant, really. The subway loves him. He could be happy, nestled securely in the heart.

But he cannot do this. To stay here would be abandoning his responsibilities. It would mean leaving his job and his passion behind. Never seeing his friends or his pokemon or his brother again.

Negative false reassurance. Still there still there

Ingo shakes his head and shudders. He doesn't understand how staying here could be anything other than abandoning everyone. He tries to turn back around and--

He can’t move.

Despite the subway’s faith confidence trust, Ingo feels his breathing speed up. It won’t let him leave. It won’t-- he doesn’t want this but he can’t even lean backwards.

Ingo shivers, and thinks of Emmet alone. Not knowing what happened to his brother. Worrying about Ingo. Worrying Ingo left him, falling into those old self doubts. Ingo promised he would never leave. He promised - and in a burst of frantic energy, he turns and manages to take a step away.

No love safe comfort stay stay STAY

Ingo struggles to take another step, while a whispering rasp hisses behind him. As he pushes his frozen legs as hard as he can, he spots squirming black shapes approaching in the edge of his vision. Cables reach out to him, wrapping around his arms, ever so gently. More circle his wrists, his legs, his feet, his chest, his neck, with extreme care. Like handling fine china, like holding a precious treasure, the wires cradle Ingo, embracing every inch of him. Ingo’s terror and panic fight the calm safe love, but he can’t move at all in the wires’ tender hold.

Paralyzed, Ingo can do nothing as the cables begin to drag him into the heart. He tries, he desperately tries, but he can't even twitch a finger. He can't move, he can't move, he will be stuck down here for the rest of his life and he will never see his brother again-

adoration safe calm belonging stay

Drawn into the subway's heart, a path made specially for him, all Ingo can do is scream "EMMET!"

Then the wires fall back into place, as if the entrance was never there at all.

No– stop- what's going on? He doesn’t want this! He can't move! He doesn't -

Home safe belonging love love love

the pressure, it's everywhere- he's being crushed, he - air? Is he breathing? He can't move, he can't move- help-

Calm safe peace secure

What is that sensation- running through him, he's never felt something like that, he doesn't understand- rumbling stopping and starting, in him - pinch and itch and drag on parts a body doesn't have, how- he doesn't want this, please stop-

Right belonging acceptance

There's no color- How is he seeing so much at once - too much, it's too much, he can't- make it stop, please-

Rest reassure love

It doesn't hurt but he doesn’t understand- he's not supposed to be– he is supposed to be…what is he supposed to be?!

Right correctness cherished belonging

help, he can't– it's so quiet- this is too much, he can't–

Reassure calm love adoration

He can't- he can't…

Acceptance belonging home

H-help… Em… met…

Belonging belonging belonging

He...

Calm safe belonging

…

Calm.

He calms.

Emmet is doing paperwork in his and Ingo's office when the lights flicker off for a second. They're back on almost immediately, but Emmet groans regardless. The subway's backup generators prevent essential functions from shutting down, but a power outage, no matter how brief, means there are many safety checks that must be run.

Emmet blinks, and places a hand on his chest. Nothing happened other than the lights going out, but he feels like something is different. He can't put his finger on what or how, exactly, but…

Hm. He'll have to ask Ingo if he felt it too after he gets back.

[sgtmickeyslaughter]

Thank you so much @callivich for taking the time and effort for coming up with these questions, and thank you @such-a-barbarian for tagging me also!

This got long lol

What’s a fic you’ve read more than once? 

one of my favorite generas of fic is shameless Mickey worship and for that I aways come back to from head to toe and the many things Mickey Milkovich has been called, Unforgiving Touches and the Feeling of Their Bruises. 

also, in no particular order You’re Tough To Love When You Don’t Love Yourself, the broad shouldered beasts series, sincerity is scary.

for something a little smutty go back to sleep has always been a favorite of mine

and as always, my favorite fic of all time Boy In The Box

What’s a gifset you always have to reblog? 

i love that gif set of Ian sniffin’ on his husband, also I think there’s one thats a compilation of Mickey’s best smiles through the series, gorgeous.

this beautifully edited (?) gifset I stg this is better quality than the actual show idk how they did that

this gorgeous art/gifset is awesome also!

this one is very important to me but man it hurts

another heartbreaker

everyone say thank you gif makers!!!!

What’s a fanart you love looking at?

I literally just saw this one for the first time, it immediately went to the top of my list!!

Its so beautifully done and captures the tone of the original piece so well while also transforming it into a unique moment and commentary on intimacy in their own relationship, ugh, gorgeous 

What’s a headcanon you can’t stop thinking about?

creative mickey! the best thing season 10 gave us was mickey and his notebook. i just know when Ian sees that thing come out post canon a part of him locks up in genuine fear

i don’t really think he gets into art persay, but just being a creative thinker, figuring out how to run their business, decorating their apartment, building ian a garden on their balcony when he gets put on the waitlist for the community garden

What’s an idea you’d love to create if you had the time/inspiration?

so I had this idea very vaguely floating around in my head for a while, but it wasn’t even remotely formed, let alone developed and then suddenly last weekend the plot just came to me in that beautiful and cruel way inspiration comes and goes, but it will take forever to write because I want the pace to feel very slow and syrupy and a little dream (or nightmare) like.

i dont want to give away the plot but its very southern gothic, slight true crime elements, cults, slight age difference (younger Mickey)… anyways if anyone from the rural south wants to be on call to explain geography and culture to me, hit me up 

i also have an idea for a dirty filthy, nasty smut fic but i would have to post it anonymously i wouldnt be able to look anyone in the (virtual) eyes

What’s something you’ve discovered since entering this fandom? A new trope you love? A different analysis of the show? Something else?

in all seriousness, analyzing Shameless as a show overall is so interesting, understanding each of the characters as case studies in different particular expressions of being raised in poverty, which is what makes it twice as upsetting when someone is like, ‘why would this character do this, thats so stupid’ and the answer is that statically speaking that character was actually very likely to do that because of the circumstances they were born into and the way they’ve been affected by that throughout their life, but okay. I also noticed that a lot of people on here are not from America and I always wonder what their take on the social/political reading of the show, if it feels familiar at all etc.. 

i also remember the first time someone commented under my fic to be like, ‘why are you giving Mickey a pass Ian did this’, and someone else commented underneath that ‘oh well Mickey did that so he’s a bad person etc.’ and it was just so upsetting to me, I dont see a lot of that on my dash but I just personally believe that if you are judging teenagers/young adults who are in the middle of their first major mental health crisis or who have suffered unimaginable abuse and neglect their entire life, you need to recalibrate your empathy levels 

What’s your favourite season? And has this changed after multiple rewatches of the show?

I love love early seasons (1-3) there is just something so nostalgic about it and as a show that’s when the writing was at its most creative and interestingly paced

also who doesn’t love baby gallavich?

What line/dialogue/description from something else (a poem, a book, a tv show, a movie, or something else) do you feel describes Ian and Mickey’s relationship? 

Ugh Im so sorry I am going to have to add all the lyrics to In Your Love by Tyler Childers, the inspiration for my first fic title because it is the most perfect song to encapsulate the passion between them and the work and sacrifices they put up for each other

What’s a plot hole you wish had been answered or resolved?

where is mandy? where the fuck is my girl?

also the fact that kevin had a son with v’s mom and just, has no interest in a relationship with him? like that made the story easier for sure but it doesn’t make sense with his character

What scene or moment do you feel isn’t discussed enough?

guys, there is not a scene in this show that we have not done to death already (affectionate)

and you know what? we’ll do it again!

but just for the sake of it, the “would you take care of me if i was paralyzed” scene, you can see that Mickey is almost idk, hesitant? but that’s because he’s really picturing it and that his yes is genuine and thought out, and ian’s face of wonder when he realizes that he has someone who loves him unconditionally and forever? earth shattering

What do you think is next for Ian and Mickey post-finale?

listen, i think the laws of television writers being assholes would dictate that they would give a break up (and maybe reconciliation) arc which is my least favorite television trope

but irl? (u know what i mean) i think they do have some hard, stressful times both out of their relationships and in it and realize pretty quickly that they have to work as a team and lean on each other and it only makes them closer

i also think that they simply refuse to sleep without each other, like one night when Ian gets stuck at the gallagher house taking care of sick franny mickey will drive over and sleep in the twin bed with him or if mickey gets wasted on a night out with sandy and debbie and his battery runs out he’ll stumble his ass home instead of going with one of them when they offer even if it takes forever

and ian grows his hair and stubble out to look like it does in the most recent photos (fluffy mullet) and mickey adores it he can’t keep his hands off his husbands head it’s a sensory dream

Thanks again for tagging me!

i’ll tag @stocious @mybrainismelted @sirrudo @solitarycreaturesthey @juliakayyy @jrooc @jezzibelle89 @i-think-you-mean-reduction @iansw0rld

[jenna--ortega]

Hi there! I have never gotten around to make a gif tutorial because there are plenty of good ones out there and I suck at explaining things. Back when I basically use my side blog (@marvelsaos) as my main, I didn’t get that many questions regarding gif making, I presume because many people who followed me there weren’t gif makers. But this year, I finally come back to my real main blog and started posting more gifs over here. This blog is where I mostly follow gif makers and is mostly followed by gif makers. I have gotten a lot more ask on how to achieve certain things in my gifs, most notably my recent Winnie The Pooh set. And this is why I decided to make this post. This is by no means a tutorial, just a post sharing my giffing journey and the things I do in gif making that might be of your interest. 

‼️Tons of rambling below. Text, image & gif heavy. Proceed with caution‼️

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Basics Everything about making a simple gif from start to finish

How to optimize your giffing process

The more advanced stuff? “Recolouring” & rotoscoping in After Effects

Tutorials mentioned in this post

Acknowledgement

Feel free to jump to any section you find useful. Most of the ramblings are in the introduction.

1. Introduction

i. How I started You thought that was the intro?! I’m the kind of person who someone would know for a decade without hearing me say a word, and when I finally spoke (usually about stuff that I’m passionate about) I just go on and on and on and it shocks people to no end. I’ve been on tumblr 10 years now as some of you might know I’m doing my 10 year celebration, but I didn’t start giffing until about 7 years ago. And I just realised I have never properly introduced myself. Hi! My name’s Winnie and my username across all social media is Ms_Stanatic. Before I started giffing, my main fangirling platform was IG, and boy I’ve got sooooo many accounts I don’t even remember all of them, the bigger ones were mofy, ouat & aos related, and these days I’m giffing all of my old favs for old time sakes. If you happened to know me back then, drop by and say hi. It probably felt like I drop off the face of the earth when I quit IG. The show that got me started on giffing was, as some of you might know, Agents of SHIELD. @marvelsaos was my “main” blog for the first 6+ years of my giffing journey. Now thinking back it was because I finally got my first laptop when I got into uni and didn’t have to make edits on my android phones anymore. But at the time, all I wanted to do was to capture Melinda May’s eye rolls and actions and static images just weren’t doing it for me anymore. And that’s how I embarked on the journey of gif making.

ii. Tools/ Softwares I used I had a Macbook air back then, and finding a cracked photoshop for mac was kinda hard, so I had to settle with GIMP. Without the GAP plugin may I add because I do not know how to install it till this day, so it was just pure nightmare. Making gif in the beginning was the most tedious thing I ever did, I’ll explain a bit more later on. The giffing community felt very different back then. I don’t know if it’s because I wasn’t aware or because I wasn’t in it. I felt like there wasn’t as many giffing tutorials on this site, and all I kept seeing was people sharing their psds. It might have been useful if I had photoshop but I didn’t. So the idea was that you can just open up the psd files and drag the adjustment layers onto the image stacks that compose of your gif, and the adjustment layers would affect all the layers beneath it. Not with GIMP though. In GIMP, the adjustment layer(s) only affect the single layer right underneath it. You heard me right. At that time the gif size limit on tumblr was 2mb, a gif I made is usually 20-30 frames/ layers. So I had to duplicate the adjustment layers 20-30 times, them move them right above each image layer. And if I don’t like how it looks, I had to do it all over again. This is slowly turning into a rant but seriously thinking about it gives me headaches. Also, did I mention I didn’t even read up on tutorials and stuff, I basically just googled everything I needed, how to screencap, import it into GIMP, crop & resize, how to use curve, then lastly how to export. No sharpening, no nothing. I didn’t even learn about recolouring like less than 2 years ago (my AoS peeps know which post I’m talking about 😉). This went on for about a year or two, then uni got busy and my life basically went downhill. Somehow, AoS pulled me out of that deep dark hole and get me back on my feet again also because I finally graduated but I’d like to think it’s my love for tv that saved me. I got a bit more time on my hand, I decided to go back to giffing and this time I was determined to get GAP installed on GIMP and have it working. But alas I have failed once again. It was around that time I found out photoshop’s older versions like cs5 was free to download, so I got that instead and finally begin giffing with photoshop.

Moral of the story: Try your best to get photoshop for giffing. It’ll save you so much headache.

And my story didn’t end there. While I was using cs5, I think many people have switch to photoshop cc which has the timeline function for things like smart sharpen (which was a major topic back then) and keyframes (which is what I heard people talking all about these days). Even without timeline, photoshop is definitely a step up from GIMP personally and I managed with a workaround on the smart sharpen function thanks to Julie (@doramilaje). Side note, all the gif makers (beginners & experienced alike) I’ve talked to are all such amazing people. They put so much energy into this craft and are more than happy to talk to you about it when asked. So don’t be afraid, just ask nicely. And maybe go off anon, you might make a friend or two. 2019-20 were probably my most prolific giffing years, I giffed non stop every single day as if it was my full time job. For me, it was something small and easy to complete and it kept my days going. And eventually my Macbook Air that I’ve been using for 5 years was starting to give up on me. And when I upgraded the OS system to Catalina, it no longer supports cs5 and I was devastated. I eventually got my hands on photoshop cc 2020, and in some ways I re-learnt how to make gifs again (like for the third time?). I knew it was about time to get a new laptop. And now that I know I’m gonna use it for some heavy duty, and I didn’t want to get another macbook because I’m just not that crazy about it and at that time I wanted to use avisynth (more on that later) which was only available on windows (I didn’t know how to install vapoursynth on my macbook ok?). Eventually I got a gaming laptop with a 10th gen i-7 processor and a Wacom Intuos Pro using my sibling’s student discount. I got the Wacom tablet trying to get into digital drawing, but eventually it came in super handy with just day to day editing and especially recolouring.

Moral of the story: Start with whatever you’ve got, then upgrade your equipment when you’re serious about it.

iii. What I’m doing now? This year has been kinda different for me. In the past, it has always felt like I’m on my own sitting in front of my laptop churning out gifs 24/7. This year, I’ve joined a couple other blogs and gif maker/ ps user networks, learnt a whole lot of new things and diversified my giffing content (I have been giffing AoS 99.9% of the time non stop previously I kid you not). And I’ll be back in school for my part time masters a month or two later, so who knows how often I can gif. I don’t ever wanna stop giffing but I know one day I will, and before that day comes I just wanna share some of my memories with you guys on this hell site. So, basically all that led to this post.

2. The Basics

I’m gonna assume you have a bit of knowledge about gif making. If you’re a complete newbie, I’ve tried my best to link some tutorials to help you understand or get started. And don’t get intimidated by the length of this post. Even though a lot goes into gif making, once you get everything sorted and find your routine, it’ll become second nature. The following is simply my workflow of gif making. It is by no means the right/ better way of gif making. Everyone does things a bit or drastically differently, I’m just here to share my process in hopes that someone might learnt something new or find something interesting. If I got something wrong, feel free to inbox/ message me and address it politely, since I didn’t exactly started out giffing with clear directions, I do get some of the fundaments wrong. And I am no expert in photoshop or any editing software, it’s more of a learning as I go sort of thing. So just take everything with a grain of salt. With all the disclaimers out of the way, here come the things you’re probably here for.

i. Video source There’s one simple rule, go with the most HQ one, I’m talking 1080p or 4k and make sure it’s the biggest in file size because not all 1080p are created equally. Here’s a post by Taylor (@kylos) explaining all of that and where to download as well. For the most part I just use 1080p because I personally can’t tell the difference but I’m sacrificing a lot of time for a 4k video to load/ process. It’s only instances like these I would use a 4k source.

(gif taken from my set here)

Downloads are gonna take up space but you probably want to keep them if you might gif the show/ movie in the future again since you already spend all that time downloading, so you might need to invest in some hard drives for this. I used to use my uni’s unlimited gdrive plan which was available even after I graduated, but after Google cancelled it I was in huge trouble. I save pretty much all my hd downloads and all my psds & gifs. I’ve recently got a WD Elements 12TB just so I can transfer all 6+TB data on my gdrive to there with space left for the next couple of years.

ii. Screencapping vs Video clipping So there are a couple of ways to go about this that I’m aware of.

screencapping with mpv (tutorial by Taylor) or other softwares

video clipping with handbrake (here’s an in depth tutorial on gif making including clipping with handbrake by Nums @cillianmurphy), vlc, km player, etc.

video clipping + cropping + resizing with Vapoursynth (download here | tutorial by Em @realstraykids)

I have tried all of the above. I started with screencapping till around late 2020, when I found out about avisynth (now replaced by vapoursynth) and finally got my hands on a pc where I can download it. I was using screencaps for a really long time because older versions of ps don’t have timeline, I would end up having to convert the video back to frames anyways so why don’t I just import screencaps as is. I think it’s the same logic for me now, because I start all of my editing in timeline, so it’s just quicker to import video clips for me (especially when comparing screencapping with mpv vs video clipping with handbrake). From late 2020 till now, I mostly use avisynth/ vapoursynth. There should be less detail lost when resizing using vapoursynth compared to ps. Personally, I think ps does a pretty good job and I wouldn’t say vapoursynth is a must, it just happens to be a video clipping and resizing two in one tool for me. Vapoursynth has additional denoise & sharpening tools, but I just couldn’t quite get the setting right to incorporate them into my giffing routine, so I stick with ps for those purposes.  Here’s a comparison for you if you’re thinking about using it. On the left is how I used to gif without vapoursynth. I did the same thing for both gifs except for sharpening, because the clips from vapoursynth just look slightly sharpened to me so I compensated with more sharpening on the left. Honestly, now looking at it side by side I actually like the one without vapoursynth more 😂 I’ll let you decide for yourself. Also, when I’m doing a huge compilation set where there are a lot of gifs and they are basically tiny and I don’t really have the dimensions in mind yet, I’ll just go with video clipping. It’s faster and I can resize it later.

iii. Resizing

There might be reasons why you don’t want to use the W x H x Resolution crop for your gif, because in the image size panel you can actually choose how you want your resampling setting. Normally I just go with Preserve Details 2.0, and set reduce Noise to 100%.

iv. Sharpening

Once I load my clips into ps, the first thing I do is add smart sharpen to them. For the longest time I only sharpen once. Here’s a sharpening tutorial by Ava (@anya-chalotra). I think those settings are mostly what people use and if you’re new to this you should probably stick with that. But I’ll let you on a secret (not a secret anymore now that’s in the open), I don’t do the whole over sharpen then blur it out thing, I just sharpen to the amount I like. This is coming from someone who spent the first 2? years giffing without sharpening, and when I do realize people sharpen I didn’t even look/ properly follow a tutorial on how to do it. I just knew smart sharpen is a thing. So, I’m sure there’s good reasons why you should sharpen to 500% then add gaussian blur and you probably should do that too. Prior to using vapoursynth, my settings were like radius 0.3, amount 100%-200%. With vapoursynth, I find it slightly sharpens my clips so I go with radius 0.3, amount 50% like 90% of the time. Then there’s the second sharpen thing if you noticed in my banner gif which I learnt from Sid’s (@sidonidoneeey) tutorial recently. I think it adds more contrast & definition to the objects in the gif.

Here’s a comparison for you to decide for yourself. I tried the max sharpening then add gaussian blur method in the second gif, and I’m still not quite convinced.

v. Colouring This I would say is pretty much the essence of a gif maker’s style. Again, everybody does it differently, different gif makers swear by different adjustment layers. Here are some tutorials for getting rid those difficult colour cast:

Kate’s (@dewandawise) channel mixer tutorial

Airam’s (@magnusedom) colouring tutorial

The best/ most experienced gif makers I know all swear by channel mixer so you should definitely check out Kate’s tutorial. Personally, my routine adjustment layers are like the ones in the banner gif. Levels → (+/- Curves) → Colour Balance and/or Selective Colour and/or Hue/Saturation → (+/-Vibrance). Then repeat any of those if necessary.

Levels: Personally, I always start my colouring with levels. When I first started giffing, all I heard about is curves and I spent a lot of time fussing around with it not knowing what it actually does. Until I found out about levels. It is way easier to understand than curves and very suitable for beginners in my opinion. You basically drag the right most arrow to meet the right side of the histogram. What you’re doing is telling ps what value in the gif you want to be the brightest (aka white), and everything beyond that value is going to be white as a result. You do the same thing on the left, and in this case defining the darkest/ black in your gif. I find this to be the simplest way to brighten and add contrast to gifs. The results as you can see is night and day.

Curves: Curves can basically do what levels do but more. See those two arrows under the histogram in curves (right), they basically do the same thing as what I just showed you in levels (left). And then obviously you can manipulate the curve to get your gif how you want, but honestly I still don’t fully understand what curves is so I’m not gonna try and explain that to you. What I can do is show you some other neat tricks you can do with curves.

You can click on the hand with the pointing finger icon, click and drag up to brighten or down to darken on any area in the gif you’d like to edit.

Another thing I like to do is click on the white (last) or grey (second) eyedropper, then click on an area where you think should be white or grey to get rid of any unwanted colour cast. This video tutorial goes more in depth and is more of a proper way of doing it, but I just don’t bother with doing all of that normally. So here you can see I click on the grey eyedropper, than I clicked somewhere in the background I think should be grey, ideally further away from that blue light beam behind her because everything near that is just gonna be more bluish. And you can see immediately the ground has less of a cyan tint and there’s more red in her skin. Sometimes, you have to try a couple of different places to get the best results. Sometimes, it just won’t work at all.

You can also Alt+click on the auto button, and a panel shows up. Click on them and see if any of those works for you. But normally I don’t use this because I have already enhanced the brightness and contrast with levels.

Once I get my overall values how I like it, I go into colour correcting. Usually nothing drastic, just trying to get rid of any colour tint and get the gif to look more neutral in colour. My go to are colour balance, selective colour and hue/saturation.

Colour balance: This is usually my go to to adjust the overall tone of the gif, and the panel gives a good visual of rgb vs cmy.

Selective colour: This is when I only want to adjust the tone of a particular colour without affecting the rest of the gif. I usually go to red the most to adjust characters’ skin tones. Also, people often ask if they should use relative or absolute mode. I would say for simple adjustment I would go with relative because it’s more subtle, but for major colour change and I want it to really show I’ll go with absolute.

Hue/Saturation: This I usually go in and click on the hand button then click on wherever in your gif you want to change the colour. Slide the hue or saturation slider around till you’re satisfied. If you want to, say, change your background to a single colour, check the box colourized. And slide the hue slider to your desire colour. Then paint black over the object in the layer mask to preserve it’s original colours.

Also, that slider you see right there. The center light grey region is where the colours would be affected by the changes you made. And the two darker grey regions flanking it are sort of a buffer so the colour transition isn’t as stark if it makes sense. You can basically slide those sliders closer to each other so the adjustment affects a smaller targeted range of colours. You can always crank the saturation to the max to see what part of the gif you’re changing the colours of.

Photo Filter: This is a cool one that I learnt about recently. You can basically apply a warming/ cooling filter to quickly change the tone of the gif. Sometimes it helps with getting rid of that last bit of an unwanted colour filter.

vi. Blend modes Do you know that you can change the blend modes of your adjustment layers to get a different result? I don’t think a lot of people do this, I don’t either most of the time. But there are a couple ones that you might find helpful.

Screen: This will brighten up the gif a lot, could be helpful with really dark scenes.

Colour: When I want my adjustment layer to only affect the colours but not the brightness of the gif.

Luminosity: When I don’t want my adjustment layer to affect the colours.

Here’s a video explaining all the blend modes in photoshop.

vii. Denoise & Clean It was from the same post that I learnt about avisynth that I found out about Topaz Labs, particularly their denoise plugin & clean plugin. I won’t go in depth into that because I’ve tried it a couple of times and couldn’t get the settings that work for me and it is very time consuming. But if it is something you want to try, here’s a post of the user sharing her topaz settings. What I actually want to talk about is Camera Raw in ps. I normally add my denoise filter after I coloured the gif, because all the brightening and saturating the gif with colours add more noise to the original clip itself. But if a scene is particularly grainy to begin with, I’ll add a denoise filter right after sharpening, add my adjustment layers, then another denoise filter if necessary. Also, if you want to keep more details in the certain areas like the hair of the characters, just take a soft round brush and paint black in the smart filter layer mask. Go to Filter → Camera Raw Filter. The denoise function is under the tab Detail. I usually only move the noise reduction and colour noise reduction slider, and keep the detail at 50.

There’s so much more you can do with camera raw. Here’s a tutorial by @michietuts​ on how to colour your gifs with camera raw. I actually completely forgot about it until I went digging for tutorials for this post. I think the reason why I never got into using camera raw to colour gifs is simply because there’s too many sliders and it’ll take a long time to figure out what works, so I just stick with what worked for me.

viii. Convert to frames & export After I add all my adjustment layers and denoise filters, I normally convert it back to frames for further editing because I find it takes so long for the video to play in timeline mode. It’s just easier for me to gauge what I want to do with the gif in frame mode, such as whether more adjustment is needed, or how I want to crop my gif. I know a lot of people would just edit everything in timeline mode, and convert back to frames as a last step to change the delay to 0.05s before exporting. You can do it however you want. It’s just spending so much time with cs5, I’ve grown accustomed to editing in frames mode. Here is my export settings:

For most people, it’s the choice between selective vs adaptive and diffusion vs pattern. Personally I prefer how adaptive pattern looks and I rarely change it across different gifs because I have my export action automated. There’s more explanation and comparison in Ava’s tutorial here.

ix. Subtitles The majority of gifs I make are what I call “scene edits”. Not that I’m lazy or anything and don’t want to be bothered with making fancier gifs, it’s just what I like to do. Especially when giffing a show I haven’t giffed before I always start with making plenty of scenes, to the point where I can recall just about any scenes from that show when I want to make a fancier gif set. So I’m just gonna share me text settings for the subtitle, show you how I center the text box to the bottom and how to duplicate it to the rest of your files. Press T for the text tool, and type in whatever subtitle you need. Here are my subtitle settings:

Alt+A to select the whole canvas then press V for the move tool. Then select align horizontal centers and align bottom edges.

Now that you have your text centered at the bottom, you might want to style it. I usually go for a stroke outside the text, some people op for drop shadow or both. Right click your text layer and select Blending Options... Check the Stroke box, change the size to 3px, position to outside and colour to black.

To duplicate text box to the same exact position in another gif, right click your text layer and choose Duplicate Layer... Then choose whichever document you want to duplicate to and press ok.

And of course I have my text duplication automated, so the text would show up in all my gifs in a matter of seconds.

x. Recap

3. How to optimize your giffing process

i. Actions This one single function in ps is gonna save you sooooo much time & energy my friends. If you’re a chronic giffer like me, you probably spend all your time starring into your computer and just clicking away like a manic, especially those times when new episodes drop and everyone is trying to get their gifs out there as quick as possible. Let me tell you, life before I found out about actions was miserable. Back then, my laptop was even slower, so maybe after I did one thing I had to wait for it to load, then repeat the same process to the rest of the gifs in the set, which is normally 10 in total. I had to grab my laptop with me during meals because I basically couldn’t walk away from it. Actions was a lifesaver, especially for things you’d routinely do when making gifs like sharpening, resizing, denoising, convert to frames, export, etc. You basically use actions to record yourself doing it once, and you can just hit play every time you want ps to do it again. And to take it a step further, you can automate ps to play that action on all the opened files. You then record that automation into an action, then voila you can sharpen/resize/export all your gifs in one click. Now, I can click automate convert to frames, go out and eat dinner and come back to it.

Now here are my actions. I know the naming doesn’t make much sense to you, but basically I have actions to automate sharpening, denoising, converting to frames, setting frame delays, exporting and saving. And yes, I do regularly hit that automate save button so I don’t lose everything when my ps crashes. Then there’s actions for formatting subtitles, duplicating layers, pasting frames after or over frames. I think this covers about everything I use on a daily basis.  Here’s how you record an action and automate said action. (Left gif) First you click on the folder icon to create new set, name it and click ok. Click the + icon to add new action, name it and press record. Then you do whatever you want to record, and when you’re done click to stop button to stop recording. (Right gif) To create an automation of the new action, click the + icon to add new action, name it and press record. (Third gif) Then go to File → Automate → Batch. Choose the set the action you want to automate is in, then choose the action. Click ok then stop recording. Now you have an action to automate the previous action you made.

(gif below) The box on the left of your action is the dialog on/off button. Basically if you check it those dialog boxes will pop up every time after you played the action, which is good if you want to customize every time but not so much when your goal is to click one button and let it run across all gif without interruption. I check most of them off except for the denoise filter which I do want to customize for each gif. To get the action panel to look like the one I showed in the first picture, click on the little button on the top right corner of the actions panel and choose button mode. And you’ll get to play an action by simply clicking on it.

ii. History

There are a couple of things I do in this panel. Have you ever make an adjustment, undo, make a new adjustment, and now no matter how many times you hit revert you just can’t get back that first adjustment you made? There’s a simple fix in the history settings. Click on the little button on the top right corner of the history panel and choose History Options, then check the box “Allow Non-Linear History” and click ok.

I often like to use the history to go back to previous adjustment, because I can see clearly what has been done (sometimes I click on the wrong button without knowing) and I can go further back without keep hitting Crl+Z. You can also click on the camera icon in the bottom right to take a snapshot of the current process/ step of the gif, so in case you don’t like some changes you make, you can always go back to that snapshot. Or you can take snapshots of different adjustments you made to the gifs, then you can quickly compare how they look by toggling between snapshots.

iii. Keyboard Shortcuts Know/ customize the shortcuts for things you often do, such as Crt+Z for undo, T for add text, V for move, Crl+A for select all, etc. It’ll save time & effort in the long run. To customize, simply go to Edit → Keyboard Shortcuts.

iv. My Workspace I’m the least organized person I know but I still want to talk about my ps workspace. It’s been structure to fit my giffing needs. Basically all the panels I need are there, and I maximize my space for the document window and timeline.

If you go to Window → Workspace → New Workspace, you can save your current workspace as a preset. So maybe if you moved things around or accidentally closed some panel that you don’t remember the name for, just click on that preset workspace, or if it says you’re already in that workspace click reset “whatever the name of your workspace” and your workspace will be reset. There’s mainly 2 workspace I toggle between, one for giffing and another for digital painting.

4. The more advanced stuff?

i. “Recolouring” I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on this part because the next part is actually what I really want to talk about. But Hue/Saturation is going to be your friend if you want some major colour change. Then add a gradient map over it for good measure. I’ll link some tutorials for you if you don’t know what I mean.

Becca’s (@yenvengerberg) mega colouring tutorial

Kate’s tutorial on @usergif​ (←there’s all sorts of gif tutorials in their resources directory, go check it out)

People would always tell you to find gifs where the character barely moves or the background is of a contrasting colour to make the process easier. Now, with timeline you’ve got keyframes to help with slightly more movement. But what if you want to make something like this gif below? 😨 I made this during my earlier days of recolouring (which was not that long ago), and the only thing I could think of was colour it frame by frame. This gif has 73 frames. There are 8 gifs in this set which I had to all colour frame by frame. It was a long and tedious process I tell you, but the results, in my humble opinion, is stunning!!! But what if I tell you it can be done without colouring it frame by frame and it only takes a fraction of the time I spent?

(gif taken from my set here)

ii. After Effects & Rotoscoping The reason I started using after effects was for this gif set. I got a gif request and my inspiration was the intro from the youtube channel sortedfood. Here’s how one of the gif looks like.

See the character cut out on the right? Basically the same thing in my recent Winnie the Pooh set. In my first trial, I was trying to do it frame by frame on ps like I always did, but there was no way I could get it looking smooth, it gets very jagged when the background was a completely different scene. And with some googling, that’s how I found out about rotoscoping on after effects. This is the youtube tutorial I learnt it from and the one I send it to people when they ask me how I do character cut outs like that. I’ll try to quickly show you how I do it below, but please refer to that video if you want more details. Usually I export my gifs as videos in timeline mode in ps, then import the video into ae. After I’m done, I’ll export the ae file as video, import it back into ps, convert back to frames and do the rest. Here are my steps to rotoscoping:

Double click the layer you’d like to work on. The layer window should pop up and that is what you want to work with.

Click on the Rotobrush tool and paint across the object you want to include. Always paint across, not outline.

I have my roto brush set to version to 2.0, and I would change the quality from standard to best.

Continue painting until everything is included. Alt+drag to deselect unwanted parts. Hit spacebar when done and let it run.

You can change the properties of the roto brush selection in effect controls.

If you want a more detailed written explanation than this. Go to adobe’s help page on roto brush here. Once you have the cut out of the object you desire, there are many things you can do with it.

Duplicate the original layer, change the colour of the bottom layer as aforementioned. And now you have a gif with a different coloured background. 

Or you can have a different background (either a solid colour or a different video/gif)

You can have text behind the object, etc.

You get the idea. (This is a simple demo, please excuse the quality and choppiness of the gif)

Now you’ll never recolour gifs the same way again.  Here’s a Kate & Yelena gif for you guys (even though it’s not the best, could’ve blurred out the edges a bit more but it’s still pretty damn awesome and I wouldn’t have coloured it like that if it wasn’t for ae)

(gif taken from my set here)

Here’s another gif I made with AE from this set. The possibility is endless and I’m barely scratching the surface. I can do a separate AE tutorial if you guys are interested. Let me know in the comments or tags.

5. Tutorials mentioned in this post

i. Text tutorials

@kylos’s film downloading and screencapping tips for making gifs

@kylos’s gif tutorial

@cillianmurphy’s giffing 101- your ultimate guide on how to make gifs

@realstraykids‘s gifmaking with vapoursynth tutorial 

@anya-chalotra‘s sharpening & exporting tutorial

@sidonidoneeey‘s sharpening tutorial

@dewandawise‘s the beginner’s guide to channel mixer

@magnusedom’s colouring tutorial

@yenvengerberg’s mega colouring tutorial

@usergif’s how to change the background of any gif tutorial

adobe’s  Roto Brush and Refine Matte

ii. Video tutorials

PiXimperfect’s Color Correction with Easy "4-Point" Technique!

PiXimperfect’s The Science of All 27 Blend Modes in Photoshop!

@michietuts​‘s How to Color Grade Gifs Using Camera Raw

C.M. de la VEGA ‘s Get the Best Results with Rotobrush 2

6. Acknowledgement

Thank you so much to the authors of all the amazing tutorials, everything was so eloquently written, well explained and easy to follow. And a huge shoutout to the people at @pscentral​ & @womenofmcu​. Our conversations on gif making have prompted me to write this post. I’ve learnt so much from the people at psc and thank you Ace & Val for creating this place that I didn’t even know I needed. It is one place I feel truly belong. So If anyone is interested in gif making, come join us at pscentral. And thank you to the ladies at womenofmcu for being so nice and welcoming, always love chatting with you lot. Last but not least, I’m patting myself on the back. For someone who’s terrible with words this is one hell of a long text post.

As always, happy giffing!

[river-taxbird]

Help me, writing/design Tumblr!

Microsoft Word sucks, there has to be a better way.

Edit: Word has this feature. It's called Linked Text Boxes. It's still word with Word's jank though, Microsoft Publisher has it, but it seems like Adobe Indesign has it with a better user interface.

I have been doing a lot of document layout work for my degree lately, and Microsoft Word continues to be just horrible. As a famous post once said, nothing about it works. So my question is, there has to be a better way, right? If anyone knows about writing software, is there anything that does the thing I want? (I do the bulk of my writing in Google Docs but the layout tools aren't good enough for the kind of design I need to do.)

My dream word processor (This may be hard to describe):

I want to be able to define specific boxes where body text is allowed to be. When one fills up, it overflows into the next.

Instead of word where you have the body text in the background, and it moves out of the way from the images, I would like text boxes that contain the body text. Like you lay out your images and static text boxes on a page, then you can fill the rest out with dynamic text boxes that contain the body text. I am sure you could do something like this with text boxes in ms word, but you couldn't do the layout as you write the body.

In my dream word processor, you could define blocks as Body Text 1, Body Text 2, and so on. If you added more text into Body Text 1, anything that is pushed out automatically goes into body text 2. If you delete text, excess text comes back into body text 1. Just like how text moving to the next page works in MS Word and Google Drive. Body text can only go into defined boxes, but it is dynamic. I feel like this could prevent the problem in word where moving one image destroys the formatting for your entire document because the body text tries to move out of the way.

Am I making sense? I am not even sure what to google to find something like this, but it has to exist, right? Magazines exist with very clean and nice layouts, they must be using something like this, but Microsoft Word doesn't do it that I know of. If it can, please tell me!

[thelador-s-mclargehuge]

Episode 3, Finding some footing!

So this is where I started to find where I stood in the series. The last couple of posts was just me going scene by scene describing things, this one I want to focus in on two things. Starting a Lore Bible, and Action Scenes.

So between ep 2 and 3 I took a trip to my grandmas which is always good to get the creative juices flowing. And I knew the Mantis Lords were coming up, and I thought "Mantises are kinda tied in to a lot of places, what with the Trator Lord, the breakup between the tribes, and the pale mourner quest. It seems like there's a lot of fertile ground for lore expansion there!" So I started expanding The Mantis stuff. Then I kept going. I'd established that Fighting History, was going to be a simplified version off Film History I'd already name dropped Zells and Hilltop, during the hornet fight. How much farther can I go with that? And maybe I should give the exposition to Sly.

The Concept I had for Quirrel was based on a Blade Runner 2049 reference I used him to make in the old series... but what if I Kept Expanding Outward.

And eventually, it was time to make this episode. Here is where I had an idea of where to go after this. I'd been playing it by ear up until this point, with a few exceptions. I knew how I was going to do some story beats, like Myla and The Ending. But now I knew what direction I was taking everything else. Hollow Knights lore is veeery open to interpretation. And If I was going to make a narrative series out of it. I needed to interpret. So I decided to go hard on that. I'd say I threw off my shackles and made my own cannon, but Hollow Knight's cannon is a tapestry filled with bits torn out on purpose. So I just filled them in. And while filling them in I realized how wide the canvas was. So I just kept going. And I'm still going!

And ultimately, going that direction I think is the best way to go. Everyone watching the series probably know how the story goes. And it's going to go mostly the same way. But it sure feels a lot different when you've got a lot more going on. And I still got a lot of surprises up my sleeve!

Now let's talk about the fight scenes. So something I didn't talk about during the Episode 2 behind the scenes is that I stopped rendering these videos in 60fps. The reason I did that is because, with the dynamic cutting, the Hornet Fight Scene just looked *way worse* in 60FPS. That framerate is really good when you have to watch out for Hornet's attacks, and therefor are focusing on a mostly static screen where the movement is done by the character and not the camera.

But when every action gets it's own cut, And the camera AND the characters are moving 60FPS can get visually overwhelming. You don't need to actively interact with A Youtube Video. The editing and camera movement does that for you! And if you just have a static screen of the characters moving it looses a majority of the 'oomph' quick cuts, zooms, and framing can give you. It's incredibly boring!

So I render these in 30FPS exclusively now.

But the reason I bring that up is that I noticed something else in the Hornet Fight It's very vertical, and Academy Ratio Widescreen looks much better than 16:9.

So i played around in the hornet fight a little, and eventually decided against going with that. Because hornet did do a lot of jumping in the air and having the full 16:9 rectangle gave me a lot more vertical room.

But I didn't need that with the Moss guards.

So the day before it needed to be released, I looked at it, and it felt like half an episode. There wasn't really a conclusion to it. 'cus at that point it just had the moss guard fight on the bridge and "Still Counts!" was all the training out lil guy did the whole episode.

So I thought "Why don't I just put, like, another fight scene in there where he learns something?"

So I did that. Then I went back to my Widescreen idea.

And I thought to myself "Okay, pretentious much? You're just gonna change the aspect ratio purely for the fight scene on your Hollow Knight Youtube Video?" Everything Everywhere All At Once hadn't come out yet, you see.

So I thought "Well okay, If I'm gonna do that. I think I need another reason for it to be there other than It Looks Better This Way" Which was wrong, of course, that's always a good enough reason. but I thought "If he's training, maybe those are the margins the character writes his notes in. He can put boss attack strategies in there!"

And, while it's been a pain in the ass and a helova lot of work. It's honestly one of the best ideas I had for the series! And I made it 3 hours before my final render lol. Sometimes you give yourself needless barriers, but sometimes a clever solution to something that isn't a problem, turns it into a new cool thing. Not always. Probably not usually. But sometimes!

[thegoblinboy]

I promise I have some good reasons for not posting as often as I was before, and I promise! I’ll start to post more regularly but this fic has been taking more time then what I expected. So just take a glimpse of some of what I have for werewolf steve again :) (still editing)

From the living room window he could already see his Uncle's figure sitting on the small porch. On his beat up blue recliner that he refused to bring inside during any season. How it wasn't infested with bugs was beyond Eddie Munson's comprehension. Pausing to look from where he stood, peering a bit he could already see the cigarette smoke floating up into the air. Careful, Careful as he was physically capable of, he opens the door and carefully moves down the staircase. Whining as he feels the cold eating through his clothing already, and the snow going through his shoes. Sometimes he wished that the porch was connected to the front steps, not disconnected and a few feet away.

"Careful boy, didn't slave away at that drink just for you to dump it all 'er yourself."  Wayne's gruffled and soft voice raises in warning. Eddie grins happily as he hears the old man. Moving and pretending to trip and fall, pretending to stumble with the mug in his hands as he grows closer. Laughing as he does, catching the slight amused eye roll tossed his way. They both knew that Wayne would go back inside and willingly make him another cup of hot chocolate. If the spill of 14' had anything to say about it. "Oh quit being a damn idget and sit down for Christ's sake." The older man tried to act unamused but it was not working, a light glimmer of what he was fighting currently in his eye.

Eddie laughs as he moves and sits down on an equally beat up couch. A faded and disgusted dark green, with cracks going through the cushions in random areas. Still holding his mug, he lets the warmth spread through his hands as he shivers. Taking a sip of said drink in hopes that it would warm him up. Moving, he places the holder down carefully on a side table next to the full ashtray. Curling up on the couch as he beams a bit, seeing a heavy blanket on the other side of the couch. A red color, and most likely brought out by Wayne. Who knew his nephew better than Eddie knew himself. Curling up underneath, he waits patiently for the warmth to take over his body, coming easy with his drink.

Tilting his head up from the armrest of the couch, he looks over at Wayne with a smile. His dark brown curls were all over the place but he didn't care nor did he care how they were causing static to form from laying on the couch. "Thanks Wayne." He beams happily. Watching the way the other softens a bit in his chair, grows a bit shy and doesn't say anything in return. Instead he lifts his own mug that he had been holding on his thigh with his right hand. A pro at letting nothing spill. Sipping gently on what was most likely black coffee. Where Eddie liked his beverages sweet, his uncle liked his bitter. Like most things they were the complete opposite. Eddie liked metal music, Wayne enjoyed country music, Eddie liked Turkey Sandwiches his Uncle loved ham. It was just their dynamic and both of them had fully accepted that.

Reaching over carefully Eddie lets his finger tips lightly brush over Wayne's. His left hand is still holding a cigeratte. Raising his eyebrows a bit, Wayne glares at him a bit before handing it over carefully. "You know those are bad for you right?" He grumbles gently.

"I know," Eddie beams brightly, pulling the cigarette close careful not to burn his hair as he takes a few puffs from it. Playing with the smoke with his mouth and even exhaling some from his nose. Relaxing a bit before he hands it back over. "Like I said, want to be just like you growing up." He teases playfully. Remembering all of the soft arguments he had with the other when he was younger about how smoking was bad for you. Now here he laid like a hypocrite, smoking twice the amount Wayne normally did.

"Oh shut up- both know you wanted to be like Ozzy, who is way older then me by the way." Wayne grumbles out. Reaching over and putting the cig out. Before relaxing back into his chair staring out at nothing. Eddie could never sit still when he was younger, to bored out of his mind to just do nothing. Always having to do something. Whether it was running in circles in the small patch of grass that they call a yard, or doing cart wheels off the porch and nearly breaking his neck. It all varied from time to time, but yet here he now laid perfectly content with just sitting in silence. A feat that Wayne actually bet a lot of money on never happening. So when it did you bet your ass Eddie cashed that money in for his sweetheart.

Both of them had the tendency to drift off into their own heads. Meaning, someone could literally be yelling at them for their attention and they wouldn't notice. Something both have tried working on but have since then given up. Which is why it's a shocker when Eddie notices that same movement from earlier from the corner of his eye. Turning his head left he looks over toward the beat up playground, that probably needed to be taken down. He still has the scar on his hand from when he cut his hand open on one of the bars and had to get a tetnicdes shot. Eyes widening in shock, and not over the fact that the pole that did cause damage to him as a child was still dangling lose but rather to the fact that there. Standing in the open. Was the most gorgeous wolf he has ever seen in his entire life. White fur causing the animal to blend well with the surroundings, snout sniffing out something. Most likely something a neighbors dog left behind.

"Wayne-" Eddie all but hisses his Uncles name in hopes to gather his attention. Knowing that it was a long shot, but not impossible. He's moving a hand down to his pant pocket. Moving to grab the cheap android that he had been happily living with for years now. No reaction was coming from his uncle, and the wolf was still moving forward a bit. Not seeing them yet. He wasn't sure what gender it was, but from the smaller frame he was assuming it was a she. And she, currently had her nose in a garbage bag. The rustling noises of plastic echoing over to where Eddie could here it. He's afraid to turn his head, nervous that she will be gone if he turns it back to watch her. Quickly, before anything can happen he snaps a few photos. Zooming in, and trying to capture as much detail as possible. Though it was difficult, his camera wasn't the greatest and each photo came just a tad more fuzzier then the last.

"Wayne." He says a bit louder, moving his body carefully. Staring at his Uncle, who was sipping his coffee and staring a hole into a neighbors house. Eddie moves his eyes trying to see what he was looking at, groaning when he realizes he was watching the football game through the window of Tom's trailer. Groaning he moves himself forward, nearly knocking the table next to him over as he slaps Wayne's arm. This time getting his attention. Startled eyes meeting his and a few curse words following suit, hanging loosely on the older Munson's tongue. "Shh" Eddie hisses again. One finger to his own lips, if he had been able to reach Wayne's he would be pressing it gently against his mouth dramatically. He moves the same finger that had been on his own lips, and carefully points in the direction where the white wolf was still moving around. He's a tad nervous the longer he watches that one of these times the same wolf will get the bag over her head.

"Hot Damn," Wayne mutters under his breathe. Obviously just as shocked as Eddie was. It wasn't common for any animal, such as a wolf to come this close to people. Most of them knew that's how they would get shot. Animals were pretty fucking smart, yet this one looked like a new born baby trying to figure out her own footing. Jumping back with a startled huff, fur sticking up as her back arches in the air as well. Similar to that of a cat, which was strange as they weren't even in the same family tree. The wolf pauses for a few seconds, staring at the bag as if it would come at her. Which it does, as the wind blows it in her direction causing her to startle and sprint away. Snow getting kicked behind her as she does. All sight of her gone within seconds of first seeing her. Both men are stunned into silence, before they look between each other. As if they were both in disbelief.

After a moment Wayne let's a dramatic huff leave him as he moves to stand up. Careful not to drop his mug, his most prized one of them all. A Garfield head that Eddie had given him years ago. "I better go warn the neighbors, I rather not hear a gun shot in the middle of the day when I'm trying to sleep." He grumbles a bit. Moving and shifting his body to the left as he's careful of the step down.

"Careful old man," Eddie laughs as he moves himself. Staying wrapped up in his blanket, pulling it up higher so that it didn't drag on the ground. Other hand moves to grab the mug, carefully sipping on it before moving to head back inside. Waddling up the steps the same way he came down, to only then pause at the top when he realizes he has full hands and can't open the door. Before he has the second realization that he was just dumb as he sets the mug down on the railing, opening the door, picking the mug back up and heading inside the slightly heated area.