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running-with-kn1ves · 1 year ago

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hii! i wanted to ask if you could do a yandere kidnapper x yandere darling? like rich depressed yan that can't imagine living without their darling and ended up taking drastic action, only to find out that darling is way more insane and obsessed passionate than they thought

A/N: I've never been super big on the yan x yan trope but I think this came out kinda cool! Hope this is what you were looking for <3

Synopsis: Sneaking into your beloved's bedroom bent on getting pictures for your stash, you're quickly found by him, who's surprisingly enthusiastic to find you breaking in.

CW: Kidnapping, mutual obsession, shrine dedications, murder (offscreen lol)

WC:3000+

“Nice… new pics for the blog.”

Your camera click click clicked with a shutter noise each time you rapid fired its capture button, eye so close to the screen you might as well be looking through the viewfinder solely itself.

“I can see it now… his unkept bedroom revealed, beautiful little face plastered beside this… heap.”

You looked at the pile of dirty clothes that had yet to be picked up by the estate's cleaning ladies. Well, if you were as filthy rich as he was, you’d probably do the same. Who would waste time cleaning their room when you have the whole world to see? Or in his case, a million press conferences to attend.

Your eye was drawn to a slightly ajar closet, an odd lock seeming to have been hastily unfastened, now leaving the doors peeking open. Something red was inside. Oh boy, you could hardly contain your excitement.

What kind of secrets would the famous, wealthy heir Elijah Walsh have in his teensy private closet? Mayhaps some drag dress up that no fan would expect? Dead bodies? Or even, the rumored cocaine stash his poor daddy was accused of hiding?

You knew Elijah like the back of your hand, unable to imagine any kind of hidden truths that you haven't already discovered. For you, a superfan, (and ultimately, the soulmate he doesn't know about yet) were aware of far more than the average tabloid who didn’t cross trespassing boundaries for love like you had.

You ripped open the doors without hesitation, snapping pics before even turning the light on.

But what you saw, was something you weren’t sure you’d want to keep on camera.

It was you. Well, a picture of you, from some yearbook or singled-out group shot that you couldn’t pinpoint the exact year from. Around your awkward grinning face was a series of items, pinned on a pretty red board like it was a crime scene of sorts. Or maybe… a shrine?

“What the f… is that my underwear??” You looked at the old pair of stretched out undies you had since middle school. Definitely not the pair you’d want some kind of stalker or investigator to get their hands on.

You saw a few old chapsticks taped to the board, one of which you had been searching for in some old bag you swore you left it in. “I was looking for those!” You grabbed the chapstick and a broken brush, the exact same you thought you had thrown away months ago.

Out of all the things you hoped to find-- used Q-tips, one of his musky jackets, maybe even some dark sex toys-- this wasn’t on your list. But you couldn’t help the spike in your heart, the flutter that made your toes point inward.

You had been running this journalist (really a stalker-ish) blog on Elijah since before he got big in the press. You went to the same elementary school and for a short time in middle school, and ever since you couldn’t get his name out of your head. Now, you had a justified reason to keep tabs on him, since his family was currently in the public eye for a variety of deeds.

Along with professing your obsession with him since childhood, your blog dated the shocking events of his controversies-- keeping it all under an anonymous pen name, of course. You had information news sites couldn’t get their hands on; the dedication you put into watching him was a trait of pride you could never let go.

Memories of him comforted you at night, and seeing his pretty face in the grocery store magazines hoarded under your bed made you drift off to daydream land where, maybe, you’d be more than just some heavy breathing keyboard jammer fawning over him from a distance..

And here was, you. Your things. In his room. Even from the times you climbed the tree beside his window, you never saw this… anomaly of items.

“What’s this even… mean.” You whispered, dumfounded and growing antsy. Elijah would be coming back now any second, the route of his driver dinging on your phone.

‘Wait.. does he, know? That I’ve been watching him? Is this all evidence to… incriminate me??’

Worry was creeping up inside of you. But there was no time, not when a heavy vase clunked against your head from behind, letting out a resounding ‘crack!’ from the contact. The chapstick fell from your fingers, camera sliding with you as it lingered loose around your neck.

The last thing you could think of before darkness hit, was ‘man, I hope I don’t fall on my camera… can’t replace it again. ‘

The unconscious darkness blinding your eyes was snuffed out what seemed hours later, replaced by a buzzing yellow light hanging from the ceiling. You groaned outloud, feeling groggy; an aching pain throbbed in your slumped neck and a sore bump on your scalp.

‘Got a killer headache…’

You tried to pull your hands up to the bump to feel for a bruise, but fell flat with your arms tucked behind your back. You jerked them around, not realizing that they in fact were stuck together-- tied by rope, or some kind of fabric.

“Thank god, you’re awake. Thought maybe I hit you too hard-- I don’t know what i’d do if that happened.” A familiar voice rang out in the musty, echoing room.

“What…?” You croaked, trying to look up without facing the wrath of your headache the more light entered your eyes.

“Here, drink some water.”

A bottle came in front of you, so close to your lips all you had to do was bend down to touch it. You did so without thinking, tasting the sandpaper of a tongue you were stuck with. As soon as the cool water touched your throat, you thought about potential poisoning. Who was this person bottle-feeding you water, why couldn’t you do it yourself??

You were too thirsty to care about the consequences, gulping it down as the bottle lifted higher to accommodate you.

Letting out a pant, you sat back, trying to rub water off your lip with a shoulder shimmy.

“Where am I? What’s going on--” It all started to come back to you, being in Elijah’s room, trespassing on private property, seeing the closet hoard of you. “Wait, please don’t report me, I promise it isn’t what you think it was…”

“Report you?” The masculine tone scoffed, a hand falling to your shoulder. “I was worried I’d never get a chance like this… you made it so easy, how’d you get in? The window?”

“...Yeah.” You sheepishly replied, looking up at your captor. “It’s not as easy as it looks.”

Oh shit. That was Elijah right in front of you. In the flesh, pretty pearly teeth grinning only inches away from your face as his hand rested on your left shoulder, gently massaging it.

“Is your head okay? I feel bad but.. I wasn’t thinking, could only think about how to keep you here.”

Keep you here? Oh no, does that mean the police are on their way??

“Now.. I don’t have to worry about sending people out to your apartment anymore.. No more security cameras, no more blackmail… just you.” He stroked the side of your cheek that was inflamed from falling against the floor. “Damn. I thought i’d have to go through the trouble of taking you in the middle of the night, I had just sent my driver out for my tools too- but, looks like that’s not even an issue anymore!”

Well, sounds like your fears about the cops was no where near the truth. But now, you were even more confused. Taking you? Stalking? Blackmail? It almost felt like you were listening to yourself talk for a second.

Behind the dark glare covering his eyes, you could see Elijah’s trademark dimples, his pinkish lips covering the slight overbite he had, constantly showing off his front few teeth. You knew those downturned eyes were there somewhere, even with their shine dulled by the shadows of what looked to be a dark cellar around you.

His hair was unkempt, thick, dark strands covering his ears and going so far to the base of his neck. Wow, you had never seen him look so scruffy, even when watching from outside, seeing him brush his teeth in shirtless pajamas. He looked worried, shirt untucked and pants wrinkled as he ran a hand through his hair.

“And I’m sorry to say.. But don’t even think about trying to run away now. I made up my mind long ago, and if I find out that--”

“Urk, I wasn’t planning on it. I saw, the uh, dedication board. Or, shrine?”

At that, Elijah stopped. His baby blue eyes went wide for a moment, forgetting that was where he originally found you until now.

You hid your head down in discomfort.

“I have the same one…of you, in my apartment… in a box under my bed. There’s even a piece of hair from middleschool that I c..ut, from you.” You held back a nauseous gag at the admission. But here you were, this was your chance to prove how much you loved him, how much dedication you put towards understanding his every move, every like and dislike, the intricacies of his family history. “Do you know why I was in your room?” You asked, wondering if he already had seen your worship blog.

Elijah took a step back, lowering to sit on a pulled out fold-up chair across from you. His knees touched yours, still dressed in his black slacks and matching loafers, rolled up sleeves on his cream-colored button up that showed he had taken liberties to get more comfortable for the night.

“I’ll be honest I hadn’t contemplated that… just about how perfect of a chance it was, that you-- my uh, small, obsession since fifth grade.. Was here.” He looked down, a small red tint creeping from his cheeks to the rest of his face. He was bright crimson, like a kid again confessing to his crush behind the bleachers. “But you remember me?? From so long ago? I can’t… Its hard to imagine, i’ve been watching you for years and thought you had completely forgotten about me.”

“Are you kidding?” You watched Elijah rub his eyes, trying to hide his face behind his knuckles. “You’re all over the news, even if I wanted to avoid you. But I haven’t stopped following your every move since, I can’t remember. Every house change, new school, shopping trip with your mother… anytime I was free I dedicated it to watching you, or my--”

You cut yourself off, stepping one foot off into the deep end on a subject you desperately wanted kept hidden.

“If I knew any better I’d say you sound like a bit of a stalker.” Elijah tried to hide his grin behind his hand, leaning forward to get a closer look at you. “What were you going to say?”

“My…blog.”

“Blog?” He parroted.

“It’s a…. Dedication blog. To you.”

“Oh, like an obsessed fan?” He jeered, laughing with bright teeth as he braced his shaking from on his knee. “Don’t tell me-- you snuck in here for content to your blog?”

“No-! Well, yes. But some of it was going in my private stash…” You pouted, knowing you’d never get that chance again now that you’ve been discovered. Your days of fawning were going to come to a close.

“So you must be the one who keeps finding a way to get pictures when I never see any reporters around. By, breaking into my home.”

“That sounds really bad.. But I promise I wasn’t going to try to steal, or hurt you!”

That only made him laugh harder.

“I can’t… can’t believe I never saw you..” He wheezed, face flushed as you sat rotting in embarrassment and shame. “I had drivers chase after you for hours when you disappeared-- but you were five steps behind me the entire time!”

Drivers… your brain clicked two and two together as he tried to stop from giggling while hunched over.

“...Drivers?” You question. No way this is what yout thought it was.”So you’ve been spying on me?”

“Don’t sound so offended, little stalker,” He settled down, a permanent smile still on his mouth as he dragged the steel chair somehow closer. “ You’ve been hard to catch, but i’ve been keeping tabs on you, as unseemingly as it is. I couldn’t do it myself but I wanted to make sure you were, okay. Before it was safe to bring you home. Though I had nothing to fear about you forgetting me at all!”

You swallowed, mouth having gone back to a dry desert as you contemplated what this all meant. YOUR Elijah was spying on you in your home? Sending out underlings to watch and make sure you were safe? The man who you’d lay your life down for? You fantasized, imagining him at your window, you-- freshly out of the shower…

“What do you mean by home? You don’t mean.. Here, in the estate, right?”

Elijah observed you so fully, it made you nervous. He had never given someone this much attention in interviews, nonetheless in the photos and videos you managed to snap of him alone. And he was looking at you, with those eyes.

You didn’t know how much longer you could take it. Smelling his sandalwood with his knees pressing against yours, his finely ironed shirt toned against him-- right here, in the flesh. You always thought you’d be at a distance, never able to come in contact with him.. And now, you were tied up in his family’s wine cellar.

“Of course my darling. Where else? I can’t possibly send you back to that dungeon of an apartment. And you,” He stood, intent on coming closer. “Came in so willingly, huh? Didn’t think you’d return my love so… earnestly.”

“W-well who said anything about staying?” You sputtered, looking at his eyes glower in an exceedingly dark fashion. “I mean…. You love me? I’d accepted I’d never be seen by you but… you’ve been watching, the entire time?”

He stood up from his chair with a slight creak, causing your neck to strain upwards to look at him. A small touch caressed the end of your chin, his finger smoothening as it lifted your head to meet his gaze.

He hummed, Elijah’s eyes full of an expression you’ve never seen him wear before. Something in the mix of a sentimental possession, and a lover. But it was so tender, you couldn’t look away. It was so safe, so familiar. You recognized that look in the mirror, visible in your own eyes when you planted kisses on his printed photo taped to your vanity.

“Haven’t been able to keep you off my mind since you plucked that leaf off of my spoiled head. Love doesn’t even begin to describe it. I need, you.”

His gaze was so genuine, your eyes soothed by the glazed over grin he gave you, leaning down to hunch on his knees to be closer to you.

“I…” You breathed, wondering if this was a dream. “I’ve wanted you to see me.. for so long. Is this real?”

You stopped working. There was no chance that he had been watching you, wondering and waiting for you to recognize him, when you were longing for his attention, having convinced yourself long ago you’d only be able to possess him from a distance.

Soft fingers that hadn’t worked a day in their lives creeped up your knees, Elijah’s face only inches away as his eyelids lowed, looking sultry as he watched you squirm.

“I pray it’s not.” He exhaled.

“...Well, I’m not staying tied up in this chair, no matter how much you beg. Though… I can’t say I’d mind staying with you. Being with you.. Here, together.”

“Good. It wasn’t really a matter of choice, anyway.” He grinned, pressing a slow kiss to your cheek.

You involuntarily hummed in content, pressing closer to his lips as you arched out of the chair, longing to touch his warm body. He was kissing you; somebody get you out of these ropes before you jump the man.

Elijah couldn’t help but grin like a maniac, drugged on the way you relished his touch and pressed your chest forward to him. He rushed kisses to your chin, bites to your ear and licks to your neck with a groan.

But a sudden stop brought your blissfully closed eyes to an open.

“I’m sorry… want you too much, it’s getting to the better of me.”

“I’m not sorry,” You mumble, hoping that if this was a dream, you wouldn’t ever wake up. “Please, don’t stop.. I’ve killed for this, don’t stop now.”

“You tempt me too much,” He chuckles, gripping the sides of your chair seat to stablize himself leering over you. “So lucky you were my little creepy stalker, and no one else’s. Wouldn’t be able to control myself otherwise.”

“Stalker, murderer of your old lovers… I have many names.” You joked, but the bitterness on your tongue remembering those placeholders you got rid of was sour.

“Many talents, too.” Elijah’s eyebrows furrowed. “You’re the one that caused my fiances to dissapear? I wondered how they kept doing that,” He looked keenly, seeing right through your little ‘joke’. “Even I couldn’t shoo my mothers’ arranged partners away.”

You tried to look away, embarrassment showing on the way you bit your lips clean and your heartbeat wrapped. “I did it in your name…. I couldn’t stand them thinking they were worth being so close and casual with you! It was infuriating every time I saw it I-- I just couldn’t take it anymore. Even if it meant I’d never have you.”

Elijah buried himself in your hair, holding you tight. The squeeze was so personable, hungry and desperate to hold all of you.

“You have me now, you have me completely. I want you-- what a favor you have done, and you hadn’t even known.”

It felt so good, praised for such hard and hateful work you carried out. Their bodies were mangled, your rage manifesting in the corpses buried under the old golf course near your dingy apartment complex-- and he was happy you did it. Oh, you wanted to hold him, to smell him fully. These binds were stopping you from caressing the lover, the dream you had fantasized holding you to sleep so often, spooning the jackets and dresshirts of his musk in replacement for comfort.

Elijah still snickered in your ear, playing with the tips of your hair.

“But now, I have to see this blog. I’m too curious-- though I can’t say seeing it will help my small obsession for you. A stalking blog-- too cute.”

You were still so shameful of it, now that he brought it up. You didn’t want your soulmate to see the virtual shrine you had dedicated to him, your unseemly thoughts and hungry urges that were far too detailed and graphic to be shared with their perpetrator. But what choice did you have? He’d find it, one way or another.

“F..fine. But you’d you atleast untie me now? My arms are getting sore.”

That seemed to cease his light-hearted expression, frowning against your skull as he inhaled the sweet scent of your hair. It was the same as he remembered, now a decade later.

“You’re not gonna try to leave, are you?” He murmured, caressing pinching your ear with a light tone. But something dangerous was held behind it. It was frightening.. But oh, as if the possessiveness didn’t fuel how much more your insides craved him.

“Do you think I’d really try to go anywhere? Not when you’re so accessible to me now.” You looked over. Elijah’s lashes looked so long up close, sweetly deadpanned eyes watching as if you were being tested, hunted.

He seemed to find your answer appealing, getting up and pulling something out of his back pocket. Leaning down once more, you saw the switchblade bobbing between his hands, a pretty and simple hunting blade. He leaned over you, pressing it against the knot above your wrists.

You focused on feeling for the blade as to not get cut, only for your attention to be pulled back to the spoiled one-percenters lips pressing yours directly. It was a shock, more than anything. You wished you had seen it coming, wish you had been better prepared to share your first kiss with your darling!

Elijah left your mouth nowhere to run as he pressed up against you, fervidly ensnaring your lips between his.

You gladly accepted the pull away for a second kiss, leaning up as much as you could while hiding your desperation. He was so soft, lips gentle and big as they enveloped your bitten ones.

“Sorry,” Elijah broke away slowly, not straying far. “I’ve wanted to do that for ages.” You watched his eyes stare wonders at your lips, fingers brushing against your trapped ones from behind as the task at hand was forgotten.

“Me too.” You uttered, pulling forward to kiss him again with an open, insatiable mouth.

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marciaillust · 6 months ago

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the older i get the more I fall in love with kuroko no basket. I wouldn't say my enjoyment of it comes from the strength of its writing or the depth and pathos the characters bring to the table but it's just so. so. it frog boils you

it starts off by introducing the generation of miracles and its just a buncha kids that are super good. one is turbo fast, one is naturally turbo tall, one can make 3 pointers from far far away. like sure there is a gimmick but its tiny, it's *believable*. these six kids are just that good whatever you watched sports anime, you know how this goes

but all in all the show starts off as. hey. we love basketball. this show is named kuroko's basketball, it is gonna be about what basketball means to its characters', especially kuroko. ok. fine. you have this duo and one is loud and obnoxious and the other one is quiet, they are the opposites but they are like light and shadow, we are gonna root for them as they go on their basketball journey and tell us what basketball means to them. ok

but the shadow guy. he's so much of a nothingburger he disappears on the court so he can make surprise moves. ok. wow. kinda funny. kinda gimmicky, more than being just tall or just fast, but like. its his whole personality anyway. everyone doesnt notice him off the court in real life too. it causes problems for him. its his dominant trait as a person on the whole. gimmicky but in character. out there but lowkey fits the threading of the fabric you're weaving here. that's just our main character and who he is as a person.

and then for the next 100 episodes you're slowly. with every match. getting exposed to new characters. with their little gimmicks. but you've seen anime before, everyone's got their thing. One will be less agile but the brains of the operation. One will be good at observing. One can do really really good fakes. Ok fine. But then. then the plot keeps escalating. the stakes keep going up. we need more characters. new matches. new gimmicks.

One of our characters can see the court really well, he knows whats what immediately in his surroundings. Eagle eye, they call that sense. But then he meets another guy, an opponent, who can see the court EVEN BETTER. He has got the HAWK EYE! the zone (state of intense focus) becomes a mythical land that only select few have the access too. Regular dunks become *METEOR STRIKES*. Slapping a ball away from your opponent becomes a *SPEAR*. Dribbling with 3 fingers becomes an indicator that you're actually on LEVEL 1 of your dribbling skills and it can go up by TWO MORE LEVELS

But throughout all of this you're like. Ok. Ok. Obviously this is basketball. The things we're seeing are merely visual metaphors and allegories for my enjoyment. It's not meant to be taken literally. BUT THEN. EVERYONE REACTS TO EVERYTHING. DIAGETICALLY. ITS WATSONIAN ALL THE WAY DOWN? EVERYONE is aware of the eagle eye and the hawk eye and the technical differences between them. Noone has done a meteor strike before! That's only theoretical! THE ZONE? its a door. Its like the door from fma. you can get cast out, the door can close on you. AND It guarded by someone! WHO IS STOPPING YOU FROM CROSSING THE THRESHOLD? Search. Find out. Withstand the storm. Open the door!! The dollar store yaoibait becomes all but text. The bonds between characters get elevated to biblical proportions. The main charas are light and shadow. But that shadow already had his light in the past. But they had a breakup. Now its like being in a new relesh looking to prove your ex boyfriend that he was wrong to dump you. And the new light is gonna stand up for his man, he's not gonna take the disrespect laying down. And the pot keeps boiling until the final bad guy of the whole tournament, the defending champion, is this redheaded twink with heterochromia in his eyes and hes GOT THE EYES OF AN EMPOROR! AND PEOPLE FALL TO THEIR KNEES FROM MERELY LOOKING INTO HIS EYES ON THE COURT! HE SAYS BOW BEFORE ME AS HE DRIBBLES PAST THEM AND THEY FALL!!! AND HE TALKS TO EVERYONE LIKE HE'S A DIVINELY PROTECTED TSAR OF REALITY! AND EVERYONE TAKES HIM SERIOUSLY!!!

BUT THEN YOU LEARN THAT ACTUALLY HE'S GOT A SPLIT PERSONALITY THING GOING ON AND HIS REAL SELF IS BEING HELD HOSTAGE BY HIS EVIL AND MEAN BASKETBALL SELF AND THAT TO DEFEAT THE GAY LOVE THAT OPPOSES HIM (the main characters) HE MUST SUICIDE HALF OF HIS PERSONALITY TO FREE HIMSELF TO REACH THE BASKETBALL HEAVEN AND HE DOES THIS VIA A CONVERSATION IN HIS HEAD DURING MATCH AND I CANT STRESS, A "PERSON" DIES, AND HE LOSES THE HETEROCHROMIA AND ITS LIKE. ITS TEXT I GUESS HE WAS POSSESSED

AND ALSO EVERYONE IS COLOUR CODED AND LIKE 17 AND ALSO THE 3 WOMEN IN THIS SHOW HAVE AT LEAST 5 SCENES DEDICATED TO SIZE OF THEIR BOOBS BECAUSE IT WAS 2012 AND THAT'S WHAT WOMEN FIGHT OVER IN PRIVATE AND THE LIGHT AND THE SHADOW WANT TO PLAY TOGETHER FOREVER AND THEY WANT TO GET BASKETBALL MARRIED AND THEY LITERALLY HAVE AN AIRPORT SCENE IN THE FINAL EP IS ANYONE ELSE SEEING THIS HELLO? TAPS MIC HELLO???

#i watch this show every year and it always feel like taking a long hit off a bong i swear

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twistedwonderlandimaginesblog · 11 months ago

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hi hi!! i was wondering if it's okay to do the tsum fic but w/ riddle,cater,kalim and sebek? cuz the request is super cute><

Cater Diamond:

Cater knew he shouldn’t have gone down the MagiCam rabbit hole because now his tsum was gone! The little guy had been watching over his shoulder but must have rolled away in the meantime, leaving Cater to worriedly look around for him. It’s more fun with help so his first thought was to hope you would help, heading to your room before getting the shock of a lifetime. The tsum was tucked in your arms as you scrolled through your phone, with you occasionally giggling at a video and explaining some trends that you came across. The tsum seemed happy to do so and Cater pouted, wishing he could be in that exact position, if only he could figure out how to ask.

Kalim Al-Asim:

Kalim’s tsum had been a sweet little show-off for you before, dancing in front of you to get your attention and only happy once you swooped him up in your arms. Kalim thought it was the cutest thing seeing you with the tsum, and the tsum seemed quite happy to be close to you. He felt it’s sadness when you had to leave because it mirrored his own when you had to part, he willed time to move quicker so you could reunite. While he yearned the tsum jumped into action, rolling itself to your room and directly into your arms in the way Kalim dreamed. If he didn’t have Jamil constantly telling him it was a bad idea he would’ve plopped down in your bed long ago, just wanting to cuddle up with you like the tsum was.

Riddle Rosehearts:

Riddle is not thrilled to know the tsum was a little rule-breaker, making a run for it while he was preparing tea. He’s frustrated as he searches for it, looking all over his dorm before he messaged you asking if you’d seen it. When you respond with a ‘maybe’ he knew you were being coy, finding his way to your room to demand you explain your noncommittal answer to his question. He knows sees it was just an outright lie as you most certainly knew where the tsum was, as it was happily snuggled in your arms, enjoying tea with you rather than him. He scowled but you pointed out he still had a chance to follow the rules if he sat down to drink some tea together and he did so, the tsum not sparing him a second glance as it was completely enamored by you.

Sebek Zigvolt:

Sebek had thought, with horror, that his tsum had rolled off to defend Malleus as it displayed many traits that he did, and he worried it was bothering his master. The truth of it feels even more horrifying as he was deeply in denial about his feelings for you, and it felt like cold water being splashed on his face to see a tiny version of himself curled up in your arms like he was being pampered. He’s rendered speechless when you see no issue with this, stuttering out that it was indecent before stopping himself. It was an entirely innocent interaction but it was making him irritated, moreso by the minute as the tsum glared back at him defiantly and refused to move from your arms.

#Twisted Wonderland #TWST #Twisted Wonderland Imagines #Twisted Wonderland x Reader #TWST Imagines #TWST x Reader #Cater Diamond #Kalim Al Asim #Riddle Rosehearts #Sebek Zigvolt #Cater Diamond x Reader #Kalim Al Asim x Reader #Riddle Rosehearts x Reader #Sebek Zigvolt x Reader

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nekropsii · 8 months ago

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Aww. On one hand, I'm glad my words touched you. On the other, it makes me so deeply sad knowing even the smallest glance towards granting one basic human dignity is enough to drive one to tears. I wouldn't even call my words the bare minimum - I don't think that countering the common idea that a group isn't inherently abusive should be the bare minimum. The bare minimum should be casual respect, the same that's afforded to any other person. The bare minimum should be me not even needing to say any of this in the first place.

NPD is so heavily demonized, especially right now. There's wave after wave of people claiming "Narcissistic Abuse" is a valid term and viciously attacking anyone who breathes in the direction of contradiction, every single search adjacent to NPD results in almost nothing but article after article on, specifically, how to hurt people with NPD, or protect yourself against them... There's conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory posted online quite literally painting them as actual real demons, like, Demons, from The Bible, or linking them to the Jewish Reptilian conspiracy theory, and it's just completely and utterly gut-wrenching. Even in spaces that proclaim themselves as safe, or progressive, or bigotry-free, these unjustified, bigoted snap judgments occur. It's the worst.

NPD is not something that I have. I don't have any Cluster B Disorder, actually. But I'm sympathetic because they're all fucking human beings the world has decided is socially acceptable to turn into a Sinister Other, a Walking Otherworldly Threat, like this is a fucking fiction novel or a video game. I'm sick of it.

There's a few people in my immediate circles who have NPD. They're all good people. They're nice, they're funny, they have perspectives on things that I deeply value, they're smart, and I treasure their proximity so much. They've never done anything wrong, and certainly haven't done anything wrong purely on the basis of being some Evil, Conniving Super Villain. They're literally just hanging out, and I'm glad to know them. My life is better and more enriched having known these people. They have never wronged me, and I don't think they ever will. And even if they do, it would not be because they have NPD, it would be because they're a living being. As people, we all have the capability to harm others. Animals have the capability to harm other animals, too. Plants can harm you. This is not a trait unique to the Disordered.

Us people without NPD need to do better, to listen to our friends and siblings with NPD, to help boost them up so that we can help end this wretched fucking curse - or, at the very least, quell it. We need to help them speak louder, and amplify their cause with our vocal support. Ableism will never go away, but the least we can do is try to move towards making it not as socially acceptable to be bigoted. None of us need a Sinister Other to combat. This is not war, this is not the medieval times. We do not need this. We do not need to beat a persecution complex into ourselves to excuse persecuting others. We do not need to live in constant fear of the idea of the line cook who just wants to go home and play Dark Souls, or the office worker passing the time by thinking about their 3 cats, or the high schooler at home reading their favorite shoujo manga, or the guitarist driving home tapping their fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of the radio. These are not your enemies. They are people going about their lives. They've literally never hurt you. Stop projecting your fear of abuse onto strangers - onto minorities.

My message to people without NPD is to fucking check yourself if you believe in Narcissistic Abuse, or automatically assume that people with NPD are up to something. Especially right now, that is a very, very vile, dehumanizing form of absolutely rampant ableism that we needed to take extreme steps to mitigate fucking months ago. Years, even. The best time to shoot this bigotry and burn it's corpse was the moment it started rising. The second best time is Now. Interrogate yourself. Realize that people with NPD are literally just human beings. Stop being awful to your fellow person. The way people think and speak about people with NPD is just absolutely disgusting, and everyone needs to apologize to them right now.

My message to people with NPD is simple: You deserve one billion dollars for having to put up with all of this shit. It's actually deranged. Trust me, there are others out there that think this is horseshit. You are not alone.

#npd #cw ableism #nekro.sms

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nightcolorz · 1 year ago

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I would love to hear your thoughts on autistic Armand, if you haven’t already spoke about this! Imo he’s very autsitic coded, and it’s very precious to me as an autistic iwtv fan :]

OMG!!! RUNS AROUND. Yes lmao I talk about this a lot actually it is one of my favorite Armand things to meta about bcus I’m also autistic and he is my special interest🙏I was trying to find some of the stuff I’ve written about autistic Armand but tumblrs search engine makes it near impossible to find anything so I gave up 😭, but believe me they r out there. Even tho I talk about this a lot I would love love love to talk about it some more for u anon because I can never get enough of armandtism.

I first figured Armand was autistic when I was reading the vampire Lestat because when he is first introduced he is completely non verbal and only communicates through the mind gift. through further explanation it’s very much implied that he does this because he finds putting his thoughts into words hard and he considers just projecting them into peoples brains much easier. Armand speaks out loud for the first time like more than halfway through the book, and lestat is surprised to hear him lol. This is super autistic I feel like that’s obvious 🙏 it’s basically the vampire power equivalent of using a non verbal communication device. Armand having trouble with connecting with people, understanding how to “fit in”, and talking r prevailing parts of his character throughout the whole series (not just tvl) which solidified my headcanon into basically a canon fact in my mind lol.

When Armand is first introduced in iwtv his strangeness is chalked up to his vampirism, but it’s soon revealed throughout tvl and qotd that Armand is considered a strange outcast by other vampires. The things he struggles with r unique to him and r not representative of vampires in general. His otherness/strangeness can also not be chalked up to his trauma or his age turned because Armand was also an outcast as a young child. It’s described in the vampire Armand that Armand was not understood by his parents or his community because he was obsessed with and freakishly good at painting. His community interprets his unusualness as a sign of some divine intervention, the priests believe he is a saint or a prophet sent to earth, even at times saying things implying that he is “not human”. Unusually high quickly developing skill in childhood is an autistic trait, as is hyper fixation on an activity/topic that becomes a core identity factor and prevailing obsession. The affects of Armand’s trauma only worsen the severity of his autistic traits. C-ptsd and autism often overlap and coexist in autistic people who were traumatized in childhood, which seems to be Armand’s case.

in queen of the damned Armand is at his peak autistic lol, I feel like this is when most book readers gain that head canon. The Devils minion chapter revolves around Armand using Daniel as a guide to help him learn how to be “normal” and to blend in to the modern age. Armand can’t seem to figure out how to blend in on his own because he is unable to understand social norms of any time period enough to integrate himself into society. Armand is in love with technology and what most would consider monotonous sensory experiences. He stares at his own reflection for hours, he loves kitchen appliances and watching ingredients whir in blenders, cameras, he watches the same movie over and over again and never gets bored of it. The way Armand fixates on technology really reminds me of how a lot of autistic people played as children. He enjoys repetitive, sensory behaviors over “fun”. For Armand this means watching the same things repeatedly, which is a form of visual stimming. There r moments where Armand is trying to understand his world, but is so blind to what he is trying to understand that he goes about his discoveries wrong. Such as in qotd when he tries to interrogate strangers to gain information on societal norms but he only gets uncomfortable glances. Armand is desperate to understand and to connect but he is consistently inherently alienated, whether it be from humanity or from other vampires or from himself.

Armand also can not process his memories comprehendingly. This is part trauma part autism, but autism is def a factor. Because of his repressed trauma induced memory loss Armand finds it difficult to talk about himself to people. This is worsened by Armand being unable to comprehend the aspects of story telling that he needs to be able to tell people about his life. Armand explains to Daniel that he vividly remembers small details, such as dates and weather, but he could not tell Daniel what “things were like” because he “doesn’t know what that means”. Literal thinking, the inability to grasp vague, fiction based concepts like narratives and metaphor, and strict fixation on minor details like numbers, are all autistic traits!

Armand also struggles heavily with emotional regulation. He is described as often having intense and extreme meltdowns where he cries and screams and breaks things. Armand is easily bothered, in tva he mentions that he covers his ears when he is overwhelmed. The vampire Armand begins actually with Armand becoming overwhelmed in public and trying to escape to an attic so that he can be alone in silence. Armand copes with his intense emotions by putting on a mask of neutrality. He is often described as expressionless and blank, uncanny. But this is a mask, and when Armand can no longer mask and his disguise lapses his facial expressions r described by lestat as being so over the top and emotional that they are disturbing and weird. Over the top unnatural facial expressions as well as blank unreadable ones are both autistic traits. For Armand he is naturally overly emotive to the point of being considered horrifying, and he hides this by taking the opposite extreme. Either way, either expression Armand puts on causes him to be socially outcast.

Armand often describes feeling like there is something wrong with him that causes him to be isolated from others and he’s not sure what it is. In prince lestat he tells Gregory that he doesn’t know why it’s so hard for him to have relationships when other vampires are fully capable of doing that. In the vampire Armand he explains to David that he’s crazy because his mind isn’t built right and his senses are tripled so he shouldn’t bother trying to understand him. I rlly relate to this as someone who felt like I was from another dimension as a child bcus i didn’t know the unspoken life rules everyone else did.

Armand is often treated like a child by the other vampires and assumed to be emotionally immature and too fragile and insane to be helpful. Armand says in the vampire Armand that he doesn’t consider himself an adult because he can’t function like one. This could be due to the age he was turned, but it’s shown to us that characters like Benji and even to an extent Claudia r able to self regulate and function appropriately despite being turned even younger then Armand was.

in conclusion, book Armand is an autistic person who was never given proper support or understanding because the environment and the time period he was born in decided to alienate him further rather then work to help him socialize and learn appropriate skills, and because of the necessities he has been deprived of and the horrible trauma he endured Armand is never able to learn to function in the way he was likely capable of. this recessive quality in pair with his autism caused Armand it be unable to cope or self regulate or learn ways to understand himself since he wasn’t given a chance to in his formative years. He’s a great representative of what many autistic people who experienced intense child abuse experience.

Im rlly happy with the shows portrayal with Armand so far partly because he is omg, so autistic. Show Armand shares so many of book Armand’s autistic traits. inability to understand himself or others, fixation on small details but inability to understand the big picture, etc. even his iPad is autistic asf! My ipad is my comfort item that I carry around with me to self sooth, and this is def the vibe Armand’s iPad gives me in the show. Even assads performance is autistic! He is able to play Armand masking and Armand unmasking, the stilted expressions he gives and the blank stares, the uncomprehending earnestness. AGHHHH!! Assad stims with his fingers when Armand is nervous too which is just an amazing touch. I hope the show explores Armand’s autism, because that would literally be a dream come true. Even still, for now I’m satisfied.

thank u so so much anon for the ask this made me so happy 🙏❤️ autistic Armand means so much to me and has gotten me though some tough times. Understanding and analyzing Armand helps me understand myself better and feel more comfortable with how I am. Earlier this year I gave myself a concussion because I was harmfully stimming during a meltdown, and while I was in the emergency room I was holding the vampire Armand and imaging that he would relate to what I was going through. So yeah he is very special to me too! And once again it makes me so so happy that u got me to talk some about it. I hope this was coherent or interesting lol I felt like I was all over the place

#tvc #the vampire chronicles #armand #vampire chronicles #vc #iwtv #interview with the vampire #amc iwtv #the vampire armand #Armand #armand iwtv #armand tvc #iwtv Armand #amc interview with the vampire #Armand le russe #vampire armand #The vampire lestat #Queen of the damned #the devils minion

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artbyblastweave · 13 days ago

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Review: The Refrigerator Monologues

In my ongoing search for prose superhero fiction that doesn’t make me want to bash my own head into a concrete wall until naught but pulp remains, I recently blew through The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherine Valente, with minimalist black-and-white illustrations by Annie Wu. I thought It was reasonably good, albeit undercut by the short format and a strained relationship with its own metatextuality. A conceptual mash-up of Gail Simone’s old Women in Refrigerators project and the presentation format of The Vagina Monologues, the book is a collection of six vignettes narrated by members of the Hell Hath club- a post-mortem support group held in the afterlife for the deceased wives and girlfriends of various superpeople. We hear monologues from pastiches of six characters- Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey, Mera, Harley Quinn, Karen Page, and Alexandra Dewitt.

Across the board, the prose is phenomenal, as are the individual character voices, so that’s already one of the big persistent challenges of prose capeshit cleared without incident. More impressive is Valente’s dedication in constructing what I term a “burner universe-” which is when a parody or deconstruction world builds a setting robust enough that it would have been really compelling as an unironic, unreconstructed pitch. I’ve written before that part of why there aren’t many good original superhero zombie stories is that it’s not really worth it to do a setting’s worth of big-two-style worldbuilding just to trash it with an apocalyptic zombie outbreak; something similar is applicable here, in that Valente could have gotten away with way less work coming up with the characters and powersets, but instead went all-out on, in her own words, “creating an entire superhero universe just to make a point.” The universe she created is visibly written by someone who’s actually enamored with the source material in a way that heads off Ennisian strawmanning. All superhero deconstructions have to strike a balance between inserting ugly real-life dynamics that are conspicuously absent in the source material, and analyzing the fair-cop implications of the stuff that actually is present; half of what’s wrong with comic books, historically, are those conspicuously absent elements, but if you add too much ugliness you run the risk of a decisive victory over a strawman. For the most part, Valente understands exactly when to add additional complications and personal shortcomings to the heroes under scrutiny, and when to just shine a damning light on what’s already present in the mythology; there’s an admirable separation between disdain for the misogynistic writing decisions and disdain for the characters themselves.

To be clear, by no means is the collection perfect- but it did earn enough good will that I can hold off on the serious grousing until the back-half of what's under the following cut:

Part One: the Individual Vignettes

Paige Embry is Dead: Introduces the book’s pastiche of Gwen Stacy, who acts as a cryptkeeper-style host of sorts for the rest of the book, providing introductions for the other protagonists before handing off the mic. Paige Embry is a materials engineer who inadvertently gave her college boyfriend super speed while giving him a tour of the lab, and proceeds to do a lot of the behind-the-scenes scutwork necessary for his career as “Kid Mercury” to take off; after her two-faced mentor steals the same technology to become Kid Mercury’s arch nemesis, she’s killed while trying to intervene in their blowout fight out of a sense of responsibility for the entire situation, punished by the universe for daring to step outside her ordained role. Paige actually has very little in common with Gwen Stacy beyond the fact that they were both thrown off a bridge to their deaths, but that, in itself, is a form of commentary. The fact that adding any traits or agency beyond “The hero’s girlfriend” puts you sufficiently beyond the popular perception of OG Gwen Stacy is a decent indictment of the writing choices surrounding her. Outside of drawing attention to that, the story is most interested in transposing the invisibility of women’s labor into the superheroic context, where it isn’t usually present; Kid Mercury isn’t a vicious shitheel, the story goes out of it’s way to make clear Paige was with him for a reason, but he’s also recognizably thoughtless about how much he’s leaning on Paige to be able to do what he does. Behind every great writer, a wife watching the kids. Behind every great superhero, a materials-engineer who knows how to sew a costume and come up with a snappy name. The final beat of interest here is that Paige narrates the story from within a big-two-typical revolving door afterlife, but Kid Mercury, pointedly, has never even tried to pull an Orpheus. Spider-Man exists in a universe where the X-Men can’t stay in the ground for more than two years but Gwen Stacy stayed dead; at first, this was because dead actually meant dead editorially at the time of her death, the revolving door being a later development; and later, because her death was too iconic a beat to undo. In a setting where you can’t just point to those editorial constraints and be done with it, Kid Mercury’s failure to kick down the doors to the afterlife is allowed to raise some interesting characterization questions about whether she’s worth more to him emotionally dead than alive. 10/10, would not be surprised if the rest of the collection flowed from this.

The Heat Death of Julia Ash: The book’s pastiche of Jean Grey; Julia Ash is a star student and token girl-teammate under the (gender-swapped) Xavier pastiche until she gets infected by an alien intelligence known as Chardibys, which supercharges her abilities and turns her into, basically, the only member of her team that matters in a fight. Subsequently she runs afoul of (and ends up in an abusive relationship with) a reality warping villain who’s the anthropomorphic personification of editorial retcons and behind-the-scenes creative tug-of-war, who engineers her initial “Dark-Phoenix” style crashout and then kickstarts his own redemption arc amongst her former peers- the kind every X-Men villain eventually gets- by using his powers to “solve” the problem he created by locking her away in comic book limbo, with reality being unable to decide if she’s alive or dead, culpable or innocent, herself or a puppet for an alien intelligence wearing her skin. The fact that the story is primarily about how the writers can’t make up their mind on what Jean Grey’s deal is, does, unfortunately, make it hard for the story to make any other point in particular; it’s a story about how male egos can’t tolerate a woman being the team powerhouse, until it isn’t, and it turns out that their concern was actually completely warranted, or they weren’t actually concerned at all. It’s a story about how Xavier is a manipulative POS who uses child soldiers, until it isn’t. It’s a story about how Phoenix’s mass murder is inevitably understated by the narrative, until it isn’t. It’s a story about how female characters are judged infinitely harsher than male characters for their crashouts, until suddenly it objectively was the Worst and Most Destructive Crashout ever, that also Didn’t Actually Happen. It’s deliberately confused because it’s about how the source material is confused, and it’s one of the better examples of how when the collection is weak, it’s often a reflection of how the referent storylines are weak. 8/10. How dead is Julia Ash, at this exact moment in time?

The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Pauline Ketch: Follows the setting’s Harley Quinn Pastiche, Pretty Polly; an troubled rich kid who ends up forcibly institutionalized after her father’s abuse drives her to a string of retaliatory arsons. There, she falls in love with Mr. Punch, the setting’s Joker analogue, and, having previously inferred Not!Batman’s identity from having grown up in the same wealthy circles, she wedges her way into Punch’s good graces and inner circle by holding the information over his head. After a years-long criminal and romantic partnership she comes to trust him enough to divulge the information; having gotten what he wanted from her, he immediately drowns her in the bath.

This was, unfortunately, the only story in the collection I actively disliked, simply because it’s the only one that feels flat-out redundant to the source material. Mad Love, the definitive story involving Harley Quinn, is already about how Harley Quinn is projecting love and deep political interiority onto an abusive shithead who doesn’t care about her beyond his ability to use her to get at his rival, and she doesn’t even die at the end of that story! You have invented new bad things that don't actually exist in the source material! She barely had any characterization until Mad Love spelled out the tragedy of this dynamic, and most of what came later was predicated on her escape and elevation from it- all of which was already well underway by the time this came out, and given how familiar the rest of the collection is with the source material, it’s genuinely really odd to me that she wrote it this way. The Mad Love retread is fighting for space with a couple reasonably interesting but inevitably underdeveloped ideas. Batman is a finance bro whose “war on crime” is actually a thinly veiled gentrification initiative? Cool idea, but if the story is too much about that, now it’s a Batman story and not a Harley Quinn story. The asylum is drugging all of the captured supervillains into a dazed stupor rather than invest in any kind of directed treatment plan? That’s actually got legs as a criticism of psychiatry- but it’s telling that Polly is recast as a patient in this dynamic when her referent character would have been complicit in the systemic abuse. The closest thing to a new idea is a one-paragraph exploration of the idea that Polly was picking targets based on leftist/feminist sensibilities while blinding herself to the reality that Mr. Punch only cared about making enough ruckus to draw not!Batman’s attention. That’s not nothing. But it would be better if it were more than a paragraph! I’ll give this one 4/10- the saving grace is that Polly is a fun narrator. I’ll bump it up a few points further on the grounds that I might generally be overcompensating here out of my disgruntledness with Harley Quinn’s overexposure. I’ll end with this, though- I find it telling that Polly is the only character in the collection whose referent figure isn’t actually on Gail Simone’s original list.

The Ballad of Blue Bayou. Concerns Bayou, former punk rock musician turned Queen of Atlantis- the only narrator who, rather than actually being dead or similarly incapacitated, is instead periodically visiting the afterlife to try and retrieve her infant son, who was killed in a dustup between her boorish husband Not!Aquaman and an evil Shark guy. This entire thing turned out to be a reference to a specific Aquaman storyline where this actually did happen to their son and Mera “went crazy from grief” over it, which I didn’t know because I predictably and stereotypically know jack about Aquaman lore- but in a vacuum I’m more than prepared to accept that the writers fucked the dog on it. So, that’s deconstructive point one- that the writers are grotesquely uncharitable towards a mother’s grief. Deconstructive point two, and to some extent what I’d consider the meatier one, is that “superpowered mermaid Queen of Atlantis” is already an entirely functional pitch for a superhero, but she somehow ends up arbitrarily subordinated to her husband, a half-Atlantean who’s been involved in Atlantean affairs for maybe a few years at most. This leads into deconstructive point three- the idea that Aquaman, as typically constructed, would be an engaging novelty for people on the surface but a tiny fish in a big pond if he actually spent much time in Atlantis proper, where everyone can do what he does, and his resentment over this makes him an absentee husband and father. Overall pretty strong, although I do think the baked-in Orpheus angle is gesturing at a serious limitation of the post-mortem-support-group framing device; only so many of the referent characters are actually dead. 8/10 for being the second piece of cape fiction to play Futurama’s Atlanta/Atlantis pun as a deadly-serious element of the worldbuilding.

Daisy Green Says I Love You. Follows a pastiche of Karen Page who, after cracking under the stress of being the girlfriend of Daredevil-pastiche The Insomniac, moves to another city, gets into prostitution, then porn, then heroin, and then dies. This one is interesting to me because it carries the least overt animosity towards its pastiche hero. The Insomniac is portrayed as a perfectly nice guy,(even in the other stories where he cameos!) who never really does anything to ruin Daisy’s life aside from his lifestyle (characterized as uniquely unavoidable compared to the other superheroes) acting as a massive, massive stressor. Daisy characterizes the Insomniac as a “luck vampire,” ruining the lives of everyone he gets near inadvertently, but her life doesn’t really collapse in earnest until after they’ve been estranged for years; this reflects Karen Page’s seven-year absence from Daredevil’s book until she emerged in dire straights to kick off the events of Born Again. Her proximity to Daredevil is the metatextual reason this happened to her, but it’s basically disconnected from anything that Matt Murdock actually did. Matt Murdock isn’t really the one on trial here; Frank Miller is, along with every other writer who’s thrown a member of Matt Murdock's supporting cast into the meat thresher while he looks on, dumbfounded and without recourse. The real meat of the vignette seems to be an attempt to provide some interiority to the Page-analogue, creating a plausible backstory for a beat that had little behind it aside from a desire to shock and provoke. Karen Page got into adult films and hard drugs because Miller thought it would be shocking, gritty and realistic; Daisy Green got into adult films and hard drugs out of a combination of economic necessity, a failed acting career, poorly-managed attempts at self-actualization and poor coping mechanisms in the face of the death of her parents. Dating a superhero is something she puts a lot of blame on for her life circumstances but on another level it’s just another kinda shitty thing that happened to her, not the first and not the last; a story similar to Born Again is presumably going on in the background but that’s not what we’re centering right now. Call this one 7/10: not necessarily the strongest of the bunch but it’s gesturing at, and tinkering with, a very real dynamic; points off because I’m not actually sure whether or not we’re supposed to take Daisy’s “Luck Vampire” theory at face value or not, and I think the story suffers if we are. This isn't the first time that I'm going to say this, but you can only get so metatextual before you aren’t saying anything about anything.

Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane. This is the big one- the book’s treatment of the woman in the refrigerator herself, Alexandria DeWitt. Aspiring photographer Samantha Dane is the long-term girlfriend of Chiaroscuro, a graffiti artist who finds an enchanted homemade pin-on button that allows him to bring his art to life. He joins the Avant Garde, a superhero team consisting of other people who found totemic art pieces granting them powersets themed after various artistic mediums. Together they fight crime, which puts pressure on his relationship with Samantha, who holds leftist-flavored ideological objections to superheroes as a concept and resents being the only one of the two with an income stream. Eventually she gets murdered by the villain of the piece and stuffed in the fridge as psychological warfare against her boyfriend. And that’s the ballgame.

This one is interesting to me. It’s the books’ biggest example of the aforementioned “burner universe” effect; the plot that Samantha is on the periphery of is genuinely something I’d read a full series about. Chiaroscuro is an extremely informed and creative spin not just on the powerset of Green Lantern, but on the characteristics of Kyle Rayner specifically, whose gimmick amongst the Earth Lanterns has always been how his day job as a comic book artist informs his constructs. The Avant Garde have unique and compelling powersets, and the switch from the emotional spectrum to a conceptual spectrum based on different art movements is a clever one. The conflict of the story that intersects Samantha’s life-and kills her-is against Six Figure, a magnate who can force anyone to follow through on the terms of a deal that they shake on him with; a personification of the difficulty of trying to create art in a capitalist context, A figure who understands art perfectly well but only as a stepping stone to juicing it as aggressively as possible; the embodied spectre of both the allure and the loss of autonomy associated with selling out. It’s a strong pitch! I’d read this comic! But a vulnerability of the story being so short is that there isn’t really room to recreate the infamous refrigerator beat without, you know, recreating the infamous refrigerator beat. Sam sits at the periphery of the story, she has some concerns, she gets killed and stuffed in the fridge. She has significantly more interiority about what’s happening to her, sure, but at the end of the day she’s still just getting unceremoniously killed and stuffed in the fridge. If you’re of the opinion that this kind of story beat is inherently a problem in need of correction, the only real solution is to stop telling stories where it happens.

There’s a little more going on than that, though. There’s a sub-theme of cosmic punishment- an idea that Sam meets the fate that she does because of her lack of faith in the superhero genre; she gets swatted not just because the girlfriend needs to die for angst, but because the girlfriend had the temerity to try and poke holes in the story structure:

And then, of course, speak of the devil, one month later a wall street billionaire with significantly more power than what Jay has pinned to his fucking coat has stuffed the one remaining working artist in the story into a fridge. Because there are two kinds of postmodern superhero stories- the kind that Sam thinks she’s in, where superheroes are inherently authoritarian figures who do nothing but reproduce the power structures they claim to resist, and the kind of story that she’s actually in, where the author jazzes up their pet social issue with superpowers and apocalyptic stakes. Her boyfriend’s condescending attempt to “protect” her caused her to guess wrong, and deprived her of the information she needed to defend herself, and by saying this she called down the hammer on her own head.

Or at least, that’s the story she strings together while she’s bleeding to death in the fridge. The consequence of getting the unreconstructed beat from the victim’s perspective is that a lot of her narration consists of a scramble to claim any agency over her situation- even if it’s through some mistake that she made, even if it’s just thinking about things that are nicer than what’s currently happening to her- despite the fact that she’s in a narrative that’s inimically hostile to her agency. It’s genuinely kind of a fantastic beat. Back up to 10/10, forget that I said anything negative.

Also, the framing device for her story is her welcome party upon her arrival to the afterlife. She’s pretty damn certain she’s the next Paige Embry, the next supporting cast member doing more for the hero’s character development dead than alive. Let’s hope there’s room for her to be wrong about the kind of story she’s in a second time.

Part 2: And Then What?

Probably the component of the book that I liked the least, after Pretty Polly, is the ending vignette; The six narrators gathering in joyful solidarity, celebrating their collective escape from the, quote, “hackneyed, predictable tales, steaming on without us full speed ahead.” I think this section is slick prose but a pretty good example of how leaning too heavily on metatextuality to support your project can fall flat. Because first of all, you created this whole setting and clearly put no small amount of work into doing so, so leaning into the idea that these were all “Hackneyed, predictable tales” is kind of a self-own. You, the author, had agency over that. Second of all, at least two of these stories- Julia Ash and Bayou- rely on the sense of a situation in progress, something yet to be resolved, and the entire framing device is the afterlife as a physical locale that people come and go from- are you sure there was nothing more interesting to do with these characters, aside from rehashing a greatest hits collection with a little more nuance and calling it a day? That’s the vulnerability of the vignette structure- none of these can be a launching off point to something bigger and better than what they're attacking, there’s only really room for a slightly more involved recreation of exactly what’s under critique, with the consolation prize of everyone at least being, uh, happy in comic book heaven? Alright. Five of the six stories have enough else going on- imagery, prose, voice- that this doesn’t sink the entire thing, but that shrug, that failure to move beyond relitigating, is easily my biggest critique of the project as a whole.

Even sticking within the existing constraints of the project, there are several characters who I would have liked to see Valente’s take on within this framework. Barbara Gordon is the standout omission from the piece; the object of the apocryphal “cripple the bitch” quote from Len Wein, the perpetual discourse battle regarding the empowering portrayal of her disability or contemporary lack thereof. Scarlet Witch would have been interesting, her 2004 breakdown having since overwritten all else to do with her character in the popular imagination. Since Marvel Rivals made it topical again there’s the issue of Invisible Woman’s turn as Malice; The Venture Brothers already took a pretty mighty swing at the underbelly of the 1960s nuclear family gender politics of The Fantastic Four, but that was with the delightful lack of tact characteristic of that show. All of these are a non-negligible part of why I was so hard on Pretty Polly's inclusion actually. I kept thinking, okay, the next one will be Barbara Gordon. Surely the next one.

I’m not sure there are enough iconic slam-dunks floating around for a second collection. I think that fridging discourse tends to get lost in the weeds incredibly quickly; people keep trying to build coherent schema for what does and doesn’t count, gesturing at a bunch of high-profile beats that are definitely misogynistic in some way but then overplaying their hand by trying to unite them in some way beyond the misogyny that often doesn’t quite fit. Frank Miller’s treatment of Karen Page has all the hallmarks of his typical misogyny, but Matt rescues her at the end of that arc and they reconcile- a damsel-in-distress story where the distress is grindhouse misery porn instead of getting tied to the train tracks. She didn’t die until she sacrificed herself taking a blow meant for Matt in Daredevil (1999) #5. Does her agentic action disqualify that as fridging? Or the fact she was an active participant in the fight a page previously, nearly getting one up on Bullseye via trickery? Or is the only relevant factor that she’s dead and it’s sad? Pantha getting her head punched off alongside a dozen of her male teammates in Infinite Crisis doesn’t have an overt gendered component- but does the initial gender imbalance of the superhero population make her status as C-list fodder a problem, beyond the storytelling problems innate to C-list Fodder? What’s the line between “gratuitous” suffering and just having a tragic backstory on par with a male hero? Did Martha Wayne get fridged, or is that completely beside the actual concern- female characters who you think had more interesting things to do in the story than die who get the axe? Semi-related bugbear, I find it kind of odd that Simone’s original list mentions Invisible Woman’s miscarriage (that’s true to life! That’s a topic worthy of discussion if you’ve got the chops to handle it!) and not any of the weird gender politics surrounding Malice. Of course, Sue never died during any of the Malice stuff. Just had her inoffensive “real” personality hammered back into her, again and again.

We could be here all goddamn day. The only productive way that there has ever been to cut this knot is to point to the specifics of each situation and drill, baby, drill- X writing decision by Y Author is misogynistic for Z reasons. And that is, ultimately, what I like the most about this collection- it drills. It isn’t generalizing, it doesn't decontextualize for the sake of rhetorical convenience. It’s intimately familiar with the characters under discussion, their publication histories, what was hinky about each specific writing choice and why. Gwen Stacy’s death was, in context, a genuinely subversive storytelling beat with a mid execution that’s since metastasized in the Spider-Man mythos because the comics have run ten times longer than anyone imagined they would, and that’s had weird storytelling implications. Comic authors fall back on “female instability” as an explanatory factor uncomfortably often, Karen Page is one of roughly two women that Frank Miller knew how to write even before he went off the deep end, Jean Grey is in an abusive relationship with editorial that undercuts her capacity for her stories to definitively mean anything, and the specific thing that happened to Alex DeWitt always would have been gross even if the plot beat had languished in obscurity instead of becoming an evocative shorthand. Pretty Polly is there, I guess.

#the refrigerator monologues #thoughts #meta #reviews #effortpost #comic books #women in refrigerators #experimenting with longer-form reviews #If you'd like to see more like this like and subscribe! or whatever

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ljubimaya · 8 months ago

Text

˙⋆⊹.꒷꒦꒷ 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐋𝐄𝐒𝐇

SYNOPSIS: Waking up in the pool of your own blood was the worst way for you to wake up to, and just like the start, the day progressed just as terribly. Lucky for you, you have a vampire boyfriend who's more than willing to make the pain go away C/W: afab! reader, vampire! Baji, aged up characters (18+), period and mentions of period symptoms, mention of blood (duh), consumption of blood (duh 2x), cunnilingus during period, a little dubcon-ish at the beginning but reader later on gets into it, a tiny bit of coercion, technically monster fucking, Baji has a long tongue (like fruit bats), established relationship, petnames (baby), not proof read if I missed smth lmk <3333 W/C: 2.9k+ A/N: It's been some time since I wrote something :,) truth be told I wanted to write this during my last period but I physically couldn't bc I was in such pain :,) either way, this is super self-indulgent and inspired by a conversation I had with my lovely friend @avatarofstars. Thank you for being my enabler ily so much <33

It would have been a lie to say things started off innocent- they never do with Baji.

Cold calloused fingers trace random shapes on your thigh as you sat uncomfortably next to him. You and your boyfriend were wrapped in fluffy blankets, snuggling close to one another as the TV illuminated the dark living room. Fatigued, you laid your head on Baji’s shoulder as you continued watching the movie with him. You were getting tired, especially after the long day you had today. Waking up grumpy and hurting, you found your bed sheets and panties stained with blood. Of course you would get your period unexpectedly after changing the sheets the night prior and wearing your favorite pair of panties to bed.

For you, the day was already ruined before it even started. Everything else that followed suit could only be described as an unfortunate domino effect: You changed your sheets and frantically searched for any pain meds, resulting in you coming late to work and getting into an argument with your colleague. To make matters worse you were searching for your pain meds for nothing, since you’ve used them all up on your last period and forgot to stock up on them again. And so, you were left to work with no way to alleviate your pain, both physical and mental as the fight with your colleague and the tense atmosphere were only adding to your mental distress. But you pushed through with your day, knowing that after coming home from your hellish day, you would be able to spend the night with your boyfriend.

Baji could only visit you at night. Being a vampire, the ravenette wouldn’t step outside during day-time, making the darker hours the only times he could spend some time with you. Your undead lover knew what to do when he saw your exhausted self walk through the door: he’d have to help you relax in the best way he could. Thus, the idea of a movie night was born.

“You tired?” Baji asked softly when you laid your head on his shoulder. You could feel the coldness of his body radiate through his clothes, but you didn’t mind. You grew to love his icy cold skin along with his other unhuman traits.

“Yeah, kinda” you whimpered as you felt a cramping pain in your abdomen. Unable to move due to the pain spreading to your lower back and legs, you tried to make yourself as comfortable as you could without moving too much “But my body hurts so much, I can’t even fall asleep”

Baji turned his face to look at you, eyebrows knitted as he eyed your limp form lean against him. You felt the subtle shift of his body, but instead of facing your boyfriend your head remained nestled on his shoulder. He couldn’t see your face, but your tired tone and the overwhelming smell of your blood told him you were beyond spent.

The ravenette didn’t know much about periods, let alone the pain that comes with it, but he knew enough to understand that this might have been the worst period you have had yet. He couldn’t bear to watch you suffer, to watch you lay still as if life has been drained of you. One part of him wanted to take care of you, to rub your tummy and make sure you get enough rest.

The other part, the selfish, hungry part, wanted to rip off your shorts and dove his tongue inside your pussy.

You were too fatigued to even think about the implications of being on your period and Baji, a monster of the night thriving off of blood, being close to you. Dating him meant you were aware of the risks and issues you might run into, and dating you meant he was prepared to keep his hunger at bay as much as he could. But he couldn’t not when your sweet blood was polling between your thighs. The smell was intoxicating Baji’s senses, challenging the man to keep his composure any longer. He would have had a much easier time resisting his primal instincts if his pants hadn’t grown unbearably tight. Maybe a little taste wouldn’t hurt?

“Hmm, I know something that would make you feel much better” Baji whispers into your ear, his voice deep and raspy from his restraint “You just gotta relax and let me work my magic. Can you do that for me?”

The predatory growl did not fly past you; you lightly shuddered when you heard it, suddenly feeling wide awake. Suddenly, you were very aware of who your boyfriend was and what he could do to you. Your stomach twisted in a knot, unable to tell if you were afraid or excited.

Yet, you pulled yourself together. Maybe he was hinting towards something else, you tried to reason with yourself. Despite your best efforts, you knew your boyfriend too well.

So you swallowed, torn between reason and intuition, torn between fear and lust, mustering up all of your strength to lift your head and look at him. You whimpered as the pain shot through the lower half of your body, having moved your upper body with your head as you gazed into your lover’s eyes. Reddish brown eyes clouded with lust and want stared right back into yours, watching your every move intently.

“kei, it’s fine really. It’s not my first and definitively not my last period. I’ll just tough it out” You vetoed, even though you wanted to rip your own uterus out.

Baji scoffed, unwilling to accept your defiance “You don’t sound like you wanna tough it out. You sound like you wanna be taken care off, baby”

With that, the vampire stood up from the couch and repositioned you gently. More whimpers of pain left your lips, a sweet melody to Baji’s sharp ears. This wasn’t the first time Baji was tasting your blood, far from it. You’d let him feed off of you from time to time whenever he was sure he wouldn’t go overboard and drink too much of your blood. He’s eaten you out plenty of times too, but waiting you out on your period - that would be a first for the both of you. So he’ll make sure to make it an experience of a lifetime.

“Kei, wait-” you tried to stop him as he yanked your fuzzy blanket away, exposing you to the cool air of your living room. Baji had none of that, he didn’t want to hear any protests from you. The man kneeled down and took your shorts off a little too fast to your liking.

“Keisuke, you know, maybe some rest would do me much better” You sheepishly murmured, heat shooting up to your face at the sight before you: Baji, on his knees between your thighs, strong hands holding your squirming legs in place, his gaze intense and the outline of his hard cock on his sweatpants….

Your boyfriend could only scoff at you, finding your idea to be not only dumb, but also offensive “Bullshit, baby. Nothing could do you better than me”

Cold lips wandered over your hot skin, seducing you to comply with his demand “C’mon, I just wanna make you feel better” Baji hoarsely, half lying, half telling you the truth. He did want to make the pain go away after all, but your sweet blood and your cunt were calling to him. And who was he to deny your urges - even when you weren’t fully aware of them?

There was something so hot about Baji this assertive. While the vampire continued giving your inner thighs kisses, you began to wonder if maybe he was onto something. After all, you did have a long day, and you knew of the euphoria inducing bites your lover could give you. Perhaps tongue fucked by your boyfriend would make you feel better. Your gaze met his just as he sunk his canines into your soft flesh. Wimmers and gasps left your lips as Baji began sucking on your skin, letting the blood flood his mouth. You shut your eyes tightly at the sharp pain of his monstrous teeth digging themselves into your tender flesh. The pain faded and morphed into euphoria.

One bite was all it took for you to take your mind off your abdominal pain, and one bite was all it took to fully break your resolve.

Your eyes were still shut as you savored the exhilarating feeling you got from your lover’s bite. Baji continued to bite into your thigh, feasting on your blood as his bites trailed closer to your clothed cunt. He stopped, his hunger for your blood seemingly quenched. The man took a good look at your thighs; covered in bite marks, bruises blooming on your skin like wild cornflowers on a field. Truly a sight to behold.

You were feeling a bit lightheaded. Baji was careful not to take too much blood from you - after all, he had to save room for dessert - but he still fed off you more than he usually would. Not that you could complain, you were no longer in pain and felt more relaxed.

“How are you feeling?” your boyfriend asked while he toyed with the lining of your velvety red panties. Finally, you opened your eyes.

“I’m feeling better now. Much better, actually” you mused “but I feel a bit dizzy, thanks to a certain glutton” you rolled your eyes teasingly and laughed lightly. A smirk formed on Baji’s lips as he heard your little insult, amused by your cheekiness.

“Ah, I see you’re coherent enough to joke around. Good, means I didn’t take too much blood from you” Baji remarked in a husky tone “But I can make you feel even better. After all, I’m not done feasting on you”

With that, he bit the elastic band of your panty and slowly pulled the flimsy piece of clothing down to your ankles with his teeth, his sharp canines grazing your skin. A shiver ran down your spine as you intently watched the erotic scene unfold in front of you. Baji held your gaze the entire, hypnotized by your half lidded eyes and plump lips slightly parting.

Baji threw your panties to the away, uncaring of where they would land. Opposite to his earlier movements, the vampire forcefully gripped the apex of your thighs and swung your legs over his shoulders. A surprised yelp left your lips as you were being repositioned to sit closer to the edge of the couch. Your back and head hit the backrest of the couch with a light thud. You wanted to glare at him, maybe even tell him to chill out, but the hungry gaze you were met with made you feel weak to your knees.

Baji was practically on eye level with your cunt. Drenched in your own blood, your pussy looked as delicious as a cake being served on a silver platter to him. Baji licked his canines, licking the remaining droplets of your blood as his gaze switched from your pussy to your face. Despite being practically bare and feeling his icy cold hands gripping your thighs, you felt so damn hot; he made you feel hotter than the sun.

“You’re not going to refuse me, are you?” He rasps out as he was mere centimeters away from your pussy. The vampire grinned as he saw you shaking your head unabashedly “I need words, baby. Tell me what you want, and don’t take too long to think-”

“I want you to eat me out” You admitted loud and clear, not a trace of shame in your tone or face; no, the way you said it was so bold yet desperate at the same time, as if you were begging him. Perhaps you were begging Baji to tongue fuck you, but your boyfriend saw no need to tease you any further. After all, your wish is his command, and he was aching to taste more of you.

Baji stuck out his long tongue and lapped at your folds, groaning at the taste of your blood mixed with your arousal. His wet muscle traced your labia before easing inside your wet cavern. The vampire pushed his tongue inside slowly, making sure you were comfortable. His tongue wasn’t in any way thick, just thick enough to not hurt you when he’d thrust it in and out.

Moans bubbled out your lips as your undead lover took his time tasting you. He savored every thrust, every droplet of your blood, every little sound you made. Baji's nose pressed against your clit as he sunk his tongue deeper between your velvety walls. The tip pressed snug against your g-spot, making your toes curl from sheer pleasure.

Your eyes pressed shut when you threw your head back, hands finding your lover’s raven hair and grabbing them, pushing his face closer to your aching core. And while Baji loved that you embraced the pleasure, he grew frustrated.

Reddish brown eyes, half lidded and clouded with lust, watched your trembling form fighting yourself from releasing too soon. He pulled away, making you whine in protest. You looked down on him, eyebrows knitted in confusion and frustration as you managed to stutter out “W-why did you stop all of a sudden?”

Baji’s lower face was covered in your blood, a sight that made you feel excited and hot “I want you to look at me” he breathed out ruggedly, his lips deathly close to your nether lips “Don’t look away when I fuck my tongue into you. Don’t close your eyes, keep them on me” Biting your lower lip, you hesitantly nodded, unsure if you would be able to keep your promise, but God were you determined to keep it.

So Baji thrusted his tongue back inside, this time a bit more forceful. You yelped at his roughness before your moans of pain soothed into frantic moans of need. You needed him to make you cum, and you needed it to be as hard and nasty as he could give it to you.

Your fingers raked his hair, pulling on his locks hard when he relentlessly fucked his tongue into your pussy. There was no going slow and sensual anymore as Baji now forced his wet muscle in and out of you as hard and fast as he could.

Trying to keep eye contact with the ravenette proved to be harder than you had initially expected; his iron grip on your tender skin was painful, his tongue bruised your insides in search of your sweet red nectar and his eyes burned with carnal desire. The way Baji was looking into your eyes felt like a predator looking into its prey’s eyes before eating it alive. A shiver ran down your spine to your clit as he nudged your sensitive bud with his sharp nose, creating a delicious friction that had you seeing stars.

But you stayed put: you kept on looking back into his eyes even when his tongue grazed your g spot. Once he found your spongy spot there was no going back. The vampire carefully watched your reactions when he pistoned his tongue, always making sure to hit your g spot. Your eyes began to tear up the harder he went on you, your vision became blurry from the pain and pleasure; your lips parted as a string of ‘Oh my God’s, curses and Baji’s name left your mouth like a broken record and your hair was disheveled. The hottest mess Baji has ever seen in his life.

His dick strained painfully against his sweatpants, aching to be let free and sink itself down your throat. But that would be for later, after he has had his fill on you.

“Oh God, Kei” you screamed as you buckled your hips against his face. The tightness in your tummy became overbearing, dulling your sense of shame even more as you unabashedly screamed and begged your boyfriend to make you come. You didn’t care about the thin walls or the noise complaint you’d get in the next morning, brain full of the way his tongue feels inside you.

Chanting ‘Please, please please please’ as the knot bursted in your tummy, you cried out his name. Your body felt limp after your release, so you fell back, hitting your head and back on the back rest yet again. Panting heavily as you came down from your orgasm, Baji helped you ride your high out before he pulled out his wet muscle from your clenching hole. His grip softened before releasing you, standing up from his kneeling position.

“Fuck, my knees hurt” Baji groaned as he patted his knees “next time I better get a pillow to kneel on, baby”

“Next time?” you teased breathlessly, smiling at the gruff man once he stood up to his full height.

“Yeah, next time” Baji replied smugly as he licked off the remainder of your blood away from his lips “I got a taste for you now baby. This will become a monthly routine from now on”

You hummed at his idea, eyes wandering to his very obvious bulge. Somehow the view alone sent a tingle to your spent pussy.

Baji wasn’t dumb, he knew you were looking at his cock and he knew you were thinking about the unspeakable things he could do to you with it. A smug smirk crept on his lips as he wiped off the blood on his chin before he stepped closer to the couch. With one movement he had you laid down on the couch, your back on the cushions and your head propped up on the armrest.

The vampire stood above you, looking down on you as he slowly pulled his sweats down “You had your fun. Now it’s my turn”

#mdni divider by cafekitsune #tokyo revengers baji #baji keisuke #baji x reader smut #baji x reader #tr x reader #tokyo rev smut #tokyo revengers x reader #tokyo revengers x reader smut #baji smut #tr x you #tr smut #tokyo revengers smut #tokyo revengers #tokyo rev x reader #divider by adornedwithlight

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