#would that maybe differ depending on context? also yep!

[marypsue]

bugs me ngl that the assumption now seems to be that ‘queer’ is always a shorthand you use for a whole bundle of specific labels that you ~*actually*~ identify with. Queer can be the only label. I’m not withholding anything from you by telling you I’m queer. 

[radiantdanvers]

X Reader / OC Fanfic Ideas

These are my fanfic ideas for x reader / OC that I made up cuz I can't write for shit. It would be nice to see if anyone is willing to use these ideas but don't worry no pressure. I will be updating these and Also, I am not sure If you can understand some of them so please don't mind my English. :)

MARVEL

Mutant OC / Reader: So I recently watched X-Men 97 and I LOVED IT. It was really good and I highly recommend the show. So You know when I watch something and if I happen to really like it, then my mind immediately into daydreaming about how to insert myself or create a new OC for the story. In this case, I thought of a character with similar abilities to Atom Eve a.k.a Samantha Eve Wilkins, from Invincible. If you didn't know she can manipulate Atoms. I thought it was interesting and It could be for the movies or the shows. Or even the Avengers / MCU.

Mutant Detective OC / Reader: I think they could be a detective and during one incident their mutant powers awaken. It could be related to being a detective like how they use their powers to help them investigate certain cases and ALSO, I was thinking of having supernatural themes added to the mix. Reader / OC works on those types of cases since they could be relevant depending on the Marvel universe...I'dk if you understood but yeah...

Red Widow OC / Reader: I made a moodboard for this and to give you some context; the red widow is a trained assassin from the red room and if I am not mistaken she used to idolize Natasha and all that. She's pretty vigilant in combat skills, great in fencing, and a trained acrobat. I was thinking of an OC / Reader based off of her in the MCU. They could be Natasha's Siblings alongside Yelena. It could also be the middle child, which would be a nice dynamic to see.

Gwenpool reader! Gwenpool reader!!!! The character who shifted from our universe to the mcu,, that would be so cool to see.

The Vampire Diaries

Elven OC / Reader. I remember reading a Kai Parker fanfic with a fae reader and I know there are differences between the two (I think...?). I did some research on elves and I think those types of characters would be a unique twist to the story. The OC / Reader could have any type of unique background to their character, for example: they could have a different realm for themselves keeping out humans, vampires, and some others alike. (Yes I've been doing a lot of thinking.)

Harshly Blunt Reader / OC. So we know there a certain people who need someone to talk some sense into their heads due to their actions. Like, let's say for example: Damon, Stefan, and even Elena. And a 'rude' character would just be perfect for that. They could even make the Mikaelsons get nervous after knowing them. They would hold this visible scowl or the 'resting bitch face' all the time. And also like to think that they could have a soft spot Bonnie because that girl deserves EVERYTHING.

From the Past Reader / OC. This character is from the past, similar to the Mikealsons, somehow they were put to sleep maybe by a witch or some other reason and they wake up alone in the current timeline by someone or something. And they also could be someone important. I am also thinking of their personality being all 'graceful and elegant', silently scoffing at how things change, could be a character development in itself for them. But that's up to the writer.

Isekai Reader / OC. The character is transported to the tvdu universe from the modern times.

Teen Wolf

Elven Reader / OC. Yep, the same thing because I think it would be unique and at the same time it would fit the tone too. (Also for more info on elves, I've read that they possess superior senses, immortality, magic, healing, close with nature, and also very vigilant in combat.) Could be a simple background like keeping the character and their family being all secretive about their nature and everything.

Silent Airhead Reader / OC...?: It would be funny to see this like shit would be happening around them and they're all like '🧍'. This could be because of various reasons like they don't know what's going on with werewolves and stuff and they're nervous/scared to ask someone over and over again about a certain situation and it's just a mess for them so they just have to endure all of that silently and go with the flow.

Riverdale

Ok so this one, I can explain. So Out of curiosity, I watched the show after hearing about issues like how the show's genre keeps shifting to another one and all the cringy stuff that happens. I couldn't finish the whole show but I thought of something: It's the Classic Isekai Trope with OC / Reader where they could be watching the show and they somehow woke up in Riverdale. It could be hilarious how the OC / Reader would have no choice but to witness the ongoing events around them. They could be trying their utmost best to avoid dramas and certain interactions but SOMEHOW they get roped into it. The thought of OC / Reader having a book on the list of things they need to avoid from the time they learned how to write is just funny to me. I'm not sure if there are similar fanfics yet but if there are it would be nice to know. And I'm so so so sorry if I offended any Riverdale Fandom!!!

Jujutsu Kaisen

coming soon...

The Maze Runner

coming soon...

The Boys

Black Widow Reader / OC. The character with the same abilities as the mcu's Black Widow, they could be a famous supe or a secret assassin that allies with the the boys themselves. I don't think I've seen this anywhere but this would be cool to see since I love Nat so much and anything related to her.

Captain Marvel Reader / OC. Similar to the previous one and also because I love Carol So much. This could be taken from any interesting takes. Like, they could be in hiding and were found by someone, maybe by Billy. They could surprise the seven and some interesting dynamics could emerge like; rivalry with Homelander since he isn't the only one who is the 'all-powerful' anymore.

MCU reader / OC. Ok so the plot I am thinking is like this; Due to some multiverse misshape, the reader / OC gets transported from the MCU to this one. And till their friends from her home timeline figure out the mess, they had to deal with being in this world and I think it would be interesting and fun to see.

Haikyuu!!

coming soon...

Game Of Thrones / House of the Dragon

coming soon...

The Umbrella Academy

coming soon...

Updated:7/12/2024

[ceterisparibus116]

Law question!

Is "what counts as reasonable" (as in how a reasonable person would act/reasonable doubt etc.) something that people in the legal world have different opinions how to interpreter? And could those disagreements lead to a case going to court instead of being solved without needing to go to court?

I just found it fascinating that a lot of things (right?) seem to depend on the reasonability of it. Which do makes sense that such a sentence needs to be there, but also doesn't it make the law - a very objective-presented thing - a bit open to... subjectivity?? But it's also really good because you do need to consider the circumstanses and context of things when rulings are done. Right?

I know nothing about law, but the implications of reasonabilty fascinates me and I want to know more!

(Also, I may or may not have started to ponder it because I tried to write a scene where Matt and Foggy is sleepdeprivied and studying for finals and I wanted them to talk about something law-adjacent...)

THIS IS MY FAVORITE ASK EVER BECAUSE YEAH.

Law is all "we're so smart and everything is defined and our arguments are so precise" and then "but what is a reasonable person?" absolutely smacks you in the face.

So the "reasonable person" standard (RPS) (which, fun fact, used to be the "reasonable man" standard and I'm thankful we've moved beyond that) is considered an objective standard, meaning that it doesn't matter if any specific person thinks or feels a certain way, based on their unique knowledge, feelings, experiences, etc. (that would be subjective). This mythical "reasonable person" who supposedly represents all of us is recognized to be a "legal fiction" (which is where, for legal purposes, we act like something is true even when we know it's probably not true).

This objective fact is one that must be determined by a fact-finder: aka a jury (unless a person waives their right to a jury trial, in which case the judge will be the sole fact-finder). So in reality, the "reasonable person" is whatever a jury of 6-12 think.

And yes, cases will absolutely go to court just because each side believes that the RPS will turn in their favor.

For example, the crime of stalking, in my state, has objective and subjective elements. The subjective element is that the victim feels alarm or annoyance. The objective element is that a "reasonable person" in the victim's situation would also feel alarm and annoyance.

So if a stalking case went to trial, the victim could take the stand and testify for hours about how truly alarmed or annoyed they felt, and maybe the jury would even believe: "Yep, this person was definitely alarmed/annoyed."

However, that's not enough for a conviction - the jury also has to believe, "A reasonable person who experienced what the victim experienced would also be alarmed/annoyed."

So the prosecution will argue to the jury why a reasonable person (read: the jury) would definitely feel alarmed/annoyed in those circumstances, whereas the defense will argue that...well...you can imagine how ugly those arguments can get, essentially saying that the victim is lying or crazy or overly emotional, etc.

All this raises some serious questions. What if the defendant is a male, and the victim is a female? Would a jury of women be more likely to imagine that a reasonable person would feel alarm from a male stalking them, yet perhaps men would feel that a reasonable person would not be alarmed by another man stalking them? We deliberately moved away from the "reasonable man" standard, but in cases like this, should the jury actually be instructed to ask, "What would a reasonable woman feel in this situation?"

(If you want to see a fascinating yet unofficial illustration of this, watch this youtuber's reaction to the movie Hush, and then read the older comments or watch his response video which highlights some of those comments. Admittedly, part of the youtuber's reaction is colored by him viewing the situation as purely fictional, but he also acknowledged that the movie failed to properly situate him in the protagonist's situation - in other words, the movie failed to help him see the objective reasonableness of the protagonist's subjective feelings and reactions.)

You can imagine other areas where this is discussed. Should the jury be asked in cases involving children about what a "reasonable person" would do, or what a "reasonable child" would do? Or in cases involving a Black defendant and police, should a jury ask what a "reasonable person" would feel or do in that situation, or should the jury ask what a "reasonable Black person" would feel or do in that situation? What if the jury in this case is all white?

And where do we stop? What traits are relevant or not? Even if we can all agree that gender and race should be factors in the RPS, should we also consider sexuality? Should we always consider sexuality, or only in certain cases? Should we consider religion? Should we consider mental illness? Should we consider everything a person might include in their tumblr bio?

And arguably, if you take that too far, you end up with a bunch of laws that are almost impossibly vague to interpret. Like, if I want to send a person a couple of notes, do I need to know all the possible traits of my would-be victim (their age, their race, their gender, their sexuality, their religion, their mental illnesses, etc.) to determine the likelihood that a reasonable person in their shoes would consider my behavior to be stalking?

Additionally, you risk opening the door to some scary prejudice. Like, if a hypothetical person is 18 years old, Black, trans, female, gay, and autistic...would the standard applied to her be different from a person who is 26, white, cis, male, straight, and neurotypical? Would these different standards really make things more fair? How would you safeguard against prejudice?

It gets very sticky. This is one (of many) reasons why I prefer criminal law. See, the RPS does pop up in criminal law, usually with crimes like assault and stalking; also with certain defenses, like self-defense, which requires that a defendant's actions in self-defense were objectively reasonable. However, most criminal charges don't involve the RPS.

For example: did you operate a motor vehicle? Were you intoxicated? Okay, you committed a DUI, case closed - the jury doesn't have to worry about reasonableness at all.

Anyway, the short answer is: you're absolutely right and you've hit on one of law's dirty secrets that, if scrutinized too closely, causes a lot of dominos start to fall. It's very fascinating, especially as we as society become increasingly aware of intersectionality and the ways that subjective experiences correlated with group identity (like race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.) can influence a person's view of what is objective.

And yes, Matt and Foggy would absolutely debate this incessantly, either as part of their studies or to procrastinate from studying, and if you do in fact write this, please tag me in it so I can read it!

[autistic-sidestep]

🧿 and 💋 for Sura, please!

🧿Do they have a superstition or belief? Such as "black cats bring bad luck", belief in ghosts, tarot, crystals, meditation, etc.

yep! there's a reason why eyes are a central motif to argos' design (and in general just being rife with symbolism. im linking the posts i wrote up a while back bc i don't really have the spoons to add anything new). they've picked up a lot of things from other people, baby sura was a bit like a sponge absorbing other peoples' belief systems from people they liked (so some of stuff of ortega's or elena's from the time spent with them).

like they used to wear a nazar bracelet/pendant (which ricardo kept) and prayed. both were things they picked up from the various people sura met during their first escape, since they'd observed cultural things were something you could find common interests and community. ("these people look like me, therefore, maybe i should do that to fit in?").

sura was still willing to learn even if it never fully understood the customs, but it was really the communal aspect to it that they found so appealing, the connection and unified purpose that they didn't really get to experience at the farm (seeing, but never being able to participate). similar reasons for the draw to vigilantism and becoming sidestep, i think. so sura picked up a bunch of different customs, (including avoiding pork, up until the nanosurge at which point they went basically pescetarian if not vegetarian, (raw) meat made sura nauseous after that).

i think post hb they're a bit less superstitious now. but there's still some traditions sura will still keep up, like prayer (and using an accompanying mat/cushion), or using tealights and incense. it doesn't really believes in higher beings anymore (or at least not in benevolent ones. what was that quote in nitw? "a universe that doesn't care, but people that do." feels kinda fitting. entropy and forces that aren't really personified, that just are for fate motive? although i might swap it to anger/justice and have it as a secondary motive.), but just for the routine and comfort of it (autism). also i think it factors well into sura's outsider scar and attempting to heal it.

not to mention sura's had some habits in the past like. letting the microwave timer go off is not only bad, the whole day's ruined now. when they used to hang out in the rangers hq breakroom sura would just. stop the timer a second before it was done. even if it wasn't their food. no beeping allowed. >:( (i'd hesitate to call this a compulsion but it certainly was one of sura's eccentricities.)

(does this make sense lol. i am so exhausted)

💋Do they kiss first? And do they bite their lips if they're mischievous or aroused? And do they bite their partner's lips when they try and pull away?

kissing first depends on the context, but Probably yes if they know the other party is interested. sura's not really one to presume on that front, since their orientation stuff makes figuring that out little wonky. i think sura's puppet/ace/juno is allo so that makes things extra confusing flipping from her body to itself and the fact it's less confident dealing with "romantic" stuff as itself. sura can fake it well enough as juno since she's meant to be attractive and deal with the stuff that comes with (dating, flirting, etc.)

sura? less so. even with argos, there's a degree of separation between that persona and its civilian self. but yes to lip biting, probably a big tell lol. biting partners lips…. i could see it, yeah, just to tease as long as they can tell there's nothing wrong? all comes down to how comfortable they are with the other party, ig

[lucysarah-c]

Okay okay

I like your opinions really but

To me really if someone cheated on me that is it , that ends the relationship , I mean what Erwin expect ? They coudle? . I really hated how Erwin treated her before even the incident. He was manipulating here, it's like she is always here and listen to me and love me , I don't need to do anything for her .

I don't know I think Erwin should really know that the moment he kissed Marie he ended his relationship with twiggy . What happened with levi , I'm not saying that's right, it's wrong but for a whole different reason, they shouldn't rush that's all , she was hurt . Not because that's cheating really , you know friends? I don't know if you know it but in this show Rachel and ross were the main couple and they had a break from their relationship , so Ross get drunk and sleep with someone else. Is it wrong? Yep ? Did he cheat? No , he didn't . The same here it wasn't cheating simply, it wasn't right

So nana ,I personally loved nifa more , nothing against nana it's just she shouldn't really judge people , friends protect eachother yeah but they support eachother. I think she wasn't that fair towards her or levi really but my favourite friend is linda , she is Queen she THE QUEEN

And twiggy okkay I agree with everything you said but I go easier on her cuz she's just young, and she is trying too much to make people acknowledge her , she is sad but I can really relate

Erwin, I don't know he is Cool but I like seeing people like him suffering, am i evil 🙈? Maybe but yeah I like it lol

Levi ,

Nothing, he is my man, my babe , my love, YOU ARE DOING GREAT MY LOVE KEEP GOING ** CHEERS CHEERS

Hi sweetie! It's great to see you around here again!

I completely understand your point. I've never watched Friends, but I have a general context, haha. However, I truly get what you mean! I always think that HG is a "POVs story," where almost everything is very "grey," depending a lot on how the character sees the events unfold. Like, haha, Levi has a much less "grey POV" about his actions. In my mind, Levi thought that the moment Erwin didn't prioritize Twiggy's safety, she was single for him. He could have "understood" a lot of stuff—each couple is a world of its own, and so on—but for him, the safety of those he loves is "above" any other nicety.

So in Levi's eyes, the relationship basically didn't exist even before the cheating, lmao. He says it in his first POV, "if he wasn't scared of losing her, then she wasn't important to him. That relationship was doomed even before I showed up."

If you ask me, the relationship would have been over for me the moment you introduced me as your assistant, LMAO. In that second, I'm picking up my stuff and telling you we are done.

OMG, I'm so happy you like Linda! Writing Linda is my favorite. She's such a badass. The mere mental image of her seeing Marie coming inside the hospital and running through people in high heels to listen to the doctor's appointment is so professionally wrong but iconic. I think Levi and Linda have a very weird relationship because both are extremely honest and fearless, but Linda has a way less charitable character. She lacks a lot of social awareness. Levi's favorite friend of Twiggy is Nifa, and it's clearly seen, but he can't help but chuckle sometimes with Linda. That girl is wild, and Levi kinda enjoys her comments. I imagine her saying, "No, I don't go to church, dear. You have to kneel to pray, and I don't kneel to anyone, not even to give a blowjob." and Levi can't help but chuckle. The girl has more guts than the entire MP formation together, and Levi supports that. Plus, Linda never fails to deliver the juiciest gossip from MPs, and how could Levi not love that?

But Linda does certain things just to bother Levi, like giving him one kiss on each cheek each time they meet, staining with lipstick because he hates it. Linda is that friend who would get 100% canceled on Twitter if people heard what she says, but she's also that friend who's got your back even if you murdered someone.

[team-council-two]

what are some good, various ways to say "i love you"? or maybe just even ways to say "i care about you"?

so since this isnt directed at any of us in particular, ill assume that its meant for all of us ! ill start

everybody knows je t'aime, come *on*. still, i assume i have to mention it. "je t'apprécies bien" literally means i appreciate you well, but comes across as similar to i enjoy your company. in a similar vein, "j'aime être avec toi" is i like to be with you. je tiens à toi is i hold you dear basically ?

that said most of this is... very hard to translate. see. uhhh if you read further down, ray explains that americans overuse love this and love that and blah blah, where russians will use almost strictly their equivalent of like. and the french have a similar distinction ? yet Not the same, as in we have a triple graduation for this. we have j'aime, which can ironically be both i like (casual) and i love (romantic) depending of context, j'aime bien (i like this but firmly rooted in casual) and j'adore (i like this, but more intense, like when americans pull out i looooove chocolate, but also can be translated to i treasure you when you say je t'adore). well ignore for now slang versions such as je kiffe (i dig) and the like as i simply cannot remember them. j'aime and je t'adore essentially switch to romantic when you adress directly someone (ex : je t'aime/je t'adore), though adore is also context dependent, it is somewhat allowed in family use, and if you use je t'adore it basically translates to i cherish you both in tone and use.

as for the i care for you, we don't. have that ? i think ? je me fais du soucis pour toi is i worry for you, je pense ("fort"/"très fort" optional) à toi is i am thinking of you... yep no no straight translation i think.

theres a lot more i just find this tricky to deal with because we are verbose as fuck about affection, as everything else, and have many variations. id need a fuckin masterpost id double check w several people to quite list french expressions of apreciation tbh

-alpha

The platonic version of "I love you" is "Ich habe dich lieb/Hab dich lieb".

And for everything else I'm too aromantic to feel comfortable about and thinking about it too much turns me into the spiral.

- Aschen

Russian is very straightforward, but we generally don't talk about love a lot. Where Americans would say "I love this movie", "I love your dress", "I love [any random thing]", we would use "like" or, weirdly enough, "adore". Heavy says "I adore this Doctor" in the Russian dub.

For romantic love, we most often just say "I love you". For a confession, we would more likely say "I like you". As a side note, Google Translate sometimes turns these phrases into "Я Вас люблю" and "Вы мне нравитесь" respectively, which is correct but not in use since, like, the 18th century. It's an overly polite form. For a more natural, contemporary version see: "Я тебя люблю"/"Ты мне нравишься". Though the mechanics of formal VS informal language are delicate enough to warrant their own post.

We don't usually use the word "care" because saying "I care about you" in Russian is the same as "I care for you", and can be seen as motherly, or just straight-up have a different meaning from what is implied. We'd insteady say "Ты мне (очень) дорог" - "You are (very) dear to me".

- Ray.

[prowerprojects]

(Modern Tails anon) Considering there's apparently financial troubles going on with IDW, one has to wonder if the comic lives long enough to see that story one day.

Heh, the funny thing is, he could technically do those things too. Maybe not as well, but a kid fox genius running around with a flamethrower he built being alongside Blaze has to invoke some type of interesting imagery. Same with a stealth mission with Rouge.

I figured, especially with Sonic is one the earliest examples of seeing a video game character having a clear personality. (At least those Origins cutscenes added something more upfront; albeit very late for this decades-long series. But something to refer back to nonetheless.)

I think I've seen that somewhere. The most I know of Tails himself in that continuity is that he and other foxes are from some secret zone and he has grown the title of hero in that village through rather clumsy, but well-meaning antics. Albeit through lying at first.

(Yup, AOSTH Tails even turned an entire truck into a mechanical dragon and handled himself while Sonic was frozen in stone. The most SatAM did was that one episode near the end. I still wonder if the plans for season 3 had gone through, would Tails be looked at a bit differently depending on how it went since his role was supposed to expand greatly.)

Hmm, it's going to depend on how these next set of episodes go. Seeing the other Tailses will likely strike a chord in Nine; but that doesn't fully mean villain arc. Existential crisis, maybe. I expect him more to tap into something hidden within him he didn't notice before. (Probably doesn't help that outside of Sonic and Shadow, we don't know the Prime versions of the characters that well; not great if you don't have at least basic knowledge on Sonic. If Tails did show some "Nine" traits during his early days with Sonic; specifically the trusting and friends part, I think there'd be a fairer grasp of why Tails didn't end up like Nine and why Nine is slowly resembling the original Tails. This applies to the other counterparts too, not just his alone.) Heh, never doubt the power of a fandom has when they catch the slightest bit of angst fuel from any character. And missing the nuances that come with grey/neutral characters. (Trust me, I'd love to see Tails let loose some raw, unbridled emotion that could have you think about his morality or sense of justice, but in the right context. Something I don't see Prime fully committing to, whether they DO go through with it.)

Two intelligent scientific minds, separated by different upbringings and how they apply their emotions to their logic, but still learning about how the world works and defy said logic through personal experience. All while seeking approval and praise. Lots of potential there.

There was another Sonic Channel story last year that basically said the same thing about their bond. One being "they have something that goes beyond trust", that "they know what the other needs without having to speak". (Also, their dynamic breaks some the typical tropes you see with 'hero-sidekick'. Like, the latter has the base of operations, not the former. Also, it is not funny and wholesome that Sonic considers this baby fox that attached himself to a younger him the biggest source help he could have ever hope for?)

Honestly I'm not very knowledgeable on how this whole deal works, so I won't say anything on the matter. I wonder if we could get a Sonic webtoon? I know DC comics and Archie both have at least one. Of course, both of them are of questionable quality, but who knows, maybe we'll luck out!

Haha, that's true! Personally I don't really care for him being a kitsune spirit, but I've been thinking of an idea where he replicates their abilities with his tech to make someone else believe he is one.

Yep, Fleetway Tails is from the Nameless Zone which is kind of like old-timey alternative dimension with magic and goblins and stuff. He was kind of loser there, so he moved to Mobius hoping he'd make a name for himself, but he was still a loser there too. But he was too embarrassed and wrote to his family that he became a hero. In the early StC, the writers weren't kind to Tails. He usually just messed things up or got captured (you could kinda understand Sonic's frustration with him, though he could stand to be nicer), and if he did manage to save the day, it was due to sheer luck. He got better though, especially after Sonic got stuck in another dimension. (After he came back, the Freedom Fighters kind of went their separate ways, but S&T often had adventures together as a duo. They both kinda grew up, Tails became more competent and stopped caring as much about impressing people (including Sonic), and Sonic mellowed out and stopped being as harsh on him. They became a better team! I have a soft spot for the stc!Unbreakable Bond, you just kind of have to take into account the specifics of the writing of stc as a whole, I understand it's not everyone's cup of tea.)

(I... have mixed feelings on satam, but mostly I just can't finish watching it. It feels like a drag. Not something I would be watching if it wasn't Sonic-related. Not gonna comment on the quality of it, because there are some other shows I felt similarly about and they're super critically acclaimed, like atla. (If Tails was more prominent I mind have at least been watching for his sake) I promised a friend I would read Archie and I wanted to watch satam first, but it looks like at this point I'll just have to skip to the comics.)

I really want to see different counterparts interacting. I'm kind of with Shadow on this situation, try as I may I don't really see them as separate people, I'm more interested in what they could say about the Prime versions of the characters. But it would be more effective if we spent more time with the Prime versions in the first place. I'm hoping for more flashbacks tbh. (Plus I just love how the og models for the characters look without the Shatterverse clothes)

Oh yeah I remember that one! Man I love how Sonic Channel hypes up their bond. I hope we'll get to see more of this in the next games. Sonic really lucked out (and so did Tails of course!)

[bluewinnerangel]

Hit us with those good good canyon moon home parallels. You know we know you got em.

Are you ready for this SIT DOWN YOU'RE NOT READY. Listen this lil shit. Which one? THIS ONE

just decided to sit down and just TAKE APART HOME, HUSSLE IT, and go yep that's it that's my new song alright why because my lil louis lil blue wrote this for me hihihi that's why Listen to how Home starts, the "make a little conversation", and then compare that to Canyon Moon, the "you gotta see it to believe it". There are a bunch of obvious parallels between these 2 (oh I dunno maybe mermaid just yelling Home home home I'm going home over and over for one), but because these lines really sound the same the same and I had noticed some of these lines are quite similar too ("make a little conversation" vs "quick pause in conversation") I got the idea to check and compare them all and uh... I think there's really some fun intent going on here.

All the lines in Home that are sung this way:

"make a little conversation"

"so long ive been waiting"

"so many nights I thought it over"

"told myself i kinda liked her"

"so hot that I couldn't take it"

"want to wake up and see your face"

"still high with a little feeling"

"see the smile as it starts to creep in"

And the same for Canyon Moon:

"you gotta see it to believe it"

"so hard to leave it“

"the world's happy waiting"

"I heard jenny saying"

"staring at the ceiling"

"carry the feeling"

"quick pause in conversation"

"an old lovers hippie music"

Hussle that and you get parallels:

"make a little conversation" -> "quick pause in conversation"

"so long ive been waiting" -> "the world's happy waiting"

"so many nights I thought it over" -> "staring at the ceiling"

"told myself I kinda liked her" -> "hear jenny saying" / "(she plays song I've never heard,) an old lovers hippie music" this is a bit of a brain twist I'll get back to it.

"so hot that I couldn't take it" -> "so hard to leave it“ (which is either the same or the opposite depending on how wanna look at Home's message)

"want to wake up and see your face" / "see the smile as it starts to creep in" (context in home is waking up in the morning looking into each others eyes) -> "you gotta see it to believe it" (context is "sky never looked so blue" so then lemme just bring in "I get so lost inside your eyes, would you believe it?" - Adore You. blue skies blue eyes same same)

"still high with a little feeling" -> "carry the feeling"

Look at that. LOOK. AT. THAT. Listen to it. (Playlist of all songs mentioned in this post here) Listen to how all these lines are sung exactly the same, and like that's not enough they're same words same contexts same same!?

Also wanna just bring in the brainfarts happening over at me trying to find peace not having these parallels haunt me constantly which I try to resolve by making these silly little highlighter central mad professor's insane scribbles on a whiteboard except I'm not a professor and it's Harry's insanity and this is made in powerpoint:

There's a whole B side to this post coming ~Joni Mitchell parallels~ after more home parallel rambles below the cut:

To me the "Told myself I kind of liked her" in Home is one of the most important lines. In either case, but especially in the case of it possibly being very literal. That Louis possibly tried to convince himself that he did like her, and so he had a period where he was truly considering not being with whom makes him feel alive le curly boy, I mean it's right there in the above lines, although I'd like to think he talked about women in general, and not about recent feelings but rather the whole part where you are a kid realising you're not straight and well the whole song the whole song is a gift to anyone who has been there. That either way this line to me encapsulates that fear of what if you decide we're not enough to the curly boy "you" in question.

Then with that we can go back to possible intentional parallels, as Harry not once but twice in different contexts in Canyon Moon writes he's currently not home (implied that the time under the canyon moon is home), and while he's thinking back to that time of being home, he hears a girl talking: "I heard jenny saying" (I'd also like to think that it perhaps was "I heard her saying' at first and then they wrote Kid's fam into it, not based anything really, just, possible.) and then again in the last verse "she plays songs I've never heard, an old lover's hippie music, pretends not to know the words" which I take as a huge crazy wordplay puzzle, because he's saying the "she" is doing something he doesn't know about (copy from here:) here I think he's using [not knowing the song she is playing] to describe something being off, not his jam, not his music, in the same waters as "but there was something missing in her eyes", he's just thinking back to a time under the Canyon Moon, just waiting to go home, so he describes being somewhere that's not home as songs being played he doesn't know. And I'm not done with that line yet as there's that sweet sweet keyword "pretend" drop, all these sneaky little "pretend" "lying" "trick" words just sprinkled into all kinda contexts everywhere, is he trying to tell us something?

But beyond that I think this hippie music verse is just fat thiccccc greasy juicy references to Joni Mitchel, so off we go to the second parallel:

Harry's driving me into the laurel canyon with this. It's absolutely not any new info that Harry loves Joni Mitchell and would take inspiration from music he loves but I just took a tumble and feel like I am still just barely scratching the surface here. In terms of sound I don't wanna say too much here because I am no expert, not anywhere near, so whatever I would say wouldn't do whatever he's got going on any justice, but Canyon Moon is very clearly a Joni Mitchell fanpiece. And yeah probably not just Joni Mitchell and Home, there's for sure other influences in there too, but she's there alright. You don't need trained ears for that. And then there's that bit where the song's called Canyon Moon. What canyon? I'd place my bets on the Laurel Canyon. Not because I wanna yell about laurels although I always wanna yell about laurels but because of its link with an old lover's hippie music from the Laurel Canyon and Ladies of the Canyon's Joni Mitchell.

Also mentioning the part where he's described being obsessed with Blue as being "in a big Joni hole" (meanwhile I'm in a Harry(&Louis) hole and just getting sucked into the holes they get sucked into someone send help), and of course that tweet which is a lyric form My Old Man from the album Blue:

Tracklist of Blue:

Canyon Moon most closely resembles Carey you know the song Carey there snuggled between Little Green and Blue because god forbid we leave the poor bluegreeners alone for a second.

When considering possible inspirations for FL it's the entire album here, and take Ladies of the Canyon down with it as well while we're at it, but still I wanna highlight Carey the most:

And I just want to point out that of this album he's so obsessed with, Blue, is in itself doing this whole trick with colors (blue, green, black, silver and white), with the color blue (mostly used to describe loneliness) mentioned in all songs on side 1 with the only exception being Carey. Fun fact, I guess. Skies never looked so blue, doors yellow broken blue, all that. As for other parallels with this album and Fine Line, there's loads, perhaps California being second closest to Canyon Moon, and also this recurrent mention of café's (and the way it's mentioned [like in relation to a relationship going (not) well and (not) meeting there kinda thing] just makes me think of the beachwood café line). Then in terms of sound I'd say Canyon Moon comes close to Carey (yep again) and Big Yellow Taxi, which Harry covered of course.

And last last I also just wanna point out the part where that 2013 tweet already showed Harry's been obsessed with this Blue album for years and years, so there might be inspired sprinkles extending places I haven't noticed whatsoever and this is just a tiny fraction of whatever's been coming out of the Joni hole for years, who knows maybe Home was already Joni Mitchell inspired.

Byebye I'm off having a breakdown over listening to Blue and Conversation in the context of Harry listening to them thank you very much.

A playlist for all the songs mentioned in this post, but please do get as obsessed with this album as Harry has and just listen to the whole thing top to bottom, anyway:

End on a link to all my song analyses here, and LISTEN to the Canyon Moon / Home parallels here.

[shihalyfie]

A timeline of Ken’s fall into the Kaiser persona

The timeline of Ken meeting Wormmon and going through a sequence of events that made him into the Kaiser is relatively unclear, especially because Ken’s own memory is distorted, but production notes and other minor clues in the anime hint at a timeline that works with it:

August 2000: Ken goes on some kind of adventure with Akiyama Ryou and Wormmon

Late 2000-early 2001: Osamu dies

Around 2001: Ken goes on a second adventure with Akiyama Ryou, is hit by the Dark Seed, Oikawa sends him the fateful email, Ken visits the Dark Ocean

Late 2001-early 2002: Ken begins his conquest as the Kaiser

Yep, that’s right: Ken went on two different adventures with Akiyama Ryou.

A further breakdown of this timeline is under the cut!

So the thing you’re probably wondering is “wait, this is supposed to be a Tag Tamers tie-in, but Tag Tamers doesn’t make sense with this at all! Didn’t it say Ken went on an adventure with Ryou in March 2000 right after the Diablomon incident?” The thing is that for as much fanfare as there is about Tag Tamers being important to 02′s timeline, in fact, very little of Tag Tamers makes sense with 02 itself, and the game is is so contradictory that it doesn’t actually help you understand 02 much at all. This is, unfortunately, par for the course with Bandai licensed games, which don’t exactly have the greatest track record of keeping true to anime characterization or being remotely consistent with it at all (Daisuke’s characterization in Re:Digitize is borderline insulting), and everything we know about Adventure and 02′s planned lore doesn’t make sense with it either. In the end, we’re just going to have to follow our very loose attitude towards the concept of canon and default to the anime’s depiction of things for the sake of this particular analysis, pulling from Tag Tamers only when we can incorporate details from it in a way that doesn’t contradict everything.

02 episode 33 has Ken explicitly bring up the idea of “an encounter with a Digimon” that led to him becoming a Chosen Child happening in August 2000 (Koushirou had just mentioned the recent wave of Chosen Children having had a preliminary encounter via the 1999 incident). Unfortunately, we don’t know any more than this, due to Ken’s own memory failing, and the subject is left there.

(Again, yes, this is contradictory with Tag Tamers, but remember that said depiction of “Ken and Ryou watching the Diablomon incident” also contradicts Ryou clearly being seen by himself in Turkey in Our War Game! The anime is consistent with itself; the game is the outlier here.)

So when the Digivice emerged from Osamu’s computer (actually meant for Ken) in the flashback in 02 episode 23, we see a very young Ken with a purple shirt. Let’s take a closer look at this design.

We’ve received a lot of versions of this design sheet over the years, but all of them are consistent about one thing: this design depicts Ken as nine years old, in third grade. (Whether it gives grade level or age depends which version of this reference sheet you’re following, but everything is consistent about this.)

All of Ken’s various designs as depicted in this episode and other flashbacks are very clearly marked and depicted, and even the younger design of “Ken at the time of blowing bubbles with Osamu” has its own sheet (he’s four years old at that point). Moreover, the above nine-year-old design has an explicit instruction on this particular sheet: “please use this for his interactions with Osamu,” meaning that this is the design everyone was instructed to follow up with during any scene where Osamu is alive.

The Animation Chronicle confirms that this happened in August 2000, so it seems to be shortly after Ken’s “initial encounter”. (Or maybe this is the “initial encounter”? Ken might have conflated both.)

This is the same design Ken is depicted with when he first is sucked into the Digital World (again: he’s clearly depicted as going in alone, not with Ryou as Tag Tamers depicts). While Ken’s memory is understandably very muddled, a lot of the details here make sense with each other:

The worst thing we see of this little venture is Wormmon having to fight a Gazimon. It’s not a big deal of a thing they have to fight through.

It’s clearly short enough that Ken can go in and out during the duration of an afternoon without anyone in the real world noticing (besides Osamu).

Ken’s looking like he had a lot of fun -- definitely not the kind of thing that seems like he went through a lot of trauma.

It’s unlikely anything much of a big deal happened during this point, other than some emotional bonding with a new best friend.

Osamu also died shortly after, given that Ken is still depicted with this design in the surrounding events as depicted in 02 episodes 21, 23, and 45. (Spring 2003 also refers to the titular spring as “the third spring” since Osamu’s death, confirming that Osamu must have died within the time period of late 2000 to early 2001.)

Ken is depicted at Osamu’s funeral in 02 episode 48, and while his clothes are different and we don’t get a full-body shot of him, note that there’s attention paid to making sure his design aligns with the above purple-shirt one -- his bangs drop in the center, rather than pointing left.

However, Ken remembers a trip through the Digital World in 02 episode 43, and Ken is depicted with a very different design that doesn’t match up with the one depicted in 02 episode 23. This has often been passed off as animator error, or Ken’s memories perhaps being extremely muddled, but what we know about the surrounding circumstances doesn’t actually suggest that...

This design is consistently written in notes to depict Ken as ten years old, in fourth grade. Not only that, if you look closely, Ken is visibly slightly taller, so it’s not just a simple question of clothing; his bangs are also depicted as pointing left, the same way they’re generally depicted with him at eleven, and not dropping in the center the way his nine- and four-year-old designs depicted.

On top of that, the surrounding circumstances behind this adventure depicted in 02 episode 43 also seem to be very different from what was depicted in the one from 02 episode 23:

The battle is clearly depicted as being against Millenniummon, and, regardless of whether this is following Tag Tamers or not, that’s clearly a big deal of a defeat.

Ken’s injury from the Dark Seed is enough to completely send him on the verge of death, which probably would not elicit the same kind of casual reaction he had during his emergence in 02 episode 23′s flashback. It was mild enough that Ken “recovered from his injuries and went home,” but that’s definitely not the kind of thing you’d expect to result in Ken be emerging with a big smile on his face (especially since Osamu’s violent reaction back then was implied to be out of jealousy for Ken’s happiness). Moreover, Ken returning in a poor state of health would probably be much less likely to be noticed by his family when Osamu is dead (and therefore not there to notice) and Ken’s parents are deep in grief.

This incident is the one that directly caused Ken’s trauma, meaning it’s more likely that this incident is going to be the one that got scrambled up in memory (it didn’t take long for Ken to recall his initial adventures with Wormmon in comparison back in 02 episode 23).

Ken refers to this incident as “two years ago”, but recall that, on top of his own unreliable testimony and scrambled memory, 02 episode 43 (when he brings this up) takes place during late December 2002, meaning that an early 2001 date doesn’t necessarily fall out of the question here, and it’s also not the first time 02′s final quarter taking place at the very end of December has thrown off date references. (02 references to “age” and “relative time” are often very rough in general and a bit too overly realistic, considering how long of a period 02 spans over and the question of things like exactly how long Daisuke can be said to be “eleven years old” over the course of the series, or the fact Osamu is said to be 7 when Ken is 4 and 11 while Ken is 9, so the more important part is paying attention to the fact the design sheets are so explicit about referring to different things.)

Moreover, this design of “ten years old, in fourth grade” is used in 02 episode 23 to show the events that we retroactively know happened right after that:

Once Ken had the Dark Seed in him, it makes sense that Oikawa wouldn’t hesitate to reach out to him, since he now had a great opportunity to exploit him mentally! Remember that this design debut all the way back in 02 episode 23, which meant that we knew that there was some kind of “timeskip” between Osamu’s death and Oikawa emailing Ken, but...if that were all there was to it, why would Oikawa wait so long between Osamu’s funeral (which clearly had Ken with his nine-year-old design) and now, especially since this “timeskip” would have given Ken extra time to mull over and recover from Osamu’s death? It makes much more sense when you apply 02 episode 43′s context that Ken’s Dark Seed implantation happened between Osamu’s death and the email, with Ken still having a really horrible year mulling over Osamu’s death, then getting dragged out like this and having something traumatic stuffed into the back of his neck that had the potential to feed on his already thick emotions of grief, and finally being at the right emotional point for Oikawa to make use of him.

It also explains why the Kaiser didn’t become enough of an issue to merit intervention until all the way in April 2002 -- presumably, of course, the Holy Beasts needed time to prepare, but if Ken wasn’t implanted with the Dark Seed until 2001 and Oikawa’s email shortly after that, that means Ken building up his persona as the Kaiser only really had less than a year to form (especially since 02 episode 23 states that Ken suddenly “doing well in school” didn’t start happening until Ken roughly got to the same height as Osamu was when he died, and the illusory meeting between the brothers in 02 episode 49 shows that Ken’s not actually that much taller than said height at eleven).

Moreover, if you do know the development circumstances behind Tag Tamers and 02: Tag Tamers already existed by the time 02 episode 23 was released, and so did Ken’s ten-year-old design (hence why it and Ryou’s design consistently show up together in concept art). This ten-year-old design had already been associated with “the time Ken got hit with a Dark Seed” (which really seems to be the only holdover in common between Tag Tamers and the anime) by the time 02 episode 23 was made, and despite that, Ken was given a completely different nine-year-old design for the flashbacks in 02 episode 23 that consistently got its own sheet. And you can’t say the animators forgot the ten-year-old design existed, because they clearly were fine using it for the other flashbacks in 02 episode 23 that happened to not be that flashback -- it’s hard to easily pass that off as “animator oversight” when it’s conspicuously introduced in the anime in a context it’s not known for and only revealed to be in its original context later.

Why did they suddenly change designs and depict such a “timeskip” back in 02 episode 23 when, if it really were supposed to all be related to the same events anyway, they could have just reused the designs and called it a day instead of making a whole new model sheet for an entirely new one? Whole entire character designs don’t just come up for no reason, especially when sheets are so consistent about them corresponding to different things, and the nine-year-old design seems to be made specifically for the purpose of having a distinct one for anytime Osamu was alive -- so it’s much more likely that this distinction is actually intentional (regardless of whatever the game says in terms of specifics).

As an amusing side note: Ken’s unusual height has been pointed out by a lot of people, and it’s sometimes been speculated as a bit of fridge horror that his unusual height growth might have also been impacted by the Dark Seed (especially given the 02 episode 23 comment about Ken reaching Osamu’s height correlating to when he started expressing similar “genius” tendencies), but even putting aside the fact he’s consistently portrayed as tall even in Kizuna and the epilogue: if Ken indeed got hit by the Dark Seed at 10 instead of 9, that means the kid had some pretty considerable height growth between those ages even before anything supernatural came into play. His father’s also tall, and Osamu was pretty obviously around the same height as Ken at age 11, so there’s clearly something in the Ichijouji family overall. Ken’s just tall.

[oh-boy-me]

HONESTLY I am really endeared to leviathan being the more incomprehensible brother AND am very interested to know what makes him particularly difficult to translate (both in text and when he’s speaking)... you’ve mentioned he uses a particular dialect and a lot of slang and I am so intrigued to hear the details 👀

Oh I will take ANY excuse to gush about language; I’m more than happy to dissect some of the more frustrating lines I’ve translated from Levi.

There are lots of times where Levi uses slang, either general colloquialisms or gaming terms, but because it’d take too long to find them all I gathered the ones I specifically complained about in the posts.  I’ll sacrifice myself and re-translate them, breaking it down lol.  With luck I’ll be able to get across why it was so frustrating.

First, I’ll break down a simple comment, to give an idea of what straightforward Japanese looks like.

俺もやってみたいな (ore mo yatte mitai na)

(Simeon’s comment from Create Your Own Avatar?) 俺: I も: also やって: From やる (to do), more colloquial than する み: From みる, in this case “to try” たい: Want な: A little bit of emphasis So together, it’s “I want to try it too.”

Japanese takes some getting used to, because the word order is very different, it loves postpositions, and you have to figure out what parts to group to get the right meaning, but it’s nothing that you can’t handle with a little practice and base knowledge.

As for Levi, well... that’s below the cut for length purposes.

神企画キター！！ (kami-kikaku kitaa)

(From Idol Mammon) 神: Before a noun, 神 means “top notch.”  It’s a productive prefix, so you can add it to a lot of things to suggest that it’s good quality.  In the gaming world “godlike” is the general meaning. 企画: Planning, design キター: きた comes from くる (to come), and if it doesn’t make sense in the sentence literally, it probably means “here it is.” So together, it’s “Godlike planning!!”

By the way, in linguistics “productive” means that it’s still being used to make new words today.  For example, -s to make a plural is productive, but -en (like in oxen) is unproductive.

これぞ真のリア充！ (korezo shin no riajuu)

(From Chronicles of an Otaku) これぞ: This, but like.  More powerful.  It’s like “THIS,” emphasis on the this. 真の: Real, genuine リア充: Normie I think I translated it as “This is the true ultimate normie!”, where “ultimate” came from the strength of これぞ.

ぴょんブームだったんだよね (pyon buumu dattanda yo ne)

(From Mammon the Bunny) ぴょん: Boing, or jumping like a rabbit would ブーム: A boom, as in a fad だった: The past form of です (to be) ん: Kind of implies an explanation だよね: Either “isn’t it?” or “yep,” depending on the context. Since everything from だった on basically means “it was,” all we have left is “boing” and “fad.”  So… “That was a bouncy boom”

そのままやないかーいwww (sono mama yanai kaai)

(From Where Did the Rabbit Go?) そのまま: The way things are, without anything changing やない: This is the kansai-ben part.  The kansai dialect is (obviously) spoken in the kansai region, and is mainly characterized by the language of Osaka.  やない replaces じゃない to mean “isn’t.” かーい: Also common in kansai-ben, but it’s basically an elongated か, which is a softer, more masculine question mark.  やないかーい means “it is, isn’t it?” ＊Previously I said that it was specifically kansai-ben, but I don’t think it’s actually exclusive to that area. www: lolol It basically means “Nothing’s changed has it?” but with the obvious colloquialism I stylized it to be “Business as usual, huh?”

I don’t think Levi uses kansai-ben consistently, so I’m not entirely sure why he threw it in here.  Maybe he’s just borrowing it because it sounds cool to him.

レッツサバヘルゲー！ (rettsu sabaheru gee)

(From I’ll Protect You) This one is either pretty interesting, or kind of annoying. Survival game is サバイバルゲーム (sabaibaru geemu) or サバゲ (sabage).  ゲー and ゲーム are the same, so there’s no problem there.  But Levi says サバヘル (sabaheru), which has two options:

It’s a play on words, because ヘル means hell.  Which is cool

Levi doesn’t pronounce things ever.  Which would be really cool if Japanese wasn’t my third language and I wasn’t trying to understand it

I don’t remember if I talked about that in the post, but I was very tired when I made that post specifically, so.  If it’s the wordplay option, unfortunately I couldn’t think of any way to give the same idea in English at the time (maybe survivhell itself would work?).  The meaning is just “Let’s (play a) survival game!”

--

In terms of speaking, he’s mainly frustrating because the way words would be pronounced in textbook Japanese aren’t always how he pronounces them because... well, in the real world people don’t pronounce things the textbook way.

For example, if you listen to him say Leviathan (pronounced reviatan in Japanese) when entering battle, I kept hearing “rebiadang.”  Phonologically, here’s probably why:

bi (ビ) is the more natural way to pronounce vi (ヴィ) in Japanese.  Vi is pronounceable, but not natural.

da (ダ) instead of ta (タ) is a common case of voicing a voiceless consonant when it’s between two vowels.

In Japanese, /ng/ and /n/ are both ン, as in they don’t differentiate between those two sounds, and it went to the velar /ng/ because the next sound is /k/, also velar.  Although you could argue that he does say /n/.

Looking back, it probably should have been obvious that “rebiadang” was “Leviathan,” but when you’re stressing to figure out what it is, the answer isn’t as clear.

I’m not going to try to explain how he pronounced ざまみろ because he kind of just... doesn’t say that.  It sounded more like wario than mamiro to me.

If I had to explain what makes transcribing him hard, I’d say that he often cuts corners and sacrifices enunciation for speed.  Lucifer also has a few consonants that get blended, usually with /k/ and /g/.

Honestly though, after the frustration in the moment, it’s great that Levi doesn’t sound like he’s right out of the Genki II textbook.  It forces me to exercise my language muscles, and shows off how unique everyone can make their own manners of speaking!  Keep being you, Levi, and I’ll keep figuring out what you mean by that.

[thedreadvampy]

Ok please if you don’t mind saying - who is Stuart semple and what did he do? I’m so confused. Like I recognise the name and I think he might the an artist or something but I have no idea

He is indeed an artist! He’s a English multidisciplinary fine artist best known for his ongoing beef with English sculptor Anish Kapoor over the 2016 exclusive licensing on the process to make Vantablack colour coating, which meant Kapoor was the only artist allowed to use it. Then Stuart Semple made Pinkest Pink pigment and said it was available to everyone but Anish Kapoor, and there was a big blowup which there’s a lot of documentation of - it was very memed.

Since then, Semple has made a bunch more pigments, most of them with the available-to-everyone-but-Anish-Kapoor disclaimer, and the beef periodically flares up, although I will say as time goes on it seems to me to have got increasingly one-sided given that Kapoor has pretty much wandered off.

(I’ve used several of his colours, btw. Pinkest Pink is pretty good. Blackest Black, his attempt to make the blackest possible paint (as opposed to Vantablack which is a nanofibre coating) I was pretty disappointed in, I’ve honestly had better light capture from mid-range art shop paints. His other pigments vary in quality - some I really liked, some I was meh on, but I think Blackest Black is the only one I was actively unimpressed by)

Anyway. Where I come in is much less exciting. 

A few months ago I reblogged a post on Tumblr asking about Semple from a discourse tag (my reblog did not tag or @ anyone), and I made a glib comment where I said (very truthfully) that while I thought he was pretty decent at pigments, both his paintings and his online persona came across pretty adolescent to me.

so it turns out Stuart Semple is an inveterate name searcher (hi Stuart if you’re reading this!) 

(Side note: I actually should have guessed this from 2019 Twitter when he saw and commented on an untagged thread I wrote about him and Kapoor’s beef (which was because I’d seen an article in which Kapoor, a British-Asian man, said that the racist Prevent strategy was liable to drive young British-Asian men into the arms of terrorist groups by making it clear their country hates them reblogged on Semple’s account with a caption claiming Anish Kapoor was pro-terrorism, which, while tongue-in-cheek, isn’t a neutral statement for a white person to make about an Asian person and was a pretty phenomenally bad-faith reading of Kapoor’s actual words) and in my thread I pretty much said that when the story had broken, I, like everybody else, had found it very funny and been firmly on side with Semple’s bit, but I felt that a) after a couple of years it really wasn’t very relevant any more and it had started to feel less like Fighting The Power and more like bullying the amount of Semple’s web presence was devoted to talking about Anish Kapoor; b) that it was a shame that Anish Kapoor was increasingly only known as The Vantablack Guy given that I really like a lot of his work and c) that continuing to frame a Jewish person of colour as the Face of the Artistic Elite was a bit weird given how overwhelmingly white the high-end art world is. but I digress. Semple responded to that thread, I don’t really remember what he said, it wasn’t an acrimonious response but it was a bit Oh I Didn’t Do Anything To Tag You?)

so anyway he found my reblog and commented saying ehhh I don’t remember, something along the lines of not feeling like I was being very kind and that he was trying his best. also I think he said I had accused him of being racist? which again the actual Tumblr post literally just said I thought his art and persona came across as juvenile and I think in the tags? I mentioned that I thought it was time for him to step off the Kapoor beef. 

then he screencapped my post, including my profile picture and username, and posted it on all his socials with a kind of :( people are so mean on Tumblr :( caption and um

idk if you know this about Being A Public Persona With Tens Of Thousands of Followers but. if you post someone’s identity and say ‘I do not like what this person is doing’ it. can get messy fast.

uh I don’t follow Stuart Semple (see the original post I made) but he commented to make sure I knew he’d posted my post on Instagram and “all my followers like your wig :)” which. according to my partner who did go and look at the time, the Instagram comments were largely about how I was an ugly non-passing trans woman aka “man in a wig” which. throw the whole suitcase out. There were a good few days where I got a lot of angry anons, ranging from ‘stop bullying Stuart Semple!!!!!’ to ‘die in a ditch graphically’ to ‘how can you claim to have opinions on art when You Are On Tumblr’ (I have been a freelance illustrator for 7 years and I have a Masters in art and design) to ‘your art sucks and you’re fat and ugly’ and my personal favourite ‘how can u be cis and use she/her pronouns you dumb snowflake’

(within that furore was a whole branch where someone was like ‘sex worker huh bet you’re bad at it’ and I was like ‘yep! that’s why I don’t do it any more! it’s hard work and it involves a lot of self-promotion and customer skills which I don’t like and am not good at!’ and this was a Whole Thing where they kept trying to insult me (much like today’s anon) about my supposed failures as a Slut Who Is Bad At Sex and I kept going like ‘ok but here’s how that just. doesn’t make sense in reference to what sex work actually is so like, ok?’)

and Stuart Semple and I were also having a conversation which, depending on your perspective I would call his attitude either conciliatory or passive-aggressive, there was a lot of ‘me and my followers would never say rude things about you :) keep up the art kiddo :)’ and being charitable I would say he was trying to be nice while being angry, and to avoid escalating (but with the added context I got later about the wig comment, I think that interpretation of his behaviour maybe. has some cracks?) and ultimately he took down the posts, we had a brief conversation about keeping pet reptiles (apparently he has a lizard) and we left it on, if not good terms, at least peaceable ones. 

however I still periodically get messages about it from angry Semple stans. and I’m not sure the argument was resolved, in that I still very much think it’s fair to make criticism, including quite harsh criticism (which I’m not sure ‘adolescent’ is), on art which is put out for public display and enjoyment, and that it isn’t a personal attack to post a criticism of someone’s public-facing work and statements on social media unless you actively target it towards them (for example, @ ing them), and Semple still thinks there’s no difference between a random blog with under a thousand followers criticising a public figure’s work and a public figure with 100k followers on most platforms criticising that blog (out of context - he clipped out the post I was reblogging from and my explanatory tags, and looking at my blog you may notice that 90% of my nuance is in the tags) while giving his followers all the information to find said blog.

(also as multiple people have remarked. if you want to say it’s an unfair criticism to call your online presence immature, being a middle-aged artist who as far as I can tell has a net worth over a million who spends your time name searching yourself in order to get mad at untagged mild criticism from strangers on the internet and share it on all your socials for your followers to join you in Being Big Mad is uhhhhhhh. it uh. it’s not like. not super thin-skinned and immature)

(also also I just googled his net worth and unsurprisingly I can’t find a source on it I’d consider reliable, but I did find multiple articles about him getting in trouble for breach of contract and nonpayment for gallery employees, including two accusations of him writing a big defensive blog post then changing it after a few hours to a very short post saying I LOVE YOU so like idk how true that is but it does seem. consistent with the above interactions.)

[five-rivers]

Orb/Reanimation

Another part of Doorways!  Link to series here.

.

.

.

“What’s his name again?” asked Danny, picking at the hem of his shirt.  Today had been… stressful, for a number of reasons.  Partially the long drive and the disastrous breakfast stop, but also the fact that they were driving to meet a guy who was possibly:

a)       Vlad Masters version 2.

b)      A horrible hole in reality that would try to kill him.

c)       Possessed, like the Keens.

d)      Using ghost stuff without knowing it was ghost stuff.

e)      Messing around with ghost stuff while knowing it was ghost stuff, but without any of the skill to keep it from messing him up in turn.  

f)        Crazy in some wonderful, unforeseen way.

Or, finally,

g)       Mom and Dad’s one and only normal friend.  

Danny really wasn’t holding for the last one, if he was being honest.  After all, unlike Marianne, this guy had been part of the Paranormal Research Club.  

Okay, maybe there were other, positive, options.  It was completely possible for someone to be weird or crazy and not be evil or even particularly threatening.  Most ghosts were like that, in fact.  

Still.

“Frank Stone,” said Dad, cheerfully.

“If he turns out to be a Dr. Frankenstein type, I quit,” groaned Jazz.  “Just so you know.”

“You won’t quit,” said Danny, with complete confidence.  

“He is a doctor,” said Mom.  “He was studying biology when we met him, for his undergraduate degree.”

“I quit; I’m telling you.”

“If you were really quitting,” reasoned Danny, “you’d just open the door and jump out.”  He was pleased that Jazz was taking her turn as the resident overdramatic teenager.  She carried that burden only rarely, but it did seem like long trips in the GAV really brought it out.

Maybe they made her remember the whole Youngblood thing.  Who knew? Not Danny.  

“I’m not going to jump out of a moving vehicle. That’s more of a ‘you’ thing.”

“I can’t really dispute that,” said Danny, remembering all the times he had, in fact, jumped out of a moving vehicle. “In my defense, I can fly.”

“Why you can fly completely negates that as a defense.”

Danny held up a finger.  “Okay, so, first off, reality is not a moving vehicle.”

“Anything can be a moving vehicle, depending on your reference frame.”

“I agree on the moving part, but I dispute the vehicle part.  Vehicle comes from the Latin vehiculum, which is ‘a means of conveyance.’ Reality is not a means of conveyance. Ergo, it cannot be a vehicle.”

“Not so fast, brother dear.  Words change meaning over time.”

“Yeah, but that’s still what vehicle means,” said Danny.  “Unless you’re doing the medicine definition, anyway.  I think.”

“Reality is a metaphorical vehicle.”

“Well, if it’s metaphorical, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s moving.  Does it?”

“I’m… not sure.”

“I think this is the place!” exclaimed Dad, pulling into a parking lot.  “Golding City University Medical Research Lab.”

“He doesn’t live here,” said Danny, slowly, “does he?”  They weren’t ambushing this guy at work, were they?  Even if he did turn out to be just as bad as all of Mom and Dad’s other friends, that was kind of mean.  

(Except, the Keens had been acceptable, once they were no longer possessed, and even the ghost possessing them hadn’t been too terrible.)

“He’s in the building behind the lab,” said Mom. “They let the teachers live on-campus, here.  He’s expecting us, anyway.”

Right.  Because they had called ahead, giving warning to their potential enemy.  Curse you, common courtesy and sundry social conventions.

Jazz was glaring at the small name sign on the building, which was just barely visible through the rain.  “Golding City University,” she said, eyes narrowed.  

“Uh, is something wrong?”

“Frankenstein,” she said.  

“Um,” said Danny.  He looked more closely at the name.  “Golding City.  Ingolstadt.” Oh, no.  Now he was glaring at the name, too.  Because Jazz was right, and it would be his luck.  Their parents’ luck.  Whatever.  

“Do you feel anything?” asked Dad.  

“No,” said Danny.

“Well,” said Mom.  “We’ll have to run a bit, try to stay out of the rain.  It’s too bad there isn’t a closer parking lot…”

“I could also just make us all intangible,” said Danny.  

“What?”

“I could make us all intangible.  I do it all the time to miss the rain when no one is looking too closely.”

“Huh,” said Mom.  

“It isn’t as if my powers disappear when I’m not fighting ghosts,” said Danny.  “I get to use them for other things.”

“I know, I know, it just seems… petty.”

“Petty is one of the best words to describe ghosts with,” said Danny.  

.

Frank Stone did not look like a Frankenstein. Not the monster, and not the ‘doctor.’

(Because Victor Frankenstein had not, in fact, become a doctor, had he?)

He was actually pretty average looking.  The same age as Mom and Dad, of course. Brown hair.  Glasses.  Skinny, but not that skinny.  Could Dr. Stone rob a grave?  Probably. But carrying the loot away without some mechanical advantage was probably out.  Unless it was old loot.  Dried out. Maybe just bones.  

Corpses were heavy.  

(No, Danny was not going to elaborate.)

Dr. Stone appeared to be somewhat confused about why Danny and Jazz were there.  Evidently, Mom and Dad had managed to give the man the impression that they wanted to fund his research with the fortune they had inherited from Vlad.

Which, incidentally, had been inherited by Danny, who couldn’t really do much with it until he was twenty-five.  Not that he was particularly keen on funding… Whatever it was that Dr. Stone was researching.  

Maybe that would be different if he could tell what Dr. Stone was talking about.  Danny wasn’t stupid, far from it, and had a good background in any number of esoteric subjects, but, well.  It was hard to rival an adult lifetime of learning and research.  Especially when he didn’t have any context.  

Mom and Dad’s briefing on Dr. Stone had generally focused on what he had been interested in as a member of the Paranormal Research Club, not his true field of study.

“Oh,” said Mom, suddenly, “this is about your organ transplant project, isn’t it?  You really need to provide more context.  When you just jump right in like that, even we’ll get lost!”

Okay.  Danny felt better.  

“Well, yes,” said Dr. Stone.  “I have been working on this off and on since college, you know how it is.  I know you kept up with that portal business!”  He flashed a nervous smile and set his coffee mug down on his coffee table.  It made a soft chinking sound against the glass.  “But the university gave me a grant, Vladco’s been donating some supplies—From their chemical division, mostly—and I’ve been having a lot of success!  I can’t wait to show you.  We’ve actually got a few specimens in near-stasis right now, all from mice.  We’re going to be implanting one tomorrow.  See how it functions.”

“Have you implanted any before?” asked Mom, leaning forward.  

“A few, but, well.  I can’t say they were resounding successes.  The most recent subject only lasted a few days… Although, that is better than the first! We’ve been adjusting some of our ratios.”

“Say, Frank,” said Dad.  “What chemicals are you using for this, anyway?  I know you’re using them in conjunction with low temperatures, but keeping crystals from forming in the flesh—”

“Yes, yes, that’s always been the problem with cryogenics,” agreed Dr. Stone.  Then they dove back into jargon and technical language.  

Danny glanced sideways at Jazz, uneasy.  Chemicals.  From Vladco. Yeah.  Not suspicious at all.  

He leaned over.  “Ten dollars says that he’s using ectoplasm to reanimate dead bodies.”

“I’m not taking that bet.  Do you feel anything weird from him?”  Jazz whispered back.  

“Weird, yes, but…”  Danny bit his lip.  “I’m not sensing any… doors.  Or ghosts.”

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “So, when we do find his mad science lab full of dead body parts, what do we do?”

“Well…  Nothing? As long as they’re legal dead body parts, I guess.  You know, from organ donors, or people who donated their bodies to science.  I mean…”  He shrugged.  “You’ve read Frankenstein, too.  And met Ellie.”

“Hm.  True,” said Jazz.  “I have to check my biases.  I’m still quitting, though.  As soon as we find his Frankenstein stuff.  Just so you know.”

“No, you aren’t.”

Jazz just sighed.  

.

Danny walks silently through the halls of the research facility.  True, Dr. Stone was planning on giving his family a tour of his workspace first thing tomorrow and had implied that other researchers would be doing the same, but Danny believed in being prepared.  

Well.  Sometimes. He was allowed to be inconsistent and contradictory.  Like any teen, he was still learning how to exist.  

Maybe he should stop comparing himself to ‘any teen,’ though.  It was beginning to feel dishonest, even in his own head.  Even though, technically, it was true.  

Anyway.  

This place was kind of creepy.  At least, he presumed a normal person would find it creepy. Too bad he didn’t know any normal people.  Sam would think it was cool.  Tucker would be freaking out because it was a medical research lab.  Ancients, Danny was as bad as his parents.  

It did have a number of features that one would typically only find on the set of a horror movie, however, so he felt fairly confident in his assessment of its creepiness.  Also, he had encountered at least five different crimes against nature and sanity (it took one to know one), and he hadn’t even gotten to Dr. Stone’s lab yet.  

He was impressed.  He hadn’t expected such a high concentration outside of Amity Park or Vlad’s hideouts.  

At the thought of Vlad, Danny drooped. Yeah.  He still wasn’t over the stupid fruitloop.  Still hated the fact that he had died.  

Back to the crimes against nature.  Ectoplasm was definitely a component, if a small one. Hard to get things to glow that precise, reality bending shade of green otherwise.  Also, well.  Danny can sense ectoplasm.

And…  Now he was in a room of jars full of diluted ectoplasm and… He sniffed. Formaldehyde?  He frowned and decided the number, size, and arrangement of jars was suspicious.  He walked around the table.  Yep. That was in the outline of a human body. Yep.  

Honestly, this wasn’t any more alarming than the living mice impaled with various glowing needles, or the disturbingly brown heart beating in a fish tank a few rooms back.  It was, also, significantly less alarming than the prosthetic face (mainly because, dang, that thing looked realistic), the (fresh) skeleton someone had been injecting ectoplasm into (yikes), and the weird flesh… blob… thing that someone had just left out in their workspace.  

Still.  This was another point for the ‘someone is building a Frankenstein’s monster in this building’ theory, and Danny had kind of been hoping that he was wrong.  

He walked out of the room, on alert for random murderous corpse monsters (or sad corpse monsters that needed a shoulder to cry on, a restraining order against their creators, and a loving home).  Or mad scientists.  Because, at this point, he was fairly certain that everyone who worked here was crazy, and not necessarily in the fun way Mom and Dad were.

He was glad they had decided to sleep in the GAV and ignore Dr. Stone’s invitation to stay in his apartment.  

Dr. Stone’s office was just next door.  His lab, just beyond that.  Danny approached cautiously, his ghost half on high alert, and his deeper self stirring uneasily.  

He laid a hand flat against the door, and that stirring became wakefulness.

Crimes against nature.  Hubris.  Pride.

Superbia.  It had to be.

A hole.  A wound.

Well.  This was fast.  Even with the Keens’ list of Paranormal Research Club members they had encountered while possessed, Danny hadn’t expected to find another thing like Gula so quickly.  

He hadn’t wanted to.  Despite his outward pessimism, he had hoped that there weren’t any more.  

After several frozen moments where Danny braced himself for an attack, he realized one wasn’t forthcoming.  The tear beyond the door had not noticed him, was not trying to consume him.  

So, he had a choice.  He could either try to deal with this alone, right now, or he could sneak away and tell his family what he had found.  Both choices had pros and cons.  

Before even a second had passed, Danny was easing away from the door.  He hadn’t quite promised to share if he felt anything strange, if he had detected anything bad, but…  It was a near thing, and he didn’t want to be dishonest with his family after they had been so accepting of all his… Stuff.  

Yeah.  Call it stuff.  Nice and generic.  Covers everything.  

Plus, his encounter with Gula had confirmed that he needed backup.  

He refrained from calling on his powers on the way out.  He didn’t want to draw attention.  The limits of the doors to the place which should not be mentioned were largely unknown to him.

Luckily, the doors weren’t alarmed, and he got back to the GAV without a problem.  He poked Jazz awake first.  

“Hey,” he said, “we’ve got a problem.”

.

“This portal is just… Sitting there,” said Mom.

“Yep.”

“In Frank’s office.”

“Well, I think it might actually be in the lab, but yes.  It’s kind of freaking me out.”

“Is Frank sleeping in his lab?” asked Dad, stroking the stubble on his chin.  

“No, I checked that before I went in,” said Danny. “He’s in his apartment.”

“You just… broke into his apartment?” asked Mom.

Danny shrugged.  “I didn’t break anything,” he said.  “But, I mean, what else was I supposed to do?”

For a moment, it looked like Mom was about to argue or scold him, but she shook her head.  “Alright, then someone else is in his office.”

“Maybe.  I’m not sure if these portals need a person attached or not.  Using person in the very loosest of senses, because…”  He made a gesture he hoped would be interpreted as a soul being forcibly removed from a body without killing the body.  

“You don’t think it’s in the, um,” Jazz also made a vague gesture.  

“You mean the hypothetical Frankenstein’s monster he’s made?  Yeah. I think that’s likely.  Also, judging from the sheer amount of, um, weird stuff in the other labs, I’d say it’s influencing everyone and everything around it, too.”

“Is that a thing it can do?” asked Mom.  

“I mean, I can do that,” said Danny.  He paused.  “’I’ in this case being the portal.  Yeah.  That’s why Amity Park is so…  Amity Park.”

Mom breathed out, slowly.  “Sweetie, trust me on this, Amity Park was strange long before we made the portal.

“Well, yes?” said Danny, not seeing what that had to do with it.  “So?”

“So, that strangeness couldn’t be caused by the portal.”

“Mom.  I’m—It’s a hole in reality.  Do you think it’s going to obey the laws of cause and effect?  You went to Amity Park because it was already a ‘thin spot,’ right?  I was already there.”

Mom looked vaguely ill.  

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “Let’s table that discussion for right now.  What are we going to do about this?  Break in?  Wait for our ‘tour’ tomorrow?”

“I don’t like the idea of waiting for Dr. Stone to give us a tour,” said Danny.  “I don’t want to give them time to prepare for us.”

“He doesn’t know what we’re here for, though,” said Dad.  “Does he?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny.  “I can’t read minds.”

“Yet,” added Jazz.

“Do you think he even knows about the…”  It was Mom’s turn to enter the gesturing game.

“Let’s just call it a hell portal for the sake of communication,” said Danny, despite the fact that the term did not do the actuality justice.  “Or Superbia for this particular one.  I think this must be Superbia, anyway.”  He didn’t want to imagine the possibility of even more of these things out there.  

“I’m not sure how he couldn’t notice that something strange was going on,” said Dad.  “Even if he was using ectoplasm and other supernatural elements in his research, we gave him a good grounding in what to expect from ectoplasm in college.”

“Yeah,” said Jazz.  “But not everyone is like you and Mom.  Your college days were over two decades ago.”

Something moving in the dark and rain beyond the GAV windows, catching Danny’s eye.  He pushed past his family to get a better look, blinking to adjust his eyes.  

“Heck,” he said.  “We have a mob.”

“What?” exclaimed Dad, rushing to the console to turn on the GAV’s exterior floodlights.  

They illuminated Dr. Stone and a crowd of college and graduate students quite nicely.  Their eyes reflected a dim red.  The GAV was, as far as Danny could see, surrounded.

Very briefly, the thought of gunning the GAV and crashing through the crowd crossed his mind.  It was just as quickly dismissed.  

He didn’t know what the line between influenced and mind controlled was, or how easily Superbia could cross it.  It was even possible that the ‘hell portal’ could vault over both of those and land directly in possession.  

“Ghost shield?” suggested Danny.  

“Will it do anything?” asked Mom.  

“Won’t hurt,” said Danny with a shrug.  

Mom flipped the switch.  

“What are we going to do?” asked Jazz, softly. “Wait them out?”

“Realistically,” said Danny, “we don’t have enough food and water to do that.  With this many people, they could take turns watching us.”

“Call the police?” suggested Maddie.  The other three turned to look at her.  “They are still human, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” said Danny, frowning.  “But I don’t know how much, um, agency they have right now.  If we were in Amity, I’d say sure, our police understand, mostly, but…  Also, bringing extra hostages into this might not be a good idea.”

“If it’s the campus police that would get called, they might be affected, too,” said Jazz.  

“They have campus police?  How do you know?”

“This college sent me a brochure once.”

“Right.  Um.  I could always just fly us out of here,” said Danny.

“Assuming they don’t have ranged attacks,” said Mom, dubiously.

“Hm.  Yeah.  I think I could lift the GAV, and then we could just leave the shield on.”

“Assuming the shield does anything.”

Danny shrugged.  “I can always just try to fight them outright.  I’d prefer not to do that, though.”

Mom inhaled as if she were about to say something but was cut off by a loud noise from outside.

“Jack~  Maddie~ I know you’re in there.”  That was Dr. Stone’s voice, warped by a megaphone speaker.  “Why don’t you come out and see what I’ve done?  I dare say I’ve exceeded even our wildest dreams from college.”  A long pause.  “I even made a portal…  Weren’t you trying to get one of those?  Isn’t that what got good old Vlad hospitalized?”  There was laughter.  Too much laughter.  

The mob was laughing, too.

Superbia.  Pride.

Danny knew what he wanted to do.  He wanted to walk out and deal with the threat that was grating on his every sense.  But…  He knew that prideful actions were contraindicated under the present circumstances.  

Influence.  Right. How much could Danny be influenced?

How much could his family be influenced?

He looked up at his parents, seeking guidance. They seemed uncertain, too.  

“I didn’t destroy any lives- I made new life. New life!  Powered by an interdimensional portal, oh, yes…  Can you imagine the application?  Can you imagine a new world?”

“Okay, he didn’t seem like this in the apartment,” muttered Jazz.  “We have human nonlethal weapons, right?”

“Still have to worry about running people over,” said Danny.  He looked back at the lab building.  “We could try to cut this off at the source.  They aren’t protecting the building.  They’re using it as part of their perimeter.”

Eyes turned to the dimly lit building.  

“We can cover you,” offered Dad.  

“I don’t like this any better than you flying off with us,” said Mom.  “But…  It offers a more permanent solution.”

Danny should have gone after it when he was in the building the first time.  Well.  Time only rewound for one ghost, and that ghost wasn’t him.  

Unless he counted…  Never mind.  The point was, despite all his other wonderful and troubling features, Danny couldn’t go back and change a decision he’d already made.  Agonizing over it was a waste of time and brain power.  

Dad got behind the wheel.  Jazz crawled up into the well-disguised turret.  Maddie manned the other weapons.  

Danny stood at the door, ready to run, ready to transform as soon as he was through the shield.  

Family bonding activities.  So much fun.  

.

The mob attacked before he got the door open. He still made it to the building.

.

Danny didn’t bother with doors or windows or halls. He remembered what floor Dr. Stone’s office was on, and, now that he was sensitized to it, he could feel Superbia. He went through the walls, straight as an arrow.

(He wondered, briefly, if he was being as bigoted as he’d often felt his parents to be.  If he was ascribing more evil to the portals to the Red Country than was warranted. If he was simply holding up a dark mirror and seeing what he feared from himself.)

(But no.  He did not command like that.  He did not force his people to assemble armies in the night or attack people.  He kept them safe.  He had rules.)

The lab was awash in sick red not-light that burned in Danny’s mind.  It was barely physically perceptible, more present in senses that couldn’t translate to human terms than anything to do with Danny’s eyes, ghostly or not.  

In the center of the lab, on an operation table, was a stitched-together corpse.  Perhaps, under other circumstances, it would have been a very pretty corpse.  A young woman with long dark hair and broad shoulders.  

Its chest had been torn open.  Half-in half-out of the cavity was a red orb, the source of the not-light, like some sick imitation of a ghost core.  

(It reminded Danny of Freakshow’s staff, and he realized that he never did find out where that horrid thing had come from.)

They had been trying to make something like Danny.

He felt like he had eaten those blood blossom pancakes.  

Danny gritted his teeth and let his light, white-green and clear, fill his hands.  Ectoplasm fought against the miasma in the air, an oddly purifying presence. It wasn’t enough to chase away the wrongness.  This wasn’t his space.  

The fight against Gula was different.  Both he and it had been within nominally living bodies.  They had been next to the heart of Danny’s territory, his home ground.  Danny had been tricked and trapped, taken off guard, unable to use the tricks he had grown used to while fighting ghosts and Vlad.

(He could feel Superbia in his mind, pride urging him forward towards error.  Pride in his abilities, in his mind, in his family.)

Danny drifted sideways, watching.  Listening.  Other things in the building were stirring.  Sparks of wrongness growing and twisting, warping into fountains and springs.  This whole building was full of it.  Rotten to the bones.  It pressed against his teeth.  

Careful.  

He had to be careful.  

The orb shone.  

(Too much like Freakshow’s staff.)

(Influence, Danny remembered.  Just how close was it to mind control?)

Doing this as a human was impossible.  Trying to fight that as a ghost was unwise.

The always-open always-closed door that both contained and laid within Danny’s soul shifted.  So did the corpse on the table, its constituent parts sliding over each other gruesomely.  Death had lost its hold, lost its meaning.  The ghost that was Danny twisted, and he was too human, too alive.

Special little thing.  You think you can defeat us.

He could.  He could open himself and wash all this away in an instant.  He could burn with electric fire and the cold of deep space.  He could reach out.  The orb would be as dust under his hand.  

He didn’t move.  

In thinking you become…

Un-light burned up from the grooves in the tile floor. It didn’t reach the soles of his boots, didn’t reach his soul.  He gritted his teeth.  

US.  

YOUR VICTORY IS OURS.

“Wow, you picked the wrong person to use that strategy on,” said Danny, out loud.  Internally, he pulled on the delicate and frayed strands of reality that persisted even here. “I have so much imposter syndrome and anxiety that it isn’t even funny.  I know I can’t beat you.  Not here.”

But then, he didn’t have to.  

He found the right string and pulled.  He found the key and opened the door.  Death was in the room again.  Danny could move again.  Not so much the pile of flesh in front of him.  It was hard, it hurt, to keep hold of something like this, but half of Danny was this, was dead, even if he had far too many halves to ever be whole.  

Ice coated the floor, the tiles cracking under the sudden temperature change.  He dropped to the floor and was human.  

An impossible thing.  

And behind the human—

Well.  Danny didn’t have to defeat Superbia.  It wasn’t like Gula, didn’t have that strength, that experience.  He just had to make it so the things that would, could.  

(Danny had rules.  Some of them were to protect himself.)

He walked over to the orb.  Ultimately, it was just a representation, not Superbia itself. Still.  He put his foot down on it and slowly transferred his weight to it until it cracked.  Until it splintered.  Until it shattered.  Until he ground its dust under his heel.  

Then, the building collapsed.  Danny didn’t move, didn’t have to move.  He was a ghost again, floating in the air, exactly where he had been, all the floors having passed harmlessly through him.  

Outside, the faculty and student body of the college were sprawled in piles on the ground.  The GAV was, somehow, halfway up a tree.  A shockingly sturdy tree.  Several statues were in pieces.  

The sun was coming up.  

Danny put a hand to his chest and assessed himself. Yes.  Still here.  Still himself.  The Ghost Zone still sang in his bones, in his core.  He was still anchored in Amity Park.  Everything in order.  

This place, though… This place would be tainted for years, a thin spot forever.  He could feel it, now.  Why couldn’t he feel it before, when they drove in?

He shuddered.  Then he flew down to the GAV and knocked on the window.  Mom rolled it down.  

“Want me to fly us away to somewhere secluded before the cops get called and we get asked a bunch of awkward questions?” he asked.

Mom closed her eyes.  “Please do,” she said.

[vinaity]

hey !! i saw you were looking for some danganronpa requests and i was wondering if you could write mondo owada x fem! reader where he asks the reader to prom (or just any school dance) thank youuu !! 💖💖

woohoo! this ended up being almost 2k words (1.7k to be exact), and this is my first time writing in months! this was a joy to write, and i added some more plot and context to this!~

this is also my first time writing mondo, so please don’t judge!

You were never really the type to go to proms- but that didn't mean that you would straight up turn someone down rudely if they did ask.

Now, people have tried to ask you to the prom- but you had to politely turn them down because you weren't interested to go this year.

There was one reason for this: Your ex.

You had caught him cheating only a mere week ago, and going to the prom would bring you more pain. Seeing those happy couples dancing would've added salt to the wound to your breakup.

That's what brought you here, sitting in class casually when something landed on the back of your head.

You turned around, seeing a scrunched up paper ball sitting behind your chair. Picking it up, you turned around to your desk and opened the note.

"Meet me under that one tree after school, don't bring anyone else."

You knew exactly what tree they had meant, there is a sakura tree near the schools entrance. You usually could see cars or busses driving past, as there was a car-park on campus for people to park if they were attending here. But people don't really go there unless it is to have a quiet place to study, but this could be for something different maybe?

You looked at the note suspiciously, as you didn't recognize the handwriting.

As the day went on, your mind drew back to the note which was sitting in your pocket.

-

It was lunch when you were beginning to overthink, but suddenly you heard a voice being you

"Hello Y/N!"

You turned around, seeing your good friend Ishimaru Kiyotaka walking towards you with his lunch in hand.

"Taka! Hi!" You smiled happily as he sat next to you.

Something was off, your other friend wasn't here. He was always here, but today where was he?

"Where's Mondo?" You asked innocently, looking at Taka in concern.

"M-Mondo is just sick! Yep, he's just sick. Nothing else." You were growing suspicious, as Taka never stumble or repeat his words. As Taka was blabbering on, an idea had popped up in your head considering the note you had received earlier that day.

"Taka, I don't wanna be rude or anything, but do you know anyone with this handwriting?" You asked, showing Taka the note.

He had taken his sweet time reading the note, even bringing it to his face to have an closer inspection.

"Me?!" Taka scoffed, "I have no idea what you're talking about! Are you even going?"

"I am, why?"

"Why?! You have no idea who even gave this to you in the first place!"

"It got thrown at me earlier, I don't know who threw it but someone did."

"That doesn't matter! You could die for all I know!"

Before you both could argue more, the bell had rung for lunch to be over. You sadly didn't have any classes with Taka, so you were just left with your thoughts for the remainder of the school day.

-

Your curiosity was at it's highest when the bell had rung to indicate that it was indeed 3pm and that the school was over for the day, which left you rushing outside of the school and towards the parking lot.

As you were walking away from your locker, you felt someone's hand grip your wrist. You turn around in shock, only to see.. Taka?

"Nope, there's no way you're going there by yourself!"

"But the note says that I can't bring anyone."

"I don't care at this point, I want you to be safe and not end up dead on the sidewalk the next day or something!" Taka had always been the one to think the worst out of everything, which was both a good and bad thing depending on the situation.

"At least follow the notes rules and wait nearby or something."

"Fine, but I want to be able to see what was going on."

"Alright fine, but if anything bad happens you're coming to save my ass."

"Fine."

-

When you had to leave Taka and head down closer to the exit of the school, you had suddenly felt a weird vibe. It was quite hard to explain in words, but it felt like something was fishy with this whole situation.

Why was the note thrown at you in the first place when you had told people that you weren't going? Why was Taka acting so defensive earlier? And most importantly, where in the world was Mondo?

You, Mondo and Taka were really close with each-other. Yeah, you did have other friends as well- but you had felt like Mondo and Taka were the people who understood you the most. You and Taka had known each other for years, and when Mondo was introduced to your tight-knitted group by Taka, you had welcomed him with open arms.

After knowing Mondo for 4 years, you had had secretly grown feelings for him over time. You didn't want to say anything as you didn't want the friendship to be ruined, and besides why would he go for someone like you where there are so many other, more attractive girls out there?

You had never told Taka about this, as you were scared Taka would tell him. You knew in your heart that Taka would never do such a thing, but you had just went with the safe way and kept your feelings to yourself.

There were lots of secrets you hadn't told them, but one of the big ones was that you didn't really love your ex. When you thought about it now, you had thought that he would be a band-aid fix on your feelings for Mondo. In retrospect, the relationship just made you fall in love with Mondo harder.

Mondo was always at school, no matter what event had happen he would still show up. He didn't really care much about the education part of it (unlike Taka, which you thought was kind-of relieving), and he was genuinely there for you if you ever needed someone to talk to (Taka was like that too, but he was too busy with his studies all the time to even hang out outside of school).

Everyone would ask why you weren't afraid of Mondo, and you would always reply with "There's more then what meets the eye you know, you can't just base someone on their actions.  Because if you don't at least give them a chance, you won't be able to see the real them or to see the motivation for their actions." And it was true, especially for Mondo.

Your thoughts were side tracked as you arrived at the tree, much to your dismay there was no one there. Deciding to wait for at least an hour, you sat against the tree and began scrolling through your phone hopelessly.

The sound of an motorbike disrupted your thoughts, you looked up to see Mondo.. on his motorbike. He gestured for you to come here, which had you running towards him.

"What are you even doing here?! Where were you all day?" You asked as he just huffed and handed you a helmet and gestures to the spot behind him on his motorcycle, which you put the helmet on and sat on the spot behind him.

As he began to drive, you leaned close to him and asked, "Where are we going?"

"Just wait will ya', we'll be there soon." He replies, focusing on the road ahead of him.

After driving for about half an hour, Mondo parks the motorbike near a park and tells you to get off the bike and head to the park with him. You comply, following him as he enters the park and sits himself against a tree.

You stand in front of him, wondering what he was doing until you heard him speak, "Ya' sitting down or what? I've gotta tell ya' somethin'."

Sitting down next to him, there was silence as you both just sat and stared at the sky.

"Mon?" You asked, looking over at him, "Why did you take us here?"

"There's somethin' I've been meaning to tell ya' for months." He replied, locking his eyes with his, "I-I just don't know how it'll go out ya' know."

"The only way is to ask, Mon. What's up? You can tell me what's bothering you." You smiled at him, gazing into his violet orbs.

"Did you wanna go to prom with me? I heard you goin' on about how you weren't gonna go, but I just wanted to make it so ya can have a good time." He admitted, "I know it's hard to get over a breakup, I've been there once or twice in my life."

"You have?" You asked surprised. You had thought that Mondo hadn't dated anyone.

"Yea, It's hard- trust me will ya." He replied, "I just wanted to make a memory with ya that we'll both remember. I never really got to cherish those with my brother."

"Mon, that's so sad.. and I'm happy you want to make those memories with me." You smiled at him, leaning over and squeezing his arm, "I would love to go to prom with you."

Mondo's eyes lightened up as your smile widened, "Why did you think it was hard to do in the first place?"

He looked away from you and stared at the grass, "Because there's somethin' I've been meaning to tell ya for years."

"Go ahead Mon, we have tons of time."

"I-I like ya, but not in the friend way. I have for years, Y/N." He turned to you again, "I still remember the first day we met."

"In the cafe-"

"-Yea, I remember thinking that you were the sexiest person I've ever seen." As he said that, you felt a blush creep up on your cheeks, "After knowing you for so long, it made me realise that you've made my life better then it was. You make me a better person, and I love ya' because of that."

"I-I love you too Mon- you've made my life much more entertaining. Also.. you give the best hugs." He laughed at that, "But.. I would date people to get my mind off you. To be honest with you, it made me fall in love harder with you."

He smiled as he wrapped an arm around your shoulder and pulling you close to him, "Y/N.. I love ya so much, and it feels so good knowing that you feel the same way."

You hummed, leaning close to him as the arm around his shoulders snuck down to your waist- "It's true Mon, I love you- more then words could explain."

"Same here, doll."

[flamediel]

1. who do u think uses the most petnames

Erick, he has a silly sense of humor so I think he comes up with crazy and silly nicknames that catch on with the rest.

2. What pet names do you think they each like to call you ~romantically~

Richard- shorty/shawty or baby girl. He has a height complex (short with a big attitude) so he is def gonna use petnames that accentuate that he is bigger than you. Though, I also think he would be the one to call you like the most grand stuff to hype you up like "my diosa" or something like that.

Chris- Cutesy version of your name. In terms of like terms of endearment I think he constantly changes them up, like for a month he calls you sweetie, then two weeks he can't stop calling you whatever cute wording the used in their new single (like honeyboo for example) and so on. He has a fun personality and needs to keep it fun and light in the relationship too.

Zabdiel- He will absolutely call you Mi amor when he is annoyed/frustrated, almost all boricuas do that. Prob just goes with mami , bebe (or the less common variant beba) and if you have a middle name he would 100 call you that. With Zabdiel, I feel petnames is all about intimacy so when he uses each petname kind of becomes code words for his moods or his feelings or just some secret joke between you two.

Joel - the one that goes absolutely into the ridiculously sweet petnames. He will call you honey, sweeatheart, mi cielo, mi reina, mi vida and prob refers to you when talking to other people as "the love of my life". This boy is a hopeless romantic and the way he uses petnames reflect that.

Erick- creatively made up petname...maybe based on something that reminds him of you or maybe some silly but adorable version of your name. Whatever it is, Erick came up with it just for you and it will 100% make you feel special. He just seems to be the type that can find humor in everything and will turn that silly humor into fun petnames.

3. What petnames do they like to be called ~romantically~

Richard: I feel that though he doesn't really care much, he would kind of love it if you called him by his middle name. And well, the classic Papi I guess?

Chris: He would be so upset if you called him by his full first name, he automatically thinks he did something wrong when you do that. I think he would be fine with anything as long as you say it in the write tone, like if you say a sweet name but your tone isn't sweet he'd put a pouty face until you use the right tone...what you are actually using as a petname he doesnt care much.

Zabdiel: I think he prob likes to hear you say his name just like that. But he prob expect a similar version of what he calls you depending the situation so nicknames like Papi and bebé/bebo are prob tossed around the most.

Joel: anything is fair game except his name, he will call you like at least 3 petnames when talking to you and he expects the same treatment. Mi amor, mi rey, mi corazón, ect are some examples.

Erick: Prob the classic baby? Idk tbh 🙈 Maybe he is into animal petnames? Yeah, I can see that like you calling him by whatever animal the first plushie he gave you.

4. What petnames do they call you but ~spicy~

Ok, Im gonna try it differently now, Imma say a couple of petnames and who I think would say them when getting spicy:

-Daddy's girl/ Good Girl - Richard, Chris, Zabdiel (when he is feeling in the mood to tease)

-Mami- Erick & Zabdiel

-My (insert degrading term here) -Richard and Chris

-Mia/Mine - Zabdiel, Joel and Richard (yeah they give the vibes to whisper possessively when going down on you)

Nena- Zabdiel & Erick (prob as a warning when being teased)

-Baby- Joel, maybe Richard (though Baby Girl is more his style)

-My pet -I think this might slip out of Joel's mouth in the right context.

Kitten/ Gatita :Richard, Chris and Erick

Belleza: Chris, Zabdiel & Erick

Mi diosa: Richard

Princesa: Richard, Chris & Joel

5. What petnames do they like to be called but ~spicy~

Daddy: Obviously Richard, Chris and Zabdiel (but I think Zabdiel specifically might prefer the spanish alternative Papi)

Baby: Zabdiel and Erick (Joel would be both turned on and offended by being called baby)

Calling them by their own names: All of them, have you seen the egos of those boys? Yeah

Calling them by their middle name: Richard and Chris

Dirty/ Naughty boy: Chris, Zabdiel, Erick & Joel

My pet: Zabdiel

Guapo: Richard & Joel

DAMN ok iara lets go!

1. who do u think uses the most petnames?

erick. i agree he’s so silly he’s always using casual nicknames it’s the cutest

2. What pet names do you think they each like to call you ~romantically~

richard: can’t lie if that man started calling me shawty i would call him that right back he’s barely a few inches taller and he comes in w that energy? but tbh i just feel like i would v much enjoy pissing richard off alkjdlshs. baby girl or anything romantic or extra like that tho? bro I’d be so RED and he knows

chris: i agree i don’t see him sticking to one name for too long he’s always changing it up. esp when he’s joking around he’ll sing those parts to you and just watch you blush and roll your eyes at him for it. 

zab: i love the idea of nicknames varying by mood. and it just turns into a thing where you can kind of figure out where he’s at mentally based on what he says. mi amor when he’s annoyed or frustrated, but then bebe when he’s tired and just needs a hug. mami when he’s all needy, just TONS OF NICKNAMES. i can see him using a middle name esp if you don’t love it to make it all cutesy, or your last name.

Joel: yep.. that fucking tracks dskjjdhjkshk man loves love and he is sickly sweet w his pet names. it’s honestly cute how constant it is and esp since it’s all genuine it makes you SOFT man

erick: look i see erick pulling a christopher w those song themes pet names like my boo and shit but he’s super jokey with it, he also uses like those ridiculously over the top ones but always w some humor behind them. and name ones, 100%, he’s really cutesy and jokey with it. 

3. What petnames do they like to be called ~romantically~

Richard: def papi, but i also do think he cares like. richard gives me lowkey romantic vibes like once he’s in w someone he’s IN yk? and I feel like he’d enjoy being called my love or amor or something like that bc he does have a soft spot and we gotta talk about it more dammit

Chris: you’re right christopher is so formal? and even chris i feel like he wouldn’t love. he deserves affection ok he wants to be called love and baby and like even papi casually and just w a ton of love in your voice and if you sound off he’s gonna be so confused about it. 

Zabdiel: ok but zabdiel as a name seems so intimate for some reason? idk why but it really does. i would call him baby 100% like idc if he’s twice my side and could physically split me in half he’s baby and if he’s MY baby then he will definitely be made aware of this lmao. 

Joel: joel needs love and affection and uou know what that’s valid. baby? sweetheart? amor? angel? he’s melting

Erick: not animal nicknames 😭i can see it tbh but he looks like my cousin so i can’t even imagine him like that lmao

4. What petnames do they call you but ~spicy~

Daddy's girl/ Good Girl - this is such a richard and chris phrase, zab when he’s teasing or feeling dommy but chris ESP like if you’re giving him head? “you’re being such a good girl for me, just like that baby”

Mami- Erick & Zabdiel, sure, but also chris. tho in a more casual way. he would DEF say it in bed too. 

My (insert degrading term here) -Richard and Chris. yes, tho rich uses more degrading terms i feel like. 

Mia/Mine - Zabdiel, Joel and Richard. yes but ESP ZABDIEL like? when he’s just, slightly jealous or put off. if you’re teasing him by talking to other guys or not giving him attention for example? he’s pinning you to the bed, kissing down your chest and just whispering it to you, reminding you who exactly can turn you into this mess.

Nena- Zabdiel & Erick definitely. zab in that quiet voice when you’re trying to tease him in public especially “later, nena”

Baby- Joel ESPECIALLY yes, and in that whiney babyyyyy when he wants attention

My pet ok yes i agree this is def only joel and only in specific scenarios

Kitten/Gatita: Richard, Chris and Erick. i can see this esp w richard in that teasing, degrading tone when he has you tied up and on your knees, stroking your face and wiping the running mascara off of your cheek once he’s finished fucking your mouth

Belleza: Chris, Zabdiel & Erick. erick for sure. big erick vibes w this one, whispered undfer his breath as he watches you undress. 

Mi diosa: Richard yes he’s such a ficking simp like? we need to talk about that more

Princesa: Richard, Chris & Joel. again w richard the band’s simp and then chris and joel for sure, both sexually and not. 

5. What petnames do they like to be called but ~spicy~

Daddy: I agree with this being a richard thing, but i think chris is definitely more into papi and zab would only really be ok with papi. I don’t see him liking daddy at all tbh, but papi? for sure. 

Baby: Zabdiel better like being called baby bc i will call him baby all the time he has such baby energy. I actually see erick being more offended by it as the baby of the group, and joel being surprised at first but leaning into it. 

Calling them by their own names: omg yes in bed? esp zabdiel he will MAKE you say his name in bed when he’s feeling possessive, asking you who this pussy belongs to. richard def prefers daddy in bed and might take his name as being bratty but in foreplay or less intense scenes he’s super into it. 

Calling them by their middle name: Richard and Chris. tbh idk about this one like? maybe? i really don’t know.

Dirty/Naughty boy: Chris, Zabdiel, Erick & Joel. ok i’m gonna have to say this one goes to joel i think he feels good about breaking rules and this is definitely one of those things that reminds him he’s being nasty lol. 

My pet: Zabdiel. i see that highkey. also likes callling you mami in the same vein esp when you’re taking the lead

Guapo: Richard & Joel. i very firmly believe if you call richard anything but daddy in bed he’s mad BUT i can see this in teasing or foreplay w him for sure. joel is def into it he needs an ego boost. 

come talk about petnames

[julesnichols]

fic writer review!

1. How many works do you have on ao3?

2. What's your grand total ao3 word count?

3. How many fandoms have you written for?

4. What is the first fandom you ever wrote for?

5. Is there a fandom you would like to write for but haven't yet?

6. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

7. Do you respond to comments? Why/why not?

8. Which of your fics has the angstiest ending?

9. Are any of your fics pure fluff?

10. Have any of your fics ended differently than you originally planned?

11. Do you write AUs?

12. Do you ever write smut?

13. Do you usually try to stick to canon?

14. What are your favorite tropes to utilize in your writing?

15. Have you ever received hateful comments on a fic?

16. What is the nicest comment you've received?

17. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

18. Have you ever co-written a fic?

19. What is your all-time favorite ship to write for?

20. Is there a WIP you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

21. What are your writing strengths?

22. What are your writing weaknesses?

23. Are there any of your early fics that you wish you could go back and change?

24. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in a fic?

25. What is your favorite fic that you've written so far?

**Tag another writer if you want!**

1. 82 or so (I’ve posted a few anonymously and I intend to keep them that way publicly)

2. 207,816

3. On ao3? 7, though over the years across other sites it’s been more; don’t remember exactly now

4. Crossover between Twilight and a Harvest Moon game, I was 12, don’t judge me

5. Mmm… maybe?

6. Okay so:

1. i can’t give it up (POI)

2. you should see me in a crown (CAOS)

3. I Love it When You Play Doctor (POI)

4. Make Time (POI)

5. you got me on a cliff’s edge where i belong (POI)

As a word of warning, all of these were written either during a manic episode or while drunk. And I feel like you need that context because they’re not great, they’ve just been on there so long that they got a lot of kudos.

7. Always! I like engaging with other people. Even if all I can manage is a thank you, I want people to know they were acknowledged. :) I have a lot of anxiety about comments due to negative past experiences, but I try.

8. Oh Jesus… I have 82 of them I honestly don’t really know anymore. 😅 Sorry

9. A few are, yes.

10. Oh definitely. My long fic for Penny Dreadful is a good example. It ended similar but I did scrap some stuff because it didn’t feel right, and where I ended it did.

11. Yes! Mostly canon divergent AUs and fixits, but the murder mystery AU exists 👀

12. Yup. A lot of it. Oops??

13. In general, yeah. Or twisting it slightly.

14. Bedsharing, friends to lovers, enemies to lovers. Mostly.

15. Yup. And I am not afraid to tell someone off for them. How politely depends on whether or not the person genuinely intended to be mean though. I know sometimes people think they’re being helpful, but telling me my story isn’t realistic isn’t helpful when you could just exit out or write your own. And I am not afraid to politely and assertively say that last bit. The more the merrier when it comes to fics, and don’t feel entitled to tell people how to write theirs. But if you intended to be hateful… I’ll be far less polite.

16. Oh god… I don’t know.

17. Knock on wood I’m pretty sure the answer is no. But y’all. There’s a way to say your work was inspired by someone else’s. Please use it. This shouldn’t even have to be a concern.

18. Yep!

19. Hmm… probably Melanie and Bennett honestly. Ethan and Vanessa are a close second though.

20. I think I will eventually finish all of them, it’s just a matter of time. I did start something a few years ago for Penny Dreadful that I ended up posting, but it also works as a oneshot so I’m not sure I’d ever go back to it. And I’ve kinda started the sequel to the long Penny Dreadful fic, which I do wanna start posting and finish some day. When I’m more confident that I’ll be able to do so.

21. I’m… not sure? It honestly depends on the characters and pairing.

22. I overthink. Generally. But also again depends on the characters and pairing.

23. All of them pre 2018 honestly. And a few after that, but not as many. Don’t have the energy for it though.

24. I think that it’s complicated. I hesitate to write in languages I don’t speak because I don’t want to get something wrong and accidentally offend. But at the same time too, I do think that it is kind of offensive not to write in another language sometimes if a character would be speaking it. So I try to find a balance and hope that I can walk that tightrope by never choosing anything overly complicated.

25. Mm… depends on the day. But overall I have to say the PD long fic with our backs to the wall (the darkness will fall) because I proved to myself that I could write longer things and complete them.

[thisiskatsblog]

Hey, sorry if this is too personal or if you’ve already answered it. Would you mind telling how you realized you were bisexual? I’m kinda confused and struggling a bit 😫

Hi there! Warm hugs to you! Confusion happens. Struggling with that is really normal and okay. Whatever it is that’s confusing you, there’s probably a lot to unpack, but it’s good you’re not running away from it. For me, there were cues all along, but clarity came when for the first time, and this was in my mid- twenties, I allowed myself to sit with all of my feelings, without pushing any of them away. Because pushing them away, I only then realized, I had been doing for a very long time. 

It was almost insignificant. My partner commented positively on the female violinist at a Sparklehorse concert. I was really pissed and scolded him about it. He said I shouldn’t feel so offended as “She’s your type”. For a moment I felt like I was about to explode. He meant to say she looked like me, but for a second I understood something different. And I had a flash of realization. I had been about to act offended, which would have been blatantly homophobic, but underneath, I had also felt a tinge of relief, YES she WAS my type, I liked this woman, I’d do her. And it was this mix of “oh god I almost acted like a homophobic prick” and “oh god FINALLY someone GETS me” that made me realize - OH. I have these feelings, and they have been making me miserable, because I feel like I should be pushing them away. But what if I didn’t act like a prick to myself, what if I stopped being scared of them, stopped pushing them away? I watched the rest of that concert mesmerized by the wonder of my feelings for Sparklehorse’s cute violinist, and realized, yes, I feel sexual desire for women, and that’s never going to go away. My sexual desire for men had always been clear and without question to me, I knew that wasn’t going to go away either. So that was the start of a long, and still ongoing, journey of gradually looking my feelings in the eye, and starting to understand I was always going to feel attracted to more than one gender, and trying to navigate that fact in a biphobic and bi erasing world. It is not always easy and simple. I don’t feel I’m fully there; but looking it in the eye really made me a better, nicer, happier person.  

I have probably shared the full story in the past and I may have tagged it “bisexuality” or “me”, but I feel ya so I’m happy to tell the story again. Under the cut. And: always here to talk. 

Clearly it’s something that was always there, and the realization came in many many stages. When I first heard of the concept gay people (it was the eighties, in the context of AIDS) I asked my mom “but what if I turn out to be gay” and her absolute certainty that I wouldn’t, really did not sit right with me. I was 8 and could not imagine getting naked with anyone, but I could imagine marrying a girl. I think I already realized I liked some girls a bit more than others in my very early teens, but it took the form of strong admiration.  I grew up in a strongly religious and homophobic environment, incredibly powerful incentives all around to ignore those feelings, stay far away from them, not explore them, just, pretend they were not there and label them “I just REALLY want to be her friend”. Just blame that tingly feeling in your chest when you sat close and she talked in your ear on the strong smell of her perfume. And later, telling yourself this is a phase, a test. Yep, must be God testing me - praying (something i considered useless long before I lost all faith), but praying, probably the last time I did it, please God, help me, please let this go away. I cried an entire night long. And forgot about that episode for more than ten years. Pushed it as far as I could in my memory.

 Knowing for absolutely sure I liked guys, I was sure I could not be a lesbian (and didn’t want to be, the homophobia was deeply engrained) and I was sure this would eventually go away. And it did, I got a boyfriend, he was cool, and beautiful, and delicate, and he had long hair. Boyfriends came and went until I met a girl who instantly became my best friend on the day we met, and someone - probably thinking we looked cosy - handed us a flyer to an LGBT event at uni that same day (I should write a fic based on this I know). She said “let’s go, for fun”, and me, remembering the goddess from high school who had inspired my desperate prayers, though, yeah, I should look into this, and said, “yeah, for giggles”. We went and I... did NOT feel at home. I’m rather femmy, and most of the women there were pretty butch, and I just... did not feel attracted or like I belonged. I also didn’t like it when the groups split up and the guys went elsewhere. We watched a lame movie about a woman discovering herself and my friend had opinions. One of which was “I don’t want to go for the drinks after, you’re prettier than any of the girls here anyway, let’s go to mine and have some tea”. I am pretty flirt blind I have to tell you that at this point. Over all the years that we were best friends we emotionally functioned as a co-dependent couple, but I never took any of those things she said, like “you are more important to me than any boy could be” seriously. Like, at all. I was pretty dense. Plain stupid, really. But I agreed with her and said, yeah no, not interested, let’s have tea at your place. All the environmental homophobia had deeply hidden me from myself. So we stayed best friends who acted a bit like a couple. 

So i was completely oblivious, but it must have been around this time that I at some point woke up from a very sexy, pleasing dream, which I had not wanted to wake up from, and realized, hey, that was a girl, with delicious boobs, lush lips and beautiful curly hair I was just dreaming of. SHOCK. It was not a phase... By then I’d had sexual experiences, had grown comfortable with being a sexual being (coming from such a religious upbringing, that in itself took ages) and I could look it in the eye. Sexual desire for women. But I thought it was just that. Hmm, I apparently like thinking of sex with women. Not a hair on my head that considered a romantic relationship, building a life with a woman. It was before women could get married to eachother and have children. Ellen had come out maybe a year or two before, or three, or five, I don’t know - point is: I didn’t know any long term female couples. There were no examples.

That said, my friend and I were sometimes perceived as a couple (I will never forget the time someone congratulated us on planning to move in together, or the time someone called her my sweetheart instead of my friend (girlfriend and friend are the same word in Dutch, so I cannot imagine the times people used that word meaning something other than I took it for, or the times I said it and people took it for something else). But people really close to us thought we were an item. Except there were boyfriends, coming in and out of our lives through revolving doors. They generally didn’t bother me. I mean, mine, always delicate long haired boys, sometimes wearing makeup or girls’ clothes, DEFINITELY did not bother me. But they annoyed her. She never thought any of them was good enough for me. I didn’t think any of her boyfriends were quite good enough for her, but she was clearly also not serious about them, so they didn’t bother me. Until we made plans to move into an appartment together and she sent me househunting with her then boyfriend who was also looking for something, and he inadvertently said “i don’t need something big, I expect I’ll be spending most of my time at your apartment”. I cancelled the plans immediately and I didn’t even know why it hurt me so much. 

Worst. Breakup. Ever. She was extremely upset over it as well. People who knew us well could just not get what had happened. And it took me years to figure out how I had been separating my strong emotional attachment to her very neatly from any sexual attraction I felt to the female body. Years later, I figured out that my behaviour on a beach holiday with our respective temp boyfriends, had been pure jealousy and repression. One time she wanted to bathe topless and I got completely upset. My boyfriend was upset at me “not trusting him”, her boyfriend was upset at me “being a prude”, and she was upset at me refusing to look at her and “treating her like a slut” (I wish). But really I was scared shitless. I did not want to look at her boobs. Without being in any way conscious of it, I looked away to avoid having to recognize sexual feelings. That same holiday her boyfriend at some point stood stark naked on a table. I looked away from his private parts as well, a little less though, those feelings were also not desirable considering he was her boyfriend, but - you know - more familiar, and less scary. When I heard her bumping the headboard in the room next door, I wanted to have loud sex with my boyfriend too. 

And years later, I had sex with her boyfriend as well. After he’d long been dumped and replaced, after I’d cancelled the moving in plans. After she and I had tentatively started talking again. I begged him never to tell her anything about it ever. It felt like the worst betrayal, as I knew she had truly cared for him and I couldn’t bear for her to find out. I don’t think she ever did. I also never stopped feeling guilty about it. What she thought of me was the only thing I cared about. 

There was a short interlude with a hot redhead I’d developed sexual desire for, still not taking the possibility of a relationship with a woman seriously, and running into her in the underwear department with exactly the same set in her hands, and thinking, oh, to buy underwear for her, wrap it, gift it to her on her birthday, and that eliciting the picture of a longer term relationship with her, and thinking, yeah for her I might not mind people thinking i was gay, I’d be proud to introduce her to my friends - an easier thought to entertain when it’s entirely hypothetical and also realizing then: uhm. People thought I’d be a lesbian, like they now think I’m straight. Perhaps this is the reason why I do not know anyone who is bisexual. I just think of them all as straight, or gay. The invisibility of people who are bisexual was a really difficult one for me. It’s SO difficult to picture coming out as bisexual when no one you know is living any kind of example. Anyway. This was a fantasy, but a useful one in making progress towards understanding myself. 

Enter the man I ended up having a child with. He had been in the picture for a while. The “girlfriend” from before (that’s what I call her now) had always warned me off him, didn’t think we’d be a good match. But I really liked him, that wasn’t going away. So when it turned out he liked me too, we got together and it worked. It was our last year of uni, and after, she moved away for an internship, and I moved in with him. She visited once, which led to his confession that he hated her guts, and her confession that she hated his, followed by a list of denigrating comments about our living circumstances. She was clearly not supportive of the relationship that was everything to me so the decision was easy to cut her out. This was even worse than the first “breakup”, complete with nightmarish dreams and withdrawal symptoms. I kept dreaming about her an din those dreams we’d make up and apologize for all the horrible things we had said and done to eachother. I also kept having sexual dreams of Madonna, and a hot friend of ours. Which I’d discuss with my boyfriend. He could relate. It must have been around this time that I started truly questioning the nature of my lost relationship with the girl.

The relationship with my boyfriend was good but I did display some serious unpleasantness around... certain issues. I’d always had that with my boyfriends. I had issues with pictures of beautiful girls on their walls. Particularly if they had nice boobs. They had all seen that as inappropriate jealousy or prudishness. Jealousy it was, but not the kind they thought. To me, the realization FINALLY came as I was at a concert with my boyfriend, and he was talking appreciatively about a female violinist. I acted angry and upset. He called me a prude. I denied it. He called me jealous. I denied it. He thought I was acting like a pain in the ass anyway and said I should feel honoured, cause “She’s your type”, he said. 

And my brain went “Ah”. Indeed, she is my type. I’d do her. BUT I CANNOT SAY THAT AND I HATE YOU FOR BEING ABLE TO SAY THAT. I was jealous, cause he was allowed to express desire for women, and I felt that I was not. So that was it, my aha moment during a Sparklehorse concert. He had meant ‘she looks a bit like you’, I got him completely wrong, but I am so thankful I did. 

That’s unfortunately not the end of the story. But it was the turning point. I had finally understood. It was the starting point of me revisiting all the past issues, stringing all the beads I just painted for you together, making sense of my own story. I made a resolution then and there, that - whatever else - I was probably never ever going to come out, because bisexuality did not exist in my world,  but I would allow myself to feel sexual desire for women. I was going to stop hating myself for it, and I was going to stop hating others for being allowed to feel something I didn’t allow myself to feel. I instantly became a much more pleasant person to everyone I know. And enjoyed my raunchy dreams about Sparklehorse’s violinist, Madonna, and a certain redhead. 

On online fan forums I started migrating to LGBTQ content, it was my way of staying in touch with my community, as there was none in my real life. There was no local  bi group that I knew of, and though I did attend some lesbian parties with a lesbian friend, besides her, most lesbians I met were not very welcoming. The fact that I had a boyfriend of course did not help. I should not be blaming them. 

I found my people online. Started introducing myself to people I met online as bi. Started figuring out how I had been suppressing my sexual desire for women. Then when I couldn’t deny that anymore, had been separating my emotional attachment to women from sexual desire. Realized that societal heteronormativity had made it almost impossible for me to conceive of women as potential long term romantic partners. Casual sex with women I could definitely conceive of, and co-dependent strongly emotional more than friendships eclipsing all the men entering and leaving through revolving doors. But a healthy, stable, romantic, emotional and sexual partnership with a woman? That seemed impossible to me. 

I worked hard to change that, and opening my mind to it, and to the idea that sometimes, you love more than one person at the same time; This has really helped me accept my feelings, myself, who I am. And as I said, it made my life a lot better. It’s gradually allowed me to develop the confidence to come out to people I trust, friends, colleagues, and to try and find, and even build bi+ communities. It’s been great to meet and talk to other people who don’t fit into narrow categories, and allow themselves not to. 

Wishing you the very best on your journey; thank you for sharing with me; and always here to talk anon