peach-star-drops - Tumblr blog

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Here’s the thing: Atsumu does not fight to kill. 

He tells himself that he never ever argues with the intent to hurt the other person - which is halfway a lie because sometimes he gets so mad that words slip out and they are meant to bruise. But that’s the thing, the words are only meant to bruise. 

He doesn’t throw words out that can stab. He does not cut people down into shreds so harshly that they do not know how to recover. 

Every hit he makes is just above the belt, never below it. 

Enough to hurt, enough to make things seem like they are worse than they really are, but he does not gut people. Not if he can help it. 

It’s a very carefully crafted skill, and it’s one that he never would have had if not for the constant fights with his brother. Truthfully, Osamu was his saving grace here. If he’d never learned how to toe the line with his brother, how to say words that irritate and sting but never cut, he’s actually quite sure that he would only fight to kill. 

But instead, Atsumu does not fight to kill. He does not go below the belt. He never crosses a line that cannot be uncrossed. He needles, he pesters, he bruises, but he does not stab. He does not slice. He does not hurt people without making sure that he is not hurting them enough to break them. 

It really is a skill and it really is something he’s done all his life. 

He does not shoot to kill. He never has. He’s not sure he ever will, even in his worst moments. 

Kiyoomi does not have this skill. 

read more!

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Kiyoomi cannot believe he ever thought that Hinata Shoyo was nice. 

He’d been blinded by the other boy's idiot routine, thinking that the redhead was an over-excited puppy dog, that he failed to notice that Hinata was actually the devil. 

Kageyama took a sip of his beer from his place next to him, sighing. “No one ever believes me when I warn them.” Yeah. Kiyoomi had not believed the setter when he’d first been introduced - well, reintroduced, technically Kiyoomi had gone to two years of the Youth All Japan volleyball camp with him, but he hadn’t seen the man again until Hinata had dragged him over after a match against the Alders - and Kageyama had sighed, and apologized for his evil boyfriend. 

Everyone on the Jackals had been confused of course. Because Hinata Shoyo was not evil. It did not help that Hinata, at the time, had let out a loud squawk, slapped the back of Kageyama’s head, and claimed that Kageyama was the evil one. Everyone had just accepted it - Kiyoomi included. 

Now, though, he knew that Kageyama was right. Hinata was the evil one. 

“You’re just lucky he’s no longer as bad as he was.” Kageyama scowled. “He locked Tsukishima and Yamaguchi on the roof. In the rain. It started hailing on them.” Kiyoomi has no idea who Yamaguchi is and only a vague idea of who Tsukishima is, but he feels a pang of sympathy. They’d been subjected to the true evil that was Hinata Shoyo as he was now being subjected to the evils of Hinata Shoyo. 

Because it had been Hinata Shoyo who had grinned up at him, all innocent and sweet and fake, and told him he just had to come out to the bar with them tonight, please sakusa-san!  

And Kiyoomi, the fucking idiot had agreed, because at the time he thought Hinata Shoyo was his friend. 

Hinata Shoyo was not his friend. 

Hinata Shoyo was not his friend because he had come in, thirty minutes late to the agreed meeting time - leaving him alone with Kageyama, who was actually a cool guy even if Kiyoomi had no idea what to talk to him about beyond “Hey good game.” - with Miya fucking Atsumu. 

Miya fucking Atsumu in a mini skirt. 

He took a long sip of his whiskey, staring at Miya fucking Atsumu at the bar, his head thrown back in a laugh, accentuating his collar bones with the loose top that he wore, something cropped that showed off those fucking delicious abbs, and his fucking high wasted mini skirt. A high-waisted mini skirt that left almost nothing to the imagination, just the brush of the fabric falling in sync with the curve of the blonde's ass and highlighting his frankly unfairly attractive thighs that Kiyoomi wanted to bite. 

God dammit. 

“At least you haven’t been handcuffed to him,” Kageyama took another sip of his beer, shooting Kiyoomi a serious look. “The second our old team captain became a cop, he stole a pair of handcuffs and forced Diachi and Suga to be handcuffed together until they finally talked out the fact they’d been in love with each other. He threw away the key. Diachi had to call his boss.”

Again, Kiyoomi had no fucking idea who Diachi and Suga were, but the sympathy was there. 

Miya fucking Atsumu laughed again. He took another long sip of whiskey. 

And then Hinata Shoyo turned, catching his eyes and had the audacity to wink at him. 

“I’m gonna murder him,” He informed the opposite hitter’s boyfriend. “No seriously, I’m going to murder your boyfriend, Kageyama.” “We’ve all tried.” A dark glint passed in the other's face. “Good luck.”

Kiyoomi let out a long, low breath, then stood, taking his empty glass with him to the bar. Settling into the seat beside Miya fucking Atsumu, he quickly ordered another one before turning to his setter. 

Only to find Miya fucking Atsumu too busy talking to Hinata to spare him a glance. 

He downed the whiskey as soon as it came out. 

Hinata winked at him again, pulling Atsumu into a hug with his hands placed way too low on Atsumu’s hips. He almost let out a growl. 

Yeah, Kiyoomi decided. Hinata Shoyo was not his friend. 

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To be reused at first sign of trouble 😔

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“We hope this email finds you well” babe, the only emails I hope find me well are the ones from Archive of Our Own

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don’t bully me for how i spelled delicious

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I desperately need a “Blades of Glory” Matsuhana AU

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Very soft and genuine question that you should feel no need to answer but what do you think a better ending would’ve been? Like if you could rewrite all of the parts of GA that didn’t vibe w you what would the plot be?

For me personally I would’ve had Mikan’s memory loss be a much longer thing that she herself goes through the process of undoing.

hello!

i think you asked a similar question before!

my answer is much the same. if i could rewrite everything i don't vibe with, for one, there'd be less of the underwear harassment done for humor bits. not a big fan of those.

again, i will bash mikan having the stealing alice because it's my least favorite thing from the first half. i think if it had to happen it should have elevated mikan's character in some way, and it had no real effect beyond giving the esp a reason why yuka no longer had to live. i like the stealing alice. i love yuka's complex relationship with the stealing alice. i dont like mikan having the stealing alice. just that. i think it's a bit contrived and didn't really do anything for me narratively or character-wise.

i think the high school arc, or the escape arc or whatever, was a bit messy and simultaneously too fast-paced while also being too slow. theres a lot i lose track of in that arc and i think timing is a big part of it.

and the end... i would change almost everything

mikan would save natsume, not hotaru. i am uninterested in hotaru saving natsume and mikan chasing her again. i find that pointless. if mikan had to lose all her memories, i would have liked for it to mean something. i agree with you that her memory loss should have lasted longer and been something she struggled with. as it is, the manga just threw a bunch of cheap emotional shots at the end that didn't really mean anything and as a result just feel insulting. even if nothing else changed, i would have extended the end from 3 chapters to far more, to ease mikan into things, perhaps introduce an element of suspense and gradual discovery.

mikan piecing things together for herself would have made for a more compelling end, for sure.

tbh theres not much i would add that i didnt say the first time. thank you for the ask!

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Thoughts on Ron and Hermione as a ship?

thank you very much for the ask, @thesilverstarling!

i’ll state my position straight away: book ron and hermione are the best of the canon couples.

they will have a long and extremely happy marriage made rich by great and stalwart love, lust, fun, and faithfulness, rather than held together by duty and couples’ therapy like so many readers and authors (including jkr, who seems to have decided to spend the years since the conclusion of the series failing to understand anything about her own characters) tend to think.

i will state another position straight away: lest i seem like i’m just a fan with blinkers on, i think this even though hermione is, by far, my least favourite member of the trio. if she were real i would detest her, and i dislike how she is treated by the narrative as always justified in her negative characteristics. i like fanon hermione - perfect and preternaturally good - even less.

as a result, i think that it’s ridiculous that jkr has said that she thought ron needed to ‘become worthy’ of hermione. they belong together as equals - which is what they’re set up in the narrative as being from the off - and i hate seeing that undermined.

because ronald weasley? he’s an icon. and he doesn’t get anywhere near the respect he deserves in fandom.

there are multiple reasons for this - ron’s narrative purpose is to be the everyman sidekick, and so he is able to be less special than harry or hermione (the helper-figure); the amount of aristocracy wank in this fandom means that the weasleys’ ordinariness is less appealing to writers than making harry have twenty different lordships and call himself hadrian; the narrative interrogates ron’s flaws - especially his capacity for jealousy - much more intensively than it interrogates either hermione’s (cruel, inflexible, meddling) or harry’s (reckless, self-absorbed, judgemental) - but one i feel is particularly significant is that ron is such a british character that many of his traits are not understood as intended by non-british readers.

in particular - as is outlined in this excellent meta by @whinlatter - ron’s sense of humour isn’t indicative of immaturity or a lack of seriousness, but is, in fact, evidence that he’s the most emotionally aware of the trio.

ron is shown throughout the series to understand how both harry and hermione need to have their emotions approached - and i think there is no piece of writing which says this better than crocodile heart by @floreatcastellumposts:

That was what she liked most about Ron, she thought vaguely. He was very good at being suitably outraged on your behalf. For Harry, for her, for Neville. That sort of thing mattered, when you were hurt or embarrassed or wronged in some way. You needed to have someone else on your side, to be as emotional as you felt, maybe even more so, so that you might feel a bit more normal. It was very decent of him, and she was not sure he realised he did it.

ron’s inherent emotional awareness is an enormous source of comfort to other people. he does the work which isn’t flashy or special - he makes tea and tells jokes and is just there - but which is needed in healthy human relationships far more frequently than a willingness to fight to the death for the other person.

[as an aside, this normality - even though i think it is assumed rather than justified by the text - is also what ginny provides for harry. if you believe that hinny are a good couple but romione aren’t… i can’t help you.]

but let’s look at some specific reasons why ron and hermione belong together:

their communication styles mesh perfectly. ron is the only person hermione knows who feeds her love of being challenged and debated, and who is able to engage in this way of communicating without becoming irate when she refuses to back down. ron is good at picking his battles, but he’s also good at recognising that hermione’s tendency to argue isn’t intended to be confrontational a lot of the time - it’s just the way she works through feelings and problems. he’s far more easy-going about her tendency to nag, interrupt, try to provoke arguments, or speak condescendingly than he’s given credit for - and hermione evidently respects this, since when he does tell her not to push a situation (above all, when she’s trying to needle harry into talking about sirius), she listens to him.

that ron and hermione’s tendency to bicker is taken by fans to be a bad thing is because it’s something harry - from whose perspective the narrative is written - doesn’t understand. harry is extremely conflict-avoidant - he tends to take being pushed on views and opinions he has to be insulting; and he has a tendency to assume that he is right which is just as profound as hermione’s. he and ginny communicate not by debating, but by ginny having no time for his rigidity and refusing to indulge it - but ron and hermione bickering about everything is not a negative thing within their specific emotional dynamic.

[as another aside, this glaring chasm in communication styles is why harry and hermione would be a disaster as a couple.]

they each provide validation the other needs. it’s clear - reading between the lines - that hermione is a tremendously lonely person. the friendlessness of her initial few weeks at hogwarts seems to be a continuation of her experience as a child, and - outside of ron and harry - that friendlessness endures through her schooldays. i’m always struck, for example, by the fact that, when she falls out with ron in prisoner of azkaban, she has no-one else to spend time with, and that this is only avoided in half-blood prince because harry decides not to freeze her out. i don’t think her friendship with ginny is anywhere near as close as fanon seems to imply (ginny has no interest in being nagged either), nor do i think that she’s anywhere near as close to neville (not least because she is so condescending to him) as she’s often written to be.

and this loneliness seems to stretch beyond hogwarts. the absence of hermione’s parents’ from the narrative is - in a doylist sense - clearly just a device to maximise time with the trio all together, but the watsonian reading is that she doesn’t have a particularly good relationship with them. hermione’s obviously upper-middle-class background - the name! the skiing! the holidays in the south of france! - can be presumed, i think, to come with a series of expectations from her parents which she feels constantly that she’s not entirely meeting, particularly expectations attached to academic success.

[for example, the grangers - were she a muggle child - would undoubtedly have ambitions for her to attend an elite university and then go into a prestigious career. tertiary education of the type that they’re familiar with doesn’t seem to exist in the wizarding world - most careers seem to be taught by apprenticeship - and this, alongside all the other divides between the magical and muggle worlds which contribute to the distance between them, would be one very obvious area in which she felt the need to prove herself to them.]

ron, too, has quite a difficult relationship with his position in the family - voldemort’s locket is not wrong to point out that he seems to receive considerably less of his mother’s emotional attention than ginny or the rest of his brothers - and he too is constrained by expectations which he doesn’t know how to explain he has no interest in - above all, molly’s desire for her sons to achieve top grades and go into the ministry.

he also suffers while at hogwarts from being ‘harry potter’s best friend’, something which harry never appreciates. but hermione does. she recognises ron’s jealousy and never allows harry to minimise it (and she and ron are very much aligned on having no respect for harry’s saviour and martyr complexes). she appreciates ron’s strengths - above all his kindness and his sense of humour - and makes him feel as though he’s achieved things with them. and ron does the same for her; he is hugely observant when it comes to her, and he challenges and defends her.

the two of them clearly spend a lot of time together one-on-one while harry’s involved in his various shenanigans (including outside of school - hermione has often arrived at the burrow days or even weeks before harry, and they seem to write to each other frequently when apart). they do this within a relationship which is fundamentally equal. one issue with hinny is that, post-war, harry is going to have to get used to seeing ginny as a peer, rather than as someone he has to protect. but ron and hermione never have that issue - equality is baked into their relationship from the off.

because, to be quite frank, fandom overstates the role that jealousy plays in their relationship. it’s true that ron certainly doesn’t acquit himself brilliantly when it comes to hermione’s relationship with viktor krum (it’s because he’s bi and doesn’t know it yet), and a tendency to externalise his insecurity into trying to make others also feel insecure is one of his primary negative traits (hermione does this too, via her patented lofty voice when she’s trying to condescend to people). but this is often taken as the initial red flag for how the relationship would crash and burn, and ron’s toxic jealousy is often used in fan-fiction as the trigger for emotional and physical violence towards hermione which, frequently, seems to drive her into the arms of either draco malfoy or severus snape… who are, of course, the first people we think of when we hear the words ‘not prone to jealousy’...

but i think it’s important to point out several things in defence of ron’s jealousy over krum. firstly, hermione evidently regards his jealousy as ridiculous - she’s upset by it, yes, but her upset must be understood as being caused by the fact that she wanted him to ask her out. she doesn’t think he’s being possessive, she thinks he’s being stupid. secondly, hermione is equally as jealous over ron’s crush on fleur delacour and relationship with lavender brown. she behaves just as cruelly when it comes to lavender as ron does when it comes to krum - and the narrative only treats her actions as more sympathetic or justified both because harry dislikes lavender too, and because, by that point in the series, jkr has dispensed with any inclination to ever criticise her.

but, outside of this teenage pettiness, ron is never jealous of hermione over things which matter. he is never jealous of her intelligence or competence or ambition or success (indeed, he defends her constantly from attacks designed to undermine her in these areas). for someone who struggles with being overshadowed by harry, he is never upset at being overshadowed by her. he is clearly going to be happy to support her in any of the career ambitions she can be written as having post-war.

and, on this point, i think it’s worth interrogating why so many readers still seem to feel uncomfortable with the idea of ron and hermione having a dynamic where she is the more ‘powerful’ one. [it’s always a bit trite to say ‘but what if the genders were reversed?’, but actually that’s not irrelevant here]. if hermione ends up taking the ministry by storm and ron becomes a stay-at-home father or has a job which is just to pay the bills, what, precisely, is wrong with that? why, precisely, should hermione regard ron making that choice for himself as a negative thing? hermione so often seems to leave ron in fan-fiction because of a lack of ambition - something which seems to be particularly common in dramione - but, in canon, she is shown to not particularly care if ron and harry do the bare minimum when it comes to studying etc. she nags them to do their work so they don’t get in trouble. she doesn’t nag them to do it to the same standard that she would.

and, actually, i think that ron being less ambitious than hermione is something which is key to how well they work. because ron provides not only emotional support, but emotional clarity.

hermione is shown throughout canon to - just as harry does - have a tendency to become obsessive to the detriment of her own health. she is also often - as harry is - emotionally or intellectually inflexible, and finds it hard to move on when what she feels or believes is proven to be wrong. both she and harry are micro-thinkers, who lean towards knee-jerk assumptions and stubborn convictions (and, indeed, hermione has a remarkably hagrid-ish tendency towards blind loyalty).

ron is none of these things. ron is a big-picture thinker (it’s why he’s so good at chess). he’s a pragmatist. he’s the least righteous of the three. he understands that faith and loyalty are choices, and that sometimes these choices will lead to outcomes which are bad or hard. he is the one of the three most willing to own up to having made mistakes. he is the one least likely to act on gut instinct (and, therefore, the hardest to fool - i think it’s worth emphasising that he clocks that tom riddle is tricking harry immediately, the only one of the trio to do so). he understands that things are a marathon, not a sprint. he is the least obsessive.

and these traits contribute to aspects of his character which are underappreciated. ron worries about hermione making herself ill during exams, or when she is using the time-turner, and makes an effort to get her to set healthy boundaries and redirect her anxiety. ron stands on a broken leg in front of sirius or goes into the forest to fight aragog not out of righteousness, but out of choice. ron takes over the burden of preparing buckbeak’s defence when it is clear that hermione is approaching burnout. ron is completely right that harry hasn’t done any long-term planning for the horcrux hunt, and his anger does force harry to tighten up after he leaves the trio. ron has a clear head in the middle of battle. ron makes harry and hermione laugh. ron is unafraid of human emotion. ron arrests harry’s tendency to brood over the little things by looking at the bigger picture. ron will always come back.

ron is bringing his politician wife regular cups of tea and making sure she doesn’t work all night. he is helping his lawyer wife to feel less upset over losing one case by reminding her that she’s won ten others. he is noticing stress creeping in and whirling her off for a dirty weekend, or even just a takeaway on the sofa. he is teaching his daughter to be proud of her ambition and his son to treat women as equals and both of his children that all you can do when you fuck up is apologise and try to do better. he is making hermione smile on the worst days of her life. he is helping her strategise her long-term goals when she gets stuck on the short-term ones. he is telling her straight when she needs to get it together. he is seeing a misogynistic head of department call hermione a ‘silly little girl’ and choosing to tell him exactly what he thinks of that.

ron is the ultimate wife guy. hermione is a very, very lucky lady.

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two spy x family ideas both based on "Still/The Neva Flows" from Anastasia the Broadway Musical

A: an au where Damian is Gleb and Anya is Anastasia focusing on the confrontation scene, specifically the lyrics

The children Their voices A man makes painful choices He does what's necessary, Anya

For Russia, my beauty What choice but simple duty We have a past to bury, Anya

Including all the angst and pain that would come from that. B: It's just a play but the 6 year olds are all really really into it. Loid is getting stress ulcers from these dramatic fucking toddlers.

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howdy

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give me your most controversial music opinion

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Unironically transfems are so cool and I would love to experience femininity and have it fit right over my bones the way they do

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Something so slept on is Penelope and Genevieve’s friendship.

She really is someone who understands Penelope to fully and entirely and I love her for it. I think her words are a key part of why Penelope doesn’t give it up.

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part of why i like the colin/penelope/eloise trio so much is because all of them are the third wheel. eloise third-wheels the couple, colin third-wheels the besties, and penelope third-wheels the siblings

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So excited to drop this lore but I was actively talking about this in my adv class las semester:

There’s probably going to be a massive pendulum switch back to cable because the way that streaming services handle the increased prices plus the introductions of ads have made them entirely obsolete. The fact that every single channel has a separate streaming service has also made them obsolete because now in order to access all your favorite shows and channels, you have to have all of the separate streaming services making it just the same as cable but now for a much higher price.

Streaming services lived long enough to become the very thing they sought to defeat.

I feel like I might sound like a boomer, but why do streaming services have ads now. I thought the point of streaming was to pay to be add free.