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briar-rolfes-research-oubliette · 8 months ago

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ON MONDAY, I (FINALLY) MADE IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE NEWEST ERAGON BOOK!

MURTAGH

“A Book I Read”

It took three very patient friends of mine to encourage me to finish reading this. I took notes the whole way through, and I am now sharing those in hope of finding loving community with my fellow haters.

Important context:

I loved Eragon, which came out when I was roughly eleven

Christopher Paolini was the first author to ever disappoint me

I used to love epic fantasy, until feminism, coming out, and learning about literary criticism made me just too mean to enjoy it

Since 2015, whenever I’ve had writer’s block, I’ve found inspiration by looking at this screenshot:

Christopher has managed to create a life where his mum has never stopped doing his laundry or his editing for him. He has never worked a job in his life. He has infinite time to work on his craft, and yet, with all of those advantages, he writes the way he does. I don’t hate him, but I do want to destroy him in single combat.

LET US BEGIN.

17 November 2023

I forgot how obsessed this man is with proving he knows rare words. Picking up my phone to google the word “trenchant”.

He really just didn’t want to say the dragon had a sharp sense of humour huh? Oh, no, it’s TRENCHANT. It wasn’t even for dialogue I identified as comedy but Murtagh thought it was TRENCHANT. He and Thorn have been alone in the wilderness for too long

NOT NASUADA BEING DESCRIBED AS HAVING ALMOND EYES

Of course the protagonist has grown a beard. He’s A Man Now.

I have a theory that this book is about coming to terms with marriage. Murtagh is like “our bond… our bond that lasts until death… the oldest magic… only the two of us understand each other. But, we’re also trapped with each other,” and I’m like hm. Fascinating. Say more

Instantly Murt befriends a child, to prove he is good really.

It’s so weird to read a book by a grown man with kids who is like “how did we all start out so innocent and pure…” like have you MET five year olds

This whole fork fight scene makes me feel second hand embarrassment deep in my soul. It’s SO This Guy Is The Best And Coolest

“Fencing with effortless ease” I do not care how well trained he is: you cannot kill four men with long swords by stabbing them with a little fork in “four hard impacts.” It’s just not happening.

I’m really dwelling on the idea of magic as “imposing your will” on something. It’s very.., something. Murtagh cleans his shirt by “imposing his will on the garment” like. Okay, I suppose in a way that is how all laundry is done, but it’s. Hm.

How come he’ll clean a shirt with magic but not shave with magic? Why are these books SO obsessed with beards and shaving and how to do shave and using magic for shaving etc etc, Eragon was also majorly preoccupied with this

Paolini’s got so many complexes on the page. All the “we’re half brothers and your dad killed my dad” stuff is A LOT

The naming stuff… SMH what would Ursula Le Guin say about all this

I’m obsessed with how even as (gasp) an OUTCAST!! Murtagh can’t not be the coolest guy ever for any time at all. It’s like a disease

Giving the child the enchanted killing fork was the worst decision ever made. Murtagh gives her a murder weapon and is then moping like “what’s it like… to live without killing…” literally pages later.

I’m really startled that Murt is delighted to see a tiny flying magical grass boat come down from the sky and circle him instead of being like “wtf, I’m being Watched,” which would be the true act of a man we are told is paranoid

I just got to the bit where Murtagh offhandedly says that magic users who “are the heaviest” always have the most spell reserves.

Like……… what???? Magic eats your fat?? It burns glucose??

You could be a better mage if you just, ate a bunch of raspberry frogs before each fight??????

It’s food powered??? You really want to go there, Paolini????? Wizards in the candy shop, eating sweeties like Mistborns?

GOD, if only Galbatorix had chugged a bottle of red cordial before his last big fight!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(I return after losing my mind about this to my partner for forty minutes)

If it was “if you’re hungry you can’t FOCUS” I’d get it. But I always assumed it was like, you know how other fantasy does it? Some kind of pool of ADDITIONAL energy that you are accessing and that can be used up (until you go too far and start using life force or whatever). Like, it’s CHANNELLING it that makes you tired, not that it’s literal food energy.

Murtagh is always running or doing his sword forms or whatever and now I’m like “DUDE, NO!!!?!? DON’T BURN YOUR WIZARD CALORIES!!?!?”

I like when magic can’t do EVERYTHING, when it’s consistent or limited in some way, but I do hate the idea that it’s this predictable. Food energy becomes raw magical power. I GUESS.

(A little later)

Screaming at the suggestion Thorn can tell when Murtagh is horny.

I don’t like the euphemisms. It makes it worse

The fact he can’t talk to his dragon whenever they’re “too far apart” (distance never specified) is making me insane. Why did I pick up the dragon riding book if it’s mostly about leaving your dragon locked up at the bike rack

I know Thorn is basically a rescue dog with anxiety, but it bothers me how much he’s left on his own. The narrative just has no idea what to use him for other than speedy transport for the first um… 200 pages, it seems? He’s meant to be his own creature with his own intelligence. He doesn’t go anywhere without Murtagh though. So what is he doing all the time

I think Paolini WANTS his world to be big and mysterious (his introduction literally just keeps saying things in the world of the story are mysterious) but he HAS to keep explaining everything

24 November 2023

I’ve figured out something that annoys me about the world of this book, in terms of just how the worldbuilding is not actually that magical. It has the D&D problem!!! Which is to say that every regular person on earth is Level One and every important character is like, level 12. And part of what makes that even worse is that all women in this world are level zero.

I’ve been watching my friend Chris play the first Alan Wake game and we realised that all the faceless enemies that are possessed by Evil in the game are… working class men. The protagonist is this literate wealthy New York writer who is constantly killing faceless workers—farmers, loggers, coal miners, builders. And that’s not an INTENTIONAL commentary by the game, but it’s very revealing. And This book is the same in that: there is no such thing as a complicated poor person. They’re all either Dirty Evil or Dirty Good. Murtagh is going around, writing poetry in his head and inventing magical computer code, and then every child is an urchin who is like Oi Guvnah, and every dad is gruff, and every woman is worried.

The language used to describe everyone who isn’t a Fighting Man is so demeaning. And even then, we only need to respect the leaders of those men. The leaders are the only ones with depth who might need to be taken seriously.

It’s like Murtagh has a tally in his head where he is going “finally, a guy who is level 6��!

Most people in this world exist to deliver information to the protagonist.

Paolini either thinks his readers are too dumb to understand that his characters exist between scenes, or he doesn’t understand himself that we don’t need to see every time Murtagh enters a city under a new name and how he does it. Or know what he ate for dinner and how he prepared it and where he slept and what he dreamed and, and, and—

It’s weird because Paolini is being self indulgent as fuck but it is NOT fun to read. This dude really just needs to go write a survival story or something… A guy in the woods depending on nothing but his wits and his axe and his beard and his libertarian values

I don’t understand the stakes at play. All the magic scenes with Mind Penetration are so sudden and hard to actually understand as action. And the way it works is about brute force, so the dragon is not going to be at risk of being taken over except by another, even bigger dragon

It would be fun to read the Murtagh city sleuth segments if Thorn was backseat driving a little. I think that their bond should not get thinner over distance. The fact that it does just defeats the point of a magical bond.

Why does the dragon have to stay so far away? Like… it’s established that there’s a spell to conceal a dragon from sight. Dude. You could just go fucking invisible

There’s so many decisions that just are so bonkers to have made. The whole fetch quest for information pissed me off so bad. “You have to join the guard” (40 pages of emotions about uniforms ensue). This guy learned about plots from video games

Paolini had kids apparently, but you can tell he doesn’t really understand kids. “How do they all start out so innocent and pure,” says a man who has never heard a seven year old describe someone being killed by farts before.

The description of Murtagh carrying a cat that doesn’t want to be carried is very funny. I don’t know if Paolini has ever carried a cat before. If you’re carrying a cat that doesn’t want to be carried close to your chest, and you tighten your grip when it squirms… say goodbye to your nipples, my man

It’s strange how much Paolini doesn’t explore the things that seem to be the point. FOR EXAMPLE, the fantasy soul bond trope loves to say “even during sex!??! 👀” because it’s about INTIMACY, and some alien presence always being there. The dragon rider trope is popular because dragons are powerful and wise but also Beasts. Magic is fun to read about because it can do things that can’t be explained.

Paolini’s world is big, but nothing in it has any real substance. Nothing in it has any real consequence, and it makes it impossible to really invest in anything that happens. None of these poor city folks have a life once they leave the scene of delivering Murtagh information… or if they are a woman, delivering him a hot meal. There’s no sense of a world that exists outside Murtagh’s point of view!

25 November 2023

The towns so far don’t feel at all distinctive to me! I was interested in the one with the massive lake, but then it having this massive fish in it was the only point of interest. It would be fun to have been like “oh the fish has ruined our summer festival! It’s ruined the nobility pleasure cruises! It’s also eating fishermen!” Or “Why do all these fishing boats have huge spikes on the prow? Well,”

Again, these guys are all level one in peasant dirt town. They have no capacity for individual thought and no ability to adapt.

It’s like Paolini doesn’t know what makes people and places in fantasy feel distinct, or have culture. It’s so evident in how much he HASN’T thought about. For example, the bonkers amount of restrictive gender norms that he doesn’t seem AT ALL CONSCIOUS OF? Everyone who died in the war was A Man. No women died in the war. But that hasn’t resulted in any social changes. There aren’t more women doing work, for example, like being fishermen

I remember being thirteen or so and reading the bit in the second book where Arya explains to Eragon that she’s better and stronger than a human woman, because she is an elf, so Eragon doesn’t have to worry about her in battle. I was this kid there like “man, that sucks. I assume he’s coming back to that assumption later,” and… he never did. He still hasn’t. And that sucks

The dragon riders were not THAT long ago, in the world of these books. It makes me wonder—were none of them human women? I always assumed that some were human women, but… did dragons only choose elf men, elf women, and human men? If they chose human women, then even being accepted into a paramilitary dragon force didn’t change gender expectations in the rest of the world. What the fuck. He’s really never thought about this.

Women keep showing up as cunning-mysterious, as humble dirtmothers, or as innocent children. Oh my god I’m just describing maiden mother crone. That’s all he’s capable of.

I just got up to where he rescues the werecat baby (innocent girl child) and settles in to hear the stories of elder werecat (cunning-mysterious)

I noticed the Arya Problem with how Nasuada is described in this book, too. Every woman has to be the best, most capable, most powerful woman ever, to be worth the attention of The Boys. Otherwise they can’t respect her. Only two literal queens can be considered worthy of just two average guys who got pet lizards. Even then, they’re not actual equals.

“She still empathised for me.” Yes, don’t worry, Murtagh, I remember that’s what women are for.

I should note that the reason Nasuada is considered so powerful and so much worthy of his love and is her strength as a person. This is proven in the Eragon books because “she still empathised” with Murtagh whilst he was medieval torturing her. He was medieval torturing her for like… most of a book and that’s how they fell in love. Because she could see in his eyes that this guy torturing her… was Complicated. He didn’t really WANT to be medieval torturing her so she actually felt worse for him than he felt about how he was (and I can’t stress this enough) medieval torturing her

I just can’t imagine that THE QUEEN OF A WHOLE CONTINENT would still prefer the guy who sadly tortured her. He’s her top preference. Out of EVERY OTHER MAN IN THE WORLD

I put the book down until the day before I was meant to have finished the book for book club:

10 March 2024: from page 274 onwards

The evil witch is called BACHEL?????!!?!??!? Fucking BACHEL. Pronounced “buh-SHELL”, the guide at the back says. You changed one letter in Rachel, don’t lie to me Paolini

I got so mad being reminded the evil king Galbatorix was defeated by “Eragon forcing empathy upon him” so that he magically exploded himself out of guilt that I had to put the book down and complain to Charlie for five straight minutes

I guess that’s why Galbatorix made Murtagh torture Nasuada for him. He knew that if he’d done it himself she would have empathised with him too hard and he would’ve exploded himself

Murtagh has never met a single person he has respected. Murtagh is the specialest boy in all the land. Eragon had to leave the country because they were both too special to share a continent

Murtagh decided on where to go and he was immediately surrounded by armed guards who took him to where the plot was

Paolini uses the fucking word “admixed” while discussing EATING A PIE. The flavours admixed in his mouth. Just because you know a word… doesn’t mean it’s a word to deploy about eating a pie

I HATE how the only people strong enough to do the strongest magic are Elves Or Human Riders. It’s fucking magic my guy! Why is it checking your goddamn DNA! Also, hey! Wasn’t it supposed to come down to the strongest wizards being the guys who ate the most for lunch?

In a world of Magic how come every wizard battle ultimately comes down to who is a better Professor X?? I came here for fireballs, not Mind Battles. I don’t care about your Mental Wards

Hahaha Murtagh!!! Get trapdoored, bitch!!!!

Dragon panic attacks: conceptually cool but a bit ?? Like ah… the plot literally comes to scoop him up and carry him away. Yet again something outside of Murtagh makes a decision for him about what to do next

Murtagh’s poetry is going to make me explode myself like Galbatorix in book 4

If there’s something I like about this book so far it’s just the bits where he and Thorn are camping. Not flying, because then Murtagh is using the time to think and that’s horrible. The bits where they make campfires or whatever feel like something is actually happening. A guy and his dragon hanging out

Man. The way this novel is plotted really reminds me that it’s not actually that hard to write a book.

Murtagh goes to the evil village (oh yeah there’s an evil village. It is where Bachel lives. She is evil because she does magic without using the magic language). The village is called:

NAL GORGOTH

But I couldn’t remember this so I kept referring to it in my head by another, more familiar, name

Murtagh is so freaked out by finding a village with architecture that he doesn’t recognise. He’s like “My god!!! Nasuada has to be warned!!!” Ok but about what??? New ways of building pillars???? The art deco movement threatens the land??

Kinda fascinated by how much this village represents a threat to CULTURE. The architecture, the people… Everything about it so far is designed to be A Foreign Threat. The inhabitants are Of All Races (except elves they are too cool too pure etc). The humans have A VARIETY OF SKIN COLOURS, which memorably never happens in Alagaesia, a continent once explicitly described in the Eragon books as only having two (2) black people on it at all (then one died) (the other is Nasuada) (the one who died was her dad)

This guy with a goatee isn’t quite human. He is maybe part urgal and he is so uncomfortable to look at! Mainly he has arms that are a bit too long!! Bachel isn’t a human and also isn’t an elf, and that’s also deeply unsettling.

Bachel also fundamentally represents a threat to THE STRUCTURING POWER OF LANGUAGE, huh??

Bachel is so far the most interesting character in the book!

Bachel has: ALMOND EYES and AMBER SKIN

Murtagh is so upset and confused when Bachel calls him “my son” like… I’m cryign. “But she’s not my mother! I know my mother!!” he thinks, in a panic.

If this was a fantasy novel written twenty to thirty years ago, then the sexual tension between Murtagh and Bachel would be absolutely insane. Alas, this is a world of abstinence, and sexuality is only ever meaningful looks between a queen and the guy who tortured her (it is weird how he keeps caressing Nasuada’s face on the gold coins)

It’s very funny that Bachel has specifically fourteen warriors. The prose keeps telling us that there’s fourteen of them. So you get Murtagh stepping forwards and then sentences like “the fourteen warriors attending Bachel shifted”

She seems like a perfectly normal cult leader to me? Why is she automatically a threat to Nasuada! How come the two of them can’t arrange a toxic political marriage that becomes… something more 😉😉😉

Nothing annoys me more in this book than Murtagh being able to identify specific vintages of wine. It keeps happening and it pisses me off

Bachel is a half elf!!! “It had never occurred to him that such a thing might be possible.” This is truly and absolutely unbelievable to me. Nobody in this world ever has sex

How did it take so long to get to such an objectively cool village!!! Like this is just a cool place!!! Sorry that Nar Nar Goon is evil but like FINALLY something has style

Three thoughts at once:

I’m so bored that Paolini’s mind can’t get more interesting than temple virgins, let alone wearing white to represent ritualistic purity. Like… nobody in this world fucks anyway, why does it matter!

Murtagh should also wear white all the time

Lesbianism doesn’t count as a violation of being temple chosen. Alín is wearing lesbianism

Paolini has never once written a woman who is Normal. He just can’t conceive of it. You can feel how he starts sweating.

Murtagh finally realised it was a cult. What sets it apart as a cult is that the followers appear to be “half-wits” to him

I’m going to detransition to break his fucking neck

Paolini has learned nothing since he had a woman deliver the exact same line in like 2008. The fact that another editor just thumbsed this up. The fact that this is in a book published in 2023. Well, now I’m REALLY embarking on an antagonistic reading: that’s right, I am reading women as capable.

Obsessed with Bachel. She is a girlboss and I’m a feminist xxx

Book is constantly weird about how much she is capable of eating and drinking at her feasts and how it makes her appear swollen and bloated etc etc. Murtagh is so weirded out by this because he feels it is unfeminine… as though she is not a witch and we weren’t told earlier that how much magic you have is directly equal to how much you eat. (Meanwhile he is only picking at his food and eating just enough of it ‘to be polite’ as though this is not making a decision to have less magic than her)

She has so much charisma compared to anyone else in the book. If my choices are her or Murtagh then sign me up boys!!!

Okay but much like how this would’ve been a VERY charged relationship 30 years ago, I’m weirdly disappointed Bachel she isn’t not described as megahot? Like the book keeps telling me about this virginal templemaiden or whatever, because Murtagh is only attracted to women he can rescue. But I’m actually just like… I think this woman is hot. Tell me more about her. It’s wild that this book is written by a guy like Paolini, who told me all about Oromis’ pubic hair in 2008, and who barely thinks women are people. Yet he doesn’t want to discuss her tiddies?

This book could, and should! have started when Murtagh landed his dragon in the evil village of Nar Nar Goon. That’s the point that stuff got actually interesting. Everything before this was literally video game fetch quest logic plotting that earned him the right to fly to Nar Nar Goon.

Boar hunt. More like BORED hunt. And then suddenly there are so many pigs, a comical number of them flying everywhere

This motherfucker using the phrase “the boar was lying athwart him” in a sentence in an action scene????

Murtagh is nearly dead and the boar is lying athwart him?

I’m going back in time and bullying the author at school

RIP Murtagh, trambled to death by 30-50 wild hogs

Oh god every time someone knocks Murtagh out he has a vision or a bad dream or a flashback or whatever and it’s so tiring

“EXISTENCE WAS A TOMB WHEREIN THE SINS OF THE PAST LAID INTERRED???” Do you ever read a sentence that sounds so much like the author is jerking it? “All had been lost, and there before him lay the instrument of their destruction” he is furiously jerking it oh my god. “Destroyer of hope, eater of light” oh, god, he’s still going

…This book is. Weird about mothers

Murtagh flies into a rage because Bachel mercy killed a guy who was dying bc of boar trampling because “I COULD HAVE HEALED HIM!!!!!” And the mercy killing is proof it is a cult. Because doing it Bachel’s way meant the guy was too relaxed and at peace when he died

Paolini’s family were in a cult, as I understand. So it’s kind of weird how much he doesn’t really understand how being in a cult works

I don’t really remember how religion works in this world, but I do remember tuning out of a long boring passage in book 2 or 3 where Eragon learned about all the gods and decided he was an atheist. It’s especially weird to be like “holy shit, an EVIL religion??!” In a book where religion has absolutely never come up before now

Oh my god, Alìn was whipped for being ‘too familiar’ with Murtagh!!! That’s because she’s so pure and a helpless victim girl in all white :’((

In my mind Bachel and Alìn COULD be in a fucked up lesbian relationship with bad BDSM etiquette. Of course Paolini can’t imagine a world where women have enough personality or agency to fall in toxic love with each other. Also even though he has people tied up and strapped down and whipped and being tortured etc in every book don’t think he knows that BDSM like. Exists. Boooooo

Murtagh: killing one guy who is dying of a punctured lung is the ultimate evil!

Also Murtagh: I know an invisibility spell, but to sneak out of my room I am going to suffocate seven men to death

Genuinely upsetting to read those men dying. He made it impossible for air to enter or exit their lungs with a word. Veins popping clawing at faces etc. God, what a way to go. So unnecessarily cruel. Yep, there goes the good guy

The main way the village is evil is that there are unsettling carvings everywhere. Paolini read some Lovecraft, but he did not understand what was up with it. Or maybe he did, because this book did get a lot more weird about Racial Purity once Murtagh arrived in Lovecraft Village

11 March 2024

There’s a bloodstain that “filled Murtagh with the apprehension of evil” and it confused me because these books are so gory. Earlier he killed four men with a fork. But like oh yeah I guess it’s because when Murtagh murders people now it’s bloodless. I guess. His murders are good you see

This chapter is called The Bad Sleep-Well you can tell Paolini thought he was a real genius for this one

Okay but why are there bats… roosting… in a cave… at night. And why is Murtagh worried that red light will risk waking them? Animals cannot see red light?? SOME FARM BOY YOU ARE, PAOLINI

Okay I have to stop nitpicking. I have to restrain myself until my Vyvanse kicks in

“Murtagh felt a sense of not just age but antiquity. Whoever had built the stairs had done so long before Alagaesia had been a settled place. What was it Bachel had said? That the cultists had lived in Nal Gorgoth since before elves were elves... He was starting to think she had told the truth.”

Sorry uhhhh, Alagaesia was settled?? When they talk about The Grey Ones, are they talking about a race PRIOR TO COLONISATION?????????

“He continued forward. Deeper into the womb of the earth. Deeper into the black unknown, seeking, seeking, always seeking a farther shore, every sense razor-sharp and razor-scraped, skin all goosefleshed, cold sweat dripping down the back of his neck and gathering around his belted waist.”

God it’s so overwrought...

He found the well!!

Oh my god. The well is a natural magic hotspot and that means it “wasn’t the sort of thing that the Draumar ought to have dominion over.” It’s a natural resource???

“Not that he would want Du Vrangr Gata to assume control over such an important location either. This was exactly what the Riders had been created for: to oversee and mediate that which could destabilize the land.”

Murtagh is going to bring democracy to the Middle East

He’s too scared to mentally contact his dragon with Bachel around. If he was a proper horse girl he would find a way

Oh Galbatorix BECAME evil because he met Bachel and she manipulated him. Haha oh dear. No, you can’t just come to the conclusion the dragon rider paramilitary force who controls the resources are bad on your own. Not just because they sent you into the mountains when they knew it was dangerous and wanted to find out if you’d be killed up there! No, a manipulation had to have happened

It’s funny to me that the evil ancient witch queen who lives in seclusion in the mountains uses the new name for the city of Uru’baen. Oh no, she knows it as Ilirea. She’s hundreds and hundreds of years old. You know what that is? Evidence of Find And Replace, to me.

Bachel’s eyes are “glowing with fevered ecstasy.” I could make her feel that way. Also. Because, I know about sex

Always with the fucking passing out at the end of the chapter for Christopher James Paolini

NOW Bachel is being described appropriately as a hottie. FINALLY. GOD! It only took Murtagh being mind controlled in his brain but I. I!!! I could see the glorious light of truth!!

“He followed, dumb and wildered.” Well, not as much as that sentence. (You can be bewildered. But can you ever just be wildered????)

The dedication to making Murtagh the most pitiful little meow meow in existence in the Galbatorix flashbacks I’m… what happened to the joys of a guy who is evil because he was convinced or was tricked, not because he was fully brain abused???

The Urgals are racially… uncomfortable. Yellow eyes and Murtagh just straight up saying “how do you speak English”

The evil guys have masks and they put them on and like channel the animals the masks are of and on one hand it’s an idea I THINK is cool but also combined with the everything it really has this “tribal stuff is threatening” vibe all over it

“What do you want, witch?”

“I want you.”

Obsessed with how he’s shackled to a table and there’s still an incredible lack of sexual energy to this scene. This is like a day at the office for both of them.

… oh, but she is wearing claws and claws DOES equal a threat of penetration. Maybe a little sexual? As a treat??

Him being tortured reminds him of torturing Nasuada. Wow, it was their first date!

It’s just like. It’s fucked up imo. She should never kiss you Murtagh!!!

Is anything more boring than a torture scene.

Also, was he not drugged right before this scene? How is he able to mentally evade her and power his wards etc?

I’m mad that when he’s brought fancy foods by Alìn he doesn’t share his food with Ubek the Urgal

Oh my god Ubek tells him a story where the moral is just him outright saying at the end, “it’s important to stay close to the people we care for, even if we don’t always fit in so easily” lmao. Subtlety of a mallet

Is anything more boring than a torture scene? How about a torture chapter!!!1!1!1!

This chapter is interminable. Oh my god.

Oh, so we did all that and he gives in I guess. I can’t believe how little agency this man has had throughout this book????

Haha oh my god, Bachel is studying his nude and compliant body in front of her court. Telling him to turn around so she can inspect his back (no mention of his ass even though it is out, tragic). Fucking love it. Now that’s bdsm. Pledging my allegiance to her instantly.

I am BORED. I liked when he was at least doing things of his own volition!

He flies his dragon off on Bachel’s orders and we get the line “Never had air smelled so… so… delicious.” Cryign

GASP he’s killed… CHILDREN!!!!!!! I hate how it only becomes horrifying for him to have done these murders once he realises they’re HUMAN children. Urgal children? The implication is that would’ve been a bit tacky but ultimately fine

Prison brothers blood pact. I feel so little about this. Ubek is 5000x more interesting than Murtagh but he’s been slotted into what is unfortunately a sort of magical indigenous person trope but where instead of being a human being, he is an orc. Which makes the whole trope much worse

Murtagh touched Alìn’s face… gasp! She’s been corrupted by the Touch Of A Man!!!!! (I do not care about this.)

(I care a little. For example she didn’t touch HIM. He just reached out and she didn’t pull away. This is the biggest decision about this character’s life, and she isn’t even allowed to be the one who makes it. He decides on her behalf, and she must be okay with it. Because she doesn’t pull away or fight him off.)

(Also Paolini doesn’t seem to be aware that ‘a woman who has been pledged not to be touched by a man’ would um. USUALLY be understood by a reader as euphemistic. Not that her purity could be forever ruined by a man literally just touching her face)

The way Paolini fills Murtagh’s brainwashed dialogue with oops all ellipses makes me want to tear the book apart with my teeth

Worst: how Grieve the guy who is part urgal is perpetually referred to as “heavy-browed.” “the heavy-browed Grieve” I’m sorry but I missed phrenology school, is that bad??

Also if he’s maybe part Urgal but Murtagh is now given a chance to making it clear that some of his best friends are urgals... Why is Grieve so distastefully described? What’s wrong with being half urgal? My suspicion: it’s the bloodlines intermingling

I suspect I can just skip every fucking dream sequence and flashback. Nothing of any value in these

This one guy, Lyreth, who trapdoored Murtagh for 2.5 seconds ages ago in the book, is TWICE referenced as holding/ touching the waists of “village” or “cultist” women in his dialogue tags. That’s the full extent of it. It’s not that there’s a giggling tavern girl sprawled in his lap while he’s speaking. These faceless women are exclusively sketched into existence by how a named male character’s hand is on their waist. We don’t know anything about how they are responding to his touch, which is extra in-your-face considering that Murtagh just obliterated a woman’s ritual purity by touching her face without asking. And it’s only ever these women’s waist. It’s not their hips or thighs or boobs. He’s not kissing their necks. I’m sure in Paolini’s mind this guy touching women’s waists is meant to read as sexual, which is supposed to reinforce that he’s a scumbag… but it doesn’t work because it’s so impersonal. These women are just… unmoving waists that he is just touching. It serves as a good illustration of how women—and sex and sexuality and bodies—are handled in these books. Men are never ruled by their strong and muscular bodies. Men have minds, and magic, and telepathy battles. Even when Murtagh is on a torture table or when he’s naked in front of a powerful woman who is actively inspecting his body, he doesn’t feel vulnerable. He doesn’t have an ass or a dick. The wind doesn’t make him shiver. He’s just a Mind. But women, well. They only have bodies when men touch them. The course of Alin’s life is defined by Murtagh’s touch, and even Nasuada, a fucking queen, only gets physical description via the coins Murtagh has in his possession and his memory of the cuts and bruises he left on her body. And women also have no minds—unless they’re werecats or elves or half elves, the only kind of woman who are remotely threatening, the only kind of women who are “as good as” the baseline of human men. Nasuada is proven as Murtagh’s equal because she was able to overcome the torture of her body. If he hadn’t tortured her, or if she had broken down, she wouldn’t have proven herself worthy of being his romantic partner.

Eragon’s romantic interest also started out being tortured. Not by him, but “girl who is tortured but is too strong to give up her secrets” was her entire characterisation for a book and a half, until he rescued her. That’s uh. That’s how you find girlfriends who are good enough for your protagonists.

THESE FUCKING BOOKS.

Bachel has put Thorn in a special wrought iron muzzle. Yet again, this is just objectively cool

We learn about who the cult worships: evil dragon underground. He makes fumes come out of the earth and they brainwash people and give them visions. He will come out of the ground and eat the sun unless every living thing worships him.

Really Bachel is not leading a cult she is leading an environmental rescue mission. Quick we gotta get everyone to worship this evil dragon STAT, or he’s going to wipe out all life on earth.

Why does an evil dragon living under the earth with the power to eat the sun (?!??!) actually want or need to be worshipped by “every living thing”. What is his motivation?? And why would that stop him eating the sun?

“The sculptures would have horrified most any artist in Alagaesia, no matter their race.” Mark this down as one of the worst sentences he has written yet!!

I realise now I’ve been misremembering multiple main characters’ names

I like Bachel telling Thorn to stay, like he’s a dog. That’s good to me

Murtagh is learning about the power of friendship to heal himself last minute, I guess

Why is Murtagh pausing to duel fucking Lyreth, the most boring man in the world. Is it because of the waists he touched??? I have never felt this man was worth any time at all

NOT Paolini specifically pointing out that Lyreth “smelled of a cloying peach scented perfume” and that he’s physically weaker than Murtagh as Murtagh overcomes him. Lyreth was too feminine to be strong, in the end

This book is obsessed with the word “youngling.” Murtagh says to Thorn “don’t kill any younglings.” He’s fighting Lyreth but he’s not worried because he himself is “no longer a youngling”. Fucking fuck off! just say youth. Child. Kid. Teenager even!! Come on!!

Murtagh going “this is taking too long” in the duel: me at the whole book thus far

“Is wrong-think to worship Bachel or Azlagur,” says Ubek. This is real dialogue in a book published in real 2023. Oh yeah btw everything he says is written like this

Oh, the urgal’s size and brute strength makes him Murtagh’s equal. I see

Grieve is legitimately yelling “kill the non-believers!!” and calling them desecrators??? Cartoon hours

To start winning the fight, all Murtagh had to do was find his magic sword! It stores all his potency and he inherited it from his father. Freud?? Don’t worry about it

The cultists are bleeding green blood???? Does this mean they’re not human or is it the lighting or what.

Groups of dragons are always being described as a Thunder Of. They’re only ever being described in visions but it’s always being described as “a thunder of dragons”, because Paolini is very proud of inventing his very own collective noun for dragons I guess

Buncha little pasty freaks showing up.

Murtagh’s ultimate challenge: he has to fight one hundred gollums

Paolini inventing new guys for his dungeon at unprecedented rates

Murtagh is legitimately busy trying to think of new names for his sword NOW?? He is just going to stop in the middle of this urgent fight to go find where the bad woman (Bachel) took the good woman (Alìn) to go “my sword has a bad name. It could have a good name.” Did he not have time while he was mouldering in the dungeon to think about this

He’s checking his compendium, like in video games.

Books have never been worse. If Murtagh/Paolini calls this sword Scar I will legitimately never know peace

Oh the sword is called Freedom now. Get it? Like America? It’s the most important value??

“Seeing the armor, Murtagh realized that the leather garb the cultists had donned for the festival of black smoke had been made to resemble Bachel's fantastic suit.”

what a sentence

This is the worst

I hate how her spear has a name and a dramatic history. Like come on

Fucking mind battles again

Alin is just… I’m sorry to her, but she’s not a real person. She’s a cardboard cutout in distress

The final boss fight should not be taking place in the magical world of the mind

Now she’s calling him “infidel?” Okay

The ultimate battle: the structuring power of masculine language versus the primeval chaos of raw women’s emotion!!! Who will win!! Hint: Christopher Paolini wrote this!

“She seemed merely a woman again.”

‘Merely’ is how Paolini always describes women (when he thinks they’re worth describing of course)

Wait… is the only reason Bachel has been intimidating REALLY just because she’s been channelling a tough evil boy dragon? Once the mask is gone and he’s not empowering her… she’s merely…

I’m going to kick Christopher Paolini’s fucking ass

Murtagh feels so emotionally close to Bachel. As he splits her skull. Normal book

For real why were ALL the Riders so afraid of Bachel??? The gas fumes? Face masks not invented?? This seems pretty easy to solve like if they’d just. Sent more than one guy?

He passes out and the chapter ends of course. Then he wakes up in the city

Ah, Alin is blonde and blue eyed. She was a pale skinned virgin who needed rescuing from an evil and also foreign almond eyed amber skinned woman who was whipping her. You know how it goes

I hate how Alìn always calls Murtagh “my lord.” She’s like one of those medieval fighting game banners of a sexy woman. She’s a cartoon.

Isn’t it a shame that when Murtagh hastily gets out of bed to bow to Nasuada he is wearing pants. So much funnier if he wasn’t

I’m so over this book holy shit

Oh, for being the apparently only sole survivor of Murtagh’s obliteration of her cult and everything she’s ever known, Alìn is being promoted to… Nasuada’s maid. That’s not what she asked for. That’s just what she’s being told she’s going to do from now on. Fucking hell.

Nasuada is Jealous of this blonde woman and I was afraid for her because Nasuada is also famously the only black woman on the continent. But of course she has nothing to fear because only the most powerful woman in the land could ever be remotely Murtagh’s equal, which she proved by being stronger at being tortured than him

She asks him to stay and she touches his hand just lightly

The END??

They don’t even kiss?!!!?!! I had to read it twice to be sure. SEXLESS BOOK.

#how do I tag this. probs not in the official tag right #Murtagh: Don’t Read It!!!#DONT READ IT #I can’t believe how much money Christopher Paolini is worth… I also can’t believe he managed to father two children #man doesn’t know what women children OR sex are. how did he manage to solve that equation twice over

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x-reader-writer · 1 year ago

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Communication

Pairing: Doctor Who (10th) x Male Reader

Style: Fluff

A/N: Sorry I've been gone so long guys, I've been very busy and had writers block! Also, my suggestions are still open ♡

~~~~~~~~

Y/n had been known the Doctor for over three years now. He'd met him not long after he'd regenerated, having seen Rose pass by and was now travelling with the Doctor and Donna. However, Donna had gone home to visit her family - mainly her grandad. So, it was just him and the Time Lord.

Y/n sighed to himself as he was sat in one of the infinite rooms of the TARDIS. The doctor was somewhere galavanting around the ship, so it was just him and the TARDIS.

"You know, sometimes I wish I could understand you as well as he does," y/n grumbled to himself, leaning back on the chair as he looked up at the ceiling.

He heard the iconic sounds of the TARDIS replying to him, making him smile. "You're always so kind to me, even if I don't understand you, you reply to the best of your ability," the man replies, a small smile on his face.

After a few more sounds, he starts to seem to understand what was being 'said'. He looks around confused, assuming the Doctor was walking past.

"Can you understand now?"

"What...?"

"I said, can you understand now, Y/n?" Y/n's eyes widened as he gawked. "From your reaction, I assume you can."

"How is this.. possible?"

"I mean, I'm a living organism that can translate all languages, so why is this not possible?"

"That.. weirdly makes sense," Y/n chuckles to himself, a wide smile on his face. "Thank you."

"You're very welcome, dear Y/n."

"Dear?" Y/n questions, raising an eyebrow.

There was silence for a second, before he heard the response, "Don't tell the others, but you're my favourite. Oh, and you shouldn't say that to the Doctor either. He may get jealous."

"Why would he get jealous?"

"He gets rather possessive."

Before y/n could reply, the Doctor walks into the room, a bright smile on his face. "Ah, there you are!" He looks him up and down and looks puzzled. "Why're you just sitting there not doing anything? At least read a book!" He mopes.

Y/n chuckles and smiles back at the doctor. "I was just having a conversation with the TARDIS."

"Well that must be boring," he replies, frowning. "C'mon, there's something I want to show you."

Y/n shrugs his shoulders, before getting up and following the doctor to the control room. The Timelord walked straight to the door and waits for his companion to catch up to him. He smiles at them, before opening the TARDIS doors.

Y/n's eyes widen and his mouth falls agape, before slowly walking through the door to look at the scenery closer.

The TARDIS had landed on a blue, grass field that stretched into the heavens, touching the lilac skies with stars that shined pink. The turquoise trees stretched high and danced in the soft breeze, with light blue fruit resting on the leaves.

It was an incredible sight, and introduced so many cool colours that Y/n adored. The Doctor leant against the TARDIS' doorframe, watching his companion's reaction, before pulling out a picnic blanket and basket from the entryway.

The Doctor lays out the picnic, before Y/n turns to look at him. He smiles brightly and joins the Doctor on the blanket.

"Thank you, this is lovely."

"Well, I know how much you love pretty scenery and some of these colours. Plus, you deserve a nice, peaceful break. After dealing with me for so long."

Y/n blushes softly at realising the Doctor had taken notice of the things he liked and sorted this all out for him. "I really appreciate this, Doctor."

"And I appreciate you," the Doctor replies, before smirking playfully at Y/n. "Now eat up! The food won't last forever!"

#doctor who #fanfic #fanfiction #reader #gay #dw #tenth doctor #lgbtq+#lgbtq #writing #back from the dead #tardis #the tardis speaks #male reader #male reader insert #doctor x reader #doctor x male reader #bbc doctor who #david tennant

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oh-katsuki · 10 months ago

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original pinned!

hello :)) okay so i mentioned this a little bit ago, but i will be moving blogs in the coming days and will be shifting entirely onto the blog @woahjo. i've decided to go by the same pseud i currently use, (because i feel like i'm lying if i don't and i hate that LMFAO) though i considered going by a new one, and my ao3 will be staying the same. i also won't be reposting anything to the new blog just yet (maybe a few of my favorites eventually), but i'll be leaving this blog up! the new blog (ofc) is a writing blog and will function essentially the same way this one does. please come join me over there if you like. i'd feel very honored <3

i'm not sure how many people really care all that much about what i have to say about this, but i'll say a little bit anyway bc i feel a lot of responsibility and big feelings towards this blog.

tldr; i'm switching blogs. it's silly to get emotional but i love it here, i love you, please come say hello over on the new one if you'd like.

i've been feeling this way for a while, and while the recent discourse had an effect, it's mostly a result of my own feelings. i just think it may be time to get a bit of a fresh start. i've had this space for nearly three years now and the community that's been built on this blog is beyond what i ever could have imagined when i first started writing. i know i'm getting a little sappy, but frankly, im shocked people wanted to be here and follow my writing at all. (i never know what to say when people tell me they do) it really humbles me and i hope to continue writing for many many years to come.

i recently took a long look at the way i view fandom culture and space, as well as how it affects me, and i sort of came out on the other side realizing that it might be time for a change of scene. i love this space. i love this community. it's something that i am deeply proud of to a point that i feel very emotional over leaving (clearly lol). in fact, i'm incredibly nervous about posting this. there's a lot of anxiety in posting your art for people to see and it makes me feel vulnerable to type a post like this telling y'all just how much i appreciate you and the part you've all played in this lovely little spot. i'm very emotionally attached to this place.

but!!! i'm excited for the type of creative refresh effect a new blog might have, as well as the ability to get to chat with you guys a little more and make friends. things get lost on here (both because tumblr sucks and because my blog is so messy that it makes me physically nervous to think about) and im hoping to be able to keep my new blog clean and tidy so that everything is easier to find. i've been feeling writer's block for a while now and i feel like having "more space to roam" (for lack of a better phrase) might have a really nice effect.

anyway, all this to say that i love it here. for those of you that choose to follow me to my new blog, please come say hello. and of course the group of old mutuals who are no longer active, i love y'all. if you ever come back to tumblr when ur old and gray, come say hi since i'll probably be writing x reader anime fic still. lol

#i would tag this with my important tag but i can't FIND IT #DAMMMMNNNN ITTTT #anyway #i know im corny please don't laugh at me #this blog has just been very formative for me and has been such an outlet #and ik it's dumb to be attached to something as silly as a blog.. but i def am #and for fear of sounding sappy or silly #i'd really love it if you came to join me on my new one #not just because you think im cool.. but because the new username is sexy and i think that it's important to acknowledge that #i feel so shy posting this #oh my god #SCREEAAAAMMMMMSSS IM SO NERVOUS #this is so poorly written WHATEVER IM NERVOUS #this can be reblogged if you'd like!! doesn't have to be though #i may make a more concise and short post for it eventually too

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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What the fediverse (does/n't) solve

No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, it’s still a dictatorship, and subject to the dictator’s whims. We must demand that the owners and leaders of tech platforms be fair and good — but we must also be prepared for them to fail at this, sometimes catastrophically.

That is, even if you trust Tim Cook to decide what apps you are and aren’t allowed to install — including whether you are allowed to install apps that block Apple’s own extensive, nonconsensual, continuous commercial surveillance of its customers — you should also be prepared for Cook to get hit by a bus and replaced by some alt-right dingleberry.

What happens next is a matter of technology and law. It’s a matter of whether you have to give up your media and your apps and your data to escape the no-longer-benevolent dictatorship. It depends on whether the technology is designed to let you move those things, and whether the law protects you from tech companies, or whether it protects tech companies from *you, by criminalizing jailbreaking, reverse engineering, scraping, etc.

As thorny as this is, it’s even harder when we’re talking about social media, because it’s social. Sociability adds a new and pernicious switching cost, when we hold each other hostage because we can’t agree on when/whether to go, and if we do, where to go next. When the management of your community goes septic, it can be hard to leave, because you have to leave behind the people who matter to you if you do.

We’ve all been there: do you quit your writers’ circle because one guy is being a jerk? Do you stop going to a con because the concom tolerates a predator? Do you stop going to family Thanksgiving because your racist Facebook uncle keeps trying to pick a fight with you? Do you accompany your friends to dinner at a restaurant whose owners are major donors to politicians who want to deport you?

This collective action problem makes calamity of so long life. At the outer extreme, you have the families who stay put even as their governments slide into tyranny, risking imprisonment or even death, because they can’t bear to be parted from one another, and they all have different views of how bad the situation really is:

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/12/the-oppermanns-book-holocaust-nazi-fascism/672505/

The corporate person is a selfish narcissist, a paperclip-maximizing artificial lifeform forever questing after its own advantage. It is an abuser. Like all abusers, it is keenly attuned to any social dynamic that it can use to manipulate its victims, and so social media is highly prized by these immortal colony-organisms.

You can visit all manner of abuses upon a social network and it will remain intact, glued together by the interpersonal bonds of its constituent members. Like a kidnapper who takes your family hostage, abusers weaponize our love of one another and use it to make us do things that are contrary to our own interests.

In “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media,” Cat Valente is characteristically brilliant about this subject. It is one of the best essays you’ll read this month:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

Valente is on the leading edge of creators who were born digital — whose social life was always online, and whose writing career grew out of that social life. In 2009, she posted her debut novel, “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making” to the web for free. Two years, and many awards, later, Macmillan brought it out in hardcover:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/10/valentes-girl-who-circumnavigated-fairyland-sweet-fairytale-shot-through-with-salty-tears-magic/

“Stop Talking to Each Other” is a memoir wrapped around a trenchant, take-no-prisoners critique of all the robber-barons who’ve made us prisoners to one another and fashioned whips out of our own affection for one another and the small pleasures we give each other.

It begins with Valente’s girlhood in the early 1990s, where Prodigy formed a lifeline for her lonely, isolated existence. Valente — a precocious writer — made penpals with other Prodigy users, including older adults who assumed they were talking to a young adult. These relationships expanded her world, uplifting and enriching her.

Then, one day, she spotted a story about Prodigy in her dad’s newspaper: “PRODIGY SAYS: STOP TALKING TO EACH OTHER AND START BUYING THINGS.” The headline floored her. Even if Valente wanted to buy the weird grab-bag of crap for sale at Prodigy in 1991, she was a 12 year old and had no way to send internet money to Prodigy. Also, she had no money of any sort.

For her, the revelation that the owners of Prodigy would take away “this one solitary place where I felt like I mattered” if she “didn’t figure out how to buy things from the screen” was shocking and frightening. It was also true. Prodigy went away, and took with it all those human connections a young Cat Valente relied on.

This set the pattern for every online community that followed: “Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.”

Or, more trenchantly: “Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control. Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.”

Valente traces this pathology through multiple successive generations of online community, lingering on Livejournal, whose large community of Russian dissidents attracted Russian state-affiliated investors who scooped up the community and then began turning the screws on it, transforming it into a surveillance and control system for terrorizing the mutual hostages of the Russian opposition.

Valente and her friends on the service were collateral damage in the deliberate enshittification of LJ, band the Russian dissidents had it worse than they did, but it was still a painful experience. LJ was home to innumerable creators who “grew audiences through connections and meta-connections you already trusted.”

Most importantly, the poisoning of LJ formed a template, for how to “[take] apart a minor but culturally influential community and develop techniques to do it again, more efficiently, more quickly, with less attention.”

It’s a template that has been perfected by the alt-right, by the Sad Puppies and the Gamergaters and their successor movements. These trolls aren’t motivated by the same profit-seeking sociopathy of the corporate person, but they are symbiotic with it.

Valente lays out the corporate community’s lifecycle:

Be excited about the internet, make a website!

Discover that users are uninterested in your storefront, add social features.

Add loss-leaders to “let users make their own reasons to use the site” (chat, blogs, messaging, etc), and moderate them “to make non-monster humans feel safe expressing themselves and feel nice about site.”

The site works, and people “[use] free tools to connect with each other and learn and not be lonely and maybe even make a name for themselves sometimes.”

The owners demand that users “stop talking and start buying things.”

Users grow disillusioned with a site whose sociability is an afterthought to the revenue-generation that is supposed to extract all surplus value from the community they themselves created.

The owners get angry, insult users, blanket the site with ads, fire moderators, stoke controversy that creates “engagement” for the ads. They sell user data. They purge marginalized community that advertisers don’t like. They raise capital, put the community features behind a paywall, and focus so hard on extraction that they miss the oncoming trends.

“Everyone is mad.”

“Sell the people you brought together on purpose to large corporation, trash billionaire, or despotic government entity who hates that the site’s community used those connective tools to do a revolution.”

The people who “invested their time, heart, labor, love, businesses and relationships” are scattered to the winds. Corporate shareholders don’t care.

Years later, the true story of how the site disintegrated under commercial pressures comes out. No one cares.

The people who cashed out by smashing the community that created their asset are now wealthy, and they spend that wealth on “weird right-wing shit…because right-wing shit says no taxes and new money hates taxes.”

This pattern recurs on innumerable platforms. Valente’s partial list includes “Prodigy, Geocities, collegeclub.com, MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, Tumblr,” and, of course, Twitter.

Twitter, though, is different. First, it is the largest and most structurally important platform to be enshittified. Second, because it was enshittified so much more quickly than the smaller platforms that preceded it.

But third, and most importantly, because Twitter’s enshittification is not solely about profit. Whereas the normal course of a platform’s decline involves a symbiosis between corporate extraction and trollish cruelty, the enshittification of Twitter is being driven by an owner who is both a sociopathic helmsan for a corporate extraction machine and a malignant, vicious narcissist.

Valente describes Musk’s non-commercial imperatives: “the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away…[the] viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option.”

Not every platform has been degraded this way. Valente singles out Diaryland, whose owner, Andrew, has never sold out his community of millions of users, not in all the years since he created it in 1999, when he was a Canadian kid who “just like[d] making little things.” Andrew charges you $2/month to keep the lights on.

https://diaryland.com/

Valente is right to lionize Diaryland and Andrew. In fact, she’s right about everything in this essay. Or, nearly everything. “Almost,” because at the end, she says, “the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis.”

That’s where I think she goes wrong. Or at least, is incomplete. Because the story of the web’s early diversity and its focus on its users and their communities isn’t just about a natural cycle whereby our communities became commodities to be tormented to ruination and sold off for parts.

The early web’s strength was in its interoperability. The early web wasn’t just a successor to Prodigy, AOL and other walled gardens — it was a fundamental transformation. The early web was made up of thousands of small firms, hobbyists, and user groups that all used the same standard protocols, which let them set up their own little corners of the internet — but also connected those communities through semi-permeable membranes that joined everything, but not in every way.

The early web let anything link to anything, but not always, which meant that you could leave a community but still keep tabs on it (say, by subscribing to the RSS feeds of the people who stayed behind), but it also meant that individuals and communities could also shield themselves from bad actors.

The right of exit and the freedom of reach (the principle that anyone can talk to anyone who wants to talk to them) are both key to technological self-determination. They are both imperfect and incomplete, but together, they are stronger, and form a powerful check on both greed and cruelty-based predation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Small wonder that, from the beginning, the internet has been a fight between those who want to build a commons and those who wish to enclose it. Remember when we were all angry that the web was disappearing into Flash, the unlinkable proprietary blobs that you couldn’t ad-block or mute or even pause unless they gave you permission?

Remember when Microsoft tried, over and over again, to enclose the internet, first as a dial-up service, then as a series of garbage Windows-based Flash-alikes. Remember Blackbird?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)

But standard protocols exert powerful network effects on corporations. When everyone is adhering to a standard, when everything can talk to everything else, then it’s hard to lure users into a walled garden. Microsoft coerced users into it by striking bargains with buyers at large companies to force its products on all their employees, and then by breaking compatibility with rival products, which made it hard for those employees to use another vendor’s products in their personal lives. Not being able to access your company email or edit your company documents on your personal device is a powerful incentive to use the same product your company uses.

Apple, meanwhile, seduced users into its walled garden, promising that it would keep them safe and that everything would just work, and then using its power over those customers to gouge them on dongles and parts and repair and apps.

Both companies — like all corporations — are ferocious rent-seekers, but both eventually capitulated to the internet — bundling TCP and, eventually, browsers with their OSes. They never quit trying to enclose the web, via proprietary browser extensions and dirty tricks (Microsoft) or mobile lock-in and dirty tricks (Apple). But for many years, the web was a truly open platform.

The enclosure of online communities can’t be understood without also understanding the policy choices that led to the enclosure of tech more broadly. The decision to stop enforcing antitrust law (especially GWB’s decision not to appeal in the Microsoft antitrust case) let the underlying platforms grow without limits, by buying any serious rival, or by starving it out of existence by selling competing products below cost, cross-subidizing them with rents extracted from their other monopoly lines.

These same policies let a few new corporate enclosers enter the arena, like Google, which is virtually incapable of making a successful product in-house, but which was able to buy others’ successes and cement its web dominance: mobile, video, server management, ad-tech, etc.

These firms provide the substrate for community abusers: apps, operating systems and browser “standards” that can’t be legally reverse-engineered, and lobbying that strengthens and expands those “Felony Contempt of Business Model” policies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

Without these laws and technologies, corporations wouldn’t be able to block freedom of exit and freedom of reach. These laws and technologies let these corporations demand that the state obliterate anyone who gives users the tools to set their own terms for the communities they built.

These are the laws and technologies that transform network effects from a tool for openness — where even the largest, most vicious corporations must seek to pervert, rather than ignore, standards — into a tool for enclosure, where we are all under mounting pressure to move inside a walled garden.

This digital feudalism is cloaked in the language of care and safety. The owners of these walled gardens insist that they are benevolent patriarchs who have built fortresses to defend us from external threats, but inevitably they are revealed as warlords who have built prisons to keep us from escaping from them:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Which brings me to the Fediverse. The Fediverse’s foundation is a standard called ActivityPub, which was designed by weirdos who wanted to make a durably open, interoperable substrate that could support nearly any application. This was something that large corporations were both uninterested in building and which they arrogantly dismissed as a pipe dream. This means that Activitypub is actually as good as its architects could make it, free from boobytraps laid by scheming monopolists.

The best-known Fediverse application is Mastodon, which has experienced explosive growth from people who found Musk’s twin imperatives to cruelty and extraction sufficiently alarming that they have taken their leave of Twitter and the people they cared about there. This is not an easy decision, and Musk is bent on making it harder by sabotaging ex-Twitter users’ ability to find one another elsewhere. He wants the experience of leaving Twitter to be like the final scene of Fiddler On the Roof, where the villagers of Anatevka are torn from one another forever:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

With Mastodon’s newfound fame comes new scrutiny, and a renewed debate over the benefits and drawbacks of decentralized, federated systems. For example, there’s an ongoing discussion about the role of quote-tweeting, which Mastodon’s core devs have eschewed as conducive to antisocial dunks, but which some parts of Black Twitter describe as key to a healthy discourse:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/21/Mastodon-Ethics

But quote tweeting wasn’t initially a part of Twitter. Instead, users kludged it, pasting in text and URLs for others’ tweets to make it work. Eventually, Twitter saw the utility of quote-tweeting and adopted it, making it an official feature.

There is a possibility that Mastodon’s core devs will do the same, adding quote-tweet to the core codebase for Mastodon. But if they don’t, the story isn’t over. Because Mastodon is free software, and because it is built on an open standard, anyone can add this feature to their Mastodon instance. You can do this yourself, or you can hire someone else to do it for you.

Now, not everyone has money or coding skills — but also, not everyone has the social clout to convince a monolithic, for-profit corporation to re-engineer its services to better suit their needs. And while there is a lot of overlap between “people who can code,” and “people who can afford to pay coders” and “people whom a tech company listens to,” these are not the same population.

In other words: Twitter is a place where you get quote-tweeting if the corporation decides you need it, and Mastodon is a place where you get quote-tweeting if the core devs decide you need it, or if you have the skills or resources to add it yourself.

What’s more, if Mastodon’s core devs decide to take away a feature you like, you and your friends can stand up your own Mastodon server that retains that feature. This is harder than using someone else’s server — but it’s way, way easier than convincing Twitter it was wrong to take away the thing you loved.

The perils of running your own Mastodon server have also become a hot topic of debate. To hear the critics warn of it, anyone who runs a server that’s open to the public is painting a huge target on their back and will shortly be buried under civil litigation and angry phone-calls from the FBI.

This is: Just. Not. True. The US actually has pretty good laws limiting intermediary liability (that is, the responsibility you bear for what your users do). You know all that stuff about how CDA230 is “a giveaway to Big Tech?” That’s only true if the internet consists solely of Big Tech companies. However, if you decide to spend $5/month hosting a Mastodon instance for you and your community, that same law protects you.

Indeed, while running a server that’s open to the public does involve some risk, most of that risk can be contained by engaging in a relatively small, relatively easy set of legal compliance practices, which EFF’s Corynne McSherry lays out in this very easy-to-grasp explainer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

Finally, there’s the ongoing debate over whether Mastodon can (and should) replace Twitter. This week on the Canadaland Short Cuts podcast, Jesse Brown neatly summarized (and supported, alas) the incorrect idea that using Mastodon was no different from using Gab or Parler or Post.

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/843-god-save-the-tweets/

This is very, very wrong. The thing is, even if you like and trust the people who run Gab or Parler or Post, you face exactly the same risk you face with Twitter or Facebook: that the leadership will change, or have a change of heart, and begin to enshittify your community there. When they do, your only remedy will be the one that Valente describes, to scatter to the winds and try and reform your community somewhere else.

But that’s not true of the Fediverse. On Mastodon, you can export all your followers, and all the people who follow you, with two clicks. Then you can create an account on another server and again, with just two clicks, you can import those follows and followers and be back up and running, your community intact, without being under the thumb of the server manager who decided to sell your community down the river (you can also export the posts you made).

https://codingitwrong.com/2022/10/10/migrating-a-mastodon-account.html

Now, it’s also true that a particularly vindictive Mastodon server owner could summarily kick you off the server without giving you a chance to export your data. Doing so would arguably run afoul of the GDPR and state laws like the CCPA.

Strengthening these privacy laws would actually improve user rights — unlike abolishing CDA 230, which would simultaneously make the corporate owners of big services more trigger-happy when it comes to censoring content from marginalized groups, and make it all but impossible for those groups to safely run their own servers to decamp to when this happens.

Letting people set up their own communities, responsible to one another, is the tonic for Valente’s despair that the cycle of corporate predation and enshittification is eternal, and that people who care for one another and their communities are doomed to be evicted again and again and again and again.

And *federating these communities — creating semi-permeable membranes between them, blocking the servers for people who would destroy you, welcoming messages from the like-minded, and taking intermediate steps for uneasy allies — answers Brown’s concern that Twitter is the only way we can have “one big conversation.”

This “one conversation” point is part of Brown’s category error in conflating federated media with standalone alternatives to Twitter like Post. Federated media is one big conversation, but smeared out, without the weak signal amplification of algorithms that substitute the speech of the people you’ve asked to hear from with people who’ve paid to intrude on your conversation, or whom the algorithm has decided to insert in it.

Federation is an attractive compromise for people like Valente, who are justly angry at and exhausted by the endless cycle of “entrepreneurs” building value off of a community’s labor and then extracting that value and leaving the community as a dried-out husk.

It’s also a promising development for antitrust advocates like me, who are suspicious of corporate power overall. But federation should also please small-government libertarian types. Even if you think the only job of the state is to enforce contracts, you still need a state that is large and powerful enough to actually fulfill that role. The state can’t hold a corporation to its promises if it is dwarfed by that corporation — the bigger the companies, the bigger the state has to be to keep them honest.

The stakes are high. As Valente writes, the digital communities that flourished online, only to be eradicated by cruelty and extraction, were wonderful oases of care and passion. As she says, “Love things. Love people. Love the small and the weird and the new.”

“Be each other’s pen pals. Talk. Share. Welcome. Care. And just keep moving. Stay nimble. Maybe we have to roll the internet back a little and go back to blogs and decentralized groups and techy fiddling and real-life conventions and idealists with servers in their closets.”

“Protect the vulnerable. Make little things. Wear electric blue eyeshadow. Take a picture of your breakfast. Overthink Twin Peaks. Get angry. Do revolutions. Find out what Buffy character you are. Don’t get cynical. Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in.”

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Heisenberg Media (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_-_The_Summit_2013.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Moses confronting the Pharaoh, demanding that he release the Hebrews. Pharaoh's face has been replaced with Elon Musk's. Moses holds a Twitter logo in his outstretched hand. Moses's head has been replaced with the head of Tusky, the Mastodon mascot. The faces embossed in the columns of Pharaoh's audience hall have been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The wall over Pharaoh's head has been replaced with a Matrix 'code waterfall' effect.]

#pluralistic #prodigy #standards #activitypub #tumblr #federation #fediverse #mastodon #jesse brown #canadaland #cat valente #twitter #yasnses #social media #freedom of exit #section 230 #cda 230 #intermediary liability

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xretiredcommanderx · 2 months ago

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[Rules & Tags]

As both a writer of a book and suffering from epilepsy (Photosensitive) there will be times that I am absent. Please be patient with me and I will be patient with you.

The mun is nearly 30 with many years of writing and RP experience. That said, due to a medical diagnosis the length of replies (And sometimes my very own jargon/vernacular/or how I describe things) will vary. This is not a lack of interest or ability, this is just my brain being a silly goose.

This blog is an open blog to OCs and AUs. However please be informed that communication is key.

I will not RP anything NSFW with anyone 18 or under. It is ILLEGAL! If you are caught lying about your age, you will be blocked.

Please no god mod. I would like to enjoy rping with you and I think the only way we can both achieve that is if we both agree not to god mod. I do not think that is fair to any one. If you wish to do something that requires something of my character’s action, do ask. I am pretty open to things and if you ask me, I am more than likely to say okay.

〡〢〣〡〣〢〡〢〣〢〡〢〣〡〣〢〡〢〣〢〡〢〣〡〣〢〡〢〣〢〡

Tags and Verses

Typically in the tags you will see me do a lot of tagging that is talking to the viewer (mostly via Magnus breaking the fourth wall). This is because I have crippling writer's syndrome and I like communicating with you guys or putting in some comment. However if I am roleplaying, I will try to remember to tag something to keep the universe organized. Usually via the individual's username, AU or main verse, RP name, etc.

These are a few tags I have thus far for such verses. I will add as the ball gets rolling, but this is a lot of loose papers of which are not mine--I ain't gonna remember it all--LET'S GO!

Tags:

Ultra Mun Speaks - (if the Mun is speaking)

|| IC status - ( If the Muse is speaking)

|| V - (Which ever RP or verse we are roleplaying, most likely on the main universe)

|| AU - (Which ever RP or verse we are roleplaying; in an alternate verse)

|| Tagnus - (Tarn and Magnus ship)

|| Shenanigans - Just for silliness. We get silly here!

|| Memes in Threes - I like to post memes in sets of threes to give people the option and selection. I do this from time to time.

|| That's a lot of papers none of which belong to me - I'm pleading the fifth. I refuse to answer.

|| Long Post - : ) For ✨long posts✨. To WHICH I try to put under the cut.

〡〢〣〡〣〢〡〢〣〢〡〢〣〡〣〢〡〢〣〢〡〢〣〡〣〢〡〢〣〢〡

#Rules and Tags #for mobile users #|| Long Post

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novaliae · 2 years ago

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sappy appreciation post for @bunfloras 'cause it's his birthday and they are very cool <3

hi bun beloved! happy birthday you are so cool

sappy time now <3 under the cut 'cause i have a feeling this could get long

cool. so! as you know i found you through iwhia in some of the first chapters (mid april 2021? i think? wild to think that's almost two years ago now). my friends had got me into dsmp a bit before and i was reading emduo. that school year was a Time—we were hybrid for most of the year and it meant that i didn't have lunch with any of my friends. so during those periods i ended up at a shitty little desk in my school cafeteria, angling my phone this way and that to try to pick up an extra bar of cell data, and browsing ao3.

i was obsessed with iwhia from the beginning. i gushed about it to a friend. i still smile when i see your name in my ao3 subscription box because it reminds me of the little thrill i would get checking my email to see you'd updated during lunch one day. i would read a chapter and the bell would ring and i'd have to traipse up three flights of stairs with my heavy backpack and i wouldn't even notice because i was so consumed with brainrot over the story you'd created. i've read iwhia more times than i can count, and it will always be very special to me. i remember screaming in my friend's dms when i found out it was ending, followed by more screaming when i realized you were starting bones. i didn't know you at all, but i already looked up to you. i hadn't written anything in years when i clicked on the first chapter of iwhia. i started working on fics again, and it was partially because of how inspired i was by your works.

and then i joined burrow in something like august of that year!! i was so nervous—proximity to cool writing person!! intimidating!! but you were so friendly and welcoming and i started to come out of my shell and it was amazing! i went from losing my shit the first time you Perceived my existence to rambling in the bones channel to you after every chapter, making memes about the iwhia bot and infodumping about boats. i was super insecure and anxious at that point in my life and you treated me very kindly and i appreciate it to this day.

i am very grateful for you, and for the community you built around burrow, and for the incredible people i've been able to meet through you. it has been so fucking nice as a young queer aspec person to be surrounded by other aspec people, to see qprs normalized, and to just get to nerd out over the block guys with people who are just as insane about them as i am. the LL era has so many of my fondest memories; i'm close with so many wonderful friends because we worked together on the iwhia project. and you have been so fucking patient and supportive through it all too—dealing with my random bullshit in your dms, the constant angsting of warrior ocs, and encouraging me when things go well :D

you are genuinely such a bright light, bun. you've brought joy to so many people's lives through your incredible writing and the community brought together by it. you've inspired writers to create beautiful things because they want to mold themselves in your image. you're always looking out for your friends. the ideas you come up with are so fucking creative and brilliant it makes me bounce up and down with glee. you have such a gift for words that i don't know how to express the power of. you people have been so awful to you and you've remained resilient despite it all. you got back up. you kept writing. you're still here. i consider myself ridiculously lucky to know you—the nova of two years ago would never believe that you even know i exist—and you deserve all the good things in life and more.

i hope you have a wonderful birthday bun <3 we're all here for you and we always will be.

#we love you bun #okay to reblog

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violetsystems · 2 years ago

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#personal

Of all the things I'm known for here including writing three paragraphs long form and researching the taxonomy and order of fruit? Not a lot of people knew it was my birthday this week. I don't have an active Facebook anymore so I don't think anyone would know. People find ways to show it even when they can't be high key about it. I can't really be too high key anymore about things I'm known for. Mostly because I'm sure it's pretty much understood at this point. That and active sabotage and retaliation by jealous people including the police and the people that work with them. When people forget you then you tend to focus on the people who don't. And Tumblr has been a refuge for me in terms of friendship over the years. Not a lot of people would be held captive this long to me ranting and understand the character arc of it. But a lot of what's happening around me in real life is rooted in populism and some form of social justice cucking. Like you haven't done enough for the community. So much so that people want to make sure they grief the birthday you had that they pretend to not know the day of. So much so that people out here in all walks of life make me out to be a villain they'd never even address by name. I'm some legend. Some terrorist. Some spy. Some mentally ill writer on the internet. Some lone wolf. Someone who doesn't follow subliminal and forced peer directions from a bunch of people hiding from the consequences of their actions over time. Most of what I experience on a daily basis is isolation, intimidation and retaliation because I haven't fallen in line with the herd. But it's gotten so bad that I've resigned myself to rely on what I already know. That even if people like to show in public that they can bully me behind the scenes online it's a different story. I'm sure people try and I've blocked a lot of people trying to make me think they're side blogs. But as a genuine person who knows nothing else other than being hardcore, you begin to innately know when someone is full of shit and when someone is being nice to you. I think it comes down to the fact that I think before I click. Just like I think and talk a lot in my kitchen to myself about how I feel about the world. I want to be sure when I interact with people. Just like I want to be sure people aren't using my birthday for some organized crime organization's initiation. Nobody baked me a cake and made me an offer I can't refuse. At least not in real life. But about a year ago around this time, I started taking my interactions with certain people a little more seriously. A vibe I'm sure that's grown over time in an unspoken friendship. Enough for people to quietly whisper just what this old, weird guy on the internet is all about. I don't feel old. Not as old as the people flailing around me. And they're younger than me.

People go along with populism in difficult times because things are rough. Around two and a half years ago I was let go from my job and forcibly retired. I didn't really understand what retirement was because I worked solid for twenty years. My friends at my old job distanced themselves out of fear. And I started to learn that a lot of my life was just forgotten about. I still had a roof over my head and resume. I created a company to try to work for myself. I got shunned more than I could possibly explain. The motives are clear. People in this neighborhood that I've lived in for over twelve years now compare themselves to me. Claim I don't belong here for probably more obvious reasons than we'd like to get into. I definitely don't own property. My situation is an experiment in population density which explains why I feel like a lab rat for politicians and protestors alike out here. The secret with everyone is that they think everything is a protest and every protest is a provocation. And people with tax payer funded jobs think it's their right to follow suit especially when they have a whipping boy. I am that scapegoat. I've lived it for years on this blog even before the accusations switched from being white and affluent to being attracted to women and posting fashion related pictures about them. People are always looking for something to neg you about. They probably learned it from men who control and dominate women in relationships with that same fucking stupid technique. You feel awkward and self conscious around someone you think has it all. So you constantly and subliminally break their balls if they have them. I'm no different. I was always trying to learn from the critique I thought was valid from the community I was part of for over two decades. The arts community or as I like to call it... a tax write off charity case for rich people to fuck with. You'd think leaving that community would be less pretentious. But I'm out here defending my right to breathe because I don't own property that has lost it's value over the last two years that also is being taxed unfairly. That is if you don't understand that people like me were the Petri dish for politicians to claim they created communities focused on walkable streets, public transportation, and diversity of culture. All for a tax break that people didn't get the memo for because the alderman was too busy calling me on my birthday in New York to ask me to vote for him in a run off. That's no lie. Nothing I've ever written about has ever been all that untrue. I'm never going to vote again if that's what rich politicians get away with doing at the expense of their community. And yet I'm the one who gets punished and isolated year after year for being right. I'm right about spending my time on my birthday alone. Because nobody outside of Tumblr has ever even tried to interact with me. I have to live with knowing people in this community actively tell other people to ignore me. That's beyond cucking. It's something worse than domestic terrorism.

I'm not going to be the one to sit here and tell you I can fix it. Everyone else would be crying no one baked them a cake. There's enough I've caked on my own since last Valentine's Day. People seem to persecute me in public for that too. In fact, so many people seem to know everything about me including my masturbation habits. That's beyond fucked up. It's like they've camped out on my doorstep to usher in their Ron DeSantis fueled civil war. And for all the things we think about Chicago being progressive? It's the front line for all the domestic terrorism from January 6th on. We have a Florida governor speaking to a police union in the midst of a chaotic election. We're part of some horribly fucked up rich people's transgressive art that jet sets in it's private plane to here and Miami Basel. And I've been at the center of its unintelligent and belligerent tantrum for years. So much so that I have no life. No joy. No pursuit of happiness. No real reason to be anything other than invisible and that has been helped by people working together in this neighborhood across international borders and law to actively destroy my life. I'm still alive. I turned forty nine. That's pretty fucking old if you made the wrong decisions for yourself like everyone else. I'm not married. Never have been. Don't have kids. It's not like I don't want to start a family and live cozily ever after. Maybe I just want to be cozy for a month long cuddlefest and see how it works out. Maybe I've been happily connected for years and just didn't realize it because nobody was ready or at the stage of their life to admit it. Maybe I've been actively sabotaged every waking moment of my life desperately trying to fight it off and finally stood up to it. Now it's an irresponsible and illegal mess of incompetence and excuses. Just like people tried to actively excuse the last three years of my life as being insignificant so they could wait for me to die and resell my entire narrative back like Van Gogh. This is how these rich people work. You will never break through to them. You will never be their equal unless you have millions of dollars in stock they control the markets with their goddamn fat faced twitter feed and poses next to Ghislaine Maxwell. The simple fact of the matter is that I'm here not by choice. But I'm still alive. And I don't have to fucking explain to any trust fund charity case hipster fuck what it is I'm into and why other than the people I love. If those people want to give me a birthday present they can go fuck themselves. I have a shovel to bury your shit if it ever snows again. Just like I'll have another birthday again where you could bake me a real cake. For now. I don't have a fucking life to celebrate other than with you. And that's not something that bothers me really. <3 Tim

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quokkacore · 2 years ago

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honey :D i’ve been thinking of you!! i hope your writers block is a little bit kinder to you (and that you give yourself the lee (HA) way to be kind to yourself too) you deserve it!

for the fic title, it’s a lil cheesy but “eighth wonder if the world”

(STOP this is so sweet thank you so much, im literally tearing up at this)

eighth wonder of the world (choi soobin x reader)

— fluff, angst, slice-of-life, new parents au

after nine long, nerve-wracking months, she's finally here. your beautiful baby girl. she's perfect, and you and soobin are over the moon.

almost immediately, however, things start to fall apart. yes, minji is adorable, but she's also a colicky baby who wakes up every other hour, demanding things that she can't communicate and you have to figure out yourselves. is she hungry? does something hurt? oh no, that smell, i really hope it's not—good god, how can so much poop come out of such a tiny little thing?

soon enough, it begins to wear both of you down: are you even fit to be a mom? what about soobin? why are you guys suddenly arguing so much? when's the last time you had a shower? if you guys can barely handle this, what's going to happen for the next 18 and more years?

it's when you both figure out how to work together that things get better—only through your love through each other, and for minji, your sunshine, your treasure, your very own eighth wonder of the world, do the both of you perservere.

and once you figure that out, you're ready to face anything, the three of you against the world, head on.

song recs; radiohead - no surprises // the amazing devil - fair // john lennon - beautiful boy

send me a fic name and i'll write you a fake fic summary <3

#fic name game #anon if you dont like kids i am SO sorry ;-;

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zorkaya-moved · 2 years ago

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let’s talk about that: female ocs.

Anyways, unfiltered Ren speaking hours. I probably should read this over, but it’s late night and I have a lot of emotions/words to speak about this. Purely personal thoughts and advice. You do NOT have to take my advice ofc lmao it’s just smth that works for me. THIS POST WON’T BE CUT, BLOCK ‘LONG POST //’ FOR NOW.

Hello-hello, my sweetest and most amazing women/female oc writers! My cis women muses, my transwomen muses, my non-binary ladies, all muses who identity as a woman. Also, please correct me if I referred to anyone incorrectly; English is not my first language. I want to make sure it’s about ALL muses who identify as a woman. I’ll correct myself immediately!

Let’s talk about the state of the RPC towards women muses as I’ve seen it in the recent two-three years and just tell this without any wool over eyes to anyone who would like to write a gorgeous female character of their own creation on Tumblr Dot Com. Let me tell you that this is an arduous road, truly filled to the brim with hardships but the moment you find your niche and your happy place - it’s a delight, it’s heaven, it’s precious.

I’ll be honest, these are biased from my perspective and may not be agreed on with other people.

How is it being a female oc writer? Let me tell you, who reads this and writes a female character you created from nothing be it for the original lore or for an existing fandom: You’ve got nerves of steel and patience of a saint if you keep up your lady’s blog for longer than a year in this community! It is a slow, tough and hard process to go through but you CAN do it, you fucking can. You can, you will, and you’ll rule. Pick up your crowns for writing such amazing women, you deserve it. You’re doing enough. Don’t give up. I’m sorry things are hard and I’m sorry you might feel unseen or ignored, but know that I may not reach out as a potato or get awkward or just sit in my corner lurking but I SEE you, I SEE how much you put into your amazing woman and I APPLAUD you with such RESPECT.

What are the most important things when you write a female character on Tumblr to know about?

1) IT’S HARD. It’s very fucking hard. I don’t want to start off this talk with such a low note, but it isn’t easy to be a female original character writer on this website. Some people don’t think it’s this bad until they start to write a female oc because they either have written a canon female character or didn’t see the troubles that the RPC has against originally created ladies. Listen, canon female characters struggle too, either from oversexualization or flat character description/personality that the writers make beautiful on their own or because their character stands between a popular m/m ship and ‘she must die to make this special m/m ship canon or she’s ruining it all!1111!’ (please know it’s very sarcastic but I see this still happen).

Honestly, any originally created woman in any fandom (and gods, imagine have an ORIGINAL lore) can be looked down at for the sole reason of the stupid ‘shipping’, and yeah, I know, this is 2022 but it’s still prevalent. People may not be aggressive about it but they are very passive aggressive about it in many, many fandoms (As in: remember how we all heard about how shipping with male muses happens vs female muses happens? The way FEM OCs are seen as attention seekers while it’s totally ok for a male character to have like 10+ ships. Or how the double standard of real life goes: a guy slept with many people and he’s a cool dude but if a woman has the same sex life then she’s called all nasty words). But know one thing: It doesn’t matter what you do, some people will fucking judge and come at you because they’re dumb and they’re miserable; stand tall, fuck those people 'cuz they don’t deserve your bright mind and sexy power of creativity.

THE DOUBLE STANDARDS ARE REAL AND, SADLY, THEY’RE STILL GOING VERY STRONG. You will have to remind YOURSELF how double standards work to also keep yourself sane. Listen, I do that all the time. With my character, to ease my anxiety, I sometimes ask myself: if Zarina were a man, would people be acting weird / angry / accusatory about it? Honestly, helped me see so much clownery in the RPC with that tactic alone. Fuck double standards.

2) YOU WILL MOST LIKELY REACH OUT FIRST FOR 95% OF INTERACTIONS IN THE BEGINNING. Listen, talking to people is exhausting irl and your social battery will struggle here (I know mine does and then I feel anxious/scared I’m not doing well enough in reaching out lmao so I overcompensate by oversharing and overflowing ppl with info/plots/screams). It’s just a fact, not many people would reach out first in the beginning if you don’t have an awesome group of friends who will support you from the get go. I am blessed with my friends who were the reason I never gave up on Zarina and continued to push and write her. Even today, I still have fear and worry that I don’t offer enough as a female oc when I write lore, extra detailed verses, and try to come up with a ton of plots. Sadly, it is... just how things are sometimes.

Not many people will dedicate their time in reading the whole about page or they may not remember everything or they may be just confused or something else. It’s heavy, it gets tiring, it’s awful when your ghosted or brushed off because you’re a female oc. It happens. You have to be prepared for that. It does feel like a damn battlefield out here sometimes to get interactions. I - personally - had a strong start thanks to so, so many wonderful people surrounding me and I continue to thank everyone for being supportive. However, not many female oc writers are as lucky as I was when I started, and even then, the death threats/blocks/passive aggressive comments I had witnessed? Yikes. Thankfully, now that I started to keep my boundaries, it’s been a much smoother process.

3) SOME PEOPLE MAY JUST NOT BE INTERESTED AT ALL. And you know? That’s ok. It’s not about you as a writer or a person. It happens. They are not your people. Breathe in, breathe out, and forget about them, move forward.

4) MY POWERFUL AND VILLANOUS WOMEN, you might be hard pressed by some people aggressively or passively. Sadly, the RPC doesn’t take kindly to a woman who is just as powerful as idk Sosuke Aizen. Like, I kid you not. But also: DO NOT PUT DOWN YOUR WOMEN, WRITE THEM POWERFUL AND FUCK THE SOCIETY FOR TRYING TO DOWNPLAY ‘EM. GIVE THEM A MIDDLE FINGER AND WRITE. I won’t lie, I say this, but I’m still traumatized over my own experience so I fight with worrying over making Zarina too strong... when I made her the most OP creature in her own lore, like the fuck is my anxiety doing to me. I also have to keep reminding myself to stop being a coward when writing dark content that I never romanticize and always make sure everyone knows is fucked up because Zarina is fucked up.

So what is important to keep super close to your heart as an oc lady writer in the rpc?

1) BOUNDARIES. BOUNDARIES. BOUNDARIES. My sweetest writers, I suffer from the intense trauma of how female characters are treated in the RPC: I fight with trying to stop pleasing people, to stop apologizing for my character, to stop feeling like my oc is an overpowered character no one will care about. You might subconsciously bend your character’s abilities or personality so you could get interactions, but do NOT do that. Do NOT allow others tell you how to play YOUR woman. Is she into feminine things? Gorgeous. Is she into masculine things? Gorgeous. Is she into something that others may find weird? Gorgeous. DO NOT CHANGE YOUR LADY TO FIT THE STANDARDS OF OTHERS. Yes, it will cut off some people who might ‘expect a specific type of a female oc to fit their wants’ (which is like wtf) but you’ll cut off weeds which you don’t need OR you will also be able to see people who simply aren’t interested or in some cases are uncomfortable with your type of female muse. It’s fine. You’ll find your people. Be true to yourself, be true to your character, be unapologetic about this because there is nothing to be apologetic about. This is your Queen/Monarch, this is your Goddess/Divinity. You are the creator, it’s YOUR beloved lady and don’t let ANYONE tell you how to write her.

1.5) PEOPLE MIGHT TRY TO PUSH YOUR BOUNDARIES. It’s rare but it happened to me and several people I know in the past. IT’S OK TO SAY NO, IT’S OK TO DENY A PLOT, IT’S OK TO DENY A DYNAMIC THAT DOESN’T MAKE YOU COMFORTABLE OR GOES AGAINST YOUR CHARACTER’S VIEWS. I’ve had people who tried to write my character’s reactions in a very wrong way since they expected her to be ‘nicer’ in the past or her act ‘nicer’ to other character who she wouldn’t act nice towards. I had to put my hands down and say ‘this isn’t going to happen’. People who refuse to listen to you are not worth it. All of the people I’m surrounding myself with right now (sweet moots I love you) are people who understand Zarina’s personality/views because I explain them and they do not try to change her. Gorgeous. You’re champions. However, NEVER allow another person to walk all over you and your woman. YOUR opinion matters, YOUR character is not just a shipping fodder or their fantasy’s outlet, YOUR character is YOUR treasure so you DO NOT FEEL BAD FOR PROTECTING YOUR TREASURED CREATION. Don’t be afraid to correct people, don’t be afraid to tell the correct way, don’t feel bad for disagreeing with someone. Anyone who makes you feel about about it through writing is a bastard and should be kicked out of your IMs/DMs/Followers’ List. BOUNDARIES ARE A MUST.

2) KEEP YOUR ANON CLOSED. Fools aren’t powerful enough to handle a complicated woman, honestly. It doesn’t matter to those anons what type of a woman you write: powerful, meek, feminine, masculine, etc. Anons will get on your nerves constantly. Imagine writing a morally grey woman who is comfortable with her sexuality and uses her sexuality as a tool while being a cold-hearted bitch? Yes, I’m talking about my character rn because it’s the best example. Do you know how many death threats I received in the beginning for writing an unapologetic woman like Zarina? There wouldn’t be a WEEK without getting those little shits in my askbox calling my muse all sorts of slur, calling me an attention seeker, etc. Like damn some of them were creative in their insults, I was almost impressed if not for my mental health suffering despite ‘not caring’ about others’ opinions but my anxiety sure did and does sometimes because mental health be like that. Yes, there are some nice anons around, but it’s too detrimental for your drive and your mental health to keep those anons on. For your own sake, close that anon and don’t open it at all. Tumblr hate anons have a vendetta against female characters and honestly sounds like an incel problem to me.

3) THE RIGHT PEOPLE WILL COME, BE PATIENT WITH /YOURSELF/. It’s discouraging, it’s hard, it’s tough, I know, but believe me, there is light at the end of all this struggle. Continue to expand your OC’s story, personality, writing. You are wonderful for what you are doing and you are gorgeous. You are doing so much. Some people won’t interact with you and that’s ok, it’s not your fault and you are beautiful, so is your fantastic lady. Continue ruling with your queen and don’t let anyone ever tell you anything different.

4) BE KIND TO YOURSELF. IT’S TOUGH, BUT YOU’RE DOING GREAT. LOVE YOURSELF AND LOVE YOUR LADY. WRITE WHAT YOU LOVE. YOU LOVE SHIPS? WRITE SHIPS. YOU LOVE FIGHTS? WRITE FIGHTS. YOU LOVE VILLAINS? WRITE VILLAINS. DO NOT LET THIS WEBSITE KILL YOUR CREATIVITY WITH WRITING WOMEN.

#psa.#❄ ― OUT OF CHARACTER. ╱ fun time’s passing by like river’s flow.#anyways i'm done i drop my mic and i go off to write my drafts #long post //

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fatehbaz · 3 years ago

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I’d like to read a sci-fi story and say, “Gee, I’d like to live there. This place seems like it treats people fairly or at least values doing so.” I’d like to see more stories where resilience tools from the past are put to use. Obviously, there’s sci-fi that does this, but I’d like to see more. Perhaps that’s why I write in the genre, as a way of problem-solving futures, or as Toni Morrison said, to write stories you’d like to read. [...]

Afrofuturism existed long before the term was created and will exist beyond this period. I don’t see the times as dictating its necessity. People of African descent and the African diaspora will have a relationship with the future, space, and time and will pull from culture, experiences, and the resilience tools to navigate it in part because that’s what humans do. [...] Black people don’t have the luxury of abandoning hope and dreams because of shifts in politics. W. E. B Dubois wrote the sci-fi story The Comet in the 1920s, and while there was a literary cultural renaissance afoot, I wouldn’t call that the best of times for Black Americans. Ezekiel’s wheel as a spaceship reference was in Black spirituals during enslavement. People looked to hope because they had to. Sojourner Truth in the early 1880s said she’s “going home like a shooting star.” When François Mackandal led a six-year rebellion of self-emancipated Maroons against plantation owners in Haiti in 1752, nearly forty years before the Haitian Revolution, people claimed that during his capture he turned into an animal and flew away.

Many African cosmologies from the Dagara to the Yoruba are inherently interdimensional, as evident in the symbolism of the art and architecture. [...] Brazil has a robust Afrofuturismo scene of theory and works. There’s a book called Afrofuturismo written in Portuguese that I’ve just ordered. I’ll have to translate it via Google until an English edition comes out. I spoke at a virtual conference of Brazilian Afrofuturists recently and I’m really excited by the depth of their work. Jelani Nias of Toronto, Canada, has a cool book called Where Eagles Crawl and Men Fly. Toronto has a robust scene and is home to the annual art show Black Future Month curated by Danilo McCallum and Quentin Vercetty. Afro SF: Science Fiction by African Writers edited by Ivor W. Hartmann is a good anthology. The book came out a few years ago and has a wide range of works from authors across the African continent. I also like Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo. [...]

I don’t want to say it’s a template. People all over the world have relationships to space, time, and the future with a unique cultural lens. However, the term has created ways to narrow the focus on literary works, music, and more from specific cultures. I think it’s given rise to conversations on the shared aesthetic and philosophical thought within other cultural lenses. It’s pretty exciting. Within African/African diasporic communities, the term “Afrofuturism” helped people to anchor and frame the works they were creating or ideas they were tossing about. I think terms like “Indigenous Futurism” and others are doing the same [...].

[A] veil was broken during this period. Many have awakened to the fact that there are grave disparities and that they could consciously or inadvertently be contributing to [them]. [...] However, walls, gentrified neighborhoods, and gated communities can’t protect people from a virus. [...] There’s an abundance of “neighborliness.” I had three neighbors pass away during this period. After one neighbor’s funeral, the procession of cars came to my block. The cars were led by a purple and gold carriage carrying the body. Yes, I wrote that correctly. A carriage. A fairytale Cinderella-style carriage with gold trim. A minister on a remote microphone asked if any neighbors wanted to say a few words. Some said prayers. One guy came to the mike and gave this rousing inspirational prayer for the block, all followed by a balloon launch. Over a hundred balloons were sent into the sky in honor of this man who most in our society would describe as ordinary.

-------

Ytasha L. Womack, interviewed by Wade Roush. ““A Veil Was Broken”: Afrofuturist Ytasha L. Womack on the Work of Science Fiction in the 2020s.” The Reader - MIT Press. 19 August 2021.

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flo-shifting · 3 years ago

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I think surrender is the final push.

Long story short, I'm highly skeptic of every "fact" about shifting that I hear in the shifting community. Not because it's from shiftok or amino or whatever, but because I realize that most of the beliefs this community has on shifting are just that personal beliefs, opinions.

Like when we expect to shift in just a couple of tries. LIKE WHAT? Who told us this? Why did we believe them?? And don't get me wrong I'm so glad for those that shifted on their first try or even after a few months (also kinda jealous, but I'm working on this lack mentality) how in the hell that became the standard that we measure ourselves with?!

We're thinking that two, three years to learn ON OUR OWN a skill like this is a long time? Guys, let's put shifting into perspective. If you want to learn how to astral project or lucid dream, more experience people will WARN YOU NOT TO EXPECT IT IMMEDIATELY. They tell you straight up: this could easily take you a decade, sit down and get comfortable.

Why do we pressure ourselves so much? I know that we shouldn't overcomplicate shifting, but also let's take all the time we can to actually learning about this. The amount of things I am discovering about not only myself, but about the universe. How energy is transmuted, how we co-create our reality and the amount of actual power our conscience has. IT'S INSANE, and all came through shifting.

Also, patience is so so so important. I know that sometimes accepting that something that you want is not gonna happened right now and there's nothing that you can do to change it feels like giving up or accepting also that you can't shift at all, or it feels like you're out of control. But this desperation is counterproductive, energetically you're blocking your own progress. The more you hold on to what you want, the more you're repelling it simultaneously. The universe it's fuck up like that.

I don't really care anymore how much time it takes me to shift, personally I think it is because I'm not doing methods anymore. I've never been very fond of them, to be honest. I've tried a bunch of them, got symptoms with some, got weird dreams with others. More than anything, they made me anxious, specially after they didn't work. So I stopped doing that, and now I just meditate for a while, set intention and just vibe with the idea of shifting before going to sleep. lol that's literally a method.

What I really don't like about how we approach methods is how they "end" when you shift or, more importantly, when you don't. I've been listening to some podcast on Spotify of Neville Goddard, and it really stuck to me the way this man view the universe and manifesting. I definitely think Neville Goddard teaches you how to shift, but not with methods like we normally do, but with continuous perseverance in the idea of already achieving the goal and focusing on your feelings.

He has this hole thing of being God and creation being finish, and the power of the mind over all but the great importance of our feelings.

Feelings make you shift. I'm so sure of this. They align you with your desired physically. I think it is because when we feel something, so strongly we feel it in our body, like how painful heartbreak feels or how big your chest can get when you feel proud. Feelings are fuel.

So my strategy became just affirming during the day, taking a moment to truly feel like I had already shifted. To explore the feeling and let myself get carried away with it. But quickly transform in me kinda forcing myself to stay in that same "zone", which maybe that's the idea. But I felt stuck, so I'm changing the approach.

Surrender.

I know that I sound like I'm crazy, but I've been getting this messages or "downloads" about letting go, about surrender completely to this process and just accepting that I'm being carry. Y'know. Divine Timing and all that.

Also, if you never read "A la deriva" you should. It's a short story of Horacio Quiroga, a big writer in my country that I read when I was in highscool, but it just got to me how it relates to how I'm feeling right now. So as it seem I'm talking about this now, the story is about a man that lives in the Amazonas, and one day like any other he leaves his house but a snake bites him. He's only option is to get on a little boat and float in the Amazonas to a doctor's house in the area. The point of the story is that as he drifts though the river his mind also stars to drift and, well, he dies.

And to continue with this insane analogy, I think I just need to surrender like the man in the story. Of course not to actually death lol I don't think surrender is the thing that's going to make me shift either. I think I'll end up having like an ego death or something. Like, I have all these limiting beliefs to myself that I'm deconstructing little by little, and this "final surrender" is the last step to a new breakthrough, or a new perspective, a new me.

Yep, a little dramatic, but I'm really excited.

I feel so liberated with this "new" way of shifting. Like I literally am putting it in the hands of fate and my own subconscious, I'll shift when the moment is right, and I'll also know it when I know it? idk I have been stressing over shifting and everything in my life for so long, I don't want to do it anymore, so I'm not lmao

Anyway... I'll be reporting anything worth reporting on this.

chausito.

#shifting blog #shifting #reality shifting #shifting community #shiftblr #desired reality #shifting realities #shifting journal #shifting journey

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blxetsi · 3 years ago

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armin arlert, mikasa ackerman, and eren jaeger polyamorous headcanons (modern au)

armin arlert x gn!reader, mikasa ackerman x gn!reader, eren jaeger x gn!reader, mikasa x armin x eren x gn!reader

warnings: uhh fluff, this is very long, reader has a gf b4 getting w ema,

this is like my first post since feb that isnt a request 😍😍😍 how did i pull this out of my ass

- obv eren, mikasa, and armin have been besties since childhood so its no wonder they all got together first 🤩🙏

- and theyre all hot so why wouldnt they wanna date each other

- i think armin and eren wouldve gotten together first, and then invited mikasa into their relationship

- the three of them have been officially going steady for like over a year now, and its going really well

- they didnt really expect you to drop into their lives tho

- youre an old friend of historia's and you two reconnected after you moved to the city, securing yourself a decent paying job working as a writer for the city paper

- you usually get the boring stuff, never able to get a good story to write about, focusing your time on heartwarming stories in the community or the sports column

- its boring but it pays the bills

- you were thankful when historia called you during your lunch and asked if you wanted to get drinks at a bar with her and a couple of other friends

- of course you said yes

- so historia and her girlfriend ymir picked you up after work, having dinner with them after a long week was the best, but you were a bit nervous to meet all of their friends

- thats how you met eren, mikasa and armin

- at first you were sure that mikasa and eren were dating, seeing as mikasa had her head on the taller man's shoulder, while his arm was wrapped around her

- but when armin leaned down to give mikasa a kiss before heading off to the bar you werent so sure

- ymir pulled you away to get more drinks and explained to you what the situation was, while commenting on the way you gawked at the three of them before

- you were embarassed to say the least but they didnt bring it up that night so you hoped the throuple didnt notice (they did)

- you really hit it off with all of them though, especially sasha and jean, and were constantly talked about among the friend group

- because of your demanding job dealing with writers block and deadlines you couldnt really meet up with all of them often, usually just having sleepovers at ymir and historia's apartment, the three of you drinking while you wrote on your laptop

- after a couple months of casual hangouts with historia and ymir and their friends, you kinda became one of them too which was nice

- you were added to the groupchat, you all followed each other on social media, and a certain brunet had taken a liking to you

- eren didnt know why exactly he was so attracted to you but he was, maybe it was your hair, or how pretty your skin looked even when oily or with breakouts, maybe it was your smile or your body or your sense of humor or you kindness or maybe it was all of it

- eren jaeger would always stay faithful to his boyfriend and girlfriend, but maybe they could add another person into the mix, more to love right ?

- he had only known you for a couple of months though, he didnt want to jump the gun and bring this up with his partners so soon, especially if they didnt feel the same way he did

- and it would be a bummer if you turned out to be a bad person or smth

- so summer rolls around with lots of memories being made with your new friends, as well as friends from work, and you get a girlfriend ??

- shes not really your girlfriend you two have only been out on a couple of dates and she kisses you a lot but, you havent talked about labels

- one night you, along with your friends are back at the same bar where you first met them

"so, tell us about the girl youre seeing." ymir says, smirking over her beer.

eren's ears perked up at the mention of you seeing someone. "girl ?"

historia nodded. "mhm ! y/n's been talking to someone recently, they've gone on dates and kissed and stuff."

"and stuff, jesus tori you make it sound like we've had sex." you sighed.

the blonde just laughed, leaning her body onto her freckled companion.

"well ? what about her ?" eren asks. armin slapped him on the arm, already having suspicions about eren's interest in you.

your shoulders sagged. "well, she's great and everything, truly..."

"but ? is there a but in this ?" connie asked. sasha started laughing at connie's use of the word but, while jean slapped the girl on the arm because of her reaction.

you shrugged, swirling what was left of your fruity cocktail in your glass. "well, i'm not sure. she's very lively, and sweet. but i don't know, i just don't see myself being able to be in a steady relationship with her."

"so you're gonna end it ?" eren asked. you thought he seemed a bit too eager about your failure in the love department.

"why do you care so much ? you like the thought of me being lonely ?" you shot back, before downing the rest of your drink.

"no i just-"

"i think what eren means is," mikasa intervened, her smooth voice calming you as she looked at you with a smile on her face. "is that there's no point in staying with her if you can't see yourself with her. don't lead her on."

you nodded. "you're exactly right my friend. which is the plan for tonight because i," you quickly checked the time on your phone. 8:17. "have a date with miss molly at nine, so i will be taking my leave."

the group engaged in a chorus of boos for leaving so early, while you chuckled and took the lighthearted insults thrown at you by sasha and connie with ease. grabbing all of your things you put down two twenties onto the table. "i'll see you guys later, have a goodnight." as you walked off you heard jean yell "have a good time you heartbreaker !" making you shake your head

- the date with molly went less then well. she yelled, and cried, and even tried hitting you at one point. your walk back from the park was spent blocking her on every form of social media you followed her on, and when you got back to your apartment you spent the night in a hot bath before retiring to bed

- meanwhile, armin and mikasa were trying to pry the truth out of eren, who was constantly denying his attraction to you

- finally mikasa took one for the team "eren, you aren't alone with the way you feel, i do too." this made eren more willing to open up to his partners

- armin doesnt say anything about you, only saying how youre kind. he doesnt feel the way that his girlfriend and boyfriend do, but he knows that may change

- soon enough, more time flies and christmas rolls around, with you all deciding to have a secret santa get together.

- historia invites everyone to her home on christmas eve, with ymir begrudgingly allowing it

- bertholdt and annie come too, reiner not being able to make it due to going home for christmas, while everyone else decided to stay in the city

- you picked out your secret santas at the beginning of november so you would all have enough time to find something for each other, you hoped whoever picked your name gave you something good

- after hours of games and karaoke and drinking you all decided it was time to open the presents

- ymir got socks from bertholdt, connie got an ugly beanie from ymir, historia got new pens from mikasa, mikasa got knitting needles from annie, annie got a dumbell from eren, jean got a not so appropriate t shirt from connie, jean gave sasha more comic books, armin gave new stationary paper to bertholdt, sasha gifted you that new biography you've been wanting to read and you gave armin your old copy of frankenstein by mary shelley

- he was surprised but very thankful, "how did you know i needed a new copy ?" "well i remember you said eren spilt water on your old one, and the pages just stuck together so i thought you might as well have mine"

- it warmed armin's heart that you remembered something so insignificant, and opened him up to the thought of being with you

- the rest of the night was spent with hugs and thankfulness, cheering when the clock struck 12 and it became christmas day

- after getting things cleaned up everyone decided it was time to leave, with armin, eren and mikasa offering to give you a ride home

- a ride where armin straight up kissed you in the backseat

- you stopped him of course, thinking that it was weird he would cheat on his partners right in front of them, while they were shocked all on their own for different reasons, armin who didnt have feelings for you KISSED you

- and surprisingly armin took the lead in explaining how he felt, why he kissed you, an apology for doing so, and an offer to start dating all three of them

- your heart was pounding in your ears and your entire face felt hot, it was probably the alcohol, or the way his lips felt so soft when they touched yours, so you said yes.

- its not smooth sailing from there

- youre kind of awkward

- this is your first relationship where you really feel like you could love these guys (you already do) but its also your first relationship with multiple people

- the trio start inviting you over more often, soon for sleepovers, and start inviting themselves over at your own place, mainly eren

- he just comes at random times, sometimes when youre not even there and waits for you, or stays and cleans up a bit before leaving

- armin and you share a deep love of literature, and you often find yourselves in hot debates about whatever youve read (mikasa and eren have to pry you two away before things get physical)

- mikasa likes to cook with you, she shares recipes that her mom taught her, and her and armin love to cook dinner together whereas eren is the breakfast maker of the household

- the first time you slept in the same bed as them you were so nervous your whole body thumped to the tune of your heartbeat, you were convinced armin could even hear it as he was laying beside you, but eren wrapped an arm around your waist, pulling you into his large chest before whispering "youre as stiff as a board, relax honey"

- eren snores, mikasa drools, armin has those dreams where you fall and then violently wake up before you hit the ground

- slowly but surely you stop thinking about your relationship as the trio and you, but as all of you together, and that really helps you come out of your shell a bit

- you may still be in the honeymoon phase, and there may be bumps along the way, but you like being with armin, eren, and mikasa. they make you so happy, it feels like the happiest youve been in a long time

- you like watching eren and armin dance in the living room while you and mikasa cuddle on the couch, before the boys pull you two up as well

- you like when armin reads to you, his soft voice reciting the words of the great gatsby

- you like it when eren can just tell youve had a rough day, and pulls you into a hug like hes protecting you from all the bad things in the world

- you love being with them. you love them. and you think that theyre it for you

i rushed the ending bc im fucking tired but i kinda wanna do a poly!series with like sasha, connie and jean, or annie, bertholdt and reiner, or any other poly ships u guys may request !

so yeah pls give me feedback it rlly helps me figure out whether you want a polyamorous series (or just like what i write in general), and it would be my first series ever which would be super cool anyways

yeah requests open for poly!ships anyways

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tonguetiedraven · 3 years ago

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Neat Notes and Messy Words

Fandom: Blue Exorcist/Ao No Exorcist

Pairing: Bon/Rin

Summary: Rin starts to find notes in his locker and assumes they're for his much more popular twin. (Hardly unreasonable since his feet are always covered in the notes falling out of Yukio's locker.)

Except they might not be for Yukio at all, which begs the question: who is leaving the notes?

Part: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight

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The note was in his locker just like he’d anticipated, and this time he couldn’t wait to open it up.

[Rin, you’d laugh if you knew who I was. And as much as I love your laugh—] whatever they’d written there had been scribbled out with a vengeance. [I will tell you one thing. I’m a guy.]

A guy! That knocked off half the school! He could do something with that!

But… why did they think he’d laugh? If they knew him, they’d have to know he wouldn’t do that. Not with the amount of times he’d been friend-zoned. That shit sucked. Even if he didn’t feel that way, he wouldn’t laugh.

“Rin?”

Yukio was watching him again. He looked confused, which, fair. Rin was scowling at a piece of paper.

“Nothing. Bother with your own notes.”

“I did.” Yukio indicated the fact that his locker door was open and there weren’t any notes falling out of it. “I chatted with Suguro about it and we figured out a way to block the opening.” He shrugged. “They can’t leave notes now. At least not in this locker. I can’t block my shoe locker, but those are easy to sweep away as long as they don’t get in my shoes.”

“Flip them upside down.” Rin muttered as he looked back at his note. A guy… Who could it be?

“Rin, I never asked you what was wrong.”

Rin’s gaze snapped up. “Huh?”

“I never asked. You just told me nothing was bothering you, which begs the question: what is bothering you?”

“Nothing.” He folded the note and shoved it in his pocket. Taking out another sheet of paper, he scrawled a few words.

[Note writer, I won’t laugh.]

This was the dumbest way to communicate. Rin needed to know who he was. He needed a phone number at least. How was he supposed to get to know him if he could only talk to him once a day?

Hmm… Him...

Rin shoved away the first face that immediately popped into his head and taped the note to his locker.

“You know,” Yukio mused in the careful way that meant he wanted to pretend he didn’t care, but really wanted Rin to listen, “you could always try and watch to see if you can spot your ‘note writer’ leaving the note.”

That felt like a betrayal of trust. Even though he wanted to know who it was, he didn’t want to trick them into it.

“I mean,” Yukio added, “even if they tell you, how will you know they’re not lying?”

Rin locked his locker and tried very, very hard not to think about that. Just because he’d been picked on before didn’t mean it would happen now. This was real. His note writer liked him. He just knew it.

Right?

It was Renzou and Konekomaru today, no Ryuuji in sight, and the absence had his tail drooping.

“Hey, Okumura,” Renzou bumped his shoulder as they headed towards their class. “Excited for Valentine's Day?”

Rin shrugged and tried not to blush. If he played his cards just right, he might have an actual date this year. He really hoped so. Shiemi had made her lack of interest in that sort of thing clear, and he was never going to get the courage to ask Ryuuji out, so his note writer was his only hope.

“You think your secret admirer will do something special?”

Rin didn’t bother hiding his blush. “Wh—how do you know about that?!”

Renzou’s right eye twitched. Konekomaru stopped walking for a moment. “Moriyama? Uh, she mentioned it.”

Rin’s cheeks grew warmer. Great. Who all had Shiemi told? Well, at least that confirmed it wasn’t her. Not that he’d really thought it was. It didn’t sound like her, and she didn’t use that sort of paper.

“If you don’t want them to do anything, I’m sure you could just let them know.” Konekomaru offered after a few steps.

Renzou shifted back into his view. “They’re not making you uncomfortable, are they?”

Rin promptly shook his head. “I’d just like to know who they are.” He clutched the strap of his bag and pictured all the notes inside it. They were sweet, and had clearly been given a lot of thought. He could picture someone (he tried not to picture them too hard, he was certain they’d turn into someone he knew and admired so much) doodling, writing, trying to think of the right words… Maybe they’d chew on the tip of their pen, maybe’ they’d mess with their hair… Maybe they stared in the distance, or maybe they were in a place where they could watch him as they wrote.

Whoever they were, he wanted to meet them.

They were both still staring at him, and it made him feel like he was missing something and he was uncomfortably aware of his blush.

“Uh,” He swallowed awkwardly and dropped his gaze to the tiled floor of the cram school, “where’s Suguro?”

“Bon? He’s already at class. Doesn’t want to miss anything or something.” Renzou shrugged like it wasn’t important, which was weird because he was smiling, and it wasn’t at all convincing.

And then they were at the classroom.

Ryuuji was writing in his notebook, eyes intent on his book, and for a moment, Rin let himself wish that his secret admirer was a certain rooster haired boy.

It wouldn’t happen, but there was nothing wrong with dreaming.

#bonrin #ao no exorcist #blue exorcist #rin okumura #my fics #ryuji suguro #getting close to the reveal ;)#will bon confess or rin figure it out?#bon/rin #bon x rin #bon suguro #ryuuji suguro #aoex #bonfire #sugurin #my tumblr fics

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joheunsaram · 4 years ago

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To Make A Power Couple - 02 (knj)

Chapter 2 - Pizza and Life Chats

THIS IS A REPOST SINCE I LOST ACCESS TO MY OLD ACCOUNT. PLEASE FOLLOW THIS BLOG FOR UPDATES ON THIS SERIES.

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Summary- Namjoon and Y/N go on their first date, and Namjoon is whipped.

word count- 5k

pairing- idol!namjoon x ceo!reader

rating- pg13 for now

genre- series, fluff, eventual smut, strangers2lovers

warnings- mentions of hangovers and panic attacks, tooth-rottingly fluffy

a.n- okay here’s the second part! I wrote this up fairly quickly (don’t expect this to be the norm!). This part I wanted to kind of address the stress of overworking as a young adult (GUILTY 🙋🏻‍♀️) so sorry if it gets a little serious at parts. I also wanted to switch it up so it’s from Namjoon’s perspective. I hope you enjoy it. SOFT JOON BEING A BIG OLD SOFTY.

Feedback much appreciated! 💕

taglist - @beach-bitch-bitch-beach, @sassyuniversitytacopeanut

Namjoon woke up startled as his phone alarm rang. He was groggy and his splitting headache made him nauseous. “I’m never going to drink again”, he mumbled. He groaned as he got off the couch he had crashed on the night before, trying not to trip over Taehyung who seemed to be dozing happily on the floor as he made his way to his room. He hadn’t stayed at the dorms in a while, preferring the quiet solitary of his own apartment nowadays, and with his hangover in full swing he felt like he was walking through a stranger’s house.

Last month was hell. He had procrastinated on his songs and none of the vocal guides were even halfway done before the due date. Every time he tried to finish a song a new one would pop up in his head and he would start on that, leading to a hard drive full of files labelled “finish soon” and “draft”, and a notebook full of scratched out scribbles. It was like his brain had decided to abandon him, deciding it had had enough of his perpetual melancholy. He had felt drained and burnt out, a husk with no creative juices left. Luckily, Yoongi and a few of the producers had taken pity on his stressed out state and lent a hand so he had been able to finish the bare minimum three days ago - before the label pressured him further. He was never more grateful for a small break.

In all honesty, he needed a way to jumpstart his brain, and get out of the routine of home, practice, meetings, studio, home. Sometimes, he almost wished he didn’t have the success he had so he could go out and let loose a little - a club, a party, anything. But the last time he went somewhere like that he got swarmed and the police had to be involved. He couldn’t risk that, not after the trouble Big Hit went to threaten media outlets a year and a half ago, when he was caught with what they called a hickey, but was actually a stress rash.

As he brushed his teeth today, however, he smiled at the mirror. Last month may have been terrible, but last night was one of the best he’d had in the past year.

When he had heard Bang PD’s team talk about how they were attending the charity gala as he met them for notes on his songs, he was intrigued. He had read about this non-profit in the paper before. They seemed to be helping bridge the gap between people through communication and that spoke to him. So much so that he had scrolled through their website multiple times, reading testimonials and almost memorizing the mission statement. They wanted to help kids learn English for free so they could communicate globally. He really liked the idea. It was hard for him to learn the language as a kid and he knew that the only reason he became as fluent as he is from the tutors his parents paid for and his obsession with American television and music. Although he didn’t need the tutoring anymore, he did enjoy talking to the in-house tutor at the company, John, from time to time and improving his skills. The fact that this company wanted to add a John to every school in Korea starting from the rural areas, made Namjoon want to meet the man behind the movement. Little did he know, he’d be meeting the girl who’d shift his idea of the ideal.

He had never been more glad to have convinced his company to let him and the boys attend an event. He had initially suggested it as a way to break the mundane before their comeback practices started and network while supporting a cause he liked. Two days ago, he wouldn’t have guessed it would have been an actual fun night leading to him nursing a headache.

He spent the next hour reliving last night as he showered and caught up on the news. He also read the messages he sent last night over a hundred times and had butterflies each time. Wasn’t he too old for butterflies? He wanted to message you again but every time he tried, he ended up overthinking it. Everything sounded forced or cheesy, and it was worse than any writer’s block. He threw his phone on the bed in frustration watching it bounce and land on the floor, before he grabbed it and pocketed it. Hopping around to get rid of his nerves, he decided to take a break from rereading the thread he already had memorized and check in with everyone. If his hangover was this bad he couldn’t imagine theirs.

Making his way back to the living room he found Taehyung now sitting on the floor, sleep still very evident on his features as he yawned and groaned. On the couch next to him sat Yoongi, holding an iced americano and staring into space. The rest were missing but he could hear a blender annoyingly whizzing in the kitchen.

“How’re you guys feeling this morning?” He asked as he sat across from Yoongi.

“This is why I don’t drink. Why did no one stop me?” Taehyung whined as he rose from the floor to leave, massaging his head.

“We tried. You were very excited to try all the disgustingly sweet drinks the hot bartender was making for you.” Yoongi replied with a sigh. “How was your date, Namjoon? You glad I forced you to go to the bar to talk to her?” he snickered, sipping his coffee before exhaling loudly in contentment.

“Honestly, I owe you big time. She was… amazing. I don’t think I’ve talked to someone that comfortably in a while” Namjoon sighed wistfully.

“I’ll add cupid to my resume,” he deadpanned. “Is she tolerating you for another date?”

“Yeah. We’re getting dinner on Tuesday, but I want to message her now. Argh!” He ran his hands over his face in frustration. “What do I even say? ‘Hi I’m the guy who was too scared to kiss you all night so you had to do it for him, what’s your favourite colour?’” Namjoon was annoyed at himself. It’s bad enough that he was having writer’s block in his music, did he have to have it for something as simple as texting too? This was ridiculous!

“Or you could just ask her how’s her hangover today. Jeez! Do I have to draft each of your messages? Stop being a dumbass and text the person you like.” Yoongi scoffed, clearly over Namjoon’s sudden and uncharacteristic insecurities.

Namjoon gave a resigned sigh as he reached for his phone and wrote out exactly what Yoongi suggested. Hey, he was his hyung for a reason - he had a full 6 months of life experience on him.

Namjoon: Hey! Hope your hangover is not too bad today.

As soon as the message was sent, he started getting nervous. Tapping his foot incessantly while he stared at his phone, willing it to buzz, annoying Yoongi enough to leave him alone on the couch in the process.

Y/N: Hi to you too! I actually don’t get hangovers so I’m doing great lol. What about you?

Namjoon: What do you mean you don’t get hangovers?

Y/N: I don’t know. Can’t get dehydrated if you’re always dehydrated!

Namjoon: That… makes no sense. Do I need to start reminding you to drink water?

Y/N: Only if you’re better than this app on my phone…

Namjoon: I can guarantee you I’m better than any app on this planet.

Y/N: Wow. Big claims! We’ll have to put it to the test I suppose.

Y/N: You never told me how you’re feeling. Oh and how’s Taehyung? Is he okay?

Namjoon: He’s doing fine. Made a pact to never drink again and if i’m being honest, I’m going to join him. I am shocked that your head is not exploding as well.

The messages continued easily after that, filled with updates of each other’s activities, playful flirting and even photos of dinner. By the time Monday rolled around, you had been messaging each other constantly, with no end to the conversation in sight and the only long pauses being when you were both asleep or working. It seemed like you would never run out things to talk about. Namjoon hadn’t messaged someone this frequently since he got out of his last relationship. It felt nice to relay his mundane day to day events to someone and he found himself excited to hear about your mundane, like how you decided to mix two different types of bad coffee blends to make a shockingly worse one. He was surprised again at how fast he felt comfortable around you. It was even starting to scare him a little - he only knew you for three days and it felt like he had known you forever! What was this weird spell you had on him?

The conversation Monday, however, was fairly sparse, and Namjoon was eager to set up plans for the next day, so that night he decided to call you.

After the first three rings, he was overthinking his decision. Maybe it was too soon to call? Maybe you didn’t like talking on the phone? What if it went to voicemail? Would he have to leave a message? What would he say? His inner monologue was quickly halted at the sound of your voice.

“Hello, this is Y/N” you sounded distant, almost too formal. He felt nervous.

“Hi… uh… this is Namjoon. Is this a bad time?”

“Oh Namjoon! Sorry I didn’t check who called when I picked up!” Relief washed over him at the change of your tone. “Sorry one sec can you hold on.” he heard you say as your voice got mumbled. He waited while he heard you talk to someone about proposals and deadlines. Were you still at work? He checked his watch - it was 10 pm. He didn’t know whether to be impressed by your work ethic or worried that you were overworking.

“Hi sorry about that! How are you?” He relaxed at your airy tone and smiled.

“I’m good. Are you still at work?”

“Yeah it’s only like 7 so it’s no big deal. I usually leave around 8” Were you serious?

“Y/N… It’s 10:04…” He was shocked at how nonchalant you sounded, and suddenly he had his answer - he was worried, not impressed. He had known you for three days and already you were setting his caretaker alarm off. He wanted to scold you for being careless and overworking, like he’s used to doing for the boys, but he knew it was too soon. He doesn’t even know why he’s feeling that way all of a sudden and tried to suppress his protective instincts.

“No it’s not! It’s…” He could hear your voice going further away as he imagined you moving the phone in front of you to check the time. “Oh shit you’re right. What the hell? Okay sorry I’m gonna put you on hold again.” Before he could say anything he heard your voice again, distant again but loud. “Oh my god. Guys, it’s 10pm. Go home! Why did nobody tell me? No it doesn’t matter we can do that tomorrow. Please go home. Pack up now! You too Siwon, don’t worry I’ll go home after I get off the phone. See you!” He smiled at the sternness of your tone - it reminded him of a teacher dismissing class.

“Sorry about that. I didn’t realize I overworked my team. Had to send the troops home” you laughed and Namjoon felt his heart flutter.

“I don’t wanna keep you from going home. I can call you back once you get there,” he offered. He felt bad that you were staying in an empty office on his account.

“Oh don’t worry about it. It was a lie to get Siwon off my back. I’m probably gonna be here till like 1 or something. I still have to get this done” you said matter-of-factly, like it was the most normal thing in the world. He knew that tone fairly well, having used it multiple times himself when he locked himself in his studio, running on nothing but coffee and energy bars.

“Okay I know we’ve only just met and we have our first date tomorrow, but do you want some company?” He asked before he could stop himself. The line was silent for a bit, and he felt self conscious, scared that he had overstepped and driven you away. Before he could check his phone to see if you had hung up you spoke.

“It’d be pretty boring for you to watch me just type away. Are you sure? It’s pretty late.” He was sure his cheeks would hurt from how wide he smiled.

“It’s not a problem at all. I was going to work tonight too.” He wasn’t. “We can just work together. I’ll bring food. Did you eat yet?” his words tumbled over each other.

“How very college of you.” He could hear you giggling on the line. “Now that I think about it - I’m starving.”

“Okay text me the address, I’ll be there soon.”

He had never been this excited to pretend to work.

He spotted you as he walked through the doors of the 13th floor, pepperoni pizza in hand. You were sitting at a long desk near the middle of the room. He was surprised as he expected you in an office, but he found you typing away at your desktop. Your hair was tied up in a bun and you were dressed in an oversized beige t-shirt, eyebrows furrowed head bopping to the hip hop track playing through the speakers. You seemed to be in your own little world. He felt like he was spying on you as he leaned against the door watching but he also liked seeing how you acted when you thought no one was watching. He was about to announce his presence when the track changed to a Childish Gambino one and you whooped and started to rap along.

You were now fully head banging and rapping the verse at the top of your lungs. He would be impressed by your fairly good amateur skills if he didn’t find the entire scene so endearing. His heart was doing somersaults as he watched you now fully engrossed in the song, typing forgotten as you got up and started to pretend you were on stage, an imaginary mic in your hand asking haters if they “eatin’ though”. You looked so adorable that he couldn’t help but squeal a little “cute!”

That’s when you saw him, eyes wide. He felt a little bad when he saw how embarrassed you looked, immediately stopping and slapping a hand to your mouth before bursting out in nervous laughter. He could write a whole album with that laugh. Oh he was so whipped, he thought to himself as he made his way to you.

“You know you’re not half bad!” He exclaimed as he set the pizza on the table, pulling a chair next to yours and settling down.

“Do you think your fake compliments will save you from the fact that you were spying on me?” you asked, crossing your hands across your chest, pretending to scowl but failing to do so.

“First, real compliment. Second, would pizza save me?” He opened the box and proudly smiled, loving the way your eyes lit up as you reached for a slice.

“Yes it will!” you exclaimed as you took your first bite, lightly moaning at the taste. “But erase that memory from your brain please.”

“Nope. Never. It was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen and I’m going to save it forever” he said as he also started on his slice. You pouted up at him, cheeks puffed and it took all the self-control he had to not kiss it off your face. He hadn’t felt this way in so long, it was like you were his first crush. Trying to control his pulse, he asked “What are you working on so late?”

“Oh I have a proposal due for a meeting tomorrow at noon and I’m only halfway through it,” you frowned wistfully at the screen as if willing it to type on its own.

“Can I help?” He asked, knowing fully well that he couldn’t. He just had an overwhelming urge to make that frown disappear.

“You being here is help enough,” you smiled sincerely as you looked at him and he felt his heart explode, a blush creeping on his cheeks as he smiled bashfully. “What are you working on?”

“I have a few songs I have to finish the lyrics for. Been procrastinating” he rubbed the back of his neck as he pulled out the notebook from his back pocket.

“Can I help?” you echoed his question to which he echoed your response grinning. He wasn’t lying though. Even though he had planned to not really work, as the night progressed he found the change from his usual writing spot inspiring. Sitting next to you, the sound of the keyboard clicking was soothing leading to words pouring out of him. He filled pages as he stole glances at you concentrating on your proposal, tongue peeking from between your lips, still bobbing to the music which was now playing from your airpods instead of the speakers. He smiled at the sight, before focusing on his notebook.

After about an hour or so of hard work, he finished three songs that he had allotted himself the whole week to do. This was the most productive hour he had all month. Antsy for a break, he looked over at you and found you staring at him, a hand under your chin. As he met your gaze you smiled.

“You’re really hot when you concentrate. Has anyone ever told you that?” you commented. He was taken aback by your remark, heart fluttering at your smirking face. Not missing his chance and spurred on by the comment, he scooted closer in one sweep till your knees touched and you were face to face.

“You’re one to talk. I couldn’t stop looking at you this past hour.” Gazing into your eyes, he was amused to see your smirk disappear as it was now your turn to be shocked. He reached out and tucked a stray hair behind your ear letting his hand linger, enjoying the way you sighed as he did. “Can I make good on my promise now?” He whispered, his face centimeters away, looking at your lips. The way you bit your lower lip made him want to take you there and then. The desk looked big enough. Hell, even if it wasn’t he could make it work.

“Promise?” you whispered as he watched your eyes flutter to his lips.

“To kiss you first…” Too impatient to wait for your answer, he brought his lips to yours, relishing how soft they felt under his own. He was thrilled at you returning the kiss, deepening it as you grabbed the collar of his shirt to bring him closer just like you did after the party. He was beginning to think this was your signature move, and he’d be lying if he said it didn’t immensely turn him on. He moved his hand cupping your face to rest on your neck and he could feel your heartbeat mimicking his. He put his other hand around your waist pulling you closer, wanting to be as close to you as he could get. He traced his tongue over your lips, his head cloudy with endorphins as you opened your mouth inviting him in. He had never tasted something so euphoric, his tongue exploring yours in a rush.

He could feel you pushing forward as he leaned back and allowed you to straddle his lap, your legs on either side of the chair. As soon as you were on his lap, he pulled you closer, both arms around on your hips, your chest flushed with his. He kissed the side of your mouth as he made his way down your jaw to your neck. You smelt like vanilla mixed with a fresh flower garden, and he was sure this smell was better than any drug in the world. He could hear your breathy moans as he sucked where your neck met your collarbone, licking to soothe it before moving further. He wanted to taste all of you. Your hands were in his hair and each tug made him groan into you, making him harder. He could kiss you like this forever. He wanted to save this moment so he could come back to it and relive it. He traced his hands up and down your sides, moving under your shirt but remaining on your waist, enjoying the feel of your soft skin.

“Namjoon… Namjoon… slow down” he heard you say breathlessly as he felt a slight push. He looked up at you, your eyes half lidded and lusty as you grabbed his face and brought it to yours. You were sending him mixed signals, but he didn’t care as long as he could keep kissing you.

“We have to slow down or I’m going to want to fuck you right here.” You whined as you both came back up for air, but you kissed him again nevertheless. Hearing you say that made him want to do anything in his power to make that happen.

“I don’t mind, baby,” he said against your lips, kissing you with urgency, biting your lower lip and pulling it gently to elicit another moan from you. To his disappointment, you seemed to have better self-control than him as you pushed him back, both of you panting as you struggled to catch your breath. He moved his hand back to your hips tracing little circles, feeling comforted by you smoothing his hair you had pulled earlier.

“There are cameras here. I’d rather not make a sex tape on our first date.” You giggled as you pointed to the black sphere in the corner of the room. He had never hated the obsession buildings had for security more, but the crudeness of your comment made him laugh. He had almost forgotten this was your first date, it felt like he had kissed you a thousand times before. You tasted like the relief of an awning in the middle of a summer downpour.

“I think we need to cool down,” you say as you climb off of his lap. “Let’s go.”

He followed you as you led him to the little kitchenette near the end of the room, unable to resist the urge to wrap his hands around your waist in a back hug. He knew he was being too clingy for a first date, but the way you giggled and put your hands over his gave him assurance.

“Lemonade, coke, or water,” you asked as you peered into the fridge.

“You.” He smirked kissing your neck, feeling bold off of the high from your makeout session.

“Joon!” you pretended to sound scandalized as you turned in his arms, smiling warmly. The nickname made his heart swell. It added a familiarity that he didn’t know he missed from you.

“You haven’t called me Joon before. I like it” he smiled as he pecked your lips.

“Hey! We are cooling down! No kissing! Now pick” you chided and Namjoon couldn’t help but wonder if you were this assertive in bed too, a million scenarios playing in his head. Okay, you were right, he needed to cool down.

“I’ll just have water, thanks,” he said as he grabbed the bottle you passed him, opening and gulping half of it. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was for something other than you. You both made your way to the tables, sitting across from each other.

“So did you finish your proposal?” He asked trying to cool himself but failing as he noticed you running the cold water bottle against your neck, the beads of condensation dripping on your shirt. He cleared his throat as he tried to focus his attention on your eyes, a mantra of stay focused playing in his head.

“Yes! Finally! It’s perfect.” you smiled proudly and somehow he felt a wave of pride too. “What about you? Made any progress?”

“Actually yes. I kind of finished my entire week’s writing in that one hour” he was still amazed by his own progress.

“Okay, Mr Overachiever” you joked and he chuckled.

“To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be able to write anything, but I don’t know your presence is kind of soothing. It helped me focus.” Watching your smile grow wide, he continued, “I’ve been having pretty severe burnout this past month and it has just been hard to put down my thoughts, even non-lyrical ones.” He fidgeted with the water bottle as he looked at it, avoiding eye contact.

He didn’t know why he was telling you this. He recalled when he told you about his struggles as a leader during your first conversation. Somehow being around you led him to vomit out his feelings. It was… unlike him. Namjoon was usually not this honest on dates, or relationships, as much as he would hate to admit it. That’s the reason he broke off his last one. He felt bad lying to her about a busy schedule when he just wanted to be alone. She would have understood, she was kind and thoughtful, but it just felt easier to lie and not put the effort in to explain his thoughts. Even when they broke up, he lied and told her that it was because he couldn’t handle being in a relationship at the moment, when in reality things had cooled off a while ago and he felt guilty as his feelings faded.

He felt your hand reach out and grab one of his, intertwining your fingers. He felt comforted by the gesture as you rubbed your thumb across him before you spoke two words that warmed his heart. “I understand.”

“You know it’s hard to work at full speed all the time. It’s okay to not be at a hundred all the time. The valleys feed the peaks” you continued. It was a simple remark, but it sounded surprisingly poetic to him. He hadn’t felt this understood outside of the boys for a long time. It was refreshing. It was terrifying. He resisted his natural urge to run and hide.

“Are you speaking from experience?” he asked, needing to divert the attention away from his own vulnerabilities.

“Yeah. I had it pretty tough a couple of years ago. Too much pressure from myself, too many expectations. Led to too many vices and panic attacks” you shrugged as you continued and he squeezed your hand to comfort you. “It creeps up from time to time but my therapist and I have it handled” He looked at you in awe. You hadn’t given him a throwaway answer or switched the limelight back at him. You wasted no time in being as vulnerable as him, if not more. He knew at that moment that regardless of where this thing went, he wanted you to know you better.

“Thank you for being honest.” He brought your hand to his lips and kissed it gently. It was an intimate gesture but he wanted you to know how much he appreciated your words - how much he appreciated you - in that moment. You both sat in comfortable silence for a little while, playing with each other’s hands that were still intertwined, till one of you yawned loudly causing the other to giggle. With the weight of the conversation lifting, you both fell back into playful banter as you decided to pack up and call it a night.

“Do you want me to walk you to your car?” Namjoon asked, wanting to drag the night on longer despite it already being almost 2 am.

“Don’t judge me but I actually don’t know how to drive. I was just going to cab back.” he saw you giggle bashfully as you pulled your backpack over your shoulders.

“Oh, no judgment here! Me neither” he laughed. Why does everyone think it is such a big deal to not drive? It’s better for the environment! “Do you want to take one together? I don’t really want you to ride alone this late.” He rubbed the back of his neck, hoping he didn’t come off as if he was trying to dictate what you did.

“I’d really like that,” you said as you walked towards the elevators. He held your hand as you both got on, liking the way you moved closer to him at that.

In the cab you both sat closer than necessary, his arm wrapped around you as you both made plans for your scheduled date later that day, trying not to doze off. When the cab stopped all too soon at your apartment, he kissed you gently as he told you how much he enjoyed your company.

That night laying in bed, his heart felt full as he read your goodnight message. He was sure of it now. He really wanted you in his life.

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