#…but that’s also memory from like two decades ago soooo very likely off

[bbcphile]

Ohhhhhh (AKA. Happy Anniversary to Me: Escape from the Mold House Edition)

The last week has been A Struggle and while there has definitely been plenty of Bad Shit going on (bad medical news about a friend, having a retraumatizing medical experience, some rough anniversaries of other things that brought up trauma memories, and learning that my gallbladder is very likely a ticking time bomb and btw, everyone please cross your fingers it doesn't rupture and go septic?), it didn't feel like it was quite at the level of Bad Enough (by my incredibly warped standards from too many decades of trauma) to warrant how much of a tailspin I was in.

Well. Now I have figured out the missing piece and am feeling SO MUCH BETTER.

But holy shit, the expression "The body keeps score" is so damn accurate, because of course my body was freaking the fuck out about a very traumatic anniversary that I had conveniently temporarily blocked out even though it was only two years ago (oh dissociative disorders).

To learn about the "My Apartment Almost Killed Me" Saga, keep reading below.

Soooo, here's the backstory: in May of 2022, my health, which had been rapidly tanking over the previous 9 months, took a dramatic nose dive. I was either sleeping or nearly passed out most of the time and couldn't walk across the living room without basically keeling over face first onto the ground because my muscles would go on strike, and then I would have to lie there, unable to move, until @sufficientlylargen could literally pick me up off the ground and put me on the sofa, because the muscle weakness was so bad I couldn't even lift my head or push myself up to my elbows. I had also been in and out of the ER with stroke-like symptoms, but none of the members of my medical team could figure out what was wrong. It was terrifying.

Until one day, at the very end of May, I realized I had been walking without falling over at PT and then stopped being able to walk as soon as I walked into our apartment. I repeated the experiment a few times, and realized that yep, there was definitely something in the apartment that was mostly responsible for whatever the hell was happening. We packed a bag for me and found a friend who let me crash at their place for a week while we hired an air quality expert to come and test our place. It turns out that we had 2 feet of stachybotrys mold growing up the walls of our basement, and the combination of neurotoxins from the stachybotrys plus my MCAS was literally poisoning and killing me. Over the next few weeks, we got rid of 85% of our belongings (including several hundred books, all our clothes, some of my favorite xmas ornaments growing up, which were just about the only happy things about my childhood, and most of our furniture) because we couldn't clean them enough to keep me from keeling over when I was exposed to them, packed everything else (on the porch--because I couldn't go inside--after soaking it all in ammonia so we wouldn't bring any spores into our new place), and simultaneously house and apartment hunted to try to find a place we could move into ASAP because I was supposed to be having neurosurgery in over a month and needed a place to recuperate, and every minute we delayed was a risk I'd permanently lose function due to nerve/brain/spinal column damage. (Things were made more difficult by the fact that there was a non-zero chance I could be paralyzed by the surgery so we needed to find an apartment that didn't have stairs in case I couldn't walk.) There was other drama during this time, too (eg. my new neurologist, who I had been waiting 9 months to see, closed her practice the day before my appointment with her without making any referrals, my new PCP accused me of drug-seeking when I was trying to make pain management plans for after my surgery, etc. etc.), which didn't help. But at least, within 2 weeks of moving out of the Mold House, as we'd dubbed it, I started being able to walk more than a few blocks and to even just think about writing again (and, ya know, also regularly speak complete sentences, since sometimes the neurotoxins had taken that, too), so we knew that we'd made the right decision.

Anyway, the good news is, we found a place and moved in on July 6th, so we only had to spend a month and a bit living in friends' guest rooms, hotels, and airbnbs with our two cats (one of whom developed a UTI and ear infection from the stress and mold, so we were also medicating her), and we were able to postpone my neurosurgery until February, and the neurosurgery was a success, which is why I'm alive and able to do things like write meta and fic again!

All this to say, I hadn't realized until I saw a thing about it on FB Memories (lol) that it had been 2 years since my apartment was literally killing me and I was abjectly terrified. And it never fails to amaze me that my body (and some parts of my mind) clearly remember anniversaries like that even if I don't, because my anxiety will be through the roof and I will be having more flashbacks about Unrelated Trauma Things and just generally feeling like my resilience is at about half its normal level. My working theory is that those aspects that remember the anniversary assume it's happening again and I never got out (oh emotional flashbacks. How I hate you.), and it's only once I make the connection consciously and can reflect on 1. how terrible it was (yay validation?) and 2. the fact that it's over and I survived through sheer stubbornness and good research skills (again) that I can get back to my baseline and things (like writing) become so much more fun and easier.

Last reflection on this shitshow: last year, I was too busy recovering from my neurosurgery to notice what I was feeling about the 1 year anniversary of the Escape From The Mold House (or at least, if I had any reflections on it, I don't remember them), but I'd guess it was probably still too upsetting and traumatizing for me to be ready to look at the memories directly. But right now, at least, I'm really proud of myself. I mean, all of that was horrifying and traumatizing, and I wouldn't wish it on ANYONE, but I'm really proud of myself for saying 'fuck this, something is wrong, and I think I know what, and I am going to solve it because I can, and I refuse to die like this.' I sometimes forget that under all the anxiety and trauma and insecurity, I am fundamentally incredibly stubborn, determined, confident in my opinions, and willing to fight for myself.

I'm hoping I can hold onto that reminder as I go forward, especially depending on what I learn about whether my gallbladder is in fact a ticking time bomb. I can and will argue with my doctors to take this seriously if I have to; I just don't want to need to.

[momofaddict]

Thanksgiving day this year will be one year since my daughter lost her life to heroin OD. I've lost what little faith I had. I do believe in an afterlife, because the idea of NEVER seeing her again is unfathomable. But God, Heaven, Hell - they just seem like a fairy tale.

It still doesn't feel real, except that it feels very real as I raise her now 18 mo child. I love him with every fiber of my being, but as anyone who reads this knows, my plans for being a relaxed, traveling empty nester are gone. Maybe that's selfish, but I can accept that.

I'm so mad at her for leaving me and especially for leaving her child. I'm mad that my life, as I planned it, is gone. I'm mad that Phoenix's father killed himself 4 days after my daughter's death and I have to explain both deaths to him someday. I'm mad that I will have to face his full-blooded sister one day & explain why she was given up for adoption and Phoenix wasn't. I'm so sad and mad about this whole scenario and I'm so alone as a single woman. I was always happy being divorced since age 23. But now - I could really use the help. That's a hard thing to admit.

What's more is I miss my baby girl. She was my very very VERY best friend. I could be my true self with her, even in her addiction. How can life go on without her contagious laugh, her child-like trust in people, and her unique love for humanity? I can't believe it's been a year. If it weren't for her son, who is in my care until my end of days, I'd be so lost. I mean I'm still lost, but he gives me purpose and a means to press onward.

But while I'm unloading, I may as well admit that it's also difficult when I'm having a hard day. I have to put my happy face on when Phoenix gets home from daycare no matter what kind of wretched day I've had at work, or no matter if I just need to crawl into bed and cry for my daughter. I feel like if I project any kind of negativity around him, we will both be miserable. It's just me. My ex helps a couple days a week, but that means dealing with my ex... whom I left 30 years ago! Not fun, but I'd be an even hotter mess without any help at all.

Oh sure, everyone wanted to help at first when Melody died. But those offers are now silent and it's just me - and my ex. Ugh. I'm just exhausted, and sad, and scared, and alone. I miss her, I miss her, I miss her soooo effen much!

WHY HER!?

I finally started therapy. And I got really lucky and I love my new therapist, and found her on the first try. However... I've only had one session with her in four weeks. Week two, she was sick. Week three, I went to Colorado. Week four, yesterday, she canceled again because she has a friend in the hospital. I fucking need this woman to help me!

I leave you with this tribute that my son posted online on her birthday, Sept 8. She would have been 32. I couldn't have given a better description of her spirit and her adorable childlike naivete:

My sister, Melody, absolutely loved infomercials. It bordered on irrational. One year I received one of those copper pans for Christmas, and while I was happy to get it, she didn't think I understood the gravity of the gift I had just been given. "Do you know what that is?" she asked me at the time with complete sincerity and genuine concern that I didn't quite comprehend what an incredible technological wonder I had been given. "You can melt candy on that."

She absolutely had the HD glasses. They made your vision amazing. OxyClean, sure. Slap Chop, absolutely. It did not matter what was being sold; every product was solid gold, including when it was literally solid gold.

I know it seems silly to bring this up on what would have been her 32nd birthday today, but I think it says something important about her and who she was. She believed in people. It's not that she necessarily believed the products worked as advertised. It's that she believed in the ideas of making things better that they represented, and she believed that the people making the pitch believed in what they were pitching.

She could fully and wholeheartedly empathize with those complete strangers. So much more then, could she love, empathize with and believe in the people lucky enough to know her personally. She was somehow everyone's friend that they talked to on the side of a party or gathering they were starting to feel uncomfortable or out of place at. She made it seem so easy, which is what makes the next part so cruel.

She also suffered from heroin addiction for over a decade. It is the reason I keep using the god forsaken past tense instead of the present.

I have a lot of very bad memories from all of that time. I cried a lot then. I cry a lot still.

Please, if you know someone that suffers from addiction, don't write them off. This is not to say you should enable their addiction. Just encourage rehab and support groups. There are also support groups for friends and family members of people suffering from addiction. Addiction, whether it is to drugs, money, gambling, work, or any other flavor is a disease, and it desperately needs treatment. You don't have to go it alone, and, take it from someone who tried to, you shouldn't. It'll eat you alive.

In the end, though, don't feel sad for me. If you were fortunate enough to know my sister, you probably got, what, a few years? A decade? I got thirty one whole damn years.

I love you, Melody, and I miss you every god damn day.

[rocket-bear]

⭐star⭐ FOR THAT ONE ASK THING!

aaaah ty for asking!!! I’m just gonna take this opportunity to, ramble about a couple of different things so this is going to be real long I’m sorry,

First, two scenes from All-In:

When she tells him that Saikyoudai is her number one choice for university because it has the degree plans that best suit her hopes of double-majoring in child development and education, he ditches his other options and goes all-in on his own application. She’ll get in, he knows, and she does. The football team isn’t sterling– though the big fucking baldy is there, and that’s a mark in its favor– but he’s had experience with building a team from the ground up. He can make it work.

I’ve seen folks critique the idea that Mamori just follows Hiruma to Saikyoudai at the end of the series, and while there are DEF criticisms to be made about HiruMamo– tangent: I personally don’t know why I love it so much, because “male character treats everyone around him including his love interest with blatant disrespect bc the way he actually shows respect does not at all reflect anything that another human being would ever recognize” is like, usually VERY much not my jam, but meanwhile it somehow works for HiruMamo to the point that they’re one of my everlasting OTPs– to me, there’s no actual evidence that Hiruma picked Saikyoudai first (unless it’s in a guidebook or something?), so I wanted to push back on that assumption a little! Everyone that’s attending Saikyoudai is canonically very smart or very talented, so it makes just as much sense to me that they either landed on Saikyoudai together because it’s a great school, or that Mamori was actually the one to choose it and Hiruma followed her there. The only canon character on the Wizards before Hiruma joined was Banba, so while Banba is great, it’s not like the football team would have been a particular selling point for him. Hiruma’s a literal genius who could go to any school he wanted, so– yeah. Saikyoudai was Mamori’s pick, not his!

Next is the kiss scene! I’m not going to quote it because this post is already going to be long enough, but GOSH I have had that specific set-up for The Moment HiruMamo Happens in my brain literally since I was 13 but I just never actually took the time to write it into anything, and then abruptly last night it was just like, IT’S TIME. (The fact that it’s been in my mind for that long always makes me vaguely worried that it was something from another fic or a prompt that someone wrote over a decade ago and I’ve accidentally stolen it by thinking I came up with it myself so ANXIOUS BLANKET APOLOGIES, IN CASE THIS EVER HAPPENS, SOMETIMES YOU COME BACK TO A FANDOM OVER A DECADE LATER AND MEMORIES ARE HARD,)

But!!! In any case, whenever I think about HiruMamo finally happening, in my head it’s always Mamori that actually… not necessarily makes the first move, but actually approaches the conversation?? because Hiruma’s allergic to being actually, genuinely vulnerable, and jokey vaguely antagonistic flirting is one thing, but acknowledging that the Vibes are Real is a whole other thing and Mamori’s the one in that equation that’s emotionally mature enough to accept it. So in All-In, Mamori opens the door by just, legit inviting herself into Hiruma’s room, Hiruma does some flirting that could easily be brushed off if he was misreading things, and Mamori explicitly challenges him to DO IT YOU COWARD. One of my favorite dynamics for them!

FINALLY, from Kick Drum Heart– again, rather than quoting a scene I want to talk about a specific plot device, because if I let myself dig into scenes then we’re gonna be here all day. When I was first plotting KDH, the whole idea was really just Sena and Shin developing their relationship in college via Shin tutoring Sena, and I hadn’t planned for either Shin’s poetry plotline or the consistent presence of Panther in story with his mirroring romance plotline with Homer. I fleshed out Panther’s storyline because I just REALLY, REALLY wanted to include the detail of he and Sena casually hooking up in the US since it’s one of my favorite headcanons rofl, and so I wanted to expand his role to be more central to the narrative out of respect for his character and so that scene would feel more cohesive! And then for Shin’s poetry, I really wanted to find something that would allow me to explore the way ShinSena is mutually supportive, rather than limiting it to just Shin supporting/inspiring Sena. Modern fandom is MUCH better about this so shout-out to all the other wonderful writers still writing for ShinSena, but back in the day there was tendency to reduce Shin down to nothing more than Sena’s Hot Sexy Supportive Perfect Boyfriend, without really delving into the ways that Sena is also a hugely important positive influence on Shin’s life instead of it being a one-way street. (Like!!! Shin literally, canonically does not even enjoy football, the thing he devotes every single second of his time and energy to, until he loses to Sena!! Literally in canon this is true!!!!!! I HAVE A META POST IN THE WORKS ABOUT THIS,)

So, I wanted to think of something that Shin could be struggling with during the story that Sena could support him with the same way Shin was supporting him for biology. This was tricky, because Shin’s canonically a great student and Sena isn’t, so I had to think of something academic that A) Shin would struggle with in the first place, and B) Sena would actually be better at. I faffed around with ideas for a while but finally landed on literature/poetry while I was rewatching Chihayafuru for oh like the fifth time, due to the scene where Chihaya’s summer homework is to write some original poems and some of them are extremely silly (“I FEAST UPON A WHIRLWIND OF ICE CREAM…”) and some of them are accidental beautiful love poems about her love interest. I thought that would be perfect for Shin, who tends to approach things in overly clinical/literal terms and struggles to openly express his more positive feelings, and while Sena’s not a poetry buff, I figured he would at least be able to help Shin rework things to sound more expressive and less clinical! This in turn then set up the entire climax of the story with Shin sharing the theme of his poetry collection with Sena, so I’m soooo glad that I landed on that idea because it really made the whole story come together. (SO LIKE, EVERYONE SHOULD PAY RESPECTS AND GO WATCH CHIHAYAFURU, IT’S AN AMAZING SHOW)

Shin’s poems went through a lot of drafts of mostly small tweaks to change wording or slightly adjust a metaphor, but as a bonus, one that I didn’t end up using at all was [Bradycardia, / until you appear ahead. / My pulse comes alive.] I thought the idea of Shin trying to use the word “bradycardia” in a love poem was hysterical, but then the rest of it was like, actually deeply romantic, and too similar in theme to [Muscles atrophy. / You appear along with spring, / Promising new growth.], so I scrapped it.

my god that’s so much more than you asked for sorry about the wall of text BUT I HOPE YOU ENJOY???????

[zenithlux]

Soooo.... About the rest of Vergil's drunkin' promises... (人 •͈ᴗ•͈)

I’ve actually had more than one request for these, and I wasn’t quite sure when I would tackle it. But now that I have this rather adorable request in my inbox, my brain was finally like I GOTCHU FAM(S), so now here we are. 😏 I’ve finally built up the courage edited this story enough to post. 

This is a follow up to Intoxication and Promises (but you don’t really need either if ya don’t want). Also, I’m still practicing the spice, so uhhh… there’s that. 

And it’s also NSFW. So here’s a nice Vergil picture because… I mean why not?

High Praises

Ashira might have wondered how she’d gotten herself into this predicament if Vergil gave her a second to do so. But every time she tried to form a coherent thought, he’d nip at her thigh in a silent “warning” of some kind (though she wasn’t opposed to seeing where that “warning” might lead, given the circumstances). When she tried to admonish him for that he’d lick in just the right spot where her words either died on her lips or came out as a jumbled mess. At some point, she’d given up completely and had pulled on his hair in some kind of lame defiance.

Except he loved it when she did that, so that “defiance” was very, very short-lived. 

But fuck. All of this - his wicked thoughts, devilish tongue, and the way he just stared straight into her eyes without any hesitation or shame - had her so close to tumbling straight off the metaphorical precipice that she was half surprised she’d managed to stay on the bed. 

Though considering the way his hands had all but clamped down on her hips, maybe that wasn’t all that surprising.

He’d caught her off-guard earlier when he’d quite literally and without warning knelt in front of her when she had tried to get out of bed. And he’d been completely silent as he’d gently glided one of her legs over his shoulder and planted an absurd amount of butterfly kisses along her thigh. “My beautiful queen,” He’d murmured, dragging the silk of her own damn nightgown so tenderly against her skin that all she could do was shiver, eyes locked on his. And he’d stared right back. In fact, Ashira was quite certain his eyes hadn’t deviated from that one spot, even when her own threatened to roll into the back of her head. “It seems I have some… atoning to do.”

“For…?”

She hissed as his teeth grazed along her thigh. “I made a promise,” He said. “And I have yet to fulfill it. A faux pas on my part, but nothing that can’t be remedied.” His voice was unfairly seductive and unbearably husky. Though considering the myriad of ways he’d used it over their rather long married life, she was more than used to hearing it. 

It didn’t make him any less pleasing to listen to. If anything, it made her find ways to hear this version of him more often. 

So, in her haze of arousal she’d smiled back and said, “And here I thought you forgot.”

He slid his hands up along her hips, pulling her nightgown out of the way. “I never forget.”

“Except when you’re hopelessly drunk.”

Ashira fully accepted the more forceful bite she got for that. Not enough to break skin- never that - but certainly enough to leave a mark. “Careful,” He murmered as he drug the pads of his fingers back down her abdomen and along the elastic of her underwear. “Or I may just forget right now.”

“Never,” She said as she drew small, lazy circles along his knuckles. “That would be dishonorable.” And while that would probably be enough permission for most people, Vergil still waited, even as his eyes hazed over with his own arousal. And as Ashira finally felt the last remnants of her sleepiness fade away, she brushed her fingers through his hair. “Which promise, my love?”

“If you put your trust in me,” He said as he drug her panties down in such an agonizing place that it took everything she had to keep from bucking right into his face. “I’ll worship you, as a Queen should be.”

The first time he had said it however long ago (six months? A year? Bah it didn’t matter) had been arousing enough, but she’d brushed it off as it had only been spoken after she’d managed to get him wrapped up in an absurd amount of blankets. And of all the promises he’d made that night, that was the one she assumed he’d never remember. It hadn’t been part of the long, drunk ramble where he’d practically agreed to sleep with her on the moon if she’d asked, so she didn’t think that she’d given him that particular part of the memory. Clearly, it had drifted between them at some point; she just didn’t know when. 

The second time, however, had her stomach flipping in pure desire

His expression turned a touch too smug. “I never forget, my beloved.”

Now here she was, struggling to keep herself upright, much less hold herself back. Vergil was far too good at this; something she had both known and forgotten at some point in the last however long. The reminder, while torturous in all the right ways, was welcome. But beneath her pleasure was a hint of frustration. She wanted more, and was positive that he knew it too. 

“Impatient, my love?” His coy voice echoed in her mind. “This is all for you.” 

She tugged on his hair again in mock annoyance. “Says the one in control.”

A soft hum echoed back as his tongue circled her clit. “Dammit Verg-” Even her thoughts vanished as his fingers slipped through her folds with astounding ease. Her arms shook with a mix of pleasure and exertion, and she wanted nothing more than to just flop back onto the bed and let him do whatever he wanted. But when her eyes trailed to the ceiling, he stopped moving - again. That was quickly becoming his favorite tease - and she forced herself to meet his gaze. His finger pressed against her most sensitive spot in silent praise, and she couldn’t fight back the groan of pleasure. “Why must you do this to me?”

He chuckled, his breath much too warm against her skin. “You would do the same.”

She had done the same, in fact, but she was much too stubborn to admit it. And even if she wanted to, the pressure of a second finger wiped her mind of any suitable response. She barely noticed when his lips drifted to her stomach. She didn’t wonder how he kept such an infuriating pace while completely ignoring her own attempts to push back against him. When his lips met hers, she was too busy trying to find more friction to question how he’d actually gotten there. 

He pulled away far too soon; both his lips and his fingers from her core. She growled, clenching her muscles in an attempt to keep him there. But he simply smirked and slipped right out regardless. “You’re much too wet for that, my Queen.” Her second attempt to intimidation was cut short by a sinful moan as his teeth grazed down on the pulse in her neck. His fingers caressed her spine, painting her skin with her own fluids. 

“You coy, sinful, infuriating devil.”

He bit her neck in response, before peppering her collarbone with a mixture of kisses and nibbles. When he reached the other side, the hand on her back slipped under her thigh as his knee teasingly pressed against her entrance. The silk of his pants was pure heaven against her swollen clit, and she bit her lip to keep from begging for him. Of course, her desire swirled in her mind as often as his name. When she finally dared to speak it, he silenced her with a kiss as he effortlessly lifted her enough to push them both back onto the bed. 

Ashira’s eyes widened as he sat up, stripping off his cumbersome shirt before swooping in for another kiss. She arched into him, sighing in content when he pushed her back down with his chest, pinning her to the bed beneath him. His hands found her wrists, but he lightly scraped the skin of her arms in endless and nonsensical lines. 

“Let me,” She murmured as she tugged gently at his hand. He paused for a moment, face buried in the crook of her neck. Their hearts were in perfect sync, practically crashing into each other with each erratic beat. But that was normal. They both knew each other so well. He the most sensitive pieces of her skin, and exactly how to draw whatever sound of hers he wanted. But she knew what he wanted, too; tender brushes through his scalp (or not so tender, under the right circumstances). Soft lines traced against the muscles of his arms, shoulders, or chest. And as she tugged on those memories in his own head- two decades of knowledge- he eventually let one of her hands go as he pressed his own down to steady himself. She kissed him in appreciation and brushed along his arm. His head didn’t move, and a quiet groan against Ashira’s neck made her shiver. 

“Vergil,” She whispered. He knew she was desperate, no matter how controlled she kept her voice. But she knew he’d done the same to himself. As she pressed her fingers along the muscles of his arm, she gently rolled her hips against the mound he could no longer hide. There was a small attempt to pull away from her, but a second kiss brought him right back. “Don’t hold back, my love.”

He lifted himself just enough to meet her eyes. But even in the clutches of desire, he still managed a smirk. “Is my Queen begging?”

She felt her demon-half bristle before she could stop it. But as her eyes changed, so did his: bright, draconic blue staring down at golden irises. But she didn’t want blind passion. Not after he’d spent so achingly long attending to her while expecting nothing in return. Despite his clear need, she knew from his thoughts that he would be content to drive her to her own peak, and save his own for another time.

But that’s not what she wanted. And this was technically a promise for her. So, she reached up and brushed her thumb along his cheekbone. “If that is what you wish from me,” She said. “Then yes, my king. I submit to you.”

He was gone for only a moment, yet her heart swelled the second he returned. She slid her hand back into his, and he lifted it to his lips, kissing each knuckle with equal tenderness. On the last one, he intertwined their fingers. When he leaned in to press a kiss to her temple, he guided himself deep into her core; slow and sensual. A simple gesture that pushed her close to tears. Once he’d pushed himself in as far as possible, he paused, kissing the corners of both of her eyes before capturing her lips again. 

His pace was slow, but Ashira found she didn’t mind it. Life always seemed to move a bit too fast nowadays. Too many people demanding too many things in such a short amount of time. Stolen kisses were often all they could manage. And if they found time for intimacy, it was going to be slow. Not necessarily gentle, as they both found thrill in aggressive love making as they did anything else, but drawn-out pleasure that would tide them over until they had another chance.

And the gentle rocking of his hips with hers was more than enough. Each thrust pushed him as deep as she could take him, and each pull drew out her own pleasure in an endless cycle. After some time, his head fell back into her shoulder, and she slid her fingers along his scalp before pulling him as close as she could. A comfortable warmth radiated between them. Their intertwined hands were off to the side, anchoring them both into some kind of reality. And as her legs quivered, and a warmth bloomed from her chest, she squeezed his hand tighter. When pleasure ripped through her muscles, all she could do was whisper his name over and over again like a wonderful, reverent prayer. 

And when her mind finally settled somewhat back into her body, his pace quickened, chasing his own pleasure. She rolled with him, rubbing circles along the base of his neck. He lifted his head from her shoulder, and pressed it back against her forehead. “Look at me, Saina.” His demonic eyes snapped open in a heartbeat, and she felt him teeter on the edge, searching for that last little push. “I’m here,” She said. “I’ve got you.”

His hand tightened on hers when he finally found his release. Even as he kissed her senseless, he felt his warmth splitting within her. A breathy moan escaped, followed by his own shudder as her pleasure looped back in on him. She kissed him gently to pull him back, and the two waited in comfortable silence. When their bodies finally relaxed- aside from their deep, content breathing- he pulled away and drew her back toward their pillows. She curled against his chest, smiling as he tried to pry out the blankets from under her. He gave up halfway, oddly impatient, and grabbed a fleece one from under the bed. “At least nothing caught on fire this time,” Ashira mumbled as she wrapped her arms around his stomach and nuzzled his chest. 

Vergil snorted. “Pythy still isn’t over that.”

“And he never will be,” She said as her eyes drifted shut. “He’ll be laughing about it in his grave if the old geezer ever manages to find one.”

Vergil’s gentle laugh was enough for her to ease into a quiet slumber. 

[adragonstale]

2,7,11,18,19,23,24,26,28,32,33,37,45,50,51,58,68,72,74,79,85,87,88,91,92,93,95,96,98,99 !! (that'll do for now xD)

· 2: If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be?

That’s a pretty though decision. For personal pleasure aka having fun? Tom Ellis. To do something meaningful? Well as meaningful as it could be, Donald Trump and I would punch him in his ugly face and kick him in his baby carrot.Maybe not the wisest choices, but I was never known for being wise to begin with.

· 7: What’s your strangest talent?

I’m good in remembering Details about TV shows even a decade after I’ve seen them :D

· 11: Do you have any strange phobias?

Nope, luckily no phobia at all

· 18: Do you believe in karma?

Yes, big time. and I hope it bites all those people ruining our world in their asses

· 19: What does your URL mean?

It was a blog only for dragons to get reposted and well it didn’t stay like that, but I like it anyway so I never changed it

· 23: How do you vent your anger?

Mostly through videogames. Sometimes my anger is fasterthan my brain and it can happen that I punch a wall without wanting to do it. Isprained my hand more than once because of this :D

· 24: Do you have a collection of anything?

I collect dragon figures, bones and other dead stuff,books/comics I want to read, Lucifer stuff (TV show, Comic and biblical figure), books about dog training/ mushing

· 26: Are you happy with the person you’ve become?

Mostly yes, I still have a lot to work on and I know Iwill not be able to get over all the things that I hate on myself. But since Istopped giving a damn on what other people think about me I became way more happy with myself

·  28: What’s your biggest “what if”?

Another hard one, there are a lot of “what if’s” in live,right?The one that’s almost always present in my thoughts is “What if I had money and what would I do with it.”The answer is pretty simple. I wouldn’t need to decide between getting a newwinter jacket or another vet treatment of my now deceased senior dog.I wouldn’t need to decide if going to a Christmas market is something I canafford once or twice a year.It would also be just to go on vacation. Not a big ass 5 star hotel vacation.More like “Let’s go to the beach over the weekend outside of the season andjust enjoy the time there.”And it would be supporting all my favorite artists via commissions or patreon.

· 32: What’s the worst place you have ever been to?

School. I count it as place and those where the mosthorrible years of my life. I hated every day and the only good thing were thevacations.

· 33: Choose: East Coast or West Coast?

I’m from Germany, soooo I have no idea, spontaneously Iwould say West Coast though, because California is always warm in comparison toGermany (even though the drought and wildfires are horrible) and I have someawesome friends there

· 37: Do you believe in luck?

Yes, too bad it often hits the wrong persons

· 45: What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had?

I think I was 20 or 21 (looong time ago) when I had amotorcycle accident.It was the ONE day I didn’t wear my whole protective gear because the daybefore I forgot the protective pants in the office. Well, long story short: It rained, my tires where old and were about to bereplaced in the next days and I fell. I got away with a knee that is now actingup every know and then. It can be pretty annoying, for example doing squats? Nope not more than 10 or so or it would swell and hurt the next day.Although now that I think of it, I also had a bike accident a few years later.I fell on my wrist and sprained it pretty bad. I never went to a doctor and Istill have issues with. It probably had some fissures or so. I don’t know, butsince then I’m in pain if I pick up heavy stuff in a certain angle and rotatingit is also not always pleasant.

·  50: Do you believe in magic?

Harry Potter like magic? NoMagic like in spirits, a hidden world next to ours and stuff like that? Yes.

· 51: Do you tend to hold grudges against people who have done you wrong?

Oooh yes. It takes a lot to piss me off and make me holda grudge, but if someone manages it, I will hold on to it forever. Probably not the healthiest thing to do, but welp.

· 58: Can you touch your nose with your tongue?

Yes, not the tip of my nose, but my septum

· 68: What do you think is Satan’s last name?

I would say Morningstar, even though it’s more a titlethan a last name.How about Decker? :D

· 72: You are at the doctor’s office and she has just informed you that you haveapproximately one month to live. a) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are goingto die? b) What do you do with your remaining days? c) Would you be afraid?

a) Only very close people like my mom and my soulmate friends. They deserve to know.

b) I would do a lot of stuff that I put off. Like going to the beach again.(although I don’t have so much on my bucket list). I would see that I can finda good new home for my pets if my friends are not able to take them in, becauseI love my little fur and scaley babies. I would also give away my money (notthat I have any LOL) to my friends most in need.

c) Oh hell yes. I believe in some kind of afterlife, but it’s still scary

·  74: What’s a song that always makes you happy when you hear it?

Too many to name them, but a really special song is this one.Whenever I hear it I’m back in Croatia 15 years ago standing on a beach andwatching the stormy sea. I just loved it. It was calming and powerful to me.And since then this song is on almost all of my playlists when I’m on the wayto a convention or so and so it collected many more memories as well

· 79: What is the single best decision you have made in your life so far?

Getting my Body modifications done/ planned out. It pairswell with #26 since both go hand in hand. It made me happier and more selfaccepting, so it was definitely the best thing

· 85: What’s the last song you listened to?

DeProfundis – ASP(No, I don’t only listen to German Musik)

· 87: What is your current desktop picture?

And those two didn’t change for quite a while now. I havethe right one since the scene aired and before I had Season 4 Crispy on theleft, I had season 3 one from the last scene.

· 88: If you could press a button and make anyone in the world instantaneously explode,who would it be?

Donald Trump!And if it could be more than one then also Boris Johnson, Erdogan and all the other tyrants and idiots in important areas of the world

 91: You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even

cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What is thatpower?

Flying, give me some big ass wings and let me fly. It’sbeen my dream and to go superpower since I can remember, but I insist on the wings

· 92: You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be ahalf-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experienceagain?

The Tom Ellis Meet and Greet I had this year. My life isn’tthat exciting that I had any other important things happen within the time span of 30 minutes

· 93: You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

Hard decision between growing up with an alcoholic Dad orhaving my sister.The history between me and my sister is long and full of hate for each other. No, you are not obligated to like each other just because you are family. No,not even if your ages are relatively close to each other.And well, then there is my Dad and nope, I’m not in contact with him anymore. I don’t even know if he is still alive since I know from my mom that he got diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor earlier this year. And to be honest, I don’t care at all.

· 95: You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Whereare you gonna go?

Since I’m going to Los Angeles anyway soon (Because Ihave the best friends who gifted me the plane tickets and everything so I cansee the Lucifer sets T_____T) I would say Norway or something like that.I really REALLY hate the cold weather, but I would love to experience a realhusky mushing/ dog sledding tour.

· 96: Do you have any relatives in jail?

Nope, not to my knowledge

· 98: Ever been on a plane?

Yes, exactly one time, in January this year to go toBrighton to the first LUX Convention

99: If the whole world were listening to you right now, what would you say?

I’m not the one who should speak to the world. And itdoesn’t matter anyway if nobody is really listening if you know what I mean. Iprobably would ask if they would be willing to REALLY listen to people likeGreta Thunberg and the scientists again.

[jbuffyangel]

Boom: This Is Us 3x09 Review: (The Beginning is the End is the Beginning)

Well now that’s a twists I didn’t see coming.

Let’s dig in...

Jack and Nicky

Jack has spent the last two weeks trying to clean Nicky up. It’s not going great. Nicky off drugs is no more amiable than Nicky on drugs. As I said before, he’s no picnic. But traumatized people seldom are and what they need is someone to never give up on them. For Nicky, that’s Jack.

But Jack is running out of time. He has 48 hours to clean Nicky up before he’s put back on his old base. Jack informs Nicky about the ticking clock after Nick punches Jack square in the jaw. DON’T HIT JACK NICKY! IT’S JACK!!!

Jack takes Nicky to a spot across the river. The town they are stationed in looks small from a distance. Jack tries to explain to Nicky Vietnam will be a distant memory once they get home. 

Source: @livelovecaliforniadreams 

Unfortunately, a Jack Pearson speech is not going to fix Nicky. I think it’s important for us to see that there are problems not even Jack can solve. He’s not God. Jack is just a man trying to save his brother.

But a “distant memory” isn’t how war, drug abuse and PTSD work. Even Jack had difficulty coping with Vietnam once he returned home. He tried to bury his pain and it became the source for his alcoholism. 

Source: @livelovecaliforniadreams​

So, if a man like Jack is traumatized from war what has it done to someone like Nicky? Someone who is gentle, sweet and, shy. Someone who doesn’t have a reserve of emotional strength like Jack. Someone who is unable to cope with his fear. Vietnam broke Nicky the same as it did Jack, but only one Pearson boy found a way to hold himself together in Vietnam. Only one Pearson boy put himself back together once he returned home.

Nicky: I don’t want to get clean, Jack. I see it all again when I get clean. I’m not gonna complete the mission.

This is probably the most heartbreaking line of the episode. We cannot save those who do not want to be saved. Nicky wants to be high. He wants all his memories washed away in a wave of euphoria. The drugs take the pain away and all Nicky wants is to stay in that place no matter how short a time. It doesn’t matter to him that he’ll keep chasing the same high, but it will become shorter and less intense. It doesn’t matter to him that he’ll need to take more drugs to have the same effect. None of it matters to Nicky because he’s an addict.

Jack returns from a mission to find Nicky missing. Then, there’s an explosion. A boat blew up with one of the men on it. Of course, Jack believes it’s Nicky and he dives into the river to save him. However, we never see Jack arrive at the wreckage or pull anyone from the water. The camera simply cuts away.

STORY TIME. So, before my husband and I began watching the episode he said to me he believes Nicky is really alive and he didn’t die in the war. I mocked him, quite thoroughly. 

Me: You are nuts. That’s the crap Arrow pulls. This is This Is Us.

Husband: He’s totally alive. 

Me: You are totally wrong and delusional.

Then, Kevin’s guide tells him he never found a record of his uncle’s death. I said to myself, “Well it was Vietnam. It’s completely possible they missed a body.” 

Source: @livelovecaliforniadreams​

And then we cut to old man Nicky living in a dilapidated trailer. My husband just quietly gloated. Now I have to eat crow for the next decade. Thanks a lot, writers.

This is absolutely a twist I did not see coming as evidence by my overly confident mocking. I have no idea how Nicky survived Vietnam. My initial guess is he faked his death and went AWOL. I don’t think Jack knew he was alive, but it brings up a lot of questions. As shockers go this was a spectacular one.

Kevin and Zoe

Is Kevin making a documentary with Zoe? I don’t know how I missed that, but apparently I did. His comment about getting a good ending makes a lot more sense to me now.

It’s cool to see Kevin walking the same roads in the same towns his father once was. 

Source: whitefluffyyeti

I was certain the man still living in the village was going to be the injured boy who Jack helped. Yeah, I was 0/2 this week. I’m not great at guessing This Is Us plots. lol The conversation proved fruitful regardless. This is a transformative trip for Kevin. I don’t think he sees in all the ways just yet. He’s getting answers to questions he wasn’t even asking. 

In some ways, Vietnam became what Jack said. It looks completely different with a little time and distance. Kevin sits down with the villager and he’s hoping he will recognize either the woman in the photo or his father. The villager recognizes neither, but the conversation goes in a direction Kevin wasn’t expecting.

“They both hid their war stories. They both pretended to be okay for their children.”

Two sons, whose father’s were once enemies, have a chance to sit down and discuss who their fathers were. Kevin and this villager have very little in common, but they have this thin thread that connects the past and present. One day we are enemies on a battle field. The next we are drinking tea and sharing stories about our loved ones. It is a crazy, wonderful and frightening world we live in. 

As disappointed as Kevin is not to get any answers about the necklace, I think Jack would be profoundly proud of his son. Kevin found the answer Jack wanted him to find. The necklace was Jack’s reminder to hold onto his humanity no matter the circumstances. The thank you was a constant reminder to be a good man, which gave Jack purpose. By sitting down with that villager, and sharing stories of their fathers, Kevin found the humanity his father searched so hard for in Vietnam. Kevin connected to the little bit of peace Jack had during his time at war. 

But discovering Jack’s brother Nicky is alive? That’s the BOOM ending Kevin wanted for his documentary. 

So much of Kevin’s search is focused on the woman wearing the necklace in the photo. Kevin is almost driven by fear that there was another woman his father loved and he held on to her for all these years even while married to Rebecca. We know the truth though. There is only one woman in Jack Pearson’s heart and it will always be his Bec. 

Vietnam has never been about a woman for Jack. Vietnam is about Nicky Pearson. Kevin is going to find the brother Jack lost years ago. Jack’s son is going to do what he couldn’t. Kevin is going to bring Nicky home. 

Source: @livelovecaliforniadreams​

Kate and Toby

I just need good things for these two, particularly since our marital rocks Randall and Beth are headed for a rough patch. I want Toby and Kate to enjoy this pregnancy. I know how impossible that is. There wasn’t a day of my pregnancy I wasn’t absolutely terrified, because I had a miscarriage. My pregnancy with my daughter also became an absolute nightmare and I wish in those earlier days, when I wasn’t so sick, I had been able to enjoy more moments like Toby and Kate had tonight.

Kate doesn’t want to be surprised about the gender of the baby. I feel you girl. One of my few happy days of pregnancy was finding out we were having a girl. Toby and Kate are terrified knowing the gender will make it more difficult if they lose the baby. But Toby eventually comes to conclusion that it will be devastating if they lose this baby too. There is no protecting themselves from that pain, so they might as well enjoy the pregnancy while things are good.

And things are good. They are having a boy. Of course, they will name him Jack. I accept no other suggestions.

Source: @livelovecaliforniadreams

Kate also decides to finish her degree after she is turned down for a job she’s perfect for, a chorus instructor, because she doesn’t have a college degree. I cannot describe how insanely challenging it is to continue your education when you have children. It’s not impossible, but it is difficult. So, Kate should absolutely use this time to finish her degree.

Rebecca and Tess

Soooo… Kate outed Tess to Rebecca. My initial reaction was NOT COOL KATE.

But then I thought about it. I realized if it were my child, niece or nephew I would want someone close by to know so they could keep an eye on the child. If Kate lived nearby she probably wouldn’t have said anything. Telling Rebecca may make Tess hesitant to trust Kate going forward though. Bottom line: Kate betrayed Tess’ trust, but she did it out of love and concern. Sometimes a child’s privacy has to be sacrificed in order to protect and help him/her.

I love Rebecca because she’s just so damn earnest. She is a beautiful 5’7” column of love. Rebecca so desperately wants to help sometimes she oversteps. She almost always backs her way into help. Rebecca screws up the opening move, but she lands the dismount.

Carrying secrets does way on your soul and body. Rebecca has had her fair share of secrets. It’s kind of a Pearson family trait to bury your feelings deep and I admire Rebecca for trying to break the cycle with her granddaughter. Tess decides to tell her parents largely because of her grandmother’s advice and experience.

Randall and Beth

Oh boy.

Randall has his first city council debate and even though he gets his mojo rolling it takes awhile. Unfortunately, his campaign manager informs Randall he is just too far behind Sol Brown and he’s going to lose the race.

Source: @livelovecaliforniadreams​

Tess tells Randall and Beth she might be gay and the three have a touching heart to heart. They are parenting goals. Randall and Beth sit down to regroup and drink some wine. Beth finally tells Randall she wants him to drop out of the race since they have so much going on around the house. Beth didn’t anticipate much of an argument since he’s losing. After all, Randall promised her that if the race ever got to be too much for the family that he would drop out.

Unfortunately, Randall does not keep his promise. He tells Beth has to see this through.

Wow. Just… wow. I don’t think being married to a Pearson is always the easiest thing because these children are occasionally narcissistic. We’ve seen it with both Kate and Kevin. Randall was our shining star though and he just came crashing to the ground.

I don’t think Beth was ever jazzed about Randall running for city councilman, particularly for a city I think he lives at least 45 minutes away from. But she put on her supportive wife hat and went out campaigning. She even tried to make Randall’s dream her dream. It didn’t work.

Things have changed though. Beth finally mentions their finances and how they’ve had to dip into savings to make “the dream” happen. 

Blessed be to Jesus someone finally addressed the bills. They are officially not the Rockefellers. I couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on. Then add in Deja and Tess’ emotional upheaval and Beth’s unemployment… she is absolutely right. There’s a lot going on right now.

But here’s the kicker – none of those “things” going on right now directly relate to Randall. He’s not the one in emotional upheaval or unemployed. Randall is fine so Randall is going to do what Randall wants to do. However, I have a feeling if the shoe was on the other foot and Randall was in emotional upheaval or lost his job the whole household would grind to a halt to help him through it. Or at least Beth would.

I don’t understand how Randall can say his family will always be his number one priority, when Beth outlines all the ways this campaign does not prioritize the family. Randall is very clearly putting his campaign before the family. So, as of right now, the campaign is more important to Randall than how his wife feels or what his family needs. Of course, he made promises to potential constituents, but the promises he made to his wife and daughters is more important.

I talk a lot about balance in a marriage. Marriage is never 50/50. It’s more like 60/40 or 30/70 or 90/10. Our needs shift in a marriage. One partner is giving more while the other is receiving more. What’s important is the support shifts along with the needs in the marriage and that’s what makes it 50/50. One partner cannot carry the supportive weight 100% of the time. That doesn’t make for a healthy relationship.

I believe Randall and Beth have a healthy relationship and an outstanding marriage. However, I think there’s been a continued focus on Randall for quite awhile. All for good reasons, but now is a time where the needs have shifted and therefore so should the support. But Randall isn’t shifting. He’s not giving the same as he’s received. The spotlight needs to shift to Beth and Randall refuses to take a step back. And Beth has every reason to be pissed.

The flash forwards reveal the “she” everyone is going to visit is Rebecca. There seems to be some apprehension on Tess’ part, so maybe Grandma isn’t doing well. Rebecca would almost be in her eighties. Also, the way she described her bones aching in present day felt like some kind of clue to whatever medical issue may be going on with Rebecca in the future.

Tess tells Randall she will call her mother in the car and then it cuts to Beth standing on a balcony watching ballet dancers. 

Source: @livelovecaliforniadreams​

She is obviously running her own dance program, since her assistant called her boss. So, Beth’s passion is dance and she found her way to it. YEAH!!! She remembers to bring “Pin The Tail On The Donkey,” a Big Three birthday party tradition, so maybe it’s Rebecca’s birthday. The flash forwards seem to imply Randall and Beth are not together, but I don’t believe that for a second. I think the heaviness comes from whatever is going on with Rebecca and not from marital strife.

Beth and Randall are going through a rough patch right now, which happens in a marriage. This feels like a bomb going off right now because there are some long simmering issues Beth and Randall have to deal with coming to a head. However, I have no doubt they will work it out though. 

I’d start by apologizing Randall. 

Stray Thoughts

Kevin is my travel soul mate. I’m a planner too.

I want a shirtless selfie. How do I get a shirtless selfie Kevin?

Copacetic? Annie is like 5! Mini genius alert.

“Return it like Serena.” YASSS SISTER.

A city councilman shoveling my driveway? Randall gets my vote. SOLD.

[firecoloredwater]

Dragonflight Chapter 1 Commentary

And, after way longer than planned, I have finally gotten that commentary written for the first scene/chapter of Dragonflight.  Under a cut because this is long, and both spoilers and tangents abound.

(This is also being crossposted on pillowfort here, so if you have an account please consider this encouragement to comment.)

Plot Events

Lessa wakes up with a bad feeling and tries to figure out what danger is approaching.  She fails and resolves to wait.  The watch wher adores her.

Worldbuilding Details

Lessa trusts the watch-wher to be very aware of/sensitive to danger, so that her sensing something it doesn’t is very strange.

The watch-wher has an “odorous lair” and is kept on a chain in the courtyard.  Also: clipped wings, a scaly head, and pointed ears.  It flees into the den when the sun rises.

Kitchen drudges all sleep together in the cheese room; Lessa is described as “curled into a tight knot of bones” so presumably drudges aren’t fed well (at least in Fax’s Ruatha).  They have sandals and sleep on straw, but apparently do not have any means of brushing their hair (or else Lessa hasn’t been making any use of it, and this isn’t terribly unusual for a drudge).

When describing Ruatha’s deterioration, it’s referred to as “the once stone-clean Hold.”

“Hold” seems to be roughly equivalent to a castle; Lessa refers to the “paved perimeter” of the Hold, as if a Hold is a very physical thing, more a place than a culture or a city which can expand just by building houses/roads/shops.

“the craftsmen’s stony holdings at the foot of the Hold’s cliff” implies that the Hold is built into a cliff, and that craftsmen have stone houses/shops/both that are built at the foot of but outside the cliff.

Lessa’s Hold is initially referred to as “Ruath Hold,” with “Ruatha” used in a way that seems like it might be more equivalent to “America.”

There are a lot of tales and ballads about “the dawn appearance of the red star.”

“Milchbeasts” are probably milk cows, but I suppose could also be goats or other animals used for milk.

The watch wher seems to be able to understand speech, though it doesn’t speak itself.

Commentary

I had forgotten how Anne McCaffrey began every book (every chapter?  From the format it looks like it’ll be every chapter, but see, I don’t remember) with an in-universe song excerpt.  Not that I wouldn’t have recalled when reminded, but without prompting I wouldn’t have come up with it.

As a result of this feature, the very first words I ever read of Pern (and, of course, the first in this reread as well) were not prose, they were lyrics:

Drummer, beat, and piper, blow, Harper, strike, and soldier, go. Free the flame and sear the grasses Till the dawning Red Star passes.

I like the lyrics, and I think they’re fitting for my experience of enjoying Pern.  These lines are very imagistic, very emotional; it’s a remarkably martial feel, considering three of the four characters/archetypes in the lines—drummer, piper, harper, and soldier—are musicians, and only the last is, well, the soldier.  It gives me the feeling of all of Pern together gathering themselves and preparing and marching to war… which is what F’lar ends up spending most of this book trying to make happen.

It’s also deeply ironic, considering that I think soldiers exist in Dragonflight and Dragonseye and… well, some of the colonists in Dragonsdawn are retired former soldiers who don’t want to talk about it.  But as far as I remember, soldiers just flat out don’t exist in any Pern book other than those two three.  Even guards, and the concept of guards, seems to vanish.  I’ve heard that national leaders are under much tighter security now than they were a century or two ago—which makes sense, it’s a lot harder to keep an assassin with a rifle out of murder range than an assassin with a sword—but medieval leaders still had guards.

Pernese leaders, on the other hand, seem to be operating under the philosophy that if you can’t personally defend yourself from assassins, then you kinda deserved it anyway and the assassin will probably rule better than you did.  You’d think that people would at least be a little concerned about what happens to Jaxom considering he’s the sole possible heir to Ruatha once Lessa and her descendants are ineligible due to dragons, and I can only guess what sort of political mess would result if Jaxom died.  But off he goes, wherever he feels like at any time, with not only no guards but not even a ‘visiting my secret girlfriend on her farm, send a search party if I’m not back by the morning’ note.  Which I believe of Jaxom easily, but why does no one worry?  Why is there no Zazu trying to make Simba-Jaxom behave himself?

And F’lar!  Okay, sure, he has a great big dragon to protect him, but on the other hand so did his father, who was assassinated.  I think it’s implied that F’lar put extra effort into learning knife fighting so that he could defend himself if someone tried to murder him like F’lon, which is… something, anyway… but F’lar, have you ever considered asking any of the hundreds of men in the military organization you have absolute power over to, say, do literally anything other than stand aside and watch when someone tries to murder you?

Now, to be fair to F’lar (and to all his subordinates who never suggest such a thing) the murder attempts were usually narratively framed as duels (even though they were never initiated with the formalities that would surround dueling when it was a thing in real, Earth cultures).  Between that, F’lar’s pride, and the culture just not having the concept of guards, I have no trouble believing that F’lar wouldn’t come up with the idea.  But how did we get to a culture that doesn’t have a concept of guards for world leaders?  And how come no one else ever tried to interfere?  Stab the evil Oldtimers in the back if you must!  They went through zero formalities, they just pulled out a knife and aimed for murder, this is closer to a tavern brawl that an honorable duel.  The other Oldtimers who value tradition so highly are not gonna side with the guy who tried to murder his peer just because he used a weapon to do it!  Hell, Lessa can just psychically smack them down and be done with it, no death needed.  Have Ramoth order their dragon to yell at them until they cut it out, just do something.

…Alright, I’ve gone on for a full page and not even read an actual sentence yet.  Time to move on.

…Soooo am I the only one who just kind of… forgot that Lessa can see the future?

Okay I didn’t forget forget, the explanation for it is half the plot of the book, but I don’t think it ever quite clicked for me until rereading that Lessa can see the future.  The very first thing that happens in the first chapter of Dragonflight (and therefore the very first thing that ever happened in all of Pern) is: Lessa has a bad feeling.  She immediately interprets this bad feeling as an indication that something dangerous is about to happen and tries to figure out what it is.  The next few chapters are about F’lar and Fax arriving, both of whom are dangerous to Lessa and her plans in different ways.  Fax is the usurper who killed her family and would kill (or perhaps forcibly marry, then kill) her if he knew who she was; F’lar immediately takes her away from the Hold she just won back after (I think) a decade of hiding and plotting, and ensures that neither she nor her children can ever rule it.  For a good cause and all, but still: pretty dangerous for Lessa’s plans to rule Ruatha.

I’ve gotten off track.  Back to the point: Lessa can see the future.  Or sense it, anyway.  More interesting to me is the fact that she never questions her ability to do this.  We know that she went back in time twice to give herself these feelings, to save herself from Fax as a child and to sense incoming danger at the beginning of the book, which is where these feelings come from and why they’re right.  I don’t question her trusting it as a scared kid, but as an adult who’s just expecting danger and not yet in it, I’d expect a little more skepticism.  Some degree of ‘hm, what if this bad feeling is in fact not world-changing prophecy, and instead is just about the way my boss seemed stressed yesterday and tends to kick me when he’s in a bad mood?’  Or, ‘what if this is just residual feelings from a nightmare, since I just woke up and the watch-wher isn’t bothered?’

Doylistically, the answer is that Lessa is right, her sense of danger establishes suspense for the first few chapters, and ‘but does the danger Lessa sensed actually exist?’ is not a subplot that fit into the rest of the story or that Anne McCaffrey had any interest in.  (Presumably.  Maybe there was a draft where Lessa doubts herself until Fax arrives, but I doubt it.)

I like Watsonian explanations better though, so let’s look at it that way.  The degree to which Lessa trusts this sense of danger makes it seem to me like she’s experienced this before, and probably several times; one distant, panicked memory from when she was a kid is not good evidence of having a reliable, invisible ability that no one else does (or, probably, has ever even mentioned as a fictional concept, considering that Pern doesn’t seem to have fiction beyond slight inaccuracies in historical ballads and maybe room for the possibility of made up characters for love songs and similar).

It’s also fairly plausible that Lessa could have psychically sensed danger before it arrived previously.  Her immediate interpretation of what happened, after all, was not ‘I traveled through time and read my own mind’ but ‘I sensed malice from someone with my telepathic powers’ which is definitely a thing she can do, since she spends the next several paragraphs psychically searching for the danger that woke her up and confirming that it’s not anywhere she checks.  A handful of instances of that happening (and her actually finding the source of the menace) would give her a pretty good reason to trust her ominous feelings, and might explain why neither Fax nor any of his cronies ever found her.

Lessa has spider sense, is what I’m saying.  Go forth and crossover, fandom.

Anyway, Lessa spends a few paragraphs scanning the surrounding area, which is used to give us a sketch of the setting: Ruath Hold is a place contained by walls and set into a cliff; outside it is a paved area and stone buildings where craftsmen live, and a causeway to “the valley.”  Wind blows to Ruatha from the shores of Tillek, which seem to be pretty close.  Further out is the Pass, which is further than Lessa has ever psychically scanned before.

Then we get a slight detour as Fax is mentioned.    He’s described as “the self-styled Lord of the High Reaches” and Lessa is pleased that he’s infuriated by Ruatha’s deterioration and hasn’t been there in three turns.  Turns is capitalized for some reason.  Was that a thing in 60s scifi?  Capitalizing words that replaced ordinary words to draw attention to how scifi the vocabulary is?  I remember between always being italicized, and I think I’ve seen similar italicization of new words in fantasy series, but at least ‘between’ is a new use of a word for a new concept.  Turn is just an invented synonym and capitalizing it makes no sense at all.  I just… don’t know what she could possibly have been thinking, much less what her editors were.  Maybe she had an editor who knew nothing about scifi and thought that was a thing?  I think I’ve heard that she originally wrote romance, so maybe she just kept a romance editor who’d never read scifi before and decided that fake it til you make it was an acceptable strategy.  It’s the closest I have to an explanation.

Moving on, then Lessa gets up.  She finds her sandals, brushes straw out of her “matted” hair, and twists it into a knot.  I… I have objections to this.

I actually can and regularly do put my hair in a knot at the base of my neck without using any hair ties or anything other than the hair itself to hold it, and doing that when my hair is badly tangled doesn’t work.  It’ll go into the knot, sure, but it’ll also just come undone in a minute or less.  Getting it into a knot that it will stay in for any length of time requires either something to hold it in place or getting the balance exactly right, and you can’t do the latter with tangled hair.  A few small tangles, sure, but anything approaching matted is just… not going to work.  If I can’t run my fingers through my hair, it won’t stay in a knot.  (Also, ‘matted’ makes me think of fake “dreadlocks” and that there must be mold growing in her hair, but that’s probably more that the connotation has shifted over time.  At least, I hope.)

Also, humans are primates that like grooming ourselves and each other; even if for some bizarre reason it’s illegal for drudges to own combs, the drudges should just be finger combing their own and each others’ hair.  (Or cutting it all off.  Or hiding illegal combs in that straw they sleep on.  Whatever.)  The matted hair is there to indicate that Lessa is living in a really bad, physically deprived, barely surviving situation, same as Lessa waking up on straw in a cold, smelly room full of other drudges, but that really should’ve been done by making her hair oily or something.  She’s going to wash it in a few chapters anyway, at the same time as she combs it.

Granted, I don’t have much trouble imagining Lessa shunning all the other drudges’ company during hair combing time so that she can plot vengeance more, so maybe it’s just her and all the others have only slightly tangled hair.

Anyway, Lessa goes outside.  She interacts fondly with the watch-wher, in a very similar way to how a person might interact with a dog, though the watch wher is probably meant to be a bit smarter than dogs are.  Then she climbs up to the ramparts and we get a little bit more of the setting: the Hold has a massive gate, and the Pass is within sight.

(How close is Tillek?  Technically it said that the danger ‘didn’t scent the breezes from Tillek’s cold shore’ but I refuse to interpret that literally, Lessa is not psychically smelling emotion on breezes.  I can only assume that she psychically scanned a significant part of the way to Tillek’s shore, if not all the way there.  That was within her ‘I’ve gone this far before’ range while the Pass wasn’t, and now she can see the Pass.  Mountains can be seen a pretty good distance away, but ‘the stony breasts of the Pass rose in black relief’ sure doesn’t sound like a smudge on the horizon.  How close is Tillek?  I’ve been thinking of Holds as capital cities controlling small-nation-sized areas of land, even if most of the land is unpopulated, but this is making them seem more like small towns with barely any space between them.  Could I walk from Ruatha to Tillek in a day?)

Lessa stares into the east, then the northeast, and notices the red star (which isn’t capitalized even though it’s clearly a proper name like the North Star, which I just googled because this made me doubt myself, and North Star is indeed supposed to be capitalized.  I can’t just have a really old and unedited version, this is the omnibus, there was time to fix this, where is her editor).  The sight of the Red Star makes a bunch of “incoherent fragments” of stories about the Red Star at dawn flash through her mind too quickly for her to make sense of them, which conveniently leaves us with the ominous feeling we were supposed to get and no distracting other details.  On the other hand, I’m now wondering if all those Red Star story fragments were projected by future!Lessa, so maybe there’s some foreshadowing along with the narrative convenience.

Lessa’s instincts tell her that while there is danger coming from the northeast, the danger from the east is more important, so she goes back to staring that way.  But then the warning feeling fades away, presumably because future!Lessa finally figured out what was going on and went back to her own time.  Present Lessa accepts that she’s been warned, and just has to wait to see what she was warned about.

Then she looks over the valley a bit and muses about how Fax gets no profit from Ruatha, never will while Lessa lives, and has no idea that she’s the source of this.  She smiles and stretches, then panics when a rooster crows and she worries someone might have woken up and seen her with uncharacteristically confident body language, so she lets her hair back down and reassumes “the sloppy posture she affected.”

Okay, I have several questions.  First: if she’s that worried about being seen acting uncharacteristically, wouldn’t it make more sense to just return to her normal pose and not whirl around like she has secrets?  Yes, she was startled, but she’s been doing this for years.  I’m sure she’s had moments where she thought she almost got caught before, she’s had a chance to practice subtlety.

Second, are there really so few drudges that Fax’s cronies can recognize individual drudges and their usual behavior, or does Lessa think some other drudge would tell Fax who she is because they saw her standing up straight with her hair pulled back?

Third, why were there no guards to see her?  Fax slaughtered her family at this same time of the morning several years ago, and I remember a specific mention of the guard who had been paid to not sound an alarm.  Why does Fax not have a guard now that he rules the place?  Lessa was on the ramparts over the gate, she should’ve been easy for a guard to see.  She should have been standing next to a guard.

Fourth, I’m pretty sure that after years and years of “affecting” a sloppy posture, that would just be her normal posture.  I can accept the “princess is forced to work as a servant, is eventually revealed to be a princess by how her skin is just as pale and her hands are just as soft and her dancing is just as graceful and her singing is just as sweet as if she had grown up with nothing to do her entire life but perfect those things, because it’s just the inherent nature of princesses to be naturally perfect in those ways” conceit in a fairytale, but this is a novel and it bothers me.  Both because there are whole worlds of classism going on in that concept which I may not be qualified to analyze but can sure side-eye with a double dose of irritation, and also because it makes no sense.

Lessa is Cinderella (with spider sense and dragons) but she’s supposed to be more plausible, and she’s also singlehandedly sabotaging an entire Hold (however much ‘a Hold’ actually is) while maintaining a cover as an overworked and underfed servant.  Her posture is not her priority, and there are no perfect posture genes to be passed down royal lines.  Lessa slouches.  Probably she gets in a bunch of passive aggressive battles with R’gul and then F’lar over it.  That is the only reasonable option.

…Moving on from that rant.

Lessa hugs and pets the watch wher, which is at least as ecstatic about this attention as a dog would be after being left alone for a week.  Lessa thinks about how the watch wher is the only living creature that knows who she is, and also the only one she’s ever trusted since her family was killed and she survived by hiding in its den.  She reminds it to be vicious to her if anyone else is nearby, it’s reluctant but promises to obey.  The sun rises, the watch wher runs back into its den, and Lessa sneaks back to the cheese room.  End of Chapter 1.

So, uh, another question: why didn’t Fax just kill the watch wher and replace it with a watch wher bound to him?  I can’t imagine there were none available in however many years it’s been, even if watch whers were originally conceived as nighttime guards for Holds and nothing else.  I also can’t see Fax being inclined to spare it out of pity or similar.  Did all the watch wher breeders refuse to let him have an egg?  Couldn’t he have made a breeding pair out of all the watch whers from all the Holds he rules and used eggs from that to replace the watch whers bound to families he’s usurped?  Is this another example of ‘Fax doesn’t even want to think about Ruatha’?

Anyway, now I’m going to go even deeper into English major mode.

I really wish I could give this to one of my old English professors and see how they critiqued it.  This chapter is a bit under two and a half pages long in the book I have, I’d guess no more than five pages in a regular sized paperback format.  There’s no dialogue and very little action.  There are several points where the phrasing seems like it’s trying too hard to me, though I suspect that that is due to changes in what’s considered standard in the last fifty years.  I kind of suspect that if I had turned in something similar to this for a class, it would’ve been ripped to shreds, mostly on the basis of having lots of exposition with no dialogue and little action.

Despite that, this chapter does a lot of things in a very short time.  It introduces us to the setting: we have a decent idea what a Hold is and that a properly maintained Hold is supposed to be clear of grasses, and we have a decent idea of what drudges are and how they’re treated, and we have a sketch of the surrounding landscape and significant nearby locations.  We have a pretty good idea of Lessa’s character and motivation, and we know that Fax is an enemy of Lessa’s and that he goes around conquering Holds to add to the one he rightfully inherited.  We know the Red Star is ominous.  We have pretty good foreshadowing for the discovery of time travel.  We know that watch whers have scales and wings, live in dens, and are vicious to most people but adoring of a few, which sets us up pretty well for the dragons that appear next (who might not be strange to us now, but which would have been a lot stranger when this was published).  We know that Lessa has psychic abilities, and a broad range in which she can apply them.  That’s pretty good for a few pages.

We also have an established tone, and Lessa acting in contrast to it.  The scene puts a lot of emphasis on how cold everything is, and how much stone is around, and generally works to make the reader feel how chilled and oppressive and deteriorated everything is.  For the first half of the chapter Lessa fits into this: she’s bony, she’s huddled on the floor, her hair is matted and full of straw.

Almost exactly halfway through Lessa starts moving, and she glides.

There have been indications that Lessa rules Ruatha already; she’s psychically tracking everything, to start with.  But that is the moment where Lessa breaks out of the general cold-decay-oppression and is shown as a ruler, in secret or otherwise.  Starving, oppressed servants don’t glide.  Queens do.

The rest of the scene continues to present Lessa as powerful; she stands above the gate and muses about how Fax will never get any profit from Ruatha, and will never know that Lessa is behind it.  She tells the watch wher what to do and it promises to obey even though it doesn’t want to.  And then she vanishes back into hiding, biding her time.  The next chapter will be F’lar’s POV, and this one does very well at establishing Lessa as someone lurking in Ruatha, ready and motivated and able to screw up F’lar’s plans.  F’lar doesn’t know she’s there, but we do and are waiting for the collision.

I’ve seen people call Anne McCaffrey a bad or even a terrible writer, and… I suppose it’s possible this chapter is an anomaly, but I’d call this pretty good.  Old fashioned in some ways that make it seem pretentious or overdone by modern standards, but we can hardly blame her because styles changed over time.  I certainly have objections to her characterization of many characters, and I’d say that her worldbuilding consists of cool ideas which were warped by various prejudices, and there are several details which were glossed over for narrative ease that I wanted more realism on (which I think is partly an example of shifts in what’s considered standard over time).

But when it comes to the actual, literal, technical writing?  Anne McCaffrey knew what she was doing.  There were a lot of things that she had to accomplish in this scene, and I think she did them all pretty well, and for the most part pretty subtly.  She knew how to communicate what she wanted to; just because we would’ve liked her to communicate something else doesn’t mean she was bad at communicating.  There’s a reason this series created a fandom which is still going a full half a century later.

[unpickingthetangles]

Influence Tag Game

I was tagged by the wonderful @fatal-blow!! Thank you so much for giving me a platform to be this pretentious! I am deeply ashamed of myself, ahaha!!! This turned out SOOOO LONG so I am going to link to the summary of Hadrian. 

Rules: Give a short summary of your WIP, name seven sources of influence on your story, and tag seven people.

Hadrian the Scholar summary. 

There are probably a billion mistakes in this. I didn’t proofread it because I am running late for work. FORGIVE ME. 

1.  When I was 18 I got an amazing opportunity to stay with my sister in Beijing for over four months. I didn’t speak a word of Chinese or Mandarin and I was still a ridiculous teenager. I had been sheltered as a kid; the farthest I had gone outside of the US was to Niagara Falls (which doesn’t really count, right?) I went from a spacious farmhouse to an apartment no bigger than a college dorm room that I shared with my sister, my brother-in-law, and my five year old nephew. I was able to experience another culture and a people so foreign to me that I had to adjust my whole way of thinking. Best part, it was at a very influential age, so many of these new feelings stuck to me like glue. I remember going to a wedding, walking through the city at 2am, climbing parts of the Great Wall that hadn’t been reconstructed.

Oh, let me tell you the moment that really got to me. We were stay at this little freckle of a village, very small, very old. It was settled in a green valley and the Great Wall wrapped around the hills everywhere you look. My sister and I followed this trail into the mountains and came to the wall, where local men were working on keeping it standing. I sat down with a very old man and he gave me a popsicle, drew a map of the US in the loose dirt, and gestured to it. He was asking “where are you from”. And somehow over about a half an hour, I talked to this old man without speech, sharing a moment of connection over a popsicle, with this grand old structure that will outlive us both in the background. This had to be one of the most profound moments of my life, really. It was my sister (for all her many, many faults) that suggested that I write. She liked the way I used language and the way I saw Beijing. That trip has been extremely influential to me.

That’s the wall on the mountain back there! 

2.  I also believe the concept of ‘J.K. Rowling Revisionism’ has played a huge part in how the story’s characters have greatly evolved. Despite how you might feel on the subject, I have taken the concept of it and used it to be more inclusive with my characters. I remember seeing a post on Tumblr years ago that was said, ‘What? Did Dumbledore have to be staking around Hogwarts in a rainbow flag for you? Did he need to be playing house music and raving the whole time?’ and it listed about a dozen more egregious gay stereotypes. As a queer person I was so insulted by that. It clicked for me that ‘it takes a single throwaway line to help identify a character as (x)’. I didn’t want to play it safe anymore. I didn’t want to write ‘subtext’ and instead was compelled to make it fully ‘text’. If I wanted to read about queer people in love, I should have the wherewithal to write it myself. But I also had to think of other people who needed representation as well. I know this is more of a popular discussion today, but five years ago it was rather new, and it changed the way I write.

(Let me be specific here: Lissy and I have had numerous conversations about Rowling Revisionism and if it was (broadly considering) ‘Fair’ to criticize her for it. It is an extremely complex conversation concerning the long-lasting effects of representation or lack thereof, in my opinion. That is why I am using the word ‘concept’ here, as in it should be more of a literary discussion had by creators and not a polarizing debate set in simple black and white tones. (looking forward to the many anons I get about how it isn’t black and white.))

3.  It is my belief that strong, believable characters far outweigh the plot or premise of a story. While the latter two are important, it is the characters that the reader is going to attach themselves to. A writer must introduce the idea of them as complex people in the world to get that special relationship the reader has with specific characters. The first thing I ask when I hand off my book to a beta is, “Who is your favorite character?” and I’ve gotten a different answer every time. That is a phenomenal thing! I am proud of that. When you look around fandoms, the fans are not drooling over the plots, they are defending characters and championing their causes.

With that being said, I’d say a major influence is in characters in media that made me rethink how I should approach writing characters. One of those would be the movie 12 Angry Men. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend it. This movie changed my goddamn life. Every single time I watch this movie, I find something new, something I missed the last 20 times I watched it. Hell, I watched it with Lissy once and she pointed out something so huge that I missed it. (ps. Still mad about that baby. How dare you be so clever?)

So how did that happen in a single-room mystery with 12 characters, none of which have names (save two at the very, very end) hit me so hard? How did this movie sink into me so deeply when it is mostly dialogue? I asked myself this over and over again. The answer is in the characters! At 1:10 into the film you are given a wide shot of the whole cast, a judge lazily prattling off his lines. Then the camera pans over the 12 Jurors: you see who is fidgeting, who is paying attention. Juror #5 looks off reflective of his decision to condemn a man to death, Juror #3 looks angry – why is he so angry? These are details that breathe an ever-expanding life into their characters. This whole cast is amazing, with Henry Fonda as #8 and Lee J. Cobb as #3. You know everything you need to know about them, without much backstory at all, without any grand declarations of their motivations. Hugely influential to me. It taught me that every character I write needs a strong introduction. If they are a weasel, they should be introduced as a weasel. If they are goodhearted, show an act of kindness. Hell, the first thing Hadrian does is show up at a funeral to mock the corpse. When he is introduced to Douglas’ character, he is dressed as a trickster god for a party. That tells you so much about him without putting exacting words to it.  

4.  While I had the meat of Hadrian the Scholar already planned out, it wasn’t until I read the works of KJ Charles that I really felt that I could be a writer and do it well. See, I’ve always been fond of those beautiful illusions like “my love for him was like a vein of gold in marble” (that’s from A Gentlemen’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, by-in-by). But I had no talent to write such pretty pretty words, not unless I work very hard at it, and even then it’s clumsy. KJ Charles doesn’t write in such a way. But what she does have is fantastic characters that react to situations in believable ways. She won’t be caught writing a character that doesn’t have his share of faults. As much as I loved A Gentle’s Guide because it is written in a style that I admire and love, it is Seditious Affair by KJ Charles that I reread the most. That’s because when I finished that book, I found that I missed the characters. It is also incidentally about two people who should be enemies because of their politics, yet they fall in love and fight for their partner’s beliefs, because they are important to their love. This basically sums it up. It really helped me think about Hadrian and Douglas’ relationship. Bless this author, seriously.

5. Waking Life is an indie film that is an interesting watch, though to me it hasn’t aged very well. However, it is this one brief segment that stuck with me most. Here is the full transcript:

Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from. I mean, it came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like, you know, "water." We came up with a sound for that. Or "Saber-toothed tiger right behind you." We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, I think, is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we're experiencing. What is, like, frustration? Or what is anger or love? When I say "love," the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, you know, through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I'm saying and they say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They're just symbols. They're dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It's unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we've connected, and we think that we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for.

It made me think about how language is used when it is applied to complex thoughts and ideas. I took a lot of what she says about language and tried to absorb it, pick it apart, and elaborate on with my own works. What I am doing when I am writing is a grand act of translation. How can I translate my own experiences with grief onto this scene, onto these characters? How can I best write love? Or anger? How can I tell a believable story of one character’s decades of emotional abuse? I am using my own life as this huge canvas of events and painting over it with different faces, different places, different heartbeats. And then I take that canvas and show it so someone else, who then will in turn see something entirely new. Language is inert! What a concept! Complex ideas must be first translated! This is a fantastic summary of how I view writing.

6. The painting In Bed, the Kiss, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. 

What a gorgeous painting, showing such an intimate moment between two people. It’s invocative of a full, well-loved life shared in love. It becomes even more powerful to me when I remember that it is widely believed that Toulouse-Lautrec only had relations with prostitutes. He had a life of health problems, having broken both is legs that did not heal properly, he was also abnormally short. Because he couldn’t participate in sporting like his friends, he turned to painting. It was a life of indifference and difficultly. Yet, he made one of my favorite paintings for its depiction of the serenity that comes with intimacy.

In the same vein, it is believed that Van Gogh was colorblind. He created some of the most recognizable paintings in the world while he was mired in depression and lonesomeness. Monet’s distinct style towards the end of his career is believed to be caused by cataracts. So much of the beauty in the world has been brought to us because of friction, tension, pain, anger, grief, depression, illness, isolation--- all the things that are believed to make the world ugly place. And yet, it was these artist’s ‘impediments’ that made their work powerful--- unique. All of creation is frustration, as said above. I believe that’s true, and it is something I think of while I write. I’m dyslexic, I make many mistakes, my relationship with language is a weird one, but I never forget that it may be the one thing that sets my writing apart. Through the struggle, I will create. My sense of humor? Because of my shitty childhood. My characters? Because for most of my life I wanted to be someone else. My writing style? Because of a reading ‘disability’. Creation is in conflict! That’s some inspirational shit right there.

7.  Aaaand… Muppet Treasure Island.

Let’s see.. 

I will tag @queerloveandspaceships, @coveofmadness, @drderange and anyone else who wants to do it! I am sorry I am so fried after all of this. 

[gamingofkenna]

KH3 Day 6

Almost a week in!! That’s eighteen bucks to Redbox baby!

I’m doing some grinding before jumping into San Fransokyo - apparently the treasure sphere I started with was literally the hardest of the first 6 you see? Literally all of them were easier. So I finally have the materials I need to upgrade my spaceship and lookie here, I can navigate space safely again waddaknow

Also finished letting the Hidden Mickeys in Twilight Town. I love how ‘make Sora take some selfies’ is literally not even technically a part of this sidequest, and yet any mickey he can’t selfie with (because of the angle or whatever) is a huuuuge disappointment.

Sora getting to San Fransokyo and immediately going to text his brother about how cool it is is so good, so pure.

Hiro meets these strange kids and immediately reveals his true identity like that’s not how you superhero kid???

So far my favorite things about San Fransokyo: this takes place after the movie, so there’s no chance of this world making me rewatch a poorer-done version of a movie I love; everyone’s leveling up and getting new powers.

I really wanna just... run around San Fransokyo without monsters showing up. This city feels so big and there’s so much to look at. I’m taking pictures of random everythings. I’ve only found two lucky emblems so far there’s probably soooo many hidden everywhere.

And the mysterious disguised black coat is.... Riku? Or really just some other person using one of Riku’s bodies or... something. Identity is weird in this game. 

It’s the main bad guy....’s heart piece, the one that used to be in Riku, in a spare body (like the one Sora wants to find for Roxas). Also they talk about time travel a lot in this conversation, so it’s like.... he split his heart up and sent the pieces into different times? To gather the right vessels. Sounds like this guy really just wants to live forever.

NEGA-BAYMAX.

Nega-Riku literally just pulled the spare Baymax out of the alt dimension, confirming the crack dark world theory (I’m going to say) and reconceptualizing Hiro’s trauma all over again, damn.

THERES TWO BAYMAXES IN CANON THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER also lol at Hiro literally noping out of X-man’s ‘this evil data chip is literally all that exists of this robots heart if you kill him you kill the robot mwahaha’ gosh I love Big Hero 6.

RIP me, I always forget to look around for the chest with the map in it, and this city is so confusing, I was literally running around for twenty minutes just trying to find the map before I eventually thought to look up a video.

I found all the hidden mickeys in San Fransokyo before even trying to leave. It was weird, the cutscene didn’t immediately pop me out of the world like it usually does. Not that I’m complaining.

Riku and Mickey are stuck in the dark world - big surprise. Maybe you shouldn’t have let them run off and do their very important quest while you dicked around trying to figure out what hearts are??

Sora summons another gate to... another island somewhere? And finds some mysterious keyblade... which opens ANOTHER gate. Cool cool cool.

‘You can’t make a whole pint without us’ I know this is an ongoing joke but y’ALL this is a KIDS GAME, NO DRINKING ALLOWED IN THE AMERICAN LOCALIZATION

OK I’m very curious as to why Sora has to wander around with this heavily-accented duck and talking bipedal dog, and Riku gets to chill with the King of Disneyland.

Aqua is back, I adore her to pieces, she’s all angry and grimdark now from being left here for over a decade (part of me is like, Riku was here just a few hours ago? But now I’m wondering if she ended up here back in like KH2 and this is another meta joke), we’re just gonna hug it out tho.

OH WAIT NO WE GET TO PLAY RIKU AGAIN. Did this dude just visualize accepting his own faults and weaknesses and move on and grow like a mofo? I bet he got ALL the angsty character stuff in the prequel games you white-haired anime boy. BRB gotta go save my gf now.

Special move: activate Sora cutscene. They get a DOUBLE keyblade now!! All night-and-day themed that’s gotta be one hassle to try to use!!

For a hot minute there I thought they were really gonna leave her behind again WE FINALLY SAVED AQUA YAY!!!! Before she realizes she’s back she thinks she sees Terra and someone named Ven - one of whom is the kid who looks like Roxas (who in turn looks like Sora). And the islands are called the Destiny Islands, and I’m suspecting all the Keyblade Kids got stranded on various islands for timeperiods unstuck from the timestream?

AND NOW WE GET TO PLAY AS AQUA KICKING SOME BORING DUDES BUTT this is the greatest day of my life. Sora’s literally like ‘but youre still recovering Aqua let me fight!1!’ and she’s literally just ‘no I’m not your girl Friday I’mma stomp this fool’ I a d o r e her.

Aqua loses because of a script which is stupid, but then Sora figures out how to wake up not-Roxas, who I guess has never met Sora before, based on the way he reacts? And he has a flash to nega-Sora, which I assume is something about when X-man was trying to use Sora as an evil heart piece vessel. Anyway blah blah, everything worked out good!! Everyone who isn’t literally stuck in someone’s body is safe!!!

I adore the way Aqua talks, she speaks a little slowly and solemnly but with such calm emotion GOSH I love her so much, why did it take you all so long to find her.

Axel is all ‘ahem cool cool but why am I also in this room with everyone and also why does Ven look just like Roxas? Everyone already knows everyone and this is a lot to memorize!!’ This just in Axel is back on my good list

Jimminy: ‘it’s ok I gave you cheat sheets on your cellphones!’ Look dude I’m not reading your ‘the story so far’ summary. I’m following everything well enough (*cue audience laughter*)

OK so Nega-Riku is actually like legit hanging out with Riku, not a memory or anything, and he’s not a bad dude? Unless there’s two nega-Rikus but I dont think this series would go THAT far (*cue audience laughter*). Anyway and then Sora and Kairi have a cute moment and everyone’s kinda just chillin’ before.... whatever they’re supposed to be doing next, and I’m officially 31 hours into this game and I’m gonna call it a night. 

[winterscribe]

So I’ve been meaning to work on my Project (still don’t know what to call it and the working names I come up with are awful) It needs outlines and worldbuilding, I need to establish who Avaleara was so I can show exactly how she changed- All that stuff. AND YET all I wanna do right now is imagine time travel shenanigans that land Pre-torture Avaleara and Pre-Avaleara D together in the future where they have been married for like 3000 years. I love the whole idea of “Her? Really?”  “Him? Really?” mutual What the Actual Fuck??? going on.

Rambly run on scenario under the cut-

Like I usually give left hand his own body so he can snark and sass without D shutting him up as easily (fucker knows to make the best comments when he’s out of D’s reach. Doesn’t always dodge the stakes but he can still talk) And plop Avaleara with her siblings (+takashi but really she thinks of him as a brother) So they are all just like soooo confused. Meanwhile i usually give Future Takashi chaperoning duty. Set it up so that “Oh Future D and Avaleara are out of town you’ll have to wait till they get back.”(Avaleara needed to stay in the capitol because suspicious activity, but rode out to an outpost for a few days to gather Intel. D is on another planet in the system attending a conference that Avaleara should have but couldn’t because of aforementioned suspicious activity. Teamwork and Telepathy bitch) This gives the past characters a few days to get to know each other (And get Really Really Confused about how the hell Avaleara and D are spouses) 

Future Takashi explains very little because most of it’s painful for him and all of it really needs to be seen to be believed anyway. Also they decide that they’ll wait a few days after they get back to tell Future D and Avaleara just who Takashi is escorting around because that way they will act natural and maybe the relationship will make sense. (Past D thinks Future D will call Takashi out for hiding something in .5 seconds. He’ll be floored when Future D accepts “I’ll tell you in a few days but for now go with it.” with the absolute unshakable certainty that Takashi would tell him if it was life threatening.)

Anyway so you get Past Avaleara who is like What the Fuck happened to my current boyfriend? Did he die? Amicable break up? Disastrous break up? What the fuck Future Takashi why aren’t you saying anything??? And no offense dude (But also kinda offense cuz you’re kinda an ass) but Who the Hell is this random antisocial jerk from another planet? The Ass can barely be fucked to say more than a sentence at a time, seems bored as hell despite being on another fucking planet, and barely even looks at me? Like you want me to believe this jackass is my husband in the future???? Like aside from the fact I can’t even stand his (lack of) Personality, I’m second in line for the fucking throne,my whole life is built around duty to my people, and while I am free to choose for the most part, any partner I take must be as devoted to my people as I am, has to love them as much as I do. They need to be an example to look up to, someone they can trust and respect. Not some taciturn and intimidating ass who can’t even appreciate the beauty of our world, let alone her people!

Meanwhile D is mostly indifferent. Like nothing is trying to kill him so he ain't gonna kill his way out and apparently all he’s gotta do is wait until they do the math to get him back to his time/planet.  (and hand wavy bs to explain why he believes this is actually happening and not some fucked up psychological attack). Also Clearly this Future Takashi is smoking something there is no way this chick is his wife. Lefty is cracking up at the mere suggestion this clueless idiot is gonna be D’s wife. She's so soft and fragile, from a world where violence hasn’t really been a thing in generations. She’s all innocence and idealism. She tripped and cut her lip and whined about blood in her mouth for an hour for christ’s sake. The only hint of fire was when she got fed up with D’s dismissive attitude and bawled him out, but even then she frigging apologized even though D had been the dick. But noooo she just went on about how it wasn’t Diplomatic of her to lose her temper and that it was only expected that since D was from a culture that valued different things he would dismiss her people as too soft, and while he was wrong she wasn’t going to foster understanding with anger. This chick wouldn’t last 30 seconds on the frontier, let alone be the kind of woman who could be married to a hunter. And that wasn’t even taking into consideration just who D is. If D tried to settle down with this kid Dracula would eat her alive before he allowed his one success to get with a weakling from a pacifist culture and risk pathetic offspring.

So basically Avaleara gets more irritated as the days go by, D remains indifferent, Avaleara’s family is getting really pissed at D because he’s ignoring Avaleara and they are really starting to doubt the likelihood of a happy marriage and Future Takashi is doing all the facepalming and starting to think maybe he should just fucking tell them what happened to Avaleara. Except- how the hell does he break it to them that Avaleara was tortured until she was broken, mind body and soul and the Avaleara that Future D met is an Avaleara that rebuilt her whole identity after horrific trauma and therefore understands him on a level Past Avaleara could never come close to. Oh by the way, the person that tortured Avaleara was in fact Xahros, the man Past Avaleara is completely in love with and who she’s decided must have died because what else would have happened to break them up. (Future Takashi is heartbroken thinking Past Avaleara had this much trust in the bastard but doesn’t realize she settled on that option mostly because Why Else would Future Takashi be so reluctant to talk about it and get such a pained look on his face when she asked. )

Not to mention seeing Past Avaleara is kinda messing up Future Takashi’s head cuz in order to not completely fuck up the universe and kill everyone, all past people MUST forget this ever happened. But that means he has to let Avaleara be tortured, something he would have done Anything to prevent. But anything can not include risking all life in the universe. So future takashi is kinda slowly having a breakdown and trying not to burst into tears every time Avaleara says or does something sweet which is All the Fucking Time. Like seriously Future Avaleara can do gentle and kind, but it takes Effort and underneath is a current of rage and paranoia, ready at any moment to go from calm to murder faster than you can blink. Seeing the difference is tearing Future Takashi apart because after like 5000 years he’d kinda forgotten Just how sweet she used to be and its breaking him all over again. But its also breaking him that everyone is getting pissed at Past D when Future Takashi knows where he’s coming from and he gets it. No, Past Avaleara isn’t the kind of person who D would take as a wife, and D is so fucked up from his whole shitshow life that he’s not really a stop and smell the flowers kinda guy. I mean most of the flowers on his earth try to kill you. It took Future D decades to really appreciate this world and stop expecting it to try and kill him. It took longer to let himself love it and her people. It ends up this weird dynamic in which Future Takashi wants to defend D but doesn’t know how to do so without insulting him so is awkward as fuck but Past Takashi wants to deck D cuz he made past Avaleara Cry (no matter that it was mostly because she’s frustrated with the situation and confused/heartbroken over Xarhos)

So then F-Avaleara gets home first. And sees this tense quagmire that Future Takashi is in the middle of. Except her and D have been separated which means that Avaleara isn’t in the greatest shape. Avaleara’s lingering ptsd means that she has a hell of a time with nightmares. When D is there he can either ease her out of one into a better dream or help her when she wakes up, grounding her and reminding her its just memories. She tries to sleep without him when they are separated but it usually doesn’t work. At this particular point in time, she remembers the last time she tried to sleep when D was away and woke up choking on a piece of her tounge she bit off durring her nightmare. It left her a little fucking spooked so she’s running on no sleep and shitty eating habits cuz she’s distracted. All of that means she sees that Future Takashi is falling apart, recognizes it, but decides that D is due home in two days, they’ll team up and make him sleep then pry the fucking problem out of him together if they have to sit on the stuborn bastard. After all he’d do it for them and turnabout is fair play. Meanwhile she’ll hover around him when usually she’d be avoiding people because she’s too close to that edge.

For a few hours Future Avaleara seems a lot like Past Avaleara. Sure she’s calmer, but hey she’s 6000 years old, she ain’t gonna act like a hyperactive 750 year old. Plus she’s obviously tired. I mean the scar on her face is a little odd since Revanants don’t scar easily but she is a princess, so probably just survived an assasination attempt like her mom? I mean why else would she have a scar, they can only be made deliberately with poison which alters dna making it impossible to heal completely… (Ah the past people are so so innocent)

But she’s calm and kind. Somehow the fight Past Avaleara and D had about how her people were soft is brought up. Future Avaleara explains the war a billion years ago that left half a planet barren, a decision to hold all life sacred, and the responsibility to protect peace so that no one has to fight for their right to live. While it still seems like idealistic nonsense to someone who lives in a world of kill or be killed, there is something about the way This Avaleara says it. Something burning in her words no matter how soft and calmly she says them. (Its the steal core of someone who has fought and bled to keep this peace, who refuses to let it be idealistic nonsense.) D knows his world is hell, its unkind and unjust. His own father is a large part of the reason its so barbaric which is why he is determined to kill him. The years have narrowed his focus to killing Dracula but there was a time before he’d seen too much that he thought maybe the world could be something more, maybe there was a chance if he removed the biggest obstacle. He’d long since buried that thought as he saw humans and vampires alike slaughter each other and their own for petty reasons. But here was a culture founded after cataclysm that brought together different people from different worlds and chose to forge peace. Its a dream he once had but killed to survive. He has to be hard to survive. But these people dont and it’s not a bad thing if its real. D’s still a little dubious about the idea that there are powerful people who actually want to protect and not exploit the less powerful. He’s confused but ultimately not interested since he’s still not fully believing this is going to be his future (Cant believe he has a future that doesn’t revolve around death).

Anyway I’ll post a part 2 in a few days but this is getting long and I have some other work to finish up.