#( had this half written in my drafts for about a week & it felt relevant enough to finish )

[erabundus]

thinking  about  how  ren  has  a  tendency  to  adjust  his  moral  code  in  accordance  with  whoever  he's  seeking  the  APPROVAL  of  —  or  whatever  he  assumes  their  moral  code  might  be.  i  like  to  use  his  relationship  with  kazuha  as  a  prime  example  because  there  are  a  lot  of  things  they're  so  DRAMATICALLY  opposed  on  —  and  it's  not  as  though  ren  is  some kind of doormat  for  him  (  not  in  the  slightest  )  but  he  will  occasionally  stop  and  take  what  he  would  probably  want  into  consideration  before  he  acts.  kazuha  wouldn't  like  it  if  i  stole;  i  won't  steal.  kazuha  would  want  me  to  help  this  person,  so  i  will  —  and  make  sure  he  knows  so  i  can  be  compensated  for  it  later.  it  doesn't  even  necessarily  have  to  be  accurate  to  their  actual  beliefs  —  but  rather,  how  ren  personally  interprets  them.

notably,  this  isn't  exclusive  to  romantic  relationships,  either.  anyone  ren  is  close  to  will  receive  the  same  treatment  —  though  the  degree  to  which  he  tries  to  adjust  is  largely  dependent  on  a  mix  of  respect  and  general  dynamic.  nahida  is  another  very  good  example;  ren  will  often  make  decisions  based  off  of  what  he  assumes  she  would  want  —  or  take  the  fact  his  actions  may  reflect  on  her  into  consideration  before  doing  something  potentially  cruel  or  reckless. it's for the best.

that  doesn't  mean  he's  incapable  of  making  decisions  for  himself;  ren  does have his  own  set  of  personal  morals,  but  they  aren't  particularly  complex  or  rigid.  he's  generally  content  to  leave  others  alone,  unless  they  go  out  of  their  way  to  provoke  him  —  he  REACTS.  if  someone  tries  to  hurt  him,  he  will  hurt  them  back.  if  someone  tries  to  take  something  from  him,  he  will  take  everything  they  have.  in  a  sense,  it's  an  offshoot  of  his  beliefs  regarding  debts;  genuinely  (  to  put  it  in  the  simplest  way  possible  )  fuck  around  and  find  out  logic.  yet  it's  because  his  own  moral  code  is  so  simplified  in  comparison  that  it  easier  for  ren  to  mold  it  to  fit  what  others  might  want.  he's  impressionable.

[illfoandillfie]

Out of Context

Request: First of all, congratulations on 1,000!!!! Could you do a a sequel to Interloper where maybe an interviewer is giving her shit for having once been a groupie and Bri Rog and Deaky defend her and have amazing sex after at like their hotel 😂-foursome anon (I’m back)

Interloper / Snapshots From Before (Prequel)

Pairing: Roger Taylor x Brian May x John Deacon x Fem!Reader

Warnings: SMUT (18+), gangbang/foursome, oral sex (m and f receiving), anal sex, tit fucking, light choking, slightly dom reader, cheer up sex, some spanking, double and triple penetration

Words: 6,145

A/N: This was another request from back at my 1000 follower celebration last year. It’s been sitting half written in my drafts since then and I finally felt inspired to finish it lmao. Foursome anon I hope you’re still around and you see this!!

Blurb Advent: Day 10

Taglist:  @vee-ndetta​ @atomic-watermelon @kellypenac @labessieisallama​​​ @deakyclicks​​​ @jennyggggrrr​​​ @drowseoftaylor​​​ @hannafuckingsucks​​​ @i-cant-hangout-im-drumming​​​ @queenmylovely​​​ @ilovequeenmorethanyou​ @johndeaconshands​​​ @borhapbois​​​ @stardust-galaxies​

Doing press wasn’t easy, especially when interviewers insisted on questioning you all separately. You preferred having at least one of the boys to back you up. They’d been dealing with the whole interview process for so long now they knew how to avoid answering things they didn’t want to, knew how to deal with rude reporters. But it was all new to you. Perhaps that was why this particular interview had gone so badly. There was no Freddie to make the right snide comment, no Roger to get pissed off on your behalf, no Brian or John to squeeze your knee comfortingly or take over when you go tongue tied.

Things between you and the rest of the band had been going much better since Freddie had locked you in that room together. It didn’t happen overnight, there were still lingering tensions. But any badmouthing they did of you was out of your hearing which you much preferred. Gradually, as the tour wore on, there were less tensions. They got used to having you around, began including you in their games of scrabble and their not-quite-awake conversations over hotel breakfasts. Until one day, in the final leg of the tour, when Freddie admitted to you quietly that he hadn’t overheard any whispered comments for nearly a week. “And here I was thinking we’d never get there.” “Oh hush, darling, I told you from the beginning they wouldn’t hate you forever. Sure they took a little longer to come around than I had anticipated but it all worked out in the end. And now when you tell them the execs have asked for another full album featuring you, they probably won’t kill you.” They hadn’t, of course, though you’d worried for the safety of everyone involved in making the decision. Roger looked as if he were a second away from punching the first person to talk to him.

They took less time to calm down though, especially after they saw how nervous you got before the first interview. Your agent had decided some preliminary press would help build excitement for the album before the songs were even written. Calls were made, journalists were found, and before you knew it you were facing a crowd of people vying to ask you their questions, cameras flashing the whole time. It was a lot. More than pushing you into the deep end, you’d be thrown to the bloody sharks. Any lingering ill will the boys had for you vanished after that. They’d all thankfully been there too, had drawn the attention to themselves rather than let you struggle to answer everything on your own. After that they’d kept an eye on you during the smaller interviews. Mostly the reporters were happy to talk to you all together and, as long as you said one or two things about how excited you were to be working with Queen again, and how much fun touring with them was, you could get away with letting them take lead. But every now and then you got stuck with some jackass who wanted to quiz you solo. And this interview, this horrid interview, had been one of them.

Roger pushed the magazine away from himself, letting it slide as far down your kitchen table as it would go. “She’s a fucking bitch that reporter.” You looked down at the magazine, still open to your interview, the headline alone making your stomach turn. “No, sorry, that’s an insult to dogs. She’s a fucking cunt.” “Rog,” “No, that’s an insult to vaginas. There is no word strong enough for that poor excuse for a journalist.” “Roger, sit down.” Roger shot Freddie a dirty look but sat down anyway, his knee bouncing with restless energy, “Sorry. I’m just pissed off.” “Yes, we gathered that, thanks Rog,” “She took everything I said out of context, you have to believe me.” “We do, Y/N, we do,” John said softly from beside you, rubbing circles on your back. “It started well, I swear. Just the usual questions y’know, what’s it like working with Queen? How does it feel to be singing next to Freddie Mercury? Were you nervous about touring with them? Can you give us any hints about the new album? All the things that usually come up that Freddie coached me on how to answer, and I was doing fine. I had my prepared answers and there was no stumbling over words or anything like that. I thought I’d finally got the hang of it all and then she asked me to elaborate on what it was like working with you. I’d already told her the usual thing – it was fun and y’know blew my mind and all that. But then she asked how it compare to being your groupie.” “You didn’t answer her did you?” “Christ no, Brian! Jesus what do you take me for?” Brian held his hands up in apology. “I told her that it wasn’t relevant, but she kept asking, one question after another thrown at me and no matter what I said she didn’t stop. All sorts of stuff, like which of you was the best shag, and if I’d only wanted to be your groupie because I hoped it would lead to my own album, and if I was still offering my services,” you made air quotes around the words, “accused me of using you for my own gain and asked if you were the first band I’d tried it with or if you were just the only ones gullible enough to let me. I tried to tell her no and that I wasn’t going to answer those questions but she just kept going and then she told me to get used to the attention and left. I guess she didn’t need my answers to write a whole article about it.” “Which of us is the best shag?” Brian repeated the question though you suspected he wasn’t just checking he’d heard you correctly. The others all fell quiet, waiting to see if you’d answer. “Really Bri? That’s what you got from that?” “Right, right, sorry, not the important part. Look, it’s not as bad as you think it is.” “Bri’s right, love,” Roger said, much calmer than he had been before, “there’s nothing of substance in here. Like this quote, as for the fun Ms Y/L/N mentioned was had on tour, one can’t help but wonder just what she meant. Could the stories about nights spent playing boardgames be covers for debauched, drug-fuelled, orgies the likes of which would make a pornstar blush, I mean, there’s nothing there. It’s all conjecture and anyone worth a damn will see right through it.” “But some people will believe it,” “Maybe, yes,” Freddie said, “but it’ll blow over. We’ve all been in the same place you are at one time or another. If anything this officially makes you one of the band.” “Yeah, Y/N, it’s all just spiteful rubbish.” “Thanks guys, but I think I might just call it a day, go back to bed. Stay if you want, I don’t mind. But if you leave lock the door behind you.” You stood and headed to your bedroom.

The four boys stayed quiet until you were out of your room but you heard their hushed voices and hissed comments through your bedroom door as you pulled off your jeans and unclasped your bra from under the baggy jumper you wore. It took about five minutes before there was a soft knock on your bedroom door. “Y/N, can I come in?” You contemplated feigning sleep. “I know you’re not asleep.” You sighed and sat up, hugging your knees to your chest, “Fine, Roger, come in.” “Freddie’s gone to make some calls,” he said, standing just inside your doorway, hands in his pockets. “Calls about what? It’s out there now, there’s no getting it back.” “No but we need to make it clear to other journalists that those kinds of questions won’t be answered in any future interviews, and hopefully we can make sure that parasite never gets to come anywhere near us again.” “Isn’t that mean to parasites?” Roger chuckled, “getting over it already, see,” he sat on the edge of the bed and placed his hand on your covered knee, “I know this sucks, and I get that you’re ashamed, but I promise it’s not as bad as it feels right now.” “I’m not ashamed.” “What?” “You said I’m ashamed of it but I’m not.” “Oh. I thought-” “I’m a bit embarrassed because obviously I’ve never told my family what it is I got up to when I went to all those concerts and now they’re all going to know, lord knows some of them will believe the worst of it. And I’m pissed off that I didn’t stand up for myself more. I just let her keep cutting me off and talking over me when I should have told her to fuck off or at least called her out for being a prudish arsehole who probably only attacked me because she’s jealous I’ve fucked three quarters of Queen. And I’m annoyed that you’ve all been brought up in the article, and she’s questioning whether your good people just because you sept with me. I mean does she expect you all to be virginal saints or something? It’s just frustrating and yes, upsetting. But I’m definitely not ashamed.” “Huh, okay then.” “What?” “Nothing, just, we assumed you regretted sleeping with us.” “Lord no. It wasn’t planned, like she was insinuating, but seeping with you definitely helped me get my foot in the door with this whole music thing. And even if it hadn’t done that, it was still fun as hell and made me feel good. If I wasn’t fucking you I would have been out having mediocre sex with guys I met in pubs and I don’t care how much of a slut it makes me seem, but I’d rather fuck a whole band every single night and actually get off than have a disappointing drunk lay with a guy who’s never heard of the clitoris. Fuck, I’d still be doing the whole groupie thing now, and be perfectly happy with it, if Freddie hadn’t heard me singing that day. That night at the after party, that was heaps of fun.” “Give me a second would you,” Roger stood and walked to the door, giving you another glance before he turned the corner. You watched the doorway, not quite sure what to make of his behaviour but your questions were answered soon enough when he reappeared with Brian and John following. “So apparently we misread the situation,” Brian said, taking the seat Roger had just vacated. John sat cross legged at the end of your bed while Roger flopped onto the mattress beside you. “I can’t believe you’d think I regretted being your groupie. Have you met me?” “In our defence you seemed very upset, what were we meant to think?” “I had a shitty interview and got called a whore in a very public way, of course I’m upset. Doesn’t mean I regret anything.” “Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry, we should have realised. But we have a proposition for you. We actually thought of a way to cheer you up when we first saw the magazine this morning but then when we got here you seemed so sad and we didn’t want to make you more upset or uncomfortable,” “What Brian is trying to say is that we have an idea we think you might like.” “Jesus will you two stop beating around the bush?” “Shut up Rog, I’m getting there.” “Y/N,” Roger said cutting off the others before they could waffle any longer, “Would you like to fuck us again?” You almost choked. “Zero tact. What he means is, we thought we could cheer you up. All three of us, entirely focused on making you forget that magazine.” “Wait, I’m confused,” you massaged the bridge of your nose as you tried to catch up to them, “you saw an article that called me a whore and thought it would cheer me up to, what, be your shared fucktoy again? Yeah it was fun but-” “No, no, no, that’s not what we mean,” John said, “you’d be in control of how it all happens. It wouldn’t be like last time.” “So, you’d be my whores?” “I guess?” “The point is,” Roger chimed in, “we want to make you feel better. If that means making you cups of tea and buying you a box of chocolates that’s fine. But it could also mean you having three cocks and all the orgasms you can handle.” You looked from Roger to John to Brian and then back again, trying to work out if they were joking or not. But they all seemed sincere enough for you to actually think about their proposition. It wasn’t what you were expecting to hear from them, and it hadn’t crossed your mind until they mentioned it. But now that they had, you had to admit it sounded fun. Last time had been fun and that was when you’d been passed around and used mercilessly, so having them all again, but with a bit more say in how it happened, could only be better. Plus, part of you wanted to prove how unashamed of your groupie history you were and what better way than this? “Okay, I’m in.”

“Do we need to set any ground rules?” Brian asked. “You all know my safeword,” “Saxophone,” You laughed at the chorus of eager voices, “Yes, exactly. Other than that I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Not like this is new exactly, is it?” “Well, no, I s’pose not.” “Exactly. And if there’s anything I don’t want I’ll tell you. So you’re,” you pointed at Roger, “going to kiss me now, while you two undress,” “Getting right to it, excellent,” Roger laughed, as he pushed himself closer to you. He didn’t waste any time, leaning in to kiss you right away. It started off a little too soft for your liking but as soon as soon as you made it clear how into it you were, kissing him back harder and pressing yourself closer, Roger reciprocated. His hands wandered down to your chest as you felt Brian and John get up, following your orders, their clothes left where they landed on the floor. Roger’s hands were soon replaced by Brian’s as he knelt behind you, and you found your head being pulled around so he could kiss you too. Roger took the opportunity to undress as Brian and John caught you between them. You couldn’t tell who was removing your clothes, only that once your jumper had been pulled over your head John was kissing you. He leaned back, tugging you along so Brian could pull your underwear off, his hands caressing your bare bum. “How do you want us?” John asked, brushing your hair back behind your ear. “Um,” you looked around at the three very naked bandmates waiting for your word, “One of you is going to eat me out. Don’t care who but I am going to cum.” “Yes Ma’am,” John laughed, lazily saluting you before rolling you onto your back and shuffling down between your thighs. You were taken by surprise when you felt his tongue run between your lips, expecting nips on your thighs and the teasing puff of his breath as he hovered just out of your reach. But he was clearly taking the job of cheering you up seriously. Brian and Roger weren’t any different, settling into the spaces on either side of you, their light touches only enhancing the feeling John had set off. You felt their fingertips on your breasts and in the ends of your hair, tugging just enough to send a shiver down your spine but not enough to make you gasp in pain. “So what would you like from us, love? What dirty little fantasies are going through your head right now?” Roger tapped his finger on the middle of your forehead. You opened your mouth but a small oh as John latched onto your clit replaced the words you’d been intending to say. “Think we’re going to need a little more than that, Y/N. C’mon, tell us what you want. Do you want us to just take turns fucking you, filling you up over and over and over.” “Or are you thinking more along the lines of last time? Taking two at a time because one cock isn’t quite enough for you now?” “Try three,” you managed to get out as you slid a hand into John’s hair to hold him in place, “want you all at once.” “Jesus,” Brian swore, dropping his lips to your neck. “I’ve been a piss-poor groupie considering the stories that reporter’s peddling. Everyone’s going to think I’ve been taking all three of you at once constantly, but we’ve never actually done that, have we? Might as well embrace my slut title and change that,” “Let us work up to it, Love” Roger said softly, recapturing your lips as he rolled your nipple between his fingers. You whined, partly from Roger and Brian’s attention and partly because John raised his head, your hips rising slightly at the loss. “Guess I should start stretching you out then,” he said offhandedly as he licked his fingers, the same way you’d seen him do a hundred times before while playing. You couldn’t stop the moan that rose up in your throat, the sound only making John chuckle against you as he lowered his head and resumed his focus on your clit.

It only took a few more minutes to have you swearing through your first orgasm. The two fingers John had inside you enough to send you over the edge as they brushed against every sensitive spot they could reach. Your neck tingled where Brian had marked it and your nipples were stiff peaks, extra sensitive to cool air after he and Roger had delighted in torturing them with teeth and tongue and fingertips. “How was that?” John asked, slowly withdrawing his fingers when he was satisfied you’d finished. “Fuck,” was all you could say, the three boys laughing, John dropping a kiss to the inside of your thigh. “Think you can handle more?” “Actually Bri I think I might be done,” “Oh. Really?” “I’m kidding.” “Thank Christ. I’m so fucking hard there’s no way I could get my pants back on anyway.” You laughed and pushed yourself to sit up, “Poor thing. I suppose you can use my cunt for a bit.” “Classic guitarists always getting first go,” “Shut it drum boy, I was about to offer to blow you but if you’re going to be like that,” “No, no, I didn’t say anything.” “He did Y/N, I heard him, blow me instead,” “Ignore Deaks, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” “Like a couple of – oh!” you were cut off as Brian grabbed you round the middle and wrenched you onto your hands and knees, “children. A little warning next time please,” “Sorry,” Brian leaned forward to kiss your back as his fingers trailed up the inside of your thigh, “but if I didn’t move this along we’d be stuck arguing about who gets to blow who forever.” “N-no we wouldn’t,” you stumbled over your words as Brian’s long, talented fingers pressed into you, “I made up my mind, Rog in my throat.” “What about me?” “Don’t worry Deaks, you’ll get your turn. If you want you can spank me though, or bite me or pull my hair or whatever else you can think of. You know my limits. Also we’ll need lube so if you want to go digging through my bathroom draws and find some you can. Might be a reward in it if you do.” “Spankher, please,” Brian nearly whined, “always makes her cunt so tight.” “Think I’d rather claim that reward thanks” “Alright then I’ll spank her,” “Guys! Can you stop arguing. I have holes enough for all of you, that’s kind of the point of this. And, Brian and Roger, if I don’t get both of your cocks deep, deep inside me within the next thirty seconds I will kick you both out and let John have his way with me on repeat.” A moment of silence accompanied your statement. You saw Roger, eyes wide, look over at John and then to Brian, and could only assume they were returning his dumbfounded look. “Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven,” Roger blinked as if waking from a daydream and hurried to kneel in front of you, one hand gliding over the length of his cock as the other reached for your hair. Your mouth fell open in a gasp as Brian suddenly filled you, holding your hips tight as he bottomed out, which gave Roger enough opportunity to push himself towards the back of your throat. There was a shift in the mattress as John got up but you were a little too preoccupied to hear the door open and shut or the sound of him rummaging through your bathroom. You only realised he’d returned when a sudden, loud spank hit you and you knew Brian’s hands were still occupied with your hips. For their parts, Roger and Brian were keeping you busy, skewered between them, not sure whether the noises coming from your own throat were moans or gags or wordless begging. Brian breathlessly laughed as John spanked you again, “So fucking tight. Bit harder?” “Y/N?” You made an assenting humming noise and nodded as much as Roger’s cock would allow which John rightly took as permission and so hit you again, harder than the last.

It was an intoxicating feeling, taking two cocks at once, all the while wanting more and knowing you’d have it before long. Brian fucked you hard and precise, as if his goal was to split you open from the inside out. Had it just been him and you alone you would have found yourself creeping further up the bed. It had happened a few times before, leaving you either hanging off the edge of the bed, or with your hands over your head and pressed against a wall in an effort to keep from banging your head. But all he managed to do was push you further onto Roger’s cock, making you gag and choke more often. Roger didn’t seem to mind that though, giving as good as Brian, firmly gripping your hair so that you couldn’t even attempt to move off him. The added impact from John’s hand just made you shiver and moan. He was the one who sensed you were getting close though, reaching under you to rub your clit and give you the extra push you needed to get over the edge. Brian wasn’t too far behind you, groaning as he tried to keep fucking you, his hips faltering as he twitched inside you and spilled his seed. You felt his hands on your backside as he spread your cheeks, leaning down to spit on your arsehole before he pulled out of you. Once Brian was finished with you, you tapped Roger’s thigh and he pulled back. “You okay?” he asked, stroking your cheek with a knuckle. “Brilliant, just thought that since I can move a bit easier, I’d take over. You look like you were close.” “Fucking yes I was close,” You giggled as you readjusted your position to be more comfortable, once again taking Roger’s cock between your lips. This time you pushed yourself lower, taking him deeper, making Roger swear above you. You pulled back again, hollowing your cheeks until you sank down once more. A strangled moan seemed to catch in Roger’s throat and it spurred you on. You reached out to cups his balls, massaging them in your hand as you took him as deep as you could and hummed. The hum turned into something akin to a squeal (though slightly muffled and choked off at the end) as the sticky cool of John’s lube covered finger teased your arsehole, tracing circles around it before slowly sinking into you. The sight seemed to be enough to finish Roger off, one hand on the back of your head to steady himself as he shot his load down your throat, pulling out towards the end so the last of it dribbled down your chin. “Now me?” John asked, pushing a second finger in with the first as Roger let you go. “Stretch me out a little more and then yes,” “Oh, no, I’m not ready for that yet. I want your tits.” “What?” “Your tits, Y/N. Turn around,” His fingers left you and you were free to move, shuffling on your knees to face him. John pressed down on your shoulder pushing you to sit back on your knees and adjusting your angle so he could slide his lubed up shaft between your breasts. He pushed them together with his palms and slid them up and down his dick as he rutted against you, spreading the sticky lube over your chest. With a slight smile at John, you  dipped your head a little and kissed the tip of his cock as it moved towards your lips. “Fuck, been waiting so long for this,” he groaned, “gon-na make a mmm-ess all over you.” He gave up on speech as he neared his released, communicating exclusively in grunts and increased speed until he finished, covering your chest and sternum in ropes of cum that dripped down your skin.

You laughed as John fell back. The hardest you could remember laughing in a while. “What’s so funny?” Brian asked, reaching out to rub your shoulder. “Just thought what that reporter would say if she could see me now, naked and dripping in spunk,” you managed to get out between giggles, “her face would be fucking priceless.” The boys laughed along with you, glad you could see the funny side of the situation with the article. “Does that mean you’re feeling better?” “Yes Rog, but I’m still not done with you.” “What did you have in mind?” “Well,” you crawled over to where Roger was sitting, leant back on his hands, and placed your hand on his throat, tilting his face away from you a little so you could lick a long stripe from his jaw to his temple, “I meant it when I said I wanted all of you.” “Never doubted it, love,” he sounded a little breathless. “Just let me know when you’re all ready to go again. Not you Rog, I can see you’re ready.” “I’m good too Y/N,” “Yeah, same,” “In that case,” you shifted your position, lining yourself up with Roger and sinking down on him, squeezing his throat a little harder as you adjusted. “John, you still got that lube?” “Yes, uh, yeah here,” there was the sound of a cap flipping open and you leaned forward encouraging Roger to lay back so you could give John better access. “Hey, Rog, can you spread your legs a little wider,” “S’pose so, just don’t kneel on my bollocks or anything,” “God give me a second, the thought of that just made mine try and jump up inside me,” You giggled as John shuffled closer, using his fingers to spread some more of the lube over you and to keep stretching you out. “What about me, Y/N?” “I haven’t forgotten you Bri. I want every inch of your cock shoved so far down my throat I can feel you for a week. Just let me get used to the others first, yeah? Still feels kinda odd having two of you at once since we’ve not done it much.” Brian nodded, contenting himself with running his fingers through your hair as he waited. John, having pulled his fingers from you and slicked up his dick with more lube, sank into you slowly, his hand on your back to keep you bent forward. It suddenly felt hard for you to pull in a new breath as you tried to adjust to the feeling of both of them, especially when John gave an experimental thrust, fucking you slowly to make sure it felt okay for everyone. Brian talked softly, reminding you to breathe and telling you how well you were doing, until you were better in control of your lungs and ready for more. “Are you sure you want me as well?” “Yes. Lets show that parasite just how far I’ll go, huh?” Roger laughed, “that’s the spirit.”

Brian didn’t need more convincing than that, though it did take a little trial and error to find the best way to accommodate all three of them. Brian tried perching his arse on the headboard but Roger whinged about “seeing nothing but Bri’s ballsack flopping about. And I know you see things when you’re gangbanging but that is too much.” In the end Brian stood next to the bed by Roger’s head, enough to the side that Roger’s view wasn’t impeded but still close enough so that the angle wouldn’t strain your neck. He gathered your hair into a messy ponytail as he pulled your mouth onto his cock, letting you work yourself further down his shaft as slowly as you needed, checking in with you every now and again to make sure you could take more. The other two were mostly still as you adjusted to Brian, though once or twice they’d given a small thrust or shifted slightly and made you whine. Once you had Brian buried as deep in your throat as he could go you paused for a few seconds and then pulled back again, strings of saliva breaking on your lips. “How was that?” “Good,” you gasped, “New. Kinda weird but very fucking good.” That didn’t really explain anything but you weren’t sure how to describe the nearly overwhelming fullness, the sudden heat, the tension in your belly which you couldn’t pinpoint as either anticipation or nerves or just because you were stretched open on three cocks. “And that’s without us doing anything,” “I know,” you grinned, “I’m excited. Why didn’t we try this sooner? But now you guys can cut loose. I’m not sure I’ll be much use in like riding you properly or whatever. Just don’t know my brain can focus on keeping both of you in my holes while I’m thinking about blowing Bri well. So, just fuck me however you can and we’ll see how it goes.” “Don’t worry, we’ll make you feel good,” John said, rubbing your back softly. “Yeah, course we will, love. And if ends up being shit then we can just take turns instead,” You nodded and took a deep breath before leaning forward to take Brian again. You controlled the pace once more, bobbing up and down his shaft, sucking on his tip, as the other two figured out their rhythm. It was a strange sensation to start. It felt clumsy and more than a little awkward, especially when John mentioned how he could feel Roger inside you. But that eased as they adjusted and worked out how best to fuck you. John held your hips as he plunged into you, each thrust harder than the last as his confidence rose and he found out what you liked most. Roger’s hands moved over your skin rather than staying in once place, palming your breasts and teasing your nipples between his fingertips before sliding down your side to grasp your waist and then back up to your breasts. You were rocked on his cock with each of John’s pounding thrusts, which only made you moan around Brian’s. You let instinct take over there, one hand stroking from his base up to meet your lips as you swallowed him deeper. His hips jolted when you whined or moaned and before long you dropped your hand away from his shaft, instead grabbing his arse to keep yourself steady. He pulled you off him again and you could feel the spit on your chin. “Forgot what a fucking incredible cocksucker you are.” Brian groaned, “But can I take over? Fuck your throat?” “Yeah, okay,” You had time for another breath and then you were pushed down again, right to the base. “There we go,” he groaned, pulling on your hair, “Gonna make you feel so fucking good.” Your hum was choked off and ended in a gag as Brian ground his hips into your face. That seemed to be the tipping point though. The moment all three of them forgot about awkward views or who was positioned where and became entirely consumed with fucking you deep and hard. You were glad to let them lead, grabbing you, pinching and pulling and squeezing every inch of you they could reach. And all the while spearing you on their dicks, keeping you in a cycle of mounting pleasure as they found all your most responsive spots inside and out. You felt your orgasm building again, the heat rising, getting more urgent as you got closer and closer. The sounds you made were muffled by Brian but that didn’t stop you making them, moaning with every pounding thrust. As you neared the edge Brian pulled you off his cock so they could all hear you properly, their encouragement mixing in your lust addled brain and creating a wall of noise that pushed you over the edge with a loud cry. And yet they didn’t stop. Brian waited until your orgasm was reduced to aftershocks that made you wince and whine and then cut off your air as he entered your throat again, resuming the long, deep strokes that made you gag until he came, holding you down as he emptied himself completely.

As soon as the other two didn’t have to worry about giving Brian access to your mouth they adjusted your position, John pushing on your back until you were bent over. Roger attached his lips to your throat as they simultaneously fucked into you, the change of angle pushing Roger’s cock against you in a way that had you seeing spots. You cried out again as Brian lay a slap on your arse. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” John grunted as he came too, unable to hold out any longer though he didn’t withdraw from you either. His hips slowed a bit and he whined softly but he kept fucking you. “Rog,” you panted, trying to get him to finish too. “You’ve got another one in you, c’mon love,” You whined but nodded, the familiar sensation already tightening in the pit of your stomach. Again the three of them encouraged you, John wrapping his hand around your waist to find your clit, Brian reaching under you to squeeze your breast as his other hand came down on your arse again. They gave you no option but to cum, shivering between them. Finally Roger let go too, moaning into your ear as he filled you up.

It took a moment to disentangle everyone, John being careful not to go too fast and hurt you, but finally you were able to collapse together, sweaty and panting, spread out over the room. “So, cheered up now?” Brian asked from where he’d lain down on the carpet You peered over the edge of the bed at him, “Think so. Thanks for that, it was fun.” “Any time, love,” Roger chuckled from the end of the bed, patting your knee, “and I mean that.” “I’m not you groupie anymore,” “Never said you were,” “Then what?” “What Rog means,” John cut in from where he’d spread out on you window seat, “is that if you ever need cheering up or to let out some frustrations, we’re here. We’re happy to help,” “Does your help always involve a gangbang?” “Not always,” Brian laughed. “Well, a lot of the time,” Roger added with a wink. “I’ll keep it in mind,” you chuckled, “I’ll have to face my family at some point and there’s a high chance I’ll leave upset and frustrated so, we’ll see. Wonder how Freddie’s getting on with those calls.” “I’ll go give him a ring and find out,” Roger said, half groaning as he stood and stretched. He didn’t bother grabbing any of his discarded clothes before he left. “I’ll take Rog his pants,” John sighed as he got up and replaced his own underwear, exiting the room with an eyeroll, Roger’s underwear pinched between his thumb and pointer. “And I’ll...stay here?” Brian said, “unless you need anything?” “Nah, I’m going to jump in the shower. Let the other two know that’s where I am, would you?” “If you’re doing that, can I have the bed?” “Sure Bri,” you laughed, “as long as you promise to change the sheets when you wake up.”

[ineloqueent]

Hello! I would like to ask for fluff with Joe since you haven’t written for him yet. How about Joe dating/flirting with someone way more quiet and shy than him? A shy! Reader

here’s some fluffy joe for you! i’ve made y/n into a bit of a bookworm, because i’m a bit of one myself, oops. hope you enjoy :)

⭒

Joe had been the first person in your life to understand that being shy wasn’t mutually exclusive with not wanting to be spoken to, that you were human, and craved connection as much as anybody else.

You’d first encountered him at the local hybrid cafe-bookshop, Paracosm. Perhaps that was why you’d been a little more at ease than usual, that day; you knew the place. Paracosm was your favourite haunt, filled with the familiar comforts of tea and yellowed pages, the glittering light bulbs that hung from the ceiling like little planets and kept the atmosphere of the cafe cosy, even on the coldest of days.

Or perhaps it’d been the look of kindliness about him, the slight ginger tint to his hair, the snow dusting his eyelashes, the way he’d shivered and shared a laugh at his own expense with the barista. It was a beautiful quality, to be able to laugh at oneself.

Or maybe it was none of those things at all, and instead simply that he’d smiled at you when he had accidentally made eye contact with you, instead of hurriedly looking away, as most people— including you— did.

“I should’ve worn a warmer jacket, I think,” he said conversationally, and with a start, you realised he’d been talking to you.

Your first thought was why? Why was he speaking to you?

You were sitting by the door, yes, in the spot where you normally did, because the way the bookshelves were positioned by the table ensured that no draft would sweep over you, but just because you were closest to him… Was that why he had directed his remark to you, in polite resolve of the mistake he’d make in looking at you earlier? Or was he speaking to you because he wanted to speak to you?

No, of course not.

But he was still smiling at you, almost expectantly, as though he thought you would reply.

“Wrong day to wear a thin jacket,” you said, and your tonelessness could have been mistaken for hostility. You cursed yourself inwardly; it wasn’t hostility, it was nerves. Admittedly, the man was attractive, and as you already struggled with small talk in the company of people you knew, talking to this auburn-haired stranger turned your words more nonsensical than normal.

But he laughed again, lightly, easily. He had an easiness about him, a simplicity that boasted earnesty and depth, both wit and charm. “You’re right,” he said, simply. “But you look like the clever sort.”

You blinked at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” you said.

The memory of a smile remained on his face as he told the barista, “A latte for me,” glanced in your direction, then added, “and another hot chocolate for the lady, please.”

Your expression turned further puzzled, and the man said to you, “Mind if I sit down?”

He’d said it so kindly, as though he genuinely cared that you would not be bothered by him taking the seat across from you.

“No,” you managed, “sit down.”

He pulled out the chair and sat down, made as though to take off his coat, then changed his mind, instead wrapping it more tightly around himself.

“You’re reading Shakespeare,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“You’re reading Shakespeare,” he repeated, and you glanced down at your book.

You were reading Shakespeare, but as to why that was relevant, you couldn’t guess.

“And?”

He shrugged. “Call me simple-minded, but if you’re reading Shakespeare for fun, you have to be some kind of smart. You can’t read between the lines if you’re not smart, and most of Shakespeare is between the lines, not in them.”

Pulling your book closer to you, you challenged shyly, “How do you know I’m reading for fun?”

You noticed, as you leveled your gaze on him, that his eyes were a lovely brown, the kind of colour one might wish to sink into, merely to fathom a whisper of the warmth that lay within them. “You were smiling at the book when I came in.”

He’d noticed you even before you’d seen him.

How often did that happen?

The answer was never. You were one to shrink into the corner, preferring to deflect most attention, and careful observation was your greatest asset in this world of loud-talkers and scatter-brained thinkers. You imagined that nothing about you drew the eye.

But you’d drawn his.

A flush touched your cheeks. “That’s embarrassing,” you muttered. You were only half-joking.

That smile was back on his face again.

“I’m Joe,” he said, reaching out to shake your hand.

“Y/N,” you responded quietly, taking his hand. His skin was soft.

“Joe! Latte and a hot chocolate.”

Joe raised his eyebrows at you, then went to retrieve the drinks. Returning, he set down the hot chocolate in front of you.

“You really didn’t have to do that,” you said, avoiding his eyes.

“Oh, but I wanted to,” he winked. “Gotta make a good first impression.”

Your book was a refuge as you glanced down again, the reliable pattern of black lettering stamped into creamy paper offering you familiarity in this unfamiliar situation. You weren’t used to this… interest.

“And anyway,” he resumed, “what I meant to say was, that’s not embarrassing,” he jammed a finger in the direction of your book, “but the fact that I know how to recite the entirety of Macbeth backwards is.”

“Backwards?” you couldn’t help but laugh. “Why do you know how to recite the entirety of Macbeth backwards?”

Joe winced. “See, that’s the embarrassing bit.”

You raised your eyebrows, and with a heavy sigh, he continued.

“It was a bet. I was being stupid and thought it would be a good idea to bet my friend a hundred dollars that I could memorise any play within a week.”

“Okay, that does sound a bit embarrassing,” you conceded. “But still, why backwards?”

“I’m getting there, I’m getting there,” he said, blowing over the surface of his latte, gingerly taking a sip. He recoiled when it was still too hot, wrinkling his nose in an adorably childish manner. “Backwards, because my friend decided to teach me a lesson for being an idiot, and one-upped me that I should learn it backwards. Before I knew it, there was an entire bar-full of strangers chanting for me to do it, on pain of death if I refused.”

You laughed, finally slipping your fingers from your book, closing it gently with the bookmark inside, your attention captured by how this man told stories in such a lively way, the lilt of his voice akin to how one would narrate a fairytale.

“Go on, then,” you said, trying your hot chocolate. It was perfect, as ever. Perhaps a little more so because it hadn’t come out of your weekly budget. And because it had been paid for by a handsome stranger, one who actually wanted to talk to you. “I want to hear some backwards Macbeth.”

Joe’s eyes twinkled. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I do,” you answered. But you didn’t, really. And he knew it.

He narrowed his eyes.

When you didn’t flinch beneath his gaze, he began, “Despair thy charm, and let the angel whom thou still hast served. Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.” Here, he changed his voice to represent the change in speaker, and you smothered a laugh in your hands at how dramatic his facial expression had become. “Thou losest labor as easy mayst thou the intrenchant air with thy keen sword impress as make me bleed. Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests; I bear a charmèd life, which must not yield to one of woman born.”

A few more lines, and he had you utterly in stitches; you did not bother to quiet your laughter. Of course, the lines now sounded completely meaningless, but Joe’s sense of humour was as ridiculous as your own, and in deriving pleasure from the ludicrousness of a Shakespeare work read backwards, Joe was more likable to you than ever.

“I believe you, I believe you!” you cried, and his composure crumpled, a grin spreading across his face.

“Thank god,” he said eventually, when the two of you could contain yourselves. “I thought I’d have to recite all of it before you gave in.”

You shook your head, still smiling.

“I would’ve done it, though,” he said, and you felt your chest tighten at the look of earnesty in his eyes.

“You should be an actor,” you told him, and he chuckled, the warmth of the sound warming you.

“I’m glad you think so. I am an actor.”

“Oh!”

“But I’m not pretending I want to be here with you,” he said.

Something like butterflies had fluttered beneath your skin.

He’d returned to Paracosm every day after that, and though he seemed happily surprised each time he encountered you, you weren’t so foolish as to believe that your meetings were actually a coincidence.

As the days went by, you grew more comfortable in Joe’s presence, until you were relaxed enough to begin an argument with him about which of the Brontë sisters was more forward-thinking in terms of women’s rights. Unlike most of the men you’d come across in your lifetime, Joe was perfectly comfortable debating such topics, even going so far as to slag off the more conservative male classical writers of the same time period. The two of you had then pored over the difference between Oscar Wilde’s poetry and his literature, examined the metaphors of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, trawled through the conspiracy theory regarding Shakespeare and whether or not he had really authored all of his own works. The latter conversation had become so heated that other cafe patrons had begun taking their own personal sides on the matter, loudly voicing their opinions until even Paracosm’s baristas had a thing or two to add to the discussion.

“How are you so well-read, anyway?” you’d asked Joe.

“My mom forced me through all of the classics before I was ten,” he’d said with a shrug. In his nonchalance, he became all the more alluring, the humbleness a complement to his personality.

Not many days into the routine of running into you at Paracosm, Joe had asked you to go out with him, properly.

You’d nodded, “Okay.”

“Okay?” he’d laughed, nervously. “You don’t have to go out with me if you don’t want to.”

“No,” you’d shaken your head, adamant that you get your point across. “I want to go out with you, Joe.”

His face had broken into a smile. “Okay,” he’d said, making you laugh, and his smile had broadened until it reached his lovely eyes.

The first time he’d kissed you had been on that first date.

He’d taken you to see a musical, one you’d struggled to pay attention to because Joe kept looking over at you to gauge your reaction to certain parts of the show, laughing with you, smiling when you smiled.

After the show, the two of you had wandered down the boulevard, and as it had been cold, you’d used this as your excuse to hover close enough by Joe’s side that your sleeves occasionally brushed as you walked with your arms by your sides.

You’d been content to walk like that, floundering for breath when his eyes caught on yours, your heart stumbling along its usually steady course. But then, in place of sleeves, his fingers had brushed your fingers, and suddenly you wanted more, to be closer to him in this blistering cold where his touch would surely warm you.

And he slipped his hand into yours.

You could hardly breathe.

“Look,” he said quietly, pointing up at the sky.

Confused, you frowned, but it wasn’t long before you realised his meaning: snow drifted down from above, snowflakes spinning through the air like dancers. It was beautiful, light snow, not the heavy kind, the kind there’d been on the day when Joe had first stumbled into Paracosm, the kind that would warrant a panic about losing one’s way home.

The snow was beautiful, but you couldn’t take your eyes off of Joe.

He stared up at the heavens, his eyes wide with childlike wonder, and for a moment, you lost yourself in watching him, drenched in your own memories of a simpler time.

Snow glittered in his hair, on the shoulders of his coat, on his eyelashes and on his collar. The word ‘angelic’ came to mind.

“I like snow,” he murmured.

You laughed softly. “I can see that.”

He lowered his eyes until they met yours.

You remembered that he was holding your hand.

“And I like you,” he said, a smile finding its way to his lips. His eyes were homely and familiar in his face, the face you’d looked into for so many days now, gazing at him and wondering at how it was really nothing more than a coincidence that the two of you had met. What a wonderful coincidence.

“I like you too, Joe,” you whispered, your hold tightening on his hand.

He lifted his other hand to your cheek, not quite touching you, but close enough to make your breath hitch.

His own gentle exhale tickled your skin.

Tentatively, he asked, “Is it okay if I kiss you?”

“More than okay,” you murmured, already gravitating toward him.

“Okay, because I wasn’t sure, and I wanted to be sure, and I—”

You cut him off, pressing your lips to his as he hummed a soft oh against your mouth and finally, finally pulled you into his arms.

You felt him wrap his coat around you, and you leaned further into him, relishing his warmth in the coldness of the night.

When he pulled back, he combed snow from your hair with the lightest of touches, laughter in his eyes.

“You know,” he said, “you must be more well-read than I am.”

You blinked at him. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, because that was classic, cutting me off.”

You rolled your eyes at the ridiculousness of his joke.

The snow fell more thickly now, but neither of you moved. You simply stood, you with your head nestled against Joe’s chest, Joe with his coat and his arms wrapped around you. His breath ruffled your hair.

“My well-read girl,” he whispered.

⭒

[ckret2]

what are ichi, ni, and san attracted to individually?

Oh man I found my draft of this buried way deep in my docs, I meant to finish answering this ask weeks ago. How long have I been not working on this? Dang.

Anyway.

I've made some posts about who each of them are individually attracted to, but I haven't done one yet on what each of them individually finds attractive, so sure! A lot of the below will also discuss the love interests each of them has expressed attraction to, to the extent that each of their individual love interests reflect their individual tastes.

This post is 2700 words, buckle up.

Let's start off with what they've got in common—because what they've got in common vastly overwhelms their differences. All of their personal tastes have been heavily shaped by the trauma they went through, so both their collective tastes and individual tastes reflect that. Most prominently: they're all attracted to skilled/strong warriors, because 1) under the Xilien military they had it beaten into their heads that the only thing of worth about them is their ability to destroy, 2) at this point nearly all their hobbies and interests besides fighting have atrophied to nothing so fighting is the only couple bonding activity left to them, and 3) they live under constant terror that if they care about something, it will be destroyed/killed, because they ARE an instrument of destruction/death and that's the framework through which they see the universe—so a partner who can defend themself against anything that might try to destroy them is very appealing.

So you get a powerful warrior, that's gonna put a check mark on all three of their "ideal partner" wish lists.

They're also going to be collectively more attracted to people with dorat-esque physical traits. Scales, coloration in the yellow range, long flexible bodies, articulated wings, a one-head-and-four-limbs symmetrical body layout, snoutlike face with one mouth and two eyes... (When you've been around enough aliens, things like "symmetrical bodies with four limbs" and "one mouth and two eyes" are no longer a given.) Not that EVERYTHING is necessary for them to be attracted, of course, but little things add up. For example, if they were forced to choose and if he wasn't their Hated Nemesis, they'd find Godzilla more attractive than Kong on the basis of the fact that he's reptilian, he's got a tail, and he's got a row of spines down his back, and therefore he's more doratlike than Kong. However, Godzilla loses out to Manda, who's snakey, has horns, and is close to a color that dorats actually come in.

This isn't a conscious thing on their part—they don't, like, mentally tally up dorat-like traits. But if you went up to them and asked "hey, what traits do you consider hot?" and for some reason they decided to answer instead of incinerate you, the list of features they'd provide would end up pretty well describing a very handsome dorat. They don't REALIZE they're looking for dorat traits, but if you pointed it out to them they'd be like "Oh, huh. Well, yeah, basically. But a good looking dorat."

Plus some variations based on their original Dorat Sexualities; like, Ichi and Ni are both more attracted to smaller wings and longer/spiny tails, while San is the opposite. (Not that this is necessary. San looked at Gigan's itty mainly-for-decoration wings and went "yeah these are fine" and Ichi looked at Rodan's little nubby tail and went "sure, still cute.")

Other traits they've got a shared interest in: positivity, optimism, upbeat attitudes, all that, because they've got none themselves; self-confidence, courage, bravery; people who understand the war machine life—they don't feel wholly relaxed around people who don't have a kill count that can be measured in planets, they feel like they've got to keep up an artificially harmless façade not to be cast out by people who Don't Get It; someone they can see more as a "beast" than as a "person" because they feel like "people" are out of their league but "beasts" are their equals (which is an artificial divide that they absorbed from Xiliens, based on arbitrary measures of personhood like "does their culture wear clothes" or "did they invent their own technology or inherit someone else's").

Okay, so, on to their individual preferences. In order!!

Starting with Ichi! A.K.A. The Only One That Actually Has A Crush On Rodan. Most of the reasons he likes Rodan are because he hits a lot of the traits that all of them find attractive: great warrior;  he's pretty upbeat; he's brave; he gives them "oh this is definitely A Fellow Animal and not a Person" vibes; they think that he's totally down with destroying the world (because they don't realize that he didn't understand that that was what they were up to); and he makes them go "oh, he's like, 60% dorat? 65%?"—because of his appearance, because he (like them) survived the oxygen destroyer unscathed, and because he could break out of their siren song mind control. So those are all reasons for Ghidorah to like Rodan.

But it doesn't explain why Ichi likes him so much more than the other two.

And deep down... deep, deep down... I think Ichi just wants to get dicked down and Rodan looks like he can do the job.

But seriously though—Ghidorah, as a whole, has been suppressing a broad swath of their emotions for an extremely long time, ESPECIALLY their capacity to form emotional connections with anyone else. Ni and San have both cracked on that front—Ni's got an ongoing crush that he deals with by burying it alive, and San's got a star-crossed love half a galaxy away that he left behind kicking and screaming—but Ichi's never cracked. He's never let himself fall for anyone. Ni and San see "keep Ghidorah isolated, independent, self-contained" as an obligation; Ichi sees it as a duty—his duty to his other two parts.

None of the three is officially the leader/in charge, but Ichi ended up the de facto leader because back when they were even worse of a psychological wreck than they are now he was the one who just barely held it together enough to corral them and keep them going. He's the team Mom Friend, assuming that the mom in question is also a hardened drill sergeant without an ounce of natural maternal instinct, and the friends the drill sergeant mom friend is mothering are two traumatized soldiers trying to escape a postapocalyptic hellscape so they can forage for food. He's done a better job of not getting attached than the other two because he's felt most strongly that that's absolutely not an option.

But then they're on Earth, one of the worlds they've struggled the hardest to try to conquer, one of the most frustrating experiences of their post-Xilien-escape life; and they've just woken up from several millennia in ice, pissed the fuck off but also disoriented as hell and keenly aware of the fact that they lost a HELL of a fight in order to have been frozen; and mentally, they're somewhat rattled apart, they're still rebooting their usual emotional shields and defenses, they're still trying to get the mental pieces put back together, and Godzilla attacks them like a minute after they wake up and their brains are definitely not put back together—

There are holes in Ichi's mental defenses that have never been there before. He's vulnerable in a way he hasn't been before. It's not that something about Rodan is more attractive to him than it is to the other two—it's that the other two keep a good solid inch of iron around their capacity for affection, but Ichi keeps a nice fat five-foot-thick steel wall around his; and right now that wall is missing. He is completely exposed to the possibility of someone swooping in and seizing his heart—and Rodan went right for his chest with talons extended. And because just that one time, that one day, he's already shaken up, he's already vulnerable, Rodan gets through when the next day he might not.

And so even though the other two can also look at Rodan and agree, yes, the things Ichi is attracted to him for are indeed attractive, Ichi falls hard and fast when the other two don't.

Or, the tl;dr version:

Ichi has been suppressing his sexuality for several times longer than the human race has existed. For a moment—just a moment—all that suppression is gone; and so he's at risk of latching on to anyone that struck him as attractive. On this day, at this moment, he wants to get dicked down, and by god, Rodan looks like he can do the job.

And with all that written... because everything we've seen that Ichi is attracted to so far fits in with what Ghidorah-as-a-whole is into, I'm not sure that I've got anything specific to list that sets his tastes apart from the collective's. I might come up with some later, but since thus far they haven't been relevant in what I've been writing, I haven't come up with any in particular. Maybe it's just the case that all the things he's attracted to also happen to be things that The Whole is attracted to. Y'all wanna suggest specifics, I'll see if I like any that I can work in?

Ni's romantic tastes are best covered here, with the explanation of why he's into San:

https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/187039340467/anonymous-said-why-did-redacted-fall-for

And honestly... that's it. That's his taste. San is his taste. His taste is San. He had a babycrush on San since back when they were three individual dorats that barely knew each other, long before they were picked up for Highly Unethical Animal Experimentation, mutated, combined, and turned into Ghidorah; and realizing that one of the two people he was stitched together to and sharing brainspace with was the dude he had a crush on was one of the primary things that galvanized him to, like, survive. And since then having a secret limerent obsession with one of the two dudes he's fused to has determined almost everything about his romantic preferences, sexuality, and entire mental/emotional landscape.

What he liked San for originally can basically be boiled down to:

1) He was less "hivemindy" than other dorats, particularly dorats of his sex—San's sex is the one that's got less control over their empathic abilities, and so it's easy for a bunch of them to get together and catch the same emotion from each other like a fast-moving contagion. San had a tendency to go less "tunnel vision" on whatever The Group was thinking about and notice things going on outside their current activity—often with such great interest and attention that it broke The Group out of the zone as well, to their consternation—but Ni, who was uncomfortable in hiveminds, appreciated that about him.

2) Ni's of the dorat sex that's got stronger empathic abilities, but also a better ability to dim the degree to which they're active—and Ni liked to not just dim his ambient empathic field but also turn it off completely, because he didn't like others reading his feelings at all times. This is uncommon enough in dorats that it actually drove their owner to take him to the vet to make sure his head was okay. (And it was okay; he was just Extremely, Extremely Introverted by dorat standards.) Most dorats thought that this made Ni super weird/uncomfortable/off-putting. San thought it made him interesting, a unique novelty worth investigating. Ni appreciated that San didn't radiate Wild Discomfort in his presence.

3) San was, like, pretty hot. For a dorat. To other dorats. Adolescent dorats. Basically he was the cutest preteen snake in the room because he looked like a 14-year-old snake instead of a 12-year-old snake.

But that... was an extremely long time ago. And basically none of it applies anymore. What's being hivemindy or not matter when there's only three of you and you're always in and out of each other's heads? What's it matter that once upon a time long long ago San thought Ni was okay for shutting off access to his emotions when now there are only two people who CAN feel Ni's emotions/thoughts and both of them are equally chill & used to him keeping his mind closed/filtered to them? What's it matter that San was a cute baby snake when they're now three terrifyingly ancient monster snakes that were mutated to look almost identical?

So, by this point? What he's attracted to is, legitimately, "whatever San is like." His preferences shift so that they're always San-centric. San is the emotional rock Ni is clinging to.

... It's honestly kind of terribly unhealthy.

So if you asked him what he's attracted to, he'd say, like, "Oh, you know... someone who's observant, attentive... someone who's curious about his environment, likes learning... someone who appreciates the little things... uhh...... someone who's closer to the left shoulder than the right shoulder........." and then he'd peter out of traits to list because at this point Ichi, Ni, and San's identities are like 75% overlapped and there's not much room left in them for their individual differences.

But he wouldn't be interested in any of those listed traits if they were in somebody other than San.

(Ni is capable of being "interested" in other people—but it's 50% "I'm interested in you as a friend" and 50% "We, Ghidorah, currently in a mood to feel like an individual instead of like three people, are together interested in you romantically." Ghidorah slides back and forth between being "three-in-one" and being "one-from-three."

San's tastes are covered pretty thoroughly in the post about why he (and the rest of Ghidorah) is into Gigan:

https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/186622638902/more-on-the-relationship-between-gigan-and

Beyond all the reasons San likes Gigan that Ichi & Ni share—his skill in & passion for violence, his familiarity with what it's like to be an unwilling war weapon—he also likes his sense of humor, his ability to appreciate and revel in little details the way San does... and, probably more importantly than anything else, Gigan represented a way out.

All this time, Ghidorah has kept together and remained... if not "stable" in the sense of "emotionally healthy," then "stable" in the sense of "maintaining a mental balance well enough not to fall over"—but they're stable like a tightrope walker who's gotten really good at maintaining that balance on their tightrope, not like somebody who's standing on solid ground. And they maintain that balance through isolating themselves, never letting themselves get attached to any place or any thing or any one, never letting themselves linger in one spot for long, always moving on, on, on, on, back into space. They're that meme "If I keep my body moving and my mind occupied at all times, I will avoid falling into a bottomless pit of despair."

Which is all well and good, except "avoiding connecting with anything" does not adequately keep San's mind occupied, and the only reason he hasn't fallen into a bottomless pit of despair is because he's got two other people in his head just barely tugging him back from toppling in. But he's desperate for... a sense of continuity, a sense that he can invest something in life that won't vanish in three days, a sense that anything matters. He wants desperately to connect to something else—or someone else.

Gigan offers that connection—Gigan is someone safe they can connect to, because he has the same lifestyle as them. He's someone that San can let in... without them having to change their life at all.

So, that's what he's attracted to that sets him apart from the other two: he's attracted to escape routes. He falls for someone who can anchor them so they don't keep tumbling off into space, from world to world and apocalypse to apocalypse. He wants someone who can be an excuse for them to stop and hold still. Someone who's compatible with them, someone who's just like them, someone who burns worlds the same way they do, but is capable of wrapping their arms (wings? tails? whatever) around Ghidorah and holding them in one place—whether that's "one place" physically or emotionally.

He's just tired of floating through outer space in asteroids.

[tacitwhisky]

Jon of the Kingsguard: Story Autopsy

While not the first jonsa story I posted, Jon of the Kingsguard is the first I wrote. The initial concept isn’t original to me: I can’t find it now, but an ask reblogged by asoiaf university offhandedly mentioned Jon joining the Kingsguard and how it would complicate Joffrey and Sansa, and that immediately got me thinking. Jon going south is such an interesting context for him, and the way he interacts with being in the capital and the more southern view of knighthood and duty, while still being fundamentally being the same person, was really intriguing to me.

Another driving idea behind the story was the concept that Jon and Sansa both start in this fic and canon not valuing the other: Sansa is status conscious and looks down at Jon because of his birth while Jon is dismissive of her feminine pursuits (there’s a good meta here that talks about how Jon is very supportive of tomboys like Arya or Ygritte, but tends to not like traditionally feminine women because of Catelyn). That duality of the two, their mutual dislike for superficial reasons, was really fascinating to me, and I liked the idea of their arcs mirroring each other as they learn to value the other (I quote the relevant part of a related meta here, if you’re interested).

I also made the decision early on to ignore the parts of asoiaf canon that weren’t conducive to the story: no white walkers, no war of the five kings, no Hound, no Petyr or Renly or Stannis. Partly this was a decision I made just for my own sanity, but mostly because paring down and narrowing the scope of the world was the only way to truly let the premise of Jon joining the Kingsguard breathe and develop fully.

The Original Vision: Or, No Plan Survives First Contact With The Page

My original vision for the story was as one of those lyrical oneshots that gracefully dip in and out of events and time, and that’s how I originally started out writing it. It was one of those stories that just gripped me and wouldn’t let me work on other stuff until I’d gotten it out of my system. I wrote the first third of it in about a week, the words just flowing one after another.

I got as far as the first time Joffrey hits Sansa, but then realized I wasn’t quite happy with how Jon and Sansa’s dynamic had developed so far. Ironically enough for a jonsa fic, I felt like the two hadn’t interacted enough. By that point I’d run out of steam for the story though, and decided to just set it aside with the vague idea of maybe turning it into its own original story at some point.

(Which, for the record, wouldn’t work: there’s simply too many things specific to the asioaf world in the story, and a lot of the background of the plot would have to be expanded for it to make sense on its own. Joffrey, for example, would need actual scenes of him being horrible earlier in the story rather than only showing up onscreen right before the end, Danaerys kind of reads like a deus ex machina, etc.)

I let the draft sit for almost a year, until I’d gotten over my hesitation over spending writing time on fanfic and written and posted Tipsy in a Red Push Up Bra (have I ever mentioned that I dislike that title? Because I do, but could never come up with something better). At that point I decided to take a look at Kingsguard again, and fix the things I didn’t like in what I’d already written before moving forward.

Adding The Jonsa Spice

Most of the process of second drafting was simply adding more interactions between Jon and Sansa. Which again, is odd that I didn’t do in the first place, but whatever. I’ll run through a few here.

“Do you know where Arya is?” Sansa tosses her hair, the red-bronze sheen of it flashing in the light, a quiver wobbling the edge of her voice. “She’s going to ruin everything.”

Jon sighs and whistles Ghost to him. It will be worse for Arya if she’s late. “I’ll help you look.”

Originally Arya popped up before the second paragraph above, and Sansa dragged her off and that was the end of the scene. I’m not really sure what I was thinking, because the story inherently needs a scene at the start to show the status quo of Jon and Sansa’s relationship where they actually interact and talk. It’s just a basic tenet of writing.

They reach the stables, and Nymeria pads out to nose Ghost and Lady. Sansa’s nose wrinkles at the sudden scent of horse and hay, and she lifts the hem of her skirts above the churned earth and mud. And where is your prince now, he thinks darkly, or is trudging through mud a job only for bastards? 

I find it endlessly hilarious how extra Jon can be, and the general saltiness between Jon and Sansa in these first few chapters was a huge amount of fun to write. This scene also emphasizes Sansa’s initially chivalric view of the world. I love any fic where Jon and Sansa are cast as knight and lady, and here they go on essentially a quest, even if it’s a mundane one. That’s what this is about:

Once out in the yard again Sansa makes to walk off, but abruptly turns on her heel and gives Jon a swift courtesy. “Thank you for your aid, Jon.”

It’s also just a nice character beat for her: Sansa never forgets her courtesies even if only to Jon.

Chapter two also had a couple scenes added and expanded. The scene with Jon and Sansa in the sparring yard was entirely added in the second draft both to give them more interaction, and to punch up Jon’s sense that something is going on between Sansa and Joffrey that he doesn’t understand. That feeling finally blossoms in the wedding scene, which is also the emotionally largest addition to the second draft: the bedding.

Carefully, Jon lowers her into the bed, and only then does Sansa look at him again, eyes trapped, the line of her jaw clenched and sharp and fragile as a shard of glass. The night’s wine has left Jon’s mind murky and slow. “Your grace,” he mumbles, tongue thick, meaning to step back. Her hand flashes out, fingers clutching his sleeve. “Don’t call me that,” she whispers, eyes pleading, “please don’t call me that. I’m still Sansa.”

In the original draft Jon lays Sansa on the bed and just… leaves. Really odd decision on my part, and even just this short interaction pulls the whole chapter together and solidifies what Sansa’s going through in a tangible way. It’s honestly one of my favorite moments in the story now, and really sets the groundwork for their relationship.

Alayaya

Maybe the biggest addition in terms of word count I made in that second draft oddly enough doesn’t include Sansa. The entire second half of chapter three where Jon visits Chataya’s brothel with Tyrion is a second draft edition. Part of the decision to add the scene was pacing: once I gave up on the idea of this fic as a oneshot, crash cutting from Jon deciding to join the Kingsguard to Joffrey’s coronation felt really jarring.

The other part was to just explore Jon’s headspace: in canon Jon is a tightly wound ball of expectation and duty, and piling knighthood and it’s hangups around sex on top of that would ony make it worse. Which itself ended up being a larger part of the story than I initially planned. 

Jon flushes. The girl is beautiful, freckled and lushly curved, with long red hair brushed to a copper sheen that reaches to her hip. As if she can feel his eyes on her the girl glances up at him, a slow, wicked smile turning the corners of her lips. There is nothing of her but for the red of her hair that is like Sansa, yet her smile coils something sick in Jon’s gut, and for a moment he can again feel Sansa’s fingers tangling in his sleeve, the fragile weight of her in his arms, the way her eyes had pled with him

Jon wrenches his gaze away. I am no Joffrey. He downs the goblet in a single swallow, tongue barely recognizing the smooth ripple that marks it as Arbor Gold. “Not her.”

I’ll talk more about this in the next section, but I wanted Jon’s feelings for Sansa to be ambiguous here, especially with how tangled up they are in ideas of chivalry and duty and westerosi patriarchy. You can read this scene as Jon shying away from attraction to his sister, as Dancy being a figure of temptation for his honor, or as Jon simply still being traumatized by the bedding and worrying he’ll be like Joffrey.

“I am bastard too counted your Westorosi way.” Alayaya tilts her head to the side as she returns to where he stands. She hands him his cup. “My father was a summer islander like my mother, a sailor passing through Kingslanding on his way to Braavos. But among my people there is no shame in bastard birth, for the gods made not only us but our desires too, and in that way we bastards are a gift of the gods.”

“I’ve never felt a gift.” Jon laughs, the sound more hollow than he expected.

I hadn’t originally planned for it, but Alayaya’s views on her own bastardry (which aren’t canon, but are a reasonable extrapolation) are a great contrast with Jon. Here she’s offering another way of viewing his bastard identity, a way of freeing himself from its shackles, but Jon just isn’t there. Stories are all about contrasts and foils, and Alayaya is a great one for Jon. Not to mention what surprisingly good chemistry they have.

To Romance Or Not To Romance?

In the notes for the first chapter I wrote:

I went back and forth quite a bit on whether this should be under the Jon/Sansa tag or not. Ultimately I did decide to put it there (for now), because I think if you’re into Jonsa you’ll enjoy it, but do note that the romantic elements of this story are not at all overt, so fair warning.

This pretty accurately reflected my initial mindset on how explicitly romantic the story was going to be. Being the first jonsa story I wrote, I think I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the incest facets of it (to be honest it’s still not an attractive part of the pairing to me), and they think of each other as brother and sister for most of this story. Even without any romance I was still driven to write the story: I generally find intimate platonic relationships as interesting as romantic ones.

As I finished retrofitting old chapters and writing new ones, more and more feelings started to show up between Jon and Sansa, until I realized that there was really no holding it back: this was going to be a fic where they had romantic feelings for each other far before they find out their cousins. Still, vacillating back and forth on how blatant to be about their attraction to each other is something that hounded me as I moved past the material I’d originally written, and kept moving itself earlier and earlier into the story.

Relationship Progression

The story can actually be broken into several distinct periods in the evolution of their relationship. The status quo when the story starts is Jon and Sansa are mostly salty at each other because of how few things they have in common and their general disdain and resentment. Neither of them have anything really like attraction for each other, but the underlying situation is there: they’re simultaneously too distant to really feel like siblings, but also too close to see each other as potential romantic interests.

The saltiness begins to give way as Jon begins to see more than just the image Sansa projects (her crying into his shirt over Lady), comes back a little bit in chapter two, and then gives way even more as he begins to see how not-perfect her life is.

“Joffrey is to break lances with Ser Loras.” There is something queer in Sansa’s voice, an uncertain edge to it that Jon cannot place. “He asked I watch.”

He bites his lip, but does not know what to say. Since she’d been old enough to curl up in old Nan’s lap Sansa had dreamed of marrying a lord like Joffrey, a shining prince with flashing blue eyes and gold hair. This is the song she’s always wanted: and she is not his sister in the way Arya is, in the way where he can ask her what troubles her. 

It’s still very opaque to him though until the end of chapter two:

The gale of voices of the ladies holding Joffrey aloft in the corridor is louder now, the sound pulsing in Jon’s blood. He reaches up and wraps his hand around Sansa’s fingers, and it takes all the will he has not to kneel in that moment and swear to her by the old gods and the new that he will protect her from Joffrey and the Lannisters and all the realm. But this is not a song and he is not a knight, not any more than he has ever been a Stark. Carefully, he untangles her fingers from his sleeve and gives them a tight squeeze. “Sansa,” he says meeting her eyes, and later he knows he will tell himself it is the wine that makes him step forward and brush his lips against her forehead. “Sansa Stark.”

This interaction is the start of an underlying, recurring tenderness in their relationship that will only grow over the course of the story. On a side note, this scene is also yet another invocation of the knight and maiden motif, and how Jon’s sense of duty is conflicted by his bastard identity.

Jon and Sansa’s relationship is kind of on hold for chapter three (Jon visits the brothel) and four (Arya leaves), and then picks up again in chapter five (Joffrey first hits Sansa), though they’re still not particularly close in that chapter, still at a sort of wary distance. The attraction element is beginning to strengthen though, like in this moment:

Sansa blinks and looks away, out to the window. For a moment she looks so like a maiden from a song waiting in her tower for some brave knight to come save her that it cuts Jon to the bone.

Which is a bit much for your sister.

Chapters six and seven are the next stage, when Jon and Sansa are drawn closer because of the situation they’re going through together: they’re really the only other person either of them can depend on and trust. But just as much as that kind of situation can forge a bond, I also wanted to show just how ugly abuse can be in tearing people apart.

Not to get pretentious, but one of the inspirations for that and the scene I’ll go into next was a section in Anna Karenina where she and her lover are shunned from society, and she starts to cling and become jealous of him even as he begins to resent her. Desperation and loneliness aren’t always pretty, and often don’t forge a bond.

Trauma and Abuse

Sansa giggles. “What do you think, Jon? Would fucking me keep you true?”

The words catch Jon like a slap. He drops her hands. “That isn’t funny, Sansa.”

This scene is a really pivotal one, bringing to the front a lot of the underlying elements of the story so far: how abuse can tear people apart, the latent attraction in Jon and Sansa’s relationship, and showing the emotional toll Joffrey’s abuse has taken on Sansa.

Ironically for such a pivotal scene though, it isn’t one I originally planned. I don’t remember how the idea first came to me, but I do remember that I initially rejected it for being too shippy and clashing too much with the tone of the story. But the idea stuck with me, and in execution I just tried to make it clear that Sansa isn’t so much jealous as simple insecurity and desperation: as much as Jon has been beside her, he isn’t the one undergoing abuse, and Sansa is very, very aware that he has a choice in whether to stay with her. As she says, he can leave the tower whenever he wants even as she’s trapped there.

She rolls her eyes. “I could make you happier than she makes Jaime, you know. All the court says I’m more beautiful than her. I’d treat you gentler too, let you use me like one of your whores and never once complain. I’m sorry I have all these bruises, but you can give me one of your own if you want. Would doing that make it easier for you? Would it make fucking your sister sweeter? I want it to be sweet for you, Jon, truly I do, so sweet you’ll never leave me, so sweet you’ll strike me at even the thought of another man in me.”

This is Sansa, in a moment of desperation beginning to lose her grasp on what a normal relationship is, conflating abuse with love, and embracing the idea that her only value to men, even Jon, is her appearance. It's a bit of a nod to what Cersei in canon tells Sansa tears aren’t a woman's only weapons, that she also has one between her legs. Just as later Jaime will be a good foil for Jon when it comes to why the knight saves the maiden (which I’ll go into in a bit), Cersei is the other side of the coin from Sansa. Not exploring that dynamic between Sansa and Cersei in actual scenes is actually something I kind of regret not doing, though I didn’t think of it till too late; if I was ever to expand or turn this into an original story it’s something I’d definitely include.

There is a dull roar in Jon’s ears as he reaches up and clasps Sansa’s face between his hands, jerks her eyes back to meet his. “I will never strike you.” The words are sharp, short, harsh, but Jon needs her to understand, needs her to know beyond the flicker of a doubt. “And I will never leave you, Sansa. I swear that, swear it before the sight of gods and men, swear it by the old gods and the new. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever, not until I draw my last breath and the life leaves my body and the crows come to feast on my eyes. You are my heart, Sansa. You are all I have. Never doubt that. Never.”

This is really the only way I ever thought about writing Jon react. There are other ways that might make sense, but needing to give Sansa comfort in that moment is the only thing that felt truly right to me.

Would Fucking Me Keep You True?

One of the techniques Martin uses a lot in asoiaf is a short phrase that gets stuck in a character’s head and repeats whenever they’re feeling a particular emotion. This is a technique that really works for me because it’s something that happens to me in real life (hurrah for mental illness), and “would fucking me keep your true?” is the one that crops up the most in this fic. Mostly it’s because it’s just such a good shorthand for the for the tangled and complex feelings Jon has for Sansa and his sense of duty and understanding of knighthood.

That tangle of feelings is what marks the next section of Jon and Sansa’s relationship through till the last chapter; as indefinable as it is, it’s the only solid and true thing in their lives, and it’s what Jon clings to after he leaves Sansa and sets off to find Dany and bring her back.

---

This post got much longer than I thought it would, so I’m going to break this off here and finish it up in another post down the line.

[independencelogbook]

9.29.19

So I'm still figuring out how to make this whole "writing about things" situation happen in these circumstances- I had written posts on day 1 and 2 and had saved them on the app on my phone, but without service or wifi I guess they didn't stick. Had an empty drafts page after connecting to wifi in port today :(

Regardless, I'll just do a recap of those first-day proceedings here from day 4. As I'm writing, it's 9:46 pm on our first day in port on this cruise. Luckily they were kind to us with training and didn't schedule anything today, and since hardly anyone is on board when we're docked, there's not much work to do in the theatres. So I was able to get off the ship in Malaga, Spain for the afternoon!

Honestly kind of surreal still to walk off the ship (it has also not sunk in that this ship is my home for the next few months) and be walking around in Spain like it's an everyday thing. Reminds me of being on the subway in New York where it feels a bit like you've teleported. You step outside and suddenly you're in a totally different place without really seeing it happen like in a car or plane.

The first day of my contract involved a wake up call at 4:30am, shuffling on to a couple of private buses with about 50 other people starting their contracts that day (lots of which were returners coming back from a break between contracts), and a quick, hour long drive to Southampton. At the dock, we put our stuff through an x-ray and into the void of the building somewhere for more security screening, and lined up to have them double check that we had all the necessary medical/marine security/passport requirements to get onboard. The other stage staff new hires and I met up with our supervisor and she took us onboard to get our ID badges and room keys. Dropped off my stuff in my room and came back out for a tour of all the relevant crew areas of the ship. That was a whirlwind, and a confusing maze of all the plain, off-white crew stairwells that look the same. It's definitely not a straightforward path anywhere haha, but I think I'm just starting to get a handle on how to find any of the important places on my own. We got our luggage from the I-95, which is what everyone calls the literal only staright shot of a hallway for the crew. It's the pathway on deck 1 that runs along the whole length of the ship. It looks the same in both directions and so do all of the little hallways and turn offs that lead to the equally confusing staircases haha. Finding anything here feels like a puzzle, and I'm determined to figure out the most direct, and least guest contact, ways to the places I need to get to. Most of the crew cabins are down there too, so it's kind of like home base on the ship for crew. Pretty much anything I need to get to is on decks 0-5, so at least I'm not regularly traversing the entire ship. Boy it's a ton of stairs though lol.

We got to tour the theater spaces a bit, had our first encounter with the mess halls, and I had some cabin switchery that led to me moving all my stuff in to a different hall down the way from my original one. I believe I'll be moving back to my proper cabin spot at the end of this cruise though. They like to room people within the same department so your schedules match, and they group the same department's cabins together somewhat too. The room is small, but not claustrophobic or anything. I'll have to give you a square footage estimate sometime, cause it really is tiny haha. Glad I didn't bring any more clothes than I did.

Seas on day 2 (starting around 3 am, which I know because the rocking woke everyone up) were horrendously rough for about a day and a half straight through, and I was definitely really seasick in the morning. Luckily they have seasickness pills readily available in a bin outside of crew medical that everyone was popping like candy that day lol. That stuff worked like a charm and I felt better by the afternoon. After that little roadblock, it was just the fun game of getting better at not stumbling around everywhere because your whole environment is moving around you. It felt sort of like being on a gigantic carousel- like a slow, circular motion, but for hours and hours. Or like a slow-motion version of when you first drop on a roller coaster- that kind of light-headedness and weird feeling in your gut. Plus a semi frequent, erratic lurch thrown in there to keep you on your toes haha. Funnily enough, when I was sitting down at a restaurant off the ship today, it felt like I was swaying and it was super disorienting... Guess I've already got my sea legs thanks to that rough weather lol. On the upside of the rough sea day, in one of the many trainings that is keeping my schedule packed this week (and will next week as well), I got to use a fire hose off the back of the boat! That was pretty neat. Also good things from the training: figuring out how to better navigate the stairwells after learning how to read the signs better, and learning how the recycling and water systems work on board. Actually pretty interesting how they end up pulling this all off. It's such a crazy concept when you start to think about it.

This one's getting long, so I'll call that good for now, but that's the general idea of what my first days on board were like. Next time, I think I'll describe some of what my work on board is gonna entail.

Thanks for reading! It's a big learning curve on a lot of drastic lifestyle changes, but I'm enjoying the process and I think things are going well, all things considered!

[enesjay]

update: I’m still alive and ‘ever yours’

「Huh, you’re still alive?」

Apparently so. Let’s just say this – second year was a wild ride. The first half of it things just ‘got too real’, and the second half of it nothing felt real. In between them were some transformative personal experiences for me on top of the university workload which as usual, was brutal. 

The first semester, I found myself working on two essays simultaneously, back to back, like a clockwork just to keep up. It was tough, and I just have to record somewhere in writing – I’m quite proud of myself for pulling through in spite of many things. December 2019 will go down as one of those ‘rock bottom’ moments but it was one that I’m glad I experienced – I came out of it much stronger than I was before.

And then, second semester was... a mess. The first five weeks was alright, and then by late February the universe just threw the kitchen sink in: strikes, coronavirus, deadlines. Suddenly it was all chaos – 0 to 100 real quick sort of situation. Funny enough, that moment came mid-March, right around my birthday – not exactly how I envisioned how my official entry into adulthood(tm) would look like. 

So, it’s only right that I return to the very thing I’ve been desperate to get back to. Am I making excuses for not working on the novel? Possibly. But I also realised that taking time for myself was important. I did beat myself up a lot for struggling, which I shouldn’t have, because all it did was make me feel even worse. 

In spite of it all, I’m happy to say that I’ll be entering third year with another solid first! The next year is looking challenging for sure, and essentially we’ve turned into a massive online school (yikes). And of course, that 10k words dissertation is just around the corner...  

But enough of uni for now – onto the novel!

「'Ever Yours’?」

I did mention a change in working title from ‘A Certain Task’ to ‘Ever Yours’. But why? Because it’s more relevant, that’s why. 

After spending some time cooped up in the archives last summer and reading through many, many old letters (and failing to understand most of them because I’m rubbish at palaeography), there’s one thing I’ve noticed: everybody had a unique way of signing off letters. I think that that’s pretty cool, and we should 100% bring it back. (I’m guilty of using the pretty safe but flavourless ‘kind regards’ to sign off my emails, but that’s beside the point). 

What I particularly love is that nearly all the sign-offs express sentiments along the line of ‘affection’ and ‘duty’. For William Pitt, it was was ‘Ever Yours,’ (sometimes with ‘Affectionately’ in between, but most of the time he didn’t even bother to write those two words properly, to begin with). Here’s an example: 

[Image: William Pitt to William Wyndham Grenville (April 1789), Add Ms 71587 f.33, The British Library, London, accessed 29 June 2019]

A bit squiggly, but you get the idea. For me, it made sense to switch up the title, but the decision wasn’t immediate because I thought “well, this sounds a bit too romance novel-y*, doesn’t it?” but after surveying some of my readers, they didn’t seem to think so. So there’s that. A decision was made. 

(*I’m not saying there’s no romance in the novel – but this isn’t a romance novel per se so I’m trying to avoid false advertisement). 

「Reworking」

Another fairly difficult decision, but for the best. When I started writing Ever Yours, it was written in first person present-tense. LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE OF HOW I’VE BEEN WRITING MY WHOLE LIFE. HELLO. I think I was trying to do something different, but I felt like that was a mistake. 

Transforming the novel into a different perspective/tense has been a challenge of its own (given that I’ve already written about 20k words in the previous style), but it also gave me an opportunity to tidy a few things up as well so I’ll consider it a win. 

「Final Thoughts」

A note from myself, to myself: don’t stop working on this. By ‘this’ I mean the blog, the novel, anything related to it. I have a bad habit of not seeing things through or never finishing anything, which is why I keep disappearing for aaaages, but I know that I can’t be like this forever if I want to get things done. So I’m back – remind me to get my butt back onto this blog if I disappear! 

And to the people who reading this: I hope to be sharing some of thing things I’ve been working on soon! Maybe some excerpts and tidbits from/about the novel, or some good research stuff I’ve been keeping in my notes! I have a couple of things in mind, even a post drafted so look out for them! 

Farewell, for now :) 

[the-master-cylinder]

SUMMARY Claire Ward hires private investigator John March to look into the increasingly bizarre activities of her husband Charles Dexter Ward, an esteemed Rhode Island chemical engineer. Through a series of conversations with John, Claire reveals Charles’s recent unexplained isolation in their carriage house, his sudden uncovering of his family history, and their visitation to an abandoned ancestral farmhouse near Pawtuxet where he found a painting of a man named Joseph Curwen, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. Since these events, Charles has purchased and moved into the farmhouse, leaving Claire without explanation.

Upon investigating, John finds that numerous deliveries are made to the farmhouse, and inquires about them to Charles, who is evasive; Charles explains that he is undertaking routine chemical tests using animal cadavers. Shortly after, an elderly man in a neighboring home is found brutally murdered, only a few remnants of his bones left in the house. Police assume he was attacked and eaten by an animal, but John is skeptical. Claire and John go to visit Charles together, and find him pallid and speaking with an archaic affect. They attempt to extract an explanation from Charles, but he simply tells them he is on “the edge of greatness”, and that in six weeks’ time, they will understand.

Claire agrees to have Charles committed to a hospital. Doctors find his metabolism to be inexplicably high, triggering ravenous hunger, and attribute his change in demeanor to hormonal issues; however, they are unable to explain his craving for blood and raw meat. Meanwhile, John uncovers a diary in the carriage house from Ezra Ward, Charles’s fifth-great grandfather, dated 1771. The diary explains how Ezra had an affair with Joseph’s wife Eliza, and that Joseph had been practicing necromancy in catacombs he constructed on his property. After a flood penetrated the catacombs, the townspeople discovered a grotesquely malformed creature in the river, which they burned alive. The diary ends leading up to the townspeople’s raid of the Curwen house, and Eliza’s admission to Ezra that she was pregnant with Joseph’s child; Claire, John, and John’s assistant Lonnie surmise that Charles’s biological great-grandfather was actually Joseph, not Ezra.

John and Lonnie decide to search for catacombs on the farmhouse property with Claire. They uncover the entrance in the house’s basement, and inside the catacombs find a laboratory and half-grown creatures in wells; Claire also discovers Charles’s briefcase. They attempt to flee but are attacked, and Lonnie is killed by one of the creatures. John leaves a bomb in the catacombs, and he and an injured Claire escape with the briefcase before the house detonates. John takes Claire to the hospital where she is sedated, and the doctor informs him she is pregnant.

John goes to visit Charles in the psychiatric institution, and confronts him with the briefcase, which he discovered filled with human bones. He accuses Charles of in fact being the 250-year-old Joseph Curwen, who successfully found a way to conquer death through his necromantic experiments. Joseph admits his identity, and confesses that the bones in the suitcase are those of Charles, whom Joseph killed after Charles raised him from the dead. He explains his plan to regain his health and eventually be discharged from the hospital, after which he can impersonate Charles. Joseph attempts to cannibalize John, but John pours the restorative potion from the laboratory over Charles’s bones. Charles’s skeleton reanimates, and begins to tear the flesh off Joseph, before the two disappear in a cosmic explosion.

DEVELOPMENT Two facets of Lovecraft’s work create problems for filmmakers, who must not only wrestle with expanding his short stories to feature length, but must also find a cinematic method of conveying the sense of malign cosmic conspiracy underlying many of his later plots. Perhaps the closest anyone has come to capturing Lovecraft is Roger Corman’s THE HAUNTED PALACE (1963), which, despite its Poe title is actually a previous adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Though Corman retained little of Lovecraft’s plot, many of the author’s more outre concepts survived, and Corman’s visual style was a fair approximation of Lovecraft’s literary voice.

THE RESURRECTED was initially written as a spec script by Brent V. Friedman, whose interest in adapting Lovecraft was piqued by the work of Stewart Gordon. “I didn’t really start reading Lovecraft until I noticed that RE-ANIMATOR was based on his story,” recalled Friedman. “I went out and devoured everything I could by him. The one story that struck me as having filmic potential was The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, because there’s so much there. His stuff is mostly short stories I saw some great little ideas, but I didn’t see a film in any of them.”

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is one of only three short novels that Lovecraft ever wrote. At approximately 120 pages, its length seemed optimum for translation to the screen. Noted Friedman, “Because I was so naive at the time. I thought, ‘This will be easy to adapt.’ It was very difficult. The way the novella is written is just how the title implies—it’s written as a kind of objective look at this strange experience. There was no real main character. Unless you want to make a documentary, that doesn’t hold up.”

Friedman set about adapting the novella without being aware of Corman’s film. “I didn’t see it until after I’d written the script I didn’t realize what it was based on until someone told me,” admitted Friedman. “It’s an interesting little film, but it’s a very different version.” After several drafts, Friedman managed to dramatize Lovecraft’s tale well enough to show the script to producers Mark Borde and Kenneth Raich, who took it to Toni Scotti of Scotti Brothers Pictures. In looking for a director, Borde sent Friedman’s script, then titled SHATTERBRAIN, to Dan O’Bannon through a mutual friend. The choice was appropriate: O’Bannon’s RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD had been an effective low-budget directorial debut; perhaps more importantly, O’Bannon’s ALIEN, though an “original” screenplay, captures many of Lovecraft’s more visual concepts probably better than any official adaptation, particularly in the sequence exploring the alien planet and derelict spaceship.

Coincidentally, O’Bannon had already been trying to adapt Lovecraft’s novella, and he brought many of his ideas to the script. “My script is relatively different from the film,” said Friedman. “I set up the main character as a psychiatrist examining Ward. The thrust was how the case affects this psychiatrist. He’s coming from a scientific background, thinking there’s a rational explanation, and takes on a case which makes him rethink everything he believes. After finding out there’s a supernatural explanation, he ends up going slightly crazy.

“When O’Bannon came onto the project, he had been trying to write a script from the same material, and he felt that he had never cracked the third act. He read my script and said, You’ve solved a lot of the problems, but the way I’d always had it in my mind was the main character’s a detective.’ If he was going to get involved with the project-which everyone was very keen on-he wanted to tell the story his way. Everyone was skeptical at first, because my script was getting good response. O’Bannon wrote out a 15-page treatment to show how you could integrate parts of my script with what his idea was.

Rejected Creature Design

“I can’t even tell you what a thrill it was to find out he was involved with the project.” Friedman enthuses. “In just the past six months that I’ve been working with him. I’ve probably learned more about writing than in the previous 26 years of my existence. It’s almost as if, until that point. I was just winging it.”

“Dan’s thinking was this story naturally lends itself to a detective because there are so many clues to be discovered. It looked good on paper, but the execution was a lot trickier than he had made it seem. The toughest thing was to keep the detective not only intellectually involved, but emotionally involved. Dan’s idea was to involve him, a la CHINATOWN, with the wife—which works on a certain level but on another level becomes distracting.”

The change in lead characters resulted in a change of title as well. “The word ‘shatterbrain’ is actually a Middle English term for crazy,” explained Friedman. “It was more relevant in my original script, because the psychiatrist came unglued. It does sound a little like a B-movie, but at the same time it evokes a certain image, so it was appropriate. I pushed for it long into post-production-people got very bored with my suggesting it. THE RESURRECTED, to me, gives too much away. Once you meet the three main characters -well, one of them’s been resurrected, and it’s not too hard to figure out which one!”

PRE-PRODUCTION Devising a photographic look that would capture Lovecraft’s tone fell to cinematographer Irv Goodnoff, who went through an interesting audition process for his director. “There was one other director of photography interested,” said Goodnoff, “so Dan gave us an assignment to bring in what we thought our interpretation of the script would be.

I went back and studied a number of painters that had the flavor of what H.P. Lovecraft felt like, expressionistically speaking. I brought in 30 books, marked out with the pictures I liked. About a week later, I got a phone call saying Dan wanted me.”

Pre-production lasted from June to October 1990, followed by seven weeks of principal photography in Vancouver, Canada, which doubled for Lovecraft’s beloved Providence, Rhode Island. The Bridge Studios, which cover almost 50,000 square feet, provided ample space for the construction of a labyrinth of tunnels where dwell the ghastly results of Curwen’s experiments.

“It’s a contemporary piece, but there’s also the 18th century and the whole world of the catacombs, so, in essence, the picture has three looks,” explained Goodnoff. “We used two different film stocks: Kodak for most of it, and Agfa for the period scene. The Agfa has a more creamy pastel look; the Kodak is much higher contrast with a denser black.

I try to create a flavor and a feeling. Sometimes, a third of the screen is black, and there are shafts of light. When you’re doing horror, you don’t show everything. Dan O’Bannon told me, “You set an expectation for the audience. Then you make them wait, and you make them wait, and you make them wait. When you finally suggest that they see something, they’re going to be scared.’ That was basically our approach.

“It was the most difficult job I’ve ever had to do. The scheduling should have been nine weeks, but we only had seven. We wrapped principal photography just before Christmas. It was one of those deadline days. The plug was being pulled at midnight. I’ve been on a couple of pictures like that: because of bonds people, financial and contractual things, one minute over 12 means you’ve blown it. Those bottom-line people have no grace in a lot of cases. We had three different units going. I was running from one to the other, checking, then shooting my own unit. It was a 14-hour marathon.”

Sarandon with O’Bannon

“Charles Ward is basically a well-intentioned, good man who is led astray by a desire to conquer this great scientific problem that his ancestor has posed. It’s kind of a parallel to Frankenstein: a good man who is consumed with something that he shouldn’t be messing with. The big theme here is basically “Don’t screw with death.”  – Chris Sarandon

SPECIAL EFFECTS The premise of the story is best summed up by a passage Lovecraft quotes from the alchemist Borellus: “… from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a philosopher may … call up the shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust where into his Bodie has been incinerated.” Typically, Lovecraft refers to the results, when not all the “essential Saltes” have been gathered, simply as the “livliest awfulness” without ever describing them in detail.

Such restraint doesn’t work on the movie screen, according to Friedman. “He didn’t really show you a lot,” said Friedman of Lovecraft. “In a book that’s almost scarier, because the reader uses his imagination to fill in the blanks. In a film you can’t just keep talking. Ata certain point you have to deliver the goods. The way the script plays is you get up to the point where he left off and then you have to start creating on your own.”

Coming up with specific designs for Lovecraft’s livliest awfulness fell to Masters, who took his initial inspiration from Friedman’s script. “There were incredibly bizarre descriptions which I had a lot of fun interpreting,” said Masters. “When it finally came to materializing these, O’Bannon would show me books of paintings by Francis Bacon, who I’ve always been a fan of. He would express himself in these imageries, these strange concoctions of paint and color and light rather than form and shape. Dan really got into talking about the character rather than the form, so it was an interesting challenge to come up with a design. What we tried to do is take the human form as groundwork and completely distort a certain aspect of itas long as there’s something the audience can grasp, it’s quite frightening. We designed about 30 monsters; in the film there are about five. I’ve still got reams of designs that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use for anything else because they’re so weird.

The effects unit during principal photography was directed by supervisor Todd Masters because O’Bannon was on a tight schedule. “Dan would take a sequence all the way up to where the effects jumped in, and he would finish off a sequence,” said Masters. “He would leave us the middle. My crew worked nights, mainly for sound reasons we didn’t want to cause troubles with the other unit. We had to match a similar camera style. Things marry very nicely.”

“We’ve done more tricks on this film than on any other I’ve ever worked on,” said Masters. “We have monster suits, remote-control animatronic characters, puppet heads, stop motion, and pneumatics. We had a set of prosthetics on Chris Sarandon for a good portion of the end of the film. You can’t tell he’s wearing anything—they match his face-until we turn on the lights. It’s networked with fiber optics, so it gives the illusion that his veins are glowing when he comes to his climactic end.”

“For most of the monsters, I was given a long leash,” Masters explains. “O’Bannon started coming down with quite a strict design on one creature that I called the ‘Darwin monster,’ which in one of the early drafts of the script was actually supposed to be Darwin resurrected. As the script developed, that monster kind of got pulled all over the place. Some of the earlier maquettes had some really wild designs, but O’Bannon finally just said, “Well, you know, what I really want to see in this movie, which we haven’t done yet, is a half-skeletal body-being that these are supposed to be resurrected corpses with its other half this kind of swollen, amorphous, elephantitis looking guy.’

“I was never too excited about that,” Masters admits, “just because I always thought it was more interesting when [the Charles Dexter Ward character] made these mistakes out of these corpses’ ashes–they didn’t always come together in the right place, and would elongate and do strange things. Dan wanted something that was a little stricter, closer to human, so he actually sat down and pencilled out this sketch which would eventually become this monster, and I did a maquette and a variety of sketches to hone in on what he was trying to get.

“It’s a pretty neat monster,” Masters concedes, “but it’s not my favorite in the film, because to me it’s too much of a solid substance. Many of the other ones are so disturbing and so amorphous that it’s difficult to put your finger on exactly what every piece is.”

I though there are a number of creatures in The Resurrected, Masters points out that there isn’t an overabundance of gore for gore’s sake-although there are some healthy sprayings of blood.

“That’s one thing that Chris Sarandon and I were really trying to steer away from,” he clarifies. “I’ve never been a fan of gore, and I don’t really care for splattering walls with blood even though I did splatter two sets with blood for this film. Actually, one day I flew in from LA, got off the airplane, and Dan came up to me and said, ‘Do you have a lotta blood?’ I said, “Well…yeah.’ And he says, ‘Well, do you have lots of blood?’ It’s like, ‘I don’t know.

Extensive visual effects, supervised by Todd Masters in post-production, helped the ambitious nature of screenwriter Brent Friedman’s evocation of the horror of Lovecraft. Though many of the effects in Friedman’s script were deemed too expensive, Masters-originally hired to produce makeup and physical effects-sought to find a way to retain them, working closely with production designer Brent Thomas.

“Thomas really pulled rabbits out of his hat,” said Masters. “He loved the project from day one. He and I would get together after office hours at the studio and sit down in the hotel bar to concoct ideas. That’s how the movie turned into such a crazy fiasco. We thought the whole idea of Brent Friedman’s script was so bizarre and wonderful that we kept wanting to play.

“Every time something was pulled away from us, because there wasn’t money for this monster or that set, Brent Thomas and I would figure a way to put it back in. We didn’t want a film that has small production value. Horror films deserve all the scope and scale they can get.”

The horror that was to be resurrected by detective John Terry early on in Curwen’s laboratory got axed so Masters’ effects unit could afford to rent a studio to work in. As a low-cost stop-gap director Dan O’Bannon suggested that Terry resurrect just two fingers, “a goofy idea,” said Masters, who came up with a believable, low-budget finger monster concept instead. “We had to keep fingers in it,” said Masters, “so we turned this thing into almost a crab monster with fingers, an eyeball, and some external organs.”

After principal photography wrapped, Masters and producers Mark Borde and Kevin Raich viewed a rough assembly to determine what effects were still needed. What was originally intended to be a few weeks of rotoscoping expanded to six months, four shooting miniatures and another two adding opticals. “The producers really wanted it to be an effects-filled film,” said Masters. “We made sure that we kept the budget down. I’ve coordinated a lot of visual effects in the past. Since our eyes were looking through the camera, and our eyes only, we cheated to hide all the expensive stuff just inches out of frame.”

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One amusing episode involved a four-foot-high balsa wood miniature of Curwen’s mansion, rigged to explode. “This was part of Ted Rae’s unit—he did two miniature shots in the film,” said Masters. “We had it set up in Ted’s parking lot, waiting for nightfall. As I was painting part of the chimney, I heard these little cracks in the structure. As I was ready with the final dab of paint, a big gust of wind came and blew the whole thing down! What a nightmare! Ted and I jumped underneath the house and tried to hold it up, but we ended up having to recreate the whole building in a day and blow it up the following night.

“Everybody that worked on this film put their blood into it,” Masters summed up. “It turned into a labor of love for a lot of us-which I know sounds cliched, but everyone was really pulling for it, and it shows in the film.”

The extensive post-production schedule turned out to be a hindrance for composer Richard Band. “They made about eight edits the night before my recording session,” said Band. “That’s a composer’s nightmare, but all too common these days.” Band came up with a synthesizer score that boasted a full orchestral sound. “To have done this score with an orchestra would have cost $400,000,” said Band. “The producers have resigned themselves to a synthesizer score.”

Summed up Friedman, “I think we retained more Lovecraft than any other adaptation I’ve seen. We didn’t just use the concepts as springboards for our own story. In fact, there’s one scene lifted word-for-word, dialogue-wise, involving the first time you see Curwen posing as Ward, and he’s talking this strange 18th century speak. So there’s some place where Lovecraft is completely intact, and there are others where liberties were taken. It’s not as grossly amusing as REANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND. It takes a much more serious, Gothic slant. In the end, I wish we could have made my original script, but I’m still happy we made something.”

CAST/CREW Directed Dan O’Bannon

Produced Mark Borde Kenneth Raich

Written Brent V. Friedman

John Terry as John March Jane Sibbett as Claire Ward Chris Sarandon as Charles Dexter Ward/Joseph Curwen Robert Romanus as Lonnie Peck Charles K. Pitts as Ezra Ward Megan Leitch as Eliza Lauren Briscoe as Holly Tender

Special Effects by Jason Barnett    … prosthetic effects David P. Barton  … prosthetic department head (as David Barton) Julie Beuscher   … prosthetic effects Bryan Blair  … prosthetic effects Evan Brainard    … prosthetic effects Kevin Brennan    … prosthetic effects Jeffrey Butterworth  … first assistant special physical effects (as Jeff Butterworth) Scott Coulter    … prosthetic department head: Todd Masters Company, Inc. (as John Scott Coulter) Bernhard Eichholz … prosthetic effects (as Bernie Eichholtz) Earl Ellis   … prosthetic effects: Todd Masters Company, Inc. Kevin Flemming   … special effects photography Thomas Floutz    … key effects makeup artist (as Thom Floutz) Mark Garbarino   … prosthetic department head Karin Hanson … prosthetic effects Marty Huculiak   … special effects assistant Timothy Huizing  … prosthetic effects (as Tim Huizing) Gil Liberto  … prosthetic effects (as Gilbert Liberdo) Geoff Martin … special effects key grip Todd Masters … special effects unit director Mike McDonald    … special effects gaffer (as Michael McDonald) Kevin O’Leary    … special effects assistant Gary Paller  … special physical effects coordinator Dennis Petersen  … special effects assistant Tom Price    … special effects assistant (as Thomas E. Price) Jonas Quastel    … special effects first assistant camera Robert Sheridan  … special effects assistant Mark Sisson  … prosthetic effects James Slavin … prosthetic effects (as Jim Slavin) Chris Spouler    … special effects assistant Candace Van Woerkom  … prosthetic effects Andrew Vincent   … special effects lamp operator Scott Wheeler    … prosthetic effects Shawn Wilson … special effects assistant Andre Bustanoby  … prosthetic effects (uncredited)Visual Effects by Bret Alexander   … visual effects miniatures Jim Aupperle … visual effects director of photography Asao Goto    … visual effects miniatures Dave Gregory … optical effects supervisor Todd Masters … special visual effects Jeff Pyle    … visual effects miniatures Ted Rae  … additional miniature / visual effects director of photography Marc Tyler   … visual effects miniatures David Williams   … additional optical camera: Illusion Arts (as Dave Williams)

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Cinefantastique v22n06 Fangoria#106 Fangoria#112 Gorezone#22

The Resurrected (1991) Retrospective SUMMARY Claire Ward hires private investigator John March to look into the increasingly bizarre activities of her husband Charles Dexter Ward, an esteemed Rhode Island chemical engineer.

[miraculous-dnd]

Insight Chapter 2

A miraculous ladybug D&D!AU  Words: 3552 Rating: Teen for mild language Summary: Between sessions the group finds time to catch up outside of D&D. 

Marinette slept late the next morning, it was Saturday and she didn’t have to go into work that morning. She walked into the office around 10 anyways though, one of the designs that she had been working on calling to her. The office was quiet, Sylvia apparently taking her day off seriously, so Marinette put on some music and got to work. Around 1 she was interrupted by a buzz from her phone:

Adrien: Hey

Marinette: What's up

Adrien: You free today?

Marinette's heart raced, despite herself

Marinette: Yeah, just finishing up some work, what did you have in mind?

Adrien: Well I was in the neighborhood and I was wondering if you wanted to grab a late lunch, or maybe some coffee, if you've already eaten?

Adrien: Maybe we could talk D&D?

Marinette: Yeah, that sounds great.

She sent him the address of the office,

Marinette: Meet me here @1:30?

Adrien: sounds like a plan!

Marinette dropped the phone on the drafting table and took a deep breath. She let the excitement run its course, Adrien wanted to catch up and grab coffee. This was normal, right? They were in a D&D group together, they were in the same industry (though the lowest ranking Gabriel designer could probably buy out Coccinelle without breaking a sweat and Adrien was on the damn board of directors), they had plenty in common, they could go for a normal lunch between friends.

Ok, maybe the grade school crush wasn't so past tense. She tried to shift her focus back onto the designs in front of her, but she kept being dragged back by the silky cat's purr of Adrien's Rogue voice.

That's only a little weird. Right?

Adrien walked up in front of the small shop front of Marinette's and smiled, it definitely had her touch. He opened the door and walked in, the building seemed to be quiet, but he could see a light coming from the back. He walked towards it, taking care to go a little louder than natural, so as not to frighten.

She was sitting on a stool, half-finished sketch on the drafting table in front of her. Her hands were on her chin and her eyes were a thousand miles away.

Adrien cleared his throat, "Marinette? Did you still want to get lunch?"

She startled a bit, "Oh, Adrien, I didn't hear you come in. Sorry. Yes. Lunch, that is, yes I still want to go to lunch."

"I'm glad, I had started looking forward to it."

"oh." Marinette tried, very hard, to find something slightly more articulate to say, but alas.

"There's a deli around the corner, they have good vegetarian food." he pauses for a second, "are you still a vegetarian?"

"Yeah. Well, most of the time, I'll make exceptions for special occasions. But vegetarian deli sounds good, uh, let me just pack up a bit." She hurriedly packs away her sketches and slings a small ladybug purse over her shoulder. She beams up at him, toothy grin wide.

oh.

The deli wasn't very far away, and Marinette and Adrien sat on a bench outside to enjoy their sandwiches. They sat in silence a while, sandwiches an excuse for the awkward silence coming from the fact that neither of them had really talked to the other, outside of D&D in, well, a couple of years now. Adrien broke the silence first.

"So how is work going? Your shop seems like a lot is happening."

"Ha. That's a very polite way of saying the shop looks a mess."

"No, I mean-"

"It's alright, I know the shop's a mess, It's probably a good thing anyways, it means we're busy. Which is pretty much also how work is going; designing is what I always wanted to do, and I love it, but the business side is a lot of work when it is going well, and even more work when it's going poorly, but I guess that's the price I pay for living my childhood dreams"

Adrien felt a small pang of envy, to be able to pursue a passion, to have a clear idea of what your passions were, it must be nice.

"That sounds stressful, but I'm still kind of jealous, working at Gabriel is kind of soul-sucking. Like, I'm not ungrateful for what my dad left for me, it's just- I don't know, I didn't have a lot of time as a kid to have my own dreams, I had a path laid out for me, you know?"

"I never thought about that, you were a bit, wrangled as a kid weren't you?"

"I don't think I've had an unscheduled period longer than three days since I was, well, maybe ever."

"Yikes, that sounds not great"

"Yeah, it is what it is. Marcel is- he's Marcel, but he means well." Marinette raised her eyebrows a hair.

"Marcel, as in Marcel Proust, the man who, to hear half the fashion rags tell it, is slowly sucking the soul out of the Gabriel brand?"

"He doesn't have the most sparkling personality, that's true, but he is trying, my father and him, they were friends, or as close as my father got to having friends. Marcel just wants to honor his memory."

"I'm sorry Adrien, I'm sure Marcel means well, it's just, he's been with Gabriel for how long now? 15 years? 20? In an interview last week he had no idea what Toilé was."

"Yeah, he hasn't invested much in the theory, but he has a handle on the nitty-gritty of running a corporation."

Maybe too much of a handle, Adrien thought.

They sat quietly for a while, before Marinette spoke,

"So, how about the game last night? That was quite the fight huh?"

"Yeah, I'm super pumped to get to use my new item, it seems pretty versatile."

"Yeah, I don't know about mine, i'll take a hit to AC, but it bumps up my whip's range and damage, so that's pretty sweet."

"The card says tier 1 on it though, so we've probably got to unlock the really cool pieces."

"Yeah, I wonder how high they go, like, what is the max tier do you think?"

Alya is in her favorite spot, next to the window in her regular cafe, looking down over the main part of the shop on the level below, the additional seating area quiet by comparison.  The word document in front of her sits, almost done, but not quite, the blinking cursor mocking her as she struggles to wrap up the story she has been writing. The political scene has become bleaker since she became a politics reporter, when she was young she had felt like there were heroes, people making real change, people caring for people and about process. Now though, well, every hero has their dirt, and Alya had made a career finding that dirt, which made the idea of a spotless hero something that Alya reserved for fiction.

Oh well, she still has two hours until deadline. She tabs over to her email, hitting the refresh and watching as a wave of unread messages cascades down her inbox.

Junk. Junk. Deal with that later. Junk. Junk.

Her eyes scan down the list of subjects and from addresses, until she hits a subject line that she can't ignore.

RE: Hawke

Alya clicked. Her eyes widened as the message appeared before them. This was big.

Their coffee date/outing/catch-up session/whatever-you're-supposed-to-call-it over Marinette was back in her office, back in the zone, her pen putting the finishing touches on the design that she had been working on earlier when her phone buzzed again. Marinette grabbed the phone eagerly,

Alya: Hey, you got a minute?

Marinette: Yeah, just doing a bit of weekend work, what's up?

Alya: I'm looking for advice, but I gotta be a bit vague, you down?

Marinette: Its for a story, isn't it

Alya: Yeah, anyway if you found out that someone in your industry was in the pocket of a certain, politician, and you could expose them, what would you do?

Marinette: Shit. Um, give me a minute to think

Marinette: I mean, I'd call you, obvs.

Marinette: I take it calling them out isn't going to make you very popular?

Alya: I mean, they've got a couple of fans, if you catch my drift.

Alya: I'm nervous enough about it to come to you for advice, if that says anything.

Marinette: Ha. Yeah.

Marinette: Well, I don't know, is there a hard time limit on this?

Alya: Not really, there's a couple of months before it's really relevant.

Marinette: Maybe you could just make a draft then, and see how you feel?

Alya: Good plan. How's this weekend looking? are you down for another session?

Marinette: Ooh, we've got a big order going out on Friday, but Saturday or Sunday ought to work!

Alya: Good to hear! I'll get in touch with everyone else, see how they feel. <3<3

Marinette put the phone down, then picked it up again and checked the time, it was almost 8, her stomach rumbled. Looks like another night of takeout.

Adrien was not a fan of Mondays. Working for Gabriel was... stressful, in the most boring way. Marcel was a controlling CFO and Adrien still wasn't entirely comfortable in the executive role that had been created for him after his father's death. It felt like the right thing to do though, and fashion was something that Adrien knew a lot about, so he did alright with that part of it, but bringing himself to care about the gross market returns on the spring line Tokyo marking campaign was next to impossible.

He had some time before his presentation to the board, so he closed the document, in a pinch he could wing it pretty well. He pulled open another document on his browser, and scanned down what he had already written.

"The Life and Times of Pollux Blackvein"

Raised by his aunt and uncle, Pollux spent most of his time as a child avoiding responsibilities, finding places to hide. There was little he loved more than to find a rooftop or shaded alcove from which he could people watch in peace. He created rich fictions in his head. This period of happiness could not last long however and tragedy soon struck again when a illness took both his living relatives. With nothing to keep him in the small town that was all he had known, he fled into the woods only days after his 16th birthday.

In the woods he found the hut of a old hermit, who took him in and gave him a place to stay as he mourned the life that he had left behind. When he had recovered the hermit began to train him, teaching him how to survive in the wild, how to hide and how to move silently. It was the old man that taught Pollux how to fight, and Pollux took to the quarterstaff quickly, favoring knives second. When the hermit had taught him enough, Pollux left his home for a second time, returning to the village that raised him.

When he arrived he found that the village was in a desperate condition. The Magistrate Vitaa Douleur had been installed in the town since he had left and was in gross abuse of her position, levying cruel taxes and enforcing laws that had gone untouched for good reason. The abuse of power made Pollux furious, so he began to formulate a resistance. He started small, disrupting the couriers that Vitaa dispatched to other cities, stealing small shipments of coin and distributing it, subtly, to the people of the town. When this caused her to double down on the oppression of his town, Pollux began to sow the seeds of violent rebellion. The rebellion was, ultimately, successful but it was a Pyrrhic victory. At the end Pollux stood over the body of Vitaa Douleur drenched in the blood of friend and foe alike, the assault on the manse leaving only Pollux standing, after searching the manse for any clue as to who was responsible for her installment in his town he burned down the manse and fled town that night. In that part of the country, stories are still told about the rebellion of Greenthorp, and the mysterious figure that led the people against the tyrannical ruler, but they are stories that Pollux has never heard, having fled to the capitol in search of the mysterious figure that sent the scourge to his people.

Since arriving in Erathia, Pollux has fallen in love with its people, and he is already beginning to chaff at the way that the nobility (or at least some of them) take advantage of them. He has made few friends in Erathia, finding the thieves too unscrupulous and the revolutionaries too lax and inactive. He is a radical living in a city of moderates.

-

Adrien sat there and let the cursor flash at the end of the document, he felt like there was something missing, maybe he needed more characters? Should he maybe soften Pollux's stance on nobility, since Marinette and Chloe were both playing nobles? He should have sent this to Alya like, two months ago, so maybe he shouldn't worry about it. He really wanted Alya to like it though, so maybe he should. What he needed was another set of eyes.

Adrien: Hey, you got a minute?

Max: Not really, but I need a break, what’s up?

Adrien: Not much, I was just hoping I could get you to look over my character background before I sent it to my DM, if you're busy I'll ask someone else.

Max: This is for Alya's campaign?

Adrien: Yeah

Max: Send it here, I need something to pull me away from work anyways.

-

Max: Nice, it looks good, I'd say you could send it to her as is, maybe add a couple of names of people from the town?

Friday night found Alya sitting in the workspace in her apartment, DM guide and monster manual open on the table in front of her, spreadsheet open on her computer. Tomorrow night was going to be epic, they were finally going to get into the meat of the arc that she had prepared. She just needed to find the right encounter to really bring home the scale of what they were supposed to be doing. She flipped the pages of the manual, looking for inspiration.

Myconid, Nothic, Ogre, nah.

Nothing had quite the feel that Alya was looking for. Then an illustration caught her eye. She started typing:

Horrificator: AC - 8, HP - 72, Speed 15 ft.

Nino woke up to the warm sunlight coming in through the window, and to the persistent buzz of his phone. He picked it up and looked at it groggily. "Reminder: Working Bibliography Due @ Noon today."

Shit.

Nino stumbled out of bed and pulled open his laptop. 10:00, two hours, that was probably enough time to shit together some sources, he could always go back later and decide not to use any of them. That's what he'd done in undergrad, 9 times out of 10. Just as he was opening the library page his phone buzzed on the bed.

Adrien: You still planning on getting lunch today?

Nino: Yeah, I got some stuff to finish up that's due @ noon, but we could go after

Adrien: Sounds good, how're classes going?

Nino: Well, I've heard you talk about how dry your junior capitalist meetings are, and I can assure you that, without a doubt, Professor Putnam is three times dryer

Adrien: Grad school sounds like a blast

Nino: its thrilling, now bug off, I gotta finish this, I'll see you at 12:30?

Adrien: Wouldn't miss it

Nino turned off the phone and got to work.

He got a respectable amount done by noon, and sent off the file at 11:59 precisely. He turned his phone back on and a flood of notifications rolled down the screen.

Alya: UUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH...

Alya: Can you believe this guy, and whats worse ca...

Alya: What really bothers me though is the way tha...

Alya: I swear, if I have to hear another relative say b...

Alya: That absolute shitstain of a man is the last thing...

Alay: Did you hear about the new thing with Hawke? he...

Apparently it had been an eventful morning.

He opened up the first text.

Alya: Did you hear about Hawke? he just announce he's running for president

Alya: That absolute shitstain of a man is the last thing this garbage pile of a country needs.

Alya: What really bothers me is the way that people are taking it seriously, like, this is the man Front National wouldn't endorse.

Alya: I swear, if I have to hear another white guy say 'ooh, he's outside the system' NO SHIT, he's outside the system because the system had the basic decency to kick him the fuck out.

Alya: Can you believe this guy, and what's worse is I'm going to have to report on this creep for like, a year!

Alya: UUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Gross.

A knock at the door interrupted Nino's reply. He opened the door and Adrien stood there, leaning against the hallway of Nino's apartment building.

"So, you ready to get lunch?"

"Just gotta put on some shoes, come in."

"Nice place you got here Nino."

"Not for long, I'm gonna be apartment hunting again soon."

Nino finished tying his shoes and stood up.

"Where are we headed?"

"Why am I always the one who has to decide on where we eat" Adrien laughed and stepped back into the hallway as Nino locked up the apartment.

"It's because you're the one with the time and money to eat out with any regularity." Nino said, giving Adrien's shoulder a playful punch.

"Fair enough I guess. I was thinking the bourgeoisie pig, since it's pretty close."

"The coffee shop? Do they even have food there?"

"I think they have a couple of lunch options, are you hungry?"

"I'm starving, I haven't had anything to eat since lunch yesterday."

"Dude, you've got to eat. Fine, how's Heather's sound?"  

"Bro. I am always down for Heather's, you know this."

"Right, dumb question gets dumb answer, Lets go."

Heather's was only a few metro stops away from Nino's apartment, so it didn't take them too long before they were sitting down in the distressed leather booths that fit right in with Heather's distinct 'american diner' aesthetic. The walls were decorated with old street signs, black and white photos of crowds of people, and other random paraphernalia. Nino looked over the menu, an eclectic mix of American/Korean/Chinese/Indian/French/Japanese dishes, and unlikely fusions of all of the above.

"Bro, is there any chance that the vegan ramen burger is good?" Adrien seemed skeptical, but Nino knew better.

"Heather's has yet to let me down. That is far from the weirdest sounding thing I've gotten here. You should try their vegan soy sauce ice cream, that's an experience."

"I'll take your word for it. You ready for tonight?"

"D&D? Heck yes, I've been ready all week. I hope we get to go a bit longer this week though, last week felt kind of short."

"Yeah, but at least we got a bit of action, I was itching for a fight."

"Yeah well you don't have a wizard's hit points, so I can see how you might be a bit more eager to fight."

"Please, you're fine, we all passed our tests and now we’re gonna see some real fighting, I wonder what Alya is going to throw at us tonight."

"Same, I'm itching for a chance to get to use my new item."

Evening came and Adrien and Nino walked up the steps to Alya's apartment, the October chill settling in as the sun sank below the tall parisian buildings. When they hit the buzzer for Alya's apartment there was a long pause before the intercom crackled.

"Yeah?"

"Its us, Adrien and Nino, you wanna let us in?"

The lock clicked and Nino pushed into the foyer, the old building was a bit run down, but not a bad place to live. They took the elevator up to the fifth floor, and waited as Alya undid the locks on both doors to the apartment proper.

"Hey guys, ready to play? Marinette just texted, she should be here in a couple minutes. Chloe is on her way too."

When they were all gathered at the table, Alya got down to business.

"You all leveled up last time, so did you all figure out your stuff or do you need to do that now."

With leveling up out of the way, Alya wasted no time launching into the story.

"Last time, you remember, you appeared in front of a cave and decided to explore it, finding an old gnome who told you that you had been chosen by the gods to protect Erathia, as you stepped forward to accept this responsibility four fighters appeared to test your abilities, you defeated them, and the Gnome rewarded you with magical items of great power. You then appeared back in Erathia, and that was where we left off."

[kjg222453kjg222454]

Week 11 - independent study

Writing up parent handbook

I had a framework for how the parent handbook might flow like and was only planning to do a spread and the cover, ended up doing the whole thing as I wanted to get it printed properly. 

Working through the framework I had already planned out > started writing up the content for it, this will probably be helpful for my design report which I need to start writing soon! 

Cover and Purpose planning

What to expect from Kea Kit Part 1

What to expect from Kea Kit part 2

What to expect when you first visit prison

What to do in between times and direction to more info.

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Advent calendar

I had all the narrative and window text written up for this so decided to start with a basic layout of how this might come to look and flow through. I’m going to design two a3s a top sheet and a bottom sheet and stick them together – would be nice to have some thicker stock for this but going to go with the same feathered stock i’ve been using for the letters as it needs to either fold or roll nicely to sit in the box for storage. 

I wanted this to feel like a treasure map so it made the kid’s curiosity and anticipation for their ‘adventure’ more exciting. It was quite a challenge to lay this out due to the varying lengths of text underneath. This definitely needs some more refinement. Currently feels very all over the show and the bottom is quite crowded. 

The white background felt very bright and stark. All my other collateral has a solid background colour. Having a test of a low opacity background to see if this will help break up the elements a bit more,  give some contrast to things etc. Still not feeling right about this. I think I’m gonna need to move somethings around. 

Shifting some things up the top down to add in a title and also make the squishy-ness/busyness feel purposeful. Also tried adding in some of my other little illustrations which go along with the narratives of some of the text – this looks way too overstimulating and I don’t really know where to look first. Still unsure about the background colour. I do like the addition of the grass bits though. 

I felt like the opaque background didn’t quite fit in with the rest of my collateral so changed it to a solid bold colour and swapped the tracks from yellow to white so they don’t blend in. I took the little extra creatures out and have hidden them under the numbers/flaps that they are relevant to. 

Was thinking about having this folded in half to fit in the box and wanted to have an outside cover. Nothing was really working for me though and I tried to roll it instead of fold it which actually looked a lot better in my opinion, so blank back side of this calendar it is! 

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Spatial Planning

I went to check out the block 10 dungeon to see if it was ideal or not for my spatial mock ups. There was a bit too much shit lying around and had the idea of checking out blocks 5 & 6 as i know that those hallways are a bit more hospital like which is very similar to inside a prison according to conversations and research. 

I took my camera around with me and got some snaps + videos or the space and what it’s like to walk through it with nothing implemented in there. 

photos from blocks 5 & 6. Very stark and boring, the doors look heavy as if to keep you in or out. 

Video walking through the space. Pausing at where things might be on walls.

Notes from spatial planning, measurements etc. I want to get some large formats and stick them up in the space then film again walking through. Also going to do a photo mock up of what you might see at a first glimpse of this hallway.

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Large format print chat with Luiz > decisions on what to do

I had a big chat with Luiz about the filming I wanted to do to show how my spatial was implemented and he said that photo mock ups should be fine + more professional and that I was rushing to get large format and filming done that day - there were too many variables to consider so I decided just to get some large formats done to install in my preso room instead. 

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Full spatial mock up

I started off with an overview of what you’d first see when you arrived in the hallway space I was focusing on. this took quite some time to get all the perspectives and angles right but I’m pretty happy with how this looks. It gives a real feeling of an adventure up ahead, a lot of my friends said it looked like fun and they were curious to see what each speech bubble said. It’s also nice to note how much this looks like a hospital space too so this project definitely has the potential to work across similar environments. 

This is a before image, I hadn’t quite got the lighting right on my post processing – i wanted it to feel cold and threatening but i think that i really just needed the space to look bland and nothing. Showing how there is nothing to distract the children from their thoughts and emotions.

before pic - bland and sterile space.

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Narrative mock ups

beginning with the outside of the prison – using the photos I took up at Mt Crawford Prison. It’s quite rundown due to abandonment but the Kea start to build curiosity and take away some of that anxiety around these buildings. 

The first part of the Journey starts with the notion of tāwharau (protection)

The narratives that follow (in order) to lead to the visit hall. I envision that this could be adapted every 9-12months so that each visit could be different and exciting each time. This could be co-designed with the prisoners as to what their children like or what stories they’d like to tell/teach.

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Large formats

Luiz had my large formats done so fast! literally by 8am the next morning. They’re HUGE this big kea is about 1m long! Super happy with how these look. 

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Parent handbook

I don’t have all the image content for this book yet (planning to have a full bleed image on the left side). So started off by figuring out my type systems. Definitely prefer the two column system to the top version! 

What a spread might look like with a full bleed image. I’ve also colour coded each of the sections/phases of the project.

Cover – simple and more formal for parents/adults. 

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Photos

turned my desk space into a photo studio for the afternoon:

some pics that came out of this session:

took quite a few, detailing all the little bits and pieces but haven’t had a chance to go through these yet as this was all i needed for the parent hand book. 

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Printing from Wakefields

I got my storybook cover and parent hand book printed professionally at Wakefield’s Digital. The Cover is a PLC gloss hard cover and the booklet is just a 2up saddle stitch 12pp booklet on gloss 120gsm stock – feels a lot more formal for the adults. 

The cover is a little bigger than expected and doesn’t quite fit as well in the box as well as I want it to. As you can see it all over flows just a little too but remembering that not all of the kit comes in the box at once so there is definitely room for the first kit to be sent in this. 

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Writing preso - first draft

first script:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R7DT8JvgjCrCrKfFzALbS2_3qABJSykBVI5P3jWTB1s/edit?usp=sharing

This originally started off quite formal, as if i was pitching to government. It didnt really sound like me and felt a bit dislocated from the project so i re-wrote it a bit more emotively. It’s very heavily centred on developing empathy for the user journey, I’m a bit worried that I have got enough about my process and solutions in it. Will read it out to Jason in class tomorrow and see what he has to say. 

[yvaquietdays]

No Excuses (but also some excuses)

Warning: the following post contains a lot of naval gazing...

I should probably apologise for the lateness of this blog post. Or maybe, on second thoughts, I shouldn’t apologise at all. I never intended this to be constant, bi-weekly affair. Just something I’d use as an outlet for any thoughts, opinions or feelings I had that I felt were worth sharing. In true me style however, updating this thing became a source of anxiety for me. What if I had nothing more to say? What if it’s already been said? What if people will expect more of the blog and I don’t deliver? What if my lack of studying in writing and literature becomes painfully apparent and the blog just becomes a viral embarrassment? Seriously. I know it’s irrational, you don’t have to remind me. But I did my best to quash those nervy b’s, to smash them into the ground with my sturdiest Doc Martens (which I’m excited to share have been worn in again now that the grass-scorching heat has dissipated and that gorgeous northern brew of rain and cloud cover has blessed the streets of London) with vigour, and perhaps a few beads of sweat from my upper lip. Sometimes they’re just whispers, in the back of your head, gently feeding the self doubt with seeds of dissent, until the crop grows more fully into something weedier, which is much harder to stamp out. It’s importantly quell those sneaky whispers regularly. Luckily, I kept doing just that; I only needed to update the blog when it was relevant, and if I didn’t feel like it, I didn’t have to. In the end if I have to apologise, it’s to myself (I am sorry if anyone was waiting on another post; I know I’m being pretty self absorbed here). I mean, I don’t think I kept any of you awake at night, clutching at your bed clothes, covered in tears and mud and ghosts, shrieking “WHEN WILL SHE UPDATE HER BLOG? I PRAYED TO THE HEAVENS AND I CALLED DOWN THE SPIRIT OF UNANNY AND STILL I AM LEFT HERE TO CRY ASUNDER?!” Or something along those lines. 

(I don’t know who Unanny is.)

So if I don’t feel like it, I don’t have to. That’s kind of been my modus operandi of late; if I’m not inspired, the universe just isn’t open for business. She ain’t sellin’. I try not beat myself up when I can’t execute an idea, or when I’m trying to write a draft for my novel and my neural pathways seem to be blocked up with desire for cheese and Harry Potter instead of lyrical wit and literary glory. I actively choose not to berate myself, but treat myself. I’ve been working steadily for the past year to nurse myself with kindness and to give myself more respect than before, to step forward in small steps of positivity rather than falling backwards into regret and self doubt. It’s constant, small work, rewiring your brain. But I think it’s been working. Some days I’m not certain, but for the most part, yes. 

See, I figured if I pushed myself when I wasn’t jiving with it, if I tried to scratch down the words or search the heavens for the melodies, to pull a sick “beat” out of my arse on Logic, it would certainly be insufferable. The worst kind of creativity. Just awful. If I try to force an idea, it won’t feel good, and that is in direct assault with my philosophy of kindness. I know what you’re thinking though, you have to fail in order to succeed, and I’d agree that is another trite but true platitude that I’ve been trying to adhere to. I’ve spent years avoiding true creativity or expression in the event that it will be the worst thing anyone (myself included) has ever heard, read or bore witness to in the history of all creative outputs, and that’s including Friday by Rebecca Black. Banger.

Eventually, I switched myself off from it, I turned away and kept myself in the dark, only trusting the light when someone had the good grace to give me a compliment. But there’s only so long you can rely on others for your self worth. And that time is finite, my friends. So I’ve been very focused on complimenting myself, on sitting in the light, in trying, failing, trying, failing. Life is a cycle, it all moves, life and death, we all get to start again. All of it. And I do believe that. I do. Just recently I’ve been working and writing and recording some things that have been purely experimental for me; I’ve so enjoyed fleshing out parts and lines, tearing my lyrics apart and compromising and hearing the bad sections and replacing them with better ones, only to change my mind about it being there in the first place, and all of this being a very good, very productive, very nourishing thing.

But when the goddess ain’t calling, I don’t call her and ask her why she isn’t picking up the phone. Instead, I'm just grateful in the moments of proper creativity; I write down my moments of inspiration, I note down the lyrics that flow unbidden into my brain, I find images that source the artistic ideas I want to follow up and I record melodies and song ideas into my phone. In those moments, however fleeting or short, I find comfort, and I thank myself for being such an incredible fucking genius.

OKAY RON. You’re right. I’m not a genius. 

My other motto in life is something an old friend said to me, and it has resonated with me ever since. Know what you’re good at, and know what you’re not. Know your skills and worth, but have the grace to admit your flaws and the things that have you stumped. Be strong enough to admit that you’re not perfect and when you can ask for help, you can usually take down anyone who looks at you condescendingly for not knowing just by saying that to them. You’re stronger and wiser for it, I think. There is nothing wrong with not having all the answers. And the guy (and it’s always a guy that laughs at me for asking...sigh), who thinks he is the pot of all knowing is usually stumped by your lack of shame or embarrassment. 

So the one thing I’m not good at is persisting. Whether that’s at picking up my guitar more, playing the piano, learning to use Logic or getting to grips with music production. Or maybe it’s just persisting in the face of my fears. I’m not sure, man. Is it the anxiety, or a genuine unease and lack of musical ability that stops me? I’m painfully aware that my knowledge of chords is slim, but I’m also horrendously aware that it’s because I don’t practise enough. So I’m not perfect, I’m not the best at this. I still have some ways to go in improving as an artist. I’m a lazy arsehole, and imma tell you all that. 

Frustratingly though - and this is kind of what I wanted to get on to - I keep seeing my former good vibe sentiment all over social media. You know, the one about being kinder to yourself, taking more time, forgiving yourself; “thank your inner diva!” And while I obviously think this a very commendable and instructive philosophy, I also believe it willfully ignores the hard, teeth baring work we have to do to undo all the negativity we’ve practised over the years. I’m a firm believer of the philosophy that we have to be kinder to ourselves to lessen the mental load, but we also have to graft and get our nails dirty, we have to be able to face our fears and we must not become complacent. This is my biggest fear (alongside being alone, failure, tiny clusters of small holes and little girl ghosts), that I’ll become a haven of positivity and light and a beacon for hope and transcendence in my downward dog pose, but I’ll also become a lazy fucker who’s convinced herself she doesn’t have to learn all the chords because the “universe hasn’t made me yet.” We have to tell ourselves when we’re being an insufferable twat, and fast. Pride is no longer fashionable to me. I know this makes me sound like a full tilt bozo, but it’s a genuine concern. In the last year I’ve fully inserted myself, bellend first, into yoga, mindfulness, meditation, exercise and being a zen queen. I’ve challenged myself mentally in ways I wouldn’t have even considered when I was younger, I’ve accepted blame and flaws about myself, I’ve done it all. But my pale white scrotum is still so very privileged and doesn’t want to do the hard work. It doesn’t want to fertilise the soil. I just want to plough into it ‘cos it feels good. But what if I wake up one day, with my pale scrotum in hand, ready to fertilise, and I’ve been left barren and empty? What if I’ve wasted it all trying to save it all up for that one good plough, but then the opportunity never comes? WHAT IF I MISS THE OPPORTUNITIES AND THEN ALL THE FIELDS HAVE BEEN FERTLISED BY SOMEONE ELSE?!?? Okay. So I have to do better. I have to play when I don’t feel like it. I have to learn musical theory so it is ingrained in my synapses. I have to fertilise the bloody soil with all the creative jizz I can muster; whether it’s good, nutritious, exciting stuff, or whether it’s weak and half-arsed. The field doesn’t mind. Any jizz is good jizz. I’m sure you’re wondering where I pulled that analogy out of but I’m sure you can all guess. Hint: you sit on it

The following excuses will not fly; • I don’t feel like it • I’m not inspired • I went for a run this morning and I’m tiiiired (whiney voice required) • I have to finish this Herbology class on my Hogwarts Mystery game • I worked for a whole four hours this morning • The onions made me cry • I’ve already written some lyrics this week (whiney voice also required with this one) • I have no money • I haven’t showered yet • The plants need watering, the towels need washing, need to buy food, all the chores etc. • Charlie Weasley wants to be my friend on Hogwarts Mystery game and I’ve always wanted to be a Weasley • I spent two hours looking at houseplants online and didn’t buy anything • I’ve been trawling the internet for pictures of James McAvoy and his girlfriend to see if he’s truly happy and wouldn’t rather be with me instead Ultimately the only acceptable excuse I will accept is that I’m menstruating. So I urge you all to do the same (persist, not menstruate). Please let me know that you’re guilty of this too. I’m tired of seeing all these bloody proactive “influencers” pouncing out and assaulting me with their life positivity and perfect, shiny, stylish lives. 

Ok. I’m looking forward to my next post a little more now. And talking about something else other than jizz and scrotums.

Let’s keep trying. xxx