#( needs like a million threads with everyone tbh )

[moonspirit]

More Cadet!Aruani.. pretty please? Like, literally tell everything you got, I am willing to read an entire thread of it.

Ohhh anon~ I'm glad you enjoy my cadet!Aruani haha xD I don't do it often tbh, somehow.

But nope, not literally everthing I've got! Only bit by bit, so I can savour and ruminate on the thoughts and eke it out for future posts too xD

For now, maybe... some fluff between the two will do for now?

It's a slow day in the 104th training corps. No training since all superiors are away, no exams (also far away), no titans breaching walls and creating havoc. Everyone's off somewhere or very much in somewhere and being nosy about it, there's nothing to do, nowhere to see, and Annie's sure if she doesn't open her mouth and talk to another human-shaped being, she'll go insane.

Not that she has any energy for it.

But maybe... maybe if she can find him, all she'll have to do is listen.

It's doubtful, Armin is rather popular with the people and for all she knows, he could be making the girls flower crowns and reeling off obscure fact after obscure fact to anyone who listens with gusto. On a free day like this, maybe he's not even in town. Maybe he's been whisked off somewhere by his friends. Maybe he-

And then she stops in her tracks because there he is, sitting by the canal, a book in his lap (how typical, she wants to laugh), but all alone.

Maybe he'd rather not see her though and be bothered by her empty presence when he could be reading the book in peaceful solitude.

Somehow, even if she can't nearly overturn her desire to take his time for herself, the sudden doubt roots her to the spot and she can no more walk forward. Instead she just stares at the back of his head where the pale afternoon sun warms the locks of smooth gold hair with a desolate sensation of longing taking over her heart.

Who knew loneliness could cause feelings like this. Her father would be disappointed.

But maybe she creates a darkness, or maybe she creates a void, it's lost to her which, because Armin seems to think he should turn around at that very moment and look for some reason, only to end up blinking with surprise at the sight of her lurking around the corner like a homeless kitten with "take me home" written all over its face.

It's embarrassing really, but thank god he can't see her cheeks properly at this distance.

"Annie!" he calls, a great big smile spreading over his face.

Oh, stupid. Stupid of her to think he wouldn't want to share his time. Armin's an idiot, carelessly giving everyone his time! She's just another one.

"Hi." She says, stepping into the sun to sit next to him. The canal is like the dozen others just like it in this town, nothing remarkably large or impossible to fathom; if she transformed, she'd step right over it without so much as a glance down. She's also nimble and quick on her feet, qualities her father had made certain she was aware of if only to size up an enemy by comparison - even if she were to stumble sitting down by the edge of the canal, nobody in the military would expect her to fall.

So why then, does he reach a hand out as if to catch her if she falls?

And why can't she look away from the shape of his palm?

Armin's smile is, somehow, brighter than the sun on the back of her neck. "I thought you would've gone to the market with Mina and the rest. What are you doing here alone?"

"I could ask you the same," She retorts. "You're always surrounded. How come nobody needs you today?"

There's a flash of something like the edges of disappointment in his eyes, so quick and fleeting that Annie thinks she imagines it when it's gone.

"Well, you know, I'm glad to have the day to myself," He chuckles. "It's quiet and peaceful."

"Right, and then I intruded."

"No, no," He laughs, shaking his head. "I'm glad to see you, Annie."

Annie looks away, squinting at the flowing waters. The sunshine makes it glitter in a million different ways, dazzling her until all that's left in her vision is a soft, beautiful river of light, flowing to some unknown place. In the corner of her vision, she's acutely aware that the book on Armin's lap leaves its place for the stone ground - a sign that makes her nervous, really, because it means that all of his clever little attention is now on her.

"Pretty, isn't it?" He says softly, making her look at him.

At the shape of his face, framed by a soft molten gold that flutters with the wind; at the blue of his eyes, a shade she doesn't really know the word for as it penetrates deep into her own; at the tip of his nose, always dusted an endearing pink; at the ridge of his brows, a tad stronger whenever the bangs move away in the breeze; at the set of his jaw, the shape of his lips, the-

"W-what is?" She stammers, dazed.

"The water." He laughs, and she feels so silly.

"... Right."

Some of the people back in her hometown used to believe in Gods; said calling upon their names would ease their thoughts and bring them to calm.

Perhaps she should try it, just this once, because her heart-

But then, Armin leans in, a smile just short of bashful playing on his lips.

"There's more water like this beyond the walls."

Oh god, there it is. Again. Somehow, she's glad for it.

Annie can't help but release a sigh. "I was wondering if you'd grown tired of talking about the sea. Haven't heard about it in three days."

There's everything in his laugh, embarrassment, happiness, hope the size of the sun, and then some more embarrassment. For better or worse, Annie decides, it's her favourite sound and can he please continue to laugh?

"Sorry. I'm sure I've bored you by now..."

"No," She hums, drawing her knees to her chest and closing her eyes to the warmth heating up her face. "Tell me about it again."

And he does.

And Annie decides it's her favourite story because it's kind and beautiful and better than any of the ones she grew up hearing.

This story of the sea is sweet.

[mcrcki]

here i come with another MASSIVE event plotting / starter call (this time with over 20 characters bc who even am i) !! before i get too much into event stuff, i just wanna put up some housekeeping things so i'm not just repeating myself over and over in the discord : i will be dropping almost all of my pre-event threads. meaning, i will only be keeping the thread if it is an active plot that needs to be continued because we aren't at a place to infer the ending. i am just so utterly overwhelmed with my number of drafts that i really need to just start fresh, so i'll be using this as my chance to spam the heck out of y'all's calls and get way more threads that i actually have muse for. i'm sorry if we had a thread you really wanted to continue, i just need a fresh start. now for housekeeping for my call, as always this will be capped. i wanna write with everyone but i can't if i get a million requests from one person so!! the cap is three starters per writer!! blind date starters will not count towards that cap. otherwise, please LIKE for plotting messages, and REPLY for starters (pls specify muses unless previously discussed!!)!

in the meantime, if you wanna see what my clowns are wearing, please follow this link to my pinterest :))

alani tiure | star wars | blind date w. cami o'connell ( 3 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : imma be so for real and say that they think they're absolutely too good for this lmao, their dad is a crime lord in the city, and really they're just here to take advantage of some free drinks and maybe check in on some clients. her date is going to have to be okay with her being slightly stuck up but will absolutely be down for some dancing despite it. potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : sofia robbin sloan torres, ellie williams, cami o'connell

beatrice | over the garden wall | date w. wirt ( 1 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : going with her favorite boy loser, wirt. definitely here just for the free party and to do something fun, now that she's human again she's taking advantage of all the things they missed out on as a bird. will definitely be here to make friends, they're a little rude at times but i promise they're kind when you get past the kind of rude exterior !!! down for shenanigans !! potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : xiao chiye

branwen | a court of thorns and roses | blind date w. enola holmes ( 1 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : winnie LOVES THIS, she hasn't gotten to have fun in pretty dresses in ages, she was still young the last time they were able to have any kind of formal party so they're really enjoying this. she wants to see everything this party has to offer so she'll be dragging her date around everywhere, wanting to take it all in potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : he xuan

daniela dimitrescu | resident evil | blind date w. jeremy smith ( 2 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : ok tbh, daniela only came to this and signed up for a blind date to possibly grab an easy snack. they're a man-eating monster idk what anyone expected here. but tbh, once they saw the girl she's actually simping over (and will not make a move yet for one reason or another) they're going to be flirting and going so far to make her jealous, it doesn't matter with who tbh. also open to some absolute chaos if you wanna do something Bad potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date (for murder purposes)

starters : myri tiure, henry creel

danika fendyr | crescent city | flying solo ( 3 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : listen danika like.. just got here, she's just getting used to the city and her memories again with her friends, since so much happened back home. she's spending the majority of her time crashing her bestie's date, for various reasons, but will be out on the floor dancing and drinking as much as she wants, enjoying the hell out of a free party potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : bryce quinlan, apple caramela, hunt athalar

elain archeron | a court of thorns and roses | date w. lucien vanserra ( 2 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : this is elain's first ball in the city, and she's very much looking forward to a night where she can just dress up in a beautiful dress and dance with her husband. things have been... rough with her family unit so she's just happy to let loose a little bit and enjoy everyone's company and dance the night away potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : lu junyi, lucien vanserra

evangeline ennar | throne of glass | blind date w. choi nam ra ( 2 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : evangeline grew up in a high fantasy world, getting dressed up in fancy clothes for a ball is all she could've hoped for coming here, and now she's old enough to really enjoy it, she is going to be having the best time for real. will be helping her mom glare at her not dad, but other than that, she would love some friends so just dance around with all night potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : choi nam ra, aedion ashryver

kaya dura | star wars | blind date w. lola flemming ( 2 / 4 )

they/she pronouns : kaya is not really in the dating and dancing mood, they are still getting over their ex after a very hard breakup, where her ex killed her and all that fun stuff. so, they're really trying to like.. get themselves out there and get over her, so they signed up for this blind date and are forcing themselves out into public again. will probably get drunk for the first time and just want to forget everything to have fun potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : kaiden monsula, kasil monsula

keelan cardulo | fourth wing | date w. mira sorrengail ( 0 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : lowkey her and mira's first public appearance as a couple, especially after everything that happened back home that resulted in keelan's death, she is very much looking forward to getting to dance with their girlfriend and just enjoy that. is a bit anti social if they don't know you, so when mira is inevitably somewhere else, find them hanging to the shadows potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters :

leia organa | star wars | date w. han solo ( 3 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : mom and dad night out!!! leia's a mom of six now, and while ya know four of the six are adults with some having children of their own, and the other 2 are less than six months old, she just wants to have a little fun. the past year has been.. hard. and despite being the president and having to be here for this ball, she would so much rather be home right now, avoiding all the memories that valentine's day now brings out in her mind. last year was the worst night of her life and she will in fact be drinking a lot to forget all that bastilla did a year ago. #thereturnoffloorgana potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : din djarin, ahsoka tano, winter celchu

louise vance | harry potter | date w. thea hughes ( 4 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : a party???? hell yeah lou is gonna be there, they love this whole vibe. will 100% be testing the limits of security and trying to ride the t rex skeletons and any other shenanigans they can get into. they're here with their best friend in the whole world, thea, and they're definitely just friends, if you see them slow dancing really close that's just what besties do potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : thea hughes, emmeline vance, bucky barnes, willie

marlene mckinnon | harry potter | flying solo ( 2 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : marlene lowkey is working this, and will be having fun but trying to stay focused on her job. she's unaware currently so, they'll just be hanging around with whoever is kind of hiding in the outskirts of the party, could absolutely be convinced to dance/will flirt given the chance, but mostly just here to have a fun day at work potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : dora tonks, esther mckinnon

morrigan | a court of thorns and roses | date w. cassandra dimitrescu ( 2 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : this thing with cassandra has been a bit of a whirlwind romance, and she's found herself really swept up in the other, and will absolutely be spending a lot of her time in their arms. but considering how her family life has been lately, she will also be checking in on family and doing what she can to make sure reporters aren't going too wild with everything going on with rhys and her family. potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : cassandra dimitrescu, rhysand

omega archeron | star wars | date w. kirei monsula ( 1 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : if i had a nickel for every time one of my muses is on a date with their best friend and convincing themselves it's not a date, i'd have 2 nickels-- anyways, omega will be here, fulfilling her role as senator archeron's messy as hell kid, and drunk as shit nearly getting kicked out for shenanigans around the maze, and also perhaps drunkenly making out with their best friend kirei that they've been pining after for years. potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : hunter

rosemary winters | resident evil | flying solo ( 1 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : now for my girl that knows she's in love with her best friend but her best friend doesn't know her and is here with another girl!!!!! honestly rose will be in a corner getting so drunk, glaring daggers at mouse's date and wanting nothing more than to be the one dancing with them. please come try to drag them out of this slump they are sulking HARD potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : lyra ayala

rowena ravenclaw | harry potter | date w. hunter ( 1 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : rowena is uneasy after the last masquerade that happened in the city, and last valentine's day, and will be spending a fair amount of time at hunter's side until she realizes that this is actually safe, that things are normal and she can cut loose a little. will be spending a lot of time dancing and mingling, happy to talk to anyone who needs some friendly conversation, even if she may just info dump at you. is VERY excited that this is at the museum and may spend more time wandering the exhibits than actually dancing. potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : arnold

sella palpatine | star wars | date w. allana solo ( 4 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : oh sella is LIVING FOR THIS. valentine's day is her fucking holiday and she will be making up for how hellish the last one was. considering the fact that her and allana have yet to have a single good date on a holiday, she is going to be spending as much time as possible making her girlfriend twirl her around the dance floor. if anyone needs a dancing partner, sella will also let you spin her :)) she is just here to get a little tipsy and enjoy all the love in the air potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : rey palpatine, steve rogers, sion val palpatine, allana solo

sophie hatter | howl's moving castle | date w. howl pendragon

she/they pronouns : once again, sophie has been dragged to one of these parties because their husband loves these things far more than she does. howl dressed them, and as long as he agreed to a babysitter, sophie agreed to come to this. they are not the biggest dancer, a bit too self conscious to put themselves out there like that, she doesn't like drawing attention to herself. which is difficult when your husband is wearing a glittery pink suit but... potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : cindy moon

sorrel blackbeak | throne of glass | flying solo ( 2 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : i am planning on letting sorrel get their memories back during the event so she's going to be having a little bit of a time trying to find the rest of the thirteen and reunite now that her memories are back. once that's sorted though, she will be a little anti social but if someone asked her to dance, they're not one to say no. potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : asterin blackbeak, manon blackbeak

tatum riley | scream '96 | blind date w. conrad fisher ( 2 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : tatum is just trying to put herself out there, to enjoy some good things in the city, even if she's a little on edge with just throwing herself into a blind date roulette, she knows she's gotta get out of her comfort zone so she's going to make the most of this party and enjoy the heck out of it. even if that means someone's gotta drive her ass home cause she's gonna be gone potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : sam carpenter, jake wheeler

vesta starkos | star wars | blind date w. riley matthews ( 1 / 4 )

she/they pronouns : listen vesta is unaware and super normal right now, and she wants to dance with a pretty girl. even if she's a little sus of all the people who keep staring at her like they know her, they just wanna dance and have a little fun, to cut loose instead of thinking about school. is up for some shenanigans and drunken adventures if people are down potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : ramona flowers

victoria sutherland | twilight | date w. james witherdale ( 2 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : vic will never pass up an opportunity to dress sexy and dance on her mate, she has absolutely zero shame and does not care who is watching them. she also loves to use these events as a perfect little hunting ground. vic will probably be upset that it's not turning into a nightmare but, she can make it a nightmare if she really gets that bored. until then? she will be annoyingly hanging all over her mate all night. potential plots ➛ drinking (not alcohol) || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date (for a drink ;) )

starters : heidi volturi, bella swan

violet sorrengail | fourth wing | date w. xaden riorson ( 2 / 4 )

she/her pronouns : did violet show up to this ball 90 minutes late, looking very flushed? yes. is she going to talk about it at all? absolutely not, her siblings are here and her friends can infer what's going on. now that she's here, vi will be happy to dance and enjoy the party with her friends and just get a few moments of normalcy considering the ticking timebomb her life has turned into, she is going to be savoring any moment of normal young adulthood with her family and friends thank you potential plots ➛ drinking || dancing || looking around the museum || general chatting || anti social food/bar behavior || attempting an escape || flirting || chaotic shenanigans || stealing your date

starters : sgaeyl, xaden riorson

[kennesis07]

My mistakes and advice with learning LOA 💭

┏━•❃°•°❀°•°❃•━┓

With the amount of time that has passed with me learning law of assumption, there’s NO WAY I wouldn’t make mistakes along the way, especially coming from a place of insecurity and desperation. A lot of people discovering LOA nowadays, so I thought it would be nice to share my tips and advice on the matter so people won’t end up like me when I was learning!

• Tip #1: IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW YOU MANIFEST

Let’s set the record straight, it does not matter how you manifest! The law isn’t a one size fit all thing. You can repeat the same phrase 1 million times; you can just decide; you can visualize; you can script; you can do a 55x5 method; hell I don’t care if you spin around 3 times and do a hand stand! Do whatever makes YOU feel comfortable and gets you in the wish fulfilled and stop flipping between techniques! I personally love visualizing, inner conversations, and affirmineg.

• Tip #2: YOU CANT ENTERTAIN TWO STORIES

What I mean is that you CANNOT be saying “SP is so happy with me!” one moment and then 5 minutes later you’re complaining about SP is always ignoring you and looking at other people. Like what are you talking about; Didnt you JUST said you had your SP?! Stop flipping between having your desire and not! You either have you desire or not you make that choice now!

• Tip #3: 4D IS ONLY REALITY

It’s hard to grasp if you’re just learning but your 4D (or Imagination) is the only reality. I may make a separate post on this, but pretty much everything comes from YOU, not something in the 3D. Everything you see in the 3D is not your true self or reality (even your physical body). That’s why I and many others say to focus on your inner man- aka YOUR 4D. If you’re not changing yourself, don’t come crying to me or others when you haven’t gotten a text back from SP.

• Tip #4: ITS GOING TO MANIFEST NO MATTER WHAT

The main premise of manifesting is to fulfill yourself IN IMAGINATION not kicking your feet around wondering how or when it’s gonna happen. I know a lot of y’all are impatient and what you’re desires now and believe me I’m naturally impatient, but CHILL. It’s gonna happens, it will happen, and it HAS to happen. Thats law. Don’t worry about time because it doesn’t exist. What you need to be focused on is having it in imagination.

• Tip #5: STOP OVER-CONSUMING

Tbh, you need to be applying what you know more than you scrolling thru loa accounts. Im not saying it’s wrong to look at threads, but the reason I’m saying this is that everyone who uses loa has a different opinion and a different way of manifesting. Some people might believe that Self Concept is the most important thing while others might not. In the end it’ll just leave you more confused and you searching for more answers. Discipline yourself with applying instead of trying to find “the key to manifesting” will be more beneficial to you!

With that I might add on to this as I learn more about LOA and get more epiphanies, but until then I hope this will be useful to you all!



↻ ◁ II ▷ ↺

[msmargaretmurry]

I love the idea of a celebrity demonstration! Show how hard it is to do what these guys do! I also think the major issue really is that what players want to do and what fans want to see are usually very different.

I also think that the nhl likely did ask teams with players that couldn’t attend about replacements but they probably said no. I know that happened last year with the Kraken where guys just wanted to go on vacation. I really wish more players would contribute when asked about the asg. Because the articles have said that the league reached out to a couple of star players and it sounds like Connor was one of the only ones who really contributed. And while I like Connor, of course his ideas are just pure hockey skills.

I think one way to fix some of the annoying domination from one team or another is having fans vote for the player representative of their team and the league picks out the star players. That way fans can vote in their favorite guys but no team is crazy over represented. It feels like a real missed opportunity not to have more guys participating in the giant skills competition first. You could make it so there are 3 preliminaries and everyone participates in 1 or 2 of the 3 so everyone gets to see their guys. And then you just eliminate each round till you have like 5 guys in whatever the final comp is. And each skills competition in itself gets a winner.

And there should be some sort of time served exception where if you’ve been to 3 or more all star games, you decline without punishment. That way guys going might be a little more excited and you’d get to see new people.

yes i completely agree that a significant issue is what the players want to do vs what's most entertaining for many fans. i tried to touch on that in my little ramble but i don't know how coherent it was 😅 something like celebrity demonstrations imo would add a bit of that entertainment factor without putting it on players' shoulders. i think there's a really interesting thread here about how so many hockey players are uncomfortable with stepping out of the "athlete" box and into the "entertainer" box, even though sports are literally the entertainment industry (and they're not the only athletes that resist this, but it feels particularly prevalent in hockey) but i am not going to try to interrogate it before i've had my coffee 😂

100% correct on the league asking for replacements and guys saying no. as should be their right! they've already planned vacations! and i mean like, you could easily cut down on the danger of losing representation from a team by inviting two guys from more teams instead of 4-5 from two teams. but there is definitely a problem with guys simply not wanting to go. if my choices were "long tropical vacation with my friends and family" and "three days in toronto to play 20 minutes of hockey" i too would opt for the former. not including everyone in the skills comp imo MORE of a disincentive than the previous format.

i like the idea of individual event champions and an all-around skills champ -- like gymnastics! i do think there is a time constraint issue with trying to put together a fair competition that involves all of the players. in the past sometimes there have been individual event incentives -- break 100mph on hardest shot and win money for the charity of your choice, etc. (also i would MUCH rather see these guys battling to win money for charity than hear about how winning that extra million is soooo motivating 🙄)

as many issues i have with the execution of connor mcdavid's saw trap of a skill comp, i DO think it's good that he got involved! kinda side-eyeing guys who were asked and didn't get involved tbh! building an event that both players and fans can love will need to involve player voices AND fan voices, and all respect to connor's efforts but he is not representative of an average nhl player or even an average-good player, and he certainly cannot comprehend the mind of an average viewer. he's in a class of his own, as a player and with the kind of personal leverage and security he has in the sport.

anyway this is why i never got mad at ovi's habitual "oh the asg is coming up? alas, i am conveniently lightly ill or injured, guess you'll have to take someone else from my team" after he'd been a bunch of times. that's how caps fans got the absolute delight of kuzy at the asg, and how tom got his first all star nod and got to be wonderfully surprised by how welcoming the other players were to him! and then when the asg was somewhere fun and vacationy (south florida) ovi was like, yes i will make one more appearance so my son can experience the asg. i think that kind of agency is good for players! ("agency" here used loosely, since he did have to sit for a game every time he dipped out of his all-star nod. but a) he was a big enough star to get away with it and b) his organization clearly supported his decisions, which is not a luxury all players have. the league did NOT like when he did this but i support players being able to say fuck off to the league!)

i don't think it's a coincidence that many of the most memorable fun asg moments in recent memory have been ones where players and/or fans took initiative to make the weekend their own in ways that went outside of the nhl-prescribed box (e.g. ovi and geno's big reunion, ovi begging to be picked last in the draft, the john scott of it all -- even leon's "i'd get off the ice" bit and the ensuing drama kind of falls into this category for its unscriptedness imo, although it is the closest to an nhl-approved storyline of the moments that come to mind.)

lmao this is so long sorry. in my defense the metro keeps fucking holding between stations so i am stuck underground with nothing better to do. but obviosuly i don't have all the answers for fixing the asg from a player buy-in perspective OR a fan experience perspective, i just think it's a really interesting and frustrating problem!

[fakeoldmanfucker]

since i saw you have so many zuck post and i'm a little bit invest in it like you so i want to ask some question about threads since i don't want to have another social media because i have so much now

1. does moskovitz actually interact with zuck there? i saw them following each other

2. does saverin made an account and followed zuck?? since i don't know if that is his real account, tbh if he actually followed zuck, became one of the new users on threads i'd be surprised because i thought he already didn't care much about either fb or meta in general

also I saw zuck posting tsn reference there for threads and commenting gif of tsn too

sorry for my sloppy english, hope you reply

Hi anon! Thank you for your ask!

What I need everyone on Tumblr to know is that Mark is basically trying to reinvent himself. He's been the butt of a lot of jokes for about a decade now, and this bout with Elon, and Elon's fumbling of Twitter, has presented a prime opportunity for Mark to reboot his public image. This means he's responding to people's posts on Threads, making jokes, and yes, referencing The Social Network.

Now to your questions:

Yes! Dustin and Mark are actually still really close. Dustin's mentioned going on vacation with Mark fairly regularly (for whatever that means for them). Dustin had access to the pre-release launch of Threads and was user # 3037 (as indicated on his Instagram account), and he generally talks about Mark a lot, mostly to defend him/hype him up. He's been talking about Mark a lot lately, because of the drama with Musk and with the launch of Threads, but Mark has been pretty consistently mentioned in his Twitter posts, going back for years. Dustin seems to be particularly excited about Threads, probably because he feels let down by Twitter and the promise of Bluesky, and also because Dustin still owns a 0.6% stake in Meta, which is worth something like $5 billion. Dustin as well as other early Facebook employees have expressed a feeling of nostalgia and excitement akin to the early days of the company, both from the product development side as well as from the consumer side. Anyway, it seems that Dustin's penchant for micro-blogging and Mark's role to promote Meta's new app have combined and allowed them to publicly communicate for the first time in at least a decade. It has been, honestly, delightful to watch. See the bottom of the post for screenshots of their interactions.

Judging by the Instagram account linked to the Threads account, Saverin really is following Mark. (I judged whether or not the Insta account was real by scrolling through who he follows: some weather accounts, someone with the last name that's the same as his wife, someone who's either a sister or cousin, Fox News. These interests correspond with the types of accounts he follows on Twitter; it's most likely really him.) I agree, it is kinda of insane that Saverin joined so early; it's possible he sold the rest of his shares because B Capital got a big infusion of money at the end of 2022, which corresponds with the fund they raised earlier this year. It's also possible he converted his shares from Class A to Class B, but this move still loses him power. He doesn't really have any incentive to be interested in Meta, not anymore. And yet, Saverin was just under the 2 millionth member to join Threads (1,920,187). Taking into account that 30 million people(/brands) joined Threads in the first day, Saverin was an early adopter. At the same time however, in addition to likely not having any financial interest in the company, Saverin doesn't post very often on Twitter (most of which are reposts of articles) and has only ever posted to Instagram twice, and not since 2014 at that. It's interesting to me that he apparently cares so much to be on Threads so early since he doesn't seem to be that fond of micro-blogging or Instagram anyway. At the least, he is a private person, more private than even Mark has ever been, and he is likely on Threads to lurk rather than to post. Which brings me to the point that Saverin is following Mark. He's also following a number of influential Meta people, including important early employees (none of them follow him back). Combined with the fact that Saverin consistently puts "Facebook co-founder" at the top of all of his bios, regardless of his current projects and investments, this paints an image of a petty man who wants to be relevant. It may be interesting that Saverin follows Mark, but don't expect anything to come of it. Saverin lost his chance to make any amends with Mark and anyone else a long time ago.

Bonus: Mark posting a TSN gif? For some reason?? Even though the post he was replying to didn't even mention TSN? (it's a screenshot of the gif of the moment when Eduardo gives Mark the money to go to Palo Alto for the summer while they're hiring interns)

[nightwhispcrs]

vday minievent plotting call  /  reference post for my sanity under the cut

        obviously want to plot out something with all my muses’ pairs for a fun, dramatic thread, but also open to plotting and writing with anyone else for the event !!  just want total chaos.  dark themes totally fine sooooo like this and i’ll dm you on discord.

roman roy  —  paired with tyrell wellick

despite being the biggest clown bitch on the planet he actually can’t really hurt anyone physically so he’s gonna be totally freaked out and prob sleep early.  if im being totally honest.  hurt him if you want tho idc !!

katniss everdeen  —  paired with peeta mellark

oh what an absolute nightmare for them.  basically the hunger games, huh?  katniss would be willing to defend herself and others with lethal force, so if anyone needs to be killed ,,, or wants to kill them tbh ,,,,,, hmu. 

jack shephard  —  paired with michael corleone 

he is always trying to save lives, not take them, so the sudden shift in mentality is going to make jack question himself, think he has some kind of rare sickness, and hide out.  he’ll probably be able to push past it and protect others if need be.

craig manning  —  paired with jt yorke

having a desire to kill your old friend who you’ve been so happy is alive again in dc ... is a weird feeling.  so craig is just gonna be totally freaked out idk.  don’t expect him to be any help but he’s probably not going to hurt, either.

naomi pierce  —  paired with kendall roy

for unknown reasons naomi is so protective of her friend ken, was just looking forward to a night out for old times sake, and then she wants to murder him.  i mean, don’t we all sometimes ?  she’s gonna be hunting him the entire night and it’ll def get dicey if you come in her path.  

arnold [novak]  —  paired with tyler galpin

honestly arnold was just hoping this wouldn’t feel like an awkward tinder date, and now he’s fearing for his life.  

adam newman  —  paired with julian alfred pankratz

i’m sorry but adam will literally kill you no questions asked if he feels the right kind of threatened.  if you want to kill him, pls go for it.  if you want to be killed or hurt by him, we can arrange that as well.  

ronald ‘mac’ mcdonnald  —  paired with dennis 

what an idiot.  will def try to kill dennis and fail.  hurt him pls 

enjolras  —  paired with edwina sharma

enjolras will absolutely be down to hurt/injure/kill anyone, so...... yea.  he’ll be on a warpath.  also wouldn’t mind him being killed (again) so lmk

monica geller  —  paired with elora danon

after what happened at halloween, monica is on edge and ready to defend herself.  fearing her life in danger and the confusion in her head, she’s gonna be fixated on trying to kill her date.  sorry elora.  

charlie dalton  —  paired with li lonnie

when you give a silly clown a knife it can be kinda scary huh?  they’ll be probably changing their mood hour by hour ,,,, down for anything here idc

matt evans  —  paired with will solace

matt is freaking the fuck out.  he was already so freaked out just being transported to dc ,,, now this is suddenly one million times worse.  he’s used to the apocalyptic everyone-for-themselves brutal survival mentality, so like ,,,, he’s also kind of at home with this.  someone fight him pls?

eli joseph stock  —  paired with auden west

they don’t know what to think.  they don’t remember auden, don’t remember loving auden.  wants to hurt auden but can’t for some reason.  will just be a mess all night and hiding whenever they see anyone.  someone else can bunker down with them if they want

[8-evil-annoying-catboys]

genuinely it’s a shame that most social media sites allowed 13-yr-olds from the get-go because social media is so harmful to growing kids (i should know, i had facebook starting when i was fuckin 8 yrs old and branched to other social media from there pretty quickly). the way that consumers’ attention is like, farmed and sold, that’s not healthy for ANYONE, but it fucked me up having access to it that young even when there still WERE kid-focused sites that would still allow me to be social in the same way while being… made and moderated specifically to be safe and fun for kids.

like, i still played club penguin until i was maybe 12, but i think i would’ve had a much better time as a teenager if the most social website i used was club penguin and not, like, fucking google+ when it was infested with conservatives and then tumblr and instagram. but, because i had access to social media and everyone else my age seemed to as well once i hit about middle school age, i wouldn’t really be on sites that actually Were for kids that much, even though i could have. i cannot IMAGINE how hard it is to be a kid in this digital age without club penguin and a lot of sites like it that either don’t exist anymore or have been heavily changed, or that maybe are just hanging on by a thread because they’re not popular enough to be profitable anymore. especially when playing outside is also inaccessible, because you can’t get anywhere without a car, green spaces are few and far between, and cops can just show up and harass you for loitering at *checks notes* the mall, or even a fucking public park.

kids don’t have ANY spaces for themselves outside of school anymore, not really, and school itself is riddled with a million problems from underfunding to the threat of gun violence to the shitty education system making it so that kids don’t even want to be at school when they have to, let alone after they’re allowed to leave. and the spaces they have to talk to their classmates, on social media, are dangerous for them because they’re not made with them in mind, and they really shouldn’t be accessible to them at all because of the way they’re built, but… where else are they gonna go?

do not ever get mad at kids for being on social media. they’re not the real reason everything is so sanitised, and they’re suffering the most because of this, tbh. they’re getting all kinds of fucked up, and then everyone thinks that the internet sucks because of them, when it’s literally the capitalists as always that are ruining the internet like they ruin everything else. the kids just need social interaction that they struggle to get otherwise because of how hostile everything outside has become and how hostile the school system has been to students for over a century or even longer

The concepts of NSFW is being cleared of the Internet under the false pretense of children’s safety when it’s really about the people in power sanitising for advertisers and pushing evangelical narratives AND that not enough is done to keep legitimately harmful content off of spaces that minors have access to are ideas that can coexist

[mermaidsirennikita]

There's definitely a connection going on with the whole sanitized media, purity culture, unproblematic fave era that's happening right now. You brought up David Bowie who is not the only one. There comes a point when people don't want to pull on the thread because they will realize most popular entertainers have been accused (and are most likely guilty) of assault, domestic violence, rape or have probably been with underaged girls or boys. And as much as they don't want to be seen enjoying, stanning or shipping something problematic that's in fact impossible. So that's why we get people defending or denying or outright refusing to acknowledge the problematic behaviours of not only their faves but people in popular culture.

I think people do need to accept that the vast majority of the people they like, who are famous, have done something they won't like. Depending on when the person became famous, some of the sins may be lesser... But it's a fucked industry. You could have someone posting a really shitty slut-shaming comment, someone liking something they shouldn't. Tbh, social media usage is the downfall of most more recent/"woke" celebs today--people need to realize that they really shouldn't have public social media accounts unless they're going to pay a social media team. And even using a private account is dangerous, unless you seriously limit who has access and ensure that your password is changed constantly.

Then there are more serious crimes--actual crimes. Most of your favorites, especially if they are male, especially if they are white and male and of a certain era, have done something fucked. Even the squeaky cleanest of people... just aren't perfect.

The issue that we have in this purity culture is that people don't understand that everyone's threshold is different. For example--I know David Bowie had sex with underage girls. I also do enjoy his music. It's something I have difficulties with. I also love Prince's music, despite him doing the same shit. I can still listen to their music and enjoy it; I am figuring out how to do that while acknowledging what they did and not supporting that, but it's difficult, right? And the threshold is personal; I used to fucking love some Michael Jackson songs, but what I've heard from his victims....... I can't handle that anymore.

However, all of those men? Hugely important to music history, development, and pop culture. No matter what else comes out about them, on top of the other horrid shit, that is literally impossible to change, and that's something a lot of purity police seem to struggle with. It super doesn't matter if you say "DID Y'ALL KNOW THAT PRINCE HAD SEX WITH UNDERAGE GIRLS???? JAIL FOREVER, HOW COULD YOU EVER LISTEN TO PRINCE". The impact has been made. There are artists who wouldn't exist now without Prince, Bowie, MJ--and there are artists who will exist because of those artists, and so on. There are millions of moments that have been made in pop culture and in individual people's lives because of these artists, because of Elvis, and so on. And we can acknowledge this and discuss it and critique it and make an effort to not support artists who still do this shit, but we cannot pretend that these people who did horrible shit didn't shape culture. I'm sorry. We just can't. You'll sit there saying that Bowie is evil and rotting in hell and you'll never support him, and boom--you go to a movie and a Bowie song is playing. A song that would not exist if Bowie hadn't existed is playing.

That's kind of the nature of the game, and always has been. Successful artists make a fuckton of money for their industries, please their patrons, what have you... And so they are given excuses. It super doesn't fucking matter if you like it or not, so how about let's not focus on shaming people for enjoying those artists in a world that encourages them to do so, and we focus on processing what these artists have done and taking steps to ensure that people can't do what they do in the future. I'm not going to beat you up for loving Bowie's music--but I am going to have an issue with you trying to cover up his bad behavior. I'm just not going to be an obnoxious asshole and be like "DIDN'T YOU KNOW WHAT HE DID????" when I fucking know you know what he did.

And the same can be said for historical figures in general by the way. It's not just about music or film or TV, etc.

[kittenofdoomage]

Happy Birthday to my blog, seven years ago today I started out in this strange wilderness and it's only gotten stranger 👍 nearly 700 stories and over 3.3 million words of fanfiction.

I was just going to leave this as a happy birthday blog post but I feel like I've got a few things I need to get off my chest, so this is below the cut, I know not everyone wants to or particularly cares to read it so there's ya choice 🤷‍♀️

There's no big announcements here FYI. I'm just doing what my friends have told me and putting my thoughts down on paper.

Some of you may have noticed I'm not posting anything on Tumblr anymore. The lack of interaction (comments, asks etc.) has just really put me off putting anything on here because it doesn't really feel like anyone either wants to read it or wants me around anymore, and I'm not gonna beg for attention. I'm not surprised, to be honest, my whole life I've been a square peg in a round hole. People just don't want me around - it's not just online. In real life there's exactly one place I feel like no one wants me to leave and that's in my house, with my family. I've just always been an odd person, and there aren't many people who vibe with me, it's cool, I've accepted it. But I'm not gonna be opening myself to that discomfort or pain anymore. My fics are all on Ao3 and I'll continue to post on there, my Tumblr will remain but I can't find the strength to get excited about something and then deal with the crushing feeling that no one wants my work. TBH I barely check Tumblr that much anymore bc I only come on here to check messages (usually from Beka, who knows all of this already but if you're reading this, thank you for listening to me and being patient with my mental breakdowns). My asks are staying off for now (sorry, Heart Anon, I love you, I've no idea who you are but please know you've been a light in my life and I appreciate you so much, and Marie, you have also been a beautiful friend with your daily gifs and hearts) but my PMs are on, just don't expect an answer right away.

I turn 35 tomorrow. It's been playing on my mind a lot, especially since my life expectancy ain't looking too good lol. I don't really have much of a life outside Tumblr. I'm a pretty boring person actually. Writing was the way I expressed myself and I truly enjoyed interacting with people who liked my stories. During the pandemic, it's been a way to keep myself focused and keep from slipping into the dark places we're all too familiar with. But there have been occasions lately where writing has been the cause of a slip into a dark place. And that's not healthy, and I need to work on it. I feel this is the time to stop forcing myself to write, seeing as I can't do much of it with my tiny human home for the school holidays.

My Patrons don't need to worry, I've still got material to share, it's a commitment I intend to honor because really, writing is the only thing I have, the only thing I feel I can do well and I am so, so, so, appreciative of every single person that supports me. I can't have a regular job right now (I hope that will change at some point because I've worked all my life until I got sick and I hate it) but you guys have given me a thread of independence, of dignity, and I value every one of you so much, those who have supported, who continue to support and who do so in the future.

I know this won't get absorbed, because it never does but those of you who read on Tumblr... please share the work you like. Set up a separate blog if you're too embarrassed to share on your main, make a reblogging blog, send asks, whatever, just please tell your author how much you liked what they did. I can assure you, those authors are waiting for it. We work so hard on what we make, what we create, we want you to scream from the rooftops. It doesn't even have to be coherent, we love all the feedback, we crave it (as long as it's not just a demand for part two, even Thor learned to ask for more without being rude about it, everyone else can). Without it, we're like plants without water. We don't feel the want to create anymore. And that's kinda where I'm at now. I don't want to lose my passion for my art but when there's nothing to do it for, sometimes it's out of our hands.

So, that's where I'm at. I'll probably lose followers (though I've already lost 250 in the last two months so that's not a surprise) and if any of my Patrons feel like my statement is unacceptable, that's fine. I don't expect anyone to agree with me. I just wanted to put my feelings down, to be honest with everyone. And I have.

I don't want the list of stories to end at 700. I want to keep creating stories that everyone will enjoy. I really hope things with change, even if not for me, then for the others out there who are on their creative journey.

Much love to everyone, stay safe xxx

(this post will remain untagged so it will not show in searches and I'm not tagging those people who I have spoken to about this and my feelings in general, as they know who they are, and they know they're very special, amazing, and appreciated people to me. I don't particularly care if this gets reblogged or not.)

[bigskydreaming]

Do you ever feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill defending characters against the same whole-hearted misinformation that keeps getting repeated again & again as if it's canon? I tried 4 times in a chat thread where people kept insisting that Dick Grayson and even the Teen Titans were jerks to Jason Todd when he was Robin. I don't know how you do it. No matter what you say, it just keeps going. No canon is ever enough. Why are some fans so set on the idea that everyone ostracized Jason?

Ooof yeah, that’s a whole barrel of annoying. The big gripe for me, in both my major fandoms, is that so much of the misinformation comes paired with this contradictory insistence on how much people don’t give a fuck about canon.....even while willfully trying to reinvent canon to say what they want it to say, in order to back up their version of events or take on various characters!

Its like, if you don’t give a fuck about canon, THEN DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT CANON. Don’t TELL me you don’t give a fuck about canon, and then GO OFF on how canon does all these things that canon most definitely does not do, thereby casting MUCH MUCH doubt upon your claims of not giving a fuck about canon, and suggesting that in fact, you do give quite a bit of fucks about canon, actually.

Y’know?

fahsklfhalfhkafl

But honestly, I’m not the person to give advice on this front because oof, I make bad choices here. LOLOLOL, no but for real, I can’t really tell you how to just deal with this because I’m like, I do not have mastery of that skillset myself. I have however long since exhausted myself of any illusions about CHANGING the minds of people who are particularly insistent upon things that never happened informing their particular view of characters, because like.....the reality is, people who come into fandoms emotionally invested in views of characters that they derived from other fics or fanons, like......it doesn’t matter that those things aren’t canon, what matters is their emotional investment in this particular fandom is entirely bound up in those particular views no matter WHERE they originated from, and so most of them aren’t changing their minds any time soon because they don’t WANT another viewpoint, their original one is the reason they’re here and invested in the first place. 

BUT at the same time, everybody wants to feel validated in their viewpoints, so the more that viewpoint is challenged by people being like uh no, here’s a thing that says you’re wrong, look, its here, its clear, the facts say shhhhhh the marketing campaign for all the Hateorade you’ve drunk about this character is based entirely on The Sky Is Green If We Say It Is logic.....the more people are like, determined to prove they’re right, even if their own personal conviction ORIGINALLY was not dependent on canon whatsoever and it only retroactively started mattering to them not as a source point for how they view characters but like, rather, a data point for Here’s How I Can Still Win This Argument.

And here’s where being in a comics fandom gets really fucking annoying:

Because there are so damn many comics.

And like, a lot of people in comics fandoms don’t even read the comics, and say so - and I mean, this is fine? If you’re here for the characters you don’t need to be here for the comics, so if you don’t actually like comics, like don’t read the comics, just read fic. Its whatever. BUT the bigger issue in my experience is like.....people arguing about comics canon even when they haven’t read the comics, like....often project onto everyone they’re arguing with, like, their own stance on comics.

What I mean by that is a lot of the people arguing about comics canon even when they proudly haven’t read a comic in their life because there are so many where would they even start and also, eww, I’m not doing all that.....like....there’s this presumption evident in a lot of arguments that the same holds true for everyone else in comics fandoms.....that none of the rest of us have read all those comics either, because how could anyone? There’s so many of them!

Forgetting of course, that many of us come into these fandoms from entirely different trajectories. If you come into a comics fandom because of fanfics, or a cartoon adaptation, or the movies.....upon your first day in fandom, when you look at all the comics canon that’s out there, you’re like holy shit that’s a lot, nobody could ever read all that, I’m certainly not going to read all that, I’m going back to fics.

BUT for those of us who came into these fandoms from the direction of reading the comics......our perspective was entirely different, because it was never some singular monolithic VASTNESS of unread comics that nobody could ever tackle because where would we even begin. For those of us who were reading comics for years or most of our lives......its been a handful of issues a month, month after month, year after year, rather than all in one sitting.

So the point of conflict becomes the presumption from a lot of fans who AREN’T here because of the comics, that comic book canon is this untapped cornucopia of potential validation, Schrodinger’s Canon, it can be basically whatever they want it to be, because who’s to say it ISN’T? If they can’t read all of that, nobody can read all of that, so when you think about it, its entirely plausible that the thing they insist happened in canon actually DID happen in canon, SOMEWHERE in all of that.....because just because they don’t know where it is and can’t point to it as explicitly existing, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist either. Who’s to say, really?

Well. Umm. People who in fact actually HAVE read all or most of the RELEVANT comics. Like yeah nobody’s read every comic ever I bet, lolol, but for lifelong DC readers, canon ISN’T this vast uncharted territory that can potentially contain everything.....its actually quite charted, and there are people who absolutely do know what it does and does not contain.

And this I think is at the heart of the insistence on particular points of argument, like Jason was always perpetually mistreated and Dick and the Titans hated him on sight and that’s why the Knights of the Order of Protection for the Smol Jason Bean hate Dick, because he was a giant jerkface to a little kid who never did anything to him ever. Like it doesn’t matter how much we point out that no, this did not in fact happen and is untrue, COMPLETELY, like.....people who came into fandom because of fics about Jason in which the entire perspective upon his character is uniformly, with virtually no exception, that he was scapegoated by Dick from Day One and he and Dick will always be eternally at odds because of the remnants of what a jerk and failure of a brother Dick was to him at first.......like, I feel like there’s this conviction lying underneath all those arguments, no matter how much canon they’re presented with, that there still exists out there SOMEWHERE, some untapped treasure trove of panels proving what a buttface Dick was to his first little brother, validating everything they’ve ever believed and thought ever, because look all those depictions of Dick being a giant assbutt to Jason in fics had to come from SOMEWHERE after all, didn’t they?

Well, yeah. They did come from somewhere. They came from the writers who wrote those fics that way because they either just hated Dick’s character or they were working through their own sibling angst and projected certain dynamics onto the characters or someone told them this is what things were like in the comics and they didn’t know any different or just didn’t care or a hundred million other possible reasons for why they wrote them that way with none of those reasons being Cuz Canon Said So.....and then those particular depictions caught on and multiplied fruitfully like the offspring of rabbits doing it sans contraceptives.

Because its not like “perpetual black sheep of the family so unfairly hated, so misunderstood, especially by the family’s favored son, the golden boy” is a fan favorite trope on its own, regardless of whether or not the characters said trope is applied to actually FIT that trope.

So in the end, the painful irony was not only did canon have nothing to do with that trend, canon COULD do nothing about that trend, because the reasons people turned to it, despite how often canon gets brought into it....really had nothing to do with canon.

So tbh, my personal stance these days is the best defense to fic-borne and originating views of the characters and their dynamics is NOT canon, its....more fic. Fic that presents a counter-narrative to the ones that are so often the first thing people see when they enter fandom, and thus become engrained as Truth. So that there’s at least more variety out there, because where there’s variety, there’s varied points of view, and the more people internalize THAT, that there are variations to be found in how these characters relate to each other and their shared histories......the more people have to make a CHOICE about what variations they most want to adhere to, from among the OPTIONS they’re presented with, instead of just doubling down on the first thing that clicks for them, no opposition in sight.

And if these counter “Dick’s just the worst like what an uber asshole gonna give a five star rating for Sucking At Life to that guy” fics happen to be inspired largely by canon rather than fanon like....oh no, how strange and unknowable, that’s not the Process, we’re doing it wrong but hey whatever.

But does that mean its not still frustrating as hell to see people just parroting the Dick and the Titans were mean to Jason truism as fact, especially when you know damn well its not? Hell no. That’s annoying as fuck. But don’t worry so much about trying to change peoples’ minds, I say, and instead just find people who ARE open to canon or familiar with it, and just have a good rant. Its fun!

 Here, I’ll start:

UGH AND ANOTHER THING ABOUT THIS WHOLE “DICK WAS SUCH A JERK TO JASON AND THE TITANS ALL FOLLOWED HIS LEAD” CRAPOLA SUMMER SALES EVENT:

Where would that even have happened???

Like what really chuffs my chopped onions here is when people are so suuuuuuuure that the gatekeepers of comic book fandom are keeping the real juicy anti-Dick panels hidden every time they ask “Hey Siri show me proof Dick’s a jerkmonster to Jason”....because like...they’re just SO SURE these panels are out there and its like lololol but where would they even come from? 

Because everybody overlooks that in proper Dickens fashion, pre-Flashpoint Jason was a Tale of Two Jasons, the pre-Crisis adorable child of sunshine and whee, and the post-Crisis I have smoker’s lung at age twelve Jason......and these two Jasons can and do and are MEANT to co-exist within the same body! They’re the same Jason, in hindsight!

See, post-Crisis Jason only existed for like, less than TWO YEARS real world time, before A Death in the Family! People have this assumption that because of how rock-solid the post-Crisis origin for him is and how solidly that’s informed his characterization and stories moving forward, like.....there was this HUGE foundation for it back in the day that was built upon.....but no! We’re talking like, less than twenty four issues IN TOTAL. Post-Crisis Jason was a drop in the bucket compared to pre-Crisis Jason.

So why then, is post-Crisis Jason so much more firmly cemented in peoples’ minds than pre-Crisis Jason even though pre-Crisis Jason had way more material written about him?

Because for once in DC’s existence, they were SMART about a retcon. They didn’t TRY to pit post-Crisis Jason versus pre-Crisis Jason and make people pick between them. Post-Crisis Jason wasn’t an attempt at overwriting pre-Crisis Jason and making it so he never existed. Instead, what they did with their limited amount of time writing post-Crisis Jason was overwrite only two stories specifically: his actual pre-Crisis origin, and how he and Dick first met....and then they let everything else from pre-Crisis stay! It just got folded IN BETWEEN Jason’s new post-Crisis origin and everything that came after that, thanks to some handy non-linear storytelling and flashbacks.

So rather than Jason having two entirely separate storylines and directions, they still kept him at just one....and his post-Crisis origin and A Death in the Family became BOOKENDS surrounding not just the twenty issues in between those two stories......but ALSO surrounding ALL the pre-Crisis issues featuring Jason.....including the times he interacted with Dick and the Titans.

And that’s why there’s no untapped treasure trove of potentially vilifying issues showcasing Dick being such a can of Jerkola to Jason.......

Because post-Crisis only amounted to a grand total of like twenty something issues.....in which Jason interacted with Dick once and only once....the issue which ends with Dick giving Jason his blessing as Robin, his costume, and his phone number to call him if he ever has any problems with Bruce.

But simultaneously, because all those pre-Crisis issues still existed, were still relevant, were still in continuity (as evidenced by Jason himself when he came back as the Red Hood and fought Tim at Titans Tower, referencing how he was briefly a Titan himself.......aka those issues in which he teamed up with the Titans, which ONLY happened before his new origin)....we similarly know that it wasn’t like Dick and Jason never had any contact after their first post-Crisis encounter....we just never saw Jason use that phone number on the page AFTER that issue (because again, there was no time before he was killed off in the comics TO engineer another on the page meet-up, like both characters were busy in unrelated stories in the course of the mere year between that issue and ADITF). BUT by the power of retcon, we do know that Jason still must have used it at some point, or else Dick reached out to him again at some later point off the page......because Dick and Jason’s easy familiarity with each other pre-Crisis STILL EXISTED AS WELL. They had a sibling relationship post-Crisis because they had a sibling relationship pre-Crisis...AND IT WAS THE SAME RELATIONSHIP.

And this is Part Two of why no untapped treasure trove of Jerk Dick and Poor Jason panels exists......because other than that one post-Crisis issue, all their other interactions hail from the pre-Crisis era....where Dick adored Jason and so did the rest of the Titans.

Jason wasn’t resentful of the Titans or scared of them or nursing grudges, he thought getting to hang out with his big brother’s friends WAS THE COOLEST FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD and you could practically see him bouncing on the page the times it happened. He glowed when Dick would ruffle his hair playfully or compliment him, and the Titans’ collective energy towards Jason was very much OH OUR FRIEND’S BABY BRO IS THE MOST ADORABLE SMALL CHILD EVER AND WE WILL PROTECT HIM WITH OUR LIVES.

Like people WILLFULLY misconstrue this one issue where Jason teamed up with the Original Titans other than Dick for a mission against Cheshire, and claim like “oh see, this is the proof that the Titans were mean to Jason because of Dick, they kept giving him shit for not being Dick and hated him for replacing Dick....” which omg noooooooooooo, that is so odiously NOT what happened in that issue. First off, NOBODY blamed Jason for replacing Dick back then, because at the time those issues were written, he DIDN’T....this was when Dick had given Robin to Jason himself, when choosing to move on as Nightwing. And even RETROACTIVELY looking at this issue in light of the retcon where Dick was fired as Robin, this STILL changes nothing about Dick and Jason’s dynamic at this particular time or how the rest of the Titans would have viewed Jason as of this issue.....because that’s where the post-Crisis issue specifically writing Dick and Jason’s new introduction to each other on the page matters so much. As now the ultimate takeaway is even while not making Jason Robin himself, this issue STILL showed Dick giving Jason his blessing.....thus maintaining and stabilizing every pre-Crisis interaction between Jason and the Titans and ensuring that this whole “they resented him on Dick’s behalf” scenario wouldn’t throw any retroactive curveballs into how they were with Jason...because now there still was no need for anything on Dick’s behalf, as far as Jason was concerned, because Dick had given his A-Ok.

So that just flat out never happened, not originally, pre-Crisis, and not even in hindsight after the post-Crisis retcons were factored in, because the HOW of the post-Crisis retcons specifically factored in an avoidance of this potential tangle.

And in fact, what DID happen in the arc where Jason teamed up with the Titans without Dick, to go up against Cheshire.......is that Donna, who was in charge of the team at the time, kept trying to defer to Jason-as-Robin, because subconsciously she was insecure about her leadership at the time and having a Robin at her side was making her think of when Dick had been in that role, and simultaneously been their leader, and thus she was trying to lean into the familiar comforts of being able to turn to a Robin for direction.

And Jason CALLED HER OUT ON THIS. Politely. And cutely. No for real it was adorable. But like, he did it with poise and self-confidence and deliberation, and SHE HEARD HIM. She snapped out of it. Jason laid out exactly what she was doing and why and Donna was like oh shit, you’re right, I HAVE been doing that. And Jason was like, and that’s not fair to me. And Donna was like no, you’re absolutely right, that isn’t fair to you, I’m sorry. And Jason’s like, I can’t be the leader here, I don’t have the experience that Dick does. But you do, and you can be the leader. And Donna was like. You’re three for three kiddo, damn you’re good at this.

AND THEN THEY WENT AND KICKED BAD GUY ASS TOGETHER AND EVERYTHING WAS HUNKY-DORY BECAUSE THE POINT OF THAT ENTIRE PLOT WAS NOT “EVERYONE IS MEAN TO POOR JASON BECAUSE DICK MADE A CONSPIRACY OF MEANNESS” IT WAS “JASON’S A KICK-ASS LITTLE GO-GETTER WHO KNOWS HIS STRENGTHS AND HIS STRENGTH IS TELLING PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE BEING DUMB AND THEY NEED TO STOP THAT.”

Okay, one caveat here. I must confess, its killing me....there is ONE Titan who was a jerk to Jason.

But uh....that Titan was Hank Hall aka Hawk. And he’s a jerk to everybody. Its kinda his superpower.

And he most certainly didn’t do it on Dick’s behalf, as Hank hates Dick and Dick hates Hank asfhilfhalfhalf. Seriously, they’re basically the hateship that ppl keep trying to make Dick and Jason into, only without the incest makes it spicy or whatever element, but like, if you’re not hung up on that and can ship people without them being related, oh no, oh woe, oh say it ain’t so, like, DickHank is the unsung hateship of dreaaaaaaaaaaams. They’re like:

Hank: As it is a day ending in y, I feel now is the perfect time to let you know, without prompting, that I hate your guts because people like you. And I hate people and everything they like, on account of people are the worst.

Dick: Well, you’re people, and you’re the worst, so that tracks.

Hank: So we’re agreed. I hate you. You hate me.....

Dick: Our hate is so in harmony.

Donna: What is even happening here and do I want to know.

Roy: In reverse order, no, probably not, and I’m not sure, but I THINK they’re getting hate married, and exchanging vows to hate each other in sickness and in health, forever and ever.

Wally: *skidding around corner* I CALL BEST MAN.

Donna: Its not a real wedding Wally.

Roy: Idk they seem pretty serious about it. Which means the best man position should be valid here, which means it should be me, because suck it West, only way you’ll ever be Dick’s best man is over my dead body.

Wally: Get ready to throw down then, Robin Hood, and just call me the Sheriff of Notachanceinhell, that best man position is MINE.

Garth: Whoa, hold up, I have an agreement IN WRITING from when we were THIRTEEN for Dick and I to be each other’s best men at our weddings, so I’m gonna need you both to stand down, I LITERALLY CALLED DIBS. Look. ITS IN WRITING.

Donna: Oh for fuck’s sake, you collective pluralization of buffoons, STOP TREATING THIS AS A REAL THING. ITS NOT A REAL THING.

Dick, eyes dead-locked on Hank: Oh this is real Donna. This is happening.

Hank, stepping forward, eyes equally locked: I have never been more serious about anything in my life. 

Lilith: Sure, you’ve only both saved the world but hey why should that matter. This is definitely the real shit.

Hank: Please. I only did that to prove I could do it better than Dick could. I hate the world.

Dick: Aww, and did you cry yourself to sleep when that flopped?

Hank: Wouldn’t know. It didn’t happen.

Donna: I swear by every god on Mt. Olympus, the first one of you to say I know you are but what am I is getting flung into orbit.

Anyway. I might have gotten distracted somewhere in there. What was your question again and did I answer it? I think I did....fahlkfhaklfhalhfa.

[finalgirlagatha]

 ranking the alll alumni handbook pictures

Tedros: 8/10. his smile is very accurate to his personality. i love his eyes, i’d be down to get lost in them. he DOES looks like a chad or a walter, and someone got carried away threading his eyebrows but idc i love my funky bisexual boy

Agatha: 9/10. I'd die for her and she looks like she'd gently protest before letting me. Nice eyes. Witchy thin eyebrows. Is that a dimple I see? yeah, she cute. soman stop calling her ugly challenge

Sophie: 8/10. I don't have much to say but this seems about right. I love her facial proportions, her upturned nose and the hair. she looks like the  volley ball girl who bullied me in middle school. 

-10/10 not my beatrix. she looks like a Karen. She’s gonna ask to see my manager and I’m just gonna pretend I work there to avoid conflict. 

5/10 ok it’s not that bad, he is described as a beefy lad, but when i was doing the handbook redraws chaddick came out super trippy bc i didn’t know how to draw the head:neck ratio without making it look unbalanced. It could be better and it could be worse. at least he’s not white, right?

10/10 she could pour soup on my lap and i’d apologize to her. i am a Reena Loving Individual and everyone needs to know that. Look at her smile. look at her eyes. she knows i’d do anything for her. ugh. queen shit. 

10/10: look at her dimples and her round face and tell me you wouldn’t marry her the second she apologizes for bumping your shoulder in a crowded hallway. look me in the eyes. yeah. i know, me too.

8/10: cute man idk i love her. do you think kiko listens to girl in red? 

5/10 i don’t even know who this is but he looks like he’d listen to eminem unironically. he’s the token straight on thin ice. 

7/10 I think I’m being too mean. this is pretty good, i love it . i always thought she’d have a pixie cut but this is cool too. no one takes the nevers calling themselves ugly seriously bc of this goddess 

10/10 exactly how i always pictured her. love how she threatened the painter to let her rats stay or they face her wrath. very cool of her. 

8/10 I don’t have a big opinion on Hort but he looks okay. actually tbh it looks great for him, he’s not too hot, or ugly. it’s meh. like hort. 

6.5/10 Ravan sweetie I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Points for the original book accuracy and the fact i like dudes w long hair ((nah but like give this man a reason to smile and he could be a ten not even lying))

9389408493/10 amazing. amazing. amazing. there is nothing wrong with this. i love this. periodt. s h e. look it she has a chocolate. swan. good for her!! she deserves it. look at that ~sparkle~ she has in her eyes. you’re doing amazing sweetie. 

10/10 mona step on me challenge. look at the way she’s staring the painter down. if she ever looked at me like that i’d immediately fizzle out and manifest into a million little atoms. 

9/10 i love her. she’s so precious i’d die for her look at her smiling 🥺💞😫 she’s trying to be intimidating but she can’t help it and tbh good for her 

overall: they’re all p chill and i like the art bc it’s fun and imaginative. now, where is my brone handbook art 

[notebooks-and-tea]

Parse & Folklore: A Ted Talk

Alright everyone, settle down and come have emotions with me about how many of the lyrics from Folklore could apply to Parse. This is a long one so buckle in kiddos. I’m not usually a omgcp blog and I haven’t actually used tumblr in ages but I needed to share my emotions. Someone please yell at me if they have any more thoughts - I’m always here for Parse &/ Taylor rants!  

1. The 1 - let’s be real you could read the entirety of this song as Kent, hopefully having now finally managed to move on from Jack, wistfully thinking back on how nice it would’ve have been if he had indeed been ‘the one’. 

Lyrics that kind of hurt:

We were something, don’t you think so? And if my wishes came true It would've been you In my defense, I have none For never leaving well enough alone      Rosé flowing with your chosen family And it would've been sweet If it could've been me In my defense, I have none For digging up the grave another time 2. Cardigan -  So the concept of this song doesn’t directly relate to Kent but a few of the lines stick out to me a lot and I guess just generally this idea of ‘when you are young they assume you know nothing’ in the context of what Jack and Kent would have been going through when they were in Juniors.

Lyrics that stand out to my angsty heart:

But I knew you'd linger like a tattoo kiss I knew you'd haunt all of my what-ifs The smell of smoke would hang around this long 'Cause I knew everything when I was young I knew I'd curse you for the longest time <--literally just Kent not being able to let go of Jack despite how long it’s been since the draft

3.  My Tears Ricochet - Definitely don’t think about the idea of Kent loving Jack and being cut out and ignored following his overdose while listening to this song. ‘I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace’ when thinking about Kent visiting Jack at Samwell and being rejected, then lashing out is particularly painful okay. You could totally interpret a lot of this song as Kent lashing out at Jack and reminding him that he can cut him out and claim he’s moved on but he’ll always be a part of him and it just makes me sad to think about how that might not actually be true...

Lyrics that make me sad:

Even on my worst day Did I deserve, babe All the hell you gave me? 'Cause I loved you I swear I loved you Till my dying day  I didn't have it in myself to go with grace And you're the hero flying around saving face <--Jack getting to look like Kent attacked him for no reason as if he doesn’t also owe apologies  'Cause when I'd fight, you used to tell me I was brave And you can aim for my heart, go for blood But you would still miss me in your bones    <-- also kind of reminds me of Kent, in his anger when he turns up at Samwell, lashing out and saying that it’s people like him who still care about Jack no matter what

4. Mirrorball - okay literally just one line really sticks out to me and makes me sad so definitely don’t think about Kent having to hide who he is around the Aces, especially when Jack and Bitty kiss on the ice and he’s in the bar and someone whose name I’ve forgotten is being a homophobic dick, while Taylor sings “I'm a mirrorball I can change everything about me to fit in”

5. AUGUST - like the entire song basically? But like specifically these two boys have a month in the summer between winning the memorial cup and the draft and maybe Kent thinks it’s perfect and he’s so hopeful and he knows it has to end because they’re going to be on separate teams but maybe for him, just wanting them to be together is enough, at least for now. But everything goes wrong and Jack slips away and then they lose contact because Jack cuts him out and all Kent knows is that he should have known because he was never really his no matter how much he hoped that would be true. So now he just has those memories of the two of them together that one summer and maybe that kind of makes me want to cry?

Lyrics and sadnessss:

I never needed anything more Whispers Of "Are you sure?" "Never have I ever before" <-- just really hammering in that reminder that they were just kids before the draft But I can see us Lost in the memory August slipped away into a moment in time 'Cause it was never mine And I can see us twisted in bedsheets August sipped away Like a bottle of wine 'Cause you were never mine  Will you call when you're back at school? I remember thinking I had you Wanting was enough For me, it was enough To live for the hope of it all Cancel plans just in case you'd call So much for summer love, and saying "Us" 'Cause you weren't mine to lose 6.  This is Me Trying - Yikes, isn’t the title just a hypothetical Parse anthem though? Once again, not really exactly in the spirit of the actual song but I feel like so many of the lyrics apply? I mean, Kent turning up at Samwell vibes and once again he lashes out because he feels hurt but he’s trying. He doesn’t even know if Jack wants to see him but he’s hopeful so he turns up and he’s trying to be helpful and to reconnect but he’s still hurting even if Jack doesn’t seem to care? Also definitely don’t think about Kent in his first year in the NHL when he’s supposed to be living his dream and enjoying life, celebrating victories with his new team but all he can think about is Jack and how he may have hurt him and that he’s living the life he’s missing out on. 

Lyrics I have emotions about:

I didn't know if you'd care if I came back I have a lot of regrets about that Pulled the car off the road to the lookout Could've followed my fears all the way down And maybe I don't quite know what to say But I'm here in your doorway <-- Kent turning up at Samwell not really knowing if Jack would want to see him but being so hopeful that he would just hurtssss I just wanted you to know That this is me trying  And at least I’m trying

And my words shoot to kill when I'm mad I have a lot of regrets about that

And it's hard to be at a party When I feel like an open wound It's hard to be anywhere these days When all I want is you

7. Illicit Affairs - Ooooh boy, we’re back to entire songs that remind me of Kent and Jack and pre-draft sadness. So cannon Jack might claim that they never really dated and doesn’t that hurt even more if you consider Kent thinking they’re basically dating in secret only for Jack to overdose, then cut him off completely and deny that what they had ever involved any real emotions on his part? So here’s where illicit affairs makes me want to sob. Definitely don’t think about them having a secret ‘relationship’ that starts off because they’re just such close friends, the best friend either one of them has ever had, but they’re also both closeted professional hockey players and horny teenagers let’s be honest, and what starts off as raw moments of honesty and closeness between them get’s slowly corrupted because they have to hide it all, and they have the draft to think about, and Jack has his anxiety etc. And maybe Jack doesn’t call him kid or baby but he does call him Kenny like nobody else does and Kent would ruin himself if it meant he could have Jack back, would give him anything, would get him a spot on the Aces so they can finally play together like they were supposed to...This song makes me sad.

Lyrics that hurt especially (might as well post the entire song here tbh):

And that's the thing about illicit affairs And clandestine meetings And longing stares It's born from just one single glance But it dies and it dies and it dies ...a million little times / They show their truth one single time But they lie and they lie and they lie ...a million little times

So you leave no trace behind Like you don't even exist Take the words for what they are A dwindling, mercurial high A drug that only worked The first few hundred times

And you wanna scream Don't call me kid Don't call me baby Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me You showed me colors you know I can't see with anyone else Don't call me kid Don't call me baby Look at this idiotic fool that you made me You taught me a secret language I can't speak with anyone else And you know damn well For you I would ruin myself ...a million little times

8. Invisible Strings - Is this song too happy for my feelings about Kent most of the time? Probably, but basically any ship that ends in Kent/Happiness could apply to this song and that’s the reason it stays on this list. So basically think about Kent being happy and moving on with someone who’s so so good for him and helps him heal and then reconsider this song with that in mine. 

Lyrics to think about:

Time, Mystical time Cutting me open, then healing me fine

A string that pulled me Out of all the wrong arms right into that dive bar Something wrapped all of my past mistakes in barbed wire Chains around my demons Wool to brave the seasons One single thread of gold tied me to you Cold was the steel of my axe to grind for the boys who broke my heart Now I send their babies presents <- the idea of Kent moving on and no longer having confrontations with Jack whenever they meet but instead being happy for him too makes me so happy 

9. Betty - Okay once again the actual idea of this song, definitely doesn’t directly apply but hear me out. Kent turning up at Samwell wanting to be heard out by Jack. Maybe it doesn’t happen directly after the event so he’s not ‘only 17′ but he effectively is and he doesn’t know anything really. He didn’t at the time the overdose happened and he never got the chance to deal with it properly because Jack cut him out so he still doesn’t really know anything. All he knows is that he misses Jack and he wants to play with him again and wants them to get back to where they used to be, to where they’re suppose to be. And if he insulting Jack’s team isn’t James (Taylor’s POV) singing about Betty’s ‘stupid friends’ then idk what else to say. Why does this song scream Kent so much to me despite being about a random 17 year old boy who cheated on his girlfriend?

Lyrics I want to scream about:

Betty, I won't make assumptions about why you switched your homeroom But I think it's 'cause of me  <--so obvs not homeroom but please don’t think about Kent thinking that Jack overdosed and decided not to go to the NHL after her recovered because of him

But if I just showed up at your party Would you have me? Would you want me? Would you tell me to go fuck myself Or lead me to the garden? I'm only seventeen I don't know anything but I know I miss you <--maybe he’s not 17 but he’s basically still just a kid whenever Jack’s involved

Betty, I'm here on your doorstep And I planned it out for weeks now but, it's finally sinking in Betty, right now is the last time I can dream about what happens when you see my face again The only thing I wanna do Is make it up to you So, I showed up at your party Will you have me? Will you love me? Will you kiss me on the porch in front of all your stupid friends? If you kiss me Will it be just like I dreamed it? Will it patch your broken wings?

I definitely have more to say on this but this is already so long so that’s it for now, might continue on some other time?

[awed-frog]

hey, do you have some good sources/articles about whats been happening in europe regarding the virus? especially about how the other countries neighboring italy are reacting & how its not nearly enough. they dont necessarily have to be in english, german (or french?) should be fine too, if they have more specifics. if not, then it's fine as well! i just dont really know at which media outlets to look (tbh i don't even know where youre from but you seem like you know about whats going on there)

Hello! When it comes to European news, The Guardian is always a good place to start. Here is their Coronavirus page, and here there’s an update from today (March 14th) on how European countries are dealing with the outbreak.

(The Guardian is still 100% free but they have a kind of voluntary support system - I encourage you to look into that if you like them.)

Euronews is another great source. Depending on where you live, it’s also available as a TV channel.

eu-observer is a Belgian-based online newspaper which covers issues from the various member states in English. Here is their update on the situation.

swissinfo is also a good source on European news and the current mess, although they do focus more on Swiss stuff. It’s available in ten languages.

If you read French and German, you can have a look at Germany’s Die Zeit and France’s Le Monde - many articles are members-only, but there’s always a fair selection of free content. And: the French Press Agency, AFP, offers a fact-checking service in English, which at the moment it’s about 98% coronavirus.

The Italian Press Agency, Ansa, also has a page in English. 

(In case someone out there doesn’t know the difference: press agencies are typically about ‘raw’ news, which means no comment, no analysis, no opinion, no background or context, whereas newspapers also offer all of that. The advantage is that you can understand better what’s going on; the disadvantage, of course, would be open or covert bias depending on the journalists’ political leanings and/or funding sources.) 

Finally, The Local, originally a Swedish project, is also a decent source of European news. They now provide several websites for different European countries, and their information tends to be accurate and up-to-date. Here is the Italian website; look top right for the Austrian, Danish, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish versions.

As to how some countries are not taking proper precautions, you can find several Italian doctors discussing this and warning foreign governments to act more decisively. Here is one Twitter thread verified by Snopes, and here are a couple of articles from The Independent, the Boston Globe and Vox covering the same issue. 

Basically there’s a lot of racism-tinted nonsense making the rounds; only yesterday, a UK celebrity doctor claimed Italy was implementing extraordinary measures so that Italians could indulge in ‘one long siesta’. I’ve also seen people here on tumblr more or less arguing the same, or saying we shouldn’t worry because this is just a flu, or whatever else, so let me be clear: the main problem with this thing is that it is very contagious and it attacks the lungs much more aggressively than a seasonal flu. This means many patients (for now we estimate 10%) will need a bed in the ICU, and those beds are not that many. Out of that 10%, many will recover - if they can be treated. 

So, yeah - problem one is that vulnerable people (mostly the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions) are at risk no matter what; but problem two is that many sort-of-healthy people will need intensive care, and no country is ready to deal with thousands of people suddenly ending up in the ICU. There are not enough beds. There is not enough staff. There are not enough things. Hospitals don’t generally plan for thousands of critical patients for the same reason people don’t generally stock 700 rolls of toilet paper: there’s one chance in a million you’ll actually need that stuff. This is why Lombardy’s hospitals are collapsing: not because they’re inefficient, not because doctors are lazy, not because Italians are generally unreliable and idiotic, but simply because too many people got sick at the same time. And that’s why we need to stay home and wash our hands: because it’s likely most of us will get sick, but we can deal with it if we don’t all get sick over the same two months.

The goal here is to fit into that blue curve: people get sick over a longer period of time, they get treated, we have enough supplies for everyone, very few people die. There’s no need to panic, but let’s take this seriously.

[professorspork]

i know I always say this, but, last night REALLY WAS the BUSIEST OF DAYS in the Reaper War

before I get into yesterday’s gameplay, I realized I forgot to react to the fact that Jacob got Brynn pregnant, which -- again, I suppose that wraps up everything about his backstory in a nice little bow, lad of the bad dad gets to be good dad, but like... it still gives like they gave his character incredibly short shrift. so. humbug to that.

but I have bigger fish to fry (ha ha, literally, see what I did there?) because ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE, AND ALL OF THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. I rescued Ann Bryson, and learned that -- shocker -- she had a bad relationship with her dad. I uh may have condoned her getting a bit of a nasty nose bleed in order to track the Leviathan to Despoina, where as ever I got to read a bunch of people’s weirdly specific sad diaries. my jump into the depths was very cool and scary (does no one get the bends in the future???) and I enjoyed my The First-style body swapping conversation with the Leviathan in which I tried to prove I’m ~special and this time is ~different. on the one hand, I don’t know why I expected the origin of the Reapers to be anything other than yet another story of AI gone wrong, but this whole cinematic parallels thing is starting to edge out of “everything matches up and is of a piece” territory and into the murkier waters of “we kind of only had one idea, actually.” to reveal that the Reapers’ plan is just stray AI code to ‘preserve life’ is at once very chilling and a bit of a let down; when I think back to when I talked to Sovereign for the first time and I had my initial “GOD IS A MACHINE THAT WANTS TO KILL US” freak out, I was in fact very on board for an evil plan too broad and complex for a human mind to fathom. for it to be this feels kind of predictable and pedestrian.

that said, watching the Leviathan take down a huge-ass Reaper capital ship with its pulse signal was very satisfying.

oh no this is going to get very long, now that you’ve had this fun teaser i’m gonna put the rest under a cut

then we kicked it on over to Thessia and I highkey traumatized my girlfriend. I feel like I should have seen the reveal that the asari were more advanced because they were hoarding prothean tech coming, but I didn’t. hearing and seeing all the asari commandos helping me get wiped out was a real gut punch, but didn’t hold a candle to my frustration at the confrontation with Kai Leng. I’m not mad that the game wouldn’t let me beat him, per se (though I still think it’s ridiculous that I’ve taken down a Reaper by myself and I’m supposed to be afraid of a dude with a knife), but I am pissed that it all happened with combat cut scene magic. this game has given me difficult combat before! if, in fighting Kai Leng, I’d genuinely felt outmatched, I think I would have tolerated it better -- or if the combat had been me fighting the Harvesters and then Kai Leng sneaked around me because that’s what he does, he sneaks. but to have such a relatively easy combat sequence with him that felt very much like winning just to have it snatched away from me... maddening. WHY CAN’T I BEAT THIS ONE GUY AND HIS KNIFE? I don’t want to be all “Kai Leng is a Mary Sue” but like... he got to murder Thane and then beat me in overtime, and his entire vibe is I exist to sell action figures even though that’s not, as far as I know, any part of Mass Effect’s profit model. so it’s just frustrating. and for them to then rub salt in the wound and have him EMAIL ME to be like “lol snowflake r u triggered” was just. MY PATIENCE IS THIN, ME3. DON’T PUSH ME.

seeing Shepard have to admit to failure was a gutting scene, though, and a necessary one. and watching Liara fight with Javik was highkey satisfying, too. 

so anyway, because i was BIG MAD at Cerberus I tracked them first to that one N7 communications mission-- 

(Sample dialogue: Helen: Why aren’t you using cover? You’re going to die! Use cover! Me, jumping out of cover and rushing Cerberus goons trying to melee them to death: BECAUSE I’M MAD)

-- and then to Sanctuary, and HOO BOY WAS THAT A LOT OR WHAT. from the second I heard Oriana’s voice I had a pretty good idea of what was going on here, but seeing in in practice was still creepy af. and like. i’m just gonna go out on a limb and say INDOCTRINATION BAD. I AM NOT A FAN. shout out to that one capitalist volus on the Citadel who was like “lol sanctuary is a scam don’t waste your money” i guess

additionally, last night was significant because I picked not one but TWO ENTIRE renegade convince options, because I saw no reason to be nice to terrorist daddy the illusive man or actual terrorist daddy Mr. Lawson. after I got through all that, Helen explained to me how difficult it apparently is to keep Miranda alive by the end of that confrontation, so I got to do some WHAT LIKE IT’S HARD? preening at how Nice Sheps Finish First sometimes. 

but as usual, the real highlight is getting to know my crew better and talking with them. I finally got some prime flirting in with Liara during Leviathan. it was VERY cute when she was like “man what’s with you rescuing damsels from dig sites? if you end up teaming up with her to save the world and bring down the shadow broker i’ll be very jealous. ... and concerned” and WEIRDLY CUTER when she was like “hey the only tentacled alien who gets to mess with your brain is ME” because Liara is like 115 by now considering how slowly i’m getting through these missions and she still does not know what romance is. 

[no but seriously, Liara does not know what romance is. half the time I’m still going WE’RE STILL DATING, RIGHT? every time she refuses to talk to me. and even after Thessia, when everyone was like “go talk to Liara, she needs you” and even JAVIK of all people was like “you’re dating Liara, right? it’s so obvious” our interactions did not feel particularly... romantic? it’s a tricky needle to thread, obviously, I’m not looking for sloppy makeouts right after millions of her people died, but it still reads as very odd to me. anyway.]

Javik’s story about how he once had a ship like the Normandy and a crew of friends like mine and they all ended up indoctrinated and he had to personally slit their throats went way harder than I ever expected it to. even just the IDEA of having to do that as my Shep upsets me. i’m legit enjoying getting to know Javik, even though i’m still GuessWhoJustGotYelledAt.jpg every time I leave his room. I HAD ENOUGH OF THAT FROM KREIA, JAVIK, YOU’LL NEVER PUSH ME AWAY.

I was surprised by how hard Tali took Miranda’s successful challenge of Mr. Lawson, though in hindsight it makes sense -- with the geth war still happening on top of everything else, I don’t think Tali ever did get the chance to process her anger at her dad being a war criminal and all. and her whole “emergency induction port” bit about the straw was cute as hell tbh. her friendship with Garrus over the comms continues to give me life. 

(in other quarian news, I AM SAD ABOUT KAL’REEGER.)

and jeff. JEFF. after Thessia i literally ran to the bridge and said aloud “Jeff, make me feel better” as I clicked interact with him, and then he made that dig about asari dancers, and i was like NO NOT LIKE THAT. (I mean, what Shep literally said was “now’s not the time for jokes” which is ironic considering she, unlike me, still calls him JOKER) but then he was all DAD ANDERSON SAID I’M SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH, I’M SORRY, I’M DOING MY BEST and like. what a fucked up little family we are. he feels guilty that I died saving him, still! apparently he asks EDI about my stress levels and they are BAD and he feels BAD! im crey. OH AND ALSO THE FACT THAT PTSD ASARI LAURA BAILEY WAS TALKING ABOUT HIS FAMILY ON TIPTREE AND I CAN NEVER TELL HIM BECAUSE THE GAME DOESN’T LET ME DO THAT???? V UPSETTING.

and then of course EDI had to TRIPLE DOWN on all these feelings i was already having by telling me about human resistance and selflessness on Earth and how she wants to turn off her self-preservation code because she’s not about that. I’M SUCH A TOASTER FUCKER HALP.

Garrus being all “well sometimes your best friend gives you a pep talk” speech was cute as hell, and I was strangely charmed when Kaidan was like YOU CAN TELL I’M EXTRA MAD BECAUSE MY VOICE HAS GOTTEN SO DEEP grumbling.

next up: shore leave, and then going after Cerberus will trigger act 3! i may one day finish mass effect after all!

[arshinquarantine]

online shopping

To be honest, I don't really care for online shopping. A million little neurons fire off in my brain when I give someone money and they give me an object instantly. Who I was with, how I looked when I first tried it on, what I felt when I first tasted it, how much of a bargain it was, the feel of seams on my fingers or the weight of deckled pages in my hands, the caution I threw to the winds or the impulse that I permitted to seize me all combine in a few seconds to inject one simple emotion into my simple brain: buying shit feels good. Until recently, online shopping was utterly devoid of any positive emotion for me. I don't like computers, and they particularly irk me when they ask me to punch my credit card number or (worse) save it. I don't like waiting for boxes to arrive or dealing with going to the post office to pick them up or the endless amounts of recycling I'm going to have to do. I also absolutely do not have the time or the will or the discipline to return roughly half of what I buy because I'm picky and women's sizing for anything is a hot mess, so piles of unwanted shit pile up in my tiny apartment taking up valuable real estate. So I generally go out of my way to avoid the whole business of it all. 

For the first few months of the quarantine, I lived like a purist, buying only what I absolutely needed to online. Unfortunately for me, I was living in an unfurnished apartment (the sum total of the furniture I owned was a mattress, a shitty dollar walmart desk, and a shittier dollar walmart chair) so I actually needed to buy a lot of stuff and I dragged my feet miserably through it all. It took me weeks to pick out basic white Crate & Barrel plates for my kitchen, another few months before I committed to a bookshelf that held only about a third of the books I own, and far too long to buy a bed frame. The worst crime of all was my sofa; when I think about how many months I lived with only my mattress or my floor to sit on, I genuinely wonder how far my propensity for masochism can truly go.  Ordering my groceries online was simply out of the question, I remained staunchly devoted to buying them in store even when I had to wait 40 minutes in line for my turn.

Soon, the early alarming but novel weeks of covid gave way to the later mundane, claustrophobic ones. After a few weeks of regularly working out, I realized that there was no world for me to emerge into with my newer, hotter body. The comfort I got from my group chats and zoom hangouts soon petered out, and I returned to cooking my usual 20 minute weeknight meals. Stuck in a new apartment, in a new city, without a car (I can't even drive so this is actually moot tbh) my world quietly shrunk to the 600 odd square feet of hastily, partially furnished space I could call my own (now shared with a sibling) and a few blocks in either direction. I wore the same clothes, called the same people, walked the same walk, shopped at the same Shoppers, made the same complaints and wallowed in the same worries, and then I woke up and I did it all over again.

And then I decided that it was time for something new, and I've been searching for newness ever since. A "resurfacing" night cream that promised to make my skin brighter. A houndstooth blazer from an online vintage store that fit like it was tailored for me. A monstera plant that unfurled leaf after leaf under my distracted care before I finally succeeded in killing it. A bluetooth speaker to fill my home with the sound of qawwalis my dad taught me to love. The boxes would arrive days, sometimes weeks after I make the actual purchase, feeling more like a gift from an unknown benefactor than something I furtively paid for. I used to dislike online shopping for its delayed gratification, but soon began to covet it for exactly that reason, like the steady cadence of a few minutes of excitement made me feel like I was accomplishing the impossible task of feeling an emotion. A cheap rug. An expensive sofa. Baking equipment. Painting equipment. Exercise equipment. Books about best friendship, books about love, about a dying earth and dying mothers, set in Syria and Detroit, Naples and Busan, some devoured, some discarded, all read in hot pursuit of staving off how utterly dead I felt on the inside. Each box that landed on my doorstep neatly filled a hole in my life, a void that never seemed to shrink.

It felt reckless and frivolous—childish even—to allow myself to keep getting things that would make me happy. It contradicted everything I wanted to believe about myself: that I was unaffected by anything money could buy, able to achieve complete inner peace by simply "thinking good thoughts", and minimalist to my core. How positively pathetic of me, I'd think, to need a "thing" or an "item" to be able to feel happiness. Even as I searched within myself for gratitude at my good fortune, my good health, I often came up empty, and the answers to all my questions seemed for lie, for however brief a moment, in whatever Instagram thought I should buy that week, silently delivered in recyclable packaging, with a return label and a promise of brief delight.

Most people my age, my peers haven't lived through an event as seismic as this. The idea that life being irreversibly changed even after this, that it already has changed feels alien to me, a square peg trying to jam itself into the round hold where my brain used to be. Life as it used to be feels right around the corner, just a week away, just a month away, just a season away, and soon, I tell myself, I will get back the normalcy of buying four americanos in three hours to keep my internet access at the cafe I've been working at, the fun in an afternoon spent mindlessly window shopping, the stupid joy in dancing the night away in a sweet and sticky club, the relief in resting my head against the shoulder of a friend, the discomfort of getting on the subway at rush hour, the ordeal of a 15 hour flight home to see my little sister.

I lost family members this year, and I spend my weekends flitting between my numb grief and a website that sells silk pyjama sets. Sometimes, I don't speak to my father for days, afraid that he might see right through my false cheer. Sending him pictures of the first snow, my meals and paintings seems enough to me. Lately I've been waking up from dreams that range from bad to fully qualified nightmares about my mom's health. I haven't seen her in nineteen months. I ruminate over where I want to live, if I want children, who I want them with, new questions that have cropped up and firmly planted themselves on my brain. I find myself rejecting the companionship of the friends on my phone. I want them here in Toronto, so we can laugh at the past, and marvel at the present, our warm bodies pressed against one another. And I crave the thrill of deep conversation with new people who remain interesting to me for only as long as I know nothing about them. Loneliness seems to run like a thread throughout everyone's twenties, I suppose, and I'm unable to tease out where the disorientation of being 24 ends and the isolation of living in a pandemic begins. But tangled up, they are stronger together and frighten me everyday, and I surround myself with boxes and yet more boxes to ward them off.

[elegant-etienne]

3. [I] trusted [you]

Send me a number to receive a micro story!

Thank you for the ask, @maybeimawhale​!

(This song is what always comes to mind when I see the word ‘Trusted.’ And I think a lot about how I used to relate to this song, in the wake of a really bad break-up, but now that I’m older, I have to wonder if the narrator of the song is being at all reasonable. I also find it helpful, when revisiting subjects I’ve written before, to twist around the perspective a bit, and give myself permission, without naming the character in this piece, to treat Etienne’s ex-husband as a NPC, and admit to myself a lot of my own character’s faults from the outside.)

BEHIND THE CUT: Descriptions of a toxic marriage, substance abuse and addiction, suicidal ideation and an attempt, allusions to past abuse and PTSD, and very inaccurate TBH but this is more or less how I remember it going down descriptors of someone having a “split personality,” and some light misgendering of Etienne (they ID’ed as male when they met their ex-husband, and at the time of their wedding).

Also I am sorry for any errors, I can’t go back and fix them after the initial post or it’ll break the formatting on the post.

insp. Ben Folds - Trusted

It's funny I know But I'm disappointed in you I thought you could read my mind

Your husband - your spouse Etienne is doing better after the time away. Actually, the time when they was sleeping in the recovery wing - three sennights - is among the best you two have had. A few hours of visitation, and they're affectionate and loving and missing you. Even a rare smile, and they show you where the stitches came out. A bell or two isn't enough time to get worked into a fervor about things and restart the same fights you've been having for moons.

When they return, Etienne has warmth in their cheeks again. They're gaining weight again. They don't smile, but they've always been quiet about that sort of thing. They've missed you. They've missed you so much. They look more like they did on your wedding day, that reserved, understated glow. They look like the Etienne you married.

(In those moments when you thought you could still be one person successfully. In those moments when they thought they'd killed the other you. In those moments when they stood at you at the altar, teary-eyed but happy, so happy.)

"Welcome home, Etie," you say with your brightest grin.

"I'll be better this time. I promise. I'll never do that again."

You laugh and embrace. You're both so relieved.

But I came home early And saw that a drawer'd been opened Looks like you've been reading my diary instead

After a long shift in Medica, all you want to do is come home and take a bath. Etienne seems to have other ideas, however. They're seated at the desk. They're glaring at you. They hold up your notebook - the one with all the reports.

"So this is what you've been doing at night while I'm gone? Forbidden research and magic? I thought we talked about this! It's too dangerous, after the last time. What if it goes too far?"

"There was no one else who could do it. It had to be me." You've never raised your voice to Etienne. Not once. Sometimes, you've cried while you're fighting. Etienne has shouted before. Twice. It frightened you.

(They wanted to kill the other half of you.)

"What if something had happened to you while I was in care? I wouldn't have known where you were. And what if there had been an emergency at the FC? Folk need you. I need you. And you promised..." Etienne bows their head, sucking in sharp breaths to try and stop the crying.

"You have no business going through my notes. There could have been patient information in there!"

"...You were acting strangely. You were hurt. You weren't telling me things. You broke your promise." The tears have been withdrawn, all that's left is dead, blank sullenness from Etienne.

"I had no other choice."

"Did you even try to stop and think of one?"

"There wasn't time. Percy and--"

"Percy?!" There it is, the raised voice, a burst of life, a flame in their eyes. "I knew it. I knew he and you--"

"It was work--"

"--Have something going on, you told me it was nothing, you told me you weren't seeing him when I wasn't around-- While I was in the bloody hospital from trying to kill myself because I can't stand this, and you wouldn't leave me alone, you wouldn't just give me the space, and now the moment you have you're running around--" Etienne always gets like this. A million words a moment. Each a pointed attack, an accusation. When Etienne gets this way, you can't do anything right.

"--It's only work--!"

"Maybe I shouldn't have come back. Maybe Rosa was right, it's too soon, we're not ready." Etienne straights their posture, scrubbing at their eyes with the heels of their hands. "I drew you a bath. I'm going to bed."

How does it feel to realize You're all alone behind your eyes?

The bath is strewn with rose petals, the candles burned down hours ago. It's dark and cool in the bedroom off the heat of the bath. Your spouse is bunched up in one corner of the bed. "I love you, you know," you speak to the dark. To Etienne's back.

"I love you too," Etienne says, but doesn't turn around. “...Be honest. Did you fuck him?”

“No, it’s not like that. He found this... it was like a cursed circus, full of twisted creatures, he needed cleansing spells, he was able to show me ways to amplify my power...”

(He knows about the other you.)

"It's alright if you did," Etienne says, malms away in the same bed. Did they even hear your explanation? "If you want to, just tell me. We can figure out an arrangement, a lot of married couples do, just don't lie to me. Don't lie."

"It's not like that."

It seems to me if you can't trust You can't be trusted

You wait to hear the soft wheeze of Etienne's snores, but you drift off before they do. Somehow. In the middle of the night, it's a repeat of others. This hasn't changed with the time in care ward, apparently. Etienne sits up and starts screaming, won't be held, won't be comforted. 3AM in the morning and your spouse is in the corner, knees to chest, rocking. They start rooting around, too, when you pretend to sleep. They won't find anything. You poured all the liquor out sennights ago -- even the things in the back of the icebox and at the top of the bookshelf.

Caught in a dream Picking up astral signals Some of them psychic, you better watch what you think

You come home to Etienne sitting in front of their vanity. You see the shimmer of a deactivated glamour prism. There are tears in their eyes, but you don't know why. They slip the plate into a drawer somewhere, and you do not ask more about it.

"I got more of the sedative. To help you with sleeping. So you don't have to drink." It's never difficult to cadge a little bit of medicine on the side for loved ones when it's needed - such are the benefits of being one of the heads of Medica. No one has to ask any questions. Etienne doesn't have to get upset or embarrassed at exposing their problems to anyone they don't trust. Rosa doesn't have to put her foot down and force Etienne to stay in the care ward, away from you. It's win-win.

Something flits across Etienne's face - suspicion, mayhap, and they say-- "I'm going to try and handle it. I'm. I don't know if it's a good idea for you to keep giving me that stuff."

"The sedative's non-habit-forming. It's better than alcohol, at least."

"I still shouldn't turn to something every time I'm distressed. It scares me. Depending on that."

"Then at least talk to me about what's bothering you."

Etienne looks at you through the mirror, not turning around. "It's not anything distinct. It's. Hands. Being pulled down into darkness. Being pinned down. Being unable to escape. Sometimes it's so real I feel it, getting slammed into a wall or onto the icy ground... and no matter how I struggle, I can't get free. So I start screaming."

"Etie..."

"Well, whatever. Everyone's got their shite." You hate this. How they mutter and retreat into themselves. They fold up into themselves and they don't come back.

(Your nightmares are of fire, of the Calamity. Lost in the woods, mother and father are gone, you can't find your brother's hand--)

Etienne shuffles resentfully into the silence. "Are you willing to tell me what you did on that mission?"

"Are you promising not to get angry when I tell you the  details?"

Etienne lifts their chin. "I'll decide that when you tell me."

(You tell them. You don't tell them all of it. You don't tell them he's back.)

Happens to be that everybody else's dreams are Freudian clues You better watch what you dream

A few suns later, Etienne makes breakfast for you. That pink ruffly apron, but there's no singing this morning: just the sizzling pan. "Do you remember anything at all about last night?" they ask, plating up the little fish with fresh, fluffy rice. They loved that Doman cooking book you got them.

"Um..."

Etienne pours you scalding hot green tea. "I went looking for you. I gave that friend of yours quite a scare. I think maybe he thought I'd burn him alive." Etienne snorts. "I just made his tea boil a bit. When he told me the truth of what you two have been up to."

"Why would you--"

"Then I found you in the Quicksand. Chatting up someone else. Are you cheating on us both, darling?"

Your head's spinning as you try to braid the threads of last night back together. "That wasn't me--"

"No, it wasn't. I brought him back here. He was as awful to me as ever." Etienne accuses with swordlike jabs. "If he's back," they say, "Why did we do any of it? The ritual? I almost lost you then! Why did you make me do any of that if he was just going to come back?"

(Your head hurts.)

"You shouldn't have gone through my things," you hiss out. "There are things that you are better off not knowing!"

"Oh, like the fact you and that boy have a magical connection? Unlike anything either of you has ever experienced? And how you - the other you - is the most brilliant mind he's ever known? It's just like I said. Remember that? You said nothing was happening, but he's totally in love with you."

"It isn't like that."

"Tell that to him, then."

(Etienne never listens.)

"Even if there's something going on - it - it isn't with me and him, it's--"

"The other one. I know. The other one who threatened to kill me."

"He was just testing you."

"And that makes it better?"

"He's lashing out because you tried to destroy him."

"He started it. You said the ritual would fix you," Etienne rasps out a whisper. "I can't believe this. I can't believe we did all that and... I'm dragging someone wearing the body of my husband out of a seedy tavern. I looked like such a fool. I thought we fixed this."

"Maybe," you feel your voice dropping to a growl, "I never needed to be fixed."

You want to see the other side What's going on behind the eyes

(Last winter, you came out of a fog to Etienne staring at you, withdrawn into a calmly blank expression, their posture stiff.

"Why," they ask you, "Did you just threaten to murder me?"

You said, groggily, "What?"

And you explained it all. The splitting.

"How am I supposed to feel safe around you when there's - there's something inside you that wants to kill me?" Etienne asks, too steadily. "He knows everything about me that I've told you. He knows what I'm afraid of. This is a problem." They say, and they speak your name urgently.

"I'm sorry if I scared you, if - if he did."

"Oh, I wasn't scared," Etienne says, quietly and intensely. "I'm used to being around men who'd just as soon slit my throat as fuck me. Or one and then the other, with no particular preference of the order. I just didn't realize you were one of them.")

Still it seems if you can't trust You can't be trusted

Here is one of the fights you've had more than once: your friend thought of a way to get rid of the other personality. Put him into another body.

"So we'd just take the body of someone who - what? Even if you found a willing subject, that would be killing someone." Etienne pulls their knees up to their chest, the water rippling. You're sitting at the edge of the bath. They seem to want to melt into the steam wafting off the surface. It makes them dewy. You're not sure if they're crying or not.

"No," you tell them, "We could put him into another body where the spirit had already returned to the Lifestream."

"That's necromancy. I won't do necromancy."

"We may have no other option."

"If you mess with corpses, you really won't have control over what ends up in there. You could be inviting something very, very bad in. You know that, don't you? What you're talking about is defiling the dead. It's a sin. It's a defiance of Nald'Thal's balance. It's a perversion of everything I believe. You know that. You shouldn't do it. Don't ask me to do it!"

"What if we have no other choice?"

Etienne stands up in the water, then, thinking to get out. They shout, "I can't do it! Don't ask me!" Their voice echoes and buzzes in the small space of the bath. The water ripples as they sink back down into it. They let the water bury them like a comfort blanket. "I'm - I'm sorry. Please just go away," they say in a tiny voice. "Let me think."

"I'll be outside."

Didn't you know we're as close as we can be?

In the end, what else could you do? Etienne didn't trust you to handle the situation. Etienne wouldn't participate in the most obviously effective ritual. Etienne was angry at you when the first attempt didn't work as planned. Etienne was an unstable, suicidal, dangerously alcoholic. It hadn't taken much time at all after the hospitalization for them to fall back on old ways.

They couldn't be trusted.

On the day you left to do it, you kissed their forehead, tucked the blankets all around them, and put strong wards on the doors after emptying another round of hidden bottles.

The sun's coming up She's pulled all the blankets over Curled in a ball Like she's hiding from me and That's when I know

Their voice comes over the linkpearl. There's a danger to it. "Why are there wards on the door, what are these?"

"It's the only way to keep you from drinking when I can't be there," you explain calmly.

Etienne sucks in a breath, and you brace for yelling. "You can't just lock me in here," they whisper. "I'm a person. I'm an adult. You have to let me out."

"I have somewhere to be for a few suns. You've food in there. You'll be alright. Sober up."

"Can't you call someone to come check on me? Rosa, or someone? Please, I can't - don't leave me here alone."

"I'm sorry, it was my only option. This can't wait."

She's gonna be pissed when she wakes up For terrible things I did to her in her dreams

The apartment is in poor shape when you return. It seems at several points Etienne attempted to magic the doorway and scorched the rug - or the levin sparked and started a fire - and they also attempted sheer brute force. One of the charming little kitchen chairs is splintered. But the Etienne you find is more like the Etienne you married. Ducking their head shyly, saying, "I'm really sorry... I'm sorry I relapsed, I'm weak."

"I'm sorry I had to do that," you say. The two of you hug desperately.

(You're sorry you had to do all of it.)

You want to see the other side What's going on behind the eyes

(You're sorry the first ritual failed. The softness and patience Etienne showed you then, when you were recovering, when you didn't remember them - they were just as sweet as they'd been when you first got married. When you first started dating. Before everything got so bad.)

Still it seems if you can't trust You can't be trusted

The night Etienne tried to kill themselves, you had a fight. It was about all those nights you went out, not telling them where you were going. "I can't keep doing this," Etienne said to you, staring up at the statue of Nald'thal in the Ossuary. "I can't." They speak your name with such quiet urgency. "I need time to think."

"Please," you beg, your eyes stinging. "Don't leave me." You grab their arm. They try to jerk away from the touch.

Their voice echoes loud in the Ossuary. "Don't bloody touch me when I’m upset! Please!"

You hold onto their arm harder. Their arm is so thin. They're slipping away from you. "Please don't leave, please don't be angry. Please...!"

"I'm not -- I'm not -- I just..."

You're sobbing.

"I'm sorry, darling," Etienne says, gently touching your face, your hair, "Let's go home."

You have a long conversation-argument at the apartment. You explain why the work is essential. They beg you to promise not to do things that put you in danger. You tell them you'll do your best. You don't like doing things that upset them, after all.

"I don't know what's wrong with me,” Etienne murmurs. “I feel hounded, I can't sleep. You're always so busy. Since the ritual and... since that... incident with Henri..."

"Are you guilty? Because of what happened?"

"I honestly just want to be alone," Etienne says. They are sitting at the desk about a yalm from you, but they're malms away. "So much has happened the last few moons. I need to figure it out."

"Do you mean traveling? I can't right now, with work -- and I don't know if it's a good idea for you to be on your own. I don't think you're alright on your own right now."

"True," Etienne says, lowering their head. They shuffle around in the desk, and your feel your face heat. Another bottle? Etienne whispers something, "You won't let me go," mayhap, and then. The letter opener.

Thank the Twelve you're a healer. Thank the Twelve you had the sedative. They beg you for it that night, after you stop the bleeding. They can’t sleep and they’re half mad, crying and ranting. And you take them to your co-worker Rosa in the morning. She takes Etienne away from you. Says they need to rest and recover under direct supervision. Etienne doesn't even want to see you at first, or perhaps it's that Rosa won't let you near them. She's the one who stipulated only short visits while Etienne recovers. She only lets you back after Etienne sleeps for two suns straight.

Didn't you know we're as close as we can be?

You remember the day you fell in love with Etienne. You both were sitting at the Quicksand. You had tea, they had orange juice, and another man sat down between you two at the table and made himself welcome. He asked you why you stuttered.

"While on the subject of questions, why are you so bloody rude?" Etienne asked. They said to you, "You don't have to answer that." And you smiled, feeling sunshine radiating out of every pore.

"I'm not the sort of man for relationships," Etienne said, later, as you walked down the streets of Ul'dah, over to the steps of the Ossuary. You offered to escort them to work, as though they needed it. "I've been through a lot. I don't even know if I can love anyone - it all seems like kind of a fool's errand, honestly. Men are... I've just met so many, many awful men."

You took their hand, and they look at you, surprised. "I can be patient," you promised them, "I can wait. I think you're worth it. I think you're worth trying for. I've never met anyone like you."

"Well, thank you, I suppose," Etienne says, their lips twisting as they hold back skeptical laughter. "Let’s promise one another, though - let’s be honest with one another about how this going. If someone else catches your fancy, or I do something you don't like, please just tell me. You wouldn't believe how many times I got hauled out of a nobleman's bed by a surprised wife. As if it's my fault their marriage is falling apart! I don't want anything like that, alright? No silly secrets!”

"Promise."

“Not that I imagine we'll get married. I'm really not the type." Etienne laughs at the sky. “What am I doing?!”

Hello.