#*and* i have an engagement during the re-takes so i'm absolutely fucked

[daily-basil]

Basil misread the deadline for his fucking final exam

and a shitty stranger doodle because i'd feel bad seding in just that

[qqueenofhades]

It's definitely a refusal to engage with or truly understand politics. I'm 24, I was in middle school during Obama's second term and 17 in 2016, and I feel like a lot of my peers just continue to be appalled at how bad things have gotten with the Republicans and why Democrats can't do anything to stop it. What's missing from their understanding is how long it took for the Republicans to get here. It didn't start in 2016. They worked for decades to do all the nightmarish shit they're doing now, and Democrats just haven't been able to do the same (because people refuse to vote consistently and give them the power to do those things). I feel like that's where the "both sides are the same" bullshit comes from - the idea that if the Dems wanted to stop the GOP, they would. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how anything works, and often relies on downplaying how bad the Republicans actually are in order to support their 'Dems are just as bad' stance.

Things did get catastrophically worse when Trump was elected, and he broke things way more than they ever had been, but he doesn't exist in a vacuum and it took the Republicans a lot of fucking work for him to do what he did. The only way the Dems can counteract that is by having a party of people willing to put in a similar level of work, and that requires understanding our structures and how things work (executive orders are only temporary fixes and actual legislation takes time, compromise, and work), and a lot of these people just aren't willing to do it.

The thing is, yes, I absolutely do get the feeling that everything is terrible and we are doomed. I went through it when GWB was re-elected in 2004 and then again in 2008, worrying about whether Obama would get elected and end that particular run of Republican-induced misery (when John McCain looks like a fucking saint compared to the GOP candidates we are being offered now), and obviously plumbed the depths of despair in 2016 with Trump. But I don't remember ever thinking that I should just give up trying, stop voting, or any of that, and I don't think it was because I was some kind of special person who was just so tenacious. I obviously have not been a teenager in the present era and yes, that means I have different views on things from the next generation, but also: this has always happened. Moments of total political despair and feeling that everything is fucked are also not a new thing. We are going through it with Trumpism, the previous generation went through it with Reagan/Thatcher, the previous previous generation went through it with Nixon/Vietnam, the previous etc generation went through it with the Cold War, the previous etc. etc. generation went through it with World War II -- and so forth. There has never been any one point when everything was great and there was no work left to be done, because, y'know. That is not how either history or human nature works.

Hence, that is why I'm trying to figure out what in the fuck is going on right now, and whether it's just social media that have made things so bad (entirely possible). Critical thinking is a shambles, yes, but that's not necessarily something young people have chosen for themselves. The current world is a late-stage capitalist dystopia run by four or five trillionaire oligarch cartels and corporations, and obviously public education, basic civic responsibility, the teaching of any "controversial" history, and everything else that might threaten that setup has been systematically and methodically dismantled, politicized, or so infiltrated with false information that it's basically useless. That in itself is not young people's fault. They have genuinely been dealt a terrible hand in many ways, and I don't blame them for being angry about it. I too am angry about it! I do question, however, when the overwhelming sentiment became "well we should just give up and let the bad guys win, either because it's too much work to change it or because that will spark the Great Revolution and that's the only way to fix things ever, and doing anything else at all in the meantime is wrong."

Once again: I do not blame young people for being angry at the shitty situation they are currently facing. I do not blame young people for being disillusioned with the system and thinking that it can't solve everything at once. But yet again: there has never been any government, country, or organization in the history of ever anything everywhere that was able to do that, and the ones that tried, or insisted that they could do it, were infamously murderous bloodbaths, because breaking society (even with all its flaws) into a thousand pieces and thinking this will make My Preferred Ideological Utopia Now Appear is probably the deadliest belief in all of time and space. The world is flawed and has been for all time because humans are flawed and probably will be for all time. Being a grownup requires coming to an understanding of that fact and seeing what you can do in spite of that. People in every era have had gaps and biases and blind spots and other things that hobbled their understanding or made their efforts for change less perfect or complete than they would have wanted in an ideal world, and they have had to move past those anyway. The current generation is no different. Not to sound like a boomer, but even despite the mess they've been faced with, they need to figure out how to engage with it anyway and not just completely absolve responsibility because they can't fix it all at once. Which I don't think most young people do! There are plenty of them who really do get it and are engaged and idealistic and working for good change, and that's great! It's just the other part that worries me, and which is not as small as we would like to think.

And yes, part of this is just flat-out bad information and the stubborn lack of any desire to change it if it conflicts with pre-existing beliefs. (This is by no means exclusive to young people of this current generation, as it's another bad habit of humanity, but yes.) In the aforementioned "you're driving young leftists away :(" ask I got yesterday, there were also plenty of dubious and just-flat-wrong claims, such as that Democrats keep moving to the right "especially economically." That is just not true. In the last four years, the Democrats have moved the most economically leftward in all of American history and have finally and flatly rejected the Great Reagonomics Myth. Just because Clinton did Reagonomics-lite in the '90s (when most of the current generation of Online Leftists weren't even born), that is thirty years ago and in wildly different circumstances. These things are not difficult to look up. Do it. Try to educate yourself, even if the system doesn't want to do it. You can't just throw up your hands and insist that nobody taught you, so how could you know??? Put that "instant access to all of human history and knowledge" to use, even just a little. It'll be good for you!

Likewise, there was also the anon's befuddling insistence that I was "patronizing" or "shaming" anyone "further left than Biden," which reflects their apparent feeling that telling people to vote for Biden is a "personal attack" on their cherished beliefs, or whatever. I'm unsure how many times we have to keep repeating that voting for a candidate does not mean you are canonizing all their beliefs exactly as your own, and that it's just one tool to do the bare minimum to not live in a fucking fascist theocratic dictatorship, but yeah. I can guarantee you that I personally am well left of Biden. I can guarantee you that most people on Tumblr voting for Biden are probably well left of him as well. That does not negate the fact that Biden is the most progressive president America has ever had, regardless of how much Online Leftists shriek otherwise. It also does not negate the fact that this is by no means true of America as a whole (witness the large faction that still thinks Biden is a godless far-left evil socialist). It does not negate the many complex historical, political, social, cultural, religious, racial, etc reasons that have collided to produce the America where this is the case. Therefore, if I do not want to live in a society ruled by Trump and his orange Nazi minions, which is the case due to how badly the last 10 years have been fucked up, I will use the tool of voting for Biden! He can be successfully pressured to create positive change in the direction that I would like! Trump cannot and will not under any circumstances, regardless of the wild fantasies that suddenly he will transform into a perfect progressive on Gaza or whatever other issue! THIS IS NOT THAT FUCKING DIFFICULT!!!!!!!

Anyway. All of this is obviously complicated. Obviously things are bad and frightening and we want a solution that fixes all of it at once, instead of slowly, badly, and piecemeal. But as I said: that has never, not once, been the case in all of history, and we know what happens when people and/or governments with delusions of psychopathic grandeur try to do it. We do not want the "Final Solution" (which is infamous as what Hitler literally called the Holocaust). We do, in fact, want the careful step by step, we want things to get better and not just explode in a mountain of nihilistic doom, and that does take work, from everyone. So unfortunately, there is no real choice except to do it.

[waitmyturtles]

Geeeeez -- whoa. Did that ever take some twists and turns. I Feel You Linger in the Air, episode 9: I don't think this can be meta, since I'm still sorting through my thoughts, but I'll try.

I mean, I'm shook by the end, and I don't want to jump here, but I think I have to: Jom realizes that his fate follows him. Is this a Buddhist reincarnation analogy? His lovers leave him to enter traditional/heteronormative relationships, both of them out of obligation and not out of want (or at least, that's how I'm reading Ohm's decision at the start of the series).

And so: Jom strolls onto the scene during the engagement celebration to fuck a lil' shit up? Damn. As @shortpplfedup said to me in post-ep discussion: in that moment, as Jom interrupts the dinner, are we seeing Jom realizing that he has "nothing to lose"?

Jom learns through Ming that Eaeung Phueng was caught having an affair with Maey. Fong Kaew then comes to ask for help in saving Maey. And then Jom learns that Yai will be engaged.

Jom is putting two and two together: this is a family in which the parents are starving their children of the real affection that their children desire. BOTH OF THEIR KIDS. Both of their kids are gay. BOTH OF THEIR KIDS are potential embarrassments. Their parents will NOT let their kids lead the lives they want. As much as Yai will talk to his father about the life that YAI wants to lead: his father's power will always win out, and his mother WILL go along with what his father says. This is not a family that will allow the heteronormative paradigm to change. And we are reminded, constantly, that Yai's father's career very much hinges on his children following a literally straight path.

(Let me just fucking say that rewatching Bad Buddy right now is NOT HELPING MY FEELINGS towards BAD ASIAN PARENTS at this moment, lol help me.)

Anyway, I thought an interesting parallel to all of this was Pat's shooter's James's encounter with Robert (uhhhh, wtf James, just strolling into the servants' holding area, huh? I was like, what are YOU doing here, lol.) James sits Robert down to tell him: homeboy, you gotta focus on work. And Robert's like, nah dude, too much shit's going down at home. And James is like, bruv, what do you care more about? You are going to let your work go, and let your reputation go, because you're not concentrating enough on your job? Don't mess this shit up because of the house stuff.

I am absolutely, 100% like this sideeye (-_-) re: James -- I question his motives, because we have no idea what his priorities are, and Robert says as much.

But it's interesting that we got this parallel -- one side from within Yai's family, and another side from two foreigners, both saying that family life can be enough of a distraction to take down careers. This threat transcends Thai culture, as James's and Robert's backgrounds indicate. And that the struggle that these entities have is in making REALLY SURE that the family lives are as calm and copacetic as possible so as to NOT risk the careers of anyone involved.

Saving face, anyone? The effort to save face in these instances could VERY well cost a life or lives, and I think we know that Jom knows that as he begins to embark on his risky show at the end of the episode.

He may be trying to leverage his modern perspective on LGBTQ+ equality, because -- he sees his own fate repeating itself from past to present, and vice versa. If we take the Buddhist analogy further: is this a change he needs to make in a past (or future?) life in order to stop the cycle of repeating fates in his lives?

It might be. I don't know. We could call it a clown theory, but director Tee Bundit has referred to "dimensions" in the IFYLITA behind-the-scenes videos, so I'm really not sure. But we can safely assume that Buddhist practices infuse this show (remember the encounter with the side-eye monk in the last episode), so... reincarnation is a directional possibility.

All of this to be said. As Jom's fate repeats itself, I'll also note that certain Asian cultural practices like saving face also repeat themselves (...... can't believe I'm infusing almost all of my writing with Bad Buddy these days, but alas -- Bad Buddy shows that saving face in Asian societies is well and thriving in our modern times).

And maybe this is a theme of IFYLITA -- repetition. Of Jom's fate, yes. Of saving face, yes. Of prioritizing work and reputation over a family's happiness, yes. Traditions and behaviors that get inherited and passed down through families and societies, generation after generation.

And Jom arrives on the scene to change the paradigm. We don't know what risks he and/or Yai (AND EP, AND Maey) will face, but he's about to change some shit, and we'll see what that fall-out will look like.

[maintitle]

Weird thing, and I'm not sure if it's age or what, but as I get older I'm finding that my favorite kinds of games stress me out a bit. For example, I've been going kind of slow through BG3, which is odd because when I was young I would've beaten that in a weekend.

The reason for it is partially because I find the combat difficult (it's easier than the first game, a game I never beat despite really loving it), but mostly it's because I think I've replayed these kinds of games so much that I obsess with perfection. The main drive for me is maximizing content and approval with my companions and trying to get as many side quests in as possible, and I think that stresses me out in games where that either takes a lot of time (BG3) or that have long stretches of nothingness between those things (DA:I). That stress doesn't extend to older games, but I think that's largely because I know every corner of them at this point.

Weird thing is, I don't think this is a bad thing, especially in the context of BG3. I stress out about these details because I WANT to engage in the game as much as possible. And yes, I should really ease off because that stress ruins some of the randomness of choices in a first playthrough, but I still don't think wanting to do well by companions in the first playthrough is at all a negative from that experience. Outside of literally one situation (I repeated the Isobel kidnapping until I succeeded on it, largely because I was fucking pissed off that I could easily win the scenario but kept rolling ridiculously low. THAT was stubborness.) I let my rolls determine the plot and don't try to minmax things... but I WILL fight for high rolls with companions. I WANT to get to know them, so going through a new game can sometimes be stressful because the appeal of the game is getting to know these characters.

Still, I do think the stress of that interferes a bit with my experience. My first ever run of the Mass Effect series saw me play the third installment without Garrus, because I played ME2 about six months before ME3 came out and I just never thought to check if he could be saved until I realized during ME3 that there was footage of him ABSOLUTELY being in the game. THAT was a unique experience, so I should want to re-experience it, right? Well... Inquisition taught me different.

I like Inquisition. I liked it at release... but I was also in a really tough place in my life at release. I had just had life changing surgery, and I was sleepwalking through life for a really long time after it. I had to come to terms with my mortality at a very early age, and I didn't quite realize through the trauma yet that I now had a disability. The surgery took so much out of me that I played DA:I for the first time and I just didn't do a good job engaging with it. My girlfriend at the time REALLY wanted me to engage in it, so I did it, and my large reaction to it was pretty much 'oh, cool' and moving on. I was too out of it to truly engage and enjoy the experience.

I replayed it in 2020 and it was a TOTALLY different experience. I dumped a lot of time into it, and while the game has some pretty glaring flaws (fucking hell the world is so empty and so few of the quests in it actually matter), but despite that I think it's really, REALLY fantastic. But that experience taught me that I WANTED to put my best foot forward into a new game in this kind of genre... and I think that's the source of the stress. I was ambivalent to a fantastic game because of general malaise, and I DON'T want that to happen again, so I'm being a perfectionist trying to get everything right with the companions and that slows me down A LOT. Like, I have 69 (nice) hours in the game according to my save file, but I have 86 hours in it according to my PS5. Now, a lot of those hours are me fucking around with character creation in order to make my ten thousand D&D characters, but still, that's a lot of reloading.

But the end point here is, I think it may have enhanced my experience of the game. While it's deprived me of some UNIQUE experiences, it's also made me deeply care about the game, and I think that vastly outstretches what I've lost from it. It's kind of special to immediately care about a game so much you engage in this kind of behaviour, and I can't honestly say that's anything but a positive. And I am ABSOLUTELY sure the same with be true of Dread Wolf, and while that's a bit stressful as well, I greatly look forward to that stress, because that stress is part of what makes this mini-genre appealing to me. It's never been the overall plot or even the world, it's all about the characters, their stories and themes and how you relate to them. That's the heart of the genre, and I'll be damned if I'm not gonna work my ass off to see their best sides.

[debbiechanclub]

AO3 is down so I finally finished reading over here. I take my time, sorry. So Finlay is endgame huh? Nellie and David make sense. She seems more secure with him than the others. David just knows what he wants so I'm glad she finally found herself a real man that's gonna lock it down. Jay missed out and I hope it's killing him that she's with David. Now Riley...he really can't do anything right. Kissing her when she was sad and drunk was a big no-no. Nellie stepping over his stuff was SAVAGE. I'm already rooting for evil Nellie 😈

No worries!!! Thank you SO much for reading and taking your time to send this. I know AO3 is down, but I've been thinking in the back of my head that people haven't said much to me about this fic because they lowkey hate what I've done 😅 So this means a lot to me. But yes, David is endgame. And while I'm not gonna sit here and lie that my own personal bias toward him had absolutely nothing to do with that decision, a lot of thought actually went into it. And since you sent this ask, I'm gonna go through and explain individually why all of Nellie's other love interests just weren't it for anyone who may be wondering! (And reveal just how different things could have turned out 😅)

Okay so first up: Jay. There was a point in time where Jay was endgame. You remember that teaser scene I posted where someone is reluctantly congratulating Nellie for being engaged? Jay put the ring there (and Zack was the person speaking). And to be perfectly honest, if I had finished this fic before Jay lost the IWGP title and left NJPW for real, he probably would have remained endgame. But then he left, and I started thinking about how Nellie's whole life is in Japan, and how her career would really just be starting to take off right around when Jay left. And then I started thinking about how he really didn't treat her that well at all, and I realized her taking him back would have looked so spineless. And so I started looking elsewhere for Nellie's endgame.

Now, I still have to write Jay's arc, and there's still some stuff going on between him and Nellie in that. But she's definitely going to keep him at arm's length, and he's going to lowkey try to sabotage her getting together with David (which I alluded to a bit in the first flashback scene). So Jay and Nellie's story definitely isn't done as written yet.

Next up: Kyle. Like Jay, there was a (brief) moment in time where Kyle was endgame! HOWEVER. I base my fics as much in reality as possible re: schedules and real storylines/fueds, etc. And after Kyle and Nellie hookup in fall 2021, based on Kyle's actual schedule (as detailed on Cagematch; I fucking live on that site) and what I had in mind for Nellie, they don't see each other again for a whole ass year. And by the time they do see each other again, Nellie is already in the process of reconnecting with David. (Yes, reconnecting! They go on a date wayyy back in 2017 during Nellie's first trip to Japan, which I also have plans to write about.) And actually, Kyle plays a part in Nellie realizing she has feelings for David—which is yet another thing I plan to write about. (It might be a flashback scene in part 2, actually.)

But to sum up Kyle and Nellie: right person, wrong time. It really is kind of bittersweet. And I wrote a REALLY long scene establishing Kyle as endgame that I might just post as a bonus because I worked hard on it and like it and don't just want to scrap it.

Zack. There's honestly not much to say here. Zack and Nellie have hella chemistry, but they don't work as a couple (outside the bedroom 🤭). And that's basically the entire reason they don't get back together despite Zack being the only one of Nellie's love interests/exes who lives in Japan. He was never (seriously) considered to be an option for endgame (despite that Cruel Summer fic I wrote that I regret every time I remember it 🙃). I do plan on writing a bit about when they were together before they realized they weren't right for each other, though.

And last and maybe least. Riley. Riley was never endgame. (After the rewrite) He was never anything more than a casual ongoing hookup for Nellie before she got together with Zack. But like I've written, she has a soft spot for him because she pities him a bit, I think 😂 That being said, her stepping over his things on the way to the Bullet Club locker room was absolutely a deliberate choice on my part.

So yeah, there's my long-ass explainer, and I hope it helps anyone who may be thinking I just willy nilly threw Nellie together with David. And thank you again for reading and seeing my vision. It means more than you know 💖

[adelheidvonschicksal]

sorry about that ask, i'm so incredibly excited i'm shaking and i had to turn off my video i was listening to because i couldn't concentrate! anyway, i'd like to request JJK with megumi!/older-half sister who he only meets because she's getting engaged forcibly to naoya, i want him lusting at first sight and angstily pining a bit and them fucking in the her marital bed before the wedding while naoya off at his bachelor party or w/e. with creampie and the reader initiating the sex! is this okay?

Title: My Empire of Dirt

Pairing: Bro! Megumi x Sis! Reader; ft. Naoya x Niece(?)Reader; the family tree is a wreathe.

Content Warning: Graphic Incest (Half-sibling); angst; maladaptive coping; manipulation; smut; dubious consent; physical abuse; mentions of arranged marriage, breeding mentions; mentions of forced impregnation (no pregnancy);

Summary: In which, the Zen'in princess finds herself wanting to get even with not only the man forcing her into a marriage she doesn't want but also the family that abandoned her. It doesn't feel as good as she expected.

Notes: BTW! I loved the enthusiasm of this request xD I tried to fit as much in as possible. I had to re-write so often that I'm sure I missed something during editing.

It’s beginning to dawn on you that you may not be as good of a person as you’ve always thought of yourself. You try your best not to be a burden and to help where you can; you’ve left more bowls of milk out for the strays than you can count. When you compare that to the other members of your hedonistic bastard family then it’s easy to see how you managed to fool yourself into believing that you weren’t that bad.

Certainly, you aren’t as bad as your father, who left you behind at a young age. He knew. He knew how this clan functions. He knew that there would be no future for you here. Your only saving grace in this clan is only because of the potential of your womb. Surely, the chances of you bearing the next ten shadows user are exceptionally high, courtesy of the blood of the very same bastard flowing through your veins. You’re sure he knew that’s the only use the clan could have for a girl, barely a woman, like you. Still, Toji left you here to rot. And you’re certain you’re rotten all the way down to the core, just like everyone else that carries your last name.

That’s why it comes as no surprise to you that your uncle Naoya sought the quickest opportunity to snatch you up the minute the clan elder talked about marrying you off, or that he managed to orchestrate a wedding in less than a month; with a lovely venue provided at the school for your great clan with shared accommodations for you and your…husband.

It gives him the opportunity to shove you to the bed, one knee crumpled against your crotch as he pins you down, but you can’t find enough emotion to care. You accepted this a long time ago. “I hate that you and Maki always have that same condescending look. Can’t you at least show a little feeling?” he taunts. You’re sure he’s truly upset, unable to get a rise out of you as you thrust your hands against his chest in a desperate attempt to shove him away. “I absolutely can’t wait to make you cry.”

His tongue snakes along your bruised cheeks, and you strain your neck to get away from the perverse action, which only makes him laugh harder. “Get off of me, damned pig!”

Naoya smiles, absolutely amused by your frustration. “Fine, but don’t think you can keep up this defiant attitude forever,” he warns but you refuse to take his bait and focus on fixing your wrinkled clothes.

Huffing, you wrap your arm around the bedpost to keep yourself steady all the while controlling your breathing to allow your frustration to wash away. Naoya busies himself, speedily pacing around the room and collecting his things.

“Where are you going?” Your question isn’t out of concern for him. Simply, you question to figure out exactly how much peace you’d have for the night and how much hope to build up that he might never return from where he’s going.

“The men in the clan are throwing me a little party,” he explains. “Call it a last night of freedom.”

“Typical.” You don’t know why you thought he’d at least have the decency to pretend to be a good husband in public. “Don’t know why I expected any better.”

“Isn’t it normal to want to celebrate our impending marriage?” He turns to you and a slither of a hand crisscrossing over your thigh makes you want to hurl. “Unless you want me to stay. We can work on making our very own Megumi tonight.”

You cringe and jerk your body away from him, your filter breaking in the process. “You’re disgusting. A pathetic excuse for a man jealous of a boy half—” you didn’t get to finish your complaint as he shoved you to the floor and the sting of a kick makes you yelp like a dog.

“I see I still got to teach you some respect come tomorrow.”

Despite the burning in your ribs, you count yourself lucky that he only kicked you twice this time, and you slowly stand to your feet when you hear the angelic sound of your room door closing.

You throw on your jacket and a pair of jeans before following his example and leaving the room. You’re not sure how long you aimlessly wander the streets of Tokyo with no particular destination in mind. If you had somewhere to call home, then you probably would never return. Alas, the closest thing you can achieve to peace is being far away from your family.

“What are you doing out by yourself?” You guess you couldn’t escape all of them as you come face to face with your brother. “It isn’t safe to be out by yourself.”

And you notice how he shifts his gaze to a low-level curse blended into the surroundings of the city. It hides and chitters behind the light post. It’s nothing you consider more than the fireflies of cursed spirits, fluttering around human metro areas, and they’re about as equally as threatening as said bugs. But you guess in his eyes, you’re someone who needs protection, which you think you would have liked having someone to protect you at some point in your life but it’s about ten years too late and now unnecessary. 

“I don’t get to go out to the city much, and I guess I got a little lost,” you explain.

“I’m heading back now if you want to follow,” he offers to your surprise.

You didn’t expect him to offer since he hasn’t been able to build up the courage to talk to you very often. The day he first saw you even, you could see the shock spreading across his feature. You thought it was from seeing his estranged sister after all this time until you realize he had absolutely no idea who you were other than the Zen’in princess staying at the school for the next few days along with the other great clans attending the wedding. Figures for Toji not to mention you. You wonder if your father even remembers your name.

Then, you find that he’s often watching you, which garners the familiar sinking sensation inside you of being hunted. Luckily, he never attempted to do anything other than catch the little flickers of your image or to embarrassedly avoid your gaze when it met his. When you managed to talk to him, it was friendly, if not a little awkward. It didn’t take you long to figure out he’s attracted to you, at least sexually. If there was something more, you didn’t know since you weren’t versed in the world of genuine emotion aside from anger and deceit rampant in the Zen’in clan.

You wonder if his attraction is another reason Naoya is wary of you being alone with him. There’s no doubt the clan would much rather you try to produce an heir with Megumi, the potential rewards outweighing the risks of such a union. You almost laugh imagining how pissed off Naoya would look if your engagement switched over. He’d probably explode if he even knew you were talking to your brother. So, who can fault you for wanting to tease the situation a little bit? Maybe if you get lucky, Naoya will catch the two of you together as you walk past the neon lights of the bars and clubs, and you could gaslight him about it later.

It's like magic how easy it is to make the waterworks start, a sniffle then two swiped away by the long arm of your jacket. Megumi’s knuckles beat at the back of your hand, his fingertips nervously curling under yours before fluttering back to the safety of his side, too afraid to take the plunge to hold an engaged woman’s hand even if she’s crying. Even if the tiny pitter patters in his chest when he looked at her told him she deserved better than the obviously swollen cheek on your face. Megumi curses under his breath. He wants to tell you that you should run away from that family, don’t look back, burn the bridge so they can’t follow, but that’s easier said than done.

“It’ll be okay,” he says, knowing that it would never be enough, but the words are all he can offer right now. He hopes it is enough so you can at least find comfort when he finally breaks the resistance in his mind to hold your hand. You accept the action readily, making a shiver goes down his spine when you smile back and intertwine your fingers with his.

When you reach your room back at the school, he sits with you on your bed and places a gauze over your cheek to help with the swelling. Can’t let the Zen’in princess walk around with a wound on her face. You almost feel guilty for playing with him like this. He’s kinder than most people you’ve met. Then you remember, if he had grown up in the clan, he probably would’ve treated you the same as everyone else. He’d probably scrambled to marry you, just like Naoya.

You’re unashamedly jealous that he had the good fortune to be born a blessing, with a dad that chose him, leaving a part of you that wanted to spite Megumi as well. It’s a selfish desire but you deserve to have something. Megumi owes you that ever since your father married his mother and left the clan.

“I’ll get some ice.”

You grip his arm, drawing his attention back to you before he has a chance to get up. “What would I have to offer for you to take me away from this place,” you ask him. It’s always something you wanted to ask Toji; how many letters would it take for him to choose to rescue you, too. But now it’s too late as the only thing remaining for you is to scrape up as much fairness as you can from this world, even if it means doing it until your hands bleed.

“You know I can’t do that,” Megumi answers after what seems like an eternity, knowing now more than ever he shouldn’t be here, alone, with you. Weeping, you crane towards him, gripping the front of his shirt with both fists and dropping your head against his chest. You can sense him physically tensing at your touch, his heavy breathing echoing above you, and he’s a step awkward when he finally makes the decision to cup the back of your head in a short hug.

When you pull away, he’s searching for something you can’t quite understand, with an emotion you’ve never had the pleasure of knowing as you catch a highlight of sorrow flashing in his eyes. His thumb brushes away a fresh tear leaking from you. It invites the opportunity for you to give him what he’s probably been thinking about for a while now in the form of parted glossed covered skin and soft sighs. There’s a split moment of uncertainty before he gives in and kisses you back. You take the time to savor the moment, drawing it out to reel him further in with the taste of your lips and the flex of your tongues bumping together.

His hands tread around you, squeezing you into his strong hold. The tightness and desperateness at which he hangs onto you reveals that you might have had more influence over him than you originally realized, and you also find that you like his build much better than your fiancé’s, strong and muscular but not overbearing. Sweetly, you paint his neck with gentle kisses, and you test the waters of desire with a needy squeeze of his crotch.

The groan from his lips along with the arching of his hips up into your touch jolts your heart even if it’s the result you wanted. It’s almost perfect. You take the extra step to settle yourself onto his lap and lower your arms around his shoulders to play with the hair at his nape. “Naoya is never gentle, but you would be gentle with me, wouldn’t you, Fushiguro?”

Megumi swallows thickly to where you can see his Adam’s apple bob, and you can hear his throat is dry as he tries to collect and voice his thoughts with a harsh rasp. “…We shouldn’t,” he chokes out, which makes you want to scream. “It’ll only make things worse.”

“No one has to know,” you try to pedal back, letting the line out a little bit to give him enough room to relax before reeling him back in. “I thought maybe…you liked me.”

“You’re getting the wrong idea. I want to but,” he admits, not that you needed to hear it when you can feel the imprint of his dick against your ass, “you’re not in your head right now.”

“I am thinking clearly, Fushiguro,” you correct. You’re probably thinking more clearly than you ever had before. You only needed this one thing. “I just…need to know what it feels like, to have someone care about me, please just this once.”

And maybe he really does think he’s your knight as you look to him pleadingly to solve all your problems in the world with something he can only give you. “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“Probably not until morning,” you answer. Though, you really hope he comes home sooner. You’d trade your very soul to have him walk in on this scene, with your legs spread over Megumi’s lap and his large hands climbing up your backside.

“More than enough time then,” he mumbles, tenderly drawing circles into your hips before flipping you over and closing you onto the bed. He watches your face, taking a few deep breaths as his mind keeps repeating that he’s really doing this with you, that you’re much more gorgeous underneath him than he’d imagined.

If this is a dream, he hopes he doesn’t wake up. You’re so, so beautiful, and his heart swells when he thinks you’ll look even more dreamy in your wedding dress.

Megumi kisses your cheek then your jaw as he begins to push up your jacket and shirt, exposing your stomach to his series of kisses and nips. It’s like he’ll never be able to get enough of you fast enough. Hopefully, you wouldn’t see him as desperate from the way he cautiously squeezes your waist and nuzzle into the warmth of your chest.

You hold in a hiss as he too accurately drags over your wounded side. The pain only makes you more excited as it reminds you of your fiancé, of the fact that you’re about to fuck the man who irritates him the most in the very spot he sleeps in, and you can’t wait to rub the fact in his face that he isn’t going to be the one to rid you of your virtue like he so bragged. Instead, your little brother would have the honor since he so clambered for the chance to fuck his own sister without so much as even questioning your position on the family tree, a circle at this rate surely. You wonder if you should ask if that turned him on as he pushes your top above your head.

A smile slivers on your face. “That isn’t fair, you need to undress too,” you tell him. He folds and listens to you without argument; and you can’t deny that it was making you excited to have him under your commands the same way everything about you made him excited from your lips teasing at his neck, the way your hands glide over his bare skin, the squeeze of your thighs cushioning around his hips.

You weren’t expecting him to get hard so fast, but you suppose it doesn’t matter. You have plenty of time, and the more he can give the better for you.

“You’re beautiful,” he breathes out, and it makes your lungs burn from the sharp gasp you take in as he sucks on your nipple. You’d have to remember to tell Naoya that Megumi thought—you squash the thought. It was too painful to think about, and you wanted to focus on other things as he begins to pull off your pants.

This is something Megumi thinks Naoya wouldn’t probably do for you, and he almost asks if your fiancé has ever thought about more than his own pleasure but the glossy look in your eyes tells him to not bring up something that would undoubtedly cause you more heartache, not when you’re crooning into the air and your hands are tangling into his hair in desperate grips to match the feeling washing over you.

He starts, gently at first, but harder as your moans escalate with the shifting of his tongue over your clit. You tense as you feel something cold entering you but quickly start arching when he adds a second finger, pressing and tickling at your sensitive nerves.

“Fushiguro,” you whisper in strangled breaths, stomach convulsing with each knotted clench of your lower body. And he hopes, at least this much, will make him someone you think about in the future when your hands release his hair to grip the sheets under you.

Though, you’re too busy thinking it might be worth having your engagement switched over if he can use his tongue like that, in a way that has your vision skipping.

He’s definitely self-satisfied by the time he’s finished and gazing up at you. But it isn’t enough to satisfy you, not until you seal the deal, go all the way until there’s absolutely no ignoring what’s happened between the two of you.

You sit up to kiss him hard, catching him by surprise again. You don’t break away from him until you have him underneath you, your legs splayed around him, hands working fast to work down his slacks enough to uncover his cock.

He pulls onto your hips, encouraging you to stroke him along your wet cunt. He continues until he’s lined up with you, and there’s a split hesitation as he asks, “Are you sure?”

“More than sure,” is your answer, and you take the lead to slide yourself over his cock and begin to roll your hips to push further downward, which causes you to sigh. “Fushi-Fushiguro.”

He heaves, deep and heavy, his expression short of being taken over by lust as he ruts into you. “I’m not hurting you, am I?”

“No,” you whimper.

“Good,” he states, sitting up to hug his arms around your back and kiss and bite your neck as you grind and bounce on top of him. You whimper into his skin, hiding your stuttering whimpers against his shoulder.

You grind your hips down against his, his face scrunching shut as he chokes down a moan. You can feel it, feel him pulsing harder inside you as his breathing speeds up and his chest rises and falls against the rhythm of your own.

“Close,” he spits out, hiding his head in your shoulder, and you suppose that this is much quicker than he wants by the little whimpers that escape him as he tries to hold out from the clenching of your walls around him.

You’re so close to his ear that you’re sure you can whisper to him anything as he shudders and falls into his high. “How does it feel to cum inside your older sister?” Is what you want to say if only to see the look on his face and to feel his jerking hips skip, but you needed him for just a bit longer. So, you bite your tongue and hold onto your thoughts as you feel his warmth filling you.

If having kids for the Zen’in is your destiny then you’d much prefer sneaking a Fushiguro in; and if not, you at least hope the wet spot the two of you make together will last until morning as it leaks out from under you, spreading to the sheets between your legs.

“Sorry, that was fast,” he puffs.

“No, no, it was more than enough,” you answer thankfully. You couldn’t wait to tell Naoya that your brother got to you before he had the chance.

He pulls you down and places a kiss on your forehead. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, I mean, if I could…I’d take you away from them,” he whispers along the crest of your forehead. “Let you stay with me.”

Your pitifully jealous heart skips a beat. You guess there is some ripe flesh still remaining between the rot and your core. It makes you want to cry genuine tears for the first time in a long time, so long that you can’t remember the last time. Probably because he looks so much like the one person you wanted to hear those words from. Despite being aware of these feelings, you still wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the exact time the tears began to fall. It only makes it worse when he holds onto you like he actually loves you. Something you still couldn't believe is possible.

[glass-onion-soup]

Thanks for this long, thoroughly considered ask. I think you're completely on the money on both points here, that John continued to abandon Julian because it was too uncomfortable to make the effort, and that his Bermuda trip might have been a turning point that made him re-assess his first father-son relationship. I'll explain why I agree tho.

Re: John's comfort zone - I think his "what can ya do?" abandonment of Julian had two factors to it. The first was shame, and his shame-based self hate. John was a classic example of a "thwarted perfectionist" thanks to Mimi's emotionally incestuous and narcissistically stifling upbringing. If you can't do something perfect immediately, there's no point in doing it at all, otherwise you will be subject to ridicule and abuse. Thwarted perfectionists often check out and either don't finish/start projects, or engage in performative self sabotage (John was more of the latter, though he evolved into the former for a while in his 30's). I think his attitude with Julian was "I already fucked this up, I fucked it up right away, there is no fixing it because I was destined to be bad at it, etc". This might not have even been on a fully conscious level, but I can't imagine seeing or thinking about Julian made him feel very good about himself. It was psychologically easier to start with a new kid and do it "right" from the beginning this time instead of fixing what you already broke. In this psychological frame of mind, raising Sean can also simultaneously become redeeming the fuck up with Julian (symbolically; this still left Julian out in the cold). John seemed to view going back to Yoko in 75 in general as an act of maturity based on insight over how he let his first two "marriages" (Cyn, and Lennon-McCartney) fall apart as soon as they got difficult. I would disagree with this personally lol, but if he were talking about anything BUT his codependent relationship with Yoko he'd be totally correct. Like, the sentiment is not wrong, and it says a lot about where his head was.

The other factor is, as you implied, John's belief that he lacked personal agency. This reinforced his thwarted perfectionism, bc the mental hurdle to even imagine himself being able to fix something he broke was too powerful when he was languishing in learned helplessness. It's no accident that the only time he made real overtures to Julian after leaving Cyn was during a period when he was highly productive in a creative sense (and playing a leadership role in many of his creative endeavours to boot) and with a woman who, while she did get sucked into mothering him quite a bit, encouraged him to take risks and uh, like, go outside and shit.

I'm mostly just fleshing out what you've said here with more psychological detail because I think you already hit the key insight: his experience sailing to Bermuda was a huge turning point re: his self perception wrt personal agency. The big elephant in the room, however, is Yoko. It didn't take long for John to start opening himself up a few inches to Cyn and Jules after breaking with Yoko in the mid-70's; it was her who had the zero sum game attitude wrt his first family (which he, don't get me wrong, absolutely went along with at the time, he was so determined and desperate to "break" with his old life; Yoko's "cut everyone out" rhetoric was a useful mental tool and excuse for him). I think the fact that 'Double Fantasy' was originally supposed to be a John-only project that Yoko shouldered her way into indicates that he hadn't actually reclaimed or fully integrated this newfound sense of agency at the time of his death, but the attitude he fostered there hadn't gone away.

So yeah: if John had been able to nurture that positive feeling, if he and Yoko went their separate ways, if he had been able to go back to England and reconnect with his old circle of family and friends, I think it's probably true that he would at least tried to make things right by with Jules (and maybe even Cynthia, but lets not get too crazy here).

As for what it might have looked like, it's difficult to know tbh. I do think that John was one of those people who just had a hard time relating to small children because they couldn't discourse on an adult level (tho notably he was better with young girls than boys). Re-connecting with Julian as a teen/adult who was capable of interacting more as a peer than a dependent probably would do a lot to radically reframe their relationship and give John points of reference and enthusiasm to engage with him. Likely this would have primarily happened through music. However based on observation of similar situations irl, I think there probably would have always been a wedge of distrust present as often happens with adult children of highly irresponsible parents. What I'm saying is that I believe they could have or would have become friends, maybe even close friends, but I don't believe they ever would have become "father and son".

[auckie]

re: that one post about hoarding housing bc your tags Are you also a person getting into real estate just to deny investors and try and help people find housing- because everyone tells me i'm going to tank within a year and i need some vindication

So. It’s not very easy to deny them because they will find someone else, and you can try and beat them but a lot will offer cash (no mortgage) which usually takes priority to sellers. I refuse to deal with them but I also am not big enough of a presence to garner their attention beyond like. An individual who’s a flipper, in which case I tell them I don’t do investors. Which has offended some people. You can absolutely make your bread and butter doing rentals, only dealing with sellers, I even know people who take on short sales (IDK WHY. Gd I can’t even imagine), however most people agree that outside of commercial (which is all investors), residential investment clients are the way to go. I say fuck em! Those shitheads are the ones who game the market and make bubbles burst! However, real estate in general is a hard job to /solely/ rely on if you’re just starting out. A lot of newer realtors have a job, and real estate is actually their side gig. I’m very lucky in that my mom is one, gives me her extra clients, my broker LOVES me, and since I’m a…fairly recent graduate during covid, I still live at joke 🙄 have a lot of bills I still gotta pay, but not rent! Even still, I’m trying too move out stat, so I’m about to take a second job bc my car and medical expenses keep eating all my money.

Anyways back to the point! I stand by the fact that I don’t think you need rely on investors for income. I think they’re all shmucks who you can pass on to coworkers for a referral fee…but as far as besting them? Not much one little realtor can do 😔 aside from help regular people find homes and write smart contracts that will win sellers over, and also try and steer ppl the right way wrt environmental policies when they’re looking at certain homes. I don’t know anyone personally but I was reading about realtors who work with tribes to buy land back and convince homeowners to engage with land back policies, which is so cool and gives me a lot of hope to hear, but I gotta learn more about it and how it might work in my locale. Anyways, good luck dude! And if you ever feel the squeeze feel free to talk with me! I’m by no means an expert but there’s a lot of avenues in real estate that allow you to avoid actually selling to investors or land lords! Like becoming an inspector, a loan officer, a title abstractor, real estate paralegal, or even the receptionist at your office (it pays better than you’d think!)

[countessofbiscuit]

Hi biscuit. I need help. You're such a wonderful and prolific author, but I was wondering how you deal with the low rate of comments in this fandom. I feel like I'm just throwing out fics into the void that are hitting a few marks, but there's little to no incoming feedback. How do you stay motivated?

Firstly, thank you. I enjoy being creatively fannish, it’s been a real balm in helping me overcome a lot of childhood bullshit as I’ve grown older.

Which brings me to my first and most salient piece of advice:

Write/create/art for yourself.

To speak specifically to writing: the minute you write with receiving feedback/kudos/comments/reblogs/&c. in mind, you set yourself up for disappointment, and the work ceases, I think, to be as genuine as it could be.  This isn’t necessarily to say, ‘don’t write with an audience in mind’: writing as if certain folks might read the finished piece can inform and improve a lot of things — but, in my experience, writing with the expectation of receiving feedback from this audience is a very bad idea. It will absolutely shred your mental health.

This is true for any fandom, but doubly so for TCW (I assume that’s the one you’re referring to). Barring some false starts, it’s the only fandom I’ve ever really written for, so the trickle of comments (some of them frankly bizarre) is nothing new to me. Jury’s still out on whether that’s a blessing or a curse.

How do I stay motivated when I go into other fandoms — sometimes even just next door to other SW sub-fandoms — and see mediocre writing receiving tens and hundreds and sometimes even thousands of comments and oodles of praise?

For the love of the fictional sandbox inside my head. A bone-deep desire to constantly improve. Really solid friends. Hard liquor. Spite.

And I fucking love words. I’m not very good at them, I’m painfully echolalic in person and on paper, but I love them all the same. I want to master them, and if it takes a lifetime, well — there are worse ways to spend a life. I’ve got stuff to say and emotions to flay, dammit. 

This is such a tired saying, but you have to write what you want to read (and re-read!). And, perhaps more importantly, you have to write what you enjoy writing. This has really come home for me during the pandemic, when escaping my bland WFH/lockdown situation has been literally all about carving out a happy mental space, complete with curated playlists, top-shelf drinks, and specially chosen Lush handsoaps so that even my stimming takes me somewhere else and enhances the pleasure of what I’m doing: escaping through fiction made by and for me. If it brings someone else a few minutes/hours of escapism, too, all to the common good! Fuck yeah!

This mindset has also taught me not to judge works by the number of kudos/comments they receive. It’s often a complete misrepresentation of what’s worth reading out there, and is usually influenced by factors far beyond and unrelated to what’s actually on the page/screen. Focusing on the content and not the stats will greatly enhance your reading and writing experience, imo.

At the end of the day, if lots of feedback and engagement is what you really crave, either find a different fandom* or take up fanart, ideally on Instagram ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

(*You’re not the first person to scratch their head about the comparative lack of engagement in the TCW fandom. It’s a long-observed phenomenon. Best guesses as to the cause? A plethora of ships fractures the already small audience, and the fandom skews young and fandom-norms-illiterate.) 

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Hello! I'm pretty sure I saw you mention a while ago that you were disappointed by confessions of the fox, would you mind explaining why? I've seen mostly good things about it myself. If I misremembered then I'm sorry and I hope you have a good day :))

I think this is one of my less popular opinions. And I understand - we so rarely get historical fiction with trans folk as the titular character (indeed, we rarely get any fiction what that). So I get people’s desire to laud it. 

For me though? It fundamentally didn’t work as a book. As a story.  

Let me count the ways. (Apologies in advance for the length of this.)

First: If you’re trans-ing someone who was historically cis instead of seeking to find a real, historical trans or gender-nonconforming person, I have questions. 

Most of the questions can be summed up as: Why? 

I struggle with historical fiction that takes a cis person and re-imagines them as trans as if there aren’t already literal historical, real trans people out there whose stories can be told. It smacks as (unintended, well meaning) erasure of lived experiences. 

Jack Sheppard, to the best of our knowledge, was a cis dude. There were trans folk in London in the 1710s and ‘20s. You might have to dig a bit for them, but they’re there. Because trans folk have always been there. 

Second: Characterisation 

This is more personal taste, but I found Jack and his girlfriend Bess to be inexcusably boring. How a trans, thief and gaolbreaker in 1720s gin-soaked London can be written as boring is anyone’s guess. But he was. 

Jack had no real personality and I found his story to be uninteresting. Oh, he’s the world’s best thief and gaolbreaker, that’s nice. But on its own it isn’t enough.

He had few to no faults. Childhood trauma isn’t a personality. Nor is being trans. And the author relies heavily on gender + occupation (thief-ness) to equal personality. So it falls very flat.  

Bess, his girlfriend, is a mixed-race sex worker from the Fens (even though actual real-Bess was from Edgeware). She seems to only exist to demonstrate that Jack is good at sex. She also veers a little into the Mystical Woman of Colour Healer Who Aids The White Person on their Journey of Self Discovery trope. 

Neither Bess nor Jack undergo any real change in the book. They exist in a weird stasis and experience no development, despite living through some harrowing things. They’re wooden dolls who move through the story without really engaging with, or being influenced by, the things around them. 

The other “main” character is a modern Academic who “found” this supposed “manuscript” of Jack’s life and is annotating it. His story unfolds in the foot notes and it’s just so messy if not a bit contrived. It didn’t make sense. I think the author was trying to convey that the Academic was in a sort of dystopian future, but if that’s the case it didn’t work. And if that’s not the case, the entire inclusion of the Academic’s story served only to annoy and take me out of the reading experience. 

E.g. There’s a scene where the Academic is being taken to task by the Dean for playing stupid games on his phone during office hours and like honey, lapsed-historian/academic here, trust me the Dean doesn’t give a fuck what you do during your office hours so long as you’re in your office and students can come bother you about their poor marks. 

The manuscript is supposedly being sought after by this pharmaceutical company for nefarious reasons that never struck me as being entirely realistic/believable. Also, the university was spying on this non-tenured, slightly useless Academic as if he somehow mattered? Which made zero sense. Anyway, it was stupid and should have been ripped out of the final version. OR changed substantially. 

Jonathan Wild, the thief taker (main antagonist to Jack), is probably the only interesting person. 

Third: Lack of Follow Through, or, the Fabulism Was Not Used Well 

The book tries to blend in some fabulism to the world by giving Jack the ability to “hear” the thoughts of inanimate objects. This could have been fun and gone to some interesting places, but it failed to deliver. 

I personally found the shoe-horning in of “capitalism commodifies everything” to be sloppy and heavy handed. It was done with little grace and didn’t sit right given that we are dealing with the early modern period. Yes, you can use the past to critique our modern woes, but do it intelligently. Don’t slap modern points of view and understandings of things onto the past and expect them to make sense. 

Anyway, Jack spends the book hearing inanimate objects talk to him, asking him to “free” them, or something. And uh .. .it doesn’t go anywhere interesting after that. 

Also the correlation one can draw from these objects to, you know, slaves, is uncomfortable. Especially as it’s the cargo of the EIC ships that Jack hears. I don’t think it’s intended in any sort of malicious way, but the allusion is there and I always found it to be distinctly uncomfortable. 

Fourth: Misuse of Marxist Theory, or, More Heavy Handed Moralizing that Annoyed the Dear Reader because it wasn’t subtle and, more importantly, it wasn’t done intelligently. 

So, the author is an academic - studies 18th century lit. Which is readily apparent as his Academic (self-insert) character is, I believe, supposed to be a historian and uh ... you can tell that the author doesn’t know enough to wing that. E.g. How he interprets some of the laws and customs of the time. Instead of understanding the social, economic and, most importantly, environmental issues that gave birth to laws like “the corporation of the city of London owns the streets so you can’t muckrake” he chooses to understand them through a very 21st century lens (and a Marxist one at that. I know I’m perhaps a bit uncool for this, but I find the application of Marxist theory to the early modern period to be ... not useful). 

Do you know why, mid/late 17th century London passed these municipal laws? Because of the god damn fucking plague you numb nut. You absolute buffoon. It had nothing to do with “oh the City/government is evil and wants to own you” it had to do with the fact that no one cleaned the goddamn street. So the city took over doing it. 

Prior to this, in London, you were supposed to keep the street in front of your building clear of waste, debris, refuse etc. No one did this, of course. I live where it’s cold and snows a lot and people can barely shovel the 2 sq ft of sidewalk in front of their driveway in the winter. I dread the idea of an average homeowner being expected to keep the street clear and clean. 

Anyway, guess what dirty streets attract? Vermin. Guess what comes with vermin? Plague. Guess what happened in 1665/66? The great plague of London! 

17th century England might not have understood germ theory, but they did understand correlation. (Also, the population of London was doubling at the back half of the 17th century and streets needed to be reliably cleared for through-traffic reasons etc. etc.) 

ugh, sorry, that one in particular drove me up the wall. Not everything is a capitalist conspiracy. Especially when we’re talking about municipal by-laws from the 17th century. 

And I understand the temptation to read a lot of modern interpretation of words like “corporation” and “company” onto bodies that used these same words in 17th and 18th centuries. But the weight, meaning and connotation of “the worshipful company of merchant adventurers” is different from, I don’t know, “the tech company google” or whatever. The early 18th century is when we start seeing the birth of the stock market, of “venture companies” (i.e. merchant adventure companies), of a lot of the language and proto-iterations of what will grow to be economic institutions of our time. But it doesn’t mean they’re the same and that difference is important. Because Jack Sheppard is a man living in 1720 he’s not going to be having our modern 21st century critiques of capitalism because his engagement with the economic systems of his time would have been radically different to our own experiences. 

Fifth:  Unbelievable Top Surgery & Recovery 

So, Jack gets top surgery. In 1720s fever-ridden London. While quarantining in a brothel. 

And he lived! No infection! No tearing! He was up and about in a matter of days. I don’t remember if his nipples survived the operation or not but somehow Jack did. Without anesthetics! Or you know, any concept of hygiene. 

His Mystical Girlfriend Who Exists to Show How Good Jack is at Sex is also somehow Magically Very Literate and also Magically a Surgeon? and performs this surgery on Jack in the middle of a plague. 

The entire ordeal was so poorly handled in terms of believability that I literally set the book down and said “what the fucking fuck” to the empty room then drank wine before finishing the chapter. 

An aside, it is funny thinking about the quarantine chapters at this point. I read COTF when it first came out a few years ago. Sweet summer children, we none of us had any idea how to write quarantine scenes. 

That reminds me: the entire quarantine thing was presented as the government trying to control movement and take away people’s rights etc. instead of a very normal, typical response that cities had been enacting since 1350. Samuel Pepys, who lived through the 1665/66 epidemic, barely even notes the restrictions. He’s like just “hmmm I’d love to go to the pub but I also don’t want to die. so. *shrug*” 

At the time of the author’s writing, most of us in the western world had no idea how normal and day-to-day disease was for our ancestors and yes, sometimes there would be crackdowns to try and curb it if an epidemic hit. That was part and parcel of life. So again, Jack and Bess wouldn’t be like “ooooh we’re 21st century slightly libertarian lefitsts who think the government is doing this to control us and for nefarious purposes”. Much more likely, they would have been like Pepys and viewed it as nuisance, albeit a necessary one. 

Sixth: Overall Lack of Realism 

I think I’ve noted the big moments where I was like “no one in the early 18th century would think that I’m pretty certain”. This isn’t to say people didn’t grouse, complain about London government (and the king etc.), critique or question the world they lived in. They absolutely did! Regularly. With great verve and gusto, if the broadsheets are anything to go by. But their critiques, their complaints, suggestions for bettering life, are not the same as ours. Because how could they be? They lived in a different world, were responding to specific things, grew up hearing and believing certain things etc. 

Jack, aside from having minimal to no character, really did read like a modern slightly-libertarian leftist who was plunked into a novel that takes place three hundred years ago. 

In addition to unrealistic political views, his understanding of body, gender, sexuality and identity also read as incredibly modern. Now this is harder, because we have so few extant sources from that time on those who lived non-gender conforming lives, and from their point of view, so yes creative imagining and interpretation is the rule of the day for writing that. 

But, we do know how in general the average person engaged and understood gender and sexuality and that would, naturally, inform anyone whose experience was different. And that base line of “probably what a typical cis Englishman or woman felt about their body and identity” wasn’t present. At all. 

Indeed, gender engagement at that time was interesting. The concept of the body, the role of the physical body, how it was interpreted is absolutely fascinating and the author could have done some really cool things with that. But he didn’t. He went for slapping a modern interpretation onto the past. 

At this point, write a dystopian novel and make Jack a fictional character. That probably would have gone over better, for me at least. The conceit can remain the same: It’s the year 4056 and an Academic found a manuscript from the year 3045 when the Dystopia Was a Thing - and go from there. 

--- 

I think part of what made this very popular and why people seem so taken with it is that it reads smart. It reads like someone who has immersed themselves in that world etc. because of the slang and language used. 

Yet, for me, as someone who has studied this period extensively, especially queerness in London in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, it read flat and unrealistic. 

I was initially very enthused when I started it. There are some posts to that effect on my blog. But it very quickly went south. It tries very hard to be Radical and Smart and Subversive and Critiquing Everything and so I think it fails at the fundamental thing it should be doing: telling a good story. 

(Note: The book does try and address racism in London at this time. It also felt a bit forced. And Jack seemed to have no prejudices or preconceived notions about Indian and Black folk which isn’t realistic. Like, it might make him #Problematic but my dude, you’re writing a man born in 1702. He’s going to have some iffy views. That can be challenged! Absolutely. But they still would have existed.) 

---

Thank you for the ask! I again apologize for the length of the reply. 

[demyrie]

I'm curious but why did you delete JAM? It was one of my favorite JxD fics and I never got to finish reading it.

ahhhh oh dear, yeah, that happened.

So, for everyone arriving, I wrote a fic called Just Another Mission for the Jak and Daxter game series, and Jak/Daxter pairing. Yes, the green haired elf protag with the fuzzy orange thing, which btw used to be a human and was a human in fic. I think I started it when I was maybe 14 (yikes omg) and a few years ago, I deleted it, and I don’t delete fics.

Rant and personal history ahead, but tldr; i deleted this particular fic because:

1) I became more and more uncomfortable with the way I’d treated certain characters without giving them respect or resolution (throwing around things like domestic abuse while being too young to properly understand What I Was Doing or How to Answer Very Triggered Friends Who Had the Misfortune of Reading This I’m So Goddamn Sorry, as well as falling into that Not Like Other Girls slash fan ditch of treating female characters like shit/obstacles to the main pairing WHICH IS JUST ******) as well as personally uncomfortable portrayals of obsession and taking advantage of people that turn my stomach to this day (see reason 4)

2) i got way in over my head with my own writing/style which was so obtuse and self-indulgent that I felt a great amount of shame over it, including the attention it had gotten, and the way it went to my head and turned me into an egotistic little shit. I was an asshole peacock and I regret it. There was a break where I got waylaid before the final confrontation in the fic (see reason 4, also a very bad time to get held up in any narrative) and when I returned to the story, i nearly cried because it was such a mess and I didn’t know what I was saying anymore. Finishing it was a struggle and I even remember one JnD fan friend being like “hey this chapter seemed really curt??? short?? not like you” and I was like YEAH THATS NOT ME ANYMORE god i hope

3) there was a sort of ... anti-JxD surge in my little pool from people I really respected and it made me think i was doing something wrong even just remembering it, so I cut off that memory.

4) it coincided with two ugly relationships in my life that marred it, and I just wanted it gone for my own mental health.

So anon, I’m very sorry that you never got to finish it. I had good intentions in mind and gave them a happy ending where they realized they loved each other, even if the journey there was difficult. 

It both touched me and broke a piece of my heart when someone came to me years ago and asked me why I had deleted it, saying the story had given them the courage to come out as gay to their family. In that moment, overwhelmed with how ProblematicTM the whole story was, I was really struck with just ... how subjective our world experience is, and how so many things can mean so many different things to every single soul and how terrifyingly VALID peoples experiences are, no matter how they come by them. We’re all so unique and convoluted, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure -- and one man’s trigger is another man’s key to Becoming. But no matter how inspiring, I couldn’t bring myself to repost it. 

Hopefully this will be the only fic i ever delete with relish. Jak and Daxter will always be a good memory for me, regardless. Thanks for the ask, anon.

(even more) personal stuff below the cut. tw for stalking, harassment, manipulation and emotional abuse.

So.

Im a firm believer in stories living beyond their authors (something that JK rowling doesnt seem to understand iykwim). I don’t normally delete past works, because while I wrote them, I also know that they’ve outgrown me as most narratives do: people are absolutely allowed to enjoy what they want to or need to, not just because I think said thing is reflective of my current work or jives with my current stage of life. 

However, JAM was a particular Thing that Had to Go.

The timeline is hella fuzzy to me because I’ve blocked a lot of it out, but I was coming out of middle school and struggling with my mental health. On the real life side, I was stuck in a situation with a close friend of mine who was very fixated on us being in a relationship and the pining was loud enough to hear from the other side of the country. Wounded people pleaser that I was, I flipped (exhaustingly) back and forth between “i dont like you like that” and “but I want you to be happy so what if I tried liking you like that?” and there was massive amounts of hidden hurt and resentment and tension and abandonment complex activation and just ... a strangling of anything that made our friendship good for either of us. 

Also she was a she. So. Yannoe, gay is difficult.

This definitely burnt me out on the “best friends pining” trope and is probably legit the ONLY reason I’m not equally in the erasermic and erasermight camp haha. That trope feels claustrophobic and draining to me, so I leave it for others to enjoy.

It also coincided with a married 45yo adult man luring me into a “platonic, ecstatic, boundary-breaking, you-are-my-beautiful-young-muse, words cannot express how much I love you” creative type relationship that inevitably turned possessive, domineering and manipulative. Within the bounds of the Renaissance Faire community, I thought he was a safe person and he was not, and his constant reassurance that I wasn’t like other women my age was absolutely hypnotizing to a undeveloped soul who really, really wanted to be special.

We traded poetry and tarot card readings over email. He bought me manga and shared stories about his time overseas and in the service. He made me props to go with my renaissance faire character and showed me where to find cheap leather so I could piece things together myself.

He also stalked me and owned me for the better part of a year and I only realized it once he started harassing a dear friend of mine overseas, whom I was visiting, about a package that he’d sent, which apparently he’d covered in original poetry to let me know how much he loved me But Not In a Hetero or Sexual Way Bro, so of course he didn’t want it to get lost in the postal system. So what is he going to do? Note my friend twice a day asking if its arrived until she inevitably, tearfully spills that this guy is stressing her out and who is he anyway?

My horrible secret was out, which only sounded horrible when I explained it to someone else. I realized this man was trying to follow me wherever i went and I got so fucking angry that he was messing with my friend that I had to stop it.

(He called me a cunt when I broke it off with him on the phone in the dark on the floor of my bedroom in the middle of the night so my parents wouldn’t hear, then sobbed and said he was sorry. I was so dissociated from the rush of anger and helplessness that it took for me to actually MAKE the call that all I could do was wiggle my foot and watch it in the reflection of the mirror on the back of my door, and think maybe I was a cunt but I wasn’t his cunt anymore. So there. 

Afterward I slammed my forehead into the mirror a few times to make sure I’d actually done it and it wasn’t a dream.)

During all of this, I was writing this stupid fic. I think. Honestly, I don’t fucking know, but I can’t think of it without thinking of him and how i was devoured.

The stress of hiding this “totally wonderful but NORMAL PEOPLE DONT UNDERSTAND WHAT WE HAVE!!!!” grooming shit from my parents was gutting me alive, and I was so far gone RE: worthiness/autonomy that I didn’t even consider why I BOTHERED diffusing his petulant accusations over notes on deviantArt again and again as he baited me into shit just to explode over how I didn’t love him and I figured out another way to soothe his engorged and tarry ego without explicitly lying that I loved him too. 

He made me regret my silver tongue and way with words as I used it to defend myself again and again, and crushed my love of writing. I would pace the neighborhood for almost an hour several times a week, claiming I was ‘exercising’ but really trying to understand why i felt so trapped, or where the lines between love and hate lay, or why I wanted to cry all the time, as i low key tried to get hit by a car just to force something to change in my life and jolt me out of his smothering, needy nightmare of constant texting and emails and notes. I couldn’t fucking flinch without him knowing about it, and asking me if I was okay. For this reason, I react very poorly to people fretting over me at length, and loudly. I get angry and feel violated, or just pinned to the floor by someone Performing their love on me with no real regard for my health.

This whole time, I was escaping into fandom. It probably saved my life, in one way or another, because I found friends who supported me and made me laugh in the JnD sphere. Especially the friend whose distress caused me to snap and realize This Couldn’t Continue.

This terrible man was the first one outside of my friend group that I showed my writing to, the first adult as well. It was on the dark side even then, but he said it was wonderful and amazing. He teased me for being stuck up in my authors notes on JAM (one of the reasons I’m just getting over ... talking ...) but said it inspired him to start writing as well. He used that writing to imagine hokey sprawling stories of him being a hot rod racer and me being his sexy girlfriend, Very Totally in Love. Why Couldn’t We have Just Met in a Different Lifetime??? not that its a relevant question for my young 16yo friend lol just something dreamers wonder lol lol here why don’t you take this traditional irish engagement ring aka claddagh i bought for you, lie to your parents and say I bought one for everyone in our renfaire group, and turn it toward your heart, to imply that you’re in love, so that I can keep your heart safe for you until you find a boyfriend?

FUCKER YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKER ok I’m done. Fuck.

JAM was a project of mine that spanned a year or two and is intrinsically tangled in those very bad relationships and very bad lessons. I deleted it because I needed to, for purely personal reasons beyond the fact that it was generally bombastic, over-long, tone-deaf and dealt with very serious issues poorly. Due to these experiences, you won’t catch me in a hot minute writing either best-friends-pining or heavy jealousy/possessiveness fic, but everyone else? Go crazy just tag your shit.

so. anyway. isn’t subjectivity actually terrifying? You never know what something can mean to someone else. So just ask, maybe.

Damn, son. Some fics you just can’t repost.

[ourimpavidheroine]

Hello favorite author of mine! Here's a question that you don't have to answer if there are spoilers involved (and if so I'll ask again later, but I can't help but try now because I'm NOSY): I know you've said that Qi just appeared on the page while writing the 5 Times fic, so at what point did you realize what Qi's future in relation to Wu and Mako would be? Was it prior to writing ASoSaA?

So because you are you, I’ll give the long answer instead of the short one!

There may be some mildish spoilers ahead - so read or not as you please.

I’ve said before that I have set myself some challenges as a writer. Please Excuse My Penmanship was me tackling the dreaded letter fic (and there are still some people who will not touch it with a ten foot pole because of it) and I decided early on that Wu as a character would do really well with a first-person diary format (even though, again, there is a lot of hate out there for first-person fanfic and people won’t read it because of that). 

LoLo was planned, absolutely. I wanted someone for Lin, and I wrote that character specifically as someone I thought would be a good match for her (or at least my version of her). All of the kids were planned as well - oh, there might have been some waffling about names (I went back and forth between Poppy and Lily for a long time but in the end I think Poppy suits her better) and even gender (Goba was supposed to be a girl but I just kept writing “he” over and over again and finally gave it up and let him be the boy he so clearly wants to be) but they were planned. (It’s why I know so much about Sayuri as well as Ikki’s kids). Naoki was written as my way of trying to take a character like Azula - a brilliant prodigy - and put her into a loving and supportive family, and see where that would take her. Would she be boring if she didn’t have that villain arc? Or didn’t have a redemption arc like Zuko? Could I make her the best bender of her age and still make her real? Likable? A character people resonate with? A character that people want to read more about? That was my own challenge when it came to the Butterfly, right down to making her a firebender who will eventually be jumping right into a Chosen One trope.

I had characters that were supposed to be relatively unimportant just take off. Nuo is a fine example of that. I was going to write about Wu searching for a secretary but realized it would bog the story down. (Wu’s recounting of it for Iris in AtWtPHM was my original idea that I had to scrap.) So I had to create this secretary for him out of nowhere. She was never meant to be as instantly engaging as she was; there was no plan at all to have Wing fall so hard for her. She quite literally just started happening in Dear Diary; I just got the fuck out of her way and let her run her part of the story. (It’s always best to let Nuo do that anyhow.)

Baatar Junior is my redemption arc, of course. His attraction to Ikki kind of hit me upside the head and I was like…no way! This could never work! CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. (He was also a gift for my betareader - he’s her favorite character of all of mine, and so I knew I had to do right by him, as difficult as he is. And he is! He’s the most difficult of all of my characters, canon and OC alike, to write.)

So that leaves me with my Qi. That scruffy kid of non-determinate gender who showed up sitting in the chair next to a hungry Mako’s desk. As I’ve said before, I never planned for Qi. Qi just showed up on the page and I let them. I had no idea what was going to become of that kid; they took over the story like Nuo did, but in a totally different way. I realized very early on who Nuo was and what her future would be - she was going to stamp her way right into Wing and Zaofu’s heart. 

But Qi? 

Qi was a slippery little koi fish. I could never quite grab ahold of them - I tried to determine gender and it just wasn’t happening and I realized to myself that it was because this kid was actively rejecting gender and I knew I needed to let that happen. I did not set out to write a nonbinary character the way I did a trans character (and yes, I have an OC that is trans that not even my betareader knows about yet, because they will be coming out as part of the storyline). Qi made themselves nonbinary and as a writer I had to respect what the character wanted for themselves. And that’s how it has always been with Qi. I realized early on that this character wanted to write themselves and I made a conscious choice to let that happen instead of planning things out for them. How would this work for me as a writer? Would it be a red hot mess? Or would the character just keep unfolding, like a flower? Hopefully the latter. 

My betareader can tell you that there have been several times that she has read something and said, Wait, I thought Qi was going to that other thing instead of this! And all I can do is shrug my shoulders and say, I know! But what can I do? Qi tells their own story. Qi doesn’t really care all that much for my careful planning, either.

It was during AsoSaA that Qi let me know that Qi was actually in love with Wu - that it had gone way past the mostly grateful crush that Qi had been sporting for Wu for years. Qi also made it clear that there were feelings for Mako as well. And it kept going from there. Qi’s changes as Qi gained confidence and an understanding of their place in the world - the learning to read and write, changing the accent, the true and unique fashion sense - were never planned. I just let Qi lead the way. There a few things I do know about Qi’s future; one or two things that are set in stone already. But Qi IS a slippery koi and just when I think I have grasped something about them they are out of my hands and swimming somewhere new and unexpected. I’m just following along as best I can. So what I’m saying to you is that I still don’t know what all Qi’s future holds for them. I really don’t. Qi will tell me when Qi is ready to as Qi always has.

I’ve had some questions from readers about the whole polyamory thing. Ikki is in a traditional Tibetan fraternal polyandry relationship; I wrote it deliberately that way. (So to be clear: There is no incest happening. Baatar and Huan are not sleeping together and they won’t be having any threesomes with Ikki, either. I’m not kinkshaming, it’s just not what I am writing.) It’s why the folks in Baidi Village are completely fine with the whole thing - it is the cultural norm for them. Because of this, their relationship is never going to cause much comment up north where the temple is. (That is obviously not the case elsewhere.) I am not writing my fic for kids and I have unlimited time and space for it so I can delve into some of those more traditional and geographical influences far more than Bryke ever could, of course. Most ATLA/TLOK fanfic relies heavily on Chinese and Japanese influences; I wanted something different. Asian influence, of course, but something outside the mainstream. Thus Baidi village was born.

My Wu, on the other hand, has been strongly influenced by Imperial China. Which the canon Wu was as well, of course. The Earth Monarch was clearly based on that. I’ve run with it. (I’ve researched and then talked so much about Imperial China that I finally sat down and re-watched The Last Emperor with my son. The movie does have its issues, of course, but it’s meant a whole lot of really interesting dialogue about racism and colonialism with him.) It makes me want to throw my hands up into the air and kick people when I get the comments I do about polygamy. “I’m not into it” or “The characters would never do that” or even “This whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.” Polygamy is a real thing in many non-western cultures. The ATLA/TLOK universe is not set on our Earth; it is not Asia, but rather Asian-influenced. But I will tell you one thing it isn’t, and that’s Christian. Western Judeo-Christian influences do not apply. Wu being a King in a dynasty that was clearly based on Imperial China would have had a consort and concubines. It’s just how it is. He’s not the king any longer, but he is a prince, and in his mind, having more than one partner is not only normal, it is to be expected. Qi obviously just swam their way right into that!

So this is my incredibly long-winded way of telling you that I really can’t nail down a specific time when Qi told me they were going to have a relationship with Wu and Mako! I still haven’t written the whole Qi and Mako thing out because Qi just hasn’t gotten around to telling me what it is yet. I am sure they will. When they do, I will write it down for the rest of you!

[the-entp]

How does Fe loop work in an ENTP? Think I might be in one and I'm not sure what to do about it…

What is an Ne-Fe loop like?

Under normal circumstances, Fe in general usually seeks to understand another’s feelings and be attentive to the needs of others. This allows for a healthy appreciation of relationships and connections.

What does a healthy tertiary Fe look like?

In a healthy ENTP, tertiary Fe allows us to be more considerate of others and we seek to be more understanding of people and are likely to listen to their thoughts with empathy. It also makes us aware of how our behaviour can affect others and we are likely to adjust our way of interacting with others to ensure that there is a sense of cooperation.

Ti can overlook many aspects of the external world in its somewhat obsessive search for the whole truth. This causes the stereotypical cold, blunt and ‘I-don’t-give-a-fuck’ ENTP. Such ENTPs can overlook the importance of engaging with others to create an environment where ideas, thoughts and possibilities can be explored in a more cooperative manner.

Tertiary Fe helps to correct this weakness. It keeps us in check and reminds us to take consideration when presenting our thoughts and ensures that we understand and appreciate healthy connections with others.

What does an unhealthy tertiary Fe look like?

We become extremely sensitive to criticism and are likely to lash out for it. We are unable to handle disagreements and differences in opinions well, especially when this disagreement is acting against our Ne. This can cause us to seem cold, insensitive and extremely arrogant.

There is a strong need to be independent or, at the very least, be seen as being independent. For this reason, we are likely to refuse to acknowledge people’s opinions or even accommodate relationships, especially with our loved ones and people we care about. This is mostly due to believing that feelings are a weakness and that such a weakness can be used against us and also ruin our reputation.

With our Fe perspective, we can take advantage of the awareness of other people’s feelings and weaknesses to intentionally cause hurt and upset them. We can also use this knowledge to manipulate others into doing things we want or into liking us. This feeds our ego and gives us a false sense of confidence.

An example of this would be an ENTP acting nice and caring towards a person, not out of the goodness of their heart but with the intention of wanting to be liked by people. Later on, when the ENTP needs something from said person, they would guilt-trip the person into helping with something along the lines of, “I’ve done so much for you. I helped you when no one else did, and I’ve always been such a good friend. We’re friends, aren’t we? So you’ll help me, right? You’ll help me because I’ve always helped you, right? Because that’s what friends do, after all. And we’re friends.”

An unhealthy tertiary Fe can quickly lead to an Ne-Fe loop.

What does an Ne-Fe loop look like?

During an Ne-Fe loop, we tend to overlook or ignore the advice of our auxillary Ti. Fe is an extroverted function, similar to our dominant Ne, meaning that we can easily become heavily concerned about the external world. Without the introspective view provided by our auxillary Ti, it is very easy for us to become defensive about our inability to manage problems and blame our surroundings or other people instead of looking within ourselves and our own shortcomings.

Interestingly, those of us in an Ne-Fe loop have a constant need for approval from others. We aren’t consciously aware of this so it can be difficult for us to recognise that this is happening until either the situation gets out of hand or someone points it out to us.

There is a lot of insecurity involved and we have very little confidence in our ability to make decisions and good judgments without the approval of others. Wanting to feel confident about ourselves, we are likely to seek admiration by manipulating people and other social situations. There is a lot of anxiety about how people see us and a lot of pressure in wanting to be admired and seen as independent and capable.

This can manifest in wanting to achieve certain results such as getting the top grades, buying the best clothes etc. This puts us in situations which would, under normal circumstances, be unreasonable for us (such as taking on too many responsibilities than we are able to handle), and it also puts us under unnecessary pressure. Such an anxious and eager-to-please mindset takes a huge toll on our mental health, eventually leaving us unable to manage the issues created by our Ne-Fe loop.

How to get out of an Ne-Fe loop?

At first, an Ne-Fe loop can seem very empowering. It can seem like everything is under our control and that we have the ability to manipulate situations to fit our Ne’s liking. However, this later causes problems (both mentally and in our surroundings) that simply Ne and Fe can’t handle by themselves.

At this point, it is important to take a step back and reintroduce auxillary Ti to its rightful place. Healthy Ti helps us to make better judgments by allowing us to reflect on our decisions before we decide to act on impulse.

We can help re-engage our auxillary Ti by:

Considering possible future consequences of our immediate actions. (e.g. “By saying this, will I be seriously offending someone?”)

Taking into account the pros and cons of a decision. (e.g. “This subject seems the most exciting, however that subject has more opportunities to learn such and such.”)

Prioritising. (e.g. “Yes, I could work on that side-project now. It sounds like a good idea. However, then I would be taking out time that I could spend studying for my exams in the next two weeks. Hm. I’ll study for my exams instead and then, after they’re over, I can set aside time to work on my side-project.”)

I should note that there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to achieve certain outcomes such as having good grades and whatnot which I mentioned earlier, but not at the expense of our mental health, and most certainly not while just running for it, hoping it will happen, our only intention being to impress others.

With the help of Ti, and later Si, we can achieve specific results with better precision and carefully planned steps to ensure that we can do it to the best of our abilities. This will reduce wasted time, energy and errors while also helping us to be much happier and confident with our decisions.

Related: What is an Si-grip like?