#AGAIN no one come for me! I'm not saying those books aren't classics and he can't enjoy them!

[qm-vox]

Man Who Talk To God Have Difficult Life - Playing Clerics In D&D

(St. Nokta Kinslayer, whom you'll meet further down in the article. Art by the esteemed @druid-for-hire who quite frankly cannot be thanked enough!)

Guess who's back motherfuckers. When they ask how I died, tell them, still angry. After the paladin article I asked around about classes to cover "next" and got a lot of requests; rogue, warlock, sorcerer, so of course I have elected to be a good friend by losing my will to live for months on end and then doing none of those. Let's talk Clerics, shall we? I'll not lie to you, this is going to be an angrier article than the paladin one, in no small part because it's inevitably going to go into contentious ideas like alignment, fantasy religion, and others that the player base has been knife fighting about since mammoths still walked the Earth. There are going to be moments when I look y'all in the eyes and say with my metaphorical human mouth that the problem is you Doing It Wrong, and I can only ask that you hear me out. Not to assign you homework about my fuckin' cleric article or anything, but the one I previously did about The Many may be helpful here as well. There's going to be a bit of a focus on D&D 5e here, and I'll be frank about that: most people are playing 5e these days, and as I'll be arguing further down, Pathfinder's take on Clerics and more broadly on faith are a worthless poison that actively worsens the world.

This article's title is drawn from Small Gods by the esteemed Sir Professor Terry Pratchett. As always, credit goes to Afroakuma for teaching me a great deal of the examples I'm going to give, though citing specific sources are going to be difficult as many of the books in question have been out of print for decades and I am neither an academic nor a machine.

Now for the obligatory Content Warnings. We're looking at discussion of fantasy religion & comparisons to real-world religion, violence, discussions of atrocities such as torture, desecration of the dead, and destruction of culture, as well as traumatic deaths/backstories for the sample clerics at the end. As mentioned above, there is also going to be some alignment discourse. You have been warned; do as thou wilt.

Without further ado, let us begin with...

O Mighty Smiter - Clerics Through D&D's History

We begin the obligatory text wall.

Clerics have been here since the beginning. They were around back when "Elf" was a class, and while their history is complex it has, eternally, been colored by the bit where Cleric has an inherent identity problem. In many ways it is, as a class, too broad, so wide-open that getting something coherent out of it is an exercise in frustration or even futility. It'll be easier to talk about what Clerics aren't than what they are, and oh boy, will I. A brief note here: while Druid is going to come up in the context of 1e and 2e, and again a bit later when I start talking about priests (yeah, that's a separate conversation, we're gonna get there), this article is not otherwise dedicated to Druid. I'm gonna need a significant amount of whiskey for both me and my priestess before we god damn go there.

AD&D 1e and 2e: Deus Vult - Do the world a favor if you ever pass near Gary Gygax's grave: piss on it. Ol' Gary G rooted Cleric in his classic blend of obsession with medieval ideas and piss-poor research, invoking many myths about priests of the Crusades and applying them as a one-size-fits-all vision of war-clergy of Every God. He would personally run into problems with this in his own writing before he got out of the game, and rather quickly at that, as he tried to write faiths whose imagery and ideals did not fit the Crusader Priest ideal, but since he was, and I cannot stress this enough, a hack with all the morals and emotional intelligence of mustard gas, he never quite solved those problems for himself. I'll hop off my screed now, I just want this said up front, especially since it's the fundamental evil that chases Cleric to this day.

The O.G. Cleric was described as a melee combatant that took a close second-place to Fighter in that arena, with proficiency in heavy armor and a variety of useful weapons, though they were forbidden from using "edged weapons that spill blood" (there's those Crusader myths). Random fun fact, the very first incarnation of Cleric only had spells up to 7th level, but the level tables for their class went up to level 29 or so, and man, ain't that just wild. As your Cleric gained levels they also became more highly placed in the church of their god, eventually hitting High Priest and just kinda sitting there as they leveled up. Interesting note here: Clerics couldn't be Neutral (that is, not Lawful, Chaotic, Good, or Evil) back in the day, and instead anyone wanting to run a Neutral Cleric had to take a subclass you might have heard of by the name of Druid, which in turn eventually had to face other Druids in SINGLE COMBAT in order to level up past a certain point. Why? I don't know. Summon Gygax's ghost and ask him between rounds of spiritual torture. This original version of Cleric had Turn Undead, a feature that's been attached to almost all Clerics by some name or another in all of their incarnations, and boy, Turn Undead used to be fucking wild. Roll a dice, consult a table based on your result and your level, and end up Turning or Destroying a number of very specific kinds of undead. AD&D 2e would put "undead gods" on this list starting at 13th level or so, and let me tell you: this came up in published material more often than you might think. Last but not least, like most characters back in 1e and 2e, Clerics eventually got to run a building full of people. At first the Cleric attracted about 20-200 "fanatics" who would work for free and help them build a shrine (no word on how TF you feed and water these fanatics) but eventually was given the right to build a proper castle-temple and produce 1 silver per month per resident via "trade, taxes, tariffs". Ladies and gentlemen, D&D.

Aside from the aforementioned alterations to Turn Undead, AD&D 2e introduced a concept known as Spheres to Cleric casting. Now, stop me if you've heard this before: each god gave access to 1 or more Spheres, which were specific lists of spells that their Clerics had access to (fun fact, Paladin casting was "as Cleric of 9 levels lower", but only with access to specific Spheres). So if you worshiped, say, Lathander, you had access to Healing, Sun, Divination, and IIRC a couple of others, and that's it, that's the whole ticket. Now, you may remember Kits from the Paladin article, and Clerics did have some of that action, but more than that they had "specialty priests", a sort of even-more-hardcore version of this whole proto-Domain deal; a Specialty Priest had different class features in comparison to normal Cleric, and access to different or more Spheres, both of which were determined by their god. Each Specialty Priest was, in its way, its own separate subclass of Cleric and if you published a god back in the day you had to get one of these installed. Were they all good? No. Fuck no. God no. Are you kidding me? But they were often very distinctive.

This doesn't get talked about a lot, at least not until we hit Pathfinder, but Clerics have had codes of conduct like Paladins for as long as they've existed, sort of atomized across their various gods. The rules around these have always been vague, and rarely culturally enforced in the player communities, but they did and do exist. A cleric of Kelemvor raising a zombie has done a bit of a blasphemy; raising a ghoul or vampire probably entails divine retribution, a reduction in character level, or even the loss of their powers. Oh, and other gods are probably trying to court you since clearly you're looking for new management and a trained cleric is a resourced that's hard to pass up.

No version of Cleric has ever particularly had a strong identity, but this original version may have been the closest to having one...because it's bad. To the credit of 1e and 2e, the eventual installation of Nonweapon Proficiencies, later to become the Skills system, did let them be competent as actual like, priests? Cleric got access to the stuff needed to actually minister as a spiritual leader with some extra socked away to practice sacred arts related to their god (ex. bookbinding for a cleric of Denier) and maybe even some god damn hobbies too. But outside of the ever-more-niche & esoteric arena of specialty priests, themselves presented as particular fanatics, agents, or chosen ones, every cleric was a Crusader, and every god's clergy were war-priests. And that's weird, right? And so now we must move on to the demon that never dies.

D&D 3.5: The Word Of My God Is 'Begone' - Quick question, have you ever wanted to roleplay someone perceptive but otherwise deeply stupid and utterly incompetent to move unsupervised through human society, who is, nonetheless, OMNIPOTENT? Welcome to the 3.5 Cleric, one of THE casters of all time in the absolute Caster Supremacy Edition. I hope you came ready to hear casual mentions of mechanics that would make a Victorian occultist cry. If you go looking at the class page for Cleric you might notice there's both jack and shit there, and for my readers who got into D&D at 5e the following might be a bit of a shock: Cleric was one of the strongest classes in 3.5.

In terms of the actual mechanics related to Cleric in 3.5, Turn or Rebuke Undead and spontaneous casting were some of the big ones. Well, "big" ones; Turn Undead qua Turn Undead was actually kind of shit and would often just not actually like...turn...the undead, but the charges of Turn Undead a Cleric kept around could be used for many other options that permitted alternate spending, notably here to include Divine Metamagic. These alternate spends were better than using Turn Undead for its actual intended purpose more or less always, and Divine Metamagic (DMM) in particular was an unholy monstrosity that underlied a lot of Cleric's power later in 3.5's run, letting them customize their prepared spells on the fly without having to use up higher-level spell slots. Now, I really cannot stress this enough: Cleric was one of the most powerful classes in core alone, without adding any supplements. DMM and similar options made Cleric even stronger but they were very much gilding the lily, to be frank. "Hey Vox why are you saying this," you would not believe the number of ignorant pricks who made a literal moral crusade out of going to "core only" in 3.5 claiming it made for a better balanced game. The good version of 3.5 has never existed, destroy anyone who claims otherwise.

Where was I - spontaneous casting, yes. Now, Clerics were still prepared casters, they had X spell slots every day at very specific levels and had to pick specific spells to fill them. That is, if you want to cast create water more than once in a given day, you need to memorize create water more than once that day. However, Clerics could convert a spell of any level to either cure wounds or inflict wounds of the same level, depending on the alignment of the Cleric (Good Clerics Turn Undead and cure wounds, Evil Clerics Rebuke Undead and inflict wounds, and Neutral Clerics not otherwise restricted by their god get to pick one for their entire career). This gave 3.5 Cleric a lot of flexibility, very valuable flexibility in a game environment where casting a heal mid-combat was basically always the wrong move, but out-of-combat healing was still an invaluable resource. RIP to Evil Clerics though, inflict sucked ass.

Lastly, we have domains. Now, if you check through the domain list on the SRD you may notice that they are rather less defining than the 5e Domains, granting a single power apiece and a list of spells you get access to. Most gods in 3.5 granted access to 3+ Domains, and their Clerics got to pick 2; together, these are the "kind" of Cleric you are, the aspects of your god that you kinda embody which then shape your power. Clerics got special extra spell slots solely for Domain spells in addition to their usual progression, and could memorize these Domain spells in normal slots as well. 3.5's list of Domains was deep and wide to the point of self-parody, and the power that gave a player to customize their Cleric's aesthetic and mechanics could be immense. Sure, many Domains were much weaker than others (Magic Domain is bonkers and that asshole is in core) but ultimately every Domain is stapled to Cleric, and since Clerics don't learn spells, only memorize them, there's a floor as to how weak you can possibly be.

So, what are your restrictions on Cleric? Not many. Non-War Domain Clerics had a sort of mid list of weapon options, sure, but if you're not casting you're playing wrong already so who gives a shit. Heavy armor and full access to shields meant a lot of build flexibility as far as that goes, so no problems here. The biggest thing is that a Cleric needed to be, and remain, within one alignment "step" of their god, plus or minus any other specific restrictions. That is, a Cleric of Liira, who is Chaotic Good, must be Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, or Chaotic Neutral; becoming Lawful Good, True Neutral, Chaotic Evil, etc would result in losing all Cleric powers and being unable to take Cleric levels until they fixed their shit or found a new god. Strictly speaking, these Clerics could/would still Fall a la paladins if they sufficiently blasphemed against or angered their god, but in practice this sort of thing was just...not common.

This is the section where I would talk about other divine classes in 3.X but honestly they were all so god damn weird and specific that no comparison really could be made. Shugenja, for instance, just isn't cognate to Cleric. The closest thing is the Healer class, no points for guessing what their deal is, but the thing with Healer is they have more in common with paladin, so like. Cleric or bust baby, welcome to fucktown.

Which brings us back to what Cleric was like narratively, the answer to which is: confused. The thing is...Clerics have always, likely will always, want high Wisdom, which makes them perceptive, good at detecting lies, weirdly talented at handling animals, competent to navigate the wilderness, and also I just described a Disney Princess. The trouble is, nearly everything else is strictly secondary. Every caster wants and needs Constitution in 3.X so they can make those Concentration checks and also, you know, not die, so okay, you're perceptive and you can hold your liquor, but after that nothing else matters. On the one hand, this makes for a great deal of versatility in terms of your ability scores, but on the other hand Cleric had 2+Int skill points per level on the most dog shit skill list in the game so being a very smart Cleric rarely bought you anything. Higher Charisma could be cool, but hey, see that skill list? It's still shit, and if you aren't also buying Intelligence you quite literally can't afford to keep up the social skill tax. A true war-priest wants Dexterity so they can act before their enemies and command the battlefield but that's more or less all you buy out of Dexterity on Cleric so congratulations, you're an almighty quickdraw and also illiterate. "What about Strength," what about it.

I really cannot overstate the paralyzing nature of that skill list, because priests - which 3.5 wanted Clerics to be, which it thinks they are - need more of them than most people think. A proper spiritual leader needs to buy up Insight, Knowledge (Religion), Knowledge (Local), Knowledge (Nobility), and Persuasion at a minimum, and they sure do also want Intimidate and Perception. You get two of those. Two. Just two. If you buy up Intelligence after you eat your vegetables like a good player, you maybe get to buy four of those. And that's it, that's all you fucking get. Clerics are not competent to be priests, which is going to be true of them going forward from this edition on. Now, I'm painting with a relatively broad brush here, and there's definitely religions on Earth these days which did, or still do, separate out roles that might reasonably be called a priest & Cleric vs. those roles that are community leaders and interpreters of doctrine and law, but there's a shocking amount of "here's my vision of what priests are and do" that Cleric wants to be, and isn't, because of this whole fucking deal.

But while 3.5 was extremely blind to the bit where Clerics just were not what it thinks priests are any more, it was very much not blind to the terror and power of their spellcasting. A high-level cleric, in the narrative of any given setting, is a terrifying force - an army unto themselves, a one-woman political bloc whose existence is an implicit threat of violence on a civilizational scale. I didn't spill all that ink about the power and mechanics of Cleric up there for nothing; 3.5 was very interested in how those mechanics could manifest within the narrative, how they are inextricably bound to said narrative. Hell, in Expedition to Undermountain alone the backstory of the dungeon includes one non-relevant sect of Clerics who was, in-universe, trying to game the spell slot system, alongside another unrelated sect that the PCs trip over by accident and fight inside their half-constructed fortress of partially undead bone which they control via Rebuke Undead.

Lemme say that again just for emphasis: there's an adventure where an accidental encounter is a long siege through a half-animated evil fortress that can be controlled through pure divinity, which was invented because its builders, in-universe, were trying to optimize their power and create an advantage they could control but their enemies couldn't. And this is just my favorite example, it's hardly the only one. Even the fucking novels got in on this sort of thing. We all joke about how wizards have no rights, because they don't, but watch a Cleric hit level 7 or so and you'll realize quickly that they are becoming something to which mortal laws are more like polite suggestions. Nor is this necessarily solely the sign of greater favor and thus potentially restriction from their god; indeed, a Cleric has to bring things to the table themself, narratively speaking! Divine spellcasting is a real skillset that you get better at with practice and experience, and part of the reason higher level Clerics get so much attention from other gods - aside from the obvious "this person can solo an army and still go home in a mood to have sex with their wife" angle - is that a skilled Cleric is a rare resource worth stealing.

Overall, 3.5's vision of Cleric is perhaps the one that suffers most from Cleric's identity-draining lack of specificity. Its Clerics were powerful, but they were also largely all the same; they could change their spells every day, but that only really meant that your list of spells doesn't really matter beyond personal preference. Domains offered some customization, but they didn't go far enough, and indeed if they were to go far enough the all-consuming might of Cleric would only be even more flagrant. So let's return to the most honest edition of D&D, shall we?

D&D 4e: Healer Calls The Shots - There are a lot of reasons that D&D 4e was born dead, and a big one is that classes with healing abilities were labeled 'leaders'. This seems absurd these days, especially if you're into esports at all; the support player being the team leader has become accepted strategy in a variety of games, in no small part because one simply cannot win without them, and yet at the time the D&D fanbase - still in an awkward transitional period of nerd masculinity that I don't have the time or the PhD to write about - rebelled against this concept with fountaining violence. The "girlfriend classes", leaders? Absurd. Preposterous. Clearly Sir Dipshit the Fighter with no mental stats or applicable skills is the leader.

I'm not fucking bitter, you are.

So what was Cleric's deal, exactly? Cleric qua Cleric was a Leader, as mentioned before, that could primarily be built either as a scrappy melee type or a more hard-support implement caster. "What's an implement caster?" glad you asked; back in 4e you had to hold a casting implement to cast your spells, something like a rod, staff, wand, holy symbol, your mother's haunted skull, whatever, and these had specific mechanical effects that altered your abilities. Some classes, like Cleric, could also or instead use a weapon as their implement, but in practical terms the strict wealth-by-level guidelines meant you got one or the other and would build your stats accordingly. Keep this in your back pocket for later, it's going to come up again. Also for your back pocket for later: these implements were, well, implemented as part of 4e's item progression, and the expectation was that you would spend your available resources (in this case, gold/phantom gold, collectively Wealth By Level) on better implements that would make your abilities work more work-y. Limited wealth meant that while in theory you could have both a magic weapon and a magical implement, in practical terms you get one or the other 'cause there's other shit you gotta buy.

What Clerics did with these implements was sell healing and healing accessories. While 4e introduced the concept of Radiant damage (used there as especially good against fiends, undead, and other forces of evil) and Clerics did indeed have access to some of that as well as buff abilities, their main thing was being the ranged healer par excellence, able to heal or cause healing far in excess of their peers in the role such as Warlord. Here, then, we return to the throughline of the divine healer which stretches all the way back to fucking BECMI, and which modern audiences may recognize more readily as the JRPG archetype of the White Mage - itself rooted in BECMI again! This hobby is an ouroboros, I say, with love.

Joining Cleric here are a selection of other classes with divine powers who take on a similar conceptual space. I talked a bit about Invoker during the Paladin article so I'm not gonna go over them again (this shit is long enough as it is), so we're gonna talk about Warpriest and Runepriest.

Introduced in the Essentials line, Warpriest was - like most Essentials classes - a simplified take on Cleric meant to be more accessible to new players. It shifted just about everything towards Wisdom in terms of writing one's character. Warpriests were these tanky all-around characters who gave up some of Cleric's team support for better attacks, and notably did not select powers on level-up, but rather got a progression based on their Domain. Readers familiar with D&D 5e might see some similarities here.

Runepriest, on the other hand, was a weird freak of a Defender whose thing was projecting offensive or defensive Auras that they could amplify with their support abilities and swap out every time they attacked. Their primary stat was Strength, drawing on a similar idea to the later revised 5e Barbarian or, perhaps more familiar to y'all, Beast incantations in Elden Ring. Very much not simplified, Runepriest offered some initial build diversity but didn't get a lot of support as the gameline continued, ironically ending up as very limited despite seeming intentions of breadth.

Narratively, these classes were somewhere in the range of 'village preacher with a hidden badass streak' to 'war missionary' to 'literal thug for the literal god of literal fascism'. 4e here stands out for being the first edition to acknowledge that a Cleric is not really a priest as such, and is much more like...a chosen one, a conception that very much fit well into 4e's idea that adventurers are inherently freaks who do things no sane person would ever consider. If you're thinking, "gee that sounds odd, why wouldn't there be like Clerics just existing inside cities", I point you at works like Dungeon Meshi who advance this same idea. Fundamentally, the skills one uses to break into ancient tombs full of undead are not skills you develop while working as a spiritual leader or a bureaucrat or even as a military officer. Adventuring is not a career you get into because your life is going well.

Of course, as mentioned, D&D 4e was born dead, so now we need to talk about the demon that ate its corpse and was, for a time, the unquestioned king of the TTRPG space by dint of its treachery and malice.

Pathfinder: Deus Vult Part II: World Holy War - Keep Pathfinder in your back pocket next to casting implements, they're gonna star in the religion section later as I express a fundamental anger that borders on inhuman rage. You have no earthly idea just how much I'm cutting out of this section alone considering that like many, I was there for Pathfinder during the beta and thus got in on the ground floor of a great deal of incompetence, malice, cruelty, outright betrayal, unexamined double-think, and egotistical bullshit.

That said, let's actually talk about Cleric.

In terms of Cleric qua Cleric, you may be noticing that the table there looks a lot like 3.5's Cleric, and indeed in many ways they're pretty similar. The biggest immediate difference is the addition of Channel Energy, which lets a Cleric become a healing bomb (or harm undead bomb, or vice versa) a certain number of times per day linked to their Charisma modifier. This is in addition to spontaneous casting, so it's a strict addition; further, it being a 30-foot burst means a channeled heal might actually be worth your Standard Action at some point in your career. It won't be, but it might. Additionally, Pathfinder Clerics are proficient in the Favored Weapon of their god by default (more on this later), which - by contrast - was often much harder to access in 3.5.

Like D&D 3.5, Pathfinder has a dizzying array of Domains to go with a default setting packed full of gods (more on this in the religion section later), ranging from things as broad as 'all magic ever' to things as embarrassingly specific as 'ambushes as laid by kobolds specifically'. Seriously, look at this list, it's absurd. And while by sheer numbers and specificity it's roughly equivalent with 3.5, I'm not about to claim 3.5 has the high road here, Clerics in Pathfinder get more abilities from their Domains and thus your choice of Domain and/or Subdomain is far more important to your Cleric than it ever was in PF's parent game.

Indeed, option paralysis is going to be the name of the game here. Clerics in Pathfinder, in addition to Domain and Subdomain and their choice of god, also get to pick out variants on the Channeling ability that I talked about and, like all Pathfinder classes, have access to a dizzying array of Archetypes. These Archetypes in turn range in scope and concept from variations on how one has trained as a Cleric (such as Crusader, keep that name in mind for later) to like, race essentialism as class features such as Fiendish Vessel. Sit on that statement for a bit. Really internalize it.

Now, while the rules for Pathfinder give provisions for older versions of Clerics such as Clerics of ideals, Planar Clerics, etc, in practice Pathfinder is very much married to its one-and-only setting, Golarion, and to its particular vision of Clerics as the dedicated priests of a single god. This is a difficult vision to accomplish, as they still aren't competent to be priests, but it's also one that adds another layer of information a player has to juggle, as Golarion makes a much bigger and yet somehow much smaller deal about Clerics falling and losing their powers; each of its gods has a published code of conduct, Obediences you can perform for mechanical benefits, and sometimes even exclusive spells. I said I was gonna cut my beefs with Paizo out of this section but I really cannot resist just one: this is from the creators who made their first bones by arguing that mechanical bloat was the cardinal sin of 3.5 and advertised a return to the purity of Core. It would be funny if it weren't so fucking infuriating. If you can't hack it as a Cleric of your god, you lose your powers until you either start hacking it, or find a new god that agrees better with your current behavior, and those gods are very much in the market to hire.

In addition to Clerics as the hypothetical main priests (both as PCs and NPCs), Pathfinder introduces Inquisitors, Oracles, and Warpriests and we're gonna have to talk about all of them so I hope you weren't doing anything else with your day. Let's start with Inquisitors. Meant to be to Cleric what Ranger is to druid, Inquisitor is a wildly revealing take on how Paizo thinks about religion and ethics. To wit:

"Grim and determined, the inquisitor roots out enemies of the faith, using trickery and guile when righteousness and purity is not enough. Although inquisitors are dedicated to a deity, they are above many of the normal rules and conventions of the church. They answer to their deity and their own sense of justice alone, and are willing to take extreme measures to meet their goals. Role: Inquisitors tend to move from place to place, chasing down enemies and researching emerging threats. As a result, they often travel with others, if for no other reason than to mask their presence. Inquisitors work with members of their faith whenever possible, but even such allies are not above suspicion."

James Jacobs would like to tell you, with a straight face, that this is a normal and expected way to engage with religion, to think about religion, and that Inquisitors as presented here can be of any alignment and serve any god, all of whom will keep them around on purpose. In a related story, James Jacobs is a sniveling wretch. In another related story, the aesthetics and proficiencies of Inquisitor are very much like, the Hugh Jackman Van Helsing. I do not say this as an insult to either Inquisitor or to Mister Van Helsing, his aesthetics slap, but do keep that in mind for what I'm gonna say later.

Mechanically, Inquisitor drops a lot of control and damage, gleefully sacrificing most of the support a Cleric offers in favor of singling out particular targets and persecuting them to death. They also get a surprising amount of out-of-combat utility, adding their Wisdom modifier to Knowledge checks to identify "monsters" ("hey what's a monster" good FUCKING question), gaining bonuses to tracking like a Ranger, and adding a FAT bonus to Sense Motive (this becomes Insight in 5e) & Intimidate checks. Their combat style is a mix of hard control spells and self-buffs to damage so they can sandpaper their enemies to death; very functional, but also very much a particular vision of a holy warrior. And lest we leave this unsaid, Inquisitor spells were very much concerned with rooting out "heresy", heterodoxy, and punishing "sinners" within their own faiths, which is a wild-ass statement when you remember, again, that they can follow any god. You wanna tell me the god of revolutions runs secret police whose job it is to murder heretics? You wanna tell me that, James Jacobs? That's what you're telling me? Fucksake. Adding to this is that while Inquisitors can take Domains, they more commonly take bespoke Inquisitions that, well, make them better at being the secret police. You know how the god of the harvest runs the Grain Gestapo and they're the good guys somehow? Like that.

This, however, is where I drop the other shoe. Look at Inquisitor's skill list. Look at their skills per level. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? They're competent to serve as spiritual leaders, indeed, infinitely more competent to do so than either Cleric or Warpriest are or ever will be. The rest of their abilities make that idea just a little bit absurd, but if you don't mind every local village priest being an apprentice serial killer on their off hours Inquisitor is the only divine class that can do the job. The only one. There are no others. The next-closest candidates are fucking Bard and Rogue.

Which brings us to Warpriest, I think. I will not mince words here: Warpriest fucking sucks. Pitched as one of the many so-called "hybrid classes", Warpriest's parent classes are Fighter and Cleric, and it really got the worst end of both. Cleric is cracked enough that even with 6th level casting Warpriest evens out to doing fine, but my fucking god. Warpriests get some minor buffs to their weapons and armor, allowing them to customize those items and granting a phantom buff to the budget they can assign to them, as well as access to Blessings, their particular spin on Domains. These are good ways to extend their spellcasting but are, essentially, equivalent to a secondary pool of spells and buffs; likewise, their Fervor ability is a pool of healing/harming in theory, but in practice you burn Fervor to self-buff as a Swift action (Bonus Action for you 5e folks) or you're doing it wrong. The problem here is that Warpriest is just...worse Cleric. The phantom buffs to their weapons and armor, as well as their pool of bonus Combat feats, do not make up for the bit where they swing less accurately, less often, than an equal level Fighter, Paladin, Ranger, etc. You're casting or you're failing, and if you're already a hard caster, you're a Cleric - and Clerics, y'know, are already war-priests.

Oracle is the weird one out of this list. A spontaneous and Charisma-based divine caster, Oracle stands out for having a more limited list of spells that they get to use more often, and for having flexibility with their use of Metamagic feats the way a Sorcerer does. "What if I don't want to use Metamagic feats," I'm afraid you'll need to go fuck yourself, this is what you're doing. Oracle was an instant smash-hit with the player base of Pathfinder for its strong aesthetics and customization; where most Clerics are essentially the same with minor differences, every Oracle is, in some way, different. In particular, each Oracle has a Curse which makes them like, literally & textually disabled in some way but also grants them power, ranging from "you're just deaf, that's it that's the curse" to "you've been infested by an alien hive-mind from literal space, good luck fucker", and also pursues a Mystery that gives them themed abilities and further customizes their spell list. Unfortunately this is still a Paizo class; in terms of the actual mechanics, most Curses are essentially meaningless, with a rare few either being so bad that they're unpickable or so good that you kinda have to justify why you didn't take them (Deafened is the latter, incidentally) and most just being nothingburgers that matter not at all.

Now, notable here before I talk about Mysteries is that Oracle, like Cleric, is living that 3/4th base attack bonus life and can natively wear up to medium armor. Unlike Cleric they are not natively proficient with their god's Favored Weapon but otherwise they're fronting as a gish (spellblade for you youngbloods, a character that mixes magic and melee). The thing is, while that 3/4 attack bonus is great for spells that make attack rolls - here Oracle is handily beating contenders like Wizard or Sorcerer in terms of accuracy - they are, you know, ninth-level casters. The correct move for your turn is "I cast a spell". There are not exceptions to this. In an extremely related story, most Mysteries are full of not-spell things to do with the actions you would normally use to cast spells, and while some of them - such as the endless parade of ways to boost your Armor Class - replace certain spells, essentially saving you a slot, many of them are just kinda...weak blasts or control abilities that don't meaningfully compete with, again, "I cast a spell". And like, the flip side of your choice of Mystery often not mattering is that you're free to pick something that seems thematic to you, but riddle me this: if you never use the abilities you pick up, does it matter that you have them?

There's some obvious winners in Mysteries, as there always is. Lore and Time are cracked as hell, and you can get away with something like Metal that has mostly passive abilities, but here we need to talk a bit about the theme and flavor of Oracle. Paizo sold the class on the idea of mysterious connections to the divine, a sort of divine mirror to their Witch class whose associations with the otherworldly are potentially unknown to them and move them without their consent. They then immediately abandoned this faster than my father abandoned me; every published Oracle is the Oracle of one god in particular, Mysteries are associated with gods the way Domains are, and this means that in all ways Oracle is a Cleric who can get laid. I am, perhaps, disproportionately angry about this, both on a professional level (lying to your readers is a bit of a dick move) and on a personal one (I wanted the Oracle they sold and did not receive it). And that's...a bit of a let-down, right? Paladins are already god-locked in Pathfinder too, so at this point Oracle, while having strong imagery, is not meaningfully different from its peers in a way that you can really latch onto. I dunno. It's a waste, y'know?

Overall, Paizo's vision of its divine classes is not able to be separated from its vision of religion as a zero-sum holy war in which everyone is desperate for converts, no one trusts anyone else, and rooting out one's own flock for heretics and heterodoxy is considered normal and morally acceptable behavior. Paizo deadass thinks the Spanish Inquisition are the good guys, if not literally, then in spirit, and that is, not to put too fine a point on it, disgusting. Mechanical innovations are present here, but to be frank the signal-to-noise ratio is awful, and it's very much not worth the effort to pillage their work for the few good ideas that have managed to survive.

Which brings us, at long last, to:

D&D 5e: The Power of God And Anime On My Side - I apologize for nothing and I will do this again.

So, right here up front, before I talk about anything else, anything else at all, Fifth Edition Clerics are, for the first time, both not priests and not trying to be priests. To quote Pages 56-57 of the 2014 Player's Handbook: "Not every acolyte or officiant at a temple or shrine is a cleric. Some priests are called to a simple life of temple service, carrying out their gods' will through prayer and sacrifice, not by magic and strength of arms. In some cities, preisthood amounts to a political office, viewed as a stepping stone to higher positions of authority and involving no communion with a god at all. True clerics are rare in most hierarchies.

When a cleric takes up an adventuring life, it is usually because his or her god demands it. Pursuing the goals of the gods often involves braving dangers beyond the walls of civilization, smiting evil or seeking holy relics in ancient tombs. Many clerics are also expected to protect their deities' worshippers, which can mean fighting rampaging orcs, negotiating peace between warring nations, or sealing a portal that would allow a demon prince to enter the world.

Most adventuring clerics maintain some connection to established temples and orders of their faiths. A temple might ask for a cleric's aid, or a high priest might be in a position to demand it."

Merciful fucking Illmater, we made it y'all. Not that the player base, by and large, has noticed; many people continue to play clerics as priests, to think of all clerics as priests and spiritual leaders, and to expect them to be such. And they are not priests. As I've argued already they've never been priests, but 5e does have a firm vision of Clerics - they're shonen protagonists. The chosen many, as it were, and that vision is clearer and more thematic than Cleric has been since mammoths still walked the Earth. Y'all are doing this wrong. Please stop.

Anyway, mechanics! The more things change, the more they stay the same; Cleric still has a dog shit skill list, they're still a mid-armored all-rounder with anti-undead features, they're still pretty good at resisting mind control. The Optimal Cleric(tm) is rocking high Wis and Dex so they can act first and get off their powerful control spells, which in turn implies light armor in an unusual first for D&D, but I'll be real with you: Cleric has one of the best spell lists in the game, as long as your Wisdom is high you can do whatever you want and never be punished for it. Notable here in comparison to previous editions are the flexibility of the Cleric's spell slots in 5e - you can cast any spell you have prepared out of your slots rather than locking 1 spell to 1 slot - and Ritual Casting, a feature most people associate with Wizards but which is very, very much available to Cleric and gives them similar out-of-combat utility. Turn Undead and Destroy Undead return, both more functional than they've been in decades, and are now linked to rests of any kind and also used to charge Domain features. "What about Divine Intervention -" what the fuck about it.

Which brings us to Domains. And the thing about Domains is there's still a lot of them in the context of 5e; the Player's Handbook alone published seven of them, and just about every player-oriented book after that had 1-2 more, sometimes as many as three. Cleric is feasting, and while most of the food is decidedly mid it still doesn't matter because it is, again, stapled to Cleric. Like I could wax poetic, at some considerable length, about why Domains like War, Trickery, or Grave are bad options, but y'know, the thing is, they're still fucking Clerics, they'd be doing fine with no Domain at all. I'm not gonna go into a massive breakdown of the pros and cons of any given Domain, but in general you'll have the most harmonious time with Domains that don't expect you to be spending your actions doing things that aren't casting spells. War, for instance, is gonna be a let-down because it really wants you to be making weapon attacks and you do not have the tools to make that remotely worth it; conversely, Grave also sucks, but it mostly fills in actions that your spells can't or won't, so you'll have a much smoother time playing Grave. For those wondering, the hands-down winners of the Domain list are Knowledge, Life, Light, and Tempest, though an extremely dishonorable shout-out goes to Order as a control & utility pick that is completely unaware of its own existence as a cosmic fucking horror story. See the sample Clerics below for that shit.

Now, remember when I told you to keep implements in your back pocket? 5e also has them, but they're introduced a bit...unevenly. Magical items do exist that do what magic implements used to do, namely, boost your spell DCs and spell attack modifiers - the caster equivalent of a magical weapon - but not many were ever published, and the ones that were are mainly for arcane casters. Fans of Critical Role may be recognizing items like the Spire of Conflux or the Hand Cone of Clarity as taking this role (and indeed quite a bit of Mercer's world and mechanics draws influence from D&D 4e), while players of Baldur's Gate 3 are pointing at the screen and naming some of their favorite caster-focused shields, gloves, and helmets right now. Any of these are a pretty neat way to engage on this idea as long as you keep things under control (you don't wanna exceed a total of like, +3/+3 here), but you as the DM, or you and your DM if you're a player, can and will be making this shit up yourself for your Cleric.

So, what's 5e's vision of Clerics, narratively? Well...see, the thing is, the text I quoted above is mainly it. D&D 5e is remarkably lore-light on the player-facing end, instead investing a lot of its lore writing in wild reworks of various cultures such as drow or gnolls, which I will not comment on because I do need to end this article at some point and I'm still in the fucking context section. There's a soft sympathy towards the position that 5e's Clerics, as they level, are holier Clerics, rather than more skilled Clerics (again, see above), but even that is a very tepidly held position, one which in novel writing and related media is far from consistent or primary. That said, I couldn't walk out of this section with a straight face if I didn't talk about the WILD fucking Domain assignments 5e makes for its gods, which in some cases is an artifact of many more specific Domains no longer existing, but in other cases appears to be the product of some of the most ignorant Protestant bullshit you can possibly imagine when thinking of the gods in question. Again, see the existence and flavor of the Order Domain as an example here, but like, in what fucking universe is Helm associated with the Light Domain? Since when was Wee Jas a Grave Domain kinda goddess? Not to hype this up twice in two paragraphs, but you will notice when we get there that I have chosen to ignore this whole affair for many of the upcoming sample Clerics and when I do there'll be some discussion about it. I do these things to myself and I really wish I didn't but this is who I am as a person now.

Going to the Land Of Context is like going to the Underworld, it takes you three days no matter how fast you travel. But at long last we have arrived, and we can conduct the actual fucking article. May Oghma pity me, for I myself will not.

Gotta Go, The People In The Important Pajamas Are Mad - Clerics At Your Table

Before I say anything else, that headline is not my original line but I cannot for the LIFE of me remember what early aughts webcomic it's from. I am likely misquoting it but if anyone on this hellsite recognizes it and can point me back to it for a proper credit I will be quite grateful & also get the citation in.

The following section is meant to help you in fleshing out a Cleric concept to play or even to use as an NPC. While some of this advice is edition-agnostic and indeed when we get to the religion section we're gonna return to some Takes Through The Editions and I will be very sad and also angry, a great deal of it will be slanted towards 5e because, let's face it, that's what people are playing. Make of this what you will. Also covered here will be same-paging (again), Clerics & alignment, and common pitfalls of playing Clerics (and suggestions of how to avoid them). So, without further ado:

Same Paging - In Which I Blow The Meta Joke About This Being In Any Class Article I Do Early Like A Damn Fool

Same-paging is the practice of talking to your group in a way that helps set mutual expectations, and it’s something every RPG group should strive to do regardless of the system they’re playing in. You’ve probably done this to an extent before, as part of being pitched a game (”We’re going to do a dungeon crawl through the deadly halls of Undermountain”), during character creation, and the like. If this opener to the section sounds familiar, it's because I copy-pasted it from my last class article and there's nothing you can do to stop me. In the specific case of Cleric, the elephant in the room you need to explicitly talk about and not just assume shit about is the sort of relationship you're looking to develop between your character and their god(s) and, y'know, any themes or ideas about spirituality that you explicitly would like to see included or, conversely, very much need to not see included. We're gonna get into it more in the religion section later but man it truly does fucking blow chunks if you're looking to have, say, a serious exploration of your character's faith and its relationship to society, but the rest of your group is on some Reddit Atheist shit, right? Hell, it's not even pleasant if you unexpectedly end up doing the inverse. In addition to this, if you're looking to explore ethical or doctrinal dilemmas (i.e. if you're really into the idea of playing a Cleric of Eldath as a dedicated pacifist, or dig into the conflicts that might arise between the Orders of Denier who preserve knowledge vs. some kinda magical infohazard), this is the time to say it and chew it over with your group. And again, as long as everyone's having fun and not hurting someone else any way you play it is fine - a kick-in-the-door style campaign is a perfectly fun campaign to have. The point is to set expectations up front, not to like, ensure that the group is playing in the one ordained way to play. Which is bold words considering how many times in this article up to this point I've deadass accused people of playing wrong, but I do mean it. I contain multitudes.

One Day, A Tortoise Will Learn To Fly - Making Your Cleric

The Pratchett quotes will continue until morale improves.

Once you and your group have communicated your expectations to each other, it’s finally time to start sketching out your concept! There are many ways to do this, though the two primary schools are mechanics-first and narrative-first. That is to say, opening up with something like "Using the Knowledge Domain to pick up proficiencies on the fly sounds fun to me," works out great, as does opening up with something like, "My Cleric learned her ex-wife was literally a goddess about three weeks ago and is having a wild one about it." However, this article is about to be long enough already without me trying to write a mechanical guide to 5e Cleric, let alone any other Cleric, so we're gonna focus on the narrative approach. If you need a mechanical guide, I promise you that the player base of whatever edition you're into has made several and that the author of each one has some kind of passionate beef with the authors of all of the others. Consider the following questions for your Cleric:

Why Did You Become A Cleric? To be a Cleric is to be of the chosen many; inherently, you're gonna be a bit weird. That weirdness may be because of the conflict between your perceived social station vs. who you are as a person (to wit, people might expect a Cleric of Oghma in the Forgotten Realms to be a stuffy scholar and be surprised when he shows up to strongman competitions or turns out to be one of the Sword Coast's most prolific authors of erotica), but in all honesty odds are much higher that you're a freak. Incredible divine power doesn't erase the bit where adventuring is not a career one takes up because one's life is going well. That said, just because you're a chosen one doesn't mean you didn't also get to choose. Did your Cleric pursue Clerichood for some reason, and if so, why seek that power? If they didn't seek it out on purpose, how do they feel about this change in their relationship to divinity and the burgeoning power within them? This is where you can get both characterization and plot hooks; a Cleric forged when she swore herself to the Red Knight in a desperate attempt to defend her farm from bandits is a very different beast from one who sought power and station from Bahamut so they could enact reforms in their society. Look for connections to the game world and reasons to care about it.

How Did You Learn? There's some obvious things to answer here - your Cleric learned how to wear up to Medium armor, the proper use of shields, and basic combat techniques - but the more interesting question to dig into is your spells. D&D has actually had many different schools of thought here, some of them co-existing or competing with each other. D&D 5e, as mentioned above, breaks on the idea that a higher-level Cleric is a holier Cleric, and that their casting is an almost intuitive process of seeking intercession or requesting miracles in advance in case they need them. Many people play their Clerics this way, but here I will once again climb atop my mountain of old-ass lore and offer an alternative: divine spellcasting as a skill you actually have to learn and practice. In this school of thought, a higher level Cleric is a more practiced and powerful Cleric, and is intrinsically attractive to "rival" deities not simply because they are a great champion of their own but because they are a potent resource. For those in the audience wondering how this makes any fucking sense, I will point out, gently, that this idea is actually still prevalent in Japanese media and its White Mage archetypes, as well as in popular videogames like Elden Ring. These Clerics learn spells from somewhere, and the "somewhere" has a broad variety of answers; they unlock the secrets of their rites through cryptotheology, they experience divine revelation, their god teaches them personally, they're mentored by more experienced Clerics. Indeed, Ms. Jester Lavorre of Critical Role fame engages on her divine casting in this mode, often expressing that the Traveler has been telling her about new spells or teaching them to her personally, and while this is set up as something suspicious about the Traveler in her story it's actually a quite storied idea of Being A Cleric with deep roots in many D&D settings. Regardless of your choice here, though, consider this next question:

How Do You Relate To Your Power? This is another arena with a lot of unquestioned ideas that do not necessarily like, relate to how Clerics have been historically or even what they could be if we took only 5e as gospel. In most cases, people take a very Protestant slant to their Cleric; their spells and powers are divine gifts which can and should be revoked at the whim of their god, who is in turn a being of higher morality who intrinsically knows better. And like, I'ma get into this in the religion section here in a bit, but this is a wild idea when you actually look at the gods in question, let alone when you remember that to be a Cleric is to build a relationship with one's deity. Pious service as thought of by Christians is a way to relate to your deity, sure, and there's even some hanging around that are into it (Torm, f'rinstance), but like, Waukeen would find such a relationship distasteful, would say to such a cleric, "Girl, you're selling yourself short." So put some real thought into this, and you may come to surprising answers for your Cleric. Do they see their divine power as bringing forth the holiness intrinsic to the world? As an outflowing of their own passions and obsessions? Could your Cleric read as a grim cynic to others because they view their spells as not fundamentally different from arcane magic, and caution sternly that power is power regardless of source? Are they gifts from the world of wonder and horror, which anyone could use if they knew the right way of seeing? Your Cleric's abilities are not like a second layer on top of their personality, they're part and parcel of who they are as a person; give it consideration.

What Are Your Values? Hear me out; this seems like an obvious question, something every character should ask, but here I'm going to introduce an argument that I'll elaborate on later - gods in D&D are, essentially, worldviews. And while the worldview embodied by your Cleric's god(s) is obviously the one most important to them - they did become a wholeass Cleric about it - D&D has some specific-ass gods. A Cleric of like, Azuth (god of spells, patron of wizards) is not getting a party line about a whole lot of basic ethics and kinda has to figure that shit out for himself. So ask yourself not just who your Cleric believes in, but what, and how this might relate to their faith or grow from who they are as a person. A Cleric who is the fourth child of a noble house (kicked out to a life of adventure because they ain't inheriting shit) may well have opinions about noblesse oblige, politics, and power that have absolutely nothing to do with their chosen god; likewise, D&D has a rich tradition of Clerics of fairly evil gods such as Auril, Loviatar, or Umberlee who are out here selling the wonders those dark powers have on offer because they genuinely believe in helping people or, you know, have Standards, the thing professionals are supposed to have. A frontier Cleric may well have opinions, for better or worse (traditionally worse, D&D has a long history of being friendly to empire) about the colonial project they're a part of, or a Cleric up from the Underdark might be spending her free time in academic knife fights defending the beauty and splendor of her home's ecology. Your Cleric is a real person in a real reality, not an extension of her god; that's the kind of thing that gives a person some fucking opinions, no?

What's Your Relationship To Your God(s) Like? And in a related story, this point! Unless something really odd is going on, your Cleric is not a divine being free from mortal needs or the burdens of history; it therefore follows that she is not about to be a perfect incarnation of her god(s) ideals. That's, y'know, the neat bonus you get for having an afterlife. Let's leave alone for a moment that there is a pretty strong possibility that your Cleric is so uneducated and/or fucking stupid that they don't know the textual dogma of their own faith (though please, do not forget this, it's one of the funniest things about Cleric); the ideals of that faith, and of their god in particular, are something they are probably growing into. This really should not be a controversial take, not after Critical Role blew the fuck up with the likes of Caduceus Clay and his spiritual journey in the name of the Wildmother, but you might be surprised. It is, genuinely, okay if your Cleric is kinda bad at following their god(s) in some ways! Maybe even many ways! A dwarf Cleric who's out adventuring instead of at home using their magic to help their clan is already failing at least one major ideal of the dwarven pantheon, for instance. Clerics and even priests of Sune Firehair (goddess of art and beauty, a chaotic and capricious foe of evil whose mantle is the splendor of the living world) have a partly-deserved reputation as shallow hedonists who reify existing beauty standards; the entire faith of Lathander has a serial inquisition problem that they haven't stopped having an ongoing civil war about since the fucking Dawn Cataclysm. So how does your Cleric see the divine ideals to which they are meant to aspire? Is their deity their teacher and guide? A stern master to be obeyed? A distant and dazzling figure almost disconnected from matters of dogma in the Cleric's mind? Their literal actual lover? There can be many answers here, and while I don't want to downplay the delicious angst of a well-done "I'm a bad worshipper of my god and I'm guilty about it" arc...well, the signal-to-noise ratio there is real bad, let's say. More on this in a later section.

Hobbies? Pick some. I really should not have to be saying this and honestly it's a dependent consideration with the whole 'what are your values' thing but if I see one more Cleric whose entire life and job is religious service with no interests outside of it I'm going to drop the moon on Europe and whatever happens will happen. Fucksake, this isn't even a 'many D&D players are culturally Christian' thing, this is just lazy writing and historical illiteracy. Did you think all those monasteries and temples in like, Redwall and such making beer or growing crops was just the authors having a fuckin' laugh? Come on.

Playing With The Big Boys Now - Cleric Aesthetics

You may be remembering this section as where the Paladin article talked a bit about refluffing. This is...sort of like that. As one of D&D's full casters, Cleric is deep in its particular idiosyncrasies, and using the Cleric kit to make a non-Cleric thing, while possible, is still going to have a...a particular shape, let's call it. If, for instance, your setting doesn't have any separation of arcane and divine magic & "clerics" are just a different school of magical study, you're probably fine. If you're trying to do a fully technological setting where "spells" are high-tech gadgets, you're gonna run into a bigger set of problems much faster. All of that said, though, there's still quite a bit to talk about in terms of bringing out unique flavor for your Cleric, some of which are habits that the 5e player base has already rushed ahead to hold up as good practice and others which are rarely thought explicitly about. I do hope you came ready to learn about obscure TTRPG audience drama that has never wholly died out. Let's start with the easy one first, shall we?

Spell Aesthetics - I'll not lie to you, I should probably be angrier about this topic but the convoluted history of the player base's relationship to "what do your spells look like?" is too fascinating for me to really build up the fury it deserves. There has been, indeed, in some senses still is a shockingly vitriolic argument within D&D circles about whether or not all spells of the same name look the same, and while I am vastly simplifying the two perspectives generally break down into "they need to look the same so that they are identifiable for balance reasons" vs. "having your own personal brand is sick as hell". The latter has traditionally won by default in terms of the overall body of D&D's work, especially in the spaces defined by the novel-writing, though the influence of CRPGs like Neverwinter Nights who break on the side of spells looking the same for everyone (for obvious reasons) shouldn't be downplayed. D&D 3.5 had a Feat for this that makes your spells a little harder for people to recognize via the Spellcraft skill but mostly just gives you absolute reign to customize the look of your casting; Pathfinder, by contrast, doesn't want you customizing jack shit (and indeed late in its run also edited Silent Spell and Still Spell so that your casting of spells is still detectable to the naked eye, cowards that they are). That said, and to the surprise of absolutely fucking nobody, I break very strongly on the side of "having your own personal brand is sick as hell", as do many of the major works of modern 5e, here to very much include Critical Role but also many other actual plays such as Dice Shame or Planet Arcana.

So, what goes into deciding what your spells are like? First things first, the mechanics; an aesthetic that doesn't do what the spell does, or have the components the spell uses, is right out. It's one thing if your group handwaves certain ideas for ease of play or because they don't interest y'all (see here the common practice of replacing expensive material components with just subtracting the gold from your sheet when you cast), but like, your guiding bolt fires Something that requires an attack roll, it deals Radiant damage, and it causes some kind of light that clings to an opponent. Verbal components, mechanically, must be spoken in a clear voice. Somatic components...exist. To be perfectly honest no one has had a clear idea of what Somatic components are ever aside from a vague idea that they require your hands (this is mechanically explicit in 4e & 5e) and even then there's exceptions, dishonorable shout-out to the scene in War of the Spider Queen where a wizard casts with his fucking feet. Notable here is that casters in 3.5 through 5e can replace non-expensive material components with a focus/implement/character feat, such as a staff, orb, wand, crystal, or in the case of Clerics, their holy symbol; these implements are touched, invoked, involved in the somatic components, or otherwise pretty obvious. The next bit of this is gonna be all about selecting your own aesthetics but I do want to reiterate first something I have said before and will continue saying over and over and over and over and over and over and over again: in any conflict between the narrative and the mechanics, the mechanics win by default. This is because they are the tools with which you actually engage with the game world. When your Cleric of Umberlee casts flame strike, there is some manner of dealing Fire damage involved. Maybe it's boiling sea water, maybe you hit a motherfucker with an underwater volcano, maybe you just go "the classic burning column of fire is fine", but you can't bitch slap people with that spell and then say it's actually the cold ocean depths. Alright? Alright.

So when you're looking at "what do my spells look like" there's three places I like to interrogate. The first and most obvious is, what's the deal with my god? This can be a pretty broad thing to look at; gods are worldviews, and those can be interpreted very differently. Not to return to a super famous example here or anything, but when your friend and mine Caduceus Clay (Critical Role) has spiritual guardians that look like swarms of beetles and manifests his damage spells as aspects of decay, another Cleric of the Wildmother may well lean into vines and trees, or their guiding bolt might appear as hurling a whole-ass rhino at your face that then explodes into light. Here, then, we roll into the second question: what domain is your Cleric? This is the aspect of your god or your faith that you're the closest to, which is dearest to your heart, and will therefore manifest in the act of spellcasting - which in turn is derived from your relationship with the divine. A War Domain Cleric of say, Eilistraee, may well emphasize the martial prowess of that goddess in their spells, manifesting spiritual armor, blades of moonlight, mighty shields, numinous warriors, while a Twilight Domain Cleric of the same goddess is gonna be all in on the moon and stars, the sky at night, crescents, and the like.

Lastly there's the physical action of spellcasting to consider, and here I would like to hasten to point something out. While it is common practice to simply use one's holy symbol as a divine focus, it is not required. Many faiths on Earth have holy symbols or something cognate to them, but there are also many that do not, and for those looking to explore a faith in a D&D god which doesn't practice that sorta thing Clerics are, like all casters, perfectly empowered to use a Component Pouch and cast spells in a more formal, ritualistic fashion than the typical image of calling out to one's god and seemingly producing a miracle without actually casting a spell (but more on this in a bit). Is your Cleric a student of divine magic, going through carefully-practiced forms? Are they intuiting their way through spellcasting, a razor's width away from being something like a Sorcerer? An almost saintly figure, whose spells appear for all the world as miracles (and if they are how do you square that with the dumb plans the average adventuring party engages with)? Do they speak their spells in a booming voice, announcing the presence of the divine? Are the rites they chant almost business-like, a concession to the needs of the casting but perhaps not seen as properly holy or reverent? What language are you casting in? Give it some thought.

Turn Undead & Other Features - Surprise bitches, there's old-ass lore about this too. While all Clerics can Turn Undead no matter how little sense it makes (look my in my lich eyes: what the fuck does Azuth care about undead?) and this is for Doylist reasons of legacy design, how they've gone about doing so and why have multiple interpretations. Way back in AD&D 2e this was something you were encouraged to think about and design for your cleric (see: The Complete Cleric's Handbook & The Complete Paladin's Handbook), both in terms of the physical action and what the power looks like. The classic wave-of-radiating-force look, displayed in Baldur's Gate 3 and used extensively in Critical Role, is indeed an old one with a lot of pedigree, associated with Clerics of sun deities such as Pelor or Lathander, but also with militant deities like the Red Knight, Bahamut, or even Wee Jas (it might seem weird that the goddess of necromancy is out here sponsoring Turn Undead but for the Ruby Lady specifically it's less 'begone, unnatural horrors' and more 'behold, my eviction notice'). Going with this has traditionally been some kind of plainly-spoken invocation or prayer; 'disperse and dispel', 'back to dust', 'return to sleep', that sorta thing.

However, this is far from the only possible look or interpretation. Indeed, popular these days is simply lifting one's holy symbol and calling upon one's god, which I have some objections to - it's not appropriate for every god, and it's also just kinda unoriginal - but is perfectly serviceable. Turn Undead as a sort of spell, with obscure incantations or formal rites for gods like Azuth (here making one's Turn Undead similar to dispel magic rather than any intrinsic divine abhorrence) could fit your Cleric, as could Turn Undead as a power move where you assert your god's greater authority over the undying (excellent for many non-nature Evil-aligned gods, and hilarious for gods like Loviatar). Likewise, Turning or destroying the undead can and should be flavored by your god and Domain; a Cleric of Chauntea that Turns Undead may well terrify them with the reminder of the grave, the bounty of the earth that will grow from their stolen bones, while a Cleric of Mystra simply unbinds the magic that holds them together (and, again, the eternally hilarious Clerics of Loviatar manifest the power of their goddess to beat the shit out of the undead). One move might even be to say your Cleric of a god who doesn't give a shit about the undead is actually drawing on another god from their pantheon who does; the aforementioned Cleric of Azuth is actually invoking his vassal, Velsharoon, who has authority over necromancy.

When it comes to one's Domain powers, you kinda live and die by your brand here. Every Tempest Cleric in 5e is gonna have the exact same fucking power list, so if you're not making your Tempest Cleric of Umberlee different from a Tempest Cleric of Gruumsh what the fuck are you even doing. While the way your god interprets these themes is obviously important - your character chose to follow them for a reason, after all - perhaps more important is the way your Cleric relates to them. A Chaotic Neutral Cleric of Umberlee who has a love of the terrible beauty of the sea conjures storms of sublime awe, like something out of a Gothic novel, while a more traditional Chaotic Evil one may well lean on storms as instruments of vengeance and punishment, sharing in her goddess's petty malice. When your War Domain Cleric takes that attack as a bonus action, is he seizing a moment, or drawing on berserk rage? What kind of Light or Life do you have? The opportunities are here y'all, seize 'em.

Radiant and Necrotic Damage - These are relatively young as far as D&D goes, and while they have bones in with earlier kinds of damage they're actually a bit thematically confused. Just to give you an idea here, Radiant damage is dealt by guiding bolt, the Light Domain power, ACTUAL FUCKING LASER RIFLES, and also flame strike. It has replaced instances of "this damage derives from pure divine power and cannot be resisted", Positive Energy damage, and also just fire damage for some fuckass reason. So when your Cleric is dealing Radiant damage, something all Clerics do, what is it? Nearly any of the above is a potential option, though I'll admit that I'm a sucker for the Positive Energy damage where you give living beings super-cancer that devours them in moments and/or unbind and dispel undead. Complicating this is that in the 5e paradigm, Radiant and Necrotic damage are both associated heavily with divine classes, and have nearly equal claim to holy power.

Which brings us to Necrotic damage, which is dealt by inflict wounds, as well as spells like blight, and also associated with Evil Clerics via spiritual guardians and similar spells. This one is derived from Negative Energy damage historically - that is, pure entropic power, not just death but "stop", "cease", "still", "silence" - but this is not always the case, and it very definitely has been used in 5e to represent things like blood drain, soul drain, pure unholy power, and also flaying someone alive. Similar considerations to Radiant damage apply, but they apply especially when you're out here casting Necrotic blasts when you, say, worship a nature or life god. What exactly are you doing? Why is it you're doing it that way? How is this, too, a miracle?

I May Have Started Worshiping Umberlee Because The Priestesses Are Hot - Clerics & Alignment

So here's the thing. As I mentioned above in the 69 page long context section, Clerics have had Falling mechanics for awhile, even if they have been consistently downplayed or ignored in comparison to Paladin. There's also been a very long time in which Clerics were required to be close to their god(s) in alignment, and there's something to be said there; how can one build up a deep and intimate relationship with a divinity that you have nothing in common with? But there are many groups that don't want to fuck with alignment (I'm gonna do that alignment article one of these days and on that day I will die), settings where alignment and worship are less connected (see: Eberron), and of course in 5e these ideas are no longer formally connected in that fashion, with alignment requirements being removed. Hell, books like Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything introduce some wild-ass ideas on the random fucking tables like "your Cleric has an ongoing relationship with an imp she doesn't fuckin' like". That seems pretty functional, so, why am I talking about it? Glad you asked: I'm an ancient-ass lich and a bit of an alignment apologist, and also this is my article and I'll infodump about alignment bullshit if I want to.

Now to make a proper run at this I'd really need to actually do that alignment article, so I'm gonna ask you instead to journey with me to an imaginary land where everyone is engaging on alignment in good faith and understands two foundational principles that the modern zeitgeist has kinda left behind; the first being that alignments are broad categories that describe beliefs which have things in common, and the second being that any given one of the nine alignments has room for many, many variations on those beliefs. Not to put like too fine a point on it but just as one f'rinstance there are no less than three different Outer Planes you can point to and say "this is Lawful Good" and each and every one of those three separate dimensions of Lawful Goodness contains its own internal array of differing beliefs and expressions of what it means to be Lawful Good. And in that sense, your Cleric's god is going to be a worldview that is included in their alignment, but is not necessarily, often, or even ever a generative force for that alignment. Evenhanded Tyr is not a fount of Lawful Goodness from which mortal beings drink to become more holy; he has a worldview, beliefs, and dogmas which one can describe as being Lawful Good, and he/his church seeks to teach them. Likewise Umberlee, the famous Bitch Queen, is not Chaotic Evil in the sense of 'overthrow all governments' but in the sense that the sea recognizes no master, is sovereign in itself, and will not be denied; that she is friendlier to Chaotic worshipers comes down to a sort of mutual comfort and expectation. A Chaotic person might not like that her goddess is a divinely infamous bitch, but she like, gets it, y'know?

So when it comes to your Cleric and alignment, there's an easy ask: what is it about their faith that attracted them to it, and in what ways are they aligned with that faith & in what ways are they lacking, opposed, or still have things to learn? The gods of D&D are stranger and wilder things than people give them credit for, to be sure, but the thing is that being a perfect embodiment of your god(s)'s worldview is one of those neat bonuses you get for being a dead person, not something people generally pull off while yet living. And, not to leave this bit on the table, not all or even most of those conflicts are necessarily what one might call a dealbreaker. It can be something as simple and doesn't-need-to-be-solved as like, a follower of Azuth spending time running for political office (a Lawful/Lawful disconnect; Azuth doesn't really give much of a shit about mortal law), something profoundly wrong but understandable (a follower of Oghma who passionately hates certain kinds of literature or poetry; Oghma is the god of all language and written art), or even really major which can form the core of an arc where either the character or god has to give (Shadowheart in Baldur's Gate 3 goes through this, but for the one person on Earth who hasn't played yet a different example might be a worshiper of Bahamut who ended up joining the colonial invasion of Chult, directly angering his god because he has failed to understand some fundamental fucking lessons here).

All of this is a lot of words to re-argue a previous point; your Cleric is not a sovereign being, capable of acting without reference to the real reality or by pure ideal alone. They have baggage, they have community, they have or had a family, they have beliefs shaped by being a real thing in a real reality. Look at the ways these aligned beliefs both touch and conflict with their church, their god, or both, and you will find a bounty of characterization and plot hooks. Keep in mind as well that the gods of D&D are fallible beings; they are students of their own ideals as much as they are teachers of such, and there are, indeed, perfectly usable hooks to be found there as well. Your Cleric is not a saint or a savior, usually; they are a student and teacher of divinity who seeks to understand it, and going on that journey together with one's god is something that has been lost in the current paradigm of the D&D audience being friendly to fucking Reddit atheism.

Call It A Girlfriend Class One More Time Motherfucker - Common Cleric Pitfalls

I'm not bitter, you're bitter.

D&D is a snake devouring itself, and like many such ongoing communities and fandoms it therefore has a lot of cultural baggage which is, how do you say, completely disconnected from objective fucking reality. This section covers some common pitfalls people walk into when making and playing Clerics. If some of these end up sounding like personal callouts...dunno what to tell you. Examine your shit.

Healbot.exe - Yeah we're starting off with the big one. Look me in my eyes. Look me directly in my fucking lich eyes. Clerics are not healers. No one in D&D is a primary healer. There have been exactly two effective primary healers in all of D&D history; the first is the Vitalist, a Psionic class published by Dreamscarred Press as part of a third-party supplement for Pathfinder 1e, and the second is Life Domain Cleric in 5e. That's it. End of list in all of history. "But what about -" no. I promise you, whatever you're thinking of is not a primary healer in the fashion you think it is. This is an ancient misconception, rooting all the way back to when only divine-type classes could heal (Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Ranger), but even back in that day healing was valued more highly than its actual effectiveness; the archetype of a videogame healer, someone like Mercy in Overwatch who can turn the tide by keeping vital people alive long enough to make big plays, that has never been part of D&D - at least not before players have access to the spell heal, which radically flips the math by itself. Much like the question of alignment, I do not have the page space or the fucking game theory degree to give this topic the attention it truly deserves, but the very short version is that PC hit points are very low, damage is quite high, and healing doesn't solve either of those problems. When you burn your action, Bahamut fucking forbid your one spell per round, on a heal what you have done is a few things: failed to advance the combat towards a conclusion, failed to meaningfully mitigate damage, burned a spell slot that could have done one of those first two, and quite possibly put yourself out of tactical position. There are cases where a heal is the right call - the spell heal as mentioned already, or in 5e getting someone to stop making Death Saves - but in general if your options are healing or doing literally anything else, pick literally anything else. Am I coming at this very strongly? Yes, but the thing is that the perception of Clerics as being "healbots", expected to memorize primarily healing spells and cast the same, has been an equally ancient and infamous perceived drawback to playing Clerics; indeed, there was a time when tables would offer incentives to someone for playing the Cleric because "someone has to be the healer" and nobody wanted to be. Does that sound like a fun experience to you? Is that the future you want to keep having? No? Good, STOP FUCKING HEALING.

Now, I said I don't have the game theory degree to unpack this, and I don't, but that was aggro as hell so I do owe a bit of an explanation. Healing being bad in D&D comes down to a few incentives, some of which I just mentioned above, but there's another big one - the only hit point that matters is your last one. Your PC, and indeed NPCs/monsters, are just as effective at 1 hit point as they are at 100 as they are at one thousand as they are at one million. Meanwhile, especially in 5e towards which this article has a significant bias, average NPC/monster damage is more than double that of an on-level heal until, again, heal; therefore, a cure wounds or healing word for someone who isn't unconscious has, at best, bought them half a turn of being alive, and given that the real swing is much larger than actual average damage the odds that you get that half a turn - pathetic in and of itself - are not in your favor. Your party does not need to be healthy, only alive; this, then, is why you only start healing once they stop being alive. Area-of-effect heals like mass cure wounds change this math a bit especially in response to area-of-effect damage which is typically lower than single-target damage, but here I will finally hold to my repeated statements that I lack the education to unpack this; if a mathematician wants to compare a devil's fireball to mass cure wounds in the notes here, please, be my guest, genuinely.

Zealotry - Welcome to the Cleric version of "stop making your paladin a cop", which readers may remember from the Paladin article. Here I need to cut a fine line; the average D&D player likely has a pretty strong idea of a particular kind of person when I say "zealot", and that kind of person is the scum of the Earth. And, indeed, while masterful roleplaying and acting might make running a fanatical missionary interesting for your play group, this is a common failure mode and I do not fucking encourage it unless you're really sure that you are, in fact, the god-king of Big Dick Mountain. However, this mode of like, the Baptist preacher is a very narrow and specific kind of zealotry and passionate belief, and I am here to make the argument that a good Cleric is, indeed, a zealot on some level, at least in part because odds are good that you, person reading this article, are yourself a zealot on some topic or other! The esteemed Kendrick Lamar, for instance, is a zealot of hip-hop. I am a zealot of old D&D lore. Ed Greenwood, praise fucking be, is a zealot of anthropological worldbuilding. To be a Cleric, one of the chosen many, is to have a deep and passionate connection to the ideals of your god; it is to care about those ideals, and to learn them further, to be a student and teacher of them, to be a disciple and practitioner of them, and that indeed is a kind of zealotry that has nothing to do with trying to convert people or oppress them (usually). Kill the part of you/your Cleric that cringes; if you're running a Cleric of like, Sune Firehair, right, pour in your passionate opinions about art and beauty and love. Go on rants about proper trade and taxes when you're running a Cleric of Waukeen. Get fuckin' homoerotic about the ocean with your Cleric of Umberlee. When your Cleric is moved to share their wisdom with others, look for ways in which these lessons are relevant to their lives, and commit to the fuckin' bit. These are the things which are, definitionally, most important to your Cleric, closest to their heart. By all means, act like it, yeah?

Slapfights And Other Bad Ideas - Way back in 1e, D&D described Cleric as a secondary weapon-user, competent to fight in melee but lesser than Warrior-group classes. This is a lie. This has always been a lie. 5e furthers this lie with the Divine Strike class feature, but the thing is that while you are not technically doing nothing by making a weapon attack you really are not doing much and should be looking into doing literally anything else; if you're not casting, you're doing it wrong. There are going to be levels in which Divine Strike edges out a Cantrip, but ultimately you are not a weapon user and should not be acting like one. Going further here, the sanctioned action for Cleric is to bump your Wisdom as fast and hard as you can, because it controls all the Cleric things you do. Here I again return to my statement that in any fight between mechanics and narrative, the mechanics win by default because they are how you engage with the game world. Once you eat your vegetables, then you can go off doing wild shit like taking strange Feats. If you need to see this in action, look no further than the oft-cited Ms. Jester Lavorre of Critical Role fame (Campaign 2, The Mighty Nein).

St. Dipshit the Illiterate - Man I hope you're ready for a third version of this joke when the inevitable Druid article happens. Like with the Paladin article, this isn't so much a pitfall as it is a for-your-consideration; Intelligence has long been a real easy dump for Clerics, and that's gonna shape how they move through the world. While D&D 5.5 (the 2024 releases) went some distance here by giving Clerics the ability to add Wisdom to their information-style checks, for every other Cleric you have someone who is very attuned and attentive to the living world (high Perception, Insight, and Survival), but very bad at formal learning, academic study, and the like. Does your Cleric compensate for this by seeking aid when they need that kind of intellectual rigor? Taking more time (that is, making more rolls) so they can correct for their own shortcomings? Do they embrace the intuitive knowledge they can gain via their Wisdom-based skills rather than attempting to record or examine? Of course, I should not leave this on the table either; as of 5e, Charisma is also an extremely easy an attractive dump stat, and since CLERICS ARE NOT PRIESTS exploring a low-Charisma Cleric who can only really show her troth through works rather than words could be quite interesting, should you be inclined.

The People In The Important Pajamas - "Cleric" NPCs

Again, if anyone can track that webcomic down my life is yours.

You may remember this section from the paladin article and be wondering what the scare quotes are about. Following through with my argument that Clerics aren't priests, some of the potential NPC roles I'm about to outline aren't Clerics, strictly speaking, but would have been Clerics back in 2e (when they could be priests) or 3.PF (when everyone was in fucking denial). Our first entry is going to cover a concept that you could pillage for worldbuilding purposes, and then the rest are potential Cleric roles. Ready set GO!

Adepts (Revenge Of The Old Lore) - Introduced by this name back in D&D 3.0 and rarely used by Dungeon Masters or, if we're being honest, the game writers, Adepts were an NPC-only class back when PCs and NPCs were built using similar rules. Sorta like a Cleric, and sorta like a Druid, and sorta like a Wizard, but absolutely dog shit at all three of them, an Adept is the spellcaster who is worse than other spellcasters at everything; that is, they're meant to suck shit, but can be competent to, say, buy a remove curse from, to manufacture magical potions, to help enchant divine-type magical items, and the like. Notably, being an Adept means you're not part of the chosen many - this was the class associated with people who put in the work to learn divine magic the hard way, or who for one reason or another could not commune with their god in a manner that might be more associated with a Cleric. As little use as it saw, this is a concept that could use some bringing forward - many, many D&D settings, here to include Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Eberron, blithely assume that these services are on offer, and indeed that in a big enough city you might even be able to buy raise dead or stronger magic. You know who sells that but isn't qualified to be the kind of freak an adventurer is? Adepts!

Retiree - Of course, sometimes Clerics do survive being adventurers, often "intact" for a given value of that (having regeneration in-house saves you a fortune on prosthetic limbs). This kind of Cleric-as-NPC are going to be famous figures, perhaps thrust into positions of spiritual or communal responsibility they might not be equal to; after all, Clerics aren't priests. Make an NPC a lot like a Cleric, turn them middle-aged or old, call it a day. Someone like this may have taught a PC Cleric, especially if they caught said PC early on and intervened to try and ensure this youngblood doesn't die screaming between learning the difference between "my god is with me" and "I'm invulnerable."

Rival - As a PC Cleric gets more powerful and starts, you know, slaying fucking dragons and shit, the strength of their legend may well give their word weight on dogma, doctrine, and ethics. Someone more happy with the status quo of their faith, or someone with a differing vision, these can be great Cleric NPCs, rife with potential for social conflict and always able to be tapped for an epic caster-on-caster showdown. Your goal here is to make someone who could be a player character, they just aren't; bring in passionate ideals, think through their reasons for supporting the vision of faith they do, and, oh yeah, don't forget the weird pile of magic items endemic to all adventurers.

Cackling Villain - Did you know Clerics have been either the best or second-best necromancers in D&D for nearly every edition? They're third-place in 5e, behind Necromancer Wizards and Oathbreaker Paladins, a first-time event for them, but quite literally every Cleric of 5th level or higher can wake up in the morning, decide to raise an army of the dead, and then do that. They can just do that! Even outside of strict necromancy Clerics have that combination of zeal, competence, perceptiveness, and, let us not forget, terrifying magic that can make them excellent setpiece villains or even non-villainous antagonists. Your party thinks a wizard is behind this bullshit? They're gonna wish it was a wizard.

Religion In D&D Part 1 - Context Part II: Revenge Of The Context

Do I need to break this up into two headlines? Strictly, no. However, this thing is already a fucking doorstopper, I might as well give a place where people can pause.

So remember, eighty years ago, way back at the top of the article, when I said this was going to be an angrier article than the last one? Despite writing that warning myself I have, during the course of this, been shocked at how salty and aggressive I've gotten about things thus far, and this is coming from someone who knows he has anger issues in the first place. I genuinely did not realize the depths of passionate opinions I have on offer about Cleric. However, that warning was for these next two sections, as I'm very, acutely aware of my beef here, my deep well of bitterness, and my years of confused rage that have become a kind of formless hate for the way the discussion on fantasy religion across the genre, but especially in D&D, has been discussed. Y'all got a lifelong atheist out here about to tell you that you're being harsh and reductive about religion as like, a concept, and to make matters worse the behavior of the D&D audience in general has been such that I am now in a position where I need to do apologetics for known genocide enthusiast Gary fucking Gygax. Do you have the slightest idea how little that pleases me?

So let's start this off right. A lot of folks operate on incomplete, incorrect, or just plain nonexistent ideas of what faith has, historically, looked like in various D&D settings, so I'ma play the hits here and then we're gonna get into the next section where I make some suggestions. Alright? Alright.

Greyhawk: Weirdly Coherent - Commonly and incorrectly hailed as the first D&D setting (rest in peace Blackmoor & Dave Arneson), Greyhawk (known in-universe as Oerth) was written primarily by Gary Gygax, though shaped heavily by his home games and the players thereof. Now, I'm not gonna veer into a hit piece on Gygax (and even if I wanted to better ones already exist), but notable in the context of his writing on fantasy religion is that Gary Gygax was a fanboy for the Crusades, but also a massive (and half-educated, poorly researched) fanboy for ancient Celtic legend. Some of the oddities for this strange mix have already been mentioned, such as how the original Cleric is based on Crusader priests and the modern Cleric is still feeling that influence, but this - alongside growing up very culturally Christian in, you know, the United States of America - was also very much influential on how Gygax would come to write his fantasy faiths and also run up on his own limits with the same.

Faith in Greyhawk is polytheism as brought to you by someone who almost sort of understands the idea of polytheism. Genuinely, Gygax made a good run at this and kinda tripped over his own shoelaces at the end...well, his own shoelaces and his unrelenting race essentialism, thanks for the racial pantheons buddy. Greyhawk is home to many faiths, which worship and/or fear and/or oppose multiple gods (for example, Erythnul is associated with the so-called New Faith of the Flaeness but is more of a demonic figure of evil than a god you are, socially, expected to 'worship'). For your average person, the buck stops here. While an individual god may have greater prominence in a given region for political, social, or mythological reasons (for example, the relative prominence of Boccob the Uncaring in the Free City of Greyhawk in no small part due to the influence of the legendary Cleric known as Riggby) and therefore have a grand temple or dedicated cults in their name, this isn't the norm everywhere. When the Church of St. Cuthbert of the Cudgel installs a building in your frontier village they're here on a mission, it's weird, and you should be worried. On a normal day, your average lay member performs acts of worship as part of their day-to-day life, calling upon the god(s) who are relevant to their endeavors to give thanks, to ask for blessings, to honor them, or to plead mercy. Clerics, in turn, while socially conflated with the more specific cults are often pantheistic Clerics, drawing upon many gods as representatives of the overall faith. Dogmas are typically a little light on details when it comes to the afterlife, in part because the idea of an unearthly reward for one's faith is often seen as a little distasteful, and in part because going to the afterlife of a particular god is actually pretty rare on Greyhawk. Your average person is drawn to the Outer Plane that most aligns with their worldview, and goes on their spiritual journey in the hereafter without reference to a particular god.

Which is where we get to the weird shoelace tripping, because you only get an afterlife related to your faith if you've developed an intimate and intense relationship with one god in particular. When this relationship has become a defining, perhaps the defining part of your life (whether or not you're a divine caster), then you go to that god's afterlife when you die. The typical case here is someone with a deep passion for work that falls under the purview of a god, such as a master thief ending up with Olidammara, or a mountain man passing into the dominion of Elhonna. Clerics, though rarer, are prime candidates for this sort of afterlife, but also like...the fuck were you on, Gygax? Admittedly not all faiths in the real world particularly concern themselves with the hereafter or claim to have answers about what it might be like or what it entails, and in that sense Gygax's Planar afterlives as soft mysteries and a sort of default state aren't entirely out there - it's the strange dash of monotheism at the end that gets me. And, not to leave this unsaid, Gygax is not a particularly good fantasy anthropologist, so sometimes he just. Wrote shit. That he perhaps should not have written if he wanted to retain the chunk of his dignity that he lost by publishing it. I'd say to do a shot every time he writes something weird about women as gods or women in faith but you'd get through one book and be dead already.

Forgotten Realms: The Original Sin - Ed Greenwood you are this hobby's cool grandpa and also mine and I'm so sorry that I need to put you on fucking blast here. I can only hope that you've heard all this already; it's been being bitched about for twenty years, after all.

Statistically the first D&D setting that you personally have encountered, the Forgotten Realms (the continent of Faerun on the planet Toril, in-universe) was originally written by Ed Greenwood and has been contributed to by a list of other authors entirely too long for me to cite without dying of starvation at this keyboard. Most commonly known for its gonzo locations, intricate worldbuilding, and being absolutely riddled with famous high-level NPCs engaged in high-level bullshit with one another and the world at large (a status encouraged by the staggering array of novels and videogames set in it), the Forgotten Realms is also infamous in the audience for requiring that people worship a god that is their closest and most favored god and to be true to that god or face punishment in the afterlife. Those who are False to their faith face an eternity of civil service in the City of the Dead, while the Faithless end up mortared into the Wall of the Faithless to suffer until eventually becoming one with the Fugue Plane. It's very easy to point the finger at Ed Greenwood's Catholic faith when it comes to these worldbuilding elements, and while I'm certain that has something to do with the state of affairs I need you to take a walk with me.

The Forgotten Realms is a land of miracles and wonders. It is lousy with gods; indeed, if you ever go look up a full list (do NOT fucking use the FR Wiki) you may well spit your drink at the screen. Faerun is home to gods native to the world, interlopers from other Primes, gods from human cultures that ended up here when their faithful were kidnapped across the Planes (here to include gods from Ireland, Egypt, and Finland, raise your hand if this sentence is how you learned that there are gods native to Finland), alien horrors from beyond the stars, Planar luminaries, ascended mortals, and more. These gods gather into pantheons, though to be frank that relationship is often quite uh, feudal, or familial. Trying to claim the gods of someone else's pantheon don't exist or are lesser than your own god on Faerun is a real fast ticket to getting your ass beat by said gods while your own gently asks what you've learned from this experience. Among other things, though, this means that "converting" within your own faith basically isn't conversion; if you grew up in a family of Chauntea worshipers and you get real into Mielikki this event, socially, is fucking nothing, it's a non-event. It might be a different story if you turned around and started worshiping Mystra, but even then that question is very much mediated by one's culture and geography; converting even far outside one's current or native faith is a non-event in, say, Waterdeep, but it might be a little more surprising in Neverwinter.

Here's the thing: the Forgotten Realms does not experience a separation of "religious life" from "normal life". This is gonna be a hard idea for my American readers in particular to grasp, but while Jane Average Realmswoman has a single patron deity and she is trying to emulate that god's example as much as possible, it is perfectly normal for her to pray to other gods, ask for their favor, and interact with their worshipers, and this is in no small part because they are inescapably bound with Jane's everyday life. The local cults of Azuth and/or Mystra bankroll the parchment makers who print the novels Jane reads (because parchment is required for scrolls, and both churches are also in heavy on magical industries), the fishermen who catch the food she buys offer fearful worship to Umberlee who is both their provider and their destroyer, the faithful of Sylvanus, Chauntea, or Eldath maintain the city parks and fight tooth and nail to keep them wild. When she feels lost in her life and needs guidance, the temples of Selune are open at all hours of the day and night and are the closest thing the Realm has seen to A. therapists and B. benevolent therapists. The weird BDSM club she goes to every now and again opens every party with a hymn to Loviatar. The Temple of Illmater doesn't run a fucking bake sale once a month vaguely for poor people in general, they go forth amongst the downtrodden and help them every god damn day, offering food and potable water, healing, healing again, healing a third time it's a bit of a theme, a listening ear, and campaigning for their interests in the political arena. Jane herself is a worshiper of, oh, let's say Deneir, she runs a bookstore and dedicates herself to the Goddess of Libraries; she goes to the temple of Deneir for copies of their holy texts to give away to those who ask, to verify rare tomes or donate them for the public good, and for those rites which are held in the temple, but when she went and got married a few years back she and her wife were joined in the temple of Sune Firehair, goddess of love. These gods and the organizations they run have been part of Jane's community since that community was founded, and each advances something in the living world that they see as holy and worth having; they are entwined, active, earnest. You've gotta be chill about people worshiping another god or being part of another faith entirely or your social life is going to just fucking explode.

This, then, is the full and glorious flower of Ed Greenwood's zealous dedication to anthropological worldbuilding, and unfortunately it has been sorta softly hidden and scraped under by years of corporate writing. Back in AD&D 2e, the books Faiths & Avatars and Powers & Pantheons went in deep on this subject, digging on all levels into how these religions practice and their role in everyday life, but from 3.0 onward this theme has seen less importance alongside a plethora of other writers who did not understand the vision, not that I'm looking at any RA SALVATORE YOU FUCKING HACK in particular. The end result is that the average player for 20+ years has been introduced to the part of faith in the Forgotten Realms that is deeply weird monolatry, and has reacted to that vision, but been denied the full view of a strange but very functional polytheism whose bones are still in the setting. That vision of strange monolatry is also one that other settings have been copying for a dog's age, here to include our next subject, Pathfinder. Strap in, I am going to say a lot of things and none of them are kind.

Golarion: World Holy War - Originally written by James Jacobs and contributed to by a plethora of freelancers and internal staff members at Paizo, Golarion is a shallow theme park of a setting characterized by incuriosity, disinterest in the human condition, incompetent homages to other, better settings, and thoughtless, distinctly American sympathy for empire. Like with many things James Jacobs claims to love but refuses to understand, Golarion's model of divinity is very much based on what people think the Forgotten Realms model is, and even in the context of that already-corrupt shadow, Golarion's is much worse. Much of the worldbuilding around divinity and cosmology is utilitarian; for instance, Mr. Jacobs is on record stating that gods on Golarion empower Clerics and other champions because direct miraculous intervention would set off a chain of mutually assured destruction that would leave no mortal life behind. Other bits are clearly more personal; as a key for-instance here, gods on Golarion are generative forces for alignment. That is, a god defines what it is to be, say, Lawful Good or Chaotic Neutral, and to defy a god is to have your alignment changed (see: Wrath of the Righteous). It is for this reason that the churches of Golarion concern themselves to an extreme extent with orthodoxy ("right thought", contrast orthopraxy, "right action"). Sharp-eyed readers may be recalling that I talked about paladins in Golarion being expected to root out heresy; this situation is also why every god on Golarion supposedly maintains Inquisitors, as seen prior in this article. Further, these literal thought police deploy spells like castigate which punish and humiliate victims, primarily those of one's own faith, into confessing their "sins", which, while we're right here, how did the literal god damn Catholic remember that not every faith has sins or engages with the idea of sin and James Jacobs fucking couldn't pull that shit off?

Churches on Golarion do not have broad faiths that include multiple gods. Any given god may have divine friends, allies, or slaves, but ultimately the churches they run all have missionary work & attempted conversion in common. There was a good chunk of time in which Sarenrae, goddess of redemption, was running a fucking slave empire into swordpoint conversions, and only as of Pathfinder 2e has that been being fixed at all, in no small part because, again, James Jacobs does not understand the things he claims to love and dug his heels in when readers told him to his fucking face that this was a bad look. Likewise, these churches are separated from "normal" life quite a bit, being a place where one walks to in order to get one's worship on before returning to the rest of one's life, a particularly Protestant model of worship reproduced so thoughtlessly that I'm shocked Mr. Jacobs didn't achieve a state of no-mind and escape Samsara. Sometimes they sponsor religious organizations such as knightly orders or wizard colleges but these are exceptions, not the rule, and even then "oh hey the Hellknights are coming to town" isn't exactly a day to day kind of fuckin' event, is it? Mechanics like Obediences attempt to walk this back, but the thing about requiring you to spend resources to get mechanical benefits from worshiping your god is that you've turned around and made this a strange thing. Praying and honoring, say, Shelyn every day is no longer something you just do, it's something weird freaks do and they get divine power from doing it. There is no escaping the blade of the ludonarrative; mechanics win all conflicts because they influence the actual game world.

Now, while I sincerely hope my complete contempt for James Jacobs has come across here, I do have an obligation to be evenhanded. Pathfinder 2e has walked some of this back, but the root problems remain. The second edition of Golarion has, for example, removed Alignment entirely, which certainly solves one problem, but it also replaced castigate with crisis of faith, a Cleric spell designed to kill other Clerics by making them doubt their gods. Likewise, Pathfinder 2e has been mum on certain cosmological revelations from late in Pathfinder 1e, one of which being the idea that only one god will survive the end of the universe and they get to be the supreme god of the next one, which is given as the motivation for them being so far up on the nuts of getting converts. This idea is, to me, completely repulsive, but it's also just such a revealing take on what Paizo thinks gods are and what they think of faith. And unfortunately, the broad zeitgeist of the current D&D audience is very sympathetic to that idea, which brings us to:

Religion In D&D Part 2 - I Cannot Believe I Of All Fucking People Have To Tell You To Stop Being Such A Cynic

Man the little icon on the scroll bar is gettin' real fuckin' small at this point. This will be the last major set of arguments for the article; following this section will be one sample Cleric for every Domain published in 5.0 (5.5, released in 2024, is a bit young for me to bother just yet), so just stay with me here y'all. It's been a long, angry, bitter journey, and yet there is this final hill to die on.

So, what's this broad zeitgeist I was just talking about? To be frank, it's a combination of thoughtless American Protestantism and some r/atheism bullshit. As the audience for D&D has gotten more left-leaning and queer, in no small part due to the wild successes of shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20 (and WotC's weak, half-done, and yet unambiguously open support for including queer players, players of color, and others traditionally gated out of D&D), there has been a...conflation, shall we call it, of the fictional religions in various D&D settings with, not to put too fine a point on it, real-world Evangelicals and others who perpetuate harm in the name of faith. And, y'know, I get it. I'm a whole-ass bi dude from the edge of the Bible Belt, I used to get fuckin' jumped every other day or so, I lived in Kansas for six mother fucking years, I get it. But uh, remember when I said I'm a bit of a zealot for the old lore? Remember my consistent theme in articles of not liking it when things with great potential are left on the table because there is an Approved Way to view them? Yeah. So. Let's talk. We're gonna lay out some arguments and some suggestions.

Everything Old Is New Again - "But Vox," the strawman who teleported into this sentence is saying, "you yourself have said that the stuff you're into is old! Surely there needs to be an accounting for the changes in play culture, let alone real-world culture?" And like yeah, sure, but here's the thing: edgy-ass immature atheism (I say, as an edgy atheist) is also old as hell in D&D. Like, old-old. Late-game AD&D 1e old. Older-than-me old. Now, D&D's first serious and nuanced internal conversation about the nature of divinity and its role in mortal lives was part of Planescape, whose bones remain in all modern settings to this day (even Exandria, primarily written by Matthew "I Am In Every Videogame, Yes, Even That One" Mercer), but like a lot of settings it was very...inconsistently brought forward during 3.X, leading to the loss of a lot of its strangeness, its philosophy, and even its earnest willingness to simply be cringe but free. Though this was by no means confined to Planescape, as many writers of D&D novels were extremely willing to question the utility, motives, or even divinity of the gods - here to include Paul Kidd (author of the novelizations for White Plume Mountain, Descent Into The Depths Of The Earth, and Queen of the Demonweb Pits), who I usually claim as my gold standard for D&D novelizations but whose attitude here is, quite frankly, embarrassing in its confident thoughtlessness and cynicism. The ideas that gods are super-predators, that they are a class of abusers, that they are false idols, that they cannot claim divinity because they are limited/can be killed, these ideas are, statistically, likely to be older than you are. Better writers than you have been fumbling this since before you learned how to read.

Jesus Christ Is An Outlier And Should Not Be Counted - So here's the thing. The idea that a god needs to be a transcendent being, with attributes that render them sovereign from the living world, removed from time and supreme in all senses? That's just Christianity. If you go talk to like, a rabbi, an imam, if you can have a frank conversation with a Hellenic pagan or a Zoroastrian or a follower of Voudoun, they'll offer quite different perspectives, often a number of different ones from within their own faiths. There are more conceptions of what it is to be divine, to be a god and to worship gods, than there are cultures that have believed in gods, and to be frank the best advice I have for you here is to go outside and touch grass. Then, take some of the grass with you and have some fascinating & frank conversations with anyone who is not Christian. Even Gary Gygax, fanboy of the literal fucking Crusades, tried to handle his shit here and got more than nowhere in terms of success. When you insist that the gods of D&D need to be like the god of Christianity, you are both limiting yourself creatively and engaging on a great deal of art in bad faith, bringing with you your own baggage which you are failing to question. These conversations are gonna be difficult! You're going to feel ignorant; you may try the patience of the people you're seeking to learn from. But to learn is an unalloyed good, and here I am speaking of far more than the hypothetical benefit it's going to bring to your Cleric in your happy elfgame time.

The Lord Is God Of Both Good And Evil - Surprise bitches it's a second alignment section. First tings first, I want to repeat again that gods in D&D are not generative forces of virtue; rather, they are worldviews. This changes if you're playing Pathfinder, but if you are playing Pathfinder, stop immediately. And this argument can seem like I'm splitting hairs, but it changes the game quite a bit; a lot of players and readers wonder why, say, Liira isn't out here trying to solve all of the world's problems, but that is not Liira's fucking job, y'know? Her job is to be the goddess of joy, the pure light and laughter of seeing the world of wonder, to be god of delights and surprises, and it's not exactly fair to ask her to be something else. If your character is a Liiran and you have some concerns about, I dunno, the homelessness problem in Waterdeep, that's on you to work towards.

Broadly, though, there is a problem in the fanbase that was laid out excellently in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, written by the esteemed Ursula K. Le Guin; people find it very easy to assume that if something is described as good, as benevolent, as truly kind and compassionate and full of wonder, there has to be some kind of catch. There is a hidden evil, there is a dark cost, there is an ulterior motive. And like, look, the gods of D&D are fallible beings, they make mistakes, but the thing is that when D&D tells you a god is Good, it like...means it. Does the writing always bear this up? No. The writing is often friendly to things that are in fact bad. But even figures like Bahamut or Tyr, infamous for their associations with fantasy cops, they're trying to be the gods of like, Sam Vimes, not the gods of police brutality. Likewise gods are not the primary drivers of the battle between good and evil - they are prosecuting their worldviews, and those worldviews relate to a Prime Material Plane that is of both wonder and horror, that is full of the creations of many gods and even many mortals. It is the law of the living world that wasps lay their eggs in living things, but so too is it the law that the land is bountiful, that a shocking number of alien beings would love you to pet them, that the sunrise after a storm is uncommonly beautiful and glorious.

As far as evil gods go, let me link my article there again so I can expand on it. Broadly, evil gods in D&D can be thought of as part of two camps; Greenwoodian evil, and Dickensonian evil (shout-out to my close friend and priestess - don't question it - the Celt for this framework). Greenwoodian evils are parts of nature, unrelentingly bound to the living world, who are gods over things that are terrible but necessary. Talona (goddess of plagues), Umberlee (goddess of the sea), Auril (goddess of winter), Loviatar (goddess of suffering), these are Greenwoodian evils, and if you're noticing that most of these are women, well, Ed Greenwood seems constitutionally incapable of writing a woman who is not, at worst, both glorious and terrible, and this is a compliment. Now, Greenwood has gods that don't fit this conception - look no further than Bane, god of tyranny - but the great joke at the expense of these gods is that they are not, contrary to their own belief, sovereign from the living world, they are not above it, removed from it. They are, instead, bent, defeated, broken, and beaten down until they service the natural order, and each time they attempt to shatter the cage the world of wonder has woven around them they lose some part of themselves in the process.

Now, Dickensonian evil is named for the works of Seth Dickenson, which concerns itself with the Sword Logic, the logic of empire. The argument it makes is that reliance on others makes you vulnerable, and only through becoming a sovereign being can you be safe and complete; the ideal being, in the conception of Dickensonian evil, interacts with others not at all, or, if it must, interacts with them only to consume them for resources. Bane is a Dickensonian evil, as are Bhaal, Myrkul, Gruumsh, Hextor, and the like, and the thing about the Sword Logic is that it is persuasive, powerful, and wrong. However, while it is ultimately self-defeating, the harm done to real people in the meantime is an incalculable tragedy, and thus it needs to be opposed at all times. As edgy bastards say constantly: you can't let God do all the work. This style of evil appeals to people who are, themselves, cruel, ruthless, and inclined towards consumption, but it also appeals to people who are hurt, who have been betrayed, whom the world has let down, and in that sense there is quite a lot to explore here. The ordinary person does not give in to the logic of empire without cause.

For gods of both good and of evil, the question at the root of it all is this: why do people willingly worship them? What worldview is on offer, and why are you sympathetic to that worldview? What would it mean to change, adopt, or oppose that worldview? If you take nothing else from this section, take that and ponder it.

Death Is For The Dead - Going with the above, holy fucking hell y'all the cosmology is not as important as you think it is. There is a vast emphasis placed by the player base upon the afterlife, one which sometimes bleed into the writing (in Starfinder, published by Paizo, "choosing your own afterlife" is seen as the ultimate expression of religious freedom) but you know what most people know about the afterlife? Nothing useful! Jane Average Realmswoman knows that she will in some way be with her goddess when she's dead and that it'll probably be pretty cool and that's about it, and as far as these things go Jane is correct. People tend to react with shock and horror when they learn for the first time that the usual spiritual journey someone goes on in the afterlife will end with them becoming one with the Plane and/or god they're associated with, and to an extent I have some sympathy for this. Lifelong atheist, remember, the idea of "losing myself" to become part of something greater sounds terrifying...but is that what's fucking happening? If one is to experience an afterlife, that is, a form of life, one must be able to change. There is no escape from eventually changing so much that you would be unrecognizable as the living person you once were, and for those who want to try we have undeath on offer (except we don't, undead also experience those sorts of changes and as a result there is truly no escape from being a real thing in the real reality). And in this cynicism for the afterlife people miss the forest for the trees. When you end up, say, in the divine realm of Oghma and are filing books in his infinite library, Oghma isn't using your soul for slave labor here. You're a newly dead person who needs time to acclimate to not having the needs of the living, and moreover you're a newly dead person whose greatest, most ardent passion was language, poetry, prose, nonfiction, the glory of writing in all its flower, and now you have unlimited access to such, an endless opportunity to truly understand and grow closer to this thing that was so important to you. I'm not saying not to involve cosmological themes or to not take adventures to divine realms, don't mistake me, but...maybe try to open your mind to the idea that this thing which is supposed to be good and natural is, in fact, good and natural.

Gods & You - This is more or less re-stating some arguments from above, but put some thought into the churches and faiths your character has a relationship with. Are they part of a broader faith? Is such a faith big where they live, and what does that mean for them? What sorts of interactions and opinions, right or wrong, do they have with the local religions and why? It doesn't have to be anything huge, but the faithful are, again, inescapable. People's lives in these settings are religious, and that faith infuses their day-to-day; so too does it infuse your character's. And while I'm right here, having beef with those faiths and/or the gods behind them? Legit. Not just legit, but on the table to be consummated; there is a long and strong tradition in D&D of killing gods with your own two hands, and while gods can be hard to keep dead (look at Bane), killing them always means something. Maybe you can take their place and try your hand at being a better god than they were. Maybe you're just trying to stop their evil schemes. Maybe they slept with your mom and you take some exception to this. Whatever it is, these sorts of conflicts both have bones in with real-world religion and a storied history in D&D itself, and they shouldn't be considered outside the scope of your ambition if you really wanna go for it.

Y'all, it's been a journey. If you've made it this far thank you for reading, and as always I remain open to feedback and criticism. Please don't let the incredible length of this piece or my unrelenting, undying fucking rage intimidate you; I wouldn't be making articles like this if I wasn't trying to have a legitimate dialogue with my audience, y'know? Now, I have one last bit for you. In an effort to be helpful, to fucking flex with my writing, and as a little treat, the following section will present some example Clerics. All but one (Matthias Winters) are from the Forgotten Realms. If you make the egregious mistake of looking up the Forgotten Realms wiki, it will tell you that Matthias's god is an aspect of Velsharoon; this is incorrect, and the first person to try to tell me otherwise will be turned into a bowl of spaghetti and served up at a high school dance. This is the one thing I will be entertaining no arguments about. That said, please feel free to take these characters as inspiration, mine them for ideas, or even just to play them yourself if you're inclined to indulge my staggering arrogance in such a fashion.

One last note; you will notice that I have often disregarded the Domains associated with various gods in the books. This is in no small part because WotC did those assignments with incredible, mind-blowing fucking incompetence, and also because a great deal of their former Domains or Spheres no longer have adequate representation. I have chosen to ignore them on purpose and with malice aforethought.

Now, without further ado, may I present:

The Chosen Many - Sample Clerics

Our sample Clerics will be formatted as follows:

[NAME]

Species Domain Cleric [Background]

General pitch of their concept & plot hooks

Personality Traits: [HERE] / Ideals: [HERE] / Bonds: [HERE] / Flaws: [HERE]

Matthias Winters

Human Death Cleric [Guild Artisan]

Mattie was only an apprentice when the monsters came to his village, ravening things set loose by an unwise summoner. People he knew died, until the Shrouded Lady came and destroyed the beasts with a dark and divine grace he had never before encountered. This Lady did not ask for money, and she did not ask for favors, but of the proud and simple people of the village she did ask two things: to let others know that they had a friend in the lich-god Mellifleur, Friend of Heroes, and for Matthias's services as her apprentice. Both were granted, with many tearful goodbyes and promises to write, which have been, it must be said, kept. It's a strange life, working as a Cleric to the Lord of the Last Shroud. Matthias isn't terribly educated, no, but he's no fool: he knows his god is evil, far more vile and underhanded than Matthias himself would ever want to be. And yet, "Friend of Heroes" seems to be no empty title. Matthias is sent on odd errands all across the land, all of them ominous and to some nebulous good. Go here, says the Shrouded Lady, and warn the town that a drow raid is coming; go there, and deliver these potions to the Moonstone Four, who will have need of them. Matthias has guarded caravans, healed the sick, slain the wicked, and placed far more magical items into chests within crumbling ruins than he ever thought plausible. During less pressing times, his work as a smith still sees use, crafting items of unusual make and odd, threatening beauty for more powerful spellcasters to enchant. One day, the Shrouded Lady has promised, his training will be advanced enough to create his own.

Mellifleur is evil. Matthias knows this. But does it matter so much, if Matthias is still helping? Does the promise of lichdom for himself really matter, if he can do more right by the world with all that time? He thinks about this, between hammer strokes, and he has no answer yet.

Personality Traits: "I tend to work when I need to think." & "I ask people what they think of death." & "I eat big and hearty; quality is a distant consideration." / Ideals: "If you've helped others, the method shouldn't matter [Neutral]." & "Professionals have standards [Lawful]." / Bonds: "I might uh, be in love with the Shrouded Lady." & "I seek a lost artifact of Mellifleur that can divine the plots of other evil gods." / Flaws: "When I don't know what to do, I take the first order I'm given that sounds right." & "There is no kill like overkill."

Elrissa Morrowmoon

Drow War Cleric [Soldier]

Born on the surface as the first generation of her family to be so born, Elrissa was raised in a community devoted to Eilistraee, actively involved in shepherding escapees from Lolth's dominions. She grew up idolizing the warrior-priests of her goddess, their grace and confidence, their surety, but never felt that for herself; big for a drow, hell, big even in comparison to a human, she despaired at ever achieving her dreams of becoming one of Eilistraee's paladins, even as she trained every day with gritted teeth and tearful eyes. When her community was found and raided in an attempt to capture the escapees as sacrifices to Lolth, Elrissa lost her father, and the very next night she stormed into the sacred grove and screamed her demand for vengeance up to her goddess.

She was answered.

In a sick way, Elrissa feels sometimes it might have been better if she wasn't. Now she's a holy warrior, now she knows she has the favor of her goddess and none can deny it, but she's still the plodding, clonking, clanging thing she was before, hunting the faithful of Lolth in her plate armor like an army of pots and pans. She lacks subtlety; she lacks grace. But while Elrissa is still in some ways the little girl who was never good enough in her own eyes, watch her change when the innocent are threatened, or when the priests of the Spider Queen are within striking distance. She does not leave survivors. She will not heed surrenders. She is coming, in a tide of moonlight and hateful sorrow, until no brick stands atop another.

Personality Traits: "I am very earnest and forthright." & "I get easily distracted by nature." & "I maintain my own equipment; no one else gets to." / Ideals: "People get better when they're offered love and support [Good]." & "For drow to have a future, Lolth must die [Neutral]." / Bonds: "I will find the ones who killed my father and repay them in kind." & "Sacred groves, even those of other gods, are worthy of my protection." / Flaws: "My hatred of Lolth can blind me to practical realities." & "Alcohol isn't a problem, it's a solution."

Gemma Rivergard

Half-Elf Forge Cleric [Noble]

Gemma acquired her vocation the way she gets most things: she bought it. As the fourth child of the noble Rivergards, who make their money in trade, her life was always a bit of a loose end. On a dare, she walked into a temple of Waukeen, laid out a spread of gems and gold and art pieces from the family vault, and announced her intention to purchase the exalted station of Cleric. She was as surprised as everyone else when the Goddess of Coins agreed.

Gemma is still a bit of a loose end. Waukeen blessed her with the power to make the goods her family merely trades, and much more besides, but lacking a specific holy mission she's taken to traveling, and it's broadened her horizons. One walk down a poorly maintained road might lead to a quest to cull the monsters threatening it, or politics with a greedy lord who has forgotten the value of commerce. She's set predatory contracts to rights, fought to the death against slaver rings, and purchased a truly concerning amount of amateur art from various goblins. And yet while she's happy with her growth as a person, Gemma still feels like she's lacking a purpose. Surely she can't purchase that.

…Surely not?

Personality Traits: "Is this some kind of peasant joke I'm too rich to understand?" & "You not understanding if I'm joking kinda is the joke." & "That really updated my journal." / Ideals: "To broaden one's horizons is to improve oneself [Good]." & "Every man has his price. That's not always a bad thing [Neutral]." / Bonds: "I haven't left my family! I'm still looking out for them." & "I still keep up with the goblin artists I've bought paintings from. I'm kinda their patron." / Flaws: "You bet I can't? Hold my beer." & "I forget sometimes that my experiences aren't universal."

Neela Wagonborn

Halfling Trickery Cleric [Haunted One]

So, here's the thing. This isn't Neela. Neela is not here at the moment, and you can't leave a message. Neela, you see, was captured by a Thayan looking to build a better Mirror of Opposition, and the wizard's experiment spit out Aleen, the Lawful Evil reflection of the original Neela, who had spent her life to date as a Cleric of Liira, Goddess of Joy. The mirror's enchantment, normally used to compel the summoned copy to kill the original, did not do this to Aleen, who was swiftly captured herself, brutally experimented upon, and then turned loose with the promise that her "creator" would be watching.

She's been hiding for all her life is worth, posing as Neela and playing a nerve-shredding game of balancing distance from Neela's loved ones with staying close enough to not arouse suspicion. Who knows if she'd survive getting killed in this Faerun, which is so unlike the one she knows? Praise be to the gods both above and below, though, Aleen here has an excuse: she's been receiving revelations from Liira, which are guiding her on a quest whose objective is unclear to her, but which has enabled her to become more powerful as a Cleric. If she's tricked the Lady of Illusions…well, that speaks well of her odds, right?

Liira has not been tricked. This journey of self-discovery into the world of beauty and wonder is about to be the funniest prank the Lady of Mists has pulled in fucking centuries.

Personality Traits: "The road calls! Immediately!" & "I remember those who wrong me." & "I have a weakness for musicians." / Ideals: "A deal is a deal [Lawful]." & "Everyone else is looking out for themselves first. Why should I be better? [Evil]." / Bonds: "That Thayan needs to die. Screaming." & "No one can find out who I am. No one." / Flaws: "I'm a good liar, but not as good as I think I am." & "My cruel streak can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."

Fila Firetouched

High Elf Tempest Cleric [Entertainer]

Descended from a long line of Waterdhavian elves, Fila broke with family tradition by converting to the worship of Sune Firehair, goddess of beauty and patron of the arts. During their more youthful years they lived down to the stereotypes of the many lay members, producing a frankly embarrassing catalogue of love poetry, ex-lovers, and amateur paintings, but after the loss of their sibling to a sea storm their art took a rather more gloomy and Gothic direction. Storms and landscapes featured heavily, and with their newfound focus Fila was praised as an artist to watch, with a keen eye for the sublime. Their parents and community did their best to support Fila, but they were determined to process their grief in their own way, seeking to capture the "true heart of the storm", which they feared, hated, and also loved.

It was atop a hill in the Dessarin Valley, during a savage spring storm, that Fila was struck by lightning while trying to paint. They died in an instant of eternal agony, but it was not to be their end. Rather than claim Fila's soul, Sune Firehair offered them the chance to return, to continue their art and seek out others whose beauty was hidden by the cruelties of the world. Fila accepted, and returned to a body branded by the storm and crackling with divine power.

The plate armor is still taking some getting used to, as are the odd glances and awkward greetings from the church, but the storm, oh, the storm…

It feels like an old friend now, beautiful and terrible. It's all too happy to help with Fila's work.

Personality Traits: "Hold a moment, I need to sketch this for later." & "There is a party person in me that comes out sometimes." & "The amateur poetry will continue until morale improves." / Ideals: "The world is good, the world is beautiful, the world is worth fighting for [Good]." & "If you don't challenge norms and expectations, people will never examine them [Chaotic]." / Bonds: "I don't always get on with my family, but I'd still do anything for them." & "I haven't forgotten any of my ex-lovers; they can ask a lot more of me than I care to admit." / Flaws: "My resurrection was a miracle, but sometimes when people say my scars are a curse it still feels like they're right." & "I may be a little too excited about my newfound powers of violence."

Nattie Kells

Human Order Cleric [Hermit]

Nattie's family likes to say she was born morose; a depressed and somber child, she never quite got on with the people of her river town, and made few friends, not even during her wild years of late adolescence when she carved her way through every interested lass available only to seemingly lose her passion. Oh, yes, people tried to help, but the things they found meaning in just didn't quite resonate with Nattie, and she dabbled with this church and that career and suchlike before, inevitably, dropping them in favor of her only seemingly eternal passion: reading. Eventually she scraped some money together to go traveling, looking for anything that could speak to her, and she found a long-abandoned shrine to Jergal, the Last Scribe, assistant to Kelemvor and Lord of the End of Everything. It wasn't meaning, not exactly, but the idea that all would be ash one day, that meaning was not required, it had a comfort to it.

She was 23 when Jergal came to her in her dreams and requested her services, which would necessitate a return to lands where other people dwelled. Nattie awoke to find a pile of equipment near her, along with a holy symbol, and she set off, learning the ways of divine magic in her dreams as she made the long and pointless trek back to "civilization". Now, as the Quill of the Last Scribe, Nattie enacts what she thinks of as fate. A charm spell here, a nudge there, and things happen; a man meets his future husband by taking a road he would have walked past, a goblin scout is devoured by an owlbear he would have avoided, a horse spooks and kills its rider. Nattie has hurt people. She has saved people. She tells herself it doesn't matter, but beneath the layers of lassitude and nameless sorrow there is an uncertainty. What is she becoming?

This, too, is Jergal's design. Nattie is determined to live in misery, but the Last Scribe can wait for her to realize better. He can always wait.

Personality Traits: "Ugh. People." & "Primary sources motherfuckers! Write some! Keep them safe!" & "Nobody talk about the kind of person I am around furry animals. I mean it." / Ideals: "It means something, that you were here, and that you were alive [Good]." & "People return to dust eventually. It doesn't matter if they return to dust faster [Evil]." / Bonds: "My lonely home in the shrine is sacred to me." & "The bookstore I used to go to as a child was nearly going out of business, but as long as I keep spending adventuring money there it will never die." / Flaws: "I don't really have any bad feelings about people dying. People die all the time. They're very good at it." & "I wish I felt more blessed by the attention of my god, but he's such an aggravating little bitch. Why's he gotta be so annoying?"

Dagill Tapper

Shield Dwarf Knowledge Cleric [Background]

The son of miners, Dagill quickly proved to have a keen interest in learning, if little talent for academia. For much of his youth he found employment running books for the clan's mines, until - on the advice of the local priests of Moradin - he was sent to Neverwinter to be educated in magic, as the gift was in him and his home had little resources to explore it. Wizardry did not work out for Dagill, despite his passion for the Art, but that passion saw him into the worship of Azuth, God of Spells, and eventually he was chosen as a Cleric.

Dagill's interests lie in the recording and advancement of magical knowledge, and his new faith keeps him busy. Between expeditions to recover lost knowledge and study traditions of spellcraft, he assists in scribing scrolls and seeks out potential mages in under-served populations. Though his clan doesn't approve of his conversion, he's still a dwarf's dwarf, with a deep love for the gods of his people, who returns home often and pays his dues in gold, labor, and knowledge for the good of his people. They'll come around eventually. They must.

Undiscussed with most is Dagill's dearest ambition: to find one of the lost scrolls penned by the very gods, and cast it with his own hands. What else could bring him closer to his new god?

Personality Traits: "Have you heard the good word about how great wizards are today?" & "Despite it all, I'm still a dwarf's dwarf in a lot of ways." & "I make a big deal out of Azuth. All the time! People should appreciate him more!" / Ideals: "The advancement of the Art is meant to help people [Good]." & "We have obligations to truth, and to history [Lawful]." / Bonds: "I still send money to my clan, and I should visit again soon. I might have an arranged marriage coming up." & "The wizard who tried to teach me is a good woman; I need to repay her kindness." / Flaws: "I have a bit of an inferiority complex about wizards." & "I am easily distracted by puzzles and riddles."

St. Nokta Kinslayer

Goblin Life Cleric [Outlander]

Honesty can change a life, you know. Nokta's warband came up against a pack of tall-folk adventurers, as goblin warbands sometimes do. She was a soldier, then, seemingly destined to be smeared beneath a mercenary boot, but when she was captured the adventurers said: talk, and we will let you live. She talked, of course she talked, Maglubiyet teaches survival at all costs, but her fellows found out, and intended to kill her along with the adventurers during an ambush.

The tall-folk fought like demons to save Nokta, because they had said she would live, and they meant it. Despite their best efforts she died, to an arrow in the throat, only to wake with the battle still raging, brought back to life by diamond and spell and the tall-folk shaman in his metal armor. Three times did Nokta die, and three times was she brought back, only to watch the tall-folk shaman take a blade to the heart. Gripped by something she couldn't name, Nokta raced over, and took his diamonds, and tried to speak his spell, fervently calling out for his strange tall-folk god to spare him.

Nokta was answered in the name of Illmater, the Lord on the Rack, god of mercy and of self-sacrifice, and has served him since. For dying and returning, her new church calls her Saint, but her people call her Kinslayer, and the Traitor Shaman, and more besides. There will be no peace, and though Nokta knows her suffering reduces that of the world, this cannot continue. If the Fire-Eyed God wants her head, there can only be one recourse: break his priests until the cost of war sickens Maglubiyet , and he accepts peace. Saint Nokta is unafraid, and she is unmerciful.

Personality Traits: "What, tall-folk - uh, I mean, yes, my child?" & "I don't hate vegetables, I love meat." & "The Tall God says His blessings are for all. For some reason." / Ideals: "Peace for peace, wrath for wrath [Neutral]." & "I don't understand the compassion I was shown, but I do treasure it [Good]." / Bonds: "The adventurers who fought for me have my service for the asking." & "I'll drop everything to fight the servants of the Fire-Eyed God." / Flaws: "I don't know what this 'love' is, and 'trust' is also still pretty difficult for me." & "My fears drive me to violence far more often than the Tall God likes."

Jelka Threebones

Orc Grave Cleric [Acolyte]

Jelka came to live amongst the Sky Pony tribe of the Uthgardt as a young adult, one of several political hostages exchanged between her own tribe and the Sky Pony as part of a peace agreement; with both in the shadow of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows, wise leaders on both sides sought to cool traditional conflicts between them in favor of looking to the greater threat to their mutual north, and Jelka was selected for her cool head, proud bearing, and great foresight for such a young orc. The story might have ended there, if the Cult of the Dragon hadn't moved into the area looking to pillage the spirit mounds and burial grounds of both tribes' warriors to secure a supply of corpses for their necromancies. Outraged at this desecration and disrespect, Jelka called upon Gruumsh and Tempus in the name of both her peoples for the power to revenge herself upon the defilers, and her prayers were answered.

Today, Jelka continues her campaign of revenge in the name of Gruumsh, hunting down those who raise the dead, defile graves, and bend the minds of warriors. Her list of enemies is long and only growing longer, and she is keenly aware that she is not yet mighty enough to face down the likes of dracoliches or, say, the entire sovereign nation of Thay. But she will be. She must be. Wrongs have been done, and she wades into battle chanting the litany of them in an endless roll of accusation and reprisal, screaming hateful hymns alongside her chosen allies. Her new mission has made for strange bedfellows, but for all her outward fury Jelka remains the curious and level-headed young orc she was when she was selected all those years ago. Perhaps there are other enemies she might make peace with, to gain the satisfaction of her almighty vengeance.

Personality Traits: "Raise a cup with me! We should celebrate!" & "I'm very curious about new cultures, sometimes to the point of being annoying." & "I love a good story." / Ideals: "The world will hit you hard. If you don't take revenge, all you'll get is hit again [Evil]." & "If you don't have the guts, you don't deserve the glory [Chaotic]." / Bonds: "My word of alliance, once given, is absolute." & "I have siblings in my first tribe who should be adults soon. If they need my help, they have it." / Flaws: "I never forget a sleight." & "I pick fights I can't win sometimes."

Kellard Frosthalt

Rock Gnome Nature Cleric [Folk Hero]

Kell should have been a druid. He knows it, his clan knows it, druids know it, there's even odds that mushrooms in Menzobarrenzen know it, but he's always had a deep phobia of shape-shifting, so for a long while he was content to study nature…academically. Sure, his papers were trite, but the man published and that's not nothing. When he was hired to catalog finds for an expedition into Netherese ruins, the team found an ancient shrine to the goddess now known as Chauntea, and beset by undead guardians. Unwilling to let the sacred place be defiled, Kell took up arms for the first time, and found himself blessed with power.

Now Kell spends his time in lost places, seeking revelation and tending to the needs of rural communities. His new position is intimidating. More than many other followers of the Lady of Waving Grain, he understands that his goddess is an ancient and persistent foe of evil. Only…can something better truly be grown from her foes? Is Kell ready?

Personality Traits: "I love nature! Let me tell you about this parasitic wasp!" & "I know it doesn't fit my station, but I just, I need to be dressed sharp, okay?" & "I tell jokes with a completely straight face." / Ideals: "There are no pointless things; all things of the world have a treasured place in it [Good]." & "Generosity is the highest virtue [Good]." / Bonds: "Fuck Netheril, fuck the Netherese, burn their ruins and salt the ashes." & "After that first fight in the ruins, a peasant family took me in. I owe them my life." / Flaws: "I have a deep and abiding phobia of having my body changed against my will." & "I never, ever, ever, shut the fuck up."

Dolly Bookchild

Half-Drow Peace Cleric [Investigator]

Most half elves lose their human parent first, but as the child of two adventurers Dolly wasn't exactly surprised when her drow mother bit the big one doing battle with a demon accidentally released from an ancient binding. Seeking to understand her loss, Dolly started spending time in the sacred libraries of Deneir, and eventually converted after falling in love with learning. Academia isn't exactly her strong suit, but Dolly has a lot of practical knowledge that isn't often written down in an accessible fashion. Her new church was proud to fund the publishing of Dolly's Practical Survival Guide.

Still, a new love of learning isn't closure, and Dolly yearned to be an adventurer like her parents. After her second book went off to the printers, she stayed up in vigil to ask Deneir for a cleric's power, vowing to use it to find and advance knowledge, and to protect the ignorant. Her wish was granted, and now she bears the peace of the library wherever she goes. Every day is a lovely day for learning.

Hopefully one of these lovely days Dolly will figure out that the demon isn't done with just her mother.

Personality Traits: "It's a beautiful day to learn something new, isn't it?" & "Ah, the great outdoors!" & "I skip when I'm happy. No really. No, really." / Ideals: "Knowledge belongs to everyone [Lawful]." & "Extend grace to the ignorant; they truly do not know better [Good]." / Bonds: "Dad's getting on in years. I need to make sure he isn't worrying about me when he passes." & "I still return to my temple pretty often; it feels more like home than home does." / Flaws: "Sometimes I forget that my fun adventures can have deadly consequences." & "I'm from the big city where my heritage isn't a big deal, so it's surprising every fucking time that it's a big deal elsewhere."

Jonas Cobbler

Aasimar Light Cleric [Urchin]

So here's the thing. Jonas had a bit of an odd childhood. Raised by a then-single mother who is a devout follower of Lathander, Jonas was maybe six, seven years old when he mentioned in his prayers that he's a boy and asked for some help being a boy because he knew Mommy worked very hard and didn't have a lot of money. His first direct experience with divinity was his god's gentle voice in his mind saying: yes, my child, your new dawn is upon you. He had some explaining to do the next morning, and his mother was happy for him and seemingly cross with Lathander, for some reason?

It wasn't until Jonas was about seventeen that he got answers to that particular mystery; he came home to find his mother, her partner, and a golden-haired stranger waiting up for him. His mother introduced the stranger as Jonas's father...

...Lathander.

Maybe running away from home in a bit of a panic was the wrong move, but uh. Jonas has at least one parent looking out for him now, right? It'll be fine. It'll be fine. It's all gonna be fine.

Personality Traits: "I am extremely food-motivated." & "Let me teach you my secret handshake!" & "Uh, I've got, a spell for this, uh - fuck - uh, in the name of the new dawn uh -" / Ideals: "You don't need a reason to help people [Good]." & "The best time to be a better person was yesterday. The second-best time is now [Good]." / Bonds: "My old friends mostly went off to real careers, but we still stay in touch." & "There's a hidden place in the old neighborhood that I take care of." / Flaws: "I cannot walk into church any more without thinking, holy shit this guy slept with my mom." & "I am embarassingly weak to a pretty face."

Freddie Wright

Human Twilight Cleric [Criminal]

Hailing from a family of Selunite wererats in Yartar, Freddie used to have a fairly exciting life spying on Zhentarim operations, right up until she blundered into a cell of Sharrans in the sewers. They pushed her into a portal to see what would happen, but not before somehow stripping her of her lycantheropy to ensure she would suffer and die. Freddie arrived in Undermountain with nothing but her faith, and in her time of need the Moonmaiden answered. Against all odds, Freddie survived, scrounging up equipment, learning the traps, and eventually staggering out of the Well into the Yawning Portal Inn. She still has nightmares, but Freddie is grateful every day that she's alive to have them.

Now the former wererat stalks the Sharrans up and down the Sword Coast, seeking the return of what was taken. She hates her heavy armor and despises being caged in one body, but despite her snappish ways she takes her duty as a guide very seriously. That's part of the problem, actually. The dead of the Underhalls haunt Freddie and beg her intercession so that they might move on, and with every ghost laid to rest her prey gets further away. But what's a girl to do, ignore them? No. Freddie has faith. This righteous path must, will, make her whole again.

Personality Traits: "Time is money, hurry it up." & "Sometimes I overcomplicate things because I'm biased against direct solutions." & "Hey that reminds me of something that happened in my family -" / Ideals: "If you give people what they need to grow, they become their best selves [Good]." & "No one else can walk your path for you [Chaotic]." / Bonds: "Yartar is still my favorite city, and I stop by to do good by it when I can." & "The dead of the Underhalls that follow me have none other to speak for them." / Flaws: "Do you have any idea how much this stupid monkey body pisses me off?" & "I've got a vengeful streak that is not uh, approved Selunite behavior."

[dragonsbluee]

I have a request for batfam/Jason Todd fanfic writers:

I love the "Jason Todd is a bookworm/theatre nerd" fics as much as the next person, don't get me wrong, but can we please diversify his interests?

90% of the time when I open a fic with that tag, we see Jason reading Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice or quoting Shakespeare. And not to say that there's anything wrong with any of those being his favourite but even if he loves to read "classical" books, come on!

You're telling me Jason raised-in-crime-alley-spent-his-formative-years-between-an-eccentric-billionaire-and-an-assassin-cult Todd only reads books by dead white people?!

I refuse! Give me a man who takes to books more than ever after his return to Gotham. Jason, who reads books like I am Woman, A Really Good Brown Girl and White Tears/Brown Scars, then recommends them to the working girls as he establishes his territory. Who reads in multiple languages, and who loves Arabic poetry.

Give me a little "Robin is Magic!" Jason scouring Bruce's library and picking up a copy of The Mahabharata after he's done The Iliad, and spends weeks obsessed with Journey to the West.

Give me a Jason who's read Things Fall Apart, and One Hundred Years of Solitude! The number of quotes and references he could pull that would further support his dramatic tendencies? It would make him so happy!

[redsrooftopprincess]

Monster

Raphael x AFAB!Reader

Warnings: Smut. 🌶️🌶️🌶️

Happy Monsterfucker Pride Month you fucking deviants. 😈 Here's a present.

There are a lot of words that come to mind to the average person upon meeting the Hamato clan. "Thing" is pretty popular, and "Freak" is always a classic, but by far Raphael's least favorite is "Monster."

That one tends to stick around, like a "Hello My Name Is" sticker, even after first meeting. The others have an easier time. Leo's the calm, cool one, Mikey doesn't need any help making friends, and Don's got that cute nerd thing going on, but Raphael is big, quiet, and Close Quarter Combat has left him with more scars than clear skin, making an already ugly situation worse.

So when he was sitting at your desk while you were hanging out one night and a notification popped up on your computer, the word caught his attention.

"What is a... 'Monsterfucker?'"

You're not sure sure if anyone has ever died from asphyxiating Dr. Pepper, but you wonder for a moment if you'll be the first.

When you can once again breathe, you look up at him raising a brow at you, "You good?"

"Yup," you croak out with a nod and a thumbs up, clearing your throat, "good."

He gives you a moment to catch your breath, "So... You gonna answer my question, or...?"

Damn. You were hoping he'd suddenly magically forget that he asked.

You've been holding off on coming clean to the guys about this particular personality quirk. You're conflicted because, while it would do wonders for their self esteem, it would more or less be the equivalent of wearing a big sign around your neck that says "HEY RAPH! I'M INTO YOU!" You're still trying to figure out how to approach him about it, and whether or not doing so would ruin an already amazing friendship.

Apparently, you aren't going to get a choice.

You clear your throat, procrastinating, and looking down at the Halloween coloring book you've been working on so you don't have to meet his eyes, "Well..." You clear your throat again, "... a Teratosexual... or... 'Monsterfucker'... is someone with more... exotic... preferences," you cringe internally.

"Exotic as in...?"

"Exotic as in... non-human." You say, making an attempt at sounding casual, suddenly very focused on the cat you're coloring.

That was not the answer he was expecting.

The longer he's quiet, the louder the heartbeat in your ears.

"So you're... not... into humans." He ventures hesitantly.

"Not generally, no..." You say, still not looking at him. Your face is burning.

"Oh..." He says, sitting back and attempting to process, "So what kind of, uh... monsters, I guess... are you, um..." He can't believe he's actually asking this question.

"Depends," you say, thankfully without your voice squeaking.

"On..."

"On... who they are as a person," you say, "just like anyone."

He's quiet again, and you resist the urge to look up at him. He's running through moment after moment with you in his head. The looks, the touches, the gentle words, all those times he kicked himself for reading too much into things...

You tense as you hear him get up and walk over to your side of the bed. the mattress dips as he sits down beside you, and a hand comes up to still the hand coloring. You look up at him, heart thundering in your ears as his thumb brushes over your wrist.

"Now, I could be way off base," he says softly, "and if I am feel free to tell me and I swear I'll never bring it up again... but sometimes I feel like you and me, we..." He takes a breath, "What are we? Friends? I mean, Donnie's your best friend, but you spend all your time with me, and... um..." He trails off.

"Is that what you want...? Friends...?" You ask, hesitantly. You're talking about it. Everything the two of you have both very purposely avoided talking about. The time, the touches. You're talking about it, making whatever the hell this is real. Which means the next words out of his mouth could either build or break you.

"Honestly, at the risk of possibly ruining the best thing that's ever happened to me... No."

"Honestly," you say, breathless, your heart doing backflips, "me either."

"So... If not friends, then... what do you want?" He asks, holding your gaze.

He watches every one of your reactions closely. Any sign of unease or discomfort and he's going to bail. But there aren't any. He's pulled to you, and he closes what little distance there is, a blush blooms across your cheeks and chest.

"Honestly..." You whisper, "you."

He inhales sharply, and looks down at you in awe for a moment, heart pounding behind his armored chest. Exhaling, he cups your face with his other hand, brushing his thumb over your jaw before sliding it back slightly and tilting your head up to him.

"You sure that this... that I'm... what you want...?" He's vibrating. Everything in him is screaming out to take you. Claim you. You're right here. You're giving yourself to him. Anyone else would have just kissed you by now. But he isn't anyone else, and this isn't exactly a normal situation. He has to be sure.

His soft caress is sending sensations rippling down your arm, and you can barely breathe for the ache in your chest. The night they met, Mikey had been injured. Badly. So badly, that they had to drop in at April and Casey's even knowing there was a stranger there.

He stood in the corner and watched you like a hawk. You were new, and new was dangerous. He watched you jump in to help Donnie with whatever he needed, eyes clear and calculating.

In the moment, you were too focused on making sure D had what he needed to save his brother's life, but the memory set your skin on fire.

"Pretty much since the beginning." You whisper, nodding.

He wastes no more time. You've wanted this as long as he has and that thought sends a surge of heat through his bloodstream. He releases your hand and slides his around your waist, pressing his lips to yours, pulling you into his lap, and as flush against him as he can. He's been dreaming of this since the moment you met.

It feels right. Natural. Like you should have been doing this all along, but the moment the hand against your cheek slides into your hair, gripping it gently, and you can feel the rumble in his chest within your own, any whispers of regret are forgotten.

All too soon, he pulls back, both of you needing a moment to catch your breath.

His forehead pressed to yours, you look up at him curiously when he starts laughing softly.

He beams down at you, "You know, on the list of shit I though was gonna happen... ever..." You smile up at him, laughing gently as well. He looks at you with elated, if not confused, eyes, "You got any idea what you're signing up for."

"Pretty sure, yeah," you grin.

They all tried so hard to be human, but it was the hardest for Raphael. Whether it was a result of his mutation, his wildly inconsistent emotional states, or some combination of the two, he was the closest of the four of them to their primal nature.

That night, and the hulking figure in the corner, like some kind of ancient sentinel watching over his charges, was a memory you had come back to so many times you're pretty sure you could recreate it perfectly, not that you would want to.

You pull back slightly to look at him, and bring your hand up to his face, cupping his cheek. You look down at his lips, brushing your thumb over his scar, you've always wondered what it felt like, "... and I think I've been handling it pretty well, so far." Your eyes meets his like the period at the end of a sentence.

Looking at you as if you were the only thing he's ever really wanted, he presses his lips to yours far less tentatively this time, growling into the kiss.

You rest your hand on the back of his head as he kisses down the curve of your throat, nuzzling against it and leaving traces of himself on you. You don't miss the significance of being marked as His and something warm and grateful fills your chest.

He works his way back to your mouth, kissing you deeply before pulling back. He looks down at you, still in almost disbelief.

"I want to see you..." He says, breathless, running a finger just under the hem of your tank top. He looks down before meeting your eyes once again, and you would shudder if you weren't pinned down by his gaze.

You smile, pulling your shirt over your head, letting it fall to the ground. You had no idea what you thought his reaction would be to finding out everything, but this was way better than you could have hoped. Gooseflesh scatters across your skin, though you're not sure if it's from the change in temperature, or the way his eyes laser focus on on every inch of you. They light your skin on fire, but he doesn't move.

"You're allowed to touch me, Raphael..." you whisper. His eyes shoot up to yours, "I want you to." He inhales sharply, fingers already tingling, he hesitates for just a moment before a calloused hand brushes tentatively over an already hardened nub, making you shiver.

His hand covers your breast and he squeezes gently, the sigh that ghosts from your lips emboldening him.

When he dips his head and captures the other in his mouth, circling with his tongue, the whimper that escapes you as your eyes fall closed is nearly his undoing.

One of your hands rests on the back of his neck, while the other guides his hand lower. As he caresses your waist, his mouth moves to your other breast, giving it the same treatment and leaving your pulse racing.

You can feel the dampness between your legs, and from the way his churr has deepened, it's evident he can smell your arousal. His fingers play at the waistband of your shorts, but no further.

"This doesn't have to go any farther than your comfortable with," you reassure him.

"It's not that, it's just..." His cheeks darken, "I'm not... um..."

"Human?" You venture, with a raised eyebrow.

"Yeah..." He says before laughing softly, still not entirely able to process that this is happening, "But, I guess... that's not really a problem for you, is it?"

"Nope," you say, offering him a wicked smile which leaves him swallowing hard.

You smirk and reach up to tug at his paldron. "Feeling a little one-sided here, Red," you say looking over all the clothing and equipment he still has on.

He exhales, a permanent smile of disbelief resting in the corner of his mouth. Him. You want him. You climb off of him, laying back on the bed, and he stands. He sheds his gear and clothing as you look on hungrily, reclined on the bed like a God damn empress. His tail twitches. You aren't just letting him have you, you want him right back, and that is doing amazing things for his ego.

As he's removing the last of his clothing, he glances down at your shorts before meeting your gaze with a brow raised in expectation.

You narrow your eyes and smirk, pushing yourself up and standing beside the bed, before pushing your shorts from your hips and letting them slide to the floor. Now it's your turn to look at him expectantly as he tosses his red mask on top of his gear and takes the few steps towards you.

He looks down at you as if you're the most beautiful creature he's ever seen, and if you ask him, you are. With fabric no longer impeding, he is glutting himself on your scent and his head is swimming as it takes everything in him not to drop right there.

Your eyes roam over his body greedily, drinking him in, something you previously could only ever do in secret, and he shivers. You can't help it, you reach up a hand and hesitate for only a moment before placing it on his chest, following the labyrinthine whorls and channels in his plastron. He's cool and hard under your fingertips, and rough in many places where the keratin has been damaged.

"You know what kills me?" You ask softly, fingers tracing a particularly deep scar, "You have absolutely no idea how beautiful you are," you step forward, pressing your lips to the deep groove. You're rewarded with a sharp inhale and the rumble in his chest against your bare skin.

His hand slides around your waist and he pulls you into him as you kiss upward along the length of the scar. Your softness caresses him, and warmth pours through his shell, filling all the parts of him starved for sunlight. A deep hum reverberates inside of him when you reach the divot in the top of his pectoral scute, and kiss the scarred skin just above.

You look up at him, whispering, "Will you let me show you?"

He looks down at you, and he looks terrified. But he nods. He trusts you.

You take his hand and walk to the end of the bed. You close the door to your room, the light flashing in the full length mirror on the back of the door.

"Sit," you say with a gentle squeeze of his hand, leading him to the side of the bed facing the mirror. He does as he's told, and you climb into his lap, also facing the mirror.

You take his large hands in yours and guide him, showing him how you like to be touched. He watches your reactions to every movement closely, and it isn't long before he's confident enough to explore on his own. His fingers trail lightly down your side, following the line of your hip slowly inward. He stills, waiting to see if you're going to stop him from moving forward.

You don't.

He holds your gaze, watching your features change as his fingers slip into your folds. You gasp as he teases you slowly, and it isn't long before you're near trembling.

You're eyes fall closed, and your mouth falls open as one finger finally pushes into your soaked center. You lean back against him, whimpering as his finger curls, brushing against the soft part inside of you, before pulling out and pushing back in. He repeats the action, slowly, and again, slowly. He feels you clench around him, writhing impatiently, and looks up at the mirror.

Flush and trembling in his arms, one hand nearly covers your abdomen, the contrast of your smooth skin and his pebbled scales looking almost intentional, color and texture complimenting each other perfectly. The other continues disappearing inside of you and drawing from you the most exquisitely frustrated sounds. And it's him. He's doing all of it. His oversized, inhuman hands are creating this moment.

There is no other word for it than "beautiful..."

Your lust blown eyes open to meet his as you whimper and twist in his lap. "f-fuck..." he shudders as he drops, gripping you tighter.

The corner of your mouth turns up slightly as you meet his reflection's eyes. Trembling, he angles himself to rub against your sex, coating himself in your slick, pulling a small sound from your throat. You're already so wet and ready, and when you tilt your hips and capture his spade-tipped head, you are very grateful for that.

The burn as you stretch around him is glorious. He's bigger than you were expecting (and you were expecting), and a deep moan is pulled from you as you sink down on him slowly, your eyes falling closed.

You still once he's buried to the hilt, both of you needing a moment to adjust. When you open your eyes, his are still closed. His arms hold you tightly around the waist, and measured, trembling breaths ghost over your shoulder.

He needs a minute. This is new for him and the worst thing he can imagine right now is for this to be over before it starts. You are so soft and warm and tight, and he can feel your heartbeat pulsing in the walls around him, and if he doesn't get some kind of control, he's going to bust right here.

After a few moments, he opens his eyes, meeting yours in the mirror. His fingers find your clit again, and he strokes it slowly, groaning, his head falling back, when you clench around him.

In an involuntary search for friction, your hips rock against his and he gasps, his other hand tightening around your waist, and he's never been more grateful for years of training in meditation.

He breathes heavily for a few moments, and once he feels like he has his bearings, he holds your gaze and tightens his grip on your hips, pulling out of you slowly before pushing back in. You can feel his churr inside you and you shudder as he sheathes himself again, feeling the vibrations of his desire scatter outward from your center, leaving your fingers and toes tingling.

You move together in a slow rhythm, his eyes never leaving the mirror. He's going to remember every single second of this for the rest of his life. Whatever happens next, this is his. This moment. This feeling. He's wanted a lot of things in his life - peace, acceptance, love -, and for this one shining moment, he has all of them. For this once shining moment, he has you.

This beautiful, brilliant goddess of light and mercy is with him, wants him. You are watching him in the mirror as if he is something sacred. Divine. This broken deformation of something that isn't even a man, held in reverence, and he is filled with something indescribable.

His head falls to your shoulder with a deep moan, as a fire ignites inside of him. Not the one he's used to, there is no burning rage. No barely contained fury. This is not the fire of battle, but the fire of a forge.

Red hot iron burns in his veins as years of doubt and insecurity are boiled away. They didn't matter anymore. Every weird, unacceptable mutated turtle thing he had to deal with. Every scream of horror at his terrible visage. Your light. Your heat, is burning it away. Allowing him to make something new. He leans back, lifting you and bucking up into your harder as that heat fills him, and with every thrust, something in him is reshaping itself.

You could see it in his eyes. That fire of creation. And if you thought he was beautiful before... He holds your gaze with open purpose, unsure but ready for anything, pouring that fire into you. The catalyst of his recreation. And for the first time in his life, he feels like maybe he deserves something good.

And, Gods, you felt SO good.

He's transfixed, his hand reaching around to find your clit again, moaning as his mouth descends to your neck and shoulders. Needing to pull more of those exquisite sounds from you. Every one of them ringing through him like a struck anvil.

A smirk turns his lip as he stands, growling, and you brace against the door as he shows no signs of slowing. His large hand comes to cover yours on the door, wrapping around it. Eyes no longer fixed to the mirror, gaze downward, watching the way you stretch around him as he disappears into you, he can feel his release building as your body flexes around him.

The fire roars under your skin as his speed and strength increases, capturing every sight, sound, and scent, and tossing them back into the flames.

You're beyond language at this point, grunting and whimpering with every thrust. You can feel him in every part of you, until there is nothing left in the world but him and the burn of him filling you completely.

You can feel the pressure building as he growls low and sparks shoot up your spine, his hot breath crashing over your shoulders in waves as he is lost to you. He wraps his arm around you, leaning back and pulling you flush against him as his eyes fall shut.

You are consumed by the flames, arching against him with a cry as white fire streaks through you, the pressure breaks, and you are undone. Raphael follows with a roar, gripping you tightly as he buries himself in you. A second wave crashes over you when you feel him spill himself inside of you, your body milking him dry.

Trembling and breathing hard, you sit back and hold each other as you come down together. You meet his eyes in the mirror, and he's looking at you in reverence and gratitude, like you're his own personal miracle.

Because you are.

He wraps his arms around your waist and buries his head in your shoulder and breathes deep, pulling your scent into his lungs as he pulls out of you, leaving you feeling empty. Glancing up, he watches himself drip out of you, staining the rug below. You are flush and exhausted, but smiling as your heart rate and breathing slow.

After taking a few moments to clean up. You crawl back into bed together. He slips his arm around your waist, pulling you closer.

You smile up at him, happy, truly, actually happy, for the first time in... ever? That can't be right. It feels right. All you know is you've never been happy like this.

It won't last. It can't. He's too special. And now he knows he has options. "Just think, when you get bored with me, there's a whole community of people that will also find you hot." you chuckle softly. It was only a matter of time, right? You were nothing special.

His smile disappears.

How could you think...

"Y/N, I don't want anybody else." He says softly, sure.

"Raph, you haven't met anybody else." You counter.

"Fuck anybody else. Everybody else. I got it in one, and I ain't about to question that." He presses his forehead to yours.

You smile at him in patient, loving, disbelief. "Okay, Red."

He raises his head to look at you. "Want me to prove it? Fine. Give me a few years, I'll have you convinced."

This gets him a laugh. "Years?" you really like the sound of that.

You grin up at him. You really, really like the sound of that. But moments later, you cringe hard and start giggling, a clear sign that your brain has interrupted with something ridiculous. "Okay okay okay, I'm gonna say it. I have to say it... I've created a monster."

"If I'm lucky," he says. You look into his eyes as he smiles down at you, tucking a few strands of hair behind your ear. "You better be prepared for me not to be able to keep my hands off you," he says with a smirk.

"Y/N..." He groans and covers his face with a pillow while you cackle.

"No wait, see? Now you can't hate that word anymore because it will remind you of sex!" You chirp delightedly.

"You can't possibly be fucking serious right now..." He says, muffled by the pillow.

The next several minutes are spent with you vehemently defending your joke, while, delightfully annoyed, he quietly admits to himself that being a Monster might not be all that bad.

...

Happy Pride Month, my Monster. I love you. ♥️

...

Tag list

@thelaundrybitch @the-cauldron-witch @fyreball66 @ninnosaurus @tmntngl @thegirlwiththeninjaturtletattoos @zagreustomb @ramielll @silverwatergalaxy @gornackeaterofworlds @daedric-sorceress @sophiacloud28 @iridescentflamingo @milykins

[wistfulweaverwoman]

I have been marinating on something for the last day.

For roughly ten years I have been sharing my analysis of different aspects of THG books, but I started writing in depth character analysis before I ever joined the fandom. By nature of analysis they are subjective to comprehension, education, and personal experiences, however, I do my absolute best to keep them as unbiased as possible.

I understand that what I offer may not be what you've interpreted, and that's fine. We can discuss where we're each coming from, and agree to disagree if we don't come to an understanding. There are some things that I've shifted on over the years as I learn more about classic literature and symbolism, and even people pointing out text in a way that I never noticed. My mind continually seems to be blown by these books.

What's completely uncool is to not only tell me that my analysis is wrong, but that Susanne Collins wouldn't want me to interpret what I did, they way I did.

Motherfucking what now?? The two of you bffs? You discuss this over brunch??

So what's my beef? It stems from the kerfuffle from a few days ago where there was a bit of arguing over Katniss and whether she felt sexually aroused when Gale kissed her in 2. I did't know this was hotly debated issue till after. The person was complaining about Gale and so I offered some insight by linking my Gale analysis, (which I've already decided needs to be rewritten because there's things I'd like to add or provide further clarification on).

My analysis is metaphorical, specifically comparing THG to Dante's Comedies and how the series is Katniss's own journey through the seven hells to paradise through spiritual transformation.

They said they agreed with everything except Gale having sexual feelings for Katniss (weird take, but okay). I went on to explain that Gale represents the most base of men, and that that he's meant to provide contrast to the feelings she has for Peeta, which elevate above sexual desire to a more spiritual level. Specifically, the cave kiss, when Katniss first realizes that she does not want to lose the boy with the bread, mirrors the kiss in 2 with Gale, in which she realizes Peeta will never come back or she’ll never return and she’ll go to the Capitol to die, and he’ll die hating her… all while Gale is actively kissing her neck. And because nothing matters anymore she kisses him back:

“Gale’s touch and taste and heat remind me that at least my body’s still alive, and for the moment it’s a welcome feeling. I empty my mind and let the sensations run through my flesh, happy to lose myself.”

They then tell me that Katniss only feels arousal 2-3 times in the book (whereas I believe it's more, but they're feelings that aren't worth mentioning because those feelings aren't important, but there's hints in the narrative of her desire for Peeta, often in bed) and that what she felt while Gale was touching her wasn't arousal. I say let's agree to disagree, and then they @ me TWO more times to continue to tell me I'm wrong and the bit about SC. So they're blocked, which I have never done before, beside porn bots.

PSA for the folks that don't know this because they haven't experienced these yet:

There's a difference between sexual arousal from physical stimulation, being sexually attracted to a person, and being with someone you're in love with.

You can, in fact, be aroused by someone you're not at all attracted to, it's a physical response to stimuli. Even rape victims have felt sexual arousal, which is totally normal, though generally leaves them with a sense of shame and horror. So yes, Katniss was aroused, but not actually attracted to Gale. Again, this provides contrast to what she feels with Peeta!

"I kissed Peeta about a thousand times during those Games and after. But there was only one kiss that made me feel something stir deep inside. Only one that made me want more. But my head wound started bleeding and he made me lie down. This time, there is nothing but us to interrupt us. And after a few attempts, Peeta gives up on talking. The sensation inside me grows warmer and spreads out from my chest, down through my body, out along my arms and legs, to the tips of my being."

When she's referring to how she feels with Gale it's described physically and she uses the word "flesh". What she feels with Peeta is far far more than sexual arousal. She's not saying she's horny. Katniss feels this in her soul: "to the tips of my being".

You don't have to agree with me, but if you're going to come at me with half baked theories at least back it up with textual evidence, and not like throw some bullshit at me. Stop projecting your own shit on these characters and then calling it #cannon!!

[brightmalcolm]

I'm so happy I found your blog! This show has been my hyper-fixation ever since it came out and it's nice to find people who still talk about the show :)

ANYWAYS, I just started reading The Count of Monte Cristo (for totally normal reasons, and not so I can deeply analyze S1E13 "Wait & Hope") and I wanted to know your thoughts on the fact that The Count of Monte Cristo was Malcolm's favorite story growing up. Because this book, like said in the episode, is about a man murdering for revenge (take this with a grain of salt I'm on page 73). And I can't help but think about Martins though process of reading this story about murder to Malcolm. Because in the episode, We get a flashback of Martin reading the story to Malcolm, and He's acting out a scene from the book where I think the Count kills one of the men who betrayed him (again I'm only on page 73 I'm not completely sure). And he makes the act of murder seen fantastical, fun, and light-hearted. Which makes me think that when he reads this story to Malcolm, not only to get Malcolm used to the idea of murder, but to also prematurely downplay his crimes. So when Malcolm found out that Martin's a Serial Killer as a kid, Martin could then say, "Well you didn't have a problem with it when I read those crimes to you, why do you have a problem with it now?" And we see the adult version of this when Malcolm is an adult, Martin brings up the fact the he never killed anyone on his operating table, he only killed people when off the clock. Which of course means that his crimes aren't as bad as they really are because he could have done so much worse!

AND THE WAY MALCOLM WOULD HAVE LOOKED BACK AND THOUGHT HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BECAUSE OF THE BOOK!!

because of course Martin the Murder would read a murder book instead of a normal Fairytale, of course Martin would only act out the murder scenes from the book. It just gets the trauma ball rolling, like give my guy a break please he's had enough.

hi omg it's nice to hear from you!

so obligatory I have not read the count of monte cristo so take everything I say with a big grain of salt bc I am just going off the wikipedia page and conversations I've had with people who have read it. I like to think everything (or at least most things) with this show are intentional so I enjoy looking in to these kind of details to see what they might mean. I think one way to look at it is the writers trying to do a short hand for malcolm being an intelligent and precocious child and a bit kind of like "ha ha of course malcolm's favorite childhood book was an old french classic about revenge and not like the magic tree house bc he's so eccentric and pretentious." also it ties nicely into a murder investigation that they can base on the story to give malcolm more reasons to know a bunch of random info to help with the case.

but when it comes I think with martin basically anything can be used as a tool for manipulation, even if in another context it wouldn't be by someone else. like the count of monte cristo doesn't seem like something super out of left field for a parent to read their child in my opinion, yeah it involves murder but a lot of books involve heavy subject matter and are still read at any age. so I don't want to imply it's like bad or odd for a child or their parent to read something like that, I was reading things like the outsiders and the hunger games around malcolm's age which are both kids/young adult books but also contain death and violence. BUT I think with martin he definitely could have had some more ulterior motives and again, the show deliberately made reading the book a memory malcolm had with his dad so I think the writers definitely had intent behind details like that.

so yes I get what you're saying and could 100% see it being used that way in martin and malcolm's dynamic. I think it's in the vein of how malcolm collects murder weapons in that it demonstrates how death and murder kind of consume his life even in to his interests and hobbies and how martin's shadow is always there (again, not saying reading about murder or being interested in it mean you're a serial killer obviously but in the context of like themes in the story, a reoccurring one is malcolm's preoccupation with death and how it relates to his trauma from his father). like the example you gave, martin is very good at justifying what he has done, especially and specifically to malcolm bc he knows his son is already traumatized by his actions and desperate for some logical reasoning behind them when there just really isn't one. the way martin acts out the story is also an interesting point. again, not trying to imply this is like inherently something bad or problematic but specifically in the context of this show and this relationship it definitely shows how martin kind of presents murder to malcolm. like it's all about the larger context for me; what does this mean with the information we already know by episode 13 and what conclusions should we draw from it. and I think it makes sense how you interpret the episode!

anyway TLDR the way martin talks about murder with his son is a vital part of their dynamic. martin knows malcolm wants to understand his seemingly incomprehensible actions and he uses this multiple times in the show to try and manipulate him in to thinking different ways about them, whether that is by telling malcolm he is somehow responsible for him murdering people (see 1x02) or that he saved more people than he hurt (see 1x07) or that he has changed completely (see 2x13) ect. ALSO I just remembered how interested I am in how this show portrays the concept of monstrosity and wow this TLDR is getting long specifically in the episode you referenced eye of the needle 1x14 and how martin says something along the lines of "I'm the monster, so vanquish me" as if simplifying the concept down to that of a storybook, like he's a dragon to be slain and how he tells malcolm there's no such thing as monsters in the pilot, conjuring the image of like a child who thinks there's a monster under their bed or in their closet. so the lines kind of get blurred and martin will ultimately use every tool in his disposal to manipulate malcolm in different ways, even using things that are innocuous on their own or in a different context. would love to hear everyone else's thoughts especially if you've read the book :)

[go-go-devil]

Top 5 autistic headcanons and top 5 aroace headcanons?

TRIPLE A LET'S GOOO!!!

Autism:

Dale Cooper (Twin Peaks): One of the most obviously autistic characters to ever grace television. The allistics just didn't get it probably because he was "too social" or whatever other slight deviation from what's stereotypical in autistic characters

Kris (Deltarune): I genuinely believe Kris is deliberately autistic-coded, mostly due to that "How to Care for a Human" book you find in the library in Chapter 2 but even beyond that all of their described behaviors are SUPER relatable to me as an autistic person (and bring me back to how I felt about it in my youth...)

Daniil Dankovsky & Various Other Characters (Pathologic): Thank you once again for showing me the light in how truly autistic Daniil is at his very core <3 Besides him though I'm also in agreement with the very code of Classic HD that Peter Stamatin and Grace are on the spectrum (tortured savant and death-obsessed weird girl rep respectively), but I would also argue that Yulia Lyuricheva is autistic as well. I mean the woman is described as someone who "sits in the corner and quietly observes others" and invented an entire philosophical theory in an attempt to explain the pattern of random events invisibly triggered by people. That's what we in the business call STEM-influenced autism :)

The Lodger (Knock-Knock): Yet another video game character that is so intensely autistic. Willingly living in isolation, simultaneously longing for and hating the presence of guests in your house, talking to yourself while pacing through the hallways & infodumping about the most niche scientific field imaginable? It's so relatable 🕯

Diane Nguyen (Bojack Horseman): This one maybe doesn't have the most "evidence" compared to the others per say, but I honestly found myself relating to a lot of Diane's personality quirks and struggles AS an autistic person (ex: hating surprises, trouble regulating her emotions/prone to emotional outbursts, having the most specific overly-convoluted Halloween costume ever). With her I think I'm more in the minority for this hc since her other mental illnesses overshadow her autistic traits, plus her's aren't nearly as obvious as Juda's (who as far as I'm concerned IS canonically autistic even if it's not outright stated by the characters)

Aroace:

Patches (Soulsborne Series): There is no fucking way this man has ANY desire for sex and romance. The only hole he's interested in are the enemy-infested ones he can kick you down! Plus I do know of that one famous line he says in Dark Souls 3 which he claims to be "devoid of all worldly wants" so this might as well be canon

Artemy Burakh (Pathologic): I don't care what the shippers think, I just love the idea of Artemy having a narrative revolving around the concept of "love" while being alienated and eventually coming to terms with how he himself doesn't experience this emotion in a socially conventional way. Besides just 'cause he's aroace in my mind doesn't mean he can't form QPR's ;)

Death of the Endless (The Sandman): ABSOLUTE AROACE ICON! She's a being who loves humanity, but keeps a reasonable distance between any individual person due to her role in taking their souls upon their death. Though instead of being all moping and "oh I can never allow myself to truly be close to those I love T_T" she's instead endlessly jovial and enjoys every second of spending time with other humans in a platonic fashion, brief as those seconds are in the grand scheme of her job. If that ain't actually positive aroace rep I don't know what is 🖤

Every Character in Hylics: All of them are aroace. They're functionally immortal clay aliens who probably don't even need to procreate in traditional means to produce new life, and besides they're more interested in prog rock than romance anyway 🌙 🎸🌯

Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye): A very personal hc for me. Reading that book was one of my earliest instances of me relating to a character for their lack of desire for sex and romance; in particular the whole story about Holden losing his best friend Jane due to her no longer valuing him as a friend and wanting a boyfriend instead, to which he couldn't find himself filling that role. It's just such a vivid portrayal of THE aroace experience of having your platonic connections become "lesser" in the eyes of society, and it really pisses me off that so many contribute this character trait of his as something "he refuses to grow out of" because no it fucking isn't! But then again most analyses of this book are godawful ableist pieces of shit so I'm not exactly surprised there's a lack of meaningful analysis on the main character being sexually deviant alongside his mental disorders

[royaletiquette]

5 Pieces of Fiction Media that Influenced You as a Writer and Why? I don't consume enough fiction to be able to do this so I gotta broaden the scope

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison Most of the time, the only fiction I enjoyed in school was sci-fi. It's the only thing that remains with me today at least. Harlan Ellison is such a jackass and boy does that show through I Have No Mouth and everything surrounding it: his interviews, the computer game, the guide he wrote to the game that's really just a book version of the short story. Ted is like peak Hibiya in the way that if the reader is blind enough to believe that he's telling the truth, then they aren't getting any of the story. And I just love honestly how angry that story is without being... too whiny? I wouldn't say there's anything subtle about it, but it keeps drawing you forward for sure. Also just how Harlan writes I can relate to a lot. Which is a big one.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (painting) I'm not one for art. I just. It's nice. Cool whatever wow I'm so impressed. So seeing this in Madrid I think, after having to go to a billion other art museums and being really tired of it, stumbling on this as a final room to poke our head into is such a pleasant memory I have. Going from feeling very whelmed with my mother, and we're suddenly both like. Man what the fuck am I looking at. I wrote multiple songs about this piece. I bought miniatures inspired by this piece. I would gladly get it tattooed on me when I decide what and where and by whom.

It's such a great level of absurdity that isn't offensive in a jarring "make you think" bullshit way. Maybe it's because when I think of absurdity, I think of films from the 20's. But this painting has more of a through line so like, it still makes sense. So I don't know, something about it gives me a lot of muse.

Dead Kennedies (band) This might be one that also mainly inspires me more as a song writer than an rp'er. But it's again Jello Biafra playing with the skewed perspective of the author, which is apparently how I get my rocks off. You're supposed to hate him. He dawns this mask of a rich prep, or politician, or people you hate but really with a second of introspection you realize that's also you, and he just says the quiet stuff loudly. And musically Dead Kennedies is just fucking spooky with their bassline. So it really inspires keeping that core motivation for Hibi as me, and bringing forward those quiet parts of them that ruin the illusion sometimes.

Fantasia (movie) I can't pick between Gershwin, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky, so fuck it. Fantasia is what introduced me to them and that's what matters. I will always love and be inspired by Fantasia/Fantasia 2000. Everyone's got a Disney movie, and that's mine. I can't listen to Rhapsody in Blue without picturing it, or Rite of Spring without seeing the ballet. It just. Fucks me up the way you want classical music to. With writing though, it's the meaning and inspiration behind those pieces and composers that inspire me. They all ride such big waves and are so contrarian to what's expected from them in the music hall. There's just no way I don't also see Hibi falling in love with them and digging that "I'll do what you want, but under my own rules."

Historical/Period dramas None specifically. Just the widest net I can cast here lol. But really, watching any really inspire me to come up with new plots and different ways people around Hibi would act. Which is something I really struggle with, so it's an amazing resource, you know, human history. But it's also like, a really fun lens to put on your muse, and think about them through the eras. Personally, it helps develop them more, and understand the things in their life that make them unique and how they would change if those little things didn't happen. I'm also just such a slut for Titanic.

tagged by @mannequinentity and @distopea♥

[lightofraye]

how does it speak about you, that you stan a man who you think lies about loving his partner to save face.

because, my friend, that's a giant red flag. one thing is pretending to live together while they aren't. but affirming that you love someone, and praising them and call them your home just because you want to fool everyone into thinking you're a happy family, that's narcissistic, that's scummy behavior. because he clearly would be demostrating that he doesn't care about the feelings of others, the feelings of his partner, of his children.

that would qualify as public humiliaton once the truth comes out.

that would be enough to make people think he's the abussive one in the relationship.

what does it say about you? that you rather believe he's a buthole than believe he loves his wife.

Hi anon!

Wow... what a stretch. Is your shoulder okay?

Let me address what you've "said" one by one, shall we? I think I shall.

how does it speak about you, that you stan a man who you think lies about loving his partner to save face.

It says I'm empathetic and understand where he's coming from. I was in an abusive relationship and after that experience, I read a lot of books on abuse, the perception of abusers and so forth to try and understand what a lot of people do. To understand why I did what I did while in such a relationship as well.

because, my friend, that's a giant red flag. one thing is pretending to live together while they aren't.

Actually, it's a red flag but not in the direction you're thinking.

but affirming that you love someone, and praising them and call them your home just because you want to fool everyone into thinking you're a happy family, that's narcissistic, that's scummy behavior.

Is it? Or are you speaking as someone who doesn't understand Hollywood? Who doesn't understand public perception? Who doesn't understand what it's like to be in an abusive relationship?

because he clearly would be demostrating (sic) that he doesn't care about the feelings of others, the feelings of his partner, of his children.

Or... he does--to save himself, to protect himself. You think Danneel cares about how he feels? She doesn't. At all. She's shown it time and time and time again, in the AD House tour, in numerous public posts, in the way she told him she was pregnant, everything. She does not care about him. She does, however, care about her public perception and craves attention all the time.

The largest, loudest example would be her refusing to come to him after the Rust shooting. He had to lie to cover his ass, because even the cops were giving him a side-eye.

that would qualify as public humiliaton (sic) once the truth comes out.

How would the truth come out? You think Jensen or Danneel would say "Hey, yeah, all those stories? Fake"? No! They'd just eventually announce they're getting divorce and that'd be that. Yeesh.

(Though I could see Danneel pulling that crap and that'd make her look bad, not him. He'd get pity; she'd get hate.)

that would be enough to make people think he's the abussive one in the relationship.

Why? How is he being abusive by telling the loving narrative? After all, she hasn't come out in public, in an event--save that one OTH Charity Prom Event (god that was pitiful)--and spoke to anyone in well over a year now. No one is stopping her. All she'd have to do is wait until he's at a con or something and come out.

Unless she's the one using the kids--classic abuser behavior, by the way--to manipulate everything. Sure, he could try to tell the truth--and she could hurt the kids.

He's not the abuser, anon. She is.

what does it say about you? that you rather believe he's a buthole (sic) than believe he loves his wife.

I think I've made it clear that I don't think he's the "buthole" at all, anon. I've always made that clear. He's the victim trapped in a situation that would be very difficult to escape from. It kills me how you and other anons (likely AAs) seem to think that I'm implying he's "weak" and "incapable of standing up for himself" when I've said over and over he's in a very difficult if not impossible situation.

Danneel has the kids.

It could be that there are some changes going on in the background. It'd explain the sudden lack of family photos since Danneel's pathetic excuse of a birthday wish on his Instagram. It'd explain why she's stopped posting too.

But for his Hollywood image--which is demanded of celebrities; he's just not doing it right--Jensen needs to keep peddling those stories. His fans demand it of him. They're the ones asking him all the time, so he's gotta come up with stuff. You think the fans genuinely care? I really don't think they do.

Celebrities have an image they need to maintain. It's their lifestyle. There's a lot of ass-kissing, fake smiles, and so forth that they have to do in order to succeed.

They tell stories and fans eat it up, whether it's true or not. I explained a bit of this in another post that was sneered at as an essay--even though it was educational. Reading comprehension is your friend, anon.

As is education.

TL;DR: Jensen isn't the abuser here. Danneel is.

[mrsdostoevsky]

Hah! Get requested >:)

How about enjoying a rainy day with our beloved Fedya, juts drinking tea with him and relaxing?

Thank you my dearest Maby :D <3

“Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain...”

PAIRING: Fyodor Dostoevsky (BSD) x gn!reader;

GENRE: kinda of fluff/domestic, suggestive themes (just at the end);

TYPE: short drabble;

WORD COUNT: 690 (+/-)

WARNINGS: none at all, besides bad writing, occasional grammar mistakes and things getting a bit more suggestive at the end.

A/N: thank you so much, Kal, for being my “first” request! i love you so much, and I hope you enjoy what I wrote for you. 🥺🖤

It was a pleasant spring afternoon. The rain was pouring outside and timid sunny rays could still be seen through the gray clouds. Fyodor was at his office, running his eyes through some of the papers sprawled on his desk - calmly humming along with the classical music playing in the background.

He was completely exhausted but intended to keep working at his place until he was done - after all, being the mastermind behind all these brilliant schemes demands some hard work, you know? Suddenly, the sound of someone opening the door brought him out of this introspective state. It was you, his darling.

Sneaking your head inside of the room, you looked at your man and, in a sugar-coated voice, asked if you could enter his office. Fyodor nodded, unable to suppress the genuine smile on his lips just by seeing your beautiful face. After his approval, you started to walk across the room, carefully carrying two cups of fresh-made tea and, right after setting the cups on his desk, you approached him, placing a gentle kiss on the top of his head.

“You're tired, aren't you?” - you asked in a soft voice, caressing Fyodor's hair and tangling his silky black locks between your fingers. “Why don't you take a little break from your work, my love? Look, I've made your favorite tea just for us!”

Fyodor stopped looking at his screens and moved his gaze to you, a little smile appearing on his face. “Oh, even if I'm tired and need to finish what I'm doing, how could I deny such a gentle invite coming from my myshka?” - he said, standing up and moving with you to the other side of the office, where there was a couch facing a large window.

With the cups in hand, you sat by his side and, while looking at the peaceful sight of the rain pouring outside, you two just talked about trivialities, such as music and a book you've just finished. When the tea was over, he gently moved you to his lap and started stroking your hair.

“Thank you.” - he murmured “What?” - you asked shocked, clearly doubting what you'd just heard. He chuckled a bit and kept saying with his sweet tune “I said 'thank you', my darling. Thank your for being so considerate of me. I know I don't say those things very often, but I feel delighted when we have moments like this.”

Oh, God, your eyes opened wide. You felt your cheeks burning red and, unable to answer his sudden confession, you instantly bury your face against Fyodor's neck. He let out a soft chuckle again, clearly amused by his effect on you.

When you finally calmed down, you moved off from his neck and faced the gorgeous man - gently cupping his face with one of your hands. “I love being with you like this too, Fedya, but I wish we could do this more often. You've been overworking yourself so much we barely have time for each other...” - you said, pouting. Fyodor gave you a tender smile, reaching for your cheek and caressing it. “I'm sorry, myshka. I know that, sometimes, I don't give you all the attention you deserve, but I'll do better, if that would make you happier”. For a short moment, you just set there and looked at his face, delighted at such loving words - what a man, you thought.

Enchanted by his spell and shifting on his lap, you slowly approached him, closing the gap between your lips in a gentle and passionate kiss, a kiss that became more and more heated when Fyodor decided to hover his hands all over your body. You were so immersed in the warmth of his mouth, but you surely felt the smirk coming from his lips right after he squeezed one of your breasts a bit too hard and you let out a soft moan.

After a while, the room's background was a mix of classical music, raindrop sounds and your needy moans - definitely, Fyodor's favorite melody.

[msmarvelouswinchester]

Ever Been In The Backseat?

Summary - Your fantasy involving a certain green-eyed actor, yourself and a certain classic, black car comes true.

Pairing - Jensen Ackles x Female!Reader

Warning - Smut 18+, Unprotected sex (y'all are better than that), Oral sex (fem receiving), bearded!jensen, fluff, a little mention of Dom!Jensen (this fic really got out of my hand), just pure filth, PWP.

Word Count - 1890

Square Filled - Shirtless!Jensen ( @spndeanbingo )

Written for @anaelsbrunette's Yas 20th Birthday Bash. HAPPY BIRTHDAY IN ADVANCE YAS! Hope you like this <3<3 Prompt is in bold.

I blame this fic idea entirely on @jawritter but I don't think she is sorry, neither am I.

Beta'd by the lovely @deanwanddamons. Before writing this, I went through her fic "The One With Baby" to get an idea of the smut so she deserves a double shoutout!

I love the Ackles fam but for the sake of this fic, Jensen is not married to Danneel. This is only a work of fiction.

All the adult stuff is mentioned under the cut. So if you're under 18, DO NOT read any further!

Divider by @firefly-graphics

Looking up from your book, you realized the house was incredibly quiet. This was very unusual considering your husband was home. Normally you could hear his deep voice from his office on the other side of the hall or hear him strumming his guitar, humming along to an unknown song, but today the house was quiet and Jensen was nowhere to be found.

As if on cue, your four legged, fur baby walked into the room. Putting aside the book in your hand, you extended your arms to beckon the dog.

“Where's Dad?” You asked him as the German Shepherd walked up to you, wagging his tail. The dog tilted his head, looking up at you. “Even you don't know, huh?” You got up from your seat, kneeling down in front of the dog and gently patted his head. “Come on. Let's go find him.”

Noticing the door to the garage was open, you went in. Since the arrival of Dean’s beloved Impala, Jensen had been spending an ungodly amount of time in there, repairing and oiling the parts of the classic car and right now, the said actor was standing there in front of Baby with hands on his hips, admiring his handiwork.

Smacking your lips, you let your eyes roam over his body, taking in how his jeans clung low on his hips, the black shirt fitting his toned body perfectly, his piece of flannel lay abandoned on the garage floor. Your lips parted, a small sigh leaving them as Jensen's hand went up to his face, scratching his scruffy beard. You shivered ever so lightly at the memory of last night - the sweet burn of that beard you had felt as his sinful mouth was devouring you. The thought itself made a light blush creep up your neck, but you gathered yourself and asked, “How long have you been down here, Mr. Ackles?”

“Hey.” Jensen looked up at your words, smiling when he saw you. “Kinda lost track of time. Miss me already?”

“Mhm.” You slowly approached the man. Pecking his lips, you asked, “Is she all set for a ride?”

“Oh you bet she is.” Jensen smirked, quickly catching on to your innuendo. You let your eyes travel south of his body as he bent over to pick up a rag cloth and his black shirt rode up a little, giving you a glimpse of his stomach. Your mind instantly ran wild with thoughts involving a certain green eyed man and you in the backseat of a certain black car.

“Eyes up here, missus.” Jensen's voice pulled you out of your explicit thoughts and your eyes snapped up to meet with his green ones. Cleaning his hands, he threw the rag on the floor. “So what brought you down here, sweetheart?” He husked.

Your breath hitched in your throat when you heard his pet name for you. Very often, you had noticed that the thin line between the actor and character had started getting blurred even when Jensen was home - this was one of those times.

“You look very….Dean, you know.” You said, ignoring his question, “Except this.” You touched his bearded face to emphasise your words. Jensen made quick work of shutting the hood before looking at you again.

“You didn't seem to mind it last night when you were begging me for more.” His lips tugged up in a smirk. “I bet you are thinking about it right now, aren't ya?”

‘Fuck, how did he know?’ You wondered, but all your rational thoughts flew out of the window when he took your hand in his, entangling his fingers with yours. Jensen's other hand moved to your waist, holding you tightly, pulling you dangerously close to his body. You placed your free hand on your husband's shoulder to steady yourself when he leaned in, claiming your lips with his pink, plump ones, his beard tickling your face a little. Jensen's fingers untangled themselves from yours and his other hand left your waist and both moved up to cup your face.

Moaning, you hooked your hands behind his neck as his teeth grazed your lip. Your knees buckled under his hypnotic touch as he slipped his tongue into your mouth . Your whole body tingled , your eyes slipped closed, and your toes curling as his tongue explored every inch of your mouth. You felt your lungs screaming for air until Jensen finally let go of your lips. You opened your eyes and saw him staring at you, his eyes blown with lust. He slammed you against the door of the car.

You gasped when his hands sneaked under your shirt. With one swift movement of his hand, Jensen lifted your shirt over your head, throwing it on the ground, leaving you in just your bra. His hands pinned yours down to the side as he moved closer to you, his growing excitement pressed against your thigh. He hungrily attacked your lips once more. You had barely caught your breath when his mouth started to move downwards.

“Jay-” you whined when he nipped on the pulse point in your neck, Jensen let go of your hands, cupping your face as he whispered against your neck, “Jay what, baby?” The feel of his lips sent shivers down your spine. He ran his hand down your body, stopping at the waistband of your slacks.

“I-” you sucked in a deep breath when his fingers dipped below the waistband of your slacks, brushing against your already dampened cotton panties, pulling a soft whimper out of your lips.

“Baby, you're soaked.” He husked. “Tell me sweetheart, how long have you thinkin’ about getting fucked in the backseat?”

“L-long-” the words got stuck in your throat when he pinched your inner thigh.

“Didn't hear you. Say it louder.” He growled into your ear, his beard grazing past the skin on your neck. “Say it, baby.”

“Long e-enough.” Jensen hummed as his hand teasingly circled around your clothed core, pinching and squeezing the skin of your inner thighs.

“Fucking tease.” You whined at the sudden loss of touch when he pulled out his hand.

“What do you want? Tell me.” He smirked, looking into your eyes.

“Fuck me.”

And that's all it took for Jensen to open the door to the backseat of the Impala before nudging you to go in. You did so in with shaky legs and slid across the seat. Jensen lifted his shirt over his head with one swift motion of his wrist before undoing his belt. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of your slacks and pulled them off, along with your ruined panties. Smirking again, he climbed into the car beside you, closing the door behind him. Unhooking your bra, Jensen's hands moved up to your breasts, kneading and massaging them. His fingers caressed your stiff nipples before his mouth latched onto one sensitive bud. He flicked your nipple gently while his fingers worked on the other one.

“Fuck-” you moaned aloud, your voice bouncing off the closed doors of the Chevrolet. Stopping the assault on your nipple, his mouth started to move down after placing a kiss on the valley between your breasts. He caressed your entire torso, his mouth trailing kisses down your body before he gently pushed your legs apart, dipping his head down to your heated core. He left a trail of wet kisses up your thigh, his beard leaving a sweet burn on your skin in its wake.

His hot breath fanned against your throbbing pussy. He looked up at you before pushing one of his fingers inside you, eliciting a moan out of you. He pumped hard twice before adding a second finger.

“Fuck-” you moaned.

“That's exactly what I'm planning on to do.” Jensen rasped, as he increased the pace, curling his fingers inside you, brushing past your g-spot repeatedly. You sucked in a sharp breath when he pulled out his fingers and his mouth latched onto your aching pussy. You arched your back at his action. Your hands moved down, fingers getting tangled up in his long hair, pulling a low growl out of him, the vibrations of it edging you over.

“Jen-oh shit!” You exclaimed as he hungrily devoured you, his tongue repeatedly assaulting your sensitive pussy, sucking needily on your bundle of nerves. You felt the coil in your stomach tighten before a wave of pleasure washed over you.

“Shit!” You gasped as Jensen’s tongue lapped your juices hungrily. Panting, you tried to come down from your high as you saw him lift himself up slightly to get rid of his jeans. Your eyes were drawn towardson his noticeable bulge. Moving your hands near him, you reached out to palm his hardened cock through his boxers.

“Fuck baby-” Jensen groaned before grasping you by your wrist.

“If you keep doing that, I won't last long.” He purred, pulling his boxers down and discarding them somewhere on the front seat. His erection sprung free from his confines. Taking his hardened cock in his hand, he gave it a few strokes, running his hand up and down his shaft, the tip beaded with precum. He lined himself with your dripping entrance. His swollen tip teasingly nudged at your opening before he pushed himself into you.

“Oh-” you hissed, the sensation painful at first, but your mouth fell open in an inaudible moan as that pain turned into pleasure. “You need to m-move.” You said. He lifted himself up, pulling out of you leaving only the tip of his engorged cock inside you, before pushing back in again, deeper than before. You bucked your hips to match with his rhythm. Locking his fingers with yours, Jensen kept thrusting deep into you as you finally settled in a sync with him.

With every thrust, you inched closer to your release as both your breathing became ragged. The car’s confined space was filled with needy moans and deep breaths. Jensen buried his face in the crook of your neck as you felt the coil in your stomach tightening once more. He nibbled on your skin. You freed your hands from his grip and placed them on the small of his back as your nails dug into his skin.

“Fuck-Y/N!” He exclaimed and your nails dug deeper, his breath tickling your neck along with his beard.

“‘M close,” you breathed out.

“Mhm. That's it, baby, just like that, let it go.” Jensen rasped, as his thrusts became sloppy. Your coil finally snapped as a wave of sheer ecstasy washed over you.

“Fuck! Fuck! Jensen!” You cried out as you felt yourself coming undone. A few more thrusts and Jensen spilled himself into you, a grunt falling out of his lips, as his seed coated your walls. He collapsed on top of you, trying to catch his breath. Pecking your lips, he pulled out of you. You stared up at the foggy glass windows as Jensen reached for his boxers. Opening the door, he stepped out in all his naked glory. You sat up in the seat, also naked, as you watched him pull his boxers and jeans back up, leaving his belt unbuckled.

As Jensen turned his back to grab his shirt, you whispered loud enough for him to hear, “The backseat of Baby surely now has some stains and stories.”

Feedback is highly appreciated!

[wowsoboring]

Deconstructing Baseless Harry Potter Arguments#2 (i) : Harmione Edition

Obviously I once again do not mean to target all Harmione shippers. I know quite a few who're very good human beings and tolerant and accepting above all. However these aren't. In this case, you might sense quite a bit of levelheadedness in the beginning, however you must not be fooled as it goes south and takes a nasty turn very quickly. Don't get your hopes up, this is some of the worst shit I've ever seen, especially the way in which it progresses through its course. Naturally, for this post I have picked my own style of writing which will match that of those redditors. Reddit is the perfect breeding ground for all these weird cults, honestly. I shall be resorting to a formal language and style of conversation, very much like a debater would to sound as pretentious as these do. These posts are found on the instagram handle toxicharmonyshippers who gather such toxic musings and sayings for Harmione shippers while respecting the ones that are nice.

1)

Oh yes, let's use words like 'vehemently' to sound smart, why not? Of course, this little tidbit of the highly stupendous post seems more or less civil at the start. They also have the common decency to say "some Romione shippers" rather than generalizing all of us. Very nice of you, how very saint like. Let's wait till they drop the act and show us their true colors. Harkening back to the argument, I have but one question for you, "where do you find these people?". Where's the proof? Who are these radical Romione shippers who worship Ron and dislike Hermione? I haven't seen any such shippers and I am surrounded by Romione shippers on tumblr, instagram and fan fiction sites as well and haven't met the people you speak of. Some point out her flaws, yes, but no one hates her or dislikes her that much. I have seen two or three Romione shippers across hundreds and thousands who're skeptical of Hermione's perfection. Skeptical. Not hating, disliking, or anything. Of course, unlike this person, I have evidence: find these pi charts for your referral (clickable): https://imgur.com/a/QfPnQbB

you can, through these, see the amount of Hermione bashing across Harry Potter fanfiction and you can see that even in Romione fanfiction there's more Ron bashing. Hermione-bashing is a non-issue. That's what it is. Regarding the "nagging" statement, where's the lie in that? "Annoying" is somewhat subjective, I personally don't find her annoying at all. Who are these people and how often do you find them? "Mary Sue" is only reserved for Movie!Hermione. I have only seen book fans call her that. No one has ever called Book!Hermione Mary Sue. The movie does paint her as a flawless, all-rounder who's also drop-dead gorgeous. Only things she's bad at are flying and divination, all of which she denounces as useless, even though flying is like biking for wizards, divination, sure, not that important. with a teacher like Trelawney, even I would denounce it as hokum.

2)

Remember what I said about waiting for them to show us their true colors, well here they are. Bask in the glory of their senseless arguments. Why, I am from reddit, heck I have 25 thousand karma points on there, I just left because it was too stupid for me but I can argue like them very well. And in this case I would like to say that these people are under the impression that Ron is just there in the story for the sake of existence. And he doesn't work hard. That argument is of course, wrong. Because Ron (in no particular order):

1) fights a troll when he's 11

2) is willing to sacrifice himself when he's 11

3) stands up for his friends

4) makes sure Harry feels like he belongs in the family

5) worries about Harry and rescues him from literal jail

6) stands up against Draco rather than by-standing and enabling his behavior

7) tries his level best to make sure Norbert the dragon is in safe hands and carries it out, albeit not in perfection

8) is with Harry every step of the way in his confronting the basilisk

9) sends Harry and Hermione long letters and calls them often to check up on them

10) stands up on a bitten leg to defend his best friend

11) always apologizes for any of his mistakes and is forgiving when others wrong him

12) works his way to join the Quidditch team unlike Draco who most certainly bought his way in

13) destroys at least 2 horcruxes

14) finds out how to defeat a horcrux

15) has an excellent enough memory and observation to notice Harry speaking parseltongue and also using it to his benefit which proves he's resourceful

now since I have 8 more such pictures to rebut and I do have a life, I will stop. These aren't even a twelfth of the remarkable things Ron has done though, so rest assured.

oh wait what did you say about him just existing and not working for anything? If I recall correctly, he did just as well as Harry did in school and didn't score well only in subjects he didn't care about. Which is true for most people except for Hermione who has an eidetic memory which not everyone has, understandably. Rote memorization is not the best way to get by in life, by the way.

what are the "so many reasons" behind why Harry is the best fit for Hermione? Kindly share so I can rebut those too, I'm rather free nowadays, my finals have been cancelled. You say there are so many reasons but don't even give one, yet you want me to take you seriously. I'm afraid that's impossible.

Romione shipper here, i don't dislike Hermione. I haven't met or seen many people in the book!romione fandom who dislike Hermione (except for Movie!Hermione). The question of someone you like ending up with someone you dislike doesn't particularly make sense. In Friends, Chandler ends up with Monica: now I'm not the biggest Monica fan (I don't hate her but I don't like her very much either) but they are my favorite couple because they make sense. It's about compatibility and character traits, not liking or disliking because that's just a set-up for a ghastly invitation for people to pair up hideousness. "Oh yeah, I like Harry and I also like Hagrid, they should be together. I mean it would be very very disgusting but that's my logic, now, you can't fight it. "- that's how you sound. Please read what you write. Your logic is just...abysmal. That's all I can say without breaking my resolve and berating you with colorful profanities.

3)

This is without the doubt, the easiest one to rebut. It's a delight to see such terrible arguments at my disposal. Come on, dear Harmione shippers, write something that makes me question my choices, not things that make me scoff in disbelief.

In this case, you're essentially providing us with theories. Unproved theories and speculation of what you believe because you'd say anything you like. Where's the proof of your theory, though? Where is that crazy radical Romione shipper who does this? Kindly show me these people. Oh yes, you wanna say we objectify Hermione and disrespect her and view her as a prize. This aches me, that you believe this. No one has ever insinuated this, ever, in the history of anything. What is this winner-loser theory? How do you round off Harry Potter to "an alpha-male ends up with lead-lady" trope and still say you're a fan of the series? Harry Potter doesn't fit in with that format. Ron, Hermione and Harry are co-heroes. Similar to how there's no main character in Friends or the Heroes of Olympus series or the Avengers. We're not living in the 80s anymore. Hermione will be a hero, invariably whether she ends up with Harry, Ron or no one. She ends up with Ron and that's it. Talking about her like this doesn't make you sound any better either. Now you're calling me a misogynist because I don't support the ship of two people who describe themselves as siblings. That's very mature of you. Well here's the thing- I'm not a misogynist. It's as simple as that. I believe that women are capable of anything and everything. I believe Hermione is an amazing person and she is a hero and a different person. I believe the series would be impossible without her. I believe she is no one's prize. There's no requirement of a prize. I just think, similar to canon and the truth and her romantic interest, she will have a great relationship with Ron. There's nothing complex or deep about it, really. No personal weird-thing, no psychological complex, no internalized misogyny. There's nothing deeper than what I said. I am not sexist. I am a feminist. I am all for women empowerment. I love women with the fabric of my being. I love Hermione. I think she's amazing. You only become sexist when you ship people with unstable power dynamics, a bully-victim relation or something of the sort. Neither Romione, nor Harmione are sexist. Heck if you paired Neville with Hermione you wouldn't be sexist. And I hate talking about this so much, I can't even tell you. This talk does make it sound like I treat Hermione like an object and I assure you I respect her and I normally won't talk like this unless someone just outright calls me sexist for something that's not sexist. And this is that situation.

4)

in the case of Romione, no one is too good for anyone. Both are amazing people who're heroes and have done amazing work. That's all I have to say. There's no league, they are romantically interested in each other. I have no intention on sounding lame, but, in love there is no league. As long as you're not putting in any effort and are extremely lazy and leech off of your partner, there is no such concept and no, Hermione is not "too good" for him. Unless of course you're talking about movie Hermione, who is too good for anyone.

5) (halftime!)

oh yes they try to pull this off and wonder why we hate them. Classic. This person likes to sound british, so let's switch up our language, yeah? At least then I won't be out of my element. Let me correct ya, Ron at his best is an amazing, loyal, friendly, brave, strategic hero. There you have it. Ron and 'git' can't be used in the same sentence. Now if you talk about Ron's achievements, I re-iterate you to point two. If it's too much work, here:

1) fights a troll when he's 11

2) is willing to sacrifice himself when he's 11

3) stands up for his friends

4) makes sure Harry feels like he belongs in the family

5) worries about Harry and rescues him from literal jail

6) stands up against Draco rather than by-standing and enabling his behavior

7) tries his level best to make sure Norbert the dragon is in safe hands and carries it out, albeit not in perfection

8) is with Harry every step of the way in his confronting the basilisk

9) sends Harry and Hermione long letters and calls them often to check up on them

10) stands up on a bitten leg to defend his best friend

11) always apologizes for any of his mistakes and is forgiving when others wrong him

12) works his way to join the Quidditch team unlike Draco who most certainly bought his way in

13) destroys at least 2 horcruxes

14) finds out how to defeat a horcrux

15) has an excellent enough memory and observation to notice Harry speaking parseltongue and also using it to his benefit which proves he's resourceful

hey, see, I like Ron and I took the time to copy-paste this instead of asking you to scroll up. And I'm a lot of bad things but I am not lazy. I stick to my deadlines like Hermione. I start my homework in library class and continue it during phys ed the day its given. And I am not exaggerating. Bloody hell, I wish I was. I'm the ceo of deadlines, mate, don't tempt me! So you can see that Ron is much more than just a "nice bloke". And being a "nice bloke" isn't a bad thing either. He's all the things I said: intuitive, strategic, helpful, loyal and on top of that he's also a nice person. Yes, I do see a bit of myself in Ron. I do. I see the insecure side. I waste my time hating myself and criticizing myself and undermining myself, telling me I'm no good. But Ron overcomes that. He inspires me to appreciate myself. Is that a bad thing? Are you going to shame me for having a low self-esteem? Do you want to worsen my low self-esteem and make me feel more like shit?

Now the person who replied to your comment saying, "he isn't a nice bloke most of time.", he is. He is not being nice twice in a span of 7 years. How often do you act rudely or with jealousy? Wasn't Harry yelling at everyone in caps lock in OOTP. Now I don't condemn him for that because he's a fucking hormonal teenager like me and that would make me a hypocrite, but by your logic why don't you condemn him? Or why not condemn Hermione for saying "I only date good Quidditch players" and shoving canaries at Ron's face because someone else kissed him, while she kept using Krum and Cormac to make him jealous. She wasn't being a nice girl, then, was she? Now, once again, i don't dislike her or hold that against her because guess what, mate, I'm a hormonal teenage girl who gets jealous most of the time and would probably react in a similar fashion in the spur of the moment (Not defending her actions here, just putting myself in her shoes.) In short, Ron is a nice bloke MOST OF THE TIME.

6)

It would be misogynistic to think that. The thing is, NO ONE DOES my dear friend! My dear daft friend. I have never heard anyone say that! why are you so hell-bent on portraying us as misogynists when no one ever says that? Stop assuming. Just stop. You are crossing a limit here, aren't you? Yes you are. You cannot say these sort of things. We never said that or believed that, no one ever said this to be a reason to ship Romione. God what is wrong with you? Literally, stop fucking ASSUMING god damn it! Do you want me to assume things about Harmione shippers? Do you want me to go there? Because I will go there! I will go there the moment you tell me to. Just challenge me.

Ron is not a perfect best boi , the reason why so many of us like him is that he's imperfect and tries to become better through the course of time. You are once again assuming and I am once again asking you to stop.

Ron might be an ordinary wizard. He might be poor, sure, but he's a pure-blood and won't face much if he chose not to fight. But he did. He fought. Now I identify with Ron's attitude a fair bit, but I am also likely to spend my day in a library without noticing. People aren't one dimensional. Stop trying to act like you're a psychologist, i know you're not. I don't even think Hermione's overbearing at all! You just insulted someone you're a big fan of. Jesus.

Both Hermione and Ron are strategic, jealous, passionate, feisty, argumentative, intellectual...

that's like 6 similarities. They aren't polar opposites in the slightest. Their differences are just: workaholic, not workaholic. Nerd, not a nerd. Like that's fucking it, man!

8)

being relaxed doesn't make you less independent or driven. A relaxed and levelheaded Hermione will think through things, not be impulsive, not panic etc. She doesn't need Ron. I don't understand your obsession with acting like we ever insinuated that. Then she doesn't need Harry either lol. Stop shipping her with Harry, then or like shut the fuck up. Being a bit relaxed won't stop her or anyone from hitting great strides. Just don't get relaxed to the point you're lazy and casual about everything, that's it.

9)

What do you mean? Ron is balanced. He does finish his work on time. And even if he does procrastinate, she could also help him not and be more driven. Of course, this is an open invitation for you to call me a sexist bitch because I said that she could help him and now you'll think her goal is to help him become better yada yada yada. Fuck off. Defeating the horcrux taught him enough. He respected her. He remembered about the elves when she didn't. He begged to be tortured instead of her. He wouldn't need it because school work and jobs are different and the same person might perceive those differently. Calmness and relaxation doesn't hinder your potential. Not caring and laziness does. You can't function if you work and are stressed 24/7 with zero breaks. Period.

10)

No i do not want (nor does anyone want) Hermione to become Ron. Being slightly calmer doesn't change up your personality. I'm sure many people dislike those sort of fanfics without a doubt. I hate OOC and I don't want Hermione to lose her intellect with Ron because that makes no sense. Ron himself is intellectual and loves arguing with her. They'd boost each other, more like it.

-------

okay thats it i am exhausted as fuck. thanks for reading, i appreciate it. notes and reblogs are appreciated, this takes work.

[annoyingfobbie]

I have a genuine question. Are people like you (and me. Hispanic) considered white?

depends! hispanic culture is so full of very complex history with colonization and white people taking the land of indigenous people. So like pretty much every hispanic country is very mixed with people of white descent and people of indigenous descent. My immediate family (my parents and cousins and aunts and uncles and stuff) are almost all from Spain (which is I think like the whitest hispanic country since it's like The White People Who Colonized The Other Places), but my grandpa is from Morocco and his family was mostly from Argentina. He's darker than me and has some more poc-associated features, but I think most people (without knowing anything about his family and where he's from) would say he's white, or possibly "racially ambiguous". Spain also has a lot of Romani people, but mostly people are either of white descent or romani descent, there aren't as many interracial relationships. So much of latin america and hispanic speaking countries are people who are descendent from both indigenous AND white people, since the areas are such a mix of both (again, because of colonization). America isn't so much like this, even though it also was colonized and the land was stolen from indigenous people, and I think this is because American colonization focused a lot on killing and destroying indigenous people and communities. I don't know MUCH about the history of colonization in all hispanic speaking countries, and I'm sure it's very different for each country, but generally speaking I THINK that colonization happened to focus more on stealing land and taking over communities and erasing their culture than murdering them? I could definitely be wrong though, I am not any sort of authority on this topic.

At the end of the day, though, (again I am not an authority on this topic at ALL so what I'm saying could definitely be wrong so please do not just take this as fact, this is all just what I've learned from my limited education on these topics) 'white' and 'not white' is mostly just something made up by white people to be racist (insert classic overused example or irish people not being considered white at one point because "white people" (powerful white americans) wanted to be able to be racist towards them). I have friends whos families entirely come from hispanic countries (and non-hispanic latin american countries like Brazil) who are pale as hell with maybe some POC features, maybe none. I also have friends whos families come entirely from those countries who have very dark skin and I don't think would be considered white at all.

The parameters of what makes someone "white" or "not white" or "white passing" (which is a whole new thing with a whole new very complex meaning and stuff that I know barely anything about) are very confusing to me. I definitely consider myself white and i think so would like everyone else lol. Other than when I am very tan in the summers (people who first see me when I'm very tan tend to ask where I'm from or would categorize me as 'latino' or 'racially ambiguous'), I usually have a light skin tone and I don't believe I have many, if any, poc features. Does this same thing go for Ray Toro, who has a light skin tone and some POC features and is descendent from puerto rico (another country where indigenous people had their land colonized)? Does it go for my grandpa? Does it go for my friends? Is race about skin tone, is it about country, is it about features, is it about culture, is it about where you go or how you are treated there? I have no idea. The more years that pass from the beginning of time to now, the more people will have family backgrounds full of different races and countries of origin and stuff. There are lots of books, video essays, articles, and movies/documentaries about this sort of thing, and I'm sure a lot of them have reliable information and a lot of them also don't. I'm sure I have some reliable information and some that isn't! Idk. shits really confusing.

If you're really interested in getting to the bottom of this, my suggestion would be to read a lot about 1. the history of your country or your families countries of origin, 2. the history of 'race' in general as a topic and word and what it means and what it has meant in the past and all that, 3. the history and current state of colorism, and 4. the history of your culture. I'd also suggest looking into your family history if thats possible, asking your parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, if possible, about where they and their family are from. Maybe talk to scholars who have dedicated their lives to this research, maybe talk to indigenous people from where your family is from who are willing and wanting to educate you or discuss this topic with you, stuff like that.

Sorry if this was all over the place, I spent the entirety of yesterday (about 20 hours straight) just traveling from Spain back to America, so i'm exhausted and a little incoherent lol. Lastly, i'll give another reminder to not take my word as fact, and if anyone else sees this and wants to correct me then please please please do, I'll be so happy to reblog anything with new info!

EDIT: I also wanna add that I realize any misinformation i give on this can possibly be very harmful so fr please please please do not take any of this as fact at all like i'm begging you i am just an idiot with very little education on this topic ,msfhjkglfskj

[wonniexy]

# SPRING AND PUPS | park jay.

PARK JAY, SPRING SMILES EVENT: MAY 24, 1.4k WORDS, FLUFF, BEST FRIENDS AU, WARNING: NONE.

Spring became your favorite season in fourth grade, when a child not much taller than you were at the time strolled into your classroom, exactly thirteen days after classes began, and introduced himself as "Jay, from Seattle." Not a word more (despite him being something of a talker, you discovered days later), not a word less.

He had a black backpack over his shoulders, as if to distinguish himself from the masses of what were mere nine-year-olds, a small white bunny puppet hung from one side of his zipper, and his school uniform seemed to fit him far too big, so much so that you asked yourself if they had gotten his size wrong.

If spring didn't become your favorite season at that exact moment, you're more than convinced it surely happened always because of Jay.

You can thank his smile, your long conversations about this and that (starting with cherry blossoms on your lunch breaks and ending with why his favorite books should be placed on the top shelf of your bedroom bookshelf), his constant stroking of your head with his right hand, the way he enters your house without even knocking anymore and the way he stops by for dinner every Friday night, then stays over in the guest room (which might as well be his by now) after watching a movie with your entire family and making bets with your dad about what team will win the Sunday soccer game.

You can thank his existence itself and what he's become to you in such a short time that it was almost hard for you to notice.

"Can I touch them?" Jay asks, in a whisper; a faint whisper due to two baby rabbits who seem to be sleeping the first of many quieter sleeps of what will be their lives from this day forward.

"It might be best to wait a while, Jay." You answer, eyes glued to the little bodies of the two pets. They're so cuddly, with their little eyes closed and tummies going up and down rhythmically and steadily. "They're newborns and I think the mother needs to confirm that she has them under control." You continue, pointing your index finger at the larger rabbit, almost anchored to her pups. "Just for a few days, at least."

Jay sighs and, returning to the child he's always been, crosses his arms and rises from his position. "It's not fair; I don't think I can wait. I even dressed for the occasion!"

You can hear all of his disappointment in his words. Jay loves animals, especially rabbits.

You're suddenly reminded of the day when, three years after your friendship began, he first brought you to this place, for the sole reason that you had asked him why he never broke away from the same white stuffed rabbit you had seen him bring with him on his first day of school in your elementary days.

He had shown you all the rabbits there were, taught you their names ("most of them were made up by me" - not true) and then gave you an in-depth lecture (as in-depth as a middle schooler's lecture could be) on how those animals lived, how to care for them, and so many other things.

You still remember the warmth and happiness placed in his eyes as he spoke.

You laugh a little at his words, following his moves and rolling your eyes. "All you did was wear sweatpants and sneakers, Jay."

"When I could just as well have been wearing my favorite shirt and my everyday dress shoes, you should add!" 

"Dress shoes are not everyday shoes." You say, shaking your head and shifting your gaze from your friend to the bunnies that, underneath, you'd also like to cuddle immediately. "I still find it amazing that Lily became a mom, you know?"

"You said the same thing about Phoebe last year." Jay laughs, softly. "But I can relate. We grew up watching Phoebe and Lily be born and, now, we're watching them become moms to some beautiful puppies. Time goes by so fast..."

"Don't start crying, now, though." You look at him, barely holding back a laugh.

Jay Park is your best friend. You like the way he expresses himself, how sunny he is, how dramatic he is, and how willing he is to talk about anything. Jay really is your best friend and, perhaps, you are the only one who knows where to hit him without hurting him, just as he knows where to hit you without hurting you.

The boy turns to you and raises his eyebrows a little. If, in fourth grade, you could look him in the eye with no problem at all, now it's hard not to raise your head a little so you don't have to come face to face with his chin.

"I could and there would be no harm in it." He says, and then gives you one of his classic tongue-in-cheeks.

"Childish." You mockingly hit Jay's head with one hand as a familiar voice comes from behind you and your best friend turns in the direction of Mrs. Hong, Jay's neighbor and owner of all the rabbits in the garden. You've counted them all, you and Jay, and taking into account the two newborns, they total thirty-eight.

"Are you two still bickering?" You hear her laugh. For a little woman over eighty, her laugh is loud, but very pleasant to the ear.

"We're just keeping Lily and the puppies company." You say, before Jay can even open his mouth to fake cry in front of Mrs. Hong about the blow to the head you just gave him.

"They're gorgeous, aren't they?"

"They're a wonder." Jay replies, approaching the cage again and lowering himself onto his knees. "They look so...peaceful. Serene. I don't believe in miracles, but after all the suffering our Lily went through..."

You see him stick out his index finger and gently stroke Mama Rabbit's fur from outside the cage. Lily is half awake, as if trying to keep an eye on the pups, but she seems to let go of the contact of Jay's skin with her snow-white fur.

"She's been strong." Mrs. Hong says, nodding and taking you under her arm. "She did really well."

"We knew she could do it." You squeeze the woman's arm a little tighter, making eye contact with Jay and smiling broadly.

Jay nods at your words, then turns one last time to the bunnies and stands up.

"Have you thought of names to give the rabbits yet, Mrs. Hong?" He asks, approaching you and shaking some dirt off his pants.

"I was hoping you could do it this time. I know you've done it before, in the past, but I want these two new entries to be yours. Yours and special."

"Ours meaning that we'll be the ones caring for them? Ours meaning that we will be their current owners? Ours meaning that-"

"Jay!"

Mrs. Hong laughs at the happiness that Jay exudes, from the words that flow relentlessly from his mouth and from his entire body. He almost seems to want to jump to exaltation. "Yes, little Park. Yours."

You both jump to hug the woman, thanking her and thanking her and thanking her again, and then hugging each other and screaming like crazy. You're both happier than you've ever been, you might even say.

When you break away, you go to crouch down in front of the cage where the two baby rabbits are still sleeping blissfully and where Lily, the new mom, seems to be holding them close to her.

"Hey babies, hi!" You begin, wrinkling your nose and shaking your head here and there. "We are your new owners! I'm y/n and this right here is Jay!"

Jay laughs at the way you interact with the two pups and lightly taps you with his elbow. "If I were them, I wouldn't want you as my owner." He laughs.

You turn to face him, smiling falsely at him, only to hit him much harder with your own elbow, nearly knocking him over.

"I choose my future baby first." You say, blowing.

"Go ahead," Jay laughs at your action, "but at least make sure to pick a cute name too - you kind of suck at that stuff."

This time, Jay actually finds himself with his body slammed into the ground.

You burst out laughing, and he does as well, struggling to get up. He definitely wants to cry.

"Not so sure about the everyday dress shoes now, huh?"

[fanficparker]

A GAME OF DIAMONDS AND HEARTS // H.O.

>> CHAPTER SIX

“They agreed with each other violently and disagreed with each other pleasurably.” - A Suitable Boy, Seth

(Frenemies to Lovers! Mob AU! ) Harrison Osterfield x Fem!OC

Word count: 2.13k words

Warning: Swearing, guns, knives.

Synopsis: After the sudden death of his uncle and the eccentric multi-millionaire mafia king Lufian Clarke, Harrison Osterfield’s almost decent life is mostly devastated especially when half of what should be rightfully his fortune is transferred to their immediate rival for reasons he doesn’t know. What’s remaining is him trying to figure out how to deal with this collaboration of two rival corporations that don’t belong together and work on the side of the woman he never knew would ever be referred to as his partner in crime while they are dragged into a mess bigger than what they were trained to handle.

<< FIVE [ MASTERLIST ] SEVEN >>

"Who let you enter my private study?"

Harrison asked, stopping with one step inside his office, fixing the watch on his wrist. His eyes focused on the uninvited guest.

"My ability to walk." A smirk played over Sandhya's lips as she flipped a page in the file she was holding, twirling the ball pen between her fingers. The base of the pen rested below her lip as she lifted her eyelid to catch a glimpse of Harrison's irritable face. And damn he indeed was irritated.

"No one comes here without my permission." He hissed, striding into the centre of the room, staring at her furtively until his gaze landed on the other parts of his office. His office was a mess. Not anywhere near how he left it. His file cabinet was open and at least twenty files were lying on the sofa and a few over his desk. There were two on Sandhya's lap as she sat with her legs crossed over each other, leaning back leisurely in one of the chairs, skimming through the papers. An empty plate and a coffee mug were also sitting on his desk. The mug wasn't even placed over a coaster. He could even see some bread crumbs scattered on the wood.

He barely managed to not lash out at her, clenching his fists. Drawing in a shallow breath, he opened his mouth in an attempt to reason with her but she was the first one to speak.

"Can you log into the system? I need to look up something." She pointed the tip of the pen at the computer placed on his desk. Her voice was far from that of requesting even if she framed it as a question.

Harrison's brows pinched, "Are you serious?!" His voice sounded so pitchy, almost resembling a train wreck about to happen.

"Yes."

That's all? His stomach rumbled with anger. She didn't even look up at him. That bland yes twisted like a snake in his gut. He was past taking orders, especially from her. So, he walked up to her, swallowing his building rage and snatched the file she was holding.

"Hey!" She squealed, trying to take it back as he pushed it over his head and out of her reach.

She rose from the chair, about to grab it when he dropped the file on the floor behind his back, scattering the papers.

"Why would you--"

"Because it's my office and those are my files! And fucking," he seethed, trying to keep his voice casual, lifting the mug from the table, "We don't eat in the study, let alone dump the scraps on the desk. Also, you didn't even use a coaster!" He groaned upon noticing the ring the liquid left on the wood before he settled the mug again on the table, only this time there was a coaster beneath it.

Her eyebrows pulled together, disbelief roaring through her head, "You are worried about the coaster--"

"The white oak---"

"The uncle was murdered in this house and the nephew is more interested in coffee stains." She squinted her eyes, shaking her head.

Harrison bit back a groan. Her words had managed to flip his stomach. He sighed keeping his conduct civil.

"As much as I am curious about Clarke's mysterious death," he spoke as calmly as he could, meeting her eyes, "We aren't even sure if he was murdered in the first place."

"You gotta be kidding me!"

"I am not kidding you!" He bit back, "And anyway, get out of here. I don't like outsiders touching my stuff," he shifted his gaze to the side, hands folded across his chest.

She scoffed, almost scornfully. "Says the one who had no problem sleeping together."

Harrison's neck snapped at the words, his temper reaching new heights. Gritting his teeth, he took a step forward, looking down at her face. "If I had known it was you, I would have never--"

"Exactly!" She snapped, "You didn't know who you were sleeping with, how do I ensure you know about the people working here?"

"That's bullshit."

Sandhya exhaled, failing to reason with him. It was harder than she had expected. So, she tried the gentler way, trying to make her words sound closer to a request, "I need you to give me access to your computer." For no avail--

"What made you think I would do that? You have already seen enough." His hands dropped from his chest and she fought back the urge to roll her eyes.

The last attempt at asking and being gentle, "Look Harrison," her voice was sweeter as if she had accepted her defeat, moving to the last resort, "You have already ruined my Plan A and now I need to know about certain things to come up with a Plan B."

"You really think you're some kind of mastermind in planning? Don't you?"

"Harrison, that was my job back then--"

"Oh. I thought your job was to seduce strangers and sleep with them." He didn't hesitate but when the words finally parted his lips, he noticed the light in her eyes dimming for a brief second, the little grin on her lips fading. His heart thumped in his throat. Perhaps, he went too far.

But what he said wasn't a lie. Perhaps, it was okay. He didn't care anyway, yet his eyes moved to her neck, somewhere-anywhere, away from her face.

Those scars on her throat fell into his line of sight. Fine red lines, shallow, peeking off from her pink hoodie. He hadn't paid much attention before but she looked cute in the outfit, a way he had never expected her to look. Her expression defied the notion though, driving his brain back to the thick air that engulfed them.

Her hand came to cover her throat, gently rubbing across the marks. He swallowed. His eyes flickered back to hers and she averted her gaze to the side. Probably, that was the closest he would ever get at marking her.

He was waiting for a reply, a sharp hit back. Instead, the air between them seemed to hum quietly. Harrison had hit the mark so blatantly, Sandhya didn't even bother refuting it. And that somehow bothered him.

She tore her gaze from him, turning on her heel. He felt the urgent need to cut the silence.

"I don't support the idea of a murderer walking among us." He spoke slowly.

He heard her sigh heavily.

"Well enough," she made up her mind, walking away from him and picking up the file, he had previously dropped, "You live in your protected shell, dreaming about sunshine and rainbows while someone stabs you in your sleep," her voice was still without heat or anger, "But you know what..."

She turned to face him again, eyes hardening, "I don't want to die or lose what I have earned so, I'm going to do something about it."

"Good luck." He muttered, eyes never leaving her figure as she stormed off the room.

***

The day was heavy on Sandhya. Checking up all the records of the people Clarke had ever worked with was more time consuming than she had thought, especially considering how her initial plan of dividing the work with Harrison went amiss.

She had navigated through whatever documents he had in his room, along with Clarke's and had taken the help of Holly to get access to their server. It would have been nicer to have her in person than on a phone but she was indeed helpful, although, Sandhya hadn't found anything game-changing. There was at least a compact list of people she had her suspicions on, though.

The library was bigger than what it appeared from afar. Probably they could shoot a Jurassic Park movie in here. Or Night at the Museum or library or whatever. She had laughed at the thought. She had also walked through all three tiers of the magnificent space, analyzing the delicately carved rosewood shelves carrying books older than time. They even had some of the original manuscripts of the classics. Unbelievable.

But now she was tired. It was over six hours, she was sitting there, skimming through all the information she could get her hands on. The mob business was full of mischief. Interacting with people you should definitely keep a six feet distance from was customary .

She sighed, shutting the library computer and keeping the files aside. Untying her hair and pressing her fingers against the pulsing side of her head, she tried to relax. A gasp left her lips. She bet she saw a shadow move outside.

Her heart stopped for a moment when the lights flickered. There was definitely someone who shouldn't be here.

Slowly, carefully, she rose from her seat, ducking down the table. Then she heard it. Footsteps. She scrambled forward, keeping low, hiding behind a pillar, drawing the knife from her clothes. She waited and waited, breathing through her nose. But no one came for her. And then it hit her.

They could be here for Harrison.

She risked a peek, looking outside the library. There was still no one in sight. The alleyway seemed dark, dead; enough to accelerate her pulse. She climbed down the stairs, one foot at a time, letting her eyes wander around the hall. Stopping and hiding behind an intersected wall, she saw it: A guy in all black, twisting the knob to Harrison's room, the haft helpless in the vice of his grip. He entered inside.

Sandhya swallowed. Her throat felt dry. She only had a knife on herself right now. Protecting Harrison at all costs was a requisite. Even when he was an insufferable jerk.

He was a team.

And she hated teamwork.

She also hated jerks.

Harrison turned in his sleep, lying over the left side of his body, hugging the silk sheets that covered him. His room was pitch black, with curtains all drawn shut. He preferred sleeping in the dark and maybe that was the reason why the silver light shining over his thin eyelids discomforted him. He wasn't a heavy sleeper and little sounds managed to bother him.

He had somehow grown accustomed to the noise his clock made. His mind erratically jumped between disconnected, unwanted thoughts whenever he sensed other sounds in his proximity. Sounds that didn't match the rhythm of his clock.

Noises of shallow breathing.

Noises of out of tune footfalls.

Out of tune...

His eyes flew open, wide, fixed on the dagger that stood three feet above his chest, reflecting the minimal amount of light his window shades failed to conceal.

He tried to kick off his sheets but the dagger lunged forward swiftly like a wild animal. He squirmed, unable to move, waiting for the impact. Only that he never felt the object pierce his body. The guy groaned, his steps faltering backwards.

Harrison unspooled himself from the sheets, quickly switching on the lamp. Leaping from the bed, hands first, he landed on his toes, squatting.

Sandhya's arms were crossed around the guy's neck from the back. Wrapping her legs around his waist, she tried to push him back.

"Don't just stand there!" She cried, struggling to hold the big guy as she pulled him backwards, pressing her forearms against his throat.

Harrison shook his head, jumping forward. His heart pounded in his chest as he hit the man over his shoulder. The guy with his face blocked out with a black woollen mask, wailed, stumbling on his feet. He slammed Sandhya's back against the window, dropping both his weapon and the whimpering girl on the floor.

Harrison tried to catch him but he ran, pushing him back, storming off the door. His eyes roamed at the door and then at Sandhya. He sighed, giving out his hand. Grabbing it, she pulled herself on her feet.

"Don't say it." He mumbled, jutting his tongue out of his compressed lips.

"Told you so." She said anyway, voice so low that only he could hear, flashing him a small grin, more of a grimace, actually. His own mouth twisted but then his eye caught the sight of his window, the shades drawn away because of the rustling. His slight frown turned into a scowl.

"Watch out--" He grabbed Sandhya by her waist, pulling her down with him, capturing her body beneath his as a gunshot blasted the window of his room, crashing, shattering the glass over them.

A moment passed in silence as they tried catching up their breath.

"Are we even?" He mouthed, manoeuvring his eye line back up to her face. She was horrified, her chest rising and falling.

"We'll see..."

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…TO BE CONTINUED… // COMMENTS WILL BE APPRECIATED.

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[gh0sture]

Under the Sea

Trafalgar Law x gn!reader

Part 2, Meet the gang

You've never been particularly good at meeting new people or making good first impressions for that matter but this, by far, has to be your worst one yet. Your clothes are soaked still, your hair a sticky mess from the saltwater and your mouth is opening and closing lika a fish gasping for air as it flaps around on a bridge after being caught. It's not one of your best looks you'll admit but it is all you can offer at the moment given the circumstances.

You try to form coherent thoughts, you really do, but this is just way too much for you to take in. He reaches a hand out and you flinch before grabbing it to make an awkward shake.

This isn't just insane. This is completely knock-your-socks-off bonkers.

You feel as if you were looking at the golden gates of heaven themselves, not daring to look him in the eyes out of fear that you might go blind from the sheer radiance of his aura meanwhile the man in question just looked at you blankly. Possibly with a hint of disgust. Definitely a bit of disgust.

"The name's Trafalgar Law, captain of Polar tang" his handshake is firm and he looks at you expectantly while retrieving his hand and crossing his arms over his chest.

Neither of you say anything. He clears his throat but you give no reaction. Still staring at him like a five year old looking at a blackboard of university level algebra equations. He grimaces slightly at your behavior.

"Are you ok? I don't remember finding any trauma to your head, you should be fine" he grabs your chin and tilts your head around to inspect it disapprovingly in search of an injury. Although, he is an expert doctor so he would never miss any injuries, his pride wouldn't let him. This does nothing to soothe your symptoms though and doesn't exactly help with calming your heartbeat at all.

"I wouldn't have missed anything what's wrong with you" he mutters to himself when you finally managed to collect yourself enough to remove his hands.

"uhh no! no, i'm ok! thank you for ,uh, saving me by the way" this is the best and worst thing that have ever happened to you.

"it wasn't my choice" he deadpanned and turn back into the room to get a den-den mushi with a familiar penguin hat on it. Its so strange seeing on in real life. Although, you don't know if this is real life (is it just fantasy?). He proceeds to make a phone call (mushi-call? den-den call?) into it while you shift awkwardly on your feet in the hallway. Your feet ache from walking on the metal grid barefoot you had barely noticed until now. After exchanging a few words he walk over to the desk where he'd previously  been sitting and open a journal, presumably to continue doing whatever he did before.

"One of my crew members will be here shortly to get you settled for now and give you some necessities. We reach a port in nine days where you can leave." his voice was calm and composed, like pouring molten chocolate into your ears even though the words themselves were less than pleasant. When he spoke you could feel your knees get weak and you feel tempted to ask him a question for the sole purpose of hearing him speak more. God this man was hot. You nodded at his statement at first, not really paying attention to what he had actually said until you realized that nothing he said had been actually registered in your head.

"Wait, what?" you asked. He doesn't look up from his writing but you can hear the mild annoyance in his voice when he answers.

"Looking at you, you are rather ill equipped for staying here until we reach a populated island. Since you don't have any money or anything valuable, my crew will provide for you until we reach the port where you can find another ship to go back wherever you came from...Whatever weird country that's supposed to be...Now go down the hallway, He should be there already to help you so leave me alone" you get the feeling that you'll loose a limb if you stick around longer so you turn to head down the hallway and find "Him" who you hoped would be more polite.

"Not that way" you hear from the study and you turn around to head down the other way, somewhat (very) embarrassed.

You really wished that your first time meeting a celebrity would've gone better, but then again they do say that you should never meet your heroes. Was he always this rude in the series and book? Sure he came across as a bit of a tsundere but he seemed at least approachable in the series. You don't have the charisma or extroverted superpowers that Luffy have so that is probably an important thing to consider. As you head down the hallway you come across a man walking in your direction pretty soon. He seem far more ok with your existence and even appear to lit up a bit when he sees you and give you a friendly wave. This is already going a lot better than last time.

"Yo! You're the one we found floating around yesterday! Nice to meet you, people around here call me Penguin" He gives you a wide yet genuine smile as he grab your hand and shake it enthusiastically before you even have the chance to reach out.

"thought you were a goner when we found you haha!So it's good to see that you're up n' about, c'mon let me show you a round!" he turn around to walk from where he had just come from while you follow behind him silently.

Penguin makes it his personal responsibility to keep a conversation going even if it's pretty one-sided but it's nice. Comforting even, as he went on about how nice the other crewmembers are with the exception of the captain but you shouldn't take what he says too personal as he's a bit misunderstood. He  ask you different questions like your name, where you came from, complimenting you on your weird clothes, although it feels like that was mostly him being polite and you didn't have heart or energy to tell him that you're wearing PJ's. He doesn't mind your short answers and seems satisfied with the information he's able to divulge. To be fair you aren't sure how to answer since you don't know how you ended up here but also out of fear of ripping the space-time continuum open by telling him forbidden knowledge about his universe. It would be rather awkward explaining to him that you know a lot about them and what they've done/are about to do. You've technically stalked them through tv and books and if someone told you that they've been watching you, you would freak out. Rightfully so too. They might even think that you're a navy spy sent to gather information action for their arrest and they could kill you. Yeah, this is a mess and a half but you'll burn this bridge when you get to it. You did tell him your name though and he doesn't seem to suspect you working for some nefarious organization so all is well.

He showed you where the important places in the submarine was such as the kitchen, living quarters, rec area and bathrooms. You still have trouble telling up from down will undoubtedly get lost but he assures you that after a while you'll know this maze like the back of your hand. After leaving the living quarters he guides you to the top deck to find someone else he says will help you so that he can get back to work.

The yellow ship had surfaced at a deserted summer island and everyone was outside enjoying the sun after spending several days in the dark of the ocean. You hadn't been down in the submarine for that long , at least not while being conscious, and was already getting a bit unnerved over how cold and cramped it was. As soon as the warm rays of light hit you both the cold and your worries melt away.

"Hey Ikkaku! You have to help the drifter get some clothes!" He yelled at a woman laying in a sun-chair on the deck with her eyes closed. The familiar heart pirates uniform was open to reveal a green tank top and an orange and yellow striped hat was laying beside her.

"Haah!? Why do I have to do it?" She sat up to glare at Penguin and was about to protest when she spotted you behind him. One second you were hiding behind Penguin and the next you're face to face with a very pretty woman with very poofy hair. Her glorious lion name bounces a bit as she hold up both your hands in hers and lean over a bit to stare into your eyes. Everyone is so tall here why is everyone so ridiculously tall. Anime proportions are wild.

"Oh my god!! We were so worried about you, we thought you were dead when we found you!" You felt uncomfortable with her being so close to your face and politely thanked her for saving you while doing your best to avoid eye contact.

"Oi! Where's your manners! They've been through a lot being stranded in the ocean have some respect!" He bops her on the head and she lets you go to tell him off (and/or punch him back) but she remembers the shiny new toy in front of her and settles for staring daggers at him instead.

"Oh shut yer trap" She stares at you intensely as if to make sure you wouldn't run away or vanish into thin air. It's kind of nice being fawned over like this, and clearly the crew enjoy having a visitor.

"It's so nice having a fresh face around, It's been years since Captain let anyone new stay onboard  and being stuck with all the same jerks weeks on end gets a bit tiring you know. Now come on and let's go find you some proper clothes!" She grab your hand to drag you along back into the dark,dark depths of the submarine.

Oh joy. more cold, feet grating and claustrophobia.

"You're a bit smaller than everyone so we should probably ask Uni to sow it in for you if it's way too big" She says more to herself rather than you while handing you the classical white uniform with the heart pirates logo on the chest over your heart.

The woman who's name you had learned to be Ikkaku turn around and continued rummaging around the small closet in front of her in search of more clothes for you while you change into the white uniform when she isn't looking. It feels incredible to finally get out of those damp and sticky clothes and into something soft and warm instead. You are also the proud owner of a pair of fuzzy socks and black boots. Your poor abused feet are overjoyed that they no longer have to walk the metal grid of a thousand needles. Life is good.

"Once we get to the port of Pellar island you can probably trade your way to some more clothes but this should be fine for now"

In the little time you had spent with her you had learned quite the few things about the crew on the ship. For starters there were 21 members in the crew (including the captain), You were lucky number 22 according to Ikkaku, even though you aren't a part of the crew it's apparently better to have an even number of people aboard the ship. And hearing the stories of what they've been through it seems like you're their new rabbits foot. Since you're considered baggage or fancy cargo rather than someone useful she gives you some times on how to stay out the way, especially out if the captains way which you feel is probably a wise decision but you offer your help should she need it in the kitchen which she greatly appreciates. You hate feeling useless.

You can't help but wonder where you are in the Once Piece timeline as you rolled up the long sleeves of the uniform on your arms and legs for comfort. Had Luffy and Law already formed the alliance? Were you before the timeskip and the incident at Marine Ford? Maybe you were even ahead of the manga and anime itself in a future arc even. You were snapped out of your thoughts when Ikkaku pushed a bundle of toiletries into your arms involving a towel, a toothbrush, and a bar of soap.

"We haven't figured out where you'll sleep for the moment but it'll work out soon enough. Otherwise you can just sleep in a spare bed in the infirmary but come help me gather food from the island! We don't want to get scurvy while we're submerged!" She drag you away towards the deck after leaving your things in her room for safe keeping for now.

This woman is going to pull your arm off.

She seemed very sweet but all the touching and stereotypical anime arm-pulling is weird since you have literally just met. The way she smiles while asking you about your favourite foods and how she excitedly plan different recipes out loud make you almost forgive her though. Almost.

You move sluggishly towards Ikkaku's room to get the only material items you currently own in this world. Foraging for fruits and herb until nightfall was tiring but at least you didn't have to carry that much stuff, a guy with a black pompadour haircut had come along to help carry the crates of stuff you and Ikkaku gathered. He seemed very nice too, somewhat cocky though. You had asked Ikkaku for information on a certain Straw-hat pirate while making small talk and have come to the conclusion that he probably hasn't even started his adventure towards becoming the Pirate King yet. She didn't know who you were referring to and was even showed some seagull newspaper from their library but no info of the gummy monkey man could be found whatsoever. Since you recall him making news very early on in his "career" it's fair to assume that he hasn't gotten up to his mischief yet.

It feels a bit weird to be honest. To be in the prologue of the story like this and you have no idea what kind of things anyone other than the Strawhats and Luffy had been up to since the story followed them, maybe some vague details about Law's past and fragments from some characters backstories but this is all uncharted territory. Your thoughts are interrupted as you suddenly bump into someone and fell backwards. You reach your arms out like a bad imitation of a seagull in attempt to grab the wall but someone grabs you before you manage to take hold of anything. Your grab their shoulders to steady yourself and let go once you're back on your feet but they don't remove their hands from you. You look up to thank them for catching you when all the colour drains from your face and you realize who you're standing prom-slow-dance proximity to. It is but the one and only person you'd least want to embarrass yourself in front of. Again.

"Do you have a death wish or are you just plain stupid 22-ya" He looked down at you with what you assume to be the ghost of an amused smile or slight disgust. Probably disgust. Again. while you're distracted by his closeness and the humiliating event that is currently taking place. It could be much worse though, right? you can salvage this situation probably.

"Crap, sorry I was just zoned out.." You tried looking anywhere but his oh-so-handsome face to avoid you making this anymore awkward than it already was. You are not immune against handsome people after all. You tried moving away from him slightly but his hands stayed firm on your shoulders and could feel his gaze on you like needle pricks on your skin. you definitely do not dare looking him in the eye.

"You have to look where you're going or you might get seriously hurt next time" He mused. He may be attractive but he's definitely a jerk.

"It's impossible to see down here it's so dark..." you mutter under your breath and quickly move to side to walk past him, he let's go this time rejoice that your attempt to escape the harassing captain is successful, desperate to get away from this weird atmosphere you have created. Unfortunately for you, the universe have other plans  as he start walking behind you in the same direction you are and boy, is it awkward.

After a bit of walking you start to get a bit suspicious though. Was he following you around, waiting for you to get lost so that he could make a smartass comment about it? He is the kind of person who would find great amusement in petty bullshit like that for sure but then again you do have a tendency of assuming the worst in every situation. You decide to test this theory out by steeping to the side and make as much room as you could in the hallway and drop down to pretend fixing your shoelace. Instead of trying to walk past you he stops completely right behind you. You move as slow as you can without arising suspicion but he so kindly wait patiently behind you. When you're done "tying your shoelace" and stand up to continue your journey he follows close behind.

Oh hell no.

You can handle rudeness but this is some psychological warfare or foul play that you want no part of. No matter how handsome the guy is you will not stand for this kind of fuckery. You make a sudden halt and quickly turn around to kindly tell him to fuck off.

"Do you need something from me?" you ask with as much calm you can currently muster, irritation building up behind your customer service smile but he doesn't say anything and only look at you with the same dumb face as before. Almost like he's sizing you up before a fight. Possibly with even more disgust this time.

This Motherfucker.

When he still doesn't say anything for several seconds you just decide to be the bigger person and turn around to start walking again. Of course, with him still following you. It's better to just ignore him and he'll go away, you know where you're going. You finally reached Ikkaku's room and gather up the few items that belong to you when he finally speak up.

"You don't have a room assigned yet right?" You gave him a somewhat puzzled look. That's what he needed to know? That is why he followed you?? To ask you this???

"No? why?" You admit cautiously, almost preparing for him to start fighting you or using his power to "confiscate" one of your organs. For a brief second you could've sworn you saw a mischievous glint in his eyes you know that something bad is brewing. The cogs of evil are turning in his mind and you know that whatever comes out of his mouth next will undoubtedly mean bad news for you.

"I have an idea"

[coffee-n-bagels-comic-universe]

Bloody, Beaten, Bruised or Maximum Effort

Quick Tag List: @kuruumiya @spacelizardtrashboys @enigmaticandunstable @nattinngrst @amyofaquitaine

This passage contains potentially: scenes of one (or more) characters swearing, blood, self-harm (unintentional) and scenes of a violent nature. whump content and potential tear-jerking moments.

Summary: In this 'chapter' Kirby has her first fight in New Jersey, and stay in New Jersey for a week, leading to some heavy whump content by a certain someone.

Kirby's POV:

Standard match, one on one with a ten minute time limit. Not much for a debut but it's made into a big deal upon learning the opponents were male and female and not the standard male on male.

Jobber VS Newcomer.

Andrew Strong VS Kirby 'Gluttony' Lucifarian.

The bell rings and the fight starts.

"Strong throws the first punch and misses."

"The Ogress capitalises and hits him with a Feeding Frenzy."

"Strong is backed into the turnbuckle but the Ogress continues her attack."

"The referee is forced to separate them and Strong gets The Ogress in a lock-up."

"A swift knee to the stomach and Strong is staggered."

"The Ogress hits Strong with the Organ Grinder and it looks like it's all over."

"She covers Strong and … one … two … three. She's done it! The Ogress has won!"

Walking back to the locker room, I caught a glimpse of Moolah as she sneers at me and I shrug her off, focusing on getting into some clean clothes and going back to the hotel. I change and walk out of the dressing room with my bag slung over my shoulder.

"Good work out there, Kirby."

I recognise the voice and turn to see André, "Thank you, Drey."

"Moolah, doesn't seem to like you girls."

"We're stealing the hag's time in the sun. She always hates people who do that, even if she brings them in. I'll see you soon Drey."

"See you soon, Kirby."

I start walking back to the hotel when I start hearing a voice behind me, gradually getting closer.

"Hey, Miss, I think you dropped this." A distinctly masculine voice called out.

I turned around to see what the person wanted. To my surprise they had picked up my wallet, "Huh, I didn't feel it fall out of my pocket, thank you."

The man handed it to me before introducing himself, "Paul Orndorff. I saw your match earlier, you're fast for a giant, tough too."

"Thank you, Mr Orndorff."

He looked over his shoulder, "Oh, well, I have to go, Piper's waiting for me."

"Uh well, bye Mr Orndorff."

He left without another word and I unzipped my bag slightly to place my wallet inside, zipping it back up and continuing back to the hotel. I spent the night in a cramped hotel room and went to the gym the next morning.

Setting myself up at a heavy bag and practicing as per usual, no interruptions, no one else near by to talk to.

It was as if my mind just drifted away and I went into this mental fog, no gloves on but punching as if I did, breaking through the skin on my knuckles and only stopping after I noticed smears of blood on the heavy bag.

I wiped it down and bandaged my knuckles before moving on to doing push ups, lunges, squats and other exercises that wouldn't leave me covered in blood.

I was alone for the rest of the day, so I ordered some pizza (simple, pepperoni) and relaxed in the hotel, I pulled out a sketch book from my suitcase and began sketching.

I didn't plan on sketching anything too important so I just went with what was on my mind, which happened to be Roddy, Jeez it's like I'm becoming emotionally attached to this idiot.

When I see him next I'll give him the drawing if I have it with me. I close the sketchbook and go back to the gym for around an hour, before coming back to the hotel and getting some rest.

I woke up the next morning (January 9th) and had a day much the same as the last, got up, did my morning routine, went to the gym, came back, ordered Chinese food and started drawing. It was just a shitty little thing, but once again, the Rowdy one came to mind.

What is it with Scottish men and me, is it because I'm a quarter Scottish, is it maybe because I believe in the folk tales and stories of old, of knights on white steeds, saving fair maidens and living happily ever after, while the monsters they kill or maim lie in a pool of their own blood and wish they could've had a different life?

I have no idea, and the idea of my own mind comparing me with those monsters makes me regret ever reading those stories while growing up, rather I should have stuck my head into scientific textbooks instead of tales of heroism and fantastical ghouls, then I would have never become and wrestler or met the amazing people in my life.

I look back down at the paper and decide to let Roddy have two final full page drawings on the other side of the sketches I've already drawn of him, I add in a small note on the page under a picture of Roddy that Sam had found.

The more I looked at the drawings and that lone picture, the more I realised the small details of Roddy's features, the strong jaw with a cleft chin, his hazel eyes? or are they dark blue? either way they intrigue me. And that musculature, Roddy's not slim but not a big man either, he's at that almost perfect weight to body fat ratio. Good lord, listen to me calling … Piper, Roddy, Him, perfect. I think I want to be sick, just to be rid of those thoughts.

Right as I run into the small bathroom I hear a commotion in the hallway and someone being thrown or more accurately, hurled into the other side of the bathroom wall. I take a deep breath, re-fix my mask into it's usual position and dart out into the corridor, right as the commotion ends.

The obvious victim of the bout was on the floor face down with a long, not to deep cut down the back of their left leg and was breathing heavily when I reached them.

"Woah, hey, hey buddy." I whispered to them in an effort to calm them.

"Kirby?"

FUCK

…

That Glaswegian accent, fuck, He's not even supposed to be in town, or is he?

"Piper?!" I whisper-yelled, more to myself than to him.

"Hey…" his voice trailed off, I heaved him over my shoulder and went back into my hotel room, tossing him down on the only bed and grabbing his left foot, reaching over to my suitcase and getting my personal first aid kit, nothing too fancy, some bandages, plasters, the bare essentials. I cleaned the cut and bandaged it, taping the bandage in place.

I glanced up from Roddy's leg and saw that he had passed out, "Shit." I muttered to myself, louder than I thought and his eyes flickered open.

"Kirby? Is that you?" His voice weak but still understandable.

I stood there, frozen to the spot, unable to move, I wanted to cry as I realised how badly he had been beaten up, his eyebrow cut, coming close to his eye, his hairline a mix of matted brown hair and blood that was starting to coagulate and then I started to notice more things wrong with Roddy's visage.

His shirt (a Piper classic, yellow with a wild cat graphic) was torn in several places, showing bruises and nicks in his flesh. His kilt, however, was fully intact, including his belt and sporran, though all of it was scuffed with little scratches, but no cuts.

"Kirby? Kirby talk to me, please?" He spoke so carefully and it broke me.

I dropped to my knees, weeping, and Roddy shot to his feet, before dropping down on his left side and leaning on the bed, getting only a couple of steps closer to me.

"Kirby, are you okay?"

"Roddy, look at ya," I took a deep breath in, "How can you be so beat up and worried about me? How is that possible?"

"Kirby? look at ya, you're crying over me? I thought you didn't care about me that much?"

I wiped the tears from my face and got Roddy back on the bed.

"Stay there, Piper."

"Oh, feisty."

"Roddy! Stay on the bed and don't move."

"Yes Ma'am."

I trudged into the bathroom and ran a long cold shower, and I heard him move off the bed before swearing and sitting back on the bed.

"I thought I said, DON'T MOVE Roddy!"

"Alright, alright. … feisty"

After the shower, I dressed in the bathroom after drying myself off and exited the room. I instantly noticed a sleeping Piper.

"I guess I'll sleep on the floor then."

"C'mere." He lazily waved his arm to try and beckon me over.

"No, Roddy, get some rest."

"Come here and get in the bed." He rolled over and picked up the duvet, lackadaisically blowing a joking kiss in my direction.

"Jesus, Roddy, fine."

I climbed into the bed and felt Roddy's arms curl around my waist and his face between my shoulder blades.

"Rod, get off."

"Wha'?"

"Get off of me."

"Why?"

"Aren't you married, get off."

"if I was married, there would be a ring on my finger," He waved his left hand in front of my face, "No ring, no wife."

"Oh. Still, get off."

"Now, would that be 'get off' in the, leave me alone, way or the 'get off' in the, I love you take me now, way." The latter a clear joke but it annoyed me even more.

"Leave me alone, Roddy."

He slid his arms off and rolled to face the other way.

"Small bed, Kirby."

"I wasn't expecting company, Piper."

"Your tattoos are nice."

"Sleep, Piper."

"I'm just saying."

"Roddy, you are injured, sleep."

"I looked through your sketchbook earlier, y'know, when you were in the shower, just flicked through it, and wow, you're a great artist."

"For the love of God, Roddy! would you please just get some sleep."

"Alright!, alright. No need to yell."

"One more word and I'm chucking you out the nearest window."

We both fell silent and managed to get some sleep, it wasn't until sunrise that either one of us awoke. As I stirred from my slumber I was face to face with the Scottish idiot. I yelped and, without realising his legs were intertwined with mine, fell off the bed with him falling on top of me, waking Roddy up in the process.

"Oh, well, morning sweetheart, did I wake ya."

"Rod, get ya damn 'Loch Ness Monster' away from me."

Rod's cheeks turned pink and he quickly looked down between our bodies before sheepishly standing up and hurrying to the bathroom, I took the chance to change into a graphic tee and some black jeans, not noticing that Piper had left the bathroom door wide open, until I heard his voice.

"Woah, so uh, all of you is bigger than normal?"

I yelped and threw one of my shirts at his face, before realising that I had thrown the shirt I was planning on wearing at him, "Wait, Roddy, I need that shirt."

He laughed before handing me back my shirt, "Uh, thank you … for …saving me last night."

"Were you even supposed to be in town?"

"Well no, but I …" He trailed off

"I can't hear you, Roddy?"

"It's nothing, really."

I continued on with my normal routine, mindful that Roddy was in the same room as me and injured. It wasn't until the phone rang that I had a problem, before I could reach the phone Roddy had already answered it.

"Who is this?"

I could hear a loud, angry voice on the phone and Piper got defensive.

"You think you're a hard man do ya?!"

Damien. That's got to be Damien, which means I am in some real trouble now. Thanks Piper, ya dafty.

"I'll get her to call ya back once you've calmed down."

He slammed the phone back into it's place and breathed out a hefty sigh.

"Kirby, is Damien your boyfriend?" He seemed instantaneously calm

I almost choked on air for a moment, "No! He's my manager, and he's like double my age. He's Vic," I paused for a moment, "He's my dad, as well as the other members of the D.O.D. We're not all his biological daughters though, just Vickie."

"So, he adopted you?"

"I guess you could say that." I avoided looking him in the eyes.

"Tell me the truth. Now!"

"Promise you won't tell anyone first."

"I won't tell a soul, now, why are you so, uptight, about who he is to you."

"First things first, my name isn't Kirby Lucifarian, it's actually Kirby Trevor."

"Oh, so Damien's not you're adoptive father, either?"

"No, my real parents are Heaven and Eric Trevor. Damien's Vickie's dad and only Vickie's dad."

"Are either one of your parents giants? or is it just you?"

"Just me, the closest person to me in height, family-wise was my uncle Rory. He's the reason I have the tattoo on my wrist."

I walked up to Piper and showed him the 'R' tattooed on my right wrist.

"So, he passed away?"

"Yeah. He died, eleven, no no, twelve years ago now, when I was Seventeen, My uncle Vaughn died a couple months later, he's why I have the lighter on my left arm, my uncle Vaughn was best known for being, in the nicest terms, a layabout smoker, and the smoke took him in the end."

"So, you have a lighter to remember a man who died by smoking?"

"Dark, I know, but uncle Vaughn would've laughed at it. Erik laughed at it when I explained it to him."

"Eric, your dad?"

"No, no, Erik, with a 'K', my old tag partner before I joined the D.O.D. I think you would've liked him."

"Really, now why would I like a guy I know nothing about?"

"Well, Erik's Scottish, He's from Edinburgh. He's tall-ish, then again I am a giant, so who am I to say what's tall, he's six-foot-five. He played the bagpipes when he was younger, he quit playing when he was twenty-three, same year we lost the tag titles."

"Rough," He interrupted "Continue, please."

"Uh, well. Erik's strong, very strong, he would compete in the Highland games and well, … I guess back then I thought I'd never leave him, until Damien gave me an offer I couldn't refuse and I left him. I had a whole life with him planned inside my head and I left it all behind, for what, cramped hotel rooms and breakfasts with André."

"You had breakfast with André the giant and you didn't tell me … You, You had a good Scottish man, and you left him, for," He gestured to the room, "all this?"

"Well I jus-"

"No," He held my jaw and looked me straight in the eyes, "You had a life, a man who obviously a close relationship with you, and you gave it up for breakfasts with André and shitty hotel rooms."

"I know I'm stupid."

"But you're not stupid, you saved me, I could have died in that hallway and you brought me in here, you stopped that bastard from killing me. I could kiss you."

"Please don't."

Sorry for cliff-hanger ending, but … END OF BLOODY, BEATEN, BRUISED or MAXIMUM EFFORT.