#Because this is probably completely arbitrary and I'm probably reading too much into it

[iloveschiaparelli]

UPDATE Errol has a British accent while Rodent and Tobias have American ones.

Tobias spent his early years with his parents and grandmother, who had a home AND managed to continue paying rent to Veldergrath even after her rent was spontaneouslt doublef but was not "well-off" by any means, indicated by the fact that she borrowed books from her employer rather than bought them for Tobias to read. Probably the closest thing to a middle class that exists in Carthya. Roden grew up in an orphanage, the only one of the trio to have spent his whole life there.

Mott has a proper British accent while Cregan has a snarly one, like you'd expect of a caricaturized "British lowlife."

Errol, on the other hand, came to Farthenwood at the age of 10 to help pay his family's debts. While we don't know his family's financial situation, it's clear by the context that they aren't rich either.

Clearly the divide in British and American accents is not split by national boundaries between Avenia and Carthya, but social status. Therefore, there are 2 options for what we can gather about this world based on the audiobook performance:

Option 1 is that accents aren't developed in early childhood like they are in real life, but instead may be shaped even after the age of 10. Which would explain why Tobias has an American accent despite growing up in a debt-free home (he would have been sent to work at Veldergrath's estate had his grandmother or parents incurred debts with him), because a couple years prior he landed in a small orphanage and his accent came from there. There is some consistency also because Errol, who did NOT come from a debt-free home, has a British accent and that could be explained by the fact that he's been living at Farthenwood, around high society, since age 10. However, this option doesn't hold water because if this was true, Sage would have picked up the Carthyan orphanage accent and Conner would never have remarked on his Avenian accent

Option 2 is that Sage is the only character in the performance so far who does not conform to any sort of standard, and that while the British accent is reserved for high society, families who exist in proximity to high society end up picking it up as well (this would include Errol's family, explaining why he had the accent prior to arriving at Farthenwood.) Roden, Tobias, and other orphanage children would have an American accent because even Tobias' family did not exist in close enough proximity to high society to acquire the accent. This interpretation implies that Mrs. Turbeldy comes from a richer background than is let on by the books: she began life as part of an upper-middle class family but somehow fell in standing until she ended up working against her will in an impoverished orphanage. This would also explain her eating more than the boys to the point of gaining weight (chapter 1) and her taste for accessories and jewelry that are disproportionate to her income: It's the standard of living that she grew up with and is used to. It's also why she allows Sage to bribe her with trinkets despite hating his guts, because he's the only boy at the orphanage with deft enough fingers and a bold enough attitude to bring her the items and food that remind her of her past life.

This interpretation also affirms what we already know about Mott, which is that his family has been associated with Conners for generations, meaning that while Motts family are not nobles, they still carry the pride and mark of high society. It also affirms the interpretation that Cregan, while having served high society for a while, comes from a "lesser" background, likely having grown up in the capital surrounded by the royal army and having joined them at some point before eventually winding up in Conners service. I can't recall at the moment if Cregan has a canon backstory or not.

Sage, on the other hand, only sounds American because the reader, while possessing impressive voice acting skills, is likely American himself and had no desire to act out varying accents throughout the book as Sage's accent changes, nor to choose an accent and have to keep it up for the entirety of the book and narration. This could be out of a desire to spare the audience from confusion, laziness (self care), or both. I'm guessing both. If I had to fake an accent for 8 hours a day for several days straight I would lose my mind too.

I will have to wait for Imogen's arrival to be certain of this pattern. I'm also incredibly curious to see whether Amarinda has a British accent, and whether Sage's accent will switch to British when he changes his accent/assumes Jaron's identity. My money is on No for the latter, both because the reader is American and also because Jaron 1) did not conform to royal standards to begin with and 2) left his family at a young age. I don't know if this reader also did the audiobook for The Captive Kingdom or not, but I also wonder if he would read Darius as British or American considering that Darius is family to Jaron, but is also conformed to high society.

I'm listening to the False Prince audio book right now (major spoilers in this post btw!!!!!!!!) and I'm still in the first chapter but the reader (Charlie McWade) has read most of the narration in a pretty flat tone while giving all the characters wildly performance accents, EXCEPT SAGE, who has a basic American accent just like the narration and so far only has slightly more life injected into him. Conner and Mrs. Turbeldy are both being read in these performative British accents.

If you've read the books then you know that not only are Conner and Turbeldy both Carthyan but SAGE, who is actually Jaron, is ALSO carthyan and spends most of the first book pretending to be Avenian and faking an Avenian accent.

WHICH IMPLIES THAT THE ACCENT OF THE AVENIANS IS JUST AN AMERICAN ACCENT. And the Carthyans are British.

Help??? Is Sage's accent going to change from American to British as the book goes on and he "learns" to fake a Carthyan accent? Is the narration going to change to a British accent at the end when we realize that he's been Carthyan all along?!! Or has he been in the Avenian accent for so long that now he just thinks in an Avenian accent?

Help I know I'm probably reading too much into it but this is insane i can't stop thinking about it, Sage/Jaron's accents and sarcasm play SUCH an important role in the series so it feels SO wrong that all the characters would get essentially Pro Voice Actor Treatment while he gets to be read in a flat American tone regardless of what façade he's putting on at any given time.

[pluckyredhead]

so what did you not like about worlds finest teen titans? There were a lot of dropped plot threads and bits I expected Waid to develop more (Roy and Ollie conflict, Roy, Garth and Wally never resolved their sleepover argument, Karen's reaction at the con to nearly being unmasked, Wally's parents, ect) and also the queerbaiting with garth (and his eyes changing colour halfway through???) was annoying. I thought it was cute overall but maybe I'm not familiar enough with some of the characters?

I held on to this ask because I was going to reread the miniseries to answer you more accurately, and then I decided to not put myself through that, so...hopefully my memory is accurate lol.

(I should note before I get into it that none of my quibbles are with Emanuela Lupacchino's art. She's a treasure and we're thrilled that she's here.)

But yeah, you've put the nail on the head with a lot of it. It was just terribly paced, like Waid didn't know how many issues he had or something. Aside from all the dropped threads you mentioned, it felt like the main bad guys were...pretty much hastily introduced, or at least assembled, in #5? There didn't seem to be any kind of...well, point to this miniseries. There was no theme. There was nothing Waid was trying to say, as far as I could tell, except "Fuck Roy Harper." (Oh, we'll get to that.) It wasn't an origin story for the team. It wasn't about adolescence or coming of age or learning who you are, except maybe a little bit for Garth. It was just...there.

And I want to be clear here: Mark Waid is one of my favorite comic book writers of all time. When he hits, he hits. The regular World's Finest book and his Shazam are wonderful. I just think this wasn't the right match of writer/characters, because he didn't handle these very well. Taking them one by one:

Dick: DC is fully in their "Dick the unbearable Mary Sue" era and this book is no exception. If I never see another comic where a whole team of experienced superheroes with major league powers and training stands around like incompetent jackasses until a Bat comes along and tells them what to do, it'll be too soon. I'm here to read about an ensemble book where everyone is a three-dimensional character, not The World's Most Perfect Boy and his loser sidekicks. Not only is it unfair to everyone else in the cast, it's doing a disservice to Dick, who is a much more interesting character than this book (or Tom Taylor, ahem) gives him credit for.

(There's also something very weird and inconsistent Waid is doing across his books with Dick - WF, WFTT, and BvR - where sometimes he's throwing a tantrum because he doesn't get to be a circus star with everyone looking at him all the time, and sometimes he's screaming at Roy for filming them, and both feel utterly arbitrary to me as well as contradictory.)

Donna: Donna's characterization in this was just...bizarre. I was a little worried about how Waid would handle her, since he has a tendency to turn more quote unquote "wholesome" female characters into the Mom Friend (see: his Champions run, where he tries to get away with it by having Kamala announce that she's not going to be the Mom Friend because she's the only girl on the team...and then immediately becoming the Mom Friend), and Donna's already very much a Mom Friend, and I didn't know what Mom Friend Squared would look like. But instead he went for this...Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl approach? Where she's really into bungee jumping and monster trucks? I'm not offended by it, it's just so utterly random. This isn't who Donna is? It's never been who she is? Baffling.

I am offended (I mean, mildly, but still) by the fact that she and Garth are shoehorned together in this. He's the only boy on the team she's never been romantically linked to, even in dreams/hallucinations/whatever, so completing the set feels very much like Donna's only narrative worth is in being a love interest, which...gross.

Garth: Garth probably got the best treatment of the bunch, to be honest. He was in character as the shy little weirdo he was in the Silver Age and in pretty much every flashback we've ever seen. He's smart and perceptive and bad at saying what he wants and generous towards those who have hurt him, all of which is very Garth. I have no complaints about him except the weird queerbaiting, and I'm not blaming Waid for that because from what I understand, solicits are written by editorial working off of a pitch, potentially before the comic is even written, so who knows what happened there? It might have been a stupid joke that didn't land, it might have been a story that was pitched and then a higher up vetoed it, it might have been a story Waid was going to write and then changed his mind. I'm not going to say it's his fault when I have no idea if that's true. Otherwise, I think he handled Garth well.

Wally: Wally was another one where I was just like ??? the whole time. He didn't feel like Wally, he felt like Bart. But, like, fanon's innocent child version of Bart and not the actual canon character, who has a lot more backbone. Why is he hero worshipping Dick like that? Why is he so docile? What was up with that weird line where Dick's like "you're the youngest?" Yes, historically Dick had already dropped out of college while Wally was still in high school, but otherwise they've always been portrayed as the same age. And if it's a reference to debut year, Donna's the youngest. It's such a random throwaway line dumped in at the very end for...why? Confusing me personally?

The worst, though, was whatever the hell was going on with Wally's parents. Wally's parents are not an idyllic suburban couple! They are not the Kents! Rudy West is only not classified as a supervillain because he doesn't have a costume! Even if he hadn't tried to kill Mary, sold the Earth out to alien robots, faked his own death, or run a deadly labor camp for children at this point in the timeline, he definitely hit Wally and, uh, poisoned Wally's Little League coach. I don't think Mary is as bad as some of fandom does, but she's certainly a difficult person. Wally was desperately unhappy at home as a child, which is why he latched on so hard to Barry and Iris. And Waid knows this, because he wrote a lot of that canon. If it's a retcon, it's such a strange, pointless one that makes all of them a lot less interesting. Just baffling.

Karen: I think it was a very smart choice to add Karen to the founding roster and make the team slightly more gender-balanced and not all-white. It's kind of a wasted choice, though, when she's so aggressively sidelined. All she does in this book is hang around with Mal and the support staff. She isn't looped into any of the major emotional conflicts - Garth and Donna, Dick and Roy, Roy and Wally and Garth. She's not treated as a headliner in the same way the others are, and that really sucks.

Roy: Hoo boy.

When Waid was announced as the writer of Batman vs. Robin, I was worried, because I had a feeling he didn't like Damian. I couldn't put my finger on why, it was just a feeling I had. And boy howdy, was I proved right! Damian is treated like shit in that book.

I had the same feeling with this book and Roy, and...let's just say I'm two for two, okay?

Here's the thing. I'm okay with Roy being written as kind of shitty, especially during his period of his life. Teen Titans: Year One writes him as an utter fuckboy, and I love that comic. The Mal and Karen issue of The Other History of the DC Universe retells the Bronze Age Titans era from their perspective, and it pulls absolutely no punches regarding Roy being, well, kind of an asshole...and it's right to do so, because it's drawing very directly from those 1970s comics, and he was often awful in those.

But Waid writes him as a generic 80s movie villain. He's a human popped collar. He's a stereotype of a bully. My problem isn't that I need him to never do anything wrong, it's that nothing in this book is specific to Roy, his history, or his established personality.

For instance, all of his bragging about how much money he has? He comes off like a kid who was born into wealth and has never known anything else, but that isn't true. He was at best middle class before Ollie, probably more likely working class given the economic situation on most reservations - but there's no indication that he's responding specifically to that shift in circumstances. He's just, like, Draco Malfoy with arrows. Also, Dick has a nearly identical history but none of the same issues. He even says "Roy and I have the same background but he sucks." Why is one of them a perfect angel untouched by filthy lucre, and the other is Bradley Uppercrust III?

And then there's the subplot with Ollie neglecting Roy, which fizzled out to a real wet fart of a resolution. But honestly, at no point did I know where Waid was going with that, because...well, if you know Roy's history, you know Ollie neglecting him is what leads directly to Roy getting into drugs. And like...first of all, the timeline here is off, because historically Ollie didn't ditch Roy until after he lost his money, and he still has it here. (How interesting would it have been to have Roy pretending he was still rich in addition to pretending Ollie was around?) But also, this comic ends on an "and now everything is fine!" note, but it isn't! It really, really isn't. So Ollie showing up at the end and being like "I'm here for you, buddy" doesn't ring true, because he is demonstrably not in this very comic, and we also know he won't be in the future. And Roy getting what he wants doesn't feel like a satisfying resolution either because we don't actually get to see changed behavior from him, and again, we know this won't last. (Again, TT:YO handles this dynamic very well, where we see that Ollie is an affectionate but negligent guardian who Roy is learning some very bad habits from.)

And to top it off, constantly contrasting Terrible Roy to Virtuous Dick and simultaneously pretending that Ollie was at this point a responsible guardian has the (I hope unintentional) effect of implying that Roy will eventually become an addict because he's just a bad and weak person, instead of a struggling teen who needed support and didn't get it. I would have actually preferred a story that hinted at the beginning of Roy's addiction and how he hides it from the Titans, because we've never had that story told in comics, but I don't think Waid's the one to write it. Instead we get a conflict that's out of character for Roy, a resolution that doesn't feel at all earned, and the looming threat of Roy's immediate future which Waid refuses to address.

In conclusion, this book was a mess, and you should all read Teen Titans: Year One instead.

[kibbits]

Hi okay so I've been rotating the break a leg boys in my very neurodivergent head and. I don't know the specifics because I don't know theater or musicals, but with the everything about them - having to relearn how to be themselves, essentially unmasking, and the difficulty with social cues that comes with actually interacting people rather than just performing for them - I just. Okay wait lets start differently -

At some point they become true friends with Y/N, we know that! But do they know? They never had friends before, and with their difficulties I can just see them struggling to even understand the concept, much less where the lines are, and wondering if Y/N considers them friends too!

So while I don't know how you planned it out/ if you have something different in mind already, I just kept thinking of a scene where they wonder and try to ask - hey, are we friends? But they're scared of misunderstanding cues because it's all new, so they fall back onto their scripts! Because despite everything, they know those, and they're reliable and familiar! So they rope Y/N into a little improv scene or perhaps a little musical number where the characters proclaim their friendship, and then they just. kinda trickle out of the scene to ask - are we? because just asking outright is scary, but they can mask it as a play, while also trying to reach past that comfort zone, and I just think they'd really need some sort of confirmation that yes, they are friends!

(and that certainly is not projection as someone who struggles to identify boundaries for friendships and likes to double check also - I mean the boys have the extra complication of Y/N being assigned that job to care for them! I'm sure there's anxieties involved, once the masks begin to crumble! Okay I can be normal now this is. long. GFHDSJ)

HI OK SO!!!! YOU BLEW MY MIND COMPLETELY WITH THIS ASK AA

So uh as you know you're the one who recently made me realize I'm audhd and,, , in the light of that,, , SO MUCH of my own goddamn AU just. clicks.

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first of all-- YES! Yes, I totally see them doing that! Setting up an elaborate scene and thinking about how it'll go, late at night (imagining in scripts how YN might react)

They purposefully leave the end of the script blank so YN (who might not realize it's based on reality at first, or sees it but thinks they're reading too much into it) gets to the end and goes: "Uuuh guys? I think I'm missing a page? Are they friends or not?"

And the boys go: "We don't know-- are they?" (hopeful puppydog eyes)

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Second of all, I'll use this as a jumping point under readmore cause my god it made me see the AU in a new light dfkljdg

Cause uh I realize now that it's not just an AU about 'what if they'd never become daycare attendants' but rather about acting (masking, putting up a front, internality vs externality, discovering sentience, discovering themselves and each other as people) in general

So I think that first of all,, due to the nature of the thing, YN is probably ALSO audhd and struggles with boundaries, because I do, too. (head in hands i genuinely didnt notice now much i coded them pff But then again, uh... I am ALSO pretty good at masking fgjkldg)

I can get very attached to people very fast, and I call people my friends easily (but like. several different kinds of friendships?? Different degrees of intimacy and points of connection) but i also need to hear it from the people in return or else i get wary of "taking up too much space" (despite the irony of liking when other people are interested gjklgd)

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But. MY GOD LUCE. THEY'RE ALL SO ND (specifically Autistic and ADHD, healthy dose of anxiety and More)

So we've got Sun and Moon who are a Problem Animatronic, who are Strange and Offputting sometimes. They take their roles too seriously, they embody them, they don't 'act like real people' outside of that. They follow arbitrary rules, and expect you to know and follow them, too.

And then Y/N comes along, and they immediately follow along with their rules (read:script/assigned role) not only that? But they clearly establish their own rules, too, as well as reasons for Sun and Moon to follow them (god. you see what I mean by everything being so clear in retrospect??)

Management sees: Holy shit, after countless maimed staff members, a(disposable one)n intern bumbles along into the closet where the Actor has been shoved, and miraculously gets them both to cooperate??? And they survive? Without injury?

Sun/Moon see: FINALLY some good fazzing food communication!

In reality: AUDHD to AUDHD communication is happening dfklgjkld

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so uh just wanted to say all 3 are AUDHD.

Sun collected all the kinetic/high energy symptoms and habits, like physical hyperactivity and restlessness, full body stimming (watch out for the limbs!) poor volume control, jumping the gun and interrupting, things like that

Moon got the more internal ones: Non-verbal or minimal words a lot of the time, doesn't like to be perceived when he's not acting, sits like a gargoyle/floor time/other pressure stim (WILL flop onto you) and also chewing fkljdgj, innatention etc

They both def don't have personal space awareness, are anxious and restless but in different ways, sound stims/echolalia out the wazoo

Y/N by nature will be different but since its my AU they'll reflect mine so. healthy mix/helping of both? fgjklgdl Inattentive, both super observant and blind to obvious things, sometimes less verbal, sometimes hyperverbal, pacing and shaking their hands like they can't contain all the things they want to say, Floor Time (tm)

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Lots of mirroring and parallel play hangouts, they're all both cats and golden retrievers your honor. Sun will pick up YN and/or pace. Moon will flop over/near them. YN is good with both jkldk They can hang out in silence, or talk for HOURS.

YN will just start singing a random silly thing and bouncing in place and the bots will sometimes mirror (Moon not so much verbally but he can hum, and Sun can actually talk through the speakers (buttons) on their chest while Moon is out anyway)

Oh yeah that's another thing! Sun can help Moon out if he's out but has a hard time communicating, because they can both talk while the other's out as part of their duet setting. They don't often do it, though, because most of the staff would freak out if they knew they were both active at the same time? Which is silly, it's literally built into their routines/gimmick!

Man now I am thinking of so many nice hangouts (of course its not ALL sunshine and rainbows but. They click well.

[alpinefrsh]

Hi!!👋

One of the first scenarios that popped into my head when I first read TIITTV (I found this series around the time part 5 was posted), was a Drista vs Krang kind of fight. And then I realized Drista may be invincible by default, but that doesn’t mean she’s all that dangerous. (There’s a difference between dangerous and deadly, Dris is definitely a little deadly) So I let the thought go pretty quickly. But I fell down the rabbit hole again and was like, ‘hey, what if we put the deadliest characters from each world in the same room and see who was more dangerous?’ Then I thought: XD as dsmp’s most deadly/powerful. But when considering XD’s powers, it made me realize how little he actually uses them. And that’s when I went back to Drista. Because listen, XD may be more knowledgeable about his powers(and therefore is more able to restrain them in power), but, what is essentially a ‘baby’ god… Drista is the personification of Chaos for a reason. She’s as trigger happy as a 14 y/o logging onto her older brother’s Minecraft server through his account and going crazy with operator commands. (See what I did there ;>)

I thought about this a bit too much and I honestly have no idea anymore. There is an unexpected amount of stuff to consider about the SMP gods, and also a bit about Krang too. Thoughts :D?

Thanks, hope you’re having a good day/night! <3

Hello!! o/

Oh, dude, that'd be kinda sick actually. Buncha flashy weapon and potion summoning shots. But yeah, not that she'd know how to actually use them effectively, lmao, she'd have no need to ordinarily.

Hm, I could see an AU where Drista decided to go along with Tommy to check out where she was sending him- but we slide back the timeline a little bit to take place during the Krang invasion. We place some slightly arbitrary limitations on Dris where she can't make another portal right away, but it's too dangerous for them to just sit around doing nothing, hence, joining the fight.

Hm... I'm not sure how much I'd want to take away the main fights from the original rottmnt cast, pretty big part of Leo's character arc in particular, but I could also see Tom and Drista clocking that the big alien flesh ship up in the sky as the probable source of their problems. Drista could hypothetically fly up and help with some portion of the fight, even if that's just by throwing down splash potions to help Leo and hinder the Krang.

I mostly like the thought of her and Tommy tearing up, like, krangified busses and shit. Both because it's badass, and because it doesn't interfere too heavily with how the original storyline plays out.

Alternatively- Krang 2 (the sister Krang) is still on earth in government confinement or something. If she were to break out, she'd likely want revenge on the Hamatos, and especially April, no doubt. I... Have some things that haven't happened yet that would technically make contacting the members of the dsmp possible, but I can't say anything about it yet because it's a pretty big spoiler.

But when things go sideways, Tommy could hypothetically use this unspecified method to contact some godly assistance from the dsmp. So that's a pretty feasible way of setting up a hypothetical fight between one of the Krang and Drista. I doubt she actually has much genuine combat experience, so I could more so see her acting in a supporting role for the others- ooh, she could have a cool scene where she summons a thunderstorm and starts fighting by summoning lightning.

It'd be hard to hit such a fast moving target though, so it's not a completely overpowered ability. Possibly have to get the Krang to stay still for a few seconds to land a shot on her?

Anyway, that's about the extent of my ideas for this concept. Although I'm fairly certain I'm not going to be involving the Krang at all in this series (outside of being mentioned), it was fun to think through the hypotheticals :D

You as well! <3

[croik]

what do you dislike about Kayne/the butcher in terms of writing?

Everything 😌

No but really I'll share my thoughts under the cut.

I could probably write an essay about how the introduction of Kayne has already irreparably damaged the show's narrative, but the short version is that by existing, he has erased virtually all stakes, imo. He appeared basically out of nowhere, deflated all tension leading up to the final confrontation with the King in Yellow (who was the main antagonist at the time), and following that confrontation removed all the consequences of it. By undoing Arthur's broken bones and returning John, everything about Arthur's and John's choices on the plateu were invalidated, as well as the choice we the Patrons had made, despite it being billed as a very significant vote. He replaced them with entirely new and completely arbitrary consequences (the memory loss, whatever John's deal is).

His motives may or may not become clear later on, but in the meantime, we're left with a villain who seems to be reshaping the story just for his own amusement, with no regard for the characters' agency or consequences. If Kayne can bring Arthur back from literal death whenever he wants, why should I ever be worried for his safety? Why should I care if John is losing his memory again, when Kayne has full control over his mind and existence? There's no point even wondering what he's after or what the conditions of his deal are until he reveals them himself, and even then, it might just get undone again.

It's contrived, imo. It's lazy. It's a get out of jail free card when you snap a character's femur and then realize you don't want spend time on healing, or come up with some other explanation to get rid of the injury so the plot can barrel forward. He's too powerful, and until he tips his hand, we can't trust that anything else will stick or matter.

Butcher is different, but the problem I have with him is the writing trying too hard to convince us that he's smart/good at this. Him clocking Arthur as blind after a few minutes, after personally watching him READ THE NOTE he himself gave him, and despite none of the other people who spent longer with Arthur noticing, is a desperate bid for us to think he's smart. Him climbing on top of the moving train, where he can't see or hear his quarry, and dropping in exactly when Arthur is next to the specific window, is very dramatic but nonsensical. He chats on and on with the officers, basically shouting at the audience how scary and important he is for far too long.

And he just happened to chase Arthur into an apartment building with a chair and rope set up in the basement. Again it's all a little too convenient. There's a lot about the current scenario that doesn't make much sense logistically, but it doesn't matter because we're just supposed to take the Butcher at his word that he's very good at this.

And hey, I'm not looking for realism. That's not my issue. I just don't like a story telling me that the villain is the best in his field, and then showing him rely on happenstance and luck while he prattles on and on, and sometimes magically intuits something unearned.

(I'm also not a fan of his "oo I'm in love with my victims" shtick, but someone else explained that better already)

Disclaimer these are all my personal feelings and I'm not trying to convince anyone or say you shouldn't like these characters, I fully admit I also have strong personal reasons for disliking them unrelated to the writing so I can't be 100% objective. But who even can be, amirite?

[solitarelee]

Maybe real animals were canon in pokemon in gen 2 but they aren’t anymore. They were retconned out and have been for years. Wtf is this deliberate ignorance of the lore claiming to be “oooh you don’t ACKNOWLEDGE it” nah it’s bc ur wrong

bro literally just read something. anything. it's been fun canon for years and years and years. I cannot believe I'm getting hate mail about pokemon but okay here, since apparently anything post gen 2 is all you will accept for some arbitrary reason, here.

In pokemon diamond/pearl/platinum, owls are mentioned by a Bird Keeper

In pokemon x/y both real world fish and butterflies appear

Numerous colloquial references to real-world animals actually appear throughout pretty much every single game (ie flies, rats, bulls, butterflies, hornets, etc; as much as I adore and enjoy the 'replacing colloquial phrases with Pokemon names' trend genuinely, they don't bother in any translation of the games including original JPN). Things are also referred to via horsepower.

Multiple animals are mentioned in pokedex entries including elephants (Raichu, Gastly), coral (Horsea, Corsola), chameleons (Lickitung), plankton (multiple water types including Shellos), dinosaurs (multiple fossil Pokemon like Aerodactyl as well as Flutter Mane and Brute Bonnet just in case you're REALLY a new-games purist)

Corals, barnacles, and non-Pokemon fish can be seen in Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Ranger

In the manga, there being animals is just like, an explicitly stated thing in canon, as well as Pokemon being unrelated to animals but instead a completely different thing (which is WILDIN but I guess kinda makes sense)

In the anime and movies, there are a lot of instances of wildlife, frankly in the original series there's too many to count, but if for some reason we're saying nothing prior to gen 3 is canon (literally where is that being pulled from), there are appearances of corals, barnacles, mink fur, mollusks, etc. I don't know how to tell everyone present that these things are animals.

Like, look, as I stated, I know it's a fun bit that people do, but actually there has not been some declaration from god (who would even be god in this situation???? do you know how many people write for pokemon???) that animals don't exist. You're just talking out of your ass because, I presume, there have been fewer explicit references to animals over time in the anime. Inasmuch as there is a canon for Pokemon, however, it's on the side of animals existing; sea animals en masse at the absolute least.

One could make a fascinating headcanon about animal life in the pokemon universe being diminished (hence it appearing mostly in the form of sea life, insects, extinct animals, etc) due to increased predation from pokemon and the filling of ecological niches by Pokemon. But for that, you'd have to have intelligent thought and not be the kind of person who sends anon hate over your apparently religious pokemon beliefs.

In the particular case of this funny (if mildly sigh worthy to me, personally, because of my unnecessarily anal approach to Pokemon which it seems you can definitely relate to, being a huge asshole) gag, there is an entire genre of pokemon called "cat pokemon." Or "mouse pokemon." Those words probably mean fucking something in that case, even if it's just a term for something akin to a family of similar-looking Pokemon. The whole "what's a cat I've never heard of a cat" thing is just sigh-worthy to me personally, due to the explicit mention of it and other "real world" animals across Pokemon media. I find it unfun, which is my personal taste. I also find you unfun. I hope this helps.

[blackidyll]

I was tagged by the lovely @saint--claire for this! (❁´◡`❁)

3 Ships I have so many ships that I can mention, so I'll just do one each for three arbitrary categories.

1) Ship I'm reading: IceMav from the Top Gun movies. I mentioned this before, but I needed both movies to fall in love with this pairing so hard. Like if I watched the movies individually I would be interested but not this much - but throw in the fact that they canonically have 30+ years of history and TGM made it very clear that their bond has gotten even stronger over the years *chef's kiss*. Rivals to wingmen! Ice as Mav's guardian angel! Mav was the only one Ice trusted to teach the kids so they could all come back home alive! Mav pounding his wings onto Ice's coffin!!! The angst from Ice's canonical death adds a sort of realistic bittersweetness that makes the ship somehow more appealing to me. But also, because real life is depressing enough as it is, I'm happily rolling in OG!TG wingmen era fics and found family MavDad/IcePops and Dagger kids AUs forever.

2) Ship I've written: Halfdain from Genshin Impact. I like a lot of Genshin characters and relationships (both romantic and familial), but Halfdain was the one that broke my two-year pandemic lockdown writer's block. Halfdan literally appears onscreen for like three minutes, but his loyalty to Dainsleif! He followed Dainsleif's final command for 500 years! He remembered and recognized Dain even when his memories should have completely eroded away! He believed in Dain so much. And Dain! How he recognized Halfdan even in his shadowy husk state! The way his eyes flickered and he smiled the gentlest smile for Halfdan! The hand clasp in the flashback, and the Black Serpent salute! Halfdan's fate is also what inspired me so much - I was so distraught at the fact that Halfdan dies and they couldn't be together despite everything they've been through, I broke my own writer's block to fix things. Tragic endings what? I WILL FIX THEM WITH FIC. This is probably the rarest pairing I ship (<50 works on AO3), but I love them so much.

3) Free choice: 00Q from the Daniel Craig James Bond films. So, I've kind of stopped writing for them. However, I see a pattern with my current ships and like.. I haven't actually watched No Time To Die, but I know what happens to Bond. And going by my track record, I'll either write my own fix-it fic or I'll look for all the fix-it fics. And that's why I still haven't watched NTTD: 1) i'm not quite ready for things to end, and 2) I don't want to risk switching hyperfixations, so I'm procrastinating on it. But 00Q will always have a special place in my heart, both for how long I was actively in the fandom for, and for how much I grew as a writer writing for them.

First Ship I'm probably aging myself right here, but considering the timing of when I got into fandom it's either Yuki Sohma/Tohru Honda from Fruits Basket or KakaIru from Naruto.

Last movie Enola Holmes 2. I enjoyed it!

Last song Hoyoverse just dropped The Stellar Moments Vol 3 album and I've been listening to it while writing this. My favourites are Chapter of a New Era (Yunjin's theme), Storm Chaser (Heizou's theme), Evening Luxury (Diluc and Fischl's outfit teaser) and Surasthana Fantasia (Nahida's theme).

Currently reading Uhhhh.. I have far too many fic tabs opened, but two IceMav fics that I'm actively following are As Lions by @qin-ling (Time travel fic! The angst of Mav's now unreturnable original timeline and his Ice's death, but also hope in the form of getting to save Goose and befriending '86 Ice again!) and ICE - In Case of Emergencies by @derpinathebrave (post-breakup IceMav where Ice gets called as Mav's emergency contact after an accident. The title is already excellent but also the writing is impeccable).

Also I have a ton of Sandman fics opened before my brain took a sharp dive into TG fandom, so here's a fic I was halfway through: We have all the time in the world (a great exploration of Dreamling throughout their once-a-century-meet ups, where Dream is slightly more in-tuned to his feelings for Hob).

Currently watching I just finished watching Season 3 of Mob Psycho 100. I (surprisingly) did not cry at the ending but the moment 99 (the season 1 OP) played in the final episode? Oo, good chills, it was so excellently done.

Currently consuming All the Chinese New Year snacks. Actually, I can't eat most snacks yet because we're saving them for 初一 . But you know what you can't save for too long? Mandarin oranges. So many mandarin oranges. This is the best season for mandarin orange lovers :D

Currently craving Milk tea (not boba. Just tea and milk variants, no tapioca pearls or other toppings).

Tagging @qserasera, @no-gorms, @solowinged, @kamicom (welcome back!), but only if you feel up to it. And if anyone else would like to pick this up, please feel free!

[caphayzardous]

things r fine just debriefing a short convo into a huge poste

caved and asked one of my damage-informed (and also reasonable-inquiry) questions through text. you can't imagine how much I don't like to take serious topics into text format, hate Getting Weird Over Text, but a) this qn always feels so unimportant in-person, yet haunts me semi-regularly when I'm alone. had told myself several times I'd just get it out of the way IRL only to be like 'psh, nah'. and b) due to recent propensity for crying - and also non-recent perpetuity of crying at ANY serious moment - I felt that just this once text was safer than IRL for keeping things sensible.

it went fine (I say that now, we'll see if my lover is actually waiting to follow it up with an honourable in-person "Call It Off Because You Were Weird", but I don't THINK that's it). I somehow got an answer very very close to the Fear Outcome but in a way that I feel okay about?

Basically confirmed what I already know. this is all re: some near-arbitrary semantics of the relationship, basically that we are dating (sike did you all think I officially worked that out before valentines, like I said I would? I did not. but I did become more confident in that truth, before this recent upset. it is a relief to have this confirmed actually tho) BUT we are not 'partners'/in a serious relationship.

if that sounds weird to you. well yeah. this is what I mean by arbitrary semantics and nebulous areas. "we are lovers and we are friends and we've been going on dates for 6 months but it's not...?" anyway, however bizarre that sounds, it feels good to me and is about what I expected and wanted.

even though: its close to what I feared, too, separated only by the nature and details of the conversation. honestly I think it just makes a difference to me to hear "lover" "friend" "date" rather than cut-and-dry "friends with benefits" though try explaining the actual difference there?? it Feels different. to me at least lmfao, there may be less distinction to her, but by god she has the tact not to say so. I think it just affirms that my soft little feelings, are okay as they are. are not entirely misplaced, even though they wont go any further. I did not have illusions about her feelings but mine are still being looked after, yeah.

think also this whole thing just feels different to... you know... the past situation that recently re-haunts me (do you know that came to a crux about this time of year as well...? and with the impending end of things, I became so scared that it would all twist up the same way). probably the fact that things are being communicated at all makes a world of difference dont you think adchsbsj!!! like it may be late in the game to re-affirm these details, but it's happening at a decent and safer moment. in that past exp, the relationship exploded in a bad way and SIMULTANEOUSLY I found out that we were not even dating... according to them. so you can see why I might be hung up what counts as dating or not.

Im not asking for love, I just wanted to know Im not being made a complete fool of (again).

talking about this always feels like Im going to get y'all saying 'oh, bri...' because I Know how it reads still (yes I am a fool all round).

I will keep an eye on myself. In that same past exp I made the mistake of convincing myself I was ok with certain things like this, only to subsequently have really volatile and opposite feelings about it. sometimes I can tamp down distress with the cool detachment of logic but ofc that bitch comes back UP, you know? so I will keep an eye on myself here to see if I'm ACTUALLY still good with this situation as it stands, or if I'm just Trying to be good with it.

a lot of blog post to say: things are alright. my chest has been aching the last few days since it got into my head that there are parallels with the past. but it finally stopped hurting, and my heartrate finally settled, after speaking with them about it - I feel soft and safe again. so I think it's safe to say it's a good outcome. I feel I can separate it from the past again.

hope we can still stick the landing and get the 'good ending' when she leaves aus and we stay friends after hehe. I believe!! I believe!! I dont want this damage to take that ending from me!

might delete this'n its a mess but wanted to get it out thx if u read lmfao

[notthathobbes]

As someone who literally has a degree in writing let me tell you that yes, in the right context, these would HIT, and I hate educational and societal standards/examples of "bad writing" because...

...they're...objectively...wrong.

There's such a "highbrow" misinterpretation of literary quality that's been spread by gatekeepers, educators, and writers for, like, a long time.

(Like, definitely decades, probably centuries. Maybe longer. Ask your resident English/History double major.)

It insists (among many wrong things) that "good" writing must be both eloquent and bewildering. That it must use fancy words and string them together in a fastidious fashion. That it must be striving towards an equivalency to that of Michaelangelo's work: Angelic, entrancing, and perhaps even worthy of worship itself.

And what utter. Complete.

Bullshit.

Because...?

All writing is contextual and subjective.

Would these analogies be appropriate for a high school essay? Probably not. Would plenty of teachers still laugh if they encountered any? Abso-friggan-lutely.

Different styles of writing suit different pieces and purposes of writing. No one (1) single style is any objectively better than another because nothing is universally effective at everything.

Meaning...

Writing that's entertaining/informal/(un)expected/etc. isn't inherently "bad."

Just because we've been taught that the pinnacle of literature is Shakespeare doesn't mean that all good writing must be complex, pretty, or (gods forbid) written in iambic pentameter.

(For the record, I've read over 20 of his plays and all of his sonnets. Over 75% for fun and in my free time.

I love Shakespeare. I'm not slighting him. Just our modern idolization of his work.

Slutty English Bard man is talented, sure, but not a god.)

There are plenty of great writers that prefer for their books to be entertaining and understandable than to be of (arbitrary) "literary merit." Plenty more who surely hate works that need to be analyzed for hours to understand or must be combed through meticulously to catch and appreciate the smallest of details and nuances. I'm sure there are celebrated writers out there who would even like analogies like the ones above.

In fact, Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse V) would love some of them.

In Pity The Reader: On Writing with Style (a book detailing much of what Vonnegut had to say on writing, put together by his former student and friend Suzanne McConnell), one piece of advice he gives is:

"Don't be predictable. End your sentences with something unexpected. Keep me awake."

Not sure about you, but for more than a few of these analogies, I could never have predicted where they went. Does that make them automatically good?

Of course not!

If a piece of writing becomes too unpredictable, then it's suddenly also confusing and more difficult, the opposite of one other big piece of advice Vonnegut insists on:

Pity the reader.

Y'know, the title of the book.

It's about making it easier for the reader. Vonnegut was passionate about making the reader's job easy because:

"We must acknowledge that the reader is doing something quite difficult for him... He has to restage your show in his head -- costume and light it. His job is not easy."

Like I said, it's in the title: Pity the Reader -- meaning not think of the reader as pitiable, but:

Take pity on the reader.

Be nice to them. Use words they know, and put them in an order they can read. Throw in a joke or two. Don't give everyone long names that start with an "A" only to often call them nicknames with no connection to their full name. Stuff like that.

Vonnegut nails both of these points (Keep Me Awake & Pity the Reader) in his Creative Writing 101 Rule #8:

"Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."

Great advice, great book, great author.

Before you go, let's (quickly) use what we've learned:

Take #11 from this list: "The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free atm."

What information do we get from this "really bad" analogy? Perhaps:

The main character is a man mid-to-old age

The story takes place within the last few decades

He's been married to the same woman for 30 years

Said wife has cheated on him

He views infidelity as unforgivable and an end to their marriage

This all upsets him but not outrageously so, as if it is an inconvenience that can be (if not without annoyance) accepted and lived with

Therefore he doesn't care all too much about his wife/marriage

All of this information, and not to mention an unexpected ending/analogy (with a chuckle if you know what's funny), and this is "really bad"?

TLDR: Fuck the concept of "Really Bad [Anything]", because all it'll do is (best case) limit your creativity and understanding of writing, or (worst case) convince you that you suck before you've even given yourself the chance to be good.

[askgothamshitty]

Hello I'm 17 years old and I'm having a hard time with being afraid of ageing and becoming a woman. I just feel like the world is so scary to teenage girls but as a woman I will be expected to be more responsible and I'll have to do things like date, get a good job, get married, have kids, and get into fashion and makeup. But I don't want any of that. I'm scared because I don't want responsibilities and I'm afraid of men and I don't want to get old because youth is beautiful and ugly old women are treated badly. Help, how do I fix myself?

First of all I want to say that your feelings are totally valid and you are not alone! So many girls/women feel this way, and it's totally logical to considering how incessantly these gender roles are shoved down our throats by nearly every aspect of society. Please know that it's okay to have these thoughts and feelings, and that it's not you that's the problem, it's the culture.

Second, you don't have to do anything you don't want to. Dating, marriage, having kids - you don't have to do ANY of that. The idea that a woman must go down this path to find true happiness is a LIE! Studies show that the happiest demographic are single and childless women.

I'm sorry to say that you probably will have to get a job at some point (trust me, I hate this reality too LOL), but don't put pressure on yourself to have a "good" job on anyone else's terms but yours. What's "good" to you should be something that pays the bills and doesn't make you feel like shit. I know other people/society at large put so much value on climbing the corporate ladder and being a workaholic but you do NOT have to play that game.

You also do not have to get into fashion and makeup! Now, this is definitely a harder area to divest from since it ties in to self-esteem and self-worth, but it's totally possible to break free from beauty standards and feel confident, happy, and whole without that stuff. For me, personally, I've found that not keeping up with trends and using less makeup have been a huge positive. I spend less time getting ready, am less hyper-focused on my appearance, and save loads of money.

The journey to accepting yourself as is and not caring about the beauty standards doesn't happen overnight, but it does start with the mindful intention to just let go. It means understanding that those standards are completely arbitrary, completely socially constructed, and not at all realistic or attainable. And it means deciding that you're not going to let these unjust, fake rules ruin your life. It may take a while to fully and genuinely feel that but it has to start somewhere.

What has helped me is finding likeminded women to bond with and reading feminist theory. Having friends who feel the same about gender norms helps you carve out a space in your life where you can interrogate and resist them. Expanding your mind with feminist knowledge helps you see through the norms which present themselves at absolute truths.

<3 my inbox is always open for venting

[tigger8900]

2022 Reading Wrap-Up

I started tracking my reading early last year, in an attempt to determine if I was truly reading as diversely as I thought I was. I also set an arbitrary challenge that I wouldn't read books by white authors back to back, which in retrospect(by about mid-year) I realized was silly to do at the same time as I was attempting to gauge diversity, but by that point it was too late to make excuses! In 2022, I completed 68 books and DNFed two books, one by an Asian author and one by a Black author. Both are excluded from all analysis.

My expectations were that, left to my own devices, I'd wind up reading maybe 40% books by white authors, 20% each Asian and Black, 10% Latine, and then a few Indigenous, Jewish, and maybe even a Romani author. I expected that I read at roughly a 50% ownvoices rate, looking at the main characters in a work. There would probably be a very high rate of gender and sexuality representation, but I wasn't sure how it would shake out for ethnicity, disability, and some other categories I wanted to track. That's part of why I was looking at it, right?

Time for the results! Looking at author ethnicity, the breakdown is as follows: White: 35.29% Asian: 32.35% Black: 17.65% Latine: 5.88% Multiple Authors: 4.41% Indigenous: 2.94% Jewish: 1.47%

Obviously, I did not come across a book by a (known to me) Romani author to read this past year. I'm not too surprised that I didn't, given the state of anti-Romani sentiment in the world. So I had hopes there, but didn't make it happen. I also only had one book by a known Jewish author, which could have been better. But keep in mind these ethnic categories were assigned based off of what was on wikipedia and in the author bio. I didn't launch full investigations. There might have been more than just the one book, you never know! (Speaking of Jewish authors, Neil Gaiman needs to write a new novel, or some short stories, or something. Just saying.) I only read two Indigenous authors, and I know I could have done better on that, I just didn't.

Just over a third of the books I read were by white authors, which isn't too bad given the number of repeats(I had three books from Seanan McGuire, and I read the entire Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik). I read fewer Black authors than I'd anticipated, and more Asian. Looking at the breakdown of the latter, I suspect it's because the AAPI category encompasses so much of the world, and I also added middle eastern authors into it because I wasn't sure where else they could go. I read far fewer Latine authors than anticipated. Four of the books I read featured multiple authors(three collections and one multi-ethnic collaboration), and couldn't be fit to this analysis.

As far as representation goes, I had more ownvoices content than I'd expected. Of the ethnicities tracked, Indigenous was the lowest at 75%. Asian ethnicity was at least 76% ownvoices(I say "at least" because I had a few "no" flags in there specifically because I wasn't sure of the heritage of the author), and Black was 82%. Jewish and Latine ethnicities were 100%. I read plenty of books with queer content, though I didn't expect the lower rates of ownvoices there: 45% and 46% for gender and sexuality, respectively. It's not that much lower than what I'd estimated, but I'm shocked that it's so much lower than the ethnicities. I suspect this might be because I erred on the side of marking "no" if I was unsure of the gender or sexual identity of an author. I'm not the queer inquisition, but while I respect the right of authors to not disclose their private business I can't very well mark them "yes" when it's really a "no way to know" situation. I read very few books featuring representation of disabilities(only 5 across all tracked categories), three of which were known to be ownvoices. I feel like typically I do better than this, so maybe it was just a one-year slump?

Well, that was a lot. So, what are my goals for this reading year?

Continue reading diverse Asian authors, including works by those living in Asia. I'm actually happy with the detail breakdown of this past year, and even though it took up a larger % of the total than anticipated I wouldn't change anything about the set of Asian authors that I read. Just keep doing what I'm already doing.

Read more works by Black, Latine, and Indigenous authors. Keep my eyes open for Jewish and Romani authors as well. Specifically, I would like to read a book by a Latine author that isn't fantasy/mythology-based, and I would like to read a book by an Indigenous author from the Pacific.

Read more books in translation that aren't from Japan. I don't know how it happened, but books originally published in Japanese accounted for more than half of all my books in translation this year. Whoops! I would like books in translation from Europe and Japan to be no more than 50% of all books in translation read in 2023.

Read more books about people or featuring characters with disabilities. See if I can do better than this past year's abysmal showing, and prove that it was in fact a statistical blip and not an unknown habit. Though if I'm deliberately seeking out books, is it really a habit? 🤔

Don't overthink it. Stop it. STOP. Bad brain. Just read the books.

I have a bunch of reading to do for work in the early months of 2023, so we'll see how well these goals hold up once I get the have-to stuff out of the way.

[bangtanpromptsfics]

moonflower.

dialogue prompt #6: “It's 3 o'clock in the morning”

pairing: jungkook x reader

genre: established relationships, fluff

word count: 1,550

warnings: making out

summary: a 3am walk in the city with your boyfriend

a/n: got this inspiration from an instagram reel and I wanted to transfer that entire feel into this one shot. hope you guys enjoyy and please drop feedbacks it really boosts motivation!! p.s as soon as I completed this, butter official teaser was released SOOOO EXCITED!!!

masterlist

“It's 3 o'clock in the morning”, you take a breath in and resume kissing him, hands tangling in the locks at his nape.

“I know”, he rasps, pulling back to bring your foreheads together, taking a moment to immerse the image of your swollen lips and cold skin of your face “It'll be fun baby”.

You don't know who exactly started kissing. Jungkook came back from his night shift not long ago and he expected you to be asleep. But he was beyond happy to catch you peacefully listening to music and waiting for him, paying attention to arbitrary details of the city still alive below. What began as a welcome kiss soon turned into a brief makeout-session, the first press of his lips against yours truly reminding how much you missed Jungkook throughout the day.

And during small breaks of catching each other's breath, he suggested for a night walk, much like a date since he had been too busy this week.

“Okay”, you huff, still feeling your chest squeezing together to get the normal breathing rate. A smile tugs at his lips and with one final smooch he leaves you to change your clothes into something safe enough for walking through the cold night.

Maybe it's because you had been with Jungkook for so long that you basically adapted a lot of his fashion sense and little habits. When you step out of your small shared apartment, you both look like members of a punk band, all black and leather.

Jungkook smiles down at you, remembering how much you have changed, it felt like you grew bored of colors as well, much of your aesthetics going monochrome at this point. There was a time Jungkook even went worried about it, thinking you were somehow adjusting to him. But you reassured him that he was all the color in your life you needed.

Jungkook interlocks fingers with you, squeezing palms together as he leads the way down stairs.

“Where are we going exactly?”, you ask, an obvious curiosity he hasn't clarified yet.

“I don't know really. We'll figure that out”.

He always had a way with words which made you warm and curious at the same time. You just smile in return and wrap your hands around his leather clad arms and walk along.

You liked this. Dates with no particular destination to be in. Just strolling till your legs are tired, eating street food, getting coffee together or studying at the public library because your apartment is located at a not so silent heart of the city.

And you liked Jungkook very much too. It sometimes feels like lopsided that it demands to overflow from underneath your skin, and sometimes when you are making love to him or cuddling his head close to your chest, you believe he feels it too.

It hits you all of a sudden that you never shared those three words. Never ever uttered them in this two years of relationship and you question them now. Totally random of a realisation just like the day you woke up in a cold sweat accepting to self that you have to confess to Jungkook.

The first place you stop by is a heavily packed food truck selling korean food. It's a usually visited one so Jungkook ask for the customary meal, fire noodles. His favorite of street foods not because there wasn't anything better, he just adored your blush flushed face when you are done.

“Babe?”, he tears open the ketchup and squeezes the content with his chopsticks while watching you, “you good?”.

Apparently you had spaced out, still fueling on the thread of thoughts from earlier. You ground yourself to the present in a jolt, “I'm alright”. You give him a nervous smile.

Jungkook pulls his chair close to yours so that your arms and knees are touching, your skin growing hot despite not touching your noodles yet.

“What are you thinking about hm?”, he demands to know, but not intimidating you more than the point. He busies his hands mixing the ketchup into your noodles instead.

“I love you Jungkook”, you blurt, eyes planted on a random spot on the ground waiting for an outcome.

“And you realized that now baby?”, he chuckles, watching you all shy. He places his noodles from his lap to the table in front to fully face your direction.

“I love you too baby, so much. And I've said that so many times before, when you are sleeping, or when you were not listening. I think I was not as brave as you”, he confesses.

Your chest swells in warmth knowing he had always told you this. You peck his nose and dig into the food, finally able to feel the hunger settling down.

Content with the late night meal, you begin to stroll again after Jungkook laughs and cups your flushed red face. You always hated spicy food as a child but then this is another one of those quirks you caught up being Jungkook’s girlfriend.

“Where do you wanna go baby”, he asks, feeling lost of a trajectory for the date and now you are equally lost too, dwelled in the fact that he will lead the night.

“I don't know”, you state and at the sight of a specific place you continue, “wanna get some drinks?”.

Jungkook immediately giggles, “We both know you lose your mind over half a glass of rum love”.

You knit your brows together for a pout, “Well then you can carry me back home can't you? That would be romantic”, you press yourself to him for no apparent reason.

“Carry you all the way home?”, he muses, holding your whining head softly on his palms while pecking your forehead.

“C’mon Koo then why do you workout for three hours all day? Make some use of your muscle”

“Oh I make plenty use of these muscles and you know it”, he teases back and you smack his arms in response.

After a few very cliche comebacks you both agree to drink the night away. Good thing that Jungkook had a good tolerance to alcohol among you two. Carrying his drunk body single handedly for a smaller human like you would be a tedious task. The math was correct here, and so you start slurping your glass of whatever cheap whiskey they had.

You were enjoying all of this, truly to the core and to the point that you swore there is nothing better to life than this. But Jungkook always felt otherwise.

You see, you are not a rich couple. Just normal millenials who go to college supported with scholarships and debts to pay, several part time jobs and a very low key life where you prioritise your expenses and plan finance together. A couple who has not went on classy restaurant dates in glittery tight fitting dress, or even a sundress and expensive suits. He always wonders about the things that could make you happier and maybe one day he can afford that Italian restaurant you once said is really nice because your sister was proposed by her husband there. You'll look so beautiful in a dress and he can't wait to allure on that.

“Koo?”, you slur, already feeling consciousness leaving your body, “What are you thinking about now hmm?”

He smiles faintly at you swirling his drink and bringing it to his lips to think upon the answer a bit.

“Nothing babe. You look so beautiful right now”, he says.

And immediately you search for a reflecting surface to check yourself out, and that's because you're drunk. Your more sober self usually ends up processing a lot of butterflies at the pit of your tummy.

“I am!?”, you beam, finally able to see a very blurred something of your bummed out face with hair falling over and maybe there's even a little dried drool at the corner of your lips.

“Yeah”, he giggles, scooping you up in his arms for a tight hug, “Let's get home shall we?”

“Carry me pwese”

“C’mon love”, he helps you climb on his back for a piggyback ride, “I'll carry you”.

You tug your limbs a little tighter around Jungkook, he pats under your thigh to loosen up so he can walk. He listens to random mumbles you are whispering to him and he smiles occasionally, carefully paying attention to everything.

“I love you so much sometimes I don't know what to do with myself”, you say and Jungkook stops dead in his track to process the words a bit.

His skin turns red which you can't see and probably you wouldn't mutter such things on your sobering. And he is glad. Glad to know that you are content with what it is. His mind stirs around, his own set of booze blazing the thought further.

“Why did you stop Koo? You tired? Should I carry you?”

“You love me that much?”, he asks, completely dodging your questions.

“Yes. So much”, you kiss his cheeks, pressing down harder then usual to prove your point.

He is convinced you are the one who has a way with the words. You say things which brings him to his knees and you remain so oblivious to it.

“Let's get you home”, he states through a smile.

Thank you so much for reading!! ♡♡

Original Content of ©bangtanpromptsfics

[yoonpobs]

we don't talk together | myg

pairing: min yoongi x oc

genre: angst, hurt/comfort, growth! exes that remain exes

words: 2, 842

summary: it's hard to say it's over

What they don't tell you about goodbyes is that it isn't the end.

It's far from the closing of a book. Goodbyes are the itch that urges you to pick up an old book from the shelf just to feel what you first felt when you re-read certain parts of a book; the same remorse you felt when a character you grew attached to didn't get the ending they deserved. Or, maybe it was the villain that was misunderstood—your own heart wishing to reach out to the sad soul that couldn't even be recognised when all they do is speak.

But some books will end up dusty, forgotten, tucked away in the corner of your shelf; or in the most drastic of cases: lost.

"The park looks ... different," Yoongi speaks up for a lack of a better conversation starter.

You hum. What would you say? That it wasn't the same from when we used to spend our Spring's blended into Summer's until it got too hot for us to lay in each other's embrace?

It was still too fresh even though it's been nearly a year.

"There are more dogs," You point out the moment a tan pomeranian runs past the two of you, the owner an old couple laughing away under the cherry blossoms.

He nods, fingers stuffed in his trench coat. You note that it's the same one he wore on your anniversary, plans abandoned when there was a mix-up with the reservations until the two of you stumbled across a hidden gem that soon became your go-to date place.

You will yourself to look away so no more memories can resurface. It seems like every part of your life has somehow seamlessly intertwined itself with traces of Yoongi that it was impossible for you to exist as just yourself.

"How are things at the firm?" He asks after the two of you walked side-by-side in complete silence as more and more chatter fill your ears.

"It's ... going," You chuckle dryly.

Yoongi raises an eyebrow at you, shooting you a brief glance over until the two of you reach a bench. You dare say it's muscle memory that dragged your heavy feet into the direction of the only bench that you've known in the park. The compressed reminder of the initials of your names that you carved as teenagers likely still staining the years old wood. It was meant to be an emblem for wisdom, the ring of growth that meant to be the endgame for the two of you.

You almost laugh in bitterness and how literal the metaphor was.

"Everything okay?"

Yoongi takes the first step to sit on the bench because he always did. Ever the gentlemen when he opened doors for you, let you into the car first, waited until you stepped ahead of him to trail behind like a shield.

The first date, first kiss, first confession.

The first one to decide that it was over.

"My boss is just being sexist, as usual. I thought I'd get used to it after spending two years there but ... there are some things that you just stay unfamiliar, you know?"

It was very like you to speak in double-entendres without intending to. But it was also like Yoongi to pick up on it, especially after years of learning all the best and worst parts of you; he was and probably will be one of the few people in your lives that will always foresee your next move.

The two of you sit a fair distance apart on the bench even if it was a battle for space anyway. You didn't have the liberty to lean into his embrace anymore and he wasn't in the position to say that it was okay for you to breathe, to relax.

"You shouldn't get used to those remarks. There are times where you learn to grow used to constructive criticism but if what he's saying makes you question your worth because of very arbitrary reasons like your gender then that isn't criticism, nor is it constructive. It's bigoted and chauvinistic."

You look down to your thumbs as you fiddle with it, his words comforting you. It was woeful that you still chased validation from him even after learning to be that person to yourself.

"Yeah, I guess."

Then how did you get used to things?

If time didn't make things familiar then what did? Was it not the five years with Yoongi that led you to see him build an empire for himself all the while destroying the relationship that you had? Or was it because he was the person that you thought of doing the most minuscule things?

"By the way," He clears his throat, eyes still set forward, "Namjoon says hi."

You raise an eyebrow, surprised to hear the name of a mutual friend—or more appropriately, friend by association and acquaintance when that link was broken.

"He knows that you're with me?"

Yoongi nods his head.

"I needed to let someone at the studio know and ... well, he's the only one that knew of our situation."

You chuckle bitterly.

Of course. The suggestion of his work only made your heart drop because as much as you wanted to be supportive of him, even after the break-up, the name of his studio or songs only reminded you of the battle that you helplessly lost.

"You can tell him that I'm still a text or phone call away. No need to play messenger," You return.

The atmosphere is more reflective than awkward. You know that the two of you had your pieces to say, your own narrative to tell but neither brave enough to break the calm that you were settled in. It was a nice difference from the way that things ended, and you supposed that you were similar enough to believe in a mirage than the inevitable truth.

But you didn't call him out after six months to sit in silence to walk away with your heart feeling heavier, nor did you invite him out just to remember what it feels like to have him next to you—even in complete silence.

"Would you have really quit?"

This time, you gather all the bravery that you've built over the past few months to ask the question that has been mulling in your mind since the night you decided that it was officially over.

It was a painful break-up. Even if you expected it when Yoongi came home earlier one night with bags under his eyes and his keys that he usually left at the studio because he knew you'd always be home to open the door for him.

"I'm sorry?" He seems taken aback.

You don't blame him. You've always been more passive in dealing with confrontation due to your conflict-averse nature—but that didn't mean you didn't get angry or annoyed—or hurt. But if you learned anything, it was to stop asking yourself questions that you'll never have the answer to.

"Would you really have left the company to save our relationship?"

You chose your words carefully. Instead of saying to be with you, knowing that he lost the love, he had for you somewhere along the way—you point out the one hole that he held on to for the sake of stability. The one thing that was constant in his life with how unpredictable the music industry was.

"Yes."

Somehow, the answer doesn't make you feel better because even with time apart you knew he was lying to save your face.

"You don't owe me anything to lie to my face, Yoongi." You frown.

Yoongi sighs, rubbing his hands across his face as he leaves your statement hanging in the air to mull over his answer.

You prefer the silence that way. It showed that he was at least listening, or cared enough to decide his next set of words. Nothing like how much it pained you to acknowledge the responses you got from him when you were crying were just out of obligation than sincerity.

"No, I wouldn't have."

You nod your head, expectant of the answer but you needed to hear him say it himself rather than drowning yourself in ruminating thoughts of how there was still a semblance of hope that he would've given it up for you, for your relationship—or the life that you were meant to build.

"I wouldn't have asked you to, anyway." You confess.

Yoongi turns his head to look at you and for the first time since you've met at the park, he notices the absence of a necklace around your neck. The necklace that you never took off. He wants to comment on it, ask where it went or if you've pawned it off out of pettiness but he held no remorse towards you. You were tolerant with the break-up even as you sucked in your tears when he knew that it killed you on the inside. Yoongi didn't have the heart in him to ask you.

"Oh."

"You were the one that said you'd quit so we could stay together," You say softly.

Yoongi doesn't respond as he looks back to the night where the two of you sat down to talk about the standing of your relationship. It was a rollercoaster of emotions that started off with an amicable discussion that eventually led to the two of you yelling until you surrendered to your tears and just left the battle completely.

He said a lot of things that night. From things that he's been bottling up for months, to things that he's always wanted to tell you and things that he didn't remotely mean, and things that he's regretted the moment it left his lips.

"I guess I did."

You sigh, leaning back into the bench as you observe a couple walking in front of you, passing your bench as they share an ice cream on a cone; bickering on who'd get the first lick. To anyone, you and Yoongi would've looked just like a couple that has reached a comfortable point in your relationship where intimacy was just sitting next to one another.

But you admit, there was something oddly intimate and heart-breaking about sitting next to someone you've loved with your whole heart and feel nothing but ... weightlessness. Like the burden of your concerns was lifted ever so slightly just being here.

"I wouldn't have made you choose between your relationship or your dream, Yoongi. I would never have done that to you."

Yoongi knew you would never have made him do something as abhorrent as that. You were far too understanding. But you had wanted from him too, that he wasn't willing to provide just yet. He didn't know if it was because of the expiration date to your relationship or because of the stress he was under at work—but he convinced himself that it was you that was asking for too much instead of him compromising too little.

"I ... I know," He whispers, "I'm sorry."

You purse your lips. You try not to let your emotions appear on your sleeve. You were tired of allowing your face to speak before you did. You needed to use the voice you had.

"I loved you so much, Yoongi," You murmur, "I loved you so much that I would have taken anything I could've gotten with you just so I could be with you."

Yoongi stays silent at this.

"I didn't mind if you spent more time at work than at our home. I just wanted to know if I was ever in the picture when you were talking about the future. I know how much you love music and I supported you through every audition and failure ... and to know that I was just—" You swallow, the words still painful to say. But you needed to make your peace with it, "—that I was just someone that would wait for you instead of your partner. That's when I knew that you didn't love me the way I loved you."

Yoongi chokes to speak up but you shake your head.

"No, Yoongi. You loved me, you did. But somewhere along the way you stopped and you just pretended that we were okay even when I was trying my best to fix the seams. I wasn't your girlfriend anymore, I was just someone familiar to you and I didn't deserve to feel that way." You tell him sternly.

Yoongi surrenders to his silence as you take a deep breath to continue.

"Maybe I loved you too much in a way that you couldn't understand."

"_______, don't say that—" His eyes widen when he tries to reach a hand to yours to comfort you, but your body language remains stoic as you keep your hands in your lap.

"—and that's okay Yoongi. I loved you but not in the way you needed. I'm not here to make you feel bad about what I chose to do on my own because it wasn't my fault that I couldn't be what you need." You say sadly, but a small smile on your face as you finally say the words that have been eating at you for months.

"... okay," Yoongi accepts.

"We all have different ways to love and be loved. I loved you and that was enough for you at one point but love isn't all a relationship needs. You loved me too, in your own way and I accepted that but just because it was enough for me doesn't mean it was enough for us." You glance over at him to see him staring at you intently.

"I'm sorry that things turned out this way," Yoongi says softly, eyes gentle.

You wave him off.

"I don't think I'll ever love someone as much as I loved you, though," He confesses, eyes returning to the scene in front of him filled with different colours of life that seemed to look vibrant under the Spring sunset.

You shake your head and chuckle softly.

"You say that now but you'll meet someone one day and you'll remember all the reasons why you love in the first place. And it'll be enough for you, and them."

He shrugs, a small smile itching on his face.

"I really did love you," He says, "But I'm sorry for not being honest with you. I owe you that much of an apology."

"We're not here to forgive or forget, Yoongi," You look at him kindly, "We're here to move on."

He purses his lips and hums, nodding his head.

"I hope you get that promotion at work you were talking about months ago, ______." Yoongi offers, a gentle grin marring his face.

"I did," You shrug.

It feels liberating to have achieved something and only feeling content by acknowledging it yourself. Months ago, you would've hurt at the fact that Yoongi didn't know. But the change you welcomed after the end only showed you that there was a new path for you to walk on.

His eyes widen, but eventually, he chuckles and shakes his head, muttering something under his breath that sounded a lot like knew it.

You push yourself off the bench, dusting your hands on your pants as you offer him one last smile before you say goodbye for the second time.

"I hope you find someone who you'll love more than you ever did with me." You tease.

He rolls his eyes.

"Impossible," The grin on his face is easy, and your heart still clenches at the nonchalance, but you don't expect the feeling to go away so easily—nor do you mind. It just shows that you needed to wait and that you were willing to do it.

"Of course you will. You're a musician, Yoongi. You need a muse," You smirk at him as you turn around, a small wave on your hand to say goodbye.

As you walk away and his body gets smaller and smaller from your vision, you turn around to say:

"We don't talk together is a beautiful song."

Yoongi's smile is genuine, and so is his goodbye. A gentle acknowledgment of his hand as he stands up himself, walking to the other direction of where you were headed.

You still had a love for Yoongi, and you suppose you always will. Just like how you would feel pleasant when rediscovering a childhood hobby that triggers a fond memory, or how you love different things in your life in different ways. Whether or not you love someone more than you've ever loved Yoongi isn't your concern, because when love comes in one form, it goes in another.

When you still take the same route you'd usually take with Yoongi after your walks back home, you pass the cafe you used to frequent to see that it's replaced with a new bar. You smile fondly to yourself, shaking your head.

You loved that place.

But eventually, you'll find another cafe with a beautiful interior and a latte to match, and you'll love it too.

[wolvesandpetals]

Loki x Sylvie Post-Finale Fanfiction (Angst, Rated Teen) Part 2 of 2

Part 1 is here:

She never knew it would hurt this much when the person she loves is right in front of her, but she can't reach out and touch him; when she is still her, he is still him, but everything else has changed, like an invisible lever in an old theatre changing the scenery in the background, bringing them both to the part of the play where they are hopelessly lost.

[[MORE]]

All it took was one single moment, one single decision, and everything feels irrevocably broken now. It makes her contemplate on the true nature of relationships, how fragile they are, and how easy it is to shatter them- and her.

The smoke is slowly clearing, and all that seems to be left is a man who is doing his best to keep his distance from her, physically and emotionally.

She can tell from the way he stands with his arms crossed, or his fists clenced when his hands are by his side, that he really doesn't want to hold her hand. How can something so simple as the touch of his fingers be so vital to her existence that it feels like something has been ripped out from inside her?

She wants to reach out and touch him, but she is scared that if he pulls away outright, any hope of reconciliation that she still has left will shatter into pieces.

And she really needs this hope. It's the only thing she still has left. It's the only thing that keeps her going.

---

He looks like a man with a mission.

They spent quite a long time together, running from the TVA, running towards the citadel at the end of time, hoping to achieve their goal of bringing down the one behind the curtains.

But that was her mission, and he was there for her. She was the one behind the wheels, he was the one keeping the sails afloat.

Now it's different. Now he has a defined goal, a glorious purpose.

She's seeing him in a whole new light now, and not just because he has switched to Asgardian leather and metal armors.

As far as she is concerned, she is better off doing it all alone. One woman army, nobody to get in her way, nobody to screw up her plans. Nobody to blame her if it all goes to shit.

Or so it was, until two months ago, when Mobius decided to enlist her help in fixing the multiversal madness.

She has never really worked with people before, and it's weird, to say the least. She never considered herself a team player, but she is finding herself hating the idea less and less lately.

And she swears it has nothing to do with him. Not the fact that they are working together, and seeing his face first thing in the morning brings her a sense of calm that she quite can't explain. Or the fact that their rooms are next to each other and it makes her feel secure enough to finally get some rest at nights. Or that this whole arrangement has kept them on talking terms, when they had gone their own separate ways otherwise.

Nothing to do with that at all.

---

Humans are stupid, and the biggest evidence of this is how they decided that two extremely powerful Gods skilled at magic, enchantment, and defeating an evil extra dimensional cloud that swallows everything it touches, should be delegated to the role of research. "You're clever. You're good at reading people. You can put yourselves in the shoes of the bad guys, no offense", they said, but really, what they meant was, "We can't trust you out in the field much." She knows it, he knows it. She just doesn't know why he's complying.

That's how they find themselves researching every single day.

She likes to think he's not the only reason why she's studying in the library instead of in the comfort of her room, but that'd be a lie.

At first, he chooses to sit at a separate table. But she keeps going over to his to "get his opinion" on something in the file she's reading, and finally, he gives in. Their current arrangement consists of him sitting in the chair in front of her, to the left, prim and proper, while she hoists her feet up on the table.

He falls asleep on the desk one night, face smacked against a file, the tiniest bit of drool forming at the corner of his mouth. It would be a hilarious sight, if her heart wasn't feeling what she can only describe as longing.

They should probably talk about it, like mature adults, but neither of them know how to do that.

All she can do right now is gather the courage to run her fingers through his hair. The touch is hesitant at first, as if one wrong move would make him wake up and push her back to square one. Slowly, she relaxes, letting her fingers dance on his scalp.

He stirs in his sleep. "Please Sif. I'm sorry. Don't cut off my glorious locks, please."

Now this is a story she must hear when things are better.

If things are better.

---

Doctor Strange joins them very briefly, very rarely, but the tension between him and Loki is hard to miss. It's worse than the current situation with her, and that's saying something.

"You don't really like Stephen, do you?"

Something inside him seems to shift, but he masks it behind a non-chalant look immediately and just arches an eyebrow at her. "He's Stephen now, is he?"

"Well, that is his name." She shrugs. "What do you call him?"

"Strange", he spits the word out with an amount of irritation that indicates there definitely is a story there. "That is his name", he mimics.

She can't help the smirk that spreads across her lips. "What did he do to you?"

"Nothing", he lies, ignoring the horrifying flashbacks of thirty minutes of endless falling. Not a single soul must ever know a mere human got the best of him. "What can he do to me? I'm a God among those mortals. He just irks me because he is so pompous, and arrogant, and he ceaselessly uses magic to toy with others."

She pretends to think deeply. "Now where have I seen that before?"

He scoffs. "You mock me, but I am nothing like him. For one, I am not rude."

"He seems fine to me", she declares decisively.

It's the first time in months that he gives her a cheeky grin. "That's because you're rude too."

---

They are still just containing the threats to their world, instead of finding a way to fortify the barriers between worlds and stop the threats from coming.

"Shouldn't we have a plan to seal off the other worlds from ours?" She asks him one day.

"They are working on it." He tells her, and then with a look of worry, adds, "I hope."

There are debates on what to do at the Avengers tower and at the TVA. Nobody seems to agree on what the best course of action is, but everyone seems to be following the general instructions of Doctor Strange.

During one such meeting, a Minuteman makes the mistake of voicing out loud how she wondered if things would be better if they were running according to their old boss's plans.

Sylvie feels the guilt wash over her once more.

"No", Loki tells them all firmly. The determination in his voice takes her completely by surprise. "Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary. The definition’s blurred." She catches him steal a glance at her direction. "We couldn't have left a dictator in charge just because it's convenient. Listen, I'm the bad guy. I've done horrible, unspeakable things. I thought humans needed to be ruled. I wanted to rule. But even I know that it's not right to take away a person's life completely. These are innocent people. You are innocent people. You have families back home, parents, children", a pause and a softening of his features, "-love. A whole past, a whole future. That man had no right to take it away from you."

His powers of persuasion are foreign to her, and it's mesmerizing to watch. Her enchantments cannot hold a candle to how he is able to just talk people into doing what he wants, thinking what he thinks, seeing what he sees.

"He who remains had a plan. One, singular plan, from one, singular man." There is absolute conviction in his voice. "It's not the only way. We'll find another way. A better way."

She has never known what it is like to have someone see you for who you are- broken and flawed, and defend you- even your well-intentioned actions that yielded different results than what you expected and hurt them in the process. She suspects it has been the same for him, a lifetime of not having anyone have his back.

The warm feeling inside her is brand new. What is the name of this? Comfort? Relief?

Happiness?

---

This will be their first time out in the field in a long time, and she feels a little sick to the stomach.

He notices. "Are you alright?"

The concern in his voice tugs at her heartstrings. She nods. She has faced way worse, she shouldn't be so nervous about this, but she is. "I've never done this before."

"We can always just kill him and blame it on the Chitauris", he suggests with a serious face.

"I heard that", Peter yells from the other room, where he is doing whatever it is that teenagers do to prepare for battle.

She shakes her head in disbelief. "I can't believe we're babysitting."

"I've done this before", he assures her, and it surprises her to picture him being entrusted with such a serious task. "The trick is to conjure up illusions that keep them distracted enough to not cry."

She laughs. "You're thinking of infants. This one is a little older."

"I'm over a thousand years old, Sylvie. They're all infants to me."

Peter joins them, mask covering his face so that he doesn't reveal his identity. "So what do I call you? Loki and Loki? That's confusing. How about Loki and Lady Loki? Or is that offensive? I'm not suggesting women are inferior, because they're absolutely not..."

"Does he come with an off switch?" She whispers in horror as Peter rambles on.

Loki grins. With one wave of his hand and a flash of green, Peter's own webbing shoots out and seals his mouth shut.

---

Things are fine but not fine at the same time. He's right there beside her, but not there at all. They have their banters, they have their stolen glances, but they haven't had a meaningful conversation since that first day when she got back. She's been putting it off for a long time, but she knows they really do need to have the talk.

She corners him in his room one evening while he's tinkering with a temporal collar. She takes a seat in the chair next to his bed and rests her hand on the table, leaning her head against her palm, before switching position and crossing her arms and legs. Everything about her posture screams uneasiness. If he notices- he probably does- he doesn't say anything.

"You defended me that day."

He briefly looks up from the task at hand and gives her a soft smile. "Of course."

She blinks. "I don't understand." Her hands involuntary rise up to rub her temples. "If you can justify my actions to them, then how can you still be mad at me?"

"I'm not mad at you", he says without missing a beat.

"Rubbish", her words come out angrier than she intended. This frustration is the result of the months of status quo they have had. She has to know now, one way or the other. "You're distant. You're guarded", she accuses. Then her voice breaks, as she feels a part of her break all over again with her next words. "You don't hold my hand. Why? Tell me."

He abandons the collar and focuses his full attention on her. Staring straight into her eyes, he answers her. "You know why."

"I wouldn't be asking if I did. Look, if it's because I chose the mission over you-"

"-Of course it's not that." He says decisively. Then a sad smile clouds his face. It's the same look he had when she accused him of conning her to gain the throne. "Do you think I'm the type of man who would want a woman to abandon her life-long ambitions just because she has met someone?"

She knows he isn't. But it still doesn't answer why he is so cross with her. "What is it then?"

He pauses for a moment, trying to decide whether he wants to bare his soul out to her once more or not. There are two ways he can go from here- choose to not let her in again and save himself from the hurt, or trust her again and open himself up to potential pain.

Who is he kidding? Pushing her away- keeping her away- doesn't hurt any less.

There were a thousand things that had to go wrong to bring two Lokis from two universes together. A connection like that, it doesn't just happen.

And it doesn't just go away. The pain is constant, it's a part of him, pounding like a second heart every second he has to stop himself from reaching out for her hand.

This has to come to an end.

He takes in a deep breath, bracing himself. "You didn't have to send me away, Sylvie. I wanted to stop you from making the same mistakes I did. But in the end, I didn't care what you chose. I just wanted us to do it together."

She never even imagined this could be the reason for his hurt. All these months spent thinking he hates her for her choices, and now it turns out he is hurt simply because she chose to do it alone? "I'm sorry." She says sincerely. "I just wanted you to be safe."

"And I just wanted to be there with you till the end." He confesses. His eyes shimmer with the emotions he has kept bottled in for so long. "You go, I go."

She doesn't know what to say to that. She has never been good at articulating her feelings. Tears stream down her cheeks at the realisation that even after everything, he is still there for her.

She didn't cry even back at Lamentis when they thought they were going to die. She doesn't let anyone see her cry when she is sad or scared. That's all she has known her whole life. She's used to it by now.

This is new. These are tears of relief. Comfort.

Happiness.

Tentatively, she crosses over to the bed and sits by his side.

It's quiet for a few minutes. But unlike the months of tension so thick she could cut it into splices with her daggers, this is comfortable silence. The kind they had before it all went wrong.

"Did you even miss me?" He whispers.

"What kind of silly question is that? Of course I did." Her shaking hands grab his, and oh how she missed this.

He intertwines their fingers. His eyes draw closed. Bliss. That's the only word for this feeling.

He opens his eyes again and studies her. She's staring back at him, teary-eyed, but with a hopeful smile. "Really? Because you have a really unique way of showing it. You didn't even come looking for me."

"I didn't know how to face you", she tells him honestly. No tricks, no enchantment, no treachery. Not with him. "I didn't know if you even wanted to see me." Her voice grows quieter, dropping to a timbre that perfectly encapsulates her deepest fear. "I thought you hated me."

"Hate you?" He is shocked that she thinks that is even possible, specially after seeing him these last few months. "Sylvie, I'm working with the Avengers. The Avengers. Do you know how much I hate them? They are my nemesis. They're self-righteous, condescending, and so completely dull. Every second with them makes me want to rip their hearts out. Why do you think I'm here with them?"

She thinks she knows. But she needs to hear it anyway.

"It's because of you." He lays it all out on the table. All cards on deck, win or lose. "You've been running away. I have been the one who has been here, trying to hold down the fort, working to fix everything. Because that is what one does when one loves-"

Shit. The word slips out before he realises it.

Their eyes go wide in unison.

"Sylvie, I-"

"-Don't you dare take it back now." She warns him. "I-" She doesn't know how to say it either. They make such a great pair, both equally daft at saying how they feel, like they are teenagers, not Gods who have lived for centuries. "I've been running because I didn't think I could bear the burden of knowing I found you and then I lost you. I don't want to lose you. Not now, not ever."

He kisses the back of her hand, before letting it go. He cups her face, gently caressing her cheeks with his thumbs. "I don't want to lose you either."

She leans in closer, until their foreheads touch. She can feel his breath on her face, warm and soft. That is exactly how she feels inside. "You won't", she promises. "You go, I go."

---

(Quote on Lesser Evil from The Witcher. Thanks for reading!!)

[foxymoxynoona]

You definitely don't sound like your complaining. I think you're allowed to atleast express whatever difficulties you may be facing. Giving you that space is the least we can do for you.

And I understand the want to put that pressure on yourself to write and update regularly, but thats also why I wanted you to know that it's completely okay if you take a tiny break for yourself. You literally do this while having a job and kids, and I can't imagine what kind of superpower you have to balance all of these, and still make time to write for random strangers on the internet. I get it that when you love something you do it even when it's not expected of you, it's just amazing to see you do it still.

And you still managed to update tmwc and I'm so excited because I loooove long chapters. The amended flashback chapter was my favourite and i have read it like more than 10 times now. So thanks again!!

I hope you spend great holiday times with your family! And you can choose not to answer it but I was so curious to know if you dress up for Halloween and if yes what is it gonna be this year?

-😸

Ok GOOD haha. I don't mind people asking for updates probably because it happens so infrequently tbh, I really just meant that there has been more INTEREST in TMWC and so I got a little spooked about whether the next chapter would be good enough. Usually I TRY not to think about my writing like that, and just write what I write take it or leave it, because perfectionism is the death of creativity.

You're so sweet, you and everyone who keeps reminding me to relax about updates. It's funny that my self pressure comes through even over tumblr. I'm awful about this IRL, I make all sorts of arbitrary rules and requirements for myself.

I'm really glad you enjoyed those Amended flashback chapters! I debated so ong about whether to do it that way, I thought it might be boring o too much as a reader.

For Halloween I used to dress up so big, but last year I was having surgery and didn't get to play... I'm not sure what I'll go as this year yet actually!! My kids are Mario and Yoshi (last year they were Mario and Luigi, do you see a trend here.)

Ok I'll share this funny anecdote: my younger one for WEEKS said he wanted to go as a black bean. A single black bean. It's so absurd, I was really excited about it, btu then he saw a Yoshi costume and fell in love. He is still requesting I go as a single black bean. Alas, i will not be 😅 but kids are so funny

[rawliverandcigarettes]

Also, speaking of salarian planets : since Trigestis predicted a planet's existence and location mathematically when all the planets in the Pranas system in ME3 are close enough to be seen from Sur'Kesh (Halegeuse is closer to Pranas than Jupiter is to the Sun), do you have a headcanon to fix that ? Like, faulty interface in ME3, or something fancier, like Trigestis's planet being exploded during the Krogan Rebellions ? I hope I'm not being a bother.

Hello again! I'm sorry it took me AGES to get to it and I will, shamelessly, blame it on new job syndrome again.

So I kind of want to use this ask, if that's okay, to confess something slightly embarrassing coming from a narrative designer and someone who slugged through releasing a fic under the guise of "I want to get it right" for so many years: the more time goes by, the more I realize I am not as much of a lore nerd as I thought I was.

It's more complicated than that actually: I adore, ADORE lore that deepens art thematically. Whatever I can get that gives me insight on societies, culture or characters, even biology/geology **that adds an insight on theme**, love it. Can't get enough (ish when it comes to HH, because I'm actually a coward and I'll get to that).

But lore that exists to fill up Codex pages, lore that I sense have been written under pressure of deadline or does not intrisincally tells me more about why is this story told... It can tire me pretty easily. That's why I do not care, could not possibly care less about the obligatory million details about gun and weaponry in videogame codexes (not just ME), or the fetishism around military hierarchy breakdowns (unless it's used as a jumping point to explore character or world, but it's rarely the case and ends up being just weirdly reverent, nearly ritualistic --the attention given to these details does inform on themes, but way more on what has been prioritized than the actual details in these cases imho). It got way worse since I started doing the work myself; there's at once so many thoughts put on the details, and also so little in certain cases --you just gotta cram something and it's the compromise that you got at the eighth meeting on the matter, and it's kind of meaningless by that point and a weird middle ground nobody is truly happy with, but the deadline's looming and you have bigger fights to concentrate on so whatever, ship it I guess.

A lot of videogame lore gives me this sort of vibes now, and the planet descriptions of Mass Effect, while honestly pack-fulled with treasures of characterization that gives some underwhelming species more characterization that we ever got in the main missions, have probably been written either by a contractor with a tight deadline that proposed concepts fast and had to iterate on the rejects even faster, or by a core team member that did this on the side when no fire was currently roasting the game alive. It's speculation of course, but most of this "codex" game writing is very dense and high-input work that does not really allow for self-reflection or letting the content simmer and slowly shape sense out of itself. So while I love the details and some are so good, I have to admit I generally choose and pick from whatever speaks to me in this sort of descriptors, and it's been a hot while since I last cruised the galaxy searching for these treasures of worldbuilding. I should do it more! But it did slide down as a the bottom of priorities, just like this writing probably did in real life....

But to actually answer your ask instead of going on a weird tangent about game writing work: I'm gonna be honest, I completely forgot about that bit. I could make up an explanation on the spot, but the truth is: I was kind of waiting to get on The Empire of Preys to do a checkpoint on deep salarian lore (especially location related), and have it inform the detailing of the writing past the big lines --actual salarian culture shows up surprisingly little in Halfway Home given Shlee is completely allergic to his salarianness and runs away from it as fast as he can!!!!

Another embarassing confession that I took an even more embarassingly long time to work through: for the first years of working on the project, I felt very vulnerable and defensive about my interpretation of the story and themes, and I was terrified, absolutely terrified of illegitimacy. So confronting myself to lore again after my initial judgement/gut feeling, after all the emotional attachment I put into the story and all the deep meaning it took for me, was not an option I enjoyed at all, and I avoided everything Andromeda because I was so scared of what it could do to my fragile reasonning. Since then I decided I cared way less about doing a completely valid and diligent reading of micro-details of lore than to put my own spin on the universe, in conversation with it rather than restricted and bound by its, sometimes, arbitrary limitations. I still have to ploy around plot points (UGH Cerberus DLC *shakes fist*), but only if I can make it into a Point somehow (I think I did with the aforementioned after years of battling with it). But paradoxically, letting go of this insecurity (which is still in process of deconstruction, I am not completely above it yet) allowed me to rediscover hidden gems of lore, question my biases and interpretations, and helped me deepen my story. So I'm super glad you bring it up, I'll definitively look into it and see if I can twist this inconsistency into A Point or let it go!

I'm sorry I replied exactly 0% of what you asked, but I think the opportunity to go a lil' Author On Main (TM) was too good to pass. Sorryyyyy. ._.