#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.

[goatsandgangsters]

Book Review: Januaries by Olivie Blake

★☆☆☆☆ [1/5 stars]

DNF at 34% / after 4 stories / on page 133

This was a slog, with juvenile writing, flimsy storytelling, and nothing particularly interesting to say.

I tried. I really tried. But after thinking, "I'm not enjoying this. Maybe I'll try one more?" after every single story, I can't do it. I can't try just one more. I'm not strong enough.

The writing style was unimpressive. It alternated between unsuccessfully attempting a lyrical voice and (much more often) writing in what I've now termed "meme voice"—a quippy, modern-slangy, overly casual tone that often jarred with the fantastical fairytale setting. The two styles together clashed, and neither was wielded with much success.

The short stories themselves seemed to take a very long time to accomplish very little. There was a lot of needlessly convoluted setup, where the only payoff was the exact same cookie-cutter couple falling in love. Again. Seemed extremely roundabout. None of these stories are really "doing anything."

I picked this up because the cover is gorgeous and I thought the seasonal framing would make it a good pick for the start of the year. While the cover remains gorgeous and has thankfully not decayed Dorian Gray-style, even the seasonal framing seems arbitrary. Maybe it becomes clearer with later stories in the collection, but so far there hasn't been anything to tie these stories to their particular season thematically. There's no sense of temporality at all, which seems careless given this collection is structured around time.

I try really hard to finish everything that I pick up by choice. I don't DNF lightly. I can't even remember the last time I outright gave up. But my good will as a reader has been completely squandered and I don't think there's any benefit to continuing—either for myself or for this review, which would probably devolve into angry swearing if I tried to force myself through an insurmountable 200 more pages.

I haven't read any Olivie Blake before, though I know of her. Maybe her novels are stronger (short stories are their own unique skill set), but unfortunately I'm not very motivated to find out, as this was a poor first impression.

Below are my notes that I jotted while reading each story:

The Wish Bridge: 2.5 stars Writing is very juvenile. Alternates between attempting a lyrical fairytale voice (itself meh) and extremely modern slang-y phrasing, which is jarring. Feels like flash fiction on tumblr, but not in a good way (aka trying too hard to rules-lawyer a trope or genre convention, instead of telling an actual story). Not a strong start for a collection.

The Audit: 1 star Took a long time to do not very much, which is not a great quality in a short story. The whole setup seemed like a needlessly roundabout way to achieve what it wanted to achieve; I was expecting it to do More based on the premise. The meme-y voice still isn't my favorite, but it fit better for this story and this character. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around someone unironically writing and publishing this story In This Economy. It truly boggles my mind that this story has NOTHING to say about labor OR free will vs destiny. Truly taking the speculative out of spec fic.

TUMBLR EXCLUSIVE: I hated this short story so much that I had to text @opheliaintherushes venting about the bizarre pointless premise, and I think you'll all hate it too, so I'm transcribing my annoyed texts below so you know that I am Justified In My Ire once you understand the plot [editor's note: annoyed texts have been condensed for clarity]: so it's set in what I'm ASSUMING is a near-future sci-fi setting where using ~technology, they have this new pilot program where people in their 20s can find out how much money they're going to earn in their entire life, get the whole lump sum upfront as a loan, go enjoy their youth, and then when they're like 35 they go do whatever job they're "meant to do" that earns them all that money in the first place You might think the point of this setup is to explore something about work or wealth or youth or capitalism. You would be wrong. Our annoying 20-something protagonist finds out the ~terrible news that she now has 40 MILLION DOLLARS IN HER BANK ACCOUNT. She has to go to grad school when she's 30 so she can get the qualifications for her job at age 35, but otherwise she has a decade to enjoy HAVING 40 MILLION DOLLARS Also did the question of free will or fate factor into this ever? No. It did not. She spends the entire short story doing absolutely nothing. She said she was going to quit her job to travel. She doesn't do this. She repeatedly GOES TO WORK. (She works in, wait for it, a bookstore because of course she does of COURSE she fucking does. and it's a ~chill bookstore that makes all its money selling rare books so she doesn't have to do like, any work). It is so many pages of her just like, considering buying Nice Chocolate and then getting stressed and not buying it. And then continuing to go to work The thing that she DOES do is repeatedly hang out with her downstairs neighbor in his apartment that he never leaves ever. He only got several hundred-thousand dollars, because he's going to die young, which is why he's stopped leaving the apartment (again: do questions of fate come into play here? No) They fall in love, which apparently was the actual point of this short story. Seems like a whole lot of unnecessary setup to me just to write a story about falling in love with your weird neighbor So anyway, after doing absolutely nothing with her 40 MILLION DOLLARS for like twenty pages except think about how she doesn't really know what to do with it, it ends with her renting a bunch of famous paintings from museums and bringing them to this guy's apartment so that he can enjoy them without leaving his apartment. The end. hold onto your blood pressure, but her roommate is in law school (she chose not to find out her ~destiny) and the protagonist is like "do you want me to like, pay for law school" and the roommate says no (??) and the protagonist is like "I just want to make things easier on you" and the roommate says AND I QUOTE "things being easy isn't the point." which like WHAT. in this economy????? Why are you setting up a story about WEALTH AND FATE AND PREDESTINATION AND WORK to literally just bone your neighbor I'm literally staring at the wall of my cubicle and thinking "I don't know if I can do it. I'm not strong enough." Usually books that I hate take longer than this to go off the rails. It's been 51 pages. There's 300 more.

this was also the point when I came on tumblr and complained to you all about my suffering, but then I continued to read two more stories "just in case it got better." It didn't.

Sucker for Pain: 3.5 stars On a style level, the writing was worlds better than the first two. But in terms of plot and character, it was basically every YA paranormal fantasy that's ever been written condensed into 40 pages, so it wasn't really for me. At least that there was some degree of prose.

My feeling is again that we just sort of meandered around for 40 pages. There isn't a strong sense of purpose here, or that real kick that short stories are meant to have. So far none of these have been Doing Anything in a storytelling sense

The Animation Games: 2 stars Well, this one went in directions I did not expect, which is not the same as Doing Something. Again took too long to do very little of substance and unfortunately it devolved into meme-y-ness and a very typical couple dynamic that's been done to (ha) death. I kept looking at the number of pages and feeling deeply frustrated that there were more of them. Romantically murdering each other with weird antics like somebody decided they wanted Tom/Jerry instead of Tom & Jerry went on for an excruciating number of pages.

Shoutout to one of the worst sentences I've ever read: "He let the water coat his lips, seeping coolly onto his tongue, before it slithered gradually down his throat and settled conclusively in his stomach." Slithered? Settled conclusively?? Maybe I shouldn't have complained about the meme voice if this is what her attempts at being lyrical are like. But unfortunately this sentence lives in the same story as meme-voice dialogue such as "I sort of assumed you were the regular kind of dead." It's painful.

The only thing I felt after this story was exhausted relief that it was over.

In conclusion: I would recommend this book to people who want to look at the cover without ever opening it.

[cultivating-wildflowers]

2024 Reading - March

By now it is clear that I will not achieve my arbitrary goal of reading 100 books this year, and that's fine. My overall progress so far is what I really care about. I am confronting my TBR, I've already read a good number of nonfics, and for the most part my reading has been enjoyable.

While I do have some large books coming up on my list, I am hoping to set aside a little time in April to get to a couple of anticipated rereads (finally) because I'm starting to crave a change of pace into something more familiar.

Total books: 4  |  New reads: 4   |   2024 TBR completed: 5 (2 DNF) / 9/36 total   |   2024 Reading Goal: 11/100

February | April

potential reading list from March 1st

#1 - Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis by Gina Dalfonzo - 4/5 stars (audio)

After the whole Thing with The Mutual Admiration Society, I went into this book with no small amount of trepidation.

I was immediately put at ease.

This was a surprisingly cozy little book that accomplished what it set out to do. It wasn't horribly deep, but it was thorough and heartwarming. And I found myself cheering when I discovered that Sayers and I apparently have the same opinions about a certain aspect of Paradise Lost, so that was fun.

It does lose a star for spending what felt like too long on the Charles Williams scandal. I think the writer was trying to make a point but I'm a bit lost on what it was.

Notes: 1) Do not get the audiobook if you are at all put off by poor pronunciation and enunciation. The narrator couldn't even say "Pevensie" correctly. 2) I have to be objective, since I kicked up such a stink with the last Sayers-adjacent nonfic I tried, and say there is a bit of bias to this one, with the writer coming from an Evangelical background. It's not overpowering but I would say it informs Dalfonzo's approach. (Which...is how writing works. Whatever.)

#2 - Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik - 5/5 stars ('24 TBR)

"There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That it what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away."

I haven't had much luck with Novik in the past. I read Uprooted probably six years ago and remember it struck me as kind of bland and disjointed. When A Deadly Education was released I picked it up, excited by the premise, but didn't make it through the first chapter. I was starting to think Novik's style just wasn't for me.

Then while chatting with Elsabet (@eddis-not-eeddis), she mentioned how much she loves Spinning Silver and urged me to give it a try, so here we are.

Friends.

I did in fact enjoy it quite a lot.

The standout aspect for me is how Novik writes relationships. Any kind of relationship. Even the little ones that barely get a paragraph's mention. And then we get to see how those relationships build bonds, build links, make their own kind of magic, and I'm sold. This is how you flesh out characters. And this is how you make me care about them and connect with them.

Novik still has a very distinct style that sometimes trips me up, but it works.

(side note: I always forget Novik helped found AO3, and every time I'm reminded I go "oh yeah! good for her!)

More like this: "The Bear and the Nightingale" by Katherine Arden; "Anya and the Dragon" by Sofiya Pasternack (middle grade but the same sort of vibes); "Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow" by Jessica Day George.

#3 - A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan - 4/5 stars ('24 TBR, audio)

Fantastically written, well-paced, with an engaging narrative and a solid cast of characters. However, it works well as a stand-alone and I’m not sure whether or not I’ll continue the series. There was something in it that was lacking for me personally. I would definitely recommend it, though!

More like this: the Emily Wilde series; the Frontier Magic trilogy by Patricia C. Wrede.

#4 - South With the Sun: Roald Amundsen, His Polar Explorations, and the Quest for Discovery by Lynne Cox - 3/5 stars ('24 TBR)

If you’re looking for a book that's strictly about Roald Amundsen, don't start here. This book is half a general history of 19th century polar exploration leading up to Roald Amundsen; and half a recounting of some of Lynne Cox’s swimming accomplishments, which were largely inspired by Amundsen's work and travels.

I also wouldn't recommend this as a starting-off point for people who aren't familiar with the details of Lynne's story, since she ties so much of that into Amundsen's story.

Overall, it was a decent enough read. Lynne's passion and enthusiasm are plain all throughout the story, but her writing voice is lacking and parts of the book--especially those focusing on Amundsen's various expeditions--were clumsily written and difficult to follow. Amundsen finally crossing the North Pole received a grand total of one paragraph and was so unclear that I had to read it twice and then google the details of the endeavor to understand the significance of the dates listed. The last hundred pages are a proper muddle.

DNF

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern ('24 TBR) - Another book that was strongly recommended by a tumblr mutual! I wanted to like this one, and not just for Jules's sake. I gave it about 15% but it wasn’t clicking and I kept getting lost. Some reviews say the first part is rough, so maybe I’ll give this another try later. Don’t hate me, Jules 😅.

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher ('24 TBR) - I will not apologize for not finishing this one. I'm straight-up ticked off.

The story started out strong (despite me being pathetic and having to really power through the stressful parts). It set a good pace AND the story was straight-forward and compelling. The first red flag was the writing style because my. stars. Did we have to get ominous, melodramatic, foreshadow-y asides practically every single chapter? Could be my fresh-from-DNFing self talking, but the whole voice came off as pretentious trying for profound. [Edit from after browsing 1- and 2-star reviews: it's not just me.]

I decided to put up with it because I honestly did want to know how the story would end. But it just dragged on and on with no direction. Stuff just...happened. And I got bored.

So I looked up reviews. And found spoilers. And rage-skimmed the last few chapters.

Friends. If you can get to the half-way mark in the story you're telling without even a hint of setting up for a stunt like that ending, you're doing it wrong.

Don't read this book. It's dumb.

Currently Reading:

Recorder by Cathy McCrumb (reread)

[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?

[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

[projecthipster]

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)

Art by Adrián de la Cruz. Probably the only one that shows the overwhelming scale of this novel. Notice how it wraps around on itself? Like it doesn't really have a beginning or an end, just an arbitrary cut-off point in the infinite cycle.

"Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”

So we come to it at last. The absolute brick of a novel for truly defining hipster cred. I’ve done it, Ma. I read the giant tennis killer movie book. It took up all the summer of 2024 and a bit beyond. Apparently I started in May and finished in September, though I knew there were some pre-May abortive attempts. For those months I would take it in my bag to work, reading a few tiny-print large-paper pages on the train there. At work I would leave it in the office stashed in a sneaky place because no way I'm carrying that around while leading a bike tour. Then a few more pages on the train home. A few pages before bed, finishing a chapter if that was possible. There were a few road trips in there where I had time to plow through a hundred pages over a weekend. And did all those big pages of tiny print change me?

Well, every book changes every reader a bit, I hope. 

One chapter of Infinite Jest begins: The following things in the room were blue. And then the text goes on to list blue things. I know the book predates the Tumblr-originated¹ “The Curtains Were Fucking Blue” meme, by way of predating Tumblr and most of the entire internet. But the way this chapter starts feels like it’s taking the piss out of that dumb meme. I just don’t know which way it seems to be arguing. Infinite Jest is a book replete with metaphor and very few of its many proverbial curtains are ever actually just blue. But at the same time David Foster Wallace seemed to enjoy poking fun at literary critics who took their job of looking for symbols in made-up stories all too seriously. Or maybe he liked to poke fun at authors who tried to outsmart the previous to show off themselves. There are other chunks of Infinite Jest that all but say as much. It doesn’t matter anyway because descriptions of blue things in rooms as shorthand for discourse on symbolism in fiction postdates the writing of this particular explicit description of blue things in a room. But so much else in this book seems prophetic to the point of indicating some time travel shenanigans, so why not this paragraph too?

Listen. I already said listen, but listen again. I’ve read plenty of books that are told out of chronological timeline order. But this one is so notoriously out of order, and maybe it’s to the point that even the commentary and implicit meaning is out of order from when it was actually written?

Some people will tell you that this is a novel that can’t be summarized, that it’s too sprawling, too rambling, too nontraditional in its plot structure. And it is those things. But get past the fact that the chronology is intentionally opaque, being set in a dystopian future 2009² in which names of years themselves have been sold for sponsorships, so you need to reference either a specific post-it-noted page or a secondary page of notes to complete equations like “Year of the Whisper-Quiet Dishwasher minus Year of the Whopper,” get past that fact and the non-chronology is nothing you haven’t seen in any CG animated movie that freeze-frames on a record scratch at the end of an opening scene and tells the viewer that they’re probably wondering how our plucky rodent hero ended up in this situation, before flashing back to reveal the 90-minute answer.

In this case our animated rodent is Hal Incandenza, a teenage tennis prodigy who goes nonverbal during a college admissions interview and is gurneyed away to some sort of institution. The trigger phrase for the novel to flash back– and by some argument the last sentence in the book, chronologically speaking, although it’s only at the end of the first chapter – is a deceptively casual “So yo man what’s your story?”

This is Hal’s story. But all of our stories are the stories of how we relate to the world, so if we’re to understand why and how this kid got pushed to the edge, we need to know the world that pushed him. Thus begins what feels for a few hundred more pages like a thematically loosely linked connection of short stories describing the sort of world – a half step removed into speculative fiction from the 1996 of its writing, maybe a quarter or an eighth of a step removed from our contemporary setting of reading – that would of course inevitably drive a smart, perceptive kid into a breakdown. A relatable structure, then, to say the least, but far from an escapist one, which tracks given that this is pretty explicitly a polemic against media escapism.

And the picture painted by the suddenly wide-open story structure is one of economic despair, transparently concealed political chaos, paltry and desperate attempts at personal communication, omnipresent entertainment, and absolutely universal addiction. The first character we meet in the flashbacks is just sitting in his room, paralyzed by analysis paralysis from his Netflix queue³ while he waits on the delivery of a weed stock that he promises this time will be the last he ever smokes, unlike every other time he said that. Then we meet cross-dressing male prostitutes and unwittingly manslaughtering addict burglars and suicidal young women curling up in hospital beds and bathtubs and abused teenagers and people vomiting blood in alleyways from Drano-tainted heroin and so on and so on and it is hard to read, this swim into parallel lives of fictionalized versions of the people the reader can see when they look up from the page and see, down the train car, a faceless figure in three layered tattered hoodies, bent nearly double with their eyes to their ankles, shaking and muttering. Smellable from all the way down here. But reading these stories tempers the natural fear of that sight too, going into the humanity of the figures we glance over to keep from thinking about them. “Books are empathy machines.” I thought this quote was from some great writer of classic deeply witty fiction, so I looked it up and it turns out it’s from Diary of a Wimpy Kid creator Jeff Kinney. So I was right. Oh, yeah, and there’s a mysterious movie that kills anyone who watches it through a deeply compulsive need to do nothing else but put it on repeat as the viewer starves in their lay-z-boy.

Eventually, the lines begin to converge. Maybe it’s impossible to sum up the plot of Infinite Jest in a sentence. Well, I like to think I’m good at sentences, so here’s my attempt.

In an alternate-future 2000s wherein paraplegic assassins seek revenge on the USA for annexing Canada as an excuse to literally catapult toxic waste into Quebec, addicts converge in a recovery house on one side of a hill in suburban Boston, while over the hill at an exclusive tennis academy a dysfunctional family deals with the political and psychological fallout of their late patriarch having created ASMR so good it kills people.

Ok, so that’s a long sentence, but it’s grammatically fine and there’s only one period there. It’s a “Jesus wept” compared to some of the multi-page run-on sentences Wallace tries to pretend are coherent in this book, believe me. 

And by the way, I should probably mention that THIS IS A SATIRICAL FICTION BOOK, WHICH IS WHY IT SHOWS CANADA AND MEXICO BEING ABSORBED INTO THE STATES, A THING THAT COULD NEVER AND WILL NEVER HAPPEN and anyone suggesting otherwise ought to be exiled without a boat to that sub-Antarctic active volcanic island. I don’t believe in the death sentence which is why my recommendation isn’t one. Exilees will get matches and a pot so they can melt snow for water, and they can eat penguins and algae. But if the volcano gets active, eh, can’t control geology. I’m naming no names but you may be thinking them.⁴

That terse summary up there does I think get to the heart of the thing. It’s an upstairs-downstairs drama, a study in social contrasts. While the rich tennis school kids are all isolated by pressure and competition, the addicts across the hill form a community, in the case of some characters more successfully than others. We also zoom a bit on our few true main characters. Hal is there, of course, and his disabled brother Mario, who in his unshakable kindness is really the heart of the novel. Across the hill the novel focuses in on the burgeoning relationship between muscular former-narcotics-addict burglar-turned-House-staff Don Gately and new arrival Joelle, who we learn was in that killer addictive movie that’s spreading its deadly influence across North America, filmed by none other than James Incandenza, Hal and Mario’s father. And the scattered pieces begin to connect. The philosophical coda provided in the series of chapters in which a government agent and a Quebecois terrorist discuss the Meaning of America doesn't really connect to the plot aside from to provide lots more worldbuilding background and in a few implied spots, but serves as a sort of meta-analysis to guide the reader thematically through.

I guess I could say that this summary might spoil the plot. We are so far removed from the world of the sort of story where spoilers matter, honestly. But there is a great satisfaction in realizing the connections as a reader. So, retroactive spoiler warning, I suppose. This is non-chronological too. So yo man what’s your spoiler?

Case in point of making satisfying connections: by almost page 800, Wallace finally, finally, describes what the deadly addictive Entertainment actually is, how it was made and what’s onscreen. And it’s like ah shit the threads come together. Everyone in the book (in the world?) is addicted to some form, either chemical or psychological, of escape from the two omnipresent psychic burdens of adult consciousness, the black wave that Kate Gompert describes.

That you and only you are ultimately responsible for your own life, and

That no matter what you do therein, you’ll die anyway.

And with a patent baby’s-eye lens laid down in a cradle, with Joelle the Freudian-psychological ideal of motherhood leaning over it telling of reincarnation, James Incandenza created a perfect simulacrum of a return to a pre-conscious early childhood state of ideal dependence, so technically immersive that there’s no suspension of disbelief and the adult psyche is totally obliterated while watching. And plus in this dependent subconscious totally absorptive state, Joelle as mother figure presents this theory of reincarnation, assuaging the death fear in a sort of religious revelation absent the doubt or duty of traditional religion. No wonder no one can wilfully return to consciousness after that. It’s the obliteration of the anxious self that everyone is looking for, whether directly through drugs or sex or media entertainment, or indirectly through utter obsession with competition or work or ideology. Or utterly and finally, through suicide, the call for escape that almost claims Kate in the book and tragically did claim Wallace in real life.

The only real solution — at least for a while — is the seeming naivety of the shrugged-off disabled and recovering like Mario and Gately, is to connect genuinely with other people and share your fears and realize you’re not alone. That’s why irony is such an insidious poison: in its disdain for real emotion and heartfelt outpourings it convinces us that we can only connect to other people at a distance. But without those connections we can only assuage the fears that are the human condition by falling into self destructive habits to try to obliterate them outright from our minds.

Anyway. Book's about tennis. RIP DFW you would have liked Father John Misty and fuckin despised TikTok with every fibre of your being. There I go distancing myself with irony again. Goddammit.

I give this Hipster book Thirty-Love.

Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.

This review comes from nomially the twenty-first list, The Most Hipster Books of All Time, but it's probably one of the most universally present ones across all the lists.

Up next: one of the few records I actually have listened to in the proper way.

Stay deck.

By Poor Yorick Entertainment

¹ I think it started on Tumblr but it's remarkably hard to find the original screenshot¹ᵃ

² Probably, by calculation, though of course it's not called that.

³ It’s not called that, it’s called Interlace, but you could sub in the words and change nothing else. It's a streaming service.

⁴ The name is of course Johnny Gentle, germaphobic pompadoured lounge crooner turned continental president.

¹ᵃ These endnotes, and the endnotes within the footnotes, are here because Wallace does that same thing in Infinite Jest, by the way. Some of the notes, found in a hundred-page chunk at the end of the book, go on for dozens of pages. In some chapters in the main text, there is technically no text in the chapter at all, only a reference to an chapter-long endnote. This is why it's useful to have at least two bookmarks, because you kind of have to read in order twice at once. Having some extra notes to pages with interpretation guides and sponsored calendars and such is useful too. Wallace did this to make the act of reading more involved, less passive, and even more non-chronological, just like how our lifelong experience of trying to understand the world that created us is an out-of-order ever-deeper fractal detailing of our own history. Or something.

[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!

[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

[nietzsche-mustache]

Since you're not joking:

You're confused because you're treating postmodernism like a meme instead of a historical and philosophical shift.

Postmodernism isn’t one thing. It’s a label applied (sometimes retroactively, sometimes loosely) to a set of cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic responses to modernism and Enlightenment thinking - especially after WWII. It's more a sensibility than a unified theory.

(And you would know that much about postmodernism from 30 minutes of Googling and reading if you'd put any sincere effort into it.)

No, it's not just "no objective truth." You're right that skepticism about truth goes back to the Sophists. But postmodernism isn’t recycling that - it's responding to modernist claims about universal reason, scientific progress, and the stability of meaning. Postmodern thinkers didn’t invent relativism, they situated it in the wreckage of modernity.

Modernism = the world can be understood through rational structures. Grand narratives, formalism, utopian visions.

Postmodernism = those structures were often power plays in disguise. Think irony, fragmentation, suspicion of meta-narratives.

You don't "accidentally" do postmodernism by reading structuralism, hermeneutics, or D&G. Those are related, but not identical. Structuralists tried to find systems beneath meaning. Postmodernists asked: What if the systems are the meaning? What if they’re arbitrary or ideological?

You’re conflating completely unrelated figures. Nick Land isn’t postmodern, he's post-everything, more adjacent to accelerationist horror than anything Foucault or Lyotard wrote. D&G aren't doing "deeper materialist analysis" - they're mapping flows, ruptures, intensities. You're slapping Marxist labels on things you haven’t actually digested... and probably haven't read.

If your takeaway is "I'm confused and therefore this must be bullshit," that’s not skepticism. That's intellectual laziness with an ironic Gen Z filter. Saying "even people who read this don't get it" is not an argument - it's just you admitting you've never attempted it, bragging that confusion is your comfort zone, and resolving to stay there, never actually engaging with ideas that challenge you.

If you change your mind and would like to actually engage with these ideas, start with Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. Then read Foucault's What Is an Author? and Discipline and Punish.

If that’s too much, read Jameson on postmodernism. If that’s too much, just admit you like sounding smart more than you like actually understanding things.

Because right now, you’re doing a shallow bit. It's juvenile, it's obnoxious, and it only impresses your friends who know even less than you do.

It was a meme offering a chuckle to people who have read these things, and you treated it like a chance to show how smart you think you are - like a 4-year-old being proud they won a game of checkers against the pigeon they stumbled across in the park.

Please consider discussing this choice with your therapist.

Postmodernism's rejection of truth has hurt us more than is generally understood.

[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. ._.

[burgerpocalypse]

Back 4 Blood Beta

It's not good. I don't recommend buying or playing this game. Avoid it. If you like it, you're actually wrong.

I'll be directly comparing Back 4 Blood to Left 4 Dead because it's the same development team (supposedly). I'm also in an especially unforgiving mood, so this will be an outwardly hostile discussion of this terrible product. If you think I'm just being overly negative and want the game to fail because I'm an asshole, well, yeah, I am, but this shoddy product deserves considerable ire and I won't be convinced otherwise.

Some publications and individuals are calling it good, a worthy successor to L4D. They're wrong. L4D was a charming, polished, streamlined game. B4B is passionless, janky, and complicated. It makes mistakes that L4D solved or cleverly avoided, and introduces critical issues that ruin the experience.

Game Feel

Shooting feels weak and unresponsive, slows your movement speed, and requires aim-down-sights to have any accuracy.

Basic movement is slow and plodding. Sprinting drains stamina almost instantly, and is barely faster

Melee attacks rapidly drains stamina and has dubious reach; shoving enemies provides almost no benefit unless you have a specific perk card.

Zombies (or Ridden, a terrible, thoughtless name for zombies) shumble at you like they're competing for the Jank Olympics. One zombie can drain your health bar in seconds through sheer jankitude.

Players will regularly be yeeted, and it will seem like you just experienced an unintended bug or glitch rather than a deliberate force.

You're constantly taking damage from random, unidentifiable sources.

In summary, the game feel of this particular game is woeful.

Characters and Monsters

I hate the player characters. Well, that's a lie. HG, the prepper guy, or whatever his name is, is the only one I don't hate. He doesn't say cringeworthy lines, and he has a definable personality beyond broad emotional traits or bog-standard tropes. Player animations are also jank

The Ridden, which I will reiterate are named terribly, are indistinguishable from each other, players, and the environment. The common zombies are of the same color and height as players, so you're gonna probably be shooting teammates a lot, especially when everyone's covered in blood effects. Special zombies are awfully designed, to the point that I have to complain about them for the rest of this section. They:

are unpredictable, in a bad way

have entirely too much health with easily missed weak points

do far too much damage from unreasonable distances

move faster than the player's default speed, and can charge for extended distances

often appear in multiples and crowd chokepoints

The Hocker operates like the Smoker from L4D, but can lock down multiple players at once, chunk your health from great distances, and repeatedly jump from vantage point to vantage point at random. Its name is also stupid.

The Snitcher calls more zombies if you shoot it, which isn't obvious at all until you end up shooting it and call more zombies. It's also a key mistake that the developers of L4D avoided through rigorous playtesting, which allowed them to see that a similarly designed enemy was completely unfair, resulting in it being cut from the final release. Its name is also stupid.

The big fat guy can douse you in health-draining bile from 50 meters away, is difficult to kill, and has a variant that charge you and explode. This like they took the Boomer and made it worse in uniquely awful ways, just to see if they could. I don't remember the name, but its probably stupid.

The big arm guy can thwack you for 50% of your health bar, pin you in place, is also difficult to kill, and has a variant that is even more difficult to kill. I don't remember his name either, bu its definitely stupid.

The final one I can remember is the one that sits in a flesh pod and ambushes a player that gets too close, pinning them exactly like the Hunter would. The flesh pod blends into the environment in an especially egregious way, and the enemy itself looks stupid. Its names is also probably stupid.

Difficulty

I've cut my teeth on L4D and other coop shooters. I've beaten all the official campaigns on Expert. This game is stupid hard and unforgiving to such a degree that I fully believe that the developers do not understand at all what made L4D fun.

As players lose health, they also accrue trauma, which reduces maximum HP, potentially down to 40 HP. This cannot be recovered, even after respawning at a safe room or midround, unless you find a special medicine locker, which costs copper to use.

Levels are far too long, and there is never, ever any room to breathe. Players are constantly assaulted by zombies from all angles with no sense of rhythm or dramatic tension.

Levels also have no flow. Players will feel as though they are randomly wandering with no sense that they are being led in a particular direction. In L4D, the player characters would constantly be making observations about the environment (i.e. "Up that ladder!" or "We can use X to get across"). While L4D used tooltips to point out important objects, B4B relies entirely upon them.

Players have an elaborate inventory and currency system that is confusing and unreliable. Instead of providing healing and ammo at the start of each level, players have to buy it with copper. Like, literal in-game microtransactions. Each player has a unique wallet, though any copper picked up is given to all players equally. The copper system is an unnecessary addition that serves to slow down the start of a round.

Players can hold one offensive, healing, and support item. Medkits are not given a specific item slot, but instead compete with bandages and pills for inventory space. Guns and melee weapons also have tiers and ranks that are ill-defined. I have an extensive list of gripes I could go on about with this system, but I'll list some key issues:

There are too many items of each type, and they are too plentiful in the environment to be worth spending copper on

Ammo is broken into 4 types, which can leave you with lots of ammo for a weapon type you aren't using and no ammo for the gun you're actually using

Weapon attachments and ammo upgrades do nothing but provide confusion and force you to stop and stare at a stat screen to understand what it is you're adding to your gun. You also can't transfer them between guns, so you'll eventually have to swap a lower-tier gun with great attachments for a higher-tier gun with no attachments

Some offensive items do not behave in the way you expect them to, or provide so little value that they aren't worth using

Bandages and medkits operate identically, offering no interesting decision-making opportunities

The efficacy of healing items in general is needlessly reduced by players being able to heal by killing enemies, as well as trauma reducing max HP to the point that they don't provide any value

The Legacy of Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead provided a tightly packaged experience that nearly anyone could pick up on, and has a satisfying core loop that kept me coming back for years in spite of its many obvious glaring flaws. It was not bogged down by unnecessary progression systems or overly complex mechanics.

Since Valve allowed the series to shrivel and die, there has been no refinement of the mechanics that give L4D its magic, only inferior imitations that do not understand why things were they way they were.

Warhammer: Vermintide fails by being too complex, with vast differences between player characters, and an awful gear system that locks players out of higher difficulties with an arbitrary power system and random lootboxes

PAYDAY has zero polish, an unfathomably dull progression system, uninspired characters, awful artificial difficulty, and generally wastes the player's time with crushing amounts of busy work and waiting around

Back 4 Blood could have been great, but it completely misses the point. I'm going to try and play more of it while the beta is open, since I'm a miserable masochist, but also because some small part of me still wants to like it.

I'm sorry that this was so long and uncoordinated. I also apologize if you do enjoy the game. I just hope that I was able to provide a unique perspective of some small value to someone.

Thanks for reading. Sorry there's no interesting art to look at. I only put that comically small cover image there because it made me feel slightly better.

[mittensmorgul]

When I'm writing fic, I typically end chapters when I feel story-wise, it's a good place to do so, but in general, how many pages is considered too short or too long? Mine typically run between 11-14 pages for each chapter.

Hi there! I’m gonna start by saying that “pages” is an arbitrary designation. Just alter your margins, your line spacing, or your font, and what was 11 pages could suddenly be 30 pages (or 2 pages, if you smoosh everything down really tiny). I don’t even think of my own writing in terms of “pages” because I use a relatively tight font and single space everything. My “page” is usually about 600-800 words, depending on whether I’m writing dialogue (more hard returns, and therefore more “space”) or exposition (more big chonks of text). So that doesn’t really tell me much about your chapter length, you know? If you’re writing in 16 pt double spaced comic sans (don’t laugh, some authors SWEAR by it as their writing font of choice), those are probably pretty short chapters. If you’re writing in 11 pt single spaced Georgia, they’re gonna be on the long side.

And if you’re posting your writing on AO3, “pages” aren’t really a thing there, either. Which is why everything there is measured in wordcount.

Now that we have that clarified, I’ll go on to say your original assumption is totally valid, good, and wise. Just like sentences and paragraphs, chapters are as long as they need to be. I mean, yes we could say that some sentences are too short (like a sentence fragment, or one that doesn’t convey a complete thought). Some sentences are too long (at least throw a semicolon in that somewhere ffs if it’s rambling on and on like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy) (for reference that’s a 22k word rambling internal monologue with no. periods. at. all.) (so like... you can break the rules sometimes).

(just know what you’re doing if you intend to break the rules that badly...)

But as for chapters? Just like with sentences that end when the thought is complete, and paragraphs that end when the idea is complete, chapters should end when the theme is complete. A “too short” chapter is one that hasn’t reached its objective. A “too long” chapter is one that continues on after its objective has been reached.

Don’t try to stuff things into chapters to beef them up to some arbitrary word or page count. Readers will get bored reading a bunch of filler. Don’t arbitrarily end a chapter if it has surpassed your “usual” length just to keep chapter lengths consistent. You wouldn’t do that with sentences, either, you know? You wouldn’t just keep typing words because your current sentence was “too short.” And you wouldn’t put a period in the middle of a sentence because it was running too long.

I mean, yeah, if you’ve got a 97 word sentence, you could probably edit that puppy down into separate thoughts, but sometimes the 97 word sentence is the right length, too...

(not usually... a 97 word sentence is probably stupid long, actually, but if it NEEDS to be that many words, you don’t randomly take a hatchet to it, either.)

Chapters within a single work don’t all need to be similar in length either. Some chapters will contain multiple scenes because they are thematically correlated. Some chapters will contain a single scene, or a transition scene between other larger chapters. THIS IS ALL TOTALLY VALID AND GOOD AND CORRECT!

There’s no such thing as “a good length for chapters.” There’s only “this chapter is a good length because it serves its function within the story.”