#EDIT: i feel like maybe this is worth adding. at the core of all this is

[cakemoney]

once in a while i contemplate what was going to happen to evan, back in season 1 when he asked for the Procedure to Make Him Normal. because, like, we realized that that's a lie, right? we realized at the big reveal that there isn't anything that makes someone capable or incapable of magic; everyone on earth could do magic if they were aware of it and were taught how to do it. there wasn't a thing that could be taken out or a switch that could be flipped; everyone was magic all along, had been even before some british assholes built a secret society on it. evan was never going to stop being magic.

so, like, what was philtrum's plan. were they going to just wipe evan's memories and drop him back where he was before? would they try to erase all of evan's memories that involve magic, including all the scary demon shit that happened throughout his life? or would they just cut out his knowledge of gowpenny, and essentially rewind him to before he got that first owl? if he doesn't remember gowpenny, he's not gonna remember that he was supposed to have a procedure that fixed him anyway, so what does it matter?

i don't remember clearly, but i believe (?) the whole procedure thing was one of the ways philtrum was trying to get the whole pilot program declared a failure, so maybe wiping all their memories and sending them back without knowledge of gowpenny or magic or each other was always part of her plan. but even if they no longer remember what magic is, they will still have the potential of magic, and that could be an issue with evan, right? philtrum and co. don't know everything about evan's demon stuff, but she must've noticed from the beginning that something about evan isn't right. evan's familiar is his own shadow; in every conversation with him, evan has spoken of magic as something that he had a pre-existing relationship with (namely, a bad relationship where he is scared of magic because it has caused bad stuff to happen to him). for all the others, if gowpenny was removed from their lives, may never cast another spell again, but it's hard to be sure of that with evan; philtrum didn't know concrete details about the demons, but she also didn't know that sam managed to charm them into leaving. what happens if Bad Magic Shit happens to evan again, and something leads evan to remembering or finding out about gowpenny anyway? evan could be some kind of prophecied dark wizard, which probably isn't a foreign concept for a headmistress who runs a school where there is a whole house for kids who've been labeled evil; if they return him to america and he's left to his own devices, how can they be sure that he doesn't Cause Problems for wizard society later?

what i mean is. we already know philtrum's tried multiple times to get evan killed; we know she feels contempt for the pilot program and want to get rid of them and protect the status quo. and evan has no family to go back to; the only people who would care enough to miss him would have no way of knowing where he's gone and what's happened to him, and hopefully would not remember him once this whole ordeal was over.

she was probably going to kill him, right? like, why waste time performing complex magic brain surgery on this kid? she's got no issues with lying, manipulation, and child murder. if evan had ended up going to the nebulous Appointment, philtrum was probably going to straight up kill him, or at least try to. and for the first time in his life, the shadows and demons wouldn't be around to protect him.

[fellspawn]

honestly fuck it what if KI removed the concept of choosing and "locking in" your school when you create your character. instead they make it where you can play as whatever school you want at any time on one character. to do this, you'd have to only be wearing one school's gear at a time, and then you'd only be able to cast that school's spells (with the exception of astral/shadow) while you're wearing said school's gear. for example if you're currently death and want to play as fire, you'd unequip all your death gear and equip fire gear which would then only let you cast fire spells. once you equip a piece of fire gear in this case, you wouldn't be able to equip gear of another school or use other school's spells until you take off any piece of fire gear you have on, at which point you could switch to any other school. rinse and repeat whenever you want to play as another school.

this creates an experience similar to runescape where players have the freedom to choose the class they play without completely starting over and losing months or years worth of progress.

yes, this would incredibly limit advantages such as elemental/spirit blades and traps, feint, and tower shield, etc. on schools that dont natively train those spells, but it would make it so much more gratifying when you reap the benefits of making a choice to play those certain schools. another major benefit i see from this is eliminating the tedious grind of leveling multiple characters up to max, especially if KI plans to keep adding world after world.

i dont see this being something they ever actually do as its a Huge switch that changes the game at it's core, but for the sake of the idea here, a system like this would make sense to be level locked maybe at level 30 along with Aquila or even 60 with Waterworks. this way, new players can get used to game mechanics before deciding what play styles they like.

you only have to max one wizard, and get to play any school at any time, but only that school until you switch out your gear.

please discuss!!

[edit:] an issue of replayability, playtime, and sales for KI was brought up in the replies. while i wasn't thinking practically about this idea as it is so outlandish, i like discussing hypotheticals so i wanted to add my reply to the post.

i know me being one person is an tiny minority but there are probably others that might agree - i feel like a system like this would make me more inclined to pvp consistently, and use the team-up kiosk for replay-ability which would address the playtime and retention claims (in this fake scenario yeah the kiosk would probably cease to exist as everyone gets to max and no one needs help at lower levels anymore but i digress).

as for sales with this mechanic, if you're trying to get multiple gearsets to switch between, i can see pack sales and dungeon grinding staying at a similar level which also feeds into playtime. getting this gear takes the same time and potentially money, just on one character instead of spread out over multiple. now, would people really prefer intentionally grinding out multiple gearsets instead of stopping when they get the one they need? probably not. but during this grind especially as i've seen in novus, you get a buffet of other school gear pieces in the process of trying to get one school's set. i can attest to this because i have a full myth aeon set collecting dust in the bank and almost a full death set when farming on my ice.

as the game stands now, there are obvious benefits to having multiple characters, being multiple backpacks and banks, additional castle slots, and anything with a limit for one character. with this changed mechanic, this is another area KI can increase sales, i.e backpack elixirs instead of world exilirs which would likely become obsolete.

this is a Huge post and i didn't expect to put this much thought into such an outlandish idea but i love the brainstorming that happens as a result!

[talenlee]

4e: Backgrounds Are Weird

Hey, do you know how character Backgrounds work in 4e?

Because chances are you kinda don’t know, and I’m a great big 4e nerd and I’m not sure how they work either.

Okay, up front what’s a background? It’s a character option that you pick for your character, based on where they’re from and what life they’d lived up until now. They’re usually small bonuses, a +2 to two skills, or sometimes, a new class skill. There’s one background that stands out ahead of the others in terms of its being useful and not particularly challenging to get – born under a bad sign which just kind of implies you’re about to have the life of an adventurer, and it gives you some bonus hit points.

A lot of characters, in my experience, are born under a bad sign.

And this is because born under a bad sign is really powerful and it doesn’t actually infringe much on you, nor does it require you to go digging around in a bunch of lore books (or really the compendium) to find background material that works the best for your character in this campaign for these skills. Or, again, you probably search the compendium for the skills you want or the class skill you know your class won’t get you. Like, for all that these things are meant to make you feel like you belong somewhere the actual mechanical incentives to really care about that seem somewhat diminished. It lacks some sinew is a problem with it.

But the strangest thing is, the rules don’t really specify how backgrounds work. There’s no glossary entry for them. They first appear as best I can track down in a Dragon magazine, and they just seem to be a thing that happens as a byproduct of being from an area – and like, that opens questions like are you from an area enough? How many years are from that area? What about the long-lived characters like elves or dwarves? They’re in lots of places for lots of years, maybe? Or maybe not?

This is silly, in its core it’s pretty obvious how this works and most people I know work out the same kind of way that Backgrounds ‘should’ work. Because it seems obvious, given the way themes and classes and races and all the other components of character building work, right? They should work this way, so it’s obvious they work this way.

It’s funny given how much of 4th edition D&D is extremely strictly defined, and how many mechanical systems within it are carefully clarified, that whenever you come across one of these hiccup points, one of these places where the rules kinda 404, the player’s intuitive experience of the rules system kinda fills its place: ‘well yeah duh obviously it works this way.’

As with the Themes before them, Backgrounds suffer from a tiering problem. Some backgrounds are just extremely good, and being extremely good, they make all the other backgrounds that do the kind of thing they do feel much worse. Getting a +2 to a skill can be good, if it’s a skill you care about, but what if there’s a background that gives you a +2 to two skills you want. Getting a skill added to your skill list is good, but getting free training in a skill is better. Then what if you don’t care about skills? What if your job is something else?

Eehhhh then you probably take born under a bad sign.

This here is a design challenge you should know about in general. There are a lot of backgrounds, their sheer volume becomes a part of their problem. Players aren’t going to be able to parse out a giant pile of options and that giant pile of options becomes overwhelming and the overwhelming nature of those options mean that instead of being presented with thousands of great choices players are instead presented with a puddle of slush. But the fact that there’s a searchable database that makes the system more interactable isn’t a solution to the bad system design in and of itself.

You can cut a background into three basic families; a bonus to some skills, training in a skill, or ‘something weird.’ Everything else tends to not be worth the time. The something weird category are cool but probably shouldn’t exist – they do enable the existence of some weird builds, and I’m inclined to allow them on a case by case basis. But the thing is, mostly, all a player is getting out of a background is a skill they don’t have access to otherwise (which is itself a problem of the skill system, more on that another day), or the ability to push a truly great skill to the next level.

What I’d propose is a lot simpler:

Everyone picks either two skills to receive a +2 Background Bonus, or a single skill they can be trained in

Backgrounds, like the places, have a table signifying what their skill bonuses may imply about how your character grew up there

This of course is complicated but the thing I like about it is that players don’t have to start by finding where they come from that has the skills they want: Everywhere has the skills they want. They instead can look at the skills they want and what possible keywords that implies about their backstory, the kind of people they might be, and if those things add depth to their other ideas for the character.

This also probably snookers a lot of backgrounds that aren’t about places and are more about social class. There are a lot of those! Backgrounds all over the place aren’t about whether or not you came from an area and are much more about the physical space you’re in. The alternative point I’d suggest is to instead get rid of all the place stuff – because every place can have every benefit, really – and instead focus entirely on the social class stuff.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[sanguinescorpios]

stream sniper

dream x f!reader

summary | dream is on an important stream and too busy to give you attention. unfortunately for him, you’re feeling needy.

warnings | smut, thigh riding, voyeurism, dom!dream x sub!reader, edging, cockwarming, orgasm denial if you squint, this is filthy

word count | 2.8k

it started out innocent. you had been missing your boyfriend; between your school work and his editing, you rarely got to spend time together despite living in the same house.

you admit, you were a needy partner. you liked to be attached to clay’s hip at any chance you got, and he just let you. during recordings, during editing, even during streams; you were always there. it didn’t matter if he couldn’t really pay attention to you or if you had to sit on the couch behind his set up, you just enjoyed being in his presence.

this one, however, was slightly different than the average stream. you could count on one hand the amount of times clay had refused to let you be present for a stream and every time he had, it was a trainwreckstv stream.

it was fine, you always said, you understood. of course he wouldn’t want you there for a stream like that. he had to focus a lot harder on how and what he said on train’s podcast because the demographic and content was so drastically different from his own, and you would only distract him. it wasn’t personal. still, you couldn’t help but feel bitter about it. you missed him; final exams week had just ended and the idea of spending worry-free quality time with him was what got you through it. so you did what your totally logical brain told you to do: walk in anyways.

the door creaked as you opened it and you cringed internally. your sock-clad feet tread lightly as you moved forward into the room, praying your boyfriend wouldn’t notice your presence.

he did.

being a faceless creator, he didn’t even own a camera to accidentally have on, so you were safe on that front. the look on his face, however, told you that you were not so safe after all.

“i thought we agreed on you not being here for this stream?” he asked after tapping the mute keybind on his keyboard. he spun around in his chair with an abrupt kick from his heel, trying and failing to veil his annoyance.

“we did...but i missed you.”

he rolled his eyes, still ticked off but not so much that he was willing to turn you away. he missed you as well, he couldn’t deny it. not having you in his arms for so many hours was excruciating, though he tried not to think so dramatically. clay waved you over to him, the corners of his lips curling up at your attire.

“is that my shirt?” he asked, and you nodded. placing his large hands firmly on your hips, clay kept you close to him while he took a closer look at the oversized red t-shirt. it hung loosely on you, two sizes too big and ending mid-way down your thighs. clay couldn’t help but notice your lack of pants, too.

swooping his head down, he pressed a kiss to your exposed thigh. you brought your hands up to your face, heating up by the second, and giggled.

“no pants, hm?”

you gave him another non-verbal response, bashfully shaking your head while looking down at him through your fingers. he tsked you before pressing another kiss against your skin, inching closer and closer to where you needed him most.

“naughty girl,” he remarked after a few more kisses.

“aren’t you on a stream right now?”

clay glanced behind himself at his monitor, watching as the grown men on the screen argued with each other over some nonsensical issue. returning his gaze to you, he shrugged.

“yeah, but it was getting pretty boring.”

without a warning, clay clumsily pulled you into his lap and spun the two of you back around in his chair. after giving you one more kiss, he placed his headphones back on his head and returned to the conversation on his computer.

“yo, dream, you’ve been pretty quiet, man,” train noted, just in time.

“yeah my cat was acting weird, so i was gone for a minute.” clay placed a hand on your thigh and squeezed, a stupid grin on his face. this was gonna be one hell of a night.

***

you hated to say it, but you regretted crashing the stream. the conversation was painfully boring and dragging on, but there was no way you could leave now with the hold clay had on you. one hand lay around your middle and the other was firmly gripping your thigh. with his calloused fingers rubbing circles into the crease between your leg and your torso and his confident voice rumbling in your ear, you weren’t sure if you’d make it to the end of the stream. maybe he was teasing you, or maybe you were just needy. either way, you were gonna need a little more attention than this.

you stretched your neck in order to meet clay’s gaze, hoping he’d see the desperation in your eyes. instead, he gave you a soft smile and a kiss on the nose before turning back to the screen. he expected you to turn back as well so when you didn’t, he took notice.

reaching to mute himself, he gave you a concerned look.

“you alright, baby?” he asked and you shook your head no, “what’s up?”

“need you,” you admitted, barely concealing the whine that threatened to escape your throat.

clay’s eyes darkened ever so slightly, making it feel like the air had just been sucked out of the room. he was thinking, debating what to do next as he bounced you on his leg. the pace was punishingly slow and you grit your teeth to hold yourself together. 

“i’m a little busy, pretty girl,” he began as you let out a whine, “you’ll have to take care of yourself for now.”

you weren’t sure what that meant until you followed his gaze down. oh. oh. he wants you to...use him. okay. you raised yourself off his lap and he gave you a confused look, but it disappeared as soon as he saw you slipping out of your panties and was replaced by a smug smile. 

climbing back onto his leg, facing him this time, you let out a puff of air. fuck, he felt good. your already dripping center pressed against clay’s jean-clad thigh, the rough fabric intensifying any amount of friction you could manage. you wanted to move so badly, but clay’s tight hold on your hips kept you stationary. you looked up at him with big eyes, silently asked for permission. finally, he nodded.

you immediately began rutting your hips against his thigh, resting your hands on his shoulders to stabilize yourself. fuck, you thought as you felt the sturdiness of him underneath you, his shoulders. small mewls and whimpers escaped you as you increased your pace, chasing a high that you weren’t sure you could reach on your own.

train had clay talking about his sudden success, which was a fan-favorite topic as everyone either hated or loved him for it. the only catch was that, being the nature of train’s podcast, the focus was less on the money and more on the, well, you know.

“think about it, dream. there are people out there fucking themselves to the sound-to the thought of you. isn’t that crazy?” you heard train ask, though it was muffled by clay’s headset. 

clay looked down at his lap, on which you were grinding your bare clit like a bitch in heat, and then back up to his monitor.

“not really.”

you nearly moaned at his words, but hid it by sucking a bruise into clay’s neck. clay hissed at the feeling and tried to push you off, but you were unrelenting. you swirled your tongue around the section of his skin to soothe the pain. pulling back to admire your work, you were met with a now aggravated clay.

“y-yeah i’m alright man,” he started, glaring down at you, “my cat just scratched me.”

you rolled your eyes. great excuse, asshole.

you began to lean back down towards his already bruising neck, but were instead met with a strong hand gripping your jaw, turning you to face your now dually frustrated boyfriend. something had shifted, the air felt thicker and clay felt sharper, all softness void from his demeanor. the look in his eyes was made of steel and flickering between your own gaze and your mouth, brows furrowed and tongue dipping between his lips to swipe across them. the little voice in your head was screaming “danger”, but danger didn’t look so bad in that moment. danger looked good, danger looked worth the risk. danger looked like getting the best fuck of your life. 

ignited by the heat building in your core and the near-paralyzing look clay was giving you, you continued your previous actions. rutting your hips against clay’s thigh with fervor, you smiled proudly at him. the roughness of his jeans sent shivers through your body, you had to be soaking him and you were only getting wetter by the second.

your chin raised, a smug smile plastered to your features, and that challenging glint in your eye - you were such a fucking brat and clay lived to put you in your place. his hold on your jaw tightened before sliding down to rest on your throat, squeezing until your eyelids began to flutter and your thrusts grew sloppier. the knot in his stomach twisted tighter at the sight. fuck, clay thought, you were something else. something that needed to be taught a lesson.

clay muted again, taking advantage of the ad break to pull down his sweatpants and pull out his cock. he pumped it a few times, precum leaking from the tip and sliding down his length. your stomach flipped at the sight, never not taken back by his size. clay grabbed you by your hips and spun you around so that you were facing his pc, facing everyone on the call that you had nearly forgotten he was still on. then, he began to tease his tip at your entrance. 

“this what you wanted, pretty girl? wanted me to treat you like a slut? wanted me to fuck you with everyone on the call?”

you moaned at the feeling of him circling the place you needed him most. the heat was still heavy on you from your previous actions and your body was no less frenzied than before, you wanted your release more than anything. knowing that all of those people were there didn’t help your crazed state. you felt dirty and you liked it.

“sit.”

you lifted yourself over him without a second thought, slick and sensitive from the buildup of your long-awaited orgasm. a moan slipped past your lips at the stretch, feeling every inch of him against your walls as he bottomed out. instinctively, you let your head fall against clay’s shoulder, overwhelmed by how full you felt. god, he felt so good. when you went to move, clay’s strong hands gripped your hips and held you in place.

you whimpered against his neck, trying and failing to get some sort of friction going. when that didn’t work, you opted to clench around him, but clay simply tsk-ed you.

“you’ve been naughty, baby,” he started, “now you’ll sit here like a good girl and keep me warm until the stream’s over.”

what? you thought to yourself, the panic setting in. he can’t be serious!

“no, no, no, no, i’ll be good!” you begged. you’d been practically edging yourself for what felt like hours now, you needed him to let you release.

“i know you will, baby. now sit still for daddy, okay?”

time passed immeasurably slow. your mind was racing with thoughts, trying to focus on anything but clay’s cock throbbing inside of you. you tried your hardest not to squeeze him too often, despite how much relief it brought you. clay was feeling the heat too, your warm, velvety walls gripped him impossibly tight and he was beginning to regret choosing this punishment. you needed the lesson, but god was he suffering for it.

when the stream finally came to an end, the first thing clay did was thrust up into you. you yelped, gripping his arm in surprise at the sudden movement. he started up a steady pace, pounding up into you and rubbing harshly at your clit. the feeling was intense, especially after how long you’d been teased and forced to wait, and you found yourself moaning wildly because of it, unable to control your noises as he spun you around in his lap once again.

“had to-make me-punish you-during a stream, huh?” he taunted between harsh thrusts, grabbing you by your hair and forcing you to look at him. “had to choose today to be a little slut?”

you let out a near-pornographic noise, your eyes rolling back into your head as he hit your most sensitive spot.

“i asked you a question.”

“i’m sorry, daddy. i - ah! - i won’t do it again!” you wailed, head falling back as you felt your release fastly approaching.

clay grunted and forced you to look at him again, pushing his thumb into your mouth and letting you drool around it.

“look at me when you fucking speak,” he ordered.

he picked up the pace in frustration, wanting you to apologize appropriately. you distracted him, you should know how much he hates that. you should also know how much he demands your eye contact, getting fucked or not.

you coerce your eyes open and look at him, not concerned about how absolutely wrecked you must look right now. mascara running down your cheeks with tears from over and under stimulation, eyeliner smudged around your blown out eyes, lips red and sore from kissing on his neck, you were a mess. a hot one, if you asked clay.

“i’m sorry, daddy. i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry!” you continued to babble around his finger as his thrusts somehow grew harder and harder, the pace excruciatingly pleasurable. you were going to cum, you knew that much, but you needed permission.

“gonna cum, daddy!” you warned, feeling the burning knot in the pit of your stomach begging to unravel.

“cum for me, baby. make daddy proud.”

and make daddy proud you did, cumming hard around clay’s cock and feeling yourself spray his stomach with your juices. did you just? oh my god, you did. the embarrassment only made you feel hotter as clay continued to fuck your hole past your orgasm. you whined from the overstimulation, but he couldn’t have cared less.

clay’s moans went from low grunts to higher, breathy gasps, the closer he got the lighter his noises became. his brows were furrowed tightly and his eyes were blown out, the darkest shade of green you think you’d ever seen. the muscles in his arm pulsed as he gripped your waist tighter, completely using you as his own personal fuck toy. he was almost there, you could feel it in the way he gave his all but couldn’t keep up the organized pace he had before. you needed him to cum, not just because you were close to being worked up all over again from the stimulation, but because you wanted to make him feel good. in that moment, making him cum felt like your life purpose, your only purpose. you didn’t just want him to cum, you needed it.

“please give me your cum daddy, wanna feel it inside me,” you begged, taking matters into your own hands, “need you to make me yours.”

at that, clay groaned out a loud string of profanities and came inside of you. he painted your insides, you could feel him everywhere. you sighed at the feeling, warm and full and satisfied. clay let his head fall into the crook of your neck as he breathed through his cool down, pressing soft kisses to your neck and shoulder and mumbling praises and ‘i love you’s’. it took a moment for either of you to actually speak, just relishing in the moment and enjoying each others company.

“you gonna move anytime soon, bud?” you finally asked with a giggle. clay simply shook his head and buried it farther into your neck, humming out a ‘no’.

“wanna make sure it stays in for a while.”

you giggled again at his confession, pressing a kiss to the side of his head and ruffling his hair.

“okay baby,” you paused and pouted, “i’m sorry for interrupting your stream.”

clay sat back and gave you a soft smile, pressing his finger to your lips and turning your frown upside down, literally. he shook his head and gave you a sweet kiss, pressing his own lips tenderly to yours.

“don’t apologize, it was worth it.” a cheeky smile spread across his face and you rolled your eyes, the endearing air around you severed by your boyfriend’s childishness. you loved it, though you’d never tell him.

“you think anyone was suspicious of us?” you inquired, hoping to god no one had picked up on your quiet moans while the stream was still going.

“nah,’ clay lied.

[phoenixyfriend]

Uncle Ben and Little Luke

AKA we combine several types of time travel for maximum Soft Chaos, let’s go

EDIT NOW THAT I’VE WRITTEN THIS UP: jfc this ended up much angstier than initially intended uhhhhhhhhhh sorry

So a common enough thing I’ve seen in time travel fics is characters getting de-aged when tossed back physically, to neither the age they should be in that time, nor the age they were from the time they left, but whatever is most convenient. This is usually de-aging OT Obi-Wan into his TCW self, for reasons relating to, chiefly, removing the damage of Tatooine absolutely destroying his body alongside PTSD-driven alcoholism, but also because fic writers are horny, and Ewan McGregor playing a late-thirties negotiator is on average more appealing to people than Alec Guinness playing a vaguely feral desert hermit.

So, here’s how it plays out:

We take Luke and Ben from some point in the OT. There are a variety of options depending on how angsty we want it to be. My first instinct is ‘right after Owen and Beru die’ but I want to have that sweet angst where Luke knows that his dad is Vader and that Obi-Wan was trying to convince him to kill his own father without telling him that.

We’ll go with shortly after Bespin, and then they end up significantly before TPM. The Obi-Wan of the timeline proper is, eh, let’s say eighteen. Not really ready to be a knight, but old enough that we don’t have to worry about “if we go save Shmi, do we somehow wipe out Anakin?” which is absolutely a worry. Anakin is a toddler, and is in no place to be evil, on account of being literally two years old. He can’t even explode people with his brain yet.

Now, Ben finds himself mid-thirties, as is traditional. He’s not upset at this, because his joints hurt so much less than they used to! His knees aren’t exactly teenage-perfect, but by the Force are they better than they were in the years before he died! His hair has color! He doesn’t have arthritis! And, goodness, no physical withdrawal symptoms! The psychological aspect is still there, but nonetheless, he’s in much better shape than he last remembers being.

Luke looks like he’s about six. He was recently twenty-two. This is not an upgrade. Ben keeps having to carry him. He can’t see over the counter when they enter a bar for information. He can’t enter the bar in the first place. He’s very annoyed by all of this.

Ben is not annoyed. Ben is having a lot of emotions, actually, but annoyance isn’t one of them. He didn’t get to help raise Luke the way he might have if Anakin hadn’t lost his shit, okay, he sees a small Luke and he wants to hug him and cry.

Luke would like to be able to purchase a speeder part without the lady at the stall asking him if he needs his “dad’s” permission.

Once they figure out when and where they are, they need to decide where and how to leave. There are general shenanigans to gamble their way into enough money to hire a ship. They are in the ass end of nowhere, but definitely not Tatooine. There appears to be a jungle. There appears to be a significant variety of man-eating creatures. There appears to be a temple to the Force of questionable origin. None of this is actually helpful, except for the moment they find a “baby’s first lightsaber” in the temple.

Luke only has one hand and, being a six-year-old, his body is growing too fast for him to bother with getting a wired-in prosthesis the way he could as an adult. He can get a more basic prosthesis, but nothing that attaches to the neurons. He’ll outgrow it too fast.

He’s tiny and he’s not used to doing things with just one hand. He uses the Force to do what one hand can't, and every time someone tries to tell him he's misusing the Force he whaps them with the empty sleeve.

So, you know, they find out what year it is. Ben has a breakdown. Luke is upset that he left behind his friends. Ben admits to him that Leia was his twin. Luke stares in horror because dude, she kissed him, you couldn’t have mentioned this earlier???

Ben points out that Beru and Owen were keeping Luke away from him for nineteen years, and then they had about three days of awkward travel to find Leia in the first place, and then Ben died. He didn’t have a whole lot of time to figure out how to tell him.

(This sparks an argument that lasts several days. All onlookers assume that Ben’s son is throwing a tantrum. He doesn’t correct them, even though this is a very valid reason to be upset, because the truth is much harder to explain.)

Sooooo they travel. Mostly, Ben plays Sabacc, cleans house, and pays their way towards Coruscant. Luke still really wants to learn to be a Proper Jedi, even though Ben is pretty sure that Luke would have... a lot of difference of opinion with the Temple, but sure. Coruscant. They can at least stop by, and see Qui-Gon, and Mace, and Quinlan, and Bant, and everyone else that’s still alive and not tragically deceased in the horror following the start of the Clone Wars and then the birth of the Empire, and Ben can have a nice sob over all his dead friends being alive again.

Ben is only barely holding it together while Luke is in the room with him at any given point. But it’s fine! It’s fine. He’s fine. All of his loved ones have come back to life! It’s great! HE’S FINE.

He is not fine.

Luke is also grieving all the people who haven’t been born yet, but he’s... significantly more okay than Ben is.

The closer they get to the Core, the more often people just assume Ben is Luke’s father, and then look shocked and uncomfortable when Luke flatly calls him by his name, and they just... compromise. This is the point at which Luke starts calling him “Uncle Ben.”

Ben cries in his bunk later that night. Luke overhears it and wonders how the HELL Ben is more unstable now, when there’s a chance to fix things and no Vader or Empire trying to kill or capture both of them, and all his friends are alive.

(Luke will later learn a lot about PTSD and realize this is actually a fairly normal situation, to process significant events and emotions only after gaining safety or catharsis.)

(Twenty years on a ball of sand with an alcohol addiction and debilitating fear of the man you raised as your own brother is not, in fact, safe or cathartic.)

At any rate, they’ve settled into that pattern by the time they reach the Inner Rim. The Inner Rim is the part of the galaxy at which they’ve collected enough money (and mental stability) to travel a little better, and to take a few more risks.

Risks like “manipulate people with those baby blues.”

Ben tells Luke that he’s a menace, after he pouts so cutely that he gets a free scarf added on to a purchase that Ben makes. Luke responds that Ben has no room to talk, since he flirted a free breakfast out of that one inn owner.

Also, Luke is currently physically six. That is objectively a situation that sucks. He deserves to use it for all it’s worth if he’s stuck like this.

“You know, if you keep wearing all-black and looking longingly at the velvet cape and Space Chanel boots, the temple is going to worry that you’re a darksider.”

“Uncle Ben... you told me, yesterday, that I sparkle so brightly in the Force that it’s almost blinding.”

“Yes, but the gloves--”

They don’t agree on this, but Ben relents. He does actually understand good fashion, unfortunately, and he’s not unaware of how much Leia taught Luke about such things.

Luke’s about forty years ahead of the curve, of course, but Skywalkers are prone to such things. It’s usually in regards to technology, granted, but...

They get to Coruscant. Ben is very obviously a Jedi. He knows all the right words and walks like a Soresu master and feels warm and comforting in the Force. They let him in with minimal questions. They note down “my first padawan left the order to have a child, but died shortly after; I consider Luke here to be my nephew, and have raised him as such,” and move on.

Luke is vaguely annoyed because he already had an uncle (and aunt) that raised him, but he admits that a person can have more than one uncle. He can live with this. Ben was more family to Anakin than Owen was, in some ways, so it’s kind of true. Luke is even working on feeling more childish affection for Ben instead of the complicated mess of emotions that come from being lied to about some very large and important subjects, and then seeing the person saying those lies have regular emotional breakdowns due to something as small as Luke saying he likes the curve of the hull on that freighter.

(Apparently he sounds just like his father did as a child. This is almost heartwarming.)

The thing is! The thing. The thing is, they almost make it to the Halls of Healing to get looked over for weird viruses, or Outer Rim Parasites, or whatever the hells needs to be happening. They almost make it without Ben having a flashback to dead younglings or brainwashed troopers or the declaration of a Sith Empire. They almost make it without incident.

Then Ben sees Qui-Gon, and freezes, and does not move again.

Luke cannot get him to restart.

People are staring.

They haven’t even made it to Medical, Uncle Ben, come on.

Young, local Obi-Wan comes over and asks if there’s something he can do to help. Or maybe this “Ben” knows Qui-Gon? Master Jinn doesn’t recognize Ben, but maybe Luke knows more?

Luke does know more, but what Luke actually says is “he probably needs a mind healer.”

(Ben will not appreciate this.)

(Ben is unfortunately standing in the middle of the hallway and completely unresponsive, and is unable to argue with this assertion.)

(Ben is pretty much proving this assertion entirely correct, actually.)

Obi-Wan is helpful, if a little bitchy in the manner of most late-teens individuals, and offers to help get Uncle Ben down to the Halls of Healing. It involves Obi-Wan gently pushing on Ben’s shoulders, and Qui-Gon offering to carry Luke so he can be in Ben’s sights (because Ben is a Mystery, and Qui-Gon is quite fond of those, so he wants to stay involved). Ben kind of just... shuffles on down.

There are medical tests. They ask about how Luke lost his hand. He refuses to talk about it. They ask how Ben got all his scars. Luke says he doesn’t know. They ask if he knows why Ben looks like he’s been through a war. Luke says it’s because he probably was.

They check for foreign viruses. They find evidence of thus-far-unpatented vaccinations. They ask Luke if he knows what he’s vaccinated for.

“How would I know? I’m six.”

They agree that this is a good excuse.

(It is not. He’s lying. They do not know this.)

They do some more tests. They find a lot of questionable medical bullshit in Ben’s body. Most of this is from the clone wars, but they don’t know this. Someone realizes they haven’t gotten a ping back from the Shadow Network regarding “do we have permission to pull the medical file of a Jedi that isn’t in the normal database? We’re assuming you know who he is, since we don’t.”

The Shadow Network does not know who Ben is.

The healers, of course, go “huh, that’s weird, but maybe the name he gave his nephew was fake. We can’t exactly ask ‘Ben’ for more details right now. We already had to sedate him. Let’s check the DNA!”

The DNA pulls up as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The padawan who brought this guy in two hours ago.

“Huh, that’s weird. Let’s call in Kenobi and ask if he knows what’s going on.”

Obi-Wan absolutely does not know what’s going on.

They ask Luke.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says, lying through his teeth and not even pretending otherwise.

“You’re not a very good liar,” teenage Obi-Wan tells him.

“I’m not trying to be,” Luke says. “Can you get Master Yoda? I feel like we’re going to need him.”

They normally wouldn’t get Yoda on the request of a six-year-old, but they also normally don’t have a catatonic thirty-something Jedi who looks like he’s been through a war popping up in the medical database as the pimply teenage padawan that broke his pinky trying to do a Badass Ataru Flip last week.

Or... whatever Luke i... is... oh dear.

“Young one,” Qui-Gon asks, while people whisper-shout behind him, not realizing he’s cutting the Correlian Knot and just asking the kid himself. “Do you know why your midichlorian count is so high? It’s almost unheard of.”

“Uncle Ben said my dad was the Chosen One,” Luke says, because he is capable of being a little shit and is actually really eager to let Ben deal with some of the fallout. He feels for the man, really, but he’s also tired of being the one to field every single question.

Also, the expressions that pass on Qui-Gon’s face are hilarious.

(Luke may or may not be more affected by his six-year-old brain than he would like to admit.)

“Thank you,” Qui-Gon says, sounding more than a little strangled about it.

It takes another three hours for Ben to wake up.

He listens to the questions. He hears what they say his ‘nephew’ said. He looks at Luke.

“Is this revenge for not telling you about Leia?”

“It’s not revenge,” Luke does not lie. “I just don’t know how to explain it.”

“It’s pretty easy to explain.”

“It’s not my secret.”

“This is revenge for the Leia thing.”

“No,” Luke says. “Revenge for the Leia thing was when I ate a live frog in front of you.”

This is the point at which someone interrupts and points out that they appear to be stalling.

“Oh, he is,” Luke tells them. He gestures at Ben. “I can’t tell you more, because it’s more his story than mine.”

“I’m afraid, Master, that I am very likely to have an emotional breakdown if I allow myself to consider the reality of this situation for longer than the fraction of a second I already have,” Ben reports, full of false cheer. “Suffice to say, I am far from stable and have only held out this far for Luke’s sake.”

“Can you explain why you have my DNA?” Obi-Wan asks, as the person who’s most concerningly involved in this situation.

“You can,” Ben says, smiling like there is absolutely nothing wrong in the slightest, ever. “I’m you, from the future. I actually died and spent a few years dead before coming back. I’m not sure why I’m younger than I was when I died, but I appreciate being able to put on my shoes without my knees attempting to mutiny.”

“He needs a mind healer,” Luke reiterates, in case the strained grin hasn’t made it clear. “So do I, but not as much.”

“I have felt literally every person in this Temple save for Luke and Yoda die,” Ben reports, looking a shade more manic than a few seconds earlier. “It’s very overwhelming to feel you all being alive again. I may be approaching a mental breakdown, and I’ve been rather strictly advised against using alcohol to treat my traumas again.”

Luke kicks him in the thigh. It’s not a very hard kick, because he is very small, and he does actually like Ben. “I’m not letting you turn into an old drunk again.”

After several seconds of silence, a healer quietly suggests that everyone clear the room, and asks if someone could fetch Master Yoda as the youngling requested.

(THIS IS ALMOST THREE THOUSAND WORDS.��I started it less than two hours ago. Why am I like this.)

[riverisnotsafe]

Mine.

PAIRING: F!Servant!Reader x Naoya Zenin

WARNINGS: NAOYA ZENIN. Naoya smut. NSFW, Minors DNI. | If you're into any of these: possessive Naoya, breeding kink (?), mentions of overstimulation, jealous Naoya.

A/N: You can call me Noct or River. I’m still fairly new to how tumblr works and how writers and bloggers (?) write their imagines/fics so I do apologize in advance if my writing is not to your liking. I will also post on AO3 under sunflowerpsycho. I'm still trying to improve^^ This was self-indulgent and not edited so pretty all over the place and might be unclear in some parts, sorry bout that.

The reader lowkey a pick me but depends on how you view her, either she's a pick me or she just acts the way she acts to accustom and stroke the lil bitches ego.

“A-ah! Naoya-sama!” you moan his name as he shoots his load deep in you. A few moments of bliss and you were ready to clean yourself. Naoya never liked staying in bed long after sex. He finds it disgusting. All the fluids of sweat, semen and love juices mixed together made his skin crawl. “Oi woman, where are you going?” You haven’t even gotten up but Naoya had you strongly wrapped in his embrace. His cock still deep within you, as if acting as a plug. “I’m gonna wash myself..? You don’t like being dirty like this...usually?” the last bit came out as a question when Naoya buried his head deep into the crevice of your neck. “Ah, I’ll let it pass today. Just stay here. My cum is gonna leak out if you move.” he tried to shove himself deeper, earning an unexpected moan from you. “L-leak out???” Does Naoya have a breeding kink? Is he trying to keep his cum in you???? “N-naoya-sama...are you trying to breed me?” at the mention of breed, you could feel his dick twitch in your core. “Shut up woman.” Ah...so he is and he’s embarrassed to admit. “I feel honoured if that’s what you’re trying to do...” another twitch.

Under that tough misogynistic act, this man is just a boy who thrives on praise, he probably was deprived of any in his childhood, hence the superiority complex. But with you, he’s quite honest. The body doesn’t lie. You were just another servant. He probably paid and slept with many so you never thought of it as anything special. Besides, after all of this dirty work, both of you end up going your separate ways. A servant and the young master. That’s all it is. That is until one of the maids tried stealing from the family, unfortunately from Naoya and he didn’t take it too lightly. A woman and a thief, absolutely the worst. Ever since that, he appointed you as his personal maid, to ensure that only one person will serve him. Only one will enter and exit his quarters. Only one will serve his meals. Only one will tend to him. Only one will follow him around the house. Only one will keep him company when needed. Why did he choose you? Honestly you had no idea. Out of all the servants, clearly you were the least appealing, especially for a man of Naoya’s caliber.

You could never rival the looks of any of the other girls. You were chubby. Your thighs a bit too thick. Your cheeks were puffy. You had no thigh gap. Curves? Well, they weren’t hour-glass curves so you were bedrock bottom ranked. And when it came to family, you were a nobody. All the other servants have been serving the Zenin clan for generations. You were just a nobody who was pulled into the servant life to pay off your parent’s debt. What luck. It took him time though, to make you tend to him sexually. He might have a big ego and any woman would sleep with him but deep down he knew it was only for money and his looks, which he prided on. The sex was always bland. He could care less about the women’s pleasures, he would ejaculate outside, toss them money and demand them to immediately leave. He found them disgusting. Weren’t you just the same?

He had a great face, an even better body and all the riches you could’ve dreamt of, so why has he not tossed you out yet. He for sure can suspect that you’re just the same as all those women, plus, you were even lower, a nobody. Yet, here he is, deep inside you. This has been..about the sixth time you and Naoya have had intercourse. The first three times was when you were just a normal servant. Coincidentally he always found you and forced you to pleasure him. The pay was good so you never complained. After becoming his personal maid, it took a few months to make you fulfil his sexual needs, which is rather strange. A man like knows nothing of consent. He’s a tyrant. What he wants, he can get and he will. So why did he take months to make you fuck him when it was so easy before becoming his personal servant. Who knows? Maybe it was his underlying insecurities asking him to be sure.

“Naoya-sama...may I turn to look at you?” he grunts. “I’ll be sure to avoid any leakage” he nods. You slowly turn your body, still impaled on him. It was a different kind of pleasure but you withheld your moans. Your face are so close. This moment is intimate, for you and him. Almost unreal. He’s gorgeous. That red tint of blush and sex afterglow just added more to his beauty. “Naoya-sama. May I speak more than usual?” “Only because you asked for permission. Proceed.” he avoided looking into your eyes. A shy one. “I appreciate my master’s kindness. Thank you for allowing me to speak. Naoya-sama...please be honest with me. Are you trying to impregnate me? Why? I’m just a lowly servant. I could never be perfect to bear your children, or be a concubine. I have no value. You are too kind. We should stop. I will remove myself now. Thank you for your time master.” You slowly push yourself off him. He grabs your arm harshly, definitely bruising it.

“You said no leakage. And how dare you speak to your master so insolently? How dare you question what holds value to me or not. You are a lowly servant. You’re a filthy no-name bitch. You live to lick my shoes and pick up money I throw on the ground. You are not going anywhere. You are staying on this bed with me in you. You have to be reminded who your master is.” Oooh, you definitely pissed him off. You winced at his words. They were normal, he always told you where your place is so it wasn’t a surprise. “You stupid woman. Now it’s out. You moved and now it’s out.” he sounds disappointed. He was whining like a child. “Naoya-sama!” he plunged into you hard. “Yes, scream my name you stupid bitch.” He went faster and faster. “Don’t cum inside...I’m not worthy master” “Shut your mouth. Worthy? No woman is worthy of me. Selfish. All they care about are themselves. Such an inferior gender thinking what they know is worthy? I decide. I decide your worth.” He changed positions. He pressed both your legs close to your chest. A mating press. He was so deep. The squelching of his previous load acting as lubricant was erotic.

“You. Your lewd body. You were always trying to seduce me. Those luscious thighs. These fat breasts. You were made for child-bearing. The look you make when I fuck you. So in awe, eyes rolling back. Ah. Ah. Sometimes you even forgot payment because you rushed to clean yourself. You were the only memorable one. The sounds you make. You’re erotic. No one else can see or hear you except me. Mine. Mine. Mine.” Naoya drilled you senseless. So desperate to hear you. Desperate to look at your expressions. Desperate to conquer you. “N-naoya-sama! Ah! Ah! Naoya-sama!” You had practically lost any sense and all you could feel was his dick fucking you mercilessly. The veins. The length. The girth. He fit like a glove. He had shaped you to be accustomed to him. “When that no-name clan came yesterday for a meeting. I saw your look. You enjoyed how they all looked at you didn’t you? You slut. You’d want them to fuck you like this right? Only I can though. You smiled and served them. Desperate bitch.” The meeting yesterday?

Your mind wandered. Oh yes, a small clan that are partners with the Zenin in business. The heirs were quite good-looking and well-mannered, how could a lady not feel flattered. You can’t remember if you specifically smiled or enjoyed their small talk. Was being polite not a simple necessity a servant should have towards guests? To ensure their master was not seen as tardy. You can’t remember their names or faces. All you remember was Naoya slipping his hand under your garments and fingering you. “You enjoyed people watching right? Especially since they were good-looking. I WAS RIGHT THERE WITH YOU. Disgusting piece of shit.” He got even rougher. You don’t know how many times you’ve orgasmed and how many times Naoya had ejaculated in you but he was still at it. He’s jealous huh.. how strange. A man that could have anything and anyone in the world was strangely possessive of a worthless woman like you. “You can’t show them those expressions. Mine. Your kindness mine. Your sounds. Mine. You’re my servant.” he sounds sad.

Despite being in subspace, you unintentionally reach out to your master and cub his face. “Naoya-sama. I love you.” Those unintentional words made the malicious man slow down his pace. “What did you say?” Is he angry? Oof, all the best dealing with another tantrum. You couldn’t feel anything. Legs sore. Your mind had wandered. The pleasure had made you dumb yet the little consciousness you have for your master remained. “I love you, Naoya.” His cock twitched. “Again” “I love you.” “Again” “I love you, Naoya-sama”. All that repeating made you come to your senses. “I don’t remember the men from yesterday. All I remember were your thick fingers in me. My expressions and mewls were for you. If this body is what you want then I will offer it all to you, my master. Ask, you are my master after all. All of me is yours.” You get up a bit, and stagger, he fucked the life outta ya. “Master, allow me to speak.” a small dumbfounded nod. You slip a hand onto his cheek and kiss him. Both of you never shared a kiss.

It was too intimate for a servant to kiss their master. Only their betrothed would be worthy but you couldn’t help it, you needed to assure this man-child, you were no one else’s. “Master, I-“ “Naoya. When we’re alone call me Naoya.” a small smile crept onto your lips. “Naoya, breed me.” His face was flushed. That’s exactly what he wanted. Through the night, he fucked you in every inch of the room. Both of your fluids and smell, absolutely drenched his quarters. He never once ejaculated outside. Every drip of his semen was in your womb, he wouldn’t even pull out, in fear it would leak. Shower? He fucked you while showering too. His animalistic senses stopped when a knock on the door came.

“Lay down with your back arched. It can’t leak.” He put on a robe and answered. A woman’s voice. “Naoya-sama. Naobito-sama is calling for you.” “Tch. Annoying old man” he slams the door shut. “Oi. Arch even more.” He came back to you. “I’m going to put this in you so you don’t spill.” He was holding, A DILDO? This man has a dildo? “N-naoya-sama, t-thats...” “Some servant I had my way with some time ago left it to fuck with me. I kept it not knowing what it was but now the shape looks like it’d plug you up good.” A servant he had his ways with huh. You were just another one right. He seemed to have noticed your train of thought. “Stupid woman. That servant is long gone. And now. You’re mine. No other stupid bitch except you. Stop thinking nonsense. Maybe I’ll remind you a bit more. That old man can wait.” He unrobed and pounced you. You definitely can’t walk for a few days.

“I’ll plug you up and we’ll go see the old man” he sounds, quite joyful. “If you move and leak, I won’t hesitate to fill you up again.” Ah. He’s definitely Naoya Zenin. “Naoya-sama” you smile. “What? You should be grateful that I’ve allowed you to speak so many times since last night.” You can’t help but giggle. A slight blush forms on Naoya’s face. “How dare you laugh at m-“ you pull him in for a kiss. He reluctantly kissed back. “Naoya-sama, I love you.” you smiled. He thrusted into you without warning. “The old man can definitely wait. You filled with my child is more important.” God knows how many times he’d come in your womb without pulling out, there’s no way you’re not pregnant. “Naoya-sama...let’s stop here...I can’t walk properly if we continue, then a different servant will have to serve you.” He was about to argue but held his tongue. “Fine.” He pulled out and slowly shoved the dildo in. Looks like he’d rather have wobbly-legged you than another servant. You can't help but smile. “Go shower and meet me back here. And clean the room after meeting with the old man. The smell...erotic but dreadful. Wash everything.” “Yes my master.” You hurriedly got clothed and rushed to the servant quarters to clean up. You were happy. What a weirdo.

[doubleleoenergy]

v. Blinding Lights, The Princess and the Pogue Series

I've been on my own for long enough. Maybe you can show me how to love, maybe.

Series Masterlist

Pairing: JJ Maybank x fem!reader

Warnings: 18+ ONLY, mentions of drug use, mentions of addiction, mentions of suicide, mentions of drinking, swearing

Summary: The events from the weekend bring JJ and y/n closer.

Words: 1820

Notes: I apologize for this coming out this morning, I fell asleep on my laptop last night editing so...here it is!

The first rays of morning light hit JJ’s window, sending beams across the room and onto his face. He groaned instinctively, covering his head with a pillow, a slight headache from the night before lingering and making him groggy.

He was aware of his actions from the night before, and did he regret them? Absolutely. He knew he fucked up with Y/N, bad, but he also couldn’t help it. He had never been in a long-term relationship before, he’d never let things get farther than a casual hookup before with anyone. Ad he had never actually liked a woman long enough to see potential with her, not until he had met y/n. Well, not that they did or did not have potential, that was all up to the game of life. And an apology would be necessary if they were to move forward with even a friendship at that point.

JJ rolled out of bed and onto his feet, his door creaking as he opened it up and peaked around the hallway. John B’s door was completely open, with him and Sarah nowhere in sight. That was probably for the best, he knew if they were there, he would just feel too prideful to apologize.

Stepping out into the hallway, he walked out and into the living room, finding y/n sound asleep on the couch still. The sun shined through the windows, covering her body in a warm beacon of light. She looked angelic, and she was. Y/N was everything JJ felt he didn’t deserve in a woman, and he still had no idea why she even hung out with a Pogue like him.

He leaned back against the wall, admiring the way her body was curled up, her lips slightly parted and her tangled hair framing her face. She was still dressed in her clothes from the night before, having passed out on the couch soon after they’d arrived at the Château. JJ kept his gaze on her for a few more minutes until her eyes fluttered open, blinking away the sunlight and rolling onto her back.

It took her a moment to realize JJ standing there, the hurt from the night before resurfacing as she covered her eyelids with the cool palms of her hands. “Take a picture, JJ, it’ll last longer.” She commented. JJ finally removing himself from the wall where he was leaning, moving over to take a seat to her left beside her on the couch. She immediately rolled onto her right side, facing away from him.

“C’mon, princess, you can’t get rid of me that easily.” He teased, resting his head against the back of the couch. She groaned at the nickname, pulling the blanket over her head.

“Actually, I can. You can fuck right off, JJ Maybank.”

Her tone made JJ frown, not realizing just how badly he had screwed up the night prior. “Look, I know you’re upset, but at least let me explain.”

Y/N sat up with her back towards him, looking around on the floor until she found the backpack she had stuffed with her clothes and toothbrush, picking it up and ignoring him as she headed to the bathroom. JJ was hot on her heels, only stopping when the door shut in his face.

“Y/N, please.” He pleaded, leaning his head against the door as he spoke. Y/N rid herself of the clothes from the night before, tossing them into her bag before slipping on the tank top, jeans, and cardigan she had packed for the day.

“You can’t just ignore me forever. At least let me apologize.” JJ sighed, hearing the water running in the sink on the other side of the door. “I’m fucking sorry, okay? I just got caught up with drinking and the weed and dancing with you and I didn’t know what to do. I thought you wanted me to kiss you, I figured that was why you were dragging me out where no one could see us.”

Y/N abruptly opened the bathroom door, causing JJ to stumble forward, catching himself on the doorframe before he could fall. She passed by him as he caught himself, pulling her hair up into a bun on the top of her head. “You think I’m upset because you kissed me? I was going to kiss you, dumbass.” She admitted, crossing her arms over her chest as she sat back down on the couch.

“Well then, what’s the problem?” He questioned, walking down the hallway and stopping at the end, afraid that if he sat beside her, she’d just get up and walk away again.

“The problem is that you kissed me and then acted like it didn’t happen when we caught up with John B and Sarah.” JJ recalled the events of the night, remembering how he pulled away from her to walk back to where John B and Sarah were standing. He remembered making a joke to John B as to why they were in the woods, lying to him about the fact that they were kissing.

“Well, shit, I don’t know, y/n. I just…I panicked, okay? We have this rule: no Pogue on Pogue macking. You’re part of the Pogues now and I…” JJ sighed, running his hands through his blonde locks. “I don’t know how any of this works. Whenever I’m into a girl it’s just based on hooking up with her. It’s never anything serious. I have a fucked up way of thinking, alright? Is that what you want to hear?”

Y/N looked up at him sadly, meeting his gaze before she reluctantly motioned for him to sit on the cushion beside her on the couch. JJ followed her motions, sitting beside her and leaving some space between them. They sat in silence for a minute before JJ continued.

“Look, my mom left my dad and I when I was young, and my dad blamed me my whole life for it. He was addicted to drugs and used to beat the shit outta me whenever he felt like it. I never grew up understanding a healthy relationship, or sharing feelings, or really any of that shit.” He looked down at his hands, opening and closing them as he spoke. “I’m sorry, I wanted to kiss you, I mean, who wouldn’t? You’re the fucking best, y/n; you’re smart, funny, and incredibly beautiful. And for some reason you like hanging out with a fuck up like me.”

Y/N shifted to look over at him, a small smile on her face as he talked about her. “You’re right, I am pretty great.” She teased, easing the tension and making them both laugh. “You’re not a fuck-up, you know that, right? You can’t control what happened with your mom and dad. I was so young when my dad killed himself, but when I grew up and watched my mom drinking, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was my fault. The truth is you can’t blame yourself for the way others react to situations. Life is shit, I mean, we don’t even make it out alive after all the bullshit we go through. It’s not worth spending your whole life blaming yourself for the actions of others.”

Her words are comforting, soothing JJ down to his core. She made him feel less messed up, like he could be someone better, like he deserved better than the shitty cards he was dealt in life. JJ’s eyes flicker to her lips, leaning closer and closing his eyes before the moment is interrupted by the sound of a car horn honking outside.

“Shit.” Y/N cursed, pulling away from the intimate moment they were having and standing up off the couch. She pulled her backpack to her shoulder, looking out the window at the familiar Dodge Durango. “That’s Bailey, I texted her for a ride home when I was in the bathroom.”

JJ tried not to look flustered, scrambling to his feet and running a hand through his hair again. “I’ll walk you out.” Y/N opened the door, walking out onto the screened in porch before stepping outside while JJ walked silently beside her. She watched her sister’s expression as she looked between the two, raising an eyebrow as she smiled mischievously at y/n.

“You must be JJ.” Bailey noted, rolling her window down and resting her arm on the open space.

“Yeah, it’s uh-it’s nice to meet you.” JJ held out his hand for Bailey to shake, receiving a firm handshake from the woman, glancing back to where y/n stood.

“It’s nice to meet you finally, y/n won’t shut up about you.” Y/N’s cheeks flushed a bright red, her eyes widening as she wordlessly pleaded with her sister to shut up.

“B, don’t we have that place to go?” Y/N questioned, hinting at her sister to play along with her lie after having just embarrassed her.

“Right...yeah, get in kid. It was nice to meet you, JJ. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of you.” Bailey watched as y/n walked to the passenger door of the Durango and opened it, Y/N lingering in the doorway. JJ followed her, holding onto the top of the door frame.

“I’ll see you at school tomorrow, yeah?” She asked, biting her lip as she looked up into JJ’s blue hues..

“Yeah, sounds good. It was nice meeting you, Bailey.” He gave them both a salute before heading back into the Château, y/n hopping into the passenger seat of the Durango and shutting the door behind herself.

Bailey backed out onto the road, a sinful smile on her lips. “I can see why you like him; he’s tall, muscular, and those eyes are like staring into the damn ocean.” Bailey hissed when y/n smacked her arm as she drove, y/n letting out a huff of breath as she stared over at her older sister.

“You just had to embarrass me, huh?”

Bailey shrugged, stopping at a stop sign on the road before making a left in the direction of their home. “Mom would’ve done the same if she was here, you know that. Like she did for that boy who took you to your eighth-grade formal.” Y/N smiled at the fond memory of her mother, one of the better memories before her mother’s drinking had gotten worse.

“...Yeah, mom definitely embarrassed me much more than you just had. And that was before I even thought about kissing boys.” Y/N agreed, biting down on her bottom lip and looking out the window. She still didn’t know how JJ felt, he had been leaning in for a kiss, but what was to say he wasn’t going to pull away again or shrug it off as an ‘in the moment’ gesture. Her thoughts are clouded with the what-ifs of her and JJ’s relationship as they drove home, the lingering sounds of the radio playing softly in the background as she replayed the past hour repeatedly in her head.

Tagging those who may be interested. Please let me know if you’d like to be tagged/untagged: @midnightf, @serendipityrogers, @fuckandfluff, @eireduchess, @calisamcro​, @moniamaybank​, @astrydis​, @sokovianheadtilt​, @blackwiddows​, @matbarzalschain​, @bigassnocash​, @sspidermanss​

[trentsleatherboots]

Carach Angren, interview translation Dutch > English

Published in the magazine Rock Tribune, edition June 2020, nr. 192.

Text by Morbid Geert. Fotos: Stefan Heileman.

WILL THE REAL FRANKENSTEIN STAND UP NOW?

At the end of last year you could already read about how we kept close watch on Carach Angren. Back when they were still heavy in the production process, on Halloween Day we went over to Ardeks homebase and studio to see the first glimpse of their new work and later Rock Tribune got invited to listen to the album in Germany. Now it's almost time for 'Franckensteina Strataemontanus' to be shown to the world and that's why we wanted to take an even deeper look. Weaponed with an oil lamp and shovel we went onwards towards the graveyard to uncover the soul stirrings of Ardek. (Text: Morbid Geert)

---

Ardek, the last time I talked to you the songs were still in a very early stage and what we heard was more of a pre production. Did you tinker more afterwards to come to an end result or did you purposely keep your hands off to avoid overproduction?

"In terms of song structures and lyrics not much changed on the premature songs that you heard. What followed however was another production-finish, where especially the mix and mastering made a big change. That last stadia really lifted it all to another plane and you can really hear that."

A FRESH LOOK.

As far as I knew, Patrick Damiani was still fully onboard working on the songs at Tidal Wave Studio in Germany. How important was it for you to pull an extra producer into the process? After all, you are very much at home with that as well? Or maybe not as much as you'd like?

"Back then he worked on drumediting and played the basslines, but his role is way bigger than that. We've worked together a lot and now we're doing something for L'Âme Immortelle, where we vibe together perfectly and know exactly how to handle such a project.  When he takes on production for Carach Angren however, I notice how much better he controls it. He has so much knowledge about drum sounds, mixing,... and he's really specialised in it. It is nice to add that knowledge, it brings a lot of added value. These days a lot of bands record at home and that all makes it a lot cheaper, but a good producer brings a lot of experience and equipment, it ends up with a whole different result. Besides, we left the mix and mastering to Robert Carranza."

That last one is a pretty big name, who among others worked with Marilyn Manson. I can imagine that has a big impact on your budget, but was it worth it?

"I think so. When I listened to 'Killing Strangers' by Marilyn Manson on headphones and heard the bassline, it went so deep that it turned me upside down. Apparently Robert Carranza mixed that album.  Furthermore he does a lot of different things such as make latin music and win grammy's, but in the extreme metal scene he is totally unknown.  However, he wanted to help himself to our record and yes, the price was steep, but I managed to convince both the band and the label… even though that wasn't without some doubts, since all eyes were on me for a bit. I had a good feeling about it and shared it, with the result being having a record now that doesn't sound like the others.  He had a fresh look on our work and thus we could avoid the recognisability of the average metal producer.  There are too many records that when you hear them you know exactly who had their hands on them and in which studio they were recorded.  Contrary to what you might think, there was constant contact with him (Robert) and a lot of talking about how we wanted it to sound. In particular the clarity of the sound is massive and gives it a bit more of a cinematic effect. There was no compression applied where everything sounds constantly loud and where as a listener you'd get easily tired, but the dynamics were preserved."

DIDN'T FEEL LIKE IT ANYMORE.

To refer back to Patrick Damiani: if he does so much and even plays the basslines, do you see him as sort of a 4th band member or is that just a bit too much credit?

"That's not how we see him. He's an amazing producer and musician, who gives us his opinion and helps us out. On the other hand he is not part of the creative process and he isn't on stage with us… but it is a relationship that's been going on for 12 years and something we get a lot out of."

Now I'm saying '4th band member', but after the recordings of your new record ended, your brother and drummer Namtar left the band. Can I ask what happened and if you saw this coming, or whether it was a bolt from the blue?

“In November he recorded his drum tracks and back then everything went fine, but then there came an offer to play at '70000TONS OF METAL'. Since we always looked at the financial side of the band together, we talked about the offer and he was immediately against it.  I thought that was strange and to me it seemed better to sit around the table with three to talk about it. Then it became apparent that he'd been wrestling with it for sometime and in brief didn't feel like it anymore.  We offered him to take a break of a few months instead of just throwing away what we've worked for the last 20 years, but that wasn't a solution.  It wasn't an easy decision, but afterwards we saw it had been an issue for a long time and at that point you rather put a stop to it.  That hit us hard, but you can never force somebody to stay in a band.  To keep our motivation high we played '70000TONS OF METAL' after all with Michiel van der Plicht of God Dethroned as replacement. That pleased us all and he's willing to help us out in the future."

Michiel van der Plicht in indeed an amazing drummer. Are there any plans to keep him in the band permanently or is this an emergency solution and is there an offer still standing?

"I discussed that extensively with Seregor, but together the two of us stay the core of the band. We already have an extra guitarist live and in the studio we will definitely have those people join again, but all decisions will be made by us two in the end.  We want to avoid that other people leave a mark on the band, causing us to lose our individuality (personality). It's about so much more than just making music: the stage decor, our own stage outfits,... for us it is very clear and it's going well, so we only need help to fill in with the music in the studio and during lives."

MILKED OUT?

Let's get to the core of business. At the end of this month is the release of your 6th album, 'Franckensteina Strataemontanus'. Now lends the Frankenstein story itself perfectly for a horror metal band, but I wondered if the story isn't too milked out by other bands… unless you do it with a completely new vision. After all, that's what you did with 'This Is No Fairytale', where Hans and Gretel were transported to the now and the horror became bigger than ever. 

"When we started, I had the same feelings about the Frankenstein story, but there's a twist to it. Everything started for me as a dream, where I flew through an old house. There, I heard dissonant piano tunes and I got sucked into a room where a portrait of an old man hung on the wall. Later I made a drawing of that portrait and it got stuck in my head. When I began doing research for the album months later and even read Mary Shelley's amazing book 'Frankenstein', I found out that there is a theory that when she wrote her book she was influenced by Johann Konrad Dippel, an 18th century alchemist.  Then when I looked him up, he turned out to look like what I had seen in my dream, which personally motivated me to dig deeper. Dippel is an unknown figure for the masses and that's why it seemed fascinating to us to do something with it.  There is fiction and truth mixed in our story. By the way, Dippel lived in Frankenstein Castle near Darmstadt, where he was looking for the elixir to eternal life. He was also a theologist, but he clashed with the church and was therefore cast away. Because he also did experiments on cadavers and sought life extending resources, he would've inspired Mary Shelley for her story. What we did was make a concept around the source of her story instead of following the clichés.  That monster with screws in his head, we've seen it already before…"

Yet it doesn't seem like a concept album, because I notice that you address very diverse subjects.

"It is definitely a concept, since all stories are connected to one another, even if it's not noticeable. 'Operation Compass' is about the North-African desert war between the Brits and Italians. In official documents the Brits were ordered that if there were to be a fallback, to make all sources unusable for the enemy with 'Dippel's oil' (a nasty substance that made water undrinkable but did not poison it, so it was in battle with the Geneva protocols).  In our story it leads to a demonic outburst that went towards the soldiers. So you see, Dippel comes back throughout different moments in history. 'Der Vampir von Nürnberg' is about a real figure that is still alive. He committed necrophilia, killed people and drank their blood, … but is now at large. In our story he lost his ways after reading Dippel's books, which once again links it with the core story. 'Here In German Woodland.', the opening song, is about a boy that gets lost and dies in the forest surrounding Darmstadt, but later comes back and eats his parents. In the closing song 'Like A Conscious Parasite I Roam' it all comes full circle: Dippels life elixir only works for his soul, and his body rots away, so he searches for a guest body and his spirit creeps into that little boy." 

In a few songs, some German lyrics show up. Is that besides the concept also because of the grim sound of the language or is it simply because you live so close to Germany and it has a certain impact? 

"The subject lends itself to it of course and Seregor speaks German very well, which made things easier. And yes, the sound does play a certain role. 'Der Vampir von Nürnberg' sounds way better than the English translation, it immediately sets the right tone."

Some of these stories are the result of reality, but are often at least as gruesome as many fantasy stories: such is the bonus song 'Frederick's Experiments' about the sick science experiments of emperor Frederick II, a man who apparently was not inferior to the Nazi doctors?

"Yes, you can say that he set a good example! Seregor came with the idea and somewhere the story did fit within the total picture, even though we couldn't fit it into the big story. Our label Season Of Mist however asked for a bonus track and that's how we managed to include the song after all."

CROSS-POLLINATION.

What I noticed with the first sneak preview, but what has become clear now, is that Carach Angren this time worked very innovative musically.  Watch out, it is immediately clear that it is from Carach Angren, since you already have your own sound, but at the same time there are noticable things we haven't heard from you before. The title track has a considerable industrial touch and we also hear something from Laibach in it, just like 'Monster'. Is that something you've only recently been getting into or have you maybe secretly been an industrial fan for years?

"It is more recent, even though I've always been appreciative of it. By also collaborating with Till Lindemann for his project Lindemann, I also came into contact with it more and started taking it up unconsciously. Afterwards I got to experiment with it for my solo project and that's how I came up with the song 'Monster'. Seregor tested some things out for singing for that song and it just made sense.  It was very cool to experiment like that, which you should when you're making a record based on Frankenstein…"

It became a musical experiment instead of scientific experiment, but you do create a parallel, yes.

"Inside Carach Angren we like to put a lot of variety in the songs and if you can also give that a different look, then that is something you should try. We ourselves are absolutely crazy about it! Some fans will have to swallow when they hear those songs, but for them there are plenty of old school songs on it."

To come back to Lindemann: he and Peter Tägtgren got you involved since you are so good with classical orchestras and arrangements, but in the end it seems to have become two-way traffic, doesn't it? Have you learned a lot from it and developed other visions? 

"We worked together in a very awesome way and you do learn a lot from that. You grow as a componist, as musician and as producer. It made me compose more compactly and I sometimes pursue slightly less complex songs, like the two more industrial based songs. Always great to be able to take a different approach."

Both those songs have an easier buildup, but in the other songs you go back to the complexity that you left out purposefully 'Dance And Laugh Amongst The Rotten'. Is it a way to generate more contrast?

"In some ways yes, but it depends on how it works out in a song. We tried to make the title track a bit longer, but then the effect fell away and it didn't feel right anymore. But strangely enough I write a complex song like 'Der Vampir von Nürnberg' easier than a less complex piece like 'Monster'.  With less arrangements it quickly becomes hard to keep it exciting(engaging), but seeing as you want to keep the concept to level, you need to have enough variation. The industrial songs sound a bit less complex, but there is a lot happening in the background and they are full of tiny details that make the difference."

MIXING COLOURS.

With the new approach you have opened some doors to maybe do more experimenting in the future. Is that actually your goal or is there nothing reasoned behind it and do such new influences pop up sooner when they seem to be able to improve the song?

"It all almost comes down to what the concept of the album requires. Back when we wrote 'Death Came Through A Phantom Ship' we added swirling waves and custom/adapted sounds to it. With the new record the 'marching' of the pulsing industrial beat seemed to work the best with our Frankenstein theme. You have to see it like a painter who is mixing colours to make a new colour to fit his vision. We don't do any different and we would love to experiment more in the future. If we see what we've already tried with singing now … in the long run we were completely out of control trying to do crazy things."

The singing is indeed a very remarkable part of 'Franckensteina Strataemontanus'. We always thought Seregor had a good black metal voice, but we were very impressed by the way he twisted his voice this time around and helped set the mood.

"We are very happy about that ourselves. He delivered an excellent job and we really pushed everything to get to that point. We actually took several weeks to make sure my home studio was in perfect condition and sometimes Seregor had to redo a certain part up to 10 times to get the result we wanted, but he did it without struggling. A lot of singers that ask so much from their vocal chords are dead on their feet after an hour, but then there is Seregor who gets through the day without complaining, even while screaming his lungs out.  While recording 'Operation Compass' we did however find out it is better to record a deep grunt in the early morning, since your voice is still a bit slow and heavier from sleep.”

MUSIC AS A BOOST.

The whole corona crisis made it so that as a band it is way more difficult to promote an album now, since all concerts got cancelled. Did that have a big impact on Carach Angren or can you make it?

"I myself am very concerned with the people who are really affected by the disease and that is why I can partially ignore the inconveniences for ourselves. Nevertheless, it has a serious effect on the music industry, although that is secondary to me. We are dealing with a pandemic, people are dying and we all have to work to keep everything under control. In addition, it is strange to release an album in a full crisis, but we decided to go for it anyway. It's a cool record and we already started the promotion, so we just keep going. For now, tours are not planned, but that does not mean that we will now stream all kinds of performances to attract attention. We are not that type of band… what is a shame is that our plans for a very cool video clip are now also being abandoned. We had to go to Germany and there are also the social distancing rules, which make such a recording impossible.  But should we really want that and turn it into drama? Of course it sucks to have to promote the release like this, but the whole world is just not what it was a few months ago."

Do you have any alternative ideas to bridge that gap? I know that you guys always have enough visual ideas and there already is a lyric video for 'Monster', but I can imagine that there is more to come.

"We are working on that yes, because last month we made one for 'Der Vampir von Nürnberg' and next month we might take another song in hand. We will keep doing those sorts of things together with some 'making of-' videos that we recorded in the studio, that way we can give the album some extra promotion.  Nothing for us to worry about so… by the way, there is something about releasing a record in times like these. The people have been stuck at home for months and have nothing to do, so if we can give them a new piece of music to listen to to get through the day, then that is awesome too. It would be disappointing for the fans if we just put our new work on the shelf because of this pandemic. Every band should do what they think is best, but we had already started our press campaign anyway and we would also be a lot less driven if we only had to arrive 'with old stuff' within six months or later."

Carach Angren already has a few beautiful video clips which are build up with a real story and don't only have something musical to offer. In addition, there are also the lyric videos, where certainly those for the complete album 'This Is No Fairytale' with comic images by Costin Chioreanu stand out from the crowd. Have you never thought of bundling everything on a DVD?

"We've honestly never thought about that, but that's actually a really great idea! I think it would be nice to bundle everything together and that way we immediately remove some (away) from youtube. That can always be a good idea for the future."

LEARNING SCHOOL.

As songwriter of Carach Angren you may have previously absorbed a lot of influences that shaped you into the musician and songwriter you are today. Can you list the five most essential records or artists that shaped you personally and what exactly were their interests?

"That is a good question that doesn't let itself be answered very easily. In the classical field and orchestras I think Tchaikovsky and Stravinski are very important. They both had a lot of influence on me as a componist. Another important inspiration to me in that respect is John Williams (modern componist famous for his film scores for Star Wars, Jaws, Jurassic Park..) They helped shape me even more when it comes to layered composing, although I don't come close to what they do. As a child I followed keyboard lessons for 8 years, I did a year of conservatory and studied a year of music and media, as well as cinematic orchestration. Those last two were online, but on a serious level and you really had to write pieces for an orchestra. I learned a lot there, but ever since then I kept learning by actually doing it myself, looking through books and analyzing musical pieces.  But if I hadn't gotten the theoretical basis I had as a child, I would've never been able to do this today. On production level I have to mention Nine Inch Nails and, something you'd might find strange, Michael Jackson! If you see how well their albums are produced, and how many layers are incorporated, it's amazingly well done! You can say about Michael Jackson's music what you want, but the way the songs are built up and how much dynamics are in there thanks to the arrangements by Quincy Jones, it is absolutely astounding.  There is no lack of bells and whistles and sometimes, for example, the snare drum comes in in four layers, something you don't hear so loudly even in extreme metal. I mainly listen to those albums as an audiophile to analyze them and see what I can get out of it as a producer. Last week I checked the solo record of Roger Waters, in which I heard effects that seemed to be situated outside the loudspeaker field. Then I want to know how that is done and whether I can integrate it with Carach Angren. That kind of thing is the reverse of the compression they use too often today and you wonder why we don't all go in that direction anymore."

---

Translated by Jeordie/Trentsfishnets.

(For the record, if this interview already exists in English, I will just see this as translating practice C:)

[matchsumu]

candlelight

description: existential nights with tooru :) 

pairing: oikawa tooru x f!reader

genre: fluff (so disgustingly sweet, blame those damn ear edits not me)

warnings: existentialism

wc: 1.3k

a/n: let’s just pretend that light pollution doesn’t exist

“I leave you alone for twenty minutes and you’re planning to sacrifice me?” you tease while observing the current state of you and your boyfriends shared bedroom. 

“GAH! Y/n-chan, you scared me!” Tooru exclaims, jolting upright from his squatting position and swiftly tossing the lighter he was gripping to the side. 

The room was littered with a dozen glowing candles ranging from size, shape, and pungent scents that you swore you were smelling while in the shower.

“Don’t be ridiculous, I was just trying to set the mood~,” he said in a sing-song voice while sauntering over to you. 

You rolled your eyes but couldn’t stop the corner of your mouth from quirking up a bit, “the only thing being set is our apartment, on fire.”

He pouted at your remark and pulled you into a warm embrace. “Forgive me?”

You swatted at his chest before tucking your chin into the crook of his neck. He always had quite the flair for dramatics. 

“I suppose.”

---

The candles didn’t actually bother you; they flickered prettily from your view on the bed. You thought the gesture was sweet and maybe even a little romantic, as everything in the room glowed warm. Each candle smoldering like a miniature sun, all in charge of lighting up their own little domains.

“You’ve created a nice little set up, Tooru,” you murmured into his hair.  

He perked up slightly at the praise, shifting around the blankets so that he could hold you tighter. 

“I know that you’ve been stressed lately; and I know that I haven’t really been there for you as much as I should be with volleyball and all, so I just wanted to help. I read online that candles are good for relaxation, but I still wanted to be able to see your face, because I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever, so I got a bunch of them to make sure it would be bright enough and-”

“It’s perfect,” you interrupted, “Thank you. It means a lot.”

It really was perfect. He was perfect. He meant a lot. 

Oikawa hummed in response and you felt him smile into your figure. 

His sudden shyness made your heart swell with fondness, and you pulled back from his embrace so that you could see him. 

All of his features glowed warm. Brown hair showed caramel, and his eyes melted into pools of amber and bronze, swirling with every flicker of the flames. He was your sun. The fuel that made the light in your heart glow.

“Like what you see?” he teased but was unable to hide his own breathlessness. 

“Always,” you weren’t sure if the heat on your face was from the fire or him. “Thanks for looking out for me.”

“Always,” he echoed, “it’s all for you.”

You both knew he wasn’t just talking about the candles. 

The two of you settled back into your resting position before you took a deep breath and broke the silence.

“Can I ask you for some advice?”

He cocked his head towards you but nodded nonetheless. 

“Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you could go back in time and change the past?”

He stayed silent, waiting for you to finish your thought.

“Like sometimes I wonder what my life would look like if I picked a different college major, or if I hadn’t transferred to Seijoh, or even if I put extra creamer in my coffee this morning. There must be so many different universes of me living completely different lives to the one I’m living right now. It just makes me wonder if the life I’m currently living is the right one,” you rambled softly.

“Yeah, I think I know what you mean,” he said, prompting you to continue. 

“I’m just scared that I’m wasting my time worrying about stuff that’s meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I want to be able to live in the moment more,” you added.

You were glad that the dim lighting was enough to conceal your expression for the most part. Sometimes talking was easier when you didn’t have to focus on anything else. 

“Get up.”

You met his serious gaze with a confused expression. 

“Grab a blanket too, it’s cold out,” he added while climbing out of bed and throwing a shirt on. 

“Why?” It was the middle of the night. 

“We’re going to go live in the moment,” he smiled from the bedroom doorway, eyes sparkling. 

---

The view from your balcony was a masterpiece. The stars had put on a brilliant show, as if you and Tooru were the only people left on the earth to watch it. 

It was a cold night - cold enough that your breath came out in puffs of miniature clouds, before disappearing into the void. 

But as cold as the air was, you felt warm from the tip of your nose to your sock feet. You were wrapped up in a blanket with Oikawa, pressing so close that you weren’t sure where your skin ended and his began. 

You sat in the silence, basking in his warmth. It was almost as if he brought the heat of the candles with him, embedded into his skin just to share with you. 

“The stars look nice,” he stated.

“They do.” 

You were silent again, basking in the starlight as the sleepless city clamored on in the foreground.

“Love?”

You turned towards him, as his favorite pet name for you left his lips.

“I know what you mean, by the way. About wondering if things were different. I used to think about that a lot.”

You remembered. Those weren’t very fond memories for you. You hated seeing him so sad; he probably felt the same towards you. “What about now?”

“Now?” He hummed in thought, “Now, I’m happy, I look back and everything was all worth it.”

“I’m glad,” you smiled warmly.

“And,” he continued, “I’m happy that you’re with me in this universe. I hope we’re together in every universe.”

A world where you and Oikawa were strangers, did not exist; there was no doubt in your mind. He had set up a camp in your heart, at first only a log and a spark. But along with your growing fondness for each other, the flame in your heart erupted into a combustion of exuberance. How could he not be a part of your world when he was your sun, burning brightly at the center of it all.

“I have a feeling that you managed to worm your way into all of my lives. I hope that the other ‘me’s’ have the strength to deal with your shittyness,” you sighed.

“Mean!” He gasped and jammed a finger into your side and you laughed at his outburst.

“I pour my heart out to you, and this is how I’m treated?” Oikawa whined, “careful, love, you’re going to turn into iwa-chan if you keep this up.”

“Aw, now we can’t have that,” you cooed and he reveled in the attention. 

Maybe you should be concerned at how intertwined your lives have become. But there was really no avoiding it, after all. He was your sun. He kept you warm to the core on the coldest days and swept rays of light throughout your world, transforming it into a shining palace, where you hoped to spend the rest of your days. 

The question was not, Would you be together? rather How could you not?

How could you not, when you couldn’t even imagine a world without him?

“I love you,” you mumbled softly into his skin. The words didn’t feel like enough. There was no way you could pack all of your emotions into three syllables, but as always he understood.

“I know, I love you too,” Oikawa responded quickly, on autopilot. You had gotten to the point where those words didn’t need to be contemplated before being said. 

The night sky was beautiful but even so, it could never outshine the stars in Oikawa’s eyes. As you curled into him, you knew that you could not be as content as you were now in any other universe.

[clevermird]

8 Reasons your World of Darkness characters might not be working

If you’ve been playing World of Darkness games for any length of time, you’ll probably have run into at least one character that was just bad- downright painful to roleplay with. You might have even been the one playing them.

This is not about those characters.

Lots of times, we make characters that are mostly good, but there’s something about them that doesn’t quite work. They don’t quite flow, or maybe they feel like an odd one out in the game. So here’s eight reasons why otherwise good WoD characters might not be working:

1. Lack of Focus

It’s very easy, especially with more experienced characters, to just stack stuff into their backstory endlessly until you’ve basically got a novel. But your ST doesn’t want to read all that, you probably won’t be able to keep track of all of it, and most importantly, it will make the other players feel frustrated because your character is going to take up too more narrative space within the game. It will also lead to frustration on your end, as it’s likely going to wind up impossible to address everything you’ve come up with in the scope of one chronicle.

The way to prevent- or at least mitigate- this issue is to pay close attention to the “concept” line on the character sheet. It’s easy to skip over for being mechanically irrelevant and not very fun, but it helps give a core to key in on and help you trim excess material that doesn’t serve what you really want to do with the character. Nature and Demeanor are additional ways to give yourself guidelines to avoid adding details that don’t make your character more complex, just more complicated.

2. Poorly developed mortal/mundane life

The mortal life is what makes the character relatable. While “young neonate trying to fight elder tyranny” is a theme that can resonate with us… we’re not vampires or werewolves (at least I hope nobody reading this is). We’ve never struggled with the Beast or participated in a punishment rite. The part of a character that’s going to make them believable and sympathetic is the part more of us are familiar with, so avoid the temptation to “skip to the good parts”

3. Your concept requires too much research

This is somewhat YMMV- while there’s a bare minimum of research you need to do to avoid shallow stereotypes and ridiculous errors, some people are much more bothered by inaccuracies than others. If you’re the kind of person who’s going to be very frustrated if you realize in the middle of the session that you don’t have any idea what a culturally appropriate favorite food for your character might be, or what that engineering term you’ve been throwing around actually means, be prepared to spend a lot of time outside of game sessions checking into every aspect of who your character is an what they can do so you can minimize the number of times you’re caught flat-footed. Or just pick something a bit closer to home. If, on the other hand, you’re more comfortable winging it, this might not be as big of a concern.

4. Poorly defined or vague goals

Pretty much everyone knows a good character needs to want something nowadays. But commonly, these goals wind up being something big and broad like “find my place in the world” or “repair the reputations of the Euthanatos”. But it’s very hard to make goals like this affect any specific action or lead to any specific plotline. They’re a good start, but should be narrowed down before the chronicle begins to something more concrete. “Prove my worth as a cainite to the local Sabbat” is something a lot easier to act on and use as a catalyst for action and inaction, but is still a facet of something like “find my place in the world”.

5. Character goals poorly matched to the chronicle

This is going to require talking to the ST to resolve, but if you’re going to be playing in a 1st edition Chicago by Night chronicle, and you make a Toreador whose life goal is to get elected president of France, you’re not going to be able to make any meaningful progress towards that within the scope of the game. Not, of course, that characters shouldn’t want things they can’t have. That’s one of the funnest ways to torture them! But you do need to make it such that you can feel like what you do in the chronicle is actually relevant to getting or failing to get what you want.

6. Not allowing room for failure

You can’t force other characters- player or ST- to react to yours in a specific way. If it’s very important that everyone in your game (or a specific character) finds your PC sexy/scary/annoying/trustworthy, you need to rethink. Traits, Merits, and Flaws can get you most of the way there, but you’re setting yourself up for a bad time if you don’t make sure the character still works if you don’t get the intended reaction.

Also, you don’t want to set your characters up in a way that they cannot fail, because dice gods are bitches and you’ll probably wind up botching at the worst possible moment. A common example of this is a character who’s lying about their past, and this lie must never be called into serious doubt for whatever reason. Eventually, the player will fail a roll, and needs to be prepared for what’s going to happen if that’s the case. Finding ways to minimize these things is smart playing, but you can’t eliminate the role of chance entirely, so keep that in mind.

7. Making characters that can’t work with a group

WoD games do tend to be a bit more friendly to individualistic characters than many others, but if you make a character who won’t ever join up with the coterie/pack/cabal/motley/etc (or will require a contrived explanation or constant outside intervention to keep them with the group), that’s a bad move for everyone involved. Ditto for those characters who will be actively antagonistic to the rest of the group without reasonable provocation. The other players will have a bad time as you drag the chronicle down while they deal with keeping your PC happy, and you’ll have a bad time as you miss out on all the good action while your PC is off lone wolfing it.

There’s many ways to integrate a PC into a group, but if you want to make someone who’s generally independent, but sticks with these people, an easy way to handle it is to coordinate with another player to establish some kind of previous relationship, be it friends, lovers, family, or simply a working partnership.

8. You don’t actually want to roleplay the character

This is kind of a weird one, but once again, there’s two facets. First, what your character does isn’t actually very interesting. This is common with creative characters who want to make some kind of masterwork (although it does pop up in other places). You wind up roleplaying someone sitting in a room writing a book, when you could have just been writing a book yourself and it would have been a lot more fun. This isn’t to say that creatives can’t be fun PCs, but you need to give them something to get them out of their studios or off their computers.

On the flip side, sometimes you’re not comfortable roleplaying your character. A personal example will be useful here. I had a Vampire PC at one point who was a Follower of Set. During her mortal life, she had been involved in a sexual relationship that was very taboo by many people’s standards, and the psychological effect this had on her carried through her Embrace. It affected how she fed, how she viewed the Cult of Set. But I don’t really enjoy erotic rp and actually get very uncomfortable roleplaying the heavy sexual themes. And while the concept didn’t require explicit sex scenes, there was a lot of focus on her sexuality and sexual themes. I wound up feeling like I was constantly walking a tightrope, trying to portray the PC in an authentic way that was true to how I envisioned her mind working, while also never getting too far into sexual situations. I actually wound up having to retire her. Not because she was a bad character, but because she was a bad character for me.

If for whatever reason your character requires focus on something you feel uncomfortable roleplaying, you should really just skip it. It might get easier, it might not, but you don’t want to put yourself in a situation where you’re forced to retire them in the middle of a game because it’s just not working. If you’re unsure, try saving the PC for a one-shot or getting your ST to run a detailed prelude for you, which will give time to explore a bit without the pressure of making this an ongoing thing if you don’t like it.

  Thanks for reading! None of this will save a totally crap character, but all of them will help take concepts that are OK and elevate them to something useful.

[archivingspn]

Entertainment Weekly Special Edition: The Ultimate Guide to Supernatural 2017

SAM AND DEAN WINCHESTER KNOW "WEIRD." Their entire life has been weird, ever since the moment a demon claimed their mother's life. In case anyone has forgotten over the course of the show's past 12 seasons, Supernatural tells the story of the Winchester brothers, portrayed by Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who fell into the family business of hunting creatures after their mother's murder. What began as their father's journey for revenge has evolved into endless monster slayings, near-death experiences and more than a few actual deaths.

By this point the Winchesters have been to Hell and back, killed Death himself, come face-to-face with God and prevented the Apocalypse. But perhaps more impressively, the series has survived three network presidents, five showrunners, a writers' strike and five different time slots. Turns out the only thing harder to kill than the Winchesters is the series itself. "It's one of those shows that has moved a lot, and yet each time it has found that core audience and built on it," Warner Bros. Television president Peter Roth says. "It's been an unsung hero."

If anyone knows about being an unsung hero, it's Sam (Padalecki) and Dean (Ackles), who've dedicated their lives to saving others and asked for nothing in return. Seriously, how many nights have they spent sleeping in their car?And yet that on-the-road lifestyle has paved the way for a number of the show's riskier episodes, which play a crucial role in keeping the audience engaged. In 2015 "Baby" was told entirely from the perspective of their beloved 1967 Impala, and that's not even close to the craziest thing the show's tried.

Aside from the rules the show creates within its canon—yes, they have a historian in the writers' room to keep them honest—not even the sky is the limit when it comes to story ideas. “[Show creator] Eric [Kripke] used to say, 'Smoke 'em if you've got 'em,' which meant: Anything crazy, don't be afraid to run it by us," executive producer Robert Singer says.

That motto led most famously to season 6's "The French Mistake," in which Sam and Dean found themselves in an alternate universe where everyone mistook them for Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, the stars of a show called Supernatural. "Our show's not bound by reality," Ackles, 39, says. "We're rooted in reality, but we're not bound by it. That gives us a fifth wall almost."

But Supernatural's season 12 finale managed to raise the stakes by somehow introducing the boys to something they'd never seen before: a world in which they don't exist and Heaven and Hell are locked in an eternal war. By episode's end, their allies Castiel (Misha Collins) and Crowley (Mark Sheppard) were dead, and their mother, Mary (Samantha Smith), who was resurrected-by God's sister!-in the season 11 finale, found herself trapped in this new reality with the Archangel Lucifer (Mark Pellegrino). If that doesn't seem bad enough, the birth of Lucifer's son is the very thing that opened the rift to this apocalyptic realm. "The world in which Sam and Dean were never born is not a good world," showrunner Andrew Dabb says. "It speaks to the importance of our guys. The world Sam and Dean live in is certainly not perfect, but it's a whole hell of a lot better than the alternative."

Dabb describes the new run of episodes as more melancholy than last year's, with new threats including some long-dead characters. And somehow Scooby-Doo has a role to play. (More on that later.)

"Last season was, in some ways, a very upbeat season for us," says Dabb, who goes on to explain that season 13 will be "darker." In their grief the boys will butt heads when it comes to both Lucifer's son Jack—Dean wants nothing to do with him; Sam thinks he's worth trying to save— and Mary, whom Sam refuses to give up on despite Dean's having lost hope that she's still alive. "The Apocalypse world hangs over our guys a little bit like a sword of Damocles," Dabb says of the season's beginning. "We're definitely going to spend a little time there."

And of course Sam and Dean have this new responsibility thrust upon them before they've had the chance to properly grieve their many losses, including Castiel, who Dabb says will appear, though maybe not the way fans are expecting. "We're not looking to hit the reset button," Dabb says. "We want to give both our guys an opportunity to react to that and ask the question: How would that affect them if their closest friend sacrifices himself for them? There is a certain amount, especially when you look at Dean, of survivor's guilt."

That being said, there will be at least one (animated!) moment of levity, though it's in the season's back half. Episode 16 will be a much-anticipated Scooby-Doo crossover, for which Ackles, Padalecki and Collins have already recorded the audio. "They've often talked about Supernatural crossing over into something." Ackles says. "I love that it's Scooby-Doo."

But even with exciting new ideas on the agenda, there's always the lingering question of how much longer the show can continue. According to CW president Mark Pedowitz, the answer is as long as the guys are happy and the ratings are relatively stable. As for Ackles and Padalecki, they are focusing on the next milestone: hitting 300 episodes (something that would take them 13 episodes into season 14). However, if Sam and Dean have taught the actors anything, it's that Death can be lurking around every corner (and he's usually eating pizza). "If we don't make it to 300, I think Ackles and I will both be truly bummed," Padalecki, 35, says.

Ackles adds, "They're paying us to bring that little bit of magic to what they wrote, and I still feel that magic. The day that I don't feel that magic will be a very sad day, and I hope that day never comes. I'd like to get to 300 before that day comes."

One thing everyone can agree on is that they want to know when the end is nigh. "I think it would be bad for this show to just ride off into the sunset without a finale," Singer says. "I think we've earned that." Ultimately the only thing that's certain about Supernatural's eventual end is the fate of Sam and Dean's Impala, Baby. "He gets Baby," Padalecki says of Ackles. "I get Baby Two." Ackles makes one correction: "No, you'll get Three. Two is a stunt car. It's beat to s---.”

But nobody gets Baby just yet. For now they'll need all the Impalas they can get as they try to solve the problems of not one world but two.

[pg 10-12]

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

Stars Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki and Misha Collins have rolled with rapid changes and some surprising detours during the series' remarkable run. BY SAMANTHA HIGHFILL

JARED PADALECKI CAN STILL REMEMBER THE exact pitch for Supernatural's first season: “Route 66 meets X-Files, brothers on the back roads of America hunting things that go bump in the night.” That was how he and costar Jensen Ackles were told to promote the show, which, in its first year, was just that-Sam and Dean Winchester chasing urban legends from state to state.

But over time that original pitch added a few sentences. Much like with any good road trip, there have been quite a few turns—and the occasional crossroads along the way. Although the show remains about two brothers on the back roads of America hunting things, those "things'' now include everything from vengeful spirits to imaginary friends and even Lucifer himself. After all, a show doesn't last 13 seasons without adjusting its game plan. For Supernatural that has meant an ever expanding mythology, some shocking deaths, resurrected characters, breaking the fourth wall and so much more.

Yet all the while, one thing has remained true: Sam and Dean Winchester will do whatever it takes to save the world and, even more so, to save each other. And they'll do it while navigating those seemingly endless back roads in their 1967 Impala.

Finding John Winchester (portrayed by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was the boys' goal in season 1, though that ended up being about as difficult as getting John to stick around once he was finally discovered. The Winchester family reunion was short-lived: Season 1 closed with a car crash and the fates of all three men up in the air. And then there was that demonic deal John made with the same monster they had been hunting.

JENSEN ACKLES Everything up until that point was about finding Dad. We found Dad, we continued to fight as a unit, and then we lost Dad, and now we were two orphans.

JARED PADALECKI And I think that was the first time we ever brought back somebody from the dead, and it was you [to Ackles].

ACKLES I died in the car crash, and he traded his life with Azazel.

PADALECKI I think that was the first time we ever saw a major character die and come back. And that was a total leap of faith. So we told the story of Reapers and the veil and what happens to your soul.

ACKLES That's when we got into afterlife.

PADALECKI That was a big title shift in what Supernatural could do...

ACKLES With the introduction of Hell and making deals with demons—which is funny, because you think about that now, and [creator] Eric [Kripke] must've always known because Mom made the deal with the yellow-eyed demon.

The next shift would come later in season 2, laying the groundwork for the introduction of angels far before Castiel spread his wings in that abandoned barn in season 4.

PADALECKI "Houses of the Holy” was the first time we ever talked about angels on Supernatural. [Jensen] and I both were like, “Whatever your religious beliefs, whatever ours, we're not here to proselytize. We're here to make a serialized television show, but we want it to be universal.” So we actually had a conference call with Eric Kripke, and we were like, "Hey, man, we don't know how we feel about this.”

ACKLES We didn't want to be a mouthpiece for writers' religious views, because it wasn't the show that we had signed up for. Our argument was: “We trust you. You've done good by us so far. However, this is our one concern, and we're just bringing it to the table so that we can discuss it.”

PADALECKI And they heard us out, and I think that's why they waited another year and a half before introducing our second and most famous angel. I think it's the one time we've ever called them together with a complaint. Because I'm not a writer. I don't want to be a writer. I enjoy my job as an actor. But that was legitimately like, “Listen, if you're going here about religion, I don't want to be a part of it.”

MISHA COLLINS And now amazingly, 11 years later, so much of the show has been hung on biblical lore and mythology that is actually drawn from the Bible. One interesting thing for us is that we end up talking along the way to priests and pastors and ministers, or even nuns, who love the show.

(...)

ACKLES It was amazing, but my point being that we're in one of the most religious places on earth, and they're catering to people from a show that deals with religiously inspired story lines.

PADALECKI But not telling the story that the Bible tells.

ACKLES That's the out. That's where we get a pass is that we're not trying to tell the story of the Bible. The writers take inspiration from biblical elements and then elaborate on them. So when we got into that original discussion, Eric came back with: “We're not here to tell the story of Jesus Christ. We're here to take that element and use it as inspiration for the story.” I think that alleviated any concerns that he and I had. And at the same time we really trusted Eric and still do to this day.

Another leap of faith came with season 2's "Hollywood Babylon,” which can be considered the show's first meta episode. It opened the door for everything from season 6's “The French Mistake” to the upcoming season 13 Scooby-Doo crossover.

ACKLES “Babylon” was the first time we took the piss out of ourselves and were poking fun at the industry.

COLLINS That has been a huge [help to know] that you can go to these absurd lengths and break conventions. Reading the script where we are doing a Scooby-Doo episode makes me feel proud. Where else can you do that?

Padalecki What other show does that and has the fandom at large excited that they’re going to do that? Can you imagine if JAG or NCIS did a Scooby-Doo episode? People would be like, “What?” Not only do we break the fourth wall, do we go meta, but those end up being some of our best episodes.

The season 5 finale holds the No. 1 spot on EW's episode ranking, but that hour was important for many reasons, one of which being that it was creator Kripke’s farewell.

COLLINS “Swan Song" was another milestone because that marked the culmination of Eric's original vision for the show. He had a five-season arc in mind that tied up perfectly with a bow, and then he moved on and handed the reins over to Sera [Gamble]. That became, “Okay, guys, now let's figure out how to start a new chapter or a new volume in a series of chapters.”

PADALECKI It's the story that we were all born from, those of us who were introduced in the first five years. So to have the creator step away? I would argue that it was the largest shift.

Gamble served as showrunner for seasons 6 and 7, the latter containing another major show moment: the death of Bobby (Jim Beaver), Sam and Dean's father figure.

PADALECKI Bobby was such a big part. Jeffrey Dean [Morgan] was never as much a part of the show. He was obviously a huge part of the story, but he did [just a few] episodes, and Jim Beaver did 60 or something. And there was something about his death that we knew it was final...or final for Supernatural.

ACKLES Because his character said, “I'm done.” So it wasn't like he got killed accidentally and we found a way to bring Bobby back. He was like, “I'm hanging it up, guys." It was heavy.

PADALECKI That probably was the first big death of someone who'd been there for years...

ACKLES [Interrupting] A fan favorite...

PADALECKI Yeah, and I remember [CW president] Mark Pedowitz saying something to the effect of “As a fan, I hated when Bobby died, but it was great television.” That's how I feel. 

ACKLES Like when Sam Winchester dies for good, it's going to be good television. But when Dean Winchester lives on, it's going to be great television. [Everyone laughs]

The season 12 finale saw the introduction of an apocalyptic alternate world in which Sam and Dean Winchester were never born and Heaven and Hell are locked in an eternal war. And with that world comes the possibility for a number of character returns. But does it feel like a turning point? 

COLLINS Well, I think the rift and the fact that you can go into the apocalypse world and you can all of a sudden revisit every character in a different iteration—there could be a different version of every character—it opens up this incredible panoply.

(...)

PADALECKI And if an alternate universe exists, then how many alternate universes exist? It's hard to say, because I feel like it's impossible to identify a turning point during the turn. In hindsight it will reveal how this story will affect the show, the canon at large and the way we move forward. But I certainly feel like we're opening up doors with the rift and with the son of Lucifer.

(...)

[pg 20-26]

THE CORONER'S VAN JUST PULLED INTO THE driveway. It's the middle of August in 2016, and Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles are filming a scene for Supernatural's 12th season at a farmhouse in the Vancouver countryside, which is standing in for Iowa. Sam and Dean Winchester have ditched their flannels and jeans for sweaters and slacks in order to pose as social workers. They're doing what the two brothers do best: lying about their jobs in order to solve mysteries and kill monsters—in other words, saving people, hunting things.

When Supernatural premiered, Sam and Dean Winchester were born into the family business of hunting creatures, and it's a lifestyle that, over the years, has left them with very few people they love. Turns out, when you spend your days battling shape-shifters, witches and the occasional angel—they're not all nice, you know—nothing is guaranteed, especially not tomorrow.

But no matter how crazy the Winchesters' world gets—or how many worlds they have to face—one thing remains unchanged: At the center of it all are Ackles and Padalecki, whose Dean and Sam are the beating heart of the show (whether theirs are beating or not).

(...)

(...) even pulling up their favorite scenes on their phones to watch at the table. Padalecki can easily name the scripts that made him cry—“Heart,” “Sacrifice" and "Baby" all land on the list. The common thread is a heartfelt moment between the brothers where they get to talk about their crazy life as if, say, having visions of Lucifer is normal. “I feel like those situations where we treat the abstract and the fantastical as just part of life is where the show thrives,” Padalecki says. Ackles adds, “I think the show is truly at its best when it doesn't take itself too seriously, then it does take itself seriously, and it gets scary as s---,”.

But whether Supernatural is making fun of itself, scaring the living daylights out of its fans, or just letting the brothers have a moment on the hood of the Impala, it all works because of our central heroes. “It's about the Winchesters," says Crowley actor Mark Sheppard. “We really do care, and it's a testament to the boys that we still care."

(...)

As the sun sets on the Vancouver countryside, Sam and Dean ditch their slacks for jeans and send the coroner's van on its way. It won't be needed—this show, and the brotherly bond that holds it all together, has a lot of life left in it. Not that death has ever stopped it before.

[pg 32-34]

(...)

DEAN WINCHESTER Jensen Ackles

He was always the good son. Dean embraced the hunter's lifestyle, and he idolized his father despite John's many faults. But with the senior Winchester devoted to tracking down demons, it fell to Dean to help parent Sam, and he went to great lengths to protect his younger sibling-at one point even making a deal with a Crossroads demon (at the cost of his own life) to resurrect Sam from the dead. The two have had their differences, but throughout, Dean's brother was his first priority. "Watching out for you, it's kinda been my job, you know? But more than that, it's kinda who I am." Cynical and initially skeptical of the existence of God, Dean has nonetheless managed to become best buds with the angel Castiel (and on first name terms with both God and God's sister Amara). His self-sacrificing nature means he would do literally anything for those he considers family-and that's a short list: Sam, Mary and Castiel.

[pg 38]

Sympathy for the Devil

EVERY HERO NEEDS A HELL, BUT SUPERNATURAL HAS JUST TWO PROTAGONISTS AND HUNDREDS OF VILLAINS. HERE’S HOW THE SHOWRUNNERS APPROACHED SAM AND DEAN’S MANY FOES, FROM WELL-KNOWN URBAN LEGENDS TO SATAN HIMSELF. By Samantha Highfill

[pg 51]

Stairway to Heaven

SAM AND DEAN MET CASTIEL. AN ANGEL OF THE LORD, IN SEASON 4, AND IT CHANGED THE COURSE OF THE SHOW. BECAUSE ANGELS WEREN’T ALWAYS THE PLAN— AND CASTIEL WAS ONLY THE FIRST. By Samantha Highfill

(on page 57 there’s a small box of print on the corner that says: In what executive producer Robert Singer calls one of the series’ most “iconic images,” Castiel (Misha Collins) is introduced as the show’s first real angel.)

WHILE OTHER CHILDREN WERE LEARNING multiplication tables, Sam and Dean Winchester were hunting monsters. “When I told Dad I was scared of the thing in my closet, he gave me a .45!” says Sam to Dean in the Supernatural pilot, recalling an episode when he was 9 years old. Clearly creature encounters were par for the course in the Winchester way of life. And when you grow up battling all the evil in the world, it's hard to believe in the good. But in the show's season 4 premiere, Dean would come face-to-face with the one supernatural entity he didn't think existed: angels.

“[Show creator] Eric [Kripke] wasn't in love with the idea of doing angels,” executive producer Robert Singer says of the early days. “But as things went on and we were getting into demons, I would say to him, 'I don't know how we do demons without doing angels.’”

The show tested the waters in season 2's “Houses of the Holy,” when Sam and Dean worked a case that appeared to involve angels then went in a different direction. It wasn't until late in the next season that the seraphim were finally embraced. When Dean was dragged to Hell, they needed to get him out. And if there's a Hell, it stands to reason there has to be a Heaven. "[The season 3 finale] was the gateway into this whole other world of angels and demons," executive producer Andrew Dabb says.

When it came time to spring Dean from Hell, it was Castiel, the show's first angel, who gripped him tight and raised him from perdition. But Castiel quickly established that he wasn't a typical cherubic angel. Many of the show's angels were, as Sam and Dean would put it, real dicks. “We have our own brand of angels and the idea that they were these warriors of God,” Singer says. “We introduced Castiel, and we just went from there. Heaven opened up different levels of angels.”

The moment Castiel spread his wings, the show expanded its universe. Castiel came bearing news of something much bigger: the Apocalypse, the ultimate showdown between good and evil-or more specifically between Archangels Michael and Lucifer. “We started with archangels and the idea that Lucifer was an archangel and was cast out of Heaven,” Singer says. “We certainly took some license, but it was all biblically grounded. We just took those things and went a step further to make them work for our story.”

From there the show explored all kinds of angels, from Zachariah and Naomi to Gabriel and Metatron, and, of course, it eventually arrived at God-or Chuck, if you prefer. “We didn't really know that Chuck was God when we first started with him," Singer says of introducing the character in season 4. (He wouldn't be revealed as God until season 11.) “That evolved. We wanted a relatable God, a God with foibles.”

Nine seasons later, what started as one angel in a trench coat has evolved into Lucifer, God, Leviathan and even a sister for God. “We play a little fast and loose with religion, but no one has really complained about it,” Singer says with a laugh. “So we'll just keep going.”

[pg 56-58]

CASTIEL Misha Collins

What can you say about the only member of Team Free Will who wears an overcoat? Cas has become a true member of the Winchester family.

[pg 61]

[centrally-unplanned]

Serial Experiments Lain: A Guide to Proper Mindfucking Procedures

(I finished Lain! I originally wrote here “will jot down some thoughts, maybe I can write a full essay sometime later”, reviewing it now this is absolutely a full essay, so scratch that lets commit)

Serial Experiments Lain is a starring member of the pantheon of 90′s “mindfuck” anime, those shows that supposedly blow the mind with esoteric philosophy and trippy visuals. Current-me has frequently sallied against this notion, particularly the idea that any of these shows (or most any show) are that philosophically dense - the nature of television & film is such that they almost never are, which is normally a good thing. But young-me watched Lain around the same time I watched the original Ghost in the Shell film, and I had that halcyon experience for both: intriguing, but also on the border of incomprehensibility. As such I held little opinion of either of them, not trusting my hazy memories, until I saw them again much later. Ghost in the Shell, by the way, is a terrible, painfully boring film, precisely because it tries to be that philosophy-mindfuck concept. Which can work when you are young and stupid, but once you have read literally anything, anything at all, a single op-ed will do, about “AI and Identity” or the like its ideas are trite and shallow while it has sacrificed characterization, plot, and pacing in pursuit of that failed dream. 

Lain on the other hand is a brilliant show that succeeds at that concept far better than media like GitS ever could precisely by not even trying to be that. The thematic foundation of Lain is actually quite simple; the openness & inter-connectivity of the internet is not just utilitarian but can offer a way of living that is seemingly brimming with unlimited freedom and emancipatory potential, but that promise is found fundamentally to be a hollow (ahem) shell, with reality being not only inescapable but desirably so. Or something like that? I mean maybe. Lain never spends that much time on answers, because those are boring; instead focusing on the actual experience of the titular Lain herself as she navigates these concepts. All of the content it throws out are lateral moves around this core, details to mull over as opposed to attempts to “go deeper”, which makes it not-that-hard to follow once you understand that is what is happening. There is even a scene where the, let’s say “villain”, tries to go full-philosophy on Lain: who is the real her? What is identity anyway? Plays that whole entire hand, and she replies:

Which, given that those themes are absolutely the themes of GitS, made me laugh out loud and yes is 50% of why I am comparing them. I am certainly not saying that Lain doesn’t have philosophical concepts, it clearly does in spades. Stitching those concepts together into a grand thesis, however, is just not the focus. 

What is Lain’s focus is mood, and I have never seen a show use so many varied animation concepts and narrative approaches all towards capturing a singular mood; that of the free-wheeling hacker-for-truth aesthetic of the early internet. It is of course famously filled with glitchy shots of Lain flickering on CRT monitors and horror-shadowy power lines, damn does it have so many shots of power lines. But that is covered ground - instead I want to note how often the narrative approach itself just goes off the walls in service of its goals. Episode 9 is the peak of that approach, where scattered throughout the episode is a fully-fledged documentary that starts with the Roswell incident, which it then admits is fake, nevermind! before pivoting to discourse about Schumann Resonances and the Earth as a decentralized Neural Net and...

Just a screenshot from an anime here folks! Vannevar Bush better have a Danbooru tag 

All of this information is “true” by the way, as in real concepts and thinkers and crackpot ideas...until the end, when suddenly its someone from Tachibana Labs adding Schumann Resonance Integration to the 6th Protocol and wait-a-second that’s the show-canon, Tachibana Labs isn't real. As a ~youth~ you might be foolish enough to try to figure out how say ELF bands might be critical to understanding the plot of Lain, which is a classic “philosophy mindfuck” mistake; its all bullshit, the ideas only matter in the most loose way that does not require understanding them. Yet, this is *exactly* what that early hacker internet felt like; crazy ideas being stitched together from low-pixel edited docu-footage repurposed to utopian futures or secret conspiracies, and by sliding this stream-of-consciousness braindump right into the canon of the show it makes Lain feel like a perfect simulacra of that age. To spend any amount of the runtime of an episode on this and to actually pull it off is queering the madness/genius binary in the hottest way. 

The reason Lain can pull this off is its other source of strength I alluded too - all of these visual elements are in service of a very human story, that of Lain trying to figure out her place in the world. And this arc hits one of my sweet spots for media, what I have called the “multifaceted arc” in the past, where instead of a show having multiple independent arcs for characters it instead has one seemingly-completed arc that proceeds to be refracted, challenged,and altered over the run of a show. I mentioned in my previous Lain essay how the show was using the visual language of exposed skin to communicate Lain’s digital emancipation, becoming Lain of the Wired. In those early episodes that is what is happening, and this process peaks around the halfway point with a confident, powerful Lain. She spends much of episode 6 looking like some variation of this:

Total badass. That confidence and power then proceeds to be abused, manipulated, revealed as a false identity, and then stripped away over the latter half of the show - being Lain of the Wired turns out to be a curse as much as a blessing, and for the very human reasons of the connections to real people she loses through that process. This emotional core does an amazing job of keeping you grounded - in the same episode as that conspiracy documentary, Lain has her first kiss! (Its a bit of a dud, but still). And by the end of the show she is at the apogee of her digital empowerment, and also riddled with despair, loneliness, and in desperate need of help, looking like this:

Note the withdrawn pose and the positioning of Lain backgrounded and way below her friend in the frame, to imply a state of weakness despite her capabilities. That is some classic visual language by the way: no crazy shot effects, no weird narrative devices, just straightforward emotional communication. Lain spends 50% of its runtime going full avant garde, but never (okay, rarely) lets that overwhelm its arc, and threads the needle to make that arc one of the deeper and more moving arcs I've seen in a show.

Serial Experiments Lain is far from perfect, despite all the praise I just put on it; Episode 6 for example has some dumb midichlorian-style “you are trying to explain something no one needs an explanation for” plot, and half of the crazy visual effects are compensating for the fact that its budget was like 10 dollars. But it peaks far exceed its valleys, and I am exceedingly happy to have watched it; I have always struggled to name my “Number 5″ on my top 5 Anime list with a lot of contenders for the slot, but Lain might have just snagged the title.

(Which would make my top 5 list *entirely* composed of anime from the second half of the 90′s, and not due to nostalgia as I only saw the majority of them in the past few years. Certainly a question worth answering, but for another time...)

[op-peccatori]

True Disaster (NSFW) | MLQC Lucien | Kinktober (October 2nd)

Prompts: October 2nd:  Asphyxiation || Orgasm denial/edging || Public

KINKTOBER IS HERE and I’m liviiiiing. @alloveroliver​ thank you, thank you, thank youuuu for organizing and hosting Kinktober!! 

Fandom: Mr Love: Queen’s Choice

Pairing: Lucien/Reader

Rating: 18+

Warnings: explicit smut, unprotected sex, oral (female), orgasm denial, (semi?) public sex, overstimulation, sex toy (vibrator)

a/n: the title is from Tove Lo’s True Disaster. I believe this song applies to how I feel about Lucien perfectly. and I dearly hope I didn’t fuck it up during the editing

For the fifth time today, you’re wondering if this is worth it. It’s getting old. 

You can barely concentrate on the pages in front of you, the letters blurring in and out of focus. Your breath is growing heavier, everyone’s voices loud in the background but still beyond your understanding. Your thighs squeeze together, a futile attempt to gain some friction, to ease the agony you’re being put through. Your coworkers have no idea anything is out of the ordinary, they have no idea you’re on the verge of losing your mind. And it’s all thanks to the man smiling angelically down at Anna while she thanks him for appearing on their special episode for Miracle Finder. 

Sadistic bastard.

You would say he hasn’t even glanced your way, but you know that’s not true. You can feel him taking note of your reactions. Every drop of sweat that beads on your forehead, the slight tremble in your fingers, every moan you swallow with panic clearly visible in your eyes is observed by him. You can see how much he likes it, it’s clear in the dark glint in his eye. You can almost hear him purring with delight.

Your boyfriend is an evil man. It’s a part of his charm. 

You wonder how no one can hear the buzzing in your body. You can feel it down to your toes, but it’s centred below your belly. Sending pulses that threaten to overwhelm you. It’s absent right now, but every once in awhile his eyes would dart to you and decide you haven't been tortured enough.

Just a little more, baby. Can you do it for me? 

And so it would increase, pulling you under the surface but never letting you drown. It’s breaking you down inch by inch, a hand around your ankle dragging you into madness. Putting you right where he wants you.

Good girl.

It takes you a few seconds to realize someone was calling your name. You glance up to see another regular on the show, Kim. The singer. Kiki, Willow and Minor have agreed that while he wasn’t quite on Kiro’s level, the singer was very good-looking. His aloof and reserved personality only added to his appeal. You just hope he doesn't notice the twitching.

“Hi, Kim! Sorry, I’ve been...a little out of it, you laugh nervously. “What were you saying?” The man, bless him, just gave you a small smile before repeating himself. 

“I just wanted to thank you for allowing me to be a part of the team,” he says, smiling a little wider at your protests. “I’m really glad I got to know everyone here. And you, of course. I’ve been a fan of Miracle Finder since I was a kid.” 

And isn't that just so sweet? 

You relax and smile back at him warmly, immediately engaging him in conversation about the common factor in your childhoods. He tells you how excited he was when he got a call from you, his usual reserved demeanour set aside. You miss his flushed cheeks and shy gaze completely, too busy telling him about your favourite episodes. 

You’re distracted. And like a fool, you let your guard down. 

“Um, I was wondering if you’re...seeing anyone,” he asks suddenly. You pause, blinking at the sudden question, a something nervous churning in your stomach. 

“Huh?“ He seems oddly encouraged by your response.

“Yes, I actually wanted to ask if you’d like to get a coffee or something soon,” he confesses with a ghost of a laugh. Just as you’re done processing this, your mouth opens and the only sound you manage is something resembling a strangled tone because it’s started up again. Not low, not steady–it’s insistent, working the walls of your core ruthlessly. Your eyes fly to Lucien in panic, but he’s not looking at you. You hold on to the edge of the table, mouth open and eyes wide. 

No. No no no.

Kim calls your name, concern in his voice. 

“Right, um. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid,” you say and gasp, your smile shaky. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” His face falls but before he can say a word, you squeak something about the bathroom and fling yourself out of the chair, rushing out of the conference room. Your journey to your office is shaky at best, the wave building with each step you take. You fall to your knees with a low cry as the door closes behind you. You can’t touch yourself, because he’ll know. You can only pray that this time, he’ll let you finish. 

“Oh God.” 

Your hands are clenched in the pale blue carpet, your knuckles white. Your teeth are digging into your lip painfully. Your walls flutter, and you’re so close. It’s been over two hours since you started this game, your confidence in winning it non-existent after being denied for so long. 

It was right there. And then it was gone again, snatched away from within reaching distance. You slump and whimper, the disappointment nearly unbearable.

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fu-“ 

“Well, isn’t this a sight?” came a voice you knew were all too familiar with. You look over your shoulder to see Lucien standing in the doorway, an infuriatingly innocent smile on his lips. His eyes are anything but. You take a deep, fortifying breath and fall on your ass, leaning back on your hands, as you pant. There are tears in your eyes. 

“I hate you.” He locks the door behind him. His smile slips into a smirk and you couldn’t help but think there was something extremely filthy about it. You want to devour it, lick the curve of it and see if it still stays when you shove it into your sex. It probably would. 

“Do you?” He coos, slipping his jacket off and draping it over a chair. He moves smoothly, without a care in the world, as if you aren’t trembling at his feet. He offers you a hand and you take it with a weepy glare, letting him pull you up. Your knees are weak, and you have to lean back against your desk to be able to remain standing up. If he were a less composed man, you just know he’d be laughing evilly. Instead, he watches you, your skin heated and gaze needy. 

“So much. You’re trying to kill me,” you say with certainty. He grins at that, a hand on your thighs already, stroking the flesh there teasingly. He kisses your cheek, your neck, humming at the taste. ”And you're succeeding.”

“That’s a very serious accusation, darling,” he says, tone mocking but mostly suggestive. Your belly clenches in response. “What in the world would I do after killing you? How would I go on?” 

You scoff, hyperaware of his long fingers hot on your skin. “With ease and the memories of torturing me to keep you warm at night, I’m sure.” You try to adjust your body so he would be closer to where you need him. He pinches the inner part of your thigh in response. 

“I would wither away,” he sighs, stepping closer to you. He’s sincere but your frustration has reached its limit. You don’t have the patience for his dirty mind games, not right now. “I like the real thing far too much.”

“It doesn’t seem like it.” 

“No?” He brings his other hand to your mouth, tracing your lower lip with a finger. You bite it and the sound that leaves his mouth could only be described as predatory. “But you know I’ll give you anything you want, don’t you? You need only ask for it.” Ask for it. You have troubling asking for it, but you also have trouble with not being allowed to come for this long.  

Decisions, decisions.

“Then let me–“ you try to say, but are ultimately unable to finish. Lucien’s mask slips into something eager. “Let me...“ 

“Let you?” he asks slyly, the pads of his fingers teasing the edge of your underwear. Your head tilts back, watching him as he leans over you with a hand resting on the desk. Your heart races faster at him being so close after what feels like ages.

You remain quiet. 

“Let you what?” He asks again, a whisper against your lips. His fingers dance over your clothed entrance, his pupils dilating when he feels just what he’s done to you without even touching you. One dips into your sex slightly and your walls contract. You’ll say anything to get him to give you what you need. “Use your words, babygirl.” 

“Let me come,” you implore, mouth curving up when his hand stills, his eyes wide with surprise that you actually said it and gave in. You’re mildly embarrassed but mostly aching for him to touch you. He opens his mouth, probably to tease you a little more, because he’s an asshole – when you both hear someone calling your name. You ignore it, continuing. “Please, Lucien? Let me come. On your fingers, your cock, anythi-”

“____!”

It’s Kim. 

‘Seriously?’

It doesn’t seem like he’s about to give up, his voice growing closer instead. The doorknob jiggles. Lucien and you stare at each other, breaths mingling. The look in his eyes is so electric, you chew on your lip nervously. And then he rips your underwear in half, stuffing its remains in his back pocket as you stumble. 

“Lucien!” you whisper-scream. Honestly, he can be so jealous and petty. It pisses you off at times, but right now...you decide it’s working in your favour, because he’s pulling the vibrator out to replace it with his fingers, pushing your legs apart impatiently. Very out of character for him. You know it has everything to do with the guy outside, which has you terribly amused. “Maybe I should see what he needs–oh.“ You’re cut off by his fingers pushing their way into you, with Lucien not even bothering to start with one. There’s little resistance, and you might have thought to be self-conscious with how utterly wrecked you are, but you can’t think beyond the prize that’s suddenly within your reach. 

Thank you, Kim!

“Oh, please, please please.” You cling to him, terrified of being left dangling from the edge again, your hips grinding into his hand. “I’m so close baby, just a little more.”

Lucien doesn’t say anything, his breath tickling the shell of your ear before his tongue sneaks out to trace it. Your hand comes up to rest on his broad shoulder, before slipping down to the fly of his pants. He’s wearing the black ones. A favourite of yours, mostly because of how they stretch over his backside. You had barely been able to look away every time his back was to you. Paired with his black turtleneck, it was positively sinful. And unhelpful. 

You suppress a smile at his obvious bulge as you unzip his pants carefully, your fingers spreading over his briefs greedily as you palm him through them. He groans softly, biting down on your earlobe. Your fingers squeeze around him and you whimper. You can’t help but run a hand over his ass before you pull his briefs down, his cock leaking and stiff in your hands. Your lips quirk up at the feeling of him panting into your hair, and he kisses you urgently, his curling fingers making you moan and pull away.

You spit into your hand and wrap it around him, your palm warm and slick around his shaft. His tongue licks into your mouth again with increasing intensity. 

The desk is uncomfortable beneath your back when he presses you into the surface, your stapler digging into your shoulder but it’s forgotten when his dick is slipping through your folds. The burn is satisfying, as is his low groan. 

“Oh, you feel so good.” Your walls are clenching around him, your legs pulling him closer. 

“You have – no idea how perfect you are.” He watches you arch your back with raw desire in his eyes. You have no thoughts to spare, just a deep hunger for him as he snaps his hips into yours, his fingers gripping your hips possessively. “Come on my cock. You’re – almost there baby, I’ve got you.” His words are a rumble that moves through your body. There’s no patience for softness, no sign of gentleness. He sets a harder pace, angling both your hips and hitting you just right, hand slipping down to your sex to finally throw you headfirst into darkness. The room is still spinning when it fades away, his cock still hard in you. 

“I think I blacked out,” you croak, blinking repeatedly. He smiles down at you, a touch of wickedness to the curve of his mouth. He kisses you on the mouth, quick and hard, and then he’s pulling out of you and pulling a chair to take a seat. You have half a second to pray before your knees are pushed apart and his head is buried between your legs, tongue pushing through your slit, ravenous and precise. You can hear someone scream, only the rawness of your throat making you realise it’s you. His tongue is intent in the way he uses it, lapping at you and rubbing your swollen sex. It’s painful, you’re too sensitive but his lips are around your clit. The sounds you hear are obscene and you’re thrown into another orgasm, one you weren’t prepared for.

He doesn’t stop. You’re half gone by the time he stands up, his lips glistening with your own essence before he licks it off and his eyes are brimming with satisfaction. 

“Beautiful.” 

Your jaw is slack, your entire body seems to have dissolved onto the desk, your legs still trembling. Your hair is sticking to the back of your neck. His eyes don’t leave you as he strokes himself to completion, his seed spattering your abused sex like thick paint as a curse escapes his lips. Your slow smile is content and lazy, and still, he watches you. 

There’s silence in the hall outside your office. 

[cabin-fever-bang]

Campfire Stories (Vol. 1)

Welcome to the Cabin! We proudly present the first edition of Campfire Stories: your one-stop shop for quality quarantine content. 

We’re going to do these regularly, with in-depth reviews of everything that’s been submitted as a prompt fill and additional recommendations from the masterlists of writers who get involved. 

If you’d like to be one of those writers, just follow us, comb through our prompts, and be sure to tag us when you post! It’s that easy. We welcome all fandoms and pairings. 

This batch of reviews was cooked up by @thoughtslikeaminefield​ (MJ), @there-must-be-a-lock​ (Lou), @itmighthavebeenintentional​ (Val), @fangirlxwritesx67​ (Viv), @cracksinthewalls​ (Bri), and @mskathywriteswords​ (Kathy), but we encourage you to pass along the random acts of writer-love and reblog with your own additions! 

Pull up a seat, toast a marshmallow or two, and settle in for some excellent reading material.

Choices We Make - @becs-bunker​ - GIF prompt submitted by  @dawnie1988​ 

Pairing: Demon Dean x Female Reader

Warnings: angst, brief threat & violence, smut, language, dub con-ish, unprotected sex, orgasm denial

Words: 1374

Everyone loves a Demon!Dean fic, and this is a good one! Lots of action, lots of angst, and some really hot, awful Dean.

Honestly it all felt like some surreal nightmare you couldn’t wake up from. You just wanted Dean back, your Dean.

These lines summarize both the Demon!Dean story arc and the narrator's frame of mind so well, pulling the reader right into the perspective of the story.

“I missed you, y’know?” Dean sighed, and the naive part of you wished he was telling the truth. That somehow, deep down, he still loved you.

This is heartbreaking because it's relatable, because the author does such a good job with the narrator's voice.

Dean licked his lips and there was a familiar hunger in his green eyes that made a whole different sensation rise in your body, and it wasn’t fear.

I'm not going to quote any more lines from the story because the author has written one hell of a twist, but trust me when I said, I gasped out loud reading it. The rest of this story is an absolute roller coaster, well worth the ride.

- Viv

Come For Me - @fangirlxwritesx67​ - image prompts created and submitted by @idabbleincrazy​

Pairing: Sam Winchester x female reader 

Warnings: smut, canon level violence, fingering, first time together

Words: 3100

First, let’s talk about this aesthetic. It’s soft and beautiful, but stark and needy. I love the quotes and photos, the way they flow together. Fantastic visual prompt. "Sam Winchester?” He spoke in a theatrical, mocking tone. “Ooooh, I’m frightened." This line made me chuckle. I love the idea of what’s ahead of us. The bad guy is built up in a hilarious way. Sam is presented through the heart and mind of the narrator, you. But thinking of Sam suffused you with a warm confidence. Not for one moment did you doubt him. This confidence is contagious and warming. Meanwhile, the anxiety over the vampire lurking somewhere else, waiting to taste you… it builds in a beautiful and believable way. There’s a rush of emotions as Sam rescues you, and he’s patient and kind, even while making jokes and being the Sam you know and love. Things progress, and there’s a beautiful and sweet (okay, and hot!) sex scene, with a first time between Sam and you. All in all, a really solid piece, with some story, some tension, some sex, and a whole lot of sweetness.

- Kathy

A New Day - @becs-bunker​ - image prompt created and submitted by @there-must-be-a-lock​

Pairing: Sam Winchester x Reader

Warnings: fluff

I’ve not reviewed an image prompt before, so let’s just jump in. The first word that jumps to my mind is light, but I love how suffused and golden the whole image is. Softer, safer, intimate. There are little pinpoints of light, rays of light, shining light, and the whole thing makes me feel...well...light. Sunrise and candlelight, new day, new beginnings. 

The images chosen for Sam, the angles and features we get, are such close, personal angles and shots, giving us this tender atmosphere and setting the tone for this story: personal. Everything you're about to read is intimate, personal, and private, in such a lovely, delicate way. 

The curtains in that first shot are so filmy and ethereal, and the whole story feels like it’s set in a kind of golden-hazed forest. And, let’s face it, any sort of vacation for a Winchester is a kind of fairy tale. 

I’ve managed to stay pretty much above the brow, so Imma have to dip down for a minute and just drool over Sam’s trapezius muscles. Oh. MY. GAWD.

Golden, glorious, graceful, and just a touch of gooey. Good, good, good.

So, right off the bat, let me tell you that this story is everything I’ve ever wanted for Sam, like everything the show and Chuck and the universe has ever denied him. He’s rested, he’s comforted, he’s bathed in glow (the sun, the reader’s love, all that jazz, you know?).

And then it goes and hits all my camping weaknesses. I was literally just telling someone how I’m missing my camp more than ever now. It’s been eight years since I’ve been, and this story brings back all those feelings of serenity and calm, voluntary isolation with people you more or less chose, because camp was and is my forever real home.

I know that seems a little rambly and off-topic, but the thing is, that’s what this story is for me. They aren’t at the bunker, their “home,” but they’re still home all the same, because (and, yes, you can shoot me for this) home is where your heart is, so this wonderful little cabin in the woods is home, whether they’ve been there together once or a hundred times because Sam.

And then that bit of sugar tossed in at the end...Oh, this story was good for my soul. “Warm mug of coffee on a chill morning, under a blanket” kind of good for my soul. 

It’s one of those where I would love to have so much more of these two, of this warmth between them, but I also am perfectly content to know them just in this one perfect moment forever, before the day starts, when everything is still in the “it’s about to happen and it will be great” stages. The beginning of a great new day.

Thank you. I needed this story, now more than ever.

- Val

Crash  - @myinconnelly1​ - requested by @adoptdontshoppets​ for @idreamofplaid​ aesthetic

Pairing: Dean Winchester x reader

Warnings: smut, fluff

Words: 810

The first thing that draws my eye in the aesthetic is the linked fingers. I love pinky links (I’m sure there’s a less cutesy way to say it, but I like it; sue me). They’re sweet, and really personal. You’ve got super tough Dean Winchester who isn’t embarrassed or afraid of intimate, goofy gestures. In fact, I feel like that would one hundred percent be Dean in a relationship: Dean is a giant ball of goofy, intimate gestures. 

I love the choices of relaxed, bearded Dean/Jensen paired with the casual, cool color palette immediately set me at ease. This isn’t going to be a terrifying, angsty ordeal. This is going to be calm, soothing, sensual. 

And the roses, the sand, the surf, the candlelight, the pokey palm tree fronds...I can hear, smell, feel every bit of these images. The golden-pink wine...ugh. This whole experience is a trip to paradise.

I love how all five senses are emphasized and made equally important. It gives us so much more connection to the moment, makes it that much more intimate. The constant crashing of the waves in the background; the bittersweet chocolate; the cozy, homey image of the baking-wrecked kitchen followed by the much more erotic, candelit bedroom; and then the scent of the oil mixed with the warmth and strength of Dean’s touch.

I also love the level of comfort in the story. We have the cookies, a hard-core comfort staple. We have the warm, lazy beach setting. And the easiness these two have together: that’s the dream, my friend. I love how they have no trouble at all communicating what they want and need, how they are comfortable enough to be messy and cute and flirty and sexy, one right after the other. 

And the description is so thorough, I have no trouble at all imagining myself there, in that wonderful, relaxing moment.

This story is relaxing, decadent, soothing, and fun all at once. I am a huge fan of the ending, as well. I was smiling through the whole story, but at the end, I literally laughed aloud. And now I think I’m going to have to excuse myself to go find some chocolate chip cookies. This story gave me a couple of cravings, and as Dean Winchester is in short supply in the real world, cookies are the one I can satisfy right now.

This story is, dare I say it, such a sweet escape. 

- Val

No Sugar Added - @myinconnelly1​ - requested by @fangirlxwritesx67​ - “I’d like to see Steve Rogers from MARVEL sharing Depression-era coping tips. Maybe he vlogs how to make apple-less apple pie.” 

No pairing

Warnings: Spoilers for Infinity Wars + Endgame, mention of mental health issues

Words: 446

This was my prompt for the Cabin, and I loved what this author did with the story! A little bit of fluffy cheer.

“Hello, I’m Steve Rogers.  As many of you know, I’m also Captain America, and I was alive during another time of hard living conditions.” 

Right now, a lot of things in the world seem scary and unsettling. It's one of those times when we turn for comfort to the lessons of the past, to the wisdom of generations, and to heroes. This author does a great job with Captain America, Steve Rogers. His cooking lesson is exactly the sort of inspiring, instructional video I would love to see.

“What is that smell?”  Natasha asked as she looked behind her to see Steve walking into the office with the plate.

Because it was never about pie, apple or otherwise. It was always about comfort. Our favorite foods help with that, and so does Captain America, especially written this well.

There are some fun tidbits in this story, including a peek of history and an actual recipe!

- Viv

Communion - @thoughtslikeaminefield​ - requested by @mskathywriteswords​​ “Fluffy dean or Jensen smoking weed plz, ty”

Pairing: Dean Winchester x unnamed female character

Warnings: marijuana use, high sex, het sex, fluffy smut

Words: 1002

How do I love this? Let me count the motherfucking ways. 

First of all, the way this sucks you into the characters’ headspace is beautiful and subtle and masterfully done. It’s in the sentence structure and the flow of the words; there’s no need to describe their inner state, because it’s written into the movement of the sentences and the choice of words. She doesn’t have to say that they’re high, because you can fucking feel it in phrases like “It’s sending me off somewhere…” or “I shiver at the thoughts careening through my mind.”

Second, this is molten hot, but (as with the best smut) it’s not just some rote story of “then he was hard and we banged and it was great.” The sexy bits are unique; this isn’t the same smut you’ve read a thousand times before. It’s got its own personality and tone and voice that very much belong to this particular story. 

Also? Filth with feelings! My favorite genre! It’s deeply emotional. I am all for smut that is both dirty and tender. This is like a masterclass on how to walk that line. 

It’s such a simple premise that becomes so much more; this has things to say about Dean, about his personality, about this relationship. This takes a very specific moment and uses it as a framework for something big and meaningful. This, for example: 

When Dean has to be big, he uses his whole self. His body takes up space and his mere presence -- he can make the darkest of demons shudder with his presence alone.

But Dean’s natural state is this -- nesting, nuzzling, curled up and warm.

Yuuuup.

Also: 

His hands -- the same hands I’ve seen thrust a blade into the guts of angels and demons -- are tender, fingertips light but persistent as they slip under my tank top and splay over my belly.

It’s so intimate. This is why we read fanfic, right? To feel like we’re close to these characters that we love so much, to delve into the sides of them that we don’t get to see much in canon… this fic feels like something personal and private that we’ve been lucky enough to be let in on. 

- Lou

Deeper Than Deep Conditioner - @fangirlxwritesx67​ - requested by @awesomesusiebstuff​ “The two Sam’s (our Sam and AU Sam) maintaining their hair care routines while quarantined.”

It’s one of those days when I’m feeling too fragile for this world. What’s the best remedy to knock some sunlight into my dark mood? Today, it’s fic -- and one that makes me giggle is a bonus.

This little gem is filled with funny one-liners and side-eye moments to make you laugh out loud:

Dean dreamed of driving away, of bikini beauties on the beaches of Rio. Sam dreamed of scarves and what it would be like to have no bigger worries in the world than his hair.

The look Dean gave him would’ve curdled milk, if there was any, which there wasn’t, because Dean took his coffee black, like a man.

A touch of realism in this bizarro situation got a chuckle, too:

“Sorry, sweethearts,” alt!Dean said, “Flights are all cancelled. A virus or something.”

When Viv named the alternates Deano and Sami, I gave in and embraced the madness. I was delighted with Deano; that’s my own nickname for Dean in my head. But Sami, a most pretentious twist on Sammy? A master stroke. I was tickled.

I was fully on board with enjoying this romp through the bizarro world, but then I was taken by surprise. This little moment, a hint that Sam has been trying to make the best of their circumstances, touched me: 

“Is this really how you live?” said Sami, with a dismissive glance at his paper napkin.

“Look,” Sam answered. “I’ve done my best. It’s taken a lot to get us this far.”

I was prepared for that to be the exception to the rule -- a moment of sincerity amongst a sea of lighthearted fun. And there was plenty of fun ahead of me. The jokes come at you hard and fast in this story! But I realized the mood was steadily changing, and suddenly, I was immersed in sincerity and maybe a little sadness:

...somewhere out there, was a universe where he pampered himself...

...maybe there was a place where he could enjoy something as simple as a deep condition...

...something Sam had wanted to watch but never had time for...

...for the first time in a long time, he caught himself laughing...

I thought maybe that was it. A few moments of Sam learning to appreciate what Sami (I was still laughing at that) had to offer, instead of simply mocking his manbun and scarf (I don’t think I could ever stop mocking that, but Sam’s a better person than I am).

But no. It didn’t end there, and I still wasn’t ready. Before I knew it, I was steeped in Sam’s melancholy, his yearning for a life kinder and gentler than what he’d been given. I was truly heartbroken for him in that moment.

I won’t spoil the rest, but by the time I got to the ending, I was grateful for the funny beginning that softened the landing. I expected a comedy, but what I got really was deeper than deep conditioner.

- Bri

Dear Mr. Fantasy - @itmighthavebeenintentional​ - image prompt submitted @thoughtslikeaminefield​

Warnings: SEASON 15 SPOILERS, bit of angst. 

Words: 2157

I found the image prompt in my Tumblr feed and immediately started plotting ideas that I cannot write bc I have too many fucking WIPs so imagine my excite when one of my all-time favorite fic writers (and one of my very best friends) filled the prompt as a surprise for me!

Val tells stories with a depth and humor like no one else I’ve ever read. Her natural wit and smarts shine through her fictional words as well, and I love seeing glimpses of her in her work.

In one universe, someone neglected Baby (couldn’t have been Dean, had to’ve been Sam) to the point where she pulls slightly to the left. Dean spends the morning after that dream with a muscle tick in his cheek and a suspicious, side-eyed glare for Sam that he never bothers to explain.

Dear Mr. Fantasy is bittersweet. It is soft and rich and full of color — all the senses are here. It’s a sledgehammer of realism wrapped in velvet. And it’s so very Dean.

At forty-eight years old (none of that years young bullshit, either; he’s old, and he’s goddamn earned it)

In the midst of reading canon Dean dreaming of and admiring and protecting his favorite of his AU-selves and that version’s life, we are treated to what it would be like if he was allowed a normal life. Our devoted, brave, warm, and loving hunter as a common mechanic would be just as brave and loyal, no?

“Pretty sure she’s settled on ya, so just make sure you’re worth it.” 

So that’s what Dean did. 

But our Dean — the Real Dean as Chuck says — can’t quite let his guard down even in his dreams of another world, even if that other world is safe as houses. He’s still aware of just how unreal this reality is.

Splashes of indigo and orange paint the horizon, framing her approach in a wash of colors blending into shadows that hold no danger.

Then, he lets himself mingle with that dream, if only for a few moments and it’s bliss.

Older Dean and worn-out, monster-plagued Dean sigh together, content down to their bones. This life is it for both of them. She is it. One Dean still can’t believe his amazing luck after all these years, and the other aches at the simple, total happiness he feels honored to witness.

I love you, she whispers, and he allows himself to believe for one moment that she’s talking directly to him.

I’m not going to spoil anything for you, but I will say that you need some tissues. I cried through 90% of this story, from joy and from heartache. 

Because that’s what Valerie does, breaks your heart and makes you smile, and it is so fucking good.

- MJ

Synesthesia - @there-must-be-a-lock - request by @wendibird​ “SPN, Sastiel, due to all the Angelic Grace Sam has been exposed to over time, he starts resonating with Castiel’s. Especially if Cas’ emotions are running high.”

Pairing: Sam Winchester x Castiel

Warnings: none!

Words: 750

First, I love the song that enhanced this idea for Lou. It lends a tenderness and whimsy to the plot that isn’t inherent. 

Second, Lou’s words are like poetry and watercolor doing a dance of their own making — GORGEOUS phrasing and rhythm.

Cas whirls around, and Sam is hypnotized by the bright blue in his eyes, wide and concerned in a way that makes Sam feel like he’s being lit up from the inside. There’s a floodlight in his chest. 

And, y’all, I don’t even go here, but I swooned SO HARD.

It’s an effort to focus, but when he meets Cas’s eyes, Cas smiles. Sam sees a shower of sparks like the last fizzle of a firework.  

Sam hears it as a flutter of spring green like a new leaf. 

And Lou’s characterization is always spot on, right? But like Dean isn’t even in the scene, yet here we are.

Don’t let the words fool you; there’s a very angry rainbow happening in his head most of the time.

And did I mention the ARTWORK that is this woman’s WORDS?

There are stars under their feet, entire galaxies spinning out around them, dancing spirals of kaleidoscopic green and gold melting into whorls of brilliant blue.

Anyway, please go read. You’ll be flying high for hours afterward. xox

- MJ

Salvation - @dontshootmespence​ - image created and submitted by @idabbleincrazy​

Pairings: Sam Winchester x reader

Warnings: angst, torture, gore, smut 

Words: 1,401

The aesthetics by this artist inspire stories just because they are so well done. This one was a good balance of handsome Sam and some nice suggestive pics along with the phrases that helped shape the action of the story.

This story feels like an episode of the show from earlier seasons, just the right balance of angst and monster fighting with tantalizing peeks of smut and feels. Excellent job!

There are no words that come close to explaining what she means to him. How she saves what soul he has left.

These flashback scenes are both hot and tender. The voice the author  gives to Sam is spot on, achingly familiar.

"You're Sam Winchester, the boy with the demon blood."

It's easy to forget, sometimes, all the things that Sam has been and done, how fearsome of a hunter he is. This story reminds us with razor sharp precision.

When he meets her gaze, he finds the peace he's craved for so long.

The contrast between the flashbacks and the action is painfully good.

What’s more frightening, a man like Dean, practiced in his violence out of necessity? Or a man like him, on the verge of losing everything and nothing left to lose?

This is a well drawn distinction between the Winchester brothers, and such a good characterization of Sam!

"You're safe with me, Sam. You never have to hide from me." 

Such a beautiful relationship between Sam and this woman! It's no wonder he's fighting so hard to save her.

This story has an imaginative plot, fast paced action, some sweet hotness, and such a good Sam!

- Viv

The Second Hand Unwinds - @mskathywriteswords​ - image prompt created and submitted by @there-must-be-a-lock​ 

Pairing: Dean Winchester x reader

Warnings: hurt, comfort, angst

I had a vibe in mind when I created this aesthetic but this went so far beyond anything I could’ve imagined. It absolutely nailed that nostalgic, wistful, antique-photo-album feel, and then it managed to knife me in the fucking gut in a few ways, none of which I saw coming. 

The JOY in the first part of this is absolutely tangible. It’s so romantic and sweet in a very dreamy way that feels exactly like first love. I love the scattered, disjointed imagery around the flowers in the first part, like flashes of memories coming at you all at once, and then when it settles into the narrative it manages to hold onto that dreamy feeling while still moving neatly through the plot. 

This moment was about us, and I wanted to live in it forever. You never gave me reason to cover my body, not that night or ever.

Goddamn right. Ugh, precious and beautiful. And then this:

After so much undiluted time together, I had no idea how to sleep alone. I felt raw waking up by myself, not being able to feel your stubble tickling my skin. 

There’s something about that last line that just grabbed my heart and tugged it in a wonderful way. It’s ACCURATE, first of all; this is one of those super-specific feelings that is hard to describe concisely. I haven’t really thought about that feeling in a while, but that little sentence just cut through so many years and brought me right back in a deep and visceral way. 

You took pride in doing all the things that were never done for you, you’d told me.

Ouch. It’s little touches like this that make this ring true to character even though it’s a very different Dean than we see in canon.

And then that ENDING. 

How do you contain a bomb once it’s been set on fire with grief?

Fuck, dude. Everything about that ending was so painful. I love that she left it raw and messy and not like a simple “welcome back!” kinda moment. 

This was just gorgeously done. Can not recommend it enough. 

Fort - @there-must-be-a-lock​ - prompt by @mskathywriteswords​​ “Fluffy dean or Jensen smoking weed plz, ty.” 

Pairing: J2 x reader

Warnings: blowjobs and weed. 

Words: ~2150

This piece of deliciousness opens with Jensen walking out of the bathroom with a towel on his hips; do I need to say more? I don’t, but I will. After some beautiful description of the blanket fort, we get treated to Jared in nothing but pajama pants. The descriptions in this piece are vivid and full. the way Jared’s hand looks between Jensen’s muscled shoulderblades, thumb stroking back and forth between patches of gold and red light, makes me want to capture the moment and hold onto it. I can see that image in my mind, picture the two of them together, and that’s what makes excellent writing for me. The warnings attached to this piece are fully applicable; the story is very cute and sweet, there’s weed, and there’s Jared and a wicked oral fixation, which in the case of this one-shot means dear Reader, that’s you, get to witness a searing blowjob from one J to another. The way these three interact makes my heart swell, and there’s something about watching the dynamic change between them that really hammers home just how functional they are together. Dive in to this universe, Everything. There are no regrets to be had, maybe only that you waited so long to get wet.

- Kathy

The Gazelle - @thoughtslikeaminefield​ - requested by Anonymous “I’d really love some more Dean x Benny fanfiction, AU, aligned with canon timeline, whatever. I think they deserved a chance and Benny got killed off before it could even be explored :(”

Pairing: AU Dean Winchester x AU Benny Lafitte x unnamed female character

Warnings: power exchange, mmf threesome implied, Denny apparent, nudity

Words: 1000

Let me start with a caveat: I’m in the bag for pretty much any Dean x Benny fic, pretty much any Dean x Benny x person #3 fic, and absolutely any MJ fic. So you could stop reading this review right now and just go read the fic, if you want; in fact, I sort of recommend it, because it’s better than anything I could have to say about it. But if you want to stick around, I promise to be a little more coherent than ZOMGGGG PERFECT HOT SEXY TIMES DENNY LOVE GORGEOUS MORE PLZ!  

Before we even get to the words, we’ve got a gorgeous graphic. Black and white beautiful boys, staring you down with those “I’m gonna fuck you so good” eyes, paired with a sweetly sexy woman tinted with a soft pink; she looks carefree, open to have some fun, and you can imagine her telling them to bring it on. MJ’s graphics are always great, setting the perfect mood for her fics, and this is no exception.

And right from the jump:

Dean and me — we share a lot of things.

We share good music and good drink. Tonight, we’re sharing a good woman.

Oh, this is in Benny’s voice?! Okay okay okay, cool cool cool, I can handle this…

...Dean purrs like a jungle cat as he hovers behind her, hands in her hair, twisting and twirling the silky tresses…

...Dean sets the pace and is the anchor, always. He keeps everything stable and grounded…

And now I’ve realized that I’m going to be seeing Dean through Benny’s eyes -- and no, not cool, can’t handle this -- but I’m definitely not stopping.

I like to mix things up, though, and he lets me.

MJ is a brilliant writer with many talents, but I think her specialty, regardless of what characters she’s writing with, is brilliantly salacious smut that’s steeped in emotion. She can’t help it. Her fucks come with feels, every single time, and I hope it never changes. 

This piece is certainly no exception. Dean and Benny are circling their prey, this unnamed woman, utilizing their individual strengths -- Dean’s encouraging, I’m demanding -- and the sexual tension is building with soft touches and lingering kisses. As the scene is progressing, Benny’s inner monologue is sprinkled with thoughts about Dean:

Times we don’t have a subject, Dean’s focus is on me. I don’t argue and I do not complain. Dean knows what to do with every inch of that long, lean body of his. He knows how to cage a person in, make them feel safe, wanted, fucking needed.

She’s handily building emotion and a personal backstory without an exposition dump, without taking focus away from the action for too long:

His hands move slowly, seemingly random, but I know how focused he is on her and the moment. Giving and seeking pleasure are vital things to Dean and he takes the acts to heart.

I’m immersed in the now of this scene but I also understand the depth of their feelings for one another, their history and dedication to each other, and how they work together to bring another partner into their orbit. MJ makes it look easy, when it’s anything but. 

And then she gifts us with this perfection and I’ve melted into a puddle of emotionally aroused goo:

“You promise to love, honor, and cherish ‘til the morning light, Dean?”

That is a vow of devotion to a one-night stand. What?! How?! Does her brain come up with this?

From there, the scene continues, the action escalating, supported by a framework of realism and heart. Her Dean feels familiar and in character, even though we’ve never seen him in this particular situation. And Benny, we hardly knew ye, but she brings him to life alongside Dean and I buy their relationship completely. I buy all of this, and now I’m invested.

And then… 

“Do it, then,” she says, challenging. “Wreck me.”

My breath catches, my heart starts to race -- yes, here we go! -- a few more sentences, one last connection between Dean and Benny, and then --

Oh, you are evil, MJ. You are so perfectly evil and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

- Bri

[sluttyopinions]

Difficulty in Dark Souls and Why We Can’t Live Without It

April 6, 2019

Written by Samantha, Slutty Opinions

The debate on the role of difficulty in video games seems to, never actually end. It feels like something people talk about literally every year, and for some reason, Dark Souls (and the many games that have followed in its influence) is always the target. It feels like something that doesn’t need much debating in my opinion, but it gets brought up often regardless. For some reason, this topic gets me really riled up and I have a lot of strong opinions on it. It feels like I’m ready to go into a tirade any  time I see it, and lately, I’ve been seeing it way too much. This article is kind of my own way of venting, as well as collecting all the arguments I’ve found in favor of how necessary challenge is, primarily in the new generation of From Soft and Hidetaka Miyazaki games. I think it’s important to address why this issue is truly a non-issue, why it came to be an issue in the first place, and why I even care. For the purposes of this article and keeping it simple, I’ll mostly be referring to one of my favorite games,

Dark Souls isn’t about being really hard

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to Dark Souls being, pretty damn hard. It’s well above average in the department of making me constantly die and wince and feel tense. It’s not the type of game you can just pick up on a whim and breeze through, yet some people clearly want that experience from it or else I wouldn’t be writing this. For some ungodly reason, Dark Souls, or at least most of Miyazaki’s action games since Demon’s Souls is ALWAYS at the center of these discussions. Dark Souls has been the go to analogy for “hard game” for most gaming writers and journalists for YEARS now to much criticism and booing all around.

It’s hard to blame people who haven’t been exposed to the actual games for having this thought process. When Demon’s Souls first came out, it was a breath of fresh air for many in a time when games were getting more and more “dumbed down” across the board. Bandai Namco, the publisher for Dark Souls, decided to use this reputation to its advantage in advertising, calling the definitive edition of Dark Souls the “Prepare to Die Edition”. Streamers caught onto the game quickly as a very easy way to get views because seeing people die and struggle can be, well, fun!

Despite all this, that’s not even close to all there is to Dark Souls. The reputation can be a bit misleading, and it feels like a lot of the easy mode begging crowd knows not much else other than this reputation when it comes to the game. Probably the absolute best aspect of the way Dark Souls was made was its world. The map design is impeccable, it’s very very difficult to find a map more lovingly designed than Dark Souls 1’s. It has so many interesting rewarding shortcuts, feels completely logical and real in the way it was designed despite being in a fantasy world, feels extremely fluid, and is loaded with detail and character. If I were to recommend Dark Souls to someone, I would start with how much I love the world itself in all its aspects. The narrative, the characters, the detail, the risk and reward. I would never even think of telling somebody “It’s really hard and makes you feel cool at the end” (even if there is truth to that statement).

Nonetheless, Dark Souls wouldn’t be worth playing without challenge

I may have said that Dark Souls cannot be reduced to simply “hard game”, but, without being hard, it wouldn’t be a game I would recommend to anyone. All the goodness and enjoyment you can find in the depths of the game is built around the base of it being not an easy time. As I hinted at in the last section, the world design is very risk-reward in nature.

You often encounter forks in your path where you must decide which path is closest to the next checkpoint, or if you want to risk your current experience for more experience and treasure on the more dangerous route. Finding your way around this fluid map wouldn’t feel like much anything without the risk involved. The reward is only rewarding because you banked your skills on that risk. On an easy mode, any path you take would feel the same. Sequence breaking into a much higher level area would not have the punishment it contains to make the rewards worth it if you could waltz into those higher level areas.

The bosses are designed around persistence and patience. The reason the bosses are interesting is because they are something you learn. Many action games are built around reflex as well as training but Dark Souls’ philosophy of design is around dying as a teacher. Not only the bosses, but you advance slowly but surely through levels each time you come back. You win some, you lose some. Enemy placement is designed in a way so that each time you memorize them more, and in a sense, the game then becomes easy. That is the end goal of your adventure, at least, mechanically speaking. Easiness would strip that functional identity from it.

An easy mode would strip Dark Souls of its narrative identity as well

The idea of people asking for an easy mode so they can see the world and story without having  to put in the time shows me that those asking don’t really know a lot about Dark Souls to begin with. As I already said, mechanically, the world would become uninteresting without the risk and reward. The writing of the game also revolves around this risk and the concept of persistence I described earlier. All you’d be doing on an easy romp is looking at a lot of brown stuff and reading cryptic item descriptions. I can’t comprehend wanting to pay for an experience like that and not just watching videos about it all that you can do for free. VaatiVidya has some great ones seriously, you don’t even have to have played the games to enjoy the videos. But, it would certainly help a lot.

The entire theme of Dark Souls is, patience and persistence. In the world your adventure is set in, humans are cursed to be undead and revived again and again. Miyazaki loves making gameplay have as little conflict with the narrative as possible, which is part of what makes his works so unique. This dying and reviving you do in game is what most people in the world around you do. However, most npcs have, limited purpose. Being a shopkeeper, being a warrior, a scholar, maybe even a cynic. Once their “purpose” they have sought out to find has expired, or they have lost confidence in it, they lose their very minds.

Your duty as the player character is to find the First Flame. Not important what that means for the sake of this article, just, your goal. The goal of many others in this world who are just like you. Because the player character is an extension of yourself, your will to find the ending, to find the flame, is imposed upon your avatar. You deciding to get up and give it another go at your true goal is like your character giving life another shot. Even in a cold, nihilistic world like that of Dark Souls, humans can find purpose and determination. Hope and patience are virtues in human beings, and they can allow us to surmount anything. That determination can even surpass the might of the gods themselves. The will to get up after being knocked down a ridiculous amount of times is what makes humans good and what makes life worth it. If you could run to the ending in 5 hours, you would not have gotten anything out of the writing in the game. All the character arcs, the crushing despair around you, the theme itself, gone. Someone could explain it to you as I am now, but that simply isn’t the same.

As I said earlier, a Dark Souls without challenge is a game I would simply never want to play. Miyazaki didn’t choose to make his games hard so tryhards and elitists could masturbate over their digital accomplishments. He makes them hard because that’s the way he feels he could make his art mean something. The way he could use the medium and the art form to the full advantage of his work in every dimension. It’s insulting to imply nothing would change with an easy mode added. I wouldn’t trust anyone who played the game on a setting like that to be able to give the game a proper analysis or review, especially not a journalist who is supposed to convey the core experience to an audience who doesn’t know what it is yet.

Dark Souls difficulty is overblown and overhyped

The reputation preceding Dark Souls is somewhat a false one. As I had previously said, saying it’s an easy or even moderate experience would be a lie. Dark Souls is definitely a hard experience, and one that serves it well as a piece of art. However, it being the “only hard game ever” as it seems to be conveyed in pop culture is a little ridiculous.

There are, a ridiculous amount of difficult games out there in the market. Many of which are much more difficult than Dark Souls and its sequels and much less forgiving. Many of which also do not have easier modes. Dark Souls gets an irregular amount of attention in the public eye and especially to lazy journalists for not much reason.

The game design in Dark Souls is built off pure willpower and the willingness to retry, not often reflexes and exact timing. It is designed in a way so that every death contributes to your end goal. Maybe on one run you opened a shortcut that makes your route easier, maybe you cleared out a miniboss that won’t respawn. Or you mastered your way around a specific enemy. There is no “game over state” in Dark Souls, and what you lose can easily be won back. The game design is punishing, but it gives you the resources to make sure you’re not losing progress or just going insane in general.

Let the artist decide their own art: Not all media has to be for everyone

In the end, an artist has the right to decide how they create, and what they create. As consumers, we reserve the right to get or not get a piece of work as well. If we feel something just isn’t good, or it isn’t accessible to us, or even just not our style, we don’t have to get it or consume it. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to complain about something. I complain about entertainment all the time and always make sure my thoughts on something are fully voiced even if my wishes are unrealistic.

Sometimes though, a piece of entertainment can, thoroughly not be your thing. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was poorly made, at times far from it. A personal example would be I did not like Zelda: Breath of the Wild as much as most. It was enjoyable, but more on an “average” level of enjoyable for me and I left frustrated not wanting to pick it back up, and just missing the older Zelda formula. While I do have specific critiques of the game and things it could have improved, I don’t think it’s a “bad game”. It’s amazingly made and there was a lot of love behind it. It’s just the exact adventure it was going for was not the adventure I was looking for, and that disconnect pushed me away from it.

I’ve seen people on the other side claim the statement of “not all entertainment is for you” is on its own elitist and gatekeepy but, it’s only an undeniable truth about the world. This statement doesn’t even have anything to do with the difficulty. If you REALLY REALLY didn’t enjoy Dark Souls no matter how many times you tried, making it easier wouldn’t change that. Maybe you disliked the tone, the aesthetic, the characters, the feel of the combat. All of that is valid because not everyone has to like everything. Changing some stats like health pools or damage won’t change the game design (The funny story is, I really didn’t like Dark Souls when I first tried it. I tried it maybe 10 times before it clicked, and now it’s my 2nd favorite video game franchise of all time.)

Comparing Dark Souls to other video games is quite honestly, a dishonest debate tactic. Trying to claim that “X hard game has an easy mode so, so should Dark Souls” is not very fair to it as a piece of art. Art is not homogenous or standardized, it’s art. As I explained very thoroughly before, I feel Dark Souls would be butchered had it had its challenge removed, even optionally. Some games even if designed with being very hard as its normal, can get away with easy settings for a variety of reasons. The story can be viewed through interesting dialogue and cutscenes that someone with less patience and time would want to see, it can offer a fun exploration of the mechanics in a way that makes you feel like you’re on a power trip versus on an uphill battle, etc. That choice is up to the individual game and the creator. It is clear Miyazaki and team have no interest in changing their art for the masses, and I can easily see why.

The claim against easy modes is not inherently elitist

People who stand up for my argument or parts of my argument are often targeted for being elitist gatekeepers trying to keep their precious game away from the masses. Making it easier would allow others to play it without struggling the same as the veterans, which would make the veterans insecure enough to fight against it. They earned their pointless digital trophy already and they want to keep it, all to themselves. Or at least, that’s what the people saying this stuff would have you believe.

“If the easy mode is optional, how does that bother you? You already finished the game, and now more people can play it! It’s a win-win. I can’t imagine a reason for fighting that concept other than to maintain your secret club and the status of it.” The truth is, Dark Souls fans (For the most part at least. I won’t deny elitists exist) desire more people to play their game with them, and will help anyone who seeks it. We just don’t want people playing a bastardized version of the game which as I explained, I wouldn’t recommend to basically anyone. It would be like discussing an entirely different game with people who think there is no difference. It’s not because they’re “weak” or “uncool” for choosing a hypothetical easier setting, it’s because that experience would not carry even near the same identity.

I cannot overstress the fact that Souls fans absolutely love to help. It is possibly one of the most guided games ever made. Video guides, written guides, guides of all types for all different people. The fandom is one of the surprisingly nicest, funniest groups I have known which is surprising due to how toxic the nature of fandoms tend to be, and how dark and lonely the concept of Dark Souls is. I guess this loneliness inspires people to band together in the real world, and try to make things light to contrast the nihilism often found in the world of the game? Just me throwing out crazy theories a little.

I would personally love to help anyone who wanted to try the game, the way it was designed to be played that is. I would sit beside any friend who wanted to get into it and help them until it clicks, if it ever does. The experience requires a lot of dedication and patience, so I would help teach that to others. Honestly, if it weren’t for friendly people in the community and the wonderfully put together internet guides, I never would have gotten into this series. The truth is, Dark Souls doesn’t have a magical barrier keeping gamers from playing it. The barrier is your own determination. Everyone is encouraged to try, and every single one of us as human beings have the potential to overcome it and learn it. It’s not that some people “can or can’t” play Dark Souls. It’s that some will, and some won’t. And any won’t can become a will. It’s an equal opportunity beatdown.

This argument is not actually about accessibility

Strange I had to wait until the end to get to this, since this is what the argument seems to revolve around the most. Is keeping Dark Souls as purely a difficult experience physically preventing disabled gamers from playing it? The journalists and pundits who advocate for the easy mode would like all of us to believe that. Kind of funny how little if any of those advocates are disabled or understand what disability means.

Accessibility is how, well, accessible, something is. It’s a really stupid statement but I can’t think of a better way to word it. Access is if a person can get their hands on something and experience it to the end like the rest of their peers. Is being simply, not easy, an accessibility issue? In my opinion, no, not at all. Accessibility issues include things such as good controllers, customizable visuals and user interface, customizable button mapping, fair game design, etc. None of these categories has anything to do with difficulty. Implying disabled gamers can only play point and click games is kind of insulting in my personal opinion, not that I am disabled myself so forgive any assumptions I may make.

The truth is, disabled gamers CAN play Dark Souls and similar games. As I have basically beaten to death already, the core game design of Dark Souls is patience, and determination. It’s about basic learning and trying, a very human instinct that all of us have and can use or weaponize. The gameplay is fair, and somewhat slow, and more punishes you for not being prepared or for lapses in judgement than simply not being able to press the buttons fast enough. If a gamer has the tools needed to physically play the game in as comfortable a way they can, how hard the game is shouldn’t change their access.

Difficulty, at least in a fair game, is only a test of how many times you are willing to get up and face adversity, a lesson Dark Souls tries to impart in its own story. If anything, disabled people all over the world know this lesson by heart already. It doesn’t matter how unfair the cards you were dealt are, or how oppressive your surroundings are. If you want to keep moving, and if you have reasons to keep moving, you can find, purpose. Regardless of how you were born or what life has done to you if you continue to get up you can essentially win. Dark Souls is easier than life in that way since it does have a definitive “end state” to it. An end that is accessible to anyone of any standing given the patience and drive, and resources to experience the world.

This whole debate is manufactured to an extent

The reason this debate even arose again to begin with, and why it keeps showing up over and over again is you guessed it, games journalists. Even though by writing this I’d consider myself a journalist as well, I don’t hold much high regard for the field as a whole which is not a very unpopular opinion and hasn’t been for quite a few years. The easiest way to get clicks on anything, video game news or news news, is to get people angry at what you’re writing. Hate clicks generate easy revenue. If someone sees something they agree with while scrolling, they may nod and keep going. But if they see something that makes  their blood boil, they’ll screenshot it and read it to make sick burns against it and show the mess to their followers.

Of course then that starts a cycle of people pulling said article up over and over and it generating an internet hate storm with people now defending the original point. This whole mess was the internet falling hook line and sinker for some poorly paid overstressed sap’s click scam. Probably multiple scams coalescing into one bigger mess. I admit I in writing and publishing this have fallen for it, but hey, I enjoy doing what I do, and I feel it’s worth sharing my side.

Another possible motivation for manufacturing petty crises from a journalist’s point of view as I’ve seen many point out is the simple fact that journalists face deadlines. It is a very and I mean very stressful part of their careers, and for game journalists, their deadlines are based on when they can finish a game. It’s why a lot of lengthy rpgs don’t get treated very fairly or have entire sections excluded from review, and why now these same people are begging for notoriously difficult games to be easier. The sooner they can finish it, the sooner the stress is gone and the sooner they can be paid. Having the responsibility of your paycheck based on your patience when you don’t have much time for patience can cause some to snap and write what they wrote. In the end though, I just pray I never have to read reviews of journalists reviewing a From Soft game on easy mode, because that wouldn’t be much of a review at all.

Why I even care

For those of you still reading, thank you, so much. From the bottom of my heart. It may have become clear in reading why I put so much time into this, or why I get so angry every time I see this argument come up, but it may not be. I’d like to make it very clear why. This game series is very close to my heart, and seeing people act all-knowing about it when it’s clear they haven’t touched it at all or for at most 5 minutes makes my blood boil.

On top of pretending to know game design on a game they know nothing about, they resort to cheap tactics such as guilt tripping and shaming. The whole “elitist” route trying to make the opponents seem like pretentious asses is not very mature for starters, and trying to shift the fact that they lack patience or simply don’t like a game onto being about the rights of the disabled makes me angrier than anything. I have seen many many disabled gamers become furious at these people and for good reason. I have been furious about this for a very long time now, and I hope putting my thoughts to paper will calm me, even if only for a little while.

I sincerely hope my thoughts gave you a new outlook on something or other. That is the most I could ask for as a writer. If not, and you still read this far, I hope I made your day brighter.

[mozillavulpix]

(1) Okay so, rambling, but in regards to the Keebo thing; the idea is that Keebo is the true "protagonist" of "Danganronpa 53", and there's a lot of meta things pointing to this. How his appearance (namely his hair) is more similar to the previous protags compared to Kaede and Shuichi. How he was the focal character of the very first promotional material (with no Kaede or Shuichi in sight). How he is the only character present on the box for the V3 special edition.

How his name “Kiibo” is the Japanese word for Hope. And that’s why he’s literally the “audience surrogate” in V3, the outside world sees through his eyes (just like how we did with the protags in the previous games), and why he gives the big HOPE SPEECH at the end. Now granted… yeah, this doesn’t mean a lot until literally the end. Keebo doesn’t do much of anything throughout the game aside from his weird relationship with Miu, and calling things “robophobic”.

Even with this being what the author was trying to go for, I literally couldn’t tell you why? What they were trying to say, or how it affected the game’s narrative/themes or anything of the like? It is a thing that exists, but with how it’s so not present for the majority of the game, and even at the end, we end up controlling literally everyone during that last trial anyways… Yeah, it’s fair to say this didn’t land with a lot of people. And I doubt me saying this will change anything, but I wanted to talk about this (sorry it’s so long!) because I just find it interesting and worth adding to conversations about V3. Really, if you look out for a lot of interviews and talks with the director (Kodaka) about this game, he can say some pretty wild stuff. Especially in regards to what he SAYS he did with the game, and how it actually turned out (in particular; the Fake Prologue, and the First/Last trial twists). Yeah… I like V3, but honestly, story/theme-wise it’s kind of a mess.

Thanks for the long ramble, anon! I did find what you said interesting. As I am now fangirl trash and can’t stop consuming.

That does make sense, really. V3′s ending is pretty strange, in that it feels like it isn’t connected to what was happening in the other chapters of V3 at all besides the ‘truth and lies’ theme. Shuichi doesn’t really play a major role, Kokichi’s plan doesn’t really contribute to the final struggle, it’s not like we see Ghost Kaede and Kaito or something, and Himiko kind of ends up being just there given her development was basically over by Chapter 4.

Like, thinking about it, it seems like all of the main Danganronpa games have a final chapter that pretty much refocuses the entire game into a specific struggle, regardless of whether that struggle was a core part of every trial or not. Heck, 2 was pretty self-aware of that, what with Junko calling the protagonists of 2 the ‘bit players’ compared to the fight of her vs Makoto, only for them to eventually retake control of the narrative once Hajime goes Super Saiyan. 

V3 was also self-aware of it, given how the mastermind is all like “Yeah, even that great Kaito subplot? I just made it up. It didn’t matter at all.” But I guess…I have a bit of trouble trying to figure out what V3 was trying to say. I guess by being so blatantly “the entire game up until now didn’t actually matter because it was a lie”, it is trying to say “Sore Wa Chigau Yo! Just because it’s a lie, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning to us! You can’t say that 20+ hours of gameplay didn’t make us feel anything that mattered”

It’s a cool idea in concept. Maybe the issue lied with the execution? The fact the trial was 30% Let’s Look Over Chapter 1 Again, 30% Keebo yelling at everyone, and 30% the ending to The Hunger Games. It just somehow…doesn’t really fit together.