#I DID have an entire essay written out of all my little frustrations like paragraphs upon paragraphs | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

pan-fangirl-345 · 4 years ago

Text

Books Bring People Together

Summary: A frustrated and stuck Kaminari comes to you for help, and it somehow blooms into something else along the way.

TW: I made Kaminari ADHD, so I'm sorry if there's anything wrong, I went off what my ADHD friends do and what a medical site told me. I myself am not ADHD, so again, I apologize if there's anything wrong with this. Small swears, and Mineta, which should be a warning in and of itself.

A/N: I have had this half-baked idea stuck in my head for months and I wanted it out, so I am giving you all this!

"Hey, um, (Y/L/N), can I ask you something?" Kaminari asked, sliding into the chair across from you at the common room table.

"Sure, what's up?" you asked, setting your pencil down on the paragraph you were reading.

"Um, this is kind of embarrassing," Kaminari admitted. "But, um, I'm having a really hard time with English right now, and I know that you're right behind Bakugou in grades."

"Where are you going with this Kaminari?" you asked, crossing your arms in front of your chest.

You had heard things about Kaminari, and after meeting Mineta and knowing that Kaminari hung around with him, you didn't have the best impression of him. You had just been placed in Class 2-A, and so far you had mostly hung around with what the other students were calling the 'Dekusquad'.

"I need someone to tutor me," he admitted. "Normally English isn't all that hard for me, but Shakespeare is whack and I don't understand half of it."

"You want me," you started, "to tutor you. Why not ask Bakugou? Isn't he your friend?"

"Yeah, but . . . Bakugou has . . . harsh methods, and I need someone who won't treat me like an idiot," Kaminari confessed.

"Alright," you relented. "Why don't we get started now? Do you have anything going on?"

"No, this takes precedent," Kaminari said, rushing to grab his things.

"Alright, here's my question for you," you said when he propped his book open. "Why don't you understand?" You saw the look on his face change and you winced. "Sorry, sometimes I have a hard time controlling the tone of my voice. Let me rephrase that question." You paused for a moment, thinking of the right words before you said, "What about this don't you understand? What's the one thing about this that trips you up?"

"The formatting for one thing," Kaminari grumbled. "Why the hell is printed like that?"

You chuckled, brushing hair out of your face. You had thought the same thing the first time you had read Shakespeare.

"Alright, how about you just read, and then you can ask me any questions while I work on my own stuff, alright?"

"That sounds like it might work," he admitted.

"If that doesn't work, feel free to let me know," you told him. "This is about what helps you remember the material better."

"No, like I said, normally this is really easy for me," Kaminari said. "Let's try it."

"Alright, and remember, if you have any questions, I'm right here."

"Thanks (Y/L/N)," he mumbled.

"Of course, I wouldn't be much of a hero if I couldn't help people, right?" you mused, smiling at him.

"R-Right!" he chirped, grinning back at you.

You both worked in silence for a little bit before Kaminari leaned back in his chair, rubbing at him eyes.

"You okay?" you asked.

"Yeah, sorry, I'm ADHD, so sitting still and trying to read this is a little hard," he confessed. "And I might be dyslexic, I've never been tested but sometimes reading is hard for me."

You frowned, biting the inside of your lip, running the situation through your head.

"What if I read it to you?" you asked, looking up from your chemistry homework.

"How? It's a play," Kaminari said.

"I used to be in a drama club in middle school," you told him. "It's set up like a script, or if we don't have the energy to act it out, it's not hard to pretend that it's a regular story."

Kaminari stared at you for a moment before he nodded.

"Yeah, yeah I think that might work a little bit better than me staring at the same paragraph for fifteen minutes without actually reading anything."

"What part are you on?" you asked Kaminari, moving to glance over his shoulder at the page.

"Portia is trying to convince Brutus to tell her what's going on in her house. I think."

"Oh, I adore this part," you muttered, mostly to yourself. "Alright, what has you stuck?"

"This part. 'I grant I am a woman; but withal A woman well-reputed, Cato's daughter. Think you I am no stronger than my sex, Being so father'd and so husbanded? Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose 'em: I have made strong proof of my constancy, Giving myself a voluntary wound Here, in the thigh: can I bear that with patience. And not my husband's secrets?' I don't entirely understand what she's saying."

Wow, English must've been his thing, he didn't mess up a single word, and he was able to read it fairly fluently, everything considered. It might have taken him a little longer than normal, but he had nailed it.

"Okay, so she's basically telling Brutus that she won't tell his secrets if he tells her what's going on, it doesn't matter if she's a woman or not."

"What was with the voluntary wound thing?"

"So, it depends. Sometimes, in plays, the women playing Portia will have a fake knife and stab themselves in the thigh, other times they pretend to slice themselves, depends on the director," you told him. "She basically cut herself on the thigh and said, 'If I can handle this I can handle whatever's going on inside your head.' Do you understand?"

"Yeah, but damn, this woman is a badass," Kaminari said, staring down at the pages."

"Right? Some people read that as psychotic, but it's Shakespeare," you told him, "everything in Shakespeare is psychotic to some extent."

"That's fair. Thank you for explaining that to me," he said.

"Of course, that is why you came to me," you replied, laying a hand on his shoulder for a moment before you moved back to your seat.

Kaminari, despite the things you had heard, was actually quite intelligent, it just took him a little longer to get the answer sometimes.

"Thank you so much for helping me," Kaminari murmured. "You were super helpful."

"Of course, I actually enjoyed helping you," you told him. "And if you need any more help, please, let me know."

"I will, thank you so much (Y/L/N)," Kaminari repeated.

"Have a good night Kaminari," you told him.

"You too!" he chirped before he headed up to his room.

You sat down at the table again, staring at the chemical formula in front of you.

So, if zinc only had one charge, positive two, and it was combined with thiosulfate, that meant that there shouldn't be the need for two of the zinc atoms, they would make the charge neutral.

You wrote the answer down, checking the textbook to make sure you were right. Polyatomic ions were a little more complicated than monoatomic ions.

There were only a few more questions, and then you could go to bed too, and you just hoped that there were no trick questions.

You were the last one in the common room, as usual, despite assuring Iida that you were right behind him when he went to bed an hour ago.

"Alright (Y/F/N), time for some good sleep," you muttered, shutting your book and gathering your supplies.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You had been tutoring Kaminari for about six weeks, and he was definitely smarter than people gave him credit for. Sometimes he just needed a few minutes to think, or he needed something explained to him in a different way than everyone else.

Sero had been joining your little tutoring sessions too, and you had started doing them in Sero's room, since there were things Kaminari could mess with while he studied, and it was an environment where he didn't feel the need to prove himself.

"Hey, (Y/L/N), can you help me with this problem?" Sero asked, waving you over.

"Of course, what are we working on?" you inquired.

"Polyatomic ions, again," Sero said. "I need this extra credit."

"Alright, which one are you stuck on?"

"How do I figure out which Roman numeral goes here? Gold has multiple charges."

"You work backwards," you told him. "When you look at the formula, you need to figure out what charge dihydrogen phosphate has."

You gestured to the chemical formula.

"It has a negative one charge. Right?" Sero inquired, checking the list of common ions that the teacher had given them at the beginning of the unit.

"Right, and you have three of those ions, right?"

"Yeah, because there's a subscripted three outside the parentheses."

"So you have three of those, which means that those three together have a negative three charge."

"Right."

"So now you just have to figure out which gold variant has the right charge to cancel that one out."

"Well, there's only one gold atom, so it's gold three right?"

"Bingo, you got it."

"Oh, that makes it so much easier than what I was doing," he muttered, erasing the math he had been doing, writing down the way you had just shown him.

"(Y/L/N), can you come read through this essay for me?" Kaminari asked. "I think it's okay, but I need another eye on this."

"Sure, hand it over," you told him, taking the papers that he had handed to you.

You grabbed one of your signature blue pens and uncapped it, ready to mark anything you thought he could do better.

There wasn't as much as you were expecting. While Kaminari had a hard time interpreting things, once he understood, he was golden. He had a way with words, you noticed as you scanned through the paper he needed to hand in next class. You assumed that it gave him time to think about the right phrasing of things.

Other than a few grammatical and spelling errors, the paper was well written, and there was nothing major that needed fixing.

"Good job Kami, this is really good," you told him, ruffling his hair lightly.

He responded well to physical affection and praise, you had also noticed, and he made it easy.

Once you got past the typical shield he threw up, he was a nice guy with insecurities, just like everyone else.

He chuckled, leaning into your hand.

You noticed that the others didn't touch Kaminari as much as you did, despite having known him for much longer. They were worried about getting shocked, Sero had told you.

"Why though? He's never shocked me," you had told him.

"He can't control it sometimes, it builds up in his body and it needs an out."

"Well, that still no reason to stop touching him," you had mused. "If he shocks me he shocks me, it's really no big deal."

Kaminari had only shocked you once, during a thunderstorm when there had been a lot of lightning outside. He had gotten excited about getting a 90 on one of his tests, and had hugged you, giving you a slight shock.

He had apologized profusely, but you had waved his apologies off.

"It's okay Kaminari," you told him. "It happens to all of us sometimes."

You were finding yourself thinking about him more than you should've. You had become good friends with both him and Sero, and the other students had started coming to you when they had a question, but Kaminari was a little different.

It had started out with the flirty comments, but slowly those had turned into real compliments. He had been keeping Mineta away from you more and more, and he had even started laying off the perving with the grape rat.

He was a good guy, he really was, despite the playboy attitude. He was sweet, and he was just like every other person in the world.

"Thanks for tutoring us both," Kaminari said as the session was coming to a close.

"Yeah, you're really saving our asses," Sero agreed.

"Of course, come to me any time," you told them both, smiling as you made to head back to your own room.

"Hey, um, (Y/L/N), can I ask you something?" Kaminari asked.

"Sure. You know how much I love questions," you teased, smiling at him. Then you noticed his expression. "Kami?"

"Will . . . will you-" he chuckled awkwardly, messing with the seam of his pant leg. "Can you read something to me?"

"Yeah, of course," you said. "What is it?"

He handed you the book, and you smiled.

"My dad used to read this to me when I was little. I think that's why I love books so much," you admitted. "That was before . . . well, it doesn't matter now. Come on, we can head down to the common room if you want. Or your room, it doesn't really matter to me."

You had visited Kaminari's room on more than one occasion to return things to him, he tended to be a little forgetful, and he had often left things with you.

Despite the fact that everything you had learned about society told you that you should avoid being alone in a room with a boy, you trusted Kaminari enough to be alone in a room with him.

"I really like to read too," he confessed. "But sometimes my brain doesn't like to let me do it."

"I understand, it's okay," you told him, touching his arm lightly. "Are you sure that you'll be able to sit still long enough for me to get through any of it?"

Kaminari, after spending so much time with you over the last few weeks, had figured out how your voice worked, and he rarely got offended by your tone of voice anymore, which you were thankful for.

"Yeah, I like the sound of your voice, it helps calm me down. I think I might pay attention more if you read it to me."

"Alright, sure, let's go," you said, holding the book to your chest.

You knew this book like the back of your hand, and you had a feeling that Kaminari was telling the truth when he said he would be able to pay attention.

Kaminari followed you into the common room of the dorms, trailing just slightly behind, but he was in front of you the moment Mineta tried to get to you.

It amazed you how fast he could move sometimes, when he really wanted to.

"Get lost Mineta," you said. "I have nothing to say to you."

Mineta opened his mouth but a raised brow from Kaminari had him shutting it and heading to his own room so he could think his pervy thoughts in peace.

"I can't believe I was ever friends with that perv," Kaminari whispered. "I think I owe a lot of the girls apologies."

Kaminari glanced over his shoulder, and you smiled at him, linking your hands together.

You were proud of him, he had really grown lately, and you were glad that he was seeing how uncomfortable he had made the girls.

"I'm proud of you," you told him, and he beamed.

He responded well to praise, and being told that he had done a good job.

"Come on, we'll have to go to bed soon if we don't want Iida to lecture us again," you said, sitting down on one of the couches.

Kaminari sat down next to you, leaning his head on your shoulder as your propped the book open.

You didn't mind the fact that Kaminari was a little clingy, the contact was nice, and he always radiated warmth, though whether that was his normal body temperature or he ran hot because of his quirk, you didn't know.

You started the book off, barely having to look at the words as you read, changing your voice as necessary, stopping every once in a while to explain a word to Kaminari that he didn't understand, or to answer a question that he had.

It was nice, spending time with him like this, simply because he wanted to, not because he was going to fail a subject.

Somehow he had ended up with his head on your thighs, and you had one hand buried in his hair, brushing it away from his face, your fingers carding through it softly.

He was making a content noise in the back of his throat, and you smiled down at him, finishing up a chapter.

"Do you want to go to bed?" you asked softly, not wanting to disturb him too much, he had enough trouble sleeping as it was.

He hummed softly, leaning into your hands, and you smiled down at him softly.

You had never been one for crushes, they had seemed pointless, and there had never been a person who had caught your attention like this.

You had thought about it, of course, what it would be like to be in a relationship, but you had never thought that you would have to worry about it.

Well now you were worrying about it.

That nameless, faceless person that had been with you in those daydreams was starting to look frighteningly like Kaminari.

You had panicked when it had first started happening, until you realized that it would probably fade. You had had a friend in middle school who had a new crush every week, and you had assumed that it would fade with time.

It hadn't. That uneasiness that had popped up around him slowly melted into a nice warmth whenever he was close. You had started to stop worrying about whether he would like this, or hate that, and had started to show your true colors.

He had seemed to like you even more when you had started doing that, and you were glad.

But the only bad thing was that now you were noticing other things. His hands lingered a little longer than necessary when he helped you during training, his smile always seemed brighter when you made him laugh. His eyes always seemed to follow you around the common room, and he sometimes appeared at your side when you walked in.

You weren't sure if you just overthinking things or if he might like you back.

But this wasn't a simple crush anymore. You weren't sure what it was. It was a little too early to be love (even though it was just a rush of chemicals in the brain meant for human survival), but it was way past a simple crush.

Was there another step between a crush and love? Was this going to end with your heart breaking? Was there even a chance that he might like you back?

These were things that you kept in the back of your mind until you were alone in your room. Worrying about them in his presence made him worry about you, and you didn't want him to worry about you if he didn't need to.

"Kami, seriously, you need to go to bed."

"If I do, so do you," he told you, making you chuckle.

"I'll go to bed if you will. You are in my lap after all," you teased, pulling your hands away.

"That's fair," he murmured, stifling a yawn.

"Go to bed Kami," you whispered, standing up as soon as your legs were free.

They had fallen asleep a while ago, but you hadn't had the heart to move him.

"Alright," he mumbled, stumbling towards his dorm room.

You smiled softly, heading for yours.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You weren't sure what woke you up hours later. Maybe it was the three glasses of water you had drank before bed, or maybe it was the fact that your brain hated you almost as much as Kaminari's hated him.

You stretched, pulling a hoodie on over the tank top and shorts that you had gone to bed in, heading for the common room.

You weren't going back to bed any time soon, so you might as well get some studying done with a nice cup of tea or something.

You were almost surprised to see Kaminari sitting at the common room table with his books out.

"Denki? What are you doing?" you mumbled, wandering over.

"(Y/L/N)? What are you doing up?"

"I could ask you the same thing," you murmured, plopping into the seat next to him.

"Couldn't sleep, my brain went into overdrive the minute I tried to fall asleep."

"I at least got a good four or five hours in," you replied. "But it's Friday night, I should be sleeping in."

"What woke you up?" he asked, laying a hand on your thigh.

Kaminari, you had noticed, liked having his hands on you.

Not in the perverted way you had expected though. He liked having a hand on your thigh or on the small of your back. He liked an arm around your shoulders or his arm linked with yours when you all took class outings. He liked being close to you.

"No idea. It might've been a nightmare," you admitted. "I remember faint flashes, but it might've been something else."

"Are you going to be able to go back to bed?"

"Nah, I'll be up for a good while," you told him, leaning into his shoulder.

"Anything I can do to help?" he asked.

"Can you just . . . talk to me?" you inquired. "I like listening to you talk about things. Calms me down."

"What do you want to know about?"

"Anything. Everything. You."

"Did you know that I have a cat named Marshmellow?"

"What? No," you said, perking up a little bit. You had always been an animal person.

"Yeah. He's the spawn of the devil, but I didn't know that when I named him. All white, pretty blue eyes. Pure fucking evil," Kaminari told you, taking his phone out to show you a photo.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, he absolutely despises me," Kaminari said, handing his phone over to you. "Loves my sister though, so he isn't a complete psychopath."

"He's a cat, can animals even be psychopaths?" you asked, moving your seat closer to his.

"No idea, but it wouldn't surprise me if he is," Kaminari said, chuckling.

"You're right, he is pretty," you murmured, flipping through the photos quickly.

Kaminari hummed, but when you glanced up he was looking at you.

He had that look on his face, the look that he sometimes got when he looked at you. It was one of the reasons you wondered if he liked you or not. He looked like he was in pain when gave you that look.

"Denki?" you inquired softly.

"Hmm?"

"Why are you looking at me like that? Like you're in pain? Like you're hurt?" you asked.

You didn't like the way your voice sounded. That little hint of insecurity snuck in, your voice had that clogged sound it got when you tried not to cry.

You weren't sure whether you could handle his response to that, but you needed to know if being around you caused him pain. You needed to know if there was any chance that he hated being in your presence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Kaminari's POV)

Pain, huh?

Yeah, this was definitely pain, seeing her like this, swaddled in a hoodie he had left in her room accidently a week ago, covering her shorts, making her legs look a mile long.

He had tried to ignore it, tried to ignore the feeling in his chest every time he looked at her, tried to ignore the blatant male pride that came with seeing her draped in his hoodie, but he was only human after all.

Denki, after spending so much time with a girl that didn't tend to pull her punches, he knew how uncomfortable he had made the girls with all of his comments. He now knew how it made them feel when he said some of the things he had.

Denki never wanted her or any of the other girls to feel like that again, and he wanted to ignore some of the things that were running through his head, but she was making it hard when she looked at him like that, when she said his name the way that she just had.

"Denks?" she asked softly, moving to get a better look at his face.

Denki had never had a crush, not a real one anyway. He had had his eyes on Jirou first year, but that had been fleeting.

He was flirty, it was just his nature, but this feeling whenever he looked at her . . . that was completely new on him.

"Denki, are you okay?" she asked, putting her hands on his face lightly, making him look at her.

"Do you have any idea what you do to me?" Denki asked, placing his hands over hers. "I wasn't sure whether you felt the same way and I didn't want to mess anything up."

"Denki? What are you saying?" she asked, eyes bright with hope as she looked at him, running her thumb over his cheek softly, almost absentmindedly.

"I like you, (Y/F/N), I like you a lot, and this isn't some . . . three A.M. spur of the moment confession, but . . . it kind of is. The point is that you're smart, and all kinds of gorgeous, and there's so many things about you I wish I could list, but words aren't my thing, and I know that I'm rambling, but I really can't stop 'cause I'm terrified of what your response is gonna be and I don't want to fuck anything up and-"

"Denki," she cut in, smiling at him the way she did when she was fondly exasperated with him. "You have nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing. I like you too."

"Why?"

Even Denki was surprised by the amount of confusion in his own voice.

"Because you're a dork," she stated. "Because you're smart, even if people don't always see it right away. Because you want to be a hero, because you like to make a difference. Because in the end, you're a good guy, when you get past the playboy attitude and shitty pickup lines. Because you're cute and all kinds of soft. Because apparently I have a thing for hyperactive morons with screwed up hair."

"Rude," he muttered, but she smiled at him even wider, and he knew that it was worth it.

"Am I wrong?" she asked softly, swinging her legs around to get closer to him.

"No, but that doesn't mean that I'm happy about it," he mumbled, pouting slightly.

She gave a small giggle, something that rarely happened, and Denki smiled, wide and unburdened.

"So, what do you say about going on a date?" he asked, tucking her hair behind her ear to get a better look at his face.

"I think that's the smartest thing you've ever said to me," she teased.

Denki pouted again and she touched his nose lightly, making it crinkle in response.

"That wasn't a no," she told him, wrapping her arms around his neck softly.

"You know, this looks good on you," he whispered, touching the hem of the hoodie carefully. "And it looks very familiar."

"It does?" She pulled away to look down at it and her eyes went wide. "I didn't even know it was yours. I just threw it on on my way down here. When did you even . . . .?"

"I left in there like a week ago," Denki informed her. "I thought you had just kept it."

"I didn't know it was in there," she admitted. "But I'm not sorry that I'm in it, it's very comfortable."

"We can share custody," he murmured.

"We'll have to," she agreed. "I don't think I can deal with never wearing this again. You actually have good taste in hoodies."

"Why are you so surprised by this?" he asked.

"Because most of the time your style seems all over the place," she replied. "But that's not a bad thing. It makes you unique."

"Normal is overrated."

"A normal sleep schedule is not," she said, standing up. She grabbed his hands, pulling him to his feet. "Come on, we can chill in my room if you want to."

"You aren't nervous about having me in there?" Denki asked.

"No, because I know that if you try anything I can knock you on your ass. I also trust you," she told him, linking their fingers together softly. "Is this okay?"

"More than okay," he breathed, stepping close enough to brush their shoulders together.

He could get used to this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Your POV)

It was a rare day when you and Denki got a day off together. Being heroes was tiring, and schedules were always weird, so when you both got a day off together, you always spent them together.

"You're up early," Denki murmured, slipping in behind you from where you were sitting on the window seat of your apartment.

He wrapped his arms around your waist, burying his face in your neck.

"The baby woke me up," you said.

Said baby padded into the roof, tail high in the air, a smug look on that cute furry face as he jumped up onto the seat, curling up in your lap.

"Marshmellow, don't lay on my book," you muttered, pulling the book out.

"Told you, he's fuckin' evil," Denki murmured, kissing your shoulder lightly.

His shirt was slipping off your shoulder, and Denki treated uncovered skin like a target, regardless.

"How long have you been up?" he asked.

"Only an hour or two, and you looked so peaceful, I felt bad waking you up. I know that you've been getting more action than I have these last few weeks," you murmured, taking one of his hands, kissing his palms softly, leaning back into his warmth.

"I love you," Denki hummed.

"I love you too Denks," you told him.

"Read to me?" he requested, and you smiled.

"Always," you replied, finding your spot in your book again.

#denki kaminari x reader #denki x reader #kaminari fluff #kaminari x reader #kaminari x reader fluff #denki x reader fluff #mha #mha kaminari

160 notes · View notes

docholligay · 4 years ago

Text

LIVESTREAM WINNERS AND TOP POINT COMMENTS

THose of you who read the schedule already know this but the winners are:

HOLLIGAY INVOKES THE SPIRIT OF CLOSET GHOST

and

WE COOK FOR DINNER IN THE APOCALYPSE

Please join me for both! It’ should be a terrifying, thrilling time.

AND NOW, THOSE OF YOU WHO MADE ME FEEL THE WARMEST. Thank you to all who answered--I know this was super self indulgent and it means a lot to me that you took the time. So, literally 12 out of the 13 of you got at least one point (One person did not give any details, or even a quote) MAZEL.

Point allocations are below!!

One point winners:

4(?)ish years ago, you sent Jet a series of letters/cards/funeral lilies, from different Sailor Moon characters. The lilies were for Mako. One card was from Michiru, after Haruka's death. I have never been able to find them again, but I just loved the care you put into them--how they were all written specifically from the character, the fact that you even put tear stains and perfume on the cards. It was just so creative and touching, and it felt like the characters were real for an instant, mourning and living and giving you a peek at their lives. --- @kumeko (That was A Little Letter, and Mako’s was actually a separate thing for the same contest!)

“Before you get yourselves killed I want to go on record as saying this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.” Rei stood with her hands on her hips at the front of the garage- from that short story about Mina and Haruka strapping an engine to a shopping cart. You can really feel how rei must feel, the resigned exasperation mixed with genuine, but hidden, concern for Mina and haruka’s safety. I think i have said the exactsame thing before people i know do stupid shit. --- BeefSalad33 (oh ma, an oldie but, I think, a goodie)

OH MAN. I am always thinking nonstop about that piece where Minako confronts Seiya about bullying Haruka, specifically for the line where Mina spits out "you think she'll love you for this?" and UGH that LINE. it HAUNTS me, I want to BITE DOWN ON IT AND NEVER LET GO, I WANT TO PUT IT EVERYWHERE EVER BECAUSE IT HURTS SO GOOD, AND I DON'T EVEN CARE ABOUT SEIYA. --- @wouldntyoulichentoknow (I’m so glad that I’ve managed to make both you and jetty grit your teeth and care about Seiya at some point ahahah)

"*But flowers grow from death and decay, don’t they? That has always been true, you know that, Mako. You are a rose of perfect beauty, grown in the rich fertilizer of your loss.*

She threw the stress ball across the room, knocking over the cup on the sink, spilling the ice down the drain."

The contrast between reminding herself of how life works, and then still being bitter about it, and knowing what she is and being frustrated about it. It's a lot, when sorting out various issues- i have trauma, and that makes me better at empathizing with people, i'm adaptable long-term, and that means i can put up with some bullshit, that kind of thing, but that doesn't mean those are wholly good things. It's nice to see it put into words, and so plainly, and with such a strong reaction of it.

Roses can still grow wild, as pretentious as that sounds with how your passage resonates to me, but it's still nice to feel that. ---- @katrani (I’m so glad it resonates with you! I liked that line a lot! )

2 point answers:

Christmas Carol, Stave 1 - “You are a terrible person,” she jutted out her chin, feigning strength. “Fareeha deserved much better than you. But,” she took a deep breath. “I still hope she forgives you, someday. Someday, I hope you will deserve it.” It feels like cheating to use the most recent thing you’ve written, but nonetheless this section conveys so much about your take on Mercy, so quickly. She may be an idealist, the peacekeeper and builder, and she may want Pharah to have a relationship with her mother that’s not this disaster, but that doesn’t stop her from acknowledging that Ana’s been the primary factor in making it what it is and telling Ana that directly. I love how you write Mercy (and Tracer for that matter) as very warm characters who try to see the best in their situations but won’t gloss over the fact that sometimes, someone does have to be shot in the fucking face. “Good” doesn’t mean “hopelessly naive”, even with a pacifist, and I appreciate that you have characters who show that.

Bonus, and a fringe case as technically part of the Fushigi Yuigi hateblog: “She was still trying to get home, had been unable to get Tamahome to let her poison him, and then Nakago had hugged her into his chest until she had been forced to flatten him with a punch to the nads. She was tired, she was hungry, and she was trying to have a moonlight bath to consider her options and wash the stink of a man off of her.

And then, Tamahome, again.” - Haruka-gets-dumped-into-Fushigi-Yuugi-as-Yui was a delight that entire episode, but this post was one of the best. Is it really just narrativizing your frustrations with the many, many writing choices that were made here? Absolutely. But it’s a fun little bit of comedic pacing here, especially with the utter exhaustion of Haruka that this bullshit isn’t over yet. (“Fuck my life” to the moon wondering if Usagi could help and regretting how hard it would be to drown herself are close runners-up on that front.) --- Regalli

(Mercy is, in many ways, my attempt to write someone who is MOSTLY a pacifist that I can respect. It’s not easy for me! I often find pacifism to be cowardice, because so often in life the people I know who are pacifists are, well, not the folks in the street. So i thought, could you write someone who is very hesitant to kill, who believes that even Doomfist, even Reaper, even whoever, deserve care if they are hurt, who believes that a sword will not leave her hand free to uplift the fallen, and make her brave? And make her strong? And so was born, Mercy, who proved that, yeah that person, at least in my mind, can exist.)

I think one of my favorite passages from your writing is from "The Rest is Commentary". Particularly the part that starts with "I am a doer. " That entire paragraph is wonderfully written, with mix of beautifully descriptive language to describe *why* you don't trust words. It's slightly paradoxical, but it also fits with the rest of the essay (?) so well. And even beyond that, I love reading when you write about your faith. You are deeply devout woman, and a personal aspiration to me. When you write about your faith, it reminds me that there is work that needs to be done to live it, and not easy work either. But it is very much worth every bead of sweat, and every drop of blood. --- @shavedjudomonkey

(Thank you so much! I love that people have connected so much with my Jewish writing)

3 point answers:

From Requiem for the Great Consummation, I adore the word play with "compose." Ie, in the line, "Michiru folded her hands in her lap and composed herself." Why? I'm a musician. So, Michiru, with her music, holds a special place in my heart. (Why Ami gets the music attacks is beyond me. WTF?) I don't think the writers ever really understood what it takes to be a musician, and while fanfic writers often include Michiru's music, I've never really seen it done well. (I'm sure it has been. I just haven't seen it.) Music is all about structure. It has to feel free and soaring, but it can only be that because of the intense amounts of tension and structure underneath. A kite without a string plummets. When I reach for high, soaring notes, that's when I have to be most conscious of having a solid base. Making music Is constant tension. So, often when I see writers portray musicians, it's all "she never felt so free and untethered as when she sang/played the,violin/piano/whatever." And I think, "wow, really? She must have been Crap." So, back to compose/compose. This wordplay shows that tension. The "I have rehearsed this 5,000 times and am still working so hard I'm sweating standing still in this freezing auditorium so that it can look and sound completely free and easy." This is Michiru's entire life. She is composing herself. She is outlining complex rhythms and tensions and resolutions that even though you hear when the piece is played, you don't fully take in or understand, and all you consciously comprehend is 'wow, pretty.' Because that's how music works. Organs have keys that can't be heard by the human ear, and composers include them in their pieces. Why? We can't hear them! But we feel them. If you look at the score for an orchestral piece, it contains So. Many. Notes. So much going on. But when you listen, all you hear is that melodic theme. But if you take out anything underneath, things change and cam fall apart. Michiru lives her life like that. She creates herself, composes herself, and it looks elegant and free and easy, but it is so so very tightly controlled and rehearsed, and that particular wordplay showed off that side of Michiru's music, which is one I don't get to see explored much. --- @incorrecttact

(Thank you so much for this!! I am NOT a musician, but so much of Michiru and music speaks to me, the structure of it, the discipline, the way it allows you to express yourself while hiding behind something else. And yes! I think of that double meaning so much!)

I want you to know... that this was very, very difficult. I made a notepad and collected shit I'd pulled out from your work where I could find comments where I did such, and then I AGONIZED. Here is where I landed but know it's so close with other things god.

"Winston worked in earnest at his inventions, and Emily went back to teaching, and the two of them began to cook for each other again. Family dinners once a week resumed, grew with some of the new recruits that were being folded into their family. Pharah and Mercy’s daughter took them to the zoo, the park, out into the world. Dva had continued the game they had all been playing before Tracer died, their party picking up after the terrible and well-done loss of their beloved rogue. ***Life did not return, but it grew forward. It bloomed again.***" — A Clock's Fading Chime

I ended up choosing this one because I hate it a little when I read it. Not because it's not good but because it's SO PAINFUL. I love so much about the way you talk about love, and I think grief is all a part of that. We grieve because we loved. The idea of the grief period, especially for those in a close circle of a lost person, being like the cycle of the seasons where a flower may die but life blossoms in the soil it left behind is so evocative and perfect and everything leading up to that last line is the soil for which that line got to bloom. The slow, simple way life returns to them, that they adjust to the heavy rock in their pack (A piece of yours I revisited for this and a metaphor I will always carry with me) and start growing stronger together. And that they find it WITH EACH OTHER too just god, it kills me. But would I rather wish it wasn't necessary? YUP. FOR SURE. It hurts to think about someone who plays Lena's role dying in our own lives and trying to mend the rift between those left behind. But it brings all those possibilities and who may have gone already before to mind because it feels so grounded in the reality of what these experiences are like and shit it's just a great sampling of everything I love about your work. Beautiful prose, saying so much with so little, grounded in stuff that feels read, and ending on a banger, transfixing line. ---- @thoughtfulfangirling

(Thank you so much! I LOVED that whole series of fics around that, as it is in the way that I often like to toy with the nature of grief, and the way that we go on. Things aren’t ever the same, but we go on. And I’m so glad you gt into it too! It’s very self-indulgent for me, basically everything with OW, so I love when other poepl like it)

4 point answers:

Given that I am not Jewish, I hope this isn't overstepping my bounds, but your passover Seder speech really spoke to me this year. Specifically the bits about the relationship between cowardice and metaphorical bondage:

"This is a celebration of our freedom from bondage, but it is a also a reminder, a call that we must ensure we do not, in cowardice, return ourselves to bondage. "

Without explaining too much, and risking the kind of parasocial oversharing that you lamented the other day in a post, this particular push and pull has been at the forefront of my mind this year. The intense gravity that the familiar, the easy, the safe, can have, versus the genuine terror of pressing out into the unknown in search of something better.

Trying to change, and to do better, and to press on, is fucking terrifying, and hard. But, that is not an excuse. And I appreciated the reminder. --- @blastoise-m

(Not overstepping at all! I am so glad that it speaks to you, I really, really love this kind of writing, and I really should get back to doing more of my Jewish writing. My rabbi is leaving, because we apparently don’t have the money to have a rabbi! And he’s readying people to be lay leaders, and called on me to be someone who could give Divrei Torah (sort of like our sermons) because of my tendency to do stuff like this, and it’s very scary! But really exciting as that’s the kind of stuff that had me interested in being a rabbi, is picking this stuff apart and applying it to our own lives HI YOU ASKED FOR NONE OF THIS SORRY)

"There are no beautiful deaths in this world, and am sorry that you must know it. Rei never was allowed to say goodbye. I watched Haruka grow weaker and more ill every single day. We each have been jealous of the other, at turns, but I tell you this truth now: Our lives mean much more than our deaths. You and Seiya had a wonderful love story, and you raised a wonderful daughter, and unfortunately it is very often difficult to finish a story in a satisfying sort of way. It is not the end of your story, simply of hers. For you, it is a new chapter"

I think this is still one of my top 5 fav fics that you've ever written. I still think of it randomly once in a while. It's such a small moment but it sold me Usagi and Seiya in a way never would have expected. It's such a moment of growth for both Usagi and Muchiru. A small moment of connection for two people who are so different.

This is wrapped up in the entire MaS series, which I could never separate from this work let alone this quote. The entire series is a series about love and all its many permutations. About finding meaning in a world when you think your meaning has been taken away. About carrying on when you think there's no reason to do so. And I think this quote really encapsulates all of that.

This story, this entire series, is one the favorite things I've ever read and I'm so glad that you decided to share it. --- @madegeeky

(I truly and in all ways love how much you love this fic, it cheers em and makes me so happy every time I am reminded of it. And thank you for loving that line! I FEEL that line. It’s been true for every death that has come to me, so I love when it has meaning for others. )

The 5 point answer:

"God separated the sky and the sea, and that’s true, but there will always be the horizon where they blend."

I'm not much of a quote person. I'll often remember the feeling or the takeaway but rarely the words themselves. This, though, has stuck with me.

There is so much in this world, and so many people, who see everything as absolutes. Black and white. Good or bad. Right or wrong. And as I've grown and changed, that has come to bother me more and more.

This quote is such an elegant and accessible way to express how that oh-so-common point of view is a fallacy. And really it's just a lovely line that invokes both lovely imagery and feeling. ---- @seolh

I FORGOT I WROTE THIS, and like the completely arrogant piece of shit I am, when I read it was I was like, “Oh fuck, that’s a solid line.” And yes I am with you on getting older and relizing that the horizon line can be so fuzzy out there, sometimes, and this quote WEIRDLY came back to me when I needed it, a lot, and so thank you!

#names for thing

21 notes · View notes

severalspoons · 4 years ago

Text

Long Rambling Trigun Meta Discussion 2

I *hate* the reply function in Tumblr. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t function. It doesn’t even open up a findable page so I can respond, and I can’t directly answer the reply. That’s why I reblog.

So, here’s the next best thing:

tiggymalvern

I don't recall anything like that fic you mention from either canon. It's a lovely idea, if only I could imagine Vash and Knives stopping arguing with each other for long enough to do it.

This fic I’m remembering was surprisingly hard to find, and now I’m wondering if it’s from FF.net rather than AO3. Will share once I find it!

The twins argue while doing it, IIRC, and have very different approaches. Luckily for the humans, in this fic the engineer likes the plant and takes care of it well, given how little is actually known about how to do so post-crash. Even so, Knives almost kills the engineer, but Vash stops him and leaves behind a little journal full of advice and encouragement.

IMO, I feel like this is something Vash would be motivated to do more than Knives:

-- to repair his relationship with Knives

-- because he feels responsible for the people Rem saved

-- because he wants the bulb plants to be safe and happy

(listed in the order I thought of them)

But Knives would see this as slight progress towards Vash seeing things his way, so he’d go with it. What do you think?

tiggymalvern

I've never been entirely clear on the manga ending myself, and I think Nightow left it somewhat ambiguous deliberately. Vash and Knives are fighting, and then the earth forces attack them both, Livia intevenes and Vash and Knives fly off and

six months later we find Vash in hiding with the people who saved him, because Knives convinced them to, and then Knives plants an apple tree to help feed the peopl looking after Vash, and then he vanishes...

I assume he chose not to stay with humans and just went off somewhere, but it's left open

Interesting! Yeah, I got the sense it was supposed to be deliberately ambiguous, too.

Many people say that Knives died giving his last energy to save Vash, to the point where I thought that was canon.

No matter what happened with Knives and the tree, I have questions. If Knives planted the tree before dying or disappearing or whatever, I’d want to know where he got the apple seeds, and if providing the energy to make that tree survive on Gunsmoke killed him. If he turned into a tree (which I thought was the canon, but maybe not?), how? I can see why you didn’t interpret Knives as turning into a tree.

All I know for sure is, if Knives were dying, he’d want to do it on his own terms. Ideally in a way that would express his point and make an impression on Vash. I was going to say that creating a tree doesn’t seem like Knives’ style, but then I thought about the apple tree scenes in the anime. However that tree came to be, Vash would most likely associate it with happier times on the ship. Maybe he’d be fucked up enough to see it as a gesture of love.

Maybe it was the closest thing to a gesture of love someone as manipulative and self-absorbed as Knives could manage...

tiggymalvern Knives really is a person with no middle ground. When he believed Rem's teachings, he believed them wholeheartedly, that everything would turn out fine and people just needed to be given a chance. When he rejected those teachings and decided it was all just rubbish, he went maximum speed to the other extreme. Reject ALL humans, not just the individuals who had proven that they suck. And reject as in eradicate, not just avoid...

I love Knives’ all-or-nothing way of being. Maybe because I know and love so many people with a little streak of that. And it’s so believable. Reminds me of a quote I read somewhere about how a misanthrope is a disillusioned idealist.

Knives thinks in utilitarian terms (”the greatest good for the greatest number with the least possible sacrifice”) as a kid for the few short scenes before he turns evil. He also seems to think in terms of groups rather than individuals (”humans,” “spiders,” “butterflies”). It saves him the grief Vash goes through at coming to know and lose so many people, but it also helps him justify a racist ideology. I love that about him, actually. If I were to write a Knives redemption fic, a key arc would be helping him learn to see others as individuals. I have a few paragraphs of something like that written...

Kids definitely need wonder and to see the beauty in the world, but it's also a good idea to mention the possibility of weird strangers offering candy that are best avoided. For these bizarre new non-human children, those warnings would have been extra pertinent, and maybe would have reduced the shock of what came after. Knives is definitely more mature than Vash in those flashbacks. Like you say, he wants to discuss issues with Vash, and Vash just parrots Rem.

Agree.

I have a theory. Earth, in Trigunverse, seems a lot like our world, only worse.

I’ve seen a lot of people’s sense of wonder, beauty, fun, and curiosity squished. I was the weirdo in preschool, among other four year olds, for being too much like that. Maybe on Trigun Earth, a bleak place to begin with, that’s the norm. (And destroying people’s wonder/curiosity/etc. leads to depression and the ennui of modern life, but that’s another essay).

Some people, like those who run Waldorf schools, overreact by going to the opposite extreme. The worst, most ideologically rigid ones, deliberately wait to teach kids to read so they can explore the world unmediated by words a little longer. (And will even discourage kids who learn to read early, grr). Waldorf philosophy assumes young kids are basically sensing, feeling, and imagining beings, rather than thinking ones.

I get the sense that Rem is one of these sorts. She was squashed and made to feel worthless for the way she saw the world. Maybe that’s part of the reason she was so depressed and needed Alex’s help. She’s raising the twins the way she wished she had been raised.

That sort of parenting wasn’t appropriate for a plant, of course. But no one had raised independent plants to adulthood before. No one knew what was appropriate. No one knew how to teach them about danger (or how not to).

Growing up as a neurodivergent person in the Dark Ages, the only kid with allergies and sensory processing problems, etc., I understand all too well how badly things can go when even the most loving parents just don’t know what to do, and can’t find helpful information anywhere. Where helpful information isn’t just hard to find, but it doesn’t exist yet.

So as critical as I’m being of Rem, I sympathize with her. She really didn’t have much to go on but her own knowledge and experience, and she bravely did the best she could.

Vash isn't thinking for himself yet, but he's a kid, so that's allowable. It does make it harder for Knives, though, who feels he has to be responsible for them both.

You know, Knives does feel responsible for them both, and I hadn’t thought much about it and about the implications of that. No wonder he was so frustrated and furious. There’s definitely a sense of “something is deeply unfair and wrong” for a child trying to raise not only themselves, but their younger sibling(s). Perhaps that’s part of the reason I saw Knives as caring about Vash, in his toxic, screwed up way.

Plant biology is MASSIVELY confusing, and the more you try to piece it together, the more your head hurts LOL. But I think that's almost the point? ...Leaving the readers struggling to figure out the plants is the human perspective.

What do you think about the anime being so much from a human pov, especially considering that the most important characters in it are not?

Wolfwood is the support Vash needs to learn to control his plant powers among other things, the powers that have terrified Vash for so long that he ignored them. But Wolfwood isn't scared of them - or rather, he is, but not scared enough to abandon Vash because of them. He knows all about Vash, he knows all about July and the hole in the moon, he's seen Vash transform into some weird crazy thing with feathers, and Wolfwood still stays. Wolfwood lets Vash know that Vash's mistakes can be forgiven, and Vash is still a worthwhile person despite them. And because Wolfwood believes it, Vash can start to believe it.

Between how well you put this and the dynamic itself, I’m...blown away and don’t know what to say.

– “Vash, take care of Knives.” This breaks my heart because so far … he hasn’t. First he follows Knives around. Then abandons him. Then attacks him. I really do think Vash was trying. He followed Knives around for so long while being so angry with him for what he'd done, and yes, part of that was because he didn't want to be alone himself, but part of it was him trying to follow Rem's advice.

Yeah, true, he did try at first. I undervalued it because by the time the series starts, that was far into the past and Vash probably doesn’t even remember it, but still.

In the manga, Rem specifically says, 'Vash, don't leave Knives alone,' because I think she recognises that Knives is prone to extremes and needs a balance.

See, that instruction makes so much more sense. And I think the plants would have agreed. (Well, of course they would. They’re a collective consciousness, after all).

Rem probably also knew it’s bad for anyone’s health or sanity to be alone, and an emotionally unstable twin plant even more so. Knives would be in a solitary confinement of his own making.

Vash tried and tried to get Knives to change; he spent so much effort trying to explain why genocide wasn't the answer. But Vash failed, and eventually he recognised that he was always going to fail. So he left Knives, because he needed a life that wasn't that failure. He needed to do something to compensate for Knives. He took upon himself the responsibility of not only protecting the humans from Knives, but protecting the humans from the worst in themselves, which Knives' actions brought to the surface. And that is one hell of a lot to take on, and not a recipe for a happy life.

Yeah, that’s...a heroic life, but not a happy one. In a way, it seems almost as doomed as trying to change Knives.

#trigun #meta #character analysis #vash the stampede #knives millions #millions knives #rem saverem #baby plants #oversharing #me irl #nicholas d. wolfwood #vash/wolfwood #vash the stampede/nicholas d. wolfwood #vashwood #killing time #fucked up sibling relationships #trigun anime #headcanons

11 notes · View notes

taeken-my-heart · 5 years ago

Text

Moirai Chapter 4

Summary: On your 18th birthday a name appears on your wrist. The name of your soulmate. It’s a momentous day that everyone looks forward to, but you’ve always brushed aside; refusing to believe in a fickle mistress called destiny. But what happens when on the morning of your 18th birthday you wake to find the name of your mortal enemy? Jeon Jungkook.

Pairing: Jungkook x Reader

Genre: Soulmates au/ Enemies to lovers au. Angst, fluff, bickering, romance, eventual smut.

Word Count: 5106

Notes: There is a read more placed after the first paragraph, but we all know tumblr is weird so if it doesn’t show up I’m sorry :(

*****

Mondays sucked. You were pretty sure that was a hard and fast rule by now, but as you rolled up to school looking like an actual hot mess and with your sweatshirt on backwards (don’t ask, you weren’t actually sure how that happened but you did dress in the dark this morning so…) you were even more sure of that fact.

Ella complained the entire way about your mom not being able to drop you off and now you felt like your ears were bleeding as she rushed off in the direction of her friends; a new audience to voice her frustrations to.

You hiked your bag higher on your shoulder, aiming for the doors of the school. You had an AP bio test today that you’d spent the weekend studying for, which sucked because those were hours of your life you couldn’t get back and would rather have given to Lucas. As it was, he had only about a week and a half left before he had to go back for the next semester.

He insisted that when you graduated you could just go to college with him and then you’d get more time together…it just felt so far away. The hallways were filled with the zombies of the weekend and the others that were far too chipper this early in the morning. You liked to think you fell somewhere in between. You weren’t exactly happy to be awake, but you’d made it past the point of zombie thanks to a clumsy journey of dressing yourself in the darkness of your room.

The sea green of your locker came into view and you shuffled up to it, twisting the combination into the lock and pulling it open. AP bio was first so at least you could get the test out of the way and breathe a little easier after.

“Hey there, sister in law.”

You turned to find Lillian, long strawberry blonde hair swept up into a ponytail and a goofy smile attached to her barbie pink lips. “Wow, that’s a statement.” You said, pointing at her mouth and she grinned wider, shrugging the books in her arms higher.

“Figured I’d give something new a try. Is it a good statement or a bad statement?”

You turned to look at your friend, frowning in dismay. “We’ve been over this, everything on you is a good statement, you rude girl. You can’t be smart, nice, and beautiful too. You need to share with the rest of us.”

“Oh stop,” Lillian chuckled, “you’re literally the entire package, Y/N, so I don’t even want to hear it.”

Noelle came strutting up beside you, hip pressed to the lower locker next to yours, sunglasses still covering her eyes and eyebrow raised. “Did I hear correctly? Is one Mr. Jeon Jungkook really your English tutor?”

“Wha-?” You spluttered, watching as Noelle pushed her sunglasses from the bridge of her nose and to the crown of her head. “Why would you even think that? Are people seriously saying that? The tea must be empty if that’s what people are concerned about.”

“I don’t hear a denial,” Noelle sing songed and you rolled your eyes, grabbing your AP Bio book and closing your locker.

"OK, no, I’m gonna go ahead and put a stop to that right now. He’s not my English tutor, I’d rather choke. I do take my education seriously, though, so I probably should find a tutor.”

“Seriously enough to take advice from your worst enemy?” Noelle asked, turning to walk beside you as you and Lillian began walking towards your classes. “Wow, this must be the real deal.”

“It’s really not.” You muttered darkly and you could see Noelle grinning from the corner of you eye. “And I just told you he’s not my tutor. Anyway, this is my class so I’ll see you guys later. Bye!” You waved quickly, stepping into the classroom and going to take your seat.

******

After lunch was finished and you retreated to your English lit class, you waited until Jungkook and pool party Barbie were seated before going and finding a seat as far away from him as possible. Unfortunately, that meant the back right corner, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in a situation like this.

Ms. Collins passed back the first draft of your essay, weaving her way around the room and you frowned down at the very average C written in dark blue ink. You would never get the hang of this crap. No matter what you did, you couldn’t figure out what you were doing wrong.

You sighed, shoving the essay into your backpack and scratching at the wood of your desk with your fingernail. “Remember,” she said, now standing back at the front of the room, “the second draft is due this time next week so make sure you’re doing your research and putting in the effort; you don’t have much time to slack off.”

The lesson passed with you taking a few measly notes and a new list of words you needed to memorize for a small spelling test next week. Ms. Collins then turned on the Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet and you sat back to try and comprehend at least some of it. You weren’t sure what Shakespeare was on, but it had to be good considering he was making up words and crap and still managed to become one of the greatest playwrights of all time.

The bell rung, signaling the end of class and you lifted your bag onto the table, sliding your books into your bag as you allowed the rest of your classmates to trickle from the room. You just wanted some time to pout by yourself. What was the point in a second draft if you still had no clue what you were even doing wrong in the first draft?

Standing sluggishly, you made your way to the front of the room, eyes trained on the door as you began to prepare yourself for a refresher on the Civil war.

“Y/N, can I speak to you really quick?” Ms. Collins smiled and you nodded, pulling at the strap of your bag and walking to her desk.

“Everything OK?” You asked.

“Well, I’ve noticed you’re having a bit of a tough time with some of our assignments so I wanted to talk to you about the idea of me assigning you a tutor from class.”

“Yeah,” you nodded, “I have thought about getting a tutor but I wasn’t actually sure how to go about finding someone in the class with the time and skills to help me.”

“It’s no problem, I’ve already got someone in mind. Actually, I asked him earlier if he’d be willing to help out and he said he’d be happy to.”

“Oh!” You smiled in surprise. “That’s great, I really appreciate it.”

“Great, so I’ll let Jungkook know you are game and you guys can figure out the details.” She smiled, shuffling some papers around on her desk and you felt like your heart fell into the pit of your stomach.

“Jungkook?” You stuttered, and she looked up at you.

“Yeah, is that a problem?”

“Ah,” you hesitated, glancing around the room in discomfort, “It’s just, we…have our differences.”

“Well, he’s the highest in the class and he’s got time until the soccer season starts in the spring. He’s the best candidate. Perhaps it’s best to put differences aside. I’m all for positive collaboration and learning to work with people you don’t always get along with; you’ll need those skills when you’re older and going into the workforce.”

You sighed, nodding and pouting. “I know, it’s just…Jungkook and I have a weird history.” You mumbled, scuffing the toe of your shoe against the floor.

“Maybe it’s time to let bygones be bygones.” Ms. Collins smiled. “Anyway, you better run, class starts soon. Just give it a try for me, hmm?”

You sighed, nodding. There was no point in fighting against it; Ms. Collins was nice, but bullheaded. When she’d made up her mind, you couldn’t change it. “OK.”

After school you sulked your way to the courtyard. Ella had texted to tell you she was meeting up with friends and not to wait up and you still couldn’t get the whole Jungkook being your new tutor crap out of your head.

“Y/n!” Someone shouted and you turned to find Noelle running to your side, long dark curls swinging haphazardly around her face. “Are you walking home?”

“Yeah,” you nodded, looking over her shoulder, “you wanna join?”

“Yes please!” She grinned. Just as you started walking again another person was calling out your name and you turned your head just in time to see Jungkook coming to walk beside you.

“What do you want?” You grimaced. He smirked, nodding his head at Noelle in greeting before turning his attention back to you.

“Ms. Collins told me you agreed to tutoring. When did you want to set something up?”

You grumbled under your breath. Of course, she’d already told him. “I don’t know, to be honest I don’t think you could even take this seriously. Maybe we should just call it off. I’m fine with just skating by. English isn’t my thing, that’s ok.”

Jungkook rolled his eyes, bumping your shoulder with his and you frowned up at him. “Of course, I’ll take this seriously,” he said, “I do some paid tutoring on the side and it would hurt my reputation to mess it up with someone out of spite.”

“I’m not paying you, Jungkook.” You said, linking your arm with Noelle who was listening quietly by your side.

“No payment necessary, I’ll tutor you for free since we’re such good friends.” He grinned.

You scoffed. “Since when?”

“Come on, Y/N, help me build my tutoring portfolio. Besides, I already told my mom about it yesterday after Ms. Collins asked so your mom will probably be expecting it.”

“Geez, do you share everything with your mom?” You sneered.

“Absolutely.” He chuckled. “So, what do you say?”

Noelle nudged your side and you glanced at her. “Come on,” she smiled, “you were talking about needing a tutor anyway. Jungkook’s really smart, let him help you.”

“Fine.” You sighed, “But if you pull any funny business, I swear I’ll castrate you.”

“Scouts honor!” He saluted and Noelle giggled as he sent a wink her way.

“Well, anyway,” she said, pushing some hair from her face, “I need to head this way. I’ll see you tomorrow, Y/N!”

“So really we can start anytime,” Jungkook continued as you resumed your walk home, “we could even start tonight if you wanted to. I could help you with the second draft.”

“I don’t know.” You mumbled, forcing your gaze anywhere but him. His hair was parted and swept off to each side, dark and slightly too long, reaching just passed his eyes. He pushed his hair back with his hand as though he could hear your thoughts and you sighed. Why was he so good looking? You hated him.

“Come on, no backing out now. I swear, I’ll be a good boy, just let me help you.” He smiled, three fingers up in a scout’s honor.

“Fine,” you acquiesced, “but any funny business and I swear I’ll punch you straight up the butthole.”

“Graphic,” Jungkook nodded, “I like it.”

You walked up the pathway to your house, Jungkook trailing behind you. Sliding the key from your pocket, you unlocked the door and made your way inside, kicking your shoes off at the threshold. Jungkook closed the door behind him, stepping from his shoes and into the hallway.

“Mom, I’m home!” He called, and you looked up at him with a frown.

“Jungkook?” Your mom called, stepping from the kitchen with a smile, “hey honey, what are you doing here?”

Your mom wrapped her arms around his waist, patting his back and you huffed. Your mom didn’t even show this much love to you. “Hi sweetie,” she smiled at you as an afterthought and you smiled tight.

“I’m here to tutor Y/N in English.” He smiled and your mom grinned, patting his arm.

“Oh, that’s right, your mom told me you were probably going to be doing that. That’s so kind of you! Did you say thank you, Y/N?”

You huffed deep in your chest while plastering a smile across your face, “of course mom. Jungkook knows I’m grateful.”

“Yeah, Y/N is great,” he said enthusiastically, slinging his arm around your shoulders and you tried your best to hold your squeal of disgust. “Actually, she even told me she wanted to make me dinner some time, as a thank you.”

“Really?” Your mom smiled at you and you smiled tightly at Jungkook.

“Oh, yeah.” You huffed; chest tight with indignation. “Wow, yeah, well, I’m just so grateful after all.”

“I’m so glad you two are such good friends.” Your mom smiled, squeezing your elbow. “How about you stay for dinner, Jungkook? I could text your mom.”

“That would be great, actually. They’re going out on a date so it’s fend for yourself night.” He chuckled and your mom practically belly laughed. Mortifying.

“Anyway,” you called loudly, grabbing Jungkook’s forearm, “we’re gonna get started on that English assignment.” Jungkook waved at your mom as you pulled him up the stairs, closing the door behind you and dropping your backpack on your bed.

“Man, haven’t been in here in years.” Jungkook whistled, dropping his bag at his feet and scanning the walls of your room.

“You haven’t exactly been welcome.” You muttered and he looked over at you with a smirk, eyebrows wiggling.

“But I am now?”

“I thought you said you were going to be good!” You seethed and he held up his hands in defeat.

“Fair enough. Ok, grab your stuff and let’s get started. Where should we sit?”

You sighed, looking around your room. “Let’s just sit on the bed, my desk only has one chair and the carpet is uncomfortable.”

He nodded, grabbing his bag and bringing it with him, sitting cross legged on the end of your bed and digging through his backpack for everything he needed.

You took your place at the top of the bed, a pillow behind your back and one in your lap. “Here, hand me your latest essay so I can see what I’m working with.” Jungkook said, taking a notebook from the front pocket of his backpack and clicking his pen to life.

You pulled your essay from your assignments folder, handing it over gingerly. “I swear, if you make fun of me…”

“I promise I won’t. I really meant it when I said I take this gig seriously. It’s how I’m making extra cash right now.” He stared down at your work, pen twirling between his fingers as he read. Every once in a while, he’d hum and make a note in his book before continuing on.

You watched in apprehension as he flipped the page in silence. After finishing the essay, he made more notes in his book, chewing on the end of his pen in thought. “OK, so one big problem that I see right away is that your paragraphs are not well connected. You have certain ideas you want to connect, right, but instead of connecting them from paragraph to paragraph you’ve kind of left them disjointed. So, it’s like, in paragraph one you’ve talked about how Hamlet’s goal is to avenge his father’s death and the consequences of that choice and then in paragraph 2 you’re suddenly talking about Ophelia’s death, which doesn’t necessarily connect, but you could connect it with the idea of foreshadowing the royal families demise. Then in paragraph three you continue on talking about why you think Ophelia and Hamlet’s relationship is significant, but again, it doesn’t exactly have a connection to Hamlets attempt at revenge or even her death so it feels disconnected. You also have a habit of telling and not showing. You’ve gotta let the evidence speak for itself.”

“Wow…” you breathed, lips pursed in thought, “that is not at all what I thought you’d say. OK…so then what would you suggest?”

“Well,” he sighed, “if I’m being honest, I’d suggest a complete overhaul. This was just the first draft so there’s of course going to be lots of room for growth. You’ve got some pretty solid ideas; I just need to help you find a better way of connecting those ideas together.”

“So, it’s not a complete loss?” You asked, shoulders loosening slightly.

“Naw,” he shrugged, “we can definitely work with this. Your writing voice is pretty decent, you just need to figure out how to get the ideas you have in your head down on paper in a better way. It’s almost mathematical, like how you build an equation.”

You laughed, shaking your head, “this is nothing like math, Jungkook.”

He grinned, shrugging, “I don’t know, you have to formulate ideas, make a base and build on top of that. There are formulas to writing, you know? You just have to solve them.”

“Ok, ok. I’ll take your word for it. So, what would you say I do now?” You asked, biting your bottom lip nervously.

“Let’s work on making an outline, we can even spider diagram it if you need to.”

“Sure,” you shrugged, “if that works.”

By the time your mother called you down for dinner, Jungkook had helped you to map out all your ideas on a spider diagram and even start writing down your first few paragraphs on your laptop, helping you to see how you could tie your different ideas together to make your essay more cohesive.

“The spider diagram seems to really help you,” Jungkook said, trailing after you down the hallway towards the kitchen, “you should use it more often to sort out your ideas so you have a basis of how you want to start and where you want to go from there.”

Stepping into the kitchen, you grabbed a plate, loading it with the food your mother had left on the island for you to pick through. “Hey Jungkook.” Ella smiled from across the countertop, grabbing some fruit for her own plate. “My mom mentioned you were here.”

“Yeah,” he grinned, “just helping Y/N with an essay she’s writing.”

“Completely hopeless, right?” Ella joked and you scowled at her.

“Actually, she’s doing pretty well. She’s got some really good ideas, it’s just all about finding the best way to get them down on paper. She’s picking it up pretty quickly.”

“Thanks, Jungkook.” You murmured, looking up at him in surprise.

“Wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.” He grinned.

He made his way to the dining room, Ella hot on his tail with conversation he was a willing audience to and you watched him go in curiosity. Why was he being so…decent?

“How are your AP classes coming, Y/N?” You mom asked, taking a sip of her water as you pushed a piece of broccoli across your plate.

“They’re fine,” you shrugged, “pretty easy as long as I study the material.”

“And you came up with an idea for your science project?” She continued, taking a bite of her food.

“Yeah, I’ve got a general idea for what I want to do.” You said. Jungkook turned to look at you, eyebrows rising.

“You’ve already figured out your science project?” He asked, voice husky with surprise, “we don’t even have to start working on that until the spring.”

“Yeah,” you nodded, starring down at your plate in embarrassment. “I like to be prepared. I’m a bit of a nerd I guess.”

You could see Ella nodding out of the corner of your eye and just before you could extend your foot to kick her in the shin, Jungkook continued. “No way, I think that’s super cool. The science fair always takes so much time and preparation; it’s cool that you’re trying to get ahead of the game.”

You stared at Jungkook, eyebrows furrowed, but Ella distracted him with conversation about how prepared she was for all of her classes so you could only ruminate to yourself. What was Jungkook’s deal? Was he seriously trying to bury the hatched like he’d proclaimed? There was no way.

“What about you, Jungkook, honey?” Your mom said, turning her attention to him after asking Ella all about her school activities, “what have you been doing recently?”

“Mostly doing school work, but I’ve been doing some tutoring on the side to make money while I’m not in sports.”

“This is your last year playing soccer, do you think there are going to be scouts when you get into the season?” She inquired, finishing off her water and grabbing the pitcher to pour more.

“Yeah, maybe.” Jungkook nodded, “but we won’t know for sure until it’s closer to the season.”

“Well you never know, you could get a sports scholarship to a lot of different schools, pay your way through college!” Your mom smiled, offering the pitcher of water to your sister who shook her head, taking a bite of her food instead.

“That’s true.” He nodded.

“Where’s dad, by the way?” You asked, glancing back out the door to the kitchen.

“He’s just coming late from work; told us to eat without him.” Your mom remarked, finishing her plate and standing, “want me to take yours?” She asks, motioning to your plate and you nodded, allowing her to collect it from you and take it to the kitchen.

After the four of you finished dinner you cleaned the kitchen, putting away the food and dishes before Jungkook ran to grab his bag from your room and you showed him to the door. “You should try and finish the essay tonight so that you can show me tomorrow at school and I can give you some more pointers.” He said, slinging his bag over his shoulder and you held the door between the two of you as he put one foot over the threshold.

“By tonight?” You huffed, pouting down at the floor and he grinned.

“Better to be proactive, right?”

You shrugged, sighing, twisting the door knob in your hand. “Yeah, I guess.”

He nodded, backing out the door, “Cool, well, see you tomorrow.” He waved and turned to head towards his own place, just a few houses down the road.

You sighed, closing and locking the front door, staring up the staircase towards your room where you’d left your laptop with your essay on it. The last thing you wanted to do right now was go upstairs and work that essay.

With a huff, you grabbed hold of the railing, dragging yourself up the stairs and into your room. The paper wasn’t going to write itself and you needed to do it now while Jungkook’s advice was fresh in your head.

By the time you were finished, everyone else had already gone to bed so you were shuffling quietly into the bathroom to go brush your teeth. You had about 6 hours to sleep and you intended to make the most of it.

******

You dreamt of Jungkook dressed as Hamlet. Your mood was especially crabby because of it, but you managed to remember to print out your second draft for him to read so that was something positive, at least.

“You ready to go?” Your mom asked, peeking her head into your room as you finished packing your backpack.

You nodded, throwing your bag over your shoulder and following her down the stairs. Ella was already sat in the back of the car, which surprised you, but you figured your mother must have insisted since she was such a shotgun hog all the time.

Sliding into the passenger seat, you dropped your bag by your feet, fastening your seatbelt and leaning your head back against the rest with eyes closed. All you could picture was Jungkook in a stupidly good looking houppelande and puffy shorts, but he was wearing a hat with a feather sticking from the top and drooping down the back of his head and somehow that made you feel so much better about the whole thing.

The ride was mostly silent. You could hear the music from Ella’s earphones, but there was no conversation and it gave you a few minutes to let the irritation from your dream wear off before you arrived at school. The last thing you wanted to do was take your frustrations out on your innocent friends.

“Have a good day at school!” Your mother called as the two of you stepped from the car and you waved. “I’ll be in the pick-up line at the end of the day, Ella.”

Jungkook was waiting at one of the outdoor tables when you and Ella made your way towards the front entrance and he waved you over. Ella continued on towards her friends and you grit your teeth, turning to make you way towards him as he pulled the notebook and pen from his backpack once again.

“Morning!” He smiled as you sat across from him. The sun was already blinding and you had to squint to see him from where you were sitting. You readjusted your shorts; the bench a little too cool on your skin and nodded in greeting towards him. “Did you manage to finish your essay?”

“Yeah.” You murmured, pulling it from your backpack and handing it across the table to him.

He grabbed it from your hand, reading through while clicking the tip of his pen absentmindedly. After what felt like forever of you shifting awkwardly in your seat and looking around the courtyard at all of the other students beginning to make their way into the building, he finally cleared his throat, looking up at you.

“This is much better. There’s still room for improvement, but for a second draft I’m pretty happy with what you’ve done. I’m gonna make some notes and we can go over them after school.” He said, handing you back your essay and standing to pack his own things.

“I can’t today, I’m actually meeting up with Lucas after school.” You said, sticking your essay back in your homework folder and sliding that back in your bag.

“Oh,” he faltered, looking down at you, eyebrows wrinkling in the center. “Ok…well, maybe after you guys are done hanging out?”

“I don’t know when that will be.”

Jungkook pursed his lips, tugging his backpack over his shoulders. “Here, let me see your phone really quick.”

“Why?” You asked, handing it to him anyway.

After messing with your phone for about 30 seconds he handed it back to you, one recent outgoing call on the screen. “Just text me when you’re done and I’ll come over.”

With that, he walked towards the school where you could see Rachel waiting, arms crossed and foot tapping impatiently. “Sucks to be him.” You mumbled, before packing up your own stuff and heading to your first class.

*****

Thank you so much for waiting patiently for me to get this out! Now that my life has settled the next few chapters should come out much sooner than 6 months. My goodness, I’m so sorry you had to wait so long! I’m going to try and get myself back into a once a month posting schedule. Please be patient with me while I figure this out and please let me know what you think of this chapter! Your feedback means so much.

Chapter 3

Chapter 5

#jungkook scenario #jungkook fluff #jungkook smut #jungkook angst #btscreatorsnet #bangtanarmynet

344 notes · View notes

mari-onberry · 5 years ago

Text

12 days of Luka Day 4: Luchloe

Read on ao3

@lukacouffaineappreciationmonth

Chloe had been failing math for a while now, and was finally realizing that this problem wouldn't just go away with money. She was trying to stop depending on her parents, anyway, which is why she was going to a public university.

She would have to ask someone for help if she wanted to pass. Problem was, asking for help wasn't her strong suit. She wished she could ask Adrien for help, but he had been studying abroad with Marinette. She was thankful for it at first, because it meant she didn't have to see Marinette rubbing their relationship in her face. But it actually proved to make things difficult, since she had depended on Adrien to tutor her most of the time.

So, Chloe went through her options. There was Juleka, Rose, Alya, Nino... She frowned as she realized none of them would be very willing to work with her. She had hurt all of them. And Sabrina had been out of the picture since high school. She regretted treating all of them so badly, but it was too late. She had no one--

“Chloe? Are you alright?”

She looked up from her math textbook to see Luka. Oh no, she thought, not the emo kid. “What do you want?”

“Do you need help?” It sure looked like she did-- she had been staring at her textbook for a while now without writing anything down.

“No. I'm fine.” She was defensive. She didn't need help, not from him.

He knew she wasn't fine. He saw the frustrated scribbles on her notes that were all too familiar. So he sat down across from her. “What are you working on?”

“An essay,” she said, humoring him. Maybe if she talked for a while, he would leave her alone.

“What essay specifically?” He said, joking tone in his voice, trying his hardest not to scare her off.

“I have to write about Kant for my ethics class.”

Luka had taken a similar class his freshman year, so he somewhat remembered ethics. “Well, if you don't mind, I've actually been studying to become a teacher, so I'd be happy to help.”

She really did need help with the essay-- it was due in two days and she hadn't even started the rough draft. And maybe Luka wasn't as bad as she remembered. She had been pretty closed off to everyone in high school. "Fine. But this is just so you can practice teaching, I don't actually need help."

He went along with her charade, or at least pretended to. "Of course. This is for me, not for you."

She nodded, and tried to suppress a smile, worried he might see her true feelings.

"Okay, so have you done an outline yet?"

She looked at the blank document she had up on her laptop. "Uh, yes?"

He laughed, obviously caught on to the fact that she was lying. He explained to her how to start an outline and typed out the basic categories, but she was too busy watching his lips and fingers move as he did so.

"Chloe? Are you listening?"

"Hmm? Oh, yeah, I am." She looked into his eyes, and suddenly realized how beautiful they were. Why had she never really looked at him? Now, she wished she had started earlier, because she could probably spend a lifetime just memorizing every detail of his face.

"Okay, can you write the next sentence, then? You're off to a good start now."

She looked at the document. She didn't remember what he told her, and she definitely didn't know what to write next. She quickly read over what he wrote and placed her hands on the keyboard. "Umm," she was ready to give up.

"It's okay, you can take your time. And if you're confused about any of it, just ask me."

Wow, she thought. He's actually a good teacher. She typed out a sentence that she thought might sound good, and he helped her edit it a little to flow well into her thesis, and in no time she had written the entire introduction. It usually took her at least an hour to get this far.

"Okay, so next you should write your first body paragraph, and relate it back to your thesis. Do you think you could do that tonight and I could look over it tomorrow?" It was getting pretty late, and Luka was getting hungry, but he wanted to help her as best he could.

Chloe didn't want to tell him how badly she procrastinated the paper, but she also needed his help if she was going to get it done quickly enough. And with him around, she felt as if her writing was also better, maybe even good enough for an A. And if that was possible, she knew her parents would be proud of her. "Look, pretty boy, I know you're trying to get rid of me, but the least you could do is at least help me finish my rough draft." She saw him check the time on his phone and got a plan. "If you want dinner we could get something to eat as we keep writing this?" That sentence sounded much nicer than what she was used to coming out of her mouth. "Or you could abandon me, making you directly responsible for me failing the class," she added to sound at least a little meaner.

He just chuckled and answered, "Sounds like a plan."

His demeanor annoyed her; she was usually good at aggravating people, but he didn't seem the slightest bit bothered by her.

Since they actually had to get some work done, Luka suggested they go to an internet cafe, which was new ground for Chloe. She wasn't used to eating anywhere other than the 5 star restaurants her parents took her to.

Luka ordered a coffee and a scone for himself, and in seeing how lost Chloe seemed, ordered the same for her. They set up at a table in the corner, and Chloe continued to write her essay, and with him there she had pretty much gotten the hang of it. Every so often, she asked him to read over it, and he would edit it, silently until he was done.

She liked watching him look over her work; she followed his eyes as they moved over the page and she imagined wondered which part he had read. Most of all, she loved how she trusted him to read what she had read, even if it was just some dumb ethics project. When she would do homework with Adrien, she wouldn't ever let him read her work, and instead just asked him about her word choice and whatnot, as if she was too scared he would judge her. Luka didn't give her that sense of fear, and in fact she was glad she was able to trust him to help her. She always had trust issues, so his was new for her. She took her computer back, happy with the amount she had gotten done. "Luka, do you think we could do this tomorrow too? I need to finish as soon as possible, and I would love your help again."

"Luka nodded. "Yeah, that's fine with me. I'll meet you here again tomorrow then. How's four sound?"

"That sounds nice." She was sad to see him leave, but was already looking forward to their meeting tomorrow. "Oh, and Chloe?" He called out to her from across the room. I think you forgot to be mean to me."

Chloe frowned and opened her mouth to object, but he had already gone out the door. Her face turned bright red as soon as he left, and she rushed out of the building quickly to try and hide her embarrassment. Despite his teasing, she decided she might “forget” to be mean to him more often.

#luchloe #miraculous ladybug #twelvedaysofluka #lukacouffaineappreciationmonth #luka couffaine #mari writes

13 notes · View notes

marshmallowgoop · 6 years ago

Text

@kuribo4indahouse replied to your post “[[MOR] Getting my stuff reblogged by big blogs always kinda feels...”

Don't worry too much about tumblr. Tags are weird. People often just won't see things they would like. My tumblr isn't anything to write home about, but sometimes I'm sirprised nobody sees some things I post that I think are of interest. And then snothr blog posts the same thing and it gets tons of notes. I think tumblr's system gives preference depending on several factors. I have like 1200 followers, I guess that is quite a bit but not that much? So your stuff is probably being missed by many KlK fans on this very site, it's weird. :/

Don't worry about it. Your coverage of the KlK game is absolutely amazing btw, I think you'd work well as a game's journalist for example...or just media/film journalist.

I hope I made sense lol, I'm a little sleep deprived

You made perfect sense. Thank you for writing all this when you were so tired. I have too much to say to put well in a reply, so I hope it’s okay if I post this as a non-reply. Do let me know if not; I’ll take this down right away.

I agree that Tumblr is highly flawed. If content includes outside links or somehow seems “spammy” by the site, then that content won’t be searchable. You might be able to find the content by scrolling through the tags, but tags aren’t looked at as much as the search—in fact, it’s actually impossible to go through Tumblr tags using the mobile app—and if content isn’t searchable, it will never be recommended to other users, either.

Because I’m careful to cite my sources (and write a lot, I guess?), the majority of my work isn’t searchable. That means that the only way folks will find anything I do is if they happen to go through tags, follow me or check out my page, or if a big blog reblogs my work. And that’s the thing: Tumblr—and social media in general—is so much about being noticed by the right people.

And if you go to your Tumblr settings, click “Labs,” and opt to enable the “Reblog Graphs,” you can really see this phenomenon in action.

All you have to do is hit the little bubble icon at the bottom of posts on your dashboard or blog:

For example, check out the Reblog Graph of a recent post of mine that did fairly well:

The orange dot here is my root post, and each of the blue dots represents one reblog. Because I’m a small content creator (and this post isn’t searchable), only four blogs reblogged the post straight from me, whereas 13 blogs reblogged the post from a bigger blog. If that bigger blog hadn’t reblogged my work, it’s likely that none of those 13 blogs would have reblogged my work, either. They probably wouldn’t have even seen it.

Of course, this is just how society works. Joe Nobody’s not gonna make much of a name for himself until he’s noticed by someone powerful and influential who can help make him big. But social media sites like Tumblr hurt so bad because it’s just so clear to see how much you don’t matter unless someone huge thinks you do.

I mean, I fall into this thinking, too! So often I’ll see a post that I think is really good, but it’ll have very few notes, and popular blogs won’t have picked it up at all. I’ll wonder to myself, “Is this creator someone that I shouldn’t be supporting? Is this a repost of someone else’s work that people are ignoring as they should?”

And... that’s sad! It’s sad that I think this. It’s sad that I’ll have blogs “like” my posts and only reblog them when someone big and popular does—and sad that I catch myself doing this, too. It’s sad that your worth is so decided by a few powerful people at the top.

On a personal level, I’ve had so many doubts and insecurities about my work because I’ll see essays that make similar arguments to my own but garner so much more praise. I’ll see YouTubers make videos on topics I’ve literally written a book’s worth of meta about cite “recommended reading” and never include anything by me. They say that “comparison is the thief of joy,” but comparison is also a way to help push yourself to be better. What are others doing that I’m not that gets them noticed?

Maybe Tumblr isn’t the best place for my kind of content. Maybe I need to start making video essays. Maybe I format my posts badly. Maybe folks have a personal problem with me.

My frustration is that I’m unsure of my own quality. I know I have a lot to learn and improve on, but I believe in what I do. I cite my sources, I proofread, I strive for accuracy and make sure that I can back up all of my arguments and claims. I’ll spend hours writing and rewriting until I get a post the way I want it, I’ll scrub through tons of video footage to confirm that I’m spelling that word right, I’ll take numerous photos to be sure that the one I’m putting on my post is the best it can possibly be.

I think about presentation and readability and keep my paragraphs from going on too long. I include pictures and gifs to break up the word blocks, and I think about the placement of these images and the relevancy of them. I think about making my language engaging and exciting, even when talking about more academic concepts, and I’ve worked a lot on improving my grammar and making myself as easy to understand and as accessible as I can. I’ll watch an entire movie or read peer-reviewed journals or papers to make my responses to asks extensive and interesting and nuanced.

Everything I write that’s longer than a few sentences generally takes, at the absolute minimum, two hours of my time (including this!) I’m sure some of my more ambitious posts have pushed 30 hours, if not more.

And some of those ambitious posts? They get maybe 20 notes and not a single comment.

So, I wonder. Am I making content that people don’t like because it’s bad and I need to get better, or am I just doing all the wrong things to get noticed? Or do people—especially the big, influential people—simply hate me?

This is why social media contributes to such poor mental health, and I know I’m far from alone. There are people who work so much harder than me who get so much less for their efforts. There are so many passionate, dedicated, kind people who don’t receive the attention they deserve—such as yourself, kuribo4indahouse!

Thank you for your sweet words. I know I shouldn’t be a game journalist because I’m not really a gamer and that’s not my expertise, but to be taken more seriously and become more recognized as a media journalist or commentator would be a dream come true.

I don’t know if I have what it takes, but nobody can know. All I can do is keep improving and trying, and even if I don’t “make it,” I love what I do, and I’m very thankful to those who support me.

#kuribo4indahouse #replies #ramblings #goop makes a personal post #gifs i made

15 notes · View notes

moonlightkth · 8 years ago

Text

You're The Only One

❁ Request: So can you do a Yoongi imagine where we’re in a big fight and you flinch as he does something ? ❁ Group: BTS ❁ Pairing: Yoongi x Reader ❁ Genre: Angst || Fluff ❁ Word Count: 1392 ❁ Summary: Yoongi comes home, only to ignore you the entire time. After getting fed up with getting ignored, you try to talk to your boyfriend only to be accused of cheating on him with one of his members. ❁ Authors note: I am so so so so so sorry that this took so long, i really hope you like it. Also I am really sorry if this is bad, I haven’t written anything other than school assignments for over a year and I’ve never written in second person before. Thank you so so so much @evalocity for not only encouraging me write this, giving me some ideas and editing it, but for also continually telling me that I am a good writer who is capable of finally finishing this imagine. ily boo xx. feel free to send me how i can improve in my ask box! (this future english major probably, doesn’t even know how to properly space out paragraphs so lol if someone wants to tell me how to do that feel free) also I might rename this later on

You were working on your school essay on your laptop in the living room as your boyfriend, Min Yoongi, was writing some new songs in his studio at Big Hit. You’ve had the assignment for a few weeks now, but you had never really found the time to work on it as you wanted to focus on your upcoming 2 year anniversary with Yoongi and you wanted that day to be perfect as your boyfriend was luckily scheduled to be home that day. You finally had it entirely planned out, which allowed you to finally start to work your essay that was due in a few days. As you continued to diligently work on your essay, you heard Yoongi walk into your shared apartment. You looked up as soon as you saw the door getting opened to see him with a grumpy expression on his face, although you thought nothing of it as he was probably like every time he was back from work. This expression looked a bit different though, and thinking that he was just a little bit extra tired today, you continued to work on your essay. As Yoongi started walking towards you, you quickly moved your laptop off of your lap so you could give him his usual kiss but, just as your lips were about to touch his, you felt your boyfriend moving his head causing you to kiss him on the cheek instead. Yoongi stopped for a split second and then walked straight past you, going to the kitchen island and taking out his songwriting notebook to write some new songs, your eyes following his every move. You were slightly confused now, as no matter what type of mood he was in, Yoongi never failed to give you a kiss when he came back from a harsh day. You turned your attention from your boyfriend back to your laptop, still thinking nothing of his mood and wanting to complete your essay as soon as possible. Putting your laptop back on your lap so you could continue to work on your essay, you heard a loud, frustrated groan coming from your right. You quickly turned your attention to Yoongi, waiting for him to come hold you in his arms like he usually did when he got stressed out while writing songs, but as nothing happened you asked him, “Oppa, are you okay?” After a few seconds of silence, you decided to speak up again. “I have a feeling that you’re stressed. Do you want me to make you tea or something?” You asked, looking at him and smiling softly. Once again, you had no answer. You sighed, feeling sad because your boyfriend must be been so stressed that he won’t even talk to you. “I’m nearly done the fourth paragraph of my essay so once I’m done with it, do you want to come here and watch a movie? It’ll be a good stress reliever for the both of us,” You said, hoping that this would get you a response from Yoongi. As your only answer was once again the complete silence, you had finally concluded that your boyfriend was ignoring you specifically. As you finally realized that he was, it was natural that you would want to know the reason why. You moved your laptop from your lap to an empty spot on the couch to your left so you could go talk to your boyfriend and figure out why he was ignoring you. Slowly and awkwardly walking up to him, you had your right cheek slightly sucked in, a nervous habit you have had for a long time. “Yoongi-oppa, what’s wrong? Why are you ignoring me?” You asked slowly, not wanting to anger him even more, assuming that he was at least. You stared at him as you slightly bit the right corner of your lips, another nervous habit you had. Nervously watching as Yoongi put his songwriting notebook into the backpack he brought to the studio and practice room, you saw him getting up from his chair as he was now standing in front of you intimidatingly, causing you to take a slight step back in fear. “I think anyone would want to ignore someone who’s cheating on them,” Yoongi said with detest in his voice. As soon as you heard these words, not only did you feel your heart drop but your jaw also lightly dropping in surprise. Quickly grabbing onto Yoongi’s hand as you wanted to quickly convince him that you weren’t cheating on him, you replied, “Yoongi-oppa, what are you talking about?” locking your eyes in his. Yoongi quickly ripped his hand from your grasp and reached for his bag, taking out a few pieces of paper and handing them to you. The pieces of papers were screenshots from a kpop gossip website and a few random Twitter and Tumblr accounts all saying the same thing, that you were cheating on Yoongi with his best friend and co-member, Hoseok. The sight of this news made you lightly laugh, mainly because your boyfriend was believing these ridiculous rumours but also because of the fact that he screenshotted them and printed them out. The screenshots consisted of all the ‘dates’ you and Hoseok had been on as everyone was saying that it was “bound to happen.” You placed the few sheets of paper on the kitchen island and grabbed Yoongi’s hand again. “Baby, I’m not cheating on you,” you told him chuckling, unable to hide your amusement caused by all the dumb rumours you just had to read. Yoongi once again ripped his hand from your grasp. “I mean why would I even cheat on you? You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me.” By this point, you were absolutely dying of laughter. You couldn’t believe some of the things you had to read about your’s and Hoseok’s ‘relationship ’, as some of the things were so absurd that you believed that the media would do absolutely anything to get publicity. You continued to giggle as you watched the expression on Yoongi’s face change, but as you never been really able to read Yoongi well, you couldn’t really tell if he was happy, sad, embarrassed or even angrier than he previously was, judging by the look he was giving the sheets on the kitchen island, you concluded that he was indeed angrier. Maybe you shouldn’t have laughed, you thought, maybe he believed you until you started laughing at him. You flinched as you saw Yoongi raise his right hand, and as soon as he saw your expression, he dropped his hand and cradled you in his arms. “Baby I wasn’t going to hit you,” he said as he rocked you back and forth in his arms. Yoongi pulled you away from him slightly to wipe the tears you didn’t realize were rolling down your face. “Shit. I was just going run my hand through my hair because I was embarrassed. Shit, I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I made you flinch,” he added in a rush and some of it in Satori, a nervous habit of his. You gave your boyfriend a soft smile and gave him a quick peck on the lips. “You know I’m not cheating on you, right?” You asked, wanting to make sure that your boyfriend knew you weren’t. Your boyfriend then gave you a quick kiss on your cheeks, your forehead, your nose and finally on your lips. “Of course I do. I’m so stupid for even slightly believing those rumours. But why were you with Hobi a lot? Not that I mind you hanging out with him,” he asked you as you guys moved from the kitchen to the living room. You both sat down on the couch, cuddling with each other. “He was helping me plan our 2-year anniversary date,” you answered blushing, wanting the date to be a surprise. Yoongi looked at you lovingly before giving you another kiss on the lips, this one lasting a little bit longer than the previous kisses. “You are absolutely adorable y/n,” he said before kissing you one more time. You gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, “I love you Min Yoongi,” you said smiling to yourself as you looked at your laptop that Yoongi moved without you realizing it. “I love you too, y/f/n.”

(y/f/n = your full name)

#bts #bts imagines #bts scenarios #bts suga #bts yoongi #agust d #min yoongi #min yoongi imagines #kpop #kpop imagines #kpop scenarios #imagines #requested

326 notes · View notes

thewishingcap · 8 years ago

Note

Hello. I noticed in the section titled "about fleets" that you are an INTJ. I am an INTP and I'm interested in what it's really like to be an INTJ, since of course the stereotypes aren't very accurate and the testing sites don't always get the full picture. Also, if you can, could you please list what you think the types would be for the characters you write about (besides Vaati)

Hi there anon!

(this… this turned out to be super long. I’m self absorbed apparently. aha)

Hmmm. What it’s like to be me huh. I’ve taken the test at least 5 times spread out across years and I’ve always only scored INTJ and agree with a lot of the descriptions haha. It uh… it kind of makes me sound like an ass. And I guess I am, and I’ve said that before, but I got comments telling me people didn’t believe me. But I’m an ass, and, well, more on that on the last few paragraphs but first:

I think the part that struck me the most when reading the descriptions of INTJ was that we don’t think things are impossible. Nothing is impossible to achieve, though some things might be difficult. It’s not straight up idealism, just… I guess a sort of arrogant logical truth. If I can’t achieve something, it’s because I was lazy, or didn’t think the effort to get there is worth the result (like, if I really wanted to be an astronaut I could find some way to do it. Going to space sounds totally cool, but would I actually expend effort in it? Well, no, given that my baseline capability, my financial situation, and my mental health among other things… i wouldn’t be able to reasonably handle it. But possible? With enough time? Absolutely. Or I want to be a pro basketball player even though I don’t have the height for it? Will it be hard to succeed? Well hells yeah I’m starting with a disadvantage that I have no control over that other people don’t have to deal with. But impossible? Not if I try hard enough and take advantage of every advantage I could possibly find).

… not saying people should agree with me on the above, but that’s just my approach to life in general and served me well so far.

I guess the most important idea to me is that, if I’m not doing something, it’s not because of some outside forces that I wasn’t able to do it. It’s because I actively chose not to do it. It brings the responsibility of both my successes and failures onto me, alone, and even if it sucks sometimes I like the concept.

And telling me I can’t do something is absolutely the way to get me to think of a way to do that very thing.

I like rules. I like logic. I don’t like making situational rules that have no basis of fairness. I enjoy seemingly illogical contradictions that still, on some level, follow some kind of rule (even random-seeming characters that I write still have their own personal rules that make sense to them). I also like situations with loopholes that aren’t explicitly covered in the rules (kind of going back to point 1… sometimes solutions are there if you’re creative enough or a dick enough to find them. Does it seem fair? Not always. Is it fair? Absolutely, according to the rules, and I expect the rest to adhere to the same kind of dickery because it’s equally available to all, not just myself).

Also I don’t do social. At least, I only do it on my own terms. Invite me to a party I hadn’t planned, and I’ll probably bail. I almost always have some kind of schedule on when I’m doing what, and for how long, and I tend to plan this days or even weeks in advance (and because these don’t include social hangouts, usually, unless I was the one to plan it, accepting these invitations tend to give me more stress than anything). Another thing I agree with the profiling: I’m unapologetically blunt, to both strangers and friends alike, if they do something I’m not fly with. People might get butthurt but they know where I stand.

One thing I disagree with on most of the descriptions from INTJ tests is that they often say INTJs ‘think carefully before they speak,’ or ‘are intelligent,’ or ‘present carefully constructed thought out answers to questions.’ I don’t see myself as any of these things. I usually say the first dum thing that comes to my head.

Last… I’m highly critical, of myself and, I hate to say it, of others. Most folks on tumblr see my self-critical side, since I often lament about stuff I could have done better and my uh… cringe… regarding the stories I wrote that I once thought was passable. I can’t honestly let myself say “I love what I did, it’s perfect and great,” because I can always think of something I could have done better? But I don’t say this in any negative way, just… recognizing it as truth by logic, and self reflection so I can do even better the next time.

I adhere to others’ works with the same critical eye, which tends to bite me in the butt. Usually if no one personally asks me for help on improvement, I’ll leave it alone. They’re having fun and having a good time, I won’t ruin that: I know my own self-critique is always on High Mode that’s probably not reasonable and maybe a little too harsh, and even if I welcome that myself not everyone does. All of what I said so far, above, I only hold myself to unless…

If they ask for help…? If they lament that they want their situation to change? That’s when I’ll bring that criticism mode on high, what I have set for myself. And… sometimes people are shocked my critique went from 0 to 100 in under 2 seconds. Case in point, had a student who wrote really good assignments for the level of the class. Good grammar, good ideas, thoughtfully written etc. The class wasn’t particularly hard, and it was a first year class so it was more about giving students the confidence to move forward, and while I wrote some comments about improvement here and there, I didn’t ink the entire page red. That scares them. And it’s unnecessary inking for such a small assignment.Same student asked me to proof her personal essay for an application. Now, I knew this application was extremely important, and also part of a very difficult admissions process to which I knew the major folks who would be making the decisions. She asked my help, I want her to succeed, I know how to get her to succeed because by now I know the ins and outs of the admission committee. What do I do? I ink the entire essay top to bottom in red, everything I could possibly think of that could improve.

She didn’t take that well at all, and probably expected a review that had been more or less what I’d given on the class assignments (but, to me, a 15 minute 1 page weekly assignment is not on the same scale as a 5+ hour 2 page admissions essay). Didn’t bother fixing what I suggested she fix, and what do you know she doesn’t get admitted, and she sends me back an email saying she doesn’t know how she possibly couldn’t have been admitted when she had straight As and good rec letters. Seeing people fail when they could have succeeded, especially when they didn’t do everything I feel they could have done to elevate their chances of success… and they still complain about their situation after the fact

And that’s why I’m an ass. I had a friend describe me saying that I have a problem with putting myself and others on a “pedestal of perfection.” I’m chill on a lot of things, but that’s only because I don’t find a lot of things important to me. If I look like I’m chill about something, that’s probably why - I just can’t be bothered to try my very best bc it’s not very high on my own scale of importance (also p chill towards others’ shenanigans unless i have a personal stake in whatever it is they’re doin’). In line with that, I’m good at admitting and accepting losses. I tend to make a hierarchy of things that are important, and I’ll let go of the ones on the bottom of my list even if there’s an initial sting to do so. I’ll get over it.

I’m all about efficiency. Expending the least effort for maximum payout.

The few things that are important, I have zero chill (group projects I have zero chill), and will unintentionally drag people down to my own personal hell of zero-chill when that was never what they wanted. My hyperfocus is real and you can sometimes see it when I post 5 chapter updates in the span of 5 days >_>;;;

ahahaaaa sorry this got out of control anon. When you say characters aside from Vaati, were you thinking of OCs or other characters I’ve written in stories, or my opinion on canon characters in general?

#replies anonymous #LONGPOST #whooboy

1 note · View note

domakethinksay · 6 years ago

Text

Run for your life!

Let us all unite: A scratch paper for a movement

Outline

1 Introduction

2 Throwback Idomeni

3 Meta-Analysis: The psychology of war

4 Materialism and Marketing

5 Spirituality: The Road

6 The Situation/ Plot (problematic/ controversial)

7 On a mission

8 Transfer: Cycling in Eritrea

9 Catchphrases

10 Sountrack

11 About me: All the way, Marathonna 2014

1 Introduction

The plan is to go to crisis regions around the world and run through devastated areas with the idea of raising awareness on the one hand and get connected with the locals on the other hand.

The idea stroke my mind when I was in the refugee camp in Idomeni in 2016. The inofficial refugee camp next to the greek-/ macedonian border raised a lot of attention back then and was widely broadcasted in the western media. That was, when the so called Balkan route reached it's peak before it got closed down eventually by the states of the European Union.

When I was in Idomeni I thought a lot of doing some jogging as both some kind of activity and an equalizer to the sometimes physically and above all mentally challenging humanitarian work.

2 Throwback Idomeni

Additionally, there were so many mostly young guys who had a lot of energy and no idea how to get rid of it. Many volunteers spent a lot of time thinking about constructive ways of canalizing that energy. Well, the truth is, that the majority of the present volunteers mainly thought about how we could take care of women and children. Actually nobody really dealt with the male and their daily activities.

While sport in general is a good way to kill time, team sports involve some certain issues you have when many people are highly frustrated and when there is an acute lack of resources. When the tensions are high, team sports could be a vent and end up in an outburst of agression and violence. Also the different nationalities, cultural habits, languages and religions lead to a rise of the already high conflict potential between the different refugee groups.

For further information visit:

3 Meta-Analysis: The psychology of war

I've been asking myself why there is war for pretty much my entire life. I'm also currently writing on an essay about war which I personally would decribe as the ultimate level of knowledge after a process of more than two decades. So the next paragraphs are a bit of an intrduction.

When I was like 17 years old, I found a paper on Emule (a former peer to peer file sharing plattform).which was a correspondence between two of the most influential intellectuals of our time: Sigmund Freund, the inventor of and door opener for modern psychology and Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist and developer of the theory of relativity. The title of their correspondence was simply called: WHY WAR? Even though I didn’t read much of what they wrote, I’ve been asking myself that existential question ever since. So why is it? Why, in god’s name, is it possible that there has always been war as some kind of principle of human existence.

The excitement of war and the search for a substitute. Since war can be stimulating in the most intense ways, we better try to think of a ‘equivalent’ substitute. Furthermore, after two world wars, the predominant question got to be, how we can canalize the competitive element in our deeper selfes. By all means, we mustn't fight the existential fights/ wars that could potentially kill us all if we stay on that path.

When I was in the refugee camps, I felt a lot of dark and destructive energy. Even though there was also optimism in the air, if you scratched the surface one could feel how much hate, anger and rage some refugees were carrying around with them. It’s pretty obvious, that if you fleed from a war-torn country like syria, you can’t just simply let go as soon as you leave the place.

2016 was the year when I lost faith. It was the year, when the Utopia of a unified world collapsed after what I experienced whilst the refugee crisis. The dream I’ve lived ever since I was backpacker was over and I was devastated. I was asking myself a lot how to get out of that black hole again and how I could still push things forward and stop becoming a cynic.

I was almost desperately looking for a common ground on any level. To whitness how pretty much all the refugee groups put on the differences while denying the fact that they’re obviously all literally sitting in the same boat was quite depressing. To an extent, it was dog eat dog and pretty much all the minorities got extremely discriminated by the rest.

While I often refer to football as being the only global mainstream culture and basically the designated substitute for war, it wasn’t really possible to try that in a wild refugee camp. The simple reason is that the war the people left behind was still too close and too present in their minds. It wouldn’t have taken long and there would have been a massive brawl because of some rather irrelevant foul on the pitch. The tolerance for aggression and violence was just to low to try any kind of team sport (in a camp with 15.000 refugees).

This is where it comes to running. The good thing about running is that virtually everybody can do it. You basically don’t even need any equipment. One could doubt that Philippides, who ran from Marathon to Athens 500 B.C. was wearing any shoes at all. So basically the only thing you gotta do is do get going. Just like Forrest Gumb did in the famous movie with the same name.

4 Materialism and Marketing: The demand for “sport’s shoes”

When I was participating in a shoe distribution in the refugee camp in Idomeni, it became obvious that a lot of the refugees desperately wanted some (Nike) sport's sneakers. It felt that they were some kind of symbol for them. Brand sneakers, preferably Nike somehow stand for the material prosperity of the states of the Okzident. So having fancy sneakers were like some kind of status symbol for the refugees, which was one reason why the wanted to make it to Western Europe. Obviously, there’s a lot of marketing potential for all them brands out there.

It might sound bizarre that it wasn’t possible to successfully distribute pretty much the best hiking boots one could get because the refugees were only striving for “sport’s shoes”. I remember a pair of Meindl boots next to a pair of brand new pair of Doc Martens. We just couldn’t get rid of them, even though there were still plenty of refugees walking around in completely ragged shoes.

Regarding how little some of the refugees in the camp actually knew about their destination of choice, Germany, it became obvious that their whole journey was less about the (rational) facts but about the pilgrimage to some kind of promised land. It was rather a spiritual journey and an odyssee than something that could've been well planned in advance.

5 Spirituality: The Road

The perfect metapher of something that is nothing less than a philosophy of life. We’re all on the road, on way or another. This metapher could be pretty handy to emphasize on the spiritual component of our physical existence that simply gets lost among all the wealth and material commodities we live in (in the Western societies).

The road also became like the central theme of my facebook page, 'The Road to Idomeni'. As far as I am concerned, the road is a, if not the crucial metapher of our humble existence. Literally all of us may have been through bad times but kept moving forward. Personally jogging always gave me strength and made me believe in myself and the mysterious path I'm own. It always gave me faith in myself and the confidence that I will always walk on, no matter how desperate I might be and that it ain’t over yet.

6 The Situation/ Plot (problematic/ controversial >>>do it!)

Disclaimer: The following paragraph reflects my personal view of the status quo in Syria. Since we better don't get involved into politics, this view is controversial and shouldn't be relevant for the actual project. The idea is to give people faith, thus you better frame things as positive and constructive as possible.

Insert: Written in the course of 2017...

One of the main reasons why there was this surge of refugees that hit the road was the war in Syria. Torwards the end of 2016 there was the battle of Aleppo. Eventually, Assads troops won with the help of Russia, which will soon seen to be the decisive step to end and a war that is now going on for already 8 years. Russia's decision to intervene in Syria was thereby the game changer. However the whole conflict virtually disappeared in the western media (...). That is something that really bothers me. I can't believe the double standards and hipocrisy of the West. After I've talked to a lot of refugees, I know that a lot of people have supported Assad all the way during the the war. Also there are a lot of minorites like the Christians who live in Syria, who get protected by Assad. Months ago I've signed a petition that got already launched last year (2016*). It was initiated by pretty much all the the Christian groups there are in Syria but unfortunately got completely left behind by the Western media. In the petition, they were demanding to end the sanctions against Syria. While the German government is still pretending to deal with the reasons why the people left Syria, the sanctions of the western states have been one of the reasons why the population struggled to fight shortages in the first place.

A few months ago the alliance of Syrian, Russian and Iranian troops made it to expel ISIS out of East-Ghouta, which was widely considered to be the definite last stronghold of something you practically can't define as a state of its own anymore. That is a huge victory and the end of the war in Syria in terms of military interventions. Nonethless, the western media barely took notice of that, nor seem the western governments urged to actually think about helping Syria to recover from the devastations of the war. At the moment the only western country that is rebuilding the infrastructure of a war torn country and reinstalling basic needs like a constant supply with water is the Russian Federation. This is a huge scandal and that circumstance needs awareness.

Obviously there are more conflicts in the world, but the one in Syria is the one that got only a short time ago extensively covered by the western media and now seems to be forgotten. Furthermore, since the plan was to go jogging, you still need to be able to do that in a region that is considerably safe, which means there mustn't be any fights. For me it's not only the risk itself of being there, but also the authorities and the military that could simply get confused. So there's no way to realize that kind of project in an actual warzone. Another reason is that the people got to have the capacities to get involved into any kind of sport. Even though that seems to be inappropiate in an area, where the main focus lies on the reconstruction of the infrastructure, it's always good to find a balance to a seemingly grey existence. When I think of something hypothetical like the first marathon in Aleppo, it's also something that reminds of a quote by Oscar Wilde:

„At the end of the day, reality is just a construction of the mind, our conscience is selective and human being will always be able to celebrate the irony of their destiny, no matter what“.

Update: As far as I could tell, from my point of view, i.e. the information you receive from the common channels in Germany, the Middle-East conflict with Israel as it's focal point is the most represented conflict in the media. Admittedly, my attention might be biased, however, if you think about the broadcasting companies around the world, it's still the conflict, that is the most polarizing and in a way, dividing the Okzident from the Orient.

There's got to be a way. Given that, one could think of a both literal and figurative way. The first is the one to cross the border physically, the second is the question how to get rid of all the blockades in the mind. The thing is, that you got to be able to find a force, that is stronger than all the hatred, plus the fault/ responsibilities, the Palestinians can externalize to the ones on the other side. What you usually don't see in the Western media are the human rights violations in the Gaza Stripe. The whole (media) attention is usually concentrated to the border zone. Thus the border zone functions to distract both the media and the people.

7 On a mission

You need to find something that canalizes all the hate and stimulates the people to an extent that they get distracted from the conflict and it's mere existence. It's got to be the force.

To be honest, the peace process (between Israel and Palestine) has failed completely. Thus we need to do better by finding a completely new approach.

One person to cross the border, to break the ice, so to say, or just to go, i.e. to run, where nobody else dares to go. It's got to be a riskful voyage, there's no doubt. I also recommend to run by yourself and independently first. The promotion aspect comes second and shouldn't catch the locals attention straight away. I'm not saying that there's gonna be an illegal border crossing, but if you actually jog from one side to the other with your passport in your hand, the heavily armed border police will look at you in the most peculiar way the least.

VISUALIZATION: You would get extreme pictures in a devastated area. You take a normal camera that virtually comes with your smartphone these days. This camera can you also use to get in contact with your sourroundings. Secondly, you can use a body camera (Go Pro) for the first person view. A friend of mine from Syria posted this video when the Syrian Troops attacked the rebel/ terrorist stronghold of East-Ghouta.

The third camera is a drone that makes videos from a bird's eye view to capture the whole scenario.

8 Transfer: Cycling in Eritrea

Back then in 2014 I've met a bunch of Eritreans in a refugee asylum in my hometown in Bavaria. When they told me, that they're from Eritrea, I shrugged because I had never heard of the country before in my entire life.

After that, I did some research and watched a few documentaries about the small country between Ethiopia and the Red Sea. The Italians imported cycling as a recreational activity whilst once back then when they were colonializing Eritrea. It's popularity hasn't decreased ever since. There’s even the Tour of Eritrea, introduced by Italian community of Eritrea and once called Primo Giro dell’Eritrea (The Tigrynian writing is: ዙር ኤርትራ). The Tour of Eritrea is a multistage bicycle race held annually throughout the country.

One could refer to Eritrea as a bluepringt how to kick off a sport for the masses in a development country. Obviously, you better don’t do this explicitly, because of the oppression that came with the colonialization by the Kingdom of Italy back then.

9 Catchphrases

Gegenschmerz/ Counterpain

Unify! UNITED

Freedom for all

The Pilgrimage

...

10 Soundtrack

Chuck Ragan – I believe

Xavier Rudd – Bow down

Bruce Springsteen – Born to run (controversial)

Hilltop Hoods – Tomorrow will do (Chorus as “Outro“)

Hilltop Hoods – The Hard Road (Restrung, beginning as „Intro“)

and many more …

11 ABOUT ME

Running for me is a rather spiritual thing. It gives me the feeling that I'm on track. That I'm on the road to somewhere. However the road itself is the destination. Everytime when I go for a run I got time to reflect and think about myself, i.e. the decisions I made, and the path I'm on and the way I go (i.e. the decision I will make).

It gives the feeling, that I'm connected with destiny, having an inner dialogue with the super-ego (i.e. god).

Thus running is for me like praying. Like some people go to the church, I like to get in touch with nature and the elements. I actually started to literally pray when I'm running.

When I go for a run I suffer for my sins. I pay a physical price for the mistakes I made, i.e. the decisions I regret. Running a marathon is comparable with a pilgrimage. The marathon I did in 2014 was like walking to Santiago de Compostela (or Mekka). Altogether, it took me five years to fulfil that dream. Doing the marathon also was like a pain therapy. Pain is crucial, since it gives me the feeling that I'm alive. The contact with the Elements is also highly important, because they give me the feeling that I'm connected with creation. Last winter I went for a run when it was -10 degrees outside. That was good! I mean, what doesn't kill you …

In 2014 I was frustrated with Uni life. I tried hard to put the focus on what was happening in the Ucraine. Also there was the Ebola virus rampant in the South Western African States. I wanted to do something and act, rather than just observe everything that was happening through the media. The plan was to either go to East Ucraine with a convoi to supply the area with humanitarian aid or alternatively help out the red cross to inform the people about the Ebola virus. Unfortunately, I broke my ancle when I just finished off my last paper for university in the last quarter of 2014.

In 2016 I went to Greece and Turkey for altogether 5 times. I went to the inofficial refugee camp in Idomeni for the times and came again to work as an idenpendent volunteer in the official refugee that were ran by the Greek military. I was a volunteer, an activist and freelancer journalist. Furthermore I was doing public relations and trying to connect the people via my facebook page „Wir machen was: The road to Idomeni“.

It pretty much started in 2010 when I found a pair of dirty Nike Air Sneakers in a shelve in a hostel in the middle of nowhere in New South Wales, Australia. Actually, I already started when I was still in Sydney because it was a good way to do some free activity and have a look at the city while detoxing from last night. Gosh, there are just so many reasons to go running!

Back in the day when I went for a run while I was working at Skybury Farm at the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland

Back then I had just quit my first job in Goolgowi, New South Wales, where I was planting trees for about 3.5 weeks for a miserable company. After that I spent roughly a week in a working hostel in the next big town called Griffith. I found the shoes left behind in the corner of a shelve, full of mud and without shoelaces. However, they were in a superb condition after I’d put them into laundry machine. Before I had found them, I went jogging with my Adidas Samba, but without proper shoes it felt like having stones in my legs for a couple of days after the run.

The Nikes were one of the treasures you may find on your travels because some fellow backpacker just couldn’t be bothered to take them with him on his further journey. Probably they just didn’t fit into his backpack anymore.

After I eventually flew from Sydney to Townsville shortly afterwards, I was sitting in a working hostel in Ayr, Queensland. I didn‘t have much to do on that afternoon because there was no work in the first couple of days after my arrival. Because I got bored, I decided to go for a bit of a run. I eventually ran all the way from Ayr to the next village Home Hill. The initial plan was to visit a girl I‘ve recently met, who was staying at a working hostel in Home Hill. When I arrived in Home Hill, I decided to not try to visit her and concluded, that it might not be the best ‚set up‘ for a visit. So I just turned around and ran my way back to Ayr again.

On the way there were massive Bushfires because the local farmers burn down the sugar canes because it makes it easier for them to extract the sugar. It was a rather spectacular scenario and felt a bit like running through flames. After that run which was years before there running apps, I looked up the distance on Google maps and it said that I ran 23.6 kilometres. That was the initial spark for making the decision to run a marathon one day. The plan also was to do them my super vintage Nike Sneakers. Unfortunately my whole backpack got stolen when I was on Ibiza in 2013.

I made it: My first marathon in 2014 at the VVO Oberelbe-Marathon in Dresden, Germany.

Entering a world of pain: The last kilometres before the finish line.

0 notes

thelowercasegimmick · 7 years ago

Text

Opinion Piece, 10/3/16: Infodumps and YA

If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, regardless of what level it was, you almost certainly heard the advice ‘show, don’t tell’. It’s one of the most basic and well-known pieces of writing advice out there, and it’s also one of the hardest to put into practice. I feel as if I talk about infodumps in every other review, and because of that, I wanted to expand on my thoughts on this subject. Infdoumps are, in short, a failure of showing - the author has decided to tell the information they want to get across, all at once, rather than showing it in practice. But why, exactly, is this a bad thing? What’s the point of showing, rather than telling - isn’t everything just the author telling you things? Aren’t infodumps necessary to convey information when the worldbuilding or backstories are complicated? Those are the questions I want to answer.

When I start reading a novel, I sometimes imagine that there’s an implied interaction between me and the author. The author (along with their editor and publishing company) has essentially said to me, “This book will entertain you. I’m asking you to give up several hours of your life to dedicate to my words, and in exchange, I promise not to waste any of that time.” Essentially, I think that every part of a novel should hold some interest for me. I’m not saying every word has to be enthralling, but I am saying that not one word should be boring. That’s obviously an unattainable ideal, but an author should strive to get as close to it as they can. I do understand that, to some degree, sacrifices have to be made, and that some bits of the novel will be boring in the moment but will play off in an interesting way later. But as I said above, reading a novel is a time commitment, and if too much of my time is wasted, I’m going to quickly grow frustrated with a book.

To me, that’s the point of showing rather than telling. Nearly every novel has some sort of backstory that the reader needs to understand before the book will make sense or be any good. But, almost without fail, telling is the least interesting possible way of getting across this information - it’s the method that wastes my time the most. If the telling is brief, it’ll usually be unmemorable, and there’s a good chance I won’t be able to recall it later. For example, simply saying, “Jane was easily excited,” just doesn’t stick in my head. I read dozens of books every year - I’ve probably read about hundreds of easily-excited characters. But if you actually show Jane being easily excited - if you write a scene where she’s gets excited over minor events - that sticks in my head. If you show her in a scene like that, you don’t have to state directly that she’s easily excited, because I’ll intuit the information - I’ll remember the scene, and the information will stick in my head. Not only that, but the scene is (or at least, has the potential to be) interesting to read. After all, getting a feel for a character is one of the joys of reading, and the scene could be funny, or move the plot of your book forward in some way. This is why writers are advised to show rather than tell. It makes the information more interesting, and memorable.

So, that’s why showing is better when the information you’re trying to get across is short. But when you have to get a large chunk of information across at once, that’s when things get a lot more difficult. See, in the example above, while the reader probably won’t remember the information, you haven’t really stopped the momentum of your story for very long. You should try to avoid stopping the story’s momentum at all, of course, but it’s not going to ruin your book to do it for a sentence or two. But there’s an extra problem with trying to tell a lot of information at once: you have an infodump. An infodump is when a story stops entirely to tell an entire paragraph or more of information or backstory. This is by far the easiest way to impart large chunks of information, which is probably why you see infodumps so often. But they’re low-effort, low-reward - infodumps aren’t just the least interesting possible way of imparting a lot of information, they actively hurt the momentum of your novel. For a paragraph or two, you’ve stopped the story entirely. An infodump doesn’t move the novel forward at all, and a novel that’s standing still is wasting my time. Every good novel has to be moving forward at all times. Forward momentum will obviously look different in an action-packed space opera compared to a slow-burning romance, but in both, the situation needs to be changing, or else the novel will inevitably get boring.

The way to avoid infodumps is essentially the same as how to avoid briefer bits of telling - demonstrate the information in a scene. A very good example of this is in the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, one of the few things I talk about more than infodumping on this blog. The Chaos Walking trilogy is written in first-person present-tense, and as such, we see Todd and Viola’s thoughts in real-time. It wouldn’t make sense for the characters to explain to the reader their backstories or how the world works, because we’re seeing their thoughts as they think them. People aren’t exactly in the habit of internally explaining their thoughts to outsiders. And to be clear, Ness does have a lot to explain to the reader - Chaos Walking is set on an alien planet where everybody can hear each other’s thoughts, and at the start of the series, Todd has never seen a woman before. Ness has said that he saw the first-person present-tense as a challenge: how could he impart all that information without breaking the story’s internal logic? And to be fair, Ness doesn’t do it perfectly - there are one or two small infodumps where Todd thinks about basic things that he has no reason to think about. But mostly, Ness incorporates the information into scenes, in little bits at a time, and he trusts that the readers are smart enough to piece together the information. And this completely worked - I’ve seen plenty of readers who weren’t into the series (which is understandable - the series is kinda out there, extremely dark, and definitely not for everybody), but I’ve never seen a single reader complain that they didn’t understand the world.

That’s the first book I’d recommend in order to see how one can avoid infodumps. The second is, of course, Liar (2009) by Justine Larbalestier, another book that I just can’t stop talking about on this blog. (The other major one is The Hunger Games (2008), which I’m not going to talk about in this essay, although it’s another example of a book that gets across a lot of complex worldbuilding without infodumps). Liar is actually a contemporary story, but it’s one with a lot of backstory it needs to get across. (In a lot of cases, backstory is to characters as worldbuilding is to fictional universes.) So how do you insert that backstory naturally into a story? Larbalestier’s answer is one of the most creative I’ve ever seen. Larbalestier’s solution is to essentially use infodumps as character building exercises, to the extent that they don’t feel like character development anymore. Liar spends a lot of time in Micah’s head and not a lot of time on action, and a huge proportion of the time we spend in Micah’s head gets across backstory of some sort. This backstory is important set-up for the theme, but Larbalestier masks this fact by showing us something new and interesting about Micah’s psyche along with that necessary information. Part of the fun of the book is seeing this for yourself, so I won’t spoil it too much, but essentially, Larbalestier uses fourth-wall breaks, humor, and lots of other fun devices during Micah’s internal monologues, and each one tells us something new about her. Whereas in the hands of a lesser author, this might’ve turned the novel into little more than a bunch of writing exercises put into a random order, there is in fact something tying everything together - each internal monologue does in fact tell you information, and it does all build up to something, both thematically and in a sort of dramatic structure. But Larbalestier masks this so well that it’s almost impossible to be aware of what she’s doing until the novel is finished. She delivers the information in a memorable way, without you even realize that she’s getting you to remember setup for a potential payoff. It’s essentially the same thing that Patrick Ness did, but it uses very interesting internal monologues instead of Ness’ equally interesting scenes.

Setup and payoff is one of the most important concepts in fiction, and I think a mistake that a lot of authors make is to prioritize the payoff over the setup. The prevalence of infodumps in YA is a reflection of that - the author decides to make the setup boring, and the consequence is that the reader often stops paying attention before the payoff arrives. But some of the best books I’ve ever read are so great specifically because they find creative ways to set up their payoffs. It makes the payoff more satisfying, and the opening third of their novels less boring. There is no formula to successful setup, but I guess I would call infodumps an anti-formula. There’s nothing that guarantees success, but an infodump almost completely guarantees failure. So, in short, that’s why I complain about infodumps so much - not only are they boring, but I think writers can do so much better.

#ya #young adult books #infodumps #worldbuilding #chaos walking #liar

0 notes