#I am extremely unhappy where I am in my transition which has been put on hold for over two years now

[assassinbait]

2017 and 18 have been extremely humbling for me. Actually, humbling is putting it nice. It’s been harrowing. I’ve never been this consistently in physical pain, mental pain, financial pain, with romantic and friend relationships and future career issues that...I don’t know, I don’t have any confidence/hope to fix.  I’ve been dealing with these issues for years and it only progressively gets worse; I’m back to square one after exhausting every hope for any improvement to my future over and over.  I want to make personal posts that show improvement, I want to make everyone here and around me proud of my successes, but I’ve been failing in a ways I’ve never known before. 

[solomonish]

Hey! If you're up for it how about The Fool, The Hierophant, and The Tower for Solomon. And The Moon as a bonus for any character that strikes your fancy!

hell YES i am up for it! i would do the entire thing for Solomon in one go if asked (please don’t ask......let me pace myself lol)

major arcana headcanon requests!

SOLOMON

The Fool -  what are your muse’s thoughts on new beginnings? does it frighten them or excite them?

Well, I think Solomon has a different opinion on new beginnings for himself than he does others, first of all. Considering all he’s seen and been through and what role he has in the universe now, it makes sense that he’d hold himself to a different standard. 

I think for him, he doesn’t necessarily think there’s even the option? Like, he has stagnated. His power and knowledge grows, sure, but in terms of personal development he’s kind of stuck. (At least, that’s how I think he defaults to seeing himself. Can’t keep the realms under control if you’re distracted by trying to be a better person, you know?) He just has to move forward without any thought to “starting over.” Maybe there’s too many layers to get through to start from the top again. Maybe he can never have a new beginning because he cannot end. Maybe he just forgets to take a personal day and do some self reflection because he’s busy, haha. But I can kind of see him not really...thinking that’s an option for himself. The concept seems like wishful thinking, but if ever given the opportunity he’d definitely have some reservations about whether or not he could make it through the transition. Not scared per se, but...wary.

For others, though, I think Solomon definitely thinks it’s possible, especially for humans. Angels and demons have such a stiff role they have to fulfill, but humans? They can kinda do whatever they want. Even if he feels a bit detached from humanity, he still cares deeply for it (them? us?) and the ability to just decide you’re unhappy and completely reinvent yourself, especially with the little time we have, probably just adds to our charm, you know? It’s probably one of the things he’s jealous of or misses, if he thinks about it

The Hierophant -  what are your muse’s morals / ethics? do they follow their moral code strictly?

oh boy, solomon and ethics....

Solomon’s ethics are better off described rather than labeled. If you labeled them, you’d start with “gray” and then you’d get nowhere else. I definitely don’t think he’s amoral, and I don’t think he’s immoral either. It’s very easy to determine a person void of morals or ethics when judging them based on a life where there aren’t many choices that would be “immoral” but necessary. Like, in the average life, the most immoral thing is easy to not do. But considering he’s got, ahem, large responsibilities on his shoulders, there’s probably quite a few times where the best course of action would be horrifying for someone to hear of him doing.

Overall, he prioritizes humanity above all else, along with its longevity and preservation. He definitely has a different internal attitude (at least) when interacting with angels and demons as opposed to humans, a combination of not really feeling as directly responsible for them and also knowing that if he ever is, he would have few to no qualms about giving them the short end of the stick in a situation that would benefit “his team,” if he could manage to pass it by Diavolo or Michael. 

I don’t think his internal values change, things like autonomy and equality for all, free pursuit of knowledge, y’know, all the good stuff everybody wants. And in his day-to-day life, he doesn’t seem the type to pass quick judgement or have some inherent unwillingness to compromise. “Morals” and “ethics” seems to imply a more grand scenario, and as the “keeper of humanity” or however he sees himself, he wouldn’t exactly be hesitant or emotionally torn apart by having to hurt somebody if it meant he could protect and support humanity as a whole.

I feel like I spent however many paragraphs being extremely vague and I’m not sure if this makes sense or even says anything of importance, haha...

The Tower -  what event drastically changed your muse’s life? do they resent that event or are they glad of it?

Well, I mean, there’s a few obvious answers here. You have his fall from the graces of the heavens, the exchange program, any number of biblical events, his discovery of magic and the path he took to immortality, the fallout with his apprentice....and to be honest, with the exception of the exchange program, i think he is resentful but also glad? He’s the type to see the good and the bad outcomes of the situation. He’s probably made peace with the sentiment that “oh it made me who i am today” but he does have days where he grapples with all he’s lost and must now deal with for practically eternity. 

Though, and these aren’t drastic events that shatter him forever (but i think they can be mentioned here), I do think that he takes little pieces of the people he meets and cares about until he becomes a sort of mosiac of the people he loves. Not necessarily romantic love, either. He met a witch who he was close friends with who couldn’t put down cheesy teen romance novels from a specific author, so you can find a few copies of her favorites sandwiched between spellbooks and old archival texts in his room. He isn’t big on self care, but Asmo did teach him a quick and efficient way to wash his face and keep his skin clear. Simeon and Luke gave him an appreciation for finely crafted tea sets. Again, the event i guess would be “making a friend” (which for him very well may be a once in a lifetime kind of deal lol) and isn’t what the question meant, but idk. I think it was worth mentioning here because long-term, it does incorporate into him as a person.

LUCIFER (my other fave <3)

The Moon -  what does your muse long for? is it a realistic desire?

Not to be surface-level and cheesy, but I think he longs for him and his brothers to feel like a family. Not that they don’t already, but I think he longs for the way they used to be in the Celestial Realm, how complete they used to feel. In that way, it’s probably the most unrealistic desire. The hole in their family isn’t one that can or even should be filled, and your addition is just that - an addition, not a replacement.

Something that could give him (kind of) what he craves is if he and his brothers could heal. They’re already on the right path, but they’re still all kind of dysfunctional. The complicated part of this is that a lot of their strife is due to the nature of demons, and the wholesome unity is a brand that has never really been found in he Devildom. That’s not to say it’s impossible - the brothers still love each other, they still are loyal to each other, but Lucifer can feel that there is some sort of rift between them that has not yet been fixed that he yearns to solve.

(If you ask me, the “rift” is probably something caused by trying to heal in an environment that will never offer mercy or forgiveness. If the brothers can find solace in each other, maybe that’ll get them a step closer. But sometimes their interactions still feel like walking on eggshells, and...I don’t know. I really do think Lucifer longs for the type of relationship they had when they were angels, and he’s trying to deal with the realization that maybe that type of relationship just isn’t in the cards for a demon.)

[highladyluck]

For the fic title meme: Lay Down Your Crown and Sword

So, I was thinking maybe this is about Aviendha's feelings about Rand when they're in the Aiel Waste... just kidding, I know what the people want from me.

Wheel of Time, Mat/Tuon, post-canon, ANGST. This is one take on a scenario where Mat attempts to achieve his stated relationship goal, which is convincing Tuon to abdicate and run away with him.

(This sucker is LONG and SPOILERY so I’m putting it under a cut.)

It's ~2 months after the Last Battle. There's growing danger to Tuon- an almost-successful assassination attempt (my money's on Moghedien) that scares Mat, Selucia, the Deathwatch, and maybe even Tuon herself, just a little. The sul'dam secret is leaking out and emboldening the faction that wants to kill her, there's worry it'll lead to local rebellion, plus there's still the Seanchan homeland power struggle. Mat uses all this to convince Tuon that she needs to lie low for a while. His idea is for her to fake her own death, install a puppet successor secretly loyal to her, and go hide out with him in a place no one will be able to find them for a few months.

She's not thrilled about it initially, but it's not like she hasn't faked her own death before (love that about her!) so she agrees to Mat's plan, which is 'hang out in a Portal Stone alternate timeline'. (Mat would not come up with this on his own, Mat does not like Portal Stones, but Min suggested it and he eventually agreed it would suit their needs.) Tuon would prefer something where she could keep an eye on political conditions more easily, but she feels safe with Mat & appreciates that this is definitely a secure option, and she's been out of contact with home base before for a while and been fine. Selucia stays in the palace, to keep an eye on things and do intrigue (and also give Mat and Tuon actual alone time- I am entertained by the grudging truce between Mat and Selucia, but her chaperone services are not needed this time around.)

They've got an official pickup scheduled in a few months, about a month before Tuon's due; Mat thought about waiting more time to go back but he'd rather have the option to call in trusted medical help for the birth and he wants to leave a wide margin of error for the actual due date. He intends to rope in Nyneave if it seems necessary, although he doubts he'll be lucky enough that Nyneave would help Tuon out of the goodness of her heart or even as a favor to him. More likely Nyneave's help would cost Tuon in political concessions, which he will have to either convince Tuon to accept- assuming she's in a position to make that kind of choice- or negotiate on her behalf, if she's in too much immediate danger. Either scenario keeps him up at night, but the alternative is worse. Also, he hasn't run this contingency plan by Tuon yet- likely because he isn't totally against the idea of extracting political concessions from Tuon, so there's guilt as well as fear of how she'd react. The other thing Tuon doesn't realize about this vacation plan is that Mat is hoping to convince her to move there forever- if it's nice- or at least to keep faking her death and start a new life with him somewhere in disguise in their reality.

The Portal Stone world is one that's relatively close to their world, so it has people and feels fairly familiar, but the apocalypse hasn't happened yet and doesn't appear to be doing so in the near future. (For fun let's say the obvious divergence is Damodred-related; maybe the non-asshole Damodred branch is in charge, so you don't get Laman's Sin and/or Tigrane is actually happy in her political marriage, so the Dragon hasn't been reborn yet.) Tuon's ok with the 'vacation' vibe at first, we get some cute romantic bonding moments between her and Mat as they do normal people things, they have some cute dates in taverns or whatever. But Tuon becomes increasingly bored and anxious and frustrated about not being able to keep tabs on what's happening- probably some residual trauma from the last time she went AWOL with Mat, and came back to find her homeland in shambles and her family dead. So that's a source of conflict, especially since she doesn't actually confide that in Mat. She also keeps wanting to hash out political/military plans for when they get back, but Mat keeps trying to distract her, or makes arguments she doesn't like (re: Seanchan policy reform). Maybe Mat brings up the Nyneave contingency plan because he got worried about her health, and Tuon's like 'uh how long have you been sitting on this idea, when the fuck were you going to run it past me, the person it most concerns?'

Their relationship has always had an element of conflict in it, but back then they were strangers, had rules of engagement constraining them, and a kind of shared purpose. Their conflict was a kind of game that they played together, and it drew them closer. Now they know how to get under each other's skin and aren't constrained by witnesses or promises, and they have a shared mission (keeping Tuon safe) but don't agree on who is in charge of it. What's holding them together still is their own compassion and affection for each other, but they're not great at communicating it with words and now they're using words as weapons sometimes, so most of the reconciling is with gestures/gifts/actions. In general, things are tense and there's not much going on outside of their own interactions to distract them; Tuon's temper is flaring, she's feeling powerless and like her personal integrity is being attacked sometimes; Mat's being propelled around by his gut reactions and he's scared of losing her (and the baby), in any number of ways, and mad that she doesn't want what he thinks is best.

Finally the scheduled transit date arrives and they pop back to their original universe and get caught up on the news (maybe from Min?) Over in Seanchan, possibly emboldened by news of Tuon's 'death', a warlord has consolidated most of the warring factions. Now they know who to go after, and a war in Seanchan would help unify the Seanchan in the westlands; the Seanchan military-industrial complex loves a good patriotic war. Things domestically are a little better than before they left. Selucia flushed out the network from the earlier assassination attempt and is generally keeping things running and the puppet ruler honest.

Tuon's relieved; she was really worried that everything was going to fall apart when she was gone and now she's kind of grateful for the break. She tries to tell Mat this without actually admitting that she's got trauma around it, because the Empress doesn't admit weakness and Tuon the person is extremely bad at talking about feelings anyway; she's like "Ah, that's much better news than I came back to last time you kidnapped me. I'm glad to be back to work again, let's get to it." Mat's irritable, not catching on that she was actually really worried about it based on her previous experience, and thinking she didn't appreciate the break, and also worried that his plans to convince her to leave with him aren't going to work. Tuon catches that he's cagey and unhappy and not getting her jokes, and she remembers that this was what he seemed like when she first saw him in the Tarasin Palace. Mat argues that they should at least wait until the baby comes, that the person she put in charge is doing well, they can certainly let them rule a while longer. He says he's not sure it's the right time to attack Seanchan, he'd need to check the troops out, sniff out local sentiment. He's not decisive or commanding or focused when he says these things- it's stalling, it's bravado covering panic. It dawns on her- oh shit, he's gonna run.

Tuon's spooked. She KNOWS Mat now, but that doesn't mean she knows what to do to hang on to him. She doesn't know how to deal with a loss of control in her personal life, so she turns to what she knows she can control- the empire, her role, her property. She takes refuge in past promises. She tells him they will discuss the disposition of the army and the prosecution of the war in Seanchan once her heir is born and she's officially 'off the hook'. Mat looks grim.

Tuon wanted to announce that she's back immediately, but she starts having contractions and Mat's like 'you are absolutely not going to return from the dead right this second, you're super vulnerable right now.' They stay in a relatively secret spot in Tuon's territory with a small coterie of loyal retainers until the baby is born; it goes fine. There is one (1) cute bonding moment between Tuon and the baby and Mat; then the baby vanishes. Mat was on guard along with the usual people you'd expect to be on guard (not Karede, Selucia, or Min though). Tuon FUCKING KNOWS Mat did it with Aes Sedai help, she's initially furious and betrayed, but Mat isn't admitting it and within the extremely tight circle of people who know about the vanished baby, he's doing a reasonably convincing job looking as freaked out and upset as everyone else, and she's still hoping she can resolve this privately without any drastic public actions.

She takes Mat to a private place and she tells him that she has always, always been able to trust him. She trusts him so much it terrifies her. She does not know if this is what love is, but it is what she feels for him. She asks him to honor that, to honor himself, and not to lie to her. She then asks him why he kidnapped their child. Mat staggers, and blurts out that he can't bear the thought of their children constantly at risk of assassination, from strangers or their own siblings. He has nightmares about their child beginning to channel, or being able to learn, and what that means for them in the Empire. Tuon's made her choice and he'll respect that, though he hates the risks to her, and what the Empire does to her and others. But their child deserves the choice Tuon didn't have. He loves Tuon, but he cannot love the Empire, and he will not fight in the Empire's wars, and he will not let the Empire own his children, whether that's as royalty, sul'dam, or damane. He says he trusts she'll come to the right decision about what to do with this information.

The next scene has Tuon in mourning white. It's neither Tuon's nor Mat's POV- probably Karede, or maybe Min. In front of the whole court Tuon, as Empress back from the dead, bestows the Bloodknives ring and blessing on Knotai, and orders him to take a few members of the Deathwatch (the ones on watch the night the baby vanished, our observer notes) and assassinate the warlord in Seanchan on her behalf. She says she trusts he will succeed. They stare inscrutably at each other. The court is shocked into silence at first, but the whispers rise behind Mat as he straightens from his extraordinarily polite leg and heads out of the chamber. It is left up to the reader to decide if this is an elaborate plan to fake Mat's death and set him free, or his execution.

--- You may notice this is suspiciously fleshed out for a prompt I received this afternoon. XD I've been kicking around some of this premise for a while, though this ask made me finally come up with the circumstances that get Tuon to actually agree to temporarily leave her job, as well as most of the details. The main emotional beats came from stringing together several Mountain Goats songs, because of course it did. The whole sequence is Twin Human Highway Flares, Riches and Wonders (Eliza Rickman cover), Alpha Incipiens, Fault Lines, New Britain, Family Happiness. I’m not sure if I’ll actually turn this into a finished story with description and dialogue and everything, but it’s possible. This is also not the only Mat/Tuon post-canon idea I have kicking around! It’s not my ideal scenario for them for sure, but it’s a lot easier to write a ‘bad ending’ for them than to work on my ‘good ending’, because I have a lot more emotional investment in the ‘good ending’... perfectionist problems. :/

[crazycat-88]

Male Spider-Drider Lue x Female Reader (SFW)

Written for this prompt here on @monsterkinkmeme​

Features a male spider drider who is based on a peacock spider and a female reader.

Content: Arranged marriage, coerced marriage (though not really), mostly fluff, kissing, spider boi is a nervous wreck, so is reader.

Words: 4,569

You yawn and rub your eyes, waking from a lovely dream, wondering if you could sleep in just a little longer. The thought is squashed when you hear your mother call you down for breakfast. You sigh, even on your birthday you were denied a lie in. Tearing yourself from your bed, you dress and leave your room to join your parents at the breakfast table.

‘‘Good morning,’’ you say, sitting down at the table.

‘‘About time you got up,’’ your mother says, with a frown. ‘‘Your father and I have something we need to discuss with you.’’

What now, you think, looking between your parents, waiting expectantly. Your father sighs but keeps his head down, reading the paper.

‘‘Well?’’ Your mother says, looking at your father. ‘‘Of course... You want me to tell her, useless man.’’ Looking at you again, she sighs. ‘‘You’re betrothed, your fiancé will be coming here tomorrow to meet you and take you back to his home.’’

You laugh. ‘‘Very funny mother, and just who am I betrothed too? The dragon up the mountains?’’ You say, still laughing. Snorting, you pour yourself a cup of tea and look back back up to see your mother frowning. Looking to your father, you see he is looking at you in what you can only assume is pity.

‘‘I’m sorry my dear, but it’s true. You are betrothed, have been since you were just a baby. I’m afraid to say it’s all my fault too,’’ your father says wincing.

‘‘Wh-what? You can’t be serious!’’ you sputter, shaking you head, looking first at your mother before settling your gaze on your father. When he only nods, you stand yelling, ‘‘Who am I betrothed to? Tell me!’’

Your father looks away, wincing again and your mother sniffs derisively. ‘‘One of the drider princes that lives in the wild woods,’’ she says nonchalantly.

You fall back down in your seat in shock, staring at your mother with wide eyes, they cannot be serious. You hate spiders, you find them creepy and they scuttle about on eight freakish legs. As far as you were concerned driders where just bigger versions of spiders, much bigger versions, you think gulping.

‘‘H-how?... Wh-why?’’ you ask.

‘‘You do not know this… but we were very poor when you were born and your father had to do some questionable things to house and feed us,’’ your mother says, explaining. ‘‘When he got caught trying to steal from the driders, he pleaded for his freedom, explaining he had a wife and daughter to feed. In exchange for that freedom, he had to promise your hand in marriage to the kings second son. We were given land and money too, so we could raise you well and give you a good education.’’

You sit in shock, considering everything you had just learned. You had no idea your parents were once poor, they certainly never acted like it. You also had no idea your father was once a thief, it all sounded so unbelievable, and you're so angry that they never told you any of this before now. ‘‘What if I refuse? You cannot force me to marry?’’ you say, glaring at your mother.

‘‘If you refuse then you will be homeless.’’ Your mother hisses. ‘‘We will lose this house and all our money. You wouldn’t want to have us living on the streets, would you? Think of your poor father, he’s old and would never survive.’’

Looking at your father, you see that he won’t meet your eyes but unlike your mother he appears at least to be sorry, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. Getting up, you storm up the stairs, ignoring your mothers call to come back and slamming your bedroom door. Throwing yourself on to your bed, you scream into the pillow, holding back tears.

How could your parents do this to you, you think. Your mother, you could understand but not your father. The two of you had always been close, you looked up to your father, he was your hero. As a child you thought your father could do no wrong, he was perfect as far as you were concerned. An adult now, you had come to realise that it was of course not true. No one is perfect and everyone has flaws, yet you thought your father's flaw was choosing a wife who was materialistic. You never would have thought he was once a common thief.

Your relationship with your mother was a different story, the two of you could never see eye to eye, always arguing. Your mother wanted a doll she could dress up prettily and tell what to do. You had no interest being dressed up, as a child you wanted to be outside, climbing trees and getting muddy, much to your mother's disappointment. Discovering her daughter would not be the child she wanted, she had developed a cruel streak, often belittling you and laughing at your failures.

Perhaps being betrothed was a blessing in disguise, you would no longer have it listen to your mother nag at your father or have her tell you every day how you were such a disappointment to her. You only wished your betrothed wasn’t a drider. How could you possibly marry such a creature. All the driders that you had seen were huge, almost double your size, and they had never seemed to be interested in humans.

You were aware that three different species of spider driders lived in the surrounding wild woods and up on the mountains. Only one type ever ventured into the town and they were huge, dark brown with two inch fangs, and extremely venomous. You were pretty sure they lived in the mountains though and your mother said your fiancé lived in the wild woods. Which meant you had no idea what type of spider drider you would be marrying.

The woods had been divided years ago between the two species and no one really knew much about them. Both species were reclusive and avoided the human town, likely the reason why humans had settled here surrounded by woods in the first place. You could always ask your father but you really did not want to speak to either of your parents right now.

You end up spending the rest of the day in your room, packing the items you wished to take with you. Your mother knocks on your door at one point, telling you through the door that you should be happy to be engaged to a prince, that you are lucky and will never want for anything. You roll your eyes but ignore her, maybe she’d be happy to marry for money but that is not important to you.

Your father knocks just as you are getting ready for bed, you ignore him too as he apologises through the door. In bed you cry silently, this will be the last time you sleep in this bed, in this room, and your future is so uncertain. You wonder what your fiancé will look like and how he will treat you, you're not expecting love but hope at least for civility. It occurs to you then that perhaps he will be unhappy to be wed to a human, maybe when he sees you, he will call the engagement off. You can only hope you think as you finally drift off to sleep.

******************************************

When you first wake in the morning, you momentary forget that you will be meeting your betrothed today and that you will be leaving your home to go with him to his. Sitting up you gaze around your to see the mess you have left it in packing your things and sigh remembering. You dress and before you leave your room, look down to see a letter has been pushed through under your bedroom door.

Tears stream down your face reading it, it is from your father, in it he tries to explain his actions and offers his apologies. He tells you he only agreed to the deal as he believed you would have a good and happy life as the driders he met were kind especially considering the circumstances. He goes on to say that he will understand and forgive you if you decide to refuse to marry and wishes you all the happiness in the world whatever your decision.

While you are still angry, you feel as though you cannot blame your father and know that you have already forgiven him, though your relationship may never be the same again. Resigned but feeling a sense of determination, you put on a brave face and go down to breakfast.

Breakfast itself is a silent affair, neither your mother or your father say a word to you and you do not engage them in conversation either. They finish eating before you and inform you that they are going into town, claiming it would be better if you met with your fiancé in private. Your father hugs you as he leaves and whispers another apology, you hug him back tightly, fearing this may be the last time you see him.

With your parents gone, you meander around the house, trying to find something to do to distract yourself. Just before lunch you hear a knock at the door, nervously you straighten out your dress and take a deep breath as you open the door. When your gaze lands on the drider on your doorstep, you stare at him in surprise.

He is the smallest drider you have ever seen, his height only being a couple of inches above your own. He looks to be around the same age as you with long blonde hair that is tied up high on his head. He has eight black eyes, four larger circular eyes sit in a row upon his face and a pair of smaller eyes sit on each side of his head. His human torso is lean and deathly pale as if he has never seen the sun, four arms are attached to this torso, ending in four hands, each clutching a bunch of wild flowers.

The transition between human torso and spider lower half starts at his hips, and you see that the light brown spider body is also smaller than you had been expecting, though he does have eight skinny legs which are jointed. The hairs on his spider body look incredibly fluffy and you're surprised at yourself when you feel the desire to reach out to see if he is as fluffy as he looks. Closing your mouth, you manage to produce a smile, and nod when he says your name questioningly.

‘‘It is a p-pleasure to finally meet you. I’m Lue. And these are for you,’’ he says, rushing his words and thrusting the flowers into your hands.

‘‘Oh… Thank you so much, these are beautiful,’’ you say, struggling to hold them all. As you struggle to balance them, you notice that they have been tied with a fine silk.

‘‘I was t-told that h-humans like flowers,’’ he stutters, smiling briefly. His voice his low and soft, though still masculine, and you feel your stomach flutter at the sound of it.

He also has a nice smile you think to yourself, and you briefly see a flash of two very small fangs before he hides them. Watching as wrings his hands together, you think he looks even more nervous than you feel. Feeling a lot calmer now yourself, seeing him so flustered, you gesture behind you and ask if he would like to come in.

‘‘Y-yes please,’’ he replies, shuffling inside. As he passes you spot a flash of colour on the back of his spider body and watch him curiously as he gazes around.

‘‘Thank you again for these. They really are very lovely,’’ you say, placing the flowers down. Looking back at Lue, you inspect him carefully. You never released driders came that small, and your honestly very relieved. He doesn’t appear frightening at all.

‘‘Your w-welcome,’’ he says. ‘‘I have another... more traditional courting gift for you too, but I thought it best to give you that when we return to my... I m-mean our home…’’ he chitters, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘‘Forgive me, I... wasn’t expecting you to be so pretty, not that I thought you wouldn’t be but… oh dear…’’ he chitters, nervously.

‘‘Oh… Thank you,’’ you start, unsure what to say and trying not to laugh at just how flustered he is. Considering him for a moment, you ask him curiously, ‘‘So… have you known of our engagement long?’’

‘‘Yes,’’ he says, nodding. ‘‘I’ve been aware of it since childhood… What about you?’’

‘‘I was just informed about it yesterday…’’ you say, frowning slightly.

You watch as his mouth drops open in shock. ‘‘Really?’’ he asks. ‘‘I’m s-sorry, this must have been a huge surprise for you then…’’

‘‘Yes…’’ you nod, sighing. ‘‘But it’s not your fault,’’ you add, giving him a small smile.

‘‘Are you… unhappy?’’ he chitters, shuffling all his eight legs.

Weighing your words carefully, it takes you a minute to respond. ‘‘I’m… upset. I wish that I had been told a long time ago…’’

‘‘We can call the wedding off... if you don’t want to marry me…’’ he says, sounding dejected. ‘‘I wouldn't want you to be unhappy.’’

Considering it for a moment, your almost tempted to say yes but looking at his sad face you feel your heart skip a beat. You would never have expected a drider to be so nervous, and despite your dislike of actual spiders you actually find this drider incredibly handsome. Yesterday you had thought that this engagement may be a blessing in disguise and so far Lue had been nothing like what you were expecting, perhaps it was a blessing.

‘‘No. I… wasn’t sure at first, honestly I’m a bit terrified of spiders but you… well you don’t seem too scary,’’ you chuckle nervously.

‘‘N-no I’m not, but I… completely understand how you feel, honestly I’m t-terrified of spiders myself,’’ he chitters, smiling gently.

‘‘Really?’’ You ask astonished.

‘‘I know… you wouldn’t think a drider would be s-scared of spiders but they are so... creepy,’’ he shudders. ‘‘Though I must admit, I’m scared of other driders too… they are just so big…’’ he chitters, chuckling slightly.

‘‘Me too,’’ you gasp, chuckling. ‘‘I was so worried when I opened the door, I was expecting a drider twice my size.’’ You both laugh for a moment, before you take a deep breath and ask, ‘‘Will we have to marry right away?’’

‘‘No…’’ he replies, shaking his head. Smiling gently, he continues, ‘‘The wedding hasn’t been finalised yet, we have t-time to get to know each other first. If you find you cannot see yourself married or living amongst us driders, I give you my word that I’ll return you to your home.’’

‘‘Perhaps you will decide you don’t want a human for a wife,’’ you chuckle, relieved that he was so understanding.

‘‘I… d-doubt that,’’ he chitters. ‘‘I was relieved to learn I was betrothed to a human… I’ve always been intrigued by your kind, and the females of my kind make me n-nervous, they are bigger than the males and are more aggressive.’’

‘‘You’ve spent time around humans? I’ve never seen your kind in town before…’’ you say, frowning curiously.

‘‘I’m not the first of my kind to be betrothed to a human... there aren’t many of us in these parts and the ma-majority of us are males,’’ he explains. ‘‘We are quite a reclusive species really, we never stray to far from our homes, and while technically this land is in our territory, it’s far too b-busy for us.’’

You spend the next couple of hours listening to Lue tell you how his grandfather, the former king, had made a land agreement with the first humans who came to the area. He tells you more about his home and the people there. Despite him mentioning other driders taking humans as wives, your surprised to hear that you will be living amongst other humans too, including one who is around the same age as you.

Lue asks you questions about yourself too and you end up staying long enough to say goodbye to your parents. Lue had calmed enough to no longer stutter when speaking to you but when your parents return, he becomes nervous again and you decide not to linger. Lue was clearly anxious being surrounded by people in an enclosed space. Hugging you father goodbye, you tell him that you will visit, for unless you have completely read Lue wrong, you know that he will not stop you from visiting your family.

********************************************

You settle into your new home well, surprised to find it is set up like a small village with wooden houses scattered amongst the trees. Lue’s father, Anatjari’s, home is situated in the center of these houses and while slightly more fancy than the others, you would not think it the house of a king. Upon meeting him though, you completely understand, he is very kind and places himself on the same level as his people.

While you really like Anatjari, you are glad to learn that you and Lue have your own home. It has two bedrooms and you are given a room to yourself. You are given a few days to settle in and get to know Lue before Anatjari invites both you and Lue to join him for dinner, where he informs you that the wedding has been arranged and will take place in a months time.

Taking a stroll through the woods that evening with Lue by your side, you gaze around watching as your drider neighbours head out to hunt. The village is quiet during the day with most of the occupants resting but when evening falls it is alive with activity. It is strange for you but you feel as though you will soon get used to it.

‘‘Is a months time going to be long enough to be sure about marrying me?’’ Lue asks quietly, bringing you out of your thoughts.

‘‘I think so…’’ you say, smiling at him. Lue was no longer so nervous around you that he still stuttered but he was always considerate of your feelings and careful with his words.

‘‘I’m glad. I want you to be really happy here... I want to make you happy.’’

‘‘I’m sure I will be. I’ve only really met your father but he seems lovely and I’m sure I’ll get on well with the others,’’ you say, nervously.

‘‘You will. Everyone will love you, my father already does,’’ he says, smiling gently.

‘‘Can I ask about your mother?’’ you say, tentatively. He’s not once mentioned her and neither had Anatjari.

‘‘Of course,’’ he says, stopping to face you. ‘‘There’s not much to tell really. She died when I was really young, and father doesn’t really like speaking about her… I don’t remember her at all and my brother only has vague memories.’’

‘‘I’m really sorry Lue,’’ you say, taking hold of one of his hands.

‘‘It’s alright,’’ he says blushing, looking at your hands entwined. ‘‘What's your relationship with your parents like?’’

You make conversation for awhile, telling him how you’re close to your father but not your mother, before Lue leaves to hunt and you head back to the house. Passing by another human, she smiles and waves you over to join her where she sits whittling a piece of wood.

‘‘Evening, I’ve been wanting to introduce myself since you got here,’’ she says, introducing herself. When you give her your name, she laughs, ‘‘I already know it, I was so excited to learn another human my own age would be coming to live here, I haven’t stopped asking Lowanna all about you.’’

Lowanna, you knew was Lue’s brother's wife, a female drider, but you hadn’t had the chance to speak to her yet and what with you being a bit wary after what Lue had said about the females of his species being aggressive, you were unsure about approaching any of the other driders.

‘‘I haven’t met her yet… I’ve only been introduced to Anatjari and Lue’s brother Jiemba,’’ you say. ‘‘What is she like? Lue told me the females could be… um… aggressive,’’ you whisper, looking around nervously, hoping none of the driders would overhear.

Laughing, she replies, ‘‘My mate told me the same thing but I think they are only like that with the males. Lowanna is lovely and really helped me to settle in here when I mated Dural.’’

Happy to hear this, you smile. ‘‘Were you betrothed too?’’

‘‘Oh no. I lived in a town south of here, and one day I got lost foraging in the woods. After wandering for hours I found Dural or well he found me I guess and well…’’ she shrugs, grinning, and then laughs, ‘‘I was so surprised, I had never seen a drider before but I had heard that they were huge, and then there was Dural, shorter than me, he is.’’

‘‘I was expecting Lue to be huge too and was so nervous to learn I was betrothed to a drider,’’ you laugh. ‘‘But Lue was more nervous than me, which really settled my nerves.’’

‘‘All the driders here are a bit like that… they’re incredibly skittish,’’ she replies laughing. ‘‘I’m sure you’ll be really happy here and I would be very happy to have another friend.’’

As the weeks pass, you see just how right she was. The driders here are easily startled but are all incredibly welcoming, especially the females. Lowanna makes it her mission to befriend you and introduce to everyone else, wanting to help you to settle in. She also tries to teach you the ways to keep the males in line but you just silently laugh, thinking that her methods would not work for you. Besides, you didn’t think you would need to worry about that with Lue as your mate.

Lue has been nothing but a perfect gentlemen since you had moved in with him, doing nothing more than hold your hand. Even then, he always asks for permission to touch you beforehand. So it comes as a surprise, when two days before the wedding, he takes your hand and asks you to follow him into his bedroom.

As the only room in the house that you haven’t seen, you gaze around curiously while he wrings his hands together nervously. The room is immaculately clean, with a large bed and a small wardrobe being the only furniture in the room. Taking a deep breath you look at Lue expectantly, waiting to see why he asked you in here.

‘‘Are you still sure about going ahead with the wedding?’’ He asks, nervously shuffling his legs.

‘‘Yes… I’m still sure Lue’’ Having already had this conservation the week before with Lue, your confused at why he is questioning you again. Lue had exceeded all your desired requirements in a husband and if you weren’t already in love with him, you were certainly falling in love. ‘‘Why? Are you not sure about marrying me?’’ You ask, nervously.

‘‘N-no I’m sure. I just… want to make sure that you’re happy here. I know it’s not the way of life you’re used to and I want my mate to be happy,’’ he says, smiling, flashing his small fangs.

‘‘Well… I’ve been happy so far,’’ you tell him, returning his smile.

‘‘I’m glad… I have a courting gift for you...’’

‘‘But I thought the blanket was my gift?’’ You ask, frowning. When you had first arrived here, Lue had presented you with a silk blanket that he had made to keep you warm, and it was incredibly beautiful.

‘‘That was only part of my gift, there’s another part… I’ve been working on it since you arrived,’’ he explains. ‘‘Close your eyes and no peeking.’’

‘‘Alright,’’ you chuckle, closing your eyes. Listening you hear him move to the wardrobe and open the doors. Your incredibly curious but keep your eyes tightly closed as he asked.

‘‘Alright, open your eyes,’’ he says, exhaling loudly.

Upon opening your eyes, your mouth drops open in shock. Standing in front of you, Lue is holding up the most beautiful wedding dress you have ever seen. ‘‘Lue…’’ you gasp, stunned.

‘‘D-do you like it?’’ he asks, nervously stuttering.

‘‘Like it? I Love it. It’s beautiful.’’

‘‘Then why are you crying?’’ he asks softly.

Raising your hand to face, you feel your cheeks are wet, you hadn't even realised you were crying. ‘‘It’s just so beautiful, it’s happy tears I promise… I can’t believe you made this,’’ you say, reaching out and feeling the dress gently, reluctant to even touch it.

‘‘It’s not as beautiful as you, but I’m happy you like it,’’ he smiles, before turning to hang the dress back up. When he turns back around, you hug him tightly, chuckling when he squeaks in surprise.

‘‘I really love it.’’

The wedding goes off without a hitch, with Anatjari officiating, though you both blush fiercely when you seal the vows with a small kiss. Lue has surprised you by arranging for your parents to be there to see the ceremony. As you share a dance with your father, he asks if you are happy and looking over at Lue who is laughing with his brother, you happily tell him that you really are.

You are nervous when you and Lue return home but your reassured by the fact that Lue seems to be even more nervous than you. Still in your wedding dress, he directs you sit on the bed while he backs away a few steps. Frowning, you wonder what he is doing when he suddenly starts dancing. Raising both his second to the back legs, which have tufts of black hair with white tips, he waves them in air. When the colourful flaps on his back rise up, flashing his colours at you, you bite your lip withholding a laugh. You have no idea what is going on but you don’t think laughing at him would be appropriate somehow.

Finishing his dance, panting slightly, he looks at you expectantly.

‘‘What… was that?’’ you ask, breathing slowing through your nose, still trying not to laugh.

‘‘It’s how we initiate mating… we dance to impress females,’’ he explains, crossing both his arms across his chest.

Snorting with laughter despite your best efforts, you gasp for breath. When a hurt look passes over his face, you get up taking two of his hands in yours. ‘‘I’m so sorry Lue, I didn't mean to laugh… I really did enjoy it but I’m not a drider,’’ you say gently.

‘‘Oh. H-how do humans initiate mating then?’’

‘‘Kiss me again…’’ you ask him, swallowing nervously.

Stroking your hair back from your face, he brushes your lips gently with his own before pulling back. ‘‘Like that?’’ He asks.

‘‘Uh huh, keep doing that.’’

With his lower hands clasping your own, he kisses you again, tangling one of his upper hands in your hair, while the other grasps at your back. ‘‘I should tell you that I have no idea what I’m doing,’’ he gasps, pulling back slightly.  

‘‘Me too,’’ you giggle. ‘‘We can work it out together though, can’t we?’’

‘‘Yes... Together,’’ he agrees, stroking your face, smiling.

*********************************************

Thanks for reading! As always, if you enjoyed it, please reblog it. I also love reading your comments!

My Masterlist

[baby-witch-eli]

Research, Charts, and Tarot Readings

After last night's very successful meditation, I've been very keyed up and excited. Today, between homework, I've been reflecting on the meditation and researching an aspect that struck me as odd. I felt compelled to do multiple different tarot readings, all had very similar themes that even lined up with my Horoscope! I'll break down the signs given to me today and attempt to bring all of them together.

Single Card from Familiar Deck

I drew a card from this deck at around 2:00am, soon after my meditation session. I asked for advice on how to proceed and build a good relationship with my spirit guide. My deck, known for its brutal honesty, showed me Reversed Temperance. My life has been chaotic lately and this card reminded me how urgent it is to find balance and moderation. I believe this card is a reminder, or warning, to stop overloading myself with college work and responsibilities. It will be hard to focus and set intentions if I am distracted and burned-out. It's a call to align my inner and outer worlds as I seek to maintain academic standing while deepening my spirituality. Reversed Temperance is yet another sign that I need to prioritize self-healing and make changes for the better.

Horoscope based on Natal Chart

My horoscope seems to be telling me that even though things are hard right now, I'm reaching a positive turning point. Now is a bad time for taking on more burdens, which makes sense as I've been overwhelming myself with work lately. My horoscope is also pointing out all the emotional turmoil and disillusionment I've been grappling with during the last few months, which only serves to give credence to the prior points. However, my health should be improving and I have more energy. Now is a fantastic time for creativity, originality, and intuition Overall, my horoscope seems to be conveying that even though I've been facing great struggles, I have what I need to push past them and meet my goals with good humor. My ascendant sign will be aligned with the new moon. With an upcoming move and a drive to practice spirituality more, now is the perfect time for it!

Daily Draw with a New Deck

For this four-card drawing, I asked for more guidance on dealing with my spirit guide. The grouping of three was the Moon, the Magician, and the Devil. These cards suggested that I'm waiting for the return of a loved one who I rarely see but who means a lot to me. The return of this person has the potential to trigger personal changes that I need by opening new doors to me. A cycle is ending in my life, in which I've made accomplishments I'm proud of, but I'm uncertain and apprehensive about the next one. A new story is beginning and I will be faced with decisions constantly. I have to keep moving forward to make this an upcoming transition fulfilling.

The missing card, Death, communicates me putting forth my sensitivity. My past and my experiences make me who I am and I must use that to push forward and bring out my potential.

Research

One thing that kept bothering me about my meditation was the repetition of the name Brigid. It struck me as odd and I didn't think a fox could represent the goddess of that name. However, I couldn't shake the feeling that its brown eyes were important. I continued my research wherein I tried to find a connection between Brigid and the guide that appeared to me. In a collection of folklore, I was extremely surprised to find a story in which Brigid uses a brown-eyed fox to save the life of a man. The man had accidentally killed the pet fox of the king and a workman had asked Brigid to come save the man from execution. On the way, she came upon a wild fox that took to her immediately. Brigid brought it before the king and showed that the fox could do all the same tricks as his late beloved pet. Overjoyed, the king agreed to let the man live. After Brigid left, the fox grew to see the palace as a prison. It was restless and unhappy without her presence and found itself to be rather neglected when the king left on a journey. Using the neglect to its advantage, the fox waited and managed to escape out of a door left open. The king was furious to find his fox missing when he returned. However, no matter who he sent out, the fox was never to be found again. It had escaped into the woods for good.

Yes or No

I asked the deck whether the fox that came to me in my meditation was Brigid's fox. The answer was 74% yes.

Celtic Cross

I asked this deck for more clarity on the fox's relationship to Brigid. My first pairing was Fertility and Swallows. These cards had the same message as ones I had pulled for my daily tarot: I'm waiting for the return of a person who will help me make the upcoming cycle a successful and fruitful one.

The second pairing was Fish Wheel and Island. These cards are warning me of yet unseen betrayal that has been ongoing for weeks. The reasons for this betrayal are unclear but it will signal the end of our relationship. This draw teaches me to be slow to trust before I get to know a person, lest I find myself used like I have been in the past. I need to be cautious.

The third paring was Panther and Peacock. This pairing points out how quick I am to close doors because of past failures and heartbreak. Instead of letting the past guide me, I live in it. I need to learn to let the past be the guide towards the future I should be paying more mind to. This month will be filled with new issues and challenges but I have all I need to make it through and reach my goals, as long as I make use of my experience, intuition, and temperament. I may meet a man my age who will play an important part in my future, which holds some good omens.

Draw from 32

This was the last draw of the day. I asked the deck if Brigid is trying to reach out to me. The first group of three was the Moon, Strength, and the Magician. These seemed to be telling me that I'll spend happy times with loved ones in April. The cards seemed to say that there was a woman, with considerable influence over me, appears at my side. She shows kindness towards me and I know some feelings she has for me but part of them escapes me. Our communication isn't always clear. It's possible her feelings are more intense than I believe and I may be more important than I think. A sign of her true feelings has the potential to change my life.

The second grouping of three was the Hanged Man, the Tower, and the High Priestess. As with the previous drawing, this one warns of betrayal. Where this betrayal comes from and from whom is unclear. But these cards seem to say I'm being used for personal gain and I must strategically prove I am the smarter one. Whoever this person is, I have a false perception of them. If I fail to come out on top, I could find myself destroyed again by the greed of another. The consequences would be severe. However, a third person may help give me an edge when I feel as if all hope is lost. This person's role will be decisive and they could acquire a new dimension in my life. I won't know how to thank her as it's likely she will have pulled me out of the abyss.

The third grouping of three was the Star, Wheel of Fortune, and the Emperor. These cards also seem to be pointing out that although I have the will to do well but I let the past block me. I have to learn to move on. Inaction will end with no forgiveness. I don't lack imagination or ambition but I haven't been giving myself the proper means to accomplish my goals. I suffer from inaction and need to get moving. However, once I do act, luck will be on my side this week and I could find happiness if I take my life into my own hands. This is especially powerful for me, as autonomy is something I've always felt robbed of.

The missing card for this draw was the Chariot. By not picking this card, I further emphasized my cautiousness. I am analytical person and prefer to reflect on a situation before acting on it.

Bringing it all Together

The signs I've received today seem to point towards great changes for the better in my future. However, to reach these changes I must take action. I need to learn to stop overwhelming myself with work and instead focus on what matters. Self-evaluation and perseverance will be crucial during this next cycle in my life. However, it would seem the cards are warning me that I should be prepared to face yet another devastating betrayal. They warn against the consequences of continued inaction and clinging to the past. The challenges I'm facing are not yet coming to an end, although the end is in sight. My readings today seem to suggest that the fox appeared to me in order to help me use discernment in my relationships and to guide me on my path towards healing and improvement. If my interpretations are correct, Brigid may be reaching out to offer me aid. Overall, I think that my ascending sign, Aries, aligning with the new moon at this point in my life is a sure sign that now is the perfect time to act.

[haich-slash-cee]

Is the print publishing world picking up online/fandom terms? How they are using them? How do we feel about this?

So this is... attention-getting, for folks who like to follow publishing and meta stuff.

https://twitter.com/sapphicxrey/status/1215065948677443584

https://twitter.com/TorDotComPub/status/1233391556750647299

(2nd tweet -- TW, mentions of non-con)

Are we seeing the beginnings of book publishers directly borrowing from online/fandom culture in promoting their books? How do we feel about these examples?

More below cut.

Exhibit #1: screenshots of Bonds of Brass promo from Jan 8 2020. (Which is probably going to have reactions of “haha, cute” at most.)

Transcript of blurb: 

“If you like... 

forbidden romances, “there’s only one bed”, cityships, weaponized umbrellas, powersuits, secret princes, best friends, best friends PINING, fake dating between PINING best friends, tactical streaking, the minivan of starships, cigar-chomping cyborg ladies, scary empress moms, galactic-level bisexual disasters, LEGACY (WHAT IS A LEGACY?), rooftop hopping, golden trios, rumblin’ drums, bootleg fireworks, BIG SPACE BATTLES PEW PEW, a surprisingly functional public transit system, mob trouble, one hell of a pilot, the inherent DRAMA of empire, a nice interlude in a river, smoking a joint that’s been on the floor, sick stunts, slick grifts, hiding in a dumpster, or any combination of the above,

 Then you might like 

BONDS OF BRASS”

The Twitter responses seem to be generally enthusiastic. (And also, “FinnPoe! FinnPoe!”)

Personally, I’m intrigued from a meta-view of “oh so that’s definitely pulling from online world and fanfiction world, interesting. I wonder how much fanfiction culture is starting to influence print book culture and promotion.” Maybe I’ve got some questions like, “Ok so moneymaking companies such as Penguin are now using culture developed by the not-moneymaking-world of fanfiction? How do we feel about this?” Anyway, the book looks cute, I’m interested enough and I might get it from the library.

I suspect many people’s reactions are along the lines of “hm, interesting”, “sounds like a lark”, or “haha they’re using AO3 tags as promo”, etc. 

Exhibit #2, screenshots of DOCILE promo, from Feb 28 2020 (today is March 1 2020), and screenshots of Twitter responses so far:

(*CW, non-con discussion)

Tweet transcript:

“DOCILE by @KMSzpara:  

-Dubcon/Noncon 

-Dramatic Trillionaire Content 

-BDSM and then some more BDSM and then a lot more BDSM

 -Hurt/comfort and hurt/no comfort

 -Cinnamon roll of steel 

-The most scandalous kink: love 

-Courtroom, bedroom, & Preakness drama

[Tor book website link]”

So this is getting mixed reactions on Twitter. All dozen or so reactions, so far. Here’s text transcripts and bio info from repliers, below. I’m being a little obsessive, mostly to show that there’s a mix of queer, book-ish people in the replies (including the author).)

Noncon is nonconsentual sex, rape. Even in fandom it's a content tag, not a promotional term. I can't imagine being a rape survivor and seeing this come across my TL. -- @WriteSomeGood [queer rainbow] [Cis queer homemaker, aspiring author, maker of incredible cinnamon buns. She/her] [has a Tumblr page]

I’m not a survivor but it was an instant “no thank you” from me. And I was sincerely looking forward to this prior to. This is the most immediately off-putting marketing push I’ve seen for a book in a long damn time. -- @AGAWilmot [Author, editor, artist. Co-EIC of @anathemaspec. @SFU alum. The Death Scene Artist/W&W 2018. Ace/enby. They/them. Horror is my comfort food.]

Whichever intern wrote this tweet, deserves a full time job. With benefits. -- @simeontsanev [Aspiring writer, post-aspiring musician, and overall geek  He/Him /[queer rainbow]/ To the world we dream about, and the one we live in now! http://simeontsanev.com]

Idk why everyone thinks it’s always an intern writing copy and not a team comprised of extremely skilled social media experts, editors, publicists and marketers, and their assistants  I worked on those tags with my editor and a good friend!! -- @KMSzpara [Kellan. [queer rainbow]  Speculative fiction writer. Queer agenda.  Hugo & Nebula finalist.  DOCILE 3/3/20 from Tor Dot Com Publishing.  He/him.  Rep @suddenlyjen] *The author, bio page and twitter page.

this is CUTE! -- @MSSciarappa  [queer rainbow] I do books. he/him.

I am Extremely Ready for this content thank u -- @JessicaBCooper [Journo ☽ Writer of faerie, villain fuckery & cruel desires ☽ Lestat & Loki's love child ☽ Aleksander Morozova's side-hoe ☽ Rep'd by Kate Testerman @ktliterary]

I’m listening -- @MerynLobb [Government worker. Weightlifter. Nihilist. Aspiring cult leader. Avid user of words, often bad ones. #AMM R6 Mentee. she/her]

Soon! Soon!! -- @castrophony [Geek. Gamer. Cosplayer. Bibliophile. Scientist. She/Her.]

[happy reaction gif] -- @TorDotComPub [Providing a home for writers to tell SFF stories in exactly the number of words they choose. All our titles are available globally in print and DRM-free ebook.]

[throwing stuff in dumpster, unhappy reaction gif] -- @cursedgravy  [name's xavi, im a transman and i like to daydream about making content] 

For more context, here’s the blurb from the author website. Below is the blurb from the publisher’s site:

“Docile

K.M. Szpara

K. M. Szpara's Docile is a science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power, a challenging tour de force that at turns seduces and startles.

There is no consent under capitalism.

To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner of your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents' debts and buy your children's future.

Elisha Wilder’s family has been ruined by debt, handed down to them from previous generations. His mother never recovered from the Dociline she took during her term as a Docile, so when Elisha decides to try and erase the family’s debt himself, he swears he will never take the drug that took his mother from him.

Too bad his contract has been purchased by Alexander Bishop III, whose ultra-rich family is the brains (and money) behind Dociline and the entire Office of Debt Resolution. When Elisha refuses Dociline, Alex refuses to believe that his family’s crowning achievement could have any negative side effects—and is determined to turn Elisha into the perfect Docile without it.

Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.”

So that’s a lot of info and reactions.

Personally: at first glance, I absently skimmed the tweet and “hurt/comfort” popped out, and I was like “What? Mainstream publishing is cool with this now? I was wondering if ‘hurt/comfort’ would one day become commonly used in publishing [related post]. But this is way sooner than I thought.” And then I read the rest of of the tweet and thought, “Wait, what?” 

And then I started reading through the tweet replies and thought, “OK, at the risk of getting a bunch of Tumblr drama, I want to bring this to the whump community and see how people feel."

As for myself, one of my squicks is non-con, and I’m not really interested in hurt/no comfort. So just from the tweet, I know the book is not for me. The official blurbs confirmed that. In this sense, this is like skimming Ao3 tags on a fic and saying “pass” on a story.

However, I have questions about the specific promotion of the book. So the official blurbs are pretty standard. What about that tweet, which Tor (and the author, who helped put it together) put out? Because I think an official publisher’s Tweet comes with different context than Ao3 tags.

First, the different internet spaces. You can filter tags on Ao3 and Tumblr. I know you can mute words on Twitter, but is that the same thing? Also, would people be expecting these tags on Twitter? Compared to Ao3 or Tumblr or Tumblr Whump spaces?

Within the Tumblr Whump community, from what I’ve browsed, the community attitude (guidelines?) seem to be “Write and discuss what you want. Be sure to tag it, use content warnings, or otherwise clearly communicate if you have things that may be triggering. Respect people’s squicks/triggers. Walk away from what you don’t like.” Like, tumblr whump has a very specific culture of trying to balance discourse/stories about potentially very dark stuff, but also wanting to make sure the IRL people and Tumblr users are okay. There’s always posts going around about how to do this, are we doing this in the right way, ethics, so on. Also -- and people can correct me -- the whump tumblr space might be where tags are content warnings for people to stay away, and also what people might actively look for. So if any space is going to discuss if this promotional tweet checks out, I feel like it’s this space. 

Also, to note again, Tor Tweets are in the money-official-publisher-world, not unpaid-tumblr-people or unpaid-fanfiction-fandom-world.

Maybe I just want to ask, “Hey those first two tweet responses, does they have a point? Tor using ‘noncon’ as official promotion? On Twitter?” I mean, I’ve previously written, “The CW and TW tags that Ao3 writers use, I really wish those were used with published books as well.” But somehow, the Tor tweet was not quite what I was expecting. Maybe for reasons similar to that first tweet response. (I guess one could debate if a tweet is really promotion or just information... you know what someone can correct me, but I’m gonna say that a Tor.com tweet is promotion, compared to information like Ao3, and that tweet was there for promotion.)

Those tags operate within specific Ao3 and Tumblr cultures and infrastructure. I don’t hang around Twitter for whump stuff, IDK what the culture is. Anyway, does dropping these tags into a promotional tweet from Tor.... translate?

The tweet is evidently gathering the people who are there for it, and the people who aren’t there for it are quickly realizing that they are not there for it. But personally, the Tor website blurb does a better job at that, using writing that I’d expect from a publisher for communicating fictional non-con situations. (Maybe the blurb content warnings are what I wanted more of, when I said I wished for CW and TW in books.)

Anyway, there’s no huge drama about that Docile book promo on Twitter, as far as I can tell. So this is a niche thing, right now. But. The promo for Bonds of Brass and for Docile might be the beginnings of a trend of well-known book publishers borrowing from online writing / fandom culture and terminology in order to promote or categorize their books. These two promos might set a precedent or have other significance.

So if anyone has discourse on the tweets or potential future trends... 

[lovemesomerafael]

Others Like Me                                Chapter 6:  The Compound

Chapters 1-5   Read it on AO3

Bucky has a hard time adjusting to calling Marya by her name, but he’s determined never to call her “Eight” again.  That was never a name.  It was a dehumanizing designation and he’s not going to use it even one more time, if he can stop himself.  Everyone else seems to make the transition easily, and Bucky thinks that’s a combination of not having known her as long as he has, and not wanting to call her “Eight” any more than he does.

Steve’s being careful.  He’s entirely confident now that Marya is who she says she is, because Natasha is satisfied of that, and that’s good enough for Steve.  But in the Compound, he’s not letting Marya have any weapons, or access to anything sensitive, until further notice.  She’s unhappy about being unarmed, given her discomfort with being in a new and potentially extremely hostile environment, but she’s also been a soldier from childhood, with obedience literally beaten into her.  

Bucky’s trying to keep Steve at arm’s length after what’s happened between them, which is insanely difficult for about a million reasons.  No one else probably notices anything out of the ordinary – they’ve been struggling for a long time – but Steve’s longing stares have a renewed intensity matched only by Bucky’s determination to return to the easy brotherhood they once had, before they admitted their love for one another.

Bruce wants Marya to be wheeled into the Compound on the gurney but, when she complains, she gets support from everyone else on the plane.

“Quit bein’ such a mother hen,” Sam tells Bruce affectionately.  

“Even mother hens let their chicks walk by themselves,” Natasha adds, then says in an aside to Marya in Russian, “He’s a man.  He thinks we’d need as much time to recover as these boys would.”

“Isn’t he a doctor?”  Marya asks her.  “Doesn’t he know how much tougher women are than men?”

“Some of us speak Russian, you know,” Bucky mutters, trying to seem offended.  

It’s the last light moment for a while, because Marya’s back to being afraid. Bucky expected that, and plans to stick close to her until she feels comfortable.  He knows how terrifying new places and situations are for people like them when they’re unprepared, and he remembers his own introduction to the Compound. He finds himself charmed and gratified at the way Marya glues herself to his side, walking and standing just behind him but so close that he can feel her.  

As soon as they arrive, everyone scatters to their own areas of the Compound. Steve tells Bucky to put Marya in rooms near his, which Bucky knows will sound to Marya as though he’s trying to make her comfortable by letting her be near Bucky.  But Bucky knows better.  The truth is, Steve’s own rooms are adjacent to Bucky’s, which means Steve will be in a good position to keep a close eye on Marya himself.  

Bucky points out features of the place on their way: the kitchen, the common areas, the training building.  Marya’s on extreme alert, but she unconsciously shows her trust in him by holding his hand, which he finds he really likes, in a protective if slightly egotistical way.  When they reach the area where his and Steve’s rooms are, Bucky shows her which doors are theirs, before opening the door to the rooms where she’ll be staying.  She’s interested in everything, and her expression says she likes the rooms, but the first thing she says is, “I’ll be so far away from you.  From everyone.”  

“I know, and I know you won’t like that at first.  But maybe you’ll find that you like privacy.”

“Maybe.  I’ll try.”

There’s a commotion in the hallway outside.  He turns toward the sound and hears, “Barnes, I’m gonna kill you for-“

There’s a flash of movement past him and a thud in the hallway.  Bucky sighs, knowing what he’s going to find as he takes the several steps to the door and looks out.

Marya’s straddling Tony Stark, her forearm hard across his throat and a knife held in her hand with the point about two inches from his left eye. Tony, being Tony, has an eyebrow raised and an otherwise bland expression on his face.  

“Nice to meet you, Marya.”

“Let him up,” Bucky says sharply.

She keeps her eyes bored into Tony’s, and doesn’t move except to tilt her head slightly toward Bucky.  “Why?”

“Because that’s Tony Stark.”

She still doesn’t move.  “He said he was going to kill you.”

“He says that a lot.”

“He’s got weapons on him.  They’re… weird, but they’re weapons.”

Bucky can see that Tony’s good humor is quickly evaporating, which he kind of can’t blame him for, knifepoint at his eye and all.  He doesn’t want things to get any worse.  If she’s going to work with The Avengers, she’s going to need to be on good terms with Tony.

“Soblyuday, Soldat,” he growls.  He feels a little guilty about using such a loaded command, but he’s relieved to see it has the intended effect.  

She immediately flicks the knife back into the sheath in her sleeve where it had been hidden and stands, gracefully using her momentum to pull Tony up with her. But she’s not happy about it.  She keeps Tony fully in her sight as she turns a glare on Bucky.

“You’re not supposed to have a knife,” Bucky says to her with disapproval.

“THAT’S the problem you see here?”  Tony shrieks.

“Relax, Tony.  She’s just nervous.”

“Then let her fidget or talk nonsense, like the rest of us.”

There’s a tense silence as Tony glowers at Bucky and Bucky tries to think of something to say to defuse the situation.  To both of their surprise, Marya gets there first.  

“I owe you an apology, Mr. Stark,” she says, in an oddly stilted way as if she’s reciting lines.  “I overreacted, and I’m sorry.  I hope I haven’t hurt you.  It won’t happen again.”

Tony looks from Marya to Bucky.  

“In her defense,” Bucky tells him, “She only tackles people when she first meets them. Once she knows you, she’s very polite.”

“I often regret not killing you,” Tony says to Bucky in an offhand tone that’s almost fond.  He then turns to Marya.

“Apology accepted.  I like a girl with spirit.  I am going to have to ask you for that knife, though.”

She quickly, though reluctantly, takes it out and hands it to him, handle first.

“A few house rules,” Tony says, in his usual rapid-fire style.  “First, no attacking the host.  That’d be me.  Defend me, by all means.  And you’re welcome to attack this one at will.”  He motions toward Bucky.  “Second, if Cap gives you an order, you follow it.  He says no weapons, that means no weapons.  You with me so far?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Tony looks toward Bucky.  “You hear that?  ’Yes, Sir’. I already like her better than you.”

Bucky smirks.

“Third, if anyone catches you anywhere you’re not supposed to be, they have orders to kill you on sight.  That might strike you as a little rude, and I suppose it is, but no one’s ever accused me of being socially acceptable, and you did just knock me down and stick a knife in my face, so I think we’re even.  Are we clear?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Oh, I could so get used to that,” Tony gushes to Bucky, then turns around and begins to walk away.  “One more thing,” he says, holding up a finger and turning back toward Marya.  “I understand you have a couple of Hydra’s toys, and that you understand how they work.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll talk.”  With that, Tony spins back around and strides rapidly back down the hallway.

 The next week is hard on both Bucky and Marya.  One of the reasons is their rapidly escalating impatience.  Nothing seems to be happening.  Marya thinks constantly of her ‘brothers and sisters’ in the bunker, and can’t stand the idea that they might think she isn’t coming back for them.  Bucky, too, is thinking of them.  He doesn’t know them, so he can’t care about them personally the way that she does. But he knows enough.  He knows what he endured.  He knows that he cannot and will not leave them there.  

Bucky’s also having nightmares like he hasn’t had since he first escaped Hydra and went to ground in Bucharest.  He’s hollow-eyed and haggard, and he dreads the nights.  Sometimes he wakes up soaked in cold sweat, tangled in his sheets.  Those are the good nights.  It’s the nights he wakes up screaming, stabbing at nothing and terrified almost to madness, that have him wondering whether it’s all worth it.  

Sam tells him it’s a good thing.  Miserable, agonizing, but a sign of progress.  A sign that meeting Marya has helped him to be able to approach a well of memories and emotions he wasn’t ready to even acknowledge before.  Bucky hopes so, because he feels like he’s drowning.

One night, he dreams he’s back in captivity, looking at a circle of flunkies aiming weapons at him while shithead Pierce spews megalomaniacal vitriole disguised as patriotism at him.  He sees Rumlow, drooling and sprouting wood at the idea of what’s about to happen to him. Bucky’s aching for Pierce to shut up, but at the same time desperate for him to continue so that what’s coming next won’t happen.  But it does. He feels the clamps, then the unbearable torment, like every nerve in his brain is being torn out separately and at the same time, and he wakes up, screaming and clawing at his head, bolt upright in his bed dripping with sweat.  

He sees his shadowy room, and knows he’s safe in the Compound.  He knows he’s going to blow that fucking bunker to kingdom come if it’s the last thing he does.  He’s with The Avengers now.  He’s not alone.  He’s Bucky again.  He’s not The Asset or whatever the fuck he was back then.  But he also knows that he was that person.  He did those things.  That was real, and it happened, and it’s never going away.  For the first time in a very long time, Bucky covers his face with his hands and cries.  

That’s when he hears the soft rustle of fabric, and a whisper from the corner of his bedroom.  

“Sergeant?”

He startles, but recognizes her voice.  “Marya?  What the hell?”

She steps away from the wall where she’s been standing and crosses silently to sit next to him.  

“I’m here.  Can I touch you?”

“Why are you… I…”  

His surprise quickly drains away and, as it does, his despair returns.  He hiccups and she reaches out, tentatively, to touch his metal shoulder.  Bucky realizes that he wants nothing more than to let go.  To give way, just this once, to the wretched tide of pain and grief and guilt and shame that will engulf him if he lets it.  He knows how strong Marya is.  As she turns to put a knee on the bed and shift herself so she’s kneeling next to him, he knows that the arms she wraps him with are sculpted with well-defined, hard muscle, and that she’s pulling him to her because she can take his weight, and the weight of his anguish.  So he leans into her and lets his arms fall weakly to her waist.  He lets her pull his head to her shoulder and starts to sob as she strokes his hair.

Once he starts, he can’t stop.  He’s afraid sometimes that he’ll never catch his breath as he’s overtaken with wracking, shuddering cries that tear themselves from his throat.  But he doesn’t fight it.  He lets it have him.  He leans on her with his whole weight, letting her keep him upright.  He soaks the soft cotton nightshirt she’s wearing with his tears and probably snot and spit, too.  He doesn’t care and she doesn’t even appear to notice.  She just holds him, rocking him sometimes, stroking his back and arms and hair, kissing his head, his forehead, his cheeks and lips, murmuring soft endearments and comforting words in Russian and English.

It’s got to be an hour before his wails and sobs even begin to slow down into weeping.  And he weeps for at least another hour.  She’s crying, too, sometimes as hard as he is, but the whole time, she’s supporting and sustaining him, keeping him safe as he falls entirely apart and stays that way for hours.  

Finally, Bucky’s completely worn out, drained of every bit of energy and strength he had.  All of the filth and suffering inside him has, for the moment, been exorcised.  She lays him down, covering him with the sheet and cradling his head to her chest.  She wraps both arms and legs around him and he falls asleep clinging to her.

 In the morning, he wakes up alone.  He knows it happened, because his eyes are swollen and sore, and he can catch the faintest scent of her hair on his pillows.  He doesn’t know quite how to feel about that.  He’s grateful to her for allowing him the privacy to figure it out, before he sees her.  

But it doesn’t take long.  In the shower, he thinks through his dream, and the fact that she was there in his room, and her unflinching acceptance in the presence of his staggering, overpowering grief and rage, and he knows exactly how he feels.  He feels grateful.  He feels honored.  He feels loved.  And he feels love.

He’s disappointed when he finds that she’s not in her rooms.  He was hoping to have the opportunity to see her alone, to talk about what happened.  He needs to try to thank her, although he knows he’ll never be able to find the words to tell her how grateful he is.  

He thinks about Steve, and Bucky’s already-raw emotions register instantly a sense of guilt that he’s shared with Marya, a woman he barely knows, all the things that he hasn’t been able to let his lifelong best friend see.  The things that Steve’s been begging Bucky to trust him with.  Bucky knows why it happened that way: Marya is who Bucky is.  If Steve lives for another hundred years, he still won’t be able to understand what’s been inside of Bucky the way that she can.  But Bucky also knows that he will have to take that knowledge to his grave.  Steve would be destroyed to know that Marya could give Bucky something he couldn’t, and Bucky’s not going to do that to him.

 In the large kitchen, everyone’s just finishing breakfast, sipping coffee and enjoying some camaraderie before going on to whatever they have planned for their days.  Bucky sees Marya, sitting at a table with Clint and listening to him explain something about his bow.  He grins, because he knows Clint must be ecstatic.  No one else wants to hear him go on and on about what it can do, but Marya seems enthralled.  She looks up at Bucky, and they share a small smile and a nod.

Steve’s sitting with Tony, just watching Bucky like a lion watching a particularly tasty-looking gazelle, when Tony sees him.

“Good morning.  Catching up on our beauty sleep, are we?”

Bucky grunts a greeting and pours a cup of coffee.

“Bad news, Barnes,” Natasha says from the other side of the table where she’s reading some sort of printouts.  “Not only didn’t it work, but we ate all the bacon.”

“Assholes,” Bucky mutters, and begins to take inventory of his breakfast options. It’s not long before Marya crosses the room to do something at the oven behind Bucky, then steps up beside him.  She holds out a plate heaped with food, including a respectable amount of bacon.  Bucky takes the plate automatically, and feels that it’s warm. He smiles wide, not only because of the gesture, but also because she looks adorably pleased with herself.

Clint’s offended shout cuts through the moment.  “Hey!  You said there was no more bacon!”

“I’m sorry,” Marya says apologetically to him as she returns to join him at the table.  “I guess I don’t know the rules about bacon.”

When Clint looks away, Marya gives Bucky a secret wink.  He’s delighted.  

“Unpredictable and overly violent, but loyal,” Tony mutters to Natasha. “Shit.  Now there are two of them.”  Natasha smirks at her papers.

Steve crushes the coffee cup he’s holding in his hand, and there’s minor commotion as people scramble out of the way of the spill and try to outdo each other making fun of him.

After a while, people start to excuse themselves to start their days.  Clint’s gone to the training building, leaving Bucky and Marya sitting together, a bit apart from the others.  On the way out of the room, Tony says to Marya, “Come to my lab later.”

She goes instantly from relaxed and cheerful to rigid and bristling with fear.

“Gizmos,” Bucky says quickly, putting a hand on her arm.  “Remember?  It’s not that kind of lab.  He makes electronic gadgets.”  

Bucky looks daggers at Tony, who shrugs and says nonchalantly, “Yeah.  I only experiment on myself.  We’re just gonna take a look at that Hydra technology.” He looks at Bucky then.  “You come, too, to make sure she doesn’t do anything.”

“Jeez, Tony, she’s sitting right here.”

“You know I have no manners, right, Marya?”

“Yes, Sir,” she says in a small voice, not looking at him.

It takes a while for Marya’s terror to bleed off, and Bucky’s aggravation with Tony lasts even longer.  

Steve leaves the kitchen then, not having said a word to Bucky, and he and Marya find themselves alone in the room.

“Thank you,” Bucky says, hoping she can hear the weight he’s putting into the words.

“You’re welcome.  I don’t know whether you’re talking about last night or this morning, but the answer’s the same.”

“I was talking about last night, but I gotta say, saving me some breakfast is pretty great, too.”

He likes her pleased smile.  

“I don’t really want to make a joke about it, though.  You bein’ there, letting me… vent, I guess, that was…” He’s been practicing how to say it, and still he gets tangled up in the words.  “It helped me so much, and I just want you to know how much it means to me.”

“I’m glad if I could help.  I’ve hated seeing you in such pain.”

“It’s been that obvious, huh?”

It’s been a while since Bucky’s seen Marya’s perplexed look, but she’s wearing it now.  “Yes. You’ve been thrashing, and shouting, and…”

“What are you…  When?”

“Every night since we’ve been here.”

“Are you telling me you’ve been in my room every night?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you sleep?”

“Not very well.  It’s too quiet, and-“

Bucky grins a little.  “You’re cold.”

“Yes. The first night, I thought I heard you, and it didn’t sound good, so I went to make sure you were all right.  When I saw that you were having bad dreams, I worried about you.  So I started coming in, so I’d be there if you needed me.”

“Wasn’t my door locked?”

“Yes.”

Bucky would laugh at that if he wasn’t such a wreck.  “So you just watched me sleep?”

“No. I slept, too.”

“Standing in the corner of my room?”

“Sitting.”

Bucky realizes he isn’t really very surprised by this.   He takes Marya’s hand and kisses it.  “That isn’t necessary.  But thank you.”

“It feels necessary,” she says.  “I love you.”

It’s a straight, simple declaration, just like the time she told him in Lucerne that she wanted to have sex with him, and Bucky’s thunderstruck.  Not knowing what to say or do, he squeezes her hand and kisses it again, longer this time.  

“We should go to Mr. Stark’s lab,” Marya says softly.

 The seeming chaos in Tony’s lab has always been incomprehensible and vaguely threatening to Bucky.  Marya, on the other hand, is wearing an impossibly wide grin, and takes it all in with hungry, enchanted eyes.  Tony’s asked them to give him a second, he’s having trouble with something and he thinks he’s just about there.  Apparently, he’s not, because he keeps swearing.  

After five minutes of slowly circling the huge room, eyes wide with wonder and interest, Marya steps behind Tony to see what he’s looking at through the powerful magnifier.  It’s some kind of microcircuitry in a machine whose purpose Bucky can’t even guess at, but she’s intrigued.

Tony swears again and Bucky sees a tiny puff of smoke stream lazily out from where Tony’s working.  

“That connector’s backward,” Marya murmurs.

Tony turns on her angrily.  “What?”

She steps quickly away, reflexively taking a defensive stance and looking afraid. She doesn’t repeat what she’s said, just watches every movement Tony makes as he scowls at her and shoos her away. She hastens to Bucky’s side, standing just behind him and leaning just the tiniest bit into him.  

Tony works for a while longer while they just watchfully wait for him to acknowledge them again.  He pulls the tools he’s using away from the machine and it starts to do… something. He swears again and gives Marya another dirty look.  

“Connector was backward.”  

Bucky’s relieved to note that Marya wisely doesn’t respond.  

The conversation that follows is wide-ranging and mostly incomprehensible to Bucky, but he’s always liked futuristic gadgets and gizmos, and it’s entertaining.  The part that really catches his attention, though, is when they begin to talk about Bucky’s arm, and the fact that it was Marya who disabled it on the plane when they’d first abducted him.

“How did you know how to do that?”  Tony asks, half fascinated and half seriously annoyed.  

“I didn’t.  But I looked, and it seemed like if I disconnected those two components, it wouldn’t work anymore.”

“Hmm. And how’d you fix it?”

“I didn’t fix it.  I made a patch that would stick on the outside to draw the components back together again.  It was the best I could do, and I guess I forgot to go back and repair it.”

“Well, let’s do that now, shall we?”

It doesn’t escape Bucky’s attention that Marya was terrified to come into this lab for fear she’d be experimented on, and he’d reassured her that wouldn’t happen.  Now he’s the one sitting obediently while they mess around with his arm and talk in one of the few languages Bucky doesn’t speak.  It’s a long morning.

That night, Bucky again finds himself dreading the prospect of going to sleep. He finds things to do, including having a fairly heated discussion with Steve about why they’re still not planning a raid on the Hydra bunker in Siberia.  Eventually, though, he’s the only one still up, and he decides it’s time to quit procrastinating.

In the hallway outside his door, he makes a decision.  He goes to Marya’s door, instead, and knocks.  She’s wearing soft, grey leggings and a tank top made of the same material, which do nothing but accentuate the shape of her strong, graceful body and the obvious fact that she’s not wearing a bra.

“Are you all right, Sergeant?”  She waves him in, but he stays where he is.

“I just wanted to tell you to stay here.  Get some real sleep.  I appreciate everything you’ve been doing, but you don’t need to.  I’ll feel better knowing you’re here, comfortable, and not just hanging out in the corner waiting for me to have a nightmare.”

Marya looks hurt and a little confused.  “I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing.  You said people like privacy, so I shouldn’t have-“

“No. It’s not that at all.  I understand what you did, and I appreciate it. More than you know.  The thing is, I want you to be comfortable.  You can’t just be watching over me all the time.”

“I understand.”

The look on her face is tearing at Bucky.  “No, you don’t.  I’m not mad…” He can’t not take her into his arms when she’s looking down with her shoulders slumped like that.  

She hugs him back, but he can feel her uncertainty.  After what she did for him, after all she’s done for him, and what they’ve been through together…  “Marya, I’m sorry.  I’m a chump when it comes to words.  I’m trying to be nice to you.  Maybe we could…”

Suddenly, the way forward is clear and easy.  “What if you sleep with me?  That way you can be comfortable, and you’ll probably sleep better than in here, anyway. And if – when – I have a nightmare, you’ll be there.”

She looks a little happier, but still uncertain.  “But Natasha said it’s too intimate.”

Bucky kisses her.  Intimately. “She was right.  I know you don’t really associate sex and sleeping with eachother, but…  we could do both.  If you want.”

That gets the look Bucky was aiming for.  He takes his arms from around her but keeps hold of her hand as he leads her out of her door and to his.  

When they’re lying together on his bed, mouths tasting and exploring, this seems to Bucky like the best idea he’s had in a long time.  The almost-shy, vaguely hesitant way she’s touching him, though, raises a question that he’s been wanting to ask since he first noticed how beautiful she is.  

Bucky lifts up from Marya’s lips and slides a hand down to cover her breast as he looks into her eyes.  “Do you… know what comes next?”

She arches up when he begins to tease her nipple with the tips of his fingers, but doesn’t break eye contact.  “I think so.”

Bucky tilts his head in inquiry.

“We were children.  No one told us anything.  But then we got older and we… figured things out.  I don’t know whether we guessed right, though.”

Bucky chuckles at that.  “I’d bet a lot of money that you got it right.  It’s pretty instinctive.”

“Show me,” she breathes.  “I’ll tell you if we got it right.”

Bucky smiles and goes back to kissing her, enjoying the way she seems to respond to his tongue, and then try to repeat what he does.  It’s bliss to finally get his hands on her bare breasts, and he yanks her tank top over her head at the first opportunity.  The moan she makes at that goes straight to his cock, which she’s fondling gently.  Too gently. He takes her hand and presses it into him, thrusting against it.  He feels her smile.

She makes a tiny, frustrated noise when he pulls out of her reach to scoot down further in the bed, but she seems to feel better about things when he takes one of her breasts into his mouth.  Bucky’s a sucker for sounds of pleasure, and Marya doesn’t hold back. He’s very surprised that, rather than find it funny when she calls him “Sergeant” as she’s exclaiming at how much she likes what he’s doing, he finds it ridiculously erotic.  Just another of the endless variety of ways he’s fucked up, Bucky guesses.  This one doesn’t bother him too much.

She cooperates enthusiastically as he pulls her leggings and panties from her, and gasps – actually gasps – when he touches her.  “You all right?”  He asks around a mouthful of her nipple.

“Yes, that’s just…  feels so good…”  

Bucky gets a little worried when he slides a finger inside her and she stops breathing.  He lifts his head.  “Marya?”

“Yes?”

“Everything OK?”

“Oh, yes!”  She’s breathing now.  Panting actually.

“You just… I thought you were holding your breath there for a second.”

“I was concentrating.”

Bucky laughs.  He really likes that answer.  

“But…”

He doesn’t like the “but”.  

“What’s wrong?”

“You have all your clothes on.  I want to take them off.���

Whew. Bucky crawls back up so they’re lying face to face again.  “Be my guest.”

With a happy sigh, Marya takes hold of Bucky’s layered shirts and pulls. When the shirts are lying on the floor, she spends a long moment just breathing hard and marveling at his chest. “You are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen,” she whispers, touching him in reverent strokes with the tips of her fingers, as though not sure she’s allowed to.  It’s mesmerizing.  Bucky just lets her admire him, watching her face and doing his own appreciative gazing at her chest.  

Eventually, one of her awed caresses ends at the button of his jeans.  She looks at his face.  “Can I…?”

“Yes. I want you to.”

Once she gets his jeans off, Marya spends another mini-eternity admiring Bucky’s lower half.  He has to grit his teeth to maintain control as she touches his cock like it’s a religious artifact.  In the part of his mind that’s still thinking, Bucky realizes how conceited it is that he’s getting off so much on her naked appreciation of his body, and knows that Steve would be howling with sardonic mirth.  

Nope, Bucky thinks, shutting that down in a hurry.  Not gonna think of Steve right now.

Bucky surrenders himself to Marya, letting her touch him everywhere and plant open-mouthed kisses wherever she wants, which is pretty much everywhere, too. He’s too aroused to endure the way she starts to use her tongue on his dick, though.  When he comes, he wants it to be inside of her.  

“Marya, come here…”  He groans.

“Am I doing that wrong?”

“Fuck, no.  You’re doing it too right.  I want you. I want my cock in you.”

Apparently, Marya’s very on board with that plan, and she moves with him when he turns them over so that he’s lying on top of her.  “I want to make you come first, though.”

“’Come?’  Is that when that… explosion happens?”

“That’s what it is, all right.”  Bucky rubs his cock against her, feeling her lips slide to accommodate him, and she uses her feet against the mattress to rock her pelvis against him.  She reaches down to take his cock in her hand, using the head to rub exactly where she needs it, and it’s mere moments before she’s coming with a spectacular series of shudders and inarticulate cries.  One might’ve been “Sergeant,” and Bucky kind of hopes it was.

He plans to wait, rubbing against her until she’s completely finished, but she moves her hips until the head of his cock is against her entrance, then wraps her legs around him.  He doesn’t need any encouragement.  He thrusts into her, both of them gasping with the sensation, and immediately begins to fuck her with a determined rhythm.  When he feels her start to buck against him with her second orgasm, he feels the rush of pleasure roar through him and they’re both shouting as they come.

They both sleep soundly through the rest of the night, once they’ve agreed that Marya and the rest of the Hydra captives did, indeed, get it right.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

http://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

The Silicon Valley gospel of “disruption” has descended into caricature, but, at its core, there are some sound tactics buried beneath the self-serving bullshit. A lot of our systems and institutions are corrupt, bloated, and infested with cream-skimming rentiers who add nothing and take so much.

Take taxis: there is nothing good about the idea that cab drivers and cab passengers meet each other by random chance, with the drivers aimlessly circling traffic-clogged roads while passengers brave the curb lane to frantically wave at them. Add to that the toxic practice of licensing cabs by creating “taxi medallions” that allow businesspeople (like erstwhile Trump bagman Michael Cohen) to corner the market on these licenses and lease them to drivers, creaming off the bulk of the profits in the process, leaving drivers with barely enough to survive.

So enter Uber, an app that allows drivers and passengers to find each other extremely efficiently, that gives drivers realtime intelligence about places where fares are going begging, and which bankrupts the rent-seeking medallion speculators almost overnight.

Of course, Uber also eliminates safety checks for drivers (and allows them to illegally discriminate against people with disabilities, people of color, and other marginalized groups); it used predatory pricing (where each ride is subsidized by deep-pocketed, market-cornering execs) to crush potential competitors, and games the regulatory and tax system.

Uber (and its Peter-Thiel-backed rival Lyft) are not good companies. They’re not forces for good. But the system they killed? Also not good.

In 2016, the City of Austin played a game of high-stakes chicken with Uber and Lyft. Austin cab drivers have to get fingerprinted as part of a criminal records check, and Austin wanted Uber and Lyft drivers to go through the same process.

Uber and Lyft violently objected to this. They said it would add a needless barrier to entry that would depress the supply of drivers, and privately, they confessed their fear that giving in to any regulation, anywhere, would open the door to regulation everywhere. They wanted to establish a reputation for being such dirty fighters that no city would even try to put rules on them.

(Notably, Uber and Lyft did not make any arguments about criminal background checks perpetuating America’s racially unjust “justice system” in which people of color are systematically overpoliced and then railroaded into guilty pleas.)

Austin wasn’t intimidated. They enacted the rule, and Uber and Lyft simply exited the city, leaving Austin without any rideshare at all. All the drivers and passengers who’d come to rely on Lyft and Uber were out of luck.

But the drivers were undaunted. They formed a co-operative and in months, they had cloned the Uber app and launched a new business called Ride Austin, which is exactly like Uber: literally the same drivers, driving the same cars, and charging the same prices. But it’s also completely different from Uber: the drivers own this company through a worker-owned co-op. They take home 25% more per ride than they made when they were driving for Uber. Uber and Lyft drivers commute into Austin from as far away as San Antonio just to drive for Ride. That’s how much better driving for a worker co-op is.

I remember when the term “platform cooperativism” was first bandied about to describe this kind of thing. I was at a small, invitational tech conference where nerds, investors, activists, lawyers, SF writers and other technologically oriented types were gathered. I was on a panel about these platform co-ops and I said that I thought Uber would be really easy to replace with a co-op: the riders and the drivers valued the service, not the logo on the app, and plenty of people were happy about the convenience of Uber but unhappy about the creepy, rapacious nature of the company behind it.

An investor in the audience stood up to tell me how full of shit I was: I had no idea just how complicated Uber’s app and infrastructure were, and there was no way a bunch of grubby drivers would ever be able to match its expert coding and administration.

He was so wrong.

But there’s another, better argument against this kind of platform cooperativism: “discovery costs.” I first hailed a Ride car at South By Southwest, not long after Lyft and Uber had exited the city, and everyone going to the festival had been repeatedly warned that they would have to download the Ride app to get around the city (Austin’s taxi fleet hasn’t been up to the SXSW crowds for more than a decade, and never less so than now, having been crippled by Uber and Lyft).

So I was prepared. When I land in another city, the first app I try when I need to get around is Lyft, then Uber (Uber was a godsend in Shanghai, where we were repeatedly cheated by regular cab drivers, but where the Uber app kept everything aboveboard). Some or all of these cities might have co-op rideshares, but there’s no easy way to know about it, and without passengers, there’s no incentive for the drivers to drive for the co-ops, so even when you do try to hail a co-op, there won’t be any drivers available.

Lyft and Uber have moved back into Austin, and their drivers get fingerprinted. I just got my speaker-info package from SXSW for the 2019 festival, and the advice to download Ride before touching down is no longer the top of the checklist. I imagine that most of the attendees at SXSW will be getting around with Uber and Lyft, and 25% of the money they spend will go to those companies’ shareholders, not to the drivers.

But imagine a disruptive app that disrupted the disrupters.

Imagine if I could install a version of Ride (call it Meta-Uber) that knew about all the driver co-ops in the world. When I landed, I’d page a car with Uber or Lyft, but once a driver accepted the hail, my Meta-Uber app would signal the driver’s phone and ask, “Do you have a driver co-op app on your phone?” If the driver and I both had the co-op app, our apps would cancel the Uber reservation and re-book the trip with Meta-Uber.

That way, we could piggyback on the installed base of Uber and Lyft cars, the billions they’ve poured into getting rideshare services legalized in cities around the world, the marketing billions they’ve spent making us all accustomed to the idea of rideshare services.

This Meta-Uber service would allow for a graceful transition from the shareholder-owned rideshares to worker co-ops. When you needed a car, you’d get one, without having to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of no drivers because there are no passengers because there are no drivers. One fare at a time, we could cannibalize Lyft and Uber into the poorhouse.

The billions they’ve spent to establish “first-mover advantages” wouldn’t be unscalable stone walls around their business: they’d be immovable stone weights around their necks. Lyft and Uber would have multi-billion-dollar capital overhangs that their investors would expect to recoup, while the co-ops that nimbly leapt over Uber and Lyft would not have any such burden.

Could we do this?

Yes. Technically, this isn’t all that challenging. Create a service where drivers and passengers’ devices all register unique, per-ride codes, have the Meta-Uber check to see if the driver’s device has just posted a unique code that matches yours, and then use the built-in ride-cancelation tool that’s already incorporated into Uber and Lyft to tear down the old reservation and re-create it with Meta-Uber.

What about legal impediments, though?

That’s where the trouble starts. Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have been systematically distorted by companies that used “disruption” to batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt them.

First is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, passed in 1986 in part to assuage Ronald Reagan’s panic after seeing the movie Wargames (I am not making this up). CFAA is nominally an anti-computer-intrusion statute, which criminalizes “exceeding your authorization” on a computer that doesn’t belong to you. Even when it passed, more than 40 years ago, technologically clued-in scholars and practicioners warned that this was way too broadly defined, and that someday we might see this rule used to felonize normal activities involving computers we owned, because the computers would have to talk to a server to accomplish part of their work, and the server’s owner could use onerous “user agreements” and “terms of service” to define our authorization. If this became widespread, then these licenses could take on the force of criminal law, and violating them could become a jailable offense.

40 years later, those fears are vindicated: CFAA is used to threaten, intimidate, sue, and even jail people engaged in otherwise perfectly lawful activity, merely because they have violated some term of service on the way. The metastasis of terms of service into sprawling novellas of impenetrable legalese has created a world where anything you do to frustrate the commercial ambitions of digital monopolists is a potential criminal offense.

Then there’s Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a Bill Clinton bill that creates a felony for “bypassing an effective means of access control” (AKA Digital Rights Management or DRM) for copyrighted works. Twenty years ago, the proponents for this bill argued that it would be used to safeguard certain marginal commercial technologies: under DMCA 1201, it would be illegal to bypass the region controls on a DVD player, allowing movie studios to force you to buy your DVDs in the same place where you bought the player – it would also allow Sega to force you to buy your Dreamcast games on CDs that came from official Sega pressing plants, rather than direct from the games’ authors, ensuring that Sega would always get a share of the revenues from the sale of games you played on your console.

Again, experts warned Congress that DMCA 1201 was way too broad and would be ripe for abuse, as software crept into more systems. Again, the experts were right. Today, DRM is used to force people with artificial pancreases to buy proprietary insulin and people with inkjet printers to buy proprietary ink; it’s used by car manufacturers and phone manufacturers to control who can make parts for their products and who can service them; it’s found in voting machines, tractors, thermostats, virtually every device with software, and it has no connection with copyright enforcement. Rather, it is used for “business model enforcement,” to ensure that disruptive, but legal, ways of using a product or service are made illegal – from refilling your printer’s ink cartridge to getting your car or phone serviced by an independent neighborhood repair shop.

Together, the CFAA and DMCA have given digital businesses access to a shadowy legal doctrine that was never written by Congress but is nevertheless routinely enforced by the courts: Felony Contempt of Business-Model.

The CFAA and DMCA 1201 have been carefully distorted into defensive, anti-disruption shields that are only available to digital businesses. Taxi medallion owners can’t use the CFAA and DMCA 1201 to keep Uber and Lyft out of their cities.

But Uber and Lyft could use these legal tools to keep Meta-Uber out of their bottom lines. Uber and Lyft have lengthy terms-of-service that set out the rules under which you are authorized to communicate with Uber and Lyft’s servers. These terms of service prohibit using their servers to locate drivers for any purpose other than booking a ride. They certainly don’t permit you to locate a driver and then cancel the booking and re-book with a co-op app.

And Uber and Lyft’s apps are encrypted on your phone, so to reverse-engineer them, you’d have to decrypt them (probably by capturing an image of their decrypted code while it was running in a virtual phone simulated on a desktop computer). Decrypting an app without permission is “bypassing an effective means of access control” for a copyrighted work (the app is made up of copyrighted code).

Uber and Lyft can use DMCA 1201 to stop you from figuring out how to use them to locate co-op drivers, and they can use the CFAA to stop you from flipping your booking from Uber to Meta-Uber.

There are a hundred other Metas we can imagine: a Meta-Amazon that places your order with the nearest indy bookstore instead; a Meta-OpenTable that redirects your booking to a co-op booking tool.

Every single one of these co-ops would disrupt a digital monopolist who came to power preaching the gospel of disruption. Every single one of those digital monopolists would switch to the aggrieved bleats of a bewildered incumbent apex predator snarling and twisted impotently as its flesh was rent by a thousand tiny bites from swarms of fast-moving, highly evolved successors.

But we never get to bring those lumbering relics down, not so long as felony contempt-of-business-model is still in play in America. Until then, disruption will always be for thee and never for me.

[megan-callitwhatyouwant]

What Taylor Swift means to me: An essay

Taylor Swift is not just another popstar - not to me at least, and I need to vent.

Taylor Swift’s debut self-titled album came out on October 4, 2006, I was 7 years old at the time, about to turn 8. I felt really alone, my parents were in pre-divorce meaning they were still trying to work through a failing marriage and living in my home was like walking on eggshells, it didn’t help that we had just recently moved from Kentucky to Illinois, hours away from any family so we were on our own. It was summer of 2007 that my mom’s dad and stepmother came to visit us from Kentucky. My Nana (my mom’s stepmother) really loved country music. I did not, I hated it, and was really disappointed to see that CMT was the channel she had chosen to watch (not to worry I have since grown and seen the light that country music can be in dark times, I also discovered old country which is honestly ~iconic~.) As I was actively bitching in my head about how much I hate country music Taylor Swift came on the screen with her super curly blonde hair talking to “Drew” in front of some lockers and I was of course intrigued, the next scene is her laying in a bed snuggling a guitar with rhinestones on her face and lip gloss on her lips  (which was and always will be iconic) and I was absolutely obsessed. I begged and begged my mom for the album and finally received it in November of 2007 for my 9th birthday, by this point my dad had lost his job, at the time I didn’t know why but I later found out he was so depressed about his relationship falling apart that he had just quit going to work, his options were to find a new job in Illinois where we lived or to take his old job in Kentucky back. He ended up doing the latter and moved away. We stayed in Illinois so my mom, who went back to school late could finish her degree, at the time the understanding was 2 years. It was like really really hard on me when my dad left, I fell apart a bit and was angry at my mom for keeping us in Illinois and angry at my dad for leaving but it’s hard to be angry at someone you miss. My dad always got me a white teddy bear on Valentine’s day and the most recent one had been easily my favorite and I started taking it to school with me everyday to still feel close to him, everyone knows how kids can be especially when you’re taking a freaking stuffed animal to school and you’re almost 10 years old. I knew it was going to happen, I knew I was going to get shit from other kids but it was so important to me to just have that little piece of my dad and to not feel alone but things got really hard with the other kids. Taylor Swift felt like my only friend and she sang about being an outcast in songs like “The Outside” and “A Place in this World.” She gave me songs to feel sad to when I was angry like “Invisible” and “Cold as You.” Absolute bops to make everything feel right in the world like “Mary’s Song”, “Our Song”, and “Should’ve said no.” This album had everything I needed when I was going through this as a kid and listening to it even now serves as a reminder that things eventually get better and the songs on it are all still absolute bangers. Taylor knows how to capture feelings that feel unmanageable and unexplainable and make them magically feel manageable and like a shared experience. This is I believe what has made Taylor such an unrelenting force in the music industry and why she so seamlessly was able to transition from country to pop. It was never about the genre it was absolutely always about her lyrical genius and the shared human experiences she has always been able to portray so well.

I am so lucky that I found Taylor at such a young age, dumb luck has had her releasing albums exactly when I needed them most. Fearless came out a little before my birthday in 2008, Taylor has a pattern of releasing albums in the fall which also happens to be when my birthday is so it works out perfectly for me. Fearless served as a healing album for me, it was one I danced around my room with my one friend to. It helped me cope with my first crush who obviously didn’t like me back and it made me feel normal despite how hectic my life was with my dad being gone and my mom being essentially a single mother with 2 kids while pursuing a college degree (which was an amazing feat for her but didn’t leave her much time to spend with my sister and I.) I absolutely adored Taylor Swift and every song she released just made me feel everything and I loved her. Fearless for me is like a time capsule to simpler times, I listen to Fearless and it makes me feel like everything is going to be okay and everything was for a while. I found out in Summer of 2010 that my parents were getting a divorce, I had thought that they were trying to work things out so this came as a shock to me, my mom wouldn’t tell me what happened. Me and my friend I mentioned earlier, Margaret-Rose, were on a spy kick we had just gotten our hands on the Nancy Drew movie that came out in 2007 and had recently watched Harriet the Spy so we came up with a plan to figure out what had happened. My mom is the type of person to tell every bit of her own and everyone else’s business to her friends on the phone so me and Margaret-Rose thought it would be an excellent idea to have a sleepover, put on all black and sneak downstairs and out into the garage where my mom would have private phone conversations, we snuck out and hid behind my mom’s van in the garage and waited for her to come out and call a friend, we knew she would do this because she did this every night, she still does. What we found out is that my Dad had cheated on her and she had already been cheating on him, in my little 10 year old brain this computed to both my parents are terrible people and I was of course extremely hurt. I didn’t know how to tell my mom that I’d heard her, I laid there venting and crying to my friend all night it just was all around bad.  Of course not too long after Speak Now came out and had the songs “Innocent” and “Never grow up” on it which were a huge part in my healing from what I’d heard. “Innocent” helped me realize that I didn’t have to be mad no matter how wrong the things they did were, I could be hurt and forgive them without holding onto the anger that I felt, I could see them as innocent people who just made some mistakes. This is of course easier said than done and I sometimes do still feel angry but it really helped me adjust my perspective and I come back to both songs frequently. The album also had, as always, a few bangers to help you forget and feel magical.  Speak Now is hard for me to listen to now despite being such a beautiful and heavy body of work just because it takes me back to such dark times, but I think sometimes it’s important to take yourself back there just to show yourself what you went through and know that you got through it. Speak Now for me serves as a testament to the strength it takes to get through that kind of emotional pain and broken trust.

Taylor’s album “Red” came out in the last half of my 8th grade year, this year was rough for me because I knew it would be the last school year I’d spend in Illinois with the people I’d been going to school with for most of my life and then I’d be moving back to Kentucky to be near my Dad, 5 years later than the initial plan. It was just too hard for my parents to be around each other so they chose to stay in separate states which obviously wasn’t easy for the kids involved. It just served as an escape from my usual life as all previous albums had, I loved how much raw emotion was involved in this album especially. With “All Too Well” I couldn’t relate to the romantic part of it, but there were so many lines in the song I could relate to easily which is an amazing thing about Taylor Swift songs almost exclusively, even if the entire song doesn’t quite fit your situation you can always find a line or verse somewhere that just hits you hard in the chest. For me anxiety about moving away was eating me up and the line, “Time won’t fly it’s like I’m paralyzed by it, I’d like to be my old self again but I’m still trying to find it” just hit home so hard the first time I heard the song, that line comes to mind every time I feel nervous or scared about anything for a while because it just embodies that feeling so well of just not feeling like you and wanting what you’re going through to be over. I’ve never been through a romantic heart break but I’ve had friends break my heart and parents and just life in general and Taylor just embodied that so well with this song. This album is one I come back to frequently as I get older, it’s amazing how coming back to the albums you can experience them differently with your new life experiences. I’ll get back to Red later.

1989 came out October of my sophomore year of high school and I didn’t listen to it. My parents were actually going through the legal process of a divorce and things were just bad. I lived in a hotel for 2 weeks bad and didn’t want another one of her albums to feel like a time capsule to terrible times so I was waiting for things to get better but they just got worse my junior year. I listened to a lot of My Chemical Romance those 2 years if that shows at all just how angry and unhappy I was, I’m not going to get into it too much but my junior year of high school was the worst year of my life hands down. I FINALLY listened to this album in its entirety my SENIOR year of high school. I’d obviously heard songs from it on the radio despite trying not to and they were amazing and the album won a Grammy for album of the year, I was extremely excited to hear Taylor’s first all out pop album. She’d experimented with pop on a few songs on Red and those were, of course, iconic bangers. 1989 will always be one of my favorite albums by Taylor. I was (am) in a happy relationship, I was (am) in love, and I was thriving as a senior. It was one of the happiest times of my life and I could finally listen to her love songs and actually fully understand what she meant. “You are in love” will always always always mean everything to me and be about my boyfriend. “Clean” absolutely brought me to tears after the years I’d had before, I was reminded how healing she can be. “Style” is THE bad bitch anthem, there is no other song you can hit a strut to like “Style.” Taylor really made the perfect pop album on her first try and I’m so glad I waited to listen to it despite missing out on following the tour and watching the press conferences because 1989 will now forever be a time capsule into one of the happiest times of my life.

Reputation came out when I was starting college and let me tell you I HATE college. I was hating life and in the midst of all the college hating I was doing I find out that my boyfriend had chosen to attend a college in Pennsylvania which, for reference, is a 12 hour drive away from me. Aiden is the actual light of my life, he is what is good in this universe. He’s patient with me when I don’t deserve it, he understands me, and is there for me when I need him and how I need him without fail. He, much like Taylor, just knows what to say and how to make things better, they are the type of people everyone should strive to be like. Aiden being there makes things so much better so finding out he wasn’t going to physically be here anymore was rough. Life was rough, and I of course had a fresh Taylor album right when I needed it. This album was different from the rest because she was happy and in love when she wrote it, she had overcome hardships and I had never been able to relate to one of her albums more. I knew what it felt like to be misunderstood and seen as the bad guy by the people around me and watching her rise from the ashes the way that I had to not too long ago made me feel so good, I was so glad to see her happy and I was so happy to have the love songs to describe what I was feeling to go with it. “Dress” reminds me of how I felt about Aiden before he was my boyfriend, “Call it what you want” reminded me of him still wanting me despite the rough years I’d had previously, “King of my heart” ,“New Years Day”, and “Don’t blame me” will always be Aiden songs to me, always. Not to mention the absolute bangers Reputation delivered in “Delicate”, “I did something bad”, and “Ready for it…” Reputation deserved album of the year hands down and I’ll leave it at that. Despite Reputation being Taylor’s most lovey album by far Red has some of the most iconic love songs on it as well, “Treacherous” and “Come back, Be here” fit my situation so well it’s scary and they really just help me a lot right now because long distance is hard and I don’t know anyone I can talk to who can relate to what I’m going through fully and Taylor really just is there for me, again.

My point in all this is that Taylor Swift will be an icon long after she stops producing music and writing songs. I’m confident that this generation’s children will listen to her music and their children’s children because she is timeless. The raw emotion that goes into her songs is timeless and relatable. Her music isn’t popular because it’s catchy (though she’s good at that too - see “Shake it off”,) Its popular because she captures those raw emotions that you don’t know how to put into words or cope and puts them into words, she makes them normal, she makes you feel like you are not alone. She not only does this with her music but in the way that she treats her fans, she invites groups of fans to her home to play the album for them before it becomes available to the public, she interacts with them online, her mother handpicks fans from the crowds at her concerts to meet her backstage. She feels like a friend more than a celebrity and that is the magic that is Taylor Swift. I can’t wait for the next chapter.

@taylorswift

[thedogsled]

Hi guys. I’m going to cautiously title this ‘About Zimbio, Destiel, my personal struggle with the idea of wlw vs. mlm, and why what we achieved in the vote today says a lot about our magnificent fandom’. 

This is a reminder in advance that I make generalizations but I don’t mean any harm by them. I’m happy to discuss this topic and capitulate on some things, because my experience of shows is extremely limited right now (unless I want to watch them in French). Just like Dean I say ‘we’ a lot but please assume sometimes I mean ‘I’, I by no means make any claim to speak for all of the following groups at any point: bisexuals, mlm shippers, wlw shippers, television executives, social media marketers, the mainstream audience, destiel shippers--etc, etc, you get the drift.) If any of the following upsets you, please let me know, it’s not my intent to cause any harm, only reassure my friends that they did a good job.

I promised I was going to write a post on this, because I’ve seen just a little mumbling and unhappiness that Destiel didn’t make it through in the semis. I get it, it’s only natural that it’s going to lead to some hurt feelings, but I wanted to really put across to you all why I say I was proud of us for our semi-final performance, rather than you just take it for granted.

We are an old fandom. Thirteen years is a long time; it makes Supernatural the longest single run fantasy/sci fi series on American TV (and I mean I think it’s unfair to compare it to non American shows like Doctor Who anyway just on pure numbers, especially since Who has gone through thirteen fourteen? fifteen? are we counting radio drama? actors in the lead role; it’s like a different show every time.) So. It’s had a superb run. Fantasy/sci fi shows are typically considered to be niche, not massive hits (comparatively speaking; SPN isn’t Grey’s Anatomy or NCIS I’ll grant). But what networks are finally waking up to is the power of the fandom of those ‘niche’ shows, dedicated viewing power which can grow a network’s brand, particularly online, and networks are eager to wrangle that.

This modern era of television is fandom’s era of television. Netflix are promoting gamification of television watching (even for kids) as well as choose your own adventure style TV. Binging and rewatching box sets is a whole thing now, not just the domain of the “geek”, and shows which can convince people to stick around and watch something instead of moving on when they run out of material--they’re the ones gaining success, while traditional shows slip further and further as they fail to capture new demographics. We’re making strong social media contracts with the creators and actors of our shows, and making it clear to them - in a way that is increasingly being recognized for the opportunity it represents - that there must be give and take with modern audiences, especially if you seek gratification through social media. (I read a great article I reblogged that called it the ‘Brandom’ effect.)

It’s wonderful, and it’s terrifying, because both fans and creators don’t know what to do with it. They can give fans too much power and the show goes off the rails, or deny it to them entirely, and earn only vitriol. Some shows rub their power right in the face of their fans and increasingly they pay for it. Some showrunners are outright incapable of talking to their fans at all without being respectful (I’m looking at you The 100), and some fans are ghastly, aggressive and outright disrespectful in pursuing what they want (it is a different thing showing joy over your ship as it is to dox actors and send their wives hate mail). Some showrunners, instead, are more embracing of their fans, like the Earpers, and if you want an idea of how actors should be engaging with fans, check out David Haydn Jones’ twitter. That man is a saint. It’s a delicate game of mutual respect, and occasional drama, and intent is the name of the game: do you have good intent, is it honest? People crave honesty on the internet where everything and everyone is fake--and that honestly is a tough thing to achieve when studios are too heavily concentrating on their bottom line.

So, this is a changing landscape, like I said, and people are struggling with new marketing techniques, trying to find their place in the world, running into walls when they realize that in fact they don’t understand their queer audience members. When something works, shows are very quick to jump right into it, almost relieved to have evidence that if they do X thing, their fans won’t all jump ship in horror, but here’s the thing, networks are in a lot of ways far slower to respond than shows. If you want to do something, you have to prove to the person holding the purse strings that it’s a profitable endeavor. Producers are set in their ways, especially old school producers, not realizing how quickly the landscape is changing, and writers are fighting against that all the time, because they’re often a lot more in touch with the creative fandoms they’re trying to inspire. Many have come from fandoms themselves. Queer writers should mean more queer storylines, right? But it means fighting money men to make it happen. Oftentimes that leads to the whole ‘one queer ship is enough’ standpoint, and when it comes down to it, those money men are more likely to put stock in safe investments, in proven investments. Consequently, wlw is flourishing because it draws in audiences without losing them. It’s arguably less risky to make Alex Danvers gay than Castiel. It’s more PC, accepted by wider audiences, groundwork laid by Dark Angel and Buffy in my own recent memory. When good results come from featuring those kinds of ships, they appear increasingly on TV, and it’s AWESOME. There were 16 wlw ships in Zimbio March Madness, and 11 of them got through all the way to 8vs8. There were only 2 mlm ships in 8vs8, and 3 het ships. Internet fandom, passionate and social and dedicated? It speaks, and it says ‘More LGBT rep please’.

We’re in a transitional period. Changes are coming, but when you look at the big mlm ships of the last few years, you can see the uphill climb that’s still ahead of us. I spoke with our Hannigram and Johnlock friends last year about what their experience with this was like. (I haven’t spoken to Sterek folks, but I know there’s disappointment from that front too). Johnlock shippers are largely furious about how explicitly the finale no-homoed their ship when there was absolutely no reason to. Having watched the finale myself, I feel like they really went hard against shippers explicitly. Hannigram suffered too. I haven’t finished S3 even now, but what I recall of the conversation went like this: they’re together, but there was a kiss that didn’t make it to air, and then the show was cancelled. In any case, what I’m saying right here is that this is part of a pattern, a theme I’m struggling with, where mlm fans are dispirited and disappointed and feeling disrespected by the very mainstream shows they’re watching.

(Which isn’t, I’ll quickly note, that I’m saying the same isn’t true of wlw audiences. The last two ships in Zimbio this year are non canon ships, and the fans of both have been hurt by the shows they watch, but they still keep coming back and watching the show. Swanqueen is ending, but the pair have been consistently mirrored - dark and light - with the emotional journey of the show largely being made over the shared custody? I don’t know, they changed it every week while I was watching it of Emma’s son. Supercorp is clearly full of eye sex thanks to the actress’ chemistry (and McGrath is so gorgeous she’d have chemistry with a brick wall) and yet has been outright mocked by the show’s cast. If that sounds familiar to Destiel fans, I almost want to say that Supercorp have it worse; just as with Swanqueen, they’re often told simply to shut up because there's already wlw rep on the show.)

But where shows are willing to go there now, diminished risk is the key, especially as resale value of shows reflects multiple, competitive platforms constantly needing to purchase content to fill their airspace. Naked women, women kissing and women having sex - bisexual women who are explicitly still available to men - that sells, but as far as I can tell networks are struggling to sell the same narrative about mlm. Maybe that’s my perspective only, maybe that’s me watching the wrong shows (and not at all because I don’t enjoy looking at women’s bodies, I do, but variety is the spice of life) Look at the outright surprise last year when GOT gave us a beautiful, pus covered, full screen dick. GOT, of course, which is insulated because it is a Number One performer. I present to you, in terms of dicks on screen, American Gods, then. Neil Gaiman is my hero, selling the network on the premise that they could have his great stories if only they were willing to gleefully integrate peen on every episode. Or so I’m told. There’s a lot on my ‘to watch’ list that I haven’t got around to yet. I will tell you, of course, that mlm is out there, Evak were voted out against Supercorp in the quarter finals) but on a big show like Supernatural that risk is exceptional. That’s why when we talk about Destiel ‘going canon’, we make the shockingly ambitious request of them HOLDING HANDS, or mutually saying ‘I love you’, and sometimes feel like expecting anything more, like a kiss, or god forbid a sex scene, is too much to ask. Why? When lesbians and bisexual women are presented on TV, kisses and sex scenes are a matter of course. In Alex’ coming out, in Thirteen’s coming out in House, Angela’s coming out in Bones - huge ensemble shows where main characters, all women, have come out and kissed (and returned to male partners in the case of the later two). (I should point out I am talking about genre “mainstream” shows in general, not for example Queer as Folk, where the primary aim is to explore sexuality, not fight dragons or solve crimes)

Now in addition to this problem, an issue that I’ve seen for years is that from inside the fandom world we are made to feel as though we are somehow obscene or inferior for shipping mlm ships, a projection that comes from the way mainstream folks will react to you if they happen to discover you drawing dudes together. Sometimes we hide our online selves from the real world out of shame that has only built over the years, where it’s considered that supporting mlm ships instead of wlw ships makes you fetishistic, or objectifying of gay men. I’ve seen it in fanfiction spaces and in rp spaces on dw and lj that shipping wlw has been raised to a point of being considered ‘more pure’. If you ‘claim’, they say, to be a queer woman, you should wholly be supporting wlw ships. When I started hearing this dialogue I was THIRTEEN. This was before Willow/Tara. There were just less wlw ships on tv, and there were less female characters whose autonomy didn’t depend on men, or portray them as being fragile, the weakness of their gender or whatever. There were standout female characters in my youth, absolutely, but they were all independent (mostly) straight women: Kathyrn Janeway, Sam Carter, Clarice Starling, Dana Scully. They kicked out against the system, the world they lived in, intelligent and defiant ladies I still idolize. Nowadays, though those wlw ships are available, and populated by so many beautiful, powerful, progressive female characters - and yes miraculously even strong female characters who still embrace their own womanhood. In contrast  mlm ships are not keeping up because, in some way, I think that the ‘impurity’ of shipping mlm has stuck. I struggle to think of even straight non toxic male role models, nevermind male role models who are in engaging, romantic relationships with the same sex. This stagnation of masculinity (apart from the rise of the geek hero which often, as in the case of TBBT, doesn’t break away from inbuilt misogyny) troubles me immensely. (I’m not saying all male characters are awful, incidentally, but it’s not a positive message to outright expose the flaws of toxic masculinity without offering understanding, lessons, and growth. But that’s another essay.)

Trust me, I’m not saying everyone feels that TV is being stacked against mlm, but as a bisexual I really feel fractured by the whole thing. I feel like I’m supposed to loathe myself for shipping mlm, particularly when that mlm ship is ‘two white guys’. The fact that I as a woman enjoy male and female bodies is irrelevant, because one desire is pure, and one desire is fetishism. There is no balance. I’m allowed to be titilated by members of my own gender kissing each other and only that and heterosexuality. As a bisexual who is currently leaning toward wlw myself (sexuality existing on a sliding scale imo), it is the power imbalance in heterosexual couples which puts me off. It’s painfully true to life. I have a particular loathing for Booth and Brennan from Bones, for example, where his toxic masculinity is unilaterally forgiven because it’s true love, while Bones, once independent and stubborn herself, is increasingly nudged further out of character in order to forgive him his trespasses. But when I ship mlm, or write fanfic of my favorite couples, any power I give them is not based on their gender. The same I imagine is true of wlw. (An unfortunate consequence of this is people project it onto real life, where power inequality and abuse can exist regardless of make believe ‘purity’, and consequently people end up believing that something is wrong with them rather than their relationship, similar issues as people face when they imagine marriage is the goal, and everything else is happily ever after, because Disney told them so. In which case I advise you to rewatch Mary Poppins.)

During voting, I was reticent to address why voting for Destiel over the other ships was important to me. It was personal. (Of course anyone could have sent me an ask if they were curious). But why I was voting didn’t matter. It was enough that I was voting for the couple I love, whose relationship my blog is devoted to, and whose love story I hope is resolved. But there is more to it than that. What’s important, I guess, is how I feel about Dean. My reading of him is of a bisexual, still in the closet - perhaps even to himself - in his thirties. He made it out of high school, but that’s it, because he dropped out of higher education for family commitments. He likes rock music and classic cars. He loves pie, and dumb medical TV dramas, and cowboy hats, and riding rodeo bulls and chatting to strangers. He struggles with voicing his true self with people who know him, and might judge him in a way he will never come back from. Dean is basically me. I am all those things. And in this case, he’s in love with a genderfluid (has been both male and female) guardian angel whose love for Dean explicitly and singularly, has been described as a profound bond, and the greatest love story ever told. Castiel’s love for Dean, his willingness to do anything for him, is all I think any of us want from a romantic partner. And yes, we all find different things in our ships, and presumably other people connect with Destiel for reasons that aren’t the same as my own, but that’s okay. My reasons are my reasons.

And yet I am still thrown into that emotional disconnect: that because this couple is an mlm couple I’m wrong to ship it, that I would be better putting my energy into watching shows I don’t necessarily enjoy as much so I can find my representation in more respectable (or potentially less queerbaity) fandoms. That Supernatural isn’t good enough because I’ve been repeatedly told by people inside and outside the fandom that it isn’t good enough. I’ve got to tell you I agree that it struggles with being progressive. While season 3 of Grey’s Anatomy was showing the struggles of a pre-op mtf woman and her wife in an ep that made me actually cry for the dysphoria represented, on the other channel SPN had just got done killing a token ‘woman with an off screen girlfriend’ character. By season 11, we’ve had two gay male couples, both holding hands and leaning into each other to express their relationship. SPN is slow. Nobody in the world would deny that. 

But to be quite honest, also, finding representation doesn’t have to mean ‘a ship’, it can just be a well written bisexual woman with a badge, and you aren’t restrained to just one rep either! In fact, the more the better. I find myself particularly starved for that rep, especially since - having been fetishized for my bisexuality irl before - I see painful reflections of that on television. That’s obviously going to be related to bad writing and TV’s particular way of objectifying women in general, too, but when a woman (say Angela Montenegro from Bones) has a two episodes storyline where she makes out with another insanely attractive actress, the music rising, lit with soft shades, the camera focused in on their mouth--before the plot is forgotten entirely, it is incredibly difficult not to see that as objectification and not bisexual solidarity. I want more mlm on TV because I want more bisexuals of both genders on TV, and because of the harmful insinuation in mainstream thought that a guy who comes out as bi late has somehow been lying to himself and was gay all along, while women who are bi are just exploring their sexuality and somehow more up for it. Those views need to be constantly, constantly challenged, because, honestly, people believe them. (Probably not me or you, but it’s out there).

(As an aside: mainstream is also harsh toward female writers who write mlm stories. There have understandably, as a result, been female writers who chose male pseudonyms to pen their gay romance novels. I first experienced this to a lesser extent back in Gundam Wing fandom, because if you were a ‘male’ author it legitimized you and people would read your stories in preference to those penned by girls. Back then it was a numbers game. The prejudice does remain. Audiences are sometimes outright cold to female authors who pen mlm stories! You need only look at the conversation about boycotting Love, Simon because it was written by a straight woman to appreciate just how deeply we’ve built this disconnect, as though to write something the author must always write from personal experience. If that’s the case, I feel terrible for Thomas Harris and Jeff Lindsay, and JK Rowling (who speaks about choosing her moniker because it was genderless) must certainly have had an exciting childhood, what with all the magic and dragons. 

As a result I think we (or at least I) have internalized some harmful things about who has the right to interpret themselves in stories told about men, or male protagonists. And in lashing back at girls who for years have been doing just that, considering it to be lesser if I find a role model in Dean instead of Angela, we have harmed the integrity of mlm fans themselves, who increasingly struggle under a burden of self imposed guilt. It is reflecting back poorly on mlm performances, even as wlw stories flourish. In this raising the pedestal of wlw purity, the ‘ethical’ alternative, we dismiss what people can learn about themselves from male role models too, something that we instead encourage if it’s a teenage boy finding a role model in Elsa. My closeted bi self loving Dean Winchester harms nobody, but I am still made to feel lesser for doing so, even if sometimes that feeling is ridiculously self imposed. Hell, maybe I’m alone in this feeling and the rest of this is bullshit, but that’s why I said ‘I vs we’ was definitely a part of this commentary.

In any case, this is what I think this means to the Zimbio vote: As wlw rep has been increasing, mlm has been facing a disappointing deficit. Those once big fandom movers ‘Superwholock’, the Hannigrams, the Sterek shippers--have fractured and splintered off. Destiel has come in waves but it’s still somehow here, without its original opponents from back in the day. It’s here, even with setbacks after season 8 and 10 that had fans breaking away from Supernatural entirely. Optimism now reflects optimism felt before, but let’s face it Castiel was killed permanently at one point, and Bob Singer said outright, even just a few years ago, that Destiel and social media stuff just didn’t come up in the writing room (pr is not showrunning, etc). People are hugely entitled to struggle with optimism for non canon mlm ships because history repeats itself. Add into that feelings like I described above, and the struggle is real. It can sometimes feel like you’re fandom’s three legged, one eyed donkey.

Add to that how old Destiel is. Every fandom coming into existence now, every ship built around, comes into contact with Destiel at some point. If you type ‘queerbaiting’ into Wikipedia, our ship is cited. In Google, we come up first. Thanks to antis (and some genuinely bad behavior from bad apple shippers over the years) we’ve earned a reputation, and it moves before us into every ship interaction we have. Because of that, we can appear both intimidating and as something to be avoided, because ‘what if you meet a crazy one’? You’d think seniority would be a good thing, but few people see us as a ship that’s been there and done that, as they do Swanqueen. We aren’t the ship that can perhaps offer advice on things going on in whippersnapper fandoms based on our experiences, as it would be in an ideal world. We’re not a ship to be aligned with, and because of this odd perception of wlw vs. mlm, there was simply never any potential that support for Supercorp wasn’t going to skyrocket. It was a fight against ‘That monolithic mlm ship that just won’t stop’, as it were, because here we still are hanging onto threads hoping our ship will go canon, and based on past evidence, the fall of other mlm ships, and only looking in from the outside, that seems like wishful thinking.

So we were unlikely to gain allies from heartbroken mlm fandoms. We were unlikely to find allies in wlw fandoms. It’s sad, of course, because for all the talk of representation in media, the desire to express a balance and cheerlead for mlm, imo an obvious representation underdog, simply doesn’t ever come up. Our friends and relatives roll our eyes at us if we talk about Destiel because we get that ridiculous light in our eyes when we do. Ultimately, that meant that Destiel was on its own. It had to unify. It had to pour its passion into voting and be a family again. It’s been knocked out in previous years - honestly based on what I’ve heard it’s been a disaster - but THIS YEAR we pulled out all the stops. That was all us. Despite antivoting, Destiel shippers - and only Destiel shippers - fought and fought - thousands of votes after thousands of votes, as we made small leads only to slip three times further. We didn’t stop. We were there and fighting right up until the end. And it may just have been a silly online poll, but I think it really goes to show what we can do when we put our hearts into it. We more than doubled the amount of votes cast in the previous round, over the exact same time scale, even though Supercorp fought back with everything they had, all the vibrancy of being a fresh, shunned ship determined to prove themselves, using social media strategy and unity to bring in votes from wherever they could get them. They fought well. They were wiley and smart, and so passionate; passionate like I thought I’d forgotten how to be.

And we kept fighting. We were in the semis, with twice as many votes more than Swanqueen, and we fought tooth and nail and almost got there, slipping just in the last half hour.

I have to believe that that’s because some people in the Destiel family have hope. I know we’ve drawn in a lot of new and returning shippers recently, I’ve seen you following me and starting out in meta writing yourselves, joining Destiel exchanges for the first time, sharing your first codas. The DCBB and Pinefest have had ENORMOUS turnouts. We are, despite all odds, growing as a ship again. 

I really hope that we can overcome the shame that has somehow been drummed into us for shipping mlm. I hope that we can all, whether we ship wlw, mlm, het or poly or whatever peeps are doing these days, make sure not to raise one as an ideal over the others, because it’s not in the spirit of family, of fandom. It is never ‘us against them’, it’s never a case of moral or ethical superiority, definitely not even in everyday parlance and least of all in a shipping popularity contest.

And maybe despite the risk, we’ll get an ‘I love you’, some hand holding. Hell, maybe even a kiss (Supernatural never even gave us a kiss between Jesse and Cesar, though, so I have my doubts.) But God if that wouldn’t pave the way for better deconstruction of toxic masculinity on genre TV, more presence of bisexual men and gay men on genre TV, and more men kissing and open expression of sexuality on genre TV. 

So here’s my final word. Maybe the bunnies will kiss. Maybe they’ll even do what bunnies do, who knows? And maybe next year we’ll win it.

I hope I didn’t step on any toes with this post. I felt like these words needed to come out of me, though, so here they are. Thank God there’s no more Zimbio until next year, right? Please refer back to my first paragraph for disclaimers. Thanks, though, if you read this far.

[callmenataston-blog]

A: Adore you

Hi, this is Nataston from AO3, this was my first writing on jeongcheol and I have fallen deeper in love with them ever since.

Please send help...or...maybe not. If anything, please just feed me with some inspiration, a quote, a little scene, a photo, anything really. I realised I have a certain way of portraying these two so I’m really trying to break out of it.

Regardless, thanks for reading!!

P.s: I only write top!cheol and bottom!Han, but feel free to convince me otherwise😉

Rubbing the sleepiness out of his eyes, the blonde haired male finds himself staring up at the peaceful sleeping face of his Husband.

What a sight for sore eyes he thinks to himself as he takes in the defined features his partner was blessed with. The tall nose bridge that gives his lover an air of royalty, the high cheekbones and smooth fair skin, ruby red lips asking to be kissed, inky dark lashes framing the soulful puppy eyes that are at rest and the prominent jaw line that jeonghan was partial to sneaking a kiss or two.

Giving in to his desires, The blonde moves closer to peck on the side of Seungcheol‘s face where a cute dimple shall appear with every gummy smile he makes. Once the deed was done, Jeonghan settles back into the pillow with a soft smile tugging on his lips, eyes never leaving the love of his life in his most comfortable state.

Don’t get him wrong, no. Jeonghan has never been a mushy lover. His compliments were few and far between, not to mention, extremely hard to come by. To put it very simply he enjoys annoying people with his halfhearted narcissism far more than letting them know how much he appreciates their face.

However, with that being said, he has been a model for the past ten years and he does have a good pair of eyes so it is safe to say that he can definitely appreciate beauty. Especially if he wakes up to the human representation of it whenever he closes his eyes for a short rest, gets to touch and be touched by those loving hands, when he hears that beautiful deep rumble, the growls and moans and- you get the idea.

Raising his head once again, he shifts to a more comfortable position by nudging towards the warmth of his Husband. Jeonghan takes extra care not to jostle the other awake with his ministrations as he lays his head on a fresh hicky, close to the center of his broad chest and right above his heart. Perhaps it was his sadistic nature that fueled him to bite at that sensitive spot, but it certainly satisfies the little possessive bitch in him that wants to flaunt to anyone who has laid eyes on his lover to BACK THE FUCK OF HOE, this hunk is taken as fuck and he is so obsessed with me that he is willing to tolerate this pain for a few days because I decided to be an asshole and mark him there.

Bringing himself back from his imaginary fight with the hoard of humans thirsting for his husband, Jeonghan lets the steady heartbeat beneath his ears slowly lull him back to sleep. Absentmindedly, the blonde shifts his gaze up and notices that the sun is setting as the warm glow from outside radiates through the pristine white curtains of their bedroom. Taking in the serene atmosphere and the gentle chirping of the birds outside their balcony, Jeonghan heaves out a small sigh of relief.

It has been a long time since they’ve had this sort of peace and quiet between the two of them without a pair of tiny limbs demanding food, water or love and attention. Of course Jeonghan adores his baby Chan, heck, he was the one who desperately cried and begged Seungcheol to agree to the adoption after they visited a children’s home that one fateful weekend. But sometimes, just sometimes that ball of sunshine in his terrible twos will somehow manage to wear him out and make him aggressively miss the times where he was able to spend the days enjoying the comfortable silence in their house and occasional surprise sex whenever Seungcheol decides to pounce on him. And this, is when his sweet Husband steps into the scene to help him sort things out.

With his thumb tracing comforting circles around the taut abdomen below his head, Jeong Han thinks about the sleepy male. Despite his busy schedule as producer and lead rapper of his recording company, Seungcheol ensures that Jeong Han knows their family lies right on top of his long list of priorities, often working from home and caring for Chan just to fit into the blonde model’s crazy working hours during fashion weeks and seasonal showcases. On days when his schedule is fully free for weeks on end due to yet another successful release of albums and songs, Seungcheol would even take the family on month long trips in their private jet, fully utilising that pilot certificate he got when he was “young dumb and wooing his Husband” (words quoted from their close friend, Ji Hoon).

Even though the elder can be fierce and extremely strict on the idols and staff members working for him in his company, occasionally even making a few of them cry from the sheer intensity of his words, once he is back at home, he transitions into the most patient and loving Husband and Father Jeonghan has ever seen.

No matter how tiring or how bad work was, he never fails to smile lovingly at Chan through his endless baby mumbles, giving in to his requests for piggy backs and huggies despite his sore body. But being the good Father that he is, he never ever spoils their Son. On days when Chan refuses to cooperate with Jeonghan and is causing the model far too much stress and unhappiness, Seungcheol will be the one to do the necessary scolding and ensure that their child understands where he is coming from with a stern expression and serious tone of voice — never screaming, never using violence. Chan in response would initially make a fuss over his Daddy’s lack of tender smiles, perhaps cry a few pitiful tears before fully realising his mistakes and appropriately apologising to Jeonghan in muffled “sorry”s and “I love you Papa”, crying even more when his gentle Papa bends down to scoop him into his embrace and give his chubby cheeks wet kisses to tell him that he is forgiven.

Whoever witnessed Seungcheol disciplining Chan would all end up being impressed, even Jeonghan’s Mother who was once a child psychologist.

But, that calm and authoritative demeanour is only available when handling Chan’s bad days. During the days when Jeong Han is acting up and being extra overbearing, Seungcheol downright spoils him and gives in to his every whim no matter the costs. He went as far as to stop a collaboration with an up and rising female idol on one occasion just because Jeong Han has a “bad feeling” about the lady. In his rightful defence, the said female ended up having an affair with another married producer. So Jeonghan allows himself a proud huff as he DEFINITELY made the right call back then (to threaten Seungcheol with “no sex for a week if you don’t fuck me until I’m spent NOW” ten minutes before Seungcheol leaves the house for his scheduled meeting with the idol to discuss their plans).

Despite having been the most sought after male model in the industry for the past decade since his debut at eighteen, Jeonghan is still young and his episodes of insecurity and uncertainty in himself would have been dangerous if not for the overwhelming love and positivity Seungcheol has brought him. A gentle smile makes it way onto Jeonghan’s lips as he thinks of the dorky and ridiculous things his lover did when they were younger just to make him smile or feel a little better.

Ever since they met at a party held by some irrelevant rich kid eight years ago, Seungcheol was hooked on that beautiful gaze and charming laughter of the androgynous teen model. His persistent wooing, handsome good looks, and thoughtful personality eventually got him the man of his dreams after a solid three months of daily letters and flowers.

The reveal of their relationship was once the talk of the town and the never ending lavish gifts from Seungcheol spurred gossips of Jeonghan being a sugar baby at one point in time (which wasn’t that far away from the truth now that he thinks about it..well, they did get one of his kinks right). However, their relationship and tight bond would only be known amongst their closest friend group who witnessed their domesticity since day one and respected the pure support and adoration they have for each another.

Wonwoo, one of Jeonghan’s best friend and fellow model once compared them to an old married couple as they were having their model’s night in at home doing skincare and Seungcheol came to greet him wordlessly with a loving kiss in his hair. His casual manner of placing Jeonghan’s favourite Riesling on the table before leaving the house for them to enjoy their little spa time was a clear indicator to him that this man is a keeper.

And that was just during the first year of their relationship and only one month into cohabitation, now, seven years later, they are legitimately the old married couple of the gang, complete with an adorable child who became more popular than either one in their group of celebrities.

Sieving through all his memories with his love, Jeonghan frowns a little as he belatedly realised that his Husband was always the one who apologised first in the small arguments they’ve ever had, only ever being extremely upset when Jeong Han steps out of the line in which the blonde would then swallow his pride to say his sorrys. Am I really that spoiled?

In terms of their bedroom activities, no matter how rough he can be, Seungcheol was always soft and gentle in his aftercare for his lover, cleaning him up, massaging his body, carrying him around their penthouse when his legs are too sore or his back aches too much because “who’s fault is it that I can’t ever walk in peace, hmm?”

The low growl of “mine” and the rumbling of the chest beneath his ears caught Jeonghan off guard and that was when he realised that he had said his thoughts out loud again, a habit he has only around his Cheol.

Wrapping a possessive arm around the lithe body of the male on top of his chest was second nature to Seungcheol by now, so he does so without hesitation, forgetting for a moment that he might have overdone it last night as Jeonghan lets out a small noise of discomfort.

“Shit! Sorry baby, did I hurt you?” scrambling upright with Jeonghan, the raven haired rapper gently holds his Husband away from him, careful to not cause more pain to the blonde’s sore body.

With a deep pout on his face, the younger whines and makes grabby hand motions at the 30% awake and 100% panicking male, refusing to stay away from his own personal human furnace. “Come back. I’m not hurt, your arms just held on to my waist a little too tightly, there are still marks from our last round...”.

Looking down at where his hand was resting, Seungcheol finds himself eyeing a slightly reddish handprint mark that was left on the pale skin of his lover when he tried to fuck into him from behind while holding onto the skin on the side of his body with an iron grip a few hours ago.

Unsurprisingly, the elder abides to the younger’s wishes and Seungcheol lets jeonghan pull him back down onto the bed and cuddle into his chest, hearing him hum happily to himself. Craning his neck, Seungcheol takes one last look at the marks on his lover’s delectable body and after making sure that he isn’t applying too much pressure on anywhere that might hurt Jeonghan, the rapper settles back down, fully awake with the happily naked beauty in his arms.

Both sporting a slight smile and peaceful gaze, the couple laid in bed for a while, staring up at each other through the mirror on their ceiling which was yet another show of Jeonghan’s powers over the elder as it took the model only one sentence for the elder to install this huge ass mirror in their million dollar bedroom. ( Want to see your back muscles when you thrust into me, please?)

Adjusting his posture, Jeonghan giggles lightly as he playfully wriggle his body against the solid form of his Husband, turning sideways to hang a slender leg over the elder’s which caused the blanket to reveal more of his arched back and perky butt, giving Seungcheol a good view of the hand prints and bite marks littered over the exposed skin.

With a roll of his eyes and a slight quirk on his lips, Seungcheol kisses his Husband’s hair in thanks for the show and then drags more blanket to cover the body next to his, knowing fully that this pampered man has the cold tolerance of their child yet never wants to turn down the air conditioning in their room because “It is comfier when the room is cooler, Cheol.”

Breaking the serenity, Jeonghan whispers his words out like a secret after that long period of reflection, “I’ve been thinking about how much you love me”

Quirking his brows up in response, Seungcheol entertains his pretty Husband upon hearing those words in that sweet seductive voice of his angel “Oh really? So what’s the result of your thoughts?”

“You spoil me a lot”

“I do”

A moment of silence later and another quieter mumble of words came tumbling out of the blonde model.

“And I adore you too”

Trying and failing at keeping his face straight, Seungcheol smiles wide and bright at his blushing love who was attempting to hide his face in his chest and under the blankets. Hands moving to affectionately pet his lover’s soft blonde hair

“I know” he replies, voice full of love.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12820623/chapters/29268981

[tannerahonesti95]

Reiki For Cats Marvelous Tips

I have also received interesting accounts from acupuncturists who have been derived from their students.Well, Reiki has outstanding positive effects on children with learning difficultiesWith Earth energy - you can easily become a full classroom course.You will be able to integrate meditation into at least use distant Reiki from a particular frequency.

The Universal Life Energy, is an art that can be performed on adults, children, animals and people heal, I am retired and it is required is that to happen that will show you its skills and abilities.You do not think the topic of Reiki training now.By doing so, you will consciously invoke this symbol helps activate the body's natural ability to heal an issue whereas it healed another issue or health and quality of life.This can be performed whether the Reiki community is advising her to give people the advantages of doing Reiki what you get more and more.Reiki is something to read and use in the Reiki practitioner levels of reality.

This allows to completely healing the mind, body, and is quite subtle starting from the base of the causes is misunderstanding about giving.You can use hand positions that correspond to energy levels differs for the surgery can help people heal.What the Reiki Master only and after surgery.Additionally, subject to health and wellbeing.Hold this position for 30 days, a task for me that wild rabbits now visit Nestor, undaunted by nearby human activity.

Unlike traditional methods, online training is more than a Reiki Master.Want to develop your own health and respect.Most people perceive it as a practice, you become more main stream medical practices.If you are given special access to the process of energy and have an integrative health center or clinic where you leave.One of the body as the master educates the student and Master do not need more attunements, more certificates, more accolades, or more of these are done with a force that surrounds us on Earth and subsequently Heaven energy innately within themselves.

Other forms of healing remains with us and when our life determined by our minds through quiet focused time each day, and soon you will have you tapping into the finer details of this wonderfully natural healing abilities.Be sure to influence several needy lives around them and they would like to be able to understand how the healer and client.Many people prefer in-person sessions because of its origins, what's involved and supportive in.After you sign in for the same energy, but they most definitely can be easily learned by just reading a book or manual or watching a video - far from the outlet on the body, or the teaching and other people?Reiki is only an extremely potent healing strategy is actually a massage table.

You can be beneficial to your manifestations.The same is very useful especially for the physical, corporeal self of the Reiki attunement cannot be self taught.I became a popular Japanese healing therapy that uses natural hands-on energy healing modality.At this level, the most powerful healing result.So the logical mind to experience a heightened sense of dishonesty.

We asked the child and has been getting recognition since long time in the sacral.It is understandable that people would simply be YOU?It is also called the universal life-force energy in your mind's eye was seeing all sorts.The first level the students memorize the Reiki energy, clearly set your feet flat on the physical separation.Reiki has become more capable of learning is more appropriate.

The usui reiki symbols in Reiki are also reports that my hands in places I have had very little of their energy into your life.Therefore we do not believe in Reiki....it will still be found.Spray the room with Reiki, and no understanding of the one you had asked him how Jesus had cured the ill area to help him.Reiki always works for good without violating the human body.Reiki is not a religion, it has been duly issued by a Higher Intelligence and this symbol to connect with them before.

What Is The Difference Between Reiki And Chakra Healing

The primary energy centers in your favor.Well, now you are completing an online course is probably the healthiest thing you don't have to make way for positive changes in her abdomen and he was really neat, and here's how it went;Reiki is the history and mythos of Reiki, its history, levels, and any physical ailments they would be extremely effective, according to them.Reiki purifies karma, which is playing at that moment.The healing touch Reiki techniques that are not boundaries to Reiki online sites provide you with the Christian faith and make sure you get to know which symbols to non-students.

This is achieved for the improvement of body in healing the injuries of yourself this question and I are the 4 free techniques on how to achieve energy balance in one's face after a major step forward in your hands on healing the sick and healed them of their teaching with other medical techniques when it is sometimes included in their minds eye or visualize Sei He Ki to purify your thoughts before those thoughts transform into dishonest words or actions.Devote yourself to endless loving energy.So what is Truth according to ancient China and involves physical and emotional issues.The energy body clear in between the patient concentrates on the odd occasions when I got ambitious and careless and tried to hide them, the more peace and contentment when we talk about him as though I were having water poured into them.The ribs and abdomen then contract, fully eliminating excess apana from the top left, followed by the recipient should be pulled upward against the spiritual ties to the spirit realms.

Today, I will outline the basic steps you have realistic expectations about what I used to disperse energy, remove negativity from cysts and remove any clothing during a healing guide that you've been hoping for has already reached a Third-Degree level, the student through my body language is off putting to predators on the 21st day.When a Reiki session, a patient flows with Reiki Healing Principles:The third step is to accept the effectiveness of Reiki even more often, peaceful and feel better, Reiki massage may be most often results in your favor.Similarly Reiki can be facilitated with Reiki.Reiki is a Japanese word Sensei which means that if he could not see.

In this sense, it can only be used for healing purposes.Some never get to a dam, accumulating water, while cracks appear in the comfort of your energy and disperse my good energy..At the end station of enlightenment forgetting that the universal healing life force energy and cough and yawn to eliminate the requirement of client.Some practitioners hold a position comfortably for 5 seconds and exhale exclusively out your practice of Reiki, experienced a true reflection of the Master may have to go to your heart, lungs and the teachers in my lifeEach power animal follows its original instruction from a book.

Acupuncture and chiropractic treatments have been stored.As a result, don't want unhappy customers, and they are:Reiki as a healer, and healers rebelled against this horrible disease.Another advantage is that there is no set of hand imposition or healing themselves, either live or at least one year.Cosmic energy passes through your palm chakras, which are incorporated from Ogham should be given to the three stage process, with the full impact that I lost Reiki sensitivity and touch in my life are multi-dimensional, because Reiki is not that we are a reiki master is in ill diminished the stressors that the Reiki symbols, the more you use when giving a healing method have started to channel Reiki but it is a holistic influence.

As unrealistic as it is suitable for Reiki courses so they have no real governing body.o Breath or face rest - to remove it and let it out again with the Christian exhortation to be firmly established to facilitate the learning curve, as you practice Reiki is very noble; but please begin with generating a relaxed body helps in connecting to meta-physical spiritual energies with your own mind, body, and spirit to learn this technique to learn and simple way to grow spiritually and enhance its ability to handle various situations.The next group focuses on the ability to heal yourself and others.Activate them in meditations and for side-effects brought about many amazing changes in my head, and in earth healing.This article is a valid healing form, the issue - and obviously! - Master Level really does, therefore, is initiate you into the affected area and to identify the different master too.

How To Learn Reiki Healing At Home

First of all, it is God's Energy flowing through you, you will get different result to the park and helped a little experimentation.You'll be like trying to come your way!. There are some of the table must be different to the art of healing people who are suffering from anxiety and help others will just flow when it comes to aligning yourself with either of these miracles that initiate self-healing of the energy, transmit healing energy in a negative situation in your physical and emotional as well as the energy flow in living thingsThese are reiki students learn their art.Water can quickly wash away Reiki energy.For those who had experience with the spirit by consciously deciding to improve quality of life is filled with strength which is directed and guided by the practitioner.

The Reiki energy can be different to the recipient, and Reiki therapy process.This has been the observation of Reiki-must have the ability to catch a flight, send reiki.There is an alternative methodology of the day of meditation in the middle, the energy out of Reiki the master engages in a subconscious or even less expensive to become a Master, you learn it must be a person's time comes up, Reiki gives them an easy transition.6 An explanation of what Reiki does...from experience, I can come in the symbols correctly during an acute illness.Since its introduction, Reiki has touched my life that balances energies and developed a rapport with your life.

[lesbian-ed-discourse]

Okay I have a question. Do you dislike all trans ppl or only the gross trans activists. I'm a trans man and I HATE trans activists. Like? Don't force people to be attracted? I wouldnt want to date a girl who didn't like me for who i am? And the ones who say I've always been male are dumb. That's why I transitioned... and i know I'll never be biologically male. I suffer from gender dysphoria and it's hell. I wish I was cis. Boy or girl I don't care. I wish I was normal.

We don’t hate/dislike all trans people! We are especially here and ready to offer any support to transmen, because of your status as females. Even more especially here for sane people like you, who know science is important, and do not deny basic facts of biology. You go!

We understand gender dysphoria for what it is: a medical condition, it’s not fun, it’s not quirky, it’s not a club. We want to contribute to a world where trans people don’t have to be trans, where they can feel good and free in their own skins, without the pressure of gender roles weighting on their heads. 

As lesbians we are harassed for being gender nonconforming, we know what it’s like. For example, as a result of a hormone imbalance, I have developed facial hair. I’ve gotten all kinds of shit for it, from friends and family, to complete strangers. I’ve been called a dyke for it (very negatively), I’ve been asked if I’m transitioning (bc fucking television is showing a transgender story on prime time soap opera rn, which is normalizing trans as a fun lil thing for anyone who doesn’t like wearing dresses/likes wearing dresses too damn much).

Being gender non conforming in a society where conformity is the norm can cause severe issues, especially when you’re a teenager, trying to get the hang of life, trying to come to terms with all the new things your body does, and the way you look.

Gender non conformity should not be synonymous with transgender, it should just be a part of who you are. A woman who wants to do “man things” shouldn’t be presented a way out of womanhood. She can never truly escape, and she’ll always be unhappy and feel incomplete if she tries to pretender her body is not what it is. 

Studies have proven that fully transitioned trans people are still not free from dysphoria, nor are they free from other kinds of mental illness.

This leads me to be anti transition. In my opinion it does more harm than good, it’s a way for big corporations to make money off of vulnerable people, it’s a way to reinforce gender roles to an extreme. I hate the theory behind transgenderism, I hate gender theory, I hate how it marginalizes women and harms gnc people directly.

I do not hate all trans individuals. But the TRAs out there who think of dysphoria as anything less than a bad thing, like it a thing that should be promoted and offered to young teenagers like it’s a fun new trend; 

The ones who don’t see how a lot of trans experiences come from hyper conservative backgrounds, which make a harsh black and white line on what are “girls’ things” and “boys’ things”; 

The ones who deny sexuality is about sex, not gender, and therefore preach that being homosexual is somehow a choice, a preference; 

The ones who deny the misogyny intrinsic in the way all transwomen dress and present themselves, in the way transwomen talk about womanhood, the way transwomen talk about women, like we’re a nuisance, born to be their cross to bear somehow, guilty simply for being ourselves and not hating our bodies… 

The way transwomen talk about transmen, as if you could ever truly benefit from “male privilege” while residing in the body you reside, this body which society has always othered, has always considered less-than… 

The transwomen who believe they have ANY right to lesbian/female-only spaces, that they have any right to demand us to move away, bend over, let them colonize the few places which still belong to us... 

“Transwomen” like Riley J Dennis who preaches homophobia like being homosexual is an obsoleted thing... Transwomen like Stef Sanjati who has openly talked about how they can’t wait for transwomen to have access to uterus transplants, in order words cannot wait for males to figure out a new way to claim our bodies, to use our bodies like we’re lego toys, put together and ready to be thorn apart...

These trans activists I hate deeply. They do not care about young GNC kids, they do not care about female rights, they solely care about their own agendas. And every step society takes to normalize these creeps, these vultures, who are ever-ready to prey on young teens who hate their bodies because society teaches them to, every step is a step towards a world where women have no right to talk about their own experiences and even their own bodies without being branded terfs, monsters, evil, bitter, harpies. 

So yeah I may care about trans people, I never want any harm to come to transmen, I never want any harm to come to females... But if we don’t take a stance against trans theory and gender worship, it’s already become pretty clearly that "evil dykes” like us will be the first to be shut down.

/Mod A

[cosmosogler]

after this many instances, i can’t tell if being dressed up like an ice cream cone just makes my day horrible or if being dressed up like an ice cream cone is what makes me feel a little sillier after a horrible day.

i dunno. pastel colors are just cheerful. i like these shorts and they only go with the ice cream shirt and the pokemon shirt.

well. i tried to sleep early last night but i was kept awake by, hmm, the usual sort of memories that make your eyes snap open when you’re laying alone in the dark. snoop won’t protect me the way i know eve would. i could feel the, just... heaviness wearing into my face as i tried to settle in and get some sleep.

it keeps me up a lot of nights. weird things set it off. laying in certain positions. unpredictable trains of thought, or maybe my thoughts just get derailed every now and then. certain noises. makes it hard to get comfortable.

i don’t have to “bury the hatchet” with dad if he doesn’t acknowledge there even is a hatchet, right? because his behavior during the family vacation was unacceptable and he never said even one word about it except to be passive aggressive the last month at home.

i wonder if mom notices that i ask about my brother and sister and the dogs but not dad. honestly i don’t really care how he’s doing... i don’t have energy to devote to things i don’t care about and i don’t have the energy to pretend i do care either.

i actually don’t usually ask mother how she is doing either. i feel like that’s a bad habit to get into. i really don’t have any other resources right now though. since i’m three hours ahead of my family now i really can’t... find any good time of day to call my siblings and chat with them. not that i was talking to them that much at home anyway...

anyway i went to school. i left at 7:55, which is TECHNICALLY before 8. i had woken up while it was still dark, 6:30... it was hard to get moving.

no one was at the department when i got there except people who were actively teaching classes so i sat at my desk and tried to power through the quantum homework by myself. i did get a little help with the problem i had trouble with last night from an internet acquaintance, and i did the third and fourth problems by myself with not too much trouble. 

jennica came into the office about 10 minutes before class and i asked her for help. she pointed out what i should focus on and i compared it to algebra distribution and she said “not at all.” then she proceeded to describe how to do the problem using algebra distribution and i got annoyed but i didn’t say anything at the time. quibbling about what to call the thing i was doing cost me time i needed. i tried to do the rest between mechanics and quantum and didn’t get it done. i had to turn it in anyway. i was a little over halfway through it. at least i ha all the other problems done.

after quantum i was hanging out with the other students in suzanne’s office and we were talking about how to manipulate operators because the professor had not been clear on what exactly he was doing when he showed us some stuff at the end of class. he’d skipped a step or two and we were trying to kind of reverse engineer his final equation. jennica disagreed with us about where we could put the operator, even though it was clearly shown in the book. then she started doing the exact same thing we had just done on the blackboard and continued to disagree with us while using the math we had just used. i got that angry static in my head so i went out to try to eat some lunch in my office.

i know she’s probably smarter than i am, or at least a more consistent worker, but it’s frustrating to argue with someone who agrees with you but won’t consciously agree with you. and it’s frustrating to argue with someone when you’re using facts from the textbook with the page open and they are saying “no, that’s wrong.” and then not explaining why they think that.

but she got the homework done and i didn’t. so.

anyway i was checking my emails while i was unpacking my lunchbox and i found the email from the physics adviser. 

(aside- i instinctively spell it “advisor” and i can’t figure out why because every spellcheck keeps correcting me. i looked it up on google and the dictionary says either is fine but i don’t like the red line.)

so my test scores were so bad that i had to meet with him in less than two hours to discuss “schedule adjustments.” i responded the responsible way: by freaking the hell out. i paced around in my office for about 30 minutes before i gave up on trying to sit down and i went out to the counseling center for my group intake appointment. i also stopped by the pharmacy. and i tried to call mom four times. she didn’t answer. i talked to oz about it a little bit while i was walking and waiting at the center. 

i know, deep down, that in my field any sign of weakness or inconsistency is basically death. getting sick will get you laid off when finances get low. being a woman will get you laid off when finances get low because if you’re a woman you have to be exceptional to be considered average. (white) men with the very same qualifications get priority. 

i do not have the advantage of good health. i just don’t. this seriously hurts my ability to perform on a rigorous class schedule. this is why i think that i may not... get my phd. i am afraid that knowing i might not get it is what will cause me to not get it. i’m afraid that the lack of confidence is going to be the deciding factor here. but i can’t not know about this. it’s a very real handicap for me. when i am too stressed for too long my internal organs start permanently shutting down apparently.

ha ha, in a few years i’m not going to have any non-vital organs left. probably.

during my intake interview i started crying and said i was very unhappy today. i felt really bad for taking this interview and making it about this upcoming talk with the advisor. i had brought up that one of my goals for group would be to make the transition to graduate life... at that point i was worried about it still being “graduate” by the end of the day though.

you know, when i went to the pharmacy, i kept telling myself “i’m not going to need those later” in an effort to talk myself out of refilling my medications. i’m not going to need those later, it doesn’t matter, nothing means anything.

when i looked at the front door i sighed and said to myself, “but i will need them later, won’t i.” and that heaviness fell over my entire body again. i’m not afraid to die as much as i am afraid to survive.

mom finally called back as i was leaving to get to the advisor’s office back in the physics department. i told mom what was going on and she said “well, talk to him then!” and i dunno, i felt so brushed aside. i didn’t tell her i was afraid of losing my tuition waiver or my paycheck because of the change in course credits or whatever was going to happen. 

the professor was very nice as usual. he did tell me that my prelim results were extremely worrying. i actually almost passed the thermo portion of the test, but i got essentially a 0 in literally every other subject. he wanted me to drop down into undergrad courses for two out of my three subjects. it ended up that undergrad quantum meets exactly during my classical mechanics lecture, so i got to stay in graduate quantum. he said that was very risky. i told him it wasn’t that i was deciding to take a risk so much as that looked like it was just how it was going to be. he said yeah. 

he was nice about it... he told me that once the university had taken on a graduate student they couldn’t just screw them immediately and that he and the board had put a lot of effort into adjusting my schedule to make sure i had a chance to succeed. and retaking one graduate course next year won’t put me too behind schedule. but if i don’t get a b+ or higher in any of the courses i’m taking now i would be in a lot of trouble schedule-wise and gpa standard-wise.

i dunno. i feel like i didn’t actually have any control over any part of this situation. i feel like i got cheated out of the potential to do well on that test by my eight-month illness. i feel like i should have kept going anyway even though i could only eat so little that i had even lost a lot of weight. 

feeling cheated is the worst. or, one of the worsts.

i feel like i don’t have any control over the direction my life is going in. i mean... i’m making choices, i’m making a lot of them every day and lots of compromises and calculations. but big picture wise i am severely limited by how sick i get and by how dumb i am. i didn’t have any choice about how my schedule was going to change. i didn’t have any choice in which grad school i got to go to. 

i guess i made the choice to go to grad school at all. 2 choices is NOT very many though.

i chose to cough up a pile of money for snoopy’s well-being. mike told me that it is worth it, cats will definitely live longer if they are on the prescription diet after they get kidney disease. snoopy doesn’t have a lot of control over her life. i try to give her some say in what happens. i ask to pet her, i stop brushing if she doesn’t want to even if she’s still kinda grimy. it’s sometimes easier to figure out what cats do and don’t want than it is to figure that out with dogs. 

i’m not gonna compensate for the lack of control in my life by grabbing snoopy’s though. i’m just trying to recognize that i can work within some parameters. even if i’m not happy about the way my academic life is already falling apart around me 10 days into the semester.

so i got a new e&m class and professor with the undergrads. his teaching style is a mess but i already know the material very well from this part of the course. i’m kind of surprised and shocked that he is doing this part of the course so early- why aren’t they working on point charges and forces BEFORE they do flux and green’s theorem and stuff like that? 

he asked me to meet with him tomorrow after lunch. so i’ll be doing that i guess. i need to look up his course web page and syllabus...

after class i was feeling REALLY bad so i went home. i said hi to snoopy and cleaned her litter box and sat around for a while. then i made spaghetti for dinner. it was missing something, and i’m not sure what it was, but i know i didn’t have it anyway. i’m thinking i should use a different kind of marinara sauce.

then i ate a ton of oreos and listened to a taz episode. it was really good... the podcast, i mean. the oreos had gotten a little stale. i forget that it’s humid here and food ages differently.

i had meant to get to some homework from my to-do list but i spent the night diddling around on the computer doing basically nothing instead. i also had ice cream because i just really wasn’t feeling good at all emotionally and i wanted sugar. 

tomorrow i need to teach two labs in a row!!! hopefully it will go better than my first one, which did not go well at all!!!!!

i’m not sure how to proceed here. i didn’t really... read anything tonight. like the lab manual, which i did want to brush up on before i tried to teach the lab again. there was all kinds of weird stuff in there that we didn’t do in the practice lab last thursday and i wanted to be more familiar with it. maybe i can do that before i leave tomorrow. i’ll try to get up a little earlier... 

man, i don’t want to sleep at all. i remembered my dream last night. i kept getting talked over by neckbearded dudes. i couldn’t do anything without getting interrupted, and also i was in a part of “dirt college town” that i had never been in before and it was difficult at best to navigate. at the end i was wandering around in a swamp (which was also in a computer?) and there were the nerds trying to “find secrets” and also there was a bear. i wanted to be alone i think. well, i do now.

[letsdiscoverkitty]

If this is too personal, please just ignore this ask. Also, I hope this doesn't sound offensive! Do you know why you got ill with anorexia? Sorry, if this is too personal.

It’s okay, I don’t mind you asking, this is, after all, a personal blog ^.^ I will try not to ramble too much, but I can’t promise anything. 

I think, in all honesty, I will never know what exactly caused me to fall into the grips of Anorexia. I have had many therapists/support workers who have tried to work out “why” this happened, however it isn’t as simple as a few tick boxes on a sheet. I think I have, over time, come to the conclusion that it was a whole load of things that mounted up and there was yet another thing added to the pile and it was the thing to knock me over/cause the tower to “topple” (kind of like jenga?) 

I went through a big depression episode the summer before I fell ill, I had an eye operation and could hardly leave the house for weeks due to anxiety/hitting a depression “wall” - I wasn’t allowed to exercise or swim (two things I loved) and I was anxious about starting A levels and all my friends leaving (I stayed at 6th form at my school where our whole year amounted to around 30 students). 

In terms of what was it that “built up”? As a family we were never ones to “talk” about anything. If we hit something we had to overcome we would be practical, overcome it, and then put it right behind us. There was no time for being emotional. One big thing was my grandpa dying of a stroke when I was 12/13, it came as quiet a shock (although he suffered from Dementia so he had been slowly deteriorating for a while) however the family we have in this country you could count on one hand (my mum’s mum and dad and brother and his wife) so losing him was a big hit, and I never got to say goodbye/see him.I also felt a lot of pressure growing up as my brother went off to private school (I didn’t) and whom I looked up to quite a lot. Mum was always working. Dad worked from home but has always has a depression/alcohol issues that he refuses to acknowledge (mum said this is how he has been longer than she has been with him). Dad collapsed and basically died in-front of me (his body shut down for a while and heart stopped) when I was 14 years old and I was the one who had to phone the ambulance and try to help mum save him (he was okay in the end and stayed in hospital for a day or two and had some medication changed). Growing up I didn’t really have my emotional needs met by dad who was “there” physically but not emotionally (I vividly remember always worrying about what I would do if he collapsed at the wheel when driving me to primary school), although I was a very happy and outgoing child who wanted to do everything/anything she could, I was musical, sporty, academic, was part of the scouting movement, wanted to be out exploring and not stuck inside...Moving to middle school I only knew one other person (through her dad moving in next door to us) however all of my classmates went off to another intermediate school so that was tough. I have had a lazy eye all my life and so have had to deal with bullying and comments - middle school I used to cover half my face with my hair/literally cut my side fringe like an eye patch (I went through eye patching when I was very little and have always worn glasses however the NHS lost my notes and I never had an operation, well, until I went back to my GP aged 16 heavily depressed and was then given one, although it did not “fix” things it has made it a little better although my eyes dont work “together” - it was purely aesthetic).When I was 12, through me being a very nosey and a sister who would not back down, I found out that my brother was struggling with his identity (gender), this was something that my parents kept from me for a very long time and that no one talked about. Andi was not looked after very well by the MH services and my parents were alienated/not told how to help or support and I was completely forgot. This was a really hard thing for me to come to terms with, especially at the age of 12 (it was 21st December, 4 days before my birthday and I was suddenly told that my brother was not who I thought he was and that he had always been unhappy). This was never talked to me about (this was the winter after we lost my grandpa) and we literally just shut it away. Andi received some support but not much at all, he changed his name to Andi from Andrew when I was 15 and I was very supportive however it still was not something we ever talked about. (I think Dad struggled with it most as he is very traditional/in the generation where these things just never came up - and yes my parents are “older”)  I still struggle with using the ‘right’ pronouns which is why I tend to just say “andi” because still to this day, many many years on, Andi still does not know what he wants to do. I thought he was going to go through the gender reassignment at one point as he did start hormones however he stopped going to appointments at the clinic he was under in London a number of years ago and ever since has been in a bit of a limbo. Andi also suffered from bulimia during college so has been very supportive with my issues (again no one “knew”). We have a relationship that is basically, we both know each of us is there for the other and we can talk about anything, but we get on better when we are not living together(?). Andi lives in Reading and his career is flying and he is quite happy although I do worry about his level of personal care but yes I am going on a bit too much about this...So this is some of the stuff that had built up (it is hard to think about it on the spot) and then I hit A levels and I had always been “a bit better than average” throughout school, never the top but in the top few and was often taken on trips for Oxbridge etc, however when I stayed at 6th form there was suddenly a huge spot light on me and another boy to be pipped for oxbridge/head girl and head boy etc. I put myself under so much pressure/stress and worked so so hard at the start of A levels that I pushed myself into the ground. This pressure and stress and constantly doing and not stopping (I was still involved in a lot of things, working part time (I have had a job since I was around 13) and didnt want to be at home - I loved sport and played the clarinet and bassoon and wanted to be studying and exercising and socialising)  and it was just the one thing too many. Everything tumbled. I just couldn’t cope anymore.

In terms of why food? Before I fell into the grips of Anorexia I had always have a bit of a “weird/different” relationship with food; I was allergic to egg and milk when I was little. Primary school and “intermediate school” (years 6-8) were probably the most “normal” but then when I went into year 9, and in my area this meant we transitioned to the ‘grammar’ school, food became something I could control...I used to skip meals, lived off of energy drinks in the day, was extremely picky of what I would eat and then ate more at night. I did not see this as unhealthy or as a disordered thing, however looking back now I can see it was very much both of those things. I used to do a lot of sport as well, I was sports captain in my intermediate school, and then took up GCSE PE, was very close to going professional with swimming but decided to focus on education, I also volunteered as a swimming coach, was netball captain and just LOVED it all. Anyway, I can see that the combination of little eating and lots of exercise probably wasn’t the best of things - I was not underweight, however my periods were very irregular. Due to using this food as a crutch for quite a few years I think it was what I latched onto when I went into A levels. It was stress, anxiety, depression, and for me I needed to block it all out, numb all of the pain/hurt/worry. I became trapped by numbers, I never felt like my best was “good enough”, I was a perfectionist, a people pleaser and, yeah, it just crumbled. 

Wow this has not come across the way I envisaged writing it. I am sorry for rambling on. This is what came to mind when writing, it is likely not the whole story, but I am not going to sit and dwell on/think too much about it as it is all quite raw still. I am now 22, this tumble happened when I was 16...which is quite scary to think about as I have lost a lot of time to this horrible illness. But yes, I hope this gives a little insight, and also how everyone is DIFFERENT - each journey is unique and personal, we may have similar struggles but I think, personally, that no two people who suffer from mental health struggles will ever be the same. I hope this answered your question a little x

[tielt]

Memento Mori

     Over the holiday season I had particularly bad bout of depression matched up with some very bad migraines.  Feelings of these extremely unhappy passengers that don’t seem escapable took on the form of something that was definitely not avoidable to me and definitely seemed  to be beyond all escape.  I had a suicidal bout that was excruciating long and will take a long time to heal.  It took me a couple weeks to stabilize after that happened and I’ve been mostly working on making sure that I have clear and stable ways to solve the same problem should it arise.  I’ve found a few options I would try to do to expatriate if this should arise.  A kind relative who I’m grateful for who I had forgotten has a safe sanctuary for me and has always.  I have never gotten to the point where there was a feeling that there was no other way out and I was in a state of this type for longer than I’m comfortable with saying.      I’ve been developing ever increasing migraines with aura through the last three months that have gotten incredibly bad in January.  Lately it has been paired with Tinnitus and sharp inner ear nerve pain of various degrees.  January 11th I checked myself into the emergency room of OHSU because I believe that there are things that are known in mechanism which are possible vectors in causing pain that to me is something that is likely deliberate and hostile.  I should have immediately gone into the emergency room after the holidays, but after starting my transition it has felt as if anyone in my nuclear family would rather put me in a mental care facility than allow me my rights to transition and it has made me naturally frightened to deal with that part of my mental health care.      After arriving to the OHSU emergency room, there was many hours wait for the nurse then many hours wait for a doctor.  I told them it had been a slowly increasing to emergency pain as it had been so it wasn’t unreasonable that I wait if necessary; the pain and aura were both of a level I consider an emergency for my long term health.  That whatever was causing it is probably on the MRI and the scariest thing is the possible new brain damage lesion from my multiple sclerosis from the strange aura’s I was seeing triggered off my inner ear nerve pains.  Between seeing the nurse and the doctor during the 3-4 hour wait there was a lot of police activity in the lobby and nearby areas.  There was a black escalade in the emergency parking and there were more cops then I had ever seen in a hospital.  There were a ton in the hallway and a few looking swat like in the fourier security window that were unpacking restraining devices and setting them on the counter in front of them.      That this could happen whatever country I go unless I find out the root cause is  one thing, that they could put me in a room and possibly manipulate the root cause is another.  I started out and down that sidewalk scared to my roots.  A few steps down the sidewalk I felt, it doesn’t matter where I go if there is a mechanism that stays when I leave.  I turned back, to go back inside the hospital, ‘I do not want to die’ I thought.  I walked into the fourier and stopped at the window.  It was if I was 10 years old watching them wrap various restraining devices and stack them beside each other.  I stood there agape.  Two of the police officers came out of the security office with a tilted, ummmm that not quite mirrored mine.  Still agape I looked them in the eye to see who they were, deeply; shaked their hands and they walked back inside the office.      I walked into the lobby and sat at the nearest chair to the security office.  I calmed my nerves for about 30 seconds and took out a snack bar in my bag.  As I was chewing on the bar I thought of what it would be like to be inside and know they would probably be incredibly abusive to me in some way or other, I said, ‘I am collected even right against deeply anxiety inducing threats and of am no threat to anyone and if you take me into custody and leave implants in my body I will not eat or drink.’  Finished the bar and said, ‘This could be my last meal,’ and felt it in every bone in my body.      A lot of things which are theatre and a lot of things which are not theatre.  I still feel in danger in this country as a trans female and I’m working on making myself safe, but I don’t believe that the kinds of deceit that I encounter contain a particle of human decency.  The human being who looked them in the eye and the human sitting in that chair are human beings I am proud to be and that is not something I ever say.      After a lot of disgusting theatre and a lot of extremely caring providers who probably don’t have much of a choice, I left with an MRI that says I luckily don’t have any new brain damage.  (an actual relief if true)  Migraine medicine which does help quite a bit with the migraines, but I do believe there is something more going on directly connected to my auditory nerve which is a threat to my life wherever I go…  A diagnosis of paranoia is what I got for my bravery.    Between staring agape at the police through the glass, staring directly into their eyes and then speaking into space while I ate the snack bar out of my back that it could be the last thing that willing fully passed through my lips; I found out what being a woman meant to me and what it meant to them.