#I could write an essay about how much this man works hard and suffers for others

[tatatale]

ITSSGTDYODOFOYVOU

DREAM WAS THERE!

(Dream is my favorite)

The cute boomer! [x]

[yoyoyokii]

It all ended too soon

Law x Reader. sadness... 💔

doing this instead of an essay? maybe.

A CLASSIC LAW ANGSTISH MOMENT UHM I CANT WRITE HAPPY ENDINGS SORRY SO UHM... I wasn't even gonna do a decent ending but i got told off for making it too brutal so...

ENJOY (maybe)

1.9k words tyvm 😤

༺｡° .ᘛ𓆩♡𓆪ᘚ. ° ｡༻

You can’t sleep again. It’s 5am now, or so you can assume by a quiet rustling in the kitchen, signalling that Sanji must be awake. You haven’t properly slept for over a week now and it’s given you enough time to memorise the entire crew's routines. Sanji is the first to wake up at 5, Brook also wakes up at this time but just kinda stays in his room for a while. Robin moves out at 6, Zoro and Nami 7, Usopp 8. Franky is the last to walk into the common room at about 9. Then there’s Trafalgar D. Law, the one person on the ship that you were never meant to get so used to, that you were trying so hard to keep unfamiliar.

Key word, Trying.

But how could you not know everything about him? When it all happened so naturally… When one day you were fighting alongside each other as allies, simply as part of a formed alliance, and the next you found yourselves entangled, both in body and spirit, beneath the stars. It was all too much of a cliche for your liking, but you have to admit that it was an enjoyable one.

In a restless fit, you peel the covers off of your body and sit up. Law sleeps beside you. He lays still, undeterred by the bed's sudden movement. You watch with sunken eyes and a heavy heart as his chest gently rises, gently falls, and then gently rises again. It’s unfair how peaceful he looks like this, how he sleeps so beautifully while you suffer alone through the darkness of the night.

He’ll be gone again come spring, but this time you’ll probably never see him again.

It’s not like neither of you didn’t know it was going to end like this, you were aware of it from the start. Law’s the captain of Heart Pirates and you’re a Strawhat, the odds were never gonna work out in your favour.

A soft sigh escapes the lips of the man resting to your right and you decide to get up before your emotions catch up to you. You cringe at the way the bed squeaks as you stand up, as you move to pull on the nearest jumper in your proximity before heading to the door.

Before walking out into the hall, you take one last glance at Law. The bare skin of his shoulders reflect the dim glow of the moonlight that has seeped through a small gap in the curtain. It’s as if he’s sparkling, he seems almost unreal, unworldly beautiful, yet he’s never looked so human. So vulnerable. 

Leaving the room and closing the door ever-so-quietly, you tiptoe to the kitchen in search of some solace. 

“Hey love,” Sanji looks up at you with a concerned smile as you enter. He’s standing by the stovetop boiling some water with a hand lazily sitting in his pocket, “still can’t sleep, huh?”

“Nope,” you move to lean against the kitchen counter, sighing. A frown pulls downward at your lips as you watch the cook move to get a mug, putting together a warm concoction of caffeine, just for you.

Sanji hands you a fresh cup of coffee. It sits within the palm of your hands. It’s entirely too hot and borderline painful, but you’re too drowsy; your mind is too hazy to care. 

This has all become a part of your daily routine; you spend hours being tormented by your own emotions, then when Sanji wakes up, you meet him in the kitchen where he’ll make you coffee and then beg for you to talk about what the hell is up with you. It isn’t the pink pilates princess 5 am perfect IT girl routine you wish it was, but it was familiar enough by now to be comforting. You also simply enjoyed Sanji’s presence. You had a good friendship with him, he never told anyone about your business and you never told anyone about his.

“This is eating you alive, isn’t it?” He poses it as a question as he turns to prepare a coffee for himself, but really, it’s more of a statement.

You nod. It’s like the past few months have been a weird lucid dream and now that it’s almost time for you to wake up, you don’t know how you’re meant to face reality again.

You take a sip of the coffee, it burns your throat on its way down and it’s painfully bitter but it’s your own doing. You told Sanji, the first time you came to visit him so early in the morning, that you wanted it black with no sugar, as if you wanted to use it as a form of punishment. As for what you were punishing yourself for, you never quite knew.

“I’m just so scared of this all ending,” your eyes begin to glisten beneath the fluorescents of the kitchen and you bite the inside of your cheek. The white-knuckle grip on your coffee cup threatens to break the handle clean off.

“Sweetheart, you’re doing a great job of keeping it all together for Law's sake, but you can cry, it’s okay.” He says softly as he steps closer to you, taking the mug out of your hand and placing it down on the counter beside you before capturing you in a hug. It’s gentle, full of concern, and you lean into his warmth, desperately needing the comfort. It’s a gesture of acknowledging that he understands and it’s something that he’d never let the other crew members see. It’s something he’d keep just between the two of you.

“No. I promised myself not to cry until he’s gone,” you squeeze your eyes shut, protesting against the tears threatening to escape as you continue to utter into his chest, “what kind of selfish person would I be? We both knew this could never last.”. He doesn’t respond, he just holds you until your breathing becomes more even. Sanji knows you won’t listen, he’s tried, but god knows you are too stubborn for your own good. Your intentions were always too pure and you always let them hurt you in return.

He comforts you like this for a while, only pulling away when the sounds of someone else waking up begins to echo through the ship’s halls. He takes a step back and places a reassuring hand on your shoulder for a moment before turning away to prepare breakfast.

…

It is Spring now, and it’s time for Trafalgar Law to return to his crew.

You’ve all stepped off of the Thousand Sunny to say goodbye and you can’t quite focus on what the rest of your crewmates are saying to Law, or how they are even reacting to him leaving. You should probably be consoling Chopper, seeing as he looked up to him so much, but you don’t have it in you to take a single step forward, let alone think of the right words to say to the small reindeer.

You only snap back to reality when you notice everyone has turned to look at you. You still feel detached from your own body as you let your feet take you over to where Law stands. You stop just before him, tilting your chin to look up at him.

You try to speak but every vowel clings to the back of your throat, and with every breath, it feels like your tongue is choking you out.

How are you meant to compose yourself, when he looks down at you with the only eyes in the world that knows the true depths of your heart and soul?

“It all ended too soon, I'm sorry.”

He finally breaks the silence and you force back your tears in an attempt to preserve your own personal vow, opting instead to bite down into your lower lip. As blood begins to draw, and the taste of metallic begins to lace your gums, he steps forward and wraps his arms around you, placing a chaste kiss on the top of your head.

He is soft, he is warm, and he is everything you could never be.

“don’t be sorry, you aren’t allowed to be sorry.” You say shakily into his chest, “I enjoyed every second of our time together, I’ll never regret it.” your words come out as nothing but a muffled whisper but he understands nonetheless, he always understands.

“I wish I didn’t have to go, but there’s nothing we can do about it” he speaks into the softness of your hair, and although you can’t see his current expression, the dread in his voice was enough to alert you of the sorrowful look on his face. 

“I know.”

There’s a brief pause. He clings to you tighter.

“I have to go.” It hurts for you to hear as much as it hurts for him to say it. His determination to stick to whatever complex plan he has constructed in his head was something you always admired, but you selfishly wish that just this once, he wasn’t so damn smart and calculative. You wish that his stubborn and borderline unkind demeanour would falter for just a second, so that you could understand how he truly feels about the situation at hand. Of course, however, there is nothing to be done, Law is not a man that you can change so easily. He loves you, and you know that, but he simply can’t be distracted from taking the correct path.

He finally loosens his grip on you.

“I know.” You whisper as you breathe in his scent for the last time as his arms fall back to his sides. It takes you a moment, but you let go of him and step back, out of his grasp.

Law can’t bear to look directly into your eyes, the sorrowful look on your face doesn’t suit you and he will never forgive himself for doing this to you. He chooses to glance down at your feet for this next part; the hardest part.

“Goodbye.” He finally says with hesitance. This is all too cruel, in any other life you two were endgame. out of all the timelines to coexist, why did you two have to be in this one?

“Goodbye.” Before you can say anything else he grabs your face and presses his lips onto yours. Your final kiss; it’s heartfelt, it’s familiar, and it’s comfortable. His lips manage to say more than you could ever come up with in an entire lifetime and as he pulls away slowly, something lands on your head. You reach your hands up to feel what it is, it’s his hat. You look up at him, questioning his motives as your eyes finally well up.

“Keep it, for me, please.”

Law takes one last sombre look at you and turns around. He walks away and you don’t stop him, this is just how it has to be. He begins to disappear from your line of sight and you fall to your knees in an emotionally exhausted heap, your heart feels as if it has burst inside your chest and you finally let your sobs take a hold. You watch as his figure finally fades into the atmosphere, clutching desperately onto the leopard print fabric of his hat, the only physical thing you’ll ever have to remember him by.

You vow to never love anyone again.

[tallbluelady]

Oh. Oh man. I never thought about how hard ShB must have been for Urianger, lying to Rowan above everyone else and watching her suffer, knowing he can't say anything. And then when it all falls down... Oh man, the guilt. How did that all go down? What was ShB like for them?

It's great, because Urianger made the decision to start actively courting Rowan while she was absorbing all the Lightwarden's light. The thought process: I can offer my heart as a hideaway through all the trauma of this! This won't end badly at all! What happened after is entirely up to her, and he fully expected to be dumped right after they returned home with the Exarch's death.

Something that I'm kinda looking forward to exploring more is the fact that Urianger underestimates how much his affection for Rowan grows and evolves when they reunite on the First. Like the Exarch, he has this idealized form of Rowan to think about for three years. Then she's back in his life and she's real. And not only is she real, she's more complicated and fun and interesting than a memory could ever be. He's been in love before and he thought he knew how it would effect him. But love is different every time, and with every person. By the time they get to Mt. Gulg (I almost typed Mt. Guilt lmao), he's starting to realize that he's not going to handle life well without her.

He buries his guilt in acts of affection or trying to humor Rowan and Ryne. Urianger is going to tell jokes (Rowan gets his sense of humor) and find flowers and trinkets to put in her hair. He's going to be the attentive healer after battle, and while he can't do much to fight the Light, he's going to do everything else. Because what else can he do? The plan must work. The Exarch worked for over 100 years on it...

But the plan doesn't work. The Exarch can't take the Light into himself and fling himself into oblivion and send them home. And now Rowan is cracking under the pressure that would be too much for any one person and now it's the person he wholeheartedly loves. He picks her up and runs down that mountain, probably teleporting down at least half the distance. The next time she's conscious she's out to get Emet-Selch's head and he can't stand that she would do it alone either.

And then she forgives him. He cannot fathom it, but the release on his heart is such a relief. He's ready to go to the bottom of the ocean to face the villain with her. And if we ask Rowan... that's all she ever wanted. Rowan doesn't back down from the monsters she's asked to slay. She knows she can do it, and she knows she's one of frighteningly few who even can. On the First, she is the only one who can face the Lightwardens and live. She'd just like some support for the other things, you know? It's why she was so receptive to Urianger in the first place - he's doing things, not just raging at the injustice. She's faced injustice before and people ranting at it never did her any good. The romance did comfort and shield her. He gives her White Auracite to vanquish Emet-Selch. He's supported her the entire time they've known each other.

After they defeat Hades they have to have a long conversation about it all. How it wasn't really the fact that she had to face something that could kill her that made Rowan upset, it was the fact that Urianger and the Exarch hid details about that would all entail. He vows to be more open, and luckily that was a thread that the writers decided to continue on through Endwalker. (On top of that, the whole situation colors their sex life as well, which is fun to write about.)

So yeah! I hoped you enjoyed my essay about my Wolship!

[menniemons]

Obey Me! Characters As Teachers:

Lucifer

Tbh not really a teacher vibe more like a principal or vice principal vibe

He's pretty strict what can I say?

Or maybe that substitute teacher that was way to harsh on everyone

But if he HAD to be a teacher I feel like maybe a math teacher or history teacher

I actually feel like he could teach multiple subjects but math and history stick out to me the most

I think he could be that type of teacher that actually engages with his students and gets them into doing their work

Or rather scares them into doing their work-

He's definitely strict though no matter what position he takes

Mammon

I feel like this man would be an economics teacher

He could be good at subjects if he wanted to

And he's definitely versatile in them too

So I think he would be a fun economics teacher 

He would likely keep his kids engaged by telling them a story that relates to what they're doing or learning in class at that moment

But sometimes he would tell stories so he doesn’t seem like a bore or look old

He'll also probably give them tips that he learned by himself or his brothers (if they felt like sharing)

He'd be a good teacher because when it comes down to money suddenly he's a genius and an expert

Would want him as my economics teacher

Leviathan

Is this even necessary??

We all know this guy knows his way through technology

He coups himself in his room to sit at his computer to play games or watch anime

I feel like he would fit into computer science or digital art

Would be the type of teacher to make his kids to work his way

Likely a little uptight but it's okay since he'll make it up by having easy extra credit

The extra credit being a short essay on one of his favorite animes or why Henry is the best character to exist

Something along the lines of that-

Satan

English teacher is obvious but I feel like history would suit him too

Maybe even science?

As an English teacher he would make his kids write essays on a topic of a book he assigned purely because he loved it so much that he felt the need to make others read it

His students probably would learn to love some books since he reads everything he can get his hands on and shows it to them

If he gets a rowdy student in his class or a trouble maker don't worry because they'll be obedient after Satan takes them aside

If Satan gets the role as a history teacher be prepared because he'll just go on and on rather than shortening it

Would definitely drag things out because he would be so engrossed in them

Asmodeus

This is kinda hard-

I guess health ? maybe psychology?

I feel like he enjoys teaching others about their body and their mind

And what's healthy for them

(Asmo baby I'm sorry but this is difficult)

He would definitely give them tips on how to be aware of others around them and how to read a room

Would teach students how to be respectful and responsible in different ways so their lives wouldn't be as difficult when the times comes

Beelzebub

His is pretty straightforward

He's a P.E teacher

Would try and get his students to be more active and will try to get them to take care of themselves

Would also give them tips when or if they finally decide to try his exercises

You know? Like the basic, "Try to do it this way because it'll hurt if you do it that way."

I feel like his students would feel more comfortable around him so they can joke with him

Even if he's a little quiet and can seem intimidating we all know he's a sweetheart

Beel would be that one really cool teacher we all had at some point

Belphegor

I think he would be a type of elective teacher

Or maybe an assistant teacher?

Maybe to Simeon and Barbatos, we all know he loves Beel the most but I'm not gonna make him suffer through physical exercise

I feel like he would be the teacher to put rowdy brats down cause I think some students would take advantage of Simeon's kindness and Barbatos' patience and large class size

But I also but him as assistant teacher because I can't find something that'll suit him well

As much as he loves slacking off he will help students who need it and can't get the other teacher to help them at the moment

These keep getting shorter oh no

Would be annoyed at first by the kids but since they kept pestering him he caved in and started to enjoy their presence after a bit

Type of person who hates babies and toddlers but likes older kids because they can take care of themselves better and don't make as much noise

Diavolo

Wouldn't be a teacher but the principal, but not a scary one but a cool one that other's are attracted to

As scary as he looks, he loves kids and enjoys taking care of them

If one of the teachers couldn't find a substitute teacher he would immediately offer to take care of their class

People, not just students, love him

He's social, responsible, dependable, and charming

Like what else do you want?

Though when someone does need to be punished and they have to deal with Diavolo

They're never gonna talk about what happened to them with him

When he's not having to punish kids for being brats he's gonna be the coolest person

Barbatos

I'm gonna say culinary class/home economics

He would teach the biggest class because its helpful and fun

So he would have 2 teacher assistants

Luke and (sometimes) Belphie

Would teach everyone in his class how to sew and cook

He would teach kids how to cook balanced and healthy food

And he would let Luke teach them how to bake sweets and basic deserts

This duo would be so powerful in the kitchen

He would also make Belphie help those who are having trouble with minor things

Barbatos as a teacher would be so patient

I feel like he could also be a vice principal to Diavolo

Solomon

A science teacher of some sort

He would probably scare the kids at first with his crazy ideas and experiments

Like terrify and scar them

“Yea my science teacher started multiple fires and taught us how to make explosives”

But he would then make his kids ease themselves into the same exact stuff

So now not only is Solomon a danger hazard

So are like 30 other kids

His classroom would constantly smell of something

Not even he knows what it is

Also his classroom has had the most fires in it than any other class

Or school

Has many stories of himself and students getting hurt in ridiculous ways

Scares the faculty and children because he and his kids are menaces

Simeon

Simeon gives me music or art teacher vibes

He would love people's creativity being manifested in peaceful ways

A bob ross type of teacher

If he decides to teach art then he would be patient with his kids and push deadlines back for them

I feel like he would have a ton of people wanting his class but he takes the best and up and coming artists

A few of his students have probably because famous or had a hit song or artpiece

The faculty can't tell of they love or hate him

He's too positive and bright sometimes but they also adore him because of it

The only people that hate or dislike him either haven't met him or envy him

He also probably has a fanclub or some type of organization rooting for him

Luke

Likely a type of assistant teacher or an older student

Either way he would get the best grades ever so teachers don't mind if he's out and about

He would assist Barbatos or Simeon with their classes

And he would teach and learn a few things from both teacher's and their classes

(He is kinda hard to write for me)

Teachers probably love him because he's a model student and actually enjoys teaching others

Students love him sm, but there’s definitly people who don’t but won’t say a word

Because if they did, they would go missing for a few days.

[applepiesandalibis]

So. A couple of posts ago I mentioned writing an explanation of why I adore each TPC album for a different reason (a thing that makes this specific album unique for me). Nobody asked for it. Here it is.

The first one, Young Bodies Heal Quickly holds a special place in my heart mostly because of its vibes. And also because I listened to it in the hard times and it really helped me to deal with some things. It manages to depict many different emotions and feelings perfectly: such as fear, anxiety, anger and in the end it even becomes really comforting, makes you feel safe and calm even if the rest of the album feels like the world is ruining and you're absolutely helpless. I really love how it contains both very energetic and very calm songs. I mean, pretty sure all of their records do, but here it's more noticeable and I like that contrast. ALSO, something about the voicemail sample with that agressive instrumental as a background... I just find it incredibly cool for whatever reason. In general, YBHQ has some of the coolest samples.

Hide the Kitchen Knives... Well, I don't listen to that one a lot, sadly :( Mostly because it's not on spotify (at least for me, heard some lucky people have it there) and it's not very comfortable to listen to it on other platforms. Still, I like it for — yet again — its unique vibe, cool instrumentals (God Forgive Us All is just..... mwah /pos) and also some thoughts John expresses on this record. I find the whole concept behind it very interesting.

God Bless Your Black Heart for the story it tells and the fact that absolutely everything on this album is connected. Makes my neurodivergent brain happy, I will NEVER get tired of (over)analyzing it and yapping about it. John said he worked very hard on this one and it really shows!!! I associate a lot of good moments in my life with GBYBH (even though the album itself is pretty dark) and Said the Spider to the Fly will always be one of my favorite music videos to ever exist. It means a lot to me and I rewatched it hundreds of times.

Then, Now You Are One Of Us, which has its SpOoKy atmosphere that is actually trying to hide a very hopeful message behind itself and no, I will NOT shut up about this. Plus, again, the samples are just perfect. It was the first album of theirs I heard and it really made me realize how good this band is. I know how cringy this probably sounds, but it actually changed my life and it only gets better with each listen.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete-U is just crazy. In a good way. I mean, a 40-minute song that is mostly just one phrase being repeated over and over again? Who do you think is eating this up? That's right: me. All of the other songs are great too, of course. I can't fully understand the concept behind this album tbh, but that's what I like about it.

Someday This Could All Be Yours is, as I previously said, the one I listen to the most. The natural disasters concept is something that really got my attention at first and the lyricism on here is INCREDIBLY good. Every song has its own mood and its own 'personality', which makes me want to came up with a character for each one of them (I already have a bunch of TPC based OCs, but still). Also I'm a big fan of the suffering that thinking about Vol. 2 brings me into👍🏻 /hj

And, of course, their older stuff (...And the Machines Are Winning, Essays on Frantic Desperation, singles like Dilbert, a Man If You Will, etc.) deserves being mentioned too. I feel like these guys were really vibing while recording this! The lyrics aren't that deep as they are on later records, sometimes you can't even understand what John is saying, but the instrumentals are amazing. John straight up tortures his guitar sometimes; it makes such a cool sound though, so it's totally worth it. They had a very great start and I love older TPC just as much as newer!!!

Obviously, I can't just not mention Nighty Nite in this. Dimples gives me a nostalgic feeling, but at the same time it's so dark and can easily make you anxious. My fav track from it is definetely Meaningless. Ironically, it makes me feel like life does have a meaning. I don't know. And again, the lyrics are very good here.

Until the Horror Goes is also very nostalgic, but in a slightly more positive way. John said this album is mostly about getting older and dealing with adult life and it does depict this feeling very well. It also has a really pretty cover — my favorite after the GBYBH one. The songs on it are catchy, I know them all by heart. The instrumentals are yummy too (take Animal Rites for example, it scratches my brain in such a good way). I like the more electronic sound it has and I think it was a good way to end John's career as a musician... (sobs)

TL;DR: The pAper chAse is the best band in the entire world and they have never released a single bad song. I love all of their records like they're my children (or even more, cause I don't really like children... you got the point). End rant.

[o0anapher0o]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

Thank you for tagging me @meraki-yao. I am very happy at the oportunity to shamelessly plug many, many of my fics :D Let’s do this!

How many works do you have on ao3?

47

What?! When did that happen? And how?

What’s your total ao3 word count?

502,199

Weirdly less surprising, even thought hat number is completely unreal.

What fandoms do you write for?

Interview with the vampire (2022)

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

Red White and Royal Blue

Star trek: Deep Space Nine

And I have one teeny tiny Thunderbirds fic

Top 5 fics by kudos

Somewhere I have never travelled (ds9)

Petal by Petal (ds9)

Your most frail gesture (ds9)  

Watch that man (rwrb)

Personality (ds9)

I feel like I should count the first three as one, since it’s literally parts 1, 2 and 3 of a trilogy.

Surprising how fast my first rwrb fic got up there.

Do you respond to comments?

Always, usually a bit rambly. I love talking to people about my writing :D

What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Puh, that’s a hard one. I’m such a happy endings girl. My instinct was one of my iwtv fics, but they’re more angry than angsty lol, so I’m saying it’s between Of all untruths the truest is you (iwtv) and Do no harm (ds9)

What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Your most frail gesture ends with a wedding, though actually I like the accepted proposal in Petal by Petal more.

Do you get hate on fics?

None so far (knock on wood).

Do you write smut?

No. A lot of my fics make it clear sex is happing but I don’t write it and I haven’t really any urge to.

Craziest crossover

My TayNick character crossover New Information. Also my only crossover so far, but that’s a side note.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of. Hopefully having all my stuff archivelocked will keep it that way.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

YES! Someone did a translation of Do no harm into Russian. Only one of the coolest things that ever happened to me (though I would have preferred to be asked beforehand rather than simply be presented with a link).

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No. I’m not entirely sure how that would work, but I’d be open to it.

All time favourite ship?

Why do people insist you have to have one favourite over everything else? No, I’m an adult, I can have as many OTPs as I want.

What’s a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

Beneath Lucifer’s claws. I love this story so much, but I have it in me to finish it. I also have an old ATLA fic I love to bits, that has really neat bits but I was such a different person when I wrote it, it would need a complete rewrite and half of my favourite scenes don’t really work anymore.

What are your writing strengths?

I’ve been told my pacing is good. And I think I’m quite good at characters voices right when it comes to fanfic.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Punctuation. And I definitely suffer from ‘why use a period when I can use a comma’ disease XD. Scene transitions always feel clumsy to me, I don’t know if they read like it.

Thoughts on dialogue in another language?

Oh, there’s an essay. If I were to give general advice I’d say, avoid it. It’s fun to read when you speak the language and annoying if you don’t, having to look up stuff all the time interrupts the reading flow. It’s even more annoying when you speak the language and the author clearly didn’t.

I’ve seen it done well once, where it was used so the characters couldexchange information because that was the natural thing to do for them, while keeping it a secret from the reader. That was neat. 'But even that could be done by just saying 'he said something in [language]'.

First fandom you wrote in?

Published or not? My first published fic was Jack’s Desk for mfmm. But I also still have fifteen year old supernatural and vampire diaries fics in a notebook somewhere. The world wasn’t ready yet.

Favourite fic you’ve written?

Something unstoppable and Somewhere I have never travelled. Neither of them came out the way I thought they would but I love how they ended up so much.

tagging @sapphosewrites @xenobotanist and @nalyra-dreaming

[msfbgraves]

Also: I think people forget how lonely and desperately needing love and companionship Terry was before Daniel, even if he didn’t know it. Going around drinking and playing piano until dawn, and fucking beautiful little omegas without any emotional connection is no way to live. 

Daniel changed Terry more than Terry changed him. He NEEDED that omega more than Daniel ever needed him (at the start,’of course). Daniel could have moved on from that first meeting—but Terry? Obsessive, detailed, Terry? No way! And Daniel has given him so much—puppies, a home, a family. With Danny he has a friend, a confidant, a lover, a companion, a spouse. Terry desperately needed all of this, but he needed someone especially for him, and Daniel might have been tailored personally for him. 

Those moments in Knights and Pawns when Terry nearly throws all this away—and this special little omega—due to his terrible actions make me want to reach through the screen and slap him. Fool! Don’t you know that if you lost Daniel you would lose yourself? 

Damn it Terry! That’s probably why I’m rooting so hard for him on the Euro Trip but moreso after the funeral reveal. Win that sweet boy back!

OK, man this inspired me to write a whole essay. Thank you Nonnie. I have been thinking about this som much, especially since so many grown men in my life have been such complete and utter idiots about this, and in every tough guy gangster show I see them make this mistake over and over again, it simply poured out.

In my eyes, Terry suffers from something I see a lot in 'tough guy', patriarchical settings. You can force things in life, and win - and these people often try to force love by taking away their partner's option to leave. Terry is also very emotionally smart when it comes to manipulating other people - he knows that proximity helps in building affection, and when he is good to the boy, time and care and puppies will do the rest to build enough love to weld them together. And with that established, he's safe. He can do whatever he wants. All these mob men - they're good enough to their wives to know that if they occassionally want to treat them like shit, they can. Their wife will love them enough to forgive them and stay - cue the cycle of abuse. And Daniel is like the foundation his family life is built on - but who appreciates a foundation, truly? You expect a foundation to be there, you don't go around noticing it every day.

Except of course when your foundation gives, your whole life gives, and immediately.

But that's not what Terry has learnt. You want something, you win it. You win it, it's yours, to do with as you will. If anyone challenges that, you hurt them until they stop.

It has helped him to survive all this time, hasn't it?

What these mobsters always only realise when it is far too late, is that this is no way to live. If you spend your life hurting those you deem weaker, even if you really love them and show them a lot of affection, they'll leave you. Can take ten years, but they'll go. With very close relationships, it can take 25, but they will leave. And Terry in his thirties - he's not seen it enough. Terry has never really been in a long relationship that he didn't dictate. He's Amanda's older brother, after all. And he's been taught only to take and win. Sure, he can dole out love, and get it back, but to him that only ever feels like his rightful due. And he may feel you have to be a good boss, a good Alpha, but then, as an Alpha, you're owed affection back. And that worked for a very long time until he tried to take over the LaRussos. Because that's what he thought it would be, and the LaRussos don't let him. And he can't simply kill them. So here he comes home with a massively bruised ego, stonewalled by a beta brother-in-law...

And it's so goddamn sneaky. If he'd beat Daniel, that would have shown. He would have had to admit to himself that that's what it was. But with sex... it's so easy hide, so easy to gaslight your spouse about. Heat of the moment, baby, I forgot myself. You know how you make me feel. You're just so hot, sweetheart, you drive me wild. And he would have said something like that, as soon as the power rush had worn off. Because immediately, in his war torn soul, he knows exactly what he's done. How wrong it was. But doesn't the patriarchy also teach you that it is your partner's job to love the rough edges off? Isn't that what they do? Pour their love in to soothe what you had to dull to become powerful enough to 'win' at life? You feed them, they love you - that's how it's supposed to work, yeah? You're the strong one here...

But you're so right, Nonnie- Terry, do you think you can win a game of love against Daniel LaRusso?! Indeed, are you stupid? That boy has a strength these tough guys can't even conceive of. Because he is strong enough to leave. That boy nearly eloped without a cent to his name because he loved his girl. Yes, he could have moved on. Yes, he would have found another. He doesn't need anyone to love him into being a person.

And Terry is so feckin' brainwashed into this Alpha supremacy bullshit that he has no idea how to respect someone, has no genuine idea what the difference is between people doing what you want because you make them vs them doing what you want because they love you. He really somehow thinks that if he could force Daniel into loving him, he can get that from any other omega, as if that is the only thing Daniel provides him with, adoration and sex. He can get that from any kitty. And when he tries -

Look there's grown men who never get there. Maybe they never actually love their partners. They move on to another, someone younger, and when these younger people clue into their bullshit, someone even younger, that is if they make enough money. Otherwise they grow old begging for love from their children or their exes 'for old times' sake'. But to Terry's slight credit, maybe - he finally gets it. He doesn't love 'his' omega, 'his' mate, and he doesn't love him only for his cooking skills (Lucille's there taking over the housekeeping for her Daniele's sake, and the angelinos and angelinas of grandpups). He loves his Danny, his Daniel. More than that, he needs him. Not 'an' omega. Him. His mate. His love. His heart. For feck's sake, what is he playing at. Also, where is his baby son? And had he known that was why he felt so empty inside, so worn, before he met Daniel - he wouldn't have done it. Never. If Terry could go back, he'd fight himself to the death before he ever laid a finger on Daniel that night. Still, he might not have understood without this terrible crime.

But that's only half the battle. This is completely new to Terry. How to truly love Daniel for what he is after this? Will Daniel even let him? Because the boy has had it. Betrayed by his father, his brother, his mate. Only one of those betrayals, of course, is Terry's, but it hits the hardest. At least his family came through somewhat... No, it's hard for them both for different reasons. Yes, he's had six good years of marriage to look back on, that counts for something. His youngest pup is an infant, and all his children need their home. But you cannot keep hurting someone without them getting sick of it, and for the first time in his life - Daniel has no love to give.

You played yourself, Terry Silver.

[ekho-ekho-ekho]

there aren’t many perks to working in the indy publishing world, I’ll be honest. it’s relentlessly exhausting, damn-near thankless, and the pay is shit. but one perk—one of the few—is that I have no problems whatsoever enjoying a piece of literature while also hating the author deeply. like, none.

 I can love a book and hate its author in the same way a kindergarten teacher can love their students and hate the students’ parents. authors will pour all their insecurities and repressions and cognitive dissonance and petty little bitter indignant thoughts into a story, andr eally think they’ve masked the truth under a dozen layers of metaphor... failing to realize that all dozen layers are completely transparent. and that’s assuming they’re remotely aware that this is what they’ve done. so then, it’s up to some poor hapless editor to fix as much of that shit as they can without the author getting defensive on a personal level. because the more defensive the author gets, the more they dig their heels in, and the more ground that editor has to concede, and the more the book suffers for it.

but! tragically! even bad authors—even the thinnest-skinned, least self-critical people on the planet—will sometimes come up with really fun and cool concepts! concepts that you know could have grown into much better and cooler stories, if only the creator wasn’t so determined to get in their own way. when my friends in childcare lament the influence of garbage parents on their otherwise sweet, clever, considerate students, I hear in them the same despair I feel when I think of Harry Potter, or Star Wars, Lovecraft’s entire body of work—of all the stories that could have been so much more in the hands of an author with some modicum of self-awareness.

which, incidentally, is why I love transformative fanworks so much! because you get to see those concepts turned over into the hands of someone who gives a shit. someone who sees the potential of these stories to speak comfort to the outcast. you get to see how much more nuanced the themes of prejudice in Harry Potter could have been if Hermione had been a Black girl, or if Harry had Indian ancestry, or if the worldbuilding elements like house elves and goblins had been handled in holy shit literally any other way. you get to see Lovecraft’s fear of the Other reinvented by the same minority groups Lovecraft himself hated so viscerally. you get to see queer readers of Dracula lovingly melt down all the internalized homophobia in the text and re-cast it into a young woman’s quest to avenge her murdered girlfriend.

I know some people draw clear distinctions between criticizing a dead author vs a living one, but to me, there are only two that matter. first being that, when I criticize a living author, there’s a chance—however slim—that they might actually hear me (in which case, good); and the second being the responsibility to not financially support a living author—which I personally don’t find difficult because, on top of being a fundamentally spiteful person, it’s not like I have disposable income anyway.

beyond those two points, I don’t see much value in not interacting with a story you enjoy just because the author fucking sucks—especially if you’re already someone who engages with stories critically. by “critically,” I don’t mean you spend hours writing long, meta essays about racist implications of, idk, how slavery is portrayed in the Star Wars movies (although I do love me some metatextual analysis!). but if you consume a piece of media and your first impulse is, “Man, I really loved the central idea, but it’d be so cool if that one character had been explored with more nuance—if that one plot point was given more emphasis—if this one arc had been done just a little differently....”—in other words, if you don’t consume fiction as a passive vessel—that’s already critical engagement.

and I guess this is why I find it worrying, the way people draw hard lines between enjoying a problematic author’s works if they’re living vs dead. like enjoying Dracula despite its many harmful themes is automatically more okay than enjoying shit like Harry Potter—even if one enjoys both from the same critical angle—simply because Bram Stoker’s dead and Joanne (derogatory) isn’t. that’s why it worries me to see people fretting over whether or not they’re “allowed” to enjoy problematic contemporary art. not financially support it. not defend it. but wringing their hands over the moral implications of engaging in any way, be it by making fanart, or reading fanfic, or even just revisiting a book they already own.

so, from someone who works with authors for a living: yeah, it’s completely possible to enjoy a work of fiction while hating its author. like if you’re truly worried, then you shouldn’t support the work financially. if you’re truly worried, then you shouldn’t defend the bad to uphold the good. but if you’re truly worried that just enjoying the story makes you a bad person? then I can only assume you’ve not met many published authors. like, sorry, but if you feel like you have to like a writer personally in order to enjoy their work, I have bad news, because a good hmm ~70% of authors—even the ones who aren’t raging bigots—are some of the most annoying, myopic, whiny, entitled, self-defeating people you will ever meet. because they’re people. they’re not the gods of their little imaginary worlds, whatever they might want to think.

opinions may differ, but far as I’m concerned, a story is only the product of its authors’ mind in the sense that you are a product of your upbringing. it’s a factor of one’s identity, sure, but it’s far from the only thing that makes you who you are.

in fact, I’d go so far as to say that by interacting with problematic fiction—thoughtfully, critically, compassionately, creatively—a reader can shine new light into the shadowy corners of all that a story could have been. and if that new light throws into sharp relief the flaws inherent in the source material? so much the better.

[hussyknee]

So my own anthropology B.A was cut off because I got too disabled to continue, but I have been reading a lot about decolonization and disability justice since. Two years ago I took a summer course on decolonial academia, focusing on writings about race, caste, gender and disability from the Global South. I'm kind of laid up at the moment, but here's the summary of what I got out of it (C+P from another explainer I've done before):

Every system of oppression in the world is based on the body. Which means the bedrock of all things is ableism.

The European elite based their world order on "who gets to be human?" Their rationalizations of this evolved into an understanding of humans as bodies, and humans as minds.

Humans as bodies are mindless things only equipped to toil, suffer, labour and die – the unwashed masses. You can see this narrative in how Global North news and media has historically portrayed and continues to portray black and brown bodies as hordes, conflicts, the crush of humanity. This is what gives rise to the concept of "bare life" – human bodies stripped of citizenship, of rights, and consequently of personhood, belonging nowhere and counted by no one. Refugees, undocumented immigrants, the enslaved, indentured workers, people trapped in no man's land.

(Btw any fantasy or sci-fi media where the enemy is a faceless horde is smuggling white supremacy and imperialism. Because that's how they justify white anxieties of invasion and fears of the empire.)

Humans defined by their minds are thinkers and philosophers and scholars and interpreters of the human condition. The management, the nexus of the knowledge economy, the enlightened. Their bodies are merely a house or vehicle for the mind. The driving ideals of "hard work", "lazy", "productive" are all the triumph of mind over matter.

This is eugenics. It was first invented as a rationalization for the oppression of the poor and the disabled, and later exported to the colonized. Whiteness defines itself as the absolute mastery of the mind over body. Whether they call their bodies "temples" or "instruments", white Western thought sees bodies as something that exists apart from the body, and meant to transcend it. This is why they have such a yen for Orientalist philosophies, with no thought for their cultural roots. By spinning a narrative of our cultures being "dead" or "ancient", they can rationalize our own knowledge as rooted in the past, people who used to think for ourselves until our civilizations (the humans as minds) "died", and now they're generously taking them out of our hands into the "modern" (white Western) world, where they can evolve and thrive (I could write a different essay on how PoC get to have "culture" but white people get "civilization"). In this way, they conceptualize and propagate the idea of the Global South as a machinery of production while the Global North is naturally the market for it.

(This is just about what's happening in the present global system built by ongoing colonization, that we call coloniality. Some version of the mind-body split exists in other stratified and hierarchial societies, predating white supremacy, like the Indian caste system. In fact, Martin Luther King, when he visited the Dalits in India whose struggle had been inspired by the US's Civil Rights Movement, he conceptualized Black people as the "Untouchables" of America – race itself as a caste system.)

Now we could try and challenge this by saying that no, we (BIPOC) are also minds as well, which is what a lot of other colonized people's have done in their struggles for reclamation and independence. But we have found that we then have to live in a constant state of proving our capacity for "intelligent" thought and "civilized" behaviour, which are simply more ways we have to perform to white abled standards, and just as much an arbitration of who gets to be human. In essence, respectability politics, that just makes us turn around and eat our own in a desperate bid to be accepted. It's made colonized societies harsher, crueler, more fearful, and drives a generational trauma that makes us inflict all of that anxiety around failure and exclusion on our children.

With the pandemic, people are finally hitting their limits with this narrative of absolute control and transcendence, realizing it doesn't work. Our capacities and limitations and needs not only matter, but they define us as humans. We are not made to work beyond our capacities, nor beyond the obstacles and barriers to life as we are meant to live it. More, they're finally realizing that humans are not made to work. No other species except hive insects are made by nature to work into the grave.

More people are coming to understand what it means that humans are a species of animal. The human animal, whose minds and bodies are one, where neither exists independently of the other. That we have to put ourselves back into the framework of nature, of what we were evolved to be as animals, and see our place in ecological networks. Because we do belong in them. We aren't an inherently destructive plague that never should have happened. We were always integrated into our environments and contributed to them before everything spun out of control. We can see this in indigenous ways of life. And in returning to our place in nature, we let go of supremacy. Over nature, over each other and most of all, over ourselves. This is the very essence and end goal of decolonization.

Like I said, this didn't start with race, but it's perpetuated by it in the present day. That's why we say that race issues affect every single person in the world whether you're white or not. You just don't realize it when you're white.

Things i learned as a child that probably no one intended to teach me

To grown-ups, being bad at stuff is a sin. Forgetting stuff is the worst sin of all, and also doesn’t exist - it is widely believed (and your behaviour will be interpreted thusly) that in some Freudian sense, it is impossible to forget things if you care about them or their consequences or the people who care about those things.

Your being happy and enjoying what you do doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether you are Fulfilling Your Potential.

Human beings do not require rest outside of sleep. Thinking that you do is called ‘being lazy’.

Who you show physical affection to is a matter of politeness and social protocol, and has nothing to do with your own desires

It is rude to inform people of your preferences, even if they seem to care about catering to them and therefore might find this useful information.

Etiquette centres around doing things in especially awkward, skilful and time-consuming ways in order to demonstrate superiority over people who aren’t able to keep up.

[c-is-for-circinate]

Wait, isn't "anti" stuff more like "anti-pedophilia" and stuff? Like, you have a point about anti-porn attitudes, but from what I've heard just "anti" on its own means against stuff like kid porn and incest porn and legitimately f*cked up sh*t like that.

Okay!  So this, I think, is actually a great example of what I was talking about, and a really useful thing to understand.  (CW rape, child abuse, etc)

Smarter people than me have written much better essays about why policing thoughtcrimes is a bad road to go down, and I will probably reblog some of them next time they cross my dash for more context.  What I want to talk about is the trigger mechanism, the ‘oh, this looks like danger!!!’ immune response in how we look at different kinds of porn, and how that applies to anti culture.

Here’s the thing: I am anti-pedophilia.  I think that, for most people, that’s a stance that largely goes without saying!  Adults who prey on children are bad.  I’m also against incest; relatives who prey on their family members are bad.  Above all I oppose rape.  Sexual predation of any kind is bad.  In fact, I’d say that’s the most important item on the list.  There is plenty of room to argue about where the lines are between ‘adult’ and ‘child’ and how teenagers fit in the middle, and there’s plenty of room to get historical about the lines between ethically terrible incest, distasteful-but-bearable “aristocratic inbreeding” between distant cousins, and the kind of consanguinity that tends to develop in a small town where everyone’s vaguely related to everyone else by now anyway.  The core of the issue is consent, and it has always been consent.  Pedophilia and incest are horrific because they are rape scenarios where the abuser has far more power and their victim far fewer resources to cope, both practically and emotionally; because harm to children is, to us as a culture, worse than harm to adults, for a lot of very valid reasons; and because they constitute betrayal of trust the victim should have been able to put in their abuser as well as rape--but they are all rape scenarios, and that’s why they’re awful. 

These things are bad.  It is good for us to have a social immune response system that recognizes these things when they’re happening and insists we step in.  That is a good thing to develop!  It helps us, as a society.  It can help the people being victimized.  It’s the same reason educators and childcare workers in the US are all mandated reporters, why we do background checks on people working near kids.  These things happen, and they’re terrible, and it’s good that we try to be aware and prepared for them.  (Though obviously studies show we’re a lot less good at protecting the vulnerable than we’d like to pretend we are.)

The question is: why does that same social immune response trigger, and trigger so angrily, in response to fiction?

Anti culture is fundamentally an expression of that social immune response.  Specifically, it’s that social immune response when it is set off by a situation that, while it has some similarities to the very bad real-life crime of sexual predation including pedophilia and incest, is in and of itself harmless.

If you’re instinct is to flare up in anger or dismissiveness because I’m calling these things harmless, I want to ask you to just take a deep breath and bear with me for a bit longer.  What you’re feeling right now is an allergic reaction.

Humans tell and read and listen to stories about “legitimately fucked up shit” all the time.  It’s part of the human condition.  It’s part of how we process those things happening, not just to use, but to other people in the world around us.  It’s part of how we process completely unrelated fucked-up shit, playing with fears and furies and insecurities that we all have, through so may layers of fiction that we don’t even recognize them any more, playing with power dynamics in metaphor and making characters suffer for fun.  Aside from the fact that literally all stories do this to some extent or another; aside from the fact that drawing lines between ‘ok that’s good storytelling’ and ‘that’s too fucked-up to write about’ is arbitrary, subjective, and dangerous in its own right; aside from all of that, these stories are stories.  All of them. 

Even the ones about rape, about incest, about pedophilia.  They’re words on a page.  No real children were harmed, touched, or even glanced at in the making of this work of fiction.  This story, pornographic though it may be, is part of a conversation between consenting adults.  (And if a teenager lies about their age to consent, that is a different problem altogether.)

Stories in and of themselves, no matter what they’re about, are no more dangerous than a crate full of oranges.  Which is to say: utterly harmless, unless all you have to eat is oranges, all day every day, and you find yourself dying slowly of nutrient deficiency--which is why representation matters.  Or unless someone wields one deliberately, violently, as a tool to cause harm, and someone gets acid in their eye--which is the fault of the person holding the orange. And unless you happen to be allergic to citrus.

The key here is this twofold understanding:  First, the thing that hurts you can also have value to others.  Real, legitimate value.  Whether you’ve undergone trauma and certain story elements are straight-up PTSD triggers or you just don’t like orange juice, that story, those tropes, that crate of oranges may be somewhere between icky and fundamentally abhorrent--but we understand that that is still your reaction.  Even if you don’t understand how anybody could ever enjoy it; even if every single person you surround yourself with is as sensitive and disgusted and itchy about this thing that makes your eyes hurt and your throat stop working as you; that doesn’t make it true for everyone.  That doesn’t make oranges poisonous.  No real children were involved in the writing of this story.  It is words on a page.

But, secondly: the thing that has value to others can also hurt you.  Just because a story isn’t inherently poison doesn’t mean it can’t cause you, personally, pain.  That’s what a PTSD trigger is: an allergic reaction, psychological anaphylaxis, a brain that’s trying so hard to protect its own from a threat that isn’t actually present (but was once, and the brain is trained to respond) that it causes far more harm and misery than the trigger itself possibly could.  And no, it’s not just people with PTSD who sometimes get hurt by stories.  There are many, many ways a story can poke the part of your brain that says, this is Bad, I don’t like this, I don’t want to be here.  The story is still, always, every time, pixels on a screen and ink on paper.  The story causes no physical harm.  But it can poke your brain into misery, it can stir up your emotions, it can make you want to cringe and run away.  It can make you want to scream and fight and go after the author who brought this thing into existence.  It can make you hurt.

This is an allergic reaction.  This is your brain and body, your reflexes and instincts, trying to protect you from something that isn’t really happening.  And just like a literal allergic reaction, it can do actual harm to you if it gets set off.  This is real.  The fact that stories can upset you to the point of pain and mental/emotional injury is real, even though it’s coming from your own brain and not the story itself.  There are stories you shouldn’t read.  There are stories I shouldn’t read, regret reading, will never read, because they hurt me.  That doesn’t mean they’re the same stories that would hurt you.  That doesn’t mean they don’t have value.

And, finally:

If getting upset about stories is fundamentally an individual person’s allergic reaction, their brain freaking out and firing off painful survival instincts in the face of a thing that isn’t, in and of itself, a threat?  Then the anti movement is a cultural allergic reaction.

Fandom as a whole has a pretty active immune system, which doesn’t mean we have a good immune system.  We try very hard to be aware of all the viruses and -isms and abuse and manipulation and cruelty, both systematic and individual, that exists around and within our community.  We’re primed and ready to shout about things at all times.  The anti movement is that system, that culture, screaming and shouting and fighting at a harmless thing on a grand scale.  It wants to stop that thing, that scary awful thing that trips all of its well-primed danger sensors, at all costs.  It’ll swell up and block off our airways (our archives) if it has to.  It’ll turn on the body it came from.  It’s scared and protective and trying to fight, and it’s ready to fight and destroy itself.

Luckily, fans and fanfic and fandom and fan culture are a lot bigger and older than they often get credit for, and it’s not like these cultural allergies are anything new.  We could talk about shippers and slashers in the X-Files fandom in the 90s.  We could talk about the birth of fandom in the days of Star Trek.  We could talk about censorship and book burning going back centuries.  We survived that and we’ll survive this, too.

But god, does the anti movement my throat and eyes itch.  Man is it irritating, and sometimes a little suffocating, to realize how many stories just aren’t getting told out of fear of what the antis will say.  And that’s the real danger, I think.  What are we losing that would have so much value to someone?  What are we missing out?

[thekatebridgerton]

Amongst the things the show has done poorly is explaining the HUGE difference between the classes, the fact that people think Benedict and Sophie will not have issues because they made Kate a commoner says a lot about it

Hey you said it not I but I agree.

I could write a whole essay about social status discrimination and how that is different from income level discrimination.

Also I have to correct you on one little detail people seem to be mixing up a lot: nominally speaking, Kate isn't a commoner, socially she's still very much categorized as gentry.

I mean on paper I can see how she could be classified as commoner given her father's situation, but socially, she's definitely gentry. This woman has never been a commoner since commoners are working class. And Kate isn't working class.

Because However much she mentions she will be a governess when Edwina marries, Kate never actually had to work for a living in her life, despite her family being in economic straits. And even if her father did work for a living, Kate was afforded the education and social schooling befitting to the daughter of a gentleman. Same as any other young lady who anticipated her own season one day. In fact she was educated so well she actually taught those things to Edwina successfully

Sophie on the other hand, learned to work as a maid since early age. Her education was severely neglected because of the circumstances of her birth. And even when she did get a modicum of knowledge about high society refinement and manners it was because she learn those things on her own, not because of specialized education, governesses or tutors. Sophie never learned piano forte, or embroidery and was never expected to know the difference between a Baron and a Baronet in her everyday conversations.

Rather than that as a working class woman she most likely knew things you and I classify as essential life skills, such as how to remove stains from clothing, how to balance a checkbook of expenses, barter in the marketplace and as Araminta so cruelly pointed out, polish shoes.

People in the modern world likely don't understand that one of the many many reasons classism was so prominent in that era and why jumping social classes was so frowned upon was also because of the significant education barrier.

Working class had such a difficulty getting educated not because it was hard (there were actually clergy who were willing to teach), but because they didn't have TIME. A working class person who needed to earn their living or die, usually started learning a trade as children and rarely got a proper education. In fact this was so well know in society, that a maid who knew how to read was seen as more valuable and likely to find employment than one who didn't.

And as such if a noble married someone from the working class. The shunning they received was hard to forget. Because the words ' uneducated' and 'vulgar' were thrown around a lot and humiliation lurked in every corner.

So when Anthony says that Benedict marrying the bastard of a Earl is only marginally better than marrying a maid. The man knows what he's talking about.

Because on paper the shame of marrying an illegitimate daughter in high society was only marginally better than the shame of marrying a working class woman. But they still remained roughly equivalent.

Which is ironic because in Sophie's point of view, she suffered more in her family house for being a bastard than for being a maid.

But as Benedict's wife, she would have been way way more shunned if she hadn't had a claim, however illegitimate, to nobility in her blood. In spite of being working class.

It didn't make anything better, but let's just say being a bastard of an Earl made the shunning of being working class 10% less intense

That's why Kate and Sophie's situations can't be compared. Because social status discrimination is more complicated than modern people like to make it out to be

And that's been today's tea

[zephrunsimperium]

Well I've just been emotionally winded! Thank you so much for the shoutout and thank you for writing such a delightfully thorough essay; once again, I'm finding myself utterly floored by how much this nerdy old man has endeared himself to me. If I may add my own thoughts...

Everything that I know about Ford points to him connecting his self-worth to how hard he's pushing himself. His awful sleeping habits, the way he talks about success in the journal. This man is the type of person who feels that it is a personal failure to have to take pain medication. He only feels like he's worth something if he's miserable. 

I wonder if, as a kid, Ford compared himself to characters like Frodo Baggins and Paul Atreides. His work on the Stan O' War clearly shows that he dreamed of adventure. Did a young Ford dream of heroism as well? And if so... did he equate heroism with pain and sacrifice? Carrying the great burden of the ring of power, losing people close to him. Was he convinced that suffering made you more heroic, more manly, more admirable?

I've always assumed that Ford calling Fidds to help him work on the portal was Bill's idea, but I'm really intrigued by the idea that it was Ford's. Bill is an expert manipulator and one of his most devious moves was separating Ford from his support system, which he does by showering Ford's with praise, claiming that his specialness makes it impossible for anyone to understand him. Anyone but Bill, that is. And it's not hard to convince Ford of this; after all, he trusted Stan and Stan hurt him deeply. I think it would make Ford and Fidds' relationship all the more tragic if Ford called him up to try and subconciously prove whether or not he was as "special" as Bill claimed. Bill really does seem to have it out for Fiddleford and clearly suceeds at driving a wedge between him and Ford.

Bill thinks Ford is like him - they're both freaks, they're both angry at the world for turning its back on them. But Ford cares for people; he COULD have been as evil as Bill, but he decided not to be and that is utterly heroic. 

I wholeheartedly agree that Ford will find himself feeling empty with Bill Cipher gone and nothing to hate. The man has lived in constant fear for several decades; it's really no wonder why he has a concealed gun while playing a game with his great nephew. Ford does a fine enough job tormenting himself without Cipher's help. That is a lot of learned behavior to undo, but I hope that once he does, he'll be able to rest, finally. He definitely deserves sweet dreams for once.

As semi-promised on Thursday night: here is a fuller explication of my thoughts after reading @zephrunsimperium's post about Ford and anger (which you should go check out their various Ford analysis pieces if you haven’t, they’re excellent and, unlike me, actually get to the point in a timely manner!)...thoughts which ultimately melded with some attempts at another essay I had semi-abandoned a few months ago, so hold on tight, friends, you’re in for quite the long ride with this one, should you choose to wade through it to the end, for this essay is more than 10,000 words long. Numbers in parentheses indicate endnotes, which can be found at the, well, end. Trigger warnings for extended discussions of multiple kinds of abuse portrayed/only thinly made into metaphors in the GF canon, and for discussion of mental health. For anyone feeling up to dealing with all that...read on below the cut.

To my way of thinking, one of the most essential things for understanding Ford lies in recognizing all the gaps between who he is, who he wants to be, and who he wants other people to think he is, and the intersection of anger, the performance of masculinity, and his long, long history of relational traumas is the fateful crossroads which those gaps emanate from. At the risk of sounding unduly like a pop psychologist, I also think his father is an important individual to consider in light of these issues.

Filbrick, as Stan tells us in ATOTS, was a strict man who had “the personality of a cinderblock.” Stan is not always a terribly reliable narrator, but he seems to lack the ability to lie to the flashback camera, and the first few flashbacks of the episode give us a glimpse at what the Pines family was like in the sixties which supports Stan’s assertion about his father. In those scenes, Filbrick is the only character we don’t see expressing strong emotion of some kind before the science fair, something that makes the ‘sound and fury’ of the scene where Stan is disowned, when it comes around, all that much more shocking. Until this point, Filbrick came about as close to physically resembling a cinderblock as his personality was said to; even when he expressed approval of Ford in the principal’s office, it was a relatively muted display, barely more emotive than his earlier “I’m not impressed” or his silent disappointment in the season one flashback when Stan recalls the summer Filbrick first sent him to boxing lessons. We learn after the science fair that he can, apparently, express anger very vividly, but “Lost Legends” further underlines how he is otherwise mostly emotionally inaccessible to his family; Stan (despite being far more aware of his emotions than he might like to admit that he is) cannot just talk to his father about how he feels, and once again, the only concrete emotion Filbrick shows on-screen is anger. Pictures near the end suggest possible mild experiences of a few other feelings, and the adult Ford, narrating many years after the fact and very probably after Filbrick’s death, speculates about what might have been going on in his head, but those feelings are never made explicit the way his anger is. We don’t know why Filbrick is this way (the closest thing to a hint we get is the information that he was a World War II veteran - there is, after all, a reason for the common portrayal of the Stan twins’ entire generation as one which was saddled with cruddy fathers in the aftermaths of World War II and Korea – but for all we know, Filbrick could have been like that before the War, too. What was his family life like, growing up? His financial condition? Could he just be someone who was born with a strong predisposition toward an emotional or personality disorder, regardless of whatever else happened in his life? We just don’t have enough information about him to say for sure), but it seems safe to speculate that he was this way pretty consistently: whatever else was going on with him, the only emotion he seems to have felt comfortable expressing was anger.

And this is the guy Ford and Stan had held up to them as their first, and quite possibly most influential, example of what being a man is.

I’d argue that – when they were children, at least – this was more of a problem for Stan than for Ford. Filbrick presumably saw them both as shamefully weak as children, but Ford, at least, had another route to the old man’s approval readily available to him. If Filbrick was at least grudgingly proud of Ford’s intelligence, then Ford could receive the measure of parental approval which Stan craved and could never get; we also see that Ford could apparently hold his own while sparring with Stan by the time they were teenagers, so it’s likely enough that he no longer had to worry about physical assault from his classmates by the time he was in high school, either. Though still isolated and insecure underneath it all because of his childhood experiences and probably in part due to his ongoing social isolation, Ford was able to find a path to a kind of self-esteem: he was both brilliant and quite capable of using his six fingers to break your nose if you had too much to say about them, and he knew it, and everyone else knew it, too. He also had his brother as a constant source of support. When Ford was made to look ridiculous by having a drink thrown in his face in public, Stan promptly threw a drink in his own face in order to look even more ridiculous. When Ford won competitions, which he seems to have started doing at an impressive rate very early in life, Stan seems to have been almost over-enthusiastic in his approval: he looks as delighted about Ford winning the science fair (at the time, before the meeting with the principal) as Ford himself does, if not even happier about it. Even his habit of copying off Ford’s papers in class could have served as a reinforcement for Ford’s ego: he not only could manage for himself, but he could even allow someone else to depend on him.

In this way, by the time everything went wrong, the teenaged Ford had probably already developed a degree of self-respect and self-sufficiency that Stan was still struggling to reliably maintain forty years later. Neither of them could ever be the kind of man Filbrick was, or of which they thought he would approve, they were both too emotionally vulnerable and expressive for that, but it’s probably noteworthy that Ford kept pictures of famous scientists (instead of family photographs) around him during his college and young adult years: because he could also do something Filbrick never could, he was able, to some degree, to carve out an idea of “how to be a man” on his own terms. If Filbrick’s approval was an immovable object in the path between Stan, Ford, and healthy expressions of adult masculinity, then where Stan flailed against it, Ford simply walked around it by choosing new conscious role models.

Tesla, Sagan, Einstein, and company were “great men,” successful (well, at least remembered posthumously) and respected, who were also given to Nerdy Enthusiasms. Said enthusiasm, an open delight in the marvels of the natural world, was therefore an emotion besides anger that Ford could express freely without compromising his view of himself, and it seems that he did so regularly. This appears to have worked well for him; we know very little about his college years – only that he worked very hard, that he made at least one close friend and (based on his usage of the plural ‘friends’ when discussing DD&MD) possibly even had a social group of sorts, and that he continued to indulge his creative side to a degree by playing DD&MD, which was as close as someone in his late teens and early twenties could probably get to continuing the kind of fantasy play he’d enjoyed as a child without sabotaging his probable adolescent desire to feel very grown up – but it seems they were productive and reasonably happy. Six years after them, a slice of his life comes into focus for us in the form of his journal. He was probably around thirty to thirty-three years old when it was written(1), give or take a year or two, and we find him several years into the circumstances he was in when he says, as a much older man, that he’d finally found somewhere to belong. He could be lying - Ford, unusually, even has the ability to lie to the flashback camera, or at least omit things - but we don't really have any reason to believe this; when the flashbacks turn to Stan making an abortive attempt at contact, Ford on the phone sounds cheery. His lack of paranoia and surprise about someone phoning him is also not the only evidence that, at this time, he may not even have been totally socially isolated in Gravity Falls – in the same years, he goes to the public library with some regularity, he declines to buy cookies from a zombie Boy Scout, he converses sometimes with the mailman, and he is on friendly enough terms with Dan Corduroy, even some years after Dan finished building Ford’s house, to know that Dan’s family had a holiday cabin and to ask to use it. Clearly nobody was too close to Ford even then, but his chosen path was going reasonably well for him; it's possible that Stan might have found him rather harder to replace at this point than he did later, after an unspecified time lapse, which may have lasted as long as a year,(2) during which Ford had gradually became a complete recluse as he became more and more consumed by his relationship with Bill Cipher. Before that time lapse, Ford the man seems like a logical enough place for Ford the boy to have ended up; after it…..

Well, after it is where we get back to the topics of anger and its intersection with various aspects of identity and self-concept.

A decent place to begin is with Fiddleford, and with why, exactly, Ford asked him to come to Gravity Falls. Ford tells us that he asked Fiddleford to come because he (Ford) did not have the technical know-how to complete the Portal. There is some evidence to support the veracity of this idea: Fiddleford is, after all, the man who later proves able to build astonishingly lifelike robot monsters whilst homeless (and thus, it seems safe to assume, without conventional sources of funds or supplies), and he is the one who sees the flaws in the Portal design. Indeed, he seems to start spotting them before he even has a chance to physically see them: Ford tells us that Fiddleford started suggesting revisions to the plans over the phone while still in California, in the same conversation where he agreed to come. In the third portion of the Journal, the sixtysomething Ford also mentions hearing about how a Parallel Earth Fiddleford was convinced to come back to the project, at which point the Parallel Portal was stabilized and became something that could be used the way Ford had intended to use it (as opposed to how Bill had intended to use it). The implication is that Ford not only didn’t understand how to complete the Portal, but that he also didn’t understand the plans even as far as he thought he understood them. Certainly the Fiddleford of the main timeline, who would have worked with him before, was instantly suspicious about the existence of a third collaborator once he saw how far Ford had gotten without him, which further supports the idea that Ford was more of a theoretician than a mechanic. This does, however, run somewhat against the grain of much of what we see Ford do on-screen. As a teenager of modest economic means, he was shown to be as comfortable working with his hands as with his pencil, and he was able to build something which acted enough like a perpetual motion device that he won a state-wide competition and drew the attention of an elite university. At university, he created the mind control tie – something which appears, both by its existence and by the glimpse we get of how it’s wired in “The Stanchurian Candidate,” to involve electronics more sophisticated than what Fiddleford was shown working with in roughly the same time period. I tend to run with the idea that the events of the episode “The Stanchurian Candidate” only happened in a particularly vivid nightmare of Stan’s, and therefore include the tie simply because it was in the Journal, but if one goes with official canon and accepts that “Stanchurian Candidate” happened, then Ford somehow, in a matter of hours, with no budget or supplies, invented a thousand-year lightbulb that also improves the complexion of the user in the same episode that shows us the wiring of the tie. In the eighties, he also seems to have developed his mind-encrypting machine as a private project, and in the Multiverse, he survived entirely on what he could steal or construct for thirty years, and it seems he had progressed a long way toward the development of the Quantum Destabilizer on his own before he stumbled into the ‘Better World’ dimension; Parallel Fiddleford really just sped the completion process up because he’d happened to discover a useful fuel source for presumably completely unrelated reasons years before Ford showed up. Clearly, Ford can more than hold his own as an engineer, and as one with a particular flair for doing impossible things with electricity and the laws of energy conservation; even Fiddleford trusted his gift in that area enough to, however reluctantly, briefly accept his claim that he had been working alone despite his serious doubts about the idea, and to allow Ford to bully him into silence about the Portal’s design flaws for weeks or possibly months before the confrontation at the diner. Why, then, did he suddenly become convinced, during that fateful July, that he could not finish the Portal without Fiddleford?

The answer may lay a few pages further back in the Journal. Not long before he calls Fiddleford, Ford makes notes on the plans for the Portal that Bill had showed him in a dream. One of these notes is “I MUST NOT LOSE MY NERVE!” Later, in a state of mind where he is increasingly paranoid and beginning to lose a degree of touch with reality, he reflects repeatedly about Fiddleford’s nerve in similar terms. There may well have been some level, deep down, on which Ford knew he was getting in over his head, and he was scared out of his mind by that realization. If this is true, then, on some level, he knew something was...off, with what was going on around him. He knew he needed help from someone he trusted and who was not Bill. And so he reached out to his college roommate for that help, and he did so in a way that allowed him to still plausibly deny just how much trouble he was in, both to himself and everyone else, and he didn’t only need that deniability because he was inviting a third party into the isolation of an increasingly abusive relationship and would need an excuse if Bill took exception to the idea of Ford relying on anyone or anything other than Bill. He also needed that plausible deniability to preserve his self-concept, because by this time, whatever he had or hadn’t been earlier, Ford Pines had become a deeply, deeply dishonest man.

One of the key moments for understanding this - and, in many ways, the character overall - occurs in “Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons.” There, Ford delivers the exasperated line, “if my hands were free, I’d break every part of your face!” If that line was taken totally out of context and shown to a casual viewer, the casual viewer would likely misidentify it as a line of Stan’s. Stan is, after all, the character with the hair-trigger temper and violent tendencies, right?

To an extent, yes. In “The Golf War,” Stan asks Soos if it would be “wrong” to punch a child (Pacifica) – probably more of an indirect threat in response to Pacifica’s insults toward the Pineses than a true question, but Stan’s moral code is sufficiently different from the standard issue that one can’t completely dismiss the possibility that he really wanted to, well, punch a child. And who can forget his antics in “The Land Before Swine” or “Scaryoke,” where he punches his way single-handed through monsters which had defeated the rest of the cast? Or in “Not What He Seems,” where he takes on multiple government agents in zero gravity while, for at least part of the time, he had his hands fastened behind his back? Or that glorious moment in the finale when he did, in fact, break every part of Bill Cipher’s glitched-out face? Stan is also the character who lost his temper to the extent that he lashed out at Ford physically in the middle of the save-the-world ritual, and Stan is the one who keeps his old boxing gloves around his bedroom, along with owning at least one set of brass knuckles. As an old man, he still seems to take pride in having learned to fight back against the world physically as a child, and he recommends that Dipper try knocking Robbie unconscious bare-handed when Dipper is challenged to a fight. And, of course, the man is a menace whenever he gets within a certain radius of the Stanmobile, the vehicle that can take out roadway railings, light poles, and theme park gates without showing a scratch. There’s no denying it: Stan is perhaps many other things, too, but he’s also a very physically aggressive kind of guy. If, therefore, someone in this series was going to threaten to break someone’s face, it seems obvious it would be Stan…but it wasn’t. It was his supposedly milder-mannered, “goody nerd-shoes,” brother who, on examination, actually behaves far more casually violently than Stan does throughout his sadly short time in the series. To demonstrate:

Ford sets foot in his house for the first time in thirty years and identifies the first person he sees as his brother. Later, writing in his reclaimed journal, Ford describes his own reaction thus: “instinct took over and I punched him right in the face. I feel kind of bad about that!” 

In the very next episode - aside from his antics in the first scenes(3) and the already-mentioned description of what he’d like to do to Probabilitator after the wizard captures him - we also have Ford’s immediate reaction to the wizard’s materialization. Stan is, naturally, most clearly unnerved by an evil math wizard suddenly materializing in the TV room, but there’s a moment where he glances sideways at Ford after Ford pulls a gun; to me, at least, this glance made it seem like he found that behavior pretty disturbing as well. For the past several hours, after all, Ford had been playing board games. Most people do not bring concealed guns to game night with their nephews. Ford does.

Stan and Ford both have wanted posters that show up ‘on screen’ – Stan’s in his box of memorabilia in “Not What He Seems,” and Ford’s in Journal 3. Stan’s talks about “scams, frauds, and identity theft” - all potentially serious crimes that can ruin the lives of the people on the other ends of them, but ones which follow the general tendency (per the reading I did last March) of real-world con men to avoid violence in the commission of their crimes. Ford’s, on the other hand, refers to its subject as ‘armed and dangerous,’ and as someone with a bounty on his head. From the way Ford depicts his own appearance in it, it seems likely that particular version of the poster is at least ten to fifteen years old, but in “Lost Legends,” he is still instantly recognizable in the multiverse for his criminal shenanigans, even in the company of his near-identical twin. In his own words, “a number of dimensions consider me an outlaw to this day.” If one uses the dictionary definition of the term - and considering how much variety comes up just in the few examples Ford gives of worlds he’s visited, there’s no reason to assume he hasn’t visited a few Premodern Justice Dimensions - this means there could be multiple dimensions out there where the authorities took the time and trouble to formally declare that he had done something shocking enough to justify the revocation of all rights and protections he might have otherwise enjoyed under the law, thus allowing anyone to do anything they could physically manage to him with no fear of any negative repercussions except those he could personally inflict on them. He also refers to his own  exploits as “swashbuckling” (a term which brings piracy to mind) and offhandedly mentions travels with “bandits” (a term which describes practitioners of behavior usually classified under the ‘organized crime’ umbrella due to the cooperative nature of the often violent or potentially violent crimes in question).

Much of this behavior, it’s true, can be attributed to a combination of trauma responses and, in the Multiverse, sheer necessity. He refers in the journal to talking “my way into and out of food and shelter,” and the “out of” comment underlines how, like Stan before him, he very abruptly went from having a relatively stable situation (at least in the material sense) to being homeless, which would be at least a serious shock to the system of almost anyone, including people in much better mental health than he was in at that time. Then there’s the more complicated non-material aspects of his previous situation. As an adult reader, it’s stomach-knotting to go through the 1980s portion of the journal, because if you look at the behaviors and dynamics and leave out the “incorporeal eldritch abomination” element, it only takes a very little extrapolation from the material for his ‘partnership’ with Bill becomes an uncomfortably realistic depiction of a domestic abuse situation. Considering that either of these major traumas of 1981-1982 could (and, if the fantastical elements are stripped out, regularly do) induce PTSD in nearly anyone, and considering how many more traumatic events he doubtless went through in the years following, it’s not implausible that the man would develop a tendency toward believing that the best defense is a good offense. However, there is also evidence that at least some of these tendencies predated Ford’s major traumas, and that – despite how he would very likely insist this was not the case - the trigger-happy adrenaline addict we meet in “A Tale of Two Stans” may not represent a total change in character from who he was before the Portal – or even before Bill. The evidence here is admittedly scarcer and more ambiguous, but to illustrate:

In Journal 3, Ford seems sincerely puzzled about why Fiddleford would show signs of trauma after the gremlobin incident. This incident involved Fiddleford being shown his worst fear (something which ended in tourists being removed from the Mystery Shack via stretcher in apparent catatonic states. Fiddleford was a  man who probably had an anxiety disorder to begin with, who was just accepting the reality of the supernatural, and who was living, for at least several months, hours away from where his wife and young son were, something which seems to have troubled him at the best of times. It's remarkable he was functioning at all after the gremlobin incident). He was also hit with a bunch of venomous quills, and flown through the air by something which clearly had no good intentions for him in mind…and that was all before the solution to the situation ended up involving Ford crash-landing everyone through the roof of a barn, breaking Fiddleford’s arm in the process.

The gremlobin incident is not the only time Ford, even before the multiverse, appears bewildered by perfectly ordinary responses to frightening stimuli. While Fiddleford admittedly may have had some form of anxiety or compulsive disorder to begin with (an idea supported by events like his tearing out his own hair under stress and his need to correct the Cubik’s Cube), his reactions to monsters appear far more reasonable than Ford’s offhand assertion that he has survived many monster attacks without registering any of the experiences as traumatic.

When Fiddleford was in danger, Ford’s automatic response involved, essentially, jumping off a cliff and hoping the magnet gun-to-hyperdrive attraction would first catch and then carry him long enough for him to catch up…and that he would then somehow figure out how to land the improvised gremlobinmobile without killing himself, Fiddleford, and the monster all in one go.

When we go into the bunker in “Into the Bunker,” Soos finds a candy dispenser in a cabinet filled with weapons. These weapons appear to be a mix of firearms alongside various medieval or Renaissance-style pieces. It is, of course, possible - though to my mind, improbable; Fiddleford seems to prefer indirect methods of aggression, mostly in the form of homicidal robots - that some or all of these weapons belonged to Fiddleford, but there is also evidence that there was a similar mix of weapons in the house which later became the Mystery Shack: sside from Ford’s singular ideas about how to answer a door in “A Tale of Two Stans,” we also see a box of other manual weapons which Dipper has access to in “Boss Mabel,” and which Stan is seen rifling through to find a crossbow - presumably the same one which had come alarmingly close to his nose thirty years earlier – at the beginning of “Love God.” Stan further asserts there are ten guns in the Shack during “Fight Fighters,” but we never see them; even while fighting against zombies, while following pterodactyls into caverns beneath the town, and during Weirdmageddon, Stan routinely arms himself with bludgeoning weapons, not ranged ones. The only time we see him use a ranged weapon (at least that I can recall) is the time he aims the crossbow at a balloon, which was out of reach. Ford, however, despite demonstrating almost immediately upon arrival that he’s quite capable of fighting without one, repeatedly uses ranged weapons even in close quarters: the crossbow in Stan’s face, the handgun in the living room, the Quantum Destabilizer during Weirdmageddon, the spear in the closing montage of the finale. These examples are, of course, all justifiable enough in their various contexts, but the combination of several incidents and all the weapons around the house and its environs makes it seem eminently possible that Ford was a bit of a weapons nut long before he became an interdimensional fugitive, and that if there actually are ten guns in the house, Stan may have more or less 'inherited' them along with the Stanford identity.

When Bill - who knew Ford very well before the Portal - shows Ford a vision of a possible future in an attempt to convince Ford to join him in his conquest of the universe, it is a vision of complete destruction. We see Bill’s giant finger tearing cities apart in an uncomfortable amount of detail, and are treated to the sight of planets being munched on like apples…and this is Bill’s sales pitch, the ‘party’ he is inviting Ford to and really, really wants Ford to agree to attend. This leaves us with two options: either Bill can’t understand that anyone might ultimately desire anything beyond or besides the chance to participate in unlimited, consequence-free violence (something which doesn’t square too well with Bill’s otherwise apparently excellent grasp of human motivation and how to manipulate it to serve his own ends), or Bill has some reason for thinking that the prospects of immortality and a group of ‘friends’ to destroy things with on a massive scale might genuinely appeal to his “old pal” just as much as the prospect of being “all-powerful” and “all-knowing” would. This is also hinted at by how Bill appears to try to convince Ford to relate to him by revealing that he was once mortal himself and explaining that he burned his dimension before offering Ford the chance to effectively do the same to the universe of the canon timeline. 'Become a god of destruction' or 'get tortured a lot' were also not the only possible options Bill could have offered; he could, for instance, have tried to convince Ford that if he (for all intents and purposes) became a god, then he could save at least some sapient life-forms in the universe from Bill by setting up his galaxy as a benevolent dictatorship or the like, with the alternative being that everyone would die if Ford didn’t take that deal. Bill did not attempt anything of the sort. Bill, at least, thinks Ford is not only capable of observing or even committing acts of great violence, but that he is capable of relishing the opportunity to do so.

Why are all these things easy to overlook? In part, it is because Ford wants us to overlook them, because they do not ‘fit’ with the person Ford wishes that he was. He wants, very much, to see himself as a cool-headed, utterly rational, cultured figure – not least because this would represent a total contrast to his twin brother and everything Stan stands for, either in reality or inside Ford’s imagination - and so he uses long words and is usually fairly softly-spoken. He emphasizes his “well-ordered and scientific mind” even as he behaves in ways which suggest he’s highly volatile and puts in writing (however carefully concealed the information might be behind veils of words) that he planned to make his name on a scientific project which wasn’t of his own design, a behavior which indicates a comfort with shortcuts even more potentially disastrous than Stan’s. When he does, rarely, have to acknowledge something that he would rather not acknowledge directly, he always immediately justifies the potentially unflattering behavior in fairly grandiose ways - stealing radioactive materials, for instance, is rationalized as a ‘doing a public service,’ and all the things he did to become a wanted man in multiple dimensions are, similarly, lumped together and dismissed as crimes committed “for a noble purpose.” No doubt some of them were, but on the page about the Infinity Die, one doesn’t really get the impression that he was particularly discriminating about when he used that thing, considering the usage statistics we’re given. The page informs us that the Die saved Ford’s life three times, endangered it “around 20,” permanently changed the color of a sky one time…and that it’s been used enough other times besides these that he can note the odd frequency of rolling a four(4). When talking to Dipper, he also seems quite confident about just how far the Die can warp reality - he doesn’t speak as if “the universe could turn into an egg” is an exaggeration. Use of the Infinity Die would not be a reliable way to limit damage or even to advance his goals while committing other crimes, so it becomes a bit difficult to justify his apparently relatively casual use of it as something he did only as a last resort and/or only in service of a noble purpose. Most fans recognize that he clearly started over-identifying Dipper with himself toward the end of the series, but he identifies Dipper with himself only when it comes to traits he is proud of having; otherwise, the “grammar, Stanley” remark is one of the few criticisms he has of Stan which doesn’t also come across as something he might want to say about himself and his own less desirable qualities, if he could only bring himself to acknowledge them for what they are in plain language. It reads, to borrow from someone I once talked about the character with on Reddit, like “my man is just as chaotic [as Stan], he just manifests it differently.”

Part of this difference lies in their respective approaches to the truth. Neither is anything you could reasonably call an honest man, but the distinction lies in how Ford appears to lie to himself a lot more often than Stan does. Stan, outside of ‘working hours,’ is utterly up-front about who and what he is and what he cares about: he’s a crook and a grifter and a liar, interested only in that which benefits him and the small number of people he personally cares about. Only once, when contemplating his epitaph in “The Stanchurian Candidate,” does he show anything even vaguely resembling shame about this, and even then, he still includes the detail that he would, of course, be a crooked mayor if he became one. It's entirely possible that the only ultimately sacrificed himself to destroy Bill because of the direct and imminent threat Bill represented to his individual relatives. As the man himself once said: it wasn’t enough for him to be the town’s hero, because his real agenda was being Dipper and Mabel’s. Ford, on the other hand, seems to have shared many of Stan’s desires (wealth, respect, shortcuts to these things) as a young man, but also to have always felt some need to convince himself that he wanted more (for lack of a better term) socially acceptable ‘side features’ as well. When he dreams of scientific accomplishment, he will admit he looks forward to riches and glory...but he also throws in that he wants to revolutionize science to enhance the well-being of all mankind, too. When he writes down the story of how he began his quest to kill Bill, he acknowledges that he wished to “wreak vengeance for the life he stole from me” - but only after saying he would “save the multiverse from [Bill’s] wrath.” Later, though, when talking about his meeting with a parallel Fiddleford, he refers to his vow as a “vendetta” - a word defined as “a blood feud in which the family of a murdered person seeks vengeance on the murderer or the murderer's family; a prolonged bitter quarrel with or campaign against someone.” The word can be used far less precisely in casual conversation, of course, and he probably does sincerely see it as his duty to atone for his mistakes by removing the entity which seeks to exploit them, but at the end of the day, despite his attempts to frame his behavior in terms of doing what is objectively right, there’s also a massive degree to which his quest is personal. Anger and revenge and personal concerns ultimately prove just as important to him as they are to his brother, if not even more important. This is illustrated perhaps most dramatically in the lead-up to the Final Deal: one can only imagine what Bill’s back-up plan was, because Bill came close to not needing one. Ultimately, when put to the test, the principles which went along with the persona Ford tried so hard to project crumbled: the family was, in the end, more important to him than saving the world, just as it was for Stan. He never mentioned the idea of making any attempt to save himself in the deal (on top of doubtless believing that such an effort would be doomed to failure, there are hints that Ford always planned to die in the execution of his revenge, or at least never saw a way around doing so), but he was willing to let Bill take over the galaxy “or worse” just to save (or at least exempt himself from the responsibility of personally dooming) three other people on a probably quite temporary basis. If Bill was unraveling reality all around them, after all, where exactly were Stan and the twins supposed to go?

“What other choice do we have?” It took no few viewings of the finale for it to register why I always find that line so wrenchingly uncomfortable to watch. At that moment, finally, for the first time on screen, Ford admits that he cannot save the situation, or even himself. That he’s been backed into a corner – trapped – forced to acknowledge that another entity can and will hurt him, and that it can and will hurt him on as many levels as it pleases. He’s been taken right back to where he was when his first grade classmates nearly put him in the hospital, and he can’t hide it from himself or anyone else anymore...and it’s after this moment that we almost immediately see a dramatic change in Ford’s behavior and self-representation. The same man who remained remarkably defiant, all things considered, when tied up by an evil sorcerer who was gloating about its plans to consume his brain, or even in the midst of what was probably several days of severe torture,(5) visibly flinches, his hands shaking, while using the memory gun; in the aftermath of that moment, we then see him standing in a corner, looking helpless and at a loss for what to do while other people (specifically, mostly Mabel) try to figure out a solution without his assistance, as he's meekly accepted the situation instead of trying to change it. Dipper notes that some point in that day was the “only time” anyone had ever seen Ford cry, a statement that implies there had been other occasions where Dipper expected him to cry when he didn’t do so – perhaps it’s just because Dipper is used to Stan, who cries rather a lot, but for some reason, Dipper regarded this observation as specific enough to underline the severity of the situation during the first hours of Stan’s amnesia. The closest Ford really gets to his pre-Weirdmageddon demeanor again is when he takes the long way around the block in order to ask Stan to accompany him to investigate some anomaly up north, just as he’d previously made the same excuse about being too old to manage on his own anymore for asking Dipper to stay in town after the summer ended; since even unbending enough to, effectively, ask anyone not to leave him was already a step away from his isolated-hero act, it’s far from one of his more distinctive adult characteristics reasserting itself. Something, it seems, in the man profoundly broke in the throne room of the Fearamid, and based on his worryingly fervent attempts in the last pages of his journal to represent both Stan and Fiddleford as plaster saints, it doesn’t seem like it’s getting fixed any time soon.

I noted earlier that I suspected Ford had no intention of surviving his duel with Bill in the Nightmare Realm during “Not What He Seems.” There are a few reasons for this. One is simple probability, of course (even if he had destroyed Bill, there would have still been plenty of creatures around that would have been more than happy to eat him, and his death ray was almost out of power). More pertinent, however, are a few of Ford’s own words. Twice, he refers to Stan as having “saved” him – not ‘rescued’ ‘retrieved’ ‘gotten back’ or any other possible combination of words, but “saved.” The first, where he’s still grumbling about it, is when he shows Dipper the Rift and explains why he was angry at Stan for this seemingly charitable behavior: he saved Ford’s life, but at the cost of endangering the world, and at that time, Ford was still deeply committed to the idea of himself as someone who sacrifices, not someone who sacrifices are made for. On the second occasion, while trying to explain what just happened to Dipper and Mabel after they realize that Stan no longer recognizes them, he sounds almost bewildered as well as moved as he makes the statement. Shortly before that second occasion, in the Fearmid itself, he also, infamously, uses the word “suicide” on the Disney Channel, when he tells Dipper and Mabel that any attempt to take on Bill – or, in other words, to undertake the very task he was attempting when the Portal reopened in NWHS – was a “suicide mission.” His behavior, from the moment he comes back, is usually varying degrees of reckless, and the Journal illustrates that this isn’t an entirely new tendency: aside from vowing to undo the damage he’d done “or lose my life in the attempt” at the end of the 1980s section, he also put himself through the kind of work conditions that can literally kill a person for, it seems, months before he realized Bill had played him; afterward, he proceeded to have a breakdown while continuing, or even increasing, his dangerous habits of sleep deprivation and stimulant overuse. And even before that, as previously noted: he once didn’t think twice about jumping off a cliff. There has, at least since he came to Gravity Falls, always been a part of Ford which seems to have had some inclination toward self-destruction; he may not have been suicidal as such in the early years, but even then, he seems to have been more than merely indifferent to his own well-being. It is at this point that all the disparate threads of this essay will begin to gather back together into a single line, because this behavior can be interpreted as Ford, essentially, daring the universe to so much as try to make a victim of him, because it was at in those years that he began to feel the need to assure himself that he wasn’t one. After he admits he’s out of ideas in the Fearamid, though, he finally has no other choice but to admit that he has in fact been victimized – specifically, by Bill Cipher.

When Ford chose to adopt famous scientists as his models for how to be a man, he began to lie to himself about himself to some degree. He insisted he was rational and unemotional when he was anything but. He retained some pride in being in better physical condition than the other men close to him during both his scientist and hero arcs, but he downplayed his quite real attraction toward violence (recall that on two of the three occasions where he and Stan came to blows, Ford was the one who escalated the conflict) and thrill-seeking, trying to veil them from himself as well as the reader. Ford’s tendency toward black-and-white thinking didn’t disappear at the end of the show; he simply reversed the polarity, so that now, instead of him being the hero, he recast others in that role and was at least attempting to accept a place among the ranks of those who’d needed saving. This was something that he’d been denying he was for a very long time, even at the price of focusing on anger-inducing aspects of the past, perhaps distorting them out of proportion in his memory so he could keep his mind on the future. Unable to cope with the loss of control implicit in his situation with his 'Muse,' acting as the agent of something else and being manipulated in deeper and deeper over his head, he directed his attention to a future where he would be on top again, focusing on anger toward the past instead of on his fear of the present.

For most of the show, Ford has real issues with anger, and I tend to believe that quite a lot of them had to do with the need to protect two things after the disintegration of his relationship with Bill Cipher. One is his image of himself, and the other - arguably, something dependent on the maintenance of his self-concept - is his sanity – or at least, if not his sanity, then his ability to function. As noted the other night – anger might not feel good, exactly, but it can feel so much better than hurting that it can be mistaken for feeling good. Fury can be paralyzing, yes, but it can also, when directed outward, keep you moving – spite, as they say, is the source of many an accomplishment Self-loathing, on the other hand, will crush you like a boulder, sooner or later...and it’s painfully obvious, in the scrambled, increasingly unhinged journal entries between the Portal test and his decision to call Stan, that Ford is capable of intense self-hatred. Even in later years, when he has focused his entire mind on revenge for decades and reviles the traits in his brother that he dislikes in himself, there’s still that undercurrent of guilt and self-hatred running just beneath the surface, so close to the top that even he can never really fully ignore it. He doesn’t really know how to accept help while maintaining his self-respect, and here’s where we get to him being both an abuse survivor and, arguably, specifically a male one.

Earlier, I referred to his partnership with Bill as an uncomfortably realistic depiction of a domestic abuse situation when you strip the supernatural frills away. Bill could well have marked off items on some kind of manipulation checklist: he would flatter Ford to draw him in, and then withdraw without explanation, leaving Ford despondent and thus that much more dependent on Bill upon Bill’s return. Bill convinces Ford that nobody else really understands him like Bill does, and that nobody else ever could do so. They are all parasites who want to ride on Ford’s coattails, or steal his work, or are people who will hurt him because they are jealous of him; Bill is the one who inspires him, because he’s just that deserving of inspiration...except, of course, when he isn’t. When the Muse would go silent for long stretches of time, waiting with highly uncharacteristic patience until he got just close enough to desperate for a breakthrough. Then the whole cycle would begin all over again, until finally, by 1980-1981, Bill had succeeded in reducing Ford’s world to little more than himself. Based on the state of Ford’s study, he was, by the end, probably literally worshiping Bill as a god.(6) It is therefore possible to argue that the relationship included spiritual abuse in addition to the blatant psychological, physical (“enjoy the mystery bruises”), and financial (in that much of the grant ended up being used to pursue Bill’s agenda instead of for its intended purpose) abuse...and all of that happens before the possession sub-plot after the Portal test, where any illusion that their association is consensual or in any way for Ford’s benefit falls apart. Bill systematically violates every understood boundary within the relationship during the weeks between the Portal test and the Portal incident, and Bill very clearly enjoys doing so. He takes the time to taunt his victim by scribbling in the Journal when Ford blacks out. He seems to derive a great deal of satisfaction not only from the ability to completely deprive Ford of all mental and bodily autonomy on a whim, but from reminding Ford that he had this ability: he seems to have gotten a twisted satisfaction from knowing that Ford knew that, sooner or later, he would be unable to physically prevent himself from sleeping any longer. The hopelessness and inescapability of his situation are thrown in Ford's face again and again, and apparently for no better reason than that Bill is a physical and psychological sadist. Other people's misery and horror are like a drug to Bill, and we see, again and again, in the series that Bill will even undermine the pursuit of his own goals in order to enjoy it.

And the person he did all this to was Ford. Someone who already had profound trust issues (from his point of view, everyone he ever cared for had betrayed him to one degree or another), and whose formative years were during early fifties. This is significant, even aside from the impact of personality flaws specific to Filbrick Pines on his son’s development. Even today, in our rather better-informed times, many people dismiss the idea that men and even boys can be victims of abuse entirely, and even some of those who acknowledge the possibility won’t take it as seriously as the idea of men abusing women and girls. When Ford was physically and verbally bullied in elementary school, the only solution his father could offer was “learn to hit harder than the other guy.” If someone hurts you, you hurt them back; this, in the earliest examples he seems to have had, is how you reclaim power, and if you can’t do that, then Filbrick thinks you’re weak, that you’re an embarrassment, and that he just wishes you were gone, to very nearly quote Stan from “Dreamscaperers.” This was also a general attitude of the surrounding culture, without a lot of prominent examples of better options. Years later, it follows - horrible though it is to say – reasonably enough that when Ford realized he’d been manipulated and used by something that couldn’t be punched in the face, he began to have a breakdown, which only began to resolve in a small way when he convinced himself there was, in fact, a way to do something at least equivalent to punching Bill in the face. His plan was irrational and poorly strung together, and it did require him to ask someone for help, which must have galled – but it’s only Stan he has to ask, after all, and Stan doesn’t really count, and Stan owes him anything he might choose to ask for anyway, and besides, he’s not really asking Stan to help him deal with the problem, is he? He’s going to be the one who defeats that bastard or dies trying. Stan’s just...going to hold his beer, so to speak. Or book, as the case may be. Because he doesn’t need Stan. He doesn’t need anyone. Because he’s in control of this situation. He’s going to save the universe, and then everything will be fine again (or so he tells himself), because then he will be, once and for all, beyond the reach of anyone who might want to hurt him again. Because if he can pull this one off, then who would dare? Who would even want to? He’ll be a hero, a savior, someone deserving of everyone’s respect – and if not, he’ll at least be a martyr, which to him likely seems like a better second choice than continuing to live with the thought that he’s vulnerable and that everyone knows it.

An interesting thing to examine at this point is the similarity between his approaches to Fiddleford and Stan in the eighties. Earlier, it was argued that Ford may have reached out to Fiddleford as much out of repressed fear as from any real need for technical assistance. When Fiddleford first comes to Gravity Falls, Ford cannot stop talking about Fiddleford’s excellence, praising it even above his own. Fiddleford is his friend, his partner, his companion on this path to glory. Slowly, though, it changes. He begins to cast more and more doubt on Fiddleford’s capabilities, in a way, at first, which almost seems reasonable due to Fiddleford’s neuroses. He begins to feel that he is doing Fiddleford a favor – many favors, in fact – by allowing him to participate in “making history” like this. He projects and lashes out. This shows up even more clearly when he writes to Stan. He does not, admittedly, start out with praise in that case, but he still clearly goes through the same process of progressing from acknowledging a need to twisting it around in his own head so he no longer has to do so, just at a higher rate of speed. Almost as soon as he decides to write to Stan, he adds in his journal that “perhaps he can prove his worth to me.” This is followed by some prevarication – the line about how perhaps the mistakes of the past can be made right could apply to his thoughts on how he feels Stan wronged him, his thoughts on his situation with Bill, or even his past actions toward Stan, and when Stan arrives, Ford initially seems to present the matter as one where he needs a partner-in-crime because Stan is the one person he can trust – but within minutes, he shouts about how he’s offering Stan the one chance he’ll ever have to do something meaningful in his entire life. He’s progressed again to the idea that he doesn’t need help, and that he’s just doing these people - people who he has ostensibly asked for help - a favor. He is still in control. Because he doesn’t need them. He doesn’t need anyone. And when he triumphs over Bill, then….

...Then….

...Then we get to the bit I did write about on Thursday night. Specifically, how there’s very likely going to come a day when Ford will start finding it very, very hard not to have Bill around to hate anymore. To paraphrase zephyrsimperium - even when anger is hurting you so much that even you can see that it’s doing so, even when you know, intellectually, that it doesn’t really feel very good at all, it still hurts less than actually cleaning out the psychological wound.

To a certain extent, Ford’s anger did save him in 1982. Coping mechanisms can be necessary, for a time, when a trauma is too close to deal with. Truly dealing with it would be healthier, but there are situations where some distance has to be put between oneself and the trauma before it can be addressed; situations where you’ve just very suddenly become homeless and are being hunted by your reality-warping abuser would, it seems safe to say, be among these. Too much pain from too many sources could not be addressed all at once, especially by someone who, for reasons both cultural and innate, possessed none of the psychological tools or self-awareness to even begin to work through it all, and so when survival became a priority, focusing on hating Bill more than he hated himself probably was the only choice Ford realistically had in that moment. At the end of the show, however...Bill’s gone. Ford no longer has that mission to focus on, and at some point, that’s likely to mean waking up and realizing – if I may be forgiven for quoting a song from the Dark Ages, aka, my childhood -

“Wherever you go, there you are/You can run from yourself, but you won’t get far.”

Learning to defend himself as a child wasn’t enough – he still had to seek validation, acceptance of some kind, through all those competitions. Winning the competitions wasn’t enough – he still needed to find a place where he could fit in, somehow, either as a genius or as an anomaly. Going to college, finding someone he considered even more brilliant than himself, winning a grant – somehow, it still wasn’t enough, he needed to discover a new theory and emblazon his name in the history books...never realizing that even if he’d succeeded in that endeavor, it still wouldn’t have been enough. And all that was before Bill. Afterward, sure...he killed Bill. The being that made him feel weak and stupid and helpless all those years ago, it’s gone now. He won. And it still won’t be enough, because removing Bill doesn’t undo what Bill did to him. It doesn’t take away the difficulty of trusting anyone else after such an acute betrayal. It doesn’t take away the anger at himself for being someone who got duped. It doesn’t take away all those years out in the Multiverse, and the memories of whatever less-than-ideal things he had to do to survive them, or the impulse to hit first and ask questions later that he’s developed, or anything else. Nor is throwing himself into being the Perfect Friend or Perfect Brother in an attempt to make up for the past going to ultimately help much – he can’t undo whatever wrongs he did Fiddleford or Stan any more than they can undo the ones they did him, and all three of them are likely in for a rough ride of learning how to have relationships where sometimes you clash and disagree, but you trust the other person enough that you can have a relationship with them when neither of you is a Perfect Anything to the other…and where you trust the other person to still want to be your friend after you demonstrate that you aren’t perfect, or even able to perfectly fit into a simple, clear mold. As hard as accepting onself as a flawed individual with vulnerabilities that can be exploited is, it's probably still child's play compared with then, after having been taken advantage of in the past, to trust anyone to not do so at the first opportunity again.

Despite the somewhat gloomy tone of this essay, there are reasons for hope. One lies simply in the fact that Ford got this far. His story, after all, follows the arc of many a tragic hero, and yet, he manages to end the show alive and without having gone over to the Dark Side (even if he came dangerously close and was only pulled back from the edge by Stan’s quick thinking and acting skills). Another, more promising, is in "Lost Legends," where we get a glimpse of the Pines family in the week between Weirdmageddon and the birthday party. We see that Stan has recovered his normal personality and memories enough that he and Ford manage to annoy each other throughout the adventure. They disagree on how to proceed, which of them is more competent to look after the twins, etc...and the incident ends with a truce, rather than each of them slinging blame at the other for the situation Mabel ultimately has to rescue them both from. Ford is able to accept that they both contributed to the problem, rather than it being a black-and-white situation, the way he seems to have viewed most situations for quite some time. He even lets Stan play with the super-glue gun of science. It's progress. Here's hoping, for everyone's sake, that it's one step among many to be taken.

Notes

(1) See my essay “The Trouble With Timelines” on AO3 for an explanation of this assertion.

(2) Reasoning for this hypothesis can also be found in “The Trouble With Timelines.”

(3) Based on his lack of alarm when a second specimen later attacks him in the lab, my theory is that Ford staged the near-escape of the Cycloptopus at the beginning from first to last - note how he appears to have a pretty solid grip on it when he enters the gift shop, and later turns to the family, holding it up and smiling brightly, after subduing it as though looking for approval from others before indicating that he’d like to be included at meal times. Later, in “The Last Mabelcorn,” we learn from the read-out of his thoughts that he lurked closely enough behind the vending machine to eavesdrop for at least long enough to hear Stan refer to him as a “dangerous know-it-all;” since his other thoughts in that sequence all involve loss, anxiety, regret, and childhood bullying, it seems reasonable to assume that whatever he had hoped  to overhear, it wasn’t that. Considering how Ford agreed to avoid the children at the end of “A Tale of Two Stans,” it seems likely to me that Ford staged the Cycloptopus incident just for an excuse to interact with the rest of the family for a moment without obviously trying to do so, and that the creature was not actually especially dangerous.

(4) Though it is possible that some of the times Ford rolled a four were among the 20-odd times the Infinity Die allegedly endangered his life; if he was already in a bit of a bind and decided to risk getting a solution that way, rolling a four with something that is highly illegal to own - and, therefore, probably even more highly illegal to roll - would be unlikely to improve his situation

(5) I saw an essay once where someone actually tried to figure out what, if Bill was accurately portraying his own usage of electricity, happened there: best-case scenario involved convulsions violent enough to dislocate joints accompanied by severe internal and external burns. It seems, considering the contrast between his first appearance in “Take Back The Falls” and his relatively physically normal behavior during the rest of the episode, that being turned into gold again resulted in the instantaneous restoration of his pre-torture physical condition, but this would probably provide small comfort if you are under the impression that every time you ‘wake up,’ you’re just going to go right back through the same thing again...and again...and again….

(6) Comments in the codes of all Journals and in invisible ink in the blacklight journal make the question of Ford’s religious beliefs another interesting one; we know he was raised Jewish, but his few remarks after dealing with Bill could suggest that, by the story’s main time, he may have become some form of dualist. An argument which can be used either for or against this idea is the apparent existence of the Axolotl cult, as shown in exclamations by space refugees, carvings in Jheselbraum’s shrine, Bill’s dying invocation, and a bumper sticker in “Lost Legends.” On one hand, Ford expresses confusion about what the refugees meant by “praise the Axolotl!” and makes no explicit connection between the statement and the carvings he later sees in Dimension 52; when he speculates on “the opposite of Bill?”, it is unclear if he is referring to Jheselbraum or her background art/presumed patron deity (“Oracle” is suggestive of the Oracles of Delphi, who were priestesses of Apollo and were supposed to prophesy through divine inspiration, so it does seem likely that Ford, Jheselbraum, or both believe that another entity is the source of her prophetic gift). It is also unclear what, exactly, the power dynamic between Bill and the Axolotl is; the fact that Bill invokes it in the hopes of returning from his deletion implies it is far more powerful than him, but it is unclear (both in Bill’s invocation and in the Axolotl’s prophecy in “Time Pirates’ Treasure”) if the Axolotl could choose to ignore the invocation if it wished to do so. Bill, we know (or are at least told), was once a mortal being which sought escape from all laws, including the laws of nature which dictated his own mortality; we do not know how the Axolotl came to exist outside of time and space, or what this implies about its nature. When Bill muses on his enemies, however, he swears that neither Time Baby nor “the big frilly jerk” will stop him; this could imply that he sees Time Baby and The Big Frilly Jerk (most likely Axolotl, unless the canon version really does have a twin brother) as equal threats, and that perhaps “the ancient power” is something they are all in some way bound to/reliant upon for their seeming immortality? Bill was able to reduce Time Baby to his component molecules, but word of author is that TB is not actually dead and will eventually manage to pull said molecules back together into a Time Baby-like shape again, which renders the issue of power levels even murkier.

[binxyu]

Jungkook was meant to be just a guilty pleasure. Not your guilty pleasure, but a guilty pleasure. You knew never to fall in love with a man that thought loyalty was showing up on time. He was everything you never needed, but here you were. Your fingers pressed on the trigger that would start the flame of pain.

>>Pairing: Jeon Jungkook (dom) x fem!reader (sub) | fuckboy!jk x witch!reader

>>Word Count: 7.5k

>>Genre: Mini Series / Smut & Angst

>>Warnings/Kinks: Arguments, breast play, creampie, cum play, disloyalty, degrading, exhibitionism, fingering, hair pulling, marking, oral (receiving), praise, unprotected sex, and witchcraft

Jungkook was too beautiful for his own good.

From his pouty lips and sharp jaw line to his starry eyes. The man was perfection.

Even you had fallen for him, a woman that stopped believing in love.

But, all you could do now was remember the times you had together as the fire slowly burns in front of you.

As your love for Jeon Jungkook disappeared into nothingness.

Your fingers typed away at the keyboard, writing the second of three essays you had due. It was nearing the end of the semester and, while you were ecstatic at the mere thought of summer vacation, the stress of exams was looming over you.

“Can you look over this paragraph for me?”, you peeked up over your laptop and nodded, moving your own device out of the way to make room for Namjoon’s. Kim Namjoon was a journalist in the making, a man that knew exactly how to put events into words. He was quite different from you, but study sessions together were always eventful. You were the perfect person to correct his grammar mistakes or to help add detail to his work and he was the perfect person to help explain a certain historical detail you may have missed.

Studying religions was what you had decided was your interest considering your unique practice. You enjoyed learning about the beliefs of people centuries ago but the facts could get scrambled in your brain and that’s where Namjoon came in. He almost seemed to have a never ending timeline in his brain.

“I’d add more emphasize on Jungkook. He did beat the record after all”, you quickly realized when you read the paragraph that he was writing for the school paper again. Despite your attempts to persuade the man that he could do much better with his time, he continued to write for it.

“That’s true. Wait, how did you know about that?”, you let out an amicable chuckle. Of course Namjoon would assume you did not know. Just because you despised sports did not mean you were deaf. The whole school had been talking about the student since the track meet. While you couldn’t remember the exact record he beat, it was still a record.

“People talk”, you shrugged and Namjoon nodded. It was peaceful for a moment as you went back to typing, managing to push aside your emerging migraine. Your body was begging for a good nap, but you had to get this done. You were, among less appealing qualities, a hard worker. Perhaps it was due to the pressure put on you as a child or maybe it was because that diploma was just out of reach. Either way, nothing was going to get in the way of your future.

And, like the biggest fuck you from the universe, Jeon Jungkook walks in.

Yet, you hadn’t realized and kept typing until Namjoon cursed loudly, drawing you out of your world.

“Are you okay?”, your voice was soft before your eyes met the issue. Oh, poor clumsy Namjoon.

He had spilt his coffee all over his shirt, staining the freshly new white blouse he had worn. You couldn’t help but laugh as you dug in your bag for a napkin.

“Don’t bother, it’s too much for a napkin. I’ll go to the restroom. Be right back”, you gave him a brief nod and a thumbs up. Still, you got up with your little pack of napkins and tried to clean up the remaining coffee staining into the table. The librarian is sure to kill you both if it does end up staining the wood. Standing back to examine your work, you almost screamed.

Standing by your laptop was a tall figure with the most sinister smirk you’ve ever seen.

Jeon fucking Jungkook spilt your coffee all over your notes and laptop.

Your mouth hung open for a moment before fury overtook the shock. You stomped up to the broadly built man and yes you didn’t believe in violence as a solution but all you wanted to do was slap the smirk right off his gorgeous face.

“Why did you do that?”, you also wanted to yell but the librarian was already eyeing the table and you couldn’t draw attention to the mess.

“Because I like to watch you suffer, sourpuss”, how have you not killed the man in front of you? You had no idea. Because that name infuriated you.

You knew it was the student’s way of messing with you, wanting to strike that minuscule nerve inside of you. No one else believed you could get angry but Jungkook knew you could. Mostly because he had caused that anger.

“And why is that? Because Jimin told you another lie about me?”, Jeon Jungkook was so impossibly similar to Park Jimin that it was uncanny who he had learned his traits from. Truth be told, you had the smallest crush on the man in front of you during freshmen year. He was so affectionate, caring, and friendly back then.

But, instead of ending up with the sweet heartthrob, you had ended up with Jimin for that year and the next.

Starting out, he was simply a popular boy and loved you with his whole heart. But, time went by and his true colors shun through like the sunlight through your irritatingly useless blinds. He was a playboy. An awfully good one at that for you to have never noticed the extra pairs of undergarments that laid on his floor when you slept over at his dorm.

He cheated, but he blamed it all on you and even Jeon Jungkook hates your guts because you were sure Jimin had told him exactly what he had told most of your friends. That you had broken his heart with your “horrifying” witchcraft and that you were dangerous. It explained why so many students asked to see your devil shrine the next day or tried to barge into your dorm to look at what Jimin talked about.

The most ironic thing was that you had never used magick around the man and you barely used it to begin with. You supposed it was for good reason considering that happened the first time you told someone about it.

“Jimin doesn’t lie. He’s never lied to me and I’m sure you’re well aware of what you did”, his finger jabbed harshly above your breast, just slightly lower than your collarbone. Among many things, Jungkook was dense and forgetful. You noticed that quickly when you started spotted reminders written on his fingers or palm. Just like the little note saying “library 7pm” was written on the finger jabbing you.

Unless the track star had another reason to be in the library he never visited, he wrote that down just to catch you in time.

“Tell me, Jeon. What did I do?”, you tilted your head and moved away from him, realizing the coffee was now leaking onto the floor. You desperately wished Namjoon would hurry up and get back to help you.

“You broke his heart. Using magick or something”, you bit your lips in annoyance and turned around to face him.

“Or something? Jungkook, I never did anything to Jimin. I know you won’t believe it because you look up to him like some god, but he cheated on me. He broke my heart”, you jabbed back, hitting the same spot he hit you, “and, if you haven’t noticed, Jimin doesn’t seem heartbroken, does he?”. If he dared to say yes you may have to use that horrifying magick Jimin lied about because your ex was anything but heartbroken. He was with a new woman almost every night and, even with this knowledge, they lined up to be with him. Who could deny the charming Park Jimin?

Finally, Jungkook shook his head, his curly black hair bouncing as he did the movement. If he wasn’t such a nuisance, you might’ve wished you could run your fingers through it. It looked so fluffy.

“Then, leave me alone. It’s been years of your torment and I’m tired of it”, you sighed and slung your bag over your shoulder after shoving your slightly wet laptop into it, walking out of the library after sending a text to Namjoon that you had felt bad because no one really knew about your fights with Jungkook and Namjoon would surely try to beat his ass if he found out about it.

Leaving the coffee on the table was a bold move but a part of you hoped that the asshole would clean it up. It was his mess after all. Not your’s.

“You’re coming to the track meet, right?”, the voice startled you and you sat up on your bed, making direct eye contact with Kim Taehyung. The only guy with a key to your dorm.

“Tae, I love you but you know I do not do sports”, you grumbled and flopped back onto your bed. Your classes had you beat and the need for a nap was too great to give up. Even if it was for your best friend.

“I know but it would mean so much if you were there”, don’t do it. Don’t do it.

You did it.

You made direct eye contact with those big puppy eyes Taehyung always used to get his way. You had fallen victim once again.

Which was why you had ended up in the cold, shivering as you watched the team run around the track for what felt like an eternity.

Taehyung had done great considering he barely moved before the season but who really stood out was Jungkook. His back muscles were only moments away from ripping through the flimsy shirt he was wearing and sweat was coating his hair. He was aware of how good he looked. He always was. He even was ballsy enough to wink at one of the girls screaming his name in the crowd.

Thankfully, the pleasant bliss that was drinking kept your mind off how irritated you were. You had snuck in a beer to drink (not that everyone else didn’t) and the alcohol loosened you up a bit.

After the meet was over, a sweaty Taehyung was clinging to you like a massive koala. He was high off adrenaline and couldn’t decide whether he wanted to cuddle or jump around.

“Tae, take this before you pass out on top of me”, you handed him a water and he gratefully took it, still leaning against you as he chugged down the drink.

Taehyung and you were polar opposites. He was an athlete, quite dorky, a great singer, and was overly optimistic. You, on the other hand, liked to keep to yourself, was not the best of singers, and always stuck to the reality of things. Even if you could manipulate that reality the tiniest bit.

“Let’s get you home”, you let the man lean his weight on you tiredly as you started to walk towards the exit of the field.

“Sourpuss, I need to talk to you”, that voice was definitely not the one you needed to hear when you were this tired and already agitated. What does a girl have to do to spend time in her bed?

“I’m a little busy if you haven’t realized”, you gestured to Taehyung, who was breathing directly on your neck and nuzzling his nose against the skin. It wasn’t an odd gesture considering your close friendship but his face was so cold it send goosebumps down your spine.

“I’ll help”, Jungkook offered, quickly coming to your rescue by crouching down and getting Tae on his back. The man grumbled but was happy to take the ride considering it was less soreness for his legs to endure the next day.

The Jeon Jungkook helping? What a trip.

“What do you want?”, you winced at how rude it sounded. Sure, Jungkook most definitely deserves said rudeness, but he was helping you.

“I’m sorry”, you legitimately thought you were hearing things and turned your head to look at him, stopping in your tracks.

“Can you say that again? I don’t think I heard you correctly”, the athlete groaned before turning to look at you, frustration evident on his face.

“I’m sorry. You were right about Jimin. He’s been talking shit behind my back for months and I had no idea”, if it wasn’t for your “told you so” attitude, you would’ve felt sorry for him. Jimin was one of his closest friends after all.

“Hate to say I told you so but”, he glared at you to shut up and you quickly did. His glare was so cold that a shiver went up your spine.

“Sorry, it was a joke. Jimin is really manipulative so don’t let him bring you down”, you reassured him, even bringing your hand up to pat his shoulder. By the way he flinched away, you would’ve assumed your hand was made of lava.

Noted. Jungkook hates being touched.

“I assumed so much about you and that was immature of me”, the man smiled softly at you. It felt like arrows pierced your heart. He had such a cute smile for an asshole. Like a bunny.

“It’s fine. Lots of people assume things about me”, you shrugged as you both started walking again, Taehyung looking down at you to make sure you’re okay. He was like your protective older brother and you couldn’t be more thankful to have him around.

“But they shouldn’t. So what if you follow a different religion? It doesn’t mean you’re evil”, that was probably the first time someone agreed with your practices besides Taehyung and Namjoon (mostly because he understood it better than others).

“Thank you for saying that. It means a lot”, you finally smiled back at him, sending his heart right into his chest as his heartbeat picked up. Needless to say, he adored your smile.

“I hate to ask this of you but could you tutor me on Epidemiology? I regret ever taking it and I’ll pay you”, you were wide-eyed with shock to say the least. You didn’t expect Jungkook to go out of his way to learn. Especially, not with you.

“Sure, you can join Namjoon and I in the morning”, you nodded before you saw the way Jungkook’s nose crinkled up in displeasure.

“What? What’s wrong with that?”, he sighed in response to the question as you both reached your dorm building. You’d just let Tae stay with you for the night.

“Namjoon hates my guts. We’re way too different. Besides, aren’t you two dating? I don’t want to be some third wheel”, Jungkook almost sounded disgusted at the idea, probably imagining you making out with Namjoon in front of him.

“I’m not dating him. He’s just the only other intelligent male I can tolerate”, he seemed to relax once you finished speaking but there was still tenseness evident in his shoulders which wasn’t due to the large man on his back.

“I still don’t get along with him despite the fact that he writes about me all the time. He once yelled at me for cheating and wrote an article about it”, that was a slap right to your face. Right, Jungkook was a player and he could throw your feelings aside like one of his cigarettes. Do not get attached.

“Well, don’t cheat”, you said because, let’s be real, it’s the truth. You unlocked the door and helped Taehyung off of his back.

“Bye Koo, thanks again”, your words were quick and you kicked the door closed with your shoe, your hands full thanks to the oversized man child clinging onto you.

Koo. He liked that.

Weeks had ticked by and, somehow, Jungkook had managed to get your number. Honestly, Namjoon probably slipped it out or Taehyung gave it to him. According to Tae, the man had been oddly friendly to him and they were (borderline) friends now. They played video games together, practiced together, and even barged into your place for snacks together.

Great. Now you had two man-children to take care of and feed. It was definitely taking a chunk out of your paycheck each week to get extra snacks for the two. They ate like starving animals whenever they came over. A small part of you even thought it was just to piss you off even more.

Jungkook finally managed to get you to agree for a tutoring session with him. Just one. If this one went well then maybe you would agree to more.

The only sad thing about the session was that it was scheduled to happen right after your last class on Friday in your previous dorm. The dorm you had just finished cleaning up since the last time the two adult toddlers had destroyed it.

Surprisingly, when you had woken up one morning, Jungkook was still there. You assumed he and Tae were too drunk to get back to their own dorms and had decided to just sleepover at your’s. It was quite annoying if you were to be honest, but the way Koo looked actually interested in your religion was enticing.

He didn’t look scared or disgusted when he looked at your little collection of crystals on your desk or the jar resting on your end table sealed with candle wax. If anything, he actually looked amused or even impressed.

“I’ll pick you up after class. I can’t believe you don’t drive and walk to your dorm every day”, Jungkook shook his head as he walked beside you. Coincidentally, your last classes were next to each other but you were shocked to hear him offer to give you a ride.

“Don’t judge me, Mr. Playboy. I just have a fear of hitting someone. Have you seen the lunatics at this campus? They will run out into traffic for fun”, the man chuckled wholeheartedly at the pout on your lips. Plus, your joke was actually pretty accurate. Even he had almost hit a drunk idiot when trying to get back to his dorm late one night.

“Okay, that’s fair. So, you okay with me driving you?”, you nodded cautiously. While Jungkook was guaranteed to know every path to your dorm by now, you were still guarded. Being in that tight of a space with him was going to be difficult.

No, you don’t get those so-called “butterflies” when you were with him. Honestly, those butterflies were typically a bad sign to you. Feeling sick because you loved someone sounded a bit odd and almost contradictory.

You actually found yourself with more powerful emotions than anything. If Jungkook made you angry, you were angry. If he made you happy, you were happy.

Everything just felt so much stronger when you were around him. Thankfully, he almost always made you happy. He made you laugh because, once he discovered that beautiful sound, he couldn’t get enough.

So, after your class, you met him out in the hall and he walked you to his car. Now you realized how such an undetermined man got into college.

He was filthy rich.

Sitting there in the parking spot was a brand new Mercedes Benz. Its black color almost matched the distinct leather jacket that he decided to wear today. It very much screamed Jeon Jungkook.

However, it did not scream you whatsoever. You were almost afraid to get near it.

“Hop in. My grade isn’t getting any lower”, he opened the door for you and you weren’t sure if it was because you were friends, or whatever the fuck you two were, or if it was because he wanted a discount.

That’s not fucking happening. He’s already stolen plenty of money through snacks from your cabinets.

Meekly, you got into the vehicle, immediately buckling your seatbelt as if it was going to hurl itself into motion at any moment. Jungkook shut the door and went around to get into the drivers’ seat. Apparently he trusted his own driving so much that he never wore a seatbelt (Namjoon would’ve had a stroke if he was told that) and he drove with one hand (scratch that- make it two strokes).

Despite those things, he was an actual good driver. You felt safe and he drove the speed limit. Maybe it was just because you were in the car with him?

Getting out of the luxurious leather seats proved to be a hassle considering you knew your seats in your dorm were no where near as comfortable. You could sleep in that passenger seat without a care in the world compared to your own bed. Still, you forced yourself to get out and you two went up to your dorm. Jungkook is way too familiar with the place now considering he barely talks to you. It’s your place and, yet, he comes here for Tae.

“Alright, what unit do you need help on?”, you asked softly as you took the needed supplies out of your bag. You actually already took Epidemiology. It had nothing to do with your major but it was interesting to you. Who wouldn’t want to learn about the science of the world’s biggest killer: disease?

Jungkook simply looked at you, blinking a few times and pressing his tongue into his cheek in that nervous habit you realized he had.

“Oh- for fucks sake, Koo”, you grumbled as you realized how long of a process this was going to be.

It had been months since you began tutoring the student and, finally, there was progress.

Standing proudly with his shoulders back was Jeon Jungkook holding a test with a big number ‘92’ on it in red ink. Your heart swelled with pride.

“I passed! This was the exam review test so I’ll pass the exam, right?”, you smiled brightly as you looked at his excited eyes. You never thought Jungkook would ever be excited over passing a class but you can’t judge people by their covers, right?

“Yeah! Just keep up with the studying and you got it”, you nodded quickly, looking away from his puppy eyes when you felt happiness engulf you like a fire.

Ironically, you were actually playing with fire. Your hand tugged on the trigger and a flame flickered from the end of your lighter. You brought it down and lit the candle in front of you. To be honest, you were a bit of a goodie two shoes but you did break one rule.

No fire in the dorms.

“Hey, I really wanted to thank you. I’m actually passing all my classes now and it fills like my life has purpose again”, woah, didn’t expect that.

“No problem, Koo. Your life always has purpose. What do you mean?”, you looked up from what you were doing, noticing he was leaning against the frame of your door.

“All I did was party and drink. Sure, I was a good athlete but that can only take you so far”, you nodded in understanding and stood up, walking towards him.

He followed your every move like prey waiting for the predator to attack them.

But, instead of an attack, he was met with a warm, genuine, and, all around, great hug.

“Do you think of me as everyone else does?”, you looked up at him, meeting his starry eyes.

Oh, you hated them because of how much you loved them. They held the galaxy within them and you could stare into them for hours if given the chance.

You were many things but, tragically for Jungkook, a liar wasn’t one of them.

“Honestly, I did before. I’ve seen you do some of the things the rumors talk about-“, smoking, cheating, fighting, “but now I know that’s not all you are. There’s more to you, Koo”.

All Jungkook had been able to think about was your words. Sure, he didn’t care about your opinion before but it truly did make him happy to know you thought better of him.

“Jk! Where have you been?”, oh no.

“Jimin? I’ve just been at the gym a lot”, lies. He had been with you a lot.

“Ah, I see. How’s the bet going?”, the shorter man asked, running his fingers through his precisely cut hair. What a born model.

The bet. The bet you had no clue about. The bet Jungkook was too dense to refuse.

“It’s going. She hugged me yesterday”, Jimin scoffed and then chuckled, vastly different sounds that almost made Jungkook double over in fear. Truth be told, he despised Jimin. He despised him because he scared him. The only other man more influential than him was Jimin and that meant Jimin could ruin his reputation in a matter of seconds.

“That’s all? Damn, she really is void of love”, the bet Jimin was referring to was the one he made with the younger at the beginning of the year.

“I bet you can’t make her fall in love with you. She didn’t even love me, Koo! Me! I’m telling you, if you make her fall in love with you then I’ll get you anything you want”.

Time was running out with exams coming up and Jungkook needed to hurry if he was going to win such a bet. But, was it worth it if it meant disappointing you? Jimin may be scary but you made him feel so happy and so proud.

The only time he had seen you disappointed was when Taehyung broke one of your jars, resulting in a mess of coins, herbs, and wax on the floor. That’s the day he decided he never wanted to be on the receiving end of one of those looks.

“Yeah, she’s guarded which is understandable-“, wait- did Jeon Jungkook just grow some balls? “I’d be void of love too if everyone judged me for something I believed in”. He did.

“Where is that coming from? She deserves it, doesn’t she? Come on, JK. Keep that head in the game!”, Jimin patted his head like he was a child with all A’s on his report card, which, for once, was actually true thanks to you.

What game? You? Were you truly just a game to him?

“Alright, I’ve got this”, damn. Maybe you were.

Most nights you found yourself at the library now. It was the only place that was filled with peace and quiet. Especially on a Friday. Not even the librarian was here.

“Guess who”, hands covered your eyes and you would’ve punched the man behind you if you didn’t immediately recognize his husky voice. It was soothing with just the perfect mix of roughness. You couldn’t help but wonder what it sounded like when he just woke up.

“An asshole who thinks it’s okay to sneak up on women in a deserted place”, you grumbled and Jungkook immediately removed his hands.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you”, oh here we go. Argument number two thousand.

“I wasn’t scared. I was just saying that, one, you’re an ass and, two, don’t do that to women”, he nodded in agreement and you thought that was the stopping of an argument. Boy, oh boy, were you wrong.

“I won’t anymore but you’re so weak. I’ve scared you so many times now”, you glared at him. Thanks to months of being by Jungkook’s side, you had become a bit more out of control. The feelings you used to keep caged up were now more out in the open. You cussed more often, even tried drinking (and almost spit it out on him), and your frustration was no longer hidden from the world.

“Jungkook, you are a menace to society and I would like it if you leaved”, it was a pointless threat. You didn’t really mean it. You adored his company but you wouldn’t admit that with a gun to your head.

“Liar, you love me”, shit. Did you? No, don’t ask that. It was just a joke.

Damn you and your overthinking.

“No, I hate you. Shut up”, that was also a useless threat. Jungkook never shut up. He was quite the talker and shutting up was not in his vocabulary.

“No, you hate me. Shut up”, he sat on the table you were previously working on, knowing this would take a while. Your arguments always lasted between thirty minutes to two or three hours. You both hated to back down.

“No, I love you. Shut the fuck up”, wait a second-

“As you wish”, he smirked victoriously and leaned closer, his face so close to your’s that you could smell his musky cologne.

“That was wrong”, you glared at him and he shook his head, “don’t open your mouth aga-“ you were cut off as his lips connected with your’s. He kissed you so intensely that your mind was fogged up, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

Finally, with your brain still hooked on adrenaline, your hands found their way to his cheeks, cupping his well defined face as you kissed back. You could feel him smile into the kiss before he pulled away, leaving a spark traveling down your body. Now, that’s a good feeling.

“Ah, I love when you shut the fuck up”, you were so close to beating him with your bag.

Everything was weird after the kiss. Life wasn’t some fairytale where you both lived happily ever after in some old palace somewhere.

No, you were both actually stuck in that “fuck, what are we?” mess.

Love wasn’t something you could control and that was why you never let it get that far, but, with Jungkook, it felt uncontrollable, spreading like wildfire.

So, you avoided him.

Of course, it wasn’t the most humane or easiest form of dealing with your feelings but it worked.

Well, for a little bit until Koo decided to block you off in the library, cornering you into the back section of the religious books. Oh, how ironic.

“What’s wrong?”, his voice made your knees want to give out. It was early and you assumed he woke up early just to catch you. His attire said that enough from his sweatpants to the tank top hugging his upper body. He obviously just threw something on before he left.

“What are you talking about?”, you tilted your head and tried to act innocent, but, once again, a liar you were not.

“Oh please, you’re obviously pissed off or scared of me or something”, bingo. You were horrified of what you were feeling and, in tune with it, Jungkook.

“I don’t know! Why do you even care? You’re obviously going to pass your exam so what am I needed for anymore?”, you winced at your own words, watching as the man’s usual bright expression turned into a sorrowful one.

“It’s much more than that, y/n”, that was probably one of the first times he had said your name. He usually called you nicknames like princess, sourpuss, or whatever else he came up with depending on his mood.

“Then what is it?”, the stare he gave you made you want to hide further into the corner. It was so predatory that your body was trying to fight its own instincts to run away and avoid the problem. You were always a flight over fight type of girl.

“You”, the one word made your eyebrows furrow, racking your brain for a response or understanding of what he meant. Jungkook shook his head as you watched your face twist in confusion.

“You’re so dense. Why would I kiss you if it wasn’t all for you?”, he leaned closer to you, hand resting on the shelf of the bookcase behind you. You silently thanked the universe that no one else was in there yet.

“Discount?”, it was the first thing you thought of and it caused a low chuckle to rumble out of Jungkook’s chest. He looked up into your eyes and it almost knocked the air out of you.

“Hmm, unless it’s a fuck buddy discount then I don’t think I want it”, he raised an eyebrow cockily and your eyes went wide. Little did Jungkook know that he just complicated your relationship even more.

“And what if I’m okay with making such a discount?”, the student practically groaned at the words, free hand finding its way on your hip, squeezing it. You don’t know where your new found confidence came from but you had gotten rather blunt since hanging out with Jungkook.

“Then I’d say you’re not the person I thought you were”, he hummed, leaning in to whisper in your ear. The way his breath tickled your ear sent sparks through your body.

“Is that what you want? For me to take you here against these books?”, yes you did. Looking around, you were met with many versions of Bible and other holy books of all religions. It was absolutely filthy and wrong to do it there which was why it was perfect.

“Yes, I want that”, your nails dug into the wood behind you, trying to ground your emotions down. It had always been an escape tactic to you.

“How naughty”, now you understood why he had chosen today of all days to corner you. He loved the skirt you were wearing and how easily it gave access to everything delicious underneath. Plus, your legs were perfect to him.

His fingers danced along your thighs before he pushed up your skirt, revealing the black lace panties underneath. Oh, you knew what was going to happen today and you definitely knew Jungkook liked his black.

“So pretty. Just for me?”, the question took you off guard, your own questions flooding your brain. Ultimately, after a few moments of silence, you decided he probably had a possession thing. Who didn’t like to feel powerful?

“Just for you, Koo. Fuck, touch me please”, so you decided to feed his little ego, edging him on until he pulled the panties to the side to reveal your glistening pussy.

The dim light of the library truly didn’t do it justice but he couldn’t help himself from finding it to be also perfect. He was in deep shit now.

His long fingers ran down your slit until they reached their destination: your pussy. He rubbed around it before he slowly plunged his middle finger into the wetness, curling against your walls.

Fuck, you always hated that finger but with it inside of you? Maybe you could make an exception.

Your body shook in response to the stimulation since you hadn’t been touched in so long, your hands gripping the wood tighter to keep yourself steady. Jungkook smirked when you clenched around his finger before he added another, stretching you out wonderfully as he scissored you open.

And that was when Jungkook found his favorite sound in the world.

“Jungkook! Oh god”, you moaning his name sounded like music to his ears and he couldn’t get enough. The only thing he hated was how quiet it was since you were still conscious of the library around you. He wanted you to scream it.

“You like that, princess? You want more?”, you obediently nodded, not in the mood to be denied an orgasm (which you were sure Jungkook would do if you didn’t obey). The man chuckled and leaned down, still pumping his fingers steadily as if it took no effort at all. If you had done this yourself then your fingers would have been cramping by now.

Your body jolted when Jungkook’s plump lips wrapped around your clit, sucking harshly on the nerve as if he was starving. To be fair, he had skipped breakfast.

You feared for the books behind you as your body spasmed, orgasming on the man’s fingers. You took deep breaths once you were finished and watched as Jungkook pulled away, pulling his cum covered fingers out of you.

With prolonged eye contact, he slipped the digits into his mouth and sucked the juices off of them. A new wave of arousal went through you when he tapped your lips with them, making you open your mouth. You gagged briefly when they hit the back of your throat but you sucked on it, licking your way up his middle finger.

“Good girl”, now that was going to haunt you forever. You whined when he pulled his fingers away and he smiled teasingly at you.

“I’m going to need to see these”, your eyes went wide when he gripped the collar of your shirt and ripped it clean down the middle, tossing it aside as if it didn’t cost you a fortune.

“Jeon Jungkook! That was expensive”, you huffed but he paid you no mind, just reaching behind you to remove your bra too so it can join the rest of your clothes.

“What if someone sees? I can’t cover these up quickly, Koo”, you crossed your arms over your chest, looking around cautiously. Jungkook just laughed and pulled your arms away, pinning your wrists above your head so he can press his body against your own.

“Take my shirt off and you can put that over you for the day. It’s fine, sourpuss”, oh you would’ve slapped him if you weren’t so turned on. He let go of your wrists and you quickly removed his shirt for him, revealing a muscular chest you could’ve never imagined.

And he never imagined how beautiful you’d look with your hard nipples pressed against the thin fabric of his white t-shirt. He grabbed them immediately and you failed to see the spark in his eyes as he squished them together.

“That was one of my favorite shirts. What a di-“, you yelped when he pulled your leg up over his shoulder, yanked his pants and boxers down, and pulled your panties aside to rub his angry tip against your folds. Your head rested back as he rubbed against your clit, covering his cock in your juices.

“What a dick indeed”, Jungkook chuckled deeply, arousal blurring his world into nothing but you. The only thing that mattered at that moment was feeling you.

His lips attached to your neck and you were so out of reality that you didn’t realize he was littering the skin with his marks, a silent claim on you as he pushed himself inside of you.

“Oh shit, it’s exactly as I imagined. So tight and warm”, and he was just as you imagined. So very big. You didn’t think anyone else could stretch you out as much as Jeon Jungkook and that thought made you groan.

“You’ve been imagining it?”, it was your turn to smirk and, for the first time ever, the man in front of you blushed.

“Oh please princess. I know you’ve been thinking about it too”, and you had been. Not that you’d ever admit that after he just basically friends with benefits zoned you.

“Just move you asshole”, Jungkook gripped your hair, tugging on the soft strands as he finally kept pushing, bottoming out inside of you perfectly.

His big hands moved to grip your hips, a little help to keep you up as he started to snap his own into your’s. He was mildly uncomfortable at first but, as you adjusted to his size, bliss filled your body.

Finally, you were doing something to make yourself happy and pleased. Maybe Jeon Jungkook wasn’t the best man to do it but he was making you feel so so good.

The man snapped you out of your thoughts as he brought your hand down to your clit. You understood and started to rub it, happy knowing that Jungkook was also looking out for your own pleasure too. Not that you’d know he had been thinking about you creaming on his big cock for months now.

“Keep doing that”, he whispered despite the heavy groan that threatened to come out. He was referring to the uncontrollable clenching you were doing around his dick, sucking him into your walls with each muscle movement. You listened and (despite knowing you were going to keep doing it anyways) clenched once again.

“Can I cum inside?”, you whimpered at the idea of Jungkook’s cum filling you up and, knowing you’re on grade A birth control, you nodded. While Jungkook was effortlessly attractive, kids were not part of your plans by far.

“You close too, princess?”, you nodded, a small moan spilling past your lips despite your best efforts to be quiet. With that knowledge, the man orgasmed and you could feel his seed start to coat your insides. The feeling made you tumble over into your own orgasm, coating his softening cock with your release.

“I think that’s the best sex I’ll ever have”, you praised him as you tried to put your cramping leg down off his shoulder. Instead, he held it tighter and pulled himself out of you. He watched as his cum started the spill out of you, dripping down your thighs beautifully.

So, he’s a man who likes to admire his work.

You almost screamed when he pushed it back inside of you with his finger due to the sensitivity.

“See you later, sourpuss”, Jungkook smirked and put your panties back to their original position before he pulled his own boxers and pants back up. He walked off and you were left gobsmacked with his cum dripping out of you onto your panties.

As the weeks passed by, the world became more vibrant and cheerful but also more chilling and worrisome.

Exams were over and you were free to go wherever you pleased but, somehow, you always found yourself wanting to be with what was supposed to be your secret guilty pleasure. Now, he was your everything. He truly brought color into your world; sadly, color always comes with black and white.

“I won the bet, Jimin. I want what I asked for”, you listened intently from the other aisle of books. The library had become your go to spot to find Jungkook. Surprisingly, the once unmotivated student was more frequently in here because of the sheer relief he got when you stood before him with a proud smile. What a softy.

“Really? She fell for you? Damn, you still got it. I can’t believe you asked for this though”, the disgust in your ex’s voice was evident and you so desperately wanted to see what he was referring to. You truly thought Koo had stopped being friends with Jimin after he apologized but apparently you were wrong about a lot of things. Most of all, you were wrong to love again.

Feeling your tears start to spill down your cheeks for the first time in years, you forced yourself out of the library. You should’ve seen it coming. What would a playboy want with you? A woman looking for a serious relationship? You’re an idiot and you’ll fix it.

Said playboy must’ve spotted you because you could hear his heavy footsteps behind you as you rushed out of the library, hurrying into a run with the safety of your dorm in mind. It was time to end this.

So, here you were. Remembering everything from the past few months as the candles in front of you burned, getting so desperately close to the string connecting them. You had carved an evident ‘JK’ on one and your initials on the other, bonding them to the people who needed to be apart from one another.

Watching his candle, you noticed the wax dripping down the long wick and you knew they were tears. You knew because of the loud banging coming from your dorm door, the man on the other side screaming and sobbing for you to let him explain.

Your candle, however, burned strongly with vengeance. It stood so tall compared to Jungkook’s and, as the fire finally burned through the string tying you both together, you felt free. It was like Jeon Jungkook had never affected you before and his name slowly slipped from your mind.

Eventually, the banging stopped as the candles reached their ends and the fire flickered out under your gaze. You felt so blissfully numb as you walked towards the door, opening it to reveal a confused Jungkook looking up at you.

“What did you do? It’s like-“, you cut him off with your hand, pulling him up rather roughly.

“You never knew me. That’s how I want it, Jeon Jungkook. You never knew me and I never knew you. Now, get your prize and leave me alone”, you slammed the door in his face. You felt pure relief but Jungkook could still feel a pang of want in his body.

You had failed to notice the little wax left of his candle that stood strong as you dumped it in the trash and he failed to notice that he had left his “prize” outside your door as he rushed off.

A gorgeous rose quartz necklace.

What a way to declare your love to a witch who just cut it all off.

[brujahinaskirt]

Here's a non-shitpost KCD essay for you. Cut for length.

One of the reasons KCD's writing works is that it's sort of an antithesis to the late-season spirit of HBO's Game of Thrones. Maybe we could even say it’s an antidote—a counterstudy to offset the crude grimdarkiness that's become so ubiquitously posh lately in fantasy and historical fiction alike.

In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, almost every character you meet—big or small—is profoundly human. That’s not to say “inevitably weak and disappointing,” as with many (grimdark) stories of its ilk. It’s to say that, at some crucial and overt point of their development, these characters are defined by love, either by its failings or its emotional pressure or its capacity to bring out the best in us.

This is especially true for those who are or appear to be villains. Just a couple examples from an impossibly long list:

The mean-spirited dandy drunk, your knightly nemesis apparent, reveals himself as a fiercely moral but desperately lonely new adult who needs love more than constant scoldings—and who utterly, embarrassingly adores our protagonist through the rest of the game.

The brigand who poisons you, struck suddenly by his own empathy, hurries to stop the poison and save your life—in much the same way as an incident of animal cruelty suddenly reversed his dark ideas about the nature of the world.

The unfaithful, conniving noblewoman may seduce you in insensitive and borderline offensive ways—but she is also a generous and compassionate leader, beloved by her subjects for treating them like people, not underlings. (Even if she treats our protagonist himself like this week's favorite toy.)

The calculating, pretentious lord who seems indifferent to his subjects’ suffering, who has a scholarly answer for everything, who presumably seduced and abandoned a woman… is again and again rendered weak, nervous, and tongue-tied by his powerful fear that the child he now wants to love will reject him.

Complex characters aren't a novel invention, but this is a specific type of complexity: the idea that a person's behavior towards us is not always emblematic of who that person really is. This pattern is true for countless characters, minor or major, and I’d suggest it’s the definitive narrative element of the game. Even the “proper” villain—the marauding robber baron whose schemes contribute to an entire village burning to the ground—is rendered scared and vulnerable when his lover’s safety is threatened. And—when the man he loves is freed—this villain comports himself with honor that feels almost anticlimactic in its humanness.

Some players complained about this... about the story being too fiddly, too personal, too talky, too slow. I see why a product of twenty-teens HBO might think so, but I say their expectations are grossly mismatched with the type of story/art they're consuming here.

In Kingdom Come, the climax isn’t the point. HBO-style unguessable plot twists and entertainment violence and this maudlin grimness about the supposed "true nature” of people aren’t the point. Kingdom Come’s point isn’t that goddamn pervasive, falsely-clever TV writer crux of “within every friend lurks a monster with the capacity to betray you, so WATCH YOUR BACK.”

It’s not quite the inverse crux, either. KCD doesn’t claim all evildoers are secretly good at heart and can be fixed if you hug them enough. Some people, it maintains, are fundamentally broken. But its point seems to be exactly that: it's hard to predict who's who until you figure out what and how a person loves. It explores that nuanced road between goodness and wickedness: that humanness, if not humanity, dwells in every person, even the villains. That people—even the worst people you know—are, when compelled by the right kind of love, capable of shocking tenderness, honor, and maybe even kindness.

I remember watching a Let's Play of the final hours of the game. As the protagonist and his companion (said dandy drunk) gallop toward what appears to be a blisteringly obvious HBO betrayal setup, the streamer mentally scrambles to figure out what's going to happen—namely, how the HBO-brand grimdark plot twist is going to smack him in the face. He's not excited for it. "Please don't be evil, Hans, please," he pleads, groaning at the certainty of what's coming just around the bend.

And then it doesn't.

Hans isn't evil. The villain wasn't luring you into an elaborate betrayal set-up. This time, exhausted by the fighting and the politics, everyone has simply told you the truth—and maybe this is the most surprising and satisfying twist of them all.

Refreshing, tbh. I’ve had enough compulsory grimdarkiness. Like streamer dude, I am here for it.

[daikushiji]

study date

pairings: tsukishima x reader, bokuto x reader

request: Is there anyway I could get something about tsukishima and bokuto asking for attention and cuddles but their s/o isn’t giving it to them cause she’s studying?

a/n: ofc u can bb!! thanks for your patience, hope you like it <33

Tsukishima Kei

when you suggested studying together, he didn’t really like the idea

knowing that you would have asked obvious questions and made unnecessary comments for the entire time

but lately you were both so busy with your schedules that you couldn’t spend much time together

so the study date seemed like a good compromise

you promised not to distract him, so when he joined you in the library, you only greeted him with a peck on the cheek and got back to your books right away

now he can’t help but spare a glance at you every few minutes, waiting to feel you tap on his shoulder to ask him something

but your eyes were fixed on some paragraphs, trying to memorize them

no comments on his old pencil case, no whining about dropping out of school soon, no touching him "by mistake" while trying to borrow stationery 

nothing at all

he even tried to annoy you by clicking his pen in your ear for five minutes straight or bouncing his leg against your knee

but you didn’t say anything, just a polite smile when you met his eyes while turning the page

you promised to behave because you missed his company, but you weren’t the only one who was feeling lonely

leaning closer to you, he looks down at your notes

“do you need help with anything?”

”no thanks”

”you sure? i’ve almost finished”

”i’m good”

noticing how you’re cutting him off, he hides the pout on his face

but seeing your hands so close, he tries to lace his pinky with yours

thinking that you actually bumped into him, you pull your hand away

”sorry”

he firmly grabs it in his, resting them on his thigh under the table

”i thought..”

”i know what i said”

he mutters, avoiding your gaze, well aware that his ears are bright red

so you simply draw circles on the back of his hand for some minutes in silence 

when you suddenly feel his grip getting tighter

he stands up, dragging you to a remote section of the library

before you can ask him anything, he hugs you tightly

burying his head in the crook of your neck, he takes a deep breath

”sorry i couldn’t resist any longer”

he whispers, his lips brushing against your neck 

you lace your arms around him as well and then gently running your fingers through his hair

he traces some kisses up to your mouth, resting his hands at the sides of your face

”i missed you so much”

Bokuto Kōtarō

you were behind on school work

and when you told your boyfriend that you had to cancel your date, he almost started to cry of despair

but he’s a resourceful man yk

so if you couldn’t go to the date, the date would have come to you

he showed up at your house promising to help you study

or at least not to distract you

which sounded unlikely, but he was really trying his best

he sat you down on his lap, lacing his arms around you and just resting his forehead against your back

rocking you, he listened to you reviewing for your exam

then when you began to write your essay, he nuzzled your neck, softly humming in your ear

getting bored after a few hours, he started to play with your hair, puffing and muttering occasionally

but when he finally sees you getting up, he jumps on the spot in excitement

”you’re done??”

”not yet kō, sorry”

he sighs loudly, grabbing your wrist

”you should really take a break”

you know it’s been hard for him, not being able to talk for the entire time

but he kept his promise, suffering in silence just for you

so you gave in

”i guess you’re right”

his pupils dilate hearing those words

lying you on the bed, he curls up next to you

”i love your back, but i prefer watching your face”

you softly giggle, sliding your thumb over his cheek and then cup it in your palm

he leans into your hand with a tender smile, closing his eyes

”much better”

you ask him about his day and he starts to ramble, saying that he has to catch you up on so many things

when he finishes telling you about the dream he had the night before, you pull away from his embrace

”i should get back to study now”

but he immediately tightens his arms around you, stopping you from getting up

”just a few more minutes please”

[luckgods]

Why all the white guys in whump?

I got Inspired by a post asking that question, and here we are. Warning: long post ahead.

I think it’s due to a combination of factors, as things frequently are.

The preference for / prevalence of white male characters in fandom is well-known and has been examined pretty thoroughly by people already.

What’s worth noting for discussing this tendency in whump in particular is that the ‘whump fandom’ itself is not a ‘fandom’ in the traditional sense of being made of fans of one single source narrative (or source setting, like a particular comics fandom, or the Star Wars extended universe) with pre-existing characters. Although subsets of traditional fandoms certainly exist within the larger whump fandom, a lot of whump is based on original, ‘fan’-created characters.

So, given the tendency of ‘traditional’ fandoms to create stories disproportionately centered on white male characters due to the source material itself being centered on white male characters (and giving more narrative weight to them, characterizing them better, etc), if we say hypothetically that the whump fandom is split say 50/50 between ‘traditional’ fandom works and original whump works, you’d expect to see a higher number of works focused on white men than the demographics of the ‘traditional’ fandom’s source work would predict, but not as extreme of a divergence between the source material & the fanworks as the one you’d see if whump fandom were 100% based on popular media.

However, that doesn’t quite seem to be the case. Whump stories and art remain focused on overwhelmingly male and frequently white characters, which means that the tendency of the fandom to create stories disproportionately centered on white male characters cannot be ONLY explained by the source material itself being centered on white male characters (and giving more narrative weight to them, characterizing them better, etc).

And, having established the fact that whump writers & artists presumably have MORE control over the design of their characters than writers & artists in ‘traditional’ fandoms, we have to wonder why the proportions remain biased towards men, & white men in particular.

—

The race thing is pretty simple in my opinion. Mostly, it’s just another extension of the fanbase’s tendency to reflect the (predominantly US-American, on tumblr) culture it exists in, which means that, in a white-centric culture, people make artworks featuring white people.

There’s also the issue of artists being hesitant to write works that dwell heavily on violence towards people of color due to the (US-American) history of people of color being violently mistreated. I’ve actually seen a couple of posts arguing that white people SHOULDN’T write whump of nonwhite characters (particularly Black characters) because of the history of actual violence against Black bodies being used as entertainment, which means that fictional violence against Black people, written by white people, for a (presumed) white audience, still feels exploitative and demeaning.

I'm not going to get into all my thoughts on this discussion here but suffice to say that there's probably an impact on the demographics of whump works from authors of color who simply... don't want to see violence against people of color, even non-explicitly-racialized violence, and then another impact from white authors who choose not to write non-white characters either due to the reasons stated above, or simply due to their personal discomfort with how to go about writing non-white characters in a genre that is heavily focused on interpersonal violence.

Interestingly enough, there’s also a decent proportion of Japanese manga & anime being used as source material for whump, and manga-styled original works being created. The particular relationship between US-American and Japanese pop culture could take up a whole essay just by itself so I’ll just say, there’s a long history of US-Japanese cultural exchange which means that this tendency is also not all that surprising.

—

GENDER though. If someone had the time and the energy they could make a fucking CAREER out of examining gender in whump, gender dynamics in whump, and why there seems to be a fandom-wide preference for male whumpees that cannot be fully explained by the emphasis on male characters in the source text.

I have several different theories about factors which impact gender preference in whump, and anyone who has other theories (or disagrees with mine) is free to jump in and add on.

THEORY 1: AUTHOR GENDER AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
 Fandom in general is predominantly female, although these days it might be more accurate to say that fandom is predominantly composed of cis women and trans people of all genders. However, pretty much everyone who isn't a cis man has had to contend with the specter of gendered violence in their real personal life. Thus, if we posit whump (and fandom more generally) as a sort of escapist setup, it's not hard to see why whump authors & artists might willfully eschew writing female whumpees (especially in the case of inflicted whump), because (as in the discussion of people of color in whump above), even violence towards women that is explicitly non-gender-based may still hit too close to home for people whose lives have been saturated with the awareness of gender-based violence.

THEORY 2: SICK OF SEXY SUFFERING.
 Something of an addendum to theory 1, it's worth noting that depictions of female suffering in popular media are extremely gendered (in that they specifically reflect real-life gender-based violence, and that said real-life violence is almost exclusively referenced in relation to female characters) and frequently sexualized as well. There's only so many times you can see female characters having their clothes Strategically Ripped while they're held captive, being sexually menaced (overtly or implicitly) to demonstrate How Evil the villain is, or just getting outright sexually assaulted for the Drama of it all before it gets exhausting, especially when the narratives typically either brush any consequences under the rug, or dwell on them in a way that feels more voyeuristic and gratuitous than realistic and meaningful. All this may result in authors who, given the chance to write their own depictions of suffering, may decide simply to remove the possibility of gendered violence by removing the female gender.

THEORY 3: AUTHOR ATTRACTION. 
I'll admit that this one is more a matter of conjecture, as I haven't seen any good demographic breakdowns of attraction in general fandom or whump fandom. That said, my own experience talking to fellow whump fans does indicate that attraction to the characters (whether whumpers, or whumpees) is part of the draw of whump for some people. This one partially ties into theory 1 as well, in that people who are attracted to multiple genders may not derive the same enjoyment out of seeing a female character in a whumpy situation as they might seeing a male character in that situation, simply because of the experience of gendered violence in their lives.

THEORY 4: ACCEPTABLE TARGETS.
 The female history of fandom means that there's been a lot more discussion of the impacts of depicting pain & suffering (especially female suffering) for personal amusement. Thus, in some ways, you could say that there is a mild taboo on putting female characters through suffering if you can't "justify" it as meaningful to the narrative, not just titillating, which whump fandom rarely tries or requires anyone to do. This fan-cultural 'rule' may impact whump writers' and artists' decisions in choosing the gender of their characters.

THEORY 5: AN ALTERNATIVE TO MAINSTREAM MASCULINITY.
 Whump fandom may like whumping men because by and large, mainstream/pop culture doesn't let men be vulnerable, doesn't let them cry, doesn't let them have long-term health issues due to constantly getting beat up even when they really SHOULD, doesn't let them have mental health issues period. Female characters, as discussed in theory 2, get to ("get to") go through suffering and be affected by it (however poorly written those effects are), but typically, male characters' suffering is treated as a temporary problem, minimized, and sublimated into anger if at all possible. (For an example, see: every scene in a movie where something terrible happens and the male lead character screams instead of crying). So, as nature abhors a vacuum, whump fandom "over-produces" whump of men so as to fill in that gap in content.

THEORY 6: AMPLIFIED BIAS.
 While it's true that whump fandom doesn't have a source text, it's also true that whump fans frequently find their way into the fandom via other 'traditional' fandoms, and continue participating in 'traditional' fandoms as part of their whump fandom activity. Bias begets bias; fandom as a whole has a massive problem with focusing on white male characters, and fans who are used to the bias towards certain types of characters in derivative works absolutely reproduce that bias in their own original whump works.

—

I honestly think that there is greater bias in the whump fandom than anyone would like to admit. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems as though whump fans avoid introspection and discussion of the issue by bringing up the points I talked about in my previous theories, particularly discomfort with depictions of female suffering for amusement.

However, I think that, as artists, we owe it to ourselves and one another to engage in at least a small amount of self-interrogation over our preferences, and see what unconscious or unacknowledged biases we possess. It's a little absurd to argue that depictions of women as whumpees are universally too distressing to even discuss when a male character in the exact same position would be fine and even gratifying to the person making that argument; while obviously, people have a right to their own boundaries, those boundaries should not be used to shut down discussion of any topics, even sensitive ones.

Furthermore, engaging in personal reflection allows artists to make more deliberate (and meaningful) art. For people whose goal is simply to have fun, that may not seem all that appealing, but having greater understanding of one's own preferences can be very helpful towards deciding what works to create, what to focus on when creating, and what works to seek out.

—

GENDER ADDENDUM: NONBINARY CHARACTERS, NONBINARY AUTHORS. 
Of course, this whole discussion so far has been exclusively based on a male-female binary, which is reductive. (I will note, though, that many binary people do effectively sort all nonbinary people they know of into 'female-aligned' and 'male-aligned' categories and then proceed to treat the nonbinary people and characters they have categorized a 'female-aligned' the same way as they treat people & characters who are actually female, and ditto for 'male-aligned'. That tendency is very frustrating for me, as a nonbinary person whose gender has NOTHING to do with any part of the binary, and reveals that even 'progressive' fandom culture has quite a ways to go in its understanding of gender.)

Anyways, nonbinary characters in whump are still VERY rare and typically written by nonbinary authors. (I have no clue whether nonbinary whump fans have, as a demographic group, different gender preferences than binary fans, but I'd be interested in seeing that data.)

As noted above with female characters, it's similarly difficult to have a discussion about representation and treatment of nonbinary characters in whump fandom, and frankly in fandom in general. Frequently, people regard attempts to open discussions on difficult topics as a call for conflict. This defensive stance once again reveals the distaste for requests of meaningful self-examination that is so frequent in fandom spaces, and online more generally.

—

TL;DR: Whump is not immune to the same gender & racial biases that are prevalent in fandom and (US-American) culture. If you enjoy whump: ask yourself why you dislike the things you dislike— the answer may surprise you. If you create whump: ask yourself whose stories you tell, and what stories you refuse to tell— then ask yourself why.