#I decided when I chose to do this blog that I would not paint anything in colour

[florilegia-or-what-you-will]

There are friends on earth,

lovers living who lie in their beds,

while I walk alone in the first light of dawn

under the oak tree and through this earth-cave,

where I must sit the summer-long day;

there I can weep for all my exiles

[myheartbelongstothefandom]

about the movie, i have ... a lot of mixed feelings, and its been a very long time since i even used this blog, but i need to ramble into the void about it.

first of all, i am actually really happy that there is new material, and i cried when i knew it was on the cinemas in my country and i cried non stop for a very long time, and i was happy while watching the movie, but it was lacking, to say the least, it was a bad movie. so its a bit infuriating to see so much praise going to it, when ...

first of all, its really frustrating that after four year all we get is one movie that doesnt even reaches 90 minutes (i do not know how it went i didnt read anything about the production or whatever went backstage, and tbh i dont think i care, 4 years is a lot of time, considering that the first three seasons were released one year apart from each other, and the fourth season even though it took them 3 years there was covid and ... there were in total 24 or 25 episodes. not 86 minutes)

i know im gonna say something that has already been said, but its very odd that it was a movie and not one full season?? theres no argument that would make it make sense to me why, for the love of god, they decided to make this arc a movie. theres so much to be said about it idek where to begin

if im correct, this game goes from the chpater 249 to 322 (i did not read the manga), and i do not like being the nerd but... all the four seasons, in total, are 85 episodes, meaning they adapted 249chapters to create those 85 episodes. so the 73 (from 249 to 322) chapters couldve been adapted into a whole season of 24 episodes !! its really odd that they chose to do a movie when there was so much material that couldve, and shouldve, been adapted.

this is a game that was awaited since the first season, it was the second practice match karasuno had, and it was a goal since the beginning, to play against nakome in a national tournament. the fact that they spent the time that would be like 4 episodes on this is mind blowing. the game against shiratorizawa was 10 episodes, the game agains (the game in the first season again dateko goes on for 2 episodes!!!) THE FIRST GAME AGAINST AOBA JOHSAI STARTS SOMEWHERE ON THE 19 EPISODE AND GOES ON UNTIL 24 !!!!!!!! BE FOR REAL BE FOR REAL PLS YES IT WAS AN IMPORTANT GAME BUT THERES NO COMPARASION

the flashbacks were interesting and i was rll glad i saw them but bc everything was so rushed, it just felt like chunks that they had to put there somewhere in the middle of the game. and while throughout the series it was works wonderfully and its really fluid, in the movie every time i was about to get inti the game there was a flashback....

one of the reasons why i love haikyuu is because they dont focus just on one character or one team (one of my favorite episodes is even winners and losers, season 1, ep 16): in this anime, because its volleyball, theres no need to have a villain, the motivation is always to win, and maybe the character has a reason or maybe it doesn't, but that doesnt matter. and they could paint the other teams as villains, but that would be cheap and tbh overdone, they are not the big bad wolves trying to takee away the victory of the main character, they are just highschool students that want to play and to win to keep on playing. so the fact that they only focused on kenma, and kuroo ig, really took away some of the charm of haikyuu.

there were very few memorable moments, sure the final kenma pov was cool af, the shot of kenma and hinata with a knife was amazing, and the animation of kenma putting hinata on a cage was also cool. and i did like the way kenma looked kinda... sad?? when hinata started to be down, but ..... it just wasn't enough.

it wasn't enough to the overall quality haikyuu as as a whole, and tbh i dont even think it was a good movie

[mlembug]

I was writing some sort of response but then I realized I could use this post as an excuse for writing an infodump.

The way text is presented, including the choice of a font is dependent on the use case, target audience, the specific medium... and a whole bunch of other factors (one of the major "other factors" is "can I afford this font"). The thing that is specific about the medium of "computer screen" is being constrained to a pixel grid.

The differences in use case include stuff like whether you are making a parody of an existing Team Fortress 2 sign, or text in a Tumblr post, which I'll get deeper in.

The main computer display I am using right now is 24" Full HD (1920x1080) IPS LCD screen that was bought in 2014 and is still not broken so I'm not throwing it out until it does. A quick calculation involving knowing its diagonal (24"), aspect ratio (16:9) and relying on Pythagorean Theorem reveals that for every inch you can fit 85 pixels.

85 pixels per inch also happens to be absolute dogshit in terms of how much we can fit. This necessitates all sorts of workarounds and compromises. My initial idea for this post involved writing in great details just exactly how complicated is that and that you could literally spend not just years, but decades on improving this, but then I found rastertragedy.com which would blow away all my attempts not only by the author's expertise, but also comprehensiveness of this site. So instead what I'm gonna do is taking surface level observations against the context a Tumblr user may be familiar with, and invite people to go there if they want to read more.

I took a screenshot of my own blog's header in Firefox at 100% zoom, and the letter "m" fits in 13x8 pixel grid.

A quick examination through Firefox's right click -> Inspect reveals Tumblr uses a font named Favorit by Dinamo Typefaces. There must be some reason why Tumblr chose this font, because they spent €4500 on it (Automattic has 1934 employees if we rely on wikipedia's figure), which is honestly not that much because this seems to be a one-time payment and not a subscription. Maybe that's why they chose it, but also there exist fonts that are free for commercial use so I'm not exactly convinced.

Taking that font's "m", this is how it looks when open in High-Logic Font Creator:

and meanwhile these are my two attempts at overlaying a 13x8 grid and coloring it using only "filled/not filled"

Can Photoshop do better? Here are the ways it displays my nickname using all the rendering methods it offers. Because Tumblr likes to change compression scheme from png to jpg, I upscaled this image using the nearest filter approach and pray jpg-ification does not ruin it. From top to bottom, the methods are: None, Sharp, Crisp, Smooth, Windows LCD, and Windows.

The last one is not Photoshop, that one is MS Paint, which presumably uses whatever Windows uses and typically Windows application use too, unless they decide to handle displaying fonts on their own (just like Photoshop has its own font renderer)

Several observations are worth noting:

TF2 signs had twice as much pixels horizontally and twice as much pixels vertically, which is understandable for the use case that relied on a more decorative text.

the "None" is the closest to what I did manually, it also happens to offer the best contrast out of them all. It's also what the previous poster states to be their preferred (or at least, "preferred over subpixel rendering"). There's also a lot of disadvantages: kerning is fucked by having uneven distance between letters - once it's 2 pixels and once it's 3 pixels. Uneven kerning results in legibility issues because you use the distance between letters to know where is a space and where is not. The font weight is also uneven. The pixels are more noticeable.

Other approaches compromise on contrast and they make the font weight and kerning appear visually similar.

Microsoft Paint did a thing unlike anything Photoshop did - the colors are no longer a white, black and shades of grey, but there are noticeable colors in it. This is subpixel rendering, used in addition to aliasing. Subpixel rendering specifically relies on how LCD screens work, in that a single pixel is not a single rectangular unit, but 3 smaller rectangular ones that display each individual color of the RGB color palette. The Microsoft's take on subpixel rendering is called Microsoft ClearType.

Photoshop does not offer subpixel rendering at all and uses only anti-aliasing. There are very good reasons for this. Subpixel rendering relies that you read the text on an LCD screen, at its native resolution, with no resizing operations done on the text afterwards, and the order of subpixels has to match. Nearly all of these assumptions are violated on regular basis when you make a bitmap image. Further complications may arise if you use certain kinds of glasses, you have color blindness, or your color cones react in a noticeably different way than an "average" human. For similar reasons back when we had only 16 bits to represent a color of a pixel, we assigned 5 bits to red, 5 bits to blue and 6 bits to green because we took note that humans are typically more sensitive to changes in green.

Nearly all of the decisions here result in "you win some, you lose some". In fact, there is even more decisions to be made. The way we collectively moved from serif fonts to sans serif fonts is the end result of us not having enough pixel density to represent these serifs on computer screens in a readable way. Similarly: Microsoft Word changing its default font in 2007 from Times New Roman (serif font) to Calibri (sans serif font) is an admission that most Word documents are no longer printed out on paper, but read directly on a computer screen.

I have also been experimenting with a program named "Better ClearType Tuner" and while I don't really have anything cohesive to say over a wider set of fonts yet, this is literally a goldmine in terms of me making casual observations on fonts. In particular some fonts actually look pretty well (in my subjective opinion) without any kind of anti-aliasing, while some look absolutely atrocious (like Consolas) without subpixel rendering. This certainly has a lot to do in terms of what was the original font designer testing for. This leads me to conclude that being able to control the way programs display fonts is not enough - you also need to control the font. One of the members of the discord I'm in does exactly that, except she also uses Linux (whenever she shows me a screenshot of non-antialiased text I'm feeling pain, but this is her choice and she has to deal with that way more than me).

Unfortunately this is at odds with people who make the software which would rather you have as little configurability, as the more settings are configurable, the more combinations of settings are possible, and the more combinations are possible, the more likely you will encounter a problem with a combination that was never tested in the first place. (this also happens to be a problem with Linux as a whole - your program works on Windows 8.1, 10 and 11? well there are many distributions times many versions so how many are you willing to test your software on? how many are you able to afford testing on?).

The long term solution to the problem is moving to displays with higher pixel density, which in the past has been pushed mostly by Apple (the "Retina" screens), because Apple has more graphic designers among their employees, and also more graphic designers among their userbase, and this has been significantly painful to them.

(source is Kanojo ni Naru Hi)

[thedancefloorsilly]

Hi! I think this is your ask/request box so please correct me if I’m wrong lol.

If you don’t mind could you do Shalnark,Feitan,Phinks, and Illumi with a s/o who asks to paint his nails? Just like a head canon of if they’d allow it and what colour n stuff

Also I love your blog, I love how you pretty much stick to the canon. Have a good day/night :)

𐐪♡︎₊˚ trouble trio + illumi :: reader asks to paint their nails

hii!!! and yes youre totally fine this is the right place <3 imma just say rn that i LOVEE this req lol its so cute! and thank you so much omg <33 i like to try and stick to canon so i appreciate you noticing i hope u have a great day/ night as well MUAH

cw :: might have spelling mistakes its a lil long hehe

✧.* phinks

- you and phinks were absentmindedly watching the t.v., when a nail polish commercial came on and immediately struck you with a certain idea. you smiled to yourself, and called out your bf’’s name, "hey phinkkkksss," you sang out, which caught his attention. "yeah?" he answered.

- "can I paint your nails?"

- he makes a grimace when you first ask him this, and by the looks of his face... he's ready to tell you a hard no. it's going to take a bunch of 'pretty pleases' and other ways of convincing for him to give in. 

- but once he's thought about it, phinks will finally let you paint his nails.

- you tell him you're only gonna put clear polish on him, just so its not too ‘showy’. then again, phinks’ hands and nails are... a little roughed up so to say, which prompts you to think: why not just give him a whole manicure!

- once you start, phinks never realized he’d feel this relaxed by this process. he’s just sitting down watching you intently cut his nails, filing them down, shaping up his cuticles, while also thinking to himself, “is this why people love getting their nails down??”. 

- plus he just lovesss all this attentive care you’re giving him!

- right as you were about to paint his pointer finger with the clear polish, he immediately stops you. “i changed my mind,” he says abruptly , “go paint ‘em however you want,” phinks then smiles. and nooo he totallllly didn’t say that to make the process longer noooo.

- but you smile at his request, and follow along with a green polish. phinks notices this and smiles, appreciating how you chose his favorite color to paint his nails :)

- “finished already?” phinks asks once he sees you start to dry them off. “Nope!” you say, and then immediately take his hand to plant a kiss on them, “but now i am.”

- he chuckles, and gives you a quick kiss on the cheek, while then eyeing the work you did. this whole manicure thing really wasn’t as bad as phinks thought. in the future, there might be a chance where phinks might suggest for you to do his nails again <3

✧.* feitan

- believe it or not, feitan actually enjoys watching you paint your nails. he finds the whole process of it so satisfying whenever you do.

- the precision of each individual stroke, along with the gratification he gets whenever you perfectly paint your nails is something he'll never get tired of (except when you mess up...)

- but one day after you were finished painting your nails and waiting for it to dry (of course he was there next to you), you brain lit up with a little idea.

- "how 'bout i paint your nails for a change fei?" you asked him, to which he just looked at you stoically.

- now feitan didn't give an immediate response right away... he just had this blank look to him, a look that would be almost impossible to decipher.

-"fine," feitan decides, which makes you happy and surprised to see. You search through the colors of your little bag filled with nail polishes, but immediately stop once feitan tersely says, "black" (no surprise tbh).

- so as you find the black sitting at the bottom of the bag, he puts his hands out toward you and you get the nail polish wand ready. the thing about feitan is that his hands aren't shaky or anything so its really easy to paint!

- as you precisely cover each nail, feitan literally finds everything SOO relaxing likeeee

- watching you do your nails is one thing but being the person getting their nails painted is another!! he loves the pampering feeling you're giving him, and though his usual bare expression says otherwise, he's actually thoroughly enjoying himself!

- once you're done and they’ve dried, feitan intently looks at all of them. now you might be nervous about what your boyfriend might say, but no no no he's looking at his nails like that because he LOVES it!! 

- it's really adding to his look he thinks, and under his mask feitan has this cute smile on his face.

- he then pulls down his mask to give you a small kiss to your temple :) and as he notices that you haven't painted your nails yet, he's asking if he could paint yours black so that you guys can match.

✧.* shalnark

- definitely the most lenient of the four to allow you to paint their nails! 

- So the minute shalnark jokingly asks, “what if you paint my nails someday,” you immediately take it as an opportunity to do it!! when you ask him what colors he wants, he just leaves it all to you so that you can surprise him (”pick whatever color you want, _____.”).

- now obviously you’re gonna take advantage of that opportunity... which leads you wanting to do the most extravagant nail design ever- 

- each finger is gonna be some different color and different design, whether it be polka dots or stripes or glitter or gems... shal literally does not KNOW what he’s got into. 

- and he even realizes this the minute you take out EVERRYY single color and little design accessory you’re gonna be using on him... for sure you know that your inner nail artist is come out so shal better come thru with a tip and everything LOL

- now as you start painting his nails, the colors you’re using are... questionable to say the least, and shalnark can’t help but make a jovial grimace when he see’s them.

- “that’s an— interesting design choice you’re going for, _____!” your boyfriend says oh-so cheerfully when he see’s how you’re doing his middle finger .

- “hm? i don’t see a problem with them?” you joked back giggling, as if you weren’t trying to recreate a portrait of shalnark literally onto his nail. spoiler alert: it looks like a giant glob. 

- (listen, your intention is to have fun, not to make them look pretty!)

- so once you’re on your very last nail to paint, and shalnark has experienced every stage of grief after seeing how you did them, the minute you place those last gem stones onto his left-hand pinky is when you finally announce that you’re done! 

- and the minute you give him that excited (and giggly) smile, he gazes over at your creation and you two just can’t help but to laugh.

- now shalnark hopes that chrollo doesn’t call a troupe meeting anytime soon, because its practically be impossible for him to remove them off from the amount of top coat you put on them. and noticing that your nails aren’t painted, nows your turn to experience the saaame treatment.

✧.* illumi

- the idea of you painting them actually came from a dream, in which you were decorating his nails with a shiny black paint on them. though you really weren’t sure how he was going to react, you decided to give it a try and ask illumi.

- now at first, your lover just stares at you with no trace of emotion found in his eyes. in his mind he was confused. he didn’t really see the purpose of painting them or anything. they were only a weapon, nothing more nothing less.

- but you explained to him that painting his nails was honestly just for fun, something you guys could try together!

- and so illumi takes this information with ease and allows you to paint his assassin nails (even though he still didn’t really get the hype with them...)

-when you start painting his longgg nails, he’s kinda just STARING at you the whole time... it’s a little pressuring because illumi’s gaze can be a little intense sometimes.

- everytime you make a teeny mistake, he might point it out 😭 saying stuff like “you smudged it” or “there’s a spot you missed”. and this isn’t him trying to be rude or anything, illumi’s just trying to help in his eyes.

- even though things feel quiet, deep down illumi actually really likes this whole process. illumi never really got any kind of attention growing up, so seeing you putting this much effort in something as little as painting his nails, it really makes him feel appreciated. 

- so yes, he’s very much enjoying the process now :) even closing his eyes in relaxation as you continue down the line of nails. once you tap your hand, signaling that you’re finished, he opens his eyes again.

- “done already,” he asks, and as you nod, deep deep down Illumi feels a little disappointed (he was really enjoying himself after all)!

- the minute he looks down, he takes his new painted nail’s in. once again... cue that blank stare. does he like them?? does he hate them?? does he—

- “they look nice,” illumi finally says, making you let out a quiet sigh in relief because you honestly can never know with him... 

- even though your boyfriend’s lack of words might suggest that he didn’t think much of them, deep down, Illumi was more than impressed! he really thought they looked nice :)) that, and every time he see’s them, illumi will just be reminded of you <3

[hellenhighwater]

Hi your blog has been such a comfort to me this past month! I’m starting law school next month and I’ve had this whole weird THING with the fact that I’m not someone you would expect to be a lawyer. I was an art major turned environmental science major and most of my interests fall far from the stark professional imagine I usually see of being a lawyer. I have this fear that I’ll have to change or mold myself into someone else in order to succeed but seeing you makes me feel less afraid because I feel like you are so true to who you are. Did you ever feel anything like this when you were in law school?

Well, in fairness, I was raised by lawyers. So "lawyer" to me has never meant the sort of sleek professional you see on TV, it's always been my dad the dork and my very sweet mom. So I never really had the cognitive dissonance of trying to wedge my art-major self into the lawyer cutout.

That being said, I've always felt that I can choose to only show an aspect of myself without being...untrue to the whole. There is a part of me that is capable and comfortable in the position of the controlled, knowledgeable professional, and I can be that self all day at the office and not feel like I'm betraying the part of myself that wants to paint my whole house black and hang skulls on the walls. I don't have to show the whole of myself to every person I meet, nor do I want to.

But I chose to work in a very public-facing area of law. One of my best friends is also a lawyer, and she came out of law school and said, No, I will not change my neon hair, I will not hide my collection of action figures visible in the background of my Zoom calls, I do not want to have to customer-service-voice an angry client. And so she went into federal law, in an area where she almost never goes to court and her only client is the government. All of her coworkers are fine with the level of weird she operates at, because she's excellent at her job.

I would rather have the pocket card that is "this person is what I expect to see when I picture a lawyer and therefore I expect her to be able to do lawyer things and speak with the authority of a lawyer," than I would have to establish my competency because I don't look like people expect me to, or to give the strangers I deal with on a regular basis insight into who I am. My coworkers know me well enough to see past the "basic lawyer" front, but most everyone else? not so much. And I like it that way.

Here's something true in nearly any field: you can be as weird as you want to be as long as you're good at your job. You may decide that seeming to fit the lawyer mold is advantageous to you later, or you may decide that you hate that and you want to wear yellow converse to work every day. But all of that is only surface level. You will still be yourself. Law is just a job; it doesn't have to be who you are.

Also, good luck in law school! It's honestly kind of fun.

[audreydoeskaren]

Have you read Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim? Idk what Era precisely it's meant to be, but I'm curious if anyone in the Chinese fashion sphere has anything to say about the clothes making/designing portions of the book, re: what clothes making was really like, the job of a royal tailor/tailors in general (were they common, or did most people make their own clothes? Was it a respected job?), that kind of thing! Thank you for your work on this blog!

I don't usually read fantasy novels like Spin the Dawn but I can say a thing or two about clothing production in imperial China. The state of dressmaking was different for each era and I can only talk a little bit about the Ming and Qing. Obviously I don't know the complete details of every stage of production for clothing, I'll just share some things that I do have knowledge on. Most of my information came from Rachel Silberstein's book A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing, which could be read on JSTOR.

Royal dressmaking

Clothing that was meant for royal use was seldom created by one person alone, but rather the combined efforts of specialists and professionals in different areas. The designs would be made by artists in court, then textiles used for the clothing would be commissioned from state owned textile workshops, then sent to tailors to be sewn into garments and then to embroiderers if embroidery was required. Embroidery wasn't always necessary, since for most of the Ming fashionable and prestigious clothing was made from fabrics with woven patterns (e.g. brocades, damasks) instead of embroidered ones; embroidery would not become the dominant form of decoration until the Ming-Qing transition in the mid 17th century. Normal people wouldn't be able to purchase fabrics from the imperial workshops, but imperial workshops have been on the decline since the late Ming and commercial workshops were producing quality fabrics on a par with those from the imperial ones. Imperial workshop also frequently sublet their work to commercial ones.

As to the design aspect, formal court dress was heavily regulated as to what patterns and garments could be used for what occasion, so there wasn’t much room for artistic liberty. It was on informal clothing that more creativity could be exercised; embroiderers could choose what patterns and motifs go on garments and tailors could experiment with different proportions.

Source

Women’s 吉服 jifu formal ensemble from the Qianlong era. The patterns and their placement for such formal garments were fixed.

Source

Guangxu era informal 氅衣 changyi. The final appearance of this garment was still the combined efforts of many people, e.g. the weavers decided on the purple color, the tailor decided on the proportion and the embroiderers the floral motifs etc..

Home dressmaking

Common people prior to the 17th century mostly made their own clothes, particularly by the female members of the household. It was very common to make clothing from scratch i.e. the growing of cotton or grooming of silkworms, to fabric weaving, sewing and embroidering. It was considered a part of women's education to learn how to weave fabrics and sew garments together, but this doesn't mean that the entire dressmaking process was confined to women or one person either; men, who were expected to do farm work, would grow the crops necessary for the weaving of fabrics, and often assisted in the weaving process. Since the majority of the Chinese population lived in the countryside, many families produced fabrics from raw materials they made on their own farms and made clothes from said fabrics. Because of the difficulty in weaving brocaded fabrics by oneself, home dressmakers who couldn't afford to buy ready woven fabrics prior to the late Ming had to limit themselves to plain fabrics. In the late Ming and early Qing, the rise of embroidery as the dominant method of decoration meant that fashionable patterns became available to less wealthy people who couldn't afford to buy expensive brocaded fabrics, since they could reproduce all the fashionable patterns with just needle, thread and spare time. Embroidery books showing popular patterns and motifs were widely available and could be purchased cheaply. With that said, that doesn't mean that the entirety of a garment had to be made from scratch; many decorations and notions could be bought from shops, like trimmings, ribbons, buttons and prefabricated embroidery appliques. The seamstress would just need to buy the fabric, decorations and notions and put them together as one garment. In the Qing, women seldom went out of the house, and they relied on vendors or middlemen for vendors who brought products to their homes for sale. For women at the time, being a skilled weaver, seamstress or embroiderer was a highly desirable trait, not just because it symbolized "female virtue" whatever that means, but also because it provided work opportunities. Women who were otherwise not employed could take commissions from commercial weaving, tailoring or embroidery workshops as a side income.

Commercial dressmaking

Since the 17th century, the textile industry was increasingly commercialized and it since became more viable to purchase ready woven fabrics from commercial workshops, especially for people in urban areas.  These were usually owned by rural families as a side income, and they would often hire landless people to work in their manufactories. I don't know if owning a textile manufactory was a respected job (probably not, considering the literati's hatred for everything commercial) but these people did make serious money. Family operating businesses were often co-owned by wife and husband. Embroidery workshops making prefabricated embroidered appliques and tailor shops making ready to wear garments were also quite common, often relying on middlemen for delivering orders and negotiating prices between the workshop and individual embroiderers/seamstresses in the countryside. In Qing tailor shops, it was often the case that only menswear could be purchased ready to wear, whereas womenswear was made to measure or by the wearer herself. Within tailor shops, there were many subdivisions of labor, like some people did pattern drafting, some people cut pattern pieces and some people assembled the garments. The status of commercial tailors has historically been low, mostly because of the Confucian ruling class’ disdain for consumption, luxury and anything non-self sustaining.

Source

Ca. 1780s export painting showing weaving women.

Feminist tangent

In the Qing, most home weaving and embroidering were done by women, but the commercial workshops were male dominated and their guilds prohibited entry for women, because commercial dressmaking had become a lucrative business and men didn’t want to share employment with women. Male employees in workshops were considered artisans and better paid, whereas women who had to work at home were considered unskilled labor and paid less. Most commercial tailors in the Qing were also male, for reasons similar to why embroidery was male dominated. Whereas women commonly sewed clothes for themselves and their families, they were often prohibited from becoming professional tailors working in workshops or joining a guild. It’s that bogus thing where handicrafts are “women’s work��� but when men see how profitable they are they suddenly become “artistic” and limited to men. 

Commercial tailors, who were male, were seen as a cultural abomination for doing what was historically seen as “women’s work” for profit. In order to elevate themselves to a higher, more respected status, they chose to throw women under the bus and revise the history of all things historically considered “women’s work” to make them more male centered. An example of this was the 露香园 Luxiang Yuan or Dew Fragrance Garden, a renowned Suzhou embroidery workshop built up by three generations of women of the Gu family, who owned the estate and was the namesake of their style of embroidery, 顾绣 guxiu or Gu embroidery. The male family head at the time, Gu Mingshi, later became the patron saint of the Suzhou embroiderer’s guild founded in 1867. The reason why Gu Mingshi was worshipped instead of the three women who made Gu embroidery famous was largely because male members of the Suzhou embroiderer’s guild needed historical justification for their exclusion of women and erasure of women’s contributions. Apparently late 19th century scholars also complained about this misogyny so this isn’t a new understanding.

Source

Gu embroidery by Han Ximeng, one of the three OG Gu women.

With all of this said, it doesn’t mean that women stopped working in commercial embroidery; women were actually the backbone of the industry, they just didn’t get any recognition from official, male written guild records and such. Many people in the 19th century observed that while the resident embroiderers in commercial workshops were men, a lot of their work was sublet to independent female embroiderers in the countryside, who were not credited on the finished product or advertising. 

Now I’m kinda inspired to make a whole rant about working women in the Qing and their representation (or lack thereof) in the Republican era, but there are some 20 unanswered asks sitting in my ask box so maybe later😅

[the-lonelybarricade]

I totally stole this from one of those writing prompt blogs, but can you do Rhys and Feyre going to couples therapy together as a joke when they only just met?

Okay my love, I literally just finished writing this and haven't actually proofread it. It was meant to be silly and jokey but ended up being a bit more serious than I intended, but I'm a sucker for fake dating tropes so maybe I'll continue their story at some point. Anyway here's a modern Feyre and Rhys going to couples thereapy together (whilst not actually being a couple):

Feyre was absolutely determined to prove Nesta wrong. Usually her sister’s grating comments didn’t penetrate Feyre’s hardened demeanor at home, but something about their stint yesterday had thoroughly gotten under her skin. Nesta had a talent when it came to barbed words, so it was the casualness with which she’d said Feyre was boring and predictable that had kept the words ringing between Feyre’s ears. They lacked the usual bite and venom that was characteristic of Nesta, and somehow that made them impossibly worse.

Was Feyre a creature of habit? Sure. But she had always been content with her quiet, unassuming life. They’d grown up poor, with little luxury, and as a little girl Feyre had always believed all she’d need to be happy was paint supplies and enough time to get lost in a blank canvas. Feyre had that now, and she was happy. She spent almost every day in her studio, a paintbrush in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. And that was fine. She may not spend a lot of time with other people, but that was fine.

Routine is fine. Being focused on your career is fine. So why did the implication that her life is stagnant rile her up so much?

Feyre couldn’t articulate what, exactly, had bothered her so much, since she was perfectly happy with the current state of her life. Yet the next morning she’d woken up, vowing to take a day off and spend the whole day being entirely unpredictable.

She was going to pull a Jim Carrey in Yes Man. She was going to seize this damn day. And any voice in her mind that pleaded her to stick to her comfort zone was going to be diligently ignored.

When she set out to get her morning coffee, she ducked into the first cafe she came across without checking the reviews. And instead of ordering her usual chai latte, she asked the cashier to make her their favorite drink. She sat at a booth and sipped it experimentally. It was sweet and tasted of caramel; she decided she quite liked it. So far so good.

She sat wondering what brave venture she should do next, something that would be worthy of telling people about. Something so brash and crazy and unexpected Nesta would eat her stupid, truthful words.

“Mind if I take this seat?”

The voice was like smooth velvet. Feyre glanced up to meet a pair of eyes that were such a deep, peculiar shade of blue they almost looked violet. She was momentarily stunned speechless, which caused the impossibly handsome stranger to lift one of his perfectly groomed brows in question.

“Of course,” Feyre answered, her mouth feeling a bit dry. She quickly took a sip of her coffee to quell this strong reaction her body was having to this man.

She’d been expecting him to take the chair to sit elsewhere, but he slid into the chair at her table, directly across from her. Feyre spared a cursory glance around the cafe. Customers milled about, but there were plenty of empty seats strewn here and there. It was far from necessary to share a table with a stranger.

Her interest piqued, Feyre turned her attention back to this strange, alluring man.

“I’m Feyre,” she said, sounding much more confident than she felt. But today was about branching out of her comfort zone. Making the first move with an attractive man certainly qualified.

“Rhysand,” he answered with a charming grin, extending his hand into the space between them. Feyre accepted it with a mirrored smile, for a moment marvelling at the way his hand completely enveloped hers.

Feyre cleared her throat. “So tell me, Rhysand, what brings you to this table in particular?”

The way he wrinkled his nose was unfairly endearing. “Call me Rhys,” he said. “I only really use Rhysand in a business setting. And I chose this table in particular, because I saw a beautiful woman sitting here and was feeling especially forward.”

Feyre laughed in surprise. “Forward, indeed. Well, Rhys, I have spectacular news for you.”

“And what’s that, Feyre darling?” the suggestive tone to his voice sent shivers down her spine and instantly those warning bells in her mind were blaring. This man was too handsome and he was a complete stranger.

“I’ve decided to do something completely stupid and spontaneous today, and you’re officially invited to join me.”

Rhysand grinned, his eyes flickering with mischief at her proposal. She supposed that should be concerning, too, but she felt her pulse quicken. “And what stupid, spontaenous thing will we be doing, darling?”

Feyre leaned back, trying to regain composure by taking a too casual sip of her coffee. “I haven’t decided yet. I’m open to ideas.”

Across the cafe, a man stood up so quickly his chair tipped over with a loud thunk. Rhys and Feyre both whirled their heads at the commotion.

“This is why we need to go to therapy together!” the woman across from him screeched. “You can’t control your stupid temper!”

“I don’t have time for this shit,” he growled. “I’m not going to sit there for an hour so you can manipulate some dumb bitch into agreeing with you!”

“It’s not about sides,” she groaned. “I want to work through this with you!”

Feyre felt a tug of sympathy at the desperation in the woman’s voice. She could feel her pain and frustration second-hand, having been in similar shoes herself.

“Fuck this,” the man grumbled, storming for the door.

The woman followed after him. “Our appointment is in 10 minutes! Please, let’s just try it.”

The door swung shut behind them. Feyre watched the couple continue their walking argument down the city pavement, gesturing wildly with their hands.

Feyre sighed. “Man, that poor woman. It sounded like she really wanted to work things out.”

“That guy sounded like an absolute ass, maybe it’s for the best,” Rhys said. Then, his eyes lit up and he turned to Feyre with a slow, conspiring grin. “It does give me an idea, though.”

“What’s that?” Feyre felt a bit intimidated by the roguish expression on his face, even if it did make her feel breathless.

“Well, I do happen to know there’s a psychiatrist's office right above this cafe. If I had to guess, that’s where our friends were going to have their first session. And from the looks of it,” he nodded towards the couple, who were now striding in opposite directions through the city, faces flushed with anger, “they won’t be attending.”

“And your point is…?”

“Let’s go in their stead. Make a game of it. First person to break character loses.”

“And what does the winner get?”

“Well, if I win, then I get to take you to dinner.”

Feyre considered for a moment. Dinner with a handsome man certainly didn’t sound like losing to her. “If I win, then I get to use you as a model.”

“You’re a photographer?” His brows rose in interest and Feyre summoned all her will power not to blush. Since when was she bashful about her career?

“Painter.”

Rhysand grinned. “If you win, you can use my body anyway you wish, Feyre darling. Nude would be best.”

And that was how Feyre had ended up in Dr. Suriel’s office, Rhys by her side on the sofa. It was perhaps the most adventurous thing she’d ever agreed to.

“So, Mr and Mrs Mandray. Apologies, I didn’t get your names on the forms.”

“I’m Feyre, this is my husband Rhys,” Feyre answered, thinking it lucky they didn’t have to guess at the mysterious couple’s forenames.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you Feyre and Rhys. What brings you to my office today?”

Rhys immediately slipped into his role of the concerned husband. He placed his arm around Feyre’s shoulders and tugged her close. Rhys opened his mouth, then shut it, glancing at Feyre hesitantly.

“My wife and I have been getting into a lot of… disagreement lately,” Rhys answered carefully, and already Feyre thought this was going much better than it would have if the actual Mr Mandray had turned up.

“My husband,” Feyre said flatly, channeling her inner Nesta to put venom into the word. “Is insisting on painting our house purple.”

“I see,” Dr. Suriel says, assessing the displeasure on Feyre’s face. “And I’m assuming you want to paint the house a different color.”

Feyre pressed her lips into a thin line. “See, that’s just the problem,” she said, crossing her arms. “That’s exactly the color I would want to paint our house.”

Dr. Suriel frowned. “So you do want the house to be painted purple, as does your husband. Am I understanding that correctly?”

“No,” Feyre sighed. “He wants to paint the house blue, but is insisting we paint it purple, because he knows it’s what I want. This bastard refuses to be anything but accommodating.”

“We’re going to try to refrain from name-calling in my office,” Dr Suriel said calmly. “So, Feyre, you are clearly unhappy that Rhys wants to paint the house purple. What color would you paint it?”

“Blue,” she answered. “I know it’s what he secretly wants to paint it.”

“She doesn’t see the hypocrisy in what she's saying!” Rhys complained. Then, he turned to Feyre, looking impossibly serious. “Darling, I know you want to paint the house purple, and I already told you I’m fine with it.”

Feyre groaned. “I don’t want to paint the house purple! I want to paint it blue.”

“You’re only saying that because you think I want to paint the house blue.”

“Do you?”

Rhys hesitated. “No.”

“Don’t lie in front of our therapist,” Feyre said with narrowed eyes. “We promised to tell the truth while we’re here.”

“Then you tell me the truth, Feyre. Do you genuinely want the house to be painted blue?”

Now it was Feyre’s turn to hesitate. She could see the corner of Rhysand’s mouth twitch as she did so. “No. I mean yes! I do!”

“It sounds like at the heart of this argument, you are both ultimately concerned in pleasing the other person, is that fair to say?”

Feyre and Rhys glanced at each other, then nodded in agreement.

“Do you think there’s a color you could both compromise on, so that you don’t feel as if your partner is the only one making a sacrifice in this decision?”

Feyre met Rhysand’s brilliant violet eyes. In truth, she’d blurted the color purple because she’d been thinking about the color of his eyes. She'd never seen eyes that color, and they were wonderfully vivid. Feyre was lost thinking of painting a world in a monocrhome of violet, like a city that lived within his gaze.

Feyre realized she’d been momentarily swept away, snapped out of it by the humor that washed behind those starry irises. She blinked back the haze and tried to think of an answer to the question.

“Mustard yellow?” she proposed.

Rhys pursed his lips in mock consideration. “Mustard yellow,” he agreed with an emphatic nod of approval.

Dr. Suriel blinked in surprise. “All right, well I’m pleased we could solve that issue. Is there anything else you’ve been arguing about?”

“Yeah, actually. My wife,” Rhys gave Feyre a pointed glance. Somehow, despite being strangers, hearing Rhys refer to her as his wife sent waves of pleasure jolting through her. She felt her stomach flip on itself. “Isn’t satisfied with our sex life.”

Feyre instantly flushed at such an accusation, however fabricated.

“Is this true, Feyre?” Dr. Suriel turned her eyes towards Feyre and she shifted uncomfortably at having to make up stories about her sex life with Rhys. Making Feyre imagine rolling in a bed with him was certainly his goal, and she’d lie to say it wasn’t affecting her. Rhysand looked absolutely delighted to have made her squirm. Fine. Two could play at his game.

“Y-yes, well,” Feyre stuttered, the burning in her cheeks condemning. “I keep telling Rhys that 16 orgasms in a session is excessive. He’s much too generous a lover and he never lets me give as good as I get.”

Feyre felt satisfied with the way Rhysand’s face went crimson.

Dr. Suriel’s brows rose. “This seems to be a common theme in your marriage. Rhysand, would you say that you’re often prioritising Feyre’s desires over your own?”

“I think Feyre sorely underestimates how much pleasure I take from satisfying her desires,” he answered, his eyes flicking to Feyre with enough of a sensual promise that her heartbeat turned staccato.

“Rhys, it sounds as though your generosity is part of the way you express your love, is that safe to say?” Rhys nodded. “And Feyre, it seems as if you have trouble accepting your husband's generosity, both in and outside the bedroom. Do you feel that’s a fair statement?”

“I-I suppose so.”

“Sometimes people have trouble accepting their loved one’s generosity when they feel like they aren’t giving something in exchange. It can be hard to accept that kind of love when we don’t feel like we deserve it. Do you feel like this could apply to your situation?”

Feyre blinked. This was meant to be a gag, something daring and experimental. She hadn’t expected to be psychoanalyzed by Dr. Suriel, or at least for her analysis to hit so close to home.

Rhysand shifted forward on the sofa. “Is this true, darling?” he asked, sounding concerned. He took Feyre’s hands in his own, brushing his thumb along her skin as he met her gaze. “I think you deserve the world.”

She would almost think he was being genuine if she hadn’t met him only an hour ago. Feyre marked the conviction on his face, those burning pools of earnesty in his eyes, and marveled at what an incredible actor he was.

Somehow she ended up blurting part of the truth. “My family life growing up was kind of tough and I’ve never really known what unconditional love was like. I think a part of me still believes it's something I have to earn.”

“That sounds like it must have been very hard, Feyre. But it sounds like Rhys loves you very much, and that this is an issue the two of you can overcome together. When you feel the instinct to reject his generosity, try to remember where that message is coming from. And Rhysand, try to keep in mind that this is something your wife is still working through, and be patient if she feels more comfortable giving you something in exchange. This is her way of expressing love, too. At the core of your issues is both of you thinking about the other person, try to remember this when a breakdown in communication occurs.”

Somehow they’d lost control of their therapy session and were receiving actual therapy, which wasn’t part of the plan at all. But somehow, despite not actually being married to Rhysand, what Dr. Suriel said was reassuring.

Feyre turned to Rhys and smiled. “I think I understand better, now. You’re free to give me as many orgasms as you want, honey.”

Rhys grinned fiendishly. “And I’ll let you reciprocate in whatever way you feel comfortable, darling.”

Dr. Suriel clasped her hands together in approval. “Excellent. I think so long as the two of you take measures to accurately communicate your needs, you’ll find these breakdowns will occur less frequently. And that’s it for our time today, but I am happy to have the two of you back any time.”

Feyre walked out of the session hand-in-hand with Rhys, feeling a bit dazed. It had certainly gotten more serious than she’d expected, but perhaps her judgement had been misplaced in thinking therapy could be anything other than serious, no matter how joking the complaints.

“Well, that was certainly stimulating,” Rhys quipped once they’d left the office.

“And it seems we’re at a draw, considering neither of us broke character.”

“You do play my wife convincingly well,” Rhys practically purred, “perhaps I’ll let you take up the real role, if you feel so inclined.”

Feyre laughed. “I’m expecting a few other offers to come through. Give me a few days to look over the applicants, then I’ll get back to you.”

“Okay, well how’s this. I’ll give you my number, you can wait until all those applicants come back to you, and once you’ve decided that I’m clearly the obvious choice, you can call me.”

Feyre smiled as she pulled out her phone and handed it to him to insert his number. “You do make a very convincing husband. Perhaps I can hire you for weddings and Thanksgiving dinners?”

“Real husband, fake husband, a partner to do spontaneous, outrageous things with. You call me, and I’ll be whatever you want me to be, Feyre.”

It was perhaps the strangest and most generous offer she’d ever been given. When they parted ways, Feyre thought that she’d certainly filled her quota for an interesting story to tell. And maybe, most likely, she’d be calling that number very soon.

[jihyuncompass]

Private Collection

I figured for this week I should go back to where it all began. The character who made me start this blog, my url, the first character I wrote smut for. It’s good to be back my beloved Jihyun <3

Kinktober 2021. Week Three

V/Jihyun x MC

Word Count: 4.5k

NSFW. Only read if 18+

Tags Below the Cut

Warnings/Tags: Photography, Praise, Oral Sex (Male receiving), Creampie

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The sound of Jihyun’s camera grabbed your attention. Turning around you met your partner’s face. The camera lens facing towards you, Jihyun angled to perfectly capture your face. You smiled, facing him as you heard the click of the camera shutter go off. 

Even after choosing to chase his passion for painting Jihyun had never truly put his camera down. Even if it wasn’t his primary art form anymore he could never resist the urge to pull his camera out when the moment struck him. Besides, taking a photo was much faster than a painting or a sketch could ever be. 

Looking over the top of the camera you saw Jihyun’s smile. The shining glint in his eyes that always made you smile back. 

“I’m sorry. I just couldn’t resist.” Jihyun said, taking two more photos of your smiling face. Approaching him he lowered the camera, looking into your eyes with his own instead of the camera lens. 

“Couldn’t resist?” You teased. 

“I can never resist you.” Jihyun whispered. “You’re too beautiful. I just have to capture your every moment.” His hand went to your cheek, pulling you in for the sweetest of kisses. All love and heartwarming sweetness. As sweet as his kiss was, it made another thought grow in your mind. One far less sweet and innocent like the kiss he gave you now. Cataloging that thought you decided to come back to at another time, when you were more prepared. Right now, you just enjoyed the sweetness of this moment, and how long it’d last. 

The thought returned to you a few days later, after Jihyun had already left for his studio for the day. Sitting in the living room answering RFA emails you’d remembered what you’d been thinking. Your heart rate picking up, you considered the idea more seriously. To you, the idea was new, and extremely exciting. However you worried about what Jihyun would think. Maybe he’d think it was over a line, or uncomfortable. Sometimes with him it was hard to know, you couldn’t even have tried to guess. Still, maybe it couldn’t hurt to try. 

Before you could second guess yourself you had your phone on and were already calling him. Throwing your caution to the wind. 

“Hello?” 

“I’m sorry to call you right after you left but I have an idea for later. I want to see what you think.” 

“That’s alright love, what’s this idea you have?” 

“I thought of it while you were taking photos of me the other day.” You started. “I was thinking that I’d want you to take more photos but. I had a specific theme and type of photo in mind” 

“Oh? What are you thinking?” 

“I was thinking. Maybe something a bit more… intimate.” 

Jihyun was silent on the other end. The silence stretched on for multiple painfully long seconds. Oh god, you’d made him uncomfortable didn’t you, that’s why he wasn’t saying anything. 

“You’d like me to take photos of you like that?” 

“You can say no if you aren’t comfortable with it.” 

“No, it’s not that I’m uncomfortable, love.” Jihyun said. “In fact I- No, nevermind.” He said. Clearing his throat. “I’d love to.” 

Sighing in relief you relaxed against the back of the couch. “Then let’s do it.” 

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Standing in the bathroom of Jihyun’s studio you triple checked your appearance. Making sure your hair wasn’t in your eyes or hiding your face. Once you made certain that your face looked the way you wanted your eyes travelled down towards what you were wearing. 

Jihyun had left the choice of your clothing, or lack thereof all to you. Given the power you chose to go for something you knew Jihyun would like. Simple, elegant but also revealing, and although he hadn’t seen it yet you could already see the look on his face when you left the bathroom. 

Taking some breaths for courage you gathered your courage to go out there. In the studio you knew Jihyun was preparing his camera, checking the lighting and all the smallest details, but mostly he was waiting for you. 

Hand on the doorknob you took one last moment to select yourself before opening the door and stepping into the studio. 

“Jihyun?” You asked, stepping into the room Jihyun had set up for today. His back was turned to you, fiddling with the camera in his hands. Hearing your voice he turned around, stopping the moment his eyes met you. 

You waited for him to say something, but he was silent for a good long moment. A deep blush tinting his ears and spreading through his cheeks. It usually didn’t take much to fluster him, but today all it seemed to take was just the mere sight of you. 

“Well?” You asked. “What do you think?” 

Pulling himself together, Jihyun responded. “You look. Radiant, love.” His voice was breathless, still unable to tear his eyes away from you. 

“Are you ready to start?” You asked, stepping closer to him. Jihyun tore his eyes away to look back at the camera in his hands. 

“Ah. Yes I think I’m ready.” Jihyun nodded, readjusting his hold on the camera. You nodded, looking around the room that Jihyun had set up. Even if this had all been your idea you still couldn’t ignore the slight nervousness bubbling up in your chest. 

Jihyun seemed to sense this. Putting a hand on your shoulder. “Angel? Are you feeling okay?” 

You nodded. “I’m okay. Just a little bit nervous.” You explained. 

“It’s alright.” Jihyun said, cupping your cheek with his hand. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, alright?” He reassured. Letting your shoulders relax you nodded, moving in to kiss him. 

Finding comfort in his eyes you regathered yourself and put on a smile. “I’m ready.” 

“Beautiful.” Jihyun said, another click of the camera shutter as you posed with your face away from the camera. Only Jihyun’s words and the camera shutter to prompt you to keep posing. 

He’d taken countless photos by now, each one more beautiful than the last in his opinion. As Jihyun stared at the viewfinder of the camera he struggled to ignore how fast his heart beat in his chest. How warm his face got with every new position. 

You looked back to him, shifting your position to face the camera. Another few clicks of the camera followed you as Jihyun took even more photos. Your eyes glancing around you tried to think of what the next pose could be, what else you could do. Especially since you’d noticed the red growing on Jihyun’s face, how he seemed to be focusing extremely hard on the camera so as not to get too flustered. 

Watching him adjust the lens you took him all in. The softness of his hair, the warmth and passion in his eyes. His careful fingers holding the camera, the constant feeling of warmth and comfort that seemed to radiate from him. 

Keeping your facial expression careful, you stood from your pose, approaching Jihyun as he lowered his camera. 

“Love?” Jihyun asked once you’d stopped right in front of him. 

“How about we take a little break.” You suggested, voice low and steady. Resting your hand on the top of Jihyun’s camera prevented him from lifting it again. Bating your lashes at him he nodded. Reaching up your hand you brushed some of his hair away from his eyes, wanting to look at him better. 

Jihyun’s hand went to your waist, pulling you close to him. His touch was always gentle but firm. Enough that you could always move out of his grasp, but tight enough to ask you to stay. 

Pressing a kiss to his lips you pressed your body against his, as you did so Jihyun’s hold on you got tighter, his kiss deeper. 

“You’re so beautiful.” Jihyun whispered to you. “I can’t stop looking at you.” 

You smiled at him, placing a kiss at the corner of his lips. “Then don’t stop.” Your heart was beating fast, ideas starting to run through your mind. Ideas that hadn’t been part of the original plan, but ideas that were not at all unwelcome. 

“What are you thinking about?” Jihyun asked you, his voice hardly reaching above a whisper. 

“There’s something I want to do.” You said. “Well, a couple things really.” You tried to give away the suggestive tone in your voice. 

“Oh?” Jihyun said, then the realization grew on him. “Oh.” His face got even redder, as he briefly avoided your eyes. “But the photos-”

Your smile turned into more of a smirk. “Who said we have to stop taking photos?” 

Jihyun’s mouth opened and then closed. Like he was trying to make words but couldn’t get anything out. Your hands went to his hips to bring yourself closer, pressing yourself against him, and in particular pressing against a hardness already present.

“If that’s what you’d like of course.” You said. “But, I do know that’s what I would like.” 

Staring at you a while longer, he finally cleared this throat. “What did you want to do?” 

Taking his cue you took his hand, leading him to a chair and motioning him to sit. His camera was still in his hands as he sank into the chair. He was silent as you kneeled in front of him, your face level with the bulge already straining against his trousers. Exactly what you’d hoped to see. 

A hand on his thigh you glanced up towards him, watching you with wide eyes. “Are you okay with this love?” You asked. 

Jihyun swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded. “Yes, I’m okay.” You gave him a reassuring smile and let your hand travel inwards towards the strained fabric. Palming him through the fabric. Jihyun bit his lip, containing the groan that threatened to pass his lips. 

Your gaze stayed on his face, trying to read his expression. You’d never try and push him past what he was comfortable with, but he also was not always the most open about his wants. 

Reaching for the waistband on his trousers you slowly undid the button and made a show of pulling down his zipper. Jihyun’s eyes were locked on you, unable to look away from you. His heart raced in his chest, biting his lip to keep himself calm. 

Keeping your movements slow and steady you gently grasped the waistband of his boxers. Your eyes seeking permission. 

“Do you want to?” Jihyun asked. 

“Do you want me too?” You answered. 

“Only if you do.” Jihyun responded. Accepting his permission you dragged down the cloth to let his length escape its confines. Jihyun sucked in a breath as your hand grasped him at the base. You admired his already fully erect cock in your hand, warm and heavy in your grasp, precum already starting to accumulate at his tip. 

Starting slowly you moved your hand around him. Your thumb swiping at the beads of precum to spread around the rest of him. He sighed, sucking in a breath with his eyes falling closed. Taking a moment you focused purely on pumping him with your hand, a smile building on your lips as you watched Jihyun’s face. 

Positioning yourself, you leaned close to take his tip into your mouth. A gasp left him as you took him. Your tongue swirled around the weeping tip, above you Jihyun moaned quietly. You looked up at him, the sight of his face sending a jolt straight to your core. His eyes closed in pleasure, face red and flustered, one hand on his camera, the other holding onto the arm of the chair for dear life. 

Closing your eyes you moved your hand back to his base to fit more of his length into your mouth, hollowing out your cheeks as you brought your head down on him. A louder groan came from Jihyun above you, pushing you to go down further. Suppressing a gag and you took in as much as you could manage. Taking a moment to prepare the two of you before you lifted your head and brought it down again. One hand gripping his thigh and the other around the remainder of his cock you couldn’t fit. 

Bobbing your head up and down, your hand pumping at the base you closed your eyes to focus on your ministrations. Jihyun’s noises grew a bit louder, primarily made up of heavy breaths and the softest of moans. The hand he’d had on the arm of the chair moved to rest on the back of your head, prompting you to continue. 

Needing a moment to catch your breath you released his length from your mouth with a lewd pop. Moving your head away your hand took over, rubbing from base to tip, your salvia making the movements even easier than before. 

“How’s it feel, love?'' You asked him. Jihyun’s eyes opened, even if half lidded. 

“So good.” He whispered. “You’re always so good.” You smiled at him sweetly, pressed a kiss to the underside of his cock. Jihyun whimpered softly, covering his mouth to muffle his sound. 

“I think.” You started, speaking with your softest voice. “I think maybe you should take some more photos.” 

Jihyun looked back at his camera, he must have forgotten he was holding. Looking between you and the camera he nodded. Giving him one more sweet smile you lowered your head back onto him. The click of the camera shutter making your wet core throb with want. Later. You told yourself, right now you wanted to keep this going. Especially with how happy Jihyun looked right now. 

Returning to your previous motions you did your best not to gag on him as you brought yourself down on him. Hearing the sound of the camera click every few moments. In the silence between photos you savored each sweet sound Jihyun made. He was never one to be loud, but when he did make noise it was like hearing heaven. 

Making sure to bat your eyelashes you glanced up at him through half closed eyes. Making extra sure to look right into the camera lens. Several more clicks followed, Jihyun rapidly trying to capture your face at that moment. 

“You’re so perfect.” Jihyun said through breathless moans. “You’re so beautiful, so good so-” He paused to catch himself after you went down as far as you could. “I love you.” Breathing heavily Jihyun’s eyes briefly squeezed shut. Already he was starting to get close, you could already feel it. His cock twitching inside your mouth as your tongue ran over the underside of him. 

Keeping your concentration you maintained your pace, even as his hand on the back of your head pushed you further down, and Jihyun’s hips tried to thrust up into your mouth. Your hand moved to his hip bone, holding him in place. His noises grew higher pitched, his breaths heavy and labored. 

Jihyun stiffened as you pulled him out of your mouth besides the tip. Your hand quickly picked up the speed as Jihyun finished into your mouth. The salty, hardly bitter fluid coating your tongue. Opening your eyes you enjoyed the sight above you. Jihyun, with his chest heaving with heavy breaths, eyes half lidded and filled with need and hands shaking as he went to hold your face in his hand. 

Taking the tip out from your mouth you swallowed. Jihyun watching you with complete adoration. It made you want to take the camera out of his hands to capture it for yourself. But instead you settled for memorizing it with your eyes. 

“Did you like that?” You asked. 

“Yes.” Jihyun said. Leaning forward in the chair, pulling you into a kiss. He didn’t seem to mind the taste of himself on you. When he finally pulled away he kept his face close, holding your face in his hand he admired you, the blush across your cheeks, the slight haziness in your eyes, your lips slightly swollen. He just wanted to stare at you endlessly, hold you like this forever and ever. 

Jihyun’s hand left your cheek, travelling down to the lingerie you chose, his fingers tracing the outline of the fabric. You lifted yourself on your knees to let his hands wander further. 

“Is it wrong that I want you out of this?” Jihyun whispered to you. 

You smiled. “Not at all.” Kissing him again you felt his fingers tracing your waist down to your hip sending a chill down your spine. “Actually, I think you should help me out of this.” 

Jihyun’s eyes widened, his breath catching in his throat. He nodded, his hand on your hips gently pulling you up. Following your instructions you stand up, Jihyun following you. Setting his camera on the chair behind him. 

Bringing you into another kiss Jihyun’s hands wandered, his hands running over your hips and waist. Pulling away from you Jihyun carefully began to strip the lingerie from your body. Careful to treat the pieces with the utmost care to not damage it. 

“Beautiful.” He whispered. “So beautiful.” Jihyun whispered, taking one step away he admired your bare form in front of him.  This was far from the first time he’d seen you like this, still every time he managed to look at you like he’d just seen the most beautiful thing in the world. His eyes wide and shining with wonder and overwhelmed with what you could only identify as love. 

“Jihyun?” You asked, his gaze meeting yours. 

“Yes, love?”

“Can it be your turn? I want you out of this.” You tugged on his button up shirt.

Nodding, Jihyun kissed you again. Your hands quickly worked on his shirt buttons. Working from the top down and then sliding your hands up his chest to push the shirt off from his shoulders. 

Dropping the shirt behind him you moved your hands back down to the waistband of his still unbuttoned and unzipped trousers. Pushing them down his hips. Jihyun pushed them down the rest of the way to step out of them. Kicking them out of the way behind him. 

Capturing your lips in another kiss his hands ran down your back, his fingers tracing the curve of your spine as they descended. Every touch felt gentle, yet full of a wanting need for more of you. 

Pressing your body against him you smiled as you kissed him. Feeling him already getting hard again as his hands moved across your body. Still, his hands never quite reached where you wanted him too. 

Jihyun pulled away from your kiss, smiling warmly at you. “Let’s move somewhere a bit more comfortable.” Taking your hand in his. “Wait.” You said to stop him. “Grab the camera.” Jihyun turned back, grabbing the camera from off the chair and took your hand again. 

 Jihyun led you to the couch against one of the walls of the room. Jihyun sat first, urging you to straddle him. Following his lead you straddled him with your knees on either side of his hips.

“You look so beautiful like this.”  He said, lifting the camera to take another photo. You smiled happily, knowing the camera was capturing your face. “I love you so much.” 

“I love you too.” You whispered. 

“Can I be inside you?” Jihyun asked. “Please, I want to feel you now.” After kissing 

him again you nodded. Lifting yourself to position yourself above him, your rested your hands on his shoulders.  

“Are you ready?” You asked, your hand reaching to cup his face. 

“I’m ready.” 

You lowered yourself onto him, taking in a sharp inhale as your walls stretched around him. Jihyun’s hands on your hips he aided you as you took him into the base. Your eyes meeting Jihyun’s you were met with a look of adoration. 

“So good.” Jihyun whispered. His thumb rubbing circles onto your hip bone. In his other hand you knew he still had his camera, although for the most part ignoring it in lieu of taking you in with his own eyes. 

Slowly lifting yourself on your knees you pulled out just a little bit. Capturing him in another kiss. One hand ran through his short mint colored hair, pushing it back and away from his eyes. While you’d raised yourself slowly at first you quickly lowered yourself back down. Jihyun moaned quietly into your mouth just as he pulled away from your kiss. 

Raising yourself up and down again you found a rhythm. Each rise and fall sending waves of hot pleasure through your body. Your own sounds matching Jihyun’s heavy breaths matched with quiet moans. Your eyes closed as you focused on keeping up your pace. 

The returning noise of the camera shutter made your eyes open. Jihyun had raised the camera again, you grinned.

“You’re so beautiful.” Jihyun said breathlessly. “You’re so good, so perfect.” Jihyun’s eyes grew hazy with pleasure. The one hand not on the camera moving down from your hip to reach between your legs. His fingers swiftly finding your clit, his thin and gentle fingers starting to rub circles around the sensitive nub. Your hips instinctively bucking in response, a louder moan leaving you. 

Jihyun snapped another photo as your eyes squeezed shut. Your hand on his shoulder tightening its grip as more photos were taken. You didn’t think it was possible for a single sound to bring you so much pleasure yet with each click it only drove you to greater heights of sensation. 

Your eyes opened as Jihyun’s other hand went to your waist. He’d set the camera aside, wanting to focus entirely on you. Instead of seeing you through a camera lens. His face was warm and flushed a bright red. His eyes are right on you, eyes hazy with nothing but adoration and desire. 

Jihyun’s arms wrapped around your middle, slowing your movements till you were just barely moving.

“Love?” You whispered. 

“Can we change positions? I- I don’t want to finish before you do.” 

Your mouth opened then closed. Nodding you lifted yourself off of him, moving off of his hips to let him move. Following his lead and his hands on your hips he positioned you on your back laying on the couch. One leg resting on the top of the couch and the other hanging off the edge. JIhyun hovered over you, the warmest smile on his face. 

Repositioning himself he stood with one knee on the couch and the other on the floor. He held your hips to adjust you to lay in the exact position he wanted you in. One hand on your hip the other held his cock, giving it a few quick strokes before lowering his body down to position himself. Dragging himself across your folds he gathered up the wetness that’d accumulated. A quiet whine passing your lips when his tip ran across your clit. 

His tip pressing against your entrance he looked up at you. “Ready?” 

“Mhm.” You hummed. Jihyun reentered you slowly, giving you a moment to get used to him inside you again. One of his hands on your thigh he took a deep breath. Preparing himself for a moment, he then began to thrust in and out of you. Starting slowly with a few shallow thrusts, testing the waters before increasing his speed and going deeper. Each thrust gained in intensity, which in return made your voice louder as you moaned. 

“You’re-you’re so beautiful love.'' Jihyun said between heavy breaths. Your hand went to Jihyun’s hand resting on your thigh. Lacing your fingers with his, Jihyun smiled, quickening his pace. “You’re so perfect, so wonderful.” 

Forcing yourself you leaned up to try and kiss him, with Jihyun meeting you halfway to hold your face with his free hand. His fingers traced your jaw, despite the rapid snaps of his hips still softly tracing your features. 

Laying you back down, his hand left from your face, grazing your breasts and down your stomach. His touch sending a shiver down your spine. His hand trailing back between your legs. You cried out in relief as he returned attention to your clit. The combination of sensations filling your whole body with waves of pleasure. 

Jihyun’s hand in yours tightened. “You’re doing so good, angel, so good for me.” His words alone were getting you close. Your breathing was made up of primarily moans by this point, each thrust sending you deeper into a wave of pure pleasure. 

“Jihyun I’m-” You started. 

“You’ve been so good, love.” Jihyun said. “So good.” Your hand squeezing his, your eyes were squeezed shut, each moment of pleasure growing more intense. The pool of heat in your abdomen grew hotter with every second. You weren’t going to last like this, you were already so close. 

“Jihyun I’m gonna-” Your voice was cut off by another moan being pulled from you. 

“Don’t hold back love, I want to feel you finish.” 

With his words filling your ears your barrier finally broke. The white hot ecstasy rapidly filling your entire body. Your back arching off the sofa, a strangled cry loudly coming from you as you finished. Your walls fluttering around Jihyun’s cock inside you. Beyond your own cry hearing Jihyun’s breathy moans. 

Jihyun’s thrusts continued despite you coming down from your orgam. His thrusts sending aftershocks through you. Soon you noticed the difference in his pace. He was getting faster, but less rhythmic. His breaths heavy and eyes closed, you knew he was close to his own orgasm. 

His eyes closed he couldn’t see you, and so intensely focused on the feelings taking over him he couldn’t even hear beyond his own breaths. Squeezing your hand his mouth opened in a silent scream as he reached his own climax. Thrusting as deep he could into you as he finished in you. 

Click. 

Jihyun’s eyes opened, half lidden and exhausted. In your hands was the camera he’d set aside. The lens pointed at his face. 

“Love?” He whispered.

“I wanted a couple of you.” You said, taking one more photo. “You look so beautiful, I couldn’t not capture your face.” 

Jihyun took the camera from your hands. Turning the lens back around to you. Snapping a couple more photos. “I thought this was a photoshoot for you.” Jihyun teased. 

You smiled warmly. “Yes, but I wanted at least a couple of you.” 

Jihyun smiled back, leaning forward to kiss you. A kiss so sweet you thought it could give you a cavity, all warmth and love. His lips so soft against yours. 

You whined when he moved away. Giving you one more peck he stood straight up, slowly pulling out of you. Looking between your legs as his seed started to leak down onto the couch beneath you. 

“Jihyun?” You asked. “Should we clean up?” 

Jihyun glanced back at you for a moment before returning to your dripping core. Lifting his camera again. A smile on his face. 

“Not just yet. I think I should take a few more pictures first. For our private collection.” 

[therealvinelle]

Hello! Why do you think Carlisle likes Aro? (Love your meta btw!)

This blog lasted 25 days before becoming an Aro/Carlisle blog. The sanity was nice while it lasted, I suppose.

Oh well, I embrace my trash ship.

(Anon is referring to this post)

(This one is also relevant)

So, while on Aro’s end it was a case of “did the gods just give me my very own Enkidu?”, for Carlisle we must look at the circumstances. The Carlisle Cullen who walked into Volterra is not the Carlisle Cullen who works at Forks General.

Carlisle was a demon-hunting priest who brought his religion into his new life. Having no idea what he’d just become, apart from the obvious things like “I desperately want to kill people for their blood” and “I sparkle?!”, many of the things that are obvious to us would not be at all obvious to him. His only experience with other demons was the slum-dweller that killed him. It was brutal, and three other people from his parish were murdered as well. He’d been able to track the vampire down, something I can only take that to mean that the vampire used his parish for hunting grounds. He’s so horrified by what he’s become that he tries to destroy himself. This fails, and instead he finds a way out that lets him live without having to kill, and with that comes to the realization that vampires retain their souls (which is for another post).

My point being, Carlisle wakes up as a demon, and has no way of knowing how any of this works, nor of how to explain the fact that he is able to retain his soul. It’s telling that even after centuries of being a vampire he still thought something might be fundamentally different about him, as he chose to turn Edward by simulating his own transformation, even though it meant more pain for Edward. In other words, Carlisle was not guaranteed that his experience was universal. By the time we meet him in canon he’s wonderfully friendly to everybody regardless of what they eat, but I strongly doubt he got from point “Demons are monsters and I’ll rally a mob to lynch them!” to “Vampires are people who sadly eat other people.” right away.

So, you have freshly immortal Carlisle Cullen wandering around Europe with no way of knowing that other vampires are as (for lack of a better word) human as he is. How can they be, when they choose to eat people? (My personal headcanon is that he went by a Persephone theory, and figured that by resisting human blood he’d remained a man.)

It was this Carlisle who met Aro and the other Volturi. According to Edward (I unfortunately don’t have Twilight with me so I can’t quote his exact words), they were the ones who showed him that vampires can in fact be sophisticated.

Sophisticated. Not just as in Aro, Marcus, and Caius eat their virgins with some fava beans and a nice chianti, but as in they’re civilized and intelligent beings. Carlisle was no longer a one lone freak who somehow retained his soul while everyone else went full Buffy vampire, or any other such theory. I can’t even imagine the impact that must have had on a young Carlisle who would have been even lonelier than the Carlisle who found Edward in Chicago. That Carlisle at least had friends, this younger version had absolutely nobody.

Aro changed that.

More than being sophisticated, Aro turned out to be a kindred spirit, an absolutely brilliant mind and a generous host. Carlisle chose to live with him for decades, leaving only because of their dietary differences. And even if people disagree with me with all of the above, I don’t think anyone can argue that this one isn’t huge.

Of all the people Carlisle knows in canon, Aro is the only one he stayed with just for Aro’s own sake. Carlisle loves the Cullens dearly, but the cornerstone holding them together is their shared diet, and the fact that Carlisle turned four of them, the other two joined. He did not happen upon them and then like them so much that he decided to move in. As for his other friends, he cares for them all, but he didn’t share decades of his life with them.

Regardless of how we’re interpreting their relationship (as in, platonic, UST, or raging homosexual affair), I don’t think anyone can dispute that Carlisle and Aro are each other’s best friends.

But beyond proving that vampires aren’t all sewer-dwelling, priest-eating rascals, what exactly made Aro so special?

I’ll just list his qualities in no particular order.

Sophistication This guy is a lover of the arts and of knowledge. His gallery and library must have been the most extensive and diverse in the world, and it probably still is. I can’t even begin to imagine the wealth of knowledge and treasures that Aro must have collected over the years. If the Holy Grail exists within the world of Twilight, Aro has it. Where I’m headed with this, is that not only would Aro’s collection be the coolest thing ever to Carlisle, but also that this was a time when the number of books and an art collection was a sign of high class, of intellectualism, of all things fine and noble that was considered virtuous. Aro acts very much like wealthy European nobility, he even lives in Italy, the cultural epicenter of the Western world of old. He physically could not have been more impressive to Carlisle.

Kind of a continuation of the previous point: Aro is from Ancient Greece (well, he’s Myceanaean, but same difference to a “You predate Homer?!” starstruck Carlisle). Ancient Greece was the ultimate, perfect, civilization to Europe, and Carlisle got to Volterra just ahead of the Enlightenment. This alone would have made him so unbelievably cool to Carlisle.

Nerd I think this one speaks for itself. Carlisle is an unbelievable nerd, an inquisitive mind who’ll study anything and everything, and in Aro he found someone who also has an inquisitive mind and will study anything and everything. They’re both very intelligent. Carlisle went from being that sad whale that sings on a frequency no other whales can hear, to having someone who just got it.

His gift So you’re all gonna have to stay with me on this one. Aro’s gift is one most people would find very invasive, which as I touched upon in one of the posts linked above must be very isolating. And yet we know from canon that Carlisle has no problem at all with Edward reading his mind all the time, and more, if Aro reading his mind was a problem then Aro and Marcus would both have known, and I doubt their friendship would have worked out. So, I think that Carlisle not only didn’t mind having his every thought read, but that this was an actively good thing. Because what is less lonely than the company of one who knows you as intimately as you know yourself? To be friends with Aro is to be truly understood, known more deeply than anyone else can ever know you. And to someone who seeks companionship as much as Carlisle does, I imagine this is an extremely attractive feature.

Offer of friendship Carlisle would have been hopelessly lonely when he met Aro. And as no one else is mentioned as being close to him, Jane hadn’t even met him which I find pretty telling of how he interacted (or didn’t interact) with the Guard, and he wouldn’t yet have any of his other friends that he later made, he only had Aro.

He enforcers a law that keeps the known world from descending into chaos Human civilization wouldn’t last a day without the Volturi. There would be nothing stopping vampires from taking out entire villages in one go, immortal children would be everywhere, and the newborn armies would spread like wildfire. In the world of Twilight, the Volturi are a necessary evil. And Aro is their leader. The fact that he not only keeps the world together, an ungrateful task with no end in sight, but had the idea to create a law in the first place would make him all the more amazing to Carlisle.

And I’m sure there’s more that is currently slipping my mind.

Just, Aro is on every level the most impressive, awe-inspiring, and dare I say dazzling, that anyone can be to Carlisle. And he came into Carlisle’s life at the best possible moment. If he’d agreed to do the animal diet, Carlisle would have stayed. If he wanted to seduce Carlisle, I think he’d succeed. I also think that their time together was far more formative for the person Carlisle became than anyone gives Aro credit for.

(And if Carlisle had never found anyone who’d share the diet, he would eventually have returned. I imagine Aro thought the same, but that’s for another post.)

Oh, and last bit - in Breaking Dawn we get this beautiful moment where Carlisle learns that Aro robbed the British royal family, and he just goes, “yup, that’s my guy”. Even after Eclipse, he remains fond of Aro. I mean, there’s also the fact that he’s been lugging around this giant painting for centuries, even at a time when he didn’t have a house and I can only speculate as to where he was keeping it.

Of course, over the course of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn everything goes to hell, but that’s for another post.

TL;DR, Carlisle went from a priest’s son to living with an evil vampire overlord for decades because he’s just that great, in the present he keeps a giant painting of him in his office. I feel it’s safe to assume he likes the man.

(Edited on the 13th of April to fix some phrasing and add a link)

[nova-network]

I never actually played Team Fortress 2 myself (time-consuming academics and all) -- I just kept up with all the comics and short videos. So I don’t have much to contribute to #SaveTF2.

At least, in terms of actual stories about playing TF2.

So I’m about to tell you Teufort Tumblrites a very, very different story about my involvement with this fandom -- back in the days when I was an undergraduate, the servers were thriving, and my friends were always ready to make jokes about this game.

This is the story of the tumor pinata.

My background is mostly in two overlapping fields: biology and bioengineering. In one of my undergrad honors seminars, I had a group project where we had to do a presentation on a paper on a topic of our choice. We chose antigen-specific cancer immunotherapy -- essentially, using the immune system to fight cancer without hurting the body with its own immune cells in the process.

Now, I love presenting, and I really like to do fun multimedia things to make my presentations more fun for the audience. In particular, I like having interactive aspects, and I like giving out food. So in this case, I decided that I should do the same thing with this presentation, to make it more memorable.

Specifically, I decided to make a big pull-string papier-mache pinata. Which I painted to look like a GIANT TUMOR.

You see, the students in the audience were supposed to represent the immune cells, and they would come up and pull the strings to kill the tumor. Which I had decided to fill with Starburst candy.

It was a massive hit with my class. Naturally, this meant I decided to tell my friends all about it.

My friends who played TF2.

I was a fan of the series already. I had read all the comics, watched all the videos... except one.

You see, because of how focused I was on my studies, I didn’t always have time to check for updates to my favorite series, whether they were games, comics, shows, or anything else. And I, pre-medical biology student and creator of the tumor pinata, had absolutely no clue that Expiration Date had come out shortly before my presentation.

It should also be noted, at this time, that I have a very obviously German surname.

Hoo boy, I got a LOT of jokes about the Medic and his tumor bread.

I ended up just kind of running with it -- he’s my favorite TF2 character, so I’d say I got a good deal out of this -- and Expiration Date quickly became my favorite video in TF2′s entire repertoire, partially just because of its legitimate quality, but also very much because of the tumor pinata. Because of this, I got way, way more involved with the Team Fortress 2 community, both with my college friends and online, and started following TF2 fandom blogs, meeting other people who liked the game, sending memes back and forth, etc. I’m even still friends with some of them, after all this time!

So that’s the story of how I made my first real connection with the Team Fortress 2 fan community. Not through fan fiction or fanart. Not via cosplay or conventions. Not even by playing the actual goddamn game.

My friendships in this community were fostered, at their core, by tumor candy.

As a side note, I stored the remains of the tumor pinata in my family’s garage for several months, until it was finally eaten by mice that decided to live in it. Archimedes might have competition.

[plush-rabbit]

Coming Out - Ace Ed.

Request: When you have the chance (or if you're comfortable with the topic, I know some aren't 😅), could you write something about Shigaraki, and/or Mammon, and Asmodeus' S/O coming out to them as asexual? Clearly they're nervous about how they'll react and explain to them that they're okay with having an open relationship if they wanted to still have sex (genuinely okay with it, not because they're nervous). Again, it's okay if you decide not to do this because you're not comfortable with the topic or unsure because you're not that informed on asexuality! (Sorry to bother you if you decide not to write anything 🙇)

A/N: I hope you like these!! I, myself, am not ace but I tried to do as much research with this as possible (reading about different experiences). I hope you enjoy!! (if this is in any way acephobic, please tell me. The last thing i want is to make this blog an unsafe place)

-

Mammon:

Coming out isn’t easy. It can be nerve wrecking no matter the people and coming to a demon who- to be fair- has had more experiences in life than you could ever imagine or even begin to grasp, you still have anxiety that settles deep inside of you. You sit him down, your hands fidgeting with each other and perceptive as always, Mammon holds your hand, a tender smile across his features as he tells you to take a deep breath. Once you get the words out, Mammon blinks, his head tilted and then he smiles. It isn’t like the one you saw moments before, it’s wider, ecstatic and he’s pulling you in for a hug. He’s glad that you’re able to find your truth and being a demon who has lived for so long, he’s fully aware of the meaning to identify as ace. He’s the friendliest with humans, coming into contact with several for one reason or another, so he’s quite aware of most human experiences and takes your coming out with excitement and supportiveness.

While he knows what being asexual is he would want a bit more clarification so he doesn’t overstep any boundaries. He’s a touchy demon whose love is expressed with actions and- very rarely- words. His questions come one right after the other; he isn’t trying to be invasive but he wants to know where you both stand in this relationship. He nods and will listen without his attention wavering. He’ll likely interject just wanting clarification on a few things or making sure he hasn’t crossed any boundaries. Having lived for so long, he’s come to know very different sexualities and gender identities and he’ll make sure that you’re still interested in a relationship with him.

If you do offer for an open relationship where he can take out his tendencies, he won’t take it except for his rutting periods. It isn’t exactly something he is eager to do and even if he does have your permission it feels a bit off for him the first few times of his rut. Other than that, he isn’t keen on an open relationship. He’s fine without sex and can always masturbate just fine. It’s common for the house to contain some type of lewd joke so if it gets too uncomfortable or pushes too close for your sexuality, he’ll cut the joking short. If you're comfortable with the jokes and even start to partake in them, he’s on your side, laughing with your hand held in his.

He’s still touchy with you depending on how you feel about it but sometimes he can’t really help himself. He won’t try to push you for sex but he can be found with his hand cupped over your chest or on the inside of your thigh. It’s not him trying to hint at anything sexual or even because he’s in the mood, it is simply because he just likes to touch you and have you close- it’s comforting for him to have his hand on you, to let him know that you’re still beside him. If you do happen to have an aversion to touch, he is likely to remember it and will ask if it’s okay to hold you or even just keep an arm spread so you can come to him if you choose so. It’s no secret that the greedy demon sleeps either nude or partially nude so he will offer to change that if you are uncomfortable, scratching the back of his neck and mumbling about how he’ll have to lower the temperature but for you, it’ll be fine. If you choose to have him sleep however he wants to, he still doesn’t, mostly due to his own flustered self.

Mammon is so supportive in an overeager type of way. He’s buying things that have your flag on it and gifting them to you with such a proud look on his face that it’s sweet. He can understand that coming out is something very close to humans given your hesitation to share with him so he makes sure to take that trust that you gave him and do the best that he can do for you. You can offer an open relationship and he’s touched that you care for him and his needs but it's not something that he’ll take so quickly. He likes you just fine and it’s trust and kindness that you gave to him that made him fall for you. The second eldest wants you to know that no matter your sexuality or identification, he’s by your side with various items stamped with your flag. He’s eager to please, holding your hand and pulling you into shops, leaving with at least one bag in each hand and his smile is bright. Greed is his sin and he values you by his side a lot more than he could ever express in words.

Asmodeus:

Asmodeus can sense that there’s been something on your mind, you’ve been bouncing your leg rather rapidly the past few days, you seem to be distancing yourself from him, but he knows you, if there’s something bothering you, you would tell him. While he may be the Avatar of Lust, he is in-tune with your emotions that don’t include lust. He’ll let you take as long as you need to until you do come out. Once you do, he will take your coming out with happiness and embarrassment. He holds your hand and tells you that you being asexual changes nothing in how he feels for you. On the other hand, he has been flirting with you and offering sexual opportunities. He’s apologizing immediately, he had no clue and had based the fact that he couldn’t feel your lust because of the first meeting.

He is based around lust- his nature isn’t something that can be changed so easily but he can accommodate it for you. He wants you to be comfortable around him and he won’t risk that just because he’s feeling particularly active one day. He’ll sit and talk with you, learn where you stand on the ace spectrum and take it from there. Your admiration and feelings come before anything sexual with him and perhaps it's the fact that you don’t feel sexually attracted or have a high libido but at least he knows that you are with him because you genuinely care for him and not because of the pleasure that he can bring. He tries a lot for you and while dates can’t end in the way that he’s used to, he can spend the time with you in bed, a hand around your waist as you watch television, something still so intimate to him as he holds your hand and falls asleep on your shoulder.

Touch is something important to the younger brother. He cannot be alone, he likes being surrounded by people and having attention on him so touch is still something that is going to be part of the relationship- if you are okay with it of course. It’s not uncommon for him to hold your hand before bed and ask and if you two can sleep shitless- nothing sexual but rather just for comfort of another warm being beside him, for him to feel your soft skin and run his gentle fingertips up and down your spine as he curls into you. There is nothing inherently sexual about being nude and to him it’s much more about just feeling you beside him.

The demon likes to flirt, and there’s something about knowing that it’s not going to turn sexual that leads him to be more fun with it. He’s laughing through his lines and he enjoys when you play along. While he takes up your offer on having an open relationship, he isn’t going to take it up the actual act most of the time. A few times it will be out of necessity, release, or even just parts of his own sin that he cannot control. He’s been in many relationships where they have been open or polyamorous, but the whole party was involved. If he were to be honest, while he does enjoy sex, he does enjoy your company just a bit more. Plus, he has a plethora of toys at his disposal if he is ever feeling up to the act without wanting to leave his bedroom.

You coming out to Asmodeus warms his heart. You know that he is the Avatar of Lust and he hasn’t made his attraction to you a secret so you coming out to him means a lot. You chose to stay in a relationship with him and care for him. You trusted him that he would understand and he does. He takes your sexuality with grace, never pushing too far and knowing your limits. Your comfort is important to him and he’s going to care for you in ways that are not sexually intimate. He’ll hold you close, paint your nails to match his, wear matching or complementary colors and hold you close to him. His sin defines him in many ways but he always longs for something so much sweeter than lust. He’ll hold your hand and kiss your knuckles, letting you know that you mean the world to him.

[justalads]

this is an essay post that was written in response to an in-depth discussion i was having with another person on a lot of topics. that’s why it’s written like it’s addressing someone. because of that, it is a little confusing on its own (because the things in quotes are responding to things the other person said) but me and the person who runs this blog thought it would be better to make this a separate post, so that people who want to see this response can see it without it being attached to the person i was having the discussion with. we spoke to the person and they said that would be fine. with that being said, this is a very long post. if anyone finds parts of it useful, it will have served its original purpose.

so what i mean about it “making sense” that dream became like that is that it kind of does, you know? i’m saying that the desires were always there. not that he was always willing to go so far for them, or even that they were as strong as they ended up being! after all, there’s a difference between declaring war to reclaim land and people, and making a vault in order to take things that were important to people.

what he always did possess is a sort of “ownership” of the server. and this was probably founded from the fact that it was, you know, his server. he wanted l’manburg back because he didn’t like that people came onto his server and then said he couldn’t have something. and that’s one of his primary points in his conversation with skeppy: the analogy he uses of someone coming into his house and saying he can’t have a table.

and later, in the vault, this is the reason he gives for wanting control: that it is his server. he tells tommy it isn’t supposed to be fair, it doesn’t need to be fair, because fairness implies equality, and he doesn’t see everyone else as having equal claim to the server. so that’s what i mean when i say the signs were always there: his statements match upand paint a path through the story. true, you don’t just “become” a bad person. there’s no reason for him to suddenly get all weird and want ultimate control, if he was completely neutral and peaceful in the beginning. this is why his character is decently written!

and since the potential was there in the first place, that’s what gave him the ability to or put him in danger of doing what he did.

so yeah, it’s true that his spiral was not only his fault, because even someone who thinks they own something is not going to just jump to the lengths that he did. he had other experiences, and saw how other people worked, and then was met by pushback from people when he wanted them all to do what he said. because his house analogy is lacking something: he owns the house, but everyone else lives there too.

it may be “his” server in that he pays upkeep fees, but that doesn’t mean he deserves control over everything that happens on it! if your roommate goes “i want this table and you can’t have it”, even if the house belongs to you, it’s kind of weird to go “no you can’t have it, it’s mine”. especially if all the roommate wants the table for is so they can play monopoly or something with their group. and even more so if the roommate will let you play monopoly if you want to (remember the embassy?), and if you can just buy a new table then what’s the point in getting upset over the one?

i just think you put a lot more of the responsibility on other characters. saying that all they did was villainize him and treat him as pure evil and break his boundaries is wrong because one, no, that’s not all they did, it’s exaggerated, and two, he was also doing things to them! it did not come out of nowhere! and clearly, his mindset didn’t come from nothing, so a personal flaw contributed to it! people who are innocent and care too much about others and are then mistreated do not do what dream did, and we know this because there is a character very similar to that: ranboo.

(i could talk about this for a super long time honestly. it’s very interesting how close they are, and since enderwalk ranboo is just ranboo with all his memories and he helped dream... there’s clearly something that happened that he’s forgotten that’s very important.)

hates conflict, tries to mediate things, cares about the people he loves to a fault. and we don’t see him running around and telling people they can’t build nations because it “divides people”! he has also been hurt and betrayed, but he still recognizes his responsibility to respect others and their agency. the difference between dream and ranboo is that one, dream has a spine, and two, dream thinks of the server as his. dream’s belief is one of the driving causes of his actions.

it’s true that nobody deserves to lose half their friends at once. it’s also true that before he declared war, nobody had any actual negative feelings towards him. they made fun of him for saying his side had more women. he made fun of them for having none. it was playful banter. that’s the thing about the hot dog stream: the tone is incredibly light. wilbur soot, known dramatic idiot, decided he was going to go play capitalism on a minecraft server. both tommy and wilbur at that point had been making various stupid attempts to gain “power”. and none of this was treated seriously, because others were doing the same kinds of things.

you know how many times tommy logged on and got involved in small petty conflicts? pretty much none of them are mentioned in canon again, because at this point, there wasn’t even much of a canon to get involved in. the smp at this point was a place for people to go and do bits. and invoking wilbur’s joke hatred of tommy and those like him seems a little unfair. wilbur’s main bit was calling tommy an annoying child. when wilbur was stealing the blaze rods, it was not an actual attempt to get power because it was not treated as such by anyone, it was treated with the exact seriousness that it deserved: sapnap and tubbo declared themselves the “police”.

what kind of actual control is going to come from taking blaze rods, especially on a server where you can just go get more? and it’s not like theft is really a crime on the server. everyone else chose to play into the bit.

it’s like now, when tommy shows up with a new idea and people who don’t like him start claiming that this is proof that he never learned anything and he was actually bad all along. the church prime thing, l’sandburg, any time he steals something or is rude to jack manifold. because although semi-lore is fun, sometimes people treat it as serious lore when parts of it are not intended to be and then use it to imply things about the characters that don’t line up with canon.

that’s kinda off topic and not really about dream, so i’ll move on

“i’d like to ask you to once again watch the actual stream.”

i mean, yeah. i did watch the stream. i don’t know a lot about george, and i prefaced my thoughts at the start by saying that. obviously attempting to catch up after isn’t as good as knowing the context and plot, (this sounds sarcastic but it is genuine i’m sorry sjhksjs) but i do want to offer this: it’s an opportunity to look at the plot in a different way. you say that you are on dream’s side in this scene, and while having that bias alone isn’t bad, i think it’s a good idea to attempt to see the other side. that’s what i’ve been doing while going back and forth with you; examining my own bias and attempting to look past it, and explain why it’s there.so dream kicks george off the throne. and you say that it’s not bad that dream does it, because george’s monarchy was already a figurehead. you know, i don’t see this as being any better? this means that when dream made george king, he already did it with the fact that george wasn’t really in charge in dream’s mind, meaning that dream was, you know, the ultimate authority. that is a power dynamic. dream has control over who is king of his faction.

when you watch the stream where dream makes george king originally, dream doesn’t really let him know that his power isn’t real. that’s the problem with this situation: the presence of a power dynamic alone is not the issue, it’s the fact that dream was misleading about its presence. dream just tells him “you’re king.” in fact, dream demonstrates more control over eret, by telling them just that they can’t be in charge anymore and george is king now. he tells them to take off their crown, to which they protest because it’s a layer on their skin and it would show their eyes, something they’re uncomfortable with. dream says “i need you to do it. you gotta do it. i mean, i’m not asking you, we have three of us here.”

they physically threaten eret. and by the way, the reason that dream thought eret had “betrayed” the greater smp? eret was attempting to help pogtopia and make things right with the people of l’manburg, something you claim was also dream’s wish during this time (he had switched over to manburg at this point). dream told eret that the king had a duty to remain neutral.

it is only then, when dream tells eret to remain neutral on things, that dream tells eret that the act of being king means nothing. this is where the “what makes you king” quote coms from, by the way. dream has the ultimate control over who is king. but whenever he makes someone king, he doesn’t tell them that. and when dream leaves, eret fully realizes this and admits that dream’s right: they don’t have any power. so what was the point of betraying l’manburg?

if there was no power with being king, why did george accept it? why was there even a king in the first place? the only reason eret agreed to betray l’manburg in the first place was because dream offered them power.

when dream confronts eret about remaining neutral, dream says “my plan is that there’s no manburg, there’s no l’manburg, there’s no pogtopia, there’s just dream smp and there’s dream smp everywhere. and that’s been my plan since the very beginning, i’ve never wavered on that. that’s why i had you betray them, and that’s why i gave you kingship, because i felt like you’d be a good king because you’re neutral.”

ignoring the fact that he’s twisting why he made eret king (they were on the side of l’manburg and he tempted them away), he also claims that his faction only has been his goal since the beginning. this will be important later.

cc!eret confirmed in a twitter thread on their alt that their character was possibly the longest victim of dream’s manipulation.

and finally, watching the stream where dream dethrones george, the thing sticking out to me is how dream is phrasing it. he says that george should step down because people are attacking him, and dream isn’t always going to be able to protect him. and then he says this.

“and i think you’ll just be targeted if you’re the king. and you want to be able to like, get revenge on tommy and stuff, right? so we can work together.”

i kind of wish he didn’t bring up tommy. i kind of wish his main goal at this time wasn’t just going after tommy because he thought tommy was the root of all the problems. and i think this kind of highlights a little bit that when dream built the walls around l’manburg again, it wasn’t just because he was “defending george” or anything, because i don’t think george really cared that much? dream was using the fact that it was george’s house that blew up in order to go after tommy.

after this line, the others all kind of gang up on dream, true. it’s partially for the joke, as evidenced by quackity’s “THE GIRLS ARE FIGHTING!”, but it’s also kind of them being, you know, legitimately angry at his character. and it’s funny that it’s sapnap who leads it. sapnap brings up what dream said, that he doesn’t care about anything except for the disks. dream says that he didn’t mean it, and then george says “then why did you say it?” so dream saying that clearly hurt them, and he can’t just push it off by saying he didn’t mean it once.

and in the end, george doesn’t even agree before dream makes eret king again! george and sapnap are trying to have a conversation with dream about how they feel they’ve been treated, and dream brushes it off with “maybe this isn’t a good time to bring it up,” before ultimately ignoring what they’re both saying because in his mind he has a good enough reason and it doesn’t matter what george thinks.

dream is in the act of passing power over to eret, and george says “i’m still king. i’m literally right here.” dream shushes him. dream also implies that the reason george is getting attacked is because he backs up everything dream says, reducing george down to an extension of his own will or calling him a follower. dream accuses sapnap of trying to divide him and george, and sapnap says this: “i’m not dividing anyone, i stand by george. he’s my king but most importantly he’s my friend.” dream replies that george is his friend but not his king.

i just sort of want to show you the other side here. george and sapnap weren’t just running around instigating conflict any more than dream was. and although george didn’t do anything as king, it meant something to him, because it was a symbol of the trust he thought dream had for him. dream saying he was taking it away for his own good meant he didn’t even trust george to protect himself. he was treating him like a child.

and then when george is silent, listening to everyone debate whether he deserves this or not, dream accuses him of only pretending to be sad. it’s true that he was pretending to cry, but i don’t think that warranted dream telling him he’s “acting like a baby” and that he was a bad king.

sapnap and george had a real point, and dream ignored them. he hadn’t addressed the things he had said that hurt them, and so they raised legitimate grievances with him! dream doesn’t treat their concerns as important, and talks down to george in particular.

ignoring the fact that sapnap and george were also hurting is kind of hypocritical. you’re right, “abandonment hurts you, no matter if the people have good reasons for it or not”. dream said the spirit thing before sapnap did any sort of real leaving him. and dream’s reasons were definitely not good.

i have no idea why you got the idea that george is so awful. he was walking around with his head down. the only one also calling him things like manipulative and a drama queen is, well, dream.

basically: (/hj)

george: :(

dream: you are attempting to emotionally manipulate me

butternut is a master of psychological manipulation

anyway

so sapnap, george and quackity felt betrayed there. they left, and went to mexican l’manburg to try and console george. and then dream shoots quackity and kills him, and tries to attack the others as well. it’s worth noting that quackity also had a reason to be upset at dream: dream’s treatment of l’manburg. dream then shows up and calls george a tyrant. dream never listens to what george says during this, he just continues saying what he already said. dream taking the kingship away from george hurt him more than letting him stay would have.

watching this is painful, because it’s making me realize just how much dream doesn’t actually care what his friends think! he says he cares, and he might think he cares, but then he calls them babies and liars and tyrants. his argument with george here reads like something awful. he’s using the excuse of “caring about him” in order to undermine and insult him, and take the moral high ground. dream essentially tells george that he didn’t make george king out of any respect for him, it was just random. he doesn’t treat his friends well during this scene. i don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to get angry.

when quackity, after sitting in silence for the entire conversation, says he disagrees, dream tells him that he’s just dumb. doesn’t wait to hear his reasons, doesn’t value his opinion, because dream is so sure that he’s right and he knows what’s best for the server, and by extension, everyone.

other interesting things: dream brings tommy into it again by saying he’s what causes all the problems on the server. dream tells quackity to think about what tubbo would think about him picking this fight. dream says that george would probably do anything he told him to do. his entire position is “you guys can think whatever you want, but it won’t change anything.” genuinely, tell me how this is them abandoning him? and when they do drift away later, tell me why they don’t have a reason to? dream doesn’t respect them! he takes their friendship for granted!

“would you consider it justified for all of tommy’s friends (even tubbo who he’s been close with for so long) to abandon him just because he’s said basically the same thing about the discs - like three times?”

thank you for bringing up the disk thing. do you really think that tommy and dream acted the same when saying that an item held more worth than their friends?

think about what the disks symbolize. control over tommy. tommy wants them back because they are a sign of dream having power over him! tommy doesn’t want his abuser having power over him! and yeah! it was a messed up thing for him to say to tubbo that the disks were worth more than him, but he apologized! he understood that what he said hurt tubbo, and he tried to rebuild the relationship! tommy took responsibility for what he said, and tried to be better. notice how afterwards, he was willing to sacrifice anything for the safety of his friends? notice how in the vault he told dream to take the disks and do whatever he wanted with them, when dream switched from threatening the disks to threatening the life of tubbo?

and what do the disks mean to dream? they mean power over tommy. the disks have no power over dream. they are a tool that he can use to hurt and control tommy. and he never apologized for this, because he wasn’t sorry. sapnap told dream that this hurt him, and all dream said was that he didn’t mean it. who is he lying to, then? tommy or sapnap? it was so important to dream that he had ultimate control over the life of someone else that he almost drove them to take their own life. i’m sorry, but this comparison sucks.

people gave dream a chance. people gave him a lot of chances. the disregard he showed for others is disgusting, especially towards his friends, and even more so towards those who he didn’t like. my problem is that though you repeat that you don’t “blame” others for what they did, you still hold them to more responsibility than you’re willing to hold him to, or at least that’s what it seems like. i’ve been investigating the other side through this whole process. and yeah, there are definitely places where i was wrong. but sometimes i do not understand, and maybe that means i should just give up on trying to understand those places. if other people can see things i can’t, maybe we agree to disagree.

i legitimately cannot see dream being the person who was treated the worst here, but let me know if i’m misrepresenting you.

i’m sorry that i sound angry, and i’m not really upset at you, but the comparison of what dream said and what tommy said set me off.

“no one having respect for him as a person”

people did respect dream, man. he was the leader of his faction. he had a lot of power. his friends trusted him to be a good friend to them. but he didn’t feel like he had an obligation to do that, yeah? and you only get respect if you give it, so they stopped respecting them because he hurt them. he didn’t learn any hard lessons about violence being the only way because he never stopped to consider another way. when faced with a problem, his options were for the problem to go away or he would make it go away: surrender or die.

during the stream where he sets up the walls with sapnap, his message is the same throughout: wipe them out. no mercy. burn their land to the ground, leave no survivors. there’s no love in war. children get hurt in war. this is a warning shot, he says, as he fires into their land. as sapnap burns down tubbo’s house and chat spams “no mercy”. they don’t show mercy because mercy is weak, and they are powerful.

one day i’m gonna write a thing that talks about the greater smp like how people talk about early l’manburg because oh boy

i’d like to see evidence of dream learning that violence is the only way, and only being able to protect himself through fighting. i don’t remember this happening, i remember him generally choosing violence as the first option.

“dream didn’t have an arising god complex.”

a god complex means more than just saying “i’m a god.” there was buildup because that’s how characters work. tommy was also trapped in the prison, and he didn’t suddenly get a god complex at the slightest bit of power, did he? the definition of a god complex is “an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility.” dream cannot admit when he is wrong. he feels as if he has a right to the control of the server, and that grows into a state of obsession. and when he’s taking tubbo and tommy down into the vault, he mocks them for thinking he was weak or that he didn’t think ahead.

once dream knew he had control over death, the complex reached its peak, and that’s when he actually admits it. characters that antagonize others already possess traits that contribute to their arc.

and hey, i know that cc!dream says his character is blocked off emotionally. i also know that he’s been given a lot of chances to apologize to people, to be sorry, to admit fault, even in small situations. did dream show remorse during exile? did dream sound like he was being “forced” to isolate and control tommy, or did he sound like an abusive parent scolding a kid for something? when dream beat tommy and tubbo and took them down to the vault, did he sound sorry? the thing about subtext is that it has to actually be there, no matter how quiet, at least a little bit. listen to dream arguing with quackity after george was dethroned and tell me he sees himself as anything other than right.

a few one off lines are not enough evidence to wipe out the rest of his character’s development.

he sounds sorry once he is faced with direct consequences, because that is the only time he is held responsible for his actions.

it’s also a weak argument to say that something is happening when, as you said, we don’t see his pov. it is fair to say that i don’t know if it’s not happening, and that’s a good point. cc!dream’s comments about his character being closed off emotionally can mean a lot of things. for instance, they could mean that his character is willing to do this to himself in order to get control. or it could mean something else entirely, i don’t know. basing an entire fact about a character off something we don’t see at all doesn’t tell us anything useful about the character, and i apologize for doing that.

i guess my reason for saying that was that i don’t see evidence of him trying to get better during pogtopia. if we don’t see signs of him being sorry or attempting to treat other people better, why should we assume that he was doing those things?

“yes, and none of c!dream’s “friends” ever did.”

dream’s friends supported him until he abandoned them and disrespected them. his time in the prison is a consequence of his time out of the prison, albeit an unfair one.

“dream didn’t hurt george.”

dream’s disrespect of george is what hurt him. dream didn’t apologize for it, he didn’t attempt to understand what george was feeling, and he didn’t look for a compromise. and yeah, it was beckerson in the vault. he had a space for mars, he just hadn’t collected it yet. so yes, dream did betray sapnap. if you have legitimate evidence of sapnap doing something that made dream actually upset, before the vault, i’d like to see it. (there might be something lol i’m sorry i’m Very Bad on his lore but from what i’ve investigated i didn’t find anything really important.)

i don’t think puffy saying “this person does bad things” is her dismissing their trauma. and the eggpire and her have both hurt each other. puffy isn’t the Trauma Designator of the server. if there’s an instance of her straight up saying that someone doesn’t have trauma then i missed it.

“she’s another one c!dream was attached to and who failed to ever reach out to him”

i don’t see evidence of this? there was the one stream where the relationship was established, but after that he never tried to seek her out. he doesn’t even talk about her. it’s not a failure from her to not reach out to him, if their connection is light at best. i honestly feel like she was more attached to him than he was to her.

“like she’s doing something extra by being a decent person.”

she’s saying he didn’t deserve to see her because he did bad things! she still cares about someone who has done bad things, but she recognizes that those things are bad. she’s saying the punishment for what he’s done should involve not seeing her, personally, and i think she should be able to make that decision? she doesn’t endorse the rest of his punishment, because she doesn’t know what it entails.

she helped him by thinking he was in the right. she helped him by even trying to understand him, when everyone else could not. she gave him the help that she could by being on his side, by being friendly to him, and after she realized he was wrong she could not do that because he was off preparing the vault! and she had other things to worry about! “could have” is useless because it can mean anything! tommy “could have” not burned george’s house down. would it have mattered, when dream already had it out for him? no!

dream took anyone being close to him for granted. he did not give anything back to them once he started going down the path. if he did something bad to them, and they were angry, that was it for him. he did not attempt to fix the bond, like other characters do when they hurt someone they care about.

“i never said anything negative about them other than describing things they did that had a negative effect.”

here’s my main point: we don’t know they had a negative effect.

you criticize the characters for not taking an action that we do not know the implications of. everyone could have been super nice and worried about dream and that could have changed nothing. that’s why i think the criticism is unwarranted.

their crime is inattention to a situation that some of them did not even know was happening. that’s like saying that techno is “responsible” for some of the pain of tommy’s exile, because he did nothing to stop it. that’s like saying that quackity or tommy “should have” removed the tnt from the button room under l’manburg.

i just don’t get the point of the criticism. because it can apply to any character in any situation, you know? we could say that eret taking back the kingship from george enabled dream into taking more control over his friends, and that eret should have stopped him. we could say that skeppy telling dream he was wrong about l’manburg pushed him further into the role of the bad guy. if you aren’t being negative about the characters, then why bring it up in the first place?

“truly believe they did all those things” they didn’t do anything. if you’re talking about the “actual consequences and effect it had on him as a character”, you have to look at what affects his character.

we can say “sapnap should not have said this to dream”. because that is something sapnap actually did, directly to dream’s face, and it is something that visibly affected dream. considering the conditions of the prison, it is an inhumane thing to say. that’s something i would call reasonable to consider when analyzing dream’s character.

but puffy talking to herself, writing her own thoughts and reactions down? that does not impact dream in any way! and i think puffy thinking internally that dream is a bad person (when she has been given adequate reason to think so) has a lot less impact on Real Plot Events than the stuff that dream actually did.

what is her “fault” here? what harm did she do? what am i excusing? what did she do wrong, and how is the effect of her specifically visible in dream’s actions? he hasn’t mentioned her in months, and it’s my perspective that if he cared, we would know.

if a tree falls in the forest when nobody is around, does it make any noise?

(the person i was responding to linked a thread about how the prison isn’t helping dream and how puffy and sapnap saying he deserves it is inhumane)

that thread doesn’t actually seem to be assigning any fault to puffy, it’s just saying that hearing that kind of thing hurts.

(also, the person who wrote the thread saying “i told you so” is going to have nobody to tell it to. we all already know dream is going to be violent when he gets out, because he told tommy he would hunt down and take revenge on the things he loves. but he’s not going to be violent because puffy didn’t visit him.)

“another person he cared about who didn’t prove to care about him enough to stop him from spiralling or try help at all.”

how did puffy not care about him? what did she do before the vault that showed that? how did she specifically abandon him, by actions of her own will and not of consequences of his? for supposedly caring about her, dream did pretty much nothing to show it.

“if “they don’t owe him anything” is your base argument against someone being hurt via being left by people they care about over and over again until they’re utterly alone with no support system and unhealthy mindsets, we might have to agree to disagree”

we would disagree if that was my point, but it’s not. because that’s not what the characters did. they didn’t all abandon him, as i’ve said. he says that he cut ties with them, but if you say he’s lying when he says that you can disregard it, i guess. and five to six people are definitely not responsible for him. again, you’re critical of them for an action they didn’t take, and in some cases it was impossible for them to take like with tommy, who certainly didn’t abandon him, as hard as he tried to.

“his (dream’s) manipulation is the clumsiest thing i’ve ever seen”

i mean i don’t really find it funny that dream was “bad” at manipulation. and clearly it was powerful enough to work on multiple people, and if he was that ineffective at it it wouldn’t have worked. but i understand what you’re saying, although i disagree with your take on wilbur.

it’s true that wilbur’s smart, but this is again saying things about stuff we can’t prove. if you look at the context of wilbur’s actions next to everyone else’s, they seem pretty tame. and he can play a morally grey character without the intent being that the character was seriously manipulative all along. although i guess it’s nice to think that you’ve solved the code, if “solving the code” means “the majority of everyone else is wrong” then you may want to take a step back.

i think the principle of occam’s razor sort of applies here, and especially applies later to the conversion between dream and wilbur. unless there is strong, strong evidence for a theory that sort of goes against stuff, there may be a better explanation. i’ve scrapped like fifty theories because of this dude hskhdksjsthe things i said at the start about tommy and wilbur’s grabs for power not being serious still do apply, and so does the fact that at the start of the roleplay, the cc’s didn’t see their characters as that separate from themselves. i think it would be kind of weird for cc!wilbur’s intent to be genuine manipulation of his actual friends all along, especially when he wasn’t playing it as a bit.

“that’s precisely what he did and how he got them to side with him in the war.”

nope. he didn’t tell anyone they “needed” to to anything. anyone who joined the country joined of their own free will, and nobody joined during the war, just before and after.

wilbur didn’t really “recruit” tommy so much as they were on a team of causing small arguments. wilbur joined and he and tommy went to go scam people together, while tommy told him about the various other little schemes he had been running. and i don’t really think he was intending to do a real takeover, which is why i called it “weak”. the man told people that potions give you diarrhea. does that sound like the work of a mastermind? no, because it’s the self proclaimed “crime boy”. and that “drug empire” got shut down pretty quick for something that was supposed to last a long time.

“just put “revolution” instead of “business” as a guise of what he was actually doing.”

l’manburg was not the drug empire under a different name. l’manburg was about separation from the greater smp, admittedly because they felt that being stopped from selling drugs was a bad thing, but then they pretty much completely dropped the drugs and the empire throughout the wall vod.

so when he was recruiting people like fundy, he was doing it with the intent of getting them to make drugs with him. he says nothing about dream when fundy joins his drug empire. and yeah, he lied to him originally, but it didn’t work. fundy visited the van and saw through wilbur (and tommy)’s story, and then he decided to join, on his own. because he wanted to make drugs.

a quote from the wall vod:

“we’re starting a revolution, not a war.”

there was no targeted hatred towards dream until he approached them. and i would say the most “evidence” that wilbur was trying to go after dream in any way is the infamous “what’s tyrannical mean” moment. the thing about that moment is that taking a single moment and using it to define an entire period is unfair. it’s not like that’s a turning point, and after that they solely go after dream. they don’t. i agree that you have to watch the actions of wilbur, and his actions at the time were geared towards becoming independent and progressing the condition of l’manburg.

wilbur is honest with eret when they join that they are committing crimes. eret joins because “haha americans bad”. meanwhile, dream is in chat telling eret that there are “three defectors from the kingdom”.

“the only reason people disbelieve this is not because it doesn’t align with canon, but because they assume he’s lying for the sole reason that it doesn’t align with the way they see canon.”

if what revivedbur said agreed with canon, people wouldn’t be pointing out that it doesn’t. watch back the hot dog stream, the wall stream, the first war stream, even the stream after that when niki joins. look at how wilbur speaks, and also look at how he acts. it does not match up with all of what revivedbur says.

early wilbur is naive. he thinks he’s doing the right thing, so he therefore concludes the people against him are wrong. the only fighting back that l’manburg does before war is declared is killing alyssa (and this was tommy’s idea, wilbur was discouraging killing her), because they thought she set the fire. once she told them she didn’t, they gave her back the stuff they thought they had. tubbo still had her pickaxe, but didn’t realize. and for this? the people of the greater smp hunted him down, trapped him in a box, and killed him as well as killing tommy, who tried to save tubbo.

wilbur scolded tommy for killing alyssa. wilbur wanted to focus on building the nation, on declaring independence, and actively ignored the other side. he writes the declaration and he believes in everything it stands for! half the things in there are things that the other people of l’manburg yelled out, that he wrote in as they were being fired on by the greater smp. it comes from all the people.

the declaration of war from the greater smp pretty much says “sometimes you just gotta kill some people, you know?”

i am not disagreeing with you that after the first war, wilbur fell into corruption. it’s implied greatly that this is partially a consequence of the first war, and also partially stems from his fierce protectiveness of l’manburg.

also, if you’re saying that you have never and will never believe wilbur, i would urge you to re-examine that. it’s hard to avoid bias when you refuse to take most things that someone says as truth. i am also curious how you came to this conclusion as you began to watch the smp (if you never believed him at all) and who’s perspective you were watching.

“according to his actions and all known laws of logic” according to the streams and vods that very much still exist, and his actions in them, no, he wasn’t lying since the beginning. did he tell lies? yes, everyone did. was he being untruthful about his devotion to l’manburg when he took arrows for it and died for it? no. it’s pretty clear to see when you watch the vod. his actions speak louder than his words.

so no, it doesn’t make sense for him to be lying since the beginning. it doesn’t make sense that revivedbur’s ideals are a switch from how he was even right before he died, so we cannot trust his memory and his morals to remain intact! the man was alone for thirteen years, speaking of torture.

“he thought l'manberg his and no one else’s, a weapon of power for him to use however he pleases. unlike dream who destroyed himself bit by bit trying to take back what he cares about, because it was not power, but people - wilbur saw no more worth in it and destroyed it instead.”

hmm. i’ll come back to this later.

a point- not everything cc!wilbur says about his character is negative.

a lot of his commentary on his character came after his death, so it encompasses his spiral. i will again suggest that you listen to “eight” by sleeping at last. it’s true he can play a morally complex character, because he does, but he does not play an intentional antagonist the entire time, even in “secret”.

“i was just talking about how hypocritical and downright ridiculous his later accusations are, which you didn’t address.”

how are his later accusations hypocritical? wilbur calls him a tyrant in the moment, yeah. wilbur thinks that he should be able to do whatever he wants, and since it’s the dream smp, he assumes dream is the leader. dream never contradicts this, by the way. wilbur writes in the declaration of independence that “in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one to dissolve the bonds which bind us. disregarding of this truth is nothing short of tyranny.” so that’s what he considers tyranny. when he got stopped from selling drugs and tommy got arrested, he didn’t yell “tyranny”.

mistreatment of citizens by authority and denial of independence is tyranny.

dream and the people of the greater smp hurt and attack the people of l’manburg throughout the wall stream. importantly, since they denied l’manburg independence, the people they were firing and attacking were their own citizens in their eyes. mistreatment of citizens is cruel. upon hearing that l’manburg existed, they became even more tyrannical. thus when wilbur writes this in the book, as they are being fired on, he believes this to be true because it is.

“despite there being no evidence” watch the wall vod. think about the definition of tyranny, and even the different definitions of tyranny.

“a capitalistic empire on dream’s land” so wilbur did have reason for thinking dream was the leader, yes? because it was his land? his “house”? how dream said they were taking back the land that was rightfully theirs? how he called them “traitors to the kingdom”? ignoring the fact that once again, wilbur did not say anything negative towards dream until dream showed up and insulted l’manburg.

wilbur’s form of lying and deception for the drug empire was the norm for the server at the time. we don’t see him pulling this sort of exaggerated bit once he gets into l’manburg, because he’s idealistic and he really believes in it. if you watch tommy’s stream where wilbur first proposes the country, he jokingly says the reason he’s making it is because “americans ruin bits”. also during that stream, tommy asks if they’re making a drug empire, and wilbur says that no, they’re making a nation where drugs are legal.

“didn’t even do that much” hmm. no, i’m pretty sure dream and the people of the greater smp did do the stuff wilbur accused them of. one, he wasn’t directly accusing dream, (because. his problem wasn’t with dream specifically.) and two, the things he said in the declaration did happen?

“they have robbed us.”

to be fair everyone on the server did that lol

“imprisoned us.”

tommy was imprisoned for the drugs and for other things he was involved in, and tubbo was trapped and murdered for a thing he didn’t even know he had.

“threatened us.”

they were fired on multiple times when building l’manburg, they were threatened with consequences for the drug stuff, they told them in pretty clear terms that they were prepared to kill them instead of letting them be independent. the day of the war, dream and sapnap burned down all the trees around l’manburg and lavacast walls around it, saying it was a “warning”.

“killed many of our men.”

again, true. tommy and tubbo in particular died a lot during this time.

so since these things really did happen, how is wilbur lying about them?

“the people he was accusing of being tyrannical were very selective”

one, he accused sapnap of being an american, and it was the americans that were going for them. you don’t need to protect people that aren’t being hurt. most of his reasoning for “no americans” during this time was that anti-mask protests were happening in america, and he was making fun of them. two, the others imprisoned tommy, which does not count as “self defense in an anarchist society”. they accepted tubbo because he was european, and because he was willing to work for the nation like the rest of them. sapnap just wanted a drug dealer.

“dream’s “no factions” thing he had going on also included no government by default, showcased by him having problems with people starting countries.”

if there was no government, why did dream never point this out when wilbur said he was seceding? the server is dream’s faction! he doesn’t want “no factions”, he wants only his faction. dream refers to the server multiple times as a nation, and even a kingdom. anarchist societies don’t have prisons. the prison and the police is a system. if you have an anarchist society, but two specific people are going around arresting people, them going “oh but there’s no government” doesn’t take away the fact that they’re creating a hierarchy, using their own power? they also never claimed that there was no government.

everything that dream said later in the conversation with skeppy also lines up with this. ignoring the fact that there was a monarchy established because it “didn’t have any real power” is disregarding the fact that one, it was there, and two, that there was someone around with enough power to establish it in the first place. i don’t know how to say this any clearer. anarchist places do not have kings.

and anarchy is not the only thing that fits. it wasn’t designed to be a geopolitical drama, they just made the mistake of letting wilbur soot onto the server. so they didn’t need to have a name for the system, because the system was “do whatever you want”, including establishing authority.

“dream had all the reasons to believe they were aggressive and was fully justified in declaring war.”

dream didn’t declare war because alyssa was attacked. he had done stuff to them before that happened, and they got back all of her stuff (again, not by asking and trying to work it out, but by kidnapping someone who genuinely believed they were innocent and killing them as they begged for help.) dream started the official conflict because he declared war. he also started the unofficial conflict. he didn’t think they were aggressive, he thought they were weak.

“if he (wilbur) thought he was being mistreated he could just stop trying to mistreat others”

what, because he had any sort of power? he did stop mistreating others. l’manburg legitimately did nothing to intentionally hurt anyone, and tommy killing alyssa doesn’t count because that was his decision and revenge was already paid out for that. so wilbur stopped scamming people, built the walls to contain his country (he said that they needed nothing outside the walls at some point) and then was attacked multiple times. his mistreatment didn’t stop.

“it was supposed to be his l'manberg.”

wilbur didn’t destroy it because it was supposed to be his and it got away from him, that’s why he held the election: to try and restore peace through attempting to rig the election. he destroyed it because “the thing i built this nation for doesn’t exist anymore”, meaning the freedom it originally granted to its citizens was gone under schlatt. meaning the policy of no violence and using words was ruined. if the thing he built this nation for was power, this would make no sense. he could have taken power so easily. he passed off the presidency.

“something worth having power over” is something important. it is something that can be good for lots of people, and the power over it is what makes it safe. it’s worth having power over because when others, like schlatt, take that power, it is no longer safe.

violence and tyranny had become so much a part of l’manburg that wilbur felt the freedom and peace was gone. so when he blows it up, and says “my l’manburg”, he means it can no longer be used for evil. “my unfinished symphony, forever unfinished”. he saves it for himself by destroying it. so yes, he is being selfish, but not to ruin it for other people. he takes it into his own hands to weed out the fighting, and by doing so takes himself with it. his vision was never complete, because the wars had taught him that the only true freedom, the only true victory (“i won.”) for him was in death. (and then that turned out to be wrong.)

there’s a reddit post that cc!wilbur approved

that explains this a little better than i can, and cc!wilbur commented on it “any truers???” so i think it can be counted as reliable.

this full quote from cc!wilbur about his character (from his hey and stuff podcast) is very interesting. i’ll transcribe it here:

“i decided i was going to make a breaking bad style roleplay, where me and tommy would be drug dealers. and uh, one thing lead to another and i’m the president of a nation losing it due to my own insolence and uh, short sighted naivety. basically disregard for my fellow citizens who i claim to love so much. and a, and a dark, twisted understanding of what is possession. and what is, what is my right.”

i like this quote a lot because it highlights the initial traits that caused his spiral. it also places him as kind of similar to dream. the reason he lost the presidency is that he got too cocky. and the reason his spiral was so selfish is that it was all he could see— when his earlier vision of freedom was shattered by the first war, he didn’t know how to adapt and so became attached to power as it now felt like the only way to keep what mattered to him.

this is emphasized in his conversation with quackity during his second lore stream: that there was a drastic change between the person who made l’manburg and the person running for president. this quote matches up very well with the election arc. wilbur’s motives were different before the election, and they were different after.

once he had the freedom that he wanted, he became scared of losing it and that is what pushed him down. “if i can’t have it, no one can” is on the surface about the power, but the lament for what he once had (freedom in a country without tyranny) is there. that’s why he became so power-oriented. if he did not have control of l’manburg, it could be used to go against his original vision and it would be better off gone.

another good piece of information is cc!wilbur’s comment on his dnd alignment post, where he says this:

“wilbur is on the border of chaotic and neutral evil. wilbur, in his chaotic sense, is a crazy man who wants to blow up his old nation and kill his friends. but, more realistically, in his neutral sense, wilbur is the archetype of a man who had great power and who lost it all due to his own poor choices and negligence who sees destruction as his ratification.”

note the “realistically”.

he feels as if he owes it to l’manburg at the end to blow it up, and he didn’t mind taking himself with it as he thought that nobody cared about him anymore and he didn’t have any more to give.

(related to this, in the dnd alignment post, cc!wilbur places season 1 dream as chaotic evil and says his only motive is chaos. firstly, this would only apply to season one, and although cc!wilbur was working with cc!dream and everyone else to write the plot here, i wonder why he says this instead of saying anything else about dream’s motives. this seems to disagree pretty severely with what you think, but it also disagrees with what even i think about dream during this time.)

revivedbur comes back and has plans because he regrets his past. he hates that he gave up that easily. and he could absolutely lie about his past actions! there is no reason to ignore the contents of an entire war because someone who was alone for thirteen years says it!

“shouldn’t have it” doesn’t mean he was lying when he said he wanted it. he was just wrong, which he knew when he blew up l’manburg and that’s part of why he did it.

“they said they “fought with words”, like that doesn’t sound like a peaceful solution, more like a different approach, and it was because that is what they did”

they said the words thing a lot of times, and most of the time it was used as a “tommy don’t attack that person.” and “fighting with words” is arguing, it is replacing the trauma of real battle with talking it out. l’manburg did stick very closely to their motto of words over violence. look at the contents of the first war.

and once war was declared, wilbur was enthusiastic for it. sounds suspicious from someone claiming to not want war, right? he said it was a chance for them to prove themselves, to prove they could rule themselves. he also said that if they could defend themselves it would be proof. he never went “time to attack them”, and when he said he didn’t want a war in the past he meant that he didn’t want to start one. his being enthusiastic about the war ties into his naivety about running a country. it was also an acceptance in a way, no? it meant that the greater smp saw them as something worth declaring war on.

and it’s heartbreaking seeing him so excited to prove himself, because we know that the experience of the war is what lead to his spiral and his cynicism as president. we know that a few weeks later, he’s going to be crying into his pillow every night.

for the clip (the “something worth having power over and then you get killed by your dad” clip), i kind of don’t know what to say. i don’t think this is a clear condemnation of the entirety of l’manburg’s beginnings, but i do think that i was probably reaching a bit with trying to interpret it. there are definitely a lot of ways to see that, though.

no, he showed it in the first war and he clearly said it. i don’t think somebody who wants to mess with dream is going to not even think about him until he shows up, and even after then largely ignore him until he declares war.

“yes, it was worth something to wilbur, and that worth was power.”

question: power over what? power for what purpose? how did he use that power?

if it was only worth having power over, then why did he give it up? why didn’t he just kill schlatt in the first place? again i think the reddit post addresses a lot of this. original l’manburg was worth more to wilbur than power because he was willing to surrender when his life and his friend’s lives were threatened, and he told tommy it was not worth it to enter a duel and sacrifice his own life for it. after the war, he cared about power over it in order to keep peace, and then he realized that his own desire for power caused him to abandon his morals and he attempted to destroy it all.

“the greater smp did represent anarchy and peace.”

i just don’t think the ideals of the early smp line up with anarchy, and especially not dream’s actions later. he believes in forced peace, and unity under his terms although that belief is more gradual.

“see you tell me you didn’t fall for propaganda and then say this.”

it’s not “falling for propaganda” to watch the streams and interpret them. “propaganda” is defined as an attempt to spread information, often of a misleading nature. it’s what wilbur used during his presidential campaign, it’s what everyone used during the election. i do not base my opinion of his character off things that have been said about him after the fact. i watched the content when it happened.

so what about the facts that one, he wanted peace at the start, and two, that he cared about protecting his nation and the people he cared about is propaganda? it is information that i believe to be true based on my own analyzing of his actions during that time.

wilbur never says this as an attempt to lie to anyone. he wanted peace if it meant he could have freedom, but he would not attack anyone for freedom, he would defend it once he had established it. he wasn’t trying to establish an empire after the drug van stream (he says this in the vod where he discusses his plans for l’manburg with tommy) and the actions of the greater smp were tyrannical. what happened is that later, after the first war, he lost faith in peace because people continued to attack him!

“he did create division for his own benefit the way i see it.”

can you explain the “benefit” that division would give him? because like i said, his goal was his own personal freedom. he wasn’t attempting to divide people, he was reacting to mistreatment, whether perceived or real. and more often than not, people asked to join him, he didn’t try to convince them.

“yeah wilbur said it genuinely to tubbo when he first brought him armor”

as i was going through the old vods, i did find the origin of that quote (the quote where wilbur says “we go in with no armor and then stab them in the back” or something along those lines)! there’s something funny about it though. notice how he says it and then never does anything about it? and how nobody from l’manburg acts on it? because you have to look at his actions, something you emphasized that i agree with. they have more weight than his words. he also said “wanna kiss” to dream, so i don’t think this really counts as “proof” of an ulterior motive, because he said a lot of things.

“you see a pattern already?”

the “pattern” i see of his reactions to conflict in his nation is that he didn’t want to assert control in order to oppress people, he wanted to assert control to keep the peace, by rigging the election so that he had “legitimate” authority. was it a hypocritical? yeah! it reminds me of what dream was doing, too: placing his goal of peace over his wish for freedom of everyone.

the difference is that dream didn’t have any reserves about “starting an army and asserting dominance over his own people because they didn’t respect his authority and he was irritated by it”. weird that that can be used to describe dream as well, huh? and before it can be used to describe wilbur?

this is also after the first war, where wilbur learned a very important lesson! and it’s right before he realizes he’d become what he had tried to destroy. the other person who acts like this never realized this, though. it’s because he was never trying to destroy it. just saying.

“the friendships inside of it could’ve existed without, and would’ve probably been better off without being stained by war”

wilbur did not consider making l’manburg as a severing of relationships between the two nations. he even expresses neutrality towards some members of the greater smp. wilbur didn’t “make people think” they needed l’manburg, he saw it as a thing to devote yourself to, an ideology. he did not force others to think this way, although he encouraged it. people ended up sacrificing a lot for that (against their will sometimes), and so they became attached to it.

“the original dream smp was this but actually true instead of just being a front.”

ah yes, the dream smp with absolutely no hierarchies. nothing like mister “my house” at all. no “my land”, no “my server”, no “the king has no power”, no “it’s the dream smp”. /s

“wilbur didn’t fear for anyone’s safety”

hmm, no, wilbur did fear for everyone’s safety. you know, when they were being attacked continuously throughout the war? and when he finally surrendered because they were being threatened and killed?

“the dream smp was already safe”

dream and sapnap need better ways to “keep the server safe” than by blowing up people who wanted to go off and do their own thing and posed no threat to the greater server.

i don’t know how to provide “evidence” that dream and the others attacked l’manburg? the evidence is the fact that they did. again, wilbur’s initial goal was not conflict with the greater smp, it was emancipation. when tubbo was taken hostage and killed, shot at, robbed multiple times of materials it had taken him hours to get, and had his old house burned down simply because he was part of l’manburg, those were the reasons that tubbo ever fired a shot at them in the first place!

when wilbur lead his people out on the first day of the war, it was to negotiate. they dodged the arrows and went to the embassy, where they were then trapped and driven back into tommy’s house. it was then that they fought back. self defense. i don’t know what else to tell you.

“trying to end the war as soon as he could” is kind of misleading, because it implies that dream hated the violence. he just wanted to win as soon as he could. he didn’t care what he had to do to win it. no mercy.

the dream smp was not freedom because when you try to leave freedom, it doesn’t hunt you down and try to destroy you. anarchy doesn’t call you a traitor when you leave. and yeah, dream was real friendly to tommy when he continued the disk war when it first settled. and of course when your friends join a different nation, the most logical course of action is to murder them repeatedly! /s

the definition of anarchy includes personal freedom, the exact thing wilbur wanted. anarchy does not include authority, it is firmly opposed to it. i think i would place the early greater smp as more of a stateless society, if i had to put a name on it (again, i am extremely wary to do that because it wasn’t written as anything with a name. this is also a mediocre take that i don’t really believe because dream had his own faction.). a stateless society is one of the goals of anarchism, but does not encompass the entire belief.

dream’s main motivation was that he didn’t want anyone being independent. it didn’t matter who was leading it.

and i’m sorry, but you can’t just take away evidence by saying “he was lying” when there is no proof he is? if you take this conversation at face value it makes more sense! (this is about the conversation between wilbur and dream right before the “independence or death” scene)

“both sides had their losses and were ready to harm the other” what did the greater smp lose. its people? its land? there was other land, and the people could still remain friends. some of them did. dream even says before this that yeah, l’manburg is losing. and wilbur here is attempting to downplay that loss, claiming they’re on even ground because that’s what he wants to happen. he is trying to appear stronger than he really is. he’s bluffing, but it doesn’t work.

i don’t like saying “nobody’s the victim” here when one side was getting absolutely whaled on by the other. wilbur has the ability to be genuine, and he does. if he was trying to “play” the victim, he would exaggerate the damage his side had suffered. his words and his actions match up, and this is a pretty different circumstance from him doing a bit. he is a victim. that’s just straight up true.

i’m not surprised that you think this way, as you’ve said you were on dream’s side since the start, but i’d like to once again ask you to examine where you got these perceptions.

dream offering them “chances” was just offering them surrender. that’s not merciful, and it’s not fair, either. and he may not have wanted to hurt them, but he sure didn’t mind doing it. wilbur wasn’t sewing some kind of anti-dream propaganda in his nation while the battle was going on, the hatred for dream came from the fact that he was attacking all of them.

“colonize” is a bad word choice for what l’manburg was. nobody was living on that land before they got there. the land should have belonged to nobody, so why did dream get so mad about “his” land being taken? what about that specific area was so important to him, when he did have the ability to visit?

wilbur was pacifist, he was not the instigator, again i have to say i can’t offer up proof if you’re convinced that he was lying. when he fought back later it was in self defense. please watch the vods. and recognize that wilbur’s actions election era are consequences of his experiences revolution era.

i genuinely don’t understand what you mean by comparing this to exile. please rephrase your point. if you’re comparing what dream did to tommy to wilbur trying to stop dream from hurting him and his people more i have to say that’s a... questionable take. it’s probably a bad idea to make exile comparisons if you’re going to use them to victim-blame, as that’s very antithetical to exile as a whole and kid of ironic.

“i mean, what other choice was there?”

no, dream had a lot of choices. he did not offer them a peaceful way out. he declared war and then he attacked. it was then that he told them many times to surrender. and no, wilbur didn’t push them to go and die, evidenced again by the times he used himself as a distraction so that they could run, and that he didn’t want tommy to do the duel but ultimately respected his decision and his freedom.

“dream constantly asked them to give up instead of fighting.”

dream has a responsibility to not attack kids. dream also has a responsibility to attempt any sort of peaceful negotiation. tubbo was boxed and murdered before war was declared, and tubbo personally had done straight up nothing to the people of the greater smp, and he didn’t even know why he died until tommy saw that alyssa’s pickaxe was mixed in with his stuff.

if wilbur claimed to wish to prevent violence, and then he did, or at least attempted to, i don’t know why you think it’s untrue. calling someone a rude name is not equal to murder. “verbally violent” means pretty much nothing and was coming from both sides.

(this next part is about the “let me be your vassal” scene in pogtopia)

“there’s a theory wilbur legitimately thinks dream selfish”

i mean, yeah. i think that kind of sums it up. wilbur was appealing to dream’s personal goals. i don’t see how he was shut down though. he already helped pogtopia, so him being asked to further help someone from pogtopia shows that they trusted him enough to tell him the plan.

i’ve watched the clip a lot of times and i think that the meaning can be ambiguous. i am using dream’s other actions during that time to determine how much of an effect i think it had on him. i don’t think he got “shut down” in any sort of meaningful way here.

“he didn’t seem to hold even that against him as he tried to help get back l’manberg with him.”

if dream didn’t hold the disk thing against tommy then, he sure decided to get mad about it later (he brings it up when arguing with quackity), despite the fact that he had also re-opened the conflict in the past.

“i believe they (dream and tommy) had genuinely been friends once.”

sure, i think they were friends before dream did what he did with the disks, and allies during early pogtopia. dream still decided to switch sides and team with manburg because schlatt offered him the book. this is, ironically, dream abandoning tommy.

“he has a sense of responsibility (not control) over the people on his smp.”

i think it can be responsibility and control. most of the responsibility is misguided, and lots of it is just actual control. i don’t know where you’re getting a lot of this.

and i do not know where you got that his fatal flaw was caring too much? he “cares” in the way of having control! he doesn’t care about the well being of others as long as he thinks he’s right. i’m just saying that he sure could have walked away, because he did just that later when he sided with schlatt. it’s not a speculation about his character when it’s something that he did.

him walking away did not entail complete surrender to wilbur. there were a lot of other things he could have done, but i don’t want to get into “could have”’s as i don’t really think there’s a point. wilbur was attempting to convince him, yeah, but that didn’t mean it was true. we know that wilbur was lying about wanting ambition.

also, i don’t think dream was allied with pogtopia because he liked them or he was trying to be better or anything. he said in “tyrant” that it’s because schlatt was worse, and wilbur didn’t have any ambition to expand.

“maybe you misunderstood something i said, but no, he definitely didn’t.”

okay, so since dream didn’t think wilbur was a villain, wilbur was not “pressuring him” into becoming one by helping him. my point was that dream didn’t think that, and wilbur didn’t care. sorry for not making that clear, i was asking a rhetorical question.

(i said here that “someone calling someone else out for hurting them is not the same thing as villanizing them,” and they responded with this)

“yeah, they are. and dream was villanized.”

oh boy.

vilify: to utter slanderous and abusive statements against, to defame.

(i probably should have been saying vilify instead of villainize because they mean the same thing but i straight up did not know it was a word, sorry lol)

slanderous means false and malicious. abusive means offensive and insulting. defamation is things that are not true.

if somebody says, “this guy punched me.” that would not be vilifying them. it is a true statement with a neutral tone. if they add “he is a bad person”, that could possibly be seen as abusive, as it is insulting, but the point of vilifying someone is that you are making them out to be someone they’re not. it involves the use of lies and continuous exaggerated language. slanderous and abusive. abusive only is not enough to classify something as vilifying.

someone reacting to something dream did by calling him a name is not vilifying him. it is true that he did the thing, and it is also true that the person saying it believes it. it is rare that someone criticizes him without real reason or goes overboard (the person who really does this as far as i can remember is tommy), and when tommy does so it is almost always reciprocated. so we have dream and tommy constantly vilifying each other, and other people saying negative things about dream and sometimes vilifying him, if they lie about it. he sometimes vilifies them.

my point is that vilification is not wilbur telling niki, “dream burnt tubbo’s house down”, despite the fact that he calls dream a bad guy. it’s not slanderous because it is true. dream assisted sapnap with the act. vilification is not tommy explaining to ranboo what was happening during exile, or telling dream that dream makes him worse. “someone calling someone out for hurting them” implies truth, and it doesn’t necessarily imply abusive language, but it doesn’t matter because it’s true.

maybe we were going off different definitions of vilify. but when we’re accusing characters who are victims of abuse and manipulation, we need to be careful with what we accuse them of.

anyway

wilbur saying he wanted to use the tommys of the world was left in the drug van stream. tommy himself was pushing a lot of the “dream bad” stuff because he had more experience with him. when tommy was confused during those two scenes (vassal scene and revivedbur calling dream his hero)it was because he believed that wilbur respected him, and wilbur working with or idolizing someone who had hurt tommy in the past was a contradiction to that belief. wilbur does not question tommy’s anger during the vassal scene because he doesn’t care that dream is bad, and when he is revived he either does not believe it or does not want to acknowledge it. revivedbur cares a whole lot more about power for the sake of power than wilbur ever did.

again, tommy isn’t stupid. he has his own reasons for not liking dream, and the disconnect comes from a place of trusting wilbur.

by the way, wilbur left the vc before saying that tommy didn’t care. he was talking to himself (and chat). and he was more fearful that tommy was leaving than angry. plus, he didn’t actually force tommy to give up his house: there was miscommunication between them and the embassy was the power tower in the end. wilbur just wanted confirmation that tommy would spend time in l’manburg. it’s true that he went about it in a bad way, though.

he didn’t push patriotism onto them, they were also excited about the country. there were other scenes beside the tyrant scene, and the amount of times wilbur had to tell tommy to shut up about how great the country is is a lot higher than the one time he had them call dream a tyrant.

true, that scene (scene where wilbur asserts his authority as president) is before pogtopia. it’s also after the war for independence. i am not saying that wilbur should have said any of that stuff. i’m just pointing out that it wasn’t always like that.

also i do not really see “you’re never gonna be president” as a taunt or manipulation or anything. i think wilbur genuinely believed that having tommy in charge of the country would one, get them into more conflicts, and two, mess up tommy mentally. being the president sucked and wilbur knew that. wilbur was not kind to tommy. but a lot of stuff that’s pointed at as manipulative is pretty clearly wilbur’s own paranoia spilling over in a desire to protect tommy, ie saying that tubbo would betray them. wilbur genuinely thought that and he was trying to warn tommy.

“tommy, when i said you’d never be president, it wasn’t a challenge. it’s true. you’re never going to be president.”

tommy’s life has been hard, that’s true. not disagreeing with you there. but not every adult has been using him the whole time. and if you’re looking for fault, i would personally look at the guy who killed him three times first, just saying. other things had impacts but there’s a clear scale.

“tommy formed an attachment to them as a result of the disc war, not the other way around.”

so yeah, initially it was a shallow trade: the disks for the armor. once that conflict was resolved, and tommy apologized, that should have been the end of it, yeah? especially since tommy now had a stronger connection to the disks? that would have been nice.

the problem is that dream took them back for no reason. because he did, he went back and dug up tommy’s whole front yard and spawned months of conflict after. having “leverage” over someone like that is kinda messed up! it’s not like tommy was going around committing mass murder every tuesday, he got in scraps with other people on the server who also committed petty crimes. so i can’t really blame tommy for wanting them back, even though he stole them.

and if dream didn’t care about the disks, why did he later use it as “proof” that tommy caused all the trouble on the server? if they were so worthless to him that he gave them to skeppy, why did it matter that tommy stole them?

i don’t know what you mean about this being the only way dream could control people. the amount of genuine fear other characters felt when he logged on was there for a long time. he held a lot of power on the server, and a lot of his control was physical, evidenced by exile in particular but also the wars.

when he did ultimately use connections to control people, that was still a bad thing.

“his friend’s house got burnt down and he wanted the person who did it to be held accountable?”

okay, george’s house got burned down. do you remember the initial punishment that dream proposed? probation for tommy until he was eighteen. and when dream was arguing with his friends, he pointed out that the only reason l’manburg was being held hostage for tommy’s crime was that tommy was involved in the government. he said that if tommy hadn’t been involved in the government, he probably would have just hunted him down and killed him.

also, someone responding to this pointed out that dream was trying to frame tommy for things at the time. dream was intentionally creating other conflict in order to get to tommy. dream did not care about the house. he burnt down other people’s houses.

that’s not “holding someone accountable”. that’s not even close.

“he was taught this from experience”

the leather from the horse was used to blackmail him after he had already started doing that to people. you know how tommy mimicks him? that’s what was going on (still bad that he did it but like. come on.) so that may have been the push that caused dream to cut his own connections (so that nobody could ever do that to him again, and he would have no chance of failure), but it didn’t just happen to him for no reason: it was a behavior he taught someone else.

“he did genuinely think he was a villain before the war”

tommy called dream a lot of stuff before the war, and most of it was unprompted by wilbur. a lot of it was also, like you said, two friends joking around. just because wilbur taught him a new word (he didn’t really tell him what it meant though) doesn’t mean he was manipulated into using it all the time or something. and i’m pretty sure tommy got a decent definition of tyranny later, when the greater smp decided to attack l’manburg before anything went down.

“it’s just a character acknowledging what people who looked deeper into the narrative already knew.”

what i’m saying is that narratively, wilbur has an extremely good reason to be biased right now. taking anything he says as truth doesn’t solidify an interpretation as truth. there has to be enough evidence to actually back the entire thing up in the first place, and i’m just not seeing “wilbur was always going for power and division” as solidified by his actions during the first war.

and again, tommy’s not stupid, and the entire time tommy is yelling at him! tommy knows something is off! if people also in the story are saying “this isn’t right”, i feel like they’d know? tommy was also part of l’manburg, he has an opinion too. so when he says “we founded l’manburg because we knew dream was the bad guy”, he’s talking about why he did it. and he brings up a good point: “you say you did it to stick it to the man, but you’re idolizing dream, who is the man”. (paraphrased i don’t know his exact words but this was his point) this shows that wilbur’s motives have changed, even from what revivedbur will say.

(they linked three twitter threads here. i don’t know if relinking them here is a good idea as the whole point of this separate post is to disconnect the two sides, but the threads were by dr3amofagame on twitter, for reference purposes. i’m not going to link the independent threads but i think people can tell which ones i was responding to.

if this is wrong to say who made them please let me know, i do not know how Any of these websites work. if you’ve read this far, please don’t try to like,,, look up who any of these people are (especially the person i was debating with. don’t do that /srs) and send anything bad to them. that’s the whole point of this separate post. if anyone sends negativity directly towards people because of this post i’ll bite you)

that first analysis has some Opinions. oh man.

i don’t know man i’m just going to point some things out:

-the person who wrote the thread pulling the “child” card makes me laugh because tommy had committed more crimes than wilbur at that point. ah yes tommy innit innocent child being horribly dragged into a giant war by evil wilbur /s

-wilbur did not call dream a tyrant before dream showed up and made fun of their land

-wilbur did not legitimately think dream a tyrant when he told tommy and tubbo to call him that. neither, really, did tommy and tubbo. it was a joke. like infinite women. like dream saying “i’m evil” when he was blowing up creepers on their land before the battle. like dream and sapnap being all “down with the british”.

-their attitude on that changed when the greater smp begin exhibiting tyrannical behavior (before war was declared!).

-“having tommy and tubbo fight his battles and build his walls” is just untrue

-the l’manburg anthem was, one, not written by wilbur (he commissioned someone to do it on fiver), and two, was written after the first war. they sing it in the stream where niki joins. so yeah, at that point, they did emancipate from the brutality and tyranny of their rulers! it doesn’t say who the rulers are (therefore it’s. not blaming solely dream.) but pretty much all of them were brutal!

-also oh my god this thread has a lot of things that wilbur just straight up didn’t say (or do).

-“would rather die than submit to your tyrannical rule” is a quote from the speech wilbur gives before dream lights the tnt. dream had done stuff to them at that point. this is out of context.

-i don’t want to seriously critique this thread because a lot of it seems more like something emotional than an attempt to start conversation, and i can’t really go against that.

-the main argument, that dream did nothing before being irreversibly forced into the role of the villain does not really match up with what happened.

-there’s a lot less of people calling dream a villain than people seem to remember.

-and also, dream was lying about wanting l’manburg to be something. he says to eret a few days later the quote that i included a while back, that his goal has always been for there to be one faction: the dream smp. note that at this point he’s officially on manburg’s “side” now. he also says he has never wavered on this from the beginning. so he’s either continuing his manipulation of eret and lying to them, or he’s just saying that he wants l’manburg to be something to wilbur and tommy to try to get them to trust him. and hearing him yell “YES!” after the explosion? i’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

okay, so then looking at the second analysis:

-once again, calling wilbur a colonizer? there is a definition of that word that matches up with his actions, but that definition is something establishing itself in a place. by that definition, everyone on the server is a colonizer. so calling just wilbur that seems... a bit weird, considering that the common definition does not match up with what he did.

-“got his (wilbur’s) entire side killed” ignores the fact that it was Dream And His Friends Who Killed Them hghfnjgnfm

dream: wow wilbur you’re bad at this war thing

wilbur: please stop killing us

dream: how could you do this to your people

wilbur: you??? declared war???

dream: no you don’t understand. i had a really good reas—

sorry sorry i’m just. yeah

-also this thread reminded me that “tyrant” (the book) exists and yeah, i do see your point that dream did care about tommy (a little bit). i just wonder why he turned against him again? and why dream is willing to admit here that l’manburg was peaceful, and also that wilbur was not like schlatt in some key ways?

-and again i don’t see wilbur calling dream a villain during the vassal scene.

-some of this thread is just speculation. i’m not going to consider “wilbur may manipulate dream in the future because they had a conversation in the past”, especially because revivedbur’s mental state right now is godawful, because i don’t think it holds any value to examining the past. the important part is the breakdown of the vassal scene.

-i’ve already said what i think about the vassal scene. dream wasn’t getting tossed around during that. just because he’s quiet doesn’t mean he’s being manipulated? and wilbur isn’t going “you think this”, he’s asking dream what he thinks by paraphrasing what wilbur’s heard from him before, and adjusts it once dream corrects him. i do think this one is more open to interpretation though; this is just my opinion and it doesn’t have a lot of stuff to back it up lol but i’m not convinced either side has much evidence

and the third analysis:

-dream had no idea what kind of government they were setting up there. he didn’t ask, so he wouldn’t know if it was a dictatorship. and again he was allowed on the land, he just never built the embassy. the “no americans” rule was weakly enforced during the first war, and the reason wilbur got so serious about it later is that the americans were the ones who went after him and killed everyone during the war! so he had a reason to want them off. objectively a bad reason? maybe

-it would be cool if dream said “hey don’t do this here’s why” instead of stomping off during negotiations and then coming back to beat them up and declare war. he didn’t though

-the problem people have with greater smp vs. l’manburg is scale. the greater smp was quite literally infinite, and l’manburg was a small space. there wasn’t anything important in l’manburg that other server members needed to get to. people could still leave to visit their friends. they didn’t legitimately hate americans. but nooo, you can’t have the table because it’s my table. what if you do something bad with the table? remember when you tried to sell people “better air” for three dollars and then took someone’s air conditioning? you just want power! i’m going to go bring back rubber bands to pelt you with.

anywAys moving on

no, i do agree with you on the sam stuff. for some reason i was under the impression that cc!sam was uncomfortable with being depicted as torturing dream a while back, but with the stuff happening with quackity now, i’m reasonably sure that doesn’t apply. they don’t retcon stuff that was intentional but there may have been something taken back a few months ago before they planned this.

but yeah, clearly the prison stuff is awful and messed up. that’s why i noted the thing at the start of the reply: i am in no way saying that anything sam or quackity have done to dream since prison hasn’t affected him. these are things that i see as having visible impacts on the character.

(i pointed out that dream originally commissioned the prison)

i understand that it’s frustrating to hear that used as an excuse, but i wasn’t using it that way. i was pointing out that neither of them deserve it. during the vault stream, dream tells tommy that his plan is to put him in the prison. he says that exile was “perfect”, and the only issue was that tommy could get away. putting him in the prison fixes that.

so yeah, what dream was planning to do to tommy is different than what’s happening to him. but the reasons that other people wanted dream in the prison match why he wanted tommy in there: like you said, it’s a vault. it’s so he can store him and use him later, to give attachments and thus power and control over others.

tommy’s original plan was to kill dream. ultimately, he didn’t want him to suffer more, he wanted him gone. nobody on the server knew yet that death was limbo, and tommy probably thought it was mercy for someone like dream. dream was the one who brought up the book, as an attempt to save himself. he will say whatever he needs to say to avoid death, because anyone would (except someone like wilbur who’s. accepted his role. you know?) so he’s the one who reduced himself down the the book, saying if he goes, so does it. that’s when sam suggests the prison.

true, the arc is dark. this is where sam’s actions become corrupted and he loses sight of some of the responsibility he claims to have. it’s also the arc where dream lied to tommy that he had changed, and pressured him into staying by saying he was his friend. it’s the arc where dream kills tommy, and doesn’t allow sam to come get his body for days. it’s the arc where dream gets even worse, whether because of his time in the prison or because of his peaked god complex, probably both.

and again, my problem is that criticizing characters for actions they didn’t take is pointless. it tells you not much about the character, and considering the circumstances of what dream had done it does make sense for none of them to step in! they are looking at the fact that dream had an entire vault dedicated to controlling them. they are seeing that dream was fully prepared to murder tubbo and lock tommy away forever to be used. they are witnessing tommy giving dream exactly what he got.

so “acknowledging” this does nothing useful! we do not see these actions (or lack of) specifically affecting dream. i can tell you what dream told people he was doing, and it matches up with things he had done in the past, and there are moments he denies the narrative that you say drove him to do this. but i can’t really prove anything when you say he’s lying here because it fits how you interpret the story.

it’s what you’re saying people are doing to revivedbur: saying he’s lying without any proof, when with him there is evidence and he has the motive to lie. when revivedbur lies, tommy calls him on it. tommy doesn’t call dream on it. i’ve laid out why i think it’s not true, and i’ve seen stuff in early canon that directly contradicts what revivedbur says. occam’s razor! many pieces of evidence versus a few statements from someone who at that point commonly lied about things like that.

dream standing by while tommy and the other citizens get killed in l’manburg by his own orders isn’t very peaceful or non-tyrannical of him. tommy was enforcing an eye for an eye, and to be honest? i don’t think “kill your abuser” is such a terrible message to send, despite the fact that we know that tommy’s coping mechanisms come from a bad source. and tommy was far from free of what dream did to him, as evidenced by later when he again attempts to mirror what dream had done to him in the past.

yeah, i read your analysis of the interaction (skeppy and dream arguing over l’manburg). that’s not the only interpretation. skeppy doesn’t call him the villain. he is repeating back to dream the actions that dream took, and dream tells him he’s making him sound bad. skeppy wasn’t influenced by any “propaganda” you think l’manburg was putting out while they were getting murdered. skeppy was an outsider who was calling it as he saw it.

and if other people saw what dream was doing as bad, maybe he was... doing bad things? for bad reasons? skeppy was critical of dream for his actions. talking over somebody does not certify it as “twisting words”. skeppy was accusing him of doing the actions, like “so you did this? you started the war?”. dream was defending the logic behind his actions, like “well i did it because.”

basically

skeppy: hey it’s kind of. messed up that you killed a bunch of people. you know? you kind of just attacked them out of nowhere

dream: no no no you don’t understand. i had a really good reason

skeppy: i don’t see a reason?

dream: you’re making it seem like i didn’t have to do this

skeppy: you d i d n ‘ t

and skeppy didn’t finish the conversation with “you’re lying” or “you don’t know what you’re talking about”, he just told him he was wrong! as in his actions were cruel and needless! “people must have hated coming to your house”.

(they asked me to name one person who dream cut off first)

okay, name one? puffy. sam. punz? he did cut them off, he straight up told tommy he did it, and making a place in the vault for fran when sam had done nothing but work with him? and they didn’t “show up ready to kill him”, they showed up to see what he was doing. so he tells tommy he abandoned them, and indirectly tells them with the spirit scene. sapnap and george noticed this, and called him on it, but he just said he didn’t mean it?

if dream “wasn’t as close” with sam/puffy/punz, why are we putting responsibility on them for his actions.

so sapnap and george walked away from him, but because he did something to them. and puffy didn’t abandon him. punz didn’t abandon him, punz got paid off because that’s what punz cares about: money. he’s a mercenary.

using “they left him first” for sapnap and george doesn’t allow for why they left him: because he wasn’t treating them fairly. he isn’t their parent, he’s their friend, and he wasn’t acting like it.

“he was hurt and abandoned to the point” “he ended up hurting people doesn’t negate the fact he was hurt himself first” “the environment they all were a part of pushed him this far, and that’s just what happened”

so you’re saying it’s right that the reason dream did bad things to people is because bad things were done to him first? because dream was definitely the one who got attacked first during l’manburg. because he just cared so much about george that he kicked someone out of society just to defend his honor. /s and then, because his real purpose was protecting george, he went back and tried to make things right with george because it wasn’t about tommy? oh wait, he didn’t. he focused on only tommy. because george’s house was an excuse.

“that’s just what happened” is a bad take on “people got abused”. the fact is that dream started a lot of the conflict. looking at the retaliation and self-defense that people did towards him and saying “he got hurt a bunch that’s why he did the later bad stuff” completely negates that he started it? and his “retribution” was always exponentially worse than the actual crime committed?

dude, i’m just trying to point out that the story says he cut people off. yeah, he was hurt at times, but that is not an explanation for what he did. it’s not even a logical cause, because we do not see it affect his character. the subtext has gotta be there. the fact that he was hurt does not make him any more justified.

“circle of violence” does apply (not all of them, though). but in this situation, it’s a kid stealing someone’s lunch money, and then the other kid breaks their nose. the first kid punches the kid, the second kid puts them in the hospital. when the retribution dream gave was always worse than whatever happened to him, the issue is not “look at the people hurting him”, it’s “stop him from hurting people”!

so clearly dream needs some kind of therapy (not from puffy though i’m not letting him near her /hj), because just killing him would be a permanent solution but it would upset people who like his character. the prison is awful and not going to work. my personal solution for him is to send him out somewhere a long way away, so that nobody he’s hurt has to see him again. maybe people that wanted to go with him could, and it would be like a new smp. but when that idea was proposed, tommy said darkly that he was always going to come back. maybe it’ll be the solution in the future. who knows.

if the mistakes were unintentional, why criticize the characters for them? and what about “the environment” besides the other people changed how dream thought? a lot of it was internal.

we have him exiling tommy as a weird, desperate plea for friends (not really) when he very much could have gone back and spoken to the people who were his friends. we have him continuously saying that tommy causes all the problems, and he needs to be “restrained” or “controlled” or whatever other excuse he came up with for taking away a person’s free will.

we have him obsessing over the disks, and we know it’s not about the disks, it’s about power over tommy and power in general. he says this in the vault. he says this at the community house scene. his progression is towards a twisted sense of possession, same as wilbur, oddly enough. but they are different in that wilbur is possessive over the idea of freedom that he created with l’manburg (and having power over that) and dream is possessive over control over all.

wilbur’s idea is ruined. he tied his sense of self to the nation and when it was used for corruption (kind of by him and mostly by others) he saw himself as corrupted and decided to take them both out so that they couldn’t hurt anyone. he admits his own fault to the point of self destruction.

dream’s idea is threatened. other people live there, other people want to do things, and so he becomes so attached to the idea that it’s his server and he will do anything to control opposition. he cannot admit his fault unless forced to.

wilbur would do anything to control a tool of power, because he wanted to not use it as that tool. wilbur wanted anarchy at the end. he says so in his last presidential speech. his naive views about freedom from the start of the server had worn off, as he saw people use power as a tool in a way that he had never intended or meant to use it.

wilbur created the election so that he would have an actual authority over the land, and he could stop the fighting of its citizens. he thought he knew better, kind of like dream did. this is when his motives get the most twisted and selfish, he wanted peace so bad that he would take away freedom for it (like dream). but when he lost, he accepted it, and that’s the difference. he saw the desire for control in his own actions, and hated himself for it. that’s why he wanted to blow up l’manburg, to take away the tool for power and the person who had been tempted to use it.

wilbur was a good leader in the political sense (dream admits this in “tyrant”) but when he stands before the rubble of l’manburg and calls it his, he’s saying that his rule would only lead to destruction. anyone’s rule would. power corrupts. l’manburg ruined is his l’manburg, it’s his original vision of complete freedom laid out before him, and tracked to its inevitable end.

so then, you would say, dream was right, yeah? he didn’t want l’manburg. but wilbur before he explodes l’manburg doesn’t like dream. he thinks dream’s right in that factions lead to oppression, no matter how good the intentions, but he also knows that dream was a little too willing to hurt them and that dream doesn’t believe this. dream does not want anarchy, he wants chaos but only if it gives him control. he treats the smp like his country, and once again, power corrupts.

went off there, sorry. dream and wilbur are similar but different in some very important ways.

sapnap had been hurt by dream before the vault, and as dream didn’t see himself as in the wrong, he didn’t reach out. sapnap was with pogtopia (wait this might be wrong i do not remember but he was definitely on l’manburg’s side during doomsday) because tommy had shown him more kindness than dream, and that was originally dream’s side. dream just turned on them for the book.

and sapnap also witnessed dream mocking tubbo, making fun of tommy, exposing ranboo. he heard dream going off about how tubbo was so stupid for thinking dream was his friend, for thinking dream cared about him. why would sapnap side with dream if dream was showing no signs of even wanting him?

sapnap accused dream of that, and dream did not listen to him. he could not see the other side: he was so convinced that he was right. we do not know if sapnap went into the vault with the intent of killing dream. i’m pretty sure most of them were there to see if what tommy had said was true. and then, sapnap saw that it was.

nobody abandoned him because of the vault because he had already abandoned them. they just made it mutual. it being a “consequence” of stuff doesn’t make it any less of a messed up, power hungry thing to do, and some of them had done nothing to him before he decided he needed to control them. he was planning to use friend to control ghostbur, who he had already taken advantage of and tried to kill once.

“people do not decide to isolate themselves for no reason.”

true, people don’t cut themselves off for no reason. the reason was power and control. i once again have to emphasize that nobody forced him into this: it was a spiral. other people didn’t do everything “first”. the small taste he got of his own medicine was a poor mimic thrown at him by someone he had done terrible things to. he started spiraling before the spirit scene happened. and if people are telling him he can’t achieve peace, maybe they’re just... right? did he go up to someone and go “i don’t know how to make this server peaceful :(“? because if he did, and if they then pointed at his long list of war crimes and told him not like this, i don’t really see that as anything more than a consequence for things he had already done.

someone can lie about what they want. maybe he did originally want peace, or maybe he was lying to himself that he did. l’manburg did not invite war. he wanted unity above peace, and that “unity” dissolved into “control”.

it was a defense so that nobody could control him the way he was going to control them. cutting himself off was out of fear, yeah. collecting everyone else’s items? power and control. he says this a ton of times, sometimes not even out loud.

i did rewatch the vault vod. that’s how i got all the quotes of him stating his motives. i’m not saying it was a healthy thing to do at all. i never said dream was mentally healthy, i said he had a god complex and he was obsessed with control. someone’s bad mental state can hurt others as well as themself, and they’re still responsible for the others and for trying to be a better and more respectful person. that’s why revivedbur’s “apologies” mean nothing right now.

“he lists his reason for starting the war as them declaring independence, so i don’t think it really matters when the official document was sent.”

it does matter a little bit, actually. they were already attacking l’manburg before official war was declared. they also attacked them during the peace period. wilbur wrote the declaration as he was standing on the roof of the caravan, being shot at by the greater smp.

a country becomes independent when it officially declares itself to be independent. they were still united; it was tyranny.

when dream saw that l’manburg was writing the declaration, he scrambled to declare war. he had reopened and started other conflicts in the past, and involved himself in places he did not need to be. it’s true that a response is a response, but you cannot treat all responses the same way. quackity’s “response” to the things dream had done (killing tommy among those) was to torture him. we do not consider that good, or fair, or “just a response”, we consider it cruel and unusual punishment.

the greater smp fulfilled the words that wilbur had not yet written in the document, and that’s because they weren’t a prophesy, they were a history.

“...would be completely honest about (dream’s motivations in the vault) in front of his biggest enemy. /s”

i don’t see evidence that dream wasn’t being honest. what did he have to lose by it? tommy could do nothing to hurt him. so yep, he would be honest about it. and he’s listed his reasons as power before. he also has the ability to tell the truth about his motives.

dream does not see tommy that way. he sees him as someone whose only positive contribution to the server is attachment. he tells tommy that evil is relative, and to dream, tommy is the evil one. in fact, he says that tommy is evil lots of times. he only says that tommy sees himself as a hero when he’s trying to convince him to let him kill his friend. dream is using tommy’s black and white perception to get him to do what dream wants. he only says tommy sees himself as the hero, not that dream sees him that way. dream does not care about who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy, because he’s not idealistic like wilbur and he’s not a kid like tommy.

him making a joke about building the prison with a “little bit of evil” doesn’t matter because next line he says that tommy’s evil to him. dream isn’t playing the villain, cc!dream is. cc!dream is playing a character that is antagonistic towards others, and he plays into it and jokes around with it, as other people playing antagonistic roles have in the past. cc!wilbur does this a lot during the election and pogtopia. cc!techno hints at it with his “ah yes, blowing up a country, we must be the good guys”.

it may sound like a character because someone’s playing it, but it’s not dream.

this video matches up with some of my points here, but it’s also framed like an english class. it is an interesting meta argument, and one that i would say i partially agree with, but as we’re not really arguing on terms of meta it does not act as a general opposition to your argument. the intent of the authors does not dictate how you see the story, but it can help with interpretation of it.

dream’s words during the vault scene sure do line up with his actions for the months before that. so yeah, no discredit to cc!dream. he’s playing his character. and it’s not like he’s unwilling to make him sympathetic. he’s done so in the past (and is doing so now) and the fact that he does not do it during the vault, and downplays the tragic part of it (him losing his friends) sure makes it seem like the main point here isn’t “poor dream”, it’s “poor tommy”. they’re telling a story. it has a moral.

dream being reserved about his plans may be shown in the fact that nobody knew about the vault (except punz i think?) until dream was ready to put it into play. he generally is quiet about what he wants, he just cares a lot about it and will do a lot to get it. he’s not one for speeches unless he’s trying to make a point. the point here being that tommy is trapped. dream’s capable of explaining his thoughts. tommy asks him why and invites him to share, so he does.

this isn’t really a “nobody can interpret it like this”, it’s just pointing out that the events of canon are there and should be fully considered. character dream’s perspective of the story is biased, so people can look at it and be correct in how dream sees the situation, but “how dream sees it” and “how the story goes” do not necessarily line up.

conflicts dream has started besides the vault? okay.

-reopening the disk war by digging up the hidden disks

-declaring war on l’manburg the first time

-burning down other buildings in order to frame tommy

-blowing up the community house (or having it done for him)

-attacking l’manburg again with techno and phil

(didn’t start really, but inserted himself into when it wasn’t his business:)

-helped pogtopia

-gave wilbur tnt

-sided with manburg in the fight

-built walls around l’manburg

-demanded tommy be punished

-took personal responsibility for exile and used it as a way to isolate tommy

there’s also this post that describes things dream has done in general. the tone of the post is biased, but the actions were canon. some of these may be “retribution” but they sure were uncalled for.

so when he exiled tommy, that was about “unity”? big happy family except for one guy because “he causes all the problems”? it doesn’t matter whether he believed he was in the right for his motives. the vault does not make sense for peace or unity. it is a twisted, controlled unity. what i’m saying is that he uses peace as an excuse for his actions. he had to exile tommy, tommy would have just gotten worse. he had to declare war on l’manburg, it was a necessary evil. because nothing screams “peace” like declaring war and killing the other side, right?

those may be his actual motives in the early scenes, and he thinks he’s doing the right thing. this changes with the vault. he no longer uses this as an excuse, his “excuse” is that he has a right to it. his self proclaimed motive is power and control, and unity through that. so why not accept that as his motive when he says it there?

“becoming a control freak as a result of feeling the loss of control over your own circumstances isn’t equal to dehumanizing the people you’re trying to control.”

nah dude he absolutely dehumanized them and took away their agency? he describes tommy as a pet and a tool, minutes before he switches and describes himself as the book. this could also be used to make an interesting point on how he sees people as their values, in item form. so he’s using one item to control another. tubbo’s a pawn, tommy’s a tool, techno’s a weapon, he’s the book.

he calls george a baby, and makes decisions for him. by planning to using the items to control the people, he was prepared to take away their freedom and agency by emotionally manipulating them. he did this to tommy. agency is the capacity of someone to act. he takes away that ability in order to have control.

he’s not just a control freak over his own life, the problem is that he does it to others. again, we’re talking true freedom here: the ability to do anything, even things that we would consider morally wrong. he takes away george’s power, which is revealed to be nothing. he then swiftly turns and tells him that if he tries to overthrow eret, he would be a tyrant. not acknowledging that dream just overthrew a king and stated in a new one, he hypocritically calls george the tyrant for planning to do that.

(i didn’t even notice this until now, but it’s actually interesting: dream is extremely hypocritical here, unless, of course, he sees himself as having more claim to who is king. now why would he think that? a hierarchy, perhaps?)

“which is understandable seeing as you’ve said already you never tried to look deeper into him, but it’s incorrect nonetheless.”

i said that before this i had not attempted to examine his character in a sympathetic light. that’s what i’ve been doing. his wish to “fix” his home is really just a wish to control his home, which is pretty evident when you look at right before exile. the smp was peaceful then. tommy had committed petty crimes before, and george didn’t even really care about the house. it was minimal damage. dream jumped at the opportunity to convince everyone else that tommy was the real problem (speaking of propaganda and vilifying).

and “he was getting better until the sixteenth” disregards that he threatened eret, enabled wilbur (however you interpret that, he still enabled him), and sided with schlatt for power reasons even though he said he would help pogtopia. giving pogtopia some stuff doesn’t make him the “good guy” because pogtopia were not the good guys! that’s the point! he sided with them because wilbur had less ambition than schlatt, and therefore posed less of a threat to the greater smp! he wasn’t helping them just purely out of the goodness of his heart. he didn’t think schlatt was right, he abandoned him very quickly, but he could have just taken the book and dipped. he fought in the war. he took the book for personal gain and he placed that above the trust of pogtopia.

“he wasn’t on a power trip at all, he didn’t have a god complex up until the prison stripped him of all his dignity and then threw an opportunity at him, and he wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone.”

power trip: an activity or way of behaving that makes a person feel powerful

exile and the vault, arguably before that a few times as well. there are a few quotes that emphasize this.

dream’s god complex was already there in the vault. that’s why he was scared enough of being controlled that he shut everyone else away: he wanted to secure himself even more as the sole power.

and exactly. he wasn’t proving anything to anyone else, he was proving it to himself. therefore he also wasn’t trying to “prove” he was big and bad and evil and irredeemable, he was trying to feel confident about his own power!

if he doesn’t care if he’s thought as of evil, why did it supposedly drive him into the spiral? if he stopped caring about it, that would also explain why he was indifferent towards it (because he was indifferent towards it, every time someone called him that, indifferent or angry). he didn’t think he was evil because he thought he had a right to what he was doing. so he pushed himself into wanting more control, after seeing something he identified as a problem: tommy. you’re right that that’s part of what makes him tragic: that he stopped caring about what he owed to anyone else. that’s why he hurt them.

“it’s likely and fits perfectly into his character arc in canon.”

people who are emotionally repressed still show emotions, they just don’t show them as often. dream shows emotions but he does not show the specific emotion that would give evidence to this theory. i’m saying that claiming something is deeply rooted in his character (not the emotional repression, that’s confirmed) when he shows no sign of it doesn’t line up with canon. it’s more of a theory than an analysis.

“it is good storytelling because cc!wilbur pulls it off brilliantly.”

cc!wilbur still played a complex character! his behavior changed significantly after the war, but there is evidence that he was a certain way during the war. his character grew from that point but my argument is that he was not always a liar about important things and that he genuinely believed in the values he formed l’manburg for. if you want to watch wilbur being power hungry and hypocritical, rewatch the election arc.

actions, not words. cc!wilbur pointed out hypocritical things his character said, but that just shows he was playing a flawed character. people using the wall thing as some kind of proof that he was evil is stupid because part of the idea behind the wall was poking fun at america. it was “look, this is what you guys do”.

his early character was passionate and naive. cc!wilbur was aware of this. he was still a chaotic crimeboy, the nation was founded on drugs. but not everything he did was “for chaos” because again, he played a multi-dimensional character. he can make jokes about politics.

“his main support system left by themselves.”

i’ve already explained why i think dream broke most of his own bonds. again, there’s textual evidence to support this and actions as well that line up with it. and lots of people were willing to help dream. he didn’t murder all those people by himself.

“it also seems you’re strongly biased against c!dream, which, to be fair, the majority of the fandom is.”

it’s true my bias is against dream. it’s also true that my reasons for that bias are backed up by moments in the story where he clearly states his intentions, and a lot of the evidence to the contrary is, to me, one-off moments that can be interpreted in many ways. a lot of the bias also comes from the fact that he did pretty bad things and i’ve been watching this for a long time.

this post is pretty much what i’m saying, i guess.

alright @flypaw here it is :]

~ Lad 2

[oingo233]

Anything at All -Regulus Blurb

Summary: Blurbs for your ever-growing friendship with Regulus and his unrequited feelings.  

Regulus Black x Hufflepuff Reader

Warnings: none, but house is specified like once, for the dynamic of the friendship. It’s cute I promise :)  Also, nothing else is specified.  No weight, race, gender or anything like that, reader is neutral. (though if I do mention something about any of these, please let me know so I can change it. I try to keep as neutral as possible so anyone will feel comfortable reading)

Authors Note: I usually write full fics/imagines but I have less time with Finals this week but I wanted to write and Regulus came to mind. Also my love for Regulus stems from @roonilwazlibimagines who has the most wonderful Harry Potter blog and writing!

                                            **** Anything at All ****

- Regulus first saw you on a patch of green grass, it swayed beside you as you lay beneath the sun. The wind  danced across your skin and your hair would dance ever so slightly with it. Your skin warming and your smile far more beautiful than the lake beside you. He found it curious how you would smile to yourself, eyes closed as you lay on your back and tap your fingers to the beat of the songs. Very softly you would whisper the lyrics.  He wished just for a moment, to lay there beside you and listen. To make you smile just as sweetly.

- He felt stupid soon after though.  He didn’t even know your name, and you were too pure for him by the looks of it. Too good.  

- But he starts noticing you more and more and soon you two become friends, despite the difference in houses (which he debated with himself often, before you two got really close).  You would often drag him out to a picnic with your muggle mixtapes and listen to them with him. Then you two would lend each other books and study together, and soon you were inseparable.

- You once gave him a plant. You are a hufflepuff and it was this he admired most about you, your kindness and goodness made him for once, feel truly happy and unjudged. Made him want to be good too. So it was no surprise you gave him a bright, purple shamrock plant. 

- You said it reminded you of the pretty red butterflies that would flutter about the lake the first time you and Regulus picnicked there.  He charmed paper in the middle of particularly boring classes to look just like them and fly swiftly by your ear and then straight into the window.  A dry, dark joke on his part, but it always made you giggle.  That class would bore someone to death.

- He of course swooned at this, but hides it with a smile.  He nodded at you and took it from your sweaty hands (nervous habit of yours) he said he would take care of it, and politely thanked you.  Adding throughout the day how much he liked it. He makes sure to appreciate you in little ways he never felt like he was, he never wants you too feel like he used to (and often times he still does feel that way).

- After you pushed him too, he names the plant.  He named the plant Paul, because the first song you danced to with him was “Hey Diddle” By Paul McCartney. 

 - You dragged him out to a quite spot by the lake, your favorite place on campus and he too began to find a new kind of peace there.  No one else was around so you make sure to play your music out loud. Regulus lays back on his arms and watches you sway your hips, and prance to the songs.  He laughs occasionally at the horror that is your dancing.

 - Then a new song plays and you gasp and turn to him, he pales at the look you give him, already shaking his head no.  “Please,” You beg, he shakes his head. “No, I’m not dancing.” He stared at you pointedly, but then you got on your knees beside him and softly took both his hands in your own, tugging ever so lightly.  Looking into his eyes, you try to beg with looks alone.  “It’s me favorite, this one...” He caved, no man has ever caved so fast.

 - It was because of the softness that you touched him with and the glow of warmth in your eyes, the promise of fun held within them attracted him like no other. Soon you two were up and dancing.  He was awkward, no doubt, so you increased your dance moves to be even uglier so he soon caught on and did his ugliest dance moves too. You both looked liked two headless chickens running around, hands intertwined throughout the song while you moved to the music.  But no laughter on the campus was louder than the two of yours.

- When you first heard of his plants name. you laughed so hard that when he confessed this to you it made him blush.  He wanted to run away forever until you turned to the plant with the brightest smile and said “Good morning Paul, Regulus is going to take great care of you.  Look at you! Such healthy leaves already.”  You cooed, winking at Regulus who only blushed deeper.

- He’d never admit it, and I mean never, but he sometimes talks to Paul.  Before bed, little “mornin’ Paul,” or “night mate.” 

- The worst of it was when he would drunkenly turn the plant to face him, as in the pot you painted for him is facing the side where you painted the lake you two frequent.  And he just rambles on about you “(y/n)?  yeah, (y/n) you know them.  Yeah, they’re pretty great.  Pretty in general.” He’d hum to himself then, some song your currently are obsessing over.  “I think I love them mate..” he’d chuckle to himself, nodding briefly and slurring on his words.  “yeah, I know.  Not so dead in the chest after all.  Wait till mummie gets a load of this..” He’d swallow thickly and seem to sober slightly, then puts a finger to his mouth.  “Shhhh, don’t tell her and I won’t either.  (y/n)’s mine, I won’t let my family get to them too.” He nods to himself dignitly, then turns the plant to face the moon and goes straight to bed.

- He talks to the plant because it “listens”.  It’s not often in his life he feels heard or a deep understanding with things.  But Paul reminded him of you, and you saw who he really was, and still chose to be his friend.  Though the term friend makes him bitter, but rather that, then no you at all.  

- Then one day, when Hufflepuff won the match against Slytherin (god did you rub it in his face. Though you comforted him and complimented his skill as seeker. He still had to find a way to get you chocolate because of the match’s turnout.  You hugged him when Hufflepuff won, he no longer shied from such touches.  He knew he’d give you candy no matter who won.) 

- Anyway, this sore loser Slytherin notices your over pour of joy, and decided to get rude.  Not appreciating your “smugness” on the matter. 

- He said something awful to you, and Regulus without a second thought pulled out his wand and told the ass to bugger off.  He hexed him anyway, as he was walking away, just a small little spell that tied his shoe laces together.

- The guy face planted and Regulus beamed at the way your frown turned into belly laughter.  He for the first time, initiated big contact, and threw his arm over your shoulder and led you away from the scene.  Reassuring your worth with kind words whispered in your ear.

- He thought of you often.  During class, homework, writing the scarce letter home, during break...he couldn’t get you out of his head.  You were such an overwhelming and positive force in his life it would sometimes make him emotional.  He knew he’d do anything to keep you safe, to make sure you are happy and well taken care off.  He’d do anything to protect you and the world you love so much.

Anything.

[sukirichi]

hi suki! wanted to tell you this bc i have no one else to talk about it with ><

( you can answer this when the English chapter releases! i was able to read it because my friend bought the WSJ issue)

I was trying to udnerstand Naoy's character, so I was reding everything from CH138-151 again. I'm kinda sad at how people just calls Naoya a Toji fanboy (though true LMAO) and not realizing how Toji really influenced his persona. Like the admiration Naoya held for Toji is so deeply engraved in him that he, who was called a genius sorcerer as a child, looks up to a man who was called a failure. Toji is probably the only man in the clan that he respected, that's why toji's level of strength became his "picture" to follow. And I think a lot of who Naoya has become is because the Zen'ins literally groomed the decency out of him. Still, though groomed to be everything he is, he himself chose not to change anything about it.

(wait but also?? little naoya looks cute like he would guide old ladies on the ped xing so what the fuck happened after that)

I guess one major reason why he does not respect anyone else in the clan (besides his superiority complex) is because of the Zen'in's concept of what is marked as strong. Like, the way they see and treated him as if he's the best sorcerer in the making, yet failing to see Toji's powers and rejecting him fully. It's something similar to Mai when she said "Maki has talent that I don't. And the clan rejected that; that talent that I lacked", except Naoya is raised to be a confident (arrogant?) child, thus he takes it as a challenge instead and works to achieve it.

So, when Maki reached the level of Toji, I think his reaction wasn't simply stemmed on his "fanboy" antics, but his desperation of being part of that level of strength. I think he's more irritated in the fact that Maki, someone who he does not see anywhere near as strong as he is (though he does say Maki is strong in chapter 138), reached a level of strength that he hasn't; that he is trying hard to achieve. It's also the same with having your favorite superhero getting defeated. And Naoya's in denial that there is someone else who could be the same as Toji.

I like how he's an antagonist that was not build under the foundation of a sob backstory (though it was a v small sneak peak of his background and was mainly centered with his admiration for toji, plus I think people forget that Naoya is an antagonist), how he acknowledges that he has not reached that level of strength. Of course, I'm angsty about his misogynistic ideals. I get that he's from a very traditionalist clan so... yeah. I mean, no child is born evil. Children learn from those around them (I've seen many people say he's trash since he was a kid when he said that "i wonder what miserable face he has", but like he's a kid, he doesn't know what he's saying AHSJFJWJQ8QR he was either taught that or he just learned it from others. Funnily enough, he does say toji has a pretty face now LMAO). Maybe it stems from something else, maybe it didn't.

I'm not saying him trying to kill Megumi is forgotten (Though, the Jujutsu Society is a place where teens get executed for the simple fact that they are too strong, so im not surprised. Just like Noritoshi said, age does not matter in Jujutsu Society). I see now why he was really pissed about Megumi being the head, since Naoya has been promised the position since he was young, only to loose of a 15 year old who is the son of the man he admires :')) However, still, none of it excuses the shit he did. He still has a shitty personality, but it's nice to know a bit of a background.

Anyway, that's all for now. My English is bad so that might be all over the place •`,`• That's just my take on it so I could be wrong or maybe seeing him wrong since we still don't know much abt him. I'm always scared to talk about naoya because the last time i did (on twt) i got a backlash of hate (ppl really do get hate just from admiring someone's characterization). Your blog is like a safe haven for naoya stans, so i thank you for that hehe.

Have a nice day suki!! kisses~

(also this is a PSPSPSPS to a naoya childhood friends au fic pls 👁👁)

bestie omg I am so sorry, I found this deep in my inbox and I am *shakes* and yes yes let’s talk about naoya, I would be more than glad to and I’m sorry I didn’t see this any sooner!! more rants and simping under the cut

I'm kinda sad at how people just calls Naoya a Toji fanboy (though true LMAO) and not realizing how Toji really influenced his persona. Like the admiration Naoya held for Toji is so deeply engraved in him that he, who was called a genius sorcerer as a child, looks up to a man who was called a failure. Toji is probably the only man in the clan that he respected, that's why toji's level of strength became his "picture" to follow. And I think a lot of who Naoya has become is because the Zen'ins literally groomed the decency out of him. Still, though groomed to be everything he is, he himself chose not to change anything about it.

omg for this…I’m actually like…like I love the detail that naoya admires toji? as we can see from the panel of little naoya, it’s like people have already planted in his head that no cursed energy = loser, yet he ended up admiring him and I am,,,my heart is just soft! exactly! just think of naoya born as a genius sorcerer yet his admiration for toji, who is painted as the clan’s failure, helped shape him into who he is! idk but I just really love the fact that naoya, who is like born with the pressure and role of being clan leader, somewhat strays from tradition and ends up finding strength into toji and even strives to follow him or “stand by him” someday. for me, it just shows that perhaps naoya isn’t really half as bad as he should be in an honest sense, meaning that he’s evil or morally corrupt because he was born that way or because he chose to be that way. I do agree that perhaps he is the way he is now because he’s groomed to be like that, but of course, I’m not going to disregard the fact that somewhere along the way, Naoya could’ve matured to choose himself to not embody the misogynistic tradition of the zen’in clan.

This could just be me, but my interpretation of it is that Naoya seems more like the perfect product or embodiment of how the clan shaped him to be, blinded him with false morals and the patriarchy presiding into them. Rather than Naoya being just “a misogynistic arrogant man” in my perspective and my opinion, I see him more into the bigger picture of his toxic upbringing to begin with. Like, no child is born evil unless there’s like a predetermined curse deciding their fate for them, so its partly the Zen’in clan’s fault he’s that way. But Gege showing that Naoya admiring someone the Zen’in clan disregarded, it shows that he is capable of being himself without the clause of his clan enforcing things to him once again, like the whole “he’s gonna be the future clan leader” thing, though that is still heavily embedded within him.

(wait but also?? little naoya looks cute like he would guide old ladies on the ped xing so what the fuck happened after that)

OMGGGG PLEASE THAT’S SO CUTE, HE LOOKED SO INNOCENT AND ADORABLE BUT EVEN AS A CHILD HE WAS ALREADY CALLING PEOPLE A LOSER LIKE EYE

I guess one major reason why he does not respect anyone else in the clan (besides his superiority complex) is because of the Zen'in's concept of what is marked as strong. Like, the way they see and treated him as if he's the best sorcerer in the making, yet failing to see Toji's powers and rejecting him fully. It's something similar to Mai when she said "Maki has talent that I don't. And the clan rejected that; that talent that I lacked",except Naoya is raised to be a confident (arrogant?) child, thus he takes it as a challenge instead and works to achieve it.

Anon, is it just me or like…was his superiority complex also enforced on him by the Zen’in clan as well? Again this could just be me going all psychologist mode on Naoya but the nature of superiority complex is quite interesting, you know! As a psych student, I perfectly understand that superiority complex either stems from several things like a) wanting to live up to one’s or others expectations, b) masking it with a deep stem of insecurity, or c) it’s a coping mechanism. See, I could go on and on about but then I’d have to link all my past studies lmao so let’s just put it on layman’s terms that my interpretation of Naoya’s superiority complex is once again, influenced by the clan. Imagine being a kid born into a clan where people remind you again and again that you’re the future leader, that you would be the one to guide them or protect them or discuss the clan’s future and status once you grow, and you’re quite groomed for it.

For such pressure to be put on a child’s shoulders, it kind of strips off his youth and instead of him enjoying his youth, I can imagine that it took a toll on little Naoya, and the reason he grew his superiority complex is his way to cope and reach the standards and expectations that is given to him. Of course, he’s a kid, he might start to wonder, “Can I even do all of that?” but seeing as the Zen’in clan highly measures strength and growth based on abilities, cursed energy, and overall just to conform into the image they’ve held for years, it’s quite obvious that Naoya can’t exactly voice out his worries over this, so instead, he masks it with a superiority complex that absolutely boosts him to a higher level, thus giving him the confidence he needed to carry out his tasks and the reassurance that, “Yes, I am worthy and I will be the clan leader.” As for your theory that he takes it as a challenge, I can see where you’re coming from! I think Naoya is the type of person who definitely likes to challenge himself, but one of the reasons I love his character so much is because he’s not completely a brainless “head on straight to war” type of person too.

He knows his limits and knows which side he should be in, as showed when Yuuta came and mans surrendered easily. Idk why but to me, Naoya, who is such an arrogant confident man who has high trust in abilities, but at the same time can admit when someone is stronger than him (like him admiring Toji and Gojo) just makes him more human and a little more beautifully flawed. Like, he’s not perfect and he’s most definitely an irritating character, but the way he was written is just *chef’s kiss*

So, when Maki reached the level of Toji, I think his reaction wasn't simply stemmed on his "fanboy" antics, but his desperation of being part of that level of strength. I think he's more irritated in the fact that Maki, someone who he does not see anywhere near as strong as he is (though he does say Maki is strong in chapter 138), reached a level of strength that he hasn't; that he is trying hard to achieve. It's also the same with having your favorite superhero getting defeated. And Naoya's in denial that there is someone else who could be the same as Toji.

Yes, ah I really do love this theory that he’s more irritated because in his mind, he’s like, “I’m a genius sorcerer! I was meant to be clan leader! This is my rightful spot to be a strong one, so how come Maki, who is a woman, with no zero cursed energy has reached the level of the person I looked up most to?” again, Naoya didn’t say that and those are just my opinions and brainrot so don’t come at me for it uwu, but yeah I do think that he’s very aggravated that he didn’t react that level first. Because I guess you could say, he’s probably alluding that Maki reaching Toji’s strength = them being equals, and ofc Naoya wanted to be the one standing beside them. It probably hit his superiority complex that he wasn’t the one in Maki’s spot especially when he tried so hard to achieve it, and considering the gifts he was given (same cursed technique as his dad and him having cursed energy) it threw him off.

Yeah, Naoya is most likely in denial and becomes aggressive over it, although I don’t really mean physically aggressive because Naoya is actually quite calm and ‘composed.’ If ever he did go on a rampage, he does it in such a suave, calculated manner with this silent confidence that he will win. It kind of makes you root for him because he even fools the audience (by audience I mean ME) that he’s going to OWN that fight but whoop, he got his ass kicked. Plus ten points for confidence and a bonus thousand points for being sexy though!!! Yeah, omg he’s probably in disbelief that a woman of all people could be like the person he admired most.

I like how he's an antagonist that was not build under the foundation of a sob backstory (though it was a v small sneak peak of his background and was mainly centered with his admiration for toji, plus I think people forget that Naoya is an antagonist), how he acknowledges that he has not reached that level of strength. Of course, I'm angsty about his misogynistic ideals. I get that he's from a very traditionalist clan so... yeah. I mean, no child is born evil. Children learn from those around them (I've seen many people say he's trash since he was a kid when he said that "i wonder what miserable face he has", but like he's a kid, he doesn't know what he's saying AHSJFJWJQ8QR he was either taught that or he just learned it from others. Funnily enough, he does say toji has a pretty face now LMAO). Maybe it stems from something else, maybe it didn't.

OMG YESSSS ANON YES YES YES *slams down simping button angrily* That’s what I like about him too! Even though Naoya is cocky and wayyyy too arrogant for his own good, I also like that he acknowledges he’s not quite in a level he wants to be in yet. And hah, his backstory, it wasn’t totally sob because it’s obvious he was much too doted on, but I still hate how they made him like that. True, if he’s still carrying the same misogynistic ideals as he is now in an age where he has the mental capacity to improve and be different, then the belief has become more of a choice than something engraved into him, which I am really disappointed and not really into because of course, he’d be much better if he wasn’t like that in the first place. LOLOLOLOL yes yes he’s a kid, it sure as hell doesn’t excuse the way he is now but like just think !!

if a kid was spouting out such mean words and CLEARLY no one is correcting him, who really is the problem here? A child has a harder time deciphering what is right and wrong by himself without proper guidance. And he didn’t have proper guidance, they really just let him be like that and it’s because the clan!! sucks !! ass !! YEAH he probably called toji with a miserable face because he hasn’t seen him before but after seeing the iconic dilf, Naoya gone be like, “anyways, I lied, moving on—”

I'm not saying him trying to kill Megumi is forgotten (Though, the Jujutsu Society isa place where teens get executed for the simple fact that they are too strong, so im not surprised. Just like Noritoshi said, age does not matter in Jujutsu Society). I see now why he was really pissed about Megumi being the head, since Naoya has been promised the position since he was young, only to loose of a 15 year old who is the son of the man he admires :')) However, still, none of it excuses the shit he did. He still has a shitty personality, but it's nice to know a bit of a background.

yeah no of course, no worries! even as a hardcore naoya stan, I can admit this dude is TERRIBLE for so many reasons! yeah I mean that could be pretty irritating because he was born for it, raised to be clan leader, groomed and expected he’d have that role, but nah someone else took his throne. yeah I’m with you on that, naoya has a shitty personality and I would totally smack him if he was real because he makes my eyes roll to the back of my head, but knowing his background and theorizing (read: me going all psychologist mode because he’s the only character I ever cared about to apply my studies into) his character is quite fun. I wish we had more scenes with Naoya though, I really hoped he’d play a bigger role but he just…died, I guess, though I’m starting to believe that maybe he really isn’t dead! Gege did him dirty omg I’ll cry again if it’s really GENUINELY confirmed my baby is gone.

Anyway, that's all for now. My English is bad so that might be all over the place •`,`• That's just my take on it so I could be wrong or maybe seeing him wrong since we still don't know much abt him. I'm always scared to talk about naoya because the last time i did (on twt) i got a backlash of hate (ppl really do get hate just from admiring someone's characterization). Your blog is like a safe haven for naoya stans, so i thank you for that hehe.

ah no worries about your English, I didn’t really notice anything wrong with it tbh! And I understand, these are all just our opinions/theories/perspectives, we could be wrong or not, we don’t really know because we’re not Gege (⋟﹏⋞) NOOOO PEOPLE HATED YOU ON THAT? ISTG I’VE NEVER SEEN A FANDOM CANCEL SOMEONE AS MUCH AS JJK FANDOM CANCELS NAOYA AND NAOYA STANS LIKE – he’s just a fictional character omg, cancelling naoya is understandable because I would too but attacking his fans? or generally anyone who talks about him in a neutral or not in a way that goes, “yeah I would punch this mfer” is just?? doesn’t make sense to me bestie, people really choose to do that with their time yikes.

AND AWWW THANK YOU YES I PROTECT ALL MY FELLOW NAOYA STANS HERE, I respect who people simp for because if it’s what you enjoy and as long as you’re not hurting anybody, then it really doesn’t matter and it’s not a big deal! and you’re always welcome here uwu. have an even nicer day bestie and I’m sorry I didn’t see this sooner AAAA I really loved talking about this tho HEHEHEH I’m not actually too much of a JJK theorist since I’m not smart enough to pay attention or infer from all the details but NAOYA HMMMMM also childhood friends fic? hmu let’s hear it!! also ahh hmm idk but i get really happy whenever people talk to me freely about naoya bcos even tho i have been a naoya simp for like three months, it was not until recently that people came to me about him and i have just been simping alone (bcos people MADDDD) spsppsps okay rant over thank you anon i love you kith kith <3

[tealin]

Observation Hill

To see the post in its original format, please visit twirlynoodle.com/blog

There is no mistaking Observation Hill when you arrive at McMurdo, if you know anything about it.  It is a distinct cone, right at the end of the peninsula – even if you've never seen a picture of it, its name alone tells you it's a prime lookout, and sticking out into McMurdo sound as it does, it has clear views in every direction.

I had seen pictures of it, but I was still surprised how it loomed over the station.  Unlike the vastly larger Mt Erebus, it is visible from everywhere; whether you're eating in the Galley or crawling back to bed from the Crary lab in the wee hours, it's always looking over your shoulder.

Though not apparent in the above photo, it is clearly visible in person that there is a large cross mounted nearly at the peak of the hill.  Visitors especially from the States might assume it is just another expression of religious devotion – Christ died on a cross on a hill, so hilltop crosses are not unusual in a country which puts great stock in expressions of Christianity – but this is not another one of those things, in fact it isn't even American.  This cross was erected in January 1913 by the surviving men of the Terra Nova Expedition, as a memorial to Captain Scott and the other members of his party who died out on the Ross Ice Shelf on their way home from the South Pole.

Before the ship arrived it was decided among us to urge the erection of a cross on Observation Hill to the memory of the Polar Party.  On the arrival of the ship the carpenter immediately set to work to make a great cross of jarrah wood [an Australian hardwood].  There was some discussion as to the inscription, it being urged that there should be some quotation from the Bible because "the women think a lot of these things."  But I was glad to see the concluding line of Tennyson's "Ulysses" adopted: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."  

... Observation Hill was clearly the place for it, it knew them all so well. Three of them were Discovery men who lived three years under its shadow: they had seen it time after time as they came back from hard journeys on the Barrier: Observation Hill and Castle Rock were the two which had always welcomed them in.  It commanded McMurdo Sound on one side, where they had lived: and the Barrier on the other, where they had died.  No more fitting pedestal, a pedestal which in itself is nearly 1000 feet high, could have been found. 

(Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, pp.565-7)

The establishment of the cross took two days: the first, to hack a hole in the volcanic rock in which to mount it, and the second to carry up the pieces and erect them.  

It stands nine feet out of the rocks, and many feet into the ground, and I do not believe it will ever move.  When it was up, facing out over the Barrier, we gave three cheers and one more.   (ibid., p.567)

106 years later, there is a hiking trail up Observation Hill.  I had intended to make a pilgrimage since the moment I arrived, but with everything else going on, and the ongoing challenge to get enough sleep, it wasn't until quite late in my visit that I finally made it.

My first attempt was on a relatively fine day, when I thought I could get some good views. The trailhead was clearly marked on the station map, but when I got there I couldn't find a way to reach it without crossing a fuel pipeline, and I had a dim recollection from orientation that this was a big no-no.  I wandered about looking for access until I started getting a headache from the fumes, and gave up.

The next opportunity came a few days later, after I'd found out from a veteran that it was OK just to step over the pipeline there.  It was a thickly cloudy day, and hazy by Antarctic standards, so I wouldn't get as good a view, but that did mean I could look forward to having the hill to myself.  So I stepped over the pipeline and started up.

It looks like a terribly steep climb from the bottom, but once on the slope it's not so bad, and is far less slippery than the gravel slope of Arrival Heights.  Partway up I passed a mountain rescue class, but beyond that the trail was entirely mine.

Like the rest of Ross Island, Observation Hill is volcanic in origin – in fact it was once a small volcano of its own.  Unlike the subglacial volcano that is now Castle Rock, which grew cylindrically through a hole it melted in the ice, Observation Hill must have been uncovered in its later years  at least, because it has the classic cone shape made by molten rock running down the outside.  It is a lighter colour than much of the rest of the exposed rock in the area, and in places, it gives a really good impression of being sedimentary rather than igneous.

While the climb was not as physically intense as I had feared, it did still make me very warm, and I had two pauses, not to catch my breath but to cool down.  One was to watch the rescue class, the other was when, somewhere near the top, I lost the trail, and examined the terrain for a while to guess which side would be least fall-off-able.  I chose the wrong one, it turns out – I didn't fall off, but I did have to pick my way over some bare rock and came out above the cross, which is mounted in a pocket of rubble just off the peak.

It's hard to tell from the photo but it is in fact quite large – I am an average sized female and I  stood well under the crossbar.  The inscription is still there, but over a century of blizzards have battered it, and some parts are just barely decipherable.

The names – above of the worst of the blowing grit – are still legible.  This gave me one of those moments which always seems to come by surprise.  I have lived most of my life, and certainly all of my career, in close proximity with fictional characters, who demand to be believed in, either out of escapist necessity or professional duty.  Most of the time I am off in my own little world, and the fact that that little world is now a historical moment in Antarctica does not, necessarily, make it more real, in relation to my literal present reality, than any movie I've worked on.  I know these guys were real, I have seen film footage of them, and read their handwriting, and, some of them, even met members of their families!  But when I'm up to my elbows in the work, it's easy to give it the part of my brain that suspends disbelief on a production.  Suddenly something will come along that jolts me back to their reality: in this case, a name carved on a physical object by someone who knew them personally.

At the same time, this physical object impressed upon me again just how much time separates their reality and mine.  Originally the cross was painted white, with the incised letters filled in black.  Only a little of the white paint remains in the deepest recesses of what are quite shallow letters, now.  In 1960, when Silas Wright returned and was photographed up here, the wood had already been scoured clean.  His visit was 47 years after the cross was put in place, and 49 years before mine.  The same imagination that conflates historical realities with fictional ones can make those years evaporate, but that is still a lot of years, and erosion, unlike imagination, doesn't lie.

Cherry may have believed that the cross would never move, but it has in fact blown down twice, once in the winter of 1974 and again in 1993.  Its restoration in 1994 was a significant effort: a new concrete "boot" was made for it at Scott Base and delivered to the site by helicopter, and the cross itself was relayed up the hill by teams of helpers.  (You can see photos of the event here, p.44)  I cannot say how moving it is to see such an outlay of resources and enthusiasm by people who never met the Polar Party, to perpetuate their memory.

The cross isn't the only thing to see at the top of Observation Hill, of course – there is everything else.  It turned out to be the perfect way to end my tour of Terra Nova landmarks, not only because it was the last bit of home territory the Terra Nova men themselves visited, but because I could see nearly everywhere I'd been from up here.

As you can see, it was not the greatest day for landscape photography, what with the matte light and the taller mountains being covered with cloud.  But I had not come up here to take pictures.  The sombre atmosphere befitted what I had come to do, which was to remember these men and thank The Powers That Be for the blessings that had been showered upon me in the last few weeks.

The cross faces south, towards their last camp, and the Pole.  This is, of course, a thoughtful and fitting aspect of the memorial.  It also gives the impression of a beacon, a light in a window, a lighthouse on a headland, guiding them home. The men who erected it knew the men were dead.  They are still dead.  We all know this.  But they are still out there somewhere, and it is not impossible to imagine some small irrational part of the human psyche wanting, in some small way, to show them the way back, and call them back by name.

Minna Bluff was covered in cloud, so I couldn't use it as a bellwether, but the wind started to pick up and was colder than before, so I thought I should start heading down again.  The correct trail was obvious from this end, and I poked along it for a little way before everything caught up with me and I sat down to have a little cry.

The cross is a historical artefact, and while it is not as plum or as complex as the huts, it still requires conservation.  Alarmed by the degree of erosion on the lettering, the Antarctic Heritage Trust has devised a shell to protect it from the worst of the winter winds.  That will do something, but it has already lost a lot.  When I was up there, I wondered why it hadn't ever been repainted, as the paint would go a long way to protecting it, and when the paint wore off it could just get repainted instead of eating further and further into the wood.  The raw timber is more harmonious with the environment, and I like it better aesthetically that way, as do many others I'm sure – the white cross with black letters in Debenham's photo from 1913 is very stark and artificial in such a magnificent landscape.  But it would last a lot longer.

On the other hand, generations of Antarcticans now have the cross as a touchstone, not only as their link to the history (not everyone gets to visit Cape Evans)  but as a landmark in their own experience of Antarctica.  It was personally important to the men who painted it white and put it up, but it is also personally important to hundreds, if not thousands, of people since then, who have never seen it white and don't know that's how it started, and might see the repainting as a travesty.  If it were to be conserved, to what extent would that go?  Would the letters be re-carved deeper, obliterating what remains of Davies' original work?  At what point does conservation end and adulteration begin?

The alternative is to take down the original and keep it somewhere out of the weather – Scott Base perhaps – and replace it with a replica.  Jarrah is still available, the letters could be carved afresh, it could be the bare wood everyone has known and loved for the last fifty years at least, and the original could be saved from the effects of weather once and for all.  But doesn't this defeat the intent of the original in some way, and make it – dare I say – a Disneyland version?  Do we owe more to history to keep it as it is and let the elements wear it down, or to preserve it as long as possible and do whatever might be necessary to extend the experience and historical understanding of a place, if not its authenticity?

These are all questions that curators and conservators have been grappling with for years, so I leave it to them to make the decisions.  I am grateful to have seen the original, and to have a moment to myself up there to reflect on these things, and more.  I hope, whatever happens with it in the future, Observation Hill is not de-crossed entirely.  How else will they find the way home?

[wonkaworldwide]

Two things I got for Christmas

Something you may not know about me (and I don’t know why you would because I'm mostly anonymous on this blog) is that I love collecting props from TV shows I like. I own a giant painting from the show Veep that hangs in my bedroom, I own a fake bottle of vodka from House of Cards that they say in the show costs $700,000, and I own a ton of small things from those shows (and Nurse Jackie).

So this Christmas I had some money to spare and I thought to myself: if I love collecting props so much, why don’t I own anything from my favorite movie? Well, the simple answer is that those shows are not extremely popular or widely-watched. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, on the other hand, was the 7th highest grossing movie of 2005. So it’s a lot more expensive owning something from this movie. But I decided it was worth it. Here’s what I got...

The first thing was a prop Wonka bar. I had the option between getting a blue chilly chocolate creme, an orange triple dazzle caramel, or a whipple-scrumptious fudgemallow delight. I chose the chilly chocolate creme one (the caramel one would’ve been my second choice). Apparently each prop Wonka bar actually has a plastic fake bar of chocolate inside. (And whenever I remove that tin foil, I do so like a surgeon as to not wrinkle it or defile it).

The second (and more noteworthy) thing I got was the Wonka Factory Manual and Instruction Book. For those who may not know what exactly this is: when production on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ended, Tim Burton had 1000 of these books created to give to each member of the cast and crew. This book had been on my radar for quite some time, since I fell in love with the movie five years ago. I always dreamed of owning a copy.

So simply put, there’s 1000 of these in existence. I assume everybody involved with production got one: from the stars to the special effects technicians to the producers to construction. The book is basically like a yearbook for the cast and crew, with almost everybody who worked on production getting a funny picture or a sarcastic quip. It’s quite an engaging read and I’m thrilled to have it, and, yes, I will be posting a lot of the book’s contents. It’s too good to keep top secret. (And also yes, this was the book where I got the list of elevator buttons).

Here’s some to tide you over until then. Enjoy!