#I didn't care at all for most of the historic characters

[myfanfictiongarden]

Did I finish watching Rome? Yes.

Was it a good show? No.

Did it have things I liked? Absolutley.

How would I rate it?

Costumes, hairstyles, set design, historic feel: 9/10

Acting: 9/10

Writing: 4/10 (10/10 for everything related to Lucius and Titus, but 3/10 for all historic events)

[britneyshakespeare]

i'm very interested what ppl find to be the harder shakespeare plays and which they found to be easier. bc i was googling out of curiosity and i found a sparknotes article (link if you're curious) that ranked ten of the most commonly-read plays on difficulty and it put king lear kinda down low whereas it put julius caesar pretty high because of the politics/complicated conflicts. that kind of baffled me because julius caesar was the first tragedy i read outside of the classroom and i found it very approachable; it's one i often recommend to people trying to get into shakespeare because the plot is already familiar to most ppl and you can just enjoy the poetry and how shakespeare chooses to characterize these figures. on the other hand i read king lear a few years later in my shakespeare journey, and to be honest i still kind of have a hard time with lear. maybe i just don't connect with it on some level; i'm not sure. it's not a very tightly-organized play where the action is as centered as in the other tragedies like hamlet or macbeth. that's certainly a me thing and maybe that'll change with age. but i'm always a little surprised when i find someone's experience with the plays so much different than mine.

anyway if you're reading this feel free to reblog and tag or comment which shakespeare plays you found yourself falling into most naturally and which worlds you felt like you had to force yourself into. i'm interested in what ppl feel on this subject

[holdoncallfailed]

rpf tier ranking

tier 0: actors. too easy. actors fall in love all the time due to proximity and amount of time spent together, especially if they are playing characters who are themselves in a relationship.

tier 1: bands (post-80s). writing songs together is incredibly intimate and requires emotional vulnerability. tours are great opportunities to spend a lot of time in an enclosed space together. sometimes they will sing into the same microphone at the same time so their mouths are close together which is basically making out if you think about it.

tier 2: bands (pre-80s). see above. however this requires slightly more mental fortitude because a lot of their fans will insist on their heterosexuality and get really mad when you say simon and garfunkel were kissing on each other or whatever.

tier 3: contact sports team. sports can be emotionally intense if you care about that sort of thing and obviously there are a lot of opportunities for intricate rituals wrt touching another's skin and locker rooms and all that. but this requires more imagination because there is less text (i.e. songs or correspondence) to use as evidence.

tier 4: solo artists. this is where things can fall apart. you have to choose both figures in the ship wisely and exercise a decent amount of creativity because they are not compelled to be together all the time (see above). you can cast a wider net but that lack of specificity may hurt those with weaker imaginations. also they don't always write their own songs.

tier 5: historical figures. this varies a lot both in terms of plausibility and social acceptability. depending on how old the figures are you could legitimately turn this into an academic dissertation if you wanted to commit that hard to it. however you may also come up against a lot of opposition among your colleagues. one must be intellectually prepared to present concrete evidence and argue one's point. (however, you are also more likely to convince people b/c the figures are old and dead and can't deny it. and probably didn't know what rpf is.)

tier 5.5: historical figures who have been fictionalized in media. this depends on the tone you take but unfortunately you will always be up against thomas jefferson hatsune miku binder as the starting point for the general public's thoughts on your hobby. so good luck.

tier 6: racecar drivers. if you are into racecar rpf i assume you are capable of seeing colors that are not visible to the ordinary human eye. they are literally in cars. the creativity required to wring a [romantic] narrative from people driving cars around a track is beyond my comprehension.

tier π: living politicians. you are a pariah among even your most deranged peers. no one respects you. you are categorically a weirdo and beyond help.

[hollowed-theory-hall]

For Voldemort, I always considered it like he has a goal (immortality), and a flaw (big ego). If he just wanted to be immortal, he'd make a few horcuxes and be done with it. He could be a recluse and study magic for centuries. But he can't just put pieces of his soul in any container. They've gotta be special, and important, and nothing is as special to old Tom as wizarding history. So he's got the founders' items, and the Gaunt ring, and they need special hiding spots, and so on. Further contrasting his goal, he can't just recluse himself from society, then he can't take over. His own ego and, well, evil-ness, means he makes enemies. This is one of my favorite writing techniques actually, where a character's goal is hampered by their flaws.

I personally think Voldemort is more complicated than this. I mean, I talked in the past about how I don't think he really wanted to live forever, and while, he would have loved to study magic, Tom can't be a recluse (hence why he returned from his world tour eventually).

I think Tom Riddle is someone who is desperate for human connection. I think, one of the things that hampers him the most is actually his need for recognition. his desire that others would know how great he is. He absolutely has an ego and thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread, but he wants everyone to know it too.

But his pride is a weird one. Like, Tom thinks he is the best, but he still considers himself not enough. He has a unique mix of self-hatred, a lot of pride and ego, and a huge dose of general spite that makes his mind fascinating, but also a hazard to everyone around him.

And I think, choosing Founders Artefacts wasn't for pride reasons or for Wizarding History (I think he cares about Magical Theory way more than any other area of magic, but I digress), but for sentimentality reasons (Dumbledore is correct about this assessment). Like Harry, Hogwarts was Tom's first and only home:

“I believe he had several reasons, though he confided none of them to Professor Dippet,” said Dumbledore. “Firstly, and very importantly, Voldemort was, I believe, more attached to this school than he has ever been to a person. Hogwarts was where he had been happiest; the first and only place he had felt at home.” Harry felt slightly uncomfortable at these words, for this was exactly how he felt about Hogwarts too.

(HBP)

I mean, if we look at all the items he chose as Horcruxes the only common denominator is that they were all sentimental to him:

The Diary - something very personal to him that has no historical relevance. Hell, it's a muggle diary that I headcanon he found after WWII reached Britain and that the diary, like him, was a survivor.

The Gaunt Ring - Tom didn't know this was the resurrection stone, all he knew it as was a family ring of a line that lost all it's relevance. It was made into a Horcrux because it's a reminder of his family.

The Cup - a reminder of Hogwarts, his first home.

The Locket - both a reminder of Hogwarts and his family. I think the locket was his favorite Horcrux, hence why he went to all this effort to make proper protections for it while he didn't for the others. I think he cared about what this one represented the most.

The Diadem - again a memory of Hogwarts, but also his own pride. How he found a magical artifact thought to be lost. And he placed it in a similarly prideful location — a room at Hogwarts he thought only he knew about.

Nagini - a snake he felt affection towards, this one was made as a prize for her because he liked her, no other reason.

Most of the Horcruxes didn't have unique hiding spots. I mean, the Gaunt Shack, really? Lucius Malfoy's study (the diary) hardly even counts as a hiding spot. Both the Locket's cave and the Room of Requirement are places that are sentimental for Tom personally. Places that remind him of his own accomplishments. they aren't special for any grand historical reason, they are special for Tom as a person.

So, all in all, I think Tom is much more sentimental than he is prideful. I mean, he is both, but his pride is hampered by perfectionism and self-hate much more than most read him as. Like, part of his ego is that he is unwilling to think less of himself because he hates himself and he hates that he hates himself. Like, I don't think my reading of Tom Riddle is a super popular one, but it's the only one I think makes sense.

So much of his behavior just makes much more sense if you think he is desperate for human connection and recognition from others, especially when younger (with a pretty wrapped view of other people and how friendships work). And is a surprisingly sentimental guy.

[welcometothejianghu]

Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 琅琊榜/Nirvana in Fire.

Nirvana in Fire is a 2015 historical series best described as either a complicated succession drama set in the premodern Chinese imperial palace, or the story of a man who didn't die a decade ago and has decided to make it everyone else's problem.

And really, I almost feel silly giving my glib little summary, because Nirvana in Fire is so well-known of a property. It's a classic for a reason, and that reason is that it's legitimately very good. This show is what happens when you adapt a solid story, get a bunch of very talented actors, and throw a huge amount of money at it. It's incredibly popular and highly acclaimed, and it earned all of the hype.

Still, while I bet there are few people adjacent to c-drama stuff who've never heard of Nirvana in Fire, I'm sure there are plenty who haven't watched it. After all, it looks like one of those slow, serious shows with a lot of ponderous talking and no joy. If that's the impression you've been given, I could imagine looking at the 54-episode commitment and saying, I don't need that in my life.

I am here to tell you you're wrong. It is a banger of a show. It's tense. It's funny. It's heartbreaking. It’s exceptionally clever. It’s jaw-droppingly stupid. It’s romantic. It’s tragic. It has smart plots and bizarre subplots. And that's not even touching the thing with the yeti.

So in case you're one of those people who's heard of Nirvana in Fire, but has put off watching it for one reason or another, I'm here with five reasons I think you should try it.

1. Epic Shit

Did you like the Lord of the Rings? More specifically, did you really like the second Peter Jackson film? Great, then you're all set for this.

I guess I could have called this Game of Thrones without the dragons, but that's not actually the vibe at all. Game of Thrones is much more sensational and salacious, with all the blood and butts and what-not. The Tolkien comparison is more apt, I think, because Nirvana in Fire is equally about as wholesome as you can get in a property where dudes are still getting stabbed all the time.

This is a show about vengeance. And yeah, justice for the fallen, sure, that's fine too. But mostly it's about a bunch of good people joining forces to make sure the bastards who did wrong pay, with their lives as necesary.

The problem, though, is that these bastards are incredibly powerful, which means that a pure brute-force approach isn't going to work. Accordingly, this quickly becomes a story about the power of smart teamwork to exact retribution on some people who can (and did!) legally get away with murder -- and our heroes are some of the people with their necks most on the line if anything goes wrong.

Don't let the Middle Earth comparison fool you into thinking this is all epic swordfights. It's not. (I mean, for one thing, as well-funded as this project is, it doesn't have Peter Jackson Money.) The vast majority of the tension in the show comes from dialogue and slow, terrible realizations. The fight scenes are almost a relief from the nail-biting intensity of intimate conversations about getting a letter from somebody's ex-wife or returning a book.

All told, the show has that incredible almost-RPG vibe of going through all the little subquests and cutscenes you find along the way to defeat the final boss. The plot carefully unravels a multi-tendriled mystery told to you by people in incredible costumes. It doesn't get much more epic than that.

(Nirvana in Fire is also a cautionary tale about how you should be very careful with who gets invited to your birthday party.)

2. A chronically ill protagonist

Okay, right in the first episode, it is established that the main character has three whole completely different names and an old nickname. I'm going to call him Mei Changsu for the duration of this rec post, but let the record show that I could just have easily gone with one of the other three.

What you learn in that same first episode is that Mei Changsu used to be a palace insider, the cocky son of a noble family, only now nearly everyone he used to know thinks he's dead. Also, he's not far off from being actually dead -- he has an unspecified terminal condition that's mostly managed, provided he stays in his little mountain hideaway with his handsome doctor bestie and doesn't return to his old stomping ground and start kicking over hornets' nests.

So guess what he's about to do.

I have to make a note of how brilliant the casting is here: Hu Ge is an action actor! He is a kickpuncher of a man! And I think it's great that you can sort of see his frustration, as well as Mei Changsu's, at having to spend the whole series wrapped in countless layers of fabric and/or lying in bed while everyone around him gets to be the badass action heroes.

Mei Changsu's not faking it, either -- he's actually dying. He expends his energy where he thinks it's necessary, and sometimes that means he has to spend the following week in bed. He's constantly frustrated with himself for what he can't do anymore. He's racing a clock, and that clock is his own failing body. If he dies, the only hope anyone here has for justice dies with him.

He gets two love interests that the show treats pretty much equally. One's a lady general who wasn't even a love interest in the book. The other's the handsome prince who was initially going to be his textual romantic partner in same book, until the author hopped genres from danmei to general historical drama. I can't even call this a love triangle, because there's no competition. He just gets a wife and a husband -- in that he gets neither, because circumstances and his own illness keep him distant from them. He lies to both of then about his condition (among other things). He wants to be with them both and knows he can't be with either. And they in turn have to learn to accept what of him they can and can't have.

(Also, Nihuang (her) and Jingyan (him) are both incredibly gorgeous, which is exactly what bisexual genius Mei Changsu deserves.)

Obviously this isn't a perfect representation of life with chronic illness, largely because Mei Changsu is an incredily wealthy man who lives in a universe with what's basically magic medicine. However, I've seen the story's treatment of him and his condition resonate with a lot of chronically ill viewers, so even with the fantasy layer on it, there's definitely something there.

3. Dave

I have already told the story of how Meng Zhi became "Dave," but long story short, he's such a Dave that I legitimately forget his character's real name. He embodies Daveness. He's The Ultimate Dave.

Dave is an excellent fighter, a loyal friend -- and a terrible liar. He's possbly the only straightforward character in the entire show. When he's asked to be duplicitous, he's comically bad at it. Dave will never do a heel turn. I was misled at first by his semi-evil facial hair, but I have seen the error of my ways. Dave is pure lawful good.

And the reason I list Dave as such a selling point is that having a Dave means you always know what's going on. This is because Dave never knows what's going on, and he has no ego about that, so he asks questions, and other characters have to explain to him what just happened, and that is how you figure out what's going on.

It's an incredibly smart move on the drama's part, because some of the (very fun) schemes are so complicated that there's no way for you, the viewer, to understand them just by watching. Without the internal monologues and omniscent narration of a book, the machinations are opaque. You need things explained -- but why would the schemers explain their schemes? Well, Dave needs some exposition, so here you go.

So if you're worried that you might be left feeling stupid by a show where so many sneaky people are hatching so many complex plans, worry not! Like the good man he is, Dave has your back.

4. A Million Amazing Antagonists

If you like bad guys, this is a show for you. This show has brilliant bad guys all the way down. It has bad guys at every turn. It has bad guys for every taste. Welcome to Big Liang's Big Bad Guy Emporium, where we guarantee you'll walk out of here with a bad guy you like, or your money back!

(And yes, this set of pictures is also to say that their costume budget was entirely well-spent.)

Without getting too far into spoilers, I will say that the basic situation underlying the whole series is this: The emperor has done a lot of bad things, and he has enlisted a bunch of people's help in hiding those bad things, so much so that many of those other people have done even more bad things the emperor didn't even know about -- and then everyone has gone to great lengths to cover those up as well. Our protagonists spend the whole series unraveling this colossal shitshow and bringing people to task for their crimes.

So really, if you're going to spend 54 episodes taking down the baddies, they've got to be baddies you love to see taken down. And these are -- in part because all of them have crystal-clear, rock-solid motivations for their actions. Nobody here is a moustache-twirling comic-book-villain baddie. They're all bad for reasons that are very understandable in their individual contexts. And not a single one of them is going to go down without a fight.

5. World's Best Mom

(Sidebar: The fact that four out of five of my reasons to watch the show are individual or groups of characters should be your strongest indicator that this is an intensely character-driven story.)

This is not a Dead Mom Show. Okay, some moms are dead, but mostly this is a Moms Are Alive And Often Cause Problems Show, which is a lot of what makes the palace drama so delicious. But there is one Good Mom who stands out above all the rest: Consort Jing.

Played with perfect grace and devastating politeness by the stunning Liu Mintao, Consort Jing is a skilled doctor and excellent baker who starts the show with a low-level status among the women of the palace. She swallows down all kinds of mistreatment because she's not in a place to oppose it -- and when she can retaliate, it must only be through soft power. She loves her jock son with all her heart, but because of both their relatively poor positions in the hierarchy, she doesn't get to see him all that much. She wants to be an asset to him, while all the time she has to fear becoming a liability.

She is also the smartest person in any room that she's in, unless she's in a room with Mei Changsu, and even then it may be a tie.

There are lots of great characters in the show that I could have highlighted here, and plenty of them are women, but Consort Jing in particular never ceases to impress me. She is trapped in a gilded cage, married to a man who [lengthy list of spoilers that are traumatic to her in particular], and held hostage by how every time she even looks like she's out of line, it puts both her and her boy in danger. She's the most vulnerable of any of our good guys. Kind of like Wang Zhi, she's got to be clever or she's dead.

Consort Jing is not part of Mei Changsu's original plan. She figures out his plan and makes herself part of it -- and entirely remotely, as she and he aren't even in the same room until episode 40 or so. She puts herself in great danger to make sure he succeeds, not because it will necessarily do her any good, but because Jingyan needs him. This woman has been captain of the Mei Changsu/Jingyan ship for like twenty years already.

Oh, and did I mention her outfits?

I love you, Consort Mom.

Are you ready to watch it yet?

Get it on Viki! Get it on YouTube! Get it on YouTube but in a different playlist! (And also maybe get it on Amazon? Not in my region, but maybe in yours.)

I will warn you that it does take off running -- I think I saw someone say it introduces nineteen characters in the first episode? I was worried that I'd be too innundated by situations and flashbacks and names to be able to follow. By the second or third episode, though, I was rolling with it. So if you feel like you're struggling at the beginning, stick with it a bit. See if you don't feel it start to click.

...Man, reading over this post has left me going, oh, but I missed that! and that! and that guy! And yeah, the truth is that there are just so many great things about the show that limiting myself to only five (and being limited to only thirty images) was tough. I'm sure that people reblogging will add their own must-see elements.

Truly, this is a show that deserves its reputation. It may not be for everyone, but if this is the kind of thing that you like, it is a shining example of that thing.

Besides, you have to love a production where everyone was clearly having just a whole lot of fun being big ol' costumed dorks.

[sugawhaaa]

SEONGHWA X READER

{Chapter one}

Blue paint red apple

Warnings:: mentions of guns and swords/abusive relationship

Pairing:: pirate!Seonghwa x princess!reader

Genre::pirate AU, ur fiance is clearly jealous LOL

A/N::I got this idea from a character of janitor ai so credits for the inspiration: marshwa4! I don't have this story fully planned out but I know it'll work out and PLEASE TRUST ME IT LOOKS SUPER STEREOTYPICAL AND CRINGE BUT JUST READ THE FIRST 3 PARAGRAPHS ITLL GET BETTER‼️

REMINDER‼️ this isn't 100% historically accurate and should be taken with a grain of salt. This story is also set in the late 1800s to early 1900s specifically in Europe but if you want you can imagine it wherever else you'd like, it is a fictional story after all 💗

Park Seonghwa wasn't an uncommon name to hear around the kingdom. It was more of a fairy tale name than anything. Stories of his rebellious and vicious acts travel around villages and kingdoms quickly. He has been seen by many royalty and merchants but rarely caught. Officials estimate that he's killed over 400 people in his 2 years of being a pirate, with the help of his crew of course.

You were much too concerned with your citizens to care about politics and things. Being the second heir to the throne meant that you didn't have to worry about politics or officials, you were worried about your people. You were a big part of one of the children's schools. A few times a week you'd head down to the children's school and teach them some things about being a princess and simply just hang out with the kids. That was pretty much the entire highlight of your life.

Most of the time you spend in your castle. You didn't really have duties to attend to and you didn't have many friends. Most people your age were too scared to talk to you.

You sat in your room painting a massive canvas in a soft green dress, a little apron over your body to protect your expensive dress from getting ruined. You held your palette in one hand and the paintbrush in the other. You step back to look at the entire canvas, a sad sigh escaping your lips. Disappointment in your eyes. The maid in the corner comes to your side.

"Is everything alright princess?" She asks kindly.

"Yes, quite alright," you say as you put down your palette and brush. You take off your apron and hand it to the maid. "I'm going for a walk around the village," you say as you leave your room. You go downstairs to see your fiance and father talking by the doorway. You stop your hurried steps and go down the stairs cautiously and gracefully, switching your persona. "Prince Herrington," you say as you approach your soon-to-be husband. He bows to you and you force yourself to swallow your pride and curtsy.

"Where are you headed?" Herrington asks with his chin up, looking down at you.

"I'm going out to retrieve some…" you paused and tried to speak while looking at his dispiteful face. "Paint," you nod and Herrington looks at you suspiciously.

He stands to the left of the door and holds it open for you. You walk out with a respectful nod towards him before heading for the village streets. You gaze around the streets taking in the Seabreeze and fresh air. You stop by one merchant who seems to be painting. You look at his table to see paints and hand-carved palettes. Once he notices your presence he stands up and bows.

"Princess Y/N, it is an honor," he says as he sits back down. "What can I offer you?" He says eagerly with a smile. You spot one beautiful blue paint and pick up the bottle.

"Could I have this? How much would it be?" You ask kindly.

"Free of cost for royalty," he says with an eager smile. You look at the bottom of the bottle to see £1.75. You toss him two pounds before walking off.

"Keep the change," you smile with a gentle wave. You turn to continue your walk before bumping into someone, stumbling backward from their force. You dust off your dress. "Excuse me," you say with a displeased expression as you look up to see a tanned-skinned man with his hair slicked back. Your lips parted in shock from such an exotic-looking man. He looked down at you with a blank expression.

"Pardon," he says in a rough voice. He leans down slightly to reach your height. "My, aren't you a rare sight," he says as leans closer. Your breath quickens as you step back a little. He picks up an apple from the stand next to you. He takes an aggressive bite as he examines you. You're at a loss for words as he analyzes you, his gaze heavy and lustful.

"Y-You're going to pay for that right," you raise an eyebrow at him and he looks down at the apple, standing up straight again. He tosses it behind him and a short and scruffy man catches it, his teeth gold and rotted as he smiles at the apple.

"And if I don't?" He crosses his arms with a little smirk. You adjust your dress and try to stand tall to him. You open your mouth to speak before stopping. "Cat got your tongue princess?" He chuckles as he looks down at you.

"You will pay for it. I command you to," you frown and cross your arms. He puts his arms down and scoffs.

"You command me to? Oh~ I'm scared," he says as he tosses a few coins to the merchant who stands there distraught.

"You should be," you say before instantly regretting your words, realizing how stupid you sound.

"Oh you're so cute," he chuckles and your cheeks grow pink. His eyes flutter down from your pink cheeks to your neck. His smirk faded to a stern look as he followed the chain around your neck, to the top of your dress, his eyes ever so slightly peering down your dress. You cover your chest and look away from him. He puts his hand on your waist and pulls you close. You gasp and put your hands on his chest. He notices a ring on your ring finger, silver with a blue gem in the center of it. He lets go of your waist and grabs your wrist, examining the ring on your finger.

You look at him sternly and he looks into your eyes. His eyes suddenly avert behind you to see a few soldiers. "I look forward to this," he smirks when the soldiers come up behind you.

"Who is this?" Herrington says in a loud voice, trying to stand his ground. You sigh and turn around to look at your Fiancé. You force a smile as you look at him.

"He's just a man I bumped into by accident," you chuckle with an innocent smile, his hand still wrapped around your wrist.

"Let go of my wife," Herrington says in a strong voice trying to intimidate the man holding you. The man scoffed and let your hand down.

"I'm not your wife," you mumble and the strange man looks at you with curious eyes. Herrington grabs you and examines you carefully.

"Are you alright Y/N?" He says as he runs his hands over your body. You look away from him.

"I'm alright," you say in a lifeless tone. Herrington holds you close to him as a soldier points a gun at the man. You look concerned as they point the gun at him.

"What's with the guns~?" He mocks as he puts his hands on his hips. "I haven't done anything wrong, I paid for my food, I conversed with the princess for a moment, and now I'm on my merry way," he says as he turns around putting his hands up.

"He's right," you nod up at Herrington.

"He's armed!" Herrington calls out and gestures to the sword case on his left hip. The man quickly grabs the sword and points it at the soldiers. The dull wooden tip pointing to their guns.

"It's wood," he chuckles. "I use it to teach kids how to use swords," he laughs and puts the sword back in its case before walking off to find his crew of men who ran away earlier. Herrington encourages you to come back with him to the castle as he reminds you to never go outside without protection. As you walk back you look down at your ring, the blue gem glistening in the sunlight.

[Time skip]

That night you lay in bed. Your hand is raised above your head as you admire the ring. A maid rolls in a tray with tea and biscuits on it. "I heard about your encounter with Seonghwa earlier today," the maid says as she waits for you to sit up. You fix your nightgown and look at her surprised.

"Seonghwa? Like the pirate?" You ask confused as she offers you the teacup.

"Yes, princess. I was told by Prince Herrington that he was holding you in the street, interrogating you," she says in a worried tone as you take a sip of your tea.

"He didn't seem like Seonghwa, I thought he was just some man," you say as you look at the specs of leaves in your tea. "He was very well dressed for a pirate," you explain before looking at the maid. She takes your cup and offers you a small plate of biscuits. "I guess that explains his inappropriate behavior," you sigh before taking a bite of the biscuit.

"Oh? If you don't mind me asking, princess, what did he do?" The maid sits next to you on the bed. You clear your throat and prepare to speak.

"He looked down the top of my chest," you say as you rub your upper chest and the maid's eyes widen.

"Oh my," she gasps. "How vile, I'm so sorry for you," she says as she places her hand on your leg comfortingly. You shrug and pick up the teacup. "Well, you need to get some rest for your big day tomorrow. I'll be in my room if you need anything," she says before wheeling the trolls back out to the hallway, closing the door behind herself. You finish your tea and look at the canvas in the corner of your room. How different things would be if you hadn't gone out today, if you hadn't got mad at your painting, what would've happened? You sigh blow out your candle and lie down.

Your mind races with the memories of Seonghwa. His eyes, his touch, his voice when he spoke to you, the way his body was drawn to you like a magnet, his lips inches from yours. You daydreamed about someday meeting him again...

[dulc3vida]

you.

rafe cameron x bunny!reader

part 1. this is my au so don't think too much about canon lore. characters, times, events, ect... might not match but PLEASE JUST ENJOY THE STORY PLEASE JUST GIVE IT A CHANCE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASe

warning: 18+ read at your own risk. this is a dark fic loosely inspired by the tv show you. dubious content lies ahead, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

UNC Chapel Hill: September, Sophomore Year

there was nothing rafe cameron hated more than being tutored. it made him feel stupid, needing someone to explain and break down concepts that others understood easily. ward used to lose his mind trying to find rafe new tutors because in all honesty, when rafe felt cornered or helpless, he got nasty. saying the rudest things that made these well-paid, private tutors basically discard a paycheck, was one of the first times rafe ever felt true power. the first time he ever came close to knowing what his dad felt like, even though his dad had a much better reputation than rafe ever would.

rafe especially hated english. the books were boring and he could never be bothered to sumbit more than a half baked essay regarding the text. that's how he ended up in the study room in the library sitting across from you. he remembered you from class, the TA. you always sat besides prof. callahans desk and you looked younger than any TA he had ever had, probably even his age. your face was familiar but rafe couldn't put his finger on it. you were clean, you smelled good, and your nails were done which meant you had the time and money to take care of that kind of thing when most college students forget to feed themselves. you occasionally looked up from the signup sheet as the minutes ticked 5 past 3pm, where only rafe's name was signed.

"i guess we can start now." you mumbled, flipping your notebook open. "this weeks quiz is going to cover part 1 of crime and punishment. have you... started the reading?"

rafe's hard gaze bored into yours and he shook his head without another word. he was thinking about how cute and neurotic the way you had your notes organized was and how soft you spoke to him. were you scared of him? rafe was intrigued.

"okay, no biggie. we can just start there. did you check out a copy of the book?" you asked, pulling out your own copy that was bursting at the seam with sticky notes and colored tabs. again, rafe wordlessly shook his head. "good thing we're in the library. come on, let's go see if they have any left."

rafe followed close behind you, you could practically feel him breathing down your neck as you walked through rows of books before finding the one you were looking for. you showed rafe how to check a book out before returning to the study room. "okay. let's start."

you began dissecting the book from the very beginning, soft voice describing the historical context of the book. rafe was surprised at how well he was keeping up. it didn't hurt that you were cute, nose all blushed and button, scrunching up whenever you couldn't read your own handwriting in your notes. a pair of clear framed glasses sat on the bridge of your nose which you constantly adjusted due to your eyelashes hitting the glass. you had a habit of licking and biting your lips, applying lipgloss on every "brain break" as you called it. maybe all this time, all he needed was a cute tutor that he could stand looking at.

in between writing notes and flipping through the book, he caught glimpses of a "j" necklace dangling in your cleavage. did your name start with a j?

"what's your name?" rafe asked once the two of you began packing your things up. it was now 7:30 with the sun beginning to set. you told him and he repeated it under his breath.

"my friends call me bunny though." if you're bunny, who is j? you tossed your bag over your shoulder and let your hair down from the claw clip that was holding it up. it billowed over your shoulders and you tucked a few stray strands behind your ears after taking your glasses off. you weren't the shy good girl he met at the beginning of the session, no, you were different. good girl in front of everyone but he knew there was another energy in you that he wanted- no he needed to see. rafe watched you leave, staying a few steps behind, where he could comfortably watch you and before he knew it, you were jumping into the passenger side of a beat up old brown van that pulled up, and leaning over to give whoever was driving a kiss.

rafe felt a familiar, red hot anger wash over him. the first time he felt that anger was when sarah was born and ward wouldn't stop fawning over her. ward basically forgot he had a son when sarah was born which made rafe incredibly insecure. that insecurity built a home inside rafe's heart, where any little inconvenience could turn it into an ugly monster with sharp teeth and a desire to tear everything in sight into fucking pieces. this time, the monster was awakened at the reality of you having a boyfriend.

against his better judgement, rafe ran to his truck the second you took off, speeding down the road he saw you drive down. it took him a minute, but he managed to find the shitbox on wheels you were riding around in. he made sure to stay far enough away to where it didn't seem suspicious, but close enough to where he wouldn't lose you again.

he wouldn't lose you again.

he repeated that phrase to himself as he drove into jacksonville and while he parked his car a few spaces from the van in a place where your little group was fully visible. you came to the beach. there was 3 guys, 1 girl, and you. gone were your leggings, tank top, and cardigan. instead, you donned a pair of cutoff jean shorts, a bikini top, and a huge smile on your face as you settled yourself in the blonde boys lap.

rafe thought he recognized the group you were with, but he was hoping his eyes were just playing tricks. of course, it could never be that simple because rafe did know them. the pogues. what were they doing on the mainland? he hadn't seen them in a while and was getting used to not having to see or smell them other than when he went home for holidays.

jj, he knew worked in the cafeteria ever since he graduated earlier in the spring, which is probably how he met you. rafe had never been fond of jj, in fact, rafe lived to antagonize jj back on the island (if he cared for the cafeteria food, he would probably be in there a lot more to mess with him) so him having you felt like poorly timed karma. to be completely honest, rafe hadn't expected such a dramatic shift of power dynamics when coming to college because now there was at least 10 other rafe's who were dating the girls he should have been dating. he did just fine at parties, more than fine, but he was starting to get tired of drunk girls who just lied there all limp and sweaty or threw up on his dick (happened twice freshman year and he didn't enjoy it like he thought he would). the first decent, eligible girl he meets is getting her pussy dug out by jj maybank of all people and it felt like someone, somewhere was laughing at his misfortune. it almost made him want to give up on you.

almost.

he would never let jj maybank win at anything, let alone your heart. there was just something about you that he couldn't let go. the only thing he couldn't figure out was why everyone else was here too? none of them had a chance of getting into chapel hill. you either had to have perfect grades, be incredibly wealthy, or be a legacy student. thankfully, rafe managed to be 2/3 of those things.

rafe sat back in his seat and just observed you. he cracked his windows open and tried to listen to your conversation but he was too far to hear anything other than laughter and unintelligible voices. he pulled his phone out and typed your name into instagram, easily finding your very public page.

rafe decided to do some digging. he would start at the bottom. scrolling all the way back through a very curated feed (rafe could tell you pick and choose which of your old posts get to stay up and which ones ruin the feed) rafe felt his heart sink.

he knew you.

OBX: Summer 2018

"come on, bunny, i don't wanna go without you." your friend, esther, pleaded. she had been invited to rafe camerons party, a coveted event where anything and everything happened. esther was dating rafe's friend kelce, who invited her to the party.

"you're not even gonna talk to me so what's the point in going." you responded, filing your nails while you laid in bed.

"honestly, when's the last time you really went out? you only ever go to the country club and don't say your parents make you because last time you weren't even with your parents."

"well, the old men buy me drinks if i talk to them and make them laugh. sometimes they give me money. one of them gave me this tiffany bracelet." you stuck your wrist out to show off the silver bracelet with the heart tag which was branded with the company's insignia.

"that's kinda gross." esther scrunched her nose. you only shrugged your shoulders.

"so is going to a party at rafe camerons house. jungle juice is probably roofied" rafe had been the stereotypical jock douchebag who only hung out with other jocks, cheerleaders, or other impossibly gorgeous girls. you saw right through him which is why you never caved. not when he invited you to his lunch table, not when he asked you out, not when he tried to grind against you on the dancefloor at junior prom and called you a bitch when you pushed him away. at some point, rafe stopped trying trying with you and turned his attention and "where my hug at?" energy towards other girls who were much more susceptible.

"so we'll pregame. just please don't make me go alone." in a flash, esther sat on top of you and pinned your arms down while a string of "please, please, pretty please with a cherry on top!" tumbled out of her mouth.

"OKAY!" you had enough, but were still giggling. "i'll go, just get off of me so i can change."

"yay!" esther rolled off of you. "wear the black one, the one that makes you look slutty."

"aren't we supposed to be getting you laid?" you asked, looking through your closet that was practically overflowing with expensive name brands.

esther looked down at her hands. "me and kelce already..."

"no way. really?" she nodded and you squealed rushing over to hug her. "babe i'm so proud of you! wait- why do you need me there then?"

"its the first time i'm meeting his friends and i'm nervous." she explained, now looking through your clothes with you. "i need a buffer, yknow, a cute friend who can keep my boyfriends friends occupied."

you blinked. "so basically, you're whoring me out?"

"you just told me that you talk to old men for money and gifts."

"yeah and they don't even get to see me in my little black dress."

when you arrived at the party, it was in full swing. rafe caneron's parties had a reputation. booze flowed, drugs were shared, and there were enough rooms in the house for every couple to get busy in. it was the perfect haven for teen delinquency.

you were unimpressed, as per usual, with rafe's antics. he had been in the pool when you arrived, a girl on either side of him while he smoked a joint.

"how long do i have to stay?"

"until you start enjoying yourself."

you went to the bar. grabbing a red solo cup, you mixed yourself a drink of cherry vodka and coke. you chugged it, always having the attitude that when it came to alcohol you had to get right to the point. when you finished it, you made yourself another one.

"excuse me." a hand gently placed itself on the small of your back which made you jump. "my bad, didn't mean to scare ya- hey you're esthers friend right?" it was topper. "i just saw her with kelce. i'm topper." he stuck his hand out.

"bunny." you took it.

"whatcha got there?"

"chery vodka and coke."

"nah nah nah- you like the cherry vodka?" you nodded and he took your cup from you. "let me make you a drink."

"okay." you watched his every move as he fixed cherry vodka, cranberry juice, and lime in a brand new cup. "thank you. what is this?"

"it's called a cherry bounce. cheers to you, bunny. hopefully this isn't the last time i see you."

you only smiled at him, tight lipped and gently tapped your cup against his before taking a drink. "topper, this is really good. make me another?"

"you're not even done with that one yet." with that, you drank the rest of your cup. "okay, party girl." he took your cup back and fixed you another. "you wanna dance?"

you hated to admit it, but you actually were having a good time with topper. he was funny, kind, nice to look at, and he was a good dancer. the night was going so good, until esther invited you and topper to sesh with her, kelce, and rafe as the party died down.

it wasn't the sesh that was bad, no, you even managed to be polite and sociable with rafe. it was after the sesh when your drinks had caught up with you and you needed to pee. "esther can you show me where the bathroom is?" you asked but it fell on deaf ears as esther and kelce were mouth fucking.

"c'mon. i'll show you." rafe got up and began walking inside the house without another word. you quickly followed, only wanting to relieve your bladder and be alone for a few minutes to gather yourself and your thoughts that were racing on account of the sativa blunt you had just smoked.

rafe walked up the stairs, basically torturing your bladder with every step until he got into his room. "just use this one."

you were too desperate to argue about whatever his intentions were bringing you here so you went in and almost tripped over yourself getting to the toilet. you made it through, no accidents happening and feeling a lot more gone than when you walked up the stairs.

you stepped back into rafes room and he was sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for you. "you okay? you were in there for a while."

"yeah." you stumbled over to sit next to him but he got up and went to his window. "just a little dizzy."

"everyone fell asleep." rafe watched his friends make themselves comfortable on the outside couch on this hot summer night. you climbed over his bed and looked out the window at the sight of your friend asleep on her boyfriend's chest and topper asleep, hugging a pillow.

"do i get a prize?" he cocked his head at you. "for being the last one awake at a rafe cameron party?"

"what do you want?" rafe asked you seriously and you sighed, lying back against his navy blue sheets.

"for you to not be such an asshole." you murmured and stared at the ceiling. "i mean, you're really cute but you ruin it by being... you."

"i knew you had a thing for me." rafe must have only heard half of what you were saying because he was taking his place back next to you on his bed. "c'mere." he patted his lap and it didn't take much more coaxing than that to get you crawling into his lap. he positioned himself the way he wanted you, straddling him with your crotch right on top of his. "been waiting for you to finally come around." he trailed his hands up and down from your waist to your ass. "y'gonna let me inside that pretty pussy babe?" rafe whispered in your ear, sending all your intoxicated arousal straight to your core.

if you had been in a clearer state of mind, you would have never even been in rafe's room, but here you were letting him guide your hips to grind against you through the thin layer of your black lacy panties. your short dress had already ridden up your thighs, exposing you even more than you already were.

unexpectedly, rafe tugged the top of your dress down and leaned down to take a nipple into his mouth. when he grazed his teeth against your sensitive, hardened peak, you gasped and jolted against him. "rafe." you whispered, trying to get his attention because your head was spinning. instead, his hand found a place between your legs and pushed your panties to the side, dragging his fingers through your folds and spreading your wetness. he used it to rub your clit in circles, encouraged by your whimpers in his ear. "oh rafe..." you felt your orgasm building quickly due to your drunken state, but you also felt a pit building in your stomach. this felt wrong.

you blinked and you were on your back. your dress had found a place across your stomach and your panties were torn off of you without your knowledge. you closed your eyes, hoping if he thought you were asleep that he would just stop.

of course, things would not be that simple.

while your eyes were closed, rafe got undressed and slipped a condom over his cock. he grabbed a pillow and placed it under your hips to prop your pussy up for him at the perfect angle. he took his cock and tapped it against your clit. "wake up, sleepy girl." you only whined and tried to close your legs but he forced himself between them so you couldn't.

your eyes snapped open when you felt the intrusion of his cock. "uhhh..." you let out a mixture of a moan and a whine. the stretch burned because no matter how wet you were, rafe was objectively big, especially the mushroom tip of it. you didn't know if it was the liquor, the weed, or what, but you could basically picture what it looked like based on the way it felt inside you.

rafe gave you no time to adjust and set a punishing pace off the bat. he had one of his large hands splayed over your stomach, pushing down and making you let out a short, loud moan. "let me hear you. wanna hear how good i fuck this pussy." rafe grunted while thrusting in and out.

you, in your state, were incredibly embarrassed no matter how good he hit your spots so you were barely letting any noise escape your mouth.

"always playing hard to get... you're gushing around my cock... and making a mess on my sheets... but you still act all stuck up..." rafe spat at you through his teeth and you let out another high pitched whine. he punctuated each word with a hard thrust, his balls now slapping your ass with vigor. "gotta put you in your place, huh?"

he flipped you over and pulled you onto all fours. his hand splayed across your back this time and pushed your chest into the bed, creating a beautiful arch to your back. "so fuckin pretty." he moaned when the slid back into your tight warmth. the change of position did nothing to help you hold onto the little composure you had as he was now deeper than before, mushroom tip generously rubbing against your g-spot and his balls now smacking your clit. you were too far gone to care how you looked throwing your hips back against his. "fucking slut." he grunted, grabbing a handful of your hair. "y'wanted this huh? yeah, yeah, you been needing this huh?"

you could only moan as he painfully gripped your hair and pushed himself balls deep, rolling his hips against yours. "you like the way i fuck you baby?"

"mhm..." you had your eyes closed as you focused on the tension building in your stomach. a heavy hand landed a smack against your ass.

"use your words. you like my cock?"

"i love it..." you desperately moaned out.

"good girl." rafe pushed your head back into the bed and drilled his cock into you brutally. you were struggling to hold your hips up, but rafe held you up with one arm. "fuck... m'gonna cum. y'gonna let me cum in this pussy?" rafe grunted and pulled out, sliding the condom off before thrusting back into you. "there we go." he spoke through gritted teeth. "thatagirl, pussy feels like heaven."

you felt the difference and opened your mouth to protest but all that came out was unintelligible pants and moans.

then you saw white.

your orgasm washed over you, making your pussy clench and flutter and cream around rafes cock. you felt rafes hips stutter against yours and then you felt hot ropes of cum paint your insides. you couldn't stop moaning because rafe was still inside you, slowly thrusting and rubbing your clit. "so fucking tight..." he commented as he watched the way your pussy suctioned his cock and pulled out.

against your knowledge, rafe had been recording since he got you in doggy and was still recording. "shit..." he groaned as he focused the camera on your glistening pussy. a drop of his cum came dribbling out and he pushed it back in, earning a soft "ahhh..." from you. he played with your sensitive cunt until you came again for the camera and passed out.

when you woke up, you were alone. for a brief moment, you hadn't remembered what happened and were just confused as to where you were. you peered around the room and saw your dress and torn panties and it all came rushing back. the drinks, the sesh, having sex with rafe cameron. he must have changed you because you didn't remember putting on one of his shirts or sweats.

you checked your phone and your parents had been blowing you up since 8am. it was noon. you had missed calls from esther and a series of texts that said she couldn't find you in the morning and hopes you made it home safe. "shit." you groaned and got out of bed, legs sore from the sex you could only remember flashes of. you tidied the room up and changed back into your clothes before walking downstairs with your heels in hand. you slowed as you reached the foyer, hearing voices from the parlor.

"i don't know dude, doesn't feel right to watch this."

"she was totally cool with it, c'mon."

"you're gonna wanna see this."

you recognized the voices as topper, rafe, and kelce. then a video began playing and at first it just sounded like porn, then you realized it was your moans streaming through rafes phone.

"you like the way i fuck you?"

"mhm..."

"use your words. you like my cock?"

"i love it..."

"good girl."

you felt sick to your stomach as you heard the boys commenting on the video. how could you be so stupid? of course rafe would record you without permission while you were off your ass last night. you only blamed yourself as you walked home from tannyhill.

the video followed you around over the summer and you only managed to escape it when you went off to college.

rafe never thought twice about you after that.

JACKSONVILLE: Present.

rafe stared at your instagram feed in utter disbelief. he hadn't thought about you or the video since that summer. he honestly forgot it even happened. he wasn't a douchebag, he was a handsome young man who took all the opportunities presented to him (as he told himself). was sending the video around immature and stupid? probably. he was a kid though. everyone makes mistakes, or at least that's what he tried to tell himself as he looked through old pictures of you. did you remember him? you must have. you looked different from the last time he saw you but he looked the same. you definitely knew who he was the second he came into the study room and he didn't know how to feel about that. it made his job easier and harder. he already had a connection with you, but he would have to go through a grueling apology process that he really didn't care for. he just needed to have you.

as he scrolled into the more recent stuff, he couldn't help but notice that you didn't post jj on here at all. the page was a monument to you, all the better, and you were gorgeous on here. 2k followers with 1k likes on every post you made and comments that varied from "you're so gorgeous" to "just give me one chance." you had a highlight titled "my <3" and there was only one picture of you holding jj's hand with the song "melting" by kali uchis which was posted only a month ago.

he left your profile and went into his camera roll, into the hidden folder and scrolled back to 2018. he found the video and pressed play, his cock getting hard immediately and straining against his pants. soon enough, he had his phone pressed to his ear and his hand down his pants as he watched you and kie gathering firewood. soon enough, he was cumming in his hand to the sound of you saying that you loved his cock.

rafe managed to clean up a little and continued to watch you, well into the night as you and your friends built a bonfire and smoked a joint. it was midnight when you all had decided to leave. he followed the dirty old van back to campus and learned where your dorm was, watching you and jj head in.

rafe made it back to his dorm at around 3:30am. the more he learned, the more questions he had. rafe fell asleep with only one thing on his mind.

you.

[yamisnuffles]

DATV Spoiler Free Review

I beat Veilguard a couple days ago and have had some time to let it settle in my brain. So, without getting into the nitty gritty and more spoilery things, here are my overall feelings on the game.

The Great:

The world itself. The scenery. It was really gorgeous and felt fully alive in a way that none of the previous games have quite managed. Since it wasn't as open world as DAI nor as narrow in scope as DA2 (nor as old as DAO lol), it felt more vital. Definitely a place where the advances in graphics helped, I'm sure.

The Good:

The companions. I wouldn't say any of them blew me away but they all at least ranged from enjoyable to very good. I definitely had my quibbles here and there but I think they were all pretty solid. As such, though I've only done one romance, I'll suppose they're all good. A bit... sparse in my experience and from what I've been hearing, but nice enough.

Overall, I also think the story was pretty good. Like much in this game, nothing that blew me away, but solidly compelling.

Also, mechanically, the gameplay and the glamour system. It still doesn't feel like DA to me but it was enjoyable once I got used to it. It works well with how I play games. And it was nice to just set looks for myself and my companions and not worry about stats vs appearance.

Rook. I have some definite Complaints, and so this point is probably closer to the good to mid range, but they did a pretty good job with letting you pull in your faction stuff. I'm prevented from saying great because it feels like, even with what are supposed to be rougher dialogue choices, you're limited to being mildly pleasant.

The Mid:

The music. This is tragic to me because every previous game had some really standout songs and DAI especially was such a solid soundtrack. I love soundtrack music. Also because Hans Zimmer! I love Hans Zimmer. But the entire thing felt very generic epic fantasy to me. It wasn't bad but it didn't feel good. The only times I ended up moved by the music was when they lifted DAI songs.

The lack of imports. It wasn't the end of the world but did make some cameos feel really off. And for all the talk of making what few things were imported matter, that really didn't feel like the case at all (unless you were in a specific subset of players). I didn't care too much, but it was just enough to make things feel weird, especially with characters like Harding who are so attached to previous stuff.

The Bad:

The world felt so sanitized. I have no issue getting rid of real life bigotry that makes so sense in the context of the world. For example, the sexism in DAO especially made no sense. That said, there was a lot of in world nastiness that is just... gone. The game does a lot of telling us the elves have it bad but doesn't show it. No one bats an eye at a Tevinter mage running about outside of Tevinter. No one cares about a Qunari in occupied Treviso. I suppose it's not the worst thing in the world but it feels weird, especially when it's so central to Solas' motivations.

This sanitization carried on through pretty much everything. All of the factions are presented as good and heroic, even the ones that are historically pretty shady. Your companions are all pleasant and palatable. They have the occasional minor squabble but even when they almost have actual beef, it's solved super easily. You might get some disapproval for decisions but companions never seem to much care or hold it against you, even on really big things. I don't need DA2 levels of interparty drama but, boy did I want a bit more tooth sometimes.

The Awful:

I can't get into it without spoilers but it did a Thing that Bioware sometimes likes to do that I absolutely loathe. This is definitely personal but it ruined some of my desire to replay.

Overall:

I'd give the game a 7/10 or maybe 6/10, depending on how I'm feeling. It was enjoyable for the most part but it had so many things that felt like splinters. Lots of little things that stuck under my skin and bothered me. Would I recommend it? Genuinely depends on the person.

[blue-sadie]

I love your neteyam x goddess oneshot but can I please ask for God neteyam x offering reader where each month he gets offered a woman but he's never interested intill she's offered and there's smut involved 🙏

Offering To The Gods

God Neteyam x Offering Reader

Summary: neteyam god of predator and prey is not easily pleased by most but you all you have to do is beg

Warning: begging, tsireya is not the chiefs daughter in this, aged up characters Outfit

Yn/3rd person pov

It was always seen as a blessing to be chosen for an offering for the gods but it wasn't it's was sickening to you and to some of the other girls here.

Each offering they would dress up in the littlest amount of clothing and send her into the woods and wait to receive a sigh from which ever god took her.

The village has received many gifts from the gods all except one, neteyam god of animals predators and pray he was not an easy one to please.

Each one of the girls bragged that they would be the one to be picked by him but in some cases they weren't picked at all and lift for dead in the woods.

The village was bustling in preparation for tomorrow's offering most families showing off their daughters and their 'beauty'.

"Who do you think is tomorrow offering is" my friend tsireya murmured as she stuck to my side as we weaved through the crowd.

"I really don't care I think I'm gonna skip the festival anyway" I said glancing at her we made our way to our usual spot that we always sit in when they announce the poor unfortunate soul.

Our spot was on top of a small shed close to the podium so we can see the families reaction when they know that they'll never see their daughter again.

"Its kinda sad really" I paused taking a bit of my apple "they brag about their daughter but when their chosen they think it's the end of the world".

We both laughed and watched as all the villagers crowded around the podium wanting to be first in line "look there's fra'na" tsireya laughed.

She was the bitches of them all saying how she is gonna be the only one to be chosen by neteyam and how all of us would be left for dead.

"This months offering is" the announcer paused as she drew out a name and gasped as she saw the name, the people beside her peaked and their eyes widened.

"Its the chiefs daughter" I muttered taking another bite of my apple "t-this months offering is yn" my choked on my apple coughing historically.

"What" I choked out falling off the roof as people in the crowd looked shocked everyone knew of my opinions and didn't even know if I would go.

"My daughter excepts" my mom called out making me look at her like she was a mad woman "what" I yelled.

She then grabbed and dragged me back to our family's hut praising me and telling me what needs to be done.

She pushed me into the bathroom locking the door "make sure you wash everywhere and wash your hair nicely" she shouted through the door.

I sighed heavily and got into the steaming water in the bath groaning as the water relaxed my muscles.

I leaned my head back against the tub slowly closing my eyes but when I did flashes of neteyam ran through my mind but they weren't of his statutes or stories.

He was shirtless and breathing heavily his hands running all over his body his face covered in a light blush.

"Yn" he groaned I jerked out of the daze as he eyes met mine, my chest heaving I shook my head angrily I can't let this get to me.

I started scrubbing my skin and washing my hair, only getting out the water when it was about to turn cold.

I dried my skin and put my hair up into a bun before putting my clothes on "are you done in there sweetheart" my mom called "yes mom I'm done" I huffed.

She opened the door to expose her and 4 of her friends holding different bowls and other weird things "no" I muttered shaking my head.

But she ignored my protests and dragged me to a chair and her and her friends got right to work on 'pretting' me up.

One of her friend applied a face mask, another one did my hair brushing it intently and two of them painted symbols to my skin.

"This is what you are wearing" my mom smiled but my jaw immediately dropped "no ways in hell am I wearing that it's not even clothes" I shouted out.

She gave me a death glare "you are and that's final" she muttered.

"This is what most girls wear" one of her friends pointed out "hey do you remember eir'a she wasn't wearing anything" another laughed.

They continued to tell stories till sunset and hesitantly said giving me one last look before they left.

Mom smiled widely giving me the creeps "I still don’t see how they still allow this stupid tradition" I muttered walking up to my room and shutting the door with annoyance.

I flung myself onto the bed and stared up at my ceiling 'tomorrow is gonna be torture' my village was one of the small few that still participated in the tradition.

And didn't take any of it lightly, tomorrow I will be offered at dawn and I can't see anyone outside my immediate family not even tsireya.

But as I started to drift off to sleep I was thinking up a plan to escape.

-Next day-

I woke up early and started putting my plan into action, I put on the excuse of clothing and put my hair into a bun hiding a small carving knife inside.

"Once I get inside I'll carve a spear and pray like he'll i can make it out the other side" I explained to myself making sure that the knife is not visible.

"Ok my sweet time to go" she smiled and led me out the house to the edge of the village "please tell me your not planning anything" she asked as we neared her family.

"Nope nothing" I lied smiling and giving my family a small wave "aw you grow up so fast" my aunt cries giving both my cheeks a kiss.

My uncle pulled me into a hug "remember what I taught you" he whispered and that was it for the goodbyes.

"Remember me will you" mom murmured as she squished my cheeks together "sure I will mom" I gave her a half smile and turned to the forest.

I took a deep breath giving one final glance to my family before walking into the jungle, this part everyone said it's a game for the gods.

Kind of like whoever hunts her down first gets to keep her but the offering also has to survive the predators of the jungle.

As soon as I was beyond view I took the carving knife out and started making a spear to protect myself before I go further into the jungle.

I grasped the spear tightly and carefully started to move in no one has ever returned to the village people just know some die because of their screams.

"I can do this" I muttered and started sprinting I had to get to the other side before nightfall or at least find a spot for a camp.

The forest was quiet no other sounds other then the floor crunching under my feet as I ran I kept my breathing slow so I didn't run out of breathe so quickly.

Keeping my gaze ahead "look at her" I fell panicking as I looked around my surroundings where was that coming from.

"They always do that" the voice laughed, I just shook off the shock and took off running again "they never do that though".

The voices seemed to follow wherever I go and I try to not look back 'it's probably a trick' it was soon becoming dark and there was no place to make camp.

'A tree will have to do' I sighed coming to the nearest tree slipping the spear through the skirt gaps so i won't lose it making sure it was secure.

Started climbing up "look she's a monkey" "will you shut up" I shouted climbing higher and higher in till I was 30 meters up.

Shifting on the branch to find a comfy spot "make sure you don't fall" the voice called out from down below making me roll my eyes.

My kept shifting uncomfortably the jewels making it impossible to sleep "maybe I should continue running" I whispered and slowly made sure I didn't make a noise as I climbed down.

"I'm surprised you made it this far" I screamed jerking towards the voice my eyes widening at the sight of neteyam.

I tried to speak but all that I could get out where squeaks "your actually the only one that gets this far all the others just sit by the river and gaze at their completion" he chuckled.

"And your the only one to make a weapon" he gestured to the spear on my back I looked to the side do I really want this or make a run for it.

"There is no end to the jungle" he said stepping closer and with each step closer I took one back till I was pressed up against the tree.

"I'm not gonna hurt you yn" he whispered staring deeply to my eyes "h-how do you know my name" I stuttered out making him laugh and shake his head.

"I'll explain it all to you if you take my hand" he murmured putting out his hand for me to take, I bit my looking looking between him and his hand and hesitately took it closing my eyes.

I felt the wind blow around me and like a zap it disappeared "you can open your eyes now" he chuckled, I slowly opened my eyes which flattered to adjust to the light.

I gasped we weren't in the forest anymore but a gold palace filled with different animals "wow" I stood in aww watching as different parrots flew from the ceiling out the window.

"This is my home, now come we have much to discuss" he beamed and gently started to lead me through the palace.

"This is our bedroom" he smiled pushing open the double doors I paused as he walked inside making him let go of my hand which made him turn to me.

"Our bedroom" I asked he gestured for me to follow him but I just shook my head looking down at the floor.

"I know that you hate this tradition but I'm not gonna try anything I hardly sleep in this room anyways" he murmured taking ahold of my hand again.

"Now please let me explain this to you" he said and when I slowly nodded he took me inside the room it was like a jungle inside it looks like we were teleported back.

There was trees that had cabinets carved out and the bed was hanging from the ceiling over a small circlure pond.

"Here we go" he smiled leading me over to a small table and chairs "now can you please explain" I said sitting down and watching him as he sat opposite me.

"You believe in soulmates right" he questioned "to some extent yes" "well the reason for a god chosing an offering because she is his soulmate".

I did not believe that for one second, I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms "yn the reason I said our room is because you've been here before" he muttered.

My throat felt dry after he said that "what" I choked "yn the only reasons god pick their offerings is because it's their soulmate reincarnated".

My mind started to fill with thoughts "every time your offered you always hide a carving knife and plan to escape the other side" he said getting up from his chair coming to stand infront of me.

"You always hate this tradition and your always friends with tsireya" he whispered kneeling infront of me "d-does that means she's a gods soulmate to" I ask.

He noded "my brothers" he gently grabbed both of my hands "no matter how many times you come back to me I always find a new way to love you".

My heart flattered at his words and my heart started to feel a longing for his "can we please take this slow and steady" I murmured He nodded eagerly "I'll wait an enternity".

-A month later-

I started to become more comfortable around him and slowly started to let him sleep in the bed with me he was patient every step of the way.

"Good morning my love" he rasped as he pecked my cheek as he cuddled into me further I was wide awake biting my lip.

I wanted him I don't know why I felt like this but I needed him "what's wrong" he asked and carefully turned me towards him my eyes glancing between his and his lips.

"I-I wanna kiss you" I admitted "I wanna- no I want you" I blurted out making him groan out but not in annoyance it sounded like pleasure.

He chuckled "then all you have to do is beg" he murmured making a deep blush settle on my cheeks "w-what" I stuttered he took my chin into his two fingers and brought my face closer to his.

"Beg" he muttered my eyes flattered "I u-um please can you take me" I whispered "louder I can't hear you" he teased "fuck please just I need you" I pleaded.

"Then you can take me baby" he growled and brought his hand to caress my cheek and pull me into a kiss.

His tongue ran over my bottom lip before making it way inside my mouth twisting around mine my moans were muffled by his lips as he slowly moved me on top of him.

"Wait wait" he pulled back and stared at me intently "are you ready" he asked "y-yes" I whispered nervously "I need you to be 100% yn no 59 70 I need you 100%" he muttered.

I smiled down at him he's so caring I brushed his cheek with my hand "I'm a 100% neteyam" I murmured and gasped as he switched our position so he was on top.

"I was hoping you said that" he growled before attaching his lips to my neck sucking harshly surely leaving a mark.

I whined as his hands tore off my clothes and his leaving us bare he pulled back his eyes slowly dragging down my body.

"You never disappoint" he growls out moving his lips to my breasts "f-fuck neteyam" I moaned I looked down past his head and gaped at his cock as it twitched and sparkled with precum.

"Please just fuck me neteyam" I begged his eyes snapped to mine as he pulled back "whatever my goddess needs" he grins and he positioned himself infront of my entrance.

Kissing me as he slowly pushed in, I groaned at the pain but he quietly shushed me and praised me making my heart flatter.

After I adjusted he slowly started to move and watched my reactions very carefully to make sure he didn't hurt me.

My moans of pain started to turn into one's of pleasure and his thrusts start to slowly increase in pace.

"Y-your so tight" neteyam growled out his cock filled every inch of me, he slowly let one of his hands slip down between us to rub my clit matching the pace of his thrusts.

"Fu-fuck" I cried out in pleasure as I felt myself close to cumming, neteyam growled as I clenched around him his cock starting to twitch inside me.

"I'm gonna fill you with my cum" he growled into my ear making my eyes roll, all the pleasure he was giving me was becoming overwhelming "c-cumming" I screamed out as I shuddered in pleasure.

"Yn" he groaned his thrusts started to fulter as he cam, we both panted and whined as we started coming down from our high.

"We are differently doing that again"

[chaifootsteps]

Honestly, Watching/Reading Lackadaisy made me realize that Viv puts, like… no effort into researching the history of her characters. Like, at all.

Almost all the main characters in Hazbin died during a specific time period, but despite that, they all speak like how relatively modern 20-30 somethings and dress the exact same (Cool it with the Striped Suits, Top-hats, and Bowties, Viv, I swear to God) when it would’ve been way more fun and interesting to have the the era they died in reflected in their designs and dialogue. But I think my biggest gripe with Viv’s inability to do more than google one topic and call it a day is the circumstance surrounding Angel’s death. Angel died of an overdose of Angel Dust (the drug) in the 1940s. Angel. The guy who died in the 40s. Died of a drug overdose. Of a drug that wouldn’t have been invented until the 1950s. Years after his death caused by the nonexistent-at-that-point drug. Yeah, great research there, Viv.

Meanwhile, Lackadaisy/Tracy wears the extensive research smack dab on the sleeve. And she kinda has to, seeing as Lackadaisy is technically a period drama, and the whole gimmick of it is “1920s America, but now everyone’s a cute lil kitty cat”. If the historical context in the historical period piece isn’t accurate, then the whole thing falls apart, and Tracy takes great care in making Lackadaisy as accurate to the era as humanly possible.

What really sold me on Tracy's commitment to period accuracy was the art book that just came out, specifically the page where she talks about Mitzi. There's a little drawing of her early design, and most people would agree it looks absolutely fine, but Tracy insists it's not and that she drew it before she did research. I just thought it was super impressive.

(For the record, PCP was invented in 1926, but it wasn't really used as an anesthetic until the 1950s and didn't take off as a street drug until the 1960s. It's also hard to overdose on because you'll tear off your clothes and run screaming into the streets long before you get to that point.)

[dresshistorynerd]

Ranking Men's Costumes in Renaissance Period Dramas - Part I: The Bad

Part II: The Good

I have a bone to pick with Renaissance costuming of male characters. Films and TV never seem to understand French hoods or the concept of tied up hair but the crimes committed with female characters costuming seem to pale in comparison with those committed with male characters costuming. It would be easy to find some atrocities that should be brought in front of the Hague from the bottom of the barrel shows like Da Vinci's Demons and Reign, both of which costuming is basically black leather jackets, pants and boots. If we're lucky, they have some vaguely Renaissance details imitating doublet or jerkin. But these shows make absolutely no effort, even the women's costumes are straight from modern fast fashion shelves (often literally). But I have noticed that even costuming that has some effort otherwise put behind it, still costumes male characters with the most boring costumes and minimal effort. The Tudors didn't have good costumes, but there's some effort towards historical immersion, even if quite lackluster, but the men's costumes are still so sloppy.

My theory is that they think men's Renaissance fashion was too goofy and embarrassing to fit their cool and sexy main male characters. Also men dressing up and taking care of their appearance? That's obviously homosexual behavior, and these hot men who the main female characters are fawning over are Manly and Heterosexual. So they don't dress up in fancy clothing or colour!

To give a fair change to the costuming, I will be selecting only shows and movies which have good costuming for the female characters. If they are not even trying, it feels kinda pointless to point that out. I have selected 10 period dramas. I haven't seen all of them so I'm not going to analyse the costuming any deeper than how good and well made they look and how well they evoke the historical setting. I don't demand historical accuracy, but I will be more harsh on that front if the women's costumes are succeeding in that. But one of the point of period dramas is to immerse into a historical setting, so if the costumes can't evoke that feeling, I think they have failed. Obviously this is not some objective ranking, but my opinions. This is in two parts (because of Tumblr image limits), so I'll start with the five worst costumes in order of best to worst.

5. Ever After (1998)

Ever After is supposedly set in Renaissance France, but the costuming resembles late 15th century and early 16th century Italy much more. It's not very historical, and clearly not really trying to be, going for more of a fantastical style. It works, I think because they make it cohesive and very pretty.

Men's costumes resemble also resemble Italian styles. The Lombardian style sleeves, short doublets and tight pants land it right there. The men's costumes are much more boring than the fun and fantastical women's costumes, but they got the least worse spot in this worst costumes list for several reasons. The pants are actually tight and they have codpieces. The sleeves are actually really great I love them. And there's no leather pants or doublets.

And look at this, at least one doublet is closed with lacing!! (I apologize for the very low image quality, it was the only picture I found of that costume.)

The biggest gripe I have with the costumes are the boots. Just let these male characters show of their calves. At least not everything is black but the lack of colour is still disappointing too.

4. Becoming Elizabeth (2022)

The female characters have quite excellent costuming. The fabrics are rich and gorgeous, the bodices are extremely smooth and crisp, some of the best I've seen, partlets are on point and correctly used. My only complained is the occasional open hair and yet another case of the weird upward pointing crown-like French hoods.

French hood didn't have any crown shaped thing, it was a hood and the headpiece is actually several headpieces made to reveal the lining of the hood in a crescent shape. So it is very much flat against the head. (I've written about French hood's construction before.) And sure they look more early Tudor fashion, the sleeves should be much more dramatic and the bodice elongated. Like here's a portrait of the actual young Elizabeth. But I think the detailing, great construction and good looking materials make the costuming beautiful and feeling enough like Tudor era.

So how does the men's costuming hold up? Pretty okay, which is why this show is so high up in the list. I haven't seen any leather pants on anyone. Leather jerkins were an actual thing, they just weren't black, and though the leather jerkin in the show was dark brown and not smooth hide, it was not black so that's something. Edward VI does have actual stockings and Renaissance shoes, which is great, but he is a kid and I didn't see any grown man rocking that style which is very cowardly behavior imo. There's some colourful silk jerkins in there too. And they even could get away with all black since that was very fashionable at the time. They are all wearing slashed trunk hose. AND! They have actual accurate codpieces sticking up! That is so rare especially in this period when the codpiece was not just a flat piece of fabric.

Unfortunately this is where the good things I have to say end. All of these court people are for some reason wearing riding boots inside and everywhere all the time. The hose are way too long and the jerkins are way too short. The hose should be just peaking under the hem of the jerkin. Obviously none except the kid uses thigh high stockings. One of the worst things though imo is the lack of structuring in the men's costumes. The women's costumes are so well structured, but the men's costumes are just wet rags hanging on them? The doublets were heavily structured to create a pigeon chest and hourglass effect.

In conclusion, there's clearly some effort made, some very nice historical details, but the overall look is very costumy and sloppy because of the lack of structuring and lacks the historical silhouette.

3. Mad Love (2001)

The movie is set around 1500 Neatherlands (and Spain). I think many of the costumes are gorgeous (like the examples below), though overall the costuming is quite inconsistent. Most of it fits at least okay to the time period and setting, though the red dress here is more along Italian styles, but not entirely off either for early 1500s Low Countries. Some costumes though are 50 years from future. Of the women's costumes alone, this would probably be the worst costuming on this list, though I think better than most Renaissance costuming, which is why it still ended up on this list.

The men's costumes resemble more early 16th century German fashion than Low Countries fashion, which was more similar to French fashion than German. In the red ensemble there's some weird jerkin looking overgarment, but jerkins were not a thing yet and they were never in this style. I will excuse the lack of codpiece since in Low Countries' fashion it was hidden under longer overgarments, even though in this more German style it would have been left in view. The hose are no where near fitted enough, and the boots should not be here at all. Overall this is kind of a mess, but it is better than the last two. We have skirt, we have weird sleeves, open neckline and most importantly, we have colour. Also while this shoulder-length curly hair wasn't in fashion outside Italy at the time, I still appreciate the sluttiness of it.

2. The Borgias (2011-2013)

Now we are getting to the territory, where the lack of effort is starting to be very obvious. Like the costumes till now were not particularly good, but clearly they at least attempted, even if not very hard. So, The Borgias. The show is set in the early 1500s Italy. The women's costumes are gorgeous. Not always the most historically accurate, but at least close enough and very pretty.

The men's costumes however... a deep sigh. Some of them are not that bad, like this first one has kinda Lombardian sleeves and a too small doublet showing off the lacing (in Italy the lacing was almost always ladder-lacing though regardless of gender, but it's something I guess). Most of it though, especially of the leading men, who are supposed to be cool and hot, is absolutely garbage. The same black leather jackets and pants seen in the bottom of the barrel shows. Like the costumes of the female characters and some of the male characters feel like they are from two completely different shows. Like sure they have codpieces, but their pants are so loosely fitted they wouldn't even need the codpieces. (I explain the use of codpieces in this post). And of course they have boots. Of course. In Italy it was even common to not wear shoes at all, they just sewed leather soles at the bottom of the hose. And even the men's costume that have tiniest bit of effort, are so dark and lacking in colour, when the most fashionable young men at the time wore these wildly multicoloured hose and doublets. The feeling I get the showrunners were so god damn afraid of giving the cool male characters any elements or details that could in anyway seen as feminine today, they stripped all the historical elements away. Like they couldn't even give Cesare lacing, they had to make it Manly Buckles?? It's such an insecure performance of masculinity. I admit the last image here is the worst offending example and there were some with a bit of color even, but in other ways most of it is exactly this bad. I will have to hand one thing to them though. They did manage to get the slutty shoulder-length hair right.

If this man is supposed to be sexy, prove it to me by showing his ass with lovingly fitted hose.

1. Rosaline (2022)

This is roughly set in the same time in Italy too as The Borgias, based on women's costumes, I'd say at the very end of 15th century. And those women's costumes are honestly great. They even have hand-sewn eyelets, ladder-lacing and cartridge pleats. Even some of the most high effort costumes don't get these details right. Honestly I only have issue with the hair, the hair goes from okay or outright terrible. They even made this super historically accurate Renaissance apron for a maid.

This got the lowest ranking so you know what comes next. The men's costuming is absolutely unacceptable. I feel like it would be excessive to even describe all the ways these costumes fail since to me they are so obviously bad. The difference between these women's dresses with such gorgeously crafted details and these men's costumes that give absolutely nothing is so stark and gives such a massive dissonance. They are just wearing modern skinny-ish pants, all the colors are so muted and dark, there's no shape, no structure, no codpieces, just sloppy bland jackets and pants. Even less effort than men's costumes in The Borgias have. Except one thing they have over The Borgias, they were able to ladder-lace that doublet. Otherwise these are just bland, boring and actively ugly. And it's so weird that they took this "gritty gruff "realistic"" route, when it's a comedy about Romeo and Juliet? You afford to be a little goofy with a comedy and yet you did this.

Extreme disappointment, do better.

Part II: The Good

[lucianalight]

I love that Agatha All Along despite bringing many familiar elements and tropes from witch-themed stories and folklore, is stereotypical in a best nonstereotypical way.

When it comes to witchcraft the focus of the story is more on the craft side of it. It is less about power, and more about knowledge, understanding, skill and art the members of the coven are capable of. It is the combination of all these traits and abilities that let them survive their trials. I especially like that art has been one of the aspects of each trial. Jen's potions so far have been healing, medicine that is said to be both science and art. But potions can also be linked to cooking, a craft and an art. Music and singing are crafts and arts too.

And then there's the matter of "witch" as a negative label that historically targeted people who didn't conform. A lot of times those people were "evil women" who were said to steal and kill babies, or harm and heal with their knowledge. Powerful women. Angry women. Inconvenient women. Bad girls. Gay men. Queers. Mentally ill. Outcasts. And our little queer coven is a group of rule breakers among the outcasts.

It's also interesting that despite looking like the characters have stereotypical traits, at their core, at their full potential as a witch, they're the complete opposite.

Jen while bound is selling pseudo science and has hurt her clients. Jen at her best is knowledgeable to the point that witches around her don't understand the terms she uses and since her trial she was able to heal people. Alice is angry and a loner but her anger isn't shown through aggression, but through grief and depression. In both cases losing belief in themselves was what stopping them from reaching their full potential.

The belief that Jen's expertise comes from her knowledge and no one can take it from her was what saved her. Alice was saved because she finally saw that it wasn't her fault that she carried a generational burden. She shared her grief, opened up to her coven and learned that all the while she was loved and protected. That she wasn't a disappointment but a sure and certain hope to finally break the curse.

Lilia while living through the most stereotypical picture of a fortune teller or a psychic, is the one who's the most annoyed with the misconceptions. I imagine her trial must have sth to do with the stereotypical evil witch of stories.

Agatha on the outside is the picture of that stereotypical witch Lilia hates so much. She can be cunning and ruthless and obsessed with power. The rumors say she even sacrificed her own child for power. Yet that is her biggest fear and regret. Yet she becomes the most observant or caring of the group when they're in danger or distress. They way she cares about Teen and is protective of him. When she makes Jen believe in herself. And reminds Alice that all this time she's been loved and protected and capable. Agatha keeps pretending she doesn't care. But as the story goes and the bonds with her coven strengthen it's become harder and harder for her to keep pretense. It would be interesting if she doesn't get a specific trial, but her trial would be her journey through the road.

[hedgehog-moss]

Inspired by your last ask! What are the best French books you’ve read that have no English translation yet? I read Play Boy and Qui a tué mon père (really loved the latter) last year and it feels so fun to read something that other Americans can’t access yet

I'm too nervous to make any list of the Best XYZ Books because I don't want to raise your expectations too high! But okay, here's my No English Translation-themed list of books I've enjoyed in recent years. I tried to make it eclectic in terms of genre as I don't know what you prefer :)

Biographies

• Le dernier inventeur, Héloïse Guay de Bellissen: I just love prehistory and unusual narrators so I enjoyed this one; it's about the kids who discovered the cave of Lascaux, and some of the narration is written from the perspective of the cave <3 I posted a little excerpt here (in English).

• Ces femmes du Grand Siècle, Juliette Benzoni: Just a fun collection of portraits of notable noblewomen during the reign of Louis XIV, I really liked it. For people who like the 17th century. I think it was Emil Cioran who said his favourite historical periods were the Stone Age and the 17th century but tragically the age of salons led to the Reign of Terror and Prehistory led to History.

• La Comtesse Greffulhe, Laure Hillerin: I've mentioned this one before, it's about the fascinating Belle Époque French socialite who was (among other things) the inspiration for Proust's Duchess of Guermantes. I initially picked it up because I will read anything that's even vaguely about Proust but it was also a nice aperçu of the Belle Époque which I didn't know much about.

• Nous les filles, Marie Rouanet: I've also recommended this one before but it's such a sweet little viennoiserie of a book. The author talks about her 1950s childhood in a town in the South of France in the most detailed, colourful, earnest way—she mentions everything, describes all the daft little games children invent like she wants ageless aliens to grasp the concept of human childhood, it's great.

I'll add Trésors d'enfance by Christian SIgnol and La Maison by Madeleine Chapsal which are slightly less great but also sweet short nostalgic books about childhood that I enjoyed.

Fantasy

• Mers mortes, Aurélie Wellenstein: I read this one last year and I found the characters a bit underwhelming / underexplored but I always enjoy SFF books that do interesting things with oceans (like Solaris with its sentient ocean-planet), so I liked the atmosphere here, with the characters trying to navigate a ghost ship in ghost seas...

• Janua Vera, Jean-Philippe Jaworski: Not much to say about it other than they're short stories set in a mediaeval fantasy world and no part of this description is usually my cup of tea, but I really enjoyed this read!

Essays / literary criticism / philosophy

• Eloge du temps perdu, Frank Lanot: I thought this was going to be about idleness, as the title suggests, and I love books about idleness. But it's actually a collection of short essays about (French) literature and some of them made me appreciate new things about authors and books I thought I knew by heart, so I enjoyed it

• Le Pont flottant des rêves, Corinne Atlan: Poetic musings about translation <3 that's all

• Sisyphe est une femme, Geneviève Brisac: Reflections about the works of female writers (Natalia Ginzburg, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, etc) that systematically made me want to go read the author in question, even when I'd already read & disliked said author. That's how you know it's good literary criticism

Let's add L'Esprit de solitude by Jacqueline Kelen which as the title suggests, ponders the notion of solitude, and Le Roman du monde by Henri Peña-Ruiz which was so lovely to read in terms of literary style I don't even care what it was about (it's philosophy of foundational myths & stories) (probably difficult to read if you're not fully fluent in French though)

Did not fit in the above categories:

• Entre deux mondes by Olivier Norek—it's been translated in half a dozen languages, I was surprised to find no English translation! It's a crime novel and a pretty bleak read on account of the setting (the Calais migrant camp) but I'd recommend it

• Saga, Tonino Benacquista: Also seems to have been translated in a whole bunch of languages but not English? :( I read it ages ago but I remember it as a really fun read. It's a group of loser screenwriters who get hired to write a TV series, their budget is 15 francs and a stale croissant and it's going to air at 4am so they can do whatever they want seeing as no one will watch it. So they start writing this intentionally ridiculous unhinged show, and of course it acquires Devoted Fans

Books that I didn't think existed in English translation but they do! but you can still read them in French if you want

• Scrabble: A Chadian Childhood, Michaël Ferrier: What it says on the tin! It's a short and well-written account of the author's childhood in Chad just before the civil war. I read it a few days ago and it was a good read, but then again I just love bittersweet stories of childhood

• On the Line, Joseph Ponthus: A short diary-like account of the author's assembly line work in a fish factory. I liked the contrast between the robotic aspect of the job and the poetic nature of the text; how the author used free verse / repetition / scansion to give a very immediate sense of the monotony and rhythm of his work (I don't know if it's good in English)

• The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis: The memoir of a gay man growing up in a poor industrial town in Northern France—pretty brutal but really good

• And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran: Yet another memoir sorry, I love people's lives! Jacques Lusseyran lost his sight as a child, and was in the Resistance during WWII despite being blind. It's a great story, both for the historical aspects and for the descriptions of how the author experiences his blindness

• The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, Emmanuel Carrère: an account of the Jean-Claude Romand case—a French man who murdered his whole family to avoid being discovered as a fraud, after spending his entire adult life pretending to be a doctor working at the WHO and fooling everyone he knew. Just morbidly fascinating, if you like true crime stuff

[centrally-unplanned]

Time for a pet peeve take response - let me capture our target below:

[Unpopular Fantasy Opinion Take:] The fantasy genre by-and-large took the wrong takeaway from Tolkien, and has been generally spiraling since as a result. They took his surface-level aesthetics and fantastical elements, and left his engagement with real, historical texts, his philology & his moral seriosity. In a different timeline, subsequent authors would have adopted Tolkien's erudite love of language and mythology and applied it to other cultures & mythologies - not just superficially, but by engaging with the great Chinese novels or the Shahnameh like he did with Beowulf. Even when you *do* see more recent novels "inspired by" other cultures, they are very blatantly just taking the (degraded distillate of the) Western, Tolkien-esque tradition and coating it in a thin veneer of Chinese or Mesoamerican lore.

This is not the first time I have seen this specific take, and it is part of a "fallen literature" genre that is always confusing supply & demand, with a hefty bout of selection bias for good measure.

To get the obvious out of the way, the "lessons" people took from Tolkien are entirely what audiences want to read, and were never going to be any other way. Most people don't wanna read hard, heavy books! Even if they want that sometimes, for every one Gravity's Rainbow they are gonna read a dozen Gone Girl's as a palette-cleansing snack, which means by-the-numbers the latter will dominate. Fantasy did not invent the genre of adventure stories and swashbuckling heroes and hot maidens to woo and mystical mumbo-jumbo; people stapling tried-and-true genre tropes onto elves and orcs once they took off was a given. The "shallow" part was the only part that could have changed; a world where the median fantasy novel is dealing with theological issues could never have been.

And to top this all off, no disrespect to Tolkien at all, but like...he isn't that deep? The "moral seriousness" of the Lord of the Rings is very simple - characters are often cartoonishly evil or blatantly good, the conflicts they face are often black and white, and in particular the moral dilemmas faced by characters boil down to tests of courage more than half the time. What Tolkien does have is his own unique interests? Like in Middle Earth the "act of creation", from art to life, is itself a moral undertaking with metaphysical implications. This is super cool - but it is also again very simple, it is barely even discussed in the novels and his ideas can be summarized in a paragraph. This is all good btw! The novels would not benefit from more complicated morality. But modern books are just as complex, and often more so.

Actually just a little aside here - a lot of people do this thing with Tolkien where they mention his letters and drafts like that is canonical story text? Yeah he wrote like an essay about the theological implications of the various orc origin stories, but he didn't publish that, it is nowhere in the Lord of the Rings and is barely in the Silmarillion. Other authors have notes like those; you just don't read them.

And the "other cultures" stuff is particularly egregious - I'm sorry, are we just not reading many modern stories? You think Spinning Silver isn't pulling great threads from Slavic folklore? You think the Chinese Gays in Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed aren't dropping refs to Daoism and the four classics in between their will-they-won't-they necromancy shenanigans? In response this author would, of course, pivot from their bailey of "no one references other traditions" to the motte of "and if they do it is shallow" with no definition of what qualifies as such, nor again any admittance that audiences care way more about getting the gays than the deep cut cultural refs. The fact that the median person in the west prefers their Dungeons & Dragons campaigns in a default Tolkien-esque setting because the point is to have a comfortable backdrop for ease of play of a combat dice game will just not factor into their analysis.

The elephant in the room for all of this is that foundational texts differ, structurally, from modern texts, because they were made in different environments. The Lord of the Rings probably wouldn't sell well today! The prose is wooden, the characters are flat, it throws random lore it never explains at you, Tom Bombadil is just there as a walking momentum-destroying plot hole, etc. People read it because it was a first in a world that didn't have books committing to this level of world-building & detail in a fantasy environment. And as a new genre, things like his crazy level of language building are appealing, it's all so new and different, something cool to dig into.

But imagine picking up your 185th elves-and-orcs sword & sorcery book in 1998 and reading "ah yes Quenya is just one of two alphabets for the Elven tongue and it is inspired by Finnish-Germanic and I write entire poems in it even though I never finished a cohesive dictionary or grammar system but I do have 15 pages of pronunciation notes"?? You would throw at it at a fucking wall, absolutely insufferable. It was cool the first time, and that is why you learn Elvish, just like you learn Klingon. That was never gonna keep as a zeitgeist - instead just popping up here or there as this or that series takes off.

You have to accept that audiences are in the driver's seat on this one - they have infinite stories to choose from, they are absolutely not being dragged along by willful writers. Which means genres will evolve and change over time - and that is fine.

[alicerosejensen]

Another you

Warning: reader mutation (c-virus), angst, blood, slight aggression, acquired albinism, fem/reader (not an agent, an ordinary civilian who worked at the museum), Leon has plot armor, more narration than dialogue, the text contains an antagonist like Simmons (male character), Ada is helping Leon again, relatively happy ending.

Synopsis: You didn’t want to change, you loved him, just as he loved you, but against your will, your love turned into hatred and animal anger towards him. However, Leon still hopes that you will remember him...

A/N: This is probably my biggest work. Tumblr told me to fuck off a few times while editing, but I came out victorious in the fight, although I had to re-write the text into the draft a few times because Tumblr for some damn reason published it without my knowledge. I hope feedback if anyone liked it, because I have been burning with this idea for a long time!

The text also contains an excerpt from Byron's poems (I adore him)

He promised himself first of all that nothing would happen to you. That his work won't affect you in any way and you won't get hit by the corporate bastards, and you really didn't. However, something else happened...

But people whom Leon loves or simply cares about tend to leave or even die.

Everything was fine with you. Ideal in his imperfect life and you were this perfection that he valued and protected. A prudent person would not keep an expensive diamond in front of everyone, so Leon did not scatter information about you and who you are to him. You were loved and dear to him more than all the treasures of the world, he appreciated your tenderness towards him and kindness, because it was you who helped him get out of the hole of despondency in which he buried himself. His personal little guardian angel. Still, he has something to continue his fight against bioterrorism.

A normal working day, except that the museum where you work was supposed to host an exhibition of some very expensive collection for which you were so carefully preparing, forgetting about yourself. It seemed to Leon that you were burning with enthusiasm and love for the work you were doing, which made you walk around too excited, forgetting about food, so he had to remind you to eat. This exhibition had no meaning for Kennedy, but he did not belittle your efforts thrown into this preparation, especially since you were so happy that you were incessantly talking about all these paintings, historical activities depicted on them and objects: a pendant with a strand of hair of some queen - you explained to him that this is a symbol of affection that was previously used It's like you're giving a piece of yourself to your giver, a kind of connection with a loved one, but this is just one of the meanings of such a peculiar gift. Silk fans, a clock, a desk, some items of clothing that, in Leon's opinion, were very strange and he was just glad that fashion had moved far ahead.

Although he could interpret all this in one word: beautifully.

And you were beautiful too. He would have liked to spend more time with you, but you were completely absorbed in your work, and he was overwhelmed with paperwork that he couldn't stand, but anyway, at least he could come back to you and listen to excited speeches and new facts that he didn't know anything about and would hardly remember if he told him about it someone else.

And everything went to hell when there was another outbreak, less global, but most importantly - human lives. And yours.

He was trying to save you, even if someone else had survived this exhibition, he would still have saved you first and not someone else. Mini Raccoon City, that's what he called it, making his way with you to the emergency exit while you kept up with him on your heels, because today you were supposed to shine and glow and not cry with fear looking at the pale corpses of history and art lovers. The light from Leon's flashlight illuminated a small part of the space while you walked quietly thinking about Leon's words, "I wonder how much time we have before they get up?"

"Were they poisoned?" you assumed, because how could you kill such a huge number of people without weapons. Leon, watching the ventilation grilles in the rooms, suggested in his head only one quick way.

"It must be gas,"

But then you would both have died too, you decided, but you did not voice your thought, because shortly before the tragedy you were invited to discuss something by the sponsor of this exhibition. A man who managed to collect so many magnificent things with a rich history. The man who gave you flowers and flirted with you from the day you first met, despite the fact that you made it clear to him that you were not interested in any relationship with him, except for work.

However, Leon also remained silent when he saw the luxurious bouquet of scarlet roses on your work table, which filled your entire small office with their aroma. But right now that simply wasn’t the main thing. He needed to get you out of the mess that happened, and then ask about flowers from rich strangers.

You walked slowly, trying not to make any noise or cry behind him while you clung to his jacket, partially managing to wonder why Leon's gun was with him when he had no reason to carry a gun. All this, of course, was secondary, given how stress, coupled with imagination, turned the exhibits into various frightening figures that frightened, made you scream, thinking that the fallen armor, which was probably simply poorly secured to the stand was another dead man. I didn’t even want to think about what happened in the exhibition hall, much less imagine. Leon had to take you by the hand and at times drag you along with him because the panic really aggravated everything, he was afraid that you would start to go hysterical, but it seems that despite the periodic stupor, you kept yourself well under control, exactly until the moment when Leon’s flashlight went out, leaving you in pitch darkness.

“Leon?” you called out anxiously, feeling noisy ragged breathing behind your back. Was this what Leon was talking about? Until recently, you hoped that his words were just another stupid joke and the dead do not rise, but here behind you is the living embodiment of a nightmare who is ready to grab your neck and feast on warm flesh. Have time to scream? You didn’t even have time to fully scream when a strong grip grabbed you by the shoulder and roughly threw you to the side from the line of danger because you fell, hitting your thigh on the marble tiles, after which a series of deafening shots and the muffled groan of a dead man was heard, three bullets or maybe be more? You didn't count.

As if in slow motion on a large screen, it was impossible to take your eyes off what you saw. All sounds died down, leaving the silence of your own mind and the smell of blood.

All you could do was watch how the beam of light from the flashlight shines directly on the corpse and how Leon’s hands are trying to bring you to your senses, because you knew the one whom he had just completely killed. Richard, your colleague with whom you had coffee this morning and discussed the latest news, sometimes often joked at lunch... was now dead and you were crying without knowing it. Tears just flow uncontrollably from your eyes even as Leon wipes your face with his thumbs, trying to lift you off the floor and make you go outside.

“Come on, sweetheart, I know it’s hard but we have to go"

"I... I can't... why here?" You ask more into the void than from him

“I don’t know, but we need to get out of here.” Leon grabs you under the armpits, helping you get to your feet, dragging you towards the exit.

Better yet, this would all just be a nightmare. The noise from the shots makes you cover your ears with your hands while Leon once shoots people, at the same time trying to protect the slow-moving you. They scream, moan, attack and you feel like you are in a horror film with high-quality special effects and good acting, but you realize, albeit reluctantly, that all this is not a joke but an evil reality where Leon almost at the very exit asks you to pull yourself together and you don’t even you can stand on your feet. Before your eyes, everything collapsed and the world went crazy, trying to grab you with it.

"I can't... can't... I'm so scared..." your hands grab Leon and he hugs you to him, which only makes you want to cry harder and ask him to do the impossible - to return everything to the way it was. He hugs you tightly, kissing you on the top of your head, giving at least some reassurance given the fact that he has always tried to protect the little that he loves from his work, but you accidentally found yourself in the epicenter and your reaction is quite expected.

"Everything will be fine, please look at me," he asks in a soft tone, lifting your head and forcing you to look into his eyes, "It will be difficult, I do not know what is happening outside and what kind of virus it is, but you must not leave me alone. I shoot, and you stand behind me or hide if I tell you to. If you see a dead person, don't you dare approach him!"

"Is it like this everywhere?"

Leon didn't quite understand if you were talking about the whole city or just the upcoming race, in any case, he only nodded briefly, giving you a little more time to catch your breath while you listened to the rapid pounding of the heart in his chest. He was afraid too.

It could have tried better. You really pulled yourself together, but after contacting Hunnigan, Leon exhaled for a second, saying that the virus had not spread so far and in fact the appropriate measures had already been taken, she sent the two of you to the evacuation point where doctors could examine you and give you a vaccine injection in case it really was gas, as Leon said, which logically you were both breathing anyway. So the virus could have entered your body, the scariest thing you reasoned while you were following him, is that you are both alive by a lucky chance, because if Leon had not been attacked by an attack of tenderness, it would probably have been the last day of his life. You no longer even thought about the fact that that sponsor called you somewhere... Emerick. You smiled when you remembered that Leon called him a high-dimensional asshole, but he probably became a victim like everyone else, so there's no need to speak ill of him.

You thought that because you didn't think he was a bad person. You and Emerick had common topics of conversation, he knew a lot and he had a rich collection of rare things bought from auctions for a lot of money, besides, as he himself said, much of what he actually has was inherited in his family, which made you think that he probably was some kind of hereditary noble. His manners were really perfect.

It took about an hour before Leon left you in a quiet place. There were only zombies outside and a few survivors who, no matter how hard Leon tried, still couldn't help. They always died in front of his eyes, even now leaving a sense of guilt in his soul, because he should protect and not kill, but now this is the best thing he can offer them to the infected. Wide windows on the third floor of a God-forsaken warehouse protected from enemies and if you believe Ingrit, then this is the C-Virus that Neo-umbrella created, not so old, but in the terrorist market, in fact, it is already junk.

"At least there are no cocoons and lepoticas, otherwise I would have big problems"

You were sitting on the crates risking tearing your nylon tights while Leon was talking via video link on his work smartphone, waiting for his colleague Ingrit from F.O.S to plot the safest route to the plane that should pick you two up. Leon thought you were safe with him. You just sit quietly next to him trying to catch your breath while he does the main work and he was really calm until you screamed sharply falling off the box, forcing him to turn to you when he saw you holding your neck.

The phone immediately fell to the floor.

"What happened? Are you in pain?!"his eyes widened as he pulled out the dart that was the cause of everything. "Baby, can you hear me?! Everything will be fine, hold on!"

There was no one in the window. By the way, there was no time to search for the culprit. Thoughts were flying crazily in his head, Leon picked you up in his arms, hiding you behind drawers so that you would not get into anyone else's lens, noticing how quickly your breathing becomes shallow.

Was it a new virus or an improved one from before? You curled up crying from what seemed like your organs were turning into a burning cauldron causing hellish pain that made you moan loudly.

"Hunnigan! I need a vaccine, urgently! Where's the damn helicopter?!" Ingrit shot up for a moment. The women's painful moans in the background were ready to make Leon burst into tears and she was almost sure that tears were stuck in the corners of his eyes.

"It will take time to figure out what it is..."

"There's no time!" he shouted into the phone. Ingrit's fingers immediately clicked on the keyboard.

You sobbed. The bones seemed to melt, which made you literally lie on the concrete floor until Leon shifted you onto his lap, feeling your body temperature rise from normal to high.

That's probably why you threw up and blood gushed out of your nose. Your heart was pounding wildly, you didn't hear Leon screaming in panic, hugging your body to him, realizing that if you don't inject the serum soon, then everything will be over. You're dying, but Leon's brain refuses to accept it when he picks you up in his arms trying to save you because with your death, life won't make sense to him.

"You're not going to die!" the words expressed through clenched teeth echo in the spacious building as Leon picks you up in his arms and carries you outside in time. "Everything will be different"

He couldn't let this happen again. It was as if everything was being repeated again from hell to hell, only now in Helena’s place he is himself and he definitely won’t have enough strength to put a bullet in your forehead, and if he does... then he’ll shoot himself too.

Every minute was precious and if it weren’t for the infected, Leon would have instantly reached the right place and injected you with the serum, but luck was not on his side again, just like on the first day of work in Raccoon City. You were heating up so much that he could feel the heat emanating from your body, even through your clothes. Once the virus enters the human body, the incubation period varies for everyone: Deborah Harper lasted two hours before she mutated, for some it takes about a couple of minutes, even God himself does not know how much time is measured for you.

Having reached the helipad, Leon cursed everything in the world since the helicopter was not even visible anywhere. The situation was clearly not going in your favor. You again let out a painful groan, feeling like your body was literally burning and your head hurt so much that you wanted to be hit with a huge hammer. Leon stroked your back, holding you close to him. God, your temperature was already colossally high!

"Just a little more, be patient, honey" Leon doesn't believe it, he wants to, but he can. You scream and cry, trying to tear off your skin with your nails just to make this heat go away. He would like to change places with you, it would be better if he were dying now and not you, and not so monstrously.

The virus flows through the veins, attacks all defense mechanisms, mercilessly rebuilding the entire body in a new way, creating an aggressive weapon out of a person capable of mass murder without any remorse. Leon's affection does not destroy you, right now it is the only way to save yourself, but even if by some miracle an active medicine fell on your head, what is the chance that it saved you? The probability of healing, even with side effects, tends to be no more than 5-7%.

"D-don't want to d-die"

A pitiful groan, through the agony of pain you see Leon’s crying eyes, the skin peels off unnaturally under the influence of high temperature, but this is not visible under the clothes, but face...

"No no no no!"

Leon fell to the ground from your sharp push, but immediately jumped to his feet, running up to you after a wild, painful cry. Just one second and the body was suddenly engulfed in a flash of fire, turning the flesh into a hardened cocoon. You are gone.

It was all over.

Leon sees double. It shouldn't be like this, it shouldn't be like this! The gun is lying somewhere a couple of meters away, having fallen out of the holster when you pushed it away from you, and if this was a standard work situation, Leon would have tried to quickly run up to it or pick up the Sentinel Nine, but his hand did not rise. His knees hit the concrete floor painfully, along with the realization that he had lost again. The hard cocoon transforms the caterpillar inside itself into a beautiful butterfly, which is destined to fly, but Leon knows that everything human in you has burned out and only a monster will hatch from this cocoon, at best only vaguely reminiscent of you, so maybe it’s better to just tear it apart and then let him go on his own a bullet for himself?

The rain continues to pour, gradually calming down. The guys from B.S.A.A are already somewhere down there clearing the city of the infected and saving the survivors because there is a vaccine, there are ways to destroy the trash that Neo-Umbrella created. The sounds of gunshots mix with a frenzied rumble in his heart, which is why Leon doesn't want to hear anything anymore, preferring instead to stretch out his hands to your still warm cocoon, where some movement is already visible. Watching this, Leon was ready to miss even the deafening sound of the helicopter, but the light made him close his eyes and lift his head up.

Even without looking closely, he immediately realized that it was not the helicopter that Hunnigan had sent.

For the sake of love, people really do the most cruel things.

Leon immediately realized who was behind all this when the helicopter landed and several armed men jumped out of it, their faces hidden by masks. He slowly got to his feet, looking at the culprit of his suffering, dressed in a snow-white suit, with an impudent grin that Kennedy remembered from the beginning of the evening, when everything was still fine. Leon could have sworn that he had never felt such rage before, although a painful scream stuck in his throat.

No one pointed a gun at him. Everyone just froze, waiting for something.

"It's a small world, Mr. Kennedy," he said, waving to one of his assistants, and he and two mercenaries pulled a cryogenic capsule out of the plane. "But it was stupid to think that a man like you would die from a bunch of mindless zombies. I must admit, I didn't want to go to extreme measures until the last moment, I liked today's event, but because of you, I had to cancel everything. I've lost most of my collection"

"So it was you after all…" Leon muttered through his teeth, not yet grabbing the gun, realizing the risks. He is alone in the open space - a wonderful target. "I didn't see your corpse in the museum."

"A distraction," he explained, watching the capsule's preparation from the corner of his eye.

Emerick… Leon suddenly remembered how you recently confessed to him that he began to take care of you by giving you flowers, then inviting you for a cup of coffee, listening to music or general topics of which there were too many. But in the end, when the attentions began to exceed the standard amount, hinting at something more, you refused him, saying that you already have someone. You didn't notice, but Leon has been catching his obsessive glances at you all evening… How sometimes you looked at the exhibits behind the glass case, which you can not touch, despite the ban.

But you didn't even choose between the two of them. Leon always came first.

"For what?"

Emerick smiled as he looked at the cocoon and Leon's question disappeared by itself. Because of jealousy? Because a rich bastard couldn't get what he wanted, even with a giant bank account?

"You won't believe it, Mr. Kennedy, but for love. Death took away a dear person from me and I want to return what belonged to me, however, you will not understand this"

Leon grinned, clenching his fists.

"Why? Why her? If you wanted to take revenge on me, then you would have taken revenge on me and not on her!"

"Who said it was you?" asked Emerick, looking at his interlocutor as if he were an idiot. "For the most part, you just annoyed me like an annoying fly, but no more, although you encroached on something that does not belong to you."

Leon was about to answer and pounce despite the machine guns pointed at him, but the movement below and the sound of the cocoon tearing attracted all attention. He has seen it many times and your hand was reaching out to break free from the tight shackles of the past flesh, forcing its way out. Everyone is closely watching the birth of a new life, but only in the eyes of one of those present there was delight, not fear and regret. Leon couldn't bear it… He didn't understand what was wrong. The transformation was different.

"Happy birthday, Ada,"

A memory flashed through his mind.

History repeats itself. Only it turns out that besides Simmons, there is another bastard who looks like him in everything.

Leon reached out to you, as if trying to grab you, to help you get out and take you away from here. A brief moment of hope still lit up in my soul like a small smoldering flame, my mind seemed to be clouded, and yet deep inside there was a glimmer of awareness. He couldn't get rid of the feeling that something was wrong while you were trying to get out, muffling all his annoying voices of caution. Wrong smell, wrong body color… Leon squints his eyes, the cocoon breaks and before he can grab your hand, he freezes.

The slimy, sticky naked body lying in front of him looked more like a white marble statue with a thin network of blue veins protruding under the skin. The mercenaries looked at each other, clutching their guns tighter but still not pointing them at you. The sight is really amazing. Leon comes up to you lying down, at first glance it seems lifeless, but looking closely, your chest quietly heaves and he kneels down again, pulling you to his shoulders, peering into familiar but still changed facial features.

There are no appendages behind the back, from which ugly claws protrude, no razor-sharp claws, no fangs. But instead, unnaturally pale skin and hair… the structure is thicker, and the color merges with the color of the body. The same discolored ones, but stuck together due to the transformation in the cocoon. You open your eyes a little, and instead of the usual iris, two red lights rush at him without a shadow of anger and aggression, just fatigue, something that Leon used to see when you stayed up late at work.

"And, when the grave restores her dead,

When life again to dust is given,

On thy dear breast I'll lay my head—

Without thee! where would be my Heaven?"

Ignoring the familiar lines of poetry, Leon remains silent when he gives him an order in a harsh voice.

"You won't understand," Leon has no doubt. He doesn't want to understand these motives. "You're not even worthy of the dirt under her nails, let alone touching her!"

Leon picks you up in his arms, turning to face Emerick, meeting with loaded guns.

"Did you infect her with the C-virus so that she would become your toy?"

"A toy?!" he snapped back.

Now it already looks like a confrontation between two men for the heart of one woman, almost a joust in modern realities in all its dirty manifestations and meannesses, but Leon does not feel the advantage. A fairy tale with a bad ending. One madman decided to use a virus to change the girl's memory and her appearance, making you the one who died a long time ago, and he…a brave man with a valiant heart who somehow thinks that even after death, Simmons is also connected with this. Even indirectly. Sold the idea of resurrecting someone else's personality in another person?

The rain is hitting your body in drops, and Leon wants to cover you, hide you, hoping that this is his second attempt. It seems that consciousness is returning to you, but you are still disoriented, not understanding who you are and what is happening. You became a part of the darkness that Leon carried on his shoulders.

"All for love," one wave of his hand, and the one standing behind him makes Leon bend painfully, crying out in pain, almost dropping you, his fingers dig into your skin, causing a barely audible moan from your mouth, but you are still snatched from his hands, carried into that capsule, after that, Emerick turns away from his opponent, putting something like an oxygen mask on you, stroking your cheek gently with his fingers.

"What the hell kind of love?!" Leon knows for sure that the other person is smiling even if he does not see it himself.

"You may not believe it, but I'm one-woman man, Mr. Kennedy. It took me a fortune to improve the C-virus so that it would affect her body without turning her into a vile insect-like creature. There was only one side effect after the final result - loss of pigmentation, but this is not significant, in all other respects it completely met my expectations. All THIS is for her sake."

"You sick... "

"No, I'm a heartbroken husband who lost his wife prematurely but now we will be reunited." Emerick looked at you lovingly before closing the capsule, which they began to load back into the helicopter. “And you, Mr. Kennedy, are just one of millions. You saw a work of art and decided to grped it when you had no right to do so. Someone like you will never understand her value, you were never able to give her everything she deserved!”

It’s hard to disagree when the muzzle of a machine gun is pressed to the back of his head, but Leon still fights as he watches the cryogenic capsule ahead being shoved back into the helicopter.

Adrenaline is pumping into his head and his palm is itching to get the second gun out of the holster, but Leon realizes one wrong move and this will be the finale in his story. You will drown in a pool of false memories, considering yourself the person you have never seen or known, you will begin to be called by another name, carrying antibodies to the improved C virus in your new body and you will give yourself into the arms of a man distraught from his loss, considering yourself his true love.

Leon walks on the edge, but now the feeling that a thin rope can throw him into the abyss, from where there is no return, feels more acute. If only Hunnigan's helicopter had arrived, but intuition suggested that the delay was caused not just by technical circumstances.

"Do you think you injected her with a virus and she will start to adore you? You gave her the power to smear you like a bug on the wall as soon as she wakes up." He does not know the properties of this virus and what abilities it can give, but experience suggests that minor adjustments in appearance and lack of pigment like albinos are not the whole potential obtained.

"You've dealt with many terrorists, but I'm not one of them, Mr. Kennedy," still pretending to politely hide his hatred for some American sharing a bed with his woman, whom he considered his own, Emerick retorts: "I don't want to turn people into monsters, although I don't want the world to be on fire, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices. This virus was tested on many before my trusted person injected it to her, and before using it, I tested it on many."

Leon clenches his teeth, glaring at Emerick, letting him finish. Truly, big money creates lawlessness.

"As I said, everything is for love"

But there is no love here. Just an obsession.

Emerick no longer intends to continue the conversation, sits back down in his seat in the helicopter next to the cryocapsule, again signaling his people to get rid of the last witness, besides, he no longer intends to dirty his hands, especially about someone like Kennedy. Although he may still have the desire to end Leon on his own, but looking back at the capsule, his lips are touched with a mocking smile. The project must be completed, and the finishing touches are always needed so that the creator can enjoy his creation.

"But so be it, I'll leave her memories of you. The most bitter and unhappy, she will remember you and be glad that I saved her from you. See, I can be generous even to those who don't deserve it."

"I will refuse your generosity."

The situation was turning into complete shit. Emerick probably hoped to clean up all traces of himself, which is why he left the mercenaries to clean up after him, while he himself rose into the air with a last contemptuous glance at Leon.

"I'll find you, you son of a bitch."

He'll find him and kill and then bring you back.

Fortunately, sometimes Leon has a guardian angel with a smoke bomb behind his back, covering him with shots from a crossbow bolt while Leon quickly pulls out his spare pistol, getting rid of the last two mercenaries. A familiar style and a familiar fragrance when the haze clears allowing you to see the savior in the flesh in his unchanging red outfit and Leon would even smile at her if the plane with you did not move away from him every second. Ada is the red queen of today who postponed the execution of her former lover, smiling at him gently and a little cunningly wondering how fate brings them together and separates their paths from time to time. Leon does not thank out loud, but words of gratitude to this woman who clearly spent her personal time on him still freeze in the air.

She looks at the remains of the cocoon, clutching the crossbow tighter, roughly imagining what could have happened, seeing Kennedy's wet eyelashes, although the rain could have been to blame for everything, which fortunately had already calmed down, as well as the noise outside, although occasionally groans and shots were heard in the distance. Today, her calculated accuracy saved him again.

 "Long time no see, Leon" The velvety voice sounds soothing, but a little tired. In any case, Leon definitely owed her more than double the fare for his rescue.

A princess must have a knight in love to protect her from evil. In fairy tales, a kiss of love usually solves all problems, but what if the princess herself does not remember losing herself in the memories of her own and others? A suppressed personality cries out from the depths, not wanting to be forgotten, fighting with the one who took the pedestal and two names… two girls cannot merge into one, causing you only panic attacks and uncontrolled aggression, forcing the creator to believe that he is not so skilled even if he was filled with desire and endowed with money.

A charming man who calls himself your husband bends over her, holding out his hand decorated with antique rings to you, and you look at her with a puzzled look, pressing your back against the wall, trying to create distance between you. Because no matter how hard they tried to suppress your personality, but the feeling of uncontrollable fear, fused together with a new body, did not leave you, so you did not believe. Neither to him, nor to himself, nor to anyone else, and the dagger in the white palm hidden behind your back does not seem so heavy. The reaction is faster, the senses are heightened, and although the virus does not give the princess strength, you still resist, wounding your "husband", allowing scarlet drops of blood to bloom like roses on a white dress that has merged with the color of your skin.

Contrary to that, you have not become perfect, but you are still a passionate obsession for two men: one with pure thoughts and the other with a mad desire that has been tormenting him for a long time. It's hard to escape from the mansion, but thanks to heightened senses, it no longer seems impossible. However, it is even harder to ignore your true self, which screams and tears your head apart, as well as to separate two personalities from yourself.

You're confused. Not in luxurious rooms and corridors, but in yourself.

Something screams from the inside telling you to run away from here, and then it calms you that this place is your home, you know every corner here, every crack on the vase, these outfits in a separate dressing room tailored specifically for you, everything is familiar and at the same time alien. Your husband said that he saved you from a bastard named Leon, and after saying this name, the image of a blond man with beautiful blue eyes immediately stands in your eyes, but your heart overflows with rage, forcing you to tighten your grip on the dagger hilt.

You still have at least one sincere emotion, as you thought, however...

Leon is intently examining the analysis result from the remains of the cocoon that was sent to him. It really was what he was thinking, but Ada had already revealed a little secret to him.

"Maybe years will pass, and her real personality will somehow begin to manifest itself. I still don't know how Simmons fixed Carla's memory."

Leon puts the phone back in his pocket, looking at Ada with a slightly offended look, although she knows that he holds a grudge only against himself.

"But she's an exact copy of you," Leon reminded her, saying that when you pulled out of the cocoon, your face remained almost the same, yes, the features changed a little, but it was still you.

"But it will explain your new friend's obsession with your girlfriend," she chuckled, teasing him kindly, "If she looks so much like his dead wifey, then why would he change her appearance when they are almost identical to each other."

"And if it was an extreme measure, as he said... " Leon continues, scolding himself even more.

"You provoked him to infect her yourself. If he was hitting on her and she turned him down because of you, then it makes sense. Maybe if your girlfriend had been more mercantile and greedy for money, everything would have been without the virus."

However, was it Leon's fault or yours? Ada didn't blame anyone.

Leon may never guess at the ulterior motives, which may not have existed at all, but who else but she helped him again, however, leaving all the dirty work to Leon himself. After all, you were his concern, not hers. Although she followed you and your strange behavior a little, she finally sent him the coordinates of the place and your photo.

"I wish I could say that she remembered everything, but it seems that the virus did not affect her the way it was originally intended. Be careful, your beloved is a little aggressive."

Is it a consequence of the virus, or do you still remember who you are? Leon wants to believe in the latter when he collects equipment for the road, no longer hoping for anyone's help. But your new house looks more like one big clever trap and all the working staff have disappeared somewhere. In Leon's opinion, there should be more than one butler here, but there were no corpses either. Holding a gun at the ready, it was essentially a trespass on private property, but in the report he would later indicate that he was getting evidence. It won't be easy to find you, although you might make a little noise to attract his attention.

And you? You are sitting in a silent garden in the sweet scent of roses, standing out against the background of bright colors as a white spot, listening to the noise of the fountain, which still somehow calms you down after the last scuffle with your spouse. Alone, barefoot, you walk along a stone path, fingering strands of hair between your fingers, trying to compare in your head incomprehensible pictures from the past of two different people. You cannot love that person, for some reason you are afraid and angry at him despite his care. He took the knife away from you, letting you wander around the house like a ghost humming an annoying melody from his own past to himself, letting Emerick hope that manipulation and time will do their job. You hate Kennedy and that's been enough.

The support group is ready, but Leon still prefers to pick you up and then let the guys from the alliance work, having their own personal accounts in this matter. This could be the easiest capture of a terrorist in all his professional experience, but when his presence becomes known, the situation becomes complicated in the form of additional traps equipped with deadly devices and gas for which the anti-C vaccine is useless. In the end, Leon remains even without light and the flashlight does not save well. He looks into every room in an attempt to find at least some hint of your stay here after almost six months of absence.

And he finds in one of the inhabited rooms where only one bed occupies a quarter of the space. There is a beautiful comb with precious stones with traces of white hair on the dressing table, and Leon, picking up the jewelry, is sure that you are here somewhere, just like he is wandering among the dark corridors, although he really regrets that he did not find you in this room. However, another thought comes to his head when a thin lace pale pink negligee lying on the back of the sofa catches his eye… you only walked around in such things with him alone, and clutching the fabric in his hands, Leon can't help but think that Emerick slept with you in this bed.

The funny thing is that he's ready to forgive you everything now. He won't even remember that another man touched you afterwards because you're a victim and Leon, even if you don't remember him, wants you to at least return to a relatively normal life.

But the silence is suddenly cut short when a creak is heard behind, barely perceptible to the ear. A secret door? He does not turn around, freezing in one position, continuing to hold your negligee in his hands, feeling someone's sharp gaze on his back, but out of the corner of his eye catches a familiar silhouette, in the darkness of which two red eyes are burning.

You.

Leon tenses up. The sound of the blade breaks the silence, and your light tread turns into a sharp jerk as you rush at him with a sharp hairpin, hoping to plunge it deeper into his back. Your reaction may have improved, but Leon's reflexes are still faster, Kennedy dodges to the side, which causes you to fall directly onto your dressing table, knocking it over with you, forcing him to open his eyes in amazement.

"No, no, no, you couldn't turn into a monster," a thought runs through Leon's head.

The mirror breaks into many pieces and dig into your skin, causing the blood to contrast brightly on the light skin, which seems almost an unnatural sight. But through the pain, you hiss again trying to pounce on him, which causes Leon to fall on his back, rather out of surprise, managing to intercept your hand that aimed the clip directly at his eye. Pushing you away is not too big a problem, but the point is that you will still continue to throw at him and he does not want to use weapons at all.

"Bastard!" you growl, "Don't you like being hit back?"

"Stop, it's me!" he shouted, still holding your wrist so that you couldn't hurt him.

It was as if you hadn't heard. Leon pushed you away a little, hoping that being farther away would allow you to get to know him better, but what he didn't expect was for you to lash out at him over and over again, and honestly, if it were up to him, he would have removed the threat quickly, but it's hard to hurt someone you love. He'd had to kill Marvin and the President in the past, that in itself still weighs on his soul, but if he had to kill you… Deborah was easier. She was Helena's sister, not his, so his hand didn't shake when he pulled the trigger of the shotgun, but you're different. You're impossible to shoot at.

"Stop it!" he begs twisting your wrist so that you scream in pain and that scream tears his soul causing a lump in his throat. "It's not you! I beg yoy don't make me hurt you."

He doesn't even want to think about the estate being so deserted because of you. Leon still thinks it's just a virus, and somewhere inside you remember his, you just need to trigger it somehow. Ada said the virus affects you differently than it does Carla, but she didn't mention that you're aggressive to anyone who tries to touch you. Leon keeps his guard up, but despite your tight grip, you've apparently acquired some sort of ability that allowed you to break free and run down the hallway. He's not sure if you can throw people against the wall like baseballs, but your regeneration is enviable, because the only reminder of the wounds from the broken mirror on your body are drops of blood.

No abrasions.

So, after a little scuffle, as a result of which the antique dressing table is smashed to pieces along with all the bottles standing on it, Leon gets to his feet trying to figure out what the hell just happened. However, your trail has already disappeared. The house is huge, but despite this, Leon still puts the safety on the gun, afraid to instinctively shoot you if you attack him again. In hand-to-hand combat, you have little chance, but his reflexes can work faster than his brain. But abrasions and wounds a couple of centimeters deep, your body is able to regenerate itself. So cold steel will be the best thing, in case he meets other inhabitants of the estate besides you.

As already mentioned, the flashlight did not save the situation too much, of course, fanatics worked in some places, especially in the garden, but Leon did not find anything except small supplies, although his gut instinct encouraged him to pick up a gun to feel confident. But in the backyard, after several hours of searching among the marble statues and the damp fresh air that hit in the face, somewhere among the bushes in which some cautious movement is heard. It's like a wild cat sneaking up to its prey and Leon realizes - you're here!

Behind him again, so Leon straightens up. If it were daytime or even evening, he would have no problem finding you, but there is a starry night overhead. Rage is growing somewhere between your ribs, inside, but everything is different for him, because despite the internal contradiction, Leon is to some extent convinced that it is useless to fight with you.

There is nothing in his chest but regret and delayed words that he rarely said.

And yet at some point you look at each other continuously. You notice that he has only one knife in his hands, just like you, although Leon hides it back in the case, taking two small steps back trying to talk again. White hair is blown away by the wind and it annoys you that there is no elastic band or barrette to put it in a bun or tail. There doesn't seem to be anything in this damn house for your comfort!

The most painful thing is the way you look at him, but Leon still grins hiding his pain behind an inappropriate joke, standing in a fighting stance preparing to deflect blows.

"Well, I'm not against role-playing games, I really liked it when you were my bunny last time."

It's confusing or rather discouraging that it stops you for a few seconds and Leon uses this time to take the knife away from you, but you dodge so deftly and still more scared, almost dropping the knife to the ground.

"Come on, drop it, sweetheart" Leon asks, taking a step towards you, then you, on the contrary, retreat trying to find your advantage. "You know I'm not the one who's going to hurt you. I'll take you home."

"fucking dog," you growl in response, seeing how he swallows the insult, "Do you think I'll go with the one who made me like this?!"

Your voice is almost hoarse with hate. At the same time, Leon's face takes on a painful appearance, as if he was hit from the inside in the most painful place. That's what that son of a bitch told you! Okay, you can scold him with the most vile words, most of which he'll really be surprised that you even know, but... No buts!

"See?! I'm not afraid of you anymore! "

"You've never been afraid of me."

"You loved me, and I still love you," he wants to say, but the words are stuck in his throat. And after all, somewhere in the whirlpool of memories, these frames sometimes pop up in your head. Not the Stotholm syndrome...

You weren't afraid of him, but of the other one... the man who is your husband calls you by a different name, although Leon calls you by a completely different one, and what you hear from the agent seems much more familiar, more correct and more familiar.

"Baby, I don't want to hurt you! If I wanted to, I would have shot long ago, right? "

"I'm not your baby!" you're snarling, and your red eyes are burning even brighter in the dark.

Bad word.

Leon wants to bite his tongue. He still doesn't know about all the properties of your mutation, but he hopes that now you won't have claws behind your back, God bless him who left him many years ago, but it seems you don't have anything like that. Although when you attack him in a fit of anger, Leon really hurts like hell, which makes him even clench his teeth trying to hold back a moan of pain.

Probably, with strong malice, the power also somehow increases... A lot of times, because it looks like you broke his rib.

"Yeah, you never liked that word, but at least you didn't rush at me with a knife before," Leon still jokes, realizing that talking clearly won't help here. He doesn't want to use force, but it seems that there is no choice. He agrees that you may never love him more, but he won't leave you here either.

It is not even necessary to move to radical measures. Your head is bursting with pain again, causing tears to flow from your eyes and everything inside screams with fear, making you want to cower into a ball. Therefore, Leon does not expect you to bend at the knees and cry and start running away from him, just as you ran, according to Ada, all over the estate from Emerick. The wind licks wet tracks from your cheeks, scratching your skin when you run along the garden path, running out into a small open space before freezing in a frenzy, pressing your palms to your chest, as they did in a previous life, before mutation, when you were worried.

Cocoons.

A nightmare come true. Your heart was pounding and forehead was covered with sticky sweat, as were your palms from which the knife slipped.

"It's scary..." an inner voice echoes. You hear Leon running up to you and stopping too, looking at something he hoped to forget someday. Tears involuntarily flow down your cheeks, as if the real you are making your way, pushing someone else's personality into the background. Fire, pain, fear, a dart... This hellish pain that turns people into monsters, you haven't seen the staff, the estates, but now you understand what happened. Just like a divine epiphany.

Maybe it's just one of the reactions. Leon remembered from his own experience that not all individuals hatched from cocoons, but this was a huge rarity, and here as many as twenty if not more, however, this was the trigger. You remembered something.

The wet paths glowed in the light of the moon on your cheeks. If the situation had been different, Leon would have immediately tried to console you, but it seems that this could have become another stupid idea, on the other hand, your stupor could have been turned into a plus and they could have simply picked you up, put you in a helicopter and then calmly dealt with this crap. A tempting thought, of course, but... Something like a phantom pain... a feeling as if the whole body was burning again and being reshaped under high temperatures. Even the same hellish headache that sends a painful pulsation into the eyes. You were again struck by a short flash of memories, how someone’s strong hands held and stroked you while your body was changing and it definitely wasn’t your husband... his hands are icy, and his voice is dry, devoid of emotion... Maybe..

"Аt least it's clear where everyone has gone," a voice sounded from behind. It was getting harder to breathe and the world was spinning wildly in front of your eyes, so an inner voice told you to find where to land or your head was at risk of injury. This is not the first attack, but the most severe in the last few months. Anyway, your vague consciousness leaves you for a while, turning off, allowing you to get lost in fragmentary memories, but Leon's hands manage to catch you in time, carefully laying you on the grass.

Leon checked your pulse, the main thing is that your heart was beating and your chest was heaving smoothly. Apparently, it was an ordinary fainting fit against the background of a spectacle that caused you psychological trauma. He picked up your knife with which you tried to stab him a couple of minutes ago, was ready to take you away from this place as he had hoped earlier. Those guys who were still alive from his group proved that Emerick was not in the estate, but Leon did not believe.

And it's good that I didn't believe it. Leon didn't believe in miracles at all.

Well, right now he was definitely aiming to just pick you up before you regained consciousness, because trying to explain where the truth is and where the lie is clearly not the best idea. Calling a helicopter for evacuation and picking you up in his arms, hugging you closer to him, Leon quickly jumped up but heard a painfully familiar click to his right, which froze him in place.

“In the past, hands were cut off for theft, but I’ll assume that a colossal imbecile like you doesn’t know that.”

Leon grunts as he turns around. A tactical vest will protect his back and chest, but his head remains open for a shot.

"Then you should have been walking without hands for a long time," Leon retorts, putting you on a bench while delaying your rescue. "Looks like you didn't run away after all."

"I don't like unwanted guests, because of you, my wife and I will have to move to another place. It's a pity, she liked this garden."

"She's. Not. Your. Wife." Leon almost hisses, reaching for his gun, but jumps aside after a burst of three shots that were meant for him. "Bastard"

"I was informed that they did not get rid of you and I assumed that you would look for me at least out of a sense of duty to the country you work for, but please note that there are bigger fish in the sea. You seem to have a weakness for women with Asian features, so maybe you'll focus on your own preferences and not mess with my wife, whom, as I told you earlier, you just don't deserve. You have no idea what a valuable diamond she is, a nugget! One in a million!

Oh, this conceit! His measured and calm tone is annoying, Leon tries to suppress his anger at the fact that the bastard dug up information on him somewhere, but his attachment to Ada is in the past, although they still care about each other in some sense, but now there is you. And you are you, not the woman that Emerick considers his wife. Leon hides behind one of the cocoons and the bullets hit the non-dense flesh, after which a kind of ugly embryo that was once an ordinary person falls to the ground, forcing him to quickly take a better position behind the statue of the goddess Aphrodite.

"You've been living a lie for so long that you've come to believe it yourself!"

"Oh, sure, you know better!" sarcastic laughter makes anger boil from the inside, but Leon looks out of hiding just to look at you and make sure you're still where he left you. "We past even though we always knew that we were made for each other, and only by chance and then you got in my way! "

"I would have felt sorry for you if in your grief you hadn't tried to make an innocent girl into a copy of your dead wife and killed a lot of people in the process."

Leon pulled the safety off the gun. Now the main thing is not to catch a stray bullet and hope that this bastard does not turn into a giant mutated creature, because apart from four spare clips and another pistol, he has nothing and the space is not spacious enough to maneuver, besides, you could also get hurt. He has already forgotten that you can regenerate wounds, but nevertheless, there is no time to find out what is your Achilles heel yet.

"All for the sake of love"

"This is not love"

Leon pulled the trigger but Emerick dodged. There was a smell of gunpowder and something sickeningly acrid in the air, as if something had died somewhere and even the scent of flowers could not completely drown out this smell. You opened your eyes, but your head still continued to spin and the sharp noise of the vystreds only mocked your brain, forcing you to involuntarily pull up your arms and clap your ears with your palms, just like... Like when you were protected from zombies in a museum"

It wanted to hide, curled in a dark corner and not get out until everything resolves itself, although life knows how to throw surprises. You hear someone else's conversation, you hear how the one who came for you says that your husband is a sick cretin who considers it normal to infect people to make a copy of a dead person out of them, whereas he explains his reasons only with grief. The puzzle is not fully assembled and there are still many white spots in your memory, but some fragments have connected to each other despite the fact that you still do not understand who you are.

This shootout will continue for some time, and unnoticed by these two, you will slowly slide off the bench and see Leon and Emerick engage in hand-to-hand combat after they ran out of bullets. It is noteworthy that after losing your knife in battle, which is now proudly stuck in a tree post, he used his own, which he did not plan to part with, but since they are busy with each other, you calmly grabbed the handle and pulled out the blade, looking at your own reflection of scarlet eyes in steel.

You don't love any of them and you don't want to choose someone's side at all, but you also don't want to be tied to someone who actually infected you, having put so much effort into driving you crazy. You need to make a choice, and whether it will be right, only time will decide. Two people are fighting for one woman, although it looks like you are not a princess in trouble at all, and as Ada said, despite the effect of the virus, the real personality will still take everything back under his control, but the old life will never be. All dreams burned down along with that body, so you're also quite sincerely stabbing the family knife into Emerick's back.

The princess does not need a knight to kill the dragon, because she herself is able to stab him when he does not expect it. This is the simplest from the point of view of Leon's combat missions, but at the same time the most difficult. A scarlet stain spreads on the snow-white suit, but that's all. Emerick had not infected himself with anything, although his fate could not be called terrible. It was all for love, and he died at the hands of that love. A stupid death, which is even insulting, but not for you. And walking with you to the helicopter in the living room above the fireplace, Leon really understands why such an obsession arose...

You really look like the smiling girl in the portrait like two drops of water.

He was told that rehabilitation would take a long time, possibly years. You never spoke to him, you didn't even say a word, but you didn't attack him either. You just withdrew into yourself, allowing the doctors to conduct tests and identify whether you are ready to mutate into other stages when you receive any damage, but I was glad that you did not. In their opinion, all your physical data remained at the same level before infection, although perhaps you just deceived everyone well just so that they would leave you behind and not make you an experimental rat, allowing them to drain blood from you, but this allowed Rebecca's team to make a new improved vaccine. A dubious achievement for Leon, given the fact that you persistently ignore him.

He brings clothes, books, even begged for a TV for you to let you kill time and still nothing. You didn't even turn it on until the moment when, with fighting and shouting and after a bunch of official papers, Leon was finally allowed to take you home. They said that you don't have any regeneration and your injuries heal like on any other person, you don't rush at people in attempts to devour them, sometimes you still talk for more than five minutes a day (but not with Leon) and you don't have any unusual abilities. Nothing that would be of interest to the bigwigs of the government. You'd think that you'd literally become a black sheep, people would just start mistaking you for an albino, which is basically true now.

It's good when you can control some of your body's processes. This eliminates a lot of problems. At home, you curiously look at all these little things from your past life, thinking about what it was like to share this apartment with Leon, you look at the bed in which you must have slept with him, and it seems incredibly comfortable, although right now sleeping with Leon causes rejection. He does not climb into your personal space, no longer clings like a puppy, although he whines in the corner from the lost affection of a loved one. He gave you the bed, but he sleeps on the couch, brings breakfast and after a couple of months you get in touch.

It took Jill Valentine several years before she returned to the barn. Chris is so comforting, telling him that everything is still fine, but if necessary, he will let you go. One way or another, of course, he will check if everything is okay with you, but he will let you go if you still do not accept him back into your heart. Leon believes that therapy will help and you will remember your real self by separating the grain from the chaff. You don't have to love him again, although he will be happy if you ask him to stay by your side on a stormy night, hugging you after a nightmare. Then he will wrap you warmly in a blanket and press your face to his chest, gently stroking your back and comforting you with words.

Therapy will help and one day everything will be fine again. Kissing the top of your head, Leon wants to believe it as much as you do. At least you're willing to try.

[topazadine]

Okay, okay, here's perhaps my spiciest and most controversial take yet.

Now, before I even say anything, please note that I am talking specifically about fantasy. Not retellings of myths, not historical fiction set in different countries, nothing like that. This is for second-world fantasy, where you're creating a whole different world.

Ready?

Stop making everything so damn complicated!

This is not to say that you can't have a rich and exciting world filled with lore, religion, different societies, traditions, unique geographies. Not that. Of course we want that: it's the whole reason we read fantasy. I'm talking about something else.

This is my simple takedown, and you can read the rest to better understand what I mean:

Stop jamming your story with five billion weird words.

Don't use super complicated nouns.

Keep the characters to a minimum so we can know and like them.

Don't yammer on about all the backstory.

Stop making readers do homework just to understand things.

Focus on the feeling a story gives instead of the intricate worldbuilding.

And lastly, a pre-emptive note to those who are putting their hackles up and telling me why they are an exception.

Why is it important to keep things simple?

A lot of people shy away from fantasy because they assume that every fantasy story is going to be so complicated that their head will hurt. Not in terms of plot - many people like complicated plots - but in terms of terminology and history. Things that ultimately don't really matter to the plot.

We as writers often assume that everyone cares about our story as much as we do and is equally captivated by every detail. This is simply not true.

To your reader, your story is not their life's work: it is entertainment that they want to be able to enjoy at their leisure. It's a distraction from their difficult lives and all their real-world frustrations. If they get really into it and, say, write fanfic or whatever, that's amazing! But they're not likely to do that if they feel like they'll be jumped on for doing something wrong or that they have to include every single little detail.

For example, I wrote over 1 million words of Touken Ranbu fanfic. Touken Ranbu, at its heart, has a very simple premise: you've got a bunch of legendary swords that were turned into hot men and fight evil time-traveling monsters. You can understand it with just that. There are layers to it, though, that you can slowly untangle. That makes for good writing because it works on multiple levels depending on how much you care about it.

I would have given up on the story if I felt like I needed a dictionary just to understand the plot. Most people would. Language needs to be accessible and premises need to be clear, or no one is going to want to go deeper.

Subtle little details that people can pick up are way more enjoyable than tossing every single factoid at people so that they feel overwhelmed and can't think. It's wonderful to have rich layers of symbolism, mythology, etc. That's excellent. But you can only get people to care about those things if they can actually comprehend your damn story.

A lot of the things that turn people off from fantasy are all about a writer's ego, and it oozes through the work. People can tell that you're wanting them to pat you on the back for putting so much shit in your story. It's annoying and a total turn-off when you make readers work so hard to comprehend what you're saying.

So what exactly am I talking about? This.

Using made-up terms for everything that could easily be explained with a normal English word

When I am writing fantasy, I imagine myself as a translator. After all, my made-up societies have their own made-up language (Seinish) that is referenced a few times.

However, I'm not using Seinish words all the time. I'm writing in English. I didn't write out a Seinish dictionary or even come up with most of the terms because, honestly? Most readers don't care. They want to understand what's going on in as simple of terms as possible, with only a few specific terms that remind us that we're somewhere different.

I may use some specialized terminology, but it's always couched in context clues that make us aware of what it is without actually having to just say "sdlkjfslkdjf, also known as a marketplace."

For example, in The Eirenic Verses, the High Poet Society has religious centers called meronyms. (Which actually isn't a made-up word.) We know they're religious centers because we see all the religious leaders living there. Someone sees the term "meronym" and goes "oh yeah, that's the religious place" and moves on.

It's one of the only confusing, specialized terms in the book other than place names, which people expect whenever they're reading fantasy. Because of that, it stands out and is easy to remember. It's not one of 1029310283012830132 different terms someone has to remember in order to follow along.

Even Tolkien, famed for literally writing an entire extra book full of lore for his stories, doesn't really use that much specialized terminology except for place names. My favorite author, China Mieville, only uses specialized terminology for things that have absolutely no basis in our reality and that can't be explained otherwise. And he's an extremely eloquent guy who uses the weirdest words possible whenever he can. If he can write a book that's mostly comprehensible without a cheat sheet, you can too.

If there is an English term for what you are trying to explain, just use that, for the love of god. The point of writing a story is not to show how smart and special you are: it is to tell a story. You need to remove as many barriers to access as possible.

Things that get a pass and can be made up most, if not all, of the time:

Place names (as in specific places, not categories of things)

Peoples' names

Languages

Species that don't exist in our world

Modes of transportation that don't exist in our world

Magic that can't be explained in any other way

Technology that can't be defined by our language

Look, if you have an animal that is basically a dragon, just call it a dragon. If you've got a wheeled carriage, call it a carriage. Call earth magic something based in earth terms, like "terravitae" or something, idk. There should be some connection to our world in your terminology because you are writing this in English for an English-speaking audience.

It doesn't make you a lazy writer, it makes you one that wants people to understand what you're talking about. Again, imagining yourself as a translator is a good way to keep yourself from going ham on the nouns.

Proper nouns that are way too complicated

Let's look at some well-known proper nouns from fantasy.

Middle Earth

Narnia

Earthsea

Discworld

Westeros

Ankh-Morpork

Bas-Lag

Wonderland

They're all ... simple. They're not a million syllables with weird intonations and accents and all that. If you showed this to a medieval peasant, they'd probably be able to pronounce them and would likely understand that they were place names.

Unless there's a good reason to have a weird name, don't use one. Come up with something simpler.

All of these I mentioned are three syllables or less, making them easier to remember. In fact, I'd argue that nearly every proper noun in your book should be no more than three syllables. Maybe one or two four-syllable ones.

Any very weird name should be balanced out by several easier ones so that it stands out.

40 million characters

Younger writers often want their world to feel very lived in, so they introduce dozens of characters with their own names, descriptions, backstories, etc etc etc. The problem is that this is a huge mental load on your reader, especially if a lot of the characters have very similar names. It makes reading your stuff into a chore rather than an enjoyable experience.

Now, some literary greats do have a lot of characters. But they get away with it because they're great.

I'm not great, so I don't do that.

I'd also suggest that you don't do that, regardless of how good you think you are.

To see if you have too many chracters, write out a dramatis personnae and rank it in terms of importance. Does your top tier have like 15 characters? Cut some. Figure out where they are in the story and if they don't exist for more than a few pages, delete them. Absorb them into someone else.

If a character is only in one scene, don't bother naming them. They don't matter enough. This reduces the cognitive load for your reader because they can see that character for what they are: a background person who exists only briefly.

Any time you name a character, they need to have deep plot relevance. The more unusual your character's name, the more important they should be. And they should have some sort of relationship to another character, preferably the main character. Otherwise, why are they there? Why do we care? Go away!

Way too much backstory

I am an adult and my brain is filled with 50 million other things. I have to remember stuff for my job, I have a to-do list, I have family I care about who needs me.

Your story is not the end-all be-all of my existence. Hell, my story is not the end-all be-all of my existence either. I want to be able to pick up your book, understand what's going on, and then delve a bit deeper or even make up my own headcanons.

I do not need the entirety of your story's world thrown at me right off the bat. It is overwhelming and tiring. Imagine if you visited a different country and someone immediately came up to you and started spewing the whole history of the country right after you stepped off the plane. That's what you're doing to your readers!

Think also about how you approach your everyday world. Do you reel off a million facts about your personal history the instant you meet someone? No, of course not. It'd be weird and creepy.

Are you constantly recalling facts about your city while walking down the street? Do you even know any major facts about your city? You probably know a few little trivia points and that's it. Because it's not relevant to you, and it's not relevant to your readers, either. I can't recall off the top of my head when Cleveland was settled, but I can tell you that we have the world's first Dunkleosteus fossil in our museum, because that is interesting to me. That's the kind of thing that makes a place feel lived-in, not four hundred thousand pages of exposition about the place's history.

Give your readers time to settle in, and reveal things slowly as they make sense. Maybe we hear a little bit about the country's government as they pass a parliament house, or because they have to visit the city center for a different reason. If it's not pertinent to the current scene, then don't put it there.

I've got tons of lore for my world. Some of it may be referenced one singular time, and some of it may be never referenced at all. That's okay, because it's just for me to get a better sense of the place I created. If a reader doesn't need it, then I don't bother putting it in, because it might detract from their enjoyment.

Overall: stop making your readers do homework!

We do not want our readers to feel like they are working when they are reading our stuff. Excellent writers can infuse deep themes and symbology into their stories without making it feel like work. These are the writers who are remembered forever, because not only have they made a good story that you can enjoy at a surface level, but they have also twined in deeper themes that you can dive into after you've digested the story.

I did my undergrad in British literature, so I read a lot of Shakespeare and contemporaneous authors. Shakespeare is considered complicated by modern standards because of the Elizabethan language, but if you translated it into modern terms, his stories are simple. People betray each other and stab each other, or fuck each other, or get transported to weird magical worlds.

You could watch a Shakespeare play and think absolutely nothing of the themes, but still enjoy the story. You could know absolutely nothing about Greek history and still get the gist.

This is because Shakespeare specifically wrote his plays to appeal to a mass audience. He was a god-tier author when it came to balancing symbology and plot. To be like Shakespeare, be simple. Remember that your reader does. not. really. care. all that much. They don't.

It's very unlikely that your writing is going to become someone's life's work and they're going to spend their whole existence studying. Cool if true, but unlikely.

Your job is to make a story that people like and want to read. Only when you've gotten people liking and reading do you get permission to go ham with the backstory and the characterization and the weird names, because they trust you to create a story that they will like. Otherwise, your primary objective is making people feel things so they want to feel more things and read more stories.

People care more about how a story makes them feel than the specifics

Yes, of course there are outliers to this who really want every single detail of the world, but those are few and far between. You should not tailor your story to these exceptions. Think about the average everyday person.

I have many books that I love, but I can't tell you everything about them now. I can, however, tell you how I felt when I was reading them: the plot twists that made me gasp, the thing that made me cry. I can give you a general, sweeping impression of whether I liked or disliked the story and what made me feel something. This is what people recommend books based on: how they felt.

Your story should focus on the plot and the emotion. People watch movies, listen to music, read books, or look at art to feel something, not to memorize factoids for later usage. Even if they do want to memorize factoids, they won't do that if they haven't built an emotional connection to the story.

While in life, we want facts over feelings, it's opposite in creative writing. We want feelings over facts. The emotional resonance, the mood, the characters, the plot: that is what is important, not showing off how smart you are and how much you have thought about your story.

"But Topazadine, I am special and different! I'm not going to follow your advice."

Sure. Go ahead. I can't stop you. If you want to have a million characters and an entire dictionary to explain everything, that is your choice.

No one can tell you how to write; my advice is just advice.

If you don't like what I have said here, then feel free to ignore it. You don't need to justify it to me or anyone else.

However, you must recognize that this may not resonate with readers. It will turn people off.

I'm not a completionist, and neither are many others; they'll roll their eyes and click out when they are faced with ten pages of character names upfront.

Of course you should always write for yourself first, but if you are planning to write fiction for any level of commercial appeal and you intend to make any amount of money on your work, then audience does matter. If you want kudos or comments on your AU, audience matters. You won't get engagement if you are alienating people.

Your writing decisions are always your own and no one can demand you do something different. You just need to decide whether your personal satisfaction in writing your story in a certain way outweighs your desire for validation, and, perhaps, money. I can't tell you the answer for that; it's up to you.

If you enjoyed this, maybe you'll consider reading my fantasy book, 9 Years Yearning, which does not have 121238103 characters and 3230123 strange words. It does, however, have double-tsundere-mutual-pining-gay-boy-awakening. And horses. It's also just $3.