#I have like personal experience with how hard this is

[etherealmelodys]

Kang Dae-Ho

NSFW ALPHABET

A - Aftercare (What they’re like after sex)

Have yall seen how this man acted in the show? He’d definitely be a master at aftercare. Thanking you for allowing yourself to be at your most vulnerable with him, making sure you’re not in any pain, hot bath, whatever you wanted this man would do it for you asap. And trust when he’s done making sure you’re okay? Immediate cuddles and praise.

B - Body Part (Their favorite body part on you and themselves)

I feel like for Dae-Ho, his arms or hands would be his favorite body part. The arms he uses to cradle you in your most intimate and vulnerable moments, keeping you safe at all times. His hands are so much bigger than yours as well, always making you feel so so good. For his partner, I don’t think he’d have a specific body part he likes about you more than the others. Everything about you is perfect, so why should he have to choose one thing?

C - Cum (Anything to do with cum)

He’s definitely a big fan of cumming inside you. He sees it as a way to be more intimate and closer to you. If you’re not a fan of that, he’s always down to cum on your stomach and thighs. The way the milky substance coats your abdomen and thighs really gets him going.

D - Dirty Secret ( Self-explanatory)

He’s really into you taking the more dominant role in the bed room. It’s not that he himself doesn’t like to, but the thought of you bossing him around and using him for your pleasure really gets him hard.

E - Experience (How experienced are they?)

I think he’s relatively experienced, not as experienced as someone like Thanos, but he knows what he has to do to get you to cum as much as he’d like.

F - Favorite Position (What positions do they like the most?)

He’s definitely the type to love any position that gives him a good view of all of you, and welcomes as much eye contact as he can get. The best for these would be missionary, rocking horse, or the happy scissor.

G - Goofy (How serious are they in the moment? Do they tease you?)

Dae-Ho would try to be as serious as possible during the act. He sees it as one of the most intimate acts you can have with another person, and he wouldn’t want you to think he doesn’t take it seriously, or you serious. Now if his partner is more playful during the act? He’s all for it.

H - Hair (What’s the hair situation down there)

This might be me being bias, but I think he has quite a bit of hair down there. Now it’s not a jungle mind you, but he just doesn’t feel the need to go bald when nobody’s complained about it before. For his partner he does not care at all. You could be as bald as a Siamese or as hairy as a rainforest, he still gon eat!

I - intimacy (How romantic are they in the moment?)

I feel like regardless of his mood, he’s always going to bring that romantic energy. Whispering praises in your ear while he slowly thrusts up into you, holding you so close to him to the point you can feel each other’s heart beats.

J - Jack Off (How often do they touch themselves?)

If he’s with somebody, he definitely jacks off more than he would if he was single. Just the thought of you gets him so hard and whiny, he never feels the need to jerk off to porn or anything like that when he has you.

K - Kinks (What are their kinks?)

He definitely doesn’t have any crazy kinks, he’s pretty vanilla. Praise, overstimulation, and hair pulling, while be it lightly, are his major ones, he’s not a fan of anything that could harm you in any aspect.

L - Location (Where do they prefer to have sex?)

He’s not into anywhere public, he’s too nervous about potentially getting caught, most importantly anyone seeing you that vulnerable. The bedroom is where he’s the most comfortable at, but anywhere ranging the shower or couch is fair game too.

M - Motivation (What turns them on?)

Just seeing you in general gets him going. Whether you just got off of work, sweaty and exhausted from the days events, or if you just woke up in the morning, bed head and all groggy. He thinks you look sexy no matter what state you’re in.

N - No (What are some things they’ll never do?)

He would never do anything to intentionally hurt or degrade you. Being raised with sisters really instilled his respect for women. Degrading, choking, anything similar to that is out of the question.

O - Oral (How do they feel about oral? Do they prefer giving or receiving?)

He definitely prefers giving to receiving. While he loves the sight of you on your knees gagging on his dick, what he loves even more is the sight of your arched back and fucked out face as he licks and sucks at your clit for hours. He’s definitely a service top, putting your pleasure above his own.

P - Pace (How fast/slow are they?)

He definitely prefers a slow and sensual pace compared to a faster one. He just loves the face you make, one of pure bliss feeling him slowly fill you up and pull himself back out again, the way you look at him as if he hung the stars in the sky, and the way you thank him for making you feel so good.

Q - Quickie (How do they feel about quickies?)

He’s not the biggest fan of quickies, he prefers to take his time with you and wants to make sure you feel good to the fullest potential. But if you’re desperate and beg him for it? Who is he to deny you.

R - Risk (How willing are they to experiment? Do they take any risks?)

Like I said before, he’s not a big fan of taking risks, or anything that might get you caught. He is however game to experiment in the bed room, but he’ll never initiate it himself, you’ll have to do that.

S - Stamina (How many rounds can they do? How long can they go for?)

Due to him being an ex-marine, I think his stamina would be extremely good, at least above average. Expect him to do at most 2-3 rounds before he starts to get tired. But before he does, it’s always his top priority to make you cum as many times as you can handle.

T - Toys (Do they have any toys? Are they willing to use any?)

I don’t think he has any of his own toys, but he’d always be down to experiment with the ones you have. He wouldn’t go out of his way to purchase any, especially for himself seeing that he has you already, so what’s the point?

U - Unfair (Do they tease you? How unfair are they in the bedroom?)

Just a tad bit, he loves you too much to do it excessively, but that doesn’t mean he won’t do it at all. Just when you guys are in a more playful mood does he really get into the role of teasing.

V - Volume (How loud are they?)

He’s fairly loud, he doesn’t do a lot of grunting, mainly whining and moaning. He’s always encouraging you to be as loud as you want as well, telling you the sounds you make are so pretty, telling you how it makes him wanna fuck you for even longer just to hear more of you.

W - Weird Fact (Self-explanatory)

He’d definitely want to try pegging, just once to see if he really is into it. But only with a partner he’s been with for quite a while.

X - X Ray (What’s it looking like in those pants.)

Dae-Ho is around 5’11-6’0 tall, and he’s quite beefy. He’s definitely above average, but he’s not huge. I’d say he’s around 6.5 inches, considering the average size in Korea is 5.3 inches. His tip is definitely a reddish pink color, about #EE9B9D, with a slight curve to the left. He had a few veins running along his shaft, noticeably a thicker one on the underside of it.

Y - Yearning (How high is their sex drive? How often do they have sex?)

He doesn’t have a super high drive, it’s about average, about every other day. He’d prefer doing other intimate acts with you, such as cuddling, watching a movie together, or just being around you in general in a non-sexual context

Z - Zzz (How fast do they fall asleep after sex?)

He usually falls asleep after a little bit of pillow talk, and of course making sure you’re comfortable and content with his performance in bed. He’d only be able to rest after making sure you’re fulfilled

(Thank you guys sm for waiting on this, I lwk fell asleep due to being sick half way through but I pulled through! This will be my first fic on this app so enjoy😼)

[cheshirewrites]

It's been years since you fought the dragon, years since you pierced it's crimson scaled and dug your blade into its heart. It was a quick death, and not the slow, painful kind that the King had demanded of you, and some might have even called it merciful.

You fought a lot of things, back then.

You've learned better now.

You left the King's service, citing a quest for your godly patron, and it's not quite a lie. Your patrol is a wild thing, a once scorned Goddess who adores the loyal, but not like most would expect. The Goddess prizes dedication to someone's own ideals, and well-

After what you learned, leaving is not a hard choice to make.

But your Goddess approved, her laughter curling in the back of your mind, and the King hadn't argued, or at the very least, he doesn't make any arguments that aren't easy for you to refute.

It wasn't easy, at first, transitioning from a busy knight to an aimless wanderer. There was no order or schedule to follow, just an endless road through the contry side and all of the towns built around it. And the people, of course, you know now that the people were what made it all worth it.

And now?

It's been years since you fought the dragon, years since you heard those ominous words. I will come back, the beast had said, you will not know what form I will take, or how long it will take, but you will see me again.

These days, you were less rash, slower to anger. The kind of person who asked questions first, and rarely ever raised a blade. You have a wife, a brilliant alchemist with dark curls and a cutting smile. Rose calls herself a cottage witch, and she laughs alongside the Goddess in your head, twin voices ringing with amusement, and you have never been more happy.

You have a son now, too, though, neither of you had expected it.

The boy introduces himself as Victor, standing outside your door with a crooked, toothy grin as he holds out his hand. Says that he'd heard they were the people to talk to, if you had a certain aptitude for magic, and well, here he is.

And indeed, here he is.

Victor, with his fever bright, golden eyes.

The you from years ago would have raised your sword in an instant, pushed Rose behind you and demanded some kind of response. It's what you were trained to do, after all, but you've learned better now.

So you smile, and shake the boy's hand. He's warm, you think, but don't say. "Welcome," you say instead, "why don't you come inside? Rose, my wife, is the one you should speak to."

To put it lightly, Victor and Rose get along like a house on fire.

Victor isn't necessarily quick to anger, but he knows exactly where to redirect his words, and Rose, witty as she is, knows exactly how to manage it. Knows how to redirect his sharp tongue into something calmer, whether it's muttering curses under his breath or bantering back and forth far too quickly for you to keep up.

He's good for her, too, you think, watching them experiment with magic. Rose has always wanted an apprentice, someone to pass her life's work onto and -- if they were interested -- try and create something new.

And gods, they create.

You, a heroic paladin have successfully slain a fearsome dragon. But the dragon warns you that death is but a door, and dragons don’t die, they reincarnate. You paid it no mind….until your son was born with golden, slitted eyes.

[lilacstro]

🌸Uranus through the houses: what generational curse you are here to break

hey y'all, back with another post. I hope you are doing well :) been very very long since I made a post haha. This post may be rather short? Idk how long it'd be tbh, let's get into it now!

Paid readings open

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🌸Uranus in 1st: to break the stigma around being yourself, your "real" self, doing you, what you really want and going against the wind because that is your purpose and calling. Finding yourself, and not hiding it away. Doing everything you desire to, not confronting to societal or traditional norms, being the one of heart

🌸Uranus in 2nd: Speaking up, showing what respect is supposed to mean for one self, initiating the concept of self respect and personal boundaries, re-inventing the relationship with money, material things and desires.

🌸Uranus in 3rd: Big thoughts, innovative thinking. Thinking in a broad manner, against the current circumstances or conditioning. Big dreamers for a reason. Usually either extremely strong or extremely weak relationship with siblings for whatever the reason. New, big ideologies. Breaking the generational thinking patterns.

🌸Uranus in 4th: Someone who would follow their heart. Choosing their chosen family, prioritizing the family they created. Following the spirit of their soul and mind. Bringing reforms in the whole family, changing the family dynamics from their generation and lineage, reforming traditional dogmas and orthodoxes running in the family through generations.

🌸Uranus in 5th: Taking pleasures of life seriously. Being more attuned to your inner voice if it signals you to follow your dreams, hobbies and passions. Leaving this "work until you die" kind of mentality and actually indulging in things you like, following your heart, the rhythm of your soul. Full of creative energy.

🌸Uranus in 6th: Breaking monotony in life, breaking this idea and pattern of stability, security, and predictability in life. Leaving behind the idea of, "tunnel vision", basically. May despise following routines, structures, traditions in life. Usually have spontaneous bursts of energy instead of being consistent per se, usually the "turbulent" types.

🌸Uranus in 7th: for this placement, I feel their spouse or partner would heal patterns more than them. I mean both of you together would change things together, but they would more likely lead or initiate this revolution. Your family may have hard time settling with them, but eventually all would be good.

🌸Uranus in 8th: The way the shadow side of life is treated or talked about. Maybe you grew up in a family where darker things like, death, or other taboo topics were not discussed. This is true for a majority of people who do not have this placement as well, but you would be the one who may introduce them to such ideas and may be in charge of making them comfortable embracing their own shadows, and so you may often experience projection from your family often, because you're triggering their shadows.

🌸Uranus in 9th: Someone who would not accept things taught to them for no reason, without explanation. Other placement that speaks in terms of genetic unwinding. You would change the way upcoming generation thinks. You may question religion, traditions, beliefs a lot, not to ridicule them, but to find their relevance in the current world. Expanding the tunnel vision, the view of the world. You may adapt a different culture or a philosophy than the one you're born with and challenge the idea of unknown and foreign in your family.

🌸Uranus in 10th: This stigma attached to people and society and the world. "what would they say" "what would they think" and you may most probably set out to do things no one in your lineage could think of doing, especially in terms of jobs and career, creating something new altogether. You may be seen as eccentric by others for that, but more you grow in this energy, more you would heal this idea of following the crowd for people who are lost themselves.

🌸Uranus in 11th: This again for people who have the wildest dreams and do not care about being a part of the social community or to conform to it in any way. You are very very likely to have high spirits, and follow your higher purpose, your dreams. More of a rebel kind of placement, you do not care if your dreams or ambitions are different than the one imposed or planned for you. You would break this programming of needing to be a certain way, a certain success recipe, a certain dream, in your lineage.

🌸Uranus in 12th: More of a visionary kind of placement. Someone who does not conform to immediate ideas and tunnel visions. Someone who's thoughts and ideas would not make sense currently but would be the future. You are here to heal subconscious programming, limiting beliefs, thoughts, and opinions of your lineage. The deepest of all the above placement and very transformative. You yourself may have experienced unexpected changes and events in life, that shake you right from the bottom until a steady foundation is built, and you are meant to transmute this same lessons and light to your lineage.

until the next time

ps: i love you

xoxo

[atlabeth]

(please) spare me indignity

pt 3

pairing: spencer reid x fem gideon!reader

summary: you and spencer spend more time together. it's bad, then it's good, then it's something else altogether.

a/n: continuing the gideon!reader series! a whole lot of this is arguing because they love each other fr. sorry this took so long, for some reason i had a really hard time finding my footing here but i hope you enjoy!! reader is a victim of the sassy man apocalypse bc this may be s1/2 spencer but he is not going to not be standing up for himself!! have this new banner that i made to try and help with my inspiration. title is from nothing new by rio romero

wc: 5k

warning(s): r and spence argue some more. angst, hurt w/o comfort, then hurt with comfort! idk theyre kinda sweet

You and Spencer spend the next six and a half hours watching movies. 

You make it through Goodfellas and you only tell him to be quiet twelve times. You take a break to get water and make popcorn, which was so generously provided in your grocery supply, and while you’re doing it, Spencer insists on picking the next one. You end up watching Psycho, and you don’t think he lets a single scene go by without explaining the meaning behind it. 

You choose Notting Hill after, and he knows just as much. He picks Halloween—it doesn’t really help your stalker anxieties, and Spencer apologizes profusely when you bring it up, but you still end up finishing it. Next you go for Pointe Grosse Blank, then Spencer picks Kolya, a Russian film that he specifically put into the box. 

There are subtitles, but he spends half the time translating for you anyway—apparently there are nuances to the script that an English translation doesn’t get compared to the original Russian, and that would be a tragedy. 

He’s in the middle of his third rant going on seven minutes when you finally break. 

“Okay,” you say as you reach for the remote, “I can’t do this anymore.”

You do a double take when your hand meets another instead of hard plastic, and you see Spencer beat you to it. You pull your hand away as soon as possible, feeling your face heat from annoyance.

“What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” he echoes. “The movie’s not over yet.”

“I can’t take any more of your rambling,” you say. “I’m cutting you off.”

He frowns. “We have to finish the movie first.” 

“What are you, a broken record?”

“I couldn’t be a broken record because I said two different things,” he protests. “Besides, what else are you going to do?” 

“Unpack my things? Read a book? Sit in silence staring at the wall in my room?” You shrug as you stand up and walk over to the kitchen. “I’ve got a lot of options.” 

“Gideon told me not to let you out of my sight,” Spencer says, standing up as well. 

“You can see me pretty well from there,” you say. “You don’t have to invade every bit of my privacy.” 

“I— I kind of do,” he says. “The whole point of a safe house is to keep you safe. If you’re off doing your own thing, it’s not really safe.”

“It’s not like I’m leaving!” You throw up your hands in exasperation. “What, are you going to sleep with me too? Make sure I don’t go anywhere in the middle of the night?” 

It’s almost funny how fast his face flushes bright red. You’ve got a feeling he doesn’t have a lot of experience with this sort of thing. 

“That’s what I thought,” you say. “Keep watching your movie if you want. Just leave me alone.” 

You feel his eyes on your back as you storm off to your room. The childish part of you wants to slam the door, but you decide to throw Spencer the smallest bone and leave it open. 

It’s not his fault that you hate him, and that just makes you hate him even more. He gets to come out of this the bigger person, a saint for putting up with your various deficiencies while keeping you safe from a stalker. You’re just the difficult, ungrateful, estranged bastard daughter of the most deified man in the Behavioral Analysis Unit who can’t set her personal grudges aside for her own good. 

You shove your duffel bag into the bed with a little too much force. You unzip it, deciding to try and occupy yourself with unpacking. You’re here for the indefinite future, so you might as well make yourself at home. 

You can’t help the dry laugh that comes at the thought. You don’t know if you’ve ever felt at home anywhere. 

This might be the worst thing about this whole situation. You’ve got a stalker out there, and it’s making you do all this bullshit introspection against your will. It’s got you thinking about your dad and your relationship with him, and thinking about Spencer Reid and how he’s replaced you in your father’s life without even really knowing about it because he didn’t know about you until he walked into your dad’s office a month ago.

Ten minutes pass in a blur before you’re knocked out of it by a rapping on your door. You turn to see Spencer standing in the doorway, expression unreadable.

“What?” you ask.

“You’ve been quiet,” he says. “I’m just checking in.”

“I’m still alive,” you say. “Nothing exciting happened in the five seconds I was gone.”

“It was ten minutes and thirty two seconds, actually,” he says. “But— but good.”

Again, more silence passes between you. You look up at him from your pile of clothes after thirty seconds. 

“Are you just going to stand there?”

“I— I don’t know what else to do,” he stammers.

“Didn’t you say you did something like this before?” you ask. “Guarded some girl from her stalker?”

Spencer nods. “She was a lot easier to get along with.”

You roll your eyes. “Somebody out there wants to kill me to get back at my dad. Sorry that I’m not the pinnacle of happiness.” You make a point to avoid his gaze. “But what I’m trying to say is that you’ve done this all before. You should have some kind of idea of what to do besides bothering me.”

“How am I bothering you?” Spencer asks in exasperation. “I’ve said three sentences to you!”

“Everything you do bothers me, boy genius,” you say. “I thought you would have figured that out by now.” 

“I—” He looks like he wants to say more, but instead he just clamps his mouth shut and shakes his head before he walks away. 

You stare down at your pile of clothes, largely unfolded and scattered around the bed. The silence doesn’t give you the satisfaction you thought it would. 

It only lasts for all of thirty seconds though, and you don’t have time to linger in the discomfort—you hear footsteps, heavier ones this time, and you look up to see Spencer round the corner once again. 

“What is your problem with me?” he blurts out. 

You frown. “Excuse me?” 

“You heard me,” Spencer nods. “You hate your dad, fine— but he’s not here for you to fight with, so you’re taking it out on me. It’s classic displacement, and you don’t get to take it out on me.”

“Why not?” you ask. 

“Because it— it’s not fair!” he sputters. “I didn’t do anything to you— I didn’t even know you existed until a month ago!” 

“Well, gosh, boy genius,” you say, “I’m sure you’re smart enough to figure it out yourself.”

“Stop calling me boy genius!” he exclaims. “We’re the same age!”

“Then stop acting like one,” you retort. “I know you’ve got a psychology degree, but you don’t need to use them on me whenever you can.” 

He frowns, his mouth opening for a second before he closes it. 

“Were you going to ask how I knew that before you realized the obvious answer?” you ask. 

“No,” he says. 

“Yes, you were.” You continue folding your clothes. “You went to Caltech, MIT, and Yale, even though it was your safety school. You’ve got three PhDs, two BAs, and you’re working on a philosophy degree, but you’re not done with it yet.” You shrug. “A little difficult to make it to classes with all the FBI stuff.” 

“…Does he really talk about me that much?” Spencer’s voice is quieter than it was before. 

“Oh, yeah,” you say. You set a finished pair of jeans to the side then look at him. “I graduated from college too. Granted, it was a couple years ago, not when I was 17, but I think it still warrants a little support.”

“You went to George Mason,” Spencer says. 

Your movements stutter. You weren’t expecting him to actually know.

“Yeah,” you say. Your heart skips a beat. “How do you know?”

Has he talked about you to the team before? Sure, they didn’t know you existed before you showed up out of the blue, but maybe he showed them a picture after it happened. Your mom carries one of you in your cap and gown in her wallet—maybe he got a hold of one and Spencer caught a glimpse of that. Maybe you just missed it and he does have a picture of you on his desk. Maybe—

“You have a sweatshirt for it,” he says with a gesture. You look where his finger is pointing, and sure enough, your GMU sweatshirt is tangled up with a couple of other crewnecks.

“…Of course,” you say. You don’t know why you even dared to hope. “Because it’s more likely that you’d notice something like that than it is for my dad to talk about me.”

Spencer says your name, and you hate the sympathy in it. 

“No.” You cut him off before he can get any further. “Don’t try to defend him. You know,” you huff a cold, humorless laugh, “he missed my graduation, too. Two separate dates for commencement and my actual school’s ceremony, one 45 minute car ride, and he couldn’t make it to either one.”

“You don’t know how busy we are,” Spencer tries again. “We work weekends and holidays and around the clock— sometimes we get called in at 3am to stay in some random town for weeks at a time, and there’s nothing we can do about it! I— I mean, we’ve had three days off in the past 47 days and—”

“That’s why I have a problem with you!” you cry out, throwing the shirt in your hand onto your bed as you turn to face him. “Because I’m twenty-four years old, and I’ve lived an hour away from my dad for the past six years, but his team that he spends all his time with didn’t even know I existed until I showed up at your office.” You take a step forward, anger resurging inside of you. “Because I threw away a chance at an Ivy to get to see him more, just to deal with the same bullshit as usual. Because I worry about him dying every single day he’s in the field, and he can’t even give me a phone call at the end of it all—” another step forward— “and even in the middle of this shitshow, you think you have a right to defend him— to- to tell me how to feel about him!”

You move even closer, close enough to see his wrinkled button-up is partially untucked, his lips are slightly parted, and his stupid doe eyes—that haven’t left yours—with his stupid dilated pupils, and you jab your finger in his chest. 

“Because all I ever wanted is my father’s affection,” your voice breaks, and you hate the way it makes you feel, “and he’d rather build an entirely new life with an entirely new kid than give it to me.” 

You push your way past him, making sure to shoulder-check him on your way out. You don’t look back as you forge your way to the bathroom (that you unfortunately have to share), even though his gaze burns into your back. 

You close and lock the door. It’s childish, you know, but you need to be alone right now. You can’t stand to be around him.

Spencer just— he irritates you in a way that no one else ever has. He’s your age and more accomplished than you could ever dream to be, with almost six times the degrees and a much better job, and probably a family that loves him. Who wouldn’t love him with everything he’s done?

You, apparently.  

You plant your hands on the countertop as you stare into the mirror. Your usual dark circles have become more pronounced over the past month, and you can’t help a wry laugh at the thought. All that trouble sleeping and it was for the wrong damn reason. 

If you knew someone was watching you, you would have moved out of Virginia months ago. But maybe this bastard would have found you anyway. If Spencer’s profiling is right and he’s going after you because of your dad, you don’t think much could really dissuade him. 

Tears pool at your waterline, and you wipe them away with a rough hand before they can manifest into something more. You slump back against the opposing wall as you continue to stare at yourself. 

You’re pathetic and you can’t even find it in yourself to care. 

You hear the sound of footsteps once more and you wrap your arms around your midsection. This chill won’t go away. 

“…Are you still alive?” a hesitant voice calls. 

You bite back a remark. “I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?” 

“No.” You don’t know what makes you answer honestly. 

A beat of silence passes. You really do feel like a kid. You’re talking to him through the door because you just yelled at him and Spencer is still being the bigger person. 

“Can I help at all?”

This answer comes a little quicker. “No.”

Again, more silence.

“Okay.” Spencer pauses, and the footsteps start again. His voice is a little closer the next time he speaks. “Just… let me know when you’re turning in. So I know you’re still alive.”

You huff. He can’t even stick to his guns and hate you like you hate him for ten minutes. “I don’t think I’ll be dying anytime soon.”

“You never know,” he says. “Spontaneous human combustion might not be proven beyond pseudoscientific concepts, but there’s a first time for everything.”

The laugh that comes out of you is unexpected, both in its lightness and occurrence at all. “Keep an ear out for the smoke alarm, then.”

“If you smell anything burning, stop, drop and roll,” he says. “Make sure you don’t run. All it’ll do is add to the oxygen and feed the fire.”

“Okay,” you say. “…I still don’t like you.”

You swear you can hear the smile in his words. “I know.” 

-

You wake up when the smoke alarm goes off. 

It’s a very rude awakening. It jolts you out of your very uneasy sleep to unfamiliar surroundings—in your disoriented state, you almost forget where you are. 

Right. You’re in a safe house in the middle of nowhere because someone is stalking you. How could you possibly forget?

You stumble out of bed, rubbing your eyes to try and assuage some of your exhaustion as you leave your room. 

“Is the place on fire?” you ask through a yawn. 

“No!” Spencer exclaims, sounding more panicked than usual. That straightens your back and speeds your pace. “No, everything’s fine—” 

You smell smoke, and as you come around the corner, you see him waving his hands overtop the toaster trying to dispel said smoke. You can’t help but laugh, and you actually smile when he gives you the most helpless look. 

“I’m so good at so many other things.”

“What are you trying to do?” you ask wryly. “Burn this house down to try and get a better one?” 

“This wouldn’t have started a fire,” Spencer says. “Toaster fires usually spread because they’re below wooden cupboards, which catch easily and spread everywhere else.” He gestures at the toaster, which he has plugged in to an outlet on the side of the island. “No cupboards, no house fire.”

“You started this because you were making toast?” you ask. 

He flushes. “I’m used to the toaster I have at home. I have the settings worked out perfectly there. This one is all wrong.” 

You sigh and shake your head. “Just… hit the reset button, and open the door. It’ll be fine.” 

“I can’t open the door,” he says. “It goes against the safety thing.”

“Then open a window.”

“Making it easier to get in here in any way goes against the safety thing,” he says. 

“So we have to just deal with the smoke?” you ask in exasperation. 

Spencer hits the vent button on the microwave, and the fan whirs into action. “No?”

You shake your head in disbelief as he then reaches up to hit the button on the smoke alarm. His t-shirt lifts with the movement—your eyes drift to the bare strip of skin, and you immediately look away when you realize. 

“Where’s the coffee in here?” you ask, clearing your throat as you start sifting through drawers. “I’ll be even worse to deal with if I don’t have caffeine.” 

“I already brewed a fresh pot,” Spencer says, gesturing with his head. “Half and half is in the fridge, and sugar is in the cabinet.” 

“Oh,” you say. You stop what you’re doing, your hands lingering above the drawer handle. “You didn’t have to do that.” 

You see him shrug out of your peripherals. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Because I was a total asshole to you last night, you want to say. Because I’ve been awful to you since I met you and you refuse to fight back and give me a better reason to hate you. 

“Because you didn’t need to,” you finally say. Good one. 

“I did. So you’re going to have to deal with it.” Spencer takes the burnt toast out and throws them in the trash can, talking while he does it. “You know, it’s actually a rumor that burnt toast contains carcinogens and can increase the chance of cancer. Acrylamide forms when you burn food, but researchers haven’t found a link between starchy foods with high amounts of acrylamide and cancer.” 

You hum in some form of acknowledgement as you take a mug out of the cabinet and fill it from the pot. You take a sip and grimace—it’s not the best, but it’s caffeinated. After three years of shitty gas station coffee throughout college, you can deal with it. 

“How did you sleep?” Spencer asks. 

“Fine,” you say. 

He frowns. “Really?” 

“Yes,” you say, a little rougher. “The dark circles come with the model.” 

“There are a lot of causes other than sleep deprivation,” Spencer says. “Contact dermatitis, hyperpigmentation, dehydration, alcoholism, stress—” 

“Got plenty of that,” you interrupt. 

“Even genetics can play a part in it,” he says. 

You huff. “I think this is one thing I can’t blame my dad for. I haven’t slept since the nineties.”

“Well, you should try,” Spencer says. “The blood vessels around your eyes don’t constrict like they should when you’re sleep deprived, which means your blood vessels dilate, which increases blood in the area, and that gives you dark circles.”

“Wow,” you say wryly. “I really look that bad with them?” 

“I— that��” Spencer’s face flushes red as he stutters, and you hide the slightest smile with your mug— “that’s not what I mean! I’m just trying to give advice to help—” 

“I know.” You set your mug back down, not able to fully bite back your amusement. “I was joking, Spencer.” 

“Oh,” he says. “That’s… new.” 

“Am I not allowed to joke?” 

“It just doesn’t seem like you,” Spencer says. “Especially after last night.” 

“I’m too tired to fight with you right now,” you sigh. “Enjoy your break.” 

He clears his throat as he takes two fresh pieces of bread out, then looks at your mug. “You drink it black?” 

“It’s not coffee if you don’t,” you say. “It— it’s a sugary mess.” 

“It is not!” he exclaims. “It still has the same amount of caffeine, and it’s still coffee—” 

“No it isn’t!” you laugh, and you nod at his mug. “How much sugar did you put in there?” 

“A couple spoonfuls but—” 

“Spoonfuls?”

“But it’s how I like it!” Spencer defends. 

“Don’t you have some facts about how harmful excessive sugar consumption is?” you ask. 

“Of course I do,” he says. “I also have some about the benefits of black coffee, but I’m not going to tell you now.”

“Wow,” you say. “I’m so hurt.” 

He shakes his head as he slots two more pieces of bread into the toaster. “And to think, I was trying to make breakfast for you.” 

Again, that gives you pause. Why does he keep trying to do nice things for you?” 

“Don’t bother.” You pick up your mug and go into the living room. “I don’t really eat breakfast anyways.” 

“That’s not healthy,” he calls after you. 

“Most things I do aren’t,” you respond. “What’s on the agenda today?” 

“Skipping breakfast puts you at a higher chance of heart disease,” he says. 

“Then I guess we won’t have to worry about the spontaneous combustion, will we?” You look back at him. “What’s on the agenda?” 

Spencer sighs. He’s given up momentarily, it seems. “Gideon’s going to call me in thirty-two minutes for an update. The whole team has been focusing solely on your case.” 

You perk up. The coffee warms your hands through the mug but it doesn’t fully assuage the chill down your spine. 

“Do they have any leads?” 

“I don’t know,” Spencer says. “Gideon hasn’t called me yet.” 

You roll your eyes. “Do you think they have any leads?” 

“Maybe.” The toaster pops and he pulls the bread out, then starts buttering it—or trying to. His brow knots in annoyance at the stick of butter, still hard, and he pushes his glasses up with his free hand. You have to look away. “Like I said, Gideon helped start the BAU. He’s solved more cases than anyone else, and,” you feel his eyes on you, “it’s personal this time. He’s probably working around the clock.” 

“Just have to hope they get somewhere,” you murmur. Your coffee tastes even more bitter than  usual, but you drink it anyway. 

“They will,” Spencer says. “I promise.” 

“Y’know, people keep making promises they can’t keep,” you say. “I’m getting real tired of it.” 

“Well, I’m not leaving your side until they do,” he says. “And I’m going to keep you safe. So consider that promise kept.” 

“Great,” you say. “I’m stuck with you until I die or this is solved.” 

“You’re not going to die.” 

“You don’t have to take everything I say so seriously.” 

“Then don’t say everything so seriously.” 

You huff a laugh and shake your head. Spencer comes over with his plate of messily buttered toast—not very easy with fully solid sticks of butter—and sits down across from you. He holds the plate out. 

“Want one?” 

“I told you, I don’t eat breakfast.” 

“You should.” 

“Because one piece of toast will make so much of a difference,” you mock. 

“It will,” he says. “Maybe it’ll even make you happier.” 

You roll your eyes and drink more of your coffee. “Are you going to bother me all day like this?” 

Spencer took a bite of toast then shrugged. “If you’re this blase about everything relating to your health, then yes.” 

You groan as you stand up. “It’s too early to deal with you. See you in a few hours.” 

“And good morning to you too,” Spencer says wryly. You make a parting gesture with your hand in response. 

It’s been a day and a half, and not only have you argued with him twice, but he still refuses to give you anything to work with, still insists on trying to be there for you. It’s as infuriating as it is gratingly admirable. Anyone else probably would have tried to kill you by now. 

Well, you’ve already got a stalker trying to do that. 

You sigh and down half your coffee. You’ve got a long day ahead of you. 

-

Spencer doesn’t know why you not liking him bothers him so much. 

It’s illogical, but it makes sense for you. Your dad spends more time with him than he does with you, and you’re projecting your hatred for Gideon onto Spencer. Whatever. 

But it’s not just whatever, and that irks him. 

This is an assignment, simple as that. Gideon trusted him enough to put you under his protection, even if it’s for your mental health more so than your physical. It should be a point of pride, being chosen for something like this by someone like Gideon.

Spencer presses his fingers against his temple. You’re a lot, there’s no way around it. But you also claim to hate him, and he knows that’s not true. 

Yes, you argue with him. Yes, you’re short with him. Yes, he lost his temper momentarily because not even Spencer is capable of endless grace. 

But he also sees your moments of lightness throughout it all. Your brief smiles, the quips that lean towards jokes more than insults—and he notices your eyes, and the brightness that breaks through on occasion. 

He always notices your eyes.

Spencer’s phone rings in his pocket, jolting him out of whatever reverie he found himself in. He pulls it out and flips it open, then presses it to his ear. “Gideon?” 

“Reid,” he greets. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” he says. “You’re calling twenty-four minutes early.”

“We just finished a briefing,” Gideon says. “I wanted to get word to you as soon as possible.” 

Spencer sits up. “What is it?” 

“Morgan, Hotch, and Garcia have been working together to comb through my past cases and see what they’re up to now. They finally found a potential unsub,” he says. “Someone I put away a decade ago was released last year, and recent records indicate he’s back in the area.” 

“Who is it?” he asks. 

“Adam Hernandez. Also known as—” 

“The Stafford Strangler,” Spencer finishes. “He killed three people in two weeks in the 90s—classic spree killer. You caught him with David Rossi’s help.” 

“Released on good behavior, despite the victims’ families campaigning against it,” Gideon says. “You know it?” 

“Obviously,” he says. “I’ve read all of your old case files.”

Gideon chuckles, and he can almost imagine him shaking his head. “Of course you have.”

“Do you think Hernandez is your guy?” Spencer asks. 

“I’m not sure yet,” Gideon says. “We applied for a warrant—as soon as we get it, Morgan and Elle are heading his way to ask a few questions.” 

“You think he’d do something like this?” Spencer shifts his position as he frowns. “Hernandez got fired, lost his house, then went off the deep end. He killed because he didn’t see any other solution. The guy going after your daughter is a lot more emotional about all this, and—” his throat feels dry all of a sudden— “and it’s like he’s got some kind of attraction to her.” 

“You don’t need to remind me,” Gideon says roughly. “We’re going for leads where we can, and we’re still working every other angle. It doesn’t end with Hernandez.”

“...Good,” Spencer says. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help from here.” 

“You’re already doing everything I need you to do.” Gideon pauses, and he hears the creak of the chair in his office as he adjusts how he’s sitting. “How is my daughter doing?” 

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “Her mood changes with the wind. One second she’s trying to start a fight with me, the next she’s trying to joke around with me. It— it’s a lot, I won’t lie.” 

“But how is she handling all of this?” he asks. “Staying in the safe house, dealing with a stalker, feeling like a sitting duck.”

“Very cynically,” Spencer says. “She keeps talking about dying or getting killed.”

Gideon sighs. “That sounds like her.” 

“She’s… she’s mad at you, mostly.” Spencer picks at a hangnail, ignoring the sharp, temporary pain. “Every time I bring you up, it lights a fuse. You’re the one thing she hates to talk about.” 

There’s nothing but silence on the other end. 

“Gideon?” he asks. “Did I lose—” 

“I’m here,” he interrupts. “Just… thinking.” 

“It’s not your fault,” Spencer says. “She’s—” 

“It is my fault,” Gideon interrupts again. “Has she told you much about her younger life?” 

“...Some,” Spencer says. 

“Like?” 

Spencer doesn’t really know what to say. He doesn’t want to just tell Gideon that you’ve told him he’s been an awful dad. That it’s really all you’ve told him. 

“You can say it, Reid,” Gideon says. “I won’t get mad.” 

“...She says you’ve missed out on her whole life,” Spencer finally says, notably quieter. “Her high school graduation, her college graduation— most of the stuff that happened in college, actually.” 

Gideon lets out a rough sigh. “I’ll always regret it.” 

“So it’s true?” Spencer asks. He’s surprised at the sharpness of his voice.  

“I don’t get to control when cases come in,” he says. 

“We’re a whole team of qualified agents,” Spencer says. “We— we always have been. Especially when you and Rossi were together. It was like the golden age of profilers.” 

“Spencer—” 

“You made it to my graduation!” he interrupts. “You were there for my chemistry PhD, and you said you would be there when I get my philosophy degree, but you couldn’t make it for your only child’s high school and college graduations?” 

“I already told you I regret it,” Gideon says. His voice is as calm as ever, and for some reason, that irks Spencer even more. “What more can I say? It’s in the past now. I can’t change what I did.”

Spencer stares at the wall. He doesn’t know why this is such a damning thing to him. 

His own dad has missed all of his graduations. He’s missed almost every part of his life. But his dad walked out—he wanted nothing to do with Spencer or his mom. 

Your dad is right here. Gideon is still around, working every day to save lives and change the world and take down monsters—but he’s still not there for you. 

He’s so close and yet he always steps out of your reach. 

“Spencer.” Gideon’s voice is tinny through the speaker, and he presses his phone back against his ear. 

“Call me back the second you get another lead,” Spencer mutters. 

He hangs up without another word. 

[homunculus-argument]

oh wise tumblr finnish gothy twink, i need your guidance

if everything goes well, im moving to finland for university in not a long time. the thing is, i have between 0 and no idea what finland is like, besides cold. what are things i should know before going there? any advice shall be welcomed with open arms

Hard to answer without knowing where you're from so I've got no idea what you would already know - like if you've never seen snow, it'd be important to know that touching it with bare skin kind of hurts, so avoid doing that. Finnish culture is a high-context introvert culture where you're expected to read the room and pick up on very subtle cues what you're supposed to do, but people who are obviously not native finns get some slack for not always guessing correctly (unless you're black, which I naturally have no personal experience of, but people can be racist as hell).

Best I can suggest is try to look at what other people are doing. If you walk into an area that's crowded but dead silent, it's probably rude to talk there. If you walk into a place where everyone's taking their shoes off, it's probably rude to keep your shoes on. Sometimes people smoke in places with an obvious "no smoking allowed" sign visible, but that doesn't mean it's allowed, the people smoking are being rude.

Finns are absolutely zealous and dogmatic about rules. Breaking rules in situations where following them would be pointless and impractical is sometimes agreed to be okay, but if some rule is strictly followed, people who see you breaking it can and will take it as a personal insult, a way of saying "I don't think the same rules apply to me, because I think I'm better than you." The rule itself might be completely arbitrary, it's the principle that matters.

Also try to pay attention to the distance people keep between each other. How close to stand other people varies from culture to culture, and it's generally unconscious and easy to miss if you're not actively trying to observe it. If someone you're talking to takes a step back, that doesn't necessarily mean you should take a step forward.

[h-sleepingirl]

You Are A Wizard, So Pour Over The Tomes

Hypnosis is magic. It is not just “the closest we can get to magic.” Trance practices in all kinds of forms have served as the basis for mysticism across cultures and human history -- thousands of years. It is not new. It is not western. It did not start with Franz Mesmer or James Braid or Milton Erickson or Wiseguy.

Modern hypnosis stems from a rich human history of fascination and spiritual veneration of the mind’s power. We are practitioners of a comparably new discipline where we can literally change the way that other people experience the world. Their innermost selves are as leverage to us -- putty to us, when we know what we are doing. We can transform others freely. We can give pleasure or pain. We can facilitate experiences that seem to defy reality.

People talk a big game about respecting that power. What they usually mean by that is respecting EACH OTHER. That’s crucial, obviously -- not manipulating, not harming, being a good person.

But what about respecting the discipline itself?

It’s tempting to see what we do as disconnected from the “historical” and “outdated” methods of hypnosis. But we are a part of that history. We are likely hilariously wrong about a lot of things related to trance, hypnosis, the human mind -- what will hypnosis and psychology look like in 100 years? And even as we innovate, we are always building on the techniques and ideas that came before us -- in ways we are often not even aware of. We reinvent; we use ideas from the past unknowingly.

We have a right -- and a responsibility -- to OWN our magic. I am not here to gatekeep and say that this magic is not yours. It IS yours; it’s unequivocally yours. But as a whole we could do more to respect it.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And hypnosis is not even a technology that we UNDERSTAND. The only real reason we DON’T see ourselves as wizards is because there is a huge motivation to legitimize hypnosis as a scientific discipline -- and non-rationalist perspectives are looked down upon in our culture. I’m not anti-science (maybe a little -- tongue in cheek) but I do think that labeling hypnosis as “just psychology” is dishonest about how much we actually objectively know about it -- and does a disservice to the phenomenon itself.

I’m not saying hypnosis is literally metaphysical. But I am saying we practice something very powerful without knowing its nature. There are secrets we have tried to suss out about this magic through history that we have written down -- past and present. We actually have tomes of knowledge, records of past experiments and modern inventors.

In the last couple of years, I’ve started teaching/facilitating “text studies” -- classes where we sit down with an excerpt from a hypnosis book and parse through it as a collaborative group. I desperately want to show people that there is value in just critically reading the resources available to us. The clinical texts -- especially older ones -- are hard to read, like they are almost in a different language. But it is amazing the insights we have come to by tackling them together.

These old texts are not pure truths -- there is a lot we’ve improved on over time. But we can learn a lot by learning what hypnosis was like historically. The entire discipline of hypnosis is extremely susceptible to change -- it is defined SO MUCH by how we view it culturally. I just recently was amazed at re-reading some Erickson where he talks about making his subjects daydream autonomously -- as a primary mode and result of inducing hypnosis. Contrast that with today, where if someone’s mind wanders for even a moment, they feel like they’ve failed. There’s something really important here -- a technique from 50 years ago that tells us something we’ve lost in modern practice.

And there are countless examples of this, of people losing and reinventing methods over and over. As I’ve watched our kinky niche grow over just the past 13 years, I’ve watched ideas phase in, out, and in again -- there is both growth and regression of our collective body of knowledge. That’s the nature of things, especially when we operate partially disconnected from the resources that are available to us.

We CAN be connected to the rich human history of trying to unravel the secrets about our minds, and about this thing that gives us enormous transformative powers -- powers that we take for granted.

You are a wizard -- so pour over the tomes.

Read a book. Read an article. Set aside some time and view yourself with the respect of being someone who can study and suss out a magical text. Take notes, look up words and concepts you don’t know. Or just absorb what you can on a first pass and go back later. Read a chapter or just master a single page. Romanticize the aesthetic of sitting with the scent of paper, or as the technomancer with words appearing on a screen.

Read. Own this art. And bring that respect of this art to the people you share it with. I promise you can do things with hypnosis that you have never thought possible.

------------------

This is a little motivational piece (for you and me!) as I gear up to teach "Analyzing Erickson" at Charmed. It's something I feel really passionately about, and I wanted to share it.

Permanently linked/free on Patreon.

[kaislvves]

IN WHICH; you and kaiser get into an argument over a stupid reason which leads into a hard launch after his match.

a/n: do NAWT speak to me about how unrealistic the last scenes are. i KNOWW how crazy fans can be and they’d probably be mauling/trampling you guys to death😭 also say no to telling me to put my ear to your mouth and listen what you have to say (kaz ref…) only to tell me this is ooc leave me alone pls. & not proofread lolz

cw: swearing, arguments -> making up, my writing

“i could stay for tonight.”

it was sickening coming from your tongue because kaiser knew he didn’t want you only for tonight. he’s coming close to crushing you with how hard he’s squeezing your body like he never wants you to leave.

“just for tonight?” is a question he poses. the air around you two remains silent and it angers him—are you thinking about an answer? for there is no other answer than accepting defeat and staying in his arms, forever.

you try squirming around to wiggle your way out of his hold because it was getting warmer than you’d like it to be. “yes, micha. just for tonight.” you start whining at this point but he does not budge no matter how hard you try. he’s only growing more irritated by your response paired up with the nickname you call him to be affectionate.

affectionate his ass—you’re basically admitting you hate him. as much as he loves being seen as an enemy in others’ eyes, he hates when you perceive him in such a manner. “don’t call me micha.” his huffing out and you can feel the vibrations in his chest

“okay mr. football prodigy.” your tease is muffled by his chest. in most situations, he’d take it as a compliment to feed his ego but he knows you’re deliberately trying to egg him on. and though he currently can’t see your face because of the position you guys are in, he swears he can feel your eyes rolling at him.

“i still have a life… and a job.” now it’s your turn to get fed up by his behavior. “am i not your life?” he’s sounding like you genuinely just offended his whole bloodline and hell, maybe even very distant ancestors. you want to say he’s joking but judging by experience, he most certainly isn’t.

one thing you understood when you first started dating him was that he would not give up his career for you and using the same logic, you didn’t have to either. now can some mind reader tell you why this is happening? why is he being so stubborn about this in particular? not like kaiser isn’t dramatic or stubborn most of the time but he’s never been this stubborn over a matter like this.

“michael that’s not… i just—i can’t just give everything up for you.” oh, now you’re calling him by his full first name? perhaps that wasn’t the best way to word it because you feel grip shifting to the back of your head to keep it in place, he does this because he doesn’t want you seeing his face. “why not?” he barks a lot quieter than he normally does.

“what do you mean by ‘why not’? this has been my life, even before i met you.” you try holding in the scoff that you were trying so hard to avoid but it’s obvious now.

as if it wasn’t already tense but it feels like it bloomed into a raging silence. you believe he’s thinking of an answer but in reality, he isn’t. he’s thinking about anything else other than him opening his mouth because only the heavens know what words would spew out of his mouth if he were to—imagine how worse he’d make this petty argument.

you hate this.

you hate silence.

you hate him being silent.

and you make the dumb decision to add salt to the injury—the one thing kaiser didn’t want to do. “do you actually want to argue about this? if so, i’m not staying at all.” there you go, saying things you don’t actually mean. “do you mean that?” oh he actually responded. you did try to choose your words carefully but your mouth moves faster than your thoughts.

“and if i did?” you’re lying through your teeth, but he takes the bait.

that was what unlocked his vile mouth that should be censored on television after losing a match. “you really are annoying, you know that? i hope you didn’t because i didn’t know that either when i started liking you. or were you just leading me on? i don’t care if you aren’t staying anymore. just fucking leave.” he’s lacing his words with cyanide.

he’s second guessing his thoughts of wanting you to stay forever if you were just going to be acting like that. his grip on you is finally loosening and it’s easier to slide right past his arms. you take the chance and peak at his face. it wasn’t the look you want to see on him normally but it is justified in this situation. he has a scowl on his face but he still looks so pretty like this. he’s looking at you too, albeit not with the admiration you’re doing.

it isn’t the best idea to stay silent and so you don’t.

“fine then.” you say while walking away from him to head towards the entrance and like expected, he doesn’t follow you. you take the bag from the front-door rack and slip on the shoes he gifted you.

you spare no time opening the door, not even glancing back when you shut the door as well. kaiser is the one looking, glaring at the back of your head before you disappear behind his door. after he knows you’re off completely, he goes over to lock it shut but also ends up smelling the slight scent of your perfume floating in the air.

looks like you won’t be staying tonight anymore. and now that this happened, will you ever? did he want you to?

this argument could have been so minor if both of you had just sucked it up.

were you still together? it didn’t end in clear closure, just him telling you to leave and you did.

did you still want this? did he still want this?

in all honesty, he just wants you. no matter what form, no matter what, he still wants to say he knows you. it didn’t have to be this way.

safe to say neither of you had good sleep that night.

kaiser has many ways to express his aggression. be it words, physical contact (past), or what he’s doing right now—football. he hasn’t contacted you ever since that day and you haven’t either. makes him question what he still is to you.

why does he care? if you don’t want to talk to him, neither do you. if you hate him, he hates you.

however, whenever he does take his anger out of the field, he dominates it. effectively becoming the king of the field. from the get-go it was obvious bastard munchen would win the match against some other team they were playing against.

you could tell too, setting aside the fact you were sitting pretty far from the game. what made you want to watch the match even if you thought he was probably your ex already? you didn’t know. it’s like you just gravitate towards the stupid rat tails man, he’s an annoying magnet to you now.

and like everyone betted on, bastard munchen did win.

the team immediately celebrates by huddling together, slapping each-others hands, carrying each-other, and what not? you unconsciously smile at the scene, it was small, you could still feel it but you couldn’t help it.

kaiser is celebrating with his team, being somehow lifted on-top of ness’ shoulders (which he is really annoyed at and he’s wondering how the fuck he’s doing that, what is wrong with him?). he ultimately scored the last goal they needed to win. it wasn’t a surprise because when he plays, he wants to—needs to—win.

despite that, his teammates couldn’t help but realize his anger, leading to yoichi asking him a question that makes kaiser want to choke the black-haired man on the spot.

“the hell was that?” he asks (referring the stupidly impossible goal kaiser was able to score, but you know… he doesn’t believe anything is impossible.) “i have a question for you too, yoichi. what the hell is that kind of question?” he’s laughing out, still on ness’ shoulders. but he’s laughing so hard his whole body starts to shake, making ness stumble a little.

still, yoichi was able to tell something was off.

“uh… what’s gotten your panties in a twist?”

but before kaiser could answer that with going off on him, he’s being pulled into an interview.

what made that goal possible?

“it was never impossible.”

what do you feel after winning?

“as if we weren’t going to win.”

boring questions he didn’t want to answer but he was obligated to—for he was basically the star of the show, like always. that was until a certain question was asked that made him look around the stadium for the first time.

that was quite an impressive goal.

“of course.”

is there anyone you wanted to watch that shot?

he’s silent. he’s thinking of you as he gazes around the bleachers—embarrassingly thinking everyone has your face and accidentally making eye contact with crazy fans that go berserk when he does. the only reason he never looked before and during the match was because you wouldn’t be there.

what a desperate reason, right? row after row, he’s scanning every seat, even the ones that are empty and imagining you’re the one sitting in it. 3rd to the top row, he scanning and not expecting to see you.

the fuck? is that you?

is he looking at you? kaiser is looking in your direction and in the area you’re seated but you’re so high up you can’t tell and it’s very unlikely he is but he keeps staring. you’re awkwardly looking away and around your section to hide your face.

oh but he’s already gotten a look of the face he so desperately wanted to see and he’s not going to look away, nor will he stand in one place. like a lunatic who just escaped some mental hospital, he’s booking it from the interviewer who stands shocked.

oh ok... he totally saw you which defeats the total point of you sitting so far away, was he lying to you when he said his eyesight wasn’t the best? probably. anyway, that was your sign to also walk away.

screams of fans were deafening and you felt like your eardrums were going to burst anyway.

who cursed you? because it was such a coincidence that kaiser comes out the way you were going to exit. he didn’t count how many fans who were asking all sorts of things he ran past to get to you.

as soon as you saw his face, you tried playing it off cool and spun the other way to walk away but he was by no means dumb and he saw you do that. he clicked his tongue in annoyance.

it felt like when you ask your friends to chase you and they actually do and now you’re screaming your lungs out trying to outrun them. obviously it was futile because he was so much faster than you.

no words could explain how fucking loud the crowd was, first when he ran, second when he entered the spectator area, last (hopefully) when he hugged you tightly from behind, stopping you from running.

like that night, he was warmer than you’d like him to be. arms wrapped around your waist and his chin on your shoulder. “are you running away again?” he’s whispering into your ear and despite the crowd + the booming voices around you… ++ the paparazzi basically stomping on people to get a photo, he’s unbelievably close to your ear, you have no trouble in hearing him.

“kaiser.” you breathe out in the same shock the interviewer was probably in. “don’t call me that. answer my question.” he huffs—he hasn’t heard you call him that in for like… forever! (unless you count other arguments)

“should i want to run away?”

“i don’t want you to.”

the grip is getting tighter and it slightly stops you from breathing for a second. you don’t want to run away, you don’t hate him.

you were thinking the same as him, whether or whether not he still considered you his. but you know his ego is way too high for his own good so you do him a favor and ask him instead.

“are we still something?” you ask and it hurts him that you do—did you not think that anymore? his eye is twitching with uncertain emotions. “…tell me your answer first.” there’s hurt evident in his voice because he doesn’t want to jump into conclusions and hurt his ego even more than he already has fighting for his way to get to you.

“i don’t know, are we?” he’d flick your forehead with full power if he wasn’t trying to make up with you. it’s barely audible but you hear “i still want this.” a frown is on your face and he took it as a bad sign.

“i do too, micha.” you admit, he’s spiraling by how you say his name.

as much as he wants to say that he did want you to stay with him forever, that he didn’t want you to leave him, that he doesn’t actually find you annoying, that he loves you. he decides on doing only the second and last option because he’s kept himself, you, and the fans waiting far too long.

(you also wanted to say you didn’t mean it.)

he’s spinning you around to face him.

“don’t leave me, ever.”

he holds your hands in his, leaning forward to kiss you.

and though you guys still have so much to apologize, discuss, and everything in between… you both would rather leave that for a private matter. just stay in this moment, in his arms for now? if not forever.

oh and now you hoped this was the last time the crowd got as rowdy as it was.

GERMAN FOOTBALL PRODIGY; MICHAEL KAISER AND HIS SUPPOSED PARTNER MAKE IT PUBLIC! WHO IS THE LUCKY PERSON? EVERYTHING WE KNOW RIGHT NOW…

locknessmonster : bro wtf

[knavcsblade]

unprofessional.

+18!

cw: professor/dilf!arlecchino x student!reader. NOT highschool; both arlecchino and reader are adults. dom arle, sub r. overly descriptive. a lot of tension. age gap. power play (?). slight degradation. cunnilingus. 

wc: 3.4k

summary: professor arlecchino tutoring student reader who had fallen behind in class… and lesbian sex.

a/n: i couldn’t stop thinking about dilf arle as a professor… i would apologize, but i know this is a millionaire idea. plus, i haven’t written in ages and my fingers are now moving all over the keys like it’s nothing. i’m free!

Lessons have always been annoying—as far as you can recall—so much so that you would usually find yourself pouring your focus into the most insignificant things you could think of.

You would bring novels into class to read as the professor explained a new subject; you’d look out the window and process all the things you had to do on that very specific Tuesday afternoon; you would even take naps in between the prolonged sentences of that one teacher you simply couldn’t stand, for a reason that managed to escape you every time.

That was until the day the man was rumored to have been fired and replaced by another professional with more experience on the field—someone who most likely wouldn’t bore all the students to death.

Great, you thought, another male educator with an inflated ego who would roll his eyes at every inquiry from his pupils before proceeding to answer sarcastically just to make them feel witless. You were oh so excited for that.

The moment you looked up from your walnut desk, you already knew something was off. Everyone went silent as soon as the door opened—a common occurrence, though it felt different this time, especially since the clicking of heels echoed through the large room.

“Good morning, class,” those were the first three words that came from the new professor. The gravelly depth of her voice carried an air of authority that quickly forced everyone to put all their attention on the manner in which she approached her desk.

You were all in almost a chokehold in an instant, that was as clear as day. However, you seemed to be the most interested one out of the bunch by the way your eyes lingered on her form—on the way there was a lack of sway in her hips that you were unused to.

Most of the female scholars were nothing like her, and not just physically, you could already tell. She carried herself in a way that had you almost hypnotized, and you already knew you would be paying attention this time around.

There was a soft thud that bounced off the walls when she set her messenger briefcase on the dark wood of her new desk, eyes glimmering like coals in the darkness never leaving the class sitting before her. “Before we begin, introductions are indispensable,” her gaze flickered towards you for a few seconds before she spoke again.

That was… odd. You definitely looked like a deer in headlights to her now.

“I’m Arlecchino, and I’m afraid I will be your new professor from this moment onward… and no, I shall not disclose the details of your previous professor’s departure, before you ask.”

The auditorium had fallen silent the second she walked in, but due to the velvety, spellbinding tone of her voice, it seemed to grow even quieter. Of course, she had every student’s undivided attention at this point, but you found yourself staring at her for longer than would be considered appropriate.

The way she wore her suit captured your notice almost instantly. This was a common attire worn by every professor at the institute you attended, though hers was utterly captivating. The way the fabric clung onto her body, adding the way she carried herself… it was difficult for you to focus on her words at all, no matter how hard you tried.

And oh, her voice had you in a trance. The way the low vibrations of it echoed through the room sent shivers down your spine in a way you had never felt before. This person couldn’t be real…

You were so distracted by her you didn’t even realize the lesson was already over until you noticed the people around you beginning to stand up—Arlecchino taking a seat at her desk just to go through some papers she had taken out of her briefcase.

Much to your dismay, you were snapped out of your thoughts by this and, of course, her speaking. “Make sure to continue… hitting the books, as they say. In spite of your former professor’s leave-taking, the exam dates remain the same.”

The moment you got up and most of your peers had exited the room, you simply had to look at her for the last time. Truly, where did this woman come from? She was otherworldly, in your very honest opinion, and you were one hundred percent upset about having to make your way outside at that moment.

But oh, did you enjoy the lectures now.

You enjoyed her… them so much, the quality of your exam was abysmal. For her, even having to read the few words you wrote down felt like a punch in the gut, and she almost winced while going over it. However, who could blame you? Your last professor was truly someone who spoke and lulled you to sleep, and she was too distracting for you to even begin to comprehend the words that flowed out of her mouth.

The moment you picked up your test from her desk, you didn’t even look at it. You caught a glimpse of red inked scribbles all over the paper, clearly Arlecchino’s corrections, but you couldn’t bring yourself to even read what she had to say. You already knew you had messed up—what was the point?

You always told yourself you would simply ‘study more next time’; however, this was futile. All the subjects were related, so you practically were doomed to fail. You hadn’t the time to go over so many different things in just a few months.

The lesson began once you sat down, and one more time, your chin rested idly on the palm of your hand as you watched her. This was the sole reason you had underperformed on the exam, or so she thought.

She could almost vividly see the way her speech went in one of your ears and out the other, and in spite of her calm demeanor, it was slowly beginning to vex her. Were you truly this careless?

Of course, she kept an eye on you while she explained the intricacies of the new subject at hand, slowly pacing before the entirety of the class as she did her best to direct your attention to her words—not the way her steps allowed you to notice just how toned her frame was beneath the fabric of her suit.

The second everyone got up to leave the auditorium after long hours, you heard a soft “you”—one that oozed authority despite its calm tone. You already knew whose lips that simple word came out of. Naturally, you looked disoriented as you approached Arlecchino with your bag now hanging from your shoulder and heart beating so loud in your chest it might as well have been about to burst.

“Yes?”

Her gaze eventually turned to you, blackened hands gaining purchase on her own hips as she looked down at you. Finally, you could see her nails up close, one of the things you continued to ogle while sitting a few feet away from her, and you were more than fascinated by them now.

She cleared her throat to catch your focus once again after noticing it deviating from her face, and you would have been startled if only you hadn’t found her so attractive. “I have been informed that you are… one of the students who didn’t exactly pay attention to these classes previously. I wished to let you know you may come to me after lessons so I can clear any doubts you might have.”

Her eyes bored into yours as she spoke, and if you couldn’t hear your own heartbeat in your very ears, you would have assumed it had stopped completely. Educators were allowed to be mesmerizing, sure, but you had never found yourself being so… distracted by one.

“I’m positive you have quite a few of them, since I was told you spent most of your time dozing off or staring out the window at the previous professor’s lectures. Not to mention the way you seemed more than distracted in our last ones, unlike the other students…, and your failed exam.”

You immediately felt called out by her—who wouldn’t? Wasn’t this deeply embarrassing? This woman assumed you were, well, an uninterested fool, judging by her almost condescending tone. She already knew you had always been busy hearing her voice, but never truly listening to her. You felt your cheeks begin to burn from the shame.

“Yes, I…,” you cut yourself off to clear your throat, fist covering your mouth as you thought for a few seconds. Would you confirm her obvious assumptions about you, or reject her offer? Well, the answer was obvious. “I suppose it would do me good.”

“It would do your grades good,” her head tilted ever so slightly to the side as she spoke, piercing eyes solely focused on yours at all times. They were inhumanly beautiful yet hauntingly distant; despite this obvious nature, you couldn’t look away. “I don’t particularly enjoy the idea of my students falling behind.”

That said, a vocal sigh left her parted lips and filled the room in an instant. 

“We will meet at the library, yes? Perhaps I can… enlighten you for once.”

And so she did. She would spend hours on end trying to get certain things through your pretty little head, often having to literally snap you out of your thoughts. You spent long periods watching the way she held her garnet fountain pen instead of listening to her, and this was becoming tiresome.

You could practically hear her jaw clenching as you quietly giggled and lied through your teeth. “Don’t worry, I understand” and “yes, that makes sense” were things you would say time and again, even if Arlecchino hadn’t been speaking for minutes.

In a way, she found you… amusing, albeit irritating. The situation wasn’t one she was used to, even after years of being an important scholar of Teyvat.

You thought you weren’t being so blatant, though she caught on the reason for your absentmindedness pretty quickly. She would notice even the smallest of details about your actions, like the way your gaze would drop to her lips as she spoke, or how you continued to bite the inside of your cheek—it was almost as if you were somewhere in between reality and some different plane of existence.

She didn’t blame you, however. You were very clearly infatuated with her, and oh, did she find it sweet.

The only issue with these private lessons was that neither of you had considered the fact that the library closed once a month for the staff to conduct a book recount. The first Friday this took place, Arlecchino found herself having to simply invite you to her home so you could both resume your routine.

This wasn’t exactly inappropriate, at least not to her. It was fairly common for her colleagues to take the students who needed the most support to their places so they could perform their duties as tutors to them—you were utterly flustered, however.

You had ‘sneakily’ gotten information out of her about her personal life, like how she had adopted three children a few years back, or how she had a beautiful garden with rainbow roses she enjoyed taking care of before making her way to the institute. None of that could ever compare to setting foot into her house, fully missing those children she had mentioned before.

You now sat at the desk in her study, cross-legged with your tightly clasped hands resting on your lap and Arlecchino sitting before you. You desperately wished to look around—to take in the way she had decorated the room and maybe catch onto small details of hers she wouldn’t confess. However, you kept your gaze on her the entire time. Furniture could wait, could it not?

“I apologize for the… chaos,” her voice rumbled as she focused on putting away the scattered papers all over the large desk into a folder.

All you did was wave your hand dismissively in response, and if you weren’t looking so intently, you would have missed the way the corners of her lips lifted with utmost subtlety.

Your books were covering the mahogany wood in minutes, Arlecchino slightly leaned in as the crimson crosses in her eyes focused on the words plastered on the pages. She could definitely feel you studying her form more than you would ever study the sentences sitting right in front of you. She had had enough now.

Her voice pulled you out of your head in an instant, doe-eyed as you hummed. It took you a few seconds to register her question, the usual “did you understand?”

“Oh, uh… yes, absolutely.”

“Do it, then,” she said, leaning back with crossed arms and brows furrowed slightly enough to make you press your lips together instinctively.

It was clear you were puzzled at her words. You hadn’t heard what she had uttered before, and she just knew it.

“I’m… sorry, what?”

To this, all she did was exhale deeply through her nose and begin to organize all the books and papers you had placed on her desk. Her patient demeanor was beginning to falter, and all due to you.

“Get on the desk. Don’t make me repeat myself again.” Her answer was simple, and the way she said it left no room for hesitation whatsoever.

She put all your belongings aside to rest her palms on the edge of the furniture, getting up with a swift movement that made her chair roll back and give her enough room to wait for you to do what she had commanded. It was clear there was a plan in her mind, one about what she would do to you the second you obeyed, and it was nerve-racking.

Oh, well. Who were you to not do as she said? Especially when her gaze lingered on yours expectantly.

You slowly made your way towards her, hands trembling as you used them to prop yourself up and now find yourself sitting atop her desk in pure silence. Your legs were pressed together, naturally, since you had decided to wear a skirt due to the hot weather that had taken place merely a couple of weeks earlier. You didn’t wish to expose yourself before her, or did you?

“You know, dear,” she started as she drew closer, the nickname as well as the manner in which her hand found its way towards your thigh making your heart race in what could only be anticipation, “you aren’t good at listening, or understanding what I regularly explain to you… or keeping your focus on something other than me.”

At that moment, everything around you seemed to vanish. She was now so close you could feel the heat of her body against yours and her breath tickling your face. Somehow, before you could even react at all, she stood between your spread legs as her blackened hand snaked its way under the fabric of your skirt.

Could your poor heart even take all of this?

“I’m sure you aren’t even paying attention to what I’m saying right now, are you?”

“Sorry, you… you’re too close. I can’t…,” you didn’t even finish your sentence, but not due to her. It was all because your mind could only concentrate on the way her nails uniformly dug into the plush skin of your thigh.

“You can’t… what? Think? Of course you can’t,” she muttered in response, knowing she needn’t speak louder considering the closeness between you two.

It didn’t take her long to shatter this small distance, however. She leaned in impossibly closer, giving you all the time in the world to pull away if you wished to do so—if she had been stupid enough to misunderstand the whole situation. Yet, as the seconds passed, you didn’t. Obviously. 

Her other hand managed to gain purchase on your waist to pull you in and meet her lips halfway, wrapping you in a kiss as unhurried and torturous as it was passionate and hungry. And oh, the way you finally let out the breath you weren’t aware of holding through your nose the instant you tasted her only made her fully press herself against you.

You let her in eventually, a whimper betraying you as she fervently explored your mouth and her fingers wrapped around the hem of your underwear to slide it down your legs. She couldn’t find herself caring about anything other than giving you what you had wanted in such a desperate manner since you first saw her, even more so ever since you had managed to grow on her so easily.

She thought you were simply… almost adorable. The way you drooled every time your eyes landed on her was something she found more than entertaining, and she wished to see how many reactions she could pull out of you with uncomplicated deeds.

Arlecchino only pulled away to kneel before you, and you couldn’t help but notice the fine thread of saliva that connected your lips before it snapped once her face waited right in front of your unclothed, drenched cunt. She watched you in silence, crimson eyes now turning darker at the sight of your desperate expression.

You just wanted her to ravish you, didn’t you?

All she had to do was lift your legs up to rest on her shoulders just so her tongue could finally roll between your folds and soak in your fluids fully. This took longer than you were hoping for, but once it did, your head lolled back at the feeling.

This was followed by you dragging a moan out of the depths of your throat, an action that made her hold tightly onto your thighs since she could already tell you would be the type to squirm and make a mess only from getting eaten out.

The pretty noises coming from you the moment she found that sweet bundle of nerves only made her react by digging her nails into the warm skin of your thighs and shoving her face even further into you. Her nose was pressed against your mound, and the sensation of the small hairs pricking on it made the feeling even more enjoyable for her.

She seemed to eat your pussy out like a woman starved—one not afraid to pour the entirety of her silent desire onto you and watch you relish it in its entirety. She could even feel the mixture of your wetness and her saliva beginning to drip down her chin and pour onto her pants to stain them in the future, all the while she lapped against your sensitive clit.

Long minutes full of moans, whimpers, and your hand tangling in her hair passed when you felt that well-known heat forming in your lower stomach. You couldn’t ignore it, and neither could she. Arlecchino could simply tell how close you were to an orgasm just from the way your legs squeezed her head every once in a while.

“Fuck… fuck, Arlecchino, please,” a strained plea that was interrupted by a mewl left your mouth which hung open for her to hear you.

Between lewd slurps and wet noises, her eyes found yours for what probably was less than a second. This managed to get you to clench around nothing as a loud moan filled the air.

“How vulgar,” came the only muffled response from her, though she lacked the sharpness of her usual tone. She was absolutely pussy-drunk at this point, only focused on bringing you to ecstasy with her tongue and claws carving crescent moons into your thighs.

It didn’t take you long to find your release, twitching and holding onto absolutely anything on that desk to keep yourself from fully resting on it. Even at the peak of your orgasm she didn’t let go of you; she was entranced by making sure she licked you clean of all your juices no matter what. It became overwhelming at one point—the way she made sure to swallow your climax solely made you wish this would have happened sooner.

Once she was done enjoying your taste, she slowly got up to wipe the remains of your loud crescendo with the back of her hand, red crosses finding your pupils though she knew you were more than out of your five senses.

“I do hope that, after this, you will pay more attention to our future lessons, dear,” her voice was somewhat deeper, and it forced you to nod through your exhaustion.

You would definitely focus on her words from now on.

[crazy-pages]

I'm not even sure it's wildly unguarded so much is perfectly reasonable and quite grounded speculation which needs more mathematical exploration, but it's really fun, so...

This will take some background first though.

So. Thestandard model of the universe as we currently understand it is a variety of quaternion topological structures laid over a manifold with three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.

What that means in somewhat simpler terms is that spacetime is squishy and stretchy but does not tear, and has three dimensions which are negative, and one dimension which is positive. What this means is that if you go an equal distance in one direction in space and in time, they cancel each other out and the effective distance is zero. If you've ever heard that light doesn't experience time, or that somebody moving fast relative to you experiences less time than you do, this is why. The distance you travel in this case is how much internal "time evolution" you experience, and (to simplify things) we are all moving in the time dimension at the same speed. So if someone moves really fast relative to you, you see their time evolution distance as being smaller than yours. But light is moving so fast relative to you that it appears to have no time evolution at all.

Then at each point on this hyperbolic (name for positive and negative dimensions together) spacetime, we can define a variety of numbers and these numbers are quaternions. So, complex numbers are numbers which have one real component, and one imaginary component. So like 3+i. Quaternions are like that but they have one real number and three different flavors of imaginary number. Like 3+i-2j+4k. Each imaginary number acts like i does, so j^2=k^2=-1. But also there's ij=k and ji=-k. They're fun and also for complicated reasons, extremely useful for describing three-dimensional rotations so they show up in a lot of graphics programming.

Now these numbers show up in complicated ways. For instance, let's imagine a circle. Now we're going to add a line from 0 to 1 attached to each point on the circle. That makes a cylinder right? Well sure, but it can also make a Möbius strip. The lines don't have to be attached to their neighbors in a way that makes a cylinder. At one point on the circle we can have two of the lines be connected upside down creating a Möbius strip. Well these, both the cylinder and the Möbius strip, are what are known as topological structures.

Except in the standard model, instead of having a circle as the foundation, we have a hyperbolic spacetime. And instead of a simple line from zero to one, we have line segments of quaternions and infinite lines of quaternions and planes and volumes and hyper volumes of quaternions, and also real and complex numbers which can be made out of quaternions. And instead of just being able to attach things so that they look like cylinders or Möbius strips, there is so much weird stuff you can do with these structures.

And those weird structures are things like the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field, strong field, weak field, and the higgs field. And there are certain properties of those fields which create structures which tend to persist even when acted on by other forces, and those are particles.

Now this theory is incomplete, we know some ways it doesn't quite match reality. One theory for why is that we need to extend the quaternion number structures to include octonion number structures, which have seven types of complex number. Unfortunately the math for this is so hard that in 45 years only one person (Cohl Furey) has made any meaningful progress on this theory, and that only recently. An attempt at a simpler to solve model is string theory, where each point in space-time is a circle instead of a point, but it's run into a lot of trouble.

Anyway, that is the background necessary to understand this fun theory about what happened before the Big Bang. See, remember how I said space time has three negative dimensions and one positive? Yeah that's not necessarily the case. You can also have three positive dimensions and one negative and get something very close to the physics we see. The difference is just that you swap a lot of the right hand rules for left hand rules, Like rules about how a curling magnetic field generates an electromagnetic force, where in this flipped spacetime the force would go the other direction.

So the question is, why do we see right-handed forces instead of left-handed forces? Why is the universe one way instead of the other? Well the answer this theory proposes is that it's not, it's both. On one side of the big bang you have positive time moving in one direction, and on the other you have negative time moving in the other direction. So on the other side of the Big Bang is just a mirror to our universe with differently handed physics rules.

The trick is that you need some weird math to describe the connection between the two sides right next to the Big Bang. I don't mean this in the sense that stuff could be transferred from one side to the other, but in the weird abstract mathematical way where one connection defined a cylinder and another connection defined a Möbius strip. And it turns out that some of the mathematical connections proposed to make this work happen to come with interesting solutions to some perplexing bits of cosmology.

The authors of this theory are very reasonable and grounded about it, and will be the first people in line to comment that not enough work has been done to evaluate this properly as a theory yet, or even to construct a full theory which can be evaluated. But they also point out, quite rightly I think, but this is a much simpler and more sensible solution to some of our cosmology issues than string theory is, and think we should be investigating similar mathematical structure implications of the standard model before we go replacing the whole thing with string theory.

Fellow science assholes and science enthusiast assholes: Hit me with your favorite wildly unguarded speculations about what conditions were like before the Big Bang. Bonus points if the crankery includes dubious math; we love reading about dubious math.

[tamayula-hl]

Recently, I’ve been feeling a strong urge to write fanfiction, but as a Japanese person, I can’t help but feel the immense barriers of language and cultural differences standing in my way.

I’ve always loved writing fanfiction and have more experience as a writer than as an artist. But I don’t know any English at all. The Japanese short story collection about Seb and Omi that I posted on AO3 over a year ago still has zero bookmarks (which isn’t surprising 😂). In other words, as someone who can only write in Japanese, my value as a writer in this fandom is practically zero. I have so many stories I want to tell, but since I can’t speak English, I can’t even stand at the starting line 🤣🤣🤣. Even if I started studying English intensively now, it would probably take years before I could write stories in English on my own 🤣.

On top of that, I only have a Japanese perspective shaped by Japanese values and ways of thinking. For someone like me, it’s impossible to depict Western characters’ personalities, thoughts, and actions without them feeling off. The more I read fanfiction written by Western authors in this fandom, the more I realize how significantly values and ways of thinking differ between Japan and the West. I notice these differences so often that I’m genuinely shocked. With art or comics, I can at least visually mask these cultural discrepancies to some extent, but with novels, where detailed psychological descriptions are key, there’s no way to gloss over these differences.

Foolishly, I’ve been thinking about translating my stories using ChatGPT, just as I do with comic dialogues. But even with AI tools, translation takes an enormous amount of time. And more importantly, translating between Japanese and English is incredibly difficult—no matter how advanced modern tools like DeepL or ChatGPT are, they can’t produce truly accurate translations. This fandom is already filled with amazing, beautifully written stories in natural English. So who would ever want to read a poorly translated story in unnatural English produced by tools like ChatGPT or DeepL? 🤣🤣🤣

With art or comics, I know that I can improve with practice. But when it comes to mastering English and capturing the nuances of cultural values, no matter how hard I try, I will always fall short compared to Western creators. I recently became painfully aware of this reality, and now I feel so sad and empty. Even so, I can’t suppress this foolish urge to write stories. Someone, please give me the final push to give up on writing fiction 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣.

(I couldn’t find the right term, so I used the word “Western” in this text. But I do understand that there are many people in the West who aren’t fluent in English, and that cultural values differ greatly from country to country.) (And to all the non-native English writers who work hard and create amazing stories, I have the utmost respect for you.)

[bisexualbrainrots]

I've been thinking about these two, and like, it intrigues me how the weight of their experiences and some core elements (most likely) added to the breakup.

Like, just from canon alone I see that Tommy carries some weight on his shoulders from the person he used to be and his journey regarding his sexuality. He did hurt others by engaging in bigoted behavior in the past (and changed, which is good!). He probably spent at least a decade in the closet, figuring who he was and suffered from a comphet that made him almost marry a woman. Plus he's been out for less than 10 years and (possibly) didn't feel comfortable enough with himself until he got a clean slate. And he probably didn't have support when he came out, but that's a headcanon. I think this made him project that onto Buck, even if he didn't mean to.

And Buck's journey is nothing like Tommy's (from what we've seen).

Buck definitely carries wounds regarding his self-worth, he is somebody who thinks he's both too much and not enough. He didn't grow up in a supportive household, and the only person who did support him left. His sexual awakening, from what we saw, was a very different experience than what he's used too. He had people with him, he was immediately supported and told it didn't change how others saw him. The weight of his sexuality looks to be light, there seems to be barely any struggle, unlike Tommy. And I think it made Buck underestimate how bad it probably was for Tommy before.

Adding to that, there are also other elements to them that led to this mess.

Buck is impulsive, acts without thinking and doesn't grasp the consequences of his actions until they blow up on his face. And Tommy seems to act on self-preservation, he guards himself from danger and pain and acts on it. And it plays against them.

I think Buck's self-worth issues hit hard when he learned about the engagement, but not for that in itself.

I remember he actually looked intrigued when Tommy said he almost married a woman, and it wasn't until he knew it was Abby that he was put off and spiraled (side note: I hate the way they decided to canonize the Abby theory). It was that idea that if Tommy hurt someone Buck loved, then who's to say he wouldn't do the same to him, someone's who's "too much"?

I also think Buck's impulsivity set off Tommy's self-preservation alarms. Add that the (possible) projection he put onto him and it's no wonder Tommy ran, because, if he has hurt people before then who's to say Evan wouldn't do the same one day? If Evan's pace is fast then who's to say the relationship won't be too?

It's just, ughh there's so many layers I could peel off from this but it's also very much a stretch in my head.

Anyways, thanks for reading this? I don't know if it made any sense but hey, it doesn't really need to.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

So to make a long story semi short; during fall term a couple unknowing found a set of mastodon teeth and brought to my anthropology professor at the college, since then they conducted some field work and found more bone. They obviously stopped because of winter but in summer the college will be offering a field work class to go help at the site. I want to do that, but as mentioned before I have Cerebral Palsy which means I don't have a lot of upper body strength or flexibility. But I can still do a lot. My I guess problem is my Professors respect me and that's hard for me to get with all the ableism and I worked hard these last two semesters to break out of my shell to get here , I guess I just don't want to 1. make a fool of myself 2. be a hindrance and/or mess something up

any advice?

This sounds like an incredible opportunity, and I would definitely encourage you to pursue it! I hear your concerns about embarrassing yourself and being a hindrance, but I think you should reframe your thinking around facts that 1) everybody deserves learning experiences regardless of their physical ability, and 2) there are things you can do that will be an asset to the excavation.

Some of these things include taking notes and photographs, documenting and storing finds, and working with any digital tools like GPS units. You may also be able to do lab work and different kinds of analysis, depending on what they find and how they run the program. A good supervisor (although not all are created equal) will be willing to work with you to come up with a plan for how you can participate and what that will look like.

Usually, classes like this have applications where students list their relevant coursework and write a brief personal statement about why they want to participate. There are a couple of ways you could go about this in regards to disclosing your disability and seeking accommodations. You can either:

Disclose early: this would entail including something about your disability in your personal statement, in an email to the professor running the dig, etc.

Disclose later: submit your application without mentioning your disability. Feel free to mention how hard you've worked to get where you are, and if you want to talk about vague challenges with your health as part of that, it's up to you. If you are accepted to the dig, ask for a meeting with the supervisor where you can then explain your needs and what you are able to do.

Generally, I advise erring on the side of disclosing later rather than earlier. As I'm sure you're aware, prejudice and implicit bias are unfortunately a thing, and sometimes the only way to protect yourself from those impeding your application is to withhold information (although obviously this isn't an option if the professor already knows you). Additionally, you have legal protections against discrimination that are much easier to enforce after you have been accepted.

That being said, I've been heartened to see that more and more people in archaeology spaces are thinking about what accessibility means in field settings and how to include people with disabilities.—perhaps this is also the case with whoever is running this dig. Archaeology is for everyone, and there are many roles in an excavation for someone who can't do physical labor.

Finally, I'll close with some resources that might be helpful.

The Disabled Archaeologists Network: while I don't think they have a ton of programming for undergraduates (yet), membership is free and can put you in touch with

Field Tested: an article about a disabled student who was able to participate in a geology field school (similar levels of work to an archaeology one). It discusses some of the accommodations the student needed, and what they were able to do.

Here's an article by Dr. Anita Marshall, the professor who ran that accessible field school. Its content isn't substantially different from the one I linked above, but at the end it also cites some good literature about accessibility in field work. You should be able to access a lot of those publications through your institution's library or @jstor's free (or institutional) service.

Good luck, -Reid

[sandraharissa]

Another thing that I like about the Silco and Jinx dynamic as I see it in s1 is how we see how Powder in act I was already very troubled but despite that it didn’t show much. Sure she sulked and messed stuff up but Vander seemed like he was not interacting with Powder enough to know anything bad was going on inside her head or that it even was a problem that she messed stuff up, like he’s never told it was specifically Powder who lost the loot or that it caused issues within the group, Vi handles the matter completely on her own. Vi seemed oblivious to the possibility of Powder having a meltdown, Mylo clearly doesn’t think his complaining does any damage to her mind or he'd stop/tone it down, if Claggor thought it was that bad you’d think he’d protect Powder more too. We get all these close-ups to her face and some quiet moments like when she separates from the group in the apartment or when she’s cornered at the docks or when she eavesdrops on Mylo and Vi and of course when she has her meltdown. We the audience have a way better understanding of just in how much distress she is non-stop and how isolated and helpless she is and how everything scares/hurts her. Just like it often is the case with ppl who are struggling, bcos most times she’s shy and polite and so ppl around her are unaware of how bad it is.

And then Silco’s treatment of her, spoiling her, lack of discipline or boundaries or consequences etc. in the long run exacerbated certain issues but I’d argue that it primarily just created an environment where she’s showing her issues way more than she did beforehand. Before there was an attempt to fit into society/her environment and act properly, like a normal person. Living with Silco, neither of these matter cos they don’t matter to him, he himself is an evil weirdo who doesn’t care if ppl like him. Combine the understanding/safe space with a new parent who encourages self-isolation/self-acceptance to the point of embracing your bad traits/maladaptive coping mechanisms and with her own overwhelming experiences and it’s not hard to imagine her early on while living with Silco simply changing her attitude and self-expression to be more honest and open and unapologetic to how she acted before. years later resulting in her outwardly exhibiting unhinged behaviors and even intentionally playing into her ‘crazy’ reputation for strength/advantage when before she was hiding/suppressing her issues.

It's heart-warming that she feels safe and understood with Silco and trusts him more than anyone else and is more confident than before. However her displaying her issues more than ever only to be enabled no matter how bad it gets would of course only result in the further deterioration of her behavioral/social issues. But it’s also not like Silco has the external means (psychiatrists on runeterra) or internal means (healthy mind, knowledge of mental illnesses) to actually do anything about her issues anyway. just like Vi/Vander didn’t have the means to help her in any way, they could never 1)figure out what’s wrong and 2)be able to fix it.

[0rczy]

I really like analyzing Varigo, one thing I've noticed recently is how different their approach to romance (and human connections in general) really is, but also how they're pretty much the perfect foils in this regard.

Varian grew up sheltered away in their mansion. He didn't have much clue about socializing, so when Rapunzel came to him, he gives all of them proper respect (calling Rapunzel "Princess", Eugene "Flynn Rider", as in the full name). You could assume it's because of his dad; later when the two confronted each other, Varian called him "Sir". Probably because Quiring taught him to be respectful of others, and they both clearly take this social rule rather seriously.

So then Cassandra comes in and saves Varian, for apparently no selfish reasons. She likely just didn't want to have a child get crushed when she could've prevented it, but to Varian, this changes his view on people. Cassandra isn't just a distant figure to respect; instead, someone he could have a connection with. And this is where one of Varian's most essential traits come to light: when comfortable, he treats situations like an experiment. He immediately starts calling her by a nickname, "Cassie", to see how she would react. At the day of the expo, he keeps trying out different tactics, trying to essentially just get close to Cassandra. One could Interpret this romantically, but I personally like to think he just really wanted a friend. A lonely kid, seeing someone cool show any kind of affection for him immediately made him go "there could be something here! I need to find out!", and so he does. In his own, nerdy way.

Hugo, on the other hand. He, unlike Varian, grew up having to socialize all the time. Having to talk his way out of situations constantly, he learned to put up walls so that the most desirable results come out, benefiting him and his missions. When he weasels his way into the Team, he also calls them nicknames. In his case, it stems from a need to distance himself from people, so that he doesn't get attached. One slight exception though is Varian, as Hugo seemingly not only uses nicknames on him to keep up built-up walls, but to get a reaction out of him. This is very similar to how Varian approached Cassandra when he was younger. He's interested in Varian from early on, and he handles this in his good old Hugo fashion, because he finds Varian entertaining. Varian at first doesn't trust Hugo, but when he proves himself trustworthy, he gives in. He's willing to reach out, making Hugo more than a means to an end. Eventually, the two become friends! Then more than friends!

And then, their approaches change.

I'd like to think that it was Hugo, who fell first. Or at the very least, he's the first to realize it, and he HATES THIS. His flight or flight is activated, and he really wants to flee. He's the type to ignore his feelings, try to bury them. That's all he knows how to do, really. Especially because for what could be the first time in his life, he's actually falling for someone who is his friend. Someone who means a lot to him! He wouldn't want to ruin things, especially because he knows that betraying Variant will break the guy's heart, once he finds out. Therefore, the less pain, the better.

Varian is the exact opposite of this. It takes him a long time to figure out what he feels, and that it could be romantic (he didn't exactly have the history with romance before. The "puppy crush" on Cassandra could have easily been more of an obsession with the possibility of someone showing affection towards him). But once he realizes that there's a chance that the two could be a thing? He doesn't have to think hard about what his next step should be: he likes Hugo, and he's a scientist. Trial and error is practically in his blood at this point, so if there's even a small possibility of them getting together? That Hugo likes him back? Varian will do anything to find out how probable his theory is. And so, once again, he treats the situation like an experiment. Wasting no time, he tries to confess or bring up the idea as quickly as possible. And Hugo FREAKS OUT. He's not ready!

Varian's other big trait is his stubbornness. He's not satisfied with an uncertain answer. He wants to know Hugo's view on them, as clearly as possible. So he keeps poking around, trying to find an approach that brings out different reactions, different answers as to why Hugo would be scared of them being together. Again. Really similar to how he treated Cassandra at the expo back then. This is the only way he knows how, though. And he needs clear answers.

He gets one at the last trial. Boom. Heartbreak. This isn't about angst though, so I'll end it here.

I find them so interesting. How their upbringing influenced their view and approach to people, to friendship, to romance. To each other. They are both scientists, but one is more afraid of the results than the other.

So it all boils down to the importance of clear communication: another big theme in Vat7k, what with Ulla and Donella setting an example as what not to do.

I could ramble about these characters for ages, but yeah. This is my view on them, I loooove reading different Interpretations in fan fiction though!

[ghostdiva]

Jax Character Analysis

this was something I was going to turn into a video essay. I unfortunately found out the hard way that I don't have the mental capacity to turn the analysis I made into a video essay. it's just a small essay.

that said, click the read more if you want to read some walls of text.

So, as some of you might guess, I’m a huge fan of the amazing digital circus. I’ve always loved when shows break down their characters, and show how they tick, what their experiences are, and how they coped with it. Especially when these characters are antagonistic in nature. There’s nothing like thinking “man, this character is an asshole”,vaguely wondering why, then getting their lore dropped and thinking “oh…. Well yeah that’d do it”, while coping with the emotional knives the plot just stabbed you with.

And fortunately for me, this show is all about the characters. I remember seeing posts from Gooseworx, the creator of digital circus herself, stating that this show was not only about the characters, but finding meaning in a stagnant life. Which I think is an amazing and deep concept to think about.

Now, there are posts made by other people picking apart every member of the digital circus. However I feel a lot of people get Jax misunderstood, often writing him off as a one-note, one dimentional asshole. Some people even think he’s an NPC, like they can’t fathom the idea that a person would be capable of cruelty, despite the world we live in today. And with how hellish, crazy, and wild the digital world is shown to be able to be, I’m frankly not surprised that a character would be capable of cruelty.

However, I hardly think Jax is 1 dimensional. I think there’s a lot to see and explore with his character. I will also point out now, that I am not condoning, supporting, or defending Jax’s actions in the show, I’m simply trying to understand the why’s.

That said, the first thing I want to address are the emotions Jax portrays throughout the show. I’m also gonna throw in some tells I’ve noticed, along with a sprinkle of shape theory. So let’s get into it.

Like any good storyteller, I’m gonna start at the very beginning. We, as the viewer, see a lot of Jax in the pilot, aka episode 1. The first thing I wanna point out is his facial expressions. Specifically, his tell that I’m going to refer to as “mischief mode”. Whenever Jax wants to cause mischief, his face will portray the tell of “mischief mode”, which is portrayed by his eyes and mouth sharpening into crescent shapes. In "mischief mode”, Jax sports a Cheshire grin, and his eyes squint a bit, creating crescents for every facial feature. He does this when he’s teasing the circus members, or about to cause mischief, which usually involves one of the circus members. Even when Jax isn’t smiling, if the corners of his mouth look sharp or pointed, he’s likely still looking to cause mischief.

But what about when Jax isn’t trying to cause mischief? Well, in practically every other scene we see Jax in, that doesn’t involve mischief, he looks bored. Jax wears expressions that range around boredom, apathy, curiosity, annoyance, and anger. Many times, when I’ve watched Jax’s character, I’ve found myself wondering if chronic boredom was ever a reason for him to do what he does. Especially since he almost seems to chase anything that is new or exciting. He does have limits though, as he’s shown in the pilot immediately booking it when he sees the abstracted Kaufmo.

Speaking of, I do want to talk about his actions in the pilot a bit. As well as his overall attitude toward adventures. With the gather the gloinks adventure, Jax approaches it with a level of apathy. The gloinks are so uninteresting for him, that he barely cares when the gloinks basically kidnap Zooble. Although, you could argue that everyone held a bit of apathy toward Zooble’s kidnapping by gloink, except for Gangle. Afterall, literally everyone just stood there and watched it happen, and Gangle was the only one even remotely looking distressed about Zoobles predicament. If anything, Jax is the only one who calls attention to Zoobles kidnapping by saying “oh no, they killed Zooble. Anyway you guys wanna get something to eat?”

In the pilot he seems to hold a sort of “no matter what happens, they’ll be fine” mindset, which is likely due to the nature of the digital world. Afterall, it seems that the only real way to “die” in the digital world is by abstracting. We as the viewer, see the characters of the digital circus go through things that’d kill a person in the real world. Such as falling from high heights, getting run over, getting eaten, and being slammed into the walls and floor. At worst this can jumble their characters code, making them glitch. However, outside of that, it would seem that physical harm has no real lasting consequences. And Jax, who is already accustomed to the digital world, knows this. Hell, with how often the circus crew gets thrown around on adventures, it wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up finding humor in the misfortune others face and experience. In fact, I’d argue that he does find humor in it, because he does go out of his way to cause that misfortune sometimes.

Getting back on topic, Jax’s approach to the Pilot’s adventure is one of apathy, and he didn’t care about it so much that he elected himself to check on Kaufmo with Ragatha and Pomni instead of participating. The only reason Jax ends up participating in the Gloink adventure at all, is because Kaufmo abstracted. The fact he flees within moments of finding out Kaufmo abstracted, implies that abstracted members are one of the few great dangers within the digital circus. It’s only emphasized more with Ragatha getting glitched after being thrown around by the abstracted Kaufmo. The next time we see Jax in the pilot, he’s running. He checks behind himself as if to make sure he isn’t being chased, before addressing Gangle and Kinger.

How Jax goes about this interaction is interesting to me, and I think it’s what made people think he wasn’t all that bad when all we had was the pilot. When Gangle asks Jax about Kaufmo, he lies about it, saying “oh he’s doing great”. Jax says that with a lot of sarcasm though, dragging out the “great” and making exaggerating gestures. I think Jax lies here because he knows that if he drops the truth here, he’s just going to be questioned. Gangle and Kinger would likely be distressed at the news, making them less likely to move. And Kaufmo is still roaming around the tent. When Jax hears Kaufmo’s growls, he quickly forces himself into mischief mode, using the bowling ball to get both Kinger and Gangle down the “Zooble hole”. Jax then quickly joins them, not only successfully removing all of them from the tent area, but also hiding them from Kaufmo’s abstraction.

A lot of people tend to write off Jax as an asshole, yet his actions seem to show him caring at least a little bit about the people around him. Afterall, if he didn’t care about them, he wouldn’t have forced Kinger and Gangle down the “Zooble hole” with him. He would’ve just left them there, where they’d likely run into Kaufmo and end up like Ragatha, who was left glitched and distorted in the hallway of the living quarters.

Now, you might be thinking “yeah he’s an asshole, not a monster. But what about episode 2? He basically terrorized Pomni and Gangle the whole time”. To which I’d say “funny you bring up episode 2”.

In episode 2, you’re right, we do get a lot of Jax being an ass. However, I’d like to point out what the adventure was called. “Candy Carrier Chaos”. I’m gonna emphasize a very important word here. “Candy Carrier Chaos”. Now, I’m going to preface this by saying, I’m pretty sure Jax is a literal thinker. He doesn’t sugar coat anything he says, in fact, he’s sometimes brutally honest. In episode 3, when Caine told them they had to collect paranormal activity, Jax took it as having to Capture all the ghosts. So when he’s given the adventure called “Candy Carrier Chaos”, where he has to track down a bunch of bandits and take back what they stole; Jax is stoked. The title, and general premise of the adventure implies that it’ll be a high action, high stakes adventure, with fighting, death, and well, chaos. So he goes into this adventure with that expectation, which is why he looks so apathetic until princess Loolilalu brings out the modded syrup tanker. From that point “mischief mode” is on until they go over the cliff and land in the fudge below.

Now I know you’re thinking “OP, Jax literally throws Pomni out of the truck”. You're right, however I think Pomni was only targeted here because Ragatha literally offered her by saying “I’m sure there’s something you could do to help out” in reference to the adventure. Jax, who’s more on the idea of pulling a vehicle heist, and realizing he’ll need an extra set of hands to help him if he wants to do it, just takes the offer. Now, you gotta remember Jax’s mindset regarding member safety. Which is that “they can’t really die or get hurt in a way that matters (that is to say, physically disabled or restricted due to injury), so no matter what happens, they’ll be fine.”

Now, this isn’t a healthy mindset in the slightest, but there is a bit of logic there. Pomni is still new and doesn’t know this yet, so she’s understandably hurt and confused by Jax’s actions. Which is why she doesn’t see Jax as someone who would be there for her, and we see this with Jax’s hand missing in this scene.

But this isn’t about Pomni, this is about Jax.

Now, once the truck goes over the cliff, everyone is on the outside of the truck. With the fudge monster, it looks like Jax is like, scraping the bottom of the barrel for what chaos he can cause. The most he could do was yoink Ragatha’s key to the Kingdom with the promise to let the fudge monster into the kingdom if he helps them capture the gummy gators. It’s a promise he makes good on, and it ends up being the last laugh he gets for causing chaos in this episode.

Now, with episode 3, we unfortunately don’t get a lot of Jax. from what we do get, we see him follow the premise of the adventure, vacuuming up ghostly under the idea that “collecting paranormal activity” meant “capturing the ghosts”. Ragatha scolds him for it, and when they have to choose between the 2 doors, Jax uses Gangle’s mask to see if the scary door was rigged or something. It was, as the door turned into a giant mouth, consuming Gangle’s mask, never to be seen again. This kicks off the plot, where Kinger and Pomni get separated from the group. I’d like to point out that this is the second time in a row that Jax’s actions has caused Pomni to get separated from the rest of the group. However Jax had no way of knowing that Kinger and Pomni would end up getting forced down the scary door. Once again though, his apathy toward them is made clear when all he has to say after this is “oh that’s the scary door”.

The next time we see Jax, he’s tied up and struggling against the rope. And if I had to guess, he probably just wanted to get free to capture the other ghost that Ragatha and Gangle had a tea party with. As soon as they all left Martha Mildenhall’s room, Jax stopped struggling. While he was tied up though, Jax’s expression ranged from enraged, to annoyed.

I’d also like to point out another little detail I noticed. And it’s that Jax gets visibly annoyed whenever someone has an emotional moment. He gets annoyed when Kaufmo’s funeral is brought up, he gets annoyed when Pomni explains why she wants to bring Gumigoo back with her. He gets annoyed when Pomni thanks Ragatha for being concerned about her. It’s almost like he gets annoyed at emotional vulnerability. And boy do I wonder why this purple twink has such a strong reaction to emotional vulnerability. I mean, there’s only a few times that Jax is seen being emotionally vulnerable himself, and each of these instances are at most, a second or 2 long. 

This brings me to the 4th episode, which is the most recent episode as of posting this. This is also probably the most interesting episode for Jax’s character so far, as he seems to take it down a notch when it comes to the mischief he usually makes.

The episode begins with Jax, Gangle, and Ragatha chilling in the common area. Jax wielding a baseball bat, and Ragatha trying to teach Gangle how to throw a baseball. While Ragatha verbally walks Gangle through the motions of throwing the ball, Jax says “you’re wasting your time Raggy”, in a teasing manner. Keep in mind, this is the first time we’re seeing the characters engage in actual play with one another. And Jax does seem to just want to play in the moment. Hell, I’d say he’s being very patient, waiting for Ragatha to teach Gangle to throw so he can hit the ball. He’s also displaying emotions outside his usual range. During this bit he has a neutral, focused, or curious expression, which I’d say is indicative of him just wanting to play a game. The only “Mischief Mode” tell present here is his smile, but his eyes aren’t squinted in the crescent shape that indicates it. So it’s very likely that he’s just having fun here.

When Gangle finally throws the ball, Jax swings the bat, hits the ball with his eyes closed, and the ball hits Gangle in the face. Ragatha immediately scolds Jax, assuming he did it on purpose. Jax immediately defends himself saying “I actually didn’t mean to do that”, but Ragatha doesn’t seem to care that it was an accident, and only sees that Jax hurt a circus member again. So the 2 start fighting, with Ragatha stating her anger at Jax for always hurting the other members, and Jax arguing that this time was an accident, and that if it were on purpose he would’ve been proud of it. Which implies that Jax wasn’t proud of the fact that he hurt Gangle here. He probably was just trying to play a game.

Outside of that, episode 4 has a lot of Jax scenes that show similar and different sides to him. We see him still get up to some mischief when he throws Ragatha in the deep fryer, but after that we see a more chill version of Jax. His expressions also visually seem more strained or forced in some scenes, which might allude to what Gooseworx meant when she said Jax would get worse as the episodes went on. When Gooseworx said that originally, people thought that the pranks and mischief Jax would cause would get more and more extreme, to the point where he crosses a serious line. However, I think that Jax’s “Mischief Mode” is a mask in it of itself, which was meant to cover up his feelings and emotions. And we as the viewer will see that mask slip more and more, as Jax’s mental state steadily declines. You see, Kaufmo was an example of what happens when you don’t have a support group in the digital world, and no one likes Jax. So why would any of the circus members try to be there for him? He’s not once shown to have any care for them in their eyes. To them, all he’s done is tease them, bully them, and sometimes even intentionally put them in harm's way. Even in moments where it wasn’t intentional on his part. I’ll admit, this does make me nervous for his character moving forward, but while Gooseworx said he’d get worse, she didn’t say he won’t get better. I really do want to see Jax get some positive character development, or even just get some more concrete reasons behind Jax’s behaviour.

[eggonicayto]

A while ago, I had a dream where Picky got murdered by some backstabbing Genie. She got cut in half, and everyone got launched far away. Upon them waking up, they discovered that Picky was currently dying on the ground. They all gathered around and got all emotional, saying things like “You can’t die” or “We’re going to save you, just please hang on”…but Picky knew her time was up. And right on cue, as she took her last breath, the others were forced to run away to avoid the oncoming rock avalanche, leaving her corpse behind (to Kickin’s dismay)

Then, after the coast was clear, and when they all went back home, everyone mourned her death and held a funeral for her. Kickin (who’s Picky’s brother in my personal AU, and ig was in the dream too) has a really hard time accepting her death, and went through the stages of grief.

But then- some random scientist guy (he was a giraffe) dug up her death site, scooped up her remains, and brought it back to his lab, where he reconstructs Picky and turned her into a robot. When she reawoke in her new body, she was confused and scared, and asked the scientist where her friends are and how long she’s been out. Turns out she’s been dead for half a year now, which is when she notices her robotic state. She freaks out and then runs away to go find them again, but she was unfortunately very far away from their hometown.

Just as she arrived, she saw the very same genie that killed her attacking her friends once again. Angry, she used her new robot abilities to take him down for good. Having watched this, the others were stunned, and think they’re hallucinating. They all get emotional, but then they get sceptical if she’s really the real Picky. The days following, the others are weird towards her, and Kickin flat out says “You’re not my sister, my sister’s dead! You’re just a robot!!” Which wounds her deeply, but she understands. And all the while she’s still coping with the fact that she’s a robot herself, and having to adjust to her new body.

It was only when Bubba had some experiments done on Picky, he discovered she had an organic brain, which confirmed she, was in fact, the real Picky. Everyone was overjoyed, and cheered over the fact that they had their Picky back…though Kickin was hesitant to accept he, he eventually came around.

And then she was just Picky, but a robot. Things were different, but resumed as normal. Anddd she was pretty bummed over not being able to eat anymore. But she was happy, and funny robot shenanigans ensued.

It was like a fucking movie, I tell ya.

I might turn it into an AU.