#I have so much concept art that if we needed to hire someone one day they’d probably be fine

[cherrysnax]

okay im normal now I love art again <3

[ellievickstar]

The Name of Love (Eris Vanserra x reader)

A/N: This is just a short story to boost my imagination, I loved this concept but I’m a little lazy to write it so I hope this turned out well because I really had to push through and endure here T^T

Summary: After a long time of enduring what she thought was a loveless marriage, YN finally decides to leave the High Lord of the Autumn Court (Eris, not Beron. Beron is dead 🥳) 

Inspired? Yes! By In The Name of Love by Bebe Rexha

Requested? No. 

Warnings: Heart break, angst, lack of self-esteem, more angst, unstable author (My friend wrote the last part but we all know it’s true 😂) 

*I would put art here but I can’t draw for shit*

~*~*~*~*~

YN POV:

You huffed as you straightened the front of your skirt. Today was the day you were finally leaving. You smiled at the thought as you pushed open the heavy double doors to the throne room. Eris was on break, however, he still seemed to be filling in some paperwork. 

He looked up at you once and rolled his eyes as he looked back down at his paperwork, “I told you not to disturb me when I-” “I’m leaving,” You interrupted as you took off the wedding band he had given you years ago. You didn’t know what to expect, maybe some sort of acknowledgment or a goodbye, or maybe even a plea to stay. But, nothing, he simply hummed as if trying to get you to leave, not even paying attention to you. You looked down as disappointment filled you and bitterness. This was why you were leaving. You were tired of this, this negligence. Sure, Eris sometimes bedded you for his own needs and enjoyment but you wanted more. You wanted love and happiness. 

Now that his father had been long dead and he no longer needed you, and now that Keir was dead as well and could no longer force you to stay here, you were leaving. You turned around and left. The guards shifted uncomfortably, opening their mouths to say something but you shook your head. For years the guards have watched you struggle and you had created a sort of sibling bond with them. You didn’t want to leave them but you couldn’t bring yourself to stay any longer, and with someone else on the way… 

By the time you reached your room, tears had filled your eyes. Eris Vanserra wasn’t cruel like his father, but he wasn’t too compassionate either. There was a certain balance he had and you had loved that about him. You had held out hope that one day you would be able to settled down and sort things out together, but he still ignored you everyday. You were so tired. 

“We’ll be okay,” you said softly as you placed a hand over your still flat abdomen. You had found out this morning. Maybe, that was what made you decide to leave, but the fact remained that you couldn’t bring a child into a loveless environment like this. He might not have a father if you left, but that was better then knowing that your father couldn’t care enough to love you.

And so you began to pack.  

~*~*~*~*~*~

Eris POV: 

A second opening of the double doors caught my attention, YN didn’t usually come more then once a day during my breaks and I had been so busy earlier I hadn’t realised she left. Most of the time she offers to spend time together, or brings food that I don’t touch, I hadn’t paid attention to what she said so I wonder why she came back, however, her visits were always welcomed. 

“My lord,” A timid voice squeaked out. It was one of the handmaidens. I frowned as I glanced up. “Speak,” I ordered, already annoyed and disappointed that it wasn’t my lovely wife. I still had so much paperwork to get done and being distracted wasn’t good, but, the next few sentences the handmaiden said had me sprinting out the doors. 

“The lady has left the grounds sir, I assumed she was going for a walk but she had taken quite a large bag with her, and she left behind her wedding ring, sire” She stuttered out, seeming completely dazed. “What?” I shot out of my seat, “She didn’t even tell me anything before leaving-” “She did,” One of my guards cut in. Amber, she was one of my first few female guards I had hired after my fathers death, and I remember she grew quite close with YN. “What do you mean,” I demanded. “She told you, she told you she was leaving. So either you were deaf, or you just couldn’t care enough and I am glad,” She snorted. I stalked up to her, enraged. 

“What. Did. You. Say.” I growled. Amber didn’t even flinch. “I am glad that she got out of this loveless and ridiculous marriage, with her father recently dead and your father long gone, who is holding her back? I mean, she does have that baby, but maybe it will have a better life outside these cold walls,” My blood ran cold as I processed the guards words. And then I ran. I ran so fast to her room, and there it was, a wedding ring, and a note. 

Dear Eris Vanserra, 

I have left your home. I had told you earlier but if you weren’t paying attention I’m telling you now. I want more then what you have deemed fit to give me. You use me when you want and afterwards you discard me with no regards, I am your wife for crying out loud! Anyways, I’m tired. I have taken my stuff and I will get a priestess to break our marriage as soon as I am comfortable with seeing you again. If you have or have not heard about the pregnancy, do not expect me to give you any right to seeing him or her. Maybe I should have left the moment my father died, this was a doomed marriage to begin with. 

Goodbye,                                                                                                                      YN

I paled as I read the letter again and again. This must be some sort of trick, but as I surveyed her room I noticed that some clothes were missing, drawers were pulled open and emptied of their cash and jewels. Most of she had earned herself or brought from the court of nightmares. I held the discarded wedding band in my hand as my knees buckled beneath me. 

She had left, because of me. 

~*~*~*~*~

A/N: I might make part 2, I might not. 

taglist: tag list: @moonfawnx @bankerfrog @younxii @starlit-terror @hideing@flightlesslittlebirdie @menagerofmischief @famousbasementpainter@owllover123 @cityofidek @gigisssz

[ur-favorite-pincushion]

What do I do from here? If I feel I can survive a third year mentally, should I take it? What benefit will it give me besides a slight bump in pay?

I need to finish my book. It's a long shot, but it's my dream. I owe it to myself to at least try. It's difficult, but not impossible.

I can go to the job fair at the end of the year if I still wanna work in Japan. I worked too fucking hard to give up, but idk how to make a connection here that would give me what I need. My language ability has to improve in order to thrive here, and language school costs money. Studying on my own is not enough.

I can do translation, or art work from anywhere with a computer though, so I'm not chained to Japan indefinitely.

I could go back to the states and be a flight attendant. Move to New York and make art again when I'm not shoved in a gum packet 50,000 feet in the air for hours at a time. The money is good, but I know the job is lonely and you miss out on so much because of the work culture. I feel like I'd be leaving one lonely job for another.

I am tired of being alone, but I don't want to be with someone unless I genuinely give a shit about them. With how I feel attraction, waiting for love is like waiting to get struck by lightning. A waste of time. It's best to do other things until it happens out of the blue.

I could look into a masters program and become a college professor, but aside from studio perks and decent pay IF I can get hired on by a university, I can't say I want to jump back into teaching. Even if adult courses would be different. Even if it's art focused.

I want to say that everything used to be simple, but that was probably because my scope of understanding of the world was so small when this whole idea began.

Self exploration is an endless journey. What are my values? My goals? What is important to me?

It's so easy to get wrapped up in these all consuming concepts, but it's an endless chase and there is no perfect answer and those answers can always change.

What holds ME in importance is probably the better question to ask. What gives back to me? What will catch me on my hard days, or not runaway at uncertainty?

What will be brave, loving, and patient with me in the face of an ever changing, dangerous world?

We always want certainty, but it doesn't exist.

You just have to try things. You just have to trust your gut and jump in. Do your best to adapt.

Do your best to be happy, and be a source of happiness to those around you.

A purpose can change during the span of a human life many, many times.

Life isn't something you can plan for in definite ways.

You just gotta pick a direction and walk.

Let what feels right push you into that first step and adapt with the road as it comes.

I guess I have until November to decide.

[jinxthejubilee]

Venus - We Need to Talk (Again)

Back here again, aren't we? I'm so sorry, but I just can't help myself.

Because I have just discovered that there were plans to reveal not just one, but TWO lost turtles in ROTTMNT, I will discuss the story potential both Venus and Slash could have, should this show ever come back. (Please Nickelodeon, do something right for once and give us this show back-) But I must finish Venus first, before moving on to Slash.

And for those of you who might ask about Jennika, I thought about making her own page to hold out hope that she could make it into the Rise universe, only to come to the tragic realization that it was highly unlikely that she could ever appear in the show, given that Venus and Slash are pretty infamous as characters, and that the creators said that there were 2 missing turtles and not 3. My apologies to all Jennika stans.

Anyway, I did talk about Venus already, yes, but after revisting her backstory from The Next Mutation, I've come to the conclusion that her debut story isn't all bad? Yeah, I can't believe I just said that either.

I'll give the Next Mutation writer's 15-year-old brains credit, the idea that Venus was adopted by someone else and learned ninjutsu/magic is a cool concept, if explored correctly.

Since it's been pretty well-established that Big Mama's assistant was likely going to be revealed as Venus, I have an idea as to how she got there.

Now I could be wrong, but I believe that Big Mama's assistant debuted in Season 2. Whether or not she was just hired or was hiding out until the time was right, who can say.

For those of you who don't know or simply wiped that show from your memory, Venus was raised by Master Chung I, a human martial artist who taught Venus everything he knew.

Chung I died after confronting the Dragon Lord and demanding that he release Splinter. And his last words to Venus were for her to travel to New York City.

Now if I were in charge, I would keep some similarities to this, but obviously take some creative liberties.

In my Rise version of event, Draxum's lab explodes, the boys and Splinter take off, and Venus and Slash are presumed by Draxum to have died.

Instead of Venus' father being a human, I would make him a yokai, who finds her somehow and takes her to the farthest end of the Mystic City.

This father-figure would parallel Splinter in a few ways:

He would simultaneously be responsible, yet neglectful at the same time. The guy would be very much a loner with a tragic past, so while he would take care of Venus physically, her emotionally needs are something he simply can't and would not handle.

He would never leave his home. Granted, it would be hard to do so, as he lives very, very far away from other yokai, but he just refuses to interact with anyone he doesn't have to. But not because he's lazy, it would likely be due to paranoia and his strict moral code to keep his whatever he's keeping secret, safe from everyone.

Less of a father, and more of a master. A total flip from Rise Splinter, who focused more on fatherhood than teaching his sons dangerous martial arts, this guy is "teacher first, father second."

I see him as a cat. Not sure why I went with that, but it was a cool idea I thought of while brainstorming. While Splinter is an overweight, yet agile rat, I imagine Chung I would be a skeletal, agile, and exhausted cat.

I even have a sketch I drew.

Honestly, just think of 2012 Master Splinter for a frame of reference on his personality. He's still wise and knowledgeable, but instead of kind and compassionate, he's grumpy, unwelcoming, and snappy.

Not the greatest upbringing for Venus: living in isolation and rarely going outside, only knowing and living with one person her entire life, training constantly every single day, and being told that her emotions should never interfere with her duty, but she knows that it's the best for her! Poor thing...

So how does this play into how Venus became Big Mama's assistant? Allow me to explain:

The whole reason why Venus' father isolated himself and Venus was because of an ancient prophecy. I haven't worked out all the logistics of the prophecy, but basically he needs to protect that sacred amulet he has around his neck, or the Dragon Lord will rise once more.

Unfortunately, shenanigans happen and the Dragon Lord is awakened, but not at full power. Though he has just enough to kill Chung I.

Heartbroken and determined to stop the Dragon Lord, Venus travels through the Mystic City for any information on another ancient weapon that could destroy the beast once and for all.

This leads to her meeting Big Mama and learning about the Battle Nexus tournaments.

Whether Venus likes Big Mama or not, I haven't decided, but she's honestly just using her to gain battle experience and knowledge on everything going on within the Mystic City and/or the surface.

Depending on when all of this happened, she might have become Big Mama's assistant at least several months to a year prior to the boys being introduced to her in Season 2.

I picture that the big reveal of Venus being their sister would play out a bit similarly to how I discussed previously. I loved looking through everyone's ideas about Venus, and I can say without a doubt, that the amount of fanfare behind ROTTMNT and Venus overall is worth Nickelodeon bringing back this show.

Note: Well! I hope you all enjoyed this! If you read till the end, thank you very much! Please tell me what you think of my ideas, that would be very much appreciated! Until next time with my comments, concerns, and ideas about Slash, have a great day everyone! Byeee! 💗

[writingquestionsanswered]

Tattoo Shop AU - a quick, practical guide for writers

Guest Post by lebanon-hangover

lebanon-hangover said: this is based on my personal experience with the industry only, so depending on the era and country you are portraying, it may not be 100% accurate for your setting.

Hygiene

It may not be obvious at first glance, but most tattooists are clean freaks. We work with human blood every day, and we get clients from all ages, ethnic and social economic backgrounds, with all sorts of medical conditions.

We usually mop frequently, bleach the sinks, wipe down everything, and use cling film or bags to wrap everything. I mean fucking everything. We also scrub in, and sanitise the area on the person we work on.

Needles are collected in a sharps bin, and handled very carefully. Medical waste goes in yellow bags, and both are collected by a professional service.

Used ink caps may look full, but the ink gets diluted by blood. Like you dip the inky needle into the person, but you also dip the person’s blood into your ink. These are medical waste too.

Cleaning up must be done promptly after the session. Bin everything disposable, put things through the ultrasonic and the autoclave, and sanitise the area. We may take machines apart, but more for maintenance than cleaning, sometimes we swap parts in them too.

We have two sinks, one for hand washing, one for cleaning.

All inks and needles have use by dates.

The internal dynamics of a studio

Depending on the country, some tattoo shops tend to have ties to biker gangs, and some of those internal dynamics and unwritten rules are often present.

There’s a pecking order and it’s dead serious. Basically the longer you’ve been in a shop, the higher ‘rank’ you are, you get the better positioned stations, first pick of walk-ins, etc (Unless the client is asking for someone by name). Regardless of your actual experience in the industry, like if you move into your old apprentice’s shop, they are still senior to you. If the owner or their partner is an artist, obviously they are on top of the chain by default.

We are self employed, but we have a boss. You are only making money if you are working, but you still have set work hours.

We get paid by the clients, and we pay the studio a cut. In return, there are some items provided by them, and some we buy for ourselves. Usually the chairs, tattoo beds, gloves, cleaning products, clip cord covers, masks, aprons, ink caps, vaseline, green soap, and some basic ink is provided by the shop. We buy our own machines, arm rests, stations, pedals, power supplies, clipcords, tips and grips, needles, special colours, stencil fluid…these are a personal preference, and often depend on the artists’ style.

We totally ask to try out each other’s equipment sometimes, or ask for a certain type of needle if we ran out.

The receptionist is usually just one of us, maybe a piercer, but it also can be a hired person in top studios.

The apprentice in the traditional system is often mistreated, and they have to pay for their education, have to be there multiple days a week and don’t make any money. It’s kind of like a tear them down, build them back up again thing to see if they are really serious about the job. Times are slowly changing, but 99% of them will always need a second job. Most of them are working as bar staff.

When you open a new studio, you must visit all the existing local ones and introduce yourself, otherwise you may get a brick through the window. Otherwise there’s not much beef among individual artists, they are often friends, go to conventions together and party after, etc.

The Artists

Tattooing is a fairly physical job, stretching skin is very important. We have to also keep our clients safely still, so we often use positions to pin them down a bit. Sometimes you hit a reflex point on the foot or under a knee, and you don’t want to get kicked. Sometimes you have to pull away super fast, cos they are sneezing, yawning or giggling.

Most tattooists drink a lot of coffee, tea or energy drinks.

Some people are all rounders, some have specific styles, but we recognise each other’s art styles. Sometimes we delegate work to each other, if we think our coworkers style fits the concept better. For example if there’s a person who does script well, we give them those projects.

We don’t like when people come in with designs from other artists. Art theft is frowned upon, and we work best with our own drawings.

Most apprentices practice on their own legs, and sometimes we tattoo each other when it’s quiet. Most people have cover ups, or bad pieces from their early days. The artists’ own tattoos sometimes are in a different style than what they do, but we like to collect ink from friends or colleagues we admire.

In the first 1-2 years one is an apprentice, then junior artist. At 5-8 years of tattooing, you have earned your stripes and are considered an experienced artist.

Conventions are really fun, but can be stressful. You can make good money working at one, and sometimes get awarded for it too. We can also spend a lot at a convention.

Sometimes we poke our fingers by accident, and it’s a scary thing. Good case scenario is just some random dots on your fingers. Let’s not go into the bad case scenario.

We do guest spots sometimes, just to meet new clients, and change it up a bit.

We spend a lot of time drawing up things, and designs are meant to fall on specific muscles, stretch with the skin a certain way, so they are tailored to the body proportions of the client. A good tattoo is also an optical illusion, complimenting the body shape.

Social media presence is like a second job, you need good photos, and you need to market yourself.

Tattoo ink does not wash out, so some stains are inevitable when pouring it out. Those ink bottles get stuck so easily, and we wrestle them a lot. We try to avoid it, but wearing all dark colours is a thing for a reason.

The Clients

Tattooists need to have a good ‘bedside manners’ too. We get nervous or self conscious people, and we are told personal things during long sessions. For example scar coverups and memorial pieces can be very emotional.

We have pretty good poker faces and first aid trainings. People can faint, get shaky, throw up, some have seizures, have b.o., get sweaty, etc the same way as at a blood donation event? It’s no big deal really. We sit them down, give them some water and some sugar, and re-book them if necessary. Most artists keep some wet wipes, mouth wash, deodorant, sweets, maybe even some clean clothes at work, just in case.

If someone comes in with a wild idea for a jobstopper, we would sit down and have a long talk. If they haven’t got many tattoos, we usually try to stir them towards more safe choices, offering them creative ideas. It’s like those jedi mind tricks sometimes.

If someone is undecided, we show them our own hand drawn flash sheets. Once its gone, its gone tho, we don’t use the designs twice.

Pinterest is full of photoshopped fake tattoos, some that won’t even work as real ink. Many people also touch up their work digitally on photos, so some clients have really unrealistic expectations.

We can totally tell if someone is intoxicated or hangover. It thins the blood, and they bleed out the ink, and it’s super annoying. if it’s bad, they will be sent home and rebooked.

Some folks are self conscious about body hair, their size, stretch marks and scars. Chances are, we have seen similar, and we aren’t bothered by it, because it’s work. Surgery scars, scars from accidents, self harm scars, burns, we see it all the time. We shave some really hairy dudes all the time girl, your legs are fine. Seriously. If something makes tattooing you dangerous we will tell you.

Fit, muscular people are harder to tattoo because they are really firm. Its a workout for us.

Everyone gets midnight messages about the aftercare from nervous clients, and drunken booty calls about getting inked right at this second. We have copy paste replies…

We get creeps sometimes. Stalking, weird conversations, tmi info dumps etc.

Other things to include (for fun, or for plot reasons)

We sometimes have those “oh fuck” moments. We all do, but mistakes can be fixed, and we play it cool.

Tattooing takes time. Usually 30 minutes to multiple sessions though years and years.

Healing tattoos takes about 2-4ish weeks, and your characters shouldn’t go roll around in dirt, sunbathe, swim, pick at the scabs. Nasty infections, and messed up tattoos would be the results.

If you have a strong immune system, and you get a lot of work done in one sitting, you may get a brief bit of a temperature. It’s normal, and will go away.

Its a lot easier to get seriously drunk after getting a tattoo. Be careful.

We sometimes draw on each other for practice with our marker pens.

Tattoos are inside the skin, not on top of it. Imagine a low opacity, skin toned layer over the ink, adding to the healed tattoos’ colour. Please stop making your characters skin fully transparent.

Heavy blackwork and palms are done in multiple sessions.

You can’t cover up moles, because if they develop skin cancer, the dermatologist can’t see the signs.

There’s a stereotype about piercers having blacked out sleeves.

Stencil fluid looks just like cum.

You get that annoying itch on your face when you scrubbed in, put on gloves and finally ready to go.

Some artists have a strong preference for coil or rotary machines, and they bicker about it a lot. Coils are louder, more punchy, and more traditional, perfect for lineart. They can be customised, and they last forever. They are also called glorified doorbells by people who prefer rotaries. Rotary machines are smoother, lighter, and often use needles that are pulled back into the cartridges for safety. They are better for shading and delicate line work. Older tattooists often say they are dildo or butt plug shaped, overly delicate and are for “soft millennials” only.

Every artist owns like 5 to 20 machines, and they have specific machine builders they are loyal to.

The “which cable is broken and cutting out” guessing game. Clip cords and pedal cables get worn out easily, and that results in your machine running really jerky.

Walk-in always show up 10 minutes before closing.

We often look quite silly at work. Sleeves rolled up, folks use all sorts of plastic ppe, headlamps, and we tie up our hair. Add couple of purple smears from carbon paper, and we aren’t scary at all.

[sanstropfremir]

Thank you so much for your blog - you manage to explain to me a lot of the feelings I have bubbling up these days when I watch kpop so I can finally understand why I do/don’t like something. It’s really nice to have some deeper perspective!

Since you’ve given a lot of your kpop pros and cons, a scenario: someone tomorrow magically puts you in charge of making a new kpop group. What type of people do you look for for the group? What sort of music/dance would you pick? Obviously also what type of fashion would go with it? I’m curious what your theoretical ideal is!

here anon take my whole heart i'm <333333333 sincerely i'm glad that i'm helping people to better articulate and understand how they engage with art!

ok first thing's first, my actual ideal job would be creative director for two midsize sibling groups to do a paired concept. like shinee's view and f(x)'s 4 walls. basically i would like to be min heejin. doesn't have to be two opposite gender groups, it can be two of the same; oneus and onewe could be doing some REAL dope shit, especially because they have actual twins hello rbw do something with them and/or hire me please!! second ideal actual job is to creative direct for a male soloist, someone like taemin, key, or woodz; someone who has good creative instincts and understanding of character and confident sense of self.

ok so ideally, in this fake scenario, i don't think i'd want to design a debut. i'd instead go for a boy group with minimum five-six years of experience and average age of the group is 24-25+. not because young kids aren't springy and spritely, but because they've all settled into their bodies and also have settled into their confidence. i also just don't have the feel for 'youthful' type content, i didn't ever feel young even when i was young so it's always been out of my wheelhouse. gimme a bunch of adults please and thanks.

- as far as makeup of the group: five members, generally all with good dance skills but it's not a must, at least three vocals and one of them HAS to be a baritone. actually, since this is my ideal group you know what? fuck it; three tenors (countertenor optional), baritone, bass. music? either classic rock/opera inspired (something like bad love, maniac, fever, valkyrie (rock version) OR go real crunchy and horrible and americana with it. i'm talking iron smashed together with l'enfer with devil with the beast with idea with jungle with eat raw meat = blood drool with impressionable. we're gonna get real dirty with it. the bside they also promote is gonna be a combo of hypnotized/love on the floor/sugar. there's also solo bsides for each of the members and the main dancer does a blend contemp/urban choreo routine to so handsome hello.

ok styling. this one could go a lot of different ways depending on song and lyrics and theme and truly i don't think there's actually a specific type of styling that i need to see, because my personal methodology is always to come up with something that fits those themes, not necessarily all the things i want to see ever in a styling. but let's do some brainstorming:

- IF classic rock route: since i'm imagining the theme of this as a very aggressive critique of celebrity + fan culture, we're talking a second crack at the fake reality concept and we are doing it RIGHT this time. think that combined with the maniac set design combined with papaoutai combined with this 2019 paper magazine shoot:

yes including the doll makeup. thom browne suiting x the new 2022 moschino:

big boots and square toed shoes, transformative references/silhouettes/shapes/colours from the late 50s/60s thru to the early 70s, plus throwing in some references to to surrealist photography + filmmakers like dora maar and maya deren. honestly maniac got really close to what i was thinking but personally i wouldn't have taken it in the pop culture/horror film direction because that isn't where my brain goes first.

- IF crunchy americana route: this one is a little harder to illustrate because the type of clothing i'm thinking about would be custom handmade builds for each of the performers, but here's some of the vibes i'm thinking about. this would likely be along similar theme lines of a critique of the fan + celebrity relationship, but with a stronger emphasis on the violence inflicted on the celebrity, whether it be from external forces or from internal ones:

yep. would love to do some choreographic/mise en scene stuff with mirrors and the idea of mirroring/things that seem the same but are different. also thorn imagery. lots of thorn imagery.

[thefirsttree]

A personal update + my next game

OK, time to do this. I’ve been meaning to do a big DAVID WEHLE™ update for a while now and explain why I haven’t released a new game yet, but you know how life gets in the way. Especially when life is a quarantine hellscape, you have three beautiful, amazing, exhausting kids to raise, a spouse’s job you support, a viral YouTube channel that turns your brain to mush, a thousand emails waiting in your inbox since your game is free on the Epic Games Store (with an impressive number of redemptions too! … meaning lots of emails and customer support issues), etc., etc. What also contributes to my lack of updates is because… I just don’t really like posting online. Fascinating correlation, I know!

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a venting/ranting blog post (well, maybe a bit), because my life is seriously AMAZING and INSANELY BLESSED and LUCKY. I can’t believe how many dreams keep coming true, so much so that I feel I don’t deserve it and I really pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes… but I did want to at least be honest, because I owe that to myself.

Wow, where do I even begin? Well, how about we start with the reason I’m even a full-time indie game dev now: The First Tree. This small hobby project I worked on at night morphed into this gargantuan beast (or fox) that took over my life the past 5 years. Which is great! I’m living the dream! And yet, I really didn’t expect it to do as well as it did. At its core, my game is a slow-paced, sad walking simulator (ahem, I prefer the term “exploration game,” but you know what I mean) that somehow seemed to launch at the right time to the right audience. It resonated deeply with some of you, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I still get emails almost daily how my game changed their lives in some formative way. I’m beyond honored.

However, with that spotlight came criticism and demands from the ever-present, insatiable internet. I would randomly be surfing the gamedev subreddit trying to decompress, and I would see a comment by some rando saying how much I didn’t deserve my success, and how it was all one huge lucky fluke. And I believed them!

And to add to it, some devs considered me an indie marketing “guru”, which I was uncomfortable with. I worked hard to market my game every week, and after my GDC talk, people assumed marketing was my passion; the reason I got up every morning. Just to clarify… NO, I don’t like marketing, and I hate being the center of attention. I don’t like asking people for money and wishlists. But I did what was necessary because I was passionate about telling stories, and I wanted to give my story a fighting chance to be seen on the crowded pages of Steam.

So now, you’re probably wondering “well then David, why did you make fancy YouTube videos showing off your success? Not very modest if you ask me.” This honestly could be a long blog post all on its own, because my experience of putting myself in the spotlight and becoming a “content creator” is… complicated. It was an unusual step for me, especially since I never even showed my face online (as a game developer) until my GDC talk.

First off, I always wanted to teach and start a YouTube channel. I love video editing, especially since I’ve been doing it longer than making games! It’s a huge passion of mine. And teaching people who didn’t know they could make and finish games was a huge motivator (and it’s been so rewarding already). But the second reason is, I was scared. I was self-employed, and I was riding the success of a “huge lucky fluke” that would probably not happen again. I wanted to make sure I could provide for my amazing family, and give them food and health insurance and security in these tumultuous times. I was turning my lifelong passions and hobbies into a business, and it wasn’t as simple of a mental transition as I thought.

So, I went all in on YouTube and the accompanying online course called Game Dev Unlocked. I spent years editing the scripts and videos, and polishing them to a shine. At first, no one watched my videos, no one was buying… and in the blink of an eye, the YouTube algorithm picked up my main autobiographical video (“How Making Indie Games Changed My Life”), and I started getting 5,000 subscribers a day. Right now, I’m at 150,000 subs, which is still hard for me to believe. I always had a dream of earning 100k subs on YouTube, so I was pretty happy with the whole thing. Sales were OK, but mostly people didn’t want to buy the course. Then the emails came in…

Something you should know about me: I am a textbook “people pleaser,” and if someone asks for my help, I take it very seriously. If someone is mad at me, even if I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s all I can think about, and it ruins my day. So, taking an onslaught of people begging for help and multiplying that by an impossible amount of people for my brain to truly comprehend thanks to the internet… and let’s just say it wasn’t a healthy mix.

I received thousands of emails from people who were begging me for some kind of reassurance that everything would be OK. That their dreams would come true too. And I wanted to help every single one of them. I went from a nobody working on a game for fun to becoming a spokesperson for the indie game dream. I couldn’t even get a shake from the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru without someone recognizing me and asking for game dev advice. And it didn’t stop there… I would get emails from suicidal kids asking for help, teenagers from Afghanistan asking me to get them out of their country, and on one occasion I received an email from a hopeful game developer in a war-torn country who had just experienced a bomb blowing up their neighboring village. His friends were dead, and he was hoping he could finish a game before he died too, and he needed my help. How do you say no to something like that? Didn’t I owe it to everyone because I was lucky with my hit game and I needed to “pay it forward”? (Something people constantly reminded me of)

And then to top it off, after you’ve given everything you’ve got to other people in need… you get hate mail in your inbox. You spend the whole day serving your children and strangers on the internet, then when the kids are finally asleep, you hit the bed to relax and take a look at your phone to decompress, and you randomly come across an angry gamer in your Twitter mentions telling you your game they got for free sucks, and that you took away a potentially great game from them and that your apology isn’t good enough.

Long story short, I went to a mental therapist for the first time in my life. I was broken trying to care for two toddlers and a new baby in a pandemic (which is very, very hard), taking care of my course students who gave me their hard-earned money and demanded results, and the countless people begging for help on the internet. I was this introverted, internet-lurker trying to take on the weight of the world. I was so tired and hurt that no one cared about me and my needs… only what I could do for them.

Quitting my day job and making this hobby my full-time job has stirred up… mixed emotions. This statement may disturb some of you, but I was definitely 100% happier when I had a full-time job and I was working on my game at night. I missed working with the amazing team at The VOID, working on Star Wars… back when the success of my game was this abstract thing I could only daydream about. Mostly, I was making my game for me with no outside expectations to pay the bills or satisfy the ever-demanding internet, and that brought me a lot of joy.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! I’m actually very happy now and in the best shape I’ve been since the pandemic started. I’ve had to confront my weaknesses and personality quirks, but I’m a better person for it (and I’m sure these issues would’ve come out eventually). I hired an awesome community manager for Game Dev Unlocked who is helping SO MUCH with the emails, I can’t even tell you the mental burden it alleviates. I even leased a co-working office to help separate work from my home, and that’s been a huge help too. I’ve decided to work with my old friends from The VOID on a cool, new VR experience. It will take me away from my projects a bit, but I’m ecstatic to work with a great team again (and not manage anything, whew).

These are all things I would’ve never guessed I needed, because I thought I knew myself pretty well… turns out I didn’t.

The reality is: running a business is HARD. Running it solo is even harder. You have to remember, I was burnt out on The First Tree well into the Steam release in 2017, but I kept working on it for 4 more years due to my fears of failing again and not earning enough money for my family.

So, I was wrestling with the age-old concept of commercialism and art. There was this dichotomy of doing whatever I wanted and being true to my vision (what most people assume the indie dev dream is like), and doing only what customers wanted to buy. This is something that has killed me with YouTube… in one specific instance, I was super excited to make the exact video I wanted to make. I loved every part of its creation, and I thought it had a message that would inspire everyone. I lovingly edited it over several weeks, posted it, and excitedly waited for the stats… and it was by far my worst performing video.

This is not a new problem. Even the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo was a commission forced upon him by the very violent Pope Julius II. My wife and I regularly talk about the fine balance between artistic integrity and commercialism, a problem she is very familiar with as an artist who constantly needs to balance what she wants to make with what the customer wants to hang up in their home.

For The First Tree, I was lucky. It was pretty much what I wanted to make (I had to compromise a lot of things of course), and it turned out millions of people wanted it too. Recently, I thought the safe business decision would be to do it all over again, so I started work on a spiritual successor to The First Tree (an idea that I may revisit one day since I do love the story idea). But that isn’t happening anytime soon. Trust me when I say I am now currently burnt out on animal exploration games.

So that realization left me with a question: what do I do next?

I’ve decided I need to make a game that I want to make, for me. It will be a bit different and I’m almost certain most fans of The First Tree will not love it… but it’s an idea that gets me super excited. It’s an idea that could help me fall in love with game development again.

A few more details: this game will be story-driven, first-person, and will use the Unreal Engine. That means development is gonna be slow going, because I have to learn a whole new tool. The “smart business” decision would be to make something quickly in Unity which I’m already familiar with… but I want to do this for me, and UE5 looks like a lot of fun. I’m also shooting for an early-ish release date so I avoid burn out and I keep the game short: I want to release it in Fall 2022, but knowing game development, it will probably take longer.

With the help of my therapist, I’ve also concluded that I’ve been too accessible on the internet and that my self-worth isn’t determined by the amount of people I try to help online. Of course, I love helping people and seeing them succeed, but I need to step back and focus on my family and myself. I will delete my social media apps on my phone (I will still post big updates occasionally) and stop responding to most emails, tweets, DMs, etc. It’s not that I’m ungrateful… in fact, if I don’t say thank you or at least acknowledge the incredibly nice people who share a sweet message about my game or want to tell me how I inspire them (still hard for me to believe, lol), I feel a ton of guilt… but I need to let that go. Please know I’m extremely grateful to all the fans who follow my work, so even if I don’t thank you directly, I truly mean it: thank you.

I will still post and stream occasionally on YouTube when I want to (and I still do live Q&A’s for my GDU students). The online course sales will help support my family as I work on a potentially risky game idea (and my new job will help alleviate the risk too). I’m gonna try one more marketing experiment and sell a mini-course soon (and add an Unreal section), and after that I’m done working on it. A gigantic thank you to the people who bought my course and are part of the amazing community, it has helped me and my family tremendously, and it’s inspiring seeing the games you make!

I’m a bit worried about the whole thing since this new game idea could flop, which could definitely affect my family. But a sappy, high-school yearbook quote is coming to mind…  I think it applies here: “A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are built for.”

Thanks for reading,

David

[sothasil]

On leading a team - a Beyond Skyrim interview

With the first Creation Mod Con now over, I can post some things I wrote for it. Early in the making of the convention, several participants were asked to answer a series of questions about their experiences on the team. I had to answer two sets, the first one of which was to prepare our Leads panel (that you can watch here).

Below the cut, some Elsweyr team history, insights on how we work and recruit, tips on leading a team and other behind the scene things. Enjoy!

As a lead, explain your province / project and give a brief history. 

Elsweyr started off as an Oblivion modding project. Back then new land mods were starting to be a thing, Elsweyr had "the Elsweyr confederacy" which I haven't played – from the images it's definitly not up to our modern standards, but some ideas it had still have an effect to this day (as well as having been copied by ESO's team, I do not think it's a coincidence that their Elsweyr shares enviroments and creatures!). Skyrim came out, and those new land projects switched game, and they found a common place to organize on the Dark Creations forums. BS was formed when those bigger teams all decided to subscribe to the same rules, the Charter as we call it.

Elsweyr was a team from the beginning, but it wasn't really worked on. Some stuff had been done already, they also had models from the Oblivion years, concept art, and the writing had began for the lore setting and main quests, but when I entered the team in around 2017 it was pretty silent. Lots of dust, we slowly got started again on the concept art team, and bit by bit there was a sort of soft reboot – the lore was kept, but the priorities and team organization changed, and I started building the art direction we follow nowadays.

Without talking about release dates etc. what is the current focus of the team over the next year?

We're working on the Greater Rim region. After years of much pre production work, we want to woo our fans with a big, ingame, benchmark showcase of progress. I can't say more!

Post con edit: during the walkabout, we showed our first peek at the city of Riverhold ingame, one of our two prerelease towns!

If someone gave you five people to join your team tomorrow what skills would they have?

One guy who can model creatures – I'm talking animals, monsters, NPC races. Maybe even two, we have an entire roster of khajiit and animals to make, and no one on the job. One guy who can do tilesets, because it's such a niche skill it's hard to recruit for. One voice actor specifically for Khajiit voices, the accent and everything, someone with a higher voice would be ideal to be able to dub children and smaller Khajiit, and maybe female characters in general. One concept artist who could assist me in leading the team when I'm busy, who can design clutter well. Not sure about the last one. I'd say 3D again, probably for clothing and armor. It's hard to find people who can model and rig those well. We need a lot of 3D in general, it's been our bottleneck forever.

What in your opinion makes a good lead?

The best lead is someone who has an good vision of what we need that matches with the other leads', and does handiwork. That last part is so important. The more you understand what the people in your team are doing, the best the feedback you can give will be. I became a way better lead when I learned 3D modeling, because of how much it taught me about what modelers need. The ideal lead's job is to teach their team the way to achieve a common goal, and for that you need to understand what your team is doing, and what the other devs further down the production pipeline need from your departement.

What are some of the tasks you do as a lead that most people will never see?

All the organization and management. For an hour of concept art I do, there's five to ten of giving directions, finding how to hire people, and so, so much Trello and spreadsheets. At this point I use excel as much as I use photoshop. People don't realize how much you have to organize in order to make a team work. The claims themselves are a product of that organization, and most of the claims  aren't showcased, because what people care the most about are screenshots. Screenshots are the tip of a massive iceberg...

How do you suggest someone learns how to be a lead / improves as a leader?

On how to improve as a leader: do regular reunions with your team: your lead team, your sub-team, and your entire project, so everyone's on the same page. Plus, it's motivating to meet up regularly, and being on the same page helps everyone remember stuff. Also, participate. When you can, draw, model, write. The more you know about a topic the best lead you'll be. Try to be present and a model for your devs.

As of how to be a lead, I don't think I can teach someone this. You just know when some people will be good leads. It comes naturally. You can have super talented people and know they'll suck at giving directions. If the person has innate understanding of the goals of the team and the process of going there and everything and shows natural organization then you can ask them to give a hand at organizing and see how well they do. On Elsweyr, when we notice someone with potential, we let them in the chat where big decisions are made and let them learn like that, and when they're ready, they're officially made a lead. I still think it's the best way. Organically learn by helping around people who already are leads.

How has Skyblivion / Skywind / Beyond Skyrim collaborated in the past and how could they collaborate more in the future?

We cannot collaborate as much as fans ask us to because our versions of the same province are super different, but there are assets being shared as well as knowledge. Each team has their guys working on technical solutions and when something is achieved, other teams come take a peek. The Skyblivion guys let us look at how they modeled their dungeon tileset for example. There's also the Arcane University, where devs from all projects banded up together to teach motivated people the ropes to enter teams. It used to be BS only, but we decided that others were welcome, and now talents from all over the Skyrim modding scene teach there.

Name some unique challenges that you have faced while working on your province / project

Our project was started before ESO was a thing so Elsweyr had never appeared in a TES game since Arena. We had to make everything up. Compared to a province like say, Cyrodiil, we had no detailed map, almost no history, no visuals. Having parts of your province appear in a previous game hands you a lot of preproduction work ready made. We didn't have this.

Another aspect that comes from your province having been in a previous TES games is the nostalgia and how much it helps in recruitement. You won't have people happy to work on coming back to visit Elsweyr because nobody has been there before.

Elsweyr being so far away from Skyrim, there's no assets we can reuse, it'll stick out like a sore thumb – simple stuff like grass and rocks have to be done from scratch, as is everything else that'll show up ingame. The only thing we keep from vanilla are the Khajiit models themselves, but they represent one out of 16 of the furstocks we want so it's very little. It's a LOT of work.

The furstocks, that's another thing. We decided we'll include them early on and haven't backed off. The work required to make that work has been massive, and we've barely started. Also, all clutter and architecture made for Khajiit is designed around that idea of people with vastly different morphologies using them – it's a fun but hard to grasp way to design items. Instead of asking someone to draw a chair, you have to ask them to reinvent the idea of a chair to be used by a giant cat and his tiny cousin.

This is a lot of stuff – I wholeheartedly believe that Elsweyr is one of the, or maybe the hardest province to work on. Work from scratch, no easy recruitement, hard to design for, lots to do... Black Marsh faces similar challenges. It's not hard to see why we're two of the smallest teams who are more behind on development. A positive note in all this was the freedom it gave us. Until ESO Elsweyr came out, it was the wild west.

(For BS) discuss the differences between leading a province that has a previous TES title and one that doesn't (ignoring ESO) and the challenges of nostalgia vs. the increased interest this garners

It's what I was just saying – if your province was in a previous TES title, you have a lot of materials to work with, and a lot of people will be super excited to see what you are doing with a province they know and love. Easier preproduction, and an established fanbase to make content for. It's much easier to find recruits that way, and more recruits means easier development.

The tough part comes with the nature of the project and that's where we have to explain a lot of things to fans. BS's whole deal is the provinces of Tamriel set at the same time as Skyrim, but people will see a Cyrodiil project and assume it's a remake of Oblivion, so we have to tell people no, that's Skyblivion, that's not us. And when you make your province, and it's set hundreds of years after the game the province was last seen on, people will ask you: where's this NPC? Why does this place not look like it used to? And you have to tell them buddy, it's been a hundred years, things change! ESO didn't make this easier, they went the lazy nostalgia route and ignored a lot of that stuff with times changing provinces. Set a bad example. But from what I know, the benefits of the clout you get from having a fan favorite province way outweight the nostalgia challenge, especially since we have Skywind and Skyblivion who do those remake roles to show.

List some big lessons you have learned that you wish you knew when you started being a lead

It's hard as hell to manage a team of people. It just never ends! Wish I had taught my past self how to write emails.

Asides of that, I've not learned many big lessons, guiding people towards a direction comes naturally to me. One thing I did learn that's not really a challenge is how many people aspire to be a lead with no idea of the workload. I can't help but wince when I see someone claim they're going to start a new team for a big modding project, you can just tell it's because they want to be a lead on something. It's not an easy job and there's a reason why the projects haven't come out yet.

On a positive note, I did learn that working as a lead organically teaches you so many skills. Turns out that leading a lot of people on a big team of game devs helps you learn how to lead many people on a big team of game devs, who would have thought. Since what we're doing is essentially fanart, I didn't take my role as a lead that seriously, until one of my artists asked me if I could write her a recommendation letter for an industry job. I'm probably half the age of the guy who opened that letter. Had I told 2017 freshly made lead me about it they'd have thought I was bullshitting them...

How did you become a lead?

I joined the team back when there were maybe a dozen of us. Everyone was inactive. Samurai Healer was the one who contacted me first. I was aware of the project, I knew a girl who worked on Black Marsh, and I had ended up on the DC forums as part of the Ta'agra project. Back then I wrote and drew for TES lore stuff and Khajiit were my specialty, I worked on original content and not for any TES game in particular. I gained a following for it, and someone with connections (Lady Nerevar I believe?) told the Elsweyr guys about me. Samurai Healer got my contact and messaged me asking if I wanted to join. I was super interested and posted my portfolio and instantly got accepted. Started doing concept art. Turns out I was pretty much the only active CA on the team, and I had brought with me this already built vision of Elsweyr I had developed in my personal projects. The team lead liked it, and asked me to become the art lead. I took the spot. I learned a few years later that he almost handed the whole team to me! So in a few months, I went from posting headcanons online to leading a team. And now four years later I still do both.

[azucanela]

so yk how sokka is always the one who is so forward? maybe a reader who just leaves sokka like 👁👄👁

BOLD | SOKKA 

ATLA / LOK MASTERLIST

SUMMARY: Y/N L/N does whatever she has to in order to earn money, that includes acting as a part time guide for the weird group of people from the Upper Ring she ran into about a month ago. At least the boy her age is kinda cute though.

WORD COUNT: 1.3k

WARNINGS: flirting, mild violence

A/N: lkashdkashdkja i feel like this is bad and didn’t really fit the request well because i got a lil too absorbed into the plot so IM SORRY THAT I WENT OFF ON A TANGENT REALLY IM SO VERY SORRY ASJHDJKASHDKJ but um yeah the ending i just found funny sakjhduashdjkgaskjd thats the only reason this happened for that ending

If Y/N was honest, she didn’t trust them at all. They were a group of strangers that randomly came to town and wore clothing she’d never seen before— and Y/N had done quite a bit of traveling in her time— and acted well, just as skeptical as she seemed to be. Of course, Y/N wasn’t anywhere near as obvious as the older boy was about his suspicions. 

That didn’t mean she couldn’t have fun with them though. The moment Sokka had seen her, he’d been a tad of a mess, it wasn’t difficult to pick up on. The youngest of the group, Toph, seemed to pick up on it as well, taking to teasing the boy. While Y/N had elected to flirt, excessively.

“Are you a Firebender—” 

“No.” The boy scrunched up his nose, “why? Did someone tell you that—”

“Would you let me finish?” Y/N asked, eyes narrowing at him as she lead the group through the streets of Ba Sing Se. Despite being from the Upper Ring— Y/N had a feeling they either had money or they were very important — they’d elected to hire a more local guide it appeared. Then again, Y/N had met the guides of the Upper Ring and they were certainly... disconcerting, so she couldn’t blame them. The boy simply nodded to her words, hollowing out his cheeks with a frown. “Are you a Firebender,” Y/N repeated, “because you are really hot.” She finished with a wink.

Though he had taken most of her advances literally thus far, it appeared Sokka had understood what she was trying to say this time around. Becoming flustered as he looked away from her and huffed, “do you actually know where you are going?”

Grinning, Y/N nodded, “sure do. Do you actually know what you’re looking for? Because nobody here has told me yet.” The group seemed to grow solemn at this comment, especially the smaller boy. 

“Yeah, his name is Appa.” His hand moves to the pouch beside him, causing Y/N to raise a brow as she discreetly brings her own hand to her side, where her knife laid if necessary.

Y/N hummed in reply, “so we’re looking for a person?” 

The girl, Katara, shook her head in reply, continuing to speak as Aang pulled out a poorly drawn image. “A Sky Bison.” 

Nodding, Y/N offered them a tight lipped smile, “last I checked they went extinct.” Tilting her head at the group, it started to come together rather quickly. The robes of the boy were similar to those of the Airbenders that once dominated the skies. “Of course, it only makes sense that the Avatar, the last of the Airbenders, would have a Sky Bison.” It was a guess, and educated guess. If Y/N was wrong, she’d probably seem pretty stupid, but hey— she would still get paid.

By the way the group seemed to tense though, Y/N had a feeling she was right. A grin spreading across her face, Sokka seemed to dislike this as he stepped forward, “what do you want?”

“Come on pretty boy, you seem smarter than that.” His mouth opens, closing momentarily afterwards as he struggles for words before a sound of frustration escapes him.

“Shut up.” Despite his words, Toph had been teasing him ever since they’d hired Y/N not too long ago, the way his heart rate picked up whenever she so much as spoke was quite the tell. 

His words don’t deter Y/N as she continues to speak. “If I wanted to sell you guys out for whatever bounty is on your head, would I have said anything about knowing your identities?” Y/N rolled her eyes, gesturing to the city around them, “and this is Ba Sing Se for crying out loud. How would I ever find someone to turn you guys over to? Unless you pissed off the Dai Li—”

The expressions seemed to change as these words, causing Y/N to pause as she watched them exchange look. Her mouth gaping open, “tell me you didn’t piss off the Dai Li.” Her eyes dart between the group, each one not offering her any words, simply shrugging in reply.

“It was an accident?” The youngest girl offered. Y/N had found that she’d been the most helpful of them all, and the most entertaining. Aside from Sokka, flustering him was a fun pastime. 

Inhaling deeply, Y/N brought her fingers to the bridge of her nose, “an accident?” She mumbled, “you’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Well—” 

Y/N placed a finger over Sokka’s lips, looking to him momentarily as she spoke, “not right now, handsome.” She offers him a sarcastic smile, and despite the problem at hand Y/N finds herself enjoying his flustered reaction as he leans backwards in an attempt to remove her finger from his lips, only to fall to the ground. Sighing, Y/N looks to the rest of the group, “this is a problem.

Katara sighs at her brothers antics and narrows her eyes at Y/N, “yeah. We know—”

“No, you don’t know.” Bringing her hands to her forehead, Y/N lets out a sound of frustration as she guides them into an alley for privacy. “The people they take? Don’t come back, and let’s just say I’ve had a few run ins with them and well...” A bitter laugh escaped her, “I’m a wanted woman.”

Katara scoffs, rolling her eyes as she stares at Sokka pointedly, “of course you pick the criminal.” 

Sokka blanches, scrambling to his feet to argue with his sister. Y/N finds herself blocking the pair out as she turns to Aang, who’d begun to speak, “so how have you evaded them then?”

“Talent.” Comes Y/N’s reply, eyes darting throughout the area. “If you’re the Avatar then someone probably trailed you.” Y/N curses, eyes narrowing as she turns to the arguing pair of siblings. “We need to leave.”

Katara and Sokka cease their arguing as Toph begins to speak as well, “she’s right. I can sense them coming.” 

If Y/N was honest, every man for themselves was looking very ideal right about now. But the group of people had piqued her interest, and well... she had unfinished business. Also, as a wanted woman herself, she had a feeling it would be better if she didn’t abandon the Avatar. For several reasons.

Which is why Y/N finds herself tackling Sokka out of the way of the Dai Li.

Katara is calling out for Sokka but Y/N has already pushed him around the corner to prevent him from getting caught, yelling out, “I’ll find you. Just get out of here!”

Aang and Toph are yelling for Katara, but Y/N doesn’t have time to listen as she lies on top of Sokka’s heaving chest, a sarcastic laugh escaping him as he looks up at her, “are you an Airbender? Because you take me breath away.” Because of course, Sokka of all people has time to flirt when he’s in the middle of a fight. Though the boy was ordinarily flustered in response to her words and actions, on occasion he would find it in himself to reply with the same energy.

Y/N laughs as she pushes herself up on his chest, causing him to grunt when she rolls off him and swirls around to attack the upcoming Dai Li member. 

And he’s propelled backwards by the force of the air she commands. 

“Actually,” Y/N mumbles, rising to a stand as she extends a hand for Sokka to take, his mouth gaping open in shock, as he takes it, allowing Y/N to pull him upwards and bringing them face to face with each other as she says, “I am. That’s sorta the problem.”

This was one of the reasons she couldn’t allow the Avatar and her friends to get captured. Not yet at least. 

A/N: honestly I really like this concept might make it a series because im a clown that likes to start a series and take forever to finish it ummmmm lmk if we’d be interested in that 

SOKKA: @lammello @nataliahaslosthershit

ATLA: @aangsupremacy @jada-cleo @Art-flirt @gogo-is-cooler-than-you @astroninaaa @samsmultifandomblogs @kohi-beans @bombardia @fandomarchiveilyd @a----rag @fantasticchaoticwho @i-love-superhero @euphoricmads @jaylarkson @oddment-niwit-blubber-tweak @the-deli-meat @Wemissyou3000 @ajediherowitchrunner @1-800-schmacked @maceyisntcool @the-firebender-girl @bucky-blogs @dekahg @shawkneecaps @faveshots

[terubakudan]

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi - Book Review and Impressions

(light reflection) Perfect :D Hoping Tumblr doesn't flag me for this xD

Ok, I'm going to start this off with 'this is probably the first and only book review I'm going to do' xD Because I rarely do read books now, and just as rarely buy them. Also, I would have preferred to buy the English version but alas they only had the Chinese version in stock ^^"

Stumbling upon this on the Internet, I was immediately compelled to buy this, as if I knew I would love it and that Nagata's story would resonate with me.

【Short Version】 I can't recommend this book enough, it doesn't matter what sexuality you are or from what culture are you. Nagata makes sure to tell an honest and 'naked' (without embellishments) portrait of her own personal experiences. How she herself is a college drop-out (having only graduated from high school), pushed herself to live/work while struggling with depression and eating disorders, not being sure of what she wants and feeling that she doesn't 'deserve' things, realizing her own sexuality in that she likes girls, and just not feeling 'good enough'...all through her cutesy and unassuming art style.

I will say again though, cutesy art style aside, the book deals with some very heavy topics. Nagata is very honest and doesn't shy away from the gritty details, and I admire her all the more for doing so. Many yaoi and yuri comics often portray an unrealistic and fetishistic view of the LGBTQ+ community whereas Nagata's story is much more grounded and sincere. This is not an easy read, but it's not an overly depressive one either. Nagata literally struggled for years with her mental health, but ultimately found light on the other side. Not mainly through the help of others, but through her own choice to forgive and love herself.

5/5⭐ Definitely recommend and would read again. And if I could, I'd give Nagata a big hug and a heartfelt 'thank you' for sharing her story.

【Long Version】 While it's written primarily from an Asian (particularly Japanese) perspective, Nagata's experiences are ones that should resonate with anyone who has been through the same or similar things, regardless of one's personal background. And I myself, while being fortunate enough to not have gone through eating disorders or self harm, am no exception.

I grew up in an Asian (Taiwanese/Chinese Filipino) household, while my parents weren't Tiger Parents (no offense but fuck Amy Chua for thinking that's a proper way of raising your children), they still had certain expectations on their children: to find a good husband/wife, have a good education, have a 'stable' career, etc. And while I love my parents very much, I'd be lying if I said there weren't any times where I felt they were smothering me, there weren't any times where they kept on nagging and bugging me for very trivial details. My biggest pet peeve: guilt-tripping me just for wanting to spend time alone.

"For me, my parents' opinion of me is absolute." (NOTE: While I won't be providing exact translations of the excerpts I used here, I'll do my best to summarize the gist of them.)

At the same time, I cared very much about their opinion of me. I made it a point to do well in school, to do things according to their wishes, and just like Nagata, I didn't know what I wanted. This even extended to caring about others' opinion of me, more than my own. In my freshman year of college, I 'went along' with being friends with someone, who while was nice to me, turned out to be a manipulative bitch skilled in passive-aggressiveness xD Being half-Taiwanese/half-Filipino, it was hard to fit in since people always treated me differently, it didn't occur to me I could be choosy with friends, I thought as long as they were 'nice' to me, that would do.

Asian culture is largely a collective one, where we define ourselves by our relationships with others, compared with Western culture (primarily America, I'll be using America as a reference point) where individualism is absolute, where you define yourself as you like. In Asia, it's also normal for children to still live in the same house as their parents well into adulthood, compared with Americans who are expected to move out the house once they finish high school or start college, and they're quite literally 'on their own', having to pay their own tuition, rent, etc. Where I live (Taiwan), it's normal for adults to continue relying on their parents financially well until college. Nagata for instance, while saying her parents really make her feel so pressured, is grateful that she still had a home to stay in (and she's 28!).

If you ask me though, neither a collectivist culture or an individualist culture is absolutely good nor bad. Each have their own pros and cons, and both Asian culture and Western culture could learn a thing or two from each other.

After going through quite a few job applications, one of the interviewers tells her "Ganbatte!" (You can do it!) after Nagata tells her what she really wants is to be a manga artist.

And sometimes that's all we need really, a small gesture or kind remark can do wonders. Even if there's no base or reason for it, it's something worth believing in.

I often have doubts if I'm doing what I really want, if I chose the right major for college, if I'm doing the right thing, if I'm 'good enough'. I didn't grow up with much self-esteem as a kid, and often derived my value from others. But even at my lowest times, a 'you're doing ok' was very reassuring to me, be it from family, strangers, or people I care about. Sometimes that's exactly what we need, it may be small but it could be the difference between continuing to wallow in depression or re-evaluating and choosing to be better to oneself.

I find it's really important to know, that however alone you may feel sometimes, there are other people out there going through the exact same thing. It's something universal, and while a lot of things are really unfair in life, each person has their own lot or burden to deal with. I have a Taiwanese friend who, while being more financially well-off than me, has terrible parents. And I mean parents who are quite so literally toxic, unsupportive of her, and would outright say the worst things to their own daughter.

How depression and anxiety can feel sometimes, we can literally feel like it's impossible to breathe and be in a state of disconnection from the world.

"The sounds that invaded my ears occupied my empty brain, making me unable to think at all."

If you only did what your parents asked you to do, wouldn't days like those be very painful? In the end, only you can understand what you really want.

Nagata's art style is one I would describe as simple, cute, and effective. I personally think had her story been drawn in a more serious style, it would have been even harder to read, much less finish. It's also a choice that has artistic appeal to me, serious subject matter juxtaposed with a 'kawaii' art style.

Nagata also depicts very well her mental state and thoughts throughout her struggle and journey to self-actualization. Depression is a really tough thing to deal with, and sometimes we don't even realize that we have it or if we do, refuse to acknowledge it. In Asian cultures especially, mental health has always been something of a taboo subject and there is a very heavy social stigma associated with it. Nagata herself even said that her parents seemingly refused to acknowledge that their daughter's mental health was in a state of distress. In Japan, there is a concept called gaman (我慢), which is described as 'enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity', and while it is portrayed as an ideal virtue that inspires perseverance, it can be a source of heavy pressure for others. Gaman also means that you are expected to suppress whatever emotion or negative feelings you have, often for the sake of others and no matter how tough the situation becomes for you. And while I agree that through gaman you can become more selfless for others, it shouldn't have to come at the expense of your own well-being.

I was quite fortunate to have grown up in a more liberal Asian household, but even when it came to mental health, our family also adopted the same kind of attitude towards it, by carrying on as if nothing was wrong, or just not talking about it. And to be honest, there were numerous times I wished we had been more open about what was bothering ourselves at that time. Talking and being open about your feelings is not a 'weakness' but something incredibly brave to do, and it's my wish for that to slowly become more acceptable in Asian cultures, which I know is kind of a stretch, but it doesn't hurt to hope.

Nagata makes the decision to clean herself up, by taking a bath everyday, habitually exercising, and no longer wearing worn-out clothes.

Depression especially can be a bitch. It deprives you even of your physiological needs, like your need for food. Nagata had to struggle with that on top of eating disorders for a long ten years. She ate so little and even felt that she didn't 'deserve' to eat, and at one point, anorexia became hyperphagia, and she would feel so guilty for eating almost expired/expired food. Things that would otherwise be simple to do also end up becoming difficult/impossible to do, like taking care of your personal hygiene, getting up from bed, doing simple tasks etc.

Thankfully, after Nagata realizes that she never truly 'valued herself', she starts to turn over a new leaf. Even just starting with cleaning herself up, she takes this as a form of 'valuing oneself' and her mood starts to improve, which her family also points out. In the end, taking care of yourself is not a selfish thing to do, it can even make you a better person who is there for others.

Nagata meets up with the female escort she hired, as a means to experience human sexuality, which she had always repressed her curiosity for and treated as a taboo subject. (NOTE: And I'm glad that she met a really nice girl for her first time too!)

Sex and sexuality is also a subject that I feel is hard to talk about sometimes, which I think also owes itself to most Asian cultures being relatively conservative about it. I myself have only recently identified as bisexual, which I attribute to internalized homophobia, not wanting to admit I was into girls too. And to be honest, 'coming out' is something I'm still uncomfortable about, because I don't want to risk my relationship with my family and it's still something I would choose to be selective about with colleagues and friends. I'm grateful though that as crazy the Internet can be sometimes, it can be quite accepting and tolerant towards things that we wouldn't otherwise discuss with even the closest people in our circle. Nagata's memoir ended up capturing the hearts of many readers ever since she first published it on Pixiv.

Exploring your sexuality doesn't have to be scary, it should be something exciting and liberating. Nagata decided to take matters into her own hands, and while the days leading up to the encounter made her really nervous and she even considered not going through with it at all, she willed herself to continue, because she wanted to do this for herself, it would be pointless if she gave up after coming so far in her decision to value herself.

And it's these series of actions that she decided to do that ultimately led to her life turning out for the better, it gave her the courage to do what she always wanted: to be a manga artist, which lead to the publishing of this autobiographical memoir, something she wanted to create that would 'make people want to buy this book' and from her own preference for reading stories that 'speak of secrets people wouldn't want to tell others'.

Nagata mentions what she calls 'honey': something that varies from person to person. It could be your reason for living, that thing that drives/pushes you, or even your sense of belonging. It may not be something permanent, but you can always find yourself a new one. (she mentions the last time she had her 'honey' was during her high school days, and while she has grown apart from the friends she made, she has found her new 'honey' in the form of being a full-time manga artist.)

Nagata stumbles and trips a lot on her way to being a better version of herself, but who doesn't? She admits to things not necessarily being smooth, but at least she's doing better than before. And it's that decision to at least try that counts. We don't have to be perfect, we're all human after all.

TL;DR My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness is a honest, down-to-earth, and ultimately hopeful memoir about the struggles of mental health and learning about one's sexuality. It's an amazing book, and very much worth the buy.

A big thank you if you read through all of this too. I know it's a mess and writing isn't exactly my strong point, but hopefully I've convinced some people out there to give this book a read! Please feel free to share your thoughts and I'd appreciate it very much too if you reblog/like this post.

[itsamejin]

this love || yoongi angst

Summary: A story through the years detailing your relationship with Yoongi and all the ups and downs that came with dating an idol. 

Warning: cursing, sexually suggestive content

Genre: angst, fluff, idol!yoongi, artist!yn

Pairing: Yoongi x female!reader

Premise: Based on the song ‘This Love’ by Taylor Swift. Reader is an artist.

Commission Request: @minyoongail���

Word Count: 7,681 words

—

You met Yoongi when he was just a trainee, ready to take on the world and bursting with energy to get on stage. He had visions of grandeur- him living in a beautiful mansion, wearing name-brand jewelry, cruising in rare sports vehicles. When times were simpler, he’d promise that you’d be there with him, indulging in the glitz and glamour that came with his fame. He’d be an idol and you’d be his muse. Yet under all those pretenses, under all those empty promises, he was just Yoongi.

He was a guy who walked in and out of your life as easily as ocean tides come and go on the shore. He taught you how to fall in love, fall out of it, and rekindle it all the same. It was a sort of beautiful asphyxiation, being wrapped up in his lifestyle and learning to accept the consequences that came with dating a celebrity.

You wonder even now as you search his name on the internet, if you had any regrets. After all, you lost too much to be with him.

—

April 2013

A first meeting meant everything to you, especially when it came to your clients. You didn’t accept jobs from weirdos who didn’t respect your craft and you definitely hated impatient ones who badgered you to finish your pieces as quick as possible.

Big Hit was a happy medium and had hired you as a contract employee after reviewing your portfolio. Although the style of work they wanted from you was not at all what you specialized in, you were happy that they treated you like an actual employee and not some sort of machine. Plus, the pay was good.

You were asked to work on some cute animal characters for an upcoming boy group that you weren’t terribly familiar with, maybe stumbled on a vlog of theirs that you forgot about. You were intrigued by the slew of trainees that sat in front of you, their palms clenched out of anxiousness.

“I’m [Y/N], one of the digital artists that will be working with you guys from now on,” you introduce yourself politely to the seven bright-eyed boys in front of you.

You were in a room with other staff members, discussing the concept of the “Hip Hop Monsters” your graphics team was working on. This was a planned project lasting over a span of years and would eventually result in collectors edition items. It made you giddy just thinking of the royalties you’d earn from it all.

“I’d like it if the animals took after us,” one of the boys suggested shyly, slightly intimidated by the large number of corporate employees there were in the room for something that seemed so trivial. “I think our fans would like the characters more if they kind of resembled our personalities and stuff...”

You nod along to his suggestions, staring at his jersey to notice that the member who spoke up was Rap Monster. It was cute how they all wore clothes with their names on them. That’s one way to attract attention, you suppose.

“Any other suggestions you guys have for us?” you ask, jotting down notes and making rough sketches as they talk amongst themselves.

“I’d like it if,” a somewhat husky voice starts and you can’t help but stare into the guy’s eyes as he speaks, “my character was a turtle.”

You burst out into a fit of laughter along with the other staff members. He had said it with such a straight face and with so little enthusiasm, yet you could tell from his slight blush that he was serious. He was cute in the way that he wasn’t trying to be.

“You resemble one,” you grin at him, drawing out a small turtle with a cute beanie on your iPad, like the one he wore in front of you. You show it to him. “Something like this?”

“Exactly that!”

He breaks out into a gummy smile, one so bright that it hurt your heart to stare at him for too long. Now you were the one left flustered. He realizes how enthusiastic he was and got embarrassed once again, scratching the back of his head to avoid eye-contact.

“S-sorry, for shouting. It looks good.”

You bite your lip from forming too big of a grin. You still had to remain professional after all.

“You’re welcome,” you smirk slightly as he goes back to trying to look cool. You can’t help but doodle his name on your iPad even as the other members shared ideas for their own animals.

Suga, Suga, Suga.

You smile to yourself. It does have a ring to it.

—

June 2013

Yoongi sees you in the hallways sometimes and wants to say hi, but he can’t because other people are watching. Though, that isn’t the only reason.

He tells himself every day that he’ll muster up the courage to go talk to you, but every time he sees your face his legs turn to jelly. Yoongi was busy with debut stages recently, but he found some free time in his schedule to approach you.

Yoongi was never the shy type, more reserved if anything else, but you had something that enamored him- intrigued him. He wanted to know who you were other than the cute girl he was stuck in meetings with from time to time.

As you sat there on your desk, Yoongi lingered in an area nearby. He would give you his number today and if things didn’t work out then that would be that. There was no need to be all shy about this; it’s not like this is his first time asking someone out.

He strides over to you with feigned confidence and you look up after a minute, not noticing how his shadow loomed over you. He sees that you’re working on realistic portraits of the members and not the cutesy characters he usually sees you drawing.

“Hi,” he says curtly, trying to seem disinterested though he was the one that approached you first.

“Hello,” you smile up at him.

Suga.

“You draw really cool stuff,” he says to break the awkward tension. “You should show it to the CEO. I’m sure we’d have cooler concepts for our albums with your work.”

You look up at him, a happy glint in your eyes. He was complimenting you, although avoiding eye contact to seem a little less nervous than he really was.

“Well, I’m just a contract worker so I don’t think I really have the authority to start up new projects out of nowhere,” you say with a smile on your face at how flustered he looks. “I feel like you’re here to ask me for something. Am I right?”

He looks away for a split second, coughing to alleviate his nerves. He was a grown man for fuck’s sake, why was this so difficult?

“I was actually wondering if you could come give me some opinions about some art that I drew,” he lies through his teeth, just trying to find a way to get you in a more private area than the corporate floor teaming with watchful gazes. “I’ve been trying to start a new hobby.”

You chuckle slightly, seeing right through his words. You stand up to amuse him.

“I’d be happy to.”

He leads you to a studio filled with whacky knick-knacks and dim lighting, not necessarily the best place to draw. You know by now that he just said those things as an excuse to be alone with you.

“So where’s this masterpiece?” you tease slightly at his nervous expression. How did a guy who looked so deadpan have such a giddy personality?

“Well actually,” he starts off, palms already sweaty. “I-It’s not here right now, but I think I left it at the dorms. Maybe if we exchange phone numbers I can text it to you.”

He tried to appear nonchalant, but his hands moved as if he was doing a public speaking presentation. Yoongi thought he was doing great, though growing a little more nervous at how you were giggling.

“You know, Suga,” you start teasingly, “My number is in the company directory. Feel free to text me anytime.”

Yoongi slightly cringes hearing his stage name. He loves it, don’t get him wrong, but he didn't like hearing it come from you. He didn’t like the unfamiliar aspect that came with using his stage name- like you two only went by professional terms.

“Call me Yoongi,” he says with genuine confidence this time. “I like it better when my friends call me Yoongi.”

You nod, relieved that you could finally know this cute guy’s name. Truth be told, you were snooping around his conversations with other people to figure it out.

“So we’re friends?”

Yoongi nods, sitting down in his rolling chair.

“I’d like to be,” he grins, patting the sofa, hoping you’d take a seat with him.

And you do.

—

Present

It’s hard to work efficiently when you’re no longer in a corporate space. There’s no boss to check up on your progress nor is there a nosy coworker trying to see what you’re doing from the corner of their eye. You missed the hustle and bustle of an office floor, but it was nice exploring your creativity through freelance work.

You tap your digital pen onto the table repeatedly, looking at the reference image over and over again. It was a sick joke played by the universe to have been commissioned to draw your ex-boyfriend’s idol group, but you couldn’t refuse the hundreds of dollars the ecstatic fangirl was willing to give you. Truth be told, she might have offered too much pay, but you took up her offer anyway. Money is money.

Yet a face you’ve touched so often, a person you’d been with for years felt so unfamiliar to you. It wasn’t like you were drawing him realistically either. The client wanted anime-style figures that resembled them, looked enough like the boys to display it as her Twitter header. In the end, it’s still too difficult to draw. The rest of the members were lined up and sketched perfectly, but there was a blank area where Yoongi’s face should’ve been.

Your wrists hurt from the constant drawing and erasing so you set it down to massage your hand from cramping. In moments like these, you hated your job.

Ting.

A message notification popped up on your phone that laid beside your iPad. You usually left it silent when you were working, but you opened yourself up to distractions when drawing this particular piece. Whoever thought it was a good idea to specialize in celebrity artwork? You pick up your phone and smiled softly at the text.

hey, can I come over?

—

March 2014

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Yoongi, happy birthday to you~~”

You cheer on with the rest of the boys in their cramped dorm. Somehow you had gotten close enough with them to be at this level of comfort, sitting crisscrossed and shoulders touching with Jungkook and Seokjin. Yoongi blows out the candles and claps his hands, a little sad that another year passed by so quickly. He kept glancing at you who was focused on cutting the cake like the perfectionist you were.

He couldn’t help but feel like time was running out, like if he didn’t confess to you now then it would never happen. Yoongi took off the beanie he wore and ruffled his hair. He was feeling anxious all of a sudden.

“Dude don’t do that your dandruff is gonna get everywhere,” Hoseok whines. “The cake is gonna be decorated with your dead skin cells.”

“Go wash your hands,” Jin commands and Yoongi could only roll his eyes.

“Relax, I don’t even think we’re gonna have cake anytime soon when this slow-poke is taking forever to cut.”

He flicks your forehead as you glare up at him.

“I could so easily throw this in your face, but I choose not to,” you stick your tongue out at him and he scoffs.

“I’d like to see you try.”

All the members groan out of annoyance.

“Oh my god they’re having a lovers quarrel again,” Jimin yawned. “Aren’t you guys sick of arguing?”

Yoongi freezes at his words. Lover’s quarrel. That was a nice way to put it.

“They’ll stop arguing when Yoongi finally-”

Taehyung was cut off as Yoongi swipes three fingers worth of frosting from the cake and lathers it all over Taehyung’s face.

“You talk too much,” Yoongi shakes his head and soon chaos descended. Cake flew in places it shouldn’t have and ended when Namjoon knocked over a glass of water, managing to break it on the floor tiles. In the end, no one got cake.

Yoongi and you were laughing amongst yourselves at the kitchen sink, washing off some of the bits that got onto your shirts.

“I’m so sorry about your cake,” you say through your chuckles. “I’ll make it up to you some time.”

Yoongi only smiles.

“Yeah, you can treat me on a date,” he replies a little too boldly. You look at him in shock, not quite processing his words.

“A date?”

He nods.

“We should go out sometime.”

You purse your lips to prevent the huge grin about to be displayed on your face.

“We should.”

—

Present

It was subtle, the way it all started. You trace over the features you drew so far, only getting to his eyes. Yoongi and you were innocent lovers for a while, keeping your trysts a secret from everyone in the company except his managers and the members. A few of your friends knew, but none of them knew BTS well enough to be all that surprised. It wasn’t all that rare to go out with a celebrity in your line of work.

You almost miss those days when he was unrecognizable. After your friends realized who he was after he hit it big globally, you felt like a secret of yours was displayed to them. Your love was supposed to be private, but his fame left very little room for privacy. You missed when you were the only one that knew of him and maybe it’s selfish to think that way, but you were past the point of being selfish.

You text back.

yeah, can't wait to see you

—

Jan. 2015

Yoongi lays you down on the couch gently. His hands caressing your sides underneath the thin material of your shirt as he pulls you in closer to his kisses. This felt different from other nights, different in that there was nothing around to stop what would come next.

He pulls away from you slightly, panting from the lack of oxygen.

“Are you sure?” he asks, drawing circles on your hip with his thumb. He was only supposed to come over to help you unpack some stuff for your new apartment and here you were, pinned on the couch and sweating from the close contact.

You nod back in response, not finding the right words to get him to continue. He pulls your shirt over your head, peppering kisses on your neck and atop your breasts. He fixates on your neck languidly, biting as he sees fits.

There was a pause as you felt him press up against you and you knew then that there was no making it to the bed. You would have your first time with him on this newly moved-in couch.

The clothes dropped to the ground as his touches get more impatient, more desperate. It all passes by like a blur and you could only remember the pleasure that came with his long fingers, the satisfaction you felt when he was inside you. The climax of it all made you realize that you loved him, truly and without regret. He holds you in his arms when you come undone, flashing a satiated smile as you look up at him. It’s like the stars were in his eyes.

“How do you feel?” you ask him, worried he was already drowsy. You didn’t want to have to sleep on the couch naked.

“Satisfied,” he says with a smile on his face.

You can’t help but swoon, his eyes fixated on you. At least for now, he was yours He wasn’t Suga, a rapper. He was Yoongi, your boyfriend.

It didn't matter to you that he was struggling to make a name for himself in this cut-throat idol industry or that he would spend countless nights cursing as one of his numerous tracks get rejected. None of that was in your mind. Only he swam through your thoughts. Only him.

“I love you,” he sighs out. He was the first to say it.

“I love you too,” you reply back and he holds you tight against him.

He’s nuzzling himself in your hair, his chest pressed up against you so his heartbeat can synch with yours. He loves this, can’t get enough of it. He catches your lips and once again you are whisked in the pleasure of it all. This is it. This is what love is.

—

Present

The piece is finally finished and you send it off to your client, hoping she doesn’t ask for revisions because you can’t handle another second of drawing his stupid face. His soft skin, his tiny moles, his gummy smile...

It's not like you hate him. It’s just... a certain contempt lingers after a breakup from a long-term relationship. It’s the type of resentment that can’t really be explained. You don’t want to see him, but you catch yourself watching his videos on Youtube. You don’t want to think about him, but you hope he thinks about you. You don’t see yourself ever getting back together with him, but you don’t have his phone number blocked.

It’s a sort of paradox you catch yourself in and you wonder if you could ever get out of it. Will Yoongi ever escape your mind?

can't wait to see u too babe

—

Aug. 2016

Yoongi hugs you from behind, his face scrunched at the nape of your neck where several marks were made from last night’s events. Your eyes stayed focus on the TV in front of you, still impressed by your own ability to afford one in your bedroom at your salary.

“BTS' SUGA drops new music video for his song and mixtape Agust D...”

The news anchor drones on and you could barely hear her through the sounds of Yoongi’s soft snores. His hold on you grew tighter as he hears his stage name from an unfamiliar voice and it makes you giggle slightly at how different the edgy music video being displayed was from the same person wrapping you in his arms so tightly.

“Babe, wake up. I have work to do,” you whisper into his hair and he only shakes his head back in response.

“No,” he mutters, pulling you into him closer. You roll your eyes, managing to pry off one of his hands as you sit up on the bed.

“Don’t you have studio stuff to do today?” you ask him, searching for a shirt to wear.

He shakes his head as his eyes start to flutter open. You both reeked of alcohol since you opened a bottle of wine last night to celebrate the release of his first solo work. He was proud of it and you were proud of him.

“Can you turn that off, I’m getting a migraine,” he whines, covering his head with a pillow. You opted to wear Yoongi’s shirt instead of your own since you couldn’t be bothered to walk to the other side of the bed to find it. You smiled at his laying figure, cooped in a fetal-like position. He was still naked, but you were with him long enough to no longer be phased by that sort of thing.

“From one bottle of wine?” you tease slightly. “I think you’re losing your touch, Agust D.”

You chuckle as he throws the pillow on top of his head towards you.

“Don’t call me that,” he pouts, “It feels like you’re making fun of me.”

You stand up from where you were, stretching out your back as you make your way to the door.

“That’s because I am,” you smirk, “You know you’re saved on my phone as Sugar?”

He gives you a glare.

“It’s Suga,” he says, attempting to add some intimidation to his voice. It doesn’t work because all you do is stick your tongue out at him.

“Whatever sugar.”

He chuckles lightly and watches the silhouette of your figure exit his view. Yoongi can’t help but mindlessly follow after you.

As you exit towards the kitchen, you can’t help but hear the television from the bedroom.

“Suga has recently been caught up in a dating scandal with Suran, the solo artist, who sang with him in a song...”

Your head snaps up from those words, your skin crawling with goosebumps. You make it into the kitchen but with a heavy heart and no appetite.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, passing by you to pour himself some water.

“Nothing,” you say, though you sounded bitter. He caught on quite quickly. You were jealous again.

Yoongi heaves out a deep sigh and sets the glass of water down. He comes over to your angry figure and gives you a soft hug, laying his head on top of yours as if to comfort you. You try to pull away but he keeps you close.

“I’ll tell them to drop the rumors, okay?,” he says, genuinely enough to make you believe him. “I don’t want us to fight so early in the morning.”

“You promise?”

He pulls away.

“I promise,” he says, brushing a hair away from your face. “Let’s not think about those rumors right now. You and me both know they’re not true.”

You were never one to forget so easily.

—

It was around 2016 when you had stopped working at Big Hit. They halted the Hip Hop Monster brand and your contract was expiring with them anyway. You went from living a kush office life to struggling freelance worker in a matter of a second. It also meant that Yoongi and you would be spending less time together. His busy schedules couldn’t permit him to stay with you longer than a few hours and his presence slowly started to disappear from his side of the bed.

It was like a sinking ship, what you had with him. The pain starts off slow, unnoticeable. You’ll still laugh and keep up appearances as time passes, but you could tell there was an ominous atmosphere that wasn’t initially there in the relationship. Your screams start to grow silent as more problems start to stack on top of each other. It’s then when you hit the iceberg. It’s then when it all starts to fall apart.

He was still good for you, you convinced yourself, even as the currents swept you out under your feet.

—

Dec. 2016

“What the fuck do you mean you’re not coming?” you yell through your phone. You were sitting on the floor of your living room, holiday decorations strewn around the apartment. He promised he’d come spend a day off of his winter promotions to be with you.

“You know how hectic the end of the year gets with promotions,” he says in quiet hushes. “I can’t do anything about it. This is my job.”

You suck in your cheeks to prevent yourself from yelling. From the sound of it, he was in public.

“Yoongi, I called out of talking to a really high-paying client,” you say through gritted teeth. “And I still came home. Why am I the only one making sacrifices?”

He sighed at the other end. He didn’t have the patience to deal with you today.

“Look, can you stop being so fucking needy. I don’t need this right now.”

He couldn’t tell from the phone call, but your heart broke at the word. Needy. He thought that you were needy.

“I’m already stressed out as it is,” he continues through the phone. “I don’t need you up my ass all the time.”

“I’m not gonna wait for you,” you reply, tears threatening to spill over. “I’m going to sleep and you’re gonna get rid of all the shit you have in my apartment. I’m sick of you, Yoongi.”

He scoffs.

“I’m sick of you too.”

Yoongi hangs up, about ready to hit the wall when Jimin comes to calm him down. Small things that were never meant to be taken seriously built up until it was ready to crash down.

When Yoongi comes at night to visit you, he sees that you’re asleep on the couch. He sits next to you, pulling you into his arms.

“I’m sorry baby,” he whispers quietly. “I’ll do better.”

You nuzzled closer to him, comforted by words you forget the next day. Even when you woke up with a bad neck and Yoongi snoring onto your skin, you couldn’t find a way to stay mad at him. You knew, deep down, that some way or the other you’re gonna find yourself arguing about the same thing next week.

—

Present

Junghoon comes to pick you up. Junghoon, your boyfriend.

He’s a little uptight and too stern for his own good, but has a good heart and a knack of giving great gifts. You met him from working in the same industry, a 3D graphics designer for several video game companies. He was a new addition to your life, your relationship only about three months old.

You were warming up to him slowly, thankful for finally having a consistent presence in your life. He always made time for you, never used work as an excuse, and didn’t act cold just for the sake of acting cold. Junghoon was sweet in the way that Yoongi used to be when he wasn’t such a massive celebrity.

It was a relief to have someone like Junghoon in your life that didn’t walk in and out of your door without much of a thought to even say goodbye. Your life with him has been a tad bit dull, but you don’t mind all that much. Junghoon’s made you feel secure in ways that Yoongi couldn’t.

—

May 2017

“Your boyfriend is winning a whole ass award across the world and you’re having ramen with me?” Chaerin sighs. It’s typical for a best friend to judge the actions of the other.

“Yeah and?” you reply snarkily, swirling your chopstick around to find the perfect clump of noodles. “I’m not the top social artist according to Billboard, what’s it have to do with me?”

She rolls her eyes at you.

“I don’t know, you could at least watch him win the award?” she suggests. “The live stream is literally happening right now. Your boyfriend is making history and you don’t even care!”

You look at the clock on the restaurant wall. It was nearing 2 o’clock and your client meeting would be starting soon. You were in high demand as a graphic artist recently and as far as you were concerned, that was the only thing on your mind at the moment. You stare back into your bowl, suddenly losing your appetite.

“The apartment is lonely without him,” you admit sadly.

He bought one for himself and had you move in. ‘It’s easier to not get noticed by the tabloids,’ he convinced you. The modern sleekness of his penthouse was a nice change to your lifestyle, but you missed the comfiness of your small studio apartment. It was often too cold when he wasn’t around.

“You could watch it with me?” Chaerin suggested. “Yoongi’s probably so sad that his own girlfriend doesn’t even want to watch him win such a major award.”

You bite down on your chopstick harshly.

“Well he didn't even want me to come with him so I don’t wanna hear anymore about him from you.”

Chaerin squinted her eyes in your direction.

“Well I mean I get where he’s coming from. He’s still an idol, [Y/N],” she scolds. “It would be a massive risk to take you with him.”

You shook your head disapprovingly, pushing the bowl away from you.

“I’m not an idiot, Chae. It’s not like I was asking to be on the red carpet with him, I just wanted to be there waiting in the hotel room after the show. Two nights ago he suddenly backs out and says I shouldn’t come.”

Chaerin’s jaw dropped out of shock. That wasn’t what she was expecting at all.

“Did he say why?”

You stare down at your nails, your heart growing heavy as a long pause of silence takes place. It would be better to be honest, right? You shouldn’t have to pretend like everything’s okay when it clearly isn’t.

“He said he wants space,” you say, careful not to get choked up. “So I’m giving it to him.”

You clutch your thigh instinctively, remembering how Yoongi had brought that up with you just nights before. You two weren’t happy and that he needed to figure himself out before the relationship gets any worse. It’s just a break or whatever bullshit he spouted.

She scoffs.

“What is wrong with you two?” she asks, genuinely concerned. “You are not the type of person to take a break in a relationship.”

You stare bitterly into the reflection of your soup.

“I just don’t think I’ve been happy for a while,” you reply, taking a sip of your water that was left untouched for a better half of the night. “I don’t think he is either.”

—

Sept. 2017

The break lasted for months and you wondered if it was really even a break at all. It felt more like a break up if you were honest. He’d text once in a while and video call you when he was free but other than that it felt like he became a stranger, just another celebrity billboard you walked past on your way to a client’s workplace.

You’d draw sketches of him countlessly, in fear you’d forget how his face looked in real life and not through a low-quality screen. You etched every baby hair, every small blemish he’d hide with makeup. It was your method of not forgetting who the real Yoongi was because honestly, you didn’t know anymore. You didn’t know him.

Trrrringggg.

The sound of your doorbell could be heard all throughout your apartment. You stood up from where you sat on the bed, leaving the sketchbook of his face on the comforter. You weren’t expecting any visitors, but surely enough, Yoongi stood in front of you with a lopsided grin on his face.

“Hey.”

You let him in, not uttering a single word. He looks different now. His hair was black, thank god, but his face was a little softer than you were used to. You remember him being so paranoid about turning bald just a few years ago and here he was, no bald spots to be found. He looked healthy.

“It’s been a while,” you respond, hugging your arms close to your chest, uncomfortable that he was in your presence. It was his apartment technically, but you lived in it more than he did. He opted to stay in the dorm ever since he issued that idiotic break.

“I miss you,” he says in a lowly voice and you almost believe him. Almost.

You scoff.

“It seems like you’ve been having fun without me though,” you say through gritted teeth. “I thought you still wanted space?”

He shakes his head and brings his hand to touch your arm.

“No,” he swallows his saliva. “I miss you.”

You could feel his sincerity, but you can’t help but not trust him. He’s been viciously cold to you, but you find yourself pulling him closer anyway.

“Don’t ever do that again,” you threaten. “It’ll really be over then, Yoongi.”

He sighs into your hair. He loves you. He does. But he doesn’t know why it’s so hard to express it.

“I promise [Y/N]. I won’t leave.”

—

Aug. 2018

He buys you flowers, your favorite kind. It’s a small gesture, but it has you jumping into his arms all the same. It shows that he still cares somewhat. It’s been a while since he’s last shown it.

He holds you closely, appreciating the softness of your body and how you curl perfectly into him.

“I want to stay like this,” you say mindlessly, just relishing in his presence.

You’re not mad at him today and he’s not frustrated with you. It’s a high point in your relationship.

“Me too.”

His words are simple but it warms your heart nonetheless. Yoongi looks at you with twinkling eyes and for a moment you think that this could last forever and that it will last forever. You kiss him slowly and he reciprocates.

It reminds you of your first time, slow and careful- like you were the last person he’d ever want to hurt.

His love, although painful at times, was good to you when you needed it to be.

—

July 2019

Yoongi’s gone again. He’s on tour, as usual, and not giving you any updates. You were getting sick of it. The constant waiting, the constant insecurities that ate you up inside. You weren’t built to endure this kind of torture.

Suga. Suga. Suga.

It rolls off the tongue but it feels disgusting coming out of your mouth. His stage name, a persona. He starts to resemble that name more and more as the days go by. You hear it so much now that it no longer registers as an actual word.

You call him.

He doesn’t pick up.

Again.

No answer.

You’re about ready to throw the phone at the wall until a soft ring was heard from the small device. You take the call immediately, smiling as if you passed the hardest difficulty of a video game. The grin would soon be wiped away, though.

“Why’d you call?” he grumbles from the other line, loud music blasting in the background.

“Why weren’t you picking up?” You sound bitter. You don’t care.

“I’m out right now,” he says, exasperation laced in his voice. “I’m not in the mood to talk.”

Clearly, he just wasn’t in the mood to talk to you. Yoongi was at a party or a club or wherever he could possibly be in the streets of Shizuoka at 10 p.m.

You just wanted to chat, check on him as a good girlfriend would. He’s been complaining that you haven’t been in a while. You thought this was what he wanted- for you to care.

“I just wanted to see if you were doing okay,” you sigh. “How’d the concert go?”

“Good,” he says, clearly distracted. “Some of us snuck out of the hotel rooms to let loose for a bit.”

You nod as if he could see you.

“So you’re partying?”

You could hear him laugh at the other end, but it wasn’t from your comment. Someone else was making him laugh. Someone with a light and dainty voice, whiny as she got closer to Yoongi.

“Yeah, I guess you could call it that,” he says, clearly distracted. “Listen I’ll call you back, okay?”

You feel a lump stuck in your throat. There are no words left to say. The foreign girl on the other end giggled harder at whatever Yoongi was saying and it felt like you were invading their privacy- as if she was his girlfriend and you were nothing. You hung up, your mouth feeling dry as the tears poured down.

You see a text from Yoongi just a few seconds into your wallowing. You sniffle as you read it.

don’t misunderstand. nothing’s happening rn i'm just having a bit of fun.

This time you really threw your phone at the wall.

You go to your iPad that’s sitting untouched on your desk. You open your drawing app and just let the anger in the stylus take you from there. You draw a rough sketch of a couple on the edge of a beachside cliff. The woman seems to be falling into the water as if she was pushed. The guy’s hand reaches out to her, but you can’t really tell if he was trying to grab her or if he was the one that let her go in the first place.

As the tears spilled onto the cool surface of the iPad, you sob harder. Nothing could be fixed and everything still felt broken. It was meaningless, sleeping in his bed and wearing his clothes when he was all the way in Japan snuggling up to girls that were probably much prettier and much more willing to understand his lifestyle.

You look around the penthouse he had bought for the two of you, beautiful wide panel windows and modern furniture. It mostly looks empty, everything nice and tidy as if no one lived here. It had such a stark contrast to that of his old life when he shared rooms with other members and had no place to really put his keyboard except the studio. You smiled at the memory of you all hovering around the small coffee table in the cramped living room eating ramen.

Maybe it was your fault for falling behind, for letting the world around you build up and not follow in Yoongi’s tracks.

—

Present

You guess it was then when the relationship had passed a point of no return. When everything that felt right had started to feel incredibly wrong. You tolerated his presence rather than bask in it. You heard him speak but couldn’t bother to listen. Maybe you were petty, but more than anything you were angry.

You were angry that he could break you that badly and you would still forgive him for it.

You stare over at Junghoon who’s cooking you up something on the stove. This is what you needed.

—

Nov. 2019

Yoongi was back from some big-name award show that you didn’t watch. You heard he won Artist of the Year or whatever, the accolades that he’s collected no longer having meaning as the days pass. Why be happy for him when he himself showed no signs of excitement? This was routine. He expected the awards at this point.

You walked towards him. Yoongi looked angry, though you have no idea why.

“Hey, I made dinner to celebrate,” you tell him. Yoongi’s sitting on the couch, scrolling through the congratulatory messages he received from other industry stars. He looked like he needed to get something off his chest.

“I’m not hungry,” he mutters. “Just leave it.”

“Are you sure?”

He scoffs. It was a simple question.

“Not in the mood.”

You give him a pointed look and sit next to him.

“Why are you never in the mood for anything?” you ask him. “It’s just food Yoongi. I just want to eat with you.”

You don’t see it properly but he rolls his eyes.

“Just drop it okay? Today’s a good day, I don’t need you to ruin it.”

You suck in your cheeks.

“Ruin?”

Yoongi sighs heavily.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” he starts, facing you. “Why do you have to be so dramatic over everything.”

You grit your teeth.

“Dramatic?” your voice quivers. “I didn’t know feeling hurt was being dramatic.”

His gaze softens and he touches your arm lightly.

“Sorry, I didn't mean it like that.”

You shake your head, feeling your eyes dampen at his words.

“I hate your apologies, Yoongi,” you say in a hushed tone. “They don’t mean anything anymore.”

He’s shocked, not really sure how to respond. You were never one to confront him, especially when he was angry. Instead, he holds your hand softly. He was terrible at comforting people.

“Yoongi are you really sorry?” you ask abruptly. It was a question you’ve been meaning to ask for years now.

His grip on you tightened and you can’t quite read his expression, but you can tell that it’s not a positive response. He looks conflicted and he shouldn’t have to be if he really was. You force him to let go of you.

“I am,” he says, knowing he answered a little too late for his words to not seem suspicious.

“I don’t think you are,” you reply sadly. “You say sorry more than you-”

say I love you.

He doesn’t let you finish the sentence because he knows. He knows what you’re trying to say.

“I am,” he says with more sincerity, but he looks at you with an unreadable expression. “I just don’t think it’s enough at this point.”

“What’s not enough?”

You were confused. Is he still talking about whether he's apologetic or not? Or is it something entirely different?

“I do love you,” he says with a certain conviction in his voice, “and I always will, but it feels like nothing’s working out.”

Yoongi doesn’t look at you and focuses on the leather of the fancy couch. He doesn’t say anything but you know what this means. He’s about to stand up, but you grab onto his wrist.

“This is your apartment,” you say before he could say anything to break your heart even further. “I’ll leave.”

“[Y/N], no,” he says. “You don’t have anywhere else to go. I’m just gonna stay over at the dorm. I just...”

Your eyes get blurry from the tears. Even now it felt like he was looking down at you. Nowhere to go. It was like he pitied you.

“...need to go clear my mind,” he finishes the sentence, standing up to grab his coat.

You shake your head and stand in front of him. He’s usually like this. A coward. A bumbling fool who would rather avoid problems than face them head on.

“I need you to stay, Yoongi,” you cry out. “I need you to actually stay for once and comfort me.”

He looks at you, mouth open but no words come out. He smiles sadly and walks toward you, kissing your cheek.

“I don’t think I can do that anymore, [Y/N],” he says and you watch him leave as easily as he walked in.

It’s not like he ever comforted you in the first place.

—

The break up happened silently over a late-night phone call a few days after he disappeared on you. You packed up your things, stayed over at Chaerin’s house, and braced yourself for what was to come. It should’ve happened sooner, you admit, but your heart still sinks when he speaks.

“I just don’t think either of us is willing to try anymore,” he says solemnly. “We’ve been on and off for the past few years and I don’t think it’s healthy for either of us to continue.”

You agree, just wanting the call to end quickly so you wouldn’t have to hear his voice any longer. It hurt to have to listen to him rationalize breaking your heart.

“I don’t think we should be together anymore, [Y/N],” he says, not even a tiny bit choked up. “I think we’ve... outgrown each other.”

You knew what Yoongi really meant. He’s outgrown you.

“I think so too,” you say rigidly. Short and simple. You left nothing to be desired. “Let’s break up.”

Yoongi looks at his phone, slightly disappointed. He wished you would fight back, maybe rekindle something in him that he’s lost over the years. Yet you were silent on the line and he just had to accept it- that there was nothing left to be saved.

“Take care, okay?” he says softly because in the end he still cares- he just doesn’t want to anymore.

“I will,” you reply, ultimately hanging up the phone. You collapse onto a bed unfamiliar to you. Yoongi would no longer sleep beside you, no longer reach over to hug your side and whisper sweet nothings in your ear. He was gone and you had to accept that maybe he was never yours in the first place.

His last words replay in your mind.

Take care.

That was the most concern he’s ever shown you in the past few weeks. You almost scoff at the absurdity of it all. You don’t notice how truly broken you were until the tears start streaming down your face. You see the image of him through blurry eyes and you wonder how you could let Yoongi leave such a permanent scar on your heart.

—

Present

“Do you like your eggs runny or no?”

Junghoon asks as you approach his figure. You hug him from behind and smile at his warmth. Safe.

“Just a little runny,” you reply.

He smiles and nods, turning off the heat and grabbing some seasoning from your cupboard. You detach yourself from him when you realized what he was grabbing.

“Babe that’s not salt. That’s-”

Sugar.

You stop yourself from saying it and Junghoon looks at you with concern. He chuckles at your stoic state and ruffles your hair.

“Cat got your tongue or what?” he asks, grabbing the right container this time. “Maybe I should’ve asked if you like your eggs sweet instead, huh?”

“I’ve never tried that combination before,” you say teasingly. “Why don’t you test it out for us.”

He clicks his tongue at you and splashes some salt on your face.

“I’ll pour sugar all over you if that’s what you really want.”

You laugh half-heartedly. A simple word shouldn’t affect you this much but you find yourself get more teary-eyed as it repeats in your head. It wasn’t fair to Junghoon that you were thinking of your ex in his presence. It wasn’t fair to you either.

You feel a vibration from your pocket and you pull it out to serve as a distraction from your wallowing thoughts. It’s a text.

From Sugar.

—

A/N: This was so hard to write because my mind has just been empty these days but I’m so glad it’s done now >_< Thank you to @minyoongail​ for requesting this story. I’ve been bumping to the Taylor Swift song now because of this commissions T^T I recommend you all to listen to it. I tried to write this in a different style from my other works so I hope this is still readable for you all LOL

I’m closing commissions temporarily to focus on the ones I have now and to also start writing my own stuff. Let me know how you feel about this, I appreciate all types of comments and criticisms <3 Look forward to Part 2!

[stonecoldhedwig]

I’m still in a WhatsApp group with all the people I used to work with at my hot trash job. Today has truly been a day to be grateful.

I was a digital strategist in the third sector before I gave up my job to write full time. My Big Boomer boss hired someone to replace me who *can’t use Microsoft Word*.

It’s a rollout day for one of their new programmes. Big deal. Generally brings in a lot of money from important donors. I think I spent more time teaching my replacement how to do this than anything else because I had digital programme launches down to an art.

The Boomersaurus Rex hired to replace me has fucked up the delivery strategy so the programme launch has come from her personal account, is going to everyone’s junk inbox, and has thus far been sent out nine consecutive times. The WhatsApp group is a-flurry with messages about how everything has gone wrong.

I got a text this morning from the Boomersaurus that simply said “I cannot send?”. Send what.

This is obviously amusing for me, but it highlights something about the third sector that pisses me off. It never, ever uses the skills, knowledge and diverse experiences of younger people that could genuinely make a difference.

The international third sector is generally no longer about sending neatly-turned-out white kids “overseas” to find themselves and occasionally build schools. Thank God. Despite popular conceptions, it’s not full of altruistic angels looking to change the world, either; it’s instead full of people who—for the most part—do want to do good but are also flawed and desperately human.

There is, however, a major stumbling block to genuine progress all the same, and it’s exactly the people you’d expect it to be: white boomer men.

I’m the youngest year of the millennial generation. Most of my friends are involved in either public sector or third sector work. Most of us are paid like shit, and work for boomers who don’t know TikTok from Twitter. My best friend works for an organisation that defends journalistic freedom around the world, and her (male) boss is incredibly proud of being a second-wave feminist who once read Simone de Beauvoir, and likes to chime in with suitably outdated opinions on gender with typical White Man enthusiasm. Great. Only, it’s 2020 and we’re now on fourth-wave feminism. How can his organisation defend the journalistic freedom of trans, enby, gender fluid people when his mindset is firmly rooted in the 1970s?

My former boss used ethnic slurs about various peoples from the part of the Middle East we worked in. We provided healthcare. Imagine the impact it has on a population when the person who heads up your healthcare provider is a racist. (I obviously reported this to the chairman before I left, and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me in terms of having to resign. In good conscience, I couldn’t stay). That doesn’t even touch on his deep and rich misogyny.

These are obviously much more extreme examples than simply not knowing how to use Word. But the fucking up Word is important. It highlights the fact that the third sector is steeped in capitalism—the kind of capitalism that values longevity more than anything else. The boomer who was hired after me? She was hired because she’d been in the sector for a long time and my Big Boomer boss respected that. It’s capitalism in action: how much production can we squeeze out of you until you expire? It is quantity over quality every time because that’s what late stage capitalism does.

There’s a really simple remedy to this: bring in young people. More than that, bring in a diverse range of young people. Young people of colour, young people with a range of gender identities and sexualities, religions and heritages. Organisations don’t need these young people to have degrees in digital marketing or seven hundred years experience of sending Tweets. We’re the fucking internet generation. Choose the quality of a more meaningful, more nuanced CV than a boomer with 20 years in the same role who, sure, has lasted long, but doesn’t really have much to show for it.

When charities or third sector organisations contact you asking for support (and let’s face it, that’s predominantly financial), ask them the age breakdown of their staff. Ask them their hierarchical structure within their offices. Ask them the demographics of their staff, and ask them how they’re pursuing a more diverse and representative workforce.

Part of believing in radical economic restructuring for me is knowing that the need for charity constitutes a moral failing on our part, collectively. Our economic structures should (and can!!) be reformed so that charity is a thing of the past. Part of the work of moving to a regenerative economy that removes the need for charity is by using charities as a proving ground. What this means is holding “the best of us” to account. It means ensuring that the most vulnerable of society are served by people who look like them, and who are committed to a society that includes them. The best charities ultimately want to be redundant.

So, just as you do for politicians, hold the third sector to account. It’s uncomfortable. No one wants to be the dick that questions the lovely people at a charity. But no third sector organisation is immune to its context, and the damaging attitudes and prevailing cultural norms that we see in the rest of life exists there too. Radical economics demands this of us.

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[akampana]

Would loooove to see the ozytoria art you made, and also your thoughts on them for the ask game !

Hello Anon, thank you for the ask! I made this a few months back for a draft I scrapped. It must have worked as a catalyst since Ozy came home during the white day event.

Hahahaha hope you like it anyway. :)

What made you ship it?

You know what, I really do hate to say this but it's GilArt's fault.

By now, I think you all know about my boundless love for Saber. Ozy, however, I was first interested in because of Prototype and then when I saw the art I was like. Oh. Oh no.

So, little old me researched literally every crumb there was to Ozy, found out he's quite similar to Gil, but tan different enough, especially concerning his boundless love for his wife Nefertari (and his other wives, good on you for being generous, Ozy!). And then I got interested.

I ended up drafting a really old like years old smut-ish angst fic involving Arturia and Ozy, in which they were both using each other as replacements. You know, for Gil and Nefertari. I'll put an excerpt right below the cut. (The excerpt is not NSFW it just made the ask long. )

And that's where it started. More below.

“You broke our agreement,” she hissed from under him, words cold and accusing.

“How dare you?” she whispered, “When I am not her...”

She turned to face him, wiping away his kiss with the back of her hand. “...And you are not him?”

In her mind, superimposed on Ozymandias, was a different face. One with fairer skin and hair. One with piercing blood eyes, and an arrogant curve of lip. One less gentle. One less kind. And she supposed right now, her lover saw her as his wife. With darker hair, with olive skin, with chocolate eyes and a soft smile. Arturia was everything but.

“You are not mine, King of Kings...and I am not yours.”

Ozymandias caressed her cheek with a heavy hand, exhaustion settling over him.

He found he no longer craved the tanned skin of his wife, nor the gentler gaze of her eyes. He still loved Nefertari. He always would. That was one thing that would never change. But every night he spent with this blonde woman, he was beginning to see her for her own beauty, not the qualities she shared with Nefertari.

He was falling for Arturia.

And he was tired of pretending.

What are your favorite things about the ship?

That they've both been married before. I've alluded to this briefly on the last ask, but I frequently hc them together acknowledging their marriage with other people. Nefertari is a huge part of Ozy's life and character after all, and though Guin isn't very much mentioned in Fate, she did play a significant role in Arturia's life. One of Saber's happiest days was their wedding day.

So if we put Ozyturia in conjunction with OzyxNefertari and Arturia/Guinevere or even Arturia/Gil, the dynamic we get is Widower x Widow/Divorcee, with the former missing love and the latter dismissing it.

Plus, it's not like they won't catch each other's interest in Chaldea, for example:

He's met Arthur and Lartoria both. Meeting Arturia, he supposes the gods must be trying to tell him something.

By his dialogue Ozymandias has a thing for people who have the disposition of a king, like, oh you know, the King of Knights. :D

On Arturia's part, his general aura would initially drive her to stay away, due to certain similarities with another king. Slowly, however, she'd learn he's different.

Ozymandias has...a certain wistful aura about him, and unlike the other Servants who usually hang around her post-Rayshift, Ozymandias just...disappears.

She thought herself to be rather reserved, but she then realizes she never sees the pharaoh with the other Servants, and only rarely with Nitocris. At least she has her Table and the company of her former Grail War enemies. In comparison, she and even Gilgamesh are more social.

Then, one day, he's finally coaxed out of his hole due to Master's efforts (interlude 1), and Arturia's curious enough to ask him about it.

Delighted to have a new audience, and a kingly one, no less, he retells the poems about his wife that he's only graced Master and Nitocris with.

"HM! That you have listened to my wondrous tale of my queen for these plentiful hours intrigues me, King of Knights. While I am cognizant of my own talent, that your attention hasn't lapsed once is commendable in itself."

Arturia doesn't even realize that so much time has passed, she just found herself so lost in how much love this Egyptian King had for his wife. She laments two things: that she doesn't know if she can say the same of Guinevere, and that she knows no one is ever going to say such wonderful things of herself.

I will again be bringing up that Arturia's a competitive, sore loser, and Ozy has an ego bigger than Jupiter, and I love that dynamic. While that sounds like another ship, there is a difference:

Despite his massive ego, Ozy is far more generous with his appreciation and hasn't too sharp a tongue. What that means is, Arturia is going to be persistently annoyed by his hubris, and yet also commended on her best qualities.

She can definitely learn from him to be prouder of her achievements, even if that lesson must be frequently beaten into her head by hearing "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" over and over.

Their tangle with equality. Ozy does see himself as above everyone else as the pharoah, the god king, but in his eyes, everyone else is equal in service to him. This is why Arturia's Round Table intrigues him so much, because it applies the same principle. A circular table, so none sits at a position inferior or superior to the other, not even the king. While he certainly wouldn't equate himself to his people, that she can do so and still be revered by her followers is astounding to him.

SUN AND MOON SUN AND MOON SUN AND MOON SUN AND MOON

Ozymandias has a thing for eyes. It's rather subtle but it's there, based on his dialogue and interlude. I wonder what he'd see, faced with her brilliant, haunting emeralds.

AHOGE BUDDIES!!!! :D

I hc that she likes his voice. Even the Dajaku Dajaku. Why? Idk it's cute. Has she mumbled it to herself in battle before? Yes. Gawain thought he was having a stroke.

The MODERN AU POTENTIAL OH MY GOD CAN YOU JUST IMAGINE?

We have Ozy, a brilliant loner architect who lost the love of his life and company heiress Arturia, a recent divorcee who needs to build a new house for herself after moving out of the place she used to share with her partner. She remembers the Egyptian from the construction of one of her most successful branches, and hires his talent to help her.

He has to talk to her to understand her concept for the new place, finding out things he didn't know about the rather serious president. She's a foodie, she cares not for extravagance, and she's easily riled up by teasing. Slowly, he begins to find comfort in her presence, even when he knows all their meetings are professional.

She is forced to remove herself from overwork to spend time with him, and at first, she can't understand how anyone could stand being around someone so boastful. But, he proves his skill time and time again, delivering exactly what she was envisioning. In listening to his stories during coffee breaks, she gets charmed by his life and wishes her marriage could have been as happy as his was. :">

When the constructions end, they...well I'll leave that to your imagination hehe

Is there an unpopular opinion you have about your ship?

I know that Ozy and Nefertari are the main ship for this guy or actually, it might be Gil lol and I love their relationship as well and ship them to the heavens, it's so wholesome, but I don't think that he was married in life should be a barrier for shipping. Even if Ozy's love is particularly highlighted compared to the others. A lot of Servants had past loves and a lot lived whole lives, that doesn't stop them from possibly finding new connections. all ships are valid wheeee

Again, thank you very much for the ask! Hope you enjoyed reading through this one. :)

[effei-s]

aurora, aurora, aurora.

First and foremost: dear @alwaysreading I’m so sorry that it took me so long. My chaotic ass just won’t ever let me get things done quickly and that’s why I can’t have nice things (c).

(it’s like…. looooong and i’m hoping it’s gonna be interesting).  

Aurora Aurora Aurora, the love of his life (and mine) and the baddest bitch in the house (she’s aries and entj, that alone says a lot).

let’s start with the question: yes, she knew about him marring someone else and about Aaron. i’m gonna be a lazy bitch here and copypaste part from my ff:  

There was a mother-in-law, obsessed with public opinion, who liked to pry and snoop around (and the private detectives she hired, whom he fed to a school of large barracudas at the Gulf of Mexico). And there was the truth that still surfaced, no matter how careful he was. Untimely. Ugly. It left him with an empty house, a short note “please, return to your real family,” and an endless year of solitude.

And now my favorite part: HEADCANONS!

headcanon 1: they’ve met when they were teenagers. I know in mafi’s world people are very indifferent to children’s suffering (Anderson can beat the shit out of Adam in broad daylight almost on the school’s porch and no one would bate an eye; Juliette can go around covered in bruises and no teacher would ever question it), but I prefer a little bit more realistic approach. So when a mother forces fucking BLEACH down child’s throat I expect that that child would be taken away from her.

What i’m trying to say is that Rori and him were in the system (foster care, in the same family, but Aurora was there first; age 14 maybe 15; he probably changed a few different homes, and then he saw her and decided to stay). They started as friends (and that was probably the first real emotional bond he had). And they both were troublemakers. Anderson because he’s… Anderson (whispers; a sociopath and he hates school). And Aurora because she’s walking “I take no bullshit” sign. And sometimes, when people annoy her too much, she tends to break their noses (but her marks are still excellent). So both of them had detentions and suspensions in school, but unlike Anderson Aurora never had any REAL TROUBLES with the police. In their tandem she’s the smart one. And then (at the age of 18) they parted their ways for three years. He went in the army (because it was the easiest choice), she went to college (BA in art conservation in States). Then they’ve met again, started dating, she decided to get a master’s degree in Europe (Switzerland I’d say or Netherlands) and became a full-time art conservator (she’s very passionate about preserving cultural heritage, can you see the conflict here?) and around that time Anderson was introduced to the reestablishment concept.    

here’s the thing, their relationships were always “long-distance thing” (long before he married Leila) and both of them were perfectly fine with this. There was no “i’m gonna die if you’re not near me 24/7” bullshit. There was no “I love you” 35 times a day and holding hands. They just… knew that they love each other and it was enough.

This is probably the reason why I love them together so much: they’re two very strong-willed, stubborn and completely independent people (in this house we hate codependent relationships). They have lives and dreams and goals outside each other (and that’s the reason why they never married in the first place: marriage is a relic of the past, that weird thing for other people).

(of course it backfired at her, badly, he betrayed her trust, he broke her heart; but, trust me, if someone told her that in order to have him only for herself she had to be near him all the time and had to give up her dreams for MA and Ph.D., Rori would say goodbye to him and never look back, no matter how painful it’d be. She loves him, she does, but she loves herself more.)  

Headcanon 2: kids and independence. She won’t make sacrifices for him, but she would make them for her kids. And yes Adam is HER KID. AND HERS ONLY. And the same goes for James. I see how you can catch this “it was one-sided and she didn’t really had a choice” vibe from books. Her sneaking food in secret, him showing anger at the sign of Adam(???). I love @cyanidesouffle interpretation of this: that Cat loved him and hoped that sooner or later he’s gonna come to his senses. Lose the battle, win the war, as the saying go. But if we’re talking only about canon, i’m really not a fan of Anderson who can walk in and out and wreck havoc in HER HOME and implant his stupid ass rules, when he’s the one who’s at fault here. she’s not the one who married other man and had a child! He has no right to be angry at Adam, he has no right even look at him the wrong way. I don’t like how it’s implied that she either had no other option but to submit to his whims or she was too meek to stand up for herself and her son.

my favorite thing about my headcanon girl is that Aurora REALLY doesn’t need him. And she doesn’t even think about him as the father of her kids. The hardest part of it (first pregnancy, labor, first years of Adam’s life) he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there, because she didn’t want him to and because she didn’t need him to. He knows it and it makes him treasure her more (there won’t be any third chances for him, another fuck up like this and he’s out for good). It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows back then, and she wasn’t the kindest and loving with Adam (it’s inevitable when you impulsively decide to have a child to spite the man whom you plan to never see again) but she learned to be, little by little. Although she still was quite demanding of Adam (he literally learned the alphabet with her ‘history of art’ books).

Again: she loves Anderson, that’s why she allowed him to came back, but she loves her son more. So when they decide to start again she’s the one with all aces up her sleeve.  

MY HOUSE. MY KIDS. MY RULES.

(if you don’t like it, then you can kindly fuck off. don’t want to act like a human being? shut the door on your way out. and so help me god if you lay even one finger on Adam)  

There’s her love for him, there’s her love for her work, and then there’s her love for her kids. And she can sacrifice first two, but not the last.

Headcanon 3: it’s more of a AU part, but things would so different if she didn’t die. She won’t be a part of RE, obviously, she won’t marry him even if he’d ask her. BUT!  

a) Leila would be alive. And well. Because Rori would find out the truth, as she always does, and then she would make him fix things. She would probably take Leila under her wind, as a form of punishment for Anderson (oh look I care about your ex-wife more than I care about you, she’s really cool, btw).

b) he won’t be a supreme commander. Actually becoming a supreme was his biggest mistake. Everything gone awry because of the routine. It was fun for a few month, but then the middle-age crisis came and everything went to hell. So Rori would definitely convince him to look at it not from the ‘AAAA MORE POWER EVEN MORE POWER, I’M UNTOUCHABLE!!!’ point, but from ‘i’m gonna need to take REAL responsibility for my actions, and they actually gonna have consequences’  point. 

paris: wow, i really don’t like it. thank you, rori. where would I be without you? 

rori: six feet under, darling, six feet under. 

[leggomylino]

Stray Kids Playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons

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A/n: M.List linked down below! | My very first reaction!!! :D I hope you all enjoy <3

Tag List: @distrikt9​ @hanniiesuckle17 @smolboiseavey (Let me know if you’d like to be added!)

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✧ Bang Chan ⇢ STAY Island ✧

Passport Title ⇢ Crisp Ringleader

Okay family

As our ENFJ king Chan would totally have a island that revolved around the others 

Sure he’d have his own space too

But he’d def be one to put up lots of fun camping space and interactive inventions

A cute little barbecue grill on the beach with a wooden table and log benches 🥺🥺 and a picnic area too

I feel like he’d also go out of his way to breed black roses but that may just be me 😂🤷🏻‍♀️

Black and white flowers everywhere, and maybe some red roses too?

He’d also be a generous donator and frequently visit the others to see if anyone needed help with anything

Just stopping by to check in and drop off some hardwood, or iron, maybe even gold 

...That’s a big maybe on the gold cause we all know that stuff ain’t common and if you want Marshal on your island you better have some handy

In addition to this, I think that the generosity would only go so far and he’d be quite the tease too

Running around left and right ratting the others out during pranks and “borrowing” things from the others

“where’d my recipe for gold armor go???”

🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️ “idk bro I think I saw Minho running off with it?”

For villagers, he’d have a plethora of the animal kingdom on his island

Anyone is welcome

You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit 🥴

He’d def have mentions of Stay on his island too

And the guys, his squad

A Stay flag and Stray Kids written in the sand somewhere

Maybe vice versa

His character would likely be of similar resemblance but I can totally see him playing with the fun hair colors and face paint 

His wardrobe would consist of similar attire too: black, white, caps, hoodies, and chains 

Y’all AC fans know that one punk outfit with the chains across the bodice? He’d own that

His home is a toss up: on one hand it could be very chill and cozy, but on another I’m seeing workout gear in one corner and iron tables and a TV and radio going, maybe (definitely) a music studio setup (similar to Weber’s home but more hardcore LMAO)

All in all, I think Chan would be a chill/causal player that would be happy to help his friends and community while also playing hard ball once in a while just to mess with everyone 😂♥️

♪♫ -ˋˏ ༻✿༺ ˎˊ- ♪♫ -ˋˏ ༻✿༺ ˎˊ- ♪♫ -ˋˏ ༻✿༺ ˎˊ- ♪♫ 

✧ Lee Minho ⇢ Soodori Island ✧

Passport Title ⇢ Total Genius

Soodori is a combination of Minho’s cats

Your boy Minho couldn’t resist the ingenious idea

He’d pondered for the longest time which of his precious babies was going to be awarded the title of his island; an impossible decision

Then along comes our creative leader, “why don’t you just use all three?”

‼️‼️‼️

Genius!1!1!!1!1 😩✨

On Soodori, you bet all the villagers are cats; if you don’t have pointy ears and a swishing tail, Access Denied 🙅🏻‍♀️

This means you, Han 

Villagers included would consist of Raymond, who may or may not be an island celebrity

And let’s not forget Queen Ankha

But to Minho, all his cat citizens are equally loved and cherished as a valid part of the community

His whole aesthetic would be cats too

That includes a cat cafe

His flag would probably be a paw print 🐾 or his cat’s names, maybe a cute scribbling of their faces

And if you disrespected that, there’d be blood to pay

I can see his character closely resembling him as well, with a little paw print on his cheek? Maybe some whiskers? 

He’d thoroughly enjoy visiting the others islands “if he absolutely had to”

Swipe some goods

And bundle them up to go on the plane out ✈️

For the most part, I see him being more of a hermit on his island that only heads out On Demand

Even then, it’s kind of a toss up: good luck getting him to leave his children behind 

If you’re nice to him, he MIGHT let you come and view the splendor...m a y b e

But you better not touch or take anything 🗿🔥

Shoot, when it came to special visitors, like Redd or K.K., he’d probably try chasing them off

Put those tools to use

There’s more than one way to skin a cat

(Don’t tell him I said that tho 👀💧)

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✧ Seo Changbin ⇢ DARK Island ✧

Passport Title ⇢ Music-Loving Loner

Dark, dark, dark

We all done knew, didn’t we?

Changbin is the KING of darkness

So it goes without saying that his whole island would radiate the stuff, too

It may seem depressing and a little emo at first, but eventually the concept comes off being pretty cool

...In an angsty, Evanescence sort of way

He’d probably be very lost on how to play at first...at first

He’s got Felix and Chan to help him tho, so he’d be breeding black flowers before you know it

Maybe a little gray and navy blue tones to break up the solidarity somewhere

I’m seeing a kind of night sky aesthetic, maybe some astrology furniture???

Look out, Celeste

She’s gonna be running to Big Brother Blathers saying some scary short guy is following her around the woods

Poor Binnie just wants a Starry Sky wall...until he sees how bright it actually is

Then it’s 💯 a fat pass

Binnie would kindly welcome all sorts of villagers while being minorly selective

After all, we can’t break the darkness with some cheery-idol-wannabe villager, or some Judy the anime bear

I can say with utmost certainty at 95% that his whole wardrobe would be black caps and hoodies

Maybe a plain black tee

Some black pants

And 

White or black sneakers 🥴✨

I think he would be pretty intent on building up his island...in particular, collecting all the artifacts and critters for the museum 

He’d work hard but not go crazy or stress about it and still take lots of time to just chill in his deep dark vibes

Maybe get out once in a while to visit Felix and learn a thing or two

Overall, we see through your front, Bin; you may have a dark vibe but you’re really just a small big softie ☺️

♪♫ -ˋˏ ༻✿༺ ˎˊ- ♪♫ -ˋˏ ༻✿༺ ˎˊ- ♪♫ -ˋˏ ༻✿༺ ˎˊ- ♪♫ 

✧ Hwang Hyunjin ⇢ Kkami Island ✧

Passport Title ⇢ Soothing Season

Welcome to Kkami Island, which was almost named something else aesthetically cute like Honeycomb or Applepuff

However, like Minho, Hyun simply couldn’t resist a chance to use his precious baby’s name

On Kkami, life is pretty chill: EXCEPT WHEN ITS SERIOUS 🔥

That’s right folks

This boy may have some vibing days and go at his own pace

But don’t be fooled: he plays to win

Plant those money trees

Enter those QR codes

Carve out those pathways

Where is Blathers we have a donation 😤😤

Hyunjin would be a steady-paced worker bee 🐝 

He’d likely be selective of his villagers and go for cute ones

Possibly top to secondary tier

When it came to games and get togethers, you’d likely find him chasing another member with a net or an axe, in most cases Jisung

“qUiT LEaViNG TrASh oN mY iSLaNd!!1!1!1!” 💢

“DROP THAT DIY!1!1!1!!1”

Let’s see

His whole island aesthetic would be cute and peaceful:

Plants, terrariums, soft sunlight...

There’d be so many flowers!!! Hyunjin would have a whole colorful flower field 🥰🌸

White and wooden furniture in and around the home

An adorable tea and snack time plaza too! And a library!!! 📖✨

Very cozy and sweet ♥️

Though, shoot, if he had the energy, this guy may just build himself a palace... 🏰

Regardless, just look for the boy with the staple headband and likely some face paint to boot

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✧ Han Jisung ⇢ Swag HOT Island ✧

Passport Title ⇢ Trendy Supreme Being 

(Edit: Minho convinced Felix to hack his account and changed this to Untossable Trash)

Ohhh boy

I bet y’all were waiting patiently for this one

Or maybe you jumped right to it

Either way here we go:

Han Jisung would be the king of the trash heap

And by that I mean this guy would save up all his bells and buy himself a crown 👑 where he’d sit atop a throne of garbage

BECAUSE THERE WOULD BE TRASH EVERYWHERE SIS 😩😩

This guy would be yeeting furniture and garbage all over the place

...Okay maybe that was a bit overdramatic 

Maybe not EVERYWHERE...

......

...It’d be pretty messy tho

He’d probs have traps set up too

You step off the plane and get catapulted into the ocean, if that were a thing

You’d have to navigate and hop around discarded junk for sure

He’d have clothes here, a fan there, a...urinal...on the beach???

.........o k a y ._.💧

Han Jisung wouldn’t be all that competitive when it came to gathering every fruit or collecting all the fish

He doesn’t have the patience for that

He needs to run around and be free, letting his mind wander while wrecking havoc for everyone else; which is also Minnie’s job but we’ll get to that later

For villagers, he’d have at least one squirrel or two (Marshal?! :D) but I’m not so sure it’d really matter...all that much?

I’m not sure he’d even want many villagers at all

He’d be spending most of his time crashing other member’s islands and leaving little surprises like a useless DIY they already have or a fake painting he got roped into buying bc he was too lazy to check if it was genuine =_=

Everyone got sick of it pretty quickly but no one like Minho or Hyunjin; he’s permanently banned from those two locations and Jeongin’s considering adding him to the list next

Despite there being so much junk, his house would have an almost decent vibe: lots of instruments and fun gear, along with some random clothes, a lava lamp, and...another urinal 🗿💧

Seriously, someone get this boy a closet and some coaching in organization

Chan and Changbin are working on hiring Minnie but it’s not going too well; for one he charges too much

Maybe you can talk some sense into him...

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✧ Lee Felix ⇢ YEET Island ✧

Passport Title ⇢ Festive Chum

Okay y’all

Felix

Would be

THE KING

OF ANIMAL CROSSING

THIS BOY WOULD HAVE

ALL THE FRUITS!!! 🍎🍐🍊🍒🍑🥥

ALL THE FLOWERS!!!🌷🌹🌺🌸🌼🌻

I MEAN EVERY COLOR OF EVERY COMBINATION

A COMPLETED MUSEUM 🖼 🐜 🐠

I MEAN BEFORE ART WAS ADDED, HE HAD EVERYTHING RARING TO GO

NINTENDO WAS LIKE “wtf?!”

YEAH SIS, HE’S THAT GOOD

Boy would have a five star island all sorted into perfectly measured categories

An amusement park, a picnic area, a freaking ranch probably 🐮

Some awesome neighborhood for his tier one villagers with a YMCA down the street

A fancy one at that

I mean this boy would have it all

Expect a competitive softie that really just wants to have fun but like

He’s gonna win too lmao

He’s got his Nook Miles program all maxed out

When playing with the others, he comes up with really creative solutions when faced with a crisis

That’s because this smart cookie knows the ins and outs of the game

There was one time where he fenced Jisung in like the creepy Easter bunny and left him for ded oop

That was a bad day for Jisung and a hilarious day for everyone else

He felt bad about it but he also wanted that Subway gift card 🤷🏻‍♀️ 

Each day is a new hair color for Felix

Sometimes every few days or a week

He sometimes likes to synchronize it with his current hair color but

Experimenting is also fun

Face paint too! 🌈 He chooses a warpaint print he found on Pinterest, for days when the gang gets together for a game of tag or bug catching contests

Even if he doesn’t win, Felix always makes it into the Top 3

And he has a lot of fun doing so! 😊

He’s just one heck of a gamer is all

And his whole aesthetic shines brighter than the sun T-T ☀️

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✧ Kim Seungmin ⇢ Seungmin’s Island ✧

Passport Title ⇢ Radiant Boy

Like Felix, Seungmin would be an ace at AC

He wouldn’t get everything right off the bat

But he’d put in a logical tried-and-true effort, and once he got the ropes and found his groove, my oh my

This boy would have it all

Sophistication ✨

Class ✨✨

Flair ✨✨✨

He’s got a plethora of fruit and stylish attire too

And his aesthetic is so simple but chic

He’s got this whole clean and polished vibe

Lots of artwork and creativity

He’s even got traps that look like fancy furniture

Those are mainly for Han Jisung tho

That oughta teach him to quit nosing around and taking his DIYs <_<

One time he tried stealing a few apples for Swag HOT Island

Didn’t go well sis...

He made it to just outside the pier before getting lost in the hedge maze by Cafe Seungmin

After that Seungmin closed him into a corner as punishment and wouldn’t let him out until he dropped the Apple

But Jisung was feeling pretty prideful that day so he ate it instead 🗿💧

Anyway

This guy would def make a character that looks just like him!

Would he try new hair colors and face paint? ...Maybe

It seems like a sorta-Seungmin thing to do

Seungmin would wanna be the best of the best while still staying true to himself, so you’ll likely see tier one and two villagers that he particularly fancies

Fancy you, fancy me 🥳✨💃🏻🎶

He’d also be one to go around admiring the chaos from the background while occasionally becoming the chaos

Kinda like the Cheshire Cat 😅

When challenging the others to an art contest (who could buy the most expensive artifact from Redd without using the internet) he switched some of the other members paintings while they were distracted by a meteor shower

“Look, a shooting star! And another one!”

“Make a wish.”

“How do I do that?!”

“Tilt your camera towards the sky and press A.”

“I’ve got my camera app open and it’s just taking photos???”

“Not you CAMERA camera—“

“Hey! Chan hyung, Minho just stole my star!!!”

“I didn’t see your NAME on it...”

“Don’t fight, you can each have half!”

“That’s not how it works at all...”

...Anyway

It was pretty comical until Changbin had to say something, about the art that is

Then Minnie had to bounce before the angry shovels and nets caught up to him

“Hey!!! Why is my painting on Minho’s side???”

“Why is everyone attacking me???”

“Oh, Hyunjin has my painting...”

“I do not! ...Oh hey I do? Why’d you put it over here?”

“I DIDN’T!”

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

...

🛫 🏃🏻‍♀️💨

Poor Minnie just wanted to have some fun amongst the confusion 😔

But

When it gets right down to it, you better believe this boy would be an aesthetic and skillful player ✨

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✧ Yang Jeongin ⇢ Go Away Island ✧

Passport Title ⇢ Mistakingly Caught Son

Go Away Island means just what the title intends: go away :)

Initially, Jeongin was prepared for what he senior members would do

He knew there would be much anticipation to visit the 막내’s island and drive him crazy

Sometimes, he doesn’t mind it

But others he just wants to be left alone and do his own thing

When he started the game, it was one of those days

So he wanted to make the message clear 😤😤

Also, Don’t Bother Me seemed to be too long 🤷🏻‍♀️

Go Away was straight to the point ;D

Anyhoo

On Go Away, you’ll encounter lots of cute characters 💓

Innie has a very cute and true-to-himself aesthetic

He doesn’t understand much of the mechanics but he’s working on it okay?

And he’s getting better every day!

Okay, so like, sometimes he’ll allow Chan to come over and help

Or Felix or maybe Seungmin if he promises to be genuine and behave

But like

The rest of the members are semi-banned

Hyunjin gets a pass if he whines enough

Or he’ll come up with a crafty excuse to come over

“Innie, look! I got peaches on my island! Don’t you want one? They’re cute like you! 😩❣️”

...He could do without that last embarrassing remark but okay sure

He really did want those peaches for his picnic garden 😔✊🏻

In terms of hair color? We’re on a rotation like Felix

We’re trying lots of hair colors

And a few aesthetic designs, too!

Jeongin is very resourceful when it comes to QR codes, something Felix and Seungmin taught him

He uses them to set flowers and stones pathways everywhere

And an especially prominent one leading to the door 👉🏻🚪 

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↬ Which island will you be visiting? 🌴✨

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