#I love chocolate and want to experience the better version :c

[cakhost]

So I have had a thought about the word "America/American" and it being used as slang, I guess, to describe a particular group of USA citizens. That thought being that "America", the word, was originally made to name continents because Columbus was an idiot and didn't found an alternative route to India.

So I feel that anyone in any America could call themselves American or refer to their country as "America"; not just the USA or the particular group of USA citizens have that privilege and me feeling like them being a bit rude for owning that for so long.

But I guess, like I mention before, it has became slang to refer to a group in the USA so it has been bothering me less on that front when I think of it that way. Same with any take of "'Merica" falling into that category. Kinda like how "yankee" or "yank" is used for slang for anyone from USA, I think.

[sugar-petals]

[✖︎ sub!Lee Felix] › 𝚜𝚖𝚞𝚝 𝚊-𝚣

read it on ao3

⇢ PAIRING. boyfriend!lix + femdom!reader

words. 2k

WARNINGS. ⚠️ rated m/mdni, dom!reader, submissive felix, d/s play, fluff & various kinks

⇢ ♥︎ NOTE | because which domme doesnt like cute angelic subs 💕 felix was requested plenty after i published a chan (soft sub) and lee know (hard sub) version lately, enjoy!

sub!idol masterlist

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a = aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

snuggles. snuggles. and more snuggles. and love noises. and he’s singing something cute to come down. it’s all very random, but also predictable in some way: felix is a safe person, he won’t do anything overly wild and disruptive. felix likes to have coffee for aftercare with lots of milky foam on top. or a classic hot chocolate, big mug.

he doesn’t expect you to make it, but is happy when you do. and tell me: which dom wouldn’t want to be a bit of a service top for felix every now and then. it’s only polite for all the extra miles your sweet sub will go in bed. making it together is more likely, anyway. it defies all logic in the world to leave felix in the bedroom by himself with you at the coffee machine when he is just so clingy.

that’s a general golden rule to begin with. at any point of play or during a precarious situation, a dom stays with their sub, especially when bondage is concerned. since felix is open to ropes and other toys, long as they don’t look too scary, he’s in need of your presence and won’t leave your side. complete trust. you’re in the kitchen together very often, so it only makes sense that you prepare hot drinks side by side. unless you need to rest, a heavier session might need some minutes of pure cooldown and a final release of tension.

b = body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

felix loves his mullet, you love his mullet, everyone does. especially with his natural hair color, anyway. it’s a terrible-sounding name for something so pretty, mullet. you really need to come up with better nickname.

another body part in your constant top 5 would be his kissy lips. because of how much pleasure they are capable of giving you, and how cupid-shaped they are.

interestingly, he’s not as breast-obsessed as you thought he would be. the likes of han, lee know, you know the mood, these guys are so into it. they can’t stop thinking about their partner’s chest. felix is like changbin in a sense of thinking wow, they’re amazing, that shape, so nice to the touch — but it’s not a constant source of neediness for him. it’s cuddly, that’s what he appreciates.

c = cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

when everything’s a mess, felix is just getting started. he gets excited by the texture and, as you quickly find out, he’s a certified cumslut. unafraid by anything, anywhere. cum play makes him smile, he enjoys it that much, the little pervert. you’d have a hard time ever seeing him disgusted. felix just doesn’t roll that way. eats you out forever because he wants to thank you, it needs to be sloppy.

d = dirty secret (pretty self-explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

king of fingering his own hole, won’t even try to hide it. feels amazingly stimulated. jacks himself off with the other hand while doing so. although he’s embarrassed by his horny face, it’s a huge wave of pleasure.

e = experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

very experienced. as nice as it would be to deflower him, to baby him like a virgin, felix jokes that he’s a little ran-through. he loves sex and meeting new people, he can set a great atmosphere, and he does know damn well what he’s doing. never let the cute face fool ya. he’s skilled as a sub.

f = favorite position (this goes without saying)

in any position where he’s getting squeezed. strongly or softly, both is good.

g = goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

enjoys rough sexuality, but only to a degree where it’s still possible to make a joke. he can be serious during some play scenes but, well honestly: sunshine is sunshine. felix and his soft sex hours just wouldn’t make sense. he likes it when it’s romantic and pampering. he’s not the only spoiled one, though. he spoils his domme a lot.

h = hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

a little bit’s running wild sometimes. othertimes, not a trace. you actually prefer him with a little fuzz, short, thin, and almost curling up from dampness. forgets it sometimes, but asks how you like it. same thing with clothes, really.

i = intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

sweet talker. in fact, he chats constantly. what is silence? the opposite of lee know if you can picture it, felix is definitely an open book with close to no walls up (at least that’s how his behavior comes across, of course he has boundaries and all). chan has encouraged him to be more like this, so felix owes it to the leader to be more transparent with his top. that is not to say lee know is a manipulator by comparison: he just communicates more briefly and to the point. felix is more flowery for sure.

j = jack off (masturbation headcanon)

constantly. when the lights are out, his palm goes down south. he jacks off fast and passionately, noisy and desperate.

k = kink (one or more of their kinks)

let the peggery begin. does felix even spend any time off the strap? he can do this forever. however, he’s not the one to take it deeper and deeper. shallow is where it’s at, though he avid in his movement. teasing and longevity over quick and hard: more fun for the two of you.

l = location (favorite places to do the do)

even on a damn train if that’s in any way feasible. perfectly spontaneous. caters to your every whim, anywhere. if he’s doubtful of the location, if it’s too risky, he will find a quick alternative. felix is polite and considerate to others as well, not just you, which is the greenest ever flag. you’re not a jealous domme. those kind of tops like hyunjin or chan. the girls that felix attracts are more easy-going and easily endeared, not really bothering with envy or possessiveness.

m = motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

no-brainer: body contact. what would felix do without cuddling and feeling your skin’s warmth. and hell, lix as a cuddle counterpart is naturally healing. this guy is good for your health inside out. and, that’s why he likes being together with you seeing how his presence benefits you a lot. hey, that’s why he’s your boyfriend.

n = no (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

blood and pain play. felix is not your local masochist like han `certified screamer‘ jisung, hyunjin or even lee know. felix prefers the gentle femdom aspects of play, making your sexy time filled with crazy stuff just wouldn’t be his cup of tea. though he can be daring. cheeky felix is not a pillow prince incarnate. that’s chan! felix is super flexible and a tinge of brattiness won’t hurt. keeps it interesting.

o = oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

felix is going to lap you up like a cat drinking milk. he also loves it when you ask him to suck on your breasts. not very firmly, just lustful enough to make some nice little noises. and with his sexy tongue of course. your hands in his hair, gripping his ponytail.

when it comes to receiving, he throws his head back, yup. sloppy fast blowjobs… he loves it. not a fan of destroying your throat, it’s all about the lips for him, and some lush tongue teasing.

p = pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

you call him buck because that’s what his hips do. felix is already pretty, but even more beautiful in lustful ecstasy. it has to be in a cozy environment, though.

q = quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

it’s a semi-quickie. felix won’t like the hit-and-run style that, say, seungmin talks about.

r = risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

he is. playfully, with a smile. felix should never ever be underestimated. however, his romantic side is super strong. he makes sure you never feel like you’re lacking someone to squeeze and hug and socialize. if he’s preoccupied with work, he randomly sends a friend of his to check up on you just because. the friend will bring food and flowers signed by lix, and sometimes other presents. small ones, this is not a dramatically lush birthday party every time. just something to make his goddess smile for the day, no experiments, just love.

s = stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

neither long nor short but just right.

t = toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

pink bondage rope and a bad dragon. his classics. felix is prone to experiment, his open mind and dexterity with toys has lead him down many a kinky path. he prefers to use them on himself rather than you, pretty much constantly. solo time is super important for your boyfriend, that he’s attached to your hip can be misleading. he misses you a lot, but he won’t despair on his own, felix is his own best company when you’re busy and loves the thrill of toys.

u = unfair (how much they like to tease)

well. have you seen him dance? he can be a big tease with that banging body of his. felix tagging you on his socials to send you and stays into a frenzy with his thirst traps is a seductive move that you quite enjoy, to be honest. he can shake it, his outfits are dazzling, and he’s too cute and kind to ever ignore. felix makes sure he’s a bit more modest than during his single days, though: some things are for your eyes only. the company understands… sometimes. but when he comes home, you always make sure he knows where he belongs anyway with a freaky play session and lots of snuggles.

v = volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

the girl group songs and solo female artist albums he will blast might as well drown out his immense groaning. but hell, felix is pretty vocal. you always get feedback and `right there, yeah´ replies… he’s the sweetest and most gorgeous.

w = wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

has a sexy phone screen. completely unafraid of saucy material in general. writes rated fanfics here and there. polaroid king next to chan and seungmin who tend to keep things a lot more secret, however. but he’s definitely a child of the internet, so he’s unafraid to use google alrighty. when he has a question he thinks is too silly, he won’t bother his domme and ask the world wide web instead.

x = x-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

cute man, cute dick. very upright, compact, not huge aka two fists, not short aka one fist, it’s all nice and balanced, and a midrange length does feel best. doesn’t come with some freaky levels of girth — more sleekness, skinnier below the top. a bit column-like as a whole, no? in one word, handy is probably the right way to describe it.

y = yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

his cuddle-o-meter and need to flirt is actually much higher. foreplay is life, and life is foreplay. all else is just the cherry on top. that is felix’ number one very practiced motto.

z = zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

doesn’t tire until he voiced his every compliment. which will take a long time, and no, he doesn’t want to take center stage for its own sake; it just comes out like a waterfall naturally. felix has plenty of commentary on how it all went, and it’s mostly positive anyway. when something went a bit wrong, he won’t sweat it. if there was a terrible mistake, he’ll be downtrodden — and the whole scene is safeworded in an instant, from either you or him, anyway. felix has no incentive to push himself to keep going when something is just faulty. in other words, he’s not the type to just adapt and go, pushing the limits, being tough, like lee know would. felix being a soft sub at heart will always show. which also means he has plenty of energy left during aftercare. no dozing off in sight when you could do all the pillow talk in the world. felix will shoulder your worries and thoughts of all kind and massage you all you want.

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read it on ao3

masterlist 

chan and lee know ver.

© 2017 sugar-petals. all rights reserved. no reposts allowed. all depictions are fictional and for entertainment purposes only.

[ndostairlyrium]

🌌 MILKY WAY, 🍰 CAKE SLICE, 🚆 TRAIN for all of them? c:

eeep ** thanks dear!!

🌌 MILKY WAY - what was the inspiration behind your oc? what was the first thing you decided about them?

Elanor

So, there's a running joke I have with a few friends that the first female character of each game I play - with customizable options - has to be a badass redhead called iterations of the name Lenore, which is the name of my Mass Effect protagonist. I find it hilarious that my Shepard is traveling through realms bringing chaos and a very bad personality. Luckily Ela turned out similar to Lenore only in the physical aspects, mentally they're polar opposites - well, except when it comes to falling for dorks with sarcastic approaches on life << I don't remember the first thing I decided about her, actually, it's been a while. Probably something related to her strength.

Hawke

Just like Ela, he happened very randomly. I remember approaching the game superficially in the first run, like, picking just the diplomatic options and having a mediocre time throughout the story by deciding for the "best" decisions and romancing the "wrong" character. But then I remember @underneathestars mentioned that the humorous personality was super fun and I was like "oh, so I can play as the town's fool! amazing!". Plus, another friend told me that Fenris was the best romance so I was like "yeah, why not, better than [other character]" All the right calls were made and Kerry was such a fun character to play and mentally accessorize! The first thing I decided about him was that he's just Some Dude. No particular skillset, just a big heart and a tendency to put himself in danger because of it.

Ankh

Another child of a second or third or fourth (can't remember) playthrough. I remember wanting a really fun character to engage the environment with but this time with actual competences and that is really doing her best, and more. With her, I fell in love with the game and the franchise in general. The first thing I decided about her was that everything she accomplished, she had to work for it. She isn't afraid of failure, because failure is the first thing she experiences in life and she knows how to take the best tools from it to succeed another day.

🍰 CAKE SLICE - favourite cake flavour? are they specific about types of cakes?

Elanor

Coming from nobility, she has tasted many varieties of cake so she could develop preferences - and be picky about it << I would say something creamy and voluptuous, like those cakes with flavored custard and layers of puff pastry sheets, with fancy fruit on top. She's a fan of delicate scents and flavors when it comes to pastry, but it has to be decadent or else she prefers not to engage.

Hawke

He could eat any cake, really. However, his favorite is a classic: jam tart (onion and fig being his preferred choices for filling).

Ankh

She's lactose and gluten intolerant, plus she can't digest fermented aliments, so her options are very limited when it comes to eating - whenever she doesn't cut them herself because of her eating disorder. Rather than cake she's fond of small pastry. One of the best things she has ever eaten was the thedosian cousin of a cannolo, with fresh ricotta cheese, chocolate chips, and orange slices - she fell super sick after that but, eh, can't really blame her for making such a bad decision.

🚆TRAIN - what is their answer to the trolley problem?

Since the implications of the whole thing are quite complex, I'm going with the regular version (source wikipedia):

"There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two (and only two) options:

Do nothing, in which case the trolley will kill the five people on the main track.

Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?"

Elanor

The right thing to do, for her, would be diverting the trolley to kill one person. Hopefully it's Darkspawn

Hawke

Same as Elanor, but he'd make sure to identify the person and take care of their family afterwards

Ankh

Among the three, she's the one that thinks about it for a while before providing an answer. Would make the trolley explode, if the distance is enough to support the idea. Hypotetically, all of the people will be harmed by the explosion but nobody - except her maybe - would die. If the distance isn't enough to plan a thing, she'd do the same as the others. Her first instinct would be looking for a third option tho.

(These are not really "it's none of my business" characters lmao)

-

Emoji Asks meme

[mazeinthemiroh]

could u do a san’s reaction of reader having bad period pains

ateez reactions to their s/o having bad period pains

genre: fluff, comfort

word count: 1.2k

warnings: mentions of pain/painkillers, slight angst

authors notes: i hope this is okay but i took the liberty of doing a ot8 reactions instead of just sannie (as i usually do reactions with all members) hope that's okay! if you want a separate, longer version like a one-shot or something of this then you are very welcome to request that :D either way, hope you enjoy!

hongjoong

it's quite distressing for hongjoong to see you keel over in absolute agony. he knew you had your period but he underestimated how painful the experience actually was for you. you watch his eyes grow wide as you look up from your messy state, your body bent forwards and hands placed on your lower stomach as you tried to breathe slower. after seeing you like this, his ultra attentive mode switches on in his head. he makes sure you are in comfortable clothes and might put on your favourite program to watch. he would be much more cuddly and touchy, which makes you smile. at the same time, if you tell him you want space he completely understands that too. he wants you to be as comfortable as possible and, with his help, it certainly makes your periods a less of a painful experience.

seonghwa

seonghwa is always prepared in this area. at the start of the relationship he might have been a bit bewildered. he didn't know how to react and what he could do to help you. all he knew was that you needed help, and that he wanted to help. so the very first time you told him what would help lessen your cramps after he interrogated you about it you best believe he's on top form. running to the shop to get sanitary products, chocolates, medication, anything else he thinks you might need. and then he will cuddle you all night, rub your tummy and talk to you in a soft, calm voice. he likes to plan ahead of time in general, so he tries to take a mental note of when you have your periods so he can plan something special or maybe buy you a gift. he just wants you to have the most stress-free, painless experience as possible. he will literally do anything to make you feel better.

yunho

emotional support puppy™. he can't even comprehend what type of pain you are going through, it's frustrating for him. he wants to understand why you're feeling like this. he doesn't understand why the pain can't be taken away as easily as a headache or something. while this is going through his mind, he tries to soothe you with forehead kisses and snuggles on the couch. he is determined to make you smile or giggle or laugh, just something to take any grimace or pout of that face of yours. and he's good at making you laugh, it's one of the many reasons you love him. but you have to explain to him that when you laugh too much the cramps hurt more 😭 and his face just drops he's like :(( he hates feeling hopeless because he wants to help you in this predicament. so you have to reassure him that him just being there is enough comfort for you until the pain subsides.

yeosang

yeosang is concerned and doesn't want to leave your side in case you explode or something?? ok so he doesn't know a lot about periods but, cut him some slack, he does a pretty damn good job when it comes to comforting you. his go-to move is to make you a nice hot chocolate, and he even put mini marshmallows in that he bought especially for occasions like these :( and he will give you it with a little piece of paper with a drawing of hethet-mon blowing you a kiss yes i am crying over my own imagination thank you for asking. overall he's just an incredibly soft boy. he doesn't know whether to give you space or to be by your side and he's too shy to ask. also he doesn't want to make you annoyed or upset. so he appreciates it when you are direct with him and tell him you want a cuddle or something.

san

these times of the month will probably have the biggest toll on san the most. seeing you in so much pain to the point where you are crying?? yeah, that's the worst thing for him. what's ever worse is not being able to do anything about it. he tries every trick in the book: painkillers, hot water, tummy rubs, tea. he does everything right and perfect but there is no use. there is nothing he can do. and he absolutely hates that. because of all of this, he gets emotional. he curls up behind you in bed and spoons you, placing kisses all along your head, to your neck, down to your shoulder. he keeps whispering things like "jagi i love you so much" and "i'm so so sorry its like this" while his voice breaks with emotion, his eyes definitely welling up with tears. he feels like he is failing you even though its out of his control.

mingi

he's confused and shocked and scared that you're gonna die or something. everything he does for you is urgent and fast. you watch him whizz round, trip over his own feet when you ask him if he could get some medicine for you. you find it endearing that he puts so much effort into making sure you're ok. you just have to tell him what you need him to do because if he is left to figure out things for himself, he's gonna be so incredibly lost. when he sees you start crying his heart just shatters into pieces. he's whisking you up straight away jn his arms, rocking you gently backwards and forwards, placing your head on his chest and rubbing his hand up and down your back. will probably pop on a disney movie to distract you as you slowly settle down from crying. gives himself a mental high-five when you fall asleep on him. he just can't believe how much pain you are in <//3

wooyoung

chef wooyoung is cooking you a 3 course meal, he doesn't care. when he goes to work knowing you're on your period, he has you on his mind a lot more than usual. because he knows you get it bad. will plan out what he is going to make you for when he gets home. and you are so greatful that he is a good cook because, lord, you can appreciate his cooking when you have bad cramps. the pain seems to lessen when you empty stomach is filled with deliciousness. after you both have eaten wooyoung would be so clingy and cuddly, not once letting you escape his arms as he starts rambling on about his day or some crazy dramatic thing that happened to him a while back. he wants to distract you in some way. he will also give you lots of smooches on the cheeks and say how much he loves you to the point where its sickening. he wish he could take your pain away.

jongho

he's probably the most unsure out of all of them. he doesn't know a lot about periods. all that he knew was that they hurt and they happened every month. that was it. but after seeing you in this much pain he was kind of horrified. he didn't know what to do with himself. what to do with you?? he tried to calm you down and soothe you but there were no words of comfort that could take away from the pain you were experiencing. he would probably pick you up and settle you down in bed. a quick search on google and he would be on it, getting you something to eat, a hot water bottle for your stomach and a stuffed toy for comfort. he would offer to massage anywhere if needed, and will stay by your side for the rest of the night. mentally he is kind of restless because, oh if only he could do something about these cramps...

[hyunsuks-beanie]

Beomgyu SFW Alphabet

Mellow speaks: My first Beomgyu work! And with this, my Alphabet series will be taking a break! I'll be doing my other requests before I come back to a couple more I have for this, since I received them only recently. I hope you enjoy reading this, and thank you for requesting anonie! Also, the format of this one is a little different from the previous ones (and I'm hella annoyed with this) bc Tumblr is being weird again. Sorry about that!

A = Attractive (What do they find attractive about the other?)

There's a lot that goes through Beomgyu's mind, even if he doesn't always show it. He's always been one to think deeply about things, and have a lot of emotions, even though they might not be easily perceptible. He would want someone who can understand his emotional frequency, and is willing to be on the same page as him. He finds himself being attracted to someone who can take his jokes well, but can also undertsand when he's his more melancholy mood. Someone that won't judge him for literally being two people in one, and will instead love him for it. B = Baby (Do they want a family? Why/Why not?)

He's thought of settling down one day, but since he's still young, that "one day" still seems pretty far away. But he's definitely down for having a family with you, and can't help but feel giddy at the mere thought of having his kids running around his house. Though he's never given it much importance, when he starts going out with you, he slowly starts seeing a future with you. C = Cuddle (How do they cuddle?)

Being his clingy self, Beomgyu has to have his arms around you every moment he can. He especially loves being attached to you while you watch a movie sitting on the couch, his head in your lap or snuggled into your chest. He prefers being the small spoon most of the time, having his face hidden away into your chest or even your back, but at times, he will agree to being the big spoon, especially if it means he gets to have you seated on his lap as he plays with your hands.

D = Dates

(What are dates with them like?) Dates with Beomgyu can go two ways, and there's usually no in-between. Very often, he likes taking you out on fun day outs, either to the amusement park, to a concert, or even to a paintball class. He loves being outdoors, and if you're the type to be down for it too, then expect to often be dragged out of the house, even if you don't have anything planned. On the other hand, there are frequently also days when all he wants to do is cuddle with you in bed, or near the window sill, just looking out the glass. Such instances are more common when the weather is gloomy, since Beomgyu is the type to let his mood be affected by whether or not it's raining. Just having you in his arms, with a cup of hot chocolate to share, is enough to satisfy him.

E = Everything

(You are my ____ (e.g. my life, my world…)) To him, you're his happiness. The person who makes him want to be a better version of himself, who pushes him to do his best every day. Your mere existence is enough to give him strength when he's down, you're like a ray of sunshine in his dark world. Don't get him wrong, he actually liked the dark, but being with you makes him want to experience the light. You're the one who understands him like no other, and as long as you're with him, he knows he'll be just fine, even if the going gets tough.

F = Feelings (When did they know they were in love?) Beomgyu can be rather thick when it comes to matters of the heart, and so, it took him quite a while to understand that the fluttering in his heart when he's around you actually meant that he had a crush on you. A similar streak continues even when he starts dating you, his fondness of you growing by the day as he finds himself wanting to spend every minute with you, the thought of you refusing to leave his mind. It's only when everyone around him starts calling him out and teasing him for being head over heels in love with you, that he begins to realize that he may be in love. G = Gentle (Are they gentle? If so, how?) When he's not being an annoying bee, he makes it a point to be extremely gentle with you, taking care never to take a joke too far or saying something that might hurt you. His gentleness makes itself seen through his words, as he's always there to put your mind at ease and make you feel at home. He's especially good at comforting you, rubbing your back in a soothing manner as he lets you rant to him. His hugs are another way in which he shows his gentleness, holding you in the softest way possible while pouring all his love into the simple gesture.

H = Hands

(How do they like to hold hands?) Holding hands is your special way of giving reassurance and comfort to each other, and there are few things Beomgyu likes more than to hold your hand tightly in his as he plays with your fingers. He usually likes for wrap his hand around yours, feeling like he's protecting you (though he knows you don't need it).

I = Impression (What was their first impression?) When he first laid his eyes on you, Beomgyu was struck by how interesting you seemed. That's not to say that he didn't find you attractive or anything, it was just that meeting you for the first time, he felt a sense of reassurance as he saw you smile warmly at him. There was just something about you that made him feel like he could talk to you, made it seem like you would be interested in conversing with him about every weird and random topic under the sun. That's when he knew he wanted to keep you around.

J = Jealousy (Do they get jealous?) Beomgyu craves your attention at all times, and is extremely reluctant to share it with anyone. As such, him being jealous is rather a regular occurrence, and instead of him disliking the idea of anyone else hitting on you, it has more to do with him feeling threatened of not being your favorite anymore. So, you can expect him to get even more clingy than usual, whining for you to look at him as he continues to shoot daggers with his eyes towards the person you're interacting with. It usually doesn't escalate into something ugly though, just give him a bit of love and reassure him that he's still your favorite, and you'll have your giggly boy back.

K = Kiss (How do they kiss? Who initiated the first kiss?) Being the annoying soul that he is, Beomgyu lives for placing big, fat kisses on your cheeks, giggles escaping his lips as he sees you scrunch your nose in fake disgust. On a more romantic note though, he loves catching you off-guard, and places kisses on your lips at the most random of times, often when you're mid-sentence. He is also a sucker for forehead kisses, finding them reassuring. As such, it's a regular thing for him to kiss you on the forehead as he walks out the door, on his way to a tour. It's his way of telling you that he'll be back before you know it. Your first kiss was...... surprising to say the least. There you were, walking home from a date while talking about anything and everything. All of a sudden, he stopped in his tracks, turning to you as he took a step closer. Not thinking much of it, you continued to talk, not noticing him leaning in until his lips were just an inch away from your own.

L = Love

(Who says ‘I love you’ first?) As I said, it takes him quite a while to wrap his head around the fact that he may be in love with you. When he does realize it however, he starts looking for a way to tell you about his feelings, often falling short of the right words at the right moment. You catch onto his attempts soon enough though, giggling silently to yourself as you notice him getting all confused and flustered whenever he tries to tell you. Deciding to put an end to his misery, you take matters into your own hands, whispering a soft "I love you" into his chest as you hug him after a date. Safe to say, he still ends up being flustered, but at least he's happy about it.

M = Memory

(What’s their favourite memory together?) Beomgyu's favorite memory with you of the first time he let you into his studio, under the pretext of showing you a song he'd been working on. He doesn't easily trust people enough to show his works to them, but something about you had made him want to get your opinion. The song had lowkey been about you, nothing too obvious, and discreet enough to go unnoticed. He had watched your expression intently as you gave it a listen, a gasp escaping his lips as he noticed your eyes welling up. Even though you didn't know it was about you, you had managed to grasp the overall idea behind it, and seeing you understand the words that he couldn't find it in himself to say out loud, had just made him fall for you even more.

N = Nickel

(Do they spoil? Do they buy the person they love everything?)

Beomgyu has always been one to want to spoil you, but he often ends up getting confused over what he should buy you. As such, gifts are not much of an occurence, mainly because he just doesn' know what to get you. But expect him to keep an ear out so that he knows when you explicitly say that you want something. Whether it's in passing or in the middle of a conversation, he'll catch it, and that evil little smile will start playing on his lips. And viola, the very next day, you'll come home to find a package waiting for you on the dinner table.

O = Orange

(What colour reminds them of their other half?)

I would say yellow, because that' just what you mean to him. The bright energy in his life, the one person who can always make him happy no matter what. He's really thankful to have with him, and he wants to always preserve your brightness, to protect your shine.

P = Pet names

(What pet names do they use?)

He's the type to twist your name or cut it short in order to make it into a pet name. You can also expect him to frequently call you "baby."

Q = Quaint

(What is their favourite non-modern thing?)

Beomgyu seems like the type to take quite an interest in old-fashioned watches or even clocks, and he can frequently be found surfing the net or those antique watch stores to look for something he can buy for himself, and even for you if you'd like. He just loves the feel of the leather strap on his wrist, and often likes to take his time setting the watch.

R = Rainy Day

(What do they like to do on a rainy day?)

Rainy days are just his favorite, and he lives for being wrapped up in a blanket, cuddling with you as you softly talk about random things, afraid that if either one of you is too loud, the calm will be shattered. Or you can just sit in each other's embrace, saying nothing and just basking in the other's presence as you look out at the rain.

S = Sad

(How do they cheer themselves/others up?)

Until you came along, Beomgyu's idea of cheering himself up was to listen to sad or downright depressing music while hugging his knees to his chest. He didn't like talking to anyone unless someone (that someone very often being Soobin) practically dragged him out and made him share his sadness.

But ever since he's met you, he has started opening up to you more, unable to resist your comforting smile. Whenever he's sad, he just likes to snuggle into your chest or your neck, as you rake your fingers through his hair. Give him time, and he will eventually talk his feelings out with you.

When it's his turn to cheer you up, it can go two ways. If he senses that all you want to do is cuddle him as he comforts you, then be ready to get tackled in a massive hug as he refuses to let you go. If, on the other hand, he feels like it'll be better if he cracks jokes to make you smile, then be prepared to hear the most stupid jokes you've ever heard.

T = Talking

(What do they like to talk about?)

Beomgyu often likes to talk about the most random of things, and the topics for conversation can vary from Hyuka's new plushie to his school days to aliens, all in a matter of minutes. He also makes it a point to ask you about your day, and in turn, tells you all about his.

Another thing he likes to talk about is music, and he feels he's in his element as he tells you about the kind of genres they're experimenting with for the new album, and the type of songs he's been into these days.

U = Unencumbered

(What helps them relax?)

Cuddling with you and having you rake your hands through his soft locks helps him unravel instantly. There's just something about you that calms him down to the very core, no matter how exhausted he is.

V = Vaunt

(What do they like to show off? What are they proud of?)

His gorgeousness, hands down. And what's funnier is that he doesn't actually do it to show off how good looking he is (though both you and him know it's true), and instead does it to annoy you just like how he annoys the hell out of Yeonjun. You'll just be hugging him or talking to him, and all of a sudden, he says, "Y/N, aren't I absolutely breathtaking?," only to have you hit his shoulder.

He also loves to show off how amazing you are, and does so in front of the boys. He'll just randomly be singing your praises and giggling about how lucky he is to have you.

W = Wedding

(When, how, where do they propose?)

If given his way, Beomgyu would invite every single person in South Korea to your wedding, because he just wants to share his happiness with the world. But since that's not possible, you can expect the do to still be a gala affair, with him being adamant on having the theme as something that would complement both his beauty and yours. He'd be big on having a destination wedding, wanting your ceremony to be the talk of town.

As for proposing, he would actually be quite confused on what he actually wants to do, and will actually end up making it rather obvious that he's planning to propose. If you're the type to take pity on his distressed state, you might actually want to help him out by proposing to him yourself (much to his surprise), or if you want to let him do his thing, maybe it'll be a wise decision to throw some subtle hints his way.

X = Xylophone

(What’s their song?)

My Universe by Coldplay ft. BTS

Beomgyu just loves you to bits, and you've become so important to him that he can't imagine his life without you. You're his happiness, you're the reason he wants to wake up and be a better person. It might sound cliché, but you've become his universe.

Y = Yes

(Do they ever think of getting married/proposing?)

As I said, he's all for getting married to you, but he's abysmal at coming up with the perfect time and the perfect plan to propose to you. He wants to make the occasion special for you, and ends up taking advice from the boys.

If his suffering gets too much for you, you might actually want to help him out, either by proposing to him altogether, or by saying "Yes" without him even popping the question.

Z = Zebra

(If they wanted a pet, what would they get?)

Beomgyu loves animals, but he has somewhat of a bad luck with them. Although since he often misses Toto, he might want to get a parrot with you if you're down for it. I also see him as wanting to get fish, since he seems like he'd enjoy looking at them for hours through the tank's glass.

He doesn't want to buy a dog right now, since he's always so busy and doesn't have time to care of one, but if you end up settling down together, he would love to get a pooch with you as well.

[goingsparebutwithprecision]

Get to know me better!

Tag 10 people you want to get to know better

Thank you for the tag:  @ereborne :D

Relationship status:  single

Favorite color(s):  My wardrobe says blue, and my heart probably also says blue, but purples and greens are also up there

Favorite food:  currently, the homemade millionaire shortbread in my fridge (thanks @charhtebobo!), the goat’s cheese and caramelized onion pizza from the place down the road, and the lemon cream doughnuts from the place down the road from the pizza place down the road (we just moved to a new house and there is so much good food around here)

Song stuck in my head:  right this second it’s Agape by Bear’s Den but it’s only just defeated the ongoing Salt and Pepper Diner Experience of twenty rounds of The Heart is a Muscle by Gang of Youths interspersed with one (1) Buck Rogers by Feeder. No I don’t know what that’s about either.

Last thing you googled:  i have a vivid mental image of sitting at the kitchen table with my housemate last night drinking camomile tea and googling a question of vital importance but I have no idea what it was. no, wait, it was “do we need to put the bins out”, which isn’t very interesting (the answer was yes, and I had to do three separate rounds of “i am not a robot” to get it). In the course of the same conversation he googled both “hench women in film” and “who plays the built Russian woman in Deadpool” and was disappointed in both answers.

Time:  15.25

Dream trip:  i feel like i used to have a fun adventurous answer for this! but the travel anxiety is real. idk, i haven’t been to the sea in a while? and my sister’s in Germany at the moment, which is making me nostalgic, so maybe the Bodensee? or to go hang out with @divvectortrianglevector who I haven’t seen in person in wayyyyy too long.

Last thing you read:  this excellent Steddie fic by @greatunironic, which I found via @idiopath-fic-smile‘s amazing versions of the songs therein, Fugitive Telemetry, this incredible DinnCobb fic - it’s been a good reading time in the life of goingspare!

Last book you enjoyed reading: Fugitive Telemetry - murderbot gets to solve a murder! cleared my skin watered my crops etc etc

Last book you hated reading:  oh boy. well, it’s been a while. these days i have so little new-book-energy to spare that i don’t tend to start something unless i’m already 100% sure i’m going to love it? but i think it was about two years ago, we were talking about doing Time’s Eye by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter for @teachingmycattoread, and then it made me so angry that we did not, in fact, end up doing it for the podcast. The premise is kind of intriguing but the execution makes me want to commit acts of creative and unhinged violence. So.

Favorite thing to cook/bake:  to cook, macaroni cheese - i’ve got the recipe down to soothing-ritual-level now, and i almost never fuck it up (unless you count adding too much cayenne? which i manage to do nearly every time). to bake it’s probably my ten-minutes-and-done chocolate chip cookie recipe, which now i think about it works basically the same - I’ve done it so many times i can do it without thinking, i can fit it into the half-hour gaps between work meetings, and somehow they end up melt-in-the-mouth every time.

Favorite craft to do in your free time: hmmmm tricky. the most enduring is definitely knitting - it’s so soothing! - but I’ve fallen out of the habit recently due to ongoing battle with my physiotheraphy exercises. I’m patching some jeans with embroidery bees at the moment, which is a lot of fun, and I recently got into bookbinding, so those are both strong contenders.

Most niche dislike: probably any of my academic dislikes? I don’t know how common these are among other medievalists but 1) some specific translation choices in the Seamus Heaney Beowulf 2) Byrhtnoth antis 3) people who call the Alfred Jewel an aestel instead of an Unidentified Socketed Object. In real life it’s probably like...olives. or something.

Opinion on circuses:  None.

Do you have any sense of direction:  Absolutely not.

Tell us about your D&D character:  Akra Bharash! Silver dragonborn eldritch knight! Struggling PhD student and family black sheep! Originally conceived of as like, Newton Geizler but about dragons and also hench af, has somehow ended up Eliot Spencer, as all my D&D characters are eventually wont to do. I’m love them. I miss them. One day I will play them again.

Tag-list (you don’t need to do this if you don’t want it!): no pressure @sinni-ok-sessi @morkaischosen @tallangrycockatiel @july-19th-club @verbforverb @thesuperfeyneednoshoes and anyone else who wants to!

[number5theboy]

Please elaborate on how Five could've turned into the most insufferable character to watch

Thanks for asking me to elaborate on this text post:

@tessapercygranger​, @waywardd1​ and @margarita-umbrella​ also wanted to see a more detailed version of it, and I ended up writing an essay that’s longer than some of my actual academic essays. So buckle up.

WHY NUMBER FIVE SHOULD BE THE MOST OBNOXIOUS CHARACTER IN TV HISTORY, AND HOW HE MANAGES NOT TO BE

Number Five: The Concept That Could Go Horribly Wrong

Alright, let’s first look at Five in theory in an overarching way, without taking into account the execution of the show. The basic set-up of the character, of course, is being a 58-year-old consciousness in a teenager’s body, due to a miscalculation in time travel. Right off the bat, Five is bar none the most overpowered of the siblings; by the end of Season 2, no one has yet been able to defeat him in a fight. He is a master assassin – and not just any master assassin, but the best one there is – and a survival expert, able to do complex maths and physics without the aid of a calculator, shown to have knowledge of half a dozen languages, has very developed observational skills and, to top that all off, he can manipulate time and space to the point where he can literally erase events that happened and change the course of history. And Five knows how skilled he is; he is arrogant, self-assured and sarcastic, and his streak of goodness is buried deep inside. David Castañeda once described Five in an interview as 90% chocolate with a cherry in the middle, meaning that you have to get through a lot of darkness and bitterness before knowing there is a good core, and I think it’s an excellent metaphor. However, Five is also incredibly, fundamentally terrible at communicating with anyone, and, because he is the only one with time travel abilities, the character a lot of the actual plot - and the moving forward of it - centres around. Also he’s earnestly in love with a mannequin, who is pretty much a projection of his own consciousness that functions as a coping mechanism for all the trauma he has endured. All in all, this gives you a character who looks like a teenager, but with the smug superiority of a fifty-something, who a) is extremely skilled in many different things, b) has a superiority complex, is arrogant and vocal about it, and most of the superiority is expressed through cutting sarcasm, c) has one very hidden ounce of goodness that he is literally the worst at communicating to other human beings, d) is what moves the plot along but is also bad at talking to anyone else, meaning that the plot largely remains with him, and e) his love interest is essentially a projection of himself. Tell me that’s not a character who is destined to be just…obnoxious, annoying, egocentric, a necessary evil that one has to put up with to get through this show. There are so many elements of this characterisation that can and should easily make Five beyond insufferable, but the show manages to avoid it, and I’m putting this down to three aspects.

That Trick of Age and Appearance

Bluntly put, Five as a character would not work if he was anything else than an old man in a 13-year-old body. Imagine this character and all his skills and knowledge, but actually just…a teenager. Immediately insufferable. Same goes for him being around 30, like his siblings, all of which are stunted and traumatised by their father’s abuse. If Five, being comparatively unscathed by Reginald to the point where he explicitly does not want to be defined by his association with his father, were 30 like his siblings, it would just take the bite out of that plot point and also give him a lot less time in the apocalypse, reducing the impact it had on him as a person. And making Five his actual 58-year-old self would make him very similar to Reginald, at least on surface level, with the appearance and attitude. Five and Reginald are two fundamentally different people, but having one of the siblings being a senior citizen that’s dressed to the nines and bosses his siblings around in a relatively self-centred way does open up that parallel, and would take away from Five’s charm as a character. Because pairing the life experience of a 58-year-old with the appearance of a teenager gives you the best of both worlds. You get the other siblings (and a lot of the audience, from a glance in the tags of my gifsets) feeling protective and paternal about Five, but his age and experience also give the justifications for his many skills, his arrogance, in a way, and his ability to decimate a room full of people. It’s the very interesting and not new concept of someone dangerous with the appearance of something harmless, a child. This is also where Five’s singular outfit comes in. I know we like to clown on Five to get a new outfit, but I think what gets forgotten often is how effective this outfit is at making the viewer take him seriously. The preppy school uniform is the perfect encapsulation of the tension between old man in spirit and young teenager in appearance. The blazer, vest and especially the shirt and tie are quite formal, relatively grown up. They’re not something we, the audience, usually associate with a teenage boy wearing; it makes Five just a little bit more grown up. But there is also a reason characters in this show keep bringing up Five’s shorts and his socks, because those are not things that we associate with grown men wearing; they’re the unmistakably childish part of his school uniform. Take a moment and imagine Five wearing a hoodie or a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers; would that outfit work for him as well as the uniform does? Would he be able to command the same kind of respect or seriousness as a character? I don’t think so; the outfit is a lot more pivotal in making Five believable than a lot of people give it credit for.

Writing Nuance

The other big building block in not making Five incredibly insufferable is the writing. Objectively speaking, I think Five is the most well-written, and, more importantly, most coherently written character on the show (which does have to do with the fact that the show’s events are all sequential for him), and his arc and personality remain relatively intact over the course of the two seasons. More to the point, a giant part of what makes Five bearable as a character is that he is allowed to fail. He is written to have high highs and low lows, big victories through his skills and his intelligence, but also catastrophic failures and the freedom to be wrong. His superior intellect and skillset are not the be-all end-all of the plot or his character, just something that influences both. His inability for communication has not (yet) been used to fabricate a contrived misunderstanding that derails the plot and left all of us seething; instead, it’s a characteristic that makes him fail to reconnect with the people he loves. This is a bit simplified, as he does find common ground with Luther, for example, but in general, a lot of the rift between Five and his siblings is that they can’t relate to his traumas and he does not understand the depth of Reginald’s abuse, which is an interesting conflict worth exploring. Another thing that really works in Five’s favour is that he is definitely written to be mean and sarcastic, but it is never driven to the point of complete unlikability, and a lot of the time, the context makes it understandable why he reacts the way he does. Most of the sarcastic lines he gets are actually funny, that certainly helps, but in general, Five is a good example of a bearable character whose default personality is sharp and relatively cold, because it is balanced out with many moments of vulnerability. Delores is incredibly important for this in the first season, she is the main focus of Five’s humanising moments, and well-written as she totes the line between clearly being a coping mechanism for an extremely traumatised man and still coming across to the viewer as the human contact Five needs her to be. In the second season, the vulnerability is about his guilt for his siblings, it’s about Five connecting a little bit better to them. There’s also his relationship with the Commission and the Handler specifically – which honestly could be an essay on its own – that deserves a mention, because the Handler is why Five became the man he is, and this dynamic between creator and creation is explored in a very interesting way – their scenes are some of the most well-written in the entire show. And TUA never falls into the trap of making Five a hero, he is always morally ambiguous at best, and it just makes for an interesting, multi-faceted character, well-written character, and none of the characteristics that should make him unlikeable are allowed to take centre-stage for long enough to be defining on their own. I know a lot of people especially champion the scenes where Five goes apeshit, but without his more nuanced characterisation, if he was like that all the time, those scenes would not hit as hard.

Aidan Gallagher’s Performance is Underrated

But honestly, none of the above would matter that much if the Umbrella Academy didn’t luck out hard with the casting of Aidan Gallagher. I think what he achieves as an actor in this show is genuinely underappreciated. Like, the first season set out to cast six adults having to deal with various ramifications of childhood trauma, and a literal child that had to be able to act smart and wise beyond his years, seamlessly integrate into a family of adults while seeming like an adult, traumatised by the literal end of the world, AND had to be able to create the romantic chemistry of a thirty-year-long marriage with a lifeless department store doll. The only role I could think of to compare is Kirsten Dunst in Interview with a Vampire, where she plays a vampire child who, because she is undead, doesn’t age physically, but does mentally, so she’s 400 in a child’s body. And Kirsten Dunst had to do that for a two-hour movie. Five is a main character in a show that spans 20 episodes now. That’s insane, and it’s a risk. Five is a character that can’t be allowed to go wrong; if you don’t buy Five as a character, the entire first season loses believability. And they found someone who could do that not only convincingly, but also likeably. As I said, he is incredibly helped by the costuming department and the script, but Aidan Gallager’s Five has so much personality, he’s threatening and funny and charming and arrogant and heartbreaking. He has the range to be convincing in the quiet moments where Five’s humanity comes to show and in the moments where Five goes completely off the rails. Most child actors act with other children, but he is the only child in the main cast, and holds his own in scenes with adults not as a child, but as an adult on equal footing with the other adult characters. That’s not something to be taken for granted. But even apart from the fact that it’s a child actor who carries a lot of the plot and the drama of a series for adults, Aidan Gallagher’s portrayal of Five is also just so much fun. The comedic timing is on point, he has the dramatic chops for the serious scenes, the mannerisms and visual ticks add to the character rather than distract from him, and his line deliveries, paired with his physical acting, make Five arrogant and smug but never outright malicious and unlikeable. It’s just some terrific acting that really does justice to the character as he is written, but the writing would not be as strong if it wasn’t delivered and acted out the way Aidan Gallagher does. He is an incredible asset for this show.

Alright, onto concluding this rambling. If you made it this far, I commend you, and thank you for it. The point of all of this is that Five, as a character, could have been an unmitigated disaster of a TV character. He is overpowered, arrogant, uncommunicative and could so easily have been either unconvincing or completely unlikeable, but he turned out to be neither. It’s a combination of choices in the costume department, decisions in the writing room, and Aidan Gallagher’s acting skills that make the things that should make him obnoxious and annoying incredibly entertaining, and I hope you liked my long-winded exploration of these. Some nuance was lost along the way, but if I had not stopped myself, this would’ve become a full-blown thesis.

[shishinoya]

a - z alphabet is CLOSED

☾ ⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:⠀ *⋆.*:･ﾟ .: ⋆*･ﾟ: .⋆ — REQUEST || “Hello! I really like ur writing c: Can i request like the whole nsfw alphabet for Suga?^^‘ i already saw u did two for him but nsfw for suga is quite rare, so i wondered...😅 Ty in advance c;” — anon — PAIRING || Sugawara Koushi X Fem!Reader — TYPE || Headcanons — WARNING || NSFW — WORD COUNT || NA — AUTHOR’S NOTE || this took me so long to get to... i’m so sorry ;-; but the whole list sometimes takes me quite a long time to do sorry bb but I hope u enjoy ittt ☾ ⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:⠀ *⋆.*:･ﾟ .: ⋆*･ﾟ: .⋆

[ a — aftercare (how would they be after sex?) ]

》 Suga’s a mommmmmm

》 He will make it his life goal to make sure you are comfortable all the time

》 After you two are done with the fucking, he will be quite quick to provide any painkillers, supplements, or vitamins

》 You might not need them, but he won’t take any chances and will quite literally force you to take them

》 Fucking makes you lose a lot of nutrients🥺

》 Will apply any lotions or cooling creams onto your body to ease and make it feel better

》 Will wrap you up in a cozy blanket or bathrobe just in case your temperature drops too much

》 Even if you are warm enough, he will continue to hold you close, cuddling the shit out of you

》 Will caress your arms and any skin that he hadn’t paid attention during your session

》 Soft traces and light kisses too uwu

[ b — body part (what’s their favourite body part of you and what body part of theirs would you like?) ]

》 Your hair

》 He loves being able to play with it even when it’s not involving sex

》 Just being able to see it all messed up because of him

》 Likes being able to tug on it and run his fingers through the strands

》 Honestly, you would love his tongue

》 LOL I know it’s very forward and not that poetic

》 But like

》 Mans can give mad head

》 He’s really good at it and no joke would be your favourite body part

[ c — cum (anything to do with cum) ]

》 I don’t think Suga would be one to really really like cream pies but I still think he would love seeing his cum mixed with yours

》 Would love to marvel at how it covers your inner thighs and drips from your pussy

》 Is also a sucker for cumming on your breasts and stomach

》 Just likes seeing you covered in his cum

》 In your hair, oH yes!

》 Running down the sides of your arms, he ready to nut again

》 In your mouth? Hng

[ d — dirty secret (learn a dirty secret they have) ]

》 He will DIE if you ever found out

》 Sometimes when you’re sleeping

》 He would just dry hump you 

》 Because

》 You know, men have problems

》 And when you have a problem, u solve it

》 If you wake up during it, just stay quiet or else he’ll be too embarrassed and you won’t hear him silent trying to say your name while not waking you up

》 The noises are kinda cute uwu

[ e — erogenous (what’s their sensitive spot that makes him putty in your hands?) ]

》 His cheeks

》 ASS CHEEKS AY YOO

》 No, just kidding

》 He really likes it when you cup his face in your hands

》 The warmth of your hands just comfort him so much

》 With melt further into your hands when you do it

[ f — favourite position ]

》 Either cockwarming or fucking your while spooning

》 He’s a sweet lover and cockwarming is just a more intimate version of spooning

》 Cockwarming often ends up with him fucking you because it kinda gets uncomfortable

》 And as your pussy just squeezes are him, he can’t help it

[ g — goofy (are they more serious in bed or more likely to laugh?) ]

》 NEITHER

》 HE’S MORE LOVING IN BED

》 But if it had to be one

》 It would be more goofy

》 I don’t think he’ll be very serious and just wants to love you

[ h — hair (how well are they groomed? do they like it when you pull their hair?) ]

》 I don’t think he would really clean himself

》 He may be an amazing lover but he can be lazy

》 Sometimes he forgets to trim and it might get a bit long whOOPs

》 Running your hands through his hair soothes him but like also turns him on LOL

》 He likes a little tug but not too much cuz it hurts :(

[ i — intimacy (how intimate are they? how long into the relationship does it take for them to want to get intimate?) ]

》 Very intimate right off the bat

》 As soon as you too get into a relationship, will be all over you

》 If you aren’t ready yet, of course he won’t push you

》 But he will be really touchy 0.0

[ j — jerk off (when would they masturbate?) ]

》 Ah, sweet babey needs to relieve himself 

》 It would probably be at night time when no one can catch him in the act LMAO

》 He gets embarrassed so he will have to do it when no one is awake or not at home

[ k — kinks (do they have any kinks?) ]

》 I don’t think Suga is a very kinky man

》 Maybe a bit of bondage here and there to tie your hands or something

》 But either than that, I don’t think he really has any

》 I think of him as a switch as well so there’s no dom or sub to him

[ l — location (where do they like to fuck? favourite place? how open are they to the public?) ]

》 The couch of the bed

》 Like I said,

》 He gets embarrassed so fucking belongs in the bedroom or somewhere you two are just alone together

[ m — motivation (what drives them in sex?) ]

》 When you say his name

》 The noises he makes

》 Even the scratching and shaking can turn him on as well

》 They all tell him that he’s doing a good job making you feel good

》 And if you are feeling good, then he’s feeling good

[ n — NOs (what are their turnoffs?) ]

》 Anything that involves impaling the skin

》 Not even spanking

》 I don’t think he can handle the fact that he hurt you and will not be comfortable with it

[ o — oral (do they like giving it? do they like receiving it?) ]

》 HE LOVES TO GIVE IT

》 Loves being able to make you squirm and moves to the movement of his tongue

》 Sometimes even loves seeing the tears and hearing the whines when he stops and edges you

[ p — pace (how fast are they? how rough are they? how considerate are they of their partner?) ]

》 He is mostly really gentle and loving during sex

》 But when you want it rough

》 He can give it to you rough ;)

》 Slow, sensual sex is his go-to though

》 Rough, steamy sex is only for when he’s really into the role and the mood is right

[ q — quickies (do they enjoy them? where is their favourite place to have a quickie?) ]

》 I don’t really see him doing any quickies

》 He takes his time in bed

》 Loves to make it last

》 So quickies are not very common

[ r — risk (are they open to new experiences?) ]

》 It’s really up to you

》 If you want to try something new he would be down

》 As long as he’s comfortable with everything you ask him to, he will happily go along with it

[ s — stamina (how many rounds can they go? how long can they last?) ]

》 Not that long to be honest

》 I mean he’s pretty decent

》 But doesn’t have hulk-like stamina that ushijima or bokuto has

》 He can probably last 1 maybeee 2 if you stretch it

[ t — toys (do they use them? do they enjoy using them? what is their favourite toy?) ]

》 Nah nah

》 This bb is vanilla

》 Loves a good old cock in pussy action

》 He wants to be able to make you feel good by his own power so he would  avoid using any toys

[ u — unfair (how much do they tease you?) ]

》 Suga can tease quite a bit

》 Like he might not look like it, but he’s kinda a little shit

》 Will edge you and wait for the gasps and water-works until he’s satisfied with how much you are babbling his name

》 Since he might not last long, he will make sure that you will feel good for a lot longer than what his dick can do

[ v — volume (how loud are they?) ]

》 Suga is vocalllll

》 He will say your name, moan, grunt, groan

》 You name it

》 He does it

》 He can’t help it so don’t tease him

》 Babyyy get’s embarrassedd

[ w — wild card (know something about them) ]

》 I take him as a strawberry eater

》 Chocolate covered strawberries

》 Right before sex

》 Perfect

[ x — x-ray (how would they look like without their clothes on?) ]

》 Suga is fit, but not jacked

》 He’s got a slim build and not too too muscly

》 He’s more on the smaller and skinner end of the ruler

[ y — yearning (how high is their sex drive? how often do they think about sex?) ]

》 I doubt his sex drive is high but his love drive is high

》 LOL will never pass up a chance to give you love

》 Even if it leads to sex, it will be the sweet loving type

[ z — zzz (how quick are they to fall asleep afterwards?) ]

》 He will take all the time in the world to make sure you are feeling great and loved

》 If you have the slightest look of uncomfortable on your face, he’s up and asking questions

》 After everything, will fall asleep with you in his arms

[travellvogue]

Fluff Alphabet- Ruben Loftus-Cheek

A= ATTRACTIVE, you were always telling him that he’s the better looking one in the relationship but he couldn’t disagree more, your beauty astounds him every day, never tired of looking in your eyes and falling in love all over again

B= BABYGIRL, he was definitely a sucker for pet name but when he calls you babygirl it was like he had cast a spell on you, always loving how you give him a warning look if he ever brings up the name in public, knowing it’s certainly a nickname that will stay in private

C= CUDDLE, god he gives the best cuddles, his long limbs always the most comfortable thing to snuggle up to and be wrapped up in, his arms holding you close to his chest as he rests a leg over you, making you feel like you’re in a cocoon of warmth

D= DATES, neither of you were big on the whole date thing, your idea of a date wasn’t dressing up and going to dinner, instead the two of you would much rather do something fun like rock climbing, gokarting, or make a den in the living room

E= EVERYTHING, he never really knew what it felt like to be loved by someone who wasn’t family, but you introduced that feeling and everything else, you gave your everything to him, the feeling of being loved and being in love better than he could ever imagine

F= FAMILY, it was like you and his sister were biological twins, you got on so well, sometimes making Ruben playfully doubt if you’re only with him so you can see Vinni all the time

G= GENTLE, he’s your gentle giant, always wanting cuddles and to have his back tickled like a little baby, always begging you to get your nails done because he loves the feeling of the acrylic running down his spine, the best tickling sensation, always sending him to sleep

H= HUMOUR, you both have the same playfully, piss taking, humour. He loves that you never take yourself too seriously, always messing around and taking his banta with a pinch of salt, knowing exactly how to dish it back

I= I MISS YOU, “i missss youuu” he’d whine down the phone, the distance when he went away for matches or international training always a lot for the two of you to handle, wanting to spend every second of your days together

J= JEALOUSY, he’s Ruben, why would he need to be jealous? He trusts you with his whole heart, he’d never get jealous no matter how many guys have their eyes on you, he knows you’re all his

K= KISS, you are obsessed with his lips, how they feel against your neck, sucking and nipping at your skin as they trace against your jawline, always welcomed by a gentle moan when he reaches your lips, passionately pressed together as you cup his jaw

L= LOVE, he’d never felt a love so pure before, completely obsessed with how with one glance at your face his heart would jump in his chest, wondering how he managed to get so lucky and meet someone as incredible as you

M= MEMORIES, it wasn’t exactly a soppy memory, but he’ll never forget how you were the first person by his side during his injury, not leaving for the whole 10 months, knowing he truly wouldn’t of got through it without you there supporting him to the whole time

N= NICKEL(buying things), he’s a sucker when it comes to treating you, fully aware that you hate whenever he comes home with something expensive, but he’s learnt that you can’t be annoyed at him if the gift has meaning, whether that’s your favourite flowers and chocolate or a necklace with a tiny version of the map of the place the two of you met

O= OBSESSIONS, he’s obssesed with your hair, always running his hands through it as you fall asleep on his chest, admiring how you style it, whether that be straight or curly, up or down, plus, he knows you enjoy it when he tugs at it during sex ;)

P= PET NAMES, his most used on is baby, knowing you love the sound of it coming from his mouth, but ‘princess’ is also one he likes to use every so often, loving how you get all shy and blushy whenever he says it

Q= QUEEN, of course his mum and sister were his queens, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t join them in that role, the more powerful women in his life the better

R= RELATIONSHIP, neither of you had really had a serious relationship before you’d met one another, so it was a learning curve for the two of you, but there’s no one else he’d want to experience all these new discoveries with

S= SAD, the 6 foot 3 frame of his may make him seem untouchable, but you knew all about his sensitive side, always there with open arms when he needs a cuddle and some encouraging words when he’s having a down day

T= TOUCHY, god he can’t keep his hands off you, always having to be touching you in some way, whether it was as innocent as holding your hand or as cheeky as having his hand firmly glued to your ass, and of course a quick grope of the boobs never goes unnoticed

U= UNCONDITIONAL, it goes without saying that you’ll forever love each other unconditionally, through the highs and the lows, the beautiful and the ugly, you’ll always have each other

V= VOICE, every one knew he’d reckon himself as a bit of a Beyonce, always sing along to himself around the house, you’ve even got an instagram highlight of all the times you’d captured his questionable range of vocals

W= WEDDING, surprisingly he’s the one who’s always going on about your wedding, randomly sending you pictures he’d seen on instagram and pinterest, “for our wedding?” or “this is a cool idea” always making your heart burst at how excited he is for a future with you

X= XYLOPHONE (your song), ‘Beautiful People’ Ed Sheeran ft Khalid- it just brings back so many memories of the summer together laid in the sun giggling at each other trying to hit all the notes

Y= YOU, “everything i do if for you” he’d constantly tell you, even though he knows you hate to take the credit for his achievements, but he knows he wouldn’t be the man he is today without you by his side

Z= Zzz, he was the best teddy bear, his large body always providing the best cuddles, clinging to him like a koala to a tree, legs wrapped around his waist, arms around his neck as you found a comfy sleeping spot 

[jinmukangwrites]

From the Ashes (2/???)

Summary: In a modern version of Hyrule, a young man finds himself in a world filled with nothing but white walls, studying faces, and tests after tests. Something is different about him, and the world seems very interested is seeing what makes him tick. (A modern, BOTW/LOZ “Labrat” AU)

Chapter 1, Chapter 3 (to be released for all Partron's today, July 11th for Tumblr)

Warnings: Death, torture, blood, description on injury, experimentation, dark themes, emotional abuse, abuse.

Make sure you read the warnings, be safe.

-o-o-o-o-

Today there's autopsy, he died during it, but there's still an autopsy. They give him the numbing agent like always before they secure him down, but there's nothing that can stop the pain of a scalpel cutting down your chest, nothing like the skin being torn apart in different directions, nothing like ribs being pried apart so they can get a better look at your still beating heart.

They're careful at first, making sure he lives long enough for them to get their samples of tissues and muscles and fluid until they do what they always do instead of stitching him back together; they kill him. It's effective. Whatever brings him back to life whenever he dies heals everything and leaves nothing but a scar on his skin. He wakes up moments later completely healed and ready for whatever they want to do to him next.

It seems today they also want to test his endurance, because right as he wakes up from his autopsy, the mask that always kills him is strapped on and soon death takes him again.

The black lasts longer this time, the warmth comes a little later and just a bit duller, but he wakes up again, fine, breathing, good. Then the mask kills him again, it takes longer, again, it's colder. He wakes up. He dies. Again.

Longer. Colder. Alive. Dead. Again. Again.

Six times he dies until the machines scream at them to stop when he can't. He's dizzy, the phantom pains of knives literally in his chest burn and his lungs are begging for fresh air. He can't feel his body as they undo the straps and place him in a wheelchair for transport. Soon, he's wheeled into his home, the only place he can call his, and left there to blankly stare at the white walls until he can find the strength to move.

It takes a few hours, but he finally manages to wobbly stand up from the wheelchair. It's a practice he's mastered, this is nothing new. He doesn't bother to look back at the observation room connected to his with a panel of glass. He knows that the main scientist is there, observing him while he nibbles on the end of his pen. He's the same man who killed him for the first time in his one and only true memory. He hasn't seen that nice woman since, he wonders where she is.

Anyway, he ignores the observation room. They usually go away and turn on the cameras once he's collapsed in his small, threadbare bed. There's not much to observe when all he has energy to do is clutch at his thin pillow and breathe until sleep takes him. Why waste time watching him sleep when they could be preparing for the next experiment, the next sample, the next death.

The moment he collapses into his bed, on top of his blanket and pillow not even properly placed under his head, the bright lights in his cell turn off and multiple blinking green dots appear in the dark corners of his cell near the ceiling. His eyes unwillingly slip closed, he wishes he could keep them open, yet he knows fighting sleep is useless.

At least, when he's asleep, he has a name and family. When he's awake, he's got terror. When he's dead, he's got nothing.

Though, nothing is starting to sound very nice, and if only it would last forever.

-o-o-o-o-

There are sometimes days where they do nothing to him. He cherishes those days. He has time to do whatever he wants (within limited restrictions and boundaries of course) just as long as he does their mandatory workouts and therapy sessions.

The workouts are easy. He's brought to a large gym where there are treadmills and tracks and weights; there's an instructor and two guards and he does what he's told for about an hour to two depending on what the instructor determines what his body needs. The foods they feed him are filled with vitamins and minerals, so it's not like he's bone skinny, but he's not muscular either. Despite the things they do to him, they want his body to be healthy, that way results are not tainted by starvation, exhaustion, and a poor immune system.

He likes climbing. Out of everything they have him do during workouts, it's climbing nets and walls that he loves most. Running is fine, stretching and yoga is sort of okay, lifting weights is boring and he doesn't like that, they had him try swimming a couple times but both times he almost drowned so they got rid of that, but climbing is something he would willingly do.

There's something freeing about lifting himself higher and higher with nothing but his own strength. He likes to pretend he's climbing a mountain, a very tall mountain. One where if he ever reaches the top, he will be free from labs and experiments, he will be able to swing his arms out and lift his face to the stars and never have to go back.

The worst part about climbing is having to come back down.

Today he ran, he didn't get to climb, but there's always a next time.

Therapy sessions are a bit harder because it's a full two hours where he's expected to communicate, and he doesn't very much like the therapist. He can't speak, no matter how hard he tries to make sounds or how long they grill him in basic vocal practices it just doesn't happen. He somehow knows a bit of sign, but just the simple ones, limited to mostly letters. Most of the therapy sessions involve him trying to spell out how he's feeling with his hands and the therapist getting impatient with how long it takes for him to sign S-C-A-R-E-D or H-A-P-P-Y or H-U-R-T when he theoretically could just say the words and move on. He gets yelled at a lot, which he doesn't think getting yelled at is a part of therapy but he has to remind himself that he doesn't know what therapy is outside of the labs, so for all he knows getting yelled at for things he can't control is what therapy is all about.

Thankfully, today the therapist looks happy. When they're happy, they talk a lot about themselves instead of him. Apparently their brother got married and they got to go back home to the Zora's Domain to visit. He only knows a couple Zora, the therapist being one of them, the others being various scientists and nurses. There's a Goron on the security team, but the rest are all Hylian. He hears stories of the Gerudo sometimes, but he's never seen one. They sound beautiful, especially since none of them come here to the labs to hurt him.

After a whole long story about how the therapist got to go cliff driving with their siblings (oh cliff driving sounds wondrous even though he can't swim well) the therapist sighs and clicks a pen against the clipboard in their hands.

"Okay," they grumble, "let's get this over with. How are you feeling today?"

It's a question that should be genuine, but the therapist says it like they'd rather be sleeping.

Today, he doesn't hurt, today's a free day. He got to work out, but he didn't get to climb. He came to therapy and hasn't been yelled at yet. He's okay. A little tired from working out, a little hungry, but he's okay.

O-K. T-I-R-E-D. W-O-R-K-O-U-T

"Yesterday Doctor Marras tested your endurance, how did that go?"

He lifts his hand up to his chest, his fist shaped in the sign for "A". He moves his fist down like a scalpel would. His sign for "Autopsy".

D-I-E.

He makes the shape for "D" now and puts it over his nose, the sign for the mask used to kill him.

Six. No / R-I-S-K / seven.

"How did you feel?"

He brings his hands out in front and touches the fingertips of his pointer fingers a couple times. Hurt. He then opens his palms across his chest and drags them outward while slowly closing his fists. Afraid.

The therapist sighs and he puts his hands down to his lap. This conversation sounds old, feels repetitive.

It doesn't matter. He knows it's just a way to make sure he's still capable of thinking and living. Losing his mind would be almost as bad as letting his body wither away. Almost. They'd rather his body is peak physical condition than his brain fully functional, which is probably why his work out trainor is actually very good while his therapist doesn't help that much at all.

Whatever the case, he's asked a couple more required questions and he's not yelled at at all before he's escorted back to his cell where a small number of activities await him. By his cot is a small pile of books, a sketch pad, and some pencils. On the small plastic table next to the bed is a black tablet with apps for learning basic math and science are downloaded on, along with an app used to help him learn more words in sign. There's a paper cup of water placed next to it, right beside a protein bar which is certainly a rare sight. He's usually fed the same gray, tasteless goop every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If he's given actual substance, he must have done something good. Or they're all just in a good mood.

Not one to pass up the opportunity of actual food, he grabs the bar and gently tears it out of it's wrapping. He sighs in content as the flavor hits his tongue, it's bitter, but he can still taste chocolate. Content, he plops down on his cot and opens the sketch book. He flips through the pages he's already sketched on and lands on a blank page. Tapping the pencil against the paper in thought, he glances up quickly at the observation room. Today the glass has been changed into a mirror, which sends a wave of uneasiness through him. Whatever is going on behind that mirror, they don't want him to see today.

He sucks in a breath and turns back down to his sketchbook.

[maevefiction]

Your Light in the Mist - Chapter 51

Nothing will ever prepare you for the birth of your first child. Nothing. Trust me on this. Go ahead and do your research, attend Lamaze classes, dot the i’s and cross the t’s of the fifty line-items that make up what you believe to be a thoroughly comprehensive birth plan…you’ll be informed, and aware. But on that day, when you’re in the midst of it, and immediately after…that is some seriously next-level shit. It’s an other-worldly, out-of-body experience, one in which you’ll feel like you’ve gone straight to the ninth circle of hell and then, with nothing more than the sound of a gasp and a cry, achieved the penultimate goal of spirituality…nirvana.

 We’d chosen the Portland Hospital mainly because Dr. Phillips practiced there as a consultant, but also due to the fact that it was a private establishment with state-of-the art technology and a neonatal intensive care unit on-site. Having a midwife was an option, but since I was an ‘older mom’ it felt best to err on the side of caution and deliver with a caregiver in the room who could authorize and perform medical procedures immediately. During our initial tour the guide had mentioned that the likes of Victoria Beckham and the Duchess of York had chosen to give birth in the VIP Deluxe Suites, along with a host of other rich and famous folks. The cost? Approximately $2700 per night, not including medical fees. The perks? A private entrance and exit, catered meals, an extra bed for partners wishing to remain overnight, a lounge area and an en-suite bathroom in addition to the delivery area, which provided for all possible birthing options, including a tub for those who desired an aquatic scenario. With typical medical costs added in we’d be looking at around $30,000, double if I wound up needing a C-section. I balked until we actually saw the VIP rooms…there was no disguising that this was, indeed, a hospital, but the space was bright and airy with light wood floors and furniture, all hints of color varying shades of grey and purple. The lounge was decorated similarly, and the couch and set of chairs would comfortably seat at least six. The bathroom was large, with a purple and white diamond-tiled floor, light-wood cabinets, white marble countertops, a white marble a walk-in shower with a bench, a soaking tub, a higher-than-normal toilet, and a bidet. I’d never seen anything like this associated with a hospital setting, and had been expecting something utilitarian and claustrophobic. This just felt…peaceful, and very much like home. It made me momentarily forget that hey-o, a watermelon sized human will be coming out of your vagina in this very place before you know it, and that’s what sold me on the place, in the end. The tour guide asked us if we’d like the suite redecorated to our tastes, which would add another $40,000 or more to our total, dependent upon said tastes. I said no thank you as politely as possible, deciding right then and there to make a matching donation for whatever our bill total was to a local maternity support organization.

 I was wheeled into our suite at 10:32 PM, contractions timing at eight minutes apart. Despite my desire to wait to change into the purple and green tie-dyed delivery gown I’d found online and carefully packed in the go-bag, I was cajoled into donning the Portland’s version so Dr. Phillips could examine me immediately and determine what stage of labor I’d reached. It was cream-colored and patterned with tiny red rosebuds, which did not please me in any way, shape or form. I’d begun to express my displeasure, but as I placed my feet into the bed’s stirrups another contraction began, the pressure starting at my lower back and working its way around to my stomach, fading after forty-five seconds or so. After he’d completed poking and prodding my internal nether region the verdict was rendered – my cervix was approximately fifty percent effaced, dilation at six centimeters. All my vitals were as they should be, so Tom and I were left to our own devices, instructed to let the nurse stationed at the door of our suite know when the strength and duration of my contractions intensified significantly and/or began occurring less than five minutes apart.

 At 11:18 PM the nurse, a lovely dark-haired young woman with sky blue eyes named Bridget, knocked twice and entered, our go-bag in hand. As she placed it on the chair nearest the door I noticed that her hair, styled in two long braids, was decorated with both a bright pink and an electric blue bow tied at the bottom of each one…which was, in all honesty, adorable. I sensed that my resistance to the rosebud monstrosity that had been thrust upon me might have given her the impression that I was going to be one of ‘those’ patients, so I quickly dug around in the duffel for my trusty bag of truffles and told her to help herself after saying thank you. She grinned from ear to ear, stating that Lindor truffles were her very favorite. I said me too, showed her my sterile-wrapped gown, and our encounter ended with a gentle high-five. The healing power of chocolate…so grossly underrated.

 As soon as the room door closed behind her I untied Rosebud, wriggled out of it, then walked into the bathroom to deposit it in the laundry bin. Tom followed me, still-wrapped tie-dye gown in hand. When I turned around to face him, he gasped, and I paused, head tilted to the right in confusion.

 “What? Is there something hanging out of me? I’d like to think I’d feel it if that was the case, and I sure as shit can’t see…”

 He shook his head slowly. “No. It’s just…you’re so…so…”

 “Enormous?”

 “You are not enormous. Do you remember New York? The night we went to DANIEL? You in that red dress, so beautiful, the embodiment of Aphrodite, and I said…”

 I nodded, my voice hushed as I recalled his words. “You said the only way you could imagine that I’d ever be more beautiful than I was in that moment is if I was heavily pregnant with our child.”

 He smiled softly, expression quickly turning to one of reverent contemplation. “And there you are, standing before me, naked as the day you yourself were born, about to bring our son into this world and I…I…Maude, the love I have for you…my heart is so full I fear it may burst, and my soul, it’s…it’s…free. Soaring. Light surrounds you…it always does…but right now, it’s so radiant, so luminous…it’s almost too intense to gaze upon, but I find myself unable to look away.”

 I took a single step toward him, and as I lifted my right foot to take a second my uterus decided it was once again contraction time, but my discomfort level jumped up two notches on Allie Brosh’s Better Pain Scale from the last one, which had been a four, ‘My pain is not fucking around.’ This one was a six, ‘Ow. Okay, my pain is super legit now.’ I couldn’t speak, and it just kept going and going and going. Tom tossed the package onto the sink counter as he strode to my side, offering himself for me to lean on, arms wrapping around me as he whispered in my ear.

 “Breathe, my love. Breathe. I’m here. I’ve got you. Breathe. In, then out. In, then out. I’ve got you.”

 In, then out. In, then out. He breathed with me, and as instantly as it had begun, it ceased. He released me slowly, kissing me on the forehead as he pulled away. I reached out and took hold of his forearm.

 “How long was that? Do you know?”

 He nodded. “Around sixty-five seconds by my count. I’m thinking we should get your gown on and have Dr. Phillips come back in. You?”

 “Probably not a bad idea. That’s right on the edge between active labor and transition.” I let go of his forearm and he walked back to the counter to retrieve the gown, carefully pulling the plastic apart and removing the bright fabric, then shaking it out to unfold it. He grinned, holding it up in front of himself.

 “I don’t know…I’m quite fond of this. Perhaps I should wear it instead?”

 “Go for it. I’m fine with staying just the way I am. Everyone’s going to get a good look at my hoo-ha anyway…why bother to get dressed at all?” I was only half kidding…the thought of wearing clothing at this juncture seemed not only unnecessary, but unnatural. He stared at me blankly, and I lifted my arms out to the side. “Come on. Do the deed before I change my mind.”

 His brow furrowed. “Maude, if you feel that you’d be more comfortable…”

 “I was joking. Mostly. I’m going to wear it for now, and if I want it gone somewhere down the line I’ll just…take it off. Does that sound reasonable? Also, I really, really want an ice-cold Coke. Which is totally unrelated to our current topic of discussion but fuck, I am thirsty.” The gown was a wrap-style with snaps at the shoulders, and as he was leaning in to fasten them my eyes met his. “Thank you. What you said before…I’m so blessed to have you as my partner in this, and in my life.”

 He kissed me soundly on the lips, then guided me over to the bed and pushed the call button. Bridget was inside the room before Tom’s finger fully lifted off the button, and he relayed the details of what I’d just experienced. She agreed that Dr. Phillips needed to check me right away, then rushed out the door to track him down. The bed had been lowered so I could heft myself in and out of it without looking like a seal flopping around in the sand, and once I was appropriately situated I turned to Tom, smirking as I attempted what was likely an incredibly sub-par imitation of Loki.

 “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have that drink now.”

 There was an apartment-sized refrigerator in the lounge area, complete with an ice maker, and an adjacent beverage cart contained glassware. I’d peeked inside the fridge earlier and found it stocked with all the things we’d requested…Coke, water, mocha flavored coffee creamer, half-and-half, orange juice, and small containers of chocolate milk. Tom chuckled as he jogged out of my sight, and I could hear ice clinking and the sound of a soda can hissing as the top was popped. He reappeared, beverage in hand, just as Dr. Phillips knocked once and entered the room with Bridget.

 “So, Maude, Bridget tells me you’ve had in increase in intensity and duration?”

 I nodded, holding out my hands and making a ‘gimmie’ motion to Tom as he walked around to the left side of my bed and handed me the tumbler of Coke. I counted five ice cubes as I brought it to my lips and took a long, enormously satisfying sip. “Mmm, oh, that is SO good. Thank you. Sorry, Dr. Phillips. Super thirsty. Yes to the increase in intensity and duration. Significant, intensity-wise.”

 “Well, let’s have a look, then. And remember, if you change your mind about pain management, all you need do is ask, all right?”

 Pain management medications were off the table for me, the only exception being an epidural if the need for a C-section arose. Tom had even begrudgingly pinky-sworn that if I wavered, he’d remind me that I wanted to experience holding Henry for the first time stone-cold sober. Repeatedly, if warranted.

 “Thanks, Dr. Phillips. I’m still a ‘no’ for that option, though.” Bridget raised the bed, slid the stirrups out from their hiding place and guided my feet into place as I handed my glass back to Tom. Just as Dr. Phillips finished donning his gloves and sat down on the wheelie stool there I was, back at Contraction Central and he got his first glimpse of Trucker Mouth Maude before the pain paralyzed me completely. “Holy shit, what the actual fucking fuck, mother fucker?!”

 Tom, who I assumed had set my drink down on the side table, reached out to take my hands in his. “Remember, in, then out. In, then out. In…then out.”

 As soon as the pain subsided enough for me to speak, I couldn’t resist squeezing in a witty retort between breaths. “That’s what…got us…into this…in the first place.”

 Tom and Dr. Phillips roared with laughter while Bridget blushed several shades darker than the pink of her braid bows, and I leaned back on the bed, not even having realized I’d shifted forward. Dr. Phillips gave me another minute to relax, then resumed his evaluation. As he finished he glanced up at Bridget and nodded, and she nodded in return, then left the room. He stood, walked across the room to remove his gloves and deposit them in the proper receptacle, then returned to stand on the right side of the bed, opposite Tom. His expression was stoic, and just as I’d begun to panic the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile that quickly grew into a giant grin.

 “Maude, you’re fully effaced and eight centimeters dilated…which, as I’m sure you’re aware, means that you’re in the transition stage. You may feel the urge to push, and let me know of you do, but it’s best if you’d hold off until you’re at ten centimeters. In the meantime, let’s get you properly set up with some monitoring equipment. Bridget’s gathering the team, and Tom, you’ll need to put on a gown…”

 Tom nodded. “Yes sir. I do need to change my clothes first, though.” He squeezed my hands gently. “Will you be all right if I leave you alone?”

 I pulled my hands from his, releasing him. “Yep. I’ll be fine. Go. Hustle that bustle.”

 He grabbed the go-bag and walked quickly toward the bathroom, managing to be back at my side just in time for another contraction. This one lasted for almost two minutes according to Dr. Phillips, and it was downright beastly, leaving me panting. And thirsty. I turned to Tom to ask for another sip of soda and when I noticed what he was wearing I was completely and totally blown away. Biting my lip, I reached out to touch the ratty old used-to-be-black V-neck, and when I looked up at his face he was smiling, a sweet, bashful smile that evoked within me a whirlwind of emotions. My voice cracked when I finally found the correct words to formulate my question, even though I was relatively certain that I already knew the answer.

 “Tom, is that…is that your lucky shirt?”

 He placed his hand over mine, and after so many months of bump-stroking the feel of a flat stomach against my palm was oddly foreign. His voice was little more than a whisper. “You remembered.”

 “I remember. You were wearing it the day you got the call from Ken, and you were wearing it the first time you saw me when you were jogging on the beach in Hawaii, and now…”

 He interrupted, reaching out with his free hand to cup my chin. “I’m wearing it because today is the first time I’m going to see our son.”

 Bridget’s arrival with two other staff members in tow cut our moment short, and Tom put his gown on over his lucky shirt and running shorts while I was fitted with sensors to monitor my blood oxygen level, heart rate, contraction strength, as well as Henry’s heart rate. A blood pressure cuff that would automatically inflate in order to take a reading every few minutes was added to the mix as well, and I realized that this was it, I was in the proverbial birthing bed and would remain as such until said birth occurred. As if on cue, my innards clenched and tightened like a vise grip. An alarm sounded on one of the monitors and Dr. Phillips, who’d been engrossed in conversation with the staffers as they were on their way out the door, spun around to investigate. His eyes widened, which of course freaked me right the fuck out. Said freak-out must have been obvious as he immediately held up both hands, palms toward me.

 “Nothing to worry about, that one’s to let me know that it’s time to get my ducks in a row. I’ll scrub up straight way, Maude. It would appear that you might be seeing your little one a good bit sooner than I anticipated.”  

 While Dr. Phillips prepped, Tom jogged back to the bathroom to retrieve the go-bag, then jogged back to me. His voice was measured and calm when he spoke, but despite his best efforts to keep his shit together, his hands were shaking like crazy as he set the bag down and began rifling through its contents.

 “Okay, we need music. The Beats pill is in here somewhere, isn’t it? I don’t see it…oh fucking hell, did I forget to put it back after I used it last week? Fuck.”

 Dr. Phillips once again took his place on the wheelie stool and I pointed a thumb in Tom’s direction. “Allow me to apologize for his foul mouth as well…mainly because I think it’s partly my fault…”

 Tom snorted. “Partly?” He turned toward us, holding the Beats pill in his right hand and raising it up over his head. “Music shall be had, as victory is mine. I just need my…” His face fell. “Shit. Shit shit shit… where’d I put my fucking phone? This is unbelievable. Can’t things go as planned just one fucking time?”

 I could feel a tingling sensation, one that I now recognized as an indicator of an impending contraction. This wasn’t something I’d expected, him losing his cool, and I had no idea how to handle it or calm him down. And, it frightened me because though, as always, I hated to admit it…I needed him. Nothing else mattered…not the birth plan itinerary, the lighting, the music…all of that was extraneous bullshit. My words came out considerably harsher than I’d wanted them to, but the pain had begun to creep in and I knew there wasn’t much time to say what had to be said.

 “Tom. I don’t need the music. What I do need is…YOU. Oh fuck me, here we go…” I squeezed my eyes shut in order to attempt to fully focus on breathing as I navigated through and away from the pain, barely hearing Dr. Phillips commenting that I was doing an excellent job and to keep with it. I exhaled with a groan, feeling someone first touching, then rubbing my back. The pain was so much more intense…so much worse than I’d expected…that the phrase ‘drawn and quartered’ crossed my mind, and as it waned I flopped back onto the raised head of the bed. The rubbing had ceased, and I wanted it to resume, so I opened my eyes to determine who the appropriate party to screech my demand at happened to be. And there he was, one hand on the left rail, the other holding the bed’s controller. My partner, my love…my Tom. He didn’t notice that I’d opened my eyes at first, so I watched him quietly evaluating the lift and lower options until he looked up and saw me staring back at him. His head tilted slightly to the right, lips pressed together tightly, corners of his mouth turned upward just a fraction. He let go of the rail and reached out to stroke my left cheek, then ran the back of his hand down the side of my neck, voice hushed with repentance.

 “Very sorry about that.” I shook my head back and forth slowly, smiling ever-so-softly. “No, that behavior warrants an apology. It was incredibly selfish, and…”

 I shook my head again, firmer and faster. “While I appreciate that, allow me to remind you that we’ve never done this before and thus have no fucking idea as to what we’re doing and neither of us like to roll that way, so…” I cringed as the tingling began anew, and he held up the controller.

 “May I try something?” I nodded, and as he pushed a button the head of the bed reclined away from me. I frowned until he put the controller back in its place, bent to remove his sneakers and socks, then carefully climbed into the bed behind me, long legs coming to rest to the outside of mine. The stirrups prevented contact from my hips downward, but everywhere else we were touching, and the warmth of his body against me immediately reduced my stress levels by at least half. One arm wrapped around my belly, the other across my upper chest, his chin coming to rest on my left shoulder. “How’s this?”

 I leaned my head against his, placing one hand atop the arm cradling my belly. “Exactly right. Thank you.”

 Neither of us bothered to inquire of Dr. Phillips whether or not this was a permissible arrangement, me because even if he deemed it not allowed I would have told him to fuck right off. But nicer. Probably. Tom’s reason for not asking, I imagined, was related to his consideration of my anticipated reaction. But there wasn’t an opportunity to debate either way, in the end, because it was contraction time again and I found myself singing those words in my head to the tune of Ace Frehley’s ‘Cold Gin’, featured on his solo album way back in 1974. Strange to be thinking of things you’d absorbed during your stint with a former lover while giving birth to your husband’s child, but we’re just puny humans who have little to no control over how our hard drives are structured. While we were together I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around Norman’s devotion and dedication to his son, but now…hmm, maybe that’s why those wires crossed. Problem resolved, trouble ticket closed. Onward with the pain train, destination push it, push it real good…because despite Tom being right there with me, literally and figuratively holding me up while whispering constant encouragement into my ear, I was relatively certain that if this wasn’t over soon I was going to die. And shortly thereafter, as the pain reached its pinnacle and the contractions seemed infinite in their duration, I found myself pretty close to wishing I would.

 Thirty-seven minutes into transition, Dr. Phillips said the magic words…three sentences worth of them, actually, and if I could have reached him, I would have kissed him.

 “All right, Maude. Ten centimeters, fully dilated…and with that last one, baby’s officially crowning. Go ahead and start pushing with the next. Would you like us to set up a mirror so you can view the progression?”

 I didn’t find that last sentence at all magical, however, and I shook my head back and forth in lieu of screaming ‘no oh my god no do not want’. Tom, however, nodded in the affirmative. Not only did I have no desire to witness my body doing the birth thing, the thought of him seeing it was disconcerting for a variety of reasons. I turned my head toward him.

 “If you want to it’s fine, I’ll just, you know, not look… but…you…are you sure about watching this? I mean…it’s…and…” I paused for a second as it dawned on me that the main reason why I didn’t want him to see what was going on down there was because somewhere, deep down in my psyche, I was afraid he’d never be able to look at me the same way again from a sexual standpoint. How could he possibly be okay with eating me out after watching our kid slide out of the same place? I grimaced, preparing to explain myself in front of people who were essentially strangers. “…what’s been seen cannot be unseen, if you catch my drift.”

 In lieu of an immediate response he kissed me, running his tongue over my lips, then nudging it into my mouth. He pulled away, smiling and squeezing me gently as he spoke quietly.

 “There’s nothing in this world or any other that could ever change what I feel for you.”

 I turned my head to face forward again, lifting my right hand and waving at Dr. Phillips and Bridget. “Well, let’s give the man a show, then. I’ll just kick back and, oh, I don’t know…give birth, I guess?”   

 We all chuckled, and Bridget pulled the mirror out from the right side of the bed’s wooden base, where I assumed it was stored in a hidden slot much like the stirrups had been. It was on a pivot stand at the end of a long, foldable arm, and as she was trying to find an angle wherein Tom could see clearly but was out of my direct line of sight, I felt another contraction ramping up. This one seemed less intense, but the urge to bear down and push was overwhelmingly powerful. Instinctual, truthfully, because everything I’d planned and learned went right out the motherfucking window as my body began calling all the shots. Push. Hold. Short, intermittent breaths. Fingers wrapped around the rails, grasping with the strength of someone dangling over a cliff. And then, a reprieve, as well as kudos from Dr. Phillips.

 “Well done, Maude. Well done indeed. Two or three more and baby’s head should be out.”

 Between panting breaths, I managed to squeak out an ‘m’kay’. Tom was silent on the matter, and just as I was about to turn my head in his direction the pain was back and I became acutely aware of the pressure on my premium as I strained to expel what was causing it. Push, push, push…hold. Two breaths, then push and hold again. My muscled relaxed, but the pressure remained, flesh stretched to the limit and threatening to give way. Tom’s voice sounded as if he was in another room, even though I could see his arms still wrapped around me.

 “It’s the top of his head. I can see him. There he is. My god.”

 There were more words, but all I heard was gibberish as the contractions initiated a rapid-fire assault on my pelvic floor. One after another, with barely thirty seconds between them, which wasn’t enough time for me to even consider resting. The stretching eased briefly for one contraction, but with the next it was back and twice as strong, which made me lose my focus and cut my pushing short. When I didn’t push with the one that followed, Dr. Phillips took notice.

 “Maude, baby needs you to keep pushing. We’re at the shoulders, and once they’re through, the remainder is much smoother. Rest through one more, then back at it, all right?”

 It wasn’t all right…I was exhausted, I was hurting, and I was just…done. So very fucking done. But as I rested as he’d suggested, the phrase ‘baby needs you to keep pushing’ repeated in my head, so I snatched it up and made it my mantra because it was the only thing that mattered…Henry. Birth was the start of my parenting journey, the first step, the first test…and I wasn’t going to let him down. Failure. Is. Not. An. Option, Maude. Unfortunately, though my mind was willing, my body was less so. Three pushes later very little progress had been made, and realized the problem was that I felt like I just couldn’t apply enough force in my current position. I pulled myself forward on the bed rails, Tom moving with me to support my weight, and while that helped, midway through the next contraction my left foot slipped out of the stirrup and a rage tantrum born of frustration ensued.

 “FUCK. Fuck me, fuck this, fuck EVERYTHING. Especially those shitty fucking stirrups. I need to have my knees, like…like…closer. To me. FUCKING CLOSER.”

 As Bridget quickly began to fidget with the stirrup settings, Tom’s arms unwound from around me. I was just about to yell at him and ask where the fuck he thought he was going when I felt his hands slide up the back of my thighs and come to rest behind my knees. He pulled upward and back, his forearms now in the crooks of my knees to serve as a brace, and his hips shifted so he could lean forward and use his torso in the same fashion. When I glanced at him the expression he wore nearly made me burst into tears…it was a mixture of fear, strength, determination, encouragement and love. So much love. He craned his neck to touch his forehead to mine.

 “Is that better?” I nodded, moving both our heads like bobble dolls. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Good. All you need to do is push. I’ll hold you in place, shift you around, whatever you need, all right?” Another nod from me, followed by him moving his head back to a more comfortable position. With the next contraction I bore down, leaning into him as he pulled my knees up and back, the stretching sensation so extreme I felt as if I was ripping in two. And so I squeezed my eyes shut and screamed, a raw, primal sound that I’d had no idea I was capable of making. I screamed again with the one that followed, and the seven after that as well, at which point the pressure dissipated and the pain was reduced to a stinging sensation which caused me to assume that this was it, I’d gone numb because I was finally on my way out and lo and behold, I truly wasn’t even mad at it. I felt Tom shaking and experienced a tinge of sorrow at the fact I was leaving him until he shouted and I realized he was laugh-crying.

 “You did it! Maude! You did it! He’s out! He’s here! Open your eyes! Open your eyes!”

 Instead of following his directive I froze in disbelief, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be real, that it was actually over, until I heard first a gasp, then a mewling whimper that quickly turned into a hearty cry of displeasure. My eyes flew open and there he was, lying on the soaked padding in the space between my body and the edge of the bed, Bridget’s left arm serving as a safety barrier while her right hand rested on his chest in order to keep him in securely in place. Dr. Phillips first snipped the cord that had tethered us, then gently wiped blood and mucous from his face. His skin was a deep pink, head covered with a thin layer of black hair, eyes still shut, fists balled and shaking as if to protest his introduction to a bright, chilly space away from everything he’d ever known. I reached between my legs for him, feeling Tom’s arms slowly lowering them so my feet were touching the mattress. Just as I was about to make contact I hesitated, unsure of how to position my hands in order to pick him up safely from this angle. Dr. Phillips smiled, patting my right hand with his left.

 “You’ll do fine, Maude. One hand behind his head, the other under his bottom from the other side. I’m right here, just in case.”

 I could feel Tom unsnapping my gown at the shoulders and adjusting it to bare the upper area of my chest, and as my fingers connected with Henry’s skin I felt…honestly, there’s no way to describe how I felt. It’s a moment outside of time. A life that had sparked inside me, then grown inside me was now right in front of me, breathing, moving…I could hear the sound of his voice and he was warm and alive and real and I, Maude formerly-Gallagher-now-Hiddleston, was somebody’s mother. And thus I formally introduced myself as such to my son as I slipped my left hand beneath his head and he opened his eyes and stared straight into mine.

 “Henry. It’s okay, baby. Your Mamma’s right here. Still me, just a different view.” I wiggled my right hand under his bottom and lifted ever so slowly and carefully, bringing him upward and finally holding him to my chest, skin to skin. He’d stopped crying and his blue eyes were wide as I placed a gentle kiss on his forehead and watched him blink in what I interpreted as surprise. “Welcome to the world. Mamma loves you with her whole heart, her whole soul and then some.”

 I turned to look at Tom, who was unabashedly weeping, and grinned with wonder. “Hello, Daddy. Your son has your eyes, I think.” He leaned forward, his arms wrapping around my mid-section as he peered over my left shoulder. I turned my gaze back to Henry, shifting so his head rested in the crook of my elbow and watched as Tom raised his right hand, fingertips first gently stroking Henry’s left cheek, then slowly tracing down and around his body all the way to his feet. I’ll never forget the tone of his voice when he managed to speak…full of reverence, love, awe, and pure, unadulterated joy.

 “Hello, my Henry. My boy. My son. Welcome. I can’t quite believe you’re finally here, that I’m able to see you and touch you. Daddy loves you with his whole heart, his whole soul and then some, too.” As he resumed his stroking he reversed course, and both of us gasped when Henry opened his fist and grabbed onto Tom’s pinky finger. Tom’s eyes met mine, and the look on his face was so similar to Henry’s when I’d kissed his forehead that I totally lost it and started laugh-crying myself.  

 “Tom oh my god…Henry gave me that same look when I kissed him and I can’t…I can’t…” Tom began to chuckle as well, then nuzzled my neck as we both stared down at the small human we’d created until I experienced a minor contraction and remembered that there was uterine clean up to be done. Dr. Phillips saw it on the monitor and cleared his throat before speaking.

 “Terribly sorry for having to interrupt, but we do need to move forward with the placenta delivery and I’d like to take a closer look to see if you need any stitches, Maude. While we’re busy with that Bridget will get Henry fully cleaned up, diapered, dressed, and wrapped.”

 I frowned as she walked around the bed to my right side, and found myself suppressing a growl when she reached for Henry. My body had stiffened, and Tom must have sensed my admittedly semi-bonkers territorial reaction at the idea of someone else holding my newborn son because he extended his right hand in Bridget’s direction, palm out, causing her to pause. His voice was friendly when he spoke, but firm.

 “Bridget, I’d like to be the one to clean and dress Henry for the first time…with your guidance, of course.”

 She withdrew, nodding. “Certainly. I’ll bring the bassinet closer to the bed so Maude can see you both. We’ll need to weigh and measure him first, but the scale and ruler are built right in so that’s easy-peasy.”

 Tom kissed my cheek and began the process of disentangling himself from me. One hand remained on my back the entire time, supporting me until he could raise the head of the bed back up to take his place. I looked up at him, biting my lip, unsure of what to say. I shook my head, frowning.

 “I’m so sorry…I don’t…I just…’

 He leaned in to kiss me again, this time the top of my head, despite the fact that I was literally drenched with sweat. “Please, love, don’t be sorry. I’m so proud of you right now, for that, and for everything. And in awe of your strength…” He choked back a sob. “Thank you, my warrior goddess, for taking me as your own and giving so much of yourself to provide this most precious gift…our son. Our…family.”

 Though I tried to hold back my own tears, they fell anyway and began a rapid descent down my cheeks, then dripped off my chin and onto Henry. I lifted him slowly as I turned toward Tom. “Dude, here. Please take him before I start dripping snot on him too.”

 The sight of Tom cradling Henry in his hands, then holding him to his chest while waiting for Bridget to lock the bassinet wheels in place was surreal…and profoundly, indescribably beautiful. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him holding an infant, and when I had previously it had nudged something inside me that I was unfamiliar with, perhaps even resistant to. And now, on February 11th, 2017, at 12:59 AM according to the clock on the wall to my left, I finally fully understood what that something was. The eternal maternal…the innate desire to create, nurture, and love another human being. Long buried, suppressed in sorrow, imprisoned by fear…shackled by the possibility of loss, and the terror of failure. As I watched my husband lower our son into the bassinet and begin to tenderly cleanse his skin of the remnants of the cocoon my body had crafted for him I felt the power of ‘mother’ rise up within me, and for the first time in my life it was a power representative of good, not evil, and it released me from my chains and banished my fears and though I wouldn’t have thought it possible, I felt more whole, more complete, than even having Tom become a part of my life had made me.

 It was nearly impossible to look away, even as Dr. Phillips applied significant pressure to my belly while I bore down and pushed some more. After the placenta delivery I heard him mutter something about two stiches, and when he asked me if I wanted a numbing agent applied I shook my head, still staring fixedly at Tom as he first diapered than dressed Henry in the simple white cotton onesie with a green-tinted shadow bust of Shakespeare printed on the front that we’d chosen for him. Then came the tiny purple socks, followed by a white knit hat with his initials, HTH, embroidered on it in purple and green thread. Last came the purple and green tie-dyed baby blanket that matched my gown almost exactly, and I grinned when Tom managed to swaddle him with such perfection that Bridget patted him on the back and told him she’d never before seen such a lovely job done by a first-time parent. He lifted Henry out of the bassinet, then began to rock him slowly back and forth in his arms, humming quietly. It wasn’t anything I recognized, so I assumed it was in audible expression of what his heart was feeling. I nearly wept again, but Dr. Phillips tapped my knee in order to divert my attention. Which was warranted, because I was pretty sure he’d been talking but I hadn’t heard a single word. I turned to him, clearing my throat prior to speaking.

 “Sorry, I think you said stuff but I have no clue what. Would you mind repeating, please?”

 He smiled. “I don’t mind a bit, Maude. All of the placenta was accounted for, and the tear to your perineum was around half a centimeter, which is very minor, especially considering the fact that you delivered a nine pounder…”

 I blinked rapidly, jaw dropping open slightly. “Wait, what? Nine? Nine pounds?”

 “Nine pounds, four ounces to be exact. 22 inches long. Heart rate, respiration and coloring are all excellent and Bridget watched while Tom dressed him to make sure muscle tone and reaction were up to snuff. You’ve got a very healthy fellow there. Might have something to do with the source material.” I laughed, and Dr. Phillips shook his head. “No, I mean that, Maude. You worked hard to take care of your body throughout your pregnancy, you stayed physically active, you ate well…”

 Snorting, I pointed both index fingers at him. “If ‘ate well’ equals too much sugar, caffeine, salt and a bunch of really weird shit then you’re spot on.”

 He chuckled. “I might just start recommending that diet to patients if this is the end result. In all seriousness, though…you approached giving birth with incredible focus and determination, but when you faltered I began going over the C-section prep in my head because I wasn’t certain if you’d be able to continue. But before I could get to step three you were back at it, and stronger than ever. I admire your tenacity, Maude. Well done. Very, very well done.”

 What the fuck was I supposed to say to that? I decided the keep it simple, stupid strategy would serve me best. “Thank you, Dr. Phillips.”

 “You’re welcome. Allow me to take a moment to advise you that while you don’t feel any of it now since the oxytocin is flowing freely, tomorrow will be an entirely different story. You’ll be sore all over, especially your stomach muscles and the entirety of your pelvic floor. Since you have stitches, you’ll need to use a perineal irrigation bottle instead of paper when you use the bathroom…a bidet might sound better, but that’s off limits until the stitches dissolve. You’ll have post-partum bleeding for ten days or so, and after that light spotting for up to a few weeks. We’ll go over everything again and provide you with written instructions during the discharge procedure. Right now, Bridget will clean you up a bit and help you into a disposable undergarment designed for a heavy flow, and then you’ll be ready to give feeding Henry a go. Would you like me to send in the lactation consultant or would you prefer to attempt it on your own first?”

 “On my own, please.” I winced as whatever liquid Bridget was using made contact with my skin. She apologized as she continued, then patted me dry with a soft cloth. Hefting my ass up in the air was far easier than I thought it would be, and the gauzy undies felt weird but weren’t technically uncomfortable. I looked down at myself, and though it was still puffy, my stomach no longer looked like a giant egg was lurking inside and ready to burst through my skin a la Alien-style. I’d read several articles in which women described feeling empty in an emotional sense after giving birth as a reaction to not being pregnant anymore. Me? Not so much. I was over the fucking moon at the prospect of wearing pants again. Real, actual, people pants that had buttons and zippers and pockets. I tilted my head to the left and raised my brows as I returned my gaze to Dr. Phillips, who was currently standing to my right as he waited for Bridget to finish washing up. “So…when can I, like, get up and walk around?”

 “Whenever you feel ready. Move slowly, and if you feel light-headed, sit back down and rest. Let Tom do the lifting when Henry requires transporting for the next few hours, though, just to be safe. Would you like me to have the concierge bring something up for you both to snack on?”

 I leaned back, resting my head on the mattress. “Oh my god YES please. Anything from our preference sheet is fine. Thank you for thinking of it. And for everything, Dr. Phillips.”

 Tom echoed my sentiment, and Dr. Phillips and Bridget exited the suite so we’d have some privacy, Bridget reminding us to use the call button at any time if we needed anything at all. I reached out with both arms toward Tom, my hands making ‘gimmie’ motions.

 “Hand him over, Hiddleston. Let’s see if these boobs are good for more than just looking at.”

 He snorted. “They’ve always been good for more than just looking at. And while I truly never want to let him go, he’s starting to root at me a bit and I’m afraid I’m of little use to him in that particular department.”

 Henry whimpered as Tom pulled him away from his chest in order to return him to me and Tom talked him through it, voice barely above a whisper.

 “It’s all right, Henry. All is well. It’s time to pay Mamma a visit and have some breakfast. You’ll be warm and cozy again in no time.” And with that, my son was back in my arms again, staring up at me. I opened his blanket burrito enough to free his upper body, then removed his hat and rested him against my chest as I shifted the gown so my breasts were fully exposed. Tom was correct, there was rooting going on for sure. I took a deep breath, then used my right hand to lift my left breast and hold it up, nipple positioned directly in front of Henry’s mouth. I felt the mattress dip a smidge and moved my legs to the right so Tom could sit closer to me. Then, I waited…for a grand total of, like, thirty seconds and then…liftoff. Or latching, if you want to get all technical about it and shit. I looked up at Tom, who was staring down at Henry. When he finally met my gaze I grinned, as did he.

 “My body has made food for another human being and said human being is partaking in consuming the food and is also the sweetest, cutest, most adorable human being I’ve ever laid eyes upon aside from his father. Also, it feels really fucking strange. Not bad, just…strange.”

 We both stared at Henry as he continued to dine, lost in the glow, until the concierge knocked. Tom went to answer, and as the spell was broken I remembered that babies need burping and that not rotating between boobs would lead to unpleasantness. I positioned Henry carefully so his head was resting just below my left clavicle and began to pat his back rhythmically until he let loose a braaap that made me giggle-snort. While right boob got its turn, Tom fed me bagel pizzas while he wolfed down a turkey club sandwich. The suction on my nipple waned, and when Henry’s eyelids began to droop I burped him once more, then watched as he drifted off to dreamland for the first time in the outside world. Tom stood and took him from me, then returned him to the bassinet. I watched as he carefully re-burritoed Henry, put his hat back on, then covered him with a Winnie the Pooh cotton blankie. It was yellow, with all the characters printed in group in the center, and when Tom leaned down to kiss Henry’s forehead I began to weep. Tom came back to sit with me, pulling me into his arms and to his chest, weeping right along with me, neither of us speaking even when the tears were done and gone. I wouldn’t have thought that bond between us could possibly become stronger, nor the connection deeper, but that was indeed the case, though it remained unspoken because there were no words to convey how it felt or what it meant to both of us. All I could come up with in my head was that this love had been two and now it was three, and that was everything.

 I showered while Henry was sleeping, Tom having rolled the bassinet to just outside the bathroom, where he kept watch on both Henry and I while texting our friends and family to advise them that our bundle of joy had arrived and that they were welcome to come to the hospital Saturday afternoon at one PM for a meet-and-greet luncheon before we went home to hole up with our kid and figure out how all this worked. We’d let Bridget know that I was up and about so housekeeping could come in and change the bedding, and once I was cleaned up and dressed in my post-birth ensemble of disposable panties, a white nursing bra and a purple silk robe, an all-encompassing sense of exhaustion overwhelmed me, and as soon as I was in a horizontal position it was lights out for Mamma. Tom rested with me, fetching Henry from the bassinet at our bedside whenever he woke and began to fuss, changing his diaper or passing him to me for nursing, depending upon what seemed to be required at the time. Sometimes it was both, sometimes neither…and I’d decided going in that I wasn’t going to be a ‘cry it out’ parent. If my kid needed cuddling, he’d get cuddling no matter the hour or situation. Overcompensation for my own mother’s shitty parenting style? Probably…but as far as I knew this might be our one and only, and I was bound and determined to offer him everything I had to give.

 Part of our hospital package included a session with a professional photographer, which we decided to use during the luncheon. Tom and I had eaten breakfast at just after eleven AM, a full English for both of us, and he’d showered while I donned my outfit of the day…the addition of a pair of black cotton sweatpants and a fresh pair of disposable panties to the same nursing bra and purple silk robe I’d slept in. We worked together to change Henry’s diaper and outfit, opting for a rainbow-striped footed one-piece with a cartoon speech bubble on the front that read ‘Hello, World!’ in multi-colored script. Tom had barely finished pulling his own navy-blue sweater over his head when Simon and Luke turned up, a whole fifteen minutes early, which was, like, unheard of. And Simon, Mr. Extra Loud Especially At The Most Inconvenient Times, tip-toed into the room while whispering his greeting.

 “Maude, oh my god, look at you, you’re not pregnant anymore and Tom those jeans look like you haven’t washed them in weeks is that like, a style, and where is my nephew? WHERE?” He spotted the bassinet next to the bed and bolted over to it, Luke in tow. “Oh my HEART he’s gorgeous and he’s sleeping how do you get him to sleep the girls are still forever awake and making SOUNDS also sorry not sorry I’m going to wake him up now because I want to hold him and I need to see what color his eyes are.”

 I walked to join them, and even though I didn’t want to admit it, Dr. Phillips had been spot-on…my pelvic area hurt like a motherfucker. It was a constant throbbing, like a toothache, but, you know, in my uterus and vagina. Which didn’t, as far as I was aware, did not, in fact have teeth. Simon had already begun to pick Henry up but thought better of it, eyes meeting mine to ask for permission first. I nodded, and I couldn’t help but tear up at the sight of him holding my child. He’d always been so supportive and positive when I doubted this would ever happen, and both he and Luke had been by my side throughout the most horrific experience of my life…now here we all were, alive, healthy, happy and…parents. What a fucking thing. As Luke and Simon cooed over Henry everyone else began to filter in, including the concierge and photographer. In attendance were Diana and James, Emma, Sarah, Trudy, and, much to my pleasant surprise, Anne. When I asked how she’d gotten to London so quickly, she shrugged and said two days ago she’d just had a feeling and her plane had landed last night at seven PM. It was bittersweet, her being there…I loved her and had already designated her adopted Grandmamma, but her presence always had and always would remind me of the past. Even after you’ve come to terms with it all, the empty spaces where those you’ve lost once stood still remained. The brief bit of darkness faded as I participated in the game of pass the baby and pose for pictures, and I took advantage of having my hands free to shovel enough food into my face to feed three sizable adults. We all gathered for a final group shot, Tom and I front and center, with me holding Henry will sitting on Tom’s lap. Goodbyes were said, and as soon as everyone had departed we called in Dr. Phillips and Bridget for our discharge discussion. An hour and a half later we were walking out the side door of the hospital, hoping that our posting a photo of ourselves and Henry across all our social media accounts would reduce the paparazzi presence. It worked, in part at least, as there were only five of them outside…and they were all very polite and unusually subdued, so much so that when they asked for permission to photograph us we said it was fine as long as no flashes were used. We’d hired a car to pick us up and the driver had placed Henry’s seat inside for us, which made for a relatively quick getaway. Then, suddenly, we were at our destination…taking the elevator up to our place, walking inside…the Hiddlestons, ready to continue the adventure of a lifetime. As a family.

[as-was-written]

All the ice cream flavors

@theresastargirl​

Under the cut because there’s a lot of them!

Almond Chocolate Coconut: a touch headcanon.This Doctor isn’t especially physically affectionate, but it’s because her touch telepathy is extremely strong in this body and she doesn’t know her limitations yet. But if you stroke her hair she will love you forever.

Bacon Ice Cream: a "what were you even thinking" headcanon.She eats bathbombs. She thinks they taste flowery and nice. (i am surprisingly passionate about this headcanon i’ll be honest)

Black Raspberry Cheesecake: a sexuality and/or romanticism headcanon (romantic orientation, sexual orientation, etc).This Doctor is asexual and panromantic. With a strong preference for women.

Cactus Fruit Sorbet: a "this shouldn't work but it does" headcanon.She reorganised the library according to the colour of the books. To be fair it looks really pretty.

Cherry Garcia: a role model/inspiration headcanon.Her fam. Her friends have always given the Doctor inspiration and Yaz, Ryan and Graham are no different from that.

Chubby Hubby: a body image/self esteem headcanon.It took a long time for the Doctor to get used to her new body’s appearance, longer than she’d want to admit. All the curves and body parts that were new threw her and even in the TARDIS there was a lot of experimentation with clothing to see what was most comfortable

Chunky Monkey: a names, addresses, nicknames, etc. headcanon.The reason she is so chill about Graham calling her Doc when her first body wasn’t is partly because it reminds her of those first human friends of hers. Also character development in general.

Cookies and Cream: a family headcanon.One of the Doctor’s greatest regret in life is leaving behind Susan the way she did. She still has the shoe with a hole in it belonging to her granddaughter and she misses her every day.

Cotton Candy Explosion: a childhood/child(ren) headcanon.For a while as a very young Time Tot, Brax was her hero. Until Koschei came along and she found a new person to follow after.

Death By Chocolate: an indulgence/guilty pleasure headcanon.The Doctor loves chocolate of all kind, but especially sweet ones. At night however she enjoys settling down with a bar of dark chocolate.

Devil's Food Chocolate: a vice headcanon.This is based on the audio drama The Master so spoilers for that, but the Doctor managed to remember killing that boy when she was a child. She still has nightmares about it and it’s the one thing she won’t ever talk about.

Dulce de Leche: a happy/sweet romantic or queerplatonic headcanon.The Doctor’s favourite way to relax with a partner is to curl up on their lap and have her hair stroked. It makes her feel safe and secure and loved.

Elderberry: a hurt/comfort headcanon.If she’s in a relationship with someone she enjoys being cared for when injured. Not that she will ever, ever admit it in a million years. But it’s nice to be fussed over. 

Entangled Mints: a friendship headcanon.For the Doctor her friends are her priority. She’s happy to just hang out with them and wants to show off the universe. She just wants them happy.

Espresso 'n Cream: a coffee/tea/coffee-shop (AU)/caffeine headcanon.The Doctor adores coffee. She will be that one person at Starbucks who gives the poor barista a really complicated order though.

Fudge Behaving Badly: a misbehaving/getting into trouble headcanon.Even now the Doctor is constantly getting in trouble. In the Academy her teachers despised her because she and the Deca were always causing mischief and it’s something she has never been able to grow out of. She takes pride in the fact she has the record for most detentions in Gallifrey’s history.

Ginger Crème Brûlée: a gender headcanon (gender identity, gender presentation, butch/femme, gender feels, etc).Although the Doctor now identifies as a woman and much more feminine than before in human terms she would still probably refer to herself as non binary. She experimented for a while and definitely prefers female pronouns though.

Half Baked: a bad idea/poor planning headcanon.Although the Doctor likes to act like she’s organised and knows what she’s doing, usually she doesn’t. She’s been winging it for the last three thousand years and most of the time it’s worked.

Heartbreak Healer: a sad/angsty romantic or queerplatonic headcanon.The Doctor still has room in her hearts for every person she’s loved. Including those all the way back in her first body like her wife and Cameca.

Jasmine Peach Tea: a self-care/self-love headcanon.When the Doctor just needs a quiet time to herself, which happens more often than you’d imagine, she enjoys to get herself a herbal drink and read a book in the library. Either that or sit in the entrance of the TARDIS, feet dangling, and watch the universe.

Kahlua Almond Fudge: a language/words headcanon.The Doctor feels most comfortable speaking Gallifreyan. If she is on Earth she tries the speak English out of courtesy and because the translations are easier if she’s in a different country, but otherwise she speaks her first language.

Kiwi Midori: a creative arts headcanon.Disappointed she can’t play guitar anymore, the Doctor spent some time figuring out what this body enjoyed doing artistically. She soon found drawing. They’re usually sketches and she’s best at people, specifically faces.

Lemon Angel Food: a virtue headcanon.The Doctor tries very hard to keep to her promise of being kind. She is sick of being the Time Lord Victorious. She wants to simplify things and start again as just a friendly traveller and helper.

Lemon-Lime Sorbet: a sexual/NC-17 headcanon (alt: a secret(s) h/c).My Doctor is asexual, but whilst I was figuring out her sexuality I decided she would be a sub and have a major praise kink

Magic Mint Cookie: a magic/supernatural headcanon (alt: a taste h/c).I don’t know what to do for magic?? So I’ll do taste instead. 100% inspired by real events from Jodie, she can’t handle spices as much as she wants to. That won’t stop her eating very spic food though.

Masque of the Raspberry Sorbet: a fear/horror headcanon (alt: a costume(s)/facade(s) headcanon).Since being ducked as a witch, she has a fear of being submerged under water and drowning. It’s something she’s trying to overcome in her swimming pool because she doesn’t want anyone else to find out.

Neapolitan: an intimacy/vulnerability (or lack thereof) headcanon.The Doctor only really lets herself be intimate with people she has a long history with. She is a lot more eager to hug family members and old friends.

Orange Pineapple Whip: a kinky headcanon (alt: an eccentricity h/c).The Doctor is almost the definition of eccentric. Many people would call her whole outfit alone eccentric. She doesn’t notice though, and she doesn’t care. She is happy with who she is and that’s what matters to her.

Oreo Cheesecake: a physical health/disability headcanon.She doesn’t have any physical disabilities. The closest I can think is that her touch telepathy is stronger than other incarnations because they are the main sense for Time Lords.

Peanut Butter Plum Cherry: a soulmate/soulmate AU headcanon (alt: an unconditional love headcanon)She tries very hard not to fall in love with humans. Jamie was the first long term human relationship she had and losing him crushed her. Since then she’s tried and failed to stop falling in love with humans.

Phish Food: a music headcanon.I was discussing this a few weeks ago so this is perfect. The thirteenth Doctor is really into cheesy pop like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. She also likes K-pop and J-pop. She likes the beat and rhythm of the music. She also likes how happy it all sounds.

Purple Daze: a stoner/drugs headcanon.In the Academy she would have ginger with Koschei (for anyone who doesn’t know, ginger canonically gets Time Lords high). The less said about those times at the Academy the better.

Rainbow Cream: a nature headcanon.If given the choice, the Doctor would enjoy spending the day relaxing next to a shallow river. That’s the most relaxing natural environment she can think of. Also a secluded beach.

Road Trip: a travel or escapism headcanon.Travelling is the Doctor’s life, it’s the most important thing to her. She loves the freedom it brings, the ability to go where and when she wants. She can’t imagine a different life style for her.

Rocky Road: a difficulty or struggle headcanon.The main thing the Doctor struggles with is the new sexism she has to face. Even the more minor things like how patronising men are towards her, literally and metaphorically looking down on her. She despises it and it makes her so angry.

SNAFU (Strawberries Naturally All Fudged Up): a mistake(s) headcanon.The Doctor really doesn’t like making mistakes. More than anything else she finds it embarrassing. And that’s really annoying.

Strawberry Rhubarb Crunch: a mental health/neurodivergent headcanon.The Doctor has PTSD definitely. Not just from the Time War but the many horrific things she has seen through her long life. I also see her having a Time Lord version of ADHD, but I need to do more research on that before I nail anything down.

Tennessee Mud: an alcohol, drunkenness, intoxication headcanon.It takes a lot to get the Doctor drunk, but when she does she’s giggly and affectionate. She will probably end up on your lap laughing at nothing.

Tuxedo Strawberry: a well-dressed headcanon (any headcanon about clothes).The Doctor tried to wear a dress the first time she had to wear formal clothing, but she just couldn’t with how impractical it was. Instead she prefers dressing up in a smart tux.

Vanilla Fudge Ripple: a strength headcanon.She has incredible upper body strength. She doesn’t get the chance to demonstrate it much, but it’s something she’s always had. She is also very emotionally and telepathically strong.

White Raspberry Truffle: a weakness headcanon.Daleks are her main weakness. They break down any morals she has set out and will do whatever it takes to get rid of them all. But losing her friends? That destroys her.

Wildberry Chocolate Chunk: a social life headcanon.She spends all her time with her fam. She tries not to spend too much time with other people because she’s scared of losing more people.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

tfw hating life enough for a reeadmooore

‪yesterday afternoon i’d blocked out 3 pgs in my sketchbook & by that night i was thinking like well i’m so close to finished the sketchbook finally (ive been using it about a yr and a half by now) that i could just stop drawing when i hit the end there‬

but i’d mentioned the impending end of my sketchbook space a friend is already in the process of sending over some they havent ever used so that will at least mean if i stop drawing it’ll just have to be because i want to lol

like in this case it’s special b/c of course i’ve had periods where i’m like smh what if i just don’t draw anymore, but that’s tended to be about being frustrated w some element or other of it all. this time it was mostly just that every day of my life i have a tiny bit less motivation or energy or etc. yesterday i was thinking all day about offing myself, which i’d done the day before, and done today too

like, it’s nothing new, i’ve been hating being alive and wanting to kms and only moving in the direction of less disappointment to more disappointment and having to care less about things i previously cared about because for one reason or another things get to a point where it only adds frustration to my life anymore

but despite depression and wanting to die and life being miserble all being Not New, that doesn’t mean that it doesnt matter anymore, because after day after day after day after day after day of it for years and years, you’re in a worse place than you were a while back, even if you do feel the same. even a single day of wishing you were dead the whole time is shitty enough. feeling overall like even if you’re in a good mood now, you know your life is trash and you’re going to go back to feeling bad soon, is also shitty enough

like the thing that drawing had going for me is that, like reading and writing sometimes and even some other shit, it’s something i like to do. i do it for myself, really. but it helps that its the way i trick ppl into being here in the first place to see anything i’m talking about. i have really crap appeal. i mean i’m bad at being appealing thru shit i draw, but it’s still way more of something anybody wants vs like five yrs worth of my text posts. like...i have over 10x more followers than i did on a blog where i rarely drew anything ever

but anyways despite me drawing b/c i enjoy it, i enjoy enjoying things less. always in the middle of that “loss of interest in pleasure” life lol.......it doesn’t really matter how long i do or don’t keep drawing, b/c i mean, it doesn’t much matter to me whether i’m having fun or not. i can be enjoying drawing and still wanting to die, because that’s whats happening lol.....nothing that’s a personal factor of my life is all that important to me, because my personal existence is not that important to the person living it

also it sure hasnt helped that my sense of things like whether my life can get better or i’ll have the opportunity to pursue my nonexistent dreams or live an ideal version of my life that also doesn’t exist are all at all-time lows and only just getting lower day by week by month by year. the only way i can even look at cheering myself up is from a day-to-day perspective. and i can have a slightly more fun day than usual and then be extra down on the very next day b/c of how being a bit less numb means you’re crap-feeling emotions are now game too. and i’m very aware of how, if you’re not in a position that insulates you enough, if things get worse for you, that makes “things getting worse for you” more likely, and it’s an exponential drop that gets harder and harder to climb out of, and even if you move back up a notch out of good luck, you’re still just as likely to be knocked back down to where you were. the odds of me suddenly not only not fucking hating being alive but also having a life that doesnt fucking make me hate being alive? that’s a funny joke

‪also it’s frustrating that whether i feel good or miserable on any given day only really exists if i say something about it in a post like this lol... like i might feel awful one day but if i dont have it in me to spend ages writing about it, which is difficult also b/c putting feelings into words where ppl will only fully Get It if they’ve felt that way too, anyways if i dont write about how shitty i feel and post it then maybe later on when i’m feeling a little better or feeling a different kind of shitty, i also won’t be interested in being like “oh btw i felt awful the other day.” and if i don’t mention it, as far as everyone in the world knows, it was never a thing that happened, so it might as well not have. i mean, as a person i might as well not be happening, especially since i don’t want me to be happening lol‬

and like i was saying to someone the other day, its a lot harder via text to talk about shit b/c like, if you’re with a friend in person, you can talk abt boring or silly things and its easy and makes a good conversation. whereas talking via twitter means it would be clunky and time consuming to layout exactly had empty and depressing my existence is, and silly shit isn’t even worth the energy when you’re having a convo w lengthy gaps in it, so you can only really talk about the broadest, most interesting shit. which i don’t have much of, oh well

i do like talking and talking to people actually, it’s just rough when it’s all a few ppl online, even though i alsp extremely appreciate those people and enjoy the talking. it’s like, chatting to ppl online is like a piece of chocolate cake. it’s delicious and you love it, but it would be amazing if it was the extra bonus on top of getting solid meals every day, instead of it being the only thing you have to eat and you get it maybe once or twice a week and it’s still wonderful and is all the more valuable for it, but it isnt the same as getting enough to eat always, or Knowing you’ll keep getting enough to eat

anyways my social life is always its own special kind of depressing, even when i AM in the same place as friends. you’d have a hard time finding a situation where the concept of What I Have To Say seems interesting or even relevant to other ppl. and im not sure i’ve ever been in groups where i feel totally comfortable with everyone there and don’t feel out of place. so talking about the idea of knowing you always have access to someone to talk to or be with in person or having friends who you know you can hang out with and they actually like you and you still expect to have them a few yrs down the road—all that’s always been a “well, in theory i mean” or “at least, i imagine it would be like that” issue for me

tbh i generally feel the most comfortable enjoying myself when i do something alone; maybe it’s because i have more experience of ppl im around treating me really shittily than treating me well

ohhhhhh wellllllllllllllll what else do i have to talk about. hmmm the fact that feeling like i wanna die only seems to be regarded as an issue of “well are you gonna or not,” aka if you havent its a Victory and a happy situation instead of it being a matter of EVERY DAY I’M A CONSCIOUS ORGANISM I WISH I WAS DEAD AND MY EXISTENCE HAS BEEN HEADED IN THAT DIRECTION FOR AT LEAST THE LAST HALF OF IT

like how heartwarming that i’ve been actively suicidal for how many years? 6? 8? but i havent yet!! i always want to but just never get around to it and so this time for sure lol no more fooling around!! oh dammit and there goes another birthday still alive. like this is some elusive new years resolution or novel i mean to write.

funny i mention it because there’s practically nothing anymore that i want to do. even if i THOUGHT my life would ever become okay, i want fuckall out of it. i only exist, baby............and it’s like i said earlier, whenever i try to come up with a sad amount of potential motivations NOT to die, i have to realize that none of the shit is actually for me, or directly about me, or centered on me. like, this shit lost its charm ages ago.

well anyways. i suppose thats all i can think to say now. and it doesn’t make a difference whether i talk about my shitass existence and how crap i feel or not. it just gives the chance for a bit of it to exist in the world via a few other ppl being aware of it for a few minutes maybe, because who DOESNT want to thoroughly read a shit essay by some random weirdo about how everything sucks. the end

[blujaydoodles]

SO! At the request of @songbased and seconded by @talceles, I’ve answered all fifty of these OC questions :O A small handful also have doodles in the answers, which is part of what took me so long!

1. Your first OC ever?

The first OC I can still remember really well, the first OC that was really close to my heart and ended up with a bit of a story, was Sanju, my shapeshifter boyo. And you can tell I really love you because I went to my old DA and dug up the oldest drawing I could find of him just for you:

He was a darkling, a species I invented that could only shapeshift under the cover of darkness; he was always pale with gold eyes and black [hair, fur, feathers, scales, etc], and he kept his piercings in every form that had ears-- although, he doesn’t have them in this drawing! So maybe that was a later idea? He’s an easy-going fellow, mischievous and sticky-fingered but good hearted. He’s sort of Idri’s spiritual ancestor in a lot of personality ways. Actually, I’ve thought he’d be really fun to play as a DnD character, if I could figure out a balanced way to do Darklings for 5e

2. Do you have a personal favourite among your OCs?

Listen. For the longest time, I really didn’t. Once I had a few DnD campaigns going I loved them all more or less equally, in different ways, but……… listen. It’s Elyss, of course it is, you know this. I mean it’s close, but still. I love all my kids very much but Elyss has ended up very near and dear to me.

3. Have you ever adopted a character or gotten a character from someone else?

My gut instinct was to rattle off all the characters I’ve described very genuinely as “my child” but then I realized that’s not what this is asking, haha. Nope!

4. A character you rarely talk about?

I was going to say my sweet and very neglected baby Milo, but I actually end up talking about him a lot in other questions, so let me tell you about Melliwyk, who I’ve talked about almost none on here apparently??

Mel is a gnome arcanist (and archaeologist and historian because of the nature of her research) who has dedicated her life to rediscovering or reinventing the lost art of item enchantment in a world that is missing a huge chunk of its own history. Very much a mad scientist, she’s known for pushing the limits of her surroundings, her tools, and her own body in calculated risks taken while performing her experiments. The problem with her calculations is that she’s willing to risk a lot more than the people around her are entirely comfortable with. She has permanent lichtenberg-figure-scars running up her left (dominant) arm, apparently incurable magical narcolepsy, and shortly before the campaign began she blew something up and lost her entire spellbook in the fire-- all results of backfired experiments, but she only regrets that last one.

She spent a number of years holed up alone to focus all of her time and energy into conducting research and designing experiments-- so, she still has a habit of “rubber duck coding” by going through all her thought processes aloud to her familiar, Baxter, even when he’s not actually around. 

5. If you could make only one of your OCs popular/known, who would it be?

You know, I approached this from a lot of different angles and genuinely couldn’t decide for a long time, and then I had the thought ‘if I had a Popular Character I would get fan art of them’ and as much as art of any of my characters makes me cry, art of Elyss would make me cry the most, so,

6. Two OCs of yours that look alike despite not being related?

I apparently..... forgot how to draw Nyssa orz but curly gingerish hair, freckles galore, very green eyes, slightly goofy teeth (not pictured) ... basically Milo has a lot of features that are personally appealing to me and I went ahead and dumped all of them into Nyssa as well, ahaha

7. Are your OCs part of any story or stories?

Mmm, well, not really. I mean, DnD is a storytelling medium, of course, but outside of that context, no, not since the vague story ideas I had had for Sanju back in the day-- I’m not very good at story, to be honest :’D

8. Do you RP as any of your OCs? If you do, introduce one of your RP OCs here!

All of my currently active OCs are DnD characters, so by definition, preeetty much all of them! Hahaha. So, how about Juniper?

Juniper was brought up in a small rural village by her grandmother and aunt, both venerable druids-- but left at a young age to pursue a cartography apprenticeship in the capital city. Now a journeyman cartographer, she’s traveling the world to personally survey the land for her planned masterwork: the world’s most complete, accurate, and beautiful atlas. Things became... complicated, to say the least, when she befriended some escaped slaves and a planar-displaced aarakocra, all of whom she wants dearly to help however she can. The problem is, her only real skill (as far as she’s concerned) is making maps.

9. Would you ever be willing to give any of your OCs to someone else?

No ;A; I put too much into character creation and get Real Attached; my OCs feel pretty personal. Even having my characters’ family come up as NPCs in game has sometimes felt a little weird, even though that’s what they were actually designed for, lol.

10. Introduce an OC with a complicated design?

As a lazy artist I tend to avoid super complicated designs lol, but I think Kiele is the most in terms of just things that make her Hard To Draw for me personally? Her skin glows like burning coals, which almost necessitates drawing her in full color any time I draw her and is not something I’m super great at coloring yet; Her hair needs to look like actual hair but at the same time be reminiscent of fire; how brightly she’s burning depends on a lot of factors; and I still haven’t figured out exactly how to make a scar look convincingly like a scar while being a completely different color than scars in real life :’D (the scar also glows more brightly when she’s doing magic... I guess it’s probably just a deep red otherwise? HMM)

11. Is there any OC of yours you could describe as a "sunshine"

I was gonna do a new doodle for this q but then I remembered how happy this little drawing of Idri made me, my precious beeb c: She’s super energetic, outgoing, and upbeat; she just wants to explore the world and help people and make new friends and make people happy and have a Good Time 

Other candidates: Juniper, who is maybe a little too neurotic to get the top spot here but is Warm and Good and Just Wants To Help; Nyssa, who is always in a good mood and is kind of like the person version of napping in a nice sunny meadow after a delicious picnic; and Milo, who is cheerful and friendly and whom Idri takes after quite a bit

Funnily enough, Kiele has picked up the nickname ‘Sunshine’ from a fellow party member, but actually she’s honestly just an asshole, lmao

12. Name an OC that isn't yours but who you like a lot

OH JEEZ where to BEGIN! All my friends have such good characters you guys ;n;

But I’ve loved @miazaz‘s boy Zetsuri for, like, almost a decade (jesus). He’s a demonic trickster who is very, very beautiful and very, very Chaotic.

The most recent doodle of him I’ve done, lol. They could be talking about anyone, honestly.

13. Do you have any troublemaker OCs?

Definitely Kiele. Aside from the volatile combo of fire powers and rage issues, she also A) is the kind of person to decide she hates you and use her considerable charisma (and/or fire) to ruin your life, and B) the kind of person who causes trouble if she’s bored or not getting enough attention...

14. Introduce an OC with a tragic backstory

Actually, that would be Milo, my fallen angel. There are some details I never quite hammered out, and a lot of things I’d like to revisit now, but the gist of it was: Milo was an angel in the Holy Choir, but he wanted to be a Guardian. When he was finally given the opportunity, on one of his first assignments he made some bad calls that lead to not only the untimely death of his charge but also a couple of bystanders. It was an accident, but it was still serious enough that he was banished forever to the mortal world. He manages to hide it pretty well most of the time, but it left him with PTSD on top of a permanent feeling of being incomplete, having had his connection to the divine severed completely.

15. Do you like to talk about your OCs with other people?

*chinhands* Please talk to me about my OCs........

16. Which one of your OCs would be the best at biology (school subject)?

That would be Juniper! She was raised among traditional healers, so she already has a decent foundational knowledge of human anatomy, botany, ecology, etc. I think Elyss would also do quite well, and probably Melliwyk as well-- although, she’d be better at physics and chemistry.

17. Any OC OTPs?

........... don’t worry about it

18. Any OC crackships?

On a long car ride one time boyfriend and I were RPing random characters and Nyssa, who is very sweet and loving and gentle to everyone she meets, managed to coax/flirt Jermaine out of his shell a bit, and it was kind of silly but really fun ;D

I would ship/ crackship Nyssa with almost anyone, though, tbqh; she pairs like chocolate

19. Introduce an OC that means a lot to you (and explain why)

Elyss is a water genasi in a land where genasi are all but unheard of; she grew up shunned and isolated, and when she was old enough she left home and spent the next decade or so alone in the woods, learning and honing hunting and survival skills that have made her an invaluable scout and deadly predator. When conflict in the continent drove her out of isolation, she joined The Darkwind Regiment in hopes of ending it to make the world safe again for her family, but integrating into society (and an adventuring party) has proven challenging after a lifetime of developing absolutely no social skills...

Elyss is my first DnD character, created for a campaign that’s coming up on its third anniversary. I think at least some of my fondness comes from just that: I’ve had her the longest, so I’ve gotten to know her the best. Aside from that, a lot of how she has developed as a person (or how the campaign has pushed her) I think just... triggers so much empathy in me that I feel particularly loving and protective in response? She’s terribly lonely. She gets deeply attached to people, but she’s spent all of her life being unwanted by almost everyone around her, so she mostly believes that the people she loves the most (aside from family) don’t feel the same way. She puts a lot of effort into being useful enough to keep around, so that she can continue to be in a position to protect and provide for her friends.

I built a lot of problems into her in a way that was, at the time, designed very hopefully-- problems that I thought would be addressed and challenged by Doing An Adventure in a way that would lead to positive growth (or things I just thought would be fun/ funny). Unfortunately, most of the Big Things that have happened and the way they’ve played out so far have only made her worse-- she’s now deeply paranoid, actively avoids opening up to new people, and desperately afraid of losing what little she has, to an unhealthy extent. On the positive side, though, she is at least finally coming around to believing some of her friends do actually like her... even though by all accounts her Issues are making her more and more unlikeable >__>;;

20. Do any of your OCs sing? If they sing, care to share more details (headcanon voice, what kind of songs they like etc)?

Actually! Elyss is a really good singer! Her mother is an excellent singer and storyteller, so she gets it from her. She has a very smooth, soft alto voice and prefers melodic and flowing folksongs, lullabies, songs with a lot of interweaving/ harmonizing parts, that sort of thing. However, she sings pretty rarely, and never intentionally within earshot of anyone else-- but, on the other hand, she has a very old habit of quietly singing or humming when it rains which is so much second-nature that she genuinely doesn’t notice she’s doing it anymore. If anyone ever pointed it out to her or asked about it she’d be very embarrassed.

Nyssa is a fair singer with a soft, effortless mezzo soprano voice; she sings very often, mostly just little snippets of this or that, but prefers playing her pipes and/or dancing if there’s actual music happening.

Milo is an almost supernaturally excellent singer with a clear, sweet tenor voice (mostly; he also has a startling breadth of range). He may be a fallen angel, but he was in THE choir. He sings karaoke every Tuesday and Thursday and does every kind of genre you can think of but mostly just fucks around-- people are always pretty shocked when he actually makes an effort.

Juniper knows a lot of very old Druidic folk songs, and is willing to sing along in a reedy mezzo soprano, but she gets nervous and wouldn’t want to be the only person singing. Aubree’s a rowdy, rough-cut contralto who loves a good drinking song, rebel song, or both. Kiele can carry a tune but isn’t really the singing type. Tsakesh only sings when he’s drinking, a slightly pitchy tenor. Idri is an awful singer but that sure as hell doesn’t stop her. Mel doesn’t sing.

21. Your most artistic OC

Juniper, although she doesn’t seem like it. She approaches mapmaking as an artistic as well as a scientific endeavor, and she takes it very seriously. However, she’s not really very good at drawing anything else.

On the other hand, both Idri and Melliwyk are excellent draftsmen, but only because I have headcanonned that gnomish culture treats drawing as a core skill, taught in school alongside handwriting and math-- neither of them considers herself an artist, it’s just a functional skill (very useful for scientist Mel, and almost worthless to Circus Rogue Idri)

Oh, I almost forgot! Besides music, Nyssa also likes to whittle! Mostly little animal figurines or, like, little boxes with flowers carved into them, things like that. She gets more joy out of making them than having them, so she likes to give them all away :)

22. Is there any OC of yours people tend to mischaracterize? If yes, how?

Kiele, a fire genasi, has been repeatedly described as being literally on fire-- and, I mean, she is fairly regularly, but never when someone has described her as such, lol. Her hair is flamey colors, but it’s just hair! She’s also, I think, been mistaken for a good person by at least one other PC, and I’m both excited and sad for the day she realizes how incorrect that is

Elyss’s feelings and behaviors get misconstrued a lot, I think. Mostly that’s expected-- she’s got a lot of complicated feelings and a negative charisma modifier-- but a couple of times I’ve been genuinely surprised at how other people appeared to have read a situation with her based on how they talked about it out of character later

Honorable mention: one time in an rp board, I described Milo as having a ‘boyish face’-- another person then described him in their post as ‘the man child’. Yikes....

23. Introduce OC that has changed from your first idea concerning what the character would be like?

Juniper was designed to be Milo Thatch but with maps except aaay I rewatched Atlantis and he actually is a cartographer also, lol. Not that that’s not... necessarily still true, but it’s not as prominent as how much she turned out to be A Mom, which I had no idea about her at all until I started playing her? She’s very caring, sometimes to a fault; it’s become probably her most defining trait, but was never planned for originally. But the funniest change is that, before we started playing, I was convinced she and Justin’s aarakocra wouldn’t get along? But then in game she adopted him the instant he arrived and that’s her son now?? 

24. If you could meet one OC of yours, who would it be and why?

*aggressively loves and supports my girl*

... although, to be honest, aside from the opportunity to heap her in blankets and hot drinks, Elyss is probably not really my best choice here; we don’t have much in common and as much I as love her I don’t imagine she’d like me very much, lol. So, probably Idri? She’d be a ball to hang out with. I feel like having Idri at one of my friends’ get togethers make it the best party ever, hahaha

25. The OC that resembles you the most (same hobby, height, shared like/dislike for something etc?)

Juniper and I both: 

* are outdoorsy, awkward nerds * are ravenpuffs * assume the best in everyone until proven otherwise * resolve conflict by avoiding it at any cost * want to adopt every stray and every orphaned wild animal in the world * have no idea how to dress ourselves * very emotional and anxious but Trying

26. Have you ever had to change your OC's design or something else about them against your will?

Ooohoho man, no but Melliwyk was this close to becoming a half dragon in the last session and she’s super pissed about all the missed opportunities surrounding that whole scenario (I, however, am mostly relieved)

27. Any OCs that were inspired by a certain song?

Ah, no, not really!

28. Your most dangerous OC?

That....... depends a lot on how you look at what makes a person dangerous, but um. Kiele is violently temperamental, has wild magic, makes snap judgement calls, and likes to solve all her problems with arson, so. She’s the most dangerous to just be around in general, lol

29. Which one of your OCs would go investigate an abandoned house at night without telling anyone they're going?

Melliwyk, hands down. Ordinarily she’d want someone with her because of her narcolepsy, but recently she’s of the opinion that some people can’t be trusted not to impede her research, so she’s a lot more willing to just risk it

Tsakesh would also be inclined to do this-- as long as the house didn’t also have a reputation for being haunted

30. Which one of your OCs would most likely have a secret stuffed animal collection?

Oh, definitely Idri. We recently went to her hometown, and she for sure went in and kicked all her toys under the bed before showing anyone her room, but then went back by herself later to put them all back and apologize.

31. Pick one OC of yours and explain what their tumblr blog would be like (what they reblog, layout, anything really)

Aubree’s blog would consist mostly of cute animal and social justice reblogs-- the latter almost always with her own Very Strong Feelings added to the thread, with invitations to ‘fucking fight me’ wherever applicable. Ignores or mocks anon hate, but is embarrassingly easily baited into arguments. She has it connected to her Instagram, through which she posts a lot of photos of her boar, Truffles, pics of meals in progress/ plated meals she’s cooked, and the occasional drunk selfie (either group shots with friends or post-brawl with a black eye and split lip and a brief comment on what, exactly, the other party did to deserve it). She’s only vaguely aware that her blog exists off the dashboard; the theme is the tumblr default.

32. Which one of your OCs would be the most suitable horror game protagonist and why?

I gotta confess, I’m too much of a weenie to play horror games, so I’m not really sure what qualities would make a good horror protag >__> I feel like it also depends partly on what kind of horror game ? Is it Spooky? Is it Gorey? Is it Psychological Thriller? I don’t have a good answer for this one ^^;;

33. Your shyest OC?

Mmmmm, I mean, Juniper, probably? I wouldn’t necessarily describe any of my OCs as shy-- they’re mostly outgoing and personable, or at least unconcerned with others’ opinions of them.

I once had a very shy satyr boy named Ix, but even at the time I did almost nothing with him besides doodles, and he’s very much fallen to the wayside

34. Do you have any twin characters?

Waaaay back in the day, these were the other characters in the vague outline of a concept I had for Sanju’s story; the woman he loved, and her brother who despised him. Technically, Tsakesh also has a twin sister, but I haven’t.... given very much thought to her or the rest of his family, to be honest ^^;

35. Any sibling characters?

Both Elyss and Aubree have siblings, but they’re all NPCs-- Aubree’s family hasn’t even come up yet in game, but I have given them quite a lot of thought.

36. Do you have OC pairs where the other part belongs to someone else (siblings, lovers, friends etc)?

Well, aside from ‘they’re all in DnD campaigns where everyone belongs to other people’, ummm, Kiele has hooked up with both of that campaign’s guest characters so far, which probably counts? lol. I haven’t done sibling OCs or gotten an OC romance with anyone else yet, though.

37. Introduce an OC who is not quite human

lol oh my god I mean, Juniper is my only human, so... I guess Nyssa counts the most in this context, though.

Nyssa is a satyr who, until very recently, lived in a small, tight knit community of satyrs in a deeply secluded area of woodland. She was sent out into the world at the behest of her patron, the archfey guardian of her flock; having never left the woodlands before, she’s joyously experiencing everything for the first time, but she’s also extremely naive as a result. At the advice of the wood elves who would occasionally visit the flock, she’s attempting to pass herself off as An Ordinary Person-- but her fey features are, perhaps, just a little too odd for a mortal human(oid). Maybe if she told people she was an elf she’d do better-- but even with the right height and a bit of a beard, she looks nothing like a dwarf, which is what she’s been claiming to be when people ask.

38. Which one of your OCs would be the best dancer?

Definitely Kiele! Nyssa does bring up a very close second, but she only dances for the joy of it-- raw and wild. Kiele has practiced specifically to perform, and knows exactly how to use her body to its best potential.

39. Introduce any character you want!

I’ve said almost nothing about Tsakesh in this one! So let me tell you about my good sneaky boi :3

Tsakesh is a khajiiti eldritch knight-- a stealth archer, specifically, because this is skyrim goddamn it and I love myself. He loves exploring old ruins, specifically intrigued by magical items and traps-- he loves examining the mechanisms behind traps and has, just through this fascination, become an expert at finding and disarming them. He was drawn to Skyrim by stories of ancient ruins filled with still-functioning mechanical guardians, but has had little chance to explore as he’s found himself accidentally caught up in daedric schemes with the fate of the world in the balance. Very aware of how khajiit are viewed outside of Elsweyr, he makes a specific point of being as friendly, helpful, nonthreatening, and cooperative as possible everywhere he goes-- partly in a hopeful attempt to at least put some dent in the bad reputation his kind have found themselves stuck with, and partly just as a survival strategy.

40. Any fond memories linked to your characters? Feel free to share!

This is gonna sound like a big ol cop out but honestly, since almost all of them are DnD characters, there are too many fond memories for me to think of any really good specific examples. I’ve spent a lot of amazing time with my wonderful friends and gotten to do all kinds of fun, cool, silly, ridiculous things with and through my characters. Getting to play Aubree in person, linking hands and crying together with other players through some really emotional moments and coming through victorious... that’s one night that particularly stands out.

41. Has anyone drawn fanart of your OCs? If yes, maybe show a picture or two here (remember sources & permissions!)

YES oh my god and I cry every single time!!! I wouldn’t call any of it ‘fan art’ per se I mean, it’s always just been my friends like ‘here I drew our characters’ but yeah I’ve had friends draw Juniper, Elyss, Aubree, Kiele, and Milo and I get.... so emotional... it’s the best thing in the world you guys ;~;

42. Which one of your OCs would be the most interested in Greek gods?

Probably Idri! She loves a good story, and good lord is Greek mythology full of em.

43. Do you have any certain type when you create your OCs? Do you tend to favour some certain traits or looks? It's time to confess

Literally all of my characters who don’t have freckles are a result of me consciously going ‘they can’t ALL have freckles....’ Ditto curly hair, ditto green eyes (Nyssa has all of these in spades, you’ll notice. She’s a very self indulgent character for me, haha). Either Very Tall or V Smol. Pointy ears gotta be Very Pierced.  High dex (even before DnD was in my life; I’d definitely describe Milo and Sanju as being dex-based, conceptually). Charismatic with a heart of gold. A lot of my characters are really outgoing and friendly, I think as a way for my introvert awkward anxious ass to be my best self vicariously I guess? haha. High levels of curiosity are pretty common, too (like, even Elyss has this trait actually, although this has been pretty severely suppressed by the fact that everything that happens to her makes her more paranoid and cautious >__>)

44. Something you like about your OCs in general

I’ve put a lot of charisma and self confidence into a lot of my characters, which has been super helpful and fun to rp for me, a shy awkward dorkass. Most of them are also really good people who are braver about it than I am. I love getting to play around in different headspaces and different personalities all the time, and most of my characters are Good Noodles so they’re generally good headspaces to be in. 

45. A character you no longer use?

I mean, Milo, about whom I’ve already talked quite a bit. I had also built a small cast of characters around him, most notably his best friend Javi (a demon with a mortal body). I never did much with Javi, but I thought about him a lot. He’s really interested in humanity and came to the mortal plane on a semipermanent basis specifically to get to know People, as a whole and individually, while they were still living. Tall, lanky, and extremely taciturn, he’s almost as opposite of the small and excitable Milo as possible-- the yin to his yang. He’s a Good Dude and I miss thinking and writing with him.

46. Has anyone ever told you that you treat your OCs badly?

I don’t think so? I think I trend rather nicer to my characters than most of my friends to be honest, haha. Very few Tragic Backstories here, and a lot of Hopeful Futures. Suffering can be fun, but only to sweeten the payoff of later happiness :) 

47. Has anyone ever (friendly) claimed any of your OCs as their child?

I don’t... really think so, actually? 

48. OC who is a perfect cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure

Juniper, my sweet innocent bb

49. Which one of your OCs would most likely enjoy memes

Oh jesus, definitely Idri. She’d be a meme goblin. She’s always there right at the genesis of a new meme and she always keeps them going long after they’ve overstayed their welcome. She sends them to everybody. She particularly loves the really bizarre, like, surrealist ones and any kind of meme mashup. 

50. Give me the good ol' OC talk here. Talk about anything you want

Here are a few concepts I’ve thought about but haven’t done much with yet: a human rogue who is actually a cat that was True Polymorphed by a drunk wizard; an air genasi warlock who is a spoiled princess and whose patron is her djinni mother; a mild mannered bard historian who stumbles into a Great Old Ones warlock pact while researching an ancient civilization; an orphan who goes searching for the story of her past when the scales marking dragonblood sorcery begin to appear on her skin; a gnome ranger whose beast companion (and mount) is a giant wolf spider and whose society and economy are built around the giant spiders native to their homelands

WHEW. GOOD LORD. THERE YOU GO.

(thank you so much for asking these, I love filling out this kinda shit <3)

[dinoalexander]

Your Moment of Zen: The Gourmet Academy’s Semi-Quotable 2020 Quotedown Quotetacular

The following blog entry are intended only for mature audiences. Reader discretion is strongly advised. Although it goes without saying about three quotes in, this is neither an incendiary nor defamatory tribute to the year past, although if someone were to put together such a “tribute”, I’d completely understand. Thank you. And enjoy the show. Because you helped make it.  Ladies and gentlemen and non-binary conforming life forms across seven star systems... the Gourmet Academy’s World Famous Get Down Like a Hound Party ‘til You Puke Semi-Quotable 2020 Quotedown Quotetacular begins in five... ... four... ... three... ... two... NOW. === “This video is dedicated to touching.” -Harry Styles “Welcome to America's last public gathering.” -Jenna Riedi, the host of Geek Bowl XIV “Daniel’s New Year’s Resolutions 1) say something so brilliant, so irrefutably mind-bogglingly wowful that it makes the Quote Wall 2) organize the basement.” -Daniel “Didn’t you used to be Bill Simmons?” -Greg channeling Justin Lollie “Something new? Shouldn’t be trying it but I’m d-e-d today.” -Carl “This could devolve into something amazing.” -Jeremy “Good feeling: a Patriots loss. Better feeling: a Patriots loss in the playoffs. Best feeling: a Patriots loss in the playoffs in Foxboro.” -Travis “You are the master of the swerve.” -Klaussie “There once was a man from Nantucket.” -Ethan “Neighbor and I both have our windows open, and I refuse to do one more thing tonight until I figure out which episode of “Cheers” she’s watching.” -Adam Nedeff “Is there anyway we can CGI Matt Lauer out and replace him with Christopher Plummer?” -Greg on Matt Lauer on SNL “What’s the favorite network of the 2017 Houston Astros? BUZZR!” -Klauss “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Lost her virginity to Tom Jones.” -Sara “That’s not unusual.” -Megan “Oh look, goats! (Whiff) Oh god, goats.” -Q “The Whiteface on the Joker poster is a pretty good representation on the Academy Award nominees this year.” -Gordon “If you spend your life with a paper bag over your head, do you also need to wear a mask?” -Kevin, on the Unknown Comic "He Gay - He Christmas in Macy's Window Gay" - Mercedeze - The Circle. “Spock is gonna slap your ass.” -Greg on Zach Quinto in “The Slap” “Smeargle!” -C “I’m at the Battle of Atlanta, usually I’M the one on fire.” -Greg as Time Traveling Rip Taylor “Sexual Game Show Chocolate.” -Cyndi’s nickname for Chico “He has exact change! What was I supposed to say.. No?!” -Q “WLTI has been brought to by the Tom Brady Laundry Service - when you need stuff to be washed and blown....you know where to go.” -JB “It’s like shitting in my hand and clapping.” -Q “Let’s do that GOAT.” -C “Does Q know you’re into bestiality?” -Chris • the subject: Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time “In 2020 I’d like to set more things on fire.” -Megan “Tonight, William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, the sun god Ra, Archimedes, Rip Taylor, and Rudolph Valentino on the Loooooooove TARDIS.” -Greg as Ernie Anderson (hat tips to Mike & Chico). “Christmas Day: Email notifying me I don't need to come to the courthouse on Monday. Monday: Phone message notifying me not to come to the courthouse on Tuesday. Tuesday: Phone message notifying me not to come to the courthouse on Wednesday. Wednesday: Phone message notifying me not to come to the courthouse, period, because my week of service includes two holidays. For anyone who's never been called in for jury duty during a pandemic, I highly recommend the experience.” -Adam “This version of 2020 has a virus in it. Can I get it reinstalled?” -Catherine “Take care of y’all chicken.” -Marshawn Lynch“ No link, because (EXPLETIVE DELETED) that (EXPLETIVE DELETED).” -Joe “There’s the Wendy’s.” -C “Where where where where where?” -Q “There there there there there.” -C “The Houston Astros scandal has spilled into the world of game shows...evidence has surfaced that “Jeopardy!” contestants had wired buzzers at their podiums.” -Adam Nedeff “ "Having an English Accent in America is like having a 12" dick” -David, a contestant on Too Hot To Handle. “We are all Disney... and Disney is all of us.” -Kevin “Here comes this Donny Osmond-looking motherfucker.” -C “The coronavirus is the least dirty thing I’ve had in my hand. There’s not enough hand sanitizer in the world. That’s why I drink vodka.” -Michael "That bird just straight up moonwalked and died!" -Neumann “You think Jimmy Kimmel would buy the Walgreens brand?” -Q “I don’t make Jimmy Kimmel money!” -C “President Trump sent me a letter. I respond with fire.” -Kyle “Sense AND Sensibility? In this economy?!” -Liz “He committed the ultimate sin. He insulted the WWE in his promotion!” -Cyndi “Today was draggin’. It was very draggy. It was an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It was so draggin’ that Wink Martindale encourages me to avoid it. I was watching Dragon Ball Z in the cockpit of the Dragonzord while playing Double Dragon with Don “The Dragon” Wilson and listening to Sisqo’s Unleash The Dragon. Somebody better call Emilia Clarke, because, uh.... dragon .... joke.” -C “Name a people that animals breed.” -Bressler “Put your Facebook balls away, Karen. It’s unbecoming.” -Cindy “Pizza is yes.” -Drago, Animal Crossing New Horizons “Prahstitute.” -Klauss • the password was “hookah” “It was a one-eyed one-horned flying purple Power Ranger.” -Gordon “I'm gonna start painting people yellow and send their asses to Springfield because I'm seeing a LOT of Simps, SON!” -Katie “Bill Belichick took the box on the display floor and got a couple of plush dolphins...would’ve had a new car behind curtain #2.” -Carl “Twenty-one seasons of winners and not one of those faces looked like mine. So when I walked through those doors, I had that desire, that determination to be that very first face to give hope to those behind me who have the desire to come in here and play this game. Not seeing a face that looks like mine is very discouraging, it’s hurtful and it does make me feel like maybe it’s impossible. But I’m wrong about that because it’s definitively possible. We can do it. It just hasn’t been done yet… I want to acknowledge every African American who has walked through those doors with the same desire to be that face that I have. I see you, I salute you and I appreciate you. You came in here, you knew the odds were against you, you knew it was going to be an uphill battle and you still fought and you fought like hell. For that, I love you, I admire you and I acknowledge you all today.” -Da’vonne, Big Brother “Waldo should find himself. I don’t have that kind of time.” -@FunnyOrDie “What we wanted was Cam Newton. What we got was Wayne Newton.” -Gordon, right before everyone broke out into “Danke Schön” “You can go ahead and put "Nuh-uh! Don't eat Jesus, you monster!" on the list of things I didn't think I'd have to yell today.” -Wingo “Not only is he a chicken magnate, he’s also a chick... magnet. Amirite?” -Klauss“ Please excuse me if I don't participate in the Dolly Parton Challenge, but I'd rather my wife didn't know that I have a Tinder account.” -Prof. O “The table has had enough of your shit.” -Brian “If you work hard enough I’m sure someday you’ll reach the top of the intelligence bell curve.” -Jess’ insult “Any squirrel can find a nut once. Let’s see you do it again.” -Q “This is the kind of chaotic horniness I’m here for.” -Megan “Behold the power of the fat guy touchdown.” -Cyndi “It’s the kind of peppermint candy that can give me natural 20s.” -Jenni “The wonders.... of weed.” -Mary “Metallic testicles.” -Jimmy Kimmel “Well, it's 65° again today. I ran 3.5 miles yesterday so I chose to walk 4 today. If next year it is not 65° on this day in February, I'm quitting Ohio.” -Wingo “I see the Incelabteilung spent a productive weekend.” -Rick Wilson “You know why the RTF head writer is now hosting? Because he's now eligible to join the Actors Guild, which means he'll have potential work when 1. RTF goes down in flames, 2. The WGA agreement goes down in flames. 3.A combination of 1. 2. and RTF keeps trying to convince us that King Kong should be worth 1,250 points per ticket.” -Gordon “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” -Jessica “Of course any team could have had 14 players test positive for COVID three games into the season, but the fact that it’s an entire roster of Florida Man is just so obvious.” -Arianna “Anna Roisman is very much in love with her butt.” -C Phleb: Are you following me? Q: As if you’re cool enough to have a stalker. As IF you’re cool enough for that stalker to be me. “I’ve seen enough.” -JD “Okay Dave Wasserman.” -C -subject: NLCS “Curse your sudden but inevitable colonization!” -Blue from episode 2 of the Overly Sarcastic Podcast “I haven't watched the Super Bowl halftime show, but from the online conversation today it is clear that people do not know just how many layers of costumage it takes to look "naked" onstage. #Showbiz” -Shannon “Adolf Titler and Areola Braun.” -Kim “I don't follow sports at all, but "And then Florida screwed it up for everyone" is the least surprising thing I could have seen in the news.” -Adam “If you think 2020 has been wild so far, wait until the dragons are released in the finale!” -Bruce Q: “I need a lighter.” Clerk: “Which one?” Q: “I don’t care. As long as it produces fire.” “Today we say a not fond farewell to Adobe Flash....we will NOT miss you very much." -Carl “It’s ridicarus. It’s so ridiculous, it flies in the face of normality until it melts on the wings of its own ridiculousness.” -C “I’d like to be proven wrong 99 times out of 100,000.” -Cyndi “The wenches of Watson.” -G’s nickname for the Chasers “Paula Deen. I don’t give a toss about the woman’s politics. But there’s one thing that we both agree on. MORE BUTTER!” -Q “Do you think you could be my Korean food mule?” -Jenni, to Chico re: Korean restaurants  “This is what I told you about Travis. You’ve got to stop eating buffalo wings before you go to bed this is going to keep happening!” -Brian “The NFL Draft Takes way too long. If I wanted to watch 32 picks in 3 hours, I’d watch Jameis Winston play.” -TyFo “I think I’d win this easily.” -Greg, on “Too Hot To Handle.” “Hit me daddy, I’ve been bad.” -Q “I haven’t been bad, but hit me anyway.” -C “I hope a million Dodger babies are made tonight and their mamas name them all MOOKIE.” -Arianna “That’s tackier than a Louis Vuitton purse from downtown LA.” -Kimberly “Defense wins championships, but offense sells soap.” -Nikki “It’s like there’s nothing good on Netflix anymore.” -Alex Alvarez (Marcel Ruiz) on the Pop premiere of One Day at a Time “Let’s see what this bitch can do.” -C

“Man we have now been quarantined for 60 full days. Stuck inside with nothing but our families and our devices, filled with fear and anxiety. And we still don’t want to watch Quibi.” - Mike Shields (@digitalshields) “I love Peanut Butter. I love Africa.” - Bill Walton "So in the last 3 days Tom Brady has violated social distancing guidelines and broken into somebody's house. The media laughs it off. It pays to be white." - Barry McCockiner “BREAKING: I have decided to follow @James_Holzhauer on Twitter, since he’s been following me on Jeopardy all week.” - Ken Jennings “I was debating who had a worse night in Vegas — Mike Bloomberg or Deontay Wilder. I thought it was Wilder but it wasn’t. He didn’t have to show up a week later and get his ass kicked all over again. #DemDebate2020” - Jelani Cobb “What in the name of God’s ass is on Linda Dano’s head?” - Quisla “My 13 year-old self with my hero in Nov '83, Boston, MA. According to local legend Mr. (Tom) Baker toured the  sites at Lexington, and then Concord, site of the “shot heard round the world;" he strode up to the first American he saw and said “Sorry about all that you know!”” - @petervintonjr​ “At long last, our 4-year national nightmare is over & @SteveKornacki can finally get some sleep.” - Mark Hamill “I think I just saw The Greatest American Hero be a complete and utter perv.” - Chico “Not gonna lie. I kinda wished they'd filmed the Chicago production of Hamilton so I could see Wayne Brady kill Lin-Manuel instead of Leslie.” - @RealLordDalek “Thanks Jon, when we come back Denise is gonna go for $30,000 and I want to find out, really, if you take half of my ass and you put it on my bald head, if it’s going to create new hair. We’ll find out about that after this. ……. more after this.” - Mike Francesa’s evil Earth 47 Half Brother Louie Francesa played by Klaussie before the MG-HSH Super Match “Rebooting The Santa Clause where instead of Tim Allen killing Santa Claus and becoming Santa Claus, Santa Claus kills Tim Allen and becomes Tim Allen” - Bridger Winegar “Ted Cruz is in another Twitter war with Mark Cuban. As a coach I was always looking for mismatches. If I could ever find a mismatch as great as Cuban over Cruz the game would be easy.” - Stan Van Gundy “Just turned on the XFL.Kicker missed a field goal and they immediately interviewed him on the sideline asking what happened haha. That’s tough.” - JJ Watt “Jeffrey Toobin gave a whole new meaning to the word “laptop.” - Gerard Mulligan “No matter how gloom things things get, there's always the future, even the United States of America used to have a future. They tried to us Americans the sky’s the limit, so we destroyed the sky. Where’s your limit now? Oh! burning with toxic poison? Suck that limit!” - Xavier: Renegade Angel “Everything good espn ever did was copied from the George Michael Sports Machine.” - @mattamatic@allpro.social “How is the @WWE not calling this #Wrestlemania36 In Your House?!?!” - Marty DeRosa “When people complain about "cancel culture," they very often mean: I want to live in a world in which there are abundant social and economic rewards for saying and doing certain (but not all!) controversial things, and no social and economic penalties for those same things.” - David Frum “Herb Abrams left this world doing what he loved. Cocaine and hookers." - Brian Blair “Rats.. and I was looking forward to the empty arena NBA Team Challenge Series.” - Lollie “Wow breaking: Jay Glazer is reporting that cleatus the FOX NFL robot has been arressted for double murder outside a Houston strip club. Details to come” - PFTCommenter “Michael Moore is the Michael Avenatti of Anthony Scaramuccis.” - @blackbeltbirder “Will you accept this ass?” -Jason “The Bears are two tight ends away from a firefighter calendar.” -Cyndi “Come on, Quis. Plating is 5 points.” -C “They say you should spend three months income on your wife’s engagement ring. I spent June July and August from the summer that I turned 13… But in my defense it was a wet summer and I mowed a lotta grass, that should count for something.” -Brian (ladies....) “You can’t fuck with Ed Lover.” -Greg “You thought that it was bad now? Wait 25 years. Today's children are tomorrow's leaders; and they will have been have been homeschooled by day drinkers. Let that sink in.” -Q “Doo wah didn’t didn’t, dumb didn’t do.” -Ian “So we were talking about why cereal was invented.” -C “Y’all stop showing me The Needle. I have a visceral reaction to The Needle.” -Anne “Five dollars on a Daily Double? What are you doing, buying a sandwich?” -Q “Sometimes I wonder... what made you think that style of facial hair works for you?” -Mary Jane “Everyone’s a critic.” -C after someone closed the blood bank door after blowing his nose “You raise your kids, you will spoil your grandchildren. You spoil your kids, you will raise your grandchildren.” -Nikki “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” -Joe’s son “Ctrl-F, am I right?” -Klauss “Mmm, mmm-mmm-mmm...” -Kim “I’ve been around enough mothers to know what THAT means.” -C “This is now the 5th straight night I've heard one man complain about another man's holes and balls. No one needs sloppy disorganized holes or balls. #pause.” -Gordon “You know... We grew up watching Kamen Rider & Super Sentai wanting to be masked heroes. Pretty sure this isn’t what I had in mind.” -D “Some of y’all have not been chased around the house by your sibling with a knife and it shows.” -Jenna “At least it wasn't real maple syrup. Based on the bottle and consistency it appears to be maple-flavoured sugar liquid spread.” -Dane, on Gritty drinking breakfast syrup “And who decides Lacey Chabert should be the voice of love? She was hardly the voice of Meg Griffin!” -C “That is one UGLY ASS FISH!” -Cat "CBD infused deep dish pizza now available at White Sox games." -Carl “Gordon Pepper You're a psychotic Macaulay Culkin? I fear and respect you.” -Dom “Now I don’t even have to leave my home to not watch a movie.” -Kevin, on HBOMax “Fuck your widgets.” -Klauss “I told Galileo to stop working on his telescope. He’s not fooling anyone!” -Greg as Time Traveling Rip Taylor “Chris Wallace failed so badly that Mike Wallace also failed, and he’s been dead eight years.” -Kevin “Yay for fat shaming.” -Amberlee “Philip Rivers: Miami Dolphin?” -Carl “I don’t have enough black leggings for this shit.” -Shannon “You ever have shrunken beef?” -G “Phrasing.” -Aaron “You put the brain in Vibranium.” -Matt Richards “Several flaws in his argument, most notably that while he is correct that the meat in boneless chicken wings doesn’t come from the wings, neither does it come from the “tender”. And chicken nuggets aren’t made from a chicken’s... um... nuggets. That said, it is Nebraska, and this is what happens in that God forsaken state when they cancel football.” -Kevin “I never got spanked. We were very good kids growing up. Dad threatened us a different way. He reminded us as he was a famous person if we screwed up we would see it on page 6 of the ny post.” -G “God’s perfect idiot.” -Ryan Reynolds “You can’t clean house with a filthy mop.” -Kevin "Four." -Course Manager Joe translating Sir Goph to the crowd at Holey Moley. “May (Tim Tebow’s) marriage last longer than Million Dollar Mile.” -C “They were so offended, they weren’t.” -G “Meanwhile I can't choose a fuck fish...” -Kimberly “I have questions.” -Bressler “Do not insult the good name of Bowzer, damn it!” -Greg “Hiya Barbie! No Ken. He’s sold separately and I’m cutting unnecessary spending.” -Eden as Barbie “I’ll be at the bench if you need me. Please don’t need me.” -C as David Tennant as Scrooge McDuck “Fayetteville gonna Fayetteville.” -Jordan “Why you gotta go make good employees angry? You think another decent phleb is just gonna pop out of nowhere like a State Farm agent? ... 🎵 Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there! 🎵 POOF!” -C “I like my men like I like my commuter car: silent.” -Robin “The fact that I had to put "Real Email -- Not Wingo SPAM" in an email subject line tells you a lot about how I comport myself with my colleagues.” -Wingo “Savage Question Song! Y’all fucking FUCKED UP! YOU FUCKED UP! YOU GOT IT WRONG! YOU ARE DUMB! No, I’m kidding, you’re not dumb. You fucked up, it happens. That’s life.” -Matt Richards “You know, bucatini. It’s like spaghetti... with goals.” -C “Love like you’re Jesus Christ. Wash your hands like you’re Pontius Pilate.” -Brian “Show me on the tackling dummy where the illegal touching happened.” -Nikki “Get cable. Discover Disney Junior. Muppet Babies. Weird. So weird. #NotMyMuppetBabies.” -Paul  “Take the swabs. Leave the cannoli.” -C “Facetyfacetyfacetyfaaaaaaaace!” -Nikki “If you win, you may smoke it. WHEN you lose, you must eat it. I don’t make the rules.” -Erskine “The internet discovers that Wendy Williams is a terrible person once a week.” -Adam “¡Carajo! Errbahurr!” -me, upon looking at a full parking lot “In these increasingly uncertain times, I want to be absolutely clear on something. I never *don't* want pizza. It is never a bad or inappropriate time for pizza. I will never, in any way, be displeased by receiving pizza. And, at no time in my life, will I ever say "no, that's fine, personally I don't want any pizza." I hope I have made myself clear.” -Brian “That’s a terrifying prospect. Goddamnit, I’m in.” -Kimberly “My dream from December 2020 involved a previous neighbor and his two-mouthed dog. Not two-headed, but two mouthed. Imagine a Doberman crossed with a Big Mac.” -Evil Travis “Sounds like SOMEONE is jealous of the awesome sex her witch friends are having, just saying. #StellaImmanuelOnlyDoesMissionary” -Shannon “Why does Ken Jennings get applause for his use of a buzzer during championship rounds but the Astros are vilified? That’s Double Jeopardy in more ways than one!” -Jess “That's Roman's new move...the Bowel Movement" -JB After Roman tips Corbin over in the potty during Royal Rumble “Smoke my weed.” -Kyle “Tomorrow on Personal Injury Court: "You destroyed my vagina!" Me: "Continue."” -Klauss “Vernon Valley/Action Park on line one.” -Gordon’s one-line review of “Cannonball” “There’s no substitute for good old fashioned know-how.” -Prof. O “So a coworker says she’s pro-gun, pro-God, pro-LEO, pro-Trump, pro-life and that all lives matter. I say to her, quoting Colin Firth, ‘I’m a Catholic whore who is currently enjoying congress out of wedlock with my black Jewish boyfriend who works at a military abortion clinic. So hail Satan, and have a lovely afternoon, madam.’ See? I can flex for rubes on social media, too.” -C “Boy. Smoke really let himself go.” -Caleb “SUPER MATCH on tonight’s MGHSH: ______ LOVER $1000: Red Hot $500: Lousy $250: Latin.... I’ve been called all these things. At the same time.” -C “BREAKING: Massachusetts Lottery names Tom Brady its spokesman for its new lotto game -- Pick 6.” -Doug “If music be the food of love, then umami is the food of food!” -Heather “We already have artificial intelligence in the announcers booth… His name is Joe Buck.” -Brian “I don’t have the time or the crayons to show you how you did that wrong.” -Q “Okay so about Herve Villechaize’s dick.” -Klauss “Sharon after two Proseccos is the funniest motherfucker alive.” -Matt Richards “There’s tired, and then there’s Disney tired. He’s worn out!” -Terrie “Who the fuck is Mickey Rooney?” -Greg’s older brother when he was 8 “Remember, exercise causes endorphins. Endorphins make you happy....” -Michael “And happy people don’t kill their husbands.” -everyone  “Peace, love, dope! Now get the hell out of my house!” -Evil Travis “My sister is being disgusted!” -Shannon’s sister “I already have my picks to replace Condfederacy monuments/statues and other members of the slave trade/colonialism. 1. Spock 2, Any Pokemon 3. Columbo (Specifically for Christopher Columbus) 4. The lead singer of GWAR 5. Dolly Parton” -Dane “Having said that, KEEP STAYING INSIDE. Let’s put this in easy terms: did you ever have a teacher say “If you’re good the entire week, we’ll watch a movie in class on Friday”? And when you made it to Thursday, everybody kind of had an eye on the dipshit in the class who was probably going to screw it up for everybody? Okay, right now, as far as COVID goes, it’s Thursday. Keep an eye on Adam. Or...I mean, whatever the kid’s name was in your class.” -Adam “I'm at the level of drunk where everything is HILARIOUS and I'm very pleased with myself... now I’m having a second drink and wearing this VERY NECESSARY hat.” -Arianna “May your 2020 be like ABC’s, shaky at first, but getting stronger.” -BB “A bunch of Goofuses and nary a Gallant.” -Ian “Hard and Stormy - the next pornhub film from Michael Avenatti.” -JB after Chico tried mistakenly to say “Dark and stormy” “With a name like Joe Exotic, expect more fingers than teeth.” -Chico re: Tiger King “I’d rather offend someone by showing up, by trying to understand and trying to care, than offend someone by not showing up, by refusing to understand and for appearing indifferent.” -Christina “If you feel the need to throw shade from behind an anonymous Twitter account... Don’t. Say it to my face or don’t say it at all. Don’t waste my time. It’s 2020. We’re not on here wasting people’s time. Stop it.” -Anne “His shake brings nobody to the yard.” -Jess re: HQreeper “Did Bill Cullen do Blockheads?” -Q “OH FOR FUCKS SAKE!!!” -C "I do normally have energy, but I did just win the Space Jam, so..." -Neumann “So watching the NFL Playoff game and my first thought is that I wonder how the Houston Astros were able to show the Texans how to steal all of the KC Chiefs' signals from their playbook.” -Gordon “Does anybody here have a dollar?” -C “No but I have a chicken!” -Q “You know what borders on insanity? Canada and Mexico.” -Chelsea’s friend Cathie “A 1 followed by 100 zeroes is known as a Googol. A 1 followed by 1,000 zeroes is known as the number of e-mails you will receive from 1-800-FLOWERS in the week leading up to Valentine's Day if you've ever bought even one bouquet in your life.” -Adam “I think I hate everything and everybody, so I’m going to get drunk on beer that’s been brewed in an old sheep carcass and then I’m going to stick my tiny penis in a dead dog I found in a ditch to make hate-babies or something because I am actually more stupid than mud.” -Alucard, impersonating Trevor Belmont, Castlevania “10/10 for entertainment and entry level gaming abilities. Gratuitous gore and endless ammunition. You will literally cry from laughing. Especially if you're as good at being bad at it as I am.” -Becca “I’m trying to eat better. After work today I’m going to have myself a nice salad. That’s right a nice Caprese salad with tomatoes and mozzarella cheese, and croutons… Well OK one crouton… One very large round crouton. Pizza. I’m going to order a pizza.” -Brian “Coming to theaters in January 2021: 2Jeopardy 2 GOAT.” -Evil Travis “You overthought it!” -Michael “You know me, Michael. Overthinking is kinda my thing.” -C “I had a baby.... in my king cake.” -Kathryn “hear me out: a cross between a heating pad AND a weighted blanket. *become* the hot pocket.” -Chelsea “Guessing both Foxes (New Fox & Disney) are catching onto the reality that Seth (MacFarlane) only has one idea, which he keeps trotting out in different disguises.” -Kevin “How’s your Wednesday?” -Wingo “Oh you know, places to go, people to see, lives to save, asses to cover. You know, a Wednesday!” -C “That’s why I don’t hold grudges, because I can’t remember shit.” -Joey “Brainvision has been brought to you by the Fire Me Please Sporting Division Showdown! Who will win? The Cleveland Browns? The Houston Astros? The NJ Devils? The NY KNicks? It will be fun to find out! That's the Fire Me Please Sporting Division SHowdown!” -Gordon  "I have sent a dick pic. I didnt mean to do it. Mom, I'm sorry.” -contestant on The Circle “You can make excuses or you can make game moves. Pick one!” -C “He who hesitates is sacked.” -Nikki on Tua “Merry Crimbo!... I mean, Merry Chrysler!... I mean...” -Statboy “Welcome to this edition of “Faith in Humanity”, brought to yo by Bleagh. 🤮” -Gordon “Ass trumps feet, count it.” -VRM “On the Season Finale of St. Patswhere, Chief Surgeon Brady suddenly realizes that time has caught up to him and can't accurately perform like he as done in years past. Director of Medicine Belichick talks to his staff and is irate that instead of researching Vrabel-Tannehillitis, they brought him documents on Bunglaria. He punishes them by making them work on back cases and organizing them by bacteria count. In the operating room, time is not on the side of the staff as the patient is also suffering from Henry Syndrome where he rushed for 182 yards and a touchdown. To further accentuate the problems, Belichick finds out that Vrabel-Tennehillitis eats up the time left in the patient, despite his efforts to make time stand still. With time running out, Brady tries to push through his decline and makes a dangerous surgical operation. Sadly, the operation would turn to be fatal for the patient as Brady slips and cuts through vital organs and the scalpal is intercepted by the heart. The patient dies on the table and leaving both Brady and Belichick wondering if they still have what it takes in this new era of medicine. Will our dynamic duo return? find out next season...on St. Patswhere.” -Cyndi “That looks nothing like Tom Villard.” -Mike, anytime someone mentions Chris “Captain America” Evans as “America’s ass” “Okay, no no no no stop halt quit it cease desist. I will sign off on an Anglicized live-action remake of Ranma 1/2 before I approve of this.” -me reacting to a Fresh Prince reboot “Welcome to the Absolutely Fucking Crazy Championship game! With your analysts Tom Brady and Lamar Jackson. Tom: “Hey Lamar, how come we’re not playing in this game?” Lamar: “Cause we suck, man!” • Carl “Politicians are temporary. Wu-Tang is forever.” -@PressedNC “Coffee is not meaningless. Coffee is everything.” -LiyaZee “in the grand scheme of things, aren't we ALL between a sex store and a crematorium?” -Chelsea “You can cancel the show. You can not. Cancel. The culture.” -Chico “Go be bitter elsewhere.” -Hannah “Happy holidays ... and you’re welcome.” -Wayne Brady.... after telling us he’s not wearing underwear. === May our collective 2021 not suck as much as this year did. Seriously, I tried to burn my calendar and it wouldn’t burn.  Anyway, here’s to 2021... Come together, just think of tomorrow. 

[megabadbunny]

The Great Cookie Exchange 2k17: White Chocolate Cheesecake Cupcakes!

(lightly sweet with a delightful burst of tart, surprisingly easy to make! feat. Oreo cookie crust, stabilized whipped cream frosting, sugared cranberries, and white chocolate Christmas trees covered in edible glitter!)

Thanks to @chocolatequeennk for coming up with the cookie exchange idea, and thanks to @goingtothetardis for convincing me I could try my hand at cheesecake and it wouldn’t be a horrible disaster! :D To be fair, though, one of my favorite things about this dessert is that, while it is time-consuming and dirties a fair number of dishes, the steps themselves are actually pretty darn easy! I cobbled the dessert together out of several recipes I found online (sources below) for the sake of bringing something a lil different to my office holiday party yesterday; they were super effing popular and I received a truckload of nice comments. So if you a) are picky about sweets b) like cheesecake c) are interested in making seasonal/holiday treats that are pleasantly nondenominational (not into Christmas? Then those are wintery holiday trees!) and d) want for people to heap compliments on you, make this recipe, my buddies, my guys. <3 <3 <3

I would highly recommend making them with a friend, mostly because baking is so much fun when you do it with company. :D

The Recipes (AKA What is, How do???)

I would recommend starting with the sugared cranberries (source recipe here), and I would recommend making them a day in advance. Here’s my altered version of the aforementioned recipe:

4.5 cups sugar (3 for simple syrup, 1.5 for coating (or more if needed)) 1.5 cups water 2 cups fresh cranberries

First, make a simple syrup by stirring together your water and 4 c. of sugar in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat until the sugar dissolves and the water comes to a boil. Keep stirring and boiling until the mixture goes from opaque to transparent and has a slightly thicker texture when you lift your spoon out--like a thin syrup.

Remove the syrup from heat and let cool for a few minutes, then pour over cranberries in a bowl. The cranberries need to sit in the simple syrup for a minimum of 4 hours, but I would recommend letting them sit overnight, stirring occasionally.

4 hours later/the next day, drain the cranberries from the simple syrup, pour your remaining 1.5 c of sugar into a bowl, and coat the berries in handful-sized batches, rolling them around in the sugar-bowl with a fork until they’re evenly coated all over. (You might end up needing more sugar, since it starts to stick together and refuses to get coat-y after a while.) Place sugared cranberries on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or wax paper and let dry for at least two more hours, and, voila! You’ve got lovely sugared cranberries!

Next up--or perhaps more accurately, simultaneously up--is the white chocolate Christmas trees, if such a thing interests you! The cupcakes are just as good with or without, tbh. I would recommend using Ghirardelli’s white chocolate melting wafers--they melt more evenly than white chocolate chips (significantly less risk of scalding), they hold their shape better than the chips, and they’re just so much effing tastier than any other candymaking chocolate I’ve had. The total amount you need depends on how many trees you want to make, but I can tell you off the bat that a 10 oz pkg of the Ghirardelli will make about 20-24 of the trees I made. (Srsly the Ghir’s are just so yummy, especially tasty while melted--dip some pretzels in the leftover melty goo, nom nom nom such a good treat!!!)

You can use pretty much any Christmas tree candymaking mold of your choice; I used this one. I also recommend using disco dust if you’re in an edible glitter mood. (I would ONLY buy either the original Disco Dust or the Sunflower Sugar Art variety--others will claim to be the same but many of them are actually regular craft glitter repackaged as “technically nontoxic glitter” for cake-PROP-decorating purposes. Boo!!!)

While your simple syrup for the cranberries is cooling, sprinkle a little bit of your edible glitter in the cavities of your candymaking molds by dipping a (clean, dry) index fingertip in the glitter and rubbing your thumb and forefinger together over the cavities so the glitter falls in. (You’re gonna get glitter everywhere no matter what; I’m sorry in advance.) Melt a handful or two of your white chocolate wafers in a microwave-safe bowl, in intervals of 30 seconds at 50% power, stirring between each session. When the white chocolate is smooth and liquidy enough to pour (no more chunks!!!), pour it into the molds, doing your best not to overflow. When each cavity is filled, gently tap and wriggle the mold--this distributes the chocolate more smoothly and also helps to eliminate pesky air bubbles. Stick the mold in the freezer for 15-20 minutes. When removing, check to make sure the chocolate is pulling away from the edges of the mold--that means it’s ready to come out. Turn the mold over on a plate or piece of wax paper and gently shake and tap the mold until the chocolate falls out.

If your chocolate overflowed out of the mold, it might be a little more difficult to get out, and you might have to trim it with a sharp knife afterward. Just use extreme caution, puhleeeeze

And now it’s time for the big to-do: the cheesecake cupcakes! You can also make these a day or two in advance, if you like--they refrigerate quite well! The recipe makes about 16 regular-size cupcakes, or at least that’s how it turned out for me.

The original recipe is here (just disregard the section on the raspberry stuff); my personal tips follow:

- DON’T OVERBEAT THE CUSTARD. Only beat it until it is just blended. Aka, use a hand- or stand-mixer, but with extreme prejudice. Over-beating makes the custard more likely to crack in the oven. Not that that happened to me, or anything... 0:) (Don’t worry tho, even if they do crack, you can just hide it with delicious toppings! They’re still tasty!)

- I would almost always recommend buying store brand cream cheese over Philadelphia. The flavor is richer and they’re easier to soften.

- A quick and fairly easy way to soften the cream cheese? Stick the still-wrapped blocks in your bra/cami/back pants pockets while you’re working on the other stuff. #noshame

- When crushing the Oreos, definitely remove the filling, like the recipe suggests. You might be tempted not to, for the sake of saving time, but since I tried it both ways, I now know that the filling makes the Oreos more difficult to crush, since it makes the cookie bits stick together more. Additionally, if you don’t have a food processor and need to crush the cookies the manual way (it meeeeee), put the cookies in a baggie (be sure to squish out all the air before sealing!!!), lay them down on an old towel, place another towel over the baggie, and go to town with a rolling pin. The towels protect your surfaces from getting bashed and make the sounds a lot easier on the ear!

- If you’re making regular-sized cupcakes (as opposed to minis, like the recipe indicates), you’ll want to scoop a tablespoon of cookie crust into each cup and pack it down; on top of that, spoon custard into each cup until it’s about 3/4 full. (The cakes will puff up while baking and then sink after, or at least, that’s my experience.) I had the best luck baking the cupcakes on a lower shelf in the oven, at 325 degrees, for 15-20 minutes. They’re done when the outsides are set and the middle is still a little jiggly, or when you touch them and the batter no longer sticks to your fingers (they’ll be just a lil springy to the touch).

I don’t have pictures of the baked cupcakes, for reasons...? But hey this is what the batter looks like! :’D

While the cupcakes are cooling, you can make the stabilized whipped cream!

It so tastyyyyyyyyyyy, sigh. And unlike regular whipped cream, which collapses on itself like a delicious but dying star after a couple hours, this shit holds the fuck up! Like seriously I made it days ago and it’s still truckin’. Find the recipe here!

Once everything is set/cooled/etc. (i.e., the candy is out of the molds, the cranberries have formed a semihard sugar shell, and the cupcakes are cool to the touch), it’s time to start pipin’ and decoratin’! I used a small open-star frosting tip to pipe the whipped cream onto my cupcakes, making a small swirly circle in the middle and then little dollop stars around the outside.

Then I dropped several sugared cranberries on some of the cupcakes (in the center, atop the nice lower swirly bit), and for others, I nestled a tree right smack dab in the middle, using cranberries in the front and back to prop it up (and add that delightful little burst of color/flavor!).

Anyway, that’s about it! Just make sure you have a tall enough container to store the tree-cupcakes in, keep them all refrigerated while you’re not eating, and voila! Delicious fancy fairly-easy-if-a-bit-time-consuming cheesecake cupcakes are yours to share as you please! Or don’t. They are shockingly easy to eat.

Thanks and have a happy holiday!!! <3 <3 <3