#I mean I don't think it would have been accepted into the art gallery even if I had sent it before yesterday

[unsafeandsound]

Illusen with a little woodland symol

[tojiwrd]

5: fate is fickle ; gojo satoru

pairing gojo satoru x fem!reader

summary when satoru breaks off your engagement, you understand and accept it. but when he marries someone else, you don't understand because he didn't want to be tied down.

content warnings mentions toxic family, mentions of forced marriage, emotional infidelity, bad friends (:((), and i think that's it! lmk if i missed anything

word count 3.7k

a/n i think this is my fav chapter so far lov you guys sm thank you so so much for the support on this!!

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Spending more time with Suguru after months of occasional contact was easier than you assumed it would be. You, usually accompanied by Reina, would go to his art gallery in the evenings with a cup of coffee for yourself and him. It seemed too similar to old times, but you always chose to ignore the video reel of memories that pressed play as soon as you opened the glass doors to the gallery of how you and Satoru went there for the mere purpose of annoying Suguru.

This was one of the days your elbows were resting against one of the thin marble tables in the basement—which, you had to admit, was crafted to perfection to be Suguru’s space in his gallery—and mindlessly scrolling through your phone while he worked on his laptop. 

“Yo.” You heard him call from his desk just a few feet away from you. “I have to run out to pick up a late shipment. I’ll be back in like—twenty minutes? You can stay here, we'll meet up with Nanami once I get back.”

Nanami Kento was another new addition into your life, and you’d be lying if you said he wasn’t the most exciting one. It wasn’t that you hadn’t heard about him before—you had, occasionally from Satoru who was his acquaintance back when they were classmates—but he was fresh and new which made it a lot easier to open up to him. You, Kento, and Suguru had plans for dinner tonight with Reina, too, who backed out a few hours ago because her mother had arrived from her month-long trip. 

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. Go ahead,” you replied, sending him a small smile over your shoulder as he gave you a short wave, gathered his car key, and went upstairs. 

You just continued swiping through your phone, replying to some text messages from earlier this week that didn’t particularly mean much. You’d spent the past few days at home to only sleep, choosing to spend time with Reina, Suguru, and Nanami. You had been in touch with Shoko, too, but hadn’t found a time to meet up with her since she’d gone abroad for an internship for a couple months. Still, it had taken you a long time before you finally began talking to the friends you had that were connected to Satoru. 

You heard the small ding of the sound the system made when the door before the basement unlocks through the keycard and furrowed your brows. It hadn’t even been ten minutes since Suguru left, there was no chance he was back. It was followed by heavy thumps of footsteps going down the stairs, and you only had to see the black lace-up shoes to know who it was. 

You wanted to scramble for your things and hide underneath a table, but you didn’t have enough time because Satoru saw you the exact moment his face came into view when he stepped on the third-last step. 

“O—Oh. I didn’t know you were here.”

You tried to clear your voice, to pretend that this situation was no big deal. Of course, running into your boyfriend of three years and fiance for a few more months who broke it off with you on a random Tuesday was, in one way or another, a big deal. “He left to get a shipment. I don’t think he’ll be back soon.”

For some reason, for some fucking reason he walked closer to you. You had said that Suguru would take a while because you wanted Satoru to take the hint and leave, not so he could step towards you—closer and closer till you could look into that sea in his eyes almost clearly— and take a seat three chairs down from you. No. You didn’t want him near you, especially not after the night on the balcony. 

“Guess I’ll wait, then.” His voice was honey. It was so smooth, so soft that your ears would feel warm whenever he spoke. 

“You can just call him.”

There was always something you believed when it came to Satoru ever since he began pursuing you before your relationship: he was persistent. He would leave little notes all over your room that you’d find in drawers days after they’d been placed, asking you to go on a date, to give him one chance. Some notes, you found days after you went on said date with him, and that was when you realized how he truly was persistent. It wasn’t just when it came to you, though. When you, Satoru, Suguru, and Shoko went to a bar with an indoor mini golf area, it had taken all three of you to manipulate the ball’s trajectory when he wasn’t looking just so he could pass the hardest route. It was two in the morning and you were ridden with sleep—it wasn’t your fault. When Satoru put his mind to something, he almost always achieved it. 

“No point. I’ll just wait—I haven’t seen him in a while.” Just as you knew, Satoru wasn’t backing down. 

You didn’t know his motives, and you’d tried really hard to not dig deep into his actions to try to find out. Satoru always haunted all your questions, he was like a ghost within your body constantly testing you, trying to get you to question why he did what he did. 

You remembered that you and Satoru were once a blank page, not an entire book that had come to a tragic, unfulfilling end. You tried to erase every word, but they were written in pen and the traces always lingered. So, the only thing you could do was close the book and keep it somewhere far from your sight, but you couldn’t do that when he showed up in front of you. Not as a ghost but as a person, reminding you he was still here, real and moving, and he had pieces of you that you would never get back. 

“I’m leaving,” you murmured, deciding that you had the choice to leave it all behind. To leave him all behind. He could haunt you from within, but you couldn’t let him materialize once again into your life. 

“Y/N, stop,” he said, arms reaching out to you when you walked past him to go to the staircase but stopping as though he realized it was wrong. 

And you replied, “What?” because even though you knew you shouldn’t, a part—a big part—of you was still left in his car where he asked you for the engagement ring. A part of you still couldn’t let him go entirely because you were never good at leaving things behind.

“I want to… apologize,” he began, running his fingers through his unkempt hair. He lifted his hand when you opened your mouth, beginning to say something, and he said, “You don’t have to say anything, okay? Please, just give me five—two minutes of your time. I just need to talk to you.”

And like he told you to, you didn’t say anything because if Satoru wanted to talk for five—two minutes, then you would let him. 

“I got married,” he said, as though he was in a daze within his own mind. You scoffed, but didn’t say anything. “And that… that was fucked up. You didn’t deserve hearing about the engagement three months after I ended ours.” 

Although it was all true, although you had relived all those moments inside your head, hearing Satoru say them made them real. This wasn’t Reina helping you get over him, this was the him you tried to get over for months. It was humiliating knowing he knew exactly what he did, though there was no doubt he didn’t before this. He knew better than anyone how you felt without talking to you because he was there, holding your hand when a stray tear left your eye as if he was still yours.

You still didn’t say anything.

“I met Hana a month before I ended it with you.” You weren’t sure you could hear this. If somebody held a knife to your chest at that moment, you probably would still stand still, completely silent because there were no words left in your mouth. “I didn’t intend on getting engaged with her, Y/N. I meant it when I said I felt I couldn’t be tied down but—” He paused, as if he didn’t want to continue. 

And he didn’t continue, at least for a few minutes that felt like long, grueling hours. 

“But she was new, and I hadn’t felt that… newness for so long. Not since I’d met you. And she said things, Y/N, that made me think we couldn’t get married, that we couldn’t work.” His eyes looked at your face, and it was equivalent to a thousand needles piercing your skin because he waited for you to say something, to agree? But you couldn’t, not even after he had broken you completely and left you on the side of the road like you meant nothing. Because in your stupid, twisted head, you could have worked. If he wanted. 

He continued, taking your silence as a cue. “When I ended it with you, I—I didn’t want to. I swear. You deserved better, and I realized that I didn’t deserve to be anywhere near you. I couldn’t look at you without feeling guilty about the second-thoughts I was having because another girl made me rethink.”

This wasn’t what you expected today, was the only thought swirling through the tendrils of your mind.

“You don’t have to say you understand because I don’t either. I’m not sorry for ending it with you, Y/N, because you didn’t deserve me after all I did, after all I thought about us. But I am sorry for lying to you and, in a way, making our relationship seem meaningless because you probably thought I moved on too quickly.”

“You did,” you said, surprising yourself with the finality of your words. But you couldn’t take it back now that you had made yourself an almost-coherent member of this conversation.

“What?”

“You did move on, Gojo. Too quickly. I don’t think that, I know that and you do, too.”

He tugged his lower lip between his teeth, and you looked anywhere but at his downcast face. It was hard to admit it to him because you couldn’t stop your words, not when he was piling on brick after brick preparing to tumble it all down with you on the other side. If you stayed there any longer—

“I liked Hana then, but the marriage wasn’t what I expected.” You leaned back against the wall, placing some more distance between the two of you. Satoru seemed as though he was clutching at the flimsiest of straws to keep you there, to let you let him talk. “My father—he pushed for it and after losing you, I didn’t fight against it. I thought a marriage like this would hurt less than us getting married and—”

“And what?” you prompted.

“And having to end. I don’t know—I didn’t want us to fail, Y/N.”

You smiled wryly, understanding there was nothing more left for him to explain. “Okay.”

“Okay? That’s… it?”

“I didn’t question why you did what you did before, didn’t try to get answers. I’m not going to change after you’ve given me those answers I never asked for.” At that point, you were looking to find any words to make a swift exit, but you still remained rooted in your spot. 

He sighed, fingers reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “You’re saying you would rather not know?”

Of course, you wanted to know, but you had kept yourself from looking for answers. You knew that whatever ran below the surface of Satoru’s flimsy, no-good, unbelievable reason to end your engagement would hurt, and you were always good at taking what he said at face-value. Obviously, you were right but that didn’t grant you the satisfaction of a person whose beliefs were just proven right would. 

“I’m saying I’m over it, Satoru.” Your voice was convincing enough. "And if you want a successful marriage, maybe you should tell your wife that you got involved with her while you were engaged to me. I'm not the only one who you should be apologizing to."

As soon as you turned your back towards him and headed for the stairs, the door on top clicked open and Suguru gave you a wide smile and wave when he saw you on the other end.

It was funny, real fucking funny, how on a random Tuesday, every question that had plagued your mind like a ceaseless tornado over almost two years was answered by the harbinger of pain himself. You had been so deeply lost in your own soul, and even a person drowning felt uneasy when pulled back up into the air. Satoru pulled you out and now, he stared at you as if he was a friend who offered you a single piece of a chip because you were starving while he ate an entire packet of it. You weren’t sure how he felt but, with the way he looked at you, you were sure that some immature, adolescent part of him that’s growth stunted in middle school truly believed he had done you right. By telling you the truth two years later. 

You didn’t notice Suguru had walked down the steps and taken notice of Satoru and was now flashing his eyes between the two of you as if you were a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. You weren’t. 

“Satoru, man. What the fuck are you doing here?” Suguru asked, and you should’ve made your way up the stairs and away from them but you stayed put. Your mind somersaulted, making excuses for yourself to yourself that you had plans with Suguru anyway, and you would leave with him once he makes Satoru leave.

“I just wanted to hang,” Satoru replied, shrugging his shoulders. 

Suguru inhaled a deep breath and you could see the corners of his ears turning a dark, angry shade of red in annoyance as he stared his friend down. “Just leave for now, dude. I’ve got plans.”

You didn’t look at Satoru, but you felt his gaze on you as his footsteps reached closer to the stairs. You moved, not wanting to have any unnecessary contact with him. As he reached you, he halted his steps and looked at you and you could have buried yourself right then into a hole because you hated this. 

“I know I’m not in the position to ask for anything but I want to tell you, again, that I really don’t want you to hate me. We don’t ever have to talk again, if you don’t want to, but please don’t hate me.”

You looked at his eyes, then stared at him for a moment longer. You laughed, it was bitter and held a certain form of venom you had never shown Satoru, at the sincerity in his features. “Say what you just said but slower, just so you can also comprehend how utterly senseless you sound.”

A hint of annoyance flashed across his features before he tamped it down and shook his head. He started heading up the stairs, not bidding Suguru or you a goodbye, and you sighed in relief. 

“Y/N, I—” Suguru started, but you cut him off by pushing him by his shoulders in annoyance. “Woah, woah. What did I do?”

“You didn’t tell me!” you exclaimed, your voice finally coming back to you after whatever-that-was. “He cheated, Suguru! And you didn’t tell me.” You were saying your thoughts exactly as they leaped through your mind, barely comprehending that you had resorted to punching—albeit lightly—Suguru’s chest as you closed your eyes. 

Everything was blank, and for a moment you were convinced you had lost a wire inside your brain throughout this entire ordeal. 

“Hey, listen,” Suguru said, his arms reaching out to gently grab onto your shoulders. “You kept on saying you don’t wanna dig deeper and all that bullshit once the two of you broke up. And you were doing good, Y/N. You know how long it took you to start acting like yourself again? Four months. I didn’t want to ruin your process because you were healing.”

You gritted your teeth and said, “You had no right, Suguru. And you had no right to assume when I moved on because it didn’t take me just four months. If your—if your fiance cheated on you and didn’t tell you, I wouldn’t keep it from you.” Your voice trailed off as you stared into his eyes, and that was when you’d realized you truly couldn’t rely on him because he was Satoru’s friend first and yours second. 

You had—in great fashion—run away from Suguru’s art gallery before he could even form a defense to your words. At that point, you were sure he wouldn’t be showing up to dinner with Nanami because that would not be a good moment for the three of you. You had dug for your phone and texted Nanami, telling him that you’ll be at the restaurant in ten minutes to which he’d instantly replied saying he’ll be there in five.

It didn’t take long for you to drive and reach the restaurant, which is why you were sitting across from Kento who looked more curious than anything. You tried to avoid his watchful gaze, though he didn’t say anything. That might have made it tenfold uncomfortable because he often came to his own conclusions, without asking any questions, and ran with them. 

“Stop staring,” you muttered, fingers absentmindedly flipping through the menu. “And decide what you’re going to eat.”

“I already know,” he replied, unmoving with his stare. 

“You and Geto fight?” he asked as soon as you’d both placed your order with the waiter. He raised a brow when you tilted your head, feigning confusion. “You can tell me, I don’t give a fuck.”

You laughed at the lightness of his words. “Why do you think we fought?”

He let out a chuckle, barely audible, and took his phone out. “Because he isn’t here? And because he texted me and said ‘sorry, can’t make it.’ And he said you two were coming together and his text was sent the same time you said you were on your way.”

“Okay, genius,” you drawl, resting your arms casually on the wooden table. “I guess it could be considered a fight,” you admitted.

His eyes flickered with the slightest hint of interest but it was gone the next second. “Oh, yeah? Lover’s quarrel?”

“God, shut up.”

“Don’t go thinking I’m God just yet,” he muttered, a smirk playing on his full lips.

You threw the napkin in front of you at his face which he, unfortunately, caught with his hand. “Me and Suguru aren’t even friends like that,” you said, almost believing it. Truth was, it was the heat of the moment and you wanted to clutch at every strand of dignity to make it seem like what Suguru did didn’t hurt, alongside with what you now knew Satoru did, too. 

“Uh huh,” Kento sarcastically went along. “So what happened?”

You debated on whether or not you should tell him the entire story, knowing that he was friends with Suguru and sort-of knew Satoru. But there wasn’t anything wrong with confiding in a friend, right? You chose to give him bits and pieces from the day—about how Satoru, your ex-fiance wanted to talk and give you a whole rundown of how he pretty much fell in love with another girl while you were engaged—which slowly got you talking about the few months after the breakup and Satoru’s new engagement. By the time the two of you were about to order dessert, you had told him pretty much everything—not without being prompted though. As soon as the two of you moved on, he’d say something like that fucker’s so stupid. What did he say after that? It was almost like a conversation with Reina, but with Kento it felt different. 

He’d look at you every so often while you talked, a glint present in his eye that usually wasn’t there. He’d run his fingers through his blond hair and slightly lift the direction of his eyes to meet your eye, and if you hadn’t been shit-talking your ex’s best friend, you would’ve felt the warmth radiating through your body under his gaze more. 

“I meant it,” Kento started, chewing the last bit of the cake you forced him to order. “That Gojo kid is stupid for that shit.”

You laughed, biting your lip to contain the blush that crept up your cheeks. “Calm down, otherwise I might start to think you like me.”

He looked at you with a blank stare then tilted his head to the side, as if trying to read you. “You’re dumb.”

“What?”

“You actually think I’m not interested in you?” he asked, then laughed as if it was the most preposterous thing he had heard. You thought about it for a moment, and realized every attempt at flirting he made, you brushed off as a joke. That’s just Kento, you’d kept on saying to yourself. You’d ignored every attempt he made because the waters after a three-year-relationship were tumultuous, and it was never your first thought that Kento was truly interested everytime he made a comment slightly suggestive.

It took you a moment to realize you still had to reply to him, and in that moment you allowed yourself to feel the warmth underneath his gaze. “What?”

“I’m not saying I’m about to drop to one knee and propose or something. I’m just telling you there’s interest present.”

You weren’t surprised; only Kento could make something that people always shy away from saying seem so easy. You smiled. You weren’t sure if this could work, and you weren’t even sure if this conversation would ever lead to anything in the future, but it felt like a welcome recess from every other part of the random Tuesday. For a moment, it was easy to forget Satoru, Satoru’s betrayal, and Suguru’s behavior. Kento had come into your life during, what you’d consider, a limbo period where you were still navigating the almost-two-years-ago-breakup and its aftermath. He was fresh, and he was new. Perhaps that was the newness Satoru was talking about.

And maybe there was something innately weird about Kento, someone who was interested in you, to listen to you talk about your ex and then tell you he’s interested in you, but you’d always been a fan of the unexpected.

“Don’t go all quiet,” he murmured, twirling his glass of water around absentmindedly.

“There’s interest on my end, too.”

[rallamajoop]

Moreau's secret romantic movie fixation

Most of what you’ll find online searching for cut content from RE8 really isn’t ‘cut content’ so much as ‘rejected ideas that never made it past the concept stage.’ Early plans like having Ada Wong swanning around the village in a plague mask or that Miranda would be a foreign researcher probably never got near the finished game. You can find tons of rejected early concepts like this in the extra concept art that comes with the RE7 DLC pack (or online, for all those who’d rather not shell out that much extra money for a few extra gallery files).

But there is at least one detail from that early concept art that I’m confident did make it almost all the way into the finished game, and it’s that little tidbit about Moreau’s love of sappy romantic movies.

The biggest single piece of evidence I can cite you for this is that you can still find an unused asset for a film poster that was meant to appear in Moreau’s room.

This was to be a collectable treasure item, like Dimitrescu’s lipstick and wine glass. There’s even a description for it ("Poster for an old movie Moreau liked. It's too damaged to read.") which feels pretty significant. There are plenty of other unused treasure item assets in that same folder (I’ll probably get to posting about them later), but the film poster is the only one I could find a description for – complete with translations into all the many different languages supported by the game. I’m guessing that means this one got really close to the final cut.

But the best part? If you look closely at that poster, you might just be able to make out the title. And if you google that title, it turns out this little game asset is based on a real poster for a real movie.

(Yes, that tagline really does read, "When Tragedy Struck, Love Came to the Rescue.")

I haven’t seen Ice Castles myself, but if the Wikipedia summary is to be believed, it’s a 1978 American romantic drama about a young figure skater who loses (most of) her sight in a tragic accident. With the help of her boyfriend, she eventually comes to accept that, because she can still see just well enough to make out the bounds of the rink, she can still work past her disability to realise her dreams. I don’t need to spell out why a film like Ice Castles might particularly appeal to someone like Moreau, do I? Poor guy.

The poster isn’t the only reason I’m convinced secret-romantic-Moreau made it almost to production. Let’s go back to that concept picture again, where Moreau is eating cheese while watching old romantic movies on his TV screen.

Well, the movie may not have made it in, but TV did. So did the cheese.

More importantly, consider the scene where Ethan sneaks up behind Moreau to find the Rose flask unattended. Moreau himself is looking away, apparently focused on his TV screen, though it shows only static. And then he vomits dramatically, and utters the words “Oh Mother Miranda, if it’s for you, I’d do anything.”

I mean, it’s obvious what was meant to be going on here, right? Moreau’s watching a film as Ethan walks in, and sighing at some torridly romantic scene. There’s probably just been some hero or heroine earnestly utter some similar dialog like, “Oh [insert name here], I’d do anything for you!” All the pieces are there except the film itself!

(Do we need to take a moment here to acknowledge the, er, Oedipal implications of Moreau comparing his devotion to Miranda to a presumably-romantic scene? Because... well, it can be easy to overstate that sort of thing, but I don't think it's a stretch to suggest Moreau really would do anything for Mother Miranda.)

So why didn’t the movie make the cut? Why are we left with Moreau watching only static from his poster-less room?

I can only speculate, but a few possible answers come to mind. Maybe the team worried that making Moreau a closet romantic would render their revolting fish-man a little too sympathetic, or a little too comical. Maybe they had trouble finding a film clip that worked for that scene without leaving Ethan awkwardly watching a movie over Moreau’s shoulder for longer than really worked. Maybe test audiences were so distracted by the film going on the background that they missed what was going on in the foreground with the Rose jar. Maybe there were licensing issues around including that Ice Castles poster, or whatever film footage they wanted to show (which I feel obligated to point out may have been some other film altogether). These kinds of snags get in the way of productions all the time. C’est la vie.

The scene still works without the movie playing. But it’s hard to miss what was supposed to be going on.

Still, while I’m talking Moreau, and Moreau’s TV, have a little bonus speculation about Moreau’s relationship with the guy who presumably installed that TV for him: Heisenberg.

It seems to be pretty popular out there in RE8-fanon land to cast Heisenberg as actually-very-fond of Donna, or the Dimitrescu daughters, etc etc – and that irks me a bit, because I’ve yet to see any take on it that feels in-character for anyone involved. Even putting aside Donna’s own issues and the whole Dimitrescu connection, Heisenberg’s seething contempt for the rest of his ‘family’ is not exactly ambiguous. But even with all that said, there are few intriguing hints that good ol’ Karl might just have the teeniest little soft spot for his ‘moronic freak’ of a brother, Moreau.

The big one is that tidbit from Moreau’s diary that I already touched on in my post on the four lords, where Heisenberg apparently comforts him about his place in the family:

Mother Miranda gave me a Rose jar. No one likes me which is why I thought they would leave me out again. But Heisenberg said that was why we each get a Rose. The ceremony cannot happen without us all there.

Now, you can debate how ‘comforting’ this would have come out in practice. Knowing Heisenberg, whatever he said may have been more of a sneering dig at Moreau's intelligence than real reassurance – but even so, just reminding Moreau that he's an essential part of the plan pretty could qualify as an uncharacteristically kind gesture (and perhaps only more so if Heisenberg knew even then that it was a comforting lie).

When I say Heisenberg ‘presumably’ installed Moreau’s TV, I do mean presumably. At the end of the day, there’s a TV screen in Moreau’s quarters that Heisenberg can hijack to spy on or talk to Ethan for the same reason there’s one in some back room behind a stronghold full of lycans: the plot requires it to be there, and it’s easier to use the same asset twice. But it’s no fun sticking to rigidly Doylist analysis, so what could be the story behind it? Have some possibilities:

Moreau got hold of the TV himself, but Heisenberg snuck in at some point and modified it so he can use it to spy on his ‘brother’, without Moreau’s knowledge.

Heisenberg installed or repaired the TV for Moreau under the guise of letting him watch films on it, but secretly also uses it as a monitoring device.

Moreau is fully aware the TV can be used for remote communication and chats to Heisenberg through it regularly. Given that his film obsession didn’t make it into the finished game, maybe that’s all he thinks it does. Maybe he was even just talking to Heisenberg before Ethan walks in.

Though that first option is a workable interpretation, you could also question what Heisenberg imagined he’d ever see Moreau doing that was worth spying on. Our other obvious options are that Moreau thinks Heisenberg installed that TV for the primary purpose of enabling his 900th rewatch of The Shape of Water (oh come on, you know he loves that film), or that it’s so they can talk without leaving home. Heisenberg’s still a creep for rigging it to spy on him, but there’s another surprisingly thoughtful gesture buried in there somewhere.  

There’s one last barely-qualifying little detail that intrigues me, and that’s that both Moreau and Heisenberg seem to have similar ideas about Miranda’s plans for Ethan. Heisenberg states outright that he believes Miranda is testing Ethan, to see if he’s worthy of joining her family. And Moreau bemoans that ‘It’s not fair, I should be with her, not you!’

Neither Dimitrescu or Angie echo any similar ideas, and nor does anything Miranda actually says to Ethan suggest Heisenberg has the right idea (like so much in this mad fairy tale, the vibes are much stronger than the internal consistency). But if Moreau has the same idea as Heisenberg, despite being so generally clueless about the Rose jars and Miranda’s intent, it’s natural to suppose it’s Heisenberg he got it from. So we’ve got another possible hint that Heisenberg’s closer to Moreau than his other siblings.  

To be clear, none of this means Heisenberg has ever been nice to Moreau. He dismisses Moreau as a moronic freak, and seems unbothered by Moreau’s death. Moreau’s diary makes clear that no-one in the family is nice to him, or generally ‘includes him’ in things (though it’s hard to imagine they much include each other either). Even hinting to Moreau about Miranda’s plans could well have been a means to goad him into conflict with Ethan. I doubt Heisenberg would have had much interest in sitting down to watch Moreau’s favourite movies with him either.

But it’s not hard to imagine Heisenberg basically viewing Moreau something of an annoying, stupid, snot-nosed little brother – pitiable, but not too pathetic to inspire the odd gem of real sympathy or uncharacteristic kindness. Heisenberg’s obviously spent years telling himself that only the strong survive, that those ignorant villagers deserve their lot, that he can’t afford weakness, but it’s tempting to think that maybe giving Moreau that TV wasn’t a completely cynical gesture. After all, doesn’t every Frankenstein-wannabe need an Igor?

To finish, have some more extracted assets of Moreau-related pics from Miranda's laboratory. I just love the style and detail that went into these.

[elisysd]

An unexpected bonus chapter but I couldn’t resist when @smoooothoperator asked me if I wanted to write something with Lyanna and Charles at Lily and Lando’s wedding. I had so much fun! Go read her story Beautiful Stranger if you want to know more about Lily and Lando’s story!!! And if you want to read about their wedding, it’s here

Only bought this dress so you could take it off

Santorini had something truly magical in its air. It was a dreamy location, perfect for a holiday or better, a wedding. That’s what Lyanna thought as she was unpacking the suitcases while Charles was showing the surroundings to Julia that seemed to only want to sleep. They were here for Lando and his soon-to-be wife Lily's wedding. Lyanna had met Lily at a race and they had hit it off. They were not seeing each other a lot, both being busy with a baby for one, and an art gallery for the other. But still, it was always nice to be able to catch up whether it was during races when Lily was coming or in England when Lyanna was going there for business.

Lyanna had been surprised when Lando’s fiancée had asked her to be one of her bridesmaids but she had accepted quickly. She never really had the occasion to be one before and she was excited. When she finally finished unpacking everything she joined her husband and her daughter on the balcony.

“It’s still as beautiful as I remember.” she said sitting down next to Charles.

“Greece will always hold a special place in my heart.” he told her, kissing Julia’s hair.

“Really?”

“This is where we conceived our little bundle of joy, of course it’s special to me.”

“Hoping she will still be a bundle of joy when she will be with Kat and Max….” said Lyanna as she delicately touched her daughter’s cheek.

“She will be an angel, don't worry. By the way, you didn’t show me the dress.”

“And I won’t show you, you’ll have to wait.”

“That’s unfair. It’s just a bridesmaid dress, not your wedding one.”

Lyanna playfully rolled her eyes before standing up.

“Hold your horses, Leclerc.”

“I can’t help it. This city brings back a lot of memories.”

“I wonder what they are…” she said as he was standing up as well, carefully placing Julia on the balcony’s sofa and snaking his arms around Lyanna’s waist.

“I can show you, if you need a good reminder.”

He started to slowly kiss her neck as his hands found their way under her blouse.

“I have to meet Lily.”

“Cancel.”

“We have Julia.”

“I can call one of the boys to take her for the evening.” His kisses started to be a bit more urgent as he pressed her closer against his chest.

Finally after a lot of persuasion and promises of later, Charles let her go and stayed with Julia. Lyanna knew that despite pouting a little bit, he was happy to spend alone time with his daughter. She met Lily at the bar of the hotel. The soon-to-be Mrs Norris, greeted her with a hug and a smile on her face. She was glowing and Lynna couldn’t help but reminisce about her own wedding a few months before. She was so happy for her. In the span of a few months, Lily had become someone she was proud to call a friend.

“So, anxious, excited?” she asked as they were taking place on the terrace.

“A bit of both. But mostly excited. Thank you again for agreeing to be a bridesmaid. It means a lot to me.”

“Hey, you are my friend. What kind of friend would I be if I had refused?”she winked at her, joking.

“A terrible one. You wanted to tell me something?”

“Actually yes. You know that we just moved in, in our new house, and I was thinking of adding a few paintings here and there but truth be told, I don’t envision other pieces of art than yours. So what I wanted to ask is, would you accept to work on a few paintings for Charles and I? We would pay of course, you just have to tell us how much it would cost and we will pay. No negociations.”

“Lyanna… Oh, wow. I really didn’t expect that. I don’t know what to say…” she stuttered.

“You don’t have to say yes, I would understand if you would rather focus on other things. It’s just that I already bought one of your paintings at your exhibition, for the living room and we have the portrait you did of us at our wedding hanging on our bedroom wall. I wanted to have some kind of coherence in the decoration… so obviously your name came up really quickly when I talked about it to Charles.” she explained.

“It would be an honor, Lyanna.”

“So it’s a yes?”

“It’s a big yes!”

Lyanna couldn’t help but squealed and threw her arms around the Brit to hug her. They chatted for a while before it was late and they were both tired.

And finally the big day arrived. As Charles and Lyanna were both busy with bridesmaids and groomsmen duties, they had given Julia to Max and Kat, hoping that it would not cause any problem with Ethan. They didn’t want the kids to throw a tantrum and ruin the wedding. They would be ashamed. So they were silently praying, relying on the Greek divinities  powers to prevent any kind of drama from happening.

When Charles saw his wife in her beautiful blue dress, he knew he was screwed. Blue was definitely a color she was not wearing often as she knew that Charles preferred to see her in red but, damn it, she was beautiful. He surprised himself to think that even when he thought he couldn’t fall in love with her more, she always found a way to prove him wrong . And this dress was definitely making him feel things. Maybe it was the greek air, maybe it was the wedding atmosphere but whatever it was he knew that he would not be able to keep his hands to himself. Even more so when he noticed the slit on the dress giving him a nice view on his wife’s leg.

Lyanna noticed the way her husband was looking at her and how he always managed to have a hand on her. She didn’t find it weird, Charles always had the tendency to be a bit clingy with her but today, it was worse than usual. They were chatting with Lando’s family around the table as they were eating, when she felt Charles’ hand on her thigh, drawing small patterns and trying to find a way under her dress.

“What are you doing?” she whispered as he was pouring himself a glass of wine, ignoring the warning undertone in his wife's voice.

“Nothing.” He finally found a way to let his hand slip under it and rested the palm of his hand against her naked skin.

“Charles…”

“I don’t know what you mean, love.”

“Oh you know exactly what I mean.”

“Charles, we can’t. Not here.”

“No one will notice, I promise you.”

She soon felt his fingers playing with the hem of the only piece of clothing she had under her dress. She could feel herself blushing as he kept his teasing going as if nothing was happening. He joked with Lando, as his fingers managed to slip past the clothing barrier and a proud smile played on his lips when he heard Lyanna gasping. He was having so much fun. He soon felt the  hot breath of his wife against his ear, making him slightly shiver.

“And what about Julia.” she was trying to reason him as she could feel his fingers where she needed him the most making her loose the small amount of coherence she had left.

“She is with Carlos and Nora. Everything is fine.”

“Fine. You won. Meet me in the bathroom in five minutes.”

It was not a request. It was an order, and one Charles felt happy to oblige.

He didn’t wait for five minutes. And as soon as he opened the bathroom door, he felt two hands gripping him and strawberry tasting lips on his.It didn’t take long before his instincts to take over he pushed her against the sink before helping her jumping on it. He naturally found his place between her legs as she was urgently trying to get rid of his suit and started to unbutton his shirt.

“Slow down tiger.” he joked, playfully biting her lips, earning a moan from her. His favourite sound.

“You got me this worked up. Time to deal with the consequences!”

“Well I should do it more often, if it always comes to this.”

“Shut up and kiss me.” she whispered, looking him in the eyes.

“Happily.”

His kisses became more feverish and urgent as his hands started to have a mind on their own. He pulled up her dress as he was trying to unbuckle his belt with the help of Lyanna. He could feel her breath on him, and her hips buckling with his, trying to relieve the pressure she could feel building inside her. Charles could help himself but to mechanically move with her. He felt like a horny teenager and was not even ashamed to admit it. He was feeling way to tight in his pants and feeling the hand of his wife palming him through the material almost made him loose his mind.

“Fuck Charles, I need you.” she said while pepering every inch of his naked skin with kisses and light bites.

“I need you too, love.”

As he was about to pulled down his brief, the door slammed open, revealing a smiling and little tipsy Lily.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry!” she said immediately turning away.

It had the effect of snapping both Lyanna and Charles out of their transe as they immediately put on some order in their clothes and hair. They looked like two teenagers busted by their mother. Lily looked intently at them, arching an eybrow and crossing her arms against her chest.

“Well… if you guys announce a baby Leclerc number two in the upcoming months, I will know when it has been conceived… I can’t wait to tell Lando, about that.”

“Please Lily, don’t…” pleaded Charles.

“Don’t worry, I won’t. It’s tempting though. But if it does happen, I want to be at least the godmother! You guys own me that. Seriously, how old are you? Well…I wanted to pee, but I think I’m gonna avoid this bathroom. You guys can keep on doing whatever you were doing. Or doing each other. I don’t care.”

As she was about to close the door she turned to them one last time.

“That being said, we wanted to gift you a painting o you guys kissing. Lando took a pretty picture of you two during your baby shower. It was too sweet for us to not immortalised it. He was slightly making fun of you saying that you would never be anything else than the lovey-dovey couple. I’m glad that I’ll be able to prove him wrong! … Have fun! And don’t forget to lock the door!”

“Lily, you promised!” Screamed Charles while the door was closing.

They could hear her laughing and they both knew that they were screwed and would not hear the end of it, anytime soon.

Little did she know that her request wouldn’t be forgotten and that a few years later she would be, indeed, the godmother of a little boy.

============

Author’s note: I can’t wait to have your thoughts on this one!

Taglist: @zendayabelova @purplephantomwolf @ru-kru @dakotali @blueflorals @aundercover @ruleroftheuniverse @fangirlika @writerscurse @elijahmikaelsonbitch @leclerc13 @karmabyfernando @stargaryenx @pitlanebabe @boiohboii @reengard @shikshinkwon

[thegoldenshi-shi]

So, I have been busy making poor monetary choices again, in which I now own two different types of tablets specifically for art (ONE WAS VERY MUCH ON SALE, THE OTHER HAD A 50 BUCK COUPON, BOTH GOOD REVIEWS), and the first tablet I bought, that's honestly just a way of adding a touchscreen to a computer to me, cause like. It's a sensor pad? Well, it's proving that I can't mentally make myself apply a lot of pressure to technology, which my younger self with a ruined dsi touch screen would gape at. I have also gotten all my shelving units up! Not sure if they're staying where they are, or if I'm gonna move them around again, but I do know two that are staying where they are, mainly cause I am /not/ lifting that shelf all the way back up to chest level to take it back down again. Nuh uh, no ma'am, it will not be done. It's also gotten all my collectibles on it already, which has proven that I need to devote more of my budget to the Twins than Screamer. My frenemesis would be delighted to see my failure to my simpees.

Work has been better! Still hot, but we've slowed /way/ down, which means my supervisor has been letting me goof off on my phone or writing, cause we physically can't work too hard in the heat, but we also have no orders anyway, so... And because we've been able to get paid Not Working, I have gotten back into a werewolf story I started writing months ago! I'm setting it up one shot style rn, and posting the chapters as my brain accepts my pleading for their creation, but I also intend to make it a full and proper story once I've worked all the one shots out. I will openly admit to it being complete self service, cause I want a best friend who's 8 feet tall, fluffy, and has a crappy sense of humor. And is a cuddle monster, though that one is mainly cause I love glomming full force onto my people and displaying my awkward affection. I'm like a peacock, but instead of flaring tail feathers, I hug people in front of other people, whilst not actually really knowing socially accepted norms for hugging friends, tbh.

I also went through and completely reorganized my phones gallery, and got a very stupid laugh outta it. I have 461 transformers related pictures, and almost 400 writing prompts. Just. Saved on my phone. If I ever lose this sim card my writing career that i don't actually have will be over. On another other note semi related, I have been asked to design a friends tattoo! I don't know if I mentioned that in my last ask. He asked me to draw him a dragon to get tattooed, which, to be fair, dragons are among one of the very scant things I can draw well reliably, but also, dragon proportions curled into a ball sleeping are kicking my ass, and I am debating getting out my giant sketchpad to be able to completely control every tiny eetsy beetsy detail, cause my close friend wants me to do this thing that will permanently be on his body, and I really desperately don't wanna mess it up... Cause like. No one has ever asked me to ///draw/// for them before. I've gotten asked to paint, or do some small stuff with watercolors, but never /drawing/. And he knows I love dragons, it's part of why he asked. I just. It's a thing that happened that made me really happy, like hide in my pillow crying happy tears happy.

And then, on the fifth, I found an exactly 8 year old video of my childhood dog that we had to put down... it was from the summer before he was put down, which happened during the school year. He had been all that I'd had growing up, so, it hit kinda hard seeing something of him that moved. Even after 8 years, I still cry every time I think about him. He was the best dog any little kid could've ever been raised with, and probably helped boost my immune system against my allergies to boot, hehe. I cried for like, two hours, cause it was a video taken 7/5/2015. And, I thought I had lost all my images of him. It was a happy thing, just. A very sad type of happy. I wish I could tell him that I did love him, even if I didn't wanna lay on the ground and cuddle like he preferred. He was a dog that was born old, haha, never wanted to play or bark, he just wanted to lay on you and be loved. I was always running around on imaginary adventures though, but I did love him. If I was upset, he was my safe place. I promise this is a happy thing, it's just that I'm gonna be legally allowed to drink soon, and sometimes I forget that it's been so long since I got to see him. Especially cause sometimes, I still have dreams about playing with him in our backyard, right next to a giant pine tree covered in cicada sheds, laughing as he dug a little groove to lay in under the old rusted out trampoline. He was the most patient, tolerant dog, and it's because of him and the cat he raised with me that I'm not afraid of so much anymore. Ma and dad weren't there when we had him, but... I'll admit to giving them up forever if it meant I got to have him back

~Smooch

Hello there Smooch~

Sleeping babee dragon sounds so cute! I've never designed a tattoo, so I can only imagine the pressure (and of course the touching part of him asking you to draw his tattoo design).

Interestingly enough I too spent a loooong period of time where drawing was a dragon-only zone. I think it was back in like middle school? If you're struggling with a traditional four-legged two winged dragon, have you considered another type? There's Asian Lung dragons, Wyverns, Wyrms, or even a Quetzalcoatl style dragon that can all be very cool and might be easier for you to draw as a sleepy loaf. If your friend doesn't have a strong preference of course.

How exciting, on sale art supplies. It's kinda hard to decide sometimes between art supplies and if you're new to it, it's not a BAD idea to try multiple different types and/or brand names until you find what you like. I own two different art devices, one Wacom Intuos bought in High School and a Huion art monitor bought like four years ago. I was a traditional artist at the time I bought the Intuos tablet, so I quickly found that I prefer drawing on an actual screen I can look at instead of drawing on a tablet, BUT I had to try the tablet first to know that. What that all amounts up to is I hope you like one if not both of them ^J^ It's good to hear that your job is calming down. I'm sure that you're enjoying having the down time to work on your creative pursuits. At the risk of sounding too much like a hippie art teacher, I say it's very important to have some sort of creative outlet in your life. So it's wonderful to hear that you're getting to write on your werewolf story. I send you my best wishes that your muse stays nice and cooperative for the whole process hehe.

And lastly: The bittersweet memory of a good pet that has passed is something that I feel blessed to have as well. I hope that you can continue to enjoy your memories of a good animal without being bogged down in the sadness of their passing.

It's good to hear from you again Smooch, glad to hear you are doing well~

[thisweekinfandomhistory]

omg i just found your podcast and it’s incredibly cathartic to listen to as i have felt the loss of fandom spaces over the past few years (tumblr dying and twitter being hard to use for that). livejournal sounds so nice. I wish there was another social media site that would allow that sort of community again for art and fandom and connection.

Thank you so much for listening and writing in! The loss of fandom spaces is always so hard and sad -- I (V) still mourn the landscape of individually run HTML fansites that ran all the way to the horizon back in Web 1.0. I miss fun layouts! I miss image galleries! I miss fandom mailing lists! (And I highly recommend The Rec Center if you don't already subscribe to them).

I actually think that Tumblr isn't dying so much as accepting its size and scope -- it ISN'T a social media site, and it's never been something that was going to be able to compete with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for mainstream, everyday-Joe users. People who don't have a hyperfixation or a fandom want to see a variety of content and are easy for The Algorithm to feed. Tumblr users... are not.

Tumblr may have started out with the goal of being a hub for Srs Bsns Photographers & Poets/Writers, but everything about its format makes it the perfect site for fandom to flourish.

I'm really happy that Tumblr itself is embracing that now! AFAIK their actual slogan on the Apple App Store is "Tumblr: The Home of Fandom." Fandom is a niche subculture. We're just not gonna have the numbers of a Twitter or a TikTok. (And honestly, thank fucking god. Can you even imagine the chaos. I shudder to think.)

Tumblr is a microblogging site. It's for people who write too much for Twitter and whose images aren't the vibe of Instagram. It's for gifsets, which are an art medium unto themselves that social media sites wouldn't have any use for, really. And it's definitely not for Norbert in Accounting to connect with his grandma on like Facebook.

The anonymity of Tumblr is antithetical to modern social media sites -- even though IT IS INSANE TO ME THAT PEOPLE PUT THEIR REAL NAMES AND PHOTOS ONLINE, DID WE NOT LEARN ABOUT STRANGER DANGER??? -- and the fact that Tumblr is inherently ABOUT transformational, shared, "yes and" content, rather than mostly original pithy content like Twitter and IG and TikTok, makes it attractive to people with the hyperfocus of fans more than people who want to scroll and scroll and just see Stuff. I mean, obviously on Tumblr we're all looking at Stuff, but you can CURATE your feed on Tumblr in a way that you can't on social media. Curation is the enemy of The Algorithm. And Tumblr users fucking hate The Algorithm.

And honestly? The Algorithm hates fandom, because it's really hard to market things to someone with a hyperfixation. I don't CARE about your product, and seeing it instead of the thing I want to be looking at makes me HATE your product. The Algorithm really needs to be able to feed you a lot of different types of content to see what you're interested in. If you go into a site already knowing what you're interested in, then... ::shruggie:: Sucks to suck, Algorithm.

All of that said, yes -- community is definitely an aspect of Web 1.0 that feels like it's missing, or very hard to find, on Tumblr. I know a lot of people are finding great fannish communities on Discord these days, but I am elderly and don't know how to find Discord communities in the first place and also I'm painfully shy, so. I just Tumbl.

But I think that the loss of a sense of community is also part and parcel of Web 2.0, from the formats of websites to their function. It was easier, in Ye Olde Days, to feel connected to other people who found your fandom online because... not everyone WAS online. There was a sense that if you loved a thing enough to find your way to a fansite, or to LJ, or whatever, that was already taking the first step towards opening yourself up to friendship. Now, with social media and with smartphones and whatever else, literally everyone is online all day long. It isn't already a little club of nerds, yk?

I don't know. The internet as a whole has changed its shape and scope so much in the last ten years, let alone the last 20, that it's a whole different arena than it used to be. I don't really have any solutions or suggestions. Maybe once we get our Patreon up and running or something we'll start a TWIFH discord that people can join and make friends on.

But all of that is to say --

tl;dr, Fandom itself is antithetical to "social media" sites, and it needs blogging sites like Tumblr or LiveJournal or hand-coded HTML fansites to BE ABLE to exist. /opinion

[requiesticat]

You don't actually ship Enjel and The Strange Boy, do you? Enjel deserves so much better 🤢

If you think that's weird, you should see my other ships!

Jokes aside, I'm not too big on that paring either, but rather fascinated by the concept of it. In my fanfic, I want to see how it would play out as part of a hypothetical scenario, if that makes sense.

The first chapter features an environment inspired by Ib (specifically Mary's level). It's meant to tie in with Enjel's realm as well as to highlight aspects of her character.

Spoilers for that game beneath the cut

Enjel is quick to put on a facade and buddy up to others if it means getting what she wants. However, to her credit, she treats Goldia with kindness, having good intentions in the beginning. In this sense she's like Mary, who befriends Ib and Garry in order to escape the art gallery, only revealing her true colors at the last moment.

Ultimately, I view Enjel as someone who would latch on to anyone who can help her further her goals. She's very curious about things, having only just been created during the events of Pocket Mirror- so someone like the Strange Boy, who has knowledge of the "real world" that Enjel desires, would be able to provide her with what she's looking for.

However, their partnership is a fractured one. Kosmich (the name I gave the demon) is too sadistic and self-absorbed to handle relationships maturely. He views living beings as pawns for him to toy with. Henri is arguably the only person who never could fully be controlled by Kosmich, given that he's shown to be alive/acting of his own will in Goldenertraum's new ending. But Enjel doesn't get that courtesy, shattering like the others once she manages to obtain Goldia's mirror.

Realistically I don't think a romantic relationship would work here. Maybe a friendship at best? They're far too broken as people for it to be healthy. Kosmich encourages Enjel to show independence, but only because it will result in her downfall. Even if they did manage to overcome their differences, somehow, they'd always be codependent toward each other. Kosmich regretting his actions, showing some form of humanity would be the only thing that could build mutual trust or understanding between them.

Additionally, he says that he's 'far older than he looks' in Enjel's cinematic. If that's true, and Kosmich has been living for centuries, then he might find it hard to relate to humans, having no concept of love beyond monitoring the actions of people he created.

We've seen a lot of depictions of the other characters that portray them in more of a sympathetic light, regarding fan creations, but never the Strange Boy. So one of my goals is to explore that potential route as well. Years ago, there was a theory going around that he possessed Henri, though Astral Shift debunked it. It would explain a lot- why he looks so similar to Goldia, and helps her in the long run despite actively trying to hinder her journey towards self-acceptance.

I ship Lisette and Goldia as well, but this is getting long, so I might do another analysis of that paring in a different post.

[deviantartdramahub]

DeviantArt - Discover The Largest Online Art Gallery and Community

What the fuck is this nonsense? frigidhermitprincess admits to having done a roleplay with Club-Dreamiverse, but then complains about another one they did together? Is she blind or something, or did she not read the comments from the past? He has already said many times that his roleplay is based on people accepting people who have autism. But she took it out of context and made it sound like a twisted creepy grooming fetish or something, indicating that she is one of those people who thinks autism is a disease, like what the fuck you piece of shit!

Being autistic does not mean you have an illness or disease. It means your brain works in a different way from other people's. It's something you're born with. Signs of autism might be noticed when you're very young or not until you're older. If you're autistic, you'll be autistic for the rest of your life.Autism is not a medical condition with treatments or a "cure." But some people need support to help them with certain things. And if that wasn't bad enough, she then goes on to attack Triagonal, claiming she is a paedophile without anything to back it up other than some rather out of context bullshit when Triagonal asked if there were any shipping options, such as how she would fucking get the fanfic she requested. To me, this must have been an actual paperback or hardcover book; otherwise, I highly doubt Tri would have even asked about the option at all! And need I remind anybody that DeviantArtDramaNow is a pissant shithole blog that fucking specialises in terrorism as well as propaganda? For example, the Co-Founder, who is a fucking drug abuser, claimed I was defending paedophiles because I debunked and proved that her shitblog was lying about Tri. And there is also the fact that the Co-Founder, aka. Morothais, is also protecting a catfish sexual predator named BirdThatWhispers, aka. AnimeCitizen, or whatever name he goes by now! Who was seen and caught forcing a 14-year-old girl into a spanking fetish after previously forcing a girl into his favourite fetish, tenical porn! Sadly, the second girl took her own life a week after she told me she would have loved to work with me on an anime one day, but then, after about a week, I never heard from her again. It was confirmed in the news that she had died by her own hand. Thanks to that rat-faced motherfucking cunt! THAT! And Tri, along with other friends of mine who are also being forced to share that fate, is why I'm so fucking enraged at those cunts over on DeviantArtDramaNow, and Bird, and Eve... They'd say otherwise because they know they've lost their grip on us!

Amen to all that. Autism is as valid as its alternatives. Someone with autism can be as much to a society as anyone else. Aristotle was said to have autism, two other examples of such people being Jordan Peterson and Satoshi Tajiri, the maker of Pokémon. Maligning it leads to the destruction of its people.

I (unlike many people, namely all entities mentioned in the linked reply chain, which everyone should be reminded only has screenshots) don't claim to know everything about what's going on, but in the spirit of the justice and peace-making done here in this Tumblr group, if Club-Dreamiverse is able to use Tumblr (or send a proxy to do the following), he is allowed to make a case for himself.

Triagonal on the other hand has been my username (still is, I kept many of my features because my departure was based on a misunderstanding) and I can at least speak for myself, starting with asking if what frigidhermitprincess said is an attack on an aspiringly merciful judge (as I am the judge of this group). To respond to her accusation towards me, I'm asexual. I didn't know it was still common for skeptics of asexuality to claim asexuals are closeted predators; I know in some places this is a hate crime (but as seem to be shown in all of these DA links, we can only hope the latter's followers would care).

She too isn't unwelcome to make her case here, where it would be viewed under a fairer microscope.

[bellmo15-blog]

I want to fucking break something right now!

I just found out this afternoon that someone I had commissioned recently was not a very good person! At all! Like, the bigoted, racist, homophobic and transphobic kind of not good person and had been posting some really awful stuff to there alternative account! I found out about this because a friend linked me to this tweet exposing the artist in question. https://x.com/singlesalt/status/1842746990783799730

And I'm sorry, but I just felt sick after learning all that. And it's put me in a pretty foul mood! As someone who has made friends with people who are both trans and non binary over the years, has friends of different nationalities and races, who's become a lot more open about being bi sexual and even went though a point in my life where I thought I might of been trans I'm not happy learning this! And I'm angry at both the artist because of all this shit that's come out about them and myself for not learning about this sooner because I've basically just found out I've given my money to someone so awful.

Oh but do you want to know what the worst part is though? Before I even commissioned them there were actually being really friendly to me via DM's on Twitter and were also following me, meaning they would of known about my sexuality before hand yet still accepted a comm from me. Do you know how that feels!? Thinking that someone's a really nice guy only to learn about what they are really like a few months later? Even more so a few weeks after you paid them to draw something for you!? I was already anxious about commissioning artists I haven't commed before because of my not good social skills but this experience has only made it worse! Because now I'm worried the next new artist I comm is going to secretly be a bigot behind closed doors.

That is why I have since blocked them and removed the pic I got from them from all my galleries. That might upset some of you who did love the pic especially with how much attention it got but I don't get these pics for attention in the first place anyway! You can have the nicest looking art style in the world but if your a terrible person behind it all I don't want to see your shit on my page and I sure as hell don't want people like that who are so open about there hate for people who are of a different sexuality or ethnicity.

I'm sorry. This whole experience has put me in an even worse head space than I already was. And I hope I never have to go though this crap again.

[paulcatania]

HOLY FUCKING SHIT, TUMBLR?!?!?!

Dear Tumblr, I am so sorry for everything. Really. I am part of the problem.

First off, I am sorry for the #PornVibesStrong moment that Twitter ROBBED you of during and prior to the Trump Administration (and who knows, perhaps now). Didn't Trump shut you down? Something happened. I can't remember. But I know that wow, what a time. This time however? This is another time. A time which feels like no time or space are we existing. Just maybe. If anyone can understand what that means of feels like to think or say. The post Covid existence being this constant alternate universe, time warp fuckery I can't quite seem to pinpoint with a term defining. Listening to "Head Over Heels" right now by Tears For Fears feels appropriate. It just has that sound to it ya know. Especially when it shows up in Donnie Darko. OMG. DOES NOT THE POST COVID WORLD FEEL LIKE DONNIE DARKO???? I know this much. Wait hold on..... Ok I had to go and quickly skim the lyrics to that song as final line of the song played... "Funny how time flies....". It really is all connected.

I haven't written in forever. Not like this. Not through the vessel that is you dearest Tumblr. I have abandoned my original venting/creative space-preferred via the digital realm. It's all beyond a bit much; to say the least. As of this exact moment, trying to rid myself of the physical foot print being my last four years. A mental health decline in late 2018 where life didn't seem one worth living, yet still trucking through creative projects and feeling connected to "the muses" whoever they are. Entities undisclosed, yet carrying me. An overpowering of dark forces bringing me to feelings of wanting to simply NOT EXIST. I wouldn't say I was suicidal, but how many steps can we possibly be before thoughts turn transcend actions. So I kind of acquired an art gallery of my friends in the earlier months of 2019 which then turns into my quite literally manifested 2nd Hand Shop which I simply called "Paul's Closet". In this post Covid world I am left with what seems to be endless items now making up my brand name switch to a less than desireable to some "2nd Hand HoE". I know right. Who doesn't want to shop there?

2nd Hand HoE is a less than acceptably managed resale shop out of my office space in my hometown of Gloucester, MA. Yup. This is where I'm at. I mean it's not THAT bad. I'm working the sidewalk/vestibule/stairwell which leads to a second-level office building consisting of office space for commercial use. It's been a long and wild 3 years being back and forth between here and my apartment in Peabody just about 15 miles away. A shared space with my ex partner. The poor dude. Sorry Alex. Haha. Yeah, No. It was a great 3 years. A wild learning experience with a friend unlike any I'd ever had. Relationships can be intense. Cohabited relationships even more so if not the right time and place. And space. Hold this space my dear lover. Ugh I'm gonna shart my jorts. Honestly. I'm so lost. Like what am I doing. WAIT, I know....... DUH. I'm reintroducing myself into the strong relationship I once had with the Tumbz. I see you Tumbzi, and I know you see #metoo.

Anyhoozers, I was all up in my feelitos, and I don't even know what the fuck made me think of it but I was like, what should I do? Just sit here anal cav deep in my iPhone swiping between apps slash doom scrolling and being envious of others' shit???? NO. Ufck That dumb stuff. I need to recreate my life. Will I this time? Well, hope the fuck so. The universe will always work out the shit it needs to but I would like to be a little bit of a commander in this simulation as well. I mean that's only fair right? Most would say so. I have discipline issues. I'm afraid to take chances. I'm afraid of what everyone thinks of me. It's ridiculous. I hate the internet, and all these things I hate and am afraid of are the things I'm supposed to connect to and through to be anything worth anything in a capitalist world right? I don't even know what I'm saying right now. I just know that I need to speak or type or write or whatever the fahhhhhk is on my mind or else the wheels will turn and spin right off the track. Or shall we say, Tumbl off course.

of course.

[inc0gnit0-m0de]

I have a venom x reader x Eddie fanfic request! The readers an artist who draws digitally and they draw a LOT of venom who finds the drawings, I’d love to see what you could come up with for his n Eddies reaction I’m such a damn venom simp (I also definitely haven’t been doing this myself 💀)

Dude ur good if you've been drawing a lot of Venom. I don't have the guts to draw the two bc I suck at drawing round objects. But, yeah, I'm willing to accept your challenge. (tbh I've been waiting for another request to come in) (credit to the original artists bc there's a lot of pics I don't know the creators of)

✨~Venom x Eddie x Digital Artist!Reader~✨

Y/N stretched in their chair after setting their stylus down. This was about the 25th time they've drawn Venom, but they can't help it, he's the coolest thing ever to Y/N. Y/N always love comics as a kid and meeting Eddie and Venom fueled their desire to become an amazing artist even more. Y/N sighed in relief as they stood up. "I should probably get some fresh air... Or at least something to eat..." They said as they walked away not caring about leaving their drawing tablet unattended. "Y/N, do you know where the- Huh, they're not here..." Eddie says to himself looking around. 'Eddie. There's a small tablet on the desk.' Venom says in Eddie's mind. "Well, duh, that's their drawing tablet. I've rarely seen them any day without trying to draw something." Eddie says out loud. 'Let's look at their art, Eddie.' Venom says as he appears out of Eddie's shoulder. "Uhhh, I don't know about this, V, they could come back any minute..." Eddie says nervously as Venom forces him to sit down. "Well, a minute is long enough to look at atleast 4, maybe 6." Venom says as he turns it on. Eddie sighs in defeat and looks at Venom. "I guess a couple of drawings would be okay to look at..." Eddie says as he goes into the tablet's photo gallery.

Eddie snorted at the sight of tiny Venom while Venom frowns. "Is this really how they think we are?" Venom says unamused at the sight of tiny him. "Well, it's kinda cute wouldn't ya think?" Eddie says as he playfully nudges Venom. Venom looks at it again and blushes slightly. "...You really mean it?" He asks as Eddie chuckles at him. "Of course, you dork!"

"We like this one, Eddie. It perfectly depicts our symbiotic relationship." Venom says in delight. Eddie blushes and scoffs. "I told you, V, saying it like that makes it sound weird..." "But, aren't we not a part of this relationship too?" Venom asks, tilting his head like a confused dog. Eddie looks at him and shrugs. "I guess, but don't be surprised if I say otherwise, Love."

Eddie and Venom both seemed to be wide eyed and blushing at this specific piece. Eddie was absolutely amazed with how perfect the anatomy was and the cool color palette, but Venom was just amazed with how handsome Y/N makes Eddie look. Eddie awkwardly clears his throat, trying to break the tension but that only seems to deepen the tension until... "Oh god, you weren't supposed to see that!" Y/N yells in panic as they slam their drawing tablet closed. Eddie and Venom flinch at Y/N's sudden entrance and Eddie awkwardly chuckles. "Sorry, Sweetheart... V got curious over you leaving your drawing tablet, so we..." "We looked at your art, you make Eddie look hotter than he really is!" Venom admits. Eddie rolls his eyes. "Geez, way to rub it in my face ,Para-" "Hey, hey, hey!!! Don't start anything you two. I just cleaned glass up from your last fight..." Y/N says as they pick up their drawing tablet as a blushing mess. "I should've came prepared, hehe... I was waiting to show you, but I've been so busy with deadlines and-!!!" Y/N gets cut off by Eddie simply kissing their lips to shut them up. (not in a mean way) Y/N tenses at the action, but soon melts into the kiss. They both pull away as Venom looks at the both of them, pouting from the lack of attention. "Aww, sorry, V, I forgot you were there for a second." Y/N says chuckling as they pat Venom's head. V purrs at the contact and lightly licks Y/N like a dog. (that's his way of showing affection) "You really have some skills, Babe, you could work for a comic company or make your own tv show with your skills!" Eddie says enthusiastically. Y/N chuckles and lightly blushes. "Thanks, Eddie, I'm still working on that." They say as they hug their two lovers in a warm embrace. "We think we're starting to like this human, Eddie." Venom says, still purring. Eddie chuckles. "Oh shut up, V."

Hi, I had to take a shower in the middle of this so I lost some ideas in the process. But, anyways!!! I hope you enjoyed this, Anon!

-𝓁𝑒𝓂🌸𝓃𝓎𝓈𝒶𝓀𝓊𝓇𝒶𝓈

[museumshift]

Museums in Media: Black Panther (2018)

While this scene was over pretty quickly, I think a lot of things can be addressed here. I'm going to come at it from a couple of different opinionated viewpoints... so be patient with me.

The Coffee

Girl. Come on. Drinks on the floor are a major no-no. Even if we museum professionals DO break our own rules, we wouldn't be seen doing it in front of museum visitors. Otherwise, how can we say "no drinks in the museum" with ANY sort of weight?

The Audacity of this Caucasity

This woman does not refute claims that she's an expert on West African culture and art (at least, that's what I'm reading from this scene). Now, I'll approach this from two different perspectives:

I think this is a very haughty attitude to have. However, one can't say it's inaccurate. So many assholes think they're the expert on something. They've often weaponized their privilege to push the narrative of the "other." If you aren't familiar with this, think of it this way – many exhibits that discuss Native Americans often refer to these tribes in the past tense. They push the narrative that they are a group that no longer exists. Um, hold up. They still exist, hombre.

This woman does not speak for all us museum professionals. I NEVER claim expertise on anything. This opens you up to critiques and criticisms. It also holds you back from learning more. If you have a very narrow mind and fail to accept new evidence, it stops being about education and starts becoming a narrative that no longer fits... anything. In reality, I think most, respectful, professionals would have attempted to open a dialogue.

In both instances, you would expect this woman to have collaborated with the Benin people to correctly identify the weapon (that later turns out to be Wakandan). If she had, you think she would have mentioned something along the lines of, "...after consulting with a Benin native and expert..." which would have made her save face. However, given how these items were obtained (#repatriate) perhaps they were only relying on the provenance given to them by non-Benin people.

Display

I'm not seeing much identification in this gallery. I *think* I see a small little sign where the masks are but that cannot be enough to accurately describe the pieces. This is supported by the curator (?) who describes the items to Killmonger. You would have thought her reaction would have been different if all this information was provided in the case itself.

Conservation

Okay, I'm hoping someone who does ACTUAL conservation and restoration of artifacts can weigh in.

We are dealing with an element that doesn't exist in reality: VIBRANIUM. In the MCU canon, vibranium is known for its extraordinary abilities to absorb, store, and release large amounts of kinetic energy. Why has no one discovered that this item is so unique? It supposedly dates from the 7th century. Now, this checks out as West Africa has been smelting and working with iron since the 6th century. Most recognize, or have heard of, the Benin Bronzes. These famous works are from the 16th and 17th centuries. While a different material, they have about the same kind of age and wear as this item... yet, this item is supposed to have nearly 1000 years on them? I want to know what the material is listed as in their database. Let's not lie, this thing is in pretty good shape. You don't get an item to look that good without constant care and upkeep. Since it is vibranium, maybe it DOESN'T need as much upkeep... but even that should raise a flag. Are y'all telling me that a museum of this size and budget hasn't used modern means to study it? In addition, we see later that the metal is in perfect condition. Nobody has discovered this with cleanings and annual condition checks? Consider me skeptical.

When they broke the vibranium head off, I died. Ugh. Why?

Repatriation

As soon as Killmonger brings up how unethically artifacts have been obtained (read: stolen) by white colonialists, this would have been the perfect time for her to go: "Yep, you are absolutely right." However, given that she's been made out to be kind of a POS, I guess her reaction is in character.

This is a fictional museum. While it was shot in Atlanta, it was supposed to be The Museum of Great Britain... which doesn't exist. Surmising that this is a stand-in for the British Museum, I can understand the major issue here. I don't work for the BM but I can't imagine that all its workers toe the company line of "we stole this shit fair and square... we've licked it, it's ours." In fact, former trustees have resigned and absolutely tore down the museum and their unwillingness to repatriate cultural items. So, it's not a matter of employees but a matter of the Board of Trustees. You can read more about it here. Suffice it to say, there was a MUCH better way to go about this.

Security

Killmonger makes the comment that they've been keeping an eye on him since the moment he walked in. Yup. I buy that. However, it was an excessive amount... especially since he wasn't actually doing anything wrong, causing any disturbances, etc., it was very *sigh* "...the racists are at it again." However, this was an important narrative tool and I get it. I also get the feeling that he either a) requested to speak with her beforehand, or b) when he got there. Either way, she should have presented herself better if meeting with a patron. Again, that fucking coffee.

Also, where was this type of security when Arthur Harrow from Moon Knight was making out with the painted wall segments?!?!?!?!!!?!??! (see my Moon Knight post for more on that).

******************************

Anyway, this was my breakdown and comments on the museum scene in Black Panther. Let me know if anything else jumped out at your OR if you are a restorer/conservationist and can expand on what I've written/my questions pertaining to the treatment of objects.

A link to a clip of the video is below:

[oivsyo]

First of all I want to tell you that your art is top tier! I love your art style, you are extremely talented and a blessing to the NejiHina fandom!

I don't know if you are accepting requests or suggestions for fan arts so feel free to ignore this. ^^ I was wondering if one day you could draw a NejiHina fan art based on this beautiful illustration from the otome game Shuuen no Virche:

https://www.otomate.jp/virche/gallery/?page=12

For some reason I think the Hyuga clan has horses (they travel by carriage when they have to go to other villages or countries on business). I imagine Neji taught Hinata how to ride after reconciling with her after their fight in the chunnin exams.

Obviously you don't have to do anything if you don't want to but if you decide to draw it will be a dream come true, (I repeat, you don't have to do anything if you don't want to).

Hi, sorry for taking so long to reply!

I never thought about such an idea for the art, I'll take note of it, maybe someday I'll draw them with horses.

Here is the screenshot of the suggested idea.

Although I had no plans to draw Neji and Hinata riding horses (to tell the truth, I just don’t know how to draw animals, as strange as it sounds), I had some thoughts on this regarding the canon. 

Naruto world is shown to be very small and cramped. Characters travel around it in a matter of hours and on their own legs. It seems to me that it greatly reduces the scale of everything that happens, and in my headcanons I imagine everything differently. For example, the land of Fire is one of the largest countries in the world of Naruto (it's canon, by the way). It seems to me that it would be cooler if it took the characters at least 2 days to get to the border with the land of Wind and about the same time to get to the village hidden in the Sand. It would make moving across the mainland an adventure in itself. 

Such an increase in the scale of the world, an increase in distances would make it possible to make the cultures of different countries more diverse and it would become more logical. Each country would have its own customs, traditions, religion, maybe even dialects. It may seem boring to some, but I like it when fantasy worlds are more thought out and individual, this allows to better feel the story.

In addition, in the canon, shinobi move exclusively on foot, which seems personally to me very wasteful and irrational, especially in an enlarged world. I don't remember if there were horses in the canon at all. But I headcanon that they exist in the world of Naruto, that shinobi also travel long distances on horses or on some other local animals. All shinobi are taught to ride in the Academy.

Since Hinata and Neji both come from an aristocratic family, it seems to me that they both should be able to ride from an early age. Moreover, I don’t think that Hinata is inferior to Neji in this skill, she is still the heiress of her clan. So who will teach whom to ride is a question =)

After thinking a little longer, it occurred to me that, for example, in the Gai team Lee and TenTen were bad at riding and this would be one more reason for the puberty and mean Neji to look down on them.

And in Hinata's team, she and Shino would be very good at riding, although the horses would not like Shino's bugs and would be worried around him. Kiba would not know how to ride a horse and wouldn't really want to learn, because he has Akamaru and he shied away from riding training rides. Perhaps he would have disliked and been afraid of horses.

[thewidowsghost]

Daughter of the Sea - Chapter 1

So, I started this on my Wattpad, and if figured I'd just put it on here! Just tell me if you want me to add you to the taglist!

Percy's POV

My name is Percy Jackson.

I am twelve years old. I'm a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York, and my sister, (Y/n), taking online schooling at home.

Am I a troubled kid?

Yeah. You could say that.

I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Manhattan—twenty-eight mental-case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff.

I know—it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were.

But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes.

Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. You wouldn't think he'd be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armor and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn't put me to sleep.

I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn't get in trouble.

See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course, I got expelled anyway. And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that...Well, you get the idea.

On this trip, I was determined to be good.

All the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, redheaded kleptomaniac girl, hitting my best friend Grover in the back of the head with chunks of peanut butter-and-ketchup sandwich.

Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated. He must've been held back several grades because he was the only sixth grader with acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was crippled. He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don't let that fool you. You should've seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria.

Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwiches that stuck in his curly brown hair, and she knew I couldn't do anything back to her because I was already on probation. The headmaster had threatened me with death by in-school suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining happened on this trip.

"I'm going to kill her," I mumble.

Grover tries to calm me down. "I'm okay. I like peanut butter -" He dodges another piece of Nancy's lunch.

"That's it." I start to get up, but Grover pulls me back to my seat.

"You're already on probation," he reminds me. "You know who'll get blamed if anything happens."

Mr. Brunner leads the museum tour.

He rides up front in his wheelchair, guiding us through the big echoey galleries, past marble statues and glass cases full of really old black-and-orange pottery.

It blows my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years.

He gathers us around a thirteen-foot-tall stone column with a big sphinx on the top, and starts telling us how it was a grave marker, a stele, for a girl about our age. He told us about the carvings on the sides. I was trying to listen to what he had to say, because it was kind of interesting, but everybody around me was talking, and every time I told them to shut up, the other teacher chaperone, Mrs. Dodds, would give me the evil eye.

Mrs. Dodds was this little math teacher from Georgia who always wore a black leather jacket, even though she was fifty years old. She looked mean enough to ride a Harley right into your locker. She had come to Yancy halfway through the year when our last math teacher had a nervous breakdown.

From her first day, Mrs. Dodds loved Nancy Bobofit and figured I was devil spawn. She would point her crooked finger at me and say, "Now, honey," real sweet, and I knew I was going to get after-school detention for a month.

One time, after she'd made me erase answers out of old math workbooks until midnight, I told Grover I didn't think Mrs. Dodds was human. He looked at me, real serious, and said, "You're absolutely right."

Mr. Brunner keeps talking about Greek funeral art.

Finally, Nancy Bobofit snickers something about the naked guy on the stele, and I turn around and say, "Will you shut up?"

It comes out louder than I meant it to.

The whole group laughs. Mr. Brunner stops his story. "Mr. Jackson," he says, "did you have a comment?"

My face is totally red, I think. I answer, "No, sir."

Mr. Brunner points to one of the pictures on the stele. "Perhaps you'll tell us what this picture represents?"

I look at the carving, and feel a flush of relief, because I actually recognize it. "That's Kronos eating his kids, right?"

"Yes," Mr. Brunner says, obviously not satisfied. "And he did this because..."

"Well..." I rack my brain to remember. (Y/n) would have known the answer. She was nuts for this kind of stuff. "Kronos was the king god, and —"

"God?" Mr. Brunner asks.

"Titan," I correct myself. "And...he didn't trust his kids, who were the gods. So, um, Kronos ate them, right? But his wife hid baby Zeus, and gave Kronos a rock to eat instead. And later, when Zeus grew up, he tricked his dad, Kronos, into barfing up his brothers and sisters—"

"Eeew!" says one of the girls behind me.

"—and so there was this big fight between the gods and the Titans," I continue, "and the gods won."

Some snickers from the group.

Behind me, Nancy Bobofit mumbles to a friend, "Like we're going to use this in real life. Like it's going to say on our job applications, 'Please explain why Kronos ate his kids.'"

"And why, Mr. Jackson," Brunner says, "to paraphrase Miss Bobofit's excellent question, does this matter in real life?"

"Busted," Grover mutters.

"Shut up," Nancy hisses, her face even brighter red than her hair.

At least Nancy got packed, too. Mr. Brunner was the only one who ever caught her saying anything wrong. He had radar ears.

I think about his question, and shrug. "I don't know, sir."

"I see." Mr. Brunner looks disappointed. "Well, half credit, Mr. Jackson. Zeus did indeed feed Kronos a mixture of mustard and wine, which made him disgorge his other five children, who, of course, being immortal gods, had been living and growing up completely undigested in the Titan's stomach. The gods defeated their father, sliced him to pieces with his own scythe, and scattered his remains in Tartarus, the darkest part of the Underworld. On that happy note, it's time for lunch. Mrs. Dodds, would you lead us back outside?"

The class drifts off, the girls holding their stomachs, the guys pushing each other around and acting like doofuses.

Grover and I were about to follow when Mr. Brunner said, "Mr. Jackson."

I knew that was coming.

I tell Grover to keep going; then I turn toward Mr. Brunner. "Sir?" Mr. Brunner had this look that wouldn't let you go—intense brown eyes that could've been a thousand years old and had seen everything. "You must learn the answer to my question," Mr. Brunner tells me.

"About the Titans?"

'"About real life. And how your studies apply to it."

"Oh."

"What you learn from me," he says, "is vitally important. I expect you to treat it as such. I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson."

I mean, sure, it was kind of cool on tournament days, when he dressed up in a suit of Roman armor and shouted: "What ho!" and challenged us, swordpoint against chalk, to run to the board and name every Greek and Roman person who had ever lived, and their mother, and what god they worshipped. But Mr. Brunner expected me to be as good as everybody else, despite the fact that I have dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and I had never made above a C– in my life. No—he didn't expect me to be as good; he expected me to be better. And I just couldn't learn all those names and facts, much less spell them correctly.

I mumble something about trying harder, while Mr. Brunner takes one long sad look at the stele, like he'd been at this girl's funeral.

He tells me to go outside and eat my lunch.

The class gathers on the front steps of the museum, where we can watch the foot traffic along Fifth Avenue.

Overhead, a huge storm is brewing, with clouds blacker than I'd ever seen over the city. I figure maybe it was global warming or something, because the weather all across New York state had been weird since Christmas. We'd had massive snow storms, flooding, wildfires from lightning strikes. I wouldn't have been surprised if this was a hurricane blowing in.

Nobody else seems to notice, though. Some of the guys are pelting pigeons with Lunchables crackers. Nancy Bobofit is trying to pickpocket something from a lady's purse, and, of course, Mrs. Dodds isn't seeing a thing.

Grover and I sit on the edge of the fountain, away from the others. We thought that maybe if we did that, everybody wouldn't know we were from that school—the school for loser freaks who couldn't make it elsewhere.

"Detention?" Grover asked.

"Nah," I said. "Not from Brunner. I just wish he'd lay off me sometimes. I mean—I'm not a genius, not like (Y/n). She seems to know everything."

Grover doesn't say anything for a while. Then, when I think he is going to give me some deep philosophical comment to make me feel better, he asks, "Can I have your apple?"

I don't have much of an appetite, so I let him take it.

I watch the stream of cabs going down Fifth Avenue, and think about my mom's apartment, only a little ways uptown from where we sit. I hadn't seen her or my sister since Christmas. I want so bad to jump in a taxi and head home. Mom and (Y/n) would hug me and be glad to see me, but Mom would be disappointed, too. She'd send me right back to Yancy, remind me that I had to try harder, even if this was my sixth school in six years and I was probably going to be kicked out again. I couldn't be able to stand that sad look she'd give me.

Mr. Brunner parked his wheelchair at the base of the handicapped ramp. He ate celery while he read a paperback novel. A red umbrella stuck up from the back of his chair, making it look like a motorized café table.

I am about to unwrap my sandwich when Nancy Bobofit appears in front of me with her ugly friends—I guess she'd gotten tired of stealing from the tourists—and dumps her half-eaten lunch in Grover's lap.

"Oops." She grins at me with her crooked teeth. Her freckles are orange, as if somebody had spray-painted her face with liquid Cheetos.

I try to stay cool. The school counselor had told me a million times, "Count to ten, get control of your temper." But I am so mad my mind went blank. A wave roars in my ears.

I don't remember touching her, but the next thing I knew, Nancy is sitting on her butt in the fountain, screaming, "Percy pushed me!"

Mrs. Dodds materialized next to us.

Some of the kids were whispering: "Did you see—"

"—the water—"

"—like it grabbed her—"

I don't know what they were talking about. All I know is that I was in trouble again.

As soon as Mrs. Dodds is sure poor little Nancy was okay, promising to get her a new shirt at the museum gift shop, etc., etc., Mrs. Dodds turns on me. There was a triumphant fire in her eyes as if I'd done something she'd been waiting for all semester. "Now, honey—"

"I know," I grumble. "A month erasing workbooks." That wasn't the right thing to say.

"Come with me," Mrs. Dodds says.

"Wait!" Grover yelps. "It was me. I pushed her."

I stare at him, stunned. I can't believe he was trying to cover for me. Mrs. Dodds scared Grover to death.

She glares at him so hard his whiskery chin trembled.

"I don't think so, Mr. Underwood," she says.

"But—"

"You—will—stay—here."

Grover looks at me desperately.

"It's okay, man," I tell him. "Thanks for trying."

"Honey," Mrs. Dodds barks at me. "Now."

Nancy Bobofit smirks. I give her my deluxe I'll-kill-you-later stare. Then I turn to face Mrs. Dodds, but she isn't there. She is standing at the museum entrance, way at the top of the steps, gesturing impatiently at me to come on.

How'd she get there so fast?

I have moments like that a lot, when my brain falls asleep or something, and the next thing I know I've missed something, as if a puzzle piece fell out of the universe and left me staring at the blank place behind it. The school counselor told me this was part of the ADHD, my brain misinterpreting things.

I wasn't so sure. I go after Mrs. Dodds.

Halfway up the steps, I glance back at Grover. He is looking pale, cutting his eyes between me and Mr. Brunner, like he wanted Mr. Brunner to notice what was going on, but Mr. Brunner is absorbed in his novel.

I look back up. Mrs. Dodds had disappeared again. She is now inside the building, at the end of the entrance hall.

Okay, I think. She's going to make me buy a new shirt for Nancy at the gift shop.

But apparently, that wasn't the plan.

I follow her deeper into the museum. When I finally catch up to her, we are back in the Greek and Roman section.

Except for us, the gallery is empty.

Mrs. Dodds stands with her arms crossed in front of a big marble frieze of the Greek gods. She is making this weird noise in her throat, like growling.

Even without the noise, I would've been nervous. It's weird being alone with a teacher, especially Mrs. Dodds. Something about the way she looked at the frieze as if she wanted to pulverize it...

"You've been giving us problems, honey," she says.

I do the safe thing. I reply, "Yes, ma'am."

She tugs on the cuffs of her leather jacket. "Did you really think you would get away with it?"

The look in her eyes is beyond mad. It was evil.

She's a teacher, I thought nervously. It's not like she's going to hurt me. I say, "I'll—I'll try harder, ma'am."

Thunder shakes the building.

"We are not fools, Percy Jackson," Mrs. Dodds said. "It was only a matter of time before we found you out. Confess, and you will suffer less pain."

I didn't know what she's talking about.

All I can think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorm room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.

"Well?" she demands.

"Ma'am, I don't..."

"Your time is up," she hisses.

Then the weirdest thing happens. Her eyes begin to glow like barbecue coals. Her fingers stretch, turning into talons. Her jacket melts into large, leathery wings. She isn't human. She is a shriveled hag with bat wings and claws and a mouth full of yellow fangs, and she was about to slice me to ribbons.

Then things got even stranger.

Mr. Brunner, who'd been out in front of the museum a minute before, wheels his chair into the doorway of the gallery, holding a pen in his hand.

"What ho, Percy!" he shouts and tosses the pen through the air.

Mrs. Dodds lunges at me.

With a yelp, I dodge and feel talons slash the air next to my ear. I snatch the ballpoint pen out of the air, but when it hits my hand, it isn;t a pen anymore. It is a sword—Mr. Brunner's bronze sword, which he always uses on tournament day.

Mrs. Dodds spins towards me with a murderous look in her eyes.

My knees are jelly. My hands are shaking so bad I almost drop the sword.

She snarl, "Die, honey!" And she flies straight at me.

Absolute terror runs through my body. I did the only thing that came naturally: I swing the sword.

The metal blade hits her shoulder and passes clean through her body as if she was made of water. Hisss!

Mrs. Dodds was a sandcastle in a power fan. She explodes into yellow powder, vaporizing on the spot, leaving nothing but the smell of sulfur and a dying screech and a chill of evil in the air, as if those two glowing red eyes are still watching me.

I'm alone.

There is a ballpoint pen in my hand.

Mr. Brunner isn't there. Nobody is there but me.

My hands are still trembling. My lunch must've been contaminated with magic mushrooms or something.

Had I imagined the whole thing?

I walk back outside.

It had started to rain.

Grover is sitting by the fountain, a museum map tented over his head. Nancy Bobofit is still standing there, soaked from her swim in the fountain, grumbling to her ugly friends. When she sees me, she says, "I hope Mrs. Kerr whipped your butt."

I answer, "Who?"

"Our teacher. Duh!"

I blink. We don't have a teacher named Mrs. Kerr. I ask Nancy what she is talking about.

She just rolls her eyes and turns away.

I ask Grover where Mrs. Dodds was.

"Who?" he asks, but he pauses first and he wouldn't look at me, so I figure he was messing with me.

"Not funny, man," I tell him. "This is serious."

Thunder booms overhead.

I see Mr. Brunner sitting under his red umbrella, reading his book as if he'd never moved.

I go over to him.

He looks up, a little distracted. "Ah, that would be my pen. Please bring your own writing utensil in the future, Mr. Jackson."

I had Mr. Brunner his pen. I hadn't even realized I was still holding it.

"Sir," I ask, "where's Mrs. Dodds?"

He stares blankly at me, "Who?"

"The other chaperone. Mrs. Dodds. The pre-algebra teacher."

He frowns and sits forward, looking mildly concerned. "Percy, there is no Mrs. Dodds on this trip. As far as I know, there has never been a Mrs. Dodds at Yancy Academy. Are you feeling all right?"

Word Count: 3159 words

So yeah, this is the first chapter of this book.

Not much (Y/n) yet, but we'll get there.

Love y'all!              Kaitlynn ❤️😍

[themainspoon]

See, this is a great example of the importance of collaboration and cross diciplinary work. While I may be able to do proper critique of the social, cultural, and ideological elements at play, I am clueless when it comes to the preservation of historically important works of art, and completely missed a genuinely good criticism of the decision made. You're completely right, maybe we shouldn't be putting historically important in bathrooms.

In fact, this made me think about the bathroom thing more, because I think it really does say so much. The quote from Kaechele, the person who is responsible for all this directly states: "We never had female toilets at Mona before, they were all unisex," meaning that their response to the lawsuit involved re-gendering the bathrooms in the gallery. This is an action that makes the space less inclusive and egalitarian, and not in a way that is at all in line with the way they were trying to make the space more discriminatory and less egalitarian.

To re-gender the bathrooms becauase of the lawsuit seems, if I may be blunt and uncharitable for a moment, petty, spiteful, and almost even childish in a way that demonstrates a clear faliure to understand why the museum had unisex bathrooms in the first place. Gender nonconformity and non-binary identity is to be accepted and welcomed, unless it gets in the way of us being exclusionary to make a point. If accomodating the queers would have the effect of making us unable to exclude men, than the queers must also be excluded.

The point I made about chivalry is one I want to return to now: "Ladies love the Lounge — a space away from men — and given what we have been through for the last several millennia, we need it. We deserve both equal rights and reparations, in the form of unequal rights, or chivalry — for at least 300 years."

I cannot get over this quote, this is a direct quote from Kaechele, and it has been looping in my mind all day, because I almost cannot belive the lack of self awareness it displays. I will not restate what I said about chivalry above, because there isn't anything more to say. But this quote really does highlight something about the lens through which Kaechele views reality and understands feminism, even though I don't think that it was intended to do so.

Kaechele's "feminism" is seemingly less interested in the question of abolishing the patriarchy, ending the unjust systems of gendered opression that exist within our society, and instead focused on asking "When will it be my turn to benefit from inequality?". The chivalry mention is perfect, because the entire concept is rooted in misogyny, but it still benefits a certain group of women who perform a privileged form of femininity. The way the patriarchy demeans women as weak pathetic creatures who need big strong men to do everything for them is warped and twisted into a tool of some misguided idea of equality, because it benefits the person talking about it.

In the quote she also portays women as a unified whole, who all share the same experiences and identities, and who all face the same opression. I should not need to explain how this directly spits in the face of black, trans, muslim, disabled, queer, and working class feminists. It ignores literal decades of intersectional theory and genuinely good, challenging, and important advancements in feminist thought in favour of a worldview that ammounts to a non-critical, easy to regurgitate, black and white "Us VS Them" narrative.

I would actually like to clarify one thing, it may have seemed like I thought the exhibit was a faliure. But after everything I just said above, I think it actually got the exact emotional responses it desired. By all accounts the exhibit was effective. However, while it may not have been "bad exhibit" on a technical level, it is an effective exhibit that communicates a deeply flawed understanding of feminism held by a person who, in my opinion, is bad at being a feminist in a lot of basic and fundamental ways.

Sorry, just saw a headline and wrote a whole thing on it and felt compelled to share it here too:

Article in question:

I understand what they're going for, but I can't help but feel that the potential problems of something like this outweigh the possible artistic impact.

Firstly, excluding men and allowing women requires creating hard, inflexible definitions of those things that force everybody into one of those two categories, and the thing is that you can't actually do that without being actively bigoted. Even beyond what you all likely already know I'm taking about, there are also lots of cultures that understand gender differently and have categories beyond just our binary. What this exhibit tries to do, to cleanly allow entry for one objective group while cleanly excluding the other objective group isn't possible, because those groups are not objective, their meanings, what they look like, and how many there are differ across time and place.

Secondly, this temporary solution treats womens bathrooms as a neutral space, which they simply aren't. There is a long history of lots of women being excluded from womens bathrooms, there are plenty of accounts of butch lesbians being forced out of womens spaces for being to masculine. Womens bathrooms are a space where the norms of dominant and privileged forms of feminity are enforced. This also ties into about the function of gendered space within Patriarchal culture.

The function of "womens spaces" is pretty straightforward, they create spaces where women can feel safe from men. But let's dwell on this idea of men as inherently threatening, what it communicates to both men and women, and what that does to actually reinforce patriarchal ideas about gender for a moment. Centeral to all of this is the idea that saftey for women can only be achieved through excluding men and masculinity, which are conceptualised as inherently violent. Positioning segregation as the solution to the reality of gendered violence is to refuse to ask men to change. When it is accepted that the only way that women can be safe is to seperate them from men, than there is no reason for men to try and challange the behaviours and social conditions that make women unsafe. Avoiding gendered violence becomes the responsibility of the group that is overwhelming victimised by said violence.

The patriarchy will never be overturned if people are too afraid to demand that women be safe around men, that a woman can walk into a bar filled with unfamiliar men and still be completely safe. If we accept that women are allowed saftey and equality only in spaces from which men are excluded, than men never have to learn to become safe, they never have to reflect and change, they remain unchallenged and unaware that they actually need to change, and the same sexist patters of behaviour continue. If men cannot change, if they are in fact somehow inherently violent and predatory, than the patriarchy is forever, women can never become truly equal, and feminism becomes a failed experiment. I do not believe that the patriarchy is forever, I do not believe that feminism is pointless, and if you don't either, than we need to understand that the only way to make possitive change is to challenge the status quo, not try to work out how to live safely within it.

It is also worth discussing the power that women's fear has. This is where I get to a critique that others have communicated poorly (and possibly in bad faith). This work is clearly one of a very privileged woman. This entire concept reeks of psudo-radical white liberal feminism. Back in feminism's second wave one of the main radical ideas was that of "lesbian seperatism", the idea that women needed to liberate themselves from men (This idea and the history surrounding it is going to be covered only breifly, this will not be in depth, this is perhaps too simplified). This idea collapsed, because of primarily black feminists, who wrote not only about the discrimination they faced as women, but also as non-white people, and the specific forms of bigotry faced by non-white women. They found that in their fight for racial equality they had more in common with black men than they did with the sometimes actively racist white feminists who were calling for seperatism. The idea of seperatism only made sense for middle to upper class white women for whom patriarchy was the only form of discrimination worth challenging. White women benefit from white supremacy, and in fact patriarchal ideas surrounding gender are important in white supremacist ideology (and many other bigoted ideologies).

If we accept that women can only find saftey in segregation, than women are cast in our discourse as inhabiting the position of a sort of weak, delicate prey animal that needs to be protected from predators. Not only does this justify traping women within the household and perpetuating the idea that they need a strong stoic male protector, it also contributes to a lot of bigoted narratives. In White Supremacy it is the job of the white man to protect white woman from the "impure" non-whites, and the fear of the white woman becomes a justification for the violent opression of non-white peoples. In the past homophobic portrayals of lesbians treated them as sinful predators, who wanted to corrupt "good, god-fearing straight women" to the ways of homosexuality. Modern day transphobia relies on portraying cis women as prey for trans women, who are percived as predators who want to invade their spaces, and it sees young girls as vulnerable to being "corrupted" by the idea that they can become men if they so choose (which is seen to somehow permenantly damage them and "tarnish" their "purity"). When Bisexuality began to enter the public eye, bi men (specifically black bi men) were demonised as being "aids spectres for straight women", and were falsely blamed for aids being transmitted to heterosexual populations. Throughout history the idea that women are vulnerable and in need of protection has consistantly informed bigotry. Demanding that women can be safe around men, and that they can be seen as strong and independent as opposed to weak and vulnerable is not just a feminist cause, it is one important for doing a way with a lot of social injustice.

Chivalry, which the creator of the exhibit says is needed for about 300 years in order to make up for patriarchal opression, is a form of benevolent sexism. It treats women nicely, but it does so becuase it views them as weak, delicate lessers. I do not know the creator of this exhibit, I do not know enough about them to make personal judgements of their character. However, I can judge and critique this artwork as a feminist statement. That is in fact what I just did, it should be clear that I do not think it is very good. This exhibit stands for the "feminism" of only the most privileged women, of those who haven't moved beyond the thinking of the second wave, of those who have refused to engage with modern feminist theory and discourse that would actually meaningfully challange them.

To overcome patriarchy we must demand that women be safe with men, not safe from them. If you want to make a meaningful feminist statement aimed at confronting men through an exhibit, do not "challenge" men by excluding them and saying "well this is what you did to us so suck shit". Instead, demand that they change, confront them in ways that cause reflection, make them uncomfortable about things they can do something about. This exhibit just vomits forth the same narratives they already get: "the only way for women to be safe is to exclude you, you are not expected to change", what if instead we were to meaningfully ask for change and reflection, if we were to tell them what they needed to do to make the world a better place, would that not be more constructive?

[capricornwriter5]

You are the one - Chapter 8

Pairing: Bang Chan x female OC; Lee Know x female OC

Genre: au (high shool, college), love triangle, fluff, angst, smut, from friends to lovers. Warning: soft drugs

Words: 6k

Summary: Bang Chan and Jasmine have been best friends for as long as they can remember. With little time to finish high school, they both begin to develop romantic feelings. However, family situations and communication issues force them to move away. Once in college, they decide to try to regain the friendship they had. As Bang Chan sees the opportunity to finally be with the girl he has always loved, his friend Lee Know, who had been studying in England, returns home and the connection he develops with Jasmine is undeniable. Can the chemistry and attraction with Lee Know outweigh a tender first love and memories of years of friendship between Bang Chan and Jasmine?

Disclaimer: I named the character Jasmine (Minnie for Chan 🥰) because I love that name. Besides, it’s easier if we want to see Chan saying cute names (it’s better than just Y/N, I think) but you can totally picture yourselves in the story, that’s the idea. <3

Chapter 8 - Two friends, one art gallery

In the following weeks, Jasmine's father kept trying to talk with his daughter; however, the only time he managed to convince her to listen for a couple of minutes was the same night that Jaz kissed Chan for the last time. The conversation turned into such a heated discussion that it ended up making Jasmine doubt whether or not she would continue with her plans to enter college. She was seriously worried about her mother, if the girl was barely able to handle the situation with her father's new family, she was sure that her mother could not do it alone.

Fortunately, things were going well with Chan, not like before, of course, as there was still a lot to work on between the two. There were days when the girl preferred to be alone and Chan learned to respect and accept that.

"So are you definitely over?" Han asked one night when he, Jasmine, Changbin, and Chan were having a drink. Jasmine had gone to bring something to eat and Chan's gaze upon seeing her walk away did not go unnoticed by his friends.

"Definitely," Chan replied sighing.

"At least you're friends again," Changbin commented. "It could be worse, I thought you two would never speak to each other again."

Even though some time had passed, it was still a sensitive topic for the couple, so Bang Chan changed it as quickly as he could. "Lee Know called me. He asked when we would visit him."

"Tell him we can't. My parents don't want to pay for the trip and Changbin is grounded, he won't have any money for the following year. His parents found his weed."

Jasmine heard the last part as she was sitting back with them. For the first time in a long time they heard her laughing naturally. The girl couldn't help but make fun of how clumsy Changbin was, who of course had thrown quite a tantrum ordering her to keep quiet.

"You do realize that it was OUR weed, right? If I fall, all of you come with me, no more party for anyone."

"You're not the only dealer, muscles. We all know more people, and I assure you they have better hiding places than yours."

"It wasn't my fault, that wasn't even my place, I had changed to clean and..."

"You don't clean, you can't even tell the difference between a broom and a mop."

"Hey! Jasmine, you're being mean today. No one is going to like you, you're not going to have any more friends and you're going to be eternally chained to us. Also, stop calling me muscles, I hate it." Changbin's ears were so red that Han took a picture and sent it to Hyunjin so he could make a sticker of him.

"Chris and Han are not so bad. Now, you are a whole topic, Bin. But don't worry, we can fix you. Especially now that you're training a lot, you're getting husky and kind of hot." Jasmine's comment made Chan and Han laugh heartily, as they knew that every time Jasmine said things like that, Changbin would get angry at how embarrassed he felt.

Naturally, Changbin made a whole scene, one that included him sitting alone at another table. The only way for Jasmine to bring him back was to buy him more food and promise him she'll never tease him again with the size of his arms. Everybody on the table knew that was a lie.

"What were you talking about before Bin's circus?"

"Lee Know invited us to visit him in England," Chan replied.

"Lee Know? I think I recall his name."

"We met him during the soccer championship in London. We were there for almost two months." Once Han explained that Jasmine remembered several calls with Chan while he was there and he mentioned someone called Lee Know. "But unlike Chan, we're not rich, and Changbin's grounded."

"It seems that it's someone else who's eternally chained to me." Jasmine teased Changbin, who looked at her in the worst way. "Will you go, Chris?"

"I'd like to, but I don't have time, graduation is around the corner and when we go on vacation we have to decide which apartments to rent."

Contrary to Chan's smile, Jasmine forced hers and drank from her beer in order to avoid making eye contact.

*****

Prom night came and despite how much Jasmine begged her mother not to make her go, she ended up attending. Jaz was doing it exclusively for her, as the lady was really excited to see her only daughter graduate from high school.

"My life, you look amazing, you really are a princess!" She said kissing her forehead. "Come on, don't make that face, you and Chan are the best students of your class, you deserve this party more than anyone. You won't have another moment like this, sweetie."

Jasmine had talked numerous times about that moment with her parents, especially her father. Hence, walking without him was the cruelest reminder for the girl that her family was totally destroyed. Just the night before, Chan visited her and despite not being completely sincere about what she was feeling, he had understood that she didn't even want to be there. However, once again, Jasmine ignored what she was really feeling and smiled for her mother.

After walking in with her mother and posing for the photographs, Jaz looked for her place at their table, where Chan and his parents were waiting for her.

While the boy's parents talked with Jasmine's mother, he took the opportunity to get closer to his friend. "Are you okay?"

"No, I'm not okay Chris, I don't want to be here. I hate this, I didn't want to tread, I don't want to dance, I don't want to hear mom saying dad had an emergency trip instead of saying he's in his damn new house with the woman he fucked while mom and I were waiting for him." She said too upset and sipping both her wine and her best friend's.

"Minnie..."

"Sorry, I'm sorry. It's just that this is all bullshit and I can't bear to see mom living a lie any longer. This time it's not even a lie made by dad, it's made by her." The girl tried to get up for another drink, but her dress had gotten stuck under the table, making it impossible for her to move. "Stupid dance, stupid dress!"

Due to her mother's depression, Jasmine had learned to hide what she felt so that the woman would not see her depressed, but that night the frustration was taking over Jaz and everything was letting it out in the dress. She was pulling the fabric as her life depended on getting it out. Meanwhile, with the tenderness and patience that characterized him, Chan bent down, moved the chair, released her friend's dress, and took her hands to calm her down.

"If you want, we can go after dinner. I can go with you outside if you don't want to dance and regarding the dress, it fits you very well, it'd be a shame if you tear it up." He said very softly but with the sweetest smile.

"You have to dance with your mom." She responded by sighing and taking some water to calm herself. "Thank you, the last thing I need is to leave this place with my dress torn."

"You better have brought nice underwear, otherwise, it would be a terrible humiliation from which even I won't be able to save you." He said making her laugh.

Just before the moment in which the students would dance with their parents, Jasmine had escaped to the bathroom to avoid being there. What she did not consider was the possibility of a delay. Unfortunately for her, when she returned, all her classmates were just starting to dance. The girl tried to be as unnoticeable as possible until she reached her table, where she prayed that her mother would not insist that she dance.

"Honey, it's a shame your dad couldn't be here today, but if you want to dance..." Chan's father was about to offer his hand, but Jasmine shook her head.

"Jasmine! Don't be ungrateful, please." Her mother said.

"Mom, I don't want to dance. Sir, I appreciate your offer, but the truth is that I don't know how to dance, much less this type of music, so I'd better stay here."

Chan's father nodded but his mother kept insisting and Jasmine no longer knew how else to say she didn't want to without being rude. It was already too hard to handle for Jaz to have to watch all her classmates dancing with their fathers for her mother to keep insisting on the same topic. Just when things seemed to get no worse, she glanced toward the door and saw her father approaching. She had asked her mother to tell him to not go that night; however, there he was, walking directly to her as if he did not have enough damage.

From where Chan was dancing with his mother he saw what was happening. He saw the man approaching the table. He couldn't believe that he had dared to do something like that without even considering what it might do to his daughter.

"I already told you I don't want to," Jasmine repeated wishing that the earth would swallow her since her father kept offering her his hand standing in front of her and there were already several people seeing them.

"Princess..."

"Don't call me that way!" The latter was said a little louder than she had planned and had earned more eyes to focus on them.

"Jasmine, dear."

Seeing that even her mother insisted that she dance with her father, Jasmine felt that she was on the edge, she wanted to yell at everyone and tell them to leave her alone, but someone else took her hand and looking up, she saw her best friend smiling at her and waiting for her.

"Shall we dance, Minnie?" Chan had stopped dancing with his mother the moment he saw what was happening and tried to get to the table as soon as possible.

Jasmine's grateful gaze said it all.

The room was full of students dancing with their parents; therefore, having in the middle of the crowd a young couple was definitely something that stood out that night. Little by little, both students and parents turned their attention to Chan and Jaz, but for them, there was no one else, it was exactly the same as when they went to the concert.

Being considerably shorter than Chan, Jasmine could hear his heartbeat totally out of control. The girl let herself smile that night, a smile that came from the deepest part of her soul, for Bang Chan's heart was one of the few things she could continue to trust. It was the only thing that did not lie to her, and hearing its fast pace made it exceptionally clear for Jasmine how much he loved her.

After they had ended their relationship, Jasmine and Chan had been very careful with physical contact, they had tried to keep their distance, not sleep together again, and avoid hugging as much as possible, at least while trying to get back to normal. However, they made an exception for that night. Neither of them noticed that the photographer took several shots of the two of them dancing, and they wouldn't see those pictures for a long time.

Just as Chan's hands were moving away from her body when the song ended, so the sparkle in Jasmine's eyes was fading, as she knew she would have to return to the table where her parents were waiting for her. Discomfort and anxiety awaited her along with false smiles from her mother pretending that everything was fine, as well as her father's words, which she did not want to hear.

"We don't have to go back," Chan said behind her and made her focus on him again, as Jasmine had not moved her gaze from the table where her parents were.

"Your parents are waiting for you."

"I've waited for them for years and they haven't been there, you have." He said with a sad smile.

Not caring that everyone was looking at them and that they were again going to be the topic of conversation for the whole school, Jasmine approached Chan, and standing on tiptoe, she leaned on her friend's broad shoulders so she could reach his cheek and kiss him. "Thank you Chris, I adore you." She said in his ear before leaving the room together.

Despite how upset their parents were that their kids had disappeared the night of their graduation, neither Jasmine nor Chan cared what they were told. What happened that night was what they needed to be able to have beautiful memories from a night that did not promise anything good, especially for Jasmine.

*****

It hadn't been more than a week since the prom when Changbin, Han, and Chan were hanging on Jasmine's house. They were having a great time playing some boards in the garden while drinking some beers. The group was just waiting for Hyunjin when things started to spiral out of control. Jasmine's mother came home to collect her hospital card and took the opportunity to tell her daughter something that the girl had tried to avoid. Her sister had been born, something that Jasmine already knew. What she ignored was that the baby had been hospitalized due to respiratory complications.

Jasmine's mother was trying to tell her daughter what's going on, at least so she would know. However, the girl's reaction was something totally new for her mother, as the girl yelled at her that she did not want to know absolutely anything about her father or his new life, she even got upset with her mother for continuing to try to talk about it.

Even though Jasmine and her mother were arguing on the second floor, her friends could listen to everything from the garden.

"Should we do something?" Changbin asked very nervous and looking in all directions, as if waiting for something terrible to happen.

"What are we supposed to do, Changbin? Do you want us to go upstairs and give Jaz some water?" Han asked.

"What if we tell her that Hyunjin is already here? At least they would stop arguing."

"Of course, and when she comes down and sees that he is not here, we tell her that he disappeared by magic."

"Chan, do something, it's not fair, she was just fine. Her parents keep fucking everything." Changbin said pushing him but just as Chan got up from his chair, Jasmine came back and apologized for what they had heard.

"I'm so sorry about that, guys."

"Don't worry, we all have shitty parents." Han smiled as Hyunjin was already walking to them with some basket of food.

Hyunjin's comments about Changbin's designer jacket broke the tension and soon, the group had recovered the sense of humor. According to Han, Changbin, and Hyunjin's eyes, their friend was a bit serious, but nothing to worry about considering the discussion with her mother. However, to Chan, who could read Jaz better than the palm of his hand, it was evident that she was not fine.

One of the reasons why Bang Chan had fallen in love with Jasmine was because no matter what was happening or where they were, the girl always made him laugh, she can also make him talk for hours about anything. Moreover, he loved how easy it was for Jasmine to make any person feel comfortable with her, Jaz had always something nice or funny to say. Trust her was the easiest thing to do since the girl was the most honest person anyone could meet. Bang Chan had all his life of knowing her and it was not until all the family problems started that he began to see Jaz not being totally honest with how she felt. In fact, if there was one thing that she had no talent for, it was pretending to be or feel something alien to reality. Chan himself had asked her to have a filter so she could control her comments or facial expressions, but the truth was that the boy had come to cry with laughter more than once over Jasmine's face when she didn't like something, or when he heard her scolding Changbin and Han for having absurd ideas. Among all the things he loved from her, was that any scolding coming from Jaz always ended in a loving hug or a kiss on the forehead, even Changbin and Han were used to that.

Throughout his whole life, Chan had seen her looking for the bright side of things; but now she rarely laughed or smile honestly, she hardly joked with her friends, and she did not hug them anymore. She had just stopped expressing her feelings.

Feeling guilty and concerned for that change in Jaz, Bang Chan had tried to talk to her several times, and that day was not the exception. He stayed when the rest of the group returned to their houses. Although Chan tried to avoid the baby's topic, it was inevitable that it would come up.

"This conversation is pointless, Chris, dad's happy with his new family, that's not going to change. I don't want to meet her, so it doesn't really matter how I feel."

"But it's not good that you don't talk about it either, Minnie, you shouldn't be dragging something like that for so long."

"I know how to deal with this, don't worry."

"Well, if you don't want to talk about that, we can think about what we'll do tomorrow. There are several apartments that we can go to see, some are closer to campus, but their rent is higher."

"What are you talking about?"

"Minnie, we're almost in the middle of February, we have barely a month to decide where we'll live. I was afraid that the only options we have left will be the cheapest or the most expensive apartments, that's never good. But I have good news, I found some options."

Chan sat next to her best friend, and taking his cell phone, he looked for the bookmarks he had created of some apartments that Jaz might like.

"Can you believe it? I finally managed to organize things as you always do!" He said too proud of himself.

Being friends for so many years, Jaz and Chan had already made little trips together and she always organized everything, but Chan saw her during the process and had tried to do the same with the apartments. He'd spent hours organizing all the options, even jotting down the features they might and might not like. He had also made tables where they could compare the expenses they would have depending on which apartment they chose.

However, while Chan showed her everything he had done, Jasmine's father kept writing to her.

Between the comments of Chan and her father insisting that she be part of their new family, the girl felt that the air was beginning to fail. It hadn't been a good day, she didn't usually argue with her mother, what had happened in the afternoon had Jasmine's nerves at their highest point. At that moment, what little emotional stability the girl had could be shattered at any moment. She had fought for it not to happen, she had smoked every time she felt her emotions get out of control, but that day everything overwhelmed her. Jasmine hadn't realized how affected she was until that day, but the truth was that she was terrified of facing everything she felt and beyond that, the girl was too proud and organized with her life to accept that she needed help. Chan was the first to be there offering it to her, but while from time to time Jasmine accepted it, other times it was impossible for him to communicate with the girl.

"So which one do you want to start with tomorrow?"

"Whichever you want, Chris, it doesn't matter," She answered lifting her shoulders.

It cost a lot for something to offend Bang Chan, the boy had more patience than anyone else, but that night, Jaz got it. He had spent hours choosing the apartment for Jasmine, he hadn't even paid attention to his options, so receiving such an uninterested response bothered the hell out of him.

"Minnie, I'd appreciate it if you would say something else and not be so indifferent, if you don't tell me what you like and what you don't, tomorrow we're going to waste a lot of time."

"Don't worry about my apartment, Chris, go see your options, I can go later."

"Jasmine, the idea is that we go together and choose together."

"Anyway, I don't even think I can afford the rent for an apartment right now."

"That's precisely why I'm showing you the prices but you are not paying attention to me. Plus, you won an incredible scholarship. "

"It doesn't cover everything, there are many things to pay, not only where I live, my major involves a lot of material. Maybe I should think of something else to study or... "

"What are you saying? You are the most talented person I know, you will be the best designer ever! "

"I have not been able to draw anything for months."

"Because many things are happening around you and you have not been able to find time for yourself, but when you leave all this behind, you'll go back to drawing as before. But for that to happen, you need to motivate yourself a bit, Minnie." Chan tried to ignore Jasmine's earlier comment and again mentioned the apartments to her, but the girl shook her head negatively.

"I can't afford them, Chris. I can't ask mom for money either, she's covering all the household expenses by herself."

"Your dad has been trying to get close to you for months, to apologize. Maybe if you let him talk you could..."

"I'm not going to talk to him! How can YOU suggest something like that?"

"Are you going to ignore him your whole life? He made a mistake, but you can't punish him forever, that hurts you more than him."

"Even if I talk to him, I won't accept his money. And it's not out of pride." Jasmine anticipated what Chan would say to her because that was not really what it was about. "Mom says that the baby is not well, she is hospitalized and that implies a lot of money."

The last thing Jasmine wanted was to show concern for her sister, or at least show a bit of vulnerability, but with Chan, it was very difficult to hide who she really was. Naturally, having to accept something like that out loud added more negative feelings in Jasmine, who got up to open the last beer that was left of the night, practically all of them had been drunk by herself. When she was about to remove the cap from the can, she felt Chan's hand on her back, but it made her so irritated that she jerked around, not wanting anyone to feel sorry for her. Jasmine was so blinded that she did not think clearly, her best friend could never feel anything like that, he only wanted to help her.

"You haven't eaten well today, if you keep drinking that you're going to get sick." He said trying to take the can, but the girl stepped forward and took the first drink. Chan could only sigh and try to ignore it. "Minnie, I can help you pay for the apartment, that's not a problem."

"I'm not going to accept something like that. It's your money, your major is also expensive and..."

"Trust me, I can pay the rent and take care of my things."

"No"

"Why is it so difficult for you to accept help, Jasmine? Sometimes you are impossible, stop being so proud."

"It's not about that."

"So let's live together, let's split the rent for the apartment. I promise not to bother you, we can find a big place, you won't even feel like I'm there if what you want is to have your space."

"Chris, this doesn't make sense, we're not going to live together."

"So what solution do you find? Because all you do is say no to everything I propose."

"I won't study this year, I'll work to save and be able to pay for things myself."

"Are you serious?" He asked with a wry laugh. "Are you going to postpone all your plans because your damn pride won't let you accept my help?"

"No, I'm not doing it out of pride, I already told you! I also can't just walk away and leave mom alone with all the problems out there. Besides, I don't have to give you explanations."

"You're not doing it for your mom and you know it!"

"You don't know shit about me, Bang Chan!"

"No Jasmine, you're right, I don't know shit about you! Tell me what you really want to do so I don't stand here like an idiot."

"I don't want to study, I don't want to go to college yet."

Chan stared at her silently for a few seconds, and when he felt like he could speak without fussing, he did. "Jasmine, this is something we've planned since we were kids. Why didn't you tell me before that you had changed your mind? This doesn't just involve you."

"Don't complain to me for not saying things on time when you didn't say it when you were my boyfriend. Bang Chan. You really are not an authority on this matter."

"Wow! You can't be telling me this..."

Chan took his things and was about to leave, but as he was leaving Jaz's garden, his emotions overcame him and he returned furiously. She had never seen her friend like that before or spoken to her in that tone.

"Don't ever make me believe you forgave me when you really didn't. Be a little more considerate and honest, tell me now if every time you and I have a misunderstanding you are going to keep throwing my mistake in my face."

"Fuck it, Chris! You have no right to claim anything from me."

"Yes, Jasmine, fuck it! You're right, I don't know anything about you, and I'm convinced that you don't want me to know either, so I leave you alone. Do what you want."

The last thing Jasmine heard was the knock on the gate when Bang Chan closed. That same night, Chan wrote to Lee Know to say that he would accept his invitation and visit him soon.

*****

The next day Chan had already bought his flight ticket to England, he still did not know when he would return, but he was sure that he needed to clear his mind of everything that was happening at home.

Since he arrived in London, Lee Know hosted him in a splendid way, welcoming him into his home, showing him around the city, and introducing him to several of his friends. Lee Minho, known to his Korean friends as Lee Know, had lived practically his entire life in England as his grandparents' business had prospered. They had started a few coffee shops in Korea and Japan, but it was now quite a successful chain and when Lee Know's father met his wife, they had decided to move to England and take over opening more coffee shops.

As for the type of person Minho was, his characteristics could not be more different than Bang Chan's. While the Australian boy had a lot of patience and avoided discussions, Lee Know was very direct, rather, too much. His tolerance was very limited and he was quite outgoing. While Bang Chan had been dreaming of having a relationship with Jasmine, Leeknow was jumping from one casual relationship to another.

Truth be told, they were so different that it was funny to see them interacting with each other, especially since Lee Know used to tease Chan for being so idealistic, while Chan always advised him to be less ironic and sarcastic about everything. Despite being such opposites, they had become very close friends and of all the people Lee Know knew who lived in Korea, it was Chan that he had the best relationship with.

Clubbing with Lee Know was a whole experience considering how ridiculously handsome he was. It was not only his perfectly made face and stunning body proportions but also his cold attitude which make any girl fall for him. His appearance was his lucky charm, for Lee Know was definitely not the type of person who took an interest in the life of someone other than his close group of friends. Therefore, if he would need to start a conversation with a girl in which he truly needed to participate, it would be a disaster.

The first night Lee Know took his friend to a party and in a matter of seconds, they had numerous beautiful girls surrounding them. Surprisingly for Lee Know, it was just him who enjoyed the female company.

Next day, while they were having breakfast...

"I just don't get it, man. You were like a girl magnet without even trying it. Don't tell me that you have a girlfriend." Lee Know asked interrupting the thoughts of his friend, who had been looking at his cell phone wondering if he should write to Jaz or not.

"I did, but things didn't work out and we didn't break up in the best way."

"And yet you're on the other side of the world thinking of her."

"She's not someone you can easily forget about." He responded by lifting his shoulders and putting the cell phone back.

"It'd be if you really wanted to. Turn the page, find someone else, it shouldn't be that difficult for you. You already saw it."

"What's your secret to being so practical, huh?"

"What is yours to be so sentimental?"

"Don't get me started." Bang Chan replied shaking his head negatively. "We better talk about something else. Have you decided what you will do with your university? "

"The original plan was to go to Korea and start there, but I'll be able to do it until the second year."

"So are you moving to Korea? That's great, bro!" Chan said smiling at him.

"Yes, I will study photography while I help my grandparents with the coffee shops they have there. To tell the truth, I don't think they need much help, they have a very responsible girl working with them for many years."

"You'll continue with the family business while I try to run away."

"What are you surprised about? We have never had anything in common." He said laughing.

"Thank you for having me, I needed to get out of the house quickly or I would go crazy."

"You knew you could come whenever you wanted, but getting you out of Korea was impossible. I don't know what or who kept you so busy, Changbin and Han said that a girl. Although if you are single now and things are as complicated as you say, why not stay here longer? You could even study your first year of university here and come back to Korea with me later."

Bang Chan had not considered such an option, not only because of the scholarship he had fought so hard for, but because all his life he was in Korea, Jasmine was there, but the way things were between them now, he didn't even know if they would study together.

"You told me that your parents don't want you to study architecture, but they insisted on studying abroad, so if you think about it, you are fulfilling some of what they want. You come from a rich family, covering your studies here won't be a problem for you."

"It's not that simple, Lee Know."

"What ties you to Korea? You don't see your parents, you don't have a girlfriend, you can make new friends and find a new girlfriend. Think about it."

"I already told you... Hey, is it normal for your cats to do that?"

Lee Know lost the thread of the conversation when he saw that two of his cats were stuck inside some kind of fancy Greek urns. The only time Bang Chan had seen Leeknow's soft and sentimental side was when he heard him talking about his three cats or his grandparents.

Later that night, Bang Chan considered Lee Know's proposal, after all, he was right, there was nothing that would make him stay in Korea. Jasmine had decided to change her life plans without even consulting him. He liked England, he would be away from his parents, away from all his problems.

However, to accept Lee Know's proposal would be to waste so many years of effort to obtain that scholarship and he would be dependent on his parents again. Not considering that he and Jaz would become history. There were many things the boy had to consider.

*****

The next day, Lee Know took Bang Chan to see one of his favorite places, an art gallery famous for its photographic collections. What most captivated Chan were the photographs of ancient buildings. Each one elicited a different feeling in him, emotions that he felt when he designed, or when Jasmine helped him bring the sketches he drew into real life.

After appreciating the photographs of buildings, Chan looked for Lee Know in another of the rooms, but saw something that caught his attention so powerfully, that the boy's jaw dropped. It was the collection of an English artist who had drawn various pictures related to childhood. There were several of them, but the first dusted off memories that led Chan back to when he and Jasmine were just children.

They used to go to art classes together and the first assignment they were given was to work in pairs and draw something that they related to their partner. The following week, Jasmine presented the class with a drawing of an extremely cuddly koala. Chan laughed as he remembered his friend saying why she thought of koalas when she saw her best friend. She had said that, in addition to sharing the country of origin, they were just as adorable as Chan, that they loved sleeping as much as he did, that they ate as much as her best friend, and that, despite never having hugged a koala, she was sure that it would feel the same as hugging the boy. That day, Chan's ears lasted red until he went to sleep.

When it came to him to present what he had drawn, his nerves made him throw the paper away several times until he finally showed a beautiful doll that he had seen on a trip with his parents some time ago. Despite being just a child, Chan represented quite well the delicate features of the doll's face, especially the eyes, which were just as almond as Jasmine's, they even had the same stunning honey color. He had drawn the freckles that both the doll and his friend had on their noses and had paid special attention to accurately show the long wavy black hair. The similarity between the two was so obvious that Chan had practically nothing to explain. Jasmine had broken the silence because from where she was sitting she was applauding her friend excitedly and proudly.

Now, years later, Bang Chan found that doll again. The first painting in front of him was a toy box, but the same doll that he had drawn as a child stood out among all of them. The impression that this made on Chan led him to remain static looking at the drawing until he came back to reality when Leeknow found it and invited him to see with him a collection of photographs of a dance group. Despite having such a good time admiring the works of art, so long without eating or drinking made them stop to think about what to do.

"Do you want to go to one of my family's cafeterias? Now that I think about it, you've never been to one, right? Ah, Bang Chan, you are a very bad friend, come on." He said passing his arm over his friend's shoulders.

The cafeteria was more welcoming than Chan expected, Leeknow said it was the hallmark of his grandparents and it was one of the reasons why it was successful, as many of the customers who kept going said they felt at home.

"It must be amazing to have a business that you like and with which you are doing well. You cook well, you could expand this business. I have to look for work soon, I can't depend on my parents any longer."

"Now that you say, that ... I really don't want to dedicate myself only to the family business, I would like something different, something related to art."

"Photography?"

"Photography could be the beginning. Just imagine having your own art gallery where you can exhibit what you like, or what you do. You draw, you can understand me."

"An art gallery? It could turn out well, but we would have to think of a place and that is a lot of money, in addition to the sponsors that we don't have. "

"We could start with something virtual, art sells a lot if you know how to position yourself."

Lee Know and Bang Chan ended up closing the cafeteria very late, as they were discussing ideas of what they could do to start a different business than their families by doing something that they both liked. The following days, they visited various art galleries and chatted with some Leeknow acquaintances in England who were dedicated to different types of art. This is how they began to shape an idea that could mean a before and after in their lives.

To be continued… 🐺 ✮Prev. Chapter

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