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cimeret · 2 years ago

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Sooo ... the thought that Obi-Wan and Dooku never met before ATOC keeps haunting me.

Honestly, in-universe it never really made sense to me. Even less so after watching TOTJ and seeing how Dooku actually cared about Qui-Gon and expressed interest in meeting Obi-Wan. It's another Anakin/Grievous situation except all the characters involved should have an active interest in making it happen. First, Qui-Gon should have introduced them to each other, second, both Dooku and Obi-Wan should have been curious to meet the other, third, while the Temple is large, how unlikely is it that they didn't run into each other once in a hallway somewhere, in the courtyard, at some official event? (It's common knowledge that, normally, you can't take two steps in the galaxy without running into some old acquaintance.) But we have Dooku's statement from AOTC and there's really no way to soft-retcon "our paths have never crossed before".

So I tried to come up with reasons that might have prevented Obi-Wan and Dooku from meeting. I guess these are more headcanons than a coherent theory, but sometimes I like to play around with ideas. (Also, this got really long and I'm not sorry)

As a Jedi, Dooku was hyper-focused on his private mission against systemic injustice and the Senate for most of his time. He was away from the Temple a lot, with his mind always on his cause, and meeting young Obi-Wan just wasn't a priority. It's not that he didn't have time or didn't care at all, it just comes down to what he chose to devote his time to. Noble cause > interpersonal relationships. TOTJ also paints him as much more of an antisocial loner than I had imagined him to be in his Jedi days. So when he was in the Temple, he probably preferred to keep to himself, so a chance meeting with Obi-Wan would be unlikely. He left the Order in 42 BBY when Obi-Wan was 15, which would mean that for 2 years Dooku seemed to have better things to do than get to know Obi-Wan. Sad. How much contact he had with the Order after he left, and when, is not entirely clear; he still visited regularly, but apparently remained less in communication with Qui-Gon.

After he started aligning himself with Sidious, he may have distanced himself even more from Qui-Gon. Up till TPM, he was still self-aware enough to see that he was on a dark & dangerous path and I think he might have been torn between wishing Qui-Gon would join him or not. Although he often said that he would have liked Qui-Gon by his side (like in AOTC to Obi-Wan; in the TOTJ episode "The Sith Lord" to Sidious), some things like the long, final look he gives Qui-Gon in their farewell scene in "The Sith Lord" make me think he was, in truth, rather conflicted. Part of him may have wished to keep the whole Sith business away from Qui-Gon, to protect him (and, by extension, Obi-Wan) from Sidious and maybe even from himself. By this point, he already killed his best friend Sifo-Dyas, the clone army deal is done by now ... there is no going back for him. So it could just as easily be the other way around: That he's distancing himself because he knows full well that his relationship with Qui-Gon is a weakness. Thus, his "I should like to meet him someday" might actually be more of an "I wish I could have met him". Not so much a desire, but more like regret. Because part of him knows it's not going to happen, not anymore (well, or at least not in the friendly family setting his statement implies). He ruined this possibility for himself for a long time, and I wonder to what extent his detachment may have been an active, perhaps even (semi-)conscious decision. One recurring theme of the Dark Side is that it asks you to kill everything you love or could potentially come to love. And Dooku is a perfect example of a character who is somehow set on making his own existence miserable, even when he has sooo many better options open to him.

As for Qui-Gon … well, I think his complicated relationship with both Obi-Wan and Dooku might have kept him from introducing them to each other. Qui-Gon clearly loves Obi-Wan, but at the same time he isn't always sure if he can be the mentor Obi-Wan needs. Their relationship is always overshadowed by the after-effects of Xanatos, Bandomeer, Melida/Daan … there are quite a few stories about how they had a little trouble connecting with each other initially. Even after they resolved most of their issues, there may always be a bit of uncertainty left, an unspoken strain on their relationship. And how is Dooku going to factor into this? What if Dooku destroys this balance they've managed to achieve? Because for as much as Qui-Gon respects and loves Dooku, he also knows of his reckless, destructive tendencies. I mean ... even as a Jedi, Dooku has always been pretty dark and creepy at times (yk, Force-choking or Force-lightning people) and yes, maybe Qui-Gon has come to grips with it and they have learned to live with this dynamic (as you do) and have grown together to form a reliable team. Something that works, but again, it's not perfect. And again, there's a lot of underlying uncertainty here -- I think that is nicely illustrated in some of the books where Qui-Gon reflects about how Dooku's & Rael's relationship feels so very different from Dooku's & Qui-Gon's.

And now adding Obi-Wan to that mix? Well, for starters, I think Dooku would find a lot to criticize about Qui-Gon's teaching methods and point out both his and Obi-Wan's flaws, question some of their choices … there are too many directions this could go that end up hurting Obi-Wan. And of course Qui-Gon would defend Obi-Wan and himself, but it would still bring things to light that are uncomfortable. Because Qui-Gon is a little bit Obi-Wan's Dooku and a little bit Dooku's Obi-Wan. In a way, he balances both of them, so he can't have them clash. He would have to question himself, his life choices, and two of his closest relationships. Or what if it goes in the opposite direction? What if Obi-Wan's latently rebellious and questioning nature is further spurred on by Dooku? To what extent would Obi-Wan even listen to and trust his master's guidance, to what extent might he be inclined to listen to Dooku instead? I always thought that in an alternate universe, Obi-Wan and Dooku might find a lot in common if they just happen to meet under the right circumstances (though I have to admit that I just like seeing the two of them together, so I'm probably biased).

Ultimately, it boils down to how Qui-Gon might be harboring the subconscious thought that he is not living up to expectations. Not to his master, not to his padawan. And maybe he's made peace with that individually, but the moment the three of them come together? That's where the established dynamics shift. It could hurt and end badly, or it might have saved some things in the long run (but knowing Star Wars, it's more likely to be the former). My point is, Qui-Gon may not have been actively or intentionally trying to keep them apart. But he didn't necessarily encourage them to meet either, and deep down he may have been relieved that it never came to that.

Obi-Wan had a lot on his plate during his apprenticeship and getting to know Dooku was probably not high on his list of priorities either. And I'm thinking of the scene in the Padawan book by Kiersten White where Dooku and Obi-Wan almost meet. And how Obi-Wan spends a lot of time angsting that Qui-Gon might join Dooku and leave him and the Order behind. On the one hand, it's so sad to see how Obi-Wan, even after years, is still not feeling completely secure in his relationship with Qui-Gon, but on the other hand, it also seems like Obi-Wan perceives Dooku as a threat, as someone who could potentially take Qui-Gon away from him. Side note: I found the language and use of words rather interesting in some places … Dooku collecting Qui-Gon, Qui-Gon being lured by him … yeah, Obi-Wan clearly has some feelings about this whole scenario. That's probably why he wasn't so keen on meeting Dooku. Which is funny in it's own way, considering how Dooku later tries to lure in Obi-Wan. But as far as Obi-Wan is concerned, that seems like a strong argument that I think could explain why he's actively avoiding Dooku.

But what about before, when Dooku was still a part of the Order? Obi-Wan, especially in his younger years, always tried so hard to be a perfect Jedi. At first glance, that should absolutely motivate him to seek contact with an older, experienced Jedi, especially if said Jedi is his master's master and one of Yoda's former apprentices. It also wouldn't have been a bad idea to subtly ask Dooku for stories about Qui-Gon; that might have helped Obi-Wan with his fears and doubts regarding his master. Apparently, Qui-Gon always spoke highly of Dooku, so Obi-Wan should have no reason to dislike meeting him. But I assume by the time Obi-Wan had somehow settled into his apprenticeship and was ready to tackle his problems, Dooku probably already had his reputation as a less-than-perfect Jedi. Surely Obi-Wan picked up a story or two from other Jedi, and he certainly didn't like all of them. Perhaps Dooku already seemed to him like a darker version of Qui-Gon (or, if you want to stretch it, even of himself), and that might have kept Obi-Wan from wanting to meet him.

Bottom line: everyone's messed up and they know it.

If you actually read through all of this, thank you so much and let's take a moment to commemorate their fake family reunion!

(Bless this gif! It's so beautiful, I'm sobbing)

Would be very much interested in reading more opinions and thoughts on this topic because I'm clearly a tiny bit too invested in this!

(Edited some numbers because apparently I can't do math. Sorry. Assuming Obi-Wan became Qui-Gon's padawan around 44 BBY and Dooku left around 42 BBY, the time Obi-Wan and Dooku were both members of the Order would be 2 years at most, not 4. Makes me feel slightly better!)

#star wars #tales of the jedi #obi-wan kenobi #qui-gon jinn #dooku #disaster lineage #family dynamics #long post #this is what keeps me up at night #i spend way too much time thinking about these idiots #maybe the Force somehow prevented Obi and Dooku from meeting #since it would change the entire timeline and vader might never exist and no one would bring balance to the Force #there are a million ways an early meeting between them could go #i feel like i could write another 1.5k words about all the tropes for this idea but maybe not today

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legoshi-plz · 4 years ago

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WAIT WHAT ABOUT A CHUBBY S/O WITH NSFW FOR THE G A N G ??? -🐙anon

A/N: Alright alright alright! Now that’s a big-brained prompt right there! I kept it shorter this time and with less characters because doing the usually lineup was taking way too long

Warning: NSFW. Also this is written for Fat/Plus-Sized! Readers. It was intentionally specific in that way. Please no Fatphobia, if you don’t resonate with that then this might not be for you. Reader is also Gender-Neutral.

//////////

Louis:

- So scrawny yet has the most confidence out of anybody.

- Sees having a heavier S/O as a testament of his own prowess.

- “You’re not too heavy, I can handle it. Just trust me, beautiful.”

- Always pushing the limits when it comes to throwing you around and picking you up. You’re always scared he’s going to drop you but he never does.

- Exclusively prefers chubby partners. They just feel right for him, feel softer, feel better, especially during sex.

- Speaking of sex, Louis always has to top, please don’t try to persuade him otherwise. It’s really important to him to prove to you that he’s capable of fucking you out good and proper despite being on the skinner side.

- Please be loud and tell him what a good job he’s doing, it strokes his ego so much.

Legoshi:

- He’s actually not picky about what body type his partner has. Legoshi usually falls for personality first and will love any body that that personality comes in.

- Or at least that’s what he likes to think, until he gets a taste of life of the fluffier side.

- Has a hard time keeping his hands off you, your body just turns him on so much. He even feels pretty guilty about it because the last thing he wants to do is annoy you but one look at your thighs and he’s on you in an instant.

- He’s very gentle with you. You’re just so soft and so delicate, he couldn’t stand if he hurt you. Fucks you nice and slow, making sure you’re well adjusted to his size before he picks up the pace.

- Could go down on you for hours and has. Can’t get enough of your taste, it’s almost hypnotizing to him. Makes you cum with his mouth again and again until you’re literally begging him for a break.

- Legoshi is also a hopeless romantic. Very common for him to go off on poetic tangents about how much he loves your body. Incorporates body worship often during sex but also outside the bedroom as well.

Gouhin:

- Gouhin is a panda so chubby, bigger bodies are the norm for his kind. Despite him being a muscular outlier, he’s still almost exclusively attracted animals with more fat.

- Likes his partners HEAVY, says he just can’t feel anything with a skinny partner. Very open and proud about his preference.

- Craves how warm you are and is constantly sticking his hands up your shirt, down your pants, in between your thighs, etc. to warm them up. Just likes to always be touching you somehow.

- Also loves for you to sit on his lap, even for mundane things. As far as he’s concerned, his lap is your permanent seat and even has you sit on his lap in public. If at a gathering with friends, they know better than to offer you your own seat because they already know Gouhin’s not having that.

- Since he’s so muscular, he’s not afraid to do all the work in bed. He actually perfers it that way, really makes him feel like an Alpha male. He will still let you on top (he has an absolute weakness for you riding him), but his strong arms are going to be wrapped around your waist/hips helping guide you while he’s thrusting up into you. Finds it adorable when you get tired and he has to take over.

- “You did so good baby but now it’s time to let Daddy do the work.”

- Aftercare with him is so sensual. He loves to kiss every inch of you afterwards, especially your tummy. He actually has quite the fixation on your tummy, loves the roundness of it. Usually showers it with kisses and then starts going lower which inevitably leads to a Round 2.

Riz:

- Again, like Gouhin, he’s a bear and bears just prefer animals with more meat on their bones. He sees it as a given and thinks everybody knows about this preference bears have so he’s genuinely shocked when people don’t know this.

- However, unlike Gouhin, he’s a little less... refined in his attraction. Riz unintentionally seems like he has a fetish for plus-sized animals by how horny curvy body types make him, but that’s just his hyper-sexual nature.

- Which is why he nearly worships the ground you walk on. He finally found an animal that’s able to keep up with high sex drive, who’s also able to handle his rough nature without him being worried he’s going to break them in half.

- Sees larger partners as more sturdy, so he feels like he doesn’t have to hold back with you. Manhandles the absolute hell out of you just because he can. Also, he’s always habitually squeezing your sides/rolls, he’s completely obsessed with how solid you are.

- Always picking you up and carrying you. If you’re in another room but he feels like cuddling, he’ll find you, throw you over his shoulder and bring you to the couch/bed/etc. just to curl up with you. Thinks your weak attempts at saying “Put me down, I’m too heavy.” are HILARIOUS.

- “Do you know how strong I am, baby? This is nothing to me,”

- Riz is still very much aware of how huge his dick is so he wouldn’t ever purposely hurt you but he is an intense lover. Mating Press is his go-to position, followed by regular missionary. He loves when his huge body is covering you and you literally have no other option but to lay there and take his fat cock.

- Also loves any position where he picks you up and fucks your soft body into a wall. Thinks it’s cute when your chubby hands slap his shoulder when your orgasm is approaching. Speaking of chubby hands, he likes to put two of your fingers in his mouth and suck them while he’s pounding into you (it’s a really weird kink of his but it keeps him rock hard during sex so you let it slide.)

Collot:

- Like Legoshi, he didn’t really know about his underlying attraction to plus-sized animals until he met you. He’s always been an ass man, preferring the big, round kinds the would jiggle in the palm of his hands. But when he saw your body, he was completely mesmerized.

- He’s still very much an ass man, and takes any and every opportunity to smack yours then squeezing it. You know that thing guys do when they grab your ass so hard they spread the cheeks a little. Well, Collot is the King of that.

- Also loves to spank you. Not always as a punishment either, sometimes he’ll just come home, see you looking irresistible, and will sit down, patting his thighs. “C’mon, you know the drill.”

- Spanks you and marvels at the way your thick thighs and ass tremble before him. Always rewards you by sinking two long fingers into your plush heat. Doesn’t stop fingerfucking you until you’ve made a mess all over his lap.

- He’s definitely handsy in almost every aspect of your relationship. Pinches your cheeks when he’s teasing you, blows raspberries on your tummy just to get your attention, caresses your thighs when he feeling frisky. He also really likes how pudgy your arms are. Likes to nuzzle his face into the soft flabby part of your upper arms (you know the part). It’s really warm and smells nice because it smells like your scent (perfume/cologne/etc.) and he just can’t get enough of it.

- Has a little bit of an oral fixation when it comes to you. Loves to watch you eat, talk, anything that involves your mouth really. And when you’re not doing anything with it, he’s fighting the urge to stuff your face with his cock and see your pretty lips work their way around that. Seeing your chubby cheeks bulge from taking his girth into your mouth sends him over the edge every time.

- He’s extremely possessive over you. Knows exactly how gorgeous you are and how anyone would leap at a chance with your soft, full figure. The thought of sharing you is enough to have him foaming at the mouth.

- “You’re mine, do you understand? Nobody’s coming between you and me.”

- That’s something he says often, usually after sex when his fingers are trailing up and down your spent form. Despite him saying it softly, you know he means every word.

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driftward · 2 years ago

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Title: FFXIV Write 2022 - 20. Anon Characters: Zoissette Vauban, Klynt Gohtawyn, Urianger Augurelt Rating: Teen Summary: Zoissette has a way with word. Notes: A sequel has been written by @Saesama here

"And thou mayest make thyselves comfortable here, for these rooms are thine," said Urianger, as he opened the doors to the rooms assigned to Klynt and Zo. "Prithee prevail upon me if thou needest aught, and I shall attend thee anon."

Klynt stuck her head into her room and peered around. It was spacious, at least by her standards, even if it did look like the bed was going to be too small.

"Anon," said Zo from behind her, still out in the hallway. "Hmn."

"Is aught the matter?" she heard Urianger ask, and she turned around to look at Zo curiously.

"Not a very common word, is it, anon? Bit old fashioned. Almost fallen out of use... but not quite," said Zo, and she looked into one of the many books she seemed to always keep around her, flipping through pages. A glance at her face showed that her tongue was in her cheek.

"Kindly forgive me, for I knoweth my manner of speech doth oft confound," said Urianger, with a bow.

"Oh no, not at all! Sorry, sorry. Didn't mean to make it awkward. I was just thinking out loud. Anon, anon, anon. Hmn. Good word," said Zo, and she bowed to Urianger in turn. "I think we have it from here for now, don't we, Sergeant?"

"Sure do," said Klynt amiably.

Urianger nodded, and he headed off, and Zo ducked into her room. Klynt shrugged, and began to unpack her old life into her new room.

-*-

They were a pair, Klynt and Zo, at least since Gridania. And Minfilia apparently saw no reason to change that, since they'd both officially joined the Scions of the Seventh Dawn at the same time. Klynt let Zo take lead, which honestly, she'd been doing for a bit now. The Elezen was duty-bound yet kind, and if she were a bit daft at times, well, it was a small flaw for an otherwise fine commander. She wasn't a wretch about it, like certain former captains, nor did she act like she somehow deserved the position by dint of blood, like some of the Hearers had. She just did whatever needed doing, and often took the lead in conversations, and that was good enough for Klynt.

"Now that you've both been situated," said Minfilia, "The Remembrance ceremonies are due to begin soon. I would ask that you both attend the speeches of the leaders of the Grand Companies. It would behoove you to know what each of them stand for, and see for yourselves the people who we are fighting for."

"Of course, Antecedent," said Zo, her bearing almost military. "We shall travel anon."

Minfilia nodded, and Zo turned to leave, and Klynt was quick behind her.

"Anon?" she said, frowning at the Elezen. "Really?"

"What?" said Zo.

"Whatdayamean, anon?'" asked Klynt.

"As soon as you've packed your kit," said Zo.

"Ah," said Klynt.

-*-

Per Tataru's recommended travel schedule, they had went to Gridania's ceremony first. Klynt had largely found it boring. Next they travelled to Ul'dah, which was less boring. Klynt has spent too long in Gridania for Kan-E-Senna to be interesting, but Raubahn had a voice that could bring down mountains, and a passion that would raise them back up.

She idly wondered if he liked them tall.

They were on their way to the airship concourse to make for Limsa Lominsa when they had been accosted by a Lalafell who, apparently, had recognized them and had opinions that he wished to share, preferably to be passed to the Antecedent, could they take this package to her, and as soon as possible, thank you very much. Klynt didn't keep track of the details, and while Zo had been writing a few things down in her notebook at first, as the man's tidal wave of words had finally died out, Klynt noticed that the notebook had found its way back to its pouch and that Zo's eyes were damn near half-closed, and a wan smile was frozen on her face.

"Yes, of course, of course," said Zo. "We shall see to it that your, uhm, loquacious feedback, as well as your package, makes its way to the Antecedent anon."

"It had better," the man said. "It's very important to me, and the realm at large, as you know!" He waggled a finger in the air before stalking off.

Klynt sighed. "So... I'll go ask for our tickets to be updated while you go see if there's a chocobo porter around at this hour?"

"What? No. Whysoever would we do that?" asked Zo.

"...so we can go nip off back to the Waking Sands real fast 'fore takin' the ferry over to Limsa?"

Zo looked confused. "Why, is there something you need to pick up from there?"

Klynt pointed slowly at the package that was still in Zo's hands. "...you just got done tellin' that man we'd be droppin' that off and havin' a word with Minfilia."

"Oh, that. Sure, yes, of course. You know. Whenever we get around to it," said Zo, tucking the package away into one of her traveling bags.

Klynt furrowed her brow at Zo, but the Elezen's face had gone to that placid neutrality it so often had, and she decided to let the matter drop.

-*-

Klynt stayed onboard the airship during the Remembrance ceremony in Limsa Lominsa; no need to risk being seen by any of her former shipmates, and Zo had not asked much on the matter other than making sure that she was in good health, which she was grateful for. They had returned to the Waking Sands, and had readied themselves to settle in to a routine of adventuring and whatever odd jobs the Scions would ask of them.

Arenvald had approached them in the common area while they were having lunch. "Got a moment?" he had asked.

Klynt gestured to an open seat, and he took it, sitting down with his own lunch in front of him. "Thanks. Anyroad, I'd like to ask a favor of you two."

Zo just nodded a bit, not really looking up from her reading, and Klynt shrugged at him. "Depends on what it is," she said.

"A'aba and I are thinking of putting together some training drills. We've gotten a lot of new people these past moons, and I think we'd do well to learn to work together, to fight together. Also I think it'd help the newer people get acquainted with some of the older ones. You two are some of the better known names around here, and I've seen what you can do with that axe. And I think Zoeysai's the only one outside of the Archons who makes such deft use of a codex. I know you're busy, and I'm asking a lot, but it'd be a real boon if you could show up to a session or two."

"M' not opposed," said Klynt, jerking her thumb at Zo, "But she's our bookkeep. Assessor?"

Zo looked up at Arenvald, and smiled at him, putting her book aside. "That sounds like a splendid idea. We'd be happy to help. Let me look at our schedule, and I'll get back to you anon, that sound alright?"

"Yes! Yes, that sounds great. Thank you both!" said Arenvald. "I'll leave you two to your lunch, then. I look forward to seeing you in the training rooms!"

He got up, and moved away, and Klynt looked at Zo, and gave her an eyebrow.

The Elezen dug out a notebook, and flipped through it, and frowned, apparently thinking.

"It looks like we have a few good spots open," she said at last. "Next Windsday work for you, Klynt?" she asked.

"Sure, why not," said Klynt with a shrug.

Zo nodded, and made a few notes in her notebook, and tucked it away. "I'll give him our answer before I go to bed, then, and also will remind you the day before," she said, returning to her reading.

Klynt looked at her for a long moment before returning to her own lunch.

-*-

It was late evening when they had returned from the training sessions. Both had bathed and changed, and Klynt was testing the soreness in her arms while Zo was performing some light stretches while she waited for her kettle to come up to boil.

Klynt was in the cabinets looking for food when Y'shtola arrived in the room.

"Ah, there you two are. I was hoping for a moment of your time."

"Er- uhm. What can we do for you, Archon," asked Zo.

"Y'shtola will do fine," said Y'shtola, and Klynt rolled her eyes, waiting.

"Of course, Archon Y'shtola."

There it was.

She sighed, but her part in the mummery played, Y'shtola continued on.

"I have been looking over your notes from your encounter with Ifrit, and I would know more of this Miqo'te woman you described," said Y'shtola. "I would ask you some questions, if you've the time."

"Of course, Archon Y'shtola," said Zo brightly. "We are available anon, of course, I just need to run to my room and get my notebooks. If you would wait here...?"

"Of course," said Y'shtola, and Klynt sighed, frustrated, as she quickly followed after her.

"I thought that meant it could wait," groused Klynt. "And we're s'posed to be resting up for tomorrow."

"What?" said Zo, as she got to her bedroom and ducked inside.

"You just told her -" began Klynt.

"Yes yes I know what I said. My apologies, Sergeant, I'm sure she won't take but a few moment, no more than half a bell, and anyroad, it's just a few questions, we'll still get plenty of sleep, I promise you."

Zo emerged from her bedroom with her notebook and what Klynt recognized as several other writing tools aside, and she frowned at the woman.

"If an Archon has seen fit to come to us for what we know," said Zo, "It must be important, and possibly urgent aside."

Klynt made an annoyed noise, and Zo at least had the decency to give her an apologetic smile.

"Fine," conceded Klynt. "My dreams will be of protest, though, Assessor."

"Duly noted," said Zo.

-*-

They were heading back to their rooms. Klynt felt tired from the day's exertions, and Zo was not much better. They both needed bed, and Klynt was desperate to get to hers.

"Thank you for today, Sergeant," said Zo, leaning her head against the door to her room while she tried to work its lock. "We did a good job. Sleep well, and I shall see you anon."

Something had been bothering Klynt for a while, and she had been keeping it to herself, but she was too tired for her brain to mouth filter to be anything useful other than as a tube.

"Hey, Zoey," she said tiredly.

"Hmn?" replied Zo, at last managing the lock and opening the door to her room.

Klynt shot her a look, frowning at her. "Is it just me, or does that word mean whatever you want it to mean, based on how much you like th' person you're talkin' to and how fast you wanna get around to somethin'?"

Klynt saw Zo's shoulders go tense, and she frowned, but then she watched as they slowly relaxed, and a small, tiny smile played on Zo's lips.

The Elezen's movements were all slow, exaggeratedly slow, as she turned to face Klynt. She bent over at the waist just the tiniest amount as she pursed her lips, brought a single finger up to them, and winked at Klynt.

"I will tell you anon," she said.

And then she vanished into her room, closing the door gently behind herself.

Klynt stood there, stunned. That was possibly the most genuine she had seen the Elezen in their entire time working together. After a few moments, she began to chuckle, and then, wishing she wasn't so tired that cackling hurt, she cackled anyway, and disappeared into her own room, flopping down on her bed.

The next day would find her anon, she thought to herself, as she went to sleep.

#ffxivwrite2022 #final fantasy xiv #zoissette vauban #klynt gohtawyn #urianger augurelt #anon #202209-20 #biot writes #arr

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impostoradult · 4 years ago

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Media Market Research (and why its undermining all the things you love)

Trying to understand what is dysfunctional about Hollywood is an epic task, and the answers are like the stars – arguably infinite. Hollywood is dysfunctional for literally more reasons than I could count.

But market research plays a fairly heavy role in its dysfunction (IMO) and the time has finally come for me to add my professional two cents about this issue. (This rant of mine has been building for a while, FYI. Hence why it is so...comprehensive. There is a tl;dr section towards the bottom, if you want the high level summary)

*** For the last 4+ years I’ve worked in the field of market research, almost exclusively with major media makers like Warner Bros., NBCU, AMC/BBCA, Viacom, FOX (before Disney acquired them), A+E, etc. (this past year I quit the job where I was doing this work for a variety of reasons, many of which will become clear as you keep reading, but I am still listed as a consultant on the company website): https://www.kresnickaresearch.com/who/ (Rachel)

And just for comparison, here is a Halloween selfie I took 4 years ago and posted on my blog, so you can see I am who I say I am.

I know a fair amount about how market research on major media franchises is conducted and how it influences production, and a lot of these choices can also be at least somewhat tied back to the massive flaws in the market research industry and its impact. *** First, at the highest level, you need to understand market research in general is not well-conducted much of the time. Even the people doing a reasonably good job at it are VERY limited in doing it well because of financial constraints (clients don’t want to spend more than they have to), time constraints (clients want everything done as fast as humanely possible) and just the inherent problems within the industry that are decades old and difficult to fix. For example, all market research ‘screens’ participants to make sure they qualify to participate (whether it is a mass survey, a focus group, a one-on-one interview, etc.). So, we screen people based on demographics like race, gender, age, household income, to get representative samples. But people are also screened based on their consumption habits. You don’t want to bring someone into a focus group about reality TV if they don’t watch reality TV. They aren’t going to have anything useful to say.

However, a lot of the people who participate in market research have made a ‘side-gig’ out of it and they know how to finesse the process. Basically, they’ve learned how to lie to get into studies that they aren’t a good match for because most market research is paid, and they want the money. So, a lot of TV and film market research is being done on people who don’t actually (or at least don’t regularly) watch those shows or movies or whatever but have learned how to lie well enough in these screening processes to make it through. And because of the aforementioned time and money issue, clients don’t want to spend the time or money to actually find GOOD participants. They just accept that as an inevitable part of the market research process and decide not to let it bother them too much. So, a fair number of the people representing YOU as a media consumer are people who may not be watching Supernatural (for example) at all or who watch a rerun occasionally on TNT but haven’t been watching consistently or with ANY amount of investment whatsoever. You can see why that creates very skewed data. But that’s just the tip of the skewed iceberg. *** Second, media market research is conducted in line with the norms of market research more broadly, and this is a huge problem because media is a very atypical product. How people engage with media is far more complex and in depth than how they engage with a pair of jeans, a car, or a coffee maker. There are only so many things that matter to people when it comes to liking or not liking a coffee maker, for example. Is it easy/intuitive to use? How much space does it take it on my counter? How expensive is it? Does it brew the coffee well? Maybe does it match my décor/kitchen aesthetic? Can I make my preferred brand of coffee in it? The things you as a consumer are going to care about when it comes to a coffee maker are limited, fairly easy to anticipate in advance, and also easy to interpret (usually). How people mentally and emotionally approach MEDIA? Whole other universe of thing. Infinitely more complex. And yet it is studied (more or less) as if it is also a coffee maker. This is one of the many reasons I decided to leave the media market research field despite my desire to have some ability to positively influence the process. As so often seems to be the case, I fought the law and the law won. I could never make the other people I worked with in the industry understand that the questions they were asking were not all that useful a lot of the time and they weren’t getting to the heart of the matter. They were just following industry standards because they didn’t know any better and none of them want to admit they don’t REALLY know what they’re doing. Which leads me to point 3. *** Most of the people doing this research don’t have any expertise in media or storytelling specifically. They are typically trained as social scientists in the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, or math/statistics. And many of them do not have any kind of specialization or education in media/storytelling beyond the English classes they took in high school and the one Media Studies course they took as an elective in college. Most of them have a very unsophisticated understanding of narrative structure, thematics, tropes, subtext, etc. They mainly think in terms of genres at the VERY broadest level. Also, not infrequently, they don’t watch or have much knowledge of the shows they are supposed to be doing research on, beyond what they’ve read on IMDb or Wikipedia or what is generally common knowledge. Unless they by chance happen to watch the shows themselves (which often they don’t) they often know very little about the shows they are crafting these questions about. Again, partly because they think it is like the coffee maker, and you don’t need to understand it in any depth to research it. (I know this must sound insane to you as avid media consumers, but that is the general attitude among those who do market research) There is such a lack of sophistication in how people in the business side of the industry understand media and storytelling. Most of them are either MBAs or social scientists and their training has not prepared them to examine fictional works with the kind of depth that people in the Humanities (who are specifically trained to study texts) have. Somehow, despite the fact that the Humanities is all about understanding texts, that is the one discipline they make almost no use of in the business side of Hollywood. And boy howdy does it show. *** Point 4 – average consumers CANNOT ARTICULATE WHY THEY LIKE THINGS. Particularly media things. I know this sounds condescending, but it is my honest observation. It is unbelievably hard to get people to have enough self-awareness to explain why they actually like things, especially things as mentally and emotionally complex as media. What typically happens when you ask people why they like a TV show or movie, for example? They will tell you what they most NOTICE about the TV show or movie, or what is distinctive to them about it (which may or may not have anything to do with what they actually LIKE about it). They will say things like “I like the genre”, “I think it’s funny”, “The car chases are exciting”, “I want to see the detective solve the puzzle.” Sometimes you can get them to talk about what they find relatable about it, if you push them a little. But often they leave it at either the level of literal identity (young black woman), basic personality traits (she’s a social butterfly and so am I) or situations they’ve personally experienced (I relate to this story of a man losing his father to cancer because I lost a close family member to cancer). But the vast, vast, vast majority of them can’t go to the deeper level of: a) Why X representation of a young black woman feels accurate/authentic/relatable and Y representation doesn’t b) Why it matters to me that X,Y,Z aspects of my personality, identity, experience get reflected in media whereas I don’t really care about seeing A,B,C aspects of my personality, identity, or experience reflected in media c) How and why they are relating to characters when they can’t see the literal connection between their identity/experience and the character’s identity/experience. (For example, many people have argued that women often relate to Dean Winchester because a lot of his struggles and past negative experiences are more stereotypical of women – being forced to raise a younger sibling on behalf of an actual parent, being seen and treated as beautiful/sexually desirable but vacuous/unintelligent, his body being treated as an instrument for a more powerful group to quite literally possess, etc. Part of the reason Supernatural has always been such a mystery/problem for the CW and Warner Bros is they could never crack the code at this level. Never.) Part of the reason they can’t crack these codes is average people CANNOT give you that kind of feedback in a survey or a focus group, or even an in-depth interview (much of the time). They just don’t have the self-awareness or the vocabulary to get it at that level. Let alone asking them to articulate why Game of Thrones is compelling to them in an era where wealth disparity is creating a ruling class that is fundamentally incompetent at maintaining a just/functional society, which is especially concerning at this particular moment, given the existential threat we face due to climate change. And the truth is, that IS part of what people – even average people – are responding to in Game of Thrones. But what they’ll tell you when you do market research on it is: they like the dragons, they like the violence, they relate to Tyrion Lannister being a smart mouth, maybe they’ll say they like the moral ambiguity of many of the conflicts (if they are more sophisticated than average). But the ‘Dean Winchester is heavily female coded despite his veneer of ultra-masculinity’ or the ‘Game of Thrones is a prescient metaphor for the current political dynamics and fissures of modern western society’ is the level you ACTUALLY need to get to. And most market research can’t get you that because the people ASKING the questions don’t know what to ask to get to this level, and most of the respondents couldn’t give you the answers even IF you were asking them the right questions (which usually you are not) And I’m not saying average people are dumb because they can’t do this. But it requires practice, it requires giving the matter a great deal of in-depth thought, and most people just don’t care enough about it to do that while taking a market research survey. (I know this is going to feel counter-intuitive to people on Tumblr. But you have to remember, you are NOT average media consumers. You are highly atypical media consumers who have far more self-awareness and a much more sophisticated engagement with media than the average person watching TV. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be here talking about it in the first place) Point 4.1 – People also lie/misrepresent their own experiences to market researchers because they want to maintain certain self-narratives. You have no idea how many people would get disqualified from our surveys for saying they watched less than 5 hours of TV a week. And sure, that might actually be true for a few of them. But if you watch TV with any regularity at all (which most people in modern America do) you probably watch more than 5 hours a week. The problem is, people think it makes them sound lazy to say they watch 15-20 hours a week, even though that’s about 2-3 hours a day (which actually isn’t THAT high). People lie and misrepresent their behaviors, thoughts and feelings because it can be socially uncomfortable to admit you do what you actually do or feel how you actually feel, even in the context of an anonymous survey, let alone a focus group or a one-on-one interview. People want to make themselves look good to THEMSELVES and to the researchers asking them questions. But that makes the market research data on media (and lots of other things) very questionable. For example, one finding we saw more than once in the surveys I was involved in conducting was people would radically downplay how much the romance elements of a story mattered to them, even large portions of female respondents. When we would ask people in surveys what parts of the story they were most invested in, romances ALWAYS came out among the lowest ranked elements. And yet, any passing familiarity with fandom would tell you that finding is just WRONG. It’s wrong. People are just flat out lying about how much that matters to them because of the negative connotations we have around being invested in romance. And never mind the issue of erotic/sexual content. (I don’t mean sexual identity here, I mean sexy content). The only people who will occasionally cop to wanting the erotic fan service is young men (and even they are hesitant to do so in market research) and women frequently REFUSE to admit that stuff in market research, or they radically downplay how much it matters to them and in what ways. There is still so much stigma towards women expressing sexuality in that way. Not to mention, you have to fight tooth and nail to even include question about erotic/sexual content because oftentimes the clients don’t even want to go there at all, partly because it is awkward for everyone involved to sit around crafting market research questions to interrogate what makes people hot and bothered. That’s socially awkward for the researchers doing the research and the businesspeople who have to sit in rooms and listen to presentations about why more women find Spock sexier than Kirk. (Which was a real thing that happened with the original Star Trek, and the network couldn’t figure out why) Aside from people not have enough deeper level self-awareness to get at what they really like about media content, they also will lie or misrepresent certain things to you because they are trying to maintain certain self-narratives and are socially performing that version of themselves to researchers. *** Point 5 – Qualitative data is way more useful for understanding people’s relationships to media. However, quantitative data is way more valued and relied upon both due to larger market research industry standards and because quantitative data is just seen as harder/more factual than qualitative data. A lot of media market research involves gathering both qualitative and quantitative data and reporting jointly on both. (Sometimes you only do one or the other, depending on your objectives, but doing both is considered ‘standard’ and higher quality). However, quantitative data is heavily prioritized in reporting and when there is a conflict between what they see in qualitative versus quantitative data, the quant data is usually relied upon to be the more accurate of the two. This is understandable to an extent, because quantitative surveys usually involve responses from a couple thousand participants, whereas qualitative data involves typically a few dozen participants at most, depending on whether you did focus groups, individual interviews, or ‘diaries’/ethnography. The larger sample is considered more reliable and more reflective of ‘the audience’ as a whole. However, quantitative surveys usually have the flattest, least nuanced data, and they can only ever reflect what questions and choices people in the survey were given. In something like focus groups or individual interviews or ethnographies, you still structure what you ask people, but they can go “off script.” They can say things you never anticipated (as a researcher) and can explain themselves and their answers with more depth. In a survey, participants can only “say” what they survey lets them say based on the questions and question responses that are pre-baked for them. And as I’ve already explained, a lot of times these quantitative surveys are written by people with no expertise in media, fiction, or textual analysis, and so they often are asking very basic, not very useful questions. In sum, the data that is the most relied upon is the least informative, least nuanced data. It is also the MOST likely to reflect the responses of people who don’t actually qualify for the research but have become good at scamming the system to make extra money. With qualitative research, they are usually a little more careful screening people (poorly qualified participants still make it through, but not as often as with mass surveys, where I suspect a good 35% of participants, at least, probably do not actually qualify for the research and are just working the system).

Most commonly, when market research gets reported to business decision-makers, it highlights the quantitative data, and uses the qualitative data to simply ‘color in’ the quantitative data. Give it a face, so to speak. Qualitative data is usually supplemental to quant data and used more to make the reports ‘fun’ and ‘warm’ because graphs and charts and stats by themselves are boring to look at in a meeting. (I’m not making this up, I can’t tell you how many times I was told to make adjustments on how things were reported on because they didn’t want to bore people in the meeting). (Sub-point – it is also worth noting that you can’t report on anything that doesn’t fit easily on a power point slide and isn’t easily digestible to any random person who might pick it up and read it. The amount of times I was told to simplify points and dumb things down so it could be made ‘digestible’ for a business audience, I can’t even tell you. It was soul crushing and another reason I stopped doing this job full time. I had to make things VERY dumb for these business audiences, which often meant losing a lot of the point I was actually trying to make) Point 5.1 – Because of the way that representative sampling works, quantitative data can be very misleading, particularly in understanding audience/fandom sentiments about media. As I’m sure most of you know, sampling is typically designed to be representative of the population, broadly speaking. So, unless a media company is specifically out to understand LGBTQ consumers or Hispanic/Latinx consumers, it will typically sample using census data as a template and represent populations that way. Roughly 50/50 male/female. Roughly even numbers in different age brackets, roughly representative samplings of the racial make-up of the country, etc. (FYI, they do often include a non-binary option in the gender category these days, but it usually ends up being like 5 people out of 2000, which is not enough of a sample to get statistical significance for them as a distinct group) There is a good reason to do this, even when a show or movie has a disproportionately female audience, or young audience. Because they need enough sample in all of the “breaks” (gender, race, age, household income, etc.) to be able to make statistically sound statements about each subgroup. If you only have 35 African American people in your sample of 1000, you can’t make any statistically sound statements about that African American cohort. The sample is just too small. So, they force minimums/quotas in a lot of the samples, to ensure they can make statistically sound statements about all the subgroups they care about. They use ratings data to understand what their audience make up actually is. (Which also has major failings, but I’ll leave that alone for the minute) With market research, they are not usually looking to proportionately represent their audience, or their fandom; they are looking to have data they can break in the ways they want to break it and still have statistically significant subgroups represented. But that means that when you report on the data as a whole sample – which you often do – it can be very skewed towards groups who don’t make up as large a portion of the show’s actual audience, or even if they do, they don’t tend to be the most invested, loyal, active fans. Men get weighted equally to women, even when women make up 65% of the audience, and 80% of the active fandom. Granted, they DO break the data by gender, and race, and age, etc. and if there are major differences in how women versus men respond, or younger people versus older people, they want to know that...sometimes. But here’s where things get complex. So, if you are doing a sample of Supernatural viewers. And you do the standard (US census-based) sampling on a group of 2000 respondents (a pretty normal sample size in market research). ~1000 are going to be female. But with something they call “interlocking quotas” the female sample is going to be representative of the other groupings to a degree. So, the female sample will have roughly equal numbers of all the age brackets (13-17, 18-24, 25-34, etc.). And it will have roughly 10% non-heterosexual respondents, and so on. They do this to ensure that these breaks aren’t too conflated with each other. (For example, if your female sample is mostly younger and your male sample is mostly older, how do you know whether it is the gender or the age that is creating differences in their responses? You don’t. So, you have to make sure that all the individual breaks (gender, race, age) have a good mix of the other breaks within them, so groups aren’t getting conflated) But what that means is, Supernatural, whose core fandom is (at a conservative guess) 65% younger, queer, women, gets represented in a lot of statistical market research sampling as maybe 50-100 people, in a 2000-person survey. 50-100 people can barely move the needle on anything in a 2000-person survey. Furthermore, usually in the analysis of data like this, you don’t go beyond looking at 2 breaks simultaneously. So you may look at young female respondents as a group, or high income male respondents, or older white respondents, but you rarely do more than 2 breaks combined. And the reason for that is, by the time you get down to 3 breaks or more (young, Hispanic, women) you usually don’t have enough sample to make statistically significant claims. (It also just takes longer to do those analyses and as I explained in the beginning, they are always rushing this stuff). To do several breaks at a time you’d have to get MUCH larger samples, and that’s too expensive for them. And again, I want to stress, this type of sampling isn’t intended to sinisterly erase anyone. Kind of the opposite. It is intended to make sure most groups have enough representation in the data that you can make sound claims about them on the subgroup level. The problem is that it can create a very skewed sense of their overall audience sentiment when they take the data at ‘face value’ so to speak, and don’t weight segments based on viewership proportion, or fandom engagement, etc. Point 5.2 – Which leads me to my next point, which is that fandom activity that doesn’t have a dollar amount attached to it doesn’t make you a ‘valuable’ segment in their minds. One of the breaks they ALWAYS ask for in data like this is high income people, and people who spend a lot of MONEY on their media consumption. And they do prioritize those people’s responses and data quite a bit. And guess what – young women aren’t usually high-income earners, and although some of them are high spenders on media, high spending on media and media related merch skews toward higher income people just because they HAVE more disposable income. Older white men are usually the highest income earners (absolutely no surprise) and they are more likely in a lot of cases to report spending a lot on the media they care about. Having expendable income makes you more important in the eyes of people doing market research than if you’ve spent every day for the last 10 years blogging excessively about Supernatural. They don’t (really) care about how much you care. They care about how much money you can generate for them. And given that young audiences don’t watch TV live anymore, and they give all their (minimal) expendable income to Netflix and Hulu, you with your Supernatural blog and your 101 essays about Destiel is all but meaningless to many of them (from a business standpoint) Now, some of them kind of understand that online fandom matters to the degree that fandom spreads. Fandom creates fandom. But if the fandom you are helping to create is other young, queer women with minimal income who only watch Supernatural via Netflix, well, that’s of very limited value to them as well. I don’t want to suggest they don’t care about you at ALL. Nor do I want to suggest that the “they” we are talking about is even a cohesive “they.” Different people in the industry have different approaches to thinking about fandom, consumer engagement and strategy, market research and how it ought to be understood/used, and so on. They aren’t a monolith. BUT, they are, at the end of the day, a business trying to make money. And they are never going to place the value of your blogging ahead of the concrete income you can generate for them. (Also, highly related to my point about people lying, men are more likely to SAY they have higher incomes than they do, because it’s an ego thing for them. And women are more likely to downplay how much money they spend on ‘frivolous’ things like fandom because of the social judgement involved. Some of the money gender disparity you see in media market research is real, but some of it is being generated by the gender norms people are falsely enacting in market research– men being breadwinners, women wanting to avoid the stereotype of being frivolous with money) *** In sum/tl;dr: Point 1 – Market research in general is not well conducted because of a variety of constraints including time, money, and the historical norms of how the industry operates (e.g., there being a large subsection of almost professionalized respondents who know how to game the system for the financial incentives) Point 2 – Media is a highly atypical kind of product being studied more or less as if it were equivalent to a coffeemaker or a pair of jeans. Point 3 – Most of the people studying media consumption in the market research field have no expertise or background in media, film, narrative, storytelling, etc. They are primarily people who were trained as social scientists and statisticians, and they aren’t well equipped to research media properties and people’s deeper emotional attachment and meaning-making processes related to media properties. Point 4(etc.) – Average consumers typically don’t have enough self-awareness or the vocabulary to explain the deep, underlying reasons they like pieces of media. Furthermore, when participating in market research, people lie and misrepresent their thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses for a variety of reasons including social awkwardness and preserving certain self-narratives like “I’m above caring about dumb, low-brow things like romance.” Point 5 (etc.) – Quantitative data is treated as way more meaningful, valuable, and ‘accurate’ than qualitative data, and this is a particular problem with media market research because of how varied and complex people’s reactions to media can be. Also, the nature of statistical sampling, and how it is done, can massively misrepresent audience sentiments toward media and fail to apprehend deeper fandom sentiments and dynamics. There is also a strong bias towards the responses of high income/high spending segments, which tend to be older and male and white. Side but important point – Research reports are written to be as entertaining and digestible as possible, which sounds nice in theory, but in practice it often means you lose much of the substance you are trying to communicate for the sake of not boring people or making them feel stupid/out of their depth. (Because god forbid you make some high-level corporate suit feel stupid) *** What can be done about this? Well, the most primary thing I would recommend is for you to participate in market research, particularly if you are American (there’s a lot of American bias in researching these properties, even when they have large international fanbases). However, some international market research is done and I recommend looking into local resources for participation, where ever you are. If you are American, there are now several market research apps you can download to your smart phone and participate in paid market research through (typically paid via PayPal). Things like dscout and Surveys On the Go. And I know there are more. You should also look into becoming panelists for focus groups, particularly if you live near a large metropolitan area (another bias in market research). Just Google it and you should be able to figure it out fairly easily. Again, it is PAID, and your perspective will carry a lot more weight when it is communicated via a focus group or a dscout project, versus when it is shouted on Twitter. However, that’s merely a Band-Aid on the bigger issue, which I consider to be the fact that businesspeople think the Humanities is garbage, even when they make their living off it. There is virtually no respect for the expertise of fictional textual analysis, or how it could help Hollywood make better content. And I don’t know what the fix is for that. I spent 4 years of my life trying to get these people to understand what the Humanities has to offer them, and I got shouted down and dismissed so many times I stopped banging my head against that wall. I gave up. They don’t listen, mostly because conceding to the value of deep-reading textual analysis as a way to make better content would threaten the whole system of how they do business. And I mean that literally. So many people’s jobs, from the market researchers to the corporate strategists to the marketing departments to the writers/creatives to the C-level executives, would have to radically shift both their thinking and their modes of business operation and the inertia of ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’ is JUST SO POWERFUL. I have no earthly idea how to stop that train, let alone shift it to an entirely different track. BTW, if you want the deeper level of analysis of why I can’t stop rewatching Moneyball now that it’s been added to Netflix, the above paragraph should give you a good hint

#market research #Hollywood #media studies

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iamnmbr3 · 3 years ago

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I saw the ask about having the person feeling like that the Loki show is objectively bad. I liked the show, here is why.

I love Loki, and I love the MCU, but I don’t go into any of it expecting consistency. Tony and Loki are my favourite.

Tony goes through character development in his own movies, IM3 especially that main canon just kinda ignores. So I didn’t go into work he Loki show expecting them to get him consistent or right. I just went in prepared to enjoy the show for what it is in isolation. I also know that no one looks at the stories they write for the MCU critically, so I try and turn off that for a first time watch.

I really like the show, that doesn’t mean I think they made it consistent or in character for Loki. I get why people don’t like it.

I really like the TVA and all the concepts it introduced. I really liked seeing Tom acting his heart out. And I really like Loki/Sylvie because I find something very compelling about a character who hates themselves, meeting another version of themselves and being able to love them. It is not a ship I’m going to write fic about but I like them within the show.

Basically what I am saying is that I go into MCU media with the expectation they will mess up at least one character or plot point badly every time. I like the media for what it is, and I appreciate whatever it brings to the table that I can then cannibalise into da works.

Yeah that's fair. Everyone has a right to their own opinion. Fandom is better when there are a diversity of opinions and we can all respect each other and engage in open and good faith discussion rather than attacking people for having the "wrong" views or trying to harass them out of fandom.

For me personally I feel like the show fails on 3 fronts.

1) To me it fails as a Loki show. I really enjoy Loki as a character and I wanted a show about him. And I didn't personally see him in the show at all. I saw a completely different character who does not behave, speak, act, respond, react, stand, emote, or make choices like Loki does. He doesn't even LOOK like Loki because they did his hair and makeup wrong. And that's really what I wanted. I didn't want Larry (as I call the show character). I wanted Loki. That was what was advertised and to me he was so ooc that he was unrecognizable. If I just saw a clip out of context and didn't know what it was from I would have assumed I was seeing Tom in a totally different role.

Thor Ragnarok felt like a different take on Loki that definitely retconned some of his personality and history, but still felt like an alternate interpretation of the same character in the sense that I could recognize the character as Loki (albeit a different version of him); some people liked that, other didn't. But here it wasn't that. It just felt like a completely new (and to me far less interesting and compelling) character. And beyond that it felt like the show went out of its way to make a mockery of the character played by Tom and by extension anyone who ever cared about Loki's character. Like it felt like a mean spirited caricatured parody. Loki is also extremely sidelined in what is supposed to be his own show. And it most certainly didn't feel like a show about Loki, which is what I wanted. So for me the show didn't provide what I was looking for.

2) To me it also fails on its own merits. If I view it in isolation without comparing it to previous canon and just view it as its own thing it also fails. The quality of the dialogue felt very poor. None of the humor made me laugh and it all felt very juvenile and forced. The plotting and characterization seemed nonsensical and all over the place. Like Sylvie sets off those charges and the episode ends on a cliffhanger with that but then it's never addressed later.

The reason that Loki and Syvie allegedly falling in love breaks the timeline didn't really make sense. Sylvie is going around murdering timekeepers and yet Mobius somehow immediately like and trusts her and says he prefers her to Loki. Loki and Sylvie are simultaneously presented as the same person and also totally different people. Loki allegedly learns self love but we never see that - we see him call himself degrading things like pathetic. And we see him think that Sylvie is better than him. That doesn't seem like self love. The romance feels extremely rushed and unrealistic and awkward and we aren't given a compelling reason for why they are in love or what they even have in common. Sylvie doesn't really have much of a character. Mobius and Loki don't interact much and Mobius consistently mistreats him but Loki somehow thinks of him as a friend. Mobius is portrayed as a good guy for cheerfully carrying out the TVA's ends but Kang is a villain for creating the TVA. The TVA seems to be all made up of humans even though it's in charge of all reality.

If Loki did bad things, then the TVA did worse things and thus are not moral authorities. If the TVA’s actions are acceptable then so are Loki’s. If Loki was wrong to violently impose his will on a planet (let’s forget about the context with Thanos for a minute) then the TVA is wrong to violently impose its will on all of reality in order to eliminate free will. If Loki was wrong to kill a few people, then the TVA was certainly wrong to kill trillions. And thus neither Mobius nor the TVA are moral authorities when it comes to Loki because they are infinitely worse. If the actions that Mobius and the TVA took are acceptable, then there is no reason to criticize Loki because he did far less than them. Etc etc etc.

The cinematography is also very poor and unprofessional and the costumes look extremely cheap and unprofessional. The whole story feels confused and disjointed. The directing is bad because the actors are all very capable but the performances often feel wooden and forced and fake. And the pacing is terrible. A lot of it drags and then plot twists come out of nowhere with no setup so it just makes them feel jarring rather than earned or entertaining.

3) To me it also fails on a moral front. The show contains a lot of problematic depictions and messages and promotes messages that are offensive or even downright harmful.

Mobius gleefully subjects Loki to physical torture by leaving him to be repeatedly beaten in the genital area. This is a very clearcut and straight forward example of physical torture. And Mobius feels no compassion for Loki or remorse over what he has done to him. If anything he seems to find it amusing. And certainly the audience is supposed to find it amusing (which is gross and harmful messaging on Disney’s part). He also subjects Loki to psychological torture. This is a fact. There are multiple instances in the show where the TVA and Mobius subject Loki to treatment that would meet the legal definition of torture under both US law and international law. Furthermore, Mobius and the TVA are holding Loki against his will and forcing him to labor without compensation or any hope of release because they view him as belonging to a group of people (Variants) that they view as inferior and not really people. That’s a pretty textbook case of slavery. So objectively Mobius is Loki’s jailer, torturer, captor, and enslaver. And yet Mobius is presented as justified in what he does to Loki. The writer and director have even called it therapy. And a result many people have parroted this which is very harmful.

The queer “representation” feels straight out of bigoted propaganda. Loki’s personality traits have been retconned to map onto harmful stereotypes about queer men. He is overly expressive, makes grand gestures, is flamboyant, cowardly, dishonest, weak, bad at fighting, lazy, spineless, meek, unused to exercise etc. Now a person could be all these things and also happen to be queer. However, Loki was never like this before. His character was retconned to be this way only in this series where he is confirmed to be queer.

Furthermore, the entire premise of the series seems to be that it is funny and entertaining and justified when Loki is dehumanized, mocked, humiliated, hurt, tortured, beaten, assaulted, and/or robbed of his dignity. That’s the premise. That’s the whole show.

In addition to pro torture and pro authoritarianism and pro victim blaming messaging the show also has problematic depictions of black characters (see here and here), Asian people (see here) and also has a lot of fludphobia and transphobia issues. And much more.

@nikkoliferous has put together a great compendium here of various posts explaining the various issues with the show if you're curious about why some people disliked it.

#asks #loki tv series #loki series #loki 2021 #loki show #loki tv show #Marvel #MCU

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shivada-jade · 3 years ago

Text

magical mischief (2)

hogwarts!au

character(s): diluc ➡ mentions: kaeya, sucrose, childe, venti, baal, diona warning(s): swearing <3

notes: it was supposed to be diluc, zhongli, and thoma but diluc's unexpectedly got longer than i hoped oOPS so i made a separate one for zhongli and thoma

part 1: kaeya, childe, albedo

gryffindor!

diluc

everyone knows of the gryffindor prefect. some people would mistake him as ravenclaw for being so studious; some people would mistake him for slytherin for being so closed off. in his first year of hogwarts, people often mistook him as hufflepuff for being friendly, overly polite, and outgoing. the hufflepuff mistake changed when he turned sixteen.

no one knows what happened to his sudden change of personality. no one but kaeya and a strange, childhood, ravenclaw friend that works with another even stranger ravenclaw.

sucrose pushes her glasses up, watching you create another explosion in her room.

you cough, wiping off the ashes from your face. the black smudges on your face don't go away. sucrose hands you a handkerchief and you gratefully accept it, finally getting the grime off.

"project sixty-two oh-eight is unsuccessful." the mint haired girl notes in a journal. "moving on to..."

you tilt your head, giving her a nod to go on but she stares at the space behind you. you turn and see kaeya, cracking open the door with a quiet knock. you frown, his uncharacteristic actions feel so weird. he usually just blasts open the door with a flick of his wand and sashays inside.

"kaeya?" you ask after apologizing to sucrose for interrupting her. "what's up?"

the slytherin clears his throat, opening the door more widely. "may i have a moment of your time? preferably not here, though."

he's so... formal. unlike himself.

you wave goodbye to sucrose and promise her to do another experiment next time then direct your attention back to the boy in front of you. "sure, outside?"

he nods. with a swish of his robes, he walks out. you note his posture is so unlike him. his strides are more rigid, less carefree. it's like a comparison from a beauty model to an uptight CEO.

he leads you right in a place where you can see the black lake. it's awfully farther than you expected. you thought he was going to lead to to the court yard, or at least the slytherin common room.

"kaeya, you're not acting like yourself." you comment.

"haha!" an airy laugh escapes from someone. you jolt, surprised from the unexpected guest. you feel two hands clamp your shoulders. "you're absolutely right, my dear."

you knit your brows, walking away from kaeya and... diluc. you slap a hand over your mouth. "wait, diluc- did you just laugh?!" did he just call you 'my dear' with a peppy tone

kaeya grumbles in displeasure. his arms cross while his brother leans on him with a carefree attitude.

you make an 'o' shape with your lips, piecing the clues together. "oh.. oh." you try to remain stoic and serious about the situation, seeing how uncomfy kaeya- no- how uncomfy diluc is.

you gasp out laughing, clutching your stomach. you crouch on the ground unable to control your laughs and look up to the brothers with tears in your eyes, "oh- please! you've switched bodies! how?!"

no wonder the slytherin had been acting all curt and polite. diluc in kaeya's body pinches the bridge of his nose. "the new first year did this," he starts to explain. "took one look at me and said, 'i will destroy the wine industry!' i don't even know how the kid knows of my family's business in the muggle world."

"placed a spell on us with weird words while having a quidditch practice match," kaeya finishes. "but really, who doesn't know of the winery? even the purest of purebloods know of it."

kaeya (still in diluc's body) looks at the red portion of his robes with a scrunched up nose. you're unable to tell if he hates how the robe feels on him. or if he hates wearing gryffindor's colours.

you hum, scratching your head. "you want me to undo the spell, right?"

"if it isn't a problem," diluc presses his lips together. with one glance at your unsure face, his shoulders droop. "you don't know how, do you..."

you smile sympathetically. "i'll try my best to undo it, but just in case, we need to find that first year, to the source itself"

kaeya raises his arms behind his now red hair, "great! it feels so weird to be seeing with both my eyes. or well, with both diluc eyes. the kid's name is diona. she's also in slytherin like me. diluc will lead you to her."

"what? why me," diluc asks.

"because you're the one who looks like me, duh! i cant go in the slytherin common room if i look like gryffindor prefect. just bring [y/n] with you. childe can also help-"

diluc glowers, "you still hang around that scum?"

"you still keep that vase?" kaeya throws sweet poison to diluc.

you chuckle nervously when you see them bring their wands out. "so, diona? let's find her."

kaeya raises a brow, and smirks. "toodles~! i dont want to spend another minute in this grump's body. that donna girl keeps trying to give me a pie- i dont want seven different pies." he wriggles his fingers to show his goodbye.

you shiver. it's so weird to see diluc- when you know diluc isn't actually diluc in his body. but his face keeps smiling and showing emotions with kaeya's soul inside. it's weird to not see only little quirks of his mouth or his typical sighs.

but really though, you could stare at kaeya's new face. it's strange seeing diluc with a scheming face: the one kaeya typically wears

"please at least try to not get into any trouble..." diluc purses his lips. "i'll try to act like you- you try to act like me."

you stare at diluc with owlish eyes. diluc? acting like kaeya?

it seems kaeya has the same reaction, because he freezes. luckily for him, he's quick witted, "oh? act like you?" he musters the grouchiest face and crosses his arms. "hello, i am diluc ragnvindr. i am a grouchy gryffindor. i hate kaeya. i hate lots of slytherins, especially the beautiful, gorgeous asshole named kaeya," he praises himself.

diluc fights the urge to throw him into the black lake. you laugh, dragging diluc away and leading him to where the slytherin common room is.

"i've only been here once, but i am acquainted with childe, so he can show us around." you bump his side playfully and stand outside the slytherin common room.

"CHILDE." you yell with your hands amplifying the noise.

"WHADDUP SHAWTY," you hear a shout from behind you.

you nod to diluc, encouraging him to somehow find a way to get the slytherin password from childe. you know he hates him, but you want to see dilucs words come true. you want to see how he acts as kaeya.

he lets out a shaky sigh and smiles so casually. the smile is so pretty, it hurts. it's a shame he doesn't do that with his own face.

childe beams seeing the two of you, "hey comrades! what are you all standing around for?" he prods around, eying diluc then snaps his fingers as if realizing something.

you wait a bit for diluc to say something, or act more, but it seems he's done his acting gig and goes straight to the point. "what's the password?"

you deadpan. childe's gonna question him now and he'd have to say he's actually dilu-

"yeah sure no problem! it's 'reckoning'"

diluc says the word to a blank wall and enters through the door. you squint your eyes and make a face at childe. "you're up to something, i know."

he shrugs and pushes you in after diluc. "tell diona i said hi."

...

you sit at the lounge, waiting for diluc to show up with diona. your brows crease, because diluc is right. childe knows something others don't. you don't recall telling childe you were trying to find diona.

you doubletake, seeing a hufflepuff drinking an absurd amount of butterbeer from who knows where. they hang their arms around a slender, purple haired slytherin who tries to push him off with disgust.

what is venti doing hanging out with the slytherin queen. he'll die-

"venti," you hiss, reaching out to try and let him live a bit longer.

he hiccups and waves you over. he 'whispers' to the slytherin next to him. oh he's in trouble now. "psst, baal. is that the one all the slytherins are talking about?" his whispers are shouts at this point.

the slytherins at the lounge freeze, hoping you havent caught on yet.

baal hits venti's head with a hand, "shut up. you're ruining the plan."

you snort seeing venti spill his drink on his clothes.

"but baal," venti downs what's left in his mug. "if that grumpy gryffindor wont confess to [y/n] then how on earth is the plan even going to work? he barely even talks to [y/n] these days because hee likes [y/n] too much." he says as if you're not in the room. he continues babbling even after baal kicks his shins, "kaeya's plan won't work if diona-"

oh shit so it's kaeya's plan and every slytherin is on it

baal drags venti out of the common room and throws him out and all the other slytherins hastily leave to their own rooms.

diluc coughs from behind you, now transformed to his normal self and with who you assume is diona. pink peppers his face while he tried to cover his face with his fiery hair. "um, i found diona. she swapped me back."

diona sticks her tongue out. "that ugly kaeya made a deal with me on something and i had to oblige! it's honestly so pathetic how you can't confess so deal or no deal: i had to do it, but the uglier bard ruined the whole plan so i turned you back."

diluc dusts imaginary dust off his cloak and grasps your hands. he looks down to his feet, still unsure of whether to do this or not. "well, you heard it all. it's a shame it couldn't be from me but-" he rambles. with other's he's confident, but with you he's a mess. "i hope you can accept my feelings. if not i understand, i'll go on with my day and you'll never have to see me."

he holds his breath, silently quivering with the lack of response you give. a hand lifts his chin up and he stares at your eyes, nervous.

you didn't say anything, but you smile and give his the warmest hug.

he knows the answer now.

he wraps his arms back, silently thanking kaeya for his idiotic plan. it's stupid, but it worked in the end.

BONUS!:

"KAEYA I WILL FUCKING MURDER YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS"

kaeya swirls a gold goblet with sparkling grape juice inside. he wolfishly grins and holds his cup up with a hand. "a toast for master diluc! for finally confessing, if people can even call it that."

he lowers it, placing it on his lips but never drinking it. he grins under the cup seeing diluc's wand in his hand flaming red.

"it's not even my fault." kaeya starts to explain his bullshit to diluc, "you can blame yourself. honestly, it gets tiring seeing you pine for so long and avoiding them like you weren't childhood friends with them."

the tips of diluc's ears turn red, not wanting to agree with his brother, but it was true. he was hopeless in the romantic department by himself. he can reject thousands and millions of people. he can have who ever he wants, but you aren't "whoever." you're the most special someone to him and that made him scared.

kaeya hands his drink to diluc, "do i get a thank you?"

diluc scoffs, yet accepts the drink. "thank you," he quietly mutters.

part 3: thoma, zhongli

#genshin impact x reader #genshin x reader #diluc x reader #diluc ragnivindr x reader

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aio-rya · 4 years ago

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Red Panda Headcanons

GN!Reader x Character

「Requested by: @kih-lux」

A/N: Kih~ you gave me the option and this was more focused to be a Male Reader but... It ended being more a Gender Neutral, I guess... I'll keep practicing.

・Floyd, Jade and Azul are ocean creatures, they know about hybrids and people like Ruggie, Leona and Jack, though they are aware there are other species, some of them are so rare and so unique it's far too difficult to have a chance of running into one of them. And, guess what? Yes, you were part of that category.

・"I've never seen one of your kind, why? Are you so rare? Are you from a far land? Wait, maybe you are... An endangered specie?". Be patient with the tweel, he has too many questions since his research hasn't been so long; you'll be pleased of helping him with that.

・Well, this couldn't result as you originally planned since Jade himself determined you were in nice shape, your body was as expected from a being half beast, half human. So, he decided you will be helping him on the Lounge too! So you could spend more time together, talking about you while working. Plus, he thought the contrast between your brune ears and tail made a nice contrast with the grey suit of Octavinelle.

・The curiosity soon transformed into interest, he started hanging out with you and even asked you to join his club! In fact, he thought you could enjoy it since your specie's homeland is a forest; you could help him learn from places he has never been before, though he would love to know if you remembered any sort of fungi of your homeland.

・Jade will be always respectful, asking before acting, having a special attraction for your tail and ears. He has seen things like those before, with Savanaclaw's dorm members, but you were specially cute for him. Since you had a special moment when you purred —because, yes, pandas actually purr.

・He loves the comparison you do about him being a bambu stick. His height is a bit far than yours so, when you hug him and tangle your tail on his legs it looks as if you were a red panda holding a bambu stick even though red pandas don't do that often.

・The Tweels are not used to cold, they prefer to stay on earth at winter, but that will not stop him from being warm with you. He loves your fur because of that, specially when you have sleepovers and you roll your tail against him to keep him warm.

・"What do we have here? A teddy bear?"; he will ask, mocking of you, looking at the cute red fur of your ears, caught by the white line on the side of them. You'd smile mischievously, sighing, not letting his height or his deep voice intimidate you, slowly approaching a couple of steps —instead of answering his provocation, you'll lift a hand, almost at the height of his face. "Ho... This herbivore has guts."

・"I'm no herbivore... Not at all", you'll answer, defending yourself as you show your retractile long, pointy claws to him. You'd swear everything you saw in his eyes at the moment was fear on its pure form, specially since you made this actually at his eyes' height. You'd dare to say you broke him but it'd be more accurate to tell you actually gained his respect.

・Well, your peculiar first meeting was just the beginning of what somehow became a love-hate friendship. Since he was the captain of your club and you shared more unexpected encounters than you'd have thought, you grew fond of each other; soon, going from one place to another together.

・Leona would question you a lot about your specie; he's used to carnivorous wild animals like Ruggie, like him or some cheetah or tiger hybrids, but you were a bit different. And even after you already explained him your situation, he would still mess around, giving you bambú sticks for snack between classes, just because he loves your upset expression and the way you wave your tail furiously and move your ears to the sides.

・You got to trust each other so far Leona sometimes dishevelled the fur of your cylindrical, thick tail; he was lot curious about it since it was far shorter than his very own. That meant, of course, you delighted yourself with payback; sometimes braiding the tip of his tail, or tangling his tie on a ribbon on it.

・Since you were both half animal, you knew exactly which points he'd like to be touched on. That was, somehow, cheating; specially when you found him angry and tried to make him relax, words wouldn't work so you'd stand behind him and caress his ears —of course you made him purr, you always do. That, suddenly, became an intimate thing only of you both.

・There's something Leona loves doing and not necessarily to bother you: paw your ears. For him, those are like marshmallows, the red fluff, more rigid and smaller than his own. He just melt for touching them, specially when you fall asleep because, yeah, pandas sleep as much as the Prince of Afterglow Savannah.

・He could not hide his surprise when he realised you were not completely human, you immediately caught his attention; furthermore, you were not a common specie, he deduced so by your smell. "Well, well... What do we have here? You look like Kingscholar but quite... Hm. Completely different."

・Malleus would come back to you often, some nights when he was trying to scape from his guards. But he will not arrive just like it; he will try to find some facts about you, ask you the less possible and make research by his own to know what you were, how to treat you? Until you became of more interest for him than your specie.

・Soon he discovered by your stories that you were alone too, still you had a family but your own specie was not very common, you made friends with another kind of hal-beasts and another species of pandas. That only made him to get attached to you, someone who could understand him!

・He got to hang out with you almost every night, reaching the point where he would go and look for you to your classrooms. Malleus thought at first you started fearing him too by the twitching of your ears, soon realising you just... Softened. The way you flattened your ears was signal of trust, you actually felt comfortable around him —you made the Heir of the Valley happy.

・As time passed by, you earned an inconditionnel friend, he would talk to you about almost anything you wanted to know while, in exchange, you taught him about your world, the "human" world. Soon, that became more physical, and now he pawed your ears when you leaned on his shoulder to listen at him and his tales.

・There were nights when he would take you to the castle's roof to talk more privately, or just to see the moon and the forest along the village in the distance. And many of those nights, you'd fall asleep, curled up against his legs with your tail swinging peacefully or just laying over your legs or hips; he would try to caress it, obviously not waking you up and, if you ever did, he will just blush and look away.

・You had your own tricks, sometimes when you went for a walk on the little forest around the castle, you climbed threes and hanged upside down trying to surprise him. Well... You even touched his horns. At first you were worried about him being mad but his laughter broke the tension on your shoulders. But of course, you had a tail and ears, so his payback was inevitable.

・"I have never seen someone liketh thee...", you heard the intrigue on his voice. He floated around you, upside down, analysing the visible characteristics that made you half an animal. When Lilia is curious, he's not very measured with his actions... Yeah, that means he will touch your fur.

・He'd love to study your reactions to many stimulus, so he will tease you in ways you can and cannot expect. Though you started being prepared, or at least a bit, you'd never anticipate when was he going to appear. You were basically on guard every time you were on the library or in the hallways until the final day came and he told you how interesting you were to him.

・You tried to do the same on him but the movement of your tail or even sometimes your little furry ears twitching will alert him of your presence. Since then, you both became almost inseparable; people could se him flying around you, upside down or just playfully, other times you just got to sit aside him but there were always laughter and smiles.

・Oh, true! He basically transformed you into a nocturnal creature. Once he introduced you into video-game's world, you started spending more time together, another fact reassuring him you were a panda: sleeping a lot on the evening, when classes or clubs were not taking place, and enjoying the night along him.

・That of course meant he must protect your ears from Sebek. His very own audition was sensible enough to be disturbed by the demi-fae loudness, but he was worried about you: since he knew you were a red panda and discovered pandas had developed very, very, very sensible ears due to not wanting to be hunted by predators, he would avoid having you and Sebek on the same room for too long.

・His protective instincts made their appearance. You seemed like a tender and lovely being for him, that was the reason why Lilia was concerned about you: even though you were half a human, most of your habits were of your animal part. He knew when you were sleepy and you tried to pretend you were not just to stay with him for a while, playing. He will, surprisingly, sing you a lullaby to make you sleep while he played one last round; keeping an eye on you, the way you curled up, the way your ears twitched.

・The way you met was... Amusing. Well, you see, one of your favourite spots for napping was the forest, the place where he usually made his patrols. Since his narcolepsy is always present, he tends to fall asleep in situations like this, what happened that day: he fell under your three and once you woke up together, you both got scared as hell.

・He started questioning you; why were you there? What were you doing? Who where you? You answered calmly, trying to calm him down since he was actually pointing at you with the sword. When he finished and put the blade down, you asked for him to answer the same question. And once you were aware of his condition, you understand everything and both bursted in laughter.

・There were to many incidental encounters with each other you ended up being friends. Sometimes you even went and looked for him deep in the forest, when you found him asleep you'll just sit by his side and read a book or play a bit with the animals surrounding him, usually birds. You cannot understand them, but when he woke up, he will always act as a translator for you.

・He had the opportunity of finding you asleep on the branch of a three or behind a rock, one of those times, curiosity took over him and he couldn't help but start petting you. Starting for your ears and your hair, getting startled when he heard you purring under his hand.

・Most of the time you surprised him at his night patrol, it was cold outside often, so you made a scarf for him. It matched with your tail and it was thick and furry too; your heart almost fell from your chest when you saw the happiness in his eyes. Now, when you were nap buddies, he will take it with him.

・He wanted to teach you something about him too so he used your free time to teach you fencing. Yes, he would usually bring another sword to the forest so you could kill time whenever you were not sleeping, reading or he was not on guard.

・Even Lilia cooked sometimes for Silver, he was aware of your existence. He was happy though about his little boy having a new friend... Well, deep inside himself, he was happy, just awaiting for Silver to know how love felt —in fact, he just wanted his child to go asking for advice.

#ツイステ #ツイステッドフンダラーンド #twst #twisted wonderland #jade leech #twst jade #leona kingscholar #twst leona #malleus draconia #twst malleus #lilia vanrouge #twst lilia #twst silver #twisted wonderland silver #twst headcanons

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bigskydreaming · 3 years ago

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Something else to keep in mind is the way things compound? Like for instance, I’ve seen a mini trend of fics lately focusing on the issue of Dick dropping out of college or not wanting to go, which for the record, I feel is another way of building up to the idea that he and Bruce have all these fights during this period that are two way streets instead of like....what canon actually was (reminder that in the canon that Dick actually dropped out he and Bruce actually were never really NOT on good terms, like there’s never been a big fight in the comics about this topic so.....incheresting).

But anyway, my point is its worth keeping in mind that how you frame something at one point in a narrative like.....ideally, you want it to mesh up and align with other things you’ve brought up throughout the narrative, and not accidentally contradict yourself narratively.

I mean, this is really the big gripe most Dick Grayson fans have with his fanon characterization overall:

The fact that it just doesn’t make sense.

In Jason-centric fics that are after his resurrection, how often is Jason utterly convinced that Dick can’t even wipe his ass without Bruce’s approval? And yet in Jason-centric fics that are before his death, how often is Jason thinking about how Dick and Bruce are constantly fighting and Bruce can’t seem to do anything without Dick objecting? Reconcile these two things. They make no sense.

Same thing with fics that talk about Dick being the emotional glue of the family, the one keeping a cool head to calm down everyone else when they’re all taking shots at each other.....until randomly he just pops off without warning because he’s just that hot-tempered. These things mesh, how?

Same thing with Dick being frequently referenced as idealized by the hero community......but every time he interacts with someone like Roy or Kori or other Titans he can’t seem to avoid pissing them off and creating epic grudges. Make it make sense.

Or how Dick disliked or didn’t care about Jason to the extent that he only references him as a cautionary tale because of one line in canon......but the whole damn story where he kills the Joker because of Jason doesn’t count.

Or how its not okay to blame Dick for his own rapes but both of his major breakups which are intrinsically linked to the actions of his rapists like....were clearly and objectively all his fault somehow.

Dick Grayson fans aren’t on board with most of fanon because you can’t sell people on a constantly conflicting characterization that makes no sense and has no internal consistency.....you can only cater to people who don’t NEED to be sold on that because they’ve already decided they’re down with hating a character or largely ignoring him.

And I think people have gotten so used to not thinking twice about contradictory takes on Dick Grayson that they unintentionally undermine their own fics by contradicting themselves without even realizing it.

Like its ridiculously common to come across fics that reference Dick being beloved and charming everyone at the society galas they all have to go to.....but these fics take pot shots at Dick’s name, fashion, mannerisms etc all throughout it just because the author likes it or fans expect it or whatever reason.

But actually THINK about it:

Think how snobby the socialites at these galas are characterized as being any time its Jason their noses are turned down at.....and then look at like.....the constant jokes you as the author make YOURSELF at Dick’s very name, fashion and circus origins......how on Earth does it make ANY sense that these same people aren’t doing the same damn thing about Dick? That they’re actually any more fond of him than they are Jason, if no matter how charming he might be in the moment, the second he turns around its just as easy and likely for them to make a joke about his circus background or name as it is for writers and readers? If you can’t resist doing it, you really think snobby one percenters would bother in-universe?

Hell, they’d be more likely to hate him BECAUSE of his name, his fashion, etc.....because think of how often people not so subtly infer that he’s making a bad choice when he refuses to go by a different name, or dress more accordingly to normal fashions, etc.....

Dick has a million ways he could more easily fit in with the society he was brought into and ease his passage through it, but he puts his foot down at practically every opportunity. The idea that everybody is just dazzled by him at these galas makes no sense because the most consistent character choice made by Dick throughout the decades is that he refuses to CONFORM to others’ expectations of what he should be like.

EVERY SINGLE CHOICE he makes from his name to his wardrobe to his costumes to his education to his city to his living arrangements and on and on is in complete and utter DEFIANCE of what people expect of the eldest son or ward of Bruce Wayne, Prince of Gotham, and that’s by Dick’s conscious and consistent choice. He knows damn well how to be more what people want or expect of him, and that’s not what he wants so he says mmmm but also how bout no.

Dick constantly embodies the idea that you can take the boy out of the circus but you can not and will not take the circus out of the boy no matter what environment you place him in or who you surround him with. He will not allow it. He will not play along.

In what universe is that going to endear him to the very people who would most likely view his choice to prioritize the very things they look down upon as something he consciously PREFERS over their projected expectations or assumptions?

Its not.

Personally, I think Gotham high society despises Dick Grayson no matter what they pretend to his face, and he’s perfectly aware of it. And probably gets some kind of trollish glee out of it because fuck them too, anyway.

(And all of that is WITHOUT even taking into account the fact that a good number of the people at these society galas all along were looking at Dick as their future property, given that they were Owl members who knew all along what they intended for their Gray Son. These people simply do not view and treat Dick as an equal. Its impossible. There’s no way).

Or then back to the idea of Bruce and Dick’s fights in his later teenage years being a two way street....

The core problem at the root of all this is the very idea of a two way street implies a certain give and take. A clashing of equals.

And that’s just not the reality in ANY continuity.

Because the question is, in any given fight between Dick and Bruce in ANY canon....

When does Dick ever WIN these fights?

When does Dick get the outcome he wants OVER what Bruce wants? When does Bruce ever cave? When is it NOT Dick leaving the manor without getting what he came for, or even being kicked out? When has Dick ever been able to say no, I’m NOT fired, or no, I’m NOT giving you control over what happens with Robin. Even when he DOES confront Bruce on these matters, Bruce STILL infamously never caves. He never actually apologizes or admits wrongdoing, he still usually tells Dick to leave. Like I said, basically the only time Dick’s ever got the upper hand in an argument was over the college thing and that time it wasn’t even a fight! Bruce didn’t actually care that much! That was the good timeline! LOL.

But there’s never actually a reversal. There’s no real precedent for Bruce caving to a teenage Dick Grayson and saying hey you know what, you’re right here, I’m overstepping or I’m in the wrong or I’m the one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about because our divergent life experiences here have mine as less relevant to the issue in question than yours do?

It doesn’t happen.

And here’s the problem with that:

Dick’s a literal genius. Every member of the Batfam is. Its how they’re able to do what they do. They’re ALL smart as fuck, capable as fuck. Put any of them in any other situation where they’re the only Bat present, and everyone usually defaults to them. They know what to do, they know what call to make, their approach is borne out by the narrative as being the correct approach. Their intelligence and strategy is validated by the narrative, with Dick being no exception here. In fact he’s particularly NOTED within canon narratives for being the guy everyone in the DC universe trusts to lead them.

Now.....imagine being this guy, who while although still a teenager, is in his late teens, and has YEARS of leading his own team under his belt. Years of being responsible for the lives of teammates and civilians. Years of becoming aware of and comfortable with his own natural brilliance. Years of becoming confident in being capable of making the right call when the situation demands it. Years of learning to TRUST in his ability to make the right call, to know the right approach, because not only are people relying on him to make those calls, he needs to be able to trust he can make them in order to have the confidence to follow through and DO so instead of being frozen with indecision or trying to pass the decision off to someone else, which he NEVER does?

With all that....and even with all due respect to Bruce’s own genius and experience....

What are the chances that in all the times that Bruce and Dick clash in his late teenage years....

Dick is NEVER right?

And yet.....when in any of these conflicts.....is he ever validated in that, versus shut down by Bruce who insists his way is still right?

Imagine being an acknowledged genius with years of experience and responsibility under your belt, but NEVER getting to be right in any arguments with your father, even when just based off pure freaking statistics, its frankly impossible for you to be 100% wrong EVERY SINGLE TIME?

Do you see where the two way street thing starts to fall apart? How can it truly be a two way street if part of the reason the two of them so often end UP aggressively opposed to each other during this time period.....is because of how many times previous encounters have only ended ONE way no matter WHAT?

It makes sense for Dick and Bruce not to clash as much during their younger years, because even the most stubborn kids do understand on a fundamental level that they have things to learn from more experienced adults. And Dick has never been someone mindlessly predisposed towards conflict. He didn’t become an exceptional acrobat by the age of eight by butting heads with his parents every time they tried to teach him, he couldn’t have. He KNOWS how to listen, he KNOWS how to acknowledge when someone else is right.

But as he grows older, when he has more and more experience under his belt, more and more confidence in his own insights in large parts thanks to Bruce’s own efforts in buttressing his confidence in his younger years.....what happens when the balance of who is right and who is wrong in their arguments NEVER EVER starts to shift in his direction even a little bit, no matter HOW much more experienced he seems to get....and what happens when communicating this problem, this imbalance, to the person that really matters here, Bruce himself....still inherently requires Bruce accepting blame and acknowledging even just in THIS case, the idea that he’s not always right at this point and Dick has insights that can challenge his?

Of course there’s going to be more and more conflict....but can you truly argue that its a two way street, even just based off THIS? Is the teenage son truly to blame for being frustrated that he’s not allowed to ever be right, because the thing getting in his way is his father never ever being willing to back down or cave or not have the last word?

This is the sort of inherent contradiction I think lies at the heart of a lot of conflicting viewpoints here. It doesn’t matter how much lip service is being paid to the idea that Dick is intelligent, that Dick is respected, if all your content continually bears out the idea that actually no he’s not, because Bruce is always right, Dick never is in the right in arguments or conflicts.

The latter evidence just is not aligning with the former claims, and thus readers are innately forced to make a choice as to which to believe.....and more likely than not, they’re going to err on the side of substantiating whichever stance actually has more narrative support behind it, in any particular story.

See what I’m saying?

You need to make sure your story is ACTUALLY saying what you think you’re saying or you intended to say....or you end up undermining your own intentions.

Anyway. Just throwing that out there.

104 notes · View notes

taeescript · 3 years ago

Text

IV. Script of the Angel (m)

𝔰𝔶𝔫𝔬𝔭𝔰𝔦𝔰 >> This is the story of three very different people. A successful novelist, a blossoming artist and a dedicated cop. They seem to have nothing in common. Yet, they are continually drawn to each other. It is as if their fates have been intertwined. Written. That they must meet.

𝔭𝔞𝔦𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔰 >> ft. jungkook and jimin primarily.

𝔤𝔢𝔫𝔯𝔢 >> policeman!jimin, author!jungkook, painter!reader, serialkiller!XXX; a classic game of cat and mouse

𝔴/𝔠 >> 9.1k

𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔫𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔰 >> mature themes depicted. due to the explicit nature of the topic (serial killers, murders, violence, sexual content, infidelity etc.) this is rated 18+. to spare storytelling: please consider yourself warned. sexual content present.

𝔞/𝔫 >> another long chapter. sorry! the oc is as opposite to me as day is to night, but i have always enjoyed writing characters who are different. i feel like i’m being challenged to expand my own writing skills. as always, enjoy (: feedback and comments always appreciated. (i am curious: do you prefer long or short chapters?)

previous part || masterlist || next part

The taxi arrives much earlier than any of you anticipate. Jungkook is halfway through telling you about the unfortunate event of being kicked out of his rented room when the annoyed-looking driver quickly shoves you both inside. He asks you where you are headed. You lean forward and give him the address of your house. The driver mutters how the drive is less than five minutes away, but he accepts the job nevertheless. “How about you, Sir?” the driver asks Jungkook. Jungkook is at a loss of words until you intercede. “Same place,” you say. Jungkook gives you a confused look. “You said you don’t have any place to stay tonight so I’m extending an offer. Also, sort of like a thank you for finding and staying with me through this storm.” Your words come out much shyer than you had anticipated. He gives you a slight smile. “Are you sure it’s wise for you to invite a stranger to your house?” You blush. “You’re not really a stranger.” “Ah, I’m not? Well I’m a suspect to a murder case.” “No, you’re not! Jimin was only talking to you as a witness.” “A witness? He seemed a little too hostile for that.” As the conversation had carried on, you didn’t notice how close he became until you turned to come face to face with him. The small smile he always has continues to linger on his lips. You pull back and turn to hide the flush on your face that you know for sure is present. Once the heat seems to have left, you glance at him again. He is still regarding you with curiosity. Extending a hand towards him you say, “$10 per night. I’ll be your landlady and you’re renting a room from me.” He laughs and you can’t help but stare with wonder at how white and straight his teeth are.

...

The Body is a miraculous item of study. Inside, we have these little chemical messengers that act on receptors to tell us: wake! At the same time, they tell us: sleep! Just what are these chemical messengers that run around us like tiny men in a sleep-wake factory? First, when we are getting ready to sleep, Melatonin is produced in the pineal gland to send us a message telling us that it is time to enter slumber. Their levels increase as the level of darkness increases. Once our body is asleep, a surge of multiple hormones play a role. You have growth hormone from the pituitary gland telling (a child in particular) to grow and repair tissue; you have antidiuretic hormone (ADH) increasing so we don’t have to get up and pee in the middle of the night; you have oxytocin that may peak at about five hours of sleep influencing the content of our dreams. You wait nervously outside the bathroom door. You had both returned to your house and you had changed into a comfortable pair of sweats and a sleeveless top. Your hair was tied in a bun on your head; your scalp itching to remind you that it had been a while since you washed your hair. However, you had more pressing matters at hand. You had told Jungkook that he was allowed to use the shower first but after drinking one too many cups of water – your throat was so dry – you now desperately needed to use the washroom. The water is still running and you can slightly feel the heat escaping the warm room through the small crack of the door. It was ajar and the smell of your shampoo wafted out to meet your nose. It made you wonder if your shampoo had always been so sweet and inviting. As you are the only resident of the house, there had never been a need for multiple bathrooms and thus your only solution is to patiently wait outside until your guest is finished. After what felt like five minutes but in actuality five seconds, you take a small peek into the bathroom. The glass shower door has been fogged up and you can only see a very hazy silhouette of its current occupant. If you were to dash in and release everything in your bladder at a fast enough speed, perhaps Jungkook would never notice that you would be in there. Just as long as you moved fast enough. You wanted to weigh the pros and cons of this decision but your bladder would not let your mind concentrate. Before you could control your body, you rush into the bathroom. Everything but the feeling of pleasure from the release of the buildup of pressure in your pelvis is forgotten. You close your eyes and let out a satisfied sigh. When you are finished, you deftly stand and flush the toilet. You momentarily lean over the toilet, reveling in the new weightlessness of your body, when the realization of the scenario you are in hits you. You had just walked into a man showering in your house. Not only that, you had used the toilet while he was washing up (naked) less than a feet away. If you really didn’t get out of the bathroom now, Jungkook would definitely see you in here. If you really didn’t get out of the bathroom now, Jungkook would think you are a peeping tom. If you really didn’t get out of the bathroom now – It is too late, however. You hear his voice from behind you, “Well, this is a surprise.” You turn as slowly as you can. Jungkook stands with the white towel around his waist. He does not look much different than when you had seen him drenched by the rain, but this time you are able to smell the masculine scent of body wash off of him. The first time in the rain, you had been unable to help yourself and glance at his defined abdominal muscles through his soaked shirt, but this time you choose not to peel your eyes away from the sight. The gulp you takes makes its way slowly down your throat. “I needed to use the toilet really badly,” you somehow managed to squeak. He tucks the end of the towel into the side all the while looking at you with a teasing smirk. You do not need to look in the mirror behind you to know the shade your face has turned. “I’ll be going now,” you murmur and turn to leave the room. “Without washing your hands?” he teases you. As if he now is not regarding you as a full out pervert, he probably thought you as unclean as well. You can’t remember what you say in response to that as you shuffle to the sink. The water is warm when it runs out of the faucet. Your mind is unfocused on the task in front of you as you can only think of ways to escape or talk your way out of this situation. “How are you supposed to wash any the germs away if you scrub like that?” You feel his voice vibrate along your back. You immediately tense up when his arms wrap from behind around you. His hands gently take your slimmer hands into his own and together they move through the lathering actions. He pumps the hand soap and his lips become dangerously close to your cheek when he reaches in front. “Clean between each finger and the side of your palm. People often forget to wash the area around the thumb and most of their less dominant hand,” he continues to lecture you. “Just be still,” the plea to your body and mind only being silently voiced out in desperation. There is no extra cloth to wipe your hands dry and so he uses the towel around his waist instead. Each action he does only made you become ever more anxious and self-conscious. When he seemed satisfied with you, he lets you walk away. You will your legs to maintain its strength as you take the steps needed to exit the small steamy room. You are stopped again when he says, “Are you always so innocent?” There is a part of you that wants to turn to look at him, but another part warns you that if you do, a larger temptation will face you. He strolls to stand before you. His eyes slowly make their way from your toes to the top of your forehead; then his gaze holds you steadily in place. You swallow again under his scrutiny. Taking a step towards you, he slides a finger under the strap of you tank top. The simple action makes you shiver. “Tell me, how long have you been living alone?” Your mind tells you not to answer him. What are you doing anyways? Just an hour ago you were thinking about Baekhyun and now you are being consumed by Jungkook. “How long has it been since you’ve been… touched?” his question comes out barely above a whisper – that is how close he is to you now. “I shouldn’t – ” you words are suffocated by his kiss. His lips mold until they wrap around yours. Your eyes squeeze shut, and you fall into him with such speed that it scares you. You feel both dread and thrill in your stomach. He tastes warm, that is the only thing your mind is capable of detecting. Other than that, your brain can not function and you feel yourself shiver in his embrace. You wonder if he has his eyes closed as well or if he was looking at you. Perhaps if you opened your eyes you would have an answer to your question yet you felt afraid of doing so. He pulls you waist closer to him and the dew on his chest seeps through your thin top. His skin is warm, but the now-cold water causes your nipples to become erect. He can feel them straining through the top, but rather than having his hand rise up to meet it, he slides his hand deeper into your pants. Your body tenses up at the invasion. “Relax,” the single word slurs as they are passed between your lips. The suggestion comes in the form of a command and your body strangely listens. With his hand, he forcefully grips the left cheek of your behind and roughly presses you lower body into his. The simultaneous sensation of pleasure and pain runs through your body. His other free hand brushes the nape of you neck. Your hands act of their own accord, and you find them running through his hair, all the while as he tugs on your lips; all the while that you become wrapped in his embrace. Your fingers become brushed with water, and you draw a wet finger down the middle of his back. It is his moan you hear this time, and the thrill rushes through your body again. For the next few moments, the two of you are captivated with exploring each other’s body. You think that he is about to lift your shirt off when instead his hand slips through the barrier created by your underwear. You freeze again. His lips leave yours and trace a pathway until he stands behind you, and your back is pressed tightly against his torso. All the while, his hand makes a crawling rotation until they rest on you lower abdominal. You place a shaking hand on top of this. You don’t even notice that your fingers have become icy cold. “Trust me,” he whispers into your ear. His voice is so low that you mind barely registers what he has said. You heart rises in speed in proportion to his hand that moves out from beneath yours and continually slides downward.

...

You wake with a beating heart. Your eyes fly open, and they are greeted with the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars you had placed on your ceiling. It had been a dream. Your breathing fights to become regular again, but the more you think about what you had awoken from, the more it loses in its battle. You know it is all a dream, but why was it then that you still feel the pressure on you lower abdominal? With a crack, your mind finally reels out of its stupor and a new burn in your stomach causes you to flush again. The act of sex is not foreign to you. You had given that away to Baekhyun the night you realized you were truly in love with him – the night he had proposed to you. But that had happened a long time ago and since his disappearance, you had never given yourself to another man. The thought had never even passed through you. So why was it that you had these thoughts now? Towards a man that you had only just met? Also, how was it that he could make you do something like this? Your hand slides out from your underwear and the band’s near soundless snap practically hands you its embarrassing reality on a gold platter. You couldn’t even remember the last time you had touched yourself. The concept was always too taboo and awkward for you to embrace. You were also not a person that became aroused by sexual thoughts, yet a simple dream had made you lose control of your body. You wiped your hands on the bedsheets, and turn onto your side in bed so you would no longer feel the pressure of gravity on your already tense body. Jeon Jungkook. You only invited him at the spur of the moment. You had both returned home and wordlessly showered and got into bed. You had offered to make a simple meal but he had kindly rejected telling you that he was too tired. He had also jokingly told you not to worry about breakfast tomorrow as it was the least he could do in return for letting him sleep at your place. Continuing on, you told him that he was allowed to use your bedroom so he would be more comfortable but he had patted your small sofa instead. He always carried a pillow with him and told you he could fall asleep anywhere as long as he had it with him. You squeeze your eyes shut. Why? What was this? Who is this man that has barged into your safe house?

More importantly, what is he doing to you? You curl into a tighter ball and press your thighs closer together.

...

The scent of sweet in combination to savory fills your nose and sends a chill through your body. Your eyes remain closed, still infused with slumber but you bring the blanket closer to you. A small breeze sends another intoxicating spiral towards your nose. It smells like pancakes. Perhaps with a thick layer of maple syrup and a cube of butter. There is also something that reminds you of salt – bacon. Sizzling, warm, crunchy bacon. The distinct aroma of coffee is blended in there as well. Your curiosity gets the better of you and you open your eyes. You yelp. Jungkook nearly tips the coffee cup onto your drawer when the sound suddenly occurs. He looks down and sees your wide eyes staring up at him. He meets them but you quickly shift your pupils. You look… nervous. Seeing the unexpected visitor makes you remember the events of last night. Your palms start to sweat and you only draw the covers closer to your chest while sitting up. The corner of the sheet dips past your shoulder and he catches the flash of smooth skin. “Sorry to wake you,” he scratches his jaw embarrassedly, “I saw you were asleep and I promised breakfast. I thought I’d try to quietly slip in and leave it by your bedside.” You eye the said meal on your drawer and note that your nose had not lied to you. “It’s okay,” you try to say. However, your voice is groggy with sleep and so you clear it once. “It’s okay,” you say clearer this time, “But you really didn’t have to.” “It’s nothing. I’m an early riser anyways.” He makes a motion to leave. “Wait,” you call after him. He turns back to look at you. His gaze is piercing and the strange flush that never failed to make an appearance returns. “I’ll join you outside,” you tell him. Smiling, he nods. “I’ll see you soon, then.”

...

When you had left, Jimin had sat down at his desk feeling extremely dejected. He was supposed to protect you and make sure you never shed another tear. That was his promise to his best friend. Yet here he is, as the cause of your pain once again.

“Sir, the files you had requested.” Yoongi knocks on his door. As the youngest detective on the team, he is often coerced into doing the grunt work. But his tenacious and hard-working attitude gave him rise on Jimin’s list of people he respected. Jimin tilts his head to peer above the top of his cluttered desk. New files had been opened along with the scatter of older yellowing papers. His whiteboard is nearing a grey colour at the amount of times he has written things down and then erased them. Yoongi listens and is about to leave his senior alone but stops at the door. “Sir, if I may, will you allow me to make a comment?” the younger asks solemnly. Jimin turns to regard him. His eyesight blurs and he has to hold onto the corner of the desk to steady himself. Quickly masquerading the moment of weakness, he coughs and stands straight again. “You haven’t left the station in three days. You sleep at the desk and your back is in so much pain you shuffle to get coffee. It smells of Chinese take-out and stale pizza in here with another strange concoction of coffee and sweat.” Jimin raises an eyebrow at him. Yoongi clears his throat but does not waver in telling Jimin his mind. “Go home, Sir. You need some rest. The case will still be here when you return. It’ll also be of benefit when you return with refreshed eyes and mind.” Yoongi stands still all the while looking forward. From the corner of his eyes, he sees Jimin walking towards him. His mouth starts to become dry knowing the harsh words he will hear from the his senior for speaking out of place.

Jimin tiredly places a hand on Yoongi’s shoulder. Yoongi rotates his head in surprise. Sighing, he says, “You’re right. My body is on the verge of breaking down.” He sniffs once. “And I do smell like shit.”

Yoongi chuckles, both out of nervousness and relief.

“I’m leaving the team in your hands then,” Jimin grabs his jacket from the coat hanger.

“Me?” Yoongi says astonished, “What about Lieutenant Namjoon?”

The laugh draws more strength from Jimin’s lungs than he anticipates. “I haven’t seen that guy for the past three days in the station, and both you and I know I’ve been living here. You’re young, but I like your attitude. The others like you too.”

Yoongi cannot help but smile at the praise. He salutes as Jimin walks out the door. “I’ll do my absolute best!”

“I expect nothing less,” Jimin calls out and waves.

...

He had fully intended to walk home, but there are so many thoughts in his head he needed fresh air to wash out the stale one in his lungs and to clear out his mind.

Sitting at the park just a block away from the station, he takes a small bite of the cookie he picked up from the station’s café. It is sickening sweet and he wonders how he had lived on these cookies when he used to pull all-nighters for previous cases.

“I knew I’d find you here,” a voice interrupts his quiet.

Jimin looks up and sees Namjoon smiling at him. Namjoon’s hair is swept back and he is sporting a white polo shirt along with khaki pants. His police jacket is slung over his arm and hides his badge within. At a quick glance, Namjoon looks like any normal civilian enjoying the autumn afternoon.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” Jimin lazily greets his friend.

Namjoon takes a seat beside Jimin. In one hand, he holds a brown paper back and this is what he extends towards Jimin.

Taking a peek inside, Jimin notes a container that has some type of potato salad along with another stacked container with mixed rice.

“Youngji told me to pass this to you,” Namjoon answers his unasked question, “We thought you could do without any more of the crappy station café food – full of MSG and sugar.”

The smiling face of Namjoon’s soon-to-be wife enters Jimin’s vision at the mention of her name. The two had recently moved in together and there were days when Jimin felt envious when hearing about Namjoon brag about his fiancée’s skills in the kitchen.

“Thanks,” Jimin says.

“I’m not slacking on the job by the way,” Namjoon says.

“You’re not? I don’t recall seeing you in the office for the past couple of days.”

“I got called into a meeting with the board of directors. They wanted an update on this Angel Killer.”

“Angel Killer, huh? Quite original.”

“Not my call on what we name the perps.”

A lull in the conversation comes to as Jimin caves into the meal set before him.

“Not a spinach and green bean casserole, I see,” Jimin jokes.

Namjoon laughs. Starting from a few weeks before, Youngji had gone into a fascination in preparing green foods. The entire floor soon came to understand that Namjoon would be eating the same casserole for his next few meals.

“I convinced her out of it,” Namjoon says with a grin, “Told her that she already spoils me with all her other cooking.”

Jimin chuckles along with Namjoon. He digs his fork into the meal before him. The taste of food that did not come from a can is such a welcome sensation to his body he can’t help but sigh.

“Youngji’s a fantastic cook.”

“One of the best.”

“Well, here’s to you forever gaining weight.”

Namjoon comically nods and rubs his belly.

“Well, Y/N’s a pretty good cook too. The pasta looked delicious the other day.”

At the mention of your name, Jimin falls quiet.

“You know, I understand you better than you think. That look you have, Jimin. I can see that the case isn’t the only reason you’ve been trying to keep yourself busy and inside the station. We all saw Y/N leaving the station the other day.”

“I guess that also means you all saw how upset I made her.”

Namjoon takes an inhale followed by a slow exhale. “Stop me if I’m prying too much, but what happened?”

Jimin takes an even deeper sigh. “She found out that I’m still looking into Baekhyun’s cases after all these years.”

“Ah,” was Namjoon’s simple response.

“I mean, I’m not doing anything wrong, am I? The reason I’ve never given up on finding the truth is to find some closure for myself. For her… For the both of us.”

Jimin means the words he says, but when he hears them from his own mouth, it feels strange.

“Well… what if closure for you doesn’t have the same definition for her?”

Namjoon’s comment make Jimin tilt his head in confusion. “What do you mean?” he asks.

Namjoon stretches out his legs in front of him. The park has quieted down as most of its visitors have returned to work after their lunch break. Only a couple of people still remain, but they are scattered so far around the park that none of their faces could be made out.

“Closure for Park Jimin means to discover the truth. Closure for Y/N might be simply to accept that her fiancé’s gone. She was in so much pain when he disappeared and it took her forever to even leave the house. Her first steps out were because of you. The reason she has the strength to move on today is because you’ve constantly been by her side. Maybe the reason she’s been able to accept that Baekhyun’s no longer with her is because she sees that you’ve accepted it as well.”

“She saw the files that indicate that perhaps Baekhyun was murdered.”

Namjoon’s next sentence becomes lodged in his throat. He closes his mouth then opens it again but only to have it return to its previous state. At last when he finally finds what he wants, he says, “That complicates things, doesn’t it?”

Jimin closes the food container and returns it back into the bag. In the time they had been talking, he found that he had lost his appetite. His two thumbs press against the sides of his temple and gently massage it in circles.

Everybody knows how much Jimin cares for you; some even think that the extent of it is due to Jimin’s secret crush on you. But Namjoon knows the reason why. He can’t help but look at his colleague and friend with sadness. An ancient promise that causes anguish to those in its pact.

Placing a warm hand on Jimin’s back, Namjoon leaves it there for comfort. “Is that what you believe? That Baekhyun is gone because he was murdered?”

Jimin shakes his head. As if the thoughts in his brain could not get any more complicated, the simple question makes things worse. “I don’t know, Namjoon. I have absolutely no idea. I’ve been working this case for years now, but everything always comes up to a dead end. A part of me wants to believe that Baekhyun simply decided to walk out of his old life to start a new one and he’s alive somewhere out there. Yet another part, the detective part, can’t ignore the knowledge that maybe something bad did happen to him that night. That’s why he never returned.”

“Did you uncover anything new?”

“No. Not for that case.”

Namjoon doesn’t say a word. He can sense something else in Jimin’s tone. He is unable to tell if Jimin says what is on his mind as the conversation is redirected.

“What did the directors say about Sara Michel’s case? I’m assuming that’s why you went to meet with them.”

This time it is Namjoon’s turn to furrow his brows. Namjoon had never truly wanted to become Lieutenant. Jimin knew that Namjoon had been offered the position because he first had turned down the offer. Namjoon never expressed any bitterness about it; no, instead he had said he had been thankful. Namjoon had always said how he wanted to become Lieutenant before asking Youngji’s hand in marriage. When they spoke, the only frustration Namjoon ever expressed was the unexpected amount of responsibilities that came with this new position.

“They want to know if we have any new leads. As they say, if we don’t have anything by 24 hours, the case is as good as gone. If there really isn’t anything then they want us to wrap it up. File it as another unsolved case and focus on the new big project: the whole deal we’ve been working over at with the Narcotics Team.”

“The drug related gang suicides, right?”

“Yeah.”

“We can send a couple of guys over.”

“That’s the thing though. The Board doesn’t want a few guys. They want the entire team on board. Agent Hoseok’s barely keeping above the waves with this one. HR is breathing down his neck as apparently, some well-known powerful figure’s gone missing because of this.”

“Guilty?”

“Likely, but since he’s clearly an influential guy, the Missing Person’s unit might be dragged into it as well. His lawyers have also been stalking out at the station in case anything does come up. It’s going to set the whole station into turmoil.”

Politics. Jimin hated it all. If someone was guilty, he believed that they should see the justice they deserved.

“So what should I say to them?”

“Huh?”

“The Board. You’re the one who’s worked the Sara Michel case the most. What should I tell them about our progress so far?”

Jimin bit the inside of his cheek. Progress… Did he have that? Perhaps, but at the end: speculations. That is what they are. He couldn’t take the chance. “Tell them we may have something. Try and deter them from trashing this case. Be ambiguous.”

Namjoon waits to see if Jimin would further elaborate but the other doesn’t speak again.

“Alright,” Namjoon says, “But you will keep me updated on whatever you find, right?”

Jimin nods.

Namjoon knows that the conversation is over so he stands. Stretching, he rolls his neck once and then follows it similarly with his shoulders. “I’m going to head back to the station. Go home. Get some rest.”

“None of you want me at the station, huh? I stink it up too much?”

This earns him a grin from Namjoon. “You’re the brightest mind we have on the team, Jimin. But right now it’s shutting down right in front of my eyes. Recharge it and return when you’re ready.”

Jimin nods again and lifts a head to say goodbye. Then, he is left to his own thoughts once again.

...

She runs. Fast.

He looks down at the three words. They are the only things that fill his laptop screen after he hits enter. Writer’s block: something he didn’t quite enjoy. That was why he liked to move around so much when he writes. That, plus the fact that he can see his subject clearly.

The girl is thin and wiry but the definition of hard deltoid muscles are outlined by the afternoon sun. He enjoys a challenge and she might be one.

Dane observes her like the hunter might to his prey. He notes down everything - from the pathway she takes to the speed of her jogging. Everything is important.

What a contrast she would serve compared to pretty Ms. Michel. Now, where should he display her this time?

Everything must be chosen so that it meets perfection. She is a prancing antelope that dances unknowingly for the lion. Man is an animal after all. We all belong in the Wilderness.

His eyes look up from his script and watches as the girl stretches once she reaches the bench. She is bent over to catch her breath and she wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. A small device is wrapped around her arm and she touches it to presumably change the song. Her black and blue leggings contrast with her lighter skin. Once she has rested enough, she jogs a couple of times in place before going forward and then turning the corner out of his sight.

So pretty and elegant. He wants to wrap his arms around her, and feel her pulse between his fingers. He wants to make her into his next angel.

Dane is patient. He is willing to wait until the right opportunity. He will see to it. Unwritten.

This is the third time at the park, but each day that he has arrived, she is also there. He did not need to be a rocket scientist to know that this must be her daily route. Soon, he will be able to continue on his story.

...

Jimin could not understand why, but after that day with Namjoon at the park, he found himself returning to it quite often. He would make excuses to grab a coffee, but would then find himself wandering back to the bench. He enjoyed the quietness the small area offered. It allowed him to gather his thoughts in peace before returning to the hectic environment of the station.

After allocating time spent of sitting silently under the warmth of the sun, Jimin finally stands. The park is much quieter now as the remaining people have also left. He gathers the brown bag with leftovers from the local bistro and starts stretching his legs. From the corner of his eye, he notices that somebody is running.

There is not enough time for him to get out of her way and she crashes into him the moment she turns the corner. The impact is not great and she merely stumbles back in shock.

“I’m so sorry,” he bows in apology.

She is out of breath but she shakes her head and bows as well. “No, it’s my fault! I’m sorry I didn’t see you!”

He waves it away and they share another awkward laugh before the girl in the black and blue leggings smiles and continues on her route.

Bending to pick up the brown bag he has dropped on impact, somebody else captures his attention. That person is someone he cannot seem to forget and even this slightest sight of him causes Jimin to scowl.

He is able to recognize that jacket from anywhere – that grey jacket this man wore the day he walked into the police station. He is currently sitting on a bench nearly halfway across the park. Jimin shouldn’t have been able make out any facial features at his distance, but he swears that the man’s eye follow a runner down the path.

The other man seems engrossed with something on his laptop. His eyes never seem to leave the screen and Jimin is unable to tell whether Jungkook is typing or whether he is watching some type of video. Regardless of what he is doing, Jimin has already decided that it is not good.

About to walk up to him, Jimin suddenly stops in the midst. It is not because somebody else has bumped into him or that he is caught up in another thought.

No.

It is because he recognizes the second figure that appears from behind the first.

...

The previous writer’s block disappears as fast as it had appeared. His fingers are now flying across the keyboard as he continues to write the perfect plan. In fact, he is so captivated by the growing paragraphs that he does not notice when another figure appears from behind.

“What are you doing?” your voice startles him.

He whirls around and snaps his notebook shut. You stand behind with a slightly surprised expression on your face. He is able to tell because your large eyes are wider than usual, and your mouth makes a small “o”.

Time had flown by so quickly that he had forgotten he was supposed to meet you at 1:00pm. Quickly checking his watch, he sees that the time is 12:50pm.

“You’re here early,” he notes. Scooting over, he then pats the seat next to him. You timidly follow his instructions and sit down beside him. The scarf you wear loosens as the wind blows and you fix it once.

“I was just in the area. Do you like croissants? I bypassed a popular bistro on the way here and bought us some.” You hand him the small box. “I know croissants are unexpected from a place like that, but I can promise you – they’re really good!”

Jungkook peeks in the box. Packaged in rows, there is a set of treats in chocolate, strawberry cream cheese and plain.

“Sets of three,” Jungkook mumbles.

You look up at him. “Sorry?”

He gives you a small laugh, yet minute as it is, it still makes your heart tumble. “A set of three. I like working in sets of three,” he tells you. Jungkook opts for the original.

You wait until he takes a bite before a smile breaks across you face. “Good, huh?”

He nods, crumbs falling onto his laptop. He brushes them away before they can dirty it further.

“What did you want to meet me for?” he asks you.

From the strangely shaped bag you had brought with you, you take out a wooden stand and a large piece of rolled paper. He watches as you set up you easel and clips the paper to the side. It is blank.

“I come here often to paint,” you explain as you take out another small bag that is filled with sketching tools, “I think it’s so beautiful here.” You don’t add that you had chosen this place because when Baekhyun first disappeared, this was the closest you could be to Jimin without actually bothering him at the station.

“So you called me here to watch you paint?”

“Sketch, actually. Today I’m here to sketch but in a couple of days I should be able to paint.”

Jungkook leans back in his seat. He sees that a new light has taken over your eyes as you take everything from the park into memory. Your pencil twirls in your fingers. Another small gust of wind blows the scarf away from your neck.

Over their time together, they had become so used to being in each other’s presence that you no longer shy away from him. There were moments when you would be reminded of the first night he stayed at your house, but believe you are not one to dwell in the past so you quickly forget it. At this moment, he is drawing the collar of your jacket up and fixing your scarf so that it would no longer loosen.

While he is helping you, you continue to talk, “You know, ever since I saw you, a feeling has been itching at me. I kept thinking that before bumping into you at the station, I had seen you before! Now I know. You were the guy who thought I was a street artist!”

Jungkook’s fingers falter as he sets them back on his lap. He does not move. What was it you had just said?

“I was at the square near my studio that evening. It was particularly nice. I remember a small ensemble playing classical music too. You had been the one to knock over my canvas.”

No. It was not him.

“Wait. It wasn’t you. It was the lady you were with!” When you remember, you gasps.

Jungkook turns when he hears you. There was not supposed to be a single person that could have remembered him with Sara that night. That was never part of the plan. When he turns his focus on you, there is a look of shock and realization. A fire begins to burn in his stomach.

You hold your hand to your mouth. You can see that Jungkook is staring at you and the guilt eats away inside. You should have seen it coming. He was a handsome, intelligent and skilled man. He had showed up out of nowhere. He was also a stranger to the city. The two of you had met outside the station. Of course he could not be here simply because of work.

He must have been here with his girlfriend.

And they had bumped into you that night on their date.

“Y/N, what is it?” Jungkook asks gently.

You sets the pencil down on the easel. “That woman you were with… That’s your girlfriend, wasn’t it? Oh my god… if she were to know that you’re staying with me right now. She would probably think that I’m some girl who is trying to steal her boyfriend.”

Your face only reddens more when Jungkook’s laughter echoes around the park. It lasts for quite a while and you do not know whether you are feeling humiliated or angry at him laughing at you.

He catches his breath and smiles widely at you. “That wasn’t my girlfriend. She was someone I was meeting for the night.”

“For a date?”

“No. For work.”

You do not know why, but you breathe a sigh of relief. “Well, I also remember you liking my painting. Do you remember?”

He gives you another smile. “Sorry, Y/N. I don’t.”

Disappointment makes your chest ache. Never good at hiding your emotions, it makes him smile again when he sees the obvious frown. He places a hand over yours. “I’d still love a painting though, if that’s what you’re offering this time.” It is infectious, that is what his smile is. You take you hand away from beneath his and regard the quiet scenic park again. “Do you like this place? Should I paint something for you here?”

He nods. “I’ll like anything you paint for me, Y/N.”

You blush at the way he says it so matter-of-factly. Looking up, you scan the surroundings once again before a large shadow rushes towards you and grabs your wrist.

You are hauled up to your feet roughly.

...

Seeing you so casually walking up to that man made him mad. But it wasn’t that which made him practically race across the park. No, it was the combination of him fixing your scarf, laughing with you and then taking your hand. He cannot allow such a thing to happen.

“Jimin!” you yelp, the pain cutting through your wrist. It burns and you feel as if somebody had dug a knife into your skin to split your bones.

Jimin has momentarily forgotten your disorder as he is blinded my rage. How dare Jungkook be sitting beside you like the two of you are friends? This man may be involved in a murder case. He may as well be the only suspect.

“What are you doing here with him?” Jimin demands.

You can barely get the words out – that is how tight Jimin is gripping your wrist and hurting you.

Jungkook is still seated, but upon seeing your face turning bright red and perspiration beading your forehead, he stands. “Detective Park, I believe you are hurting Y/N.”

His words are a cold splash of water on Jimin. He quickly releases you and you whimper while holding your wrist. He reaches towards you, but you draw back, closer to Jungkook.

“I’m so sorry,” his apology is gushes, “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

You rub your wrist. You know it is not broken, but the pain lingers still. You gingerly rotate it before shaking your head. “I’m fine. You took me by surprise though.”

Seeing the discomfort in your eyes, Jimin instantly feels guilty. The first time he sees you after the fight and he manages to hurt you again. “What are you doing here?” he asks again. He wants to add “with him” but he did not think it was appropriate.

“I was meeting Jungkook. I wanted to do some sketches for a painting.”

He hated your causal use of the name. He hated it with such a passion.

“Detective Park, it’s been a while,” Jungkook extends a hand.

Jimin clenches his jaw but grabs it and shakes it forcefully. “Mr. Jeon,” he says through his teeth.

You can detect the hostility between the two men. You knew Jimin didn’t like Jungkook but you couldn’t see his reason why. Jungkook had only ever been nice to you. Really, Jungkook was one of the nicest people you know.

“Why did you need to meet him to do sketches? I didn’t even know the two of you knew each other,” Jimin begins interrogating.

You falter. You had been so caught up in the previous few days you had forgotten to tell him your new housemate. Truth be told, the whole situation is so unusual for the two of you because you would talk to each other nearly every day.

“I’m temporarily living with her,” Jungkook says, unable to resist the temptation. He has already calculated and anticipated the change that would occur over Jimin’s face once he says those words. He knows that it would affect you more, but there is a type of satisfaction in seeing the rage that spreads over Jimin’s face.

It takes everything in his already weak power to hold his emotions in. Heat is already flowing to his face in which he could not control, but he could still stop the explosion of curses from leaving his mouth.

Your mouth is opened ajar once again. All the worse scenarios are running through your head.

Jungkook sheepishly rubs his neck. “Oh, this is awkward. I thought you had told him, Y/N. You two seemed so close.”

Oh yes. It is absolutely delightful in seeing the impact of his words on Detective Park Jimin.

“I – ” you start, “I didn’t get the chance to yet. Um, well… Jimin…. Jungkook is staying at my place for now. He has no other – ”

“We need to talk,” Jimin interrupts you.

You open your mouth and close it again. “Okay,” you say timidly. You start to walk towards him.

“Grab your things with you,” Jimin says sternly.

You want to refute his words but there is a sort of silent anger you recognize. You send Jungkook an apologetic look before packing away your easel and paper. Jimin waits for you and you quickly whisper, “I’m sorry,” before going away.

The two walk away like a father leading his disobedient daughter. Jungkook can only watch with amusement at the new turn of events.

...

“You’re living with him? You’re living with him? You’re living with him?!” You hear Jimin repeat the series of questions again. Your finger lightly taps your thigh and you note to yourself: the sixth time. That was the sixth time he asked the same question.

Jimin had thought for a long time on their walk to the station of what he could say. Countless words had been flying through his mind however he just couldn’t seem to find the correct ones to string together. That had led him to only repeat the one fact he is being faced with: You are living with Jungkook.

You sigh. “Yes, Jimin, I’m living with him.”

“How could you decide to do that without talking to me about it?” he explodes at last, “You barely know this guy and you invite him into your house? He’s a criminal. He’s a murderer.”

This makes you frown. Your eyebrows crease together and even your pretty face cannot hide the ugliness of your anger. “Park Jimin,” you start sternly with his name, “I don’t think it’s fair for you to make that assumption. I don’t even think you should be making that assumption.”

“Still, the two of you are living together!”

You sigh again.

Jimin stops in the middle his pacing for a second to collect his thoughts. “Fine. But what makes you think you know him enough to decide whether or not my assumption is fair?”

“Well, what makes you think you have enough power over me to stop who I’m living with?”

“I have a responsibility for you, Y/N! I don’t want you to get hurt. Jeon Jungkook is dangerous!”

“There you go again! Making another assumption! Why are you even saying this?”

“You know exactly why. It’s because – ”

“If you say that it’s because of your gut feeling I’m going to walk away right now.”

He pauses. “I just know, alright? I have evidence against him.”

“Show it to me, then.”

Presently, the two of you are arguing inside Jimin’s office. The blinds have been drawn, but the glass door is definitely not enough to hide the increasing voices. Jimin rummages through the multitude of papers and files on his desk. His thoughts are once again jumbled. He is unable to think straight at the moment and it makes him forget where he has put the files in the first place.

“You don’t have it, do you?” you accuse, “You just hate him. I don’t know what your reason is, but that’s mean. Jungkook is a good person. He takes care of me.”

Your tone is filled with exasperation. You did not enjoy when things did not go your way. Neither did he. That is the reason why the two of you tend to avoid conflicts by not being involved in each other’s personal matters. This time, however, Jimin needs his stance to be known.

“You’ve known this guy for what, two weeks? What do you mean ‘he takes care of you’? He barely even knows anything about you.”

You do not bother to correct Jimin that it has in fact been less than that. “He’s taken care of me more than you have alright?” you stab him with the words. Your face flushes the moment they leave your mouth.

Jimin’s next words are so calm, they border on hostility. “More than I have, you say? Please, enlighten me.”

“He… He supports me. He’s there for me when I need him. He’s… He’s…” With each stutter, you can feel yourself losing this fight. Pride and rage cloud your judgment, and nonetheless, you throw out your last attack, “He doesn’t try to convince me that my fiancée was murdered.”

His eyes become hard.

There are tears wavering in you eyes and you tell yourself not to blink such that they would not fall. “You tell me to try and move on after Baekhyun’s disappearance. You tell me that it’s for my own good; all this pain and guilt and frustration at losing him… You’re just as guilty, Jimin. You’ve never put Baekhyun behind you and now you’re saying something as ludicrous as him being murdered. I won’t accept it.”

He hates seeing you cry. He hates it so much. He hates it enough to contemplate easing up on your decision to live with this stranger.

No.

Walking away from you, he digs through his jacket pocket and produces an extra set of keys. He had learned to carry this around with him since knowing you. He never knew when you needed to come by and borrow his house keys.

“Take this,” he places the keys into you palm and curls your fingers around them, “When you’re done with this tantrum… or whatever this is, come home. I understand that Jeon Jungkook needs a place to live, so rent out your place to him. But I cannot have you staying alone with him. You are to live with me while he is an occupant there.”

You scoff at him, incredulously. You grip the keys in your hand before slamming them soundly on his desk.

“I am not a child,” you solemnly say, “You cannot control me like this. I am a free to make my own decisions, and I will do what I want.”

With that, you spin on your heels to exit the office. Your pulse is racing as you turn to face him again. You avoid looking directly at him but stare above past his forehead. You are afraid that if you see his expression, you would falter.

“I respect your decision to not like Jungkook. But if that’s the case, and as Jungkook is living with me, you are free to never come by my place. We will not welcome a guest who only has the intent of unsound accusation.”

You end the argument with that and stomps out the door.

...

Jungkook is waiting for you outside the station as you leave. You are so blinded by your emotions you nearly miss him until he grabs your wrist and causes you to yelp.

Immediately, he retracts his hand. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes.

You still want to yell at somebody, but Jimin’s injustice towards Jungkook stops you from screaming. You rub you wrist that is still sore from being grabbed previously. Adjusting the strap of your canvas on your back, you continue to walk forward.

“He’s so unfair,” you whisper.

Jungkook catches it.

“Nobody ever asked him to look out for me. I would have been fine,” you say.

“He cares for you,” Jungkook says gently.

You do not want to hear the words. Still, it is not like you can ignore them once they’re heard.

“He is worried. I am a stranger, and a man. Unfortunately, society has a stigma around single strange men who sneak up to a female to offer his phone while it is pouring rain in the middle of the night.” He tries to make a joke with you. Thankfully, it works as you lightly laugh.

“Well, still. Jimin is being stubborn. He has prejudices against you; ones that have no basis.”

“Let me guess. He thinks I’m dangerous. He thinks I might hurt you. With my involvement in his case, he might even think that I’m a suspect.”

You do not want to answer.

Jungkook stops you from walking. Your strides have been short but only increasing in speed. He is no longer sure if you even know where they are walking. With one hand still on your shoulder, he says with a soft voice, “He has every right to think so, Y/N. We have only started to get to know each other We both have secrets that we have yet to reveal to each other. Perhaps I am dangerous. Perhaps I may have the intent to hurt you.”

You look into his eyes which steadily hold you own. “But you won’t, right?”

He smiles at you. “Of course not.”

“Then that’s all that matters,” you say with resolution, “That’s what a relationship is built on. The slow accumulation of trust towards the other party. I don’t care if you have secrets, Jungkook. If you ever do want to share them, I will listen. But at the end, you don’t have to. I want to know you as you.”

He nods. Now with the rollercoaster of emotions within you coming to an end, you are able to see that the weather is beautiful that day. There is the soft melodious chirping of birds from all around you, and the streets are not busy as people have yet to be off work. A warm patch of heat is on your back as the sun greets you between the clouds.

Jungkook is quiet beside you for a while, until he says out of the blue, “Jimin really loves you.”

You whirl to regard him. “Jimin doesn’t love me. He is only tasked to look after me.”

His eyes soften when he looks at you again. He doesn’t follow up with anything, only turning his head back forward.

The speed of your heart’s beating rises slightly at his comment. You do not understand the purpose of him saying that. You do not understand what led to him to say such a thing.

“Jungkook,” you call out.

“Mhmm?”

“I still want to paint a picture for you. But I don’t think I can right now.”

“What do you mean?”

You had stopped walking beside him. He notices that and stops as well. When he finally turns to look at why you had stopped, he is greeted with the image of you standing with your wrist in the air. He sighs in concern and takes your wrist gently.

“Alright, let’s get you home,” he says kindly.

...

next part

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carol-effing-danvers · 3 years ago

Text

Steve Rogers is a Monster

Yeah, that’s a hell of a title, isn’t it? Strap in, it only gets worse from here.

(click here if you’d prefer to read this on AO3)

Forewarning, if you enjoyed the epilogue for Endgame, this particular essay is not for you - and no, I am not bashing the Steve/Peggy shippers, you are beautiful human beings who make the fandom brighter and I’m happy that at least someone in this fandom got the ending they wanted.

Additional warning: if you expect this to be another Civil War debate, you will also be disappointed. There has never been a measurement invented that can adequately describe how much I loathe the verbal dick measuring contest that seems to pass for human interaction between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers in this franchise. It’s not funny or entertaining - it’s exhausting, uncomfortable, and frankly it’s rather lazy writing.

This is about the very specific way that the epilogue in Endgame completely changed the way the character of Steve Rogers can be interpreted, and I don’t just mean the very illogical and contradictory way that time travel is explained, both in the movie itself and the fact that the writers and directors have two completely different views on how that worked out.

I mean that the choice made by Steve Rogers in the very last minutes of that movie alters the way I view each and every one of his actions starting from The First Avenger and that alteration is exactly what I want to talk about, because whether you view it as deserving or not, what Steve does at the conclusion of Endgame was the most selfish thing humanly possible. Time is a thief, but somehow Steve managed to steal even more than Time.

Side note here: I understand that I am a completely biased Stucky shipper, a friend to Barnes and Noble, a Starbucks aficionado - sorry. Anyway, I’ve always believed that Steve and Bucky were destined blah blah blah, but I was never expecting a Stucky ending. Disney wasn’t going to do that, and I knew that, I wasn’t bothered that Steve and Bucky weren’t doing the smoochies by the end. But Bucky’s facial expression during those last minutes was gut-wrenching. Like...I have no idea what kind of cues the script and directors gave him, but in the future, please don’t ask Sebastian Stan to look sad unless you want soul-crushing devastation. It’s not Seb’s fault, his features are just arranged that way - but the fact that the editing staff allowed Sam to be sad though elated to be entrusted with the Shield and Bucky looked like his soul was being physically torn out of his body was an… interesting choice.

Other side note: if you’re writing about time travel, I’m begging y’all to get your facts straight. Or just don’t write about time travel. It almost always sounds better on paper than it does on screen and it means that you’ve opened doors to more questions than you’ve probably got the answers for. I know this was about trying to set up the idea of the multiverse, I get that, but there were better and less messy ways to do that, and I know that because I’ve done it before. @Marvel: Let me write you a six-way orgy you fucking cowards~

By going back in time, Steve robbed Peggy of the future that would have been hers - not only that, he’s robbed her of even the chance of making the choice between those futures, because you honestly could not tell me with a straight face that Steve told her the complete truth of what he had done and she would be okay with him alternating the very course of the future. It doesn’t help his case that he has a history of not disclosing truths that he knows will be painful or inconvenient for other people in his life.

He robbed his loved ones - Sam, Bucky, Wanda - of the years they would have spent with him. Sure, he ‘came back’ after Peggy passed away, but they are adults in the prime of youth who knew him sixty years ago in his own time and he is an old, old man who has lived an entire life completely separated from them. He is practically a stranger with a name they know, but a history that no longer belongs to any of them - not even his oldest friend. They have him back, but judging from his age, they’ll be lucky to get even ten more years with him. Assuming of course, that any of them can stand to speak to him - I certainly couldn’t blame them if they tell him to go to hell and take his dad jokes with him.

Steve has stolen away their friend and dropped off an elderly and dying near-stranger in his place, and this is treated by the writing (and the majority of the acting) as a wild and unexpected but not tragic event.

Is it really that unexpected, though?

I recall seeing a Game of Thrones essay on Daenerys across my dash (I’m sorry, love, I don’t recall who you are since it’s not a fandom I’m in, but if someone knows who wrote that, please post the link!) which detailed how her ending in the series was foreshadowed many times by her penchant for bloody killings and her habit of surrounding herself with her own fawning friends.

Months after reading that, I had the thought: though Steve is never really shown thinking about Peggy after Civil War, except in a few scattered scenes in Endgame, was this foreshadowed? Whether you believe that his actions are justified or not, what Steve does is still, in the end, selfish at its very heart, and Steve Rogers is not a selfish person.

Oh no, my dear friends and readers. Because taking this action has solidified and clarified Steve Rogers as the biggest and most selfish asshole in this whole universe.

Steve does not do the right thing, Steve does the thing that will most make him feel better. The fact that this often happens to be the right thing in the end is more the result of happy coincidence than any special sort of moral authority that the man holds.

Rescuing Bucky Barnes and his fellow captives in a prisoner of war camp from being experimented on by an insane Nazi eugenicist? That was not a moral stand, that was endangering himself, Peggy Carter, and Howard Stark because he couldn’t handle the reality of his best friend being killed in war.

Sacrificing himself by putting the Valkyrie down in the Arctic Circle? That was not about sparing human lives, that was about Steve seeing his friend die right in front of him and not being able to deal with the grief. There were ways he could’ve prevented the plane from killing people without killing himself.

Trying to make Bucky remember who he was? And later on, saving him from the government agencies who wanted to hunt him down? Although, arguably, that last one is also just good common sense - Steve was already shown that government agencies could and were corrupted by HYDRA and he’d also seen how dangerous the Winter Soldier could be when unleashed.

Steve did, I think, truly believe that this was the right thing to do, but it was also about keeping his connection - his very last, since Peggy had descended into dementia caused by Alzheimer’s before she ultimately died - to a past that for him, was only months or years ago, rather than decades. In some ways, this is completely understandable - Bucky might be the very last person left alive who truly knows who the real Steve Rogers is, because the rest of these people only know Captain America and we are consistently shown through multiple movies how uncomfortable this makes him.

This gets...considerably less and less understandable as we are shown Steve’s growing relationships with Natasha, Sam, Wanda - even Sharon, though she barely gets any screen time and they share the most awkward kiss I’ve ever seen - and indeed, what might be the most uncomfortable kiss in cinema history.

Side Note 3: This is made even more awkward by the director’s choice to have two of Steve’s friends watching them the whole time - seriously, who even does that? Why would you make them do that? Only sociopaths make out with their friends staring at them like that. It’s so fucking creepy - and don’t even get me fucking started on the fact that she’s also apparently his own niece. AHHHHH!

But we are shown, over and over again, that Steve is capable of building close meaningful relationships with people in the present. They don’t know his whole history, but they do know Steve Rogers rather than Captain America and they care about him deeply.

Side Note 4: Notice that I don’t count Tony Stark among those people - despite this strangely persistent narrative that the various writers and directors tried to sell to the audience, Tony and Steve were not friends. They were never friends. They were colleagues at best, but these were two men who neither liked nor understood each other very well, but had to work together. And sometimes that’s okay, too. (Oh dear, I just gave the Stony fans a fit too, didn’t I? Sorry, guys. Enemies to Lovers is a great trope, I support you!)

But let’s set aside Steve’s gross betrayal of the people who loved him. We’ll also ignore the question of whether the motive for these good actions has tainted the actions themselves. Because even without questioning these, the conclusion of this story arc still transforms Steve into the biggest monster this franchise has.

The very fundamental way that the writers and directors can’t agree on how the time travel mechanics in their own story work mean that Steve has just done one of two things and they range from shady and very questionable to absolutely fucking horrific.

The first, that he’s created his own alternate universe to exist in, is morally dubious at best. Even the people who support this theory and liked the ending seem to feel that it wasn’t necessarily a ten out of ten on the moral goodness spectrum. They’ll say things like ‘he deserved to have his happy ending’. Even that phrasing seems to acknowledge that doing this was the opposite of the right thing. It just considers doing the wrong thing as being justified rather than horrifying.

But let’s examine this first idea for a minute - even this, the more innocent of the two implications, means that rather than really processing his grief or dealing with the repeated tragedies and losses that have occured in his life, even as he was running group therapy sessions and grief counseling, Steve Rogers chose to escape his current life by creating an alternate universe that specifically allows he himself to live out his own fucking fantasies of the way his life should have turned out.

That, in case you are not aware, is wildly fucked up. I thought I was playing pretty fast and loose with Steve’s characterization when I turned him into an extremely polite serial killer but as it turns out, I clearly just wasn’t setting the bar high enough, because that’s somehow even more fucked up than being an undercover child soldier with a small sadistic streak.

Hm, and now I feel I should have been more creative there...

The second, and even more horrifying option, is that this older Steve Rogers has been in this world the whole time, watching as things unfolded just as we’ve seen over the past decade, taking ‘the slow way’ through time.

Side Note 5: I do kind of understand why you would do it this way, because that’s really cool and shocking when you say that! Until you think about it for longer than three seconds and suddenly you realize…

Everything that has happened here, every tragedy and downfall these people experienced, happened because Steve Rogers lived his happily ever after with his beautiful wife and did absolutely nothing to stop it. He got to fuck Peggy Carter and watched as his wife built an empire of intelligence networks, knowing that her efforts were completely in vain because her agency was rotten to the core and he never told her.

Every horrifying act committed by HYDRA under the guise of SHIELD was permitted through Steve Rogers’ negligence. And that’s just the wider big-picture worldview, large and shocking, but not personal.

What about the people that Steve claims to actually care about?

This means that Steve lived his whole life in contentment with his wife and children while his best friend was physically and psychologically tortured for over seventy years and just...let that go.

He allowed one friend to murder another in the nineties, when the Winter Soldier was sent after Howard and Maria Stark. Then their child was being advised by a greedy self-interested warmonger who paid terrorists to drag him off to be tortured and slaughtered, and Steve did nothing about that, either.

Bruce Banner was exploited, experimented on, and made into a monster against his will in the failed pursuit of recreating what was done to Steve, resulting in billions of dollars in damage and dozens or even hundreds of lives lost, and Steve allowed that to happen, too.

Like Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanov was physically and psychologically tortured for others to use her as a living weapon - except that this was probably happening to her since early childhood, and a man her future self loved and trusted implicitly did nothing to save her from this upbringing.

The Maximoff twins are shown to have not wealthy but loving parents who are murdered in front of them and they both endure days of laying in the rubble of their ruined apartment, wondering if the bomb in their living room would go off and kill them. Later, they are taken in by HYDRA, experimented on, and recruited as child soldiers to the cause when they show signs of having supernatural powers. They start a series of events that result in the destruction of a major city and the loss of what is probably thousands of lives. Pietro is murdered while trying to help the Avengers to stop this, and Wanda suffers the loss of the very last living person she loved. None of these things seem to have bothered Future Steve.

Steve “I can’t sit on the sidelines when I see a situation go sideways” Rogers, planted himself on that fucking sideline and observed for nearly eighty years as friends, colleagues, and his own wife were lied to, brainwashed, tortured, vilified, and hunted down like animals.

And then there Steve Rogers himself - not the Endgame Steve Rogers, the Steve Rogers who brought down a Nazi plane and will lie beneath the ice for seventy years while everything he knows disappear (mostly) innocent of these horrors, the life he would’ve lived stolen from him by a stranger with his name and his face from another universe.

What I’m saying here is that if you consider this idea for any amount of time, it took Steve Rogers less than ten minutes to become the most evil and disturbing figure in the entire MCU, only (not really tho) contested by Thanos himself.

Gross and poorly reasoned libertarian ethics aside, Thanos genuinely believes that he did what he did for the sake of the entire population. It’s made fairly explicitly clear that Steve didn’t do this for anyone but himself.

Call me crazy, but if everyone you know needs to suffer and multiple planet-wide devestations have to happen in order for you to get your happy ending, you might be the bad guy.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned?

#forever bitter about what they did to steve #steve rogers #captain america #the avengers #marvel

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