#I really think the crux of it all was them not knowing how to navigate that balance between independence and identity while staying close

[godsfavoritescientist]

Building off of what I wrote in my fic "Sparks," I'm really compelled by the idea of Ford genuinely no longer being interested in sailing around in a boat with Stan by the time they were seniors in high school.

I like the idea of it not being just a symptom of the resentment that had been building between them, nor it being a dream of Ford's that only paled in comparison to west coast tech, but it being a genuine loss of interest on Ford's end. I think it complicates things even further in some really juicy ways.

Like, imagine going through high school slowly losing more and more interest in the dream you've shared with your twin and only friend ever since you were little kids. How do you break it to him? How do you explain it to him without making it sound like a rejection of him? Without it making him hate you?

How do you explain it without it feeling like a spit in the face to all the hard work he's put into a plan that started out as a way of him comforting you by telling you "it doesn't matter what people say about you, you're going to be an adventurer who sails away into the sunset and never has to hear their mockery ever again, and there will be babes and treasure and heroism, and then they'll all see how cool you really are!"

And all through high school you think to yourself, "he's going to move on to more realistic dreams any day now, and then I won't have to say anything about it!" But no matter how many times you mention something else he could do with his life that he seems interested in, or bring up the challenging logistics of traveling around long-term in a boat, he sounds just as committed to the childhood dream as ever, and completely oblivious to how apprehensive you sound.

So resentment grows, little by little. Because that's easier than confronting the soul-crushing levels of guilt that are building up inside of you, every time you don't take an opportunity to tell him you don't want to do the plan anymore. You don't have a single person in your life who modeled how to have difficult conversations for you. As far as you know, having this conversation with Stan would crush him into tiny little pieces and then he would hate you forever, and you can't stand the idea of losing the only friend you've ever had.

So tensions grow. A lack of interest turns into a bitter resentment that, if you were really being honest with yourself, is directed more at yourself than it is at Stan.

And then the falling-out happens, and it seems like you were proven right. Stan hates you now, and he's never going to forgive you for giving up on his dream. But two can play that game, so you try to hate him too. Because if you hate him too, then maybe it won't hurt as much that he never came back. That he never even turned up at school, or by the boat, or in through your bedroom window in the middle of the night. He knows what dad's like, and how he says impulsive exaggerated things when he's angry, and haven't you both dealt with his harsh words countless times before and been able to dust yourselves off and joke about it later? So why isn't he back at home, joking with you about how absurd your dad acted that night, being impossible and belligerent about ruining your dream, but at least now you're even, because you've ruined his dream too.

-

And now imagine you find out he risked the lives of everyone in existence to bring you back, right after you had accepted your fate was to die killing Bill. It would be terrifying and confusing and infuriating. If he cared so much, why didn't he do something to reconnect with you sooner? Why did he ignore you in favor of trying to make it big without you? Why didn't he take the infinitely safer and simpler action of reaching out to you without you having to track down his address and send a desperate plea for help? You were convinced that he didn't care enough to bother with you unless you had an important enough reason for him to come. But even then, he thought your plans were stupid. He didn't want anything to do with you, not even with the world at stake.

Did he save your life out of guilt? Does he pity you that much? It doesn't add up with what he did in the decade leading up to shoving you into the portal. And the dissonance between the version of him in your head that hates you, and the man who held out his arms to welcome you back to your home dimension, is so strong that you feel like you're being lied to again, like you're back in the depths of gaslighting and manipulation that Bill put you through, even though there's no way that's what Stan is trying to do... right? You can't figure it out, so you run away from it. You don't want to know the answer to whether or not Stan hates you, because you don't know which answer would hurt more, so you try to make him hate you more than ever, because at least then you would know for sure how he feels.

And in the end, after he sacrifices his memories for you, and for the world, things seem clearer. The layers upon layers of confusion and anger and hurt seem to have washed away like drawings in the sand, leaving behind the simple truth: that you two had an argument, and didn't move past it for forty years, and despite everything you put each other through, you both still want to re-connect.

So you sail away in a boat together.

And at first, it's wonderful. It's exactly what you want. It feels like an apology to Stan, and a thank-you for saving the world, and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to heal the rift between you two, and it's good to be back on earth, and you wonder why you ever doubted the dream you two once had.

But then, after the first long journey you spend on the sea together, when you get back home to dry land, Stan is already talking about planning your next adventure out on the open sea. He recaps every adventure you had on the first trip, over and over again, and he wants to chat with you all through the morning and long into the night, and you don't have the words to explain to yourself that you don't have enough social battery for this, and suddenly you're slipping back into the horrifyingly familiar feeling of Stan being overbearing and needing space from him and how could you think that? How could you think that about him after everything he's done for you and everything he's forgiven you for? But the longer this goes on, the more you realize that you still don't want to spend the rest of your life sailing around with Stan. It's great fun in moderation, but the idea of your whole life revolving around Stan and going on adventures with Stan and being in a boat with Stan with no time to be by yourself thinking about your own things and figuring out your own dreams makes your skin crawl with a claustrophobic kind of panic that you still don't know how to put into words forty years after the first time this feeling grabbed you by the throat and ruined your friendship with Stanley.

But the first time this happened, it nearly ruined his life forever. You can't let yourself feel this. You don't feel this. You're happy to spend the rest of your life fulfilling Stan's lifelong dream, and making up for the time you crushed his dream, and sure, maybe he crushed your dream once too, and maybe it would be nice for him to support your dreams like you're now doing for him, but you can't say that. He saved the universe, and it would be horrible and ungrateful and cruel for you to try to voice these feelings, especially when you don't know how to voice your feelings without it making other people feel like you twisted a knife into their gut. So you try to pretend the feeling isn't there.

You go out on a boat with Stan again. You planned out another incredible journey together, and this should be fun, and you should be happy about this, but the unspoken feeling you shoved as far down in yourself as it could possibly go is eating you alive. The worst part? Stan is starting to notice. You have never been good at hiding your emotions. The trick to it has always been to convince yourself you don't feel it at all, and not think about it, and that has always worked like a charm. But whenever the emotion claws its way back up to the forefront of your mind, you can tell Stan knows something is wrong. So you can't even give him the happy ending he deserves. You can't even convince him that you want to be here on the open seas forever with him, like he deserves. And you keep trying and trying to hide it, but Stan keeps asking in roundabout ways, like "You're being awfully quiet, sixer," and "whats that look on your face?" and eventually it comes exploding out of you like a shaken-up soda bottle dropped on its cap.

And then it's like you're back at home in New Jersey again, standing in the living room while dad grabs Stanley by the shirt. It all comes pouring out of you, in the worst possible way, with the worst possible phrasing, like a pandora's box of monstrousness, and Stan tries to fight back against the sting of your words, but you're made out of acid and you're burning through him and you can see it on his face, and there's never any coming back from this, not this time, you'll just have to either jump into the ocean or become a monster forever, so Stan can hate you more easily again, and-

-and at the end of the outburst, you're still on a boat in the middle of nowhere in the ocean with your brother, in dangerous waters, and you have things to do to keep the boat running smoothly.

You can't run away from him. He can't run away from you. You're stuck here for at least a couple more weeks, even if you turned around and sailed back towards shore right away.

-

And the thing that compels me so much here, despite how unbelievably angsty it all is, is that it sets up a situation wherein the Stans might end up forced to actually address the decades of resentment and confusion and wanting-to-reconnect-throughout-it-all that they thought they could gloss over and heal with enough time spent adventuring together on a boat. They might end up forced to actually address the crux of the issue that drove them apart in the first place: Ford wanting a little more space to feel like his own person, and to feel like he's able to have his own dreams, too.

It wouldn't happen easily, nor right away, but if they were stuck together on a little boat in the middle of nowhere surrounded by magical creatures they have to protect each other from in order to make it back home alive, then after they had one fight where they brought up all the things they silently agreed to never bring up again, it would probably happen many more times, and each time it would leave them both angrier at each other than ever, until eventually something honest slipped through amidst all the saying-anything-except-what-they-mean bickering. And once enough of these honest moments slipped through, then they would have a thread to tug on to start to unravel the gargantuan knot of their decades of unresolved conflicts.

And then, eventually, maybe Stan could learn that he can have a good friendship with his brother without needing to be glued to him at the hip, and Ford needing a certain amount of alone time doesn't mean he dislikes him or wants to abandon him, and Ford could learn that he can be honest and have a meaningful connection with someone without it driving them away and making them hate him.

[ktempestbradford]

Jumping off of what I said in this post about having to dismantle certain toxic ideas about myself, I realized that folks might not know how deeply not being a straight, white, cishet, able-bodied, Christianized male (aka the Dominant Paradigm) in the West messes you up mentally. It's a huge mental health problem that isn't always addressed.

When I started up my latest round of therapy I began to acquire labels for some of the ways I acted or reacted to situations. One day in session I was like: Was that a trauma response? It was, wasn't it? And my therapist confirmed. What confused me is that I didn't think I'd experienced trauma.

The idea I had of trauma was some Major Incident in which something Very Bad had happened to me or near me. Or it was about being in abusive situations, usually at home. The kind of ways trauma is depicted in the media.

Then I came across a Twitter thread in which the person said that everyone needs therapy, especially marginalized people, because the way Western society works, anyone who is not the Dominant Paradigm or doesn't hew closely to it is constantly being harmed by society.

Are you BIPOC? Racism is almost everywhere, and where it is, it's constant. It's also not always KKK-level in your face racism; it's more often wave after wave of microagressions on top of whatever challenging condition you're in due to historical racism. In other words: Chronic.

Are you neurodiverse? Good luck not being overstimulated by allegedly benign activities like going to the grocery store. Good luck not being criticized on a daily basis because you can't act "normal". Try holding down a job that expects you to sit at a desk for 8 hours yet you can't even sit in a quiet environment because the asshole CEO read that open office plans make employees more productive.

Are you anywhere under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella? Welcome to the constant barrage of invasive questions from strangers, invasive laws, invasive religiosity... Once again, an allegedly benign activity (going to the bathroom in public) can be a damn crucible if you don't look like the "right" kind of woman or man. Have fun navigating the medical system when you want affirming health care.

I could go on. Disabled people, poor or working class people, fat people, any people who have been historically marginalized and oppressed all experience this. It is trauma. It is harm. It does affect us. But it's Chronic and Systemic. That's the crux.

Because we have to keep on going even with all this. It's every day and it's not easy to escape. So we "deal with it." Some of us have good coping strategies and or supportive family (bio or found) and that really helps. It doesn't alleviate the overall problem. Thus, we all need therapy (so the OP of that Twitter thread concluded).

I don't know that we ALL need it. And I for sure know that some mental health practitioners and therapy frameworks are quite harmful to marginalized people. I'm very lucky in that I have a great therapist and the treatment I'm getting is informed by my identity and background, not ignorant of it. Not everyone has that or has access to it.

What I do know is that we all need Community. True community offers true support, which is necessary for healing.

We also all need to know that our mental health struggles and our trauma are real and valid, even if they don't look or manifest the way we've been conditioned to recognize them. Don't let anyone invalidate your experience or mental health struggles because you don't fit into a specific, wrongly-labeled box.

And don't let anyone tell you that this society isn't out here traumatizing you, because it is. Society doesn't need to be this way. But here in The (European Colonizer Created) West, that's what those with more power have chosen for the rest of us. And it sucks.

I have nothing but hugs and empathy for all the other people out there experiencing this. The only piece of advice I have is: Find community, hold on tight to each other, be that oasis of Okay that others need and they'll be that same oasis for you. <3

[kiefbowl]

Are radical feminism and gender critical ideology two separate things?

probably depends on who you ask lol

radical feminism is a movement born out of 1960s western feminism, some people say it's interchangeable with "second-wave" but I've seen others argue those two phrases aren't interchangeable. Radical feminism is anchored on the idea of addressing "the root" of female oppression, and identifies that as male supremacy. This is why radical feminists (among other feminists!) talk about the "axis of sex" - it understands that there is a hierarchy of male over female, and that this is oppressive and wrong. In my experience, you can find this idea throughout feminism...plus it's worth noting that not every feminist text specifically identities what "ideology" it's "meant" to belong to. A good thing to keep in mind.

When it comes to the phrase "gender critical," I personally don't find this phrase all that useful. I've written a couple posts about this, but I'll never find them so I'll try to quickly outline some thoughts here. In my experience, I see the phrase gender critical pretty much exclusively online. I see it used pretty much one of three ways: 1. interchangeable with "radical feminism" 2. describing radical feminism 3. as a name for an ideology. I honestly don't know where this phrase originates from, so if it really does come from a specific era or text or something like that, I'm happy to be corrected, but I have a suspicion that it originated online in loosely "radfem" spaces and has now been accepted as terminology despite no cohesive definition. "Radical feminism" and "gender critical feminism" both have wikipedia pages, and only gender critical feminism immediately references "TERFS" with a HUGE list of sources I find suspicious, despite its short length. The wikipedia page says "Originating as a fringe movement within radical feminism mainly in the United States" up front with three sources, and those sources are published in 2021, 2022, and 2023, (suspicious). I just don't buy it, I think this a misappropriation of casual feminist parlance that took place online while those feminists navigated talking about trans critical ideas in the aughts and 2010's. In any case, I've never considered myself "gender critical" as something specific. I find myself critical of gender in so far as I consider gender part of the system that enforces the sex hierarchy, and I'm critical of, like, being oppressed for being female lol. I just find it a sort of loop-di-loop sort of phrase, and not particularly clarifying to what gender is. I suppose I see the use at least at first to say "critical of gender ideology" as a way to say "critical of ideas of inherent gender identity", but now that it's understood to mean many incorrect things outside the in-group, I don't see how it continues to be useful when discussing outside the in-group. I also don't find the idea of "gender abolition" particularly helpful in many the same ways: gender only exists because of female subordination. I want female liberation, and with that gender will be eliminated. I also think this idea of "gender critical" and "gender abolition" is why radfem tumblr will go in endless circles about very superficial beauty standards as if they're the crux and not the flavor. If we eliminated make-up, it would be nice but it wouldn't do much to address female liberation, imo. That's just one example.

So, if I were to answer the question, and zoom out as far as I could, I would say no they aren't the same thing, but not for the reasons most people would assume.

[drinkthemlock]

under the cut is an “amor e medo” essay on álvares rant because it pisses me off but tldr: oh! years of untreated mental illness and looming inevitable death by consumption (on top of going through the ordeal of living in 19th century Brazil) took a toll on a young man’s abilities to relate to people? extremely shocking.

most ridiculous thing about that homophobic essay written about álvares saying that his writing was effeminate and “unvirile” and he was afraid of women and sex because he was “raised amongst skirts” is the fact that he absolutely was not raised amongst skirts. he deeply respected his mom and loved his sister greatly yes but he also went to all boys’ boarding schools, university, students’ lodgings, etc. basically navigating all-male spaces his entire life (despite the fact that spaces in Brazil at that time were not as gender segregated as we may think, esp. in Rio). like there’s literally zero evidence (that I know of) that he even had any female friends besides his sibling. also, to pathologize even the few relationships he had with the women he was related to is not only lame but feels really sexist in its core as well? like god forbid this sixteen year old boy be friends with his sister and trust his mother! he must secretly want to fuck them! and maybe, just maybe they played such a constant role in his writing because he… loved them? his elevating of his kinswomen with the purpose of tearing other women down and his possessiveness towards them is not necessarily evidence of oedipal inclinations, but of being misogynistic. which he definitely was. “oh, but there’s brother-sister incest in noite na taverna!” for god’s sake……. noite na taverna is the fucked-up-people-doing-fucked-up-things novel. the incest itself is not even romanticized! it’s rape! the sister kills her rapist later!

most of his writing is indeed about longing and love and unconsummated relationships but that’s because he’s a romantic poet. his style is unique in its execution, not in its themes. and not to play armchair therapist with a long dead teenager (but since the author of the essay already did), his personal letters reveal a difficulty in his relationships with people, full stop. women especially, yes, but most people in general as well. there are letters of his to Luís during his stay in São Paulo which are exactly about how he could not get close, how cold and unfeeling people think he is and how that makes him feel even more alone in the world. azevedo from rosaura (a book by one of álvares’ São Paulo friends that includes him and other law students as characters) is so bitter and cruel you would think the author hated álvares. how can someone who loved his friends more than nearly everything in the world (he literally says as much in the “my dearest” letter to Luís, which I’ve translated here if you’d like to read it) feel such an all-consuming loneliness? because he’s depressed! here’s the crux of it: his poems are all about those things i’ve mentioned earlier because 1. he’s a romantic poet following the style of the time and 2. because he was The Saddest Boy in The Whole Wide World. that’s literally it.

[glompcat]

NGL the most helpful advice I can give with regards to figuring out if a youtuber is worth watching or not is to look and see if they have a video on something you already know a whooooooooole hell of a lot about. Watch that, and pay attention to the places where what they say contradicts what you already went in knowing. Look that stuff up after to check and see both where your previous knowledge came from and where their claim came from (it of course could be that you were remembering wrong!). Really think about what it is they left out and what their argument gained from not talking about that thing. This then should help you navigate all their other videos because you will have started to discover how the sausage is made.

Here are two examples, put under a read more because this is not me calling these people out or anything like that, just making observations:

For example there is a youtuber who reviews "trans episodes" of TV shows. Before watching any of the others I watched her video on the 1997 Xena episode "Here She Comes… Miss Amphipolis." During the video I was mystified that at no point in the analysis was any mention made of episode writer Chris Manheim's brother, Keith K. Walsh, a drag queen who died due to AIDS in 1992. The episode in question even has "In loving memory of Keith K Walsh" in the credits. This is a pretty major thing to ignore (or worse, miss in your research) - especially when the crux of your video is looking at how the episode never commits to definitively saying if Karen Dior's character is a trans woman or a drag queen. Based on watching that video, because I went in already knowing these things, I knew that anything I possibly would learn in her other videos would potentially be missing really important context - up to and including the real life queer people who inspired the story and how that inspiration could have impacted the story that was made.

Another example would be a popular Doctor Who youtuber who sums up TARDIS wiki pages, and does not understand that history as presented on Doctor Who is not real world history and should not be treated as such. He regularly will say things about stories that are just blatantly untrue - but you would only know that if you read/listened to them yourself as opposed to reading the wiki page (or taking a youtuber's word on them). He is a professional video editor, so his videos look super slick, but is someone skimming the TARDIS wiki someone you want to view as an expert on well... anything? At all???????? Like honestly he once introduced a story as taking place on an unknown planet even though the literal first page of said story tells you it is set in London, on Earth. That is how lazy youtubers can be.

Truly and fully - look for videos on a channel that touch on things you already know about before looking to learn new things. They will tell you SO MUCH about how much follow up research you are going to need to actually understand anything about the thing the youtuber is talking about.

[storytellersumayyah]

THE GUIDE AND THE LIGHT: SEASON ONE, EPISODE TWO

The Guide and The Light are a series of comedic, romantic and soft short stories detailing the representation Muslims want but are never allowed to have. We all deserve to see ourselves fall in love and keep that love. We all deserve to have our beliefs respected and celebrated, instead of treated like a joke or insulted.

It’s about giving my community what they want and turning conversations that shouldn’t have happened in public into something we can all smile at. I hope you enjoy. (I'm also now hoping for monthly updates, or there about, but because this is designed to be fun, that may change. Please be patient.) Also, Eid Mubarak to everyone celebrating, and to everyone whose not, have a gift from me regardless!

read on wattpad instead! | rewatch previous episode | play next episode | view full series

EPISODE TWO: THE MORNING (AND SEVERAL DAYS) AFTER

SYNOPSIS: SO YAHYA AND NOOR GOT MARRIED! NOW THEY MOVE IN TOGETHER AND TRY TO LEARN HOW TO NAVIGATE LIFE AS A MARRIED COUPLE. IT'S ONLY A WEEK IN BETWEEN THE WEDDING THE WALIMA, BUT THEY THINK THEY'RE DOING QUITE WELL- GIVE THEY WENT FROM BEING ON LEAVE AND HOLIDAY AND MOSTLY RELAXED TO THE STRESSES OF WORK

Yahya woke up first. For a moment, he couldn’t understand why he was so warm, nor why he could definitely feel someone else’s presence.

And then the events of the previous day came rushing back to him and he couldn’t help the way his face split into a grin. He was married. He was Noor’s husband. It was a nice title. He hoped that he would get to keep it for a long time. The old anxiety of not knowing what he was supposed to do, or how to be a good husband, started rising to the surface, but he shoved it down as best he could. Noor had committed to him knowing exactly what he was like, and that was good enough. They would learn how to do things together.

Noor was still asleep, mouth slightly open and hair splayed across the pillow. He brushed some of it out of her eyes, even if it didn’t matter, and kissed her forehead. Because he could. And wasn’t that wonderful? She shifted slightly at the sudden movement occurring, but didn’t react beyond that. Yahya froze in place, not wanting to wake her. He did push the duvet slightly off his body, otherwise he was certain he would overheat. It was nice though, to be so warm.

It was only when the urge to use the bathroom was too strong to avoid that he shimmied out of bed, reminded of when he was a child staying with his grandparents and sharing a bed with one or both of his parents.

When he exited, Noor was sitting up, rubbing her eyes.

“Don’t do that, they’ll start stinging,” he told her automatically.

She dropped her hands. “Oh yeah. I forgot. Salam by the way.”

“Oh right, yes. Salam. How did you sleep?”

“Surprisingly well. You?”

“It was nice,” he confessed.

Noor smiled, and Yahya saw another reason to live. “I’m glad.”

“You look really pretty by the way.”

She snorted. “Yahya, it’s very sweet of you to try and compliment me, but I really don’t.” To Noor, it wasn’t a self-deprecating statement. It was just a fact. She couldn’t always look nice and put together. It would be impossible to do that, but it didn’t mean she didn’t deserve the same love as when she did.

“But you do. I mean- there’s more than one way to be something. And you just look so soft right now. Nothing but pretty is an accurate description.”

Noor’s eyes were as bright as her name. “That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever been told. You look really cute by the way. With your hair.”

Yahya immediately went to flatten it, his cheeks heating up. “Shut up.”

“Oh no. Not happening. I’m your wife now. I’m going to compliment you till you believe me.”

And that was the crux of the matter. Noor would take the compliments because she really did believe them to be true. Yahya couldn’t.

“Okay, fine. This isn’t me accepting it. It’s me trying to move the conversation along. What do you want to do today?”

Noor’s hand went to rub her eyes, but at the last time, she rubbed her arm. “I don’t know. What are you in the mood for?”

Yahya shrugged. “I don’t really know yet.”

“Do you want to go out? I know you prefer keeping to yourself and yesterday was very socially draining. So if you want to spend today just sitting inside and playing on your laptop until it’s time to check out, that’s fine. I think I’d like existing in silence with you.”

Noor’s ability to understand people was something that always stunned Yahya. It also took some of the pressure off him. Sometimes he couldn’t find the words he needed to explain what he was feeling, but with Noor, it didn’t seem like he needed to.

“We can go out. But something simple please?”

“There’s a really pretty park near the hotel. Maybe we can get some snacks, have a mini picnic and then come back? Yesterday was draining, and we need to be checked out by half-four because your dad is going to drop us back at yours, remember?”

In all honesty, Yahya had forgotten he had a life outside of the wedding. But Noor was right. On Monday, she would be back in the office, and he would be spending the entire day trying to remind his students that he was there to teach them about reactions and mols, not gossip about his new status as a married man.

“That sounds perfect,” he said.

Noor gave him a soft smile. He wanted to see all of them. “Great. Can I shower first? I feel sticky.”

He nodded. She kissed him on the cheek as she walked past, hesitant and doubting, but he matched her grin. He felt oddly proud when she ducked her head to hide the fact that she was flustered.

Whilst Noor was showering, Yahya made the bed and packed whatever he could up. When she exited, dressed in a blue dress and moisturiser not fully rubbed in, he went in himself.

Noor was texting when he came out.

“How are the baby gorillas?” He asked.

She looked up. “Wow. Okay. Warn me next time you’re going to look so handsome.”

He laughed. “Stop being so cheesy!”

“I can’t! I’m just saying what comes to mind- hang on, how did you know I was texting that specific group chat?”

“Because nobody else makes you smile like that.”

“You do,” she said, staring up at him from where she was sitting. It made Yahya want to protect her even more than he already did. Not because he didn’t think she couldn’t, but to him, love was making someone happy. It was keeping the worst of the world hidden. It was holding their hand so the weight of their burdens didn’t completely drag them down.

“And I’ll forever be grateful you gave me the chance to,” he whispered.

She stood up, pressing her mouth against his. It was chaste, and it was innocent, and it was slightly awkward because he still didn’t know what he was meant to do with his hands, but it was comforting.

“Shall we go?” She asked once she pulled away.

He nodded. “Got everything?”

As expected, Noor picked up her little backpack. “Yep.”

“Oh, just wait a second,” Yahya told her.

Noor didn’t move.

He tucked a loose strand of hair into her headscarf, then repositioned it so it framed her face better. “There. Now I can see you in all your grace.”

Noor pushed his hair off his head, even though it would fall back into its original place as soon as she let go. “Same.”

“I hate you sometimes.”

“I know.”

He took her hand, and together they walked to the park, armed with enough snacks that Yahya was convinced they wouldn’t need lunch either. And because they had both woken up later than expected, he ended up being right.

“I don’t understand why you needed to take so many photos of me as well,” he whined once they were back in the hotel room. Their picnic in the park had been nice. They’d sat on the grass, pointing out the clouds and munching away. At some point, he’d started taking pictures of Noor, but once she caught him, it was game over and he found himself on the other side of the camera. It had been different, but he’d found he liked the way Noor would encourage him and help him look less awkward.

He was absolutely going to take her phone and change her lock screen at the earliest opportunity though.

“For the memories! And because I want to make a scrapbook of things that the two of us do together,” she said.

He looked up in surprise. “Really?”

“Of course.”

It made his heart flutter. He was important enough for a scrapbook. “Okay.”

She laughed, and he was once more convinced she could read his mind.

The car ride back to his flat was quiet. He was desperately trying to remember how he had left his bedroom, and whether he had definitely cleaned up the mess he made in the bathroom whilst he was searching for a new shower gel, but then he realised it didn’t matter anymore. Noor was going to see his flat in all kinds of states until they found a new place together. A touch of mess had never bothered her, and it wouldn’t start.

The way she could go from so flirtatious, for lack of a better word, in private, to appropriate in front of his parents, astounded him. He was exactly the same, but it was always funny to see other people do it. They really did all live the same life.

“I left your key in there. I completely forgot to pack it. I’m sorry,” he said, as Noor leant against the wall.

“That’s okay. I’m actually quite excited about this.”

He finally managed to twist the key at the right angle, and the door opened. He walked in quickly, trying to hide any last minute things that were making a mess.

“I like your place. It’s a nice representation of you.”

Yahya smiled. “I’m glad. So, what do you want to do?”

Noor shrugged. “Do you want to start a show as a couple?”

“Sure. Wait. I need to make my lunch first.”

“Ah, I forgot. You don’t get it on your school.”

“No, I don’t. We can’t all be private sector workers.”

“Shut up. If you’re making your lunch, I’m going to get into pyjamas.”

Yahya nodded. Noor hovered in the doorway, as though she wasn’t quite sure where she was supposed to stand, dressed in an old t-shirt and bottoms with a sea themed print. She’d never looked cuter.

But something wasn’t right.

He screamed and covered his eyes. “Noor!”

“What? Is there a spider. Oh my god why didn’t you tell me you were scared of spiders? I gave my spider catcher to my parents. Wait. You’re covering your eyes. Is it that bad?”

“There’s no spider!”

“Then why are you- oh Yahya. We’re married.”

He felt his cheeks flush and dropped his hand. “Right. Yes. We are. I saw you this morning. I’m really sorry about that.”

And he did genuinely feel like an idiot. What kind of man forgot he could see his wife without her headscarf? Well, him apparently.

“It’s okay. Honestly, you’re the cutest thing I’ve ever met. Not that you’re a thing. I just- yeah.”

This time, he got to laugh at her. “Guess we’re both kinda stupid sometimes?”

“Sometimes? Yahya, I’m an idiot. Like genuinely, the lack of common sense I manage to display is astounding. Especially because I have a fully formed frontal lobe and everything. But anyways. Did you need any help?”

“I think I’ll be okay. I’m almost done. I just need to pack some grapes.”

Noor nodded, coming in and leaning against the fridge.

“Right, I’m done. Is there anything specific you wanted to watch?”

“Not really, let’s just look for something that seems decent?”

He nodded. But as was always the case, by the time they had finally settled on something, they had to go to bed. The previous night, they’d been so tired that they had just gotten into the bed and fallen asleep without a second thought.

This time would be different.

“Are you- so are you a cuddler?” Yahya asked, fiddling with the hem of his sleeve.

Noor tilted her head up. Yahya liked that she needed to do that. “I don’t know Yahya. I haven’t exactly been in this situation before.”

It eased the tension. And when Noor automatically went for the left side of the bed, because Yahya had moved his entire room around so he could push the bed away from the wall and place it in the middle of the room, he felt like the pieces of the puzzle had just fallen into place.

And as it turned out, Yahya was the one who subconsciously initiated the cuddles, but Noor liked them enough to not tease him.

The week between the wedding and the walima was a work one. Yahya had missed the kids, but being bombarded with questions almost made him wish it was May half-term once again. Noor had a much more peaceful time, with her colleagues simply giving their congratulations and asking if she had any photos, or if they would be waiting for the professional ones to come in.

Each day, Noor would get back ten minutes after Yahya. He would immediately open his arms so she could lie on top of him. She liked hearing his heartbeat. In the same vein, he liked pressing his fingers to her pulse point. It was always steady, and he would find himself breathing to match it. After she felt like she’d recovered- because as much as she was an extrovert, the socialising at work was different, she would climb off him and go make up the prayers she had missed.

Then they would make dinner together, eating wherever they wanted. Yahya would actually take his Vitamin D tablets, because Noor would take one bite of her food and then take both her iron and vitamin supplements so the rest of the meal was not ruined. After they put the leftovers away, and loaded up the dishwasher, Yahya would pack up his lunch. And then they would watch one episode, get ready for bed, and fall asleep with Noor safely in Yahya’s arms.

It was nice. On Wednesday, Noor thought they deserved a little treat for making it to the mid-way point of the week. She loved getting little treats, whether it was a coffee in the morning or a bar of chocolate at lunch. Yahya liked the idea of little treats, so he had started doing the same. Noor’s point had always been that money would not follow them to the grave- which was definitely something she’d picked up from her parents- so he didn’t feel any guilt about getting them. The only issue was that she brought lemon muffins. Yahya hadn’t even been able to try and hide his intense dislike for lemon.

She’d gone quiet.

“I shouldn’t have reacted so harshly,” he whispered once they were under the duvet. Some conversations were easier to have in the dark.

Noor shook her head. “It’s my fault, I should have known better.”

“You can’t be expected to know everything about me. My dessert dislikes have never come up before, it’s not like you did it to be malicious. The moment you realised it was something I wouldn’t want, you let that be the end of it. It’s fine. You’re still a good person.”

Even in the dark, he could tell she was smiling. She shifted back so they could be as close as they had since Sunday. “You always know what to say.”

“You’re teaching me to say whatever feels right.”

There was a brief pause.

“You’re not a bad person just because you showed your emotions.”

It could hardly be considered an emotional display, but Yahya was so used to saying yes to keep the peace that it had been a difficult boundary to set. Noor’s understanding and respect had made it easy.

He didn’t know what to respond with, but that was the beauty of it all. He didn’t always need to speak. Noor would know what he was trying to get at but didn’t have the words for. But he wanted to let her know, in whatever way he could. So he placed his hand on her hip, having finally realised it wasn’t a lie that some people were made to fit together, shifted her so he could hold her.

And then he pushed himself up the bed so he could kiss her forehead. He felt her laugh, and it was the best sleep he’d had since the wedding.

The walima took place on Saturday. It was a lot calmer. Noor got ready in his flat, dragging a chair from the dining table into the bedroom so she could do her make-up with the better mirror, but without sitting on the floor. When Yahya asked why she didn’t just get dressed after doing her make-up, he got the most confused look. He then realised there was no way she would change her routine on such an important day, and he sheepishly left the room to make sure his shoes were shining.

It was less formal, and more of a grand dinner party than anything else, so he didn’t feel so anxious. But even when he started to worry that he looked stupid, or that everyone could tell he wasn’t as confident as he was pretending to be, Noor just gripped his hand tighter, and that pressure would ground him in the moment.

“Remind me when the honeymoon is,” Khadija asked.

Noor barely avoided rolling her eyes, but only because everyone was smiling and she didn’t want the photographer to unknowingly capture the moment.

“The first week of July. And before you ask, it’s because there’s a bank holiday, it’s the summer holidays and my annual leave would have rolled over so I’ll still have a decent amount of time left over.”

“Are you looking forward to it?” One of Yahya’s parents friends asked. Yahya didn’t really like them that much, but they had been cut from the wedding list they had to be invited.

And because Noor could never let stupid questions be, she put on her most innocent smile. “We can’t wait.”

Yahya coughed into his drink to cover up his laugh, but he clearly hadn’t done a good job. And Noor hadn’t looked very innocent.

She grinned at him, and he grinned back.

He couldn’t wait for the honeymoon either, if only because he would get to see that smile with no interruptions.

buy me a ko-fi!

[daltoneering]

Water imagery in episode 9

(I've decided to start doing these as individual posts for readability, but they will all be copied into my master doc where you can find all my thoughts on the episodes leading up to this one as well!)

There is no fire at all in this episode! Not even a candle, I’m pretty sure. Porsche hasn’t needed his fire of survival while he’s been in his bubble with Kinn. I wonder if it’ll be back next episode?

Now, perhaps a stretch, but the first water I want to talk about is Tawan’s showering. Will this man ever be clean! (No. He’s a villain.) He showers twice, and has a bath, and perhaps it is just because of the importance of cleanliness in Thai culture (and he was pretty grim when they found him, and did throw up)—but I mentioned Porsche’s sad shower in ep 5 so I must discuss Tawan’s showering here too. There is the surface level interpretation that he is trying to wash away guilt about what he’s done/doing, but we know that he’s not guilty—the expression on his face in the mirror after he presents his ultimatum to Kinn shows us that he’s very much enjoying it. So instead, if we posit that water = Kinn/mafia family, could (and I know this is a very deep read, but stick with me!) it be that he is trying to insert himself into the main family/back into Kinn’s life?

(Shoutout to @helcinda for helping with these thoughts!) Shower water is transient, impermanent—he is failing to ingratiate himself with Kinn. And then he’s in the bath—submerged in the water—and Kinn agrees to go with him. I don’t know if this makes sense or was even an intentional choice by the production team, but I still think it’s neat.

Talking about characters putting themselves in water! Hello pool scene!

Ahhh, I have been anticipating this shot since the trailer, and I’m so glad it came when I thought it would—when Porsche is emotionally conflicted and needs to think. I think it’s really interesting that this is happening after he said last episode that he would give up smoking, particularly because smoking has been his emotional crux for so long—if he hadn’t given up, would he have gone to smoke instead of sitting on the bottom of the pool? And then, to continue that train of thought, if he gave up smoking because Kinn is now his comfort—verrrry interesting that he is going to the pool to destress. VERRRY interesting that this is the pool they kissed in last episode. Porsche is conflicted about their relationship—other people have talked better than I could about how they are now having to navigate their relationship in the mafia world, not only in their own little bubble, and how that’s affecting Porsche. He seeks solace in the place where they were most able to be themselves, where they were able to literally hide from the world, to try and work out what is going on between them.

And who is there when he emerges? Vegas.

Oh Vegas, you little evil sexy man, always knowing when to strike, when Porsche is at his weakest. I’m seeing a recurring pattern here: appearing in ep 5 after Porsche has had his mirror scene struggles and following “failed sex” scene, appearing in ep 7 when he’s feeling good and loose and trusting because he succeeded in the mission, and appearing now when he’s emotionally conflicted about Kinn. (And yes, right at the end of the episode as well.) 

There was much yelling among the gc when Porsche accepted a drink from Vegas after what happened last time—but Porsche is the kind of person who wears his heart on his sleeve and is his full self, and as such finds it difficult to spot when others are not being their full selves (even with Kinn, he is very prone to taking what Kinn says to him in mafia mode as truth), so I was not that surprised that he did.

Vegas, my deranged little man <3, sits in the pool with all his clothes on. I’m getting strong similarity vibes to when he has smoked with Porsche in the past, and strong parallels with the scene in the bar in ep 7—he is putting himself on Porsche’s level, in Porsche’s familiarity zone, literally getting into the water with him. The water here is holding all of Porsche’s own trust issues, brought about by Tawan, and holds the echoes of Kinn and Porsche’s relationship from the last episode—and Vegas is putting himself literally into that, being there with him in his struggles with trust, and in the place that Kinn was. And Kinn sees that, and sees exactly what Vegas is doing, and I think despite the obvious parallel to the smoking scene in episode 4, what Kinn feels here is less of the jealousy and more of a deep, deep distrust of Vegas—which is why he agrees to go with Tawan to get evidence, so that he can use it against Vegas, and get him out of the picture for good.

(Thoughts on mirrors and reflections in this ep--including in the pool scene above--here!)

[manogirl]

Agreed! I know we've all heard a lot about going no contact (outside of the show, and in America at least), and I think if that's what a kid needs, AMEN and do it. Get what you need.

But it's far from a panacea, it doesn't work for everyone, and it's especially fraught if you want to keep your good relationship with one parent. And that's the crux of it for me, in terms of Phum. He very clearly (VERY CLEARLY) loves and treasures his mother. He brought Peem home to his mom because he wants HER to know him.

You think he can continue to fight with his dad every time he wants to be around his mom? You think that won't be exhausting for everyone involved, including him? It's not a way to exist in the world, constantly in conflict. So isn't the question: how do I exist with my parents and not be constantly in conflict with one of them?

And I obviously don't KNOW that Peem understands that, but I do know that Peem understands that the conflict with his dad makes Phum sad, and he doesn't want Phum to be sad. He says it! He says, you do what you need to do, but I don't want you to be sad.

Y'all maybe read that scene as Peem pushing Phum to reconcile, but I read that scene as Peem pushing Phum to make ANY decision that would ease the conflict and stop creating the sadness. That's a good partner right there. Saying, here are some options for you, I hate that this is tearing you up, I support you no matter what, but you have to stop being torn up by it. Pals. That's...that's partnership right there.

They are good for each other in myriad ways, but Peem's loving attention to the situation with Phum's dad is really fucking good.

(Some of us are navigating how to be in relationship with parents who maybe did less bad stuff than Phum's dad, but nonetheless who it is challenging to have a relationship with, and honest to fucking god, as OP says, sometimes civility is the start. Sometimes it's the beginning and sometimes it's the end but it's something.)

(Notice I'm not talking about forgiveness. I don't think forgiveness matters in this conversation. Honestly! Forgiveness is nice and all, but in my own experience, not really necessary for remaining civil with one's parents. Whether Phum can be in the presence of his dad without conflict is not predicated on forgiveness.)

Is it weird that I'm actually okay with how the dinner with Phum's family went down? Yes, there were no grand gestures. No epic showdowns. No emotional breakthroughs. But the dinner is composed of little things that show, while the relationship is far from repaired, Phum is starting to be okay.

Some may call it 'sweeping under the rug', but really, I think being civil with each other is the first step. Even if they still don't see each other eye to eye, at least there's some kind of peace. Who knows? Maybe when they are comfortable with each other's presence, they'll be able to talk about what happen. But at this stage, civility is the best that anyone in that family can ask for.

[beautifulpersonpeach]

BPP, I keep going back to 2022 festa and can't believe nobody saw this coming. Did RM really hate the music they were making? Did he hate himself for so long and we never saw it? It breaks my heart to bits to imagine them suffering like this. I find myself hating HYBE more and more for forcing them to remain in the band. Who knows how else the company has been controlling them behind the scenes. I think people who called out HYBE when Dynamite was released were right. BTS need to leave BigHit and show they won't be controlled by anyone. Who do you think was behind BTS' break decision? And if your answer is military enlistment then why didn't they mention it in the festa dinner?

**

Rewriting this answer three times because Tumblr glitches kept deleting the whole thing…

Hi Anon,

I let your ask sit for some days before answering, because my first instinct was to just link their Festa Dinner and ask you to watch it. But I don't think that would be very helpful. So instead I’ll just share a different perspective of what a healthy working relationship can look like, because that’s essentially the crux of your question.

In K-pop (and the Western music industry), it's normal for idols/artists to be at odds with their company. SM Entertainment for example probably holds the record for the most number of lawsuits idols have filed against an agency, and if we take a look at the proportion of people who are fans of SM groups within the wider k-pop fandom, I'd guess they'd account for almost 50% of the whole space - there's a lot of them. So when k-pop fans default to thinking BTS must be constantly butting heads with their management in a way that's detrimental to the guys, these k-pop fans have seen a lot of examples and have a whole industry's worth of reasons to think so.

The kicker is, for anybody who actually follows BTS and their relationship with Bang PD and HYBE, especially for the last five years, they'd know it's unlikely to see a massive fallout such as the sort seen with EXO, happen with BTS.

[ Consider how when BTS renewed their contract with more than a year to go in 2018, it was highlighted they negotiated their contracts without even having lawyers present, just to express how amicable that process was.

Consider how when JTBC in December 2019 claimed BTS was planning to sue BigHit, it was ARMY out in front asking for receipts while the rest of the industry and other k-pop fans took it as a given. Less than 24 hours later when BTS members, their parents, and BigHit released statement refuting that report and JTBC had to publicly apologize, k-pop fans were confused, and many netizens were surprised that rather than attack BigHit when the news broke, ARMY had gone after JTBC seeking receipts and asking for whatever actual verifiable information the media house had to base their report on. ]

It's possible to read and hear about BTS disagreeing with their company and not think they're about to file a lawsuit. Imagine any other scenario where people would hear, "we were not all in agreement about doing this song [Dynamite] at first", and think that the guys involved were coerced and exploited into the decision. Based on what they all said during the dinner, the boys are very heavily involved in the direction their music takes. Their own opinions on the songs they're making helps determine the output, and naturally by now, they'd be used to navigating their various viewpoints on a song alongside their producers and this is even more so for viewpoints on their career. Wouldn't all this extremely unlikely to happen under tyrannical management? Think about it. This is a perspective I think is obvious, but in some parts of the internet this is a perspective that earns me the label of 'company stan', since it’s hip to be anti-capitalist in the 21st century and it's a fact corporations are evil, employees have no free will, and contracts are soul-bound so people have no room nor ability to maneuver around while in them.

But even then, in business and corporate settings, compromise happens daily and it doesn't mean any of these adult men are being mistreated, coerced, or controlled by a nebulous corporate entity. I don't think you have nearly enough information to determine they need to leave their company.

I've rambled a lot so I'll try to be brief and say the rest of what I think in point form.

"Who do you think was behind BTS' break decision?"

BTS.

- RM. Edited transcript of the Festa Dinner. Translation credit: @/winterlyblooms

And this is before we consider that the boys had planned to take a break before 2020, before Dynamite. Their sentiments in Map of The Soul: 7 were alarming the first time a lot of us in the fandom heard them, because unlike prior years, those sentiments were more explicit and were laid out so clearly.

We know how involved they are in making this music, so then we had to wonder: if they were really tired, if they really feared they could lose direction, if they were really losing their love for this.

BTS had planned to tour every corner of the planet they could get to, "burn like crazy then crash", Jin would go to the military by the end of 2020, and they'd focus on their solo music.

But then the pandemic happened, their tour was first postponed, then cancelled. They had planned to expand their reach worldwide by going on their biggest tour yet, but when COVID made that impossible, they switched strategies and instead decided to target the largest music market in the world: the U.S. Dynamite exploded and the Korean government postponed Jin's expected enlistment date. That year, BTS also became the first k-pop group in history receive a Grammy nomination.

So BTS gave it another whirl on Butter/PTD with RM hoping that in the meantime, maybe he'd be able to figure out a way forward for the group. But he couldn't and it makes sense that he couldn’t. These are adult men, many of whom have become artists in every sense of the word, they have an identity and need an outlet. They each need an opportunity to showcase who they’ve become, and they need to experience the challenge of being on one's own to grow in any real sense. In my humble opinion.

*

“And if your answer is military enlistment then why didn’t they mention it during the dinner?”

My answer isn’t military enlistment though I think it’s definitely a factor here. BTS were initially due to begin their service by end of 2020, before their government modified that law on their behalf given their accomplishments. It’s entirely reasonable for BTS to not talk about it during the dinner. Aside from the fact that the subject of enlistment is besides the point, mentioning it would only distract from the issues the boys were trying to communicate. I mean, we’ve all seen the fallout in Korea from the Festa Dinner without BTS mentioning the military. All it would’ve done is add fuel to the bonfire of pundits, commentators, and K-pop fans prone to ‘discourse’ picking these boys apart just to spread the exact opposite of what the boys actually mean, for the rest of the population to dissect them further.

*

"can't believe nobody saw this coming."

I don't think anybody knew they'd talk about it and announce it during the Festa dinner, but practically all of what was discussed during the dinner are issues many ARMYs were well aware of. Just see the first link in my pinned post. So while it's true 'nobody saw this coming' in terms of the specific timing, many in the fandom had been expecting this news for some time. BTS have been talking about their career in terms of 'two chapters' since late 2019 and every Vlive RM has done since December 15, 2019, has touched on the issues discussed during the Festa 2022 Dinner.

*

"Did RM really hate the music they were making? Did he hate himself for so long and we never saw it?"

These are two very different questions but the short answer to both is no.

*

All this to say, Anon, you're free to feel however you feel about HYBE. It's a corporation that does as corporations do. The last two years have been really something of an anomaly for BTS. I think everyone can agree on that note, but the reason why the last two years seemed so weird is what BTS explained to ARMY during Festa. If all you got from that was the narrative of Draconian top-down control over BTS to the point they are neglected, abused, and otherwise mistreated, to the point they need to leave the company... that narrative has no basis in reality, certainly not for the last 5 years. And the 2022 Festa Dinner (and everything that’s happened since then) is one of the best examples why.

[kachuuyaa]

— MAPLE LEAVES AND BLACKOUT DREAMS.

11072021 ; g.i oneshot , gn!reader , bsd!reader .. again

genre ; fluff

includes ; spoilers for the latest archon quest... ig... one mention of fyodor, gods and heavenly powers, INAZUMA ..a...a.... kazuha is intrigued by you go you go! subtle flirting probably

characters ; kazuha, beidou, paimon (platonic), aether (platonic)

synopsis ; Only one human could make another feel safe in this world of faux bliss. (In which you meet the wandering samurai from Inazuma.)

author's notes ; so sorry if you're tired of my bsd!reader content but it won't stopYaba dasabadaba yoobabababa (blow!) Moosay Abalaba dooba, cadoosay (cadoosay) Metamorphosis aporphis of morkle laborth laba gorbalib (laboratory)

It has not been long since the reunion between the twins, and Aether seemed melancholic throughout your journey back to Liyue. It was to be expected, really. You knew it all along, yet you didn’t bother to tell him. It was quite easy to figure out, actually, yet you do not want to add on to the suspicion brought upon you. You don’t bother to confront him after that, not wanting to make any mistakes during your conversation with him. Completely blocking Paimon and Aether’s discussions, your eyes fixated themselves on the sleeping Chuuya on your shoulder.

He has been sleeping a lot, you realized, wiggling a bit on your shoulder, he rested his small head on your neck. You smiled to yourself, he was quite cute. You did not want to venture into Liyue Harbor for multiple reasons, if you were on the watchlist of the Knights, there is no doubt you are on the watchlist of the Millelith. “Hey, [Name],” Paimon’s voice entered your ears, getting your attention. You turned your head carefully so as to not wake the sleeping Chuuya on your shoulder, bored eyes staring at Paimon. “Ah-” she stuttered, “do you… possibly know how to get to Inazuma?” she asked meekly, nervousness coating her features-- she was still afraid of you. Well, after the meeting between the twins, how could she not? You were certainly at the top of her “Do Not Piss Off” list.

Inazuma. A beautiful nation shrouded with darkness and all things far from heavenly. You have heard of the nation, never being able to step inside, so you resort to the wind; it gives you information on anything and everything. The rumors of you and the ballads of the ancient traverse through the winds you depend on for information, and it has not let you down. Chuuya would also eavesdrop on others for information, his short stature giving an advantage. He would keep the information for himself, for angry squeaks are the only thing that leaves his tiny mouth.

So, no, you do not know how to get there. You may hold the fate of the world in your hands, able to make even the strongest of archons bow at your feet by a simple wave of your hand. Veins pumping with the blood of another world, and another world is where you reign and have died. This world is merely but a fleeting one, you assumed, and while you may have unimaginable battle prowess and an equally indestructible and flawless ability, you simply do not care. Who are you to care about a world which has no meaning to you? You belong here, yet you don’t have an obligation to protect it. Even the archons-- the so-called “protectors” of Teyvat, had destroyed a nation made by mortal hands.

The gods here were as selfish as the ones you have read before you’ve ever come here. Your life was held in another, chained, captive in another's hands. And even though you were free by being released-- reincarnated in another world (you can’t say another life; you know it’s a continuation of your previous one, how stupid), you know you were bound to experience the selfishness of the gods, those replicating what you have seen in mortals. “No, I don’t.” You sighed, looking back at the sea. The sea has always been a peaceful place, an abyss with numerous undiscovered creatures residing in it. “There must be someone you know..” You trailed off, still focusing on the scenery before you. Unsurprisingly, Paimon snapped Aether out of his reverie and called out his name. “Oh. Let me try and think of someone…” Aether began to think, but Paimon interrupted his train of thought before he could form a name. “Paimon’s thought of someone already -- Atsuko, in Liyue Harbor! She’s from Inazuma!” Paimon exclaimed, waving her tiny arms in the air, ushering both you and Aether to Liyue Harbor, yet you were quick to decline her offer. Dismissing her invitation, you waved your hand, and said, “No, No. People wouldn’t want to see someone like me venturing with the bigshot of Teyvat.” You said, a slight tease coated in your tone.

The traveling duo had to think about your words, you were right-- in a sense, yet they did not want to leave you alone. (they were completely disregarding the existence of a Chuuya-fied wisp sleeping soundly on your shoulder.) “Aww!” Paimon whined, “Paimon wanted [Name] to come with us!” Aether simply laughed, and nodded his head, standing up. “Well, if we find a way to get there, you will join us, alright?” He asked you, but it didn’t seem like a question, it was a demand, really. Deadpanning, you nodded your head, assuring that you will, in fact, travel with them after consulting Atsuko.

You lowered your presence before venturing to the foot of Liyue, trying to conceal yourself from wandering eyes. Aether and Paimon were barely in your peripheral vision and trying to hear their conversation with the Inazuma citizen was even harder. As if on cue, Chuuya squeaked, trying to get your attention, and you faced the tiny wisp who twirled around the air, orange particles following suit. “Ah, you want to eavesdrop?” you questioned, trying to understand his body movements. A little nod with a squeak of approval was what you received in return, and you allowed him to do so. You may not understand his body movements most of the time-- but hey, you try. The wisp navigates its way to where Paimon and Aether were, making sure that he was unseen and unnoticed by the passerby. Thankfully, though, he was.

After a bit of eavesdropping, he returned back to you, and you ultimately did not get what he meant, until he gestured-- with his head-- the direction of Guyun Stone Forest. You could only assume that much. Shortly after, Paimon and Aether returned to you both, and you turned to face them, awaiting their statement. “Uh- alright,” Paimon started, unable to look you in the eye. You found her nervousness quite hilarious, your mouth forming a smirk in amusement. Despite being small, yet wasn’t hesitant to voice out anything on her mind, was afraid of a mere human like you. “Atsuko told us that we must meet with the .. Crux.” The Crux, you have heard tell of their captain and their victories. How could you not? The strange relationship between the Tianquan and the captain was being spread throughout Liyue, including their many stories in the sea. The reputation The Crux has gotten for their many bone-chilling and jaw-dropping experiences was enough to make you interested. “Continue,” You replied, eyes analytical, boring into poor Paimon’s eyes. She shrieked, and silently pleaded to Aether to continue where she left off.

Chuuya, on the other hand, was snickering mentally, not only because of Paimon’s cowardice but also because of Aether’s hesitance to respond. He opted to let out squeaks that resembled laughter. Paimon jerked her head to the wisp, comical steam escaping her ears. “Stop laughing, you orange dwarf!” She stomped her legs, and you had to hold back your laughter. Aether cleared his throat, and Paimon halted her actions. “We must find Captain Beidou, the leader of the Crux.” He said calmly, and you nodded your head. Chuuya was sulking on your shoulder, forming a little ball. How cute, you think, and stood up to follow Paimon and Aether to their destination.

Guyun Stone Forest. An infamous landmark created by the spears of the Lord of Geo, known to hold an ancient god, Osial, one you were most familiar with after the battle that forced him to retreat yet again. Guyun Stone Forest was known to house the Hypostasis that you severely resented, as well as other monsters of each variety. It was a place created by a god, and it houses an ancient one-- waiting to awaken yet again. Some say that if you come by at night, you would experience the bloodshed and the defeat of Osial vividly, memories of the god experiencing his demise would flash through your head like a slideshow.

Soon enough, you both were able to board the Crux without unnecessary mishaps, you trailing behind Aether and Paimon, your presence still unnoticed by the rest of the crew. Chuuya was settled atop your head, seldomly wiggling to find a place to relax. He was still awake, though, that was enough. Aether’s footsteps alerted Beidou, who was currently talking to an unknown stranger you have never seen before, and it seems like Aether was unfamiliar with him, too.

“Hmm? Who’ve we got here…” Beidou turned to face Aether, and you moved to the side, out of Beidou’s peripheral vision. A flash of realization took over the captain’s features, and said, “Wait, I know you. You’re that traveler, Aether, aren’t you?” She questioned, “The one who fought against the Fatui and Osial, right?” She added. Aether blinked, processing her words. Yeah, he did all those, and it should be a given that his achievements were recognized, but a look of confusion would tell you otherwise. “Have we met?” He asked in response. He was a busy man, accepting commissions from complete strangers in both nations without hesitation, and they might remember him, but do not expect this man to remember you-- at all. He chooses not to remember irrelevant people.

Their conversation was not yours to mind, instead, looking out to sea. It was far more interesting than what you’re hearing, all too familiar with what they’re talking about. Feeling a pair of eyes on you, you shrugged it off, too immersed in the beauty of the sea in front of you. Beidou’s loud voice boomed, entering your ears, which snapped you out of your thoughts. “Judging by the clothes on your back and this floating thing-- and you! Another companion, perhaps?” Before Paimon could talk back to the captain, her eyes followed Beidou’s finger, which was pointing to you.

You stared back at them, your eyes swirling with amusement and recognition. “Hi.” you greeted, you were not one for formal greetings. “[Name], traveling partner--” Beidou’s voice interrupted you before you could finish, “aren’t you the suspicious fellow the Millelith was to keep track of?” Ah. So she knows. Who wouldn’t, really? Your supposed title along with Aether’s name being spread throughout Teyvat, one outshining the other. You were feared, unlike Aether, who was respected throughout the continent, yet you were one who they would want to avoid-- to show you who you need to respect. Although that didn’t bother you, it certainly irritated Paimon and Aether.

“They’re my traveling companion-- my friend.” Aether emphasized the word ‘friend’, making you smile fondly at the boy. Paimon nodded vigorously, and Beidou let it slide, albeit hesitant in doing so. “I’ll let it slide, for now.” She monotonously said, eyeing you and Aether, “but if you do something sketchy, I won’t hesitate to do something to you.” She threatened, making Paimon yelp and hide behind Aether, while you smirked in amusement. “A deal’s a deal, captain.” You muttered, turning your back on her to face the scenery you were focusing on. “And by the way, Paimon’s not ‘floating thing,’ it’s Paimon!” She said, shouting each vowel of her name.

“Paimon… hmm..” Those words that belonged to a foreign voice caught everyone’s attention-- excluding Chuuya’s, who was too entertained by the floating particles around his body-- to turn to said man. “What a fascinating being. You two give off not only the essence of wind and earth,” He paused, “but also of… yes… the stars…” He concluded. You blinked, “Eh? The fragrance of what now?” Paimon questioned, confusion lacing her tone, “That’s the weirdest compliment Paimon’s ever heard.” She muttered, and the mysterious man turned to you. “But you… you give off the essence of the stars, and the aura of the divine.” He stated, while you turned to him, and said, “Is that an insult?” You voiced out, while he merely chuckled and shook his head. “Pay it no heed… I mean only to say I am certain… that it is by fate, not chance alone, that we should meet… and that gives our encounter meaning.”

You couldn’t bother to listen to their conversation, for you were not included. Yet you managed to catch his name, Kaedehara Kazuha. Upon studying his appearance more, you realized that he was not local. The frame around his vision confirmed your assumptions, and you could only wonder what that frame came from. Where he came from, exactly. There was an oddly calming and melancholic aura emanating from the man behind you, and it may look like he was aware of it, too. The group exchanged words relating to something about a Crux Clash, something you have never heard of before. Leaning forward to the railings, you let Chuuya sit on your shoulder while nuzzling his face on your neck. Sleepy, he was, all the time. Though that didn’t bother you, really.

“Does your friend over there have some experience in fighting?” I think they do, considering their unusually suspicious yet powerful aura, Beidou wanted to add, yet she refused those words to slip past her tongue. Aether knew you never wanted to be put in the spotlight, to be the center of attraction even for a few minutes, all of those things irked you. Even though you were the center of attraction back in your past life-- for all the right reasons, you don’t want it to happen again. Tranquility is what you desire. You were offered the curse of the gods and the blessing of death, yet tranquility is what truly made you feel human amidst everything else.

Everything passes, tranquility doesn’t. “They would probably decline if you asked them.” He said, it was the truth, really. “They’re not one for formal events,” He trailed off, running out of reasons for vouching for you. You were a mysterious individual, and while you have been their traveling companion for quite some time, you still left lingering questions on your trail. Curiosity swirling in his eyes whenever he manages to take a good look at you, wondering what you are-- who exactly you were. Perhaps being mysterious came with good looks. “Oh? Is that so?” She quirked an eyebrow and glanced at your figure before tearing her gaze back to the traveler. “Yeah, they're a tough one!” Paimon exclaimed, “They don’t fight unless necessary!” Paimon then added, recalling your previous statements to the pixie. You were ruthless and merciless in battle, cunning in strategy, resorting to being the brains between the duo. That doesn’t excuse your methodical and malicious way of swerving through the situation, however.

“I’m not interested.” Your sharp voice cuts through the conversation, dismissing every thought the wandering samurai and the captain may have had. Still facing the sea, elbows on the railings of the ship. “You, too, are not interested in the masterless vision?” Kazuha asked, and you nodded. “I am only interested in following Aether.” You uttered nonchalantly, and a blush rose to Aether’s cheeks, quickly faltering. “Well, it seems like the traveler will only be partaking in the event. Let’s get you signed up, yeah?” she questioned, “Head to the tournament arena in Guyun Stone Forest. Kazuha and I will be over soon.” She smiled, clasping her hands together. Before anyone could say anything else, you disappeared. (poof! You’re gone, and honestly, it’s a surprise that no one noticed Chuuya, at all.)

Beidou turned to look at you, yet you were gone. All that was left was a little wisp with orange particles surrounding its body. It seemed to be looking around frantically, beady eyes locking with ruby-colored ones. It blinked, and it disappeared as soon as they made eye contact. Was that [Name]? The captain blinked and shrugged her shoulders. It would be an understatement to say that both of them were confused, they genuinely thought that you turned into a wisp. Kazuha’s face remained neutral, yet there was a lingering swirl of amusement in those vermillion hues of his. “Well, well. It seems like it will only be a matter of time before the answer is revealed.” (AWOOOOAOAOAOAO WOOOF WOOF. anyway.)

You didn’t want to be noticed by the Liyue participants, having been popular on the list of suspicious individuals. You knew that if they saw you, even if it was just a glimpse, they would panic. So, what was the best option? Well-- hide, obviously. You were sat atop one of the spears, right above the reception area. The endless praises coming from the other competitors soon reached your ears, but that didn’t make you interested. They have only witnessed him in his power, but were they able to walk alongside him? You didn’t think so, besides, they’re but mere specks of dust in his house of memories. You crossed your legs, blocking out any sounds entering your ears. That is until a familiar squeak is what you heard. Looking to your left, you saw a visibly furious wisp. When you landed your eyes on him, he started smacking your head as if he was scolding you-- well, he was. In his tiny little head, he was cursing you out, and he had embarrassed himself in front of two complete strangers. You laughed, not quite loud, and gently encased your hands on his tiny body. He slept after that.

You only watched some of Aether’s matches before you appeared-- out of nowhere-- behind Beidou and Kazuha. The samurai noticed your peculiar presence the second you got there, really, you had a very, very unique scent. He would describe it as flowers-- laid out in a field, wilting ever so slowly. An enigma that presents itself as a gentle soul, malicious in movement and methodical if necessary. You had eyes that resembled that of a certain archon he grew to despise, yet he failed to sense any correlation between the two of you. If he had, though, he would be utterly speechless that you haven’t stolen him away, yet. You presented yourself as swift in movement and uninterested in talking, although he noticed a playful side that you only revealed to Aether. He now realized that you weren’t the wisp that disappeared after a few double takes, situated on your shoulder. Even that small wisp radiated the same aura that you did.

Just who were you? Kazuha couldn’t decipher you that much, he thinks he has only so little information about you, and he was right. You were a black and white canvas, one who presents themselves as plain, quiet, yet you were familiar with all emotions at once. The ability to be stoic and to have separate personalities were one of your most prominent features, being able to lure your target into a seemingly well-made trap. Your eyes were closed, listening to the waves meeting the sand, oh, how you missed that sound.

The waves crashing never failed to land a small smile on your face, unnoticed by many, tranquility was the only word you would describe the sounds the oceans make. Calming, it was. Beidou’s laugh entered your ears, “I knew I wouldn’t regret choosing you as the favourite!” You opened your eyes slightly, directing your sharp eyes to Aether and Paimon. “So what do you think, Kazuha? [Name]? He totally dominated that guy, and did it with style, too!” She said, visible pride laced within her words. To be fair, you were proud of Aether as well, but your pride was overshadowed by nonchalance. “Impressive,” Kazuha praised, “But I also observed our favorite exercise some restraint, as if to protect the opponent from harm.” He added, and paused, turning to look at you. “Ah,” you uttered, “Good work, Aether.” you were simple, Aether knew that, yet you never praised him verbally, resorting to ruffling his hair. It did not fail to make him smile, though. Paimon smiled brightly, for that was the first time she heard those words slip past your lips. You smiled gently, genuinely, and whispered, “I know you will win.”

Paimon was ready to cry then and there. Comical tears run down her face, hugging you from the neck, “Paimon didn’t know you could be so nice!” Her voice was shaky, yet you laughed in faux offense and Aether smiled, and whispered a ‘thank you', in response. Beidou laughed heartily, and Kazuha crossed his arms with a small smirk. So not only were you playful, you had a soft spot for Aether! Lovers, perhaps? Softly chuckling, you leaned back to the stone behind you, letting your eyelids rest. As the wind kissed your face you were vaguely reminded of the man beside you, yet you made no intent to look at him. You were only brought back to reality when Beidou told Aether that he would be put in the semi-finals, and you nodded in agreement. Aether smiled, his eyes forming crescents, and sent you a thumbs up in return.

After quite a long wait, it was time for the semi-finals. After some words from Kazuha and the announcement from Beidou, you patted Aether’s back gently and gave him a look that said ‘you can do this’. Well, needless to say, he was quite hyped after that exchange. Chuuya squeaked from beside you, and you let him start floating on your shoulder. This attracted Kazuha’s attention, “What’s that?” He asked, the words spilling out of his mouth before he could ever give it a thought. Chuuya and you side-eyed him, and said, “ah. This little guy?” You pointed to Chuuya, and it seemed angered at your comment. “This guy’s Nakahara. A… memoir of a... friend, in short.” Said wisp halted its actions, although it didn’t go unnoticed by both of you. “Hm, fascinating. You two carry the same aura.” You remained silent for the most part, yet a simple sigh escaped your lips. “Hm, do we?” You muttered, softly patting the wisp’s head with your pointer finger. It seemed delighted, unconsciously leaning to your touch. “Perhaps we do,” you whispered, knowing the truth behind this small wisp below your finger. “Do you… perhaps… have some history with this creature?” He asked, curiosity and attentiveness evident in his wine-colored eyes. You paused for a moment, thinking of your words. “Well, if you phrase it like that, then… sort of, yeah.” He nodded after your confirmation, yet your answers only made him insatiable; there were still so many questions he’d want to ask you, yet he knows you won’t provide for the insatiable. You never do.

After the match, you observed Aether ask other people for information about his final opponent. You weren’t bothered to watch the matches that didn’t involve him, however, entertaining Chuuya in the process whenever he wasn’t on the battlefield. But from the observations of Beidou and Kazuha, you were able to identify that seemingly suspicious man. Your intuition was never wrong, of course. He was described to be agile, swift, and seemingly formidable in battle. Well, you would be lying if he doesn’t remind you of someone you were previously acquainted with. “Wah! Paimon is starting to think that [Name] here is our final opponent!” You blinked, dismissing Paimon’s words. “Eh? No, no, no.” You shook your head, “what makes you think that?” you asked, and Paimon scratched her head, “eh… you are fast as well! Fast on your feet! Strong too! You and our opponent are far too similar!” Paimon complained, stomping her feet in the air like a child. “Now that’s just… insulting.” You muttered, and Kazuha chuckled. “Oh? How so?” He queried. You shook your head, “I would prefer to keep my prideful remarks to myself.” and Chuuya shook his head vigorously, denouncing your statement, squeaking in retaliation. Beidou’s voice cut through your conversation, stirring the topic into the final battle.

You, again, did not bother to listen, closing your eyes until someone catches your attention. Words were exchanged between the 3 elemental wielders, and the voice that snaps you out of your reverie was none other than Aether’s, “Can [Name] come too?” You snapped your eyes open, staring at Aether, waiting for him to continue. When he didn’t, you spoke up, “Where, exactly?” Paimon cut through the discussion, “With Kazuha!” and a flash of realization flooded her features, “Wait, Aether, why do you want them to come exactly?” Her voice was laced with a slight tease, and a sly smile formed on her lips, making Aether pinch her cheeks and stick his tongue out when he heard her whine. Beidou did not want to interrupt, but you know what kind of thoughts are forming on the captain’s mind. Something about “are they together?” Well, something like that. Kazuha, on the other hand, never once failed to show amusement during their exchanges, especially when the topic is about you. “Well, that’s settled, come with me. Some post-match entertainment is in order.”

What you didn’t expect is that he’d completely focus on Aether in the secluded place he led you both to. “Now that we’re alone, let me cut to the heart of the matter.” He began, he eyed Aether, then to your still, peaceful figure. Seemed like Chuuya was sleeping, once again. “Traveler, you are skilled in manipulating the elements.” He began, and that is when you snapped your eyes to Kazuha, fully invested in the conversation as if you weren’t resting your eyes ten seconds ago. Kazuha brushed off your intense gaze on him, and continued, “And not just a single element, but multiple, is that correct?” You weren’t shocked, no. You witnessed it firsthand, and all the subtle attempts to cover up Aether’s otherworldly ability were futile when it came to you. Besides, you were capable of revealing even the smallest details.

“Although I cannot make sure of [Name], while yours were not as subtle as you presume, they give me an unfamiliar aura. One I cannot discern,” He uttered, turning to face and making eye contact with you. “Now, then, may I be so bold to inquire just what power you hold?” Despite the soft tone he presented you with, you still denied it. “I do not have such power as you may think I do.” You shut down his question, “I may hold the aura of the gods, but I do not have any affiliation with them.” You said sternly, hoping that he would dismiss this subject, and swallow up your lies. If anyone knew about your ability and the status you had compared to the gods above, including Chuuya’s, everyone would be against you. The sheer power you hold in your body surpasses that of bygone gods and wandering travelers. You were an unstable yet powerful force, never truly revealing your plans, and never using the ability you were cursed to use again. You never used it to spite the gods who have cursed you in the world you know you will never fit in. You were anything but human in this world of selfish souls, well, you know who would agree with you. (you know Fyodor would have a field day if he was here.)

Although you remained composed and stoic, you silently wished Kazuha would let you slip past his questions. He was, obviously, completely oblivious to your thoughts. Kazuha wasn’t oblivious about your power, though, you knew he knew that you have one. After that exchange, you completely retracted yourself from the conversation, simply observing the two who discussed Aether’s powers and skills. You didn’t miss the slight concern that Paimon held towards you, though. You didn’t like talking; to strangers, especially. Save for your interrogation victims back in the day, in meetings, you usually butt in when necessary, or riling up the boss and Chuuya whenever you felt like doing so. The only relevant thing to come out of the conversation you listened to was everything relating to Inazuma. Ah, so that’s where he came from. No wonder the frame encasing his vision looked foreign to you. You briefly made eye contact with Kazuha, and you recognized that look in his eyes. As if he was still wary of you, and your motives.

Truth is, he was completely intrigued because of you. Still wary-- yet enamored. He knows you are observant, calculating, and seemingly notorious due to all of these traits, including your intimidating appearance. You carry yourself with utmost royalty, independent in all situations, and overpowering most of your enemies with ease. He could tell by your scent that you were one to be avoided, and one who is more powerful than most vision wielders-- scratch that, maybe all. Although that would be an overstatement to some, he just has this feeling that you are stronger than you present yourself as. That was true, obviously. What is a mysterious person without their secrets? He secretly hoped he did not give you a bad impression, for you were a mysterious one who attracts even the wisest of men. He’ll make sure to ask Aether about you, even if it’s just the simplest of information. He was certain that he hears all things in nature, yet you were one who grew in a field of foreign flowers. That, he cannot decipher.

2021 © kachuuyaa. do not steal or claim my work as your own.

[filthyjanuary]

so what are your thoughts

ok well i'm going to try to articulate them as best i can even though they're very convoluted and mixed. if you follow me you know i'm very new to mcyt/dsmp and only got into it oct 2021 so like obviously i dont have the hindsight of someone who has been following all of this for 2 years but i want to start off by saying i empathize with dream a lot. i do. i think it is hugely admirable to grow out of a bigoted situation and better yourself and i don't think people holding what he's done as a teenager against him are being fair. everyone is stupid and makes mistakes as a teenager, society evolves and so do people, and i think there's plenty to talk about without acting like people are irredeemable and incapable of growth and change. if you are a teenager i want you to know that as wise and smart and progressive as you think you are now, you're going to look back on stuff you're doing in 5 years and cringe and be angry and think 'wow how did i ever do that?'

i also understand that he has had a massive amount of growth in a very short amount of time and is dealing with things in the public eye and with a huge spotlight on him that are frankly impossible for nearly anyone to comprehend. there is not really a playbook for blowing up this fast and trying to navigate that and all things considered yes he's an adult but he's still pretty young and this is not anything anyone could've possibly prepared for and especially wrt his sexuality i can't even imagine how much it sucks to have people constantly putting words in your mouth or trying to make you label yourself in a way you don't want to especially if you're still trying to figure yourself out.

ALL THAT BEING SAID, i think my big thought is dream doesn't actually seem to grasp the crux of the issue? or at least what my personal issue is which is when you wield the influence he does, you have to be responsible with it and that means you cannot just go around on the internet acting like any other person. it doesn't matter what the other person said. someone with 5 mil twitter followers responding to someone with 5 followers is not a fair fight. it doesn't matter WHAT dream responded with, the fact that he did it directly at all puts targets on people's backs and he doesn't seem to grasp that at all and i find that concerning. especially when the people getting targeted are teenagers who don't fully have the capacity to deal with that or are aware of the implications of their own words. no one is saying he needs to take it lying down or not defend himself but there are ways to do that that don't endanger people.

and to anyone saying "well if you post publicly be ready to stand by your words", you are kind of deliberately erasing the role social media has in our society at large now. twitter is basically the public square, like it or not. if you comment on something happening in the public eye in the public square, you are not necessarily expecting the person you're talking about to respond to you directly. if i write a letter to a newspaper commenting on some celebrity scandal, i am not expecting said celebrity to actually respond even if it was published. nor should they. that would be literally insane. people talk about things on twitter because that's largely where a lot of communication happens at large in 2022, and you shouldn't need a private account to be able to talk about things going on in the public eye. the people who are IN THE PUBLIC EYE should know when and how to respond to things. it's not dehumanizing to say that your influence comes with obligations that other people don't have to deal with.

hell, this is obviously on a much smaller scale but i remember one time on twitter i defended aidan gallagher of all people. not because i care about him one way or another, but because people on the internet were bullying him and being too harsh on him considering he was a teenager and still learning and growing. that's all i said. that we shouldnt hold teenagers to the same standard we hold adults to because that isn't fair. and i got a metric fuckton of people including other teenagers calling me transphobic. which i know is blatantly not true. i didn't respond to any of those comments because i knew it wasn't fair for me, a grown adult woman with a blue checkmark to be arguing with a bunch of kids on twitter even if they were wrong. it's not a fair fight. i know i'm not transphobic and so does anyone who is important to me. why would i waste my breathe arguing with people who've made up their minds and are determined to find the most bad faith interpretation of my words?

the other thing is, i understand that dream wasn't condoning doxxing but his attempt at "reassuring" people also completes avoids the crux of the issue which is doxxing is inherently a fear tactic. it doesn't matter how many followers you have or if it's actually going to result in a threat. doxxers do what they do to scare people into silence. it is not reassuring to say "well if you have 5 followers no one who doxxes you is actually going to put you at risk because no one cares enough to put you in danger" because that's not the point? the point is it is a threat that hangs over your head and scares you.

dream is never going to convince people who hate him to change their minds and i think he needs to grasp that sometimes the best thing he can do is just to be quiet. people are always going to misconstrue you when you're in the public eye. you don't need to engage with every single bad faith interpretation of your words because it dilutes when things actually do need to be addressed. people who do support you will continue to do so unless you give them a legitimately awful reason not to. a pr person would help with that and i genuinely find it off the walls bonkers insane that he thinks having someone help him with that kind of thing would render him "corporate" or "inauthentic."

apologies if this is long and not clear, i did my best but i'm still a bit sick and sleep deprived. happy to elaborate on any points. i find myself very in the middle on how i feel about this and frankly am still sorting out my own thoughts so talking about it helps actually. but i think those are my two biggest takeways at the moment. i want dream to succeed. i want him to be better. i think people on here have a tendency to either baby him to the extreme or think the worst of him and i don't think either of those does anyone any good.

[patandpran]

In Loathe With You

What happens if Taekyung confronts Shinwoo about why Shinwoo has been avoiding him since the incident in the library?

Aka the one where Shinwoo definitely doesn’t ‘hate’ Shinwoo. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.

The way that Taekyung looked at Shinwoo terrified him.

Taekyung made Shinwoo feel seen. Like all the bullshit and layers of self-doubt and defensiveness were stripped away by Taekyung’s gaze alone. 

Taekung looked at people with such intention, it was as if Taekyung was studying you like his life depended on it but Shinwoo soon realized it was more of a survival tactic that Taekyung must have developed to navigate social situations. The more he could gather in mere seconds, the more likely that Taekyung would be able to handle the interaction without too many consequences.

Shinwoo had felt something between them shift after Taekyung stepped into the way of the fight. The cut beneath Taekyung’s eye was a reminder that he put himself in harm’s way for someone that repeatedly declared that he ‘hated’ him and called him ‘annoying’.

Who did that?

It took Shinwoo some time to muster up the courage to call Taekyung and, in his own awkward way, thank him for the gesture. He couldn’t help but stutter anytime he was around Taekyung. He was so hard to read and decipher that it was both unsettling and fascinating to Shinwoo. It made him want to reach out into Taekyung’s mind every time they shared space and find out exactly what was going on for his peer.

So Shinwoo had bought a package of bandages.

…. With the intention of offering them to Taekyung as a sort of peace offering.

But then he encountered Daon and Taekyung in the library and Shinwoo’s confidence shattered into a million pieces. Shinwoo had seen the fondness that Taekyung looked at Daon with a million times before, whether it was students who wanted to date him or friends who looked up to him as if he were some sort of God on Earth.

Shinwoo knew he could never compete with Daon. Daon was warmth, sunshine and refreshing sweet tea while Shinwoo was ice, a cup of bitter coffee and a day inside escaping the rain. Daon was laughing and beaming smiles while Shinwoo was a comfortable shared silence and contemplation. 

And it seemed like Taekyung had already decided what he wanted, despite the connection that Shinwoo had felt brewing between them. There was a part of Shinwoo that was shocked that someone like Taekyung would fall for Daon’s warmth but Shinwoo knew how hard it was to escape the power of Daon’s influence. Even Shinwoo had once felt trapped by his feelings for Daon but quickly realized they worked much better as friends. 

So, Shinwoo took a step back despite what his instincts told him.

He kept his feelings to himself and started to rebuild the wall between him and Taekyung again so that he wouldn’t get hurt. It was better to feel nothing than to feel hurt. It was better to pretend to loathe someone than love them. The pain was more obtuse.

But Taekyung didn’t seem to appreciate the regression. A few days after the incident in the library, Taekyung cornered Shinwoo in the student council room during a study period that they both shared. Shinwoo regretted ever going to the student council room that day, knowing that Taekyung paid close attention to details such as people’s routines.

“Why are you ignoring me again?” Taekyung demanded bluntly, slamming his hands down onto the council table where Shinwoo was sitting.

This was another quality of Taekyung’s that Shinwoo admired. His need for transparency and honesty meant there was nothing left unclarified, as much as Shinwoo liked to keep things hidden. Taekyung tolerated no BS and Shinwoo found it quite refreshing.

“I-I’m not.” Shinwoo muttered in response and tried to avoid Taekyung’s piercing glare by pretending to study the form he was filling out.

“You’re not good at lying.” Taekyung accused and it somehow didn’t come across as an insult when he said it.

“Look, I’m trying to get this clubs form done so if you want something to entertain you, why don’t you clean the council room again?” Shinwoo deflected, hoping it would be enough to get Taekyung off his case. He really wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation right now.

Instead of taking Shinwoo’s suggestion, Taekyung rounded the table to the side where Shinwoo was sitting and sat in the chair directly next to Shinwoo’s. The sudden invasion of space made Shinwoo’s breath hitch in surprise and when he looked up to meet Taekyung’s gaze, he was shocked to see a look of resolve rather than frustration.

“I don’t know what I did to upset you, but whatever it was, I’m sorry.” Taekyung shared, his voice softer than before.

Shinwoo swallowed slowly, taken aback by the abrupt shift in Taekyung’s tone. “You didn’t do anything. Nothing’s wrong. I don’t know what you mean…”

“You started to open up to me.” Taekyung interrupted Shinwoo in earnest. “You called me! You apologized to me and you even started to greet me… but then, these past few days… it feels like it went back to how it was before. I don’t want to feel invisible to you anymore.”

The hurt was obvious in Taekyung’s words and the guilt quickly flooded through Shinwoo. The last thing he wanted to do was cause Taekyung pain. He had removed himself from the equation so that Shinwoo and Daon could pursue whatever was going on between them. He didn’t want to mess with what was obviously brewing between them. Plus, in taking a step back, Shinwoo was protecting himself too. But how could Shinwoo possibly explain this to Taekyung without revealing his feelings for him?

Because that was the crux of it all.

Shinwoo liked Taekyung.

And that was exactly why they had to go back to how they were before…. So no one got hurt.

“Is it because I heard the stuff your middle school friends said?” Taekyung surged on anxiously. “I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s none of my business, unless you want to tell me about it. I’m never going to push you to tell me things you don’t want to. I just… I want us to get along. I want us to be friends.”

The word ‘friends’ stung more than it should have but that was a pain that Shinwoo would have to learn to tolerate. He could see that the way he was treating Taekyung was doing more damage than it was worth. If Taekyung wanted to be friends, he could keep his feelings hidden as he had with Daon. They would soon dissolve into feelings of platonic affection..

But would they?

There was something innately different about how Shinwoo felt about Taekyung. His feelings were more visceral, like they lived deep within rather than just on the surface. They hadn’t known each other for long but Shinwoo’s feelings for Taekyung felt like they had always dwelled within, ready to rise to the surface when he first laid his eyes on Taekyung.

“Okay.” 

That was all that Shinwoo could offer. 

The weight of everything sat upon his shoulders and the image of encountering Daon and Taekyung in the library flashed in his memory, sending a pang of hurt through him once again. It spread through his body like a slight shiver as he kept his eyes on Taekyung.

“Okay.” Taekyung responded slowly, almost as if he didn’t believe what Shinwoo had set.

Shinwoo watched as Taekyung momentarily gathered his thoughts, hoping that the interrogation was over and he could at least pretend to return to his work and be left alone with his thoughts. But Taekyung didn’t seem satisfied with the conversation.

“You don’t have to answer but… what changed?” Taekyung asked and Shinwoo wished he had simply continued on with the ‘I hate you’ charade. It would have been easier than having conversations like this one.

“It seemed like, for a second there, that you actually might want to be friends with me.” Taekyung expressed and Shinwoo could hear the vulnerability in Shinwoo’s words. “But then it quickly went back to how it was before… what did I do wrong?”

Shinwoo sighed, letting his gaze fall to the table rather than having to face Taekyung. “Like I said, you didn’t do anything wrong… I just… I think it’s best if we keep a distance between us.”

“Why?” Taekyung shook his head in confusion. “I don’t understand.”

Shinwoo could feel the truth on the tip of his tongue but he knew honesty would destroy any semblance of a friendship that they had between him and Taekyung, especially given how Taekyung felt for Daon. 

“I saw you and Daon in the library.” That was the only explanation that Shinwoo could offer but it only seemed to confuse Taekyung even more.

Taekyung turned his chair to face Shinwoo more directly. “Okay… but what does that have to do with anything?”

For someone so observant, it seemed like Taekyung had a blind spot to how people felt about him. It made the whole interaction both unbearable and embarrassing for Shinwoo but Shinwoo also knew Taekyung wasn’t going to let him escape until the matter was resolved.

“I saw how you looked at him.” Shinwoo explained slowly, the words feeling like poison as they passed through his lips.

“Huh?” Taekyung’s brow knit together for a moment before his eyes grew wide with realization. “You think I like Daon?”

The truth hurt already but hearing it directly from Taekyung felt like a slap across the face. Shinwoo didn’t know how to respond besides nodding and remaining silent as Taekyung regarded him intently.

But then Taekyung did something unexpected - he reached out and gently trailed his fingers across one of Shinwoo’s ears. The touch made Shinwoo become starkly still and all remaining thoughts disappeared from his mind.

“Your ears are red again.” Taekyung remarked softly, leaning in toward Shinwoo.

Shinwoo couldn’t help but let himself be caught up in the moment for a few seconds before his eyes fell on the bandaid that Daon had placed on Taekyung’s face. At that, he pulled away from Taekyung’s touch and turned his eyes away as well, feeling the shame flood through him.

Out of the corner of his eye, Shinwoo saw Taekyung’s hand hover slightly before retracting it and touching the bandaid on his face. “Daon doesn’t like me. He takes care of everyone. You should know that by now, Shinwoo.”

Taekyung looked back to Shinwoo and blurted out, “But you like him.”

Shinwoo shrugged, “He’s nice to me. I think maybe I thought I did for a second but then I realized it was a different feeling…. It was friendship, not a romantic feeling or physical attraction. I’m just not used to people having any investment in me… he made me feel seen. But I understand the difference now.”

“How?” Shinwoo wondered, not even processing the relief that he was experiencing at hearing that Taekyung didn’t want to be anything more than Daon’s friend.

“Because of how I feel about you.” Taekyung admitted, the nerves clear in his voice.  “Don’t you wonder why I was so insistent about finding out why you hated me? It was borderline obsessive!”

Shinwoo’s mind turned to static. He understood the possibility of what Taekyung was saying but it was too unbelievable to conceive that Taekyung felt the same as him, especially considering how Shinwoo had treated him.

“You want to be my friend.” Shinwoo expressed numbly.

“No, you don’t get it.” Taekyung was shaking his head in disbelief again before becoming still and solemn. “I like you, Shinwoo.”

For a second, Shinwoo thought he had heard Taekyung wrong or was imagining things. But then Taekyung kept talking, “Maybe that will make you hate me. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything but I just felt like something had changed between us and maybe...Maybe I don’t know how to have friends but what I do know is that I don’t want to just be friends with you, Shinwoo. I don’t expect anything in return, I just… need to be honest with you.”

“Honest.” Shinwoo repeated the word numbly as he was still in shock by Taekyung’s confession.

“Before I ever said anything.” Taekyung bit out.

Shinwoo  realized too late that he must have come across in a mocking tone as a look of hurt crossed Taekyung’s face before he shoved his chair back to make an escape. An all too familiar shame was clear in Taekyung’s eyes as he moved toward the door of the student council room.

And even though Shinwoo was still in autopilot, his body leapt into action on his behalf, knowing that if he didn’t act now, he might lose Taekyung forever. The damage would be done if he didn’t make his intentions clear.

Shinwoo slipped in front of Taekyung and put his back to the door to block Taekyung from exiting. Taekyung took a surprised step back and tore his gaze from Shinwoo’s, letting out a huff of frustration. “I don’t need your pity, Shinwoo. I get it now. You hate me and that’s never going to change.”

“I don’t hate you.” Shinwoo practically whispered. “I never did.”

Taekyung looked urgently back to Shinwoo. “What?”

Shinwoo took a deep breath and stepped closer to Taekyung, raising his hand to gently run his thumb over the bandaid on Taekyung’s cheek. “I don’t hate you, Taekyung. I was… terrified of how you made me feel.”

“I don’t understand.” Taekyung murmured under Shinwoo’s touch. 

“The weight of what I feel for you, it was too much.” Shinwoo explained slowly, articulating every word. “That’s why I acted like I hated you. I was awful to you because… well, you were overwhelming. I didn’t want you around because… well, I like you too, and I was scared of what that meant.”

Taekyung relaxed slightly, his expression becoming more open and curious than defensive. “But what does Daon have anything to do with this?” 

“I was planning to bring you a bandaid as an apology for how I treated you after the fight.” Shinwoo answered, embarrassed about how he had handled the situation. “But then I saw you and Daon in the library and I guess.. I just didn’t want to get in the way of you too.”

“Like I said, there’s nothing to get in the way of.” Taekyung raised his hand to put around Shinwoo’s wrist and leaned his head into Shinwoo’s palm that was still cradling his face. 

“I know that now.” Shinwoo shared with a relieved sigh.

And then something beautiful happened. Taekyung smiled at Shinwoo and something in Shinwoo melted. The walls of ice that he had worked so hard for so long to build up began to dissipate because of Taekyung’s mere presence. 

“So… what does this make us?” Taekyung asked boldly, beaming at Shinwoo.

“It definitely makes us more than friends.” Shinwoo responded, a smile tugging at his own lips.

Taekyung leaned forward so their foreheads touched momentarily before he pulled back again. He had a satisfied look in his eyes and he teased, “Your ears are red again. I guess you really do like me.”

Shinwoo rolled his eyes. He could get used to this banter but he might never get used to the reality that Taekyung felt the same way he did and had been brave enough to share those feelings with him.

And, just like that, Shinwoo wasn’t so afraid of how Taekyung made him feel anymore.

[corvid-attano]

character ask for crux: 6, 17, 19, 21, 22, 39, 52, 59. picking the ones i don't think i already know the answer to.

Alrighty:

6. how have they changed in the last year? how about the last five years?

In-universe, probably not much? Blaseball's timescale seems to move very fast and its difficult to conceptualise a year in a framework that requires characters to age a year in an irl week. I think xe's nearing the end of xis career in terms of ice sklating, in favour of figuring out other stuff xe wants to spend the rest of however long xe has around (which is probably a long time given 30xx exists as a thing we've talked about in nawball.), whereas one and especially five years ago xe was probably nowhere near even thinking about being done with sklating.

17 & 19. they’re crying—what did it take to make them cry? and what sparks genuine, unadulterated rage in them?

Someone being mean to xim specifically - other siblings goes straight to protection mode so no tears but someone being mean to xim specifically is not something xe can really navigate, imo. Not that anyone is mean to xim often, given xe has twenty+ siblings ready to grab the pitchforks and torches at any time. Speaking of grabbing pitchforks and torches; if someone were to hurt one of the other wyatts enough, sunny especially, xe'd probably be very genuinely angry.

21. do they have an idea about how they’ll die? do you?

Xe thinks static, that's the path that all of xis "dead" siblings have taken and xe figures that xe'll fuck up eventually and cause that to happen. I'm less sure the more I write Crux that it will, though. In a way, xe's already cheated one form of death by essentially wrong warping into the afterlife, so short of the Hall being canonically destroyed, I think Crux will be fine? As dead as xe is now.

22. how would they decorate their living space, if they had a chance?

Depends! I know xis room at Morrow's is fairly practical; somewhere xe can crash with little effort or reorganising, and I know xis room in the Big Garage is full of mementos because xe sees it as a safe place to keep them, so the answer I suppose is what purpose does the living space serve. In the event xe got say a house, I'd guess xe'd go for something that felt welcoming as a priority - comfy, spacious so xe can invite people over to stay if they'd like, and fairly warm (in terms of vibes rather than actual tempreature) - xe'd hate one of those minimalist "this house looks empty and its all white and black" houses for that reason.

39. are they insecure about their appearance? how about their personality? what aspects specifically worry them?

Xe was for a long time, especially xis dead-ness? Being ice-cold at all times casused a lot of first introductions to be slightly awkward and it always wore xim down, but over time xe got used to that and it bothered xim less and less. Xe's never had any issues personality-wise, beyond just being fairly quiet around new people, which xe's mostly fine with provided someone else is there to keep a conversation going.

52. how would they dress themselves up for a formal event?

Xe's worn xis fair share of fancy clothes, and I'd imagine xe favours navy over any other colour when xe does wear formalwear, so probably xe'd go with a navy suit.

59. what’s an element of their philosophy that you disagree with?

Xe has an opposition to seeking help for ximself, beliving that xe can't really get the help xe needs (especially therapy). I think that whilst xe sort of has a point, it's not worth just dismissing the idea outright, and at least trying to seek help for the issues xe's left unaddressed for a long time now can't hurt.

[novantinuum]

Fandom: Steven Universe

Rating: T

Words: 1.2K~

Summary: His family’s not present, the third time he runs away. They never see the creature he becomes.

Early corruption AU.

Howdy. To be honest, I don’t have any more buffer finalized for this fic at the moment, but I really, really wanted to post this. Chapters 18-25 are entirely plotted out, though. (There’s some lore headcanons in the author’s notes of the AO3 version!)

If you read this and enjoy, I’d greatly appreciate your support through reblogs here, or kudos/comments on AO3 as well. Thank you! <3

____

“I’d like to thank you all for coming on such short notice,” Peridot addresses the small crowd sitting before her on the top of the hillside above the temple. Garnet and Pearl are in attendance, as well as Amethyst, Bismuth, and Lapis— the individuals who supported her in making her latest breakthrough possible. Also present is Greg, Connie, and Connie’s medical professional mother, who she doesn’t know well enough to remember the name of. Resting behind her is a double-sided chalkboard— the surface facing her audience empty— and a tall, mysterious contraption obscured under a white bed sheet. “Before we begin, I must disclose that this system has only gone through rudimentary testing, so success is not guaranteed immediately.”

“Anything’s better than nothing at this point,” Steven’s father says, loosely tugging upon the large hunks of grass surrounding him within his aimlessly flexing grip.

(Silently, Garnet places her hand on his upper arm, beckoning for him to relax, to take a deep breath and unwind.)

“Y-yes, of course,” she stammers in reply, suddenly hyper-aware of the spotlight she’s called down upon herself, and how fervently everyone gathered here desires her success. Swallowing hard, she attempts to recollect her wits. “And now, to introduce my new technology.” She yanks a sheet off of her invention, positioned beside her. “Tah-dahhh!” she intones with dramatic vibrato, wriggling her fingers towards the bizarre towering device.

It stands as tall as Garnet, long and skinny with a solid base. Attached to its top is a small satellite dish retrofitted with a plethora of navigation system components from an old decommissioned Roaming Eye. Thick bundles of wires wind around the central pole holding the dish aloft, connecting to a cluster of human computers. If one were to look inside those computers, they’d quickly realize that many of their chips and cords have been replaced with the same exceedingly common hard light circuitry that’s used in energy transfer systems in Gem settlements. It’s a glorious combination of Gem and human technology, a celebration of the radical change both species are able to accomplish, working hand-in-hand.

(And most appropriately, it’s a hybrid, much like their missing friend.)

“So how is this... thing... supposed to work?” Connie’s mother says, appearing more confused than impressed by this display. Connie herself sits in unnerving silence beside her, her darkened, hollow expression a stark reminder of what the stakes of this mission truly are. There’s far too little hope amongst the members of this audience already, so any further failure may threaten to destroy resolve altogether.

Unable to fully meet the teen’s eyes, Peridot’s gaze drops to her feet. She flushes deep. “I, um... well,” she begins, adjusting her visor as drops of sweat bead upon her forehead, around her gem. “The theory of it is essentially that, uh—“

“It’s a location tracker,” Bismuth chimes in, swiftly rescuing her from under the crippling pressure. “We think we can triangulate Steven’s exact position on any planet with it.”

“Uh- yes, precisely!”

She briefly pauses to allow hard light to refresh her form, running all the way from her core to her furthest extremities. She’s fine— it’s fine. This is brand new tech, and it’s not solely her fault if it fails to succeed in its role on the first, second, or even third run. While it crushes her to entertain the very thought, what she truly needs is to forget about Steven for a moment. Forget about the pressure. Forget about the stakes. Her job right now is simply to explain the basic principles of this machine’s operation in a manner that her audience might understand. Nothing more, nothing less.

“As an introduction to this technology,” she says, picking up a stethoscope-like device that’s been wired into the base of the tracker and extending it towards the crowd to showcase, “I have invented a method to extract precise resonant frequencies from any Gem, using this. These frequencies are a unique identifying mark amongst Gemkind... think of it almost like a Gem fingerprint. Of course, Steven has both of these things,” she states matter-of-factly, placing the extractor tool down on the top of the hollowed-out computer and slowly beginning to pace back and forth in front of her creation. “Fingerprints from his organic parentage, yes. But given he inherited his mother’s gemstone, he inherited her resonant frequency as well. This frequency... is what we’re going to track.”

Peridot pauses for only a few seconds, just long enough to allow her friends ample time to bask in the logic of her unquestioned genius. There’s no time to dawdle! She worked hard on this project, and she’s only just now approaching the crux of its operation.

“Now, what some of you may be wondering,” she charges right ahead without so much as asking for questions, “is how any of this information is helpful. Why, Steven is missing, Peridot!” she exclaims, throwing her arms outwards. “How could we ever hope to retrieve the information needed to locate him when we don’t know where he is? And to answer that, I present my most important finding.”

She clicks her fingers, beckoning Lapis to join her at the front of the small crowd. Her hydrokinetic friend rotates the chalkboard on its axle to reveal the other side, which has various graphs and schematics hastily taped to its textured surface. She gestures towards two of them, a spectrogram showing a direct read of one of her test subject’s unique frequency over time, and another showing a read of the same Gem’s frequency, but derived from a different source. The resultant peaks and valleys of this second frequency are less sharp, but still immediately familiar in shape.

“In the past few days, I have conducted a number of experiments with volunteers from Little Homeschool, and have discovered that when two Gems fuse, an imprint of the fusion partner’s resonant frequency is saved in both gems. The more frequent the fusion, the stronger this imprint is. My current theory is that storing this information allows for easier synchronicity upon successive fusions, but— that isn’t strictly relevant to this mission. What this means is that we can extract Steven’s unique resonance from any individual who has fused with him.”

“Any individual?” Connie chimes in suddenly, her hands clasped in a vice-like grip in her lap.

Recognizing how desperately the human wishes to be a pivotal part in finding her best friend, she offers her a thin, regretful smile. “Regrettably, no. I apologize for my lack of clarity. This procedure will only work with Gems.”

“Then I’ll do it,” a voice cuts in from the crowd.

Simultaneously, everyone turns to meet the speaker’s gaze. Peridot’s brow creases with surprise as Pearl stands to her feet, her posture wrapped in a shawl of hesitancy. Out of the three Gems in attendance here who have fused with Steven, she has to admit— Pearl was not the one she expected to volunteer first.

“I am, of course, the individual who has fused most with that Gem,” she says, clutching her hands against her chest. “Maybe not with Steven himself, but... it’s like you said. He inherited her frequency. Her song. And I know firsthand that its melody is unchanged.”

[dreadfutures]

aight let‘s talk ao3 tags again

the very nice tag wrangler I’ll be quoting from has given me permission to share their kind and thorough responses (all bolding/emphasis is mine) without identifying information. and we very nicely go through some of my own tags from my long fic Dead Pasts, Dread Futures. Many, many thanks to this wrangler for explaining so much to me.

Anyway. I present these discussions as a peacable offer of: these are many writers’ concerns, and they are valuable, and worth considering. don’t dismiss concerns about the tag limit off hand, and don’t insist that edge cases don’t matter.

tldr; at the moment, after all this discussion and back and forths and bullying, I still believe that having 75 tags, period, as the limit across ALLCharacters/Relationships/Fandoms/Additional Tags penalizes longfics. Period. If it were even a limit of 100 tags, or broken down by Tag Type, it would be a little more forgiving. For advertising and for content filtering purposes, it only helps writers and fic visibilty to be specific and thorough in tags. A limit like this just so clearly has the potential to negatively affect large fandom/large ensemble/long fics.

It feels like this decision is being very broadly based on a "for the majority" mindset, which has never been what AO3 is about, without actually physically looking at the kinds of fics it will affect. The tag system on AO3 has been able to give fic filtering and reader-judgement a nuance that no other platform has accomplished, and longfics and large ensemble fics still, I think, depend on that as both a courtesy and necessity. I saw the rough math someone did and know that almost all fics currently on AO3 are <25k or something like that, and sure, for the average oneshot, or for even a fic <100k, a tag limit that's very strict across all tag categories probably won't be felt at all. But it's clearly something that people who write certain types of fics, and take them very seriously, will feel. Like I genuinely don't want to have a million tags. I want to tag relevant content that allows potential readers to filter & include & exclude my fic as they so choose, but also, if it does show up in their search, I want to give them the information they want to be able to decide if they want to read my fic or not. I don't want to have to put all my content warnings into a giant summary, or into a giant author's note that grows and grows. The tags have been a very helpful way of accomplishing those. Being able to cut down on parallel/synned tags is great, but it still seems like longfics that deal with multiple fandom entries, large casts, and require content warnings will butt up against that limit very quickly.

tag limit discussions:

- long fic writers adding tags as they go

- writers of franchises with many installments and ensemble casts

- writers with extensive content warnings

- use of tags to clarify a filtered tag

- use of tags to demonstrate how content is handled

off the bat - stop being jerks

look, I know objectively fics don’t need to be tagged at all. I lived in the wild west, too, when “lemon” meant anything from the merest mention of arousal to an explicit vanilla sex scene to all out dead dove craziness. a large part of me still is of the opinion that readers should just read shit, and if they decide they don’t like it, just dip. but that’s not what we’re about here. tagging is a kindness that we voluntarily undertake, and it’s also a form of advertising.

tags are useful for their specificity, for filtering and exclusion purposes

(that’s one of the cruxes of the arguments both pro-shippers and antis make: you can filter things! But you can only filter things if they’re tagged.)

I also understand that a few asshole writers have ruined this for all of us by purposefully adding so many tags it slows down the site and makes pages fail to load and hides other fics because the tags take up 10 pages. i also am frustrated with kinkmemers who just have prompt fill fic dumping grounds that span multiple unrelated fandoms and are impossible to navigate.

...the answer is not to suggest to writers that we put all our content warnings and pairings and etc. in our summaries, or our A/Ns, or to insert a first chapter that is a placeholder summary/tags page/world state. tags are useful for their specificity, for filtering and exclusion purposes.

I also have been dealing with people being murderously angry, and super self-righteous and targeting and mean about my own tags, and tags in general. people who are anti-tag are being giant fucking dicks about it. like get over yourselves and let’s just talk about a website function lol. tags are useful for their specificity, for filtering and exclusion purposes.

THE ANSWER IS NOT TO GET RID OF TAGS.

Alright, so now that we’ve gotten that flippin’ straw argument aside.

The next thing anyone has been doing is going to my page and critiquing my tags. Let’s address redundant tags.

(the wrangler has done this nicely! no ridicule necessary!)

using my fic as an example:

If you tag your fic Female Lavellan/Solas (only), it will show up in the following searches: Inqusitor/Solas, Female Inquisitor/Solas, Lavellan/Solas, Female Lavellan/Solas.  If you tag your fic Inquisitor/Solas (only), it will show up only in the Inquisitor/Solas search and in none of the others.  If you tag with the most specific version, it will show up in the more general versions, but not the other way around. So there's no real reason to tag with the more general tags.

Though I will point out that if you don't use the canonical tag      and tag your character or relationship with a custom name it will      be synned to the nongendered version, because at some point the DA      wranglers decided that they didn't want to make gender      assumptions.  So "Annabelle Lavellan" will be synned to "Lavellan      (Dragon Age)" rather than "Female Lavellan (Dragon Age)", and      someone searching for works with specifically "Female Lavellan"      won't see it.

Response: In the fanfic writers server I'm in, we've talked about how tags work and are supposed to work extensively in the past.  There's just always been a lot of confusion, which I think has been added to when people go and try to double-check for themselves and find instances where this treeing/synning is broken. Someone put out this guide (also here) for AO3 meta text this year, which has been referred to by multiple people in the server, and it says:

What if you wrote a fic for something where there's a movie based on a book, but the movie's really different, and you've used both things that are only in the movie and things that are only in the book? In that case you either tag your fic as both the movie and the book, or see if the fandom has an “all media types” tag and use that instead of the separate tags. If the fandom doesn't have an “all media types” tag yet, you can make one! Just type it in.

“All media types” fandom tags are also useful for cases where there are lots of inter-related series, like Star Wars; there are several tellings of the story in different media but they're interchangeable or overlap significantly, like The Witcher; or the fandom has about a zillion different versions so it's very hard, even impossible, to say which ones your fic does and doesn't fit, like Batman. Use your best judgement as to whether you need to include a more specific fandom tag such as “Batman (Movies 1989-1997)” alongside the “all media types” fandom tag, but try to avoid including very many. The point of the “all media types” tag is to let you leave off the specific tags for every version.

Which I believe is in direct contradiction to guidance to use the most specific tags, so that's definitely one source of confusion. The most recent ao3 meta text guide (https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2 I think this one) doesn't present itself in a way that makes this clear for writers tagging their own works. The way authors usually go about tagging things (and what's in the FAQ) is to start typing into one of the boxes and look for what populates the drop down, which doesn't lend itself to knowing that there are trees, or knowing what tags are interrelated (it seems like a whole grab bag of tags get suggested, some in-fandom and some outside of fandom, some canon/parent/meta and some children/random freeform, in just about any field you start typing in).

I'm not sure what can really be done about this. Many of us have turned to ao3-comment-of-the-day and their posts about using Tags, and various sources on google, and have clearly come up with a whole load of conflicting advice.

Fundamentally, finding parent/meta tags for a tag as you’re tagging a fic is NOT clear to writers. The fact that a nested and a meta tag can both be suggested one after the other when filling in tags largely contributes to redundant tags.

Writing for Multiple Fandom Entries

Here’s what a tag wrangler had to say about my fandoms:

As with the relationship tree, you can look at the fandom tree  here:      https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Dragon%20Age%20-%20All%20Media%20Types  and see how the fandom tags are related. Going back to your story Rogasha'ghi'lan as an example, it's tagged with Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: The Last Court.  But as I said, you only need to tag with the lowest relevant level(s) on the tree in order for your fic to show up under the higher levels.  So if you tag with      Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Last Court, it will show up not just under those categories, but also under Dragon Age (Video Games) and Dragon Age - All Media Types.  And of course because you've tagged with the specific, if someone searches under, say, Dragon Age (Video Games), but doesn't want Inquisition or Last Court fic, they can use the exclude filter to show only the earlier games.

(So that's two more tags you can remove with no effect on searchability!)

In my (but not only my) own case, I am indeed writing for Origins, DA2, Inquisition, and Last Court extensively within the same fic, so I should be tagging for all of those, specifically, still. In order to make sure my fic is seen by the correct fans, I need multiple specific tags.

Longfic Tag Bloat (adding tags as you write a fic)

And like many other longfic writers, even if I narrow down my character tags only to those with dedicated character arcs longer than 5 chapters, I still have Loads & Loads of Characters (including Dalish from the Chargers!).

A lot of longfic writers I know add characters, relationships, and content warnings as they go along.

At 170 chapters/580k words, Dead Pasts had a ton of important relationships (for example, like Vivienne & Lavellan), and as a story it's nowhere near done. I found myself planning an arc from 171 onward that would introduce a very important relationship (Felassan & Lavellan). This is how longfics end up with so many, many, many character tags and relationship tags, which is another major criticism people seem to have about "people who abuse tags."

A solution that people propose online is "split your fic." Which is actually what I ended up doing...but the old relationships and fandoms from DPDF still apply to Rogasha'ghi'lan, so Rogasha'ghi'lan will have the same number and more tags than DPDF.

If I hadn't split the fic, I would have just kept adding tags to Dead Pasts...and still had the same problem of continually adding tags. They're not superfluous tags: someone who wants to see a plot that is deeply influenced by Vivienne & Lavellan will find that in my fic; someone who is looking to see a major Felassan & Lavellan friendship grow and drive plot will also find that in my fic.

My fic is long; there are other fics that are longer, or are going to be longer, with casts that are just as large or larger, with many relationships, and that's not even talking about content warnings.

Polycule / Relationship Tags

"Tagging a polycule like Iron Bull/Dorian/Lavellan requires four      tags: Bull/Dorian/Lavellan, Bull/Dorian, Bull/Lavellan,      Lavellan/Dorian"

This assumes that people who like Lavellan/Dorian will want to read Iron Bull/Dorian/Lavellan, which is often not the case.  If your story Is Iron Bull/Dorian/Lavellan, tag it that way!  It doesn't make any sense to me to tag with the pairs as well unless the story would be of interest to people who read for that pair, or unless that pair relationship is a big step in the story (like, if you have established Lavellan/Dorian, and then they bring in Bull, you might tag for both that pair and the trio). I mean, you can tag how you like, there's no requirement that tags correspond to content. But for me, personally, if I search on Dagna/Lace Harding (I am weak for dwarf women!) I do not want to get a Dagna/Lace Harding/Sera fic.

My personal tastes don't include poly fics, but several writers I know who write poly fics are adamant that: tons of readers will not know of the possibility of the poly fic until it shows up in a search result, and the individual relationships often are significant to the fics, especially in fics that are not oneshots. For example, a great number of "fav fics" are stumbled-across! We aren't interested in the Sera/Dagna/Lace polycule ourselves, but someone might not have considered it, found it, and said, "Hey! That's my new favorite." But if polycules are segregated and only searchable by the polycule itself, alas, what's the option for visibility at all if not tagging it as Lace/Dagna in addition?

Additional Tags

Knowing when something is a "character" and when something is "additional"

Knowing that "Warrior Lavellan" (or the [Name] Mahariel) would be more useful in an Additional Tag vs. a Character Tag is also something I'm not sure how we're supposed to know? Like, I'm glad to know it now, but it's definitely not at all obvious without you telling me why it would be more useful in Additional vs in Character. Especially when to me: Warrior Lavellan is a character, and the fact that it populated the Character tag for me says that it's a Character. Because like I said, the guidance has been: start typing, and if it appears in the drop down, use it. Or, for example, my friend has the Well of Sorrows personified as a Character. Like an actual character. Does that have to go under Additional Tags, or as a Character? How do I know?

Additional tags as tone/content indicators

A lot of writers / readers have approached the Additional Tags as a surface-level overview of understanding how an author is approaching many topics concerned in the fic. Like, Vivienne is a character in my fic, but specifically I am Vivienne-positive, which I feel is important to denote because she's important to my fic, and she's a divisive character. Mood/tone/theme indicators like "Pro-Vivienne" or "we are Vivienne-positive in this house" (or like Male-Female Friendship, or "Expansive Lore" vs "Lore - Freeform" which denote different things to me) in tags (which in the comments section on the ao3 blog post get derided as "chatty tags") are still important to me, though they're useless or far less likely to be used for filtering. (I had the thesis of the conflict of my fic: “empathy is the enemy of free will” “but hope is a choice” as “chatty tags,” among some that were more mundane but important: “sera shows up late in fic”)

More seriously, there are fics that have content warning tags for filtering purposes but also clarify those content warnings to give context to readers and allow them to make a decision whether or not the content actually fits their preferences, ie, one that specifies domestic abuse as a tag (which would be in the Additional Tags) for filtering purposes but also specifies "domestic abuse not present in x relationship" (which would also be in the Additional Tags, but is useless for filtering purposes, but is immensely helpful and demonstrably used by readers to decide if they're going to even bother reading the author's note of that fic).

People are also nervous that not being able to thoroughly tag content warnings is going to end up with unhappy readers amid all the purity culture flaming that's going on lately.

Like, personally I err on the side of "suck it up, reader, and just read and find out," for a lot of things (not talking about content warnings, but talking about mood/tone additional tags), but also, given that there is already a venue here to let readers know what they're in for...taking that away sucks.

I hate a giant fic summary as much as people hate 10 pages of tags, but at least one can hide tags in their preferences, and likewise the thought of starting a fic up front with a giant author's note that gets continually updated with content warnings also isn't super appealing. Leading with a giant author's note that lays out: this is my world state and this is my character's spec and this is my character's background so you know how I'm going to approach this and these are all of the content warnings for the fic as a whole, just feels like getting into "My Immortal" territory. There's definitely a balance to be had between the art of writing a summary, what to include in an author's note, and what to include in tags, but this still seems like it's going to be fairly limiting for writers in these large franchises, especially for longfics that span a lot of topics.

It feels like this decision is being very broadly based on a "for the majority" mindset, which has never been what AO3 is about, without actually physically looking at the kinds of fics it will affect. The tag system on AO3 has been able to give fic filtering and reader-judgement a nuance that no other platform has accomplished, and longfics and large ensemble fics still, I think, depend on that as both a courtesy and necessity. I saw the rough math someone did and know that almost all fics currently on AO3 are <25k or something like that, and sure, for the average oneshot, or for even a fic <100k, a tag limit that's very strict across all tag categories probably won't be felt at all. But it's clearly something that people who write certain types of fics, and take them very seriously, will feel.

Like I genuinely don't want to have a million tags. I want to tag relevant content that allows potential readers to filter & include & exclude my fic as they so choose, but also, if it does show up in their search, I want to give them the information they want to be able to decide if they want to read my fic or not. I don't want to have to put all my content warnings into a giant summary, or into a giant author's note that grows and grows. The tags have been a very helpful way of accomplishing those. Being able to cut down on parallel/synned tags is great, but it still seems like longfics that deal with multiple fandom entries, large casts, and require content warnings will butt up against that limit very quickly.

[phoenotopia]

The Last Phoenotopia Blog Update

(Date 2021 MAR 01)

I debated how to open this blog post, but perhaps the main crux of this blog post is the best place to start. The blog is being retired.

The purpose of this blog was to be a "development" blog for Phoenotopia, and well, Phoenotopia's development is done. I'll still be doing bug fixes and maintenance on the PC and Switch versions, and playstation and xbox ports are underway (by a publisher). But I'm not going to be making any more major changes to the game. At some point, you put the paintbrush down and say it's done. Blemishes and all.

Recent Events

The game launched on Steam last month, and like any launch, it was hectic. Bugs Galore. This is our first commercial PC launch, so it was a real baptism by fire. Unlike Switch's one configuration, the PC has multiple configurations and factors to account for. The game needed to be able to handle multiple control schemes, screen resolutions, refresh rates, and more! I had a 60Hz monitor going into launch and didn't know anything about Hz (I do now). There was a troublesome stutter that some players were sensitive to that my whole team didn't notice since our eyes compensated it away. There were a few times where in fixing something at one party's behest, it introduced problems for another party. A few times, due to disorganization, I unwittingly rolled back a fix that was meant to be applied. For some, the game couldn't play at all (really glad Steam allows refunds).

It was messy. It was tiring. I.AM.BEAT.

I think the worst of it is over... I'll still be around to do the last updates and bug fixes, but I'm ultimately ready for what's next.

SO what is next?

What isn't next... is Phoenotopia 2. As you may have heard down the grapevine, the game couldn't be what you call successful. No one's earned even minimum wage on it.

Maybe there's hope in the game's long tail. A year or two down the line... maybe. I won't hold my breath though. At some point in the past few months, I finished processing (or grieving) and it's time to move on.

The game has at least earned enough for us to continue our modest operations. As long as we don't expand the team, and we don't take another monster six-year dev cycle like what Phoenotopia took, we can continue. We'll have to be smarter and faster. Perhaps the most valuable thing we gained from all this is experience.

The Experience

It is a dev blog. Here are some of the lessons I've accumulated from this game's development.

- Have a good menu design. Menus aren't just that in-between fluff before you get to the good stuff. Menus are KEY. Your menus need to be robust, expandable, and *understandable* (to you, the developer). Because once the game's out, you will invariably be asked to add more options. And if your menu design is bad, every time you have to add a new menu option, it becomes a whole new pain all over again. Support mouse from the get-go, etc.

- Focus on features that people will actually care about. For instance, I've never seen anyone praise the camera's zoom feature. In practice, people try that feature a few times and then never use it again. But that feature was a constant consideration factor for every level. Run through it multiple times to make sure the level didn't break, think about which zoom levels made sense, resize rooms because they worked at one zoom level but not the other, and so on.

- Don't do boxes that you can move around. Other 2D platformers avoid movable boxes because they're a huge headache to program and they really complicate the game space. Enemies need to respond to boxes you throw in their path and either navigate around or attack it. When you're moving the box, you have to worry about constantly changing your collision size and reconciling when the box gets snagged on the environment. The boxes were also a constant source of bugs because people can manipulate them to soft-lock themselves and more.

- More focused script. Phoenotopia's 100,000+ word script was panned more for being bloated than it was praised for being lengthy. Long scripts take a long time to write and make the game more unwieldy, increasing the costs of translation and upkeep. Every update we're addressing some textual error or mistranslation. There are some highly renowned games (e.g. Hyper Light Drifter) that do without a script at all!

- Be flashy! A bat and a lightsaber take the same amount of work to program, but the lightsaber will draw a lot more attention and interest.

- Slopes, surprisingly! Six years ago when I started, Unity was ill-equipped for 2D games. If you used the physics that Unity provided you'd have a really floaty character that wouldn't adhere to the slope when going downhill. There were a hundred different tutorials saying different things (use forces, use move position, use translation, etc). You can get rectangular collisions done in a day, but to do slopes took weeks. Meanwhile, games can actually get by fine without slopes. Most people won't even notice. Did you know the Phoenotopia flash game didn't have slopes? Neither does Hollow Knight or Rogue Legacy. You can save yourself a lot of work by avoiding slopes.

(big entities look weird on slopes. Bad slope!)

I could write enough little knowledge nuggets like this to fill a book! But I'd rather just make the next game. 

So… what IS next?

As mentioned previously, it's not Phoenotopia 2. Pirate and I are mostly just tossing some ideas back and forth right now. We'll go silent for a year (or two). Our next game's scope will be more modest in some ways, more ambitious in others. It will definitely be more smartly designed. (There will be a map!)

We'll announce it when it's ready for the public. It might be necessary for us to do a kickstarter. I've tried to avoid kickstarters having been burnt on quite a few myself and also because I worry that mismanaging a kickstarter would earn the ire of backers.

But I did keep this blog regularly updated for six years. So I've gained some confidence in my abilities to at least manage a kickstarter well.

Is it really the last Phoenotopia Blog update though?

Okay, not really. There is some news that I'll need to announce, and this blog is one of the game's main outreach channels. Here are the events that will cause me to update the blog:

Announcing the launch of the xbox/playstation ports when they're ready

If a physical edition of the game happens

If a new language is getting introduced into the game (Korean is a high possibility)

When we're ready to talk about our next game

If (BIG IF) we begin development on a Phoenotopia sequel. I do want to do a sequel one day if we have the means and the demand is there. 

Those updates will be more on a "when they happen" basis, rather than me reporting in every couple months.

Fan Art

As always, I'm very happy to see fanart of Phoenotopia. Major thanks again to Pimez for collecting all the artwork from the corners of the internet! Since this is the "last" blogpost, Sir Pimez can finally take a rest from collecting the fanart :P

ÆV made a series of pictures that tell a story. A Pooki is humanely sheared of its wool to create a hat. The Pooki is unharmed. Nice! Gotta love Gail’s expressions.

Amagoo Mazeru makes a stunning landscape shot of a full moon and shooting stars. It’s a sharp and clear vector art. I like the faint glow of the moon and the fire and the subtle gradient in the night sky. Very skillfully done!

Hah hah. I got a chuckle out of this one. I imagine this is how Gail's enemies see her by the end of the game. CaESar made this image based on TerminalMontage's famous youtube videos. Nailed it!

CrownStar drew two pictures of Gail. I'm a big player of JRPGs, so the first shot instantly reminded me of Persona 4's art style. (Hmmm... Phoeonotopia as a JRPG... there’s potential there...) Next, Birdy is shown carried off after her defeat. I really like Birdy's expression here - she just seems mildly uncomfortable.

There's a bit of a story behind the first image. As Firanka shares it, she wasn't able to defeat the Big Eye monster at the end of the flash game, so she believed a tall tale that what awaited after was a 6 armed Kobold boss. Hilarious! The second is a rendition of the lonely Anuri elder. A rare subject. The loneliness is portrayed well here. I feel lonely just looking at it!

Koo_chop draws the clash between Gail and Katash at the top of the towers. I really like this interpretation of the game's art style. It’s faithful to the in-game graphics. And the lighting, from the glow of Gail's bat, to Katash's sword, and the lightning in the background... Amazing!

Lime Hazard shows Gail with a salute pose. Very appropriate for this occasion. I also like how there's a slight tilt in the angle that Gail is portrayed. Those dynamic angles are always hard to get right, and Lime Hazard pulled it off very skillfully. See you next mission!

Lyoung0J with a digital painting of Gail posed sitting on a rock. I like how it almost seems like she was caught in a candid moment - she’s smiling, but also feeling self-conscious. Cute! The art style really pops, and I like how Gail is sporting what I call the old anime style nose. 

MyUesrNameIsSh*t with a sketch of Gail performing a skillful slingshot. I like how Gail is depicted with her tongue out in a mischievous manner, the way all mischievous people with slingshots do.

Niitsu Kentaro returns with a 2021 Happy New Year picture. That happened didn't it? A New Year... Gail's pose gave me a chuckle with how she seems to be waving the bat around as casually as one would wave hello. And "Phoenotopiyear"... Well said! One day we'll have our Phoenotopiyear...

Ochan Nu breaks all records with a stunning NINE pictures in one session :O

There's so many goodies here. My favorite would be the one with Gail staring intently at the screen - it's like she's looking directly at you. You almost feel uncomfortable.

Next, there's an Animal Crossing villager dressed as Gail and sporting her pink hair. It even looks like a house Gail would live in. Gail is a connoisseur of the arts and likes Mona Lisa. Yes :)

There are various comics of Gail pointing out Gail's weird food habits. A picture of Fran looking really cool, and even Gail rocking a bathing suit. (bathing suit image linked here in case NSFW). Wow!

Pimez didn't just collect the arts, he creates them as well! This one, which he aptly named 'The Year 175' is a depiction of when the dragons invaded the towers as told by an elderly Daean woman. Great pixeling skills! I got a good chuckle from the ice dragon leaving with its stuff slung over its shoulder.

Quo made a stunning picture of Gail playing the flute surrounded by the 5 musical notes and the Phoenix logo behind her. The theme seems to be "fire" and it works really well. Gail herself looks awesome depicted in her red suit - it's like she's leading a marching band!

Rai Asuha depicts Gail in the late game with her red suit, and night star bat, and holding a lamp. She looks ready for adventure! I really like the white outline here and Gail's poofy shoulders here - the art style feels reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics.

Seri also draws Gail bearing her late game equipment. Unique to Seri's drawing is how all of Gail's equipment is accessible from a pocket on her shirt. I also like how Gail is depicted with her lucky earrings - that accessory is often forgotten.

Treedude depicts Gail with a bat and wearing a funny smirk. She looks like she's ready to hurt someone!

Warotar returns with everyone's favorite Great Drake, Bubbles! It seems so happy to be featured!

I'm really grateful for all the fanart this game has received. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!

Closing Notes

Pirate drew a picture to mark the occasion. It shows Gail enjoying a hot chocolate with marshmallows and a pumpkin muffin. A rest well-earned...

Goodbye! Until next time!