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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months ago

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“Disenshittify or Die”

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I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@[email protected] (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

#pluralistic #defcon #defcon 32 #hackers #enshittification #speeches #transcripts #disenshittify or die #Youtube

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coffeeman777 · 4 months ago

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This is for all of my follwers/mutuals who are Christians:

I want to preface this by saying that what I'm about to share with you is only to ask you for prayer. I don't want favors, and I'm not looking for a handout. We need God to open a door for us, and so I beg you, please pray for us.

We moved to Florida coming on three years ago. We came here primarily because we believed God was leading us here. In various ways, we believed God confirmed His will for us, and so I left a great job and we sold a great house to move here. We have been opposed in every way imaginable since.

Days after moving down, Lisa and I were in a terrible car accident that we only walked away from by God's grace. We were rear-ended by an Edible Arrangements delivery truck on the highway, and Lisa sustained significant injuries that are still causing us major problems. The franchise owner was operating their delivery vehicle without insurance, and I've learned since that they shut down their Edible Arrangements franchise and took off, leaving us holding the bag.

I've been in armed security since I got out of the Marines, and in New Hampshire, that was enough to take care of myself and my family. But it isn't in Florida. The pay for most armed security gigs here is super low, and I haven't been able to find work comparable to what I had in New Hampshire. So I tried to change courses.

I earned my personal trainer certification through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, but couldn't make it as a trainer. I made the attempt to go back to college and get a degree and certification as a paramedic, but after months of jumping through hoops, that fell through. I went back to New Hampshire by myself and spent six months away from my family to try to earn enough money working both my old job and a second job, but that plan didn't work because hours were limited with both gigs, and each job wanted me to work overlapping hours; I couldn't make the schedules line up.

My incredibly generous parents-in-law offered to pay our bills so that I could come back to Florida and try a new plan. I went to a CDL training course to get into trucking. After the very long and very expensive process, I finally got my CDL-A. While I was working on that, a random disagreement between my health insurance company and the medical supplier that issued me my cpap (I have sleep apnea) resulted in the supplier demanding that I give them the machine back. It took from middle February to early June for me to get another cpap. The end result is that, as of today, I have just under two months of cpap usage data. I discovered only after getting my CDL that no trucking company will hire me with less than 90 days of cpap usage data.

I've been pre-hired and subsequently turned away from three different trucking companies since I got my CDL over the cpap nonsense (one of which told me that what I had for cpap usage was fine, only to tell me on the first day of orientation that it actually wasn't fine, and they had to let me go). It's going to be another month before I can get started with any trucking company, and I'm concerned that I'll have to go to refresher training, which will only increase the months of time I'll have to spend as a trainee with whatever company hires me, which means it will be a long time before I make enough money to survive.

My in-laws can't continue paying our bills, and although I've had a half dozen low paying jobs in this time just to be bringing in something, now I'm struggling to get anything. I've applied to more jobs than I can remember, and I can't get any traction. Not even Domino's will call me back. Our backs are up against a wall.

My first payment for the money I borrowed to pay for CDL school was due almost a month ago, and I haven't been able to pay it (I had to get financing because my GI Bill expired and the VA ignored my request for an extension). Rent is almost 2k a month. We can't afford groceries (we've been living off of food pantries).

I don't know what to do. I've been crying out to God for an open door, but so far nothing has happened. My in-laws are just about tapped out, and in my mind, the only thing worse than wrecking my own family financially is dragging them down with me.

Please pray for us. Please pray for God to give us an open door, or some understanding of what to do next. I know God didn't bring us here to let us die. God is good, and God keeps His promises. God is perfect, and righteous, and just in all His ways. God has promised that He will turn about all things for the good of them that love Him. I know God has not abandoned us, and that when the time is right, God will make a way.

I say again, I am not looking for favors or begging for money. I know all of us are really going through it right now. All I want from you is prayer. Please pray intensely for us.

Thanks, I love you all.

#prayer request

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1d1195 · 2 months ago

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Dolcezza Extra II

Read Dolcezza here | ~2.4k words

From me: something sweet and sexy

Warnings: smut, oral, and nothing else except some fluffy bits

Summary: She's had a long day and Harry wants to make it better.

There was a knock on her door immediately followed by Harry’s key unlocking the door. Harry always knocked even though she assured him it wasn’t necessary. “Jus’ want you t’know s’me,” he shrugged when she told him. She glanced up from her desk to see Harry enter. “Hey Principessa,” he smiled tiredly. A double at the restaurant on a Saturday was brutal. But it was especially brutal during the holiday season when people flitted in and out between shopping for gifts and getting holiday dinners done with extended friends and family.

He looked exhausted.

She knew the feeling.

“Hi baby,” she smiled. Even if he was tired, he was still really pretty and lovely. She didn’t know he was going to come up after his shift. Sometimes after a double, he wanted to go home and shower. But today he seemed to be in need of some snuggles.

She was still working. Which made Harry a bit insane. On a Saturday night. She could see it in his eyes as he crossed the room. His exhaustion slowly replaced by worry for how much she was doing. What did she prioritize today that resulted in her being unable to do something she loved and had to catch up on work at a late hour? Did Emma have a math assignment she needed to look over? James and Ethan needed her help with cleaning? Or did her mom ask her for help booking a hotel for the family wedding in the coming month?

Harry hated his double shifts not only because he couldn’t see her, but because he couldn’t take her control (just a hair) so that she wouldn’t end up working at eleven at night on a Saturday. “Bad day?” She asked.

He rolled his eyes. He was tired, but it wasn’t a bad day. Honestly, he had fun at work. He and Niall worked well together so unless it was busy and understaffed, it never felt much like work. “No, kitten. M’annoyed you’re working.”

She dropped her gaze. “I like working,” she reminded him.

“Shouldn’t be working at eleven at night,” he reminded her.

“Well, I was going to read but then I was really into this plan I’ve created. I wanted to make sure I got it done before I lost my train of thought. The data I’m looking at has this really cool model and I was analyzing it, and it looked like it was trending down, but I think it’s actually trending up—” She stopped mid-sentence, her cheeks turning that beautiful shade of pink that Harry fell in love with. “Sorry, you’re tired.”

He smirked. “M’jus’ glad y’didn’t stress yourself doing stuff for your family.”

She looked at her lap. “Do you want me to be honest?” She sighed softly.

He sighed rubbing his hand over his face. “Principessa,” he tutted.

She frowned, fidgeting her fingers while Harry sat beside her. “They’re just so helpless Harry.”

“I know, kitten. But they’re all adults.”

“Barely,” she grumbled.

Harry sighed, pulling her into his lap and kissing the top of her head. He was glad all that had happened in this apartment didn’t deter her from living in it. Harry loved this apartment. Loved that it was right above him while he worked, that she was never too far away from him. “How much time do y’need?” He asked rubbing the back of his head. He didn't want to give her time. But he wanted her to be happy. Work did make her happy and he knew she would feel guilty if she didn't finish it and it would spiral into her worrying more anyway.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Twenty. I’ll take a shower. Then we can go t’bed, yeah?”

She nodded. “Sounds like a plan,” she pressed her hands on either side of his face and brought her mouth to his. “You made garlic bread and didn’t bring me any,” she frowned licking her lower lip.

He snorted. “Niall told me t’leave,” he shook his head. “He’ll bring some up when he’s done cleaning up.”

She smiled delightedly. “I have the best life,” she sighed dreamily, falling back into her swivel chair dramatically. Harry kissed her forehead.

“Don’t work too hard, Principessa.”

Harry enjoyed the warmth of the shower and felt a little more like himself when he returned to her in the living room. Her eyes still focused on her screen; the pinch of her brow puckered in complete concentration. “Um...any chance you’d be okay with like ten more minutes of me working? Emma called me because...well, I don’t want to bug you with the details, but she needed my help and—”

Harry knew whatever it was, she was putty to her younger sister’s request. She was too sweet, his pretty princess. “S’fine, but m’gonna help,” he turned her desk chair, so she spun to face him. She frowned.

“Hey, I was—”

He ignored her protest and lifted her from the chair to the desk lifting underneath her thighs. Harry was glad she was wearing her sleep shorts. The ones with an impractical slit on either side of her hips. A T-shirt that didn’t match swam around her frame. One that she bought because it was easily three sizes too big.

“Harry,” she tried again, steadying herself with hands on his arms as he gently pushed her laptop away from her reach followed by the notebook and pen she used to jot down her notes and to-do list. “I was—”

Harry watched her eyes and slid his hand up the inside of her thigh, through the leg opening, and pressed his fingers right past her underwear, between her folds, and directly onto her clit. Cutting her off with a gasp. “You were what?” He asked softly. Even if she wanted to talk she couldn’t. “M’jus’ going t’take care of you, Principessa. Y’do too much for everyone else. S’only fair.” Her heart rate was flying, and it mirrored the rapid fluttering of her eyelashes as Harry searched gently between the soft sensitive skin between her thighs. “S’that okay?” He asked.

She nodded breathlessly.

“Good,” he sighed. “Love t’take care of you,” he murmured and knelt down so his head was between her thighs. “Y’okay, kitten?”

She nodded again. “Please,” she whispered shyly.

“Aw, y’don’t have t’beg, Principessa. I’ll give y’anything y’want,” he winked, tugged the fabric that was in his way from between her thighs, and then pressed his mouth to her center. She gasped leaning forward, threading her fingers through his hair for balance. His locks were still damp from his shower, and she knew she would mess up the curls and flow from messing with it before it was dried. She hoped she could blame it on bed head.

She supposed in some ways it was bed head.

She moaned quietly as his mouth devoured her. Suckling and licking at her just the way she liked. Harry loved to be between her thighs. It was a regular part of their foreplay, and it never ceased to amaze her how deliriously good it felt. His lips and tongue were sinful. The man was so sweet looking and downright boyish with his cheeky sweet grin. For fucks sake he called her a princess in another language. “Y’can moan louder, baby. Y’know it’s soundproof,” he murmured kissing her thigh as he spoke to her before he wrapped his lips around her clit.

Just like that. Her sweet boyfriend was anything but sweet when he said stuff like that. When he swirled and lapped at her clit the way he was. It was dizzying.

She whined pulling on his hair to press him harder against her core. He moaned against her as she did. The vibration caused her body to react instinctively. Her thighs tightened around his head, and he moaned again. “That’s good, Principessa,” his voice was practically thoughtful. “So good, kitten. S’that feel good?”

She nodded. “Yes, yes, yes,” she whispered the repeated word as if it was all the same syllable.

“You’re so good, Principessa. Jus’ want t’make y’feel good,” he nipped at her inner thighs while he spoke his breath cooling off her wet skin. She was simply soaked between her arousal and Harry’s mouth. “All jealous ‘bout garlic bread," he teased, shaking his head. "Y’taste better than anything we make,” he mumbled and traced his tongue down her slit then back up, running a tantalizing circle around her clit again. Her eyes actually rolled back in her head. She thought that was only in books and for dramatic show in movies. She didn’t know Harry could really make her eyes look for the back of her brain. He sucked hard on her clit making an obscene slurping noise that would have embarrassed her if her place wasn’t soundproofed to near silence. Although she thought the moan she released could have broken the barrier. “Y’make such sexy noises, kitten,” he groaned and continued to torture her with pleasure.

“Harry,” she gasped.

“What Principessa? Y’close? Y’want me t’make y’come?” She nodded shamelessly; wanting it so bad she thought she would cry if he denied her (as if he could ever dream of denying her anything). “M’jus’ going t’touch—”

She cried out as he pressed his finger into her. His lips wrapped around her clit while his tongue continued circling around the sensitive nub. He rubbed his finger against her walls, once more feeling around expertly, the way she liked that made her toes curl.

The smug son of a bitch smiled against her as she clenched lightly around him. “That’s it, Principessa. Want you t’come all over me,” he moved his finger in and out at a faster pace timing it with his licks so that she was nearly worried she was going to pass out from pleasure.

“Oh fuck, yes,” she whimpered, and Harry groaned right against her.

“Keep going, baby,” he hummed fingering her and licking her like it was the only thing he planned on doing. “There it is, good kitten,” he praised which only made her melt into a puddle.

Her orgasm seemed to last way longer than she thought possible. Her thighs kept squeezing around him after it officially stopped. Like she was trying to hold onto the final waves of pleasure. “Do y’want another?” He inquired thoughtfully once more.

Another orgasm, especially of that caliber, would definitely make her pass out.

“No thank you,” she whispered.

He chuckled and kissed the inside of her thigh. He pulled her clothing back into the correct position and he sat in her office chair before he pulled her into his lap. She could feel how hard he was through the shorts he was wearing as she fell into his hold. He kissed her neck, wrapping one arm securely around her waist. The other hand found her inner thigh, slightly sticky with sweat, arousal, and Harry’s saliva. It was hot and messy, but Harry didn’t seem to care. Probably because he was responsible for the mess. Instinctively, she squeezed her thighs again, against his hand. “Y’sure, Principessa? M’happy t’make y’come again,” he offered kissing her cheek. “Y’seem a little turned on still?”

“Just... it felt really good. It’s,” she blushed and smiled at him shyly. “It’s lasting a while,” she mumbled and tucked her face into his neck.

His quiet laugh shook through his chest and her in his embrace. “You’re so pretty,” he murmured. “Especially when y’come.” She shook her head against him, but her thighs betrayed her again. “Let’s go t’bed, Principessa.”

She perked up a bit. Her eyebrows knitting together to meet in the middle of her eyes. “I think it’s your turn—”

“Oh no,” he shook his head. “Some other time. That was purely for you,” he stood, holding her legs around his waist. She blushed, giggled softly.

“Harry, you had such a long day. It’s hardly fair.”

“Not 'bout being fair. Plus going down on you s’by far one of m’favorite things t’do," he shrugged one shoulder.

Her cheeks still felt warm. “You’re pretty good at it,” she nodded in agreement.

Harry chuckled. “Cute.”

He walked to her bedroom, setting her on the bed. “I really needed to finish a few things—”

“It can wait ‘till the morning.”

She sighed. He was right. Harry was good at making sure she was doing more for herself. Although that usually entailed him doing stuff for her. Which didn’t seem like a good trade. Harry opened her main door briefly. He returned to the bedroom holding out the garlic bread immediately to her lips. With his free hand he cupped it below her jaw to catch any crumbs that didn't make it into her mouth.

“I really do have the best life,” she sighed, crunching on the bread. He smirked.

“Do y'want more?”

She shook her head. “I love you,” she sighed dreamily.

He laughed and kissed the top of her head. “I love you.”

Harry put the garlic bread in her kitchen, turned off all the lights, and came back to her bedroom. “Let me brush my teeth. Garlic isn’t pretty.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” he assured her, cupped her face and kissed her as passionately as he could. Like it was their first kiss. Or the one they shared the first time they had sex. The kind of kiss she imagined would greet them on their wedding day, whenever that would be. He pulled away briefly, pecked her more softly, then kissed her forehead. “Delicious,” he promised, licking his lips cutely.

Harry went to the other side of the bed and pulled her to his body as soon as he was settled. His arms wrapped tightly around her, his lips on the back of her head, kissing her hair. “Are you sure you don’t want me to do something for you?”

“M’always turned on by you, Principessa. Don’t worry ‘bout it. Jus’ taking care of you.”

“But you had a long day.”

He shrugged. “M’feeling fine. Don’t worry ‘bout me, kitten. I promise.”

“I worry about—”

“I know,” he chuckled, squeezing her closer somehow. His body wrapped around hers like vine. “Go t’sleep, Principessa. Y’can go back t’being an angel tomorrow and taking care of everyone under the sun,” he sighed.

She shook with silent laughter. “Thank you.”

“No need to thank me, kitten. I get jus’ as much pleasure out of that as you.”

“That can’t possibly be true.”

“If y’let me do it again, I’d definitely come,” he shrugged one shoulder and he kissed the back of her head then tucked his face into the crook of her neck. “I love you,” he reminded her.

“I love you,” she sighed.

“Sleep tight, Principessa.”

For a few moments there was no noise except their quiet breathing. “Harry?”

“Hmm?” She squirmed awkwardly. “Do you want another orgasm, now?” She shook her head. “More garlic bread?” A swift nod. He chuckled untangling himself from her. “One minute, m’love.”

“God, I am the luckiest girl in the world.”

general taglist: @justlemmeadoreyou @daydreamingofmatilda @sunshinemoonsposts @loving-hazz @likeapplejuicenpeach

@straightontilmornin @freedomfireflies @littlenatilda @kathb59 @babegoals

@angel-upon @lilfreakjez @mleestiles @ameliaalvarez06 @canyonmoondreams

@summertime-pills @daphnesutton @l4rrysh0use @perfectywrong @foreverxholland

@lovrave @st-ev-ie @pandeebearstyles @toosarcastic03 @luvonstyles

@tenaciousperfectionunknown @classychalamet @love-letters-to-uranus @emmaawbr @crossyourpeter

@kissinthekitchen @kittenhere @stylesfever @indierockgirrl @michellekstyles

@just-another-reader1098 @hermionelove @tiredinwinter @whimsy-willows @hannah9921

@fangirl7060 @triski73 @vikiii07 @prettygurl-2009 @madstyles3204

@angeldavis777 @tchlamqtsgf @lizsogolden @me-undiscovered @you-sunshine

@rose-girls-world @claimingharrystigertattoo @inlikea-coolway

I'm sorry if I missed anyone in the taglist. Please let me know if you'd like to join, if it didn't work, if you no longer want to be included, etc. :)

If you like this, check out my masterlist here

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locusfandomtime · 10 months ago

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Doing the maths: Grian's failure at getting a mending book

lots of talk about maths and probabilities below the cut! but there's a graph and simple explanation at the end if you want to get the gist of it and are bad at maths.

(I am still young and learning maths, critique/advice always welcomed)

What are the odds of getting a mending book in Minecraft?

(I am assuming Grian has been doing all his fishing with Luck of the Sea 3)

The probability of a mending book is actually a bit annoying to estimate. The Minecraft Wiki lists fishing up an enchanted book as 1.9% chance. This is for ANY enchanted book. The Minecraft wiki talks about how the chance of an enchantment being selected is calculated. Mending has a weight of 2. Using the table, mending has a probability of 2/135.

However, Grian is looking for any book with mending, not just a pure mending book. Additional enchantments are calculated in a different way, involving RNG, which means it won't be as easy to model. Due to this reason, I'll just be using the odds for a pure mending book throughout.

TLDR: a mending book has a 0.028..% chance (2/135*0.019*100)

Grian's Data

According to this screenshot, Grian has used a fishing rod 5679 times. This number may not be fully accurate, as it includes the times he's fished other players, rather than just fished for items, but it is a good estimate.

To help visualise this data, with a median waiting time between catches of 17.5 seconds, Grian has spent over 20 hours fishing so far! He may have a problem.

Is this statistically significant?

Hypothesis testing (p-value approach):

H0: p = 19/67500 (the null hypothesis - he has no mending books because of chance)

H1: p < 19/67500 (the alternate hypothesis - he has no mending books due to different odds)

5679 trials, 0 mending books

X ~ B(5679, 19/67500) (binomial distribution, 5679 tries with a probability of a mending book being 19/67500, where X is the number of mending books)

p(X=0) (what is the probability the number of mending books being 0)

p = 0.2021473392

Now, the point at which data becomes significant is subjective. For instance, you *could* get a million heads in a row flipping a coin, it's not impossible, but at a certain point, you can begin to say "okay there's something not normal about this". For this approach, the closer the p-value is to 0, the more evidence there is against the null hypothesis . The p-value here is far above a significance level of 0.01, or 0.05, or 0.1. There isn't a clear line between significant/non-significant, but this is answer is quite a bit far from 0

With this, I cannot reject the null hypothesis.

Personal conclusion: this is not statistically significant, Grian is just unlucky.

Are other values statistically significant?

Gem's proposed 9000: results in a p-value of 0.079... more significant than Grian's number but I don't imagine Mojang would be too concerned. As said though, it's all subjective.

I am bad at maths, what does all this mean?

Here is a graph, showing what number of mending books you might have after 5679 tries. The height of the bar represents the probability of getting that amount. The numbers at the top are the (rounded) numbers I used in my calculation

The pink column is 0 mending books - like what Grian has! As you can see, it is less likely than getting 1 or 2 books, but not too uncommon to happen.

End conclusion: Grian has bad luck. Like, not as hilariously bad as he thinks, but still bad. If he keeps going, chances are he will get a mending book, but I think he should probably stop fishing because at this point he has a problem.

#if you saw my last post no you didnt #<- misread “5679 fishing rods used” as having fully used up 5679 fishing rods #this is so much better written than my last post though. and i think the graph helps a lot #long post #locus fandom time #locus maths time #grian #hermitcraft #hermitblr #hermitcraft 10 #“why the p value approach” i missed the lesson for it so this is my catch up work unironically

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crios31 · 7 months ago

Text

Chapter 2: Traveling to Japan

Story building and smut (Cunnilingus, cowgirl, creampie, doggy style)

Lenght 2700 words

You are at the airport and it’s finally time to board your plane to Japan with Wendy for a new chapter of your life.

“Take care of each other over there.” Says your mother, hugging both of you. “Ah, I almost forgot, it’s the file concerning the scholarship program plus some other things that I deemed useful.” She releases her hug before giving you the files which you put in your backpack. “Thanks mom.”

“Say hello to everyone on our behalf.” asks your father when it’s his turn to hug you.

Your goodbyes now done, you board the plane , waving one last time to your parents on the way. Inside the plane, you both go to your place in first class and follow the instructions of the crew before the take-off.

An hour later, the plane is now at cruising altitude so you decide to read the file your mother gave. On the seat beside you, Wendy is reading a book.

The first part of the file is about the public information that you mostly know. That the program is for girls that show aptitude academically or athletically and it was created by your Mother after she opened her first school. Scholarship recipients are accepted in all your Mother’s school or can in another school if they don’t want to move, in both cases all of their living expenses are taken care of. The rules they had to follow are simple, maintaining good results and good behavior.

The second part is about the non-public information. To start, the real way to enter the program is that your mother chose them, the academic or athletic potential being one more reason. By entering the program, there is more than just living expenses that are taken care of, more financial support could be given like paying a family debt. Other specific issues can also be resolved. Another benefit is the possibility to have access to private tutoring to skip grades in order to graduate earlier. In exchange for all of that, one more rule exists, they are not allowed to date.

Regarding the selection of those that will work for you, most of them cannot refuse it. Wendy was one of the exceptions. For the selection process of the applicants it is a strict one, a minimum age requirement of eighteen moreover the appearance and personality are taken into account for the decision. Those that fall short will be recommended to other employers, also a possibility is to become a standard employee in one of your ventures because of their skills. In those two cases they will become exempt from the rules of the program after graduation. In exchange they will only be asked to recruit people that could enter the program. This part also contains detailed data about the cost of the program, the number of recipients and so on.

Finally, the last part of the file begins with a note explaining that the goal of the program and the selection is for you to have people you can trust at your side and that you’ll slowly take responsibility in the program. After this section of the note you read “Grandkids?” followed by a winking smiley, both seemed to have been handwritten by your mother. This addition from her makes you laugh. The end of the note informed that the documents following it are profiles of girls she deemed ready for selection.

From your first look, there are around twenty candidates' profiles and all of them are older than you. You take your time studying each of them, taking notes. You also ask Wendy to look at each of the profiles after you’re done with it.

Later during the flight, you have just finished sorting out the profiles with Wendy in order to select a first batch of girls that will work for you.

“We are down to three sir, two of them are studying in the University that you will join, while the last one is studying in another one, in Seoul. How do you want to proceed?”

“For the one in the other University, just give her the news and explain to her that she can focus on University for now. For the others, we'll contact them to set up a meeting, starting with this one.” You give a specific profile to Wendy.

“Kim Minji? Understood, I'll arrange that during our stay in Japan.”

A few hours after the plane landed at Narita Airport, you have settled in at your hotel. Sitting in the hotel’s restaurants you are savoring with Wendy some Kobe’s beef. Finishing your plate, you look on your left, through the window at Tokyo’s nighttime view.

“So delicious I really wanted to taste this if I ever had the opportunity to come to Japan.”

“I’ll make sure you can try as many specialties as you can during our stay.”

“So many things come to my mind!”

As you talk, the waiter takes your empty dishes and quickly comes back with the dessert.

“Oh it’s so good too, I’ll try to do one later.”

You smile looking at the baking fanatic. “Do you want to try mine?” You push your plate toward her.

“Yes, thanks.” She quickly takes a big spoonful of your dessert. “It’s delicious too.”

“You can finish it”

“Really? Are you full?” She asks her spoon hovering above the dessert.

“Not really but I will eat another dessert in our room tonight.” You answer, looking at her in the eyes.

She raises an eyebrow at your answer before focusing back on the sweet treat in front of her. When she finishes it, you pay for the meal complimenting the service and the food to the waiter, then you exit the restaurant.

In the elevator, you take a look at Wendy, in particular her miniskirt and you can’t stop yourself from touching her butt.

“Sir?” She turns her head toward you in surprise. Two floors later, the elevator stops for other people to enter, in reaction, Wendy immediately shoves your hand away from her. You wait for them to turn their backs to you before once again grabbing her behind, but this time your hand is under her skirt. Her body becomes tense and you smile mischievously at her when your eyes cross hers. You continue to fondle her ass, sometimes brushing your middle finger against her pussy, as the elevator goes up you can feel her slowly becoming wet.

When you arrive at your floor, you reluctantly stop. Wendy quickly passes the opened door of the elevator and you follow suit, after entering your room she sits on the bed looking at you.

“Couldn’t you wait for us to be in the room to do that?”

“No, your cute little butt was too tempting.” You walk toward the bed, stopping in front of Wendy, you lean forward putting your hands on her tights. “And it was fun watching you get all flustered.” You give her a quick peck.

“Fun for you.” She complains in a low voice feeling your hands behind her knees.

“Now let’s have some fun, shall we?” You suddenly lift her legs causing her to yelp as she loses her balance, her upper body falling on the mattress. You grab her panties and take it off from her body. Placing your hands on the back of her thighs, you spread them.

You get on your knees as you begin kissing her legs, starting from her calves, slowly making your way up her leg. She feels the touch of your lips approaching her pussy, you alternate from one leg to the other. Wendy's growing excitement makes her breathing quicker as she bites her bottom lip.

Finally arriving at your destination, you take a look at her glistening folds. You lick her lower lips before inserting your tongue inside her. As you explore her pussy your jaw gets wet from her nectar.

“Fuck… that’s feel good.” She gasps, putting one hand on your head when you replace your tongue with your finger in order to tease her small bud with your mouth. You hook your finger toward the roof of her pussy. Her angelic voice gets louder and her walls get tighter as you continue with your task.

“I’m getting close.” Hearing this, you put a second finger in her and intensify your tongue’s work.

You feel her grip in your hair tightening and the heels of her shoes burying in your back, causing you some pain. But soon enough her hips rise from the bed taking support on you with her legs and the mattress for her upper body. From her mouth comes a scream of pleasure as she orgasms.

Her body relaxes, freeing you from her legs. You stand up and look at Wendy who is still feeling the aftermath of her climax. You take off your shirt her wipe your face of her slicks

“Do you want me to return the favor?” Wendy asks in a soft voice.

“Maybe another time, for now I want to be in you.” You get naked finally freeing your member, climbing on the bed, you give a long kiss to your partner.

“Then let me be on top.” She says as you let her push you to lay on your back. Wendy takes off her shoes then standing up, she unzips her skirt while looking at you. As the garment fell at her feet she smiles feeling your gaze on her exposed lower body. She places herself above you, taking a hold of your cock to align it with her entrance.

“Damn feels good.” You say watching your length disappear in Wendy when she lowers body.

“You’re stretching me so much.”She began to ride you, taking support on your chest. At first, she starts slowly before gradually increasing her pace.

On your side you're not inactive, taking hold of her waist to help her before sliding a hand under her top. You feel her abs as she drops on you, moving your hand higher, you take hold of one of her boobs over her bra. Her breast in your grasp, you start kneading it.

Locking eyes with Wendy you feel the grip of her walls around your member getting stronger, in response you raise your hips meeting halfway when she drops on you.

“Sir... Shit! I’m coming.” She stops moving her body tensing up as she cums, her walls clamping around your cock.

“I’m close too.” Using both your hands you lift her body before bringing her down, each time hitting her cervix. Soon enough, you discharge a big load inside her.

Following your release Wendy falls on you, her head resting on your chest and you both take some time to catch your breath. You feel yourself getting soft in her as you put your arms around her.

“Let’s get something to drink.” You say giving a light smack on her butt before releasing the hug.

“I’m so full, good thing that I take birth control or I would end up pregnant before long.” Says Wendy as she gets off from you with your semen leaking from her slit.

“Yeah, it’s too early for a kid.” You follow Wendy, taking the glass of water she hands you. While you clench your thirst she takes off her top and bra. You look at her nude body moving to the front of the window.

“I dreamed about visiting new countries and right now I can enjoy this beautiful view.” She says watching the city’s light. “And in addition to that I get to travel with a handsome man.” Turning her head she gives you a wide smile.

“Well now that I know this information, I’ll have you accompany me every time I travel abroad.”

“That would be nice.” She responds with a chuckle. “I heard good things about you before but I didn’t expect you to treat me so well until now. I hope it’ll stay like that”

“Well, you are someone fun to be with,plus you are also a smart and attractive woman. So, I see no reason to change it.” While talking you approach her, taking her into your embrace.

“Thanks.” She whispers, as she puts her hands on top of yours. Both of you stay silent observing the outside but at one point Wendy feels your cock hardening against her butt. “Someone wants more.”

“Always, and I don’t think I’m the only one with how you're grinding your butt against me.”

“You caught me.” She bends over leaning on the window.

You slightly bend your knees to align your cock with her pussy, putting your tip against it. “Hope you’re ready because I won’t stop until the end.” Taking a firm hold of her hips, you thrust all your length inside her in one go.

“Ahhh! Fuck so deep!” As she takes your onslaught, Wendy has to tiptoed and progressively gets her body closer to the window. Soon enough she finds herself with her upper body stuck against the glass. Under your thrust against the entrance of her womb, her pussy begins to twitch as she orgasms.

As you warn her before you continue to fuck her hard throughout her climax as you are far from yours. Following this, she cums again at least twice, hence her eyes are now rolled back, her mouth is open with only moans coming out of it. Furthermore, the only reason why she is still standing is you.

“Where do you want me to cum?”

“Anywhere, just cum.. it’s too much.” She barely answered between moans.

Following her words, you quickly make a decision as you are reaching your limit. You take out your cock of her snatch, placing it between her asscheeks. Giving a few thrusts to finish yourself, you then release streams of semen across her back.

You release your hold on Wendy’s waist. Without any strength left in her legs, she falls on the floor, resting her upper body against the window.

You take a few steps back, relishing the sight in front of you with the city and Tokyo’s Tower as background. Through the fog on the glass caused by your frolicking, the city’s lights are partially illuminating Wendy’s naked body and her cum covered back

“I agree with your earlier comment, this is a great view.” You immortalize this scene with a photo.

During the following days, you both explored the streets of Tokyo. Visiting the traditional district of Asakusa with its Sanctuary and the National Museum of Tokyo. Other places you get to see were, the Kokyo Gaien National Garden where you both enjoyed the peace and quiet before having a tour in the Imperial Palace of Tokyo which is beside it. Along the way, you also tried a lot of different kinds of food.

At the end of your stay in Tokyo, you take the Shinkansen to Osaka. After arriving and dropping your luggage at the hotel, you take a taxi, remembering some memories linked to this city during the ride.

The taxi stops in front of a two storey house, after paying the driver you ring the doorbell. A few moments later, a man who looks to be in his early forties gets out of the house, opening the gate to Wendy and you.

“Ah, good to see you kid.” says the man in Japanese

“Good to see you too, Uncle. Here is a gift for receiving us.”

“Thank you, oh nice wine, I think I drank some in the past, with your father. By the way, who is this young lady?”

“This is Wendy. Wendy, this is uncle Kosaku” You make the presentation as Wendy doesn't speak Japanese and your uncle, while he can somewhat understand Korean he is not fluent in It.

“Let’s get inside, the other should be waiting for you.” You both followed him inside the house. Immediately after taking off your shoes, your hear footsteps quickly approaching you. You only have the time to raise your head before someone hugs you.

“I’m so happy you’re here! I missed you so much!” says the owner of the feminine voice, hugging you.

“I missed you too, Sana.” You say, returning the hug.

#kpop smut #red velvet smut #red velvet wendy #wendy smut #red velvet #girl group smut #m reader #male reader #son seungwan

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jewishrizahawkeye · 8 months ago

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k so i made this poll awhile ago to answer my question on if people would rather spend a date with a swiftie or an anti-swiftie (someone who hates her and devotes their life to hating on her). i mentioned i didn’t have the spoons to handle it being longer than a day and know it was going to be biased as it would start in my circle and would work it’s way out, so i wanted to do a longer poll when i had the energy to handle a week long poll like that. (i’m assuming when i post this, as i’m pre making it, i’ll be in recovery from my nose surgery since i’ll be stuck at home a week so i’ll have more time to monitor and look at the tags)

so nows the time, but i’m going to addendum the question a bit:

*some extra things that came up on the original poll i didn’t elaborate on fully that i want to make clear:

- you don’t get a say in what type of swiftie you get. assume that you’re going to be spending the evening with someone who massively loves her and her music and wants to discuss it. they’ll talk about songs, their favorite lines and meanings, symbolism behind the reputation album, etc.

- YOU MUST TALK ABOUT TAYLOR SWIFT. even if it’s the anti-swiftie you must talk about her. i understand the sentiment people made on her not coming up, and that’s valid, but that’s not the question i’m asking. YOU HAVE TO SPEND THE EVENING WITH SOMEONE WHOS GOING TO TALK ABOUT TAYLOR SWIFT NONSTOP, WILL IT BE THE LOVER OR HATER?

- im just trying to gather a general consensus on this and want to get data from a lot of people which means this is going to end up on people’s blogs who probably hate swifties and are annoyed by them. that’s okay as that’s the point of my question. but if you’re going to go off in the tags about how much you hate her or hate swifties and be an asshole about it im blocking you. you can just simple say “i hate her/i hate swifties” and don’t need to elaborate. you don’t need to sit in the tags going off on how much you hate her and trying to “defend” yourself from swifties. i just want an answer to the question.

- ALSO, this is not an open poll to go harass anyone in general. if you are a swiftie and see an hater in the tags and wanna fight DON’T FUCKING DO IT. just block and go read/watch your favorite media and think of blorbos kissing or whatever, but DO NOT SEND HATE OR HARASS ANYONE.

the hypothesis im trying to prove is that people in general would much rather spend an evening with someone that is going to talk about something they love all night vs someone who will spend the evening talking about something they hate. i want to gather as much data as possible to get a good consensus and if you go and be an asshole to someone because of their tags on this poll, either side of the swiftie to anti-swiftie spectrum, your disproving the point. if you see tags you don’t like just simply block and carry on. understand? k good.

- in general this is not meant to be a very serious or heavy question. it’s meant to just let me pick people’s brains and see what they’d want to do. i just want to get my results and go. just vote, drop your opinion in the tags, and go.

- also, this last part is silly and not at all related to my data, but since i’m forcing you on a dinner date i’ll at least let you pick the restaurant and food you have. so if you could also say what restaurant/food choice you’d want and what you’d want to order i’d love to hear it. sky’s the limit here. go nutz or even very specific on what you’d want to eat. i am trying to learn to cook and don’t know a lot of recipes or different food types, so i’m hoping this will give me a bigger idea of what food is out there to make. (this question is not meant to be a way to stick it to anyone or for you to go “i’ll go to a shitty ass restaurant and take a swiftie/anti-swiftie and make them eat garbage 🤪”, it’s just a fun question to give people something positive to add to the poll if they want. AGAIN IF YOUR GOING TO BE AN ASSHOLE ILL BLOCK YOU.)

- i’m going to be annoying and ask that you reblog for a wider sample size and such, if you don’t want to that’s fine, but i’m going to be polite and ask you nicely.

that should be everything, thank you for reading my long ass list and voting in this poll. i hope you have a good day and such.

#kelly babels #polls #taylor swift

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zara-renata · 2 months ago

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Sylus's guide to hiring, or Wine time with Sylus: his POV | ao3

I think at this point this story may be hard to understand as a standalone and can be considered part of a series. Links to the previous installments can be found here.

Sylus x gn reader, Sylus x mc, Sylus's POV, second person POV

Synopsis: Sylus mulls over all the data he has managed to collect regarding his sweet little hunter so far, and spends some time considering mistakes he's made and his plans for the future. He also hires a new employee and is required to teach the twins to mind their manners in front of guests he's trying to intimidate.

This story contains: Sylus being a worshipful simp for mc and harboring definitively NSFW thoughts, the apprehension of a thief, an interrogation, an indecent proposal, a job offer, and one HR manager who gets goosebumps from being able to sense a disturbance in the social safety of Onychinus's workforce while not even being in the same building as the HR disaster waiting to happen.

Additional context: I've seen some theories floating around the fandom about Sylus and mc being children together in the lab where mc received the aether core, which i think would be amazing to explore and also would explain why Sylus has memories of mc when they first meet. However, I also got the sense from his little villain speech about "From your past to your future and all the crimes you have yet to commit," that Sylus knows mc from more than just memories as kids experimented on in the lab. So I've been writing him like he has memories of his own and mc's past or future lives. Hence his little rumination at the beginning of this story. It's maybe lazy romance writing but I hope it's enjoyable anyway.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sylus may rarely have good luck, but he would much rather have consistent bad luck than a skill issue.

He may not be able to control the luck that fate has given him, but the same cannot be said about the skills he has spent his entire life honing in order to render luck and fate irrelevant. As a result, it has been quite a long time since one of his skillfully laid plans has ended up with such a ridiculous outcome instead of unadulterated success.

But he’s learning that he shouldn’t be surprised by how often he is surprised when it comes to you. In fact, he’s irritated with himself that he didn’t learn that lesson after just the first three days he had you at his mercy when you first dangled yourself as bait for him and came plunging back into his life.

He recalls your fury, clenched teeth and clenched fists, as he crushed your hand in his, over and over. You couldn’t have possibly known, the way you were looking at him like a mere, terrifying stranger, how the faint, pitiful resonance between you flayed open his chest, exposing a heart he had long thought invincible, if only for the fact that he had thought it long dead. And along with the pain, came the fury. The dead should stay dead, and enjoy the only gift of the dead—freedom from the kind of despair he felt as you closed your eyes and refused him, again and again, the hate and terror clear in them when you would open them again. Yes, he recalls how you closed your eyes and refused to let your tears of terror fall, how you spit insults and sneered in his face despite that terror. He recalls how you took every sliver of opportunity to make a run for it each time he let go of you and dropped you back onto your knees—even though you knew it was doomed, but trying anyway, only to be dragged back by his evol every single time.

Your determination in the face of fear, your spite and defiance. None of these things surprised him, because these were all parts of the you he knew and remembered, parts carved under his skin with the same permanence and cruelty you used to carve your knives into anyone who stood against you.

He vividly remembers your rage, your cold ruthlessness, your indomitable will—the determination to survive anything, and if you somehow, inconceivably failed, despite all of your strength and intricate plans, you’d drag everyone in your reach down with you out of pure spite. Despite, and because of your razor edges, during your ‘first’ meeting—as you were kneeling at his feet, as he was relishing in the fury of your misplaced hatred towards him as he drew out your darkest wishes from the deepest parts of you—he was prepared to love you again, in all of your cruel, malicious glory.

However, he should have known that this version of you is not exactly the same as those he has been carrying with him long before you learned his name in this life. He should have learned it from that very first day that he finally had you under his watchful eyes again. When you tried to run from him, instead of trying to kill him. And there is no doubt, you did want to kill him—he saw that clearly with his aether core, and in every furious line of your beautiful body. But you resisted that urge, despite everything in you whispering through your being to devour him, to consume him, to feed yourself with the satisfaction of revenge and with all the strength he has to offer, and then discard his carcass.

But no. You had only tried to escape.

He should have learned it after the third day, when you refused to pull the trigger, and he had to do it for you.

He should have learned it when the twins woke you up, and they walked away unscathed. You hadn’t even tried to punish them for being accomplices to your long days of suffering and fear at Sylus’s hands. He had ordered them to use whatever force was necessary in order to protect themselves against any retribution from you, short of actually killing you. But you didn’t try to hurt them at all—you simply, and cleverly, he thinks with pride, arranged to be released from the room in which you were being held with no confrontation at all.

He lifts you in his mind’s eye and, like the consummate judge of fine jewellery that he is, examines all the facets that he has managed to collect about you, in an attempt to truly see the whole of your magnificence, in this life—this version of you, without the layers of his expectations and memories that you don’t share obscuring the make and quality of the diamond that comprises the you in this life.

Yes, he sees the overlap between the other versions of you and the you of here and now, but there are such significant changes that learning you all over again could take another lifetime—one he’s already eager to dedicate to learning you, because from all the other previous versions of you through to the one who woke up in his arms the other morning, he can already tell that the core of you remains the same. Yes, he loves you not only because you are you and Sylus is Sylus, and he refuses to conceive of a world with one but not the other. But he loves you because of who are you, in every lifetime. Strong. Stubborn. Smart. A survivor. And soft, so deliciously soft, but only for him. And he’s going to make sure that you stay that way, despite all of the experiences of this life that have dented your armor and seem to have made you turn your innate razor edge inward, instead of against those actually responsible for the suffering you’ve been forced to undergo for so long, alone.

He had spent those many weeks purging his organization and cleaning up the shitshow that Sherman had left behind collecting the reports that Mephisto and the twins would bring him regarding the reckless way you would launch yourself into battle, often outmatched, and only just manage to emerge in one piece. All to protect, what—he snorts—clueless tourists? He has never seen a version of you that is so… selfless. Through hacked security footage and Mephisto’s eyes, he has since watched you suppress the reflexive urge to inflict pain on others when you’re in pain yourself. He’s watched you come to the aid of not only the elderly and children—those who society has deemed should be treated with the utmost care—but also ordinary people, idiots and criminals, ungrateful citizens who take it for granted that people like you risk their lives every day to protect people like them. And you help them with such patience that if it were anyone other than you, Sylus would probably feel a little nauseated and be convinced that it was just a show, some elaborate long-con. No one can be that consistently, disgustingly kind despite their worst urges.

But you are.

However, he has noticed that your selflessness goes beyond simply kindness towards others. He has watched you refuse to get medical aid when you clearly, desperately need it. He has watched you keep people at arms’ length, refusing to talk about what is happening to you emotionally. He has watched you go without sleep, and food, and breaks, through fight after fight. And he has watched you try to slap yourself, when you think that you’re having a stupid thought. He has watched you make a fist and hit yourself, hard, when you thought that he hadn’t actually been aching to wake up with you in his arms, lips along your skin, ever since he found you again.

It appears to Sylus like you’re still wielding the sharp blade of your will from all of his memories of you, but the difference now is that you’re holding it to your own neck instead of to the world’s.

He can accept that in this life, you are kind. And altruistic—although he gags a little thinking it. Everyone has flaws, and yours just happen to be of the sunshine and rainbows variety this time around. He will love you, not despite, but because these traits are all still you. His belligerent, funny, charming equal, in all things. But he will not accept that you continue to hurt yourself, instead of the people and institutions who don’t even deserve the honor of your blade, but have it coming to them anyway.

You may be holding your knife to your own throat instead of the world’s, but Sylus would destroy planets for you, and he has no qualms about doing everything absolutely necessary to destroy your impulse to hurt his favorite thing in this world, and any other.

However, he recognizes that such a challenge will require long-term, careful effort. He will need to spend more time plotting how to accomplish that goal. Currently, he has a more urgent matter that needs his attention.

Your inability to believe that he wants you. All of you. How can he help you overcome your cruelty to yourself if you’re convinced that he harbors a similar cruelty toward you? He is already certain that you want him, at least physically. He’d have to be blind not see how your eyes follow the movement of his hands, or remain fixated on his chest. As they should, considering how much effort he puts into maintaining his physical fitness, he sniffs. He has watched with pleasure as you swallow, and turn your head, forcing yourself to look anywhere but at him when he catches your gaze lingering on his body. In any other circumstances he’d rest assured that he could keep your eyes on him with less effort—although why would he not put every effort possible into providing you with maximal viewing pleasure?—Except for some reason the universe has deemed it necessary to fill your life with uncommonly good-looking people in this life. Sylus’s face may serve as an invitation to most venues, but your primary care physician's, professional partner's, and even that strange dandy artist friend's faces are … conceivably handsome enough to possibly draw your attention away from where it should be. Which is on Sylus.

He sees now that how he went about giving you what you needed when he first met you may have had… unaccounted for, lasting consequences. He was thrilled with how quickly you seemed to come around from hating his guts and wanting to murder him, to allowing him into your space, into your home, into your bed, even. Every single one of his ruses, no matter how transparent, have been successful thus far in both allowing him to get close to you, and to force you to take care of yourself a little better, even if it’s only while he’s with you.

But he may have miscalculated in not considering every possible consequence of the cruelty with which he first treated you. He did not foresee that because he played your villain so well, you would be unable to overcome your distrust of his intentions in approaching you despite him essentially wearing a sign that could light up even the N109 zone's gloom that says “I want to make you mine in every sense of the word.” Sylus has always been a firm believer that talk is cheap, and he is not a cheap man. Actions speak far louder than words, and he is determined to show you through his actions that he will always put his money where his mouth is when it comes to you. And now that he’s thinking about his mouth…

He does have things he wants to do with you, besides caring for you and simply basking in the pleasure of being with you. Badly. But he was sloppy, by staying the night last time. All of his carefully laid plans require the height of self-control, but no matter his steel grip on himself when he’s awake, even he can’t control his deepest impulses when he’s asleep. In his dream, you had your arms around him, holding him tight, your lithe, strong body wrapped around him like a second skin, your warm, mouth-watering scent filling his lungs. He needed to taste you, devour you, swallow you whole. But he can tell that you do not trust him yet, and he hadn’t been planning to give in to his feral lust for you like he did that morning until he is assured that you will believe him when he says he not only wants your body, but every other piece of you.

He knows why he had the dream. How could he not have dreamt of you, after enduring the entire evening with his self control fraying like a poor quality garrote as he resisted the urge to put not just his hands but his mouth all over you?

If he’s honest with himself, and he always is, staying the night was not the only miscalculation he made the other night. First, bringing you his clothes. He had fully expected you to thank him in confusion for the bag of clothes and then toss them into your closet to eventually be forgotten under the pile of laundry that inevitably stacks up during the weeks you’re working so hard. He had not anticipated that you would obediently take the bag of clothes and immediately change into them. Looking up to finding you standing in front of him, his sweater engulfing your gorgeous frame, the little sleep shorts that he imagined hugging your delicious ass hidden under the sweater’s hem, your powerful legs and cute fucking feet bare for him—and his scent combined with yours wafting toward him from across the kitchen island. He barely controlled the urge to sweep every single fucking thing off the counter and drag you onto it, to make a meal of you instead of the charcuterie board he had been carefully arranging for your pleasure.

And the way you ate the food from said board… watching you eat has risen in the ranks of his favorite things about you, on par with seeing the look on your face when you’re mad at him and about to say something mean and the soft way you nuzzle into him when you’re fast asleep.

In all his life, through all the fine things he has been able to experience due to his ever-growing wealth, all of the world’s pleasures at his fingertips if he so much as snapped them, he never would have imagined that he’d ever find himself desperately wishing to be someone’s finger. Or a puff pastry. Or that fucking strawberry between your teeth, its juices sliding over your plush lip and down your chin. Lick him, eat him, chew him with your sharp teeth and swallow him, for fuck’s sake he wanted to fill your mouth and crawl inside your skin and never leave. He may pride himself on having the willpower of protocore reinforced steel but it was probably the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, standing there motionless, as you moaned your pleasure from the pastry, as your pink tongue ran along your skillful, honey-sticky fingers. Your wholehearted, singularly focused, carnal enjoyment of something so simple as a savory tart was hotter than anything he’s ever seen his life. He wanted to record it and set a projector on a running loop aimed at an altar in his bedroom for his own personal worship. But Sylus is greedy. He will not settle for the pale replication of a recorded memory of the other night. He wants to feed you every single meal you require to keep living, with his own hands, so he can watch your face as you savor its flavors, as what he provides you nourishes your gorgeous body. No, Sylus is a greedy man. Instead of a projector as a permanent fixture in his bedroom, he intends to install you instead.

He shifts on his seat, these memories affecting him in a way that threaten to make his trousers uncomfortable. He needs to refocus, now. He needs to solve the problem at hand, and not let himself get distracted with the future if he wants to make his vision of the future a reality.

Your selflessness, and frankly, lack of self-esteem—despite all evidence pointing to the fact that you’re effortlessly and wildly desirable to most people who meet you—is proving to be the biggest cock-blocker he could have conceived of at the outset of his campaign to make you his in every way.

He has successfully gotten you used to him touching you, and being in your home. You let him caress you, hold you while you sleep. But again, he’s a greedy man, and that’s not nearly enough for him. He runs his thumb along his chin, mind racing.

Now it’s time to take this game to the next level: how to take you on a date, without it causing you to slam down your defenses, or worse, having it backfire like the wine tasting? Ah yes, the wine tasting. He had been curious: would you drop your guard, if you were tipsy? What kind of drunk are you? Would he be able to tease truths out of you that you still keep hidden, despite his convoluted ploys to draw them out of you? In this respect, his plan was a success. He now knows that you don’t drop your guard even with wine coursing through you, and are prone to being even more skittish than when you’re sober. A possibility he hadn't considered, however, was that as you sipped from the wine glass with your soft, soft lips, filling your mouth with wine, he had to restrain himself from knocking it from your hand so that he could tongue his own mouthful directly between your lips, his hand on your throat, feeling you swallow everything he gave you. He had wanted to take and fill your mouth, drag you to him from your stool to his lap, run his hands down your sides, slip his fingers under his sweater on your body, dip them under the band of those silk shorts—

He has to stop thinking about this. He puts his head in his hands. He's going to lose his mind if he keeps thinking about this, and now is not the time or place.

Instead, he forces himself to recall the discovery that the look on your face is hilarious when you’re accused of being an unsophisticated heathen when it comes to the finer things in life. Granted, he had wanted to ensure that he wouldn’t have to worry about you blowing your cover if you ever have to go undercover and are expected to be a wine connoisseur, but he knew that you only served him wine in a mug that read CUNT just to be petty and spiteful, and not because you weren’t aware that wine glasses exist.

He laughs softly at the thought. You’re so fucking cute when you’re mean to him. Shit, he's going to have the same trouser problem again if he keeps thinking about you being mean to him.

He hadn’t meant to stay the full night. He was a busy man, after all, and the night was his time to conduct business. But you were so warm against him, so lovely with your soft hair brushing across his skin, frowning a little as if you were having a bad dream. And he had also had some of that excellent wine, so although he wasn’t anywhere near tipsy, he was so relaxed and comfortable that the idea of leaving you alone in your bed was more excruciating than usual. And so he just… let himself drift off after confirming that this particular chain of casinos are indeed the one he will be purchasing next.

Only to have the best dream he can remember having in a long while, and waking up with his teeth in your sexy as fuck body. Just one taste was not enough, and you had the gall to ask him if he was satisfied. He knows that Xavier is your partner and your friend, and he knows that you need people like that in your life. But Sylus feels like he is entitled to a big fucking reward for suppressing his urge to eviscerate that little sleepy shit for interrupting the conversation Sylus clearly needed to have with you to clear up any ridiculous thought that you might have that Sylus would want to sink his teeth into anyone else but you, in any lifetime.

He clenches his fist and tries to reassert control over the frustration building at the thought of this ongoing misunderstanding.

“Uh, boss?”

“Hmm?”

“Are you ... okay?”

Sylus comes back from the racing thoughts that he realizes he’s been having over the past few minutes, completely distracted from the current situation he finds himself in.

He’s lounging on a black leather booth, a low black-lacquered table stretching before him, an expansive one-way mirror stretching behind him. Kieran and Luke are both lounging on similar booths on either side of the closed black door, set in the crimson walls of one of the VIP lounges of one of the clubs Sylus owns. Amnesia. He snorts. If only he had been on the joke when he bought the place. But that’s neither here nor there. Suspended in front of him is a young woman. Hardly more than a girl, really, despite her best attempts to age herself through the skillful use of impeccable makeup.

She’s currently glaring at him, despite being wrapped in Sylus’s evol, which puts most other people into a state of catatonic terror. He likes her grit.

But it’s a testament to how distracted you’ve been making him lately that he has let his mind wander, even now, when he has business to attend to.

“Boss?” Kieran repeats, snapping his fingers.

“Is there a dog in here?” Sylus asks, examining his fingernails. He has been fastidious about keeping them trimmed short and smooth, ever since you nose-dived back into his life. Sylus is nothing if not prepared.

“Uh,” the twins look at each other, after looking around the room. “No?”

“No, there is not. Do I look like a dog to you, then?” Sylus asks, enjoying watching his henchmen start to shift uncomfortably when they finally catch on to this line of questioning.

“No, boss. Of course not!” they chorus in unison, as if Luke had also made the mistake at snapping his fingers at Sylus like an owner getting his pet’s attention.

“There will be consequences for displaying that level of disrespect to me in front of … our guest,” Sylus warns, and both young men’s shoulders slump. Sylus turns his attention back to the aforementioned guest.

She had been dragged in by the twins, kicking and shouting about suing them for assault and battery, abduction, and unlawful imprisonment. Her mascara had smudged a bit in the struggle, but her carefully braided hair and expensive looking, business professional pantsuit were still neat, and she looked beautifully put together. But she had fallen silent and her eyes had widened comically after the twins had dropped her into the middle of the room when she noticed Sylus sprawled across the couch at the back of the dimly lit space. She had immediately dropped to her knees.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. For whatever I did, just, please don’t hurt me,” she had begged, her tear-filled voice filling the room.

Sylus stood and approached her.

“I’ll do anything, just let me go. Tell me what I did, I’ll never do it again,” she sniffled. “I have children, please think of my children!”

“Look at me.”

When she did, he realized just how young she was. Younger than Kieran and Luke, probably. Practically a baby. He let the aether core in his eye flare to life, the pain streaking through him, the pressure in his head growing, as always, but he could see.

After a timeless moment, he was done and she sagged a little. She dared to timidly peek up at him. He twitched a finger and she was immediately lifted into the air by the tendrils of his evol. He plopped back down on the couch. And then, seeing the person before him suspended by the dark force of his evol, he had gotten distracted, thinking about you the other night, held aloft by the same tendrils. How you had been prepared to hurt yourself trying to break down your door to get away from the perceived threat. About how you had thought that he would take advantage of your vulnerability and drink his fill of your bare body, once you realized the threat was actually him. He scowls—he has no interest in savoring the naked lines of your perfect body until you eagerly strip for his pleasure, of your own volition.

Damn it, he's getting distracted again.

“Hey! Put me the fuck down! How dare you treat a woman like this?” The girl demands, all pretense of pathetic fear evaporating.

“I’m a feminist,” he responds. “You get the same treatment as anyone else who steals my motorcycle and then plans to stab me with that syringe in your pocket once you've lured me within reach with this... little innocent act.” He considers her for a moment. “Really convincing acting though. Apart from the bit about kids. I doubt you’ve barely graduated high school.”

“Don’t be a dick, I could be a teen mom,” she scowls. “And that is a freaky fucking power, dude.”

“Freaky, but useful.” Sylus flicks his gaze to Kieran and Luke. “How’d she do it?”

“Quick hands, electrical skills, and some really slick hacking. It took us so long to catch her because her driving is almost as good as yours.”

Sylus looks back to the girl. “How old are you?”

A calculating look crosses her face, but disappears so quickly that if Sylus wasn’t so attuned to micro expressions to keep himself and his people alive, he would have missed it. “Old enough for you, big man. I’m legal,” she purrs. “I can show you just how illegal I can be though, if you let me go. You caught me, you can play with me—you have your bike back, no harm, no foul. We then go our separate ways.” She looks at him steadily, her tongue flicking out over her deep red lipstick.

There is a long moment of silence so deep in the room that Luke and Kieran’s raucous laughter lands in it like a whale being dropped into a pond from a great height.

“Oh man,” Luke gasps, holding onto Kieran’s shoulder for support as they’re both bent over from laughing so hard.

“You’re wildly mistaken if you think this is a deal boss would make,” Kieran tries to wipe his eye while maintaining the position of his mask, which makes Luke giggle louder.

“Totally barking up the wrong tree,” Luke manages.

“Unfortunately, we must inform you that our boss is currently taken,” Kieran finally gives up, and the tears just continue streaming down his neck into his collar.

“I mean, not that being taken would prevent a slimeball from accepting your offer, but he’s not a slimeball, and he’s also taken.” Luke pauses, still trying to catch his breath. “Well, he’s not actually taken, yet. Doesn’t that require like, an offer, and acceptance? I don’t think he’s even managed to offer yet, right?” Luke tilts his head, considering.

“Oh, that’s a good point, Luke. Our boss is currently nourishing a one-sided obsession.”

“Oooh, obsession, that’s a good word. I would have said a crush, but you’re totally right, ‘crush’ doesn’t really cover this whole…” Luke continues, waving a hand at Sylus, as if to highlight the whole sad mess the man finds himself in regarding his love interest.

“Have you even opened the thesaurus I got you a couple weeks ago?” Kieran asks, putting his hands on his hips. "How can you properly compete with me in Scrabble if you don't work on expanding your vocabulary?"

“We’ve been really busy!” Luke protests, managing to radiate a pout through his mask.

“True. We’ve been quite occupied with stalking a certain hunter…” Kieran mumbles, glancing back to Sylus, who has been pinching the bridge of his formidable nose during this entire exchange. He learned long ago that he should just let Luke and Kieran do their bits, or he’ll never hear the end of their whining about him interrupting their comedic genius.

“What the fuck is this circus?” the girl finally asks, a look of disgust on her face as she glances between Sylus and his henchmen.

“I believe my subordinates are trying to thank you for the kind offer, but are emphasizing that I’m more interested in your vehicle theft and driving skills than… anything else, you might be willing to offer in exchange for me not harvesting your organs for re-sale and dumping your weighted corpse off the docks for stealing my motorcycle tonight, and thereby complicating my plans with my partner.”

The girl's eyes widen, just a little.

"Now, don't make me repeat myself again: how old are you?"

She stares at him for a second, and then mumbles, "Twenty."

"Excellent. You're hired." Sylus leans back in his seat, checking his watch and pulling out his phone. He expected you here by now. "On a few conditions."

“So she passed the test?” Luke asks, straightening on the couch.

“What test?” the girl asks.

Kieran gestures to his the mask where his eye would be under it. “The freaky test. To see if you’re trustworthy or not. Despite all evidence clearly pointing to a definitive ‘no.’” His voice sounds uncertain as he turns to look at Sylus.

The girl scowls, trying to turn and glare at Kieran. “I’m so trustworthy,” she promises, trying her best to look earnest and not like the compulsive little liar Sylus knows her to be after looking deep into her soul.

Sylus lets her squirm for a few beats because it’s kind of fun to see the mercurial expressions flit across her calculating face. Not anywhere near as fun as watching your face, but still entertaining. “I know,” he finally says, satisfied that she’s marinated long enough in uncertain fear to not forget that feeling anytime soon.

“So you’re not gonna kill me?” She perks up. Sylus just sighs and shakes his head. “And you don’t wanna fuck me?”

“Ugh, no,” Sylus grimaces like he just bit into something foul. “Please never say anything remotely like that again.”

“Deal!” She grins. “You’re not my type anyway. I mean, you're old, and like, it's bad enough that I have to endure Yaoi hands in manga." She grimaces. "I like roleplay, and things that come in pairs a lot, lot more.” Somehow, she manages to twist while still in the evol’s hold and leers at the twins, who both freeze, both masks turned towards her somehow radiating fear.

Sylus glances down at his hands. You seem to like them well enough, so he's not worried about her opinion, even if he were the type to suffer from insecurity. They're just proportional to the rest of him. He tries to control his smirk, but the thought of the noise you made when he bit you, and how you squirmed against him as he was waking up, makes it really hard to control his face. He shakes his head. Business. “If I’m going to employ you, I need to be able to trust that you will follow two rules.” Sylus intones, interrupting whatever predator-prey themed nature documentary is currently playing out in front of him.

The girl turns back to him, looking wary again.

“Are you listening?” he asks.

She nods, and suddenly looks her age. A little afraid. A little curious.

“Rule number one. Do not sexually harass your colleagues,” he gives her a stern look.

“Aww,” she sulks, but at his Look, she nods. “And rule number two?”

“I have someone very important to me that I may need to ask you to help. By being available as a driver, anytime, anywhere. The kind of driver that may need to steal conveniently parked vehicles, and to outrun my competitors who will have dangerous intentions. Or worse: law enforcement. And you are not allowed to reveal this person’s existence to anyone, or the importance of this person to me. No matter what you learn in the course of your duties, either about this person, or me, you will. Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. Do you think you can accept these rules?”

She looks at Sylus thoughtfully. “What are you going to punish your men with for snapping their fingers at you like you were a dog?” she finally asks.

He gazes steadily back at her. “I’m going to tell our chef that there will be no cheese on the menu for a week.”

The girl smiles radiantly as Kieran and Luke squawk their protests: “That is a horrendously unjust punishment!” (Kieran) “What the fuck boss?! Not cool!” (Luke).

“Okay, I can do that. But that’s three.”

“Excuse me?” Sylus can hardly think over the noise the twins are making.

“That’s three rules, not two. I can’t hit on the cosplay twins, I have to drive your unrequited crush whenever, and I can’t talk about what you two do.. or don’t have going on.” She shrugs. “Three rules.”

Sylus sighs, letting his evol set her back on her sensible heels. Why does he seem to attract the most unruly of employees in the entirety of both Linkon City and the N109 zone?

She strides over to him and pumps his hand vigorously. “Name’s Noah. What’s the salary for this gig, anyway?”

Sylus accepts her handshake, his own engulfing her tiny one. He intends to make great use of her skilled hands when he isn’t available to make sure you have a getaway car when you’re in danger, or to simply chauffeur you around Linkon City on errands that he thinks are too far for you to walk. And finally, to bring you to him, in the N109 zone, on the nights you’re too tired for it to be safe to drive yourself.

You just don’t know it yet.

“You assume I’m paying you, when I have already generously let you walk out of here with all of the organs with which you entered?”

“Well, speaking of organs, a girl's got to eat. Do I get to come to your chef’s dinners? If they don’t get any cheese, can I still have some?” Noah asks, flicking her braids over her shoulder and jerking a thumb at the twins. They shine silkily under the soft lights of the room.

“Boss, no,” Kieran and Luke beg.

“Yes I’m paying you, no you’re not coming to the base for meals unless your job requires you to be there around normal dining hours.” Noah pouts a little at this. “Kieran, Luke, stick around with Noah for a little while downstairs." Noah perks up, but then deflates when he continues, "But do not let her drink. When I've collected my kitten, you can take her to get set up with Linda. For now, send in Aidan, and the wine distributor who is probably getting impatient waiting for our meeting.” Sylus checks his watch again. He expected you here at eleven, and it’s already a quarter past already.

“Who’s Linda?” Noah asks, trailing Kieran and Luke out of the room.

“Our Human Resources manager,” Kieran answers.

Noah makes an impressed sound. “You guys have an HR manager?”

“Yeah, for like the employment agreement and insurance and benefits and stuff,” Luke answers.

“What kind of shady criminal outfit has fucking benefits?”

“Not those kind of benefits!” Kieran gasps, scandalized.

"Not fucking benefits, Kieran, but like... expletive, and then the noun," Luke tries to correct his brother's misunderstanding.

"Ooh," Kieran says. "Hey, I didn't know you knew the word 'expletive.'"

"Yeah, so, maybe next time think twice before accusing me of not even opening your gift," Luke grumbles.

Noah looks assessingly between the two of them. "You guys are actually pretty sweet." Luke and Kieran look at each other, and then look back at her.

"May I ask you a question?" Kieran asks, after an awkward silence.

"Sure," she shrugs.

"Why are you dressed like a real estate agent in her forties?" Luke asks.

"Uh," Noah glances between them again. "Is this a party trick? Like, you act like one person all the time in front of other people?"

"Act?" Kieran asks. Luke just stares at her.

"Okay, whatever. Keep your secrets, you little weirdos," she says affectionately, as if she hasn't just met them. "And I dress like this because who are you more likely to finger in a lineup for grand theft auto? Karen from accounting or the ripped-leather goth-bitch from the wrong side of the Linkon City-N109 zone border?"

"Aah," both twins nod sagely, and the door closes on their chatter with a soft whoosh of air.

Sylus unlocks his phone, and prepares to text you. Not knowing where you are is making him uncomfortable. He decides that he's going to put Mephisto on permanent kitten duty, starting tomorrow.

Time to move to the next state of play: discovering how long it takes to convince a certain hunter that Sylus is sincerely all in, and not just hunting you for sport. Let the wooing games begin.

#love and deepspace #love and deepspace sylus #lads #l&ds #lnds #lads sylus #my fanfic #i initially posted this to the wrong fucking blog #poor mass effect fans like wtf is this nonsense #anyway #hope this over the top offering is enjoyable for those still interested #i have the next part pretty much finished and the following planned #sylus x reader #sylus x mc #love and deepspace fanfiction #currently figuring out how to stuff as many ridiculous tropes into one story as possible

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zoloteh-volossya · 4 months ago

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BG3 Fanfiction Statistics, Part 1

I’ve seen some discussions of BG3 fandom trends floating around tumblr that spoke from experience but lacked hard data to refer to. As a fan of Baldur’s Gate 3, fanfiction, and graphs, I therefore thought it would be neat and illustrative to go through AO3 and document some of the statistics this fandom.

I did a similar exercise back in January and posted the results here. However, I was a bit unhappy with this analysis – it was missing some data that I consider to be relevant, I didn’t end up discussing the results much, and I only posted it to reddit. Most discussions for the creative side of fandom seem to happen on tumblr, so I made this account to post it here.

I will try and be as transparent as possible when discussing how I obtained and processed this data. A copy of my spreadsheet can be found here and contains all of the data I will be discussing. Most of the data I feature in this essay will be presented as graphs. Below each graph I will discuss the patterns shown in the graph and provide what I believe to be some relevant and/or interesting number values. If you want to see all the numbers, please refer to my spreadsheet. If you don’t care about the numbers and/or my thoughts about them, feel free to skim through and just look at the charts!

A note before I start – I gathered this data between July 21, 2024 and July 24, 2024. It is out of date as of my writing this and will be even more out of date by the time you read it. However, I believe the general fandom trends will hold up over time – the same patterns that I observed in January are largely still present in July.

Due to the tumblr post image limit and my preponderance of graphs, I will be breaking this behemoth of an essay into two parts:

General Fandom Statistics, the Player Character, and the Women

The Men, a Character Comparison, and a Pairing Analysis

We are currently in part 1. Part 2 can be found at this link. The rest of part 1 is below the read more because this is very long.

GENERAL FANDOM STATS

This information was found by looking at the side bar when browsing Baldur’s Gate fics. Therefore, this data set includes fics from the previous two Baldur’s Gate games. However, given that the games were released in 1998 and 2000, respectively, most of the fanfiction for them was likely posted to FF.net and the error from including what little fic for them was posted to AO3 is likely small.

At the time of my data gathering, there were 31,043 Baldur’s Gate fics on AO3.

RATINGS

To the surprise of nobody in the BG3 fandom, Explicit fic is the largest category, at 38% of all fics produced. It’s followed by Mature (24%), Teen and Up (20%), General (12%) and Not Rated (6%). Not all of the Explicit and Mature fics are necessarily horny – those warnings also apply to extreme violence (hello, Dark Urge). But let’s be real, most of them are tagged that way for sex.

WARNINGS

Speaking of extreme violence, let’s take a look at the warnings used for fics in this fandom.

Just about half (50.2%) of BG fics have no warnings at all. About 17.6% have warnings for graphic depictions of violence – lower than I would have expected, honestly, for a video game that features as much murder as this one does (at least, how I play it...). About 5.4% of fics feature a warning for rape, 4.7% feature major character death, and 0.5% feature underage sex.

CATEGORIES

AO3 allows users to select any categories from a list of possible options (F/M, M/M, F/F, Gen, Other, and Multi). F/M, M/M, and F/F are pretty self explanatory, Gen fics don’t focus on a relationship, Multi fics focus on a relationship between three or more people, and Other is a catch all for fics that don’t fit into any of the previous categories very well. For shipping with nonbinary (NB) characters, I have seen a variety of approaches. Some people select the category closest to the NB character’s presentation, some select multiple categories, and some select Other.

One very useful tool that I will be introducing here is the use of “otp:true.” When “otp:true” is entered into the “Search within results” bar while filtering tags, AO3 will only return fics that have just one pairing tagged. This filters out all fics that have background pairings or multiple focus pairings. Results with “otp:true” are typically solely focused on that particular pairing.

With all that explanation out of the way, the results:

We can clearly see that the most common category for Baldur’s Gate fics is M/F, with 43.3% of all fics featuring a M/F pairing. 36.4% of all fics feature a M/M pairing, 10.6% feature a F/F pairing, 11.7% are more General, 8.0% feature Multiple people in a pairing, and 10.9% are Other. These percentages add up to more than 100% because a fic can be tagged with multiple categories.

Things change a bit when you filter for “otp:true” and only include fics that focus on just one pairing. In this case, M/M predominates, with a whopping 46.0% of fics. M/F follows with 31.2%, F/F with 11.1%, 7.7% are General, 9.7% are Other, and 3.0% are still tagged as Multi (presumably for fics where the only pairing is a threesome or such).

CHARACTERS

As a last look at more general content before I begin a deep dive into looking at the various characters, I took a look at the 30 most popular character tags.

This was a surprise to me the first time I looked at it in January. In the previous two video game fandoms I was in that had a player character (Mass Effect and Fire Emblem: Three Houses), the player character was the most popular character tag in that fandom. In this case, though, Astarion has the most fics that feature him, and by a pretty significant margin (~5,000 more fics than Tav). He appears in 63.0% of fics. Tav is next, at 46.7% of fics. Then we have the rest of the six Origin characters: Gale (34.5% of fics), Shadowheart (23.7%), Karlach (20.5%), Wyll (18.6%), and Lae’zel (15.9%), as well as Halsin (15.8%) and the Dark Urge (15.3%). That they all are next to each other makes sense, as fics that focus on one character or pairing will often tag the entire ensemble. Lae’zel only showing up 16% of the time seems low, though, for a member of the main cast. To me, this indicates that not many fics are true ensemble fics that include all of the main cast.

After this block of main characters, we drop a bit to Gortash, who shows up in 7.4% of fics. He’s the most popular villain by far, followed by Cazador (4.7%) and Raphael (4.6%). Orin only shows up in 2.9% of fics and Ketheric is featured in only 1.1% of fics.

Jaheira shows up in 4.4% of fics, but her values may include fics from the earlier Baldur’s Gate games. Poor Minthara is the 16th most tagged character and only shows up in 2.5% of fics. Rolan (a tiefling NPC) shows up in more fics than she does.

Despite being featured in previous Baldur’s Gate game fics as well as BG3, Minsc does not seem popular – he’s #25, being tagged in 1.3% of fics.

One thing I did note was the comparative lack of focus on the overarching plot of the game in BG3 fics. I’ll use the Emperor as a barometer for this, as it’s inextricably interwoven into everything having to do with the Absolute, the mysterious artifact, and our protagonists’ immunity to it. Yet, it only appears in 535 fics of over 31,000 – approximately 1.7% of all BG fics. This tells me that there isn’t much engagement with the actual illithid plot of the game in most fics – at least not to the extent where major plot relevant characters are being tagged.

CHARACTER PAIRING STATISTICS

Most of my time for this analysis was spent collecting data for the various pairing tags. I went through the top 300 pairing tags by order of popularity (ending with Mystra/Cazador, of all things) and recorded how many fics each rating had and how many fics each category had both with and without “otp:true” applied. Coincidentally, this included all the pairings with 5 or more fics in them at the time – by sheer luck the 301st pairing tag had only 4 fics. I judged that I could ignore pairing tags with fewer than 5 fics without affecting the results of my analyses too much (also it had taken 4 days to get this far and I was tired).

However, a lot of authors tag their fics with both, say, Astarion/Tav and Astarion/F!OC. But for this exercise I’m not really looking at how authors refer to the Tav/Dark Urge/self insert character in their tagging nomenclature. I’m more interested in how many fics exist for, say, the pairing of Astarion and the player character.

To this end, I combined the numbers for Tav, Dark Urge, OC, F!OC, M!OC, NB!OC, Reader, and You for each character ship. In order to avoid double counting fics, once I had added the numbers for a particular tag I excluded that tag from all future counts.

[X]/PC = [X]/Tav + ([X]/Dark Urge with the [X]/Tav tag excluded) + ([X]/Original Character with the [X]/Tav and [X]/Dark Urge excluded) + ([X]/Reader with [X]/Tav, [X]/Dark Urge, and [X]/Original Character excluded) and so on.

This process dropped the total number of pairings from 300 to 162. However, it also introduces an error. Some fics ship characters with an OC who is not a Tav/Dark Urge/self insert. In condensing all pairings with original characters to the “PC” supercategory, I am ignoring that and counting their original character as a Tav/Dark Urge equivalent. Unfortunately, this is just something I have to live with in order to be able to make the data more manageable, as there is no way to tell which fics are using the OC tag to represent a Tav/Dark Urge and which are not on a mass data scale. I don’t think it will skew the results too much, at least.

I pulled out the top 20 ships for each major character in BG3 (Tav, Dark Urge, the PC, Shadowheart, Karlach, Lae’zel, Minthara, Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin) before and after I combined the player character tags into the PC supercategory. For each character, I then determined how much of each fic category (M/F, M/M, F/F, Other, Multi) they had, both for all of their pairings and for their pairing with the PC specifically.

Let's start by looking at the player character and its two representatives.

TAV

Tav is in 71 of the top 300 ship tags in the BG3 fandom.

Astarion completely dominates Tav’s ships, with a whopping 9,235 fics (1,839 otp:true fics). In fact, in order to be able to see the tiny little boxes that represent everyone else, here’s another version of this chart, this time with Astarion excluded.

There, that’s a bit more legible. The next highest is Gale, with 2,909 fics (652 otp:true) – less than a third as many fics as Astarion. Halsin comes third with 1,304 fics (207 otp:true) and Shadowheart is the first canon woman to show up, with 806 fics (132 otp:true). Astarion has more than 11 times as many fics with Tav as Shadowheart does. Karlach comes next, with 724 fics (186 otp:true). Raphael comes sixth, with 176 more fics than #7 Wyll who has 442 fics (100 otp:true). Lae’zel is #11 with 300 fics, under Gortash, Rolan, and a threesome with Halsin and Astarion. Minthara is the least popular main character to ship with Tav. She’s #15 with 146 fics (33 otp:true), and has fewer fics with Tav than Zevlor, the Emperor or Haarlep. In a marked improvement from the state of affairs in January, however, she no longer has fewer fics than Kar’niss.

Taking a look at the fic category breakdown, we can see that M/F and M/M predominate for Tav, while there is very little F/F. Dividing the values by the total number of fics, 59.8% of all fics and 50.2% of otp:true fics are tagged M/F, 35.6% of all fics and 34.9% of otp:true fics are tagged M/M, 7.6% of all fics and 4.4% of otp:true fics are tagged F/F, and 13.2% of all fics and 14.2% of otp:true fics are tagged Other. As the proportions of M/F and F/F fics drop when otp:true is applied, I assume that it is more common for M/F and F/F pairings to have background ships or be a background ship (remember that if it is not otp:true, we have no idea if the pairing with Tav is the pairing category being counted.)

THE DARK URGE

The Dark Urge is in 38 of the top 300 ship tags of the BG3 fandom, a bit over half as many as Tav.

While Astarion once again is the most popular character to ship with the Dark Urge (2,165 fics), this time he actually has competition! Gortash/Dark Urge comes in at a very respectable second place with 1,594 fics (about three quarters of Astarion/Dark Urge’s total fic count) and actually beat Astarion by over 100 fics once you apply otp:true (562 fics for Astarion vs 691 fics for Gortash). But after Gortash we once again drop down to numbers we struggle to even see on the chart. Gale is the most visible with 402 fics total (Gale has fewer fics total with the Dark Urge than Astarion or Gortash have with otp:true applied). After that we have a group of Halsin, Shadowheart, and Karlach, all with between 120-150 fics. No other pairing has over 100 fics.

Dark Urge/Tav (99 fics) and Dark Urge/Orin (87 fics) have more fics than Dark Urge/Wyll (83 fics) or Dark Urge/Minthara (80 fics). For Wyll, this is a sign that his pairing with the Dark Urge is not very popular (he drops from #7 with Tav to #9 with the Dark Urge). For Minthara, however, this is a significant climb in the rankings – she was #15 with Tav and #10 with the Dark Urge.

But what’s really interesting to me is the fic category breakdown for the Dark Urge.

The Dark Urge has noticeably more M/M content than Tav does (47.0% vs 35.6% for all fics, 56.9% vs 34.9% for opt:true) and slightly more F/F content than Tav does (10.2% vs 7.6% for all fics, 5.2% vs 4.4% for otp:true), and correspondingly less F/M content. At 13.4% for all fics and 12.8% of otp:true fics, the proportion of Other fic stays just about the same as for Tav.

THE PLAYER CHARACTER

The PC is a combination of Tav, Dark Urge, Original Character, Reader, and You. The PC is in 64 of the top 162 pairings of the BG3 fandom (losing 5 pairings from Tav as I combined Tav/Tav, Tav/Dark Urge, Tav/Reader and so on into one PC/OC category).

The player character was involved in 76.0% of all pairings and 62.1% of otp:true pairings (that is, if you add up every fic for every pairing which the PC is in and divide it by sum of all fics for all BG3 pairings I tracked). This means that over three quarters of shipping in the BG3 fandom is with the player character. It’s not surprising, but it is notable – that’s a very large proportion.

Holy smokes, Astarion! He dominates the rankings even more than before. This time, I was curious to see how much. See below for a proportional representation of all of the PC pairings (note: because many fics have multiple pairings, this circle does not represent the total number of fics but rather the total number of times any pairing with the PC has been tagged).

Astarion composes a full 45% of all pairings with the PC, Gale is bit over 13%, Gortash is 7.3% for all fics and 11.3% of otp:true fics, while Halsin has the opposite trend with 6.3% of all fics and 4.9% of otp:true fics. Shadowheart, Karlach, Raphael, and Wyll all are between 2% and 4% (with Raphael once again beating Wyll). Lae’zel is down at #11 with 1.4% and Minthara is all the way at #16 with 0.9%.

Out of curiosity, I went through all of the PC’s pairings and sorted them by the gender of the person being shipped with the PC.

Oof.

85.7% of all PC ships are with men, 10.4% are with women, and 1.9% are nonbinary beings (Haarlep, the Emperor, and Omeluum). When you apply otp:true, 87.1% of the player character’s ships are with men, 9.9% are with women, and 1.3% are with nonbinary beings.

SHADOWHEART

Welp! Let’s take a look at that 10%, starting with Shadowheart.

If you add up all the fics for all the pairings that include Shadowheart and divide that by the sum of all fics for all 162 pairings I collected, you can see that she is present in 7.0% of pairings. Interestingly, this is true both for all fics and for otp:true fics. She is in 30 of the top 300 ship tags and 24 of the 162 pairings that remain once the player character tags are consolidated.

(I have shortened Shadowheart's name to SH and Shart in various charts to keep the labels from taking up too much room in the graph.)

Lae’zel/Shadowheart is in close competition with Shadowheart/Tav. When all the player characters are condensed into the PC, though, that gap widens.

Shadowheart has 980 fics with the PC, 694 with Lae’zel, 226 with Karlach, 111 with Gale, 61 with Astarion, 51 with Nocturne, 36 with Halsin, 26 with Minthara, and 21 with Wyll (her least popular ship with a main character, at #12). 7 of her top 20 pairings are threesomes – Aylin/Isobel/SH at #8 with 35 fics, Karlach/PC/SH at #9, Karlach/Lae’zel/SH at #10, Astarion/PC/SH at #13, Halsin/PC/SH at #14, Karlach/Wyll/SH at #17, and Gale/Lae’zel/SH at #18.

Lae’zel/Shadowheart has an unusually high number of otp:true fics – almost half of its total fic count. It seems more popular to ship Shadowheart with women than men – both her ships with Lae’zel and Karlach are more popular than Astarion, Gale, or Wyll and her threesomes with women have more fics than her threesomes with men.

The fic category breakdown for Shadowheart matches this expectation.

Boy howdy is Shadowheart fic gay! She has over twice as much F/F fic than M/F fic, just looking at raw numbers of fics. Looking at the proportions of her total fic count, F/F fic represents 71.4% of all of her fics, M/F fic is 35.2%, Other is 10.0%, and Multi is 18.8%. (These percentages add up to more than 100% because many fics tag multiple categories.) This also means that we can’t know that these numbers necessarily include Shadowheart – witness the numbers of M/M fics. All it means is that these categories were on fics in which a Shadowheart pairing was also tagged.

Looking at the otp:true numbers gives us a better picture of what fics where only Shadowheart is in a relationship are like (though this not necessarily an accurate idea of patterns for her overall, as less than a third of her total fics are otp:true). 76.4% of otp:true fics are F/F, 19.8% are M/F, 3.8% are Other, and for some reason 1.2% (9 fics) are M/M. Over three quarters of Shadowheart’s otp:true pairings are femmeslash.

Shadowheart’s fics with the PC character follow pretty much the same pattern as her ships more generally, albeit with slightly less F/F (likely from the loss of the relative behemoth that is Shadowheart/Lae’zel).

32.9% of her pairings with the PC have the M/F tag, 68.1% are tagged F/F, 11.3% are tagged Other, and 18.5% are tagged Multi. Applying otp:true, 25.7% are M/F, 62.6% are F/F, and 12.3% are Other (this likely includes a substantial portion of nonbinary PCs).

KARLACH

Karlach is present in 6.0% of all fic pairings and 5.4% of otp:true fic pairings. She has 31 ship tags in the top 300 ship tags, which condense down to 26 pairings when all player character stand ins are combined.

Her second most popular ship after Tav is with Wyll, though unlike with Shadowheart the pairing is not popular enough to give Tav a run for his/her/their money. Condensing all the player characters widens this gap significantly.

The PC is overwhelmingly Karlach’s most popular ship, with 890 fics. Wyll is second, with 327 fics – less than half as many. Shadowheart and Astarion follow with 226 and 157, respectively. Dammon is next, with 91 fics, and then Lae’zel has 65. She then has a number of threesomes, Minthara (#9 with 32 fics), and Gale (#11 with 18 fics). Halsin is her least popular pairing with a main character, coming in at #15 with 11 fics.

Surprisingly, for all that Karlach is fairly butch, her pairings with men are relatively more popular than we see with the more femme Shadowheart. The category statistics illustrate this clearly.

Compared to Shadowheart, Karlach has a lower proportion of F/F and higher proportions of M/F and Multi fics. F/F is tagged on 51.8% of her fics, M/F on 42.5%, Other on 12.3% and Multi on 27.7%. (Remember that fics can be tagged with multiple categories and that just because a category is tagged doesn’t mean that Karlach is involved in that category.) Looking at otp:true gives us a look at fics where she is the sole focus. F/F is 55.0% of her otp:true fics, M/F drops to 34.4%, Multi drops to 6.1%, and Other stays fairly high at 10.4%.

In Karlach’s pairings with the player character, things change significantly.

It immediately becomes clear that the large number of M/F fics in her general pairings were largely due to her relatively popular ships with Wyll, Astarion, and Dammon. F/F dominates Karlach’s pairings with the PC with 64.0% (67.8% with otp:true applied) of fics, which puts her at just slightly less than Shadowheart. M/F is tagged in 28.5% of her fics with the PC (14.0% with otp:true applied), Multi is tagged 19.4% but drops to 1.2% for otp:true, and Other remains high with 18.0% of fics and 20.2% of otp:true fics with the PC.

Back in January, I noted that of the main cast, Karlach had the highest proportion of ships with nonbinary OCs. I didn’t track the breakdown of OC subcategories this time, but the high numbers in the Other category bear it out.

LAE'ZEL

Counting all fics for all pairings in which Lae’zel is tagged, she is in a mere 3.8% of BG3 pairings, though it rises to 4.5% when otp:true is applied. She is in 23 of the top 300 ship tags, a number that drops down to 18 when I consolidate the player character tags together.

Shadowheart/Lae’zel has twice as many fics as Lae’zel/Tav. Looking at the situation with the PC does not change this much.

Unlike any other main character, Lae’zel’s most popular ship is not with the PC but with Shadowheart. She has 694 fics with Shadowheart, 355 with the PC, 65 with Karlach, 26 with Gale, 26 with Wyll, 25 with Astarion, 16 with Minthara, and 12 with Halsin. She is in an unusually low number of threesomes – only 4. It’s notable though how skewed her numbers are towards women – a threesome with Karlach and Shadowheart has more fics than any of her pairings with a canon man. The various whole team multiship pairings, none of which have more than 11 fics, comprise most of the tail end of her ship list.

Speaking of the tail end of her ship list, what happens when we condense the player character tags is that Lae’zel does not reach a full 20 ships – she drops to 18 pairings. She has more than this, of course, but my methodology ignores all pairings with fewer than 5 fics (which means that my friend’s Lae’zel/Astarion/Tav fic is not counted). Therefore, Lae’zel’s 19th and 20th most popular pairings have 4 fics or fewer. I have represented these missing pairings with little :( emojis, because this is a sad state of affairs.

This is a symptom of a state of affairs in which Lae’zel is just not very popular in the AO3 side of BG3 fandom. Her most popular ship is Shadowheart’s second most popular ship, and the numbers crater after that. No Lae’zel ship other than Shadowheart and the PC has more than 100 fics.

Lae’zel’s most popular ships being women is demonstrated clearly by the fic category breakdown.

Wow! At a whopping 76.3% of all of Lae’zel’s fics and 88.9% of Lae’zel’s otp:true fics, Lae’zel has a higher proportion of F/F fic than Shadowheart. Granted, they’re both sizable portions of each other’s total F/F count. 26.1% of Lae’zel’s fics have the M/F tag, though this drops to a mere 7.1% when otp:true is applied. Other is tagged in 11.6% of fics but drops to 2.0% with otp:true. 18.1% of her fics are tagged Multi but this likewise drops to 4.4% with otp:true.

The pertinent question for Lae’zel is how much of her F/F count is due to her pairing with Shadowheart? How gay are her pairings with the PC?

The answer is... still pretty gay! F/F is not quite as dominant, with 67.3% of all her fics with the PC and 80.0% of her fics where only Lae’zel/PC is tagged – but 80% is a still a really high proportion! This indicates to me that a lot of the M/F in the “All Fics” chart likely does not involve Lae’zel. M/F is tagged in 33.5% of her fics with the PC, a number which is more than halved to 12.7% when otp:true is applied. 13.2% of her fics are tagged Other, which drops to 5.5% with otp:true – much less than for Shadowheart and Karlach. It seems either Lae’zel is not as popular for nonbinary OCs or that a large proportion of the Other tag is from mind flayer Tavs/Durges and people don’t write Lae’zel with a mind flayer love interest.

One other notable fact is that Lae’zel is the only female companion without any otp:true M/M PC fic. It could be due to her low fic numbers in the first place, but I prefer to think that Lae’zel fans are simply more fastidious about correctly tagging fic. It certainly fits her character.

MINTHARA

Ah, Minthara. Unquestionably the least popular of the main romanceable characters in BG3, her pairings only comprise 1.1% of all BG3 fanfic pairings, a number that rises to a whopping(/sarcastic) 1.4% of otp:true pairings. She has only 14 ship tags in the 300 most popular ship tags for BG3, a number that drops further to a mere 9 pairings once I’ve combined all the player character tags.

What’s notable about Minthara’s ship tags is the popularity of the Dark Urge relative to Tav. Minthara has 146 fics with Tav and 80 with the Dark Urge. This is a higher proportion than other main characters have. It may be because more people write her on evil routes (which likely disproportionately feature the Dark Urge) or because she has some very good lines for the Dark Urge and their Slayer form.

Another observation is the lack of primary non-PC ships. The other characters that I look at all have a major non-PC ship – Shadowheart/Lae’zel, Karlach/Wyll, Gale/Astarion, Wyll/Astarion, Halsin/Astarion. Minthara doesn’t really have that. Her most popular non-PC ship is Orin, at #5 and with a mere 45 fics. This is illustrated clearly once all the player character tags are combined.

The PC dominates Minthara’s pairings to an extent not seen with any other character, not even Astarion. She drops from 234 fics with the PC (65 otp:true) to 45 fics with Orin (26 otp:true), 32 with Karlach (16 otp:true) and 26 with Shadowheart (11 otp:true). Every other pairing has 16 or less fics. Tying into that, Minthara has very few pairings with 5 or more fics. She does not even have enough for a top 10! I have replaced her missing pairings with the :( emoji because this is sad.

Another notable thing about this chart, though, is how few fics Minthara has just in general. Lae’zel and Wyll, the other neglected companions, both have at least 500 fics with their most popular partner. Minthara does not even break 250. In fact, none of her pairings with someone other than the PC have over 50 fics.

Another interesting fact is that Minthara is the only character in this analysis to not have any threesomes or moresomes in her pairings with over 5 fics. She doesn’t share, it seems.

For some reason, Minthara has 8 ships with Councillor Florrick of all people. And it’s not all by the same author, which is what I would expect for a somewhat out there pairing. Presumably someone out there wrote a really good fic which then inspired others to play with the idea. In a small fandom like Minthara’s, one fic like that can make quite a difference.

As can be expected, Minthara’s fic categories are pretty damn gay.

F/F is tagged in 79.0% of her fics (77.6% of otp:true fics). M/M is tagged in 21.3% of her fics (17.1% of otp:true fics), Other in 6.1% (4.6% otp:true), and Multi in 8.9% though it drops to 1.3% of her otp:true fics. With these numbers, Minthara is arguably the gayest major character in the BG3 fandom by fic count, though Lae’zel beats her when you take otp:true into effect.

This pattern holds true when looking at her ship with the player character. 77.8% of her fics with the PC are tagged F/F (73.8% of otp:true fics), 23.5% are tagged M/F (15.4% otp:true), 8.5% are tagged Other (10.8% otp:true), and 9.4% are tagged Multi (3.1% otp:true). The latter is a bit confusing given that she has no multiship pairings. It may include collections of Reader/[X] fics that include Minthara.

PART 2

Welp. I’ve run into the tumblr post image limit. For part 2 of this essay, which discusses Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin and then compares all 8 of the main characters against each other on a variety of metrics, see this link.

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #fanfic #ao3 #statistics #data visualization #tav #dark urge #shadowheart #karlach #lae'zel #minthara #fandom #mine #shipping

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dragonnarrative-writes · 3 months ago

Text

Slasher Handler Part 11 - Slip Lead

Slasher Handler Masterlist

Read on AO3

NSFW under the cut.

CW: Implied stalking/surveillance, implied kidnapping, physical injury, deception/emotional manipulation, physical violence, injury with knife, genuinely not enough information, hidden weapons

Something about stabbing him, about meeting Price, has resulted in you being able to stray a bit farther from Simon’s orbit. You’re still on a rather short lead, there is a list of unspoken rules between the two of you as long as your arm. But you’re going out alone more. You don’t feel Simon’s eyes on you every moment he’s out of your sight. It’s weird.

But when it comes to Simon, it’s best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. So you start a routine of going to the cafe down the street twice a week or so to work and see other human beings. It’s surprisingly difficult, some days. More than once, you’ve felt too exposed and retreated back home. These days, you have more good days than bad. As long as people don’t talk to you too much, you’re fine.

So it’s a bit jarring when someone clears his throat while you’re wrangling spreadsheets.

The man is in a light jacket, tee shirt and jeans. Looks like he works out. Kind of a stupid haircut, but he’s at least committed to it. Very distinct looking, Simon’s voice says in your head, easy to track. Unlikely to cause problems.

Something about him makes the hair on your arms stand on end.

“D’ya mind?” he gestures to the chair across from you. At your skeptical look, he rushes to assure you, “ Jus’ fer mah coffee, ‘n t’read,” holding up a thick paperback. He gestures to the rest of the cafe. “Wouldnae bother you, but this’s the only open chair.”

The shop is unusually crowded. You frown up at him. “I’m really busy.”

“Willnae hear a peep from me,” he promises, setting down his coffee and pulling out the chair across from you. He turns the chair so he’s facing more of the room instead of the corner you’re in. And he opens his book.

You watch him for a minute, but he doesn’t look up. It’s hard to shake the feeling that something is wrong, but you do need to work. With a last wary glance at him, you settle your headphones over your ears - transparency on - and get back to organizing a data set that reminds you of a ball of duct tape.

It’s time for a break before you know it. Your companion, true to his word, hasn’t said a peep since he sat down, more than an hour ago. He barely looks up as you close your laptop before turning back to his book. He does look up when you flag down one of the servers.

“Lunch,” you say, inanely. To the server, you say, “Can I get the chicken sandwich today?”

“Chips ‘n a lemonade, yeah?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

They turn to your table mate. “And for you?”

“The same, ah guess?” He raises his eyebrows at you, like he expects you to give him permission or something. He looks back at the server. “Yeah, a chicken piece for me, as well. ‘Nd a juice?”

“Separate checks?”

“Aye, ta,” the guy says. When the server leaves, he blanches. “Hope you dinnae mind.”

You do mind, but it’s not like he can sit anywhere else right now. “It’s fine.”

He sets his book on the table, and your eyebrows shoot up. Whatever you thought he’d be reading, Jurassic Park wasn’t it. He grins. “Ah ken. It’s old, yeah? But it’s a damn sight better’n the movie.”

“Isn’t that how it goes,” you say, vaguely.

But you’ve already fallen into his trap. He turns his chair to face you, crossing his arms and leaning into the table. His eyes are unnervingly blue - somehow even bluer than Simon’s - and bright with interest. “’M serious. It’s not just that a character yells in the movie and speaks softly in the book, aye? In fact, the movie made Dr. Sattler older, aye? Great choice, emphasize ‘er expertise.”

Aging up a woman character? You’re reluctantly intrigued. “She was a less important character in the book?”

“Nae,” the man scoffs. “She’s probably the first o’em to realize how shite the whole thing is. Notices things. Stuff the other’s aren’t payin’ attention to because she’s the plant expert, an’ naebody pays attention to plants.”

You find yourself drawn in, in spite of yourself. Johnny, as he introduces himself, has obviously been waiting for a chance to talk about it, but he’s not pushy. He excitedly pulls a pen from his pocket to doodle along with his explanations. By the time your food has arrived, he’s convinced you to at least try the audiobook.

“I cannae pay attention stuff in mah ears,” he says with a grin as he starts to dig in. “But I hear good things, if you don’t ‘ave time to sit an’ read the text.”

As you nod along, you look up and almost choke on your next swallow. Simon is outside, looking at you through the window with raised eyebrows above his usual black surgical mask. His eyes flick to give the man at your table an obvious once over. And then he turns away and walks out of sight.

“Ye alrigh’?” Johnnys’ eyebrows are up near his hairline when you look back at him. “Ye look like ye’ve seen a ghost.”

“Y-yeah,” you say, torn between staying seated and the urge to run after Simon. You can’t help but look at the window again, but he’s gone, there’s nothing for it. “Sorry, I thought… Sorry. Yeah, I’ll get the audiobook.”

When you get home, Simon is on the couch, the TV on with the volume low. He watches you, like he always does, as you take off your shoes and shuffle around to put away your things. When you finally join him on the couch, you find that he’s watching a nature documentary. A crocodile slides under the water with barely a ripple.

“He was only sitting with me because there wasn’t anywhere else,” you rush to say.

Simon turns to cock his head at you. “You get ‘is name?”

“John. Johnny,” you answer. “He told me about his book, but I left as soon as we were done eating.”

“Good,” he says with a nod. He lifts the arm closest to you, pulling you close as you settle into his side. “’S good to have friends, Precious.”

“He’s not a friend. Just some guy out to lunch like everyone else.”

“You let him stay,” Simon points out. He squeezes you in a rough approximation of a one armed hug. “Been nervous around people, but you’re gettin’ better.”

This isn’t what you expected. You can’t help but side-eye him. “You’re… proud of me?”

Simon’s lips press gently against your forehead. “’S long as you pick better this time, I don’t mind you ‘aving friends. Can’t keep you all to myself forever. ‘Sides, you’ve marked me proper, ‘aven’t you? Got me as your little pet. Johnny’s not gonna be a problem.”

The little pink scar around his ribs is little more than a raised line. You slide your fingers under his shirt to pet at it. Among all of his scars, it’s one of the smallest. You’d cried the first time he’d let you see under the bandages.

“You’re not a pet,” you grumble, leaning your head on his shoulder. “You’re an alligator who won’t leave my house.”

“Your alligator, now,” Simon agrees. He focuses back on the television, seemingly done with the conversation.

You could leave it at that. But you turn to face him, instead. “You’re not mad?”

“Not unless ‘e ‘urts ya.” Simon presses his lips against your hair. “An’ I wouldn’t let that ‘appen.”

The following week, though, he stands over you with an exaggerated grimace at how crowded the place is. “Och, d’ya mind?”

Johnny is there the next time you go to the cafe. He waves from his table, but ducks back into his notebook without waving you over. So you work from your own table in peace. When you take a break for lunch, he’s gone. Two days later, it’s the same. It’s easier to concentrate, now that you’re less worried that he’ll take the conversation from the other day as an invitation.

With a sigh, you clear some space for him. But just like last time, he keeps to himself, reading and occasionally jotting things down in his notebook. It’s not until just before lunch that he breaks the silence.

“D’y’ve a boyfriend then?” You can’t keep yourself from cringing fast enough, apparently, because he laughs. “Sorry, sorry, shouldnae asked.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” you grumble.

“Aw,” he coos. “Don’ worry hen. You’re right bonnie. Ah’m sure they’ll come around, whoever they are.”

That would be sweet, if it wasn’t so painfully off base. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Oh, you’re right done wit’ me,” he laughs. “Ah ken’t I shoulda kept mah mouth shut. Ma always said runnin’ mah mouth would get me into trouble. I won’t bother ye again.”

You roll your eyes. “It’s fine. I just don’t want to talk about it.”

He doesn’t push, and you’re grateful. But when it comes time to pay for lunch, he insists on paying. It grates on your nerves. A gift from a guy is never just generosity, you learned that long before Brandon. But you clench your jaw and pack your bag up a bit more roughly than usual and say your goodbyes.

“They didn’t have the brownies you wanted,” you announce as you return home from the grocer, two days later. “I think it was a limited edi…tion…”

You notice Simon watching through the window, but he’s there and gone before you can get a read on his expression.

There’s a smattering of blood on the entryway carpet.

You don’t drop the bag with the eggs, but only because your muscles are locked up. Did someone break into the apartment? Was Simon here when they did, or next door? Did they leave? Did he take them?

A sound makes you gasp before you bite your tongue hard enough to taste blood. And then again, a muffled groan, close, from the direction of your couch.

It’s not Simon’s voice.

You gently set your bags down and reach behind the coats for the blackjack Simon insisted on leaving there for security. There’s a rustling. Another groan. You stoop low, trying to make yourself a smaller target, and creep around the edge of the couch.

When you see Johnny, bound and gagged, shirt covered in blood where he lies on the floor, your stomach drops so fast you feel dizzy.

“No, no, no, no, no,” you whisper, dropping the jack with a thump. You crawl over to him, looking around frantically. Simon is nowhere to be seen. But he did this. He had to have done this. Right?

Johnny twitches, groans again, eyelids fluttering open. When he sees you, his eyes go wide, and he frantically tries to sit up.

“No, don’t! I don’t know where you’re hurt,” you hiss. You reach around his head to untie the cloth that’s gagging him. “Oh my god-”

“We gotta get out’f here, bonnie,” he grunts, leaning into your hands as you help him upright. He spits blood on the floor. “No tellin’ when that mental bastard gets back.”

“Oh god,” you whisper again, touching the front of his shirt. It’s dark and sticky in a bloom across his chest. “Where are you hurt? Did he stab you?”

“Ah’m okay,” he grunts. “A bit banged up, but ah’ll live.”

You swallow down the urge to vomit. “There’s a lot of blood, Johnny.”

“S’nae all mine,” he answers. “C’mon, untie me, before Simon gets back.”

You’re shifting to reach behind him before your mind catches up. You can feel the blood drain from your face. “W-what? What did you say?”

“We need to get out of here!”

“No, you said his name, you called him - ”

“Simon? That’s what ye called him when you came home,” he hisses.

“No, I didn’t,” you whisper, body stuttering between frozen and electrified. You never call Simon’s name where others can hear. “And - and I - you - you were unconscious.”

Shining blue eyes stare into yours from two inches away. Johnny’s bloody mouth curls into a smile. “Oh, he’s trained you up good, he has.”

You scream when he lunges forward, huge arms grabbing at you.

His weight crushes the air out of your lungs when your back hits the ground. You twist under him, using the arm he hasn’t trapped to grab his hair and yank. He swears, and loosens his hold just enough that you’re able to free your other hand and jab him in the throat.

You expect the way that he chokes, but the hand he’s twisted in the back of your shirt stays locked tight. He coughs out a frenzied laugh as you twist. Your heart races as he prevents you from getting your knees up between your belly and his. But he doesn’t expect you to hammer the heel of your boot against the back of his knee, or how you use the leverage against his leg to roll away onto your belly.

He doesn’t let go of you, but that’s fine, that’s okay, as long as you can reach under the edge of the couch. Johnny pounces, body curling around you without quite pinning you down. His fingers twist into your hair in an echo of how you wrenched at him. But he doesn’t stop your hand, grabbing the leg of the couch and then reaching under and up and-

“Try again, Bonnie,” Johnny chuckles into your ear when your hand meets nothing but cotton and wood.

Your heart doesn’t have time to stop. The grinding pain between your hip bone and the floor makes you pop up your pelvis and reach down. The tiny knife, Little K, jumps to your hand. It’s so easy to flick it open, you think you almost cut your own belly as you heave. Johnny rides you for a moment, then pops up onto his knees to let you roll freely.

You don’t have time to decide, gut or femoral, you just swing. Denim parts, pressure -

Johnny yelps.

His weight is suddenly gone, and the arc of your arm slams the back of your hand and your elbow onto the carpet. It’s a shock, almost hard enough to make you drop the knife. You flick your eyes around, nearly blind with tunnel vision, and see Johnny standing over you. His jeans are slashed, outer thigh almost to crotch, but you can’t see blood, fuck.

He sways, oddly. Is your vision swimming? He doesn’t descend on you again, though, just laughs and wiggles. One of his feet isn’t on the ground, his injured leg is dangling, did you get him?

You imagine you can see Simon’s face, a little angry and a little amused. If you die here, Johnny will live to see his own intestines, you know it. Even if you survive, he won’t. Simon might gift you another skull. The thought almost has a laugh bubbling out of you.

“You stupid motherfucker,” you hiss.

“Oh, now you’ve done it.”

Simon’s voice startles you into action. You’re off your back and scrabbling backward in and instant as he manifests behind Johnny. Except, you realize, that Simon is holding Johnny up, one arm snaked under Johnny’s and hand around the back of his neck. That’s why Johnny looks off balance, it’s because he is, because Simon is here, he’s going to save you-

“Did real good, Precious,” Simon says with a grin. “Knew you’d get along.”

What? “What?”

Simon says something else, but you can barely hear him over your heart pounding in your ears. But you hear it when Johnny laughs. You see when Simon releases him with a ruffle to his mohawk and a shove toward the armchair. Before you know it, Simon’s scooped you into his arms and taken his usual seat on the couch. He pries the knife from your hand and snaps it closed.

“Told you I was thinkin’ of gettin you a dog,” Simon rumbles, sitting you in his lap so your back is against his chest. Before you can protest that no, he never once mentioned a fucking dog, he continues, “This’n’s mostly ‘ousebroken, already. Soap needs a firm ‘and, but you c’n ‘andle him.

Soap? What the fuck does soap have to do with anything? What kind of a name is…

"Oi!” Simon barks. “Off the furniture.”

Your stomach drops as you remember John Price, two months ago now. “Soap’s supposed to be my troublemaker, not you.” Soap.

When your wide eyes swing to him, Johnny’s face is split into a toothy grin. He tips his head back against the seat of the arm chair. One of his hands touches the blood blooming through his jeans and brings it up to his lips. He laves his tongue over his fingers. “Ah’m lookin’ forward to gettin’ to know you, Bonnie.”

A part of you wants to get up and slit his throat. The rest of you slumps back into Simon’s chest and bursts into tears.

#dragonnarrativewrites fanfiction #cod #simon ghost riley #dark fic #simon riley x you #slasher handler #simon riley x you smut #manic pixie dream ghost #soap suds #he's heeeeeeeeeere #this evil unhinged motherfucker #i'm so happy to get this out #these scenes have been in my head for so long #just to answer all of the questions that will come up: (:

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hoejosatoru · 6 months ago

Text

Roster Hopper - Aoba Johsai edition

Pairings: Fem!y/n X Aoba Johsai players (Oikawa, Iwaizumi, Matsukawa, Kunimi, Kyōtani (mad dog)) all separately. Y/n's skin color/hair color is not specified.

Summary: Y/n bets her friend she can sleep with the star players of Aoba Johsai (Univiersity AU) without any of them finding out.

Original Karasuno version here, Nekoma version here

Word Count: 6.2K

Warnings: Sex with multiple guys (separately), stoner!Matsukawa bc I hc him like that, reader smokes, unprotected sex, oral, fingering, mirror sex, semi publicish sex, rough sex, spanking, thumb in ass, squirting, the works lads were are fucking 5 men in one story, Iwaizumi bias sorry not sorry, not proof read MDNI

"I cannot believe the way these girls act," You huffed, settling next to your best friend and co manager. This was the second time today you had to kick out a bunch of girls trying to get a glimpse of Oikawa from practice.

Your friend chuckled. "You get used to it, but it is very bizarre." You and your friend were managers of your university's highly regarded volleyball team. Your friend did it last year, convincing you to do it with her when the other manager graduated. Oikawa's groupies no longer phased her.

"What is he doing to these girls? I mean he's good looking, but he's just another student," you replied.

"Maybe he's hooking up with them? Like the dick is so good it drives the crazy," your friend said, snickering.

"There's no way he's that good," you chuckled. "Honestly, I feel like he's not even the best on the team."

"You've spend thinking about this?" your friend teased.

"Hey these practices are long, what else am I supposed to do?" you responded.

"Fair enough," your friend said. "So who do you think is the best, then?'

"My guess is Iwaizumi," you replied, "But unfortunately I don't have any proof."

"I don't have any proof either, but honestly I think you're right," your friend replied, "But I wouldn't count Oikawa out. He's gotta be doing something right for these girls to act like that."

An idea hit you. "What if I could get proof?"

Your friend's brow arched. "What do you mean?"

"Let's pick like the top 5 guys on the team. I'll sleep with all of them and then I can rank who's the best." It sounded crazy leaving your mouth, but it didn't make you want to do it any less.

Your friend gaped at you. "I think you might have caught whatever crazy the Oikawa fan girls have."

You shrugged. "Maybe, but come on, aren't you curious?"

"I can't lie, I am intrigued," your friend replied, "But it seems unlikely. That's a lot guys to get through and they're bound to talk."

"I bet you $200 I can do it with none of them finding out," you countered, feeling bold.

"You're on," you friend shook your hand. The two of you discussed details. In order to get the most accurate results, you were to let them take the lead. If you started telling them what moves to do, or what you liked you'd get a skewed experience. And it was crucial none of them found out. If they knew they were in competition, they might try extra hard, which, again, would skew the data in this very scientific study. You both agreed that you would have until the end of the semester to get it done. Fair enough, considering it just started.

"Also coach is super strict about girls," your friend said, "He thinks it is a distraction, so if he found out you might lose your spot." It certainly added to the stakes, but you were willing to risk it. You had faith in yourself. You both easily decided to on Oikawa, Iwaizumi, Kumini, and Matsukawa as the top four, but struggled with the last guy.

Your friend got a devilish grin. "I think it should be Kyōtani." Your eyes drifted to the court where Kyōtani, who the team somewhat affectionately named mad dog, was slamming spikes over the net.

"I think you want me dead," you replied, "But I am curious. Sure let's make him number 5." And so you had your targets set.

Matsukawa was your first attempt because, frankly, he seemed the easiest. He flirted with you a few times at past parties so you figured you had a good shot at this one. You weaved through the crowd at the team house until you found him scrolling his phone, alone. Perfect.

"Hey Matsukawa," you beamed.

He perked up when he saw you, eye flicking over your body. You wore your favorite pair of jeans and a little top that hugged your body perfectly. From the twitch of his mouth, you guessed he liked what he saw. "Hey y/n, what's up?"

"I was wondering if you had any weed?" you batted your lashed at him,

His grin widened. "Course, you wanna smoke?"

"Do you mind?"

"Not at all. We just gotta do it upstairs, cause, you know." You nodded, understanding what he meant. Matsukawa was the only guy on the team who smoked, at least openly. Most of the guys gave him shit about it, saying it would fuck up his stamina and mess with his performance in games. So now, he had to hide it. Which worked out rather well for you.

You followed Matsukawa up to his room in the team house, both careful to avoid attention from other teammates. Luckily, it was a rather crowded party and you were able to make it to his room unnoticed.

"I can roll us a blunt?"

"Please," you replied, sitting comfortably on his bed. Matsukawa smiled, pleased at the look of you in his bed, before turning his attention to his rolling papers. He was quick and efficient joining you with a perfectly rolled blunt moment later. "You're good at that."

He grinned, lighting up, "Lot's a practice. You do the honors of taking the first hit." Matsukawa watched as you took the blunt between your plush lips. It was clear by the way he looked at you this would not be hard. You passed the blunt back and forth until it was finished, feeling a little high.

"You look like you want something," you flirt, holding Matsukawa's gaze. You leaned in closer to him, just inches from his face. "And I think I know what it is."

"Hmm, and what's that?" Matsukawa mused.

"This," you whispered before pressing your lips to his. Matsukawa's arms instantly wrapped around you, pulling you into him. You straddled his lap, playing with hair at the base of his neck as you kissed him deeper. You rolled your hips against him once to test the waters, eliciting a hum of pleasure from him. You continued your movements as Matsukawa let his hands explore your body, squeezing your ass and tits.

Matsukawa was fully hard before you even took your shirt off. He buried his face in your tits, sucking on the soft flesh and kneading with his large, warm hands. His tongue flicked over your nipple, making your arousal pool between your legs. He ravished your tits with his hands and mouth, making you ache with desire.

"Can I take these off?" Matsukawa asked, noting how you've become more needy. His fingers were hooked into pants the second you nodded, pulling them off you.

"Not fair that I'm the only one naked," you noted, pulling at the hem of his shirt.

Matsukawa smirked. "Be my guest." You stripped him down, pulling his stiff cock out of his pants. You ran your thumb over his tip, spreading his precum. You positioned yourself over him, before sinking down on to him with a satisfied sigh. He wasn't too big, but enough to make you feel full and satisfied.

You gripped his shoulders for leveraged as you rolled your hips. Matsukawa groaned as you fucked yourself on him, "God, you feel so good." He leaned back on his hands, allowing him to watch your tits bounce as you rode him. He planted his feet on the bed allowing him to fuck up into you.

"Shit just like that," you moaned, feeling him press deeper into you. Your clit hit against him with each thrust, sending jolts of pleasure through you. You dug your nails into his shoulder as you finally teetered over the edge, crying out his name.

"Fuck," Matsukawa moaned as he spilled inside you. His hips stuttered before finally coming to a stop. Matsukawa excused himself to grab you a towel from the bathroom connected to his room.

"Thanks," you said as he tossed it to you. You quickly cleaned yourself up, eager to get back to the party before it was obvious you were both gone. "Hey Matsukawa? Do you mind if we keep this between us? You know how the guys are, especially with, you know." You nodded over to the remnants of weed on his nightstand.

Matsukawa nodded, not looking to get another anti smoking lecture from Iwaizumi. "It's in the vault."

The opportunity to get with Kyōtani came unexpectedly. It was after practice, but you stayed behind to organize the team storage room. The sound of a ball being smacked around. You peaked out to find Kyōtani smacking the ball as hard as could against the wall.

"Everything okay?" you asked gently. His nickname of mad dog was fitting, as you often felt like you were approaching a feral animal when you had to talk to him.

He didn't look at you as he replied, "Coach said I need to get my aggression out." He smacked the ball harder, it ricocheting off the wall and back to him in a flash. "Apparently it's impacting my game."

"Is that why you're abusing the volleyballs?" you half joked, but he didn't crack a smile. You were beginning to wonder if you wouldn't be able to make this work.

"Yeah, don't know what else to do," he grumbled.

Well, you might as well go for it. "I've heard that sex is a good way to get out aggression."

This caught his attention. He caught the ball and turned to look at you for the first time since you came in. He had an unreadable scowl on his face. "Are you making fun of me?"

"No, not at all!" you replied quickly, "I was reading a sports magazine the other day and a professional athlete was talking about it. Said that he always had sex before games because it helped him calm down and think better." You were impressed at how quickly you thought on your feet, though you did feel a touch bad about lying. You were pretty sure sex relieves frustration so it wasn't that much of a lie.

"Well our game is tomorrow so I don't think I'll find someone in time to help with that," he replied flatly.

"I'll help you," you replied, "I mean, if you'd want that."

Kyotani's brows furrowed. "Are you fucking with me?"

"No, I promise," you replied earnestly. "I know tomorrow is an important game. I can't do anything to help during the game as a manager, but I could do this. Just think of all the spikes you'll get if coach puts you in more." You played at his desire to be in the games more and you could see the gears turning in his head.

"Okay, yeah" Kyōtani replied, "Let's do it. Come here." You obliged, surprised he agreed and buzzing with anticipation over what he would do. When you were within arms reach, Kyotani spun you around, so you were facing the wall. He pinned you in with his hands on either side of you. "This doesn't have to be romantic, it's just business, yeah?"

"Right, no feelings," you agreed. You both were using each other for a bigger goal, so this didn't bother you at all.

Kyotani brushed the hair away from your shoulder, his head dipping into your neck. He licked up the length of your neck before biting into your sensitive skin. It didn't hurt, but the surprise of it made you gasp. "I like it rough," Kyotani began, his hands wrapping your front to squeeze your breasts. "If it's too much, tell me to stop."

You nodded and he continued. He kissed at your neck as his hands traveled down your body and into your pants. He pumped a finger in and out of you, then added another to prep you for him. It wasn't romantic at all, as he stated, but there was something hot about it. Perhaps it was the way you were using each other, or the roughness in his touch, or the fact that you were doing this in the gym where you could walk in on you. It was sinful, wrong. But that turned you on even more.

"Bend over and put your hands on the wall," Kyotani instructed, though he was already manhandling your body into the position. You felt the cold air hit your wetness as he yanked down your pants, making you shiver. You arched your back in anticipation as you heard his pants slide down.

"Oh!" you gasped as he pressed himself into you. He was thick, your body needing to stretch around him. He let out a hiss as he bottomed out, both of you adjusting to the feel of the other. Kyotani wasted no time on adjusting, though, he gripped your hips and began to thrust into you. He snapped his hips hard and fast as your gripped the wall for leverage.

His hand came down on your ass with a hard smack. You moaned at the stinging sensation. "You like that?" he asked, smacking your ass again. "Fuck, yeah you do." Kyotani's pace never let up, making you breathless and sensitive. When he wasn't slapping your ass, he was gripping your hips with bruising force, allowing him to fuck you with all his might.

"Shit I'm gonna-" your words died as you came around him, your body shaking. Your knees buckled, but he held you firmly. He fucked you practically like a rag doll until he came, finishing inside you with a deep grunt. You were not surprised by his roughness, rather your enjoyment of it.

"I think I feel calmer, thanks," Kyotani said as you both redressed. It was almost comical, his treatment of this exchange. Like it was a totally normal thing to happen.

"Oh good, but do you mind if we don't tell anyone?" you asked, "Coach is weird about stuff with girls, you know? I would hate for him not to play you for something like this."

Kyotani's eyes darkened at the thought of being put on the sidelines. "I won't say a word."

2 down, 3 to go.

It was midterms week and everyone was stressed. Big tests and lots of games going on was never a good mix. Part of your job as manager was to check in with players and makes sure they were doing okay. When you found Kunimi and Kindaichi having a heated conversation, you had incorrectly assumed it was about academics.

"Everything okay boys?" you asked the first years. The color drained from Kunimi's face, while Kindaichi had a wicked grin.

"Kunimi is afraid he won't be able to impress the girl he likes because he's a virgin," Kindaichi announced.

"Dude shut up!" Kunimi huffed, his face reddening.

Kindaichi had no idea what gift he just gave you. "Aw, don't be embarrassed Kunimi," you replied sweetly, "There's nothing wrong with that. It wouldn't bother me if I was her." Kunimi relaxed and Kindaichi frowned, not having gotten the reaction he wanted. Before anyone could say more, the whistle blew signaling the start of practice.

When practice ended, you approached Kunimi when he was alone. "So tell me about this girl you like," you said.

Kunimi blushed, embarrassed that the pretty second year manager knew about his girl problems. And that he was virgin. "There’s not much to tell. Just a girl in my class who I think is cute. I've only talked to her a few times, but never asked her out. I'm just nervous that I, you know, would embarrassed myself because..." His voice trailed off because he could not bring himself to say it in front of you.

"Listen, you don't have to worry about all that. You're super cute and she'd be lucky to hang out with you," you began, "But if you're really concerned I'd help you."

Kunimi was so surprised you called him cute he couldn't process the second half of your statement. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, if you want, you don't have to be a virgin," you replied, "I'll show you what girls like. that way you'll feel less pressure with this girl after getting your first time out of the way."

Kunimi blinked. He could not believe you of all people were offering to take his virginity. "Are you serious? You're not playing a prank on me with Kindaichi, are you?"

"I swear I'm sincere," you replied, "All that I asked is you don't tell anyone. If the other guys found out, they might be weird about it."

"Of course," Kunimi nodded. He would not risk ruining this for himself. "But could I tell Kindaichi you called me cute. He kinda has a crush on you and I want to rub in his face since he put me on blast like that in front of you."

You chuckled. "Sure, just nothing about us sleeping together, okay?"

"I promise." You made a plan to meet in his dorm next weekend, as his roommate was gonna be away. You figured if he hadn't spilled the secret by then, you could trust him to keep it locked up.

When Saturday rolled around and no one knew of your little plan, you found yourself in Kunimi's dorm. "We totally don't have to do this if you don't want to," Kunimi said, shifting nervously on the bed. You thought his angst was sweet.

"Don't worry Kunimi, I want to," you replied. You placed your hand on his cheek gently. "You're sure you want to?" Kunimi nodded eagerly, making you smile. "Okay, let's start easy then. Kiss me." Kunimi leaned into and pressed his lips to yours. You slid that hand on his cheek to the back of his neck, pulling him closer.

Kunimi was a good kisser. His lips moved rhythmically, tongue dipping in and out of your mouth with ease. Both your hands explored each other's bodies, getting used to the feel of the other. You almost got lost in the moment, but then remembered you were here for a purpose.

"What's the furthest you've gone with a girl?" you asked after pulling away. Kunimi's pupils were blown out and it took him a minute to respond, like he almost forgot why he was here too.

"Oh, um fingering," he blushed. His eyes kept flicking down the length of your body.

"Did she cum?"

"Yes," he replied confidently.

You smiled, "Good boy." Kunimi blushed deeper and if you didn't have a lesson to teach you'd want to explore that more. "Is there anything in particular you wanna learn?"

"Yeah, uh, going down on a girl," Kunimi replied, "If you're okay with that."

"I'm very okay with that," you grinned. "Let's work up to it, yeah? Just like you've been doing. Girls like when you kiss them and take your time. Gets us turned on." Kunimi nodded dutifully, returning to your lips. You kissed each other more purposefully now. You stripped each other of your shirts and Kunimi gently squeezed at your tits.

He kissed them both, before progressing lower down your body with a line of kisses. He reached your pants and looked up at you for permission, which you gave. "That was a good move, kissing all the way down. You sure you haven't done this before?"

"Honestly? I saw it in a porno," Kunimi replied, making you chuckle. Kunimi stripped off your pants. You spread your legs wider, allowing him to settle between them. He flushed at the sight of your wetness.

"You know how you were kissing me with tongue before? Start like that and we'll go from there," you told him. Kunimi did as you said and you let out a soft sigh when his lips connected to your pussy. He moved tentatively, trying to find the right rhythm. The more he tasted you, the harder he worked, driven to please you.

"Move your tongue higher. A little bit more oh-" your sentence cut off when his tongue found your clit. Kunimi responded to your moan, focusing his energy to that spot. His tongue flicked and swirled over the sensitive bud, making your hips stir. You threaded your fingers through his hair, holding him where he was, though he wasn't planning to move an inch. "Fuck Kunimi!" you cried out, as your orgasm flooded your body. You didn't even have to pretend to boost his confidence; it was that good.

"Okay, I seriously don't believe you've never done that before," you said when you finally caught your breath.

Kunimi beamed, "I swear it was."

"You ready for the next step?"

Kunimi nodded, his cock heavy in his boxers after experiencing you cumming on his tongue. You undressed him, admiring the length of him and the bead of pre cum that sat at the tip. You wrapped your hand around the base of him, guiding him to your entrance. You slid his tip through your wetness, making him nice and slick.

"Whenever you're ready," you said, eyes flicking up to his.

"Promise you won't laugh if I cum quick?" he asked.

"Promise," you smiled reassuringly.

Kunimi slid himself in slowly, gasping at the feeling of your pussy around him. Of course he'd imagined this moment before, but he couldn't believe how tight and wet and warm it really felt. "Fuck," he groaned, stilling himself for a moment. He knew you wouldn't laugh at him but he really did not want to cum the second he put it in.

"It's okay take your time," you said, "plus it's good to take your time. Girls need a little time to adjust, especially because you're big." Calling his dick big gave him the confidence to keep going. He moved slowly, allowing himself to get used to the feeling of you.

You felt so good, though, it was hard for him to control himself. His thrusts became quicker, desperate. He knew he should slow down, but the feel of you wrapped around him was too good to stop. "So good Kuni, just like that," you encouraged. The fast snap of his hips was working up your already sensitive cunt all over again.

"Y/n, I- shit," Kunimi moaned, unable to stop the orgasm that built in his body. His body stuttered as he released himself inside. The sensation sent you over the edge, making you cream around him. Kunimi let out a strangled breath at the feeling of you squeezing around his sensitive cock.

"Kunimi," you said when he collapsed next to you, panting, "I don't think you have to worry about pleasing girls at all." Kunimi smiled proudly, feeling accomplished that he finally lost his virginity.. Little did he know you were beaming from your own accomplishment. You were over halfway there.

After midterms, the mood on the team lightened. Everyone was excited for the big away game you were at, as you got to spend the night at a hotel. It was a much needed break after all the tests. You were doing rounds, making sure the guys were in their rooms and not making a mess of the place.

"Come in," you heard Oikawa's voice from the other side of the door. You entered his hotel room, finding him alone. "What's up, y/n?"

"Just making sure no ones burning down the hotel," you replied, "Who are you supposed to be staying with?"

Oikawa grinned, stretching out on the large bed in an exaggerated fashion. "Got the whole place to myself. Coach accidentally booked an extra room. I bet Iwaizumi that I could get more service aces and this was my prize for being right."

"Very nice," you replied. The gears started turning in your head; this was an opportunity you could not pass up. "Your fan girls were really something today."

Oikawa shrugged, "Can you blame them? I was playing well."

"I think they are more interested in what you could do off the court," you replied.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Oikawa said with a grin that told you he knew exactly what you were talking about.

You yawned in faux boredom. "I guess I just don't get it."

Oikawa scowled. "What do you mean?"

"No offense, but I just don't picture you at being good at... that," you replied. It was risky calculation to infer you didn't think he was good in bed, it could definitely just piss him off. But if you knew Oikawa, you knew that there was nothing he loved more than proving someone wrong.

"You must have a shitty imagination then," Oikawa replied. After a pause he added, "Let me prove you wrong." You had to stifle your laugh. Looks like you played your cards right.

"Someone's eager," you teased.

Oikawa rolled his eyes. "You're the one who came in here and started talking about sex. I bet this was your goal all along."

You feigned nonchalance, "I was just having a chat with you. But I can't lie, now I'm intrigued."

"Yeah, I bet," Oikawa replied, "Get over here." You followed, joining him on the bed. "For the record, I am going to make you say I was right and you were wrong when I'm done with you." His lips were on yours before you could reply. You both tried to take control, but you eventually submitted to him. You were okay with playing into his ego for the greater good.

Oikawa's hands slid up and down your clothed body. You could tell even then he was good with his touch. He ghosted over your core a few times, never truly touching you. It effectively worked you up. "Wait, I've got an idea," Oikawa said with a devilish grin, "I want you in front of the mirror." He nodded to the large floor length mirror in the corner of the room. Your pussy throbbed at the possibilities.

Oikawa sat you in front of him, your back flush to his chest. He pulled your pants down your legs, smirking at the wet spot on your underwear. "That wet already? You're making this too easy for me, y/n," Oikawa's voice was low in your ear, making you stir. He slid your underwear off slowly, no doubt trying to make you more antsy. His fingers trailed back up the length of your leg, calloused and warm.

A low sigh left your lips when he finally touched your center, dragging his finger through your slick. He teased your clit, getting you more worked up before he really touched you. He slid a finger into you, pressing at that sweet spot inside you in slow, lazy strokes.

"Can feel you sucking me in," Oikawa murmured, "You wanted this bad, huh?" You moaned in response as a second finger slid into you. You could not deny, he was good with his hands. His touch was skillful, easily finding what made your body react. He picked up the pace, fucking you with his fingers as his thumb rubbed at your neglected clit. The sound of his fingers plunging into you was pornographic.

"Look at the mess your making," Oikawa said, nudging you to look in the mirror. His fingers were coated in a wet sheen and you were dripping down onto his thighs, soaking the fabric of his sweats. "Bet you wanna cum, huh? I can tell, can feel you squeezing my fingers."

"Please," was all you could gasp. Your eyes fell down to where Oikawa's fingers disappeared inside you. The pump of muscles in his forearms as his fingers fucked you, the feel of his ever growing hard on rubbing against your ass, it was all too much.

"Hmm, I'll let you cause you said please," Oikawa replied, pressing his thumb faster against your aching clit. You cried out his name as he gripped your thigh with his free had, keeping your legs spread for him. You both watched as you came, your cunt fluttering around his long fingers. Your body went slack against him, but he wasn't finished with you yet.

"I'm feeling generous today," Oikawa smirked as he pulled his cock out of his sweats. His dick was as pretty as he was, long and flushed a soft shade of pink.

"How unlike you." You still had it in you to banter with him. Oikawa chuckled, lifting your hips so he could slide his length into you.

"Prepped you well," Oikawa mused, "can feel you sucking me in." He bottomed out with a low groan. He thrust up into you in long, slow strokes. Your nails dug into his thighs as you savored the roll of his hips.

"Can feel you throbbing in me," you retorted, breathless. "Guess you wanted this too, huh?" You mimicked his words back to him. Oikawa shut you up with a particularly deep thrust, making you gasp.

"What's that? I couldn't hear you." His hips were snapping faster now, chasing his own high. You were right, he did want this. And the second he felt you cum on his fingers he knew he wouldn't be able to rest until he felt you do it on his cock. It didn't take long at this new pace for him to get his wish.

"Shit Oikawa," you moaned, your head falling back on his shoulder. Your body totally melted into his as pleasure consumed you for the second time. Oikawa cursed as you squeezed him, spilling inside you. You watched his face contort in pleasure in the mirror and, damn, he really was pretty. Maybe you did understand those girls after all.

"Looks like I was right," Oikawa panted, with a smug grin.

"Looks you like you were," you replied, keeping your smugness internal. Just one more left. "Just promise me you won't tell anyone. You know how coach is with girl stuff. If he found out, I'd probably be fired."

As much as Oikawa wanted to brag about this, he liked you and didn't want you to lose the position because of him. "It will be our little secret."

You were nervous about approaching Iwaizumi, but with the end of the semester approaching you had to face your fear.

"Hey Iwaizumi, would you by any chance be able to help me in the gym sometime? I've been wanting to get into going, but not sure how to use the machines," you asked him one day after practice. Iwaizumi was an exercise science major and often helped the team with work outs.

"I'd love to, it's actually perfect that you asked." Iwaizumi explained one of his class's final was to create a an exercise plan for someone. "Do you mind if I use this for the project?"

"Not at all! I'm glad to be helping you out, too." You agreed to meet at the gym later that week. There was a small gym at your campus that was for athletes or fitness related majors use only. The night you met, Iwaizumi reserved the gym for the two of you to use.

"I figured you'd be more comfortable if it was just us," he explained.

"I appreciate that. Hopefully it wasn't too much trouble for you," you replied.

Iwaizumi shook his head. "Not at all, we do it all the time for our assignments."

Iwaizumi took you through the machines, showing you how to do different workouts. You wore your favorite workout set, the little bike shorts and sports bra fitting your body perfectly. You could feel Iwaizumi's eyes on you, soaking in your body's movements. His hands were warm and firm on your body as he put you into proper form and you swore they lingers on you. Maybe he was just being thorough, but the stirring in your stomach told you it was more than that.

"You did great," Iwaizumi complimented. "Now I gotta stretch you out." Iwaizumi turned red. "Shit, that sounded bad."

You laughed, "I knew what you meant. I love a good stretch." You smiled with the littlest hint of suggestiveness. Iwaizumi took you into the trainer's room, which was a smaller space that had a little lifted bed in the corner. It looked a bit like like a doctor's office.

"Just hop up there and lay down," Iwaizumi instructed. He took one of your legs in his, pressing it up your body like you were in split. You relished the feeling of his body pressing against you.

"Feels good," you said, your voice infused with satisfaction. It was innocent enough statement, but it made Iwaizumi's pants start to feel tighter.

"You are very flexible," he commented, switching over to the other leg. He was so close to you it was driving you crazy. His body was warm and solid, the result of his own workout regimen. His scent filled your nose, woody and spicy. It was driving you crazy.

The tension was palpable as he set your leg back down. You sat up, your eyes locked on his. His body acted on its' own accord, stepping between your legs and pulling you into him. The kiss was frenzied and deep, both of you the secret desire you harbored for the other.

"Do you wanna..." his voice trailed off, breathless.

"Please," you replied.

"Get on your hands and knees for me," he instructed, his voice sweet. He helped move you into place, positioning himself behind you. Iwaizumi slid your shorts and underwear down, cursing under his breath at your wet cunt displayed for him. He gripped the plush of your thighs, burying his face in you. His mouth moved over you just as desperately as his kissed you, leaving you breathless.

He alternative between sucking and licking at your clit. Each time your body jolted with pleasure, Iwaizumi gripped you tighter, keeping you still for him. He pulled away only once, spreading your ass and spitting between them. He return to sucking at your clit as his thumb circled the tight hole. Finally, he sunk his thumb in your ass, pulling a loud gasp from your lips.

"Fuck Iwa!" you cried at. He was driven by your sweet sighs, using his tongue to fuck your dripping cunt as his thumb pressed into your ass. The sensation cause the pleasure in your lower tummy to snap, crying out his name as your orgasm surged through your body.

"Fuck I need you so bad," Iwaizumi said, "Can't wait to feel you do that on my cock." He repositioned your hips, running his palm down the length of your spine to put you into a nice arch. He pulled his heavy, leaking cock out of his pants, rubbing his tip through your slick folds. You couldn't see the size of him, but by the stretch as he pressed into you, you knew he was big.

Iwaizumi dragged his cock in and out of your cunt, low grunts escaping his lips. You were sucking it in, making it hard for him to keep as slow pace. He gripped your hips for leveraged, throwing more weight into each thrust. It was deep and hard in the best way.

"Don't stop," you urged, feeling your release building again. Iwaizumi was fueled by your words, desperate to feel your pussy fluttering around him. Iwaizumi brought one hand around your body, rubbing fast circles over your already sensitive clit.

The feeling building in your tummy swelled in intensity. The different, strange. You realized a second too late what was about to happen.

"I'm gonna oh-" you broke off into a euphoric gasp as you squirted on Iwaizumi's thighs. Your whole body shook, completely overtaken by pleasure. The combination of you squirting and your cunt spasming around his cock was too much. Iwaizumi let out a low, strangled curse as he shot hot ropes of cum inside you. When his hips finally stilled you, you were both trying to catch your breath.

"I promise I won't right about that last part in my paper," Iwaizumi broke the silence.

You laughed. "I appreciate that. Could I also ask you not to tell anyone on the team about this? I don't want them being stupid about it."

Iwaizumi dreaded the thought of his immature teammates finding out. "Absolutely, it will stay between you and I. And, y/n, I know we did this backwards, but I'd love to take you out."

You grinned, "I'd love that too."

***

"Okay enough counting your money, I need to hear the ranking," your friend said.

"Just making sure I got what I earned," you smirked, "but let's get into it."

You put mad dog in last place, which would probably piss him off. Good thing he'll never know. "It wasn't bad by any means. But I definitely enjoyed the others more."

"I just can't believe you had sex on the courts. I'll never be able too look at them the same again." You laughed, then continued.

Matsukawa was next. "He's very much a boob guy. Honestly, really good with them. If he did more foreplay he could have been higher."

"Very fair."

Kunimi was the middle ground. "He was the dark horse for me. I was surprised how good he was, especially with it being his first time."

"Dude is going places," your friend commented. You had to agree.

It was a tough call between Oikawa and Iwaizumi, but you had to put Iwaizumi on top since he made your squirt. "He was so fucking good. And I'm probably biased because I have a crush on him, but I don't care. The evidence speaks for itself."

"Both sound like a great time."

"Absolutely," you nodded, "I understand Oikawa's fan girls more now." You both giggled, then got to planning your outfit for your date with Iwaizumi.

#y'all wanted this one so bad #I hope you enjoy #aoba josai x reader #aoba johsai x reader #oikawa smut #oikawa imagine #iwaizumi smut #haikyuu iwaizumi #matsukawa x reader #kunimi x reader #kentaro Kyotani #haikyuu smut #haikyu x reader #haikyu headcanons

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akirathedramaqueen · 16 days ago

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CBT and Exposure Therapy: Blitzø Showcase

An important (really, don't skip) disclaimer

If you are contemplating whether or not you would benefit from any kind of therapy, consider consulting with your medical provider first. While I did my best to validate all the points made using publicly available resources, I am not a medical professional. At the very least, I strongly advise that you do your own research and not take some amateur's opinion about a character from a silly demon show for granted.

"Everyone in this show needs fucking therapy STAT!"

We hear fans screaming into the void every now and then. Me too. I plead guilty and I willingly put myself in custody. But I am not taking these words back.

Especially often it is being said with Blitzø in mind, who, as hinted earlier and clearly shown in the latest episode, Ghostfuckers, is not doing okay. Not in the slightest.

Which is . . . yes. Indeed, trauma-ridden Blitzø is a major problem for both him and those around him. Yes, we see him reaching his lowest point now exactly because he left these gaping wounds untreated for so long.

But the tricky question is—how, though? What to do? Will a good talking to a confidante help? Or, maybe, some kind of shock would snap him out of the spiral?

I've been pondering on this topic for more than 4 months, and, as the Ghostfuckers came out, I finally got all the data I need to prove a point. The show did all the job for me and effectively made Blitzø go through improvised versions of two popular therapy techniques. And, before I even start, I want to say—I am so glad with what we ended up with. What they did, and, more importantly, didn't do, aligns well with how it would likely happen in real life.

So buckle up, and let's see where it gets us!

Therapy # 1. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT

This is, in essence and with some corrections, your good old talking. Here you can find more information about it, so, if you're not familiar with the topic, I recommend following the link first.

But, very shortly: CBT is an extremely common approach to be tried while you're dealing with anxiety, depression, and a number of other mental disorders. What it aims to do is to help you get past unhelpful thinking (distortions) and learn not to act on it.

Looks like it fits the bill, right? Blitzø has a lot of issues with self-fulfilling prophecies, infuriatingly stupid assumptions, poorly thought-out actions . . .

But he's not like, you know . . . w-we're not, like . . . we're not doing a . . . w-we . . . what's betw— It's a transactional fucking, you see.

If you don't feel like coming, that's OK! I'm sure I can do without it for one month. :)

Stolas only cares about having a rugged peasant raw-dog him into his matress! It's nothing, ya know . . . it's nothing else.

You . . . no longer have any obligation to see me, to touch me, to bed me . . . You are— you are free of me.

He sees things which aren't truly there.

It's not Stolas giving him space after the disaster in the 'Ozzie's.' It must be Stolas not needing him anymore, getting tired of him.

It's not Stolas caring about Blitzø. He is a royal, why would he care how an imp's day he happened to be fucking was?

It's not Stolas setting Blitzø free and putting an end to a problematic transaction they had with the hope for it to grow into something more. It's him getting rid of Blitzø.

As a result, he ends up hurting himself and the relationship he had with that one sad gay bird he happened to fall deeply for but literally trashed in his own house twice, acting on nothing more than frenetic fear of losing Stolas, but in reality, driving him away even more . . . for good.

I mean, you royal fucks think you can do this every time, like you can just play with our feelings because we're smaller and not as important!

Ha! I'm right, aren't I? You get off getting plowed by people you look down on!

And I can sorry more people, everyone but you! 'Cause I don't owe you dick! Everyone, but you . . .

So, the case's closed? Let someone—say, Millie—talk to him and tell him how wrong he was about himself and the others?

Well, here's the thing. Despite him being infinitely wrong about Stolas's intentions, we can't deny the fact that every one of his beliefs was not, in fact, a distortion. It'd led him to wrong conclusions, yes, but it was built on the information he received and legitimate experiences he had in his life. Here are only some of the facts connected to only this situation with Stolas, but there are other problematic behaviors and other reasons for him acting the way he does.

Fact # 1. The circus fire did happen, and Blitzø was the reason for it. Unintentional, and of course it wasn't his fault, but it still ruined the lives of many people—him included. Blitzø cannot act like it never occurred.

Fact # 2. Hell is divided by class and race. Their situationship with the grimoire was an embodiment of that inequality. A lot of Blitzø's outburst during the Full Moon and later in the Apology Tour was connected to it, to his beliefs that Stolas is the same as the rest of the privileged circle. Beliefs, I stress, justified by the real world. Stolas is more of an exception, and even then, his behavior is only different when it comes to Blitzø. He still acts the same toward other imps.

Fact # 3. We knew about Stolas's intentions all along, but before that fateful Full Moon, what Blitzø saw was Stolas avoiding him and not communicating the issue the Ozzie's date had raised. And before Ozzie's? Stolas did act entitled and inappropriate. He was baby-talking to Blitzø and used derogatory terms while addressing him. The dude literally called him an impish plaything in the Truth Seekers.

Fact # 4. Blitzø's heavily implied (though not officially confirmed by the show) existing conditions—ADHD*, BPD**, PTSD, and dyslexia/dyscalculia***—do affect his life, and while Hell seems to be somewhat receptive of neurodivergence, he still has to deal with it every single fucking day. He is going to be avoidant and afraid to be abandoned at the same time. He is going to hate himself. His learning disabilities are going to make his life harder. No way around it.

Note: *, **, and *** contain links to separate meta-analyses from @timkontheunsure and @tealvenetianmask about the respective conditions and how they show themselves in Blitzø's case.

And my beef with CBT here is exactly that. CBT's goal is to gaslight you into believing your distortions hold no water and suggests you just ignore them. And, as I've shown with Blitzø, these reactions and assumptions aren't baseless. They are legitimate, and, in fact, sometimes help to get by. Even though it's a crooked crutch, you can't learn to walk properly by just throwing that crutch away. You're still going to limp, and oh, will it be painful.

This is oversimplistic and dismissive. Anxiety and depression don't come out of the blue, and with mental disabilities, it's even deeper. The class/disability stigma is alive and strong, and just slapping a "you're fine" bandaid on your traumatized self isn't going to help.

Therapy # 2. Exposure therapy.

Exposure therapy is another approach commonly used while dealing with traumatic past and its aftermath—PTSD, anxiety, phobias, and such. Again, if you're not familiar, there's the link for you, but very shortly—the therapist puts the patient in a safe environment and 'exposes' them to the feared object in question for limited periods of time. The goal is to eventually get rid of the targeted fear and decrease avoidance.

And Blitzø has got some phobias for sure.

The fear of letting everyone down. Again.

And the fear of abandonment. Again.

All of it is a result of self-hatred, sitting so deeply it rules his life and his vision of how others perceive him. Said it himself. Almost.

So, where and how does the show expose Blitzø to his traumatic past?

First, the most recent, and the most obvious one—Rolando and his slideshow of all traumatic events Blitzø ever had in his life.

Second—Blitzø's drug trip in the Truth Seekers. While it does not contain the events of the past as they were, it does force him to face his fears.

Are you worried I might have enough of it one day as well? . . . You're going to die alone! . . . You're going to die alone, Blitzo!

With some stretch, the third one is Verosika's 'Blitzo sucks' party. Where Blitzø was forced to see the consequences of his avoidance and rejection.

Note: to be clear, I do think the party does not show the true extent of Blitzø's actions and how much he'd hurt people. It was exaggerated by Verosika, and here I explain why this is the case.

So, what gives? Or, rather, what gives it not?

It might sound funny now, considering I brought it up myself, but I, once again, say this is not therapeutic, just as CBT kind of 'talking.' If anything, all these three events did more harm than good.

The D.H.O.R.K.S.'s goal in the Truth Seekers was to torture the information out of Blitzø. He was not supposed to overcome it. He was supposed to crack.

The Verosika's goal was to ruin Blitzø's reputation. She was working her ass off to prove he's just a heartless freak.

The Rolando's goal was to fucking kill Blitzø.

And okay, their motivations had nothing to do with helping him, but maybe it did, in its own twisted way?

No. The writers added this to push Blitzø past the breaking point, not to heal him, and to show us more of his lore. Each time he was forced to face his past or fears or consequences, he was only spiraling more.

The only thing which did him some good was . . . well, Millie finally seeing his bravado mask falling off. But the cost of it was way too high. Not worth it.

To the therapy's defense, some points why it would never work in the way it was done in the show:

Blitzø had never given his consent and was not ready to face it. I might be very rude right now, but go and try producing some explosion-like sounds in front of war veterans without letting them know first and see what happens.

The amount of fearful experience exposed was way too overboard. He couldn't possibly digest it in a healthy way.

The environment was not safe. It was straight-up retraumatizing, an intentional one.

So there's that.

But what helped then?

We've briefly brushed over the fact Millie did talk to Blitzø. While I did imply this might be an example of CBT, here are some key deviations from the classic therapy which made all the difference.

Millie didn't sugarcoat all the shit Blitzø did. He was hurting their business. He didn't pay her. He was reduced to Bethanie. It showed her opinion can be trusted.

Millie apologized for not being there for him sooner. She admitted she relied too much on Blitzø being bulletproof, unbothered by everything. She admitted she didn't support him in a way he always did.

While proving she could never hate Blitzø, she used their common story, one he knows and can recall. She used evidence to prove him wrong, not a "it's all in your head" bandaid. And more than that, later she proved it with action—not for one second did she believe Rolando and his shittalk about what Blitzø supposedly was thinking about her. Her unwavering faith spoke more than any words ever could.

Getting back to exposure therapy . . . Metaphorically, she reminded Blitzø he can handle a beating or two. And physically beat the infestor demon out of him, which, as we can see later, didn't really affect Blitzø that much. He wasn't even battered. So, apparently, when the said exposure is done by someone who genuinely tries to make you feel better and knows your limits well, it might just work?

And finally, Millie acknowledged Blitzø's pain. She didn't brush it away. She validated him.

What all of this is about?

Like every treatment, too much of a medicine can become poisonous. So are CBT and exposure therapy.

They might help, and lots of research shows they do in certain cases. But there are limitations to what they can and cannot achieve, and they have to be adjusted to each individual story, to each trauma, and they should not be applied as a way to mend the outcome of the trauma without taking into account the story it comes with. Again, legitimate concerns and experiences cannot be brushed away or ignored.

Actualy . . . we've seen where it leads in the show too. In the beginning, Millie was quite dismissive of Blitzø's worries—all of this over a . . . breakup?

And here it comes full circle.

Only when Millie started taking Blitzø seriously, did it help them progress. And look how quickly we've switched from a complete despair to a glimmer of hope! Isn't that a beautiful closing scene?

As a closing note—we do not need to 'fix' Blitzø. After all this shit he went through, there won't be a day where he wakes up and be like, "Hey, I don't hate myself anymore! And look, I'm not afraid to be abandoned or misunderstood!"

I'm sorry to break it to you, but this is a lifelong battle. Being mentally whole, healthy, and constantly happy is no more than a myth, and everyone has their own demons and skeletons to deal with.

What Blitzø needs is some good support system to pull him back when he's down.

And boy, do I hope that one particular owl will fill in that role of unyielding pillar for Blitzø each time our lizard will fall into that pit again. Look, I love Millie, but there's only so much she can do. She can't be always present, she has her own life . . . and her own disaster of a husband to look after (affectionate <3). Here and here @lost-romantique talks about Stolas's capacity of loving, with me occasionally nodding, ha-ha. But to be short—it's fucking immense. And since he loves words, I do believe he has all the energy to tell again and again and again how awesome Blitzø is. Even if Blitzø wouldn't believe it himself.

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