#It’s not a huge task to run this blog but simply time I didn’t have a lot of and it started to become a Task so I put it on hiatus.

[cursedslimecicle]

hey guys remember this account

Hi tumblr what’s the haps

[simpjaes]

BOOK SMART? P*SSY SMART. — P.JS

The one where Jay basically lives in the university library and you live in any and every party you can find on campus. Unfortunately, your grades are suffering over it and you need help. You’re quite lucky though because Jay is quite helpful. 

minors do not interact. 

WORDCOUNT― 10k

PAIRING― inexperienced loser jay x afab reader

CONTENT―  Jay wears glasses even tho the banner says otherwise lol, he’s also a loser ass dweeb in this, open minded and playful reader, college au, jay just rly wants to get in that but doesn't know how to

NOTE― this is a revamp, surprise surprise, nobody is shocked. was originally written for mark lee over on my other blog @/ncteez but i need jay like i need air so….cackling at the title tho, my brain is malfunctioning pls forgive me

smut tags under cut:: 

smut tags :: MONSTER COCK AGENDA. Jay is a pervert and smells ur towel lmao, mentions of food and detailed popsicle eating,  reader is very vocal and talkative, slight use of the pet name “pretty”, a lot of cum, cream pie, unprotected sex, mention of bc pills, Jay has a huge cock and he didn’t even know it, inexperienced Jay, experienced reader, finger sucking, nipple sucking, grinding, oral (f recieving), Jay gets on his knees, making out, sex on a table

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

         It wasn’t shocking that you were failing but it was shocking that not a single one of your friends were failing with you. They somehow managed to keep their grades up while partying just as often as you do. You don’t know how the hell they did it and you also don’t know why the hell they refuse to help you study now that they’ve seen your failure.

         Not the greatest friends, you think. They won’t help you study because they only have time to study their own classes and to continue partying without you, apparently. You knew you had to come to terms eventually that these people aren’t your friends. They’re just people to party with, people to have fun with, and apparently, people that will watch you struggle.

         It’s frustrating to walk home from classes by the run-down houses with booming music already playing. Without fail, every time, you wish you could be attending instead of studying. It’s even more annoying when you give up on your studies because you’re just not fucking getting it, and you probably would be fucking getting it if you were at a party talking to potential boyfriends or fuckbuddies. 

         Fairness in the world is so hard to grasp. Someone else always has it, but never you. The worst part about all of this is that you’re very aware of how lucky you actually are, you wasted away in college and allowed yourself to get this low simply because you were lucky enough to be well-liked. You prioritized the pointless things over the important things, and now you’re suffering for it. Complaining that you can’t attend parties, looking like a bore to your friends who pity and are embarrassed by you for not being able to multitask like everyone else.

         That’s right. You can’t party and study like everyone else, so maybe now it’s time to focus on the task you’d pushed aside for so long.

         Studying. Ugh.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

         You don’t know Jay past the fact that he is in at least three of your classes, extremely quiet, and constantly in the library when you pass by to leave the campus. You’re a little bit ashamed to admit that the majority of people you are well-liked by are the people who are ignoring you right now. The only choice you have is to find someone that can help you catch up on all of the studies you’ve blatantly abandoned. You could go through the student center and “officially” attend tutoring sessions with someone who would likely scoff at you for not getting it, or you could find someone of your own choice to help you. 

         That’s the only reason Jay comes to mind. Again, he is in three of the four of your classes. Every semester, without fail, you’ll look for your name on the dean’s list knowing that it’ll never show up, but you have seen Jay’s name on that list more times than you care to remember. 

         Jay knows of you as well. The girl who cut in front of him in the cafeteria to grab coffee with her large group of friends, making him ten minutes late to be early for his class. The girl who loudly slammed a book down in the library and nearly gave him a heart attack, the girl who came into class stumbling and giggling with one of the guys, clearly still tipsy from the night before. 

         You are everything that Jay isn’t. You are everything he avoids when accepting friends into his life, and his interest in you doesn’t really go past the point of having a stubborn, pretty girl to look at. He is a man after all. A man who is finally away from home, surrounded by hormonal women and men who can’t see past their brain fog of sexual fantasies in class. Never towards him though, he’s usually just on the outside looking in. 

         Jay has those fantasies too, but it isn’t his focus. He is dead set on being a top student, one that people recognize on the academic end rather than the partying end of it all. So, here he is, sitting with his nose in a book, glasses sliding down every few minutes as he munches on a pack of crackers. He’s been here for three hours already and finds comfort in the silence of the library. It’s such a vast place with so many corners to hide in if someone were to come and disturb his peace. Today is no different from any other Friday, where few students choose to study and instead opt for one of the various frat parties or bar hops. 

         You wish you could be one of those people, truly, but instead, you’re making your way to the library in search of Jay. The one student who you assume may actually take you up on the offer of study sessions. You imagine his shocked face when you sit in front of him, and you try your best not to imagine a look of disgust rather than approval. You need Jay now, for the first time in your life, more than ever. His knowledge of the three out of four classes you have will surely work wonders on your GPA, you will probably have to admit how much you’d be relying on him in order for him to even consider your offer too.  

God, you hate begging.

The library is so deafeningly silent when you walk in. You can’t hear even the slightest of a whisper as you walk around and peek into the many empty study rooms and cubicles. After several minutes of searching, the anxiety bubbles up inside of you. What if he decided to do something else? Of all days? The one day where he is needed to be studying? 

Just as you turn to leave, ignoring the entire second floor of the library, you nearly walk straight into him. And by nearly, you actually do  walk directly into him. 

Books clatter to the floor, Jay sighs as he looks down without making eye contact with you. It’s not the first time he’s been walked into and it probably won’t be the last. He is forever wishing that people could just watch where they’re fucking going.

“Hey, I’m sorry–” You go to say as you lean down to help him pick up the mess, he still doesn’t look at you though. Honestly, he barely even notices you there with those airpods in his ears and eyes on the floor. 

To be fair, most people who walk into him just continue walking, so…

         When he does take note of another person helping him retrieve his things, he looks up. You’re not shocked that all he does is nod at you when he takes the book from your hands and makes his way back towards his study space. 

         In an awkward way, you follow him. You feel dumb and kind of lost in this world of books and good students. Up the stairs, towards the floor you’d not even bothered to check, Jay unintentionally leads you to his little corner that already has papers and books laid out. 

         You swallow hard when he takes his seat and looks up to see that you have followed him. Jay is quick to swipe one of his AirPods from his ears and you can kind of tell that he instantly went from relaxed to nervous.

“Uh–” You look around, feeling awkward standing there. “I was looking for you.” 

“Me?” Jay questions with a soured look on his face. He doesn’t really do it intentionally, it’s just, like, what? 

 “Why?”

“Okay, just hear me out.” You start, taking a few steps forward and inviting yourself to sit at his table. There is absolutely no arm space on this side, but that doesn’t entirely matter. You begin your pitch.

“I know it’s kind of weird, but, I’m failing.”

“That’s not weird.” Jay mocks, shaking his head and moving to put his airpod back in his ear.

“Wait! Just, please–hear me out.” You plead now, a little frustrated that he’s already refusing to help you.

         He looks around and then lets out a deep sigh. Rubbing his temples, he nods.

“I know we aren’t the type to like, help each other or whatever– but I’ve asked all of my friends, and they kind of blacklisted me…you are my last resort, I swear.” You say, begging with your eyes. “Can you please just help me study for like, one day a week?”

         His body is stiff and his face is unimpressed by your pitch. 

“An hour a week?” You adjust clapping your hands together to plead even harder. You very nearly start to grovel on the ground before him. “Jay, please. I need to get my grades up.” 

“If you had just given yourself a day a week, you wouldn’t have to be asking someone you’ve never even spoken with to help you study.” He rolls his eyes, still mocking and appearing a bit cocky at the sudden power he’s been given. Of course he only gets approached when someone needs something from him. 

 “How many classes are you failing?”

“I’m failing three classes and have a C in another–” You shamefully admit. “Just an hour a day, please.”

         Jay eyes you over, shifting a bit in his seat before letting out another sigh. 

“Finals are barely a month away.”

“I know! I’ve already got extra credit lined up so I can at least get my grades up by a letter but– I,” You look down, more ashamed than before.

“You don’t know how to actually do the extra credit, do you?” Jay finishes for you and is, for some reason, shocked when you nod. 

         He can see the panic in your eyes, and he noticed for the past week that you’d been looking incredibly tired around campus. Not the hung-over type of tired either. He’s noticed you move your seat closer to the front in one of the classes and even noted that you’re actually taking notes during your time spent there. Maybe he should help you out. If not for the fact that you genuinely seem to need it, but also maybe because he’s like, incredibly aware that he is attracted to you.

 He always has been, but that’s not the fucking point. 

“Okay, you can come study with me whenever you want then. I usually study here because I have a roommate who isn’t exactly the quietest person–” He goes to explain. 

“I have an entire apartment to myself, you can come study at my place. Really, I’ll make food and everything.” You panic, still trying to sell the idea despite him already accepting your offer. 

         Jay is a little shocked and offended that you have your own apartment, and yet you’re failing your classes. No way in hell are you paying for that yourself. This only prompts him to want to help more. Because, like? An entire apartment to study in? Where a pretty girl makes his food? 

“Okay, that can work. What days and times can I be over?” He follows up with a nonchalant nod, noting the three shared classes and the one other you’ll probably need help with. He hopes he’s already taken the outlier class, otherwise he won’t be much help in that regard. 

“You can walk home with me after those classes if you want, and we can study until you’re ready to leave?” You offer. “I mean, it doesn’t have to be every day, but–”

“We can meet up after every class and decide if you want to study or not.” Jay finishes for you yet again, and you nod with a smile. 

“What’s your favorite food?” You ask, wanting to make a mental note of keeping your end of the bargain. 

         Jay thinks hard at that because being put on the spot like this makes answering any question a bit difficult. 

“Here–” You hold out your phone. “Put your number in and you can think about it. I’ll text you so you have mine.”

 You can’t wipe the smile off of your face, the anxiety is practically dissolving from your body at the very idea of someone being willing to help you in the comfort of your own apartment.

         He, on the other hand, is a bit more anxious now. He realizes that now, he’s going to be studying with you. A girl who had never even looked at him twice during the semesters you’ve shared classes. He’s putting his number into your phone, and you’re going to be texting him, and spending time with him instead of going to the parties that he’s never invited to. 

“I’ll see you on Monday?” You ask in his silence, sending a quick text to him so that he can save your number. He nods and looks down at his books. “Don’t forget to text me what you want to eat, okay?”

         He nods again as you stand to walk away. He watches intently at the way you have a little bounce in your step and can’t help but feel his cheeks flushing. God, why is he doing this to himself? 

         Slamming his head on the desk, he, much like you, cannot stop smiling now. All thoughts of studying for the remainder of the night left his head and were replaced with his new study schedule. He thinks he will try and take it easy this weekend, specifically so he is mentally prepared. He’s only talked to you for a total of fourteen minutes and he’s already lost his ability to study and think clearly. 

If he’s lucky, the two of you will pass this semester with flying colors. There’s still that tiny part of him though, that wonders if maybe you’d find interest in him, and maybe he will fail the semester with you because, honestly, you are so distracting.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

         On Monday, you sat up straight in class while eyeing the back of Jay’s head most of the time. Mostly to prepare yourself for if and when he makes a break for it. He hasn’t even texted you what he wants to eat today, and part of you wonders if he went back on his promise to you. Not that it was much of a promise in the first place, anyway.

         He was a little shocked that you weren’t the first out of the room once everyone wrapped up though. Like you, he was assuming the same thing. You’d make a fucking break for it and pretend you never approached him in the first place. After all, It was common for you to leave mid-way through class or be the first one out the door. Instead though, he finds himself proud of you. You stood there awkwardly looking at him as the room emptied out, clearly unsure of what to do or say to him.

         Jay nods your way as if to beckon you towards him. 

“You’re still wanting to study today?” He asks with a brow raised in surprise. 

All weekend he had thought about it. Thought about the possibility of it just being a joke to you, or maybe that you’d change your mind and allow yourself to flunk out like you already had been doing. His heart kind of jumps a bit noticing you looking at him like this. 

“Yeah? Wasn’t that the plan?” You ask, nudging him a bit once you get up beside him. “You didn’t text me what you wanted to eat so you’re just gonna have to eat whatever I have in the fridge, by the way.”

         Jay nods, opting to stay silent at this moment. He’s going home with you. He’s going to be seen on campus walking home with you. He’s not the sort to want attention, but this situation feels dangerously attractive to him. Especially when he takes note of how you’re probably going to look all…cozy and at home in your apartment. Like, he gets to be in your space teaching you things that you should have already known. 

         It all shouldn’t be so exciting. After all, his days are filled with the typical boring sessions of reading, writing, noting, and memorizing. It is exciting for him though. Never has he studied with someone like you, or really even gotten to talk to someone that most of the men speak to, the unreachable men no less. The ones with families that own the city, and all the houses in it.

You’re one of the unreachable women on campus, he thinks. The ones with standards based on fun, attractiveness, and chaos rather than charisma, personality, and knowledge. It’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing for Jay to be doing this right now.

“Okay, so...” Jay drones out, avoiding eye contact with you as he packs things into his ratty backpack. “I’m not super hungry right now but–we are going to your place right?”

He needs the confirmation himself if he’s being honest. Nothing would suck more than assuming and being proved wrong.

         You nod with a smile, grabbing his hand as soon as he throws his backpack on. It isn’t intimate to you, but for him, it’s…something. Holding his hand is reserved for intimate relationships with family or girlfriends. He never holds hands.

 He’s never really gotten the chance to anyway, aside from a little cousin when they were crossing the street last summer. He can’t help but buckle in on himself in a shy sort of way as you lead him from the room and out of the building. 

         You’re rambling about all of the things you need to study. All of the snacks you could offer to him. All of the hours you wish you hadn’t wasted partying, yet, all he’s thinking about is how warm your hand feels in his. You seem to be a natural at talking to people. Touching them without a single worry in the world, it’s kind of nice, he thinks. The fact that you aren’t ashamed to be seen together with him, heading towards the place you sleep. Sometimes Jay forgets that this is college. No one actually cares who is hanging out with who unless they are in the middle of a raunchy frat party, seeing their love interest getting touched against a dirty bathroom counter. 

         He smiles to himself as he finally catches up to you and allows you to stop dragging him around. He keeps pace with you now, resting his hand as if to allow you to let go, but you don't. 

“Just around that corner–” You say,  glancing over at him and noting the shade of color his face has become. “You good?” 

         Jay nods, staying quiet and trying to force himself out of his thoughts. He glances down at your hand holding his and then back up at you on instinct. 

“Ah, sorry.” You mumble, releasing his hand and trying hard to understand that maybe you truly are too clingy with most people in your life. You think his reaction was kind of cute though, and now you’re a little determined to help him relax those stiffened shoulders. Jay can’t be as boring as he seems, right?

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

“I have peanut butter and jelly, eggs, noodles, some leftover pizza and–”

“I’m not hungry, but If I can have some water or something, that would be cool.” Jay cuts you off, slipping off his shoes in an immaculate show of how clumsy he is. You can hear the clatter of your entire coat rack falling to the floor due to his weight leaning on it through that single task. 

“Okay–” You side eye his mess with a slight smile. “Water, got it.”

 You trail off to get him the drink, keeping a small mental note of how nervous he appears to be right now. He’s panicked, frantically trying to balance your coat rack back in place as if you hadn’t walked directly into him just the Friday before. 

“Jay, it’s just a coat rack.” You laugh with water in hand, hearing him mutter a sorry as he hangs one of your empty purses back onto it.

“Thanks.” He says now, reaching out for the drink.

         Watching his eyes go from the glass of water to your apartment, you smile at the look on his face. Such a smart guy acting so incredibly stupid the moment he’s alone in an apartment with a girl. Cute.

“Is this good?” You ask as if you’re offering a change of subject so that he doesn’t have to think about the coat rack he had just knocked over. You point over to your dining table that’s placed perfectly in a little nook against a window and look at him as he stands in place. “We can start whenever you’re ready?”

“Can you show me to the bathroom first?” Jay blurts, hyper-aware of his awkward demeanor. He needs to calm himself down before even thinking about sitting down to fucking study. 

   You point to the bathroom quickly, making your way to the table and adjusting everything so there is space for the piles of books soon to be laid on it. You watch only a little bit at how Jay makes his way over to said bathroom in a show of not-so-confident body language. He seemed kind of cocky on Friday, but today he seems to be like jelly. 

         You sit at the dining table without thinking much more of the man in your bathroom, instead, you pull out some textbooks and lay them out.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

         Jay stares at himself in the mirror, he can practically see the blood rushing to his cheeks and ears as he comes to terms with the fact that he probably shouldn’t have agreed to come to your apartment to study. You’re attractive. That alone is a reason in his head to avoid it, but he’s here and he’s already made a fool of himself. 

         He slaps his face a bit with some cold water and tries to will himself to stop acting like such an awkward idiot. Surely you’ll pick up on his inability to talk to women if he doesn’t get it together, right? You’re going to think he’s some weirdo, a pervert maybe, before throwing him out and avoiding him forever.

         Staring harder at himself, he waits for the color to run from his face so that way he can get out there and start the study session, but then his eyes start to wander. 

         Your bathroom is immaculately clean save for some makeup stains on the counter and a few stray hairs that must have been yanked out of your head while you attempted to brush out a night of drinking. It smells fresh and your perfectly hung towels look plush hanging against the wall. Without a thought in his head, he leans towards the towel so that he can dry his face and hands, and that’s just what he does. Except, maybe he buries his face into the towel a bit longer than he needed to, and maybe the smell of it was so astronomically sweet that he nuzzled against it even more.

         He could tell the towel had been used at least once though, solely because he could smell a scent that wasn’t the soap on the counter, nor any laundry detergent he’s aware of. Then…his eyes flick to the actual hand towel that he somehow missed, right beside it? A lace bra. The flush comes back to his face, making him feel even warmer than he did when he entered the room. Which feels like a fucking nightmare if he’s being totally honest. 

         It dawns on him again. He’s in your apartment, smelling your towels, and staring at your bra. Coming to the bathroom in an attempt to calm down has done nothing more than make things worse, and the only option he has now is to stumble out of the bathroom hoping you assume he was in here doing number two rather than planting his face into a towel where you dry off your naked body. 

         Mumbling to himself, Jay prepares himself to face you. Sure, you probably see nothing out of the norm if he does well and hides the fact that he’s hyper-sensitive just for being in your space, then again, Jay has never been the best at playing pretend.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

You offer him a bright smile once he finally makes his way back into your living space and seats himself at the table. He seems to be avoiding eye contact with you, bashfully pulling his own books out of his bag with shaking fingers. 

“Are you okay? You sure you don’t want a snack or something?” You look at him, head tilting at him in concern. 

Jay finally looks at you and notes how comfortable you seem while he feels like he’s internally falling apart. There shouldn’t be any fucking issue in his head when it comes to this situation, but here he is, panicking because a pretty girl is in front of him. 

He feels so dumb, so obvious, so embarrassed. Yeah, maybe he should eat something, at least so he can buy some time to focus on something else before he starts stuttering through your studies. At this rate, all you’re going to learn about today is how awful Jay is around women. 

“Maybe I should eat, yeah–” He says in a small voice, still staring at the books as he places them on the table.

“Come look in my kitchen, we can eat something together?” You offer, reaching toward his hand. 

He pulls back from your touch and tries to play it off casually like he was just reaching for a pencil, but you didn’t miss the fact that his hands were cold and shaky.

Taking note, it starts to dawn on you. You’ve dealt with men like him before, and it was always an interesting situation. To check your theory, you rise from the chair and lean over the table, being sure to squish whatever cleavage you have visible to make it more visible to him. 

“Salty or sweet?” You ask, watching his eyes intently and the way they struggle to reach your face. Score one for you, Jay is definitely a man above all. Luckily for him, you have lots of experience in that field, while he appears to have very little in the field of women. 

“W-what?” He drones out, pulling his eyes away from you in an attempt to hide the way his face immediately flushed. 

“The snacks? Savory or sweet?” You laugh, propping yourself back from the table and hopping into the kitchen, checking behind you to see if he follows.

He does stand to follow, but by the time you round the corner, he isn’t behind you like you figured he would be. Peeping your head around the corner, you watch as he holds his hands in front of his groin, looks down at himself, and then lets out a deep sigh. You then watch as he adjusts himself in his pants, uncomfortably hiding a semi-hard on so that he could come into the kitchen without suspicion. 

By this point, you’ve already decided that studying will very likely not be part of today’s schedule. He wouldn’t be able to focus on a damn thing like this, right? You should help him, right?

“Took you long enough.” You joke as he appears in the kitchen, turning to look at him and intentionally trailing your eyes down his body just to see if you can see any sort of bulge. He’s safe though because he apparently must have skills in hiding his arousal during the worst times. 

Jay, on the other hand, can already tell that your shift in mood is intensely different compared to before he went to the bathroom. Twice now you’ve been blatant towards him and it is not helping him at all right now. Is he reading it wrong because he’s very obviously horny right now? Were you really trying to dangle your breasts in front of him like that? Are you really checking him out right now? 

“Sorry–” He looks down. “I– uh, I dropped something.” He offers as an excuse, uncomfortably trying to shift from your view and avoid eye contact. 

“Sure.” You say with a roll of your eyes, knowing full well that he was hiding his cock. “I want something sweet. Sounds good?” You change the subject, reaching out and running your fingers down his arm. 

He swallows hard, stiffening his shoulders and nodding to you. Without hesitation, you let your fingers stay against him for a few seconds longer, keeping eye contact with him before turning and opening a cupboard. 

“Peanut butter crackers, cereal, and oatmeal.” You deadpan, slamming the cupboard and stepping to the fridge. “Pudding.” Then you open the freezer. “Popsicles, and ice cream.”

Jay just stands there when you close the doors to the fridge and look at him in question. He could opt for the crackers but his throat is already dry enough. Choking right now would be even more humiliating. Cereal could work but that would be embarrassing too, for some reason. Oatmeal is an option, solely for how disgusting it looks, surely it would tame his boner. 

But, popsicles? Hell no.

“Grab whatever you want, I'm eating a popsicle.” You say, raising a brow and throwing open the freezer door again to take your pick.

Of course, it’s  intentional. It’s fun to see his eyes light up at the very idea of seeing you eat a popsicle, and even more fun to imagine how flustered he’s going to be in mere minutes.

Jay looks to the floor and heads towards your fridge, also opting for a popsicle despite his very recent internal protest. Mostly so you don’t think he’s a pervert when he inevitably sees you eat it. But also, like, just in case you really are trying to flirt with him right now, at least his lips will taste sweet too. 

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

You had expected Jay to get flustered, and boy did he. What you didn’t expect though, was to become flustered yourself by the image of Jay’s tongue darting over sweet ice, and then over his own lips to suck up the melted and sticky juice. The only image in your head right now is the idea of if he would lick his lips like that if you were to spread your legs for him. Would he lick up your mess on his face, chasing the flavor the same way he’s doing right now?

A dull ache begins to spread throughout your body as you watch him. His eyes still avoid you but you manage to catch him a few times. Each time he makes eye contact with you, your gaze shoots to his lap just to see if he’s gotten hard enough for his cock to leave its tucked position in his waistband. 

Jay is hyper-aware now too, with the way you’re staring and almost leaving your popsicle unattended as he eats his own. He feels confused, like? Are you doing what he was actively avoiding doing to you? Jesus, you really are kind of a whore, god.

By the time the popsicles are finished, your fingers are sticky from allowing it to drip down the stick. You make a point to suck each of your fingers innocently, looking under your lashes at him for split seconds as you begin to shuffle through the papers on the table. 

“So–” You say, popping one finger out of your mouth and inserting another. “Can we start here? I need to have a paper written on at least one topic on this list and have no idea how to find a good source to read from.”

Jay hears and sees you in tunnel vision right now, but he manages to catch the ass end of your sentence and begins to try and focus on the studies at hand. Still watching you suck your fingers into your mouth, he clears his throat and places his own popsicle stick onto the table, pretending he doesn’t wish your tongue would lick him like that.

“I wrote mine based on this topic, and I found a lot of good sources for it. I don’t think our professor would think too hard about us choosing the same subject–” 

“Yeah, especially because it’s me. They’d never guess you’re in my apartment right now.” You laugh, smirking over at him. 

“I would’ve never guessed either–” Jay says without thinking, barely processing how embarrassing he is before you squint at him with a wider smile. 

“Oh yeah?” You ask, raising a brow and leaning forward. “Why’s that?” 

Jay tries to look around but now can’t seem to force his eyes away from you. A much different circumstance compared to before when he couldn’t bring himself to look at you. There’s a connection here, he can feel it. You’re definitely coming onto him and you have been for the past however long he’s been here.

“You’re kind of out of my league, don’t you think?” He laughs more at himself than he does the situation, and to you, he honestly looks pitiful after saying that. It’s incredibly attractive to you in the way he seems to praise you for being a failure simply because he’s attracted to you. At least, that’s the case if you’re reading him right.

“Who said someone like you couldn’t teach me a thing or two?” You have a smile in your voice, and it comforts him, but that comfort is shot down when you stand on your feet and walk over to him. “Who says I’m out of your league?” You ask again, watching him scoot back with his chair as you come closer.

You prop yourself against the table, essentially blocking him from his books and papers. You look down at him now, dipping your head in a playful way. “I don’t think I’m out of your league.” 

Jay notes how you’re between him and the table now. You look comfortable leaning in front of him like this, and when his eyes trail up to your face all his body can do is give in. He looks at you through large eyes, the overhead light is sparkling through them at you. 

In that instant, you can see his embarrassment fill his body because he’s no longer resisting the urge to be himself. He’s staring at you as if you could be a god and saying nothing in response to your words. 

“If anything, Jongie–” You soothe him, grabbing one of his hands and smiling at the way his pen immediately falls out of his grip. “You’re out of my league.” 

He blinks up at you, soaking in the words and not yet understanding in full what you’re doing until he feels warmth enveloping the entirety of his hand and wrist. 

“Do you know how lucky I am that you’re here right now?” You ask him, basking in the way you can see his breath get caught in his throat. “How lucky I am that you’re not only smart but hot too?”

He dips his head at this, a bashful show of your words having an impact on him. He hides his face briefly against his arm and then he realizes–

“Is this okay?” You ask, holding his hand in place as you begin to move your hips against his palm.

Jay watches the way you’ve managed to pull his hand out and plant it between your legs, all so you could grind against it without so much as a warning. He’s not against it though, if anything, his head is shot back to reality and he’s immediately back to glancing around the room and avoiding the scene in front of him.

His palm is against your literal, dampening panties, and all he can think to say right now is, “You could write your thesis on human connection and its effects on the brain.” 

You smile at his attempt to continue to study through this moment.

“I could,” You say with a deeper voice than before, feeling the way his hand stays relaxed in your grasp as you grind against it. “Or we could think about how your brain is being affected right now?”

Jay groans, feeling the warmth of your wet beginning to seep through the fabric, and honestly, it is happening so fast that he’s sure it would be more embarrassing if he walked out now. 

“How are you feeling?” You reword your question towards him, intentionally swiveling your hips so that you can position his fingers into your underwear. 

“You’re warm.” Jay chokes out, eyes now zoning in on your legs slightly spread in front of him. 

You let out a small laugh at this, pulling a bit on his arm to pull him closer, but he doesn’t compute it at all. 

“Do you like it?” You ask again, this time slipping his fingers into you. You let out a deep sigh and roll your eyes back, fucking yourself gently against his fingers before you look at him.

He’s nodding, probably more thankful now that you’d worn a skirt today rather than pants. He didn’t allow himself to take note of your attire, because if he did, he would have made even more of a fool of himself. But he’s nodding now, watching the way you hold his arm in place and slide his fingers in and out of you. 

His silence is louder than his words could be right now, you think. You can feel him straighten his fingers inside of you, you can practically see him salivate at the very idea of how you’re using him right now. You’re not done though, no, no. He’s far too sweet like this, but you want to hear words.

Gently, you pull your hips back effectively slipping his fingers out of you. There, you lift his arm and examine your wetness against his fingers. You smile again, eyes now adjusting to his face rather than his wet fingers. 

Jay watches as you guide his fingers to his lip, and without a second thought, he opens his mouth to taste you against them. He licks circles around each of the two fingers, closing his eyes almost instantly so that he can relish the experience.

He no longer cares how awkward he must seem sitting here like this, letting you do all the work.

“Do you like the taste too?” You ask, releasing his hand and watching how he continues to suck his fingers. 

“Mhm–” Jay groans with his closed mouth around the digits, making damn sure to suck every bit off.

“You’re pretty, you know that?” You compliment him this time, tearing your eyes from him and slipping your panties down your legs. You turn yourself over so that you’re now bent over the table and you ignore the corner of one of the textbooks poking against your ribs, all in favor of what sound Jay will make when he opens his eyes. 

“You can taste more, if you want.” You offer, lifting to look behind you at the way his fingers drop from his mouth and his eyes immediately zone in on your bare pussy displayed for him under your hiked-up skirt. 

He does let out a whimper, one that seemed entirely desperate to do just that for you but–he doesn’t move. He just stares, soaking in the words you’re saying, memorizing each fold and dip in your glistening pussy.

You don’t intend to wait though. Reaching behind you, you grab the back of his head by his hair and guide his face to you. The way you can hear his chair tip over as he falls to his knees makes you quiver a bit before him, and you’re almost surprised to not just feel a face against you. It appears that Jay does know what he’s doing. 

He instantly jumps into action, loving the feeling of your hand in his hair basically telling him to do it. Giving him that green light, letting him.

You can feel his tongue exploring and his other hand reaching to lift your skirt entirely over your ass. His tongue is soft, warm, wet, and so entirely eager to lick and suck every inch of you. It’s not until he starts allowing his moans to vibrate into your flesh that you hike one of your legs up and open your cunt against his working tongue more.

Guiding him by his hair still, you press his face harshly into you with little to no fight for air from him, and you’re loving it. Loving the way he whines for more when his tongue reaches the furthest limit, loving even more when he finally reaches his hands up to your pussy and spreads it out for himself.

He isn’t even thinking at this moment, just tasting and feeling you guide his tongue as if this is what you wanted all along. The thought alone of someone like you wanting to fuck his tongue like this sets his cock on fire in so many ways. He’s so hard right now that it hurts to think about it at all. Jay doesn’t give a single fuck about how pathetic he must sound to you right now, whimpering and panting against you as if this was the only sweet thing in your apartment he wanted to eat anyway. 

You hear a clatter to the floor, knowing for a fact that he’s knocked his glasses off of his face from the angle in which he skewed his neck in order to fuck his tongue into you. You wonder what’s going through his mind right now, because goddamn he’s eating you out like it’s the only thing he’s ever wanted. He’s impressively messy and loud with it too, making you feel as if you must taste like the sweetest thing on earth to him. 

For some reason, thinking back to all of the non-sexual situations you’d passively seen Jay in? It turns you on even more. The big-brained student who is constantly making straight As and never going out to parties eats pussy like this? Eats your pussy like this? Better than half of the men you’d already been with? Jay doesn’t miss a single centimeter of it,  and you can tell he’s focusing on you more than he has ever focused on his homework or studies before. 

You feel so deeply needed at this moment by Jay that all you can do is let out a desperate moan for him. One so that he knows he’s not the only one utterly stunned by the turn of events, but also because you’re fucking loving what he’s doing to you.

With each moan, Jay picks up his pace, using those same two fingers and spreading your cunt out impossibly wider just so he can attempt to bury his tongue deeper into the messy, wet heat you offer. He’s spreading you apart so well that it almost pains you to move without the fear of being torn open by his tongue alone. Your clit has barely even been reached but he still managed to make you feel sensitive to the point of wanting to beat your fists on the table out of sheer frustration for not approaching him sooner. 

Not only can he help you pass your classes, but he surely could make you feel like a fucking queen on top of it all, licking you open, up and down, as if he were born and trained for you and you alone? Insane.

“You’re so–” You groan out, releasing his hair from your grip but pressing your ass out more so that you can feel him slip his tongue back to your clit with impossible reach. He continues that, sliding his tongue from your clit to your entrance, dipping in and swirling the muscle before going back to your clit. All while he’s moaning, groaning, and panting against you. 

It’s too much, he’s so incredibly eager that you’re honestly too sensitive to let him keep going. You hate it when you pull your hips forward and lift from the table. Your legs are shaking when you do this, and shaking even more when you turn to face him and lean against the table again. 

“How–?” You look down at him in pleasant surprise, watching him lick his lips much like you hoped he would. “How are you so good at this?” 

Jay is stunned by your question because in all fairness, he’s only ever eaten a girl out once and like, it wasn’t that great because she made him stop within like a minute. He wasn’t really thinking about what to do with you though, or how to do it. He just…did it. That’s all. So obsessed with the taste and smell of you to the point he couldn’t stop himself even if he wanted to. He’d still be licking you right now if you didn’t move away. 

“I–don’t know.” He shamefully admits, nonchalantly moving his hands to his pants and unbuttoning them. Not to fuck you or anything, mostly just to release his cock from the chokehold of the denim rubbing against him. 

“You’re lying.” You deadpan, running your hand between your legs and quivering the moment your fingers run over your swollen clit. “There’s no way you haven’t practiced doing this.” You gasp, looking at him as if no other man exists. 

He shakes his head, looking up at you from the floor with innocent eyes. His lips are wet, his eyes are hooded, his hair sticking up from your fingers guiding him– it’s a lot to see him like this when you’ve only ever seen him as that goody-two-shoes student who doesn’t know how to have fun. Clearly, Jay knows how to have fun.

Your gaze on him makes him feel more bashful as he looks down to the floor, feeling embarrassed that you’re praising a complete amateur at this. 

Using your leg, you nudge him.

“You did all of that and didn’t even touch yourself?” You ask in curiosity, noting how he had only just now undone his pants to relieve pressure. “Let me see it.” You say again, almost demanding as you hop up on the table and spread your legs even more.

Frantic at your tone of voice, Jay stumbles to his feet and pushes his pants down to his thighs. His cock springs out and stands erect in front of you. You could stare all day, honestly. Jay, of all people? He’s the one with a cock this big? He’s the one with a size that could make you feel as if you’re being split in half? Well, fuck.

“God.” You comment, mouth falling open at the way it twitches in mid-air. “All of the girls would be fucking swooning, Jay, really.” You get a bit flustered yourself because only now do you understand who you just seduced and what he’s got to offer outside of brains. 

In all of his shyness, Jay hides his face from you again despite his cock out in all of its glory. Your mouth could honestly start watering if he hadn’t just eaten you out to the point of needing him to stop. Meaning, your throat is too dry right now to start drooling. 

Without another thought, you pull your shirt and bra off all in one go. No way in hell is he leaving without fucking you stupid with a cock like that. Absolutely no fucking way  would you let this go to waste.

“When’s the last time you’ve done anything with a girl?” You ask now, reaching for his arm and pulling his gaze back towards you, now almost completely naked save for your skirt hiked up to your waist. 

Jay stares at you again, much like he did when you spread your legs in front of him, this time zoning in on the way your nipples are erect and begging for his mouth to be put to use again. He nearly forgets that you’re talking to him because of the way you’ve presented yourself to him. The reality is right in front of his face, but he still wonders if this must be a dream.

“I–um– right out of high school before she broke up with me,” He says in a lazy voice, slightly raspy. It sounds as if it doesn’t even matter to him because he is so focused on you in front of him. “I’ve only had sex two times.”

“Aw–” You pitifully look at him. “What a waste, you’re such a pretty boy.” You coo, wiggling your hips as if to entice his cock to make its way towards you. “You’ve got the brains and the cock for it. You must feel so neglected.”

All he does is nod, because yes, he does feel fucking neglected, partly because he let it happen and mostly because he knows he doesn’t know how to talk to girls. Right now, Jay could genuinely start crying if you keep talking to him like this though. He can’t tell if you’re mocking him or being genuine, but the only thing he wants to do is bury his cock so deeply inside of you that all you can do is moan out mantras of how pretty he is again. He wants to hear you moan over how much time has been wasted without his cock inside of you, how badly you’d want him again and again after this. 

You can see his facial expressions change every few seconds and to be fair, your body yearns to be filled. With the way he is looking at you, there’s no way he doesn’t want to.

“Wanna fuck me, Jongie?” You ask, realizing that you much prefer calling him this rather than his full name because he seems to lean directly into it. 

“God,” He sighs out, hanging his head to look at the way his cock still stands painfully erect throughout the conversation. “Can I?” He asks now, making eye contact with you through pleading eyes.

You reach out for him, grabbing his waist and pressing his cock directly against your core. You lean your head back a bit to look at him and the way his eyes sear straight through your own. His pupils are dilated, his cheeks are rosy, and his lips are glistening. You lick against them, and the way he immediately starts to kiss you makes you think he’s a liar. He knows exactly what he’s doing with his mouth regardless of where it is. His tongue presses into your mouth so beautifully that you genuinely could argue that this man has only ever had sex twice. 

Maybe he’s a natural? 

Jay knows exactly when to grind his cock between your folds, knows exactly when to pull back to kiss your neck, and knows exactly how to lean you back with his hand protecting the back of your head so that it doesn’t slam against the table. 

He slips his cock so beautifully as he trails his kisses to your tits too, suckling gently against one of your nipples before he nearly can’t stand it anymore. He’s in his own world, barely recognizing that he’s not the only one experiencing this right now.

With an eager hand, Jay grabs his cock and presses it directly into you without waiting any longer. He isn’t slow or gentle with it. You can feel how desperate he is solely because of the way he can’t seem to fathom taking it slow. He doesn’t let you adjust, no. The second the head of that thick cock slips in he’s slamming in. All the way, forcing a yelp from your throat and a tight grip to his back.

He’s lost himself in the moment and you’re loving it. Loving the way his tongue picks up against your nipples, and the way there is no rhythm or rhyme to his thrusts. His size alone is enough for you, and you can admit to loving every single push and pull his body is offering.

The room is silent save for his whimpers, your gasps, and the wet sound of skin slapping against skin. You’re quick to wrap a leg around his waist so that when he presses in again, you can force him to stay in place, if just to let him genuinely feel what it’s like to have a pussy clenching around him.

“You feel it?” You groan out, feeling his teeth pinch against your nipple and sending a sharp pain down your body. 

He nods frantically, pulling your nipple with his lips as he does it. You can tell he’s drooling, wetting your chest in such an embarrassing way, but he’s so–Jay. He’s Jay. This is Jay.

You watch his face and the way he winces with each pulse of your hole quivering around the sheer size of him, and you coo out at him when his cock twitches in response. As if you can handle yourself right now, as if he can too.

Neither of you can comprehend the pleasure.

“Can’t believe I get to be your third.” You sing out. “You’re so good, so–”

“S-stop talking, fuck-” Jay calls out in a broken and choked gasp, feeling too turned on by the way you speak. He can’t help it when he forces his hips to move against the pressure of your leg trying to keep him in place. This time he fucks at a quicker pace. His mouth falls open against your breast and his hands shoot to your waist as he pulls himself up and opens his eyes. 

He watches the way your sticky cunt coats him as he slides in and out of you, fingers pressing so hard into your hips that you feel he could be bruising you. 

You’re so in awe of him losing complete control that you want nothing more than to cum with him inside of you. You quickly reach your hand down to your clit, rubbing harsh circles against the sensitive spot almost to the point that you could start crying out at how painful it truly is at this moment. You’ve never been this sensitive for a man, and yet, you’re coming undone beneath him and nearly losing as much control as he has. 

A mess of moans and groans is filling the room as Jay chases his high, and you are at the point that you want to say the nicest and dirtiest things to him out of sheer arousal. So you do, you talk, and you talk. Whispers of “girls would die to be fucked by you,” turn to screams of, “yeah, fuck Jongie, just like that!” 

It wasn’t until you moaned out, “Cum with me, now, Jongie, I can’t hold it–” when Jay ’s hips stuttered and his eyes closed tightly in a frustrated groan. “Stop–” He grunts, hips pressing impossibly hard against you. To the point that you scoot up on the table. “Stop, I’m–” He groans again, attempting to pull out so that he can release against your pulsing and empty pussy.

But you don’t let him.

Your legs hold him in place as you release your clit and pull yourself up on your arms just to grab against his neck and pull him down with you against the table. 

“Cum in me.” You nearly demand, holding his face so that he can’t look away from you.

You watch the way his pupils dilate more at the words and you feel the way his cock twitches inside of you. Then? His pupils are gone. He’s rolling his eyes back now, looking so fucking beautiful while doing it.

Jay’s eyebrows fall much like his mouth does when he cums. His hips are frantic but his face looks calm, and not a single sound releases from his lips. His breath is caught in his throat with each twitch, shooting ropes into you so deeply that you feel each wave of his pleasure hitting your cervix. 

  You’re very quick to rub your clit again, harsh and rough circles being amplified by the way his abdomen adds pressure to your hand with each push of his cock in you. It sends you over edge so fast, even he feels the clench, choking out each spurt of his remaining orgasm. 

You grab onto him harshly now, without a thought in your head besides kissing him. He kisses you back, realizing that despite having sex before, this may be the first time he’s ever made a girl cum. It’s certainly the first time he’s ever felt his cock being tugged by the walls of a pussy as it works itself through an orgasm, anyway.

Crazy thing is…he’s not done. Like, he can’t stop cumming. Lasting entirely far too long and far past sensitivity. Jay opens his eyes to look at you when you’re reaching the end of your own orgasm, all while he’s still filling you up, and even feeling his load bubble out from around him with each tight thrust. Your voice is beautifully raspy, and the way you hold onto him makes him feel like you should never let go. 

Upon his ears popping and finally emptied, he genuinely feels the mess between the two of you. Quickly, he pulls back and notes that the hem of his shirt is absolutely fucking soaked. In an attempt to take a small step back in order to remove himself from you, he nearly trips over his pants that had fallen to his ankles.

“Oh.” You laugh, wincing as you feel his cock leave you empty. “Probably should have undressed you.” Your eyes sparkle at the large damp spot, nearly making his shirt entirely see-through from just how soaked it really is. 

Jay steps out of his pants silently and just kind of stands there awkwardly, watching the cum spill from you. Then panic spreads across his face. 

“Um,” He croaks out, voice cracking almost immediately. “I– I couldn’t pull out…I’m so sorry.”

“I didn’t want you to.” You soothe him, noting how he’s right back to his awkward and shy persona the moment he’s finished fucking you. “It’s fine, I’m protected” You confirm for him, just to see the relief replace that panic.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

“So–” You comment, looking down at the wrinkled papers in front of you. “You really expect me to try and write at least 1200 words tonight?” 

Jay tilts his head at you, sitting with a blanket covering his entire body as his clothes go through the cycles of a wash. “If we hadn’t gotten off track, you could already be almost done with it.” 

“God, you are such a fucking bore.” You laugh, shivering at the cold air hitting your bare skin. “I’m literally naked right now and you’re making me do this right now?” 

“Finish your paper and we can talk about that. Besides, I kind of need to recover for more than thirty minutes from that, you know? I’m sensitive.” He shoots back, not afraid to sound as embarrassing as he truly is now. 

To his surprise, you nod with a cheeky smirk. Promising you any amount of him after what happened was enough to force your focus on your school work for now at least. Just because he did it once doesn’t mean he will always want to fuck stupid girls. If anything, Jay deserves someone who respects his work ethic and need to help others right? The huge cock is just a bonus when you think about it.

You know it’s going to be a hell of a month after tonight, but for the most part, you think that studying with Jay may have been your best college decision to date. You can learn a lot from him, and apparently... he can learn from you too. You just hope he doesn’t run off and use that knowledge on other girls once he realizes he’s definitely got the ability to break hearts. 

[danikamariewrites]

Hello 😊 can you do a Ruhn× shy library reader scenario/headcanon please 💗

I just wondered how he would be chasing after someone more quiet and introvert.

I also want to mention I really like your page, makes my tea break more entertaining 😄

Behind Bookcases

Ruhn x reader

A/n: aww thank you sm I’m happy you like my blog

the way I’ve thought about this before it would be such a cute dynamic 🥰

Warnings: none

You work in the Fae Archives and occasionally saw the Prince when he came by to research something for the Aux or to visit his sister. Your job wasn’t anything fancy. You were simply just the book keeper, making sure things were in there place and helping people find things.

Ruhn had asked were to find certain books and you had always fumbled your words and maybe seemed a little too eager when you brought him to the stacks. He was always so kind to you when he came in. Lately you felt like he was coming to the archives a lot. And he wasn’t even seeing Bryce most of the time.

You could’ve sworn the other week he was trying to flirt with you when he stopped by the front desk during your shift. You didn’t want to look too into it though. He was a huge party guy and your idea of a fun night was something quiet with a small group or just spending time alone at home. What could Ruhn possibly see in you?

One day after a month straight of Ruhn coming to the archives and lingering at the desk and asking you a million questions your confidence seemed to have boosted. You were typically nervous around people you don’t know. Ruhn had been coming to the archives so much you felt like you had known him for years. Even if you just had small, meaningless conversations.

You were putting books back when you heard muttering from the other side ancient bookcase. You know you shouldn’t be eavesdropping but the voice sounded familiar. Slowly taking a book out from your side, you peeked into the other aisle.

Ruhn was pacing back and forth. He looks a little stressed. His phone is pressed between his shoulder and ear as he tries not to yell at the person he’s talking to who is clearly teasing him.

“Dec for the first time I’m not sure what to do. I’m nervous. And don’t you dare tell Flynn what I just said…we’ll take me off speaker then, I called you not the whole house.” What could he be nervous about? Ruhn exuded confidence, not to mention he was a total charmer.

“No I’m not asking Bryce. I want to do this on my own.” You could hear yelling through the phone. It wasn’t angry, it sounded like his friends were cheering him on. You shrugged and gently put the book back going back to your task.

You gently push the cart out the aisle and run into Ruhn accidentally hitting him. “Oh! I’m so sorry. I wasn’t looking.” Your cheeks turn beet red as he smiles down at you, handing you two books that fell off the cart. “It’s alright y/n. I was actually hoping to run into you.”

Your eyes went wide and your lips parted a little in shock. He wanted to talk to you? You wondered if he just wanted information on something. “Yeah, what do you need help with?” Ruhn chuckled a little and nervously scratched at the back of his neck.

“Well it’s not…I don’t need help persay…but,” Ruhn never stumbled when speaking. You didn’t want to get your hopes up, that would be embarrassing. Ruhn let out a small groan and dropped his head. Looking back up at you his violet, blue eyes seemed softer.

“I was wondering if you would like to go out to dinner with me?” You wanted to jump up and down and scream yes, yes, a thousand times yes! But you reined yourself in. Your face lit up, a wide smile breaking out on your lips. “Yes. I-I’d love to.”

The prince let out a sigh of relief. “Prefect. When are you?” “Tonight,” you responded quickly. You cleared your throat repeating the word softer, “Tonight. If that’s cool with you.” Ruhn’s smile widened as he nodded his head. “Yeah, give me your number and I’ll pick you up tonight at seven.”

After giving your number to Ruhn and walking with him back to the front of the archives you couldn’t stop smiling. You were going on a real date with a real prince! And you couldn’t wait.

[donutloverxo]

A Royal Scandal 3

Modern Royal King!Steve au

(Image from Pinterest)

cowritten with @lizzygal​

Note - There will be no taglists for this. You can subscribe to the  ao3 story to receive updates!

Please note that my stories are not to be stolen or reposted on any other site. Reblogs are welcome. This blog and this story is 18+. Do not read, follow or interact if you are not 18+.

Summary - Modern ruler, His Majesty King Steven G Rogers, is on a quest to make his long term secret relationship the real thing. He is a man in love and wants his lover and partner to be his queen.

Warnings - Smut (m/f), dub con/non con, sex tape, scandals, mentions of past domestic abuse, soft dark Steve, possessive Steve, spanking, power imbalance, mentions of previous domestic abuse, somnophilia.

Pairing - King!Steve x reader

Word count - 7k

Story masterlist

Sometimes Steven forgot that you weren’t that much younger than him. He forgot about a lot of things when it was only the two of you. You did that to him. You made him forget things that everyone else reminded him of constantly, intentional and not.

Early that morning was no different.

Long before his alarm went off, Steve found himself on his side watching you sleep. Feeling in every way equal to you, like there was not this huge ocean of things that he did not have in common with you, opposed to what the two of you shared.

Obviously, he was the son of kings and tyrants while you were the daughter of immigrants and a blue-collar family. You’d grown up in a house full of love and kindness and acceptance, he had not. You’d ended your teenage years going to college and then travelling and ending up here, where you chose to stay and work and travel and live a life that Steve could only dream of, his own had never been his own and never would be.

You had dreams and hopes, little things like aspirations. He didn’t.

Steve’s life was dictated by things like duty and obligations, expectations. Yours was not.

Maybe that was why he’d been so drawn to you?

Compared to all the royals around Europe and titled individuals, politicians, even old families, none of them interested him even a fraction of the amount that you interested him. To Steve you were exotic. You were a fascinating creature who might as well have come from Mars.

He couldn’t even say what it was or why.

For so long it had felt right to be alone. Considering the blood of monsters ran through his veins, Steve had been uninterested in any sort of companionship more than a brief encounter at a private location.

For Christ’s sake, he refused to sleep in the bedroom that his father had slept in.

Upon assuming the throne, he’d selected to take up older quarters in an unused part of the palace living complex. As if to ensure he was as far away from the rooms that his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had slept. Choosing to sleep in a bed untainted by any of those men, stored from when his land was ruled by an emperor. Hoping with the hopes of a young king that it would save him from their madness.

Beside him, you slept so peacefully, trustingly.

Steve had never brought anyone into his private apartment. Nor had his bed seen any carnal action since it’d gone into storage. Until you. He’d simply never been so inclined.

A rough sound from the growth on his cheek rubbing against his pillow. A pleasant reminder of that night that felt so long ago, yet also like only yesterday.

He’d had a beard back then he remembered.

A full bushy one.

One that had made you laugh softly at, roll your eyes and still manage to pull off an acceptable bow when you greeted him that late night.

“They beat Canada then Your Majesty?” You had inquired with good nature, setting down a whole stack of papers and folders onto the very modern conference table in a big room that could fit two dozen, more if the people were standing.

He’d beamed.

Steve remembered he’d been in a particularly good mood that night. Even if he was working late on the education push into the outer regions of his kingdom. A good amount was still very rural, many simple villages that lived as they had fifty or more years ago. Many parts of his kingdom were still deeply rooted in the past.

“Indeed. Eleven to four.”

He was beaming. Beaming! You were pretty sure you could see molars. It made you shake your head and begin to sort out all your work into piles to go over. Not that you’d ever admit to secretly being caught up in the hype of the team being so close to gold at the Winter Olympics. “So then the beard stays?”

“You of all people,” he admonished, coming over to help you. Picking up the well-marked up maps you’d spent hours annotating.

Making you roll your eyes.

On he went though, obviously needing to drive home the seriousness of this matter. “The beard stays until we win gold. Next we play Norway. I don’t think it needs to be said that we cannot risk it.”

He was serious. Really serious. If that full glorious beard was any indication.

More focused on the organizing task yourself.

Sorting your work by region, pile by pile, each had taken much work and effort and negotiation, endless phone calls and trips and emails to each area to get them to work not only with you, but one another. It was like herding cats. It had taken you months to get this all sorted out for Steve to see. His ideas weren’t even ready to be implemented. This was just the pre-gaming, the leadup, the work in preparation. You weren’t even on Step One. You were on Step Zero.

“Now that I know, I’ll be sure to grow a beard next Winter Olympics.”

And then you were rewarded with a rich hearty laugh from your king.

Well not your king, as you weren’t a citizen of this country. But you still liked to think of him as your king.

Watching you sleep was something he’d never tire of. Never get enough of. It was a luxury that he didn’t realize he wanted day in out.

The ability to wake up with you tangled up in blankets. Curled back against his front. Hogging pillows as you did. Allowing Steve to run his fingers up and down your bare thigh, along the curves of your body. Letting him lean forward to press his lips to your shoulder and see the peaceful rest of your face in his slowly lightening bedroom. Every last inch of you here for him.

Hungry.

That was what it was, he was hungry for you. Like a big bear that woke from hibernation after a long winter. At times he felt such a way. Never having felt this way about anyone prior.

In his own time, he slipped his fingers down along the round of your ass underneath the flesh of your hip. Warm. Soft. Smooth. Neither of you had left the bed since the late night bath in his tub.

Further down Steve allowed his fingers to trail.

Memorizing every last second to get him through his day. From how you felt pressed against the front of him, how your back moved against his chest with every steady breath you took. The way your legs tangled in his buttery sheets with his own, how the soft cheeks of your bottom pressed against his alert groin.

Most definitely though, how your skin tasted and felt beneath his mouth. Smelling like yourself from all your favorite bath products kept in his bathroom.

You’d smelled so good that night too.

You always smelled good.

It was something that he had noticed but hadn’t given any real thought to.

It seemed to be a mix of perfume and body lotion or cream. Cause Steve found the flowery smell would linger after you walked by in the way that perfume did, infusing the air and making his brain scream out that you were near. But also, when you shook his hand, it always had that sweet fresh clean smell afterwards.

Now, whenever Steve smelled it, all he could think about was you.

Those smells danced around him. Making the late hour bearable. Making the fact that the offices were empty but for the two of you, when you both should have been home in bed, not matter.

“Ok…” you were talking to him, pointing out places on the massive map that was his nation. Arms crossed. Legs spread. Standing beside you as you informed him with tones that indicated your happiness, your displeasure as well as your utter irritation. “…so I managed to get in touch with every Education Department in all nine of your territories.”

Though you were not looking at him, Steve nodded, laser focused on this project he’d tasked you with months ago.

“All of the department heads are on board with your desired overhaul to completely modernize the entire system. Unfortunately, they told me that I had to call all the district heads for all forty-six provinces to get their agreed participation too.”

Your tone went from pleased with yourself then skeptical and then annoyed.

You turned your head to look at him. “Which is what I spent the last three months doing. It was something of a thing.”

Steve could only imagine.

He was quiet though so you could go on. More than pleased with how well you worked in this position. He’d originally been skeptical with your being a foreigner. How dedicated would you be to a job in a country that was not your own? One hundred percent as it turned out.

Your hands flattened out dramatically on the table. Outrage surged from you. “I’m still waiting on two appointees because their predecessors apparently died during harvest season and no one could be bothered to replace the position. I literally had to fly out to the outer reaches of civilization to find this out. Cause all the government offices are closed during harvest season, fyi. But they’re literally filling the positions now.”

Such was the challenge of having a large kingdom with one foot in the future and one in the past. Such things led to the difficultly of keeping a Chief of Staff.

Steve’s previous Chief of Staff had come highly recommended and lasted a little over a month.

Whether it was from a lack of dedication, the obvious frustrations of the job or maybe he simply had not wanted to jump on a plane and fly six hours then ride by car five hours to remote areas in order to complete his work. Steve could not be sure. All he knew for sure was he’d keep you as long as humanly possible.

In his eyes, you were a saint.

“What’s with the question mark?”

Making you look to see which question mark you’d marked on the map full of stickers and marks and tabs. Hours had been spent working on the damn thing.

Seeing which question mark in question made your nose scrunch. “Oh…them, they refuse to even answer my calls until they are allowed to take their traditional name for their province. Which is way above my pay grade. Someone else is going to have to deal with them. I tried.”

Ah, Steve nodded, that was far from surprising. The far outer regions were notoriously independent or rebellious, depending on your stance.

He would deal with them accordingly. Not how his father did, but in his own way.

Steve’s attention was drawn to two nearby provinces. Each had a frowny face sticker. Without asking, he merely pointed.

A noise of pure disgusted frustration came from deep in your throat. Making you stand and look to him, brandishing your hands in all directions. “I tried my best with them. I really did. Both of those provinces absolutely refuse to take part in anything if the other is involved. Apparently, they’re still salty at one another over something that happened in fourteen-seventy-three and refer to me as the foreign she-devil. So…good luck with them Your Majesty.”

Soundly you slept.

Comfortable. Safe. At peace.

Making him feel like a true man. A provider able to care for you, protect you, satisfy you. As if he were stripped down to what nature intended. Instead of what society had dictated for you both.

Reaching down to that heavenly place between the V in your thighs, Steve pushed his fingers further to find your softness slippery, your skin slick with viscous arousal. In pushing his finger up further, running it around the edge of your slit to where the gateway to your body was hidden, he found you heavily aroused. Coating his fingers with a thick fluid that promised you would be able to take him now. Oozing into the cervices between his fingers and smearing thickly down his palm and over the back of his hand.

Unable to help himself, he brought his hand out from between your legs in order to look at your arousal. Merely the sight made his balls clench in eager anticipation. Tasting the bodily excretions had his hips moving against yours on their own.

A noise came from you. Though you were far from waking. Always one to enjoy your sleep.

On his tongue you were heady, ripe. Tasting like sin. Steve licked his fingers. Eyes closed so he could savor the taste, how you clung to his tongue and were thick, like a burst of brandy swirling with his saliva.

Awakened now from his deep sleep. Ravenous like a beast of the forest. He pressed a lingering kiss to your shoulder. Making you mumble. Making you wiggle in your sleep, causing you to reach your arm out for a pillow to pull close. Hooking your leg up higher too. Becoming more comfortable in the bed in addition to opening yourself up more to your king. As if your body had connected to his on a level your mind was unaware and encouraged him to take you.

Down he peered. Strands of hair fell across his forehead at the harsh angle. A soft lightening of the sun through drapes he never closed last night allowed the sight of moisture. Folds of bare skin sheened up at him. Tempting him with that webbing of goo that promised him you were ready.

Taking himself in hand, he caught sight of your name curled over his side. Reminding him of your absolute possession over him. Sending his hand low to pull his foreskin back in order to feed this hunger of you that consumed him.

Your signature was all swoops and swirls.

Recognizable above anyone else’s writing he came across on a daily basis.

All over paper and on the maps. In little corners. Highlighted. In different color pens. On stickie notes. Written on napkins or on the back of random pieces of paper.

At the time, he’d had no idea how far gone he really was.

Not even when he watched you take note after note with a purple inked pen, your hand flowing across paper like a swimmer cutting through the water. Taking down his every word, every command.

A incredibly distinctive feeling of being full woke you up from your glorious sleep, in a very singular sort of way that could be from only one thing. Only one thing on earth felt like that when waking you up.

Pulling you out of a warm blissful sleep only to wake you with the exquisite feeling of being stretched open, pushed into, filled up. Making your fingers clench bedding or pillows or whatever they could grab.

A low breathy moan came from you in the time between you were woken and awake, your face burrowing in a pillow was followed by a soft profanity. Weight slowly covered you. Weight pinned you down to the bed a little at a time. Skin and sheets and soft dustings of hair rubbed against you.

Only when you had fully woken did you feel pubes brush against your cheeks. A light tap of scrotum bumped you too.

Long arms wrapped around you. Wet lips mouthed along the curve of your neck.

This was a far superior way to wake up. Compared to your apartment, in bed alone, to your neighbors loud shrilling alarm clock through your paper-thin wall.

Groaning out at the feel of His Majesty’s cock stuffed safely up in your secret garden. You found yourself whining at Steve at whatever time it was in the early morning. “…fuuuuck…what’d I say about doing that…” A swivel, nay, a swivel with a pop of his pelvis followed, making you see stars, gasp deeply as if you’d been stabbed in the lungs and then add on for God and Country. “…My King…shit, My King…oh shit, My King.”

Though it may have been said in jest, his tone was hot enough to scald. “If memory serves me correctly…” another deep push of thick hips shoved you forward into the pillows. “…you say, not in my ass unless I’m awake.”

Stars.

So many bright and colorful stars.

Mmm.

Yes, that was something you had told him on many occasions and it still held very true. If Steve was going to put anything in your ass, forget that thing he claimed was a dick, you needed to be fully awake so you could both physically and emotionally prepare yourself.

Nothing at all could have prepared you for the drastic turn your life was about to take that night.

Nothing.

Everything had been so normal. It was so regular. Like many a long night working late hours at the palace before. Hours had been spent going over all your hard work contacting each and every head in each education department per province, as well as per territory. In addition to the national department of education, preparing to prep them for what the king wanted.

Like any other late night, Steve helped you put all of your paperwork back in the correct order you had it in. Like every other time, he requested a palace car take you to your apartment. Granted the apartment you shared with your best friend was walking distance away. It was late and simply not safe and you found were touched that Steve would think about your well-being.

For a king, he wasn’t that bad. When it was the two of you anyway.

Looks aside, which he had in spades, he could be very funny in a sarcastic sort of way. He was very well read and intelligent, quick on his feet. Although people seemed to think of him a certain type of way based on his father and his own kingship at a young age, when he really was his own person.

You’d noticed he had a definite interest in the classical masters and had on rare occasion seen him sketch out something on a flight or during a less than stimulating event. He had an artistic ability that would never come to anything due to his role.

His strong sense of duty paired with a disgusting moral obligation pretty much guaranteed his life would be spent in service to his country. Period.

You could see why people thought he was hot. The man had been blessed by the genetic gods. Plus he was a king. Who didn’t grow up dreaming about being a princess? Or think about a literal Prince Charming from fairy tales?

Having now had the benefit of working in a real life palace. You knew the realities of that fantasy.

You had two pages of notes that could attest to the reality of your childhood Disney Princess movies.

Reality was always so different.

Not for the first time, you found yourself repeating yourself. “…and let me say one more time. Thank you so much for talking with my parents. I know it was only ten minutes, but, I know how busy you are and it just completely topped off their visit. My mother has been telling everyone about how she met the king. You even have my father cheering for the hockey team.”

A smile came over Steve’s face that was real.

It wasn’t one of his practiced smiles. It was an actual smile. You could tell because it reached his eyes.

“Well,” Steve answered you with a shrug, sounding genuinely pleased even if he also sounded tired and like he wanted nothing more than to go off to his living quarters in the palace and crash into bed, before he had to get up to start a new day. Helping you stack the last of your papers up. “Anything to convert a soul to hockey. Technically, it is his team too.” And because he could not help himself, Steve added on, “Even if his grandparents fled from here for a cushy life in the west.”

Up your hand flew to your chest.

Your jaw dropped in mock pain. “Ouch, Sir! That one was painful.”

His smile grew at your over-the-top reaction.

Still though, he dipped his head and you noticed there was a little blush on his cheeks above where that magnificent beard grew. Chagrined, he quickly followed up with, “I apologize. That was a cheap shot.”

In a physical sort of way that his people were known to interact, personal space be damned, Steve reached over to touch your arm apologetically. Not something he did frequently. Although he had done it a handful of times. The press of his mouth to your cheek was new. The little kiss was brand new. Steve’s lips were gentle on your skin. His beard tickled your face.

Never in your life had your heart pounded as violently in your chest as it did at that gesture. Quickly, your head turned. Though you did not move back or say anything. Instead, you found yourself staring at Steve. Looking into those pools of blue that were looking at you with the same amount of surprise that you felt. His lips were right there, right there.

Blood roared in your ears, your heart pounded faster and faster and faster.

He kissed you.

Did he really though?

Was it a kiss or was it a kiss?

For a moment in time, you leaned in. Leaned closer. Leaned till you almost touched him because that was what your body wanted to do. Until you remembered that Steve was a king. A KING. Remembering that made your head command your body to lean backwards a bit. Allowing you to see that he had leant in to meet you.

He’d leaned closer to kiss you.

What were you doing? What in the hell were you doing? You had no business doing this, no business at all messing around with Steve.

Fingers moved along your arm, tracing up the back of it softly. That simple touch made goosebumps break out over your skin. It made your breath hitch. Your hands began to shake so you grabbed the fabric of your skirt.

However, you made no move to step away from Steve. Nor did he make any sort of move to step away from you.

Another attempt at a kiss was not made.

Fingers touched your face instead. Steve was close enough to you that you felt his legs brush yours. You felt his breath against your face. Fingertips ran across the swell of your cheekbone, down over your lips, tracing the bridge of your nose in what felt like a desire to memorize your face.

Steve was gentle. His fingertips felt like feathers on your skin. He made you shake like a leaf in terror because you wanted him to touch you more. You wanted to be touched. You wanted to feel his hands on you and the soft glide of his thumb along the line of your jaw was painfully insufficient.

Without thinking, you reached up with your hands until you remembered that he was the king.

Were you allowed to touch the king? You weren’t sure. He was touching you and it was fabulous but were you allowed to do the same? You wanted to. You so deeply wanted to. You just were not sure what was allowed in this situation. It had not exactly been covered in the Royal Protocol Guidebook you had.

Then came Steve’s voice. Harsh. Gravelly. Desperate.

“Touch me. It’s ok. I want you to.”

For only a heartbeat or two you remained still, observing him, making sure. Only after that did you reach up with your hands to cover his wrists. Rub along the fabric of his button-up shirt. In doing so, you not only felt the strength in his well-muscled wrists, or how warm the silky fabric was, but, you could feel him tremble. He was shaking about as much as you were.

A rush of air surged from his lungs as if you had burnt him.

Curious, you turned your head so you could place a single kiss on the inside of his hand touching your face, right at the base of his thumb. In doing so, you ripped a noise from deep within him. A noise that was both pained while also infused with wanting.

“This is ok?”

“Yes,” he croaked out, as if he were terrified you would stop.

Never would you have ever imagined he would be so responsive. Almost touch starved it felt.

Sometimes, Steve still felt as if he were a little touch starved to you. Sometimes it felt like he’d gone his entire life without having that physical connection between two people. As complicated of a man as he was with as complicated of a life as he had, you at times forgot that he was still a human being with human being needs that were essential to thriving.

And it wasn’t like you were complaining.

Far from it.

Not after the orgasm you just had, not from on top of him either. Lounged across the front of him. Loose limbed. Languid down to your marrow. Peppering the damp skin of his neck with slow wet kisses and scrapes of teeth. Long drags of your tongue collected drops of salt that tasted of him. Lazily. Heart to heart. Stomach to stomach.

There really were worse ways to wake up.

Like, for instance, in your apartment taking cold showers cause the building’s water heater was ancient. That wasn’t fun at all and usually had you shivering and hurrying through an icy shower. Straight up not a good time.

This? This was soooo much better.

Feeling Steve’s long legs wrapped up in your own, paired with his softening member filling you by virtue of sheer size not letting himself just pop out…this was a much better way to wake up. Far superior in every way.

Not that you were willing to waste precious time like this luxuriating in post-coital bliss. No, no. A burning question was hot on your mind that kept popping up after last night. After all, you were a modern woman and this was a serious relationship. You had every right to ask this question at any time you wanted. Even now. As your boyfriend, the king, fondled your breasts in his hands with such intensity that you would have thought he’d just broken out of Alcatraz after a decade of no nookie. Not that you were in the least bit complaining. Not one bit.

“Am I going to have to quit my job?”

It was something of a concern.

You loved your job. You loved working with Steve. You loved your life as it was and a big part of you suspected becoming queen would mean big changes.

Not that you lifted your head from his neck, or ceased your trek down towards his collarbone. Trail of your kisses never slowing or stopping. No hint of any sort of disruption came. Not for a moment or two. Not till your ravenous boyfriend squeezed your breasts possessively. Thumbed your nipples and finally opened his eyes, as if it were the biggest chore on earth.

His voice was rough. His tone felt like hot gooey honey that just got everywhere. “No…not yet…”

Leading you to make a noise. A pop followed when your mouth left the dark spot you’d been sucking on nearly at his collarbone. What with your name already etched on him. What else could you leave in a display of ownership over him? “Nothing else to add My King?” For added emphasis, perhaps you gave you vaginal muscles a clench knowing what that did to him.

A grunt came from beneath you.

Wrapped up in yours, Steve’s legs clenched in response to what you did. White teeth sank into his upper lip and you absolutely thrived at the sight and feel of him arching up against you, shifting around beneath you at the way your body squeezed him.

Those hands left your breasts only to reach down, run over your waist as they had so many times before, leading you to grab them. Snatch then right up. Press them down into the mattress over Steve’s head. Since the man was far larger than you, this sent you leaning downwards and ever closer to his face. “Steve? I asked you a question.”

How easy it would have been for him to get free. Yet, he seemed content where he found himself. Still wedged within you. Warm in bed. Body a sea of a complex cocktail of chemicals after physically releasing into you. A far better way to wake up than alone in a massive bed. Or worse, to his mother jabbing at him to urgently tell him something that was not urgent at all.

Feeling your breasts press against his chest. Lightly brushing over his skin, your nipples little points that sparked a definite interest in his dick.

God did he want you to be his queen.

“Not yet,” Steve ground out, nearly close to being overwhelmed by you. Each and every word was enunciated to utter perfection, as if it took all of his concentration and effort to get them out. “I’ll have the palace leave your name out of the official statement today. We can go slow. Ease you into things…ease you out of your job…” and to reward him for such a thoughtful statement, you clenched around him once more.

However, it seemed, there was more and even though his eyes rolled up into his head at the feel of your core squeezing his not entirely soft organ, he pushed on with the determination of his ancestors. Grunting. Arching back into the bed as the pillows had all wound up on the floor. Perfect teeth clenched together. “M-my people…will…love you…too.”

So, it was entirely possible, that you were feeling all kinds of powerful watching him writhe beneath you. Knowing exactly what sort of repercussions this could have to your morning. Which was still progressing on time. It was entirely possible that you may have intentionally pushed your own pelvis against his to reseat yourself.

“Oh yeah? How can you be so sure? You saw what happened with those two over in England. And that prince isn’t even next in line to the throne.”

Perhaps it was the seriousness of the direction in which your conversation had taken, Steve remained beneath you. Taking no action, even though you could quite literally feel his dick grow more interested in what your hips were doing.

A panted out, “…fuck…” escaped from him, before he opened his eyes to look at you seriously, if not also a little heatedly. “Quit obsessing over them. The King of Jordan married for love. Queen Rania was a commoner. If you must, focus on them.”

Sudden movement found you falling off Steve and onto the bed, shoved onto your back and in a flash, he was on top of you again. Over you. Hovering. Though he’d escaped out of your body, you could feel the king’s most delicious semi, slick from your previous copulation, squish between you both.

Admitting on an exhale, “Forgot about them.”

“Everyone does.” He agreed, surveying down, taking in the sight of you. “My country appreciates you. They’re fond of you. You’re in all the papers and they’ve given you a nickname.”

And that. That. Nearly killed the mood.

It sent your eyebrows together dubiously so.

Everytime you were in the press it was when your skirt had been blown up on a windy day, or if you’d accidentally gotten food on your shirt. Or that time a baby goat pooped on your shoes. Or when you’d tripped and fallen off a dock into a lake. Who could forget that time you’d accidentally called the Prime Minister of Canada a ‘moose fucking cannibal’ when you’d still been getting the hang of the language, your first year on the job?

You’d been affectionately dubbed, ‘the King’s Foreign Devil’ and it had stuck.

Hell, you still got asked about your thoughts on the Canadian Prime Minister whenever a member of the press was around.

“Most the time, you have a higher approval rating than I do,” he added. Much to the consternation of Maria Hill in PR. “Trust me. There is nothing my country loves more than a hard-working loyal servant of the people who talks shit about western leaders.”

Mood totally killed, you seethed and not for the first time, “That was an accident! I was trying to call him Canada’s Disney Prince.”

***

The note had been hand delivered to the palace and was now crumbled into a ball in the Queen Mother’s bedroom as she stormed off, once more, that early morning in a fury of rose satin and silk. Her perfume clouded around her, drifting behind her, much like the wake of a boat cutting through the water.

Thick carpets silenced her heels. Doors opened for her as she neared them, allowing her to not need to slow her step even for a second. Not a single moment wasted as she made her way through the private living quarters of the palace.

Down hallways and around corners, over to the rooms that her grown son had selected as his own.

It would have been so much easier if he would have just taken the rooms that his father had lived in.

Although, with the horrific memories attached to those rooms, how could she blame him when he elected not to? She had her own private rooms. The dead kings rooms were locked up tight and still not used. Abandoned like so much he’d done, started and accomplished in his life.

Upon coming to her only child’s rooms, those doors were held open for her and on she pressed on. Sailing through his rooms, one after another, until she got closer to his bedroom and could hear his shower which was the direction she headed.

A brief glance was made at the mess that was his bed.

A roll of her eyes was followed by a shake of her head.

Some things males never grew out of it seemed.

“Steven!” She called out in warning, should he be in the bathroom about to come out in the nude. Which was the last thing she wanted to see.

Not only was his bed a mess but his clothes from yesterday were all over the floor.

She had every intention of telling him that he needed to straighten up this mess before the cleaning staff came in his room. The last thing she wanted was for them to think he was messy and then tell their families and friends when they went home that the king had a messy bedroom and word would get out that her son was a slob. Ugh. No. She’d make sure that he straightened up.

Speaking of the devil.

As his shower ran, Steve peered out of the bathroom with a wet head. A midnight blue towel was wrapped around his waist. A toothbrush was in his hand. To Sarah, it was very clear that her grown son had not shaved yet either.

Seeing him in such a state that morning along with his messy room and the fact the shower was going wasting water. It did not make her mood any more agreeable.

Though her son was taller than her and considerably more muscular, she never feared him.

She knew he would never hurt her like his father had so many times. Towards the end, Steve had even defended her from his father’s physical attacks. Those days. They had been dark. Horrible. Terrible. When she noticed that her husband had begun to carry a knife to protect himself from his son. Well. What was she supposed to do?

Attacking her was one thing. Being violent towards her was one thing. There were some things that she learned to tolerate. It was unescapable. Their son though. To take a knife to their son? Her son? Sarah would never allow such a thing.

She was queen at the time.

It was not so difficult to get the drug that she put in her husband’s evening nightcap. She’d used all of it. Thrown the vial away the next day when she went to rouse the king as she did every morning, only to find him dead in his chair. Fireplace having long gone out. Slumped down. Cold. The coroner had said it was a heart attack. Exactly as she’d been told the drug would work. He’d been buried with no one the wiser. Not even Steve.

“Yes mother?”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “You are not growing another beard. Last time you looked like some man that lives up in the mountains in a tiny shack.”

Just as her own father once did, Steve’s eyebrows rose in surprise and question.

No. That was not why she was here.

Sarah had a higher calling that morning and straightening her slim shoulders, she so informed him. “Hope and Janet are here in the city. They’ve come for a surprise visit and will arrive at the palace within the hour.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed at her in response to her information.

It was horrifying. It was outrageous. It was not what he wanted to hear that morning one bit. Not at all. Not one single bit.

Hope and Janet?

Those were two names he never wanted to hear with the additional words being, ‘on their way’. No. Just no.

All he could say that was remotely civil, after what the then Princess Hope van Dyne had done, came out in something of a tone. “I don’t want to see either of them. If you want to see them, that’s your choice. Keep them away from me.”

Considering what the now Duchess Hope had spewed to every reporter, journalist and whomever with a platform…Sarah was a little surprised that Steve was being so kind.

She’d expected a bit more of a reaction from her son.

Could she be holding a bigger grudge against her one-time closest friend’s daughter? After what had happened, Queen Janet van Dyne had become somewhat distant. Which was not surprising. Hope had not broken the engagement gracefully. Nor had she been anything less than opinionated afterwards.

“I suspect she is in trouble,” Sarah confessed. “Why else would they come here? Considering everything that Hope has said over the years.”

Steam continued to seep through the cracked door.

Sarah was about to say something about the shower. Steve was wasting a considerable amount of hot water. She herself was leading the Go Green Initiative in the country and as she stated constantly, it all began at home.

“Mother, don’t take this the wrong way, but, I wouldn’t shit in Hope’s mouth if she was starving.”

Ah.

Perhaps she’d been too quick to judge Steve’s current opinion on the wayward duchess?

Pondering his statement, Sarah found herself looking for any way to come back with a counter when she noticed that the shower turned off. Which was odd. Shower’s didn’t turn themselves off.

What was even more peculiar, Steve reached back behind himself to shut his bathroom door.

It clicked.

Like a light going off.

How could she not have noticed? How could it not have been obvious?

Blue eyes that were a little softer than her son’s narrowed. “You aren’t alone.”

Silence.

Quiet.

Her pink lips opened in surprised. A question hovered on her tongue.

“No mother.”

“But…”

“Mother,” he implored as only a son could. “Not now. She would not want the first time she officially meets you to be when you’re dressed for the day and she is not.”

And though her son’s words were true. They were right. They were exactly what she would have wanted him to say and because she had raised him well, she was even proud that he had made such a quick decision. It wasn’t fair.

Sarah wanted to find out who you were. She wanted to meet the woman that her son was involved with. Was that so wrong? Sarah wanted to meet the woman that her son was considering marrying. There was so much she wanted to say to you, so much to teach you, so much she wanted to learn about you. Perhaps her desperation showed because her son reached out to place a hand on her elbow.

“If you can chase Hope and Janet away, we could have lunch together. The three of us. If not, dinner? Or even tomorrow. I’m not doing anything with Hope under this roof. Not after she referred to our country as a third world plus hellhole full of war criminals and superstitious backwoods heathens.”

Ah, so he did remember.

Those words had been seared into her memory as well. Sometimes Sarah wondered, as Steve had never really given much indication that he cared one way or the other what Hope had said. It was only after she began to speak unflatteringly about their people that he grew irritated, much like herself.

Although, what irritated Sarah more, was the quiet that came from the royal house of van Dyne and Pym a few countries over. Never once had Janet spoke up. Never had Janet said anything about her daughters outrageous remarks or behavior. Nor had she apologized.

Knowing her son, Sarah knew that he would never court anyone who was not kind or compassionate. Steve would never pick a Hope as his queen.

Up came a hand that bore a lovely ring decorated with fresh water pearls from their own waters. “I’ll have them gone before lunch and then we will all sit down together so I can finally meet her.”

[missmentelle]

 A partner who won’t do their share of household chores is a dealbreaker. 

A partner who doesn’t manage their money responsibly is a dealbreaker.

A partner who has no basic life skills - and no interest in learning any - is a dealbreaker. 

A partner who is proud of their inability to care for themselves is a dealbreaker.

A partner who expects you to parent them is a dealbreaker. 

A partner who makes you take responsibility for their life is a dealbreaker. 

I answer a lot of questions about relationships - and spend a lot of time browsing relationship blogs - and there’s a big issue that I keep seeing over and over again: people who are at the end of their rope because their partner refuses to be a functional adult. 

The posters - who are usually women, but not always - are frustrated that their partners can’t or won’t take basic responsibility for their own lives, and they are exhausted from having to “parent” their partners. Many are in a position where they have to constantly chase down their partner to do basic chores, pay their share of bills or take care of their basic work and school responsibilities, day after day after day. There are certainly times in a relationship when one partner may need to support the other, and one partner may have a disability or medical issue that changes the types of chores they can do, but these situations are well beyond that - many of these people have been dealing with these issues non-stop for years. By the time they’re frustrated enough to turn to the internet for help, they may have had dozens of conversations with their partner about the issue and seen their partner break just as many promises, and they are desperate to find a way to make their partner take the problem seriously and finally change their ways. 

Unfortunately, if you’re in this situation, I don’t have good news for you: your partner is hugely benefiting from this arrangement, and if they’ve been living this way for months or years, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever change. 

Take it from me. When I graduated from university, I moved in with my boyfriend at the time. He had dropped out of college for the second time earlier that year, and was taking some time off to work and mature and “find himself” while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. 

At least, that was the plan. 

In reality, however, he did nothing. For two straight years. He lost a series of jobs after less than a month because he repeatedly turned up late or simply didn’t go at all. The money that he did have went to video games, takeout and snowboarding equipment - I covered his share of the rent and utilities for months, while I was supposed to be saving money for grad school. Even though I was working full-time and he was mostly unemployed, all of the household chores would fall on me - even asking him to do something as simple as putting his own dirty dishes in the dishwasher or taking the garbage out required constant reminders, pleading, nagging, begging and arguing. It was more work to get him to do a simple task than it was for me to just do it myself, even if I was exhausted and run-down from a stressful day at work. The few times he could be convinced to help out, he did a poor job on purpose, claimed that he was “no good” at chores, and that I’d be better off just doing it for him. And so eventually, I stopped fighting with him - I did absolutely everything by myself, while he sat on the couch and played on his iPad and demanded to know when dinner would be ready. It was an exhausting way to live. 

After two years of this, it dawned on me that I did not actually have a partner - I had a 23-year-old child. I had to do everything for him - I was the one typing up resumes and submitting applications for jobs that he lost two weeks in. I was the one coming home to find my pans burnt and ruined because he’d left food cooking on the stove on high for hours while I was away. His parents gave him thousands of dollars for rent and utilities, and I never saw a dime of it - he frittered it away on junk while racking up thousands of dollars in credit card debt that he refused to deal with. His wealthy parents offered him unlimited access to the best therapists and doctors that money could buy if depression was the issue, but he refused and claimed it wasn’t - he just didn’t like chores and didn’t feel like working. After two years of pleading and nagging and teaching him over and over again, he claimed to still not know how to use a vacuum cleaner, washing machine or dishwasher, even while he easily learned how to use complicated technical equipment for his hobbies. In two years, he had made dozens of promises to change his ways and to start being an equal partner, but none of those promises ever stuck - he’d be good for a day or two, and quickly slid back into “I’ll do it later” and then “you’re better at it, it’ll be easier if you just do it for me”. We had great conversations and made each other laugh and were the best of friends, but ultimately, he was draining the life out of me. He watched me struggle for years and chose his own convenience over supporting and helping me. 

And I was done. 

It can feel petty or silly to say that you are walking away from a long-term relationship because of dirty dishes. But it’s not really about the dishes. It’s so much more than that. It’s about having a partner who values your time and happiness as much as they value their own. It’s about having someone who helps you carry the burdens of life, rather than stacking theirs on top of yours and walking away. A partner who truly cares for you doesn’t sacrifice you for their own convenience - they put the work in. 

Even if that work is dishes. 

[kaaytea]

soo um I have a bit of a self indulgent request I hope u don't mind 👉🏼👈🏼

how would the Daiya boys be with an s/o who is bad at catching and throwing? like instead of catching they dodge or deflect?

(My brother always says I can't catch to save my life which is sadly true but yesterday he chucked an eraser at me and I caught it!! v proud of myself ✌🏼😅)

S/o who can't catch things

⤷Includes: Mei, Ryousuke, Haruichi

A/n: I don't mind at all Bug! This entire blog is kind of self indulgent so those requests are welcome! I didn't do all the boys so I chose a few I haven't written for in a while, I hope that ok with you 💖 (you're welcome to send in the same prompt if there are specific boys you want written!)

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

Mei

This boy is baffled

Like he can't comprehend that you're unable to throw or catch things because of how natural the actions come to him

He looks at you weird and then tests you by lightly tossing a pen at you

He definitely thought you were lying or being over dramatic but he was proven wrong when you slapped the pen away from you mid air

Congratulations he has now made it his personal mission to teach you how to catch and throw things

Mei's actually a pretty good teacher? He's spent his entire childhood perfecting his pitching and catching skills so he's got some tips and tricks

Usually Mei is a little bratty and impatient when teaching people but he's the complete opposite with you

He's very gentle and always willing to reexplain things if you don't get them the first time

It's quite a sight to see one of the best pitchers in Japanese High School baseball tossing an old soccer ball (which he snagged from the schools equipment sheds) back and forth with his s/o

Eventually when you've become comfortable with catching and throwing larger items he will insist (force) you to try using a baseball and mitt

So here you are standing on an empty field with a spare glove from Inashiro's endless supply of sports equipment

Mei is absolutely ecstatic to have you start learning to play catch but you on the other hand are slightly terrified

There is a HUGE difference between catching a soccer ball and catching a baseball. Not to mention, soccer balls are generally softer than baseballs

Mei could tell you were a bit nervous so he reassured you he'd be throwing underhand and even went over to help you position your glove correctly

Any lingering confidence you had vanished the second Mei tossed the ball towards you and you quickly reverted to your old tactics of ducking out of the way, glove brought up to your face as a shield

Mei had a sick feeling in his stomach seeing you that afraid (by extension he thought you were afraid of him bc he was the one throwing the ball at you)

He made his way over to your huddled form and gently guided the glove away from your face

"Hey...we don't have to do this if you're not comfortable with it."

"Can we try one more time... please?"

Mei smiled at you and gave you a soft "Alright" in response, picking up the discarded baseball from the ground and went back to his spot

You were determined to catch the ball this time! You just had to commit and not run away

Mei tossed the ball towards you again making you fight the instincts kicking in. You quickly squeezed your eyes shut to prepare for the possibility of being hit in the face

But the impact never came. Instead the only thing you felt was a sudden weight in the glove on your hand

You slowly opened your eyes and stared down at the dusty, white sphere sitting snugly in your hand

When you looked up Mei was already running towards you, his arms wrapped around your waist the instant he was infront of you, the momentum making him spin you around as you both let out cheery laughs

"I'm so proud of you!! We'll have you catching my pitches in no time!"

"Ah maybe I should learn how to catch with my eyes open first"

Ryousuke

Listen

I love Ryou but he thrives on teasing people

He will definitely toss you things on purpose once he discovers you struggle to catch things

He doesn't throw anything that could physically hurt you tho. He'd always make sure he throws soft things like a jacket or a bag of chips

Thinks it's sort of cute how you duck out of the way. Definitely gets a kick out of your reactions and he always has that annoying smirk plastered on his face

He'd maybe give you a few tips on catching and throwing things but I feel like he'd want something in return bc he's cheeky like that

It's a difficult task to get Ryousuke to laugh but if you throw something back at him and it just completely misses he's cracking up instantly

You were sitting on Ryou's bunk waiting for him to come back from getting you both drinks at the little vending machines around the Baseball dorms

You heard the door open and instantly turned towards it to welcome him back only for your entire body to go into a state of alarm at the sight of a pillow FLYING towards your face

Naturally you fling yourself out of the way as your instincts took over and once you're sure you're out of danger you look up to see your "sweet" boyfriend standing in the doorway with a small smile

"What the hell, Ryou! You can't just scare me like that!"

"It wouldn't be scary if you could catch."

The second those teasing words left his lips you reached for the pillow he threw and chucked it at him with all your strength

Except the pillow didn't go very far, instead of smacking him in the face like you had planned it flopped onto the floor at his feet

A snort of amusement left the boy followed by a clear laugh ringing throughout the room

"DONT LAUGH AT ME!"

"I can't help it when you pull cute things like that~"

Ryousuke walked forward and sat down next to you on his bunk then held out the drink he got you

As you reached out to take it from him he pulled his hand back and swooped forward to place a kiss on your lips

Haruichi

Haruichi wouldn't make a huge deal out of it

He'd understand that somethings come easier to others so there's absolutely no teasing from him

And unlike the other two he would never throw something at you

If he's giving you something he always makes it a point to safely hand the item to you

Sweet boy wouldn't even risk a light toss in fear of hitting you

He'd be willing to help you learn to get better at the actions but only if you asked, he wouldn't want to force anything on you

Now, just because Haruichi knew about your catching abilities (or lack there of) doesn't mean everyone else is aware

Which brings us to how Sawamura simultaneously gave you and Haruichi heart attacks :)

You were sitting in to watch the team practice on a particularly hot day so Haruichi asked Sawamura to give you a water bottle

"(y/n)! Catch!"

"Eijun-Kun wait-"

Poor Haruichi wasn't fast enough and watched in mild horror as his friend threw a water bottle at you

You looked up at the call of your name only for your mind and body to go straight into a state of panic

By some miracle (or perhaps your survival instincts) you ended up catching the water bottle!

Haruichi was rushing over to you spewing out apologies on Sawamura's behalf and checking to make sure you were ok

His worries diminished as he watched you jump around proudly stating that you caught something

(He then turned to his lovely friend Eijun and simply stated the words: "Don't ever do that again"😃🔪)

[taeslovehandles]

I never meant to target you and I'm sorry you felt that way. You properly tag everything and adhere to the "don't like, don't read" rule. I don't follow you nor you follow, because we simply don't vibe together and that's okay.

But there are posts that are on the more "innocent" side that do represent fat people as a joke and it's like they don't even realize it because it's something so well ingrained in our fatphobic society.

For example, all the characters are having fun except the fat one or referring to someone as "twice his size" (like... If they want to say he's huge, they should just say it, not imply that there's a "right size" for someone to be).

I don't think authors should censor themselves, just acknowledge the role they play in how fat characters are perceived by the community they write for.

-🍓

First of all, since you obviously haven’t blocked me, you could have come to me via direct message. This is not a topic that needs to be brought out into the public eye even more than it already is. I have worked with anons before, I would have been the last person to reveal who you are. You could have made a trash account to message me in dm’s, but since you didn’t, I will reply to you here.

I want to make one thing clear. This will be my last response on the topic. If you do not like me as a member of the community please use the block button and filter me out, because I will stay. I have many friends here, and know that many people enjoy my content. Just because a small handful of people don’t appreciate dark themes in fiction, the contents of which they can easily protect themselves from, won’t make me falter.

Now, I want to debunk this ask because your ‘apology’ actually made me very upset.

I know you don’t mean it when you say you are sorry because you’re backpedaling on what you’ve told your friends and it really rubs me the wrong way. You could have owned up to your mistakes and apologized sincerely like others had but you continue to play victim and excuse your behaviour with tales of your own trauma, projecting your own insecurities onto my blog and thus hating me.

I know for a fact that you despise my blog, especially my writing, because you do not like how “obviously skinny people write about weight gain.”

Honey.

I couldn’t be any further from skinny.

I don’t mind sharing my actual weight, which has actually gotten worse due to COVID. I weigh 490lbs. I am morbidly obese. I have always been morbidly obese. For you to come and be “nitpicky” about a genre you don’t even enjoy? Why are you even reading my fics then?

The way I write about obese people, their struggles with literally everything… that comes from real life experience. I write this to share embarrassing and exhausting daily life tasks I personally struggle with.

A skinny person would never write some of the stuff I do, because they simply don’t know. They don’t know how scary it is to hear the line “we are going to a restaurant.” They don’t know how scary it is to go into that new restaurant, scan the chairs and think “Shit, am I gonna fit? Is the chair gonna creak? Is there enough space for the next table? What if I won’t fit?” A thin person doesn’t have to think this way.

And, let me tell you something else. Yes, I agree. The world is fatphobic.

In one of my recent posts I talked about movies and shows where they make fun of fat people because I hate it. Because it is REAL LIFE. And I am all for the body positivity movement and I do believe that all bodies are beautiful, because they are.

You do not know me personally.

And that leads to my next point. If you personally have issues with the phrase “twice my size”, then that is on you. And guess what? I cannot count how often I’ve heard lines like that my whole life.

“Oh wow two people would fit in one of your pant legs.”

“Wow, you are so fat, I could use your pants as a tent.”

So trust me, I know. I KNOW. But anon, this is the important part for me. Everyone processes trauma differently.

Inked ch3? Or literally any story I have written with a fat character being forced, insulted and talked down to like they’re dumb? That’s what I have been living with my entire life. Most of these stories, some obviously more extreme than how I had experienced them since it’s fiction, have been recordings of trauma I have went through.

My own dad force fed me. Forced me to eat food and gain weight. My first boyfriend was a feeder that manipulated me into gaining more weight and took measurements. Called me pig names and abused me. Hit me, manipulated me into having s** with him and then let all of his fantasies out on me.

I don’t make this shit up. I hate my brain for being so twisted now, that I actually find it hot and arousing. It’s weird. I know, but that’s how it is.

I’ve also never had friends in school. Not even kindergarten. Why? Because my “fat incased body could spread like a virus.” I was being bullied like JK was in Pondus.

I had hot water thrown at me, got glue put on my seats and hair, had my hair ripped out and even got a cigarette burn mark on my arm. Just because I was fat. Just because of how my body was shaped.

I was strangled and locked into a small locker for a night. I was almost killed for running away from my abusive dad from his car and had to listen to things like, “You are going to die when you are 30. No one will ever love you and your body.” That I have trust issues now and am paranoid about everything and everyone.

Those dark stories. I use those dark stories to try to work through my trauma. And yes, it may be absurd to you. It may disgust you, what I write. But sadly, most of it? Most of it really happened to me. To me and other people I’ve talked to as a friend or seen online. Most of what I write will be dark because the human species is made up of terrible creatures.

Fatphobia is an important topic, and I am happy the media has been slowly getting better about it, that people accept us more. But my writing is how I work with my trauma. If I can make fictional characters feel the same things I had to feel, that makes me feel better.

And I’m not hurting anyone with it. So how is it wrong?

I do not support any of this behaviour in real life. I never bullied anyone, I always try to speak up for my friends and tell people if they are being assholes. Because I hate them too and it makes me angry when good people get shit when they do nothing but breathe.

And how @pudgecuddles already said. I don't need you to advocate for body positivity and all that shit when you go out of your way to bully someone that may have experienced the same shit you have. I do not know you or what you went through in your life, but I am sorry. I’m sorry you feel like my stories aren’t okay to write, but this is how I work on my trauma and I need you to respect that.

I’ve said this before. We don’t have to be friends, or even talk to each other.

Just be neutral.

Block me. Filter me out. Pretend I don't exist. But, whatever you do, don’t make posts that call me out while making it obvious you’re talking about me, with the cover that you are advocating against fatphobia. That’s got a name. Cyber-bullying.

Have you hurt me with those posts? Yes you have, but I’ve never wanted bad blood. As you may have noticed, it wasn’t me that made a post. It was my good friend. Because I told her how exhausting it was and she knew about the posts back then.

I have a good idea of who you are.

I remember you.

But I kept my mouth shut. Because this community is my home and the last thing I wanted was for the people who like both of our types of content to feel like they have to choose sides.

In the end, we all rub one out to fat gay boys in a band. No user is better than the rest, and if there are topics you do not enjoy, there is a button for it. No need to drag everyone into it with posts. It’s exhausting and irritating.

Now, I do not accept your apology because you lied to me and I also do not feel like you meant it sincerely knowing what I know now after reading some dm’s. But I also won’t sit here and start shit.

This is my last post about this.

Please block me and enjoy the content you do like.

Nonetheless, I hope you have a nice day and a lovely weekend. Whatever you are experiencing or going through, I hope it gets better. Because even if you hate me personally for creating content you do not support, I’d say that I am a really friendly and nice person.

I do not believe that anyone deserves to be bullied like that and talked down in official posts. It happened before with a friend of mine and you probably remember that I did speak up about it.... But apparently no one learned from it. I really hope this time you do.

Insult me and shit talk me all you want in dm’s, but don’t do it publicly. No one deserves that kind of hate or passive aggressiveness. No one. Since you sound like someone that went through a lot of shit too, you should know better. You should know how it feels to be bullied and what damage it can cause.

I’m already depressed enough and I have bad lows. Let me write my erotica and just enjoy it? That’s all I want? I am a part of this community just like you were. You leaving because you did not like my content, is not my problem. If you cannot block me or ignore it and go so far as to read them and then rant about them negatively, what do you want me to do? I won’t leave the scene just because you don’t like me.

So, you either trash talk me in dm’s from now on so that I do not see it, or you block me. The latter of which would be the more mature thing to do. The more humane thing to do. Because talking behind someone’s back is just as bad.

Again, I don’t know why you felt like it was necessary to send me an ask with lies in it when I got screenshot proof of something else you have said/issues with, so don’t backpedal on me. I know Hun. I know already.

At least stick to what you said and actually apologize or, if you can’t, just block me.

But this ask? This ask just upset me.

Have a nice day.

p.s: The fact that this even needs to be talked about is so absurd and ridiculous to me. The whole thing is a petty party in my eyes that isn't even worth anyone's time? Do people on here really not have any other issues right now or am I in the wrong movie?

[wastelandlovingscenarios]

Love your blog. It’s ✨Immaculate ✨. How would companions (+preston) and anyone you wanna add react around a preferably f!sole that they have a HUGE crush on? For example; what are the little actions or habits they do?

omg, this request made me happy and i enjoyed writing it! i love this so much. thank you for requesting anon, please enjoy! this was probably one of my longest reacts ever written.

anddddd i added sturges and x6 just cause.. i.. love them.. 😶❤️

-

Danse:

he’s never had a real crush before and you bet your fucking life that he has no idea how to deal with it. he wouldn’t notice the crush at first and would be completely oblivious to it until he found himself growing strangely flustered at sole whenever they were in his presence. everything they did, from modding power armor to simply just staring at him with their breathtaking features, always pulled the paladin out of reality, making his heart beat in all different directions and forced him to become speechless even if he had a million things to say. upon realizing that he may be harboring feelings much more than friendship for his long term partner, he becomes more attentive and protective towards sole, even if it goes out of his notice. he would find himself taking over her tasks in sanctuary despite her pleas so she can rest a little longer and take a break from all her responsibilities. danse would become more frantic over soles health, often scolding her about the importance of self care whenever he noticed that she was neglecting it and if she refused to listen, then he’d take matters in his own hands. he’d grow abnormally nervous and concerned whenever sole was away without him for too long and would literally run over to her the minute she’d come home, bombarding her with a million questions before his worries could completely subside. deep down, danse knew he wanted to shield sole from the dangers they faced everyday and pry her away from any kind of pain that could be inflicted on her. he figured it was impossible but knew damn well he could at least try, even if it killed him. soon enough, his crush for sole would grow painfully obvious and knew that he’d have to confront her about it when she started picking up signs.

Deacon:

terrified is an understatement. he found himself panicking at the thought of being attached to someone once again and tried to do everything in the book to perish those emotions as quickly as it came. unfortunately for him, no matter how much he pulled away from sole, he always found a way back to her despite his mind screaming at him to escape. god knows he wouldn’t be able to; not with that dammed smile, perfect personality, and smart mouth. now that she was there existing in his mind rent free, there was no turning back no matter how hard he tried. regardless of his newfound feelings, he’d still continue to act normal around sole, often pulling jokes here and there but everytime he’d try to friskilly flirt with them like he used to, his cheeks would go visibly red and his mouth would become dry whenever sole played along with his games. once he accepted the fact that he was in love and ready to move on, he’d spend every waking moment with her, trying to make her laugh whenever they were together just so he could see their smile. even if he tried to stray away from it, he became more affectionate towards sole, often letting his touches touches linger longer than necessary, offering a shoulder to her whenever she needed it, and just being the rock everytime life decided to knock her down. he’d observe sole a lot, noting down whatever she seemed to have interest in and all the details, small or vast, he could capture of her. remember that necklace you wanted when you looked at a run down magazine at a shop? deacons got you covered. feeling sad? he’d be kicking through that door with an armful of fancy lad cakes before sole could shed a tear. he’s more than willing to go out of his way for sole without a second thought just to ensure shes happy and safe in this chaotic world.

Hancock:

hancocks a natural flirt, it’s definitely obvious by now and sole knew it herself since the day she stepped in goodneighbor. if he wasn’t flirting with her, he was often caught flirting with people he found attractive. after a while though, that habit would deteriorate the more he spent time with sole and got to know her better as a person instead of the commonwealth hero. the idea of one night stands and random hook ups didn’t appeal to him so much anymore as he leaned more into the idea of committing to sole and the possibility of what they could be. he’d find that his flirtatious comments would grow more genuine whenever it left his lips and that his actions were much more gentle and affectionate whenever they were together. his once provocative thoughts about her would be replaced with more innocent ones and he’d constantly wondered how her lips would feel against his instead of observing her ass in that vault suit like he normally would. hancock would often give sole pet names, such as sunshine and sweetheart, and would completely abolish the nickname ‘sister’, pushing it away from his vocabulary as time went by. hancock would constantly tease sole with comments or actions, often telling her she’s absolutely beautiful to caressing her face gently just to see the sight of her wide eyed and flushed with his own very eyes. that image of her was definitely a sight for sore eyes- it made his heart swell with love and awe, a feeling he thought he’d never experience in his lifetime. he would give up anything in the commonwealth, even his love for chems, just to be with sole and stay by her side until the end of time.

Maccready:

he’s such a dork and is absolutely head over heels for sole the first time he realizes he has a thing for her. though he doesn’t go over the top to show he admires her or anything, it’s more than enough to display exactly what he feels for her. whenever they’re out on a mission, mac would always try to impress sole with anything he knows he’s capable of doing or exceeding just to catch her attention, even just for a moment. his suave and cocky attitude while doing so would immediately crash down into bits once sole sent him a dazzled grin or displayed her amazement at his skills. he would then become a flustered and anxious mess, stumbling over his sentences as he tried to pull himself together. mac would become more open with her, showing sole his interests excitedly, like his comic book collection, or telling her stories that he’s never told anyone besides lucy. he’d allow her to pry into his private life and is more than willing to have any type of conversation with her regardless of whether it was personal or just small talk. maccready would frequently gape at his companion with a lovestruck smile on his face and a dreamy glint in his eyes, admiring everything about her from her appearance to her personality. even if sole didn’t notice him doing so, others did and boy did he look like a lovesick teenager.

Nick Valentine:

it wouldn’t take nick forever to realize he had fallen in love with sole. though it’d take a while to accept, he’d eventually warm up to the idea, realizing that the more he pushed away from it, the worse the issue would become. after all, there’s no better way to confront a situation than to encounter it first hand. he’s really old school when having a crush on sole, mimicking prewar actions to show that he really cares for her outside of professionalism. nick would open doors for her, give her his coat whenever he caught her shudder, pick flowers from a garden to give to her, and overall just be an absolute gentleman. he’d literally drive ellie insane by talking about sole all the damn time, whether about professional matters or personal ones, and if her name ever slipped his lips one more time, ellie might just grab a book nearby and knock him unconscious just to catch a break. just like hancock, nick would push away the nicknames he usually used for her, such as kid/pal, and would instead replace it with ‘doll’ or ‘sweetheart’ - it seemed much more romantic and meaningful. he wouldn’t hide the fact that he has interest for sole and would make it known that he has intentions, but would never force sole if she wasn’t comfortable. luckily, she was more than comfortable.

Gage:

he would be in major denial with his feelings for sole. gage would assume it’s just a simple infatuation for the overboss and try his best to ignore the feelings that surfaced whenever she was around. there was just no way he was gonna commit to something he was uncertain of. as much as gage denied the truth, he couldn’t avoid the change of behavior that followed after that realization. he found himself defending the overboss more when someone badmouthed or threatened her and would go out of his way to kill them himself if they stepped a little too close for comfort. not for soles comfort - his comfort. whenever someone displayed any signs of affection or interest towards her, his eyes would shoot daggers directly at that person (who eventually backed away, intimidated) and his hands would clutch his rifle until his knuckles turned white. everytime sole felt down and let a few tears slip, he couldn’t bring himself to give her space like he once used to and would instead accompany her, attempting to ease her pain with small comments and a hand on the shoulder. the thought of being the person behind the one in charge soon faded into nothing as he caught himself saving sole more than once from the dangers that dared to meet her in his presence. he got more than few bullets and bruises while doing so and he found that he didn’t mind that at all. he’d let sole be affectionate to him; when she’d lay her head on his shoulder, let her hand brush against his when they were close, or lay a hand on his chest, he’d find himself enjoying it much more than he should and slowly began to crave it more. his previous thoughts of committing to her would switch entirely and he’d realize that maybe being in love for once wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Preston:

he’d come to accept his crush for the general pretty quickly. she was amazing and genuinely kind hearted after all, so there was absolutely no reason why he’d try to pull away from this feeling. prestons a huge sweetheart when it comes to sole, often complimenting the way she looked that day, sending her small comments of appreciation to know he’s grateful for her in his life, and would go as far as leaving them small trinkets hes found on his adventures, telling her that it reminded him of her. whenever sole was brought up into a conversation, he’d feel his ears perk up and he’d immediately butt in, praising her as a person and for all that she’s done for the commonwealth. he wants to make it known that she deserves more than what she is given and that all her deeds do not go unnoticed. everyone noticed the big smile on his face and the proud look in his eyes whenever he speaks about sole to others and would laugh at his joyful tone as he continued on. it’s almost identical to a child talking about their favorite toy on a show and tell event. he tries to give her the life she deserves by showing little acts of appreciation; leaving an extra box of dandy apples near her bedside so she had something to snack on, sparing a few extra caps to buy her a drink whenever they were out and about, and even cleaning up her room whenever he had the time to do so. in the end, everyone knew that sole had preston wrapped around her finger and anything she needed or desired, he was more than willing to make it happen to the best of his abilities.

Sturges:

sturges hesitates at first, believing that he’s nothing special compared to sole. it would take him a billion years before sole could actually look at him the way he looked at her, but comes to the conclusion that it wouldn’t hurt to try and pursue her. just like nick, sturges is an absolute gentleman to his core but shows it with different actions. instead of picking flowers and opening doors for sole, he’d focus on doing things that could benefit her in the long run. he’d mod whatever weapons or armor she left behind, ensuring that sole had the best of the best while venturing the wastelands and would try to upgrade her living space, adding anything that he knew would put sole more at ease whenever she came home. he would also guarantee there was an extra plate of freshly cooked food and a drink waiting for sole on her kitchen counter in case they decided to come home that night. before sole would go back out in the wasteland, he’d pack a special bag full of stimpacks, rad x, radaway, modified weapons, and other useful things she might need on her adventures, sending her away with a soft smile and a simple, “get home safe.” besides his actions, sturges would try to converse with sole more whenever he found the time to and find any excuse, even if ridiculous, to spend time with her, disregarding any plans he had that day.

X6:

the crush is absolutely foreign to him. he wouldn’t be able to utterly process the feeling at first, confused whether his systems were malfunctioning or not but would notice that his behavior would be drastically changing the more he walked the wastelands with her. he’d catch himself staring at sole longer than necessary, observing her features while she was distracted and allowed it to engrave every single part of his perplexed mind. he’d talk less, unconsciously taking in sole’s voice whenever they spoke and letting that melodious sound replay in his head for an unhealthy amount of time. with this new crush came new emotions he was never programmed to experience - fear, worry, happiness and relief. the strange thing was, it would only rise around her. whenever she was hurt or away, he felt fear and concern, whenever she was laughing and smiling, he felt a sense of happiness and the minute she’d come home from a dangerous part of a mission, he’d feel a wave of relief. he yearned to know more about her outside of professionalism, asking questions about her personal life and interests as he became more curious. as sole opened up more to him and let him see the better side of her - the one that was playful and was full of smiles and laughter - he’d feel the strong heartbeat bang against his chest for the first time in his life. once he realized he had it bad for sole, he was too far into the rabbit hole to ever turn back.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Guest Post: On Japanese Internment Camps

Since I am currently very 

I’d like to post a piece of writing from one of this blog’s fave guests (and humans in general), Dr. Stephanie Hinnershitz; please note that this was originally posted to her personal facebook page, and is shared here with her permission: There's a reason why historians are moving away from using "internment" when discussing the forced removal of close to 120,000 Japanese Americans during WWII. I also realize that I recently used "internment" in an article I wrote. This was a stylistic choice on behalf of the editors and I should have pushed back more, but it made sense for context and readership. Incarceration is the appropriate term. Here's why: I received a few private messages and emails from friends and strangers asking if I knew that German Americans and Italian Americans were also interned during WWII. Yes. I am aware of this. Many times, people bring this up in a "gotcha!" way to try and prove the point that the incarceration of Japanese Americans was not racially-motivated or had no racial angle to it at all because if it did, why did close to 15,000 "white" people end up interned? In a more charitable way, people bring up the internment of German and Italian Americans because they did not know about it until well into their adult years and assume that I might not know about it. But let's return to the internment issue. I study the removal and incarceration of those--foreign and American-born--of Japanese descent. The internment of "enemy aliens" is not my area of specialty. Under American policy, internment during WWII was a specific term for the detention of immigrants who were nationals of enemy nations (Italy and Germany, for example). Now, there were certainly Japanese enemy aliens, but the majority of them were held with other German and Italian enemy aliens in detention centers overseen by the Department of Justice. Internment fell under the DOJ.

The word "internment" doesn't apply to Japanese Americans who were removed from their homes by the Army and then transferred first to "assembly" (detention) centers and later to the "relocation centers" or "camps" (or concentration camps--yes, this phrase was used by many officials in memos and correspondence--prisons, prison camps, etc.). The reason why internment is not the correct term is because the majority of those Japanese Americans who wound up in one of ten prison camps were American citizens, not "aliens." They were not "enemy aliens" because a) they were from America and America was not at war with America and b) they were citizens. Even the planners of incarceration and a lot of the military officials I researched were careful to avoid the term "internment" when discussing the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans after Executive Order 9066 because it was basically incorrect. (Side note: Many government and military officials knew that incarcerating American citizens was constitutionally a bad idea and tried to persuade FDR to avoid including Japanese American citizens in enemy alien roundups.)

Because internment was not really applicable to the majority of ethnically Japanese American citizens, the government created a new agency--the War Relocation Authority (WRA)--to oversee the ten prison camps. The Army was supposed to be free of any responsibility once Japanese Americans were transferred to the camps, but--if you read my article--this didn't work out. The WRA a bureaucratic nightmare, a massive waste of taxpayer money, and just a poorly-managed civilian agency tasked with running an unconstitutional program.

Internment of Germans and Italians WAS NOT the same as incarceration of Japanese Americans. Two different programs overseen by different agencies. So, really, there are responsible and interesting ways to place incarceration and internment in conversation, but you can't really responsibly do it if you're trying to say that there were not racial elements to Japanese American incarceration.

BUT--if you want to try and make that argument, here are some other reasons why you're wrong:

1) When you make a decision or policy based on the belief that an entire group of people behave a certain way because of racial characteristics, that's racism. And that's exactly what happened with Japanese American incarceration.

2) Did General John DeWitt (in charge of the military zones along the West Coast where most Japanese Americans lived) believe that ALL enemy aliens should be removed from vulnerable areas regardless of race? Yes. BUT this starts to break down once we get into citizenship...

3) German and Italian Americans (whether foreign or American-born) made up a HUGE portion of the American population, particularly on the East Coast. Initially, government officials thought that even American-born citizens of German and Italian descent should also be removed and incarcerated like Japanese American citizens, BUT Italians and German Americans should be given an opportunity to explain themselves--due process--before a committee. Japanese Americans did not receive this consideration at any point AND the idea of removing and incarcerating German American and Italian American citizens was eventually dropped. Officials argued that it would be impossible to do this because there were so many Italian Americans and German Americans. Also, because many of Italian and German descent were American citizens, they were obviously loyal to the U.S. and we shouldn't really be concerned

....

Wait--what?

I hope after reading that you were able to stop and think, "But I thought you just said the majority of Japanese Americans who ended up in the prison camps were American citizens?"

Yes! I did say that! Please continue reading.

4) Officials determined that Japanese American citizens were less trustworthy than Germans and Italian American citizens because even if ethnically Japanese individuals were born in the United States (and many of those incarcerated were members of the second generation--never been to Japan, went to public schools, had plenty of American-born friends), their parents (immigrants from Japan) were unable to naturalize or become American citizens...BECAUSE RACIST LAWS SAID ASIAN IMMIGRANTS WERE UNABLE TO NATURALIZE. See what's going on here?

5) Okay, so the next "whatboutisms" that usually pop up include planned attacks by Japan coordinated with Japanese Americans in the U.S. and the dual-citizenship of those born in America to Japanese parents. Were there attempts at or completed attacks of the West Coast by Japan? Yes, the "Bombardment of Ellwood" for example. Is there any proof that these were coordinated with the help of Japanese American citizens or even "enemy aliens?" No. Were there Japanese enemy aliens who did suspicious things or expressed anti-American attitudes? Yes--just as there were with German and Italian enemy aliens. But the fact remains that it was predominantly Japanese American CITIZENS with no connections to any subversive plans who ended up in the camps--a significant difference compared to German and Italian Americans.

As for dual citizenship, if you use this argument to justify the incarceration of Japanese Americans, congratulations! You're a bona fide 1920s racist! This is the exact argument used by 1920s racists and there's a grain of truth in there: Because of citizenship laws and negotiations in Japan and the United States, Japanese Americans born to Japanese parents in the United States before 1924 were automatically both citizens of Japan and--because of birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment--were also U.S. citizens. Officials used this to argue that with dual citizenship, even Japanese Americans born in the U.S. had loyalties to Japan and deserved to be locked up. What this argument did (and does not) take into consideration is the fact that between 1924 and 1940, Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) began to renounce their Japanese citizenship--approximately 70% (according to records kept by the WRA and other data). And after 1924, this dual-citizenship situation no longer existed.

6) The end result of this was that the government and the military determined that even Japanese American citizens were less trustworthy simply because they were of Japanese descent. Discrimination and segregation laws along the West Coast made sure that Japanese Americans had a difficult time fully integrating into American society...and then this was used against Japanese Americans to argue that because they remained unintegrated, this meant they were disloyal to the United States! Anti-Japanese sentiment had been building for a long time along the West Coast, and enterprising and racist politicians and farmers who wanted access to Japanese farmland (Japanese were incredibly successful farmers because they took risks and developed different crops in California especially) took advantage of wartime hysteria and lobbied for removal. And it worked.

So what does this all mean? You can't compare Japanese American incarceration to German and Italian enemy alien detention if you're trying to make the argument that there was no racism in incarceration. Some 11,000 German Americans (most enemy aliens) were interned in enemy alien detention camps. As for Italian Americans interned, you'll see the misleading figure of 600,000 Italian Americans interned. This is not true. The government classified 600,000 non-citizen Italian Americans as enemy aliens and they were placed under curfews and other restrictive actions that violated their civil liberties--but 600,000 Italian Americans were not interned. About 10,000 were removed from the West Coast and ultimately under a thousand interned--all enemy aliens, not citizens. Additionally, on Columbus Day in 1942, FDR officially declared Italian Americans no longer enemy aliens (he got a lot of pressure from Italian American Democrats in NY who basically said, "If you want our support for the New Deal, don't even think about it, clown."). Japanese American citizens were removed from their homes, placed in prison camps in terrible areas, and denied due process. People also like to say incarceration was not that bad because Japanese Americans had places to live, the camps provided games and entertainment, and they got to leave to go work by 1943. All true. But many of you can't even wear a goddamn mask without griping, so to say that "it's not a big deal" to have the government remove you from your homes and place you in a desert somewhere is a little disingenuous, no?

And if you're still going to say it's not a big deal--Japanese American citizens also had their guns confiscated. So there's that.

AND here's the best part: About 15 years ago, some members of Congress tried to issue pass legislation to issue a public apology to German Americans interned during WWII and create some required programming in school curriculum to be sure kids learned about this. But you know what? Republicans refused to have anything to do with it because it was "un-American" and unpatriotic.

[rankmywriter123]

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[yandere-daydreams]

reading the childhood prince Shoto and maid darling made me imagine. Shoto who is like super delusional since they were kids and older. Insisting on reading a bed time story together, forcing them to play special games eventho they have a ton of chores to do Or technically, Shoto being just a huge brat when it comes to their darling. For example, if the darling is trying to avoid him, he would protest. Skipping classes, following them around. But Shoto doesn't know it's wrong even when grownup.

This isn’t really a request, but this *is* my blog and I make the rules.I’m stressed, I can’t stop thinking about this, and I want to write it. Please be patient with the tangent I’m about to go on.

The youngest prince had always been a difficult boy.

Looking back on it, his fixation might’ve taken root the first day you met. As a child of two servants, you were often lumped in with the older staff members, if only when everyone was busy enough to have forgotten that most toddlers weren’t supposed to sweep floors. When a mop and a bucket were shoved into your hands, some over-worked mistress simply mumbling about ‘the brat’ being ‘at it again’ before sending you out to clean up the mess in one of the Princes’ rooms, you hadn’t questioned it.

You didn’t see a need to, really. Considering your status, you’d be lucky to serve the royal family, one day. An opportunity to interact with a prince wasn’t an opportunity anyone would turn down. Even a child still learning to count knew that.

You can still remember the way he looked at you, wide-eyed and curious, barely a year older than yourself. He looked surprised to see someone his age, but considering the young girl you saw she was fleeing a moment before, you couldn’t be sure why. Still, you asked him questions as you cleaned up porcelain chards and spilled tea, most receiving soft grunts in the place of a reply. When you were done, you bowed respectively, left, and never gave it a second thought.

But, Shoto must’ve. He requested you more, requested you personally, having you fix small tears when his tailor was busy and make his bed, even if that was something all of his older siblings managed to do on their own. You were young, too inexperienced and accepting to question the subtle changes. You never raised a brow when your parents began taking you to tutoring sessions with Shoto, or when your chores became little more than following him around the castle, just in case he wanted company. You hadn’t fought against it when he dragged you to tea parties, or rejected Shoto’s invitations to go horseback riding, or run away whenever he convinced you to play in the king’s throne room, something strictly off-limits for servants.

He was slow to open up, but you didn’t have a problem with carrying the brunt of your conversations. There weren’t many kids in the castle and… you were just happy to have a friend, honestly.

Not that Shoto’s companionship didn’t have its downfalls, though. As you two approached your teenage years, you became responsible for dragging him to meetings, despite the way he’d complain as you pulled him out of bed. He was always childish, like that, sulking while you explained why you couldn’t attend a certain party and following you around like a lost puppy whenever you were called away for a task that didn’t involve him. You hadn’t wondered why you were suddenly ‘promoted’ to Shoto’s personal staff, but you were thankful for the change. Having to listen to his tantrums whenever you left his side was more than enough to shake the faith you had in your only friend.

“You’re my best friend.” He would whine, pulling at your sleeve, trying to drag you away from the polite ambassador who had stopped to ask for directions. “Don’t talk to the others, not if you can come find me.”

You thought he would get better, after his fifteenth birthday. You were always the more mature one, but Shoto couldn’t keep acting like a bratty child forever. And surely, as he’s forced to accept his place as the crowned prince, he would realize not every night could be a sleepover, not every meal could be taken in his chambers, and people would begin to make assumptions if he played favorites with his staff. You two could still be close, but as long as he gave you room to breathe, you’d be satisfied. That was all you wanted. That was always what you wanted

And yet, the pressure only seemed to make things worse.

It’d taken less than a day for you to realize Shoto had no intention of growing up, not if he could help it and certainly not around you. Sitting with him before he fell asleep was a common occurrence, but having him lay his head in your lap, hearing him ask you to comb through his hair and averting your eyes as he pleaded for one of your ‘commoner stories’... that wasn’t normal. You tried to tell yourself that he was just stressed, that he needed something to take his mind off Enji and meetings and kingdoms, but Shoto seeking ‘comfort’ wasn’t an isolated incident.

Hasty games of hide-and-seek in the garden, quick pecks on the cheek before he left you to your chores, the new collection of ‘gifts’ that were beginning to pile-up in your personal dormitory… things you wished you could write off as innocent nostalgia. You couldn’t walk away, not without the consequences finding their way back to your parents, and rejecting Shoto wasn’t an option.

You’d found that out the hard way, the first time he’d tried to convince you to bath with him. “Like we used to, when we were kids,” He’d explained, casually playing with the hem of your uniform. He was already shirtless, a soft smile pulling at his lips, like his efforts were just another game you were forced to let him win. “It’s only been… what, a decade? C’mon, it’ll be fun.” 

You had barely been able to respond, freezing up and looking for an excuse, your voice to quiet to hear once you actually attempted to speak. But, whatever you said, Shoto mustn’t have liked it. 

You hadn’t realized just how big his bath was, not until you were clawing at the sides, gasping for air as Shoto pushed you back down. It was the first time his glare had been directed at you, rather than the whoever had dared to take your attention away from him. And god, he was terrifying. The Prince had only let you breathe again when you went limp, suddenly so gentle as he undressed you, drying you off and combing through your hair. He helped you walk to his bed, laughing as you sobbed into one of his feather-stuffed pillows before making it clear that he had no intention of sleeping on the floor.

You didn’t stop shaking until the next morning, and the other maids turned a blind-eye when you slunk away to properly break down in a spare room.

Shoto didn’t bother asking for permission, after that. He didn't seem to think he needed to.

Sometimes, you wondered if he still thought the two of you were friends. He didn’t have many others, aside from a handful of knights and the only diplomat he’d never tried to stab for talking to you, so maybe, he thought this was just what childhood friends did. If someone else sat down and explained how unhappy you were, he might just back down, or apologize, or fuck off and die. It was what you prayed for, every time you stood in front of his chamber doors, steeling yourself before facing your closest friend.

Or, your current closest friend, at least. That was another thing you wondered about, when Shoto had fallen asleep and you were still trying to tempt yourself into trusting him. When your mind would drift back to all the possible admirers and princesses he’d waved off, to how he hadn’t done so much as smile at another person since you two had become friends. To the way his touch lingered, eyes too focused for your comfort.

To the tiny, minuscule, burning doubt that screamed he wouldn’t be satisfied with platonic gestures for much longer.

[phidica]

So, as you can see, my queue ran out last June and all I’ve done since then is reblog a couple of topical posts. But here’s the thing; that did not occur for lack of content that I wanted to reblog -- in fact, quite the opposite! Read on and I shall explain, because truly what is left for me to talk about on this blog besides the act of running the blog itself?

The way that I’ve historically prepared my post queue has been to open posts I intend to reblog in new tabs (whether I encounter them on the dashboard or via RSS feeds) and set them aside for later. At some point, ideally with no more than a few dozen posts in the pile, I would load all the tabs and then go through and manually rearrange them, then I would tag and add the posts to my queue in that very sequence

My reasons for doing this were twofold. Firstly, I wanted each day’s posts to be a fair mix of topics that didn’t put too many posts from the same fandom in a row. This was to avoid, for instance, multiple consecutive days of posts being nothing but MLP art thus giving the wrong impression to passersby about the focus of my blog, or overly annoying followers who weren’t interested in that topic at all (supposing that I even have active followers any more hah). Hence a degree of randomness was called for in the arrangement of posts. But secondly, I did not want to use the “shuffle queue” feature (is this a Tumblr builtin or an XKit extension? all I know is that the button has haunted me for a lifetime) because I preferred my queue to be in semi-chronological order, and I liked to create callforwards and callbacks in the tags. Oh we’re getting deep into my mental thought processes now...

I liked a semi-chronological queue because that way, as the posts were, erm, posted, any references to recent events in shows or fandoms would remain in the appropriate order without anything seemingly getting mixed up or obscuring some context. Then, regards to my tags: this didn’t happen terribly often but for instance there are the cases of me introducing a new tag and offering some commentary on the fact I have introduced that tag right next to it, which only works out if I can be certain which post that tag really does first appear on. Or I might leave commentary about a particular run of posts that I’ve just queued up. And, relatedly though not exactly the same, there are those posts that are best read in a certain sequence because that is key to some particular joke

So at this point I have explained why:

I don’t add posts to my queue immediately upon seeing them (ans: because they need to be at least lightly randomised), and why

I didn’t simply shuffle the entire queue at once to achieve said randomisation (ans: because subsets of the queue needed to be in a particular sequence).

I expect it’s becoming obvious where this is going, not least because of the contrast between past and present tenses, but I might as well cough up another paragraph or five to contextualise this further when I’ve already come so f a  r

I can actually probably trace the start of this system breaking down to the day that I upgraded to Firefox Quantum, the release from which point on you could only use WebExtensions, because at that point I lost access to an important addon, I think it was called like...Tab Groups Plus, or something. The point was that it let you see all your tabs on like a tiled view, showing previews of the content, and you could sort them into groups created and destroyed on-demand which would move them around in your tab list. This was an excellent tool for arranging posts into just the right order prior to queuing them, because I would be able to first sort them by fandom, and then start shuffling them together manually with just the right spacing to make it all work out nicely. With the loss of that extension, I had to start making do with the equivalent procedure with just moving the tabs around in the tab bar (okay, the tab tree, but let’s not go there right now), and with no previews of their content so I had to constantly click into tabs to check which was which. That sucked and was very difficult and time consuming and simply a huge downgrade

As a consequence of these changes to my workflow, I started doing the task of sorting tabs and queuing up posts less often, thus letting more posts pile up at once. Obviously I did cope with this for some time, since Firefox Quantum hit in November 2017 apparently?? fuck it’s been so long oh god and obviously I have still managed to get a lot of posts through my blog since then, though with more stops and starts (this story gets a bit messy because I also had waning investment in Tumblr at times, which also contributes to not actively running the blog, but I think the tabs thing is a bigger factor)

These big stacks of posts waiting for me to load them and sort them and then semi-randomise them have something of an exponential weight. As you might imagine there’s the mental aversion to starting a process when there’s already a lot of stuff to do, and then that just leads to there being more to do, and the nightmare spirals. But in a much more corporeal sense, it appears that the Tree Style Tab (oh fuck now I do have to go there, shit, okay. uh. it’s like if you replaced the tab bar (from the top of the screen) with a bookmarks toolbar (on the side of the screen) and you can sort tabs into folders and new tabs open from a given tab open as “children” of that tab, indented under them. it’s very nice for managing a winding path you might take through Wikipedia or TV Tropes, if you can imagine that. I don’t do that though; I just open a bajillion tabs from Tumblr and stuff them into a single folder that collapses into a single tab and hides them so I can continue to use my web browser despite the fact I have so many fucking tabs open) and really Firefox in general start to respond much slower to the act of loading new tabs or moving tabs around when you already have so many tabs in the tree. Literally, the more tabs I open from Tumblr, the physically harder it is to load those tabs and move them around in order to sort them to queue them to close them and thus allow me to move on to new tabs

That is the situation I find myself in now. As I said at the start, my blog ground to a halt not because of a lack of content, but an excess. I have so many posts that I want to put in my queue to reblog, that they are actively weighing down my web browser to the point that I can hardly start the process of queuing them in the first place

Naturally, something had to give eventually. Here’s what I was looking at a few hours ago

that’s right, I had 230 tabs in the pile. It’s too much. And the idea of closing that parent tab, and killing all 230 of them at once... It’s a solution of sorts, but never the one I wanted to take. I guess it was because I talked about this with Kylie the other week, and she suggested that I just shuffle the queue with the button that shuffles the fucking queue, Violet, that I started considering my way out

So, that’s what I’ve done. Look

And that only took me three hours! As opposed to an actual eternity!

Maybe this is only how I’ll swing things until this pile clears, or maybe it will be the way I work going forward. For now, I am making adjustments to the way that I tag posts in order to generally try and avoid that context-dependent commentary which has previously demanded that I keep things in a curated order. And fortunately, at the moment, I have been out of the active reblog scene for so long that there are no fandom chronologies I need to match step with, so shuffling everything is fine in that regard as well. And I haven’t yet encountered any posts that work best with the one-two punch in just the right order, but if I do, my plan is to just schedule them, for some random day in the future, with only a minute’s difference between them. I have done that before in certain circumstances anyway. So I have, with relatively little effort in the end, I suppose, (big thanks to my wife for letting me sequence-break my brain), allowed myself to click the magic “Shuffle Queue” button... And we’re gonna see if this lets me actually clear the whole backlog in the end, and perhaps regain control of my life web browser life

But rn I need to go to sleep because I just stayed up like an extra two hours beyond the point I needed to be asleep writing this all out in one stream of thought whoops

[picturebookmakers]

Marika Maijala

In this post, Marika talks about ‘Ruusun matka’ (Rosie’s Journey), her wonderfully fresh debut picturebook as an author and illustrator, published in Finland by Etana Editions. She talks openly about her intimate creation process, and the challenges of writing.

Visit Marika Maijala’s website

Marika: When writing this blog post, I am completely stuck in my writing process. I am trying to write a new story, but it keeps escaping me. Actually, even this blog post makes me a bit nervous, because it is a story as well: How did the book turn out the way it did?

Rosie and the race dogs in ‘Rosie’s Journey’ (Etana Editions, 2018)

My first picturebook as an author was ‘Rosie’s Journey’. It’s the story of a race dog, who runs away from the race track to find a place where she can run the way she likes to. Now, as I am struggling with my writing, I have returned to this project often and tried to figure out how I did it. It is hard to reach, as now, looking at it after a couple years have gone by, I only remember chaos, randomness and doubt, exactly the same feelings I am having now. I think I need to go further back to see how it started.

I remember sitting in a book meeting in a publisher’s office a few years back. We were discussing a forthcoming book project. There were two stories on the table, and the publisher asked which would I rather illustrate, this other story, or this one, with two happy dogs? I remember replying immediately: “the one with happy dogs”. The other story got selected, and it turned out to be a great book, but I think that deep inside of me I only want to draw happy dogs. In the end I even made a very stupid story for myself about four dogs driving around in their car. They are happy.

So maybe that’s why the main character in my first authored book is a dog. She just appeared in my sketchbook one day. Here is the first sight of Rosie. She seems happy.

This was a new notebook – an A3 Moleskine I had bought on one Interrail trip in Italy, and I carried it all the way home through Europe; how stupid. Especially as it was still empty after two years. That was a time when I was very tired of my work. I had illustrated children’s books for over a decade, worked with wonderful writers and received nice reviews for my illustrations. But I felt I didn’t really enjoy drawing. I used computer a lot, because I didn’t trust my drawing skills. So I took out this huge notebook and started scribbling, messing around. Drawing badly. Pictures came out. They were bad, but I enjoyed making them.

Around that time, I was selected for a masterclass with some other Finnish illustrators. Our teacher was Kitty Crowther, whom we all admired very much, so this was a special weekend for all of us. January was cold that year in Helsinki, and the course took place in a spooky old house by the sea. We were running on the frozen sea and making all kinds of exercises to free our creation and find our inner stories.

That weekend, I showed my new drawings for the first time to other people and got encouraged by the feedback I received from Kitty and other illustrators. Maybe I really was going in the right direction? We still often talk about this weekend with those artists, and looking back at it now, I think it was an important turning point for many of us. For me it was.

This is one of the drawings I did on the course. I still look at it when I am having a bad day, or I feel lost. Depending on the day, I am either the lion or that person getting eaten by the lion.

More drawings of Rosie started to appear in my notebook. I dared to show them to my publishers Jenni Erkintalo and Réka Király at Etana Editions. They were also encouraging and said that there was a story building up. I think it has always been difficult for me to see value in my work and ideas; this is why having friends and colleagues whom I can trust has been so important. When I doubt, they say just go ahead. I try to do the same for them. Through this whole process I was not alone, and so many decisions concerning the images and the story we made together with Jenni, Réka as well as the editor Kirsikka Myllyrinne, who encouraged me to keep the story very simple.

Here we get to the point where I always struggle: the story. When I was forced, I was able to produce this synopsis for the book:

The story goes: First, Rosie runs at the stadium, then she runs to escape the stadium, and in the end, she runs with friends because she wants to. And at the turning point, she stops. How did this scribble grow into a picturebook with 25 spreads (normally the picturebooks I illustrate have about 12 spreads)?

I think this book grew out of drawing – the joy of drawing. In a way, this is the content of the story as well, to find your own way of being, your own expression. For Rosie it is running, maybe for me it is drawing. And when I found the enjoyment in drawing, I got enough courage to finally write the words too, which so often escape me.

And maybe, in the end, it was just about finding the right tools for drawing. I remember an exercise from Kitty’s course, in which we were drawing, eyes closed, only feeling the paper, and the pen touching the paper. I really love how the crayon feels
 on this particular type of paper. And funnily enough, to approach a visual task through some other sense than vision, helped me to create an image I felt was also interesting to look at.

Drawing in these notebooks was a very physical act: I filled five of them, drawing dozens and dozens of pictures. Also, scanning the images from these books required some patience as they are large, heavy and annoying to handle.

One of my crayon boxes is an old Russian box of chocolates given to me by Finnish writer Hannu Mäkelä. We have made many books together. He is also the creator of my favourite books from childhood: the ‘Herra Huu’ (Mr. Boo) series.

It is quite an exhausting method to search for the story through drawing. I guess I sort of needed to live the story myself, to know how it goes. There are a large amount of drawings that did not end up in the final book. But I think I still needed to draw them.

Life on and under the bridge in a sketch for ‘Rosie’s Journey’. Unpublished.

Rosie makes a leap. Unpublished.

I don’t like to put morals in my stories, because who am I to teach anyone. I would rather let people find their own meanings in the story. Maybe I am more trying to find out about things myself, I have questions in mind, not answers. And some questions get answers during the process, some don’t.

Maybe the questions in this story were: What is it to be happy? What is it to be free? What is keeping us from doing things we love? Why do we hurt, imprison and enslave each other: humans, animals? Can I do something? If I save myself, what happens to the others? What can be discussed in a children’s book?

In the story, I combined my own history and happenings during the past few years with the story of a real rescue dog, Rosie. My friend saved her from a bad place and took her to her home, where she lived peacefully with three other dogs. She was a hound dog, just like Rosie in the book, the most elegant creature I have ever seen. I thought that maybe through my experiences I was able to understand her, that there are feelings, desires, experiences, all living creatures share.

An early sketch for ‘Rosie’s Journey’.

Race depot in ‘Rosie’s Journey’.

This I try to keep in mind when I draw and write children’s books: we share so many things, even with those we think we don’t share anything with at all. In a way I want to stress that, as much as we are and will always be focused on our own little lives, and the ups and downs in them, there are millions of others doing the same thing. And these ups and downs are very precious for those experiencing them. Kindness I also like a lot.

A sketch from my Italy notebook.

I love to watch people and animals doing their things. At the stations, in malls and supermarkets. On the streets and in the parks.

The train station in ‘Rosie’s Journey’.

I love to draw so many details in my illustrations that they often almost steal the story. Or they become the story, which actually I don’t mind. Something I really was fighting against in Rosie’s story as well was its linearity, the basic narrative structure it follows. Maybe I was trying to show options of where the story could go. Or that in a way our stories depend on other stories.

Spring in the city from my second authored picturebook ‘Suden hetki’ (Etana Editions, 2020).

People and animals living their lives in ‘Joulu juksaa’ (Etana Editions, 2019), a Christmas story written by Juha Virta and illustrated by me.

For many of the ‘best’ pictures (in my opinion) in ‘Rosie’s Journey’ I don’t have different/alternate versions. The pictures came out in one moment, with no effort, no planning, no pain. I didn’t want to redraw them; they had everything I wanted in them. In a way, I had made it easy for myself, as the concept of the book is so clear: Rosie is just running through different sceneries and settings; all I needed to do was to draw them. The themes – freedom vs imprisonment – I had in my mind and they can be found in the pictures when you study them.

I said that creating the story was a challenge for me. Still, I guess I know what I like in a story. I wanted it to be a simple story. And I didn’t want there to be any big climax in the end. Rosie just finds two friends and they run together. As simply as it sometimes goes in life. But we made a little change in the way of telling things, when the dogs start to run together. Until this point, Rosie has been running alone through large panoramic scenes, in an undefined time. In this important moment, when the dogs find each other, the story time is slowed down, and cut into a sequence of images, like in a film.

Rosie, Siiri and Iida in ‘Rosie’s Journey’.

In a way ‘Rosie’s Journey’ is a classical coming-of-age story, which pictures the growth of a protagonist to selfhood. I think the story became clear to me only when I made the last image. And it really is the last one in the book (although of this portrait there are at least five different versions). Also, the text on the last page was the last thing I wrote in the book. It came after long discussions with many friends, having gone through some small hardships in life, having tried terribly hard to find the right words, and then they came, immediately when I stopped trying:‘I am Rosie’, says Rosie. — ‘Shall we run again?’

There are so many ways we can express ourselves, and no way is above or below. I guess it depends on each of us which we find most important, or dear, easy or hard. I noticed that for me, when making this book, it was important to utter words as well. At first, we had thought with the publishers that it would be a book without words. But to dare to use words, and to use my own words, felt very important to me. Maybe for me, an essential way to express my thoughts and feelings about this life is to combine words and images. A long time after finishing the book, I found this drawing in my childhood home.

“I am Marika Maijala. I am 4 years old, my sister is 7 years, and my mum 8 years.”

I tried to draw a picture of my writer’s block. I am the tall creature piling heavy stones into the hot air balloon. A little girl asks, “What are you doing?”. I am making an easy thing difficult. Instead of just letting the balloon fly, I fill it with stones. Or, maybe I am making the impossible: I’m going to fly with a balloon that really cannot fly. I guess I can choose.

Illustrations © Marika Maijala. Post edited by dPICTUS.

Buy this picturebook

Ruusun matka / Rosie’s Journey

Marika Maijala

Etana Editions, Finland, 2018

Rosie is a race dog. By day she runs at the track. By night she sits in her little room. One day she doesn’t stop at the end of the track. She jumps over the fence and runs away. Rosie keeps running. Where does she go? A sensitive portrayal of a special journey by award-winning illustrator Marika Maijala. This large-format book is Marika Maijala’s debut picturebook as both author and illustrator.

Finnish: Etana Editions

Swedish: Förlaget

French: Hélium

Spanish: SM

Italian: Clichy

Korean: Munhakdongne

Chinese (Simplified): Gingko/Post Wave

Chinese (Traditional): Pace Books

[dustindoyz430]

From Around The Web: 20 Awesome Photos Of Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization

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[hungline]

I saw ur post abt taking prompts. Idk if you can do this but on @hybridfanfictions blog their most popular post was about a bee hybrid fic one and I though it was rlly cool....

honeycomb for a heart

pairing: yoonminjoonseok 

genre: fluff, light angst, hybrid au, rated pg13 

warnings: trans male character, mentioned misgendering and transphobia 

a/n: hi anon! so i saw the queen bee prompt by @hybridfanfiction and instantly fell in love with it. sorry this took so long to do, but i hope you like it regardless! title is taken from rupi kaur’s “the sun and her flowers” btw!

words: 1402 

summary: Yoongi never actually expected to build his own hive.

+ tag list: @jooneos​​ @kirtikagarg​ @disrespectfulkookies​ @roseyjongdae​ @reeneryu​​ @joonsvalentine​ @smoochkook​ ✨

Yoongi never actually expected to build his own hive.

Technically (legally, he means), he is a Queen Bee in name only. It didn’t matter if he petitioned to be listed as a King Bee instead, in the government’s eyes, Yoongi is and always will be Min Yoonji.

He doesn’t let that get to him though. Yoonji was a fine name and he liked it and all the special attention he garnered at first, but then his Queen Bee died. After that, he began wearing his late father’s clothes and went exclusively as Yoongi.

Bee hybrids aren’t rare, but they are uncommon. The only bee hybrids Yoongi has ever met were his mom and his uncle who soon passed after their Queen did. Knowing this, Yoongi was certain of the fact that even if he did meet another bee hybrid, they wouldn’t want to build a hive with him. Bees need their Queens. For bees, females are the ones with all the power while men are simply meant to worship and follow their stead.

Some days, that knowledge alone makes Yoongi want to crawl right out of his skin because he knows that his assigned gender at birth isn’t what he actually is, but it will be the reason he never gets to experience love and the special bond of a hive. Other days, it’s a burden he is able to carry without strain. And on every other day, Yoongi focuses on his garden, on the hives he keeps to produce honey with regular bees and the nursery business he inherited from his uncle.

He has decided to expand recently though, deadset on opening up a honey themed cafe he hopes will have more humans interested in bees. Maybe there will be a surge of requests for more bee hybrids to be made or maybe some will even walk right into his cafe and instantly want him to be their King. He’s heard of the stories on the internet after all. How all it takes for bees is one look to know who their true Queen is. It isn’t that far-fetched of an idea for him and a bee to exchange glances before the bee gives their loyalty to him.

(A bee could dream anyway.)

As a result, Yoongi had contacted an accountant that Seokjin, a panther hybrid he went to school with, highly recommended to him. His business card introduced him as Jung Hoseok, the sunnier half of the MonoHope partners and Yoongi hadn’t even bothered to do further research on him before reaching out. They had exchanged emails for the better part of the week and today was when Hoseok, along with his partner, would finally meet with Yoongi in person to hash out the main aspect of Yoongi’s desired business plan and expected profit. Yoongi was sitting at the table in his favorite nursery, checking the ledgers and running through the numbers once more while waiting for the two to arrive, pen tapping lightly against his lips.

Yoongi became so engrossed in his task that he was distracted enough to miss the texts Hoseok had sent him and regretted that as soon as the door creaks open and Yoongi shoots up out of his chair, eyes flickering towards the three figures suddenly entering the nursery.

It takes Yoongi a moment to realize that the men in front of him are bee hybrids who are incredibly attractive. Their antennae are long and the wings are thick, the fuzz on their heads closer to gold than yellow. Instincts that he hasn’t felt in a long time begin to build within him, running through his veins and make his heart pump with anticipation. His own wings start to flutter, antennae twitching as a mantra of hive, hive, hive starts up in his head.

He is able to ignore those instincts though when Yoongi realizes that more than a few minutes have passed with no one speaking a word. The three men standing before him just won’t stop staring at him and he’s beginning to feel nervous and self-conscious about himself when the tallest of the three drops his suitcase and bows down to him.

“My King,” he says, his voice rough.

Yoongi doesn’t even have the time to react before the other two men follow suit, bowing and murmuring a quiet, “My King.”

They stand back up slowly, eyes roaming all over him and before where Yoongi felt anxious under their gazes, he feels nothing but warmth now. They know that he is a Queen Bee, but they called him King anyway. No one except Seokjin has ever acknowledged that without being prompted. And yet, these three perfect strangers felt what only a bee could and paired it with what they saw before they gave their fealty to Yoongi properly.

Yoongi steps forward, steeling himself. He has a hive now, these three are his hive and he isn’t about to let them go.

“What are your names?” he croaks, wincing at the sound of his own voice.

The tallest smiles at him though, bowing again before he says, “Kim Namjoon, at your service, my King.”

Yoongi wants to tell him not to bow, to treat him like he would anybody else, but those instincts he ignored earlier are back at full force and will not allow that.

“Jung Hoseok, at your service, my King,” the man beside Namjoon introduces himself, smiling after he has straightened from his bow. “We exchanged emails, but it’s very nice to finally meet you, Your Majesty.”

Again, Yoongi wants to speak up and tell Hoseok that he need not bother with the official titles, but his instincts fight him and Yoongi decides to give in because he knows a losing battle when he sees one. He focuses on the last man to introduce himself instead, head tilted to the side in confusion. He’s pretty sure Hoseok didn’t mention bringing someone other than Namjoon with him for their appointment.

“And who might you be?” Yoongi asks, patting himself on the back for keeping his voice gentle when the short man startles slightly and flushes under his gaze.

“Park Jimin, at your service, my King,” Jimin replies, hesitant and obviously nervous, but his voice is steady and Yoongi finds himself smiling over the fact that he didn’t bow like the other two. “Hobi-hyung invited me along because he wanted a banker’s perspective on your plan. I hope that isn’t a problem.”

“I see,” Yoongi says with a nod. “It’s not a problem at all. Thank you for coming.”

Yoongi bites his lip, hands twisting together in front of him as he looks over these three men who know nothing about him but are now his anyway. “Are you certain this is what you want? All of you?”

“Of course,” Hoseok answers immediately. “You are our King.”

“But wouldn’t you prefer a Queen?” Yoongi cannot help but ask, wondering why he is questioning this so much. “You must know that I’m not… that. I will never be a Queen.”

Namjoon steps forward then and holds his arms out hesitantly. Yoongi stares at his hands for a moment before he takes them in his own, drawing closer. Out of the corner of his eye, Yoongi can see Hoseok and Jimin approaching as well but keeps his primary focus on Namjoon in front of him.

“We’ve gone our whole lives without a Queen,” Namjoon says this so matter of factly that Yoongi can only blink up at him in surprise and a bit of awe if he is going to be truthful. A worker bee growing up without a Queen? That’s traumatic, to say the least. “Now we have found a King and we do not intend to let you go, Your Majesty. Don’t you want to start a hive with us?”

And damn it, when Namjoon looks at him like that with his eyes huge and imploring, how is Yoongi even meant to say no?

So Yoongi nods and tilts his head up, accepting the chaste kiss Namjoon presses to his mouth before striding towards Hoseok and doing the same. Jimin surprises him by stepping forward when Yoongi has pulled away from Hoseok, sweeping him into his arms and giving him the filthiest kiss Yoongi has ever received in his life. It leaves him reeling, his wings fluttering and face warm as they separate.

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

[chaoskirin]

Reblog Survey Results

I know it’s been a while. I had a lot of data to go through, and I also had to run some reblog experiments to determine whether my guesses were valid or not. I’ll first discuss the raw data, then the results of my experiments, some conclusions that may be drawn, and finally what might be done about the lack of reblogs on tumblr.

Please remember to reblog this, so everyone who responded to the survey can see the results!

First: A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who participated. I didn’t expect this sort of attention. I hope this essay helps, and to everyone who wants the actual data to go over for yourself (it is a lot!) please message me and I can send you a PDF. No names are attached, so it is entirely private.

Respondents were offered the choice of eleven options and could choose multiple options based on their reblog habits for art.

A total of 150 people replied. Two responses were deleted due to the fact that they were spam and clicked every option without explanation, leaving a total of 148 viable respondents who clicked a total of 337 options:

Respondents were allowed to expand on their choices to describe other options not presented. Some of these options restated those that were already presented, and the others can be split into several categories:

No one reblogs my art, so I don’t reblog anyone else’s.

I don’t reblog art that is NSFW under any circumstance

I feel like original art is too personal to reblog, no matter the subject matter.

While I may like the art, I feel as if I need to tag/comment on it, and I might not have time when I see the art, and so I end up not reblogging it at all. (This response was overwhelming!)

If the artist ever discusses lack of reblogs, I make it a point not to ever reblog from them.

I don’t reblog from artists who state things such as “my art is so bad” or “this sucks but I’m posting it anyway”

I’m afraid of offending or triggering my followers.

Some people just expanded/reinforced the choices they made when selecting options. Many were explanations of why they were selective about what they reblogged.

I also included a section where respondents could add comments related to the survey.

One respondent stated that they considered a “like” as something to let the artist know that they like the piece, while they consider a reblog an endorsement--and that they want to be sure the original artist isn’t homophobic/transphobic/terf/etc.

Another stated that they needed to feel attachment to the work in order to reblog it.

Many people stated that reblogs were a privilege and not a right, and that likes should suffice to make an artist happy. In the same vein, another respondent said that if tumblr is being used for emotional validation [you] are “setting yourself up for failure.”

There are also many responses that encourage people to support art and fanfic, as well as thanking the author for doing the survey and encouraging the posting of results.

It was initially difficult to make a conclusion from this data, as almost 60% of respondents say they reblog as much art as they can. This didn’t seem to match up with my own personal experiences, as if this was true, every art piece posted on tumblr should receive somewhere in the range of 90 reblogs at the very least. Of course, the issue is that the people who stated they reblog as much as they can don’t all follow my blog; the survey itself reached a huge audience and most of the people who replied likely do not follow me. So this alone might prove that reblogs on tumblr definitely lead to more reblogs, and thus, more people seeing posted artwork.

So the issue lay within the breakdown of the “reblog chain.”

Essentially, while there are a lot of people willing to reblog art, there are various barriers any one piece must pass through in order to reach a wider audience.

First: There are the people who are particular about what they reblog (another 88 responses, or another 60%), people who are afraid of upsetting the artist or their followers (an answer given by 47 people, ore about 31% of respondents) and then those who gave an option I didn’t anticipate: that they simply didn’t have the time or energy or tagging capability to reblog when they saw they art, and went on to forget to reblog it. (This may include people who reblog most of what they see, but either sometimes or usually forget to do it.)

Seventeen (17) people stated this outright, and if I had the option in the survey, I believe it might have accounted for more. These answers came in at different times, so it’s impossible that these 17 respondents discussed their answer with each other. Furthermore, to have such a percentage of people individually state the same thing, it stands to reason that this is one of the major barriers when it comes to reblogging art.

I attempted to run an experiment to determine the reblogging habits of tumblr users, whereby I posted three separate images and encouraged people to reblog them. Unfortunately, due to the above limitations and inability for the experiment to reach past my own blog, I could only use data I already had.

I looked at the reblog patterns of my own art and followed the posts in question through several blogs.

The first interesting pattern I noticed was that one person I’ll call N, would almost always rebog my art, which would then almost always be reblogged by a second person (S). In cases where N did not reblog my art, the piece in question was never reblogged by S, as S does not follow me. Interestingly, if S reblogged my piece, it was then usually reblogged by at least one other person--not always the same people. But through this pattern, I tended to gain at least 4 reblogs through this chain.

I also looked at blogs with many followers who reblogged my art. This one I will mention by name, as it is a content collector blog. @theworldofthedarkcrystal​ often reblogs my Dark Crystal art, leading to incredible numbers when it comes to reblogs. One piece, my drawing of The Heretic, received 145 reblogs, which is very high. However, you’ll notice that it also has far more likes, sitting at 430, which illustrates the problem with art on tumblr.

But what about average users who happen to have a lot of followers? I looked at one popular user who follows me, who I’ll call A. A reblogs from a certain fandom, but doesn’t reblog every one of my pieces from that fandom, which meant they were perfect to examine the differences in visibility.

I won’t share the pieces here to protect this person’s identity. But this popular user’s occasional reblogs of my art would sometimes cause the notes on my art to take off... And sometimes it wouldn’t make any difference at all. So the first conclusion that can be drawn is that it doesn’t necessarily matter who reblogs your art, because individual groups of followers may not share the same taste. (And/or they may be affected by the various other options from the survey!)

This is not a scientific survey. If I expected so many responses, I might have structured things differently, however, using what I know about tumblr and the responses I received, I can draw certain conclusions.

I’ll admit, even I have scrolled past art before; I don’t reblog every bit of art I see, because it has to be relevant to my interests. Since putting together this survey, I attempted to reblog more art in general, as I realized that I was part of the “problem,” and had to make a conscious effort to change.

While I didn’t ask every respondent whether they had ADHD, autism, or mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety, my experiences have shown me that many people who call tumblr their home also feel a kinship here, because other people share the same conditions.

If this is taken into account, it’s not that people are maliciously skipping art to reblog. But those of us (myself included!) who hyperfixate are sometimes incapable of giving attention to things that aren’t currently at the forefront of their mind.

This makes it difficult for original art to take off, because those who are hyperfixating literally cannot give their full attention to something they aren’t currently fixated on. I did some research on hyperfixation, and it is also referred to as being “in the zone.” That it’s an intense focus on something for hours, or days, or years... Then it’s over. One of the articles I read stated that the writer read mystery novels en masse for a time, then stopped completely, and hasn’t read another mystery novel for twenty years.

Another article stated that “When a fixation takes hold of me, it manifests as an inexplicable compulsion to just keep consuming this new thing until I’ve absorbed it all. Sometimes this continues even to my own detriment.  My sleep schedule is routinely screwed up when this happens.  I consume every bit of it as rapidly as possible until it’s done and I don’t want to stop or slow down.”

Due to the respondents who stated that they were very selective about what they reblogged, I can conclude that at least some of the issue is innocent hyperfixation--as someone who is hyperfixating is not able to devote their attention to other things.

(This is not an attack on people who hyperfixate! It’s a logical explanation that I believe people who seek reblogs should take into account--hyperfixating people hyperfixate.)

Secondly, I’d like to address the response I didn’t anticipate--that people do intend to reblog art, but don’t have the energy for it (IE: tagging or commenting.) As I stated before, I believe this has a lot to do with art not getting reblogged, especially when the same people don’t then go back and reblog what they intended to--instead scrolling tumblr and adding more work to their queue that then also never gets reblogged.

I have also personally noticed a great many people on tumblr (again, myself included) who suffer from depression and/or executive dysfunction, leading to an inability to complete tasks that sap too much energy or don’t have a specific deadline.

And while I can’t conclude that this is the major issue when it comes to reblogging, I can say that this plays a large part, and that those of us who worry that we are being excluded or deliberately ignored should take this into account. Reblogging, tagging, and commenting does take a lot of energy, that people rightfully reserve for the things they care about the most. And there is likely huge overlap between the people who hyperfixate and those who don’t have the energy to reblog things.

At least from a technical standpoint, I can conclude that there’s no confusion on the difference between reblogging and reposting. However, there was some concern that artists might not want to see their art on certain blogs.

So what can be done about this situation?

For artists:

Start deriving comfort from the attention you do get. Even if it’s the same person or couple people reblogging your art every time, make sure to thank and appreciate them. This is something I’ve learned recently; while it’s okay to pursue popularity, your achievements and personal successes are separate from that, and it’s okay to start small.

And if someone reblogs your art that you haven’t seen before, you might consider sending them a “thank you,” as some people tend to only reblog art from people with whom they have a relationship. This might help you find some fans!

If you’re seeking to encourage reblogs, due to certain responses on the survey, it might be advantageous to add “Reblogs are appreciated and encouraged” to your works. There are few enough people that consider this “whining” that it shouldn’t affect your overall success.

For hyperfixators:

I am not an expert on ADHD, so I won’t presume to tell you to change. If reblogging one kind of art makes you happy, then you keep doing you, because this world needs happiness, and if your current hyperfixation provides that for you, then you’re miles ahead of most people in the world. If you’re ever able to, consider reblogging one or two pieces of original art, as you’ll make an artist very happy!

For That Other Big Answer:

The idea that people didn’t reblog because they didn’t have the energy to do it was surprising to me, and an answer I didn’t anticipate... but one I also felt in my soul as soon as I saw it come up.

We all have to remember that on tumblr, we’re one point in a long chain of people. If you don’t have the energy to tag or comment, it’s best to reblog that art anyway, so that other people can see it and perhaps comment themselves, reblog it, and keep the visibility chain going. If you’re so inclined later, you can go back and tag or comment! As an artist, I regularly check tags to see if anyone’s said anything nice, but reblogs make me equally happy, even if nothing is said.

For the Clutter Crowd:

If you’re afraid that reblogging too much art might clutter your blog (but you still want to reblog it!) consider making a blog where you only put art. There’s a chance people might follow that blog, thus perpetuating the reblog chain, but it’s also a place where you can comment and/or tag without adding too many art posts to your main blog.

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There are certain answers I cannot do anything about. IE: people who only reblog refined/finished works or works they consider favorites. I’d like to gently remind these respondents that while you are not personally responsible for the success or “advertisement” of newer or less skilled artists, we as people live in a society where we take comfort from the attention of those around us. Sometimes the only reason for reblogging a piece you don’t find completed to your standards is just to make someone’s day a little brighter.

In conclusion: Reblog art!