#Not posting the pages because it's pretty graphic but still thought it was worth mentioning

[sskk-manifesto]

Btw friendly reminder that the anime cut the scene where after jumping off the sinking ship Mitchell and Hawthorne encountered James L. - the Guild's top-level's secretary that the pm killed at the end of season 1 -... Only to find out it was actually his corpse standing tall, eviscerated and filled with lemon bombs, complete with graphic depiction of his face splitting open and lemon bombs rolling off it

[carriagelamp]

Since it’s Pride Month, I decided this year I wanted to raid the library for a bunch of different queer books to read. Mostly graphic novels in this case, because I’ve had a hard time settling into much reading lately... thought hopefully now that it’s summer and I finally have my second shot I’ll be able to relax a bit more and dig into some heavier novels again. For now, enjoy some light, queer reads that I indulged in this June.

A Wolf Called Wander

A beautiful novel I had been hearing lots about. This story follows the young wolf Swift, who grows up knowing that he and his pack are the mountains, and the mountains are them. It’s in those mountains that he grows and learns and loves… until disaster strikes and he finds himself viciously torn apart from his family and forced out of the mountains that have always meant home to him. Forced to survive on his own. Swift then begins a gruelling journey that makes him face injury, starvation, and the everpresent danger of humans as he seeks a new place he can call home, and new people with whom he can form a pack.

This is all based on the true story of a tagged wolf known as OR-7, following the unbelievable route he took through Oregon and northern California! It was a very neat read, and I’d definitely recommend it if you enjoy stories told from an animal’s perspective because this book is a master class in it.

Bloom

I decided for June to try to read a handful of different queer books, and this was one of the first graphic novels I picked up. It is a super sweet story and the art is lovely. It’s about Ari, a boy who has just graduated high school and is now desperate to move away from his small town and his family’s struggling bakery, to join his band in the city where they hope to make it big. An agreement is finally reached: Ari’s father will let him leave, if he can find someone who can replace him in the bakery, which is how Ari meets Hector, someone who sees artistry and peace in baking. For anyone that’s read Check, Please, it gives off those types of vibes!

Boule et Bill: Bill est Maboul

Another book of Dupuis comics, because I can’t get enough of them! This one I just stumbled across and ended up reading on a whim but it was very cute. Geared younger than the others I’ve read, but still quite funny. It’s the charming hijinks of a young boy, his dog, and the family they live with. Each page or so is a different stand alone joke, a bit like Calvin and Hobbes except expanded beyond a single strip.

Chicken Run: Chicken Pies for the Soul

This was a ridiculous urge I got and had to follow. I recently rewatched Chicken Run (which is, of course, one of the best movies ever made) and felt the need to see if it had ever been novelized. Well, I found something better than a novelization! This is a chapter book with “advice” and stories written by the various characters, post-movie. It really does a good job with grasping the different characters’ voices and making something simple and funny out of it. It was very cute (and available on The Internet Archive if anyone else feels like reading something ridiculous!)

Doodleville

I picked this up on a whim and honestly, I shouldn’t have bothered. It was not very impressive. Very mediocre, awkward feeling artwork, and a story that only slightly manages to redeem it. The concept was kind of neat, and I did like how the ending came about, the rest was rather… plodding. I did not like the main character at all, her friends felt very Intentionally Quirky Aren’t We Cute :3 in a way that just tries too hard, and… yeah. Meh. It technically gets the “queer graphic novel flag” but it’s so in-passing that it feels rather excessive to give it that.

If you are interested, it’s about a world were doodles actually exist as living creatures that can be drawn into existence (the rather unsettling implications of which is never fully explored). This is all well and good, until the main character draws a monster and takes it with her to her art club... where it begins ravanging not only her doodles, but those of her friends. Together they need to work together to figure out how to stop this menace.

FRNCK v4

Phenomenal. I adore the FRNCK series, and book four wrapped up the first “cycle”, revealing several of the big secrets dogging the series so far, and changing how things are going to be able to run in the future.

If you haven’t seen me talk about it before, FRNCK is a graphic novel (a franco-belgian bande dessinée) about a young orphan, Franck, who’s chafing under the constant parade of uninterested foster parents that visit the orphanage he lives in. Determined to learn about his mysterious abandonment instead, he flees the orphanage… but finds himself tumbling through time, landing among a family of cave-people who rather reluctantly take him in and ensure this modern boy doesn’t die in the strange, dangerous new surroundings he finds himself in. You can get these ones in English as e-books, so if you want a really kickass graphic novel series to read please try these.

Haikyu!!

I’ve heard so much about Haikyu!! that I finally gave in and picked up the first book from the library. And I gotta say, it’s well worth the hype! This series really does capture the best parts of a good sports manga -- which is to say the team is filled with interesting, enjoyable character who all need to learn to pull together, boost each other’s strengths, and cover for each other’s weaknesses. Love me some found family tropes and this series oozes it in the best possible way. And then you also get some very cool action scenes as it makes high school volleyball seem like the most intense thing on earth. I can’t wait to continue it

Queer Eye

I haven’t been keeping up with Queer Eye but I was watching it ravenously when it first came out, and this seemed like a very cathartic book to read… and it really was. It had the same gentle, loving encouragement as the show. It doesn’t expect you to change your entire life, but to learn to embrace who you are, and take small steps to enhance those things. There a segment written (presumably) by each member of the Fab Five, explaining the mentality behind what they do on the show and how you can grow in those areas too. It’s very zen.

Spinning

I got this graphic novel out at the same time as Bloom, but it was the one that interested me less of the two... though that’s just because I have less interest in “real world” slice of life as a genre and this one is meant to be autobiographical. If you’re into that, you’ll probably love this because it really is stunning. Very pretty, and the format and pacing is all really well done. It’s a coming of age story for Tillie as she grows up dealing with a crosscountry move, complicated friendships, a burgeoning attraction to girls, and attending competitive figure skating classes.

This Place: 150 Years Retold

A stunning and heart-wrenching graphic novel told by a collection of different First Nation’s authors/artists, recounting oral histories about the 150 years since the colonialist formation of the country known as “Canada”. In other words, this is a post-apocalypse story, but one that really happened and that entire peoples are still fighting to survive. It’s very eye opening and beautifully told. Very strongly recommend the read, especially if you’re at all interested in history.

Torchwood: Serenity

Whoops, not technically a book. I had thought these were technically audiobooks at first, but rather they’re audio dramas that were played on the radio. Still, I decided to include one because I’ve been listening to them like a person possessed and they’re too fun not to at least mention. Let me indulge in my obsessions.

If you don’t know Torchwood, it’s a BBC series that spins-off from Doctor Who, focusing on the enigmatic and flirtatious Captain Jack Harkness, who is running the covert organization known as Torchwood, which is tasked to protect humanity from and prepare them for alien contact. It’s goofy and campy but also more adult and heavy than Doctor Who tends to get, so it is (in my opinion) a really fascinating series. Though it also has content warnings coming out the wazoo so maybe make sure it’s for you before delving in.

Serenity specifically is possibly one of the best Torchwood stories I’ve ever experienced. The Torchwood team concludes that there’s an undercover alien hiding in the idyllic gated community Serenity Plaza, and so that means it’s up to Jack and Ianto to go undercover as a happily married couple and flush out the alien without being discovered first. Even if it means being sickly sweet together, pretending to care about the local neighbourhood barbecues, and actually caring a bit too much about the Best Front Lawn competition. What is truly magical about this one, is that it manages to make it a Fake Dating AU despite the fact that Jack and Ianto are actually dating in canon. But they’re both used to dating as a pair of alien hunters with insanely dysfunctional lives, and who now need to figure out how to deal with domesticity. It is marvellous.

Wilderlore: The Accidental Apprentice

A middle grade novel that felt a bit like a cross between Harry Potter and Pokemon. It’s about orphan Barclay Thorne who wants nothing more than to be accepted in the rule-bound village of Dullshire, and live up to his apprenticeship as a mushroom farmer. He certainly wants nothing to do with the fearsome Beasts who live beyond the village, deep in the Woods or the sinister Lorekeepers that bond with them. It was, after all, a Beast that had killed his parents all those years ago. But when he finds himself at the very edge of the forest, hunting for an elusive mushroom, he is suddenly unable to avoid any of that. Not when a wild girl and her bonded dragon appear to summon a horrible Beast and end up getting Barclay bonded to it instead. Now, if Barclay ever wants to be welcomed back into his home, he has no choice but to venture into the Woods and find a way to sever the bond imprisoning him to the massive, monstrous wolf now imprinted on his body as a living tattoo.

I honestly can’t decide how I felt about this one. I feel like it’d be a really fun read for maybe a grade 5 to 7 student? I was a bit more meh about it. It was fine, but it was very hard not to draw unfavourable parallels to Harry Potter. But for a kid who’s never read Harry Potter? Or even an adult that has but is looking for something different to scratch that itch, this might be a good book to try. I’ll probably try reading the second book when it comes out.

[luci-cunt]

An incomprehensive guide to why you should read T.J Klune’s book Wolfsong

Mostly for my very best friend in the whole wide world: @moonsandstarsaregay <33 and with 100% too many AFtG references i’m sorry

*AHEM*

A plot summary: Ox has been told his whole life he’s slow and gonna get shit for it. He lives in a sleepy little nowhere town in Oregon and is perfectly content never leaving and working in the garage for the rest of his life. His dad sucks, his mom’s a gem, and one day the house that’s (almost) always been empty at the end of the street gets filled by a family that’s just a little on the wrong side of weird–the Bennetts. They all immediately fall in love with Ox because he’s literally the most perfect mc you’ll ever meet, and he learns that not everyone actually sucks he’s just been looking at the wrong people. 

And so what if they’re also a very powerful and well known werewolf pack–I mean WHATTTTTT

There’s monster fighting, drama, adventure, romance(*), adventure, angst (Oh GOD is there angst), badassary, and just so much good shit.

The Main Character:

I could talk just about how Ox is portrayed until the day I DIE. He doesn’t have an arc where he magically becomes ‘normal’ or anything, instead he just surrounds himself with people that treat him better and finds that he doesn’t need to change. He has a heart of gold and does kind things just because he is kind. He’s the definition of a soft giant, and again, the book starts and he’s roughly 10ish (with flashbacks to younger) and it ends with him in his late 20s early 30s so he definitely grows and matures but he doesn’t change because he doesn’t NEED to. 

[More reasons to read + warnings/ disclaimers + a snippet below cut so I don’t bother y’all with a hella long post XD

You should probs read the warnings before you read the book just FYI]

Writing Style: If the style of the Knife of Never Letting Go intrigued you but you couldn’t get past the first chapter then this is the book for you. Ox is a bit simple–In the best way possible–and the book is from his perspective. His thoughts are stated outright and he takes most things people say very literally. This doesn’t change and that’s the best part. I LOVE this about it and I was TERRIFIED that Klune was going to write Ox in this style for only the first couple chapters and then suddenly switch to him being some snarky genius, but he doesn’t!!! Honestly idk how to describe it, you’ve just got to read it. 

If that doesn’t convince you: 

- First of all, werewolves, who doesn’t love em?

- Second of all gays, like, everyone, no one is straight. That one side character who shows up once? Yeah, no, she shows up twice and the second time she has a girlfriend. The main characters? All gay, and if they aren’t gay in this book they will be in the next one. 

- FOUND FAMILY

- It’s basically AFtG but gayer and softer? but not?? 

- Very realistic characters, they make stupid mistakes and people react accordingly

- Kelly and Carter and literally the best things in the world I would fucking murder for both of them and I’m pretty sure Kelly is confirmed by the author to be ace (btw they aren’t twins so you can’t even accuse me of being in love with every blond and kinda tragic set of twins I come across fuck off XD)

- OX STATES VERY BLATANTLY THAT HE IS BISEXUAL

- Very endearing coming out scenes

- Gordo Livingstone is perfect in just about every way and he’s also like if Neil and Seth were combined and grew up to be Wymack. ajsdf;lk just a dumbass gay trying really hard to be a good dad while also vehemently denying it. (Oh and yeah he literally had a boyfriend who he’s currently pissed at so)

- MC is not a genius and that’s not treated like a bad thing

- Please just read it I need more people to scream about it with me

Some warnings:

- it’s werewolves, there’s gore, obsessive use of the word “alpha” and lots of wolf-ish tendencies. Most of it comes across as fucking adorable, but ngl, sometimes it’s just a tad weird. 

- people have v tragic backstories. None of it is worse than AFtG but it’s still very intense, more on the side of gore/ violence/ some torture than heavy non/con but there’s some mentions of that. (More vague allusions/ threats rather than graphic scenes don’t worry)

- *the only thing that really wigged me out about these books is the fact that the main couple have a 6 year age difference. Any way you spin that it’s weird, but I think it was handled as well as you can??? (idk man I’m still wigged out about that even tho they don’t actually DO anything until both of them are in their twenties but STILL)

- it is VERY angsty. I mean, the soft moments are SICKENINGLY soft and there’s some of the best comedy/ cute shit I’ve ever seen but–god the ouch stuff HURTS. If you don’t want to cry over a book I wouldn’t recommend reading this.

In conclusion:

If you wanted LGBT adventure content here it is!!! I mean, if it’s the sex scenes you’re about (or against XD) there’s only really two, one is the epilogue and one is about 2/3rds through the book but from what other people who actually understand sex say it’s NICE XDD also just a very nice character moment? I didn’t read all of it but from what I read it was v nice, they’re wholesome and stupid, I love them. 

I actually really liked the romance? It’s v realistic and got the vibe of “neither of us have good self-confidence but I will DIE proving to you that you’re worth the entire world.” There’s very, very sappy and drawn out declarations of love, it’s adorable, sometimes a little weird (looking at you Joe), but altogether wholesome. There’s also a wee bit of possessiveness but it’s mostly(?) treated as the “uuuuhhhh, that’s not gonna go over well you need to chill” trait it should be.

It’s intense, and the last time I physically could not stop reading and stayed up all night just to finish a book was AFtG so... 

It is quite a bit longer than AFtG tho, like, it took me the same amount of time to read just Wolfsong that I read all three of the AFtG books in. Sometimes it drags a little, especially in the middle, but it’s all worth it. Also if you don’t like drawn out “you will apologize on my terms because you fucked up on yours” kinda things I don’t think this is for you. 

I loved it, the characters are to die for and the villains make my blood boil. I cried, and laughed and sobbed and screamed. 12/10

Here’s a lil bit to give you a taste:

Here’s a link to the Goodreads page if you want more details 

And here’s a link to where you can buy the book ;) 

[lightwoodsmagic]

Hi! So I agree Liam is queer, and the pink🔺in his video compels me not to ignore it. I saw one of your Ziam posts making its rounds after the SIU video, so I thought you were the person to ask. I only joined the fandom after Zayn left, and I’ve always had a hard time finding info on why and how that played out at the time (nobody seems to agree). Could you elaborate (or link to previous posts) on why you think Ziam is still a thing, and how they are telling us? Thanks for your insight so far!

 Hi anon! 

Thank you so much for thinking of me! I’m sorry it’s taken me a little while to answer, but it took me a bit to gather all the info I wanted (while I should’ve been working oop).

Okay, please know that this post is gonna be loooooong, so I’ve popped it under the cut.

You’re right about nobody agreeing on Zayn leaving the band, and it makes sense that people have differing views. It’s such a complicated thing; there was a lot happening at the time. 

I’m going to start by saying there’s a brilliant masterpost about Zayn leaving here. It’s incredibly detailed, talks about pretty much every aspect of it, and there’s so much to look into. It’s also wonderful to demonstrate how much the boys and Zayn still hinted at things and loved each other, like Harry using Zayn’s mic one night, Liam talking about him fondly in interviews, Niall still calling him by his nickname, and Louis wearing his clothes.

It’s a long read, but incredibly worth it, as it this stunting timeline.

Everyone is absolutely entitled to their opinion, so I’ll just give you mine. I’m gonna keep it (kind of) short though. A lot of what I’m about to say can be found in the masterposts I’ve linked above.

I believe that Zayn leaving was out of his control, and was never completely his decision. I believe that he was set to return, but for some reason, the plan changed. Mind of Mine was apparently written before he left, and while I think he would’ve been working on solo music before he left (and that all of them were to some extent), to tease an album right after the announcement that he left makes no sense. A contract like the one that 1D had/has with Syco would cost an obscene amount of money to get out of, and Zayn’s net worth didn’t change at all. They made it seem so simple in the very few interviews with Zayn afterwards, saying he just called his security, got on a plane, and left. I think Zayn struggled a lot with everything, they all did, but I don’t think he could’ve just left. There were articles put out about his new album that mentioned Simco and everything, but when people pointed out that it didn’t make sense with the narrative that Simon felt ‘betrayed’, the references were removed straight away. 

There’s also a very solid theory that MoM was counted as One Direction’s sixth and final contracted album, and it really stands up. Check it out! 

Look. There’s a lot to unpack with the whole situation, and I’ve hardly touched on it at all, but I really do encourage you to look into it with everything I’ve linked above  💞

Okay, now onto the second part of your ask! 

Ziam. My loooovveesss.  

I’m going to start by saying that there’s a lot of ways that Liam and Zayn have hinted that they’re still together, and honestly? The boys ain’t even subtle about it. I’ll start by talking about heaps of ways they’ve done that since Zayn left!

Alright, let’s start with the fact that they WILL NOT STOP LIKING, REBLOGGING, AND RETWEETING POSTS FROM ZIAM ACCOUNTS. 

(x) (x)

These aren’t subtle Ziam accounts, and it’s not just these examples. This also isn’t just something in the past; that bottom right one references Stack It Up.

They’ve also both reposted fanart from a well known Ziam where each drawing referenced the other one. 

(x)

The Zayn art says ‘Love Payne’ on the beanie. Well then. 

And the Liam one? That he posted on his personal insta? The artist added the ‘love’ tattoo from Zayn’s hand onto Liam’s. It’s obvious, and it’s not like Liam wouldn’t have noticed that suddenly there was a new tattoo added ON HIS OWN HAND. 

Not very subtle, hey.

It’s also not the only shady social media activity related to the boys  👀

There was the time that Liam explained why he’d written ‘personally’ twice in a thank you post in his insta story to Bvlgari. 

But he hadn’t. What had happened was that Twitter account @TheZiamNews had made a small mistake, and had actually written it twice. The only explanation was that Liam saw it on a Ziam update page VERY quickly, thought he had made the original mistake, and then explained. Interesting that Liam keeps up to date with them. 

There was also the time Liam blocked an account for talking absolute shit about Zayn, or when Herbie Critchlow (a producer from Icarus Falls) retweeted a tweet about Common being about Ziam. Also can’t forget Brandon Colbein posting on insta about some songs he’d written, and somehow there was one for Zayn and one for Liam. 

Oh, and when Liam’s friend Andy (who seems to…split the fandom, but alas) posted a video of him listening to Icarus Falls, or every single mirroring insta post Liam and Zayn can’t seem to help making.

And their eyebrow slits! 😊 this goes allllll the way back to One Direction days.

(x)

Now, this is a constant, recurring thing for them over the years.

It’s usually at the same time, and it usually signifies something. 

Zayn went ALL OUT one day, just after Z*gi ‘broke up’, and put a slit in his eyebrow, but it wasn’t a normal one. It was in the shape of an L. That fucking sap. Not to be outdone though, Liam popped a lil’ Z in the graphics for his show last year in Japan. 

SAPS, THE BOTH OF THEM.

Now, jewellery. 

OOOOOF are we in for it now. You’re probably regretting this ask already. 

Cartier. 

Say that single word around someone who believes in Ziam and you’ve lost them forever. 

Back in 2015 (so yes, a while ago but bear with me) during the OTRA tour, Zayn suddenly started wearing a gold Cartier bracelet. It was interesting because Zayn didn’t wear bracelets at the time. It was particularly interesting because Liam had been seen earlier that day with jewellery bags buying a present. Curious.

Or obvious. 

Either or. 

A similar thing happened when Zayn attended the ‘Straight Outta Compton’ premiere, one of his first appearances after he left the band. He was wearing a Hublot watch, which was also interesting because Zayn didn’t wear watches either. 

But GUESS WHERE LIAM HAD BEEN 2 DAYS BEFORE THE PREMIERE?

You’re damn right, anon. It was Hublot.

Now, the Cartier love bracelet. 

This picture was posted when Liam was getting ready for the Brits in 2017. For those that don’t know, the Cartier love bracelet has little screws, and can only be undone with a little gold screwdriver that comes with it. 

Liam wore it everywhere that year, and so often. It didn’t make sense for it to be ‘given to him by Ch*ryl’, because they would’ve used every opportunity to show that damn screwdriver. 

But they didn’t, because she didn’t have it. Zayn did. 

There’s also the other matching bracelets they’ve worn by Alexander McQueen.

And also the other time Zayn wore Cartier in his film clip, or the fact that Zayn started wearing a ring on his right ring finger that was sold and marketed by Cartier AS A WEDDING RING. 

They also share watches if Zayn decides to wear one, because they’re cute like that.

Now, they also share clothes. 

So many clothes, ohmygod. 

(x)

A prime example of this actually happened just last year! TWICE! IN NYC WHEN LIAM WAS THERE (obviously to see his husband). Both times, Liam was out and about wearing two of Zayn’s jackets. 

It’s also absolutely not a coincidence that when Zayn was staying at G*gi’s apartment on Bond Street, Liam stayed at a hotel a few minutes away a number of times, but when Zayn moved to Soho, Liam suddenly switched hotels to one in Soho, a few minutes away from Zayn’s new place. Just can’t stay away from an old band mate you hardly talk to, hey. 

Also can’t ignore Liam wearing numerous Kooples shirts during the time Zayn was doing promotional stuff for them. Husbands givin’ gifts.

 NYC isn’t the only city that relates to Ziam though! 

Ahhhhhhhh. Ziami. What a time, what a time, what a time (for you and I).

Anyway. 

At the start of last year, Liam and Zayn were both in Miami at the same time filming music videos for Let Me and Familiar respectively, arriving either at the same time or a day apart. It was at a time when Zayn was all over his socials, posting poems and selfies and generally being his relaxed, gorgeous self, which wasn’t incredibly common for a while. 

People were convinced they could hear Zayn in one of Liam’s insta stories, talking in the background just before Liam realises and raises his voice. It’s definitely not firm though, and Liam has someone in his team with a similar accent, but I’ve linked it so you can judge for yourself! Regardless, we knew they were both there, but it was a fun lil’ talking point!

Anyway, according to people who live in the area and know the coastline, they were in the same area at the same time, and we also knew that Liam wasn’t with Ch*ryl because she was back in the UK. Now, Liam posted an Instagram story the next morning half naked in bed, his 4 tattoo (we’ll get to that) and roses on full display, and saying he’d wrecked his voice. 

Well then. 

He also posted this. 

It was a video, but it was Liam, in his room ‘alone’ with two desserts for breakfast at a time when we knew Zayn was there and no one else was, and he suddenly had no voice. 

Okay okay, we get it. 

They also consistently reference the number 25, and honestly, no one knows why the fuck.

Just casually on Liam’s jackets and shoes, Zayn’s shoes and a shirt that was sold (even the red and yellow, ffs Zayn), and also Zayn’s NECK, which he got in 2018. There was also chevrons on a collection for Zayn, just like Liam’s tattoos.

Speaking of tattoos Zayn got in 2018. 

That big, red wolf on his chest just up there?

One of the biggest Ziam things to ever happen. 

Red was Liam’s mic colour in 1D, everything they fucking do seems to be related to red, and Liam’s nickname is Wolfie because he’s from Wolverhampton. 

It’s a red wolf, directly on his chest, and it’s 100% for Liam. It’s not the only red wolf tattoo Zayn has; he also has one on his leg with feathers, just like Liam’s feather tattoo. 

The media often talk about the eyes Zayn has underneath that, and that they’re for G*gi, but the eyes underneath are so much lighter than the surrounding ink, the shape fits easily, and to me, it seems clear they’ve been done in a way that they can easily be inked over. It was designed for a cover up, and hopefully it’s coming. Zayn also has Liam’s name literally inked into his skin. 

They also have coordinating hand tattoos. The mandala on Zayn’s hand and the roses on Liam’s are explained brilliantly in this post. The two of these together mean ‘Symbol of Eternity’. Fucking hell. 

The three roses on Liam’s hand also translates to ‘I love you’. FUUUCCCKKKKKKK.

Liam also wore a ring for a while, until he was forced to take it off, but then he rebelled anyway, and got this.

It’s important because not only is it on his wedding finger, it’s also what he said about it, and when he got it. 

Now, not only is 4 as an angel number about changing the only things that you can in a situation, but Liam directly said that’s what it was. He can’t wear a wedding ring, so he did the next best thing. 

It also came when Liam and Ch*ryl became ‘official’, and when he’d already quashed marriage twice in an interview. Interesting choice, then. He also spoke of the 4 and a ring forming a halo, but still somehow shut down marriage talk? 

…….okay then. 

Some incredibly brilliant people pointed out that it also came just before Valentine’s Day.

And just before he started wearing the Cartier bracelet from earlier. 

There’s also the blatant references to a gorgeous, loving relationship throughout Icarus Falls, especially in Common and There You Are. There You Are was pushed as a Z*gi song, but people realised it was impossible when they found old pictures of the name of the song on his original plan for Mind of Mine, and realised it just hadn’t made that album. It doesn’t fit their timeline at all, but it does fit Ziam.

We don’t see Zayn very much at the moment, and I’m glad that he’s taking his time just doing what he’s doing! It does mean that we hardly see them interact or reference each other much, but I have absolutely no reason to believe they’ve broken up. The fact that they’re both still going through PR relationship bullshit, and the timing of Liam getting a ‘girlfriend’ right now instead of just rumours is very interesting to me, because Z*gi officially finished again not that long ago. When one is ‘single’, the other can’t be, it seems. 

This isn’t even everything, anon. They’re not subtle; Zayn just isn’t in the public eye as much. 

Everything they do screams love, devotion, and commitment to each other. 

And it’s fucking gorgeous.

[bawkrya]

ok so im just gonna pick at fr from a web designer pov because looking at this site on mobile will drive me into madness if they don’t fix it at some point. The rest of this post will go under a read more because it’s both super long and image heavy.

before i hit mobile though, I’m going to point out some things i just don’t personally like in general with the site design (and yes i am conscious that they are slowly updating to a new look)

this will come as a shock to no one, if you’ve seen previous web design related posts by others anyways, but i cant. stand this menu

[ID: A cropped screenshot of Flight Rising’s Main Menu]

fr, understandably, has a shit ton of links. it’s a petsite with lore and all that, whatever. The thing that bothers me specifically is the length of links and where some are placed.

1. i BELIEVE this counts as an accessibility issue where longer links kinda trap shorter links, goes into misclicks to other pages in the site, etc. etc.  2. i don’t think. the search link should be under library personally ? Maybe make it its own category. 

Dev Tracker & Media could go under this category, possibly add separate links to forum, player, and dragon searches with updated formatting

Dressing Room and Scrying Workshop could go under the “Play” category 

Forums can be it’s own category with possible subcategories being: Announcements & News, Help Center, and Flight specific discussion forum, maybe more 

Library category could then just be: Which Waystone, World Map, Game Database, and Encyclopedia.

Support should be it’s own category.

One thing on the shop category, and i hesitate to say this because im not CONFIDENT on this one, but I’m not sure Custom Skins exactly fits? or at least, it should be Purchase Gems -> Marketplace -> Custom Skins, not between crossroads and festive favors

Merch should probably go under purchase gems, and they should maybe uhh..... i guess change the name for it overall? because 1. “merch” alone does NOT look good with its placement, 2. its another actual money purchase thing and I think those should go on the same page

Along with that, in putting merch under that page, they could put previews of the merch with a button to go purchase instead of immediately going to their merch site (which to begin with it should open in a new tab if its going to a separate site?!!)

then this is a mix of both not liking it on laptop OR mobile, 

[ID: A cropped image of Flight Rising’s Clan Home page. The Bestiary link has a bright red box highlighting it]

Obviously these pages are old, but the graphics need to be updated, and there needs to be graphics for every link in the category-- seeing with this category alone there isn’t a graphic for the Bestiary already. On top of this they need to be in link order preferably. if they had a normal dropdown menu for mobile, mobile users wouldn’t be able to access the bestiary unless FR wanted to be STUPID and do further dropdown menus w their 200 links which would be STUPID and CLUTTERED

also in my opinion the Messages link isn’t necessary since we have the button at the top. If they put it there as an excuse for accessibility, they can just. add text to the buttons. like here’s a scuffed mockup but. 

[ID: Screenshot of Flight Rising’s Messages, Friend Requests, and Alerts icons edited to have Messages, Friends, and Alerts written next to the icons]

for the friends tab, they could prolly add friend requests at the top like they do for baldwin alerts, then have an online status thing for friends below with buttons to PM, trade, delete friend, etc. I think you’re already able to disable the online status thing with page visibility? but like, make those options separate if you dont wanna block off your entire page, but dont want to be seen online.

For mobile, they can just make the icons bigger.

then. i THINK. last thing on laptop site. 

[ID: A screenshot of Flight Rising’s Social Media links with old Logos to YouTube, Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and DeviantArt]

update these fucking icons they are personally killing me, none of these logos are in use anymore (ALSO UPDATE THE TUMBLR THEME JESUS CHRIST)

ok now for mobile. what this post was originally for.

-

as you all know, if you visit this site on mobile, there is literally no form of a mobile version for it. It is just a condensed version of the computer version of the site which is...Very Bad! 

Most of a sites visitors are going to be through mobile, i forget the exact percentage, but like it’s almost a given that people more readily have their phones with them than their laptop or tablet (which. im not going to bother with the tablet version, you can apply both computer and mobile criticisms to the site). in fact a lot of my time on FR is through mobile since I’m not at home 24/7 and I don’t tote my laptop around. Playing this game through it’s mobile site is Not Fun! 

I like, won’t be too pissy or anything bc like. it’s a petsite and I’m making this post for fun. but also like it was made in 2014? 2013? so I’m not going to be u kno. angry. but it nearing the point of ten years with this site and there still isn’t a mobile friendly version. that is lazy. If anything, if they wanted a site update to be the anniversary thing, they should’ve made that update be

Mobile update as primary thing, because designing the site for mobile is a shit ton of work with the amt of pages they have to work through.

Dragon Profile page update (*LOUD SIGH*)

Clan page update

Hoard update (i have thoughts on this too but i wont dive into it this post)

Purchase Gems page update

Dev Tracker update

Forums update

“but that’s a lot to update” well. that wouldve made the anniversary being a website update considerably more worth it, because in my opinion having the dragon profile pages be the ONLY thing to happen during the anniversary was a waste and a bad decision, because other website updates are just. normal whatever updates. it made the anniversary SUPER underwhelming especially bc the past ones (to my knowledge) have only been major game mechanic updates like the eye & ancients update and i believe? the color wheel expansion was an anniversary thing? someone can correct me on that I haven’t played this game as long as most LMAO

as for how i personally would situate the mobile site. shitty graphic time, bc im not putting too much effort into this (warning this will be LONG)

[ID: Image 1. A crudely put together screenshot of the top half of a Mobile View of Flight Rising with comments on either side. It ends with the Latest News segments “Riot of Rot” and “Hoard & Vault Revamp”

Comment 1, Left side: “no banner make it a solid color that matches the burger menu. size the logo correctly etc. Comment 2, Right side: “burger menu w ONLY the categories, goes to the homepages of the categories” Comment 3, Right side: “TWO latest news posts, maybe a button to go see earlier news (which may b something to add to comp too)” Comment 4, Right side: “center dates and comments maybe idfk”

At the bottom of the image there is an added “button” that says “more updates button”]

[ID: Image 2. The bottom half of the mobile view with comments on the left side. There is a put together white box that has the Plague Flight Logo and “plage dom !” written in it. Below it are the Site Status, Random Dragon, and Exalt Bonuses boxes from the site. Underneath that is a red box with “ad space” in the center, with a red footer at the bottom.

The footer contains, “social media! (specifally made icons for site)”, “better formatted links”, and “copyright”.

Comment 1: “idk what they would caption it but the flashy can go here.” Comment 2: “ONE site status update if they keep this format” Comment 3: “probably center these links. i dont know what they use to build the site but im sure you can make icons for social media on just about anything unless this is all handcoded. just. make small icons it takes two seconds and you can copy+paste”]

i dont even want to THINK about how the lair and all that would look on mobile, it was a chore doing the home page alone SOBS

anyways, in ref to these images though--

this is just slapped together and definitely wouldn’t be a final draft, it could use some tweaking

the flashy i refer to is the box that’s above the user box that says what flight is in dom, what festival is going on, etc.

when i mention building the site and “you can make icons for social media on just about anything” im referring to wordpress, wix, whatever is used to format the site. I really only have experience with wordpress thru elementor and divi (so far) so im not CERTAIN about other places but I feel it would be pretty common to have that tool. if not, making icons (or snatching some) is rlly not that hard, probably only costly depending on what their webdesigner(s) charge for icons

I’m not like certain on who does what, how the webdesigner(s) work with/price this site, etc. etc. this is just. going off of my own knowledge. and in general this whole post is my own knowledge abt shit i did no further research to FRs team specifically 

i think this is basically it, i’ll reblog with more if i think of anything, but feel free to add things yourself or in general discuss things. again this post was made for fun so im not taking it seriously or demanding for these changes to be made, just personal annoyances and preferences.

This is also my first time doing picture IDs for a post so if I need to correct anything or the like let me know and I’ll edit it in the post!

[rkivepacks]

TITLE: i’m good, i love you Series: why are you sorry? it’s not your fault you don’t love me [see previous work] Pairing: taekook/kookv/vkook (Kim Taehyung & Jeon Jungkook) Rating: PG13 Genre: angst but you’ll live Word Count: 2,029 Trigger Warning/s: swearing(?), one or two sentences of questioning self worth but not too graphic Cross-posted on: AO3/dtgloss

NOTES: ∟ banner by @rkivepacks​ ∟ request banner here ∟ request prompt/send commission here

∟ unbeta-ed ∟ the requests for a sequel for the first one was from a long time ago and im p sure when they said requests they were hoping for a fluff one but i wasnt in the mood for fluffy when i did this so...

Summary:   the difference between want and have is you

his eyes roam the words carefully printed on the wall, on the lower left part of the painting. it is where the title, date and artist are usually placed.

a piece of me is always found right beside you it follows you wherever you go it’s lonely from what i see where i stay far from you

alone.

taehyung, these days, is alone.

he is used to it but routine never makes it okay to be alone.

his sadness should not be a routine but, oh well, it is.

he stays in his average house that’s one in the lined town houses in the village. the area itself is decongested, only the people habituating each house goes in and out of their little village and everyone is almost familiar, if not knows, each other.

his own house in particular looks lived on. more so on the side of used but not so worn out. maybe the walls are not as white and clean as they used to be, a few scratches and dirts that got on it as days pass by but no ceiling has started falling down unprompted and everything works how they’re assigned to function.

taehyung would like to think he’s more sad than alone. he still has friends anyway but friends cannot always live with you on your house guised under the cover of it being a sleepover that turns into days.

but friends just like him have their own personal matters and cannot always be with him. he understands when hoseok cannot stay for more than two days and has to leave just before lunch to meet up with a close friend of his, one from outside of their group of friends so taehyung can’t have the option to ask to come with. he understands when jimin cannot come on days he’s asking him to and sometimes comes on a saturday instead of his friday night invite.

when he’s so down, he thinks he’s not entitled to his friends times but they assure him it’s not the case.

so no, he is not alone.

he goes over to the next display, going over the sculpture itself and then to the artist description posed near the display. the sculpture itself is a form that resembles a man that is slightly haunched, although it takes more than a second to realize as the form only captures the head to chest of a human body, but considering that the back part of it protrudes slightly the way a man would when lax. the main body is that of charcoal color but it was designed to portray a visual effect of a dripping paint from its head, represented with different colors which are bright enough to contrast its dark body.

the display is almost familiar and it has been staring at him longer than he stared at it.

the title is printed in bold, a sinner

love is not a sin but my thoughts about you and the way i see the word love around you is

taehyung moves on to another display, it being a worn out stack of paper that looks as if it has 300 pages of a4’s binded by a clip. he steps closer to it to inspect, knowing displays are off limits and can only be appreciated through the eyes, he skims over the word of what he found out would be a script of some sort.

he reads,

i’m drunk, i love you

the difference between want and have is you

he walks over to the last one if its placement by the exit is anything to go by, just like the last one he’s looked over, it’s a display with a single ring in the middle.

all alone

and it sits there as if it has been assigned to mock him and the ring that sits on the very bottom and far end of a box full of things he doesn’t need but can’t seem to throw away.

he reads the title and wow, yes. it’s definitely mocking him. he had been giving it the benefit of the doubt but the title is the last straw. this whole exhibit is out to mock him.

taehyung thinks he’s being over dramatic. but he also thinks this last display is offensive to him, absolutely personal.

—

taehyung sits at home, eyes on the tv he has playing as he waits for night time news.

it seems like the words of the last display he went to see that day have been imprinted on his brain, on the wall in front of him, on the ceiling as he looks up, when he close his eyes.

—

Once you told me, your eyes are always on me.

And you did, you took care of me.

Because you are that kind of person.

You put me before you.

All the time.

Which is why you are the best.

To be honest, I would not even put me before me.

—

taehyungiehyungihyung,

have you been well? i hope you are. the longest time i’ve been away from you is now and still counting— the present. the second one would be during Christmas breaks because you and your family spend it on your relatives home alternately and don’t come back until after new years. anyway... is your hair longer now? i hope it is and i hope you dont cut it. i seem to have a lot of hopes.

im packing up for a trip to a long trail not too far from here. they said it was too pretty to pass up and you get to reach the clouds.

, jungkook

taehyung reads the letter. he received it yesterday late afternoon and it doesnt have a date. jungkook often forgets to write dates so he assumes they were written at least three days ago.

it wasnt the first letter he received. he doesnt keep count but he has a few kept behind his door where he puts his mails.

in the first letter, jungkook said its best to not have taehyung write back. he goes from one place to another, he said. so, taehyung merely reads them and keeps them.

in the first letter, he also said about his sudden departure. he wanted to be away for a while and he knows his best friend would need him for the wedding so he decided to do it after. he didnt even get to say goodbye and only got a whiff of the younger when the letter came that day.

jungkook didnt say why he left and where he went. he just did. right after taehyung’s wedding, he packed up and went away from taehyung’s vicinity as far as he could.

does he know? taehyung asks. does he know i’m not married anymore?

—

his divorce with minji was something that stemmed off a petty thing.

falling out of love is a petty thing.

but, he guesses, they both cannot trap themselves in a house they’re not happy in anymore.

it was sudden, the divorce.

minji told him that she doesnt feel the same anymore. they agreed to stay off the house and after more than a week of a cool off she said she doesnt feel anything at all.

in taehyung’s case, he did not feel it the same way minji did. he only noticed once minji told him she felt that way. it made him feel that the heaviness in the room when they’re both in it was a foreboding for something.

taehyung is a giving lover. the time away from minji made him think a lot. he knows he doesn’t have a choice but to agree on the separation. forbid his thoughts, but he doesn’t want the time to come when the both of them completely falls out of love and seeks warmth from another person and then go home at night to sleep in the same bed.

he texts minji, because as accepting as he is about the decision, he’s not too keen watching a soon to be ex wife pack up and leave.

both of them were gradually moving out their personal items from the house. properties they bought with their shared money will be sold as secondhand items and some are donated.

in between moving out and settling in to a new apartment, he’s had namjoon and jimin with him and if yoongi has extra time mostly at night, he helps sort out his things.

he knew there was a missing person. he wanted to tell jungkook about it.

but jungkook wasn’t there.

—

until one day, jungkook is back.

suddenly, he’s there attending the dinner party for jin’s birthday, sat beside hoseok.

he casted him wary glances throughout the night. at some point he was even referencing to taehyung like everything’s so normal, but taehyung knows it’s just a very jungkook way of letting him know ‘i’m here and i will talk to you and acknowledge your presence whether you like it or not’. taehyung isn’t one for being petty so he went along with it. thankfully, their friends don’t seem to give too much thought into their two other friends sat on the opposite sides of the table.

the next day, jungkook seems to have arrived in taehyung’s new home at the same time a delivery for taehyung came. it eased jungkook’s nerves that he doesn’t have to go through knocking and then purposefully being ignored.

“did you order anything?” jungkook asks just as the delivery person makes their leave.

“i went and bought some essential oils.” taehyung silently gestures for the other to come in and jungkook did, locking the door behind him.

“how are you, taehyungie?” jungkook was sat in front of taehyung in the living room. there’s only the makeshift coffee table and some mats on the floor to sit on since taehyung have yet to buy a sofa.

“tired these days. in between work and unpacking. i’m jealous of kids who do nothing when they’re moving into a new home because they get a free pass to not do things around.” taehyung pouts silently, looking at the soda in can at hand while he traces a finger on the lid.

jungkook chuckles at that and after, no one speaks until, “i’ve heard about it.”

when taehyung makes no motion to respond to it, jungkook continues, “jimin hyung mentioned it to me one time that they were helping you move out so i asked... sorry.”

“it’s okay. i had friends who helped me. i got by.” taehyung winces.

“i wasn’t.” jungkook says, the here that follows hangs in the air which they know would follow.

“you were busy.” taehyung says instead.

jungkook would retaliate but he knows there’s no point.

“i sent you an invite to my exhibit. you went?” jungkook asks, hopeful.

“i did.”

“you didn’t insist to text me or write. i kind of assumed you would once you see it, but it’s okay. at least you did go to it.” jungkook pats his own thigh lightly to distract him.

“i wouldn’t know what to say. at the wedding, and even before that. i would feel something but i didn’t want to be that person and assume. i could be seeing it wrong, i don’t know.” taehyung rambles. “but then the other boys would also drop a few comments here and then.” and it’s true. sometimes jin would say teasing words and taehyung only acts as if he doesn’t get it and sometimes, he acts as if he didn’t hear it at all.

“you were happy. i don’t have any excuse.” jungkook whispers.

“now-“

“now what?”

“i guess to some extent, i liked you back. but i didn’t see it until now so i’m not going to rush this and jump into a relationship with you right away. it’s not fair to the both of us.”

“i understand. after all, your divorce is not yet finalized. i’d be here for you but i’m not gonna distract you from it.” jungkook assures him and that’s all he needs. everything will be okay.

“i know it’s the last day of your exhibit today. wanna go together?” taehyung smiles at jungkook and indeed, everything’s okay.

[eiirisworkshop]

Untitled O Human Star fic

For Good Intentions WIP Fest, details of which can be found @goodintentionswipfest

I read the first chapter of O Human Star for a class on comics and graphic narratives, loved it, and read all the rest of what was already posted--then I started writing a fic because that’s who I am as a person.  O Human Star was, itself, a work in progress at the time, and I felt like I needed to see where the story went before I went further with my fic.  O Human Star has now finished, and it’s beautiful, but the plan I had for my fic now feels out of place, and I just don’t feel like doing the retooling it would need for me to continue.

***

Sulla needed to find a book—she knew what book, and where it was supposed to be, just, actually getting it was a bit slow going since she was trying and failing to stare at the purple haired synthetic curled up in a beanbag in the corner.  He—she assumed he, definitely human shaped and flat chested under the baggy graphic tanktop, sharp jawline, black and white flannel tired around narrow hips, so he had a book propped in one knee, chewing his lip while he read, and a braided cord running from an outlet in wall next to the nearest shelf to plug in at the nape of his neck, parting his sleek bobbed hair.

He looked up and looked her dead in the eye.  Sulla squeaked in embarrassed surprise and hid behind a shelf.  When she peered out around it, he was still looking and he raised one lilac-tinted hand in a little wave.  She waved back sheepishly.  “Hi.”

“Hi,” the purple-haired, purple-eyed, just overall purple synthetic said with a touch of a smile playing at his lips.

“I didn't mean to stare, I just—” Sulla stammered, stepping fully around the shelf, “—you don't usually see people just kinda plugged in to charge out in public, you know?  Or I don't.  I haven't.”

“Uhuh.” He plinked placidly.

“Sorry. I, uh, I'm Sulla.”

“Aytrin.” He closed his book around one finger and held the other hand out to her.  “Nice to meet you.”

She hesitated slightly, grinned, tucked her books under one arm, and stepped forward to shake his hand.  “So,” she sank to her knees next to his beanbag, “you plug in.  Do you not have a respiratory engine, or…?”

“No.” Aytrin's cheeks glowed faintly blue.  “I was a hobby build and I'm old enough there was no way most hobbyists could afford that kind of thing.”

“Oh! That makes sense.  I'm a hobby build too—well, sort of.  And my, uh, my dad's a roboticist, so it's a little different, I guess.”

“A little, yeah,” Aytrin chuckled.  “I'm guessing by that stack of books you're not just at the library to meet strangers, though.”

“Oh,” Sulla glanced down at her books, “no.  I—sorry…. I didn't mean to bother you.”

“You're okay, I'm just, like, two pages from the end of a chapter.”

“I have one more book I need, so I'll go get that.  Yeah.  I—can I leave these here?”

Aytrin smiled.  “Sure.”

Sulla neatened her little stack then ran off to find her last book.  When she got back, Aytrin had set his book aside—it had a shirtless man with a sword in a cave on the cover—and had grabbed one of her books to read the back.  He glanced up at her as she approached and dropped the book back on the stack.  “[INSERT TECHNOBABBLE HERE] Unless these are for your dad, looks like you're the roboticist here.”

Sulla smiled shyly and set her new book on top of the others.  “I'm homeschooled and my dad lets my study whatever I'm interested in so...yeah.  What're you reading?”

Aytrin cast a sidelong look at his discarded novel.  “Oldest queer robot romance I could find. Was pretty good until about about a chapter ago.”

“What happened a chapter ago?”

“Author lost the plot.  I was hoping it would get back on track but it only seems to be getting worse. I've given up.”  He moved to stretch, arms over his head, and knocked his charge cord out in the process.  “Ah, crap.”  He grabbed the end of his cord, cheeks lighting blue again, and he looked at Sulla.  “Can you do me a favor?”

“Do you need me to plug you back in?”  She reached for the cord.

“No, I can do it, but sometimes when I plug in, something shorts out or something, I go limp and I can't move.”

“That's not good,” Sulla said, mentally running through and discarding guesses as to what could cause that kind of failure mode.

“If that happens can you unplug me?”

“Yeah, of course..”

Aytrin held his hair aside with one hand and carefully fitted the connector to the port at the nape of his neck with the other.  For a tense moment he was still, then he looked at Sulla and flashed a smile. “All good.”

Sulla sighed, relieved.  “Good.  I can't think what would cause that, but only some of the time.  It's dangerous for you to plug in if you're alone, isn't it?”

“Yeah. If I overcharge I overheat, too.  It's a problem.”

“You're not here by yourself, are you?”  Sulla looked around.  There was no one else in the section.

“No, I'm here with my boyfriend.  He's over—” Aytrin gestured to one of the mezanine levels, “—over, he's over, over in—he's over in, in the, he's over in the, over in—over in the, in the—”

“Are you okay?” Sulla asked cautiously.

Aytrin held up a finger.  “He's over in the, in the law section.  He's over in the law section.  Sorry.”

“Are you okay?” Sulla asked again.

“I get stuck sometimes and have trouble—I have trouble finishing sentiences.”

Sulla frowned.  “You're kinda glitchy, huh?”

Aytrin shrugged.  “Like I said, I'm an old hobby build.  It's fine.”

“It's not fine if it's hurting you.”

“I don't hurt,” Aytrin said simply, cheeks glowing.

“Causing you problems, then,” Sulla insisted.  “You could go to one of those debug shops on—”

Aytrin laughed once, coldly.  “Do you have any idea how much it costs to actually get anything done at those shops?”

“Don't they do free diagnostics…?”

“Free or a dollar diagnostics, yeah.”  He folded his arms.  “To fix any of the problems they find, though, the costs start adding up so, so fast.  I'm worth less sold as parts than they'd charge to fix me.”

Sulla blinked.  “I never thought about that.”

“I have plenty of 'glitches' I wouldn't want fixed, anyway, because to me they're not problems they're quirks, but even the ones I would want fixed I can't afford to do anything about.  Between me and Kash we don't make enough to cover rent in the city, let alone enough to drop a few hundred or thousand on maintenance, for me or him.”

“Kash is your boyfriend?”  Sulla hugged her knees.

“Yeah.”

“And he's synthetic too?”

“No, he's human.”

She tilted her head, hair slipping over her shoulder.  “Then what do you mean by maintenance for him?”

“Going to the dentist, things like that.”

“Oh.” Sulla looked askance and fiddled with the corner of the top book in her pile—a coding manual.  “I can't help with dentists and stuff, but maybe I could help you?  I could call it a school project.”

“I'd appreciate that.”  Aytrin smiled warmly, cheeks aglow.  His eyes flicked up behind Sulla and his smiled widened into a grin.  “Hey, Kash.”

Sulla almost fell over herself turning to see a dark skinned young man with a shock of wavy, blond-tipped hair walking up from behind her, a laptop bag slung over one shoulder.  He nodded a greeting.  “Who's this, Ay?”

“Sulla,” Aytrin said brightly.  “Um, Sulla, what pronouns do you use?”

“She,” Sulla said a little more sharply than she meant to.

Kash chuckled.  “Don't be offended by him, he sucks at gender.  Ay, we've been over this, boobs and long hair is usually a girl.”

Aytrin held up his hands.  “I'd rather ask than guess wrong.  Anyway, she's offered to fix some of my glitches.  Her dad's a roboticist and she's studying it.”

“Yeah.” Sulla stood.  “I can ask my dad if it's okay for you to come over sometime.  Or, I'd have to bring stuff with me, but I guess I could come to you if you don't live to far.  Aytrin mentioned you don't live in the city.”

Kash looked intensely down at Aytrin, who shrugged.  “All I said was that we can't afford rent here.”

Kash sighed.  “You're very kind, Sulla, but we'd have to come to you.”

“That's okay, I just have to ask my dad.”

“Of course,” Kash agreed.  He poked Aytrin gently with his foot.  “You got enough juice to get you to class with me tomorrow?”

Aytrin pressed the crook of his wrist, his cheeks lit along with a series of three dots on his inner arm.  “Not quite.”

“Well,” Kash jammed his hands into pockets, “I need food, so I'm going to go grab myself dinner—you charge.”

“Okay,” Aytrin agreed, drooping slightly.  “I think Burger King is doing that thing again where if you order on the app from next to a McDonalds you get a Whopper for a nickel.”

“I'll try that.”  Kash stooped to kiss Aytrin quickly.  “I'll be back.”

Sulla and Aytrin watched him walk away.  Sulla ran her thumbnail under one of her fingernails.  “Money's really tight for you guys, isn't it?”

Aytrin nodded.  “Law school's expensive.”

Sulla lowered herself back down to the floor.  “Kash doesn't like to talk about it, does he?”

“Nope.”

Sulla looked him over and pressed her lips together.  “You can't charge at home.”

“We live in his car,” Aytrin said shortly.

Sulla's eyes widened.

Aytrin shrugged.  “His school fees cover a parking pass for the campus deck so that's where we stay.  We usually manage a little better than right now but the semester just started so all his, all his books, the semester just started so all his books and start of term expenses have sunk our budget.”

“That...makes sense.  I don't think he'd want you to tell me that, though.”

“You were most of the way to figuring it out yourself.”

~*~

The front door banged open, announcing Sulla's return home.

“Brendan!”

“Up here, sweetheart,” Brendan called through his open office door without pausing in typing the email he was working on.

Sulla zoomed up the stairs and touched down lightly just as she came through the door.  “Can I have some friends over for a project?”

“Which friends?  Titus and everyone?”

“Um, no.  New friends.”

“New friends?”  Brendan hit send and swiveled his chair to face his daughter.  “Do I know these friends?”

“Well, no….”  Sulla rocked on her toes, hands folded behind her.  “I just met them.”

“You just met them, and you want them to come over.”

“Yes.”

Brendan rubbed his temple.  “Sulla.”

“One of them's synthetic and he's a hobby build and I don't think he's been updated at all—I know he's hardly had any maintenance—and he's got some really nasty glitches he can't afford to get fixed, but I can fix them!”

“Sulla….”

“Their names are Aytrin and Kash.  They're really cool and Kash is a law student and they're dating and they're homeless because rent and school and everything costs so much.  We're really lucky we have a house and money and all the stuff it takes for you to do maintenance on me and Al, and I'm really lucky I've always been able to count on you for that.  They can't count on anybody for it and it's not fair, but I can help!”

Brendan settled back in his chair, looking at Sulla.  Her hands had balled into determined fists at her sides.  Law student meant mid twenties at least, and he was pretty sure he didn't like the idea of Sulla befriending random men, but apparently that's what he got for letting her go into town alone.  And now she had her mind set on something.

With a sigh, Brendan turned back to his computer.  “Let me make sure there's nothing too worrisome about these guys online.  What did you say their names were?”

“Aytrin and Kash.”  Sulla leaned on the back of his chair.  “Aytrin doesn't have a last name but Kash's is MacAodha. Here, I've got his Insta.”

~*~

Al just about spat out his synth tea.  “And you're letting her?!”

Brendan crossed his arms.  “She's as stubborn as you and, honestly, I'm not inclined to talk her out of doing a good deed.”

Sulla wooshed through the living room, dropping her laptop on the couch as she passed.  It bounced lightly on the cushion.

“I looked these kids up,” Brendan continued.  “There's just about nothing online about the synthetic one besides the public record of his emancipation in 2020 and a few pictures on the other one's Instagram; that one, though, the organic one, Kash—he's in law school, he works for a nonprofit that provides legal aid to displaced women and youth. I was hesitant, but these really seem to be good guys in a tough spot.  Sulla just wants to help.”

Sulla flew through the other way and dropped a tool case next to her laptop.

“You've had three days to tell me this is happening,” Al grumbled.

“I didn't know until this morning.”  Brendan shrugged.  “Apparently Aytrin had to get his work schedule before they knew when they could come.”

“You at least could have told me people might be coming over.”

“It's my house, Al—”

“I know that.”

“—and you've been nose to the soldering iron all week.  Even if I had told you, you'd've given a monosyllabic answer, forgotten I said anything, and we'd still be having this same conversation.”

Al glowered at him and sipped his tea.  “How long til they get here?”

Brendan opened his mouth, paused, and turned to call, “Sulla, when are we expecting your friends?”

“Umm,” Sulla popped over the railing of the stairs, checking her phone, “in, like, five minutes.”

~*~

Kash's car was an old Honda minivan, still in good shape but showing its age in the outlines of old bumperstickers left in varying degrees of less-sunbleached than the rest of the paint.  It pulled up, parked in front of the garage, and the old converted engine cut with a descending whine.  The driver's side door opened and Kash got out. His door closed with a hollow thunk just as Aytrin got out of the passenger side wearing the same black and white flannel he'd had tied around his waist at the library, carrying Kash's laptop bag.  Aytrin hipchecked his door shut, the headlights flashed once as Kash locked it, the two young men looked at each other then up at the house.

Aytrin took Kash's hand, then a step toward the door—which Sulla then burst through.

“Hi!”

“Hi, Sulla,” Aytrin returned brightly as her feet touched down in front of him.

“Is it weird if I hug you or…?”

“Not weird.”

She hugged Aytrin, pulled back, held out a questioning arm to Kash, then hugged him, too, when he shrugged.  

“Come in,” Sulla beckoned, trotting up the front steps.  She held open the door and the boys stepped over the threshold.

Brendan was waiting just inside with a fresh mug of tea cradled to his chest. “Hello, there.”

“Good afternoon, sir,” Kash said politely, then turned sharply to Sulla. “This is your dad?”

“Yup.” Sulla bounced energetically.

“You didn't mention your dad is is Brendan Pinsky.”

“Well, no,” Sulla admitted, “but he is.”

Aytrin cocked his head toward Kash.  “She did say her dad does robotics.”

“A lot of people do robotics, not a lot of people are CEOs of the foremost company in robotics—it's a pleasure to meet you, sir,” Kash segued abruptly.  He held out a hand.  “Kash MacAodha.”

[the-ghost-of-jason-todd]

WIP POST: BNHA & Voltron Whump List

BNHA

The Airplane Whump fic: A fic set in the future of the VQC, this fic took inspiration from the airplane scene in Six Page Spread.  It takes the idea of heroes and airplanes and gets more in depth, looking more at what airline security would look like in a world with a superhuman majority and featuring, you guessed it, a ton of whump.  Currently 2.2k words.

Excerpt: “He is the airbag and he is the seatbelt.  He is the fender, the safety glass, the crumple zones designed to absorb the force of a crash.  He is Red Riot—he was made to take hits.  As he falls, the thought runs across and across and across his mind—he was made to take this, too.  A being made of rock, he was literally designed to withstand this impact.  He needs this to be enough, because he is everything but the one thing he really needs right now, which is the brakes.”

Snake Oiled/Ouroboros: A continuation of the supernatural universe (not that supernatural) and the story found in Hum My Spirit Down To Sleep, this fic is a hard-hitter.  Bouncing back and forth between present and past tense, it outlines how Kirishima got the scars mentioned at the end of HMSDTS, which features a snake-like spectral and its seemingly paralytic venom.  Older Kiribaku, currently 10.4k words.

Excerpt: “The smell of vomit is sharp, almost sharper than the smell of blood.  They fight for dominance as Katsuki stands there with his arms hanging limp at his sides, watching the white coats flurry around like snowflakes in a storm.  One of them keeps poking at his face with a tester swab, and after the third prod Katsuki feels the unrelenting swell of rage burst within him.  He slaps the hand away and is seconds away from incinerating the swab and everything within two feet of it when a weight falls on his shoulder.”

Voltron

Shiro’s Car Crash: A prequel ficlet in the House Voltron series that depicts a fairly graphic event in Foster Shiro’s life--the car crash in which he lost an arm and a brother.  No excerpts because it’s mostly just an idea with minimal outlining.  Currently 15 words.  :’D

Sequel Fic 2: Also in the House Voltron series and currently unnamed, this fic will feature a second car crash for Shiro, giving him a serious head injury and making him a rather unreliable narrator.  I don’t want to give away too many spoilers since it’s a ways off, but I WILL say that it’s meant to parallel the Kuron arc in Canon.  Currently 1.6k.

Excerpt: “’Shiro.  You’ve always been there for me.  You gave me the confidence to find my own path.  And I will never leave you alone when you need me—I will always be here to save you, no matter if it’s from one of those dumb door-to-door salespeople you can’t shake or from your own self.’”

Strange Winds: Set in the Lizard Galra universe where Keith experienced something called the akomazot, also known as the transformation, this fic is yet another sequel (the third installment).  Featuring druid magicks and another wormhole collapse, this fic details Keith’s plight after a head injury gives him amnesia.  Is it the final stage of the akomazot?  Is it reversible?  You’ll find out soon enough!  Also features a bit of Lance whump.  Currently 15.3k words.

Excerpt: “He’s met with blood, swelling, and more blood.  The skin is split, a deep gash going from his temple to somewhere amid the overlapping scales of his frill.  That whole side of his face is mottled a darker purple—it’s swollen up, squeezing that eye shut, but he’s pretty sure that the eye itself is okay.  There’s too much swelling to see if he’s fractured anything.  And with a wound like that, everything probably got a good rattle, skull intact or no.  He’s looking at what must be a concussion, at the very least—and at the very most…”

Crisis: Collide: The first seven chapters are up on ao3 HERE but still worth a mention!  The castle is shot out of the sky by a galra cruiser and lands on a questionably hospitable planet.  Keith and Shiro are injured quite badly in the initial crash, and it’s Pidge and the others racing against the clock to save them both, especially Keith.  Pidge POV, currently 22k words.

Excerpt: “Coran is silent for a good minute, flicking through the charts and twisting his moustache anxiously.  ‘Judging by these scans, he was, unfortunately, still conscious most of the evening.  Don’t know how much pain your little human brains can handle before it becomes too much to make memories, but assuming he didn’t white out… he will remember most of it.’”

The Roadtrip Sickfic: Not traditional whump but whumpy all the same, this fic exists in a universe where all the characters of VLD are human, and they’re all on a roadtrip.  Keith catches a bug... but is it really only a bug?  Currently 1.8k words.

Excerpt: “He expects Keith to snark back, but Keith instead sinks lower.  Allura pets his hair back, whispering in his ear for a moment before she scoops him up with an arm around his chest and deposits his forehead on her shoulder.  ‘It’s okay,’ she says softly.  ‘I’m sorry you feel so bad, buddy.’”

The Endometriosis Fic: Keith is a transboy with endometriosis.  His latest period has been the worst he’s ever experienced--but the team is there to help him out!  For a certain definition of ‘help’, anyway.  Sometimes the stuff they give him just makes everything worse...  Currently 7k words.

Excerpt: “Fuck him.  Keith is about to throw up on Shiro just to prove a point when Allura and Coran finally sweep in, both of them as elegant as ever, both with armfuls of supplies.  Shiro immediately swipes the basin from Coran and shoves it onto Keith’s knees, and Keith has to settle with flipping him off with one hand as his stomach turns inside out.”

And that’s it for now!  I’m sure there are more that would qualify but I have to go cook dinner now.  Cheers!

[murasaki-murasame]

:re episode 16 continued to be Really Really Good [tm] so here I am, still talking about this anime, lmao :)

At this point I’m also basically using these posts as a way to talk about my feelings toward the manga, so, well, keep that in mind while reading.

Thoughts under the cut, and spoiler warning for the entire :re manga.

Hoo boy there sure is a lot to talk about in this episode! I wasn’t entirely sure how they were going to manage to adapt up to the end of this arc in one episode, but they managed to do it, and I think they did it incredibly well. There were some very obvious cuts, but I think they were mostly for the better.

It probably pissed some people off, but I honestly liked how they only really showed bits and pieces of how Touka’s crew got out of Cochlea. The anime really wasn’t missing out on much there, aside from more fight scenes. And I think the slideshow-y way they presented it actually managed to keep the comedic timing of Hirako’s resignation better than if they handled the scene more normally, so that was nice. Overall it just wasn’t a very important scene and I’m glad that the anime has it’s priorities straight.

I think I mentioned this in my last post but I wasn’t sure about it at the time, but at this point it definitely looks like the anime is completely cutting out the plot point of Koma and Irimi coming back into the story because uuuuuh apparently they didn’t actually die at the end of the first series? I guess??? I’m really relieved the anime cut that whole thing out, since it was so, so pointless in the manga. It only really served as shallow fanservice to people who wanted the Anteiku gang to get back together. For years now people have complained about how much Ishida likes ‘bringing characters back to life’, and those two were one of the most bizarre examples of that. And given that those two did literally nothing of value in the manga even after coming back, we’re really not going to notice their absence at all in the anime. [Maybe this will also mean we won’t get that incredibly awkward last-minute bit of exposition about the concept of zombie quinques]

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the way that Eto died without having one last chat to Kaneki, but to be honest in the manga it always felt a bit awkward that he just sorta willingly left her to die.

I’m also really not sure yet how I feel about the way they handled the scene of Marude assassinating Yoshitoki. I wish they could have included the bits of dialogue that explain how Marude received info from Hide that lead him to finally believing that the Washuu clan are ghouls, but oh well. It doesn’t really change things too much, especially since we know Hide’s still alive in the anime, and we even saw him getting onto the boat Marude was on at the start of the last episode.

And then of course we get to the biggest cut this episode made, and probably the one that’ll be most controversial to people. The way they they cut out about 95% of the stuff that went down between Mutsuki and Torso. I think it’s really gonna piss a lot of people off, but you know what? I loved it. I feel like the anime scriptwriter actually gives a shit about Mutsuki as a character and is handling him with infinitely more respect and subtlety than Ishida ever did in the manga. We’ll have to see how the anime handles him over the next few episodes to definitively see once and for all if they’re going to avoid the worst of what the manga does with him, but I’m pretty confident at this point that they’re completely changing course.

For the sake of any anime-only people who might for whatever be reading this, and also just to remind people that read the manga of what exactly went down and why I never liked it, I’m just gonna recap what happened with them in the manga a bit, so I can talk in more depth about it.

The stuff the anime showed with Torso abducting Mutsuki and taking him off to a cave on Rushima was fairly 1:1 with the manga, but after that, we got some scenes sprinkled throughout the arc where we saw what happened with them after that, which mostly involved Torso cutting off Mutsuki’s arms and legs, sticking him in a dress, and in general obsessively treating him as a replacement for a girl that Torso apparently knew as a kid that he had a crush on. The manga had a whole chapter-long flashback showing his childhood, and how he lived in poverty with an abusive father, but there was a girl he liked, who one day got killed by his father, which just worsened Torso’s existing mental issues and lead to him eventually becoming a serial killer, starting with killing his father. And after that he’s been obsessed with chasing after specific kinds of women to try and basically fill the void left by his childhood crush, but his lack of empathy and general contempt for his victims in practice lead to him developing a habit of dismembering them until they’re just a torso that won’t ever leave him. There’s a bonus page in the manga, I think in volume four of :re, which is some kind of a journal entry written by him where he spells out his various mental issues and why he’s obsessed with torsos and whatnot.

As a fun fact: that’s also the only time thus far that the official translation of the series has ever used she/her pronouns toward Mutsuki. In the journal entry written by a dude who also waxes philosophically about his own lack of empathy and how he only views people as their physical bodies and nothing else. And while I’m at it, even after Urie finds out about Mutsuki’s biological sex in the auction arc, he still keeps referring to him with he/him pronouns, even in his internal thoughts, and Mutsuki’s character description at the start of nearly every volume of the official release of :re includes the sentence ‘Assigned female at birth, he decided to transition after undergoing the Quinx procedure’. Just in case anyone needed a reminder that Mutsuki is indeed trans.

Anyway, back to what I was saying, we also got some scenes in the Rushima arc in the manga with Mutsuki becoming increasingly resigned and despondent about his situation, and we eventually get some flashbacks to his childhood, where we find out that he also had an abusive family that he also ended up murdering at one point. Then he told the CCG that a ghoul killed them all, and that’s how he joined the CCG.

To be blunt, I think the way Ishida originally handled all of this in the manga was pretty awful, especially now that we know exactly where it was all heading. He tried way too hard to try and make Torso look sympathetic with his sob-story flashback, and on the flip side, he really tried way too hard to make it into one big contrived twist about Mutsuki ‘secretly being a huge murderous psycho this whole time’ or whatever. I think at the same time there was also a flashback to the auction arc that, for the first time in the manga, made it clear that he ate some dead investigators to heal his wounds [which the anime made immediately clear as soon as it happened], and I think Ishida tried to spin that as part of the twist of him having been a psycho the whole time, or something like that. It was dumb. Oh, and also, there was some pretty graphic descriptions of how Mutsuki mutilated Torso’s corpse, involving some genital mutilation, which apparently Ishida decided to just make into a running thing with him, since in the manga Mutsuki was the one that fought Takizawa and injured Akira and whatnot before the other Qs arrived on the scene, and he also decided to just randomly mutilate Takizawa’s genitals during their fight. Somehow this isn’t even the end of the list of things I’m mad about with how the manga handled Mutsuki :) This is pretty much just the START of the bullshit :) I cannot reiterate enough how happy I am that the anime seems to be nipping this all in the bud and avoiding the gross [and frankly transphobic] shit entirely.

That’s pretty much the gist of it, but it’s also worth noting that the note things end on with Mutsuki in this arc is very distinctly different between the manga and the anime. In the manga, the Qs don’t find out about what happened between him and Torso at all, and they don’t realize that there’s anything wrong until the next arc. But in the anime, Urie finds Mutsuki in the cave, surrounded by Torso’s various body parts. I really really like this change, and the fact that the anime decided to end this part of this arc with Urie comforting him is really what cements my hope that they’re going to entirely avoid the really awful stuff that goes on in the next arc, which only really happened because Mutsuki’s mental health and overall stability just went careening off a cliff because none of the Qs knew there was anything up with him. So I hope the fact that we’re already seeing Urie comforting Mutsuki over this makes me hope that won’t be how it plays out here. It actually reminds me a fair bit of the really clumsy way the manga tried to have Mutsuki reconcile with the Qs in the final arc. It works WAY better here.

I really think the way they handled Urie finding Mutsuki was really beautiful and touching, especially after the earlier stuff with Urie frantically trying to figure out what had happened to him, and talking about wanting to go home with him. It was just a really nice, sweet way to handle it, and I think it gives Mutsuki far more respect and dignity than the manga did. Similarly to how the anime portrayed him eating some dead investigators as something sad but necessary without trying to cast any moral blame on him for it, that’s how this episode felt too, with how they framed Mutsuki killing Torso. Instead of it being an overblown ‘oooh he’s actually EVIL and PSYCHOTIC and MURDEROUS oooh how spoopy’, we just see the aftermath of it, and Mutsuki is just portrayed as the sad, abused victim he truly is, who just deserves sympathy and comfort for what he’s had to go through. I also got a real sense of smug vindication about how the anime didn’t even bother doing anything with Torso, and they didn’t even come close to trying to give him a tragic backstory to make us feel bad for him. They just killed him off-screen. I really love that. Sure it’d probably seem anti-climactic, especially to anime-only people, but it’s so much better than what the alternative would have been. Torso deserves to go out like the shitty nobody he is.

As for the aforementioned fight scene with the Qs against Takizawa, I really liked how that was done. A lot of it was definitely because, in the manga, this was really one of the starting points of us seeing where Ishida was taking Mutsuki, and how he was trying really really hard to frame him as being antagonistic. Urie accidentally hurting Akira, and Akira herself talking about how she’s aware that trying to protect a ghoul is a serious crime, works a lot better than Mutsuki being the one to attack her, and him telling Akira about what the crime she’s committing is, and making it clear that he’d act against her if she becomes a ghoul sympathizer.

They also handled the stuff with Amon pretty nicely. I still feel like his entire role in :re has always been one big question mark for me and basically everyone else in the fandom, but I’ve at least always liked his line from this scene about the importance of always thinking about whether or not you’re doing the right thing.

I’m also really warming up to how the anime is just showing the new three Qs members in action before any proper, dedicated introductions. It works pretty nicely, in my mind.

I still wish they could have actually been a bit less faithful with how they adapted the stuff with Kanou, and added some stuff to it, but oh well. I at least got a bit of a kick out of the stuff with Roma.

As I mentioned, they really cut down on the remaining stuff they had with the Cochlea arc, but I quite liked how they handled everything with Arima’s death. For one thing, it was nice to see them make the Garden feel a bit more tangible and ‘real’, in a sense, than the manga did. I always had a tough time visualizing it in my head while reading the manga since we only saw bits and pieces of it. I also liked how they associated the field of white flowers with it, but I can’t remember if that was already in the manga. It might have just been more clear in the anime since it’s in colour.

I imagine some people are gonna be REAL mad that they cut out the whole dramatic arc-ending scene of Kaneki killing some CCG people while monologuing about how he’s now the new One-Eyed King, but I liked it. I like how the anime really committed to ending this episode on a bittersweet note. I’ve also always thought that the whole ‘re’ pun with that scene in the manga was always a bit more dumb than other people think it was.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about how the anime didn’t outright show the flashbacks to Arima meeting Eto and deciding to start working with her, but they at least make it clear enough that that’s what happened. At the very least, adding in some bombshells like that probably would have made the pacing of this episode feel a lot more wonky.

And with that, we’re now going to get into the Goat arc! This is gonna be where things get interesting. I think it’s probably going to be about five episodes long, but it’s also four volumes long in the manga, so we’ll see how it goes. The main thing is that there’s a WHOLE lot of stuff in this arc that can easily be cut to save time. 

It’s honestly hard to tell for the most part how exactly they’re gonna handle this arc, but at the very least, as I’ve said, it’s very clear that they’re going to remove or at least heavily change/condense the stuff that goes down with Mutsuki, which would save a fair bit of time. This would also presumably affect the final arc, and remove a good few chapters of content from that as well.

My memory on the exact details of this arc are kinda fuzzy since I haven’t gone back to read it ever since I first read it as it came out, but going by the preview stuff for the next episode, it also looks like they might be cutting out the really awkward mini-arc from the manga where Kaneki and co had to go raid one of Kanou’s labs to get medicine for Akira and then they find Amon there and fight him and then take him back to their base. I honestly still have NO goddamn clue what the fuck Amon was doing there. It looks like in the anime he’s just going to casually show up and be part of Goat almost immediately, which feels much more natural.

It also looks like we’re getting the whole sequence where Touka gets Akira and Hinami to reconcile their differences and make amends with each other. I’ve always thought that scene was a bit awkward, but I get what Ishida was going for with it, and I respect it. So I’m happy with the anime keeping it. At the very least, I think it does a nice job of fleshing out Touka a little bit more, which is always nice, and it’s a very necessary part of Akira’s development.

I wonder if the next episode will also include her and Amon hooking up, or if that’ll happen later in the arc. I honestly don’t remember when exactly in the manga it happened, so I’m just guessing.

I was kinda hoping that they’d at least slightly change up the formation of Goat, since the way Ishida portrayed Kaneki at the start of this arc was really weird, and didn’t last long. Hopefully it’ll feel a bit less awkward in the anime.

Since we’re getting closer and closer to the moment of truth on this one, I suppose I should reiterate at least some of my feelings about Touka and Kaneki’s relationship, and how it might be handled in the anime. I have a LOT of feelings about it, but I’ll save some of it for later. [fake edit: ok I ended up talking more about this than I intended, but whatever, lol]

Just to get right to the point, I still think it’s entirely possible that they just won’t get together at all in the anime. I’m not exactly betting on it, but still. It still just sticks out to me a lot that they’ve made a lot of subtle changes to their scenes together in the anime thus far that build up to paint a very different image of their relationship.

One of the big things is how the insert song they made for the cafe scene in episode 2 of :re season 1 is pretty explicitly about Touka remembering her crush on Kaneki, and coming to terms with the need for her to let go of it and move on with her life. I mean, it literally ends with ‘Although I’ve found you, I know this meeting will not last. I have to let go. Continue finding your own way, though I will miss you. It’s time to wake from this dream’, after how the chorus and whatnot is her talking about how she’d dreamed that one day he’d be with her again like nothing ever happened and he never left her. The song is pretty clearly all about her accepting that things aren’t just going to magically go back to how they used to be between them, and that she needs to move on with her life, and let him move on with his. It’s not definitive proof of anything, but it’d make it pretty awkward all on it’s own if they do actually just, y’know, hook up in the anime as if he never left her in the first place. [Remember when I mentioned before how the manga brought Koma and Irimi back to really awkwardly force this feeling of the Anteiku gang getting back together like nothing ever happened? Yeah].

It’s also worth noting that even after that, the anime cut out and changed some minor things. For example, they removed a scene where Touka talks to Tsukiyama about the whole Kaneki situation, and she said that she thinks the :re cafe can be a place for him to return to if he gets his memories back. They also changed up the scene where Uta visited her cafe a bit by having Kaneki also visit at the same time. Which, ironically, means that the anime has him and Touka meeting face to face at least marginally more often than they did in the manga, but I think that scene actually served to further hammer in the idea that they’ve moved on from each other. Touka continued treating him like any other customer, and her line to Uta about how she’s ‘going to keep doing what she’s already decided on’ certainly gains a different sort of tone when taken along with the various things the anime has cut or added or changed, that I just talked about. It comes across more like a reminder to the audience that she’s committed to moving on from him.

And on the flip side, Kaneki didn’t really react to her at all in that scene, from what I remember, and in fact seemed to just be preoccupied with his lingering nostalgia about Anteiku in general, which was shown really nicely in the [also anime-original] scene of him having a bit of a flashback to Yoshimura and Anteiku itself. It’s also worth noting that because of this whole change, they removed the stuff with how, in the manga, Kaneki was at home while Uta visited Touka, and he was actually wondering to himself if Touka might be out on a date with someone. So it’s certainly interesting that they replaced one of the more blatant ‘he has a crush on her’ scenes with him outright visiting her cafe and not having any real reaction to seeing her again, and caring more about Anteiku in general.

It’s also worth pointing out that, even if they kept the little exchange between them earlier in the Cochlea arc 1:1 with the manga, it comes across even more as a sign of how awkward and stiff their relationship it than it already did in the manga. It’s always stood out to me a lot, even in the manga, that meeting Touka again face to face and her talking to him did absolutely nothing to sway him from his whole suicidal plan, whereas him just having a chat with a hallucination of Hide caused him to break down into tears and completely reevaluate how he values his own life. I just wanna point that out, lol.

So I’m honestly not sure how the anime will handle things with them. In general, I think the pacing of their relationship would be even more rushed than it was in the manga, at least if they keep all of their big moments. Having all of the stuff that happened with them in the manga take place over like one or two episodes of the anime would be, uh . . . really awkward, to say the least. But it’d also obviously disappoint everyone if they cut a lot of it out.

It’s also hard to tell exactly how they’d even execute some parts of it, particularly since the main reason they ended up having sex in the manga was because of the whole deal with Mutsuki attacking them and burning down the cafe, but since it looks like that sort of thing probably won’t happen in the anime at this point with how they’re handling him, I dunno how they’d set it up.

But to be completely honest, if they can at least keep handling Mutsuki well, I would actually be largely OK with the anime still having Kaneki and Touka hook up. I’ll probably talk in more depth about it later, but a big reason why I disliked it so much in the manga was just because it happened at the exact same time that Ishida decided to throw Mutsuki under a thousand buses in a row, and it was just miserable to sit through.

So yeah that’s around about it for this episode. I’m cautiously optimistic to see how they handle the rest of the season. At the very least, it looks like the next episode will be much more relaxed and slow and character-focused than the last few, so that’ll be nice.

[waywardstrand]

Working from Life - our Play by Play talk!

As usual we’ve taken a little while to post another update, but things are going super well! We feel like we’ve been reaching some pretty exciting milestones on Wayward Strand recently, and are moving steadily onward.

Before getting into the talk, we’ll be Officially Announcing it soon, but we’ve added a page on our website on which you can subscribe to our newsletter! If you want to get notified about key bits of news (including when Wayward Strand is released), or you’d like to get emails with some behind the scenes stuff, head over there and sign up!

And in the meantime, here’s the video and transcript of a talk that Goldie and I did at Play by Play in Wellington, New Zealand earlier this year. It covers a pretty wide range of topics, but it speaks to each of our influences in working on Wayward Strand, as well as what we’ve learned from the process of creating it thus far.

Transcript

Jas: So Goldie and I are going to talk about this topic mainly in terms of the game that we're both working on, Wayward Strand. You don't need to know too much about it before we get started, except for the fact that it's an interactive story set in a small coastal town, in southern Victoria, from the 27th to the 29th of January, 1978. Oh, and that it's set on an airborne hospital.

It's an interesting mix of elements - so how did we get there?

When our team-mate Russell came up with the initial idea for Wayward Strand we talked a bit about where it could be set - at that point we had the airborne hospital, but it could have been set anywhere, and in a real place or a fantasy one.

At the time I'd been listening to short fiction podcasts - particularly the New Yorker fiction podcast, on which a writer chooses a story from the archives to read and discuss. After the reading, the writer and the podcast host, Deborah Treisman, often speak about the author of the piece, and discuss how the story links to the author’s life and history. I was fascinated by how many of the stories being read were set in locations and at times that had personal significance to the author.

To highlight an example, Stephanie Vaughn's stories that have been read on the podcast, Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog and Dog Heaven, from her collection Sweet Talk, are both from an army brat’s perspective, exploring daily life on military bases, and Stephanie Vaughn herself grew up on military bases; her family followed her father around to these bases through the years of her childhood. However, none of her stories are autobiographical - they're drawn from her life, but not based on her life.

Listening to her stories really awoke in me a realisation that this was something you could do - that I could do - set a story in a place and time that you have a personal connection to - and how that could be interesting and powerful. I’m going to pass across to Goldie, but I just want to say to read Sweet Talk! It’s incredible.

Goldie: One of the most captivating and earliest exposures for me of neorealism in indie art was when I discovered American Daniel Clowes’ long-form graphic novel, ‘Ghost World’. Ghost World follows Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, two cynical, pseudo-intellectual teenage girls recently graduated from high school in the early 90’s. What really captured my curiosity was the way that the novel, as well as the 2001 film adaptation, follows the two teens as they spend their days wandering aimlessly around their unnamed American town, criticising popular culture and the everyday Americans they encounter. Especially notable in this small town, and still present in our towns and cities is the slowly encroaching franchises which smother their town’s individuality. The story regularly highlights characters who are almost the antithesis to the normalisation of behavior and social exchange. It’s hardly revolutionary, but was quintessentially realistic; a light shining on the quirk of the everyday.Ghost World was hugely influential on my expectations for myself as an artist, it taught me how to appreciate the small stuff which gets ignored by Warner Bros, Disney, Marvel and local mainstream media. Realism, in games, has usually meant photorealism - whereas realism or neorealism in literature, art and film has constantly been more about social context, historical actuality and political commitment to progressive social change. Robert Yang’s recent short article on Realism in games is worth a read to cover this.

When I arrived at uni, eventually, to study game design it was surprising to me to see that there wasn’t yet much exploration of the ‘slice-of-life’ genre in games, and even less social realism in games. There was some, the closest example I came across with glee was Dys4ia by Anna Anthropy, who used games to talk about her experiences with transitioning. Likewise, when I discovered Escape from Woomera, Katherine Neil’s extremely confident Half-Life mod which explores Australia’s ongoing disgraceful treatment of asylum seekers, I nearly exploded with hope for games. ‘Papers, Please’ by Lucas pope is another popular example of a reality-informed game for political expression. Richard Hoffmeier’s Cart Life, too, is perhaps the ultimate realist game, but to get into something as breathtakingly perfect is going to require a different talk.

Anyway, at uni, I decided with my friends to make a game inspired by Daniel Clowes, and the mundane, and set it within my fictionalised memories of growing up in Melbourne. We called it Movement Study 1. I chose Australian artists like Howard Arkley to inspire a lot of the visual design on key parts of the short game, knowing that in the 70’s he had also tried to extract the beauty from his mundane suburban Melbournian experience.

Like Ghost World, it focused on a loosely autobiographical version of myself through two characters who wrestle with their evolving post-high school friendships. I just wanted to see if it worked in Melbourne and of course, it did. It was a successful project as far as our intention for it goes. Since then, in 2013, we’ve been lucky to see games such as Gone Home and more recently, PaperBark, set in and about the Australian bush, and Knuckle Sandwich, another Australian endeavour at personal expression through interaction, with less of a real-world setting but with so much auto-biographical content. I learned through practice that the games space, like literature and film before it, was ripe for real-world settings and stories. Since making Movement Study 1, I have worked on a handful of private, small unreleased games, illustrations and stories about the lives of people from Australia, including but not restricted to family history.

When Jason and Russell approached me about working on Wayward Strand, it was an instant fit. All they had to do was mention that they were wanting to create a game set in Australia in the 70’s and I was interested. Through exploring more about the history of the time and place, we have constantly been confronted with terrible stories of injustice, as well as a plethora of unique country-life aesthetics to draw upon, and have the benefit of the lense of contemporary awareness to know which points to focus on.

Wayward Strand is my second attempt, in a team, at writing and crafting a richly Australian story based on fictional characters, informed by stories and histories I have come across. Because of the depth of history - both healthy and frankly, fucked up, I don’t doubt that Wayward Strand will eventually prove to be a successful exercise in real-world fictional narrative games.

Jas: So we thought we should have a slide that breaks down what we see as the key benefits of setting a game in a real place and time. It’s important to know that many of these benefits apply regardless of whether your game has a strong narrative component or not!

The benefits we see are, in brief:

* If you make a game that’s set in a place that has personal significance to you, it’s likely that it will have significance to other people in your family and community as well, and they'll be able to potentially help with your research process. In our case we were particularly lucky with this, which Goldie will speak to later, but reaching out to your local community is how you can find people who are able to be great resources in this regard.

* Once you set your story in a real place and time, it provides a scaffolding for your story as you are building it - you are still going to be telling your story, but having it set somewhere specific is incredibly helpful for overcoming the blank page. It’s a real place! It exists, or existed, and you can keep finding out more about it, then using the results of what you find.

* Relating to that, a real place and time is a treasure trove for influences and idea-generating facts or stories - think of it as the most comprehensive lore you could possibly imagine, and there are likely to be virtually limitless resources to draw from (we certainly found this anyway)..

* Finally, your work of art gains an immediate significance to real people's lives - the people who live in that place now, or lived there before, or have parents or ancestors who lived in that place. This provides meaning to your project beyond your personal creative impulses, and acts as a good incentive to actually finish what you've started - you’re now contributing to a continuum of cultural works about this place and time.

Goldie: Getting deeper in to the personal connections I am able to draw upon with this particular project, my mother Liz worked in the 70s, 80s and 90s as a charge nurse in Emergency Departments across Melbourne. She also grew up rurally, and has been an unparalleled resource for knowledge of the time and of experiences in hospitals. We’ve been able to base entire characters on her stories, as well as moments with almost all of the patients. Let alone the actual day-to-day running of the hospital. Vocal mannerisms, routines and expectations on the staff, behaviours of the patients. Ways for the staff to have fun, ways for them to get away with it. The hard parts and the sad parts. There were some things we couldn’t include, especially stuff which happens after dark in hospitals on slow nights such as crutches cricket, but learning about the culture of people working in these places at that time has been wonderful.

Like mum, my dad Jim was also involved in hospitals during his career- he was a senior health architect and was the lead designer on many of Melbourne’s large and small scale hospitals and health facilities. I grew up in a house full of reams of A0 paper with architectural plans for hospitals, as well as notebooks full of questions and thoughts which I never really understood. Approaching wayward strand as a designer, in the architectural mindset was definitely enriched because of this. Ship architecture on the other hand was less known to me- but luck has it that my grandfather, also Jim, was a ship’s engineer and his WW2 ship, the HMAS Castlemaine is still docked and accessible in Williamstown, Melbourne, and the public are welcome to tour any time. Merging hospitals and ships is pretty tough, though, so we’ll see how I go.

Another thing I have been able to draw upon is the experience I had with my dad in the last 5 years of his life. He died in 2016 after a long sickness which caused him the need to live in a handful of nursing homes around Melbourne. Visiting him every few days was pretty difficult after a while; nursing homes these days generally are unpleasant places, usually due to the tiny amount of funding available to them, as well as the task of managing older, sick and dying people of diverse backgrounds with differing care requirements. I spent many after work and uni afternoons with him updating him on how my life was changing, all whilst his was completely stagnant, and drawing ever so slowly to a close. He died about 5 weeks after I started working on Wayward Strand and I have squirrelled a huge amount of observations of the patients, the buildings, the routines and the feelings from those environments into the game. It’s been very healing for me, I think, to have had a project so immediately relevant to what could otherwise have been left to simmer. Knowing that the nursing home in our game is a slightly different type: luxurious, one of the first, and more like an optional living arrangement for some of the patients feels like a good thing. To really capture the greyness and frankly, macabre tone of a contemporary nursing home isn’t what we want to do with Wayward Strand…But knowing about it helps. Kind of like pushing an idea as far as it can go, and choosing which parts are gentle and true enough to include in a family-friendly video game.

Jas: I’m going to give a specific example that came out of talking to Liz which is a pretty minor spoiler - at one point we had a storyline that revolved around a character's desire to be euthanised, and that desire being blocked by the hospital staff. It made a bunch of sense to us when we thought of it and it's a topic we're interested in and initially wanted to explore in the story, but as we spoke to Liz she let us know that at the time - this is over 50 years ago at this point - euthanasia really wasn't the hot-button topic it is at the moment, and the hospital staff would basically euthanise patients if they desired it.

The staff used a euphemism for it - it was described as "making the patient more ‘comfortable’" - and the staff would just crank up the morphine and let them pass quietly in the night. This is not only a really interesting fact to know about our setting that has a lot to potentially explore in and of itself, but we've been able to change that character's story to be more suitable to the time, and to be more unique as well.

Now, instead of the storyline being very directly related to the hot-button topic - which is already being covered in other media such as the late great Terry Pratchett’s documentary Choosing to Die) -  our storyline has become more about that particular character's struggle for empowerment, and being given the right to make her own choices.

Goldie: There’s something which belongs to the people when you use media, especially media traditionally used commercially, to depict realism. Making work which comments on reality can be a powerful historical tool, both as documentation and representative of large social issues. Take for example one of the most significant paintings from the early realism period - The Gleaners, an ever-long masterpiece by Frenchman Jean-Francois Millet completed in 1857. The painting depicts, in an unadorned manner, three peasant women gleaning a field of stray stalks of wheat after the harvest, which they will use to feed their impoverished families. It is a sympathetic representation of the lowest ranks of rural society- and in 1857 it was very- extremely- poorly received by the French upper class, who were the prime audience for paintings like this at the time. Even the middle classes, fresh on the other side of the French Revolution in 1848 were upset by the painting. To them it was a reminder that French society was built upon the hard labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this with empathy towards Socialism - very uncool, even scary at the time. The Gleaners as well as other paintings and works of literature from this period were instrumental in broadening the perspectives of entire generations, thus shaping the course of history to become more inclusive, fair and considerate. Even pieces such as the (slightly problematic) Pride and Prejudice, 1813, have used reality to create social commentary and critique. Whilst this isn’t literally my personal history, it has helped to shape the reality I live in. By now, it’s the norm, artists across all media are regularly drawing upon the real world for their work. To use music as an example, there was a fresh wave of social critique with the hip hop movement, as well as with the political American punk movement in the 70s. Avant-garde art in the early 20th century with movements like Dada and outsider art in Europe are also significant, and the list goes on.

Making art hasn’t always been, and isn’t always political, but it can be, and if games are art, we can and should go there when we can, especially when we have things to say. This is one of the reasons why amplifying voices which aren’t traditionally as loud as mine, or maybe yours, is something vital for large-scale cultural progress.

In the 70s in Australia, following consultations and through general knowledge, we can paint one picture of rural Australian life at the time. It’s been covered in movies like the popular Puberty Blues, which shows the awkward, difficult and painfully slow (and sometimes painfully fast) moments of growing up by the beach. It’s heard in music of the time, notably Australia’s rock and even punk music of the time was always the voice of a working class people, demanding better conditions, and poetically capturing the conditions of their everyday lives. We can see snippets of VASTLY celebrated Australian culture by watching football and cricket re-runs, even if they were (and perhaps continue to be) pretty bad news as far as toxic masculinity goes. Less discussed than sport culture in the public forum at the time were some of Australia’s more despicable histories- for example the government’s cultural treatment of women, queer people and most markedly perhaps it’s unforgivable and unforgettable treatment of indigenous Australians. In the 1970s this was still, and I think continues to be, shameful. When the team met with Land’s Council member Uncle Chris to discover more about being young and indigenous at the time, he and I had a blast talking about the music scene in 70s Melbourne - but we also uncovered some very hard truths which have helped us shape the experiences of another young character on board the ship.

Jas: In regards to indigenous consultation we also talked with Dan Turnbull from the Bunurong Land Council - he let us know stories of the Bunurong who lived and still live on the land where the story is set, and really gave us a primer on Bunurong culture and society from his perspective.

We initially got in touch with the Bunurong Land Council through Dakoda Barker in Queensland, and we didn’t really know what to expect, but it turned out that Dan loves games, has a great understanding of what we were going for, and was able to give specific, pointed feedback and advice.

One of the particular things we came to Dan about was that, as Goldie mentioned, we wanted to have a Bunurong character in the game - a young Bunurong man - but we were worried about the ethics and outcome for the community of having a Bunurong character without having Bunurong representation on our team.

But what Dan told us was, obviously it would be great for us to have representation on the team, but that we should still go ahead with it - that he sees it as a net positive thing, something that he's excited about as a Bunurong man, and he gave us some pointers and guidance for how to do it in a way that he'd find respectful and worthwhile, as well as letting us know how to get more Bunurong folks involved.

Now it's important to note that we shouldn't assume that he speaks for all Bunurong people, or that this is some "license" or grant to do this - but it means that, from a personal perspective, we felt more sure of ourselves in including this character, and had a better idea of how we could include him in a way that wouldn’t be detrimental to the Bunurong community.

Consultation isn't a box to tick off or something that you can use to make yourself immune from criticism - criticism is good, healthy and valuable, especially when it comes from people who are more marginalised or less privileged than you.

Instead, consultation is an ongoing process that empowers you to make your creative work more relevant to more people. Every discussion that we've had so far has given us further insight; more interesting elements of the setting to explore; and has enriched the final player experience.

Goldie: If you’re able to pile in to a car or bus with your team and visit areas you want to explore, absolutely do it. When I was making Movement Study, I originally wanted to set it where I grew up, in Port Melbourne. But as it turns out, my artist and I decided to meet in Brunswick which is a more common area for our generation to have grown up in- there weren’t very many kids in Port Melbourne and so it wasn’t as well-known as Brunswick. This was definitely the right decision, as multi-generations of Melbournians instantly recognised exactly where the game was set. When Adrienne and I went to Brunswick, we spent time walking around and taking photos and footage of the old houses lining the streets. Small details popped out - how the gardens were kept, where wheelie bins were stored, how much signage there was, the condition of the footpaths, leaf litter, how much traffic there was at the time of day the game was set…so much more. Even just to be able to grab a palette from the walk was useful. It made the biggest difference to the game I think of anything else we did, and so when Wayward Strand decided where might be best for our game to be set, we decided to head off on a short adventure.

We booked a house for the weekend and took cameras and microphones and notebooks, and planned visits to local historical societies and places of interest. We got a huge amount done just that weekend. Walking around on the windswept beaches and getting our boots wet in the sand, as well as climbing over sandbanks, eating fish and chips at the local fish and chippery all helped place us in the mindset of what living and growing up there might be like. Watching kids the same age as our main character, 14 year old Casey, running around at the local markets dragging their parents around, or loitering behind the library with their bikes. Of course, things have changed since the 70s, but the visits to the historical societies helped us out there. We learned, by chance, that the closest large town to where we were, was in fact where the largest rural hospital was at the time, and that plenty of nurses and doctors had lived in the town back then. We walked through the streets documenting houses which could have belonged to our characters, all the time fleshing them out in to the richly sculpted people they are today. Small details like whether someone needed to paint their fence, or whether someone had the champion roses of the street were all there for us to pick up on and include. Who helped them build their houses? What are the families of the characters like? Who has previously used the rusted swing set?

More recently, we did a second beach trip to a different part of the Victorian coastline, just as a location scouting expedition. Kind of surprisingly, the history we had discovered during our first trip to Inverloch was extremely different to the history of this millionaire’s playground, Sorrento, even though they’re only a few hundred kilometers apart. It was only a short trip, and we spent a lot of the time either relaxing or focusing on other parts of running our studio, but at least we were able to ask ourselves “Did sunburnt knees feel the same in the 70s?”

Jas: Putting the game in this setting, having characters and stories that are informed by our own memories and life experiences, give us a structure, a scaffolding, in which to create our story. It’s gives us tons of materials to draw from, is a universe that already makes sense, and the fact that it’s so personal to us is a big factor in us still being excited about the project two and a half years in.

As an example of one of the many benefits that have come up, on our trip to Inverloch we - actually Goldie - found this book of short stories by older folks, published in 1999 - it’s full of stories by people whose lived experience is way closer than ours to the time that our characters would have been living in.

Here’s another example of a benefit that happened just last week - our animation lead Kalonica is visiting Europe at the moment, and went to the V&A Ocean Liners exhibit in London, and she posted dozens of incredible photos for source material for our ship on Slack, spurring a ton of fascinating questions - the answers to these questions will further enrich the player’s experience.

A question we keep asking ourselves at the end of this process is, why are so many games seemingly set by default in fantasy or sci-fi settings? Of course do that if it makes sense for your game, but why not have the default be a real setting, a real time and place in history or a contemporaneous setting, and open your project up to these really exciting possibilities?

Goldie: Well thanks for listening to our experiences and some of the reasons behind why we take this stuff as an opportunity, I hope it’s given you something to think about. Along with the easy and fun and warm parts of setting a project locally, I hope the weight of some of the political stuff has been inspiring too. I’ve been in Wellington for a week and reckon it’s a bit of a haven, but I’ve just arrived here from my first international trip, ever, where I visited the Pacific Northwest of America following GDC. What I saw was sometimes beautiful, but usually darkly astonishing. The homelessness crisis and drug abuse problems are results from a long history of neglect from local and federal government, the low common wages are the result of rampant unchecked greed, and the lack of even baseline social healthcare is bewildering. Some of the tiniest towns I passed through actually desperately need those franchises I mentioned earlier to create work, as dying industries leave entire generations without jobs. In New Zealand, like just about everywhere else, there is a massive housing affordability crisis, and of course there’s the growing income inequality gap which is is a problem which both of our nations share. If a portion of people in games aren’t making work or observations about what’s happening in our homes, we’re at risk of losing what I think is a profoundly significant piece of global history AND falling behind as an introspective form of expression. Even by taking inspiration from previous interpretations of a real time or place, you enrichen the cultural value of your game, and align it with other forms of fiction in a positive and fresh way; in a way that games, I think, are ready to be aligned with.

The times we’re living in are full to the brim of injustices at the hand, primarily, of big corporations and governments willing to have their pockets lined to get power. Asylum seekers in Australia are still treated like bugs, women are still, if quietly, treated as second-best, queer people in some countries are still murdered. This stuff isn’t new, but the people in this room are young and talented, and making stuff which people want to consume. It’s important, I think, to realise that by digging in to your own local histories you can help shape cultural expectations we put upon ourselves and expect from each other. Being brave enough to call out the problems, and curious enough to explore them through interaction and narrative design even retrospectively is a meaningful way to make games. On top of this, it’s also an extremely abundant resource for entertainment, if that’s more your speed. I watched a few choice New Zealand films on my way here and we’ve seen the impact those have had on the global media landscape - why can’t games use the same lore and landscapes to create new and relevant places to play?

What you as a designer choose to take from your local histories and places is very open - which is why research is key. By dealing with real world figures or events or even whole communities or towns, remember that you have the voice to highlight things which are otherwise left in the past or brushed over.

[ctechnology]

How can I increase the traffic on my website?

How can I increase the traffic on my website?

Build an email list.

Building a strong email list is not easy, but it’s essential for anyone who has a website. A good list and email marketing strategy can bring you a steady stream of traffic, as well as more clients and conversions.

One way to gather more emails in your list is to offer valuable downloadable content to your audience that requires a subscription. You want to avoid buying email lists, though, as those leads aren't qualified and could mark your emails as spam.

From there, make sure to keep your list updated to any new developments on your website, any new content that you’ve posted, and anything else you can think of that your audience would be interested in hearing about.

Blog regularly.

Blogging and content marketing has become a big part of digital marketing in recent years. Now it seems like most businesses and websites have their own blog, and for good reason – blogging drives more traffic to your site, helps you build better and stronger relationships with your audience, and can help you establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche.

Blogging can be time-consuming, but with a good strategy and content calendar in place, it’s very much worth it. You can also repurpose your blog content by converting it into an infographic, slide deck, or ebook.

The better your content is, the more your audience will appreciate it and share it – which means more traffic to your site and more loyal fans who will visit your blog regularly.

Engage with audiences on social media.

Social media can be a great source of traffic, but it requires daily attention to get you the results you need. First of all, make sure you’ve added links to your website in your different bios.

From there, in order to grow your social media presence and subsequently, your traffic, you have to engage with audiences as often as possible.

Share any new, valuable content that you publish on your website on your social media and make sure to add social media sharing buttons on your website and blog so that your visitors can share as well.

Use social media ads.

The best way to get quick results from social media is to create ads.

Facebook, in particular, is making it especially hard for businesses and brands to get their posts in front of their audiences, but with ads, you can get a quick boost in traffic.

Most social networks have great targeting and different types of ads to suit most needs, and they also bring in good results.

Create an account on StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon can be an amazing source of traffic. I’ve often noticed huge spikes in visitor numbers from StumbleUpon even without trying to achieve that.

If you’re not familiar with StumbleUpon, it’s a content curation website where the best pieces of content – images, video, or text – can unexpectedly go viral.

The "secret" to StumbleUpon is pretty simple – relevant content that provides real value for its readers. You could be getting traffic from it without even using it, as I mentioned earlier, but to make sure you get more traffic, and more consistently, there are things that you can do.

Start by creating a profile, and link to your website and blog in your bio. From there, start building a following by stumbling great posts, and finding people to follow who share your interests.

Once you start stumbling, make sure to share other blogs’ posts as well, so that you’re not just posting your own stuff – that will definitely not go well with other stumblers, but it might also get your account suspended by StumbleUpon.

Do an SEO audit of your site.

Even if you don’t have the budget to hire an SEO specialist or SEO agency, or the knowledge to completely optimize your website, there are still things – like help online SEO tools – that you can do to make sure you advance in search engines.

To boost SEO, use keywords in your headlines, post and copy, add meta descriptions to your posts and alt text to your images, use tags and add links to your posts.

You can use a tool like Found to do a quick, free SEO audit of your website so you can see what you’re doing wrong and how you can fix it. For WordPress users, you can use a tool like Yoast SEO that will help you optimize your WordPress website easily.

Do more guest blogging.

Guest blogging is a great way to reach new audiences that could then visit your website if they liked what you had to say, as well as a way to get more links to your site.

One of the ways to find great websites for guest blogs is to search for key influencers in your niche and then to start building a relationship with them. You can use a tool like Respona to find the top content shared as well as the top influencers.

Once you start a relationship with these influencers, so long as you have already published valuable content in your name, you have a good chance of getting a guest blogging opportunity – maybe even a regular one if your post does well.

Another way to increase your traffic through guest blogging is to get someone to write a post for your blog.  So when you find influencers in your niche, don’t be afraid to ask them if they would be willing to write something for you.

Use internal links.

Whenever you’re posting new content, check to see if there are any words that you can link to other pages on your website. Make sure that the link is relevant, and don’t add too many links per post, as it would definitely put off your readers.

Internal links are very helpful as they help you with search engine optimization, and they also get some of your readers to spend more time on your website.

Leverage the power of visual content.

Images can make a huge difference to your traffic. Research shows that while people remember only 20% of what they read, they actually recall 80% of what they see.

Eye-catching, fun images, mean more shares on social media and they make reading a much more pleasant experience.

Make sure that whenever you share a post on social media you also add an image or else your update will probably not even be noticed.

Create infographics.

Infographics are great sources of traffic. All of the infographics I’ve published on my website have not only gotten a lot of engagement but also drove more traffic.

Infographics get a lot of shares and engagement because they’re much more eye-catching than a regular blog post, while also conveying a lot of useful information.

But what What really makes infographics great is that once you’ve published, you can submit it to infographic directories and contact influencers and other bloggers and websites to see if they are interested in posting your infographic on their sites. This leads to more exposure, increased brand awareness, and more traffic.

If hiring an agency or graphic designer is not in your budget, you can also try any one of the free infographic tools available online. Visme, for example, allows non-designers to create not just infographics, but also interactive slide decks, social media images, and other visual content.

Engage in forum marketing.

Forum marketing is an often-disregarded form of marketing; one of the reasons for this could be the fact it can take a long time to build up your profiles on forums and it’s an ongoing task. If you stick with it though, it can get you more targeted traffic and conversions.

To get started, research what the most popular forums in your niche are, but make sure they are active and not filled with spam. Then, create a profile and start interacting; in the beginning, try not to appear as if you’re only there to sell, but rather try to be helpful and engaging and show that you are informed.

Only once you start building a rapport with other users can you really start promoting yourself, but not too heavily.  Many forums allow you to add a signature that appears at the end of all of your posts that can include a link. Try customizing this signature in order to attract users to your website, or even better, you're sign-up form.

Comment on other relevant blogs.

Blog commenting is very similar to forum marketing, in the sense that you should take the time to show that you’re actually trying to be helpful when commenting with a link, rather than fishing for traffic. In an ideal world, you should try commenting regularly on blogs similar to yours.

This is great for backlinks and building relationships with influencers in your niche, but in this case, it also shows that you are a regular reader and commenter, so linking to one of your pages won’t make you look like a spammer.

When you do link to one of your pages, make sure that it actually complements the post you’re commenting on and that you explain why you’re sharing that particular link.

[persephone-damnedqueen]

Mid Season Thoughts on the Fall Anime Season 2017:

Ugh, it’s already November, and we are halfway through the Fall season, and you know what that means.  Yup, mid season thoughts.   I know, ALREADY.  Ugh, this year is just flying by.   With most of these series hitting their 5th or 6th episode, I’m able to go into more details about the shows I’m loving, and hating this season, thus far, (as spoiler free as possible).  Keep in mind, I am only watching about 22 shows this season, so if you see something I’m not watching or should be, tell me!  Also, please remember this is solely my opinion and if yours differs from mine, I’d love to hear it.  So without further ado, let’s get into it.  

Net-juu no Susume:  Studio Signal.MD

Dropped.  Alright, so I feel like I have to mention this.   I’m a serious gamer.  More specifically, I love me some MMOs.  How much you ask?   Well, so much so that I actually met my husband on World of Warcraft.  Insane right?  I mean my god you do not want to see our /played time on that game.  So, needless to say, I am a bit critical on gaming anime because of this, because I know what it’s like.   This anime was just… . cringey.  I found myself sighing every chance I got and by the 20 minute mark, completely turning it off.  Everything about the first episode was just  … bad.  There’s really just no redeeming qualities… well, one line said by the Guild Master which was something along the lines of “you have no idea what her irl gender is.”  I laughed.  It’s accurate.  85% of female toons you see on wow are actually guys. Anyways, moving on. 

Evil or Live:  Haoliners Animation

Dropped.  Mmmm  I had such high hopes.  After reading the summary, I will admit, I was hyped for this show.  On Paper, this show sounds wonderful.  I thought it was going to be some horror psychological thriller that at the end of it left you questioning the very meaning of the world around you or something.  Instead, what happened?   I …don’t even know.  The series starts off with massive amounts of Live Action, which, while being completely unexpected, I didn’t mind so much; the series became an instant drop for me when the MC and Co were clearly showing a break from reality and needed actual mental help, was beaten instead.   It wasn’t “horror” or “edgy” it was just poor writing.  Needless to say, I have dropped it.

Just Because!: Studio Pine Jam

Dropped.  Did I make it through the first episode finally?  Yes!  When did I fall asleep this time? Episode two.  The pacing on this show is what kills it for me.  It’s so fucking slow.  Ugh, I hate dropping it because it’s really pretty to look at, but I can’t deal with that pacing.  Moving on.  

Sengoku Night Blood:  Typhoon Graphics

Dropped.  I watched two episodes here before calling it quits.  Let me save you the time.  Girl goes back in time and gains a harem.  A Vampire Harem.  You heard me right.   

Urahara:  Studios Emt^2 and Shirogumi

Dropped.  Instant Drop.  Fuck, that animation is fucking trash.  You have two studios working on this series, and the animation still looks that garbagey?!?!  How?!?!?!  I can’t even with this… Ugh, nope, moving on. 

Boku no Kanojo ga Majimesugiru Sho-Bitch na Ken:  Studio Diomedea

Dropped.  This show is annoying.   I started watching it with hopes of it doing two things.  One, fill the hole in my heart that was left when Hajimete no Gal ended; and two, explain what the hell a Sho-Bitch is. Two episodes later, I still have no idea what a Sho-Bitch is.  While the art is generic, the characters are bland and too common; also, the comedy too forced at time and repeatable.  Yes, we understand main waifu really just wants to figure out what Haruka likes, and obviously misinterprets everything, but does that really have to be the joke every single time?

Imouto Sae Ireba Ii:  Silver Link Studios

Dropped.  Hahahahahaha, why is this show so popular this season?  Seriously, find someone who isn’t talking about this show.  It’s official, this is Silver Link’s answer to A-1′s Eromanga Sensei.   My god this kid is OBSESSED with imoutos.   It’s a bit repetitive for my liking, but I totally see why people think it’s hilarious.  Needless to say though, as entertaining as it may be, I dropped it.  

Omiai Aite wa Oshiego Tsuyoki na, Mondaiji:  Studio Seven

Why am I still watching this you ask? *Nervous Laughter*  It’s grown on me.  It’s so bad, don’t get me wrong here, but like. . . . Will Nano and Souji get married?  Yes, but it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.  Rofl.  Who am I kidding?  I’m trash, but this is my guilty pleasure for the season, and it’s only four minutes each episode.  I DON’T JUDGE YOUR LIFE CHOICES.  

Osake wa Fuufu ni Natte kara:  Creators in Pack

Not dropped yet, shocking right? Well, not really, I’m only watching it for the cocktail recipes.  I feel like this anime is top notch for being bad.   Like, it has spot on animation, considering the studio and that it’s a short, it’s unique at the very least, but nothing happens.  Really, nothing happens.  It’s the same premise each episode that is repeated heavily and the downfall of the series.  Wife comes home, tired, husband makes her drink, wife gets drunk.  The end.  

Ousama Game The Animation:  Studio Seven

I feel like you have to watch the truly terrible series in order to appreciate the good ones.  This series is bad.  My god it’s bad.  Poor writing, poor animation, blood for the sake of blood, just overall bad.  And what makes it worse?  It’s one of the two survival game anime airing this season, the other being fantastic.  After sitting through both weekly, this one just fails. . . .Except Mamo.  Mamo is perfect.   I love you Mamo.  

Black Clover:  Studio Pierrot

Ugh, do they ever stop yelling?  Pierrot has killed this series.  Plain and Simple.  Honestly, there is so much I could go into, like the terrible voice acting, horrible pacing, stereotypical characters, or decent animation, but I feel like all of that is just beating a dead dog.  Everyone in the community has already mentioned all of this, so why reiterate?  I’ve been told the manga is a billion times better, and I might one day start it, (especially since I own the first seven volumes haha), but for now there are only two reasons why I am watching it still: one, because my husband really likes the series, and two, because you have to watch the bad series to appreciate the good ones.  But, for the love of all things holy, please stop with the yelling.  

Konohana Kitan:  Studio Lerche

MY CUTE LITTLE FOX GIRLS.  

I love this show.   It’s so adorable, and Yuzu is fucking adorable, and this entire show is adorable.  The tone of this show is just so fucking adorable and leaves you feeling so happy.  Did I mention it’s adorable?  No?  It’s adorable.   Ugh, I needed this show.   

Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World:  Studio Lerche

I’m watching the dub.  YEAH, I’M WATCHING THE DUB, WHAT’S IT TO YOU?!  Every season, I typically pick out one or two dubs per season to watch; last season it was Boku no Hero Academia, (Yeah, I watched it subbed too, WHAT’S IT TO YOU?) this season it’s this.  And, no it’s not just because I heard Ian Sinclair had a role in it!  So, what are my thoughts on it?  I like it.   I like it a lot.  It’s different, everything from the beautiful animation done by Studio Lerche, (yes I really like Lerche.) to the wonderful story line.  It’s different, and when you’ve seen as many anime as I’ve seen, different is very much appreciated.  How’s the dub you ask?  Surprisingly, pretty well done.  Lately, I’ve been feeling like the quality of dubbing has gone down with as many as Funimation does in a season; they mostly just feel rushed and poorly executed, if you need an example just look at Juuni Taisan.  It’s nice to see that that isn’t the case here.   

Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou:  Studio White Fox

It went in a different direction than I thought it would.  This show is genuinely good, and is definitely worth the watch this season, but more so if you like episodic Slice-of-Life series.  While I still haven’t permanently given up on the hope of the series taking that darker more philosophical route, I am actually satisfied with the way it is going from here.  I am also fascinated with the fact that they aren’t actually the last humans alive, and I think that makes this series just that much more unique than the majority of the moe post apocalyptic series out there.   I guess the only major downfall of this series is the terribly done 3D animation.  I mean, dear gods they need to take a page from Inuyashiki or Children of the Whales because they know how it should be done.   But overall, I am actually happy with the first part of the season, and looking forward to the rest.  

Mahoutsukai no Yome:  Wit Studio

The hype killed it for me. . . . 

Yes, this series is really good.  I’ve already admitted it’s contender for Anime of the Season, and the best thing this studio has done, period. (Fight me SnK fans).  But, this series has been so hyped up that I dread watching the weekly episodes.   It just exists for me right now.  I know, “but Persephone, this show is just SO good, how could you not be in love with it?”  Meh, it’s a phase, I’m sure once the hype dies down, I’ll like it more; for now though, I’ll keep watching it weekly, but if you need me I’ll be in the corner hyping up Juuni Taisen.   

Kujira no Kora wa Sajou ni Utau:  J.C.Staff

Children of the Whales, because fuck that long title.   After many recommendations, I picked it, and oh my god am I glad I did.  First off, the art style is beautiful.  It looks like nothing this studio has ever created, it’s easily one of the best animated series of the season.  I bet most people didn’t even notice it’s in 3D because that’s how well done it is.  The plot is captivating, and makes me scream either “What the Fuck?”  or “No!” at least once per episode, (thank you for holding up to the ‘Drama’ tag).  Netflix needs to step up their game and release the damn episodes weekly, just saying.   Also, Best Closing of the season.   I can’t skip the closing.  Period.  It’s beautiful. Don’t wait.   Watch it.  It deserves more hype.  

Blend S:  A-1 Pictures

My moe blob this season.  This is one of my favorites.   Why wouldn’t it be right? Cute moe girls doing cute things?  Perfection.  I think why I like this show so much is solely because of all dark, dramatic, depressing or actiony shows I am watching this season, this one can leave me with a smile on my face.  It’s the palette cleanser you watch when you are sad or just want a better mood.  It puts a smile on your face and I need that, especially this season.  Plus, it’s also just really good; and, not to mention, I got my token beach episode, so I’m happy.  

Inuyashiki:  Studio MAPPA

This show destroys me.  MAPPA, what the fuck?  Why are you making me feel?  Alright,   The opening few minutes of the first episode made me feel.  Fuck, I almost started crying.  It was depressing and yet the story was just relatable and beautiful all at the same time.  Then. . . it got weird with the whole alien, mecha space thing.  Then, more feels.  What did episode two do to me?  I broke down.  Hard.  That scene in the second episode was fucking hard to watch.  I honestly don’t think there’s been a scene that’s been that hard to watch since the puppy scene in Elfen Lied.  That’s how hard that scene was to watch.  That was also the moment I knew I was hooked.  Now, we are coming up on episode six, and I’m still just as hooked.  This is without a doubt one of the best of the season, and definitely the darkest.   

Juuni Taisen:  Graphinica

Without a doubt my favorite non sequel of the season.  I’m addicted.  I love everything about this show.  It’s fucking intense and filled with plot twists and betrayals and deaths and gore and just epicness.  Is it a bit predictable?  Well, yes, but what do you people honestly expect when there are twelve main characters, twelve backstories and twelve episodes?  Also, DID YOU SEE MY BEAUTIFUL LITTLE PYSCOTIC USAGI?!?!  BEST BOY 2017.  YEAH, FUCK YOU FIGHT ME.  

Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru:  Washio Sumi no Shou:  Studio Gokumi

My God, am I a whore for a good drama filled Magical Girl series.   Seriously, it’s my crack.  Ugh, add on gorgeous animation to top it off, and I’m set.  I loved season one.  I adored it, and now that this part has just finished airing, I can say without a second of doubt, this season is better than the first.   Just watch it.  Take my word.  Watch it.   Oh, and 

*Screaming as loud as possible while crying hysterically*  

GIN-CHAN!!!!!

Osomatsu-san 2nd Season:  Studio Pierrot

I feel like this show is the hardest show to talk about.  I mean most of what this show is can be summed up with a simple “What the fuck am I even watching?”  But, let’s see what can be said about this.  My gods this show is a gift.  This has to be one of the underappreciated comedy gems to come out in the recent years, and it fills me with joy knowing that it still shines just like the first season did. I love the more focused episodes on each of the brothers and even the parents.  With just the first part out right now, I can still say without a doubt that I am enjoying this season more than the first.  

Shokugeki no Soma:  J.C.Staff

It’s about to go down.  I repeat:  It’s about to go down.  The hype is real with this show.  This is hands down without a doubt the best season of Food Wars period.  As a manga reader I can tell you everything is true to the manga and perfect.  I need more Food Wars in my life.  This is amazing.  ALSO, MY SON IS ANIMATED NOW AND HE’S FUCKING GORGEOUS, AND I’VE WAITED FOR YEARS FOR HIM TO BE ANIMATED AND HE FINALLY IS AND I’M SO HAPPY.   

3-Gatsu no Lion 2nd Season:  Studio Shaft

My Gods, WHY IS NO ONE STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS?!?!?!!  I fucking LOVE this show.  This show makes me feel shit I didn’t want to feel.   You know a show is amazing when every episode you don’t know if you want to cry because it makes you so happy, or curl in a ball and cry because HINA AND REI ARE MORE PRECIOUS THAN LIFE AND DESERVES ALL THE HAPPINESS THEY CAN GET.  Without spoiling anything, episode three and four destroyed me; I’m talking like near Koro-sensei level of destroyed, and that alone makes it a gem that’s hard to come by.  Hina and her development in this arc is fucking amazing, and my gods don’t even get me started on Rei.   Ugh, it’s perfect and deserves all the praise.  

Gintama.  Porori-hen:  Bandai Namco Pictures

Like what even was life before Gintama?  Was there even life?  Was that actually living?  Any anime season with Gintama airing is a good season, regardless, yet once again Gintama keeps bringing us more and more quality comedic gold, proving yet again why it’s the king of comedy series.  This arc is hilarious, like seriously, is there someone out there who doesn’t like this arc?  Exactly, I rest my case.   Thank you Gintama.  

Ballroom e Youkoso:  Production I.G.

This has to be one of the best sport anime I’ve seen in a long time, and without a doubt, the best sport one of the year.  I love Sport anime, and I think that I.G. has proven they know how to do a good sport anime.  I mean with Kuroko, Haiykuu, Prince of Tennis, Diamond no Ace, (Do I need to go on?), there was never a doubt that it wasn’t going to be anything less than amazing.  But, damn.  They outdid themselves here.  I’m impressed.  All I’m left with each week is the need for more.   It’s really good.  Fuck, it’s really good.  Seriously, why are you not watching it?   Also, Fuck you Chi-chan.  You are still worst girl 2017.  Yeah, Fight me.  

So, yeah, those are my thoughts so far on the Fall Anime 2017 season.   Let me know yours, and if there is anything I’m not watching, and should be, then please tell me!  I love recommendations.  

[webbygraphic001]

7 All-Too-Common Landing Page Errors You Must Avoid

And it does this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year without ever asking for a pay raise.

But this is true only if your website landing page is designed well, maintained, and optimized to the gills. The art and science of a flawless landing page is beyond the scope of a single article, but we can start with helping you spot seven of the most common – and damaging – trouble spots.

1. Unclear Value Statement

Typically, new visitors to your page will only stay on it 3 to 15 seconds before they get distracted. In that span of time, you must offer a clear and visible reason to stick around and interact with the page.

That reason is your value statement. What value do your readers get in exchange for the time you ask them to spend? High-quality content is a must (and hopefully a given), but you also need to pull them in so they experience that content.

Does your landing page do that? If yes, great! If no, you should fix that. If you’re not sure, ask yourself:

Is there a compelling, visible headline that expresses the end benefits clearly and succinctly?

Is there a subheadline explaining your offering in more detail?

Are there supporting graphics that pull the eye toward your headline and subheadline?

If there aren’t, add them now.

2. Poor Signposting

Your landing page isn’t just there to be pretty. It’s meant to convince people to take action. If you don’t make it easy to find your call to action, most viewers won’t look for it.

deliver enough value to make it worth the hassle

You must make it clear — in as succinct and efficient terms as possible — why the action you want a reader to take will deliver enough value to make it worth the hassle. Tell them, in words that stand out from the rest of the page, what you want them to do next and what they’ll receive for doing so.

Improving your signposting stats by asking yourself the following questions:

Do you have a clear understanding of what the next step in a visitor’s customer journey should be?

Is it easy to find and take that step on your website?

Does your copy make a clear and compelling argument in favor of taking that step?

If you can answer yes to all three questions, your signposting is likely good (or at least good enough for now). If not, now you know what you have to do to improve it.

3. Slow Loading Time

Remember that 3 to 15-second maximum time limit we mentioned earlier? That span includes time spent waiting for your landing page to load, and every microsecond of that wait increases a reader’s likelihood of bailing on the whole thing. You must get your loading time to be as quick as possible.

Viewers who exit your landing page early – including while still waiting for it to load – increase your site’s bounce rate. Higher bounce rates reduce your rankings on Google and other search engines, meaning a page that loads too slowly not only impresses fewer viewers, but it also gets fewer viewers overall.

Improving your loading time is usually a job for your tech team or whoever in the office is responsible for overseeing your hosting service. That said, here are a few of the most important ways to optimize this important factor:

Optimize image size, file format, and compression;

Clean up your database by deleting saved drafts, old revisions, unused plugins, and similar virtual detritus;

Confirm that your WordPress theme (if applicable) is optimized for quick loading;

Use a content distribution network for file storage;

Analyze server response time with your hosting service, and work with them to reduce it;

Install tools that leverage browser caching;

Fix all your broken links;

Remove all render-blocking from JavaScript;

Reduce the number of redirects necessary to reach your page;

Optimize your code, especially in CSS, JavaScript, and HTML;

Enable file compression — except for on images;

Replace all PHP content with HTML wherever possible.

This is technical, detailed work, but it’s important. If you don’t have team members up to these tasks, it can be worth hiring an outside consulting company to do it for you.

4. Only One Landing Page

You have a good idea of your ideal customer’s hopes, fears, pain points, demographics, likes and dislikes, and other important information. If you have several different types of customers, you can’t use the same landing page for each of your customer groups. Each group has different characteristics that will prompt them to follow your call to action, so you don’t want to offer just one landing page.

Similarly, you also probably have more than one product or set of content and offerings to generate sales. Having only one landing page can lose leads because the page is only optimized for one of those products or content sets.

Ideally, you should have a unique landing page with a tailored offer for each of your customer models that would send those individuals to each of the products and content sets. An ad for professionals in their 30s making over $50,000 a year would lead to a landing page built for them, while an ad for heads of households working from home would lead to a landing page built for them.

Yes, that means a company with three profiles and four content sets would need 12 landing pages. And yes, it’s worth that kind of effort.

5. Insufficient Visuals

“A picture is worth 1,000 words” is ancient wisdom, but it’s far from true in the internet world – it’s actually worth more. A quick look at social media and blog performance will tell you many people will look at, enjoy, and share a photo or video, but not many will read an entire 1,000-word post on the same topic.

How well your landing page performs depends on the images you use and how you present them. Does your page’s layout conform to the best practices of visual web design:

Including images that emotionally reinforce the value expressions of your product’s core benefits;

Containing sufficient white space to not be intimidating;

Providing data images to indicate the worth of what you do;

Using visual design cues to lead the eye toward your conversion points;

Applying color gradients to highlight offers and your call to action;

Using infographics to replace the dreaded “wall of text”.

If you can say yes for half of these things, carry on. If not, this point may be among the better places to start with a landing page redesign.

6. Asking For Too Much, Too Soon

Craft a custom calls to action that meet all levels of interest, need, and desire

Not every landing page visitor is created equal. Some are hardcore fans and experts in what you do, ready for a 10,000-word white paper that dives deeply into the research supporting your use case. Others might have heard about your industry on an Instagram page and want to know the basics of what you do.

There’s nothing worse than going to a website and being asked for all of your personal information right away. If your call to action requires too much knowledge, too deep a commitment, or even too much personal information, consider scaling back. Otherwise, you risk turning away potential customers.

Better yet, go back to No. 5 above and build a new landing page for beginners and early-stage leads. Craft a custom calls to action that meet all levels of interest, need, and desire.

7. No Trust Elements

Offering some type of authentic customer referral or testimonial is important. It all boils down to the same thing: telling those who read your landing page that other people already like what you do and how you do it.

Examples of effective modern trust elements include:

Quotes from positive reviews next to a photo of the reviewer;

Screenshots of social media posts praising your company or product;

Short video interviews of happy clients;

Blurbs for industry thought leaders approving of you;

Images portraying business credentials and certifications;

Links to positive press coverage;

Logos of known business customers who buy and trust your brand.

Final Thought: What’s Next?

There isn’t one guaranteed way to turn a landing page from something full of holes into something perfect. But first, run an audit of your landing page using this list as a guide. Note which errors are there. Next, sort them in order of what takes the least time to fix to what takes the most time to fix.

Then, fix them in that order. We find that getting the quick fixes done builds excitement and momentum, whereas starting with a harder fix can mire down the whole process.

If none of these errors exist on your landing page, congratulations. There’s still lots of work to do on your website and content marketing, but it’s not among these rookie mistakes.

  Featured image via Pexels.

Source from Webdesigner Depot https://ift.tt/3n57O3c from Blogger https://ift.tt/34g8Z7y

[deanssweetheart23]

Cross My Heart

Title: Cross My Heart (Soldier!Dean AU)

Summary: Dean Winchester is a man who’s been to war and back, a man that’s lost loved ones and has seen too much to believe in love or fate or destiny. But when he meets a girl that radiates kindness and warmth, one that’s ready to love his shadowy corners and accept him for the man he really is, he begins to change his mind. And, when she shows him the darkness in her light, he promises himself that, no matter how hard things get, he’ll never let go of her. Because, he realizes, he loves her. And that is the beginning and end of everything. 

Author: deanssweetheart23

Characters: Dean Winchester x reader, Mary and John Winchester (both mentioned), Benny Laffite, Sam Winchester

Word count: 7026 (I know, I know it’s a monster fic, but I promise, it’s worth it)

Warnings: Fluff. Angst. Some language. Implied smut. Death of a parent. Loss. Mentions of blood and of the warzone (nothing too graphic). Bad marital relationship (not Dean associated). Domestic Dean Bean (yup, this should be a warning)  

Author’s Notes: This is my submission for @jpadjackles Double Birthday Challenge. My sweet B, thank you for letting me participate. I had the time of my life writing this and I can promise you, it ended up being a fic very close to my heart.

Special thank you to my twin @ravengirl94 for answering my stupid questions about the US Army, and being such an amazing best friend and beta. Without her, this story would have never been posted.

My prompt for this was Falling In Love At A Coffee Shop by Landon Pigg.(I am not American so every detail about the US Army in this fic is the result of research. If there’s a mistake in it, I apologize in advance.)

And, without further ado. Enjoy <3

The first time Dean sees her it’s on his mother’s birthday.

It’s a sunny day, sky a soft shade of blue, summer slowly creeping its way into his life and, even though he’s not sure of a lot of things, he somehow knows she would have loved this day.

He can almost see her, standing in the middle of their garden, sundress blowing with the wind, a smile gracing her lips while he’s whining because there’s no pie, and it’s all so tangible, so real, that he thinks he can reach out and touch her.

Her image disappears as soon as it’d appeared though, and he’s back in the middle of a crowded street, on his way home from training, all alone, with no plans for the day and no mum to celebrate with because his mother’s gone and nothing can bring her back.

The thought pulls at his heartstrings and he can feel it again, that sickening sensation of missing someone so much that all of his body cells are aching for her and he curses under his breath, already loathing the day.

And then she catches his eye.

She’s just sitting there, at the bay window of the old coffee shop that always seems to have some jazz melody pouring out of it, nose buried in a book.

She’s beautiful, he can tell that much, but what really stuns him is the way she’s holding the dog-eared book, fingers grazing the paper gently like it’s soft skin, eyes skimming the pages as she bits her bottom lip, a wrinkle in her brow. It’s been a while since Dean has seen someone so engrossed into something and he loses track of time, forgets that he’s burning holes on her until she looks up and her eyes meet his through the window.

And Dean is speechless, he’s terrified because he’s caught staring, but she smiles at him, soft and warm and genuine and it’s the purest, most breath-taking thing he’s ever seen.

So, he does what he’s never thought he’d do on a day that hurts him so much.

He returns the smile and watches as she goes back to her book, fingers tucking strays of hair behind her ear, then steals one, two, three long glances and leaves, mind already drifting to work and how he really needs to call his kid brother to see how he’s holding up.

He pretends he doesn’t think of her for the rest of the day.

Dean doesn’t believe in fate.

He doesn’t believe things happen for a reason and he’s seen enough to know that good things happen to bad people and bad to good ones and that there’s no one out there who gives a damn about how broken this world really is, no higher power that protects and loves and saves.

He’s seen kids dying, seen soldiers that had been laughing at his jokes the night before spitting blood from their mouths in the midst of a blaze of chaos and bullets. He’s seen his mum dying, his father turning into a shell of his old self and he’s returned from war only to wonder why.

Why the hell did he survive while others died?

And he knows, that there’s no one to answer.

So, yeah.

Dean doesn’t believe in fate.

But the next time he passes by that coffee shop, a couple of weeks later, he still stops for a second and lets his eyes drift to that bay window.

It’s stupid, he knows that, and makes him feel like he’s a character in a stupid Hallmark chick-flick, but he goes for it anyway, because, oddly enough, he feels like he’ll end up regretting it, if he just walks away like that.

But she’s not there, and for some reason, the day doesn’t seem as bright anymore and meeting with Benny for beers later doesn’t sound as fun.

Trying to swallow his disappointment, he crosses the street, pointedly ignoring that little building that has always seemed like a little piece of another world in the middle of his town.

He doesn’t go back for a month.

Dean’s almost convinced he’ll never see her again.

It makes sense, of course, because she’s nothing but a stranger that caught his eye for just a split second, one of those people that are somehow supportive characters in someone’s story without even knowing it, but it still baffles him a bit, still leaves a bitter taste in his mouth when he thinks of her.

Not that he thinks of her too often.

Nope.

He doesn’t.

But she’s a nice memory, lively and serene, and the image of her lost in her own world, scanning the pages of a book like it holds the world’s most precious secrets always manages to put a smile on his face in the darkest of hours, because, admittedly, he doesn’t believe in magic, but it’s comforting to know there are still a few people in the world that do.

So, he stops by the coffee shop a couple of times, but she’s never there and he loses all hope.

And then it happens.

He’s leaning against his shiny muscle car, right outside Benny’s house, arms folded in front of his chest, eyes focused on the front porch, when he hears a loud thump, followed by a string of extremely colorful expletives he doesn’t even know existed, and he stops and takes a breath to remind himself that he doesn’t have to reach for his gun, that he has no gun, because he’s safe, he’s back home in the States and his mind is just playing tricks on him.

He doesn’t have time to really dwell on it though because-

“Fuck. Fuck, fuckety fuck, fuck.” Someone mutters, voice soft and surprisingly pleasant.

And he doesn’t even realize it at first, but he’s already next to Sailor Mouth, and when he mumbles an  are you alright, ma’am and she turns to look at him, he swears that his whole world stops for a minute because it’s her.

It’s the girl from the coffee shop, cheeks a little flushed, hair a little disheveled and he wants to say something, he wants to say anything, but he can’t seem to find the words.

She smiles.

It’s gorgeous and genuine and a bit sheepish and he notes that if he’s thought she was beautiful before, now he knows she’s stunning.

“I’m fine. I’m just… Did I say all those things out loud?”

He laughs.

Even he is surprised at how easily the sound seems to bubble up his throat.

“Yeah, pretty sure you just did.”

“Oh God. I’m… It’s been a long day and I-”

“’S okay, kid.” He chuckles because she’s flustered and it’s the most adorable thing he’s ever seen. Then. “Here, lemme help with that.” He offers and crouches to the ground to pick up the books she’d dropped, eyes sweeping over the titles quickly.

“Interesting.”

“What’s interesting?” she implores, brow raised.

“Nothing, just,” he smirks a little, smug and playful, then licks his lips, “I didn’t really know people are still into Elizabeth Barret Browning. Since this is, you know, the 21st century.”

“Hey.” She whines, but there’s a smile playing at the corners of her lips. “Elizabeth Browning is frigging awesome, man.”

“Sure she is.”

She’s bothered now, forehead puckered and eyes ablaze with a sort of brightness that surprises him.

“Are you –how can you not like her? What’s next, are you going tell me you hate Shakespeare?”

“Well,” he chortles, shoving his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, “I wasn’t going to say anything but-”

“Oh, c’mon. He’s Shakespeare.” She chants, spread-armed shrug as she stares at him in shock.

“Hmmm. Bit overrated if you ask me. Now Vonnegut on the other hand…”

“Of course you’d say that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What could you possibly have against Slaughterhouse 5?”

“What could you possibly have against Hamlet?” she retorts, waggling the book she’s been holding.

“Look,” he tries again, titling his head to the left, “all I’m saying is the guy just whines too much, you know? And.” He jabs a finger at her. “He’s disgustingly sweet.”

“Right.” She huffs out, sarcasm laced in her voice. “Do you have a pen?”

“What?”

“Do you have a pen? It’s a simple question.” She states, then thinks about something and reaches for her bag. “Never mind, I got one. Just give me your hand.”

“I, uh,” he pauses, eyes drifting to the letters sprawled over his palm, “Sonnet 138?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What are you-”

“You should read it. Pretty sure it’ll change your mind on your whole disgustingly sweet thing.” She gushes, pink lips curling up in a self-satisfied smile that was one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen.

“You’re-”

“Awesome. Yeah, I know.” She says, Y/E/C orbs drifting up to meet his, and beams so brightly he can’t really argue with her.

So, instead, he grins and just stares because there’s nothing else he can really do but search for colors and light and life into her eyes while he listens to her speak, about Shakespeare and the sonnets and how she’s definitely gonna prove him wrong.

He stops by the bookstore on his way home that day.

Dean’s nervous.

Sitting right next to her, he drinks in the way she throws her head back when she laughs at his joke, the way her perfume blends with the fragrant smell of fresh coffee and, even though he’s so forever stunned by how easy almost everything seems to be with her, part of him is still terrified that he’ll mess something up and make a fool of himself in front of her, like a teenage boy that just had a girl say hello to him for the first time.

“So,” she says, drumming her fingers on the table, soft smile gracing her lips, “I got an important question for you, Dean.”

He hums and arches a sly brow.

“All ears, sweetheart.”

“Apple pecan, blueberry buttermilk or coffee, walnut and chocolate chip?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

She laughs.

“They’re muffin flavors.” She explains, reaching for the catalogue. “You said you’ve never been to this coffee shop, right?” A nod. “Well. You got to try the muffins. They’re the best in the entire town. So. Apple pecan, blueberry buttermilk or coffee, walnut and chocolate chip?”

“I don’t really, uh… I’m not a muffin guy.”

A scowl.

Eyes rolled skywards.

“Not a muffin guy?”

“Yeah. I… Pie. I love pie.”

“That’s because you haven’t tried these muffins.”

He chuckles, corner of his mouth curving up in a smirk.

“Kid, no offense, but ain’t nothing in this world that’s gonna make me give up pie.”

Her lips twitch at his words, something he can’t quite put his finger on dancing in her eyes.

“You mean like there was nothing in this world that could make you come to this place?”

“Nope. See, that’s different.”

“It’s different because…?”

He smiles, a boyish grin that makes him look, at least, ten years younger.

“The only reason I agreed to this is because you said you loved this place.”

“And?”

“And I’m clearly trying very hard to impress you.”

“Clearly.”

“Now, what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” she says, mischief  coating her features, “that when the girl you’re trying very hard to impress wants you to try the muffins, you try the muffins, Dean.”

He laughs at that, but his eyes soften as they flicker over her face slowly.

“What? What was that look for?”

“Nothing…” he replies, scratching the back of his neck. “You just… You really love this place, don’t you?”

A breathless smile.

“Yeah, I really do.” She whispers, looking at him from the rim of her mug.  She pauses for a second, seemingly thinking about something, then licks her lips and continues. “My dad… He and I don’t really get along, -we never did quite frankly, so when things got a bit tough at home, my mum would bring me over here for breakfast. It was kind of our thing, you know?” she grins at the memory and looks at the table, seemingly counting the grains of sugar she’d spilled minutes earlier. “We still stop by when she visits.”

He sees the serenity that has settled into her eyes then, notices the tenderness that’s basically strapped into her soft voice, and grins, because it’s almost as if her love for that place seeps into his bare skin and makes him feel lightheaded.

Glancing at the silver band he never takes off, he twists it around his finger and just thinks for a minute.

And then-

“My mum used to take me fishing.” He tells her, absentmindedly cracking his knuckles. “See, my dad has always loved it, but he’s pretty bad at it. And I mean pretty bad, kid.” He chuckles, rough and low at the back of his throat, eyes glancing out of the bay window. “She’s always lied to him about it though. Didn’t want to hurt his feeling. So, when he said he wanted to teach me, she just took me to the lake one day and said Son, I’m gonna show you the ropes here but if your dad asks, this was all him.”

Y/N laughs at his words, nose scrunched up in the cutest of ways and leans closer, fingers tucking a strand stray of hair behind her ear.

“She sounds amazing.”

Her words are like a stab in the heart.

“Yeah. She, uh, she was.” He rasps, averting his gaze. “She died. When I was four.” He pauses, hoping that she didn’t hear the way his voice wavered. “Fire accident.”

And he waits for her to look at him like he’s a lost puppy, waits for some pitiful comment to leave her lips but instead-

“God –I’m sorry, I didn’t-”

“No, it’s –you’re fine, don’t worry.” He cuts her off but she hesitates, looks at him like she might want to apologize again, so he reaches for her hand, his knuckles scraped against her soft skin. “Seriously. We’re good.”

Cracking a small, grateful smile, she traces the back of his hand slowly.

“Well. I know it’s not what you want to hear but she… She would have been proud of you.”

And she might think it isn’t much, but he feels so overwhelmed, so absolutely floored by that statement, by the kindness in her eyes and that genuine smile she’s wearing that he wants to lean over and kiss her.

He doesn’t.

“Give it a little time, kid. You might change your mind.”

“That’s not gonna happen.” She blinks. “Unless you’re a serial killer.” A chuckle. Brows raised in question. “You’re not a serial killer, right?”

“Nope.” He grins, playfulness coating his features. “But you know what they say. Got to keep my options open.”

She barks out a laugh at that, the sparkling sound spilling from her lips and filling the space in between them with nothing but gleam and sunshine and, despite the fact he’s at a coffee shop with colorful walls and jazz vinyl records, all he sees, all he can see is the bright girl in front of him, the one that’s still holding his hand and smiles the most radiant smile he’s ever seen.

He’s never felt quite at home until now.

It takes him six more dates to kiss her.

He’s walking her back home from a carnival, small hand in his large one, fingers soundly intertwined together, and she looks so absolutely breath-taking under the moonlight that all he can do is stare, at the way the soft glow dances across her face, the way her eyes shine like diamonds, the way her lips curve up into the perfect smile.

So, when they stop under a lamppost and he says something that makes them both laugh until they can’t breathe, he gathers every ounce of courage, presses his forehead against hers, clasps the side of her face with his hand, and when her eyes flutter shut for just a second, he slowly ducks in and brushes his lips against hers.

It’s a ghost of a kiss, breathy and attentive at first, but then she whimpers into his mouth and he deepens it, winds an arm around her waist and, God, she tastes like whiskey and cinnamon and that cherry pie they shared earlier.

He’s never tasted anything better.

Dean’s happy.

It’s been there for a while now, he supposes, hidden in secret smiles and quiet afternoons spent in that coffee shop she loves so much, but it hasn’t really hit him, not until he sees her in his kitchen on a Saturday morning.

She’s just standing in front of the counter, dressed in one of his crisp white shirts, coffee pot in hand while she hums a familiar tune under her breath and he stares at her, bones turning into liquid at the way she moves into the little room like she’s always belonged there, and he can feel it, he can feel happiness and serenity and warmth pulling at his heartstrings.

Quietly, he wraps his arms around her waist and presses his lips against that soft spot on her neck that never fails to make her shudder.

“Mmmm. Good morning to me.” He mumbles, the words caressing her skin while they make their way into the fresh morning air.

She laughs then, that bright, lively laugh that he’s come to love and turns around to face him, hands finding their way around his neck within seconds.

“There you are, sleepyhead.” She murmurs, pecking the corner of his mouth. “I thought you’d never get out of bed.”

Instead of replying, he smirks, all playfulness and mischief, lifts her up and sets her on the counter, long fingers caressing the side of her face gently.

“Yeah, well” he starts, tucking a strand stray of hair behind her ear, “I didn’t exactly get much sleep last night.”

“Or maybe you’re just getting old.”

Growling, he rolls his eyes at her raised brows and gets an arm around her shoulders.

“’M gonna pretend I didn’t hear that because you’re cute and last night was pretty awesome.” He gloats, nudging his nose up against hers.

“Awesome, huh?”

“Kid, you have no idea.” He hums and leans in to kiss her, lazy and soft, grinning a little into it because, dammit, it’s a good day.

It’s all pastel touches and warm lips after that and when they finally break off, he braces his forehead against hers and takes a deep breath.

“You look good in that shirt by the way.” He whispers, parting her legs with his thigh and wrapping them around his waist.

She beams at him, cheeks going a bit pinkish.

“I do?”

“Yeah. As a matter of fact,” he starts, fingers undoing some buttons as they work their way down her breasts, “I think it looks better on you.”

She chuckles at that but then he latches his mouth on her neck and she sighs, that little sigh that lets him know he’s doing everything just right, the one he loves to pull out of her whenever he can, and, Jesus, he wants to-

“Easy there, cowboy.” She chuckles. “We got a date with your brother in a couple of hours.”

“Yeah, I know.” He says, tone matter of fact as his lips move along her sternum. “He can,” another kiss, “wait.”

“No, he can’t.” she objects, but he can feel her heartbeat against his chest, knows exactly the kind of effect his ministrations have on her. “D., I’m serious about this.”

“Hmmm,” he hums, sucking a kiss into her collarbone.

“Okay, you really need to,” she pants a little, “you need to stop that. We can’t be late.”

“Why not?” he implores, pulling back.

“Because I can’t just… I mean, I want…” she huffs out a breath in frustration, clearly struggling with her thoughts, then purses her lips and drops her eyes to the floor. “What if your brother doesn’t like me?”

“Not like –kid, how could someone not like you?”

“I dunno,” she shrugs, clutching at his arm, “why don’t you ask my dad?”

And he knows it’s not supposed to sound bitter, he knows she’s just being sarcastic, but he can still taste the sourness in his own tongue, because it’s something that could have dropped from his lips, because sometimes he can see shadowy corners of himself in her lightness, can see scars that for some messed up reason match his.

“Yeah, but to Sam’s defense, your dad’s a dick. My brother’s a good kid.”

“I know that but-”

Warm lips brush up against hers, soft but persistent, and for a moment, she loses herself completely in him and everything he is.

“You worry too much, sweetheart.”

“Well, I can’t really-”

“Sssh. Lemme help with that.” He breathes against her ear as he nibbles on her lobe, hand sliding from her waist to the inside of her thighs.

“You are so not helping.” She chuckles, breathy and loose.

He hums.

“D., you really have to stop. I have to go back home.”

“You know,” Dean says as he tugs her closer, pecking her forehead sweetly, “this would all be easier if you just lived here.”

The words are out of his mouth almost immediately and she freezes and goes tense under his arms while the whole room falls silent.

And, so, he waits.

He waits for one, two, three long bits and, when she still doesn’t speak, he begins to second-guess his own self, and starts to think that maybe it’s too big of a step for them to make, or that perhaps she doesn’t want to move in with someone who can’t even whisper those three little words to her, someone who’s less than anything she’ll ever deserve.

“Are you…” she lets out a chuckle and grazes his back with her fingers nervously, eyes wide and confused. “D., do you really mean that?”

Licking his lips, he nods and tucks some hair behind her ear.

“You spend most of the time here anyways.”

“Yeah, but do you want me here? Because what we have right now-”

“What we have right now is great.” Dean interrupts her and intertwines his fingers with hers soundly, smiling when he feels her squeezing in response.

“That’s what I’m saying. And I don’t want you to-”

“No, just…” he shushes her with a finger on the lips and chuckles a little at her adorable pout. “You asked me what I want, right?”

She nods.

“I want to have this. Every day. With you.” He explains, kissing her wrist. “So,” he locks eyes with her, all openness and softness, “move in with me.”

And he expects her to say yes, expects her to laugh and squeal and giggle in his arms, but instead, she ducks in, smooths her thumb over his jaw and kisses him, deep and ardent, and when her fingers sink into his hair he thinks that, yeah, he could really get used to this.

“I guess we’re doing this then.”

“God, yes…” She breathes, face breaking into a breathless smile, so bright and so sunny that it reminds him of spring and sunflowers.

So, he chuckles and kisses her, fingertips traveling to the junction of her thigh and hip slowly.

Moaning a bit, she squeezes her legs around his waist and he smirks against her mouth and hoists her into his arms.

“Dean, what on Earth are you-”

“’M taking you back to bed,” he hushes her, pressing his lips against hers.

“Your brother is-”

“Don’t care. Want you, sweetheart.” He rasps, mouth up her jaw. “Want you so much.”

Being late for lunch turned out to be just fine.

Dean’s in love with her.

He has been for a long time, maybe even since the very beginning, but the deeper he dives into her, grasping quirks and scars and warmth, the freer he falls, feelings he didn’t even know existed wrapping around his heart like vines and reviving every withered, every dead cell.

It’s something that’s always there, in boisterous afternoons spent within the crowds, joined hands a cardinal proof that he’s not alone anymore, in quick kisses and witty remarks whispered during hurried coffee dates on bustling days, but the sentiment is always louder, always purer in moments like this, moments of stagnation, when his whole world is wrapped up in her scent and the sound of her voice and the feel of her skin on his.

As if she’s just read his mind and knows he’s thinking of her, Y/N stretches out in the hammock, cat-like, and nuzzles his chest adorably, prompting a soft chuckle from him.

“You falling asleep on me, sweetheart?” he whispers, combing his fingers through her hair.

“Mmmm… ‘M just tired.”

“Told you we shouldn’t have driven four hours to see this place.” He teases and before he even has the chance to add anything she opens her eyes and growls at him, irritation coating her features. “Can’t see why you love it so much.”

“New Hampshire is gorgeous and you know it, heathen.” She gushes, ruffling his hair.

“Pffft. ‘S okay.”

“Yeah, right.” she huffs out, looking up at him. “You love this view.”

Grinning, he pulls her impossibly close, and locks eyes with her, in love with the way they shine brightly under the afternoon sun.

“Yeah,” he whispers, not averting his gaze. “I do.” A kiss on the tip of her nose. “I really do.”

He expects her to laugh, waits for her to blush or smile or call him a cuddly ol’ teddy bear like she usually does in occasions like this, but she just looks at him, Y/E/C orbs burning into his with an intensity that reminds him of lazy mornings and tender glances, of the nights he loves to spend plugged deep into her, smoothing calloused hands over bare skin, exploring edges and curves and pulling shaky whispers of soft love out of her.

It’s that look that pulls him right in, the one that mesmerizes and terrifies him at the same time because he knows exactly what it means.

So, he lets out a nervous laugh and mumbles a what? under his breath, scratching the back of his neck sheepishly.

“Nothing I’m just… I don’t know how I got so lucky with you.”

And he’s never thought that he could be that one good thing in somebody’s life but it’s so genuine and sweet-spoken that he believes it.

“You going all cheesy on me, kid?” he grins, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Shut up.” She whines, smacking his arm. “I mean that. Before you I thought I would –I didn’t believe I’d get to have something like this. The way I grew up, I-”

“Hey,” he cuts her off, thumb brushing against her bottom lip, “we’re not your parents. We’re never going to be your parents.” He promises, clasping the side of her face.

“D., -”

“Don’t. Kid, you have no idea how much I want this to work.” He objects and reaches out for her hand, interlocking their fingers together. “God, you don’t even know how much I-” he pauses, and swallows, all kinds of pent up emotions running through his veins, threatening to spill into his voice.

“How much you what?”

He takes a deep breath then and looks into her soft eyes, drinking in the way they’re staring back at him like he’s her entire world, the way her lips are pursed in an adorable frown, the way she furrows her brows in concern and she’s so unbelievably pure in that moment, so real, that he wants to let go, wants to stop holding back, to stop being so frigging afraid.

And so-

“How much I love you.” he whispers, just three little words, out in the open. “Sweetheart, I-”

“I love you too.” She cuts him off, propping herself on her elbow to straddle him, hands cupping his face as she leans in. “I love you so much.”

And then she kisses him like she’s never kissed him before, deep and demanding and a bit desperate, and, he grips at her, lets his hands wander beneath her sundress, and he knows.

She’s been the one for him all along.

Dean’s going to break her heart.

He should have seen it coming really, should have known that nothing good would ever come out of a relationship with him, but he’d been so fascinated by her kind heart and her sweet acceptance, he’d fallen so stupidly and insanely in love with her that he’d forgotten he was practically poison for everyone and anyone around him.

And yet, now that she’s looking at him, soft, wide eyes curious and concerned, he knows he’s going to break her in ways no other man ever had.

“D? Everything okay?” she implores, hand reaching out to touch his and he shuts his eyes closed for a second and lets himself get lost in her softness.

He blinks and nods, squeezing her fingers in response.

“Was that your dad? You sounded kind of-”

“No, that was –kid, that was my CO.”

“Your CO?” she repeats, forehead puckered. “But I thought you said you had the day off .”

“I did. I do…” he sighs, running a hand over his face tiredly. “He, uh, he wanted to tell me that I…”  A glance that’s filled with sorrow and regret. “I got called back on active duty.”

Silence.

Everything around them, every single sound fades into the background until there’s silence and nothing else and even though she doesn’t say anything, Dean swears that every single thing she’s feeling floats across her face like a lonely cloud on the pristine sky.

“But you’re on reserve duty, right? They can’t just do that.”

“’S not that simple, Y/N. If they need me, they can do pretty much anything.”

She nods, eyes a little lost and face white as a hospital sheet and, God,  he wants to take her in his arms and tell her that’s everything is going to be okay, but he can’t lie to her.

“So, you have to go.” She whispers slowly, eyes drifting to the spilled coffee in front of her.

“So, I have to go.”

“How long do we-”

“A month.”

She hums, biting on her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood, orbs dark and misty.

His stomach plummets.

“You’re leaving in a month.”

He mumbles a yeah under his breath and notices the tears in her eyes.

He almost chocks on dry air.

“Hey,” he whispers softly, running a hand over his jaw, “don’t go crying on me now, sweetheart.”

“I’m sorry.” She whines, sniffing a bit. “I’m just… D., I can’t-”

“You’re not going to.” He objects, reaching up to wipe away the wetness. She leans into his touch, almost absentmindedly, and he smiles just a little, despite himself. “’S not my first rodeo.”

She laughs, bitter and wrecked.

“That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“Well, it should.” He smirks, all smug and swagger, even if he’s dying on the inside. “I’m not gonna die, kid. I love you too much to just leave you like that.”

She looks at him, looks into his eyes, searching for something.

“Do you promise?”

Instead of replying, he smiles, soft but honest and reaches out for her, manipulating their fingers until they’re laced together, then brings their joined hands to his lips.

“Cross my heart.” He vows and kisses her knuckles sweetly.

He lets himself store the feeling of skin against lips on memory but the serenity that simple intimacy gives him evaporates almost immediately, because his mind drifts to the small velvet box that’s been hiding in the pocket of his leather jacket for almost a month, the one with the elegant diamond ring his mum used to own.

And he prays to God he’ll get to keep his promise.

Dean’s been gone for 240 days.

He sends letters, even calls when he can, but she misses him, misses his scent and his smile, the way he throws his entire body into laughter, the way his eyes shine like caramel when the light catches them just right.

But she holds on.

She reads all the messy scribbles he sends, no matter how bedraggled and jumbled they are, listens to his gruff voice as it blends with the sound of static when he tells her he misses her and he can’t wait to kiss the hell out of her again, drives around his Baby with love and makes sure Sam’s doing okay just like she promised him she’d do.

And she waits.

She waits and hopes, no matter how much it tears her apart, because there’s nothing else she can do.

And then there’s a knock on the door one day.

She’s in the kitchen with Benny, making dinner for them and his girlfriend, when she hears it, a loud thump that sounds like a porcelain heart breaking.

Slowly, she reaches out for the towel, but Benny beats her to it, laying a hand over her shoulder.

“I got it, Muffin. Emily’s probably here early anyways.” He tells her, blue eyes lighting up in adoration and she chuckles a little at how love-struck he looks, and goes back to stirring the pasta, throwing a Call me if you need anything and for God’s sake, don’t have sex on my couch over her shoulder.

And she waits for Benny’s warm voice to echo in the rooms of the house, waits for Emily’s laugh to fill the place, waits for them to come into the kitchen, Benny’s hand wrapped around her waist, no matter how much the blonde woman claims to hate it, but nothing happens and she knows something is wrong.

So, she almost storms into the living room and stops dead in her track as soon as she sees them.

Sam standing at the door, tears in his eyes.

Dean’s dog-tag in Benny’s hands.

And she knows what that means, they all know what that means, but she still shakes her head, wraps her arms around her middle and mutters a broken no under her breath.

“Y/N, I-” Sam starts, taking a step forward, voice hoarse and numb.

“No. This can’t –there must have been some sort of mistake. Dean can’t –he’s not…” she chocks, despite the tightness in her throat.

“There was a road side bomb.” Sam tries to explain, taking a tentative step forward. “Dean –he was at a convoy somewhere with his team.”

“No.” she almost screams, bumping into the sofa. “He’s not…. He promised me. He said he’d come back, he…” she pauses and takes a deep breath, tears streaming down her face, then runs a hand over it. “I got one of his letters yesterday, he can’t just-”

“They were ambushed, Y/N. No one –only one person survived the explosion and he’s in critical condition. The bodies, they’re…. charred up, no one can know-”

“So maybe he wasn’t there.” She cries, hope floating across her face “Maybe this is some sort of mistake and he’s-”

“He’s not. He’s… Y/N, my brother’s dead.”

My brother’s dead.

The words echo soundlessly into her head as Dean’s smile flashes before her eyes.

She remembers the first time she saw him, remembers how bright his eyes were as he helped her pick up the books she’d dropped and teased her about Shakespeare.

There was a road side bomb.

She remembers the look of pure interest and concentration on his face as she talked to him about her favorite book on their first date, remembers the way his eyes sparkled every time he talked about Sammy.

Dean –he was at a convoy somewhere with his team.

She remembers the way his lips felt against her own every time he kissed her, the way their bodies always fit together like pieces of the same puzzle, the way he worshiped here, passion and lust blending with tenderness and love every time he wrapped himself around her.

The bodies, they’re…. charred up

She remembers the nights they spent laying side by side after he’d woken up from yet another nightmare, looking at each other’s eyes and muttering secrets to one another until they fell asleep,  the days of pure bliss spent by the lake at New Hampshire, filled with swimming and love-making and laughs and soft, tender touches.

My brother’s dead.

She remembers every graze of skin, every whispered promise, every smile and every tear and she realizes she’ll never have that again.

My brother’s dead.

My brother’s dead.

My brother’s dead.

She falls into her knees and begins to sob.

She’s sitting there again.

The girl with the Y/H/C hair and the bright Y/E/C eyes that found love in that small coffee shop is sitting next to the bay window, a Vonnegut book in hand while she sips at her beverage leisurely.

But she’s different now. She drives a 67 Chevy Impala and always wears a dog tag around her neck. She doesn’t radiate hope and bliss like she used to and doesn’t believe in magic anymore.

It’s the first time she visits the coffee shop in six months. She’s tried to stop by before, tried to go there with Benny or Sam but she never made it to the door because everything hurt too much.

Everything reminded her of Dean, of the day everything started, of the day that signified their end even if they both hadn’t realized it back then, and she couldn’t let herself be buried in that blur of emotions that just wouldn’t let her be, wouldn’t let her breathe properly.

Today’s different though.

Today she knows that they would have gone there together, so she’s there, sitting at the table they used to sit, pretending that he’s there with her, that he holds her hand and whispers jokes into her ear, laughing that rich, warm laugh of his that she misses so damn much.

The bell above the door dings and pulls her out of her thoughts, but she’s too overwhelmed and too spent to care.

She hears footsteps, feels someone burning holes at her from behind and, God, she wants to yell and cry at the same time because she’s so tired, so absolutely drained from all these people that look at her like she’s a beaten puppy.

But then-

“You know for a birthday girl, you look pretty miserable.”

And she freezes because that voice is so familiar, it’s the one that has been sneaking into the corners of her mind for months, the one she wishes she could hear again, just once, and it’s loud and clear and there.

So, she turns around slowly and when freckles and broad shoulders swim into view the breath hitches in her throat because the man standing in front of her might look older than he really is, burdened with death and ghosts of loved ones and loss, he might look worn out and tired, but his eyes, those eyes that can turn into a million different shades of green in the blink of an eye, are as bright as she remembers them when they lock into hers.

“You’re –you’re back. You’re alive.” She stutters stupidly, tears glistening as she gets on her feet.

“Well,” he smiles that crooked smile she’s missed so much, scratching the back of his neck nonchalantly, “I promised, didn’t I?”

And it’s all she needs to hear, everything she needs to know, it’s an answer that’s so simple, so solely and uniquely Dean, that she breaks into sobs in the middle of the coffee shop until his large hands wrap around her waist, pull her to his solid chest and squeeze like he’s afraid she’s not real, that someone will take her away from him again.

“Ssssh,” he coos, kissing the top of her head softly “it’s okay. I’ve got you now, sweetheart.”

Another sob rips through her and she clutches at his shirt, body wracking with defeat.

“They said –they told me you were dead.”

Swallowing around the lump in his throat, Dean drops another kiss on her hair and then cups her chin and forces her to look at him, eyes dark and filled with unshed tears, a fading scar between his brows.

“They thought I was.” he explains, dabbing away the saltiness. “After the bomb went off, I was... I was trapped behind enemy lines. Busted my leg real bad too.”

“Are you-”

“’M fine. The pain –I could take that… But knowing I couldn’t get to you… Knowing you thought I was dead, it killed me. And I was worried… When I finally found a way to get back here I thought you’d have-”

“Don’t,” she pleas, cupping the side of his face, “don’t say that. You’re…”

He nods slowly and sucks in a breath.

“Just,” she sighs in a whose, grazing his jawline gently, “never do that to me again.”

He smiles, the first real smile in over a year.

“Never again, kid.” He promises, voice wavering, mouth millimeters away from hers. “Never again.”

She laughs the laugh of a mad woman, broken and relieved and overwhelmed, and he leans in, brushes his nose against her jaw and ever so slowly, he captures her lips with his.

He tells her everything she needs to know with that kiss, takes everything she has to give, pain and tears, love and longing, and it’s like she breathes life into him all over again, it’s like that first kiss under the lamppost in the middle of the street on a summer night, a kiss that’s able to put all of his broken pieces back together and make him feel whole again.

And Dean tastes everything, drinks everything in and gives it back tenfold, knowing that he’s really back and she’s real and she’s his, she’s always been his and he smiles against her lips.

He’s right where he belongs.

Forever Tags: @jpadjackles @supernatural-jackles @ravengirl94 @percywinchester27 @hannahindie @thing-you-do-with-that-thing @trexrambling @pickupthatamulet @impala-dreamer @imagining-supernatural @becs-bunker @wordstothewisereaders @winchestersnco @sgarrett49 @myrabbitholetoneverland @iwriteaboutdean @ruprecht0420 @captainemwinchester @mogaruke @imissyoualittlemoreeveryday @wellthatsrandomkek @jayankles @keepcalmandcarryondean  @escabell @thevioletthourr @kathaswings @tiny-friggin-human​ @winchesters-flannels​ @akshi8278​ @atari-writes​ @emilywritesaboutdean​ @ofloveandlonging​ @mandilion76​ @polina-93​ @spn-dean-and-sam-winchester​ 

Cross My Heart Tags: @jensen-akf​ @samsfabuloushair​ @shamelesslydean​

[hyliancutiepie]

Day 7 | Stay With Me/AU

“In which Prompto was born a Prince and Noctis grew up as a citizen in Insomnia. No war, just love and fluff and good things. Mostly.“

only kinda 'stay with me' but more towards the end. very very loose, but it still fits so i'll say it counts xD! there is a little non-graphic NSFW stuff about... 2.5k words in. nothing too heavy but it is there, just so you know uwu

this is also the last prompt for promptis week... i'm kinda sad it's over but i'm glad i was able to get my butt into gear so i could participate! it's also been amazing reading and viewing all the content everyone has posted :D i’d also like to thank the admins at @promptisfanweek for organising it! you guys are the best!!!

Also on AO3

“I can’t believe school’s almost finished…” Prompto whined, collapsing on the neat, brick ledge around the perfectly maintained garden. “Just a few more exams and that’s it. We’re done.”

Noctis laughed, settling down beside his best friend. “And here I thought you’d be relieved.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I totally am, but I’m not too, you know?” Prompto explained and then groaned in annoyance, Noctis casting him a clueless expression on purpose. “Asshole.”

A grin formed and Noctis lightly shoved Prompto at the arm. “Don’t worry about it, dude. I get it. It’s scary going out into the world, amiright?”

“So right.” Prompto agreed with a drawn out sigh. “Except… I’m not.”

“Nah Prom, you’ll probably see more of the world than I ever will.” Noctis said with a pat on Prompto’s back. “And you already have, seeing as you’ve actually left Insomnia.”

“It’s not so great out there really.” Prompto offered. “But I should take you to that Chocobo farm I visited once.”

Noctis had begun digging around in his backpack, searching for something. “You keep saying that.” He commented, pulling out two cans of soda, one of which he offered to Prompto as he continued. “But you never follow through.”

“I will. There’s some time between graduation and my birthday so I say we convince Iggy and Gladio to sneak us out of the city.” He suggested, opening the drink at arm’s length. It made a fuss, foam spilling down the side. “How much did you shake these, jeez!”

A sheepish chuckle later and Noctis set his drink aside instead of opening it. “For what it’s worth, if they won’t do it then I will. It’ll be our first real adventure.”

Prompto’s eyes lit up at the offer, smiling encouragingly. “Oh Noct, you have no idea how great that sounds.” And although the words sounded like an invitation, Noctis could hear the tone Prompto always used – the one on his breath whenever Prompto knew there was no way he’d be allowed. “If only it was that easy.”

“You know it can be.” Noctis told him. “They can’t keep you couped up in this city for the rest of your life!”

“Noct, it’s okay.” Prompto said with a reassuring pat on his shoulder. “I’ll get out there eventually. Besides, once I’m King, I don’t think anyone’ll be able to stop me from leaving.”

Noctis knew that was a lie, but knew it was the kind of lie Prompto told himself to reassure himself, so Noctis didn’t point it out. He sighed though and turned his eyes away. “We’ll have the best adventures, you and me. Imagine the photos you’ll be able to take.”

“That’s what I’m looking forward to the most.” Prompto agreed with a firm nod of his head.

Noctis gasped, hand coming to his chest in mock offence. “And here I thought spending time with me would be the most exciting part.”

A tinge of pink brushed over Prompto’s freckled cheeks and he avoided eye contact, smile on his lips small and nervous. “Well yes, that too.”

“You know, Prom.” Noctis began, changing the subject to save Prompto feeling embarrassed. “I get that you’re probably scared of what will come after we finish school, but in the end, we’ll always be best friends. You know that, right?”

Prompto nodded. “For life.” He vowed, then took a long sip of his drink. “To think, we almost weren’t friends at all.”

“And I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Noctis told him.

“I actually wanted to talk to you sooner...” Prompto admitted, sheepishly smiling as he scratched the back of his neck. “Buuuut... I was scared you wouldn’t want to talk to me.”

“Are you kidding?” Noctis said, lightly elbowing him. “You’re the Prince!”

Prompto nodded, nervously cracking his knuckles and each finger in succession, unconscious to how the action brought Noctis’s eyes to the soft digits. Noctis smiled a little, knowing the tell-tale sign that had always been there, wanting to lay his own hand over them, hold them tight. “Y-yeah but... I saw in primary school how you avoided people. Like, on purpose. And I figured if I talked to you then the other kids would start harassing you so... I decided not to.” He chuckled at himself, staring up at the sky. “It sounds so stupid saying it now”

“It is pretty stupid.” Noctis agreed, nodding with a grin. “Anyone would be honoured to have the Prince approach them.” He told him. “But hey, your heart was – in its own way – in the right place.” A broad smile formed across Prompto’s freckled face and Noctis turned his gaze away, hoping to hide the flush on his cheeks. “S-so... why did you start talking to me then?”

“Eh, well I figured it was now or never.” Prompto said with a shrug. 

“Now or never?” Noctis repeated, frowning at the words. 

“Well, when I finish school I have my coronation and then I'll be King. All my studies will be done at the Citadel, rather than on a college campus and... well... I knew I’d never get the chance to see you again.” He explained, tilting his head as he watched Noctis’s face. “I also kinda had a massive crush on you.” He admitted with a flush on his cheeks. “And Iggy told me “if you never do something, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life”. So... I decided that if I never talked to you then I’d always wonder what might have happened.”

“And?” Noctis probed. 

Prompto frowned. “And?” 

“You talked to me.” Noctis clarified. “So, what happened? Was it everything you wished for?”

Freckled cheeks reddened even further and Prompto averted his gaze. “Well yes and no... You became my first real, friend that’s not related to me by royal duty. But… I also fell in love with you.”

Noctis smiled warmly, his cheeks heating up. “Is that such a bad thing?”

“I’m a Prince, Noct.” Prompto replied, leaning his chin into the palm of one hand. “The last of my line. There’re expectations and responsibilities that I have to fulfil and I have no choice in the matter.” He sighed. “I’m not allowed to fall in love.”

He shifted closer to the prince, sliding his hand and fingers between Prompto’s. At the action, Prompto’s other hand fell from under his chin and he stared at their linked hands with stunned eyes. “Prom…” Sunshine gold hair almost completely obscured bright blue eyes as the Prince turned his gaze to find Noctis’s. He smiled reassuringly, letting his eyes flutter shut, leaning in, tilting his head just so. Prompto’s eyes began to shut too, fingers tightening in their grip on his hand just as their lips touched.

Prompto let out a soft sigh, pressing into the kiss, his body twisting towards Noctis’s, fingers of his free hand tentatively touching under his friend’s jaw.

The kiss parted, but Noctis didn’t let Prompto go much further than a centimetre away, staring at closed eyes, counting blond eyelashes just before they fluttered open. When their eyes met, smiled broke upon their lips and they chuckled together, pressing foreheads, noses touching. “Oh Prom… I feel like I’ve wasted so much time.”

“Why?” Prompto asked, dragging his fingers into Noctis’s hair.

“I’ve loved you for years.” He confessed. “But I never said because… god I was so scared you’d turn me down. And now… school is ending and I won’t see you much anymore.”

Prompto pulled Noctis’s head against his shoulder, fingertips pressing comfortingly against his scalp. “Noct, it’s okay.” He breathed. “I actually… I actually had an idea. I wasn’t gonna mention it to you yet but...” Pulling back, Prompto kept their hands intertwined as he used his other to rummage through his bag. “I’ve been holding onto this for ages.” He commented as he pulled out a form, printed out on a sheet of expensive looking paper.

Scanning the page, Noctis noted the top of the page read “Crownsguard Application Form”. “What is this?” He asked with a frown, not understanding.

“Joining the Crownsguard means that you would live in the Citadel, in the soldiers barracks of course, but if you apply and get accepted before my Coronation, then I’ll be able to choose you as one of my personal guards.” Prompto explained. “And then you’d live in the same wing as me, Ignis and Gladio.”

“Is it really that easy?” Noctis asked, unable to believe it.

“Ignis thinks so. I am allowed to have three close guards in my retinue.” Prompto explained. “Of course… it’ll be really hard work for you. So I understand if you don’t want to – ”

Noctis picked up the form, determination filling his features.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 The King’s Coronation was the greatest event in the decade. Representatives of all over Eos and further had travelled there, from as far as Tenebrae, the Lady Lunafreya taking front seat. The great hall of the Citadel was filled to the brim with delegates, nobles and literally everyone Noctis could imagine.

And he was nervous as fuck.

He hadn’t seen Prompto all day, their sleeping quarters still so far away from each other, but Ignis had infiltrated his barrack early that morning and brought him up to a room he announced would be his. And then the Prince’s advisor had dressed him in the formal uniform tailored just for him, styled his hair and reminded Noctis how he was to act at the ceremony.

“Remember, do not speak until you’re asked to vow your allegiance to the King. Only say “I do”, understand?” Ignis said firmly.

Noctis had grinned, despite his nerves. “It sounds like marriage vows.”

Ignis had smiled back, a fond expression. Since Noctis had become friends with Prompto, the advisor had grown closer to Noctis, trusted him with Prompto’s safety through their school years and now, they considered each other good friends. “Maybe someday, they will be.” Ignis said to him.

“You must be Noctis.”

Noctis felt his eyes go wide as the soft, beautiful voice spoke to him, and he turned his head to see that Lunafreya, Lady of Tenebrae, had moved down the seats to sit directly beside him. The ceremony wasn’t to start yet and many were talking to one another to pass the time. “Uh.. yeah, yeah I am, my Lady.” He said, bowing his head awkwardly.

Lunafreya offered him a warm smile. “I am pleased to finally meet you.” She greeted. “Prompto has spoken about you often.”

“H-he talks about me?”

“Certainly.” Lunafreya replied, her eyes squinting slightly as her smile broadened. “And he speaks highly of you. I hope we can be good friends as well, Noctis.”

“I – uh – yeah, of course.” Noctis promised.

“Ah, it’s about to start. Please excuse me.”

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 “Uuuuuugh! I’m so glad it’s oveeeeeeeeeer!” Prompto groaned, collapsing onto his bed with an overdramatic ‘oomph’. He rolled over, arms above his head, still dressed in his formal robes.

Noctis had spent a lot of time in the Princ – King’s chambers since he’d entered the Crownsguard. They’d sit on the bed and play video games into the early hours of the morning when Noctis would reluctantly kiss his boyfriend goodnight and return to his barracks to a roar of teasing whispers from the other Crownsguard. They all knew his friendship with the Prince and surprisingly, showed no animosity about the fact. They had supported him, assisted him through the tough days of training, gave him tips.

Now that he wouldn’t be going back there, he already kind of missed them. But there would still be training to do, so he was sure to see them again soon.

“Noct! Get over heeeere! You must be exhausted too!” Prompto called, patting on the bed beside him.

A smile spread across Noctis’s mouth and he slid out of the constricting blazer to drape it over the nearest chair before joining Prompto on the bed, flopping down beside him, the mattress bouncing and bringing a laugh from the new King. “I can’t believe you’re actually King now.” He muttered, reaching for Prompto’s hand and giving it a squeeze.

“Honestly? Neither can I.” Prompto replied. “But I’m glad you’re with me, Noct. I don’t think I’d function without you here.”

Noctis smiled, leaning in to lightly kiss Prompto’s forehead. “Like I’d ever leave you alone.”

And from that moment on, he rarely did. Sure, Gladio is Prompto’s Shield, is at his side from dawn until dusk, but Prompto also insisted on Noctis being there too, hovering on the King’s other flank. More than once, Ignis had asked Prompto if it’s necessary for Noctis to be there all the time, but it’s Noctis who replied that there’s no where he’d rather be.

Sure they couldn’t express any of their affections whenever anyone is around, but Prompto managed to sneak in lingering touches whenever Noctis hands him an item or makes eye contact whenever he’s in a meeting and Noctis is stationed at the door of his office. It’s the little things. Not to mention that Noctis had barely used the room assigned to him, settling into Prompto’s quarters and against his side every night.

Noctis kinda wished he could take Prompto out on a proper date again. They managed a few before the Coronation, but now, five months in, it’d be impossible.

So that is why he enlisted Ignis’s help.

“I know he has dinner with us every night, but he also eats in front of other servants and maids and he can’t be himself, Ignis. He can’t be with me. I know he’s the King, Ignis, I’m so aware of it and I’m so proud of him but more than just a King, he’s Prompto.” Noctis said, pleading in his voice. “Let him have one night without the servants watching over his shoulder, please.”

It turned out that it didn’t take much convincing for Ignis to agree and not a week later Noctis was leading Prompto to a secluded, no servant’s allowed area of the royal wing where Ignis and Gladio had set up a table for two. Even Noctis stared in awe, captivated by the hundreds – it had to be hundreds, there were so many – that illuminated the area, four large bunches of roses sat at appealing distance around the circular room with a single one in a vase upon the table.

Prompto had gasped at his side when they’d stepped in, his eyes growing wide at the sight. “Oh… em… gee… Noct… did you do this?”

Noctis slid his arm down, Prompto’s hand moving from his elbow and into his own hand. He squeezed it, watching Prompto’s eyes swirling with wonder. “I arranged it. Specs and Gladio helped me out.”

“B-but… why? What’s this for?”

“I wanted to take you out on a date.” Noctis replied simply. “Leaving the Citadel isn’t possible right now, but, there’s no reason why I can’t bring the date to you.” He explained, guiding Prompto into the room. “C’mon, sit down.”

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 Prompto is shy, but eager in bed – or rather, Noctis decided, that he is eager but incredibly shy about showing it. The King had been the one that dragged him away as soon as they had decided the date was coming to an end – they had eaten food brought in by Ignis, held hands over the table as they sipped at the wine, talked about everything and anything, avoiding politics where they could – and shut the door to his chambers with a kind of haste that has Noctis raising eyebrows at him.

“Noct.” Prompto had said, approaching him with careful steps. “I want – ” He’d immediately flushed to the colour of a strawberry and his sentence broke off, as if he realised exactly what he was about to say. “I-I mean… I… uhm…”

Noctis didn’t need any encouragement or explanation and although he was shy too, uncertain about how to do anything like this, he had stepped forward and got the ball rolling with a fierce, stronger and hotter than any kiss they’d had before. It had led to clothing being haphazardly removed and tossed away, garments trailing their movements towards the bed where Noctis lay the naked King down and hoped to the Astrals he didn’t ruin this for Prompto.

For the most part, they had gone with whatever felt good, eased into the motions and both flushed scarlet when Prompto said Ignis had given him some supplies that had been in the bottom drawer of his side table ever since they’d started going out.

Turns out, Ignis knew exactly what he had been supplying and lube warmed up as Prompto moaned and tightened around him, fingers clinging to the silken sheets as he bucked into each thrust. Each breath was a gasp of Noctis’s name and Noctis had to remember to breathe as he was drenched with wave after wave of emotion and pleasure that ended with a gasp and a groan, nose buried into the crook of Prompto’s neck and shoulder.

And then they ended the evening with Noctis’s mouth bobbing down upon the King, testing with experimental swipes of his tongue and presses of his fingers, ultimately granting the King his first orgasm.

“W-well… shit.” Noctis mumbled, still catching his breath as he collapsed beside the recovering King. “That was… ”

“Noct, will you marry me?”

“I – say what?” Noctis exclaimed, snapping from the post-orgasm fog. “What did you ask me?”

Prompto was fidgeting with his fingers, gnawing on his already flushed and abused bottom lip. “I-I just… I asked if you would marry me.”

Oh gods, did he want to give the most enthusiastic reply ever, but he knew exactly what Ignis would say. “Prom – ”

“I know.” Prompto mumbled with a sigh. “It’s stupid.”

Noctis scrambled to prevent Prompto from rolling onto his other side, to stop him from turning away, he took Prompto’s hands into his own, kissing the knuckles, adoring each finger as he felt tears well up in his eyes. “It’s not stupid. You’re never stupid. And wanting that isn’t stupid. Astrals, Prompto, if I thought it would be possible I’d have proposed months ago.”

Prompto saw the tears and Noctis hadn’t even noticed they’d begun to fall until Prompto forces a hand free from his grip to wipe it away. “Noct…”

“I love you so much, Prom. More than anything in the world. I want to spend every moment of my life with you and I… I want to have everything with you.” Noctis babbled, beginning to sob as he presses his face into Prompto’s hands. “I love you but you’re not mine to have.”

It was the first night Noctis spent in his assigned quarters and it was the coldest night of his life.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 He woke to a weight at his side, Prompto’s form squished beside him onto the much-too-small-for-two bed Noctis was given.

It’s only then Noctis realised that it had been a cold night for the King as well.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 “I heard Prompto proposed the other night.”

Ignis was never good at the subtle approach, always jumping straight to the chase at any given moment. At least, Noctis thought, he waited a few days before bringing up the topic.

“Yes.” Noctis replied.

“And you turned him down.”

Noctis sighed. “He knows I want to, but he knows it’s not possible just much as I do.”

“Why exactly isn’t it possible?” Ignis asked, frowning at Noctis like he’d just spoken the strangest sentence in the world.

“Oh Specs, you know why. He’s the King of Eos, I’m just a part of his retinue. And a guy.” Noctis pointed out, wondering why it would be so hard to understand, especially for someone like Ignis.

To his surprise, Ignis started to chuckle. “Oh, Noct, there are no laws preventing a King from marrying a man. In fact, Prompto wouldn’t be the first to do so if you took your head out of your ass and accepted his proposal.”

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 Prompto was in his office, Gladio behind him, Noctis by the door as always, when Gladio suddenly announced his departure. Noctis kept his gaze on Prompto as the King watched with wide, disbelieving eyes as Gladio gave Noctis a pat on the shoulder and left, closing the door behind him.

“Noct?” Prompto asked, tentative. While he had forgiven Noctis for his brash and hurtful departure from his chambers only a week previous, there was a part of himself that held a little ache in his chest. “What’s going on?”

Noctis approached his desk, his steps careful, but certain as he rounded the polished wood and came to stand before the King. “Prom, last week… you asked me a question. It was a loaded one, with your heart on the line – ”

Prompto couldn’t help the snort that left his mouth. “Did Ignis give you a script?”

Laughter passed between them and Noctis knelt down, smile beaming. “He did. But it’s all right. I shouldn’t have shut you down so fast. I don’t think I ever actually apologised for it.”

“Don’t worry about that.” Prompto insisted.

“Let me make it up to you.” Noctis said, expertly pulling a small, black, velvet box from his pocket. Prompto had gasped before the rings were even presented to him and Noctis lay a hand on the King’s jittering knee to try and settle him. “Can I accept your proposal? Even though I’m a little late?”

Arms were thrown around his shoulders and Noctis toppled backwards, Prompto landing on top of him, mouths crushed together over and over as eager kisses were planted by a King who had begun openly sobbing above him. “Yes, yes, yes a thousand, million times, yes!”

[radmanraditz]

SHIPPING INFO.       Answer the following for your muse(s) so people       know how shipping works on your blog. REPOST.       Don’t reblog.

NOTE! THIS MEME HAS BEEN UPDATED SINCE THIS WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED PLEASE CHECK OUT THE UPDATED VERSION HERE

WHAT’S YOUR OTP FOR YOUR MUSE?:

At this point in time, I have no OTPs for my muse Raditz on this blog.

 WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO RP WHEN IT COMES TO SHIPPING?:

I’m good with doing anything I feel would be in-character for my muse to do.

Raditz seems like the guy who attracts self-centered partners for toxic or casual dating/sexual relationships. Even off of Tumblr, nobody really tried to get to know him. He’s also either been “the other guy” or the one being settled on if they can’t get with their preferred guy. I’m fine with these sorts of situations for him, but know that it won’t become emotionally intimate, and Raditz won’t feel that attached to his partner if they don’t care about him as a person.

So far on this blog, I’ve not seen anyone come at him with a true desire to have a committed relationship with an interest in his emotional wants and needs. Personally I would love to explore a healthy relationship with the muse. I’ll do the other kinds of relationships I’ve mentioned before, but it’d be nice to do something different too.

I’m used to shipping him with women in the past when I’ve played him, but I headcanon Raditz is bicurious, but leans more towards women. Men mostly come at my muse with a competitive attitude. I don’t have a lot of experience writing m/m relationships, but I’d be willing to do it if our muses have chemistry and you don’t mind my inexperience. (Still won’t write smut.)

 HOW LARGE DOES THE AGE GAP HAVE TO BE TO MAKE IT UNCOMFORTABLE?:

Any muse or mun under 18 is not allowed to ship with me or my muse. If you are over 18 and your muse is at least 18, they’re fair game to Raditz. He’s not into women who are a lot older than him that look their old age.

 ARE YOU SELECTIVE WHEN SHIPPING?:  

Not really so long as there’s mutual chemistry going on. Raditz doesn’t have as high of standards as my other muse, Nappa.

 HOW FAR DO STEAMY MOMENTS HAVE TO GO BEFORE THEY’RE CONSIDERED NSFW?:

When it comes to talking, anything that starts to get dirty with graphic sexual activity details is what I’d consider NSFW.  Detailed descriptions of sexualized body parts, groping/stroking of genitals or breasts are things I consider NSFW. Also detailed sexual fantasy thoughts and emotions felt during physical activity can be too. Basically if you could get into trouble for getting caught reading it at work, or I don’t think the content is suitable for minors to be reading, I’d consider it NSFW, tag it accordingly, and may even use the Keep Reading cut.

Blatantly stating things like: sex, penis, vagina, kinky, “let’s fuck” or other such things, I wouldn’t think are worth labeling and tagging. Grabbing, smacking, or rubbing a butt isn’t NSFW to me unless said butt is bare and the muses are starting to do something sexual in nature.

I’m not going to do graphic sexual scenes, but I do feel confident about how good my sensual writing can be without going “all the way.” By sensual writing I mean things like touching, and kissing in places that are going to be sensitive, but aren’t any of the body parts mentioned above. I take advantage of describing voice tone, verbal word choices, eye direction, movement, thoughts and feelings to build tension without getting too smutty. 

WHO ARE OTHER MUSES YOU SHIP YOUR MUSE WITH?:

At the moment there are no ships for my muse with other muses. He’s flirted with some other muses, and has had some casual sex with Skye in the Planet Vegeta AU verse that thread and plot seems to have been dropped due to inactivity as of this moment. But other than that nothing serious has been going on.

DOES ONE HAVE TO ASK TO SHIP WITH YOU?:  

It’d be nice if I’m aware that you want to ship! How else is it going to happen? I’m cool with chemistry developing out of the blue too, and if I like what I’m seeing I may ask you if you want to do a ship directly.

 HOW OFTEN DO YOU LIKE TO SHIP?:

Whenever I see potential chemistry. I like ships that help both characters grow as people, especially if it’s a positive relationship. Raditz is pretty flexible for relationships that aren’t healthy, or noncommittal too.

ARE YOU MULTISHIP?:

Yep. Raditz’s blog is a multi-ship blog where every ship is its own AU.

 ARE YOU SHIP OBSESSED OR SHIP MORE-OR-LESS?:

I love shipping and crack!shipping with fandom stuff. When it comes to roleplay though, I just play it by ear, and have low expectations for ships happening. I’m a healthy middle of the road kind of person about shipping.  

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SHIP IN YOUR CURRENT FANDOM?:  

I vicariously grew fond of Raditz x Nappa because of my friend‘s content, but outside of their stuff, what other people do with it doesn’t tickle my fancy. I really like their platonic partnership more.

For the heterosexual side of things, I like seeing Raditz shipped with: Launch, Maron, (Krillin’s ex not his daughter) Princess Snake, and occasionally Bulma.

I crossover crack!ship him with Mihoshi Kuramitsu from Tenchi Muyo! and that is my legit fandom OTP for Raditz that’s been going on for 16 years.  

FINALLY, HOW DOES ONE SHIP WITH YOU?:

I’d suggest talking to me about it and also flirting with Raditz to show interest in him. If you’re looking for a deeper relationship, make sure your muse actually treats him like a person they want to get to know, and be open and honest with him. Playing games and not being transparent won’t get your muse emotionally close to Raditz.

If you’re unsure of what to say when you bring up the topic, there’s this awesome post I found with a great format that’s short but detailed enough. I’ve even got it linked to my rules page in the shipping section.

Thanks for reading!

TAGGED BY.

Nobody, I did this a long time ago for @nappainanotherdimension

TAGGING. 

I don’t really know who all hasn’t done this that I didn’t tag when I did this for Nappa so if you wanna do it, just do it! :D And tag me so I can read yours!