#Super succinct and also on-time as an answer (/joke)

[abysskeeper]

Tagged by the lovely @keldae. Thanks friend! <3

3 ships

The ones always at the top of this list, my Trick and @gothamcityneedsme's Tavon. The ship that started as a high school joke of "what if we put the rebel and the loyalist together?" and has developed into 13 years (and counting) of the most wonderful stories of two, incredibly broken people slowly befriending each other and putting each other back together against all odds. Trick is the OC for me and these two own my heart. If I ever try to say otherwise, I'm lying.

As of late, coming up right behind the ship of ships for me, is--unsurprisingly--Gale/Nox. I'm just really excited to finally be writing my first DnD PC (ok...technically second, but not really. It's complicated) consistently, and I'm finding the outcast wizard/outcast wizard pairing is lending itself really well to my usual brand of drama, angst, and pretentiousness in writing. They should make each other worse, and the only reason they don't is because they're on opposite ends of the 'Do you want to become a god?' spectrum, where Gale is a resounding yes and Nox only moves slightly away from 'would kill a god if given the opportunity' because they do, actually, kill a god. In short, I'm having a blast writing them.

Not OCs, but third place gets to be Rosegarden, or Oscar/Ruby from RWBY. While we're waiting in v10 limbo, these two live in the back of my mind, and every so often come out to demand some attention. Without getting too much into it, something about destined, Chosen One kids and rhetorical/thematic parallels makes my brain go brrr.

First Ship

Hmmm. I think I usually answer Kataang for these but if I'm really thinking about it, I remember being super invested in Leo and Piper from Charmed, when my mom let me watch it. I couldn't really tell you what it was about them because I was about 6-8...but I was in it with them. They were the only ones I really cared about knowing what happened to them when the show ended.

Currently Reading

I currently have @/aevallare's Ao3 page up, and have for weeks because I'm notoriously awful with reading and then even worse about reading fanfic. I don't have the time and energy to start up Kindred right now (soon...vacation...hopefully), but I've been poking at Alex's one-shots. tailwind is delightful for those of you stuck in Gale/Tav hell like I am, and Wisp is jam-packed with character in such a succinct manner that I'm in love.

Last Song

I'm actively listening to Campus by Bastille right now. Great work-vent song for me. Immediately made its way onto Nox's playlist too.

Last Film

Also Argylle! I went in completely blind to it and then it gave me everything I didn't know I wanted. It was a fun romp, and the fact that it was incredibly Trick/Tav coded was an added benefit.

Currently Craving

Sleep, money, time. I'd like to say that once the paper crunch at work is over with the first submission it'll get better...buuuuut I know that's not true. I just want to have enough energy to write again. Also what I'm always craving, strawberry lemonade.

I'll actively tag @dr-demi-bee and...anyone who wants to do this lol (steal from me, please. I know not who wants these and who doesn't).

[sunrisetune]

for the character asks: All of them /j

But fr, 1 and/or 63 for the three of them?

[Image of Sailor Mercury doing the Anime Shining-Glasses Adjustment (tm) thing].

No but for real, thank you! <3 Referencing this ask meme (link) about RPG characters.

1. why did they choose their class(es)? their subclass(es)? Vive: Family tradition! Both her parents are druids and she was raised in the practiced and the faith. She branched off from them (... forgive the pun) in the first half of her troubled backstory, and took in Tanizah, her badger companion, a couple weeks after she left. Partly bc Vive was lonely for the first time in her life, and partly bc she was good in a fight. Partly bc Tanizah found her and was like, “Well, somebody’s gotta look after this kid” (Vive is twenty-three).

Nim: A fairly straight read from the Undine Adept archetype. (I mean she’s bisexual, of course, but as in straight from the manual.) She loved her community and wanted them to be safe, but knew she could do that better if she had more power, so one night she waded into the ocean until it was over her head and stayed there until the water spoke back. It’s kind of a blunt force way of becoming a druid, but it worked!

Theo: Occupational hazard? Her bardic talents come from poetry and monologues; she was raised in a travelling theatre troupe and once she could help out on the stage or practice for acting roles, she’d done so. She loved the poems and monologues best. Eventually the magic of theatre and storytelling became more literal for her, which helped out a lot with the razzle-dazzling (technical term) and special effects. When she set out on her own with her adventuring friends,, for reasons I absolutely know and have fleshed out,, she got better at fighting with actual weapons but she still very much prefers a battle of wita. (Or throwing wit at someone else and then hiding behind her tall paladin friend. Both maybe.)

-

63. what fight has scared them the most?

Vive: The first one she ever got into with her party. They’d came into her forest to murder some kobolds who’d been making trouble for travelers (the death kind), and Vive had quasi-rescued them by calling off the kobolds, who served the same green dragon as she did for reasons of backstory. (It’d recruited Vive a year-ish earlier by promising to not murder her parents, who were living and roaming elsewhere in the forest, as long as she scouted for it and made sure no one came close enough to disturb its schemes.) If she messed up her attempt to save the party the dragon would’ve been angry, which meant her parents would’ve been in danger, the forest itself might’ve been in danger of getting an acid bath, and her would-be party would be injured or dead. Her party had hard fights after that one but never one with so much of her life, specifically, in peril all at once. One persuasion check! One (1).

Nim and Theo: This is harder because I haven’t actually played either of them /o\ [I can make up a fight from their backstories and then it’ll be canon for them though, ahahA] Nim one time had to save a younger undine and her sibling from a few brine zombies when they swam out to a rock that was a bit too far into the shadowy place, and hadn’t come back at nearly sundown. It wasn’t the first fight Nim had ever gotten into or even the worst one that far, but it was the first time she’d used Surge (one of her Oceans domain powers) and saved two children from drowning. Also where she got the shell bracelet that’s her divine focus for her spells-- the girls’ mother gave it to her as a gift when she got them home.

For Theo, it wasn’t a battle as much as the word-fight between her parents and some of the other actors / stagehands / prop-workers etc and the ringleader of her theatre troupe, right after which the troupe kind of,, dissolved. Creative differences and all that. No one was actually hurt but it was a really big change, which is especially scary when you��re like, twelve. She’s still much happier when she’s surrounded by people who work together.

[mar1garden]

going batty part 1

masterlist

warning: this will be salty. very salty. if you think it’s ooc let me know and i’ll do the best i can to fix it, but the characterization in this show is so shoddy already that there isn’t much i can do. alya salt, adrien salt, lila salt, bustier salt, class salt. this is also my first posted fic!! if u wanna be on the tag list let me know 💙🌹

The first impression Damien had of his new class was that they were loud. Even as he walked up the stairs, he could hear voices in the classroom. It seemed a debate was occurring, though he couldn’t quite make out the two sides. He reached the top of the stairs, but before he could even make a grab for the door handle, the room fell silent. Damien was about to thank whatever deity was watching out for him and silencing the roomful of screaming children he was about to walk into when he heard another voice from inside the room.

“Of course she’s in love with him,” an effeminate voice said matter-of-factly. “But he barely knows she exists. It’s tragic, really. She tells me about it every time she sleeps over- oops!” the voice continued. Damien didn’t know who was speaking, and he didn’t know who they were speaking about, but he knew from their cadence and their confidence in “accidentally” spilling secrets that he couldn’t trust them as far as he could throw them. Damien sighed deeply to think that he was joining a class of liars and idiots as he reluctantly opened the door to the classroom. Once more the class quieted- chaos had broken out once more after the liar mentioned her little tidbit, which he expected had been the goal.

“Ah! Our new student! M. Damocles told me to keep an eye out for you. Would you like to say a few words to the class?” a woman- presumably the teacher, though she did nothing to show it- asked. She smiled expectantly at him as he moved to stand in front of her desk, facing the class.

“I’m Damien. I’m 15 and I’m an exchange student from America. I do not wish to distract myself from my studies during my time here, so please do not try to make friends with me. I’m not interested,” Damien told the class sharply. He walked briskly to the only open seat in the room- back row, next to some girl who smiled gently at him before returning her gaze to the front of the class. Interesting, he mused. By her bright clothes, he had expected bubbliness. Perhaps a high-pitched greeting. A hug, maybe. This was a pleasant surprise, though it was the only one of its kind he had had all week.

On Monday, they had received video evidence of a super villain in Paris. Tim had suspected it was CGI, especially since Paris was visually completely fine when he hacked some security feeds, even though the video clearly showed the Eiffel Tower falling. Bruce had decided that they really ought to at least check before writing it off, and Damien had drawn the short straw.

On Tuesday, Bruce had told him his cover for being in Paris was that he was an exchange student. He wasn’t allowed to be Robin while he was there, as it may put his identity at risk. He wasn’t allowed to leave until he had confirmation that the thing was either a hoax or genuine, unless he was in actual danger.

On Wednesday he packed. He couldn’t take weapons with him, obviously, because airport security may be a joke but he was pretty sure they would catch an actual sword stuffed in his bag. That afternoon he had flown to Paris and gotten settled in.

And now it was Thursday. Damien had learned much about the class very quickly, mainly that it was composed of a liar and some idiots. He had learned his deskmate was quiet. He had learned that he was far enough ahead in the syllabus that he could afford to study people in class.

He hoped the rest of the week was calm. Even if it meant he had to stay longer, he would rather have time to get settled before suffering a villain attack- if the whole thing was real, anyways. He pulled his focus back to the task at hand- assessing the class and finding any useful allies or sources of information. He recognized the girl next to the liar as the Ladyblogger. This meant the Ladyblog was likely an unreliable resource, which he mentally jotted down. That was good to know.

Damien cast a sideways glance at the girl next to him. She was patiently listening to the teacher and obviously tuning out the other students. When Damien bothered to listen, he noticed them gossiping about her. So Marinette was her name, huh?

Every rumor he heard was traced instantly back to the liar, and with each word he noticed the girl next to him tense imperceptibly more. He mentally scoffed. It was clear that she wasn’t going to stand up for herself. How pathetic. She was preferable to the liar or any of the blind idiots, but certainly not by much. So lost in thought was he that he flinched when the bell rang. Where had his restraint gone?

Marinette turned to him once the bell had rung. In a voice clearly pitched down so others wouldn’t hear, she spoke for the first time that day: “You’re Damien, right? I’m Marinette, the class president.” He scoffed slightly. The whole class clearly hated her, and she refused to stand up for herself. How had this mess become class president? As if she hadn’t heard him, she continued: “If you need anything, let me know. Here’s your class schedule and syllabi, and here’s a map of school. If you’d like, I can give you a tour later and explain the multiple purposes of some of the classrooms.” She handed him a short pile of papers and waited, as if she expected a response. When she got none, she nodded and left, and somehow, that made Damien feel worse than he would have if she had scolded him on his lack of a ‘thank you.’

The rest of the day, he remained in the same classes as her. He sat next to her in a majority of them, as she was often the only person with no seat partner. She remained quiet and focused, and she continued to pointedly ignore the other students, though it seemed he was not among their ranks. When he asked any questions, she answered quickly, quietly, and to the best of her ability, which he appreciated. She may be useful yet, if her succinct answers to non-hero questions were any indication of her general temperament. As he thought this, the bell rang for lunch and the class began to pack up. Damien wasn’t sure if he should risk the caf or head off campus, but as he turned to ask Marinette, he noticed that she had frozen in place. Her bag was half packed and resting on the table as she looked in surprise at someone standing at the table.

The boy was blonde and green eyed. He had had the liar hanging off of him, which either meant they were working together or he was a bigger idiot than them all. He smiled condescendingly at Marinette and Damien, then he turned solely to Marinette. “Marinette, may I speak with you real quick? It’ll only take a minute,” the boy asked, though it was clear ‘no’ was not an option. At the girl’s small nod, he turned to Damien. “Do you mind if I steal her for a sec?” he asked. Damien raised an eyebrow.

“Seeing as she’s a human being and therefore not property, I don’t see how you could steal her, but be my guest.” The boy smiled that same smarmy smile at him, and Damien decided that too many unlikeable people disliked the sweet girl next to him. He didn’t want to be among their ranks, and while the girl could do with a bit more spine, she had been nothing but pleasant to him. As the boy maneuvered her away to speak, Damien moved a bit more quietly. It would be easy for his trained ears to overhear, and they should both underestimate him, so it would be simple to eavesdrop.

“Mari, you didn’t say anything to him, did you?” the blond asked, looking searchingly at the girl in question. She sighed in response.

“Is that what this is about? I promise, I didn’t tell him anything. I think he knows she’s lying, and if he asks, I won’t lie to him to protect her, but I haven’t told him anything and he hasn’t asked.” Marinette rolled her eyes at the boy. Damien couldn’t help but notice that her posture, while visibly scared when other students were around, was simply bored when only Blondie was there. The boy had sighed in relief at Marinette’s words, but had quickly tensed back up.

“Wait, if he asks if she’s lying, you’ll just... tell him? Just like that? Mari, you can’t do that! He doesn’t know us, he doesn’t need to know our secrets!” the blond protested. He assumed a superior expression and quickly looked at Marinette in as disappointed a way as he could manage. The aforementioned girl glared at him.

“Agreste, I’m not going to lie. I refuse to do so, especially to try and protect a girl who hates me. Damien is perfectly kind and has been nothing but cordial, I have no reason to deny him information that may affect his time here. I won’t make him listen to some liar thinking it’s the truth.” Marinette ended the conversation there, walking back to the desk quickly and packing her bag before leaving class. Damien took this in with an air of quiet amusedness, though he was touched that she defended him.

Maybe his time here wouldn’t be so impossible after all.

that’s where i’m ending the first part! if you’d like to be tagged in the next part let me know! have a wonderful weekend folks! ~💙🌹

[writhe]

how did you do the natural dye? (if you don’t mind sharing the process) i’m so in love with it

I don’t mind! I wont be able to give you a super succinct answer because I am definitely not an expert, and my favorite thing to do with natural dye is to fuck around 

gonna be honest: a really great way to get started is to watch some youtube videos and read some articles. there are a ton of things you can dye with, and it will be nice having a reference for what the process looks like

generally, it is: choosing to treat the fabric/yarn/material with a mordant (or not), creating a dyebath (often using heat, but not always), using the dye to dye the fabric, and then using a modifier (or not) 

I think the limiting factors really are: 

what resources are available locally? - e.g., do you have space where you live where you can sustainably gather dyestuff? what plants are in season? 

how much do you want to spend? - this is easily a project you can do for little to no cost, but you may need to buy a stock pot if you don’t want to ruin a pot you otherwise use for cooking (lots of thrift stores teem with these, luckily). you can also choose to buy dyestuff which saves you the hassle of finding it or growing it yerself. depending on what modifiers or mordants you use, you might need to go to a specialty shop or order stuff online

 what colors do you want to achieve? - there are seriously loads of colors you can achieve with combination of dye, mordants, and modifiers. check this out - 25 colors from one dyebath! 

if you are just getting started, you can use stuff you may already have in your house or yard: turmeric, acorns, onion skins, pomegranate, walnut, coffee, to name a few. you can make mordants from copper pipes, rust, alum, piss (no joke, though i have not and probably wont) 

a really helpful guide for me has been Wild Color (this is my go-to and is the guidebook I use), yer library probably has it but if it doesn’t and you don’t want to buy a copy there are literally so, so many resources online

there is also bit of a technical side to it, with checking ph levels / measuring liquid ratios / weighing fabric. but, in my opinion (contest this, please, in the notes!) it’s not always necessary & a lot of the process you can feel out / eyeball, especially if you don’t feel tied to achieving a certain result 

lastly, make sure you dispose of yer dyestuff properly. some things are just fine to pour down the drain or into compost, but double check! for example, walnut husks are full’a tannins that will fuck yer garden/compost up

also, be prepared to dedicate some time to it! some mordants take weeks to make, and the process of dyeing usually takes at least a few hours 

there is a ton you can do with this! i am still learning! have fun on yer misadventures, let me know how it goes if you try it out! 

[vannahfanfics]

Pikachu, I Choose You!

Category: Mild Romantic Fluff

Fandom: My Hero Academia

Characters: Kyoka Jiro, Denki Kaminari

Requested By: Spoilerz_Alert (Ao3)

"Nonononono- Ahhh, Denki, nooooooo!" 

Kyoka rubbed her eyes sleepily as she shuffled down the last few steps of stairs. Hanta's miserable wail floated out of the kitchen, making her ear jacks twitch as she registered the high-pitched sound. Metallic clangs and muttered curses followed, and when Kyoka approached to inspect the chaos occurring in the kitchen, she also could discern Denki's characteristic low-toned "yayyyyy."

She smothered a giggle as she rounded the corner to find the aforementioned blond seated at the table, drooling a little as he pushed his upturned thumbs through the air. Hanta was carrying the fried remains of their toaster over to the trash can. He tossed the blackened, sparking metal into the bin with an annoyed grunt, then slammed the lid closed. "God damn it, Denki! That's the third one this semester! Mr. Aizawa'll probably start making you pay for them!" he scolded. 

"Yayyyyyyyy," responded the short-circuited boy jovially. Hanta rolled his eyes and collapsed against the counter with an exaggerated sigh. 

"I just wanted some toast," he lamented woefully. His head lolled over to watch Kyoka as she strolled into the small kitchen. "Mornin'." 

"I see Chargebolt here has apprehended the toaster villain yet again," the girl quipped playfully. Denki's head bobbled on his neck like a baby's as he mindlessly ogled at her. As Kyoka raised an eyebrow at him, he cooed and gave her his thumbs-up motion. Kyoka smiled, unable to not find his addled state comical and endearing, and walked over to affectionately ruffle his yellow locks. "Great job, buddy. You saved us from a real menace." Denki released a bubbly laugh and flopped forward, forehead striking the table. 

"Fuck, did Pikachu fry the toaster again?!" Katsuki cursed as he stomped into the kitchen to find the boy slumped over and still constantly humming "yayyyyyy!" When Hanta and Kyoka nodded solemnly, the volatile blond angrily kicked the nearest chair and tromped over to the pantry. He ripped open a box of corn flakes and shoved his hand into the bag to grab a massive handful of the crunchy cereal. He pushed them into his mouth, a few missing the mark and clattering down to the floor, while glaring at Denki. "Fucking hell. I just wanted some fucking toast," he grumbled with full cheeks. 

"Me tooooo!" Hanta cried exasperatedly and threw his arms up in an irritated gesture. "The world's against us today." Denki blinked slowly and lifted his head to peer at Katsuki. 

"Yay?"

"'Yay,' indeed, moron," Katsuki huffed and shoved another handful of corn flakes into his mouth. "How the fuck does he keep fryin' the damn thing, anyway?" Passively listening to their conversation, Kyoka hunted through the various drawers for a can opener so she could peel the lid off the canned peaches she wanted for breakfast. 

"When he stays up all night gaming, he's super tired in the morning and can't control his Quirk!" Hanta answered with a pointed glare at the clueless blond, who nodded sagely and confirmed with a succinct "Yay." Not that he knew what they were even talking about. 

“Dumbass Pikachu,” Katsuki grumbled under his breath. Just as Katsuki uttered his nickname for Denki, Kyoka spied a few washable markers in one of the kitchen drawers. A mischievous ploy bloomed in her head, and so with a playful grin, she plucked up the red marker and uncapped it with her teeth. Katsuki raised an eyebrow at her as she crossed the kitchen and sat down in the chair beside the dazed Denki. “Uh, what are you doing?” 

“A little payback for the toaster,” Kyoka mused. That was her reason for them, but at the moment, Kyoka’s mind was absorbed with how absolutely adorable Denki would look like a cute little Pikachu. She chuckled to herself as she put the marker to his cheeks. Hanta and Katsuki watched her with wide eyes as Kyoka scrawled two oval shapes on Denki’s cheeks with the red pen, and dotted a cute little rounded triangle on the tip of his nose. They all snorted as Denki blinked incomprehensibly and hummed, “Yay?” when Kyoka finished. Sniggering, Kyoka snapped a picture and used her phone’s editing function to draw a pair of Pikachu ears and a zig-zaggy tail on him. She sent it in the students’ group chat, and Hanta and Katsuki’s phones pinged. They both burst into laughter when they opened up the message. 

“That’s rich,” Katsuki snickered, admiring Kyoka’s handiwork even as he shoved the cereal box bank into the pantry. By this time, Denki was beginning to regain his senses, blinking rapidly. It took him a moment to register Kyoka’s presence beside him. After he finally returned to his baseline state, he groaned and rubbed the side of his head. 

“Aw, man, did I fry the toaster again?” 

“Yup,” Katsuki confirmed as he strolled out of the room, apparently not wanting to hang around for the pending conversation. Denki whined self-loathingly and flopped forward against the table. He opened his phone to read the notification and shot upright when he saw the picture. 

“What the-! Hey!” he whined loudly. Kyoka stifled giggles with her hand as Denki opened his front-facing camera. “Not funny!” he complained, poking at the red ovals decorating his cheek. The marks made the pout he tossed her exceptionally cute. “You’re so mean, Kyoka…” 

“What? I think it’s adorable,” she complimented jokingly. Denki just groaned and pushed his cheeks around, smearing the edges of the circles. “Relaaaaax,” she laughed and nudged him lightly in the ribs with her elbow. “It’s washable ink. You don’t have to go to class like that.” 

“Thank God!” he exclaimed with relief, rising promptly from the chair. “I don’t think I could face Aizawa like this!” 

“Like what?” Denki jumped a foot in the air at the teacher’s sudden appearance; the dark, broody man hovered in the entranceway to the kitchen, clutching an empty mug that smelled faintly of coffee. Aizawa stared levelly at Denki as the boy gawked at him like a deer struck by headlights. Aizawa then just sighed and proceeded to the coffee pot to refill his cup with the bitter brown liquid. He mixed in a faint amount of sugar and then turned to stare blatantly at the blond boy while sipping at the beverage. “Pika-pi,” he said monotonously before sauntering off. As Kyoka and Hanta collapsed in hysterical laughter, Denki’s face turned a shade of crimson. 

“Yeah, yeah, you guys, laugh it up,” he mocked irritatedly as he made to leave as well. “Next time I’m frying the toaster on purpose!” he called as he rounded the corner. Kyoka nearly fell out of her chair as she tried to get up and follow. Holding her belly, she staggered to the wall, holding onto the edge as she shouted after him. 

“Denki! Come on; it was a joke! You’re not mad, right? Right? … Denki?” 

~~~~~~~~~~

Denki was obviously mad. 

Kyoka squirmed uncomfortably in her seat as she discreetly stared at him from across the classroom. He’d refused to speak to her since that morning, and had even resorted to avoiding her. They usually walked to class together, joined by Momo and Hanta, but when she’d joined the three on the front porch, he’d stomped off by himself, insisting he wanted to walk alone. He’d arrived to class first, and when she’d cheerfully greeted him, he’d ignored her. Groaning, Kyoka flopped forward onto her desk, not even bothering to get a head start on the English homework they’d been assigned. 

I’m so stupid… 

Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, much to her surprise. She sat up to brush her fingertips over her eyes, which widened when she saw them glistening with salty tears. Hurriedly, she asked Present Mic if she could be excused and scurried off to the restroom. She slipped into a stall, locked it, and sank onto the toilet with a mournful sigh. What’s happening to me? Why am I so upset? She thought wildly as she rubbed at her eyes to stifle the tears. They stopped, but only just. 

Sure, maybe Kyoka’s prank wasn’t in good taste, but normally she’d just wait for someone to come around rather than moping over the silent treatment. But this was different. She couldn’t stand that Denki was angry with her, and it hadn’t even been six hours. The tears rolled down her cheeks as she fidgeted on the toilet, nervous energy causing her to twitch endlessly. She pulled up the damning photograph, and couldn’t help but smile at his adorably dorky expression. She laughed shakily and swiped her thumb over the screen, causing it to zoom in a little. He’s just so cute he makes me stupid… 

Kyoka squeaked aloud and sat bolt upright in the chair, dropping her phone in the process. She didn’t even rattle over the fact that the screen might have shattered. Her mind was shattering with a startling realization. Could I… Could I have a crush on Denki?! It was ludicrous. Ridiculous. Impossible! … And yet, as she thought of the boy, her heart fluttered in her chest. Groaning, she ran her hands over her face. And now he’s super pissed at me, she lamented. It was no wonder she hated the fact that he was angry… She was crushing on him, and only wanted to be in his good graces. 

“All right, Kyoka. Get out of your head,” she huffed, knocking on her head with both of her hands for emphasis. “Just calm down and be reasonable. All you have to do is apologize… That’ll smooth things over.” How could she apologize, though? She didn’t know if she could wait all day to corner Denki alone. “Drop some hints. That’s all you have to do,” she huffed doubtfully. Anxiety bubbled in her belly, making her a little nauseous. “That’s all you have to do,” she repeated, as if doing so would strengthen her will. 

It was much easier said than done. 

“Okay, Kyoka. Just relax. You got this,” she murmured under her breath. After returning from her solitary pep talk in the bathroom, the lunch bell had rung. She had just exited the line and was searching for a seat- a specific seat. Denki was settled with Hanta across the room. Kyoka’s eyes locked onto the empty booth seat across from them. After sucking in a breath like it was liquid courage, Kyoka speedily crossed the lunchroom and plopped her tray down in front of Denki, probably a little too harshly. Denki peered critically at her from under the strands of his bangs. A blush began to crawl up her neck. Much more calmly, she slid into the seat and cleared her throat. 

“H-Hey, Denki.” She saw the corner of his mouth twitch and hoped that was a sign he would break his silence. His gaze then dropped to his beef stew, and he swirled it around disinterestedly, steeping the rice in the thick broth. Kyoka swallowed, not one to be deterred, and pushed her tray forward slightly with a finger. “I know you much you like egg pudding,” she offered with a gesture to the little jiggly pudding sitting at the edge of the tray. “I don’t like it, but I thought you might like another, so…” she trailed off, hoping the boy would get the memo. His eyes were lidded as he studied the egg pudding. Silently, he reached out to take it off her tray and put it on his. He then resumed mindlessly stirring his stew. 

Hanta’s eyes shifted rapidly between the two of them, a noodle hanging out of his mouth. He slurped it up and then quickly stood, announcing that he was going to see if he could pilfer some more ramen from someone before running off like the Devil was behind him. Denki said nothing, but Kyoka saw his body tense uncomfortably. 

“Denki, I’m sorry, okay?!” she blurted before the boy could try and escape. “I shouldn’t have embarrassed you like that. I just… I just…” She couldn’t think of a reasonable explanation aside from she just thought he would look cute, and she sure as hell couldn’t say that. Denki’s golden eyes flickered up from the stew to stare fixedly at her. She slumped down in the booth seat at the harsh edge of the bright gold depths. “I’m sorry,” she repeated meekly, tears rising to her eyes without realizing it. “I’m just stupid…” 

“Kyoka,” he sighed, and the sound of his voice made her heart sing. He pushed the trays aside to reach across the table and grab her hand. He stared at it as he swept his thumb over the soft skin, and every caress sent fire flying through her nerves. Her cheeks burned pink, but Denki was seemingly oblivious to the romantic implications of his gesture. “You’re not stupid.” The smile he flashed her made Kyoka melt into a relieved puddle of mush right there, but she couldn’t help but object. 

“Denki, I took that dumb photo, and it was insensitive, and-”

“It’s okay!” He laughed with a dismissive wave of his free hand. He then looked bashfully down at the egg pudding she’d given him. “I mean, I was a little upset at first, because… I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s all you think I am. Some dumb, stupid Pikachu.” Before he could continue, Kyoka interrupted with her free hand flapping around wildly. 

“Oh, Denki, no! No, no, no! I just… I, um… Bakugo kept calling you Pikachu, and I just…” Growing meek, she slumped down into the booth until her shoulders hunched up to her ears. “I couldn’t help thinking about how cute you would look as a Pikachu…” Denki’s eyebrows nearly touched the roots of his hair as he gawked surprisedly at her. He then flashed her a brilliantly bright smile. 

“Oh, so that’s it?” Kyoka used her free hand to cover her bright red face as much as she could, embarrassed by how pleased he was at the prospect. Still holding her hand, he grabbed a fork and took a big bite of the egg pudding while Kyoka nodded admittingly. He seized his phone and pulled up the photograph, then smirked. “I guess I do look pretty adorable,” he reasoned with a wink at Kyoka. The girl’s headphone jack ears wriggled nervously, a bit unsettled by his one-eighty in mood. He dropped the phone and smiled sweetly at her. “I’m sorry for the way I acted. I shoulda just been a man and talked to you about it instead of giving you the silent treatment.” Kyoka’s throat bobbed as she swallowed the relieved sob rising in her chest. 

“Yeah, but… Fair’s fair, I guess,” she said guiltily. She flushed red as Denki leaned across the table to use his thumb to wipe away her tears. 

“No! Even if I was upset, taking it out on you like this was petty. As Kirishima would say, it wasn’t very manly of me.” His light-hearted tone all but forced Kyoka to give him a hiccupy laugh. How could she stay sad with the sunny boy around? Still, she couldn’t help but feel just a little bit blue; though he was gently sweeping her tears away, she could tell just by the look on his face that it was a purely platonic gesture. Still, she couldn’t help but lean a little into his touch, making her chin brush lightly against the heel of his palm. “I’ve got an idea,” he suggested with a bright smile. “How about tonight we watch a movie, huh?” 

“J-just the two of us?!” she squeaked, blushing at the high-pitched tone of her voice. Denki didn’t notice, nodding enthusiastically. “O-okay…” She was relieved that he was no longer irritated with her, but she couldn’t help but think that she was jumping out of the frying pan only to land in the fire.

~~~~~~~~~~

Kyoka had landed in the fire indeed. 

Her body burned with a fierce blush as she sat on the end of Denki’s bed, unable to focus on the anime movie playing on his television screen. He’d insisted on sharing a blanket, and so there she was, snuggled up under the covers with the oblivious blond and feeling like she would spontaneously combust at any moment. Denki lay on his stomach with his cheeks pushed into the palms of his hands. His ankles crossed over behind his back. Jiro was sitting upright beside him, hugging her knees to her chest and sweating nervously. 

Just play it cool, Kyoka… Don’t be weird… she encouraged herself frantically. With every passing second, she was terrified that Denki would notice the damp puddle of perspiration surely forming under her. She had to suppress a squeak when Denki shifted positions, sitting up beside her and tugging the blanket to enclose them in a suffocating bubble of heat. She worried her bottom lip with her teeth until the skin shredded a little. She’d only realized she was crushing on the boy less than eight hours ago, but now it was all she could think about. When his arm inadvertently brushed against hers, she couldn’t take it anymore. Squealing, she jumped out of the covers to stumble out onto the floor. 

“Kyoka? What’s up?” Denki blinked owlishly at her as she panted heavily. Every inch of her skin felt like it was submerged in lava. Part of her was frustrated that he wasn’t picking up on the undeniable signs, but the other part of her thought she’d surely die if he posed the possibility of her crushing on him. The turmoil of the day had fried Kyoka’s brain to charred mush, so she could only sink into one of his bean bag chairs with an agonized groan. 

“I don’t… I just… I need a minute,” Kyoka whined miserably. Denki blinked slowly, then peeled the blankets off himself and timidly crawled over to her. She peered through her eyelashes at him as he approached cautiously, her cheeks growing redder with every inch he crept closer. 

“Kyoka… Are you feeling okay?” he inquired with a suspicious look. Sure that her cheeks were the shade of tomatoes, she groaned and looked away ruefully. She rubbed at her face, flinching at the sheer amount of heat radiating off her body in suffocating waves. “You’re acting weird,” Denki continued with a concerned tone. “Look, I promise I’m not mad at you.” 

“It’s not that,” she admitted through the fingers laced over her lips. She stared intently up at the ceiling with shaky eyes. Was she really about to confess this? “Do… Do you know… Why I was so upset at the fact that you were mad at me?” Denki grunted, and she could tell by the way his clothes shifted that he was rubbing the back of his neck puzzledly. 

“Well… I dunno… I was a little shocked at how sensitive you were about it.” The bean bag creaked as she wiggled uncomfortably in the embracing soft bag of beads. 

“I… Well… I couldn’t stand the idea that you were mad at me because… because…” Her throat closed up, preventing her from forcing out the words though she desperately wished she could just spit them out. Her chest felt like a great big balloon had swelled up inside her, pushing on her chest wall to make it impossibly tight. Denki waited patiently for her to continue. Kyoka just couldn’t. Frustrated tears began to burn her eyes, and she desperately tried to swallow the lump in her throat. Whining in agony, she clamped her hands down over her eyes, praying the darkness would push her over the edge into a confession. It didn’t. 

“Kyoka?” Denki’s voice was soft, inquisitive. She heard him crawl around the edge of the bean bag to sit on his knees beside her. She whimpered as his fingers began to pull at her own, slowly prying her hand away from her left eye. Hesitantly, she cracked that eye open to see him smiling amusedly. “You’re not trying to say that you like me, are you?” She pulled her bottom lip under her teeth and chewed anxiously on it, debating whether to admit it or start vehemently denying it. After a few seconds, she managed a tiny nod. “This better not be some kinda cruel joke.” She squeaked and started sputtering refusals at his deadly serious expression. Then, in the next second, he was laughing animatedly. 

“Denkiiii!” she whined, red-faced, and punched him in the shoulder. He kept cackling even as he rubbed the now sore area. 

“I’m sorry! I couldn’t help but get a little payback,” he chuckled. Kyoka settled down after a minute, but her face continued to burn. He smiled affectionately; it made her heart thump loudly in her chest. “I like you too, Kyoka. To tell ya the truth… Being angry with you made me so miserable I couldn’t stand it.” 

“Really?” she asked in a small voice, and he nodded. 

“Yeah. That’s why I couldn’t stay mad,” Denki said gently. His hand rose to cup Kyoka’s cheek, and she pressed her face into it, relishing the soft skin of his palm embracing her. “I could never stay mad at you.” 

“Even when I do stupid stuff?” 

“Hey,” Denki snorted, “considering I’m the world’s leading expert in stupid stunts, I can cut you some slack for the occasional lapse in judgment.” Kyoka giggled. Her body sung with a bubbly champagne-like high that sent her mind floating into blissful, foggy euphoria.

Denki leaned forward to press his forehead against hers, eyes lidded as he smiled lovingly. “You haven’t smiled all day,” he remarked, catching her off guard. “I love it when you smile.” His compliment made the small smile on her lips stretch wide across her face. His thumb caressed the arc of her cheekbone as he stared deep into her eyes. 

“So are you gonna kiss me orrrrrrrr what, Pikachu?” His eyebrow cocked at her blatant request. Kyoka’s cheeks tinged pink at her boldness, but she levelly held his stare, challenging him. Denki smiled impishly, but then leaned in, pressing his mouth to hers in a lingering sweet kiss. Kyoka hummed approvingly at the pleasant sensation of his soft lips molding over hers. The movie they were watching was long forgotten as they basked in the glow of each other’s presence and the bliss of young love blooming between them. 

~Bonus~ 

Kyoka’s smile was bright as daylight as she stared into her phone screen; Momo could see it across the room. She approached Kyoka from behind as the girl lounged on the common room sofa, feet kicked up over the back and reclined against one of the throw pillows. 

“What are you smiling about?” Momo inquired as she leaned over the arm of the couch. Kyoka was staring at her lock screen. It was a photo of her and Denki; they had marker on their faces- red ovals on their cheeks, and a little rounded triangle on the tips of their noses. Brown-tipped, long, pointed yellow ears and zig-zaggy tails had been scrawled in the background with her editing app. They looked so happy together, pressed against one another as they smiled for the camera. Momo smiled, glad to see her best friend so madly in love. Kyoka tipped her head back over the arm of the couch to grin blissfully at Momo. 

“Oh, you know… Making plans. Denki wants to go out to eat tonight.” Momo hummed approvingly and leaned down, pressing her cheek against the top of her friend’s head as she hugged her loosely. 

“I’m happy for you, Kyoka. You deserve it.” 

“Thanks,” the noirette said and glanced back to her phone to respond to a message from Denki. “So, when are you gonna start going out with Todoroki?” 

“I-I beg your pardon?!”

Enjoy this oneshot? Feel free to peruse my Table of Contents!

Tag List: @deliathedork​ @simplybakugou​ @sadistiks​ @wesparklebitch​

[msbeccieboo]

Arrow 7x14 brain dump

I loved this episode!!  I think I hadn’t really hyped it up too much in my mind so that undoubtedly helped, and sure, there was a lot of superfluous shit, but I feel like I just have to come to terms with that now, and overall it delivered on some areas I’d hoped it to, and also in lots that I hadn’t expected it to!  As always, succinctness is not my speciality, and I think this one is at an all-time record length (*titters*), so get comfortable…

Olicity

SHE TOLD HIMMMMM!!!!  I think that was just my minimum requirement for the episode, which is probably why I ended up loving it; we got lots more than that!!  Olicity didn’t get as much air time as I would have liked for the episode immediately following the Olicity Baby Reveal, but I think the episode delivered quality, where quantity was definitely lacking.

I loved the parallel of Felicity’s nightmare with Oliver’s from 7x01 respectively.  In the first half of the episode we could see that she still was doubting herself and her ability to keep the baby safe, which although wasn’t stated explicitly, was clear to me at least, and I am so glad we saw that and not just immediate baby-bliss.  This lead into poor Oliver trying and failing to get in touch with William 😭 by filling up his answering machine (to which we later find FF William discovering an answer machine-style cassette…subtle as ever there arrow writers).

The next time we saw Olicity was in an OTA scene (at long last), which I will delve into later, but special mention to Oliver’s little Felicity Smile™ when she cracks her OTA joke 😍.

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Continued under the cut

The most wonderful Olicity scene for me wasn’t the big reveal, but the sofa scene.  I loved this so so much.  For the first time, Oliver really acknowledged Felicity’s pain from when he was in prison, and acknowledged that he hadn’t acknowledged it haha.  This in and of itself made me tear up…Oliver the GROWTH 😭😭  

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But then he continued!!  He told Felicity that he thought there was a better way than killing Diaz, but that he had no right to make that call for her.  He would back any move of hers and have her back “no.matter.what” *ugly crying*. 

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Furthermore, he wants her to make her choice so she can get closure on Diaz, allowing Olicity to move forward!!!

This recognition and support are what Felicity has needed from Oliver for months!!  He has likely only just been able to come to these realisations himself recently, after dealing with his own crap, and losing William etc, but he came to them on his own, before knowing about the baby and knowing he would have to ‘do better’.  He knows there has been a distance between him and Felicity and he will do his part to allow her to help herself so they can come back together, and it is glorious!!!

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This scene could have only been improved by some hand holding or other canoodling, but I am more than happy with the scene as we got it!!

Then at last we come to the big reveal.  I must say I think they could have and should have given more time and attention to this scene; I can only hope that they didn’t because of all the fluffy parent-to-be-ness that we are about to see unfold over the coming episodes???  Let a girl dream for now at least!  Stephen and Emily, as usual, killed it with what they had to work with.  From Oliver’s gentle acknowledgement of Felicity’s go-to comfort food, mint chip, to Felicity’s explanation of why she didn’t need to kill Diaz; she needed her family to live in the light and their children to know that they would do anything for them….wait, what??? *cue Oliver’s gorgeous confused puppy face* Your children, because…

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Felicity’s beautiful smile when she told him, and Oliver’s sappy happy face when he realised….YAAAAAASSSS!!!!  My heart exploded!!  Then, *end scene* 😡.  But you know what, at this moment in time I’m still so floaty-happy for them that I can live with this!

Flash Forwards

Oh my wow I love the Clayton-Smoak-Queen siblings!!!  You can clearly see Oliver and Felicity in both of them; but Will is still obviously a mini-Felicity, whereas Mia is SO MUCH OLIVER, which is so bittersweet, given that she seems to have been raised by Felicity alone (WHYYYY?!?! *sobs*). 

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Mia, it seems, has a somewhat typical love/hate relationship with her Mother, which I’m sure lots of us can identify with.  On one hand she clearly resents Felicity’s paranoia, her insistence on ‘bonding’ with things such as the Rubik’s cube and tech, which she doesn’t seem to have an interest in, but then her love for her shines through with her insistence of going after her alone (hello mini Oliver) and the line “my Mom is the only person I care about” 😭😭😭  

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Then our gorgeous grown up Will 😍 is all Felicity in his belief in Oliver as a hero and his techy geekdom, but HELLO OLIVER in the way he instantly loves and sticks up for his sister (even with them arguing, he just softened, and even turned on Dinah when she questioned Mia) and talks about family, despite how he has come to feel abandoned by Olicity.  That last line in his scene with Mia where he says “Well did it work?” could have been spoken by Stephen himself; his expression, his intonation…perfect Oliver impression Ben, well done, A+!  They work so well together on screen; I loved their back-and-forth in their scenes.  I can’t wait to see them interacting more, especially, I hope, in the all FF episode.  I think they will be a force to be reckoned with!

The bro-sis Rubik’s cube solving champions discover the mini answering phone cassette, which Mia can’t even comprehend; “can you hack it?” lol (makes me feel suuuper old).  This has surely got to at least contain some of Olicity’s attempts to contact William, to let him know he wasn’t abandoned, and at most, another of Felicity’s clues.  I just can’t wrap my head around the blatant plot-hole that is Olicity not ever managing to get in touch with William, even with the crazy tech skills on both ends of the dynamic??  I call bullshit!  I need to know what’s going on guysssss!!!  

Elsewhere, Connor supposedly didn’t know about Mia’s heritage (so no baby OTA growing up together *sad face*), except he secretly did cos his adopted father Dig asked him to watch over her!  So Connor isn’t JJ??  Where is JJ?? ISTG Larry if you erased another baby Diggle I will travel through time and kill you myself!!  Connor and Mia are clearly super close (shipping them already), and the hurt on Mia’s face when she found out Connor had lied to her the whole time broke my heart!!  I also need a scene with Roy and Mia soon; did anyone else notice how as soon as Mia revealed her parentage, he dropped his bow from pointing on her…YAAAAASS UNCLE ROY!!!  But why does no one but Dig know about Mia’s existence????  Did Olicity go into hiding??  Is this why they never managed to contact William again? Whaaaat???  Je suis confuse!!!

Bonus: Future OTA, or FTA, if you will, is totally going to be a thing I’m sure of it!  The actors seem so much fun and are always interacting on social media/live tweeting etc.  It is so nice to have cast so actively participating in promotion this year.  It’s at a point now where I would definitely give a next generation series a watch, and I can’t wait for the all flash forward episode now, even though the whole future set-up seems harrowingly disparate from what we would like to imagine.  I need to know more damnit!!

OTA/Delicity

OTA has finally (just about) reunited!!!!  It’s only been 6437280462308 years guys!!  Dig finally realises he’s been keeping the Diaz secret from Olicity for too long, so he offers them up the truth, in a “SPONTANEOUS OTA MOMENT”.  Honestly, Felicity’s sass in this scene and all the Dig scenes to be fair is just a beautiful thing to see.  Felicity rightfully tells John that this is the second time he has prioritised his ARGUS work over his friends’ safety and he looks rightfully ashamed of himself. Oliver naturally doesn’t agree with using Diaz, but has suddenly become official OTA reconciliator, and trusts Dig to get shit done, eventually offering his help with Felicity’s blessing and assistance.  

With OTA officially back in the field and like 57 things going on, Felicity takes her chance on taking out Diaz, confronting him with a gun again, and finally telling him that she is in fact stronger than him, and hence doesn’t need to kill him…Dig is ultimately left to decide between helping Oliver capture Dante, or Felicity stop Diaz and praise the salmon ladder he chooses to help Felicity!!

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I loved Felicity realising her own strength, and maintaining her ‘light’, seeing and knowing that her teammate finally had her back!!  Dig tells her that although Dante was the mission objective, Diaz (and by that he meant Felicity) was his priority!!  My Delicity heart!!!!!  Dig has one last ace up his sleeve, later telling Olicity that he realised how letting Diaz go last time had hurt Felciity, and that the most important thing should be to just protect his OTA family!!!  And just like that, OTA RISES FROM THE ASHES!!!

Bonus:  OMG I just realised that the Brothers and Sisters theme of the episode relates to OTA as well!! 😭😍😭😍😭😍

Felicity/BS

When did I become a BS stan??  Who even am I?  What do I believe in? 😱 🤷‍♀️🤯

I love Felicity’s relationship with BS.  I want to be friends with both of them.  I want to drink wine with BS whilst Felicity grumbles about drinking de-caff coffee. I think I need more sleep. Forgive me fandom friends for I have sinned 🙈😂😂

I see people saying that their friendship doesn’t make sense, and no, if you look directly from S6 to now, it doesn’t.  But if you watch S7 episode-by-episode you can totally believe that they got to the place they are in now.  They’ve grown from reluctant allies, to gaining a mutual respect, to growing to like one another.  And the shade is still totally there on both parts from Felicity’s “fake lawyer” (CLASSIC LINE), to BS calling Felicity out on her chocolate consumption haha.

So BS knew about the baby before Oliver did.  I am not majorly angry with this because…she just guessed!!  Felicity didn’t tell her.  Felicity was mortified that she’d put it all together and begged her to not tell anyone. Our girl was just coming to terms with it herself, and working out how to tell Oliver, which she is perfectly entitled to do.  

The scene where BS brings Felicity food and gives her a pep talk was totes adorbs 😍 Do I wish it was the type of conversation Felicity had had with Oliver instead?  Sure, and I’m sure we will in the future, and we got different Olicity goodies in this episode in its place.  

Source: felicitysmoakgifs

BS is all over Felicity being preggers…I’m wondering if maybe she lost a baby or lost someone with a baby on E2??  She just seems to be all about looking after Felicity, and the baby, to almost an excessive point, with random pregnancy knowledge thrown in there too 🤔

Side-note: I am all about Felicity eating ALL OF THE FOOD in this episode hahaha!  “I ate that much choc before I was pregnant” LOOOOOL!!  She continues to be the cutest.

Source:felicitysmoakgifs

Emiko/Oliver

Oh Oliver.  I feel for him so much with Emiko.  He just wants to get to know her, and make up for lost time and poor choices by Robert.  He misses Thea.  He is blinded by his love for his new sister.  This is why whenever they try to tell us ‘Oliver doesn’t trust people’ I’m like HUH?!  I see Oliver as probably the most naturally trusting person on the show, only his experiences have proven him wrong so often.  He has to believe in others, so he can believe in himself after everything he has been through/done.  He gives almost everyone the benefit of the doubt, especially family, even when it’s blatantly obvious that they don’t deserve it.  Oliver has such a big heart, and loves his family so deeply and at times, blindly. And here, with Emiko, that is what he is doing (when he should have been at home celebrating baby-making with some more practice baby-making 😉).  I don’t like Emiko…oh she’s working with the Big Bad, shocker!  I thought that she would turn out dead or a villain, given as she isn’t part of the ‘mark of 4’ gang in the future.  I’m not convinced she’s full-on evil though, not yet at least.  But the concept of her being a baddie kind of makes sense as to why they’ve made her so unlikeable.  That said, I really enjoyed the ‘sibling rivalry’ scenes they shared. Oliver in her personal space “do you have to stand right there?”, Oliver critiquing her arrows, “don’t touch my things!” 😂😂 I do think they spent too much time on them in this episode (even though it was called Brothers and Sisters, I know).  I just can’t be bothered to get too involved with her storyline, for the minute at least, as I think it will be temporary.  

ARGUS/Diaz

This is my let-down of the episode, (and every episode) but you can’t win them all!  Suicide squad blah, Diaz blah, Virgil (isn’t he a Thunderbird??) blah, Dante (Highlander!)….kinda blah!  The shame is, I think Dante could’ve been a far better villain if they’d made me know/care about him earlier in the season?  Maybe they can rescue him?  I mean, Prometheus didn’t really come into his own until the last few episodes, so I guess there’s hope???

But Diggle quit-yaaaay!! Bye bye ugly security guard outfit!!

LIZARD BOY GOT LIT UPPPPP!!! 

Burn bay burn!!  Bye bitch!!  I’m pretty sure this is the episode that the actor tweeted his goodbyes after?  What a sorry exit if so *evil laugh*.  There’s a fair bit of speculation over who killed him, but unless it was Felicity sneaking in in the dead of night to do so, I struggle to care 🤷‍♀️

Massive thank you to the gif makers; you have made this long-ass post more colourful 😘

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GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS Tag

Tagged by uuuuh @scmalarky! :D

The rules are to answer seven questions in the voice of your female characters, and then tag some peeps afterwards! (obviously LMAO)

Okay, so I’m going to answer these in the styles of the ladies from Pandemonium’s Bane – and when I say that, I mean only the ones that I’ve implemented as characters so far, because otherwise there’d probably be too many to be succinct.

So that’s Plue, Raelyn, Rose, Gaia, and Skye.

Let’s do diiis

Who was your mother and what did she teach you?

Plue: Lexi Abernathy. She didn’t teach me anything directly, but you’d be surprised how much not having your opinions taken into consideration makes you both reluctant to share your own opinions and also makes you over-eager to put other people before yourself.

Raelyn: …pass.

Rose: My mother… her name was Chantelle. I think. And she- I remember her teaching me how to draw, a long time ago.

Gaia: I don’t remember my mum’s name! Or, like, anything she taught me! That’s… that’s pretty depressing, actually. Ah, well. Comes with the territory.

Skye: My mum always taught me to be myself. Which is, uh, maybe not ironic. She definitely does that, I guess. Don’t know if the name “Rachel Veil” rings any bells? She’s sort of infamous around here.

Do you have any sisters (related or not)?

Plue: I have one, yeah. We get on decently? Oh, and I have Alia – I mean, she’s not my sister so much as a parallel version of me, but it’s similar enough, I think.

Raelyn: Nope.

Rose: No, I- No. But maybe my friends are like siblings. Some of them.

Gaia: Used to have some biological ones. Now? I don’t think so. I wanna say Skye but we’re more besties then sisters from other misters, so…

Skye: Oh, God no.

How has your gender shaped your path in life?

Plue: I think I’ve been judged a bit for being a girl, although maybe more because of my age. But the fact that I have so much authority means that I’m under a lot of scrutiny, and not all of it’s really fair. Beyond that, though… not so much? Though it does make me way less eager to have kids, seeing as how I’d have to do about ninety-nine percent of the work in that scenario.

Raelyn: What path in life?

Rose: I don’t think it really has, um… maybe it’s led people to underestimate me? But I’m not bothered by that, really! Sometimes it’s just nice to stay out of the way.

Gaia: The ONE thing I can think of is that I get occasional weird looks, because it’s less common for women to be as buff as me. (Either that or they’re jealous, which sucks for them I guess.) But like – that’s literally it? I’d have been a part of Highwing either way, and I’m bi, so like, who I’m attracted too wouldn’t change either.

Skye: Being a woman hasn’t really affected me. Being so short, on the other hand…

What does the woman you admire look like? Who is she?

Plue: I have a lot of respect for my fellow female faction leaders, to be honest – Kaylori and Vanda. They’ve both struggled to get where they are today, and they lead their factions with a lot of intelligence and long-mindedness. I think I still have a lot to learn from them.

Raelyn: My only inspiration, female or otherwise, is me.

Rose: I admire Plue a lot, to be honest. Gaia too. They’re both just so brave! And when things need to be done, they can just… do them. I wish I could do that.

Gaia: I admire ALL women!! I don’t care if they run a planet or run around the park to get fit! They’re all valid!!

Skye: Say what you want about Plue’s leadership of the Nexus Force, but at least she’s got her fucking life together. That’s more then I can say for most authority figures.

Why do you think women are considered the gentler sex?

Plue: There are likely a multitude of reasons. Generally, women are observed to be less strong then men – or at least, be less physically imposing – and women’s position as bearers of children create a power balance wherein it is the women who have to be cared for by the men. Beyond that, long-standing stereotypes exists of women wanting nothing to do with anything violent or demanding – which happen to neglect the fact that a lot of the work that women do is actually very challenging in its own right – and women are often personified as hearts, peacemakers, and passive characters when compared to the stereotypical action-oriented masculine ideal. I think its more societal habit and long-standing stereotyping then anything else, to be honest.

Raelyn: Don’t know, don’t care.

Rose: Well, I, uh… I think it’s because men are discouraged from showing their emotions more. I mean, guys always have to be, like, cool and stuff… so it’s only women that actually get to show how they feels, which means they look like the gentler sex, I guess.

Gaia: *stops flexing muscles* The what now?

Skye: Because men are trash, next question.

What is a piece of your personality that you are proud of?

Plue: My intelligence.

Raelyn: My personality’s jackshit but it’s cultivated jackshit, thank you very much.

Rose: …I’m proud to be kind.

Gaia: All of it! The whole piece!

Skye: The fact that I can get people to fuck off with just a stare.

When did you accept your own body and its strengths/weaknesses?

Plue: Fairly early on, I think. It definitely helped that I spent a lot of time physically training myself, meaning that I was having an active impact on how my body turned out, and making sure that it was more the way that I wanted.

Raelyn: What body??

Rose: I… I don’t know. I guess I just haven’t thought about it.

Gaia: Okay, no joke, but like. It’s been super annoying? Because oKAY I’m super tall and buff and I’m mostly happy with that but sometimes I remember that it’s technically weird and I just have to get over it. And then after dealing with that I got my leg sliced off so suddenly I have to deal with phantom pains and fake itching, and had to get used to seeing myself totally differently. And get more looks from people. It’s… ugh. I’m getting over it.

Skye: I loathe being short and I loathe the fact that short people are stereotyped as angry because I actually am angry a lot of the time.

  That was a fun one! I think it was a good thing to do, to delve into the psyches of my female characters xDD

I’m gonna tag @pen-for-sword and @sassypandacandy

[jennycalendar]

very really married (8/?)

read it on ao3!

return of the s1-rewrite fake-married giles/jenny fic!!! i am feeling extremely good about myself right now.

also there’s a lot of giles and jenny being Very Soft in this chapter, which i will justify by saying that canon had them making out all over school property. so this is definitely not too much of a stretch

“You’re kidding, right?” said Buffy. “You want to know if my Slayer sense is picking up on anything spooky about Ms. Calendar? As in your wife who sometimes brings us pizza Ms. Calendar? As in Willow’s favorite teacher Ms. Calendar? As in—”

“—yes, yes, my wife is incredible, I just wanted to check,” said Giles irritably, who was beginning to realize how ill-conceived his idea of asking Buffy’s opinion had been. “There have been a few…oddities…in our relationship as of late—”

“No one needs to hear about your sex life, Giles,” said Buffy, wincing a little. “Frankly, I’ve seen enough of it to know I never want to hear about it.”

“Buffy, I most certainly would not be discussing those portions of my life with you,” said Giles flatly. “Ever.”

“Why? Too busy having sex in a morgue drawer?”

This sort of thing was exactly why Giles would prefer death over telling Buffy about his drunken Vegas marriage. “We weren’t—never mind,” he said, hoping against hope that he didn’t look as flustered as he felt. “My point is that the way Jenny reacted to vampires was rather unusual, and I thought your Slayer sense might be of some use in ascertaining whether—”

“You trust me?” Buffy beamed, flipping her hair over one shoulder. She looked genuinely touched.

Giles sighed. “Quite,” he said.

Buffy rolled her eyes a little. “Then trust me when I say I get no bad vibes from Ms. Calendar,” she said. “The only thing spooky about your wife is that she’s spooky cool.” She giggled at her own bad joke, then added, “And anyway, Giles, I came in here to tell you that I think Xander’s being possessed by something. He’s been hanging with the mean kids, teasing the kids nobody likes, and he’s dressing super weird!”

Giles looked at her for a long second. Then he said with some disbelief, “So your slayer sense tells you that Xander is being possessed?”

“Uh huh!” Buffy nodded impatiently.

“He’s taken to teasing the less fortunate?” Giles began, echoing Buffy’s words.

“He has.”

“And there's been a noticeable change in both clothing and demeanor?”

“Yep,” Buffy agreed.

“And his spare time is spent lounging about with imbeciles,” Giles finished.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Buffy asked anxiously.

“It's devastating,” Giles agreed matter-of-factly. “He's turned into a sixteen-year-old boy. Course, you'll have to kill him.”

Buffy glared. “Giles, I’m serious!”

“So am I!” Giles objected, then amended, “Except for the part about killing him.” Off Buffy’s frustrated look, he explained, “Testosterone is a great equalizer. It turns all men into morons. He will, however, get over it.”

“I cannot believe that you, of all people, are trying to Scully me!” Buffy began.

“Who’s trying to Scully who?” came Jenny’s voice, and Giles winced. “Oh, Rupert. That makes sense.”

To Giles’s absolute horror, Buffy turned to Jenny, gave her an assessing look, and said, “Ms. Calendar, you know stuff about weird stuff going on in Sunnydale, right?”

Jenny blinked, flushing. “Wh-what?”

“You know that this town isn’t exactly what it looks like,” Buffy persisted.

“Buffy, don’t—” Giles began.

But Jenny held up a hand, eyes on Buffy. “What are you getting at?” she said almost warily.

“I think something’s going on with Xander,” said Buffy seriously. “I think he’s in trouble. He’s been acting super weird and I don’t know why—”

“Buffy, boys can be cruel,” Giles cut in, exasperated. “They tease, they prey on the weak. It’s—”

“Don’t boys-will-be-boys this situation,” said Jenny sharply. “Buffy, keep going.”

Buffy, however, had a strange expression on her face. “Wait,” she said. “Giles, what did you say?”

“They…tease?” Giles said tentatively.

“They prey on the weak,” said Buffy slowly. “I’ve heard that before. Where have I—” She stopped, eyes wide, then stared. “Xander has been acting totally wiggy ever since we went to the zoo!” she burst out. “Him and Kyle and all those guys, they went into the hyena cage. Oh, God, that laugh...”

Giles opened his mouth to point out how very unlikely it was that Xander had been turned into a hyena (or perhaps just start giggling), but Jenny was frowning a little. “Buffy, can we talk for a sec?” she asked, sounding a little uneasy. “This might not be a conversation we should—I mean—” Her eyes darted to Giles.

“Whatever you have to say to Buffy can certainly be said in front of me,” said Giles indignantly.

“I don’t know about that,” said Jenny.

“If it’s about the weird supernatural stuff, definitely say it in front of him,” said Buffy pointedly. “I said all this stuff to him and he totally brushed me off!”

“Rupert,” said Jenny reprovingly.

Giles exhaled, frustrated. “Buffy’s evidence is spotty at best!” he persisted. “In most of these ultimately unproven cases—”

Jenny was getting the same look in her eyes that she’d gotten when Giles had inadvertently (and then intentionally) insulted computers. “No,” she said. “You know what? Buffy’s right. This town is weird. Weird stuff happens. And I’m certainly not brushing off a concerned student. Whether or not Buffy’s right about Xander and some other kids being taken over by a hyena, the fact still remains that as a faculty member, it is absolutely my job to take a look at whatever is worrying Buffy.” She fixed Giles with a pointed glare. “And your job too, for that matter.”

“Jenny—” began Giles, helpless.

“Herbert!” Willow announced, running into the library. “They found him.”

“The pig?” said Buffy.

“Dead,” said Willow dismally. “And also eaten. Principal Flutie's freaking out.”

“Testosterone, huh?” said Buffy to Giles.

“Hyena it is,” Jenny agreed. She hesitated, then sighed, crossing the room to Giles. “You’re still a high school faculty member,” she said. “Even if you took this job so you’d have some time to research, you have to take care of these kids.”

There was genuine disappointment in her eyes, and that fact made Giles feel worse than any of her anger and frustration ever had. “You’re right,” he said quietly, because she was. Buffy had come to him with concern for her friend. Even if he was first and foremost a Watcher, he was beginning to become aware that compassion towards his charge was still important. “I’ll—look up hyenas, then?”

“I’m sure I can dig up some articles,” said Jenny, and stood on tiptoe, giving him a soft kiss.

Buffy gagged.

“Can it, Summers, I’m helping you,” said Jenny, a laugh in her voice as she pulled away from Giles. “Okay. I’m going to boot up that library computer and see what I can find about animal possessions. Rupert, you’ll look through your books?”

“You’re taking this claim quite in stride,” said Giles, feeling a strange mixture of suspicious and smitten.

“My husband’s an occult nerd,” teased Jenny. “I pick things up.”

Jenny found an astonishing amount of relevant articles in a very short amount of time. “Part of the job,” she quipped, even though it really wasn’t. Giles, meanwhile, was finding himself rather jealous of the star-struck way Buffy and Willow continued to regard her, especially since her motives were now in question. She was certainly witty, and intelligent, and kind, not to mention stunningly beautiful, but the fact remained that he couldn’t trust someone who had clear knowledge of vampires and wouldn’t tell him anything about them.

Granted, said a rather infuriating voice in his head, you are continuing to do the exact same thing with her.

Stuff it, Giles informed the voice, going back to paging through the book he’d been looking at.

“Anything useful?” Jenny asked earnestly, peering over his shoulder. Seeing the illustrations, she winced. “Yikes. This whole thing doesn’t look at all pretty. And if it’s what’s happening to Xander…”

“…then direct action must be taken, and soon,” Giles finished, glancing over at her. “I’m sure if we figure out exactly how and why this happened, we’ll be able to piece together how to help him and the others.”

“Hopefully before they do something really awful,” Jenny added. “Any kind of soul placed in a body that wasn’t meant to hold it—” She stopped, a strange expression on her face. “Anyway,” she said awkwardly. Bemused, Giles waited, but she didn’t elaborate.

“Why couldn’t Xander be possessed by a puppy, or some ducks?” Willow was saying plaintively.

“That's assuming 'possession' is the right word,” Buffy answered.

“You bet it is,” said Jenny, all but hurrying over to the girls. Giles, still frowning a bit, followed. “The Masai of the Serengeti have talked about animal possession for generations.”

“I should have remembered that,” Giles added ruefully. Jenny gave him a clear yes you should have expression, but still tucked her arm into his.

“So how does it work?” Buffy asked.

“There’s this sect of animal worshipers, Primals,” Jenny began before Giles could start. “They’re pretty much of the mind that human consciousness is this whole unnatural dilution of the spirit, and that the animal state is holy. They came up with this way to draw the spirits of different animals into their own bodies through trans-possession.”

“Succinct,” said Giles, impressed.

“Yeah, Giles takes way longer when he’s briefing us,” said Buffy, then clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

“Um, on studying things!” Willow added hastily. “In study group! Where we all study together! It’s not like Giles ever talks about the occult with us, ever, at all!”

“Calm down,” said Jenny, amused. “I know more than anyone that Rupert’s almost always working on research for his occult book. It’s not exactly surprising to me that he might bring it up with you kids on occasion.”

“Oh,” said Buffy.

“Occult book,” said Willow.

“That makes sense,” said Buffy.

Giles did his best not to look too worthy of suspicion.

“Anyway,” said Jenny, “the Primals are really only big on the predatory-type animals, so it makes a lot of sense that Xander might have ended up with a hyena spirit in him. My articles talked about that…”

“…and my books gave us a rather graphic depiction of what might happen if that spirit goes unchecked,” Giles finished, handing the book to Buffy and Willow.

Buffy took one look at the book, then set it down, face grim. “I have to find Xander,” she said flatly, then hurried out of the library without waiting for a response.

“Yeah, that’s fair,” said Jenny, squinting at the illustrations. Willow looked a little pale. “Rupert, I think we should start looking into ways to reverse this trans-possession. Something that’ll get the hyena back into the hyena without putting it in anyone else.”

“I don’t know if my books contain that ritual,” said Giles apprehensively.

“I’m sure the web can find something,” Jenny began.

There was a knock on the door, and a small sophomore peered in. “Um, Mr. Giles, Ms. Calendar?” she said uncertainly. “Emergency faculty meeting. Vice principal says all staff have to—”

“Thanks, Emily,” said Jenny, giving Giles a worried look.

Giles quite understood Jenny’s unease. Emergency faculty meetings almost always meant a death. Very deliberately, he took her hand, squeezing it tightly. “I’m right here,” he said quietly. “Remember?”

Reluctantly, Jenny smiled, though the worry hadn’t quite left her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. You are.”

Principal Flutie had been found, completely devoured, in his office.

“Oh,” said Jenny, much too loudly, right after the vice principal delivered this news. Then she got up, shrugged off Giles’s hand, and all but ran outside. The vice principal looked too distressed by the news to object to anyone leaving, so Giles followed, hurrying after her and making sure to shut the door behind him.

Jenny was leaning against a locker, her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking.

“Jenny,” said Giles. His heart caught in his chest at how small she looked.

Jenny straightened, looking humiliated, and roughly scrubbed at her face with a sweater sleeve, but she was still shaking too much to stand upright. Without hesitation, Giles crossed the hall, taking her in his arms.

“He’s the reason we got married,” Jenny said, her voice shaky and thick with tears. “Or…” She trailed off, resting her cheek on his shoulder. “He’s the reason we stayed married,” she said. “He’s the reason we’re married right now. It was all about appearances, remember?”

Giles was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t think it’s…I think this marriage might be something else, now.”

Jenny raised her head. “I don’t like that,” she said. “Make it stop.”

“I—”

“No, okay, maybe not,” Jenny whispered, and buried her face in Giles’s coat, taking a steadying breath in. He felt the way she relaxed in his arms, felt her curl closer, and realized in that moment that he couldn’t at all imagine what his life would be like when Jenny left it. It wasn’t the loneliness that would hurt—it was the absence of her. Small and kind and fiercely loyal.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly.

“For what?” Jenny mumbled into his coat.

For a lot of things. Most of them things he couldn’t tell her. “I feel as though I’m an entirely unsuitable husband for a woman of your caliber,” said Giles, which was true enough that it alleviated some of the guilt.

Jenny snorted, raising her head. “Bet you wouldn’t have said that on that plane ride,” she said. “All that stuff you had to say about decency and respectability—”

“Sod decency, Jenny,” said Giles with a wet laugh. “Decency didn’t bring us here, did it? Our marriage is a horribly unromantic story, but I don’t know if I could handle this town alone. I’m grateful I don’t have to.”

Jenny suddenly looked rather nervous. “I don’t know if I’m up for long-term commitment,” she said.

“Is this that?”

“Well, we’re married,” said Jenny awkwardly. “And we never actually talked about what all that kissing meant, I just thought—”

“Jenny, no amount of kissing means that we have to stay married,” said Giles, alarmed by her presumption.

“We just started talking about feelings and how this marriage wasn’t just appearances—”

“We are in an entirely unusual situation,” said Giles, choosing his words carefully. “You yourself mentioned that before our date was derailed.”

Jenny exhaled. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, okay. I just—it’s hard for me to wrap my head around this whole thing. I mean, god, I like you, I really do, but marriage isn’t ever something I would have chosen for myself. Being in a relationship with you means I’m at least considering—”

“It absolutely doesn’t have to mean that,” said Giles firmly. “This marriage is only a marriage from a legal standpoint. Even if no one but us knows it, we’re really just two people who have realized—albeit in the strangest possible way—that we would like to know rather more about each other.”

Jenny smiled slightly. “So this is just us dating,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But, like, we’re also legally married.”

“I did say it was the strangest possible way to get to know a lady,” Giles quipped. His smile softened. “If it would help, even a little…would you like to set an end date? Some point in time where we—”

But Jenny shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what I want,” she said, and reached up, lightly touching his cheek. Giles’s heart fluttered. “I meant what I said about not wanting to be married, Rupert, but…so far, marriage to you has been kind of okay. Stamping an end date on any possible relationship seems kinda pessimistic.”

“So—”

“I think we’ll know when it’s time to split,” said Jenny simply.

Giles found that he agreed. “All right,” he said. “So for now we’re legally married. But that’s a side thing that we can work out if this doesn’t.”

Jenny nodded, then settled further into his arms with a shaky sigh. “It’s been a really tough day,” she said. “And it doesn’t help that people are being eaten on campus, but…I’m glad I’ve got you here too. Sunnydale can’t possibly be a fun town to live in by yourself.”

“Principal Flutie was married, I think,” said Giles distantly.

Jenny raised her head. “Well, he wasn’t married to me,” she said matter-of-factly, as if by determination alone she could keep Giles from anything that might wish him harm. The look in her eyes made Giles quite believe that she could.

“I trust you, you know,” he said, and it was more for himself than for her. An affirmation that this was, in fact, someone he could trust, regardless of the secrets she might be keeping.

Jenny blinked, then smiled, and the guiltlessness of her smile confirmed it: whatever it was she was hiding from him, she didn’t think it something that might hurt him in the long run. He could understand that sort of secret. “I trust you too,” she said, a half-laugh in her voice, like she couldn’t possibly understand why he might want to tell her this.

Giles tried to smile in return.

They walked to the library together. Jenny, while still clearly shaken by Principal Flutie’s death, did seem comforted; Giles had no idea what he was feeling. Almost all of the secrets kept from Jenny had been justified by the fact that she would eventually be leaving his life, but now…true as it was that he didn’t know everything about her, it was also true that she was clearly a woman to be trusted. Staying married to her while not telling her what she had signed up for felt thoroughly dishonest.

Thankfully, the children were discussing the matter at hand when they entered, which meant that Giles was once again back on the Watcher clock. “Right now I'm a little more worried about what the rest of the pack are up to,” Buffy was saying, and Giles felt Jenny wince next to him.

“The rest of the pack were spotted outside Herbert the mascot's cage,” said Giles, doing his best to keep his tone steady. He wasn’t quite sure if he managed. “They were sent to the principal's office.”

“Good! That'll show 'em,” said Willow emphatically. When Giles and Jenny didn’t respond, she faltered. “Did it show 'em?”

Jenny let out a shaking breath, her hand tightening around Giles’s.

“They didn't hurt him, did they?” Buffy asked, but it sounded as though she already knew the answer.

“They ate him,” said Jenny quietly.

Willow sat down, slowly. “They ate Principal Flutie?” Buffy asked.

“Ate him up?” Willow added.

“According to the vice principal, wild dogs ate him, but, uh, that’s about as likely as…” Jenny trailed off, waving a hand.

“A science teacher with his head missing,” Giles finished darkly. Jenny flinched. Belatedly, Giles remembered that this amount of death wasn’t something Jenny was at all used to. “Jenny,” he said quietly, “we can continue to look into this without you, if you need some time—”

“No,” said Jenny. Her hand was now gripping Giles’s tight enough to cut off circulation.

“Xander didn’t eat anybody, though,” said Willow suddenly. “He was with Buffy.”

Jenny let go of Giles’s hand to step towards the book cage, which was when Giles noticed the slumped figure of Xander lying across the floor. “Oh!” he said. “Well, that’s a small—no, Jenny, don’t get too close,” he added sharply, pulling her hastily back. “We don’t know what he’s capable of.”

“Guys, how do we stop this?” Buffy asked, still visibly shaken. “How do you trans-possess someone?”

“We’re missing a lot of pieces,” said Jenny, “and we’re running out of time.”

“There’s some talk of a predatory act, but the exact ritual is, um…” Giles trailed off, thinking. “The Malleus Maleficarum deals in—”

“That’s demonic possession, Rupert,” said Jenny shortly. “We don’t want the demon transferred from human to human, we want the hyena back in the hyena.”

There was a strange, surprised silence. “You know my books,” said Giles, unable to stop himself from smiling.

“Light reading,” said Jenny, blushing. “My point is that until we know more—”

“Betcha that zookeeper could tell us,” said Buffy suddenly. “Maybe he didn't quarantine those hyenas because they were sick.”

“We should talk to him,” Giles suggested.

“Okay,” said Buffy, and took two steps towards the exit before stopping. “Oh, wait, somebody's gotta watch Xander—”

“I will,” said Willow.

“No way,” said Jenny sharply. “If he wakes up—”

“I’ll be fine!” Willow objected. “I know Xander, it’s—”

“That’s not Xander, Willow,” said Jenny. “That’s something else. If you’re staying, I’m staying with you.”

Giles’s mind immediately jumped from dead pigs to Flutie’s remains to coming back and finding Jenny in pieces across the library floor. “Jenny, I don’t think—” he began.

“You’re not leaving a teenager alone with a possessed kid!” Jenny snapped. “That is a recipe for more people dead, and I won’t be having any more deaths today if there’s anything I can do to stop them!”

Buffy and Willow both looked a little impressed at this, though the latter also looked somewhat annoyed at being labeled a teenager. Jenny had a point, Giles knew, but the thought of leaving her anywhere that wasn’t with him, especially when there were possessed hyenas on the loose…

The words tumbled out of Giles before he had quite realized what he was saying. “You talk so much about the deaths you want to prevent, Jenny,” he said. “What do you think it would do to me if I knew I could have prevented yours?”

The furious look on Jenny’s face froze. She looked honestly speechless.

Giles found himself stunned by his own words as well. Trusting Jenny was one thing, but this unexpected depth of emotion she inspired—this was altogether another. “I care—deeply—about you,” he said clumsily; it felt woefully inadequate, but it would have to do. “I think you should know that.” Turning to face his wife, he took her hands. “You’re right to stay with Willow,” he said. “And it’s selfish of me to want you at my side. Please, dear, just be careful.” Nodding to a stunned Buffy, he let go of Jenny and headed out of the library, not entirely ready to look back. If anything happened to Jenny while he was gone, he didn’t know what he would do.

Of bloody course the pack would come back for Xander. The abject terror that Giles felt as he raced through the hallways was unlike anything he had experienced before. Jenny had stayed behind to help. If anything had happened to her…

Giles caught sight of Buffy hitting one of the pack members with a fire extinguisher, and then Jenny tumbled through the half-open classroom door and into his arms. On impulse, he kissed her very hard, then held her tightly to him as Willow stumbled through as well. “I’m so sorry, I hadn’t thought they’d come back for Xander—” he stammered, all but dizzy with relief.

“Adds some spice to life, doesn’t it?” said Jenny, just as they caught sight of three other pack members down the hall.

“Run!” Buffy shouted. Willow obliged. Giles, absolutely unwilling to let go of Jenny, scooped her up in his arms before she could object. “Rupert!” she shrieked, but he was already following Buffy and Willow into the computer lab, slamming the door shut behind them. Buffy pushed past him to lock it; he set Jenny down.

“God, are you five?”Jenny demanded, face flushed. “I can run by myself!”

“I didn’t—want—I thought you might be dead,” Giles managed, touching her cheek very gently.

Jenny blinked, startled, then gave him a small, relieved smile, leaning into his hand. “Well,” she said. “I’m not. So no worries.”

“If you two are done being married,” said Buffy, but without as much of her usual exasperation behind it, “we’ve gotta get the pack back to the zoo.”

Giles wavered. “Individually, they’re almost as strong as you,” he began. “As a group, they’re—”

“Tough,” Buffy finished, “but getting stupider. You guys head to the zoo and I’ll figure out a way to get them there.”

Giles nodded, taking Jenny’s hand. Willow followed.

“There’s the Hyena House,” said Willow, pointing down the path. “Where’s the zookeeper?”

“He must be preparing for the ritual,” said Giles. “I’ll go in to help—” He paused, glancing at Jenny. “Jenny, would you come with me? Your expertise in this area has served us well thus far.”

“Just laying on the compliments tonight, aren’t you?” said Jenny, looking genuinely flattered. “Willow, warn us as soon as you see them coming.” She fell into step with Giles as they hurried down the path, then tugged on his sleeve, stopping them once they were a good distance away from Willow.

“What is it?”

“What you said,” said Jenny. She looked a little nervous. “About…caring about me, and, and wanting me next to you. And then kissing me like that when you got back, I didn’t know…I mean, I knew you and I finally reached a kind of okay place, but Rupert, I’ve never seen you like that before.”

“This is uncharted territory for both of us, to be honest,” said Giles, which was the closest to the truth that he could give her.

Jenny gave him a small, fluttery smile, one of those special ones that he’d begun to realize only came out around him. “Hey, c’mere,” she said softly, and gripped his scarf, pulling him gently down into a quiet kiss.

“Um, Giles?” called Willow from up the path, sounding a little exasperated.

Jenny pulled back, wincing. “Duty calls,” she said, looking a little embarrassed.

“And here I was sure it was too dark for her to see us,” muttered Giles, grabbing Jenny’s hand and pulling her along. As they ducked under the tape, he called, “Doctor? Um—zookeeper?”The zookeeper rounded the corner, face painted. “Ah,” said Giles, relieved. “The traditional Masai ceremonial garb. Very good.”

‘We all set for the trans-possession?” Jenny asked.

“Almost,” said the zookeeper.

Giles then noticed the markings on the floor. “Oh, right, yes!” he said. “The sacred circle! Yes, you’d need that to…” He trailed off, frowning. “But this would be here when…”

“Rupert,” said Jenny slowly, “it’s not possible to pull off a trans-possession without some planning beforehand.”

“I’m quite aware of that, Jenny,” said Giles, looking again at the zookeeper. The man was watching them both with a sharp, wary expression.

“People died,” said Jenny. Her eyes were flashing as she tugged her hand free of Giles’s, stepping forward and towards the zookeeper. “You are so much worse than some fucking vampire. People died because of your stupid attempt at a power trip. Kids are going to have to deal with the knowledge that they ate a person.How do you justify inflicting that on children?”

Without warning, the zookeeper lashed out, hitting Jenny hard with his staff. She fell to the ground, unconscious.

The last thing Giles thought before the staff swung in his direction was I really need to get better at figuring these things out.

He woke up in a cramped storage closet, Jenny leaning against him. Wincing, he pulled himself to his feet, keeping a steadying hand on the small of Jenny’s back.

“Does every night with you end with us knocked out?” Jenny mumbled as he opened the door.

“I’d say it’s an unfortunately safe bet,” said Giles ruefully. “My apologies.” Blinking up and around at the Hyena House, he added to Buffy, Willow, and Xander, “Did we miss anything?”

“More like everything,” Buffy began, then winced sympathetically. “You guys get knocked out?”

“The amount of head trauma that this job entails is ridiculous,” Giles muttered, hugging Jenny to his side. “You’re all right, dear?”

“Ugh,” said Jenny.

“My sentiments exactly,” said Giles.

“Listen, you guys should, uh, probably head home,” said Buffy, who was looking a little worriedly at the disoriented Jenny. “Or maybe to a hospital?”

“No, I’m cool!” said Jenny, tried to stand up without help, lost her balance, and fell into Giles’s side. Giles fell into the wall.

“Sure,” said Buffy, mouth twitching. “Okay. You two can meet us at the car, then?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Willow and Xander, beginning to gently fuss over the latter.

“Hey, I actually have a quick errand to run,” said Jenny, raising a hand to rub the back of her head. She still looked a little shaky on her feet, but she wasn’t quite as unsteady. “Is it okay if I meet you back at home?”

“Jenny—” Giles began, then stopped.

“Yeah?” Jenny met his eyes, holding his stare with a determined resolve.

Giles considered. Then he said, “I’ll see you at home, dear. Do be careful,” and dropped a kiss to her forehead.

He trusted her. It felt like the right choice.

[toast-the-unknowing]

as someone who has actually completed several long works, do you have any advice/tips for someone who has a fic that's just stopped dead in its tracks?? like at several thousand words and nowhere near finished but just, kind of at a loss as to how to get it where it needs to go?? thank you so much, and I can't wait to read your new stuff!!

Finishing long works is something that I’ve struggled with a lot and had very little success at until fairly recently (and then only in fanfic. Whoops. I’ll finish one of those novels someday). My main problem has generally been monogamous commitment – I’ll come up with a new idea and go write that and then come up with a new idea and go write that, and then I end up with thirty unfinished projects, and now I’m not even in this fandom anymore, and now I don’t finish them.

Ironically, I think part of what has helped is embracing that about myself – to a point. I let myself have my two dozen WIPs that I jump between and my big old drawer of plot bunnies. It lets me stay excited about whatever I’m working on and it cuts down on my FOMO of, like, “I had this idea but I need to be a GOOD DEDICATED WRITER GIRL and SLOG AWAY AT THIS MISERABLE STORY INSTEAD” and then I will forever and ever wonder if maybe that two sentence idea I didn’t write down and then forgot wouldn’t have been the greatest thing I ever wrote. 

(This advice may not be super helpful if you have less deeply ingrained Catholic guilt and less propensity to assume the worst in any situation than I do.)

So if you tend to be more of a one-project at a time kind of person, I think that can be a good way of bringing the excitement back into the fic – take a little break, go away, get some gears turning in different parts of your brain, see what shakes loose, come back and look at the story and be like I FORGOT ABOUT THAT AMAZING SENTENCE I WROTE, I WANT THE ENTIRE WORLD TO READ THAT SENTENCE. Sometimes when I get discouraged, it’s the thought of one single line that I really want people to read that makes me finish the whole thing: “If you don’t finish this fic then no one will ever read your fratricide on Christmas joke!” and then I have to finish it. Also I think taking a break, even a little break, can help you see where the gaps in the story are not that big. Sometimes I’ll think, God, I need an entire SCENE between these two paragraphs and it’s going to be SO MUCH WORK, and then I look at it a week later and I’m like…I can sum up that scene in a sentence.

I’ve been taking a lot of writing cues from improv lately, and something I learned how to do in improv is just say “I’m not having fun anymore, I’m going to end this scene” and I’ve been bringing that to my writing. “I’m not having fun writing this scene” – Don’t write it! Write the scene you do want to write! Even if it doesn't fit at all in the narrative that you have, you can figure out how to make it work later! Or you can just smash cut between scenes, it will be fine! I drank a looooooot of “you need to know your last sentence before you start writing, you have to outline, you have to follow three act structure” Kool-Aid in film school and I’ve been unlearning that lately and it makes writing a lot easier and more fun for me. “darling, don’t make such a drama” was just a long process of “now I want to write a scene where they’re doing graffiti. now I want to write a scene where Ronan compares Declan to Joseph’s brothers. now I want to write a scene where Henry gets Ronan drunk,” and I think it would have given Film School Toast a heart attack from That’s Not How Writing Goes guilt. But it got the story written and I figured out how to give it enough connective tissue to get by with.

Also, I have just been spending a lot more TIME writing than I used to. I have a little Chromebook and I take it with me EVERYWHERE, I write on the bus, I write during my lunch break, I write at the bar like the pretentious hipster I am. Chromebook isn’t practical for everyone but before I got it I was doing composition notebooks, same thing, with me EVERYWHERE.

I don’t have a succinct answer (clearly) but I think those are the keys for me: write a lot. Jump around between projects when you feel stuck, but honor and cherish them all enough to come back. Never write something because you think you have to. Do write something because you want to, even if you don’t know how it fits in with the rest of it yet. 

Or maybe more key: feel out what your writing process is actually like, not what it should be or what it would be nice if it were. I’m starting to get a grasp on what my writing process is actually like, and I’m a lot happier and more productive now than I was before.

[criticalbread]

Oh man these are all such useful tips and super simply explained! Thoroughly and completely blown away by your comment on his language quirk being almost 2nd-lang coded. I did a few rewatches and wrote some character notes for writing him or describing him, popping them behind a read more because they are not, uh, succinct. (Some of them line up almost exactly with some of yours, which is validating haha.) Hope maybe one or two could be interesting!

“The Mandalorian” Din Djarin

-Has a surprisingly light voice with a husky, at times throaty timbre. Other descriptors that come to mind: mellow, hoarse, smoky, soothing, quiet, steady, unruffled, burring, flat, but also can be tight, winded, gravelly.

-In conversation, has the quirk that he prefers to answer physically when possible-- “where are the pucks? Did you finish the job?” puts the trackers on the table- jobs finished; “can only give you imperial credits” takes them away as if to go somewhere else with better pay. Never needs to say his intentions when he can make them clear physically. Speeds things along, gets it all done with efficiency and no unnecessary chatter.

-First and foremost relies on silence-- to intimidate, to get people talking, to cut through bullshit, to get what he wants, to put people off balance. Silence also helps maintain the self-imposed distance he tries to put between himself & his bounties. And all outsiders, really; he moves through the world perpetually watchful and aware of his status as other. Silence makes him intimidating and untouchable, both with bounties as well as with other hunters.

-Has a sense of humor in his job/life, mostly to amuse himself (a lonely man with no one to talk to who talks to himself when he feels safe in his own space and makes jokes mostly for his own enjoyment, not because anyone is around to hear it or respond)-- gets a quippy one-liner in before putting the Mythrol in carbonite. “That’s my line.” When the Child comes along, he ends up directing a lot of his internal dialogue to his new companion.

-Quick to annoyance when things aren’t working, a plan fails or becomes unviable, someone else trips up his plan, or when surprised/put on his back foot. Expresses frustration freely. But he’s not quick to real anger. More of a short flash-bang, annoyance there and gone just as quickly. Maybe you could call him grumpy, prickly, defensive.

-For someone not particularly interested in social niceties, he can be surprisingly polite. Sincere and immediate in how he says thank you to Kuiil for helping him with the blurg; perhaps because he does not generally expect compassion or help and is surprised enough that it pops out before his usual reticence/discomfort could clam him up. And later, “I really can’t thank you enough. Please let me [give you part of the reward].” when Kuiil has helped him further and the mission is complete. He is a man who takes seriously his debts to others, and this seems to include the necessity of offering thanks. 

-Comfortable making others uncomfortable. In fact, he’s good at it for his job! Wields it like any other tool; took what might have been a weakness (awkwardness, not knowing what to say, not being comfortable smooth-talking folks) and made it work for him.

-Very physically controlled; no extraneous movements or fidgeting generally, which in turn makes those fidgets that do show up (his hands & fingers when unsure) and all extraneous unnecessary touches (picking up the shifter knob to examine as he thinks about the Child and reaches a decision) more telling. His usual uncommunicative and watchful stillness also highlights the fluently demonstrative aspects of his body language. When he shifts his weight in annoyance, rolls his gaze around, sighs, props a lean. It’s a fun conundrum of the character; unreadable, emotionless armor and visor, a blank slate enhanced by his stillness-- save for when it’s broken by a head tilt or a shrug like a shout. He emotes loudly, and more often when surprised or caught off guard.

-Cont.: Extremely committed to paying his debts (to Kuiil turning down payment: “Please. You deserve this.”) because he has come to view relationships as transactional. He considers his relationships to people by what he can give them— what he can give the Tribe, what reward he can give for assistance. It removes compassion as well as cruelty from the mix and simplifies things into something very practical. (And Din is nothing if not practical.) People don’t generally help others for nothing; people don’t generally hurt others for nothing. (Look at him. He hurts others for pay, though he can at least often say they aren’t often good people. Look at his life. No one helps him without something to gain from it.) It is for this reason that altruism and kindness can take him by surprise and shake him. He has to pay it back; he can’t understand a world where he doesn’t have to, and can’t stand not fulfilling his side. The world doesn’t make sense if someone wants to help him when he can’t give them anything. (Raises the question: Does he think his only value to others is what he can bring them?)

-Bossy.

-Thinks outside the box. His solution to a problem might not be pretty, but it’ll be expedient (and unsubtle.) A hammer who keeps finding screws as well as nails and still smacks both, to varying results. Bounty hunters don’t need a lot of subtlety, not once they’ve been clocked. Getting the job done and surviving are what matter after that point. Which means this man goes from 0 to 60 in a heartbeat. Hits hard and fast to get what he needs and get gone.

-Bullheaded and often rash. Think his trying to take on the Jawas’ sand crawler; getting frustrated with trying to negotiate with the Jawas and using his flamethrower to try and intimidate. If he can’t jerryrig a fix or a plan on the fly, he will bullrush in and try to overcome an obstacle or situation by sheer force of stubbornness and willingness to do absolutely buck-wild shit. If his plan only addresses the first part of the problem and will cause it’s own obstacle, well, he’ll think of what to do when it gets to that. It’s similar to his fighting style when things get desperate. His armor makes him largely untouchable in battle; when in doubt, strut right up the middle and shove some explosives up the butt. He probably won’t die. (So like a man used to being a mostly indestructible juggernaut during fire fights...)

-The other side of the coin to this: he has experienced so much and gotten through so many situations that he can approach many dangerous situations (a droid ambush; a dogfight with a fighter in deep space) with an unflinching competence. His experience makes him dangerous. He is highly skilled at what he does because he has been doing this alone for so long. His talent often shines in his hand-to-hand against groups; his marksmanship; his capability with a wide range of weapons; his tracking skills; his piloting-- including off-the-wall and dangerous maneuvers that most pilots wouldn’t attempt but he can pull off because he knows the Razor Crest like a man knows his own hands.

-Awkward but not bashful; blunt but not often mean. (“Bad news. Can’t live here anymore.”) Straightforward when he actually decides to respond and not just silently glower his way through a situation. He doesn’t pad his responses, not even for people who have something he wants (Gor with his information; Din doesn’t pretend to be interested in the fights, in gambling. He doesn’t try to butter him up or get on his good side.)

-Used to using intimidation in difficult straits, especially against people who have wronged him (Jawas) or have otherwise proven they’re not there by good intentions/simple bad luck. Mando is used to shoving morally corrupt assholes around, even when they are not his bounties. And he’s used to being treated as a misunderstood and misrepresented outsider for whom everyone is suspect, considering the extremely valuable nature of his beskar. Comes out swinging right from the start rather than give people the chance to do the inevitable-- trick him, use him, steal from him, trap him, or try to kill him, among other things.

-Has a soft spot for children, for the elderly, and for gentle, kind, compassionate people. (The Child, Kuiil, Omera.) People whose lives are not made through harming others. Honest working folks. Even if he doesn’t seem to know how to interact with these people who live outside of his world— see his awkwardness with Omera’s casual kindness.

-At his core, he is compassionate and capable of great altruism and selflessness because his first, most basic instinct is to help. The distance, the coldness, the cynicism, his hand-to-mouth mechanical living as a bounty hunter whose only thought is for the job and returning to the tribe with resources-- all those things have been trained into him. They are things he had to work at and learn the hard way. Even where these habits have worn smooth and seemingly natural, his true character fights to come out. (His compassionate approach to calming Davin in the New Republic prison transport, to connect to him and get him to stand down. His insistence that he won’t stand for him to be killed just for being there and doing his job.) He has smothered much of who he is in order to be the remorseless hunter he believes his tribe needs him to be and which he feels he owes them. His life has become survival, like everyone else's’ in the covert. He smothers his feelings and morals down by putting all of his time and energy into work.

-There isn’t a luxurious bone in this man’s body. He doesn’t put any credits or effort into his own personal comfort or wellbeing. He lives an extremely spartan life. He has very little in the way of self preservation or selfishness. In the end, if he has to throw his body into the grinder just for the possibility of completing the job, he will without hesitation or second thought. 

-When he brought in the bounty on the Child, it came down to a struggle between his purpose in life (providing for the tribe) vs. his own morals (what he could and could not live with). The situation involved an inherent contradiction that he had to find a way to negotiate in order to preserve his sense of self. His role vs. his most basic self. Bounty hunter Din Djarin vs. Mandalorian Din Djarin. His honor as a Guild bounty hunter and Mandalorian (his word as his honor, his commitment to the Guild Code) vs. what was right. The Code vs. The Way (“Foundlings are the future.”) He pushed through his own feelings as he always has when necessary in order to finish the job and get the pay; only to come out the other side and realize that this time he couldn’t. Compassion and morality won, his identity and personal mores as a Mandalorian won, even if it meant failing his tribe in a way by not being able to continue on as he has been. 

-When he decided to go back for the Child, what began was this character’s destruction of Self as he knew himself -- which would continue as he grew connections outside the tribe; was tempted by his more selfish desires (to stay in Sorgan with Omera); broke down his enforced distance from others and denial of his emotions; re-inherited his name and became more than just Mandalorian, Mando; allowed for the loophole in his Creed to be taken advantage of by IG-11-- to live as a man rather than die a warrior, a Mandalorian, Creed untouched and unbroken; forgave trespasses against his strict Mandalorian culture which he otherwise was honor-bound to protect(Cobb); learned of his place in a larger Mandalorian society and tradition (Bo-Katan and the Nite Owls); removed his helmet in front of Migs to save the Child then put it back on; then removed it again on the bridge to say goodbye to Grogu, even when it meant allowing others to see his face. A complete destruction of Self that will lead to him building a new self. How difficult that will be, and who he will become, remains to be seen.

-Din’s isn’t completely ignorant to history and the galaxy! He might not know what a Jedi is or much about them, but isn’t it meant to be that much of the galaxy doesn’t? Even those who have heard of them think they are a myth. Din does have a base of knowledge; he knew about the Siege of Mandalore, the Great Purge, the Night of a Thousand Tears. He’s old enough to remember these things for himself, even if he wasn’t on Mandalore for them. He was able to figure out Moff Gideon’s identity based off of his time as an ISB officer during the Siege of Mandalore, the only place where his name would have been recorded. He can spot a Rebel drop trooper by her stripes, knows a New Republic prison ship on sight, speaks multiple languages. To be so good at avoiding detection in different areas of space under different law, he has to know them well enough to be able to dodge them, like how he doesn’t run a ping on his pre-Empire ship and has his entire excuse lined up for the off chance he is accosted. A lot of history and knowledge on Mandalorians (esp the old culture that his sect abandoned) has been kept from him, and he like most of the galaxy doesn’t know all the secrets and realities of the Empire and how it was ended (Jedi, force lightning, surprise dads and siblings, etc.) but he’s not a complete ignorant. He has the knowledge base a hunter from the Rim needs to do his job well and survive. He didn’t exactly have a Core education with history lessons and social studies. He has practical and culturally specific knowledge.

-Cross the wrong line with him and he will have no compunctions with killing you. See Gor in episode 9’s intro. He revealed that he has been hunting down Mandalorians to kill them for their beskar, and has lured Mando there for the same. After getting the info that he wants from him, Din leaves him to die in a gruesome manner. Core of compassion and selflessness or not, Din is a practiced and experienced killer. Threaten the helpless in front of him, threaten his Creed and his people, attack him, threaten the Child-- pay for it with your life.

If you're a fanfiction writer who can write Din Djarin in character, please just know that I am in absolute awe of you

[theashemarie]

A Concerned Citizen

A Few Concerns:

I’m in the middle of Hurricane Harvey recovery (30 inches of rain in three days—whoo boy), so I’m going to try to keep this as succinct and brief as I can. (Also, I recently fell and knocked myself on the head so I apologize if this isn’t worded particularly well but I’m trying. I’m a very concerned citizen about this.)

I need to preface this by saying that I in no way support @encaged-au. In fact, it makes me incredibly uncomfortable, and I’ve written about this before, and I think that we absolutely need to work to make the fandom a safe place for minors. But, I also have major concerns about this @sonicsafetysquad blog.

I have never been a fan of fandom’s (and tumblr’s) penchant for callout posts and blogs. It is incredibly easy to cherry pick examples to defame someone or something, and the witch hunts that result are ugly because many people don’t and won’t think critically about things. The fact that a person (or group of people) can simply decide to make a callout blog/post, thereby declaring themselves the moral authority in a fandom/cause/issue, is downright worrying, to say the least. The holy righteousness that comes out of these people is terrifying, and they quickly accrue blind followers who want to be on the “right side” of the issue.

I’m here to tell you that there’s always an ugly side and a nice side to every storm, but it’s still just that—a storm. Those of us in the center of it are often caught up by it, but this time I have the peace of mind to see the problems as they unfold.

So yes, Encaged needs to be addressed, but the way that this callout blog went about it is absolutely the worst possible way. First of all, and most troubling, they went into a private Discord server, basically in raid formation, stirred up trouble, took screenshots without permission from the server owner, the mods, or the members, did not make any effort to conceal the identities of the minors that they claim to want to protect, and used them in their callout post. That right there immediately makes me suspicious. (They also claim to not have raided/invaded the server, but it says plain as day here that they got an invite from a concerned person, not a mod or admin (thereby the server was closed to the public), and went in and immediately started harassing the people in there.)

Once again, I’m going to emphasize, I am deliberately saying, that I do not support Encaged and my group of friends and I have been very concerned about the AU for a while. But, I am also a human being capable of critical thinking and I can immediately see that this holy crusade can only go downhill fast. My criticism of sonicsafetysquad in no way means that I support Encaged. (Gotta put this here because some people are black and white thinkers.)

Yes, by the way, I’ve seen this post, which paints a pretty ugly picture of the scenario. In their post, the sonicsafetysquad clearly cherry picked their examples, but the whole conversation is... Yeah. They raided Green Chill Zone, where Encaged was housed for a while, and their interactions were hostile from the beginning. You cannot, under any circumstances, go into someone else’s house, knock over their things, insult their family, make them uncomfortable, and then demand answers for some problematic behavior and expect them to give you what you want. That’s not how human behavior works, so the fact that they did just that and then accuse the Encaged creative team of not answering their questions? Yeah, it stinks in here. Of course they didn’t tell you their plot when you started insulting them, calling them awful things, and making their friends uncomfortable with what you called “harmless jokes.” I don’t care what holy mission from god you’re on; your behavior and handling of the situation is and was atrocious and I can’t trust any callout posts you make because of this terrible behavior. The ends do not justify these means.

Also to note, they raided the server early in the morning, when most of the mods, the owner, and the people they wanted to talk to were asleep. I don’t know if this was intentional, but by god with everything else going on, I wouldn’t be surprised.

(A sidenote: That post where they got an invite from a concerned person? And the callout post itself? (Which I didn’t want to link to but this is turning into a dumpster fire so here’s all the facts.) They seem to be claiming that this type of thing should not happen in a private server, but in this post (screenshot 16), Somberhog (mod president over on the callout blog) clearly says that they should keep it to the server. So, which is it? Should all adults who come into contact with children be policing their self-expression in a private server, or should adults only step in when things get public? When a concerned person who is in the server finds problem with it? It gets very messy very quickly, and if you want to be the police of the fandom, you sure as heck better be ready with a strong idea of what you want. Right now, they don’t have that.)

(Another sidenote: Posting PMs without permission to make a point? Really mcfreakin scummy my dudes. The micron of trust I had that they would handle this well is going going gone.) (And hand to god, everyone who knows me know that I’m not super fond of Shadzter. I can’t believe I have to defend him. Yes, he is not handling this situation well, btw, but neither is the sonicsafetysquad.)

Second, they neglected to mention that @kimmyko has received criticism for her response to concerns about Encaged, and she has handled it with grace and an open mind. (I would know, because I sent that anon in.) And the odds of them missing that ask are slim because it was posted a few hours after the first. The reason I bring this is up is that if they truly wanted to have a dialogue with kimmyko to air their grievances, they very well could have, but instead chose to put her on blast for the whole fandom to see. Once again, I’m hard pressed to trust these people to “protect” anyone if this is how they act.

Another thing to note here: the sonicsafetysquad has repeated a few times over in the past 24 hours that they have different mods with different opinions who will write different things, so accusing the whole blog of something isn’t valid and to keep this in mind. But, kids, I gotta tell you, when you start a group project like this, you are acting as a unit. If one of your members says something that gets you into trouble, you all are responsible. You should be checking each other’s work, their answers to asks, their tone, and the way they go about getting information. This is how group projects work in the real world. The whole company/project/nonprofit looks bad if one person screws up, and you can’t just point fingers like “mod so and so are entitled to their opinion!” You need to own up to the fact that one of your members threw around the word “pedophile” and it rightfully made a few people upset. That’s not an accusation you can level at someone lightly, and since you have placed yourselves in this position of power, you can’t be doing this. (They’re also playing semantics, which is the pettiest thing I’ve ever seen, but I’m not going to get into this.)

I know that this blog has good intentions, but their tone, the way they’re handling everything, and their blatant disregard for basic decency is mind-boggling to me. If you want to put yourself on the moral high ground, you can’t do this. We’re not talking about punching nazis here; this a fandom—a fandom for kids, as this blog keeps pointing out. If you’re so gung ho about protecting kids, you also need to set a good example for how to approach and handle these situations civilly, or else we’re just going to keep doing this and not getting anywhere. What are you teaching children by raiding a Discord server, pointing fingers, calling someone a pedophile, answering asks in a condescending manner, not opening yourself up to dialogue, and being so righteous that the ultimatum is that you either agree with the callout or you’re an abusive-loving stan? Every issue is on a gradient of grays. Stop acting like this is black and white.

In conclusion: this post is basically my stance on this whole thing. I can’t believe you made me do this, Sonic fandom. Now, I’m gonna go back to bailing water because there are actual emergencies going on in the world.

[srta-jax-blog]

NTPRS Day 4 & 5 (This one’s gonna be a long one!)

I’m putting these two days together because Day 5 was a half day and both days consisted of one-hour sessions addressing special topics. On these days, presenters like Mira Canion, Bryce Hedstrom, Jim Woolridge, and many others presented, and I consider myself very blessed to sit at the feet of more experienced professionals and learn from them. I went to sessions with Von Ray, Bryce Hedstrom (2x), Clarice Swaney, Scott Benedict (2x), Nathan Spencer, and Mira Canion. Thursday was also when Dr. Bill VanPatten gave the keynote speech, which was mind blowing. (I’ll address BVP’s address separately, because this is already a very long post!)

The first session was conducted by Von Ray. (I guess I didn’t get enough of him the first three days of the conference!) He presented on the value of developing good improvisation skills, which he pulled from “Truth In Comedy: The manual of improvisation” by Charna Halpern, Del Close, and Kim “Howard” Johnson. It was during this session that Von said that “Bad TPRS is better than good grammar” and that “Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly in the beginning.” I think the best pieces of advice that I got from this was that I should try to be funny/make jokes, I should embrace the unexpected, listen and make connections, and make the students look good.

Blaine Ray sat in on this session, and he gave a ground rule that he uses in Storyasking: Once I state the fact, you cannot contradict that. This was in response to someone asking about students adamantly trying to change the details of the story to suit themselves. This is one of the concerns I’ve had, but having a succinct rule like this will be very helpful.

I went to two sessions with Bryce Hedstrom because he had two topics that I really wanted to know more about: passwords and student interviews. The passwords session was first, and it was really helpful. Bryce gave great tips on how to introduce and teach the passwords, and gave some tips for how to get through them in a time crunch. After the morning sessions, I did go buy his book on passwords, just so that I could peruse the material at my leisure again and again. The book also has lists of passwords that can be used at different levels, which is helpful for me to have handy. I can’t wait use these in my classroom (and I’ll probably even make my administrators say the password when they come to visit!) He also talked a little bit about how he handles late students. They don’t have to say the password, but they do have to say “Lo siento” (I’m sorry) and the class responds with “Está bien” (It’s okay.) His reason for this, which I thought was beautiful, was that the students need to learn to forgive and also that they can be forgiven, which is a concept that so many students are unfamiliar with these days. Bryce also gave some neat little tidbits about things he does in his classroom… but you had to be there. ;)

I tried doing student interviews last semester, but the students didn’t seem to get super into it. In the second session I went to with Bryce, he explained his Special Person Interviews (we discussed the unfortunate naming, and someone suggested Selfie Talk to match with other CI terms like Picture Talk and Movie Talk) and demonstrated how he handles them in class. He said that this all stems from his personal philosophy of helping students realize who they are, what they are about, and what they want to do so they can realize Ikigai. In other words, he is using the target language to help his students become better people. He has posters with his Special Person interview questions (and sentence frames for answers) up all year round. This is an easy way to differentiate for varying processing speeds.

In this session he also addressed quizzes based on the SPI, free-writing, do nows, and how he organizes it all in a composition notebook and grades the various things within. I really liked how he organized it. I was planning on having my students get binders, but I may have them get composition notebooks and use those as well to develop a portfolio of writings throughout the semester. (I’ll be having mine keep their composition books in the classroom.)

I think part of my problem last summer was that I did not do a good job of asking follow-up questions, and I limited the questions they were asked too much. In his demonstration, he showed how he was able to get a lot of follow-up questions based on the answer to the question ¿Qué te gusta hacer? (What do you like to do?) This year, I plan to stick closer to his script for the questions that are being asked.

Which leads to the first of the two sessions that Scott Benedict presented. Both of his sessions were very helpful (and I had originally only planned on going to one of his sessions), the first one addressing using the Super 7/Sweet 16 verbs as the basis for a world language curriculum and the second regarding grading and flexible seating.

Scott explained how the Super 7 (Dr. Terry Waltz) and Sweet 16 verbs (Mike Peto) give our students the ability to communicate pretty much every idea they need to if they can use them in the past, present, and future tenses. The students will not be able to say everythingthey want say in the exactway they want to, but they will be able to circumlocute (talk around) pretty much every concept they can be expected to talk about. In Scott’s school district, the main focus of Spanish I and II is to get the students to “own” these 16 verbs across all persons in the most common present, past, and future indicative uses, although they are introduced to other tenses.

The big takeaways from this session:

1) less is more-If I focus on teaching and repeating a small set of words-the Sweet 16 and personalized, releveant vocab, the students will retain that and then some.

2) Focus on the Super 7 first, but teach “disgust” before “gust” so that the reverse construction doesn’t confuse them too much.

3) We are language parents, not language teachers. That’s actually a Haiyun Lu quote, but the point is that we need to talk to our students like we would talk to a little kid. In general, a parent corrects their child by restating their statement with correct grammar, not making them parrot it or lecturing them on grammar.

4) Shortrunposters is the cheapest website to get posters made for your classroom. Scott has made posters of the Sweet 16 verbs in a number of languages using the most common past, present, and future forms of the verbs for free on his website, and he had them blown up, printed, and laminated for his own classroom. I have done the same for the 9 I’m sure I’ll need from day one as well as 2 pages of Bryce Hedstrom’s Special Person Interview document. (In a few weeks I’ll do another order to get the rest of the posters made, because even though each 17”x22” poster was only $5.50, I’m still not made of money.)

In the second Scott Benedict session I attended addressed classroom layout and gradebook layout. This was an accidental session for me, I intended to go to a different session, but couldn’t find it. I had already planned to go deskless and begin implementing alternative seating, but this session really helped me feel better about that decision and get a better idea of what that could look like.

The benefits of a deskless classroom:

1)   There’s more space. Chairs, yoga balls, and bean bags take up a lot less space in the room than the traditional chair-desk combination. This helps me stay close to everyone, which improves classroom management and lets me have a bigger staging area.

2)   I can rearrange and group students easily.

3)   Desks are a barrier to conversation and give students a place to hide illicit activity (phones, food, etc) or disengage by putting their head down.

4)   It’s easier to implement alternative seating. There is only so much space in a classroom, having to accommodate a yoga ball next to a chair-desk or a table takes up a lot more room or makes it almost impossible to reach everyone quickly.

Scott doesn’t implement alternative seating until a few weeks into the school year, and lays very clear guidelines for the use of alternative seating.

Scott addressed how he uses various posters to develop his classroom culture, including classroom rules, a word wall, his Sweet 16 posters, question words (I like that his don’t have the English on them, but rather are illustrated with pictures), and behavior warning posters. He uses a clothesline to hang his collection of funny hats to be used by student actors (or student behavior problems) and some shelves to store realistic animal plushes that he gets at zoos all over the country. (They look amazing, and I want to start similar collections!)

Finally he talked about how he sets up his gradebook. He divides his into Speaking, Writing, Listening, Reading, and Culture categories that contribute to the students academic grade, but he can/does track things like participation, homework, effort, etc in a 0% category for documentation purposes. The percentages he uses align with blooms taxonomy and range from 10%-30%. For his level 1s, there are no speaking and writing grades in quarter 1, but he has them for the full school year, and he gives three grades per category per marking period. Two are formative, one is summative, and he assesses all the categories in one exam at the end of the quarter. This means he’s giving 15 grades/quarter, and is taking at least 1/week. He recommended staggering when grades were taken among classes, especially for the formative assignments to reduce the amount of grading done at any one time.

I don’t think I will implement this exact system next year, at least in terms of percentages, but we shall see.

Mira Canion spoke about assessing reading comprehension. She pointed out that we need to be doing this consistently because it tells us what our next move is. We discussed the ACTFL and WIDA standards for comprehension on the different levels, and how they are only somewhat helpful in guiding what assessment should look like. One of her more brilliant points was that by using the target language to teach content using Comprehensible Input Methods, we can bypass arguments about explicit grammar teaching because we aren’t teaching that.

Mira then talked us through reading strategies we could teach and then use to assess our student’s reading comprehension.

Strategy 1: Read the text, comment on it/make a prediction/ask a question/clarify something, and reread it if you are completely unable to do one of those things. We can have students write these down, and then sort them to assess.

           -Deep questions/comments get an A.

           -Simple questions/comments get a C.

           -If it is between the two, it’s a B.

           -We need to model asking deep questions in L2 (the target language) in order to help our students do the same, then supplement the ones who do with more complicated texts, and we can do that starting in Level 1.

Strategy 2: Have the students make a web of information around a topic based on a reading.

           -It’s important to have the students drawing this web, not just filling information out.

           -Have them sort whether statements pulled from the text are linked to the main idea or detail, and explain why the details support the main idea.

           -We need to really teach students how to find the main idea, not just have them read a text and then ask “so what’s the main idea?” Sure they should have learned that in their English/Language Arts classes before they get to us, but odds are good that they haven’t.

Strategy 3: Students find the story structure.

           -If a students can find and talk about the various elements of a story structure, then they understand the story.

           -You can give them a chart with columns to support them creating sentences. Ex: Somebody/wants/but/so.

R Clarice Swaney’s session dealt with doing Picture Talks. I’ve done Movie Talks with varying degrees of success, so I understand the concept of a Picture Talk, but it was still good to go to a session that specifically addressed doing them and reinforce what I already knew. The big takeaways for me was to make sure that my picture was interesting, I used creative cropping to create interest and build suspense, set clear expectations from the get-go, and have a loose plan of questions to ask that blend talking about the picture and talking about the students.

I really like the way Clarice phrased her expectations:

1)   Nothing on your lap, nothing in your hands. (She’s deskless too!)

2)   One person speaks, all others listen.

3)   Professional posture

4)   Use the Target Language, make interesting suggestions.

5)   Demonstrate understanding or ask for clarification

If a student breaks those rules, Clarice doesn’t make a big fuss, but acts like she didn’t go over the rules and refreshes them.

I really liked the suggestion of using Picture Talks to introduce or examine things of cultural reference. Working more culture study into my classroom is a personal goal for this year, which means I will have to be more diligent about researching culture in various countries, but not all of my Picture Talks this year will be about culture. I learned so much in on these two days, and I wish I could have gone to more individual sessions! I have a ton of new methods and strategies in my teacher toolbox that I can’t wait to use this year!

[purple-possibilities]

11 More Questions

First mate @letliv3 tagged me back, so here I am again with TMI. This got really long, so buckle up lovelies!

1. What is your favorite movie soundtrack and why?

I have two movie soundtracks on my phone. One is the soundtrack for Sweeney Todd (the one with Johnny Depp—is that how you spell his name? Idc) which I love because the lyrics are clever and I have been a member of many choirs in my life and we’ve sang this musical. The other is for Sucker Punch, the movie with the girl in a school girl outfit and a katana, because there are awesome covers of amazing songs, and they’re so relaxing omg. But other than those, I don’t really pay attention to movie soundtracks. But wait, hang on! When Batman Forever (I think? One of the Batmans from the 90s) came out, my brother, who was is obsessed with Batman bought it, and we used to listen to it all the time. So for nostalgia sake, that one. Kiss From a Rose is like, the greatest song (we never really listened past that track lol!)

2. What is your favorite smell and why?

I like French Lavender because it just smells nice, but the best smell is a mixture of freshly cut wood and sawdust, metal and tools, the dark green Polo cologne, fresh, crisp spring air and a hint of cigarette smoke. That’s how my dad used to smell when I was a child. He doesn’t smell like that anymore. A few years ago, when I was walking under a construction site, I got a whiff of it. From what seemed like a dream I was slammed with childhood emotions, memories of love and safety, bike riding on Saturday afternoons that ended with cherry-flavoured popsicles, laying in a pile, squished on the couch, wrapped up in blankets and surrounded by pillows on top of my dad, while my mom joked about us being as lazy as the lions we were watching on the Discovery Channel. It was a piece of nostalgia wafting over on the breeze. If I could bottle it, I would in a heartbeat.

3. If you could eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?

ONLY one? Forever? Ugh I would totally hate that food after a week. So let’s go with something healthy and maybe with a variety of ingredients so I could pick some out if I got bored. But my fav food is hot and sour soup, which doesn’t have much variety. I think actually I’d pick steak. Because you could marinate it differently, but even if you were limited to salt and pepper, you can still make it taste different enough. And different cuts taste different so I’m gonna cheat that way. I will greatly miss that soup though.

4. What teacher has most influenced you in your life?

Good or bad or memorable?

Good: my grade 7 science teacher subtly told me off for being a judgemental 12/13 year old and I still feel the shame of that sharp glance and flat retort. I’ve been much kinder since then.

Bad: my grade 11 art teacher made me feel worthless because the art I produced didn’t fit his idea of how he thought I should be interpreting his ridiculous prompts. I had to do a mixed media piece which explained “The Economic Crisis in China.” And my interpretation wasn’t “art,” but the person who got to chose their topic, chose “Global Warming,” and painted a tiny polar bear in the centre of a canvas with a white background got an A+. I’m not bitter at all, what are you talking about? I hated that he wouldn’t talk about it with me. He expected me to know what he wanted and to just do it, and that’s such a horrible thing for any teacher. In my whole life I have never disliked a teacher. I even like the teachers that everyone else calls hardasses. He and I just didn’t get along.

Memorable: My grade 11 English teacher gets an honourable mention because he was a babe and damn if I didn’t have the hugest crush on him. We used to get into conversations about the origins of words and the history of language and if that isn’t what makes the ideal man then idk what is. Talk nerdy to me 😘

5. Who was your idol as a child? Why did you admire this person?

Samus Aran, from the Metroid video game series. That was my favourite video game, my dad’s fav game, my bro, my male cousins, my uncles…everyone in the family loves that series. It was about a bounty hunter in a set of impressive, head-to-toe armour, who was just the biggest badass; a human trained by an extinct alien species to use their advanced technology and weapons. And the major “reveal” of the game? Samus is a woman. There were no female characters that were playable back then, or that weren’t just princesses that needed saving. There was no game more fun to play, that was as unanimously loved (in my small world) than Super Metroid. And I wanted to be her. We had the same colour hair (they’re changed her design now which upsets the little girl in me) and I wanted to be a badass bounty hunter that defeated space aliens and had the last being of an alien species—that was typically a deadly menace—imprint on me and think I was it’s mother. Little girls have strange dreams ok, and honestly I don’t think that dream will ever leave me. I want to cosplay as her one day, I just have to get the confidence to do so.

6. What kind of coloring books go you like? The simple and succinct ones or the intricate and detailed ones?

Eh, well I’m an artist so I much prefer to draw. But both have their ups and downs. The intricate ones can be very relaxing, as you can easily colour in pleasing patterns. But the simple ones give you more space to “freestyle” so to speak. But I love co-op colouring with children. When my cousins were super young I used to draw them pictures to colour in, and their mom has kept them all.

7. What are your go-to pair of shoes?

Slip on flats, when the weather permits it. I can take them on and off without any fuss, no ties or buckles. I have a pair now from sketchers which are plain black…something. They’re accidentally (yes, accidentally is the right word) construction shoes. They can withstand over 30k volts of electricity or something, idfk I don’t understand safety shoes. All I know is that I’m not getting electrocuted any time soon. Try me, lightening. I dare you! ⚡️⛈🌩

8. What would you name your Direwolf if you had one?

I want to say “Lucky” only because those guys don’t have much, but if we’re not being superstitious, then probably “Paul.” Because of a Family Guy joke.

9. If you could change one event in the past, what would it be? (It doesn’t have to involve you in any way.)

I…I’m really sorry, but I can’t answer this with complete honesty. My first and second responses are too personal. But my third? Hmm, if I’m being selfish, I’d close my eyes (so vague mwahaha). If not…there’s too many to chose. So many tragedies the world has faced, I can’t choose one that weighs heavier than any other, or would make the biggest impact. Because you also have to consider that some good came out of those tragedies. And if you stopped one event, then whatever tensions were being built up would just break at another time. Maybe I’d stop a natural disaster from occurring, save a bunch of lives. I’d actually love it if the Library of Alexandria still existed, or the Colossus of Rhodes wasn’t destroyed by an earthquake, or that giant statue of Athena that used to be in the Parthenon wasn’t torn down…I have a soft spot for pieces of history that were destroyed.

10. What is your favorite memory you have with your group of friends?

Not my current group, or a group really. But my fav memory with a friend is with my first roommate in university. We bought a pumpkin to carve for Halloween that turned into a ridiculous photo shoot featuring pumpkin entrails, pizza, and the stars of CSI New York on our shitty tv.

11. If you could become part of your favorite series/ movie etc. would you?

Well, first I have to pick a favourite, which is just impossible. But for the sake of the question, since I’m very involved with the Naruto fandom atm, I suppose I’ll just use that in place of “favourite.” On the one hand, it seems like a drag. Any war-torn place seems horrible in comparison to this world. But then again, magical powers are pretty sick. Would I be born into the world, or transported there? Would I have powers, or be just normal me? Would I have “foresight” based on my knowledge of the series, or be a “tabula rasa?” So many things to consider! When in the series would I be injected? Post the Fourth War, sign me up as I am now, and even as a civvy; so long as there’s some Rokudaime in my life I’ll be fine 😜. Before that? Ehhh…it depends. I’d probably miss everyone in my life over here, and with no guarantee that I’d make new bonds in the new world…ok so I’d def want my friends and family there (well, some of them lol). So maybe, depending on the situation when I got there. Which is pretty much a non-answer. Sorry!

I’m not making more questions or tagging anyone since I’ve done it once already. If you want to answer the questions I laid out in the last one, or answer these questions, just tag me! I’d love to read people’s responses. It’s all so fascinating!

[witchin-bitchin-twopointoh]

It's this weird, false idea that somehow anything that people react negatively is simultaneously good, funny, and correct. I have no idea where it came from and I don't know how to counter it.

Like, take for example the triggered jokes. Not only is is just super terrible by means of the joke seemingly dunking on... PTSD victims, but it's just not funny. It never was funny. That one pic of the red-haired feminist paired with the "TRIGGERED" text was literally always punching down and really unfunny unless you specifically hated those people and thought it was funny that they got upset.

I mean, that was the whole thing, wasn't it? Someone would have an issue with your shitty hurtful jokes and you'd scream "TRIGGERED?!" back at them.

Now that I think about it, all those terrible jokes weren't really meant to be funny. They all served to silence the people r/theDonald didn't like.

Apache helicopter meme? Trans people. Triggered? Abuse survivors, primarily, but also everyone else. "Millennials/liberals are crybabies"? Just every single person they disagreed with.

Idunno, just rambling here, but I wonder if having these succinct answers to everything that might challenge a right-wing worldview that shuts the whole dialogue down instantly (avoid all cognitive dissonance while expending as little time arguing as possible) is why teenage boys somehow fell right down the rabbit hole to fascism, unchallenged... and why they're still clinging to the jokes, long after they're dead, because of the purpose they serve.

Idk. Been studying the rise of fascism recently, and maybe that's something I hadn't considered yet.

hey, is it time yet? can we just fucking… like is it time? can we finally admit that right-winger reddit-type folks are just not fucking funny? like all those “triggered!” “attack helicopter!” “millennials are oversensitive” oh-god-it’s-that-guy jokes are just fukken…. bad? can… can it be time? can we all let go of that big ol breath we been holdin and be like. look. we tried. we gave u a couple of netflix specials, even. but ya’ll are just. like, bad at jokes. honey. listen. sweetheart. put the mic down. come here. let - no, it’s okay to cry - let it go. 

[amorremanet]

Oh boy, you're one of my all-time favorite content creators so I wanna ask a lot of questions. I'm particularly curious about 1-4, 17, and 19, but I understand that that is a significant amount of questions, so don't feel obligated to answer them all if you don't want to - just do whichever ones you please! 🌸

asks for fanfic writers

number 2 is done over here, but!

1. things that inspire you

……Uh. That’s a good question. tbh, it’s hard for me to pin down a specific set of things because… Sure, quotes or pictures usually help a lot, and so does music, but inspiration comes out of pretty much everywhere, for me, and at any time. Which can be super-frustrating when it happens, like. While I’m driving, or when I can’t get to my phone or a notebook to jot the idea down, but… Sighs. This is life, sadly

3. name three favorite writers — idk if this is supposed to be fan-authors or not but i’m really bad at picking fave fan-authors, so I’m going with not

1. Federico García Lorca — don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here, crying a lot, because García Lorca was such a beautiful soul who wrote such beautiful poems and plays, and THIS!! BADASS!!!! OH MY GOD. He was killed for being a gay man who gave General Franco the middle finger and didn’t just lie down for fascism but fought to try and keep his country from being taken over by said fascists. I love this man, don’t even go there.

2. Fyodor Dostoevsky — it was a really close call between him and Mikhail Bulgakov, because I’m limiting myself to one prolific Russian even though I love them both. But Dostoevsky won out because I’ve loved him longer, and I’ve read more of his stuff than I have Bulgakov’s (which is really saying a lot because Dostoevsky often makes GRRM look positively succinct by comparison) (though in fairness, that’s a bit on his brain; Dostoevsky lived with a form of temporal lobe epilepsy that resulted in hypergraphia and he lived in an age when novels were originally published as serials and you got paid by the word, so much like Darles Chickens, he went on and on and added subplots left right and center because Dostoevsky had to get paid), and The Brothers Karamazov is one of my favorite novels ever.

It’s also secretly hilarious, like. Yes, it’s a door-stopper that has a lot of heavy shit going on, too, with familial dysfunction and murder and all kinds of theology — but don’t try to read this book while you’re drinking something because you will probably choke on it at some point.

3. Adrienne Kennedy (I have admittedly only read one of her plays and I haven’t had the opportunity to see any of her work performed live, but Funnyhouse Of A Negro is legit one of the best works of 20th century American literature. It’s a one-act play, I’m not saying that this is a link to a PDF of it but I’m not not-saying that either if u know what I mean, and it will completely blow your mind — like, it’s so out there, doing stuff that nobody else is doing in the same way, and it’s fucking beautiful)

Honorable Mentions: Anne Rice (because no matter what issues I have with her, and we could be here all night, even if I cut out the, “and here is why Anne Rice is Wrong™ about fanfiction” tirade, because I have a LOT of issues with her? I am still trash garbage for self-indulgent gay Catholic vampires, especially when they helped get me through a lot of really bad downswings by being trashy and self-indulgent, the end)

Neil Gaiman (because no matter what issues I have with him — and there are plenty of them, some personal and some ideological — Good Omens, American Gods, and his run on Sandman are some of my favorite stories ever, they’ve helped get me through some shit much like Anne Rice and JKR have done, and I’ll probably never be over That One Quote from The Kindly Ones about, “Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it?”)

and Leonard Cohen (I would talk about him more, I feel bad for not doing it but I’m still not ready to deal with his death, even though it’s been a couple months, just? His poetry is some of the most beautiful shit I’ve ever read, and to be fair, Beautiful Losers isn’t a novel that I’d recommend to everybody but I love it)

4. name three authors that were influential to your work and tell why

1. Augusten Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, and JK Rowling get listed together because they’re in the same post and I’m gonna cheat

2. Kurt Vonnegut — like, I love his stories themselves, of course. The first thing of his that I read was his short story, “Harrison Bergeron”; we read it in seventh grade English and it was so completely unlike literally anything I’d ever seen. The things that were closest to it were Roald Dahl (they had a similar off-kilter sense of humor, though Dahl and Vonnegut are different in how they go about being off-kilter), Fahrenheit 451 (we read it in sixth grade English and it just hit me like a big yellow school bus)

and Animal Farm (which we also read in seventh grade English, and it was on a similar wavelength with “Harrison Bergeron,” as being stuff written by political leftists who weren’t afraid of criticizing the behavior and beliefs of other leftists, but ultimately, Vonnegut and Orwell are two very different kinds of satirists and, for me, Vonnegut always prioritizes the human element of the satire over the ideological element that’s so central to Orwell’s everything ever. Like, neither of them is completely without any grounding in the other’s Big Deal thing, but they still have their preferences, and Orwell’s more about the ideas, to me)

—but “Harrison Bergeron” was still so far out there from anything else I’d ever read before it, and everything else I’ve ever read from Vonnegut continued rocking my world by just going off in his own weird little Kurt Vonnegut direction where he was gonna do his thing and you were just along for the ride. It was so much fun, and completely engaging even if I didn’t always feel like I got it, and I love this about him.

That said, though? The biggest impact that Vonnegut’s had on me is that he showed me that you can write satire without losing all of your compassion or your respect for the human element, which is so fucking important to me, because so many people conflate, “satire” with, “being an asshole”

—like, so many people take, “satire” as carte blanche to be a dickbag to people because they think they’re in the right about whatever’s on their mind, even if they’re trying to satirize people who are in positions of power like Jane Austen allegedly did

(granted, I don’t buy that version of the story with her, but in fairness, that’s because based on what I’ve read of her work, I think Jane Austen was a bitter, self-righteous snob who had no friends and that her so-called, “satire” was really just her being all, “Ugh, these loser preps are so jealous of me but I can’t help it that I’m better than they are” and having literary temper tantrums over the fact that no one wanted to spend more than a few minutes with her because she was a complete asshole who looked down her nose at fucking EVERYBODY)

(I mean, I already stanned for all of the Brontës before I learned that Charlotte had an EPIC hate-on for Jane Austen, but I started stanning for her harder when I first learned the story about how she refused to take on some collaborative project with Jane Austen that someone suggested she do, because based on reading some of Austen’s work, she felt that Austen didn’t have a single ounce of human compassion in her entire withered soul and thought that Jane Austen had more in common with the people who abused Charlotte, her sisters, and their brother Branwell, than with Charlotte herself — but that being said)

Anyway, my point is that Vonnegut is a satirist with a soul, and that’s what I want to be, too. More fabulous and gayer than he was, but still.

3. Terry Pratchett — on a personal note about why I love him, no other writer can make me smile as reliably as the late Sir Terry. Like, if it’s true that Gaiman did most of the heavy-lifting with the plot for Good Omens while Sir Terry did most of the joke-writing, then…… I’m okay with that, really? And it makes sense? Like, Good Omens was the first thing that I ever read by either of them, and its voice has much more in common with Sir Terry’s usual writing than with Neil’s

—but regardless of which of them did what more than whom, Good Omens had a huge effect on my developing sense of humor when I found it at an airport bookstore in middle school, and it was my first real, serious introduction to the idea that you could write a story with all kinds of angels and demons and magic and weird supernatural hijinks that didn’t have to be relegated to the Children’s Lit shelf like HP and Narnia (though Narnia was at least taken seriously when I was a kid, and HP was only taken seriously insofar as people could call it a literally Satanic corrupting influence blah blah whatever bogus arguments they pulled out of their asses), or unrelentingly Serious About All The Things Ever (like Narnia and LOTR)

or such nauseating Christian propaganda that it makes you want to stab CS Lewis’s corpse with a rusty fucking spork (like…… well. Narnia. Which is hilarious because Good Omens literally incorporates elements from the Book of Revelation, and a smattering of stuff from everywhere else in the Bible, while Narnia has a White Witch and a talking Jesus lion and a satyr, and yet, the one whose main characters are an angel, his demonic boyfriend, and the Antichrist is NOT the Christian propaganda here)

Moreover, Sir Terry is such a good example of a writer who grew in quality and also realized when he’d done Less Than Cool things that didn’t actually live up to his philosophical ideals, so he constantly tried to do better with his work. I respect the shit out of that, and I want to be like that as a writer, too.

Also:

That’s the shirt that he wore to conventions: “Tolkien’s Dead. / JK Rowling said no. / Philip Pullman couldn’t make it. / Hi, I’m Terry Pratchett.”

Great shirt, or GREATEST shirt.

Honorable Mentions: Sylvia Plath (because I was a completely cliché white theatre kid goth chick in high school and Sylvia Plath gave me hope that I, too, could write angry, angsty stuff that didn’t have to be all HOOM BAM MACHO like Jack Kerouac and have an audience)

August Strindberg (completely rocked my shit when we read The Ghost Sonata in the Theatre History and Histrionics class I took in my first year of undergrad, because, like Vonnegut, it was totally out-there and so unlike anything else that I’d ever read before. He’s just such a little weirdo and I love it)

John Waters (honorable mention because he’s not an author in the traditional sense exactly, but he’s a content creator and he does write the screenplays for his movies, and he’s gay and weird and a proud freak who’s all about that camp trash #aesthetic and about being gay and weird and freaky, and damn everyone who wants to make you fit in with their arbitrary standards when you’re not hurting anybody, and that’s all Very Important to me, on a personal level and on an Artistic Integrity Feels level)

and Jeffrey Eugenides (I don’t love him quite as much as I used to, back in high school — a lot of the cooling on him started when I learned that he’s straight, when I’d spent most of my adolescence thinking he had to be LGBTIQ, but that then led to an appreciation of some of the other glaring Issues in his books

like how he sort of plays at calling out southeast Michigan’s history of racism and especially of antiblackness in Middlesex, but ultimately ends up replicating it more than he actually calls it out, not to mention how the whole book is really Not Good about it deals with intersex conditions and how it represents intersex people, and it’s really heteronormative in a few ways that are now incredibly frustrating for me because I see them in clearer ways than I did in high school

—but I can’t deny two things: 1. Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides had huge effects on the process of me finding my own voice as a writer, and they both kept me alive in high school, more than once; and 2. Jeff was an inspiration because he’s from the Metro Detroit area, too, and I was totally sure for so long that nobody from ‘round here could really Make It as an author or accomplish anything for ourselves as writers.

Like, I wholeheartedly believed that I was probably doomed because I wasn’t from Somewhere Cool, like JKR, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, or [insert any of the authors I ever had heart-eyes for entirely because They Were From New York!!! That Means They Are A Serious Writer!!!!] — but then along came Jeffrey Eugenides.

I discovered him completely by accident, because the Sofia Coppola movie version of TVS was on TV, and then I found out it was a book and had to read it… and then I found out that he was actually from the Metro Detroit area, and it was just? Whatever issues I have with him or his work, finding out that he was from ‘round here too was A Big Deal to me because !!!!! it meant that I wasn’t totally doomed to never have a future as an actual facts writer because I’m from Michigan instead of from Somewhere Cool)

17. favorite AU to write

ohhhhh man, hard question, because I like most of them.

Well, I mean. I like “correcting canon,” to borrow a term from @addictsitter — but tbh, I get so married to some of those ideas that I easily forget, until I’m called upon to explain it to someone else, that: Scott McCall isn’t canonically autistic and bisexual; Barty Crouch Jr.’s mother is not called, “Demeter” by anyone but me (but much like Braeden’s last name being Tandy because…… Meaghan’s last name flowed really nicely with Braeden’s, and Chris’s boyfriend being named Thierry Kensinger because I googled, “most popular baby names switzerland 1985” and, “most common surnames switzerland” and put together a name that I liked for him, I intend to just treat, “Demeter Lysistrata Gamp Crouch” as if it’s actual canon until everyone agrees with me); and all of my feels about [pick a character]’s gender identity, sexuality, neurodivergence, etc.…… are not necessarily shared by other people until I share them, oops

I like taking the, “non-magical/supernatural/ridiculously traumatic in ways that exceed average human capacity” AU setup for all of my fantasy, sci-fi, horror, Gothic, super-powered, or otherwise speculative fandoms…… and then finding ways to translate the supernatural parts into non-supernatural terms. Like, way back in the SPN fandom, my go-to was that Castiel isn’t so out-of-touch with people because he’s an angel; it’s because he’s autistic.

In Teen Wolf land: well, the Hales are generally not all dead, for one thing, because they’re not werewolves so the Argents had no reason to kill them, and Peter deciding to stalk and abuse Scott and Lydia has no magical components to it, he’s just a fucking creeper who preys on and probably assaults teenagers, possibly while he’s dating their mothers (since he’s canonically hit on both Melissa and Natalie, and went out with Melissa that one time in s1).

Then, Jackson’s kanima plot from s2 can be translated into non-magic terms as, for an example, Matt murdering the swim team on his own and dragging Jackson into it after Jackson witnesses one of the murders (I usually move Tucker the Mechanic to earlier and have Jackson be the accidental witness to his murder instead of Stiles), and instead of there being magical mind control murder lizard hijinks, Matt abuses and manipulates Jackson non-magically, Jackson falls harder into his fledgling drinking problem that came up a couple times back in s1 but was never mentioned again, and it’s Bad before Matt eventually gets caught and sent to prison. Even helping send him to prison with a promise of immunity in exchange for his testimony, Jackson doesn’t tell the whole story — not even to Danny — because there’s a lot of it that he’s trying to block out, or that he isn’t really ready or able to fully understand himself.

Or like in the Marvel theatre kids AU that I play around in sometimes, uh. Frankly, trying to make Thor and Loki into humans is kind of an enormous dumpster fire (a dumpster fire that I’ve enjoyed working on, personally, but still: dumpster fire) — also, for the link: cw for death, murder, kidnapping, emotional and psychological abuse, manipulation, (mostly inexplicit) references to torture and ethnically-motivated hate crimes, discussion of war crimes (more inexplicit than not but still), and hardcore douchebag!Odin (as in, he is the one perpetuating most of these war crimes, that is what I mean when I say, “douchebag Odin”)

But, uh. The characters who are not Norse gods are easier to put into non-spandexed terms — like, Bucky’s “winter soldier” plot involves emotional and psychiatric abuse; Sam hasn’t been in the military yet because he is in high school but his wing-man Riley died in a freak accident at Jr. ROTC summer camp; Pietro and Wanda are Erik’s cousins instead of his kids because otherwise I couldn’t have all three of them, and anyway, he’s ridiculously overprotective of them and will probably hurt you if you touch them; Nick Fury is the much beleaguered director of the theatre club, who is trying to (more or less) single-handedly save the entire fine arts department;

and Wade Wilson isn’t on drugs, he’s just like that naturally (“like that” here having the meaning of any number of possible ridiculous things but right now, let’s go with, “following Logan Howlett: Professor of Art™ around the mall on Saturday, narrating the entire thing like an episode of Crocodile Hunter, and dragging Peter Parker with him because Peter actually answered his phone when Wade called him at Too Early On A Saturday O’Clock and he has no idea why they’re doing this, but okay”)

And I was going to be sad because it’s 3:15 AM now and I didn’t feel like I had the energy left to talk about one completely ridiculous Star Wars AU in detail — but I remembered that I actually had a post about it a while back!

Short version: It’s seriously Keeping Up With The Skywalkers, just. Not rich and famous or anything. Also, no one is dead. Except Palpatine, probably. Anakin is a late-in-life closet bisexual who is doing his best to ignore this la la la, Padmé figured out that she was a lesbian after being with him for a while and is now married to Ahsoka — his ex-foster sister — instead, Obi-Wan was their friend in college and he and Anakin had A Thing before someone (Anakin) fell in with a really shitty homophobic pastor-local politician-crime lord who manipulated him (Palpatine) and a messy as fuck break-up ensued and Anakin has been trying to jump in Denial River ever since

(not that Obi-Wan can judge: he became Luke’s mentor when Luke was in college, knows that “Skywalker” isn’t a very common name and that Anakin and Padmé named their son, “Luke,” and he still totally glossed over how he, uh. Knew Anakin a few times over by calling him by his weirdo religious-political-mafia nickname, Darth Vader, in all the stories he told Luke, lol um, whoops?)

Luke is a soft gay activist but Leia is a hard bi activist who’s better at activist work that is more easily understood as activisty while Luke is better at stuff like community building and housing LGBTIQ kids who need places to stay in his spare rooms, Han is married to Leia but probably also kinda married to Lando in Canada (they were drunk, it’s complicated, but Lando is accepted as Basically Family by pretty much everyone. Anakin calls him, “the son-in-law I should have had” when he’s in a pissy mood with Han, which happens often), Chewie is Han’s incredibly hirsute old friend who has no sense of volume control (no one knows why his nickname is, “Chewbacca,” but Han insists that the story doesn’t make sense if you weren’t there), and the Falcon is an old van that’s constantly held together by duct tape, chewing gum, and luck

KyBen is constantly getting in trouble for being a bullying little shit to Poe and Finn on the playground (which is coming out of a lot of things, like, “Ben hates them for being more popular than he is,” and, “Ben hates them for being better at school than he is,” and, “Ben hates Finn specifically because wtf no, how dare you be so charming and make Poe Dameron smile like he likes you, this isn’t fair, Ben was like SO CLOSE to figuring out how to make Poe like him [not really], he’s going to go listen to a metal cover of, ‘You Belong With Me’ in his room and throw things, fuck everybody, he hates this town and this school and his family UGH IT’S NOT A PHASE DAD”)

Poe and Finn really just want that annoying Ben kid to leave them alone already like what is his deal, Hux and Phasma don’t like KyBen either (they just got stuck with him on hall monitor rotations and have to keep him from breaking people’s faces or else it will reflect badly on them), and Rey is a plucky, somewhat abrasive new girl who warms up really quickly if you’re genuinely nice to her and one time beat up Phasma to get her off of Finn because Finn was nice to her so Rey decided that they should be friends. Rey just moved to town with her adoptive dad

Obi-Wan is her adoptive dad

Anakin has the face-crack of the century

and Luke doesn’t want to detract from how hard this is for you, Dad, but is SUPER NOT IMPRESSED WITH EITHER OF YOU for totally failing to mention that you knew each other like???? WHAT. Fuck this, he’s gonna go to Tosche Station and then go have dinner at Mom’s with her and Aunt Ahsoka, this is bullshit

(Luke storms out of his own house, leaving Anakin and one of the kids who’s staying in one of the spare rooms standing in the kitchen super-awkwardly)

(update: it is 3:36 AM now, and I’m still doing better than expected, given how far off the point I’ve wandered here)

19. favorite fandom to write

Uh. Good question.

Cop-out answer that has a basis in fact: right now, my favorite fandom to write technically doesn’t entirely exist yet because I’m still making it up and the fandom won’t be A Thing until the novel’s actually done and people can read it. (And it’s not guaranteed to be A Thing but I’d really like it if I ever got to have a fandom based around something I wrote with my OCs. Like, even all of #The Discourse™, while probably incredibly frustrating on several levels, would be so flattering and I’d be beside myself because ksdfgkfgherb????!!!?! people??? liked??? this thing i wrote???!!!?!!?! enough to make a fandom?????!!!!!!!?!!!! *as yet hypothetical pterodactyl screech!!!!*)

Attempt at an actual answer: Right now, I’m sort of between fandoms a bit. HP is always my good go-to, because there’s always something to do there and even if Sailor Moon was technically here first, HP was my first fandom where I was really actively involved, in more ways than just going, “Huh, what does, ‘mpreg’ mean?” and clicking on that one NC-17 Aragorn/Legolas fic that abruptly shoved tiny eleven-year-old Kassie into the deep end of what goes on in fandom.

(Though in all due fairness, the first fanfic I ever posted online was some crack-ass HP/Sailor Moon crossover with a totally overpowered and inexplicably American Mary Sue self-insert OC. I was coming up on twelve, probably lying on my profile on that site and saying I was 13, and bless the person who took the time to leave a review going, “Hey, I know you’re young and this is a first effort on your part, but you show a lot of imagination here and that’s worth nurturing. BUT you’re not going to get much of anywhere if you don’t work on it and here are a few sources where you can start looking for help at developing characters better. I mean this to help you, so please don’t stop writing or having fun with it. But you can learn to do better, too.”

And then I asked for a copy of Nancy Kress’s book, Dynamic Characters, for my birthday, my parents found it at Borders, and the rest was history.)

(nb: this should definitely be read as me reccing that book. It’s not a perfect guide by any means, but it’s still one of my go-to’s for help with writing and inspiration for character development, and it’s a very solid, reliable resource. Like, I love it so much that I taped and glued my first copy back together about three times because it wore out from how much I read it and how I carried it almost everywhere, and then made buying a new copy a priority when I couldn’t put the old one back together anymore. but anyway.)

So, yeah. HP is my good go-to, and idk, I kind of want to try writing more than headcanons in the YOI fandom, buuuuut I’m not entirely sure where to start with that just yet — or where I want to start, aside from, “No matter what the actual main subject is, it will probably involve Chris doing IDEK what, something ridiculous probably” — and……

Well, the cop-out answer has a basis in fact? My original novel’s been getting most of my writing time and attention lately, so there’s that?

[bogject]

The Script From My Review

So I started this year by asking the question (CLICK) can objects tell stories?

and the answer to this is (CLICK) yes (CLICK)

Thanks for coming! - Haha just joking! (CLICK)

The real question was HOW can objects tell stories?

This lead to me investigating the effectiveness of found artefacts vs mythical objects, which are objects intentionally crafted to have a narrative and a history.

From looking into mythical objects I was then faced with the question - (CLICK) How can I make my own story telling objects?

To kick off my investigation I decided to focus on an initial site, which was Deptford docks, and in wanting to highlight the alternative history of the docks I built a small boat and launched it into the Thames. (CLICK) I didn’t really know it at this point but by reintroducing forms of historical labour to this site I was attempting to make the history more physically apparent, even if it was on a small scale.

So then through looking into traditional sunken ship preservation, which essentially meant pickling the ship before bringing it to the surface, I started to explore different methods of food preservation. The idea of preservation in literal and metaphorical terms became key to the project. (CLICK)

I produced a series of objects, creating links to Deptford docks using food preservation methods. The idea was that the meaning was transferring from object to object. I made Thames Water Jelly, a pickled ship and a Thames trifle. (CLICK)

I later buried this trifle underground, which is another ancient method of food preservation and this lead me to discover bog butter. I’m sure you all know this by now but bog butter is literally butter which has been discovered buried in bogs, dating back to the iron age.

So in learning about bog butter I learnt more about bogs and how they contain the perfect conditions for preservation, the high acidity and low oxygen environment means that anything biological can almost perfectly be preserved within them and this is why we’re now finding butter from 2000 years ago floating around in them. (CLICK)

I then went on to visit some London bogs, the most impressive one I found was on Wimbledon Common, named Farm Bog. I had a go at making my own bog butter which involved burying it in the bog, leaving it for five days and digging it up again. I then preceded to make ice cream out of it that I let people try at the last review. I used a recipe formulated by an ice creamery based in Dingle, a town in Kerry which is a county in Ireland where a number of bog butter discoveries have been recorded. I also have extensive family in the area. So the reasoning for ice cream was split between this and the idea that ice cream was like a contemporary version of butter. At one point it was considered of high value to a community, the butter stores would be relied upon in times of bad harvests and it was considered an indulgent treat, often brought out at special occasions and important meals.

SO, after this I began to try to narrow down what it was that had intrigued me about all these food objects I’d been making, and it was something to do with the temporality of these things and how they were able to tell a story related to their direct environment in a new and interesting way. I began to read a report called ‘Materiality of Time and Temporality of Place,’ which analysed the conditions that enable time to manifest but essentially the point I took most from this was that ‘The lived body encounters the place world by going out to meet it.’

So I decided to go to Ireland. (CLICK) By doing this I hoped to more authentically explore the environments and systems involved in bog butter by recreating the conditions to physically explore it. I decided on specific sites to visit before going and tried to keep as much ephemera from the trip as possible that I could use afterwards. I kept a diary, I stored little things like receipts and filmed as much as I could.

Once again, I buried some butter, this time in two locations and I made contact with a guy named Peter Foss, an environmental science who gave me a lot of specific information on the sites I was visiting and put me in touch with various people who were knowledgable on the area.

When I came back from Ireland I made a short film that documented what I did and a zine. The first iteration of the zine wasn’t so good but I used this to create a second iteration which was a lot more succinct. Within the zine I started to try to simplify what I was doing by employing the use of timelines and showing my thinking through the intersections of these timelines. (CLICK) Here are a few examples.

So I showed all of this at the work in progress alongside a cube of bog that I fashioned from compost and acrylic. (CLICK) The feedback I got on the zine and film was good but the cube of bog came across as more of a comedic approach and this confused the overall message so I scrapped bog cube. (CLICK)

Re-evaluating after the WIP, I tried to narrow down what the project was coming to focus on. I felt it was leaning towards being about the materiality of temporality, and even me saying that out loud makes me kind of want to slap myself,  but anyway so looking to explore further the temporality of the sites I’d been investigating I started looking at processes that had historically surrounded the bog.

I did a bit of research into peat cutting. Peat is a fossil fuel that used to be cut from bogs in squares and then dried and used as fuel. This used to be a pretty big operation in Ireland. Traditionally, after harvesting the peat the families involved would stack the bricks in structure called ruckles that would help them to dry out. Whilst being the most space effective way to dry out the large amounts of peat cut, the structures looked like sculptures in themselves, often measuring over 2 metres in height and being pretty nice to look at. They were almost like monuments to the back breaking work that went into harvesting the peat.

It was at this point that I read a pretty heavy report called the ‘Temporality of the landscape’ by an anthropologist called Tim Ingold, he coined the term ‘taskscapes’ and theres a lot that could be said about this report in general, but in short he makes the point that ‘Just as the landscape is an array of related features, the taskscape is an array of related activities.’ The landscape is not a finished form it’s generated in movement. So basically, most people see the landscape as a finite image but really its continually changing on a microscopic level and this is down to systems of taskscapes, like peat cutting, where people and environment engage in tasks that form features like paths and indentations on the landscape. The idea of the impermanence of the landscape I thought linked back quite nicely to the continually evolving nature of the mythical object and shared parallels with the bog in the same way that it’s both really old but also constantly regenerating and new.

I felt I was getting a bit tied up in theory at this point so I built a ruckle of bricks in my garden (CLICK) as a way of testing out the generation of a taskscape.

Then I had a tutorial. The general points were that it felt a little insular because I hadn’t involved enough people directly. I also needed to work out who these acts were for and what it meant to be doing this at this point in time, seeing as the whole project was focused around temporality.

I’d been recording myself carrying out generative tasks throughout the project and this is when the idea that I was re-introducing forms of labour that had historically been connected with these sites of interest came about. I liked this as a more succinct and direct explanation.

Another thing that cropped up was what is the relationship between ruckles made of bricks and butter buried in bogs. The short answer is that there is no relationship between the two.

Everyone wanted me to carry on with butter as a thing and after some initial push back I realised that butter along with preservation were two key points that I needed to stick with. I then decided to actually make some butter (CLICK) which is actually a lot simpler than you might think.

So what now? I hear you scream. Well, in reviewing all of this I’ve decided that first and foremost I want to preserve the history of bog butter. I’ve really enjoyed researching it and I think it’s necessary as we’re already kind of unsure of its origins so give it another thousand years and I’m sure we’d be even worse off. By doing this I also hope to generate conversation around the importance of preserving our cultural history and traditional heritage practices that may seem somewhat obsolete today but I think still hold value when reviewing the importance placed on technological advancement and considering the ever growing disconnect between us and the natural environment.

In order to do this I want to stage a super specific re-enactment of a votive offering bog butter burial, it will most likely happen in Ireland at a bog and I want all the details to be as historically accurate as possible. I will film this and then I’ll create a publication that documents my process and the project and lays down instructions on how to retrieve this buried butter in the future. It’s my hope that I can then preserve this literature for someone to find further down the line to discover my butter, thus kind of looping the cycle and passing on the information to people in future.

(CLICK) In order to do this I have spent the past week talking to re-enactment groups and iron age experts in order to gather the right things and make sure I’m doing everything accurately. I’ve arranged some phone calls and some meetings later on in the month. I need to gather info on rituals, dress, the way they made butter and hopefully I’ll stumble on some more things in the process of getting this information.