#also if you don't want to be tagged in these; just send me and ask or pm to let me know :)

[epsilonicronecronomiconemon]

1. Please send me the actual post you are talking about, as I just asked before. I want to block the op so I don't accidentally reblog from them.

2. Read my tags again— I said every post you reblog/make about trans men is a post that paints them negatively. I know you write smut, it's none of my business. Your opinion on my existence is my business.

3. Please cite the posts you are referencing where users nothorses and crimsonender have done the things you've mentioned. I see a lot of fallout posts of ppl like that and I've learned to ask for proof because that sort of thing can be real but also accusations of it can be used as a weapon.

4. I get hatemail too :( two threats so far just from people who claim to follow you. This weird war is vicious like that, and I am also sorry you are recieving harassment, and I encourage anyone still reading this post who is on my side to stop bothering this user who is just trying to tell me what users have been saying awful things about her

5. I reiterate, please show me proof. I know everything about this is totally nuanced and it's important to block the bad ones who overcomplicate things and get confused about what the transandrophobia movement should be about

Without hrt, Christmas is just cismas.

[sungbeams]

WIP DUMP

okay so this is lowkey inspired by @jayparked posting about her wips a bit ago (check them out here she's crazy talented and i can't wait to read them all) and since i've been struggling with writing recently i thought maybe sharing some of my wips could help. also biggest thanks to snail for helping me with the synopses for some of these and listening to me stress over the banners and everything

if you want to talk to me about any of them or wanna get tagged pls don't hesitate to send asks or comment on this post, i'd love to talk about them some more🥺❤️

MIDNIGHT IN MILAN — lhs

⟡ ┆ featuring. heeseung x fem!reader

⟡ ┆ genre and tropes. MDNI 18+ ONLY, smut, established relationship, idol AU (both heeseung and yn)

⟡ ┆ warnings. semi-public sex, unprotected sex, mirror sex, mild choking, creampie, fingering, tiniest hint of degradation (he calls her a slut like once), one singular spank, some hair pulling, not really any aftercare

⟡ ┆ estimated word count. 6k

they say love makes you do stupid things...surely fucking your boyfriend in the bathroom at the prada after party when your relationship isn't even public and neither of you can afford a dating scandal isn't that stupid, right?

(i'm well aware the hype around tipsy heeseung has already died down but i started writing this immediately after the pics dropped and then got hit by writers block so i'm dedicated to finish this)

!! more under the cut !!

HE HATES ME, HE HATES ME NOT — psh

⟡ ┆ featuring. sunghoon x fem!reader

⟡ ┆ genre and tropes. MDNI 18+ ONLY, smut, enemies to lovers, coworker AU, miscommunication (ikik), lowkey past fuckboi sunghoon

⟡ ┆ warnings. hate sex, semi-public sex (in an archive room?), protected and unprotected sex (there's several smut scenes), choking, spanking, degradation, praise kink, oral (m. and f. receiving), handjob, fingering, manhandling, overstimulation, dacryphilia, spit kink

⟡ ┆ estimated word count. 20k

park sunghoon hates you, and you hate him. it hadn't always been like that, when you first joined the company he works at he was friendly, a real gentleman, but over time of working together he turns cold, sometimes even downright mean, and you cannot for the life of you figure out what caused the sudden change in his behavior. however, things between you change yet again when you 'accidentally' get locked in your offices archive room.

HOME IS WHEREVER YOU ARE — lhs

⟡ ┆ featuring. heeseung x fem!reader

⟡ ┆ genre and tropes. MDNI 18+ ONLY, smut, college!au, friends to lovers

⟡ ┆ warnings. there's some talks of depression as well as unhealthy coping mechanism so be aware of that pls, protected sex (be proud of me okay), oral (f. and m. receiving), vanilla af, neither of them are virgins or inexperienced but they just having sex for the first time together after realizing they've been in love with each other for years :')

⟡ ┆ estimated word count. 14k

"distance makes the heart grow fonder." is no longer just a cliche saying. heeseung decided to follow his dreams, but doing so lead him to a different city, leaving you behind. no other friends, no hobbies to keep yourself busy, and no motivation to keep going, the only thing keeping you on some sort of routine is attending your college classes that your parents force you to go to. just when you're about to officially quit and give up, heeseung shows up out of nowhere and manages to pull you out of your slump, upturning your whole friendship in the process.

NATURAL REMEDY — pjs

⟡ ┆ featuring. jay x fem!reader

⟡ ┆ genre and tropes. MDNI 18+ ONLY, smut, physical therapist!reader, patient!jay, probably hipaa violations idk just don't do this irl basically

⟡ ┆ warnings. unprotected sex, oral (m. receiving), body worship (jay receiving bc he deserves someone to tell him or handsome he is), handjob, lots of oil, lowkey massage kink idek what to call this??

⟡ ┆ estimated word count. 5k

when jay hurts his knee while goofing around with his friends, his doctor recommends rest and physical therapy. lucky for him, your office is just around the corner, just that neither of you can make good on the ordered rest by doctor.

HEALTHY COMPETITION — lhs + sjy

⟡ ┆ featuring. heeseung x fem!reader x jake

⟡ ┆ genre and tropes. MDNI 18+ ONLY, smut, college au, non-idol au, and they were roommates (oh my god they were roommates), no romance just fucking

⟡ ┆ warnings. basically no plot, threesome (duh), protected and unprotected sex, anal, double penetration, spanking, oral (m. and f. receiving), multiple rounds, manhandling, they make it a competition to see who can make her moan the loudest...

⟡ ┆ estimated word count. 9k

your roommates bickering should be nothing but white noise to you at this point, but when they both rope you into their little argument of who fucks better things take an interesting turn and a welcomed distraction from studying is provided.

SNEAKY LINK — sjy

⟡ ┆ featuring. jake x fem!reader

⟡ ┆ genre and tropes. MDNI 18+ ONLY, smut, uni AU, frat boy jake (i'm sorry), friends with benefits but no one knows, alcohol consumption (they're not drunk and both consenting !!)

⟡ ┆ warnings. unprotected sex (it's a theme for me atp, don't do this irl pls), dry humping, fingering (it's jake come on now), kinda rushed sex ig, does it count as exhibitionism when they fuck in a spare bedroom idk, oral (f. receiving), breast play

⟡ ┆ estimated word count. 4k

frat parties usually weren't your thing, but when your best friend invites you (with the intention to be her wingwoman) you're not one to let her down. that is until you run into jake, whom you've been fooling around with without anyone knowing ...

© sungbeams — all rights reserved. i do not give permission to copy, repost, modify or translate my works.

[mer-acle]

I, too, sometimes dabble in the dark arts of AU making.

So here's an idea. What if Hera actually represented her domain with Athena. There's this young goddess, and let's be real, she's already traumatized by having been EATEN (Hera can relate) and Zeus is like eh. He's better with small children, and Athena's pretty grown up at least physically. She's also still pretty weak from being inside him so she can't be useful yet. Hera doesn't even know why she feels protective of her husband's child. She's always wanted kids of her own, never considered adopting or whatever, but here's a kid that doesn't have a mother anymore, that's scared and new to the world and doesn't trust anyone. And for some reason, Hera wants to be the person that she can trust.

Basically, Athena's a total momma's girl in this. She doesn't care for Zeus, why would she. He's only ever hurt her and now she's out of him, he barely acknowledges her.

Unfortunately, Poseidon is a bitch and just had to jibe Zeus about Hera and Athena being so close. So Zeus, being the paranoid ass he is, decides to send his daughter to train elsewhere... maybe far away on Earth. And ofc, nobody is allowed to disturb her training. yk, so she gets better. Athena doesn't know Hera is not allowed to visit. All she hears when she sits on the shores at night, waiting in vain, is her stepmother's words that now ring so hollow: "I will never leave you."

So yeah. That's the premise (don't be afraid to use it as a prompt, just tag me if you do, I'd love to see). I don't have a name yet, but I have some more ideas. Feel free to ask or make suggestions about this :D Edit: I have since decided to call it "Slipping through my fingers" after the Abba song)

[gloomskulls]

LIMERENCE PT 2 [tasm!peter parker x reader

pairings: tasm!peter parker x reader

part 1

warning(s): dub/non consensual (reader is drunk and drunk people cannot give consent), terribly written smut (i'm a virgin i'm sorry, I have no idea what goes on actually in the bed), oral (fem receiving), drinking, drunk reader, overstimulation, everyone is 18+ here lemme know if I missed any

If you don't want to see my dark stories in the future please block the tag #madi: dark content

A/n: I'm sorry this took a whole ass while, it's probs 90% story and 10% smut. Like it's probs shit, the smut's the reason why I couldn't finish this sooner because I had no idea where it was going. Also tried to write 2012 slang, idk if it even sounds right. don't steal any of the shit I've written or else I'm going to turn you into Victoria Heyes from terrifier ❤️🫶/srs

Peter shuffled in his sleep. Tossing and turning. Sleep never found him, how could it? He did something so unforgivable. Having an obsession with someone who barely acknowledges your existence is one thing, but sneaking into her house, completely crossing every single line, and then jerking off to the scent of your panties while imagining you on top of him, riding him as you creamed his cock with your cum.

The air felt heavy and there was an almost stifling silence in his small bedroom, while his mind worked in the manner of a broken machine, looping thoughts.

Every single thing about you — your laugh, the spark in your eyes when you spoke of something you loved, the way you uttered his name — his mind kept replaying like a broken record. Each one felt as fresh as if it had just taken place a moment ago, and each one pulled at something deep within his chest.

He had spent years arguing with himself about what he was doing. He told himself that viewing you from a distance was merely innocent fascination, a little crush. But that had been a lie. What he had done the night before, sneaking into your room was not a mistake; it was a deliberate decision.

Peter was filled with doubts, a regular person would call him lovesick, a creep even. Is she really worth it? Peter admits something he'd been avoiding for a while.

He wanted you.

Not as a classmate. Not as a partner for a stupid project. He wanted you in a way that was raw and desperate and consuming. Oh, he wanted you to look at him the way you look at the rest of the world with trust, with affection, with the same ease that made you laugh at his dumb jokes.

The realization hit him hard. The weight of it sank into his chest like a boulder, but there was a rush of something else too-something darker, more intoxicating.

Peter sat up abruptly, there's only one way or another, heart hammering as he snatched up his phone. Tapping out a quick message, he did so with trembling hands.

"Hey, u free 2nite? Was thinkin maybe we could finish the proj & grab dinner after. My treat. :)"

He stared at the screen, his thumb hovered over the send button. The fear crept back in, whispering in the back of his mind. What if she thought he was crazy? What if she rejected me outright? What if everything he'd built up in his head came crashing down?

Many thoughts crowded his mind, neither of them was good

As he stared at the text, his finger quivered. His stomach tightening in knots. The reply was already forming in his mind—would you say yes? Or perhaps he was weird for asking, for suggesting anything other than school?

But what if he didn't ask? What if he kept on pretending that this crush wasn't eating him up from the inside?

I've got to do this; he tried to steady his breath. This would never come again.

Deep breath and then Peter clicked "send."

Time seemed to stretch into eternity. His mind was racing, spinning out into the worst-case scenarios. You could just say no or even laugh it off and tell him it wasn't a good idea. It's a biology project, after all. That's what it was supposed to be—right?

That crumbled page of biology scraps lay on his desk as evidence of the project you both were working on. It was supposed to be a simple collaboration, probably will last for a few weeks if he was lucky, and then he'd just go back to being invisible to you.

But he didn't want to go back to being invisible.

He sat there at the edge of the bed, hunched over in an awkward position, his elbows rested on the stretched knees, and he stared his phone, convinced that at any moment it would leave his grip. He had typed the message, the own words glowing brighter as he waited.

He had redone it like at least a dozen times, but all versions felt way too casual to too formal. His current message was just right; friendly, innocent enough but still an invite.

What if you think it is strange? What if you don't even reply at all?

He shook his head to stabilize his breathing. It's alright, he told himself. His not asking for something crazy. It's only a dinner.

But it wasn't just a dinner. It was the convergence of years of quiet yearning, stolen glances, and missed opportunities. This was the first real step toward something more, if only he could find the courage to take it.

He shunned his phone flat on the bed thinking that might ease the tension in his chest, but it didn't. His heart raced as seconds ticked by on the clock, each second feeling like an eternally long wait.

What if you didn't reply?

What if you did?

His thoughts were interrupted abruptly as his phone buzzed.

He grabbed it with trembling hands.

"Sure! I'm totally in. Where r we meeting? 7?"

He read the message over and over again: You're saying yes. Relief was an actual weight that was just lifted as disbelief flooded him as he blinked at the screen, rereading the message to make sure it hadn't been imagined.

For a moment, he allowed himself to smile, but it quickly disappeared. Now that he got the answer, a different kind of panic struck.

What happens next?

"Yea 7’s cool, I’ll pick u up @ ur place"

He looked up at the clock-6:30. In thirty minutes, he needed to get ready. Thirty minutes within which he needed to figure out how not to screw this one up completely.

Peter fell out of his chair and quickly rifled through his closet for something fresh and unique that didn't look like it had just been thrown on five minutes ago. His room was strung out in a mess of hoodies and T-shirts that didn't do any good as he tried on piece after piece-each feeling wrong.

"Relax," he murmured at himself while gazing at his reflection in the mirror. Hi hair looked like he just crawled out from under the bed, his face was red, and no matter how many adjustments he attempted on the clothes, he still looked like the awkward kid he'd always been.

Peter raced around his pod-sized room in search of a shirt that didn't scream "high school loser." The bed was a battlefield littered with crumpled hoodies, a checkered flannel, even his Midtown Science Academy T-shirt.

"Peter?" Aunt May's curious sounding voice called out from the hallway.

"Yeah?" he shouted back while looking through his closet and listening.

"Why does it sound like a tornado hit your room? Are you okay in there?"

Peter groaned and threw another hoodie onto the pile he was amassing on the bed. "I'm fine!"

The creaky door slammed open a moment later, and Aunt May peeked her head in. Her sharp eyes traveled the disaster area that was his room, from the piles of clothes, and even down to the one sneaker he was wearing.

"Uh-huh. Fine." She crossed her arms, leaning against the doorframe. "What's all this about? A wardrobe crisis?"

He sighed at her and rubbed the back of his neck. "Nothing serious, okay? I just… I'm going out."

May raised an eyebrow as her lips twitched as if trying hard not to smile. "Going out? As in… on a date?"

"What? No!" Peter's voice shot up as he spun around, waving his hands. "It's not a date! It's just dinner. For a project. With a friend."

By now, she wasn't even trying to hide her grin. "A 'friend,' huh? Is this the same 'friend' you've been talking about nonstop since this biology project started?"

"I don't talk about her nonstop!" protested Peter, turning into a shade of tomato. "Oh, you definitely do," Uncle Ben countered from outside the hallway and into the room, sporting the knowing smirk of someone who has heard too much. "Half the time, it's, 'Oh, she's so smart,' and the other half is, 'She's so good at this lab thing.'" He said with a dreamy tone

"Okay, okay, so I get it!" he groaned while burying his face in his hands. "Can we not do this now?"

Ben laughed and slapped Peter on the shoulder. “Relax, kid. We are just teasing, and you've got this.”

May walked into the room and picked up one of the forgotten shirts from the bed. Holding it up, she said, "What is wrong with this? Nice but casual, not slobby."

Peter squinted at it. "It's too—I don't know; plain?"

"Plain is better than looking as if you are trying too hard," she said, tossing it to him.

Uncle Ben nodded sagely. "It's right." "You don't want to go full tuxedo on a first—uh, not a date," he added quickly, holding up his hands when Peter glared at him.

Peter huffed but pulled the shirt over his head anyway. "You two are the worst," he muttered, though his tone lacked any real bite.

May smiled and reached out, smoothing the collar of his shirt. "We are not the worst. We are just proud of you. It's good to see you putting yourself out there."

"I'm not—," Peter began, but Ben cut him off.

"You are," Ben said firmly. "That's a good thing. Just be yourself, Pete. If she's as great as you say she is, she'll see what we see, a smart, kind, slightly awkward but very lovable kid."

Peter's face burned. "Yea, you really know how to give a pep talk."

"Hey, it worked, didn't it?" Ben fired back with a grin.

May handed Peter his second sneaker. "Here. Don't forget this, unless you're planning to really impress her with your one-shoe look."

Peter rolled his eyes but could not quite hide the grin that crept onto his lips. "Thanks, Aunt May."

So Ben called after him as he grabbed his jacket and headed for the door. "And remember, kid—Italian places usually give you breadsticks first. Don't fill up before the main course!"

Peter groaned loudly. "I'm going now! Bye!"

He was there, at your door, heart pounding heavily, as if wanting to burst out from the body. He lingered for a while, staring at the doorbell.

What if this is a mistake?

But before you could think otherwise, the button pressed his finger.

And then echoed the sound of the bell from inside, and Peter felt that the earth would open up and swallow him whole in an instance. He heard footsteps, and then the door opened.

There you were.

"Hey, Peter!" you said, smiling that effortless way that made his breath catch in his throat, stepping aside and gesturing for him to come in. "You're right on time, I just need a minute to grab my bag."

Peter managed a small smile and stepped in, wiping his sweaty palms against his jeans. "Yeah, of course. Take all the time you need."

You disappeared into another room, leaving Peter hanging awkwardly at your door, his eyes darting about. It was a very warm and inviting house, in harmony with the kind of person you were. The faint hum of a television in another room was muffled, someone talking, and he could hear that easily.

Your presence returned with your bag slung around your shoulder and you ignited the nerves again in Peter.

“So,” you said, smiling at him, “where to?”

Peter hesitated just a beat too long, his mind scrambling to come up with an answer. "Uh, I was thinking Italian? That okay with you?"

"Italian sounds great," you said easily as your smile widened.

Peter's heart raced as you stepped out the door, walking beside him toward the small restaurant a few blocks away. The night air was crisp, and for the first few minutes, he was too caught up in his own head to say much. But then you started talking, asking him about his day, about the project, and the sound of your voice eased some of his tension.

You made him feel like he belonged, even without having a word to say.

When the restaurant came in sight, Peter turned to you. Nerves still there but mixed with something else: a quiet and hopeful excitement.

Maybe just maybe, tonight will be the beginning of something real.

The walk to the restaurant was such a nerve-racking experience. Each step Peter Parker took beside you felt like a step closer to something he wasn't ready (or was actually hoping for). His hands buried deep in his jacket pockets, fingers curling and uncurling, while trying to keep steady pacing alongside you.

But you appeared to be at full ease. You talked about the cool evening, how the trees' leaves were beginning to rustle with the cold wind blowing, and even the faint smell of roasting chestnuts from a street vendor a few blocks away. Peter heard everything, nodded, and punctuated things now and then with the occasional "Yeah" or "Totally," but as for his thoughts, they were running wild within him.

This is well. This is the standard. This is alright, He didn't over hypothesize for the hundredth time.

As much as there was relief in now having something solid to focus on, Peter was panicked that it all became real at that moment.

He opened the door for you, his hand trembling slightly as he held it.

"Thanks," you said, giving him a swift smile before stepping inside.

"Uh, yeah. Of course," Peter mumbled as he hung his head and followed you in.

The hostess took you to a corner besides the glass window, a cozy little spot with a flickering candle in the middle of the table. Peter's hands trembled as he took the chair and gestured you to sit on it.

The menu in front of him could be in another language as he stared dumbly at it, words bringing into a blur while the thoughts buzzing in his head were getting harder to put to rest.

Don't be weird. Just be normal. What does "normal" even mean? Stop overthinking! You've got this!

"This place is nice," you commented as you scanned the menu. "How did you discover it?"

"Oh, um, my aunt used to like it here," Peter said, grateful he could answer such a question. "She says the lasagna is the best."

You grinned. "Aunt May has good taste. I will try that."

He nodded, yes, but could not stop the rush of nervous thoughts flooding his mind. He glanced at the menu as if studying it although he already knew what he would order. But his mind was instead filled with every possible thing he could screw up tonight.

Don't talk too much; don't laugh strangely; don't look like an idiot.

Here came the waiter, and you ordered effortlessly, laced with a polite smile as you handed him the menu. Peter stammered out his order and felt his palms sweat as he gave it. When the waiter walked away, Peter could feel your eyes on him, and it took everything he had to meet your gaze.

"So," you said, leaning in with elbows planted on the table, chin cradled in palm, "what's your thing, Peter?"

"My thing?" he said, taken aback. "Like, my thing?"

"Yeah, like… what do you do for fun? What are you really into doing when absolutely no one else is watching and judging?"

Peter blinked, trying to think of something that wouldn't sound lame. "Uh, well, I like photography," he said. "And science, I guess. Experiments, stuff like that."

You perked up. "Photography? That is cool. What kind of pictures do you take?"

"Mostly city stuff," he said, his voice gaining a bit of confidence. "You know, like weird angles, shadows, reflections. It's probably not that interesting to most people."

"I think it sounds interesting," you said. "I would love to see your pictures sometime."

Peter's heart was pounding so hard. "Really? Uh, yeah, sure. I mean, if you want."

That made the conversation flow more easily. You told him about your love-hate relationship with math, how sometimes you spent too long procrastinating by watching cooking shows instead of doing your homework, and how one time you tried to make crème brûlée and almost burned your stove.

“I had to open every window in the house,” you said, laughing. “My mom came home and thought I’d burned dinner. I didn’t tell her it was supposed to be dessert.”

Peter grinned, feeling just a little bit more at ease. “Maybe stick to cookies next time, huh?”

“Noted,” you said with a mock-serious nod.

Then it was time to eat. You both started digging into it while still keeping up your conversation. Peter quickly found himself becoming much more relaxed, finding it absolutely easy to talk to you when he didn't over-analyze every word. You burst into laughter each time his jokes finished, and whenever his eye fell into yours, everything around faded.

There was little doubt that he was doing this because he was desperate enough to strike a topic that wouldn't make him sound like an idiot; this was the reason why he asked, "You, uh, good with the whole project?"

You leaned back, fiddled with the napkin on the table, and said, "Yeah, it's actually been fun. Well, I mean, we work well together, and you're much smarter than I had thought."

Peter blinked. "Wait, you thought I wasn't smart?"

"No, I just-" You smirk, it's clear you're enjoying his reaction. "You always seem kinda… busy with stuff, you know? You're not exactly the loudest guy in the room."

"Well, I, uh…" Peter rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. "I'm, uh, more of a behind-the-scenes guy. You know, less talk, more… action?"

You laughed, the sound light and easy, and Peter felt himself get a little more relaxed. Maybe you weren't judging him.

'This place have wine?' you ask all of a sudden, not looking up from the menu.

Peter blinked. "Uh… I think so?"

You smirked and put your feet up on the table after throwing the menu on it. "Perfect. I could use a glass."

Peter was at a loss on how he should respond. It just didn't seem like the kind of person who would order wine to go with dinner-at least, not in his limited and admittedly romanticized view of you. But when the waiter came by, you ordered an entire bottle without hesitating, barely glancing at Peter for confirmation.

"Um, yeah, sounds good," Peter said weakly, even though the thought of drinking anything stronger than soda made him nervous.

The waiter nodded and disappeared, leaving the two of you alone in an awkward silence.

But the waiter was back again, this time with a bottle and two glasses, which he laid down with a polite smile. And before you knew it, the deep red liquid was already swirling around in your glass because you had poured it in haste from the bottle.

Want some? You asked, already halfway through your first sip.

“Uh, maybe later,” Peter said.

You shrugged and took another long drink before putting the glass down with a satisfied sigh. “Suit yourself.”

The most casual kind of conversation developed between you: you asked Peter about what he was interested in, and he managed to stumble along throwing together great lengthy descriptions about why he loved photography and science, and the words came out too fast for him to think them. It almost seemed like you were listening to him, however, because he went on to nod before even asking follow-up questions, which made him for the first time in a long time feel that he wasn't entirely invisible.

By that time, he was becoming aware, as the hours slipped away, that you were filling up your glass more and more often. The bottle was now half empty when the food came, and you were already sporting rosy cheeks when the alcohol was pouring into your system.

“This is good,” you said, hardly bothering with your plate in order to gesture with your fork at it. "I mean, really good. Good call, Parker.”

The smile that appeared on Peter's face was that of nervousness. "Thanks. I'm glad you like it."

Now you leaned back in your seat, holding your glass up to the light. "You know, I don't really do stuff like this. I've kind of never had dinner with classmates. It's just a little… weird, you know?"

Peter sank a little. "Weird, how?"

"Not bad weird," you said immediately by waving your hand. "Just… different. Like, generally, I would just be at home watching some lousy reality show and trying to forget how much homework I have to do."

Peter chuckled, even though he had no idea what to say next.

After a sip of wine, the boy looked up at Peter who immediately landed his gaze upon the bottle. You seem well into your first glass with a heightening sense of ease that you appeared to be at his home. Maybe it was because of the wine or perhaps how you were looking at him right now-not with judging spectatorship but with a strange kind of understanding that made him feel as if he were not really out of place.

It was only a count of seconds before the food arrived while you already had a second glass in hand. Peter's stomach flipped at that moment. This wasn't the way he was used to seeing you, all loosened up and speaking without that slight guard he usually saw when you were around. You appeared different tonight, and Peter couldn't quite figure it out if it was a good thing or not.

However, the conversation was still going on, only that as soon as you took a few more drinks, conversations shifted to more profound, much more personal things. Laughter spilled from your lips more freely, although Peter saw that smiles were now somewhat uncontrollable. Maybe it was the wine; maybe it was just the ambience. In any case, he could feel something shifting, like you were letting him see this version of yourself you weren't sure he was supposed to see.

"Peter", you said, looking at him with wide eyes after a long sip. "What's your big dream? Like 20 years from now, what do you see yourself doing?"

He shifted around uneasily on his chair. And that question was sudden, a little more intense than he would have reckoned it to be. He was not used to being asked about his future like this.

"Honestly?" said Peter, leaning back a little and looking down at the half-finished plate in front of him. "I don't really know. I think- I think I want to do something with science, or photography. Maybe combine. Don't know really. Just like, I want to fix things, you know? Help make the world a little less broken.''

You were quiet for a moment, and Peter wasn't sure whether it was because he'd said something wrong or whether you were just thinking. But when you finally spoke, your voice was softer, almost quieter than before.

"I think that's really admirable, Peter."

That was it. That one simple sentence hit him harder than he expected. He wasn't used to compliments like that- not from you, not from anyone. The words were a strange dream, and for a second he just looked dumbfoundedly at you trying to really understand what you mean.

Peter had never imagined the night to go this way. Not even in a million years. But here he was, walking alongside you, swaying slightly on the sidewalk with less steadiness in your step than before. Surprisingly, the wine had hit you faster than he figured, and he wasn't so sure if he should be concerned or just chalk it up to the kind of night it had turned into.

"Hey, I'm-" You hiccupped, laughing lightly at your own clumsiness. "I'm fine, Peter. Really."

But Peter wasn't so sure. His instincts were whipping him into overdrive-the same ones that always made him want to leap into action when something was amiss. "Yeah, I don't think you are," he said, trying to keep it light. "Let me just walk you home, okay? Just to make sure you're good."

But you rolled your eyes, with an almost sheepish smile you gave in, "Fine, fine. I get it. You're worried about me."

"Yeah, I am," Peter said, his voice a little quieter than he intended. "But you're my responsibility right now, okay?"

You exhale a small laugh, and Peter can't help but take note of how completely giddy it sounded, a little like you weren't quite sure where you were or what you were doing. You leaned against him, and then Peter was surprised at how easily you let him help you with that.

The way home was otherwise silent except for the occasional trip and the muttered apologies from you. But Peter didn't mind it, sensing closeness, although strange. Everything was just weird tonight. The brushing of your hand against his as you reached for your keys. That laugh of yours that wouldn't leave his ears. The vulnerability you seemed to wear in your eyes at that moment.

So, then you reached your door, and you suddenly stopped and stood there, fumbling with the keys in your hand. Peter moved closer but silently offered to help. You shook your head.

"I've got this," you said, though your words were slurring just enough for Peter to catch the uncertainty behind them.

After much effort on your part, the door finally opened. You leaned in again, and Peter nearly lost his heart as he had to rush forward to steady you.

"Whoa, take it easy," Peter said catching you as you stumbled. "Let me help you."

You smiled up at him, glassy and unfocused. "I'm fine, Peter," you slurred. "Just a little…tipsy."

Peter chuckled and guided you up the walkway to your front door. "Tipsy, huh? Well, let's get you inside and safe, then."

As you both reached the front door, you fumbled with your keys and Peter had to gently take them from your hand and unlock the door himself. You smiled up at him, your eyes sparkling with amusement.

After some time and a couple of tries, she got the door opened.

"Okay, inside," he said, his tone a little more powerful now. You did not resist him as he helped you through the door, but there was a strange sadness in your eyes that twisted Peter's stomach.

You moved slowly to the couch and finally sank down on it; the wine was exhausting. Peter stood near the door for a moment, wondering his next move. He wanted to shoot his shot, his thoughts wandered to somethings more inappropriate. Wasn't this all about getting you safe? Ensuring you did not end up passed out somewhere in a big, messy pile of sheets and regrets.

"Can you just… stay for a bit?" you asked quietly, with barely a whisper.

Peter hesitated. He didn't want to go too far, and he couldn't just leave you here, not looking so…fragile.

"Yes," he spoke softly, entering then into the living room. "I'll stay for a bit"

You nodded at him, gazing at him with tired eyes. "Thank you."

Peter perched on the edge of the couch; his hands awkwardly balanced on his knees. What a strange space there was between you two now, strange in that it was so very close, yet so far away. He wanted to be of some use and ensure you were okay, and yet the way the glance kept coming from you in that direction somehow felt… off. It was like walking on a fine line.

Peter looked at you longingly, you were so beautiful.

Too close and too perfect, he found himself sitting next to you, and Peter felt the pressure of so many things left uncommunicated fill his chest. He needed to do it. He needed to say it.

"Peter?" Your voice was a soft whisper, a little uncertain. Wine had aided this whole relaxing process, yet made almost everything feel slightly out of focus.

Peter swallowed, heart pounding in the chest. He wasn't entirely sure if it was the alcohol that has found narrate in your system, or if it was the raw honesty of the moment, but he knew very well it was now or never, the one chance to say all he had kept bottled up for months.

"Yeah?" he whispered, getting closer so that he was almost against you now.

"It's just that, I… I'm sorry if I've been too much tonight," you said, your words slightly slurring as you allowed your gaze to drift over his face. "I didn't mean to get that drunk."

Peter felt his breath hitch in his throat. "It's fine," he said, his voice softer now. He could feel his palms sweating, his heart racing faster than ever. "I just… I just want to make sure you're okay."

You smiled up at him, but it was a little foggy, and Peter could tell that the wine had dulled your clarity. Still, you were so beautiful, standing there, looking at him with those eyes—eyes that made him feel like he mattered.

Peter took a sharp breath and let a sudden breath of air come out. It was as if a magnet was pulling them together, and he was drawn to it. "So, uh– I was thinking…" He hesitated for a moment, then recovered his composure, trying to calm the trembling in his hands. "I've been thinking about you for a long time. Like, longer than I should have."

His brows knitted further in confusion as Peter quickly realized that the rest of the sentence was failing miserably in getting through your mind, as if the actual words were swimming around in it, suspended in fog. He stepped closer, unable to stop himself.

"If I—" He let out a shaky breath. "You know, I've been loving you for so long now. And tonight, I couldn't hold it anymore and just… broke the dam."

Your expression shifted slightly. Confusion clouded your gaze. You blinked, trying to piece together his words. "Wait, what?"

Peter took a step closer, completely incapable of holding himself back. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, and he felt the heat between you intensify. He reached out, his hand brushing gently against your arm. "I love you," he whispered again, barely able to breathe. "I love you so much, and I've been too scared to say it. I've watched you for so long, and I—" Peter stopped mid-sentence as he looked at you, eyes looking like a lost puppy.

"You're so beautiful, so so beautiful" He leaned in, your face was so close to him, his lips brushed against yours. He held your face as he licked your lips.

You could feel the warmth of his breath on your skin with just the proximity of Peter's face to yours, and the goosebumps it sent down your spine. Those eyes were filled deeply with a longing expression and captured yours as if drowning you in its depths. There was air that quite vibrated between the two of you, and the heat that seemed to take form could even be felt emanating from his body.

"I wanted to do that for so long," Peter whispered. His voice shuddered with desire. Gentle words falling like a caress to send shivers through you: "Wanted to touch you, hold you, kiss."

His lips brushed against yours when he spoke, making your body spark with electricity. You were pretty much melting into him, as if his very desire were consuming your human body. His lips, soft and gentle, just as firm and insistent. You tasted like wine.

"You're so beautiful" he said as his hands went underneath your dress, his hands inching close to your under garments. He touched your clothed core; he used his index finger to rub your clothed cover clit

You squirmed in his touch, "P-peter" You mewled in his mouth

This just seemed to fuel Peter even more, as he set aside your panties as his smooth fingers rubbed your now exposed core. Peter looked at you, he slowly kneeled as he spread your legs.

He looked at your wet core, as if it was a painting that he couldn't understand. Without warning he then sucked your glistening pearl; his tongue probed the inside of your gummy walls as his fingers rubbed your pearl. You cried out, your body arching up to meet him, and Peter felt a surge of excitement. He was in control now, and you were at his mercy.

He knew it was wrong, you were drunk after all, but he couldn't help it, this was his only chance.

He licked and sucked at your clit, his fingers plunging in and out of your dripping wet pussy, you cried out in ecstasy, your hands tugging at Peter's hair. But he didn't care, all he cared about was your dripping we cunt.

Anticipation dwells in the coiling mouth against your body, sending shivers along your spine. Every inch of you is lulled into stimulation by his gentle probing, drawing near to a soon-to-be-hidden insistent demand. You can feel that hot air glazing across your skin, soft scraping with teeth, and relentless pressure from his lips, all of which accompanies his tongue.

Your hands are clenched while he works, fingers digging into the sheets or perhaps his hair, holding him there. Your hips jerk primitively, as though to push him deeper and encourage more pressure, while your breathing makes raspy sounds mixed with soft mewls of pleasure.

One hand is busy at your hips, molding you solidly into place, while the other slips only up over the curve of your waist before settling over your breast.

You feel yourself immersing in the sensation as your focus is honed into one. The only critical thing is the feeling of his mouth on you. The whole room begins to fade away, and you're left with only the slushing wet sounds he makes and your breathless gasps, groans, and cries.

Peter on the other hand felt like he was in cloud nine, his mouth was now fully covered in your arousal, but he didn't care. He continued lapping at your cunt, accompanied with his middle finger thrusting in and out of you.

As the intensity rises, so do your frantic movements: the hips jerk and thrust as though reaching toward some ill-defined height. His mouth is a scythe-like blur of tongue lashing and probing until the pressure builds and you're all quivering trembling muscles, precariously balanced on a knife edge of release.

Your mouth is wide open, frozen in a silent scream on your lips, and your entire body starts quivering at the moment of release.

Then silence engulfs the outside world; its only inhabitants are trapped in a silent world of raw lust. His mouth is a furnace, raging, and threatening to engulf you completely, but you lean into the flames, thirsty for the intense heat that only he can provide. Your skin is slick with sweat, your heart thundering like a runaway train as your body builds toward the inevitable climax.

Your cries intensify as tension rises, a mournful cry into this frantic air, a scream savage, echoing off the walls as your body strains towards that release. Your muscles quivering.

Before you knew it, it almost hit you like rough wave of pleasure.

His cock twitched, his balls tightening with anticipation, as he felt the warmth of her your release in his mouth. That alone could make him cum his pants. He had never been this close to a woman before, and the thought of exploring your body was almost too much to bear. And here he was doing exactly just that.

You were beautiful to Peter, but you looked ungodly when you were in a state of release. The way your chest would heave up and down, how your mascara was running down your eyes, and your lipstick smudged on the side of your face.

"You're so beautiful" he said, barely even above a whisper.

"P-peter— OH MY GOD!"

He suddenly took a long slow stripe of your pussy, as if savoring everything, but then stopped when his tongue reached your clit. He sucked on your little pearl as if it was lollipop.

You moaned loudly as your back arched and your toes curled, "P-peter" You whimpered

The way he was sucking on your clit, along with his fingers that was thrusting deep inside you. It made it nearly unbearable. The last few moments or so almost sent you spiraling into one of those severe orgasms that made you see stars on your ceiling.

Loud moans slipped from your mouth, you wondered if your parents were at home, what if they see their sweet girl falling apart underneath the so-called weird kid of your school.

Your hips bucked against his mouth, trying to ease the bittersweet pleasure he was giving you. "P-peter, oh god, stop, I c-can't take it anymore" you begged in a voice very nearly a whisper. Body trembling, your hands reached instinctively for his hair, holding him.

He continued his performance on your clit. A familiar knot kept building inside you. Suddenly, the moans turned into loud gasps, and your body began to shake uncontrollably. P-peter, I…I think I'm going to come again" you finally whisper. To that, he only sucked harder, licked harder, his fingers falling on a rhythm with his tongue swirling relentlessly on your sensitive spot, bringing you to sweet agony. Your back arched up, you gasp while screaming, "P-PETER!"

Heaving and shaking with each pulsing moan, you lay there with your body's hypersensitivity after such intense pleasure receding. Finally, Peter raised his head. That satisfied smile on his face was testimony to your ability to elicit such feelings from him. And with his eyes, he stared at you, every flicker of lust speaking volumes about what was crossing his mind. Then he kissed near the center of time in your inner thigh, his lips dragging softly, and then moving to lie with you at the side of the couch

Peter's smile slowly faded as he noticed your catch of breath, replaced with a show of real concern. He stroked your hair as he gazed into your eyes. "That was intense," Peter said. "You're shaking." His voice was tender, wrapping around you like a soft blanket. "Time to get you to bed, all right?"

He managed a slowly rise from the couch while extending his hand forward towards you. You grasped onto it and found your balance shaky; nonetheless, Peter assisted you toward leaving the living room, down the hallway, and into your bedroom.

Peter opened your door slowly, revealing the bedroom from that night. Snap out of your thoughts Parker!

The bedside lamp cast a warm glow over the room. Peter placed you carefully at the edge of the bed. He knelt down to remove your shoes and started undressing you slowly and carefully. He threw the covers over you as you laid back in bed, tucking you in like a young child.

"Rest," he whispered as he brushed his lips against your forehead. "Sleep, I'll be here when you wake." He sat beside you, stroking your hair with his hand. Your eyelids began to feel heavier, and weariness, along with all the forms of pleasure, finally overtook you. Peter was the last person you remember as you slipped into slumber, where upon you felt the warmth beside you that offered the source of a much-needed sense of safety.

@gloomskulls 2024, DON'T COPY, TRANSLATE OR USE OF MY WORKS IN ANY OTHER WEBSITE. Photos don't belong to me

[arilevenatz]

Chasing Shadows - TEASER

Pairing: popular guy!yeosang x fem!reader

Genre: Angst (?), fluff

Word count: 582

Warnings: kinda frat boy yeosang, him and his friends are handsome (yes that's a warning), reader has anxiety, she is also insecure, anxiety attacks, yeo is cheeky, like really cheeky, you might wanna flick him a bit, bestfriend! San and wooyoung, there are prob gonna be more

AN: y'all bear with me this is my first time posting on Tumblr, I'm still figuring out stuff. I had a dream about this and I decided that I'm gonna write a yeo fic. And also if you wanna get tagged, you can give your @ in the comments I'll tag y'all. And also please reblog and like, so I can get more motivated!!

"stop mocking me. I know people like you. you guys go up to girls like me and say you like them only to say 'April fools' or say 'its a dare' later. I hate guys like you"

His grin fades, his expression turning serious, but his eyes still hold a glint of mischief. "You really think that's what I'm doing?" He tilts his head to the side, studying your face intently. He maintains eye contact, his expression unreadable. He sees the suspicion in your eyes, and it only seems to fuel his mischievous glint. He leans forward, his voice lowering. "Let me ask you something..." He studies your face intently, a slight smirk playing on his lips. "First off... do I look like I have a problem finding girls to talk to?" He gestures to himself, a hint of pride in his tone. "And second..." His voice drops lower as he deliberately maintains eye contact. "Second what?" You shout.

"No shouting in the library student!" The librarian warned you. You sit back down embarrassed and all red.

He leans in closer, and says "Second, would I really waste my time pretending to like someone just to play an April Fool's prank?" His words send a shiver down your spine as he pulls back, his eyes never leaving yours. "Or maybe..." He looks at you with a half-smirk, half-serious expression "You're actually quite... interesting. Not many people stand up to me like you do." His eyes crinkle again as he studies your reaction "And hey..." He reaches over and lightly taps your finger. You retreat your hand from his touch. His expression shifts to a playful pout, though his eyes still hold a glint of amusement "Wow, so I'm not even worthy of a tiny hand tap?" He leans back in his chair, studying your defensive posture with interest "You're not scared of me, are you?" He chuckles low in his throat, his gaze never leaving yours. "listen, can I not just like you? I like you. I want to be with you"

"No! people don't simply like girls like me" you felt like crying, but you can't. His expression turns mockingly serious, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "Oh, so you're saying you're not likeable? You think I can't like you because you're... what?" He crosses his arms, leaning forward again, his curiosity piqued.

"You know what I am"

"No I don't"

"Fuck. Fine! Im fat and ugly"

His face freezes and for a moment, he looks genuinely shocked. But then, he lets out a harsh laugh. "Fat and ugly? He shakes his head, his gaze raking over your form appraisingly. "You really think that's what I see when I look at you?"

"You don't need to look at me like that, I am like that so fuck off I don't need you laughing at my face."

You stand up harshly, take your bag and walk outside the library. He follows you and grabs your upper arm, not harshly but firmly enough to hold your attention. "Listen carefully..." His voice softens, losing its usual mocking tone. "I'm not some creep who goes around lying to get in girls' pants." You open your mouth to say something but he quickly shits you off. "You know what I see when I look at you? I see someone who's honest, even if it hurts. I see someone who's strong, even when they feel weak. And I see someone who's fucking beautiful, inside and out."

[arom-antix]

Hey, just wanted to reach out to say that I found you pointing out and calling this person was really great and you shouldn't have apologized. It was incredibly true what you said, and to be honest it seems out of touch with the reality of a great deal of the japanese fandom, the nuances and their culture. Also, it was as you pointed out, extreme and may I say rude. I want to mention too that the way it was written, as if entitled of the knowledge and the 'explanation' made it all worse in context of the 'fucked up'. The original poster always gets away by using the 'well-written academic'' statement of their 'metas' as an excuse to do or say and make everyone else agree and if not, uses victim narrative and discourses exactly selecting wording for people to agree on it or feel bad.

I don't know if they tagging you in the way they did made you reblog and apologizing/backing up, but no one thought bad about you pointing it out. On the contrary, a lot of people had been bullied and discriminated by this person when they called them out/disagreed going onto lenghts of sending their friends to harass people, and the other persons can't even defend themselves because they are effectively blocked. To quite a few people in the fandom has been done, even accusing them as 'acephobes' (when they're not) or even Nazis by spreading lies. So yeah, I just wanted to say that. I think you were right to call them out publicly.

Thank you very much for this ask. To be completely honest I agree with everything you said here and don't actually feel bad about pointing anything out. I mainly apologised because I didn't want any potentially poor phrasing from my side to cause unnecessary hostility and because I myself have gripes with this person's behaviour but didn't want to cause a scene.

My honest opinion is that they have a serious issue with taking accountability for their own mistakes and highly overestimate their own intellect. If you're reading this, @thegirlwhorideslikeasamurai, sorry if I seem harsh, but it's true. I saw your post lamenting how you're the only academic meta writer / fan in the fandom and I didn't interact then because I honestly do not care enough to start that drama but with the information Blonndiec has just given me, I think it's necessary that someone calls you out.

You're not an academic. You're not beyond the mental capabilities of other fans. You're actually incredibly childish in your metas and analyses and I am not kidding when I say that I was halfheartedly writing essays more academic than every analysis I've seen from you when I was barely a teenager. I don't know how old you are and I frankly don't care. You're not as clever as you think you are.

Also, don't think I didn't notice that you didn't reblog my correction (link here to my correction and here to their "response" for those who didn't see that exchange) of your post so that you could control what your followers saw of the exchange. You're the opposite of an academic. You control information to tailor the narrative, you don't cite your sources properly if at all, you don't format your posts in anything close to how an academic analysis would be, you make unbased claims, you reference posts and canon material without in any way indicating where that information is from, you reference your own (equally unacademic) metas and your conclusions from them without indicating what post it's from or that it's your own theory this new one is based on and instead present it as a common fact, and I could go on and on and on. Your posts are also riddled with logical fallacies and you talk in absolutes and opinions when there's no canon basis to claim such things. I'm sorry, but that's not academic in the slightest.

To be clear, you don't have to be an academic to post on the Internet. You don't have to be anything at all. You could up front be a genuine idiot with no remorse and that's fine. But when you claim to be an academic and also put down the rest of the fandom for not being on your level, you have to be able to back that up. It'd still make you sound like a prick but at least your arrogance would have a basis. It currently does not.

I haven't personally seen the discussions that Blonndiec is referencing and I'm not going to claim anything definitive (because that would be unacademic of me, take notes) but if what they're saying is true and did happen as described, which I have empirical, if anecdotal, evidence to believe could very well be (a friend of mine has personally been blocked by you after they criticised you without actually mentioning your name which I of course can't prove is the reason for the block but the timing is awfully convenient), you should know that you should be ashamed of yourself.

If there's context missing, feel free to enlighten me and call out any incorrect accusations. You have every right to defend yourself. However, I encourage you to cite your sources since you're such an academic. If you don't, then it's just your word against Blonndiec and anyone else who might comment's word and that doesn't prove anything. Don't misunderstand, acephobia and nazi rhetoric should absolutely be called out but only if it's actually happening. False accusations can ruin lives. I hope you know that.

I'm not a fan of calling people out publicly and, again, thank you for this ask, Blonndiec. But considering many of the issues I've personally seen and those I've been informed of by second hand sources were posted publically, I don't really feel bad about calling this out. I could do a full breakdown of just the insulting "academic" comments alone and how there's no academia to be found in said academic metas and, Samurai, if you give me reason to, I will show exactly what I mean point by point (and academically just to give you an example of even low level academia).

If you respond to this, do it in a reblog. That's what a real academic would do. If I'm wrong and you can prove it, you'd have no reason to not show my post in your rebuttal. If I'm right, you'd have every reason to be upfront about your mistakes and how you intend to rectify them. There's nothing wrong with being wrong but there's a lot wrong with refusing to admit to it in a way that lets others peer review you (academic thing, look it up) and come to their own conclusions about the situation. That's what you did when you just @'ed me instead of reblogging my response. A true academic wouldn't hide a peer review. You'd know that if you were one.

I swing in many academic spaces and yet that doesn't make me any kind of expert and I don't claim to be one because I'm not. But since you want to be one so badly, reblog this with a response and show us all how smart you are. I'm dying to know what your academic take on this is.

[accirax]

Could you please draw Ally and Tess sitting on Hunter's shoulders like he's their personal steed?

[beanghostprincess]

Sorry I really didn’t mean I’m attacking you or your ship. I also don’t think it’s a red flag, most gay men I saw don’t really like shuggy either. I mean, probably the entire world prefers any other shanks ships? On almost every site, con or store there’s always tons of mishanks and Bennshanks and never shuggy. I get it’s also about dynamic and connection those two pairs have, like with the parallels to other ships the base for them is extremely strong. But the minimal shuggy does speak volumes. I genuinely wonder about this. Shuggy is unpopular and again while I do agree there’s strong connection between “rival ships” I don’t think that’s the only reason… and like…. Buggy is ugly, isn’t he? He doesn’t have cool style, doesn’t look cool, makes ugly faces all the time, also is a coward. I like him as comedy character and shanks brother though!

I understand where you're coming from when you say Shuggy is unpopular amongst some people (actually, before anyone says anything. It IS an extremely popular ship in Japan but I have seen A LOT of hatred towards it in this side of the fandom, so that's what I'm talking about when I say it's unpopular). I have talked about this before. And I have said a lot of times that the reason why is often because people only focus on looks and Buggy is not conventionally attractive for the fangirly twinkified sexualized gaze numerous sides of the fandom and the general audience seek. Like, I am not forcing people to ship them, but I have had people admitting the only reason they don't is because of the looks, and I personally believe that is a very (despite valid, of course) dull way of seeing ships. And respectfully, I don't care that other gay dudes or all the people in the world agree with you. It's not a red flag to not like Shuggy, what it is a red flag, though, is to come into people's inboxes to do what you're doing!

I know you don't mean to attack me or anybody who ships them but your tone does wonders showing otherwise. Your perception of shipping is just based on looks and the fact that you came here, to a blog that explicitly ships these characters and is fond of Buggy, talking shit about one of the characters' looks... Is just straight-up mean and not following the social etiquette this site should follow, which is "let people do whatever the fuck they want".

So with all due respect, what makes you think I won't find your questions offensive in any way? Because you keep talking bad about a character I like in my inbox for literally no reason. Do you expect me to admit that the ship is unpopular because Buggy is ugly and boring? Well, I do admit people view him as ugly and only a comedy relief, but I don't. Expecting others to find beautiful and interesting the same things you do is having a very close-minded vision that One Piece's plot itself is against.

By the way, you're showing that you clearly don't like Buggy in the slightest because you're only talking about the traits that you find negative about him. But of course, you like him as comedy relief. Of course, you like him as a character in Shanks' story and not as a character himself. Despite Buggy having lots of depth. Your perception of these characters seems, in my opinion, extremely empty and, as I said, only based on looks. And you're free of shipping whatever you want however you want! But please, please, don't do this anymore. This is just petty high school mean girl behavior. Even Regina George would word this in a more polite way.

So, as a little advice for you, let people ship whatever they want without questioning their favorite characters! I am sure you will live a more peaceful life!

[mel-loly]

hiii mel!! just wanted to pop by and say im always so happy to see you and your posts on my blog!!! much love 🫶🫶/p

Oh! Hey!!! Hello!! Hrya? Also-

...*sniff*......

........*sniff*....

Thank you very much for telling me this, and for always reblogging, sometimes commenting, and... Fr, showing all this affection is really very important to me, and very meaningful too! You said you like seeing me and my posts, who will I say, for always seeing you liking and reblogging my art? I just.. Don't even know how to explain it... I just know that I want you to know that I love you so much, and that the happiness I feel seeing you every day (or when I post) reblogging and liking my content is inexplicable, this is very special, just like you! You are very sweet and special, such a great friend, and I say this with all my heart!💖

And speaking of specials, I already said that I love your style and when do you post some of your art? Even now, I loved this little drawing you made, it’s so cute and beautiful!! It may seem “simple” but, I know the care you put into it and all the drawings you make, which makes you not only a talented artist but a caring and loving person also too :] and.. Yeah, I apologize for only replying now, I was looking for an oc of yours to draw and make as a gift(in return, for all the love you give me) but unfortunately I couldn't find it in your blog, hence the delay :'))

But if you have an oc, please send it to me, I would love to draw a drawing of an oc or yourself one day! And of course- if you want and if I can have your permission too.. ^^"

Alright- I don't think you're going to read all of this, but if you've made it this far, I say “thank you very much” again for everything and I hope you..

(Also- guys, follow and give her art a like! She deserves a lot of recognition and affection, and I promise you won't regret following her!💖)

[deoidesign]

I’m a trans man that recently got diagnosed with hyper mobile eds, so now seeing Steve makes me extra happy, because cool disabled ftm rep. Thanks for making the radical dude bro, he’s funky.

same disability (waving hand emoji)

Always extremely fulfilling to know my work makes people happy in some small way, it means a lot. Thank you for sharing with me

[alrightbuckaroo]

Happy Friday, my loves! It's been a minute since I've seen this tag game go around and it's been even longer since I participated. Seems like the perfect time to change that. As always, please feel free to use this as a jumping off point for all the wonderful words that have been written. Don't stop with just this list!

Take my hand, take my whole life, too by @heartstringsduet

With each wrinkle, each scar, each crease, each spot, their rings, their hands tell the stories of their lives together.

throw me on a hurricane (i'll ride it to the coast) by ArsenicInYourPudding

This is, in fact, TK's first rodeo. Carlos is lucky that he's there anyway.

Protect me by Karaxuno

“It’s what you want, isn’t it?” TK asks, struggling for a second to find the words for what he wants to say, “Space to grow?” “With you, I’d take a closet.” Carlos teases, his fingers dancing away from his shirt sleeve and instead tracing up and down the line of TK’s jaw. “Been there, done that, let’s find a house.” TK grins, unable to stop the little laugh that bubbles in his chest. Or, post-S2-fire TK and Carlos look for a place together, and house shopping has its ups and downs.

Among my stillness was a pounding heart by @tailoredshirt

TK took a deep breath. “I think we need to talk about what happened last fall. With the loft.” Carlos’s brain was skipping around from one feeling to the next like a pinball. “With…when we broke up?” “Yeah.” “You…want to talk about the breakup,” Carlos said slowly. “While I’m proposing to you.” TK squeezed his hands. “Yes. Please.”

I hold onto the night you looked me in the eye and told me you loved me by @irispurpurea

"I have lost everything!" TK roars, and it feels so good. "Isn't that the whole point?" Or: It's the beginning of Season 4, and TK and Carlos are broken up again.

The Light of Our Life by @carlos-in-glasses

After an awkward conversation, Carlos buys TK a bearded dragon and fears it may be a parting gift (Coda for 4x12)

See Me (All of Me) by @bonheur-cafe

A fractured heart and a plea to be seen. Otherwise known as: the apology from his mom that Carlos never got, but deserves.

Make Me Laugh 'till I Die, I Stand Beside You With Pride by @lemonlyman-dotcom

A coda to the ending scene of 4x06. TK has a moment of insecurity; Carlos reassures him and, in the quiet safety of their bed, confesses an insecurity of his own.

tried and true blue by @reyesstrand

"She knows," Owen says, his eyes almost too sincere for TK to handle. He clamps his molars together and just stares at his father, because if he lets himself think too hard about all the ways his mom is still here, somehow, he'll probably burst into tears. Owen gives him a sad smile. "She does, TK. She used to talk about when you'd get married all the time." There's a pause, and TK curls his fingers tighter around his mug, letting everything simmer between them. "When I got married," TK quietly repeats. "Not if?"

and because there's a new chapter on the way, I'm going to recommend my shameless collection of smut, something to give each other (things are about to get so casual)

No pressure tagging everyone above and:

@captain-gillian, @carlos-tk, @cold-blooded-jelly-doughnut, @basilsunrise, @butchreyes

@nancys-braids, @never-blooms, @mikibwrites, @lightningboltreader, @herefortarlos

@honeybee-taskforce, @guardian-angle22, @freneticfloetry, @fifthrideroftheapocalypse, @strandnreyes

@sheholdsthemoon, @actual-sleeping-beauty, @whatsintheboxmh, @welcomehometk, @reasonandfaithinharmony

@welcometololaland, @eclectic-sassycoweyes, @rmd-writes, @thisbuildinghasfeelings, @theghostofashton

@orchidscript, @paperstorm, @emsprovisions, and of course here's an open tag for anyone who just wants to share!!

[carouselunique]

Is it true that there's no animosity between you and... you know, you know who. You never talk about her in any way. I guess I'm curious. You guys seemed like really close friends and then just weren't friends at all. And there was some stuff she said that seemed very targeted at you...

I don't know if she feels any animosity toward me or not any more. Our mutual friends have said she doesn't and I take them on their word in that regard, assuming that if they have an answer for me it's because they're aware how she feels. I wouldn't know and it's not my place to put words in her mouth.

I haven't spoken to her/about her in a long time and the only time she even crosses my mind is when people bring her up to me. As for me feeling any animosity? I'll admit my feelings on her these days are complicated and way too nuance-core for people who aren't my friends to hear about but I wouldn't call them animosity in any way. I inherently want people my friends care about to live well because I care about my friends, and anyone my friends care about by proxy and I still share friends with her. I would never wish ill on people my friends care about so animosity doesn't fit into that by definition. I'd say I'm hurt more than anything and even then I've worked through a lot of it with trusted friends who have helped me deal with my emotions in a healthy way.

(Besides, my own life struggles keep me from even being able to invest time into animosity. I have to expend that energy loving my family, doing my best to support them during our struggles. And I've never been a hateful person it isn't in me. I would rather play 'Hot To Go' by Chappell Roan and teach my dad how to do the hand gestures to help him strengthen his muscles again than focus on hating anyone...)

I try not to think about her because it hurts. I often think that people forget that I'm a real person outside of her sphere, and that I wouldn't want to talk about what happened because I truly did consider her a friend for a long time. And when someone I consider a friend appears to not regard me with care any more suddenly and I don't even have closure on that... well... it hurts... A lot. Of course I never talk about it.

And I'm not stupid, I have seen some stuff she's said that I've gathered was about me. I remind myself that she has a right to vent in her own spaces and I truly mean that... it's just a shame that her own spaces have people who then have taken these things to me to show me (after all, I wouldn't have even seen these things myself if not for third-party anons going 'this u?') saying it is my own fault because I was a terribly cruel friend or my own fault for not listening to warnings about her when I had the chance and that makes me a stupid gullible bitch. You lot haven't seen some of the awful shit about me from some of her more ravenous fans and haters I've seen over the years that I've had to let roll off my back in the fear it would bring backlash - not even to me, to her. I don't want to be the cause of any hatred going to anyone.

Also I'm just not going to ever talk about the details of our fallen friendship or our fallen relationship. That's private. She might be a public person to some extent but I never was, even if I do gain some measure of small fandom for my work one day I'm just private about personal matters especially raw ones. I almost deleted this ask entirely but Idk I never stated that it bothers me when people talk to me about her from my own mouth, so I guess that's what this ramble is.

If you send me anything about Lily Orchard it will not be addressed. I am not a part of her life not even through our mutual friends. I do not know or care what's going on with her public/personal life. I haven't kept up. I will never keep up. Don't treat me as an extension of the situation because I am not in the situation. In the most plainly stated sense of the word: Leave me the Hell alone. (...pretty please.)

All I've wanted this entire time was to be left alone to process everything in a healthy, peaceful way. I'm workin' on it.

[batsplat]

#this is all incredible cowardice btw obviously i've ranked all the aliens in my notes by basically every imaginable metric#from qualifying to starts to w2w to mixed conditions to wet weather prowess etc etc etc. like i do also do it i just don't stand by it

i would LOVE to hear your rankings if you are willing to share...

sign of faith I'm posting this. please feel free to send me counter-arguments and disagreements but keep it sensible. this is not supposed to be serious, I just enjoy treating athletes like pokemon and love doing a sports discourse, but I'm not making any judgement over how I'd rank these guys overall. also, I've already said how I think basically all of these things are impossible to judge given timeline + machinery differences. it's really not that serious, this is really just an excuse to make radar charts, aka the coolest things to exist

also, obviously these categories are extremely fake and made up. please make alternative suggestions!! the two ones that I would have liked to include but couldn't really figure out how to put numbers to are 'tyre management' and 'adaptability'. with tyre management... that's a broad category and the one where era differences + bike factors really punch you in the face. like, for instance if I were doing this for dovi (which I'm not), by any reasonable standard that's such a massive strength for him - but then how do you account for his 2020 decline being so much about a tyre switch? how about jorge, who was the tyre preservation bloke, mr metronome himself, and then went to ducati and spent like, 1.3 years just darting to the lead early and slowly dropping back? what about valentino, who was seen as the absolute master of riding well once the grip levels were fucked at the end of the race, but then he too eventually got caught out by successive michelin tyre changes when he was like 108 years old? if you look at a lot of these riders' competitive decline, you do end up tracing it back to like... michelin... *shakes fist* but no it literally is about them no longer being able to make the tyres work for them for xyz reason, like that's typically the nail in the coffin, if you will. but obviously it would also feel weird to penalise someone for successfully adapting to one generation of tyres after the next until eventually no longer managing to when they're about 249 years old, y'know? also, tyre management does feel like you need to differentiate more if you're tackling it - like for instance one of dani's big strengths is the lack of tyre wear, plus similarly you have jorge's super smooth riding. whereas with valentino, casey and marc, I'm not saying they're all murdering their tyres, but their real big strength where tyres are concerned is that once the tyres are shredded and the grip is completely fucked, they're still able to be silly good in that situation. like, check out valentino's catalunya record, tyre killer track extraordinaire - you really see how good he is with this stuff in 2004 when he's more on the limit and he looks less in control than he generally does (a bit more like those other two actually). with casey, literally nobody needs me to reiterate the bonkers levels of raw talent he has, it's also not a coincidence he's the only one who's actually managed to beat valentino in one of said 1 vs 1 catalunya battles, the dirt biking thing, the insane natural sensitivity he has to grip levels. ditto with marc (minus beating valentino at catalunya), there's a reason why he's the mixed conditions goat, check out what he's been able to do late in races this year. so, sure, I could try and put numbers on 'tyre management' but.... I'd really struggle to rank them, like this may shock you but managing tyres is kinda important and it does feel the equivalent to having a category asking how 'fast' they are. they're all very good at it!! if in different ways

adaptability... yeah, look, ideally I would like some metric that considers the manufacturer switches + ability to override a poor package. but first of all, there's an obvious sample size issue, and second of all it's just TOO context-dependent. like, yes, brownie points to valentino for the yamaha switch - but how do we compare his failure to adapt to the ducati vs casey? on the one hand, obviously completely different levels of success on that bike. on the other hand, valentino by time of this switch was over thirty and casey when he joined that team was like, a child, with not that much experience of motogp - more of a raw talent who could mould himself to the needs of the bike. also, if you use hayden's results as a rough baseline, you kinda have to say the ducati was worse in 2011, and then if you dig into the numbers you do probably go 'yeah casey would've done better but not THAT much better'? like, he would've won races, not titles. I don't have a number for that from 1-10 either. dani never switched manufacturer, the honda was eventually developed away from him but *squints at the other side of the garage* he was also the only alien who had to deal with a teammate actively attempting to make the bike less rideable for him. jorge's switch to ducati is a bit. well. obviously it's not actually great that his final standings in those years are broadly in line with valentino on,,,, a WAY worse ducati a few years earlier. he gets bailed out a little bit by the three race wins in 2018 lol, dovi does have a littleeeee bit of a point that this man was not signed to win three races. but! he did click with that bike! I'm not sure I entirely buy his line of 'oh I would have won the 2020 title on a ducati' because, with all love, it's a very jorge thing to say and I'm also a bit? well before 2020 if you'd told me that marc gets injured in the first race of the season and someone else is gonna win the title, and then held a gun to my head and told me to predict who was gonna win the title in his absence, I guess I would have gone 'dovi or MAYBE fabio'. ducati wasn't in a super happy place in 2020, the tyres were funky, that could have affected jorge too!! we don't know!! I think it's absolutely a plausible counterfactual but I also haven't seen a convincing case for why the things that caught out dovi wouldn't have caught out dovi too, like come on. anyway, marc gets brownie points for this ducati adaptation, casey gets brownie points for the honda adaptation. honestly, just vibes based I do kinda think of casey as like, the most adaptable rider ever. I maybe rate valentino a bit higher in terms of getting the bike to where he needs it, and also obviously being adaptable - he has the longevity and multiple major riding style changes going for him. also marc is insanely good, and he rode the unrideable honda to places where it should NOT be ridden. it's those three in a cluster, probablyyy casey first, followed by marc then valentino, and then the other two aliens

also quite frankly I'd like to have something to do with bike development, but that's so hard to judge from the outside? obviously, valentino does have a very clear claim to fame here, and the yamaha gig is still... well, that's got to be the biggest impact a rider has had on a manufacturer this century. the other contender is casey at ducati, but the thing is he did basically bag them a title by being the only bloke who could win there, then they got super complacent, bike got worse and he fucked off. now, I'm not saying casey hurt ducati's development because of course that would be silly and unfair, but there is obviously a good half decade between him leaving that project and anyone else being able to consistently do something useful with that piece of shit. (obviously valentino also did not manage to make much short-term change at ducati so maybe we should just be blaming ducati here, but equally obviously the rider who made the single biggest individual difference into making that thing rideable isn't any of these guys but is instead andrea dovizioso lol.) as outsiders, we really can't meaningfully know how much these guys are making a difference behind the scene, all we have are vibes and rumours and surface level results... like basically if I had to rank them I'd probably give valentino the nod just because the yamaha thing deserves a nod, then kinda? idk casey + dani clearly did make an insanely good bike at honda and they should get some of the credit for kinda rescuing honda from its post-2006 slump. I think maybe dani goes second, like I know some have said he's a less useful development rider because he's too short (part of why honda didn't use him as a test rider, as well as obviously *gestures* the puig thing) and thus harder to compare to other riders.... BUT there's pretty universal praise for his work at ktm, and casey's post-motogp stints I don't think you can really say the same. with jorge... idk it's tricky, I remember reading that the vibe from valentino's team in 2013 was kinda 'well this bike is still... the exact same as it was two years ago...?' but obviously those guys also aren't neutrals. and they weren't even saying that in a negative way, there's a bit of an element of if it ain't broke don't fix it given jorge had just won the 2012 title. plus, especially in their second stint as teammates, I get the sense they were always broadly on the same page in terms of feedback? and if anything, yamaha's current malaise can partly be traced back to them not listening to shit they were being told by JORGE (+ valentino at the same time) like this is years and years back... so yeah those three are all in a blob. then comes marc, which. okay sure, super talented so can ride around everything etc etc, he's not the main reason for why honda sucks now, etc etc. but I'm sorry, you do just get marked down on this category if you sabotage bike development to fuck with your teammate. like I respect it, love you for it, but you are getting marked down here. there is no way you can get around this

then there's even more nebulous categories like 'mentality' or 'mind games' or whatever, but how even are you gonna rate this. with perhaps the sole exception of dani, all these other guys have exhibited some spectacular instances of head loss over the courses of their career. but then again with dani, you're probably also not going to point to mentality make the difference as much in a positive sense - like it's good to be even-tempered, but the highs also aren't as high in that regard. you have stuff like mental resilience, ability to bounce back from tough results... and again. I don't know. I don't feel comfortable putting a number on some of these. like say we took casey, then surely I'd have to mark him down for what happened post laguna in 2008 (and yes, I know he wouldn't agree with me on this, yes, I know there are mitigating circumstances, but it is a bit glaring). but then you look at how he got through 2009 and actually eventually got himself to the place where he won another title. how marc bounced back after 2015. whatever tf valentino did after qatar 2004. the 2009 bounce back after le mans/mugello... the 2003 arc and all that. for all of them, various criticisms in the media, hate campaigns from fans etc etc. like idk I don't have a number from 1-10 here. plus, any metric kinda has to have a clear good pole and a clear bad pole if you're putting numbers on that, and with something like mind games you can go either way on whether you think they're good or not? basically, I think we should lock casey and valentino into a room and get them to discuss this. I will provide a piece of paper with talking points and only let them out when I feel like they've had it out to an adequate extent. they're all mentally strong, love them all, let's leave it at that

wow! yay! these are all metrics I didn't even include! aren't you glad you clicked on this read more! there's so much to come after this!

let's get to metrics I did actually include: qualifying, starts, reliability, flexibility, mixed, wet, overtaking ability, defensive ability, cunning, strategy/work process. again, there were a few where I was like.... should there be some kinda basic metric for 'underlying pace' or 'raw talent' (both of which you kinda gesture in the casey + marc direction) but I'm somebody who's very outcome-focused. when you're rating things, you should sometimes just focus on the shit you can actually see. 'talent' is fake, give me results. but this does mean that... obviously not all of these metrics are of equal importance. like, qualifying is more important than how you are in the wet!! and yes, again, there's a million caveats here in terms of era and different bike characteristics and all that shit. even 'effort levels' - valentino's starts generally got better when he moved to yamaha (they were truly abysmal before that), which you can maybe attribute to the yamaha bike being better off the line (not much evidence for this from other riders who made switches back-and-forth around the same time iirc), or you can also attribute it to valentino knowing he couldn't afford quite as much faffing about on a worse bike. again, there's so so many caveats here. also, I found marc and casey REALLY hard to judge because like? it's so much harder if you haven't been able to see them line up next to each other to figure out how they compare? sure, you can use general metrics, you can check how they compare against the same group of riders, but... yeah, idk, for a lot of these categories when I was figuring out who to give a 9 or 10 out of those two I did a sort of *shrug*. I think one of these two I probably did dirty but I'm not sure which one. maybe I did everyone dirty. or maybe they all suck

so. let's go through them

1. qualifying

stuff I considered: outright qualifying performance both in terms of number of poles and average grid position, strength of qualifying opposition, h2h comparisons, adaptability to changing conditions

okay, so, I started with the most basic measure possible and looked at the pole numbers in the premier class as a percentage of number of race starts (and I've even updated the numbers for marc, that's how thorough I am hehe) (I just realised there's a problem here actually for casey because he got pole in valencia 2009 but didn't start the race due to a crash in the warm-up lap, which... well I don't want to take his pole away from him but I'm assuming the race start wasn't included? look, who gives a shit, I've kept the pole)

I also ran these numbers again just by... trimming down the number of seasons and limiting it to the 'competitive' ones, aka one where the finished top five in the championship standings. I'm aware this is super arbitrary, but I'm also not sure if we're really gaining much from including jorge's 2019 or valentino's 2021 or marc's 2023, when for instance you don't have those kinds of dud seasons for casey (though his rookie season did get cut). like, this is just a rough way of not punishing longevity and injuries and bad vibes, who knows what casey's qualifying would have looked like at age 382

doesn't actually change the order, which is nice. still think it's a better reflection of their actual qualifying chops

let's get the obvious out of the way - if you are getting almost 50% pole positions in your competitive seasons, I don't care how good your bike is or the era or whatever else, you are obviously an obscenely good qualifier. like, marc's qualifying numbers make you want to bust out the 12/10's. those are silly numbers that honestly you don't really need to add much too - sure, we can also dive into his average grid positions etc but like. they're all super high. idk what to tell you. marc has the average highest grid position every single year 2013 to 2019, enough said. I think casey over the course of his career was on slightly worse bikes on average than prime!marc, and also he was facing aliens in their prime or late prime literally every year which... yeah, maybe you do want to make a bit of an adjustment for that. like, marc's closest competition on paper in 2017-19 was dovi, who is very much not a gifted qualifier. but marc also got THIRTEEN POLES in 2014!! I know the honda was the best bike on the grid, but not by that much, and dani's hardly a slouch! idk I feel pretty happy with just giving marc the top spot here and letting casey slot into second. like, at a certain point the numbers you're staring at just sort of bludgeon you in the face, and you also have visions of cota 2015 and brno 2019 playing around in your head in a loop

THAT BEING SAID. there is one major caveat we do have to address: in 2013, the entire qualifying system was changed to introduce these 15 minute time slots. this whole q1 and q2 business is a relatively recent invention. now, this is pure speculation, but I think this format would have suited casey 'mr friday' stoner very very well. one of his big strengths was always like, being fast immediately, getting used to what the track was like with zero adaptation process and just putting down a super fast lap at the first attempt. he would have done great here!! also, I think the numbers of some of his opponents might have taken a bit of a dip and... yeah, look, obviously I'm really just talking about valentino here, who hated the new format and never got on particularly well with it. (serious argument to be made that if they hadn't switched the system, he would've taken the 2015 title - like obviously you get into weird butterfly effect territory with that kind of thing but ceteris paribus that will have absolutely cost him more than five points over the course of a full season.) he got better for a while in 2016.... but anyway during the early bits of the alien era, valentino was often qualifying like, really well when you compare it to his mid reputation. and maybe casey would've been able to beat him more under that system. probably

still, overall. idk man. almost 50% pole positions in his prime. obscene. giving it to marc

jorge is a lonely third in this metric. I feel fine with that? like, he's clearly very good, he was very good in his prime, that's how he won the 2015 title (though he did actually have a slightly worse grid position than marc that season, but crucially a lot better than valentino), he's gotten a lot of poles... but also his relative lack of flexibility hurts him here too, like he's not doing a brno 2019 is he. jorge kinda needs everything to be just right to get out the metronome, and that's also reflected in qualifying - he's more likely to be caught out by something being a bit off than either marc or casey. super fast over one lap, clearly insane underlying pace, what can you say

it's on the other end of the spectrum that I ran into my biggest headache, because...? honestly, I was a little bit surprised at valentino having the slight edge in the percentages, either way you measure them. dani has a bit more of a qualifying-centred reputation, whereas with valentino it's a bit... well, people do think he's very good at everything, and if you're looking for flaws in his game then that's one of the big things that jumps out. also, I do reckon there's a fair bit of recency bias at play here - a lot of fans only remember post-prime valentino, where format change this format change that he had just lost his edge over a single lap. some of this is also natural age-based decline? it does seem to be a thing in motorsports that saturday performances can go off before sunday performances, so it is a bit of an issue if everyone's just going 'okay but he was seventh every single week' when he too has racked up some impressive numbers over the course of his career. which isn't just longevity! you don't just longevity your way into 55 pole positions. on the other hand, you look at his honda prime and given the bike he was on, you do kinda go 'okay but I feel like you could've done a bit better here'. like, what are you doing being tied with biaggi on the yamaha in terms of average grid position in 2002... come on. come on. again, there's a teensy bit of an effort question here - I'm not suggesting valentino fluffed his qualifying on purpose to make his sundays more interesting, but I do think he does... you know, just performs differently when he knows he needs to do so. he's getting five pole positions on that 2004 yamaha... like he's clearly not a slouch

I actually think the best way you can make the pro-valentino qualifying argument is probably just by looking at the years when pretty good versions of the aliens were competing against each other on pretty competitive bikes? which is 2007 to 2009 - of course, that's gonna look fairly kind to valentino because he won the titles for two out of three years, but it's a good way to check our priors here and see whether valentino could theoretically keep pace with his fellow aliens. here's the average grid positions:

valentino got seven poles in 2009. idk, best bike, casey missed a few races, but at least against jorge it's a direct h2h (giving jorge a pass for his rookie season, but jorge's not becoming a significantly better qualifier after his sophomore season). like clearly he's fast

and after saying all of that, I ranked him last after dani!! yeah, look. I think it's marginal to me, and maybe this is partly my own bias because I've always thought of dani as a very good qualifier and have ragged on valentino for being mid literal hundreds of times. maybe it's also being swayed by the young talent factor - did you know valentino is the only alien who did not get a pole in his rookie season? these are the youngest pole sitter rankings for the premier class:

yeah, idk. I don't love this argument for philosophical reasons... but also it's kinda fine, it was obviously more important in dani's game than it was in valentino's. the percentages are close enough you can make the argument either way, but what sways me more than anything else is the competitive spread argument. like, all of dani's poles came with one of casey or marc in the field. several of prime valentino's opponents were really good qualifiers, sete in particular did out-qualify valentino over the course of whole seasons, but I'm not gonna make the case they were casey/marc good qualifiers. that's the deciding factor, congrats dani

2. starts

stuff I considered: speed off the line, consistency in starting ability, likelihood of getting holeshot, ability to get to the front from second/third row, wow factor starts from lower down the field

I was debating whether to put dani or casey first here, and I think you can make the argument for either. like, it is very hard to match dani, but I do also remember those kinda... later years, where he was still pretty competitive and winning races and all that but wasn't a rocket off the line in the same way any more, and it was one of those 'is it him or the tyres or the honda' thing. the whole problem with casey is that he retired so early so it's kinda... I mean, he may have had any of these issues too, we just don't know! unfair comparison. but well, I can at least judge the two of them competing, including on equal machinery and... man, dani and the holeshot, name a better love story. silly good. what I think is also important is... sometimes dani gets judged a bit for lack of flexibility in terms of figuring out how to get overtakes done in particular, but I can sort of picture a highlight reel of dani shooting off the line and picking his way through the field to still get the holeshot? like when he was good at this, he was so good - this is a category where the peak sways me I reckon

casey and jorge I'm also fairly content ranking in that order. jorge had to become a better starter, and while he did get very good at it and had so so many races where he just led off the start and then disappeared... idk, in terms of blistering raw speed off the line I still think casey edges him out. jorge does get brownie points for some of his ducati starts, bit more muscling his way through the field before burning out his tyres and falling back. sorry jorge. but yeah nah I'm fine with this order, casey did have the occasional stinker but also I'm blaming that on the ducati.... also jorge automatically loses the tiebreaker just because I remember that COMICAL 2014 cota jump start. then we get to marc and valentino, in that order. starts were a real flaw in marc's game early in his time in the premier class, even in his super dominant 2014, and while it did get better... like, y'know, he was never awful at them, but it also generally speaking wasn't ever one of his big strengths. valentino was 'running gag level of bad' at starting, like basically in his prime wherever he qualified, he was reliably seventh after a few corners. again, this is probably also exaggerated a bit... but also, we're operating at a high level here, somebody has to be at the bottom of the pile, and you cannot make an argument for anyone other than valentino. nobody's saying he's maverick vinales-level bad, but he's clearly no dani pedrosa. as mentioned above, he did get better at his starts when he switched to yamaha, so some of that prime honda stuff was also just him faffing about, and post-prime he really did have some great starts to make up for his poor qualifying but. y'know. balance of the career

which brings us to.... okay, one thing we do obviously have to quickly mention is that both marc and valentino have made some of those 'wow what the fuck' starts from poor qualifying positions. like, I've been insulting valentino a lot in this bit of the post, but qatar 2004 remains some very cool shit. objectively. (I mean the start he made from the back of the grid, not him cursing to sete. obviously. I wouldn't do the other thing.) marc... yeah, look, we've all seen the starts he's been making from pee fifty million this year. the... le mans sprint start, I believe? is still comically cool. doesn't save their positions in this ranking because you don't get that many points for three good starts out of three thousand, but still. did slap. plus, it does showcase they're very good at the bits where you have to like, spot gaps and dart through them, and obviously neither of them have ever been opposed to bit of muscling their ways through the field. they are very good!! still more sluggish off the line than the other three

3. reliability

stuff I considered: conversion rate on executing achievable results, number of unforced errors (anything that isn't 'strategy' like tyre choice or flag to flag handling), crashes - in particular costly ones

gahhhhhh I HATE this metric. I kinda needed a 'how often are you gonna throw away races while leading them' thing, which, to be clear, none of these blokes have done an awful lot of. but it's kinda... look, are you actually converting your maximum achievable results? what's the crash rate looking like? how many unforced errors are you making? and then I started changing my mind several different times because unsurprisingly, I can think of a lot of plenty of errors for all of them that are kinda egregious. like, that's how racing works! also this is a way less 'clean' metric than the two before that, because inevitably you're kinda overlapping with a lot of different categories. like, take making errors in the wet - obviously, that's what you do when you're not a good wet weather racer, but you don't suddenly get a free pass on mistakes just because it's raining. is this a metric that you limit to 'competitive' seasons? inherently, I am biased towards thinking a mistake is 'worse' when there's a lot at stake, but arguably that's something that should be included in the more cerebral categories and all errors should be treated equally. which I don't!! I think it very much matters being reliable under pressure. my last issue was the overlap with the 'flexibility' category because it's kinda... there's one or two riders who have a bit of a tendency to have Perfect Weekends when everything's going well, and then have poorer rides when they're just not quite feeling it. which is mostly covered under flexibility, but surely some of this stuff does also make you unreliable!!

again, they do obviously all have their errors... I think I probably penalise riders a little more severely for crashing out of the lead, which yes, all of them have done. now, I might be missing something obvious, but I think valentino only ever did so twice? donington 2009, which was in the wet (not an excuse!! he did also finish fifth, which, fair play I suppose), and sepang 2018, where he was *gestures* very old. marc... my issue with marc is that obviously he's managed to match that this year but both of those did have mitigating circumstances? his 2019 cota crash I also think had... something else going on. of course you do also have his phillip island crashes, 2014 and 2016 (I've said it before and I've said it again, prime!marc's phillip island record is incredibly funny when you think about it). then 2014 he's also got aragon, which was more about a poor decision to not switch tyres but like, crash is a crash, and argentina 2017. which is like... you know, given how he rides and how many races he was leading, it's not terrible. also I think this is a bit more dubious with early season races because you don't know what might end up costing you, but none of these were particularly important in title fight terms (argentina 2017 could have been!) so. dani... well, he's got sachsenring 2008, which was kinda terrible because he was genuinely seven seconds in the lead, but also it's raining? idk crucially it did basically cost him any hope of fighting for the title, lost the championship lead and bagged himself a wrist injury (which, of course, is also just poor luck - we do not have a sturdiness category). laguna 2010 also isn't great, especially given it just helped jorge run away with the title even more. dani also crashed from the lead at indy 2009, plus brno 2011. jorge ALSO crashed out of the lead at donington 2009 (truly, one of those days), plus brno 2009 (not great at that point in the title fight!!), plus valencia 2012 (I mean, last race of the season, also kinda a weird one since he was lapping someone), plus qatar 2014, and misano 2017. casey crashes out of the lead at... well, back to back races post-laguna 2008, brno and misano, which admittedly apart from anything else isn't great optics. I think the only other time he does it is qatar 2010? which. yeah. not ideal

okay, look, this sample size is so small I don't think you gain much from doing percentages per competitive season or whatever. on the balance of the available evidence, you do have to say that valentino only binning it twice out of the lead is pretty impressive, given he raced for like. fifty million years. and won a lot of races, so by definition gave himself a lot of chances to crash. like, it'd be lovely to have a statistic for 'number of laps led', or even better a spreadsheet with all the numbers for when riders are in certain positions, and then also numbers for how many times they crash out of every position so we could do like. some proper maths on this shit. unfortunately we can't! and it'd still only give us an incomplete picture, because again you do have stuff like 'well marc has ridden some kinda evil bikes' and 'how do we assess wet races' and 'how much pressure were they under in each situation' to assess. I still like it as a rough indicator! I suppose I've been thinking about the concept of 'crashing out of the lead of motogp races' rather a lot these last few years... impossible to guess why that is

also, those aren't the only types of unforced errors to exist. like, marc's not crashing out of the lead in 2015, but *gestures* that season is unforced error central. I also put jorge's weird helmet visor shit in this category, because fundamentally part of reliability is about not putting yourself in a position where dumb shit happens to you. and that could have really cost him!! crash rates in general - again, I don't love just giving raw numbers here. there's some specific series of mistakes that really jump out at you... an obvious one is valencia 2006, and it's also in that weird cota 2019 category of 'right I think there may have been something funky going on with the equipment but also you are calling this an 'error' so I shall call it that'. fight me casey stoner, I guess. there's other late championship errors that are. not great. like jorge phillip island 2009 or dani phillip island 2012. with casey, it's a bit 'eh' because he never was still in a title fight particularly late in a season? like, again, the 'two out of the only three crashes out of the lead in your whole career happened at the height of the title fight in 2008' is one of those things that's always going to raise an eyebrow, and did essentially end the title fight before they even got to the late stage but... yeah, idk, we're lacking in casey's sample size here. you can also look at title decider performance for three of them, and while we can get into the ins and outs of what valentino/marc got up to - never mind all that, you have two absolutely flawless performances from jorge sitting right there

when it comes to crash rate in general, valentino's in quite a happy spot again? I mean, his record in his prime certainly is silly good: three crashes in his rookie season, two right at the start, which, vale gets a little bit of 'the 500cc's were evil' bonus.... after that! one crash in 2001, zero in 2002 (the dnf is mechanical), zero in 2003 (no race off the podium), two in 2004, one in 2005 (that one was a howler mind u), two in 2006 (one he got barrelled into at the first corner and remounted, the other was as best we know an unforced error - but the three dnf's are all mechanical), one in 2007 (two mechanical dnf's), one in 2008 (remounted and finished 11th), three in 2009 (I mean he crashed like fifty times in le mans, then in donington he crashed in the wet and finished fifth which... good salvage work, plus indy which was genuinely dumb as shit). like, again, if we're specifically considering each of the aliens' respective 'primes', that record's hard to argue with. but then again, am I going to penalise casey too much for all his race crashes in 2010, given that valentino can also attest to that bike being, well, shit? also, brownie points of some kind to marc specifically for 2019, given we know what a nightmare that honda was and he only dnf's the one time. also, his 2016!! it's less spectacular in a way but that's a season that's so much about reliability - like so many marc titles are won on the principle of 'show up, don't crash, don't slum it in p13 every other week, win some races'. jorge is mostly fine - I don't want to penalise him too much for his rookie season though I do a bit more 2009, and then post-yamaha it was all a bit. eh. dani's issue is that he didn't crash that much but I swear every time he did, it felt super costly for some reason or another? which is also just bad luck, but

again, there's some stretches you do kinda maybe give a little bit of added weight. for casey, you do kinda have to mention 2012: he was tied on points with jorge leading into sachsenring, was clearly way too much on the edge fighting with dani, really should have settled for second and… binned it. right before the end. I get he's a 'I look at wins and the championships will follow naturally' type guy, but that inherently means he's gonna get a knock in this category. and then he had a mess of a mugello race right after, just multiple unforced errors and almost barrelled over poor bautista and… idk, we don't really talk about it much any more because he injured himself at indy and was definitively taken out of the title fight - but I still reckon the honda was probably on balance the strongest bike that year, and it was kinda his own errors that cost him there. for marc, nobody on this planet needs me to relitigate 2015, but yeah, 2015

also, yes, you can sort of bring in the ugly years for all of them minus casey (who had a very ugly rookie season but we'll give it a pass, and apart from that his ugliest season was 2010 - he didn't stick around long enough for comparable experiences to the others)... jorge skittling the field at catalunya 2019, quite a few dani misadventures... we can talk about valentino's ducati stint and that wet weather collision with casey that prompted the 'ambition outweighed talent' thing, we can talk about marc's silverstone 2021 barrelling into jorge or that aragon 2022 first lap or... whatever the fuck he was doing at portimao last year. clearly, when those two specifically know they're not in the title hunt, when they've been frustrated and annoyed and are hungry for success, their decision-making skills can take a serious hit, but also... okay, look, I'm not saying that injuring other riders like marc in particular did suddenly becomes okay when you're not fighting for a title, but a) clearly they were both riding bikes that were very easy to crash (I mean, again, look at casey's early 2010 crash rate), and b) for better or for worse, they're not doing that shit if they know they're fighting for a title (isolated and glaring cases of head loss for the pair of them set aside). listen, I'm deciding the rules, set aside the whole morality thing - I just care more about mistakes when they have bigger competitive ramifications

so. I do think valentino has to go first in this category and yes, we can get into the whole 'well the yamaha is very rideable thing' but also he did help make it that way so. y'know. at a certain point you just have to look at the headline numbers. he didn't crash a lot, he showed up, he generally maximised the results he could get. there's like, two or three major stains in his record, but then you also think about how he was saving his title bids with sachsenring 2016 type deals where he was working his way to the win from tenth and holding off three ferocious hondas right at the end... like, given how risky a lot of his riding inherently was, you have to say the unforced error count is low. see also laguna 2008 or motegi 2010 type shit, like not making mistakes when deliberately roughing up opponents isn't, y'know, the most morally 'good' way to approach racing but. still. he was constantly putting himself in risky race positions by dint of being such an ass qualifier/starter and his numbers are still like that. I rest my case. and, okay, I'm gonna be a wee bit controversial here and put mr crasquez in second. I don't know, maybe I'm just rewarding 'flexibility' here too and just being swayed too much by how consistently there he was in his prime but, I don't care. part of it is also the valentino situation of 'wow it really feels like you should be crashing more' (in races, I don't feel in general marc should be crashing more funnily enough), and it's also just the 2016 thing. also the 2019 thing. I get the argument with 2015, and I don't think any version of noughties valentino would have a season like that, but *shrugs* he also didn't have a valencia 2006-equivalent so whatever (I mean. he flirted with it in 2017 and that was a pretty poor performance, but crucially I'm an outcome-oriented person and he didn't actually bin it so)

then comes jorge - given his profile as a rider I don't think it reflects great on him that he has crashed out of the lead, including in costly ways, quite a few times. also, unfortunately you don't get a sophomore season freebie when we're comparing aliens, and 2009 did have some real. issues. (so did valentino's to be clear, definitely his messiest title campaign.) also, look, I think calling his ducati seasons not competitive is arguable - because unlike the valentino and marc seasons where you can at least say 'well nobody else on that bike was outperforming them', this is not something you can point to with jorge. his strongest trait is dominating from the front! he's supposed to be mr hammer and butter, he's getting a knock for the unforced errors, yeah. he gets a valencia bonus though. then comes dani - this one also feels quite harsh, and again I think it's slightly punishing lack of flexibility, but it's the really costly errors that stick out and also just... relatively more races than some of his fellow aliens where he's not reliably bringing any result home because he's not in the position he should be running in. and then comes casey, which, small sample size counts against him here. if you have that few seasons to draw from, unfortunately the whole laguna 2008 situation and 2012 sachsenring/mugello stuff do stand out

wow. this got long. I really don't like this category

4. flexibility

stuff I considered: not literal flexibility, more in terms of 'can you be good everywhere'. like, we're looking at the broad profile of a season - I want you to be good both at qatar and at sachsenring, right? have they won/gotten decent results relative to how good the bike/opposition is basically everywhere, do they just feel a bit limited at times, what were they doing at new tracks, etc, can they figure shit out over the course of the weekend

again, there's some serious overlap here with both the reliability category and also the wet/mixed conditions categories, but idk. still treating it on its own. again, there's two fairly straightforward tiers here - you've got valentino, casey and marc, and then jorge and dani. I'm not like, super attached to any particular order here? casey has the distinction that he's won at every single race he's competed at, which none of the others do, but that's also what will happen if you retire at age 27. if vale and marc had retired at that age... okay, yeah, valentino would've been missing laguna, marc would be missing austria (which he still is, actually), but also idk. valentino's laguna record is like, one third place, two visits where his bike is just 'no thank you' and then one of the best races of all time. marc got as close as it is possible to win that bloody race in austria on three separate occasions. also, casey completed the set in 2012 with... well, first of all he needed jerez, which...? who the hell has jerez as their bogey track? he'd literally had one podium there in his entire career before that point, all classes, which is kinda funny. plus, he also needed estoril - and he was really proud to finish the set, helped make his decision to retire. real take, maybe his issue with jerez is that everyone else knew it too well, like ideally he needs everyone (including himself) to be blasted with a mind ray to give them amnesia before they go to each track so he can take full advantage

anyway, look, the point is that all three of them can show up anywhere and broadly expect to be competitive in their primes. they go about this in different ways... casey had this nasty habit of just rocking up on a friday morning and being fast the second he touched the bike, valentino made more of a leisurely crawl towards 'ah well we'll figure it out at 4 am on sunday morning' (marc did a bit of both) - but broadly speaking they did generally get there more often than not. this is reflected in the very strong records they all have when they show up at tracks for the first time, and it's something marc explicitly pointed to last year in india when explaining why him, fabio and joan as the three most recent former world champions were suddenly so competitive there (in contrast to the rest of the season, where they were *checks notes* not having a great time). I don't think it's really just a raw talent thing per se, and especially with valentino he clearly did also have a very good working process (more on that in a moment), but yeah! however they did it, they sure did do it! the gaps in marc's and valentino's resumes, I do also not feel too strongly about... valentino's missing aragon, introduced in 2010, but like. he was fine there, he just wasn't winning that many races anyway after that, and it inherently didn't suit him too well. cota... well, y'know, he had one shot of winning that, won't really hold any of his 2019 performances against him. that also wasn't a particularly strong yamaha track, and again it's not like he was uncompetitive there. he just wasn't like. marc marquez levels competitive. marc has a few like austria, but that was such ducati heartlands and he really did get very close a million times, and stuff like portimao, which, well, only showed up post arm injury, he's still got time

I don't know, with all three of them it's also just so easy to pinpoint special performances at their weakest tracks, it moves me. I actually need to check the order in which I put them, which tells you how close they are in my mind. uh... okay I gave casey full marks, then marc, then valentino. yeah, idk, I guess sometimes my casey problem is that my brain just automatically extrapolates from the bits we got to see and assume he would've adapted to everything to come forevermore. but look, he really was that good!! actually the tiebreaker to me is how in his second ever motogp race he'd been ill, his flight had been delayed, he shows up at the qatar circuit like fifteen minutes before practise starts, and he ends up popping his satellite honda on pole. not knocking marc's cota pole obviously, but he'd already tested there, and we did later find out he is like, a literal deity at that circuit (casey is good at qatar but not that good). idk. that's where I'm at. I'm not actually sure why I'm ranking valentino third, maybe it's just a sort of 'begrudgingly amused annoyance' at how he won his least favourite circuit on the calendar only twice, and both were these massive spite wins (valencia 2003, 2004). like, I get that sports psychology does matter, but I also don't want to have to make an 'effort and mean-spiritedness' adjustment to all your results? obviously it's also super telling his one laguna win came in 2008, like we get it you're a hater, let's move on

oh I was about to move on but I do have to cover the other two. hm. well, look, their 2012 was super impressive and shows they can clearly be fast pretty much everywhere, but... yeah, idk, I don't want to penalise them for what the alien era was like, but maybe a little bit? like yeah they did it at a time when the bike difference was at the most egregious, and I GET that it happens to coincide with their primes, but that is not going to be the only season I look at!! sorry!! the thing about those two was if they weren't clicking with a track, you kinda didn't really expect them to pull a rabbit out of the hat come race day (even casey had a nasty habit of doing that, and acknowledged in his autobiography how extremely helpful it was to psychologically sucker rivals into thinking he wasn't going to be a huge threat). I look at jorge's sepang record, his argentina record, his assen record (and yes, I'm aware of the massive trauma he was dealt by his 2013 crash, that's absolutely a factor in the years after that), even phillip island... I know he won the latter two once in the premier class, but yeah. don't love it!! stinker after stinker at argentina, and that one in particular does raise an eyebrow because, y'know, always a bit of a quirky track with all the various grip issue dramas over the years. 2014-16 when they're teammates again, valentino gets three podiums there (including a win) and jorge just the one, so it's also not just a bike issue. with dani it's quite easy... qatar was a crappy honda track yeah, still not ideal results there, phillip island just too many riders who were better than him there, poor at assen, quite poor at catalunya too? apart from 2008, which it has to be said was a proper class performance. (admittedly who knows what valentino could've done there if he'd considered maybe not fucking his qualifying.) idk, several of these classic high speed tracks... okay, look, I'm not going to spend too much time ragging on their circuit to circuit records here, you get the point,it should be fairly clear that they both struggled more than the other three to tackle adversity weekend by weekend. and a lot of the times when they started a weekend poorly that was basically that

5. mixed conditions

stuff I considered: ... how good they are in mixed conditions. did they crash a lot in them, were they extra super special fast, did they get better when things were sketch, did they adjust quickly to these conditions, how did they manage race situations impacted by changing conditions

okay, look, again the lack of direct comparison does hurt me here, but yeah I was never going to put anyone other than marc first here. I was also never going to put anyone other than casey second, and anyone other than valentino third. all three of them are excellent here, even if it's a different vibe for each. liked, not quite the same thing, but obviously they're all great in low grip anyway, very nice with all the sliding the bike around (especially the first two). marc's got the whole insane saves things going for him even when he does make a misjudgement. there's that ability to just instantly know how to judge and adapt to whatever condition the track is in... well, it's neat! we'll get to this again in a second with wet weather racing, but I still think valentino's a bit more in the... hm. idk. he's obviously GOT a lot of natural feel, he couldn't do what he does otherwise, but he's clearly also big on kinda following other riders around and figuring it out as he goes? like it feels a teensy bit more conscious, like a deliberate thinking process rather than primarily using instinct. but yeah, I mean, you really don't have to get super complicated about that, it's literally been years and years of watching marc gain literal seconds on the field whenever the conditions are a bit sketchy. brno 2019 qualifying. no need to say more. (but if you did want to say more, I do have a misano 2015 to offer u. also like sachsenring 2016?? assen 2014! genuinely so many you could point to with him.) (actually.... I mean, I suppose we do also have to mention argentina 2018, where he was about a minute a lap faster than the rest of the field.) with casey, again, super easy, you've got a phillip island and valencia 2011 there - his last lap of valencia!! one of the best last laps of his career!! that shit was crazy!! mugello 2009!! I get that there's Reasons why valentino played that one cautiously *coughs* le mans fiasco *coughs* but still, casey was the guy who broke the valentino supremacy!! speaking. of. mugello. you want to know another mixed conditions race that happened there... that's right, last few laps of mugello 2004, like they're so fucking good. valentino's last ever race win comes in increasingly kinda sketch conditions in assen 2017, where he is also fighting marc. like, look, I'm not gonna list every single race performance in sketch conditions, and of course they did also have some stinkers... this is a vibes category, sometimes it's truly just about looking at some lap times and going 'oof you guys really are something special here'. but also clear order here, marc is just *gestures* something else yeah

anyway. okay listen at this point I don't REALLY want to rag on the other two, especially since I'll get to it more with wet races. they're just not quite at the same level! I'm not saying they're terrible, but y'know, you can just check their track records and draw your own conclusions. if jorge had lost that 2015 title, misano absolutely would have been top of everyone's list as a big, big factor in that. I've already mentioned argentina, and again it kinda is telling what their records there look like. phillip island. it's just... y'know. it's whatever. with dani, similar story, but shout out to motegi 2015. banger performance, super impressive. jorge also has a few good f2f's. but yeah, we can list every single performance where they were massively outperformed by those other three or we could. not

6. wet

stuff I considered: well. their records when races were wet. did they bin it, how did they perform against their teammates, what can we say about performance variation over time, how understandable were their errors, what was their approach like to them

similar tiers, slightly different order - casey, then vale, then marc. but again, it's super close, and I don't feel as happy with the order here as above. I just have this highlight reel in my head of casey's wet weather performances, donington 2007 and silverstone 2011 are both crazy good in different ways. yes, he didn't win every single race in the wet he competed in, but who does? and yes, his sample size is a teensy bit limited, and yes, he did lose that one le mans 2012 battle against ducati!valentino, which, who does that, but like... listen. when he was on it, he was so on it. on the flip side, and I realise this is again unfair given the sample size issues, I just don't have all these memories of watching casey crash in the wet as I do for each of the other aliens. even his poorer performances like donington 2009... y'know, there was a good explanation there. (indy 2008 is one that I'm quite meh about admittedly.) but like!! overall it just is NOT a lot of races in the wet - I feel the sample size issues with other things more strongly, but here he also just compares positively to other aliens in their primes and it's not as much a w2w thing. just something about him in the wet that I trust..? I feel like sachsenring 2008 is another one that also kinda shows he had a good feel for how much he could push. like, dani disappeared off into the distance, and casey did kinda go. huh. well idk about that but good luck. and then won the race by a mile when dani crashed out. I don't know! given that's not always a trait I massively associate with casey, I do think he was generally pretty sensible in the wet. also... yeah, given it's inherently not that many races you're judging, I do think inevitably this is something where my brain really is pulling together two or three signature performances and judging those. and with casey, I just think those performances slap

that being said. ranking him above valentino here could(?) be controversial, and I did struggle a teensy bit with this one. like, mixed conditions can be a bit dodgy and also, we'll get to this in a moment but valentino's flag to flag record *stares into the middle distance* BUT when it's full wet!! oh yeah. right. let's fucking go. the tiny caveats I have here in my mind are a) he did make some memorable mistakes in those conditions (as casey can attest to), but again, so has pretty much everyone, and b) the wet weather performances after 2015 were kinda dodgy. but that's like.... that is just fundamentally a yamaha problem once the series switched to the michelins, like I don't really see the argument for saying that was a valentino decline? it's become a pretty persistent issue, and even then valentino was generally putting his bike in a hell of a lot more impressive places than his respective teammates (hey, you still have pretty nifty performances even in that era - look at brno 2016). let's set all that aside, and focus on all the other bits: the banger performances. the donington 2005's and silverstone 2015's of this world. let's talk donington, actually, because... idk, I think there's something very valentino in the wet about that race specifically, because for a lot of the race it really doesn't look that great? he wobbles a lot, some very cool marc-y saves but preferably you don't want to HAVE to marc-y save stuff, gets to the lead and loses it and gets back again. like, okay, obviously the conditions are genuinely just atrocious, but crucially he's not just FAST!! it's not just dominant! it's him watching and learning and feeling his way into the race, until eventually he's learned enough and can pull away. obviously, it's always worth remembering there's a shit ton of natural talent here too, cf colin edwards talking about seeing his data and just going 'what tf do you mean he's locking up in every single corner' (I paraphrase), but it's... yeah, he's doing a lot of this with his brain. which I do think is a big part of wet weather racing!! like a lot of it is figuring out how much risk you should be taking at any given moment, what's possible in the moment, how much you can trust what you're feeling etc etc

but yeah, shanghai that year is a dominant one... silverstone 2015 is like, so impressive you have to say, crazy pressure from marc behind him until marc eventually crashed and then late pressure from petrucci. like that race saved his title bid and it could've easily gone wrong. also, one of my favourite things about valentino as a wet weather racer is not just that he used to be bad of it, but he used to be scared of riding in the rain. he didn't want to go out there!! teen!vale told his team boss he didn't want to race in that shit!! it's about the journey... first premier class win in... is that a wet or mixed conditions race? never mind, crucially donington 2000 he is working his way through the field on a track that is very much not try. and somewhere along the line, he did just become a proper excellent wet weather racer, even if he never was a massive fan. indy 2008 is another banger, like basically I reckon he's at his very best in conditions nobody should ever even contemplate racing in? see also what he did in his ducati years. I'm also inherently biased towards people getting better at stuff, so maybe that's part of the picture for me. anyway, with marc I don't massively have much to add to what I already said in the mixed conditions bit? I basically think he's excellent but he doesn't have the same margin over the field when it's full wet rather than 'kinda sketch'. he does also have the misfortune of running into some of the best wet weather races out there during his prime, first valentino and then dovi - who, if I were including him in this exercise, would absolutely be in the conversation for top spot alongside vale/casey. but like, just because he doesn't win them doesn't mean motegi and sepang 2017 aren't very strong, in terms of maximising what was possible on that day. speaking of 2017, misano!!!! he's good at the decision making stuff too, good at maximising his performance when he's not winning races. 2016 is a title bid that is built on a lot of kinda sketch races, most of which marc doesn't win - but he won the championship and that's the bit that matters. and in ducati!valentino style, of course those have also been the situations in which marc's had the chance to be more competitive in the horror honda years.... motegi last year is the obvious example. he's very very good, does chuck it down the road a few times too but that's life

so the thing about jorge and wet weather is that he's like, pretty poor in the lower categories, and the general 2006-07 pattern was that dovi was keeping himself competitive in those title fights in large part through starring performances in wet races while jorge flops. then there's a period in the premier class where he's actually kinda fine? does chuck it a few times, but also really some strong performances in there. jerez 2011, le mans 2012... anyway, if we're talking about assen becoming a real bogey track in jorge's later years, it's probably also worth mentioning that the assen 2013 highside came in the wet and is around the time there was a real downturn in his wet weather performances. he was still competitive in a few wet weather races! but he also... really wasn't in many. at times he was just slow - if he'd lost the 2015 title, people would still be talking about silverstone more, which you have to say he was very lucky to limit the points damage in (and he did come within a whisker of being crashed out on like, three separate instances, which can happen if you're running in a pack in the wet). then, of course, you have 2016 where his title charge completely fell apart in the wet.... as already said with valentino, the yamaha in those years clearly wasn't quite right in the wet, but valentino was still putting together stronger performances. then in 2017 jorge still has that decent sepang race where he challenges dovi for the win, but yeah... that's basically it. it's unfair when people portray him as a poor wet weather racer his whole career, but obviously. y'know. not on the level of the three above. dani...... look, I'm gonna keep this short: I get that his literal size and weight are a massive disadvantage here, but of course there's no way you can't rank him last in this category. he won one wet premier class race in his whole career, there's a lot of big crashes to point to (sachsenring 2008 again is particularly memorable) and also just him being very slow. sepang 2012 was cool though

7. overtaking ability

stuff I considered: race craft, efficiency in overtaking, direct duels, dogfights, comeback rides, creativity, .... being cool

right. look. I'm willing to hear the arguments for the others, but to me it's just got to be valentino here. like, yes, I get it - if you're constantly putting yourself in seventh at the end of every single first lap, you will just be doing a lot of overtakes. if your entire approach to winning races is built around sitting behind other riders for half the race and just vibing, then yes, of course you'll be doing a lot of memorable overtakes for the win. maybe you shouldn't have been in that position in the first place. I hear the case! I acknowledge it! but he was just so damn good at those overtakes! he knew where to place his bike, he knew where to attack, he was so good at making that shit stick, he's usually not being massively aggressive to the point of recklessness when he doesn't need to be... what's the drawback. again, maybe this is being swayed by the highlight reel rather than measuring 'pure' skill, but my god is it a highlight reel. remember how in assen 2018 he just. overtakes other riders ten times at the gt chicane? rinse and repeat, he just knew how to get past people. that's a bit of dominance in a certain track just in terms of sheer race craft that's like, a bit obscene really. there's a reason he's got three overtakes that are still iconic and infamous alike, mix of brutality of jerez 2005 and ruthlessness of laguna 2008 and determination of catalunya 2009. he knew how to judge risks, usually he walked that line very very finely - which is how he was seen as an aggressive rider but also didn't crash a lot - but boy did he know how to send it like the best of him. so you've got the range, right, something as practised as assen 2018 gt chicane, but also the creativity of something like catalunya 2009, of trying a move where others just wouldn't. also, like, FORgET the corkscrew move at laguna 2008, let's talk about that move around the outside of turn 3 ffs. and he was so good at working his way through the field!! I mean, he had to be given what an abysmal qualifier he was at times in the latter half of his career, but like his 2015 title campaign would've been impossible without that kinda qatar and argentina vibe. the man was always tussling, but he sure did do it well. idk, what's the counter argument here.... he's crashed like. at most half a dozen times. while attempting overtakes. idk I'm unmoved, sachsenring 2007 isn't enough to ruin everything else here. 'valentino rossi is good at overtakes', more as we get it

marc. marc. the thing about marc, right, is that sometimes he does stray to the wrong line of the 'aggression or just stupid' divide, but... given his baseline level of aggression, you have to say he mostly did a good job of not pushing it too far. he's extremely adept at working his way through fields... and it really is important he's willing to go for it. like there are riders who just won't! he's very see gap go for gap, as he's happy to remind everyone, and that makes him a very fearsome proposition. I'm not like... I love it for narrative reasons, but to me personally jerez 2013 does push it a teensy bit, and there's been a few too many race craft howlers for my tastes in the last few years. he's just too good to be doing shit like portimao last year. that being said, when he's keeping things sensible, the race craft is obviously elite. incredible bike placement, also just such an innate ability to thrive in those kinda chaotic situations at starts of races, in the middle of dogfights he navigates that stuff so so good..... I don't LOVE rating marc/valentino over the other three aliens on grounds of like 'hard racing' because you then get to tricky philosophical waters, but actually I'm perfectly happy to rate them above the other three for just being very good at this shit. for my money, my favourite overtake of his is still last lap on petrucci in misano 2017, like idk the sheer nerve and daring and skill in the wet!! I moved!! I also had a heart attack but never mind that!! misano 2019 ughhh my beloveddddd... okay admittedly he has a few too many of these epic duels tm he loses which we'll get back to in a moment, but that doesn't erase all the cool moves he makes on the way to moving. also obviously got to mention these comeback rides he's been having - and this kind of thing is also super important in starts!! just very very adept at all this race craft stuff, though a few too many of his overtakes don't stick for my tastes

now. the thing is. casey did most of his racing in an era that, as we have repeatedly established, was kinda ass. also, it's obviously worth pointing out that casey really wasn't trying to win his races in a way that involved a lot of overtaking. and his attitude towards racing did have the potential to hinder him in fights, because he was perhaps maybe possibly at times a teensy bit too concerned with keeping things respectful when certain other riders were willing to push him off a cliff if it could secure them pee four. that being said. limited sample size aside. when I close my eyes, I can see casey overtaking jorge around the outside of turn one at laguna 2011, and it is still the most bonkers downright terrifying thing I've seen in my life, but it is also very very very cool. that's right, he's ranked third because that move is so cool. it's just... he's always going on about risk and danger and all that and racing valentino at laguna was scary etc etc, which, yes, I do have a lot of empathy there, but my brother you are overtaking him around a blind crest. like you literally can't see where you're going. everybody finds turn one at laguna terrifying, it's seen as scarier as the corkscrew. and that's where you overtake him. and it's not an isolated occurrence - some of the laguna 2008 moves on valentino?? dude. it very much takes two to tango, we're talking some scary turn one moves and sketch turn three and turn five encounters like.... like!! phew. plus, valencia 2011 last lap

also, listen, at the end of the day, the reason why I'm putting casey over jorge here is very simple - direct record against valentino. one of them actually won extended battles against him, the other didn't. yes, jorge ran valentino close, but y'know. you don't get extra points for 'close', do you. catalunya 2009, sachsenring 2009, motegi 2010... casey actually beat valentino, he did it at catalunya 2007 and sachsenring 2010, qatar 2007... that sachsenring 2010 last lap move truly slaps!! idc if valentino had just come back from the broken leg, still slaps! now, yes, we do need to point out that jorge has done some great overtaking in his time, and he's also won quite a few close duels against marc specifically - but, well, marc didn't race casey, can't compare it. still, jorge is good wheel-to-wheel generally speaking, the risk assessment is mostly pretty good though sometimes he can be a bit... idk, clumsier on average than the three above him? anyway, still better than dani, who unfortunately did sometimes fall into the category of me going 'PLEASE overtake the guy come on move.... MOVE'. generally a lot of overtakes only happening when there's a massive tyre advantage which is like. it's fine. but it's not quite the same thing. but jerez 2010 brno 2012 for them respectively overall were obviously cool. basically my main thing for this one is that, we're not rating duels here, we're rating overtaking ability. and on the one hand I have the highlight reel in my head and the craft and skill of it all, and on the other hand I have like. if you get stuck in the pack. do I expect you to stay there or do something. and generally it's really marc and valentino where I'm expecting some moving

8. defensive ability

stuff I considered: also race craft, just general quality of defensive rides idk, how much I trust you to keep guys with better pace behind you

yeah valentino again here I fear. this is another factor where I'm really just seeing the highlight reel in my head, just so many class defensive rides (even though usually he'd PREFER to be coming from behind than holding others off). last few laps of sachsenring 2006 are like, gorgeous, what a crazy girl. laguna 2008. assen 2015. some of the late braking in catalunya 2009, like I already have talked about it elsewhere and jorge has spoken about how vale sets up his bike to brake 10m later than everyone else, but. has to be said. he really did gag me with that catalunya 2009 turn one behaviour. phewwwww some of his mugello main straight antics..... he TESTED those brakes. his last podium ride in andalusia 2020... still had it what can you say. also, thing is, there's not really many failures you can point to? his two biggest last lap defeats, he was behind going into them - like yeah still sucked he lost (especially sachsenring 2003 where you CAN kinda argue it was a fuck up in his defence) (jerez 2005 SHOULD have been a major fuck up but he won it so) but overall... oh also sepang 2006 last lap. I mean, I could go on - he's good at picking his lines and being a dickhead and just placing his bike right and also muscling his way around the track... some of his dubious motegi 2010 antics even though he's flirting with the line. also excellent at re-overtaking after being overtaken. straightforward case

so I've switched this twice and then realised I was overthinking this and next it's obviously marc. idk I think you can overthink this and marc does have a few Actual Sketch defensive rides (argentina 2015, silverstone 2019) but also his wheel to wheel record is so strong you've got to let him slot in here. like, again, the decision making isn't always ideal, he sometimes pushes it a bit too far, but the fundamental race craft can be faulted and he does do a lot of really excellent defensive riding, brutal on the brakes and all that. again, this really does jump out during the dogfights, plus also stuff like thailand 2019. he's very good at it!! a nightmare to get past, because he is also NOT just gonna give up the position! then we get into classic casey 'god this sample size is ass' stuff where I think I give him a lot of benefit of the doubt given just the lack of races where he was like... running similar paces to other guys... awful era. but clearly did have some excellent rides where defence played a huge role, catalunya 2007 was really good... assen 2007 he kept valentino behind quite a long time, few races like that where casey really does keep him behind for quite long. phillip island 2009 is a bit tricky because it felt valentino never had the ultimate pace to overtake but, well, casey started ahead, had valentino sitting on his rear tyre for a decent chunk of the race, finished ahead, so points for that. again, just a real sample size issue here but, y'know

jorge.... listen, he definitely can defend. he has done some very, very strong defensive rides. one of the strongest and most important ones of his career was at a little known race called valencia 2015 even if marc maybe wasn't as motivated to overtake jorge as he would have been some other days I'M KIDDING. it's good. lot of good stuff going on. that being said.... man, it's such low hanging fruit, but you have to talk about how jorge was robbed at the final corner first in catalunya 2009 and jerez 2013. now, look, of course people can lose races in final corners, but in both those cases you do have to say... dude. you could have defended that line. in both cases everyone does kinda go... mate. mate. you have to assume those two bastards will go for it. idk obviously this is selection bias because both instances were just so memorable, but inevitably this is the stuff you are judged on. don't do it!! omg! also, with all love to valentino's slightly deranged levels of aggression while both attacking and defending against jorge in motegi 2010, this is another one where you do kinda feel.... yeah, it's not easy when you know the other guy is kinda willing to crash you both out rather than let you win (valentino!! your shoulder!! valentino!!!!) and yeah you kinda still have a championship to think about... still. (that being said, I'm not giving valentino TOO many motegi 2010 points in either category - yes, it worked, yes, it was funny, but was it 'good riding'? eh.) do we give him points off for the sepang 2017 error that let dovi ahead... I suppose he defended very well against dovi at valencia that year lol. but actually, same thing with 2015, I'm not sure you really get many points for defending at valencia? anyway, I feel like the way this is ordered, I'm unfortunately constantly justifying ranking the same blokes last, so again, let's keep this quick. dani: fantastic work at aragon 2015. truly elite performance. wish you had done a little more of that. way too many estoril's and shanghai's and motegi's 2008. but aragon 2015 was lovely

9. cunning

stuff I considered: 'race management', how you navigate different race situations, battle smarts

hm, yeah, another bit of a catch all category like reliability was - just that general sense of... y'know, how good are you at figuring out races. working them out in your head, being smart about when to push and when not to push. decision making skills, how you are at analysing your opponents, at studying their strengths and weaknesses. at the mental side of the on-track game, at intimidation and stealth. cunning. anyway absolutely zero prizes for guessing who slots into number one and two here. all of the things I just described are very closely associated with valentino, and this is basically his category. I'm thinking what he did to sete specifically. I'm thinking how he completely switched it up against casey at laguna 2008. I'm thinking how he did that last corner overtake on casey catalunya 2007, saved it away, then did it for the win against jorge at catalunya 2009 after visualising it the week before that. it's that bloody assen 2015 chicane trick on marc - idc if that was planned or not (all right, I deeply deeply care), but either way what a clever way of stealing a win. it's the success rate in last lap duels... and then, of course, there's all the more general stuff - we've already discussed tyre preservation above, generally speaking prime valentino was excellent at controlling races across very different eras

marc clocks in second - prime marc was again just. ridiculously good at controlling races, especially in the tyre preservation era post 2015. knows when to push, knows when to not... I will yap on forever about how neat I find his 2016 campaign, by far the most cruelly overlooked of his titles just because he didn't 'win' a lot of 'races'. who cares about that, check out the consistency!! elite at race management!! marc does have a brain and he can choose to engage it, and he does prove as much on the track - he's good at a lot of risk/reward judgements, and he'd better be because otherwise with his riding style it'd be far more of a trail of carnage than it already is at times. the head loss to riding style trade off actually isn't too bad with him, relatively speaking. he's been doing some very strong race management this year, if at times from un-ideal starting positions - again, le mans main race says hi. plus, the dogfights man... not the actual fighting bit, the tyre preservation bit. unless you want to get into conspiracy theory territory, which surely nobody would want to, let's just assume that in phillip island 2015 he hadn't actually been planning to just find a bunch of extra tyre on the last lap - but phillip island 2017 and assen 2018 he times it perfectly. that being said. okay. it just has to be acknowledged. marc. we need to work on making more of these overtakes stick. yes, I've made the arguments myself, he tends to be in duels he has no right to be engaged in in the first place, he's on the limit at some of his poorer tracks, it's impressive and intimidating he's there in the first place... and I do believe all of those things! but the thing is when you tell everyone you go for every gap, and then riders are deliberately leaving you a gap knowing you will go for it, and then they get back at you, and then they do it literally seven times in one race... marc, come on. I'm on my knees. I was literally on my knees during aragon 2021. he does this against valentino, against dovi, against pecco, man even against jorge once or twice, and it does drive you a little insane sometimes. too much red mist!! too much red mist. stop being suckered into making the move marc I am so very much on my knees

with the other three, I've already kinda discussed what I'd mention here elsewhere. like, casey... idk it's a tough one because I don't think it's harsh to judge him on a tiny sample size, but if you've engaged in like. ten extended duels in the premier class and you've crashed in two of them, then unfortunately it does make me raise an eyebrow more than if you've crashed out of two from fifty, right? he does get a bit red mist-y, not just when he's punching people in practise sessions, but also like. occasionally in races. he's red mist-y in laguna '08, sachsenring '12, mugello '12... I don't think he's even mad necessarily (well, obviously he is in laguna), just kinda very dog with a bone. (biggest valentino in-race anger-affected errors of judgement are ofc qatar 2004 + sepang 2015, btw. marc I'm not gonna give the obvious and instead throw in a cute jerez 2024 sprint, like dude please stop attempting to murder joan enough.) he's decent at race management in general, though idk my issue with some of these alien wins is that, I get it's unfair, but I'm just not really that impressed with 'managing' a gap of six seconds? like congrats on being fast and not chucking it I guess. jerez 2012 + estoril 2012 are really neat in that regard though, he's proud of them for good reason. also, again, could've easily lost a few valentino fights that he didn't. with jorge... yeah, he's excellent at race management!! also a smart tussler, got those silverstone 2013 and mugello 2016 and austria 2018 wins to go too. think I do slightly hold some of the dovi losses over the course of his career against him lol. I mean, losing to dovi in direct fights does very much happen to the best of them, and this is another category in which dovi would obviously be in contention for top spot. both jorge and dani are very very strong at race managing, in particular when they're at the front, and they're capable of outsmarting opponents... again for dani, aragon + motegi 2015 do stick in the mind. valencia 2017 was suchhhh a good win too, so much going on in that race and he was smart enough to emerge on top. look, the tyre preservation thing was very good for all three of them, they could all manage races, they all had a few rough ones w2w, also you can make casey mad and spook dani. you can make jorge mad too actually

10. strategy + work process

stuff I considered: tendency to get it 'right' with team, from set up to tyre choice to improvement over the course of the weekend. also flag to flag races

easy marc win, and a big part of it really is just how that bloke fucking nailed flag to flag races. like, jesus christ, he had the cheat code to those things. how do you just make right call after right call, truly obscene. if I'm some random midfield rider, I'm telling my team to make me copy whatever he's doing like idc. also, okay, a lot of weekends he started strong, but the ones where he didn't? he ended the weekend fast. like, he's good on fridays, he's excellent on saturdays, but there really were plenty of weekends where his sundays were the strongest of them all. found a bunch of extra pace down the back of the couch overnight. 2016-19 was obviously super big on the tyre preservation and yup, got truly elite at that too - sure, some of that is just raw skill, but some of that is also prep work and knowing what you need to be doing at what stage of the race. valentino clocks in second here, and a lot of these things are broadly true of him too, especially the finding pace overnight thing. most infamous example is of course laguna 2008 - yeah, sure, tactics are great and all, but he needed to make a step to even stick close enough to casey to fuck with him. a lot of his race weekends went like that! the blot in his copybook is... dude. what the fuck is wrong with your flag to flag strategies. like it genuinely is not your inability to ride in those situations because you're clearly fine at THAT bit, but what's going on with the communication and decision-making thing here. it's also sometimes THE most obvious shit??? not to be all armchair expert here but scotty beam me in, send me back to 2006 EYE will fix valentino's f2f. it's so bad!! I don't get how bad it is!! with marc, the biggest blot is phillip island 2013 - which, I don't care he was 20 years old, I get it was his rookie season, but it could have easily cost him the title and it's such a truly abysmal fuck up that it still makes me shake my head to think about. genuinely inexcusable lol, the backstory of the whole thing is also so incredibly stupid. marc's not the main issue here, but this entire component is kinda rated by your entire team so. I mean, look, he's still on top

after that, I'm not massively fussed about the order - though again with casey I do think it's notable he was also pretty strong at the 'finding pace overnight' trick. he was kinda.... you know, he was already so strong on friday, which WAS an advantage but he discusses in his autobiography that it almost made it tricky to know where to go from there lol. but they still figured it out!! just good at figuring out ways to win. jorge did play some proper blinders f2f which I'm giving him brownie points for, some... less ideal decisions. I'm sorry, I'm also gonna dock him a few points for some of the ducati races where he was leading early on burning through his tyres and then dropping back. I think that can happen once, or maybe even twice, but like. too often, eventually u need to maybe change up the strategy and figure out what can work now. dani generally speaking was not doing that, and yeah, a few very strong 'yup you got the approach to tyre preservation exactly right' contenders, but also really did not do well in flag to flag races... tricky one because yeah with him and jorge, they were a bit less likely to find the pace overnight (casey did kinda allude to this in his autobiography lol)

graphs :)

okay. lemme show my video game-y radar charts <3

valentino:

dani:

casey:

jorge:

marc:

and combined, because well if you've read this far I might as well not play coy here:

anyway. look

I don't. love. what I've done to jorge specifically. and there's one massive jorge strong point that I could not figure out how to rank for everyone else, but feel very very strongly he is very very good at: some kind of clutch factor. this is KINDA captured by the reliability metric, but I don't quite think that one's enough... I don't think this specifically shines when he's on the heat of battle, but it does shine when he's late in a season when he needs to maximise those results to keep his title bid in good health. the glaring exception is phillip island 2009, but, well, valentino has a valencia 2006, marc has a... I know it didn't cost him but valencia 2017 was not a good performance. but! apart from that, if you look at jorge's track record from then on late in seasons when it's his own title bid (also excluding 2017 here) on the line... proper good shit. that late 2012 stretch where dani was on a different planet and jorge kept showing up to bag second place. I know I was ragging on 2015 earlier on and I'm not like, massively moved by most of that jorge season, and I still fundamentally think that if you're leading the last lap of phillip island by as much as he was, I don't care if it's literally jesus of nazareth on that motorcycle chasing after you - you should be making it a little bit harder for the guy behind. that being said, sepang was a+ given he really didn't have that much pace (lil bit of luck at the start and then those two bozos behind him did kinda help his cause, but still he did his job), and valencia was straight up excellent. I know he didn't win the title, but late 2013 was probably like. his career best stretch. the valencia 2013 performance is genuinely one of his best races. that's clutch!! that's what he's all about!! he can bring home a title!!

that being said. I had no clue how to compare that to the other four riders, not least because casey literally has not been in a close title fight with a few races to go. just wanted to say it! I also don't think all these categories are equal - like I think I said at the top, being a wet weather rider is nice but it is fundamentally not as important as being a strong qualifier. I just don't love these categories in general? I was trying to think of a way of splitting up qualifying into two different categories, couldn't think of one, tried to think of something for tyre preservation beyond inelegantly including it in strategy, didn't think of anything. easier to come up with this stuff with tennis, and obviously also easier to just like. judge pure performance because you don't have all these extraneous categories. also I kinda think these riders are basically equal on some of these categories, but also if you're doing a ranking then ranking something as equal best is chicken shit

I think generally it's good to have your radar chart arranged in an order where it's not too spiky (listen if you're still reading this post, that's really on you), so that there's a kinda correlation between the bits that are next to each other. broadly most of them do do this in a sort of 'huh dani pedrosa would have benefited from the sprint race format over the course of a full season' way. they're all not too spiky... I kept running into the sample size issue with casey, where it's just like... look, he had a fantastic career, but also in the premier class a lot of the 2007 to 2012 races were very same-y and you kinda need that variety to judge. so a lot of the times with him I'm kinda going off vibes? like I think he's good at certain things, I reckon he'd probably struggle with xyz if he'd had more of a chance to do it, and extrapolate from that. which obviously isn't a great way of doing these things. basically, I massively rate him, I think valentino had the slight edge against him in wheel to wheel but the fact that it was 'slight' given that's valentino's number one selling point tells you enough, and I wish we could have put him into more varied race and championship standings situations to see what he does. like, the overtaking ability ranking clearly is in large part that laguna 2011 overtake just sort of killing my brain

anyway from this it feels like I think marc is the most well-rounded rider, which I probably stand by? the more I dig into valentino's actual qualifying numbers, the more I do feel like I'm maybe being a bit harsh, like yeah age-based decline we get it but during his prime... also, maybe I'm a bit too mean about the starts... but yeah, idk, they're definitely bigger flaws you can point to with valentino's game than any equivalent for marc. also genuinely do think the flag to flag thing was abysmal, I refuse to believe that's not something that wasn't fixable. I still think marc's wheel to wheel is the bit where around silverstone 2019 I was kinda going 'okay love this for you but do you maybe want to WIN one of these' (and then he immediately made baby!fabio miserable). like, again, super cool he's dragging that honda into places it doesn't belong, still need to work on that conversion rate. also, there was a bit of a 'how to fight marc' playbook by then and it's the equivalent of tying a red flag to the side of the motorbike and practically inviting him to have a go. worked a bit too often! that's like, gonna be one of the most interesting aspects of the pecco/marc rivalry because if I did this for PECCO then he would genuinely be in contender for top spot for the defensive riding category (best three defensive riders this century are him, dovi and valentino in no particular order, I really do believe this). that being said, obviously the qualifying thing is bonkers, yeah, as is anything with sketch grip. my laguna 2011 equivalent for marc is that brno 2019 quali lap. mostly I think of a hypothetical casey/marc rivalry more as like. how it would psychologically torture casey. but obviously in terms of the sport itself it would've been very cool to see them face off with that kind of thing

with jorge, again, I don't feel like these specific metrics really capture what made him so good. there's no way to phrase 'unbeatable on his day' as both like, a workable metric and also something that doesn't sound kinda patronising. 'situational dominance', idk. I also wouldn't know how you'd rank the aliens for that, except valentino would be last. my main thing with jorge is always kinda getting annoyed whenever he goes missing, something I suspect would be punished more in today's motogp - but also in 2010 and 2012 specifically, that did happen very rarely. with dani, it was always the wheel to wheel stuff that was just kinda. meh. he's another one who isn't super well served by these categories, like if there's a 'technically very clean' or 'picks very nice lines' category, he'd be on top? idk man. send in alternative suggestions or shout abuse at me for not being kind enough to your favourite alien. in conclusion, I think they're cool. I'm sorry for insulting all of them a lot

[revenantghost]

To all the first-time readers of Trimax volume 10 who saw this/will see this and think, "I dun wanna ):<" Well... mood!

My first time through, I was so close to just dropping it after this point. But luckily I pushed through and used the forward momentum to keep reading because there are so many good moments to keep reading for. What will happen to Vash? What will happen to Knives? Will we get to know Livio/Razlo more? What about the rest of Team the Stampede, what happens to them? What are they even up to right now??? Not to mention, there are still a couple of other major characters to meet! Volume ten, for me, was by far the roughest to read out of any volume. It hurts so much to absorb, and as someone who loved Wolfwood deeply, just like any grief, it's hard to see the point in moving forward.

But I promise there is so much more to come, and it's worth it, or else I wouldn't have started @trigunbookclub

[tatck]

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna reread my vagabond comic. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna read it and not delete it from the internet.

[fluxweeed]

hey. hope this message doesn't bother you. I love you. I love your work. you are one of my favorite fic authors, I am absolutely obsessed with everything you write. reread everything ten times over, drarry or not, fluffy or angsty - even when it absolutely shatters my heart (e.g. for lack of wanting, SUCH a great fic btw i'm so obsessed with it). the four doors? life changing. two to lie and one to listen? engraved into my brain for eternity. what's mine is yours? what a ride holy shit, im VERY normal about it. wrapped? my comfort read. and so it goes.

if I could aggressively smother you with kudos and love I WOULD!!!

awhile ago you said that there's no such thing as "big deals" in fandom and I 100% agree but at the same time you are a big deal TO ME!!! not in the sense of any kind of hierarchy but purely based on the fact that I think you are such a cool person and your writing is amazing and poignant and your presence in fandom makes it so much better. it's been a pleasure following you here on tumblr and just reading your tags and posts.

idk I just think you rule. that's it. thank you for hanging with us. MWAH 💛

ahhhh anon sorry for leaving this message sitting in my inbox for a couple of days but !! i have zero idea how to react to this!! you're so kind!! thank you!! please discard any and all inclinations u have that i am a cool person bc i can assure you i am NOT!!