#americans are as obsessed with sex as they are terrified of it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

centrally-unplanned · 2 years ago

Text

Richard Hanania is one of my poster child writers for the "he is an complete idiot and also very smart" genre. I disagree with him on virtually everything, particularly core beliefs, but he nonetheless is an actual critical thinker who will come up with and explore interesting ideas, and so he is valuable to follow for exposure to good discussion from a world you are otherwise not gonna touch (and for a good laugh the other half of the time).

This is definitely one of those posts - the US right (not that the left is immune to this by any stretch, this is just about the right) is so infused with an instinct towards perpetual victmization that it becomes easy to buy into their own framing that the Right has been losing front after front in the culture war. This is the foundational premise of The Cathedral, the Moldbug-coined New Right tenet that "Cthulhu Always Swims Left" aka the left's structural advantage in controlling ~institutions~ means that in status-quo modernity culture will shift left over and over, endlessly...and therefore you need to violently overthrow the state and purge the corrupt neoliberal bureaucratic order to realize the will of the silent volke embodied in a CEO-Monarch to turn back the tide. Anyway, Hanania does a good job of pointing out that its really kinda bullshit. Tons of our culture has turned right over the past decades; gun control, education, and economics are the big topics that he mentions, and of course more exist, and its been a result combinations of public opinion shifting and the power of the state implementing agendas, aka normal politics.

Some of this is a bit of an overstatement - victories on like abortion for example haven't shifted minds, but instead exploited the US's ludicrous legal system to back-door legislative reform through the courts, its not a replicable experience in many other contexts or any other country. But the point overall stands, which gestures at the real problem - the only topic where the New Right's analysis 'holds up' is onthe sexual revolution and queer rights, revealing a movement irrationality obsessed with the sex front of the culture war. Here Hanania stumbles into his stupidity on why the right hasn't been successful fighting this, not really grappling with the fact that for example gay marriage is just really popular, this is a bottom-down fundamental sea change in how people view sex and society's role in policing it.

The mistake The Cathedral devotees make in analyzing society is that they take a single sip from a branch of the river of History and assume they have drunk it dry; Society swam left from 1950 to 1980, and the New Right cannot help but obsess endlessly over that transition as The Future. Note how common this is - so many people harken to "the 1950's" as the steady-state idyll of American society, the American economy, identify as 'traditional' everything from holiday songs to food recipes that were all invented around this time and have no older origin than that. Its all myths, and The Cathedral is an extension of that trend - by identifying US society in 1950 as a centuries-old continuity of tradition, it sees the changes of the ensuing decades as a radical discontinuity, and therefore a terrifying new normal.

It is wrong the same way nostalgia-memes are wrong; history never had a steady state, and people's ideas of even the 1950's themselves are primarily myth. Turns out historical conceptions of queer relationships have varied widly across time and space - none have been as progressive as today, but societally sanctioned spaces for queer relationships are legion. There has never been a steady state on sex and society.

But! Modernity *is* different from the past, and certain things have changed irrevocably - there is a verison of The Cathedral that is true. Technology & economic development have radically changed how we lived, from a society of farmers and their rulers to a society of urban professional workers. Cultural norms around sex & society varied all over the place; but (to radically simplify, there are a bunch of other factors) marriage for children to work the farms was near-universal, it was a structural necessity culture was built upon. This was a harsh limiter on sexual norms - said marriage for children needed to undergird it. That limiter is gone, forever, today. To not dive into it because its not the focus, with the limiter gone I don't think the 'sexual revolution', feminism, and queer rights is going to revert in a major way in the future.

Which will permit the right, as long as it stays maniacally obsessed with the idea that people don't have 1950's sexual morality anymore, to claim that they Always Lose. This is why Hanania stumbles, making the opposite mistake - seeing the failure to fight the sexual revolution as just a failed southern offensive in comparison to a successful northern attack on the front of education. The real trap is to not understand that culture is not freely malleable, only some of it is 'up for grabs' from the perspective of activists. Within the new status qup equilibrium of modernity, shifts right and left are not only possible but inevitable - but the rules of game have to be understood. Hanania may have only gotten halfway there, but props to him for opening my eyes to the contradiction.

200 notes · View notes

unhonestlymirror · 1 year ago

Text

I am 99% sure Naoya's mom hated his siblings much less than him. "I am the best and my siblings will never be worth me" - it's such a familiar thinking pattern to me, it makes me sad. Naoya is clearly a person who never felt loved, and at some point, such people receive irreversible damage, which makes them "monsters." Naoya gaslights himself and denies that he's actually a tool, and his only worth is in his sex, appearance, techniques, and pedigree. Maki pisses him off so much because deep inside, he knows he's a slave and she's not. He knows he's not loved, and she is. Despite all his demonstrative misogyny, I don't think he would be able to kill his own mother.

I recently saw "Why Naoya is a more popular character than Maki in Japan?" You know, in Japan, you depend on your pedigree, appearance, and sex much more than in the USA, and muuuuuuuuch more than in, e.g, Baltics. I think people should watch more videos about work, studies and school in Japan, because it will be more understandable. You can't just do what you want to do and be whom you want to be in Japan that easily because the social norms are very strict there.

People start to behave like Naoya, usually not only because of childhood traumas but also when they are deeply insecure in themselves and their own position. Thus, they try to prove to everyone that "I am not weak."

Despite all Naoya's obsession of being the best - he's not a typical Japanese "The Best", for example, Shinji Kamuro's brother in mp100. In Japan, it's not customary to wear piercings or bleach hair or make wild hair colouring unless you're a "freak". Naoya's "The Best" but he really doesn't want to be The Best, even more than Gojo Satoru. Bonus: his clan clearly dislikes him.

Maki is literally the only person who sees Naoya like a personality, and not just "son of the Head," a very bad but personality. We hate Naoya because we see him from Maki's perspective - but if to look at it as a third person, Naoya's remarks and attempts to "bite" Maki are actually very funny. He's literally a teenager in a grown-up man's body. Naoya got used to being unique, to be alone so much, that the idea itself that someone can actually understand him, that someone can be equal to him is terrifying to Naoya. Because the moment he loses his uniqueness (which is his "man privilege"), he believes, he is worth nothing. And it's horrifying to live in the world where you are worth nothing. That's why he tries to destroy Maki, and that's also why he can't leave her alone, even as a curse. It's only my assumption, but I think he knew that Maki's mother hated but loved her. I think he knew Maki's sister loved her, and it really pissed him off because he never experienced that. Oh, he envies Maki so much.

Such a character can not but evoke pity. Especially in Japanese people. Japanese people love him the same way Americans love Robbie Rotten from Lazy Town.

#jujutsu kaisen #jjk thoughts #naoya zenin #maki zenin

25 notes · View notes

grandturtleperson · 4 months ago

Text

THIS is what makes my head spin: The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture. I’m not talking about the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick. I mean he has no Republican values either. He has no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision, sense of history. He doesn’t care about the life of the mind OR the life of the senses. He is not mandarin, not committed to inquiry or justice, not hospitable. He is not proper. He is not a bon vivant who loves to eat, drink, laugh. There’s nothing he would die for — not American values, obviously, but not the land of Russia or his wife or young son. He has some hollow success creeds from Norman Vincent Peale, but Peale was obsessed with fair-dealing and a Presbyterian pastor; Trump has no fairness or piety. He’s not sentimental; no affection for dogs or babies. No love for mothers, “the common man,” veterans. He has no sense of military valor, and is openly a coward about war. He would have sorely lacked the pagan beauty and capacity to fight required in ancient Greece. He doesn’t care about his wife or wives; he is a philanderer but he’s not a romantic hero with great love for women and sex. He commands loyalty and labor from his children not because he loves them, even; he seems almost to hate them — and if one of them slipped it would be terrifying. He does no philanthropy. He doesn’t — in a more secular key — even seem to have a sense of his enlightened self-interest enough to shake Angela Merkel’s hand. Doesn’t even affect a love for the arts, like most rich New Yorkers. He doesn’t live and die by aesthetics and health practices like some fascists; he’s very ugly and barely mammalian. Am I missing an obscure moral system to which he so much as nods? Also are there other people, living or dead, like him?

"This is What Makes My Head Spin" by Virginia Heffernan, Apr 24 2017, Medium

#virginia heffernan #trump is a black hole #fuck trump #donald trump

2 notes · View notes

steelbluehome · 9 months ago

Text

The Wrap

The Apprentice’ Review: Donald Trump Movie Starring Sebastian Stan Plays Like a Tragic Frankenstein Tale (click for article)

Cannes 2024: With Stan as a young Trump and Jeremy Strong as lawyer Roy Cohn, the film is amusing at times and disturbing at others

STEVE POND May 20, 2024 @ 10:05 AM

There’s not much in Ali Abbasi’s filmography to make you think that he’d want to make a movie about a young Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn. But there’s a lot in the Iranian-born, Copenhagen-based filmmaker’s work to suggest that if he did make such a movie, it could be both fascinating and terrifying.

And in a way, “The Apprentice,” which premiered in the Main Competition at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, is both of those things. It’s a true-life horror story in some ways, and Abbasi approaches it as a Frankenstein tale in which the mad doctor creates a monster and then loses control of it. But after years of Trump imitations (and the real thing), it also can’t help but feel a little cartoonish, and maybe not the best use of the director’s particular talents.

Abbasi’s feature debut was a 2016 horror film about surrogacy; his second was the 2018 Cannes sensation “Border,” which drew screams and squeals with its scene of troll sex; and his third was the visceral drama “Holy Spider,” about a real-life case in which an Iranian serial killer who preyed on sex workers and was applauded by many in the conservative society.

To put that skill set – an uncompromising, often dark vision, a taste for horror and an outsider’s perspective – in the service of a film about the young would-be mogul and the conniving lawyer who taught him how to win at all costs wasn’t a sure thing by any means, but it was awfully intriguing.

And to call that film “The Apprentice,” swiping that title from the TV show that helped give Trump the profile to run for president, suggested a sense of humor that might be necessary to survive this particular project.

There’s humor in the film, mostly in the knowing chuckles elicited when a key moment of the Trump bio clicks into place:

Here’s where Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) introduces Trump (Sebastian Stan) to Rupert Murdoch and says “he could really help you” … here’s a young Roger Stone showing Trump a Ronald Reagan campaign button that says, “Let’s Make American Great Again” … Here’s Cohn taking Trump clothes shopping and advising him on the kind of suits that will help hide his “big ass.”

These are the building blocks of the Trump we think we know, with the movie’s opening title card saying that the film is “based on real events” but also includes fictionalized elements. And make no mistake, if Trump and his supporters get any idea of what’s in “The Apprentice,” the cries of “fake news!” will be resounding, because this semi-biopic begins with mockery and ends with dread.

At the start of the film, which adopts a 1970s style for its shots of the New York City of that era, Trump is a guy who trudges door to door in a rundown apartment building (“Trump Village”) built by his father, collecting rent checks from struggling tenants who clearly don’t like him.

In New York City, meanwhile, Trump has been admitted to an exclusive private club, where he regales a date with descriptions of the powerful men who surround them. “Why are you so obsessed with these people?” she asks, and he offers a weak “I’m not obsessed, I’m just curious” defense that isn’t enough to keep her from heading to the powder room and then out the door.

From the next room in the club, an imperious lawyer Roy Cohn invites the poor guy to come sit at the table Cohn is sharing with a couple of mobster clients and some other people he deems unworthy of introduction. Everybody at the table laughs at Trump, with his timid manner and his order of ice water — but if the young Donald is essentially presented as a socially awkward, vaguely pathetic wannabe unable to get out from under a domineering father, Cohn sees something he likes in the little bit of empty bravado Trump can summon up.

“I like the kid,” he says at one point. “I feel sorry for him.”

Or maybe he sees something he can mold in the clueless waif with family money. Cohn, who was instrumental in sending convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair in the 1950s, spouts “America first” speeches that are echoed in Trump’s stump rhetoric to this day. And he offers his three rules for winning: “attack attack attack,” “admit nothing, deny everything” and “no matter what happens, claim victory and never admit defeat.”

Strong nails a certain blank, slack-jawed, morally vacant look that Cohn had, even if he’s hardly a dead ringer for the vicious fixer who dropped homophobic slurs and insisted until the end that he was dying of liver cancer rather than AIDS. Stan has a tougher job of it — because despite the makeup and hair, it’s impossible to compete with the real thing that has dominated media for the past decade.

The movie essentially shows Trump learning to lie, ineptly wooing his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), building the Commodore Hotel and Trump Tower, making an ill-advised foray into Atlantic City and gulping diet pills to keep himself going. It’s the construction of the Trump persona, with help from the slimy advisor who has the keys to “winning.”

And it’d play like a tragedy if we didn’t know what happened after the movie ends. The movie has the feel of a rise-and-fall saga, with Trump growing increasingly unhinged and out of control — and with Stan increasingly adopting the vocal and physical mannerisms we see on social media and the news today. It’s most horrifying — and most Abbasi-like — in an extended scene that cuts between a memorial service for Cohn and Trump on the operating table getting liposuction and a scalp reduction, all set to the strains of “My Country Tis of Thee.”

That sequence might be the one that makes the most of Abbasi’s uncompromising gifts, and suggests that the director’s heart might be in a truly wild movie not quite so tethered to biographical details. “The Apprentice” is amusing at times and disturbing at others, but it’s hard not to think that Ali Abbasi could have done something weirder, wilder and more satisfying if he’d found a way to bring in more magic and less MAGA.

#the apprentice #sebastian stan #donald trump #jeremy strong #roy cohn #maria bakalova #the apprentice review

3 notes · View notes

thosearentcrimes · 2 years ago

Text

I was going to read the next Dune book once I figured out which one it was, when I realized I still hadn't read the original. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Thomas Edward Shaw (né Lawrence) narrates his experiences of the Arab Revolt as a participant of the British mission to it. The testimony ranges from routine to highly implausible, but so long as you don't actually believe any of the claims he makes, it makes for an interesting read.

There are five major elements the author blends and transitions between quite seamlessly. The most common is descriptions of the geography of Arabia. As all physical descriptions, this does extremely little for me, but could be of interest to people with visual imaginations.

There is also a fair bit of reporting of both details and general principles of guerilla warfare. As with all texts about guerilla warfare, the principles are incredibly simple. Volunteer forces are even more dependent on morale than usual, the most important principle is to conserve forces, the function of guerilla warfare is ersatz strategic depth, and some way or another you should try to slowly compose a regular force in a location protected by your guerilla strategic depth because you don't want to fight a guerilla war if you don't really really have to. This can all be found in any of the major texts, while the applications and local contexts are all fiendishly complicated and non-transferable.

The author also spends a great deal of time racially characterizing the Semite, and more rarely anyone else he happens to run into. Very unpleasant stuff, but arguably useful as a reminder of just how racist people were about a hundred years ago. But while the racists certainly have gotten a lot more subtle, the substance of the arguments is entirely unchanged. As always, it is almost entirely characterizing obvious cultural adaptations and socio-economic phenomena as being instead genetically encoded, and a pathetic sense of superiority.

Sexuality occupies a fascinating amount of space. I won't try to puzzle out the author's, since he mostly doesn't see fit to share it, but I will note that he is on balance neutral towards homosexuality, and viscerally opposed to heterosexuality, and doesn't appear to consider women's sexuality at all. Mostly it seems like he hates and disdains women, and consequently considers straight sex undignified and condescending at once, like bestiality. But when he's not being a massive piece of shit, he can be quite endearingly tender about homosexuality. Or disquietingly bizarre.

Finally, the author has a mortification of the flesh and scrupulosity OCD problem the size of Jupiter. This manifests in very weird ways, and was certainly not helped by the whole attempted rape and torture thing, or the several years of deceiving his friends to best subjugate them to an empire he definitely still likes but also definitely understands it is not actually nice to be subject to. Others might think the arguably pathological mentalities are the result of these experiences, but I think it's more likely part unfortunate coincidences and part self-fulfilling prophecy.

Returning to the joke from the beginning, Dune obviously does owe a lot to Seven Pillars. Some of the pathologies even rhyme - both obsessed with genetics but in Dune it shows up with a far more individualist bent, partly because it's American but mostly because it's a fantasy novel with a protagonist. Also Dune/Seven Pillars forces you to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with Frank Herbert/Thomas Shaw. Oh and the misogyny, though Herbert is terrified where Shaw is dismissive. The big difference is Herbert is a massive homophobe. 50 years of social progress, everyone!

#book report #Seven Pillars of Wisdom #T. E. Shaw #T. E. Lawrence #Dune #Frank Herbert #I've been collecting funny lines that are emblematic of these themes but they won't fit in the margin of this post sorry

7 notes · View notes

31st3rd30th · 1 year ago

Text

Idk.. blackpill ideology seems so lazy. The never getting of pussy and the lack of social connections... IS THAT IT! YOU DIDNT GET PUSSY AND NOW YOURE MAD!? Ok, I'll be honest. I followed blackpill content on and off and understood that at it's core its a response to societal conditioning. You're sold a story of the American dream or given the ideal image of the life you think everyone has and you think "why aren't I there?" And then you see that you're not as attractive as the people on the movie screens or the shows or on Instagram, and then we're all given dating apps and there's a new evolution to the sexual market besides just people in your town or state, city whatever. And they think that the competition is like a male model in fucking Norway... and it's not queen. Its like the wanting to be the King or ruler of some girl's life. To be the ultimate Chad in the eyes of some girl. Or even worse, the girl is like this super attractive woman and they're comparing her sexual market value to theirs and remarking, "she will never look at me! She will choose chad-" along with unattractive women, saying "she's a 3 and she will still pull more than me!" Like.. who the fuck cares....

If you are going to "rot" don't rot because you can't pull. Rot because life at it's core is terrifying and suffering. Not getting ass? Is it comparable to death? No. Rejection at first may seem hurtful or death like in pain, but once you abandon the notion that you're tied to the outside world in any way - and I mean this in the sense where your inner world is.more powerful than you think. And you harness that and create your inner world, it's not even about manifeststion or attracting whatever, it's the mind that makes the heaven out of a hell. If you're constantly telling yourself "im uggglllyy nobody love me :(" then rot bitch.

But if you harness it. If you realize at it's core. It being existence , you're here to have fun. And make some sense of your experience. Do things that your heart calls on. Achieve what you think is possible. Not get fucking ASSSSS. WHO CARES ABOUT SEX!!! I say this as a virginal 23 year old. I dint really plan on getting ass like I used to. I used to obsess about it mannn. It was this goal in mind that men are like a fucking ... idk like it's just such a limited worldview to see things in terms of sexuality and wanting to fuck. To have value in the sexual market itself is such a waste of time. I'm not antisex - I think our sex drives are integral to creation and our vitality and life force rises from the root Chakra whatever shit but at the same time, its the bottom Chakra for a reason- if you're stuck in the realm of sexual means and excretion than that's it. You've basically banished yourself to the world of eat, fuck shit. So choose the world where you can achieve what you want and create instead of being like "I need gf so I can cum."

AND I don't mean in terms of creating a family. Creation of a family is much more complex than just sex. That's integration of two people into something beautiful and cohesive. That's family. Wanting a family with a noble purpose will never be just sex in my eyes.

2 notes · View notes

yay855 · 2 years ago

Text

Americans are paradoxical, and frankly our politicians have taken advantage of this shit and even pushed it onto us in order to get elected. 9/11 was the first actual attack on US soil since world war 2, and the first attack on the US mainland in centuries... yet we're all obsessed with finding foreign terrorists (while also ignoring the home-grown ones, because they're white). Our nation has gotten only safer and safer for children (barring the increasingly hostile infrastructure) since our grandparents' time, but more Americans are terrified of their child being abducted than ever.

But here's the thing. We may not be under constant attack by foreign terrorists, but half our politicians run on campaigns against immigration to "keep out the bad ones". We may not have our children at risk of being abducted by sex traffickers, but we are at risk of having our children being abducted by the police, should they deem we were being "irresponsible", not to mention that those same politicians raging against (non-white) immigrants almost always portray them as rapists and drug dealers.

This is not a natural cultural shift, just as the red scare wasn't. Our government is deliberately and purposefully keeping its citizens terrified and anyone who doesn't comply is threatened with jail time or having their children taken away. Because that's how authoritarians, that's how fascists, get elected.

The US's actual people wanted to become socialist in the 1920s, and the US government and its corporate overlords have been pushing harder and harder and harder to ensure we never even think about that again.

34K notes · View notes

brimbrimbrimbrim · 2 years ago

Text

Kinktober (2022) List So Far <3

Word Count: BIG > 6k MEDIUM 3-6k SMALL > 3k

DnD (Big Richard the Troll/Maza) Size Kink/Tit Fucking *

Bloodborne (Micolash/Hunter) Unexpected Masochist *

Cyberpunk 2077 (Dum Dum/V) Touch Starved *

Stranger Things (Eddie Munson) Psychic Sex *

The Quarry (Werewolf!Nick/Abigail) Rough-sex Aftermath *

Friday the 13th (Jason/Reader) Courting/Seduction *

Hellboy 2019 (Hellboy/Reader!OC) Pregancy/Pregnant Sex

Dead by Daylight (Wraith/Reader) Obsession/Blood Kink

Stranger Things (Eddie Munson/Reader) Doggy Style *

The Batman (The Riddler/Reader) Premature Ejaculation *

Fallout 4 (Deegan/F!SS) Aphrodisiacs *

DBD (Bubba/Survivor) Fuck or Die *

Stranger Things (Eddie Munson/Reader) Nude Pics *

Rainbow Six (Smoke/Reader) Autassassinophilia *

Resident Evil 7 (Lucas Baker/F!OC) Frantic First-Time Sex

Watch Dogs 2 (Wrench/LowRes) Toys *

The Batman (The Riddler/Reader) Five to Nine Inches *

HAUNT (Ghost/Reader) Creampie *

MMFR (Toast/Slit) Breeding *

DBD (Ghostface/Survivor) Dubious Consent/Sadism/Masochism *

DBD (Frank Legion/Survivor) Toys/Multiple Orgasms/Blackmailed into Sex *

American Gods (Mad Sweeney/Reader) First Time Anal Sex *

Welcome to the Game (The Breather/Reader) Period Sex

DBD (The Dredge/Survivor) Locker Fucking *

Stranger Things (Eddie Munson/Reader) Risky Voyeurism *

Pathologic 2 (Tragedian/Reader) Taboo *

Terrifier (Art the Clown/Reader) Gore/Torture *

Fallout 3 (Charon/F!LW) Thigh Bruises *

Slasher OC (Shepherd/Reader) Breeding *

Cyberpunk 2077 (Dum Dum/V) Backseat Quickies *

Stranger Things (Eddie Munson) Bodyswap *

*Feel free to send in DM's for requests with anything that has a question mark. I legit have no idea what to put there. XD

*All items crossed out have been finished but won't be posted until October.

#kinktober #kinktober 2022 #fanfic #fanfiction #writing

23 notes · View notes

moderatelydelusional · 4 years ago

Text

things ive learnt abt mgg from pete holmes’ podcast

- he casually calls people ‘baby’ and ‘man’ and ‘bro/brother’ all the time and i love that

- he’s half mormon and went to mormon services as a kid

- ‘i like letting people do whatever they want to do as long as its not killing anybody’

- he’s been haunted by demons

- he doesn’t identify as an actor

- he lives with a guy named john

- his car blew up in 2007

- he buys land and has investments

- his parents divorced when he was 5

- he believes time is layered and not linear

- he doesn’t like entitled people (same)

- he loves japan and goes every year

- he thought he was jewish and was guttered when he found out he wasn’t

- he believes in a higher power and we’re all running on some kind of power and consciousness

- ‘shes better than the girl of my dreams, she’s real’ is one of his favourite movie lines

- he stays up until 4am and then sleeps until 11am. his routine consists of getting up, making coffee, creating at least two things: usually drawings. then he’ll have a bath and create some more and think a bunch. he likes to go for a drive in the afternoon and see ‘a friend, or a family member, or a babe, just some social interaction’

- he describes his artistic style, and his direction to anyone creating something for him, as using his non-dominant hand

- hes super quick at making acronyms. he made acronyms before i even caught what they were talking about

- the man is off the fkn walls. he’ll be answering a serious question and interrupt himself to ask to see pete’s bellybutton. off the wall batshit looney and i love it

- he never studied acting

- he loves luke perry, whom he affectionately calls LP

- he jokingly told shemar moore the trick to acting was to ‘talk slow and squint’

- he flirts with pete’s podcast assistant so much, like sir just ask him out already. pete said ‘aristotle will give you top shelf love’ and mgg said ‘yeah he will’

- he tries to smell nice all the time

- he’s obsessed with fresh breath

- something about kirkland is hilarious (idk what that is im not american)

- hes very self-love / love everyone vibe, kind of on the hippie side which is so sweet i love it

- he believes in everything

- hes terrified of monsters

- he loves the blair witch project

- he finds success in making one person smile, even if thats his mum

- hes very hard to offend

- hes thankful for his bullies bc it taught him early on to give no credence to what people think

- ‘have you ever shit your pants?’ ‘when have i not shit my pants?’

- ‘bragodacious’

- ‘ive never shit my pants’

- ‘if you didnt lie so much you wouldnt have to say ‘swear to god’’ pete to mgg

- he doesnt like saying anything that’s potentially offensive to other people, rude to other people, or basically can hurt someones feelings in any way

- HE WANTS TO FK ARISTOTLE SO MUCH OML

- hes very quick to self censor. he starts to say ‘fuck’ bur changes it to ‘frick’ he also doesn’t add to any conversation about drugs or sex or alcohol

- he says ‘oh my gosh’ a lot and idk I love that?

- is a really great listener and says ‘thats so beautiful’ when being told a story and its so fkn precious?

- he thinks no one likes him and will deflect any objection to that statement

- he’s not good at timelines. he knows he had dinner with you somewhere in the last five years but he doesn’t know when

- he can tell when he’s seeing a ghost as opposed to a living person. it has a lot to do with the context he’s seeing that ghost and mostly the vacant expression on their face.

- he sees more ghosts now as an adult than he did when it started at age 10

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE <3

#matty g #loren squeaks #its such a chaotic podcast omg #they dont stay on one train of thought for more than 5 seconds

375 notes · View notes

punemy-spotted · 4 years ago

Text

Of Blackbirds and Barons: Chapter 1

Chapter 1: You Make The Rain Fall Harder

Relationships: Mob!Helmut Zemo x Reader; CEO!Billy Russo x Reader; Mob!Helmut Zemo x Reader x CEO!Billy Russo

Warnings: Non-con/Dub-con; Dark!Fic; Mob and Mafia Elements; Character Death (Minor and Major); Threesome; Possessive/Obsessive Characters; Blackmail/Coercion; Kidnapping; Mentions of War; Human Rights Violations; Contract Killing; Mafia AU; Possible Dead Dove: Would Not Eat; Complete Disregard for Actual Rules of Journalism and Style Guides; Other Chapter-Specific Warnings May Apply

Chapter Specific Warnings: Non-con; Drugging/Date-Rape; Fingering (F-Receiving); Vaginal Sex; Unprotected Sex; Possible Breeding Kink; Kidnapping; Obsessive/Possessive Zemo; Dark!Zemo; Human Rights Violations; Discussion of Destruction of Novi Grad and Sokovia; Dead Dove: Do Not Eat

Chapter Summary: The problem with having sympathy for the Devil is that he will drag you down to Hell regardless.

Author’s Notes: Another series! Because I can’t get enough of Mob!AUs! Zemo makes his dark entrance. And this IS dark, so read at your own discretion. As always, all of my work is 18+ ONLY, MINORS DO NOT INTERACT.

Masterlist

The long tradition of the Duchy of Sokovia, that which once stood the test of time against the Tsars of Russia, began to crumble long before its borders did, its sweeping architecture and decadent mystery giving way to the sharp lines of Brutalism and the characteristic industrialism of the Eastern Bloc. Still, the Sokovian people managed to maintain their identity in the face of a new kind of empire, bringing greenery and art to a brisk, concrete world.

There is no Sokovia now, not the way one would think, but there are still Sokovians scattered around the world, clinging to the traditions of their once-home and searching for a banner to be united under.

A banner carried by a man like Helmut Zemo.

The caret blinks back at you with a mocking sort of finality, a metronome counting down the seconds to your ultimate frustration. Once. Twice. Thrice — you lose count, staring at the screen until your vision crosses and the words blur together, until only his name remains.

Zemo.

Baron Helmut Zemo.

Your notes are expansive, excessive, papers strewn about you and you look at each scribbled anecdote, each carefully dictated word, each photograph you have annotated until it is more red marker than actual picture and you are… frustrated.

Where do you put all that passion? He asked you over champagne and charcuterie.

You know this man.

You know this man like you know your own soul. You know this man who has bared his soul to you in turn and how are you supposed to impress upon the world that he has shown you the broken heart beating slow and painful in his chest in just a thousand words?

There is nothing. Nothing you can do, nothing you can saywhich could even begin to encompass the horrors which he has experienced and now as you painstakingly tap out word after word describing the grand beauty of his apartment, you wonder if this really was what your life was meant to be.

These are… fluff.

This is a man who has managed to unite an entire fractured country under his royal banner and yet the project wants to know about the indoor garden of his apartment, wants to photograph him in fine suits and know his haircare routine and this can’t be it. This can’t be the face of the man you see everywhere now, moreso since you picked up the assignment, purple-masked and surrounded by brass wings, over the homes of Sokovians all over New York.

And not just there.

I am a man, he told you with his hand on your thigh, But I can become an idea. And an idea is immortal.

You let your eyes skim over the photographs you took, a collection of banners and graffiti and billboards all proclaiming the need for the Sokovian people to come together and heal. To show that their small country — broken and divided in the wake of an attack by a rich megalomaniac’s private military — could not be taken down simply because its borders had been erased and its capitol turned to rubble.

We live in an age of information, and through information we are boundless.

It should terrify you.

It does terrify you.

But inside of that terror is a sick fascination with the man, isn’t there? That’s the trouble with you investigative types — peel back the layers enough and you find yourself capable of feeling sympathy for anyone.

He flaunts his power, and yet it’s innocent. Is it so wrong, then, to want to bring my country back to its glory?

No, you remember answering shakily, but not as well as you remember the pinpricks of heat his fingers left on your skin when that gloved hand brushed over you arm.

Breathe deep, hover fingers over your keyboard and try not to feel like you owe him the weight of the world. He approved of this, even suggested a word count and a topic of conversation — any chance to put his name out into the consciousness of the public, it seemed, to raise interest for the gallery by raising interest for the cause. Make it indulgent. My people, they enjoy art. They enjoy knowing that their leaders have preserved the past for them.

So do it.

… Baron Zemo’s New York penthouse is its own garden amongst a sea of steel and stone, a veritable museum of priceless artworks rescued from what remained of Sokovian museums and ministry buildings. It is, in its own way, an ode to the spirit of Sokovia, which lives on in the hearts and minds of its people around the world. He displays artworks of the many displaced Sokovians, gesturing broadly to a 3D model of an art gallery he intends to have built near the memorial at Novi Grad — with the consent of the Slovakian government — and speaking fondly of his intention to showcase the lost art of Sokovia as a reminder that loss of land cannot be the loss of an identity…

The artworks, they will be painful at first. But the gallery will showcase more and more, and eventually we will have hope.

He waves a gloved hand over the pieces he has preserved. Sokovian history. Scenic expanses, fields and flowers, a city skyline dotted with domed cathedrals. Each painting marred some way too, you can see when you look close. Patched canvas, the dusting of ash and rubble in the corner of an ornate frame, a trick of the light revealing repainting to cover up damage.

A stone hoof sits on a bookshelf, The attached horse and rider blown to rubble in the attack. I’m told it was of Emperor Ferdinand, but my archivists have not been able to confirm, he tells you as he stands behind you, his hand resting soft on the small of your back.

Come. There is more to be seen.

More to be experienced.

His living room is a garden.

It smells like fresh jasmine the moment you walk in, ivy climbing the walls and you swear you can hear birdsong from more than the pigeons cooing outside. Flower arrangement is an often looked down upon art, but the gardens in Sokovia were impeccable. My father won several awards for his pieces before his…

He trails off and you watch him, seeing the pain paint his face as openly as if he meant for you to watch the facade crack and then back to that placid, pleasant calm, a serpentine smile on his face as he extends to you a hand and guides you to the open air of his balcony and bids you Sitbids you Enjoy bids you I have looked forward to his meeting.

It is a pleasure to meet you, Baron Zemo, you begin politely, tucking a lock of hair behind your ear and trying to avoid the way his eyes follow your fingers, feeling seen, We’re grateful for the honor of your patronage for this piece, we know you could have —

Nonsense, he cuts you off with a wave of his hand, gesturing to his butler and then leaning back comfortably in his seat as champagne and various cheeses are brought forth, You are my guest, and I am grateful you agreed to come meet me here, to assist with my… project. Now. Please, enjoy, I do not want to treat this as strictly business.

Is that why he had you come alone?

Don’t.

Don’t dwell on it.

It happens all the time, right? It has to.

A somewhat reclusive man, not keen to be in the limelight, in need of public attention to achieve his goals — you are a means to an end and he is your means to an end, surely you can understand.

Is that why he wipes the honey from your lips and kisses it off his fingers?

This is going to be a difficult conversation and you know it. You can only gush over houseplants and rose décor for so long before it becomes… trite, before you’re a part of the problem, painting a shining veneer over a half-decade old injustice

But he is warm, warm and friendly and you cannot help but laugh to his response when you draw attention to the architecture to draw attention from your blush — Very modern, yes. We are in New York, after all, and the old ways are fine for country houses but not so fine, for sunny penthouse apartments —not noticing the way he looks like he’s just smelled blood at the sound of it, the narrowing of his eyes and the hiding of his inscrutable expression behind a sip of champagne.

Well then. Shall we get started?

Of course.

Why don’t we start with your plans for opening night?Your notepad is out, the recorder sitting in front of you to pick up the sound of your voice and his, ready to commit everything to memory.

Of course. We cannot deny the… elephant in the room, I think you Americans call it. There are many who took pictures of the aftermath of the attack, and not enough who have seen it immortalized…

… The tragedy of Novi Grad and the consequential absorption of Sokovia into its surrounding countries weighs heavy in the Baron’s living room, draped in ivy and jasmine and hanging vines but also in photographs of what was left after a private military corporation chose to turn human lives into a war game.

No one knows who Ultron is, only that he is dangerous, that his technology rivals that of the SHIELD Syndicate’s Tony Stark, that he is willing to ally himself to the highest bidder, and that he is fully capable of unleashing endless destruction upon the world…

You will never forget the photographs he shows you, all that death and destruction in the golden light of his balcony, all that warmth and all you can see is cold bodies bathed in concrete dust.

They call to you, when you close your eyes — answer for our crimes — and you remember the way his voice changes too, so soft and solemn, the brush of fingers against yours when you touch the bombed out shell of a country mansion My home, in Sokovia, to the gray-and-blood horror which forms the centerpiece of his display, and you remember your research too, that the Baron is a widow, that his title is inherited from the most tragic of circumstances, that his son was an innocent lost in the attack and you are furious too, at the senselessness of it all.

It is a tragedy yet unanswered for, more than half a decade since the dust settled.

That quote sits front and center on your mock-up, wondering if you could make whatever editor who would inevitably rip this piece to shreds — just before publishing its corpse alongside some glamour picture of the Baron his coat — finally see the error of ignoring the tragedy. You won’t, but it’s worth a shot, as you lean back in your chair and stare at the screen again.

Sometimes you think about it.

Watching Novi Grad happen from the comfort and safety of your living room, wrapped in blankets as open war broke out in the capital city of what had once been a crown jewel in an ancient dynasty. A playground, a show of force.

Sometimes you hear the screams.

The blinking carat waits for you to add more to this story, to decide where you want to go.

… The Baron plays a game with his interview, insists on knowing his guests just as we insist on getting to know the enigmatic leader who has risen up a beacon for the displaced people of his homeland. We will not be recreating our answers in this article, as they were of course of a personal nature, but we do thank the Baron for taking the time to get to know us just as he bared his soul, his sorrows, and his hopes to a gaggle of strangers seeking to make him known to the world…

Tell me of you, sweetling.

Me? This interview is about you.

And so I must tell all my secrets for free? No, I insist. A secret for a secret.

He watches you with a hunger, coal-black eyes an invitation. Slide your gaze away or fall and who knows what depths he will drag you into and what you will find there?

No.

Don’t look, don’t look as you sip the tea Oeznik brought when you politely declined the champagne — Another time, probably — and let it brace you with its bitterness, let it clear your head.

Breathe.

You’re in too deep now, trapped in this cave of wonders… and wouldn’t it be worth it? Know him as he knows you, follow the trajectory of the smiling man before you.

What would you like to know?

Tell me how you taste his eyes whisper.

Tell me what it would take says the curve of his fingers over your hand.

Let me put you on display hums the razor-blade of his smile.

Tell me what drives a woman to take on such a … dangerous line of work, is the final inquiry, innocent and curious and gentle and you sip your tea and smile.

Is it dangerous?

You must know how many secrets you uncover — and the lengths the keepers will go to in order to hide them.

If people get hurt, shouldn’t I bring that to light?

How noble of you, he tells you with another hum, with his fingers squeezing yours, with his eyes fixed on the gaze you refuse to send his way, It must be quite thrilling.

Let me thrill you too, sweetling.

Pull away.

Do it.

Pull your hand away, make an act of it, pick up a candied strawberry and press it past your lips, let the sweetness soak your tongue and wash away the bitter thoughts, let yourself be bright and chipper and pretend you are not afraid.

Because you’re not.

Of course you’re not.

You are in control here, you must be in control here.

This is nothing. This is a casual interview with a handsome man in his handsome penthouse, an interview about architecture and art galleries and you were a correspondent once and you are meant to be friendly here, not afraid, so what are you afraid of?

What is it about his coal-dark eyes and too-sharp smile that turns your blood, that sends you back into your hutch, little rabbit, what is it about the way he prowls at the corner of your thoughts that makes you shudder so?

What are you running from?

Who are you running from?

Your turn, sweetling.

Mmh?

Our deal, or have you forgotten already?

Yes. You have.

It’s his eyes, you keep insisting to yourself. They drag you in, so dark it feels like you’re drowning in the void of them, searching for the light at the end of the tunnel.

It’s a chase.

It’s what you’re good at.

Right — I’m sorry, I’m…

You blink.

Once.

Twice.

Thrice.

The fog in your thoughts doesn’t fade, confusion crossing over your features and ill delight crossing over his. All you had was tea, tea and some of the candied fruit his butler brought for your enjoyment, how can you feel so…

Hazy?

So…

Upturned?

Something clatters behind you and you realize it’s the chair you were sitting on as you stand, unsteady and abrupt, lost in the moors of your own frantic thoughts and there is his hand on your elbow, so careful and soft and there are his lips before yours, so…

Tempting.

Somewhere, a woman croons to you of falling rain and rushing blood and the room does spin round as you stand still in the open air of a desire that is yours and not your own all at once. Shhh, shhh, let me help you whispered in your ear, a hand to your cheek and you…

You blink.

Reality flows into view like a sudden bath of ice water. Jerk away from his iron grip, raise your hands and try to resist, shake your head and N-no, I think. I think I need to go, I’ll just call a cab —

I cannot let you do that, sweetling. Not when you are finally within my reach.

His hold is steady. Unbreakable, even, as he pulls you close and you might even be dancing with the way his arm wraps around your waist the moment you fall into his chest, Don’t look so afraid, sweetling. No one will hurt you, here.

I will protect you like a jewel.

Your mind is still yours — the dose was just enough — but your limbs? Your limbs are tied to his strings, lost as he guides you right back inside, lost as he gestures for Oeznik to close off the balcony.

Your place is somewhere else now.

You belong underneath me.

He guides you inside, jasmine intoxicating your senses and wisps of smoke seeming to float past your eyes. Reality blends into the fantasy, the Baron and his prize, the gentle touch against your soft cheek, the cradling against his form and he is…

Determined.

A door opens. A portal into another kind of decadence, with soft sheets and softer touches, the sliding of a mouth over yours as your escape clicks shut behind you and you are pressed between wall and man and you are consumed.

Curl your fingers into the lapel of his coat, lose yourself to the pressure of his lips, the sharp nip of teeth against soft flesh. He tastes of champagne and honeycomb and you are saccharine on the tongue, a mess of sighs and admonitions left unsaid.

My precious thing, whispered into your unfocused sighs, I will take such fine care of you.

And you want to protest, want to insist you are free you are uninterested you do not want this man and his hands under the cotton of your blouse but the words tangle on your tongue and instead all you can do is whimper.

Whimper, and hear him chuckle against your skin, a line of kisses drawn from your parted lips along your jaw until he’s found the thrum of your pulsebeat to draw a gasp the moment his teeth scrape against the delicate skin. He must mark you his, after all, and this he will gladly renew, over and over.

Over and over as he draws you to bed, lays you amongst soft cushions and softer sheets, indulges in the soft curves of you in the golden glow of the room. Your clothes — so conservative, so professional, so unnecessary — he makes short work of even with what mild resistance you manage, Shh, shh, do not fight me.

The heat is yours and not yours all at once, warming your skin and leaving you flushed, leaving a trail of burning want along your skin where his fingers trace over you and centering in your core You need this, sweetling, look at you…

Do you?

Is it you who needs this or he, he who has begun to kiss along your skin, he who presses himself between your legs so impatiently? The accusation lives in your thoughts and passes past your lips as a strangled Nnh-no, ignored without ceremony or appeal.

Protests are useless when your tongue can form no words and your limbs can do nothing but writhe, seeking structure in the grip of his sheets as he unravels you with a press of his lips to that soft center of yours, slick with a need you cannot own and yet all yours.

He maps you with a hungry gaze, fingers already tracing the plushness of your folds, gathering slick like he might have been collecting nectar and you watch him pull back, watch him bring his hand to his mouth, watch him wrap lips around his fingertip and drag the taste of you onto his tongue, One day I shall make you taste how sweet you are…

One day, after he has savored you so deeply.

You are so full of words they burst out of you on a normal day and yet nothing you say comes to light, just the bare whimpers and anxious mewls of your needy self as he returns to inspecting, to enjoying, to savoring the reactiveness of your body.

He touches. He touches as if he has owned your body a thousand times, he touches as if you are delicate, as if you are breakable, as if his fingers might lead you to shattering around him here and now and you…

Are so close, already.

So close, trying to find the strength in your muscles to pull away, to speak something beyond desperation with every curl of fingers against your cunt, with every pleased hum he utters in response to the flex of your sex. Shh… no more fighting, sweetling, I know you can be good.

He knows you can be good, he says, with all the innocence of a man trying to convince his cat to stop clawing the couch, not a man presently holding your legs open with one hand at your thigh and the other curling against your walls while you arch your back. It builds, the pressure, it builds and builds and builds and — Let go, sweetling. Let me see your ecstasy.

Is that what this is?

You keen. You keen softly, desperately, brokenly, as skilled fingers find the spot which makes you, which leaves you breathless and flushed and sobbing, a trickle of tears making their path down your cheeks as you bite your own lip to muffle the sounds you did not know you could make. Wordless and pleading and he notices with a cold smile the way you seem to succumb, hips no longer desperate to escape the curling, stretching assault of two — no, three — fingers preparing you for him.

Hips pressing back towards him now, a betrayal of your conscious-yet-barely-focused mind, that lustful sweetness in you taking over and he can only watch in awe. Awe not at your surrender but at your perfection, muttering in a language you do not understand and yet you understand perfectly what he means — he will have you, all of you.

Ah, I shall so enjoy playing with you more, sweetling.

But not now.

Now his impatience outpaces your need and both outpace his cruelty, his desire to see you beg and so instead he pulls back his hand — and hears the desperate N-no, please don’t — to bring a cruel gleam to his dark eyes and even barely conscious as you are you know he is beautiful.

Beautiful and cruel, as he frees himself and curls fingers around his cock, rubs your own slick onto that soft skin, hisses at the very feel of you like it must be a preview to how you will make him throb, and presses himself over you. Presses himself over you, absorbs the cry of pain or anguish or relief which pours from your plush lips with the punishment of a kiss just as he sinks, hips pressing against yours, stretching you with his full length and Now we are one, my sweet.

Now we are one.

He will take fine care of you but you, you take finer care of him, so plush and tight around his senses, so desperate as you cling, so lost and wanton and he kisses away the tears which continue to sting your cheeks and hisses half-sensible promises into your ear — You will always be mine — as he ruts his hips and practically shoves you forward with every thrust, dragging you back with a snarl and the pressure builds.

Builds and you moan, builds and you sob into his hungry mouth, builds and you hold to him as if he were the last thing which made sensein the world builds and you are consumed and he is consuming, and the release is both of yours, spilling deep inside of you and that too is the final shackle upon your soul.

You sit. In the darkness of your office and you remember, worrying the cuticle of your thumb and staring at the words you have typed while your memory drifts back to that hazy reminder.

… A discussion with the Baron about Sokovia reveals a country rich with history. Once a Duchy of the Hapsburgs during the era of the Holy Roman Empire, the deeply Catholic country clings to the Austrian and Italian tradition of ceremony and indulgence. Baron Zemo plays an example of the hymns sung in the many cathedrals which once filled the country, a mixture of Sokovian and Latin to raise the soul to divine heights.

The Baron speaks of the country’s culture with a warm fondness, of how even during Soviet occupation, the people managed to enjoy games like ice hockey, and football (the European, variant, the Baron would like to emphasize), and even spent time indulging in horse racing. Surrounded by Slovakia and the Czech Republic, it keeps a similar tradition, with a twist…

No, that cannot encompass all that you discussed, and yet that is what the recording shows, words traded back and forth which you do not remember, a conversation of laughter and warmth and none of it slots into what your mind tells you occurred.

You erase. You rewrite. It is the same passage, over and over, fingers acting unbidden of your frantic will and eventually you give in, demand to be done with these words and this screen, eventually you desire peace.

… Baron Helmut Zemo is many things. A historian, an ambassador, a politician, an activist. He is a widower, a man trapped in the past, a man with lofty dreams for the future. He wears his sorrow as well as he wears his happiness, and for those who still call themselves Sokovian, he is their shepherd into a new age.

And as the door to your office opens, your keeper.

#baron zemo x reader #helmut zemo x reader #dark!baron zemo x reader #dark!helmut zemo x reader #billy russo x reader #dark!billy russo x reader #helmut zemo smut #dark!fic #mob!AU #helmut zemo #billy russo

211 notes · View notes

papenathys · 1 year ago

Text

high fantasy:

Radiant Emperor duology by Shelley Parker Chan: it's a very queer and trans historical fantasy retelling of the rise of Zhu Yuanzhang, first emperor of Ming Dynasty in 14th century China. Zhu is reimagined as a nonbinary lesbian, and is gleefully evil, unhinged and cheerful about it.

The Poppy War trilogy by RF Kuang: very dark, disturbing fantasy series influenced by Sino-Japanese war history with additional allegorical reference to the 19th century Opium Wars. It focuses on Rin, a poor orphan who decides to join the imperial military academy, but ends up going down a very dark path of power and violence.

The Burning Kingdoms series by Tasha Suri: kind of Indian-inspired high fantasy, about a captive princess and a maidservant in possession of forbidden nature/plant magic who become unlikely allies on a dark journey to save their empire from the princess's traitor brother.

standalone reads. NOT fantasy. really good books.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: Sunja is a young girl running a boarding house with her mother in a small coastal town, in 1920s Japan-occupied Korea. She ends up marrying a pastor and moving to Japan just before the World Wars break out. Thus begins the story of the Baek family and their descendants for generations after– as war, violence, ethnocentrism and separatist history shape the terms of how the Japanese treat Korean Americans. This novel is excellent.

Severance by Ling Ma: Candace Chen works a dead-end job as a Manhattan publishing house and lives a lacklustre, lonely life. Then, a global epidemic called Shen Fever breaks out and the terrifying situation alienates humanity across the map, shutting down communication and travel. But Candace needs her paycheck, so she continues going to office during lockdown. This book has some of the BEST and most subtly horrific portrayals of capitalism and labour exploitation, and yeah, it is also a zombie story.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri: Subhash and Udayan are very different, but very close brothers growing up in Kolkata, Bengal at the very beginning of the Naxalite Movement. Subhash leaves to study in Rhode Island, Udayan stays home, passionate about student politics and resisting police/government brutalities. Then something terrible happens, and a strange, brilliant new woman comes into the lives of the brothers. This is my favourite book of all time and it's so profoundly Bengali and well. What can I say.

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder: Rachel, a lapsed Jew with an abusive mother, has very ritualistic obssessions with calorie counting and regulating food. She ends up going to a frozen yoghurt shop one day where she meets Miriam, a beautiful, fat woman who loves her body and loves feeding others. Idk how to describe the rest of the story but it's an obsessive sapphic love story with a lot of food and sex. It's also pretty dark and triggering, so do take care while reading.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa: On an island headed by a police surveillance institution, people are engineered to forget words, objects and concepts completely, any traces of these forbidden things erased from their minds- things like birds, hats, ribbons, music etc. When the narrator's friend is threatened by the said police, she decides to hide him inside her house before she forgets him. This is a dystopian novel but also a ghost love story out of Bly Manor. I loved it.

Didn't recommend A Certain Hunger because you've probably been suggested that in the comments and I wanted to focus on marginalized communities.

Pls recommend some books for my trip!!! Im looking for something molecule altering

#replies #friends tag #book recs #books #book recommendations

190 notes · View notes

nikoadari · 2 years ago

Text

I Think I'm Dating a Fae, Chapter 2

March 5

Dear Diary,

Out of all my friends, Keisha is the most open-minded about mythology and other fantastical stuff like the fae, so I asked her out to lunch for a chat. When I told her what I thought about Sol, she looked at me like I was crazy. Not a great sign, but I wasn’t deterred! It wasn’t entirely a lecture about me going too far with my “mythology obsession,” either. She asked some pretty good questions, and that was helpful for my research.

“First of all,” she asked. “If Sol’s a fae, why doesn’t he look like one? His ears aren’t pointy, he’s kind of short for a guy but not for a human, and he doesn’t have wings or faery dust.” Plus, and I’m adding this part, Sol’s black. Like, Black American black. He isn’t as dark as I am, but he’s pretty close. I’ve never heard of a dark-skinned fae, much less a Black fae. In all the stories, they’re from Ireland and Wales and Germany – Europe, in other words. Not the U.S. It just wouldn’t work, geographically speaking.

Sol told me he’s ADOS, like me. But, that means…there’s probably some European strain of something in his ancestry, right? Could there be some fae blood, or whatever-magic-creature blood, from four hundred some odd years back? Throwbacks exist. I mean, it’s magic! At this point, anything goes, right?

Okay, after some extra research on faeries’ appearances, I found this from a website on Irish fae:

“Good neighbors are well known to use magic to change their forms so they may walk amongst humans without fear. They may take the form of black dogs, or deer, or even human beings. It is not known how long they can hold these forms, but there are more than a few stories of those who only realized that the man or woman they married was a good neighbors, many years after half-fae children had been born and grown into their faery features.”

So yeah. That’s terrifying – great neighbors, sure. Just tricking people and having half-magic spawn – no! Wait wait wait. Wait a second! If Sol really is a fae, then these are his people. If this is their culture, I can’t just start saying hateful things…but tricking someone into thinking you’re human and then having sex with them, starting a family even, feels like a Zeus move, if I’m being honest….

Okay, focus! One thing at a time or else I’ll go crazy!

For now, the appearance thing. Fae can look like whatever they want since they can shape shift, and there’s apparently no time limit. So, Sol doesn’t have to look any particular way to be a fae. His height, ears, skin, all of it could just be shapeshifting or a glamour, which is kind of like…a costume? A magic costume, yeah. One that makes them look different but doesn’t actually change their bodies.

Some fae have wings, and some don’t, so Sol could have wings underneath a glamour. But he’s never acted like his wings were caught in a door or something, and when I hug him from behind he doesn’t act like it hurts, and I never feel any wings, so it’s probably not that. With shape shifting, the wings would actually disappear. Either Sol doesn’t have wings at all or he’s shape shifted them away.

Horrifying implications aside, the next thing Keisha asked me about was about the personality thing. Most sources say that faeries are tricksters and love pranks so much that they will actually kill people just to have a laugh (which… is kind of insane, right? Like, wow, how did we get Tinker Bell from that, Disney?).

Thankfully, this doesn’t fit Sol at all. Sol actally doesn’t like pranks. He almost murdered Justice for putting Saran Wrap on the toilet that one time. I’m pretty sure she’s only alive because she’s my sister. Gotta make sure to call in that favor at some point. Anyway, Sol isn’t a mischief lover.

I don’t think that bars him from being a a fae, though. It’s silly to think that literally every member of the species would behave the same way and have the same hobbies, right? Everyone’s different, and Sol does fit a few other traits fae seem to share. He has that wanderlust, always jumping from place to place, and he drifts from hobby to hobby and group to group easily enough, fitting in just fine with almost any clique he meets.

For example, last week we were partying at the club with a few friends and he eventually got tired of dancing. I watched him chat up this random biker gang over the course of an hour (and he doesn’t even know how to ride a motorcycle) and now apparently they’re all friends! They took him on a ride all over the city just a few days ago and everything.

Then, the next morning, he took the kids and me to church and had a long, friendly chat with the pastor and elders after service in the pastor’s office. They all came out smiling and chatting like it went well, and Pastor eve came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You found yourself a good man, Cecil.”

He doesn’t know the half of it.

And then Sol went to an impromptu DnD thing at the public library and came back talking about how he wanted to continue the campaign over a video chat because everyone there was “so nice,” but that he can’t because doesn’t have the time! It’s absolutely crazy.

So yeah. Not a prankster, but he has all sorts of other hobbies, is charismatic, and fits into any group he wants to easily. And that’s kinda like a fae, right? Wandering all over just looking for a good time, making friends on the way, planting flowers and trees and frolicking in lakes or whatever he does when he’s traveling abroad.

But you know…if Sol actually is a fae, or maybe something like a fae…wouldn’t at least part of his family be fae-adjacent, too? I’ve met them all; Sol took me to various events and lunches with them years ago and we all stay in loose contact now, but they don’t really seem like fae. Well, no, let me rephrase.

What I mean is that Sol stands out from his family. He can blend in with anyone, at least on the surface, but with his family? He acts around them how he acts around me: like a weirdo. And they seem to accept him like that without toomuch of an issue. Seems like a “happy to see you’re still alive, now goodbye!” type of relationship with most of them.

And they’re really normal people otherwise. Normal hobbies, and experiences, and everything. A few are entitled, and most were really sweet, and a some gossip entirely too much. They’re just regular people. Sol’s the only odd man out.

Why are they so different from him? Or rather, him from them? He can’t be the only fae-adjacent in the line. Genetically, that doesn’t make sense.

Ugh, this is going nowhere. His family’s never going to say anything if they do know, so I can’t ask them, even if he’s the only one. If Sol is a fae, he probably won’t tell me, either. And if he’s something else, well, I can’t comb every single mythology story and legend that ever was!

I need a drink. Better yet, I need a cup of Sol’s tea. I don’t remember the name – it’s something long and complicated in French – but it’s good. I’m sure he won’t mind. And if he does…well, it’s his fault for being so goddam confusing!

#fae #writing #writing community #chapter 2 #faery #nikoadariwrites #fantasy #fantasy writing #bipoc writers #writers on tumblr #decided to title them all chapter numbers now to end confusion #I think I'm dating a fae #urban fantasy

2 notes · View notes

antoine-roquentin · 4 years ago

Link

When a nation feels threatened, it gets swole. Germans and Norwegians became obsessed with individual self-improvement through physical fitness around the end of the Napoleonic Era. British citizens took up this Physical Culture as the 19th century—and their empire—began to wane. And yoga, in its current practice as a form of meditative strength training, came out of the Indian Independence movement of the 1920s and 30s.

The impetus of these movements isn’t fitness for the sake of pleasure, for the pure joys of strength and physical beauty. It’s competitive. It’s about getting strong enough to fight The Enemy, whoever that may be.

The United States is, of course, not immune to this. The Presidential Fitness Test sprang up in the mid-20th century after studies found that American children lagged behind Europeans in certain tests of flexibility and calisthenic ability. Cold War paranoia only amped up this anxiety, particularly as we entered the 1980s. What if our kids were too fat to defeat communism? This obsession meshed beautifully with boomer yuppie narcissism and birthed the aerobics fad.

Then the Nineties hit, the Berlin Wall fell, and spandex and sweatbands became hilariously passe. While America still obsessed over thinness, it was not for the sake of strength. Two things happened at the dawn of the new millennium to bring back physical culture.

The first occurred in 1998, when BMI standards shifted a few points. Formerly, one needed a BMI of 27 (for women) or 28 (for men) to be classified as overweight, but the new standard lowered the cutoff to 25 points. Twenty-nine million Americans instantly became overweight without gaining an ounce. Under the new guidelines, doctors could prescribe them diet drugs or recommend weight loss surgery.

A nationwide panic rose; headlines screamed about a new plague of fat people whose bodies were ticking time bombs destined to deliver death and destruction at any moment. Stock footage of fat people ambling about in public, filmed from the neck down to protect their identities (and more effectively dehumanize them), became a common sight on television news as bony broadcasters droned about the horrors of the Obesity Epidemic. Curiously, hardly any of the reports on this sudden increase in overweight/obese Americans bothered to mention the BMI standard shift.

The second event was, of course, 9/11.

The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon sparked a new War on Terror, and America needed to get in shape so we could win that war. The USA’s hyper-militaristic troop-worshipping post-9/11 culture seeped into the panic over obesity and gave birth to a terrifying, swole baby. Public school gym classes featured special military fitness days in which students practiced throwing mock grenades. George W. Bush added an Adult Fitness Challenge to the Presidential Fitness program. On American and British television, a new wave of documentaries and reality shows sprang up to bellow at us for being too fat to defeat al Qaeda: Honey, We’re Killing the Kids; Supersize Me; You Are What You Eat, in which a bony harridan screeched at Britons whose feces did not meet her exacting standards; The Biggest Loser, where lean coaches bellowed at fat contestants in a manner strikingly similar to that of a stereotypical drill instructor.

And muscles—giant, pulsating, steroid-enhanced muscles—returned to screens. But the new muscle era lacks the eroticism of Eighties action cinema. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed his glutes in Terminator; Sylvester Stallone stripped for First Blood and Tango & Cash; Bloodsport shows more of Jean Claude Van Damme’s body than that of his love interest.

For the most part, though, today’s cinema hunks are nevernudes. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is strictly PG-13, as one expects from a Disney product. And even in the DC universe, there’s very little of human sexuality. Capefans’ demands for more “mature” superhero movies always mean more graphic violence, not more sex. They panicked over Dr. Manhattan’s glowing blue penis in Watchmen, and they still haven’t forgiven Joel Schumacher for putting nipples on the batsuit.

Today’s stars are action figures, not action heroes. Those perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others. To have fun is to become weak, to let your team down, and to give the enemy a chance to win, like Thor did when he got fat in Endgame.

This cinematic trend reflects the culture around it. Even before the pandemic hit, Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them. Maybe we’re too anxious about the Apocalypse; maybe we’re too broke to go out; maybe having to live with roommates or our parents makes it a little awkward to bring a partner home; maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones; maybe we don’t know how to navigate human sexuality outside of rape culture; maybe being raised on the message that our bodies are a nation-ending menace has dampened our enthusiasm for physical pleasure.

Eating disorders have steadily increased, though. We are still getting our bodies ready to fight The Enemy, and since we are at war with an abstract concept, the enemy is invisible and ethereal. To defeat it, our bodies must lose solidity as well.

99 notes · View notes