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thesquidgame · 4 months ago

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Predictable

Hwang In-ho x wife!reader

Part One Part Two

Summary: Your peaceful married life is disrupted by strange symptoms.

Warnings: ANGST, money issues, hospitals, disease outbreak (MERS), disease symptoms (not MERS), poor working conditions, bad coworker, (implied) understaffed hospitals, panic, health problems, medical condition, neurological symptoms, blood, graphic depictions of medical emergency, vomiting blood, stepping on glass, extended TWs: here

Word Count: 2k~

Your apartment was dingy and small. It was on the outskirts of Seoul, and your had to take three buses to get to work. But it was alright. Your house was clean, and In-ho came home every day before you and made dinner. Your schedule was a bit more unpredictable. As an ER nurse, you tried whatever you could to get home on time, but mostly, you ended up at work until midnight.

It was a hectic job, but you were used to it. Unlike some of your colleagues, nothing extreme had happened to you in years, the first and only time being when you were accidentally stabbed with a needle. Still, it was stressful, but In-ho made all of that anxiety go away the second you saw him.

Whenever you came home, your husband would smile, kiss you, and present the delicious dinner he had made you. You would then sit at the dinner table and talk about your days, sometimes for hours, into the early hours of the morning. Then, you would wake up and do it all over again.

Your friends remarked on how boring you and In-ho’s lives were, that there was no real excitement, and that you were just going through the motions. You couldn’t disagree more. You loved going through the motions, and waking up every day knowing what you would do, and that your husband would be waiting for you at home. The predictable joy was your paradise. In-ho would wonder too, questioning if this was what you wanted. He couldn’t imagine how someone like you would want to be with a boring policeman with a 9-5 job. You couldn’t explain it, didn’t need to, you just loved spending time with your husband.

Your wedding was small and cheap, in the worship hall of a local church on a Saturday afternoon. Your family didn’t have the money for a flight to attend, and you couldn’t afford to bring them to you. So, your family was replaced by your friends, and Jun-ho walked you down the aisle.

The reception was in your house, and you and In-ho had stayed up late the night before making food. It was the best day of your life, and your friends and family stayed up late eating in the basement of the church at folding tables.

That night, you and an In-ho made love for the first time (always a gentleman), and as you slept on his chest he promised you that he would do anything for you. Even if he couldn’t give you much in terms of nice clothes, or a nice apartment, he would make you as happy as he possibly could.

In the fifth year of your marriage, both your and In-ho’s careers became enormously stressful. The MERS outbreak in South Korea made your hospital one of the central trauma centers for victims, and In-ho received a promotion, giving him more and more hours away from home.

One day, during a long shift, you almost passed out. The hospital was loud and frantic, and you fell over in the middle of the ER, the voices and lights around you becoming a blur. You only were able to regain focus when a doctor grabbed you by your shoulders and screamed in your face, “Get the fuck up and treat your goddamn patients!” He screeched, the force of it causing spit to fly into your face.

Dazed, you got up and continued treating patients, pushing your brief pass-out back into your mind as just a brief fluke.

Over the next week, you were less and less hungry when In-ho would make food. He would look at you concerned, “Honey, is there something wrong with the food? I thought this soup was your favorite.”

You offered a weak smile in return, “I love it In-ho, I just don’t have an appetite today. Sorry.”

He smiled back, “All alright, just let me know if I can do anything.”

Work got more hectic for both of you, and moments of exhaustion grew in you more and more, but all could likely be attributed to the stress of the job.

The nausea started a month after the exhaustion. At least once during a shift, you would have to run to a bathroom to throw up. After one especially hard day, where, with still six hours left in you had already thrown up three times, you called In-ho crying.

“In-ho.” You said through sobs.

Nothing else passed your lips, but immediately your husband broke out into a flurry of questions, “Honey, what’s wrong? Is everything okay, did something happen?” You could hear the panic in his voice as clearly as you could see it if he was standing right in front of you.

You didn’t say anything for a minute, just continued crying as you heard In-ho try to interject several times, but each time he stopped himself, waiting for you to say something.

You were just about the explain the situation when you heard someone knock on the door of the bathroom, “Nurse Hwang, are you in there?”

“Yes, I’ll be out in a minute.” You said, your hand shaking as you held the phone.

“We need you out here now, you can’t waste time in the bathroom.” Your coworker said. She was nice, and a recent graduate of college. Her inexperience and fear were evident, and while whatever problem she was facing was likely her responsibility, she would be torn to shreds by your boss if she didn’t do everything right, and you had to help her.

“In-ho, let’s talk when we get home.” You said, forcing your sobs back into your throat.

“(Y/n), wait-” You didn’t let him finish, hanging up now was already hard enough but if you let him talk longer it would only get worse.

The chaos of your shift only got worse and worse, and it was nearly 4 AM by the time you got home. You felt like death itself had risen and slapped you across the face.

In-ho was sitting at the table, his leg bouncing so hard you could feel the vibrations through the floor. “(Y/n), what’s wrong are you okay?!” He said, panic radiating off his skin as he reached up and grabbed your hands, searching his gaze up and down you.

You had called him earlier tonight, hadn’t you? But for some reason, the why just wasn’t there, “I- I called you earlier today, right?”

His brow furrowed in confusion, “yes, you were crying. I’ve been terrified for hours. What happened?”

You looked away from him, “I- I don’t remember.”

“What do you mean, you don’t remember? Honey, what’s going on?” He grabbed your shoulders, out of concern, and you winced away from him.

“Ow, that hurt.” You muttered, rubbing your shoulders.

The fear only seemed to grow in his eyes, “I didn’t grab you that hard I didn’t think. I’m so sorry, are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine, it’s just been a long day.” You gave him a half-hearted smile, “can we just go to bed?

He frowned but nodded and gently wrapped you in a hug, “Of course, let’s sleep, and tomorrow we’ll see if you can remember.”

Nothing came to you in the morning, and when you took your shirt off to change into your scrubs, you noticed purple bruises on your shoulders from where In-ho had grabbed you the night before.

“Honey, is everything all right in there, you’ve been changing for a while?” In-ho called in from the other room.

“Yeah- yeah, everything’s okay.” You put your shirt on, not telling In-ho so as to not upset him. You knew that he hadn’t grabbed you that hard, so you didn’t want to scare him with freak bruises.

In the next month, it became harder and harder to function. Your body constantly felt exhausted and weak and sore, and you almost never had an appetite. Sleep was rare to come by due to a constant itching feeling that would spread over your body.

The world felt blurry a lot of the time, you got more confused and forgetful at work and at home, and your bosses would tear into you more and more. It was difficult to bring anything up to In-ho, his schedule became so busy that you talked less and less, and you didn’t want to stress him out with problems that were likely just caused by a stressful job.

Whenever he would notice something, and ask you what was wrong, it felt like pieces of a puzzle that wouldn’t fit when you were answering. Your responses wouldn’t quite make sense, you would say something a little bit incorrect, or wouldn’t completely answer the question. Both you and In-ho were confused by it, but neither had the time nor energy to prod further.

Everything in your life was falling apart and getting worse and worse, but you felt too dazed most of the time. You couldn’t really think about everything happening, and it all just spiraled out of control.

In-ho awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of gagging. He stumbled out of bed, wondering if you had eaten something that upset your stomach.

“(Y/n)?” He asked as he walked to the bathroom, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw in front of you. You were crouched down on your hands and knees, a couple of feet in front of the toilet, throwing up. Throwing up near-black dark vomit.

“(Y/n)!” In-ho, in that moment, felt more terrified than he had ever before in his entire life. He ran over to you and crouched down on the ground next to you. Your entire body was shaking, and you kept throwing up. “(Y/n), what’s wrong? What’s happening? What’s going on?” He didn’t know what to do. No amount of disaster or emergency training he had received had prepared him for this moment.

You didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. He grabbed you in his arms, and you shook against his chest as he ran out of the apartment. He didn’t put on shoes, or a jacket. A broken bottle his neighbor dropped in the hallway cut his feet as he ran to the elevator, but he didn’t feel it. You were still throwing up on his chest and his fear for you was all he could focus on.

The car ride felt like it lasted hours. You were in the passenger seat, never stopping throwing up. His feet were cut up, and his white shirt was covered in blood.

He parked right in front of the ER you worked in, not pulling into a parking space. He carried you in his arms to the front desk, and all of the staff stared in shock for a brief moment at the sight of their coworker being carried by her husband, covered in blood. Within a quarter of a second that felt like an hour, they all rushed into action.

Someone took you out of his arms and placed you on a gurney, wheeling you into a trauma bay, while blood from In-ho’s feet followed you in a trail. Your eyes opened and shut, and you focused on your husband yelling your name, “(Y/n), (Y/n)!” As his face and voice faded in and out.

Part two will be out soon!

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meta-sequoia · 1 month ago

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Rose genetics and the law of unintended consequences (or, ten rose bushes, reviewed)

I have a number of longposts in the backlog, including updates on a number of garden improvement projects I undertook over the winter, but I kept putting off posting them because there kept being Horrors. However, spring is here - in California anyway - and plants wait for no one.

Over the winter of 2025, as a coping mechanism for the aforementioned Horrors, I got really into roses. Because of who I am as a person, deciding what roses I wanted to buy also made me feel obliged to reconstruct the history of rose breeding, just to make sense of the teeming confusion of the tens of thousands of named rose varieties. Humans have been raising roses for food, medicine, and beauty for untold centuries, and so they've really grown up with us. The history of the development of roses, it turns out, is the history of the development of humanity in miniature.

This post has it all: history, some light phylogeny discussion, material analysis of English folk ballads, a conceptual framework for understanding how different kinds of roses vary and why, a #haul breakdown of what bare-root roses I got and what I thought of them, and some philosophical musings on what it means for an organism to be subjected to a long-term selective breeding process, to be remade wholly in the image of human desire. All that, and pictures of roses, under the cut.

My general region of California is considered to have a good climate for roses, much good may it do us. It never gets too hot or too cold, so they essentially never go out of season, and even though our winters are wet, the rest of the year is fairly dry. This is absolutely critical, because the main problem that makes garden roses hard to grow is fungal disease. Modern roses are incredibly susceptible to fungal diseases, which are caused, roughly, by Damp. This has typically been combated with toxic sprays (though there are now less-toxic options) and aggressive pruning regimens.

Needless to say, this is a ridiculous fucking problem for a plant to have. California natives, by comparison, hate irrigation - they have a natural life cycle involving being dry in summer and wet in winter, like California itself, so if you grow them in a climate resembling their natural range, without too much added water, they will be mostly OK. Roses, as far as I can tell, actually hate all water, including rain and humidity, which is much worse because gardeners do not control the weather. If it rains too often after, say, noon, the rose's leaves might get wet, fail to dry off, get a fungal disease, and die. If there is too much fog, or it is humid, as it is in most of the country in the summer, the rose's leaves might get wet &c. If you have a sprinkler system - you get the idea.

Fungal disease can also weaken roses and make them more prone to insect infestations. This is bad because modern garden roses are, without any help from The Weather, already incredibly prone to infestations from aphids, mites, beetles, and a mite-borne disease undescriptively called "rose rosette disease", which produces a habitus that I can only describe as "rose bush eldritch horror".

Now, this may all have you asking one question. Probably, that question is "why are you so obsessed with a plant that wants so badly to die?" I will not be answering this question today. Instead, I will be answering a different question, which is "Why do modern garden roses suck so bad?"

Now, if roses are subject to some manner of curse, then it isn't a family curse, phylogenically speaking. Roses - genus Rosa species extremely miscellaneous - are a member of the family Rosaceae, which contains a massive number of useful and delightful plants. It is possibly the most economically important family of plants next to the brassicas. The rose family brings us not just roses, but apples, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, plums, peaches, apricots, and almonds. And the wild rose, untouched by human efforts, is a lot like a raspberry, actually.

Its flowers have only five petals, in pink or white. It’s got thorny stems that form thickets, and oval (or, technically, lanceolate) leaves with lightly serrated edges. Its flowers are fragrant, which is an adaptation to their long and necessary coexistence with pollinators and other insects - fragrance serves as a chemical signal for insects to "come here" or "go away", depending. The wild rose is hardy, like all wild plants, tolerant of various environmental problems that would kill a garden rose: shade, salt, normal levels of ambient insect and fungal disease pressure, drought, being consistently rained on in the afternoon or evening. It may reproduce asexually from suckers - strong shoots from near the base of the plant - and this makes it able to withstand browsing pressure from e.g. deer. (Put a pin in that.) It also can reproduce in the normal way, by having its flowers pollinated and forming seeds, which are borne in prominent reddish-orange fruits called "hips".

This is not a rose I bought, but here’s Rosa gymnocarpa, a California native rose. It’s a wood rose, so it’s shade-tolerant, and it’s often found in redwood forests specifically, so it tolerates relatively dry soil and very acidic soil.

Honorable mention: Rosa gymnocarpa (wood rose)

Source: Calscape

A raspberry plant in flower, for comparison. Source

The wild rose has another trait, which may be surprising to those who have only ever seen garden roses: it blooms once, usually in the summer. This is typical of flowers, which almost always have a season, for the exact same reason fresh fruit has a season. Flowering plants are on a tight schedule: they need to finish up their blooming, so they can set fruit, so they can get their seeds out before winter, in case the frost kills them off. And mostly we’re used to that: tulips are for spring, so you don't expect a tulip to make a second showing in fall, or to flower continuously throughout the summer. But roses have been bred to do this, and have done it for centuries, for so long we barely remember what it was like when "roses blooming" was a time of year, an event.

It's possible that for most of human history, roses were all the more treasured for being fleeting, which simply isn't an aspect of how we moderns understand roses. I am constantly subjected to traditional ballads at home, both in English and German, so I am very aware that multiple Child ballads mention roses as a way of placing the events of the ballad at a particular time of year. In 'Lady Isobel and the Elf-Knight', a song traditionally associated with May Day, one version of the chorus references the events as occurring 'as the rose is blown'. And at the start of 'Tam Lin', the protagonist meets her fairy lover while plucking a double rose, is "laid down among... the roses red" by him, and finishes the ballad on Halloween night heavily pregnant with his child. The course of the ballad is inextricably intertwined with the course of the seasons, and the bloom of roses is synonymous with early summer. (There's so much symbolism in 'Tam Lin', but especially around roses. Can I interest you in tam-lin.org at this time?)

European religious literature even uses "a rose e'er blooming" as a purely figurative phrase, something impossible and magical enough to be a metonym for the Virgin Mary - but in the modern era, most garden roses are ever-blooming. The perpetual-blooming rose is not the natural state of the rose plant, but a kind of technology that had to be developed. And I don't know, I just think that's neat.

So what have we learned? The wild rose is: once-blooming, tough, possibly shade-tolerant depending on species, very thorny, bearing simple pink or white five-petaled flowers, that are fragrant, pollinator-friendly, and produce fruit readily enough. In short, a practical, normal sort of plant.

The garden rose is…not that. There’s no other way to put this: the modern garden rose is the wild rose, but bimboified.

Now, in case today is your first day on the Internet - well, first of all, welcome, it’s bad here - but secondly, bimboification is a niche fetish where someone is transformed into a hypersexualized version of themselves that is also very stupid. Plant domestication is obviously analogous. I didn’t originate this joke; in fact, I reblogged a joke like this just last week.

Roses are like this but even more so. Like, wheat is clearly bimboified. Its sexual parts (seeds) have been remade, swollen to ludicrous proportions, and wheat is probably worse at being a plant than wild grasses. But we created modern wheat from wild grass because it was more useful that way, and wheat could in theory survive and spread without human cultivation. Roses are Like That purely because we wanted to make them a more perfect decorative object. Centuries of intensive selection pressure for appearance have rendered roses useless as an independent plant: they are so disease-prone they need extensive intervention to even survive, and they are often physically incapable of propagating themselves - one of the basic features of plants! - without human aid. That’s plant bimboification.

Source: Heirloom Roses. This one is called 'Oranges 'n' Lemons. Hardly seems like the same plant!

Here are just a few examples, of what we've done to roses. Humans love rose petals - eating them, distilling them into perfume, smelling them, just looking at them - so the garden rose has massive flowers that are so stuffed with petals that pollinators cannot get at their centers, rendering the rose incapable of reproducing except possibly with the help of a human equipped with a paintbrush. Humans love bright colors, so modern roses come in every color their natural pigments allow. Garden roses are often - though not always - less thorny than their wild cousins, because thorns are inconvenient to humans, and so have been somewhat bred out.

And what’s just as important is what was bred out of wild roses in the process of becoming modern roses - by accident. As mentioned above, modern roses are often useless to pollinators, and, not unrelatedly, can’t reproduce without human help. They often lose their fragrance, if not specifically bred for it. They are very susceptible to disease, because gardeners can keep alive, through sheer stubbornness, plants that natural selection would have culled. Likewise, they need full sun where many wild roses can get by even in the shade of big evergreens, and they can't tolerate nearly as much cold, heat, or salt exposure as their wild relatives.

This 'use it or lose it' thing, by the way, is a general principle of selective processes like plant breeding, or like evolution. If you have two independent traits, A and B, and you select hard for A, then B is likely to gradually drop out of the population, simply because the subset of A carriers that also have B is likely to be small. It's pure statistics. (It essentially is a human-created population bottleneck.) The more intense and ruthless the selection pressure, the stronger the effect. Evolution cares a lot about seed production and hardly at all about color, so wild roses are plain but make enormous rose hips; humans like beautiful roses the color of sunsets, and are indifferent to seed production, so modern roses don’t make hips at all. The failure to select for eventually becomes an implicit selection pressure against.

(Highly-bred organisms are thus less, I guess, well-rounded genetically even before you get to issues of inbreeding, and if you assume there is no biological link between your selected-for traits and other ridealong traits, e.g. domestication syndrome. Genetics is complicated!)

One adapted wild-type trait that - I speculate - was not bred out, due to its direct usefulness to humans, was the ability of roses to grow back vigorously from having leaves or branches removed. This is, it seems to me, an adaptation to herbivore browsing - if you are a rose with minimal regrowth ability, and a deer chews on half your canes, it’s curtains for you. But humans also fully remove half of the canes of their garden roses every winter - it’s critical to controlling the fungal disease that so plagues them. Specifically, pruning improves airflow through the plant, which evaporates the water that keeps falling on the leaves from the sky. (You know. The rain, that roses both hate and need to live.) In some sense, we are acting as caretakers here, shaping the plant in inscrutable ways for its own good. But to the plant, we are basically deer: just another in a long line of animals that want to steal its leaves. Unbelievable! It needs those! Fuck you too, buddy: here’s a faceful of thorns.

Truly, a tale as old as time.

This brings me to my first actual rose review, a kind of bridge between wild roses and the world of cultivated roses.

#1: Rosa rugosa, probably "Hansa"

Source: the author's yard.

This is a sucker - a vigorous young ground-level shoot - from an unnamed rosebush from my mother's house. I say "probably 'Hansa'" because we have no idea what this actually is, only that it is a rugosa hybrid, purchased from an unknown nursery in the Midwest sometime during the Bush administration.

'Hybrid rugosas' are crosses between garden-type roses and a wild rose species called Rosa rugosa, which is native to much of Asia. This particular rose bush has many traits carried over from its wild parent: it's violently fragrant, a glorious sweet-spicy combo that smells to me like childhood and home; it has wrinkly leaves (characteristic of Rosa rugosa in particular); its stems are practically coated in prickles; and it's quite tolerant of shade, drought, and salt (Rosa rugosa is a beach rose).

The main virtue evinced by this rose, derived from its wild parent, is the same reason that it is still here in my garden: it is extremely difficult to kill. My mother, after hearing me say I wanted this specific rose bush at my house the same way it had been at my childhood home, dug up a sucker from her instance, put it in a bag with some wet dirt, carried it by hand on a multi-hour cross-country plane flight, and handed it off to me. Once I received it, I stuck it in a pot, because I was ripping up my lawn and had nowhere to plant it, and mostly forgot about it, because I was busy ripping up my entire lawn. It lost its leaves suspiciously early in the fall. ("That's not good," my mother said, over FaceTime, brow furrowed. "Are the rest of your roses doing that?")

But as the saying doesn't go, "where there's green cambium, there's hope", and I continued to take care of it throughout the winter. I eventually even remembered to put it in the ground. It is now March, and in defiance of the mockery of certain judgemental housemates, who said things like "why do you have a stick in a pot?" and "it's giving 'dead', my guy", this "stick" has now decided to become a rosebush, and has a grand total of (approximately) twenty-five leaves.

Like I said: extremely difficult to kill. It is currently planted 10-ish feet from the base of a redwood tree, a tough environment where some hardy garden-style roses have nonetheless been known to thrive. Given that its resurrection has occurred entirely while it was planted under the redwood, it doesn't seem too mad about its environment.

Review: holy shit, it’s alive???

#2: Zéphirine Drouhin, the "old garden rose"

Source: Heirloom Roses

Rosarians have conceived of many groupings of garden roses, based on known ancestry, phenotype, genetic studies, and Vibes, but one major breakpoint is those bred before 1867, the "old garden roses", and after 1867, the "modern garden roses".

The old garden roses were derived mostly from ancient European and Middle Eastern stock, which had themselves been created from wild roses centuries prior. For example, this is Rosa x alba, an ancient European rose strain; it was used as the heraldic badge of the medieval House of York during the English conflict known as the War of the Roses.

Source: not mine

Some of these roses are perpetual-blooming, a trait introduced as late as the eighteenth century, and which is entirely due to trade contact with China: as far as I can tell, the genes for strong reblooming only come from the Chinese rose-breeding tradition, which was itself centuries old by that point. So the modern Western concept of perpetual-blooming roses as the default kind of rose - like so many other aspects of modernity - is a direct result of Europeans cribbing from everybody else.

Interestingly, France was a major center for rose development during the early modern period. You can see it in the way old garden roses are named: overwhelmingly after some eminent madame or monsieur. This is probably connected to the fact that Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte’s empress, was a rose fiend: she had two hundred and fifty new varieties of rose to be brought to her gardens at Château de Malmaison, which was probably pretty much all the named varieties of rose that existed then, and many of which were new to European cultivation at that time. Again, this represented a massive inflow of rose genes that were previously restricted to other countries or continents entirely. Inextricably, these gardens also represent the proceeds of early modern global trade, and of empire: Napoleon, on campaign abroad, himself sent her hundreds of specimens of flowering plants, and the French navy confiscated plants and seeds from ships captured and sea and sent them to her.

Anyway, Zéphirine Drouhin, created at the end of the "old garden rose" period and named for some now-forgotten madame or mademoiselle, is highly fragrant - one of the few roses said to really perfume the air - with a vibrant but old-fashioned color palette. (Apricot and yellow roses were also characteristic of the Chinese rose gene pool, and so were significantly less common in old garden roses.) Zéphirine Drouhin is also thornless, a rare trait that we nonetheless see in some old-fashioned garden roses, and a few modern garden roses as well.

Old garden roses have a variable but generally good level of disease resistance. Zéphirine Drouhin in particular, gets something of a bad rap for poor disease resistance; English rose breeder David Austin Roses says, tactfully, that it "prefers warmer climates" (versus, one must assume, rainy England) and that "controlling disease can be a problem". By this you should understand them to mean that it is a whiny little pissbaby that constantly gets blackspot, a diva that will defoliate at the drop of a hat (or the drop of, uh, water).

However, unlike certain other newer roses I will mention later, I have found Zéphirine Drouhin to be pretty healthy so far. I received this rose, like many in this post, "bare root", basically a stick, dormant in a bag of wood shavings. Upon being planted in a part-sun area, it has leafed out with only a scattering of aphids to show in terms of disease.

Review: So far, so good. Looking forward to the fragrance.

#3 and 4: 'Mister Lincoln' and 'Fragrant Cloud', the hybrid tea brothers

Remember how I mentioned that 1868 is the breakpoint between "old garden roses" and "modern garden roses"? That year marked the invention of a new type of rose, the 'hybrid tea', that is in some sense THE rose, the ARCHETYPE of a rose. If you ask someone who knows nothing about roses to draw 'a rose' - if you look up clipart of a rose - a hybrid tea rose is what you'll get.

Source: Star Nursery

This is Mister Lincoln, and although it was developed as late as the 1960s, it has the classic hybrid tea rose form. Hybrid teas have a very distinctive shape, described as "high-pointed", with a spiral of unfurling petals that curl at the edges, and they're borne singly on long stems, making them great for cutting and putting into vases and bouquets. They are not always strongly fragrant, and they are not generally very disease-resistant. They come in a very wide variety of colors, intense and subtle. They are reblooming.

Hybrid teas were developed by another East-meets-West cross, when the Chinese tea roses, freshly imported from Guangzhou in the early 19th century, were bred with the old garden roses. Tea roses have the same iconic form as the hybrid teas; they have those unique, pastel shades that were previously quite absent from European rose stocks; they smell like a fresh cup of tea. All these traits they impart to hybrid teas. Hybrid teas have been very popular ever since, and have been subject to a great deal of selective breeding for color and form.

Hybrid teas don't generally spark joy, to me. I find the 'cartoon rose' shape kind of twee, honestly. And the reputation for lack of disease tolerance puts me off. But I heard Mister Lincoln was incredibly fragrant, and that drew me in. Likewise Fragrant Cloud (1967), which also has the charming feature of being a violent neon coral that is allegedly very difficult to photograph.

Source: Heirloom Roses

“It'll be fine," I thought. "How much fungal disease can it get? It's not like it's humid here."

Never again. My trust is destroyed; fuck hybrid teas.

please, my son, he is very sick

This is my poor Mister Lincoln, planted from bare-root in mid-December. It has three different fungal diseases, and also an aphid infestation I can't seem to get it to shake. It looks like one of those diagrams of a liver in a medical textbook that has fatty liver and cirrhosis and liver cancer all at once, just so you can see what all the diseases look like. This is a rose that has every problem! No other rose in this flower bed comes close to having every problem! 'Munstead Wood' is also a modern garden rose (though from a very different lineage - see my review below) and it has no fungal diseases and not a single aphid!

Well, maybe the other hybrid tea I bought is doing better... well, nope, it rained last week and Fragrant Cloud has powdery mildew.

Review: Come on, man.

#5 Unidentified ‘sunset’ rose

I didn’t buy these roses; they came with my house. As a consequence, I have no idea what they are, but I am now intimately familiar with their traits, and I think they are very indicative of both the high and low points of modern garden roses.

On the surface level, the fact that these rose bushes are still with us is an impressive proof of their persistence under adversity. When I bought the house, these roses were being choked to death. Lily-of-the-nile had been planted way too close to them, and then permitted to grow unchecked and undivided for many years; their roots were completely infiltrated and surrounded with lily roots. The lily roots had also damaged the irrigation lines, which were dribbling uncontrolled amounts of water into the shared root zone. So when I excavated these roses, the whole area smelled strongly of rot, with visible mold throughout; the roots were fully wet even in the heat of August. The roses were also infested with blackspot, not surprisingly. I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was too little, too late.

But when they finally got some drainage, some direct sunlight, and some relief from the brutal root competition, they did start growing back, and even blooming. Come winter, I pruned hard, defoliated, and applied neem oil consistently. And they’ve made a comeback!

Source: these blooms are actually my roses.

They bloom, and they’re beautiful. They do this ombre thing, where the buds are bright yellow and as they open they go from yellow, to orange, and finally to red.

The growth is fairly vigorous, with no powdery mildew no matter how rainy it gets. But their foliage definitely suffers from blackspot, and occasional rose rust; the spores are probably ambiently present in the soil now, and they can’t quite seem to defend themselves, even with ample help from organic fungicides like neem oil.

They also have no fragrance. They smell like nothing. And that’s the standard modern garden rose in a nutshell, I think: beautiful color and form, shaky disease resistance, little fragrance. It’s a little sad, honestly.

Review: Okay, this one is really pretty, actually.

Interlude: Pesticides and the law of unintended consequences

So, yeah, you can sort of see how roses got a reputation for being picky divas. I can only imagine how bad this sort of thing must get in places that get (gasp!) rain or humidity in the summer.

Now, having created plants that are too disease-ridden to live, rose-lovers came up with practical and effective solutions to the disease problem they created. For the past century or so, the go-to fix for our increasingly disease-prone rose population has been chemicals: regular applications of synthetic insecticide and fungicide sprays, as well as plenty of fertilizer and herbicide to feed the roses and kill any competing weeds.

However, recall the theme of this post: the law of unintended consequences. In agriculture, the development of modern pesticides and fertilizers has been genuinely miraculous; the Green Revolution is estimated to have saved a billion people from starvation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Saving a billion people! Can you even begin to conceive of what it would be like to save a billion people, even grapple with the moral weight of that act? I know I can't; the number is simply too large for our moral intuitions to handle, I think. So I'm hesitant to bad-mouth pesticides and fertilizers too much.

But they do have massive downsides. Chemical fertilizers leach into the groundwater and cause algal blooms that make entire bodies of water go anoxic, rendering them uninhabitable to fish and the rest of the aquatic food chain. Insecticides are probably responsible for colony collapse, which endangers the pollinators that we rely on for our food supply.

And, well, even if you don't give a shit about the natural world - you are a part of the natural world. You are an animal, with all the frailty that implies. Our bodies use many of the same ancient metabolic pathways as insects and plants; the majority of your DNA is shared with a banana. And because you are an animal, it is very difficult indeed to create an insecticide that will poison other animals without poisoning you too, at least a little. Herbicides are somehow still worse, despite the more distant biological relationship between humans and dandelions: Roundup, for instance, is linked to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has led to Monsanto paying out massive legal settlements to cancer patients who used their products.

So if we can't grow roses without coating them in poison, maybe we should just… not do that? Go back to growing super-hardy nearly-wild roses like rugosas, forgoing forever the elegance and sublime color of a modern rose?

Give up this? ‘Glowing Peace’, Heirloom Roses

Not so fast! Maybe this technological problem has a technological solution. If we bred roses so that they sucked, maybe we should just not do that! Make different roses! Make roses that don't suck!

#6-#8, ‘Ebb Tide', 'Eden', and 'Lavender Crush': roses that don't suck

Over the last fifty years, people have become increasingly aware of the impacts of modern lifestyles upon our health and the health of the planet and its ecosystems. So maybe this has made the public less willing to buy roses that need to be treated constantly with toxic sprays. Or maybe it's just that growing disease-prone roses is an enormous pain in the ass. Spray, prune, spray, defoliate, fertilize, spray, fertilize, spray, water - but not too much! Oops, powdery mildew. Defoliate and spray some more.

So the genetic health of the newer varieties of garden roses is greatly improved. The two hybrid teas I struggled with above were bred in the 1960s. All the named rose varieties in this section were bred since the 1990s or later: Eden in 1997, Ebb Tide in 2004, and Lavender Crush, the baby of the group, was introduced in 2016. All of them are vibrantly healthy and quite vigorous; Ebb Tide and Eden are shade-tolerant too, and Lavender Crush is allegedly very winter-hardy. After a scant two months in the ground, they've started to put out flower buds. And they keep some of the glorious color and form of older roses. Look at them!

Source: Heirloom Roses.

I don't mean to say all 20th century roses are bad and disease-ridden. I also have purchased 'New Dawn' (introduced 1930), due to it being the fifteen-dollarest rose at the Home Depot. (My toxic trait is that I am an absolute sucker for a good deal. I don't go into TJ Maxx anymore; it's too dangerous.) 'New Dawn' has all the ancestral, throwback traits I laud here: shade-tolerance, fragrance, disease resistance. It even brings in the pollinators! But it seems to me there's been a noticeable uptick in the quality of newer rose introductions, particularly when it comes to disease resistance. I'm not wired into the professional rose world to know what that is; I'm Literally Just Some Guy. But it's a good trend.

Review: I am so excited for the buds to open, you have no idea.

#9: 'Double Knockout': the 'landscape' rose

Wait, no, I take that back. These roses have too much ease of care. Put some back.

The Knockout rose has one virtue: you cannot kill it with an axe. Literally.

This rose was planted right at the foot of a redwood tree in my garden, because the previous owner of my house was an idiot. This is a terrifically bad setup for roses and redwoods: redwoods acidify the soil, and suck up water and nutrients aggressively, leaving little for surrounding plants, and of course they provide dense shade. Roses hate the acid, the dry and low-nutrient soil, and the shade; this plant never bloomed all last summer. For their part, the redwoods hate having anything planted in their inner root zone - their roots are relatively shallow for such a large tree. This is not a good situation for anyone, so I hacked this rose back to the ground, dug out as much of the root ball as I dared, and in my naivete thought that would be the end of it. Well, it has grown back. Now I am faced with the dilemma of whether to risk root injury to my redwood tree, or just let the rose be, bloomless as it is. Probably the latter is better for the redwood tree, on the whole. Maybe it’ll get choked out if I don’t water it? Anyone’s guess, really.

The category of landscape roses is a 2000s invention. The first Knockout rose was introduced in 2000 after years of intensive selective breeding for being easy-care, free-flowering, and disease-resistant; the similar Drift line was the product of an amateur rose breeder in 2006 to much the same ends. Landscape roses are so named because instead of being demanding prima donnas suited only to those who love roses enough to take on the Rose Tasks, they’re just another pretty shrub in the landscape.

And I will say this for them: in that bad, fungal spore��inundated flower bed I mentioned, my landscape roses (plus Munstead Wood, see below) are notably free of fungal disease.

Also, I think that's leaf tissue proliferating at the center of the bottom left bloom?? A rare but harmless growth disorder of flowering plants.

This comes at a cost, of course, at least if you’re a snob like me. I don’t think landscape roses are very interesting-looking - though of course they come in a wide variety of colors, the better to coordinate with the color scheme of your house! - and they are generally, tragically, without fragrance. While I can’t complain about anything that gets US gardeners to use less pesticides, they are barely roses to me. They are, in fact, the closest roses come to being an inanimate object, a decorative thing you can just plonk down in your garden wherever, like a tacky concrete statue. They’re a commodity; the enchantment is gone. I wouldn’t rip them out where they’re well-sited, but I sure wouldn’t plant more.

Now, this is incredibly mean to people who love landscape roses, but here goes. I’m reminded of a thread from r/Ceanothus, the California native gardening subreddit, that is now burned into my brain. OP asks for a native shrub recommendation, but not just any native shrub. OP wants a native shrub that will grow very tall, but also stay very narrow - 1’ wide in places. OP needs a native shrub that will grow thick and vigorous, to block out their view of the neighbors. OP needs this thing to be evergreen; OP presumably wants low water inputs. And OP needs all this, in a shrub that will grow in full shade.

In fairness, OP was polite about it, and this is a common problem for urban gardeners. The dark, untended canyon between buildings is a very common phenomenon in Californian cities. I too have a narrow, shaded side yard containing a tiny strip of crappy, gravelly dirt, that I’d love to grow something in: how do you think I found this post? Dear reader, I am very much at that devil's sacrament.

And the ceanothusheads of r/Ceanothus tried gamely. But one commenter replied with something that fully changed how I think about gardening:

Source: Reddit

Sometimes, what you need is not a living organism, with its own needs, that will change over time in ways you may not endorse, that interacts with the world around it. Sometimes what you really want is a man-made object. Sometimes what you want to grow in your tall, narrow, lightless, bone-dry side yard, for your privacy requirements, is a fence. And that’s what I think about landscape roses. In Mediterranean and desert climates, as long as there's enough sun, you can always fall back on planting a succulent. But not every location can grow succulents outdoors year-round. In temperate climates, landscape roses could probably be successfully replaced with a particularly attractive boulder. Or, if what you want is a smart-looking, easy-care hedge: consider a fence.

Review: I’d maybe rather plant a fence a succulent.

#10: 'Munstead Wood': the old English rose, reloaded

‘Munstead Wood’, my final acquisition, is a credit to another major modern rose breeding program, this time out of England: David Austin Roses. The main idea of the David Austin rose-breeding project seems to be combining the particular charms of traditional English old garden roses - their fragrance, their romantic, sophisticated forms - with the virtues of modern roses - continuous blooming, a wide range of highly Instagrammable colors - plus disease-tolerance that twenty-first century gardeners now expect. And judging by their singular impact on the contemporary rose market, they seem to have been very successful at that goal. The Reddit reviews are glowing, the forums are abuzz for their hottest new releases (Dannahue restock wen?), their most popular roses are often sold out, and other rose sellers have catalog filters for 'English shrub roses' that allegedly share the looks and fragrance of David Austin's best.

From the author's camera roll. 'I can't believe it's not Dave [sic] Austin!'

Their marketing is also very slick. Their website is very informative, with separate filters for various kinds of roses you might want to buy ('Best for fragrance', 'For a shady spot', 'Thornless or nearly so'), all the rose varieties have literary or historical names or else are named after charming British locations, and are all beautifully photographed in their idyllic show garden, and the prose is carefully engineered to incite lust in the winter-weary gardener. They even do periodic drops of new roses, like a sneaker company.

So last November, I allowed myself to buy one David Austin rose, 'Munstead Wood'.

Source: David Austin Roses

'Munstead Wood' is really gorgeous, I think, blooming in a deep burgundy color. The website claims the fragrance is "Old Rose, with fruity notes of blackberry, blueberry and damson".

An interesting fact about 'Munstead Wood' is that it is actually region-locked. David Austin Roses sells roses in both the US and UK (and maybe other places; sorry I am so American), but the climate of the UK has been changing, with more extreme weather events and even more rain. And you know how it is with roses and the rain. 'Munstead Wood' was no longer able to thrive, and has packed up its little rucksack and gone out to explore the world as a lone vagabond - specifically, America.

So how is it doing here? Great, actually. It may have been rained on every day for the past week, but at least it's not in England, I guess.

'Munstead Wood' has no fungal disease. It looks like it's never even heard of fungal disease. I'm pretty impressed! I can't actually tell you whether the roses are good, but this is a pretty good plant, which is a good start.

Review: I'm holding myself back from buying more David Austin roses right now. God help me, I have two more open full- to part-sun spots in my garden right now.

David Austin, "Lady of Shalott". Call me the Lady of Shalott the way I'm languishing in my tower, gazing only at the mere reflections of the real world (stuck inside, looking at my phone, because of the rain) and am about to throw myself in the river with longing (to be out in the garden)

#this was mostly written like a week and a half ago #delighted to report it has now stopped raining :)#gardening #plantblr #roses #botany #...kind of. not a botanist i just like reading about it #longpost #original content #(i hesitate to call this an 'effortpost': aside from spending an hour on wikipedia trying to graph out the various old garden roses #and their relationships with the species roses that spawned them - it just kind of happened.)

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tkaulitzlvr · 2 years ago

Text

SORRY - T. KAULITZ

synopsis: you were drinking your sorrows away after yours and tom’s breakup, receiving unwanted attention at the random club you are at, until the last person you expected to see comes to your rescue.

content: angst + smut

a/n: again pulled this out of my ass this is becoming a very common theme LOL. this isn’t what i wanted to post but it’s been a week since i last put anything out so i threw it together, def not my best work and i feel like all i write is angst to smut whoops, hope u all enjoy anyway and thank u for 500 followers!!

the alcohol soon takes over as i down another shot, the liquid burns my throat and only fuels my recklessness. not that i mind, in fact, it is exactly what i need. tonight i don’t want to feel - tired of the everlasting burden of my emotions. i want to be numb, nothing but an empty vessel, letting the alcohol lead the way opposed to my diseased mind. music blares through the speakers, probably loud enough to cause some serious damage to my eardrums. but i don’t know how long i have been at this club for, though it is long enough for my hearing to become accustomed to the thick bass pulsating through my body, no longer wincing whenever i would near the speakers.

intoxicated bodies encircle me whilst i make my way to the centre, some just like me - alone and drinking away their self pity. others dance with their friends, slurred giggles leaving their lips as they sloppily sway their hips to the music, covered in nothing besides their skimpy dresses. those that i envy don’t dance alone, but with a man beside them, hands on their body, faces inches apart. they are able to focus on the one person in front of them, tuning out the hundreds of people surrounding them. but, each person that i see all have one thing in common - they fit in. and i want that too, so bad, instead of feeling so misplaced - that feeling ripe within me, apparent ever since he left.

everyone knew about tom and i’s breakup, hell, how could they not? ‘germany’s biggest heartthrob - tokio hotel guitarist tom kaulitz, parts with model girlfriend after two years!’ - that’s a headline most reporters dream of, christmas having come early for them when the news came out. and it spread like wildfire, his fans - who were particularly notorious for not being entirely fond of tom finding a long term girlfriend - had hit the jackpot. they speculated, some saying that i cheated on him, some insistent on me being too controlling - others even going as far as to say i made him choose between me and the band. but when it came down to it, they were just rumours, plain and simple. no one is aware of the true reasoning behind it - only the two of us knew why we parted.

it was a mutual agreement, yet tom was the one that initiated it. the distance inevitably put between us as a result of him travelling on tours, from continent to continent, state to state, meant that we rarely saw each other, this putting stress on the both of us. i wanted us to work, more than anything, yet the way we drifted apart from each other made it impossible, being with him feeling like a chore as every small disagreement would blow way out of proportion, usually fixed by sex, the cycle repeating for the last few weeks of our relationship, until it reached breaking point. and i didn’t want to be used for my body, though i knew deep down tom loved me for more than that, fixing our problems with physical intimacy was only a temporary solution - leading to us parting ways.

that was one reason for our breakup, however the other was far more serious, and tom wasn’t even aware of it - but i had been speculating for a while. with his frequent travelling, i knew that i wasn’t the only girl in his life. how could i have been? he would go without seeing me for weeks, and whilst he had changed past his womanising ways, it would be stupidly naïve of me to think that he had moved on from that lifestyle completely. or perhaps my mind was tricking me, the loneliness i was often left to increasing the paranoia. though he had never explicitly given me the impression he was cheating, the thought always nagged in my mind, making the breakup slightly easier once he announced that we were no longer working. he promised that he still loved me, that maybe in the future things would work out, but i knew that was just a way to make our separation less bitter.

the constant articles, pictures, videos, and speculations of tom with other women each week lead me to the present, drinking my sorrows away a month after our breakup, wishing that i had never let him go despite agreeing that us parting ways would be the best solution. i was tired too, sick of fighting for a relationship that was no longer there. sometimes it felt utterly one sided, like i was the only one willing to try. tom refused to admit this, reminding me that "i know how much he loves me". however we just didn’t work anymore, his claims of our love like empty spews of desperation, but any words uttered from his beautiful mouth were words of truth to me, until i came to the soul-crushing realisation that he doesn’t adore me the way he did when we first met, all those years ago.

but god, every time i see pictures of him with a girl that isn't me, my heart wrenches at the sight, slowly tearing my insides apart as i recognise letting him go as my deepest regret. and the anger at not only myself, but him for leaving me eats me up, alcohol and temporary fixes being the only thing that can put my ill mind at ease.

but tonight tom isn’t on my mind. i’m desperate, longing for the touch of anyone who will give me the attention. that is why i left the house wearing nothing but a tight black dress that barely passed my mid-thighs. tom would never let me leave the house in such an outfit alone. he was always over-protective over me, loving the idea that I was his and only his. however he had left me, and i don’t care how promiscuous i appear, because admittedly, i am more needy than ever. my body running way ahead of my mind, i move sloppily to the rhythm of the music, feeling two hands grab my waist gently, pulling me into them as i turn around, seeing a tall-ish guy with fluffy blonde hair smirking down me.

he wasn’t tom. he could never be tom. nobody could. not a single person on this earth could even come close to him, could make me feel the way he did, both mentally and physically. right now it doesn’t matter, i don’t care who he is, because, on the surface, he is a male giving me attention, something which i have craved over this last month of loneliness.

"hi there." I utter drunkenly, slurring my words and backing further into him, the alcohol sinking more and more into my system as i no longer care who is dancing with me, this being the first time i have experienced physical touch since tom. and oh god how i’ve missed it. i’m a mess; a desperate, foolish fucking mess. if tom could see me right now, he wouldn’t recognise me. hell, i don't even know who i am anymore - in all honesty i had lost every part of what i thought i was the second he had walked out of the door. somehow, through the alcohol and attractive man behind me, tom is all my mind can focus on - his body the only clear image in there, beyond the fuzziness from the alcohol. i utterly despise the way he has such an effect on me, knowing that he has already gotten over our relationship despite the years we spent together, even before we had started dating, we had been close friends. using all the strength within me, i drown out every thought of him, attempting to enjoy the bitter-sweet freedom and get over him.

"what's your name beautiful?" the mysterious guy shouts over the crowd, tightening his grip on my waist.

"doesn’t matter." i reply. honestly, it didn’t - i probably won’t see this guy ever again, not after fucking him anyway. in any other circumstance, i would be scolding myself for giving myself up so easily, selling myself like some cheap slut. now though, i’m no longer myself, turning to face him, latching my arms around his neck. "what's yours?"

"alex." he responds, clearly not looking to make conversation, his dick appearing to be doing all the talking. "do you wanna get out of here?" he signals to the door, my head nodding eagerly in response, craving for any intimate moment no matter who it is with. part of me convinces myself that i am with tom, that it is him i am leaving the club with, as i would every single time. i imagine that it is him holding me with such adoration, that it is him soothing me in every way possible, yet i know that he is never coming back.

my body pushes its way through the crowd, uttering broken excuse me’s as i walk by, legs becoming weaker by the second as my vision slowly blurs. i soon pick up on the reality of the situation, disgust and shame echoing within me as i realise how fucked up my mind truly is. i am about to have sex with a guy who I have never met before - whether or not tom had broken my heart, i deserved to have morals. the rationality ticking in by the second, i roughly pull out of alex's grasp, his tall frame turning around in confusion.

"i- i have to get to my friends." i lie, totally aware that i came here alone, my words barely audible as my breathing becomes uneven.

"no, come with me, don't be like this baby." he smiles, pulling me along with him, tears soon clouding my vision as the chances of me escaping the situation seem to slip through my fingers before i can gather any sense of what is happening.

"let me go!" i muster all the courage and strength within me and yank my arm away, stumbling backwards into the cold brick wall behind me, the harshness causing me to shiver as i bite the inside of my mouth, praying for something, anything, to take me out of this situation. alex nears towards me, our faces inches apart as he towers over me, my body weak and defenceless against his.

"stop being such a bratty fucking bitch and just come with me-" he begins, grabbing ahold of my arm, only to be pushed to the floor in a matter of seconds, my head looking upwards in confusion to be met with a face i dreaded and longed to see at the same time.

"fuck off!" tom begins, squaring up to alex, who is useless against him, the height difference almost humorous. if i hadn’t been scared for my life seconds prior, i probably would’ve laughed, though the only thing i am truly able to process is the confusion that soon replaces any fear within me. "you ever go near my girl again and i'll break your fucking jaw. you understand, hm?" he shouts, alex smiling to himself and walking away, clearly not looking for a fight, though his cold glare moments ago said otherwise. his girl. i am everything but, closer to being the complete opposite, though i am too startled to consider questioning his words right now.

my body refuses to move, paralysed in utter shock, wondering whether the alcohol is causing me to hallucinate. i hadn’t seen tom since the day i moved out of his house, and now he is standing in front of me. and fuck, he looks good. it doesn’t matter that it has only been a month, somehow he seems to look much better, and undeniably different. his hair, usually a dark shade of blonde, the thick locks tied into a ponytail, adorned with whatever cap matched his outfit, is changed, almost so drastically it is hard to recognise him. instead, jet black braids rest on his shoulders, the colour mirroring his entire outfit - dark and cold. his cap is replaced with a small bandana, fitted securely around his forehead, the silver piercing on his lips now just as dark as his hair, matte black, making the soft shade of pink on his lips stand out even more.

though his new look is certainly a shock, the more daunting realisation comes merely from his presence. he is here - standing inches away from me. i am unable to gauge his next move, his expression still just as harsh as it had been once he had threatened that guy. however, any doubts i have are quickly put to bed, his tensed frame nearing mine, planting a calloused hand on my shoulder before pulling me into a tight hug, his thumb caressing my lower back whilst his other hand rests in my hair. i sob into his chest, failing pathetically to hide my emotions as i cling on to him, my small frame shaking due to the cold berlin weather and my irrational state.

"i’m so sorry." he mutters, resting his head on top of mine. i cannot respond, choking on my tears and unable to do anything but hold onto him as if he may slip away. my vision is slowly blurring, the countless drinks i had making their appearance as i realise how badly i have fucked up by coming here. beyond my intoxicated state, i realise that i don’t want to be this close to tom. i long to scream at the top of my lungs, something about how he made me feel, how fucked up he is, and how much i hate him, but right now i am too shaken to even stand up alone, so i save my breath and prepare to spew my feelings out when i have the energy.

"we need to get you home." he mutters, pulling away after a couple minutes. i stare into his eyes for the first time since we broke up, his immediately filling with hurt once he registers my damaged expression. "god, this is all my fault." he whispers under his breath, guiding me to his car, grabbing his jacket that he always kept in the back for instances like this, knowing that i get cold easily. it brings me some comfort knowing that he kept the jacket there, though it probably means nothing. he places it gently over my shivering frame before climbing into the driver’s side and beginning to drive to my apartment. the house that tom and i shared was in his name, meaning that i insisted on moving out. despite us breaking up, he helped me find a place, a decent sized two bedroom apartment in the heart of berlin. though it wasn't nearly as perfect as our home, it was something, and i am grateful for it.

i face away from him, not willing to forgive him despite my vulnerable state just moments before. no matter how much he protected me just then, i can’t place my trust in him, my heart and mind still wary, the thought of him discarding me for other girls so nonchalantly after we parted fresh in my mind.

"i missed you." he announces into the empty silence, his head turning in my direction whilst i scoff in response. "don't lie to me tom." his words bring anger coursing through my veins the second they utter from his mouth, sobriety soon taking over me as the alcohol quickly wares off. if he missed me, he wouldn't have fucked every girl he has seen this past month, he would have come back, or better yet, he wouldn’t have left me in the first place.

"i'm telling the truth." he begins, hesitantly turning his gaze to meet mine, my eyes filling with tears before i can attempt to collect my composure. "i regret leaving you. i need you to-"

"do you have any fucking idea what you did to me? i haven't been eating, sleeping, you've just seen me almost have sex with a guy i'd barely known for five minutes for gods sake!" i shout, my voice breaking as the tears cascade inevitably down my cheeks, unable to hide my vulnerability in this moment. he winces slightly at the mention of me nearly sleeping with alex, his grip on the wheel increasing whilst his jaw is clenched.

he is hurt. i have known him long enough to be able to distinguish how he is feeling without him saying a word. the pained look on his face almost pleases me, glad to see him guilty over the emotional turmoil he has caused me, because i long for him to grasp even a small segment of how i feel, and my small outburst has definitely achieved that.

"i’m sorry. i never deserved you, now even less than ever. i fucked up, badly. i have no idea how to make it up to you. help me, please schatz. i want to be better, for you." he finishes, pulling into his driveway as the dark grey gates open, revealing the house that i share so many memories in, yet it feels strangely foreign, like i don’t belong here, and i never did.

"sure doesn't seem like it." i begin. "from everything i've seen online you seem to have gotten over me pretty fast. thought you were better than meaningless sex, but i guess not. same old tom." i scoff, shaking my head in disbelief of his empty words.

"what are you talking about? i haven't had sex with anyone. not since you anyway." he fires back, staring into my eyes, and for some reason, i don't think he is lying, the amount of time spent with him across my life meaning i can read him like a book.

"whatever, i don’t have the fucking energy for this. besides, you said you were taking my home. this isn’t my house anymore, incase you fucking forgot.” i state matter-of-factly, not in the mood for continuing this conversation, or even being around him.

"you can barely walk. no way was i leaving you to go home alone. you can spend the night here." he replies assertively, stepping out of the car as i do the same, slamming the door shut in frustration.

"you don't have to protect me tom. we aren't together anymore." i respond bitterly, looking down at the ground, wishing it would swallow me up. his hand gently grazes mine, testing his limits as he attempts to take his hand in mine, to which i quickly refuse, pulling away and looking at him in confusion.

"what are you doing?" i hiss, looking upwards as he puts his hands up, surrendering.

"sorry just, please come inside, you're freezing in that tiny dress." not having the energy to argue, i reluctantly sigh, following him inside, taking in the all too familiar surroundings and immediately reminiscing on all the memories i have here, longing to go back to the time when things weren't so complicated.

"look i-" tom begins, however his words are soon shortened to a stop as i quickly cut him off, lethargic and carrying a lack of effort to argue with him, because i know that no matter how long i let him speak, the conversation will only end badly, turning even more sour than it already is right now.

"i'm tired, please can we talk about this in the morning." i sigh, my head pounding as i groan out in pain, massaging my temples slowly and closing my eyes.

"okay, you take our- my bed and i'll sleep in the guest room. there's some of my hoodies in there for you to sleep in." he responds, a look of defeat evident among his complexion, relief coursing through me as i nod my head, walking up to his bedroom. the countless nights i spent in this room, wrapped in his arms, the countless mornings i woke up to his affection, the countless evenings we shared intimate moments all seem to be lost as i feel a stranger here, almost misplaced without a sense of belonging.

i open the wardrobe, immediately knowing which door has his hoodies from when i would often steal one, something he is used to me doing. i pick out my favourite one. it is simple - a white hoodie with writing printed across its front. to others, it holds little meaning, however even after our breakup, it holds thousands of memories, because it is what he wore when we had our first kiss, and the first piece of clothing he ever gave me, this small act something i won’t ever be able to forget. slipping my dress off and the hoodie over my head, his scent quickly envelops me, providing with all the security i have been longing for, my mind quickly breaking down as tears cloud my vision, my desire to have him holding me taking over as i wish that we would have never parted.

climbing into the soft sheets, i attempt to fall asleep, any element of lethargy in my body fading away as i crave to be in tom’s arms like i have been each time i have laid in this bed. his side is cold and empty, my body shuffling over to it as i snuggle into his pillow, reaching out pathetically to any remnant of him i have left. seconds feel like hours of me thinking of him, wondering if he cares anywhere close to the extent that i do, finding myself longing to take a small look inside his mind, because all i want is his love. the darkness encloses me, silence echoing throughout the empty house and only fuelling my wandering mind. every thought flashes back to him, and i loathe how he can consume my entire being without even being aware of the effect he has on me.

eventually, my eyes begin to droop, almost falling into a somewhat peaceful slumber, however before i can do so, the door creaks open, light from the hallway leaking into the bedroom, before it is cast out seconds later with the soft click of the door closing, footsteps nearing the bed as i feel it dip beside me. my body is afraid to move, instead laying still in confusion until i feel a single hand brush against my shoulder, causing me to whip my head around, tom’s eyes gazing into mine.

‘i can't do it." he mutters, scanning my eyes with his own, only the seas of brown are filled with sorrow, slightly distinguishable through the darkness.

as much as i want to tell him to leave, to scold him for disturbing me when i was finally close to falling asleep, i simply can’t. i am compelled to him, silently thanking his impulsiveness and finding myself pleading for us to work things out.

"can't do what?" i respond, laying on my side and facing him, our bodies at each side of the bed as he is slightly reluctant to push my boundaries.

"live without you, i can't do it. i need you." he replies, slowly reaching his hand out until it meets mine, his fingers clasping mine in the centre of the bed, this small act of physical affection being the only thing that binds us together, yet it is more than enough.

"you broke me tom." i whisper, blinking away the tears as i refuse to cry again, tired of being so vulnerable around him. “do you realise that?”

"i know, and i’m so sorry schatz. i’ll never be able to make that up to you. but i want to try, can you let me do that? please baby." his body slowly nears mine, until our faces are inches apart. he removes his hand from mine, my face falling in disappointment, however this quickly turns into curiosity as it moves only to reach up and caress my cheek, wiping the single tear that had fallen with his thumb. i wither helplessly into his touch, feeling completely and utterly trapped within his affection. i am bound to him, left hopeless and attached. no matter how much i try fight, it is useless, my body and my mind is unable to function without him.

"it’s only you schatz." he mutters, his face nearing mine as he captures my lips in a sweet kiss, the first one we have shared in over a month. the way his lips fit so perfectly with mine, their softness contrasting with the harshness he showed me all those weeks ago, makes me wonder how i managed to live without this feeling all this time. he is a drug, his kisses addictive as i find myself longing for more, desperate to make up for the lost intimacy as a result of our separation.

"i love you." he whispers against my lips, reattaching them almost immediately with even more desire than before, sealing every unspoken apology in the most beautiful way possible. the darkness between us is a barrier, preventing my vision from witnessing the man above me. tom reaches quickly to flip the bedside lamp on, faded yellow light leaking dimly around the room, illuminating his features as i can finally see every part of him. and oh god, is he perfect. his lips plump and parted, tinted with a rosy shade of pink, adorned with that same piercing that drives me crazy each and every time, tired and shaky breaths erupting from them whilst i stare into his eyes, deep pools of brown that i could get lost in if i look for too long.

his body. crafted by god himself - concrete proof that he really does have favourites. each inch of skin soft and sheen, resembling silk itself whilst my fingers slowly trail down it, melting into the pale surface , past his chest to his chiselled abs, gently grazing the muscle and refusing to break eye contact. my hand creeps lower and lower, tom becoming increasingly flustered until they reach the waistband of his boxers. at an agonisingly slow pace, my finger slips inside, fiddling with the waistband whilst touching the skin there, refusing to move my hand any lower whilst i take in tom’s expression. his eyes are flickering between being fully closed and half-lidded, barely noticeable wrinkles lining his forehead as his eyebrows knit together, lips parted with shaky breaths uttering from them, the cold air fanning onto my face, heavy against his warm kiss.

"fuck- please don't tease." he whispers, resting his forehead against mine and beginning to slowly kiss my lips once again, my body feeling full again as i soon realise how much i missed this feeling. complying with his plea, my hand slips further into his boxers, a choked breath muffling into my mouth as i begin to gently move my hand up and down. he struggles to kiss back, soft moans escaping from his lips and mixing into mine in the most delightful way possible as i pick up the pace.

"oh my god..." he trails off, his voice vibrating into the soft skin below my ear once his head falls just below it, my movements not slowing, the slight whines emitting from his mouth pushing me further, desperate to please him. the fast and sloppy kisses being placed onto my neck soon slow down, giving me the signal that he is close. he clutches onto my waist, his fingers running up and down whilst his legs slightly tremble, his release taking over as he lets out a loud groan, a string of curses following until he slips his boxers off, regaining his composure and climbing fully on top of me.

our faces are inches apart, my ragged breathing echoing my desperation to feel him inside me, because it has been so long since i have experienced the feeling, and it is like no other. his thumb runs along my lips, pulling the bottom one downward slowly and releasing it, before moving his head to the nape of my neck, placing slow and gentle kisses.

"you have no idea what i want to do to you schatz." he mutters against my skin, nipping at it gently, these words alone almost being enough to let go, to lose any remnant of composure i have and allow him to take me right there and then. his calloused hands reach for the large hoodie draped over my frame, pulling it over my head as i am almost completely naked, my underwear being the only barrier between us and exercising those silent promises of our love on the tips of our tongues.

"so perfect." he whispers, caressing my cheek lightly. pressing himself against me, his hand reaches to caress my now exposed breast, kissing and biting at any skin he can get access to, inaudible spews of satisfaction swallowing the silence surrounding us, my hands pushing his head further downwards ever so slightly, savouring the pleasure and wishing it would last forever. he slowly pulls away, maintaining eye contact as he reaches for my panties, swiftly tugging them downward and discarding them somewhere across the room, like the rest of our clothing.

skin to skin, the warm and bare air a mirror to our nakedness, we kiss with such hunger, such desire that our need for each other is palpable, so strong that i swear if i tried, i could feel it. because he is that love, his body living and breathing evidence that this love is real, not something that can only be felt inside, though the fire that his touch ignites within me is one that will burn forever, as long as he vows to supply the heat that is his affection. my hands clutch onto his back, his roaming my waist and pushing our hips into each other, ragged breaths echoing throughout the room as i find myself becoming too impatient. although part of me wants to savour this moment as it is our first special one in over a month, one part of me, the more irrational side, wants him to ruin me, wants him to claim me as his own and do whatever his heart desires. i am his to destroy, because if it means that i can be with him for eternity, then i am willing to do anything.

"tom…i need you." i whisper helplessly against his lips, no longer able to mask my hunger.

he places one final kiss to my lips, stroking my hair gently and positioning himself to my entrance. my eyes squeeze shut in anticipation, relishing this feeling and preparing for the intense pleasure that i have been so empty without.

“then i’m all yours.” he speaks softly, sliding into me slowly before i am able to repeat my desperate plea. because if i tried, i know that my speech would be inaudible, struggling to breathe at the feeling of him filling me up.

unaccustomed to his size, or any dick for the last month, i wince in pain before he is even halfway in, gripping his bicep and giving him the signal to stop. "wait a minute." i state breathlessly, biting down on my lip as he stops his motion, gently stroking my cheek with his palm and awaiting my permission to carry on. feeling him stretch my walls fills the hole within me, once hollow and empty, however the pain takes longer to subside, tom slowly biting and kissing the sensitive skin on my jaw whilst he waits.

"c’mon baby, you can take it." he mumbles against me, the raspiness within his voice vibrating up my spine, motivating me to tune out the pain and allow him to pleasure me. "okay." i whisper, pleasure soon starting to take over as he moves into me, stopping and throwing his head back as he bottoms out, his tip hitting my g-spot perfectly, this being enough for me to cry out, my screams echoing throughout the room, the air thick with passion. his eyes are screwed shut, sweat lining along his forehead, his breathing ragged and uneven, yet he only increases his stamina, picking my leg up and placing it over his shoulder.

the new angle sends me into euphoria, my vision turning white as i can do nothing but scream his name, my fingers raking down his back. he memorises the way he hits my g-spot, doing it over and over again, bringing me closer to my release, yet i can tell he is not there yet, prompting me to hold it so i can share my high with him.

"fuck me..." his voice trails off, his eyebrows furrowing as he savours the pleasure. my legs wrap around his waist, bringing him closer inwards, if that is physically possible. somehow he is still going, not showing any signs of lethargy. he is desperate to meet his release, hips snapping against mine with such intensity, his head buried in the crook of my neck, the incoherent groans escaping from his mouth fanning over the bare skin, sending shivers down my spine.

"tom i'm so close!" i moan, knowing that i will not last much longer. i do not know if it is the absence of sexual intimacy in my life recently, or my intense desire for him, but this time around, my ability to contain myself is long gone.

"i know baby, i know..." he sighs out, the feeling him twitching inside of me silently letting me know that he is almost there too. "just hold it for me." overstimulation soon takes over, the feeling of him moving in and out of me providing me with such overwhelming pleasure that my mouth gapes open, no sound escaping as i am utterly speechless, drunk on the sensation and a complete mess beneath him. i could cry at the feeling, on the verge of tears with each stroke, wondering how this moment is reality, seeming entirely too good to be true.

"okay baby, let go." he breathes out, his voice shaky as it is soon cut off with a choked moan, his load shooting into me as mine soon follows. i swear i can see stars, my eyes not able to stay still, my whole body the same as it trembles uncontrollably, tom’s slow and steady thrusts sending me into oblivion as he rides out our highs, his lips hovering over mine. "oh my god" is all he can say, still inside me, his mouth eventually moulding with mine, the kiss filled with so much energy despite the amount of stamina that was used just seconds before.

i am not done yet, my body feeling like it has just started as i have the motivation to go one thousands times over, addicted to the way he feels. "let me be on top." i mutter against his lips, the pillowy skin battling to try continue kissing me. in one swift motion, he flips us over, moving upwards so that his back is resting against the headboard, his hands placed steadily on my waist whilst i sit on top of him. i waste no time, hovering over him and sliding downwards, letting him fill me up and sighing loudly as i do, tom tightening his hold on me and muttering a slow ‘jesus christ’, his voice low, words as sweet as honey as they sound from the back of his throat.

pressing open mouthed kisses against my jaw, neck, collarbone, anywhere he is able to access, he groans out in pleasure, his hands remaining steadily on my hips whilst i easily maintain my rhythm. with a slight change in the movement of my hips, his tip presses against my g-spot, the friction causing me to cry out, him doing the same as his head falls backwards, eyes squeezing shut, savouring the ecstasy. my hands lay flat against his chest, watching it heave up and down with each unsteady breath he takes, his muscles flexing with each squeeze of my waist, this only encouraging me to go further, the sight of him being pleasured by me almost pushing me to my release alone.

the feeling so good i question whether i have reached heaven itself, though my actions won’t get me anywhere near, my mind wanders how i survived for so long without him, without his dick inside me, without his hands on mine - because right now he is my oxygen, my sole purpose. i can barely catch my breath, my legs shaking uncontrollably whilst my hips circle around his, feeling every inch of him inside of me. my body leans forward, skin to skin, as i bite down on his shoulder, becoming increasingly tired, however i am so desperate for my release that i continue my slow and lethargic movements.

tom is quick to pick up on my change in speed, grabbing my hips once again and angling himself correctly, before thrusting into me from below, the sudden pressure causing a throaty moan to escape from my swollen lips.

"fuck…missed this, missed you so much baby." he mutters, his whole body tensing for a second whilst he begins to twitch inside of me.

"i’m close." he groans, meeting my lips in a sloppy kiss before i can respond. i don’t even bother trying to hold it, instead allowing my release to take over me, my vision turning white as i cling onto tom’s shoulders, my head buried in the crook of his neck, crying out in pleasure as it is so intense i almost feel myself slip away. his release soon follows, mouth gaping open, eyebrows furrowing and sweat glistening his chiselled frame, outlining his muscle in the most attractive way possible. he still strokes in and out of me slowly, his hands wrapped around my small frame, no space between us. my breathing ragged, hair a mess and body trembling, i pull away from his shoulder to look into his eyes, pressing my forehead against his as i can do nothing but admire him.

“shit- i love you so much." he manages to breathe out, moving a few stray hairs from my face and planting a last kiss on my forehead, slowly pulling out of me, the loss of contact making me whine slightly as i cling onto him, afraid of losing him ever again.

"i love you too." i respond, certainty uttering from every word as i find myself more in love with him, the best sex we have ever had replaying over and over again in my memory, our naked bodies pressed together.

"i promise you, i never slept with anyone else. i never even kissed another girl. i couldn't, it wouldn't have been right, not when you were the only person on my mind." he speaks slowly yet firmly after a few seconds of peaceful silence, pulling my body further onto his as he rests his forehead against mine, stroking my hair gently.

i move my head upwards, my eyebrows furrowing in confusion. "why not? there's so many girls that you could've had. what was stopping you?" i ask, lacing my hand with his and beginning to play with his fingers, the skin soft and smooth.

"the fact that they weren't you." he responds, gently lifting my chin upwards with his pointer finger, tenderly running his thumb along my cheek. "i never got over you. i hope you know that."

deciding that actions speak louder than words in this instance, i place my lips on his, sealing our love with a sweet kiss as he instantly kisses back, laying downwards flat against the bed whilst i am still on top of him. i slowly pull away, my entire body aching, eyes fluttering shut as a tired yawn escapes from my mouth. tom reaches over to turn the lamp off, laying down beside me and opening his arms out, my head resting on his chest, his thumb running comfortingly up and down my arm. "goodnight meine liebe." he whispers, my throat sore from our rendezvous, so i place a quick kiss on his chest in response, my eyes falling shut as sleep takes me. our legs entangled, bodies together, heartbeats aligned, i feel him now more than ever. not just physically, but i feel him mentally, spiritually, our mind and being merged together as one.

requests are open! keep sending them in!!

#tom kaulitz #kaulitz twins #tokiohotel #tom kaulitz x reader #tom kaulitz smut #tomkaulitz #tom kaulitz angst #kaulitz #tom kaulitz fluff #bill kaulitz

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a-student-out-of-time · 3 months ago

Text

More Real Talk

Hey everyone. Mod Bubbles here.

I'm not gonna beat around the bush here: you all know what's going on, you've all heard about it, you don't need me to tell you about it. You've heard about it and you're gonna hear about it a lot these next four years.

I don't want to talk about that. Instead, I wanna address something else that, on a personal level, I believe is a lot more serious but a lot easier to grapple with.

You wanna know what I believe is the biggest problem we're dealing with these days? You can point to a lot of things, but at the core, they all have the same root to them.

Hopelessness.

Yeah, a DR blog talking about hope, how crazy is that?

But in all seriousness, it's at the core of every argument, every political discussion, every post I see made about not just the near future, but the long term as well. It's always the same points about neo-fascism, climate change, wars, cyberpunk dystopias, and global extinction. Very few people today seem to have any faith that the world can be better.

And I can't say I blame them. I was there too once, when I was a teenager. I lived in constant fear of the future, worried about what it means for me, and I'd get trapped in doomscrolling cycles. I'd lay awake at night and cry my eyes out. Yet I'm still here, on the cusp of turning 30, and I'm at a better point in my life than I've ever been.

Fear and desperation are ultimately useful, but they can be self-destructive. They can prevent you from seeing the truth and make you ironically vulnerable to the ones you should be most afraid of.

Why do people join cults or militias or vote for bad politicians? Are they all just stupid or evil? Sure, some may be, but most are just desperate, afraid and don't understand how the world really works. They need a helping hand with deprogramming what they were told.

Here's the facts:

We've already beaten climate change's worst predictions and the changes we've made can be reversed.

Plastic pollution in the oceans is being cleaned up.

Conservation success stories just keep coming.

More people are living better lives nowadays, with lower rates of child morality, starvation, crime, preventable diseases, even bullying rates have declined.

The Green Energy Revolution is here and nothing is going to stop it.

New advancements in materials science are on the way and will revolutionize everything from construction to manufacturing to space exploration.

I say all this because the ultimate source of hope is knowledge. Yes, you can open yourself up to a lot of dark avenues when you start learning about the world, but you'll also learn how much good there is out there being done.

This isn't a distraction, it's how I help people understand that the world can always be better and that just one person being in power will not change that.

Now, I know what you may say to that. I've seen posts about how the internet is going to be censored, that propaganda spread everywhere, that there'll be concentration camps, the constitution will be ripped up, etc.

And to that, I have to be honest: I've already heard it all before.

The things you're worried about today? I was worried about them in 2009 during the Great Recession. People worried about them in 2005 when Bush was re-elected, and the concerns there also included terrorism. Do we even still talk about Al-Qaeda? Not really!

And misinformation in this age has always been a problem, especially on the big sites. These are old problems brought to the forefront, and it's always been important to learn the skills to spot them.

More importantly, all this assumes the administration would actually be able to implement any of their promises. Every administration does that and few of the truly big ones about change have happened, especially because said promises ran counter to reality within the system.

I'm not trying to downplay any concerns about the situation, I promise. It's okay to be sad, scared, and concerned about peoples' safety. It's okay to cry if you need to. What you should not do is give up just because of all this.

I'm going to sound very harsh for a moment, but I need to say it: by being doomerist and defeatist, you're part of the problem. You not only stop helping, you run the risk of discouraging other people from trying because you believe it's pointless. When you succumb to pessimistic nihilism, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy that only rewards those who benefit from your inaction or your death.

Don't do that to people. Don't do that to yourself.

The world gets better when you first believe it can be better. How do you do that?

Well, I can't speak for everyone, but here's some suggestions that I'm sticking to:

Live daily life. Get up, eat, stay hydrated, take your medication, bathe, dress comfortably, listen to music, watch a movie, clean your home, play a game, hang out with friends, just do things that make you happy. As you should always do.

Stop looking at doomer posts. It literally does not help with anything and they are not credible sources of information just because they're cynical.

Do not let go of your ambitions. Always have a dream or a goal in mind, no matter what it is, and always aim for it. It's never stupid, it's never too late, it's something you aspire to and that's really awesome.

Stop looking for enemies. There are more important things to devote your time to than arguing over inane bullshit on the internet. That's been true since the start.

Be kind to people. Let go of whatever anger and resentment you may have for people, try to make new friends, and recognize when you can help someone else in need. Sometimes it's as simple as letting them know you care.

Be kind to yourself. You are not a failure, you're not a burden, you're not a lost cause, you can always improve as long as you're alive.

Remove toxicity from your life. Cut out bad influences and replace them with better things. If you have to leave a toxic environment, you can work on doing so.

Always learn new things. It's really fun to end the day with a new piece of knowledge you didn't have the day before.

Let yourself feel. Are you angry? Sad? Scared? Worried? Let yourself feel it, and then you can move on. Don't bury an emotion or let it stagnate.

Learn to recognize bad faith posts/misinformation. This is a critical skill to possess and one you need to always pass on to others. Not everyone who posts it is evil, sometimes all they need is a simple correction on a matter and the situation will be resolved.

Clown on Evil. Whenever people want you to fear them or take them seriously, you mock them, make memes about them, treat them as a joke and defuse whatever power they try to have.

Be true to yourself. Above all, don't let the next 4 years turn you into something you're not.

I say all this as someone who's been around longer than a lot of people who follow me: your future is not empty. I wished I'd done years ago everything I'm doing now, but I've decided I'd rather do them than spend the rest of my life lamenting and wondering what might've been.

You can spend years convincing yourself there is no future, and then the future arrives and you have no idea what to do anymore.

Change- actual change- starts from below and works its way up. And no matter how much life beats you down, no matter what's on TV or what the future may hold, you can always choose to do something about it.

You can always choose to be kind to yourself and to others. You can always choose to believe. And that's where you can start.

#mod talks #a student out of time #real talk

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weepingtalecowboy · 5 months ago

Text

Twilight be Struggling

Fanfic prompt: You know how the Twilight literally drained Hyrule (and probably more) off its light and took all people along side it

Like it would create so many problems for Hyrule in the long term even after the Twilight disaster got fixed

For example if it affected the fauna and flora so badly that everything lacks colors even after restoring the forests

It is safe to assume that damage was caused to it

Literally poison

For example if a forest gets poisoned even if the poisonous substance is removed the soil and flora could still have been permanently contaminated by it (even magic light spirits trying to fix it damage IS damage which is why it is so hard to safe forests… a sick tree is not gonna be able to do anything even though the ground has been cleared …that’s why those trees oftentimes get cut )

And the fact that the world was visibly more muted and grey in colors…

Man, that doesn’t sound good

After the Flora the fauna usually follows eating the contaminated flora and getting sick or dying from it

Spreading it through descendants and generations of offsprings and eventually being eaten by predators or recycled creating a cycle of contamination

And that is not good as well

Further the disappearance of people after the twilight came over Hyrule means that farmers couldn’t have taken care off crops

Livestock would have been unsupervised and been put in danger for the duration of the farmer's disappearance

Pets being at risk of starvation

And if it ended in a food crisis because the contamination of the twilight and infested livestock through contaminated grass or the few weeks of disappearance costed the farmers their crop yields and the livestock's health

Then it would be an immediate shortage and problem for an entire year or five depending on how bad the contamination situation is

For example some contaminated areas still decades later are unsafe to live or gather in

And contaminated fauna means that hunting would be a very unsafe thing to do if they get sick from a diseased animal it would be a no go

And being the Zelda series' goth child who is edgy and dark I think that it would not even be that far fetched to assume for it

And then Twilight joining the chain while knowing that his entire Hyrule is on a tight budget when it comes down to food and having to tell the chain mostly Wild

Not to hunt or gather anything in forests because it could make them sick

The angst and emotional pain of having to watch your ancestor see the future he created thinking that it will be better and having to say it is screwed up anyway even though he thought he made it better

(time would be heartbroken and blame himself because if he never snitched on ganondorf then ganon wouldn’t be sealed away and have become a problem for twilight)

Hyrule seeing twilight’s screwed over Hyrule: …relatable lol

Them everything is fucked in over in our world duo for the win

#linked universe #lu legend #lu wind #lu time #lu four #lu warriors #lu sky #lu wild #lu hyrule #lu twilight #twilight princess #the twilight seems like a major problem that isn’t explored enough #writing prompt #Hyrule and twilight have matching t-shirts #ocarina of time #time is a mess #he definitely would #feel sorry about it

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just-an-elf-with-the-socks · 4 months ago

Note

I need more headcanons about melkors and Mairons disabilities. Some fluf angs or something idk I am living for them

Thank you! As a disabled person it comforts me to write them and I’m so glad you asked. I hope you won’t mind the length of this post because it will be a long one.

Mairon will go first, since he has an invisible disability like I do and I’m most attached to him as a character.

Mairon has a disability called Retinitis Pigmentosa, also known as Rod Cone Dystrophy. The back wall of the retina is damaged, and this is a rare, inherited disease that’s genetic and causes severe impairment. It can cause legal blindness by age twenty

They symptoms usually start in early childhood, which is what happened to Mairon. He had glasses as a kid, as much as he hated to wear them

Unfortunately his vision just kept getting worse

He was from a well off family, his father (Aulë) made sure he had the best medical care possible, but Mairon never felt like Aulë made much of an effort to try and understand how his disability made him struggle, made him harder to deal with than his siblings (one of the reasons he left home)

Mairon was able to get his driver license, but by age twenty-eight he was legally blind

He has tunnel vision and is very sensitive to bright lights; his adjustment to changes from light to dark are pretty much nonexistent

It made his business as a high fashion jewelry designer difficult, even though he was highly successful and well respected, and he was forced to retire at just thirty years old (he was well off and could make it just fine but to him that wasn’t the point)

He already lived in the city so driving wasn’t a big deal, but he did have to get a service dog

Against quite literally every suggestion he got a husky as a service dog; he grew up around huskies and loved them

His service dog is named Minnie (it means “resolute protection,” he did not name her after Minnie Mouse), a red husky, and she was the inspiration for Mairon’s other two, Draugluin and Thuri

He does have a lot of internalized ableism

He doesn’t believe that other people having a disability is a bad thing, but when it comes to himself he thinks it makes him a lesser person, especially since he had to retire so young

Mairon refuses to make his apartment friendlier to himself and it’s definitely becoming a problem, especially when he lives on his own (Minnie’s working overtime)

He definitely doesn’t believe in other people “curing you” or “making you” feel a certain way about your disability (neither do I) but Melkor does help him to at least admit that he needs to be more reasonable about the practical aspects of becoming more comfortable with accepting help from others

While he practically spends most of his nights at Melkor’s now, he has accepted that his apartment needs things like railings on the stairs and handles in the shower

He is working on gaining the perspective and confidence that his disability makes him stronger, not weaker

Now we move on to Melkor, who’s experience is a little different from Mairon’s

Melkor has Post-Traumatic Arthritis (PTA) which is a form of osteoarthritis brought following a serious injury to his hand and upper arm

He was in a serious car accident on his way home from a gallery of his (he’s an artist, he makes sculptures) and it seriously damaged his right hand to the point where it nearly needed to be amputated

The surgery went fine, but the lasting effects of the injuries were what led to his PTA diagnosis

It comes with a lot of joint pain, swelling, and stiffness. He doesn’t have a large range of motion anymore, which can be difficult in terms of his career as a sculptor

He says he goes to physical therapy (he doesn’t)

He says he wears his arm brace (he doesn’t)

These things are done mostly out of pure stubbornness and unwillingness to admit he might have issues with his body

When he starts dating Mairon however, Mairon doesn’t have patience for any of this (although he goes about this in a respectful and loving way)

Mairon likes taking care of him and through this Melkor can slowly start to admit that he likes being taken care of (only in his head)

He only wears an arm brace (finally) when it’s the one Mairon made for him

#the silmarillion #angbang #mairon #melkor #headcanon #modern au #disability support #i love these headcanons #they mean a lot to me #especially as a disabled person

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searchforahero · 3 months ago

Note

kelso you have??? So Many????

anyway don't mind me absolutely spamming the shit out of you for more info on these

let's start with jaytim dreams pls!!

-mel 💜

(for this ask game)

YEAH i have had a serious "starting wips and not finishing them" problem since i was eleven T-T please help

okay so this is actually the main one i'm working on rn (ALTHOUGH i have been eyeing that post you made about vampire jaytim and i want to write it SO BAD if youre chill with that. so. the aforementioned starting wips and not finishing them disease may strike again)

also i don't really go into detail but this one does have a focus on gore and horror so just. forewarning on that o7

SO the actual premise of the fic is that tim decides that he needs to Fix bruce & jason's relationship and Reform Him TM, and the best way to start on that is by making jason comfortable around tim (this is set in an AU where jason did the villain thing, then the wingman thing, then that all went to shit and he's now on deeply tenuous terms with the bats, working with them but still not getting along with bruce At All, and sticking to his own code)

with this in mind, tim starts crashing at jason's place "unintentionally", like it'll be cold and he'll "just happen" to end up at jason's place halfway across the city from his own apartment. and jason has a weak spot a mile wide for tim, AND thinks that maybe he can take this as an opportunity to endear tim to his perspective.

ANYWAYS. the reason it's called jaytim dreams is because the big focus is going to be on these awful vivid dreams jason starts having whenever tim is over. the main one i have outlined rn is one where it starts out seeming like it's going to be an erotic dream with jason undressing tim, but then once he has his shirt off he cuts open tim's chest and crawls inside of him. and then i think there might be another where jason cuts out his own heart and gives it to tim, who eats it. stuff like that. just a lot of very deeply ingrained grotesque longing all written to seem vaguely erotic.

and jason's like. damn! why do i keep having these intense dreams about becoming One with tim! i bet this doesn't mean anything

i unfortunately don't have any of the dreams written yet, but heres an excerpt from the first scene!! :D

Tim follows Jason back to his apartment like it’s nothing on a bitterly cold Tuesday in January. Jason barely even realizes he’s doing it, figuring the man is just heading in the same direction. This is, of course, terribly naive. Jason gives Tim a sour look over his shoulder as he disables the alarms and traps baring his window. Before he gets the thing open he eyes Tim warily and asks “What are you doing here?” Tim tilts his head at him like Jason’s the weird one then points behind him and says “I’m not swinging all the way home in this weather. No way Hood.” Jason scowls in response, he’s absolutely not letting Tim crash at his place. The jerk made it abundantly clear how he felt about Jason back in the day when he was Wingman and still trying to make amends. If he doesn’t like Jason when he’s on his best behaviour then Jason doesn’t want to think about his opinion of him now. He doesn’t need that noise in his life. He gets enough from Bruce. He relays as much to Tim with a gruff “Get outta’ here Red.” Before the words are even out of his mouth, Tim’s face does this thing, this horrible awful thing. Sad like a kicked puppy and earnest like a little kid, and when did he flip up his lenses? Tim’s freaky ice blue eyes have no business looking that soulful. Jason folds like a house of cards before Tim can even dejectedly mutter “Well okay… I guess I’ll just go back out there… In the cold.” Jason hoists the window open and sighs heavily “Fine. Get in here pretender, but you better not make it a habit.” “Thanks Red.” Tim smiles at him brightly and Jason knows without a shadow of a doubt that the man in front of him has played him like a fiddle with nothing but a frown and a flash of his pretty irises. He repeats himself “This better not become a habit.” Tim just nods and makes his way into the living room.

#kel's bat problem #kel's search for a hero #asks :]#jaytim #timjay #kel writes fanfiction

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fogwitchoftheevermore · 10 months ago

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Please get into fwhip being malnourished you mentioned it in the gender post and 👀

oh i WOULD LOVE TO. content warnings for discussion of famine and disordered eating below the cut. this is just a very fucking sad ramble for a lot of the time, strap in.

so in my heart of hearts, the grimlands is a very old empire, and it is an empire on the decline. fwhip is the last count of the grimlands because of the rapture, yes, but had the rapture not happened, or had the grimlands survived it, fwhip would’ve probably been one of the last few counts anyways. the last few generations of counts and countesses have been problematic for various reasons- warmongers, incompetent, greedy, etc., and this has resulted in the grimlands greatly decreasing in size by the time gem and fwhip are born, as well as loosing a lot of their allies and trade routes.

they haven’t lost every ally, of course. the wither rose alliance predates canon, with mythland and the grimlands being the original founders of it a long time ago, and gilded helianthia being incorporated in when it became a sovereign nation (as it was originally part of mythland) a few generations prior. they maintain trade with both of these empires, but otherwise don’t have any real allies. mythland also has the warmongering problem that the grimlands has had, but because mythland and gilded helianthia’s exports (iron and wheat/plants, respectively) are much more important to everyday life than the grimlands’ main export, their trade relationships remain, even if they’re rocky. i personally hc almost all of the emperors we see to fall into the categories of “ill prepared/trained to be a ruler”, “became a ruler way too young”, and/or “is the first ruler of their empire and as such has no idea what they’re doing”, which is something that has its pros and cons. one pro, though, is that they are generally much more willing to disregard their past grudges, at least for trade, and maybe to be friends with each other, than their ancestors. so these issues are definitely improving by the time fwhip becomes count, but the tension is still there and he is certainly not helping the problem.

the grimlands is also a very inhospitable empire, in terms of its environment. they live in rocky, mountainous areas, making for soil that can’t support many crops other than root vegetables (carrots and potatoes). its cold, basically all year, but the winters are particularly harsh. it’s generally very hard to farm plants or animals there, though obviously not impossible. it does mean that the grimlands relies very heavily on a quite small variety of food to survive, outside of trading for food with their slim number of allies.

these traits all coalesce into one very, very bad event in fwhip and gem’s childhood- a famine that absolutely ravages the grimlands. it starts because the potatoes are struck with a disease that makes the entire harvest basically inedible, and the carrot harvest is far from enough to feed the entire empire. they still have trading with their allies, of course, but at the same time, a different disease/animal infestation (not quite sure which yet) strikes the grain of gilded helianthia and mythland. this is bad for everyone involved, but gilded helianthia doesn’t only grow wheat to eat, so they’re able to still feed their people, they just don’t have the food to spare for their allies. mythland has more of a problem on that front, but they have allies that the grimlands do not, such as rivendell, who are more than willing to get iron for a new, arguably cheaper, food price while the problem is being dealt with. both of the other WRA empires spare what they can to the grimlands, but it’s not much. they have their own people to feed first and foremost.

so the grimlands, in gem and fwhip’s youth, suffers greatly from this famine. eventually, yes, they are able to recover, but not without significant loss. gem and fwhip, as nobility, get priority picking for the food (which i think personally disgusts them, i’ll get into that a bit), but they’re not unscathed. i think this famine is a contributing factor to the death of their mother, as well. it doesn’t kill her, but it doesn’t help a woman who already had some pretty significant health issues to not be able to access the same diet she had previously. even after recovering, the famine is visible in the grimlands’ people for years afterwards. gem and fwhip struggle to put on weight, and the fact that they’re both as tall as they are is a miracle (and can be at least partially attributed to the draconic in their bloodline, though that’s quite far back at this point). fwhip, i will note, does not help himself in this regard when he gets older.

here’s where we get into the disordered eating discussion. i wanted to bring it up again, since i imagine that’s a trigger more people are familiar with than famine.

one of the last notable interactions fwhip has with xornoth is the nightmare sequence that he, gem, and katherine(? don’t quote me on her being the third person) also experience. after that, he falls out of the xornoth plot a little bit, but in my mind he continues to have those nightmares when gem and katherine do not. gem and katherine continue to get visited by actual xornoth, but fwhip (and a few other emperors who get their own unique bullshit) are not worth xornoth’s time and energy to constantly visit. but of course, can’t let them get too complacent by leaving them alone entirely (unless you’re joel, he’s an outlier though). these nightmares suck and they are consistent, and fwhip starts searching for potential reasons he’s still getting them when xornoth doesn’t otherwise seem to care about him.

his first thought is the fertilizer. y’know. the corruption tentacles that he turned into fertilizer. there’s no way that’s not involved somehow, right? but the fertilizer is good, it’s borderline magic, it means his people are getting more consistent harvests and he knows they need that. and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, so fwhip keeps turning the occasional corruption into fertilizer (against gem’s better judgement) and just doesn’t eat the plants his empire grows.

but that doesn’t work, so he keeps thinking. well, the livestock are eating these plants too, aren’t they? maybe whatever’s getting into the plants is carrying into the animals too. so then he stops eating the livestock as well.

at this point, he’s only eating the stuff he gets from other people, from the wandering salesmen who come by the grimlands or the crystal cliffs, the golden carrots gem gives him, the like. there’s the fish, too, but there’s a bit of a religious aversion to eating them and fwhip isn’t particularly religious anymore but that did stick, so he really tries to avoid it. the problem with relying on other people is something i mentioned in the original post- fwhip is horrified of looking weak, of looking small, and admitting enough about this situation to get food is textbook vulnerability that he’s not gonna do, so he doesn’t. so he’s not eating nearly as much as he needs to from that point until xornoth gets locked away, at which point the nightmares do stop for real. (or the nightmares sent from god do, the mental illness ones remain, but they’re not as much of a constant problem)

that whole situation combined with the famine in his early childhood makes it insanely difficult for fwhip to get proper nutrition for the rest of his life. his stomach so small now, he’s not able to eat that much food without getting sick. he’s getting the right balance of nutrients, but he’s just not getting enough of it. the rapture, which i think gives him a ton of new issues, also compounds on this a bit, and the fact that he survives even a few months after the event are really contingent on the fact that he has gem to help him. because without her (or anyone who could help him get back on his feet after all that, gem was just who was there) things would’ve probably gotten very dire indeed, with his mental health after the fact compounding his new physical issues, compounding the old ones. he’s got. problems.

this is such a sad fucking rant i went on my god. this is what happens when you have autism guys.

#empires smp #empires s1 #empires fwhip #fwhip #can you tell i think about the politics and history of this world a lot #the grimlands especially since fwhip is one of my main empires povs #i don’t even get into all the politics shit here. i have so many thoughts man im consumed by this stuff #disordered eating cw #famine cw #i promise all my thoughts about empires s1 and fwhip aren’t like. deeply upsetting #a lot of them are but this series is a tragedy that’s not my fault #but like i like to have fun man. i promise #my writing

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lorynna · 1 year ago

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Andrew Tate, a huge hypocrite, is the perfect example of: create the disease, sell the cure." Now, let me explain.

Tate starts off with his webcam business. He openly admits on camera - filming and releasing the footage himself -, that not only is he purposefully manipulating girls, making them fall in love with him (he himself calls it and actively uses the term "lover boy method" as a descriptor) but then also convincing them to work for him as cam-girls, telling those women that they could get rich together if she would simply start instrumentalizing her body and sexuality. He continues to explain in great detail how exactly he emotionally abused those women, lied to them and used several manipulation tactics on them. But I'd rather not mention all that here, since that would open up a whole new conversation and take too long to fully dive into this.

He also admitted on camera that he robbed them of about half of the money those women made "working for him" and then states and I quote: They thought they were on 50% and I said that the despair of the money was because of taxes."

He continues to talk about men "falling in love" with the women he recruited for his Webcam business which were selling their houses, spending all of their life savings etc. in order to pay for the cam-girl services and he commented on those men's actions saying," give me all of it" admitting he didn't at all care for the lives or fates of those men. Tate built his whole empire on being a pimp, which he defines as and i quote again" being a positive, inspirational, motivating person", exploiting and extracting money from lonely, depressed, porn-addicted men.

Now something might start to click. But isn't he a known advocate for those exact men? Telling them that porn consumption is bad, to get their health and depression in check, recommending going to the gym and preaching about how much he hates prostitutes?

He's an advocate for men's suffering and problems? After he caused so much damage to them, making money off of them, taking advantage of them and furthered their misery? The irony.

First he scammed those men, taking their money with good conscience, now he is an advocate for them, making them hate the kind of women he himself manipulated into this, talking about how bad porn is, when he literally owned a webcam business. And don't dare to come at me with "but people change, maybe he learnt from his mistakes".

For now I just recounted why he's a huge hypocrite but now let's focus on why he is a huge mysognist. He has said many things I don't even want to recount, including but ofc not limited to him demonstrating how he'd hit a women in the face that would "misbehave" and not "listen to him" and I have also unfortunately personally seen the video footage that is going around of him beating up a woman with a belt.

One example out of his many many statements so I can further lead on with this text: He further talks about his webcam business, saying "the only girls i couldn't recruit, were girls who had rich parents. Because they're like: Oh, but I don't need that money, my parents are rich! Girls are gonna get their Luis Vuitton bag either way." Implying how all women are superficial and only rich parents prevent a girl from being a "hoe". He got his fame and money from the same women he continues to publicly shame now.

He damaged women and men at the same time, yet there's still people, mostly men, defending him saying "yeah, but he also sometimes tells things that are true!". I appreciate your intention to differentiate and trying to filter through the many bullshit things he's said just so you can cling on to a single true statement.

Even the worst person sometimes has valid points, but that doesn't mean that we can just overlook the things he did in the past and the overall harm he has caused and is STILL causing.

Aside from all of this stuff, Tate continued to deny many of his statements he himself posted online before, showing massive double standards. It seems like he just tries to profit off what's giving him the largest, most uncritical fan base and by targeting incels who love to follow and hear an "alpha male" talk about how "all women are bitches", fueling their anger due to being rejected by women, he seems to have found a goldmine.

He promotes harmful, misogynistic views on women, promoting toxic behavior towards them and is imprinting on the minds of young, impressionable, vulnerable men.

If after knowing all this, you're still a defender of Tate, you might be just as bad as Tate himself.

#feminism #internalised mysogyny #radical feminists do interact #radblr #radical feminism #radical feminist community #radical feminists do touch #andrew tate

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ammyramblings · 6 months ago

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SPOILERS SPOILERS I CANNOT TAG HEAVILY ENOUGH FOR VEILGAURD SPOILERS FOR BOTH SAVING MINRATHOUS AND TREVISO!

I have played both now and I have thoughts.

Ok so as a Crow at heart I have played several times and always saved Treviso. I figured if I was going to do a Shadow Dragon run this would be the time to save Minrathous. Now I have thoughts on both options but first let me explain what I’d seen before I blighted Treviso.

I had seen many arguments stating that it made more sense to save Minrathous because of the Venetori and how much worse it was if they were in control and also that Viper gets blighted while Teia and Viago are safe.

Now having played both I could not disagree more.

So look at it this way from the perspective of someone who’s completed the game. Stop reading right now if you haven’t.

Minrathous gets pretty fucked up either way by the end. I won’t go into details here incase people who haven’t finished the game are still reading but suffice to say Minrathous is shit outta luck.

Meanwhile Treviso can get what passes as a happy ending in all this and by not helping them you literally doom the place.

Additionally - Viper gets blighted yes, but he’s a mage who knows some magic to slow that shit down and he’s given the option of a warden joining ritual which we never really learn if he takes or not, no conscription necessary because Antione and Evka have hearts.

Add to this the Venatori are ALWAYS going to be a problem in Tevinter. Antiva however, does have a chance to get rid of the Aantaam. Yes if you don’t save Minrathous lots of Shadows are publicly executed which is horrible but, (yes I can’t believe I’m writing but after that but here we are), the Shadows are an underground resistance group who genuinely are always at risk of being discovered. This could always have happened. Additionally, the Magisters while not being known for kindness or equality, do have some stake in making sure their city recovers. After all who are they going to rule and lord over and where will they get and keep slaves if shit is awful and the poor keep dying. There’s no one for them to exploit and in economic terms for them that’s bad for business.

Meanwhile, Treviso is fucked. For years, maybe forever. You can’t convince me it isn’t harder to clear blight from water especially when you literally have no real force but a group of assassins to keep order. Also you have an occupation happening. Oh and just to add insult to injury with all that, those assassins are now becoming crazy strong, trained to kill in wild acrobatic ways, darkspawn.

They literally are the worst thing that could have come of this and emotionally it’s killer since most of them want to help the city (yes we can talk about moral ambiguity and crows later, the fact is, they don’t want to fuck up their own home much like the real life mafia). So you now have all these killer darkspawn and one in particular who basically thanks you for killing him. The crows also lose Heir their trainer and Fletcher their supplier so they’re fucked two more ways and they literally can’t even drink their own water. Never mind the bugs and dead shit the disease must be rife.

All this to say as much as I admit I’m a Crow loving little shit, I do have genuine reasons for thinking saving Treviso is actually better in the long haul.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

#dragon age the veilguard #ammyramblings #saving Minrathous or Treviso #saving Minrathous #saving Treviso #treviso #minrathous #dragon age the veilgaurd spoilers #veilguard spoilers #da: the veilguard #dragon age #sorry for rambling I just have so many feelings

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clatterbane · 6 months ago

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Oh yeah, about that persistent anemia that the new endo pretty much flipped over...

Yeah, I developed some suspicions of my own there, and it took maybe 2 seconds of searching to turn up plenty of info about PPIs directly causing iron absorption issues too. 🙄 Besides the other minerals I already knew about. They're pretty well known for that, leading to bone density problems for some people. Most likely also the reason my sodium and potassium levels have kept coming back just under the acceptable range too. You fuck around with the balance of digestive secretions and pH, it may have some unintended effects!

I've been stuck on high-dose PPIs ever since that big DKA crash in 2020 damaged my digestive system. They've actually kept me on the maximum dosages approved for adult humans, but I've ended up cutting it back some myself to the point that it's just higher than usual. (Partly to hopefully also cut back somewhat on potential side effects like this, but also thanks to repeated pharmacy supply issues with formats I can reasonably swallow with my now fucked-up esophagus!)

Never had any notable reflux issues before, but with that damage there's nothing really keeping the stomach acid down where it belongs. With evidence of that from some truly unpleasant testing where they dangle sensors down your throat. And of course they're trying to keep more acid from doing more damage. Some of that effect if I don't have the meds is probably from rebound acid overproduction, but if I don't take them for whatever reason now it gets ugly within a few days!

So yeah, I do seem to be stuck on the PPIs for the forseeable future now, whether I like it or not. It's just good to know that I do need to make sure to take in extra of certain minerals on a regular basis to try and compensate for that.

Am I surprised that two endos now, and the GP I got referred to for more tests over it have just completely overlooked well-known effects of meds they knew I was taking regularly, and which are readily found immediately by plugging "PPIs iron" into your search engine of choice? Not remotely.

Nope, they'd prefer to mutter direly about rare liver diseases and all kinds of less likely possibilities--and order a zillion blood tests. At least they DO seem to like to order various testing here when something looks off instead of just ignoring it, I will give them that. Guessing they are not under the same kind of pennypenching pressure that kinda got me needing the freaking PPIs at all.

PPIs are more within primary care's wheelhouse than endocrinology's. But. the gastroenterology guy who has been prescribing the stuff for a good while now ALSO did not put together that the borderline low electrolytes he was concerned about in the context of anesthesia might have some connection there before I brought it up as a possibility. To his credit, he also did not act like I must be on crack mentioning it, or seem to take it as some weird challenge to His Authority. But, the guy--who does come across as smart and competent enough--had obviously never considered this as a possibility.

This shit may be anything but unexpected by now. But, it really does sort of bring home just how bad at least 95% of clinicians seem to be at diagnostic pattern matching, in general.

(I mean, working with patterns like this is just one of the things my own brain has Always Just Done. Getting it to fucking shut up sometimes when it's not being useful, and channeling it into actually productive avenues are the bigger challenge. Seems to be another on the less shitty side of those neuroweird superpowers. But, some of these otherwise intelligent people are just so damn terrible at it by just about any standards. At the risk of sounding like some kind of condescending prick.)

#personal #venting #medical stuff #anemia #medication side effects #patterns

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baiyunli · 2 years ago

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how to watch baseball now: a primer

This is a long, hopefully-comprehensive guide on how to watch baseball for hockey fans feeling adrift during the offseason — I have constructed this from the perspective of not only how to understand what you’re watching, but how to make it interesting to yourself.

If the numbers aren't interesting to you, forget about the numbers! They don’t have to exist in your version of baseball. Make up your own rules and use them to watch the game. Watch games only for the one kind-of okay player you like. Pick your favourite team because of a video you saw of one of them bouncing a baseball off his ass (Sean Murphy, then of Oakland A's and now of Atlanta Braves). Baseball Olds will try to pretend like the game is this big thing that only people who already watch it can appreciate, but you just have to find what you love most about it.

I’m using the NHL as my best point of reference: in terms of growing the game, I’d say MLB suffers from a very different problem than NHL (other than like, the current uproar around letting queer people exist, which is a throughline in both), in that while the NHL has a very exciting product but can’t reach people where they’re at, baseball is by and large perceived as a boring, slow game and the league will bend over backwards to make polarizing changes to the Boringest and Slowest parts rather than capitalizing on what excites fans about the game. However, both leagues are plagued by Shitty Commissioner disease. Such is the way of life.

Feel free to read all of this, or none of it, but I’ve tried to split it up in a way that makes sense and is easy to navigate. Last note: many people will tell you baseball is the only major sport going on in North America at this time of year. This is false. The WNBA and NWSL are both in full swing—not to mention the World Cup next month. Supplement your baseball watching with a wide variety of sports where you can!

How to Love Baseball

Pick a Team, Any Team

The first step in becoming a baseball fan is obviously picking a team! I could probably give you NHL comparatives and let you figure it out from there, but I don’t personally think your favourite NHL teams have much bearing on your favourite MLB ones, so I’ll give you a quick and dirty rundown of my teams instead and how you might want to pick a team.

The easiest team for me to love is the Seattle Mariners because I live just across the border, and they aren’t good enough to be annoying but also not bad enough to be embarrassed about. They’re just kind of there, which I enjoy greatly. I also love the Philadelphia Phillies because they’re my friend’s favourite team. They went on a Cinderella run to the World Series last year (before losing to the Astros in the final) and are now solidly middling. My other favourites are the Washington Nationals because of their fantastic social media presence and their hilarious stadium traditions. The current-day Nats are very much the epitome of "how can we lose when we're so sincere?"

Some teams you might want to look into are the LA Angels (actually of Anaheim) for Shohei Ohtani, the Milwaukee Brewers for — at least from what I understand — their boyband energy similar to the New Jersey Devils, the Baltimore Orioles or Tampa Bay Rays for an exciting and winningest team, and the Oakland A's for a miserable fan experience including horribly dysfunctional team management and a coming relocation to Las Vegas.

The easiest team for me to hate is the Toronto Blue Jays, which is a result of their god complex re: being the only Canadian team. A funny thing from this season is that the Rays opened their season with a historic 13-game win streak, only to be killed 6-3 by the Blue Jays to end it. Something about Toronto teams and ending another team’s 13-game heater, or whatever.

Also look into any local teams if you can. In Vancouver, our local minor league team is the Vancouver Canadians, and setting up a little picnic on the grass with friends while watching a Canadians game is a summer staple. Here’s a very cute article about them. There are a variety of lower-level and exhibition teams across the world, especially in countries where baseball is incredibly popular. One exhibition team is the Internet-famous Savannah Bananas who are dearly loved on TikTok. If there isn’t a huge baseball foothold in your area, it’s worth looking into which MLB teams are most popular where you live and/or have the most coverage. Some analytics sites like FiveThirtyEight will occasionally create maps showing each team’s popularity in different states, countries, etc. and that can be a great guide.

Petty Rivalries 101

You can always just Google these, but I decided to just list off a few major ones for your perusal: the Yankees and Red Sox, the Rangers and Astros, the Dodgers and Giants, and the Orioles and Nationals. As Toronto Maple Leafs scholar Acting the Fulemin once put it, the point of sports is to be sad in a group, and the counterpart to this is that it absolutely rules getting to see a team you hate lose.

A quick note on the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is that it's brought us one of my favourite ever quotes from ex-Mariner and current Yankee Nestor Cortes:

Once you’ve chosen a favourite team, they’re bound to have some kind of geographic or historic rivalry, and you can search those up to find out the background behind them. Also, I highly suggest deciding on a random team you hate for no reason. It makes the season experience much more interesting and gives you the chance to pray on their downfall whenever possible.

Where to Watch

As with most things about baseball, this will vary by your team. Depending on your cable package, you might be able to watch your favourite team already! That’s great news. Even if you can’t, feel free to turn on the TV, find a random baseball game, and imprint on either of those teams like a baby bird. The MLB website offers games broadcast with an MLB.tv subscription, but if you have an account you can also watch the Free Game of the Day and collected highlights from previous games! This is a great way to expand your team repertoire and figure out which team broadcasts you hate with a burning passion. Local radio stations do commentary on games if you like listening to that.

If you just want to get your feet wet rather than diving in straight away, pretty much every major game of the postseason will be uploaded by some “FirstName BunchOfNumbers” user on YouTube: for example, you can watch Game 1 of the World Series last year by just searching 2022 World Series Game 1 Full Game. However, watching the full game might be a slog if you don’t know what’s going on, and you can learn the intricacies of the sport without having to watch all four hours and twelve minutes of like, the 1962 World Series Game 7 (although that is a very exciting game). In that case, skip to the ‘How the Game is Governed’ section and read on.

All of this pertains to MLB teams, but there’s plenty to watch elsewhere. If you have a local baseball team, you might be able to catch a game or two in-person! Minor League Baseball also has their own broadcasting services and highlights are available on YouTube or their website.

League Structure

The MLB season is 162 games long. Spring training, aka the preseason, begins in February. During the regular season, teams play a three or four-game series with the same team before playing another with a different team. For example, this month the Philadelphia Phillies played 3 games in a row against the Washington Nationals on consecutive days. The day after the conclusion of their last game against Washington, they started a series against the Tigers, which was three games with one rescheduled due to weather, and then another three games against the Dodgers. This leads to a schedule that looks like this:

Occasionally, due to weather issues or other postponement reasons, a game will be rescheduled for the same day as another game against the same team — so they’ll play two full games in one day. This is called a double-header. They used to be routinely scheduled in MLB, but now they’re only played as a result of scheduling problems.

Team-wise, it’s a little more complicated than the NHL. Like the Eastern and Western conferences, MLB is separated into two ‘leagues’: the American League (AL) and the National League (NL). Both leagues have fifteen teams, and until the 1990s teams in different leagues didn’t play each other during the regular season at all, leading to different styles of play, tactics, and rules implemented between them. This is no longer the case! However, it’s important to recognize that unlike the NHL, NBA, NWSL, etc., Major League Baseball comprises two leagues, rather than two conferences of the same league. This matters because individual awards like the Cy Young or Gold Glove are given to the best players at their position in both the AL and NL, and the MLB MVP includes both an AL MVP and NL MVP.

MLB is made up of six divisions, with three in each league: AL East, AL Central, AL West, NL East, NL Central, and NL West. A division has five teams. If you know much about US geography, you might notice that the teams in each division don’t actually correspond very well to their geographic location: this is for a variety of reasons, not least of which is expansion teams requiring change in division partitioning, but nobody’s going to fix it at this point. And that’s okay!

Fandom and Things As Such

Baseball fandom, regrettably, is not much of a Tumblr phenomenon these days, but Baseball Twitter does have some incredible gems. The Baseball RPF tag on AO3 is also fairly fleshed out (albeit not to the extent of HRPF) and you’ll find that many authors who write HRPF have dabbled in baseball as well. If you’re lost on where to start choosing a team, going through the AO3 grab bag and choosing a random player who you really like in a fic is also a very respectable avenue.

I cannot stress this enough: the easiest way to learn the game without having to learn the characters is reading baseball AUs. That’s it. They’re ten times more approachable than trying to memorize everyone on your favourite team’s roster, and they abound in HRPF if you’re looking for a landing port. I have witness testimony from Lil (@wymgreenteam) that she learned what pitching signs and shortstops were from the wonderful Jack/Nico baseball AU. It works! Obviously fanfiction won’t teach you everything, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed they can be a fantastic first step and really illustrate the game from a fan perspective.

Other Media

I will caution against taking the ‘consume baseball-related media’ advice too seriously, because I find that unlike baseball AUs, other media involving baseball does not always come from someone who watches and loves the game. Think of it like hockey romance books—just like the main characters of those novels are probably not scoring hat tricks in 5 consecutive games, they probably aren’t reaching such baseball heights either.

With that said, I have not watched Daiya No Ace but I’ve heard that people do enjoy it! For genuine baseball culture-oriented media, Roger Angell wrote fantastic articles and books on the game. I love his book ‘Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion.’ Then there are movies like Moneyball and shows like A League of Our Own which tackle specific aspects of the game and how it’s played. Depending on your eventual favourite team(s), hometown coverage will also play a huge part: for the Phillies, that’s outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer or Penn Live.

Narratives

Once upon a time there was a young man named Shohei Ohtani who was breaking records set in the 1920s while playing on a horrible, failing team that refused to build around him. I assume you have some familiarity with Ohtani, but he is very difficult to describe because he is literally making history. He is the only two-way player in MLB right now: a two-way player is someone who is both a pitcher and a batter; there are a ton of rules about what constitutes a two-way player, but currently Ohtani is the only true two-way player at the Major level. This is not a perfect analogy, but he’s sort of like if Jason Robertson went out there and had a 50-goal season, then immediately jumped into net and played like Juuse Saros. He’s the best all-around player in MLB, and even though he isn’t the best pitcher or the best batter, the fact that he’s incredible at both of them makes him stand out. He also plays with Mike Trout, who’s breaking records of his own, while trying to drag the LA Angels to any sort of notoriety. Here is a prescient article about the Ohtani-Trout era in Anaheim.

Each team has their own current narratives and pairings, but Ohtani and Trout are the biggest one right now. People compare them to McDavid and Draisaitl, but it’s more like if the Oilers had McDavid and Draisaitl but were also one of the worst teams in the league right now. However, Trout is currently in the worst slump of his career while the Angels have won the last 11 of 14 games, so really all this means is that baseball is fake.

Baseball is rife with redemption and villain arcs—you just have to dig a little to find them. I have presented the Ohtani and Trout trainwreck because it’s the closest comparable to the Oilers tragedy, but there are plenty others that really depend on team and current events.

Bush Leagues

MLB teams have a very different relationship to their minor-league affiliates than NHL teams do. There are about five hundred various regional minor leagues, but the MiLB levels are Rookie, Single A, High A, Double A, and Triple A, each of which has two or three individual leagues similar to the AL-NL system in MLB.

The fun thing about MiLB is that it’s a lot closer to home than MLB! Most places don’t have an MLB team, but there’s a good chance anywhere in the USA has a nearby MiLB or regional/collegiate league team. They also have way more interesting names, like the Portland Pickles, Rocket City Trash Pandas, and Sugar Land Space Cowboys. The prospect pipeline in MLB runs a whole lot slower than it does for the NHL, and generally through those Double or Triple-A affiliates, so it’s definitely worth paying attention to minor-league teams and their standout players to see who might be the next rookie on your favourite team.

MiLB player compensation has been an issue for a long time, and the players recently unionized! A few great write-ups on it: 1, 2, and 3.

Regional Popularity

I’ve said this plenty, but I truly do think that finding your baseball niche hinges upon imprinting on a hometown team or a player you just really like. This sport isn’t just an American pastime: it’s hugely popular in Central America and parts of East Asia, and some of the best and brightest up-and-coming (and current) players hail from countries that haven’t traditionally been viewed as bastions of baseball. The game is growing every day, and it’s wonderful to see.

Baseball is very popular in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Japan, and Korea. Out of those, I’d probably say the Dominican Republic has the largest MLB presence, with only American players outnumbering Dominican ones in the league, but the sport is also fast-growing in Japan, Korea, and Australia. Japan won the 2023 World Baseball Classic, which is the baseball equivalent of the World Cup of Hockey, where the best players in the world compete against each other and Shohei Ohtani (captain of the Japanese team) pitched to Mike Trout (captain of the American team) in possibly the most electric moment of baseball in the 21st century.

How to Understand Baseball

How the Game is Governed

Rather than doing a big writeup on this, I figured I would just find some articles and videos that go through the rules well and hold your hand through it! Think of these like helpful assets, similar to the first time you search up ‘what is goaltender interference’ or 'what is offsides' after hearing it mentioned on the play-by-play and a goal got turned over and all the fans were mad and you wanted to be in on the reason why. This is that search.

Baseball Explained in 5 Minutes

How to identify baseball pitches

Everything there is to know about the The Strike Zone in Baseball.

Intro to Baseball: Positions

What’s going on with the DH in MLB? (MLB Originals)

Rules Glossary | MLB - PDF Version

Lastly, once you’ve got a good grasp on the rules and positions, I probably wouldn’t go straight to watching a full game—you want to make sure you’re using your three hours well rather than staring at a game you don’t really get or don’t care about, or both. Instead, watch YouTube highlights of various players and best (or worst) plays of the week! This gives you an idea of what creates excitement in a game and why, and different positional strengths. From there, you can start watching longer clips, like full innings or the highlights uploaded after each game, which give you a better idea of the game’s pace.

Pressing Play

While I was writing this I remembered that a fun and unique baseball tradition is players having walk-up songs when they’re up in the batting lineup.

Most teams will post their players' walk-up songs on Spotify, YouTube, etc. and while there are a few songs that are synonymous with legendary players - like Mariano Rivera's "Enter Sandman" - players usually like to switch up their songs. Often, a song will become emblematic of an era in that team's history (Anthony Rizzo's "Intoxicated" and the Cubs' 2016 playoff run). After a while, you'll notice patterns in what players pick.

Learning about each player’s song rotation can be extremely revealing, like Mark Canha switching his walk-up songs to Born This Way, Vogue, and I Wanna Dance with Somebody in honour of the Mets Pride Night last week!

Diamond Sports Bankruptcy

I’m not going to pretend to know anything about broadcasting or RSNs, but Diamond Sports, the group that runs Bally Sports, recently filed for bankruptcy, which has really affected some franchises’ profit margins and where their games can be streamed. Not sure if this interests you, but you can read about it here!

The Oakland A’s Relocation

Again: I’m not an Oakland fan, but there’s a lot of debate right now about the owners of the Oakland Athletics moving the team to Vegas despite the wishes of the town and city. Rob Manfred, the MLB commissioner, also made rude comments about Oakland fans as a result of their Reverse Boycott Night, where almost 28,000 fans came out to support the team. A professional sports league commissioner acting like an asshole to fans of a small-market team is nothing new, but it’s the culmination of a lot of drama between terrible owners and a market that loves their team.

The Long, Storied History of Cheating

The long, storied history of cheating in MLB encompasses not only stealing signs and tipping pitches, but also foreign substance usage on hands (which pitchers sometimes try in order to change how they pitch the ball), illegal equipment, and more. It’s kind of a lot. The most notable, recent case is the 2017 Houston Astros World Series Win.

Houston’s Fucking Astros

Nobody likes the Astros except Astros fans. They won the World Series last year and are universally hated, not least of all because of the 2017 cheating controversy.

In baseball, ‘signs’ are what catchers use to communicate to pitchers what kind of pitch they should throw. These rely on knowledge of the hitter currently on the plate and catching them by surprise. Each pitcher-catcher battery will usually have their own signs. In 2017, a year in which Houston won the World Series, the team set up a video camera in the center field seats with a full frontal view of the catcher, and they would use that to figure out what pitches the pitcher would throw. Then from the dugout, whoever was watching the video feed at the time would use a signal (audio cues, like banging garbage can lids) to tell the hitter who was up what pitch they had to expect. This was mostly possible because of the time delay between a catcher signalling and a pitcher throwing, which has been changed by this season’s pitch clock implementation.

In 2020, The Athletic published the first exposé article about the Astros cheating scandal, and it rocked the baseball world. Several immediate consequences followed: the Astros GM and field manager (head coach) were suspended for the full 2020 season, and although players received no punishment, the team gave up four draft picks (their 1st and 2nd round picks in 2020 and 2021).

Pitching and Sticky Stuff

Pitchers applying foreign substances on their hands is always a controversy in MLB games. Recently, star pitcher Max Scherzer was ejected and suspended 10 games after an umpire decided his hand was unusually sticky. TLDR: cheating is common, and consequences vary. Nobody has gotten over the Astros cheating scandal.

Expected By Whom

A quick rundown on the analytics side of the game and how baseball stats look very different both in their progress and insights than hockey. This is how you can sound like you know ball.

The Moneyball book does a great job explaining the rise of sabermetrics (baseball analytics) in the early 2000s, starting with Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. Because MLB doesn’t have a salary cap and their luxury tax isn’t difficult for big-market teams to pay, small-market teams like Oakland have to constantly innovate in their game tactics in order to stay competitive, and that’s why the game today is so numbers-oriented. Watching a baseball game, you’ll see far more stats than you would in an NHL broadcast: OBP (On-Base Percentage), ERA (Earned Run Average), pitching speed, slugging percentage, pythagorean win percentage, and more. Do not fear the big numbers. You don’t have to know what every stat means in order to love the game, but if you watch enough and you hear commentators discussing what, say, Kodai Senga's ERA is, you’ll come to learn what they mean! In a pinch, you can also easily just search up ‘league average [stat]’ to figure out what the standard is.

Some websites that are really instrumental in baseball analytics are Baseball-Reference, FiveThirtyEight, and FanGraphs, plus YouTube channels like Foolish Baseball and statisticians like Bill James and Tom Tango. Baseball is a lot further along in its analytics revolution than hockey, and as a result, such analysis is not just a thing for Stats Nerds but also a huge part of the way the game is played and watched today. Personally, I love stats that assess umpire accuracy in calling strikes, and so Umpire Scorecards on Twitter is one of my favourites.

It's Too Long and Too Much Money

If Connor McDavid played in Major League Baseball and was close to the kind of player he is in the NHL right now, he would be getting paid north of 400 million dollars, not to mention endorsement money. Instead, he sold his soul to a sport where reporters ask about his biological clock and his only consolation for living in Edmonton is his heated driveway.

Because MLB payrolls are so much larger than the NHL’s and they have a luxury tax rather than a salary cap, contracts are worth much more. The sport itself is less volatile as well: both a product of the longer season (larger sample size) and the luck factor inherent in chance-based games like hockey that isn’t present as much in baseball, a player's year-to-year performance is easier to predict and therefore teams feel more comfortable betting on their production. In contrast to the NHL’s 8-year limit & penalty for long contracts (like the Kovalchuk deal), and bridge deals made when a player hasn't demonstrated that their performance is sustainable, MLB GMs often give their stars contracts over 10 years, and for hundreds of millions of dollars total. Mike Trout is on a 12-year contract for almost $430 million, and by several estimates, his endorsements and the money he receives for being named All-Star, AL MVP, etc. brings that up significantly.

MLB front office terminology is very similar to the NHL, but their contracts differ in another important way: baseball players can opt out of a contract and enter free agency. For example, last season Carlos Correa agreed to a 12-year, $310m deal with the New York Mets, but the Mets were worried about the results from his physical and his injury history, so they pulled out of the deal before the season began and instead, Correa signed with the Minnesota Twins on a six-year, $200m contract.

The Used Boy Auction

Drafting in MLB works very differently than the NHL. The amateur draft (the Main one, which is also called the Rule 4 Draft) takes place mid-season and lasts 20 rounds (used to be 40), plus picks that teams are given as compensation for other events. Teams can draft players either out of high school or college baseball—while the majority of players in the early days were picked right out of high school, nowadays the largest percentage are collegiate players. High school players are only eligible after graduation, and they don’t have junior leagues like the OHL or USHL. Players at universities can only be drafted after their 3rd season there in order to avoid going to a university only for drafting purposes.

Teams retain the rights to sign the players they draft until July 15 of the following year, and a player who does not sign with their team is eligible to be signed once again as long as they meet the age and educational requirements (attending an academic institution, three years of college, etc.) Unless the player has consented to be re-selected by their old team, they cannot be chosen again in another draft year. This leads to players like Brandon Belt having been drafted three times, by the Red Sox, Braves, and Giants, and ultimately playing for the Giants after his college career.

The Rule 5 Draft is another major part of the MLB drafting system. It's sort of similar to what happens in the NHL with an expansion draft, but it takes place in the winter every year. As the MLB prospect pipeline moves slower and it's easy for teams to Stockpile high-quality prospects and bury them in the minors due to the team's current success, this draft aims to ensure that young players have a chance to play in the bigs on a team that needs more manpower. Not every team has to select a player in the Rule 5 draft; last season, 15 players were taken, including the Nats selecting Thad Ward and the Phillies selecting Noah Song.

Here's the official MLB description of the drafting process:

Podcasters or Whatever

My most toxic trait is that I unfortunately love listening to sports podcasts, so here are some good baseball ones:

The Athletic Baseball Show

Ballpark Dimensions

Effectively Wild

The Strike Zone

I hope this serves as a useful first step! Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or want to yell about baseball - I wrote this for two people, so if either of those two people find it helpful, the three hours I spent on it will have been worth it.

#baseball #waiting for spring #yun talks #mlb #baseball primer #i guess???#pinned for the offseason

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bellamyroselia · 1 year ago

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I've recently been thinking of how some of the missing Olympian gods could be adapted for future Kid Icarus games and in Poseidon's case he could be expanded upon, so I decided to dump some of my abridged thoughts about them here. Turned out I still had lot of things to say, but in general these thoughts are about what I think these gods could do and why it's possible, along with what kind of relationships they could have with the already existing KI-cast. Considering the subject matter, expect to see mythology-typical mind-fuckery and the words "motive failure" a lot - not only are these people extremely unhinged, in many myths the gods take the "fuck around and find out" approach way too literally.

To see this on its entirety, go here.

Starting with Hestia, she has a bad case of motive failure. Like what are you supposed to do with her? You can count her major mythological appearances on one hand, and even in those she doesn’t do much. It does also make imagining what kind of relationships she could have with the existing cast hard; none of Hestia's relationships are all that developed to begin with, but the ones she has with her siblings are those that get most focus… So that only really leaves Hades, Poseidon and maybe Viridi? Not much to work with, and I can’t really imagine those relationships being anything else but positive. Sure, they may disagree of some things, but overall they get along with each other. The most interesting thing about Hestia’s possible relationships is that I could actually see Dark Pit liking her due to her nice and unproblematic nature. It does leave plot potential pretty minimal though, but I could see writers using some legends about Vestal virgins as bases for plotlines where Hestia shows up as a supporting side character. The problem with those is that they tend to be pretty specific, so who knows how well they might actually work. “Arx tarpeia Capitoli proxima” makes a good moral but not much of a plotline if you divorce it from... Well, Tarpeia herself. Another possibility is that Pit’s sent to defend a place that had its sacred flame extinguished and he has to defeat the culprit behind that.

Artemis also suffers from motive failure. She may be a bringer of sudden death and disease along with being a serious contender for the title of the most wrathful Olympian, but… She’s so petty with it? Much of it is very small-scaled all things considered. Most things she does don’t have long-term consequences, and the few that do are quickly hijacked by other deities whose actions have bigger impacts to the myths in question. Like yeah, Artemis may have told Agamemnon to kill his daughter if he wants to set sails to Troy, but who cares when Apollo is inflicting the Greeks with a plague and Athena is ignoring the pleads of Trojan women. This being said, I could see her being used as an unfought antagonist for a chapter or two depending on what she does (something akin to her sending the Calydonian boar to terrorize Calydon could work), though that story ends the moment the threat is dealt with. I however wouldn’t cross out the possibility of her appearing as an ally out, though I’m not sure what she could offer to Pit and co. if that was the case as she’s not really a god of anything that could help Pit on his journey. And I honestly don’t see her having particularly positive relationships with anyone in the already existing cast - she may not dislike any of them, but she doesn’t really like them either. She’s a true neutral in that sense, which could possibly earn her Dark Pit’s respect. How long that’s going to last is a completely different matter though, it may be small-scaled put she’s still very wrath-happy person.

Have some more motive failure with Hermes, though this time it has everything to do with him being a rather hard character to utilize in a world without Zeus - because of the rating he’s not allowed to be horndog making more of himself and since Zeus isn’t there asking him to do things, it leaves him with next to nothing to do. He’s extremely loyal to Zeus and this loyalty is exclusive to him; while Hermes clearly loves the rest of his family, he wouldn’t do half of the things he does for his father for them… And boy, has he done lot of things for his father. He’s a big daddy’s boy and daddy simply can't be replaced because Hermes just doesn’t love many people in the same unconditional way he loves his father - this means he’d have to be an independent figure, since the only person he’d be a lackey for is out of the picture. Now Hermes does have some interesting figures connected to him, like his son Autolycus (shapeshifting thief and the maternal grandfather of both Jason and Odysseus, whose name literally means “the wolf itself”) and the goddess of persuasion Peitho who’s described as his wife on occasion, but I’m not sure how any of that could be utilized. Autolycus possibly could've had some potential as a recurring character if he wasn’t dead by old age, but who knows, maybe he did get deified and therefore became an immortal in the world of Kid Icarus. I mean, Medusa is just a sea daemon and a dead one of that in the myths so why not let Autolycus to become a god. But back to Hermes, what I think of his possible relationships with already existing characters? They’re likely positive overall and I can see him appreciating both Pits for their spunk, but I think that the most potential comes from different minor antagonists, like Thanatos, Phosphora and Pandora. In case of the last one, Hermes was the one who gave Pandora her personality so there's that. Into the two former ones, Hermes is a psychopomp which means that he guided spirits to afterlife and he was everyone’s preferred psychopomp. Only person who wasn’t happy to see him in this duty was Sisyphus (Ares freed Thanatos after he had been captured by Sisyphus and brought them both back to Underworld → Sisyphus sweet talks Persephone into letting him go for a short period of time → Sisyphus refuses to return and Thanatos refuses to try bringing him back, so Hermes drags him to Underworld), so one could argue that Hermes is better at doing Thanatos’ job than he is - the fact that the Sisyphus-myth is one of Thanatos’ only major mythological appearances doesn’t exactly help him in this situation. One could get some funny dialogue out of that. With Phosphora, her Japanese name is derived from Electra, who’s the younger sister of Hermes’ mother Maia. For some additional hilarity, Maia and Electra are both elder sisters of Merope, Sisyphus’ wife. Everything about the possibility of having Hermes, Phosphora and Thanatos interact smells like a comedy goldmine to me. But let’s be real, isn’t it weird that Hermes has never been a merchant in any KI-game? It’s so goddamn absurd considering how he’s the god of commerce! You’d think he would’ve been the first choice for that, but apparently not! That’s a one big missed opportunity!

Hera too has a case of motive failure, but the reasons behind it are pretty simple. First is the same as with Hermes, which is that Hera doesn’t get to do much in a world without Zeus; can't be angry about your husband being unfaithful to you when your husband isn’t around. The second reason is equally simple, it being that Hera likes Athena. In fact she probably loves Athena more than she loves Ares, Hephaestus and Eileithyia (aka Lucina) combined (her love for Athena and Hebe is probably around the equal level and if it’s in someone’s favor, it’s Hebe’s), so toss away all the possibilities of her being a villainous force. It wouldn’t really make sense considering how Palutena is mostly Athena-inspired character. The two goddesses are pretty much partners in crime and by crime I literally mean “Let’s try to overthrow Zeus with Poseidon and Apollo” and “Let’s be the only deities to celebrate Troy’s destruction” levels of things, having each others backs whenever something happens so I think it would be better to just let Palutena have a good relationship with her. With Pit things probably would get a tad more confusing depending on some other factors, but on a vacuum it’s hard to say anything about them. Regardless of those I think she and Dark Pit would have a pretty rocky relationship, as Hera along with her favorite stepdaughter and Aphrodite were some of the biggest menaces to society when Zeus was still in the picture… All roads may not lead to Rome, but many do lead to a scorned goddess, a nosey goddess or to an easily angered goddess.

#kid icarus #kid icarus uprising #ki #kiu #personal thoughts #dumping all of these here so they could stop haunting me in my head #“fuck around & find out” taken way too literally means that they wait for demigods to do something #demigods truly are the ones who drive the plot around in these tales #feel free to share your thoughts with me! i'm interested to hear what you think #thought dumping ground

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blametheeditor · 9 months ago

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Day 27 | Key

Gt July Prompt List

First | Previous | Next

When stranded on an uncharted underwater planet, alone and surrounded by hostile lifeforms, there are only two possible outcomes: adapt and survive, or die trying.

Spoilers: For the game Subnautica

Content Warnings: Cursing. Mentions of death and violence. Mentions of drowning and suffocation. Referring to someone as 'it'. Mentions of dehumanization, experimenting on people. Lapses in memory. Being held against someone's will. Mentions of diseases and infections. Darker themes.

________________________

Vincent watches a shadow slowly float across the safe shallows. Doesn’t have to look up to know who it belongs to.

That’s the benefit for having known someone for so long, to be so familiar with their habits he never has to think twice about what or why they do certain things.

The problem is that knowing about those small things now feel like they were only distractions, and there’s a possibility he never knew them at all.

...or maybe he’s just in an arcane mood.

Vincent forces himself to tilt his head to see Mike floating on his back on the surface of the water. A method they came up with to ensure the human turned leviathan can breathe without exerting himself when he visited. One currently being used to stay close instead of having to swim the long distance to the island.

The island Mike refused to leave but couldn’t explain why. Vincent knew why, though. At least, he thought he did.

Deciding to think about it later, he turns back to the window before him, watching Scott read information from the scans of both him and Mike. So far, the human hasn’t been able to tell them anything new. Though that might’ve been because Fritz was more distracting than helpful until David demanded attention, and with Jeremy deciding to leave to join Mike the man was finally left in silence. Which meant Vincent also was, no longer having anything to entertain him.

“I can’t concentrate when you’re staring at me,” Scott grumbles.

“And how can you tell I’m staring?”

Vincent grins at the scowl his question earns. “It’s hard to ignore the feeling of eyes on you when there’s twelve of them.”

“Did you finally count them all?” he rumbles, admittedly finding the thought of the human taking the time to do something like that quite amusing. Especially to use it during an argument.

“I could only ever see six at a time with your hair always covering them,” Scott says as he holds up the tablet in his hand. “The scan told me what I missed.”

“That sounds like cheating.”

“You let us scan you,” Scott comments, slightly distracted as he continues to read.

But it’s true, Vincent did let them. And to be honest, he isn’t entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because everyone except David was scanned one. Maybe it was the moment the three humans realized they were infected. Saw the genuine fear of what might happen if the disease isn’t cured and didn’t want to take away their only hope.

What made it worse is that Mike didn’t have a complete answer to that particular question. But the fact he is what he is was the only thing needed for them to understand what’s waiting.

“I think I finally figured out what you were injected with and why,” Scott announces as he taps on the screen. Not a good sign the man seems to be perplexed, not a bad sign there’s no traces of fear. “To put it in ‘laments’ terms, your ‘genetic’ code has been changed . It looks like it was supposed to force you to produce certain ‘enzymes’, maybe just alter the amount your body naturally has, but instead it just changed your appearance.”

Vincent stares for a moment as the information slowly processes. Can’t describe the feeling rising up, one that’s part bewilderment and part revulsion. “I was supposed to be the cure.”

“Basically. It didn’t work, which leads me to believe that’s why Mike was altered the way he was. If there wasn’t an ‘enzyme’ to cure it, then making someone infected into a leviathan might delay it if not completely cure them. That did work, but at the cost of his memory, still needing to breathe with his lungs, and having to live the rest of his life like that.”

There are worst ways to go. What Vincent wants to know is if Mike had been chosen at random to be a human test subject for these experiments, or if it had been done out of desperation.

He hates to admit he hasn’t once stopped thinking about the ‘we’ comment.

“What’s on your mind?” Scott asks innocently. Doesn’t realize the severity of such a question. Can’t even begin to comprehend just how close Vincent is to shattering.

He can ignore the question. Snap and tell the human to mind his own business. Ask something snarky back to change the subject. Do anything except face something that very well may break him.

“Who is he,” Vincent whispers. Feels something inside him begin to writhe for daring to second guess Mike. Firmly shoves it away so he's left alone with nothing but his troubling thoughts.

He can see William clearly in his mind. Can almost reach out and grab the monster who tortured him, who never once looked at him as he begged, treated Vincent like he was nothing except for a plaything. Can see the man working long and grueling hours to build something. Carefully adding pieces and injecting chemicals into someone lying still in a tank. Fondly ruffled black hair just like his own as wires were attached.

That wasn’t the affection something only being used as a means to an end receives. That was never something Vincent or any other leviathan could expect to be given even if the unknown desire of their suffering was met.

“Does it matter?” rips him away. Puts him back in the present. Where a familiar shadow continues to drift across the seafloor.

“Does what matter?” the ghost demands. Wants to be left alone to suffer in peace. Finally face the truth he’s been ignoring for far too long.

“Who he is,” Scott says, meeting Vincent’s glower with a thoughtful look. “Does it matter?”

If David asked him that, it would’ve been with an angry tone, a demand that such a question needs a good reason to ask. If it was Fritz, it would’ve been out of curiosity, though he most likely never would’ve thought to say something like that. But Scott’s wanting a genuine response, treating it as a rhetorical question, willing to let there be a yes or no without judgement.

But Vincent doesn’t know the answer.

Because when he looks at Mike, he sees the guppy he raised. The miniscule form that needed to be protected from something as small as a crashfish to something as vicious as a stalker. A fellow experiment who had been thrown into the ocean once he was completely built with the hope he’d survive.

There was no obligation for him to keep the modified human safe. Just because he watched the entire process and saw everything that was done doesn’t make Vincent responsible for making sure a leviathan didn’t eat the tiny thing. He was allowed to be curious, the want to know why such a thing was created should’ve been the only reason he contemplated watching over Mike.

But that wasn’t why he immediately accepted role of protector. He never so much as thought of asking what or why. He just did. Because Mike was an experiment. Endured everything Vincent had and more.

What if that Mike, the one he protected until it became clear he’d grow to the size of a proper leviathan, the one who treats him like a brother, visits from time to time because he misses Vincent and would come at a moments notice if the ghost ever needed anything, what if that Mike also helped in trying to make him into a cure.

What if that Mike is the reason he was trapped and tortured. What if that Mike would’ve been the person to inject him if given the chance. What if that Mike heard his pleas and never once tried to help even though he could.

Would he ever be able to forgive? Would he ever be able to forget? Would he never want anything to do with Mike ever again?

Vincent didn’t think the thought of no longer having Mike by his side would physically hurt. Yet here he is, the very idea of telling a certain modified human the ghost wants nothing to do with him an unbearable one. Even with the thought Vincent’s pain can all be blamed on Mike.

When did he become as soft as David?

“Any clues where to find a cure other than becoming a leviathan?” Vincent asks. Pointedly ignores Scott’s knowing smile. If the man isn’t careful he’ll start acting like David until it’s hard to tell the two apart.

“No. But, I can bet the key to figuring it out is on the island. Inside the giant glowing structure to be specific.”

“How much?”

Scott hesitates. “On if the answers somewhere on the island?”

“Just curious,” Vincent smiles as he waves a hand. “You said you’d bet, so how much? Or do you want to put your foot where your mouth is.”

“Okay, one, you’re mixing two different sayings,” the man glares as he puts his fingers up for emphasis. “It’s put you’re money where your mouth is. Two, how did that ever come up for you to learn?”

Vincent smirks. “Are you really that surprised someone who constantly curses wouldn’t have introduced me to something like betting.”

It takes a moment, but he sees when it finally clicks for Scott. “Oh 'God', you’re fluent because of Mike?”

“You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”

The silence tells him all he needs to know. He wonders what would happen if he told Mike what Scott thought about him being Vincent’s teacher for speaking human. Which, speaking of, there’s a few things David needs to learn that Fritz hasn’t taught him.

“Is there something we should know?”

He looks down at Scott. Knows exactly what the man is asking. “The only thing I’d be worry about is whatever it means to be a warper."

“You think he’d kill us once we reach a certain level of infection?”

Vincent shakes his head. “Oh no, even if it’s literally built into him, Mike couldn’t do it. You should be worried about him never letting you go, though."

#G/t July 2024 #Day 27 | Key #FNAF bois #g/t #giant #tiny #BTE writing #Subnautica AU #cw #content warning

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